It might look like a platform for the films ‘produced in foreign lands’ that Donald Trump despises. But a surprising number of pictures at this year’s festival side with the locally rooted over cosmopolitan elites

If Donald Trump really wants to save Hollywood, maybe he needs to venture outside his comfort zone and watch more European art house cinema.

The Cannes film festival, which closes on Saturday, is in many ways the very definition of the “globalism” that the American president’s Maga movement despises. Walk past the queues snaking alongside the Palais des Festivals and you hear languages and accents from every corner of the globe. The Marché du Film, where industry professionals strike their deals, is brimming with smart people from all over the world beckoning US producers with irresistible tax incentives – resulting in the kind of movies “produced in foreign lands” that the US president earlier this month proposed punishing with 100% tariffs. At the opening gala, Cannes gave Trump arch-enemy Robert De Niro a platform to rally the world of cinema against the US president, “without violence, but with great passion and determination”.

As their album Grand Prix turns 30, we rate the standout moments from a group Kurt Cobain called ‘the best in the world’

In 2018, bassist Gerry Love departed Teenage Fanclub (TFC) after 29 years, much to fans’ despair. It’s perhaps a little romantic to see The First Sight as his parting gift, but it’s certainly an impressive closing statement of his songwriting talent: an intricate mesh of guitars, a buoyant horn section, and a typically stunning tune.

Following Wish You Were Here’s release, the actor answers your questions about Sunday roasts, being kept on her toes by Paul Greengrass and especially villainous villains

Hi Julia. What’s it like being directed by Paul Greengrass with his fast-cut, handheld camera, reportage style? Do you have to approach your acting in a different way? HighPriest1967
Paul is an extraordinary director, a visionary director, and I absorbed so much by watching him work. He comes from documentary, so even though he was filming these elaborate, very expensive, complicated action sequences, he was still able to see things happening spontaneously. I remember when we were shooting The Bourne Ultimatum in Tangier, running through those windy streets. Normally as an actor, you turn a corner and you think you’re off camera, so you’d stop. But you could never do that with Paul because there might be a camera around the corner. He always liked to keep us on our toes.

You stole the show as Heather Graham’s sister in Chosen Family. Is it easier to approach comedic, unpredictable roles as opposed to more intense, serious, Bourne-like performances? Bicuser
I absolutely love working on comedies. People don’t normally think of me as a comedic actress, but when they do, I really appreciate it. It’s such a different energy, trying to get other people to laugh. Working with Heather Graham was great. I’ve just finished shooting a Christmas comedy, Unbearable Christmas, with a lot of improv comedians, and had to keep up in terms of ad-libbing lines. It was the most fun I’ve ever had.

Monumental works by the likes of Alexander Calder and Andy Goldsworthy draw huge crowds to the verdant landmark in New York’s Hudson Valley. Now these visitors can have a ‘restroom experience’ on a par with its spectacular sculptures

Unless they have been signed by a mischievous surrealist, it is not often that toilets qualify as works of art. But at the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture park that rolls across 200 edenic hectares of New York’s Hudson Valley, visitors are now treated to a sublime restroom experience worthy of the spectacular sculptures on show.

“It’s quite an upgrade from our porta-potties,” says Nora Lawrence, director of the centre, which has just reopened after a $53m (£39.7m) expansion. She is standing outside the new loos, housed in a sleek wooden pavilion that opens out on to the woodland landscape, framing views of the red maple swamp beyond. A new ticket office stands across a tree-lined “outdoor lobby”, while elegant lampposts line the route to an open-air welcome pavilion, sheltering lockers and phone charging points.

Storm King had none of these things before. Founded in 1960, on a ravaged landscape of gravel pits left by neighbouring highway construction, the sculpture park never had the facilities you would expect from such a popular visitor attraction, which draws crowds of 200,000 each year. Named after a local mountain, the art centre began as a small museum of local landscape paintings, housed in a 1930s Normandy-style chateau on a hill here in Mountainville, surrounded by 23 acres. Its founders, Ralph E Ogden, and his son-in-law, H Peter Stern, who co-ran the family business manufacturing steel bolts, soon acquired a taste for outsized sculpture, and, as a consequence, an appetite for more land. Their holdings eventually grew to include 800 hectares of the adjacent Schunnemunk mountain – which Ogden bought to preserve the woodland backdrop, then donated to become a state park.

Storm King now boasts one of the world’s greatest collections of outdoor sculpture, with more than 100 works by 20th-century greats, but it has always lacked electricity, piped water, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation. Alexander Calder’s 17-metre tall The Arch stands in the middle of a meadow like some prized fowl, flaring out its curved black limbs with haughty pride. Mark di Suvero’s trio of colossal steel structures march across the hills, rising on the horizon like abandoned oil derricks, mineshaft headframes or rusting contraptions once used to sculpt the land. Isamu Noguchi’s 40-tonne granite peach nestles in a woodland clearing nearby, looking positively modest in comparison, while Andy Goldsworthy’s drystone wall winds its way for 700 metres between the trees. But in between admiring these wonders, visitors were treated to the delights of portable plastic toilets and crowded parking lots.

In true North American fashion, Storm King had a lot of asphalt. Swathes of parking and access roads sliced across the pristine meadows, and muscled into the foreground of the striking steel sculptures, undermining the intention of experiencing art against a backdrop of pure nature.

She hid in the toilets during the Trainspotting shoot – yet became a screen sensation. As the star plays a police therapist in new Netflix thriller Dept Q, she explains why today’s young female actors leave her in awe

One of the good things about playing a therapist, says Kelly Macdonald with a laugh, is that you get to sit down a lot. There’s a fun scene in the new Netflix thriller Dept. Q in which her character, Dr Rachel Irving, weary of her client DCI Carl Morck, plants herself down behind her desk to eat her packed lunch in front of him. Morck may be the kind of troubled detective we’re used to seeing in police dramas, but Irving isn’t a typical therapist. She’s blunt, antagonistic even. It’s a “shitty” job working with police officers, she tells him. Another time she describes him as “doolally”, which in my experience is not something a typical therapist would say; Macdonald, who has had therapy, “but not regularly”, may agree.

In the show – adapted from novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and brought to the screen by Scott Frank, who was also behind the Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit – Morck is made to see Irving after he survives a shooting. Brilliant but sidelined, Morck is tasked with reviewing cold cases, and moved to a shabby basement office that becomes known as Department Q. The first case for his small crew of misfit detectives is the disappearance of a lawyer four years earlier, who everyone thinks is probably dead. The truth, it soon emerges, is absolutely terrifying.

Translocating the Scottish play to Iran with help from the RSC, iNK Stories’ version focuses on a Lady Macbeth contending with an oppressive surveillance state

The Cannes film festival isn’t typically associated with video games, but this year it’s playing host to an unusual collaboration. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based game studio iNK Stories (creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it’s been turning heads with its eye-catching translocation of Macbeth to modern-day Iran.

“It’s been such an incredible coup to have it as the first video game experience at Cannes,” says iNK Stories co-founder Vassiliki Khonsari. “People have gone in saying, I’m not familiar playing games, so I may just try it out for five minutes. […] But then once they’re in, there is this growing sense of empowerment that people from the film world are feeling.”

As The Final Reckoning hits cinemas, Guardian writers pick their favourites of the action-packed series

Mission: Impossible’s slick and sensuous surface bears no trace of the drama behind the scenes making it. During production, the screenwriters of Jurassic Park (David Koepp) and Chinatown (Robert Towne) sent in duelling script pages for director Brian De Palma and producer Tom Cruise to wrestle over. The magnificent outcome is an intense tango between the modern blockbuster and a classic film noir, circling each other warily, and beautifully, like no Mission: Impossible that would follow. De Palma’s original is a sexy wrong-man thriller, a Hitchcockian affair that comes disguised as an action-heavy corporate product (or maybe the mask is worn the other way around?). In it, Cruise’s coiled IMF agent, framed for the murder of his entire team and surrounded by slippery allies, is constantly trying to play it cool through the plot’s knotty parlor games, all while feeling the noose tightening around him. If Cruise’s career up to this point was all about often leaving his relaxed boyish middle-American charm on the surface, Mission: Impossible pushed him to try on layers – not just the latex ones – while also pulling off those incredible high-wire stunts, which would only escalate but never improve on the hair-raising tension the first time out. Radheyan Simonpillai

It may be set 60 years ago, but a new ballet version of The Who’s rock opera asks questions about youth, society and masculinity that still resonate – and it brought its original creator to tears

Deckchairs fly, arms clash, bodies launch into the air as mods and rockers engage in a fierce Brighton seafront battle. But in this east London dance studio – with Zaha Hadid’s Olympic swimming pool visible through the window – young performers in sports socks, joggers and baggy T-shirts are reimagining the Who’s seminal document of the mid-60s Quadrophenia as ballet.

Isn’t this 1973 album an unlikely subject for dance? We’ve recently had Black Sabbath: The Ballet, and Message in a Bottle set to Sting, so why not? After all, Quadrophenia is theatrical at its roots. “The closest thing to a grand opera I’ll ever write,” says the Who’s guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend. Set in 1965, the story of disaffected young mod Jimmy looking for meaning in life via music, amphetamines and aspirational tailoring became a cult 1979 film starring Phil Daniels, but a more recent incarnation was Classic Quadrophenia, a symphonic version of the album for orchestra and tenor Alfie Boe. It was when Townshend heard the instrumental version, orchestrated by the musician Rachel Fuller (also Townshend’s wife) that he said to her: “I think this would make a lovely ballet.”

Pop star recognised for sharp yet candid songcraft on Brat, but loses best album category to Berwyn at awards honouring songwriting excellence

Charli xcx continues her victory lap after the success of her zeitgeist-grabbing 2024 album Brat, winning songwriter of the year at the Ivor Novello awards, which honour the best in British and Irish songwriting and screen composition.

Brat marked a career high for the British pop artist, topping the UK charts and reaching No 3 in the US, and earning huge praise for Charli’s sardonic yet soul-baring lyrics. She won five Brit awards earlier this year, the second-highest number of wins in one night in the awards’ history, as well as three Grammys.

Exhibition will showcase her entire career, from French surrealism to fashion and war photography

The UK’s largest retrospective of the American photographer and photojournalist Lee Miller, who produced some of the most renowned images of the modern era, will take place at Tate Britain this autumn.

The exhibition will showcase the entirety of Miller’s career, from her participation in French surrealism to her fashion and war photography.

Show re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals is most ambitious to date, says artist

Marina Abramović is an art world superstar well known for challenging visitors’ awkwardness at sex and nudity by, for example, asking them to squeeze through a doorway between a naked couple.

This year, she will take it to a new level in what she is calling the most ambitious work of her long career – an immersive erotic epic featuring performers re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals.

In Cannes to promote The History of Sound, the actor said ‘I don’t see the parallels at all, other than we spent a little time in a tent’

The actor Paul Mescal has hit out at critics who have drawn comparisons between The History of Sound, a gay romance in which he stars opposite Josh O’Connor, and Ang Lee’s landmark western Brokeback Mountain.

Speaking at a press conference in Cannes the day after the film’s premiere, Mescal – who followed a supporting performance in Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed gay ghost story All of Us Strangers with playing the lead in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II – said he believes cinema is “moving away” from alpha male roles.

Post on the pair’s Instagram page says ‘Eva returned to the future today’, having died at their home in Berlin after surgery on her spine

Eva, one half of the pioneering German performance art duo Eva & Adele, has died, her partner has announced.

“Eva returned to the future today,” a post on the pair’s Instagram page said on Wednesday. “She has left this world and stepped on to the eternal stage. Her faith in the power of art was never-ending.”

Hambling says she has been able to adapt to injury – and saw funny side when her plumber asked if her work was now half-price

Maggi Hambling’s morning routine involves making one drawing with her non-dominant left hand as soon as she gets up – a practice that has come in particularly useful lately, after having her little finger on her right hand amputated.

“On November the 17th, I fell down the stairs, and I had a glass in my hand. And it’s cut through the hand and cut through the little finger,” she told the audience at Charleston festival in East Sussex, holding up her four-fingered hand.

Flat Earth: Stolon Press, which was called off after Sabsabi was dumped as Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale, will now open on 29 May

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An exhibition featuring works by Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi that was called off by Monash University in March will open to the public next week, with the university announcing it had reversed its decision.

Monash University “postponed” Stolon Press: Flat Earth at Monash University Museum of Art (Muma) in Melbourne in the wake of Sabsabi being dumped as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale. It was the first time a show had been pulled in Muma’s 50-year history.

Campaigners say knowledge taught at Newark School of Musical Instrument Crafts vital to preserve traditional skills, especially luthiery

The making of stringed instruments will become a critically endangered craft under plans to close new courses at the only UK college teaching the skills as a full-time degree.

The Newark School of Musical Instrument Crafts, owned and overseen by Lincoln College, has said it would accept no new applicants for world-renowned courses, including those currently enrolled on its foundation courses.

Attendances are up and average ticket prices down, even in the West End, but the sector faces mounting and unsustainable strain

A report by the Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre, released on Thursday, puts the spotlight on an industry struggling with rocketing production costs and in need of urgent funding. The sister trade associations have called for the government’s comprehensive spending review to dramatically increase public investment, including £500m for infrastructure, and to support its Theatre for Every Child initiative which aims to ensure all pupils attend a professional theatre production before leaving school.

The organisations’ co-CEOs, Claire Walker and Hannah Essex, said: “Theatres are doing more with less – and the strain is showing. Rising costs, shrinking support and ageing infrastructure are putting the sector under unsustainable pressure. We are seeing world-class organisations forced to cut programmes, delay maintenance and scale back outreach. If we want to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in theatre – and continue to inspire the next generation of actors, writers, and technicians – then government must act.”

Garrick theatre, London
Filial tangles, played with the actor’s real-life daughter Bessie Carter, bring George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned drama to life

This is not the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned 1893 play about a mother-daughter reckoning to cast a real-life mother and daughter. Caroline and Rose Quentin performed it together at Theatre Royal Bath in 2022. Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter here make a more compelling double act and bring an added frisson to the play’s intimacies and disputes.

Carter plays Vivie, a no-nonsense young woman with ambitions to take up the legal profession. Her mother, Kitty (Staunton), has a successful profession of her own – the world’s oldest – and a string of brothels to her name. When Kitty visits Vivie, who has just graduated from Cambridge, this secret is explosively revealed.

In Bi Gan’s ambitious alternate reality, where humans can live indefinitely, a reincarnating dissident dreamer travels through history in different guises

Bi Gan’s new movie in Cannes is bold and ambitious, visually amazing, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened meaning of the unreal and the dreamlike. His last film Long Day’s Journey Into Night from 2018 was an extraordinary and almost extraterrestrial experience in the cinema which challenged the audience to examine what they thought about time and memory; this doesn’t have quite that power, being effectively a portmanteau movie, some of whose sections are better than others – though it climaxes with some gasp-inducing images and tracking shots and all the constituent parts contribute to the film’s aggregate effect.

Resurrection is, perhaps, a long night’s journey to the enlightenment of daybreak; it finishes at a club called the Sunrise. It is also an episodic journey through Chinese history, finishing at that historic moment which continues to fascinate Chinese film-makers whose movies are a way of collectively processing their feelings about it: New Year’s Eve 1999, the new century in which China was to bullishly embrace the new capitalism while cleaving to the political conformism of the old ways.

Wigmore Hall, London
A programme of solo and duo works ranged from Schubert to Beethoven, but Kurtág was the main focus, his duets beautifully shaped and vivid

Until Márta Kurtág’s death in 2019, one of the most delightful musical experiences was to watch and listen to her and her composer husband György playing his piano duets – the playfulness, the quiet intimacy, the way in which the writing meant they crossed arms as if in a gentle game of Twister. But you don’t have to be married to play Kurtág’s duets – just generous with your personal space. Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou chose eight of them for this recital, performing them alongside Kurtág’s similarly miniature solos and framing them with four works by Schubert, the master piano duet writer of the 19th century.

The Kurtág pieces on the main programme were all from Játékok: translating as Games, this is a collection of mostly tiny piano solos and duets united by their concision and sense of mischief which Kurtág, now 99, has been adding to for half a century. Andsnes’s solo set began with an Evocation of Petrushka that indeed sounded like a sped-up tape of Stravinsky; immediately afterwards there was the contrast of Les Adieux, quietly throbbing into silence, then an about-turn into the frenzied klaxon of Sirens of the Deluge. Chamayou sent his hands cartwheeling repeatedly down the keyboard in The Little Squall, and painted spots of changing colour in Hommage Tardif à Karskaya. Their duets were even more vivid, with Harangok and Kyrie showcasing differing and equally convincing ways of making the piano sound like bells.

Ritchie’s derivative yarn whisks John Krasinski off to picturesque spots on an uninspired search for treasure and excitement – neither of which arrive

Trying to make John Krasinski happen may be a misguided endeavour, but the campaign to mould him into a new Harrison Ford is bananas. After starring as Jack Ryan on TV, he now plays Luke Purdue, an Indiana Jones knock-off and son of an adventurer-archaeologist (named Harrison, no less) in Guy Ritchie’s soulless business-class yarn. Despite plucky work from Natalie Portman as Luke’s disapproving sister Charlotte, this hodgepodge of plundered elements adds up to nothing more than Indiana Bourne and the Thomas Crown Da Vinci Code.

Bankrolled by dying billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), Luke and his dad’s old team are on the trail of the mythical Fountain of Youth. He even has a PowerPoint presentation to show how he intends to find it: hidden on the backs of six paintings by artists such as Caravaggio and El Greco are clues which will lead to this fabled source of immortality. Charlotte cautions against the whole enterprise but is soon whisked along, apparently persuaded by her brother’s bumper-sticker slogans (“Life is about adventure!”). It’s almost as if she can’t see that he is an obnoxious bully, chiding her for her life choices, puckering up creepily for kisses from Esme (Eiza González) who is trying to prevent him from finding the fountain, and given to knocking women unconscious with a disabling spray. Nice.

Cannes film festival
Saeed Roustaee’s new film takes aim at a slippery, entitled male who thinks he can lord it over a widow he plans to marry

A strange, sad, sombre movie from Iranian director Saeed Roustaee whose last entry at Cannes was the family drama Leila’s Brothers in 2022. This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises. Like Leila’s Brothers, it is about the entitlement of Iran’s menfolk, and how a man – however shiftless, casual and low-status – can somehow pull rank on a woman in the marriage market.

Payman Maadi (from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) plays Hamid, an ambulance driver in his late 40s with a certain roguish ladies-man charm whose unmarried status raises eyebrows among some of his acquaintances, but who is now engaged to Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar). She is a smart, hardworking hospital nurse who is widowed and lives with her sister Mehri (Soha Niasti) and mum (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee), and her two kids. Teen son Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) is always in trouble at school and has a breezy way of sweet-talking his mother into forgiving him and younger sister Neda (Arshida Dorostkar).

Collegium Novum Zürich/Ensemble Contrechamps/Michael Wendeberg
(Bastille Musique)
In the composer’s centenary year, this disc showcases two of his most substantial works

Almost all the major works from the second half of Pierre Boulez’s composing career developed in the same way: their starting point is a small-scale ensemble or solo piece that served as the kernel for the much expanded and elaborated later score. That was the process that led to the final versions of works such as Mémoriale, Anthèmes and …explosante-fixe…, and to the pair of substantial pieces that are played with fabulous precision and incisiveness on this disc.

Éclat/Multiples, completed in 1981, began life in 1965 as Éclat, a kit-like eight-minute exploration of the sound world Boulez had first created for the central movements of his masterpiece Pli selon Pli, and which he then expanded to a work for 25 instruments. For Sur Incises, which grew by stages through the mid 1990s, the starting point was a solo-piano piece, Incises, while the final work uses trios of pianos, harps and percussionists to create a seductive world of mysterious trills and decaying resonances and sudden outbursts of frantic activity. It’s clear from the sketches for Éclat/Multiples that Boulez intended to extend it beyond the 28-minute version that is played today, and this disc includes an extra four minutes of music never recorded before; there may be yet more to come in the future, but in the meantime these are fine accounts of two of Boulez’s most significant works.

Shakespeare’s Globe, London
Director Ola Ince brings absurdist comedy to Arthur Miller’s classic drama of Salem witch-hunting

There is never a time when Arthur Miller’s play about a world turned upside down by collective hysteria and scapegoating does not bear some resonance. But the present moment – of dangerously disputed truths and lies – is an especially pertinent moment to revisit Miller’s analogy between accusations of witchcraft and McCarthyist terror.

This production is faithful to the original 17th-century setting, amid the heat and panic of the Salem witch trials. There is period dress: bonnets for women, pointed hats for men and ribbons for the judges, along with a range of broad British accents for these original American pilgrims. But director Ola Ince brings a quietly radical touch in the form of humour – more absurdist than comic, with accusations of flying girls and demon possession taking on preposterous tones. The men, mostly the judges of the last two acts, appear bumbling, like yokels arguing over the fate of their chattel at a country fair. Deputy Governor Danforth (Gareth Snook) is particularly clownish, though no less awful for it.

‘I spotted them in a town called Elkhart, jumped out of the car and ran towards them. If you didn’t know their story, you might think they were runners or cyclists. Then you see the tattoos’

My first trip photographing Americans was in 2015, when I drove 8,000 miles across the country on a Harley-Davidson. I’d spent too long caught up in assignments and wanted to take some time off from commercial and editorial work to follow my own creative urges. America offered an opportunity to explore a landscape I didn’t know, and was far enough away from my home in the Netherlands to ensure it wouldn’t be easy for me to just go back if things got difficult.

I think Europeans often don’t understand how tough life in America can be. I wanted to show real, underrepresented people who are just trying to survive, while also drawing attention to how rich their lives can be. At a time when people seem increasingly polarised in their views, my images seek to challenge the assumptions that often divide people, and to focus on the common experiences that connect us.

‘Machines were revolutionising recording. We were told to lay down a 20-second backing track, a guide vocal – then go and play table tennis’

Lol Creme and I left 10cc at the height of the success because we felt things were starting to become repetitive. We came from an art school background and we were thinking visually. Even at that stage, there were two film-makers waiting to come out.

Ahead of the author’s much anticipated memoir, we count down the best of her books – from climate dystopias to her world-conquering handmaids

After more than 30 years, Atwood caved to pleas to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Not since Harry Potter had a publication caused such a sensation: computers were hacked in search of the manuscript and advance copies were kept under lock and key. With classic Atwood timing, the novel coincided with the phenomenal success of the TV adaptation of the original – not to mention the arrival of Trump at the White House. The Testaments won Atwood her second Booker prize, shared (controversially) with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

The chef, author and presenter wants to be John Bonham and might be found busting out Baker Street at karaoke, but which song reminds him of lost love?

The first single I bought
I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats from Sounds Nice on Birtley High Street, when I was in my teens. I know it was about a school shooting, but at the time, I thought: I have a visceral reaction to Mondays as well.

The first song I fell in love with
Still in Love With You from Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous album. I was learning to play drums and Brian Downey, Thin Lizzy’s drummer, used to do this wonderful shuffle beat because it’s a relatively slow track, and his playing is beautiful. I still play the drums. I’ve never stopped being a musician.

As Spike Lee’s neo-noir crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest debuts at Cannes film festival, we index the most ravishing Hollywood redos of all time

Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) obsesses over the fate of his missing girlfriend in George Sluizer’s American remake of his own 1988 Franco-Dutch psychochiller. Is it as devastating as the original? Absolutely not! But Jeff Bridges has never been creepier, and at least the dumb Hollywood ending won’t give you nightmares.

Horne’s endearingly eccentric comedy is music to most ears. Plus: the extraordinary secrets of bees. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, Channel 4
The second series of Alex Horne’s comedy musical show remains a mildly puzzling affair. It’s undeniably slight and the self-conscious whimsy can grate a little. However, it slips down easily, mainly thanks to the music – which is deceptively complex and cleverly assembled. The result is also borderline creepy at times, particularly in this opener during an odd little song paying tribute to the ever-expanding Horne family. Phil Harrison

A delightful animation about a shipwrecked robot, plus an extraordinary documentary about a revolt at the only US college for deaf students … after they tried to put a hearing person in charge

Chris Sanders’s delightful family animation attains Wall-E levels of poignancy in its tale of a shipwrecked robot that learns how to feel. Washed up on a remote island populated only by animals, service unit Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) finds it has no one to serve. That is until it falls on to a goose’s nest, killing all its occupants apart from runt of the litter Brightbill (Kit Connor) – who imprints on Roz as his mother. Assisted by Pedro Pascal’s cynical fox Fink, the ever helpful machine reprogrammes itself to rear the gosling well enough so he can migrate with the other geese. The Disney-style anthropomorphising is a bit overdone, but it’s a film full of warmth and wit.
Friday 23 May, 9.10am, 6.10pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

Meghann Fahy and Julianne Moore star in a creepy cultish drama from the creator of Maid, while Nicole Kidman returns as the wellness guru with an all-new star cast

From Maid creator Molly Smith Metzler, this darkly comic drama is the story of another scrappy underdog. Devon (Meghann Fahy) is struggling to keep her head above water, barely holding down a job while looking after a father with dementia. She could do with some help from her sister Simone (Milly Alcock) who has fallen under the spell of Julianne Moore’s peculiar socialite Michaela (“I get to call her Kiki, which is a really special honour”). Devon pays an uninvited visit to her sibling and what she finds looks more like a cult than a place of work. Can she save Simone – and does she even want to be saved? Not every element of Sirens quite gels but it’s creepy and nicely unpredictable.
Netflix, from Thursday 22 May

Before Blur became superstars, drummer Dave Rowntree was busy photographing them – on the tube, in Japanese taxis … and even on a big dipper

Clichy-Batignolles, in the city’s north-west, is emblematic of the ‘15-minute’ city approach to urban planning

When Katherine Hubbard’s mother started suffering from profound memory loss she used her camera to help transform the pain of loss into an act of love

Ken Grant has photographed the south Wales valleys for three decades – capturing the rugged beauty, painful scars and wild ponies that make up the landscape

From adventures in adolescence to Venezuelan dancers, these images from new artists were nominated for the Photo London Nikon emerging photographer award

Female boxers, revolutionary icons and fascinating early works by Martin Parr all feature in the 10th edition of the celebrated photography festival

From Tower Bridge bathers to moody night bus portraits, these photographs from David Bailey, Mary McCartney and more reinvent the way we see the city

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair returns this weekend to London, New York City and Marrakech. It remains the first and only fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora and this year sees a total of 30 galleries and more than 70 artists. The show runs 8 to 11 May

When Tania Franco Klein began feeling unmoored and depressed, she realised many of her friends were in the same boat. Her photographs explore the peculiar unease of modern life