Marble Factory, Bristol
Ferreira’s attitude towards fame is conflicted, but her anger and relatable brittleness only add to the cravings for her long-awaited next album

S ky Ferreira reaches for her mic stand as though she intends to kill it, holds it in a white-knuckle grip and ascends into the monster chorus of 24 Hours. Amid the song’s grinding bass and crashing synths this brief movement is magnetic in a way that it shouldn’t be – a shot of pop-star presence given extra stakes by the false starts and tortuous diversions that have led her to this point.

It has been almost 11 years since Night Time, My Time introduced the then 21-year-old Ferreira’s blend of pillowy electro-pop and dead-eyed cool. Label spats and interminable delays have made the wait for its follow-up Masochism – originally planned for release at least two years ago – into a yawning chasm. (In November, it was reported that Ferreira and her label Capitol appeared to have parted ways.) True to form, while the name of that near-mythical album is emblazoned on T-shirts at the merch table, there’s no new material debuted here. Instead, there is a punishingly loud reintroduction to songs that feel like they have been kept in suspended animation.

These are serious times, and they demand silly entertainment. Please, British TV – send in the clowns

Do we need more stupidity in our lives? With the state of the world as it is, the obvious answer is that we most definitely do not. But what if we need more stupidity in our comedy? The actor and comedian Diane Morgan argued last week that there is a crisis of stupidity in on-screen comedy: “Mandy [her show about an idiotically unemployable woman] is stupid. I don’t think there’s enough stupid stuff. Most [comedies] have always got a bit of drama or a bit of romance … you can spend a lot of money on having something look nice, but it doesn’t make it any funnier. In fact, I think it sort of impinges on it.”

This is true. We need stupid, cheap, unpolished stuff. Also out this week is a new documentary celebrating the career of Steve Martin, one of the greatest standup comedians of the past century before he became known to a younger generation for Only Murders in the Building. Martin’s whole shtick as a comedian was in being as stupid as humanly possible. Arguably, this is the root of pure comedy: lack of self-awareness, the folly of existence, the inevitability of humiliation. We need to see more stupid people being stupid for the sheer joy of it. Not just because they are standing for public office.

‘Dream team’ will reimagine black comedy about an epic divorce battle, which originally starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas

A remake of 1980s divorce comedy The War of the Roses is to go ahead with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead roles.

In an announcement reported by Deadline , studio Searchlight Pictures said that Colman and Cumberbatch would appear in a new version of the story directed by Austin Powers’ Jay Roach and written by Poor Things’ Tony McNamara. Searchlight president Matthew Greenfield said: “The Roses is a wildly funny, bigger than life, and yet deeply human story … With Jay at the helm, and Benedict and Olivia and Tony, we have a dream team bringing it to life.”

Griffiths, who has died aged 88, explored the conflict between reform and revolution in plays and scripts from the film Reds to dramas such as Occupations, The Party and Comedians

Of all the political dramatists who emerged in Britain in the late 1960s, Trevor Griffiths, who has died aged 88, was the most fervent and committed. As a Mancunian Marxist he brought to theatre his love of dialectic. He also believed passionately in “strategic penetration” of the citadels of culture. He succeeded, in that plays such as The Party and Comedians were taken up by the National Theatre; Bill Brand, an 11-part series about the frustrations of parliamentary democracy, was shown on ITV; and his screenplay for Reds, co-authored with Warren Beatty and based on John Reed’s account of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.

If there was one theme that informed Griffiths’s work, it was the conflict between reformist pragmatism and revolutionary idealism. It was there in an early work like Occupations, first seen at the Manchester Stables in 1970 and quickly picked up by the RSC for a production starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Set in Turin in 1920 at a time when every engineering factory in northern Italy had been taken over by the workers, the play involves a head-on confrontation between Kabak, a businesslike Comintern representative, and Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian firebrand advocating shop-floor soviets.

The Colombian pop star – and mother of two boys – disliked the global blockbuster, saying its message robs men of chance to ‘protect and provide’

In an unlikely dissension from what has become a critical and commercial consensus, Colombian musician Shakira has said that the Barbie movie is “emasculating” and suggested that it “rob[s] men of their possibility to be men”.

In an interview with Allure magazine that focused on the “she-wolf feminism” behind her work, Shakira said she had watched the Greta Gerwig-directed satire and said: “My sons absolutely hated it. They felt that it was emasculating. And I agree, to a certain extent.”

Two teenage boys star in Matteo Garrone’s passionate exposé of how greed, trauma and corruption drive the modern-day slave trade in would-be migrants

Matteo Garrone’s new film is part adventure story, part slavery drama; the slavery which did not in fact vanish with the end of the American civil war, but thrives in the globalised present day without needing to shapeshift too much, driven by the age-old forces of geopolitics and the market.

Seydou and Moussa, played by nonprofessional acting newcomers Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, are 16-year-old cousins in Dakar, Senegal, dreaming of escape to the fabled land of the EU as refugees, where they expect to go viral and make a fortune as music stars like the people they’re watching on TikTok. For years they have been writing songs and secretly working on building sites while pretending to go to football practice, amassing cash savings which in the succeeding months they will hand over to various gangmasters, fixers and corrupt gun-wielding soldiers.

Author of novels drawing on African and Caribbean history enjoyed international acclaim, including the New Academy prize, which stood in for the Nobel in 2018

Maryse Condé, the Guadeloupean author of more than 20 novels, activist, academic and sole winner of the New Academy prize in literature , has died aged 90.

Condé, whose books include Ségu and Hérémakhonon was regarded as a giant of the West Indies, writing frankly – as both a novelist and essayist – of colonialism, sexuality and the black diaspora, and introduced readers around the world to a wealth of African and Caribbean history.

The Belfast academic offers vitally important lessons about government strategies, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, warning that few campaigns are a complete success

In January 2002, during his State of the Union address, President George W Bush said that in “four short months” the US had “rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists … and terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own”.

The term “war on terror” had been coined a few days after al-Qaida’s attacks of 9/11 to describe the most extensive and ambitious counter-terrorism operation the world had seen. As Bush spoke, it all seemed to be going rather well.

Henderson, Indira Varma, Rufus Sewell and Olivia Williams attend a Hampstead dinner party that takes a dark turn in a play-like sendup that could go harder

There are echoes of Carnage and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in this satire of north London liberals. It’s an original script but has the staginess of a filmed play, set almost entirely in one location: a big fancy house in Hampstead where two uber-successful couples in their 50s are chattering over dinner. I wasn’t totally convinced by the dialogue; some of the lines aren’t especially clever or witty given that this is a bunch of highly intelligent over-achievers. Not enough sparks were flying.

What the movie does have going for it is a terrific performance by Shirley Henderson as brittle, nervy Sarah, the owner of said fancy Hampstead house, along with her husband Tom (Alan Tudyk). He’s a big-name architect whose latest project is a massive flop, which has forced the couple to put the house on the market. They’ve invited their best mates round for one last dinner party. There’s Beth (Olivia Williams) and her husband Richard (Rufus Sewell), a flashy, cynical celebrity barrister. Beth and Richard bring round an unwanted guest, another old pal called Jessica (Indira Varma), who has just published a bestselling memoir about her footloose wild years. Jessica flirts outrageously with architect Tom, then walks into the garden and hangs herself.