The latest in our series of writers paying tribute to their go-to comfort films celebrates Steven Spielberg’s escapist globe-trotting adventure

The ancient Greek philosopher Lucretius writes in his epic poem On the Nature of Things: “It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person … it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt.”

This feeling of living dangerously by proxy is exactly why I find it so relaxing to watch Indiana Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark go through an endless stream of trials and tribulations: trekking through the hot, sticky jungle. Avoiding venomous spiders and snakes. Being betrayed by not one, but two of his colleagues. Jumping over bottomless chasms and outrunning giant boulders, only to be thwarted by his arch-rival and chased by a tribe of bow-and-arrow-toting Amazonians. And that’s just the first 15 minutes of the film.

She left London because her paintings felt hopelessly unfashionable compared with the work of the YBAs. Now she’s back with a blockbuster show – and the world has come round to her point of view

People say that Cecily Brown left London in the early 1990s because of the YBAs – as if, she laughs, she wanted to get away from them. “I actually had great admiration for the art being made, I just wasn’t in sync with them.” While Damien Hirst was dunking dead animals in formaldehyde and Sarah Lucas was devouring bananas in front of the camera, Brown was wielding a palette and brush. “There was this feeling in London at the time that if you were a painter, you were a loser. I didn’t feel like a saddo for being a painter in New York.”

You would think, then, that she’d be returning triumphant. She was taken on in her 20s by mega-gallery Gagosian, and has works in MoMA and the Tate. Recent shows include a survey at the Met in New York. Her paintings, slippery and complex canvases that are richly allusive and reward slow looking, sell for millions, making her one of the most valuable living female artists.

Billy Bragg, Caroline Lucas and Kojo Koram among those encouraging people to share cultural artefacts

For some people it’s a Morris Minor, for others, a beach windbreak, chicken tikka masala or Magna Carta.

A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George’s flag or not.

An epic account of how three demigod directors, in pursuit of indie freedom, redefined American film-making

Here we are once more: back to the glory days of the New Hollywood that emerged from the ashes of the old studio system in the 1960s and 70s. Our cast is filled with brilliant hotshots and creative risk-takers, energised by the French New Wave, the American counterculture and the industry’s own amazing entrepreneurial past.

Peter Biskind’s breezy, bleary, cynical book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ranged freely across the 1970s, with controversial anecdotes about egos and drugs (though maybe the definitive book about the role of cocaine in film production has yet to be written). Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution had the witty idea of looking at the five films Oscar-nominated for best picture in the transitional year of 1968, from the supercool Bonnie and Clyde to the squaresville Dr Doolittle, to see what they told us about America’s cinematic mind at the time.