The Big Picture, the story of the venue’s renaissance as a grassroots community space, will premiere this month

It was the cinema screen that – despite being extremely big – a city forgot.

Now the feelgood tale of how Bristol’s Imax screen was revived by a ragtag bunch of cinephiles with a DIY punk ethos is being told in a documentary that will, appropriately, get its premiere on the vast screen this month.

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Finborough theatre, London
A woman with cerebral palsy is interrogated in a hostile future environment in Athena Stevens’ powerful work about society’s unattainable expectations

Activist and playwright Athena Stevens’ latest play, in which she also stars, is an eerie and powerful work. Like much of her writing, Diagnosis explores the double sense of reality experienced by many people living with a disability – the gulf between the life they might lead and the one society expects and imposes on them. This dual sense of reality is taken to extremes during one pulsating night in a police station. After seeing strange messages light up above people’s heads, a woman who uses a wheelchair (Stevens) grows convinced a deadly flood is set to engulf central London. But will anyone listen?

The play is set some time in the future, when a series of supposed protections have been put in place for society’s most vulnerable citizens but have only made things worse. It’s a time when an AI computer program will read you your rights, yet when recited in a robotic voice, these rights only feel all the more unattainable. It’s a time when a witness statement will be filmed for extra security, but the video keeps warping so that the woman in question, rather than being faithfully recorded, is endlessly distorted and obscured.

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Glyndebourne, East Sussex
Jetske Mijnssen’s production of Wagner’s opera – the festival’s first – bypasses much of its mysticism and magic, but it is moving and musically very special

Even before Monty Python clip-clopped two coconuts together , it was never easy to put Wagner’s Parsifal , with its heady combination of Catholic religiosity and Arthurian legend, on stage. Glyndebourne’s first ever production of the opera, staged by Jetske Mijnssen, takes a dour approach, bypassing almost all the religious mysticism, and laces the rest of the story firmly into the stays of a Chekhovian family relationship drama.

Ben Baur’s sombre sets and Gideon Davey’s buttoned-up costumes place us in a Catholic community around the time of the opera’s premiere, 1882. A quote from the Cain and Abel story, projected during the orchestral prelude, sets the tone. Mijnssen makes Amfortas and Klingsor into long-lost brothers, separated during a previously idyllic childhood when a fit of teenage jealousy over Kundry’s affections and his brother’s regard made Klingsor lash out with a whittling knife. We see this being acted out by the characters’ younger selves while Gurnemanz tells us the backstory in his mammoth Act 1 narration – a velvet-toned tour de force from the bass John Relyea .

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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