Director Mahdi Fleifel’s tale of displacement, desperation and the lengths one man will go to survive makes for suspenseful, melancholic viewing

There are strong performances and storytelling energy in this fiction feature debut from Danish-Palestinian film-maker Mahdi Fleifel, a graduate of the UK’s National Film and Television School, known for his 2012 documentary A World Not Ours , about the Lebanese refugee camp where he was born. To a Land Unknown is a drama-thriller with real suspense, but also a melancholy showcase for Mahmoud Darwish ’s poem Praise for the High Shadow.

The setting is modern-day Athens, where Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) is a watchful Palestinian refugee, with enough money from the Greek state to eat and charge his phone, drifting on the margins of crime and dreaming of escaping to Germany with the wife and son he left behind in Lebanon. Bakri’s excellent performance shows Chatila to be smart, personable, manipulative and ruthless, always on the lookout for ways to get money for a fake passport. He uses his pal Reda (Aram Sabbah), a fellow Palestinian refugee, in scams to rob people, and also relies on the money that Reda makes cottaging with Athenian guys; he is disgusted by consensual sex work, but stealing old ladies’ handbags is quite all right. He is also casually racist towards Greeks because they are not like the proper white northern Europeans he longs to live among in Germany, an attitude which betrays a strange self-hate: “The Greeks … they look like us Arabs.”

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Renée Zellweger looks as if she’s thinking of something else in weird fourquel that sees our heroine choosing between new suitors Leo Woodall and Chiwetel Ejiofor

The last Bridget Jones film – the second sequel, about Bridget having a baby – executed the daring athletic leap of jumping the shark and then jumping back. There were some tired novelties but, by virtue of its conscientiously maintained stream of likable gags, it leapt back into our hearts and BJ3 seemed a decent way to sign off the franchise and remember Helen Fielding’s inspired creation. But though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

This is a fourquel in the same unhappy tradition as Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. The jokes have been dialled down to accommodate a contrived and unconvincingly mature “weepie” component but the film becomes sad in the wrong way. The actors are mostly going through the motions, there is so little chemistry between each of the two lead pairings they resemble a panda being forced to mate with a flamingo, and Renée Zellweger’s performance is starting to look eccentric.

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The 1975 adaptation of Ira Levin’s influential sci-fi thriller has its share of unnerving moments but its brainwashed housewives concept is still in search of a better vehicle

The funniest running joke in The Stepford Wives, a horror/satire about a village teeming with glamorous homemakers with pristine kitchens and serene grins, is that the men are all wildly overmatched. They’re like the nerds who got the prom queens, except even nerds have an expected level of intelligence and personality, however socially awkward they might appear. These drips are better understood as nondescript: a few of them are balding and another has a speech impediment, but they are united mostly in feeling entitled to the docile beauty their junior executive salaries should afford them. When two women new to town overhear a Stepford wife in the throes of passion – “You’re the king, Frank!” – they know something’s up.

Adapted from novelist Ira Levin’s follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives has enjoyed a robust cultural shelf-life in the 50 years since the original 1975 version, but it’s always been more potent as an idea than a work of art in any form. (The less said about the 2004 adaptation, a noxious camp comedy starring Nicole Kidman, the better.) It was a direct influence on the brilliant Jordan Peele horror-comedy Get Out and the not-so-brilliant Olivia Wilde thriller Don’t Worry Darling, which each take place in “idyllic” communities founded on sinister social engineering. Referring to someone as a “Stepford wife” has become a convenient shorthand for compliant women who puts the needs of men above their own desires and ambitions. (Amy Dunne in Gone Girl referred to such regressive types in her “Cool Girl” speech.)

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The HHhH author’s entertaining whodunnit is stuffed with real-life artists behaving badly

Florence, 1557. A painter is murdered with a hammer blow to the head and a chisel to the heart. It looks as though someone has painted over a section of the frescoes he has been labouring on for years at the church of San Lorenzo. But who could have killed old Jacopo da Pontormo, and why?

So begins this historical epistolary detective novel, stuffed with real-life Renaissance artists behaving badly. Investigating the murder at the behest of the duke, Cosimo de’ Medici, is Giorgio Vasari, painter and author of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Not exempt from suspicion is Agnolo Bronzino, commissioned here (as in fact) to finish his deceased master’s frescoes, since lost. In their time they drew comparisons to the Sistine Chapel, and indeed one of Vasari’s penpals is the great Michelangelo himself, resentful at being stuck in Rome building the dome of St Peter’s. “These are cruel times, my friend, for the defenders of art and beauty,” Michelangelo writes – as they always have been and shall remain.

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The producer, who has died following a period of ill health, made thrillingly imaginative beats, but just as impressive was his ability to draw together the British bass scene

• News: Acclaimed British grime producer Terror Danjah has died

It’s not entirely surprising to hear the news of Terror Danjah’s death , given he had been very unwell since suffering a stroke in 2019. But it still hits just as hard, and leaves a gaping absence in British music culture. Born Rodney Pryce, he was not only a foundational figure in grime at the turn of the millennium, but throughout his prolific career remained a great enthusiast, evangelist, musical explorer and connector of people.

He was one of the first grime producers to work with singers, the first to have his instrumentals released in album form, and reached beyond the sometimes insular scene, joining dots into other areas of bass and club music, and helping grime itself to achieve maturity and longevity. He was also crucial in documenting the culture, and any conversation with him never stuck to music – his generally salacious anecdotes were packed with detail of how X was Y’s cousin or went to school with Z, all precisely located on a detailed mental map of record shops, clubs and pirate station studios, and filling in inter-generational detail. So hilariously gossipy were his stories, it could often feel like an episode of grimey EastEnders, but it also brought the music culture vividly to life.

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Sixteen authors are in contention for the £30,000 prize launched last year to redress the gender imbalance in nonfiction awards in the UK

The Buffalo Stance singer Neneh Cherry, historian Anne Applebaum and Labour MP Yuan Yang are among those longlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction.

16 authors, 11 of whom are British, are in contention for this year’s £30,000 prize, which was launched last year to redress the gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes in the UK.

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This account of humanity’s magical yet toxic relationship with rocks and minerals is filled with glittering details

One summer, a couple of millennia ago, the 14-year-old high priest of a meteor-worshiping cult in Syria learned that his cousin, Emperor Caracalla of Rome, had died and that he was to be installed in his place. The teenage priest – later known as Emperor Elagabalus – brought his cult’s sacred stone with him to the capital, where he gave it a goddess for a bride, built it an enormous temple on the Palatine Hill, and ordered Romans to worship it above all other deities. His rule was brief. After four wild years, he was beheaded by his own soldiers and his body was dumped in a sewer. As for the stone, its final resting place is unknown.

Rocks, minerals, metals – these materials from the depths of the Earth and from distant space – have inspired reverence and horror, wonder and greed. They have power over us, and they give us power. It’s likely that the first murderer used a rock. So did the first artist. Our connection with the mineral world is bone deep.

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The photographer was a key figure on New York’s downtown scene – but, as a new exhibition shows, his later works dealt with the great losses of the Aids crisis

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Susanna Cappellaro’s intimate documentary follows her spouse as he gets a body implant, the process serving to demonstrate the self absorption behind it

A cheeky programming choice for February, when screens are awash with romance, this documentary essentially observes a marriage bleeding out via so many tiny cuts that even the protagonists are barely aware of what’s going on. Susanna Cappellaro, making her directing debut, is better known as an actor who has appeared in films by Tim Burton and Peter Strickland. When she turns the camera on herself, her natural warmth, humour and intelligence come across well. That makes her a welcome counterpoint to her prickly husband Scott Cohen, an American music industry executive who decides to have a compass attached to his body permanently so that a little haptic buzz will always tell him which way is true north.

Scott sees this as his chance to become a kind of cyborg with a new sixth sense few others on the planet have. He is a much more circumspect, guarded character than his wife but by slow degrees one starts to sense that he is a raging narcissist, much like certain kinds of wealthy executives who want to have brain chips or life-extending surgeries because just getting a piercing or a tattoo isn’t cool any more. I confess that as the film went on I came to loathe Scott and longed for Susanna to dump him because clearly she could do a lot better.

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