Cannes film festival
Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler have little to work with in this disappointing dud from the Hereditary and Midsommar director

Ari Aster now worryingly creates a losing streak with this bafflingly dull movie, a laborious and weirdly self-important satire which makes a heavy, flavourless meal of some uninteresting and unoriginal thoughts – on the Covid lockdown, online conspiracy theories, social polarisation, Black Lives Matter, liberal-white privilege and guns.

The movie looks good, courtesy of Darius Khondji’s cinematography, but has nothing new or dramatically vital to say, and moreover manages the extraordinary achievement of making Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix look like boring actors. This is by virtue of its moderate script and by the unvarying stolid pace over its hefty running time which might have suited a 12-episode streamer.

Eddington is a fictional small town in New Mexico in the US, bordering Native American territory; we join the story as the Covid lockdown begins (though Trump is oddly unmentioned in all the news programmes and viral TikToks everyone’s watching) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) are at loggerheads – interestingly taking opposite sides to their counterparts in Spielberg’s Jaws on the personal liberty issue.

Here, the mayor insists on restrictive mask-wearing and Sheriff Cross refuses to wear his and is resentful of the mayor supporting construction plans for a giant new “online server farm” – gobbling up resources and symbolically sowing discord via the internet – and this complicates existing tensions.

The mayor once had emotional history with Cross’s wife Louise (Emma Stone) who now suffers from hysteria and depression and whose mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), now uncomfortably “bubbled up” with them in the family home, is a querulous conspiracy theorist and social media addict – although the problem of how to make these particular things funny or interesting is one the film never solves.

Garcia’s insufferable teen son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) is dating social justice warrior Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) who is cartoonishly convulsed with guilt at her white privilege and at having dumped Michael (Micheal Ward) because he is now a cop, working for Sheriff Cross, and a gun enthusiast – though he is a person of colour.

The atmosphere of feverish resentment and wholesale offence-taking worsens with the George Floyd outrage and Louise and her mom take an interest in charismatic cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) who has recovered memories of child abuse and encourages his followers to do the same.

So Sheriff Cross fights back against everything by running for mayor himself and winds up encouraging the townsfolk to get their guns ready for the coming showdown.

Tove Jansson’s magical stories provide a message of tolerance, inclusivity and hope amid today’s refugee crisis

All Moomin fans will recognise the turreted blue house that is home to the family of gentle, upright‑hippo‑like creatures. The stove-shaped tower is a symbol of comfort and welcome throughout the nine Moomin novels by the celebrated Nordic writer and artist Tove Jansson. Now the house is the inspiration for a series of art installations in UK cities, in collaboration with Refugee Week , to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the creation of the Moomins.

Taking the motto “The door is always open”, building will begin next week on a 12ft blue house outside London’s Southbank Centre, just a stone’s throw from Westminster. All of the installations, by artists from countries including Afghanistan, Syria and Romania, deal with displacement: in Bradford, the Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa has created a refugee tent in which to imagine life after occupation and war; in Gateshead, natural materials are being foraged to build To Own Both Nothing and the Whole World (a quote from Jansson’s philosophical character Snufkin); and a Moomin raft will launch from Gloucester Docks.

Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
Jörg Widmann conducted his own concerto with dynamism alongside virtuosic playing from his sister Carolin, while the BBCNOW were on incendiary form for Mendelssohn and Mozart

Jörg Widmann’s second violin concerto begins like no other – as though an inquisitive child had picked up a fiddle, trying to fathom what noises a bow on strings or wood might be capable of creating. Written for his sister Carolin in 2018, this concert was its UK premiere, with Carolin the soloist and her brother conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The first movement is entitled Una Ricerca, a search, and the soloist also sings while playing, enticing the instrument to find its own voice. When melody finally emerges, the miracle of the violin is somehow underlined and the orchestra’s hitherto restrained support explodes in a volley of approval.

The long central Romanze, almost two-thirds of the whole concerto, is by turns passionate, lilting and playful: scales tossed around in a game of catch had a touch of the Sound of Music, but the music also connects back to the German Romantics, this heritage clearly as significant to Widmann as his teachers Hans Werner Henze, Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm, the violin always the protagonist in an ongoing drama. Widmann, himself a renowned clarinettist, makes free with the possibilities of the whole orchestra, including a contrabass clarinet in the lineup, mutes altering the brass and bowed crotales in the array of vital percussion. The violin accompanied by glockenspiel, or by celeste and harp, conveyed a gentle, otherworldly aura, while a manic frenzy, atmospheric yet decisive, coloured the final movement. Carolin Widmann’s playing was virtuosic and plush – a broken string and the exchanges with first desk violins managed like sleight of hand – and always with the utter conviction of being the piece’s very inspiration.

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?