In a franchise filled with convoluted additions, this animated anthology feels closest to the pulpy wonder of George Lucas’s first films

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Since the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, lightsabers, Wookiees and the trumpeting blare of Darth Vader’s imperial march have been bulwarks of western pop culture – so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget the sci-fi classic comes from delightfully derivative roots.

Before the multimedia franchise that now spans 12 films, a television empire, theme park attractions and tie-in novels, Lucas was simply trying to adapt his favourite Flash Gordon comics. When that failed, he decided to create his own space opera, drawing from hodgepodge boyhood obsessions and romantic nostalgia for pirates, wizards and cowboys. The tense standoffs and backwoods desert towns of Star Wars were sourced from old-school Westerns; the ravaged kingdom, succession dramas and wheel of destiny were drawn from pulpy high fantasy. Add in a dose of samurai tropes, Buddhist beliefs and retro-futurist aesthetics and Lucas had stumbled upon something wholly new.

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Large Glass, London
Whether photographing the cave-dwelling inhabitants of the south or a black square he’d painted on a wall, Cresci showed how the camera could manipulate our memories

A few minutes into the mind-bending exhibition Mario Cresci: Geometries/Epiphanies, I find myself in a cerebral standoff with a grid of 16 black squares. This is the 83-year-old’s artist’s first exhibition outside his native Italy. Cresci belongs to a niche of Italian conceptual artists who took up cameras in the 1960s to reinvent cliches of the country’s famed identity. He studied industrial design in Venice and began working in photography after moving to Rome, where he was commissioned to photograph exhibitions of key arte povera creatives, stars of the city’s art scene in the 1960s, during the country’s period of post-fascist reckoning.

Cresci was inspired by the movement’s anti-establishment approach and focus on the everyday, and it came to shape his own bold experiments, such as performances where he unfurled strips of blueprint paper printed with political imagery from the windows of buildings. Later, for a gallery show in Milan, he presented his version of Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work Artist’s Shit , but instead of tins of purported faeces, he covered the floor in 1,000 transparent plastic boxes, each containing a photograph of a consumer product.

The company, launched in 2011, has been acquired by new company Boundless, after writers have been left unpaid for months

Authors have been left unsure whether their books will be published and when they will receive outstanding payments after crowdfunding publisher Unbound went into administration last week.

The unique selling point of the publisher, launched in 2011 by QI researchers John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard, and Crap Towns author Dan Kieran, was that it allowed writers to pitch ideas online directly to readers. If enough people pledged financial support, the author would write the book, with supporters receiving various perks, such as early access to the book or a special edition.

The actor’s lorazepam-fueled North Carolinian line delivery in the comedy drama series has taken the internet by storm

Every season of The White Lotus has its thing; a moment that takes off and becomes its own monster until long after the end credits roll on the finale. Season one was the suitcase poop scene, an effect so bizarrely groundbreaking that other showrunners wound up publicly musing on how much it must have cost. Season two’s thing was Jennifer Coolidge saying, “These gays, they’re trying to murder me,” which you will see replayed three times a minute whenever you look at anyone’s Instagram stories.

It might be too early to definitively state what season three’s thing is – The White Lotus always goes from a standing start to a nutso finale, and we still have three episodes left for things to really ramp up – but there are already a couple of contenders. For a while, it looked like it might have been Jason Isaacs’s penis, until he forcefully shut down the conversation last week. And that leaves the single most spectacular thing about the season so far: Parker Posey’s accent.

Actor known for his Creed III and Marvel roles seemingly confirms strangling his ex-girlfriend in recording

Jonathan Majors evidently admitted to battering ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari in an audio recording that was obtained and published by Rolling Stone on Monday, nearly a year after the actor avoided jail time after being convicted of assaulting and harassing her in a separate case.

The clip of Majors, 35, surfaced days before the theatrical release of his delayed film Magazine Dreams – and as movie industry colleagues endorsed his attempts at a career comeback. It also seems to contradict his denials that he ever physically harmed Jabbari or women in general.

Menier Chocolate Factory, London
As a gym-bunny vampire channelling Frank-N-Furter, James Daly leads a superb cast in a gender and genre-inverting romp that lacks bite

Before they took on Bram Stoker’s vampire count, co-writers Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen did Crime and Punishment: A Comedy – another title that speaks for itself. Here, Dracula is put through their humour wringer and comes out a pansexual bloodsucker, chasing anyone with a neck.

There are gender and genre inversions galore as Jonathan Harker ( Charlie Stemp , good comic timing) treks up the Carpathian mountains to Dracula’s castle. Harker’s fiancee is now Lucy (Safeena Ladha) rather than Mina, who is turned into Lucy’s less eligible sister and played by Sebastien Torkia in ginger-ringleted wig.

At Menier Chocolate Factory, London , until 3 May

Royal Academy, London
From hanged men and inky cephalopods to shadowy gothic castles, these cosmic, horror-tinged works let the Les Misérables writer and liberal political campaigner speak directly to us

Victor Hugo is the French equivalent of Shakespeare and Dickens. The inventor of Quasimodo and Jean Valjean is so universal that we absorb his myths even if we have never picked up one of his books. Yet how much do most of us know about Hugo himself, behind the books, the films, the musicals? By dedicating an exhibition to this versatile creator’s visual art, which started with a few caricatures and developed into sublime and surreal masterpieces, the Royal Academy does something unexpectedly moving. It takes you into the secret heart of a man we tend to think of only as a classic.

For instance we discover that Hugo campaigned against the death penalty nearly two centuries ago. His 1854 drawing Ecce Lex (Behold the Law) is a macabre inky portrait of a hanged corpse, part of his doomed campaign to save a condemned murderer called John Tapner . Hugo opposed capital punishment on principle, but a few years later gave permission for this drawing to be made into a print protesting the execution of American anti-slavery activist John Brown . If there was a liberal cause, Hugo threw his huge heart into it.

With sandals that look fresher than last year’s Birkenstocks, gossipy messages recovered from writing tablets and 73,000 shards of pottery, the London Museum’s new collection is like falling head-first into the first century

Archaeologists don’t always get lucky when a site is redeveloped in the middle of London. People have been building in the city for millennia and, in more recent times, bombing it. But if the building before went too deep, or there has been too much exposure to the air by bomb damage in the past, there won’t be much to find. Things were especially bad before 1991, when there was no planning protection for anything but scheduled ancient monuments. “We used to have to beg to get on site,” says Sophie Jackson, archaeologist at the London Museum.

It’s not that developers are insensitive, says Jackson: “When we did the excavation at Barts hospital, [it] was functioning above us – we were right under the MRI machines. Developers recognise the social value.” It’s just that the stars don’t often align.

This enthralling Chinese documentary about the torpedoing of a Japanese freighter carrying 1,816 British PoWs in the second world war excavates the emotional wreckage on all sides

This enthralling and shattering Chinese documentary benefits from superb material: a dark Boy’s Own yarn from October 1942 about the torpedoing of the wartime freighter Lisbon Maru, the attempted mass murder of the 1,816 British PoWs on board by their Japanese captors, and their rescue by Chinese fishermen from the Zhoushan archipelago. Directors Fang Li, Ming Fan and Lily Gong do an exemplary job of recounting this tragedy from the British, Chinese and (to some extent) Japanese perspectives with a piercing empathy.

An oceanic sense of loss pervades the film. Fang, a former geophysicist and the on-camera presenter here, first surveyed the Lisbon Maru’s wreck 100 miles south-east of Shanghai in 2016. Now he plumbs the depths of time to reconstruct its story, salvaging the testimony of the PoWs’ families, and finally locating the two remaining survivors, nonagenarians Dennis Morley and William Beningfield (who have since died). Morley says his daughter and granddaughter knew nothing about his ordeal; a silence practised by countless others, including the Japanese civilian captain later convicted for his role. His astonished children get the news here from Fang.