‘A big bonehead of a delivery guy was looking at all these TV screens tuned to MTV and the lines he was saying were too good to be true. So I borrowed a pen and paper, sat down and started writing’

I was in an appliance shop in New York and there was a big bonehead in there delivering gear. All the TVs were tuned to MTV and I overheard this guy sounding off about the rock stars on the screens. He had an audience of one – the junior at the store – and some of his lines were just too good to be true.

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Ten men nicknamed ‘grandpa robbers’ accused of stealing jewellery worth millions from American TV star in 2016

Ten people nicknamed the “grandpa robbers” by French media have gone on trial charged with stealing jewellery worth millions of euros from the American reality TV star Kim Kardashian when she attended Paris fashion week in 2016.

The suspects, whose ages range from 35 to 78, appeared in a court in the French capital on Monday afternoon at the start of a month-long trial in which Kardashian, 44, will testify in May.

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The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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Used in the scene in which the band play Nearer My God to Thee while the ship sinks, the instrument was sold alongside other memorabilia from the shipwreck

A violin which featured in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic has sold for £54,000 at an auction in Wiltshire of memorabilia relating to the 1912 shipwreck.

The violin was played by the musician and actor Jonathan Evans-Jones, who played band leader Wallace Hartley in the film. It is seen several times in the film, including during the scene in which the band play the hymn Nearer My God to Thee in an attempt to calm passengers as the ship sinks.

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Report confirms that Arakawa died of hantavirus and her husband, who had heart problems and Alzeimer’s disease, may not have realised she had died

Two months after the actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, final autopsy results on the couple have been released.

These shed further light on the state of health of Hackman, 95, at the time when his and his wife’s bodies, along with that of one of their dogs, were found by a maintenance worker on 26 February. It is believed that Hackman died around a week after his wife, whose cause of death was hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare rodent-borne disease.

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The discovery of a cache of ostmarks, just before German reunification makes them worthless, sets off a madcap tale from Natja Brunckhorst

Natja Brunckhorst is the actor-turned-director who first came to prominence as the teen lead of Uli Edel’s Christiane F in 1981 , playing a West Berlin drug addict and effectively co-starring with David Bowie, who had a cameo in the film. Now she has written and directed this satirical caper with an Ealingesque premise: a bunch of depressed people in East Germany in 1990, with reunification a few days away, discover an old storage depot with tons of abandoned and soon-to-be-worthless ostmarks – ostmarks galore, in fact – and not much time left for sneakily exchanging them for deutschemarks at the accepted (and humiliating) rate of two to one.

But how to explain this mountain of cash? Sandra Hüller plays a woman called Maren who, with husband Robert (Max Riemelt), leads the plan while Ronald Zehrfeld plays Volker, with whom Maren has some emotional history. Veteran player Peter Kurth brings his mighty presence to the role of Markowski, Robert’s glowering dad and disaffected state security guard working at the depot who puts them on to the scam.

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The endlessly quoted 1975 comedy remains both a clear product of its era and a timelessly funny masterwork

It was with some surprise, as I gathered my recollections of Monty Python and the Holy Grail before its 50th anniversary this week, that I realised I had seen it in full only once, back when I and the film were both considerably younger. It felt like more. The first fully narrative feature by Britain’s best-loved TV sketch troupe is among the most fondly, frequently and recognisably referenced comedies in all cinema; the film’s best scenes are hard to separate from various everyday quotations or pub impressions thereof. Some comedy is made not so much to stand as individual art than to be absorbed into our collective comic language, and so it is with Monty Python, their best work a stew of endlessly imitable idioms and accents, to be relished with or without context.

In all truth, I remembered laughing at Monty Python and the Holy Grail more vividly than I remembered exactly what I was laughing at. For this I must blame my late father, whose laughter – loud and barking, often a beat ahead of lines already known and eagerly anticipated – I perhaps recall more vividly than my own. The film was one of a jumbled canon of comedies that, over the course of my childhood, he eagerly presented to my brother and I as apices of the form, with hit-and-miss results. (Paper Moon? Wholly shared joy. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines? He chuckled alone.) Monty Python and the Holy Grail was among the hits: some giggling fits are too giddy not to catch on.

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Season’s Greetings, which was removed from the town much to residents’ sadness, is focus of touring show

It materialised just before Christmas seven years ago , turning the industrial town of Port Talbot into a destination for culture lovers, but – after much wrangling and soul-searching – was whisked away on the back of an art dealer’s lorry and is more than 1,000 miles from home.

The saga of Port Talbot’s Banksy mural, Season’s Greetings, is being told in a new play opening next week, prompting a flurry of reminiscences and recriminations about what happened after one of the world’s most famous street artists paid a visit to south Wales.

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The next pick in our ongoing series of comfort movie favourites is Steven Spielberg’s defining shark thriller

What makes a film “feelgood” ? If it’s not a romcom, or otherwise setting out to impart warm fuzzies, familiarity plays a big part. I’ve seen Jaws so many times that watching it now truly feels like sinking into a warm bath.

It’s always been my favourite film; I’ve read the book, got the hat, seen the play . (Did you know that, on set, the animatronic shark was called Bruce?) Far from keeping me out of the water, Jaws stoked my interest in marine life, even inspiring me to get my scuba qualification.

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