Ellie’s endless ditties are more horrifying than mushroom monsters. But her painful renditions of a-ha and Pearl Jam aren’t just cringe – they signal a much bigger problem

This week’s episode of The Last of Us contained a moment that froze the blood. For a split second, the hearts of the viewing audience rose into their throats in horror. This is a show that has presented us with terror after nightmarish terror but, even by these exceptional standards, this was almost too much to bear. I am talking, of course, about the scene where Ellie started playing a Pearl Jam song on a guitar.

Within the broader world of The Last of Us, the song – entitled Future Days – is of enormous importance. If you’ve played the game, you’ll know the scene it hints at. It’s devastating. You’ll also know that, if the show hews closely to the source material, the general theme of guitars will eventually reduce the audience to emotional husks, teeing up the saddest, most hopeless ending to any major piece of storytelling in years.

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The launch of her new podcast coincides with an edgier image and a relatable authenticity

Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I review Michelle Obama’s new podcast, IMO, which is surprising in the ways it breaks with the Michelle of the past.

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F Scott Fitzgerald’s tale of a man who is born old and grows young has become a West End smash. The team behind the musical tell its success story in reverse – from Olivier awards glory back to a Cornish bowling alley

Jethro Compton (book and lyrics, director and stage designer) : The Olivier awards were a huge boost for us. I wasn’t aware of the impact an Olivier win could have. We were already in conversations with different organisations around the world about getting the show out internationally – those have stepped up quite dramatically.

Philippa Hogg (actor, musician and creative associate) : The ceremony was so much fun. We came on at the Royal Albert Hall to this roar from thousands of people.

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Actor and daughter of country star shares heartbreaking story in docuseries of discovering her mom’s 2022 suicide

Ashley Judd has delivered her most complete account yet of the heart-wrenching moments during which she personally discovered her mother’s suicide in 2022 – and sought to ensure her parent let go of “her guilt and her shame” over what she had done at the conclusion of a long struggle with depression.

“I … told her how much I loved her, and it’s OK to go,” the actor said on The Judd Family: Truth Be Told.

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Lampooned by critics but loved by fans, Quo turned boogie into blockbuster rock. As a live album captures their 70s peak, their frontman remembers late friend Rick Parfitt – and reconsiders his whole sense of self

If you want to contemplate quite how far back Status Quo’s roots go, consider this: the band’s founders came together before the Beatles had released their first single, before the idea of “the band” was even a thing in pop music. They’re often dismissed as one-song wonders, or as proponants of brutally simplistic music – but as much as the Stones or the Who, Status Quo are carved into British rock.

Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster formed the Spectres in 1962, when the guitarist and bassist were still at school. Drummer John Coghlan signed up a year later and Rick Parfitt completed the “Frantic Four” when he joined after sharing a bill with the Spectres at Minehead Butlin’s in 1966. The Beatles showed Rossi not just what he could do with his life, but touched something very primal in him.

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Cannes film festival
This powerful drama from the late film-maker and his longtime collaborator Robin Campillo, who directs, charts the growing pains of a teenager from a privileged family

The directors fortnight sidebar of Cannes opens with a heartfelt, urgent drama about youth and desire – and destiny, sexuality and class. It is, effectively, the final movie of the late Laurent Cantet, who died last year.

Cantet was working on the screenplay with his longtime collaborator and contemporary, Robin Campillo and it is Campillo who now directs – and brings to the movie his usual intelligence and clarity.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The New Art at the Met, an unusual array of photos taken between 1839 and 1910, reveals an unexpected history

Photography expert and Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Jeff L Rosenheim believes that cameras are profoundly entwined with the American story. “I’ve always been drawn to photography because it has this baseline democratic principle,” he told me. “It arrived from Europe in 1839, and what were we going to do with it? How did the camera play a role in us becoming the country that we hoped we would become?”

Rosenheim sees cameras as furthering the anti-aristocratic principles that America was founded on, in the process helping individuals own their identities and document their world. His new exhibition at The Met, The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910, aspires to give us new ways of seeing precisely how that occurred. Dozens of portraits of everyday Americans showcase a fascinating people’s history of the United States, while also revealing a middle class deeply engaged in the process of discovering its identity, both as consumers and as participants in this young, quickly developing democracy. “Photographic portraits play a role in people feeling like they could be a citizen,” Rosenheim said. “It’s a psychological, empowering thing to own your own likeness.”

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Panic; PC, PS4/5, Xbox
Set during Ecuador’s 2002 World Cup qualifying campaign, this fascinating, semi-autobiographical game gives you control of the life of a soccer-mad eight-year-old

Video games have been simulating football since the 1970s, but they have rarely ever thought about simulating fandom. You can play a whole international tournament in the Fifa titles, but what they never show is the way the competition seeps into the everyday lives of supporters, how whole towns are overtaken, how a World Cup can become a national obsession. The way most of us experience the really big matches is through stolen moments of vicarious glory on televisions and giant pub screens, surrounded by friends and family and the sounds and images of real life.

This is the territory of Despelote, a beautiful, utterly transportive game about childhood and memory, set during Ecuador’s historic 2002 World Cup qualifying campaign. Football-mad eight-year-old Julián – a semi-autobiographical version of the game’s co-designer Julián Cordero – has just watched the team beat Peru, but now four more matches stand between Ecuador and the World Cup finals in Japan and Korea. Structured as a series of short, immersive tableaux, Despelote gives us control of Julián as he goes about his life, buffeted by his parents and teachers between shopping trips, car journeys and school lessons.

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Greek theatre , Syracuse
Two searing new productions, performed in a hallowed space by intense ensembles, bring strikingly fresh energy to the ancient dramas

Concurrent London productions recently presented Oedipus as a modern politician pledging a new start ( Mark Strong in the West End ) and as a distant detective investigating a climate catastrophe that jeopardises Thebans’ future ( Rami Malek at the Old Vic ).

Sophocles’ late play Oedipus at Colonus, less commonly known, looks not ahead but backwards. This elegiac tragedy finds the exile reaching the end of his life. The 5,000-strong audience at Syracuse’s ancient outdoor theatre hear Giuseppe Sartori’s barefoot Oedipus before they see him. His wooden staff strikes the steps as he descends among us, down to the front row and on to a stage populated by trees that thicken the woodland around the theatre. “It seems this place is sacred,” announces Antigone (Fotinì Peluso) at the wanderer’s side. That goes for this Sicilian playing space as well as the drama’s setting of Colonus, near Athens.

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