From Annie Hall to The First Wives Club, Keaton’s performances redefined what it meant to be funny, stylish and unapologetically oneself. Our writers pay tribute to a one-off star who made eccentricity irresistible

Laura Snapes

‘It’s about the night me and my best friend Marty Jones hung out with a flamenco troupe, wishing we were cool musicians too – so that we could talk to the girls a little better’

Our first four records had been mostly made in houses in the hills above Los Angeles. August and Everything After was our first major label album, so it was a pretty big deal. Our advance was $3,000 each; I bought a 1971 cherry red VW Karmann Ghia convertible and drove it to LA.

London film festival: Foy convinces as a grieving academic who trains a goshawk in this film based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling nature memoir

Can training a goshawk cure grief? Or treat it, in some way? Will keeping it indoors – hooded so that it remains calm – and then taking it out hunting allow you to reconnect radically with nature in a way that prissy townies will never understand? Or is this just a domesticated festival of cruelty to both bird and prey and a symptom of serious depression?

Philippa Lowthorpe’s intriguing, likably performed if slightly precious film – based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling nature memoir from 2014 – addresses these questions, but can’t quite deliver the Hollywood redemption narrative that it appears to offer: the story of a woman in the depths of melancholy who is helped through the darkness and, we have to assume, out the other side, by her goshawk, whimsically named Mabel. (Macdonald used she/her pronouns at the time of publication and came out as non-binary in 2022.)

Audiences might, by the closing credits, think they still don’t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel in the end, or perhaps at any time, but then again real life can feel messy and unfinished in just this way.

Claire Foy plays Macdonald in 2007, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge teaching the history and philosophy of science. She adores and hero-worships her dad, the award-winning photographer Alisdair Macdonald, played here by Brendan Gleeson, who inculcated in her a love of nature, and when he dies she is utterly distraught.

So Helen conceives a mysterious need to buy a goshawk from a dealer. She gets her expert mate Stuart (Sam Spruell) to help her train it and becomes a superbly eccentric Cambridge don for keeping Mabel on her wrist in college but then deeply worries her mum (Lindsay Duncan) by not leaving the house: Helen and Mabel descending into squalor together.

Claire Foy is clearly doing this for real: she has obviously learned to handle a goshawk – and her scenes have a tremendous authenticity. When she looks nervous with Mabel, she is genuinely nervous. When she is thrilled to get Mabel to do something, she is genuinely thrilled. With this bird, there can be no “acting”. The best moment comes when Helen has Mabel in the car, and it looks like Clarice Starling has taken Dr Lecter for a drive.

So has the relationship between Helen and Mabel deepened by the end? Is there, in fact, a relationship? Perhaps this could be scheduled in a season of films about people getting up close and personal with predatory animals, along with Loach’s Kes, Hitchcock’s The Birds and Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Mabel’s ice-cold gaze is very scary.

• H is for Hawk screened at the London film festival.

When the young painter was left severely injured after being knocked off his bike, he began to write – with astonishing vividness. As his paintings go on show, novelist Alan Hollinghurst celebrates this fierce talent

What Denton Welch’s life was like before his accident we know from the books he wrote after it. They give a picture of a teenager’s experience unparalleled in its vividness and oddity. Welch was born in Shanghai in 1915, to an American mother and an English businessman father, and brought to England when he was four. In his first book, 1943’s Maiden Voyage, he describes his return to China in 1932, after he’d run away from Repton school in Derbyshire.

All his characteristics as a writer are evident from the start: an astonishing candour of response to sensations of all kinds, with childlike repulsion registered as keenly as attraction; a clarity of style unbothered by literary convention; and a fierce solipsism, his sense of others exact and often unsparing, but his overwhelming purpose the record of his own needs, excitements and perceptions: not just things seen but the acutely subjective feelings they stir up in him.

As the divisive duo re-release Blueberry Boat for its 20th anniversary, they talk being unfit for success, how indie got soft and the ‘dream come true’ of getting 1/10 in NME

The Fiery Furnaces had no expectations for their second album, 2004’s Blueberry Boat. The sibling duo recorded it before their debut had even come out, and so had no idea that 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark would receive such wild acclaim: in an 8.4 review, Pitchfork called its shambolic rock’n’roll and frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger’s arcane lyricism a “a mess of weird, undulating musical bits that are hugely intriguing despite not always making a whole shitload of sense”. They were busy fulfilling a five-album deal with Rough Trade, a luxury that was pretty much par for the course as a buzzy Brooklyn band in the time of the Strokes and Interpol – not that their Beefhearty blues had much in common with preening rock revivalism. “I thought they were so bad. I just didn’t give a shit about that stuff,” was one of Eleanor’s withering contributions to the scene oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom.

Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger had moved from Chicago: in a classic older brother move, he bought her a guitar and drum kit when she was in her teens, then she roped him into playing with her when he followed her east. “We were a New York band, and there were a lot of bands where that’s what people knew about them,” says Matthew, 52, on a three-way call with his sister, 49. “That seemed to be the distinguishing feature: they were from New York and sort of new-wavy. Why were they meant to be good? I was pleased with the idea that with Blueberry Boat, at least it would be hard to lump us in with them. We wouldn’t seem like an also-ran New York City band wearing leather jackets.”

After 16 years and almost 1,700 episodes, Maron is ending his show – which changed the face of podcasting. No wonder it’s sparking an outpouring of sadness

When I discovered Marc Maron’s influential podcast WTF, I was working in a pub. It was a weird time for me. I had just left university and had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my life, so I moved back home and took on shifts as a waitress and chamber maid.

Podcasts became an escape from my reality of changing sheets on king-sized beds, folding hospital corners and rearranging tiny bottles of shampoo – and none more so than Marc Maron’s WTF.

To mark a new exhibition at Tate Modern, leading British-Nigerian cultural figures trace the impact of their heritage on their work, and consider its growing influence on the world stage

Some primal energy was unleashed among Nigerian artists in the years leading up to independence. The century-long reign of colonialism was nearing its end and the people of Nigeria, with its over 300 tribes, its ebullient energy, were poised for a new future in which they would determine the shape and context of their lives.

And the people who most articulated that double position, that paradox of modernity and tradition, were artists in all their stripes. Artists across the country, in constant dialogue with one another, created works that evoked their traditions but in a contemporary context. Artists such as Yusuf Grillo in the north, Bruce Onobrakpeya from the midwest, Ben Enwonwu from the east and Twins Seven Seven from the west were remaking the dream of art in a rigorously Nigerian context. The effect of the works created by the Zaria Art Society, the generation that congregated in Lagos and exhibited all over the world, was profound. Their work helped the nation to reconnect with its ancient ways, but adapted to modern times. It was a new art, brooding and celebratory. Often it was an art that hinted at the many dimensions of Nigerian mythology; often it drew upon daily realities. Spirits, ancestral presences, rituals, masquerades featured prominently, alongside popular subjects of dancing figures, portraits and landscapes, but rendered in a unique light, with a palette that was utterly unlike anything in the western tradition.

Musicians have long criticized the streaming service’s paltry payouts, but a new wave of boycotts is emerging

This month, indie musicians in Oakland, California, gathered for a series of talks called Death to Spotify, where attenders explored “what it means to decentralize music discovery, production and listening from capitalist economies”.

The events, held at Bathers library, featured speakers from indie station KEXP, labels Cherub Dream Records and Dandy Boy Records, and DJ collectives No Bias and Amor Digital. What began as a small run of talks quickly sold out and drew international interest. People as far away as Barcelona and Bengaluru emailed the organizers asking how to host similar events.

Actor, who voices Dolores Umbridge in the new full-cast recordings, says she hopes ‘we can all find respect’ amid renewed controversy over Rowling’s views on trans rights

Keira Knightley said that she was “not aware” of demands to boycott JK Rowling prior to joining the cast of the new audiobook versions of the Harry Potter series.

Knightley was speaking to Decider to promote her new Netflix movie The Woman in Cabin 10 (in which she plays a Guardian reporter), and was asked if she knew that “some fans are calling for a Harry Potter boycott”.

Musician invites 52 UK visual artists to create works based on song lyric to raise money for children affected by war

Kate Bush is harnessing the power of her global hit Running Up That Hill in collaboration with leading names in British art to raise money for children caught up in global conflicts.

The singer-songwriter invited 52 visual artists to respond to her lyric “If I only could, I’d make a deal with God” from her 1985 anthem. One of her best-loved songs and hailed as “one of the greatest songs of all time” by Rolling Stone, it became a hit all over again in 2022 when it featured in the fourth season of the US TV series Stranger Things.

How author researched his plots and letters from Alec Guinness feature in Oxford exhibition

Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters – they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carré. As his fans will know, they are part of tradecraft practised by the spies he wrote about so evocatively. Now, almost five years after his death, an exhibition, with the title Tradecraft, reveals the techniques and motivations of the characters’ real creator, David Cornwell.

As you enter the exhibition in Oxford University’s Bodleian library you are greeted with a large portrait of Cornwell, wearing a black bucket cap, looking straight ahead with piercing eyes, his chin resting on his gently clasped hands. Accompanying the photo are two of his quotes. “I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world,” one says. The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: “What is loyalty – to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual’s relationship to the institutions he services?”

Moody Blues bass player, singer and songwriter who played a key part in the group’s successes during the 1960s and 70s

The Moody Blues were a spectacularly successful band known for grandiose lyrics and flamboyant musical arrangements, but the deadpan title of their 1973 chart hit I’m Just A Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band) summed up the self-effacing approach of their songwriter, John Lodge.

As the band’s co-lead vocalist and bass player, Lodge, who has died aged 82, was the antithesis of the wild rocker, largely resisting the hedonistic temptations that accompanied stardom in the 1960s and 70s and making no bones about his commitment to family and evangelical Christianity.

Nigerian-American author tells Cheltenham literature festival audience having boys made her ‘worry more’

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said she is terrified that her young boys will “join the manosphere”.

Speaking at Cheltenham literature festival on Saturday, the Nigerian-American author of works including Americanah told an audience that having two sons has made her “worry more” about men and boys.

Exclusive: Fantasy about ‘a beautiful creature with wings’ has been compiled from drafts, storyboards and sketches

He rose from the slums of Victorian London to become arguably cinema’s first great comic artist, with The Great Dictator and Limelight among his masterpieces.

Now the script of Charlie Chaplin’s unfinished final film is to be published, having been pieced together from drafts, storyboards and sketches, on which he had been working before his death in 1977, at the age of 88.

The Gaza ceasefire deal, Russian strikes on Kyiv, protests in Madagascar and Paris fashion week: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

The photographer’s new book collects his pictures of the mammoth New York City park from the 1980s up until now

There is, allegedly, a commonly held belief among landscape architects familiar with New York City: for Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the designers of both Central Park and Prospect Park, the former was merely practice for the latter.

Located in Brooklyn, Prospect Park, 300 acres smaller than the Manhattan landmark, has a specifically insular quality. A surrounding urban horizon is obscured from view by old-growth forest and 175 species of trees; the park is beholden to its own rhythms, with waterfalls, grand lawns stretched across the borough’s glacial rock formations, and fewer adjacent towering buildings. Visiting feels like a quiet reprieve. For the Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz, Prospect Park has long been, as he writes in his newly released book, Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025, “one of my best teachers … a giver of life”.

The only thing that stops you counting the cliches in this French drama about a sinister au pair is the woefully dim lighting. It’s so obvious that it barely feels worth laughing at its stupidity

You wear a tightly belted beige trenchcoat and you live in a cavernous show-home bedecked with mid-century pine and fashionably inadequate lighting. You are French. You have two uncommonly beautiful teenage children and are preparing to return to your prestigious role at a maison de couture after the recent birth of your uncommonly beautiful baby. But mon Dieu, you are anxious! You fear your glamorous workload will interfere with your ability to care for l’enfant. The solution? You will hire an enigmatic au pair. Alas, you have never watched television and are thus unaware that this will expose faultlines in your marriage and lead to a series of increasingly terrifying events that will threaten the very fabric of your existence. You are Paula (Mélanie Doutey), the protagonist of four-part French thriller The Intruder, and you are, ’ow you say, stuffed.

To France, then, where Paula and Jérôme, her bearded shrug of a husband (Éric Caravaca), are poised to tick off the first point on their “TV Thriller That Begins with the Ill-Advised Hiring of an Enigmatic Au Pair” checklist. To wit: the interviewing of a childminder who appears – and at this point you may wish to ready the nearest defibrillator – almost too good to be true. Enter Tess (Lucie Fagedet), who doesn’t blink but does have the ability to make baby Orso gurgle with glee, so is hired on the spot. But what is this? Within hours of her arrival Tess is tip-toeing around the family’s bewilderingly dark house, staring at Orso’s toys and pawing Jérôme’s shirts.

The Irish actor started out with Shane Meadows but her career is now stratospheric. As she takes on big tech in The Iris Affair, she talks about nerves, AI nightmares – and battling a malevolent supercomputer

Explosions weren’t a problem, nor were the guns, fire, multiple fights and a spell underwater – but dealing with cockroaches? The line was drawn. “That was the one stunt we weren’t allowed to do,” says Niamh Algar with a laugh, “because cockroaches are actually quite dangerous.” Plus, she says with a wry smile, you can’t train one not to bite. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say her character in the new Sky Atlantic show The Iris Affair has a run-in with a bug infestation – CGI it turns out, and fakes made by the props team – that makes her other encounters with corrupt police, internet sleuths and a potentially malevolent megaquantum computer seem tame.

Algar, most recently seen in the ITV thriller Playing Nice with James Norton earlier this year, plays Iris Nixon, a genius who is on the run having disappeared with a notebook that contains the encrypted activation sequence needed to “wake” a supercomputer. She stole it from Cameron Beck (a typically wonderful Tom Hollander), who has borrowed vast amounts of money so that in a brutalist bunker somewhere in the Italian mountains he can make the machine, named Charlie Big Potatoes – “well, he’s not small potatoes,” says Beck of the most powerful computer ever built. His life now depends on getting it going again.

Yet again, Adjani Salmon’s masterly comedy is packed with hilarious moments that nail the hell of working in TV and the reality of Black British life. Its finale is superb – and leaves you begging for more

Back in 2018, when the first, web series of Adjani Salmon’s sitcom was released, its very existence was a boon to a British film/TV industry notably lacking diversity at all levels, and still in thrall to all-white period dramas. Here was a show about working-class Black Britons that both eschewed the usual drug-dealing stereotypes and was created by a real-life Black person. Salmon co-wrote and starred as Kwabena Robinson, an aspiring film-maker struggling to get a career foothold, while also making his rent and cultivating a romance with doe-eyed love interest, Vanessa (Babirye Bukilwa).

The fact that Dreaming Whilst Black was actually good, while not strictly necessary, definitely helped. The first full series won critical plaudits for its confident combination of creative industries satire, sensitive dramedy and surrealist touches. Now, the show is back for a second series, in which some of those easy, TV critic assumptions – about what progress looks like; about the intrinsic value of “diversity” and “representation” – are themselves questioned. It’s not a rude awaking from Kwabena’s dream exactly, but the arpeggio alarm on his iPhone 11 is definitely starting to sound.

In this hilariously odd new show, Tim Robinson finds himself investigating a conspiracy. Plus, the incredibly tense Blue Lights continues. Here’s what to watch this evening

9.45pm, Sky Comedy

It’s everything you want from the gameshow, but with loads of famous faces. And at one point, it feels like you’re witnessing the last pure moment in history. Beautiful

This review, being a review and all, contains information on a programme that has already been on television – specifically, the first episode of The Celebrity Traitors. If you have not seen the first episode of The Celebrity Traitors and do not want to read information about the first episode of The Celebrity Traitors then please! Look away now.

I’m sorry to have to labour the point but every critic had to sign the Official Secrets Act before screeners were released to us and I am racked with paranoia. Which is the ideal state in which to approach any series of The Traitors, of course, so well-played, BBC marketing/psyops team.

This documentary was a golden opportunity to show VB at her drily entertaining best. Instead, we get three hours of platitudes. What a maddening waste of her personality

An intimate portrait of Victoria Beckham is what we were promised by the lavish publicity surrounding the release of the three-part documentary – entitled Victoria Beckham – about the female half of the enduring power couple, and an intimate portrait of the singer turned mogul is what was not delivered. It is about as intimate as a Pret sandwich, and if anyone thought for a moment it was going to be otherwise, well, let me introduce you to With Love, Meghan, whose searing insights into life as a duchess in Montecito are going to blow your mind.

Victoria Beckham the documentary is as immaculately groomed, polished and controlled as Victoria Beckham the person. It is a puff piece for her, for husband David, her beauty line and, above all, her fashion business. It charts her evolution from stagestruck child and teenager (“You got a callback for Starlight Express!” mum Jackie recalls proudly), to Spice Girl, to most famous of the England football team’s WAGs, to increasingly successful fashion designer and businesswoman. Against a background of preparations for her biggest show yet, in the grounds of a Parisian castle, a variety of big names in the industry – including Anna Wintour, Tom Ford and Donatella Versace – talk about what is needed on top of talent to make it in a competitive (not to say vicious) field, the snobbery she faced as a newcomer from the world of entertainment and the scepticism she has overcome.

This engaging if slight show sees the unlikely duo reopen witch trials from 400 years ago on the hunt for justice. It’s Blackadder crossed with CSI – with a sprinkling of Philomena Cunk

Witches of Essex is one of those television shows that could have been created working backwards from its title. “It sounds like Witches of Eastwick!” you can imagine a producer brainstorming. “Can we do anything with that?”

Yes, yes we can. We can put together a three-part documentary about the Essex witch trials, which saw hundreds of people – the majority of them women – accused of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. Crucially, we can hire everyone’s favourite Essex boy, Rylan (though less favourite since his comments on immigration saw more than 700 Ofcom complaints last month) to present it alongside Prof Alice Roberts.

A decade after her debut became a cult hit, the US author talks about the true crime that inspired her latest novel, #MeToo overreach and being married to an addict

Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,” Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support the book as if I’d written it last year.”

She had, however, promised herself that if she ever achieved mainstream success she would write about it with the same candour that she brought to her struggles. “I’m going to write about all of it. Not just about youth, but about middle age,” she says. “Middle age is so much harder to write about, because youth is kind of like a trope. We’re very familiar with reading books about the aspirations or disappointed aspirations of youth, but middle age is much crazier ground. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as familiar. So, to write about middle age in the same way takes commitment.”

The Irish novelist discovered the Hungarian writer two decades ago, and was excited by the verbal pyrotechnics of a rule-breaking storyteller

That Christmas – it was almost 20 years ago – I came back from America with news. My friend Daniel Medin had recommended two books to me, both by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, one called War and War and the other The Melancholy of Resistance. We had also watched some Béla Tarr films, whose screenplays had been written by Krasznahorkai. The sense of slow, seething menace in the film Werckmeister Harmonies, based on The Melancholy of Resistance, and the lack of easy psychology and obvious motive in the film, the camera moving like a cat, made it exciting, but not as exciting as the two novels.

Krasznahorkai, I noticed, loved the snaking sentence, the high-wire act, mild panic steering towards a shivering fear felt by his characters, followed, in clause after clause, by fitful realisations and further reasons for gloom or alarm, and then, with just a comma in between, ironic (and even comic) responses to what comes next into the mind. These extraordinary sentences had been translated by the poet George Szirtes with considerable rhythmic energy.

To explore all titles by Colm Tóibín, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The playwright’s only living descendant traces the shadow cast by his trial – and his rehabilitation as a gay icon

Today, Oscar Wilde is one of the most celebrated writers in English, both instantly recognisable and actually read. His plays are performed. His words are quoted. He reclines in effigy on both the Strand and the King’s Road. He even has a commemorative window in Westminster Abbey. But it was not always so.

When he died in Paris, in 1900, aged just 46, the obituaries were not generous. There was a feeling of relief that an embarrassing figure had been removed the scene, and a general hope that he and his works would soon be forgotten. The Pall Mall Gazette suggested that nothing he wrote had “the strength to endure”.

The author and comedian on the immortal lines of Snoopy, discovering the heart of Homer’s Iliad and her culinary comfort read

My earliest reading memory
Harvey’s Hideout by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Lillian Hoban. Harvey is a muskrat with a grievance against his awful sibling. His sister Mildred feels just the same way. I read this at four or five curled up on a yellow beanbag next to the radiator, in Bournville, where I grew up. I honestly don’t think there is a better reading spot anywhere in the world.

My favourite book growing up
Peanuts. I loved Snoopy long before I became an author. But he is an inspiration to all writers, sending a novel to his publishers with an immortal covering letter: “Gentlemen, enclosed is the manuscript of my new novel. I know you are going to like it. In the meantime, please send me some money so I can live it up.”

All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu; When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift; The White Octopus Hotel by Alexandra Bell; Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; Remain by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan

All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus, £20)
In this thriller from award-winning author Liu, Julia Z wants to leave behind the notoriety she gained as a teenage hacker. But she’s drawn into danger when she agrees to help a man whose wife, an artist skilled in the new art of “vivid dreaming” – using AI and virtual reality to allow her live audience into her stories – has disappeared. He has seen a video from someone claiming to have kidnapped her and hopes Julia can tell him who sent it. The near-future setting is convincing, and the story is rich in interesting ideas about potential developments in the use of AI and social media. Julia is a strong, complex character, and there’s a suggestion there could be a series of novels about her. Action-packed as well as thought-provoking, this is one of the best science-fiction books of the year.

When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift (Arcadia, £20)
Like Swift’s previous novel, The Coral Bones, this book is powered by a passionate love of nature and deep concern for the planet’s future. Beginning with the character-forming effects of major events during the childhoods of the two main characters – Covid lockdowns for Lucy, the Chornobyl disaster for Hester – the novel tracks their separate journeys in climate activism and documentary film-making as both make their own contribution towards a better world, until 2070, when they meet at last. Evocative and beautifully written, this character-driven novel also inspires as an argument for rewilding in Britain.

In her debut book Authentic, Jodi-Ann Burey argues the call to ‘bring your full self’ can leave people of color exposed

In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, the writer Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: the commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of memoir, research, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, shifting the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

The impetus for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in international development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.

The legendary actor best known for her many collaborations with Woody Allen, as well as films including Reds, The First Wives Club and Book Club, has died

• Diane Keaton: a life in pictures

• Peter Bradshaw on Diane Keaton

• Keaton interviewed in 2023 and 2014

• Jess Cartner-Morley on Keaton’s style

Diane Keaton, one of the best-loved film stars of the past 50 years, has died at the age of 79 in California.

The news was confirmed by People magazine. Further details are not available at this time and her loved ones have asked for privacy, according to a family spokesperson.

Abou Sangaré is magnificent in a story that shines light on the enforced invisibility of economic migrants

There’s a turnaround in the climax of this noctambulist Paris immigrant drama that suddenly charges the film’s seemingly neutral title with meaning. Food courier protagonist, Souleymane, is hopefully in the process of altering his destiny, and this key scene is carried by fantastic acting from Abou Sangaré: trembling violently as a lifetime’s tension and struggle, as well as the daily grind of an app wage slave, comes pouring out.

Souleymane is a kind of every-immigrant, clinging on at the margins of the French capital. Hailing from Guinea, he sublets the delivery app account of Cameroonian Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie) in order to work. Under constant pressure to meet food delivery targets, he needs money in order to pay fellow Guinean Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), who is coaching him how to pass his asylum interview the day after next. But the harassed Souleymane struggles to reproduce the details of the political repression story that Barry recommends he tell.

The paradoxical emotional push and pull of those forced to migrate for work is vividly captured in Maria Lisa Pichler and Lukas Schöffel’s intimate portrait

Every four weeks, Maria leaves her small Romanian town and heads to Austria, where she is employed as a care worker for elderly people. Her life is split between borders and constant goodbyes, a transient emotional state vividly captured in Maria Lisa Pichler and Lukas Schöffel’s intimate portrait. In the opening scene, Maria drives along her local roads, pointing out the houses left empty by those who have moved abroad for work opportunities. Under the precarious forces of economy, it seems as if a whole community is gradually evaporating.

Structured around Maria’s monthly drives, the film juxtaposes her home life with her professional duties. Simple scenes of family gatherings bristle with tension. Maria’s son Ionuț laments her absence, which he deems to be a sign of emotional neglect. But as the primary breadwinner Maria takes on the gruelling job to provide a better future for her children. In another poignant parallel, we see her ageing parents whose ramshackle farmhouse contrasts sharply with the middle-class apartments of her Austrian clients. There’s a bitter irony in how Maria makes a living by caring for other people’s relatives, while unable to fully tend to her own.

With the US release of Rose Byrne’s anxiety-inducing motherhood spiral If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, writers relive their most uncomfortable movie watches

The only movie I have literally had to take breaks from in order to give my sympathetic nervous system time to downshift out of flight or flight mode, Scott Mann’s 2022 psychological thriller Fall is brilliant in its simplicity. Thrill-seeking climbing influencer Hunter convinces her bestie Becky to do a little immersion therapy after her husband Dan’s sudden death during a climb leaves her fearful, depressed and suicidal. The goal: to climb a decommissioned TV transmission tower deep in the California desert that’s roughly twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. When the rickety ladder that gets them to a tiny platform at the structure’s top falls to smithereens, the women suddenly discover new meanings of SOL. The film is nothing if not an excuse to gloriously parade a series of show-stopping, sweaty-palm scenes, yet it becomes a deeply psychological, intricate twin character study as Mann gradually peels back the layers of Hunter and Becky’s up-and-down friendship, and the latter’s gradual rediscovery of her courage. With word that Fall is being made into a franchise, I am eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to send my adrenal glands into overdrive. Veronica Esposito

London film festival: The supermodel comes across as a dippy trustafarian and the artist like her soppy old grandpa in this bland, legacy-protecting depiction of their friendship

When Lucian Freud met Kate Moss turns out to be the encounter of a sweet, cuddly old gentleman and a guardedly opaque hedonist. Both look defanged.

Freud’s sensational Naked Portrait 2002 is a nude study of the supermodel, to whom he had been introduced by his daughter, the fashion designer Bella Freud. Moss was pregnant when she sat for him – which lent a fierce, additional frisson to the painting’s candour and intimacy. Ellie Bamber plays Kate and carries off the unclothed moments with great directness and aplomb. Freud is played with Germanic R sounds by Derek Jacobi (who incidentally played Freud’s contemporary Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil in 1998) and he has Freud’s buzzard-like look but not quite the sharpness and severity.

Audiences will obviously be aware the secret plan to kill John Paul II did not succeed, but despite a baggy narrative the high-stakes espionage is still compelling

‘You want me to shoot the pope?” This is undeniably a fab jumping off point for a any film, based on real events or not, and in fact this gritty Polish thriller is a dramatisation of the 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II. But you don’t need to be much of a history buff to know that that this particular crime would be on the JFK level of momentousness if it had actually succeeded. As it is, we follow Bogusław Linda as Konstanty “Bruno” Brusicki, a former intelligence agent who is offered a compelling carrot and threatened with a nasty stick by the men who want PJP2 dead. Brusicki has also been diagnosed with terminal cancer, which in the view of the conspiracists makes him the perfect murderer; they won’t have to subsequently get rid of him to cover their tracks.

True life stories have a way of being a bit messier and wrinklier than their fictional counterparts, leaving scriptwriters with some decisions to make around how much to tidy up a set of events to suit the narrative demands of fiction. For around the first hour of this film, Bruno’s mission isn’t actually to shoot the pope, it’s to shoot the man who shoots the pope. Unbeknownst to the assassin, Bruno is supposed to be lurking to tidy up the loose ends and actually takes quite a bit of time to make it to the point where Bruno gets to say: “You want me to shoot the pope?”, which in a glossy Hollywood version would probably happen somewhere in the first 10 minutes.

It’s your chance to ask the real-life Dame about playing a baroness in Downton, being married to Richard Briers in Ever Decreasing Circles or sacrificing herself to the Daleks

It’s hard to pick a favourite Penelope Wilton character; she tends to play such lovely and forgiving people, from John Cleese’s ex-girlfriend in Clockwise, Simon Pegg’s mum in Shaun of the Dead (“Don’t point that gun at my mum!”), Ricky Gervais’s confidante in After Life, and Richard Briers’ long-suffering wife in BBC sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles.

Wilton began her career in theatre, in King Lear at The Old Vic and in The Philanthropist on Broadway. Since then, she has played an art teacher in The History Boys, Colin Firth’s secretary in Operation Mincemeat, Bill Nighy’s wife in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Keira Knightley’s aunt in Pride and Prejudice. In 2008, she sacrificed herself to the Daleks so that David Tennant’s Doctor may live. Fans of Sunday evenings, meanwhile, will know her best as Isobel Grey, Lady Merton and mother of Mary’s late first husband Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey and the various spin-off films, including the most recent, The Grand Finale.

Charing Cross theatre, London
Featuring 20 of the band’s disco-funk songs, this jukebox musical has sparkle but comes with an infuriating concept and little depth of characterisation

Fifty years after the release of the hit that gives this jukebox musical its name, KC and the Sunshine Band are on tour in North America, such is the undimmed love for their radiant disco-funk. Most of the audience getting down this afternoon – it’s one of the show’s four weekly matinees – probably know these songs from first time round. The 12in records used to frame the stage, their centre labels glowing in candy colours, are a testament to the discography at director-choreographer Lisa Stevens’ disposal.

Twenty numbers arranged by Mark Crossland are spread across an 80-minute production which doesn’t give much space for character development. So it is maddening to discover that this is also another one of those shows in which the question of how to tell the story becomes an ongoing discussion for the characters on stage rather than a matter for the writers’ room. The band’s leader Harry Wayne Casey (“KC”), played by Ross Harmon, has barely been introduced before his pal Dee (Paige Fenlon) is schooling him on 11 o’clock numbers and musical-theatre trends.

At Charing Cross theatre, London, until 15 November

The Irish standup on advice to her younger self, dodgy microphones and why success still makes her feel sick

How did you get into comedy?
I was on maternity leave and, looking back, I may have been having a manic episode. I’d had a long string of admin jobs that I hated. Usually, it was the case that I didn’t know what my job was and nobody else did either. When I was 29, I thought: “I haven’t really done anything creative or put myself out there. Here I am with two kids, what am I doing?” So I signed up for an open mic night. I wasn’t going into comedy for the money – I wanted to see if I could do it.

What inspired your latest show, Emmaculate?
People have asked: “Is it about Madonna’s Immaculate Collection album?” No, it’s not. Although, I do nod to it because when I was in an all-girls school we had a talent show one year and the girl in the year ahead of us sang Like a Virgin. She was six months pregnant and we were all very judgy. I shouldn’t have been because that was me the following year.

Exeter Northcott theatre
The journey of the Devon club from league minnows to championship winners is told with considerable elan and affection

Driving to this theatre, I passed signs to Sidmouth and Tiverton, more known for West Country charm than sporting supremacy. They are namechecked early in a play about the region’s recent rugby union history to make the point that, in the early 80s, Exeter used to lose to neighbourhood clubs considered minnows.

Exe Men is adapted by Ashley Pharoah from Guardian rugby writer Robert Kitson’s 2020 book. It shows how an ambitious investor, Tony Rowe, and enterprising coach, Rob Baxter, renamed the club the Exeter Chiefs and made them the best in England and then Europe. The Chiefs were the Seabiscuit of jock-straps and scrum caps, the Leicester City of rugby.

Watermill theatre, Newbury
Rob Madge’s colourful reworking of the 1892 comedy makes clever adjustments while retaining the original’s spirit

The frump turns fabulous in this new version of a redoubtable Victorian farce. Renovated with affectionate cheek by Rob Madge, it’s a scrappy but very fun take on the tale of dowager dress-up and scheming lovebirds.

Jack (Benjamin Westerby) and Charley (sweetly bird-brained Jonathan Case) want alone time with their beloveds Kitty and Amy (Yasemin Özdemir and Mae Munuo). Even if they evade the girls’ forbidding guardian, decorum demands a chaperone. Charley’s rich aunt doesn’t show, so am-dram fan Babbs is persuaded to impersonate her. Do shenanigans ensue? They certainly do.

Axis Ballymun, Dublin
Mixing childhood memories, songs and Shakespeare, Michael Patrick delivers a one-man show about the reality of being given four years to live

Michael Patrick may not live long enough to play King Lear, so a rendition of Lear’s storm scene finds a way into his new one-man show. “Do it now” is the imperative for this multitalented Belfast actor and playwright who, in 2023, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given an estimated four years to live. In a script written with his regular collaborator Oisín Kearney, Patrick describes the impact of that prognosis and his decision to take part in an international drug trial.

Directed by Kearney with an assured touch, the simple staging against a plain black curtain is animated by a soundtrack of Patrick voicing his friends, family and childhood drama teacher, with snatches of songs and Shakespeare sparking memories. Referring to his eligibility as “a diversity hire”, having lost the use of his right leg, a tongue-in-cheek social media post suggesting stage roles he was now suited for prompted Belfast’s Lyric theatre to invite him to play Richard III last year. Adapting the text with Kearney, who directed him, Patrick’s portrayal of the murderous king as disabled was far from tokenistic.

At Axis Ballymun, Dublin, until 10 October as part of Dublin Theatre festival, which runs until 12 October. Then at Lyric theatre, Belfast, 12-15 October

Live theatre, Newcastle
Based on real-life testimonies, this harrowing tale follows a 17-year-old subject to relentless cruelty at Medomsley Detention Centre

There is a warning on the screen above the stage: “This play is short, sharp and shocking.” It’s a reference to the promise of Margaret Thatcher’s government to give young offenders a “short, sharp shock” at detention centres, supposedly deterring them from crime. As Mike Kenny’s new play demonstrates, the experience was certainly sharp and shocking, but its impact on those detained was far from short.

Bad Lads is created from a story by Jimmy Coffey and the testimonies of the Medomsley men held at the youth detention centre, channelling the brutal ordeals of countless young men into a single fictitious character in the 1980s. After taking a joyride on a milk float, 17-year-old Jackie is sentenced to three months at Medomsley, where he is soon subject to horrifying cruelty at the hands of the staff, enduring a relentless pattern of violence, humiliation and sexual abuse.

Wigmore Hall, London
The pianist’s performance of sonatas Opp 109, 110 and 111 was full of tender, intriguing details – the works together formed something greater than the sum of their parts

Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas are a gift for a pianist as adept at balancing the playful and the profound as Mitsuko Uchida. Each is potentially a work of astonishing individual impact, yet they can come together to form something even greater than the sum of their parts.

Perhaps it’s in the way that each sonata seems to pick up on and amplify the conflicts, beauties and struggles of the one before. Op 109 came to its close above a low rumble that Uchida made sound like an earthquake – Beethoven must have thought of sound as something to be felt as well as heard. When similar deep grumbles recurred in the first movement of Op 110 – gentler and unquiet this time, contrasting with tender chords above – they felt like a recollection. The forthright little fugue variation in Op 109 found its fully grown counterpart in the huge culmination of Op 110, and the peace that was so hard won at the end of Op 111 felt like a resolution of a whole evening’s music, not just one sonata.

A thriving movement is reclaiming the genre and bringing more diverse audiences to live venues

Ask Cathy Loughead the most punk thing she’s ever done, and she doesn’t miss a beat: “I went on stage with my neck broken in two places. I couldn’t bounce around, so I blinged the brace up instead. That was a great gig.”

Loughead is part of a growing movement of women redefining punk. When Riot Women, Sally Wainwright’s new BBC drama spotlighting female punk, airs this Sunday, it will reflect a scene that’s already thriving far beyond television.

(tak:til/Glitterbeat)
The Slovenian trio conjure strange beauty from a vast arsenal of global instruments on an album that hums, drones and dances with intense power

Some bands use a variety of traditional instruments to make music – and then there are Širom. A trio that formed a decade ago over interests in post-rock and drone (their name means “around” or “widely” in their native Slovenian), they list more than two dozen instruments in the liner notes of their fifth album, from the Persian gheychak to the Mongolian morin khuur. They create a palette that’s kaleidoscopic in its textural, dynamic and melodic explorations of sound.

Širom’s work is improvisatory, energetic and tuneful. Album opener Between the Fingers the Drops of Tomorrow’s Dawn merges repetitive, buoyant patterns on the balafon (a West African xylophone) with chiming lyres and bowed passages on the guembri (a Moroccan string instrument, which here recalls the work of the late double bassist Danny Thompson at his most agile). Tiny Dewdrop Explosions Cracking Delightfully has a title like a lost Cocteau Twins B-side, but comes across like a soundtrack to the movement of a gnarly, chirrupping sprite. Frame drums and violins accelerate us towards the track’s cacophonous climax, perfect for a headbanging hippy having a spiritual conversion to metal.

As her Lifetimes tour hits the UK, we pick the high points from one of pop’s most successful vocalists, from angsty ballads to empowerment anthems

There’s no getting around the fact that Katy Perry’s breakthrough single has not aged well in some ways – the lyrics are like a lads’ mag reader’s idea of female bi-curiosity – but musically it’s an impressively fizzy retooling of the early-70s low glam sound, with crunchy guitars and glitterbeat drums.

His poem Mum Does the Washing went viral – but he started out parroting conservative talking points online. Now the British-Nigerian vocalist preaches a message of radical positivity

Playing Glastonbury almost made Joshua Idehen quit music – twice. The first time was in 2007, when the spoken-word artist’s slot followed a dancer who had successfully roused a crowd of 800. By the end of his first poem, only a handful of punters were left in the tent, even though it was pouring with rain outside. “People were like, ‘Nope, I’d rather get soaked than listen to you,’” he says. “That was a sucker punch.”

Nearly two decades later, on the Greenpeace stage this summer, the 45-year-old faced the opposite problem. Five thousand people turned up – another “earth-shattering” experience, only this time a dizzying high. “I did one Glastonbury and I was like, ‘I never want to experience that again,’” he says. “I did the other and thought, ‘It’s never going to feel like this again. This might be the end.’” He flashes a mischievous grin. “Then I was like, ‘Oh, look at how much money I can make!’”

The North Carolina-born singer’s breezy, earnest music recalls the various delights of the Lilith Fair cohort. Just be careful how you search her name

From North Carolina, US
Recommended if you like Fiona Apple, Anaïs Mitchell, Indigo Girls
Up next New album The Hermit out now; touring the US with Jens Lekman in November

Jordan Patterson’s name is unfortunately so close to that of a certain conservative Canadian author that Google suggests autocorrecting your search results when you look her up. The 23-year-old US songwriter couldn’t be much further from his brand of hypermasculine evangelism. Her debut album, The Hermit, recalls the rich 90s scene of offbeat North American female singer-songwriters who would go on to share the stage at Lilith Fair: Shawn Colvin’s acoustic breeziness, Fiona Apple’s earnest blues, Indigo Girls’ strident joy. (Similar era, very different scene: Patterson’s voice has an expressive skippiness that also channels Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins.) Her songs – and I say this as the greatest compliment – could easily have lived on the soundtrack to cosy mother-daughter drama Gilmore Girls. Fittingly, God wonders whether she should have a baby, and Hey Mama pays tribute to her own mother, pairing the scrappy triumph of Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ with impressionistic vocals that feel like a singer nudging her way towards revelation.

Dingwalls, London
Previewing new album Britpop to an audience of 600, the star promises ‘no stadium bravado’ and delivers droll new songs alongside stripped-back oldies

What do you do if you’re a superstar who has pulled well over a million people to a stadium tour? If you’re as contrary as Robbie Williams, you play a gig in a shoebox. This late-night show at the 600-capacity Dingwalls, the smallest venue of his career to date, is a rum event. It was originally a launch evening for a new album, Britpop, now postponed to February. Williams makes no bones about why. “It’s because of Taylor Swift,” he admits, in a week where her new album The Life of a Showgirl is outselling the rest of the UK Top 20 put together. “I could pretend it’s not, but it is. It’s selfish. I want a 16th No 1 album.”

Bounding on stage just as the pubs are closing, a grinning Williams clearly relishes the intimate environment. “I’m not doing all that stadium bravado and pointing,” he vows, launching into a full, stripped-down run-through of his 1997 debut album, Life Thru a Lens, with lengthy between-song reminisces of the circumstances of its making.

Royal Opera House, London
Revival of David McVicar’s production is full of kitsch turns and exquisite performances, not least from young French conductor Marie Jacquot

The orbs have been re-lit and the falcon booked, the monumental masonry slotted back into place and the flying contraption (part Wright brothers prototype, part Victorian perambulator) commandeered by another three boys. Twenty two years since its debut, with revivals now in double figures, David McVicar’s production of The Magic Flute is back, overseen by revival director Ruth Knight.

The lighting is as beautiful as ever: there’s no mistaking the Enlightenment’s visual metaphors here. Notwithstanding a technical hitch that delayed the start of act two on opening night, the opera’s sequence of mysterious non-places glides along, dreamlike and atmospheric. The opera has long outlived its genre of Singspiel – a kind of 18th-century musical – and its edutainment moralising unavoidably harks back to another age. Whether you agree with the programme that an opera insisting that women always need male guidance is “very suitable for children” will depend on your parenting style. But it’s hard to imagine the plot making more sense in the 21st century than it does in McVicar’s hands.

At the Royal Opera House, London, until 3 November.

Technology is radically reshaping how we make music. As I dug deeper into this for a radio 3 documentary I began to wonder if creative organisations are right to be so upbeat about AI. Are we riding the wave or will the wave destroy us?

The hacker mansion is part startup commune, part luxury crash-pad, part sales floor for the future. They are dotted around Silicon Valley, inhabited by tech founders and futurists. The most opulent I’ve seen is in Hillsborough, one of the Bay Area’s wealthiest enclaves, just south of San Francisco. Inside, marble floors gleam beneath taped-up portraits of tech royalty; in the gardens, gravel is raked into careful Zen spirals and pools shimmer beyond the hedges.

It was a sunny June afternoon, and I had come with my producer, Fay Lomas, to record interviews for a BBC Radio 3 documentary about the collision of generative AI and classical music in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Glyndebourne, Sussex
Floris Visser’s stylish bohemia recalls Brassaï’s Paris, while Puccini’s score is delivered with crispness and elasticity

Ditching the penguin suits and picnic hampers for affordable tickets and a smart-casual elegance, Glyndebourne’s autumn season opened with Floris Visser’s stylish La Bohème. Seamlessly revived by Rachael Hewer, it not only looks good, it does full justice to Puccini’s classic weepy while finding novel ways to raise the odd goosebump.

Dieuweke van Reij’s set – a metaphorical highway to heaven – serves for all four acts with more than a nod to Brassaï’s noirish photos of 1930s Paris. Bare walls and glistening cobblestones are breathtakingly lit by Alex Brok, while Jon Morrell’s monochrome costumes ooze couture. Visser’s bohemians inhabit a kind of twilight zone, a world of fogs, gendarmes and prostitutes, where the spectre of Death stalks the streets with the consumptive Mimì firmly in his sights.

At Glyndebourne, Sussex, until 2 November.

Jonathan Biss/Swedish Radio SO/Omer Meir Wellber
(Orchid Classics)
Biss pairs Beethoven’s fourth concerto with Sciarrino’s 21st-century miniature, creating a programme that is thoughtful and vividly expressive

Ten years ago, immersed in his project to record all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, Jonathan Biss began commissioning new works to pair with each of the composer’s five piano concertos. His recordings of these with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra reach their penultimate volume with the Concerto No 4 and Salvatore Sciarrino’s 15-minute Il sogno di Stradella, conducted by Omer Meir Wellber.

Biss’s tempos are unhurried in the concerto, and while his playing fizzes when Beethoven asks it to, this exuberance isn’t a constant undercurrent; the first movement sometimes feels a little episodic. Yet the tension in the middle movement between the belligerent orchestra and the serene piano is highly effective, and the finale, genial without being playful, has enough weight to balance it out. It’s a characteristically considered, thoughtful performance.

Electronic Arts; PC, PS5, Xbox
In contrast to the blast-em-ups this franchise drops players into a vast and vividly realised military offensive and the latest instalment is a brilliant return to form

Barely a minute into your first round of the large-scale multiplayer mode, Conquest, you will know you are back in Battlefield at its absolute best. Fighter jets scorch over head, tanks rumble by, the side of a building is obliterated by a rocket-propelled grenade. While Call of Duty has always focused its online matches on close skirmishes, Battlefield 6 makes you feel part of a vast military offensive, bewildering and ear-shattering, with even the quiet moments punctuated by the pop-pop of distance rifle fire, the shouts of orders and the cries for medics.

It’s well known that EA’s long-running first-person shooter series has hit trouble over the last couple of years, with futuristic instalment Battlefield 2042 widely considered a disappointment. So this time round, the development team (a collective of studios including original creator DICE) has gone back to the excellent Battlefield 4 for inspiration, where the emphasis was on authentic-feeling modern military warfare on large maps with lots of players. As ever, Battlefield 6 gives you the choice of four classes – Assault, Support, Engineer and Recon – each with its own weapons and gadgets, all of which can be upgraded and customised as you level up your soldier and gain experience. It’s a hybrid system taking elements of older Battlefields as well as newer Call of Duty titles, where the Gunsmith system revolutionised weapon personalisation for first-person online shooters.

A new exhibition in Berlin shows how the notoriously paranoid East German state greeted the dawn of video gaming with surprising enthusiasm

In 2019 researchers at Berlin’s Computer Games Museum made an extraordinary discovery: a rudimentary Pong console, made from salvaged electronics and plastic soap-box enclosures for joysticks. The beige rectangular tupperware that contained its wires would, when connected to a TV by the aerial, bring a serviceable Pong copy to the screen.

At the time, they thought the home-brewed device was a singular example of ingenuity behind the iron curtain. But earlier this year they found another Seifendosen-Pong (“soap-box Pong”), along with a copy of a state-produced magazine called FunkAmateur containing schematics for a DIY variety of Atari’s 1970s gaming sensation.

PlayStation 5; Sucker Punch/Sony
The follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima leans into its young protagonist’s thirst for bloody vengeance

My horse in Ghost of Yōtei is called Mochizuki, which means “full moon” in archaic Japanese, and I swear she is the most unfortunate creature in all of northern Japan. The button I have to press to summon her is right next to the button I need to press to heal my samurai during a fight and I often fumble with my thumb and call her straight into a chaotic seven-on-one brawl. Mochizuki frequently gallops full pelt into an arrow or catches a sword-swipe from one of my outlaw enemies as I roll out of the way. Sometimes she stands on the edge of the skirmish, calmly waiting for me to finish disembowelling bad guys so that we can resume our picturesque adventures across the region of Ezo.

Ghost of Yōtei is the follow-up to American studio Sucker Punch’s reverent samurai action game Ghost of Tsushima, from 2020. Most of the time it looks exceptionally well-directed, no matter what you’re doing: tense standoffs against formidable swordsmen, following a golden bird or a sprinting wolf across the landscape to find a secret natural spring or shrine, scaling a mountain to sneak your way into a tightly guarded fortress. But no open-world game’s dignified framing can survive the addition of a wayward player, and so sometimes I make it look entirely ridiculous by accidentally calling my horse into a fight, or setting myself on fire by mistake.

Newport Street Gallery, London
Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst and Invader join forces to make an exhibition that’s so bad, it’s like walking in on a crime scene

You’ve heard of the best of both worlds, well get ready for the worst of three. Down in Vauxhall in London, three artists have mashed themselves together to create the most revolting visual soup imaginable, an exhibition that isn’t so much the sum of its parts as a total negation of anything good any of them has ever done.

Whatever qualities YBA kingpin Damien Hirst and street artists Shepard Fairey and Invader might have, none of them are on display in this staggeringly vast exhibition – it just goes on and on, huge room after huge room filled with aesthetic crap.

Estorick Collection, London
If you find the fields of colour that Scully has been painting for four decades tranquil, then you haven’t been looking closely enough

A square painting called Blue Wall hangs in the gallery, its surface streaked with intercrossing rectangles in different shades of blue, richly brushed, thick and riverine. But there are gaps showing warm woody red beneath calming waters. It’s an abstract painting, a minimalist one even, yet there’s a rawness suggesting heartfelt narratives, barely contained feelings, kept just about in check behind the blue facade.

In this little essayistic exhibition, Blue Wall’s creator, the abstract artist Sean Scully, lets you into his life with unguarded passion. At the other end of the room, he exposes what his abstract art sublimates and transfigures in a recent self-portrait. It’s an innocent, honest attempt to look in the mirror and see himself, sitting at home in front of one of his big striped canvases, the colours of his clothes bouncing against it. Scully seems to be in a state of artistic flux and a mood of self-scrutiny, not just “mirroring” himself, as the exhibition title has it, in that self-portrait, but imagining a counterlife in which an artist famous for a very recognisable style of abstract painting is a drawer of cups and a portraitist of family life.

New book The Making of an Icon examines artist whose works have become almost ubiquitous

It seems like a new Jean-Michel Basquiat fashion collaboration drops online most weeks, from a £20 Uniqlo crew neck T-shirt to a kimono or a sports bra. But more than 35 years since his death in 1988, would the New York artist have been flattered or horrified by the mass marketing of his art?

Basquiat’s premature death at 27 means that questions will remain as to whether he would have signed off on things like bathmats on Redbubble or Ligne Bath’s Trumpet candle. How would he, for example, have felt about a Basquiat collaboration with MeUndies underpants – with the tagline: “Jean-Michel Basquiat … taught us all to look inward and find our authentic self. MeUndies always strives for authenticity.”

The exterior may be a bit Apple store. But inside – upending the very notion of galleries – the new Fondation Cartier can reconfigure its spaces with thrillingly movable platforms. And as for the lecture theatre, it’s blood red

Come what may, Jean Nouvel will always have Paris. The City of Lights has been the stage and stomping ground of French architecture’s vieux terrible since the early 1980s. Yet the building that first made his name – the Institut du Monde Arabe, a glittering, delicate, metallic creation inset with mechanical lenses to regulate light – is a lifetime away from the bemusement that met his last Parisian project, completed a decade ago.

That was the ill-starred Philharmonie, a gargantuan trophy concert hall, described in the Guardian as resembling “a pile of broken paving stones” and “a greatest hits mashup of dictators’ icons”. Nouvel may well concur, since he boycotted the building’s inauguration, dismayed by budget cuts and design tweaks (“value engineering” as it is known in the trade), describing his project as “sabotaged” and the half-finished concert hall as “counterfeit”.

They may not have called themselves artists but, as a new exhibition explores, the mostly anonymous painters, sculptors and craftspeople working under the pharaohs still made their mark in distinctive style

The earliest creator in world history whose name is known to us today was Egyptian. The priest Imhotep is credited with designing the step pyramid of King Djoser at Saqqara about 4,700 years ago, and so starting the sublime aesthetic achievements of the ancient state that straddled the Nile.

Yet ancient Egyptians did not imagine creativity as an individual achievement or see artists as celebrities – unless they were literally gods. Imhotep was believed to be the son of the creator god Ptah and was deified as a god of wisdom and knowledge, patron of scribes. Most Egyptian artists were no more likely to be remembered by name than Stonehenge’s builders. “Art” was not an idea. Golden mummy masks and statues of spear-wielding pharaohs were not made to be admired but to help dead people on their journeys through the afterlife. As for individual creativity, there wasn’t much place for it in art that conserved the same style, with only superficial changes, for 3,000 years.

From queer relationships and migration to AI and colonial histories, a huge range of artists have spliced together photography and archive material to create images that challenge history as we know it

When the artist Sunil Gupta found out he was HIV positive in July 1995, making a collage helped him to process how he felt. He used an image of himself taken on the day of his diagnosis clutching his knees and looking defiantly into the camera, then placed it, using Photoshop, between the bars of the M25 bridge crossing, which look as though they’re imprisoning him. “It was the day my life changed,” he says.

“Photography was a great tool for therapy,” Gupta says, and collaging “was very freeing, to get rid of those boundaries and put elements together.” On his new Apple computer, he merged low-resolution photographs he’d taken of posters and graffiti in Berlin; a zoomed-in picture of a 1930s gay bar the Nazis closed down; self-portraits and scans from books. He explored queer relationships, migration and his concerns around Thatcher taking Britain into Europe. “All of the messaging at the time, very similar to now, was about being a stranger in a strange land,” says Gupta. “I’ve been here since the 70s and I’m seventysomething but I still feel precarious.”

The Stooges frontman serves up an entertainingly sideways take on the climate crisis. Plus, the long-awaited return of a hugely popular LGBTQ+ podcast

His channel, MeidasTouch, puts out 15 videos a day exposing Republican failings – and it is getting bigger audiences than Joe Rogan’s. Is this the champion the American left has been waiting for?

Ben Meiselas is a very busy man. So busy, he has to break off halfway through our interview to conduct an interview of his own, for his next broadcast. It’s 7am Los Angeles time when we meet via video call, and Meiselas is already well into another 18-hour day of podcasting, planning, interviewing, meetings and more besides. His “pro-democracy” channel MeidasTouch, which he runs with his younger brothers Jordan and Brett, puts out 15 or more videos a day, most of them presented by Meiselas himself. “I was doing another video before this,” he says, “and so by now I’ve already released one video I did last night, which was my 4am, and now I just worked on my 7am – it’ll get released any minute now. And then I’ll have an 8.30, a 10, an 11.30 …”

The prolific output is part of the reason The MeidasTouch has become one of the most listened-to podcasts in the US, routinely beating the mighty Joe Rogan in both video and audio, and even overtaking Fox News in YouTube views. Rogan and others in the right-leaning podcast manosphere are thought to have swung the 2024 election in Donald Trump’s favour, prompting much soul-searching on the American left about its media game, and why they need a Joe Rogan of their own; MeidasTouch seems to have stepped in to fill the void.

He made millions on Wall Street, moved to the Costa Rican jungle with his wife … and ended up being shot in bed. A new podcast tells the wild tale of the US couple whose dream became a nightmare

The death of John Bender mystified the world. A handsome American millionaire, Bender moved to Costa Rica with his wife, Ann, two years after they married, and set about building a 2,000-hectare nature reserve, centred on a mountaintop mansion that had neither walls nor windows. But despite moving to this vision of paradise, the couple’s mental health fell into sharp decline and in January 2010, Bender died of a gunshot wound to the head.

Thanks to an unscientific forensic investigation by the Costa Rican authorities, the perpetrator remains unknown. Suicide is one option – John had written emails about wanting to die in the weeks previously – but the fact that he was shot in the back of the head, in bed, while wearing earplugs, suggests that Ann may have shot him. In the intervening years, the Costa Rican justice system (which has no double jeopardy law) has tried Ann Bender for murder on three separate occasions; of these, she was convicted once and acquitted twice.