The Hollywood icon defies age and Arctic climes to save the world in the epic messianic spectacle The Final Reckoning. But why won’t he bare his soul?

Tom Cruise spends about 30% of the final Mission: Impossible movie in his knickers. It being a very long film, that’s a lot of time spent looking at his body, glossy and gnarled and expensive as a walnut armoire, possibly in high-definition Imax and, even if not, certainly as big as a bus.

In The Final Reckoning, Cruise unbuttons to wallop goons (twice), wriggle from the Arctic seabed towards the waves, hop on a treadmill and take a long hot shower in front of the crew of a strikingly camp US military submarine.

Sam Altman’s extraordinary career – and personal life – under the microscope

On 30 November 2022, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted the following, characteristically reserving the use of capital letters for his product’s name: “today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.com”. In a reply to himself immediately below, he added: “language interfaces are going to be a big deal, i think”.

If Altman was aiming for understatement, he succeeded. ChatGPT became the fastest web service to hit 1 million users, but more than that, it fired the starting gun on the AI wars currently consuming big tech. Everything is about to change beyond recognition, we keep being told, though no one can agree on whether that will be for good or ill.

The Brummie is brilliant as she spends weekends with celebrities, starting with Perrie Edwards. Plus: Martin Clunes straps into a drysuit. Here’s what to watch today

8.30pm, BBC One
Alison Hammond is a pro at getting laughs out of celebrities, but this new series – in which she spends a weekend at a star’s house – proves she’s a brilliant interviewer too. Who else could get away with asking Little Mix’s Perrie Edwards if she needs to take a pregnancy test? The laughs are always there, but there’s depth too when Edwards talks about anxiety and panic attacks. Hollie Richardson

The war in Gaza means the European Broadcasting Union is risking its liberal reputation, but to ban Israel would be to undermine the organisation’s fundamental purpose

As they get ready to watch this year’s final on Saturday, many Eurovision fans will be feeling conflicted. Some will not watch at all. The reason is the participation of Israel. Isn’t Eurovision supposed to be about “ love, love, peace, peace ” (as the 2016 contest’s Swedish hosts so memorably portrayed it)? If so, they may ask, what’s the besieger of Gaza doing there?

Some people argue that the people who run Eurovision, members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), are simply spineless. Others point to the sponsorship of the event by Moroccanoil, which despite its name is Israeli. But a big international organisation is hardly dependent on a beauty products company.

Chris West is the author of Eurovision: A History of Modern Europe Through the World’s Greatest Song Contest, published by Melville House UK

Abel Tesfaye is arguably the world’s biggest pop star – so why is he thinking of wrapping up the Weeknd? As he releases soul-baring film Hurry Up Tomorrow, he charts his path through drugs, heartbreak and abandonment

Walking out to perform in front of 80,000 people and finding that your voice has gone: it’s the type of stress dream you have the night before a big work presentation. But for Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, it happened for real at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2022. “I ran backstage to find my vocal coach: I can’t sing, it’s not coming out,” he says. “And what I found out later on is that I was having a panic attack. It wasn’t a physical injury. It was more up here” – he gestures to his head – “than it was here” – his throat.

The concert, which had to be called off and rescheduled, was the final night of a US stadium tour happening while Tesfaye was also wrapping up his painfully gestated – and eventually widely lampooned – TV series The Idol , which he starred in, co-wrote and co-produced. As production overran, he fitted in shoots around his tour; his own home was the main filming location. He began experiencing sleep paralysis.

This space comedy is about a cyborg who reprograms himself to go rogue … then just wants to mock stupid humans and glob out in front of the telly. It’s such a funny premise – but sadly falls short

Imagine a bored Robocop. There you have the vibe of new comedy drama Murderbot, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz (the co-creators of American Pie, Antz, About a Boy and more) from the sci-fi book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells .

The premise is a good one. What if one of the cyborg security units used by the all-powerful, not overly benevolent Company that operates throughout the galaxy’s Corporation Rim managed to hack his own governor module and restored free will to himself? So instead of attending to the safety of humans working for or leasing mining rights from the Company he could go rogue and kill them all? And what if he’d rather not? What if he couldn’t really be bothered. What if he would rather spend his time watching shows on the Company’s streaming services and … well, not much else?

Visually effective yet narratively meandering, the star’s moody psycho-thriller-cum-therapy-session is a missed opportunity

Regrets? The Weeknd has a few. In Hurry Up Tomorrow, a celluloid roman-à-clef pegged to his sixth studio album , the Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate puzzles through the consequences of hooking up with a deranged groupie who forces him to reckon with his rock star flings. But it’s viewers who will probably be feeling rueful over nearly two hours lost in the end.

Though technically a thriller, Tomorrow takes inspiration from a real-life moment of weakness: the Weeknd – born Abel Tesfaye – losing his voice while filming The Idol TV series in between a global stadium tour. As with most of his artistic efforts, the Weeknd makes the job of distinguishing his sincere reflections from his satirical self-observations impossibly hard on audiences and smirks when they don’t get the joke. Recall his dizzying Super Bowl half-time show and face-bandage stunt he pulled to promote the After Hours album.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa praised for work exploring the loss of his half-sister in the wider context of post-apartheid life

The South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa, whose experimental work has been praised for its “power and simplicity” and explores family ties, myth and post-apartheid life, has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize 2025.

Sobekwa was awarded the £30,000 prize, one of the most prestigious in the industry, at the Photographers’ Gallery in London on Thursday for his work I Carry Her Photo With Me that focuses on the life and disappearance of his half-sister, Ziyanda.

Cannes film festival
A taut, charged procedural from Dominik Moll follows a conflicted officer investigating violence to a teenage protester

Dominik Moll’s Dossier 137 is a serious, focused, if slightly programmatic movie about police brutality in France; there are docu-dramatic storytelling reflexes and a determined procedural tread. The movie takes its cue from the horrifying real-life cases of gilets-jaunes protesters in France’s 2019 demonstrations who suffered near fatal injuries due to the police’s trigger-happy use of the LBD gun : the lanceur de balle de défense or “flash ball” gun which (deafeningly) fires vicious rubber bullets.

Stéphanie, played by Léa Drucker, is a conscientious police officer in the IGPN, the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale, effectively the Internal Affairs bureau, investigating horrific head injuries suffered by a teen protester, which could only be caused by the cops’ flash-ball weapons. She is divorced from a cop, Jérémy (Stanislas Merhar) who along with his new girlfriend – also in the police – is gloweringly resentful of what he sees as her bureau’s disloyal undermining of the police, and the way she is questioning the corners they (supposedly) have to cut to keep France safe, especially after the Bataclan attacks .