Black and white re-release of one of the fire-breathing lizard’s best outings looks terrific and has an intriguingly ambiguous human lead actor

It’s 70 years since Godzilla first stomped into cinemas, and the big lad has barely aged a day. He’s the Cher of movie monsters: constant reinvention, permanent icon status (even in his ropier moments), while never being afraid to play the hits and give the people what they want. Which in Godzilla’s case is a big fire-breathing lizard smooshing skyscrapers to rubble while the people below flee like ants. That’s exactly what you got a satisfying amount of in Godzilla Minus One – and now it’s re-released in monochrome as, wait for it, Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color. Do you see what they did there?

The film, if you recall, opened by introducing its human protagonist Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) in the dog days of the second world war, who has just faked mechanical failure in his plane to avoid a kamikaze mission. Then Godzilla attacks the airfield and he immediately prioritises his own safety over that of his cohort. Our hero is, therefore, sort of a coward, or at least has a healthy sense of self-preservation. That ambiguity may be relatively common in our postmodern world, but we’re used to seeing our main character cowards rendered in colour. There is something novel about seeing a second world war pilot who doesn’t want to fight rendered in black and white. The leading man in such movies normally is the straight arrow with an excess of bravery, on whom we can count to save the day.

Such subtleties aside, the other reason to see the new version of Godzilla Minus One is simply that it looks really great. Some rules of style are eternal, and black and white films are beautiful. As it turns out, the monochrome look is particularly flattering to the big beastie himself, who in this iteration has a wonderfully antic glint in his eye, without ever quite becoming actively clownish; he’s somehow funnier in colour. If monochrome re-releases are a gimmick, they’re at least a lovely-looking gimmick.

In his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, the Marxist thinker explores how extremist movements around the world seek to blame fictional enemies for real disasters

Like a lot of people, Richard Seymour, 47, was trying to quietly ignore the climate crisis and get on with his life. As a prolific Marxist intellectual, this meant industriously writing about a range of subjects: the Iraq war, neoliberalism, the class struggle. The climate crisis could wait until after the revolution. Besides, he didn’t have the expertise or emotional capacity for it.

But in 2015 that changed. Walking in a local park on Christmas Day, he couldn’t ignore how noticeably warm it was. He started to think about not just what has already been lost but what global heating means for the losses to come. “Some sort of defence just went down,” he says, “and I experienced a preliminary bit of climate mourning.”

Halloween is coming, and our minds are turning to scary games. But which titles are genuine fright fests? Our writers decided to find out in the most ill-advised way possible

Shepton Mallet prison in Somerset is the world’s oldest correctional facility. It is also reportedly one of the most haunted. Between its opening in 1625 and its closure in 2013, it saw hundreds of inmates, from Victorian street urchins to wayward American GIs to the Kray twins. Now a tourist attraction, it occasionally opens to paying guests who want to spend a night behind bars. Some are paranormal investigators, some are brave tourists, and others are video game journalists with a silly idea: how scary would it be to play five recent horror games all night, locked in a haunted prison?

Carrying just a torch, an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector, and a laptop, we wandered the prison finding spine-chilling locations in which to play these immersive supernatural masterpieces. Here is what happened …

This follow-up to the Southern Reach series again explores the mysteries of Area X

Ten years ago, Jeff VanderMeer published the three volumes of the Southern Reach trilogy, which between them charted the incursion of the otherworldly into a stretch of Florida coastland. In Annihilation , scientists venture into what has been dubbed “Area X” and quickly find themselves physically and psychologically transformed. Authority follows a middle manager who, in the wake of this mission’s failure, is dispatched by the shady “Central” to evaluate the people who have made studying Area X their life’s work. Acceptance jumps between timelines: the days preceding Area X’s creation, the weeks preceding the departure of the mission in Annihilation, and the aftermath of Authority, in which Area X breaks its bounds and seems set to transform the world.

VanderMeer had until this point been a respected fantasy author, a stalwart of the New Weird alongside such authors as China Miéville, KJ Bishop and Steph Swainston. The Southern Reach trilogy, despite shifting its register into science-horror, utilised many of the same techniques as his previous novels: it took the queasy sense that there is an under layer to reality from City of Saints and Madmen (2001); the Nabokovian intercutting of text and commentary from Shriek: An Afterword (2006); the transformation of a familiar, rational space into an uncanny one, in which the boundary between human, animal and plant is no longer discernible, from Veniss Underground (2003).

Eye-opening archive footage and a Bowie appearance are the highlights in an otherwise polite but bland documentary

This slick unrevealing music documentary about alt rockers Placebo highlights the potential drawbacks of making a film about a band decades after their first flush. Back in the late 90s, even if you weren’t blown away by the music, you had to admire Placebo’s bravura and the feral energy of frontman Brian Molko. Today he sits in a studio with the expression of a cat that got the cream, insisting that he is not fussed about fame or celebrity – a statement slightly undermined by the fact he’s wearing sunglasses indoors.

The point is that it can be easy to mock middle-aged rockers as self-indulgent or smug – and Molko sometimes makes it very easy (“I seek total freedom from the bourgeois constructs that exist in society”). But film-maker Oscar Sansom dusts off the archive footage for a reminder of what a radical proposition Placebo felt like to their fans when they released their self-titled first album in 1996. This was at the fag-end of macho Britpop, and Molko was taking to the stage wearing dresses and eyeliner. A couple of eye-opening clips are a reminder of just how hostile the industry was at the time to gender fluidity and queerness. “Have a look at the singer. Is it a bloke or is it a girl?” gawps one presenter.

Colin Farrell’s show-stopping turn, and a scene-stealing Cristin Milioti, make this DC crime series an unlikely winner

HBO’s DC show The Penguin is one of those rare treats that comes along almost completely unexpectedly, like Batman cracking a smile, or Harley Quinn making sensible life choices. Nobody really expected a show about the second banana in the dark knight’s famed rogue’s gallery to be up to much even if Colin Farrell’s performance, under all those prosthetics, in The Batman was a startlingly grimy diversion from the gloomy glamour of Matt Reeves’s elegant vision of Gotham City’s proto dark knight. But an entire series based on Oswald Cobb’s bloody rise through the ranks of Gotham City’s lurid underworld always seemed a little superfluous to the main event, a spiky little sideshow to keep us entertained, deep down in the gutter with a villainous Humpty Dumpty, while DC works out what to do with the highfalutin’ sequel.

Past the season’s midway point, and it’s clear it’s more than just filler, and could yet be DC’s most unexpected hit since Aquaman turned murmuring sweet nothings to swordfish into a billion-dollar box office splash . Farrell, who at times looks like Danny DeVito on a diet of gas station sushi and sheer spite, is clearly having so much fun as the Penguin that it might even make up for having to sit for three hours to undergo his daily transformation. This was supposed to be a novelty, the chance to see the Oscar nominee literally disappear into the role of Gotham’s most likable dirty little rat, but the twists, turns and power struggles are so fast and fabulous that spending each episode trying to spot the handsome Irishman underneath all that silicone would be like attending a Vegas magic show just to figure out how the rabbit got in the hat.

From sickle cell to the Covid vaccine – the stories behind medical innovations that have transformed lives

‘A great deal of creativity goes into making new medicines, most of it witnessed and appreciated by only a small handful of people.” This, in part, is what inspired William Pao, an oncologist turned pharmaceutical executive, to write Breakthrough , which tells the stories of some of the most critical discoveries in modern medicine.

Like many others in the field of drug research, Pao has his own story about a family illness. When he was a 13, his father died suddenly from colon cancer – an event experienced by his family as a “cataclysmic shock”. It set his course: “After Dad died, I vowed that I would dedicate my life to making a difference for patients like him,” he writes.

After decades of nomadic existence, the Polish capital’s art temple is open for permanent business in an inspirational, light-filled new building

When Poland joined the European Union 20 years ago, our world changed. I was a student in Warsaw, and spent my savings on a train ticket to Berlin – not for migrant work, but to see the 200 masterpieces at the Neue Nationalgalerie on loan from the New York Museum of Modern Art .

In 2017, ahead of a stint working in Silicon Valley, I rushed to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art . The very first painting I saw was a personal delight because the artist was a woman, Paulina Ołowska , and Polish.

As the ‘fifth Beatle’ Brian Epstein, Fortune-Lloyd’s performance holds an otherwise sanitised narrative together in well-meaning biopic

British actor Jacob Fortune-Lloyd stars as the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein in this uneven but well-meaning biopic. The screenplay by Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeham weaves the story in and around the two or three main facets of Epstein that are always invoked in every potted bio: he was instrumental in the Beatles’ huge international success (Paul McCartney would later describe him as “the fifth Beatle”), he was Jewish, and he was gay. It certainly unfurls itself on a broader canvas than the 1991 drama The Hours and Times , although that tight, intimate low-budget work, which featured David Angus as Epstein and a young Ian Hart as John Lennon on a weekend trip to Barcelona together, still stands up as one of the most nuanced and insightful works of Beatles-themed speculative fiction. But this one has fancier costumes, particularly in its final scene, where we see the Beatles in full-on flowers-in-their-hair and brocade Nehru-jacket-finery as they film a live international broadcast, which happened just before Epstein died of an accidental drug overdose in 1967, aged 32.

Clearly, the film ends on the broadcast’s triumphant note in order to give a bit of uplift to what is largely a sad story, if you take out the bits where Epstein makes a fortune for himself and the Beatles building a management business. (He also managed Gerry and the Pacemakers and Cilla Black, played sympathetically here by Darci Shaw.) Because if you subtract the success, then Epstein’s story here is a classic tale of gay martyrdom, all semi-closeted despair and suffering as he goes from cottaging encounters (which bring beatings and blackmail attempts) to a toxic relationship with an American lover, Tex Ellington (Ed Speleers), who ends up robbing and humiliating poor trusting Brian. At least his mum Queenie (Emily Watson, avoiding the worst Jewish mother cliches thankfully) always loved him, even if his father (Eddie Marsan) could never understand his son.