Was the second wife of Henry VIII really guilty of the crimes she was beheaded for? Pickett’s award-winning new play takes a sideways look at her downfall – by imagining its impact on everyday women

Like many British schoolchildren, Ava Pickett chanted the “Divorced, beheaded, died” rhyme about Henry VIII’s six wives – and it has stayed in her head ever since. So much so that her play 1536 pivots around the last days of the second wife, Anne Boleyn. Pickett’s history lessons covered Boleyn’s magnificent rise – which sparked a passion so great the king bent constitutional law to marry her – as well as the torrid details of her downfall and beheading. Pickett believed the “facts” (that Boleyn committed treason, that she slept with her brother) until she didn’t. “The older I got,” says the 31-year-old, “the more I thought, ‘I don’t buy that.’”

Named after the year of Boleyn’s death, 1536 comes at the queen’s story sideways. She is not seen on stage but is talked about by three young women who meet in an Essex field, in between work, to quibble and gossip about men, haircuts and the king’s bride. Their predicaments gain chilling resonances as the local men become more puritanical, mirroring the patriarchal violence of Henry’s court.

It is a Gilded Age gem full of Old Masters, from Vermeer to Holbein. And now, after a ravishing $300m revamp, it is even more welcoming. Our writer revels in its silk-clad walls and the freshly trickling fountain of its light-filled sculpture court

‘If I could have a pound for every person who’s told me that the Frick is their favourite museum, I’d be able to retire already,” says Axel Rüger, the new director of the New York institution, who has just moved there from leading the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Part of the Frick’s appeal is that it is a great museum that hardly feels like a museum at all. Even more than, say, the Wallace Collection in London – one of the inspirations behind the 5th Avenue landmark – the Frick has the feeling of being someone’s home, its contents selected by a singular eye.

That’s because it was and they were. Both home and eye belonged to one man, the Pennsylvania-born coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, who was rich beyond imagining. It is not, though, a place frozen in time. The collection has doubled in size since his death in 1919. The building, which remained the family home until 1931, was altered and enlarged to convert it into a museum that opened in 1935. Nevertheless, “It has such an intimate feel,” says Rüger. “And there’s also an element of fantasy. People think, ‘What would it be like if I lived here?’”

Contemplative doc with striking cinematography follows a tightknit community who move seasonally from farm to farm across Europe

Like tumbleweed, the seasonal labourers in Giulia Angrisani and Mattia Petullà’s contemplative documentary roam from one European farm to another, their nomadic life attached to the rhythm of harvest seasons. While the film opens with the exhausting drudgery of field work, it soon shifts its focus to moments of rest, revealing the community and camaraderie among those who are rootless.

Living in cramped conditions, in either ramshackle caravans or makeshift tents, Cecilia, Armelle, Gibbo, and Sisco lean on one another for emotional support. When not toiling under harsh weather conditions, the four cook, sing or simply relax together. From time to time, new members join this found family, where different languages – English, Italian, French, Spanish – flow in harmony. Considering that farm bosses provide little help in terms of accommodation or basic necessities, their acts of care provide a haven from the precariousness of seasonal work.

This scrappy genre-busting film starring Melissa George and Liam Hemsworth is such a thrilling watch because it is unclassifiable: small-scale and epic, brainy and silly

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Like many, my addiction to the hit TV show Severance – which follows a shadowy biotech company that can “sever” people’s memories at work from their memories of the outside world – has increased my appetite for more mind-bending, high-concept stories. Drawing from a rich well of inspiration, which encompasses The Twilight Zone and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Severance has reawakened a specific obsession of mine: “puzzle box” sci-fi plots, where Matryoshka doll mysteries unfold in an equally confusing and horrifying fashion, escalating into an exhilarating crescendo that is usually analysed in forums and YouTube videos tagged with the promise “ENDING EXPLAINED”.

The most wonderful thing about this kind of ornate storytelling is that no big budget is required, simply big ideas. Severance’s playfulness with non-chronology, labyrinthine hallways and duplicate selves are also found in scrappy, low-budget gems, such as Christopher Smith’s underrated 2009 film Triangle.

A sewing supply shopowner who stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong is faced with three choices – commit the perfect crime, call the police, or run away

Thread-slingers with an addiction to YouTube tutorials (like me) may have seen an amusing film by seamstress/historian Bernadette Banner in which she reacts to a bunch of films that feature actors sewing, or at least pretending to sew. Examples include How the Grinch Stole Christmas (not convincing) to The Phantom Thread (mostly bang on, featuring real dressmakers at work). Each one is picked apart with waspish scrutiny by Banner, who can spot the difference between a vintage treadle-operated chain stitch machine and a lockstitch machine from different periods in the 19th-century. Hopefully Banner will get a chance to scrutinise this loosely sewing-themed thriller and nitpick its faux pas, such as the bit where the seamstress protagonist Barbara (Eve Connolly) seems to sew a button on a client’s wedding dress in less than a minute. (No thread shank? Shocking!)

In fact, it is clear co-writer-director Freddy Macdonald is more interested in sewing equipment, especially thread reels and needles, rather than sewing per se. The conceit is that Barbara, a shy American woman running a sewing supply shop and mobile seamstress business in Switzerland after the death of her mother, comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. In Run Lola Run-style, the film shows us three different outcomes, each based on whether Barbara chooses to commit the perfect crime, call the police, or run away. In nearly all she uses reels of Mettler thread to rig up pulleys and other simple machines to create booby traps or retrieve useful objects, little Heath Robinson-like contraptions that aren’t quite traced out in enough detail to be persuasive. Drug deal-participants Joshua (Calum Worthy) and Beck (Thomas Douglas) are sometimes her allies and other times her antagonists, but in each timeline she must contend with psychopathic kingpin Hudson (John Lynch, the best thing in the film), doing extreme bad parenting as he bullies his son Joshua.

Talking to CBS about his ‘film school for rogues’ he advocates his students finance their work by gaining experiences outside the norm

The legendary director Werner Herzog has issued unorthodox advice to young aspiring film-makers, urging them to raise funds for their projects by working in brothels and psychiatric institutions.

Speaking to CBS , Herzog outlined the fiscal guidance he offers to participants on his 11-day workshop, described as a “film school for rogues”.

She died before she was 40, leaving behind a body of blazingly original short fiction set in America’s segregated south. But her reputation has been tarnished by accusations of racism.

A month before she died aged 39, on 3 August 1964, of complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, the American writer Flannery O’Connor wrote from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia to a regular correspondent, the academic and nun Sister Mariella Gable: “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.”

The “wolf” that O’Connor refers to is her illness, the name of which derives from the Latin. The disease can be mild, but in its worst form it is systemic, causing not only inflammation, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness and skin rashes, but also permanent tissue damage. In her last years, O’Connor could only move around by means of crutches, tending to her beloved pet peacocks. “I can write for one hour a day, and my, my, do I like my one hour. I eat it up like it was filet mignon.”

Exhibition opens this week in Taunton Castle, where mass death sentences were infamously issued during Bloody Assizes

A fresh look at an ill-fated 17th-century uprising that haunts the English West Country – and may hold lessons for the world today – is taking place close to the spot where many of the rebels were condemned to death.

An exhibition at the Museum of Somerset tells the story of the Monmouth Rebellion, which ended with defeat for the rebels who fought alongside the charismatic Duke of Monmouth, with many condemned to death at the notorious Bloody Assizes led by George Jeffreys, the Lord Chancellor.

The One Day actor will star in Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play, one of four new premieres announced by the London theatre

Ambika Mod is to star as an academic addicted to violent pornography in a new play at the Royal Court in London. Mod, best known for her screen performances in One Day and This Is Going to Hurt, will take on her highest profile theatre role to date in Porn Play, written by Sophia Chetin-Leuner and directed by Josie Rourke.

Billed as “funny, unsettling and honest”, it opens in November at the Royal Court’s smaller Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. Chetin-Leuner, whose play This Might Not Be It was set in a mental health unit and staged at the Bush last year, said: “Ever since I was a teenager, going to see plays at the Royal Court has shaped my ideals and purpose of who I want to be as a writer – so it’s a terrifying privilege to have Porn Play debuting here.” The play was shortlisted for Soho theatre’s Verity Bargate award in 2022. Chetin-Leuner said she began writing it to explore the effects of pornography on women but that it has “evolved into something much more delicate and intricate over the years”.