Toby Jones plays the spaniel-eyed schoolmaster setting Harry Lawtey’s needy young pupil on course for haughty international stardom

The career of Richard Burton seemed mythic at the time, and more so in retrospect. In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie The Room Next Door , Julianne Moore’s character is even shown reading Erotic Vagrancy , Roger Lewis’s account of Burton’s then-adulterous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor in the early 60s, the title taken from Pope John XXIII’s extraordinary denunciation: “You will finish in an erotic vagrancy, without end or without a safe port.” In fact, the nearest thing Burton ever had to a safe port was his inspirational English teacher Philip Burton in Port Talbot, south Wales, whose own frustrated dreams of the theatre were poured into the bright young miner’s son Richard Jenkins, coaching him in acting and even making him his legal ward and getting him to change his surname to Burton to facilitate the teacher’s sponsorship of his Oxford scholarship.

It’s the subject of this heartfelt, vigorously acted, enjoyable, if slightly naive movie from screenwriters Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams, and director Marc Evans. Toby Jones stars as the spaniel-eyed Mr Burton and Harry Lawtey is Richard, a lanky, needy kid morphing into that insufferably haughty and sonorous prince of the English stage. It tells a uniquely painful and dysfunctional story, and does its best to show how Burton’s pride always coexisted with shame and self-hate, and culminated with him playing Hal in Henry IV Part 2 at Stratford with Mr Burton in the audience, the pair effectively enacting their own version of the Hal/Falstaff betrayal scene.

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We would like to hear your memories of Val Kilmer – whether you met him, or appreciated his work as an actor

Val Kilmer, the actor best known for his roles in Top Gun, The Doors, and Batman Forever has died at the age of 65 .

We would like to hear your memories of Val Kilmer – whether you met him, or appreciated his work as an actor.

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The influential US commentator has written a book about how politics can change people’s lives for the better. But first, there are more pressing challenges to address ...

Ezra Klein, the New York Times podcast host and progressive media’s undisputed nerd king, starts his new book with something of a palate cleanser for our troubled times. For a few paragraphs, he and his co-author, the Atlantic journalist Derek Thompson, whisk us out of the grim reality of contemporary politics to a world of Abundance (the word they picked as their title).

“You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets,” they purr, before conjuring a near-future utopia where the cost of living crisis is a distant memory. “You live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.” The fridge is full of fresh fruit and vegetables from skyscraper farms that sit amid rewilded landscapes. This is what we can look forward to, they say, if we sweep away the bureaucratic cobwebs that mean government too often gets in the way of innovation, rather than leading it.

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Documentary follows the baloeiros , who illegally build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles

An intriguing film set in Brazil, first shown last year at the CPH:DOX documentary festival in Copenhagen, in which expatriate Danish film-maker Sissel Morell Dargis takes a look at a unique grassroots cultural phenomenon: the baloeiros , the ballooners. These are groups of young men, as secretive and loyal to each other as Freemasons, who (illegally) build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles. Why? As kind of graffiti, or a community self-expression, or situationist artform, or just a subversive gesture of pure joie de vivre that does not need or admit of any explanation.

The baloeiros are harassed by the police, on the ostensible grounds that they are part of gang culture, and the authorities encourage local people to inform on those they suspect of building and transporting a balloon. But baloeiros are cheerfully committed to their own kind of public-access artistry. The balloons show colossal images of Sly Stallone and Luciano Pavarotti – aspirational role models and pop culture icons. As Dargis says: “A flying balloon belongs to everyone, even the police.”

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A New York librarian is discovered unconscious in a park with no memory, in a mystery that challenges consensual reality

We first meet Jane O in the consulting room of Henry Byrd, a New York psychiatrist. Jane, a 38-year-old librarian, is neat, quiet, outwardly unremarkable. She sits without saying anything, then gets up and leaves. Her visit has lasted just 14 minutes and Henry fears he will not see her again. He detects in her “a loneliness of the soul … [like] a pine tree growing alone on a great, wide plain”.

Their next encounter proves even stranger. Jane has been discovered unconscious in a public park with no memory of how she got there. A day of her life has gone missing and she is anxious about the welfare of her young son Caleb, who she failed to collect from nursery during her “blackout”. Terrified about how she might be judged for this memory lapse, she finally gives an account of the inexplicable event that brought her to Henry in the first place.

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American authors of All Fours and Tell Me Everything are competing for the 30th award alongside four other novels highlighting ‘the importance of human connection’

American writers Miranda July and Elizabeth Strout have been shortlisted for the 30th Women’s prize for fiction alongside four debut authors.

The six titles in contention for the £30,000 prize all draw on “the importance of human connection” in different ways, said writer and judging chair Kit de Waal. “What is surprising and refreshing is to see so much humour, nuance and lightness employed by these novelists to shed light on challenging concepts.”

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The author of The Five, about the Ripper murders, turns her attention to another tragically misunderstood victim

In the canon of British true crime, the case of Dr Crippen routinely gets billed as the first “modern” murder. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly original about the doctor’s motives or methods: in January 1910 he slipped poison into his wife’s bedtime drink so that he could marry his secretary instead. Rather, it was the way that Crippen was caught that turned this run-of-the-mill suburban love triangle into an international cause célèbre.

Realising that it would only be a matter of time before his wife’s dismembered remains were discovered in the cellar of the marital home in north London, Crippen and his secretary Ethel Le Neve fled to Canada in disguise. Such was the media hoopla surrounding the case that the sharp-eyed captain of the SS Montrose quickly spotted the runaway lovers among his passengers. This was despite their unconvincing cover story of being “father and son” (the hand-holding and kissing gave the game away). Using the ship’s brand-new Marconi wireless, Capt Andrew Kendall alerted the British authorities that he had the infamous fugitives in his sight. Within hours, Insp Dew of Scotland Yard had boarded a faster ship from Liverpool with the intention of reaching Newfoundland first, so that he would be ready to arrest Dr Crippen and his companion when they made landfall. To a fascinated public, following the unfolding drama in the newspapers, it was as if time travel were being invented before their very eyes.

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Ruaridh Mollica is very good as Max, a freelance writer with a secret app life in prostitution, but Mikko Mäkelä’s film is not clear enough about his motivations

Sex work as a window into human nature is a longstanding theme in cinema, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who mines his side-hustle escort work for material, is also a writer. But this uneasy, self-regarding sophomore effort by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never fully distancing itself from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly makes contact with flesh-and-blood human truths.

By day, Max is a freelance hotshot for London’s trendy Wall magazine; he has just bagged himself a sweet assignment to interview Bret Easton Ellis. By night he is “Sebastian”, a hot commodity on an app called DreamyGuys. Typically servicing the older gentleman, he turns his experiences into bare-all prose he hopes to parlay into a bestselling novel. But it’s not clear what’s motivating him; perhaps it’s vanity, and his own professional advancement is the real story. Or, with his unreliability increasingly jeopardising his job, is there a deeper personal validation behind his secret app life?

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One of a series of photographs taken across India in which women, many of them abuse survivors, use traditional needlework to embellish portraits of themselves

This is a portrait of Praween Devi, a woman I met in 2019 through a local organisation while working on my project Nā́rī. I met her alongside other women who gather in their back yards to embroider together, sharing stories over cups of chai .

When I asked to take her photograph, she suggested the main hall of her home, mentioning its lack of decoration and how the walls were bare except for a framed image of flowers and, notably, a photograph of all the men in the house. Before we began, she brought in a rug from another room, subtly curating the space. As I composed the shot, I included the photograph of the men, wondering how she would choose to alter the image through embroidery.

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