Locarno film festival
Ben Rivers’s cine-poem, based on Don DeLillo’s climate crisis play The Word for Snow, follows a child’s strange encounters as she wanders in a postapocalyptic world devoid of adults

English experimentalist Ben Rivers offers up another challenging, intriguing cine-poem, this time on the nature of existence and the end of the world. It is opaque but with flashes of strange brilliance, an adaptation of The Word for Snow, a one-act stage play by Don DeLillo from 2007 that reflected on the climate crisis.

A child called Moon (Moon Guo Barker) wanders around a strange world, entirely peopled by other children, except for one eerie monochrome sequence in which Moon sees adult figures in some kind of underground tunnel, frozen in attitudes of dismay similar to the citizenry of Pompeii. In the course of her travels, bookended by clambering out of a crashed car and finally driving happily off, Moon has dreamlike encounters with these children who speak with the tongues of adult prophets. She also exchanges pungent and often memorable micro-insights or haikus or aperçus about the nature of humanity in this postapocalyptic world.

A lively, wriggly tube creature, mesmerising birds for babies and a joyful take on Joyce’s Ulysses will delight young audiences at this year’s festival

Assembly Rooms, 10.10am, until 24 August
The old man who sits at the centre of this imaginative blend of object theatre and shadow puppetry from Taiwan’s S Production is the cantankerous sort, tied to his routine and resistant to change. His day is an uneventful parade of tasks: teeth brushing, newspaper reading and failing to put his socks on.

Thompson turns up the accent dial to play a good-natured Minnesota widow bringing her charm – and her gun – to tackle some concentrated nastiness

From the freezing heart of Fargo country in snowy Minnesota comes a quite outrageously enjoyable suspense thriller starring Emma Thompson; I hadn’t realised what a treat it would be to see Thompson handle a pistol with a scope and also demonstrate where on the body you can get shot and still keep moving.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre. Brian Kirk directs from a script by screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, and Thompson turns up the accent dial to play a neighbourly and good-natured Minnesota widow. With her recently deceased husband, she ran a fishing supplies store and like him was keen on ice-fishing: venturing out on huge freezing lakes, drilling a hole in the ice, setting up a phone-box sized ice shelter for warmth and lowering the bait and lure. Her late husband sweetly took her on an ice-fishing trip on a certain remote lake for their first date – bittersweet flashbacks bring home the memory – and it is to this lake that she comes on a mission to scatter his ashes.

The California-based photographer was working on a commercial shoot when he came across this scene

His usual way of taking photos, Phil Stockbridge says, is like an angler waiting for a fish. The LA-based photographer had been working on a commercial shoot on the day he landed this image. “When I find something interesting to shoot, the main thing that starts to churn in my brain is light and composition. A lot of the time the subject’s missing and I’ll sit and wait like a fisherman for the right person or car to make the image. Luckily, for this scene, it was all laid out for me.”

Stockbridge believes this to be a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, and notes how he was drawn by “the shadow of a parking sign, the street lamp in the distance, the LA sky, a slouched fence and the edge of the sidewalk. A Long Beach day turning into a Long Beach night is on full display here. The traffic’s dying down, it’s getting quieter, cooler. The sun has set and all that’s left of it remains in the dark blue sky.”

The controversial $8bn deal was finalized this week and while details are scarce, the future is set to look very different for one of the biggest Hollywood studios

The merger between Paramount and Skydance has finally been completed , with various roadblocks (including Stephen Colbert , apparently, as well as the related 60 Minutes settlement /bribery) cleared from the path of a new entity called Paramount, A Skydance Corporation.

It’s an appropriately franchise-y moniker for a merger between a major Hollywood studio and a company that made its bones as a constant financer of some of its biggest movie series. This ends (for now) years of speculation over what might be done with Paramount , a global conglomerate that was nonetheless considered on less sure footing than its fellow remaining big five studios, Disney, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. (Well, maybe not the recently embattled Warner Bros, though they seem to have gotten a major reprieve with their killer 2025 slate) Skydance honcho David Ellison is the new Paramount CEO. The new co-chairs of Paramount Pictures will be Skydance executive Dana Goldberg and former Sony executive Josh Greenstein.

The Dexys Midnight Runners singer on being arrested 15 times, a crushing comment from his dad and a lesson from Shakespeare

Born in Wolverhampton, Kevin Rowland, 71, was a hairdresser before forming Dexys Midnight Runners. The band had their first hit in 1980 with Geno. In 1982, Come On Eileen was Britain’s bestselling single; the following year, it went to No 1 in the US. Over five decades, Dexys released six studio albums including The Feminine Divine in 2023. As a solo artist, Rowland released two albums, The Wanderer in 1988 and My Beauty in 1999. Bless Me Father , Rowland’s memoir, has just been published. He lives in London and has a daughter.

When were you happiest?
On stage – the Old Vic in 1981 and Glastonbury last year.

The poet reflects on his heritage, his new life as a father in Margate – and why his memoir is a call to arms

When Raymond Antrobus was a child, he writes in his new book, The Quiet Ear, his father would call him “white” when he was drunk, and “black” when he was sober. “White” was meant as an insult, the author explains over tea in his flat in Margate, where a pile of toys indicate the recent presence of his own young son. In his cruellest moments, it was a way for Antrobus’s black father, who died in 2014, to say “I don’t understand you. I don’t love you. You don’t understand my pain.”

Antrobus, 38, is calm and reflective when he talks about this. As a deaf person who relies on hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate, he says he has long had to “make sense of myself for other people”.

Old College Quad, Edinburgh
Lebanese choreographer Omar Rajeh’s outdoor dance fizzes with communal energy but its overstuffed concept blunts its political impact

What you might not have expected from this outdoor promenade show, which purports to be about power structures, dictatorship and democracy, is some of the most joyful dancing you’ll see this Edinburgh festival – indeed, you might even be doing some of it yourself.

Lebanese choreographer Omar Rajeh (now based in Lyon) leads a company of diverse movers, the kind of dancers that seem to move on instinct, their steps go from gnarly to sharp to shimmying; bursting with life and confidence. A pulsing jerk of Rajeh’s shoulder catches and spreads until the whole group is bouncing as one and surging through the space, eyes shining, entranced by the music, like a full moon ritual or a solstice party under the light cloud of an Edinburgh sky.

Portraits taken in early 60s reveal intimate moments before band’s fame became all-consuming

A collection of photographs taken by Paul McCartney when the Beatles were on the brink of global stardom are to be shown in an exhibition that sheds light on intimate moments as the group first experienced fame.

Paul McCartney: Rearview Mirror, which opens at the Gagosian gallery in London on 28 August, features more than 30 shots taken by the singer-songwriter during late 1963 after the release of the Beatles’ first album, and early 1964 as they travelled to the US.