There’s an investigation into a child sex trafficking ring, plus the US President and his deputy engage in some of the most disturbing scenes the show has ever put on screen. It’s quite the episode

This week’s episode of South Park opens with Santa Claus peeing in the face of a fourth-grade girl. It turns out to be an AI-generated video created by Butters as revenge against his former crush, Red, who cruelly manipulated him in a recent episode by pretending to like him in exchange for a rare Labubu doll . After learning of the video, Red decides to fight fire with fire, making her own AI footage of Butters molesting beloved Studio Ghibli character Totoro.

This kicks off a war of attrition among South Park Elementary’s student body, who use the Sora 2 OpenAI video generator – a real-life tool that allows users to create customised videos – to churn out videos of one another engaging in all manner of sexual and scatological behaviour with the likes of Popeye, Bluey and Droopy Dog (who poos in Kyle’s mouth). The adults of South Park can’t distinguish between AI and reality, so the town’s hapless police force think they have stumbled on a vast child sexual abuse ring.

As he moves into film production with the thriller Game, the musician – also known for Beak> – answers your questions on Myspace rappers, Bristol greats and whether Portishead will ever make new music

What made you decide to make a film, Game , and can you tell us a little bit about it? Zoe2025
As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself having more film ideas than musical ones. Having an independent label, Invada Records, I wondered if I could actually make a film. I was at school with [co-writer and actor] Marc Bessant, I’ve worked with [director] John Minton for 20 years and I met [co-writer] Rob Williams – a scriptwriter for Judge Dredd and stuff – when he moved to Portishead [Somerset]. The idea of someone trapped in an upside down car comes from JG Ballard’s Concrete Island. Initially it was gonna be a horror film where the character was attacked by rabid dogs, but instead we set it during the end of rave culture. I immediately thought of Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods for the role of a poacher and it turned out that his dad had rabbited. He’s brilliant in it.

How easy was it to recreate the sense of the 90s rave scene on film? k4ren123
There are only a couple of sequences, but we wanted to capture the way the rave scene went from free festivals to something more corporate where the drugs were really organised. All my mates in Portishead [the town] were ravers. I wasn’t. I went to a couple, but for the film I looked at lots of old footage and bought most of the clothes for the film on eBay. Nineties rave wasn’t fluorescent outfits. They were ordinary kids in street gear, so I’d think: what kind of trainers were they wearing?

The reviews are in for the long-awaited adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novel, presented in a purpose-built theatre in Canary Wharf

The Super Bowl optics are all there from the off: a wardrobe of great gaudy glory (the 1960s, with twists of commedia dell’arte, the Palace of Versailles and alien-chic, designed by Moi Tran), a fast-changing set by Miriam Buether and energetic choreography from Charlotte Broom. The first half, prepping us for the gameshow, lacks tension, nonetheless. “We are just hours away from being mortal enemies,” Katniss says. But you don’t feel the dread.

Arifa Akbar, the Guardian

Mia Carragher, daughter of ex-footballer Jamie, is an energetic central presence as Katniss Everdeen, the warrior who fights off rivals in the gory contest that’s the ratings equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing in Panem, the grim state ruled by a foppish elite. But the fact that she’s required to narrate much of the story while sprinting here and there is a distinct flaw.

Playwright Conor McPherson and director Matthew Dunster have set this dystopian tale in a drab, delicately evoked version of Depression-era America, where the inhabitants of District 12 eke out a living amid coal-mining disasters and food shortages. A chorus of townsfolk sway like sun-bleached clothes on a washing line, powerless and adrift, in choreographer Charlotte Broom’s evocative movement sequences.

In the chrome-and-glass dystopia of Canary Wharf in east London, most of the money looks like it’s been blown on creating a hi-tech colosseum. Eight vertiginous banks of seating – some of which move during the performance – open out into a runway, or close in to form the killing fields … Martial arts, modern dance, and hand-to-hand combat are what drive the pageant, heightened by strobe lighting and nasty white noise.

Set pieces rise up from beneath the arena-like stage, and props are lowered from above. Ian Dickinson’s sound design sends the flutter of birds’ wings around the auditorium, bringing us closer to the action; Kev McCurdy’s fight direction orchestrates gasp-worthy duels; and Chris Fisher’s illusions send arrows flying into the bullseye of their targets.

Dunster and McPherson’s unexciting production fails to reimagine and revitalise its source material. Moreover, they don’t critique the queasy subject matter. There’s simply never enough sense that we, the audience, are complicit in what we are seeing … Given that the story is about children killing each other in the name of TV entertainment, the failure properly to characterise the tributes themselves is almost a moral problem.

One aspect that cannot be faulted is the energy, stamina and athleticism of the performers, many of whom come from dance backgrounds. Carragher herself must run tens of miles during each performance; her indefatigability is commendable, even though McPherson’s bewilderingly clunky script leaves her with far too much exposition to plough through.

I wasn’t sold on the casting of a pre-recorded John Malkovich as the manipulative President Snow – it’s somewhat disorientating to have a famous American actor appear at massive scale on the screens every now and again, and the scenes where Malkovich is ‘talking’ to a live performer just feel a bit of an odd thing to be watching.

The Hunger Games: On Stage is at Troubadour Canary Wharf theatre, London , until October 2026

Having left her husband, Shaw’s daughter moves in with her at the family’s Manhattan apartment and soon tensions arise – wry, sweet, melancholic but somewhat insubstantial

Fiona Shaw finds some tremendous form in this upmarket dramedy of mother-daughter tension and first-world problems, and Katherine Waterston is (as ever) really good. There’s plenty of amusement and wry, sophisticated sadness here, though co-writer and director Gaby Dellal has confected what is, in the end, a pretty middleweight movie.

Shaw plays Kit, an elegant and wealthy widow living in a handsome apartment on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, known for her witty disdain for those less stylish than herself and about to publish a memoir of life with her late husband, a collector of Chinese art. Out of the blue her grown up daughter Charlotte (Waterston) appears, having run out on her abusive rancher husband; she intends to stay for a while with her mother in her childhood Park Avenue home while she figures things out.

Live theatre, Newcastle
Jamie Eastlake’s play addresses the forces pushing a young man towards the far right – and the school meals supervisor set on saving him

When did society become so polarised? Angela (Joann Condon) reckons it was 2005 with Jamie Oliver. As a dinner lady, she had to throw out the Turkey Twizzlers when the TV chef turned his guns on junk food . It is a wonky analysis but you can see where she is coming from.

Her confusion is partly the point. Playwright and director Jamie Eastlake wants to make sense of a country pulled to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s far-right protests and to Just Stop Oil’s civil disobedience. In a complex world, we are reassured by simple answers, but what is the actual cause of our discontent?

Shih-Ching Tsou and frequent collaborator Anora’s Oscar-winning auteur Sean Baker have created an affecting and original film of both humour and pathos

There are few things in a culture as ridiculous and potent as its superstitions. Left-Handed Girl’s I-Jing, a sweet five-year-old who has just moved back to Taipei with her mom and older sister, gets literal firsthand experience when her grandpa admonishes her for using her left hand for everything – it’s not natural; it’s the devil at work, he says.

When I-Jing stares at her appendage with dismay, so begins a new relationship between her and her devil hand as she navigates city life. Shot entirely with iPhones, debut solo director and co-writer Shih-Ching Tsou (the other co-writer is Tsou’s frequent collaborator, Anora’s Sean Baker) summons the frenetic energy and sensory experience of Taipei. There are bright red Chinese characters overtaking the glass windows of a pawn shop; the pleasant melody of trash-collecting trucks; the easy ping-pong of Mandarin and Taiwanese between generations; lush trees against grimy buildings that can nearly make you smell the specific essence of a bustling, wetter city. It’s not so much a love letter from a fan as it is a devotional to a place known by heart. Tsou pairs the kaleidoscopic fragments of the city with the splinters of imperfect people – poignantly and tenderly showing what it means to be a family in Taiwan, and delivering a triumph of a film.

Starting in Jamaica in the 1950s, sound system culture has become a feature of artistic spaces

When visitors make their way into Peter Doig’s House of Music show at the Serpentine, they’re confronted with not one but two sound systems.

The north gallery sports a vintage Western Electric and Bell Labs system that was used in cinemas in the 1920s and 30s, while Doig’s own set of Klangfilm Euronor speakers (which he acquired from Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider) also pump music into the space. Doig’s Maracas painting features towering speaker stacks.

Was the wartime chant about his solitary testicle correct? Did he have Jewish ancestry? New documentary Hitler’s DNA is trying to answer these, and more contentious, questions – but should it have gone there at all?

If a TV programme sets about sequencing the genome of Adolf Hitler – the person in modern history who comes closest to a universally agreed-upon personification of evil – there are at the very least two questions you want the producers to ask themselves. First: is it possible? And second, the Jurassic Park question: just because scientists can, should they?

Channel 4’s two-part documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator is not the first time the self-consciously edgy British broadcaster has gone there. In 2014’s Dead Famous DNA, it inadvertently answered both these questions in the negative. Having first cast aside ethical integrity by paying Holocaust denier David Irving £3,000 for a lock of hair purporting to belong to Adolf Hitler, the programme’s makers then discovered it not to be Hitler’s and thus useless for DNA sequencing.

The world of 1970s Italian cinema is the glossy backdrop for an elegantly wrought but shallow novel

“Ugliness,” noted Pier Paolo Pasolini, “is never completely depressing or repulsive. It contains within it an allegory of hunger and pain, its history is our history, the history of Fascism … It is tragic, but immediate, and for this reason, full of life.” For Pasolini, ugliness was its own kind of truth, such that Rome could lay no claim to being the most beautiful city in the world “if it were not, at the same time, the ugliest”. For some, though, that truth risked becoming “unseeable”. The gaze of the touristic voyeur, said Pasolini, skimmed over slums for the poor “filled with illness, violence, crime, and prostitution”, “convinced of the extraneousness and untimeliness of this sub-proletarian, underdeveloped world”.

Olivia Laing’s second novel, The Silver Book, is a work preoccupied with beauty. Set in the world of Italian cinema in 1974, the book overflows with extravagant film sets, feasts, dazzling costumes. Even Pasolini himself, cruising around in his Alfa Romeo, oozes charisma and allure. But as Pasolini made clear, beauty without its opposite can only ever be incomplete.