Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis star in a horse opera set in a snowbound world of bars, brothels and wide open spaces

Here is a western starring Peter Dinklage, but forget hot sun-baked gullies and leather-skinned cowboys riding sweatily through rattlesnake country. The Thicket takes place in a hard, snowbound wilderness interspersed with equally hard, snowbound little townships consisting mainly of bars and brothels. You can see the breath in the air and the blood on the snow. The plot is staple horse opera: a kidnapped maiden must be rescued by a motley group of good-ish guys with mixed motives, headed up by Dinklage playing a bounty hunter character offering a similar vein of dry, world-weary cynicism as his breakthrough role as Tyrion in Game of Thrones, only much less aristocratic. He is joined by Gbenga Akinnagbe as his right hand man, with whom Dinklage has nice chemistry, and Levon Hawke, as a naive young Christian whose sister has been kidnapped by ruffians.

The ruffians are where the film really does something unusual, via a simple but intriguing gambit. In the book on which The Thicket is based, the main villain, a man, is called Cut Throat Bill. Here, Cut Throat Bill is played by Juliette Lewis. It isn’t exactly a case of trendy, gender-blind casting; while the character is still called Cut Throat Bill, and assumed by those who haven’t met him to be a man, as soon as Lewis encounters anyone, it is very clear that the character is perceived as female. “He’s a she,” and so on. Cut Throat Bill doesn’t correct them, but continues to go by that name. You might read the character as genderfluid or trans, but existing in a world that didn’t have any vocabulary for this, and the film makes no attempt to retrofit modern ideas on to a historical setting. Cut Throat Bill is Cut Throat Bill.

Class-leading camera, top-tier chip, very long battery life, AI and quality software dominate mid-range rivals

Google’s latest cut-price Pixel offers the best bang for your buck in Android phones and is arguably better in many areas than some models costing twice the price.

The Pixel 9a starts at the same £499 (€549/$499/A$849) as last year’s equally good value model. That makes it £300 or so less than Google’s regular Pixel 9 and places it up against mid-rangers such as Nothing’s Phone 3a Pro and Samsung’s Galaxy A56.

Screen: 6.3in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (422ppi)

Processor: Google Tensor G4

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 128 or 256GB

Operating system: Android 15

Camera: 48MP + 13MP ultrawide, 13MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, Sim/eSim, wifi 6E, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (1m for 30 minutes)

Dimensions: 157.7 x 73.3 x 8.9mm

Weight: 185.9g

Britain’s traditional retailers were in decline for years. Then the pandemic changed how we buy food and boosted the fishing industry

The seafood chef and restaurateur Mitch Tonks recalls the moment things for him changed dramatically. It was March 2020, the start of Covid, when a local fishing boat skipper called him in a panic. “Nick was having a tough time; nobody was buying his catch, so I emailed our customer network,” he says.

Tonks asked people to bring cash and containers. The next morning, Nick landed his boat at Brixham , the south Devon port that is England’s largest fish market by value of catch sold. “About 150 people turned up to buy his fish. Many asked ‘why can’t we just buy fish straight off boats like this normally?’”

The challenging 870-mile trail cuts diagonally across Romania and takes in mountain meadows, fairytale forests and medieval monasteries

It was about seven minutes into my cycle ride that the first signs of addiction became apparent. My ebike’s “power assist” button felt more like a morphine clicker as we climbed the misty hills of Bucovina in northern Romania. Sergiu, my group’s guide, knew what I was up to. “Be honest with yourself – only use ‘turbo’ if you have to!” he shouted. My thumb cowered under the handlebar.

On previous adventures I’ve resisted assistance, maintaining that battery power is the preserve of the unserious. Nowadays, though, my pins aren’t as powerful, and on these vertiginous hills the extra oomph was near essential. But as with all drugs, moderation is key. After all, one wouldn’t want to run out of juice on hills that are home to wolves, bears and lynx.

Journalist Joel Budd travels around Britain demolishing Brexit myths in a nuanced study of a social group too often reduced to a cartoon by politicians

On 13 November 1968, a 35-year-old Labour politician got to his feet in the House of Commons and had a go at the ranks of Conservative members who faced him. Six or so months after Enoch Powell had delivered his infamously racist “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham, David Winnick – who was then the MP for Croydon South – had decided to attack the Tory fashion for bemoaning immigration to the UK from such countries as India and Pakistan and expressing faux sympathy with deprived communities in British cities. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants,” he said, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white working class.”

As the Economist journalist Joel Budd points out in this nuanced, enlightening book about the people and places Winnick was referring to, this was the first time “white working class” had been used to describe a certain kind of Briton. And in that sense, that small parliamentary moment was a prescient glimpse of a subject that would explode half a century later, when hostility to immigration fed into the result of the 2016 referendum on Brexit. At that point, the term “white working class’” became more ubiquitous than ever, and an insurgent political right made up of Powell’s political heirs – split between Tory Brexiters and the forces led by Nigel Farage – affected to speak for a kind of voter they claimed had been neglected and betrayed.

A new documentary series about the front line of criminal justice. Plus: Alison Hammond presents a canine-centric moodbuster. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, Channel 4
A juicy new fly-on-the-wall series inside the complicated cases taken on by the UK’s leading defence barristers. What does it take to defend a cab driver accused of transporting a whopping £1m worth of cocaine as part of an international drugs conspiracy? Barrister Matthew Radstone is about to show us. Meanwhile, was a case of alleged carjacking at knifepoint staged for an insurance scam? The two accused have different answers. Hollie Richardson

From virtual ‘wives’ to mental health support, more than 100m people are using personified chatbots

Men who have virtual “wives” and neurodiverse people using chatbots to help them navigate relationships are among a growing range of ways in which artificial intelligence is transforming human connection and intimacy.

Dozens of readers shared their experiences of using personified AI chatbot apps, engineered to simulate human-like interactions by adaptive learning and personalised responses, in response to a Guardian callout .

Universities, a key plank of our economy, face a bonfire of jobs. But are they the jobs Starmer wants to be seen to be saving?

It’s hard to get romantic about the death of office jobs.

Nobody waxes lyrical about the glory days of working in payroll, and Bruce Springsteen doesn’t fill stadiums with soaring anthems about middle management headcount. But whether the recipient’s collar is white or blue, getting made redundant is getting made redundant, and it hurts.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

The country’s three special units at high-security prisons are in spotlight after Hashem Abedi’s assault against staff

With its high, ugly, grey concrete perimeter walls HMP Frankland looks as grim from the outside as you would expect for a place nicknamed “Monster Mansion”.

Since it was opened in 1983 on the leafy outskirts of Durham – near a 13th-century priory used for centuries as a holiday retreat for Benedictine monks – its inmates have included Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman and Charles Bronson.