While a war photograph cannot stop a missile or feed a child, it can challenge denial and define a war, suggest SARA OSCAR and CHERINE FAHD

KENNY MACASKILL delivers his assessment of Nicloa Sturgeon’s account of her political career

ANDREW MURRAY recommends a volume of essays that nail the visionless, racist and neoliberal character of policy under Starmer’s Labour Party

MIKE COWLEY welcomes half a century of remarkable work, that begins before the Greens and invites a connection to — and not a division from — nature

WILL PODMORE welcomes the case put by a feminist, disentangling the abusive rhetoric of the trans rights debate

JONATHAN TAYLOR appreciates how, for a black British musician, to walk onstage can be a rebellious act

GAVIN O’TOOLE examines the fatal relationship between environmental crimes and politics in Brazil and the inspiration provided by Indigenous people

MARY CONWAY admires a study of environmental idealism that aspires to Chekhov but is arrested in a deluge of middle-class opinion

MARIA DUARTE and LEO BOIX review Little Trouble Girls, Big Boys, The Roses, and Caught Stealing

Despite the primitive means the director was forced to use, this is an incredibly moving film from Gaza and you should see it, urges JOHN GREEN

By Nigel Davison

RAM PRASAD appreciates an earnest effort to show how the art of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism is sacred and personal

ANGUS REID questions whether a human scriptwriter is behind the multiple plagiarisms of Disney’s much-lauded and vacuous extension of the Alien franchise

CHRIS SEARLE encourages you to go hear a landmark performance, and introduces some of the musicians

ANDREW FILMER welcomes the reopening of Glasgow’s landmark theatre after a seven-year transformation

WILL PODMORE welcomes a timely and clear-eyed account of both Nato and Britain’s fatal role in the process that led to war in Ukraine

MATTHEW HAWKINS unpicks three new shows that deal with historical spectacle, feminism and fascism, and the extinction of species

IAN SINCLAIR reviews new releases from The Beaches, CMAT and Kathleen Edwards

RON JACOBS welcomes a first-hand account of the dangerous journey through central America faced by migrants

RICHARD MURGATROYD is intrigued by a study that asks why the ability to diagnose outstrips the ability to cure

SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a sweeping survey of the world's biggest desert and the people who live there

JONATHAN TAYLOR attempts to disentangle the mind, self and political opinions of a successful bourgeois novelist

EWAN CAMERON makes recommendations for the last weekend of the Edinburgh Fringe

MICHAL BONCZA highly recommends a revelatory exhibition of work by the doyen of indigenous Australians’ art, Emily Kam Kngwarray

The Bard commutes to work for the first time in 45 years

GORDON PARSONS is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead

ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review The Ceremony, Eddington, The Life of Chuck, and The Thursday Murder Club

Despite an over-sentimental narrative, MICHAL BONCZA applauds an ambitious drama about the Chinese rescue of British POWs in WWII

GEORGE FOGARTY relishes the music of black British artists that channels Carribbean, Latin and club sounds, along with contemporary west African radicalism

CHRIS SEARLE hears the ordeal of the Palestinian people in the improvised musicianship of a UK jazz trio

by Hilary Cave

CONRAD LANDIN offers a guide to the diverse shows at Edinburgh Art Festival

MICHAEL STEWART applauds a fun send-up of the substandard Agatha Christie whodunnit

BRENT CUTLER unpicks the cryptic clues of a book within a book within a murder mystery

DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it

LEO BOIX reviews a novella by Brazilian Ana Paula Maia, and poetry by Peruvian Giancarlo Huapaya, and Chilean Elvira Hernandez