Glass Mask theatre, Dublin
Simon Stephens’s update of Franz Kroetz’s stark 1972 play sees butcher Charlie and welder Victor amid knives and flanks of meat, the threat of violence palpable

In the tiny Glass Mask cafe-theatre, Charlie (Lauren Farrell) tosses strips of raw offal into a bucket. A butcher who loves her job, Charlie is entertaining a potential boyfriend, the brash welder, Victor (Rex Ryan) in her white-tiled butcher’s shop, surrounded by meat flanks and an array of knives and cleavers. This bracingly unromantic scenario was created in 1972 by Bavarian playwright and actor, Franz Xaver Kroetz, in his play Männersache , which he later expanded into Through the Leaves .

In his new version, award-winning playwright Simon Stephens brings Kroetz’s stark play closer to the present day, with blasts of post-punk on the soundtrack but no mobile phones evident in Ross Gaynor’s production. Whether it is in the sharp blades displayed on the wall in Andrew Clancy’s arrestingly clinical design, or the boozy Victor’s hollow-eyed stare into the audience, a threat of violence hovers from the start.

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Leeds Playhouse
Morgan Bailey’s one-man show explores the many lives of Eugene Bullard, but for all its cinematic flourishes, emerges as a frustratingly shadowy character study

How do you capture a whole life in an evening? It’s a question for all biographical dramas, but especially so for Imitating the Dog’s new one-man show, whose protagonist led an extraordinarily incident-packed life. Eugene Bullard was a boxer, a jazz drummer, an entertainer, a businessman, one of the first African American fighter pilots – enough material for several shows. Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, All Blood Runs Red announces itself as a dérive : a loose stroll through Bullard’s life, with detours along the way into performer and co-writer Morgan Bailey’s own experiences as an actor in Paris, where Bullard made his name.

Bailey subscribes to Jean-Luc Godard’s belief that a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Narrating his proposed movie version of Bullard’s life, he jumps back and forth in time, alighting on key moments before skipping onwards. It’s a knowing strategy that plays with the conventions of biopics and cites the vocabulary of film: cuts, closeups, exterior shots. In Tyrone Huggins’s production, this approach works well with Imitating the Dog’s trademark multimedia style, allowing for witty use of projections on to screens, objects and even Bailey’s body. The repeated film-making device of the whiteout, deployed in dramatic moments of Bullard’s life, becomes a striking metaphor for the whitewashing of history.

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Repetition mounts to unnerving auditory effect as a trapped fly makes a life-or-death bid to escape

That

It would be better not to be
that fly — the fly that sees
in stereo
what happens
that day

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In the first of our annual Oscar hustings, here why RaMell Ross’s incredibly tender film of Colson Whitehead’s novel should take the top prize

The idea of praising a film for being beautiful is understandably suspect. It’s the kind of gushing tribute paid to things that turn out to be lifeless and humourless. But RaMell Ross ’s Oscar-nominated film Nickel Boys , adapted from the novel by Colson Whitehead , really is beautiful; it creates beauty and even a kind of complex, defiant joy from generational pain and trauma caused by racism in the postwar United States. Of all the films on this mixed best picture nomination list , Nickel Boys – produced by Dede Gardner, Joslyn Barnes and Jeremy Kleiner– is the film which I’d most like to win, perhaps partly because as a film about the African American experience it for some reason isn’t in the conversation in the way Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight once was.

Gorgeously shot by Jomo Fray and designed by Nora Mendis , the film follows the fortunes of Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse, a smart young black boy in 1960s Tallahassee, Florida, who gets thrown into a brutal reform school called The Nickel Academy (based on the notorious real-life Dozier School ). This is a racist tyranny where the black kids are beaten and often killed, in which case they are secretly buried and officially described as “runaways” – and all because Elwood innocently hitched a ride in a stolen car on his way to a technical academy for which he had been recommended on account of his academic promise. A nauseous irony re-routes him to a different institution.

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Olga Chernykh’s portrait of life in war-torn Ukraine, based on home videos, examines how bonds and memories persist through trauma, loss and distance

Formally inventive and emotionally resonant, Olga Chernykh’s documentary feature debut highlights the power of cinema as a guardian of memories. Using a wealth of archival footage to act as a bridge between the past and the present, the film views the war in Ukraine through a family lens. Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 is contextualised, not as a lone event, but within a history of aggression and generational loss.

Known locally as the “City of Million Roses”, Donetsk was where Chernykh grew up in a loving family. Traces of her happy childhood – birthday celebrations, weddings, school trips – are imprinted all over Chernykh’s old home videos, yet her diaristic voiceover casts a dark shadow over these images. Since the Donbas war in 2014, parts of Donetsk are now Russian-occupied territories. Chernykh and her parents have relocated to Kyiv; her grandmother, Zoryna, chose to stay behind. Against the reality of their current separation, their moments of togetherness, which only exist on tapes and memory cards, are imbued with a painful fragility.

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Gabriel Basso says actors should ‘shut the fuck up’ and that they have no authority to publicly bestow political views

The actor who portrayed JD Vance in the Oscar-nominated film Hillbilly Elegy before the latter man became the vice-president of the US has said his fellow thespians should “shut the fuck up” rather than express their political opinions.

Gabriel Basso – now starring in the hit Netflix series The Night Agent – made those comments on a recent episode of the Great Company podcast, cutting a stark contrast with his director on Hillbelly Elegy, Ron Howard , who previously described himself as “surprised and concerned” from the campaign that ultimately left Vance a heartbeat away from the US presidency.

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Guardian photographer Sarah Lee enjoyed a night with the stars at the Bafta ceremony at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Sunday

• Baftas 2025: Conclave beats The Brutalist to best picture as Mikey Madison scoops best actress
• Full list of winners
• Baftas after-parties: Pamela Anderson, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande – in pictures

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The latest in our series where writers draw attention to their favourite good-time watches goes back to the 90s when Adam Sandler went back to the 80s

Back in the days when I first attempted to be an adult – first desk job, first flat, first live-in girlfriend – there was no such thing as streaming, catch-up, Blu-Ray, 4K, HD or even widescreen tellies. Instead, I owned a 15in Sony Trinitron TV that had taken me months to save up for on my £10-a-week school paper round – smaller than the massive one we’d rented from Currys as students – and a VHS player. The only films I owned were three ex-rental cassettes I’d bought from the local Blockbuster: There’s Something About Mary, Enemy of the State and The Wedding Singer.

Once we’d watched a bit of the terrestrial channels (I was too poor to afford Sky), my girlfriend – who was training to be a teacher – would go to bed at 10pm and I’d settle down for the night with one of my three films. My favourite was The Wedding Singer because it has it all – comedy, 80s hairdos, a great soundtrack, a farcical ending and loads of quotable lines. (“Say hi to your brother Tito”, “Once again, things that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY”, “Why don’t you write a song about it? You can call it – I got punched in the nose for sticking my face into other people’s business.”) I wasn’t alone in my passion. One bored day at work, my friend Phil emailed me a good half of the script to Dumb and Dumber he’d written from memory. “But what if he shot you in the face?”

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Her track Goodbye Horses soundtracked one of the 90s thriller’s most memorable scenes, but the singer ended up driving cabs and dying in obscurity. Now a new documentary lets her tell her story

In August 2019, the New York film-maker Eva Aridjis Fuentes embarked on a cab ride that would change her life. Though her driver sported sunglasses and a turban, Aridjis Fuentes thought she looked eerily familiar. “The driver played Neil Young’s Harvest album in its entirety; we sang Heart of Gold together. I asked if she’d ever seen Neil play. She said: ‘Oh no, my concert days are long over’. So then I asked if she’d ever seen Q Lazzarus.”

Q Lazzarus was the stage name of Diane Luckey, a singer from the 80s whose song Goodbye Horses had soundtracked Buffalo Bill’s infamous nipple-tweaking scene in The Silence of the Lambs . The track became a cult classic, covered by Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, Deftones’ Chino Moreno and MGMT among others. Q vanished in the mid-90s, with many, including friends and collaborators, believing she was dead. But Aridjis Fuentes – who regularly played Goodbye Horses at club nights – had a hunch that Luckey herself was driving this taxicab. “She looked in the rearview, said, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of her’, but abruptly changed the subject,” Aridjis Fuentes remembers. Later, though, the driver admitted: “I’m Q.”

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