I was too afraid to confess my feelings and be rejected, until hearing Jarvis Cocker’s words gave me a moment of clarity

The first time Gordon and I kissed I thought we’d made a terrible mistake. It was 1995, we were both 20 years old, and we were drinking at our university bar in Leicester. We had formed a friendship over the previous three years, but I had never considered Gordon in a romantic light. He was a goth at the time, which I thought was very cool, and he had this fruity, posh voice – whereas I was a timid girl from south London with a terrible perm. I remember Gordon leaning in to give me this very innocent, tentative kiss, but it caught me off guard. I felt excited but also confused. For one thing, I’d only ever known Gordon to kiss his fellow goths.

I avoided Gordon for weeks after that, which was difficult, considering we were on the same course. We bumped into each other almost every day in lectures but I made things awkward. Conversations between us didn’t flow in the same way. I’m an overthinker, whereas Gordon is much more relaxed. I think he would have been happy to keep kissing me in a casual sort of way and see where things led, but I was frightened of ruining our friendship. I was so shy at that time, and didn’t connect with people as easily as Gordon did. I had very deep feelings for him, but I wasn’t able to acknowledge them. Gordon was the closest person to me and I was terrified of losing him by having a fling.

Moore plays a creepy socialite obsessed with raptors; Meghann Fahy plays a hot mess who thinks there may be a murder cover-up … or several. This is snappy satirical TV that goes down easy – and it’s only five episodes long. Woohoo!

I have a theory that TV shows nowadays are all tonal variations on either The White Lotus , Boiling Point or possibly Yellowstone , but honestly I haven’t seen the latter. You might wish I had supporting evidence, but isn’t that what a theory is?

Anyway, this week’s pick is definitely in the White Lotus mould. Sirens (Netflix, from Thursday 22 May) unfolds over Labor Day weekend in the Lloyd Neck peninsula of upstate New York, where a wealthy group of guests descend on a beachside estate for a charity gala. The raptor conservation organisation (think falcons, not velociraptors) is run by socialite Michaela Kell, a wellness-y guru who expects obedience from everyone around her. But preparations are interrupted by Devon, a chaotic falafel waitress who has come to save her sister Simone, Michaela’s assistant. Devon comes to believe Simone has been brainwashed, and that they’re mixed up in a murder, or several. It’s a long weekend.

Death’s back to settle more accounts and Amanda Seyfried’s a cop on the hunt for a killer – it’s your cultural primer for the next seven days, whether you’re taking your seat or resting your feet ...

Final Destination: Bloodlines
Out now
Functioning like a sort of extreme version of You’ve Been Framed, this is the premier horror franchise dedicated to giving you intrusive thoughts about horrible accidents. Of course, they aren’t actually accidents, but Death himself, stalking those snatched from his grasp via handy premonitions. Not for the faint of stomach.

E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea
Out now
You’ve probably heard of Le Corbusier, but have you heard of the architect he was obsessed with, and her greatest creation? The titular Eileen and the modernist villa she built in the 1920s are the subject of this poetic docudrama.

Hallow Road
Out now
Directed by Babak Anvari (Under the Shadow), and starring Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, this chiller is set almost entirely in the car of two parents racing to help their daughter, who has just phoned to tell them she’s accidentally run down a pedestrian.

Black Debutantes
BFI Southbank, London, to 31 May
This ongoing season is dedicated to early films made by Black female directors, many of whom were subsequently unable to build the careers that should have followed. In addition to the films, the season features events and panels, including Exhibiting Black Cinema on 22 May. Catherine Bray

Benito Skinner goes to college in Overcompensating and The Boss is at his Trump-lambasting best. Here’s the pick of this week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Imogen Poots takes the lead in Stewart’s choppy but compelling adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of abuse and sexual uncertainty

Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, adapted by her from the 2011 abuse memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, is running a very high temperature, though never exactly collapsing into outright feverishness or torpor. It’s a poetry-slam of pain and autobiographical outrage, recounting a writer’s journey towards recovering the raw material of experience to be sifted and recycled into literary success.

The present day catastrophes of failed relationships, drink and drugs are counterpointed with Super-8 memories and epiphanies of childhood with extreme closeups on remembered details and wry, murmuring voiceovers. It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

Lidia herself, well played by Imogen Poots, is a young woman who was abused in her teenage years by her clenched and furious architect father (Michael Epp) – along with her sister (Thora Birch) who often sacrificed herself to their father’s loathsome attentions to divert him away from Lidia – and their mother went into depressive denial throughout.

Lidia throws herself into being a fanatically focused swim team champ which gets her a college scholarship that she messes up through booze and coke. The film shows how in the water she feels free; swimming laps against the clock gives her a purpose and an escape – a cancellation of identity.

But now Lidia has a terrible secret: it is not merely that she is an abuse survivor – she masturbates incessantly thinking about it, and utterly despises her weak-beta male boyfriend (Earl Cave) for being nice and gentle. (That, and being spanked by her swim coach, is also a complicating factor for her interest in BDSM.)

So when her artistic opportunity arrives, so does a toxic crisis of daddy issues. Her attempts at writing get her the chance to participate in an experimental collaborative novel being masterminded by the counterculture legend Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) whose interest in her appears unsettlingly like her father’s. Is history repeating itself? Is degradation the price you pay for success in writing – or swimming – or anything? Her own writerly evolution is shown by the books she reads herself – Vita Sackville-West’s biography of Joan of Arc as a kid, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a student, and then, as a young writer, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.

These personal stories and their movie versions have been undermined recently by notorious fake memoirist JT LeRoy – whose alter ego Savannah Knoop was actually played by Kristen Stewart in a screen version of her troubled life.

But for all that, and some callow indie indulgences, this is an earnest and heartfelt piece of work, and Stewart has guided strong, intelligent performances.

Cannes film festival
The U2 singer’s ‘quarter-man’ solo stage show sees him reflect likably on his anguished family past and have a decent go at being an ordinary Joe

The stadium-conquering rock superstar Bono finds a smaller arena than usual for this more intimate and much acclaimed “quarter-man” show, performed solo without his U2 bandmates Adam Clayton, David “The Edge” Evans and Larry Mullen Jr and filmed live on stage at New York’s Beacon theatre in 2023 by Andrew Dominik. It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz.

Bono delivers anecdotes from his autobiography Surrender, starting with his recent heart scare and going back to his Dublin childhood, his musical breakthrough to global fame, his post-Live Aid charity work on poverty and famine relief (though no discourse on the question of whether Live Aid was a good thing), and his religious faith which evidently morphed from a radical Christianity in his teen years to a more wide-embracing spirituality; it is all interspersed with “unplugged” versions of U2 standards accompanied by harp and cello.

Cannes film festival
Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler have little to work with in this disappointing dud from the Hereditary and Midsommar director

Ari Aster now worryingly creates a losing streak with this bafflingly dull movie, a laborious and weirdly self-important satire which makes a heavy, flavourless meal of some uninteresting and unoriginal thoughts – on the Covid lockdown, online conspiracy theories, social polarisation, Black Lives Matter, liberal-white privilege and guns.

The movie looks good, courtesy of Darius Khondji’s cinematography, but has nothing new or dramatically vital to say, and moreover manages the extraordinary achievement of making Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix look like boring actors. This is by virtue of its moderate script and by the unvarying stolid pace over its hefty running time which might have suited a 12-episode streamer.

Eddington is a fictional small town in New Mexico in the US, bordering Native American territory; we join the story as the Covid lockdown begins (though Trump is oddly unmentioned in all the news programmes and viral TikToks everyone’s watching) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) are at loggerheads – interestingly taking opposite sides to their counterparts in Spielberg’s Jaws on the personal liberty issue.

Here, the mayor insists on restrictive mask-wearing and Sheriff Cross refuses to wear his and is resentful of the mayor supporting construction plans for a giant new “online server farm” – gobbling up resources and symbolically sowing discord via the internet – and this complicates existing tensions.

The mayor once had emotional history with Cross’s wife Louise (Emma Stone) who now suffers from hysteria and depression and whose mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), now uncomfortably “bubbled up” with them in the family home, is a querulous conspiracy theorist and social media addict – although the problem of how to make these particular things funny or interesting is one the film never solves.

Garcia’s insufferable teen son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) is dating social justice warrior Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) who is cartoonishly convulsed with guilt at her white privilege and at having dumped Michael (Micheal Ward) because he is now a cop, working for Sheriff Cross, and a gun enthusiast – though he is a person of colour.

The atmosphere of feverish resentment and wholesale offence-taking worsens with the George Floyd outrage and Louise and her mom take an interest in charismatic cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) who has recovered memories of child abuse and encourages his followers to do the same.

So Sheriff Cross fights back against everything by running for mayor himself and winds up encouraging the townsfolk to get their guns ready for the coming showdown.

Tove Jansson’s magical stories provide a message of tolerance, inclusivity and hope amid today’s refugee crisis

All Moomin fans will recognise the turreted blue house that is home to the family of gentle, upright‑hippo‑like creatures. The stove-shaped tower is a symbol of comfort and welcome throughout the nine Moomin novels by the celebrated Nordic writer and artist Tove Jansson. Now the house is the inspiration for a series of art installations in UK cities, in collaboration with Refugee Week , to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the creation of the Moomins.

Taking the motto “The door is always open”, building will begin next week on a 12ft blue house outside London’s Southbank Centre, just a stone’s throw from Westminster. All of the installations, by artists from countries including Afghanistan, Syria and Romania, deal with displacement: in Bradford, the Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa has created a refugee tent in which to imagine life after occupation and war; in Gateshead, natural materials are being foraged to build To Own Both Nothing and the Whole World (a quote from Jansson’s philosophical character Snufkin); and a Moomin raft will launch from Gloucester Docks.

Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
Jörg Widmann conducted his own concerto with dynamism alongside virtuosic playing from his sister Carolin, while the BBCNOW were on incendiary form for Mendelssohn and Mozart

Jörg Widmann’s second violin concerto begins like no other – as though an inquisitive child had picked up a fiddle, trying to fathom what noises a bow on strings or wood might be capable of creating. Written for his sister Carolin in 2018, this concert was its UK premiere, with Carolin the soloist and her brother conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The first movement is entitled Una Ricerca, a search, and the soloist also sings while playing, enticing the instrument to find its own voice. When melody finally emerges, the miracle of the violin is somehow underlined and the orchestra’s hitherto restrained support explodes in a volley of approval.

The long central Romanze, almost two-thirds of the whole concerto, is by turns passionate, lilting and playful: scales tossed around in a game of catch had a touch of the Sound of Music, but the music also connects back to the German Romantics, this heritage clearly as significant to Widmann as his teachers Hans Werner Henze, Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm, the violin always the protagonist in an ongoing drama. Widmann, himself a renowned clarinettist, makes free with the possibilities of the whole orchestra, including a contrabass clarinet in the lineup, mutes altering the brass and bowed crotales in the array of vital percussion. The violin accompanied by glockenspiel, or by celeste and harp, conveyed a gentle, otherworldly aura, while a manic frenzy, atmospheric yet decisive, coloured the final movement. Carolin Widmann’s playing was virtuosic and plush – a broken string and the exchanges with first desk violins managed like sleight of hand – and always with the utter conviction of being the piece’s very inspiration.