Lifesize hologram of Betty Szabó in red light district is intended to jog memories and help find 19-year-old’s killer

Cold-case detectives in the Netherlands are hoping that an innovative lifesize hologram of a young sex worker who was murdered in Amsterdam 15 years ago will jog people’s memories and help bring her killer, or killers, to justice.

Bernadett Szabó, known as Betty, was born in Hungary and left for Amsterdam when she was 18. Once there, she started earning money as a sex worker in the red light district. She continued to work after becoming pregnant and gave birth to a son who was placed with a foster family.

Morgan Neville’s novel animated documentary, featuring interviews with the US musician, captures his artistic process, if not the whole story…

A documentary portrait of the American music producer and fashion impresario Pharrell Williams, told through the medium of Lego block animation. What at first seems like a quirky gimmick actually works rather well. It’s a fun watch, and the technique allows film-maker Morgan Neville to visually represent Williams’s form of synaesthesia, which turns music into colours, and to explore his musical process in a suitably playful and creative manner.

The cynical may observe that the medium also allows Williams to build a Lego brick wall between Neville and the parts of his life and career that his subject would prefer not to discuss, so don’t go into this expecting anything other than a shiny plastic hagiography.

In UK and Irish cinemas

Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield
Holden and Ed Stambollouian’s one-man drama based on a real-life murder in 80s America uses film tropes to great effect – but it plays with the facts too

Two wrongs don’t make a right, or do they? Ken Rex McElroy was “the town bully”, the things he did, or is said to have done, were bad: arson, assault, cruelty to animals, statutory rape, theft. On 10 July 1981 he was shot dead in his pickup in the presence of dozens of townsfolk. No one has ever been charged with his murder.

Subtitled “A True Crime Thriller”, this new play, set in the American midwest, is based on actual events and real people. How “true” it is to either is questionable. Co-writers Jack Holden, who performs all onstage roles, of which there are least 11, and Ed Stambollouian, who directs, say they have “changed or imagined” facts “for dramatic purposes”. The distinction between dramatic licence and misrepresentation, always fine, here feels blurred.

Kenrex is at the Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield, until 16 November

Garth Greenwell’s new novel gets as close as one can to evoking the very real indignity and physicality of being in hospital

Every now and then I try to write down a description of pain, whether labour, tooth or head, and it becomes a frustrating little game in which nobody ever wins. Doctors try to quantify our pain by asking us to rate it on a scale of one to 10, or by pointing at a variety of sad faces – the McGill Pain Questionnaire consists of 78 possible words to tick, which include “tugging”, “terrifying” and “dull”, words that gamely poke around inside a feeling, but rarely fully land. Often, I wonder if there are some states, like pain, that just defy description – occasionally you think you have it and then the image turns in on itself and loops around and it’s lost – but then I read something like Garth Greenwell’s new novel Small Rain , which begins with our narrator bent double with a twisting pain in his gut. Not only does Greenwell uncover a new language for his narrator’s pain, which mutates in gradations of crisis, but also a language for the beeping, chilly intimacy of a hospital stay, and its terrible wires and humans reaching.

We have all or will all find ourselves here one day, in a raised bed on a humming ward, in the care of scrubbed-up strangers. I have vivid memories of a hospital room with a clock whose minute hand didn’t tick – instead, it slithered without clear rhythm between numbers, very sinister, very unsettling, especially at night when the lights stayed on and you watched it crawl forward towards dawn. In these places you do all you can to remain human by holding on to comfortable things, such as shame or status, for as long as possible, until a brisk nurse perhaps washes your hands for you, or a handsome doctor pokes his pen into the blood clot you present in its clean metal dish.

• Czech responds to comments made on Tennis Channel
• ‘I believe it’s time to address the need for respect’

Barbora Krejcikova has criticised “unprofessional commentary” regarding her appearance on the US TV network Tennis Channel.

The Wimbledon champion was taking part in the WTA Finals in Saudi Arabia this week, the culmination to the regular women’s season, where she lost to Zheng Qinwen in the semi-finals on Friday.

In this republished novella from 2000 about a fisherman and his son, the Norwegian writer captures the puzzlement and wonder of the human condition

Few writers working today capture the liminality of life as viscerally as the Norwegian 2023 Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse, and in Morning and Evening , his newly republished 2000 novella (elegantly translated by Damion Searls), we follow one person’s passage from womb to Earth, and from Earth to the afterlife, in a near seamless progression. This, then, is not a novel that describes a life; it is a fable about the very beginning and end of a life – a metaphysical ghost story.

The two-part book opens with a woman delivering her second child in a house on the island of Holmen. Olai, the father whose perspective we inhabit, waits anxiously in the kitchen. Could both baby and mother die? No, “God surely doesn’t want that”, but then Olai has “never doubted that Satan rules this world as much as the good Lord does”. As in his seven-volume masterpiece Septology (2019), Fosse’s prose is suffused with mysticism, and a more personal and nuanced theism. There was no doubt in Olai’s mind that God exists, but he “has never fully believed that He is all-powerful and all-knowing like they say, the pious people”. The good Lord does not rule all and decide everything. On that day, however, He prevails. The mother survives. The child comes into the world alive and healthy. Olai names him Johannes, after his father, and decides that he will be a fisherman like himself.

Danielle Deadwyler and Samuel L Jackson shine in Malcolm Washington’s debut feature, based on Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1930s Pittsburgh

The third Denzel Washington-produced movie adaptation of an August Wilson play (after 2016’s Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2020), The Piano Lesson shares strengths and weaknesses with its predecessors. The vivid, verbose dialogue of Wilson’s 1987 play may be an acquired taste, but it’s writing that consistently lays the foundations for rich and full-blooded performances.

In The Piano Lesson , which is set in 1930s Pittsburgh and addresses a family’s history and legacy through the contested fate of an heirloom piano, the standout performance comes from an extraordinary Danielle Deadwyler. She plays Berniece, a widowed young mother who stands firm against her brother, Boy Willie (a showy but hollow turn from John David Washington), and his plan to sell the piano. Samuel L Jackson is also excellent as Doaker, the peacemaker between the warring siblings, in an uncharacteristically low-key performance.

In cinemas now; on Netflix from 22 November

Newly unearthed studies by young private Henry Page have been published to mark Rememberance Sunday

“Wish I was at home for Christmas,” runs the chorus of Stop the Cavalry, the seasonal anti-war pop song, in a lyric that voices the dreams of serving soldiers down the ages. The same poignant sentiment is illustrated in the rediscovered drawings of the first world war trench artist and cartoonist Henry Page. But Page, who was a young private in the London Regiment, also wishes he could be at home for spring, summer, and autumn too, “in the arms of the girl I love”.

His landscape sketches and studies of fellow soldiers have been unearthed by researchers working at Southwark Archives in south London and offer an astonishing fresh insight into the life of troops who survived in close quarters and travelled together through countries very unlike their homeland. Many of Page’s drawings also express his love for his “girl” back home, Edith Pedley – a young woman he was later to marry and live with happily for 56 years until his death.

Three decades after he first adapted Tchaikovsky’s classic, the choreographer’s reimagining of Swan Lake with an all-male corps is back for an anniversary tour. At rehearsals with the new cast, he and his original team tell the story of a show that stunned audiences

The choreographer Matthew Bourne rehearses his company in a studio in east London, a building instantly recognisable as the home of the BBC’s MasterChef . To reach it from the nearest station, you cross a thundering dual carriageway via a dank tunnel, and then follow the road past a branch of Tesco until you reach a bridge that takes you over a creek (the studio was once a water mill). When I first see it, this bridge strikes me as perfectly ordinary; in the water below, an Evian bottle bobs, disconsolately. But in the future, I will always think of this spot as a threshold, a portal to enchantment. On one side, heavy traffic and stray supermarket trolleys. On the other, the uncommonly strange spell cast by 30 young men in old T-shirts and baggy shorts leaping ever skywards.

Inside, I watch this group dance for an hour, barely able to look away long enough to write in my notebook. The sight of them would, I think, be remarkable in any circumstances. Their boyish, mismatched kit only makes their movements seem the more tenderly expressive, and by doing so, wreaks havoc on the heart (mine feels like a steak that has been violently tenderised). But there are other things going on here, too. These men are the stars of the latest revival of Bourne’s Swan Lake, a show that not only changed the face of British dance – the swans, always danced by women in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, are famously performed by men in his version – but which has been in the world since before most of them were born (the new production, which runs into next year, marks its 30th birthday).