Liam Neeson shows off his comedy chops in this reboot of Leslie Nielsen's crime spoof

It's a brave move, to revive the "Naked Gun" movies, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. Released between 1988 and 1994, the crime spoofs were a showcase for the genius of the late Leslie Nielsen, whose "deadpan brilliance" as the bumbling LAPD detective Frank Drebin (a man with "a heart of gold and a brain of wood") helped turn them into classics of the genre. Yet against all expectations, this belated sequel is a worthy successor – "a dumb comedy of the expert kind".

Liam Neeson takes the role of Drebin's son, Frank Junior, who has followed in his father's footsteps and joined the same elite squad. He is younger than his dad was in the original trilogy, yet is also a "relic in changing times. 'Since when do cops have to follow the law,' he asks, sincerely baffled."

The plot involves an "Elon-style villain" (Danny Huston) bent on world domination, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator – but it is not really relevant: this is a film which exists solely to make its audience laugh. Some of the gags may not land, but never mind, because another will be along in 15 seconds. Admittedly, the third act drags a bit, and is "over-reliant on slapstick", but the film is only 75 minutes, so you'll not be squirming in your seat.

This is one of the stupidest films you'll ever see, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph – and I loved it. Playing on his hard-man persona, Neeson delivers his lines "with a gravelly matter-of-factness that only compounds" their lunacy, and he has an easy on-screen chemistry with his love interest, "winningly played by a game-for-anything" Pamela Anderson, which will do nothing to quash rumours of an off-screen romance. If you have a taste for this kind of humour, you'll not stop laughing until the credits have rolled. 

by Scott Anderson

The Islamic Revolution of 1979, which toppled Iran's Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was one of the most significant political events of the past 50 years, said Charlie Gammell in the Financial Times. 

It transformed Iran from a "hyper-rich, secular-leaning" kingdom "allied to the West" into the "dour, repressive Islamist autocracy we know today". And as well as reshaping the Middle East, it ultimately brought "politically motivated Islamist violence to all our streets".

How strange, then, that "no one in power saw it coming until it was too late": not the CIA, not US president Jimmy Carter (who in 1977 praised Iran as an "island of stability"), and certainly not the Shah himself. In this "brilliant" book, the war correspondent and novelist Scott Anderson tells the story of the revolution.

Drawing on interviews with many key players – including the Shah's 86-year-old widow, Farah Pahlavi, who now lives in the US – the book helps elucidate the "blood-soaked rivalries that drive conflict in the Middle East today".

Some accounts of the Iranian Revolution "do not bother overly with the deeper history of the country", said Jason Burke in The Spectator. Anderson does, "easily and elegantly" sketching the background, including the "rotten Qajar dynasty", which ruled Iran from 1789 to 1925, and the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom the British deposed during the Second World War. 

That brought his son, Mohammad, to power, said Richard Overy in The Telegraph. Bolstered by money and arms from the US (for whom Iran was a bulwark against communism and a source of oil), he embarked on a "grandiose programme of modernisation". But while this benefited Iran's wealthy elite, it alienated many traditionally minded Iranians.

And for a figurehead, those people increasingly turned to the exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, said John Simpson in The Guardian. Having long been an exile in neighbouring Iraq, he was thrown out by Saddam Hussein in 1978, and took refuge in a village near Paris – where the world's press could interview him "whenever they wanted", with every word "beamed back to Iran".

On 16 January 1979, facing escalating protests and military defections, the Shah and his family fled to Egypt. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned to Iran and rapidly established a theocracy. Anderson's book "suffers", as American accounts often do, "from concentrating on the Iran-US relationship to the virtual exclusion of any other". Still, it gives a "thorough overview" of an event whose aftershocks the "world is still experiencing". 

BBC Two's two-part series shines a light on the abuse at the heart of the Christian group

We Brits don't think of ourselves as susceptible to religious cults, said Ben Dowell in The Times. But this harrowing BBC Two documentary serves to shatter that complacency. Its focus is the Jesus Army, a sect established in Northamptonshire in 1969 by a charismatic preacher named Noel Stanton.

Hundreds of people flocked to hear his sermons, and many gave up their livelihoods and possessions to join his "evangelical rural community". Stanton, however, exploited rather than helped his followers, many of whom were young or otherwise vulnerable. He subjected them to an "increasingly doctrinaire" set of rules and punishments, based on strictly patriarchal values, and initiated a horrifying culture of ritualised sexual abuse.

As early as 1978, a cult member who'd been punished for reading books was found dead on a nearby railway line, said Madeleine Davies in the Church Times. Yet Stanton's movement kept growing; by the 2000s, it had 3,000 members and millions in assets.

The Jesus Army always seemed weird and sinister, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian, yet the scale of its crimes was only exposed after Stanton's death in 2009, when an investigation revealed that it was "a haven for paedophiles".

The filmmakers estimate that one in six children involved with the cult were abused; 539 ex-members have been accused of abuse, but only 11 have been convicted. The lasting message of the documentary is that, as a society, we are shockingly bad at bringing sex abusers to justice.