A labyrinthine but lively 28th instalment of the hit manga series juggles byzantine intrigue, spies and cop rivalries with stylish flair

By the time a suave law enforcer from the Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center turns up near the end to join colleagues from Yamanashi prefectural police, Nagano police and Tokyo’s Public Security Bureau (PSB), this bewildering but oddly enjoyable anime serves as a handy guide to Japanese bureaucratic structures. As this is the 28th film instalment (eat your heart out 007) of the bestselling manga centred on a crack sleuth forced to inhabit a child’s body, you will need to be some kind of precocious genius yourself to hack an intelligible path through the thicket of characters and byzantine skulduggery served up here.

Retired Tokyo cop Kogoro (voiced by Rikiya Koyama) witnesses a former colleague murdered at their rendezvous point, and he heads up to Nagano to follow up on the dead man’s investigation. It seems the helmeted assassin was trying to suppress information related to an assault in the mountains 10 months earlier, as local policeman Yamato (Yuji Takada) was pursuing an armed-robbery suspect before being shot by a third party. The Nagano police reluctantly accommodate Kogoro nosing around, but he forbids young Conan (Minami Takayama) from lending his considerable talents. The pint-sized Poirot manages to get on the scene anyway under the pretext of a visit to a nearby radio observatory.

The grim serial killer hit dared to take a mainstream audience to a hopeless place despite pressure from executives and test screenings to sanitise

It had to end with the box. It nearly didn’t.

Before David Fincher received a draft of Andrew Kevin Walker’s script for his 1995 psychological thriller Seven, he’d sworn off the possibility of ever directing again, still reeling from his notoriously rocky experience on his debut feature, Alien 3, which had ultimately been taken out of his hands. (“I’d rather die of colon cancer than make another movie,” he colorfully put it.) Walker’s script had already gone through various permutations since 1989, most notably a twist ending that had been written out of subsequent drafts for being irredeemably bleak. Yet, the original version was the one that Fincher read and he was unwilling to compromise, despite persistent pressure from executives and test screenings that seemed to confirm that it was too bleak an ending.

If machines become superintelligent we’re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?

What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason you’d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.

We don’t know what form this extinction will take exactly – perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an AI that’s smarter than a human being will kill us all, somehow.

The two tennis stars go head-to-head – in an interview for their new introspective podcast. Plus, two of the Inbetweeners make a fun, lively show about facts

This new video podcast from tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams sees the sisters return to their roots. It’s named after the street they grew up on in Compton, California and sees them sitting in armchairs on an empty court for a chat. The debut episode involves them interviewing each other to reminisce about old matches, their upbringing and “whether people thought we secretly hated each other”. Alexi Duggins
X Originals, episodes fortnightly

For centuries bells were the fastest means of communication, calling people to meetings, warning about wildfires, and were even believed to offer protection from storms – now they are being given a new life

In 2002, Silberius de Ura was visiting Santillán del Agua, a village in the region of Burgos, in northern Spain. He was chatting to one of the neighbours next to the town church when the man raised his hand and pointed to one of the bells, calling it the tentenublo bell.

“He told me that, when played in the right way, the bell had the power to protect against hail storms, either by pushing the storm away or by turning the hail into water,” recalls Silberius. “Until then, I thought that bells were only used to call people to mass or to announce that someone had passed away, but this was different, it was sort of magical.”

A woman inherits the patent for a healing machine from her quack father in this exploration of grief, in which a number of low budget film-makers cameo

Here is a deeply strange but diverting indie experiment: a docu-fictional meditation on the nature of grief from director Courtney Stephens and her co-writer and lead performer Callie Hernandez. Hernandez plays Carrie, a version of herself, opposite deadpan cameos from various microbudget directors.

In the fictional part of the film, Carrie’s father has died; he was a quack doctor who attempted to market an alternative healing machine as part of a pyramid-selling scam, but who also had many friends and followers who were bowled over by his charm. The lawyer executing his will tells Carrie there won’t be any money left after all her dad’s debts are paid, but she does inherit the rights to the healing machine, and there is even a prototype in a safety deposit box for her to try out.

Dr Chris van Tulleken goes in search of the disease that would Covid look like a ‘warning shot’. Plus: fun thriller The Guest concludes. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
“Covid may have just been a warning shot,” says doctor and buzzkiller-in-chief Chris van Tulleken. This bleak Horizon documentary sees him undertake a virus world tour, visiting countries including Switzerland, Malaysia and Bangladesh in search of the next deadly threat and finding several likely candidates. The good news? Lots of very clever, very diligent people are monitoring these ominous pathogens on a granular, daily basis. Phil Harrison

The frontman is realising his stage dreams by starring in Edgecity which draws on playwright gobscure’s experience of sleeping rough. The pair talk about an urgent, explosive show

In the late 1980s, fresh from being kicked out of school, Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson dreamed of becoming an actor. He was looking for a way to escape the narrow-minded confines of his home town, Grantham – and treading the boards seemed like the best possible way.

“Essentially I just wanted to be famous,” he says now, “but then I started to fall in love with the process of it all.”

Essex-based John Brandler seeking final loan payments as well as three murals from exhibitions company

A bitter row has broken out between a British art dealer and an Italian exhibitions company over three enormous Banksy murals that were loaned three years ago and which the dealer insured for £15m.

John Brandler, an Essex-based specialist in work by the graffiti artist, is pursuing legal action after losing patience with Metamorfosi in Rome, which stages temporary touring exhibitions.