The Oscar-winning film, about a Palestinian community resisting displacement and violence from Israeli forces, has become the latest focus of a culture war in the state

After a week of controversy, the mayor of Miami Beach decided to withdraw his initial proposal to cancel the lease and block a small cinema’s funding due to its screening of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land .

Residents packed city hall to make public comments, and regardless of their backgrounds and opinions, the majority, including city commissioners, agreed that censorship, eviction and defunding of O Cinema were not the answer or the path forward.

Rapper is honoured for his philanthropic work alongside the likes of John Rutter, Angela Davis and Simon Russell Beale

Stormzy has been awarded an honorary law doctorate from the University of Cambridge, to recognise his philanthropic work.

The rapper, 31, has initiated various schemes across sport and the arts outside his chart-topping music career, such as founding his Merky Books imprint which champions Black British authors, and buying out the football team AFC Croydon Athletic with the intention of turning it into a “community asset”.

Serpentine North gallery, London
Hugely complex and infinitely layered figurative paintings dominate in a show that feels part-comic book, part Chagall dreamscape, part folk-art

Every painting in Arpita Singh’s debut UK exhibition feels like a desperate attempt to make sense of a tumultuous past, to memorialise the endless turbulence of life, politics and history. Singh, born in 1937, matured as an artist at a time of huge social upheaval in India. Amid states of national emergency, rising international tensions and nuclear tests, the art that came out of India after 1975 – brilliantly documented in the Barbican’s Imaginary Institution of India exhibition last year – became a way of documenting, resisting and surviving.

But Singh’s work isn’t hugely literal, nor particularly angry. Instead, her intense, colourful figurative paintings feel like a glimpse of interior life, of emotion and trauma in times of struggle. They are hugely complex, infinitely layered and filled with historical allusions, military symbolism and daily life. The paintings are stacked vertically with imagery – not laid out on a single plane like a traditional western landscape painting, but with multiple ideas piled up and across the canvas. You’re almost never looking at just one thing, one scene, but multiple images knitted together. It’s part-comic book, part-Chagall dreamscape, part-folk art.

The actor plays Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two warring mob bosses in 1950s New York, in a caper that lacks the richness of its writer’s earlier Goodfellas

‘They’re the same – he’s marrying himself!” The speaker is an aghast Bobbie Costello, played by Debra Messing, addressing her shruggingly detached mob boss husband, Frank Costello, played by Robert De Niro. They are guests at the wedding of mercurial club owner Anna (Kathrine Narducci) to Frank’s hot-tempered mafia associate Vito Genovese. And Vito is played by … Robert De Niro.

This film is a laborious true-crime account of Frank and Vito’s homicidal falling out in 1950s New York, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Nicholas Pileggi, though with little of the perspective, light and shade and narrative richness of Pileggi’s earlier scripts. As Vito, De Niro is gloweringly resentful, taciturn, bad-tempered and wears glasses and a hat. As Frank, De Niro is gloweringly resentful, taciturn, slightly less bad-tempered and doesn’t wear glasses or a hat. Bobbie’s line surely has to be a meta joke about the through-the-looking-glass casting – but, really, the point of the Vito/Frank duplication is a question that is not asked or answered by the movie itself, and has echoes of the meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at each other. Is the idea that they are basically the same person? Maybe. But it’s a pedantic and self-cancelling approach, obstructing the idea of interesting and important differences in the two men, who in fact no more resemble each other than all the other hatchet-faced wise guys around them. Maybe everyone on screen, men and women, should have been played by Robert De Niro, in a Charlie Kaufman-type nightmare.

Surfing? It’s as Cornish as piracy and pasties. As a thrilling exhibition opens in ‘Britain’s California’, we enter a heady world of coffinboards, hotdogging Aussies – and bans dished out to gangs fighting on the beach

‘I had no friends,” says Charlotte Banfield, “and no interests. I was very depressed. It was all going to end very badly indeed for me.” Banfield – who has cerebral palsy, epilepsy and autism, and was being bullied at school – thought of taking her life. But then, aged 13, she was enrolled by her mum in a six-week surfing course run by the Wave Project , which helps to improve children’s confidence and ease their anxiety through riding breakers. It was a pivotal moment, not least because Banfield was about to be excluded from school.

Her first surf class was a disaster, though. “I had a phobia of water. I couldn’t stand it on my skin. I ran away and locked myself in the car.” But something – perhaps the sense that there was “no pressure” – brought her back. “When I went up on my first wave, I felt free for the first time in my life.” This liberation turned her life around. “I went back into education and, though I left school with no GCSEs, I got a masters in marine biology. Surfing gave me confidence.”

Wigmore Hall, London
From Simon Holt’s bird-like Acrobats on a Loose Wire to Helen Grime’s haunting Long Have I Lain Beside the Water, the four new works join more than 330 commissioned over the past six decades

It would be hard to overstate the Nash Ensemble ’s impact on the creation of new chamber music in the UK: more than 330 works since Amelia Freedman founded it as a student 60 years ago. The group’s anniversary season at Wigmore Hall, already peppered with new commissions, culminated in a day of concerts of which the finale contained four more world premieres, plus works from previous round-number anniversaries. Stravinsky’s 1920 Concertino was the outlier in this context, but its punchy, bouncy rhythmic drive made it a good opener.

First of the “old” Nash works was Elliott Carter ’s 2004 Mosaic, in which seven other instruments are corralled into cohesion by the harp: a virtual concerto, and a winning showcase here for the harpist Hugh Webb. Peter Maxwell Davies ’s 2014 String Quintet was the weightiest work on the programme, infused with hints of Orkney music and with striking moments for the pair of cellos, played here by Adrian Brendel and Gemma Rosefield. Julian Anderson ’s Van Gogh Blue, a Nash commission from 2015, struggled to hold its intensity as the two clarinettists moved around the hall between movements, but the sounds created by them and the ensemble, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, were increasingly evocative nonetheless, the finale a cacophony of unruly swirls like the artist’s Starry Night.

‘She seemed so strong, so forceful, to be going through the streets dressed like this. The hyper-feminised character she projected was like a riposte to the male violence’

I loved growing up in Belfast because it was wild. You’re not supposed to say that, but even though I was working class and we were in the thick of it, I didn’t experience any violence directly. I experienced the warmth of working-class communities on both sides, Catholic and Protestant, and the power of community in the fight for things like justice, fairness and equality. I learned about those principles mostly through women.

Belfast was a very patriarchal place, but women always seemed to be the ones making the most sense. If you look at UN statistics for when women are at negotiating tables, the chances of reaching peace agreements are much higher. Then, if they stay at the table, the peace agreement lasts longer. In different parts of the world that I’ve been commissioned to shoot, like Sudan or Beirut, I’ve met many different women but they all have the same ability to cut through the shit, yet they’re not given any power.

This thrilling trip through Japan is the best the series has given us in years

I have played many Assassin’s Creed games over the years, but I’ve rarely loved them. Ubisoft’s historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassin’s Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.

The Assassin’s Creed games are extraordinary works of historical fiction, fastidiously recreating lost periods of history and letting you walk around in them. They’re the closest thing to time travel. I play them for the virtual tourism, and find myself vaguely disappointed that 80% of what you do in these painstakingly realised worlds boils down to parkouring around killing people.

The Other Palace, London
Sarah Cameron-West’s one-woman show switches between inner and outer voices to explore envy, anger and inadequacy

We are not given the name of the main character in this one-woman show, but certainly know that her office nemesis is called Karen. We meet the protagonist just as she is being dumped by Joe, her boyfriend of four years, and it quickly becomes clear that Karen is a negative force in her life beyond the office too.

Sarah Cameron-West’s monologue was compared to Peep Show and Fleabag at last year’s Edinburgh fringe and you can see why. Like the latter, it is confessional, intimate and sheds insight on female anger, envy and feelings of inadequacy. Cameron-West performs energetically and there is real promise in the writing, but it touches on themes rather than cracking them open to say something beyond the tropes of its more famed forebears.

At the Other Palace, London , until 23 March