Emily Hartley-Skudder's new exhibition CAMEO has opened at Te Manawa Museum in Palmerston North. The show is her response to Ladies Rest, the city's 1936 Art Deco public toilet block in the Square, which Lonely Planet has named one of New Zealand's five most picturesque toilet blocks and which received a Category 2 heritage listing. The title comes from Community Action by Mothers and Existing Other users, the early 2000s protest group that stopped the building being absorbed into an information centre. Hartley-Skudder is the inaugural recipient of the $40,000 Fair Trust Art Prize, created under the will of collector Eileen Fair specifically to let a mid-career artist develop one major new body of work. Her practice revolves around hyper-realistic oil paintings of cleaning products, bathroomware and what she calls the artificial ordinary.

Michelle Langstone reviews new releases: Spa Weekend, a comedy starring Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau, Leslie Mann and Isla Fisher as old friends whose trip is derailed by a chaotic fourth; and Savage House, a period comedy-drama set during a Georgian smallpox epidemic with Richard E Grant and Claire Foy as a debt-riddled noble couple hosting a Duke and Duchess in their crumbling manor. She also picks up on (and disagrees with) other reviewer's thoughts on & Sons starring Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy.

Melanie Lynskey plays a mother dying of cancer in Don't Say Good Luck, a Netflix film produced by Adam and Jackie Sandler and co-starring their 17-year-old daughter Sunny. It was, she says, one of the easiest jobs of her career. She traces her training back to Miranda Harcourt, who taught her more in a single day audition for Heavenly Creatures than she learned in formal drama school, and to Jennifer Ward-Lealand, whose lessons she still uses. She also reflects on being nominated for two Emmys in the same year for two different shows, Yellowjackets and The Last of Us, getting Covid before one ceremony, and why she goes to sleep looking at houses in New Zealand.

Rachel Hemingway stepped on her son's skateboard returning from a family Disneyland trip, fell backward on concrete, and spent the next two years trying to come back from a serious brain injury. She came out the other side as the owner of Chapter One Gallery in Christchurch and the creator of Suitcase Stories, a fundraising project where she put out a social media call for artists to each transform a vintage suitcase with no brief other than to tell a story.

Our Ocean of Islands has just opened at the New Zealand Maritime Museum and is unlike most exhibitions in that it is contributor-led rather than curator-led: each of the 24 participating island nations was invited to decide for itself what it wanted to share, guided only by a broad focus on the inseparability of peoples, environments and indigenous knowledge. All 17 Pacific nations with diaspora communities in Aotearoa are represented, alongside Tangata Whenua and nations as far as Taiwan. Barbara Makuati-Afitu and Kolokesa Uafa Mahina-Tuai, founders of Pacific consultancy Lagi-Maama, join Culture 101 to talk about what it means to give communities the power to tell their own stories.

Therese Eberhard is an American-born scenic artist, props and set painter who came to New Zealand to work on King Kong and never left. She has worked on Avatar, The Hobbit, Rings of Power, What We Do in the Shadows and more, and spent the past decade accumulating interviews and photographs from more than 50 contributors for The Reel Deal, a scrapbook-style love letter to the below-the-line film crew. A leukemia diagnosis that kept her off set for an extended period gave her the time and focus to finally finish it. She joins Culture 101 to talk about why it took a security guard to give her her favourite interview in the book.

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: One Night Only, a comedy set in a United States where pre-marital sex has been legally outlawed by biometric implant, except for one night a year when unmarried adults can let off steam - starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner; & Sons, in which Bill Nighy plays a reclusive novelist making one last attempt to reconcile with his two estranged adult sons and have them accept their teenage stepbrother, also starring Imelda Staunton, Johnny Flynn, George Mackay and Noah Jupe; and De Gaulle: Tilting Iron, the first of a two-part epic biography of the French statesman, following his wartime leadership of the resistance in exile, starring Simon Abkarian and Simon Russell Beale.

Resilience psychologist Dr Lucy Hone has spent 15 years researching how people navigate loss. Her TEDx talk, The Three Secrets of Resilient People, has been viewed more than nine million times and translated into 23 languages. Her new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This, grew out of readers of her earlier work Resilient Grieving asking whether the same tools applied to losses that don't involve a funeral - job loss, divorce, an empty nest, a diagnosis. She calls these living losses and the things that cause them, in her family's private shorthand, BFTs. She joins Culture 101 ahead of her appearance at WORD Christchurch on 6 September.

Nairn Street Cottage has stood since around 1858 and has been a house museum since 1980, with each room dressed to reflect a different decade of the Wallace family's occupation. A new exhibition, Unsettling Nairn Street, has placed seven contemporary artists in those rooms to respond to the layers of history embedded in the building and the whenua it stands on. Writer and co-curator Emma Ng joins Culture 101 to talk about beeswax installations in the hallway, bronze crackers in the 1970s kitchen, and what you hear playing through the phonograph in the front parlor. The exhibition runs until 31 October, entry free.

An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen's play about a medical officer who discovers contaminated water at a local spa and finds himself crushed by the forces protecting economic interests, has been adapted by Aaron Richardson of Fly Leaf Theatre Company and set in a small Canterbury town. Fraser Hoffman, who plays Dr Thomas Stockmann, says he's found examples of this exact situation playing out in New Zealand at a high-profile level, and that the Canterbury setting puts water, farming and the country's clean green image at the centre in a way that feels uncomfortably close. The show runs at Q Theatre Loft 12 to 22 August.