Documentary follows the baloeiros , who illegally build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles

An intriguing film set in Brazil, first shown last year at the CPH:DOX documentary festival in Copenhagen, in which expatriate Danish film-maker Sissel Morell Dargis takes a look at a unique grassroots cultural phenomenon: the baloeiros , the ballooners. These are groups of young men, as secretive and loyal to each other as Freemasons, who (illegally) build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles. Why? As kind of graffiti, or a community self-expression, or situationist artform, or just a subversive gesture of pure joie de vivre that does not need or admit of any explanation.

The baloeiros are harassed by the police, on the ostensible grounds that they are part of gang culture, and the authorities encourage local people to inform on those they suspect of building and transporting a balloon. But baloeiros are cheerfully committed to their own kind of public-access artistry. The balloons show colossal images of Sly Stallone and Luciano Pavarotti – aspirational role models and pop culture icons. As Dargis says: “A flying balloon belongs to everyone, even the police.”

A New York librarian is discovered unconscious in a park with no memory, in a mystery that challenges consensual reality

We first meet Jane O in the consulting room of Henry Byrd, a New York psychiatrist. Jane, a 38-year-old librarian, is neat, quiet, outwardly unremarkable. She sits without saying anything, then gets up and leaves. Her visit has lasted just 14 minutes and Henry fears he will not see her again. He detects in her “a loneliness of the soul … [like] a pine tree growing alone on a great, wide plain”.

Their next encounter proves even stranger. Jane has been discovered unconscious in a public park with no memory of how she got there. A day of her life has gone missing and she is anxious about the welfare of her young son Caleb, who she failed to collect from nursery during her “blackout”. Terrified about how she might be judged for this memory lapse, she finally gives an account of the inexplicable event that brought her to Henry in the first place.

American authors of All Fours and Tell Me Everything are competing for the 30th award alongside four other novels highlighting ‘the importance of human connection’

American writers Miranda July and Elizabeth Strout have been shortlisted for the 30th Women’s prize for fiction alongside four debut authors.

The six titles in contention for the £30,000 prize all draw on “the importance of human connection” in different ways, said writer and judging chair Kit de Waal. “What is surprising and refreshing is to see so much humour, nuance and lightness employed by these novelists to shed light on challenging concepts.”

The author of The Five, about the Ripper murders, turns her attention to another tragically misunderstood victim

In the canon of British true crime, the case of Dr Crippen routinely gets billed as the first “modern” murder. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly original about the doctor’s motives or methods: in January 1910 he slipped poison into his wife’s bedtime drink so that he could marry his secretary instead. Rather, it was the way that Crippen was caught that turned this run-of-the-mill suburban love triangle into an international cause célèbre.

Realising that it would only be a matter of time before his wife’s dismembered remains were discovered in the cellar of the marital home in north London, Crippen and his secretary Ethel Le Neve fled to Canada in disguise. Such was the media hoopla surrounding the case that the sharp-eyed captain of the SS Montrose quickly spotted the runaway lovers among his passengers. This was despite their unconvincing cover story of being “father and son” (the hand-holding and kissing gave the game away). Using the ship’s brand-new Marconi wireless, Capt Andrew Kendall alerted the British authorities that he had the infamous fugitives in his sight. Within hours, Insp Dew of Scotland Yard had boarded a faster ship from Liverpool with the intention of reaching Newfoundland first, so that he would be ready to arrest Dr Crippen and his companion when they made landfall. To a fascinated public, following the unfolding drama in the newspapers, it was as if time travel were being invented before their very eyes.

Ruaridh Mollica is very good as Max, a freelance writer with a secret app life in prostitution, but Mikko Mäkelä’s film is not clear enough about his motivations

Sex work as a window into human nature is a longstanding theme in cinema, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who mines his side-hustle escort work for material, is also a writer. But this uneasy, self-regarding sophomore effort by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never fully distancing itself from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly makes contact with flesh-and-blood human truths.

By day, Max is a freelance hotshot for London’s trendy Wall magazine; he has just bagged himself a sweet assignment to interview Bret Easton Ellis. By night he is “Sebastian”, a hot commodity on an app called DreamyGuys. Typically servicing the older gentleman, he turns his experiences into bare-all prose he hopes to parlay into a bestselling novel. But it’s not clear what’s motivating him; perhaps it’s vanity, and his own professional advancement is the real story. Or, with his unreliability increasingly jeopardising his job, is there a deeper personal validation behind his secret app life?

One of a series of photographs taken across India in which women, many of them abuse survivors, use traditional needlework to embellish portraits of themselves

This is a portrait of Praween Devi, a woman I met in 2019 through a local organisation while working on my project Nā́rī. I met her alongside other women who gather in their back yards to embroider together, sharing stories over cups of chai .

When I asked to take her photograph, she suggested the main hall of her home, mentioning its lack of decoration and how the walls were bare except for a framed image of flowers and, notably, a photograph of all the men in the house. Before we began, she brought in a rug from another room, subtly curating the space. As I composed the shot, I included the photograph of the men, wondering how she would choose to alter the image through embroidery.

Photographer Sarah Mei Herman was 20 when her half-brother Jonathan was born – she spent the next two decades capturing intimate moments between him and their father

Kilmer, who has died aged 65, made his name with Top Gun and The Doors – but his exceptional talents were often under-appreciated by the mainstream film industry

• Val Kilmer, star of Top Gun and The Doors, dies aged 65
• A life in pictures

Why do some movie careers take off … and others go a bit sideways? Val Kilmer was a smart actor, a looker, a terrific screen presence and in later years an under-appreciated comic performer. His finest hour as an actor came in Shane Black’s comedy action thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, when he was quite superb as the camp private investigator Gay Perry Shrike: a gloriously sleek, plump performance which was transparently – and outrageously – based on Tom Ford. If only Kilmer could have started his acting life with that bravura performance, and shown the world what he could do. Instead, and at a crucial stage in his career, he was trapped in the body and face of a staggeringly beautiful young man.

He could somehow never quite persuade Hollywood to accept him as a leading man and above-the-title player in the mould of his Top Gun contemporary Tom Cruise, who in 1986 played Pete “Maverick” Mitchell to Val Kilmer’s Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. As the 80s and 90s rolled by, Kilmer never ascended to the league of Cruise, Hanks, Clooney and Pitt. Medication for the illness he latterly suffered can’t have helped, and it is a great sadness that fate never allowed him to mature in the same way as, say, Kurt Russell.

Prof Hannah Fry examines the kitchen phenomenon in her fascinating tech series. Plus: Rose Ayling-Ellis’s emotional signing project. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, BBC Two
Yet another show about the air fryer – but it’s OK, because this time it’s to kick off the brilliant Prof Hannah Fry’s third tech series, in which she examines seemingly ordinary objects in “obscene detail”. And this isn’t about just recipes. Fry – a self-confessed convert – traces the origins of the kitchen phenomenon back to the “accidental creation of a ‘wonder wire’” in the 1900s and one first world war pilot’s need for a hot dinner. Hollie Richardson