Rebecca Hall bravely emcees the show as our two giant friends come back for an action-packed, plausibility-free slugfest

This sequel to the big monkey versus big lizard smackdown (2021’s Godzilla vs Kong ) finds Kong moping in Hollow Earth while Godzilla listlessly lumbers around the surface world. But it would take more than a geologically improbable parallel dimension to keep these two apart, and returning director Adam Wingard ups the ante with yet more huge, furious creatures. Rebecca Hall, as titan specialist Ilene, is mainly required to explain the plot between battle sequences; Brian Tyree Henry, playing monster-blogger Bernie, provides incredulous double-takes; Dan Stevens’s Trapper brings Hawaiian shirts and devil-may-care rashness to the mix. Dumbed-down and stripped of the symbolic subtext of the earlier movies, the picture is not without seat-shuddering thrills, but it’s like a tag-team wrestling bout for monsters rather than a picture with meaning and even a modicum of thought.

As a young Liberian woman in survival mode, Cynthia Erivo carries Anthony Chen’s unassuming drama

Understated, but with a mesmerising, shell-shocked stillness, British actor Cynthia Erivo’s arresting central performance gives this earnest drama by Singaporean director Anthony Chen ( Ilo Ilo , Wet Season ) its emotional heft. She plays Jacqueline, a traumatised refugee from war-torn Liberia who has recently arrived on a Greek island. The jagged, rocky terrain of her new home evokes her fractured mental state. But even in survival mode, subsisting on scavenged leftovers and small change, Jacqueline is too proud to beg. That same dignity prompts her to invent a story – a husband and a hotel room – when she strikes up a friendship with an empathic American tour guide, Callie (Alia Shawkat). This portrait of lost souls connecting is unassuming, but quietly powerful.

People in Hiroshima react to first screening of the film, which was delayed after outrage at ‘Barbenheimer’ memes

It is hard to think of a more emotionally charged venue than Hatchoza for the first screening in Japan of the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer. The cinema in Hiroshima is located less than a kilometre from the hypocentre of the first atomic bombing in history – the devastating culmination of the American physicist’s work.

The film finally premiered in Japan on Friday, more than eight months after it opened in the US, to reviews that ranged from praise for its portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer – the “father of the atomic bomb” – to criticism that it omitted to show the human misery it caused in Hiroshima and, days later, Nagasaki, in the final days of the Pacific war.

Actor speaks for first time about how 10-year-old’s death in 2000 spurred him and others to ‘aim further’

The actor John Boyega has spoken for the first time of the “life-changing” impact of his friendship with Damilola Taylor and the way his sudden death spurred him and others to “aim further”.

Boyega, 32, best known for his work in the Star Wars franchise, was school friends with Damilola growing up in south-east London. Damilola was 10 when he was stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle walking home from a computer class in Peckham in November 2000.

The Harry Potter and Bridget Jones star is a dazzlingly versatile performer, with a string of Michael Winterbottom films under her belt, as well as Star Wars, TV’s Happy Valley and an Olivier award. She explains how she keeps on top of it all

It is easy to feel protective of Shirley Henderson on this gloomy winter afternoon. Is she warm enough? Does she want to put the heating on? “Aye, I’m OK,” she says from her home in Fife, a few strands of chestnut hair falling over her glasses as she huddles close to the laptop. “It’s a wee bit blowy out. But I’m at the age where you can get too warm, so I’m all right.” Her giggle is helium-high: the sort of sound you want to trap, like in one of those toy moo boxes, so that you can play it when you’re down in the dumps. Hearing Henderson laugh, or say “Sorry darlin’?” when she hasn’t quite heard your question makes you feel as if you’ve been cuddled.

Her allusion to the menopause, though, takes a moment to sink in. Though 58, she looks barely old enough to be online without parental controls. (No suspension of disbelief was required when she played a mother who dresses as her own adolescent daughter to sit an exam in May Contain Nuts .) Henderson came to prominence in the 1990s as one of the UK’s most probing, unpredictable character actors. After being spattered with excrement in Trainspotting, she won pivotal roles in two masterpieces: she was a soprano pining for her son in Mike Leigh’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan extravaganza Topsy-Turvy, and a feisty hairdresser smacking her lips at London life in the rhapsodic Wonderland . That was the first and best of her six collaborations with the director Michael Winterbottom , as well as the one which got her hooked on improvising.

The Oscar-nominated actor and the boss of XL Recordings – now a synth-pop duo performing ghostly songs with lyrics rooted in childhood trauma – discuss the healing power of making art

Inside a rehearsal space scented with essential oils, a new, unlikely electro-art-pop duo are preparing for their live debut. Called Sam Morton, they are the collaborative pairing of the twice-Oscar-nominated actor, director and writer Samantha Morton and the celebrated producer, songwriter and boss of XL Recordings Richard Russell. Morton, wearing denim dungarees, is singing the fluty, jazzy, bassy, atmospheric Let’s Walk in the Night while Russell, in jeans and a graffitied white T-shirt, hunches over production consoles, alongside a keyboard player and a guitarist.

We are in the Copper House, Russell’s personal studio. It is characterised by an undeniable vibe : a lime-green artwork on a scarlet wall announces “RESIDENCE LA REVOLUTION”; the phrase “FATE IS DECIDED”, alongside descriptions of cloud formations, is chalked on black walls. The tiny bathroom is wallpapered in Buddhist texts and stocked with books, including The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

There’s a likable, light-hearted zip to the monster mash follow-up but energy dissipates when we’re stuck with the humans

It was a strange old time when the creature feature mash-up Godzilla vs Kong was released, the first major blockbuster in cinemas since Covid shuttered them all a year prior. Expectations were low, thanks to how rotten the last two Godzilla films had been, but thirst for something, anything , truly escapist was high and the big screen equivalent of a kid smashing his toys together became an unlikely saviour, both commercially and critically.

Three years later with normality resuming, there’s arguably less audience demand for another instalment, although the industry could definitely do with another monster hit, the strikes leaving the first few months of 2024 a little weakened. There’s enough easily marketable simplicity to Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire that it should become a swift global hit (the film is tracking to make $135m worldwide in its opening weekend) but, especially in the shadow of the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One , there will be predictably diminishing returns for those who venture out. It’s a still fun yet far sloppier outing, a second round that’s less of a win for us and more of a draw.

The star of The First Omen takes your questions on working as a chimney sweep, finessing his perfect sandwich – and hoping to die in a hail of bullets

There’s an argument that you’re the person James Bond matures into: women still want to sleep with you and men want to be you. What’s your secret? MarcoPoloMint
I have no idea. I don’t get out much and I don’t identify with whomever they’re talking about. I did used to quip that I could be James Bond’s grandfather and I’ve always wanted to say: “The name’s Nighy. Bill Nighy.” I’m very happy to hear, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me to grasp.

When you were younger, you travelled to Paris to write a book, but never completed it. Will you ever dust down your great unfinished novel to realise your literary ambitions? VerulamiumParkRanger
I had a very romantic idea – I was a walking cliche in my 20s – of running away to Paris to write the great English short story. The pathetic thing is that I went and stood in the Trocadéro, outside the Shakespeare and Company bookstore and under the Arc de Triomphe, hoping to catch some vibes. I sat down for an hour in front of a blank page and drew a margin, like at school, for the teacher’s remarks, but the doorbell went or the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

Manic, magic, madcap … Julie Andrews is superb in the role of the flying nanny, in a film filled with amazing songs

Brilliant, entrancing, exhausting, and with thermonuclear showtunes from Richard and Robert Sherman, Disney’s hybrid live-action/animation classic from 1964 is now rereleased on home entertainment platforms for its 60th anniversary. And it has a brand-new certificate from the BBFC : upgraded from a U to a PG on account of “discriminatory language” from the eccentric seadog character Admiral Boom, who fires a cannon from his roof shouting “Fight the Hottentots!” (an obsolete term for South Africa’s indigenous Khoekhoe people ). However the BBFC is evidently not bothered by the foxhunting scene in which the fox has a cod Irish accent (perhaps because chimney sweep Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke , saves the fox), nor by the cheerful suicide reference made by one of the servants: “Nice spot there by Southwark Bridge, very popular with jumpers!”

In an upmarket part of Edwardian London created on almost dreamlike artificial sets in California, the prosperous upper-middle-class Banks family are having problems controlling their high-spirited children, Michael (Matthew Garber) and Jane (Karen Dotrice); this is grumpy banker George Banks (David Tomlinson) and his suffragette wife Winifred (Glynis Johns), who is always whirling around going to votes-for-women marches. Pompous Mr Banks saunters into the action with complacent song The Life I Lead (which melodically owes a tiny bit to With a Little Bit of Luck from the stage show My Fair Lady).