Cannes film festival
Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason examines a broken marriage through stunning imagery and quirky fantasy visions, but his new comic tone undermines the pain

Icelandic film-maker Hlynur Pálmason gave us the haunting historical drama Godland and the challenging and bizarre thriller A White, White Day ; now he has changed things up with this startling, amusing, vaguely frustrating movie. The Love That Remains is a portrait of a fractured family and a sundered marriage which, with its dreamy piano score, fantasy visions and quirky sequences to go with the dead-serious scenes of purported emotional pain, introduces a slightly disconcerting but certainly intriguing new comic tone.

Pálmason’s visual and compositional sense is as commanding as ever, with some stunning imagery of the Icelandic landscape. But it is flavoured with a new tone of persistent, playful unseriousness, which finally morphs into a tragicomic spectacle of male loneliness. In some places this film doesn’t have the weight and the impact of his earlier work, but it’s certainly engaging.

Horden Methodist Church, County Durham
Ensemble ’84 generate an exhilarating racket in this gutsy rendition of Brecht’s play about the thirty years’ war

The noise is constant. It is in the eight marimbas lined up across the stage, which add a South African bounce to Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 epic of the thirty years’ war. It is in the operatic songs, all lush harmonies and pulsing percussion. And it is in the vocal effects of the large cast, adding birdsong or insect rhythms to the battlefields. Sometimes it is in the crackle of a plastic bottle to suggest fire, the shuddering boom of a drum to indicate an execution, or the grind of hands across metal for machine-gun fire.

All of it is generated by the actors, much like the set, by the ensemble with Janet Brown and Eve Booth: a resourceful collection of corrugated iron, wooden pallets, old tyres and buckets. It gives Mark Dornford-May’s production an in-built theatricality: each performance created anew.

Benicio Del Toro and Michael Cera are essentially wingmen to Kate Winslet’s daughter, making a breakthrough big screen turn in Anderson’s enjoyable yet airless ensemble romp

Wes Anderson has contrived another of his elegant, eccentric, rectilinear comedies - as ever, he is vulnerable to the charge of making films that stylistically resemble all his others, and yet no more, surely, than all those other directors making conventional films that resemble all the rest of their own conventional work.

The Phoenician Scheme is enjoyable and executed with Anderson’s usual tremendous despatch, but it is somehow less visually detailed and inspired than some of his earlier work; there is less screwball sympathy for the characters, and it is disconcerting to see actors of the calibre of Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe and Scarlett Johansson phoning in tiny, deadpan, almost immobile cameos. But there is a likeable lead turn from Mia Threapleton, an eerie visual and aural echo of her mother, Kate Winslet.

The absurdly opaque and pointless “Phoenician Scheme” of the title is a plan by notorious plutocrat-entrepreneur Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) to dominate the economy of a fictional Middle Eastern nation with an interlocking series of mining transportation and fishing ventures, by using exploitative slave labour and moreover manipulating the agricultural market in such a way as to cause famine.

To this end, he has signed investment deals with various relatives and associates, including Marty (Jeffrey Wright), Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric) and his brother, Uncle Nubar, who may incidentally have murdered Zsa-Zsa’s wife – and is played by Benedict Cumberbatch with a fierce beard and kohl eyeliner, like Rasputin in a silent film.

His daughter is Liesl, a novitiate nun (Mia Threapleton) and in true Michael Corleone style, it appears to be her destiny to take over the business despite not wanting to. The Norwegian family tutor Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera) is deeply in love with Liesl.

But now the US government, in the form of Bobby-Kennedy-style buttoned-up apparatchik Mr Excaliber (Rupert Friend) tries to destroy the Scheme by driving up the cost of the “bashable rivets” on which the whole plan is predicated and now Zsa-Zsa must close the profitability gap by touring around each of his investors to persuade them to accept less profit than they agreed … and so the films gives us a sketch of each wacky figure in turn. Meanwhile Zsa-Zsa, who keeps nearly dying in government-schemed plane crashes, has persistent visions of heavenly judgment from a God played by Bill Murray.

Exhibition at Holburne Museum features 32 experimental land and seascapes that chart artist’s evolution

• Why JMW Turner is still Britain’s best artist, 250 years on

It is, says the curator Ian Warrell, a little like peering over JMW Turner’s shoulder as he puzzles out how to create the sweeping land and seascapes that made him one of the greatest ever.

An exhibition of the artist’s rarely seen watercolours is opening in Bath, which includes scenes of the English West Country that he created as a teenager to a series of sketched seascapes when he was a much older man gazing out at storms off the Kent coast.

Austrian-Filipino countertenor praised for melding techno with country’s rich operatic tradition in song Wasted Love

Austrians were on Sunday celebrating JJ, an Austrian-Filipino countertenor lauded for “singing Austria into the spotlight” after bringing home the country’s first Eurovision song contest victory in 11 years with a song that gives a nod to both the country’s rich operatic heritage and modern music.

JJ, 24, hit all the right notes with Wasted Love, an operatic ballad about unrequited love that mutates into a techno club anthem. The 69th edition of the contest was hosted in Basel, Switzerland.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Bedazzled and surrounded by inflatable body parts, the US band sound as thrillingly absurd on this reunion tour as when they brightened up the charts the first time around

Maximalism is too timid a word: the Scissor Sisters’ first tour in a decade rolls in like an alien carnival. A gorilla-suited master of ceremonies pulls a curtain to reveal the New York band’s logo standing statuesque: scissors split wide open, blades curving into shapely legs. Amid a deserted jeep, retro payphone and broken highway, the metaphor is clear: the Sisters are a crash-landed UFO shaking up dusty Americana.

More than twenty years after their self-titled debut album rocketed them from New York’s queer cabarets to household-name status in the UK, the band tumble from the shadows – effervescent frontman Jake Shears in bedazzled denim, cool-headed guitarist Del Marquis, and PVC-clad multi-instrumentalist Babydaddy – and the bawdy, stabbing synths of early single Laura pull a sold-out crowd to their feet.

Pleasance theatre, London
Jamie Sykes’ queasily entertaining play dramatises the contemptible views found in ‘incel’ forums – but also elicits sympathy for its characters, whose loathing is directed inwards as well as out

Three men are gathered in an online forum to speak of women as cunts, bitches and “Beckys”. These are “incels”, who boast a coded vocabulary of hate and valorise male celibacy. That is, until a fourth man among them has sex. The opening scene is the morning after and the woman he spent the night with stands hovering behind his laptop.

Cuckboy (Fiachra Corkery) and fellow incels Ghost (GoblinsGoblinsGoblins) Crusher (Jackson Ryan) and Einstain (Jimmy Kavanagh) are volubly and virulently anti-women. “Feminists have destroyed male and female courtship,” says one. But gradually they are shown to be desperate for intimacy, once the itch has been scratched by Cuckboy’s hookup with Margaret (Justine Stafford).

Cannes film festival
British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with this deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons

Once upon a time in Lagos might be an alternative title for this fervent and vividly intense child’s-eye-view movie from first-time film-maker Akinola Davies Jr. It’s a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

It is 1993 in Nigeria, a tense time with the country on the edge of disorder due to the imminent presidential election, the first since a military takeover 10 years previously. In a remote village far from Lagos, two young boys (played by bright-spark newcomers Godwin Chimerie Egbo and Chibiuke Marvellous Egbo) are awed at the sudden reappearance of their father, Fola, played by Sope Dirisu, who makes no explanation or apology for having been away for so long on business in Lagos, or for appearing now unannounced. He is a handsome, charismatic, commanding man to whom they make the instant obedient responses “Yes, daddy” and “No, daddy”.