This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year. 

"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world. 

Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.

The stage musical update of Mean Girls, and the film adaptation, pushed Reneé Rapp into the public eye. She played queen bitch Regina George. She’s become well-known for her forthright public persona, especially since coming out as a lesbian last year.

War, pestilence, famine, death. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill of them all. So what better time to visit the genuinely sunny uplands – the long-anticipated second album from Wet Leg.

My, those seemingly demure, Amish-styled girls have grown (see the demonic cover, replete with scary talons and an unhinged-looking Rhian Teasdale). They’ve officially supplemented the line-up with the three very hairy boys who’ve been playing with them on live shows and everybody’s been involved in the writing. And everything’s turned out very well indeed.

Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his Whitechapel retrospective feel like a rediscovery – incredibly fresh and immediate.

Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.

A longshot of transgender Elvira (Volker Spengler) circled by gay men, assignation turning to assault as dawn mist rises from Frankfurt’s Main river, suggests Pasolini’s brutal 1975 assassination. Rainer Werner Fassbinder instead had in mind the suicide of his lover Armin Meier in May 1978.

An Irish adaptation of Garcia Di Gregorio’s acclaimed 2008 film Mid-August Lunch, director Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers is the story of Edward (James McArdle) and his 81-year-old mother Alma (the excellent Fionnula Flanagan), who has had a stroke and can only communicate through an iPad. The stairlift is in constant use, as is her bell. And there are jokes about pouffes.

“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia. Though unemployed Toulouse baker Jérémie doesn’t acquire the business that was run by his deceased mentor Jean-Pierre, the film’s ambiguous ending suggests he might still share it with the widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Unless or until the gendarmes come calling.