Charlotte Church has lived her life in the full glare of publicity, rising from child star to tabloid target. Now, happier and more free than ever, she’s found her feet – and her voice – at her healing retreat in the Welsh valleys

When Charlotte Church arrives, she starts to cry. “I break down,” she says, “every time I reach here. It’s the first thing I do when I set foot on this soil.” It’s a two-hour drive from her home in Barry to The Dreaming, the retreat centre she opened in 2023, a pilgrimage across Bannau Brycheiniog and into the myth-steeped hills of the Elan Valley in Powys, central Wales. “Two to three weeks,” she’s explaining, icy ground crunching underfoot, “is the longest I can stay away before I start clucking. As I get closer, I feel myself relaxing, a calm coming over me, my nervous system resetting.” That bodily response, she’s sure, is physiological. Tears stream. “This land holds me like nothing else. It feels like coming home; I’m enveloped here.”

It’s early January when I visit. Through the small market town of Rhayader and out into dramatic landscapes, snow-dusted peaks atop rolling hills. A hand-carved sign marks a single-track turning. Through morning mist, The Dreaming comes into view: a three-storey manor almost built into the valley, flanked by moss-lined rocks and woodland. Fresh from being photographed alfresco, Church greets me outdoors: “It’s bloody lush, love, isn’t it?”

While working as an art teacher in the 90s, the Moroccan photographer collaborated with his students to play with the confines of the educational system

No doubt you can sympathise with at least one of the pupils in the image. She has her head down, working hard, so bowed in thought her face is almost pressed right against her paper. A few seats down, a boy adopts a similar pose. One girl has her ankles crossed, while another has hers splayed. Across the room, one girl’s shoes are practical, while another’s are oddly adult, sandals with heels, hand-me-downs, maybe. You remember how imagination allowed you to disappear, to escape, to take leave of the four walls of the classroom, of the uncomfortable wooden chair and desk at which you tried not to fidget.

Or were you the boy breaking the peace, wild and unruly, hanging over a table while lying flat on your stomach, legs dangling, fixing us with your cheeky gaze, as in this image from the Moroccan photographer Hicham Benohoud’s book The Classroom ? The images were taken between 1994 and 2000 while Benohoud worked as an art teacher and found himself, like the students, stifled by the educational system. The teacher who inspires by introducing simple freedoms into a rigid educational setting is a familiar cinematic trope ( To Sir, With Love , Dangerous Minds , Entre les Murs , AKA The Class ). Benohoud makes it his own in quiet black-and-white photographs that show how students, when given the opportunity to play and experiment, can redefine their surroundings with the leanest of creative means. Chairs and tables become frames within frames, reveal and conceal faces, as do paper cutouts held up playfully. Strings and tape, cardboard and fabric become interventions in space or extensions of the body, curtains and shrouds, places to hide, to refuse to be seen.

The author’s brilliant account of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting relationship challenges myths, finds new meanings in their music, and even throws up a few surprises

It is a strange and beguiling experience to find music you have had in your head since childhood reveal new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later. Beatles songs aren’t like most pop songs; instead of fading, they take on a richer colour and nuance, not least because new generations of fans inquire more deeply into what previous listeners might have overlooked or simply misunderstood. One twist of the kaleidoscope and a song we thought we knew suddenly sounds even better than it did the first 100 times we heard it.

This is the effect of reading Ian Leslie’s brilliant study of the Beatles’ music, a book that offers not only a lesson in listening (again) but an enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss. At its centre is the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the unprecedented peaks the two of them scaled in remaking English popular music. You may find it impossible not to be awed by their achievement all over again. But Leslie also wants to challenge a myth about the pair. After the Beatles finally disbanded, a consensus formed that Paul was the straight man to John’s rebel bohemian – vanilla against brimstone – which hardened into holy writ on Lennon’s murder in 1980. McCartney’s inadequate off-the-cuff response to the news (“it’s a drag”) took some living down. Leslie lays to rest this old opposition, arguing that there was “no John without Paul, and vice versa”. Their collaboration was as tight and co-dependent as two climbers roped together on a mountain face.

The actor talks bird-watching, homework trauma and the hands-on skill she’s teaching herself

Lie-in or early start? I’m a horrible sleeper – I spend very little time in the bedroom – and I’ll read until the rest of the world wakes up. On an ideal Sunday morning I’d go for a walk with binoculars. I like bird-watching.

Favourite bird? The house sparrow. They’re in decline, so they’re more interesting than they would seem, and they’re full of character.

Victor Hugo seduces, big names tackles a world in permacrisis and Hélène Binet challenges the Englishness of the country house – all in your weekly dispatch

Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo
These gothic fantasies and nature studies by the author of Les Misérables transport you to a surreal, seductive inner world. Read the full review .
• Royal Academy, London, until 29 June

She has been painting for 60 years – yet it’s taken until now for her to have an exhibition outside her native India. The artist reluctantly takes time out from her studio in order to grant a rare interview

When Arpita Singh’s Remembering opened this week at the Serpentine in London, despite being one of India’s leading artists, it was her first solo institutional show outside her native land in her six-decade-long career. It also marked the first time the Serpentine has given over its main galleries to a show by a south Asian artist. But Singh, who spends most of her waking hours in her Delhi home studio, is muted in her reaction. “Serpentine is a known gallery, so it is a prestigious thing for me,” is about as effusive as she gets.

At 87, Singh is reluctant to give her time to anything that might take her away from her canvas – and that includes this interview. Her vivid, unhinged paintings, chock-a-block with adrift figures, motifs and text often structured by narrow borders crammed with ornament, have won her a devoted following. In an epic Mappa Mundi -like piece, My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising, perspectives jar and scales switch in a way that jauntily recalls storytelling scroll paintings and lavishly detailed miniatures.

Playhouse, Nottingham
There’s no slowing down for the avant art-rock octogenarian as he forgoes predictability to showcase the staggering breadth and depth of his songcraft

John Cale is 83 years old. Live, it would be more than understandable to find a musician of that age in a period of slowing down and winding up, cranking out the hits to please old fans. John Cale is absolutely not doing that. An early outing of Captain Hook, a sprawling avant art-rock deep cut from a 1979 live album, sets the tone for an evening that is less about delivering the obvious and more about showcasing the staggering breadth and depth of his songcraft.

Sitting almost permanently behind a keyboard, Cale doesn’t give his masterly viola skills an outing tonight, but he sounds in remarkable voice for a man returning after several cancelled shows and four days on doctor-ordered vocal rest. Under a deep red light, Cale and his band play a tense, moody-bordering-on-menacing take on Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel, although the heavy-handed delivery of The Endless Plain of Fortune fares less well, feeling drained of all its subtlety and tenderness.

The franchise created a bromance for the ages, with this first outing featuring gunfights and wisecracking – and an at-the-time more established Lawrence pulling focus

Back in the day when Martin Lawrence had top billing over Will Smith, this movie landed in cinemas in all its gun-wielding, vehicle-exploding, post-shootout-wisecracking humungousness. Now rereleased for its 30th anniversary, it was the first in a franchise featuring the squabblingly bromantic Miami cop partnership, created by screenwriter George Gallo, directed by Michael Bay and produced with towering unsubtlety by the legendary action duo Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, one of their final films before Simpson died of a colossal drug overdose.

Lawrence plays Marcus Burnett, a married man with kids, partnered up with Mike Lowrey (Smith), who is supposed to be a single guy and ladies’ man. Oddly for a cop, he’s also supposed to be rich, with family money, which explains his smooth bachelor pad in an art deco apartment building; like so many interiors in this film, it is shot from a low angle in a kind of groovy heat haze, with shafts of sunlight beaming through – this being the signifier for interior design classiness. It is in this flat that the film rather bafflingly contrives some goofy sub-Billy-Wilder comedy as Marcus passes himself off as Mike, leading a material witness into this property for her own protection and pretending that the place is his.

The Mulholland Drive star had lunch with the director weeks before he died, and says: ‘He was not, in any way, done’

Mulholland Drive star Naomi Watts says that David Lynch “wanted to go back to work” before his death in January .

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times , Watts revealed that she had spent an afternoon with Lynch in November, along with Laura Dern, who acted in Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. “We had a beautiful lunch at his house. I knew he’d been unwell but he was in great spirits. He wanted to go back to work – Laura and I were like, ‘You can do it! You could work from the trailer.’ He was not, in any way, done. I could see the creative spirit alive in him.”