OVO Hydro, Glasgow
There’s nowhere for Eilish to hide as she balances intimacy and spectacle, filming her screaming fans as she paces a stage akin to a boxing ring

Billie Eilish’s face is blown up across a four-sided, NBA-style jumbotron. Below, tracked by camera crews, she prowls a bare stage akin to a boxing ring – a rectangle slapped in the middle of the arena, fans everywhere she turns. Such media-heavy, mega-watt staging is immediately at odds with ambiguous opener Chihiro: “You won’t forget my name, not today, not tomorrow, kinda strange, feelin’ sorrow,” she murmurs, featherlight, over distant, rumbling subwoofer and watery electric guitar.

The challenge for Eilish’s arena tours has always been to balance her talent for intimacy with her clear interest in spectacle. It’s unfortunate but perhaps inevitable that the intricate production quirks of tracks such as Lunch and Wildflower get lost in the mix tonight, with just the drums pounding through, but she compensates with astute theatrics; at still just 23, Eilish offers some of pop’s sharpest commentary on the push and pull of fame.

Inspired by club culture and reincarnation, Tianzhuo Chen and Asian Dope Boys have devised a mesmerising show that unfolds in six two-hour chapters. Prepare to enter hell and then be healed

Naked performers covered in paint roll around atop dirt and foliage. Menacing sculptures hang from the ceiling and walls. The costumes have a beastly quality. At one point, a stream of feathers are strewn across the stage; at another, pink petals float down from above. This is Trance, an immersive psychedelic experience inspired by an eclectic mix of influences from electronic music and rave culture to Buddhism, cartoons and Japanese Butoh dance theatre.

When 39-year-old Chinese artist and director Tianzhuo Chen first had the idea for Trance in 2019, it was to accompany a solo exhibition of his work at M Woods Museum in Beijing. The initial result was a three-day performance with each fraction spanning 12 continuous hours. It has since been whittled down to a single 12-hour-long production. This month, the show is on in London as part of the Southbank Centre’s ESEA Encounters, a series celebrating east and south-east Asian arts and culture.

From moaning about the truffle to complaining their towels are too smooth, everyone is absolutely awful in this wild reality show about the super-rich and their minions. Prepare to lap it up

Who among us, as the summer months and dreams of sun and cloudless skies begin and the visions of holidays and freedom take on solid form, does not think: where oh where is my hate-watch of the season?

Well, fear not, mes chéris – the wait is over! Billion Dollar Playground has arrived and it is a feast for all. Imagine that The White Lotus’s characters were real, but worse, and that none of them – increasingly unbelievably – ended up murdered. One reprobate complains that the bath towels in their luxury beachfront rental in Sydney are “too smooth”. Another derides the chef for putting smoked salmon in her caviar and asks: “Is that the same truffle as yesterday? Then definitely not.” Mo’ canapes, mo’ problems.

Here’s a breakdown of how original Switch titles work on Switch 2, explaining everything from free Switch 2 updates to inbuilt backwards compatibility and the paid Switch 2 Edition upgrades

Outside of the phenomenal Mario Kart World and next week’s Donkey Kong Bananza, there isn’t much new Nintendo software to keep early Switch 2 adopters occupied. Thankfully, Nintendo has seen fit to improve a heap of existing Nintendo Switch games on the shiny new system, both in the form of graphics-boosting free updates and more substantial paid reworks. The different options can be confusing, however, so here’s an explanation of how it all works.

From TV soaps to the supreme court to the top job, Christian fundamentalists are on a power-grab in the country. We meet the director of Apocalypse in the Tropics, a new film charting their rise

Petra Costa was rewatching footage of what has become a historic speech made in 2021 by Jair Bolsonaro, the then Brazilian president, when suddenly she noticed something that went largely unnoticed at the time. Addressing thousands of supporters in São Paulo, the far-right leader lashed out at a supreme court justice, and said he would only leave the presidency “in prison or dead”. This statement is now cited as evidence against Bolsonaro, who is currently on trial, accused of attempting a coup to overturn his 2022 election defeat to current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro denies these allegations.

But what caught Costa’s eye in the footage was Bolsonaro’s gaze. As he shouted into the microphone, the paratrooper-turned-populist repeatedly looked – seemingly seeking validation – at one particular man in his entourage: the televangelist Silas Malafaia. In response, the evangelical leader appeared to be lip-syncing along to the president’s every word. “I watched the scene many times,” says film-maker Costa, “and the only conclusion I can draw is that Malafaia wrote Bolsonaro’s speech. If not, how could he have known every word?”

Sam Edmunds hopes to help young people with his play The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return

Growing up in Luton in the late 90s and early 00s, the playwright Sam Edmunds witnessed an abundance of knife violence that has stayed with him to this day.

“Me and my friends had knives pulled on us on numerous occasions. We once saw someone being chased with a machete at the back of the field by our school. In drama class, I remember a boy went into his bag to get his notebook out and a massive knife fell out. A boy in my brother’s year was stabbed over 10 times on a night out.”

They had portholes, cutting edge mod cons – and the ultra luxurious models even came with a free calculator. As Japan’s beloved Nakagin Capsule Tower resurfaces, we celebrate an architectural marvel

Looking like a teetering stack of washing machines perched on the edge of an elevated highway, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was an astonishing arrival on the Tokyo skyline in 1972. It was the heady vision of Kisho Kurokawa, a radical Japanese architect who imagined a high-rise world of compact capsules, where people could cocoon themselves away from the information overload of the modern age. These tiny pods would be “a place of rest to recover”, he wrote, as well as “an information base to develop ideas, and a home for urban dwellers”. Residents could peer out at the city from their cosy built-in beds through a single porthole window, or shut it all out by unfurling an elegant circular fan-like blind, all while remaining connected with the latest technology at all times.

Launched to critical acclaim, the Nakagin tower’s 140 capsules quickly sold out, and became highly sought after by well-heeled salarymen looking for a place to crash when they missed the last train home. Never intended to be full-time housing, the pods came stuffed with mod cons: en suite bathroom, foldout desk, telephone and Sony colour TV. But, 50 years on, after a prolonged lack of maintenance and repairs, and disagreements among owners about its future, the asbestos-riddled building was finally disassembled in 2022. The creaking steel capsules of Kurokawa’s space-age fantasy were unbolted and removed from the lift and stair towers, pod by pod.

From her groundbreaking debut Thirteen to forthcoming teen drama Street Smart – ‘a homeless Breakfast Club’ – the film-maker explains how she’s made her way in a job still largely made for men

Film-makers have long used their movies as Trojan horses to express their political beliefs and values and Catherine Hardwicke is no different. In her 2003 debut feature, Thirteen, and her 2008 teen vampire hit Twilight, the writer-director bolstered the stories with environmentally and socially conscious messaging to inspire people to “save the planet”. And with her latest film, Street Smart, which she describes as “a kind of homeless The Breakfast Club”, she is still “sneaking in” her “good values”.

Street Smart, now in post-production, is a low-budget ensemble drama, executive-produced by Gerard Butler and partnered with charities Covenant House and Safe Place for Youth, that centres on a group of unhoused teens bonding through music, trauma and humour while fending for themselves on the margins of LA society. It stars Yara Shahidi (Grown-ish), Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan) and Michael Cimino (Never Have I Ever), as well as a group of unknown actors whom Hardwicke describes as having “big hearts and compassion for others; otherwise, they would be trying to work on a superhero film”.

Exclusive: Oxford’s Bodleian libraries to put archive items on display for first time, celebrating spy author’s ‘tradecraft’

The extent of John le Carré’s meticulous research and attention to detail are among insights into his working methods that will be revealed when the master of spy thrillers’ private archive goes on display for the first time this autumn.

His classic cold war-era espionage novels have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and inspired acclaimed films and television adaptations.

Industry insiders cite free speech concerns, saying broadcaster overreacted by limiting live streaming of ‘high risk’ artists

Music industry figures have accused the BBC of making “arbitrary and disproportionate” changes to its coverage of live music after the fallout from Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury festival performance.

There is serious concern among artists and music agencies over a BBC decision that means any musical performances deemed to be high risk will not be broadcast live or streamed live.

Show will include 30 monumental pieces displayed across gardens and 90 works filling Shirley Sherwood Gallery

Henry Moore believed “sculpture is an art of the open air” and that his works should be seen in “almost any landscape, rather than in or on the most beautiful building”.

Now the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is planning the world’s largest outdoor exhibition devoted to the miner’s son who became one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, it will announce on Monday.

Encouraging figures for latest reboot starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey, albeit below previous films in the series

Jurassic World Rebirth has outperformed expectations at the box office in its opening week, with the latest instalment of the dinosaur franchise recording over $318m in revenue worldwide after initial projections suggested it might make $260m.

The film opened over the Fourth of July holiday weekend in North America, releasing into US cinemas on Wednesday 2 July – a standard tactic to help boost opening-weekend figures. The film grossed more than $147m (£108m) over five days (Wednesday to Sunday) in the US and Canada, and recorded $171m (£126m) in the rest of the world.

Exhibition looks at housekeepers, maids and governesses who ‘enable the lives of the heroines and heroes’

After Elizabeth Bennet walked 3 miles across fields to visit her sick sister, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice came in for scandalised criticism of her “blowsy” hair and petticoats “six inches deep in mud”.

What of the women who restored Elizabeth’s hair to coiffed curls and washed the filthy petticoats? Jane Austen’s novels include mentions of working women, such as housekeepers, maids and governesses, but now an exhibition puts their stories in the spotlight.

Management ask visitors to ‘choose clothing in keeping with the decorum of the theatre’ after complaints

Operagoers have been warned they will be banned from entering Milan’s prestigious La Scala theatre if they turn up wearing shorts, tank tops or flip-flops. Kimonos, however, are acceptable.

The venue’s management team reminded people how not to dress for an opera after complaints that some spectators were donning attire more suitable for the beach.

Since the late 1970s, the US’s most prolific concert poster artist Mike King has influenced how music lovers visualize their favorite artists. A new exhibition titled Copy/Paste/Print/Repeat features some of his rarer designs at New York’s Poster House through 2 November

Kourtney Roy’s filmic photo series The Tourist exposes the loneliness and desperation behind even the most glamorous looking vacation snapshots

Dr Orna continues to offer fascinating insight as she helps clients. Plus: it’s the last visit to Reuben Owen’s farm. Here’s what to watch this evening

11pm, BBC Two
The vulnerability of the clients and the utmost professionalism of Dr Orna (compared to other “experts” on reality shows) is what makes this therapy show such a hit. This week, though, it’s Orna who lets her guard down when one couple quits: “When patients just get up and leave, I do a lot of self-examination. Should/could I have? It’s not easy.” This adds another fascinating new layer, but she’s quickly back to helping the other couples get on track. Hollie Richardson

This audacious attempt to give two polar bears a second life by transporting them across Europe to a new home is an uplifting tale. But be warned, it is shocking

OK, I think it is incumbent upon me as an ethical reviewer to state something up top. I am conscious of our collective emotional fragility in difficult times, so need to say this: do not watch the first episode of Jimmy Doherty’s Big Bear Rescue without some kind of mental fortification to hand. I am no great animal lover. I prefer them to people, obviously, but given absolute freedom of choice I would be without any sentient being in the bunker with me. I’d like to draw the deadbolts across the blast-resistant doors, switch on the air-filtration system, open a tin and a book and wait out my time in silence without responsibility for any other living soul, thank you.

However, it’s 72 hours since the closing credits of this programme and I haven’t stopped crying. If that’s an unwanted spoiler for some, so be it. I think I’ve saved you some pain overall.

Her kooky online skits brought her viral fame and a breakout role in HBO’s Hacks. Then Lena Dunham came calling with the job of a lifetime. Is the actor ready to take centre stage?

When Lena Dunham messaged, Megan Stalter lost it. “Like d’uhh,” Stalter is explaining – delighting, really. “Who wouldn’t? I was at home: this really bad apartment in Laurel Canyon [in the Hollywood Hills]. The area is haunted, and it was actually a really scary building, and nothing ever got fixed because apparently in the lease I signed they didn’t have to repair anything! I don’t actually live there now …” Stalter, 34, has a tendency to wander off on tangents. So Dunham?

“OK yes, so we were just about to start filming Hacks again.” The wildly popular, 48-times-Emmy-nominated HBO comedy in which Stalter plays nepo-baby Kayla, a chaotic and kind-hearted talent agent, her total-commitment-to-the-bit characterisation making her a breakout star. “And there Lena was in my DMs.” Stalter opened the message, which said: “I have a project I want to talk to you about.” “That’s when I lost my mind,” she adds. “Panic set in.”

The return of this twisted tale of two troubled sisters and their mum is yet more scary, lairy and perfectly portioned comedy. It is knockout TV

There’s a scene early on in the first series of Such Brave Girls that sums the whole thing up nicely. Josie – a millennial not long out of a mental health crisis, now just in a general, all-encompassing life crisis – has helped her sister to bleach her hair. Unfortunately, she has neglected to tell Billie that the plastic bag she put over her head has left a massive, Shrek-green Asda logo on the dye job. Billie – who alternates between sweetly naive and absolutely petrifying, with little warning – lunges at Josie and smothers her new dress in ketchup, before threatening to kill herself. The girls’ mother will later attempt to return said dress to the shop – stains and all – feigning tears as she tells the shop assistant how much debt she’s in.

Suffice to say, Such Brave Girls isn’t a wholesome coming-of-age affair. It is, however, a brilliant, startlingly feral comedy, one which scooped the scripted comedy Bafta last year (previous winners include Derry Girls, This Country and Peep Show). The subject matter – suicide, abortion, financial ruin, deep-seated abandonment issues – sounds like the stuff of sadcoms. But what makes it stand out in a post-Waller-Bridge world is that it is an unashamed sitcom, with a regular cast and recurring gags. Think The Inbetweeners, if it had it been written by Julia Davis.

From scoring so badly at Eurovision it made Terry Wogan resign to having Paul Hollywood call your cake ‘tough as old boots’, here are the contestants who lost big on the nation’s favourite shows

We often hear about the people who win TV contests. As well as the glory of victory, they might earn an enviable cash prize, a lucrative record deal or a life-changing career boost. But what about those who finish last? Are they philosophical in defeat or throwing tantrums behind the scenes? We tracked down five TV losers to relive their failure in front of millions, reveal how they recovered from humiliation and share what they learned.

The Guardian theatre critic’s imaginative exploration of life in the shadows

Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a “difficult” night.

That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter’s book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives.

A daughter is brought up isolated from the world in this tender debut novel from an exciting talent

In the woodland, beyond the fence, inside the old forester’s hut, Maya and Daughter live in a world of rituals. The fence is secured with “Keep-Safes” – fingernails, Daughter’s first teeth, the umbilical cord that once joined them – to protect them from intruders. While their days are filled with chores, setting traps for rabbits and gathering firewood, every night they play a game they call “This-and-That”, in which they take it in turns to choose an activity – hair-brushing, dancing, copying – before saying their “sorrys and thank yous” in the bed they share.

From the beginning of British author Rowe Irvin’s captivating debut novel, it is clear that Maya has created this life for herself and her daughter – who calls her mother “Myma” – as a refuge from the brutality of the world beyond the fence’s perimeter. Irvin’s tale switches between two narrative strands: present-day chapters narrated by Daughter, a naive, spirited girl who is as much woodland creature as she is person; and more distant sections detailing Maya’s rural upbringing with an alcoholic father and withdrawn mother, and the acts of male violence that led her to flee.

From the site of the failed assassination comes a sharp-eyed account of Trump’s political gains – and Democrats’ failings

The Democrats’ famed blue wall is more the stuff of nostalgia than reality. On election day 2024, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump for the second time in three elections. Barack Obama’s upstairs-downstairs coalition lies in ruins, as Democrats struggle to connect with working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines.

Last November, Trump came within just three points of winning a majority of Latino voters. Such Americans walked away from their presumed political home – in droves. A Trump endorsement by Roberto Clemente Jr, son of the late Pittsburgh Pirates baseball star, was a harbinger. Likewise, Trump posted double-digit gains among Catholics and Jews, once core constituencies in the Democratic party of FDR.

Butler is published in the US by Hachette

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some fantastic new paperbacks, from a Booker-shortlisted novel to a groundbreaking history of a continent

This unfinished biography evokes Corfu and Alexandria – but leaves disturbing questions unanswered

Spirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. “Spirit of Place”, though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell’s literary output: Prospero’s Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations.

It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag’s best book was Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which drew on the writings of Cavafy, EM Forster and Durrell to reconstruct the polyglot culture of the Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arabic population that flourished for centuries on the shores of north Africa. By the time of his own death in 2020, Haag had completed this biography of Durrell up to the year 1945, and the decision was made to publish posthumously. The result reads like an abbreviated account of Durrell’s life rather than an amputation: despite not becoming a significant literary figure until 1957, most of Durrell’s formative experiences had taken place by the time he left the city at the end of the war.

A deeply researched history that examines colonial and post-colonial faultlines, from Aden to Myanmar

Earlier this summer, amid renewed tensions between India and Pakistan following a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, Donald Trump remarked that the two countries had been fighting over Kashmir for “a thousand years”. It was a glib, ahistorical comment, and was widely ridiculed. Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple’s urgent and ambitious debut, offers a more comprehensive rebuttal. Far from being a region riven by ancient hatreds, the lands that comprise modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar – as well as parts of the Gulf – were divided up within living memory from an empire in retreat.

“You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space,” Dalrymple begins, “but the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable.” Stretching more than 3,000km and flanked by floodlights, thermal vision sensors and landmines, this is more a physical scar left by the hurried dismantling of British India than a traditional geopolitical divide. What might now seem like natural frontiers were shaped by five key events: Burma’s exit from the empire in 1937; the separation of Aden that same year, and of the Gulf protectorates in 1947; the division of India and Pakistan, also in 1947; the absorption of more than 550 princely states; and, in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan. Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets.

Toby Kebbell is excellent as an ageing fighter (and care-home worker) getting sucked into crime, with a vivid LaBeouf as his childhood friend

Blue-collar chancer gets drawn into criminal underworld; it must be one of the most well-worn plots in cinema, and if debut directors Bjorn Franklin and Johnny Marchetta don’t exactly make it fresh in this character study, then they undeniably lend it a heartfelt vividness. That’s thanks in no small part to lead actor Toby Kebbell, who as ageing boxer and care-home worker Sal holds our attention with a loquacious naivety, despite having been around the block many times. Yakking his way in and out of various marital, family and felonious situations, Sal is a man fundamentally in negotiation with himself.

Living in a trailer, Sal is first and foremost trying to salvage his relationship with his 14-year-old daughter Molly (Kíla Lord Cassidy), irritating his ex-wife Elaine (Elaine Cassidy) in the process. Despite his thickening waist, he’s still a force in the boxing ring; checking on his form one day is his childhood buddy and local gang leader Vince (Shia LaBeouf, with thick Irish brogue and a bleached top that causes one character to complain: “It’s hard to hear myself think over that fucking hairstyle.”) Vince asks Sal to referee the bare-knuckle boxing bouts he’s got going, but his Irish Traveller clientele won’t accept this local legend remaining a bystander.

This nicely put together Swedish UFO throwback is notable for its early use of ‘vlubbing’ – using tech to match lip movements to new English dialogue. What’s coming next?

Here is a derivative but nicely put together sci-fi throwback, in which Inez Dahl Torhaug stars as Denise, a rebellious teenager in foster care whose father went missing in 1988. A dedicated ufologist for whom the truth was very much out there, Denise’s dad was trying to find aliens when he vanished. Alien abduction? Government cover up? Regular old disappeared-guy? When his old car falls from the sky into a local barn eight years later, Denise joins forces with her father’s friends at UFO-Sweden, including the likably nervous Lennart (Jesper Barkselius) plus assorted misfits, to investigate what leads they have, including the potential role of a shady-seeming organisation, the SMHI, AKA The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute.

You may gather from the names above that this is a Swedish film, and yet the dialogue is entirely in English. What gives? The unexpected twist is that the film is an early example of a technique that you can easily imagine becoming standard practice for streaming platforms hoping to reach multiple territories for minimal cost: AI-assisted dubbing. The original actors have re-recorded their lines and AI tech has been used to edit the visuals so that the lip movements from the original Swedish version match the new English dialogue. The technique is called “vlubbing” (visual + dubbing) and the target audience is seemingly the kind that won’t read subtitles or watch a traditional dub.

Ineffectual office worker Conor calls on the services of a gremlin that looks like someone dipped a Muppet in latex, covered it in caustic soda, and ran a car over it a few times

Canadian writer-director Steven Kostanski has been one of the creative forces behind a bunch of silly-sweet horror pictures such as The Void and PG: Psycho Goreman that appear to skew towards a younger demographic. Or perhaps his target audience is really the gen X crowd that never outgrew its affection for 1980s fare such as Critters or Gremlins, cheap and cheesy schlock reliant on practical special effects. Luckily, the latter happens to be Kostanski’s speciality; he’s also worked as a prosthetic FX artist on bigger budget films such as Crimson Peak and the TV series Hannibal. All of that comes together for this daft comedy horror farrago, seemingly set in the 80s, about a nebbishy Canadian office worker called Conor (Conor Sweeney).

Conor’s beige jumper alone bespeaks a man deeply risk averse and afraid of having fun, even when his marriage to Kristina (Kristy Wordsworth) is on the line. Stung by criticism from his pony-tailed boss (Adam Brooks) for one that his presentations on subdivisions lack “spice”, Conor calls a hotline advertising a nebulous but supposedly fun-enhancing service supplied by gremlin Frankie Freako (voiced by Matthew Kennedy). Frankie is effectively a puppet, less than a metre tall, who looks like someone dipped a Muppet in latex, covered it in caustic soda, and then ran a car over it a few times. The phone call enables him – and two less interesting, similarly ugly puppet creatures – to travel across dimensions to wreak havoc at Conor’s house, like the Cat in the Hat but without the feline charm or rhyme schemes, but way more fart jokes.

Coppola said his masterpiece Apocalypse Now ‘is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam’ – this superb film shows how little he was exaggerating

The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war masterpiece Apocalypse Now got made – even scarier than Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The time has come to acknowledge Eleanor Coppola’s magnificent achievement here as first among equals of the credited directors in shooting the original location footage (later interspersed with interviews by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), getting the stunningly intimate audio tapes of her husband Francis’s meltdown moments and, of course, in unassumingly keeping the family together while it was all going on.

With his personal and financial capital very high after The Conversation and the Godfather films, Coppola put up his own money and mortgaged property to make this stunningly audacious and toweringly mad version of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness from a script by John Milius; it is transplanted from 19th-century Belgian Congo where a rogue ivory trader has gone native in the dark interior, to south-east Asia during the Vietnam war where a brilliant US army officer is now reportedly being worshipped as a god among the Indigenous peoples and must have his command terminated “with extreme prejudice”. Marlon Brando had a whispery voiced cameo as the reclusive demi-deity, Martin Sheen was the troubled Captain Willard tasked with taking Kurtz down and Robert Duvall is the psychotically gung-ho Lt Col Kilgore, who leads a helicopter assault.

US president and UK prime minister team up for a well-modulated mix of action and comedy that deserved a theatrical release

Rather than give the world an escape, Heads of State, Amazon’s throwback buddy comedy, thrums the tension in US foreign relations. Suicide Squad veterans Idris Elba and John Cena are redeployed in this gun show from Nobody director Ilya Naishuller, respectively, as the UK prime minister and US president at loggerheads. President Derringer, barely six months in office, resents the PM for not doing more to help him get elected. Prime Minister Clarke, a six-year incumbent mired in an approval ratings slump, has already dismissed the president – a swaggering former action hero – as a Schwarzenegger knockoff. After a joint press conference goes sideways and spoils the announcement of a Nato-supported energy initiative, the pair are forced on an Air Force One ride to help repair the PR damage – but it gets worse when the plane is shot down.

As it turns out, the Nato energy thingy was cribbed from a nuclear scientist that alliance forces neutralized to head off the threat of another Hiroshima – and his father, a psycho arms dealer named Viktor Gradov (a rueful Paddy Considine), is bent on revenge. In fact, the two-hour film opens with Noel – a skull-cracking MI6 agent played by Priyanka Chopra – leading a covert strike on Gradov in the middle of the world famous Tomatina festival in Buñol, Spain, that turns upside down when she and her team are felled in the food fight. That botched operation – part of a wider sabotage, as we’ll learn later – is top of mind when the president and prime minister bail out of Air Force One (under attack from without and within) into a Belarusian wood. From there, they must find their way back to safe harbor – not knowing whom they can trust when they get there, of course. All the while they’re being chased by Gradov’s hell-raising henchmen Sasha and Olga “the Killers”, whom Aleksandr Kuznetsov and Katrina Durden play like Boris and Natasha, but eviler.

This summer has 28 Days Later, I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Karate Kid franchises coming back to life but what should come next?

The Thin Man series should not be rebooted so much as remixed, shaken a little and strained into crystal coupes. These glamorous 1930s capers starred the debonair duo of William Powell and Myrna Loy as frisky husband-and-wife sleuths Nick and Nora Charles, who solve crimes while cracking wise and necking cocktails, accompanied by their precocious wire fox terrier Asta. There were six films in the original run, starting with 1934’s The Thin Man, an adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name, and ending in 1947. The perfect recipe for a new Thin Man film would comprise two charismatic movie stars with sizzling chemistry, the kind who look stunning in evening dress, but who can also ad lib their own gags, a cavalcade of plot twists and saucy co-stars, a happy ending, and of course a scene-stealing pooch. It’s good, old-fashioned fun, but that’s why it’s so timeless, and a formula that can run and run – until the ice bucket is empty. Pamela Hutchinson

The latest instalment marks a return to form after some recent duds, with all the expected Spielberg-style set pieces and excellent romantic chemistry between the leads

What a comeback. The Jurassic World film series had looked to be pretty much extinct after some increasingly dire dollops of franchise content: Fallen Kingdom in 2018 and Dominion in 2022. But now, against all odds, these dinosaurs have had a brand refresh: a brighter, breezier, funnier, incomparably better acted and better written film, with unashamed nods to the summer smashes of yesteryear, that makes sense of the dino-spectacle moments that earn their place.

Screenwriter David Koepp and director Gareth Edwards have been drafted in to take us back to basics with a new story, all but retconning the drama with a “17 years previously” flashback at the start that entirely (and thankfully) ignores the tiresome convoluted dullness of what has recently happened. Then we’re in the present day, when the existence of dinosaurs in the wild is accepted but they’ve all pretty much died out – except in and around the lush fictional Île Saint Hubert in the Caribbean.

Vera; or, The Nihilists concerns a plot to kill a tsar but after Alexander II was assassinated, its London premiere was cancelled. Now receiving a rare production, it captures his conflict between ethics and aesthetics

Who wrote the following: “When private property is abolished, there will be no necessity for crime”? In one of his plays the same writer has a female revolutionary cry: “How easy is it for a king to kill his people by thousands but we cannot rid ourselves of one crowned man in Europe.” If I reveal that the writer was a London-based Irishman, most people would assume it was Bernard Shaw. In fact, it was Oscar Wilde and, while the first quote comes from his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the last is from his play Vera; or, The Nihilists which is to get a rare professional production at the Brockley Jack Studio theatre, south-east London, in September.

The play itself is virtually unknown even to Wildean devotees. It was written in 1879 and loosely based on the story of a 22-year-old Russian revolutionary who had attempted to shoot the St Petersburg chief of police. Wilde’s version is set in Moscow but his heroine, Vera Sabouroff, has a similar political ardour and leads a band of nihilists who plan to assassinate the tsar. That is only the starting-point for a robustly noisy melodrama that was intended for London production in 1881. But the actual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March of that year and the fact that the Prince of Wales was married to the sister of the new tsarina killed it stone dead. When it was eventually produced in New York in 1883, it was greeted with sneery disdain and, aside from the odd amateur revival, has lain buried ever since.

Hammersmith Apollo, London
Minchin embraces his oddball status – is he musician, comedian, auteur or clown? – in this three-hour show

It’s 20 years since Tim Minchin’s life-changing Edinburgh fringe in 2005, and tonight he’s singing 20 songs of commemoration. There’s a lot to celebrate: few careers are this distinctive, or this successful. And there’s a real sense Minchin has got life where he wants it tonight. With a five-strong band in tow, the balance is better than on his last tour between troubadour and rock Gargantua. And there’s an embrace, too, of his misfit status: who cares if no one knows whether he’s a musician, a comedian, an auteur or a clown – or whether tonight’s show is, as Minchin describes it, “an absolute shitshow of tonal inconsistency”?

I mean, he’s not wrong. Minchin has always been a curious mix of cool and uncool, sending up rock theatrics while openly in thrall to them. He is an artist of excess, never knowingly underwritten – and for more than three hours tonight, we get a lot of him.

Theatre Royal Bath
In 25 scenes spanning 1878-1966, David Hare’s wry and elegant love letter to theatre focuses on the working and romantic relationship between Ellen Terry and Henry Irving

When fielding letters from theatregoers bewildered by the titles of David Hare’s 1990 plays Racing Demon and Skylight, the director Richard Eyre told the playwright that in future he should explain them.

Grace Pervades usefully provides an epigraph: “Grace pervades the hussy.” Even so, Hare still requires us to know, or Google, that this line comes from a review of the great actor Ellen Terry, who is portrayed here by Miranda Raison with Ralph Fiennes as her mentor, the senior British theatrical, Henry Irving. “Hussy”, which would these days rightly get a reviewer removed from the Critics’ Circle, referred to her two children “out of wedlock” and her long affair with the married Irving.

Aviva Studios, Manchester
Riven in two by grief – with musician John Grant playing the mind and former Royal Ballet principal Ed Watson the body – lead character George takes a finely danced journey back toward life’s flow in Jonathan Watkins’ inventive ballet

It makes total sense for choreographer-director Jonathan Watkins to turn George, the central figure of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man, into a double person. Isherwood’s point of departure is the profound sense of dissociation induced by grief, and in casting a dancer, former Royal Ballet principal Ed Watson, as George’s body, and singer-songwriter John Grant as his mind, Watkins at a stroke shows us his riven, dislocated self: Watson on the ground, Grant raised on a platform, motion and music operating on different planes.

If Grant’s voice is always fluent, even mellifluous, moving from low growl through easy baritone and even up to eerie countertenor, Watson’s body begins blocked – all angle and effort, no flow. On one level, the piece is the story of its unblocking, through the reawakening of desire: there’s a tennis match that morphs into homoerotic fantasy; there are passionate memories of his dead lover Jim (Jonathan Goddard); a drunken evening with old friend Charley (Kristen McNally), who has desires of her own; and finally a baptismal night-swimming escapade with a student, Kenny (James Hay), that plunges George back into the waters of life.

London Palladium
Zegler excels as Eva Perón and the crowds outside are used to capture the hypnotic appeal of populism but the narrative takes a backseat in his staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical

Director Jamie Lloyd has outraged some theatregoers, who evidently feel short-changed after paying good money to see Rachel Zegler as Eva Perón. In one scene, she wanders off stage and on to an outward-facing balcony to sing a magnetic reprise of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina to the gathered crowd outside the theatre.

What are these grumps complaining about? Not long ago, Lloyd staged Romeo and Juliet in the West End, but here is a balcony scene like no other. It makes for a sensational moment, when Perón triumphantly addresses the crowd on her husband Juan’s election victory. It is 360-degree theatre, for the rich inside (who see it on a video feed) and for the “hoi polloi” outside – very fitting for Perón given her disdain for the wealthy.

From Lewis Capaldi to Lorde to the Britpop icons, this year’s secret sets were anything but secret. But there was plenty more to beguile, from Pink Pantheress to Busta Rhymes to Brandi Carlile

On Wednesday morning, as Glastonbury opened its gates, the Guardian canvassed the opinions of early arrivals as to which act they were most looking forward to seeing. Several suggested singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi, who wasn’t listed on the festival’s bill at all. His appearance – a re-entry into public life after two years away, dealing with poor mental health and Tourette syndrome – was meant to be a secret, but everyone already seemed to know when and where he was playing.

Such is the peculiar conceit of the Glastonbury “secret set”: ostensibly a closely guarded surprise, but this year seemingly a matter of public record, only moderately less discussed than the controversial appearance of Belfast rap trio Kneecap, whose set even the prime minister apparently had an opinion. So it was that Lorde’s “secret” set in the Woodsies tent on Friday morning was so oversubscribed that the entire area around it had to be closed off. In fairness, she did her best to thin them out a bit by playing her new album, Virgin, released that morning, in its entirety. It’s a great album – a sharp, intriguingly fraught update of the dancefloor-focused pop style she previously deployed on 2017’s Melodrama – but throwing in only a couple of the hits after nearly 40 minutes of unfamiliar material comes under the heading of A Big Ask at a festival.

Norman Cook estimates that he’s reached a centenary of sets at Worthy Farm, from big stages to tiny tents. Guardian photographer David Levene joined the celebrations in the DJ booth

Irreverent, bouncy and as suitable at 4am in a club as it is at 4pm in a field, the music of Fatboy Slim dovetails perfectly with Glastonbury. And the man himself, Norman Cook, seems to know it.

This year’s festival marked a big milestone: Cook has now played 100 Glasto sets – or thereabouts – over the years, popping up everywhere from vast stages to tiny tents. To document the occasion, Guardian photographer David Levene bedded in with the DJ for the weekend, while Cook explained why it holds such a special significance for him.

Cook tries to find his daughter for Burning Spear at the Pyramid Stage

Guardian photographer David Levene used an eight-metre pole to get up above the crowds and create a unique perspective on this year’s festival

It can be difficult to get an elevated view at Glastonbury. There are various high-up platforms around the site, and of course there are the hills that give a view down into the valley where the festival nestles. But for much of the weekend you are in a crowd, looking up. Guardian photographer David Levene therefore used an eight metre-high “monopod” – a sort of highly stable pole with his camera stuck on top – to create elevation and give us a better sense of the scale of the crowds.

I wanted to get a slightly different viewpoint of the things that have become very familiar to our readers
David Levene

Astrolabe stage
The wild men of noughties indie on their return to the site to play the Pyramid stage, Pete Doherty’s opinions on Oasis – and their regrets

On the final day of Glastonbury, the Libertines are due on the Pyramid stage for an afternoon show. But first, their co-frontmen, Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, make a stop by the Astrolabe stage for the last of Guardian Live’s in-conversations at this year’s festival. “They are the greatest British rock band of the last 25 years,” says Guardian critic and today’s host, Miranda Sawyer. And Doherty and Barât are two of the most notorious hell-raisers in indie-rock. But this is a changed band, perhaps, who stop for a photograph with Mr Tumble before they walk onstage.

They kick off the talk with fond memories of Glastonbury, a place that has long been “part of the mythology of the band,” says Doherty. For him, it was running into his sister, AmyJo, having not seen her in three years. “I heard this couple fighting in the mud.” But then he realised: “I know that voice. It was AmyJo. She was having a full on barney with her boyfriend at the time. We had a massive, warm embrace and a little cry.”

Villa Park, Birmingham
The biggest names in rock, from Metallica to Slayer, came to pay tribute to the men who created their entire genre – and even in old age, Sabbath’s sound has bludgeoning force

• The big farewell in pictures: Metallica, Jason Momoa and Ozzy’s middle finger

Fireworks burst over Villa Park’s pitch, Black Sabbath wave goodbye, and the inventors of metal leave the stage for the final time. It has not been an epic show – just War Pigs, NIB, Iron Man and Paranoid – but is the farewell this extraordinary band deserve, with an undercard of stadium-fillers and festival headliners come to pay tribute.

The returning Bill Ward adds the swing other Sabbath drummers have never managed, Tony Iommi churns out those monstrous riffs, Geezer Butler flits around them on bass, and Ozzy Osbourne … is Ozzy Osbourne, a baffled and discomfited force of nature.

Co-Op Live, Manchester
The 75-year-old is in ageless voice and playful mood throughout a performance of as many of his greatest hits as can fit back-to-back in two and a half hours

The concert is just minutes old when the crowd recognise the tell-tale first four notes of Stevie Wonder’s 1980 Bob Marley eulogy Master Blaster (Jammin’), and instantaneously rise to their feet in unison and pure joy. For almost two and a half hours, the soul-funk-pop legend rifles through his back catalogue with the glee of a small child deciding which toy to play with next. At various turns he’s peacemaker – encouraging world leaders to “lead us to a better place” – then 1960s soul man, balladeer, funkmeister and synthesiser soul explorer. Such are Wonder’s musical treasures that the 26-song setlist can pile through Higher Ground’s glorious elasticated groove in the first four numbers and omit Uptight, Happy Birthday, He’s Misstra Know It All and many other classics altogether.

This rare UK visit finds the 75-year-old legend in ageless voice and playful mood. Blind since shortly after birth, he swaps sunglasses and jokes “I can’t see without my glasses”, then leads the crowd into an impromptu burst of You Are My Sunshine by way of intro to You Are the Sunshine of My Life. Given his age and the length of the show, it’s understandable that he takes a break. There is a slight lull as backing vocalists take the spotlight, and later his son Mandla Morris sings I Can Only Be Me.

The pop veteran works up a sweat to Biffy Clyro and recognises the dancefloor power of Abba, but which Kylie banger hits a little too close to home?

The first song I fell in love with
I’ve got two older brothers and an older sister. My sister played the grooves out of Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell. When I got my chance, I’d put on I Wan’na Be like You from The Jungle Book.

The song I do at karaoke
Tale As Old As Time from the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack, even though it’s a duet. My daughter Emilie is 33, but when she’s home, we’ll watch a Disney film together. She turns into a five-year-old, I turn into a young dad and it’s just lovely.

(Universal)
After her last album embraced switching off, the musician returns to pop’s fray to revel in the mess of late-20s angst with a strikingly unsettled sound

In April, Lorde launched her fourth album with a brief guerrilla gig in New York. A message telling fans to meet her at Washington Square Park – ostensibly for a video shoot – caused chaos, happily of the variety that gets filmed on multiple cameraphones and goes viral on social media. Thousands turned up and the police shut the event down, but those that evaded them were eventually rewarded by Lorde performing to new single What Was That with impressive gusto given that she was standing on a small wooden table at the time.

It was surprising. Lorde’s last release, 2021’s Solar Power, wasn’t the only album of that period on which a female artist who had become famous in her teens strongly suggested that doing so was a living nightmare – Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever and Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts did, too – but it was the only one that sounded like a resignation letter, sent from a beach in Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s native New Zealand: “Won’t take a call if it’s the label or the radio,” she sang at one point. At another: “If you’re looking for a saviour, well that’s not me.” But Solar Power turned out to be merely an out-of-office message. Four years on and Lorde isn’t just back, but apparently back in the sharp-eyed party girl mode of 2017’s Melodrama. What Was That compares falling in love to the sensation of smoking while on MDMA. “It’s a beautiful life, so why play truant?” she shrugs on opener Hammer. “I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.”

Newly restored material from vast archive destroyed in civil war takes in Anglo-Norman conquest and 1798 rebellion

Seven centuries of lost historical records covering espionage, political corruption and the lives of ordinary people in Ireland have been recovered and released.

A pioneering project to fill gaps in Irish history is making 175,000 more records and millions more words of searchable content freely available to researchers and members of the public.

Milton Keynes Bowl
Public Image Ltd deliver a thrilling set and the The can still enthrall, but it is the techno-symphonies of headliners Kraftwerk that remain truly peerless

This new one-day event is an attempt to import California’s four-year-old Cruel World festival to the UK, and as the parent US event is a devotedly Anglophile affair featuring almost exclusively original British post-punk and goth bands, the promoters could feasibly have called this offshoot Coals to Newcastle.

The early 80s were, indeed, an incredibly fertile time in British music, and it could be depressing to see so many of its prime movers recalibrated as nostalgia turns. Yet the bill is such a stylistic mixed bag that it’s hard to draw many conclusions besides the simple truth that some have aged a lot better than others.

Utilita Arena Birmingham
The newest song might date from 1992 but that matters little to fans of their fast and intricate heavy metal

It takes four songs for Bruce Dickinson to shout what everyone knows he is going to shout: “Scream for me, Birmingham!” For their 50th anniversary tour, Iron Maiden are not reinventing the wheel – they are, as ever, playing fast and intricate heavy metal. As ever, Dickinson spends much of the set on top of the backline, acting out characters, Steve Harris machine-guns the audience with his bass while playing his “galloping” lines, and Janick Gers, when not swinging his guitar around, sticks his left leg in the air and rests it on the stage side speakers. No idea why. But he always does it. And, of course, the song subjects are the contents of a 12-year-old’s head: the Battle of Britain (Aces High); crazy mental powers (The Clairvoyant); Satan (The Number of the Beast). You get the picture.

The one deviation from usual, Dickinson informs us, is that this is as near as Maiden get to a greatest hits show: the most recent song tonight, Fear of the Dark, dates from 1992. For the less committed, that is a good thing. Maiden have a tendency to be windy, and this format – their early songs were generally shorter and sharper – helps with that, though it doesn’t eliminate it entirely. Rime of the Ancient Mariner lasts nearly as long as a cross-channel ferry, and you can’t even buy duty free to pass the time.

Royal Opera House, London
Alice Coote’s vengeful Juno steals the show in Oliver Mears’ bleak and occasionally fussy production

Handel’s Semele is a curious beast. It’s both an opera masquerading in oratorio’s clothing, and a moralising object lesson in knowing your place. “Nature to each allots its proper sphere,” sings the chorus as the overly ambitious heroine goes up in smoke, charred to a crisp by the divine brilliance of her adulterous lover. It’s a point hammered home in Oliver Mears’ astute new production where the hapless Semele is a go-getting servant trapped in a palace with a slippery cad, his vengeful spouse and their glassy-eyed children.

If you take William Congreve’s libretto at face value, Semele – the daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes – is a vain fly-by-night, easy prey for the jealous Juno who eggs her on to insist that her mighty paramour appears in all his flesh-consuming majesty rather than human form. Mears takes a more interesting approach, seeing in Semele a tenacious contender who honestly believes that Jupiter intends to make her his life partner. It’s clear, however, from the bookended byplay in the overture and finale that she is merely the latest in a long line of discarded women to be consumed in the royal incinerator. A cupboardful of urns, labelled Calisto, Io, Leda etc is a suitably chilling touch.

Dylan Thomas’s evocative radio play has been adapted into films, a ballet, even a jazz suite. From its drunkards and nosey-parkers, to its ghosts and dreamers, Ninfea Crutwell-Reade’s new reimagining connects it back to its origins

In October 1953, Dylan Thomas took part in a symposium on poetry and film in New York. A recording of the event captures the Welsh writer’s speaking voice in what would be one of his last public appearances before his death 12 days later at the age of 39. Amid the pops, ticks and crackles of the tape, we hear Thomas on sparkling form, telling the audience about an experimental play he had been to see “in a cellar or a sewer or somewhere”, accompanied by the US playwright Arthur Miller. In the middle of the performance, he recounts, Miller turned to him and remarked, “Good god, this is avant garde. In a moment the hero’s going to take his clothes off.” Roars of laughter follow this anecdote, before questions turn to Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood, which had enjoyed a number of public readings in New York City that year, billed as a “new comedy”.

Under Milk Wood is quite a different sort of play to the avant garde production Miller and Thomas had attended. Set in the fictional Welsh town of Llareggub (“Bugger all” backwards), it documents the dreams, digressions and foibles of the town’s inhabitants in a blaze of poetic beauty and vibrant satire. It is a “play for voices”, borne out of the world of the mid-20th-century BBC radio feature – a fluid, experimental genre in which narration, acting, song, verse, music and sound effects were mixed together often without the constraint of a dramatic plot. Thomas himself was a gifted radio actor and had taken part in a number of BBC radio features, including The Dark Tower by Louis MacNiece and In Parenthesis by David Jones. When Milk Wood was first broadcast in 1954 on the BBC’s Third Programme, the cast was led by his friend and acting companion, Richard Burton.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Pairing Mendelssohn’s sun-filled Italian symphony with Berlioz’s broodingly romantic Harold en Italie – with actor Charlotte Ritchie on hand to bring Berlioz’s own voice to life - the Aurora Orchestra were on irresistible form

So much shared, yet so utterly different. Mendelssohn wrote his Italian symphony in 1833, revising it the following year. Berlioz wrote his Harold en Italie symphony in 1834, following a stay in Rome during which the two composers had spent quality time together. Thus the Aurora Orchestra came up with the smart idea of putting the two Italian symphonies side by side.

Beyond their loosely shared inspiration and form, however, the two works have little in common. Mendelssohn’s is an expert and extrovert piece of symphonic writing, tight and technically impeccable. That of Berlioz, meanwhile, follows a wandering star all its own, broodingly romantic and constantly innovative, exemplified by the solo viola that depicts the melancholy of Byron’s introspective hero Childe Harold.

Rachel Podger/Brecon Baroque
(Channel Classics)
The baroque violinist remains true to the spirit of Biber’s music on a new recording of six extremely difficult sonatas, animal noises et al

Ten years ago, Rachel Podger made a fine recording of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Rosary Sonatas for solo violin and continuo, each of which portrays an episode in the life of Christ. Now she adds a disc of more sonatas by arguably the most important baroque composer for the violin after JS Bach – five of the collection of eight that Biber published in 1681, as well as the quasi-theatrical Sonata Representivo, which may or may not have been composed by Biber and probably dates from 1669.

The pieces are all characterised by their extreme technical difficulty, and especially by their extensive use of scordatura, when individual violin strings are tuned differently from usual. Podger copes with all these challenges quite brilliantly, including imitating the sounds of animals in the Sonata Representivo; she brings an expressive freedom that never takes too many liberties, but remains true to the spirit of the music. If the works themselves are not quite as startling and vivid as the Rosary Sonatas, anyone who enjoyed Podger’s previous encounter with Biber will surely relish this one, too.

In Kojima’s latest epic, the Australian outback becomes a shifting, spectral landscape that you can get lost in

As a teenager in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with Australian new wave cinema, thanks partly to the Mad Max trilogy, and partly to an English teacher at my high school, who rolled out the TV trolley one afternoon and showed us Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Walkabout. We were mesmerised. Forty years later, I am playing Death Stranding 2, Hideo Kojima’s sprawling apocalyptic adventure, and there are times I feel as if I’m back in that classroom. Most of the game takes place in a ruined Australia, the cities gone, the landscape as stark, beautiful and foreboding as it was in Roeg’s film.

I’ve been playing for 45 hours and have barely made an impact on the story. Instead, I have wandered the wilderness, delivering packages to the game’s isolated communities. The game is set after a catastrophic event has decimated humanity and scarred the landscape with supernatural explosions. Now you pass through vast ochre deserts and on toward the coast, watching the sun set behind glowing mountains, the tide rolling in on empty bays. Usually in open-world games, the landscape is permanent and unchanging, apart from day/night cycles and seasonal rotations. But the Australia of Death Stranding 2 is mysterious and amorphous. Earthquakes bring rocks tumbling down hillsides, vast dust storms blow up and avalanches bury you in snow. As you go, you are able to build roads, electricity generators and even jump-ramps for cars. These can be found and used by other players, so each time you visit a place you may find new ways to traverse. Nothing is ever really still.

The 2002 adaptation of the horror video game sparked a six-film, billion-dollar franchise – and a fruitful romance between its director and his action hero

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

In 2009, actor Milla Jovovich married director Paul WS Anderson. Longtime partners and creative collaborators, the two met on the set of 2002’s Resident Evil, an adaptation of the Japanese video game franchise which pushed the limits of the PlayStation in the 90s. Starring the former and written and directed by the latter, the production – which would inaugurate a six-film, billion-dollar franchise – was not without its hiccups.

The story goes that Jovovich, unhappy with script revisions which palmed her action scenes off to her co-stars, threatened to walk. But instead of leaving, she and Anderson spent hours amending the script: the genesis of a fruitful partnership, both professional and personal. Most significantly, the rewrites returned to Jovovich’s character (the amnesiac Alice) the film’s defining scene, in which she runs up a wall, spins, jumps and kicks a zombie dog square in the face.

PS5; Sony/Kojima Productions
This is a mystifying and provocatively slow-paced game with more celebrities than you would find on a Cannes red carpet

What is Death Stranding 2 trying to say? It’s a question you will ask yourself on many occasions during the second instalment of Hideo Kojima’s hypnotising, mystifying, and provocatively slow-paced cargo management simulator series. First, because during the many long and uneventful treks across its supernatural vision of Mexico and Australia, you have all the headspace in the world to ponder its small details and decipher the perplexing things you just witnessed. And second, because the question so often reveals something profound.

That it can stand up to such extended contemplation is a marker of the fine craftsmanship that went into this game. Nobody is scribbling down notes to uncover what Doom: The Dark Ages is getting at or poring over Marvel Rivals’ cutscenes for clues, fantastic as those games are. It is rare for any game to invite this kind of scrutiny, let alone hold up to it. But Death Stranding 2 has the atmosphere and narrative delivery of arthouse cinema. It’s light of touch in its storytelling but exhaustive in its gameplay systems, and the tension between the two makes it so compelling. At first you brave one for the other; then, over time, you savour both.

Artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former Bethlem hospital patients to go on show

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalisingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists. Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

Participants in the Matadero’s inaugural Senior Audience School discover that theatre ‘takes the sting out of the nonsense in life’

The 25 people who have gathered in a small Madrid theatre over the past few months to consider identity, relationships, gender-based violence and inclusion aren’t exactly the crowd you’​d normally expect to haunt a cutting-edge drama space housed in a former slaughterhouse. And that is precisely the point.

The men and women, aged between 65 and 84, are the first cohort of an initiative that aims to introduce those who live around the Matadero arts centre in the south of the Spanish capital to the joys and challenges of contemporary theatre. Last year, mindful of the fact that many of the older residents of the barrios of Usera and Arganzuela rarely attended contemporary theatre and would be unlikely to darken the doors of the new Nave 10 space, the Matadero and the city council came up with a plan.

As Mr Doodle, Sam Cox found a global audience and made a fortune with his signature scrawls covering furniture, clothes – and eventually an entire house. But behind the scenes, he was unravelling into psychosis

From the road, it’s barely visible; glimpsed, maybe, if peered at with cheeks pressed against the property’s imposing iron gates. There is otherwise little out of the ordinary in this quiet Kent corner of London’s affluent commuter belt – St Michael’s has a village hall, a country club, a farm shop. But at the end of a snaking, hedge-lined driveway is an incongruous home: a sprawling, six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion, almost every inch, inside and out, covered in the trademark black-on-white line drawings of its owner, Mr Doodle, the 31-year-old artist Sam Cox.

A car honks twice behind me. A woman in her 80s steps out. “It’s mindblowing, isn’t it?” Sam’s grandmother Sue says, eyebrows aloft. “And terribly … different.” The gates ahead buzz open. “Take it slowly,” she offers, by way of warning. “You’ll want to give your eyes a few minutes to adjust.”

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
From a goat sculpture to a giant bronze ampersand, via a filmed argument about sardines between two Kentridges, there is no rest for this dazzling artist’s imagination

How’s this for vanity art: William Kentridge sits astride a horse, like a Roman emperor, his profile beakily aloft as he controls his steed. Except this statue is not as solid as it sounds but a photographic mural of Kentridge in horse-riding pose behind a skeletal wooden horse constructed from parts of artist’s easels with a saddle slung over its cardboard tube of a body. Kentridge mocks himself, and mocks the pretensions of sculpture. Or does he? There’s a confident, showoff brilliance to this illusion and the parallel with a previous great artist is obvious.

Another sculpture, a more solid one, Goat, is a swirling tangle of lines solidified in space, capped with a goat’s head. It’s a homage to Picasso’s 1950 sculpture The She Goat. When you see Picasso’s art it’s not so much one specific work that awes you as the boundless flow of creativity that moves from one style to another in an inexhaustible, playful stream. Kentridge lays claim to that legacy here – and with justification. He is just about the only artist now who can dizzy you in a comparable way with the abundance of his creativity as his impulses dance from drawing to film to collage and back to drawing.

Can you imagine Liverpool without its Welsh Streets or London without Battersea Power Station? For 50 years, one small band of activists have been finding creative alternative uses for great buildings their owners couldn’t see

It’s hard to imagine London without the mighty riverside citadels of Tate Modern and Battersea power station, or bereft of the ornate Victorian market halls of Smithfield and Billingsgate. It is equally difficult to picture Yorkshire without its majestic sandstone mills, Grimsby without its fishing docks, or parts of Liverpool without their streets of terrace houses. Yet all these things could have victims of the wrecking ball, if it weren’t for one small band of plucky activists.

You may not have heard of Save Britain’s Heritage, or SAVE as it likes to style itself, suggesting the urgency of the matter at hand. But the tiny charity, which celebrates its 50th birthday this month, has had more influence than any other group in campaigning for the imaginative reuse of buildings at risk, most of which had no legal protections whatsoever from being bulldozed.

“We felt that a much more punchy approach to endangered buildings was really needed,” says Marcus Binney, who founded Save in 1975, with an agile network of likeminded journalists, historians, architects and planners. “There was too much, ‘Oh, we’ll write to the minister, and have a word with the chairman of the county council.’ The usual channels were not working. We realised that the real battleground was the media.”

They were spurred by the surprise success of a 1974 exhibition at the V&A, The Destruction of the Country House, co-curated by Binney, which conveyed the shocking scale of demolition across the country with graphic power. The “Hall of Destruction”, replete with toppling classical columns, displayed more than 1,000 country houses that had been lost in the preceding century, a number that rose to 1,600 by the time the exhibition closed. The scale of the issue struck a chord: more than 1.5m signatures of support were gathered to keep these buildings standing.

What set Save apart from other heritage groups at the time was its proactive, propositional approach and energetic, youthful zeal. They had no qualms about calling out the villains, and would admonish greedy developers and lazy local authorities with ferocious glee. Their press releases and campaign pamphlets were a breath of fresh air, emblazoned with bold graphics, punchy headlines and evocative texts written with fierce authority – with a critical media-savviness brought by trustees including Simon Jenkins and Dan Cruickshank. Most crucially of all, theirs was not a call to keep the world in aspic, but to find creative alternative uses for buildings that their owners couldn’t see. “The argument for demolition was always that a building had ‘reached the end of its useful life,’” says Binney. “But the question is: ‘Useful for whom?’”

When the Central Electricity Generating Board planned to demolish its (then unlisted) Bankside power station in Southwark and replace it with offices, Save conjured a proposal in 1979, in a moment of wildly improbable blue-sky thinking, to turn it into an art gallery instead. A decade later, Tate announced that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s great brick colossus would become the home of its modern art collection. It is now one of the most visited museums in the world. Twenty years on, when a developer wanted to scoop out the elegant innards of Smithfield market and replace them with a bloated office block and shops, Save commissioned an alternative vision, fought two crowdfunded public inquiries, and won. The London Museum is set to open there next year, breathing fresh new life into the atmospheric warren of cast-iron domes and brick vaults, that would otherwise be dust.

As another piece of art falls victim to social media, Florence’s Uffizi gallery is placing restrictions on visitors’ behaviour. Is this a sensible safeguard – or simple snobbery?

It’s that time of year again. As the crowds grow, historic Italian cities and museums become the setting for a You’ve Been Framed-style sequence of absurdist moments. Last year it was a young woman embracing a (replica) Giambologna statue in the streets of Florence. This year the Uffizi gallery, guardian of Florentine art, has been defiled as a man posed for a photo in front of a portrait of Ferdinando de’ Medici. While imitating the hand-on-hip, baton-wielding pose of this scion of the soon-to-be-extinct Medici family, he slipped and put his hand through the canvas. This comes shortly after an incident in a Verona museum, where a tourist sat on an artwork in the form of a crystal chair, also for a photo, and shattered it.

The Uffizi’s director says it will now take action against the swarm of visitors “coming to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media … We will set very precise limits, preventing behaviour that is not compatible with the sense of our institutions and respect for cultural heritage.” But is it really fair to see everyone who takes a selfie with a painting, or shares their travels on social media, as part of a barbarian horde intent on destroying civilisation? If so, the battle is lost.

‘So-called sidechicks’ are celebrated in the presenter’s new show with a TikTok historian. Plus, a shocking investigation into gangs profiting from inheritance scams

Jameela Jamil and Dr Kate Lister host this podcast dedicated to the untold tales behind “history’s so-called sidechicks”, with interludes from TikTok’s History Gossip, AKA Katie Kennedy. If you prefer a more strait-laced approach then this isn’t the show for you: it’s a tongue-in-cheek riot, kicking off with Louis XIV’s paramour Madame de Montespan, and her fall from grace via a poisoning scandal. Hannah J Davies
Audible, all episodes out now

Fans of bestselling novelist Emily Henry will devour the juicy first episode. Plus, Women’s Euros 2025 and Christine McGuinness delves into dating!

If you too have raced through Emily Henry’s moreish romcom novels, you’ll want to tune in to this new podcast from Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Henry is the first guest, along with director Yulin Kuang, who is bringing her stories to the big screen. They’re talking all things romance with host Danielle Robay, who will continue to meet authors in a series made for listening to in a sunny park. Hollie Richardson
Widely available, episodes weekly

The hunt for the anthrax letter killer, the comedy genius of PG Wodehouse and real talk with Katherine Ryan – it’s the finest listens of the last six months!

• See more of the best culture of 2025 so far

• Tell us your favourite new podcasts of 2025 so far

Jeremiah Crowell’s CBC series transports listeners back to 2001, and the anthrax letter attacks that had much of the US gripped with panic in the wake of 9/11. If it all seems like a distant memory, Crowell’s meticulous narration of the events bring the frenzy and confusion of it all right back. From the underreported fatalities to the police’s painstaking investigation and the question of whether a government scientist could have been behind it, Crowell doesn’t skip over any of the details in a heavily researched series notable for its lack of sensationalism.