This gloriously absurd Prague-set tale, in which one woman is split into seven selves, is a wild ride

How many selves do we house? Thousands, thought Virginia Woolf. Are they one and the same? Not according to the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, whose alter egos – writers just like him – came with their own distinct names, biographies, mindsets and hot takes on the world. Born of him yet operating independently, he called them “heteronyms”. Are our selves on the same team? You wish, Helen Oyeyemi might say, holding up her new novel, which features a protagonist split seven ways, one self for each day of the week, and no two ever in full agreement.

Oyeyemi made her debut in 2005 with The Icarus Girl, the story of eight-year-old Jessamy, troubled and imaginative daughter of a Nigerian mother and British father, whose mysterious playmate, a girl named TillyTilly, is possibly her own destructive alter ego. A New New Me may at first glance seem like a thematic cousin; tonally, however, it belongs with Oyeyemi’s more recent works: playful, self-aware tales that revel in the hijinks of storytelling.

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A juicy period drama about the French queen ups the ante with scheming and backstabbing. Plus: the last-ever double bill of Man Like Mobeen. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
The second season of this period drama continues to deliver palace gossip, backstabbing, political scheming, a rumbling revolt … and magnificent costumes. It’s spring 1784 and the “affair of the necklace” scandal is being hatched to try to bring down Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Meanwhile, people are using the queen’s melancholy against her and the court is putting on a comic play – with serious consequences. Hollie Richardson

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A show full of deities, snakes and shrines puts three ancient faiths in the spotlight. Our writer seeks out its inspiration in the bustling metropolis of Mumbai

It’s the eyes that stay with you – piercing black discs that seem to vibrate against the intense orange of a goddess’s skin. The rest is a blur of silver, yellow and saffron as temple attendants encourage you to move, clockwise, around the murti, or sacred statue. For a moment it’s as if this shrine is the one fixed point in the whole city.

The goddess in question is Mumba, the patron of Mumbai, her temple at the beating heart of one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. A few streets to the east is the green and white splendour of Minara mosque. To the north is the intricately carved Jain temple of Parshwanath. All around is the noise and commerce of a place that Indians regard as their version of New York and LA combined – “the city of dreams”. Yet, far from being a godless metropolis, this is a place where religion is very much a going concern.

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This college comedy follows a heart throb desperately trying to be ‘totally not gay’. But beneath the razor sharp jokes is a schmaltzy show that tugs at the heartstrings

In the pandemic, Benito Skinner became internet famous for his camply unhinged impressions of celebrities, reality stars and LA types: his roster includes a devil-worshipping Kris Jenner, Billie Eilish at the beach and a twitching, gurgling Timothée Chalamet. By then, the comedian had been uploading videos for years. A clip from 2019 titled Live Footage of Me in the Closet sees Skinner comb his fringe forward, don an Abercrombie tee and travel back to the late 00s to resurrect his teenage self, a boy denying his love for Gossip Girl while repeatedly insisting he’s “not gay” until the screen erupts into a manic collage of Lady Gaga dance routines, Google results for “daniel radcliffe equus naked” and the iTunes page for Glee: The Music, Volume 1.

Six years on, Skinner is reprising the role. Overcompensating, an eight-part Prime Video comedy drama, begins with a similarly unconvincing claim. “Hey, what’s up everybody. I’m Benny, I love pussy,” our hero tells his reflection, an assertion undermined by flashbacks of furtive childhood rewinds of George of the Jungle, plus more recent footage of him leaning back in disgust from his beautiful prom date. The show goes on to fictionalise Skinner’s first year at university, a time spent desperately trying to convince himself and others that he was totally not gay .

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Cannes film festival
Drawn from a suppressed story by gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, Sergei Loznitsa’s haunting film unravels a terrifying parable of bureaucratic evil

An icy chill of fear and justified paranoia radiates from this starkly austere and gripping movie from Sergei Loznitsa, set in Stalin’s Russia of the late 30s and based on a story by the dissident author and scientist Georgy Demidov, who was held in the gulag for 14 years during the second world war and harassed by the state until his death in the late 1980s.

The resulting movie, with its slow, extended scenes from single camera positions, mimics the zombie existence of the Soviet state and allows a terrible anxiety to accumulate: it is about a malign bureaucracy which protects and replicates itself by infecting those who challenge it with a bacillus of guilt. There is something of Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and also – with the appearance of two strangely grinning, singing men in a railway carriage – Kafka’s The Castle.

Loznitsa moreover allows us also to register that the wretched political prisoner of his tale is a veteran of Stalin’s brutal battle to suppress the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura. And given the nightmarish claustrophobia and disorientation in the scenes in cells, official corridors, staircases and government antechambers, there is maybe a filmic footnote in the fact that Demidov worked for the scientist Lev Landau, the subject of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s huge and deeply pessimistic multi-movie installation project Dau in 2020.

The first prosecutor of the title is Kornyev, played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, an idealistic young lawyer, given a startlingly early promotion to a state prosecutor role – his beardless youth fascinates and irritates the grizzled old time-servers with whom he comes into contact.

He has received a bizarre “letter” from Stepniak (Aleksandr Fillipenko) an ageing and desperately ill high security prisoner in Bryansk – written in blood on a piece of torn cardboard (which has escaped the bonfire that prison authorities make of protest letters like these). The letter alleges that the security services, the NKVD, are without reference to the rule of law, using the prisons and judicial system to torture and murder an entire older generation of party veterans like him, to bring in a fanatically loyal but callow and incompetent cohort of Stalin loyalists.

The prison authorities make the politely persistent Kornyev wait hours before being allowed to visit Stepniak in his cell, transparently hoping he will just give up and go away – Loznitsa shows this weaponised inertia is the traditional official approach to petitioners everywhere in the Soviet Union.

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We're about to enter a new era for DC Studios with the July release of Superman , writer/director James Gunn's fresh take on one of the most iconic superheroes. And after months of tantalizing teases, we finally have the first official trailer, featuring a bickering Clark Kent and Lois Lane, plenty of action, villains being villains, kaiju , and of course, our favorite flying super-pup, Krypto.

As previously reported , Gunn has described his take as less of an origin story and more of a journey, with Superman struggling to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage and aristocratic origins with his small-town adoptive human family. Gunn tapped David Corenswet to play Clark Kent/Superman at 25, a bit more established than the young cub reporter of Smallville , for instance. Rachel Brosnahan plays Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo plays Jimmy Olsen, and Nicholas Hoult is arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. Luthor's sidekicks are played by Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher and Terence Rosemore as Otis.

The cast also includes Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (sporting a disastrous bowl haircut); Anthony Carrigan as Rex Mason/Metamorpho, who can transmute elements in his body to change forms; Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl; Edi Gathegi as Michael Holt/Mister Terrific, an inventor turned superhero; Maria Gabriela de Faria as Angela Spica/The Engineer, whose abilities stem from embedded nanotechnology; and Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell as Clark's parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, respectively. We'll also see Frank Grillo reprise his role as Rick Flag Sr. from the animated series Creature Commandos ; Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord; and Milly Alcock as Superman's cousin, Kara Zor-El/Supergirl.

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Cruise does things his way in this eighth and last Mission: Impossible, as his maverick agent Ethan Hunt takes on the ultimate in AI evil

Here it is: the eighth and final film (for now) in the spectacular Mission: Impossible action-thriller franchise, which manifests itself like the last segment jettisoned from some impossibly futurist Apollo spacecraft, which then carries on ionospherically upwards in a fireball as Tom Cruise ascends to a state beyond stardom, beyond IP. And with this film’s anti-AI and internet-sceptic message, and the gobsmacking final aerial set piece, Cruise is repeating his demand for the echt big-screen experience. He is of course doing his own superhuman stunts – for the same reason, as he himself once memorably put it, that Gene Kelly did all his own dancing.

Final Reckoning is a new and ultimate challenge (actually the second half of the challenge from the previous film) which takes Cruise’s buff and resourceful IMF leader Ethan Hunt on one last maverick, deniable mission to exasperate and yet overawe his stuffed-shirt superiors at Washington and Langley. And what might that be? To save the world of course, like all the other missions.

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Daré accepted the £10,000 prize for her latest novel, And So I Roar, the follow-up to her bestselling debut The Girl with the Louding Voice

Nigerian writer Abi Daré has won the inaugural Climate fiction prize for her novel And So I Roar, the follow-up to her bestselling debut The Girl with the Louding Voice.

Daré was announced as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening.

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Ryan Coogler is riding high as his new film Sinners lights up the box office , and he's got another major TV project waiting in the wings: the Marvel limited series Ironheart . And the studio has dropped a shiny new trailer ahead of the show's June release. The six-episode series stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, aka the titular Ironheart, a teen tech genius who is a protégé of Tony Stark in the comics. It's the final TV series in Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Five.

(Some spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever below.)

The series was first announced in December 2020 and originally slated for a 2023 release. But then Marvel began rethinking its long-term strategy and decided to scale back on content to counter suggestions of market saturation, and Ironheart was delayed until now. It has been described as "a crime show with an Iron Man twist at the center," based on footage revealed at 2024's D23 convention.

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