Antisocial media | Children and art | Handling disappointment | ‘An island of strangers’ | Low-traffic neighbourhoods

Asking whether young people are viewing Nigel Farage’s TikTok videos for the silliness of trivial content or their political message misses the point about the proven links between entertainment value and propaganda ( Nigel Farage is a hit on TikTok – but are young voters listening or laughing?, 11 May ). As the pollsters Ruth and Henry Durant noted in 1940 about Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcasts to the UK, “People tuned in ‘to have a good laugh’, but then, having acquired the habit, some began to think ‘there may be something in what he says’.”
Will Studdert
Berlin, Germany

• As I stood in front of a Rothko at Tate Modern 22 years ago, our four-year-old ran up to it and I asked her what she thought. “Too big!” she replied instantly, and ran off. She’ll be starting her masters degree in fine art at Oxford University this October ( The worst thing about the damaged Rothko is that it fuels the ban-kids-from-galleries debate, 11 May ).
Robert Pedersen
Totnes, Devon

The star, who at 62 performed his own stunts for the forthcoming Final Reckoning, tells Cannes press conference ‘I don’t mind encountering the unknown’

Tom Cruise got stuck on the wing of a biplane shortly before it ran out fuel during the filming of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the director of the eighth instalment of the action franchise has revealed.

Speaking to an audience at the Cannes film festival hours before the film’s premiere, director Christopher McQuarrie recounted the filming of a stunt sequence in which Cruise, in his long-running role as the field agent Ethan Hunt, walked between between the two wings of a biplane as the aircraft was mid-air over South Africa.

Cannes film festival
Told in four different timeframes in the same rural family home, this story of national guilt and yearning is powerfully unsettling

Here is a mysterious and uncanny prose-poem of guilt, shame and yearning in 20th-century Germany, and the 21st; a drama of intergenerational trauma and genetic memories, visions and experiences suppressed and handed on to descendants and grandchildren in whom they can return as neurotic symptoms of the repressed.

There are visual rhymes and unexplained cosmic echoes, and the film speaks of militarism and resentment, guilt and horror, with dark hints of abuse and sterilisation, the female slavery of domestic servitude and the pastoral world of rural Germany in which the city’s political currents are only dimly perceived. And it gestures at the terrible pathos of the old GDR, which laboured and sacrificed for 40 years after the war in Soviet vassalage finally to discover it was for nothing. The film’s original German title is In Die Sonne Schauen, or Staring at the Sun.

‘I wanted to create a dialogue between the couple kissing and the plaque showing two people in a similar pose. I didn’t ask about the hats. That wasn’t the kind of questioning I engaged in’

When I began my project photographing in the southern states of the US, I’d only recently developed the confidence needed to take effective portraits. Speaking publicly or talking with people used to make me very nervous. But I was mainly photographing architecture – I knew I wanted to change and make people my subject. So I simply forced myself to endure the anxiety. I picked locations where people gathered in public, such as beaches or parks, and would make myself walk up to them and ask for permission to photograph them.

If you do anything long enough, you start to get good at it, and eventually I turned myself into a very assertive photographer. I’m not an intimidating person – I’m small in stature – and generally speaking people like me. On any given day, if I were to ask 20 people to pose for me, 19 would say yes.

From gorilla stage invasions to novelty butter churners, the extravaganza has always been a haven for wackiness. But it’s getting less outre by the year … and YouTube and TikTok are to blame. More Papa Pingouin required!

Eurovision has always been a time to gather round the TV and experience dancing babushkas , gorilla stage invasions and someone inhaling from a helium balloon halfway through their song. But being a Eurovision entry now looks like being part of an exhausting social media content factory, which may be driving some of the wackiness out of it. No one is giving a wolf a banana this year.

In 2025, a Eurovision artist needs to tread on eggshells to avoid putting a foot wrong during months-long internet exposure, but must also stay interesting enough to attract likes and follows. It has also become the norm for contestants to provide alternative versions of their own or other Eurovision songs for the viral content mills. And it is difficult to do that if you are, like Ireland in 2008, sending a puppet .

This might be the most French game ever – but there is more to the small-scale development of this belle époque-inspired beauty than you think

Much has been made of the fact that the year’s most recent breakout hit, an idiosyncratic role-playing game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, was made by a small team. (It has just sold its two-millionth copy). It’s a tempting narrative in this age of blockbuster mega-flops , live-service games and eye-watering budgets : scrappy team makes a lengthy, unusual and beautiful thing, sells it for £40, and everybody wins. But it’s not quite accurate.

Sandfall Interactive, the game’s French developer, comprises around 30 people, but as Rock Paper Shotgun points out , there are many more listed in the game’s credits – from a Korean animation team to the outsourced quality assurance testers, and the localisation and performance staff who give the game and its story heft and emotional believability.

Oscar-winner says that a cinematographer remarking on her ‘baggy’ eyes led to a procedure that she regretted

Jamie Lee Curtis has revealed that she had plastic surgery at the age of 25 because of a comment made to her on the set of a movie.

In a 60 Minutes interview, the Oscar-winning actor said that a cinematographer wouldn’t film her one day because, he said, “her eyes are baggy”.

Almeida, London
Ava Pickett’s bold debut shows how a trio of ordinary women in rural Essex learn of the queen’s death, and speaks clearly to our own age

Ava Pickett’s debut play, a product of the Almeida’s new writing scheme, comes laden with accolades including the Susan Smith Blackburn prize . All the fuss is justified. Set against the impending execution of Anne Boleyn, 1536 is an effortlessly funny, bold and ballsy play, which asks the question: just how much have things really changed for women today?

While the historical backdrop is dramatic, this is largely a play of small and arresting moments. Max Jones’s stark set – full of long lush grass and empty horizons – never changes. We’re in a forgotten field in Essex, where three female friends meet, talk, prod and tease each other. The long grass blows and the sky, thanks to Jack Knowles’ emotive lighting, seems to throb with the promise of other, grander lives playing out somewhere far away.

Bush theatre, London
Laith Elzubaidi’s autobiographical one-man play explores the lingering pain of his family’s flight from Iraq with a standup’s humour

In the week that Keir Starmer warned that immigrants might reduce Britain to an “island of strangers” if numbers are not curbed, this play gives voice to British Iraqi refugees, and self-proclaimed “insane” ones at that. Laith Elzubaidi’s autobiographical play is not about immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers inflicting a sense of alienation on British society. It describes what they contend with psychologically, often in silence, and how it ripples down to the next generation.

Tommy Sim’aan, playing the part of Laith, recounts early memories of his Shia Muslim parents who fled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and who bury their unspoken PTSD and fear in a semblance of hard-working normality in Wembley, north-west London.