Researchers argue incorrect binding of Voynich manuscript radically changes ideas about its drawings and indecipherable text

It has been called the world’s most mysterious manuscript: a medieval set of pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text. Claimed at various times to be a book in a lost language, a musical score, an instruction manual or just an elaborate hoax, the so-called Voynich manuscript’s true meaning has defied cryptographers and codebreakers for centuries.

Now, new research offers an explanation for why a scholarly consensus over this enduring puzzle has been so hard to come by: not only because its truth is so profoundly mysterious – but because everyone has been reading its pages in the wrong order.

In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler’s NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism’s electoral breakthrough

With your art collective Centre for Political Beauty you famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property next to the home of an AfD politician. Now you’ve written a history book about the Nazis’ rise to power. Don’t we already know everything there is to know about the 1932 elections, the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act of 1933?

About three years ago I became interested in how Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDAP) rose to prominence when Germany was still a democracy, because I hoped it could tell us something about the success of rightwing extremist movements today. From looking at historical sources, I realised that the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 were in many ways more important than what happened in 1932 and 1933. And I expected it to be an open-and-shut case. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised that most of the theories we have to explain the rise of the Nazis don’t make sense – the data tells a completely different, far darker story.

From a pharoah’s pouting and almost kissable lips to a Mussolini with a hole in the head, a new exhibition is exploring how some ancient fragments speak more profoundly than fully intact treasures

The nose of Cleopatra VII was supposed to have been so beautiful that it changed the course of history: if it had been shorter, French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “the whole face of the earth would have changed”. A visit to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, however, will leave you convinced that Cleo’s conk was only the second most stunning feature to ever grace the face of an Egyptian pharaoh. Among the more than 80 objects on display at an exhibition that opened last week is an astonishingly lifelike sculpture showing off the lips of the 14th-century ruler Akhenaten: a seagull shape resting on a pillow of lush flesh, at once both stern and sensuous, almost uncomfortably kissable.

It was Thomas Aquinas who first came up with the theory that we perceive things to be beautiful when they are intact and whole, but the Akhenaten sculpture is so striking precisely because it has a major blemish. Like all the objects shown in Florence, it is only a fragment: a shard of polished limestone found in the dumps south of the Great Aten Temple in the city of el-Amarna, showing only the ruler’s nose and mouth.

Thélyson Orélien had been in the running to win a top literary prize before the AI claim emerged on social media

The organisers of France’s most prestigious literary prize said they had removed a critically acclaimed novel by a Canadian-Haitian writer from the longlist after an anonymous online account claimed the book was “almost entirely” written by AI.

The Académie Goncourt, a Paris-based literary organisation, said on Friday its decision to withdraw Thélyson Orélien’s novel C’était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die) was “driven by the desire to preserve the integrity of the Goncourt prize and the academy itself, whose central role is to promote and honour literature written by women and men”.

Mathilde Arcel, who won the Volpi Cup on Saturday for her role in Golden Lion winner Woman Unknown, said job offers have now begun to arrive

The winner of this year’s best actress prize at the Venice film festival has revealed that she is on unemployment benefits and had to fly to back to Copenhagen to report to the job centre before receiving her award.

On Saturday night, Danish actor Mathilde Arcel won the prestigious Volpi Cup for her first leading role in a feature film, May el-Toukhy’s post-second world war drama Woman Unknown, which also won the Golden Lion award for best film.

May el-Toukhy becomes eighth female director to take Golden Lion as Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love and Guardian-produced exposé of Israel’s Gaza killings also awarded

• Bold and bravura choices as Venice celebrates A Woman Unknown, Possible Love – and NAZA

May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown has scooped the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, at an awards ceremony that also saw the Gaza documentary NAZA win the jury prize.

Set in the immediate aftermath of Danish liberation from Nazi occupation, the Egyptian-Danish director’s film tells the story of a young housemaid, Marie (Mathilde Arcel), who is about to marry her widowed employer but anxious about him discovering a shameful secret in her past: during the war, Marie had an intimate relationship with a German soldier.

Film premieres at Venice as researchers question who took famous Spanish civil war shot of ‘falling soldier’, credited to the pair’s Robert Capa alias

She was one of the most fearless female photojournalists of the 20th century, and the first known to have been killed while covering a war. But in life and in death, the work of Gerda Taro has often been overshadowed by the collaborator and lover whose alias she invented and sometimes shared: Robert Capa.

That may be about to change with a new biopic that seeks to pull the pioneering photographer from out of Capa’s shadow, which is premiering at the Venice film festival just as researchers claim to have proof that his most famous and controversial picture was actually taken by her.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, about physicist Lev Landau, stars Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has refused to speak out against Putin’s war

The director of a controversial new Russian film has said “everyone pays for his own choice” when asked about his lead’s refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, which premiered at the Venice film festival on Wednesday, Greek-Russian star conductor Teodor Currentzis plays the eponymously nicknamed protagonist, Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist Lev Landau.

Alex Gibney’s marathon documentary delivers numerous eye-raising insights into the broligarch’s business deals, early idealism and apocalyptic appetite for fathering children

Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet has been one of the most eagerly anticipated films at the Venice film festival this year. The Oscar-winning 72-year-old, who has in previous films taken on the US military, the Catholic church, Vladimir Putin and Scientology, has been investigating the tech tycoon’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.0.

The result clocks in at just under four hours and presents a comprehensive answer to how on earth one man managed to amass so much money and political influence. It is shocking less for any individual new pieces of information Gibney has unearthed than for its totality. Here are six things the film tells us:

The European Prize for Urban Public Space’s shortlist highlights projects helping people cope with climate crisis

In the words of Joni Mitchell, the planners of many urban centres around the world “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”. The European Prize for Urban Public Space tries to show that cities don’t have to be locked in the automotive age for ever.

The prize’s latest shortlist, announced on Wednesday, highlights architectural projects that convert infrastructure for cars into spaces that help urban dwellers cope with the soaring temperatures of the climate crisis: roundabouts that have become splash pools, thoroughfares turned into green havens, and car parks into gardens.

Ashley St Clair was speaking at the Venice film premiere of Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk, where she warned of his dangerous influence

• Musk review – epic study of the world’s richest and most banal man

Elon Musk is sowing “deliberate division” via his social media platform X that will be catastrophic unless regulated, the mother of one of the 14 confirmed children fathered by the world’s richest man has warned.

In Musk, a new documentary by veteran film-maker Alex Gibney, former Maga influencer Ashley St Clair says Musk told her in a text message he wanted to have a child with her because he needed to have “a legion of children before the civil war”.

Director Alexandre Smia says film about Russia detonating nuclear warhead – and US refusing to respond – is not unrealistic

Russia has detonated a nuclear warhead over the Black Sea to underline its desire to revenge an assassination attempt on the Russian president. Germany and Italy urge restraint. The American president opts out of the standoff altogether and moots taking out Ukraine’s leader to appease Moscow.

A new thriller, which has brought nuclear anxiety to the red carpets of the Venice film festival this week, plays through what would happen next. In Jupiter, which premiered on the Lido on Friday, the duty to square up to the Kremlin and enter the stress-inducing mind games of the nuclear deterrent falls on the fictional French president Paul Archambault (played by the hulking French actor Denis Ménochet), who is backed in his mission by the British prime minister.

May el-Toukhy says we must end veneration of male directors that causes ‘structural problem’ for women

The enduring cult of male genius is keeping down female film-makers, one of the only two female directors in the running for the top prize at this year’s Venice film festival has warned.

“I’ve never ever read an article where a female director is promoted as a genius,” said the Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, whose film Woman Unknown has been selected for the Golden Lion competition on the Lido this year.

Director’s controversial comments earlier this year warned of films that ‘enter the field of politics’

The director Wim Wenders has clarified personal views on the relationship between cinema and politics that caused controversy earlier in the year, saying at the Venice film festival that he does not believe film-makers ought to stay out of politics altogether.

During the Berlin film festival, the veteran German director, who was acting as the jury president, had said at a press conference that “we have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics.”

The Bavarian auteur talks directing Kate and Rooney Mara in Bucking Fastard and his popularity on Instagram

In outsider visionaries such as Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo or Timothy Treadwell, renegade German director Werner Herzog has created some of cinema’s most memorable monomaniacs – characters singularly obsessed with finding mythical cities made of gold, with building opera houses in the middle of the rainforest, or with befriending wild grizzly bears.

But suggestions that they could be role models for the modern-day neurodiversity movement send this famously fearless film-maker running for the hills. “I don’t like the term neurodivergence and ADHD, or whatever – it sounds like political correctness, which scares me under the table,” Herzog said at the Venice film festival.

McDonagh’s new film, Wild Horse Nine, stars John Malkovich as an agent in 1970s Chile who feels ‘guilt and regret’ over his role in global interventions

The US’s history of intervening in democratic processes around the world deserves more attention in the light of current political developments, playwright and film-maker Martin McDonagh has said, as his Oscar-tipped film about a rueful CIA agent premieres at the Venice film festival.

“I’ve been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” McDonagh said about Wild Horse Nine, his first film since his 2022 tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin. “I think maybe something that’s not talked about enough. We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activity as much as we ought to.”

Speaking at the opening of the Venice film festival, the actor-director addressed why the jury of which she is chair will only be shown two films made by female film-makers

Maggie Gyllenhaal said there is a “systemic problem” that explains why only two female directors are in the running for the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival this year.

“It’s harder for women to get films financed,” said the actor-director, who is heading up the jury of the world’s oldest cinema showcase this year.

Actor says the press baron’s daughter Elisabeth told him her father was pleased, ‘but he hadn’t seen the film at that point’

Rupert Murdoch is “very happy” that he’s being portrayed by Guy Pearce in a new film about the origins of British tabloid the Sun, the Australian actor has said.

Speaking at the Venice film festival ahead of the premiere of 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle’s Ink, Pearce said he had been messaging with the media tycoon’s daughter Elisabeth “and she did say ‘Dad’s very happy that you’re playing him’.”

Sergei Loznitsa likens removal of €2m grant to ‘a punishment in kindergarten’ on eve of Venice film festival

One of Ukraine’s most acclaimed film-makers has criticised the European Commission’s decision to cut off funds to the Venice Biennale over the opening of Russia’s pavilion, likening it to “a punishment in kindergarten”.

The Biennale drew heavy criticism this spring when it allowed Russia to use its pavilion for the first time since 2022, despite the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The star has long been French cinema’s favourite tousle-haired Adonis, which makes his latest performance – as a schlubby, stay-at-home dad – all the more surprising. ‘I appreciate people laughing at me,’ he says

‘Even though I’ve been working in film for over 20 years, I still have this desire to look beautiful on screen,” says Louis Garrel, on a video call from his bed inside a boat off the coast of Corsica. The French film star is lying on his stomach, occasionally kicking up his bare legs, ruffling his curls and running the nail of his thumb over his moustache. I think the person he sees on the laptop screen in front of him is me, but I am pretty certain he is flirting with his own reflection.

The attraction between the Paris-born 43-year-old and the camera tends to be reciprocal. Long of limb, tousled of hair and chiselled of nose, Garrel has spent a career on screen as French cinema’s favourite Adonis – the man film-makers turn to when they need an erotic wrecking ball to smash up bourgeois twosomes and turn them into quivering menages a trois.