This contemplative documentary is a feast for the ears and the eyes, its gorgeous imagery giving Turner a run for his money

‘Here comes the squall,” says a voice excitedly. A girl of 11 or 12 clutching the side of the boat looks less thrilled. A squall is the most action you’ll get from this delicate, contemplative, rather eccentric documentary from film-maker Huw Wahl. It’s a love letter to engineless sailing: the art of navigating using only the wind, tides and good old fashioned seamanship. Though, really, that should be seawomanship, since the sailor we see most is Rose Ravetz (the director’s sister) who moors her engineless boat, the Defiance, at Maldon in Essex.

Filmed over three years and shot on 16mm film, there are some gorgeous images here that would give Turner a run for his money, like a milky sky melting into the white sea. It’s a feast for the ears, too, with a soundtrack of waves, creaking wood, the clank of metal and shrieking oystercatchers. Over in Maldon, Ravetz twists yarn to make rope by lamplight. Her musings about the effect of sailing on her anxious tendencies make it sound like meditation: “When you’re in that conversation with nature, it’s not in your head. It’s just feeling and responding without analysing it.”

A new exhibition at the Los Angeles Gagosian showcases previously unseen pictures taken by the musician during the rise of Beatlemania

He is not drowning but waving. John Lennon’s arms stretch at angles like the sails of a windmill. His face wears a toothy, incandescent smile. Beads of water dance around him like an upside-down waterfall as he swims off Miami Beach .

“He’s so carefree,” says Joshua Chuang , director of photography at the Gagosian art gallery. “It’s almost like you’ve never seen him like that; he’s always kind of joking around or brooding or being sarcastic. He’s so happy. It’s his best friend at the time capturing that and, when you know about what happened, it’s so moving.”

From humans with robotic body parts to robots with human emotions, a vibrant debut set in a unified Korea examines what it means to be a person

Silvia Park’s debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: “ affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk”. As the novel opens, Ruijie is in a robot junkyard, scavenging for spare parts and better legs. Here she meets a robot boy, Yoyo, discarded despite being a highly sophisticated model. Ruijie takes the quirky Yoyo to school with her, and a group of friends assemble to protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.

This element of the novel reads like a YA adventure, though the rest is more adult-focused: cyberpunk, violent and sexualised. In an author’s note, Park says that they began writing Luminous as children’s fiction, until a bereavement took the work in a different direction, making the novel “a shape-shifter, no longer so appropriate for children”. There’s an awkwardness to this mix of tone, although we could say it reproduces, on the level of form, the book’s central topic of hybridisation, cyborgification, different elements worked together, as the novel’s setting – a future unified Korea – does on the level of geography.

Highlights from the 2025 edition presented by AIPAD, which will run from April 23 to 27

No music, no script, no narration, no editing – slow TV like this is exactly the balm we need these days

Do you reach for your phone first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up? Me too. Only, for the past week, it’s not my WhatsApp, email or social media I’ve been desperate to check, but how many moose have managed to swim across the Ångerman river overnight.

I know. I need more going on in my life, right? How else to explain my fascination with watching dozens of Swedish moose (yes, moose is the plural of moose, sadly not “meese”) undertake their annual spring migration to summer pastures?

Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in print

You may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish” might be written with a “gh”, as in “rough”, an “o”, as in “women”, and a “ti”, as in “lotion”.

The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it . He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through” to “though” and “trough”, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin , Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.

Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s timely documentary tells the story of the courageous women whose cases of sexual assault and rape have gone unheard by the US judicial system

In 2018, a historic lawsuit was brought against the US city of Austin, Travis County, the Austin Police Department, and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office. The plaintiffs were survivors of sexual assault, whose cases had gone unheard by the judicial system. Gripping and timely, Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s riveting documentary follows these courageous women as they fight for justice.

The film lays bare the shocking details concerning how sex crimes were treated in the county. In one year, between July 2016 and June 2017, of more than 220 cases presented for prosecution, only one went to trial – and the victim in this instance was male. Testimony from the survivors reveal the harrowing extent to which officials turned a blind eye; even with scientific evidence such as DNA matches, the majority of criminal filings were dismissed, denying these women due process in front of a jury.

The theme of this year’s celebrated photo bonanza is ‘humanity’ – and Kyoto is bursting with images – from family albums with a twist, to naked men in a frenzied battle for fortune

Towering above commuters and passersby at Kyoto station is a monumental mural featuring more than 500 portraits of local residents. This striking installation by acclaimed French photographer JR heralds the opening of Kyotographie 2025, the city’s celebrated month-long international photography festival.

The theme for this year’s event is “humanity”. Last autumn, JR and his team transformed Kyoto into a living studio, setting up mobile portrait stations across the city to capture the rich diversity of Kyōto-jin society. Monks, artisans, politicians, schoolchildren and drag queens – all life is here.

Shooting the Chronicles of Kyoto – each person is photographed against a greenscreen backdrop

A great cast has fun in this drama about the death of a wealthy family’s patriarch. Plus: Jamelia plays Tina Turner in Just Act Normal. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, U&Alibi
A great cast – including John Simm, Gemma Jones, Rakhee Thakrar and Niamh Cusack – for this rompy thriller about a wealthy patriarch who died by suicide … or did he? Businessman Jack Wright married three times and has a brood of grownup kids, so there is a lot of squabbling at the reading of his will. But while everybody is storming out in a rage, an autopsy prompts questions about Jack’s death. Hollie Richardson