A new exhibition brings together Chris Killip and Graham Smith’s seminal shots of England’s north-east from 1975-87, when heavy industry and working-class life were transformed

Dupieux’s melancholic comedy sees a disillusioned audience member pull a gun before demanding a word processor to write the actors a better play

Quentin Dupieux is one of the vanishingly small number of film-makers on the non-Anglo-American distribution circuit who really is interested in – and allowed to make – straight-up comedy, albeit flavoured with melancholy or violent absurdity. For me, only Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern are comparable. Aki Kaurismäki, for example, is different; although gently and wonderfully comic, his films don’t try to hit the laugh lines in the same way.

The prolific Dupieux has now created a 67-minute sketch, a one-act cine-play about a mediocre Paris stage company performing a dinner-theatre comedy called The Cuckold to a bored, half-empty house. Just as they are grinding through their tired old routines, a guy called Yannick (Raphaël Quenard) stands up in the auditorium and announces that this so-called comedy is making him sad and he wants his money back. The dumbfounded actors start mocking this jerk but Yannick pulls a gun, clambers on to the stage and demands a word processor and printer so he can write a better play for them. Is he a radical hero for disrupting mediocre bourgeois culture? If this is a hostage situation, he says, well, so is sitting through a bad play.

A South African woman’s woes are slowly illuminated in a stark, darkly humorous novel by the author of the Booker-longlisted An Island

There’s nothing quite like a writer setting out their stall from the first page of a book so you know what you’re getting. When Karen Jennings – the South African author whose last novel, An Island , was deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize in 2021 – opens her new novel with a woman crouching over a mixing bowl to expel urine as “dark as cough syrup”, we know it will not be a feelgood comedy.

The woman is 53-year-old Deidre van Deventer, and she is in a bad way – but then so is the world. It’s the late 2020s and Cape Town is living under drought conditions (presumably inspired by the city’s Day Zero water crisis of 2018). The drought is not intrinsic to the story, but it affords an intensification of Deidre’s character traits: her laziness in not washing, her selfishness in using money sent by her estranged daughter not for water but for “takeaways and booze”.

Fans are outraged, ex-cast members think it’s drivel – even its current actors are fed up. How did the world’s longest running soap go from shaping the national conversation to thinking it’s a ropey crime drama?

Whether it’s Deirdre being sent to prison , Alan Bradley getting mown down by a Blackpool tram or “you should have stayed at the party, Maxine” , Coronation Street has provided some most memorable moments in UK soap history.

At its peak, the world’s longest-running television soap could pull in 26 million viewers an episode and its stories, such as the introduction of the transsexual character Hayley Cropper , helped shape the national conversation in a way Westminster politicians could only dream of. But in recent years, Corrie has faced a backlash from fans who say they are fed up with dark, issues-based plots, an ever-increasing cast and sporadic scheduling of ITV’s flagship soap.

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American actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier ) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne , Burt Lancaster , Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey , because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.

It is seen as one of the greatest films ever, with the most hypnotic child performance in history. So what has Víctor Erice been doing in the half century since Beehive? As his new film Close Your Eyes hits screens, the Spanish legend reveals all

In 1972, when Ana Torrent was six years old, a man came to her school and asked her to be in his film. “He had a beard,” she recalls now, from her home in Madrid. “And I told him I didn’t like men with beards.” The director said his film was about Frankenstein’s monster and asked if she was familiar with that character. “I replied, ‘I’ve heard about him but I haven’t yet been introduced.’ That’s when he thought, ‘She’s the one.’”

The director was Víctor Erice and the film was The Spirit of the Beehive . Made at the end of the Franco regime but set in 1940, in a Castilian village scarred by the recent Spanish civil war, it concerns two sisters whose imaginations are stimulated by seeing James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein at a travelling cinema. Torrent’s performance as the younger of the two girls – her face as pale and round as a communion wafer, her inky eyes watchful and wide – is among the most hypnotic ever given by a child.

‘I had no interest in teen vampire films and turned it down five times. But Joel Schumacher promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup and teeth, or have to fly around. Of course, he lied’

Joel Schumacher, the director, wanted me in the movie right from the first time we met. But the script I read was nothing like the magical movie it would become after rewrites and production, and I had no interest in teenage vampire films. So I turned it down about five times – but Joel was determined. He spent weeks explaining his vision, a mix of horror and comedy, and eventually wore me down. We made a deal: he promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup, the teeth or have to fly around. Of course, he lied.

Val McDermid and Douglas Stuart were among many writers to express outrage after Creative Scotland turned down the literary festival funding application

Val McDermid, Douglas Stuart and Andrew O’Hagan are among the Scottish authors criticising the cancellation of Glasgow literary festival Aye Write after its funding application was turned down by Creative Scotland.

McDermid said it was “profoundly depressing” that Glasgow “cannot sustain a book festival”, while Stuart called it “unacceptable”. O’Hagan said that the cancellation is “savage and it shouldn’t be happening”.