Playhouse East, London
Lily Sinko rages, writhes, provokes and teases her way through the horrifying life story of her storyteller with cartoonish abandon

Magdalena appears from the dark, perched on a bar stool, cigarettes and liquor by her side, an array of hanging lamps casting a sultry glow. Her first words set the tone – “You want to fuck me,” she says – and lead us into an uncompromising introduction, littered with sex, violence and sideways jokes.

She is the creation of French-English actor and writer Lily Sinko, and as her character’s name suggests, we’re hurled through a life of saintliness and sin, despair and redemption, as Magdalena does the best with the hand she’s dealt. We travel to her childhood in Marseille with a hostile “Papa”, an airport abduction that sees her deposited at the Virgin Mary School for Bad Bad Girls (Cash Only), and a wild escape through the streets of France, finding fleeting refuge in a cathedral.

At Playhouse East, London , until 28 June

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Much as I’m looking forward to the next instalment of the horror franchise I’m really not thirsty for a branded apocalypse-infused IPA to wash it down with

With ticket sales no longer a sure thing, additional income streams have become more important than ever to the movie business. If you want to know how much faith a studio has in a property, your best bet is to look out for licensed merchandise. This is why Wicked partnered with 400 corporate brands ahead of its release last year and why every shop on the high street is heaving with Lilo & Stitch merch. It’s why the last bag of Doritos you ate had Jack Black’s face on it.

But this strategy isn’t failsafe. Yes, if you’re promoting a big four-quadrant blockbuster, it’s easy to team up with companies who’ll paste their products with adverts for your film. However, if your film is too small, or too sad, or too weird, then any sort of brand collaboration is going to seem an extremely odd fit. In other words, can I interest anyone in a pint of 28 Years Later beer?

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He’s already put out seven albums this year – a work ethic inherited, he says, from selling drugs in Detroit. But will we ever hear his tracks with the late great J Dilla?

In the brief window between my conversation with Detroit rapper Boldy James and you reading this sentence, it is likely that the 42-year-old MC will have surprise-released at least one new album on to streaming platforms. This year alone, he has already released seven records. A planned eighth is due in July, but who knows what might pop up in between.

“My father always told me you’ve gotta work twice as hard because you can’t expect something for nothing in this life!” Boldy says of a work rate that can easily result in 20 new songs being completed in the studio over a 24-hour period. His combative verses, as cutting and direct as Don Corleone whispering instructions to a made man, have earned him critical adoration and elicited high-profile co-signs from hip-hop figureheads including Earl Sweatshirt, Nas, Westside Gunn, the late Mac Miller and producer the Alchemist, while fans are intrigued to know how he remains so prolific.

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Travolta and a team of misfits are forced to raid a tawdry gambling den, but the stakes are disappointingly low in this ineptly made work

Here is a cheap-ass knockoff of Ocean’s Eleven starring John Travolta that makes the Soderbergh film look like something by Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman. High Rollers is a heart-slowing work of staggering stupidity and charmlessness, ineptly made and quite frankly dull except when its flaws become so egregious you can’t help but guffaw.

The idea is that Mason Goddard (John Travolta, who has finally given up on hairpieces and embraced the bald) leads a rodent pack of skilled thieves and conmen. The gang is first met at the beach wedding of two of the group’s younger members, tech whiz Link (Natali Yura, mouth permanently agape) and dim hunk Caras (Swen Temmel). Alas, the nuptials are interrupted when international criminal Salazar (Danny Pardo) and his henchmen swoop in and kidnap Mason’s wife Amelia (Gina Gershon, somehow surviving this with dignity intact). Salazar demands that Mason and his crew, which also includes his gormless safecracking brother Shawn (Lukas Haas) and sidekicks Anton (mononymed Quavo) and Hector (Noel Gugliemi), must steal the contents of a safe in the suite of casino owner Zade Black (Demián Castro) at his supposedly classy New Orleans casino the Scarlet Pearl.

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The director’s immersive look at the Nashville music scene remains an audacious narrative experiment that continues to influence film-makers

Released smack-dab in the middle of the 70s, like some gravitational mass at the center of the galaxy, Robert Altman ’s Nashville is the defining work of a decade when iconoclasts upended Hollywood and took stock of the country during a turbulent stretch.

For Altman, it was the culmination of a film-making style he had been refining since M*A*S*H in 1970, one built on spontaneity, a rich evocation of time and place, and actors empowered to create characters who seem to simply exist in their worlds, rather than impose themselves on it. The offhand magic of Nashville is that it feels modest, despite a who’s who of two dozen stars convening for an epic that offers Music City as a microcosm for America herself. Rarely are great films this casually profound.

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There’s a lot to take in at the yearly live video event: from Paralives to Felt That: Boxing, Dosa Divas to Resident Evil Requiem, here are our favourites

The ninth mainstream instalment in the survival horror series returns us to the wreckage of Racoon City and promises a blend of cinematic action and psychological horror. FBI agent Grace Ashcroft appears to be the main character, but is anything in this series ever what it seems?

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Stories within stories give fascinating depth to the prize-winning author’s third novel, about a woman’s return to her family home in the west of Ireland

Elaine Feeney’s third novel, following the success of her prize-winning debut As You Were and the Booker-longlisted How to Build a Boat , focuses on Claire O’Connor, a woman who has moved from London back to Athenry in the west of Ireland in the wake of her mother’s death. Her new life is disturbed when she finds her ex-partner Tom has moved in down the road. Or rather, that’s one thread in a story that becomes steadily more interesting than this simple set-up from the romance novelist’s playbook, as layers of family memory and trauma build up to form a portrait of the wider O’Connor family: all their history, the way it has shaped them and the traces it has left on the places around.

Claire shows herself to be unusually attuned to the history of her home place, telling stories about nearby Thoor Ballylee, where Yeats lived; Lady Gregory’s Coole Park; the place where Cromwell used to stable his horses. At first it seems a bit forced, a writer shoehorning in their research. But the tic begins to make sense as the marks of the past on Claire’s family are revealed; slowly, one realises that the enumeration of these histories is crucial to the way the O’Connors live. Central to this gradual discovery is Feeney’s use of stories-within-the-story; the novel is enlivened by a series of smaller, contained memories from Claire’s childhood, and tales reaching back a century to the time when the O’Connors first lived in the family home.

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Purest hokum, of course, but what hokum! Real pride has gone into crafting this set of shocks, and it’s very well acted in beautiful locations

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a wimple. In this well-crafted horror movie, a young woman called Grace (Jena Malone) finds herself up against a bunch of nuns who may or may not be trying to do something extremely dodgy with an unknown relic, and as with last year’s Omen prequel, there’s a nice line in casting here from the Ladybird Book of Horror Nuns. There’s dotty young nun who pops up going “peekaboo” (Eilidh Fisher), an arrogant mother superior (Janet Suzman), a hardliner weapon-of-Christ sort (Jolade Obasola), and the rather rarer spooky nun with one eye hidden behind an ominous white bandage (Alexandra Lewis). Their acting is uniformly excellent, as is that from Danny Huston, who plays a priest who introduces himself thusly: “I’m Father Romero, I’m here from the Vatican,” which announces him as probably up to no good from the get-go.

Grace arrives to identify the body of her brother (Steffan Cennydd), seemingly involved in a murder-suicide, has reasons of her own for being less than a fully paid-up God squad member, and while the reasons may not be much of a surprise if you’ve seen a few of these kinds of films, this is a very nicely put together example. Sure, it’s purest hokum, but real pride has gone into crafting it..

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Tate Britain, London
Colquhoun’s surrealism and Burra’s pro-fascist war paintings and Hogarthian scenes of Harlem nightlife are all brilliant. But they have nothing in common – so why handcuff them together?

They make a truly odd couple. She’s an occultist who once appeared on BBC television explaining to the nation how to make surrealist art at home. He’s a jazz enthusiast whose slices of modern – and often queer - life are full of roly-poly grotesques. What on earth have Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra got in common, and why has Tate Britain handcuffed them together for an uncalled for, unneeded and ultimately baffling double header?

I loved Colquhoun’s exhibition at Tate St Ives when I reviewed it earlier this year, but this version of it is much more flatly laid out and her experiments in releasing the unconscious are shouted down by all the drunken, drugged, omnivorously shagging people in Burra’s 1920s and 30s clubs and bars. Yet he also gets edited and reinvented in a way that left me largely cold.

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