The latest in our series of writers highlighting their favourite feelgood watches is a tribute to Albert Brooks’ 1991 fantasy

In a world where we venerate the actor-writer-director (Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen etc), the great Albert Brooks still feels widely underappreciated. His voice work in Finding Nemo and his Oscar-nominated turn in Broadcast News gave him a respectable level of recognition and acclaim. However, he remains immensely underrated, especially compared with his comedic contemporaries like Steve Martin or Bill Murray. As a writer-director-leading man, he produced some of the funniest, most insightful comedies of the 80s and 90s, often with biting social commentary. But when I need the January blues lifted, I turn to his wonderfully sentimental and uplifting 1991 film Defending Your Life.

Brooks plays Daniel Miller, a divorced, lonely adman with little in his life besides a new BMW. When he is killed in a bus collision, he is transported to Judgment City, a Disneyland-like depiction of purgatory. It’s here where the recently deceased, good and bad, are put on trial to “defend your life”. Miller is cross-examined by his lawyer Bob Diamond (a surprisingly smiley Rip Torn) and prosecutor Lena Foster (Lee Grant). They look over nine days of Miller’s life to decide his future. If you win your trial, you “move forward”. You lose your trial: you head back to Earth to “try again”.

The legendary nightlife group known for their groundbreaking nights at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London are back – and restarting the conversation about the controversial subject

‘It’s sort of a daytime TV chatshow, mixed with an avant garde variety show,” explains Simon Casson, co-founder and producer of the legendary queer nightlife collective Duckie. Casson is explaining the colourful concept of Rat Park , the group’s latest project. “There’s going to be a big bonfire in the garden and candles outdoors in jam jars, it’s all very beautiful,” he says. “Inside, there will be discussions and performance pieces, then interviews, then another performance and more conversations – all about the terribly embarrassing subject of queer people and our sex lives.”

Rat Park will run every Saturday afternoon in February, which is LGBTQ+ history month in the UK. The collaborative events, which will be held at a “secret location”, bring together community names such as artist and archivist Ajamu X , HIV activist Marc Thompson and author Matthew Todd , alongside a selection of performers including cabaret act Rhys’ Pieces and artist Zack Mennell . Each week is themed on a different body fluid. “Blood” points the way to discussions of HIV and family, whereas “tears” might prompt conversations about grief, rejection and masculinity. (Use your imagination for the other two weeks: piss and spunk.)

Three adolescent misfits form a band in this luminous feature from Liz and the Blue Bird director Naoko Yamada

As sensitive as ever to teenagers’ growing pains, animator and director Naoko Yamada paints an exquisite rainbow of adolescent blues in this gentle tale of music and friendship, her first feature since the critically acclaimed Liz and the Blue Bird .

It follows a trio of teenage misfits whose colliding paths lead to enchanting self-discoveries and epiphanies. In her grey uniform, Totsuko might seem like an unremarkable student at her Christian boarding school, yet she has synaesthetic perception, and when she looks at people, their auras and spirits are rendered in vibrant hues. Through Totsuko’s eyes, Kimi, a classmate who is expelled for her rebellious behaviour, is pure electric blue. Rui, a senior from a different high school, is the final member of this band of outsiders; his spirit sparkles with emerald green flashes.

Kay Sohini’s account of leaving Kolkata and sadness behind to build a life in the Big Apple is a stirring tribute to the place that saved her

I find it hard to resist books about young women from small towns who move to the big city, a tendency I blame as much on personal experience as on Muriel Spark and her Girls of Slender Means . Arriving in London in my early 20s, I was often anxious, mostly about money. But the exhilaration I felt whenever I made my way to the top of a red doubledecker usually saw off any deeper fears pretty fast. Like Kay Sohini, whose new graphic memoir tells the story of how she swapped the suburbs of Kolkata for New York, London allowed me briefly to be “a character – a full-fledged, living, breathing manifestation of [an] impossible dream”.

Sohini developed a crush on New York at a young age, a passion born first of TV shows such as Friends and How I Met Your Mother , and later of books by Alison Bechdel , Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath. It seemed to her that the city was not only a muse to writers and other creative types. It was also “a fix for slightly broken people”, a phrase she would one day sadly have cause to apply to herself. At 24, having finally managed to leave a coercive relationship, Sohini found that she wanted only to get as far away from Kolkata as possible – and, naturally, New York, the city she had romanticised for so long, was the first and last destination she considered. In its anonymity and “white noise” she would surely be able to lose herself, half tourist and half PhD student (Stony Brook University on Long Island offered her a full scholarship).

He gained fame in Japan posting surreal videos of meat, veg and even ears. Then he tried writing – and soon had three bestsellers in the Top 10. As one now reaches the English-speaking world, we meet the faceless phenomenon

Hidden behind a white papier-mache mask, wearing a black bodysuit and with a voice modulated to sound something like a little girl’s, is Japan’s latest literary superstar. Almost nothing is known about Uketsu – a made-up name that means “rain hole” – who first gained fame posting surreal videos on YouTube: clips of asparagus that turns into fingers when chopped; strips of meat pegged out on a washing line; eight ears spinning on a wheel.

Then, in 2020, Uketsu posted a 21-minute mystery story based on a series of floor plans, and was told he should turn it into a novel. Since then, his books have become blockbusters in Japan: three of the country’s Top 10 fiction bestsellers last year were by him. Now the first of his novels to have been translated into English, Strange Pictures, has come out in the UK and the US, and Uketsu has agreed to speak to me about it on Zoom.

A new exhibition shows how, over the centuries, the cards went from courtly novelty to occultish tool of divination – and the way in which the art form is still evolving

There are few more appropriate venues in which to stage an exhibition about tarot than the newly refurbished galleries of the Warburg Institute. Based in Bloomsbury, London, since 1933 but founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by historian Aby Warburg – himself a pioneering modern scholar of tarot cards – its aim was the study of global cultural history and the role played by images, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the Renaissance and ancient civilisations.

“Tarot is a legacy of Italian Renaissance visual culture that spreads through time and space,” explains Bill Sherman, Warburg director, and co-curator of the exhibition Tarot: Origins & Afterlives. “But how does something created in a mid-15th-century northern Italian courtly context, not at that point associated with divination or the occult, become such a pervasive global phenomenon?”

Helin Çelik’s documentary mixes impressionistic visuals with chillingly matter-of-fact accounts of abduction, incarceration and domestic violence

Helin Çelik’s otherworldly, impressionistic documentary opens with lines from a poem by Rumi evoking Mount Qaf , a mystical mountain erected by Allah. In this place that encircles the Earth and touches heaven dwells the anqa, a fabled female bird that symbolises resurrection after misfortunes.

The three Jordanian women at the heart of Çelik’s film are going through their own journeys of healing and rebirth. Mostly shot in profile or from behind, they speak of the horrifying violence they have endured. Their stories of abuse, abduction and incarceration starkly contrast with their domestic surroundings, which are shot with amazing warmth. From the rustling of the curtains to the gentle shimmering of a dallah coffee pot on the stove, the sights and sounds of the everyday are at once calming and eerie. It seems unimaginable that life can go on in all its normalcy while these suffering souls are still walled in by their harrowing experiences.

This beautifully written tribute to the author’s uncle Eric, whose death revealed hundreds of hidden paintings, serves as a northern corrective to the metropolitan art world

“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up with a rope; his habitual bomber jacket was patched with sticky tape, as was the cracked rear window of his car. He worked as a labourer and his regular haunts were Warrington pubs, the rougher the better, and the local Betfred.

But when Eric Tucker died, aged 86, in 2018, more than 500 paintings were found in the small council house he had long shared with his mother. The works, of the highest quality, depicted mid-20th-century working-class northern life. Many showed blurry, smoke-filled pub interiors, beautifully composed and full of slightly grotesque figures, typically side-on to show their strange profiles. They often look pale (except for red noses) and pensive, but they all have one another, and here is the first of many paradoxes about Eric Tucker.

The singer-songwriter rises to Bruce Springsteen and loves the Eurythmics. But why has he had to rebrand as Wainwright?

The song I do at karaoke
My daughter is a typical teenager. She’s 13 and not interested in much that I do, but the other day I was singing Begin the Beguine by Cole Porter and she actually came down and asked: “What the hell was that?” So that song has some magic to it. It always elevates the world around me.

The song I can no longer listen to
Stephen Sondheim is brilliant, but I can’t stand Send in the Clowns. It just gets on my tits. Yes, I know that’s a very British expression. I’m pandering to you guys.