‘Death always feels imminent’: a moving Netflix documentary on prison, music and forgiveness

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In Songs from the Hole, a man convicted of murder when he was a teenager finds healing in music during his sentence In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to “the hole” – solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a fellow teenager outside a nightclub in his home town of Long Beach, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief – for what he had done, for what had been done to him. In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He’d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest...
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Streaming: the best films set in Venice

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As the Venice film festival turns 80, we pick the titles that capture the city’s allure, from desolate Don’t Look Now to romantic Summertime and Top Hat’s cheery glamour

This time next week I’ll be packing my bags for Venice, where the 80th edition of its annual film festival will unveil new films by Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Yorgos Lanthimos, David Fincher, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Bradley Cooper, the late William Friedkin – an especially glistening lineup for an event never short on gloss. But even without such attractions, Venice would remain my favourite festival: it’s the faintly unreal allure of the city itself, the spray from the Vaporetto as you leave the airport, the sense that you’re arriving into an eternal film location rather than just an industry event.

You can’t arrive on the Lido, the drowsy barrier island where the festival unfolds, and not recall the yearning melancholy and faded finery of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice – that the Grand Hotel des Bains, where Dirk Bogarde’s wilting composer Gustav von Aschenbach saw out his days, has been unoccupied since 2010 underlines the isle’s ghostly air of glamour. Although Visconti’s film is set in summer, you’d be forgiven for remembering otherwise. It’s Nicolas Roeg’s devasted, desolately wintry Don’t Look Now (ITVX), of course, that best captures Venice in its off-season. Its misty, depopulated maze of alleys and canals laden with threat match the mindset of Donald Sutherland’s grief-stricken parent.

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