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.

From quilting in Japanese prisoner camps to graffiti in Sudan via Rachel Whiteread, Maggi Hambling and Lee Miller, this documentary covers myriad artistic responses to war

Margy Kinmonth’s latest feature documentary represents the third in a trilogy of films about artists and war, following Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War , which focused on the second world war artist of the title, and the more first world war-skewed War Art with Eddie Redmayne , which showed on ITV. This time the focus is on female artists and war – as the title suggests with its cringe-inducing pun on a slang term for makeup.

It’s a perfectly valid and potentially fruitful subject, but the analysis here is often frustratingly superficial. Kinmonth puts herself front and centre as the onscreen interviewer and narrator, so one has to blame her directly for the daftness of some her questions. For instance, she asks sculptor Rachel Whiteread: “I’m wondering, is there a difference in the perception of female artists to men, and what do women see that men don’t?” Whiteread politely demurs to tackle that one. “I think that’s an incredibly difficult thing to answer,” she replies. “I don’t think you really can make that distinction.”

He caused a scandal with his erotic tale of lakeside cruising. Now the French film-maker is back – with a funny yet tragic story of lofty ideals, base passions and a lusty priest

There’s a wonderfully frank clifftop scene in Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie’s new rural thriller, in which a priest seems to give absolution to a murderer. Not through some great act of clemency, though, but because of what he wants in return. “He’s a lot like me,” says the director, laughing. “He’s navigating between his greater ideals and his desires as a man. I think a lot of us do that.”

Morally flexible clergymen, vacillating killers, characters whose desires lead them into terra incognita – this is Guiraudie’s morally unstable terrain. Misericordia is the mirror image of his much-praised 2013 psychological drama Stranger By the Lake. Where that film made a murderer a dimly grasped object of desire, here the point of view is the killer’s. Jérémie stirs up dormant passions when he returns to his childhood village for the funeral of his former baker boss. In Guiraudie’s hands, it’s never certain whether a story will turn out tragic or comic. In Misericordia, it’s both: the film starts off in Talented Mr Ripley territory, before spiralling into bed-hopping, gendarme-dodging farce.

The climate professor is justified in identifying the thinktanks, fossil fuel companies and politicians responsible for exacerbating the climate crisis but his list of remedies is underpowered

In July 2023, prime minister Rishi Sunak and energy secretary Grant Shapps issued a defence of their decision to expand UK oil and gas production in the North Sea. The move was necessary to prevent household energy prices from rising sharply across the nation, they claimed.

It was a manifest distortion of the truth, to say the least. British oil and gas prices are set by global energy markets, which are barely affected by what the UK does in its heavily depleted North Sea oilfields. Changing production there would have made little difference to domestic bills though it would have damaged our attempts to reach net zero by 2050.