Danish film-maker made public his condition in 2022, aged 66

Danish film-maker Lars von Trier, who has Parkinson’s disease, has been admitted to a care centre, his production company said on Wednesday.

One of the biggest names in contemporary auteur cinema, Von Trier has directed more than 14 feature films, often disturbing and violent.

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Courtauld Gallery, London
Is there an ulterior motive to this drearily grand exhibition of paintings borrowed from a Swiss collection? Could it be to show how vastly superior the Courtauld’s own works are?

The bland title of this show reads a bit like a confession, in terms of how little it has to say. Goya to Impressionism – so? Why do we need to see the troubled Spanish painter of war and witchcraft juxtaposed with soft scenes by Renoir and Sisley? No reason, except they all belong to a collection whose home in Winterthur, Switzerland, is closed for renovation, meaning the Courtauld can borrow them as a job lot. The trouble is that the Oskar Reinhart Collection is too similar to the Courtauld’s own to be an overly exciting proposition.

Both hoards were gathered in the early-20th century by wealthy private collectors with a penchant for French art of the late 1800s, yet by and large Samuel Courtauld got the best stuff. Reinhart’s Manets are minor compared with the dazzling masterpieces owned by the Courtauld. This is also true of Renoir. The Courtauld owns La Loge, Renoir’s scintillating early painting of modern love, but Reinhart’s row of soppy, second-rate Renoirs live down to every stereotype of this big impressionist softy.

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Ford has gravitas as the new president and Anthony Mackie makes a charismatic captain, but this is a tired and uninspired dollop of content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe

‘Brave” it might be, but there’s nothing all that “new” about the world revealed in this latest tired and uninspired dollop of content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s perhaps notable for Harrison Ford playing a US president for the first time since Air Force One in 1997, but now with secret health worries and liable to succumb to a terrifying rage which turns him into Red Hulk (Red State Hulk?) who is the ultimate disruptor, putting his great big red fist through the West Wing.

A novelty there, maybe, though he conforms to the time-honoured Hulk tradition of somehow having miraculously stretchy trousers so that the Red Hulk genitals are not exposed. As for the apparent Maga implications, Mr Ford has himself denied them, and the MCU is as cautiously apolitical as ever, though Ford’s character is certainly keener on international cooperation than the current real-life incumbent.

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She went stratospheric in the hit ad agency show, but wishes it had happened 10 years earlier. As Christina Hendricks plays a Hollywood mogul, she talks about the whirlwind of fame – and what happens when it stops

It would be too much of a spoiler to reveal the dark secret at the heart of the new comedy drama Small Town, Big Story, but I can say that it’s huge, weird and unbelievable. In the six-part show, Christina Hendricks plays Wendy Patterson, a Los Angeles TV producer who is back in her small home town in Ireland to shoot a big Hollywood production. She has returned, successful and glossy, to the place where that weird experience changed her life – not least because nobody believed her and she was laughed out of town.

Hendricks plays Wendy spiky and tough. “She’s got a real defence mechanism,” she says. “Something extraordinary happened to her and no one has ever believed her. She’s built up a wall, not letting people get too close, because then she’d have to reveal this big secret that, again, they are not going to believe.”

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I found the history of the world there, told through the medium of pots. The orgy of earthenware was baffling

Having lived in London since 1986, it was to my shame and discredit that I’d never been to the British Museum. I was not proud of the fact. This wasn’t a one-man boycott over the Parthenon marbles or anything like that. I’d just never got round to it. And this wasn’t good enough. So last week, at the ripe old age of nearly 58, I paid the British Museum a visit.

“Ah, Mr Chiles,” exclaimed no one when I walked in, “about time!” But there must have been something trepidatious about me, because a nice chap asked if I needed any help. I stammered something about looking for room 41. A friend had told me room 41 was special, so it seemed as good a place as any to start. This room tells the story of Europe from AD300. Which was amazing and all that, except it was a story told mainly through the medium of pots. Urns, pots and assorted drinking vessels of all shapes and sizes. I moved from room 41 to other rooms, going backwards and forwards in time and to all points of the compass, and found yet more pots, urns and drinking vessels. Ornate pots, rustic pots, arty pots, functional pots.

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A last-minute gig at the Bowery Ballroom saw the star play to a smaller crowd than usual, with stories interspersed among classic Beatles and Wings hits

Yesterday, an announcement went out at noon: Paul McCartney would be playing a surprise pop-up show in New York City, tonight . Bear in mind, the last he played in the area, in June 2022, was at the nearby MetLife Stadium with its 82,000 capacity. But for this special engagement, just 575 people would come together to watch the music icon at the comparatively minuscule Bowery Ballroom.

Naturally, tickets disappeared immediately, with stories of hopeful attenders physically running (yes, running!) down to the venue for box office-only sales. And lest you think Macca would use the opportunity to line his coffers, think again: tickets were sold for just $50 a pop, the price of a beer and a snack at most concerts.

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‘Guðjón was kind of angry that day. He was looking for a mink that had been killing his eider ducks. This image opened doors for him, leading to advert and movie work’

I first met Guðjón Þorsteinsson through my work as a photographer for the Icelandic daily newspaper Morgunblaðið. He and his older brother, Óskar, ran a farm above the peninsula of Dyrhólaey, a couple of hours’ drive from Reykjavík. A raging storm had broken lots of power lines so the farm had no electricity. I’d heard the brothers were having to milk their cows by hand and thought I might be able to get a good picture for the paper.

When Guðjón opened the door, he just said: “What do you want?” He wasn’t very friendly, though I sensed this was an act. He invited me in for coffee and I ended up getting the shots I wanted, but after they ran in the paper, someone complained that the cows looked dirty and they were taken away. Feeling it was my fault, I went back to the farm to apologise. Guðjón said: “I’m glad – I didn’t want to milk them anyway.”

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard has reached 1.5 million gamers around the world – yet its developers have labelled it a disappointment. With unfair expectations, it’s the niche and left-field titles that will suffer

Back in 2013, having bought the series from Eidos, Square Enix released a reboot of the hit 1990s action game Tomb Raider starring a significantly less objectified Lara Croft. I loved that game , despite a quasi-assault scene near the beginning that I would later come to view as a bit icky, and I wasn’t the only one – it was extremely well received, selling 3.4m copies in its first month alone. Then Square Enix came out and called it a disappointment .

Sales did not meet the publisher’s expectations, apparently, which raises the question: what were the expectations? Was it supposed to sell 5m in one month ? If a book sells 10,000 copies in a week it’s considered a bestseller. Even at the height of its popularity in the 90s, no Tomb Raider game ever sold more than a few million. Square Enix’s expectations were clearly unrealistic. It wouldn’t be the last time; in a 2016 interview with Hajime Tabata, Final Fantasy XV’s director, he told me that game needed to sell 10m to succeed.

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Orange Tree theatre, London
There are laugh-aloud gags and spiky dialogue as Roger Allam and Peter Forbes star in Howard Brenton’s play about the 1942 encounter

In the 1970s, Howard Brenton wrote The Churchill Play, provoking furious newspaper pieces and a testy TV encounter with Melvyn Bragg. In a future (1984) totalitarian Britain, internees at the Churchill internment camp staged a play in which the second world war leader rose from lying in state to endure insults including: “People won the war. He just got pissed with Stalin.”

That reference was to peace conferences from 1943-45, also including President Roosevelt. But, five decades on, Brenton has written about a lesser-known, frequently inebriated August 1942 encounter between the British and Russian leaders at a time when, as Churchill in Moscow presents it, each ally feared the other was about to lose to Hitler.

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