St George’s, Hanover Square, London
Jonathan Cohen and his crack baroque ensemble Arcangelo seized upon the colourful pastoral with relish, lighting up Handel’s own parish church

This year’s London Handel festival got off to a rousing start with new artistic adviser Jonathan Cohen at the helm of Arcangelo, the crack baroque ensemble he founded back in 2010. On the bill was the colourful pastoral L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, in which wit and jollity look set to gain the upper hand before Handel decides to put a dampener on things by insisting on moderation in everything.

Faced with a shortage of Italian singers in 1740, the composer went full English, laying aside ideas for Messiah “to please the Town with something of a gayer Turn.” His librettist, James Harris, interwove Milton’s poem L’Allegro (The Happy Man) with the contrasting Il Penseroso (The Melancholy Man), before adding a codicil at the composer’s request in the form of Il Moderato (The Moderate Man). The result, which ends with a paraphrase on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, may feel a bit of a mashup, but it provided Handel with irresistible opportunities for turning vivid imagery into equally vivid music. Remarkably, he knocked the whole thing out in just 14 days.

SXSW film festival: There’s more ludicrous plotting and macho action in Amazon’s decent enough fan service follow-up

Ben Affleck may have given up Batman, but he’s not done with superheroes. In the 2016 film The Accountant, Affleck played Christian Wolff, one of many aliases for an autistic mathematical savant who worked as a forensic accountant and money launderer for every stripe of black money organization. A plethora of confusing and/or outright sad flashbacks served as his superhero origin story: a cold military PsyOps father trained Chris, bullied for his difference and struggling with tantrums, and his neurotypical brother to become lethal fighting machines. The film, written by Bill Dubuque (co-creator of Netflix’s Ozark), treated Chris’s neurodivergence as a superpower, the key to exceptional skill in all fields – a noble intention, though one squandered by the misanthropic stupidity of everything around it.

In practice, Chris was a pretty standard-issue movie assassin, and The Accountant a solid but overly complicated and forgettable action movie that did not need nor set up a second chapter. Nevertheless, business persists. Like Another Simple Favor, this year’s SXSW opening night premiere film, The Accountant 2 is a long-gestating sequel from Amazon MGM Studios to a modest 2010s movie costarring Anna Kendrick that performed well outside of theaters; The Accountant was low-key the most-rented movie of 2017 in the US, gaining a relatively loyal if quiet following. And also like Another Simple Favor, The Accountant 2 is not so much a redux as fan service that leans into the inherent ridiculousness of the enterprise. The Accountant 2, which reunites Dubuque with director Gavin O’Connor, is an even more convoluted, impenetrable, outlandish spectacle of male hyper-competence than its predecessor, doubling down on what one might call divorced dad camp.

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The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Why do posh people wear pullovers casually draped over their shoulders? Jane, by email

Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday.

Publishers and analysts say popularity of genres like manga and superhero comics is a gateway into reading

The best route to learning to love words in print could well be pictures. This, at least, is the hope of the publishing industry this spring, as it welcomes news that sales of children’s comics and graphic novels have reached an all-time peak of almost £20m in Britain.

While publishers and editors are celebrating this boom for its own sake, the popularity of these titles is also being hailed as a good omen for novels, ahead of the London Book Fair at Olympia this week. “Over the last decade we’ve seen a significant rise in sales of graphic novels for both the adult and children’s markets,” said Philip Stone, media analyst at NielsenIQ BookData, as he revealed details of the latest trends, hits and flops this weekend.

Fast, free and phenomenally effective, push-ups are an unbeatable way to build the muscle you need every day – all the way into old age. Here’s how to master them, even if you’ve previously struggled

If you can’t do push-ups – or if you’re still scarred by being forced to do them as a kid – it can be hard to see the point of them. Sure, they look impressive, especially the “explosive” variety that launches you into the air, but even the standard version is so demanding that armies use it as a punishment: “Drop and give me 50!” Then there’s all the macho, chest-beating rubbish that surrounds them. It is no surprise many of us avoid them, or think we will never master them.

The thing is, we probably can with the right preparation, and we should definitely try. Push-ups are one of the most effective ways to strengthen your upper body, building your chest muscles, your shoulders and your triceps. They will help you open a heavy door, lift your bag into an overhead locker, lever yourself off the floor after a fall. You can do them whenever you have a few minutes at home, at work or on holiday – no need to go to the gym or spend a penny on equipment. Once you’re used to them, they won’t even leave you sweaty.