A rogue cyborg security (SEC) unit gains autonomy and must learn to interact with humans while hiding its new capability in the trailer for Murderbot , Apple TV+'s new 10-episode sci-fi comedic thriller starring Alexander Skarsgård. It's based on the bestselling book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. And judging from the trailer, Murderbot looks like it will strike just the right balance between humor and action.

There are seven books in Wells' series thus far. All are narrated by Murderbot, who is technically owned by a megacorporation but manages to hack and override its governor module. Rather than rising up and killing its former masters, Murderbot just goes about performing its security work, relieving the boredom by watching a lot of entertainment media.

In the first book, All Systems Red , Murderbot saves a scientific expedition on an alien planet when they are attacked by a giant alien creature. During the ensuing investigation, the cyborg uncovers a plot against the expedition, as well as a second team, by yet another team intent on killing their rivals for some reason. Murderbot joins the humans in foiling those murderous plans but escapes onto a cargo ship at the end rather than give up its hard-earned autonomy.

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The elusive 87-year-old author’s new book is a noir caper set during the big band era following a detective in search of a cheese heiress

Thomas Pynchon has written his first novel in more than a decade, publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has announced.

Shadow Ticket, due out in October, will be the American novelist’s 10th book. Like his previous two, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), this new work is a noir novel about a private eye.

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Barbican, London
Jessie Buckley, Olly Alexander and Will Young read from the artist and film-maker’s diaries, capturing a life of defiance, joy and vitality

Is Derek Jarman the first director to be more famous for his foliage than his films? At Prospect Cottage , his black-and-yellow sanctuary squatting in the shadow of the nuclear power station at Dungeness on the Kent coast, Jarman nurtured a garden in the inauspicious shingle; plants thrived between the jagged upturned stones he likened to dragon’s teeth. Thanks to his writings – notably the diaries published as Modern Nature in 1991, three years before his death – and the 2020 crowdfunding campaign to preserve the dwelling for the nation, the cottage and its gardens are now familiar and accessible to people who have never seen Sebastiane or Edward II, and may never want to.

Film is the flickering backdrop to the Barbican’s evening of music and readings celebrating Modern Nature, rather than its focal point, though Super 8 footage of a youthful Tilda Swinton (Jarman’s muse) provides a neat counterpoint to the pre-recorded sound of her 21st-century voice. Here in person are performers including the musician Simon Fisher Turner – a Jarman collaborator – along with Jessie Buckley, Shaun Evans and Will Young as well as It’s a Sin co-stars Olly Alexander and Omari Douglas.

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A follow-up to the record-breaking Netflix series might be in the works with hopes that it will ‘not be repetitive’

Brad Pitt ’s production company Plan B is in talks to develop another season of Adolescence , after the British show became a runaway hit on Netflix.

Speaking to Deadline in their first interview since the show took off on the streaming platform last month, co-presidents Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner said they are speaking to director Philip Barantini about the “next iteration” of the show, a critical success that has ignited conversations about children’s susceptibility to toxic masculinity online.

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He hand-painted 47,000 stars on the Rijksmuseum’s ceiling and drew 1,000 perfect circles, one a day. Ahead of his major London show, he explains why he often paints over his work afterwards

There’s a kerfuffle in the Camden Art Centre. Painter Richard Wright’s exhibition is opening soon and time is not on their side. Ten people are on the landing off which the galleries open. Huge, elaborate leaded glazed panels have just arrived, the metallic sections forming intricate geometric designs, and they need installing. It is a relatively new departure for Wright, teaming with artisans to work in glass. These panels need to be set precisely to hover just below the roof lanterns, so that light will flood through them and throw a dance of pattern and shape on the walls and floors.

Wright – intense, immensely tall, rapidly and quietly spoken – lets me know by his wry air of forbearance that he wishes they would just do it, and then the rest of the show can go up. In the galleries to either side are books laid on tables, some of them partially drawn or painted over, “illuminated” as he says, borrowing the word used of medieval manuscripts. On the walls there are many drawings and paintings. Some are made by dipping an old-fashioned cartographer’s pen in size (a kind of adhesive) before burnishing the whole surface with gold leaf: the gold sticks to the marks made by the pen, and the rest is shaken away so that a shimmering, fugitive drawing remains. In the main, vaulted gallery, scaffolding climbs up one wall and four people are arrayed on it in perfect symmetry, two below, two above, painting black stars, diamonds, triangles and other shapes into a great design up its back wall. The painters are Wright’s daughter and brother and two longtime assistants. He himself has just clambered down to talk to me, his fingers dotted with disobedient black acrylic.

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Ex-Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür was conned into believing he was collaborating with a member of Daft Punk – but it’s far from the first time musicians and audiences have been fooled

It all started as an unsolicited Facebook message, which may have been the first sign of foul play – and led to Wolfgang Flür, ex-member of Kraftwerk, believing that he was collaborating with Thomas Bangalter, formerly one half of Daft Punk.

Someone posing as Bangalter contacted Flür on Facebook, complimented his music and asked for a signed copy of his album Magazine 1. Flür happily obliged. He said the person told him, referring to Daft Punk: “Without Kraftwerk we would not find our own robot style, being on stage with the helmets”. Believing they were Bangalter, Flür then asked the person if they would like to work on some tracks. The impersonator agreed and sent over demos for the songs, which were worked up into a two new Flür tracks billed as featuring “Thomas Vangarde”, supposedly a new alias of Bangalter.

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Published in November, it will cover everything from Smith’s childhood to her rise as a punk rock star and later retreat from public life

Patti Smith has written a memoir that her publishers are describing as her “most intimate and visionary work” yet, which is due out this autumn.

Bread of Angels will cover everything from Smith’s childhood in working-class Philadelphia and South Jersey to her rise as a punk rock star and her subsequent retreat from public life.

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Enthusiasm was understandably high for Daredevil: Born Again , Marvel's revival of the hugely popular series in the Netflix Defenders universe. Not only was Charlie Cox returning to the title role as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, but Vincent D'Onofrio was also coming back as his nemesis, crime lord Wilson Fisk/Kingpin. Their dynamic has always been electric, and that on-screen magic is as powerful as ever in Born Again , which quickly earned critical raves and a second season that is currently filming.

(Some spoilers for the series below, but no major reveals beyond the opening events of the first episode.)

Born Again was initially envisioned as more of an episodic reset rather than a straight continuation of the serialized Netflix series. But during the 2023 Hollywood strikes, with production halted, the studio gave the show a creative overhaul more in line with the Netflix tone, even though six episodes had been largely completed by then. The pilot was reshot completely, and new footage was added to subsequent episodes to ensure narrative continuity with the original Daredevil —with a few well-placed nods to other characters in the MCU for good measure.

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This richly detailed and exhaustive biography of the maverick 60s British music producer reveals a sonic visionary whose brilliance concealed a tragically violent temper

Joe Meek first tasted success as a record producer when he created the eerie backdrop for John Leyton’s gothic teen melodrama, Johnny Remember Me, which reached No 1 in the British pop charts in the summer of 1961. A mere six years later, on 3 February 1967, Meek’s name entered the mainstream consciousness in the most darkly dramatic way imaginable, when the news broke that he had killed his landlady, the elderly Violet Shenton, before turning the shotgun on himself.

In the time between, as Darryl Bullock notes with characteristic understatement in his richly detailed biography Love and Fury , the producer’s chaotic, but hugely creative, life was “directed by his passions and obsessions”.

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