Museum staff and familiar faces discuss their favourite paintings as the National Gallery turns 200, in a film that offers personal stories over scholarly pronouncement

Here is a warm, civilised, and at points quite moving film about the National Gallery ’s art collection, timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1824. It essentially consists of a series of talking-head interviews – mostly National Gallery staff, but also a scattering of outsiders, including a handful of relevant national-treasure celebrities – in which they talk about their favourite paintings. The enthusiasms of the gallery personnel come from an admirably wide range, taking in gift shop sales assistant Joshua Pell ( The Adoration of the Kings by Jan Brueghel ), corporate development manager Helena Fitzgerald ( Degas’ Ballet Dancers ) and sign-language guide John Wilson ( Pietro Longhi’s Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice ). The famous faces, on the other hand, are mainstream TV-friendly types such as Michael Palin ( Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed ) and Claudia Winkleman ( Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks ).

The mood is essentially celebratory, with the accent very much on the personal and emotional (especially the final interviewee, former TV producer Peter Murphy, who manages to get a novel’s worth of life drama into his allotted screen time). The idea is clearly to try to demystify the gallery and connect its contents to the wider public; there is little in the way of scholarly pronouncement here, and only snippets of the institution’s historical development is conveyed (provided by history professor Jonathan Conlin). The makers are the estimable producers of the Exhibition on Screen strand, and are past masters at putting together this kind of engaging, easy-on-the-eye material.

Donald Sterling’s tapes, which aired a billionaire’s racist thoughts to millions, have been given the miniseries treatment with a powerhouse cast

Ask a group of US sports fans to name the worst team boss in history, and see how many times the name Donald Sterling comes up.

Sterling was Trump west – the tan and dyed ambulance chaser turned slumdog billionaire who spent three decades ruining the NBA’s Clippers (AKA Los Angeles’ other hoops franchise) with his spectacular cheapness (recommending a head coach stretch and wrap players to save money on hiring an athletic trainer ), stunning competitive indifference (routinely passing on young stars while half-heartedly pursuing capable veterans) and staggering cluelessness (responding to a lawsuit deposition question about his handwriting with a tortuous anecdote about having limousine fellatio ). The 90-year-old might still be casting a pall on the NBA from his courtside seat if TMZ hadn’t published recordings of him saying that Black people shouldn’t come to “my games” (especially not Magic Johnson!), forcing his divestment from the predominantly Black league.

South Africa-born painter Gavin Jantjes says institutions tried to buy work they ignored decades earlier

British arts institutions deployed “kneejerk” and “stopgap” responses in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement as they attempted to avoid criticism for the lack of diversity in their collections, according to the artist Gavin Jantjes.

The South Africa-born artist, who was a key figure during the British black art movement of the 1980s , told the Guardian that under-pressure organisations approached him to buy work that they had ignored since it was made decades earlier.

The continent’s most lauded movies feature war, terrorism and colonialism but there is so much more to African cinema

At this year’s Cannes film festival, there were films from Zambia and Somalia, two countries that don’t usually feature at the international showcase. Both received critical acclaim and Zambia’s On Becoming A Guinea Fowl went further in winning for its director, Rugano Nyoni, an award in the Un Certain Regard section.

In many ways, the two films are very different – Mo Harawe’s The Village Next to Paradise is an unvarnished drama set in Somalia while Nyoni’s film has a smattering of surrealism. But in one respect, both will be familiar to those who get their Africa from western TV news: Guinea Fowl is about abuse, Paradise is about poverty. They are themes unchanged in decades. Africa, once again, is framed by its troubles, its stagnancy.

The perfect post-sundown shot has long proved elusive. But a new book called Night Fever is celebrating the trailblazers who caught not just what the small hours look like – but how they feel

In 2008, the celebrated photographer Dayanita Singh discovered that using daylight colour film stock at night yielded strange results. When she shot at dusk, the photos came out blue. Feeling experimental one night, she decided to leave her camera on a long exposure. The following morning, she woke to discover that she had been robbed. The thieves had taken her cameras and those rolls of exposed colour film from under her bed – with pictures still waiting to be revealed. “Obviously, the camera saw something it should not have seen,” she says.

The photos Singh made next capture the frightening and uncanny sensations this incident triggered. She set about capturing images like a robber might. She wore a headtorch and captured a parrot by its light. She trained her lens on the decorative fluorescent tubes lighting neighbourhood trees and marvelled at the surveillance-footage green they lent her images. The daylight film made indiscernible night colours lurid: the ground turned red, the trees yellow, the sky a galactic indigo.

In this week’s newsletter: There are three albums from the 2020s and Eminem’s snuck his way in above Neil Young, but at least the viral countdown is switching up the canon

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Noticing an absence of best-of lists from media publications, record stores and the like these days, those disruptors at Apple Music have taken it upon themselves to compile a list of their 100 best albums of all time, the top 10 of which was shared on Wednesday. Created “editorially”, without taking into account streaming numbers (because who wants an all-Sheeran-Swift top 10), theirs is a ranking determined by Apple’s own team of experts and critics as well as songwriters, producers, industry professionals and artists including Pharrell Williams, Charli XCX, Nile Rodgers and J Balvin. Surely this carefully assembled team would put together a list that everyone could get on board with?

Well, obviously not. Apple’s list has been received about as well as its 2014 decision to “gift” (read: forcibly upload) a U2 album to the libraries of unsuspecting iTunes users. Social media is awash with screengrabs of albums deemed undeserving of their placing (“send [insert artist here] to the Hague!”), clickbait-y articles have been written about how outraged fans are about the artists that Apple has cruelly snubbed . And the dreaded phrase “recency bias” has been liberally used in response to the number of 21st-century albums that made the cut.

The exiled director’s story of officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy in his home country may be flawed, but its importance is beyond doubt

Mohammad Rasoulof is a fugitive Iranian director and dissident wanted by the police in his own country, where he has received a long prison sentence and flogging . Now he has come to Cannes with a brazen and startling picture which, though flawed, does justice to the extraordinary and scarcely believable drama of his own situation and the agony of his homeland.

It’s a movie about Iranian officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy, and sets out to intuit and externalise the inner anguish and psychodrama of its dissenting citizens – in a country where women can be judicially bullied and beaten for refusing to wear the hijab.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig begins as a downbeat political and domestic drama in the familiar style of Iranian cinema, and then progressively escalates to something extravagantly crazy and traumatised – like a pueblo shootout by Sergio Leone.

Iman (Missagh Zareh) is an ambitious lawyer who has just been promoted to state investigator – one step short of being a full judge in the revolutionary court. He gets a handsome pay rise and better accommodation for his family: wife (played by actor and anti-hijab protester Soheila Golestani) and two student-age daughters (Setareh Malek and Mahsa Rostami).

But the promotion almost immediately brings disappointment and tension: Iman, a thoughtful and decent man, is stunned to discover that he is expected to rubber-stamp death-penalty judgments without reading the evidence. He is told that he must now be secretive with friends and family who could be threatened and doxed by criminal elements as a way of pressuring him.

Most fatefully of all, he is issued a handgun for his family’s protection, apparently without any training or guidance as to how to use or store it. Naive Iman casually leaves it lying around the house and tucks it in the back of his trousers like a Hollywood gangster. (Are Iranian prosecutors really allowed to be so casual with firearms?)

When the anti-hijab protests explode in Iran, whatever liberal scruples Iman once had are suppressed. He coldly rebukes his daughters over dinner for their rebellious feminist views and accuses them of falling for the propaganda of enemies and foreign elements. “What foreign elements?” his daughters demand – but Iman sullenly refuses to elaborate. (Here is a flaw in the film, surely – in real life, Iman would make some very specific, ugly, paranoid claims.)

When his wife and daughters help a terrified young female anti-hijab protester who has been shot in the face by the police, this too must be concealed from Iman. And then, catastrophe – Iman’s gun goes missing and, with increasing resentment and fury, he suspects one of the women of his family has taken it and is lying to him. His toxic outrage bleeds into the fabric of the film itself.

(Sony Music)
Despite losing a key member, the arena-filling pop-metal stars still thrill with their surprise-released new record – a masterpiece of glutted sonic mayhem

In the end, Post Human: Nex Gen – the longest-awaited, most torturously gestated album in mainstream rock today – arrived very suddenly, a gloriously corroded data dump of tens of thousands of points of sonic information dropped last night with just a few hours’ notice.

The Sheffield pop-metallers’ Post Human project began back in 2020 with Survival Horror, a nine-track album which chimed eerily loudly with the Covid pandemic, and not just because of the noisy music: Dear Diary played on the dullness of lockdown (“The sky is falling, it’s fucking boring / I’m going braindead, isolated”) while big single Parasite Eve was written pre-Covid but seemed to pre-empt it with its tale of apocalyptic disease. One chorus couplet, “when we forget the infection / Will we remember the lesson?”, should be written on civil service whiteboards in Whitehall.

Cărtărescu’s novel Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, was described by judges as ‘wildly inventive with passages of great beauty’

Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu and American translator Sean Cotter have won the €100,000 Dublin literary award for the novel Solenoid.

“By turns wildly inventive, philosophical and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little-known to English-language readers,” said the judges.