Cannes film festival
Eduard Limonov’s bizarre career, from rebel émigré writer in New York to leader of a fascistic, militaristic political group, is told with gusto by Kirill Serebrennikov

Fascism, punk, euphoria and despair … it’s all here, or mostly, in this hilarious biopic of Eduard Limonov , the rock’n’roll émigré Russian writer and patriot-dissident who wound up poverty-stricken in New York at about the same time as Sid Vicious. Limonov (a pen name taken from the Russian word “limonka”, meaning lime but also slang for grenade) became an angry bohemian, a sexual outlaw, a celebrated adulte terrible in French literary circles in the 80s, railing against the prissy liberals and mincing hypocrites. Then he returned to Russia and became the leader of a violent group called the National Bolshevik Party. Tactfully, nobody here points out the similarity to “national socialist party”. It was if someone had given Michel Houellebecq a machine gun.

Ben Whishaw gives a glorious performance as Limonov - funny, dour, crazy, sexy, boiling with unhappiness and apparently bipolar (although this diagnosis is something else that doesn’t seriously occur to anyone). And maybe always, at the back of his mind, worried that his writing is not good enough to make him immortal, and that posing, PR, situationist outrage and political violence are his real vocation. Inevitably his autobiographical fictions are compared by a New York publisher to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (Limonov says he hasn’t seen it), but he winds up being a grizzled conflation of Ed Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club.

The novelist’s love triangle has its sights set on the elite insularity of the New York art world but its plot is programmatic

I’ve always admired Hari Kunzru’s novels for their dense, satirical plunge into subcultures. His characters are nervy, laconic, forever looking for a chance to escape their domestic lives, brimming not so much with feelings as ideas. Mike Frame, the protagonist of My Revolutions (2007), may be living the “rich person’s fantasy” of a country life with his spouse and stepdaughter at the turn of the millennium, but once upon a time he went by a different name and was involved too deep with a militant ultra-left activist group in the late 1960s and early 70s. White Tears explored the American popular music scene, with two twentysomething New York-based hipster record producers who grow obsessed with old blues singers because their songs were “more intense and authentic than anything made by white people”. In Red Pill , a middling British writer has a nervous breakdown while on an artists’ retreat in Berlin and becomes curious about the nihilistic visions of neo-Nazis and edgelords.

Blue Ruin is a pandemic novel and opens with Jay, an erstwhile British conceptual artist now living out of his car in New York, who encounters his ex-girlfriend, Alice, while delivering groceries for an app upstate. He is mindful of looking old and exuding the “stink of ill health and gas station food”, having been kicked out of a cramped bunk-bed housing situation in Queens after he tested positive for the coronavirus. Meanwhile, she is standing all masked up at the door of a sylvan cottage, her skin looking “glossy” and “radiant”. He runs out of breath while dropping her bags, and she doesn’t just recognise him, but insists that he stay in an unkempt barn in the same property. Years ago she’d cheated on him with Rob, Jay’s closest friend in art school, now a commercially successful painter. Imagine Jay’s surprise on learning that Alice ended up marrying Rob and they are quarantining with another couple – Rob’s gallerist, Marshal, and his girlfriend, Nicole – in the house upstate.

Science Museum’s Secret Life of the Home collection, including tea-making machines, early microwave cookers, gramophones and the first flushing toilets will close on 2 June

They changed our parents’ and grandparents’ lives by using technology to tackle the curse of household drudgery. Thanks to the vacuum cleaner, fridge, washing machine and microwave, the lives of householders were transformed in a few generations.

But now the UK’s principal museum collection of domestic devices – from horse-drawn vacuum cleaners to pop-up toasters – is set to close. On 2 June, London’s Science Museum will permanently shut its gallery Secret Life of the Home , a 29-year-old treasure trove of household gadgets that range from early microwaves to the first flushing toilets.

Historians estimate a quarter of settlers of the US west were Black, moving cattle on horseback, settling towns and keeping the peace

When Larry Callies went to the movies as a boy in Rosenberg, Texas, the heroes riding horses and wearing 10-gallon hats were all white men.

But the real cowboys Callies knew were Black. His great-grandfather Lavel Callies was an enslaved cowboy who worked with horses professionally after emancipation. “We’re cowboys for three generations back,” says Callies, 71, who runs the Black Cowboy Museum .

Alexis Bloom’s documentary captures the sheer charisma of the actor, model and 60s rock survivor, though little of her background

The terrifying magnetism of Anita Pallenberg – the German actor, model, style icon, muse and, according to some, murderer who dated two Rolling Stones and epitomised rock chick cool – is captured in Alexis Bloom’s suitably enigmatic documentary portrait. Composed of interviews with those in Pallenberg’s orbit, and home movies that crackle with chaotic energy, Catching Fire is more concerned with the mercurial essence of its subject than it is with the nuts and bolts of her life. We learn little, for example, about her family background.

But Pallenberg was, it becomes clear, a self-created creature; a woman who kicked back with equal force against the restrictive gender roles prevalent in 60s and 70s society, and against the misogyny of the music scene. The girlfriend of Brian Jones, then Keith Richards , with whom she had three children, she did everything on her own terms; be it acting ( Performance , Barbarella ) or parenting, her approach was unconventional. But even Pallenberg’s formidable strength of character was no match for the drugs that were ubiquitous in the world in which she moved.

In UK and Irish cinemas now

Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow
Letting rip with that still thrilling and propulsive voice, the Iron Maiden frontman performs an all solo material set – keytars, bongos and demonic laughter included

Bruce Dickinson, as is well known, is a qualified pilot – and there is something of the captain preparing for take-off in his interactions with the crowd. “In a moment,” he instructs Glasgow, “we will commence furious jumping.” Then, as the riff to Dark Side of Aquarius kicks in: “Furious jumping commence!”

His ability to hype a room has been honed over decades of what he calls the “day job” – being frontman with Iron Maiden. Next year will be the band’s 50th anniversary, and no doubt there will be much hoopla, so this solo tour is Dickinson’s chance for some me-time.

(Darkroom/Interscope)
An impeccable mix of haunted earworms, zinging lyrics and dancefloor delights that end too soon, the American superstar’s third album seems to pull back from tantalising new horizons

Both soft focus and strobe lit, Billie Eilish’s third album finds the former teen prodigy, now 22, possibly hedging her bets for what might be the first time. She has built a mainstream pop career as an outsider auteur; Lana Del Rey, but for green-haired feminist insomniacs. For her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go , Eilish unleashed a creepy circus of teenage nightmares, polemically – for some – clad in loose-fit hip-hop garb.

Round two, Happier Than Ever (2021), dived deep into old-timey heartbreak, male toxicity and body positivity, with Eilish channelling vintage starlet vibes with pointed irony. As the title suggests, Hit Me Hard and Soft is a combo platter, one that draws on signature elements of her previous works – the haunted earworms of the first album, the heady swoon of the second; it packs in epic crescendos and whispery restraint.

The subversive work of Eliza Haywood, the feminist forerunner of the TV show’s gossip columnist, is about to be republished

She is the real-life Lady Whistledown, an eyebrow-raising female writer who penned a salacious anonymous gossip sheet that skewered 18th-century London society.

Like the fictional pamphlet from Netflix hit Bridgerton , which returned for a third series last week , Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot , published in 1746, has a distinctive, mocking voice that punches up and “speaks truth to power”. Now, a new book will republish Haywood’s funny, subversive periodical, which she wrote from the perspective of an angry green parrot, and seek to raise awareness of her groundbreaking work.

Dali L Yang’s critique of China’s response in the early days of the Covid pandemic is thoroughgoing if academic, while poet Liao Yiwu’s account mixes fact and fiction to extraordinary effect

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the beginning of the pandemic, before the World Health Organization had coined the term Covid-19. Back then, it was the “Wuhan virus”, a mysterious pathogen from a city that few people outside China had visited.

On 12 January 2020, China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the virus’s genome on an international database, permitting scientists anywhere in the world to see that it was a coronavirus closely related to Sars – the pathogen that had caused a mini-pandemic in 2002-2004.