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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The survivor of mass rape who became an international symbol of fortitude hopes ‘to convey a message of strength and courage’ in A Hymn to Life

A memoir by mass rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot is due to be published early next year.

Pelicot became known internationally last year when she waived her right to anonymity in a trial which saw her ex-husband found guilty of drugging and raping her, and inviting dozens of strangers to abuse her over nearly a decade.

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Russian composer whose music expressed the deep, emotional mysticism that sprang from her religious convictions

When the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died aged 93, began to include overtly religious ideas in her concert music, it proved a provocative step to take in Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union of the late 1960s. These ideas were expressed through titles and a kind of dramaturgy that she called “instrumental symbolism”. Switching from one instrument to another, or between different parts of the same instrument, she suggested extra-musical and even theological ideas, rather like an acoustic equivalent of the geometrical distortions and symbolism familiar from the icons of the Eastern Orthodox church that she loved so much.

With works such as Introitus (1978) for piano and chamber orchestra and In Croce (1979) for cello and organ, she acquired a reputation in the world of non-official Soviet culture, inspiring for enthusiasts but irritating to the old guard of the Composers’ Union. She refused to be intimidated.

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One Battle After Another is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s experimental postmodern novel Vineland and will also feature Benicio Del Toro, Alana Haim and Sean Penn

Less than 24 hours after Warner Bros announced they had pushed back the release date for Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film to late September – with an eye, suggested pundits, on teeing up its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, for a second Oscar – a first trailer for One Battle After Another has arrived.

The brief teaser foregrounds the characters played by DiCaprio and co-star Teyana Taylor, who are are seen avidly practising gun combat.

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Now 88, the minimalist composer has reissued his life’s work. He answers your questions about Bowie, the Grateful Dead, spirituality – and his complicated friendship with Philip Glass

Why does minimalist music consist of so much repetition? Correllisflute
The word “minimalist” was invented by Michael Nyman when he was more of a music critic than a composer, but the kind of music that I and people like me deal with has changes on a much smaller scale than people are used to hearing. The number of repetitions is the nature of the music. On my early pieces, such as It’s Gonna Rain or Piano Phase, everything moves so slowly. Some people will say: “To hell with it, I’m not listening to that,” but those who do experience a different kind of listening.

Not only was David Bowie influenced by your work during his Berlin era , but also your Clapping Music is sampled on the hypnotic James Murphy remix of Bowie’s Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix). What do you recall of your conversations with Bowie in 1978? McScootikins
We played Music for 18 Musicians at the Bottom Line in New York, the first time we’d played it in a rock club. Afterwards, David Bowie came up and introduced himself and a photograph was taken, but really it was one of the very short post-concert conversations. It was the exchange of mutual admiration that really mattered. I was so delighted to see him there and he told me he’d heard us play the piece before, in Berlin. It was a nice coming together. The James Murphy remix is an odd combination that seems to work. Sometimes, you hear what people do with your music and think: “What have they done to me?” But that sounded really interesting. I wanted to hear it again.

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Quatuor Diotima
(Pentatone)
Moments of stillness and animation, spareness and exuberance, are highlighted in a confident performance of a work started in 1948 – now finally with its fourth movement

During his lifetime, “work in progress” became a familiar label in Pierre Boulez ’s list of compositions, as many of his pieces were subjected to repeated revision and elaboration over the course of his career. Most did eventually reach what Boulez regarded as a definitive state, but the one that remained in compositional limbo for the longest time was his only string quartet, which he had begun to plan in 1948 (the year of his Second Piano Sonata and the cantata Le Soleil des Eaux). For many years, only five of the projected six movements of what he called Livre pour Quatuor were performed (and recorded); the work only reached its final form after the composer’s death and almost 70 years after it was conceived, when in 2017 the composer Philippe Manoury completed the reconstruction of the fourth and longest of its movements.

When planning the quartet, Boulez had taken Beethoven’s late quartets and Berg’s Lyric Suite as his starting points, not so much as models to follow but to react against, and the language of the Livre generates its energy from the tension between the ghosts of the classical forms and the pointillist total serialism that the postwar generation of composers had fashioned from the music of Webern and Messiaen. From the start, too, Boulez had envisaged it as a modular work, from which performers could select which movements to play, and in what order, with a title echoing the symbolist poet Mallarmé’s Livre, a book whose loose-leaf pages could be read in any order.

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Royal Opera House, London
Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Puccini’s final opera is meticulously revived with Sondra Radvanovsky and SeokJong Baek both stellar in the central roles. In the pit, Rafael Payare brings care and lightness to the intricate score

Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Puccini’s final opera was a well-flogged warhorse by the turn of the millennium, hugely assisted by the global 1990s popularity of the aria Nessun Dorma . Revived only two years ago it returns again, part of a Puccini-rich season marking the centenary of the composer’s death (the event which left Turandot unfinished). But thankfully this staging is still far from showing its age.

Instead Jack Furness’s meticulous staging, tightly choreographed by Kate Flatt, feels newly minted. When the blood red drapes at the front of the stage are ripped down in the opening bars, the oppressive ceiling-to-floor set looms over everything, severed head masks looking down. The action takes place amid shadowy watchers, seemingly indifferent to the heartlessness that pervades Turandot almost up to its sudden happily-ever-after end, which used the cut version of Franco Alfano’s 1926 completion.

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