Toronto film festival: Scottish director David Mackenzie recruits Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James for a caper heavy on double-crossing but light on style

At last year’s Toronto film festival , genre-switching Scottish director David Mackenzie premiered Relay , his sly, charmingly lo-tech riff on paranoid thrillers of the 70s. It was a film that sadly crumbled in its last act (and at the box office months later) but it was an admirable attempt to do the one thing people keep begging of directors: make the kind of films that they used to make.

His follow-up, Fuze, also premiering at Toronto, is another hark back, just not quite as far this time. It’s closer to something that might have come out of British cinema in the early 2000s, a fruitful period for the crime thriller, spurred on by the emergence of Guy Ritchie and a desire to both return to classics of the 60s and 70s and beat Hollywood at its own game. In fact, it’s a film that would have hugely benefitted from Ritchie and his considerable swagger at the helm, resembling the kind of action thriller he might have taken on in his recent, underrated period, of expertly made if ultimately low-level winners.

Fuze is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released later this year

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The Voice of Hind Rajab, a harrowing account of a Palestinian child’s death in Gaza, won the runner-up Silver Lion

US indie director Jim Jarmusch unexpectedly won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice film festival on Saturday with Father Mother Sister Brother, a three-part meditation on the uneasy tie between parents and their adult children.

Although his gentle comedy received largely positive reviews, it had not been a favourite for the top prize, with many critics instead tipping The Voice of Hind Rajab, a harrowing true-life account of the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl during the Gaza war. In the end, the film directed by Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania took the runner-up Silver Lion.

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The drummer for the Britpop band on why Oasis aren’t his nemesis, his failed bid to become a UK Labour MP and how he finally conquered maths

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You’ve just put out a coffee table book of photographs of your early years with Blur . I imagine you didn’t have too many expectations at the time. Why had you stopped taking photos by the time the band blew up?

I told myself that I was not experiencing life, that I was looking at it through the lens of the camera. But what really happened was, after a few years, things stopped being bright and shiny and new and exciting. It was pretty clear that we were going to have a career, that this wasn’t just a 15-minute Warholian burst of fame. I just moved on to other things.

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No One You Know: Dave Rowntree’s Early Blur Photos is out now

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Toronto film festival: the director retells the worst wildfire in California’s history with expected technical prowess but he’s hampered by a soapy script

Even before the wildfire has started to rage in fact-based docudrama The Lost Bus, Paul Greengrass has us on edge. We’re inside a schoolbus for the morning drop-off and we’re reminded of the dangers already faced on the day-to-day, young children without seatbelts being driven around the precarious rolling roads of the California hills, the director cranking up every little sound of a vehicle we’re told is in delayed need of a maintenance check. The world is dangerous enough.

That nervy tension soon gets considerably ramped up and then rarely lets up for the next two-plus hours, an exhausting, assaultive experience aiming to both take us back to the horrors of 2018’s historically destructive Camp fire and to show us what Californians have been facing ever since and will bleakly continue to in the future. It’s ruthlessly efficient in that regard, Greengrass employing every technical skill in his well-used toolbox, returning to the subgenre of uncomfortably immersive history he’s previously explored in United 93, Captain Phillips and 22 July. It at times has the feeling of a particularly unpleasant theme park ride, one that many viewers might quickly want to get off (do you want to watch a bus of terrified young children scream and cough for two hours?). Before the world premiere at this year’s Toronto film festival, Greengrass told the audience to enjoy it but then added that “enjoy” might not be the right choice of word.

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Chef and host of BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen to join 18th series as judge after Wallace dropped from programme

The television host and chef Matt Tebbutt will replace Gregg Wallace as a judge on the next series of MasterChef: The Professionals after a turbulent period for the show.

Tebbutt, best known for hosting BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen, will join chefs Marcus Wareing and Monica Galetti for the 18th series of the cooking competition programme, along with a range of guest judges who will appear in the first stage of the competition.

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Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

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Painting was spotted online by Dutch journalists when the daughter of a former Nazi official put her house up for sale in Mar del Plata

There was nothing very remarkable about the middle-aged couple who lived in the low, stone-clad villa on calle Padre Cardiel, a quiet residential street in the leafy Parque Luro district of Argentina’s best-known seaside town, Mar del Plata.

Patricia Kadgien, 58, was born in Buenos Aires, five hours to the north. Her social media described her as a yoga teacher and practitioner of biodecoding, an obscure alternative therapy that claims to cure illness by resolving past traumas.

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From a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped ‘non-Aryan’ students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What made them risk it all?

I grew up in a house where nothing German was allowed. No Siemens dishwasher or Krups coffee machine in the kitchen, no Volkswagen, Audi or Mercedes in the driveway. The edict came from my mother. She was not a Holocaust survivor, though she had felt the breath of the Shoah on her neck. She was just eight years old on 27 March 1945, when her own mother was killed by the last German V-2 rocket of the war to fall on London, a bomb that flattened a corner of the East End, killing 134 people, almost all of them Jews. One way or another, the blast radius of that explosion would encompass the rest of my mother’s life and much of mine.

Of course, she knew that the bomb that fell on Hughes Mansions had not picked out that particular building deliberately. But given that the Nazis were bent on eliminating the Jews of Europe, she also knew how delighted they would have been by the target that fate, or luck, had chosen for that last V-2, how pleased that at 21 minutes past seven on that March morning it had added 120 more to the tally of dead Jews that would, in the end, number 6 million. And so came the rule. No trace of Germany would be allowed to touch our family: no visits, no holidays, no contact. The Germans were a guilty nation, every last one of them implicated in the wickedest crime of the 20th century.

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Textile artists are reshaping how the theatre makes its costumes with the aim of replacing harsh synthetic dyes

Squint at the roof of the grey, brutalist National Theatre on London’s South Bank and you might be able to spy a riot of colour spilling from the concrete.

This is the theatre’s new natural dye garden, from which flowers are being picked to create the colours for the costumes worn in the theatre’s plays.

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