'Heart-stopping' exhibition at London's Barbican 

Francis Alÿs "is one of the most humane and poetic artists at work today", said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Born in Antwerp in 1959 and long based in Mexico, he is probably best known for his "tremendous" ongoing video series "Children's Games". Since 1999, he has been filming children at play all over the world, his camera recording everything from snail racing in Belgium to improvised games of jacks in Nepal to kite flying in Afghanistan – an activity famously banned by the Taliban. 

Each film is "brief, enthralling to watch and beautifully observed". Each shows "inventiveness, vitality, resourcefulness, joy" – the "power of resilience and solidarity" of childhood play. This show at London's Barbican brings together many of the 40-plus videos the artist has made to date, alongside drawings and animations created over the course of his travels. 

It is a "mesmerising" exhibition that demands to be seen. "Ricochets" is a "cacophonous" experience, said Anna Parker in ArtReview magazine. Ten films play at once in a single gallery, filling the space with "shrieking and laughing", as well as the onslaught of sound created by the games themselves: in Havana, children race across "unfinished concrete" on improvised go-karts; snow makes a "squeaky crunch" as it is compacted under the weight of sledges in Switzerland; in Morocco, kids clack pebbles together before skimming them across the sea towards Gibraltar.

That many videos have been made in combat zones is no coincidence: "in wartime settings, children are powerless, but because ordinary routines have been disrupted, perversely they are left freer to play". Alÿs captures one example in Kharkiv, where he films boys dressed in combat fatigues manning a makeshift checkpoint and flagging down cars to inspect papers or demand a password (the Ukrainian word for bread, which Russians find hard to pronounce).

Violence frequently punctures the fun, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. One film sees a group of Ukrainian children playing a game called "Air Raid Alert", in which voices imitating the noise of sirens become "intolerable" for one young participant, who "suddenly flees the camera". 

In Mosul, Iraqi adolescents play football, running and tackling amid "burnt-out cars and shattered buildings", stopping only when gunfire interrupts play. It takes a moment to notice that they don't actually have a ball; in 2015, a caption informs us, 13 teenage boys were publicly executed by Islamic State for the crime of watching a televised football match. 

The show never feels intrusive or voyeuristic: whatever he does, Alÿs's work is always "a collaboration with the participants" and he knows "when to stop". "Ricochets" is "an often heart-stopping and frequently beautiful" exhibition.

Barbican Art Gallery, London EC1. Until 1 September 

by Sophie Elmhirst

This "gripping" work of non-fiction revisits the story of an English couple who "sold everything" and, in 1972, set sail for New Zealand, said the Financial Times. When their boat was destroyed by a whale, they were "left adrift on a tiny raft" – and survived for 117 days by eating raw turtles. Both a love story and an epic tale of survival, "Maurice and Maralyn" is a "superb debut", said The Spectator. 

Actress best known for playing Wendy Torrance in The Shining 

Rake thin, with wide eyes, "a Modigliani face and tremulous, broken-doll voice", Shelley Duvall would have been a striking screen presence at any point in cinema history, said Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. Even so, it was fortunate that she began acting in the 1970s, when the "unorthodox and the eccentric" were briefly embraced by Hollywood; and luckier still that she fell into the orbit of the director Robert Altman, who spotted her talent and enfolded her in his "unofficial repertory company". Duvall, he said, could "swing all sides of the pendulum: charming, silly, sophisticated, pathetic – even beautiful". He cast her in seven of his films, including "McCabe and Mrs. Miller", "Nashville" and "Thieves Like Us", and helped turn her into one of the biggest stars of the decade. 

Yet it was for a film made by Stanley Kubrick that Duvall became best known, said The New York Times. In 1980's "The Shining", adapted from Stephen King's book, she played Wendy Torrance, whose writer husband (Jack Nicholson) loses his mind when they move into a mountain hotel, to work as its off-season caretakers. The shoot was gruelling. Famously exacting, Kubrick insisted on 127 takes for the scene in which Wendy tries to fend off her raging husband with a baseball bat; she worked 12 to 16 hours a day for 13 months, and was required, she said, to cry "for at least nine of those months".

King, who hated the film, described Kubrick's Wendy as "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on screen", and likened her to a "screaming dishrag". The critics were not initially kind about Duvall's performance. But since then, it has been re-evaluated as a "shockingly realistic portrait of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship". As for Kubrick's extreme methods, these have been described as tantamount to abuse. Duvall said that she'd never put herself through a shoot like that again. On the other hand, she said that Kubrick's demanding direction had helped her to reach the depths of Wendy's fear and horror; and that she'd not trade the experience "for anything".  

Shelley Duvall was brought up in Texas. Her father was a lawyer; her mother an estate agent. She grew up loving books and stories, but aspired to become a nutritionist. At college, however, she was horrified by an experiment involving vivisection, and dropped out. She was 20, and living in Houston, when she met some of the crew working on Altman’s "Brewster McCloud". They told the director about this captivating young woman, and he was so taken with her, he gave her a small role in the film. Over the next few years, the parts he gave her got bigger, and in 1977 Woody Allen cast her in "Annie Hall". On set, she met Paul Simon, who had a cameo role in the film, and they began an affair. He broke off the relationship on the day she flew to England to film "The Shining". 

When that shoot finished, Altman – a more freewheeling director whom she adored – gave her an altogether lighter role as Olive Oyl in "Popeye", opposite Robin Williams. The film was a flop, but her endearing and subtle performance was highly praised. Later in the decade, she threw herself into a new project, creating and presenting a children’s TV anthology series called the "Faerie Tale Theatre", which featured a host of big-name stars who’d agreed to appear for a fraction of their normal fee. After that, her acting career waned. Then her home in LA was destroyed in an earthquake. She moved back to Texas in the mid-1990s, and faded from view. In 2016, however, she made a dramatic reappearance on the TV talk show "Dr. Phil". She seemed distressed, paranoid and incoherent, and he was accused of exploiting her fragile mental health. She made her final screen appearance in 2023. She is survived by the musician Dan Gilroy, her partner since 1989.