Since David Hockney entered his eighth decade (he is now 77), we seem to have witnessed an accelerated output of major exhibitions, biographies and documentaries. The public appetite has never tired of this most tireless of artists, but it’s an interest that’s been given fresh impetus by the exuberance and vivacity of his epic series of paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds.

The original Planet of the Apes series was Hollywood’s most ingeniously extended franchise, surviving the obliteration of Earth in its first sequel to loop back on itself and spin out a further three. This second film of the successful reboot and its already planned follow-up are both basically remakes of the clapped-out 1973 finale Battle for the Planet of the Apes, a conceptual handicap evident when it climaxes with two chimps in a punch-up.

Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.

Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”

Jackson Browne's output has slowed since the mid-Nineties, and this arrives six years after Time the Conqueror. The latter was much preoccupied with the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and Standing in the Breach – with a sleeve depicting a war-ravaged African village – is still stamped with Browne's social and political concerns.

So now it’s Minnie Get Your Gun from the director who brought us the gobsmackingly inventive Young Vic Annie (as in sharpshooter Oakley, not Little Orphan). Richard Jones’s subversive but still very human take on Irving Berlin discombobulated its American support and never made Broadway; but there’s little here that would rock the steadily progressive Met (home of La fanciulla del West’s 1910 premiere, with Enrico Caruso as “Dick Johnson” aka quickly repentant bandit Ramerrez).

Game Theory: Blaze of Glory

Ever since his 1967 breakthrough film Titticut Follies, an unsparing look at a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman has been turning his dispassionate observational camera on the workings of institutions ranging from the US Marines to high school, juvenile court, and the American Ballet Theater. His latest, At Berkeley, is an in-depth exploration of the University of California’s San Francisco Bay Area outpost (UC is made up of several self-contained component universities distributed across the state, with Berkeley the jewel in the crown).

The United States of America: The United States of America – The Columbia Recordings

Various Artists: Too Slow to Disco

Last year a DVD appeared featuring the 15 winning performances from the start of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition up to 2011. I watched them all, skimming if any seemed a notch below par but staying with most. You could see the star quality and the promise in many who have since become great artists, including Karita Mattila, Anja Harteros and Ekaterina Shcherbachenko.