Samuel J Friedman Theatre, New York

The White Lotus and Gilded Age actor takes on her real-life husband Tracy Letts’ 1996 thriller, which could have afforded some modern-day tweaks

You can practically smell the stale cigarette smoke lingering in the air of the fake motel set for Bug. It’s the play’s only location – though it appears in a distinctive second guise in the second act – and in its staging at the Samuel J Friedman Theatre, the set comes to a corner in the center of the stage, jutting out toward the audience. The additional angle gives the room a little more depth, but it also distorts the room’s geography, rendering it neither proscenium neat nor fully realistic. That’s the increasingly hard-to-recognize world that Agnes (Carrie Coon) inhabits when she brings near-stranger Peter (Namir Smallwood) into her life.

Agnes is a waitress living out of the motel, drinking and taking drugs in between shifts. Her abusive ex, Jerry (Steve Key), just out of prison, lurks around, expecting Agnes to welcome him back to their “home” whenever he pleases. So when her friend RC (Jennifer Engstrom) introduces Agnes to the drifter and supposed veteran Peter, he can’t help but seem gentler by comparison. But when Peter thinks he notices a bug bite from their shared motel bed, he starts to spiral further into paranoia. Agnes, whether aided by drugs, love, grief over her lost child or a combination of those, spirals right along with him.

The Son of Saul director recalls how getting his first job as assistant to the austere master was a hard but inspiring lesson in the most ambitious kind of movie-making

News: Hungarian director Béla Tarr dies aged 70

The last time I saw Béla Tarr was a few years ago at the Nexus conference in Amsterdam. We were invited to speak about the state of the world and of the arts. We both thought light and darkness existed in the world, even if our perception about them differed. Béla was already weakened in his body, but the spirit was still ferocious, rebellious, furious. We sat down to talk. It seemed fairly obvious this would be our ultimate, and most heartfelt, conversation. As the former apprentice, I was able to see the master one last time, with all his rage, sorrow, love and hate.

I first met Béla in 2004 when he was preparing The Man from London. I wanted to learn film-making and applied to become an assistant on the film. He gave me my first real job: as an assistant, I had to find a boy for one of the main parts. I spent months in the casting process, for a part that eventually was cut from the shooting script. But for Béla, every effort put into a given movie was never lost – it was integrated into the energy field of the enterprise. The final outcome had to be the product of difficult processes. The harder the task, the better quality one could expect. He wanted to film life, and its constant dance. The choreography was a revelation for me: 10-minute, uninterrupted takes, unifying space, characters and time. All in black and white.

(PIAS)
The Jarman brothers’ ninth album adds a little 80s pop sheen to their distorted guitars and confident songwriting, while always sounding exactly like the indie stalwarts

Last summer, the BBC broadcast an eight-part podcast called The Rise and Fall of Indie Sleaze. Its third episode heavily featured the Cribs’ bassist and vocalist Gary Jarman talking about his band’s first flush of mid-00s fame. It centred on their 2005 single Hey Scenesters!, from which the episode also took its name. It was a curious choice: on close examination, Hey Scenesters! wasn’t a celebration of what some people unfortunately dubbed the New Rock Revolution so much as the sound of Jarman and his bandmate brothers poking fun at it.

There was the peculiar dichotomy of the Cribs in a nutshell. They were a band so of the mid-00s moment that they were nearly signed to a record label founded by Myspace. But they always seemed slightly apart from the scene. They were certainly less voracious in the pursuit of mainstream success than contemporaries Razorlight or Kaiser Chiefs: “A cash injection, a nasty infection – don’t regret it,” offers a song from their ninth album, Selling a Vibe, with the pointed title Self Respect. They were more in tune with what their sometime-producer Edwyn Collins called “proper indie” from a pre-Britpop age, when “indie” indicated not a predilection for skinny jeans and trilby hats, but something set apart from the mainstream that viewed the attentions of Top of the Pops and the tabloid press with deep suspicion and balanced limited commercial ambitions against artistic freedom. It was a point underlined by the kind of artists who gave them co-signs. Quite aside from the former frontman of Orange Juice, there was Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Johnny Marr – who briefly joined the Cribs, co-writing 2009’s Ignore the Ignorant – and the late producer/engineer Steve Albini.

This six-part adaptation of the bestselling 2020 novel about a murder investigation is twisty, absurd and bingeable. It’s great January viewing

A woman lies bloodied and twitching her last on the bonnet of a car parked deep in a wood. Another woman arrives home bloodied, gasping with fear and for wine, and starts scrubbing her hands before clearing her flat of – well, everything.

A female voiceover intones that there are two sides to every story. “Which means someone is always lying.” Absolute nonsense, obviously, but it sounds great and more importantly it confirms what we were hoping: that we are in the presence of a glossy, efficient adaptation of a bestselling thriller and it is time to switch off our brains and enjoy (unless you are the type who likes to try to solve the mystery before the characters do, in which case, Godspeed and let me know where you get the energy from).

This tale of a family dealing with a kidnapped daughter is a deeply engaging, psychologically complex thriller that is a cut above the rest

A summary of Girl Taken is disheartening; a teenage girl is abducted by a man she trusted and kept for his own grim purposes in a remote secret location, and must use her wits to survive the depravities and maybe one day escape. But in full, Girl Taken, like the 2016 book Baby Doll by Hollie Overton on which it is based, is something much better. It takes the neglected parts of such stories – the sadder, quieter, far less titillating and voyeuristic aspects of what it means to take a person out of her home, her world and her life, and away from those of the people who love her – and fleshes all that out instead. It makes for a slower burn, but a much more deeply engaging and psychologically complex thriller than we customarily expect from such a setup, and – in asking what it really means to survive an act of profound violence – harrowing in a more valuable way.

Lily and Abby (played with depth and delicacy by Tallulah and Delphi Evans) are twin 17-year-olds, on the cusp of – well, everything really, as you are when you are happy teenage girls. We meet them on the last day of the summer term. Lily is set to enjoy the summer with her lovely boyfriend Wes (Levi Brown, who was so extraordinary in 2024’s This Town) and partying, and Abby is laying plans to go to university. She is the star pupil in Mr Hansen’s English class (“You can start calling me Rick now” he says as the final school bell goes) and the popular young teacher has always encouraged her ambitions.

How billions of trees left their mark on an empire’s psyche – shaping ideological and literal battles up to the present day

When Sophie Pinkham opens her fascinating book with the claim that “Russia has more trees than there are stars in our galaxy”, it might seem as though she is merely using a poetic turn of phrase. But the statistic is correct: while the Milky Way is estimated to have roughly 200bn stars, Russia has something in the region of 642bn trees. Stretching from the Arctic tundra to central Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the Russian forest is vast, mighty and inhospitable. Yet while it is a source of potential danger, it is also a place of great beauty and potential riches, providing furs, minerals and rivers overflowing with salmon.

Pinkham, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University whose last book explored the intricacies of post-Soviet Ukraine, here charts the landscape’s influence on the Russian psyche, and its imprint on history, society and literature. The forest is deeply entwined with Russian national identity – the country is often symbolically represented as a bear – yet attitudes towards it have fluctuated. Different leaders have proposed different strategies for extracting value from the land, leading to cycles of deforestation and tree-planting depending on whether the priority was boosting agriculture, building Peter the Great’s imperial fleet, extracting minerals or constructing hydroelectric dams. Politically, it has been a place of resistance and of ultranationalist rhetoric glorifying the idea of Russian self-sufficiency.

Engaging in creativity can reduce depression, improve immunity and delay ageing – all while you’re having fun

For some reason, we have collectively agreed that new year is the time to reinvent ourselves. The problem, for many people, is that we’ve tried all the usual health kicks – running, yoga, meditation, the latest diets – even if we haven’t really enjoyed them, in a bid to improve our minds and bodies. But have any of us given as much thought to creativity? Allow me to suggest that this year be a time to embrace the arts.

Ever since our Paleolithic ancestors began painting caves, carving figurines, dancing and singing, engaging in the arts has been interwoven with health and healing. Look through the early writings of every major medical tradition around the world and you find the arts. What is much newer – and rapidly accelerating over the past two decades – is a blossoming scientific evidence-base identifying and quantifying exactly what the health benefits of the arts are.

Behind its lavish ‘nun-core’ aesthetic, the Spanish star’s hit album pushes us to think beyond good and evil – to see that we contain multitudes

I went into Lux primed not to like it. Not because I doubt Rosalía’s virtuosic talents or her intense intellectual curiosity, but because the album’s promotional campaign had already done too much work on my nerves. The rollout was relentless: thirsty reels teasing the album on social media, fashion-forward mysticism, even bringing Madrid’s city centre to a halt – everything about it felt designed to send the message that this is less a set of songs than a global event demanding reverence.

Over the past decade, Rosalía has become Spain’s biggest pop export, and Lux appears to inaugurate her imperial phase. The album debuted at No 1 in five countries, was voted the Guardian’s album of the year, broke streaming records on Spotify, and reached No 4 in the US and UK charts, where non-anglophone pop rarely thrives. Multilingual and stylistically expansive, Lux is saturated with Catholic iconography, with lyrics in no fewer than 13 languages, and circling themes of transcendence, suffering and grace.

Increasingly, teens are given only parts of books, and they often read not in print but on school-issued laptops

Reading fiction has been such a joy for me that my heart broke a little to learn recently that many schools no longer assign full books to high school students.

Rather, teens are given excerpts of books, and they often read them not in print but on school-issued laptops, according to a survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents by the New York Times.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

The actor first realised what music was when he heard Yellow Submarine and knows a lot of Paul Simon lyrics, but what would he put on at a party?

The first song I fell in love with
My earliest memory is walking into a room at nursery school where they were playing Yellow Submarine by the Beatles. I was captivated by the sound effects, and Lennon shouting: “Full speed ahead!” When it got to the chorus, I remember thinking: “This must be music!”

The first single I bought
When I was eight, I won a competition at school to pick a new record to play at the mini disco we had on Fridays. My teacher took me to Woolworths, and I chose Come Back My Love by [50s revivalists] Darts. The first single I bought with my own pocket money was Mull of Kintyre by Wings from a record shop in Colne in Lancashire. It was No 1 at the time, and I chose it when my dad pointed out that it was by one of the Beatles.

‘You don’t have to be tortured to make great art,’ says founder of mental health support organisation Artist Wellbeing

From Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf, from Nina Simone to Amy Winehouse, the tortured-artist archetype looms large: private torment fuelling public brilliance.

But across opera, theatre, film and television, a growing movement is pushing back against what many now insist is a corrosive myth – the romanticised necessity of creative martyrdom.

In 2025 the Doncaster-born singer-songwriter has earned two UK No 1s, three Grammy nominations and the respect of rock’s greats – and he says it’s all down to putting fans first

In November, Dominic Harrison, better known as Yungblud, received three Grammy nominations. The news that he had become the first British artist in history to be nominated that many times in the awards’ rock categories came as a suitably striking finale to what, by any metric, was an extraordinary year for the 28-year-old singer-songwriter.

In June, his fourth studio album, Idols, entered the UK charts at No 1, outselling its nearest competitor by 50%. The same month, the annual festival he curates and headlines, Bludfest, drew an audience of 30,000 to The National Bowl in Milton Keynes. In July, he played at Back to the Beginning, the farewell performance by Black Sabbath, whose frontman Ozzy Osbourne died 17 days after the gig. On a bill almost comically overstuffed with heavy metal superstars paying tribute – Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax, Slayer – his rendition of Black Sabbath’s 1972 ballad Changes unexpectedly stole the show, appearing to win him an entirely new audience in the process: the crowd at the gig skewed considerably older than the gen Z fans Harrison traditionally attracts.

North Carolina home preserved to commemorate legendary musician and civil rights activist, and to serve as arts hub

It was a surreal experience for Dr Samuel Waymon, Nina Simone’s youngest sibling, to walk back into the renovated childhood home that he once shared with the singer and civil rights activist. On that day in the fall of 2025, Waymon, an 81-year-old award-winning composer, said that memories flooded back of him playing organ in the house and cooking on the potbelly stove with his mother as a child in Tryon, North Carolina. He was overjoyed to see the large tree from his youth still standing in the yard. Simone, born Eunice Waymon, lived in the 650 sq ft, three-room home with her family from 1933 to 1937.

After sitting vacant and severely decayed for more than two decades, the recently restored home is now painted white, with elements of its former self sprinkled throughout the interior. On the freshly painted mint-blue wall hangs a shadow box that encases the rust brown varnish of the original home. A small piece of the Great Depression-era linoleum sits on the restored wooden floor like an island of the past in a sea of the present.

The presenter on a Strictly apology, her high-wire triumph, and flashing her knickers at David Cameron

Born in Cumbria, Helen Skelton, 42, began her broadcasting career at BBC Radio Cumbria and Newsround. From 2008 to 2013, she was a Blue Peter presenter. Her other credits include reporting on the London 2012 Olympics and presenting Countryfile and BBC Morning Live; she also voices Annie in Fireman Sam. In 2023, she published her autobiography, In My Stride. A new series of her show Lost and Found in the Lakes starts on 5 January on BBC One. She lives in Cumbria and has three children with her former husband, Richie Myler.

What is your greatest fear?
Getting to the end and thinking that I haven’t laughed enough.

The return of hit bonkbuster Rivals, the horny hockey show taking the world by storm, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer … and Buffy is back! Here’s your complete guide to 2026’s unmissable television

As the writer of conspiracy thriller Utopia and Covid-era relationship drama Together, Dennis Kelly has form for creating darkly perceptive TV drama. This excellent series stars Josh Finan (whose performance in The Responder earned him a Bafta nomination) as Dan, a philosophy teacher with a troubled family past, working in a prison. As he explores issues around freedom, luck and destiny with the inmates, he starts to wonder if he actually belongs behind bars like his abusive father. Soon, his anxieties threaten to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• BBC One, 3 January

In this energisingly original novel, an emotionally detached English student at college in New York tells a big lie

Lies offend our sense of justice: generally, we want to see the liar unmasked and punished. But when the deception brings no material gain, we might also be curious about what purpose the lie serves – what particular need of their own the liar is attempting to meet. This is precisely what Grace Murray’s witty, assured debut explores: not just the consequences of a lie but the ways in which it can, paradoxically, reveal certain truths.

At a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year by claiming that her father has just died of a heart attack. In fact, he is alive and well back in Lichfield, England. This lie is the jumping-off point for an unpacking of Charlotte’s psychology, as well as the catalyst for her relationship with fellow student Katarina, a quasi-love story that forms the book’s main narrative.

Both stars have bigger films on release but are hugely proud of The History of Sound, which has been four years in the making. They talk about the vulnerability of singing, the cost of inhabiting a role – and rationing future parts

All things considered, telling Paul Mescal I once placed a bet on him is not quite the icebreaker I had hoped. Or rather, it breaks the ice in an unusual way.

“The key question,” he says, his voice betraying a hint of trepidation, “is what was the bet? Most Likely to Join the 27 Club?”

From CMAT and the Carpenters’ fresh starts to the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, starting again is a rich theme in pop. Here are some of the best examples

It’s hard to imagine anyone’s heart not being lifted a little by Right Back Where We Started From: the euphoric rush of new love rendered into three minutes of cod-northern soul (performed, unexpectedly, by various ex members of ELO, the Animals and 60s soft-poppers Honeybus). Avoid the 80s cover by Sinitta at all costs.