‘The CGI would have cost millions. I spent $2,000.’ Is Dreams of Violets AI slop – or the future of film-making?

It should have taken years, but Ash Koosha made a drama about Iran’s anti-government protests in weeks – and now it’s the first AI-made movie to screen at a major film festival. It could transform indie film-making, claims the director

Masters of the Universe review – Amazon’s He-Man adventure is a weak big-budget misfire

A laboured attempt to resurrect toy IP very few people still care about is a $200m-budgeted waste of everyone’s time

The Misfits: Marilyn Monroe’s final film showed her capacity for playing painfully knotty characters

Written for Monroe by then husband Arthur Miller, the role of Roslyn is contradictory and complex

Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day review – dreamy adaptation reaches for the stars

Woolf’s novel about a headstrong young Edwardian woman takes flight under Tina Gharavi’s direction, with Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders among the ensemble cast

‘The face doesn’t move’: Hollywood’s obsession with cosmetic surgeries has led to stiffer looks – and performances

With procedures like filler and Botox becoming commonplace, audiences are lamenting the smoothed-out, uncanny faces now rampant in major pictures

Planet Israel review – valuable personal documentary about Israel/Palestine conflict

Gillian Mosely’s film argues that Israelis are asked to accept a ‘forever war’ in part motivated by Netanyahu’s desire to defer investigation into corruption allegations

‘All the girls were in there for shit that is pretty normal’: the show reinventing Girl, Interrupted for a new generation

Susanna Kaysen’s cult memoir sparked a wave of novels about young women in crisis. After 10 years in the making, Juliana Canfield and King Princess bring it to the stage

Acting review – Cheek by Jowl masterclass in how to strut and fret upon the Shakespearean stage

Sophie Fiennes’s thoughtful documentary follows director Declan Donnellan as he helps actors find their way through Macbeth’s lines

Köln 75 review – how a legendary jazz-improv show was cajoled into being by a German teenager

Watchable biopic charts how an 18-year-old German booked the sickly American pianist Keith Jarrett for what became a landmark concert

Taylor Swift announces new single for Toy Story 5 soundtrack

I Knew It, I Knew You is written with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff and marks a return to Swift’s country roots

Best TV shows and movies streaming in Australia this month

Discover what’s streaming on Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Prime Video and more this month, including Wicked: For Good, Office Romance and Cape Fear

To YouTube and beyond: how online gen Z directors stormed Hollywood

Record-breaking box office for Backrooms and Obsession has opened the door for twentysomething YouTube creators as the industry rethinks what audiences want

‘Catastrophic for creative industries’: Brexit barriers shut UK actors out of EU jobs

Casting shifts to EU talent as paperwork delays and visa limits make hiring British crews less viable

Ghost in the Machine review – entertaining AI polemic dives into its dark history in race politics and eugenics

The roots of AI in rightwing ideology is examined in Valerie Veatch’s enjoyable doc, including an array of colourful, often crazed, figures

‘What if I come out with nothing on?’ Marilyn Monroe and the defiance of her final photoshoot

For the star’s 100th anniversary, Lawrence Schiller relives the nude photoshoot that showed, far from being a ‘messy’ blond bombshell, Monroe was a shrewd controller of her image