As the actor receives an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes film festival, he talks about why he couldn’t look at himself if he didn’t speak out about the US president and politics

On the opening night of the Cannes film festival, Robert De Niro takes the stage to accept an honorary Palme d’Or. He embraces Leonardo DiCaprio, turns to the mic and lets fly: celebrating the event as a haven for art, democratic, inclusive and therefore a threat to autocrats and fascists. His speech is fiery and combative, but the adoring response leaves him shaken: he has to blink and regroup. At one point, I think, he might have even welled up. “Yeah, I got sentimental,” he admits the next morning. “How could I not be?”

We’re in an upstairs salon at the Cannes Palais des Festivals, with the windows thrown and sunlight on the walls. The hosts rush to provide him with a hot cup of coffee and then – when he leaves that untouched – promptly swoop back to furnish him with another. His voice is still hoarse from the night before and risks being drowned out by the cheering masses outside. Tom Cruise, it transpires, has just appeared on the terrace. “Different type of actor,” De Niro says ruefully. “Mission: Impossible, that’s a franchise. But I understand that. I’ve done franchises myself.”

Yevgeny Sudbin
(BIS)
The pianist showcases Scriabin’s creative journey from Chopinesque preludes to utterly original modernism, shining bright in his exquisite treatment of the early works

One of Yevgeny Sudbin ’s first discs for the BIS label in 2007 was a Scriabin recital. It included three of the piano sonatas alongside a selection of miniatures that ranged right across Scriabin’s composing career, and, for his 25th release on the label, Sudbin has returned to the same composer and the same programming scheme. Though it’s the very late, intensely compressed poem Vers la Flamme from 1914 that provides the album’s title, it’s the two sonatas here, the fourth and the 10th, that provide the weight and focus, with a selection of smaller-scale pieces – selections of preludes from Scriabin’s Op 11 and Op 16, and études from Op 8 and Op 42, as well as the B minor Fantasie Op 28. The disc plots out the creative journey that Scriabin made, from its Chopinesque beginnings in the preludes, to the rarefied world of his final works, in which he forged his own utterly original brand of modernism.

Sudbin’s mastery of every technical challenge that Scriabin’s piano writing throws up is hugely impressive, the colours he finds in the music always beguiling. But sometimes he does seem temperamentally more comfortable with the earlier pieces rather than the more acerbic later style. His treatment of the preludes, each one a tiny Romantic jewel, is exquisite, the account of the two-movement fourth sonata teasingly elusive, and though he builds tension remorselessly through Vers la Flamme and negotiates the thickets of trills in the 10th sonata with wonderful clarity, neither work quite reaches the extreme levels of expression that other pianists have found. On disc, at least, no pianist has come closer to conveying that intensity than Vladimir Horowitz, whose Scriabin recordings remain unequalled, let alone surpassed; Sudbin humanises this music where Horowitz makes it forbidding and alien.

Co-op Live, Manchester
The Boss and his E Street Band pluck hope from the depths of despair with a fiery show that hits out at the US administration but ends with love

Before Bruce Springsteen sings a word on the opening night of his European tour, he has something to get off his chest. “The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock’n’roll in dangerous times,” he says. “The America I love is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.” The band then launch into a roaring, rousing version of Land of Hope and Dreams, as strings swoop, brass soars and Springsteen gives an impassioned take of the song he sang for Clarence Clemons on his deathbed. Followed by Death to My Hometown – with the titular lyrics delivered with venomous sting – it sets the tone for an evening that is bruised and angry yet also hopeful and filled with love.

The band – who Springsteen calls a “booty-shaking, lovemaking, Viagra-taking, history-making” outfit – are a hurricane force; so tight and in lockstep that they actually feel loose and relaxed. Darkness on the Edge of Town purrs along, almost grooving; The Promised Land is as potent as it is poignant.

Set to become a major cultural destination, Fenix Rotterdam shows the harsh realities of the migrant experience alongside esoteric art – giving a necessary and nuanced view of the subject’s fraught politics

What does a boat seized from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a piece of the Berlin Wall, two giant bright blue slippers and a New York City bus made of fabric have in common with paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger and Willem de Kooning? They all vie for space in a new museum, opening this week in Rotterdam, which focuses entirely on migration, the movement of peoples that defines each century of humanity and which in recent years has acquired a new political toxicity.

Situated over two floors in what was one of the largest warehouses in the world, it is the centrepiece of a regeneration project in Katendrecht, the city’s southern docks and former red-light district that is redolent with history. Across the water, now a hotel, stood the headquarters of the Holland America Line, which transported thousands of Dutchmen and women to America and Canada to start afresh in the New World. In recent decades, most of the traffic to Europe’s largest port has been in the opposite direction. Rotterdam is now home to 170 nationalities.

A rare retrospective of the late British artist reveals her lifelong dedication to disrupting the boundaries of gender, sex and death via bawdy, provocative sculptures and collages

Helen Chadwick, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at the age of 42, has long been an artist more name-checked than exhibited. Her devotees include the lauded feminist mythographer Marina Warner, for whom she’s “one of contemporary art’s most provocative and profound figures”. Yet she is habitually relegated to a footnote within British art: one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987 and an outstanding teacher of YBAs such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

She remains best known for Piss Flowers, her white bronze sculptures whose stalagmite protuberances are phallic inversions of vaginal recesses, cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. (The artist’s hotter urine went deeper, creating larger cavities. She described the work as “a penis-envy farce”.) It’s easy to see how her transgressive interests might have quickened British art’s pulse. Yet her meditations on the sacred and profane, sex and death, were expansive, propelling diverse experiments across installation, photography and performance.

I was all set to hate Buxton’s brand of self-deprecating chumminess, but his memoir somehow wins you over

One day Adam Buxton ordered two teas with oat milk from the trolley on the train. Unfortunately his came with cow’s milk and, because his need for vegan alternatives is apparently greater than his wife Sarah’s, he asked her to swap. Before Sarah had the chance to reply, the woman serving their drinks intervened, observing sensibly: “She might not want that one.” Buxton retorted with exaggerated gruffness: “She’s my wife, so she’ll have what she’s given!”

The comedian, radio and TV presenter recalls what happened next. Passengers shook their heads and looked at Sarah with pity and concern. Sarah sank mortified into her seat. The incident, Buxton writes, made him look “even more like the kind of controlling monster I had just parodied. But maybe,” he reflects, “a husband who makes a joke that lands so badly and embarrasses his wife as I just had is a kind of monster. On the other hand, perhaps I’m right and everyone else is wrong.”

This gloriously absurd Prague-set tale, in which one woman is split into seven selves, is a wild ride

How many selves do we house? Thousands, thought Virginia Woolf. Are they one and the same? Not according to the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, whose alter egos – writers just like him – came with their own distinct names, biographies, mindsets and hot takes on the world. Born of him yet operating independently, he called them “heteronyms”. Are our selves on the same team? You wish, Helen Oyeyemi might say, holding up her new novel, which features a protagonist split seven ways, one self for each day of the week, and no two ever in full agreement.

Oyeyemi made her debut in 2005 with The Icarus Girl, the story of eight-year-old Jessamy, troubled and imaginative daughter of a Nigerian mother and British father, whose mysterious playmate, a girl named TillyTilly, is possibly her own destructive alter ego. A New New Me may at first glance seem like a thematic cousin; tonally, however, it belongs with Oyeyemi’s more recent works: playful, self-aware tales that revel in the hijinks of storytelling.

From adventures in adolescence to Venezuelan dancers, these images from new artists have been nominated for the Photo London Nikon emerging photographer award

A juicy period drama about the French queen ups the ante with scheming and backstabbing. Plus: the last-ever double bill of Man Like Mobeen. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
The second season of this period drama continues to deliver palace gossip, backstabbing, political scheming, a rumbling revolt … and magnificent costumes. It’s spring 1784 and the “affair of the necklace” scandal is being hatched to try to bring down Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Meanwhile, people are using the queen’s melancholy against her and the court is putting on a comic play – with serious consequences. Hollie Richardson