It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them

A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

The results shocked a lot of people concerned about the rising threat of autocracy across the world, including me. Yet, on reflection, I don’t think we should be surprised. The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.

The actor and musician on the power of puberty, overcoming his fear of acting and what Michael Winner yelled at him

Born in Pennsylvania in 1952, Jeff Goldblum is an actor and musician who has starred in some of the most acclaimed and highest-grossing movies of all time: Jurassic Park, Independence Day, The Fly, The Tall Guy, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Wicked. He is also known for TV roles such as Zeus in Netflix’s Kaos, and his work in theatre. Beyond acting, Goldblum has been performing jazz with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra since the 1990s. His latest album, Still Blooming , came out in April. Jeff has two sons with his wife, Emilie Livingston, a former Olympic rhythmic gymnast.

Here I am in my house in Whitaker, Pennsylvania . My mom needlepointed the Grecian bench I’m sitting on. Little did I know I was going to be Zeus some day. I started playing the piano when I was nine but I was not good. Not disciplined. My teacher would come once a week, and I’d be miserable, and he’d be miserable: “So you didn’t really practise?” he’d say, and I’d reply: “No, I didn’t.” That went on until he gave me a jazz arrangement. Finally, here was something that made me think: “I like that! I want to sit and play until I know it by heart.” That’s where it all began.

Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling play unlikely lovers in this sweet and extremely revealing first time drama from Harry Lighton, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’ Box Hill

Here to prove there’s nothing gentle about true love is an intensely English story of romance, devotion and loss from first-time feature director Harry Lighton, who has created something funny and touching and alarming – like a cross between Alan Bennett and Tom of Finland with perhaps a tiny smidgen of what could be called a BDSM Wallace and Gromit. It’s basically what Fifty Shades of Grey should have been.

Pillion is adapted from the 2020 novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones : a shy traffic enforcement officer falls for the ultimate dominant alpha male – an impossibly handsome, strong, emotionally impassive biker who casually demands complete domestic obedience in exchange for the privilege of being reamed with athletic vigour and thrilling lack of sensitivity, often in a specially modified wrestling outfit.

Harry Melling, who becomes more impressive with every screen outing, plays Colin, a sweet, shy guy who lives at home with his mum and dad, Pete (Douglas Hodge) and Peggy (Lesley Sharp) who is in the final stages of cancer and who is always tenderly trying to set him up with dates. Heartbreakingly, Colin sings with his dad’s cheesy close-harmony barbershop quartet every Sunday in the pub in boaters and bow-ties.

It is here that he somehow catches the imperious gaze of leather-clad Ray (played with kingly and sexy entitlement by Alexander Skarsgard) who invites or in fact orders Colin to meet him behind Primark at 5pm for a blowjob. Soon Ray is requiring the gigglingly thrilled Colin to cook and clean and shop for him (though of course never permitted touch his motorbike) and sleep on the floor like a dog at his bland house in Chislehurst while Ray reads Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle in bed.

Colin – who symbolically rides pillion behind Ray – discovers in himself the ecstatic vocation of the sub. He shaves his head to fit in with Ray’s supercool biker compadres, which incidentally makes him look like a young Christopher Eccleston.

But when does sexual role-play become dysfunction? Or coercive control? What does Ray do for a livjng? Is Ray an abuser? Colin’s sceptical mum Peggy actually finds a harsher monosyllabic word for him when Ray finally gets over himself
and deigns to accept an invitation to Sunday lunch with this well-meaning elderly couple that he haughtily rejects in any capacity as his parents-in-law. Could it be that only Peggy is uncool enough to have seen through Ray and seen how dangerous the situation is? Or is she just another person who doesn’t get it? (And these uncomprehending people perhaps still include the besotted Colin himself.)

It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side, to where Colin has grown or at any rate changed as a person who has come to terms with what he is and what he wants, the way that Ray clearly did long ago. His dad’s barbershop quartet sign off with a rendition of Smile Though your Heart is Breaking. It seems like the only possible advice.

Usage of punctuation down almost half in two decades as further research finds 67% of British students rarely use it

• Test your semicolon knowledge with our quiz below

“Do not use semicolons,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, who averaged fewer than 30 a novel (about one every 10 pages). “All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

A study suggests UK authors are taking Vonnegut’s advice to heart; the semicolon seems to be in terminal decline, with its usage in English books plummeting by almost half in two decades – from one appearing in every 205 words in 2000 to one use in every 390 words today.

The actor and co-star Robert Pattinson have each spoken about their experiences of early parenthood ahead of the premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love

Jennifer Lawrence has spoken of the “extremely isolating” effect of the postpartum period, while discussing a new film in which she portrays a mother descending into psychosis.

In Scottish art-house director Lynne Ramsay’s moody psychodrama Die, My Love, Lawrence’s character Grace is left alone to look after her newborn in a ramshackle house in the remote woods of Montana while her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) goes off to work.

The Triangle of Sadness and Babygirl actor has made a strong, singular and sometimes surrealist first film behind the camera, with a superb central turn from Frank Dillane

Harris Dickinson makes a terrifically impressive debut here as a writer-director with this smart, thoughtful, compassionate picture about homelessness – engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences and challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

Frank Dillane is Mike, a guy who has spent five years living on the streets in London: begging, stealing, eating at charity food trucks. Dillane’s performance shows Mike’s nervy, twitchy, live wire mannerisms have been cultivated over what feels like a lifetime of abandonment: he has a kind of suppressed pleading quality as he asks passers by for the “spare change” that fewer people carry in these post-covid times; his open smile has a learned survivalist determination only - what he is is not exactly charm, he is slippery and unreliable, but also intelligent and heartbreakingly vulnerable.

His one non-friend on the street is Nathan (played in cameo by Harris Dickinson himself) who steals Mike’s money which fatefully leads Mike to a despicable act of theft and violence for which he is entirely unrepentant and which leads to a prison sentence and a hostel place, a hotel kitchen job a period of sobriety on release in which it seems as if he is turning his life around, dreamily lost in his meditation takes and even buying a little present for his probation supervisor – to whom he also confides his plans to start a luxury chauffeur business.

But, very disturbingly, it seems possible that what undermines Mike’s fresh start is his restorative justice session with his victim, an encounter which is supposed to be healing and cathartic but which Mike has no idea how to approach. Dickinson shows that he simply doesn’t understand the new register of emotional intelligence now expected of him. Amusingly he objects to the session’s convenor’s breathy, patronising voice and singularly fails to apologise.

But he clearly is, at some level, aware that he has failed a test, failed at being a good person. His job at the hotel kitchen goes south and his new job picking up littler is uncertain, despite a new relationship with a woman working alongside him (a smart performance from Megan Northam) who is much closer to sorting her life out than him. Mike has good mates in the litter-picking job and good mates in the hotel kitchen job.

But it is one of the pickers that offers him some ketamine and things spiral inevitably downwards from there. Did drug addiction mean things were always hopeless, whatever resources his Mike’s personality might have offered, The film does not offer easy answers or answers of any sort.

When it looked as if Mike on the way up or on the way out, he avoided his old acquaintances: when he sees the appalling Nathan in a charity shop, he scurried out. The old ways were contagious. His old life was contagion. But did he get infected by the restorative justice session, which confronted him with evidence of his selfish aggression, evidence which triggered only resentment?

And all the time his plagued with vision-memories of a reproachful woman (his mother?) and a huge mossy, beautiful cave (some fantasy? childhood holiday?) These are the visions of a complex past and a compromised future.

A headspinning novel from Japan alongside a high concept tale from Denmark, and a French account of migrant tragedy … our critic weighs up the contenders

What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize ? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here’s our verdict on the shortlist.

Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Book I (Faber, £12.99; translated by Barbara J Haveland) is easiest to introduce through the film Groundhog Day: its heroine, Danish antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter, is stuck in time. “It is the 18th of November,” she writes. “I have got used to that thought.” Each time she wakes up, it’s the same day again, same weather, same people passing the window.

Actor will receive a lifetime achievement award on Tuesday for his ‘enduring impact on cinema and the arts’ and ‘decades of artistic brilliance’

Kevin Spacey is to accept a lifetime achievement award in Cannes next week, in what may constitute one of the most high-profile “uncancellings” of the #MeToo era.

On Tuesday, the Oscar-winning actor is set to receive an award for excellence in film and television at the Better World Fund’s 10th anniversary gala dinner at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes.

Utilita Arena, Birmingham
Performing solo to a backing track, the rapper nevertheless generates extraordinary heat with his fluid and furious flow atop foundation-rumbling bass

Fireworks explode, flames burn, smoke engulfs the room and a screech erupts from the audience as a masked Tyler, the Creator emerges from a thick green haze to the gut-rumbling bass of St Chroma. It’s rare to hear such a frenzied response to new songs but it establishes the mood for an evening during which the LA rapper’s most recent work, from 2024’s Chromakopia , is received with the same level of adoration as old favourites. And he runs through the album almost in its entirety.

Performing solo on stage to a backing track, he bounces giddily but gracefully across the vast space. The bass frequently hits outrageously hard throughout the evening, shaking the building’s foundations, such as during the grinding charge of Noid. While effective, the frequent bass drops do sometimes kill some of the detail in the music, as well as perhaps overcompensating for the lack of live instrumentation.