Choreographers hear, somehow, a larger heartbeat; it’s fascinating and revelatory to have them reinterpret your compositions, writes the US musician, ahead of a triple bill featuring his music coming to Sadler’s Wells.

When I’m writing music, one of the primary challenges is figuring out how to notate rhythm in a way that is clear to the interpreters. When I hear a phrase in my head it is free of the confines of bar lines, but, in practical application, eventually it needs to get squeezed into recognisable shapes and containers. Every composer has their own strategy (some eschew bar lines entirely, or use alternative notational strategies outside the traditional western systems), but it’s always a negotiation: does the way the composer notates the rhythm correspond to how it should best appear on the flute player’s music stand?

I have distinct memories of being 13, hearing a piece (specifically, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements), basically memorising it from the recording, and then being absolutely shocked when I finally saw the score. “That’s where the downbeat is?!” Stravinsky’s sense of time and my understanding of the same were at variance in a way I still find exciting: the idea that there are infinite superimpositions of a practical system (notation) over a medium (sound) most often experienced by an audience without the score. Understanding that notating rhythm is artificial yet crucial requires both personal precision and empathy with future interpreters.

Brazilian actor will star in The Trial: Enemy of the People, which examines modern political and environmental conflicts

The award-winning Brazilian actor Wagner Moura is to star in a new play being staged at three European festivals next year, in the first joint production since their foundation two years after the second world war.

Moura, who is being tipped for an Oscar nomination for the Secret Agent , will take the lead role in a new production updating the Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People to examine modern political and environmental conflicts.

Forty years ago, the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the markets in Japan and the US. But in Europe, a technologically superior rival was making it look like an ancient relic

There’s an old maxim that history is written by the victors, and that’s as true in video games as it is anywhere else. Nowadays you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Nintendo Entertainment System was the only console available in the mid-to-late 1980s. If you were brought up in Nintendo’s target markets of Japan and North America, this chunky contraption essentially was the only game in town – the company had Mario after all, and its vice-like hold on third-party developers created a monopoly for major titles of the era. But in Europe, where home computers ruled the era, the NES was beaten by a technologically superior rival.

The Sega Master System was originally released in Japan in the autumn of 1985 as the Sega Mark III. Based around the famed Z80 CPU (used in home computers such as the Spectrum, Amstrad and TRS-80) and a powerful Sega-designed video display processor, it boasted 8kb of RAM, a 64-colour palette and the ability to generate 32 sprites on screen at one time – making the NES (based on the older 6502 processor) look like an ancient relic.

From Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones to the Hot Priest in Fleabag and of course Dr Frasier Crane, we salute the game-changers who boosted later seasons of our favourite series

Welcome. Nice of you to finally join us. Hope it was worth the wait. Yes, sometimes a late addition can improve a drama or comedy so much it becomes hard to imagine the show without them. Not every series gets the casting chemistry spot-on straight away. A select few of our favourite TV characters weren’t even on the show when it launched.

We’ve selected 18 characters whose gamechanging arrival in later seasons lifted the whole show and added to its legacy. Behold the super-subs who came off the TV bench and scored a winner …

You don’t need to be a fright flick aficionado to enjoy this smart and witty tale of a romantic weekend break going gruesomely wrong

It is certainly unusual to see in closeup an arrow fired into a naked scrotum before the title of a film has even been shown, but this is that rare film. The scrotum in question belongs to a man fleeing unclothed through the woods from an unseen assailant, together with an equally naked female companion who also comes swiftly to a sticky end. As opening salvoes go, it hits the spot, as it were.

Then the film proper begins. A couple arrive at a bougie rental home only to find themselves facing the ultimate millennial nightmare: you’ve shelled out your hand-earned cash on a place for the weekend but find another couple have also booked it. This is the problem of listings on multiple platforms! Or is something more sinister going on? (If the ballsack shish kebab didn’t tip you off, another clue lies in the fact that the movie is called Bone Lake, not Airbnb Clash.) Imagine the social boundary-pushing of recent horror Speak No Evil with characters from White Lotus season 2 using the set-up from Barbarian , and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how much fun this will all prove to be.

As Gore Verbinski’s AI-apocalypse film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die hurtles towards us, it’s clear from the over-caffeinated trailer that we won’t be getting another ponderous parable about robot souls, digital enlightenment or the hubris of man

It’s easy to forget, given the current glut of robot-uprising doom flicks, that Hollywood has been doing the artificial intelligence thing for decades – long before anything resembling true AI existed in the real world. And now we live in an era in which a chatbot can write a passable sonnet, it is perhaps surprising that there hasn’t been a huge shift in how film-makers approach this particular corner of sci-fi.

Gareth Edwards’ The Creator (2023) is essentially the same story about AIs being the newly persecuted underclass as 1962’s The Creation of the Humanoids, except that the former has an $80m VFX budget and robot monks while the latter has community-theatre production values. Moon (2009) and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are both about the anxiety of being trapped with a soft-voiced machine that knows more than you. Her (2013) is basically Electric Dreams (1984) with fewer synth-pop arpeggios.

Unimaginative British fable has a credible lead in Christine During, but otherwise it’s the movie equivalent of receiving socks as a present

Think of the most unimaginative, boring Christmas present you’ve ever been given – a pair of acrylic socks, for instance, or one of those suffocatingly perfumed talcum powders you can only buy in petrol stations. Now imagine the spirit of that gift transformed into a holiday-themed British feature film, and you’ll be close to approximating the dull drippiness that is 3 Wishes for Christmas. It’s got all the personality of a supermarket gift voucher. The only saving grace is that lead actor Christine During is sufficiently competent to make the insipid, sub-large language model dialogue sound moderately credible. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the rest of the cast, who seem to have been thrown to the wolves by incompetent direction and find themselves sometimes literally thrashing around, as if being torn limb from limb.

During plays Tessa, who writes an agony column for a magazine, although that bit of biography barely figures – which is quite typical of the script, a compilation of pointless plot points and stale tropes stolen from other Christmas-themed movies and literature. Thus Tessa splits up with her boring finance-bro boyfriend in a not early enough scene, decides to spend the holiday with her insufferably pert best friend Fiona (Katie Sheridan), and has a meet-cute en route with a good-looking but rude guy who turns out to be Fiona’s brother Sam (Jacob Anderton). Naturally they will fall in love, quarrel again and then … well, no spoilers. But it is a romcom.

Gen Z actors such as Millie Bobby Brown and Jenna Ortega are refusing to do what is expected of ‘the talent’

Last week, I saw a clip that made me want to stand up and cheer. It was of the actor Millie Bobby Brown talking back to a photographer on a red carpet. The paparazzi had been yelling at her to smile, and Brown retorted: “Smile? You smile,” before walking off. She refused to do what was expected of her.

It’s a similar story with the star of the recent TV series Alien: Earth , Sydney Chandler. The actor did not appear on the cover of Variety magazine alongside the show’s creator and one of her co-stars, after she said she didn’t want to take part in a video interview for a regular series called How Well Do They Know Each Other?. The interviewer spent the first half of the resulting cover story explaining the situation in a bemused, tut-tutting tone, noting all the stars who had been willing to take part in the franchise.

Priya Elan writes about the arts, music and fashion

Photography group removed after Meta’s AI tools mistook name for class-A opioid reference

When the UK charity Hundred Heroines had its Facebook group taken down it was accompanied by a message from the social media company that simply said the page “goes against our community standards on drugs”.

Now, after more than a month of appealing, the photography charity is celebrating the reinstatement of its group after the tech company’s AI tools mistook it for an organisation promoting the class-A opioid heroin.