Here’s a job pitch you don’t see often.

What if, instead of “work-life balance,” you had no balance at all—your life was your work… and work happened seven days a week?

Did I say days ? I actually meant days and nights , because the job I’m talking about wants you to know that you will also work weekends and evenings, and that “it’s ok to send messages at 3am.”

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Netflix’s international offerings include some entertaining Norwegian fare, such as the series Ragnarok (2020–2023), a surprisingly engaging reworking of Norse mythology brought into the 21st century that ran for three seasons . Another enjoyable offering was a 2022 monster movie called Troll , essentially a Norwegian take on the classic Godzilla formula. Netflix just dropped a trailer for the sequel, Troll 2, which looks to be very much in the same vein as its predecessor.

(Spoilers for the first Troll movie below.)

Don’t confuse the Netflix franchise with 2010’s Trollhunter , shot in the style of a found footage mockumentary. A group of college students sets off into the wilds of the fjordland to make a documentary about a suspected bear poacher named Hans. They discover that Hans is actually hunting down trolls and decide to document those endeavors instead, but soon realize they are very much out of their depth.

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Most games want you to save the world. This stop-motion adventure wants you to hold someone’s hand

Stop-motion adventure Out of Words was one of the most striking reveals at this year’s Summer Game Fest. While most games are built from code, Out of Words is made from clay, fabric, and glue: a love story literally crafted by hand that even caught the attention of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima (“The biggest praise we could imagine,” game director Johan Oettinger says.)

Oettinger dreamed of making a stop-motion video game since he was 12, when he first played 90s point-and-click claymation game The Neverhood. After years working across films, commercials and installation art, Out of Words became the project to merge these two lifelong passions.

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The next in our series of writers sharing their all-time favourite comfort films is a trip back to 1997 with Julia Roberts’s charmingly chaotic anti-hero

If When Harry Met Sally questioned whether men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way, My Best Friend’s Wedding is unequivocal. If your fiance has a female BFF – especially if she has the megawatt smile and mile-long legs of Julia Roberts at her ravishing best – prepare for drama. Even if you’re Cameron Diaz. Which is the precise scenario we’re confronted with at the start of my favourite chaotic caper, which made just under $300m at the global box office when it debuted in 1997, and also stole my heart as a melodramatic 11-year-old.

We were truly spoiled for romcoms in the 90s – believe me, I watched them all – but My Best Friend’s Wedding is something special. To watch this PJ Hogan classic (he also directed Muriel’s Wedding) is to sink into a warm bath of nostalgia, complete with brick-sized mobile phones, indoor smoking and croony Burt Bacharach classics. It has everything: a car chase, an all-cast singalong lunch complete with dancing lobster claws and even an intimate mishap with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David. But it also has the chutzpah to turn the romcom formula on its head, and give us an ending we don’t necessarily expect.

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I had tried elaborate mind games, herbal teas and even a military method. Nothing worked. So I gave in, tuned into some macabre podcasts and had a very surprising reaction

For years I had accepted that sleep, just like the Rubik’s cube and a receding hairline, was one of those things that I personally was not equipped to beat. No matter how much I tried to disarm my mind with an assortment of pills, elaborate mind games and expensive sleep teas, nothing seemed to work. In fact, many of these “solutions” only made my insomnia worse. On the rare occasion that I did catch myself drifting off, a bout of relief and excitement would quickly overtake me, leaving me wide awake and more exasperated than ever. The more pressure I put on myself, the more impossible sleep became.

One night I was in bed trying to replicate a strategy used by the SAS to instantaneously fall asleep by relaxing my body, starting with my facial muscles, and breathing slowly and deeply, when I finally decided I’d had enough. Clearly, trying to sleep was just not something I was cut out for. I had read all the books, done all the research and, still, nothing ever improved. If my brain refused to accept any sort of attempt to shut it down, then why waste so many hours of my day even trying?

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Justice minister says ‘we have failed’ after thieves take seven minutes to steal priceless jewels from museum

The French government is under increasing pressure over museum security as police continue to search for thieves who took seven minutes to steal priceless jewels from the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum.

“What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of Paris, get people up it in several minutes to grab priceless jewels, and give France a terrible image,” the justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, told France Inter radio on Monday.

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Director general says it is inappropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue ‘to be campaigning in that way’

BBC journalists cannot wear T-shirts in the newsroom supporting the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, the corporation’s director general Tim Davie has said.

Davie said the BBC stood against racism but it was “not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.

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The German actor’s real-life meltdown is the springboard for this compelling autofictional account, in which the author sets out to write about Kinski during lockdown

A show-stealing villain in spaghetti westerns and slasher flicks with titles such as Schizoid and Psychopath, the German actor Klaus Kinski – “a demented Teutonic version of Dennis Hopper”, as one tribute had it – is known best for his testy collaboration with Werner Herzog, whose 1982 film Fitzcarraldo put Kinski in the title role, lugging a steamship over the Andes. A terror on set as well as on screen, he was offered a part in Indiana Jones but told Steven Spielberg the Raiders of the Lost Ark script was a “pile of shit”.

Benjamin Myers’s new novel plunges us into Kinski’s fevered mind during one of his last performances, a recorded solo stage show in West Berlin in 1971, where he delivered a ferocious monologue as Jesus, “the freest and most modern of men, who preferred to be massacred than rot alive with all the others”. Showcased in a documentary released in 2008 by Peter Geyer, the act descended into chaos, Kinski arguing with hecklers before ending his monologue in a near-empty auditorium.

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An opaque, inert film by Canadian director Rhayne Vermette despite its scrupulously intended meanings

An experimental film should be approached in the same open-minded spirit in which it was created, but I must confess to being more or less defeated by this opaque, inert, micro-budget work from Canadian director Rhayne Vermette, who has worked with Guy Maddin in the past. Levers is set in the Red River valley in Manitoba, and much of it unfolds in a kind of gloomy darkness; the title, which is French, means Sunrises, and the interplay of light and darkness is a key image.

A gigantic eclipse plunges the world into shadow; the event would appear to have an occult connection with a certain sculpture and sculptor. But the eclipse is to pass, resulting in a series of sunrises around the globe, and one person undertakes to investigate what exactly has happened.

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