A Disney theme park ride adaptation remake is a challenging place to make your mark, and the dumping of Guillermo del Toro for promising real, supposedly child-freaking scares dampens hopes further. Replacement director Justin Simien (Dear White People) at least professes himself a fan of the titular attraction, and with screenwriter Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation, Paul Feig’s female Ghostbusters) slips humanity into the corporate shilling.

In late 2019, BC, another age, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi stepped on to a Southbank Centre stage and gave one of those mesmerising performances that forever stays in the memory.

The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time.

Another week, another toy story, in the wake of Barbie. And another origin-of-hit-product story, too, after Air. The Beanie Bubble, though, has none of the surprisingly gripping appeal of Nike’s rise and rise via a single trainer design, nor the (sporadic) wit and bounce of Greta Gerwig’s mega-hit. It’s all corporate idiocy, shabby dealings, and misogyny. And failure is nowhere near as fascinating as success.

If you want to get a hit show on American TV, you could do a lot worse than recruit Taylor Sheridan to create it for you. Special Ops: Lioness, a bruising trip into the innards of a CIA counter-terror unit, follows a string of successes which have made Sheridan a towering presence in film and TV.

Some country music cosies up as close as possible to pop, in hopes of dragging more listeners in, smoothing away the raw backwoods feel. The most famed exemplar of this route is, of course, Taylor Swift, at least in her early career. Other country music resonates with American folk history, emanating the vastness of the American south, its roots sounds and narratives.

Who says you can't go home again? As proof that you can, and to giddy and gorgeous results, along comes the current West End revival of Crazy for You, which reunites Broadway name Susan Stroman with the Gershwin-inspired title that launched this singular talent on her career ascent more than 30 years ago. 

This fourth season of Prime’s reworking of Tom Clancy’s fictional CIA man is supposedly the last (to avoid any confusion they’ve dubbed it The Final Mission). It maintains its tradition of deluxe production values, globe-hopping locations and the kind of labyrinthine plotting liable to prompt frequent recourse to the rewind button.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) revived Thirties adventure serials’ simple thrills, a George Lucas notion adrenalised by Spielberg. Its hero Indy Jones wasn’t built for depth or pathos, and the struggle to find reasons for his return notoriously sank Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and left this final chapter in production purgatory till Harrison Ford was 79.

In 1917, in the face of the Bolshevik revolution closing in on his country estate, Rachmaninoff fled Russia, never to return. He was 44, at his peak as composer, pianist and conductor, but spent the rest of his life in exile in the US and Switzerland, amassing a fortune and worldwide reputation as the biggest draw in classical music – but never reconciling himself to being separated from his homeland. As he lay dying, he insisted on a Russian nurse, his wife reading Pushkin to him.