The British novelist on rereading the classics, his teenage love of outsiders, and discovering the brilliance of Anita Brookner

My earliest reading memory
I remember reading Roald Dahl and Diana Wynne Jones and, in particular, I remember my parents leaving all the volumes of CS Lewis ’s Narnia series on my bed. But what came before that? I must have had picture books. Babar was around, certainly. So was Noggin the Nog. I have no clear memory.

My favourite book growing up
JRR Tolkien ’s The Lord of the Rings. I craved escape, and it was a long enough book to live inside for weeks at a time.

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The annual showcase of the best in photography features an unprecedented number of women working across all genres – from impressive up and comers to establishment names such as Nan Goldin and Sarah Moon

• Photo London is at Somerset House, London, to 19 May

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Ruth Paxton’s psychological horror is a gut-wrencher, and Leonardo DiCaprio invades your dreams in the Christopher Nolan gobsmacker. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen a Paris arrondissement fold in on itself …

One night at a party, teenager Betsey (Jessica Alexander) walks into the woods and walks out a changed person. She stops eating and shows all the signs of a mental health crisis, but tells her worried mum Holly (a convincingly frazzled Sienna Guillory) that she has been gifted prophetic, apocalyptic visions. Ruth Paxton’s disquieting psychological horror teases a supernatural answer to Betsey’s symptoms, but it is mainly a gut-wrenching tale of anorexia and how it can affect those around the patient. Guillory is fantastic as the single mother striving to hold her family together but being drawn into her child’s fantasies – at the cost of her own sanity.
Friday 24 May, 11.10pm, Film4

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Cannes film festival
The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish

Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – once the most densely populated place on Earth – is the perfect movie setting: a Piranesian labyrinth of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise. This 1980s-set action epic lovingly, meticulously recreates the notorious neighbourhood (which was demolished in 1994), but sadly, the backdrop is more interesting than the story.

At heart it’s a tale of a Chinese immigrant caught between rival gangs. Street fighter Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is initially scammed by local triad boss Mr Big (a cigar-smoking caricature from veteran Jackie Chan sidekick Sammo Hung). Chan retaliates by stealing a package and, after a great bus-top chase scene, he stumbles accidentally into the Walled City, a no-go area for Mr Big’s goons as it’s ruled by local boss Cyclone (Louis Koo). As well as running a barber shop, and smoking like a chimney even though he is dying of a lung disease, Cyclone rules over the giant slum like a benign dictator, collecting rents but also looking out for its citizens and maintaining some kind of order. He and the rest of the Walled City community take Chan under their wing, and this hard-working orphan starts to feel at home for the first time – until a highly unlikely twist of fate puts all the factions on a path to all-out gang warfare.

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What seemed like another lazy nostalgia cash grab became a favorite, with lessons that Marvel’s universe could learn from

It should have been what Magneto refers to as a “nostalgic parlor trick” – reviving the X-Men cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings throughout much of the 90s for the Disney+ streaming service. Isn’t this what all streaming services do? They comb through their back catalog to see what IP can be exploited, promising both nostalgia and, of course, a fresh new spin on whatever thing you’ve already seen before. So while it was a given that a certain number of X-Men fans would be on board for X-Men ’97, which just completed its 10-episode first season with a second already on the way, it’s still a bit surprising that a revival of an ambitious, sometimes-clunky 90s-kid object of obsession would become one of the year’s most beloved TV shows.

Some of it may be hunger for any kind of ongoing X-Men series outside of the comics, which remain, as ever, a relatively niche interest. (For every restart at issue no 1, there’s several volumes of backstory that must be summarized to even begin to understand what the hell is going on.) After the Fox network aired the X-Men cartoon, the live-action movie studio adapted the characters into the first major superhero movies of the new millennium, helping to kickstart a major cultural trend. The Fox X-Men movies ran for an impressive 20 years, but Disney’s purchase of the studio coincided with a couple of box office flops in the form of Dark Phoenix and the much-delayed, pandemic-released The New Mutants . A curtain call of sorts is coming this summer with Deadpool & Wolverine, but that movie will also integrate the wisecracking Ryan Reynolds mercenary (who spun off from the X-Men movies) into the broader MCU. As such, it’s been four years since there was an X-Men movie in theaters – and longer since the last one that really connected with audiences, 2017’s Logan.

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(Verve)
Mercurial and moody soundscapes are infused with wistful romance in one of the Grammy-winning singer and composer’s most spirited records to date

Few singers can match the delicate warmth and quiet power of Arooj Aftab ’s voice. Over the past decade, the Pakistani-American singer has released four albums that showcase her gossamer cadence in ever-quieter settings, from jazz to Sufi qawwalis and finger-picking folk. Her debut Bird Under Water in 2014 paired Urdu poetry with sitar and drums, while 2021’s Grammy-winning breakthrough Vulture Prince replaced percussion with lively strings, and 2023’s collaborative record Love in Exile with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily used only synth trills and piano to create an ambient backing for Aftab’s whispers.

If she were to continue on the same trajectory, fifth album Night Reign might be so subtle as to verge on silence. Yet, across its nine tracks, Aftab presents one of her most spirited and experimental records to date, aiming to embody the nocturnal setting that provides the inspiration for her music.

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Directors Jared Hess and Lynn Wang craft a solid piece of family fun with the tale of a pony aiming for success in disguise

Thelma the Unicorn, a new Netflix animated family movie, has plenty of successful tricks aimed at kids: glitter and cotton-candy pink, a pile of manure jokes, a mini-album of catchy original songs, an endearing hero in its titular singing pony-turned-unicorn. But perhaps its greatest asset is its parable of fame, easy enough for young minds reared on phones to grasp, but winking to those who understand a matching-double-denim-outfits on the red carpet reference.

I have to imagine that it is bewildering to grow up aware of or aspiring to viral fame – Instagram celebrities, TikTok trends, overnight Youtube stars –before you even really know yourself. In the grand tradition of kids movies peppered with adult references and talking donkeys, Thelma the Unicorn, directed by Lynn Wang and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess, offers up plenty of glitterified, thoroughly silly fun over a decent, sunny message on staying true to yourself in the spotlight.

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Trio of plays co-created by Roy Williams explores British identity in the era of Brexit, Covid and Black Lives Matter

The co-creator of the Death of England series of plays has said the decade-long project has endured because, alongside difficult conversations about race and immigration, the plays have a sense of pride in being English.

Three of the plays are to be performed together at Soho Place in London this summer, taking a project that started life as a “ microplay ”, commissioned by the Guardian in collaboration with the Royal Court, to the West End.

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She’s won two Brits and rivalled Dua Lipa and Adele for streams, but the public is still getting to know the ex-reality TV singer. She explains why snobbery has held her back, but trauma won’t

Becky Hill Hill glides up on an ebike in full pop star clobber: leather flares, black strap top with enormous silver buckles, immaculately tousled hair, light green contacts that bestow a feline air. We were supposed to be meeting at her tour manager’s flat in London, so she seems slightly alarmed when I approach her on the street. It’s a feeling that quickly becomes mutual: as we wait to be buzzed inside, Hill directs most of her chat towards her phone screen or the wall. I wonder, perhaps, if she is all interviewed out; she is now knee-deep in promo for her second album, Believe Me Now?. “Well, the job is 80% press,” she says, matter-of-factly, once we are safely on a sofa inside. “But I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she adds, unconvincingly.

Hill is one of the UK’s most successful musicians. She has two Brit awards and 12 Top 20 singles to her name, an almost sold-out arena tour in the pipeline and some incredible listening stats (in 2021, she was the third-most streamed British female solo artist after Adele and Dua Lipa). Yet while her instantly memorable dance anthems have soundtracked the big nights out of millions of Britons, the 30-year-old is keenly aware that she doesn’t have the public profile to match her vocal ubiquity.

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