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.

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.

There’s a crude fascination in seeing the contents of a literary celebrity’s therapy sessions, but we’re surely invading her privacy

Motherhood is a state of continuous loss that is meant to culminate when the dependent baby becomes an independent adult. Joan Didion survived this, as many mothers have, by keeping constant watch over her adopted daughter Quintana, fearing “swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet”. She also survived it, as fewer mothers have, by writing obsessively about the loss she feared. In her arid, fevered masterpiece Play It As It Lays, published when Quintana was four, the narrator’s breakdown is precipitated by her daughter’s long-term hospitalisation with an unnamed mental disorder. A Book of Common Prayer is about the disappearance of the protagonist’s criminal revolutionary daughter. “Marin was loose in the world and could leave it at any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing” – a description that could be applied to motherhood in general.

The coddling failed. Quintana drank to self-medicate for anxiety and by 33 she was an alcoholic whose therapist wanted her mother to participate in the treatment. And so in 1999 Didion, who had hitherto protected her inner life with her trademark dark glasses and stylish sentences with their wilfully “impenetrable polish”, found herself seeing Freudian analyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. Now her notes on their sessions have been, in my view misguidedly, gathered from her archive and packaged as a book.

Captivating film based on a true story follows an older man, and the man caught burgling his home, on a poignant journey to lay his wife to rest

Love is a many-splendored thing in this idiosyncratic, highly stylised debut from Vietnamese film-maker Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc. Blurring the lines between genres and styles, the first half of the film unfurls through a technique commonly seen in silent cinema: the iris shot. Within a circular frame we see a burglary gone wrong, a puzzling plaster cast in the shape of a woman and the burgeoning of a strange friendship, all set within an ordinary flat.

Inspired by a news story, the central premise is at once macabre and moving. Inside the plaster cast is the body of the owner’s wife, who died 10 years ago. Having caught a young burglar (Psycho Neo) red handed, the older man (Lưu Đức Cường) asks for his help on an unusual quest: transporting the body to the couple’s chosen resting place in a faraway desert. Though powered by love, it’s also a journey towards death.

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 are to go 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, will appear 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.

Booker-nominated writer Deborah Levy is thrilling audiences with her play about a psychoanalyst dealing with a very unusual patient, seized with anxiety about modern life. She explains how it came about

Two years ago, Deborah Levy came across a cartoon that sparked her imagination. It featured a Freud-like figure sitting opposite a rabbit on an analyst’s couch. Levy, a three-times Booker nominated novelist and award-winning author of nonfiction, had began her career as a playwright but had not written a script for 25 years until she came across the image. “As soon as I saw it,” she says, “I heard dialogue in my mind: a conversation, a serious, difficult conversation between a professor and a rabbit, about contemporary anxiety. I knew it was a play,” says Levy.

The premise may seem absurd but that is precisely the point – absurdism is a way of dealing with themes that have proved, in the wider world, divisive and even explosive to debate. Because the two-hander includes a rabbit, it makes space for humour, for misunderstandings.

An impassioned plea to save our rivers combines poetry and adventure

Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive ? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?”

He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings”. This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a “spiritual and physical entity”. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as “living entities”. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a “legal person [and] living entity”. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse.

The ursine protagonists are largely relegated to fart-gag sidekicks in this phoned-in attempt at a dystopian sci-fi

When George Michael recorded Careless Whisper, there can be no doubt his ultimate ambition for it would have been to soundtrack a garish animated sequence in which two anthropomorphic bears gambol through a prairie of giant fungus experiencing ecstatic visions as hallucinogenic spores rain down on them. Such is the frantic way of this Chinese cartoon franchise, as relentless and exhausting as ever in its 11th feature-film instalment. Five minutes in, before the credits, it has crammed in a post-apocalyptic prologue, oodles of eco-babble, a time-travelling tyke and an avalanche.

This latest one jumps on the fungal-panic bandwagon: Saylor (voiced by Nicola Vincent in the English-language version) has nipped back 100 years to locate the original spores at the root of a pestilence that has eradicated most of life on Earth. It turns out that hapless nature guide Vick (Chris Boike), seen polluting the forest with his tourists, was responsible for spreading them After Saylor fails to kill the mushroom in the cradle, the pair – along with Vick’s forest buddies, the bears Bramble (Joseph S Lambert) and Briar (Patrick Freeman) – are whisked back to the future. They discover a fungus-carpeted nightmare of a planet, overshadowed by a giant skyscraping toadstool.

After years of civil war and precarious peace, Covid-19 and the Beirut explosions of 2020 once again plunged Lebanon into crisis. But photographer Rania Matar has found inspiration for her project Where Do I Go? in the country’s women. ‘Instead of focusing on destruction, I chose to focus on their majestic presence, their creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience,’ she says