(Matador)
Consummate chronicler of 21st-century sensuality Mike Hadreas returns to his indie roots on a convivial seventh album stalked by death and desire

Death stalks the seventh studio album by feted US singer-songwriter Perfume Genius, nom de plume of Mike Hadreas – but stealthily, not so you’d recognise its presence at first. Here are 11 tracks that sound very much alive – songs that hum with universal emotion and queer carnality, everyday anxieties and high drama, from an artist whose struggles have formed the basis of a compelling body of work. Glory adds heft to it.

Vivid with guitars, the album’s twin opening tracks bring the peripatetic Hadreas crashing back to indie rock after long spells in art pop, and orchestral and electronic environs. His last album, the dub-inflected Ugly Season (2022), originally accompanied a 2019 dance piece .

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Letter signed by 700 members offers support to Hamdan Ballal after initial statement had failed to name director

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has apologised after criticism for its failure to support the detained Palestinian Oscar winner Hamdan Ballal.

Almost 700 voting members, including multiple A-list actors, signed a letter apologising for not directly acknowledgingBallal and the film by name.

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The actor on being thrown out of school, serving snakebites, and a lucky break

Born in Bath in 1973, Kris Marshall landed his first major screen role in 2000, as layabout Nick Harper in the sitcom My Family. He went on to play Colin Frissell in romcom Love Actually and joined the cast of the cosy crime drama Death in Paradise as DI Humphrey Goodman in 2013. Marshall left the show in 2017 but later reprised the role in the BBC spin-off Beyond Paradise, which returned for a third series this month.

This photo was taken on Easter day and is one of my first ever memories. I was standing in the dining room of my grandparents’ house near Newark, Nottinghamshire. My dad spent 30 minutes trying to get me to sit still so he could take this picture. The moment I stopped fidgeting, my grandfather popped up behind him with a camera and said: “Click! Got it!”

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She’s newly divorced and facing an empty nest, but the standup and creator of The Change insists she’s having the time of her life

Is it a pigeon-hole, Bridget Christie asked to be photographed in, or is it a box? Either way, it’s some pretty trenchant visual messaging: whatever society wants to do with middle-aged women, Christie is done with it.

It was also a chance for the 53-year-old to dress up as Kate Bush, recreating her 1978 shoot by Gered Mankowitz. And Christie loves dressing up. She did a whole show dressed as Charles II. The actor, writer and comedian is playful: she has way more than the usual number of funny facial expressions; her chat is peppered with silly, surreal ­diversions. Making people laugh is her thing, she says. “It motivates me, it helps me navigate the world, it’s like a drug.”

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In new film Mr Burton, the Industry star plays a young Richard Burton, with Jones as the mentor who helped him find his acting chops. The duo discuss trying to understand a cultural icon – and how to nail that voice

Sandringham Road lies in the east of Cardiff; a quiet run of Edwardian terrace houses overlooking Roath Mill Gardens. On a late July day, when the air is warm and the park spills out over its railings, Toby Jones and Harry Lawtey sit on the pavement, wearing matching striped pyjamas. The pair are some way into the filming of Mr Burton, an account of the early life of Richard Burton. Lawtey plays the actor in his younger years, when he was known as Richard Jenkins, and Jones is Philip Burton, the teacher who fostered his young student’s talent. So close would their bond grow that Jenkins would become Burton’s legal ward and take his surname. “Without Philip Burton there would never have been a Richard Burton,” Elizabeth Taylor once wrote. “That great rolling voice that cracked like wild Atlantic waves would never have been heard outside the valley.”

Having starred in three series of the HBO drama Industry as an Oxford graduate from a working-class Welsh background – much as Burton himself had been – Lawtey makes a smart casting. He is, too, a young star in ascendance, diligent and eager to learn, in touch with the thrill of his own potential.

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Eva Longoria and family head to Mexico for a trip that doesn’t go too well – partly because of the tiresome faux-witty banter the film is filled with

Buckle up for a family road trip comedy, containing as much arguing and hugging and learning as you could possibly hope for, and shot with a certain flair, but which provides very little in the way of actual entertainment. A sequel to the 2014 Very Bad Day film , this time Alexander (Thom Nemer) and his family are off on a road trip to Mexico paid for by his mother (Eva Longoria), or rather by her job as a travel journalist.

Per the film’s title, it doesn’t go all that well. Have they been cursed by an ancient idol? All will be exhaustingly revealed, over the course of a blessedly short runtime. It’s a frequent complaint that a film is boring because nothing happens, but here is an example where the problem is things are just constantly happening, creating a kind of antics-fatigue. Still, perhaps kids will like it?

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Roberto Lugo and other artists of color are now feeling heat from Trump’s attack on diversity and efforts to rewrite truth of the US’s past

Artists, academics and politicians have shared their outrage in reaction to the Trump administration’s latest executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network.

Late on Thursday, Trump announced that his administration had ordered a large reshaping of the Smithsonian in an attempt to eliminate what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.

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Solvej Balle had been planning her time-loop novel for a decade when the Bill Murray comedy beat her to it. Thirty years and five volumes later, it is longlisted for the International Booker

If you’ve heard about Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I, longlisted for this year’s International Booker prize, you may have experienced a sensation that is central to the Danish writer’s brand of philosophical speculative fiction: deja vu.

In Balle’s five-book opus (of a planned septology), the first three of which won the prestigious Nordic Council literature prize in 2022, someone wakes up to find they are reliving the same day over and over. Their partner, family, neighbours: they all experience this day for the first time in their life. Only the protagonist has been there before. That person is a woman called Tara rather than a man called Phil, and the day is 18 November rather than 2 February, but the plot resemblance to Groundhog Day is striking.

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In the 1960s, William Sargant used a combination of narcosis and ECT to ‘reprogram’ troubled young women. Now his patients, including the actor Celia Imrie and the former model Linda Keith, are trying to piece together what happened

From the reinforced windows of ward five, high up in the Edwardian eaves of London’s Royal Waterloo hospital for children and women, a 14-year-old Celia Imrie used to stare down, hoping to spot her mother. “When I walk past that old, redbrick hospital building today, on my way to the Imax or the National Theatre,” says Imrie, who went on to become a successful actor, “I can see the window where I’d sit waiting for her and a deep chill passes through me.”

Every day, thousands of commuters and tourists pass beneath the former hospital. Some might look up to admire the terracotta facade, with its ornate colonnades and glazed tile lettering, but few are aware of the medical horrors that took place in one small room on the top floor: the Sleep Room. It was here, on ward five, that female patients – they were almost always women – were put to sleep for three to four months (in one case, five), only roused from their beds to be fed, washed and given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): a shock of up to 110 volts that passed bilaterally through the temporal lobe of the brain, triggering a grand mal seizure.

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