Sean Baker’s acclaimed and Oscar-tipped new drama focuses on a sex worker, a story that led him to consult with those who live and work in that world

In Anora , a wilful young woman engaged in sex work is swept up in a Cinderella story. Anora, or Ani as everyone calls the titular character, who is played with mercurial force by Mikey Madison, cozies up with a rich young brat (Mark Eidelstein), the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch with mob ties. Their whirlwind romance quickly unleashes clock-strikes-midnight chaos across Manhattan, Brighton Beach and Coney Island.

The movie, written and directed by Tangerine and The Florida Project’s Sean Baker, is a deliriously entertaining and moving screwball comedy that takes notes from Preston Sturges and Federico Fellini. Those film-makers, like Baker, have always been hyperaware of class and economics, accepting wholeheartedly that love and romance, with all its joys and tragedy, is transactional. But to make such stories ring true and authentic like few have before, Baker has also been taking notes from sex workers.

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(Self-released)
Singer Rose Connolly expands the pre-Christian Irish grieving tradition with synthesisers, distortion and drone in an arresting set

Rose Connolly is Róis, a startling singer from County Fermanagh, whose first release explores the pre-Christian Irish tradition of caoineadh (keening). Here, a woman would “keen” a lamenting wail at a graveside to release the intensity of her grief and relinquish her fear of death. Largely improvised and rhythmically free, somewhat like sean-nós singing in style, the practice had almost died out by the early 20th century after discouragement by the Catholic church. Connolly fills it with new, startling life, mixing the ancient with synthesis, distortion and drones.

In the Connemara vernacular, the title means “woe is me” or even “FFS”; five long tracks are shaped around striking interludes, including the tolling bells heard before the Irish 6pm news and a darkly funny radio announcement apologising for the lack of death notices that day. Opening track What Do You Say marries mournful bass guitar with Connolly’s initially tentative, chanted vocals, sung into a granulator, before they build to a climax of high-pitched feeling. Cití, a reinterpretation of a song by County Donegal’s Cití ní Ghallchóir, begins with Connolly’s sighs and a steady pulse before the brightness of the Taishogoto (a Japanese harp) suggests the joy around other social interactions that can happen at a wake.

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The astonishing account of a decade-long deception, and an intensely moving rural drama. Plus: Bruce Springsteen on tour and a very surprising cameo from Jeremy Allen White

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Tasha Ghouri waltzed to the top of the leaderboard with this year’s first 9s, with Toyah Willcox and Paul Merson down the bottom. But as the public vote opens and the first elimination looms, who will be the first to get sent home?

Cue tension-building VT.

Charge your glasses and open a grab-bag of Monster Munch. We’re about to go over live to Elstree …

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Grand theatre, Leeds
Expert casting and striking design bring out the opera’s sense of fun, helped by the magnetism of the two female leads

The misogyny can’t be avoided in a libretto so fixated on women’s submission and sinful pride, but it can at least be undercut; and while James Brining’s production of The Magic Flute for Opera North trades as much in fantastical imagery as in feminism, it still does a pretty creditable job of filleting the opera’s toxic masculinity.

Not all of its shots hit their mark. The Wizard of Oz - style framing device isn’t quite sustained to the end, and there’s surely something more provocative to be done with the downfall of an otherwise nuanced Queen of the Night. But it’s gratifying to see Sarastro’s oppressive regime treated with contempt instead of reverence, and the opera’s eclectic sense of fun given so much leeway.

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New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac paint a damning portrait of the billionaire who turned the social media platform into a smaller business and a larger cesspool

If Elon Musk is a name that sounds as if it was invented by Ian Fleming, there’s more than a hint of the Bond villain about the South Africa-born American billionaire. It’s not just the extraordinary wealth, which hovers around the quarter of a trillion dollars mark, but the SpaceX business that sends rockets into space and seeks Martian colonisation (very Hugo Drax and Moonraker ) and the hypersensitive ego.

All of these sides of Musk are on painful display in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter . So unappealing is the portrait this pair of New York Times technology reporters paint that a more fitting title might be Character Assassination. Or it would if it wasn’t for the fact that Musk himself provides most of ammunition discharged in this damning account.

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O2 Arena, London
She lets eight songs go by before she breaks out the old favourites – but when she does, it reminds you why she ruled the charts

Janet Jackson arrives in London with the glow of her Together Again world tour overshadowed by controversy. Buried deep in a Guardian interview were her thoughts on the coming US election. Alas, she chose to repeat a lie perpetuated by Donald Trump about Kamala Harris’s racial identity, with inevitable results. Events then took a turn for the weird, as is the wont of events in the Jackson family. A retraction was subsequently issued, then the retraction was retracted – the “manager” who issued it apparently having nothing to do with Jackson. Within 48 hours the US press was talking about a “PR nightmare”.

It’s not a situation that seems to be bothering tonight’s audience – largely, but not exclusively, old enough to recall Jackson’s 1980s and 90s purple patch first-hand – but it’s a little unfortunate nonetheless, because her tour is presumably supposed to be about reframing a career held to have slumped because you couldn’t hear her music over the noise of controversy, following her infamous appearance at the 2004 Super Bowl. Whether her subsequent commercial decline might also have had something to do with a dip in the quality and consistency of her albums in the 00s is an interesting question, but Jackson herself clearly thinks they’re worth reassessing. The opening of her show is daringly light on hits and heavy on tracks from the 21st century: one house-influenced track segues into another, as if a DJ were mixing a set of tunes you can’t quite place.

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Dominant demographic among viewers ‘don’t feel like they are represented on screen’, say Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlin

The creators of a new “working-class Downton Abbey ” drama say the lack of such programming is being compounded by the decline of soaps and “posh older guys” who have had the monopoly on storytelling.

Made by the producers of All Creatures Great and Small , the “rags-to-riches” period drama The Hardacres is the brainchild of Call the Midwife and Our Girl writers Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlin, who said they chose to make the series because, “more working-class people watch telly than any other demographic, but they don’t feel like they are represented on the screen”.

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The wonders of oceanic life shine through in a magical book that is at once Anthropocene novel, disquieting AI thriller, postcolonial allegory and a portrait of friendship

Richard Powers’s 2018 Pulitzer-winning book The Overstory was one of the landmark novels of the past decade. Grounded in science and animist thought, it was a glorious ode to the wondrousness of trees. Bewilderment (2021) interleaved private loss and climate collapse to recount the grief-soaked journey of an astrobiologist and his neurodivergent son. Both these novels were set in the US. In Playground , his cerebral, Booker-longlisted new novel, Powers swivels part of his attention to French Polynesia, taking on neo-colonialism, artificial intelligence and oceanography.

One strand of the novel unfolds in Illinois in the late 20th century. It follows ocean-loving coding whiz Todd Keane and Rafi Young, a Black book-lover he connects with in high school over chess and, later, the Chinese game of Go. They both come from dysfunctional, if very different, families. Todd’s father is an accomplished pit trader with a secret life; Rafi’s is a boorishly pragmatic firefighter who is always impressing upon him the importance of hard work and excellence in the face of systemic racial inequality. Todd and Rafi deepen their bond during college but begin to drift apart once Ina Aroita, a young sculptor born to a Hawaiian father and a Tahitian mother, enters the picture. Told retrospectively in an italicised first person, these sections are in the voice of 57-year-old Todd, who has dementia with Lewy bodies, and are addressed to a mysterious “you”. Todd is now a digital tycoon, having made his name with a virtual economy platform called Playground. A measure of the book’s suspense comes from Todd’s groundbreaking, if unsettling, experiments with AI.

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