Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reunite for a so-so sequel

It's been 22 years since the release of Freaky Friday, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. In that film, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan played a mother and her teenage daughter who – owing to supernatural intervention – accidentally swapped bodies for 24 hours. This belated sequel, reuniting its original stars, picks things up in the present day: Tess (Curtis) is still working as a therapist; Anna (Lohan) is now grown up and the single mother of a teenage daughter of her own – rebellious surf-loving Harper (Julia Butters).

All is "hunky dory" until Anna falls for a British chef (Manny Jacinto), whose "snooty" daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) is Harper's rival at school. Then, following an encounter with a psychic at Anna's hen night, the curse is repeated, except this time the body swap is four-way: Anna wakes up to find herself in her daughter's body, while Tess swaps with Lily. It's confusing, but if you remember that everyone is playing the opposite of their own age, that helps.

One of the pleasures of body-swap films is watching the actors perform as each other, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, so it is a shame that though Butters does a great job imitating Lohan's mannerisms, Lohan and Curtis just opt for "generic immaturity". On the contrary, said Dana Stevens on Slate – embodying a teenager allows Curtis to "bust out" that talent for physical comedy that is one of her hallmarks. She conveys both the freedom that youngsters on the cusp of adulthood feel and the horror any teenager would display if they looked in the mirror and saw reflected back at them the face of someone else's grandmother. It's not a great film: it is uneven, and neither as funny nor as well plotted as the 2003 version. But it is quite "endearing", and it has some great moments.

by William Kelleher

Today, Cecil Rhodes is best known for the "scholarship that bears his name" – and the campaign to have his statue removed from Oriel College, Oxford, said Hannah Rose Woods in The Observer. To his contemporaries, however, he was "a colossus". Born in 1853 in modest circumstances – his father was a Hertfordshire vicar – he rose to become a gold and diamond magnate, a "railway and telegraph entrepreneur", prime minister of the Cape Colony and a fervent supporter of imperial expansion. "Rudyard Kipling thought he was a king among men." In this "deeply researched biography", William Kelleher Storey, an American historian, seeks less to understand Rhodes than to excavate "his material legacy". He focuses on the processes – financial, political, technological – that helped to make Rhodes "one of the richest and most famous men in the British empire" while causing "enduring damage" to southern Africa. This is all "very well done indeed", even if it means that Storey glosses over the more private aspects of Rhodes's life – including his "likely" homosexuality, which he "does not dwell on".

"Rhodes's career was meteoric," said Piers Brendon in Literary Review. Sent to "grow cotton in Natal" aged 17, he was soon "harvesting a much richer crop from the newly discovered diamond fields of Kimberley". In 1880, aged only 34, he co-founded De Beers, and went on to control "90% of the world's output" of diamonds, becoming hugely rich off the back of miners toiling in brutal conditions. Yet money didn't interest him much in itself; it was simply a means to help him realise his "dream" of an Africa "painted red". Storey's book is "scholarly", but the "nuts and bolts" of Rhodes's business dealings are the least interesting aspects of his life, and so it is unfortunately rather "dull".

On the contrary, we need to understand how Rhodes despoiled Africa, said A.N. Wilson in The Spectator, and in this "brave" book, Storey relates that history "punctiliously". There are those who still see him as a "bit of a hero" – who highlight his undeniable philanthropy, and who respond to the charge of racism against him by pointing to the provision he made in his will that his scholarships be denied to no student on grounds of "race or religion". Yet as Storey explains, when he used the word "race", Rhodes probably meant American, or German. He did not likely envisage Africans at Oxford. He was an unapologetic racist who helped turn the "morally nuanced British nation and empire … into a brigand state" – and his defenders "are simply wrong".

A welcome revival of the cult animation

The "beauty" of King of the Hill was that nothing ever changed, said Chris Bennion in The Daily Telegraph. The cult animated sitcom, which ran from 1997 to 2010, was set in small-town Texas and centred around cantankerous but "essentially decent" propane salesman Hank Hill. He was a man of "conservative, traditional ideas": in the north, city folks might embrace modernity, but Hank carried on drinking beer with his buddies, his diminutive son Bobby remained forever 11, and in his heart, Ronald Reagan was always the president. Yet in this long-overdue revival of the show, even Hank has had to accept that the world has moved on.

In something of a departure for an animated show, the characters have finally been allowed to age, said Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times. Hank (Mike Judge) and Peggy (Kathy Najimy) are now retirees, and have returned home after a 10-year stint in Saudi Arabia; Bobby (Pamela Adlon) is 21, and working as a chef at a restaurant in Dallas. Hank is a man out of time, baffled not only by unisex toilets and the cycle lanes that have appeared in his home town, but also by the conspiracy theorists. There is no mention, however, of the president. One of the strengths of the original series was that it satirised conservative views without demonising them, said Phil Harrison in The Guardian. Hank is a Republican, but he's no bigot: indeed, there's "a remarkable amount of nuance" to all the characters. As before, King of the Hill can be a bit "saccharin" – but its gentle, tolerant comedy "feels more welcome than ever".