From soundtracking the silent era, via 50s rock’n’roll and the ‘symphonic pop’ of Henry Mancini to iconic works by John Williams and Hans Zimmer, movies are unimaginable without music. Ahead of the London soundtrack festival its artistic director picks 10 scores that moved the dial

The music of cinema’s earliest years played a crucial role in how audiences – with a live pianist or organist soundtracking the silent movie – experienced the stories on screen. But it wasn’t until the advent of synchronised sound that they were guaranteed the same musical experience.

Even that moment, widely regarded to be 1926’s Don Juan – an otherwise silent film – wasn’t a true soundtrack. Warner Bros used the Vitaphone system, essentially a recording on disc that was played with the picture. The same system was used for 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first film for which voices were synchronised to the picture as well. Playing a disc to picture was unreliable, and it wasn’t long before music could be printed directly on to the celluloid of the film itself and the soundtrack proper was born.

Senior US officials consider the PM’s pitch to have been overblown, creating potentially far-reaching consequences for Israel

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When Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club on 29 December last year, the Israeli prime minister came with an appeal – and a not so subtle inducement.

After months of restocking air defence and other missiles after June’s 12-day conflict in which the US joined in to bomb Tehran’s nuclear facilities, Israel was ready to go again, this time with more substantial objectives.

As a child, Dominique Bikaba, was displaced by a new national park in the DRC. Now he is helping to secure land for wildlife and Indigenous groups against the backdrop of ongoing fighting

Mist hangs low over the forested slopes of Kahuzi-Biega national park, where the canopy still shelters one of the last strongholds of the eastern lowland, or Grauer’s, gorilla. It is a landscape of immense biological wealth and equally immense political fragility. For 54-year-old Dominique Bikaba, it was once home.

His family was among those displaced when their ancestral land was incorporated into the park in the 1970s. The protected area, in the lowlands of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), harbours elephants and a remarkable range of wildlife, but it is best known as the principal home of the Grauer’s gorilla, the largest subspecies of primates, known to grow up to 250kg (39st) in weight. It is one of five great ape species found in the DRC’s vast forests, including mountain gorillas, which are also found in other parts of the Great Lakes region, such as Rwanda and Uganda.

As a 600-page doorstopper celebrates their groundbreaking costumes, gigs, sleeves and videos, the duo talk about ‘side-stepping the pop-star thing’ – and the naked trampolinist EMI had to censor

In 1988, when he was 20, Wolfgang Tillmans tore an A0 poster off a building site hoarding and nailed it to a wall in his flat in Hamburg. It was advertising Pet Shop Boys’ new album, Introspective, and consisted of thick vertical bars in different colours. “It was just so cool in the context of the time,” the artist says today, admiring how the pop group had gone “one level more abstract”.

Around the same time in Doncaster, teenager Alasdair McLellan – now an A-list fashion photographer – was impressed by the clothes of Pet Shop Boys’ keyboard-player Chris Lowe; for instance the cap, stripy T-shirt and Issey Miyake glasses on the cover of their single Suburbia. “I always thought he was the best-dressed man of the 80s,” McLellan says. “Obviously, he just stood there playing the keyboard and I always noticed what he was wearing, especially all that sportswear stuff. He just seemed to do it better than everyone else.” McLellan couldn’t get style magazines in his village, so his visual education came from pop and the music press. “I got into photography through album covers, Smash Hits and NME.”

The US chain gives us limited-edition kettle chips; the British, Percy Pig chews. It’s good to know there’s something to nibble on both sides of the Atlantic

You know how you break up with someone, and then everywhere you go, there they are? I’ve been experiencing something like that these last few months, since moving back to London from New York – I can’t go a single day in without seeing a Trader Joe’s tote bag. I knew of this phenomenon of cultural exchange (Brits carry these TJ bags; in the US, they love a Daunt Books one) and while it speaks to the “cousin on your mum’s side” relationship of our two nations, it’s still jarring to see these bags casually hanging out on a London bus. Like bumping into your teacher at Butlin’s in a Hawaiian shirt. It’s not quite right.

For those who don’t know, Trader Joe’s is a supermarket chain in the US that is also the primary source of the type of silly little snacks and convenience dinners that sustain life when you can’t be bothered to do more than throw something in your mouth while lying on the sofa. The limited edition Thanksgiving stuffing kettle chips? I still dream of them. The crispy crunchy okra or the crispy onion chips? Come back, the kids miss you. And of course, the fruity jellies. More than one care package from friends in Brooklyn has contained these since I moved back, and I fall to my knees in gratitude every single time.

Bim Adewunmi is a freelance journalist

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The heroine of Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s knew war and poverty, riches and fame, love and betrayal – yet claimed to have lived a ‘terribly boring’ life. Sean Hepburn Ferrer paints a very different picture in his new biography

Growing up, Sean Hepburn Ferrer says he never felt like the son of a movie star – but he very much is. His mother was Audrey Hepburn, one of the biggest names in the golden age of Hollywood, an Oscar-winner, a screen star and a fashion icon. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world recognise her from classics such as Roman Holiday, Funny Face and My Fair Lady – besotted with the way she laughs, dances, or poses tastefully in Givenchy couture.

Audrey’s image is so ubiquitous in posters, art prints, magazines, on handbags, keyrings or T-shirts, that the family has made hunting for her likeness into a game. “I must have made this crack to my kids,” Sean says. “We were probably waiting for a train or a plane that had been delayed: ‘Three minutes to find Grandma.’ And it became a thing. Now the kids are grown-up, but they do it on their own. I do it by myself and send a snapshot to my wife and we giggle privately.”

Mediators want both sides to agree to suspend hostilities but Tehran warns peace talks ‘incompatible with threats’

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Proposals for an immediate ceasefire have been circulated to Washington and Tehran in an attempt to halt the five-week-old war and stave off an extraordinary threat issued by Donald Trump to bomb Iran’s power plants.

Mediators from Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey want both sides to agree to suspend hostilities and reopen the strait of Hormuz, to be followed by a period of detailed negotiations intended to reach a more complete peace agreement.

Meta has just lost a multimillion-dollar legal battle over its failure to prevent children being sold on its platforms. Here’s how we uncovered evidence that became part of the case against it

It started with a tipoff. I was reporting on the trafficking and exploitation of migrant workers in the Gulf when a source I had known for more than a decade reached out. They told me that child sexual abuse trafficking in the US was surging. As the Covid pandemic pushed predators online, some were using Facebook and Instagram to buy and sell children.

It was 2021 and I was about to begin an investigation with Mei-Ling McNamara, a human rights journalist, that would lead to the tech company Meta losing a multimillion-pound court case in March this year. The company had not yet rebranded and was known as Facebook, and there had not been any reporting on how children were being trafficked on its platforms. Experts from anti-trafficking nonprofit organisations and an American law enforcement official talked me through the crimes they were seeing.

Four astronauts are set to become Earth’s farthest travelled and exceed a 1970 record on the sixth day of the mission

Artemis II astronauts are on course to set a new distance record Monday when they fly by the moon without stopping there – and then swing around for planet Earth.

The four astronauts – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of the US space agency Nasa; and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen – will become Earth’s farthest travelled, going 5,000 miles (8,047km) beyond the moon, exceeding the distance record set by 1970’s ill-fated Apollo 13.

Companies using heating oil have already begun rationing their fuel use, says Federation of Small Businesses

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Thousands of independent businesses across the UK are braced for their energy bills to more than double owing to the sharp rise in heating oil costs as the war in Iran pushed Europe’s fuel market prices to fresh record highs.

About 7% of all small and medium-sized companies warm their properties and provide hot water using heating oil, which in some cases has more than doubled in recent weeks.