Royal Academy, London
The Dutch artist looks like a prophet of the Holocaust when viewed through the 80-year-old German painter’s dark lens in this startling show, which makes you see how Van Gogh might have painted modern horrors

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853, in the middle of the comparatively peaceful 19th century. If he hadn’t shot himself in a cornfield at the age of 37, and had made it to his 60s, he could have witnessed all that end in the 1914-18 war. If he’d lived to 80, he would have read in his newspaper, at an Arles cafe table, of the election of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor, and in 1945, at 92, watched newsreel footage of the emaciated survivors of Belsen.

Odd thoughts, but they are stoked by the Royal Academy’s strange and startling exhibition. This is an intimate encounter between the great living German history painter, to mark his 80th year, and his hero Van Gogh. It juxtaposes his responses to the latter, from teenage drawings to recent gold-spattered wheatfield scenes, with the Dutch artist’s works. The peculiar result is to make you see how the dreamer of sunflowers and starry nights might have painted the horrors of modern history, if he’d lived to see them.

In 2013, more than 4,000 people on a malfunctioning 13-storey holiday boat had to spend days defecating into bags. This catch-up with passengers makes for a fun hour of unintentional comedy

With the latest instalments of the series Trainwreck, Netflix appears to be trying to grant us some brief summer break from the worst kind of horrors the true crime genre can offer. In contrast to previous episodes, which looked at the Woodstock 99 riots and Astroworld tragedy that saw 10 people die in a crowd crush at a massive Live Nation-organised concert – including a nine-year-old child – it has suddenly pivoted in tone.

Last week it gave us Mayor of Mayhem, the tale of Rob “I am not a crack addict” Ford, the crack-addicted mayor of Toronto and his very un-Canadian way of doing municipal business. In coming weeks, there will be accounts of the balloon boy’s story , a private investigation agency run by soccer moms, and “the greatest shitpost ever made”. Whether this tonal change comes as a relief from having your hopes for humanity further ground down or as psychologically jarring (should such disparate subjects as child death and municipal confusion be yoked together in the same anthology series?), will vary.

Soho theatre, London
The comic’s tale of his lifelong love affair with the US – and a doomed bid to make it big in Hollywood – is a great platform for his vocal and mimicry talent

‘I love America!,” says Kieran Hodgson, which is quite the opening gambit in a week when the country has risked kickstarting the third world war. But that is the Yorkshireman’s point: there is a better US, now occluded by He Who Shall Barely Be Named, but still worth believing in. Voice of America traces Hodgson’s lifelong love affair with the States, in the teeth of his Europhile parents’ distaste, the disillusion of the Bush years and a recent doomed bid for Hollywood success.

It joins as big-hitting a body of work as any in comedy, a suite of autobiographical shows itemising the nerdy obsessions ( cycling ; Mahler; European politics) of child and adult Kieran. Voice of America hits less big, for my money, partly because its subject is less lovably niche, and also because the binary thinking (America good? America bad?) is simplistic before Hodgson arrives at his predictably more nuanced conclusion.

At Soho theatre, London , until 28 June. Then at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh , 30 July-24 August.

Their baby’s crying brings on PTSD for Kenny, a former sniper in Afghanistan, and Kerry is beset by her own dark secret. Can love keep them together?

There is never the tiniest doubt that Kerry and Kenny Watson love each other. “I always tell him that he has the most beautiful ears,” says Kerry, marvelling at the wonder of her husband. “Even his wrists are beautiful.” But when Kenny came home to Scotland after serving as a sniper in Afghanistan, it looked as if their marriage was almost certainly over. Diagnosed withpost-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Kenny was sleeping between 18 and 24 hours a day, and became so paranoid that he thought dog walkers were Taliban snipers. The worst thing was that the crying of their baby son, Harris, triggered his PTSD. This intimate documentary, told without a scrap of sentimentality, follows the couple over 10 years.

The story unfolds almost like couples therapy, unpeeling the relationship layer by layer. On the voiceover Kenny jokes that when he met Kerry he told her he was a deep-sea firefighter, not a soldier, because he thought the truth would scare her away. What he loved first about his wife was her honesty; but Kerry has never fully opened up to him about a trauma from her childhood. The camera is a fly-on-the-wall in their lives through the worst of Kenny’s illness. In the darkest moments, he is agonisingly, unflinchingly direct about what is going on in his head.

Principality Stadium, Cardiff
The US singer-songwriter graduates to the UK’s biggest venues with a theatrical show to match, featuring a house on fire, Allen Ginsberg recitals and some very real tears

Lana Del Rey is standing in a blue-on-white summer dress in front of a wood-panelled house, crying real tears next to plastic weeping willows, momentarily overcome by the size of the audience staring back at her. This sort of tension, the push-pull between genuine vulnerability and an exploration of aesthetics, has always been there in her music, and her wonderfully ambitious first stadium tour runs on it. Its theatrical staging and big ideas are all the more remarkable thanks to some very human moments of doubt.

Opening with Stars Fell on Alabama, one of several new songs foreshadowing a country record that might be around the corner, Del Rey’s voice is barely there, with its final notes followed by a dash to the wings to kiss her husband. But she stays on the rails. During Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Ultraviolence, she falls to the floor in Busby Berkeley-esque arrangements alongside her dancers, her vocals now steely as power chords and pulsing red lights ratchet up the drama.

Last week, I attended a film festival dedicated to shorts made using generative AI. Dubbed AIFF 2025 , it was an event precariously balancing between two different worlds.

The festival was hosted by Runway, a company that produces models and tools for generating images and videos. In panels and press briefings, a curated list of industry professionals made the case for Hollywood to embrace AI tools. In private meetings with industry professionals, I gained a strong sense that there is already a widening philosophical divide within the film and television business.

I also interviewed Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela about the tightrope he walks as he pitches his products to an industry that has deeply divided feelings about what role AI will have in its future.

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Peake stars opposite Jason Isaacs, as Politkovskaya’s husband, in this sentimental look at the life of a woman who, 19 years after her death, remains a folk hero

This British-American co-production offers a dramatised portrait of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (played by Maxine Peake) who was assassinated in 2006. Politkovskaya’s gutsy, impassioned reporting on the second Chechen war was highly critical of the Kremlin, the Russian army and Vladimir Putin personally. (The fact that she was murdered on his birthday was surely no coincidence.) Nineteen years after her death, she remains a folk hero worldwide for resistances to autocracy, especially given the rise in repression everywhere and constant threats to journalists.

Given all that, the film deserves respect for the subject matter, even though this is a pretty basic rendition of Politkovskaya’s story, a little too sticky with hagiographic sentimentality and the cliches of crusading journalist-led movies. It also should be noted that Politkovskaya’s family haven’t given the film their blessing; some of them may not be happy, for instance, with the thinly written characterisations of their fictional counterparts, like her son Ilya (Harry Lawtey) who is made to seem peevish and self-absorbed even when his feelings are understandable. (“I’m not watching you die!” he bellows at one point.)

The rapper is booked to headline the Rubicon festival in Bratislava, which protesters have called ‘a debasement of all victims of the Nazi regime’

A petition has been launched calling on the mayor of Bratislava to prevent Kanye West – legally known as Ye – from headlining a festival in Bratislava, calling the planned appearance “an insult to historic memory, a glorification of wartime violence and debasement of all victims of the Nazi regime”.

The Rubicon festival in the Slovakian capital claimed that they had secured an exclusive performance by the “hip-hop visionary, cultural icon and controversial genius” for mid-July.

The maverick behind Tom Holland’s Romeo and Nicole Scherzinger’s Sunset Boulevard is now stunning passersby with Rachel Zegler’s Palladium balcony scene

Rarely can a balcony have caused such a kerfuffle . But the row about the extramural staging of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina in Evita at the London Palladium is a sign of its director’s increasing celebrity status. Indeed I’m tempted to rephrase a number from an earlier Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical: “Jamie Lloyd Superstar, Do you think you’re what they say you are?” What, in short, does it tell us about our theatrical culture that this puckishly likable director has become a figure famed on both sides of the Atlantic?

His beginnings, as a recent Vogue feature pointed out, were relatively modest. He grew up in rural Dorset, was turned on to live theatre by seeing Michael Jackson on tour and attended the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. But, right from the start, there was something there. The first production of his that I saw was The Caretaker , which in 2007 transferred from the Sheffield Crucible to what was then the Tricycle in London. Two things made it original: the use of a creepy score by Ben and Max Ringham to give the play a film noir feel and the insistent presence of Nigel Harman’s Mick reminding us that the work is about the fraternal bond between him and the brain-damaged Aston, which Pinter’s intrusive hobo fails to understand.