Composer says values of Trump-dominated Kennedy Center ‘are in direct conflict’ with symphony’s message

Philip Glass, the celebrated US composer, has withdrawn the world premiere of his latest symphony at Washington DC’s John F Kennedy Center in protest of Donald Trump’s presidency.

In a statement on Tuesday, the 88-year-old composer said: “After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Symphony No 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.

Sundance film festival: Zoey Deutch is a small-town girl hunting down Jon Hamm for sex in David Wain’s disposable yet often funny lark

There’s been the expected amount of heavy-weighted seriousness at this year’s Sundance – stories about sexual assault, climate change, opioid addiction and dementia – but also a remarkable amount of silliness. Perhaps realising we might be in desperate need of an uplift, the festival has given us a cartoonish dom-sub romance, a killer Barney horror, a pop star mockumentary, a Weekend at Bernie’s art world caper and a film where Olivia Colman shags a man made of wicker. But those films are all pretty stern-minded in comparison to David Wain’s disposable, dopey comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a film without a single serious moment, driven by the sole purpose of making us laugh.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be. Wain has previously toyed with more conventional studio comedies like Wanderlust and Role Models (which for me was one of the best examples of the form in the 2000s) and spoofs, targeting 80s sex comedies with Wet Hot American Summer and romcoms with They Came Together. Gail Daughtry belongs in the latter group but it doesn’t have quite as direct of an aim, a Wizard of Oz-inspired, Hollywood-set action comedy about marriage, fame, espionage and the burning desire to have sex with Jon Hamm.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Tape is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

A quietly revolutionary account of cohabiting captured a nation’s heart – but what does it mean for the rest of the world?

When Sunwoo and Hana met on Twitter, they were in their 40s and committed bachelorettes. Both raised by the sea in Busan, they studied in Seoul before entering the city’s famously brutal rat race, Sunwoo as a fashion journalist, Hana as a copywriter. They shared the same taste in music and books, and importantly, both had rejected marriage. No wonder. In South Korea’s stubbornly patriarchal culture, women in dual-income families spend nearly three hours more a day on household chores than men. Instead, Sunwoo and Hana joined the large number of South Koreans living alone. At first, independence felt exhilarating. By middle age however, loneliness was beginning to gnaw, and their boxy studio apartments felt oppressively small.

Two Women Living Together, a 2019 South Korean bestseller that spawned a popular podcast, charts Sunwoo and Hana’s decision to buy a sunlit house together and live not as a romantic couple but as friends. Across 49 warm, chatty essays, they invite us into the life they share with four cats, reflecting on everything from the food they love to their retirement fantasies.

Sundance film festival: strong performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir and Rob Morgan anchor a sensitive film about caregiving as a form of rehabilitation

One of the greatest achievements of a certain kind of Sundance movie is the ability to shine a light on an experience or a community we hadn’t previously been aware of. This year’s stoic and sensitive drama Frank & Louis takes us behind bars, a place we’ve been many times before at this festival, but to shadow the taxing work of inmates taking care of those who have dementia, a specifically difficult job in an already difficult place. Petra Volpe, the Swiss writer-director, who last explored a far more known form of caregiving in Late Shift, an exhausting nursing drama, makes her English-language debut with a film inspired by the “Gold Coats” peer support program at the California Men’s Colony state prison.

As with her previous film, there’s real rigour to how she zeroes in on the grind of under-appreciated labour, but while Late Shift was more naturalistic and experiential, Frank & Louis is far more formulaic and emotional, a clearer bid for the heartstrings. It’s a topic that’s hard not to get emotional about, the slow loss of one’s mental abilities, something many of us might be horribly familiar with, and it’s a tough, rather hopeless experience to witness on screen.

Frank & Louis is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins contestant Emily Seebohm was accused of being a "selfish" mother during a brutal interrogation on Monday's (26 January) final.