Six great reads: the Revenge Porn Helpline, revolutionary architecture and how Netflix ruined movies | Movies

1. Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything: what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films?

How did Netflix end up churning out cookie-cutter generic product? To what extent are algorithms and data driving film production – and, if they aren’t, where are all the so-called algorithm movies coming from, asked Phil Hoad.

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2. A day with the Revenge Porn Helpline: ‘You can sense the callers’ desperation’

“By midday, Jessica has dealt with five calls from highly distressed young women in their 20s, all close to tears or crying at the start of the conversations. She absorbs their alarm calmly, prompting them with questions, making sympathetic noises into her headset as she digests the situation. “Are these images sexual in nature?” she asks the last woman she speaks to before lunch. “Do you want to tell me a bit about what happened?” She begins compiling a tidy set of bullet points in ballpoint pen. “It’s all right. Take your time.”

Intimate image abuse is a crisis in the UK. Amelia Gentleman met staff from this specialist service, demand for which has grown fortyfold since it opened in 2015.

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3. ‘There’s something very interesting about boring’: Martin Parr on his life in pictures

From village cricket matches to surreptitious shots of North Korea, Martin Parr took us through his life and career via 20 of his strange, “boring”, brilliant photographs, including a shot from the opening of the first McDonald’s in Moscow: “This was the only time I have been allowed to photograph in McDonald’s. I’ve often taken pictures without permission; being thrown out by a faintly embarrassed duty manager gives a certain satisfaction.”

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4. What connects six disappearances in a picturesque New Zealand town? ‘Everyone has a theory’

On a squally winter night 21 years ago, 25-year-old Iraena Asher vanished from an isolated beach community, one hour west of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Asher’s story is one of New Zealand’s most enduring mysteries and has left a deep wound in Piha, but it is not the only one haunting the community. Five others have disappeared in the region over the past three decades. Now a true-crime documentary is asking questions – and ruffling feathers, as Eva Corlett, the Guardian’s New Zealand correspondent, reported.

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5. Arundhati Roy on her fugitive childhood: ‘My knees were full of scars and cuts – a sign of my wild, imperfect, fatherless life’

When war broke out between India and China, the author and her brother were taken by their mother on a chaotic journey from hill station squat to an eccentric household in Kerala. Would they ever find a safe space?

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6. ‘It has a heroic, Roman quality’: how Arkansas’s timber university building could revolutionise architecture

Conceived as a “spider’s web of sticks”, Arkansas’s vast wooden wonder may become a template for environmentally sound buildings. Architecture critic Oliver Wainwright visited the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation in Fayetteville, where the future is wooden.

Oliver also featured alongside all our cultural critics in our comprehensive autumn arts preview, taking in everything from Caravaggio and football stadium architecture to Spinal Tap II and Little Simz.

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