Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire
Hélène Binet’s haunted photographs of spectacular country residences built by Jewish people across Europe are filled with the melancholic grandeur of fallen empires

All things considered, we Jews haven’t done too bad. Not that you need reminding. Every corner of the internet, from Reddit to X, is desperate to point out that Jewish people are apparently in control of the banks, Hollywood, the government and, ahem, art criticism. That’s the price you pay for being a successful immigrant.

And that success is nothing new. Swiss-French photographer Hélène Binet ’s latest body of work documents a sweeping array of opulent, lavish country houses owned or built by Jews across Europe. Bankers, textile merchants, stockbrokers, politicians, the story of post-medieval Jewry is a tale filled with an awful lot of high achievers, and they built themselves some seriously swanky houses. A selection of Binet’s images has been hung in the most appropriate of settings; Waddesdon Manor , the wildly over the top 19th-century weekend party house of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild .

The Mexican director of La Cocina on making movies under the Trump-Vance administration, why Oscars don’t matter and his time as a khaki-shorted waiter at the Rainforest Cafe

Anyone who visited the Rainforest Cafe, a now defunct Piccadilly Circus tourist trap serving overpriced burgers among plastic foliage and animatronic wildlife, may have met a future auteur without realising it. In the early 00s, Alonso Ruizpalacios was not the gifted, ingenious director he is today – the man behind A Cop Movie, a slippery psychodrama that breaks the laws of documentary, and the new La Cocina, starring Rooney Mara as a waitress at a hectic New York restaurant. Back then, he wore baggy khaki shorts and welcomed customers to the Rainforest Cafe. “Hi, I’m Alonso and I’ll be your safari guide today,” he would say. “You guys been here before? No? Well, this is Bamba, our gorilla. Occasionally there will be rain showers, but – hey – don’t be afraid, you won’t get wet!”

Sitting in a London hotel room with a view of the Thames, the film-maker grimaces at the memory. “You had to give the whole spiel,” he says. “It was fucking horrible.” Ruizpalacios, who was raised in a suburb of Mexico City by parents who are both doctors, is 47, with dense stubble, curly black hair and chunky-framed Harry Palmer-style glasses. Give or take the same lopsided smile, he doesn’t look much like the budding matinee idol in his Rada headshot . “I got into acting because I wanted to be a director,” he says. “And I needed to understand actors.”

Trump was responding to Clooney’s call to defend press freedoms while promoting his new stage version of Good Night, and Good Luck

Donald Trump has taken aim at the actor and prominent Democrat activist George Clooney, dismissing his interview on US TV news programme 60 Minutes as a “total puff piece”.

The Oscar-winning star was the subject of Sunday’s show to promote his Broadway debut, in a stage version of the film Good Night, and Good Luck, in which he plays veteran journalist Edward R Murrow, who took part in a historic TV showdown with Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Ikon, Birmingham
The artist turns the state’s suspicious gaze on Britain’s Muslim community right back in the opposite direction in an overwhelming, galvanising show

Artist Mahtab Hussain was in his 20s in July 2005, when four terrorists detonated homemade bombs in separate, coordinated suicide attacks during rush hour in London. As a young British-born Muslim with Pakistani heritage, Hussain found himself among those on the frontline of a renewed wave of Islamophobia and racial profiling in the UK. The experiences of growing up in the post 9/11, 7/7 era as a young Muslim man instilled in him a hysterical pressure “to change myself”, he says.

Five years later, in 2010, West Midlands police started putting up CCTV cameras across Birmingham – 218 cameras were installed, some of them hidden – most in majority Muslim areas of the city. Project Champion as the surveillance scheme was known, was dismantled a year later, after complaints from the community and an independent review – but the scars remain. Hussain’s exhibition What Did You Want to See? at Ikon is his visceral response to the ignominy of Project Champion, and the catharsis of coming together as a community in its wake.

The musician was commissioned to create an album inspired by the north-east’s mining history – and then discovered his ancestors died in a local disaster

When Futureheads singer Barry Hyde was commissioned by Sunderland city council to create an album inspired by the north-east’s mining heritage, he was astonished to discover an unexpected personal connection to the project.

“A historian friend of mine – Keith Gregson – told me that at least two and perhaps more of my ancestors had died in the Trimdon Grange mining disaster,” the singer says, referring to the 1882 explosion in County Durham that killed 69 men and boys. “My great-grandmother’s sons, Thomas and Joseph, were 13 and 14 respectively. There was also another Joseph Hyde, 23, and William J Hyde, 26, who we think might be related.”

Long derided, improvisational comedy is now attracting big-name stars such as Kiell Smith-Bynoe and One Day’s Ambika Mod. There’s more to it than showing off, they say – and don’t get them started on Whose Line Is It Anyway?

It’s Saturday night and I’m standing alone at the back of a north London pub when a befuddled-looking couple in matching anoraks come up and ask if this is the queue for the show. My heart sinks. I’d come to This Doesn’t Leave the Room, a night of improvised comedy hosted by the Free Association, with a theory: that improv – that most ridiculed of comedic forms – is finally becoming cool, thanks to a slew of millennial sitcom star practitioners and a stream of trendily branded shows. But as I trudge up a staircase into a room full of empty seats – me on one side, the confused couple on the other – I realise I may have been mistaken.

But then, all of a sudden, the atmosphere changes. People start flooding in with a sense of anticipation – rambunctious groups of friends, twentysomethings on dates, a trio of glammed-up girls warming up for a big night out (one of them is wearing a corset and waving a bottle of wine) – until there’s barely room to breathe. Finally, I relax: improv really might be the hottest ticket in town.

Real-life vintage shop owners Ruth Syratt and Megan Stevenson raid the past for sellable trinkets in this charmingly funny, quintessentially British comedy

Here is a very silly and very likable British mockumentary, one that – like Ruth and Megan, the two real-life Muswell Hill vintage-shop mavens at its centre – lovingly mixes and matches multifarious styles. Director and co-writer Chris Reading adopts a little The Office deadpan, some Shaun of the Dead bathos, a heap of Terry Gilliam, and even shoplifts a shot from Wes Anderson. If the resulting low-budget assemblage still bears these nametags and has the odd stray thread showing, it also has a persistent charm of its own.

The ChaChaCha vintage emporium (which really exists ) is limping along until owners Ruth (Ruth Syratt) and Megan (Megan Stevenson) stumble on a time machine in the form of a souped-up bumper car – and thus an infinite supply of merchandise from whichever epoch they desire. It transpires the gizmo was invented by Ralph (Brian Bovell), former presenter of a Tomorrow’s World-style TV show and now burnt-out stalwart of the Muswell Hill Science Club. Suspicious about their surfeit of “old but somehow new” stock, club president Martin (Guy Henry) warns them about abusing the device. Of course they ignore him – until a visual migraine of a wormhole opens up in their backroom.

At first, I didn’t know my mouchoir from my torchon, but shifts at Le Bar Commun improved my French, opening up a world of opportunities

I don’t know why I thought I would be like Grace Jones. The singer and model (neither of which I am) reportedly became fluent in French within three months of moving to Paris. For some hubristic reason, I assumed I’d do the same.

But in 2018, two years after arriving in Paris, I was coasting. I could get by, but I was essentially living the life of a digital nomad, speaking English with my partner at home, working remotely for a US company and socialising largely with other English-speaking migrants – something I swore I’d never do.

The latest in our series of writers on their go-to comfort watches is a look back to Woody Allen’s smart and nimble 1993 comedy

Some sounds are immediately comforting. Gulls, trains, a kettle. The opening chords of I Happen to Like New York, which, despite Bobby Short’s vocals escalating in volume and emphasis ALARMINGLY FAST , signals the start of one of Woody Allen ’s loveliest little pictures.

This 1993 comedy is like an unaffected Annie Hall – an impromptu reunion for Allen and Diane Keaton , playing essentially more functioning versions of those characters, 15 odd years on. Impromptu because although the first seeds of the idea came from an early draft of that 1977 film, the fairly elaborate plot was only properly written years later as a vehicle for Mia Farrow . She and Allen’s split during the end of the shoot on their previous film, 1992’s Husbands and Wives, kiboshed that plan.