The Berlin-born performer had a gift for languages that took her to Hollywood, landing roles alongside Peter Sellers, Dick Van Dyke and Paul Newman

Elke Sommer, the prolific German star of the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, early 70s Agatha Christie adaptation And Then there Were None, and British sex comedy Carry on Behind, has died aged 85. Bild magazine reported that Sommer died in Los Angeles of heart failure.

German-born Sommer, whose best-known film roles were in the 1960s and 70s, was one of the wave of European performers who crossed over to Hollywood and English-language cinema with considerable success, following the postwar emergence of European new wave cinema. Sommer was one of the few German actors to make waves at the time, as Hollywood made much of her bombshell image.

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© Photograph: Kobal/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Kobal/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Kobal/Shutterstock

From the beheading in The Omen to the attic scene in The Birds, here’s a countdown of the genre’s most iconic moments – in glorious, old-school pre-CGI style

Towards the end of the 20th century, when film-makers’ overreliance on CGI was increasingly making special effects less special, it took the old-school practical approach of Japanese film-maker Hideo Nakata to make one’s hair stand on end. Just when you think the cursed VHS tape has claimed its last victim, Sadako’s vengeful ghost emerges from the well, comes closer … and climbs out of the television screen.

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© Photograph: Warner Bros./Allstar

© Photograph: Warner Bros./Allstar

© Photograph: Warner Bros./Allstar

Demi Moore’s haute-couture maven attracts the attention of a gang of contemporary Robin Hood type clothes robbers in Riley’s fashion biz satire

Here is an entertaining, if very exhausting fantasy-caper about the fashion biz from Boots Riley, a madcap mile-a-minute melee of unadulterated ker-aziness. You might need a couple of ibuprofen and a lie-down afterwards. Demi Moore perhaps thought she was here getting a gamey starring role, comparable to her Oscar-nominated turn in the beauty-industry satire The Substance. In fact, the way the film is structured and edited, Moore is hardly more than a returning cameo, though a potent one.

She plays Christie Smith, a billionaire couture designer who has an office in a trendily designed city block which leans over at an experimental angle. Christie is the object of obsessive attention from “boosters”: supercool young outlaw women who, nettled by her arrogance, shoplift her clothes from upscale stores and sell them on at knockdown Robin Hood prices. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), the latter having the ability to, by holding her breath, turning herself into a white woman who is less likely to be challenged in a store; an interesting metaphor for what Frantz Fanon might have called black skin, white masks.

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© Photograph: Courtesty of NEON

© Photograph: Courtesty of NEON

© Photograph: Courtesty of NEON

Colman stars as a depressed and bullied fisherwoman in medieval England. Fortunately, Peter Dinklage’s basketmaker delivers the answer to her dreams – an Alexander Skarsgård made of wicker

The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.

The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki.

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© Photograph: Black Bear/PA

© Photograph: Black Bear/PA

© Photograph: Black Bear/PA

Charges against him are unclear after return to Iran despite being sentenced last year for ‘propaganda activities’

An Iranian court has handed the award-winning film director Jafar Panahi a new prison sentence of five years and one month and ordered the seizure of all his assets.

The 66-year-old, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year for It Was Just an Accident, was sentenced in absentia, his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, told the Iranian news outlet Emtedad. The court also imposed a two-year travel ban and barred him from using social media for two years, Nili said.

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© Photograph: Carlos Álvarez/Getty Images

© Photograph: Carlos Álvarez/Getty Images

© Photograph: Carlos Álvarez/Getty Images

Chair of membership council says legal advice obtained at own expense suggests offences could have been committed

Bafta trustees may have breached charity and company law by accepting free tickets for guests at the organisation’s awards ceremonies, the chair of its membership council has claimed.

Michael Pritchett told members at Bafta’s annual general meeting that legal advice obtained at his own expense suggested offences could have been committed by trustees who approved the charity’s accounts, which stated that no trustees had received remuneration or benefits.

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© Photograph: London Entertainment/Alamy

© Photograph: London Entertainment/Alamy

© Photograph: London Entertainment/Alamy

"You Can See Everything," the documentary co-directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, is a breakthrough success. It follows Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted founder of Theranos, just weeks before she goes to prison. The intimate access and the questions it raises are the talk of this fall movie season. Jeffrey Brown sat down with Alissa Wilkinson for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

What happens when a forest loses its birdsong? Following clues hidden in the sounds birds make while asleep, Argentinian physicist Gabriel Mindlin uncovers a hidden extinction – not of species, but of memory – and sets out to revive vanished melodies before they disappear forever. Part detective story, part cutting-edge science, Mindlin’s mission leads him to the dusty 1960s archives of Buenos Aires naturalist, confirming that some songs no longer echo in the biosphere. So he deploys “robot tutors” to see whether young birds can learn and spread the old songs once again.

Read more on this topic: Trill seekers: can scientists use AI and tutors to help birds remember lost songs?

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© Photograph: Martín Benchimol

© Photograph: Martín Benchimol

© Photograph: Martín Benchimol