She has been painting for 60 years – yet it’s taken until now for her to have an exhibition outside her native India. The artist reluctantly takes time out from her studio in order to grant a rare interview

When Arpita Singh’s Remembering opened this week at the Serpentine in London, despite being one of India’s leading artists, it was her first solo institutional show outside her native land in her six-decade-long career. It also marked the first time the Serpentine has given over its main galleries to a show by a south Asian artist. But Singh, who spends most of her waking hours in her Delhi home studio, is muted in her reaction. “Serpentine is a known gallery, so it is a prestigious thing for me,” is about as effusive as she gets.

At 87, Singh is reluctant to give her time to anything that might take her away from her canvas – and that includes this interview. Her vivid, unhinged paintings, chock-a-block with adrift figures, motifs and text often structured by narrow borders crammed with ornament, have won her a devoted following. In an epic Mappa Mundi -like piece, My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising, perspectives jar and scales switch in a way that jauntily recalls storytelling scroll paintings and lavishly detailed miniatures.

Playhouse, Nottingham
There’s no slowing down for the avant art-rock octogenarian as he forgoes predictability to showcase the staggering breadth and depth of his songcraft

John Cale is 83 years old. Live, it would be more than understandable to find a musician of that age in a period of slowing down and winding up, cranking out the hits to please old fans. John Cale is absolutely not doing that. An early outing of Captain Hook, a sprawling avant art-rock deep cut from a 1979 live album, sets the tone for an evening that is less about delivering the obvious and more about showcasing the staggering breadth and depth of his songcraft.

Sitting almost permanently behind a keyboard, Cale doesn’t give his masterly viola skills an outing tonight, but he sounds in remarkable voice for a man returning after several cancelled shows and four days on doctor-ordered vocal rest. Under a deep red light, Cale and his band play a tense, moody-bordering-on-menacing take on Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel, although the heavy-handed delivery of The Endless Plain of Fortune fares less well, feeling drained of all its subtlety and tenderness.

The franchise created a bromance for the ages, with this first outing featuring gunfights and wisecracking – and an at-the-time more established Lawrence pulling focus

Back in the day when Martin Lawrence had top billing over Will Smith, this movie landed in cinemas in all its gun-wielding, vehicle-exploding, post-shootout-wisecracking humungousness. Now rereleased for its 30th anniversary, it was the first in a franchise featuring the squabblingly bromantic Miami cop partnership, created by screenwriter George Gallo, directed by Michael Bay and produced with towering unsubtlety by the legendary action duo Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, one of their final films before Simpson died of a colossal drug overdose.

Lawrence plays Marcus Burnett, a married man with kids, partnered up with Mike Lowrey (Smith), who is supposed to be a single guy and ladies’ man. Oddly for a cop, he’s also supposed to be rich, with family money, which explains his smooth bachelor pad in an art deco apartment building; like so many interiors in this film, it is shot from a low angle in a kind of groovy heat haze, with shafts of sunlight beaming through – this being the signifier for interior design classiness. It is in this flat that the film rather bafflingly contrives some goofy sub-Billy-Wilder comedy as Marcus passes himself off as Mike, leading a material witness into this property for her own protection and pretending that the place is his.

The Mulholland Drive star had lunch with the director weeks before he died, and says: ‘He was not, in any way, done’

Mulholland Drive star Naomi Watts says that David Lynch “wanted to go back to work” before his death in January .

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times , Watts revealed that she had spent an afternoon with Lynch in November, along with Laura Dern, who acted in Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. “We had a beautiful lunch at his house. I knew he’d been unwell but he was in great spirits. He wanted to go back to work – Laura and I were like, ‘You can do it! You could work from the trailer.’ He was not, in any way, done. I could see the creative spirit alive in him.”

A quarter of a century on from their beloved 90s sitcom, the pair are teaming up for a travel series where they meander around France. They discuss being an odd fit in ‘lad’ culture and why getting back together took so long

Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey haven’t appeared together on TV since Men Behaving Badly, the much-loved (perhaps very much-of-its time) sitcom in which they played Gary and Tony, two emotionally immature, beer-guzzling, lady-loving flatmates besotted with their upstairs neighbour Deborah (Leslie Ash). Their characters came at a time that the caring, sharing new man of the early 90s was being swiftly replaced by the “lad”, with the rise of Loaded magazine, Oasis and similarly minded TV shows such as Game On.

Since Men Behaving Badly ended in 1998, Clunes has gone on to star in 10 series of ITV’s cosy detective drama Doc Martin, and his own travel series, Islands of Britain. Morrissey, meanwhile, has been in everything from Skins to Neighbours and, of course, voiced kids’ favourite Bob the Builder. Now they’re finally back together on screen with their new travel show, Neil & Martin’s Bon Voyage. We caught up with the pair to discuss painting each other’s portraits, the youth of today, and who else they’d like to go on holiday with …

The author on being inspired by Hemingway, Joyce’s jokes, and the diary he loves to dip into

My earliest reading memory
The first novel I remember reading was called My Side of the Mountain. I’m not sure how old I was. Maybe nine. My memory of it is so intense, and yet so vague, that I had to look the book up to make sure that it actually exists, that I didn’t just dream it. It does exist, and it’s easy to understand why I liked it so much. It presents a vision of idealised solitude – a 12-year-old running away from society and civilisation and fending for himself in some American wilderness – that obviously spoke to something in me at the time.

The book that made me want to be a writer
It’s hard to answer this question because it implies some kind of single “road to Damascus” moment that didn’t happen. Having said that, I remember even today the impact that two short, simple novels had on me when I read them at the age of 11 or 12. They were George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and it’s probably at about that time that I started “wanting to be a writer”. I think that the desire to be a writer is essentially the desire to imitate, to recreate the effect that other people’s writing has had on you. In that sense all fiction is fan fiction.

You name it, I can’t be near it. Even kissing my boyfriend is risky

I’ve been diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). It means your immune system is triggered too frequently and can cause anaphylaxis, so you can become allergic to a huge range of things. It’s a rare, incurable condition.

I’d had some minor problems from the age of two, and knew I was allergic to nuts. But a crucial turning point came when I was 18, in 2017. I was at university in Massachusetts and decided to grab a mint chocolate-chip ice-cream with friends. Before I knew it, I went into anaphylaxis, and my friends rushed me to hospital.

Ariyan A Johnson stars as the back-talking, fourth wall-breaking high schooler who falls pregnant in Harris’s rough and ready drama

There’s an undimmed freshness, warmth and freewheeling energy in this 1992 indie gem, and its director Leslie Harris – whose career since has chiefly involved writing and teaching – deserves a far bigger presence in US film history. Ariyan A Johnson plays Chantel, a young Black American high schooler who lives with her stressed parents and two kid brothers in Brooklyn (in an era before its gentrification) and rides the subway’s IRT Eastern Parkway line.

Chantel is getting great grades in school, and plans to be a doctor, but is addicted to talking back to the teachers and won’t restrain herself, even when she’s sent to the principal’s office. Her relationship with her mother and father is just as fraught – and as far as dating goes, Chantel is not going to sell herself short. And when she finally has sex with her boyfriend Tyrone (Kevin Thigpen), dizzied by his ownership of a Jeep – so she doesn’t have to travel on the IRT – it ends in pregnancy and further disasters. Tyrone gets 500 bucks from his uncle to get her an abortion, but Chantel blows it all in one afternoon on a shopping spree with a friend, in deep denial about what is happening to her, a set piece of black-comic calamity that only intensifies the compassion you feel for her. And when the baby comes, a further existential crisis is in store.

Barry Jenkins’ stunning prequel to the 90s cartoon classic, and Stranger Things’s Sadie Sink stars in a punky musical about a guitar player who may be able to save the world

The idea of photorealistic lions speaking English is a bit weird, but Disney’s remake juggernaut rolls on with a prequel to the reboot of the animated musical. Lin-Manuel Miranda takes over from Elton John in the song department, while Barry Jenkins, creator of Oscar-winning arthouse gem Moonlight , is an intriguing choice to direct this child-friendly origin story for Simba’s dad and evil uncle Scar – AKA Taka (Kelvin J Harrison). Young orphan Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) is adopted by Taka’s pride but when a gang of white lions attack, the brothers flee. They encounter a lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and her possibly familiar mandrill and hornbill pals, with danger and betrayal on the cards. Simon Wardell
Wednesday 26 March, Disney+