It’s not hard to see, watching Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre, why Franz Xaver Kroetz is one of Germany’s most staged playwrights.

Aldous Harding is one of those artists who has you scrambling for Shazam. You might not know the Kiwi singer, but when you hear her music there’s a sudden urgent need to find a place for it in your life.

How do you make a film about death, love and loss that avoids being sentimental, maudlin or pretentious? Take your cue from Portuguese artist Catarina Vasconcelos.

"Get into the scene late and get out early." So wrote David Mamet in his 1992 book On Directing Film, and Southwark Playhouse, among London's most charmingly eclectic theatres, has delved very early into Mamet's canon, reviving his 1977 play The Woods – a two-hander not seen in London since 1996.

Don Letts, the film director, musician and DJ responsible for so many of the iconic images of punk and reggae artists, executive produced this documentary portrait. The result is a warm and generous chronicle that occasionally veers on the hagiographic side.

The death of U-Roy was announced on 17 February 2021. A year on, the reappearance of his oft-reissued 1971 debut album Version Galore brings the opportunity to celebrate the music which brought him his earliest success; the music which propelled him into Jamaica’s top ranks.

Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college, prospects were strictly limited. The movie Saturday Night Fever captured this social decay, illustrating the crisis of confidence that suffused so many big Western cities.

The title borrows from the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s August 1978 debut single “Hong Kong Garden”: “Harmful elements in the air, Symbols clashing everywhere.” It also refers to Marcus Garvey’s prediction that on 7 July 1977 two sevens would clash with damaging consequences, a forewarning acknowledged that year by Culture’s Two Sevens Clash album.

Three films, each restored to glorious 4K, make up Second Run’s Hungarian Masters set. Billed as “essential works by three of Hungarian cinema’s most renowned filmmakers”, each film earns that praise in its own way.

The archive release which had the greatest impact, and still does, was Linda Smith’s Till Another Time 1988-1996. After it turned up, the reaction to a first play was instant. How could this have escaped attention? The compilation opened the door on a brilliant artist, one previously known to a particular audience.