The remarkable story of conductor Alma Rosé and the musicians who survived the Holocaust by performing amid horrific conditions

When 13-year-old Pearl Pufeles disembarked from the cattle car at Auschwitz in March 1944, she was surprised to hear the strains of Dvořák and Smetana wafting towards her. “Gosh,” thought the Czechoslovakian schoolgirl, “this can’t be that bad if they play music here.” But it was that bad and, indeed, so much worse. Pearl and her twin sister Helen were swiftly selected as laboratory fodder for Dr Josef Mengele’s grotesque medical experiments.

It isn’t clear which orchestra Pearl had heard that day. Auschwitz was a 15 sq mile complex with multiple sub-camps and there were at least six “official” orchestras staffed by prisoners who had been funnelled into southern Poland from all over Europe. Some of these orchestras concentrated on the classical repertoire, albeit without the Jewish composers Mendelssohn and Mahler. Others specialised in Sunday afternoon concerts of operetta and dance music. By far the likeliest music to be heard around the camps, though, was jaunty military marches, played loudly every morning as the prisoners set off for work, and then again in the evening as they limped back to camp, dragging their dying colleagues behind them.

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The service might boast A-listers like Natalie Portman and Colin Farrell but in a competitive streaming landscape, it’s struggling to be heard

Next week Apple TV+ launches The Studio , a Seth Rogen comedy about the rapidly changing landscape of the film industry. Episodes follow a beleaguered executive as he’s forced to make an ugly IP movie, because streamers are in dominance and this is all traditional studios are left with.

For a show explicitly about the death of the theatrical experience to be made by a disruptive streamer – one funded by the deep pockets a global tech megacorp to boot – is unquestionably a show of power. Or at least it would be, were it not for a new report claiming that Apple TV+ is currently losing a billion dollars a year.

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Sunita Rajwar and Shahana Goswami lead a sinewy crime drama as a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie who has inherited her late husband’s job

Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie. They are terrifically played by Sunita Rajwar and Shahana Goswami in what is almost a gender-switched Indian version of Training Day.

Suri is a film-maker who 20 years ago gave us a tremendous personal essay movie I for India , and this is her fiction-feature debut, which reportedly started as a documentary project inspired by public demonstrations about the gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Singh . It centres on the Indian convention of “compassionate appointment”: the dependent widow of a public official can apply for the same job. Goswami plays Santosh, whose cop husband was killed in a riot; there are dark mutterings about the unknown culprit’s Muslim identity. With no children and no money, she successfully applies for her late husband’s position and finds herself in the thick of a controversial case: the body of a young Dalit girl, raped and murdered, has been found in a village well – and the community is in uproar about the police’s obvious caste prejudice in failing to do anything.

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Seth Rogen’s great new cringe comedy has A-listers lining up for a cameo, and the magician meets wild daredevils and edge-walkers from around the world

Does the head of a Hollywood studio need to care about films? This cringe comedy stars Seth Rogen as Matt Remick, a movie obsessive whose rise to the helm of the fictional Continental Studios suggests it might be the worst quality to possess. Matt wants to make great films – but his boss Griffin Mill (a superbly villainous Bryan Cranston) sees things differently. Before he knows it, Matt is greenlighting a Kool-Aid movie, doing the dirty on his mentor Patty (Catherine O’Hara) and breaking Martin Scorsese’s heart. The sheer quality of the Hollywood cameos (Steve Buscemi, Charlize Theron and more) suggests something about the satirical message at the show’s core rings uncomfortably true.
Apple TV+, from Wednesday 26 March

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The government balked at protecting children from the perils of social media. TV has made the issues plain; now politics must do its job

It’s the story every parent of teenagers I know has been watching horrified through their fingers. The Netflix drama Adolescence starts with armed police breaking down an ordinary front door to arrest a 13-year-old boy for murder, in front of his bewildered parents. Though initially it seems there must have been some terrible mistake, Jamie’s Instagram account soon yields clues that all the adults – police, parents and teachers alike – had initially blundered past, oblivious.

Though talk of misogynistic “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate hovers over the storyline, this isn’t really a story of radicalisation. What it skewers is the feeling of growing up very publicly in a world where sending nudes risks them instantly being shared round the class and everyone automatically films playground fights on their phones, and how that intensifies dangerous feelings of shame and rejection in immature minds. Over half of young women now say they’re frightened of their male peers, according to a sad little survey for the Lost Boys project at the Centre for Social Justice thinktank. What’s not always obvious is that beneath their anger, boys are often equally frightened of them.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Conservation charity is also pausing some projects because of labour costs stemming from the autumn budget

The National Trust has frozen all but essential recruitment and is pausing some projects as it faces a £10m jump in labour costs this year as a result of higher employment costs stemming from last autumn’s budget.

The conservation charity, which looks after 500 historic houses, castles, parks and gardens, as well as 780 miles of coastline and 250,000 hectares of land, said the extra costs were the result of changes to employers’ national insurance contributions and an increase in the legal minimum wage, which both come into force next month.

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There are bruising punch-ups and exuberant shootouts galore in this series that also has a genuinely jaw-dropping Die Hard-inspired fight scene. Keeping track of all the allegiances can be tricky, though

Most meetings could just be an email. But in the heightened milieu of Sky’s bloodthirsty hit Gangs of London, face-to-face parleys have become as essential as the drama’s signature bouts of brutal hand-to-hand combat. Whenever anything dodgy happens that could jeopardise the capital’s lucrative illegal rackets, some high-level hood growls the magic words into their mobile: “Call a meeting of the gangs. Tonight.”

For the various factions, these executive sit-downs are an opportunity to look their shady associates in the eye and intuit who might be making a power grab. For viewers, it’s a useful way to keep tabs on all the larger-than-life stakeholders, from fearsome Irish mob widow Marian Wallace (Michelle Fairley) to snappily dressed fixer Ed Dumani (recent Conclave standout Lucian Msamati) and unblinking Albanian mafioso Luan (Orli Shuka). After two seasons of messy backstabbing – with no shortage of front stabbing, bludgeoning and dismemberment – the only thing you can safely assume about the unsmiling faces at these draughty warehouse meet-ups is that they know how to survive in a dog-eat-dog world.

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Actor suggests she may have been intentionally smeared but ‘no one has to forgive me’ after recent controversy

Karla Sofía Gascón has described herself as “ less racist than Gandhi ” and insisted “no one has to forgive me for anything” as she returns to the public eye after the emergence of offensive social media posts widely thought to have torpedoed the Oscar hopes of her film Emilia Pérez .

The Spanish performer, who became the first transgender woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, was dropped from the film’s campaigning materials by its studio, Netflix, and criticised by colleagues and prominent politicians after the series of old racist and Islamophobic tweets came to light.

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Speaking about the award, the American actor, one of the highest-grossing stars of all time, praised the UK’s ‘incredibly talented’ film industry and ‘stunning locations’

Tom Cruise has thanked the British Film Institute after its announcement that he is to receive its highest accolade, the BFI fellowship.

“I am truly honoured by this acknowledgment,” Cruise said. “I’ve been making films in the UK for more than 40 years and have no plans to stop.”

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