With a new TV film about the Piper Alpha disaster, ANGUS REID points out the enduring class bias of the official version of events

The bard rests on his laurels, and swipes left and right

ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review The Courageous, The Cut, Christy, and On Swift Horses

MARIA DUARTE cherishes the flashes of absurd humour and theme of community healing in a documentary set in a Soviet-era Black Sea sanatorium

TOM STONE sings the praises of one of the oldest open-air festivals in Britain

Chris Searle speaks to accordionist KAREN STREET

DAVID HORSLEY recommends a season dedicated to groundbreaking Chinese-American actor and film maker Anna May Wong

Peace Sonnet Chain: no 2 by ANJA KONIG

MAYER WAKEFIELD speaks to Urielle Klein-Mekongo about activism, musical inspiration and the black British experience

As African novels are being translated to English in a bold new trend, TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU puts into wider context the publication of Ignatius Mabasa’s The Mad (Mapenzi)

BOB NEWLAND reviews a book that will take many back to the final years of apartheid in South Africa

The replica ultimately reveals a tension between growing public demand for cultural Holocaust production and the difficulty in cultivating ethical representations of the event, writes EMILY-ROSE BAKER

KEVIN BRYAN reviews new releases by The Outlaws, Mark Radcliffe & David Boardman, Clarence White

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

EWAN CAMERON continues to comb the Fringe

Reviews of the Neil Charles Quartet, the Freddie Hubbard Quintet, and the Olie Brice Quartet

GLENN BURGESS suggests that, despite his record in Spain, Orwell’s enduring commitment to socialist revolution underpins his late novels

EWAN CAMERON picks out some remarkable performances in which Palestinian artists speak of their own experience

CHRISTOPHER POLLARD explains how and why neoliberalism adopted the racist agenda common to the populist right of today

GUILLERMO THOMAS is persuaded by a scathing critique of the Church of England and its embeddedness in imperialism

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

GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from

MATTHEW HAWKINS recommends three memorable performances from Scottish dance artists Barrowland Ballet, In the Fields Project, and Wendy Houston

GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience

TONY BURKE revels in the publication of previously unreleased tracks by the great US folksinger

MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Materialists, Unmoored, Together, and Bambi: A Tale of Life in The Woods

MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable documentary, culled from 20 years of smartphone footage, that documents the trials of being a single parent

by Tom Kelly

STEVE JOHNSON recommends a protest album with a harder edge than many in the genre

EWAN CAMERON holds his nose for a dive into mainstream comedy aimed at the political centre

CARL DEATH introduces a new book which explores how African science fiction is addressing climate change

PETER MASON relishes a legend of Jamaican roots reggae still plying his trade with a large degree of spirit

DENNIS BROE finds much to praise in the new South African Netflix series, but wonders why it feels forced to sell out its heroine

Timeloop murder, trad family MomBomb, Sicilian crime pages and Craven praise

MARK TURNER welcomes the rebirth of a once great Welsh jazz festival

BRIAN HANNAN introduces a timely celebration of one of the UK’s first communist MPs in his home town of Paisley

New releases from Cassandra Jenkins, Ryan Davis & the Roundhouse Band, and Case Oats

GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes the reissue of a seminal work of revolutionary theory that have genuine relevance in the current context

RON JACOBS rides shotgun with a member of Black Bloc on the wave of anti-capitalist protests of the 1990s and early 2000s

MATTHEW SHARPE recommends the essays of a Renaissance politician that instruct and unnerve after 400 years

PHOEBE INGLEBY relishes the unexpected power of pins, zips and buttons to stitch together stories of connection, resistance and ancestral memory

MATTHEW HAWKINS is mesmerised by a performance that dissolves the line between audience and performer

Fiery words from the Bard in Blackpool and Edinburgh, and Evidence Based Punk Rock from The Protest Family

In his second round-up, EWAN CAMERON picks excellent solo shows that deal with Scottishness, Englishness and race as highlights

MICHAL BONCZA, LEO BOIX, MARJORIE MAYO and ANDY HEDGECOCK review The Kingdom, Young Hearts, Marlee Maitlin: Not alone any more, and Stans

JOHN GREEN recommends an Argentinian film classic on re-release - a deliciously cynical tale of swindling and double-cross

CHRIS SEARLE speaks to Chris Laurence, bassist and bandmate of saxophonist TONY COE

by Clare Evans

ANGUS REID squirms at the spectacle of a bitter millennial on work experience in a gay sauna