The latest in our series on writers’ top comfort films is a reminder of why Preston Sturges’s 1941 comedy is unbeatable

I shudder to think who I would have become had I never once been a 13-year-old girl roaming the stacks of a suburban Blockbuster Video. I fell in love with movies mostly because I wanted to impress the older high school boys who worked behind the counter. The nicer ones took time to recommend their favorite films. So I must thank the beautiful, near clone of OC-era Adam Brody who enthusiastically sold me on Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’s 1941 classic. I’ve seen it so many times that I’ve come to consider it an old friend.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, what initially drew me, a boy-crazy middle schooler, to the film is the sheer hotness of its two leads. Even by our current standards of eerily plump, airbrushed faces and Ozempic-toned bodies, Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea sparkle onscreen together. Her peekaboo curls and low, sultry delivery demand attention, making it impossible to half-watch this film. If anything commands you to put down your phone and stop doomscrolling, it’ll be Lake’s dominant, ahead-of-its-time sensuality, the perfect foil to McCrea’s earnest everyman.

A genetically modified mouse goes on the rampage in bloody Disney pastiche that offers Sharknado-level performances and kill scenes hindered by poor lighting

Here’s another draining bout of horror opportunism, spawned in this instance by the copyright expiring on Disney’s Steamboat Willie , the 1928 landmark animation that launched Mickey Mouse into the world. Scurrying on to screens months behind the similarly motivated The Mouse Trap , Steven LaMorte’s bloody pastiche opens with a quote coyly ascribed to “Walt D” before plodding mirthlessly in the pawprints of those recent Winnie-the-Pooh carve-ups , demonstrating no greater brio, invention or wit. Its mock Mickey is a genetically modified super-violent pipsqueak (played by Terrifier breakout star David Howard Thornton, in mangy rodent costume), let loose from the sewers by blundering engineers; rather than the jaunty steamboat his predecessor commandeered, he wreaks murderous havoc on a grimy approximation of the Staten Island ferry, whistling while he works.

The whole never recovers from its leaden opening half-hour, devoted to lugging potential corpses onboard leaving us to wonder who, if anyone, will survive the lacklustre carnage. (Hopes are lowered like a flag for the airheaded bachelorette party.) LaMorte notionally expands the scope of his non-satirical attack by having the critter’s victims mouth familiar Magic Kingdom phrases. “Can you feel the love tonight?” says one topless passenger, shortly before being hosed down with gore. One point in favour of these cheap-and-cheerless cash-ins: in an era of dead-eyed data scraping, they may yet radicalise a generation of sleepover attenders to pursue ways of toughening up copyright law.

Two enjoyable debut novels put fresh meat on Fitzgerald’s deathless classic – one a modern-day retelling in which Gatsby becomes a female influencer, another a pacy murder mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie

It might seem unfathomable to us now, but F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel was something of a let-down when it was published 100 years ago; his previous books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned – there had also been a novella, The Diamond As Big As the Ritz , and short stories including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – had been more commercially successful and found greater favour with critics. Fitzgerald’s tale of obscure origins, extreme wealth and obsessional romantic desire appeared too unlikely, too contrived and, perhaps, too uncomfortable a reminder of class and financial inequality and its consequent social schisms to be recognised for what it was: a masterly exploration of delusion, self-delusion, myth-making and complicity.

Fitzgerald himself died 15 years after its publication believing it to have been a worldly failure and unconsoled by any hint of its future cultural ubiquity. But literature, as we know, is studded with these anomalies, burials and rebirths and now, in an age of recycling and rebooting, it seems perfectly natural, if ironic, for The Great Gatsby to spawn a number of tribute acts.

She was the overshadowed member of the iconic group. But now, with a major exhibition not far from the house she turned into a work of art, Bell is finally getting her due. And she’s not the only one

When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston , a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every available surface in blazing hues; or the famous phrase about their unorthodox sex lives – they “painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

But do you ever think – or know much – about a woman at the heart of the group, Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia and co-director of the Omega Workshops? If Bloomsbury member John Maynard Keynes was the economics pioneer, and Woolf its literary star, then Bell was the painter equivalent. Yet it seems Bell has too often been overshadowed by her contemporaries, or pigeonholed by her domestically scaled work. No longer. A new exhibition at Charleston’s gallery spaces in nearby Lewes brings together the largest number of Bell works in history, 136 in total.

In the final part of a bravura trilogy detailing the struggle to bring war criminals to account, Sands tracks a former SS commander to Chile, where he found a friend in Augusto Pinochet

This is the concluding part of Philippe Sands’s extraordinary trilogy – part history, part moral investigation, part memoir – that documents the legal and personal battles to bring to account Nazi war criminals and their disciples.

In East West Street he recounted the plight of Lviv, the city now in Ukraine, whose Jewish population either fled before Nazi occupation or, like many of Sands’s extended family, was thereafter wiped out. Two Jewish lawyers who got out early were instrumental in creating the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide that were introduced at the Nuremberg trials.

By grazing between trees and removing potential wildfire fuel, wild horses help protect Galicia’s delicate ecosystems, but Europe’s largest herd has declined to just 10,000

New arrivals sit in drab spaces and are learn how to fit in, in a film that quietly addresses the costs of integration to minority groups

Thomas Fürhapter’s documentary sheds light on the challenges of adjusting to a new culture as it follows a series of “integration classes” offered to immigrants in Vienna. The film opens in the nondescript corridors of an administrative building, which lead into sun-filled but impersonal meeting rooms where these sessions take place. As the participants discuss their worries and uncertainties, these colourless spaces transform into sites of passion and community.

Conducted in multiple languages, the seminars grapple with culturally specific issues faced by different minority groups. Topics of discussion range from Austrian ways of greeting, to more serious concerns such as racism and domestic abuse. In talking about the present and the future, people also reveal pieces of their past: some moved to Austria for love, others fled the horrors of war. Despite their different circumstances, what unites these individuals from all walks of life is a heartfelt desire to belong.

The seasoned pro brings us a slick new listen. Plus, Paris Hilton produces a rare story of social media being used for good

David Dimbleby takes on the history of capitalism . It’s a slick listen that opens in a barrage of air raid sirens and rumbling aircraft engines as Anthony Fisher watches his brother die while they both fly planes during the second world war – before going on to found the free-market thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs. The half-hour episodes don’t allow for deep dives but are as hugely listenable as anything featuring its host’s voice is. Alexi Duggins
BBC Sounds, episodes weekly

Don’t live like everyone else! Angela Jaeger met every act going in punk, in New York and London – and had crushes on them all. Now 65, she talks us through her thrill-filled diaries

There is nothing new to discover, surely, about the birth of punk. But perhaps it depends where you look. Written between 1977 and 1981, the teenage diaries of Angela Jaeger crackle with life. Published as the book I Feel Famous, the New York and London punk scenester’s writing gives us a real-time immersion, with zero revisionism, into not only what happened and who was there, but how it felt to a musically fanatical teenage girl.

Diary entry for 9 May, 1977, about a Bryan Ferry/Talking Heads gig being sold out: “Shit, damn, piss forever!! What can you do but kick and curse cause you CAN’T GO! It shits bricks solid!!” By 27 June, she’s a dedicated anglophile, a Sex Pistols and Clash obsessive, searching for an identity and asking the big questions: “Why should we be expected to live like everyone else does? What are the reasons behind TEENAGE REVOLUTION!”