Les Distractions de Dagobert was the surrealist’s ‘definitive masterpiece’, says Sotheby’s expert in New York

She was worshipped as a muse by renowned surrealists including André Breton and Max Ernst, but the Lancashire-born artist Leonora Carrington quickly shrugged off the label to achieve an unprecedented level of mastery and freedom in her own painting.

Now, on the 100th anniversary of Breton’s publication of the Surrealist Manifesto , Carrington has become the most valuable British-born female artist at auction after one of her paintings sold for more than £22.5m.

Marija Kavtaradze’s new film is a love story with a truly radical approach to intimacy. She reveals how she made a will they/won’t they tale that strays into little-known territory

They meet cute in a dance rehearsal studio. She’s a contemporary dancer teaching a class of deaf teenagers. He’s the sign language interpreter. When he walks into the room and takes off his shoes, they both look down at his odd socks and smile, something clicks. Like so much of the Lithuanian film Slow, the moment is romantic and feels true to life – as if someone is secretly filming real people with invisible cameras.

The pair start hanging out. Then one day, in her bedroom, just as you think this is it, he suddenly blurts out: “I’m asexual.” She splutters a giggle and asks what he means. “I’m not attracted to anyone sexually. Never was.”

Hannigan/Chamayou
(Alpha)
The superb projection of Hannigan’s voice and the rainbow of colours in Chamayou’s piano lay bare the sexual desire and religious fervour prevalent in Messiaen’s early works

O livier Messiaen wrote just three large-scale works for voice and piano. The most substantial, Harawi, composed in 1945 as the first part of a trilogy of pieces built around the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseult, was the last of them, while the two cycles that Barbara Hannigan and Bertrand Chamayou have recorded are early works: Poèmes pour Mi was completed in 1937 while the less well known Chants de Terre et de Ciel followed the next year. Both have texts written by the composer himself, characteristically mixing religious imagery with personal references: the Poèmes were dedicated to Messiaen’s first wife, the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, while Chants celebrated the birth of the couple’s son Pascal.

Hannigan’s silvery, flexible sound may lack the sheer heft of the “dramatic soprano” that Messiaen specifies for both cycles, but the way in which she uses her voice and her superb projection of the French texts are more than adequate compensation. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a weightier voice bringing such beguiling, soft-edged intimacy to parts of each cycle as she does. Alongside her, Chamayou finds a rainbow of colours in Messiaen’s piano writing, and as a bonus they add the rarely heard La Mort du Nombre, a 10-minute cantata for soprano, tenor (Charles Sy), violin (Vilde Frang) and piano that Messiaen wrote in 1930. The text, again by the composer himself, depicts two souls expressing their sadness at being separated, the tenor urgent, anguished, the soprano patient and reassuring – the mingling of sexual desire and religious fervour that would be such a big part of Messiaen’s music for the next two decades.

The Generation X punk turned arena rocker answers your questions on near-misses in Hollywood, his overlooked electronic period and how Marc Bolan helped launch his career

Is it true that you stole the master tapes to the Rebel Yell album during a spat with the record label? VerulamiumParkRanger
It was because of the cover. I was saying: “There’s a flaw in this picture, and if we blow this up it will get worse.” The record company started to say: “We’re leaving it. It’s not that bad.” I just thought: “I’m just not going to let this happen. It’s so silly. They just need to reprint the picture. I’m not listening to what the record company guys say. In fact, I’m gonna blackmail them.” So I went down to Electric Lady in the middle of the night and got to where I knew the tape boxes were. I took them and left the studio and gave them to my heroin dealer. And then I phoned the record company and said: “This guy I’ve given them to, he’ll have them out on the street bootlegged in a couple of days if you don’t change this picture.” And they relented. Don’t let them walk all over you.

Your 1990 motorbike smash prevented you from starring as the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (although somewhat ironically your post-accident surgery saw you fitted with your own steel framework). Do you still suffer regular aches and pains as a result of the LA crash? McScootikins
Not too bad. There’s something going on with my right foot. It’s not the same as my left foot. So there are ramifications from it, but you can fix them by wearing certain insoles in your shoes and things like that. The injury was in the middle of the lower part of my right leg, so it was something they could fix. I loved [director] Jim Cameron. I just know he would have got the performance out of me. I would have done whatever he said. It might have opened a lot more doors and it’s such a shame. But sometimes drug addiction messes things up. That’s what led to the motorcycle accident, really.

Cannes film festival
Nyoni uses unsettlingly playful surrealism in this account of a malign uncle and the family mythmaking that effaces his crimes

Rungano Nyoni is the Zambian-Welsh film-maker who in 2017 had an arthouse smash with her debut, the witty and distinctive misogyny fable I Am Not a Witch . Her new film is an oblique, intensely self-aware and often seriocomically strange family drama about sexual abuse. Its final moments give us something of the magic realism that the title hints at, but its playfully and startlingly surreal images are perhaps at odds with the fundamental seriousness of what this film is about. While it’s such an intriguing idea, an almost absurdist scrutiny of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial, there is something a little bit contrived in it and, though always engaged, I found myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.

On a dark road in Zambia, Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving a car, wearing a strange sci-fi outfit. The reason for her clothes will be given later, but they give a sheen of dreamlike unreality to what happens next: she stops the car, and gets out to look at a dead body by the roadside, lying weirdly calmly, staring sightlessly upward. It is Shula’s Uncle Fred who has perhaps been dragged to this spot by the sex-worker employees of the nearby brothel where he had probably suffered a fatal seizure.

Museum of Homelessness features treasured belongings and first-hand accounts of homeless people

What makes an item so immensely valuable that it belongs in a museum, carefully preserved for future generations? Britain’s heritage institutions may be full of historic and priceless objects, but at the world’s first museum dedicated to homelessness, which opens to the public in London on 24 May, the treasured artefacts are very different.

There is a bent and much repaired stick, originally made from two pieces of scrap wood, that for its owner was a walking aid, defensive weapon and cherished companion before he donated it, with great sacrifice, to the museum. There is the skeleton of an old shopping trolley that once carried all its owner’s worldly possessions before he offered it to help transport supplies for those in need during the Covid crisis.

A mega egg in Paris, a hovering hotel in Machu Picchu, an hourglass tower in New York, a pleasure island in Baghdad … we reveal the architectural visions that were just too costly – or too weird

Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg? In the 1969 competition for the Paris art centre – ultimately won by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, with their inside-out symphony of pipework – a radical French architect called André Bruyère submitted a proposal for a gigantic ovoid tower . His bulbous building would have risen 100 metres above the city’s streets, clad in shimmering scales of alabaster, glass and concrete, its walls swelling out in a curvaceous riposte to the tyranny of the straight line.

“Time,” Bruyère declared, “instead of being linear, like the straight streets and vertical skyscrapers, will become oval, in tune with the egg.” His hallowed Oeuf would be held aloft on three chunky legs, while a monorail would pierce the facade and circle through the structure along a sinuous floating ribbon. The atrium was to take the form of an enclosed globe, like a yolk.

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
Four students in Iran are under pressure to pass their foreign language exams in Sanaz Toossi’s gentle comedy that puts discussion above drama and ideas above emotion

The instruction to speak “English only” is underlined on a board in a classroom in Karaj, Iran. The stricture pushes an immersive version of language learning on to the course’s four students, who struggle to express themselves and, more profoundly, to “be” themselves in this foreign tongue.

There is a test coming up and some feel a great pressure to pass it: Elham (Serena Manteghi) is a medical student who needs her English-language certificate for medical school in Australia; Roya (Lanna Joffrey) is a grandmother whose son has emigrated to Canada and who is desperate to connect with her grandchild. There is also Goli (Sara Hazemi), a bright-eyed teenager, and Omid (Nojan Khazai), whose reasons for being here are opaque and who is the best English speaker of the lot, including class teacher Marjan (Nadia Albina).

(Darkroom/Interscope Records)
On this deeply involving third album, Eilish once again breaks the rules for arena-filling artists: it’s subtle and understated, yet jars the listener with eerie show tunes and explosive noise

Billie Eilish’s third album opens with a track called Skinny. It features a hushed electric guitar figure supporting a lyric filled with very Billie Eilish topics: bitter recriminations about a failed relationship, body dysmorphia, depression and the pressures of finding vast global fame while barely out of your teens. The latter was a theme that preoccupied Eilish’s last album, 2021’s Happier Than Ever , a grimly believable depiction of adolescent stardom in a world of constant online commentary and confected controversy. With its marked shift in image and sound, it succeeded in creating yet more commentary and controversy. That album’s reception is another topic that seems to haunt Skinny. “Am I acting my age now?” she wonders aloud. “Am I already on the way out?”

It’s presumably a reference to the fact that Happier Than Ever sold noticeably less than Eilish’s debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? : it only went platinum in 10 countries as opposed to 16. And perhaps also to the idea that, with its relative lack of the kind of electro-goth bangers that had propelled her to fame, and her accompanying transformation from baggy skateware-clad sulker to vampy 50s blonde, Happier Than Ever had lost the room.