Kúpula se Mueve, which celebrates African and Latin culture, has been held without problems since 2013

Madrid city council has banned a festival celebrating cultural diversity, claiming that it may lead to public disorder and complaints about noise from residents.

The Kúpula se Mueve (Kúpula Moves) festival has been held without incident since 2013. Josias Ndanga, president of the association, insists the claims are an excuse, saying: “We’re convinced we’re being discriminated against on ideological grounds.”

The Desperate Housewives star has invested in a Mexican football team, and even ropes in Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in her attempts to make a thrilling documentary. But it’s extremely hard to care about any of it

Welcome to Wrexham is one of those TV shows that has moved its genre up a level. After years of glossy “behind-the-scenes” documentaries that were just another part of million-dollar sports franchises’ marketing portfolios, the story of unlikely celebrity investors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney taking the extremely unlikely decision to buy AFC Wrexham was an unexpected tonic and a worldwide hit.

Inevitably, imitations are now spawning, with Amazon last month debuting the underwhelming Built in Birmingham, about NFL superstar Tom Brady’s half-hearted involvement in Birmingham City. Necaxa should have better prospects, since it’s on Disney+, the same platform as Welcome to Wrexham, and Reynolds and McElhenney are in it. But all the peculiar magic of the parent show is painfully absent.

Necaxa is on Disney+

The star of 90s TV series Lois & Clark and wannabe Ice agent has expressed his horror at Gunn’s ‘woke’ hero. Is there a market for Superman: Border Patrol?

It’s almost impossible to divide superheroes along political lines. Captain America might seem like a patriotic, commie-bashing lunatic, as he was in the 1950s comics during the McCarthy era, until you remember that he has also spent much of his fictional career telling corrupt government agencies to shove it. And, in the Marvel Comic Universe, at least, he went on the run rather than sign up for an authoritarian superhero registry. Superman was once the square-jawed poster boy for US exceptionalism, cheerfully posing on propaganda comic covers urging readers to buy war bonds, but he’s also been written as a Kansas farm boy so suspicious of concentrated power that in one storyline he renounced his citizenship to avoid being used as a pawn of US foreign policy.

Bar a few outliers – Iron Man cheerleading the military-industrial complex in his earliest comics springs to mind – trying to pin a superhero to one side of the political spectrum is like trying to staple fog: most of DC and Marvel’s big beasts will drift wherever the story, or the writer’s mortgage payments, takes them. Which is why it’s been so bizarre watching the right’s disgust as a vaguely woke man of steel drives all before him at the summer box office.

The upstarts from Cardiff’s underground are a fizzy, riffy, irreverently hilarious bundle of buzzsaw guitars, vim and vinegar

From Cardiff, Wales
Recommended if you like Lambrini Girls, Amyl and the Sniffers, Kleenex/Lilliput
Up next Playing Beautiful Days festival, Fairmile, Devon, 14 August and touring the UK in October

Across seven years, cheekily raucous quartet Panic Shack have gone from the Cardiff underground to the fringes of the mainstream. After forming as a raised middle finger to snooty blokey indie bands “fiddling with their pedals with a face like a slapped arse”, their self-titled debut crashed into the Top 40 last month and topped the UK rock and metal albums chart.

A charismatic Dafoe commands the screen as a Greek alpha-patriarch, throwing a claustrophobic celebration for his second favourite child

Willem Dafoe brings star wattage to this watchable drama, playing brooding Greek plutocrat and alpha-patriarch Marcos Timoleon, transparently based on Aristotle Onassis: gazing impassively at people through his heavy glasses, doting menacingly on his dependents and given to exercising in the nude in front of the servants. Spanish film-maker Miguel Ángel Jiménez directs and co-writes this adaptation of the novel by Panos Karnezis.

Bringing star power also is charismatic Danish star Vic Carmen Sonne; she plays his daughter Sofia, who has the honour and the terrible burden of a massive 25th birthday party thrown for her by the overbearing Marcos on his private island. The guest list consists almost entirely of his heavily tanned Eurotrash acquaintances and hangers-on, but this claustrophobic party is all the more painful as (like Onassis) Timoleon has recently suffered the terrible anguish of his son and favourite child dying in a plane accident.

Lyceum, Edinburgh
Performers dig up the stage, roll in the sack and merge with machines in Belgian theatre collective FC Bergman’s arresting show

Belgian theatre collective FC Bergman ’s take on “the crisis of modernity” in this show, which travels from the ancient world to mechanisation, is nothing if not wild. The boards of the stage are dug up with a plough at the start – a sign of things to come. A chicken is bashed in a sack as part of a pagan sacrifice (the real chicken remains unharmed), a naked man emerges from within an animal’s carcass and there is an apocalyptic landscape of erupting pineapples.

It’s wacky, but stays just on the right side of reckless. Directed by Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck, and part of the Edinburgh international festival, this is a wordless piece, based on muscular movement and stunning live music composed by Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio. The arresting scenes mark the arc of human progress, from the taking up of tools onwards. When the industrial age dawns, a steam engine is shown with human limbs wrapped around it, as if they are extensions of the machine.

A new book argues the long despised word associated with valley girls is now essential to the way we communicate

If you’re a millennial or millennial-adjacent, you probably grew up being chastised for using the word “like” inappropriately. You’re probably familiar with the sins: the first is employing it as a filler word, to give you time to think: “I was, like, trying to speak in a socially acceptable way.” The second is using it to mean “said”, as in: “My English teacher was like, ‘Don’t talk like that.’” And the third is using it to denote approximation: “People who police the word are all, like, a million years old.”

Yet, we all made it to adulthood despite the verbal carnage; many of us even have jobs that require communication. Now that millennials are, like, becoming the establishment, will the stigma against the word disappear?

The British prime minister and French president get sucked into a shady conspiracy in the streaming giant’s latest twisty, emotional drama. Jones and Julie Delpy tell all

Hostage is a political thriller, and observes the conventions in many ways. The pace is absolutely flawless, it’s twisty, it has emotional heft. The British prime minister, Abigail Dalton, played by Suranne Jones, faces her husband, Alex Anderson (Ashley Thomas), being kidnapped. Their marriage is well drawn – “it’s happy, it’s assured, they’re supportive of each other,” Jones says. As we chat in Netflix’s central London offices, she’s always saying five things at once, only one of them out loud. Here, the subtext (I’ve decided) is: it’s actually pretty skilled work, creating a not-schmaltzy, passionate but familiar love match in which all the audience’s hopes and prayers are with the abducted spouse. That’s why normally when fictional politicians are the victims of a family kidnapping, it’s one of their kids.

Meanwhile, the French president, Julie Delpy’s Vivienne Toussaint, is also in Britain, is also being blackmailed, and has her own dilemmas: principally, does she go over to the dark side, by echoing the far right on anti-immigrant narratives, or stick to her principles, whatever those may still be. Delpy is hilarious on this, and actually most things. “That’s something I found interesting in the show. Sometimes I wonder, I truly wonder, is there any politician who really has a conscience? I look at Macron – I cannot believe someone with a conscience wouldn’t be questioning themselves, questioning who they have picked [as a cabinet], questioning what’s going on with French politics.” “You really wonder whether any politician has a conscience?” I ask, just to be clear. “Well, yes.”

@sohoplace theatre, London
Henry is the first of a group of star performers taking Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s hit show about depression into the West End

Since its premiere in 2013, Duncan Macmillan ’s one-person play about depression has gradually become a cult hit. It’s been performed in more than 80 countries and now – finally – makes its West End debut. There’s a starry rotating cast , kicking off with Lenny Henry and also including original performer Jonny Donahoe, as well as Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver. Jeremy Herrin directs alongside Macmillan and a posse of leading producers are backing the show.

It all screams smash hit. But there’s something about the scale and downright snazziness of this production that doesn’t quite gel. The setup is simple. It’s about a young boy who, after his mum does “something stupid” when she has acute depression, decides to make a list about all the things that make life worth living. Waffles. Hedgehogs. Falling in love.