Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption.

“Dorian Benediction” begins with a muted organ and spectral chorale. Minimal drums, an electric piano, vibes, melancholy saxophone and a jazzy solo guitar fill out the picture. Over its four-and-a-half minutes, the atmosphere is haunted and haunting. This is music which appears to have seeped from the walls of a baroque church. It’s the final track of The Free Design’s third album, 1969’s Heaven / Earth.

"Three plus versions of the same album. It’s ridiculous, but I’m glad.” The first paragraph of Richard Hell’s text in the booklet accompanying Destiny Street Complete lays it out. There are, indeed, three versions of his and his band The Voidoids’s July 1982 album Destiny Street on this double-CD set. It seems excessive.

The First Generation 1965–1974 is a 35-CD box set dedicated to the blues maven and propagator John Mayall. As well as the discs, there are three books: one a hardback, another reproducing fan club material, and the third a facsimile of the press pack for his first album. Also included are two posters and a signed photograph of Mayall. Five thousand copies have been made. As it sells for £275, the 3.8 kilogram The First Generation will not be a casual purchase.

Two of the four CDs in this set are of a live performance taped on 16 April 1964. The other pair of discs were recorded on 9 July 1975. Each show issued on Charles Mingus @ Bremen 1964 & 1975 was captured by the north German regional broadcaster Radio Bremen.

“They’re only rich assholes. They don’t merit your concern,” serial killer and psychopath Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet, Heal the Living), aka rich French gem-dealer Alain Gautier, tells his girlfriend Marie-Andrée in The Serpent as he steals passports and money from a couple of unconscious tourists he’s just drugged on a beach in Thailand in the mid-Seventies.

The winter solstice occurs tomorrow, 21 December. Stonehenge, one of this island’s most significant structures, is constructed in alignment with the setting sun on that day. After the solstice, the days lengthen and a new cycle of the year begins.

The fifth and final film in the Small Axe series is titled Education. At first, it appears this refers to the education of the central character, 12-year-old London boy Kingsley Smith, impressively played by Kenyah Sandy, who’s transferred to a disgraceful “School for the Educationally Subnormal” after being disruptive.

It didn’t take long for The Stooges to acquire an afterlife. They played their final show in February 1974. In May 1975, Nick Kent wrote a multi-page feature for NME on the ups and downs of Iggy Pop and Co. In September 1975, Sounds reviewed a new album by the defunct band titled Metallic KO. One side of it was recorded at that final show.

"What's happening?", or so Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) asks time and again in I'm Your Woman, voicing the very question posed by an audience. Bewilderment would seem to be a constant state of being in director and co-writer Julia Hart's film, which doesn't so much derive suspense from withholding information as revel in an opaque narrative that I, for one, tuned out of well before the close.