Veteran Labour MP and republican Dennis Skinner angered Tory MPs after using the State Opening of Parliament to draw attention to the country's economic difficulties.

A revival of a drama written in 1977 with “astonishing relevance” to contemporary Britain opened in South London this week. Barrie Keeffe’s Barbarians is a trilogy of plays about disaffected youth amid record youth unemployment.

'I went right off the rails'

David Benedict on an actor, soon to be celebrated at the BFI, who let his choice of roles do the talking

Week in arts

We all make painful sacrifices for our work, but few half as excruciating as reading The Speech David Miliband Never Gave in its entirety, as I have done to spare you the misery. This is of course the address David would have given in September had he not lost the leadership by a whisker; the tour de force of forensic pyrotechnics which someone – and it seems futile to guess who – leaked at the very moment the Volvo Plot was causing his brother such grief. Don't believe a word, by the way, about David being a sour, embittered grudge-nurser who lives only to replace his ousted sibling. For buried amid all the Blairishly verb-less verities lay one gleaming gem of wisdom. "A family," David would have said, "is a covenant of love." Oh but it is. A scared, unbreakable bond. "A party," he'd have added, "is a covenant of trust." Again, uncommonly true. Where would Labour be today were its senior figures riven by mutual distrust? Yet for all its magnificence, the speech contains one caution for David's admirers. Where Ed's victory address lasted barely 10 minutes, David's, at almost 6,000 words, would have endured an hour at least. Being the Fidel Castro to Ed's pithier Raoul has many charms, but David does seem slightly ill-suited to the soundbite age.

Jessica Chastain is fed up with making movies that take years to come out. So she's elated that two, including Terrence Malick's latest, will play in Cannes. Kaleem Aftab meets her

"What a waste of Helen Mirren. I hope they paid her loads to make it worthwhile."

Russell Brand plays the billionaire hedonist, so what could possibly go wrong?

Starring: Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Jennifer Garner, Greta Gerwig

There's no shortage of interesting male detectives on TV, yet the women are either grim or fluffy, says Ben Walsh

Overworked, under-staffed...guardian angels don't have it easy either

Like Alonso and Gonzalo under Ariel's soporific spell, you may experience "a strange drowsiness" during Julie Taymor's film interpretation of Shakespeare's late play. What kept me awake was Helen Mirren's imperial performance as Prospera (above), gender-flipped from Prospero in the film's boldest coup, and her touching relationship with her daughter Miranda, also beautifully played by Felicity Jones. The switch from masculine to feminine lends the story a deeper sense of reconciliation and forgiveness, though as a spectacle Taymor's film exhausts rather than exhilarates, failing to establish any sense of scale or control. It roars and rages, like a tempest, but aside from Mirren its thunder is mostly fake.

The Boulting brothers' 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene's gangsters-by-the-sea thriller is exquisite for many reasons – its tangy Greene and Terence Rattigan script, a turn by the original Doctor Who (William Hartnell) as Dallow, and its horribly effective ghost-ride slaying – but mostly for Richard Attenborough as psychotic Pinkie Brown. Dickie is a match for Jimmy Cagney here as the small-time hoodlum who takes on the police, the Mob and an impressionable café waitress, Rose, in Thirties Brighton. The way he snarls when Rose clings to him is particularly memorable in this precursor to the likes of Badlands and The Long Good Friday.