Written off as ‘muses’ and denied entry to the movement, they still produced extraordinary work that is only now being appreciated. We enter a gender-breaking world of occult worship – and cats

‘Of course the women were important,” said the artist Roland Penrose in 1982, “but it was because they were our muses.” Penrose was talking to the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who was interviewing him for a book she was writing about women surrealists. “They weren’t artists,” insisted Penrose, who thought she shouldn’t even be writing about them. But Chadwick did anyway – and the result, her 1985 book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, fundamentally changed our understanding of both surrealism and female artists.

In the 40 years since, many of the women Chadwick wrote about have gained wider fame, but the past few years have seen an explosion of interest in surrealist women. Last year was the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto, which was actually two competing manifestos published by competing groups of (male) surrealists in Paris. So it’s unsurprising that we saw so much interest in the movement. But it is striking that the centennial prompted a flurry of interest in the women – who were actually excluded from those groups. Indeed, many weren’t even in Paris. Why the sudden broadening of the lens?

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No cause of death has been given for the Nasty Crew producer, who was heralded as a pioneer of grime from the early 2000s onwards

The pioneering grime artist Terror Danjah, much admired for his lush, playful and propulsive style of production, has died. A label representative confirmed the news to the Guardian via a family member, though a cause of death, and his age, have not been given.

Among those paying tribute was Kevin Martin, AKA producer the Bug, who wrote: “A fantastic producer, big hearted person and criminally underrated outside of grime circles … a positive force, sorely missed.”

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Comedian says it was ‘no longer fair’ to others in audience, after being accused of overreaction at Manchester show

Peter Kay has defended his decision to throw hecklers out of a recent gig after a backlash from audience members who accused him of overreacting.

The comedian, who is doing the last leg of his record-breaking Better Late Than Never Again! tour this month, was heckled by two rowdy audience members at the AO Arena in Manchester on Saturday.

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Two studies find the top-grossing films of 2024 were led by female protagonists as much as by men, buoyed by the success of Wicked and The Substance

Women achieved gender parity on the big screen in 2024 for the first time in the US, according to two new studies.

Out of the 100 top-grossing films of last year, women led 42% of the films, the same percentage as their male counterparts, with 16% led by ensembles. This was according to Dr Martha Lauzen’s annual It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World report. Lauzen said that 2024 “offered one of the richest slates of films featuring female protagonists in recent memory”.

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Before his blockbuster days, James Gunn made this crass, nasty, and very R-rated superhero flick starring Rainn Wilson as a vengeful vigilante

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With James Gunn directing the new Superman flick, perhaps now is a good time to revisit Super, his dark take on the crime-fighting genre. Released in 2010 – four years before Gunn made Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel – Super is gritty, weird and considerably less wholesome.

Frank (Rainn Wilson) is a diner chef who, by his own estimation, has very little going for him except his marriage to Sarah (Liv Tyler). So when Sarah, a recovering addict, relapses and leaves him for local drug kingpin Jacques (Kevin Bacon), Frank’s life completely falls apart.

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The Gooniyandi artist’s new show, Stolen Wages, chronicles the lives of Aboriginal mustering workers, like himself and his father – who was never paid in his lifetime

As a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”.

“My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 – I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls now, wearing a worn bush hat and sitting at Mangkaja Arts Centre near his home in Muludja community, east of Fitzroy Crossing. The numbers, his father told him, were ration entitlements for flour, tea and sugar.

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Debut feature does its best to keep things feeling supernatural as woman faced with impossible parenting demands slides into psychosis

Descending fully inside postnatal depression and psychosis, this horror film blends hallucination, premonition, memory and flashback; what it loses in storytelling precision it makes up for in desperate incarceration within one new mother’s headspace.

As soon as she comes home, Meredith (Emily Hampshire) is scrubbing her own birth discharge off the floor. While husband Jared (François Arnaud) is unexpectedly delighted at fatherhood, her new role chafes at an existential level. Son Alex won’t settle in her hands, Jared pushes her to take care of the house while she’s busy expressing milk and, rather than dealing with a burning meal, she smashes her smoke detector. “It’s better to accept you need to try, than be ashamed you need to try,” says Meredith’s therapist of her misfiring maternal affections. But by the time she is seeing visions of cribs overflowing with blood, and of Alex as a young boy, it feels like she needs far more regular sessions.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice have created songs for a Theatreland mystery by Humphrey Ker and David Reed. We find out how they doubled up for the detective’s ‘gory’ new case

New songs by musical colossi Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice . A script by Humphrey Ker and David Reed, old muckers from sketch troupe The Penny Dreadfuls. And a fresh grisly-merry case for Sherlock Holmes. You can only deduce from this evidence that Birmingham Rep has a likely hit on the horizon.

Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas – which will open at the Rep in November – follows Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective around London’s Theatreland. Holmes suspects someone is bumping off actors, Rice explains, “matching each gory death with something from the 12 days of Christmas”. He chuckles over our video call: “Quite a funny idea!”

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At Bisto and Aardman’s new pop-up floating restaurant you can pour gravy over your pudding or down a gravy drink – but where’s the cheese board, Gromit?

Ever since A Grand Day Out was released in 1989, we as a nation have grasped Wallace & Gromit to our collective heart like nothing else. We’ve watched them for decades, falling in love with their Rube Goldberg inventions, their nostalgic mid-century charm and their fingerprint-flecked faces. Wallace & Gromit is this country’s specialist subject. Their lives are ingrained into ours, and as such there is nothing about them that we don’t know.

For instance, when you think of Wallace & Gromit, one foodstuff instantly springs to mind. A food that has propelled Wallace & Gromit narratives and inspired Wallace & Gromit catchphrases alike. Of course, I am referring to gravy.

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