When four Californian pre-teens made an album together it was just one of many creative adventures and quickly set aside, but its reputation as naive avant pop has quietly grown. Still friends, the band explain their odd rebirth

Like an outsider art version of Sugababes, or kids singing over Depeche Mode ringtones, there’s something both familiar and odd about Summer 2000 by X-Cetra. Recorded by four preteens in Y2K California, the album distils sleepovers, crushes and butterfly clips into 11 tracks of bedroom pop and Windows 95 R&B, equal parts carefree and gravely serious.

Only 20 CD-R copies were ever made. But a still-unknown person posted one of them online in 2001, and by 2020 the girls – now women – were astonished to find it being discussed on muso forum Rate Your Music. “Pure creative expression of these preteen best friends who love each other and wanted to make art together, and that’s so beautiful,” says one user there; “Definitely on the poppier side of ‘accidentally avant garde music made by children’,” says another.

Fifty young men compete in an endurance event, during which they are shot in the head at point-blank range if they slow down, in this horrific buddy story adaptation

If you like your dystopian scenarios lean and extremely mean, then look no further than this Stephen King adaptation, which is surely one of the grimmest mainstream movies we’ve had for some time. The blunt premise is custom built for death and suffering: 50 young American men are selected by lottery for an annual marathon march. If any walker slows to less than three miles per hour, or strays off the road, they are removed from the competition – by being shot in the head at point-blank range. The final survivor wins whatever they want, they’re promised.

Why these men would volunteer for a competition with such unfavourable odds we’re left to wonder, as the broader authoritarian society in which the story is set – which looks a lot like 1960s America – is barely seen or explained. It’s clear who we’re rooting for though: Cooper Hoffman’s Ray Garraty, who is dropped off at the starting line by his tearful mother (Judy Greer), then it’s off to the races. Garraty is an all-round decent soul, who befriends and encourages his fellow competitors, particularly Pete, played by British actor David Jonsson (who’s come a long way from Rye Lane ). Their growing friendship is the film’s heart, and both actors are innately charming and natural, though both have deeper, darker histories and motivations to reveal.

Rashid Masharawi, who produced the anthology of 22 short films that was Palestine’s official entry to the Academy Awards, has remarkable optimism about the future of Gaza

Being a Palestinian under Israeli occupation will not help someone make a good film, according to Rashid Masharawi, but a good film-maker will help Palestine.

With his anthology film From Ground Zero (in Arabic: From Zero Distance) he attempts to do just that by bridging the space between the Palestinians in Gaza who have endured a campaign of annihilation behind closed doors to those around the world watching as a genocide unfolds in real time.

Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra in the US, the Philharmonia in London and at major opera houses

A number of high-calibre conductors, including Kurt Masur , Klaus Tennstedt and Carlos Kleiber , born in the years leading up to 1930, came to prominence around the middle of the 20th century, maturing during the years of Herbert von Karajan’s dominance. Christoph von Dohnányi, who has died aged 95, was among them, rising like the others through the ranks of the German opera houses to major posts in the UK and US.

Following appointments as general music director at Lübeck, Kassel and Frankfurt, Dohnányi made his British debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1965, his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1972 (with Falstaff) and at Covent Garden in 1974 (with Salome). Then in 1984 he began an 18-year period as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra , during which he elevated it to new heights.

Òran Mór, Glasgow
A naive Scottish academic is granted an audience with the genocidal Cambodian dictator in Jack MacGregor’s play

If you met a genocidal dictator how would you react? For the Scottish academic who is granted an audience with Cambodia’s Pol Pot in Jack MacGregor’s play, the first encounter leaves him blandly upbeat. “He seems quite nice,” he tells his friend, a sceptical American journalist.

His naivety verges on the comic, but the play is at its most gripping when it takes the opinions of this specialist in economic history seriously. Played by Bobby Bradley, and known only as Stranger, he is the author of In Defence of Kampuchea, a paean to the Khmer Rouge, and is predisposed to see the good in policies such as the centralisation of a money-free economy.

At Òran Mór, Glasgow , until 13 September. Then at Traverse theatre, Edinburgh , 16–20 September.

The formidable Vogue boss said Meryl Streep’s subtle performance as a fictional fashion editor ‘had a lot of wit’ – adding that she attended the premiere wearing Prada without knowing its theme

Anna Wintour, the outgoing editor-in-chief of Vogue, has addressed Meryl Streep’s performance as a formidable glossy fashion-mag editor widely perceived to be based on her in the 2006 comedy The Devil Wears Prada.

Based on the novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger , who previously worked as Wintour’s assistant, the film starred Anne Hathaway as an aspiring reporter who secures a post as a lackey to the ice-cold editor of fictional publication Runway.

Gary Younge discusses the ‘whitelash’ that fuelled another summer of riots in the UK and beyond

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It has been a second summer of riots in the UK targeting asylum seekers and immigration. And while there is something stomach-sinking about the mood and the rise in racist rhetoric, it is also worth remembering that we are in the middle of a global phenomenon, and that there is resistance. I spoke to the author and former Guardian columnist Gary Younge about why this moment feels different to those before it.

Bath museum celebrates varied ways illustrators of author’s work and adapters of her novels have portrayed her characters through history

For the 21st-century Jane Austen fan, the images of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in the beloved BBC series Pride of Prejudice or Anya Taylor-Joy’s big-screen portrayal of Emma may be the first to leap to mind.

But an exhibition opening in Bath celebrates the varied ways illustrators of Austen’s work and adapters of her novels have depicted some of her most cherished characters.

Brandon Kramer’s documentary complicates any simple view of the Israel-Gaza war in its portrait of one family’s agonising divisions

At the present moment, for pro-Palestinian campaigners, mention of the hostages and victims of Hamas’s 7 October attacks tends to be greeted with indifference, or even contempt. And yet this powerful and complex documentary, directed by Brandon Kramer (a distant relative of some of the people involved) and co-produced by Darren Aronofsky, is a reminder that the situation now can’t be understood without remembering the Hamas massacre – how it was calculated to provoke a rage-filled reaction that would discredit Israel internationally, what it meant and continues to mean within Israel and how the political and ideological connotations of the hostages have themselves evolved.

At first, the hostages’ images were widely seen as a focus for outrage and a casus belli. Posters put up in cities showing the hostages were ripped down - to the fury of their families. But now the hostages’ images are associated more with anti-Netanyahu, anti-war-at-all-costs sentiment, with the families demanding real negotiating progress in getting them home.