(15 Love)
Of a piece with the off-kilter pop of Astrid Sonne and Tirzah, Raisa K builds a striking debut out of hazy melodies, unaffected vocals and observations of everyday love

In recent years, there’s been a real appetite for a certain strain of hazy, quietly off-kilter pop made by classically trained musicians who favour a more DIY approach. Think Astrid Sonne , ML Buch or Tirzah , all of whom have put out records that are simultaneously cosy and jarring. Affectionately, the debut album by Raisa K , has a similar blueprint: simple melodies, unaffected vocals and scrappy production.

The formula makes sense: K is a longstanding member of the pop-not-pop group Good Sad Happy Bad, and the record enlists some of the key players from that world: bandmates Marc Pell and Mica Levi (also Tirzah’s producer) plus friend and collaborator Coby Sey. Here K takes the lead, exploring the mundanity of love, trust and tension with unembellished candour. The lyrics are unshowy – the kind of nonchalant sentiment you might jot down in your Notes app.

The follow-up to Detransition, Baby is a collection of short works ranging from dystopia to romance that delight in complicating identity politics

When Detransition, Baby hit the shelves in 2021, its success took readers on both sides of the Atlantic by surprise. Longlisted for the Women’s prize and selected as one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century, Torrey Peters’s debut novel was among the titles that defined the literary landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic. Finding herself in the crosshairs of a mounting culture war, Peters became one of the world’s best known trans writers, seemingly overnight.

Of course, this isn’t the full picture. Before her international breakthrough, Peters had self-published two novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, shifting enough copies for mainstream publishers to take an interest. Both appear in Stag Dance, along with two pieces written either side of Detransition, Baby: the title story and The Chaser. They make up an ambitious compendium of a decade in writing.

Disney’s latest live-action adventure has been at the centre of various controversies over casting, alleged feuds and delays

Once upon a time, Disney made a business decision: if it was going to adapt its library of animated movies into live-action features (with merch and theme park tie-ins galore), it should add Snow White to the pipeline. The 1937 classic – the company’s first full-length animated feature ever, its first crack at a veritable goldmine of princess IP – would follow the modernizations (and attendant revisions) of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, released in 2015 and 2017, respectively. It was only logical, Snow White being one of its most recognizable and brand-defining characters. The company began developing a live-action feature in 2016, in the heady first wave of its IP era.

Nine years later, Snow White has finally made it the big screen , but the journey has been anything but a fairy tale. The remake has been a saga of delays, culture war flashpoints and controversies, some earned and much not. The new Snow White has managed the difficult feat of being a children’s movie that irritates both ends of the political spectrum at once, from rightwing nuts crying “woke” over the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, to pro-Palestine advocates upset over the presence of Israeli actor and IDF supporter Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. And that’s not even getting to the obvious and nagging issue of the titular seven dwarves.

After almost 60 years in the US, the actor wants to quit the country. She talks about ‘hooligans’ in the White House – and her new silent film role in Four Mothers

Fionnula Flanagan, the veteran Irish actor, has been a star of stage and screen for more than six decades, earning Tony nominations for her theatre work, a nod from the Screen Actors Guild for Waking Ned, a Saturn award for The Others and a voice acting trophy for Song of the Sea – as well as accolades for the cult TV series Lost.

This means she has spent a lot of time in the US – in fact, she’s lived there since 1968. The home she shared in the Hollywood Hills with her late husband, Garrett O’Connor, was well known for its parties – despite O’Connor, an eminent psychiatrist, being the first president of the Betty Ford Institute.

The remarkable story of conductor Alma Rosé and the musicians who survived the Holocaust by performing amid horrific conditions

When 13-year-old Pearl Pufeles disembarked from the cattle car at Auschwitz in March 1944, she was surprised to hear the strains of Dvořák and Smetana wafting towards her. “Gosh,” thought the Czechoslovakian schoolgirl, “this can’t be that bad if they play music here.” But it was that bad and, indeed, so much worse. Pearl and her twin sister Helen were swiftly selected as laboratory fodder for Dr Josef Mengele’s grotesque medical experiments.

It isn’t clear which orchestra Pearl had heard that day. Auschwitz was a 15 sq mile complex with multiple sub-camps and there were at least six “official” orchestras staffed by prisoners who had been funnelled into southern Poland from all over Europe. Some of these orchestras concentrated on the classical repertoire, albeit without the Jewish composers Mendelssohn and Mahler. Others specialised in Sunday afternoon concerts of operetta and dance music. By far the likeliest music to be heard around the camps, though, was jaunty military marches, played loudly every morning as the prisoners set off for work, and then again in the evening as they limped back to camp, dragging their dying colleagues behind them.

The service might boast A-listers like Natalie Portman and Colin Farrell but in a competitive streaming landscape, it’s struggling to be heard

Next week Apple TV+ launches The Studio , a Seth Rogen comedy about the rapidly changing landscape of the film industry. Episodes follow a beleaguered executive as he’s forced to make an ugly IP movie, because streamers are in dominance and this is all traditional studios are left with.

For a show explicitly about the death of the theatrical experience to be made by a disruptive streamer – one funded by the deep pockets a global tech megacorp to boot – is unquestionably a show of power. Or at least it would be, were it not for a new report claiming that Apple TV+ is currently losing a billion dollars a year.

Sunita Rajwar and Shahana Goswami lead a sinewy crime drama as a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie who has inherited her late husband’s job

Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie. They are terrifically played by Sunita Rajwar and Shahana Goswami in what is almost a gender-switched Indian version of Training Day.

Suri is a film-maker who 20 years ago gave us a tremendous personal essay movie I for India , and this is her fiction-feature debut, which reportedly started as a documentary project inspired by public demonstrations about the gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Singh . It centres on the Indian convention of “compassionate appointment”: the dependent widow of a public official can apply for the same job. Goswami plays Santosh, whose cop husband was killed in a riot; there are dark mutterings about the unknown culprit’s Muslim identity. With no children and no money, she successfully applies for her late husband’s position and finds herself in the thick of a controversial case: the body of a young Dalit girl, raped and murdered, has been found in a village well – and the community is in uproar about the police’s obvious caste prejudice in failing to do anything.

Seth Rogen’s great new cringe comedy has A-listers lining up for a cameo, and the magician meets wild daredevils and edge-walkers from around the world

Does the head of a Hollywood studio need to care about films? This cringe comedy stars Seth Rogen as Matt Remick, a movie obsessive whose rise to the helm of the fictional Continental Studios suggests it might be the worst quality to possess. Matt wants to make great films – but his boss Griffin Mill (a superbly villainous Bryan Cranston) sees things differently. Before he knows it, Matt is greenlighting a Kool-Aid movie, doing the dirty on his mentor Patty (Catherine O’Hara) and breaking Martin Scorsese’s heart. The sheer quality of the Hollywood cameos (Steve Buscemi, Charlize Theron and more) suggests something about the satirical message at the show’s core rings uncomfortably true.
Apple TV+, from Wednesday 26 March

The government balked at protecting children from the perils of social media. TV has made the issues plain; now politics must do its job

It’s the story every parent of teenagers I know has been watching horrified through their fingers. The Netflix drama Adolescence starts with armed police breaking down an ordinary front door to arrest a 13-year-old boy for murder, in front of his bewildered parents. Though initially it seems there must have been some terrible mistake, Jamie’s Instagram account soon yields clues that all the adults – police, parents and teachers alike – had initially blundered past, oblivious.

Though talk of misogynistic “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate hovers over the storyline, this isn’t really a story of radicalisation. What it skewers is the feeling of growing up very publicly in a world where sending nudes risks them instantly being shared round the class and everyone automatically films playground fights on their phones, and how that intensifies dangerous feelings of shame and rejection in immature minds. Over half of young women now say they’re frightened of their male peers, according to a sad little survey for the Lost Boys project at the Centre for Social Justice thinktank. What’s not always obvious is that beneath their anger, boys are often equally frightened of them.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist