Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
Stephen Hough’s new, nostalgia-themed work enjoyed its European debut with Mark Elder and the Hallé very much on form in their final months together

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto, first performed in January by the Utah Symphony, arrived in Europe with the composer as soloist, partnered by Mark Elder and the Hallé. The concerto’s subtitle, The World of Yesterday, borrowed from the memoir of the same title by Stefan Zweig , suggests an exploration of musical nostalgia, as Hough acknowledges in his programme note; he draws a parallel with the pianist-composers of the years between the two world wars, such as Bartók, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, for whom their own concertos became, in Hough’s words, “a visiting card on the road”.

Hough hardly needs such a visiting card, and his neatly proportioned work, in three linked movements, is much more than a vehicle for his pianism. But it does look fondly backwards, though in ways that never seem derivative. The “white-note” orchestral opening might hint at the wide open spaces of 1930s Americana, but its themes are filtered through a much more acerbic harmonic palette in the hefty solo cadenza that follows. A set of variations on one of those themes, a wistful waltz (recalling a Bill Evans number , Hough suggests), carefully blends the extrovert and the intimate and provides the concerto’s centrepiece, before Hough allows himself the luxury of some virtuoso showing-off in the final tarantella.

Yolande Zauberman’s documentary The Belle from Gaza follows a population under permanent threat, recording their courage and surprising faith

The Belle from Gaza premieres at the Cannes film festival on Friday – an achievement made the more remarkable as there was a point last year when it looked as if it would never be seen.

After Hamas’s attack on 7 October and the Israeli military offensive that followed, its French director, Yolande Zauberman, considered shelving her finished project. “I thought maybe we should not show this movie for the moment, because what’s happening is so big, so huge”, says Zauberman.

On the 125th anniversary of his birth – and with a Tom Holland biopic in the works – we run down the finest performances in the Hollywood legend’s eight-decade career

A semi-straight turn from Fred Astaire in this witty comedy drama. He is an American diplomat in London whose employee (Jack Lemmon) is renting a flat from a mysterious, organ-playing landlady (Kim Novak) who is widely suspected of having offed her husband. Astaire brings a touch of old-school sophistication, while he and Lemmon make for an appealing double act, trading gags rather than toe-taps.

Exiled from their home since it was occupied by Morocco in the mid-70s, nearly 200,000 Sahrawis live in camps in Algeria. Now in its 18th year, the FiSahara festival is a window to the world

• Photographs by Susan Schulman for the Guardian

From the outside, Asria Mohamed’s tent in a refugee camp in south-west Algeria could be mistaken for a typical four-door nomadic dwelling used by Sahrawis, people from Western Sahara, though it is smaller in size.

Inside, however, is a series of QR codes attached to 19 melhfas , traditional clothing worn by Sahrawi women, that have been stitched to the tent’s interior walls, forming a colourful tapestry. Visitors are invited to scan the QR codes to dive into the stories of the women behind each melhfa.

(Domino)
In the Portishead singer’s singular, astonishing soundworld, these songs sit in autumnal gloom but are occasionally dappled with warmth and light

No one is ever going to accuse Beth Gibbons of over-exerting herself in the rapacious pursuit of fame: her solo debut arrives 22 years after her collaboration with Rustin Man, Out of Season , 16 years after the last Portishead album, Third , and 11 after it was first announced.

In fairness, Lives Outgrown has a unique sound you suspect was only arrived at after lengthy experimentation. The Rustin Man album echoes through the acoustic guitar and folky melody of Tell Me Who You Are Today, and on Reaching Out; so do the hypnotic rhythms that underpinned Third’s We Carry On and The Rip. But Lives Outgrown ultimately draws you into a soundworld entirely its own. Strings play mournfully low and squeal discordantly; the snare-free drumming resolves into a Bo Diddley beat on Beyond the Sun, and elsewhere rumbles ominously, like the last sound you’d hear before being ritually sacrificed.

Cannes film festival
Loosely based on fact, Magnus van Horn’s fictionalised true crime nightmare leaves you with a shiver of pure fear

Just in case you were thinking that this is an upbeat story of a sweet young seamstress winning BBC TV’s The Great British Sewing Bee, the needle in question is in fact a knitting needle for giving yourself an abortion in a public bath-house in post-first world war Copenhagen. This film from Poland-based Swedish director Magnus van Horn – making his Cannes competition debut – is a macabre and hypnotic horror, a fictionalised true crime nightmare based on Denmark’s baby-killer case from 1921, shot in high-contrast expressionist monochrome and kept at an almost unbearable pitch of anxiety by Frederikke Hoffmeier’s nerve-abrading musical score.

I was unconvinced by Van Horn’s previous film, the social media satire Sweat , but this new one is horribly effective grand guignol, made with enormous technical flair, like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd without the bleak humour – there are touches of Lynch, Von Trier or even Tod Browning here. It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder. I actually found myself thinking of something further back to the Malthusian suicides in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “Done because we are too many.”

From pests to pampered pets … how Victorian artist Louis Wain ushered in the age of the cat

‘Catland”, as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other “Catland”, the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth.

For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.

How can one broom tear apart a Canadian curling community? John Cullen investigates in Broomgate. Plus: five of the best post-apocalyptic podcasts

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Major news for fans of Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? – the “poo dunnit” that rocketed to the top of last year’s podcast charts, and featured in our best pods of 2023 . The amateur sleuths behind the series have just announced another, this time taking on a completely new mystery about a tiny blue corduroy suit, a tiny suitcase and a tiny man. More on that next week – but you can listen to the hilarious trailer here in the meantime.

If slightly ridiculous but utterly gripping true crime is what you’re after, though, this week’s top pick ticks all the right boxes. In CBC’s Broomgate , comedian and curler John Cullen investigates the “super broom” scandal that rocked Canada’s curling world in 2015.

Annapurna Interactive; PC, Switch
This compulsive atavistic mystery is told through bewildering yet tantalising non-linear narrative strands that the player must tease apart

It is both a pleasure and a relief to discover that while the titans of the mainstream games industry are tearing themselves apart in their unquenchable thirst for shareholder value, there are still smaller companies out there making brilliant, original games. This month, we’ve already seen Crow Country and Animal Well, and now here is the latest highly stylised puzzler from Swedish studio Simogo, previously responsible for eerily folkloric Year Walk and groundbreaking audio-textual adventure Device 6. It is, in short, one of the most compulsive mystery games I’ve played for years.

The set up for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is classic adventure territory. A woman is invited to an abandoned hotel in Siracuse, Italy, by an eccentric artist who says he needs her support to complete an ambitious, perhaps even revolutionary project. But what is really going on in this labyrinthine building, and what has happened to the family that owned it for generations? The answers lie behind an array of locked door puzzles, the solutions hidden in odd movie posters, notes and strange phone calls. There are artefacts connected to an avant garde film director, a dadaist artist, a stage magician; there are secret rooms and hidden passages, and at the heart of it all is a time-spanning atavistic mystery told through multilayered narrative strands that the player must tease apart in a brilliantly non-linear fashion.