Intervision promises to be lighter on sequins and heavier on patriotic ballads than its European counterpart

Russia is gearing up to revive its Soviet-era alternative to Eurovision – the Intervision song contest – which begins in Moscow on Saturday, with performers from 23, mostly allied, countriesto take the stage.

But sequinned bodysuits, camp theatrics and Europop bangers will be in short supply. Instead, the Kremlin’s version of the spectacle promises “traditional values”, patriotic ballads and a Russian entry led by a fiercely pro-war singer, as Moscow attempts to refashion Europe’s glitter-soaked pageant in its own image.

As the fall festivals come to a close, the awards season is slowly taking shape but without a substantial amount of sure things, questions remain

There’s been a longtime dominance of fall festivals in the Oscar race, the majority of contenders premiering at Venice, Telluride and Toronto, leaving little room for other routes to victory. For a 13-year period, between 2007 and 2020, there were only two best picture winners that hadn’t travelled that way, and that pair had both premiered at a festival anyway, just slightly earlier at Cannes.

But since the pandemic shifted how so much of the industry operates, the past few years have seen unusual variation. Coda became the first best picture winner from Sundance, Everything Everywhere All at Once the first from SXSW, Oppenheimer the first non-festival premiere to win since The Departed in 2006 and the past six years has seen Cannes with more best picture wins than any other festival. It’s meant that at this particular time of year, as we sift through the good and bad of the fall festivals, it’s harder than ever to predict the race.

The author on his secret theories about Tolkien, the most perfect and terrifying Moomin book, and how his father, John le Carré, inspired him

My earliest reading memory
I read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien at seven, in my bedroom in the deep west of Cornwall. I secretly believed that Rivendell was based on that house, which it clearly wasn’t.

My favourite book growing up
Impossible. I’m inconstant, so it was whatever I was reading at the time. Let’s say Finn Family Moomintroll, which is the most perfect of Tove Jansson’s lovely (and occasionally frankly terrifying) Moomin books.

Danny Boyle will oversee youth culture event in May to mark 75th anniversary of postwar ‘burst of colour’

Danny Boyle will turn the Southbank Centre into a celebration of youth culture next May to mark the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, which leaders of the institution hope will “galvanise” the country like the original celebration did in 1951.

Boyle’s You Are Here work will involve thousands of participants who will take over the Southbank Centre site celebrating the role the institution “has played in supporting youth culture since its inception”.

A gleaming new 4K restoration has brought the cultural touchstone back into the spotlight, but what happened to the children who played the Von Trapps?

‘We’re still almost boringly normal,” says Nicholas Hammond, helpfully making an observation that I was still figuring out how to tactfully phrase. “If you sat down with us today, you’re just sitting down with a bunch of people.”

The 75-year-old actor, speaking by Zoom from his home in Sydney, is the oldest living member of the seven-strong youth ensemble who played the Von Trapp children in The Sound of Music 60 years ago. With the indelible musical receiving an anniversary rerelease in cinemas this weekend – in a gleaming new 4K restoration to boot – five of the seven are preparing for another reunion to mark the occasion.

(Nonesuch)
From breezy swing to scampering synths, folksy harmonies to stark wails of the soul, Salvant’s crystalline vocals shine across her ingenious experiments

When the US-raised French-Haitian singer Cécile McLorin Salvant played Ronnie Scott’s for the first time as a 25-year-old in 2014, the awestruck atmosphere recognised a young multilingual jazz artist of rare gifts – but it was soon apparent that her sublime technical skill as a singer wasn’t the half of it.

Salvant had all the jazz tools: coolly hip timing, improv quick-wittedness, the crystalline sonic clarity of her early model, Sarah Vaughan. But she could also conjure up a dream world of her own that listeners would willingly follow her into. Her new album, Oh Snap, is a set of 12 originals and one cover that she created on her own over four years, before adding her band. She experimented for the first time with computer-generated sounds to draw on grungy pop and intimate folk music and expand on the classical-vocal education and extensive jazz input she acquired while living in France in the 2000s. Salvant says her enthusiasms as a visual artist also liberated her for this adventurous step-change.

Jennifer Coolidge is the funny, horny heart of a blood-flecked crime drama with strong Fargo vibes, plus the latest Pixar animation – about a boy who has a close encounter with a gang of aliens

There’s a distinct whiff of Fargo to Dito Montiel’s blood-flecked crime drama. We’ve got the seemingly ordinary family with secrets: Ed Harris’s Vincent, spouse Sandy (Gabrielle Union) and her nerdy teenage son DJ (Miles J Harvey). There are the disrupters: Vincent’s ex-wife Ruth (Jennifer Coolidge), their errant son Rocco (Lewis Pullman) and his girlfriend Marina (Emanuela Postacchini), who spark revelations about Vincent’s former life. And there are the comic-relief mob killers, nicely underplayed by Bill Murray and Pete Davidson. But it’s Coolidge who is the film’s trump card: funny, profane, horny – and wonderfully disinclined to take the revenge plot in any way seriously.
Sunday 21 September, Prime Video

(Eat Your Own Ears)
Lyle Lovett meets brain-scouring distortion on the electronic musician’s surprisingly un-nostalgic collaboration with former Lambchop guitarist Tyler

It may seem as if Four Tet ’s Kieran Hebden is arriving late to the country music party but, rest assured, this is not a case of uncharacteristic bandwagon-jumping. For one, the roots of this collaboration with former Lambchop guitarist William Tyler date back to 2020; for two, the pair’s new album doubles as a paean to the 1980s Americana Hebden’s dad played round the house when he was a kid (the record is named after his childhood home in south-west London) – music that Tyler’s Nashville songwriter father was professionally involved in.

Yet despite that neat backstory, the evocative title and the fact it begins with a reworking of country mainstay Lyle Lovett’s beautiful and sweetly bizarre 1987 track If I Had a Boat , 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s is not an overtly nostalgic album, or a particularly coherent one. The retro country influence rarely fuses with Hebden’s soporific synths and brain-scouring bursts of distortion: the aforementioned opener kicks off with a drone that wavers in intensity like the circling of a benevolent alien spacecraft, practically drowning out Tyler’s faithful rendition of Lovett’s soothingly lovely guitar work. Then Spider Ballad combines pointillist synths with an insistent bassline, while the dreamlike Loretta Guides My Hands Through the Radio layers studio chatter and instrument tuning.

Informed by everything from jungle to Krautrock and musique concrète, Tortoise broke new ground 30 years ago. Returning after nine years away, ‘it’s a different world’, they say

‘You guys would freak out if you drove down Grand Avenue now,” says Tortoise multi-instrumentalist Dan Bitney. These days, this major Chicago thoroughfare is looking pretty bougie. “Expensive flower stores, bakeries, cafes. Back when we were there, it was empty streets, motorcycle gangs.” He shakes his head at his expat bandmates. “It’s a different world, you know?”

At the dawn of the 1990s, Chicago was down on its luck. A long depression and a declining manufacturing sector had left parts of the city a ghost town – not great conditions if you wanted to open an expensive flower store, but a pretty great place to start a band. It was 1991 when bassist Doug McCombs and drummer John Herndon moved into a 40,000 sq ft warehouse space off Grand Avenue. The pair had started Tortoise the year before, initially conceiving the project as a freelance rhythm section in the vein of reggae duo Sly and Robbie. “The idea was we’d play with our friends – like session musicians, except not getting paid,” says McCombs.