In this week’s newsletter: In retiring his messianic action hero schtick, a return to challenging, messy roles could lead to a late-era flowering of his career

Is Tom Cruise finally free? That’s what I asked myself, watching Hollywood’s last movie star cling to the undercarriage of a biplane like a sloth in the climactic scene of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning . Even by the standards of the long-running action franchise, this stunt – which sees Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt shimmy into the cockpit of one moving plane before wing-walking on to another, mid-flight – seems particularly masochistic: the crew were worried that he had passed out during its filming. What’s more, Cruise doesn’t even look particularly cool performing it: at one point the wind resistance plasters his hair into a Dumb and Dumber bowl-cut, jowls flapping about like a basset hound. You would have never caught Paul Newman committing such clownery. Surely Tom Cruise doesn’t have to do this sort of thing any more?

Cruise, who turns 63 in July, has been making Mission: Impossible films since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term. But The Final Reckoning, which arrives in UK cinemas on Wednesday, does seem to signal the end of something. Director Christopher McQuarrie has been at pains to frame it as the closing of an 18-hour, eight-movie chapter, a point bludgeoned home by the film itself via a plot that inelegantly tries to retrofit storylines from past instalments into some grand, planet-enveloping culmination. And while McQuarrie has been talking up the future of the franchise as a whole, and Cruise has been making optimistic noises about being AI ported, Harrison Ford-style , into future instalments, you have to assume that it won’t continue in its current form. It’s surely too big an operation, too taxing on its star, for business to continue as usual. Which is great news for anyone who would like to see Tom Cruise do something other than motorcycle off a cliff again and again; to see him, you know, act .

Event, a highlight of city of culture celebrations, will involve 500 musicians playing everything from Mozart to bhangra

“The whole thing is chaos,” said the conductor Charles Hazlewood, before a weekend art project with the artist Jeremy Deller that will feature Handel on Ilkley Moor at sunrise, disco from a tractor, opera blasted out of modified car sound systems and much more.

“But it will be organised chaos,” added Hazlewood. “An acceptance of chaos … which is what it’s like to live in a city, isn’t it? You have to embrace the chaos.”

Cannes film festival
Hafsia Herzi manages sexuality with confidence in her first Palme d’Or competition film, featuring an affecting lead performance from newcomer Nadia Melliti

Actor turned director Hafsia Herzi presents her first feature in the Cannes competition: a coming-of-age story of queer Muslim identity, with all the painful, irreconcilable imperatives that this implies, complicating the existing insoluble agonies of just getting to be an adult. It is adapted from La Petite Dernière, or The Last One , the autofictional novel by Franco-Algerian author Fatima Daas about growing up as the kid sister, the youngest of three girls, in an Algerian family in a Paris suburb with her mum, dad and siblings.

Non-professional newcomer Nadia Melliti plays Fatima, a smart kid battling with asthma who likes books, likes football, likes freestyling, likes running – and likes girls. (This last interest is secret.) As Fatima prepares to leave school and start her first year at university (while living at home, of course) she cultivates a protective deadpan manner and wears a cap: the secular-western camouflage equivalent of a head covering. She has to negotiate her way out of what appears to be an unofficial engagement with a Muslim boy into which she has drifted. His feelings, and perhaps his sense of entitlement, will be hurt. So be it.

From wordless books to dynamic bestsellers and those that will give your kids a giggling fit, these are some of our readers favourites stories to share

New research has shown a decline in the number of parents reading aloud to young children , with only 41% of 0 to four-year-olds now being read to regularly, down from 64% in 2012. The survey, conducted by publisher HarperCollins and book data company Nielsen, also found that less than half of parents find reading to kids fun.

With this in mind, we asked parents to share recommendations of books they enjoy reading aloud. Add your own suggestions to the list in the comments below.

Film festival’s rules designed to protect ‘decency’ and seating arrangements stir controversy among those who read them

Not for the first time, organisers of the Cannes film festival, the ritziest and most photographed in the industry’s calendar, have decreed that various outfits will not be allowed on the red carpet this year.

An official statement released earlier this week stated that for “decency reasons” there will be “no naked dressing” – and no oversized outfits either – “in particular those with a large train, that hinder the proper flow of traffic of guests and complicate seating in the theatre”.

The raging beauty of the ocean has clearly found its perfect embodiment. Now we need to decide who will play the other elemental forces

Some actors are lucky and manage to immediately luck into a perfect role. Others have to struggle for years, sometimes even decades, before eventually finding a part that completely encapsulates their personality. Jeremy Irons is one of them. But the good news is that his number has just come up, because Jeremy Irons has just been cast as the sea.

According to Variety , Water People: The Story of Us, the first documentary feature by acclaimed artist Maya de Almeida Araujo has just cast Irons as the voice of the ocean. Which just makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Aggressive, hedonistic and seductive – often in the span of the same song – the independent LA-based singer-songwriter spans shoegaze, vaporwave and capital-P pop

From Los Angeles via Virginia
Recommended if you like PinkPantheress, Kylie Minogue, Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person alias
Up next Album She Comes from Nowhere, released 20 June

Neggy Gemmy has quietly spent the past decade building one of the strongest catalogues in underground pop. Born Lindsey French – and previously known as Negative Gemini – Neggy Gemmy’s music spans coldwave, shoegaze, trance, vaporwave and capital-P pop; her records can be icily aggressive or hedonistic and seductive, often in the span of the same song. Although her work is always distinctive, she’s also canny with iconoclastic references. On 2016’s Body Work, she sampled Britney Spears’ Everytime one song before her own masterpiece of emotional desolation, the breakbeat ballad You Never Knew; the highlight from her underrated 2023 club odyssey CBD Reiki Moonbeam, titled On the Floor, sounds like – and, in a just world, would have been – a 2000s Kylie Minogue single. French’s forthcoming album She Comes from Nowhere still foregrounds her distinctive voice, which can be both breathy and appealingly harsh, but it also incorporates touches of gauzy, gallic bands such as Stereolab and Air, adding appealing new textures to her work.

As an R&B star in the 00s, the singer found herself pitted in the media against artists like Beyoncé and Rihanna. Two decades on, she’s building bonds with a new generation of stars – and going viral with a gravity-defying chair trick

Backstage at April’s Coachella festival, beyond the influencers, branded content and celebrity PDAs, a viral moment was brewing. R&B superstar Ciara was dancing on a chair – not just any dance, but a gravity-defying move that involved laying stomach-first on the chair’s back, arms locked, feet wiggling to the music. She wasn’t alone either; friends Cara Delevingne, Victoria Monét and Megan Thee Stallion were all doing the move too. The soundtrack was Ecstasy, the sultry new single from Ciara’s forthcoming eighth album, CiCi. The dance became a trend on TikTok, with even a 75-year-old grandma from Miami successfully giving it a go.

When I suggest trying it in our interview, Ciara’s face lights up with enthusiasm. “You can do it,” she says, her American optimism making me believe she’s right. “What kind of chair are you sitting on right now?” I show her my cheap Ikea number and her enthusiasm dips somewhat. She’s sitting in the back of a plush-looking car at a New York airport, waiting to fly to Atlanta, her phone held close to her face so she can see better. It’s not the chair I’m worried about, I tell her, but my general fitness. “You do need a little strength in your arms,” she says, sitting back as if to say: “Let’s not risk it.”

Royal Albert Hall, London
The social media star allies her virtuosity in pieces written for her by Kristina Arakelyan and Max Richter with movie soundtracks and an infectiously winning enthusiasm

The Henry Willis organ – 70ft high, 65ft wide, with 9,999 pipes – has long been the criminally underused centrepiece of the Royal Albert Hall, but it has finally found someone big enough to bring it to life. Anna Lapwood, the venue’s first ever official organist, might be a slight 5ft 3in but the so-called “TikTok organist” – with more than 2m social media followers – is charismatic enough to sell out a midweek gig and have a packed hall eating out of her hand.

Tonight she and her organ battle with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, under the baton of the ever adventurous German conductor André de Ridder. Lapwood’s obsession with film soundtracks could suggest a rather glib populism – she even apologises for starting with a Hans Zimmer theme from The Da Vinci Code (“I don’t know why it made me cry, it’s not even a very good film”) and encores with a solo arrangement of a throwaway theme from How to Train Your Dragon. But the rest of the show has heft. Saint Saëns’ third symphony, probably the most famous piece for organ and orchestra, takes up most of the second half, while a suite from Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack shifts the organ-heavy themes into hypnotic, Philip Glass-like territory.