Cillian Murphy shines in a brutal yet hopeful high school drama, while the singer-songwriter from south London returns with her streetwise swag. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

The Greater Manchester mayor has made no secret of his Labour leadership ambitions, but faces significant obstacles

When Andy Burnham addressed a gala dinner this week, he was as coy as he could have been in a week when speculation about his future ambitions were in overdrive. “I love this job,” the mayor of Greater Manchester said. “I am very happy where I am. I have no ambition to be … ambassador to Washington.”

It was a gag that got a big laugh. Burnham has never played the game of pretending that he doesn’t seek to enter No 10. But he also does not give the standard ambitious politician’s response of saying that no vacancy is available.

A vegetarian delight that’s the perfect dinner solution for when you can’t decide between Indian or Italian

Would you like Italian tonight, or Indian? Thanks to this pizza, you can have both. This recipe is written in memory of the beloved pizza of my youth:​ a vegetarian delight ​t​hat I ate on the regular with my cousins​ at one of the many Indian-Italian restaurants on Leicester’s Belgrave Road (AKA the Golden Mile) circa 1990, right before washing it down with Rubicon mango juice and doing handbrake turns in a nearby car park.

Niamh, 27, who works in classical music, meets Harry, 30, a public sector consultant

What were you hoping for?
A pub quiz partner who is witty, well dressed and preferably Irish. It’s where my family is from originally and my mum’s dream is for me to settle down back over there.

He was once so stoned he missed his own birthday party, but the Oscar-winning actor has swapped pot for poetry. He reveals the trauma and triumph that taught him why it’s more important to be a good man than a nice guy

“Simon!” Matthew McConaughey barks. “How do, sir?!” Matthew McConaughey could not be more Matthew McConaughey if he tried. And he’s only said four words. Charming, sincere, intense, 100% Texan and 101% eccentric.

Five years ago, the Oscar-winning actor wrote a memoir called Greenlights. It wasn’t a conventional memoir, more a collection of life lessons, bullet-point anecdotes and gnomic philosophies. Now he has written a book of poetry called Poems & Prayers. For McConaughey, the two are interchangeable. It’s another memoir of sorts – this time, a portrait of his faith and its impact on his everyday life. In it he addresses faith in the broadest sense. There’s plenty of talking to God as he searches for the divine in himself, loads of Amens, but it’s also about faith in himself, his family, his career, the world, the works.

Having flown the nest, two of our sons are now back under our roof – and the third lives just around the corner

It is late on Saturday morning, and the oldest one and I are sitting opposite one another at the kitchen table, staring at our laptops in silence. We are silent because we are both working on the same puzzle, and neither of us wants any help from the other at this point.

The front door opens and my wife comes in, bringing with her the middle one and all his worldly possessions. Only the youngest one, the last to leave, has yet to return home, but he lives just minutes away and, like the other two, he has a key.

From reduced hunger to a changing palate, weight loss jabs can alter our experience and enjoyment of food

The revelation that the chef Heston Blumenthal has created a tasting menu for people on weight loss jabs may have raised eyebrows, but there is scientific evidence that drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro not only make you less hungry, but change what you want to eat.

So what do we know about how weight loss medications affect your relationship with food?

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

An expert team are resurrecting ice age ponds and finding rare species returning from a ‘perfect time capsule’

If you glanced into a green field and saw a yellow digger tearing into the turf, you might assume it was another site for new houses. But the two circle-shaped scars of dark soil on a Norfolk pasture are ghost ponds being brought back to life by an innovative and cheap form of nature restoration.

“It looks awful now. ‘What have they done? It’s a disaster!’” says Carl Sayer, a professor of geography at UCL, who is dancing with glee around the bleak-looking, freshly dug hole. “The colonisation is so quick. Within a year, it is full of water plants. Within two years, it looks like it’s been there forever. It’s a spectacular recovery, and you’re truly recovering ancient assemblages of plants.”

Barred from entry on ‘public security’ grounds, I had a moment to reflect on how far the country has fallen

Earlier this week, I was denied entry into Israel while on a humanitarian parliamentary delegation organised by the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU). The NGO is one of the most active and respected bodies working on the Middle East in the British parliament. It promotes conflict resolution, human rights and civil society.

The purpose of my visit, alongside my parliamentary colleague Simon Opher, a doctor like me, was to begin to understand the state of healthcare for Palestinians in the West Bank. Unfortunately, we never set foot in Israel, let alone visited any hospitals in the occupied territories.

Peter Prinsley is the Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket

Israeli military says aid infrastructure could be targeted after order to ‘all Gaza residents and inhabitants’ to leave

Humanitarian workers in northern Gaza have been repeatedly warned by the Israeli military that only hospitals will be considered protected sites and all other aid infrastructure could be targeted.

In messages and conversations with aid workers in recent days seen by the Guardian, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said an order to “all Gaza residents and inhabitants” to evacuate Gaza City, the biggest urban centre in the territory, applied “to all humanitarian locations [there], except hospitals” and warned that “to defeat Hamas [Israeli troops] will operate … with great force”.

Once, I believed that humanity’s problem was an information deficit. Now, I know you can’t speak truth to power if power controls your words

The BBC I joined on my first day of professional journalism – 40 years ago this week – is unrecognisable today. While, for most of its history, the corporation had largely defended the status quo, under the director general at the time, Alasdair Milne, its journalists were sometimes allowed to stick it to power. This, I believe, is what journalism exists to do – and seldom does.

As a student, I’d hammered on the doors of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, insisting there was a major gap in its coverage: investigative environmental reporting. If they took me on, I argued, I could help them fill it. The phone rang as I was leaving the house for one of my final exams. It was the head of the unit, saying: “You’re so fucking persistent you’ve got the job.”

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Held since 2020, India’s most prominent political prisoner has become a symbol of repression under the Modi regime

“There is indeed something about captivity that makes one feel like a state of somewhere between life and death,” wrote Umar Khalid in June in a letter penned as his fifth year languishing behind bars approached.

Few understand the purgatory of jail like Khalid. For five years – since his arrest in September 2020 under a draconian terrorism law – he has remained India’s most prominent political prisoner, to many a potent symbol of the systematic crushing of dissent under the dominant Hindu nationalist regime of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Texas senator says Brendan Carr’s threats to revoke licenses amid Jimmy Kimmel suspension ‘right out of Goodfellas’

Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, compared Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr’s threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of ABC stations over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary to “mafioso” tactics similar to those in Goodfellas, the 1990 mobster movie.

“Look, Jimmy Kimmel has been canned. He has been suspended indefinitely. I think that it a fantastic thing,” Cruz said at the start of the latest episode of his podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz. There were, however “first amendment implications” of the FCC’s role, the senator, a Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for US supreme court chief justice William Rehnquist, added.

President says US military carried out strike ‘on my orders’, killing three men he said were carrying illegal narcotics

Donald Trump announced on Friday that the US military has carried out another deadly strike on a vessel in the the Caribbean, killing three males on board the vessel whom Trump alleged were trafficking illicit narcotics.

“On my orders”, Trump wrote in a social media post shared by the White House and defense secretary, “the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility.”

Ukrainian leadership continues to talk up recapture of territory in counteroffensive; EU moves to phase out Russian gas faster. What we know on day 1,305

Qingzhou Wang of Amarvel Biotech accused by prosecutors of turning chemical company into ‘pipeline of poison’

A Chinese company executive has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for trafficking in chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl, the US justice department has said.

Qingzhou Wang, 37, principal executive of Amarvel Biotech, a company based in Wuhan, and Yiyi Chen, 33, the firm’s marketing manager, were convicted in New York in February of fentanyl precusor importation and money laundering.

For Australia-based cookbook author Yoko Nakazawa, pickles are an essential food. She shares three of her favourites, including yuzu daikon amazu zuke

I’ve been eating pickles made from different vegetables in various ways since I was little. Every meal included some kind of pickle on our table. I grew up in Japan and pickles were also included in bento boxes, whether it was homemade, an Ekiben from the station, or a convenience-store bento. If there aren’t any pickles on the table, I feel like something is missing.

Pink radish amazu zuke (sweet pickle), below, is a great way to brighten up your plate, and it’s incredibly easy to make. When preparing it, the radish initially loses its colour, which transfers into the pickling liquid. After a few days, the liquid turns the radish into a beautiful, vibrant pink.

Teams from 25 cities competed in front of thousands of spectators in Vienna and Melbourne is set to host the 2027 showpiece

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Tram driver Sally Burgess has never deliberately collided with another object on the track – until last weekend, that is, when she hit a giant ball as hard as she could with the bumper of her tram. The goal: to knock down a series of 2-metre-tall rubber pins, like oversized skittles, lined up on the track ahead.

“I said I would smash the ball and I smashed the ball,” Burgess tells Guardian Australia. “Only one pin came down, though. It’s pretty hard to get all those pins down.”

At least two protesters arrested as Democratic congressional candidate condemns ‘violent abuse of power’

• New York lawmakers arrested for blocking Ice access to federal building

Federal law enforcement agents used teargas and pepper balls to disperse a group of about 100 protesters, including two Democratic candidates for Congress, during a series of early morning clashes outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) building in Chicago on Friday.

Demonstrators had attempted to block a number of government SUVs from entering and exiting the facility, which has become an operating hub and detention location during an immigration crackdown in the Democratic city dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz”.

Four out of five making staff cuts as physicists say findings are ‘great concern’ for UK’s leadership in important areas

The heads of UK physics departments say their subject is facing a national crisis as one in four warns that their university departments are in danger of closing because of funding pressures.

In an anonymous survey of department heads by the Institute of Physics (IoP), 26% said they faced potential closure of their department within the next two years, while 60% said they expected courses to be reduced.

• Manager determined to stick to his 3-4-3 formation

• Jim Ratcliffe has given Amorim ‘show of support’

Ruben Amorim has claimed “not even the pope” could make him deviate from his 3-4-3 formation, despite Manchester United’s poor start to the season.

Amorim has drawn criticism for sticking rigidly to one system after a start to the season in which United have taken four points from four league games, suffered a shock exit from the Carabao Cup after a second-round defeat to Grimsby, and generally performed poorly. The Portuguese has insisted throughout that run that he is not for turning, a message he reiterated in emphatic, dramatic fashion prior to Chelsea’s visit to Old Trafford this evening.

Manager has never won at Liverpool but the arrival of Jack Grealish has enhanced his armoury to trouble the champions on Saturday

A 21st is supposed to be a joyous event, a milestone on the path to adulthood, leaving behind the immature mistakes of the past. David Moyes is at risk of reaching that figure without receiving a key to the door at Anfield.

In 20 Premier League visits to face Liverpool Moyes has garnered nothing better than six draws and experienced nine straight defeats with four clubs. In order to change the record, it may be time to do something different with Everton on Saturday. The club won at an empty Anfield under Carlo Ancelotti during Covid but have not silenced the stadium since 1999.