With a great script from Justin Piasecki this David Mackenzie-directed movie is pleasingly old fashioned, complete with Hitchcockian set piece

A terrifically smart script from up-and-comer Justin Piasecki is the basis for this twisty cat-and-mouse surveillance thriller directed by David Mackenzie, which has an old-fashioned interest in analogue things like trains and the US postal service – and it comes complete with a pleasingly Hitchcockian set piece at a classical music concert. For those who remember Riz Ahmed’s turn in the award-winning 2019 movie Sound of Metal , about a heavy metal drummer who loses his hearing, there is moreover an extra frisson.

Here Ahmed plays a lonely Muslim guy who grew up in the post-9/11 US; a lifetime of suspicion drove him to drink and now he’s in recovery. He runs an illegal and very lucrative specialist service for corporate employees in crooked organisations who wanted to be whistleblowers but lost their nerve and now just want to hand back the evidence without getting into further trouble. For a big fee, he will broker the return of the incriminating material while keeping back a copy for insurance purposes. To make contact with everyone, he uses a “relay” telephone service which connects deaf and speech-impaired people using telephone operators who read aloud typewritten prompts and keep no records of what is said: an ideally secure message-drop system.

While most of us were trying to master sourdough and watching Tiger King, Mark-Anthony Turnage put the pandemic to better use and wrote an opera. Five years later it’s coming to Glyndebourne. He tells us how

I have history with Glyndebourne. Back in 1984 when I was a naive 24-year-old, I was a music copyist to make ends meet. My great friend and teacher Oliver Knussen got me work on his opera Where the Wild Things Are ahead of its premiere by Glyndebourne Touring Opera.

I decamped to Lewes and stayed up, often all night, handwriting orchestral parts with my colleagues. I learned a lot during those high-stress days. I’ve been to many performances at Glyndebourne since, and 20 years ago was in talks with the artistic team about writing a new opera, but I never found a subject that suited. A decade later, my partner Rachael Hewer started working there as an assistant director and I regularly went to stay during the summer and autumn seasons, often at Gus Christie’s house (the wonderful Glyndebourne House, which once belonged to the festival’s founders John Christie and Audrey Mildmay). I started thinking it would be fun to write an opera for all the new friends I’d met there. Then Covid struck. Rachael and I, like everyone else, needed to do something constructive with all those extra hours on our hands. We hatched a plan: to write an opera.

This wildly atmospheric tale of a party for dying people in a crumbling seaside hotel borrows tropes from cosy crime, but is truly chilling

Living is hard emotional work – until you try dying. Alongside the rage many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that return to flagellate the conscience: the failures of kindness, the misjudged words that can’t be unsaid, the feelings left catastrophically unexpressed. Crimes of the heart – and sometimes, worse.

The malaise of regret and the yearning for absolution vibrate through Andrew Michael Hurley’s latest work of fiction, a wildly atmospheric, deceptively simple tale that borrows tropes from cosy crime only to snare you into something deeper, darker and more chilling.

Some now famous faces – Lincoln, Simm, Marc Warren – bring plenty of youthful zing to this tale of teenage life in new-town Hertfordshire

It can be fascinating to see established actors’ early work and in this British drama from 1995, we get John Simm (Life on Mars), Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead) and Marc Warren (Hustle), all showing early promise as lads in their late teens trying to figure out what to do with their lives. There’s also the melancholy sensation of watching actors with just as much potential who didn’t enjoy the same success.

Where Boston Kickout really stands out is in its depiction of Stevenage in Hertfordshire; the sort of in-between place rarely depicted in British cinema that possesses neither the affluence of the home counties nor the gritty “realness” of the north of England. But here Stevenage feels wonderfully real; these guys aren’t living in slums, but nobody has a mansion either. It captures with wonderful acuity the way that this kind of place in the 1990s would have felt so limited to four teenagers. It’s not a million miles off the kind of milieu depicted in The Inbetweeners, but instead of boredom and cluelessness leading to sitcom japes, their options, as they experience it, are: violence, escape, drugs and marriage (too young, to the first person you meet).

An African staging of Brian Friel’s Translations resonates deeply as the country distances itself from France

On a humid evening in Dakar, an Irish jig echoes through the country’s air-conditioned national theatre. The breathy, woody sound of the west African Fula flute brings a different cadence to the traditional tune. Actors dance across the stage, their peasant costumes stitched from African fabrics.

The dialogue is in French, the playwright is Irish and the players are Senegalese. Set in 1833, Brian Friel’s Translations – one of Ireland’s most celebrated modern plays – follows British soldiers sent to rural Donegal to translate Gaelic placenames into English.

The Oscar winner’s turn as a no-nonsense private investigator is a role model for women everywhere. She really shines alongside Ruth Wilson in this pacy, twisty thriller based on Mick Herron’s debut novel

I always forget how good Emma Thompson is. That is partly because she tends to work in film rather than television and I last made it to the cinema in the mid-90s. It is also partly because she is always so … how can I put this? … so Emma Thompson in all her interviews and award speeches that I can’t envisage her putting herself away enough for Proper Acting.

But of course she can – and does as the private investigator Zoë Boehm, a woman of flint and diamond, in the new eight-part thriller Down Cemetery Road, Morwenna Banks’ adaptation of Mick Herron’s debut novel of the same name. Herron has since become known for Slow Horses, the series about the busted spies in Slough House pushing paper under the world-wearied eye of Jackson Lamb, ever hoping to get back in the game. Gary Oldman, who plays Lamb, has become a sort of niche national treasure for his portrayal of the beleaguered antihero whom we like to think lives in all of us. I hope the same happens with Thompson/Boehm, because both are magnificent. Boehm is a role model for ladies everywhere, but especially those hampered by a lack of innate cynicism or by a people-pleasing nature (or early training). Look at Boehm and learn. Observe the barren wasteland in which she stands, the field of fucks she has left to give. “I don’t drink prosecco and I don’t bond emotionally,” she tells a new client and one of the show’s many delights is that this remains almost entirely true.

Down Cemetery Road is on Apple TV

From cultural appropriation to gender, Smith nails the politics of creativity. But on actual politics, she is less assured

Accepting a literary prize in Ohio last year, the novelist Zadie Smith described “feeling somewhat alienated from myself, experiencing myself as a posthumous entity”. Smith is only 50, but there is indeed something of the afterlife about the material gathered in her new book, which bundles various odds and ends from the past nine years: speeches, opinion pieces, criticism and eulogies for departed literary heroes – Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel.

In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the “anxious, permanent now” of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don’t have to be very old to feel ancient. When this estrangement is compounded by the ordinary anxieties of ageing, cultural commentary becomes inflected with self-pity. Smith’s identification with the protagonist of Todd Field’s Tár , a once revered conductor who finds herself shunned by the younger cohort, takes on existential proportions: “Our backs hurt, the kids don’t like Bach any more – and the seas are rising!”

The Seeeu Europe photo month is under way – in Tokyo! It features shots by European image-makers displayed in public, from cafes to construction sites across the capital

Gripping documentary follows Jens Stoltenberg through his final year as Nato chief – balancing diplomacy, egos and all-out war with unnerving calm

Jens Stoltenberg is the Norwegian politician and international diplomat whose destiny it was to be secretary general of Nato in the second most fraught period of its postwar history (if we accept that the Cuban missile crisis is in pole position). He was in charge from 2014 to 2024 and this documentary, with remarkable access, shows us his final 12 months – day-by-day, moment-by-moment – after Joe Biden had persuaded him in 2023, when his tenure was technically at an end, to stay on for another year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Perhaps, until that moment, Stoltenberg had been happy to assume that for all the meetings and stress, the secretary-generalship was an agreeable prestigious technocratic position without any real danger. But now he was faced with the possibility of executing Nato’s raison d’être. Ukraine can’t be admitted to Nato because that would mean war on Putin. But how about Nato giving money and weapons to Ukraine for attacks on Russian soil? Wouldn’t Russia see that the same way?