The 1982 film was rejected by its conservative financiers but had an influential afterlife at cinemas such as the Scala in King’s Cross. A restored print is showing in London this month

You never forget your first visit to Café Flesh. Mine took place in June 1986: it was a month before my 15th birthday and I was spending Saturday afternoon, as I often did, at the notorious Scala cinema in tawdry, pre-gentrified King’s Cross. I don’t know which staff member thought it appropriate to allow an acne-peppered child in to see the post-apocalyptic sex fantasy Café Flesh – in a double-bill with the equally explicit hardcore horror-comedy Thundercrack! – but I’m glad they did.

When I emerged blinking into the early evening sunlight, I had witnessed sights that few 14-year-olds could have imagined. The movie is set in a desolate future where “the Nuclear Kiss” has left 99% of the population unable to enjoy intimacy without becoming nauseous. These are the Sex Negatives. The remaining 1%, known as Sex Positives, are forced to perform for the chaste, dead-eyed masses. They grind away joylessly on stage to a jazzy but sinister electronic score by Mitchell Froom, who went on to be a producer for Paul McCartney, Crowded House and Suzanne Vega (to whom he was briefly married).

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In her second memoir, Knox writes about her attempts to adjust to normal life after leaving prison in Italy

When Amanda Knox was released from an Italian prison in 2011 after her murder conviction was overturned, her mother insisted she see a trauma specialist. Knox had been jailed along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, in what investigators insisted had been a sex game gone wrong. Four years later, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted.

Back home in Seattle, the trauma specialist began by asking Knox how she was doing, prompting her to break down in tears and run away. What was intended as an icebreaker “felt like the hardest question in the world to answer”. She tried another therapist – though, fearful of having her story sold to the tabloids, she quit after two months. Next, she went on a 10-day silent retreat where she was instructed to do walking meditation in a field, which reminded her of walking in circles in the prison yard. She had a panic attack and fled.

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This docufiction is funny and pregnant with ideas – as a group of young artists on the spectrum examine how their creativity and sense of self is shaped by autism

Here is an engaging docufictional experiment, an investigation into autism co-created by a group of young artists on the spectrum called the Neurocultures Collective . The resulting film is ingenious, funny, intellectually curious – and pregnant with ideas. It is all about how autism shapes creativity and makes sense of the self, and it gives a new kind of access to the mysterious and the uncanny.

One of the group is shown hosting a B-movie cult film club and also drawing a storyboard for his planned shlock-horror animation about zombies in the American civil war, a fragment of which we will see later. Another is apparently in a doctor’s waiting room filling out a questionnaire designed to assess her possible autism, while a little girl opposite is reading a story about a border collie called Chess. (Another member of the group will later act out the part of Chess.) Having finished the questionnaire, she is asked by the doctor to watch videos while he tracks her eye movements; we then watch the same videos ourselves while onscreen graphics – red dots and lines – make jagged shapes across the action, in places where we maybe weren’t looking. Other participants demonstrate their own choreography of ritualistic and repetitive movements: a part of intuitive role-play.

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Chloe Dalton, Helen Scales and Clare Mulley are also in the running for the £30,000 award, with the winner due to be announced on 12 June

The Buffalo Stance singer Neneh Cherry, Labour MP Yuan Yang and the doctor Rachel Clarke have been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Foreign policy expert Chloe Dalton, marine biologist Helen Scales and biographer Clare Mulley also remain in contention for the £30,000 prize.

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The Argentinian film-maker, whose movies blur the lines between gay and straight, discusses what inspired him to make his latest work – queer romcom The Astronaut Lovers

Marco Berger’s films often begin, in one way or another, with a knock on the door. A young gay man steps into a summer house, or sometimes a luxury villa, typically inhabited by a group of attractive young men on holiday. As homoerotic tension simmers, the hyper-masculine environment is charged with banter, dares, and provocative games. The Argentinian director’s films test the fragile boundaries of homosocial spaces, blurring the lines between gay and straight as characters navigate complex emotions. His settings become pressure cookers – or at times, ticking time bombs – of unspoken dynamics, male bonding, and the perils of repressed desire.

It’s these elements – heightened by homoerotic scenes and prolonged shots of the male body – that have made Berger one of the most prolific and successful film-makers in Latin America and widely pirated globally. “I’m obsessed with telling the story of two men in a summer house because summer creates the perfect conditions for exploring male desire,” Berger says. “The clothes come off, and the skin is exposed. It’s the perfect setting.”

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A man moves in with his employer’s widow in this playful but dreamlike and inscrutable drama from Alain Guiraudie, the director of Stranger By the Lake

Writer-director Alain Guiraudie must surely now be said to match Quentin Dupieux for the weirdest sense of humour in French cinema. But is comedy exactly what is happening here? Because this has to be one of the strangest films of the year – or the most deadpan of deadpan in-jokes. At one point, I thought I saw the performer playing a police officer almost laugh, but perhaps every single actor here was on the verge of cracking up throughout the shoot. It could be that every time Guiraudie yelled “Cut” everyone burst out laughing.

You could also call Misericordia queer cinema, with the word “queer” also working in its non-sexual sense. Guiraudie made his international breakthrough with his 2013 film Stranger By the Lake , but it’s now clear that the seriousness and vehemence of that psychosexual drama are atypical of the director’s real instincts, which are towards waywardness and playfulness and unreadable, inscrutable mischief. And here, as sometimes in the past, he looks as if he is making it up as he goes along.

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A group of strangers gather in a big fancy house and one has a big secret they must protect at all costs. Sure, this US gameshow is derivative, but it’s also utterly gripping and hysterical. Welcome to your new obsession

Sometimes, the best way to describe a new competition series is to triangulate it between a couple of shows that already exist. So Fame Academy was The X Factor meets Big Brother, and The Great British Sewing Bee is Bake Off meets Project Runway.

However, this is impossible to do with Netflix’s new competition series, Million Dollar Secret. That’s not because it is so fiercely original that it defies comparison. No, it is because Million Dollar Secret is The Traitors. It is transparently, baldly, shamelessly The Traitors. Million Dollar Secret feels like the result of a careful scientific procedure designed to make something as identical to The Traitors as humanly possible, while remaining just legally distinct enough to prevent it from being sued into oblivion by All3Media.

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The photojournalist, who died in January, captured daily life in East Germany as well as Castro and Gorbachev’s visits, the fall of the Berlin Wall and life in Vietnam during the war

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Rose Ayling-Ellis is inspirational as she meets a retirement community ready to learn new skills. Plus: the finale of an excellent true crime drama. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
It’s not an easy pitch for deaf actor and Strictly champion Rose Ayling-Ellis to teach sign language to a retirement community. But she finds a group of enthusiastic 65-95-year-olds, some of whom are experiencing hearing loss. Along with charismatic teacher Marios Costi, she determinedly starts a two-part experiment to highlight the increasing need for signing. This is moving, inspirational television – with added bingo and karaoke. As one of the students says: “We’re not old people; we’re recycled teenagers.” Hollie Richardson

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