At 90, McCullin has spent seven decades recording conflict and tragedy – while escaping snipers, mortar fire and capture. He reflects on pain, pride and regret

War photographers are not meant to reach 90. “Fate has had my life in its hands,” says Don McCullin. Over his seven-decade career covering wars, famines and disasters McCullin has been captured, and escaped snipers, mortar fire and more. How does it feel to be a survivor? “Uncomfortable,” he says. No wonder he finds solace in the beautiful still lifes he creates in his shed, or in the images he composes in the countryside around his Somerset home.

McCullin is proud of escaping the extreme poverty he was born into, and the interesting and adventurous life he has lived, but he says the accolades – including a knighthood in 2017 – make him uneasy. “I feel as if I’ve been over-rewarded, and I definitely feel uncomfortable about that, because it’s been at the expense of other people’s lives.” But he has been the witness to atrocity, I point out, and that’s important. “Yes,” he says, uncertainly, “but, at the end of the day, it’s done absolutely no good at all. Look at Ukraine. Look at Gaza. I haven’t changed a solitary thing. I mean it. I feel as if I’ve been riding on other people’s pain over the last 60 years, and their pain hasn’t helped prevent this kind of tragedy. We’ve learned nothing.” It makes him despair.

The Oscar winner’s turn as a no-nonsense private investigator is a role model for women everywhere. She really shines alongside Ruth Wilson in this pacy, twisty thriller based on Mick Herron’s debut novel

I always forget how good Emma Thompson is. That is partly because she tends to work in film rather than television and I last made it to the cinema in the mid-90s. It is also partly because she is always so … how can I put this? … so Emma Thompson in all her interviews and award speeches that I can’t envisage her putting herself away enough for Proper Acting.

But of course she can – and does as the private investigator Zoë Boehm, a woman of flint and diamond, in the new eight-part thriller Down Cemetery Road, Morwenna Banks’ adaptation of Mick Herron’s debut novel of the same name. Herron has since become known for Slow Horses, the series about the busted spies in Slough House pushing paper under the world-wearied eye of Jackson Lamb, ever hoping to get back in the game. Gary Oldman, who plays Lamb, has become a sort of niche national treasure for his portrayal of the beleaguered antihero whom we like to think lives in all of us. I hope the same happens with Thompson/Boehm, because both are magnificent. Boehm is a role model for ladies everywhere, but especially those hampered by a lack of innate cynicism or by a people-pleasing nature (or early training). Look at Boehm and learn. Observe the barren wasteland in which she stands, the field of fucks she has left to give. “I don’t drink prosecco and I don’t bond emotionally,” she tells a new client and one of the show’s many delights is that this remains almost entirely true.

Down Cemetery Road is on Apple TV

Kathryn Bigelow’s Netflix ‘what if?’ drama is the director’s most frustratingly assembled and visually flat film to date

Bestowed on an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can be both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can serve as protection: viewing an ennobled director’s films through this prism, auteurist critics can feel obliged to make excuses for even the worst among them. (The rationale is that a bad film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best efforts of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can leave a creative patrolling a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn’t spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals this past weekend are anything to go by – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director’s steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?) Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

Big win leaves many wondering if result reflects genuine support for president or corrosive US influence

Opposition posters scattered across Buenos Aires before Sunday’s midterms showed president Javier Milei’s name plastered over a US flag, in a bid to tap into anti-American sentiment over Donald Trump’s alleged interference in Argentina’s election.

Days before the vote, the US president announced a $40bn bailout for his Argentinian counterpart but warned that if Milei did not win he would withdraw his support.

Season two of the Adam Brody and Kristen Bell-starring show feels like a long infomercial thanks to endless product placement

After a long day, it’s nice to put on some sweats, pour yourself a glass of wine, turn on the TV and cozy up to an advertisement for Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair Serum Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex.

Or at least that’s what I found myself doing on Sunday night, when I returned for season two of Netflix’s Nobody Wants This. In the series, Adam Brody plays the so-called “hot rabbi” and love interest of Kristen Bell’s character, an atheist podcaster considering conversion. Together, the pair navigate cultural differences and disapproving family members. Or at least I assume that’s what happened – I was too distracted by all the product placement to focus on the plot.

The accomplished classical actress had a perfect ear and the ability to effortlessly pull off demanding jokes. Her performance as Sybil alongside John Cleese in Fawlty Towers was one of sitcoms’ finest

• Fawlty Towers actor Prunella Scales dies aged 93

• Prunella Scales: a life in pictures

• Share your tributes and memories of Prunella Scales

Prunella Scales portrayed two of Britain’s greatest monarchs on TV: Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. She was the first dramatic actor to play the latter on television, and won a Bafta nomination for doing so.

However, Scales, who has died aged 93, knew that public memory of her would be shaped by another woman. One who made those two royals look powerless – the self-declared domestic and hospitality industry empress, Sybil Fawlty, wife of Basil, owner of the worst hotel in Torquay in Fawlty Towers, in which she co-starred with John Cleese, who also co-wrote with Connie Booth.

Exclusive: Five women said Reform leader’s comments that they were victims of other types of sexual abuse were ‘degrading’

Five women have asked for an apology from Nigel Farage after he suggested they were not victims of grooming gangs.

They described the comments by the Reform leader as “degrading and humiliating”, and accused him of “ignorance” of the issues.

Attacks shatter Palestinians’ short-lived relief since start of ceasefire that now looks increasingly fragile

Israel carried out another strike in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday after bombarding the territory overnight and killing at least 104 Palestinians, including children, in the gravest challenge yet to the increasingly fragile US-brokered ceasefire.

The Israeli military said it struck military infrastructure where weapons were being stored in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. People in Gaza City reported hearing an explosion and seeing a column of smoke coming from the north of the territory.

Exclusive: Proposed legislation removes EU-derived nature protections as government hopes to boost economic growth

Ripping up environmental protections will put at risk the UK’s free trade agreement with the EU, Europe’s ambassador has warned.

The Guardian understands Pedro Serrano visited the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, this week and warned her that the planning and infrastructure bill going through the House of Lords could jeopardise the trade deal.

Red Cross anticipates ‘shattering and long lasting’ impact as Cuba’s president says ‘extensive damage’ already caused

• Hurricane Melissa – live updates

Hurricane Melissa has slammed into Cuba after leaving parts of neighbouring Jamaica broken and reeling from ferocious winds and extreme rainfall.

The most intense tropical cyclone to hit Jamaica in nearly two centuries, Melissa is one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes observed since record-keeping began. Climate scientists say human-caused global heating has contributed to the rapid intensification of modern-day storms.