The piercing-eyed German actor Udo Kier is best known for his supporting roles in many high-profile films, including those of Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Fassbinder. In Swan Song, he carries off his first starring role magnificently as wry ex-drag queen and Ohio hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger, though the film itself is rather meandering and has mawkish, saccharine moments.

Franchise burnout continues apace, in this asteroid strike of a finale. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness showed the previously agile and humane Marvel machine weighed down by plot mechanics and fan service, and this Jurassic Park/World trilogy unification bout proves a pointless, often ponderous 146 minutes. As post-pandemic cinema moves to total dependence on such sequels, their creative entropy could be an extinction event for filmgoing itself.

It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic). This time, the series is based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, with crime novelist George Pelecanos sharing the “Creator” credit with Simon.

The title The Great Awakening is a metaphor for America’s switch from its previous presidential administration to the current: the arrival of a new era and, with it, a fresh phase of life. Emblematic of this is the xenarthran, a type of armadillo, which lends its name to the album’s third track. Native to South America, it slogs its way into Texas where it deals with a new environment.

As the pandemic receded, Wilco huddled together in Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio and played country songs, an easefully naturally act as the world around them shook. Though famed for the experimental, eerily timely Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) and the crackling electric contrails of its further-out follow-up A Ghost Is Born (2004), Wilco have often returned to simpler verities.

The 2001 Reese Witherspoon-starring film Legally Blonde, upon which Heather Hach, Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s peppy Broadway musical is based, was something of a Trojan horse: a bubblegum-pink comedy with a feminist spine.

Barry Gibb was at the considerable peak of his era-defining songwriting powers when he provided the song that played over the opening titles of the iconic 1978 film, so it's a wise decision by director, Nikolai Foster, to go straight into "Grease is the Word" after a brief prologue.

Jude is the kind of girl that no-one would want to mess with – she can dance like a demon to Eric Clapton, skewer an ego in seconds and hit an apple from thirty feet with a knife. Yet in a play that’s so uncompromising it could give Neil LaBute a sprint for his money, what happens on the night of her seventeenth birthday raises questions that tear through the lives of her closest friends for decades.

As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Sympathy has long shifted to trailer girl Ruth Langmore, so clever and empathetic that in another life she would have taken wing, as much caught in the web of drug-dealing and cartels as her elders, but still the nearest thing we’re going to get to a moral core among the leading players.

There is so much gospel out there that it’s not easy to stand out above the crowd. Mavis Staples, with a distinctive voice that has delivered a gritty contralto for many decades, never stops. This new release, a set of songs that were recorded in 2011, is a collaboration with the Band’s late drummer Levon Helm, a sure-fire fan of African-American church music.