Sean Bean plays a scouse drug lord in a superior gangland drama. Elsewhere, a poignant portrait of Covid’s aftermath, Seth Rogen’s Hollywood satire, and the return of Bridget Christie’s out-there menopause comedy

This City Is Ours (BBC One) | iPlayer
Love and Loss: The Pandemic 5 Years On (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Studio ( Apple TV+ )
The Change (Channel 4) | channel4.com

Oh great, I thought, when I first heard about This City Is Ours (BBC One), a gangland drama – we definitely haven’t got enough of those. But, oh me of little faith! Written by Stephen Butchard ( The Last Kingdom ) across eight episodes, set in Liverpool and laced with pathos, greed and everyday brutality, this turns out to be a different level of gangland drama.

Stills, Edinburgh; Photographers’ Gallery, London
From loneliness in Norfolk to vibrant Indian culture in Leicester, a touring show captures a riot of contradictions. Elsewhere, Leeds is lent an otherworldly air by a colour photography pioneer

Given that we live in a time defined by the rise of far-right populism and a widespread indifference to traditional party politics, the idea of a unified “working class” seems almost romantic, a throwback to an age when Labour was synonymous with socialism rather than centrism. In this context, the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition After the End of History is a defiant statement, though it’s less a celebration of shared values and traditions than a series of revealing glimpses of what curator Johny Pitts describes as the “complex and counterintuitive expressions of working-class life”.

The show’s high-flown title refers to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s controversial assertion that history of a kind ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy. Much of the work on the walls is too personal and too local to be read in this context, but it does reflect Pitts’s stated aim to create an exhibition “full of contradictions, like working-class life is”.

From The Apprentice to 13th, our critic selects titles that shed light on the US under Trump. Alex Gibney, whose new documentary examines how ‘dark money’ became part of the American system, introduces the list

This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution – it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.

It reminds me of that moment in Once Upon a Time in the West , when Henry Fonda sits behind the rail tycoon’s desk and says: “It’s almost like holding a gun, only much more powerful.” The US has always been about money. That’s been our blessing and our curse. It’s the land of great opportunity, but that obsession with money over everything else has now taken us to a very bad place. We’ve reached the dark side of the American dream.

A new set of Royal Mail stamps on regional folklore reminds us of our deep roots to the land

It is possible to have too much trust in a marriage. The mythic Welsh warrior Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who appears to have been bigger on brawn than brain, once came home to find his wife, the flower-maiden Blodeuwedd, weeping with fear over premonitions of his death. She begged Lleu to prove that he was, as rumoured, invincible.

Lleu, who had clearly not read the story of Delilah, thought it was a good idea to reveal to his wife each of the unlikely and incongruous conditions that would make it possible for a rival to kill him: among other kinks, they required him to be caught outdoors on a riverbank with one foot straddling a thatched cauldron and one on a wriggling goat. Lo and behold, in one year’s time Lleu found himself being struck down in exactly that pose by Blodeuwedd and her lover, the hunter Gronw Pebr. The story is still told to explain the peculiar shape of the Stone of Gronw, sitting to this day on the banks of the River Cynfal in Blaenau Ffestiniog.

The long and often shocking journey to finding the alleged killer of young women in Long Island is brought to a wider audience in a damning new Netflix series

The film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer . Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls , an adaptation of Robert Kolker’s book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help.

It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa-based architect who regularly commuted to midtown Manhattan. Ryan had played Mari Gilbert, the late mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the early hours of 1 May 2010 after meeting a client on Long Island. Mari Gilbert relentlessly pressured the police to remember her daughter, who they dismissed as a prostitute on the run; it took eight months for Long Island authorities to begin a comprehensive search for her, finding instead the bodies of the so-called “Gilgo Four” – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, who went missing between July 2007 and September 2010. By spring 2011, authorities identified the remains of 10 possible victims of the same perpetrator. It was long suspected, based on cellphone data, that the killer lived in central Long Island and commuted to the city. In truth, Heuermann was a fairly successful architect who consulted on numerous buildings in New York – including Ryan’s home.

In their luxury bunker, the ultra-wealthy last survivors of a global disaster break into song – to sometimes painful effect – in Joshua Oppenheimer’s bloated if visually stunning debut fiction feature

The most frustrating thing about The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer’s first fiction feature film, the wildly ambitious, catastrophically self-indulgent post-apocalyptic musical The End , is how close it comes to greatness. Set entirely in an oligarch’s luxury bunker concealed in a former salt mine several decades after an environmental and societal collapse, the film’s production design is a triumph, the layers of sublimated memories and inconvenient truths papered over with immaculate and moneyed interior design.

The performances are mannered but work rather well given the rigorous artificiality of the backdrop. Michael Shannon plays the energy tycoon father, Tilda Swinton his brittle, mercurial wife, George MacKay their sheltered, half-formed adult son and Moses Ingram is a standout as a lone survivor from the outside world. And while it’s set some time in the future, the themes of an ultra-wealthy elite who think nothing of sacrificing the rest of humanity to preserve their own affluence and comfort – well, let’s just say it all feels uncomfortably timely.

The comedian talks big families, food deliveries, and his kids smugly beating him at Fortnight

Busy house? At the weekend it’s very rarely just us and the five kids. We’ll have nieces, nephews, my mum – up to 12 people. Our house on a Sunday is rammed.

How do you cope? My sons love Fortnight and I once thought I’d get involved. I asked my daughter, ‘Can you give me some help?’ She said: ‘Not really.’ I thought: ‘Thank you, the love of my life, my eldest daughter, for your input.’

Sure, this Guy Ritchie gangster drama is so cartoonish you could dismiss it as crass twaddle. But watching Hardy threaten people is irresistible

Tom Hardy can be very persuasive. In Taboo, people did what he said because he’d growled something intimidatingly gothic at them; in Locke, they knew he’d only phone back later if they didn’t give in; in the Kray brothers biopic Legend, there were two Tom Hardys and they were both holding claw hammers. Whenever he’s the celebrity reader on CBeebies Bedtime Stories, meanwhile, half of the adults watching wouldn’t need any persuading.

The idea that a Tom Hardy character cajoling, threatening or influencing someone is an art form in itself is the core of MobLand, a decent new gangster epic that casts Hardy as top fixer Harry Da Souza. Harry works for the Harrigans, the Irish clan who dominate the London drugs and guns scene, but who are prone to excess and perhaps not as savvy as they once were. Their charming, clinical lieutenant Harry cleans up their messes.