Toronto film festival: The Oscar-winning star of The Whale makes another awards play with a beautifully shot yet emotionally inert comedy drama

Brendan Fraser is an actor performing characters who help people achieve a sense of emotional healing, affirmation or comfort. That could describe who he tends to be in “real” life (whatever that means in this context) but it’s also what he’s playing in Rental Family.

The feelgood dramedy – or at least that’s what it tries so hard to be – is about an actual service in Japan that supplies actors who perform as bit players in everyday people’s lives. They’re hired by clients to fake it in roles as a family member, a friend or even the cheering audience at a karaoke bar. The premise packs meta layers and gives Fraser the opportunity to inhabit multiple roles, while turning the lens back on the audience to consider what we’re looking for in the movie(s). Unfortunately, when it comes to Rental Family, it’s just not that deep.

(Def Jam)
Part two of Bieber’s seventh album adds very little: it’s largely bland pop with glimpses of quality thanks to a buzzy supporting cast including Dijon and Bakar

J ustin Bieber ’s Swag II adds 23 tracks to his already over-stuffed Swag project , and it’s not just the title that lacks imagination. Like its predecessor, released just two months ago, Swag II unites a buzzy team of producers and writers known for freshening up R’n’B and hands them a precisely curated Pinterest board: Dangerous-era Michael Jackson, D’Angelo’s lush arrangements, Jai Paul’s glitchy, retro-futurist sonics and the sun-bleached textures of current collaborators Mk.gee and Dijon. But with unadventurous songwriting, the result is (another) album that’s all vibe and voguish production, and very little substance.

Opener Speed Demon reheats Bieber’s “is it clocking to you” meme for the second time across both albums, albeit with a bright, funky bravado and a memorably bonkers chorus about “checking these chickens”, AKA leaving his critics in the dust. But for a song bragging about ambition, it lacks adrenaline – like many of Swag II’s safe, repetitive tracks.

Marking the release of new movie Brave the Dark, the Bafta winning star of Chernobyl and The Crown – and owner of the best eyebrows in the business – will answer your questions

You might know British-born Jared Harris best for playing Lane Pryce in Mad Men, King George VI in The Crown, or Valery Legasov in 2019 mini series Chernobyl, for which he won a Bafta for best actor. On the silver screen, he’s due to play Mikhail Gorbachev in upcoming American historical political drama Reykjavik with Jeff Daniels and JK Simmons, as well as a flunky fearful of nuclear Armageddon in Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite. Before then comes his latest film, coming of age drama, Brave the Dark, in which he plays a compassionate high school teacher in 1980’s rural Pennsylvania.

Harris, who played Andy Warhol in 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol, was the antagonist to Adam Sandler in 2002’s Mr Deeds, and pops up in everything from Natural Born Killers to Ocean’s Twelve, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and Guy Ritchie’s The Man from UNCLE. The son of original Albus Dumbledore Richard Harris, he’s one of those actors who, if not in the main part, seems like an old friend, whether he’s playing the archetypal polite Englishman, a horrible villain like Moriarty in Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes, or Kenneth Branagh’s doppelganger in How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog. And there’s no arguing that he has the best acting eyebrows in the business.

After years of partying, I realised the exhaustion and anxiety weren’t worth it, and turned my back on Friday night Fomo. I still enjoy the dancefloor, but I always know when to leave

Most of my adult life has revolved around music: clubs, bars, festivals, house parties – anywhere I could dance to loud music. I loved how energising and cathartic it was to get immersed in it, to lose myself a little and move my body expressively without judgment. I’d get so absorbed that I would lose track of time; once, at Burning Man, I was awake for 36 hours exploring the festival, meeting new people and partying.

When I became a DJ, these kinds of events increased. Late nights out would last until the morning. Often, they became marathon weekend sessions, which ran from Friday night to Sunday lunchtime. It wasn’t all dancing and shenanigans – there would be moments to sit around and chat with people, too. I’d be out at least three times a week. Even though I’d get tired, I would always find some way to push through to the early hours because I was scared to miss out on things. Fomo (fear of missing out) drove many of my decisions.

In the first of a film trilogy, teenage Tanjiro seeks vengeance for his murdered family in what is a great taste of things to come

The first part of a trilogy that will conclude the massively popular anime series Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, this latest smash hit from Ufotable, directed by Haruo Sotozaki, is a spectacular treat. For those new to the franchise, the story is set during a mythical imagining of the Taisho era, where hordes of carnivorous demons descend on innocent civilians. Fighting in the name of his massacred family and a sister infected with demon blood, teenage protagonist Tanjiro Kamado joins the Demon Slayer Corps, determined to wipe these ruthless beasts off the Earth. The film picks up from a thrilling cliffhanger of the fourth season, where Tanjiro and his fellow comrades are thrust into the lair of the demon-in-chief, the cunning and all-powerful Muzan Kibutsuji.

Much of the film is structured around various battles between the series regulars and their sworn enemies. The challenge of sustaining the narrative is tempered by the use of flashbacks, providing a backstory for each of the formidable foes. Though packed with emotional impact, such detours occasionally hamper the pacing of the combat sequences, which are the film’s visual highlights. Each demon slayer is armed with a specific breath and fighting technique, which manifests into flows of water, fire, and thunder imagery, providing a striking contrast to the cavernous design of Muzan’s Infinity Castle. The latter, evoking perhaps the endless staircases of MC Escher albeit with a Japanese flair, is a handsomely animated spectacle where corridors and hallways fold into one another like endless labyrinths, while fusuma and shoji screens function as trap doors used to throw the demon slayers into unimaginable dangers.

An ambitious history of Britain’s volatile relationship with Europe, culminating in the 2016 referendum

Next year marks a decade since Britain voted to leave the EU. A whole 10 years of turmoil, and still the country can’t seem to agree exactly why it happened or what should happen next, with both leavers and remainers increasingly united in frustration about what the referendum has delivered. How did we end up here?

In Between the Waves, New Statesman editor Tom McTague makes an ambitious attempt to answer that question by zooming out and putting Brexit in its broader historical context. The result is a great big entertaining sweep of a book, tracing the roots of Britain’s ambiguous relationship with its neighbours back to the end of the second world war, and will be joyfully inhaled by any reader who loves the kind of podcasts that invariably feature two men talking to each other. It charts the path from a time when membership was seen as an antidote to British decline – the chance for “a nation that lost an empire to gain a continent”, as the Sun put it in 1975 – to a time when it was singled out as the cause of it.

The global fashion star chats to famous musicians about her friend – the man behind Ziggy Stardust. Plus, a comedian borrows a Hollywood celeb’s car for off-the-wall interviews

Kate Moss has transformed into Ziggy Stardust for the cover of Vogue, but her connection to David Bowie isn’t just sartorial. They were also friends. The supermodel hosts her first podcast about Bowie’s chameleonic period from 1970 to 1975, when he morphed into an androgynous alien, a glam rock god, a purveyor of blue-eyed soul and everything in between. Elton John, Iggy Pop and Twiggy are among the starry interviewees. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, all episodes out on Wednesday 10 September

The great soprano will be the first British singer to top the bill at the Last Night in over a decade. So why does she advise her younger colleagues to leave the country?

It’s the height of the August heatwave when I sit down opposite British soprano Louise Alder in a fiercely air-conditioned central London office. We’re here to discuss her headline performance at this year’s Last Night of the Proms but, as a seasonal warmup, I ask whether she’s had a break this summer. Alder looks faintly amused, then reminds me she’s been at Glyndebourne doing three performances of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro every week since the end of June. In fact, she was on stage as the Countess barely 12 hours earlier.

“It’s never-ending,” she says. “I don’t want this to come across negatively – it’s been the most amazing contract – but an extremely long run. Twenty shows, which I think is the longest single run that Glyndebourne has done.” Days after the show closed, the company performed it again at the Proms . “And then a week and a half later, I come back for the Last Night.”

Images chosen by 24 international newspaper picture editors will compete at this year’s Visa pour l’Image , the festival of photojournalism in Perpignan, France, for the Gökşin Sipahioğlu by Sipa Press Daily Press Visa d’or award. The festival is on until 14 September

• War, wildfires and child workers: Visa Pour l’Image highlights – in pictures