Eva Longoria and family head to Mexico for a trip that doesn’t go too well – partly because of the tiresome faux-witty banter the film is filled with

Buckle up for a family road trip comedy, containing as much arguing and hugging and learning as you could possibly hope for, and shot with a certain flair, but which provides very little in the way of actual entertainment. A sequel to the 2014 Very Bad Day film , this time Alexander (Thom Nemer) and his family are off on a road trip to Mexico paid for by his mother (Eva Longoria), or rather by her job as a travel journalist.

Per the film’s title, it doesn’t go all that well. Have they been cursed by an ancient idol? All will be exhaustingly revealed, over the course of a blessedly short runtime. It’s a frequent complaint that a film is boring because nothing happens, but here is an example where the problem is things are just constantly happening, creating a kind of antics-fatigue. Still, perhaps kids will like it?

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Roberto Lugo and other artists of color are now feeling heat from Trump’s attack on diversity and efforts to rewrite truth of the US’s past

Artists, academics and politicians have shared their outrage in reaction to the Trump administration’s latest executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network.

Late on Thursday, Trump announced that his administration had ordered a large reshaping of the Smithsonian in an attempt to eliminate what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.

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Solvej Balle had been planning her time-loop novel for a decade when the Bill Murray comedy beat her to it. Thirty years and five volumes later, it is longlisted for the International Booker

If you’ve heard about Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I, longlisted for this year’s International Booker prize, you may have experienced a sensation that is central to the Danish writer’s brand of philosophical speculative fiction: deja vu.

In Balle’s five-book opus (of a planned septology), the first three of which won the prestigious Nordic Council literature prize in 2022, someone wakes up to find they are reliving the same day over and over. Their partner, family, neighbours: they all experience this day for the first time in their life. Only the protagonist has been there before. That person is a woman called Tara rather than a man called Phil, and the day is 18 November rather than 2 February, but the plot resemblance to Groundhog Day is striking.

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In the 1960s, William Sargant used a combination of narcosis and ECT to ‘reprogram’ troubled young women. Now his patients, including the actor Celia Imrie and the former model Linda Keith, are trying to piece together what happened

From the reinforced windows of ward five, high up in the Edwardian eaves of London’s Royal Waterloo hospital for children and women, a 14-year-old Celia Imrie used to stare down, hoping to spot her mother. “When I walk past that old, redbrick hospital building today, on my way to the Imax or the National Theatre,” says Imrie, who went on to become a successful actor, “I can see the window where I’d sit waiting for her and a deep chill passes through me.”

Every day, thousands of commuters and tourists pass beneath the former hospital. Some might look up to admire the terracotta facade, with its ornate colonnades and glazed tile lettering, but few are aware of the medical horrors that took place in one small room on the top floor: the Sleep Room. It was here, on ward five, that female patients – they were almost always women – were put to sleep for three to four months (in one case, five), only roused from their beds to be fed, washed and given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): a shock of up to 110 volts that passed bilaterally through the temporal lobe of the brain, triggering a grand mal seizure.

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The British photographer saw an echo of a famous painting when he shot three strangers in a Toronto gallery

While in Toronto on a work shoot, Martin James Burton decided to take the opportunity to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario. The photojournalist, who is based in Lewes, East Sussex, England, had some lunch before heading in to see the art. While there he happened upon these three strangers. “The people in the picture are sitting waiting either for nothing to happen or for something to happen. There is a feeling of the surreal to it and an odd sense of anticipation,” Burton says. “The man with his head turned towards you draws you in, and the huge bright, blank screen is like a giant softbox lighting the subjects perfectly.”

Burton remembers his excitement at taking the shot: he immediately knew that he had captured something unusual. He also saw a resemblance to the painting Nighthawks , by American artist Edward Hopper, which portrays four people in a downtown diner at night. “I’ve always thought that photography has its own individual place in art, but when a photograph resembles a particular painting or style, it may give it an extra kudos – particularly if it’s not preconceived,” he says.

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Other foreign language additions include utepils - enjoying a beer outside – and komorebi, describing sunlight dappling through leaves

Have you ever held a puppy that was so unbelievably fluffy and adorable you didn’t know how to convey the strong urge to squeeze its head without sounding like a maniac? Well, now there’s a word for it: gigil.

Gigil (pronounced ghee-gill) is one of the new words that have made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

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York Theatre Royal
Fun, intelligent and powered by Rice’s joyful whimsy, this playful take on the spy movie is a crowd-pleaser

Mistaken identity fires Alfred Hitchcock’s Kafkaesque 1959 spy thriller. The existential terror of a man under attack by unknown forces begins when New York ad-man Roger Thornhill stands up to make a phone call in a hotel lobby and is mistaken for George Kaplan, a nonexistent spy created as a decoy by the US’s cold war-era security services. From thereon in he is pursued by enemies of the state. If everyone insists Roger is George, where does that leave his sense of self?

Emma Rice ’s adaptation is not concerned with the crisis around identity but with sending up the espionage genre through an archly played collection of spies and villains.

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BBC Concert Orchestra/Hughes/Münch/Andrews
(Resonus)
Dating from 2000 to 2023, referencing folk dance, spirituals and house music and including works for voices, there’s real variety and quality here

This release can only scratch the surface of the output of Errollyn Wallen , appointed Master of the King’s Music last summer, but it does demonstrate the eclecticism of her work. The pieces date from 2000 to 2023; all share a strong sense of momentum in these performances by the BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor John Andrews . Sometimes, it is clear how that onward drive is achieved: in Mighty River a constant, pulsing note is heard throughout virtually the whole 16-minute movement, underpinning quotes from Amazing Grace and references to spirituals. Often, though, it is more an undercurrent of restless agitation.

Two works include voices. By Gis and by St Charity is a short and effective setting of Shakespeare, compellingly delivered by Ruby Hughes, with the orchestral players’ chants of “shame!” drawing us into Ophelia’s claustrophobic inner world. Idunnu Münch is the vivid soloist in This Frame is Part of the Painting, which, setting Wallen’s own words, captures the vivid colours of Howard Hodgkin ’s paintings.

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Focal Point Gallery, Southend
The young Pole’s work is buzzing with pop references and ideas about the future, all grounded in the everyday – with kaiser rolls and gherkins

There’s a lot of art about birth, death and rebirth, but not a lot of it uses pickles. Preserves, however, are all over Polish artist Rafał Zajko’s biggest solo show yet. Big jars of brine filled with salty cucumbers and little figurines in the shape of cryogenic preservation chambers. That combination of the fantastically sci-fi and the mundanely everyday is Zajko’s hallmark. The young London-based artist has spent the past few years showing ceramic and concrete sculptures filled with flights of cybernetic romanticism and nods to vaping, baking and pickling.

In The Spin Off, as this show at Focal Point Gallery in Southend is called, he has gone on a deep dive into a vast mess of ideas about longevity and rebirth. The centre of the space is dominated by an ovoid floor sculpture that gets moved and reshaped throughout the week. Laid across its surface, ceramic tiles are assembled to look like a map of planetary systems or control panels for alien spaceships, covered in incomprehensible knobs, buttons and displays. Circular sections of it can be lifted out and replaced with items from the cabinets on the wall: little concrete eggs, ceramic kaiser rolls, jars of pickles.

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