This propulsive, gripping three-parter about a young equestrian’s death shows a duo who refused to give up on her. It’s an important attempt to do justice to a deeply dark tale

When exactly is true crime a force for good? It’s a question we should probably ask ourselves every single time we consume something in this lurid and inevitably exploitative genre. Death of a Showjumper is, in many ways, a standardly sensationalised account of a young woman’s murder: paced for maximum dramatic intensity; details judiciously withheld to spin the most compulsively watchable yarn. But its broader subject matter – the epidemic of violence against women , and the ways such abuse is silenced, minimised and weaponised against the victims themselves – is one of the few that can justify the existence of a series like this.

It’s easy to feel cynical at first. Visually stunning and thematically arresting, Death of a Showjumper’s backdrop is tailor-made for a TV crime drama. It’s set amid the equestrian community of Northern Ireland, and we are transported to a place brimming with bucolic beauty as well as “secrets and silence”. The lifestyle is familiar but subtly alien: horses are ubiquitous and the associated culture not reserved for toffs – the hunt is an adrenaline sport for skilled riders. And 21-year-old Katie Simpson was one.

Toronto film festival: The two stars do their share of heavy lifting in Derek Cianfrance’s intermittently effective comedy drama about a deceitful prison escapee

There’s considerable movie star charm powering Roofman, a mid-level comedy drama set in the mid-2000s and starring two actors who were stars around that time. It’s also reminiscent of a film that would have been released then too, a brief glimpse of a Blockbuster Video store making it easy to imagine picking this one up for a rainy afternoon rental.

On those terms, it’s perfectly watchable, engaging enough to keep us from pressing stop, if not quite enough to make us want to press rewind once it’s over. It’s based on the stranger-than-fiction tale of Jeffrey Manchester, played by Channing Tatum, an ex-military father-of-three who just can’t quite find his place in the civilian world. His old army buddy Steve (Lakeith Stanfield) reminds him of his particular skill for observation, urging him to put it to good use. Instead, after disappointing his daughter once again with an underwhelming birthday present, he decides to use it for something less well-advised, robbing not one but 45 McDonald’s, going in through the roof and making enough to give his family the life they deserve.

The cricket star continues his mission to lift disadvantaged kids out of trouble, this time including a girls’ XI. His unearthing of energy, humour and a desire to achieve deserves our support

‘Talk about grassroots cricket,” says Freddie Flintoff, leaning on a rickety railing outside a dilapidated Liverpool sports club. “This is in t’soil, this.” After three years on air, Field of Dreams, the documentary where the former England captain trains teenagers from deprived areas to play a sport they have no previous interest in, has reset to zero. His original group of lads from Preston, Lancashire, have become a team (season one) that has toured India (season two). They returned as young men who love cricket but no longer need their friend Fred’s help.

For the series to continue, the format needs to start again. And it is now a format: all the emotions and challenges are familiar as Flintoff arrives in Bootle, Liverpool, another neglected area of deindustrialised north-west England. A representative of the local cricket club, once a thriving community hub that is now regularly vandalised, takes Flintoff on a tour of the neighbourhood’s derelict and boarded-up buildings, explaining that kids there commit petty crime and join gangs for a lack of anything else to do. When Flintoff visits a class of 16-year-old boys at a PRU – a pupil referral unit, ie a school for children who are unable or no longer welcome to attend mainstream schools – they have never heard of him and think cricket is a way for posh eccentrics to waste time.

Toronto film festival: the bombastic director’s second film about the music legend shows the singer at his most mesmerizing but the picture remains incomplete

Baz Luhrmann now has two Elvis movies under his bedazzled belt. The first is his epic biopic starring Austin Butler and now he has unleashed another called EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, remixing archival material with never-before-seen footage from the singer’s residency in Las Vegas. What’s remarkable about them both, apart from the director’s obvious affinity for his subject’s showmanship, is his refusal across so many hours of jiggling and swivelling to meaningfully hold Elvis to account.

Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated 2022 film acknowledged Elvis’s cultural appropriation: how his phenomenal success owed so much to the R&B, gospel and rock he grew up around and the racist institutions that put him on a pedestal while holding down the Black artists that birthed and gave that music its soul. The movie also painted Elvis as a bleeding heart for the Black community, projecting so much torment on the crooner over the injustices he witnessed, despite his refusal to say anything publicly – for the community he benefitted from – during the civil rights era. It was all the craven and exploitative Colonel Tom Parker’s fault, according to Luhrmann’s Elvis, depicting the leery and controlling manager (played by Tom Hanks) as the reason for the singer’s strict silence, and the root of so many sins.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is screening at the Toronto Film Festival and will be released at a later date

Two versions of the Guitar Player raise important questions of attribution. In our age of fake images, authenticity in art is more vital than ever

“How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it is worth?” So ends Theft: A Love Story by the Australian novelist Peter Carey. This scabrous riff on the slipperiness of cultural value in the international art scene asks: is a copy so good that even experts mistake it for the original painting still a fake?

Questions of authenticity and attribution are behind a new display by English Heritage at Kenwood House in London to mark the 350th anniversary of the death of Johannes Vermeer. For the first time in 300 years, two nearly identical paintings of the Guitar Player , one signed by the Dutch master, the other on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and until recently believed to be a 17th- or 18th-century copy, will hang side by side. Experts have puzzled over the relationship between the two paintings for 100 years. Now visitors are being invited take part in a game of spot the difference (there are five, apparently), comparing a recognised masterpiece and its “twin”.

Toronto film festival: The multi-hyphenate’s directorial debut has noble intentions in its timely class commentary but his brand of humour makes for an awkward fit

The absence of big-screen comedies, once an almost weekly occurrence, has become such a widely complained-about issue that the rare novelty of one actually being made has turned into a marketing tool. Last month’s remake of The Naked Gun employed a campaign that directly addressed this problem, with an ad that played like a PSA about such a lack and why supporting one was of societal importance (the plea only mildly worked, with the film finishing with decent, but not quite decent enough, box office). At the Toronto premiere of Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune, festival chief Cameron Bailey made reference to the now unusual sensation of laughing with an audience, and the actor-writer-director himself has been impressing upon people his desire to make a theatrical comedy in the billion-dollar wake of Barbie. He believes in its importance so why doesn’t the industry?

A raft of recent green lights suggests that Hollywood is finally realising the demand is more than misty-eyed nostalgia but there’s still a certain unfair pressure on the few that are coming out to prove the genre’s commercial viability (Adam Sandler’s giant Netflix numbers for Happy Gilmore 2 just served to show where audiences have learned to expect their comedies to be). There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it.

In the combat zone of the supermarket duopoly, Tennilles_deals is our protector, guiding us through each aisle with her weekly videos of sale products

Maya Angelou once said “a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people” and when she said that, I can only assume she had Australian TikToker and micro influencer Tennilles_deals in mind.

Who exactly is Tennilles_deals? Firstly, she’s the Mother Teresa of Aussie supermarkets. Secondly, I don’t know anything about her personally because this savvy queen isn’t marketing herself like your average influencer. She lets her work speak for itself.

Royal Albert Hall, London
The ethnically diverse orchestra played with vigour and spirit in a varied programme that included Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Shostakovich and Valerie Coleman

This concert was to have been conducted by Simon Rattle – a mark of the esteem in which leading artists hold Chineke! Orchestra, the trailblazing British ensemble made up of a majority of Black and ethnically diverse musicians. In the event, Charleston-born Jonathon Heyward put his own indelible stamp on a varied yet satisfying program.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s La Bamboula, a kaleidoscopic dance with roots in the West Indies, played to Chineke!’s strengths. The performed it with vigour and spirit, while Heyward kept its likable blend of late-Victorian tunefulness and proto-Hollywood glitz gossamer-light. You could see why Henry Wood programmed it at the Proms 16 times, making its subsequent 91-year absence inexplicable.