There’s been high drama in Ambridge and a great start for Today’s new presenter. Plus, a delightful Lee Krasner documentary and an amusing study of unfinished art

The Archers (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Today (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Death of an Artist: Krasner and Pollock | Pushkin Industries/Samizdat Audio
Archive on 4: Gareth Gwynn Hasn’t Fin- (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds

Pray for this week’s radio reviewer, allergic since time immemorial to the theme tune of The Archers , finding herself writing in the thick of a blockbuster storyline. But with a crack consultant to hand (my mother-in-law, who remembers listening to Grace Archer dying in a stable fire in 1955: thank you, Lill) I’m braving the challenge.

Locals hope TV adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude will bring new life to Aracataca, birthplace of author’s magical realism

In sweltering mid-afternoon heat, children splash in the clear water of the canal that threads through town as elderly neighbours look on from rocking chairs on the porches of their sun-washed houses. Butterflies spring from every bush, sometimes fluttering together in kaleidoscopes.

At the foot of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, about 20 miles from the Caribbean coast, Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional world of Macondo lives on.

The comedian on how he rates his cooking skills, food disasters and the link between the chicken restaurant and David Attenborough

Growing up, our big treat was that once a month we’d go to Pizza Hut. Me and my brother would think about it all the time: Pizza Hut; salad buffet; Ice Cream Factory. Until The Simpsons came out on VHS, it did not get any better than that.

Restaurants are the closest thing to a family business. Because it was my grandad’s racket: he ran Indian restaurants in Leicester in the 1980s. His last job before he retired was running a greasy spoon, like a proper English greasy spoon, which I always thought was a triumph of cultural integration.

The 20-year failed romance between a singer and a dodgy music promoter becomes the vehicle for director Jia Zhangke’s latest exploration of China’s momentous recent history

As so often in the past, Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke swims down into an ocean of sadness and strangeness; his new film is a mysterious quest narrative with a dynamic, westernised musical score. It tells a human story of a failed romance spanning 20 years, and brings this into parallel with a larger panorama: the awe-inspiring scale of millennial change that has transformed China in the same period, a futurist fervour for quasi-capitalist innovation that has turned out to co-exist with some very old-fashioned state coercion.

Caught by the Tides reflects with a kind of numb astonishment at all the novelties that the country has been required to welcome, all the vast upheavals for which the people have had to make sacrifices. The film shows us the mobster-businessmen who have done well in modern China, the patriotic ecstasy of Beijing getting picked to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the creation of the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam which meant so much unacknowledged pain for the displaced communities. (This latter was the subject of Jia’s Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life in 2006.) And finally of course there is the misery of the Covid lockdown.

Saura Lightfoot-Leon stars as a traumatised, rubbish-fixated teen in British director Luna Carmoon’s admirable, if hard-going debut

There are certain films – Michael Haneke’s original version of Funny Games is one, Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The Tribe another – that I acknowledge as singular, visionary works of art, but which I never, ever want to watch again. Hoard , Luna Carmoon’s profoundly uncomfortable directorial debut, fits this category. It isn’t harrowing in the same way as the other works mentioned. But Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.

Saura Lightfoot-Leon is magnetic as Maria, a teenager who has lived with a foster mother in south London for the past decade. Her birth mother ( Hayley Squires ), a compulsive hoarder who channelled her fierce love for her daughter into offerings of scavenged foil balls and chalk, was crushed by a falling pile of rubbish when Maria was eight. The memories had been neatly tidied away, but when she encounters former foster kid Michael (Joseph Quinn), older by 10 years but odd in the same abrasive, unsettling way that she is, Maria starts to delve into the detritus of her past. In practice, this means that she stops washing, starts collecting humming bags of rubbish and enters into a teasing semi-sexual game with Michael (shades of the malicious playfulness of Yann Samuell’s Love Me If You Dare ). It’s impressive, up to a point, but having taken the character to the brink of breakdown, the film doesn’t know what to do next. The ending is rather too clean for a story about mess.

In UK and Irish cinemas now

When on holiday in Berwick the artist often gave his work away. Now a new exhibition reveals the value of drawings that survived in a shoebox

A 1958 drawing of a family with their dogs by LS Lowry from one of his many holidays in Berwick-upon-Tweed is to go on public display for the first time. But the sketch is lucky to have survived: it was kept in a shoe box for 43 years, emerging somewhat creased because its recipient had little idea of Lowry’s significance.

The signed and dated drawing on headed notepaper from the Castle Hotel, where the artist stayed for most summers from the 1930s until the 1970s, was given to hotel receptionist, Anne Mather. “I didn’t think much about it, and only after he died did I remember it,” Mather told the Berwick Advertiser in 2001 when she put the sketch up for auction. “He was quiet and reclusive, but I can still visualise him in the lounge. He would sit and doodle, with his glasses at the end of his nose.”

The novelist on the continuing relevance of Ibsen, the joyful quilt art of Faith Ringgold and where to find British scotch eggs in New York

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1966, author Claire Messud studied at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, 1995’s When the World Was Steady , and her book of novellas, The Hunters , were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner award; her 2006 novel The Emperor’s Children was longlisted for the Booker prize. Messud is a senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard University and has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, literary critic James Wood; they have two children. Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History , is published on 23 May by Fleet.

Last year’s Barbenheimer was hailed as saving cinema. Now takings are down and even franchises are falling flat. Can Hollywood manoeuvre itself out of this disaster zone?

In Hollywood, the first weekend of May is traditionally seen as the official kick-off of the summer movie season: an auspicious blockbuster date that has, of late, become rather a boring one.

Since 2007, when Spider-Man 3 (three full cycles ago in that deathless franchise) topped the box office – and barring two years where the global pandemic threw the mainstream release schedule into disarray – that weekend has been the exclusive domain of Marvel superhero adaptations, through to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 claiming the No 1 spot last May. That stranglehold was set to continue this year, with the legacy-milking superhero mash-up comedy Deadpool & Wolverine scheduled for a 3 May release. It doubtless would have creamed the competition, too, had last year’s Hollywood strikes not delayed it to July.

Jonathan Yeo’s divisive painting of the king raises the question of whether paintings of the monarchy have become irrelevant and anachronisitic

Why do reports always say that a portrait of someone great and good has been “unveiled”? The word is an empty metaphor that turns the first viewing into a ceremony; it also mystifies the entire procedure and makes it somewhat morbid.

Portraits of kings, presidents, prime ministers and the like are effigies, meant to replace the mortal being. Once the official image has been fixed in place, the living subject can be sent off to die. The unveiled portrait draws a veil over another ceremonial occasion: what we are looking at is posterity’s verdict, so in effect we are attending a funeral.