Packed with both complicated love affairs and terribly poignant second world war scenes, it adds up to fervent television indeed

A double-episode showcase of prestige TV has now become commonplace at film festivals. It’s a bit disconcerting to stop watching two-fifths of the way in, but for those wondering if this dilutes or betrays the great cause of the big screen – well, it was good enough for David Lynch. Justin Kurzel’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North has now come to Berlin, a big, bold, complicatedly sensual epic of wartime anguish and personal reckoning, adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from the Booker prize winning bestseller by Richard Flanagan.

The story operates in three phases: before, during and after the second world war. Jacob Elordi is Dorrigo Evans, an Australian medical student about to ship out, engaged to a beautiful woman from a wealthy family – but he has a passionate affair with Amy (Odessa Young), the younger second wife of his uncle Keith (Simon Baker).

The Parasite director delivers an intriguing yet baffling sci-fi epic, featuring panto gnashing bad guys played by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette

The Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho has delivered his first movie since the Oscar-winning Parasite six years ago, and it’s a great, big, slightly soft-edged sci-fi-fantasy. Adapted by Bong from Edward Ashton’s novel, it stars Robert Pattinson as a bio-clone menial worker of the future, condemned to eternal life, or eternal death, being repeatedly killed in the service of a space-exploration corporation, doing fatally dangerous jobs and then reincarnated.

It’s a broad-brush futurist satire on the theme of Elon Musk-type tech bros who say that whining about the environment is for libtards because we’re all shooting off for space really soon, where there have to be viable planets somewhere, and any current alien inhabitants are expendable — as indeed are the working humans who are getting us out to new worlds.

Mickey 17 is something in the style of his Snowpiercer (2013) or Okja (2017) and Bong’s “creature feature” reflex is an extravagant style that’s been enjoyable in the past. Mickey 17 is visually spectacular with some very sharp, angular moments of pathos and horror — maybe inevitably, these come in the first act when the bizarrely shocking premise is established and before the story grinds more sympathetically into gear. But at two hours and 17 minutes, this is a baggy and sometimes loose film whose narrative tendons are a bit slack sometimes; the goofy comedy with its panto-villain turns from Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette sometimes makes it look — not unpleasantly, in fact — like a kids TV special.

Pattinson himself plays Mickey Barnes, a hapless loser who owes money to a terrifying loan sharks, along with his equally rackety business partner Timo (Steven Yeun). To escape these goons, Mickey and Timo sign on for a dangerous interplanetary expedition masterminded by a creepy populist-plutocrat with shiny teeth and slicked-back hair: Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) and his lady wife Ylfa (Toni Collette); their presence reminds us of Bong’s apparent interest in Roald Dahl.

The leftwing political commentator on gen Z’s disillusionment with democracy, why she’s a ‘Mantel stan’ and the moral panic behind her first book

Ash Sarkar, 32, is a journalist and political commentator. She grew up in north London and is a contributing editor at the leftwing website Novara Media . A regular pundit on TV and radio, she made waves with a viral 2018 appearance on ITV’s Good Morning Britain , where she clashed with Piers Morgan, telling him: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot.” Her first book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War (Bloomsbury), is a lively analysis of how the ruling classes purposefully misdirect political blame by stoking the fear that minorities are working to oppress the majority.

What does “minority rule” mean to you?
I realised that every moral panic – whether it was trans rights, BLM [Black Lives Matter], Extinction Rebellion – was 1,000 doors opening on to the same place. The story was: here are these minorities who want to tell you how to live. But at the same time, I believe society is governed by minority rule – oligarchic power, corporate power, the way in which electoral systems devalue the votes of people who live in densely populated areas. So minority rule describes both this moral panic and the true state of affairs.

This time the hit TV series features Thailand’s homegrown K-pop sensation, Lisa, and local beauty spots. The country’s tourism industry is getting ready for a boost

Geeratiya Aunjarorn, like many ­people in Thailand, didn’t know much about The White Lotus , the series that has gripped audiences in the US and UK, until early last year. But when it was announced that ­season three would not only be filmed in her country, but would also ­feature one of Thailand’s most famous pop stars, Lalisa Manobal – better known ­simply as Lisa – Geeratiya and legions of other fans have followed the ­filming closely.

Over the past year, photos of the crew filming on the tourist islands of Phuket and Samui have gone viral across Lisa fan pages, and hashtags speculated on the kind of character the singer, from the K pop group Blackpink, might play. A premiere was held in Bangkok on Friday night and ­season three will be released on Sunday in the US and on Mondaytomorrow in the UK.

A Lithuanian gay romance that will move you to tears; Nick Wallis continues his dogged coverage of the Post Office inquiry; and it’s early days for Sara Cox and Clare Hamilton’s new parenting podcast

Coming Out Radio Atlas
The Great Post Office Trial Radio 4/BBC Sounds
The Teen Commandments Sara Cox

By far the most moving and absorbing piece of audio I heard last week was on Radio Atlas, the website that showcases excellent non-English-speaking audio documentaries. Before I get to the programme itself, I feel Radio Atlas may need a reintroduction (I just checked, and I first wrote about it in 2016 ). Set up and run by Falling Tree ’s Eleanor McDowall, it finds the best audio pieces from around the world and gives them a beautiful translation into English that appears on your screen, each word timed perfectly to those spoken, so that you’re not rushing ahead or catching up. It does mean, of course, that you have to look at your phone when you’re listening (unless you speak the language), but that’s good. These shows need your undivided attention.

A host of Saturday Night Live cast members and music stars hit New York on Valentine’s Day for a mammoth 50th anniversary concert

It seems like a daunting task, to sum up 50 years of music in one night. But when you harbor its cultural cachet, the respect artists have for Saturday Night Live and its stunningly expansive rolodex, as well as the shear production power of both SNL honcho Lorne Michaels and producer Mark Ronson, the result is a three-hour-plus extravaganza to rival even the starriest, most packed Grammys, Oscars or its ilk.

Coming in from New York’s bitter chill on Valentine’s night, the chosen venue was Radio City Music Hall, a perfect home considering its Rockefeller Center confines are not only a hop, skip and a jump from SNL’s Studio 8H at nearby NBC Studios. Its art deco space serves as the epitome of New York City: a tourist mecca beloved by hardscrabble locals. So it seemed natural that the Rockettes and SNL would both grace its hallowed stage at one time.

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This nightingale-inspired collaboration is a perfect fit for the singer-songwriter and the kora virtuoso

Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko and British Italian songwriter Piers Faccini are both inveterate collaborators (and labelmates) who have previously guested on each other’s records. Here they deliver a full-blown album as a duo, taking the migration of nightingales as their inspiration and following one’s calling as their theme. It’s a gentle, captivating work, its poetic songs soaked in nature imagery and beautifully married to Sissoko’s intricate, dazzling playing. Also present here and there is cellist Vincent Ségal, with further guests on the lute-like ngoni and guembri weaving subtly through the backing.

Faccini’s high, reedy vocals are not the sturdiest, but he’s in robust form here. The songs are packed with longing, whether the pull of another country, a return home or a lost love. One Half of a Dream is impatient to go, blown along by Sissoko’s gusting kora, while Mournful Moon and North and South are steeped in desert blues. A different mood comes with Ninna Nanna, an Italian folk song that’s the only piece not in English, its staccato lyrics leavened by Ségal’s cello. Borne on the Wind is an ode to the wind under bird’s wing that doubles as a paean to lost love – “the light of her song long gone”. Gorgeous stuff.

In this Oscar-nominated tragicomedy, Sarah Snook is the voice of a loner whose relentless misfortune is tempered only by a bond with her pet snails

Mention stop-motion animation and the first thing that comes to mind is likely to be the amiable claymation creations of Bristol’s Aardman studio. But in fact, perhaps more than any other form of animation, stop-motion is a medium that lends itself to darker, more violent themes: the macabre sentient tendrils of Jan Svankmajer’s Little Otik ; the haunted gothic fairytales dreamed up in the imagination of Tim Burton; the chilling pre-teen horror of Coraline . Add to this list the singular vision of Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot ( Mary and Max , the Oscar-winning short Harv ie Krumpet ), whose tragicomic tales of loneliness, eccentricity and outsider status are told in a glum colour palette that evokes black mould, peeling wallpaper and crushed dreams.

Elliot’s latest, the multi-award-winning, Oscar-nominated Memoir of a Snail , is archetypal Elliot. The sorry tale of a melancholic woman named Grace Pudel (voiced with world-weary resignation by Succession ’s Sarah Snook), the film is a catalogue of misfortune. Grace’s mother dies in childbirth; she and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are orphaned when their depressive, alcoholic father succumbs to his sleep apnoea. And then things get really bad. Grace, like the pet snails she counts among her closest friends, just wants to crawl into her shell and hide from the world.

In UK and Irish cinemas

The writer and actor on his secret food obsession, Lessons in Chemistry on TV and the best place in London for a nap

The actor and writer Malachi Kirby was born in London in 1989. He enrolled in a drama group at the Battersea Arts Centre aged 14 and later attended London’s Identity School of Acting. He was shortlisted for outstanding newcomer at the 2011 Evening Standard theatre awards, for Mogadishu . On TV he has appeared in the 2016 remake of Roots , Black Mirror , and as Darcus Howe in Steve McQueen’s Mangrove ; his film work includes Boiling Point and Wicked Little Letters . Kirby, who lives on the outskirts of London, stars as Hezekiah Moscow in the Disney+ series A Thousand Blows , set in the world of illegal boxing in the Victorian East End. It starts on 21 February.