Tony Burke’s moreish, messy debut thriller about an iron-pumping cannibal who sparks a turf war between drug gangs excels in narky repartee

‘It’s basic detective work,” says veteran smalltown cop Stanton (Charles Dale), trying to justify pressurising a lead about her love life. “Very fucking basic,” says Patch (Andrea Hall), a London colleague who has come to the sticks because of a possible connection with a grisly serial killer. That’s the narky style of this ramshackle but moreish Welsh thriller, which takes place in the coke-sniffing milieu of endemic poverty and petty criminality, under ubiquitous sallow street lighting, in which everyone’s looking for an out.

Patch is right about the serial killer: drifter Sion (Craig Russell) has pitched up in town and blags a cleaning job at a local gym. A traumatised ex-squaddie with an inferiority complex, he takes offence at the group of hoodlums lording it over the machines. So he hammers in the skull of bouncer Dwayne (Kai Owen) and stores some choice morsels in a freezer; an extra protein source for his iron-pumping. But Sion is oblivious to Dwayne having recently cut in on a drug deal with rival Albanian gangsters – so his seemingly brutal murder threatens to kick off a turf war.

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Annual survey of young people’s reading habits which began two decades ago shows its lowest-ever result, most pronounced among boys aged 11 to 16

Reading enjoyment among children and young people in the UK has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, with the decline particularly pronounced in teenage boys, according to new research.

While the past year saw boys’ reading enjoyment fall across most age groups – particularly among those aged 11 to 16 – girls’ enjoyment remained relatively stable or slightly improved.

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Year 5 children’s punctuation pun scoops top prize in the Beano’s Britain’s Funniest Class competition

A joke about punctuation has been chosen as the funniest in a competition run by the Beano comic.

Year 5 pupils at Riverley primary school in Leyton, east London, won the accolade with their joke: What do you call the fanciest punctuation? An a-posh-trophe.

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Survivors of Flight 149 share chilling testimony as they prepare for their day in court. Plus: a millionaire ex-model needs a new house. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Documentaries
“I’m on a British Airways passenger flight, where’s the champagne? Then there’s this moment when you think: ‘Fuck, they’re bombing the aeroplane.’” That’s the account of one of the survivors of the hostages captured by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces when a civilian flight landed in Kuwait in 1990. This startling documentary hears such testimonies as the survivors prepare to take the British government and BA to court to seek “justice and the truth”. Hollie Richardson

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It is a ‘queer Xanadu’, a sliver of sand where weekend-long revelling takes place in fabulous modernist beach-houses. As Fire Island gets its mojo back, we celebrate the Speedos-wearing architect who defined its look

Posters advertising a “bear weekend” cling to the utility poles on Fire Island, punctuating the wooden boardwalks that meander through a lush dune landscape of beach grass and pitch pine. It’s not a celebration of grizzlies, by the looks of the flyers, but of large bearded men in small swimming trunks, bobbing in the pools and sprawled on the sundecks of mid-century modernist homes. You might also find them frolicking in the bushes of this idyllic car-free island, a nature reserve of an unusual kind that stretches in a 30-mile sliver of sand off the coast of Long Island in New York.

Over the last century, Fire Island Pines, as the central square-mile section of this sandy spit is known, has evolved into something of a queer Xanadu. Now counting about 600 homes, it is a place of mythic weekend-long parties and carnal pleasure, a byword for bacchanalia and fleshy hedonism – but also simply a secluded haven where people can be themselves.

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South London park will host events including Field Day and Mighty Hoopla despite last week’s high court ruling

Organisers of the embattled music festival series Brockwell Live, held in Brockwell Park in south London, have said their events will go ahead despite a successful legal challenge against Lambeth council .

The park, in Herne Hill, hosts tens of thousands of people at the festivals Wide Awake, Field Day, Cross the Tracks, City Splash and Mighty Hoopla, as well as the family festival Brockwell Bounce and the Lambeth Country Show.

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Masquerading as health and fitness publications, these journals contained photographs of finely muscled, nearly naked men that were beautifully lit and classically posed. Now a gorgeous new book is celebrating these ‘museum-worthy’ images

In the late 1950s, when photography critic Vince Aletti was in his mid-teens, he stumbled upon a clutch of magazines at a local newsstand that seemed to speak directly to him. From their covers to the pages inside, the pocket-sized magazines were packed with strikingly composed images of nearly naked, finely muscled men, many of whom appeared to have a secret rapport with each other. “I remember getting really turned on by that,” Aletti recalls, sitting in his apartment in New York’s East Village. “I also remember being really worried that my mother might find those magazines in my room.”

Physique magazines, as such publications were generically known, operated on a coded system, designed to function as smoke signals for gay men during an era of heightened repression and censorship that lasted from the 1930s until the early 70s. The magazines, which were pumped out in cities across the US, made sure to pass as health and fitness publications, but the style and content of their photos were clearly created for the tastes and desires of gay men. In the decades since, physique images have often been written off as campy relics of a sad past, but Aletti wants audiences to consider them anew.

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Aubrey Williams produced huge, colourful abstract paintings and was influenced by music and climate issues

An artist whose work was part of the first wave of abstract art to hit the UK and presaged the climate breakdown protests as well as debates over the legacies of British colonialism is undergoing an “overdue” reappraisal, according to experts and critics.

Aubrey Williams, the Guyanese artist who moved to Britain in the 1950s, was a respected figure in his lifetime and the subject of several exhibitions in the UK. But after his death from cancer in 1990, the artist’s influence and the legacy of his abstract painting has slowly faded from view in Britain.

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Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton
The married sculptors made very different art – hers curvy and colourful, his rickety and angular – but it all hums with life when brought together

It is a bright and sunny day in Somerset, and out on the neatly mown lawn at Hauser & Wirth, Niki de Saint Phalle’s voluptuous Nanas (“girls”) are positively sparkling . There are three of them (a nod to Botticelli’s three graces): one silver, one black, one white, all made from polyester jazzed up with colourful mosaic and shimmering mirrors. She has captured them mid-twirl, arms tossed in the air like they just don’t care, legs kicked out at jaunty angles. They are joyful and radiant, monumental and robust, dancers and warriors.

Saint Phalle, a French American artist, began creating her abstract sculptures of women in the mid-60s, a decade after she first met the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely in Paris. He was married and so was she but five years later, both divorced, they got together; by the time they were married in 1971 both were seeing other people. It was a complicated, sometimes competitive relationship – romantically and artistically – that saw them collaborate and support each other creatively until Tinguely’s death in 1991. Saint Phalle looked after his legacy until her own death in 2002. Now, on the centenary of his birth, a new exhibition is presenting their work side by side – at least once we get off the grass and into the gallery.

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