Demi Moore’s gory satire The Substance made me think about self-image, bodily autonomy – and our worrying obsession with cosmetic surgery

I was thinking about breasts as I watched The Substance. Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror fable features Demi Moore as a newly 50, supposedly fading fitness star who makes a pharmaceutical Faustian pact allowing her to create a nubile 20-year-old (played by Margaret Qualley) to replace her half the time. Breasts aren’t Fargeat’s main focus – it’s an ass more than a tit movie – but there are plenty on show. One (minor spoiler alert?) plops bloodily to the floor at a climactic moment and if that – miles from the most harrowing bit – sounds too revolting, it’s not the film for you.

I was thinking about breasts, because I had just read about the 64% increase in reductions in the US since 2019 (not including post-surgical reconstructions or gender-affirming top surgery). Many are on women under 30, and under-19s “represent a small but fast-growing part of the market”, the New York Times reported . Women, apparently, want “yoga boobs” or the girlish “coquette” look – a braless life.

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Saltburn director Emerald Fennell has caused a stir with her project to remake Brontë’s classic – but the novel has been provocative for more than 170 years

When Andrea Arnold imagined the opening shots of her film of Wuthering Heights , she saw heavy mists ­swirling around the outline of a misshapen creature as it scaled a hillside. The figure would slowly be revealed as a climbing man, his back laden with dead rabbits for skinning.

On the day of the shoot, however, it was bright and sunny – and there were only three rabbits. “People keep saying one day I will come to like it,” she said later of her 2011 screen version. “It was a difficult experience making it, for various reasons. I find it hard to look at it.”

Beloved of Kate Moss, Bet Lynch and a host of others, the style stalwart has been having a new moment in Paris

Associated with everyone from Bet Lynch to Mel B, and sometimes dubbed a “neutral” by fashion insiders, leopard print is such a stalwart of style that it can be dated back to ancient Egypt. But in 2024 it is having something of a fashion moment once again.

Last week Kate Moss wore a leopard print coat to shows at Paris fashion week , while Hailey Bieber was spotted in a similar design in LA. Leopard has also been on the catwalk – with Prada showing a leopard coat this month – and popular on the high street. Ganni’s Izey jeans are now a familiar sight on fashionable thirtysomethings nationwide while Marks & Spencer’s £45 leopard print wide-legged jeans have sold out on the website. Due to be restocked this week, they have a waiting list of 12,000.

A complex relationship unfolding over half a century is at the heart of the elegant and largely successful ninth novel by the Irish novelist

At the turn of the millennium, then-independent publisher the Harvill Press launched its London Fiction series – a short-lived showcase of “forgotten” classics including novels by Alexander Baron, Gerald Kersh, Maureen Duffy and Henry Green. As a recent arrival in the city, I read all four books – along with Hangover Square and The Lonely Londoners – as a tour guide to the capital’s recent past: its low lives and lowborn. In her ninth novel, Our London Lives , the Irish novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey offers a similar roadmap, detailing a metropolitan experience over the course of the past five decades.

In the late autumn of 1979, teenager Milly escapes Ireland and flees to London, quickly finding work at a pub in Farringdon. There, among its fag smoke and beer fumes, she meets Pip, an Irish boxer and sometime drunk, and with him begins a halting, cautious kind of connection. It’s one that the novel traces via a twin narrative: one following Milly as she negotiates the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new; the other more tightly chronological, centring on Pip, newly sober and attempting amends, in month-by-month dispatches from 2017.

Special counsel prosecutors who investigated Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election set things straight

“The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” said the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, AKA the Mueller Report. “A Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”

Robert Mueller, the special counsel, did not criminally charge Trump but did not give him a clean bill of health, contrary to misleading claims made by Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general, in a 24 March 2019 letter – AKA the Barr Report.

Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation is published in the US by HarperCollins

Even the combined charm of its two leads cannot elevate this one-joke comedy-thriller about two underworld fixers double-booked on a job

This comedy thriller takes the sparky chemistry between Brad Pitt and George Clooney – a force that could power the national grid as well as several instalments of the Oceans series – and turns it on its head. Clooney and Pitt play unnamed competitors, both covert fixers of other people’s messy situations. When, due to a communication breakdown, they find themselves hired for the same job (a hotel room, a body, a compromised politician), the (un)professional rivalry between them boils over into petty niggling and bickering. The joke is that, for all their personal differences, they are basically the same man. But it’s a joke that soon wears thin, and a film that erases itself so thoroughly from your memory, it’s almost as if Pitt and Clooney had performed one of their bespoke clean-up services on your brain.

In UK and Irish cinemas and on Apple TV+

When celebrated writer Jan Morris published a memoir about her gender reassignment in 1974, it brought trans identity to public attention. Fifty years on, her son Mark reflects on the flawed woman he thought of as his father

Fifty years ago this year, my father published a book that, in its small but profound way, helped to change the way people thought about others. It was called Conundrum , and it charted her journey from its famous opening, describing how she realised, sitting under my grandmother’s piano in 1930, “that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl”, to undergoing gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca in 1972 – from James Morris, the celebrated journalist and writer, to Jan Morris.

Conundrum was – and still is – a seminal trans work, but it was not the first account of such a journey. There was, for example, Christine Jorgensen’s 1967 autobiography, which my father had read. In the US, a medical study, The Transsexual Phenomenon by Dr Harry Benjamin (whom my father consulted in the 1960s), had appeared in 1966, and its distinction between transvestism (cross-dressing) and transsexuality had created considerable interest. By 1975, about a thousand transgender people in the US had quietly been provided with gender reassignment surgery.

Menier Chocolate Factory, London
This frothy farce about an 1890 cabinet minister ‘accepting favours’ never stoops to nudge-winking to make its point – and is all the better for it

If the idea of watching a Victorian farce by a less frequently staged playwright seems like peculiarly old-fashioned entertainment, this production is a startling reminder of how our own world can be deliciously sent up by the past.

In the right hands, of course. Nancy Carroll, better known as an actor, brings an adaptation of Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1890 comedy that is as sparkling as they come – springy, silly and full of satirical sting.

Josh Greenbaum’s funny and touching documentary follows the comedian and his old friend across the US in a likable portrait that never quite rings true

When the comedian Will Ferrell learned that one of his oldest friends had transitioned to female and was now living as Harper Steele, he suggested a road trip together as a way of supporting and learning from her. The resulting film is a poignant and frequently very funny portrait of their evolving relationship. But that’s as far as it goes. To suggest that the documentary offers much in the way of real insight into the experience of a late-life newly transitioned individual as she navigates the US is disingenuous. The cushioning effect of Ferrell’s celebrity and, judging by the closing credit list, an extensive and well-funded production team, mean that while this is a likable-enough film, it is an insulated and artificial construction.

In UK and Irish cinemas and on Netflix