This often-distressing BBC documentary follows astonishing kids working as TikTok chefs and hospital porters – and shows their determination to smile in the face of unimaginable horror

The children of Gaza will be its future, if they are able to remain there. Starting several months into Israel’s bombardment and continuing right up until the recent ceasefire, London-based directors Jamie Roberts and Yousef Hammash made their documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone by remotely instructing two local cameramen, Amjad Al Fayoumi and Ibrahim Abu Ishaiba, as they captured life inside the “safe zone” – an ever-changing, ever-dwindling area in the south-west of Gaza, designated by Israel as the place where displaced Palestinians should reside. That the cameras predominantly follow children has an unexpected double effect: it makes the film’s many deeply distressing moments all the more unbearable, yet it tinges them with some sort of hope.

The kids are led by 13-year-old Abdullah, who acts as narrator as well as appearing on camera. “This area used to be colourful,” he says, briskly touring a scene of apocalyptic destruction in Khan Younis, where he lived in a house that sheltered 40 people before Israeli bombs turned it to dusty rubble. “Now, it’s grey.”

In this fantasy-satire of bourgeois family life, a girl is suddenly able to see everything her messed-up parents are up to

Here is a high-concept satire of bourgeois family life with all its secrets and lies from German film-maker Frédéric Hambalek; it is something to remind you of the notorious Babel fish in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which you can put in your ear and then comprehend what any creature in the universe is saying — a miraculous promotion of pure understanding which has been the cause of more and bloodier wars than anything else.

Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) is a moody and withdrawn teenager with messed-up parents. Her mum is Julia (Julia Jentsch, who 20 years ago memorably played anti-Nazi martyr Sophie Scholl ) and dad is Tobias (Felix Kramer). Julia is on the verge of a furtive affair with work colleague Max (Mehmet Ateşçi) while Tobias is being turned into a beta-male joke at his publishing company – his cover design choice for a new novel is scorned by his underlings, and he’s particularly undermined by a supercilious smoothie called Sören (Moritz Treuenfels).

He has influenced everyone from Beck to De La Soul to Arctic Monkeys. As the great musical ‘disruptor’ unveils his new murder-and-mandolins epic, he looks back on his most famous collaboration

Ask a set designer to create a bohemian Paris apartment and they’ll probably come up with something that looks a lot like Jean-Claude Vannier’s: books everywhere, vintage Bauhaus armchairs, art on every bit of wall space. You would say the living room was dominated by his grand piano, but your eye keeps getting drawn to a plethora of toy pianos that sit on and around it. On closer inspection, there are toy pianos on the shelves too, crammed among the books. “I’ve got more in the other rooms,” shrugs Vannier, speaking through an interpreter, “and I have a house in the country that’s full of them too. I take them to concerts and play a note or two. I find it adds something to a live performance that is filled with virtuosos. I have an open-tuned guitar that I kick, too – it makes a big boom.”

Disrupting an orchestral performance by playing a toy piano or kicking a guitar seems characteristic: Vannier, now in his early 80s, has been a disruptive presence in French pop for 60 years. His latest project is pretty odd: a song cycle performed by a vast mandolin orchestra, accompanied by a story written by Vannier that involves a broken romance, alcoholism, homelessness and murder.

‘A potential US distributor,’ recalls director Peter Weir, ‘supposedly threw his coffee cup at the screen at the end of the film, saying, “So whodunnit?” He felt he’d wasted a couple of hours’

One morning in early 1973, the TV personality Patricia Lovell knocked on my door. She was thinking of buying the rights for a novel by Joan Lindsay , Picnic at Hanging Rock, a story about the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls at an ancient rock formation and she was looking for an up-and-coming director. I had been gripped by the book and was very keen to make it.

The brutalising reality of the battlefield connects five different stories in this anti-war drama

This portmanteau film – produced by Warsaw Film School and released for the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – is in the Come and See tradition : a near-phantasmagoric descent into the brutalising reality of the battlefield. Equally anti-war and anti-Russia, its interconnected stories kick off in the faintly theatrical and moralist mode sometimes seen in east European drama, before accelerating for the climax into a bravura cinematic sequence: a baby’s point of view on Russian pillaging and destruction.

The film is comprised of five threads: an unnamed Polish traveller (Cezary Pazura) arrives in Ukraine to meet his doctor lover (Oksana Cherkashyna), but is sidetracked into taking a group of orphans with visual impairments to the zoo. Tasked with escorting the kids back over the border, he stops in at her parents’ house – but the old war hero (Hryhorii Bokovenko) and his wife (Nina Naboka) refuse to abandon it. Tatiana Yurikova plays a blinged-up Russian mother who has paid her way to the frontline to look for her missing son; it turns out he is in a Ukrainian hospital bed and appalling the doctor we have already seen with his opinions on Russian superiority. And finally, the frame story, seen in bleary cot-cam: a huddle of Ukrainian women in a basement hidey-hole.

A stunt double who plays roof-bouncing ninjas before the lead steps in for the closeup is stuck in a family/mob triangle in Vivian Qu’s occasionally silly thriller

Vivian Qu is the Chinese film-maker who has directed three features and also produced the noir drama Black Coal, Thin Ice which in 2014 won Berlin’s Golden Bear. Now she brings this crime melodrama to Berlin, an engaging if tonally uncertain high-wire adventure that satirises China’s hopeless addiction to gangster capitalism. It is also acidly unsentimental about the bread-and-circuses escapism of the country’s booming film and TV industry with all its period-costume wuxia nostalgia. It’s an appealing film, though it contains some strangely broad comedy and is also, in a couple of violent moments, a bit naive about exactly how easy it is for a young woman physically to fight off a big strong guy.

Above all, Qu gives us a rather amazing set-piece scene on the set of a wire-fu action movie, a scene that feels real in a way that the rest of the film really doesn’t, for all that it is watchable. Fang Di (Wen Qi) is a tough woman employed as a stunt double on a movie set, playing the black clad, sword-wielding ninja bouncing over terracotta rooftops and whizzing through the air in long shot. For the closeup, the preening star in the same outfit steps in while Fang Di staggers over to get a coffee at the craft table. The work is exhausting and dangerous and Fang Di is doing it to pay off her family debts to mob matriarch Madame Wang.

The actor’s book Freckleface Strawberry is on a list of library books suspended for a ‘compliance review’ after a presidential executive order

Julianne Moore has said it is a “great shock” to learn that one of her books had been “banned by the Trump Administration” from schools serving the children of US military personnel and civilian defence employees.

The Boogie Nights and Mary & George star wrote that she was “truly saddened” by the news in an Instagram post on Sunday.

O2 Academy, Leeds
The Stargazing streaming sensation gives his young fans what they want, but there’s evidently more to him than earworm singalongs

At 26 years of age, Luton singer-songwriter Myles Smith is a seemingly overnight sensation that isn’t. He spent his teens on the open mic circuit and first broke ground during the pandemic when his TikTok covers went viral, before last year’s Stargazing notched up over half a billion streams on Spotify. No surprise, then, that his first UK tour of biggish venues feels like a victory lap at times. His youngish crowd don’t just film Smith singing the songs that have been released already, but film themselves singing along with them. In fairness, this is exactly the kind of atmosphere Smith’s pop-folk anthems are designed to create. With many of them clearly influenced by big hitters such as Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, Coldplay and Mumford & Sons, this year’s Brits Rising Star award winner is certainly not aiming for the fringes. Every other chorus is laden with “ohh-ohhs”… or, for variety, some “ohh-ohh-ohhs” as well.

However, the Nottingham University sociology graduate seems to have more in his locker than being a cheery song-and-dance man. A gentle reggae lilt occasionally reflects his Jamaican heritage, the soulfully anthemic Little By Little showcases the affecting tremor in his voice, and his emotional frisson and hint of vulnerability elevates his material above the blandly formulaic. When a story looks like being drowned out in audience chatter, he respectfully but firmly requests that people stay quiet enough for him to deliver the emotional introduction to My First Heartbreak, a beautifully raw acoustic song about growing up with an absent father.

Recordings of fighters’ wiretapped phone calls are juxtaposed with images of wartime destruction in Oksana Karpovych’s compelling war documentary

Vietnam saw the advent of the visible war, documented by TV cameras; but the Russia-Ukraine war perhaps represents the moment we also get a fully audible one. With two relatively affluent belligerents involved, mobile phone coverage is ubiquitous on both the civilian and soldier sides. Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin’s warping effect on his people and the psychology of power.

“A Russian is not a Russian if they don’t steal something,” jokes one woman when she hears her brave boy has looted some makeup for her. Set against the shots of ransacked living rooms, wrecked petrol stations and dimly lit bomb shelters, such casual banter hammers home a chilling normalisation of imperialism and aggression – which comes with varying justifications. There is the standard dehumanisation: that the “khokhols” (a derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians) deserve it. Many parrot Putin’s line that the special military operation is fighting fascists. Or, in some troops’ amazement at Ukrainian ice-cream and abundant livestock, we glimpse an economic envy that lets such lies slip down more easily.