Empowering for some, deeply traumatic for others, the former detainees in Mehran Tamadon’s documentary paint a harrowing picture of systematic maltreatment

Mehran Tamadon’s probing film operates a kind of dialogue with his related documentary My Worst Enemy , as it creates sequences in which victims of abuse by the Iranian secret police re-enact their ordeal. In this one, the title is taken from the brutal words sprung upon a prisoner by their jailer who declares that, within the forbidding walls of the prison, God simply does not exist. As Tamadon’s interview subjects reconstruct their cells in various warehouses in Paris, their testimony lays bare how terrifyingly true that statement is.

Once an entrepreneur dealing in video equipment for major Iranian news stations, Mazyar Ebrahimi was falsely accused of espionage and assassination. With extraordinary calm, he demonstrates the various methods of torture inflicted on his body, with Tamadon role-playing the part of the detainee. In a pivotal scene, Ebrahimi gets to reclaim his narrative and briefly steps behind the camera, as Tamadon recreates a news broadcast where Ebrahimi was forced to confess to baseless charges of murder.

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He plays a troubled FBI agent in a knotty crime series made for autumn nights in. Plus: Stacey Dooley meets the ‘Benefits Queen’. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic
A compelling start for this new crime drama from the creator of Mare of Easttown, set in the Philadelphia suburbs. Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) is a binman by day, coping with the death of his brother while looking after his kids and niece, and maybe even looking for love. By night, though, he and his mate Cliff (Raúl Castillo) dress in Halloween costumes and burgle members of a drug-dealing biker gang. Enter Mark Ruffalo’s Tom, an FBI agent dealing with his own family bereavement, and put on the case with an inexperienced taskforce before a turf war escalates. It’s deeply layered, fantastically written and proof that the autumn nights are here. Hollie Richardson

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Singers took home two trophies each as Mariah Carey won a lifetime achievement award, in a night that largely celebrated female artists

Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter triumphed at the MTV Video Music awards, taking home two moonman trophies each in a relatively muted show that once again largely celebrated female pop artists and legacy acts.

Gaga, the most nominated artist of the evening with 12 nods, took home the first award at Long Island’s UBS arena, for artist of the year, winning over fellow superstars Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny and Beyoncé, all of whom were not in attendance.

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Can two world-famous actors and auteur Simon Stone bring 19th-century Norway screaming into the modern world? They talk mean directors, bathtub revelations and reinventing Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea

Entering the almost silent rehearsal room, I fear I’ve blundered into a private moment. The Lady from the Sea cast are seated in a tight circle and at least two of them have tears in their eyes. The quiet murmur of conversation suggests something heavy has just gone down. So I’m relieved when I realise they’re reading a scene – and stunned to discover the scene was written only yesterday.

Simon Stone’s modern take on Ibsen’s play is still under construction, and he has had his actors together for less than a fortnight. “Most people really take six weeks to connect to scenes,” the Australian writer-director says during the lunch break. “Often an entire rehearsal process can be the slow marking out of stuff, and it takes until your first run-through to feel anything at all. We are connecting faster, because we’ve been talking about it so much.”

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Death of British singer, who wrote and sang hits including Goodbye Stranger and Bloody Well Right, comes ‘after a long illness’, band says

Rick Davies, the co-founder, vocalist and songwriter for the British band Supertramp, has died aged 81.

Davies died at home on Long Island last week “after a long illness”, the band said in a statement released on Sunday.

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Exclusive: A Second Life will feature My Bed and never seen before pieces that reflect on artist’s experience of cancer

Tracey Emin will open her biggest ever exhibition at the Tate Modern next spring, showcasing her best artworks from a 40-year career.

A Second Life will include some of Emin’s most famous works, including the headline-grabbing and Turner prize-nominated My Bed, from 1998, alongside never-before-seen pieces.

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Soho theatre, London
The US comic and TV writer’s account of his military service in Iraq is exuberant, enlightening, and flies the flag for the plight of veterans

At one point in Bill Posley’s show about his time in the US army, he tells us how, after failing to transition to postwar life, he was denied a PTSD diagnosis by the military. It is ironic that, in an age when the word “trauma” is so freely applied – in comedy shows as elsewhere – such a compelling claim (the one for which the term PTSD was invented, no less) should be denied. The point is well made that veterans are misunderstood and overlooked in American life – and Posley has plenty more evidence to back it up.

I was struck, as I watched The Day I Accidentally Went to War, by how rare narratives like this are, on the comedy stage at least – although maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that few ex-soldiers turn their experiences into solo performances for the arts centre crowd. So much the better for Posley, a writer on Apple TV’s Shrinking , whose account of his youth, his military training and service, and his troubled homecoming, can’t help but be interesting to audiences who less often hear these stories firsthand.

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Toronto film festival: The four-time Oscar nominee is as strong as ever playing a teacher in a shocking situation, but the film can’t quite rise to her level

Though criminally underpaid and disrespected, teachers are nonetheless held to rigidly high standards of care, compassion and rectitude. They are to be exemplary stewards of our children, while unflinchingly enduring the battering of parents, administrators and outside agitators. Which is why it’s often so compelling, in a dark and squirmy way, to watch them break bad on film.

We have, of course, seen plenty of ill-advised (or illegal) sexual relationships between teacher and student, in myriad movies and TV programs. Beyond that hoary trope, though, we’ve observed with alarm the drug-addled overstepping of Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson ; we’ve been guiltily thrilled by the obsessive opportunism of The Kindergarten Teacher ; we’ve pried nosily into the shifty criminality of Hugh Jackman in Bad Education . These stories all present a grimly alluring vision: carefully maintained professionalism giving way to baser impulse.

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(Sony)
Jade Thirlwall offers a wild ride through electroclash, Eurovision drama and emotive synth-pop – albeit one she can’t quite maintain for a whole album

Last month, the indefatigable Vice magazine published a piece on the “summer of British chaos” , documenting a scene of deranged social media provocateurs existing at the crispiest fringes of our nation’s cooked identity. Writer Clive Martin defined these graven images of the algorithm as being regionally specific, lurid, rowdy, funny and hedonistic. As a former member of Little Mix, a girl band put together via public vote on The X Factor, Jade Thirlwall might not seem like the likeliest bedfellow of this unhinged movement. But the South Shields pop star’s debut solo single, last year’s Angel of My Dreams, dodged focus-grouped smoothness to present a sublimely whacked-out, thoroughly British pop vision that felt like spinning through someone else’s for you page and realising they exist in a markedly different universe from your own.

It started with a wound-up sample of Puppet on a String, exploded into a falsetto-spiked power ballad, then grinding electroclash paired with a withering rap, then sped through each mode again, variously at double and half speed. Its wild energy was fuelled by contradiction: Gucci glamour paired with lines such as “If I don’t win, I’m in the bin”. And while Jade dissed Syco and X Factor boss Simon Cowell (“selling my soul to a psycho”), the song’s vaulting soundclashes defying his bland vision of pop, Angel was also her love letter to the toxic paramour of fame: a status that might be easier to sustain with more conventional fare than whiplashing Sandie Shaw into growling synths. It was crackers and brilliant: no former boy- or girl-bander has come close to making such an arresting reintroduction since – and I mean this as the highest possible praise – Geri Halliwell burned bright through a short-lived fit of dadaist genius.

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