He wanted to remove sculpture’s safety valve – and blew up the 60s as a result. The great pop-pioneer looks back on an extraordinary career, from getting thrown out of art school to covering Kate Moss in fibreglass

Allen Jones, painter, sculptor and print-maker – he calls himself a painter who sculpts – is arguably the first, debatably the most famous British pop artist. I meet him in the studio he built 20 years ago, when he moved out of London to the Cotswolds, the kind of chocolate-box surroundings where they’ll only let you build something if it looks like a barn. “But a barn is designed specifically to keep light out!” he says in amused frustration, and huh, yes, sounds obvious when you say it. An architect found his way round that, and the place is swimming in light.

Against one wall of the studio are five of the fibreglass female figures he made as an ongoing series between the early 80s and 2015. At 5ft 2in, they are slightly smaller than lifesize mannequins. The critic Mark Hudson has described them as having “a faintly unnerving quality, with something of the doll, something of the surrealist totem and the automaton, like Coppélia”. In the facing corner is Hatstand, part of the fetish furniture series that inflamed the feminists of the second wave. Steps – comprising Hatstand, Chair and Table – have the distinction of having been controversial in pretty much every decade since the creation of the first, in 1969.

The Sidemen's show was a smash on YouTube. Now, it lands on Netflix – and all this week, influencers (plus a legendary footballer) will have to deplete their prize pot to survive. Oh, and everything costs through the roof

At the end of last year, MrBeast – an unfathomably successful YouTuber who revels in obnoxious demonstrations of wealth – went mainstream. He launched Beast Games on Prime Video, a sort of cloth-eared, Squid Game-style elimination show that entirely failed to twig that Squid Game was a satire. I gave it a pasting, but it went on to become Prime’s second biggest series debut of 2024.

As such, we now find ourselves in a weird new world. Streamers have realised that the only way they can compete with YouTube is to open the cheque book for its content and run it on their own platforms. It’s what Amazon did with Beast Games, and it’s what Netflix has done with Inside. The latter is a British reality show that premiered on YouTube last year. Every episode got more viewers than anything shown on BBC One, so Netflix quickly snapped up the rights to the second season. Inside will be watched by so many people that it’s almost pointless for me to tell you whether it’s any good or not.

‘The gig ended with onstage brawls. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever filmed but the bouncer took the tapes. It took me years to get them back’

I wanted to make a documentary about 10 bands on the verge of getting signed by record companies, to see what would happen to them. When I first heard the Brian Jonestown Massacre , I thought they were some lost band from the 1960s. But a friend told me they were alive and well – and that every label wanted to sign them. I filmed them soundchecking for an industry showcase gig at the Viper Room in Los Angeles, then they came over to my house, which is the backyard scene in Dig!

Streamer’s endless quest to make an unforgettable blockbuster continues to sputter out with the release of $300m dud The Electric State

The full effect of Netflix on the film industry, positive or (more likely) negative, will be reverberating for years to come. But in the short term, they’ve made some undeniably great movies, mostly through the strategy of giving money to great directors and appearing to let them do whatever they want (and supplementing those by acquiring already-great movies from film festivals). That’s how you wind up with The Irishman, Marriage Story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Hit Man, Roma, The Power of the Dog, Da 5 Bloods, Rebel Ridge and The Killer, among others.

It’s a lineup that smokes most of the major studios, which was presumably the idea: undercut the competition by stealing the film-makers they established and giving them the world. That particular era of risk-taking may be over for the growth-obsessed company, but they’ve still got plenty of capital to spend, which means more big Netflix movies like The Electric State , a $300m sci-fi adventure starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown that just dropped on the service. Netflix wants to engineer blockbuster spectacles to compete with the biggest movies Hollywood has to offer, and in a feat perhaps even more amazing than securing Noah Baumbach a big budget for White Noise, or improving Adam Sandler’s later-period batting average, they have yet to make one that’s actually good.

A group set up to oppose developers is the subject of this painstaking documentary, which shows the importance of manual work – and hope

In France, ZAD – “zone to defend” in English – refers to plots of land occupied by radical activists with the aim of blocking planned development projects. Formed in opposition to a governmental proposal for a new airport , the ZAD in the Notre-Dame-des-Landes region is the most famous example of this subversive practice. With sublime patience and care, Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s immersive documentary takes us into the day-to-day life of this extraordinary commune, where more than 150 people live, work and organise for change.

The popular image of the militant activist in mainstream media is generally reduced to one of joyless aggression and childish petulance; what makes Direct Action particularly invigorating is how it diverges from such sensationalist reporting. While the film briefly begins with videos of violent clashes between police and protesters, much of its 212-minute runtime is dedicated to the unseen pleasures and hardships of collective action. Rendered tactile on textured 16mm film, quotidian routines of kneading bread, cultivating vegetables or tool-making merge into a hypnotic stream of images. Labour emerges not merely as a chore but as the glue that holds the whole community together.

From the earthquake-defying joints that support a 13th-century temple to the delicacy of sashimono puzzle boxes, a new exhibition shows off the myriad possibilities of this centuries-old craft

Do you know your ant’s head from your shell mouth? Or your cogged lap from your scarfed gooseneck? These are just some of the mind-boggling array of timber jointing techniques on display in a new exhibition spotlighting the meticulous craft of Japanese carpentry. The basement gallery of London’s Japan House has been transformed into a woody wonder world of chisels and saws, mortises and tenons, and brackets of infinite intricacy, alongside traditional clay plastering, shoji paper screen making and tatami mat weaving. It is a dazzling display of the phenomenal skills behind centuries of timber architecture and joinery, celebrating elite master carpenters with the spiritual reverence of a high priesthood.

“In Japan we have a deep respect for our forests,” says curator Nishiyama Marcelo, who heads up the team at the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum in Kobe, a temple to the history of Japanese joinery. “If a carpenter uses a 1,000-year-old tree, they must be prepared to take on more than 1,000 years of responsibility for the building that they create.”

It is a momentous duty, and one we should heed. As debates around the embodied carbon of the built environment dominate the construction industry, there could be no more timely exhibition to remind us of the importance of designing with longevity, care and repair in mind. Numerous specialist tools have been shipped over from the Kobe museum, along with a team of master carpenters who have built a remarkable series of structures in the gallery, replicating parts of buildings that have lasted for hundreds of years in the face of wind, rain, snow and earthquakes.

The Netflix four-parter has touched many a nerve with its gut-punch power and staggering performances – but it’s also a vital call to action for parents and their teens

The arrival of searing new series Adolescence could hardly be more timely. The drama dropped on Netflix just as it emerged that crossbow killer Kyle Clifford had searched online for misogynistic podcasts and watched Andrew Tate videos hours before murdering three female members of the Hunt family . Then again, such stories hit headlines with depressing regularity. Perhaps Adolescence would have felt unnervingly on-the-nose whenever it launched.

The initial idea came to its star, Stephen Graham , after a spate of distressing violent crimes. In 2021, 12-year-old Ava White was fatally stabbed by a 14-year-old boy in Graham’s home city of Liverpool. In 2023, 15-year-old Elianne Andam was attacked with a kitchen knife by 17-year-old Hassan Sentamu outside a Croydon shopping centre.

From watching classic samurai movies to rendering the unique way light falls on Japan’s mountainsides and modelling individual characters’ socks, Ubisoft has spared no effort recreating a fascinatingly violent period of history

More than four years after its announcement and after two last-minute delays, the latest title in Ubisoft’s historical fiction series Assassin’s Creed will finally be released on Thursday. Set in Japan in 1579, a time of intense civil war dominated by the feudal lord Oda Nobunaga, it follows two characters navigating their way through the bloody chaos: a female shinobi named Fujibayashi Naoe, and Yasuke, an African slave turned samurai. Japan has been the series’ most-requested setting for years, Ubisoft says.

"I've been on [this] franchise for 16 years and I think every time we start a new game, Japan comes up and we ask, is this the time?” says executive producer Marc-Alexis Coté. “We've never pushed beyond the conception phase with Japan until this one."

Young’s forthcoming Love Earth tour will not use Ticketmaster’s ‘platinum’ ticketing scheme – described by Smith as ‘a greedy scam’

Neil Young has credited the Cure’s frontman Robert Smith with inspiring his decision not to allow Ticketmaster to use dynamic pricing for his forthcoming tour.

Dynamic pricing is marketed by Ticketmaster as “platinum” or “in demand” tickets which, according to the company, “give fans the opportunity to purchase the most in demand tickets to an event, at a market-driven price” – meaning a rise in prices for especially sought-after tickets.

My management and agent have always tried to cover my back on the road, getting me the best deals they could. They have tried to protect me and the fans from scalpers who buy the best tickets and resell them at huge increases for their own profits. Ticketmaster’s high-priced Platinum tickets were introduced to the areas where scalpers were buying the most tickets for resale. The money went to me. That did not feel right. Very soon, Platinum tickets will no longer be available for my shows. I have decided to let the people work this out. Buy aggressively when the tickets come out or tickets will cost a lot more in a secondary market.