There’s nothing more affecting in a 2015 British film than Freddie Jones reciting John Clare’s “I Am” in By Our Selves, the documentary scene that concludes Andrew Kötting’s semi-fictional paean to the Romantic poet of enclosure-traumatised agrarian England. Jones memorised the poem for his portrayal of Clare in a dramatised 1970 Omnibus instalment, ironic sound bites from which Kötting wove into his film’s aural tapestry.

Marvellous reviews itself in its title. The story of Neil Baldwin starring Toby Jones was – and is, because you should catch it while you can on iPlayer – simply marvellous. As a dramatic character Neil Baldwin could be mistaken for unremarkable. He has no hidden depths. Positioned somewhere along the autistic spectrum, he is apparently away with the fairytales, but his grandiose fantasies mostly happened to be true.

With site-specific shows it’s a natural urge to start by reviewing the location. And I’m not strong enough to resist this temptation. So here goes. This new piece by American playwright Annie Baker takes place at the Rose Lipman building in Haggerston, north London. This is a community centre, and first impressions are not encouraging: duck-egg blue walls, dirty windows, faded carpet squares, discoloured ceiling tiles, encrusted neon strips, cluttered notice boards. Don’t go if you feel depressed.

The BBC makes a habit of dramatising the difficult lives of those who have entertained us – tortured comedians, anguished singers, even troubled cooks. Whatever you make of their merits, the message accumulating across all these biodramas is that the audience’s pleasure comes at the cost of the artist’s pain. Or as Alfred Hitchcock put it in The Girl, “Who pays our wages? The audience.”

Berberian Sound Studio has the quirky flavour of an academic treatise on shlock horror with lively slide illustrations. Peter Strickland’s claustrophobic homage to the Italian giallo – in which diabolical dismemberings are perpetrated upon female innocents - would seem an odd leap from Katalin Varga, his brooding revenge drama set in rural Romania. But both films bring an outsider’s all but ethnographic eye to the rituals of Euro-barbarity. The game changer is that Berberian Sound Studio is also funny.

If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores.

Gary Oldman's shrewd and skilful portrayal of mole-hunter George Smiley has prompted excitable Oscar gossip, but the biggest success of Tinker Tailor... is its creation of a melancholy sealed world where the common currency is secrets, lies and disillusion. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson has brought a supernaturally observant eye to jaded 1970s London, where a disgraced Smiley is brought back to the Circus (John le Carré's pet name for MI6) to conduct a clandestine probe for the traitor leaking secrets to Moscow.

Tomas Alfredson’s riveting, stately adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy novel is an immaculately measured teaser, delivered one carefully heaped spoonful at a time. Primped, polished and with the tension ratcheted up a notch for the big screen, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a high-wire tight introduction to a group of men who live their lives in guarded apprehension. It’s populated by an all-star cast, led by a formidably restrained Gary Oldman as - watcher of the watchmen - George Smiley.

Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in lockstep and Nazi banners unfurling from windows would all be on it. If there is, Christopher and His Kind last night was following it - but then it also wrote it.

Christopher Isherwood is responsible as much as anyone for our perceptions of the period, but after decades of cinematic and theatrical adornments and encounters in this mode, a production of Isherwood's memoir cannot help but seem hackneyed, a victim of its own style. Still, returning to the source (in Kevin Elyot's adaptation) at least allows us to understand that before the style there was a story.

The story, rather depressingly, is of a one-man universe, of the complete selfishness of Isherwood (Doctor Who's Matt Smith) amid decadence and disaster in Berlin. It is a wildly unsympathetic part: Isherwood cannot see the world beyond his penis. The film shows this very well, both in the vivid yet unerotic sex scenes (this film will be heaven for Doctor Who slash fiction fans) and in the whirling and unexpected camera angles, which replicate the novelty and horror of everything to Isherwood, who is unworldly - or uninterested.

Isherwood is politically uninterested, certainly - despite great chunks of exposition from other characters (your heart falls when you get another GCSE history class) and their urgent moral opinions, Isherwood fails to stir himself at the rise of the Nazis, and even seeing the Nazis beat up someone hardly motivates him. He checks out a Nazi at an adjacent urinal, for God's sake. A wealthy Jew challenges him about opting out from "the messy business of living" in favour of art.

It takes a bravura scene of book-burning for him to contemplate the "shame, shame" he mutters about: both the Nazis' and his own. The scene works so well because, although we often hear about it, the dragging of carts of books, the enthusiasm of the arsonists, the random pages of books thrown up into the night sky on the force of the fire are rarely as vivid to us. (Having Wilde and Mann's books on the pyre, licked by flames, was probably overdoing it.)

But even after this it seems that he is emotionless. He cannot understand how his boyfriend will not leave Berlin and his brother - Isherwood found it easy enough to leave his own brother with their shrewish mother. He wants to get his boyfriend out of Germany, but confesses to being slightly relieved when he is deported from England, facing an uncertain fate. Matt Smith is able to take on the unpleasantness, even the deadness, of his interior as Isherwood appears more of a monster, and every time his heart does not break, Smith manages to make him look almost sorry for it.

Imogen Poots plays Jean Ross, the inspiration for Sally Bowles, and when they meet in Knightsbridge before the war, she flashes him her copy of his book, glad that he has cannibalised her life, just like he has turned Toby Jones's preening queen into literary fodder. Like much of the rest of the film, and Isherwood confesses this at the start and towards the end, we are watching his memories, not fact, and only in his mind could Ross feel this way. Poots and Jones humiliate Smith in their emotional shading, but Smith never stood a chance by pouring himself into this chilling man, even though he does so convincingly.

Isherwood leaves, and not just Berlin - he goes to California. In a late scene in his Seventies Californian apartment, he confesses that he was isolated but says that he was helping the cause of gay rights without realising it at the time (by screwing a series of models from Vogue tableaux, according to this film). In his political, financial, social, sexual safety, this comes across as base self-justification a million years and a million miles after he fled. I suspect the director wants us to have some sympathy for Isherwood, with a touching shot of a meaningful Berlin-era clock, but after this film, sympathy is denied to the man who denied sympathy to all others.

Joseph Mallord William Turner - Billy to his intimates, such as he had - is the notional centre of The Painter, a snapshot of the great British landscape artist as a young iceberg. Toby Jones is the main draw in this world premiere of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's new play, and he emanates quiet charisma and sardonic wit. But it's the women in his life who get the better scenes and who steal the show.

Success came early to Turner. In 1799, when the play begins, he was still in his mid-twenties but had been exhibiting watercolours at the Royal Academy for nearly a decade – possibly buying his paints from the Colourworks Reeves factory in Dalston, north-east London, a building which, in a very neat marketing manoeuvre, is also the Arcola Theatre's brand-new premises; a high-ceilinged, unfinished but striking bare-brick space.

There was more going on that year. Turner had just moved into a new studio with his devoted father whom the play and performances induce you to take for a kindly, devoted manservant until late in the game. His mother, Mary, meanwhile, was drifting into madness. In 1799 she entered Saint Luke's Hospital, but would die in Bedlam.

This was also the probable year of Turner's best-known self-portrait (pictured above), deliberately channelled in the publicity shot (pictured left) of Jones for the Arcola's production. But painted Turner is handsome, romantic - intense, to be sure, but also a little suave and patrician. Jones's Turner is unshaven, rumpled, scowling, a bit of rough. When he opens his gob, he's pure East End barrow boy. "I thought Turner was posh!" sighed a woman behind me.

Turner's father, we learn, was from the lower orders: a wig-maker who lost his trade when wigs fell from fashion, one reason no doubt for his devoted support of his son as a new meal ticket. There are also references to a world in turmoil ("Town was mad again") from the Napoleonic Wars, and Turner is cramming Dutch, perhaps on account of his lifelong passion for Holland's art. Rebecca Lenkiewicz's play is full of such elliptical detail. But - with only seven characters - it's very much a chamber piece.

As a rule, Turner didn't do portraits. In the play, he calls it "face painting". He didn't do people much, come to that. "Your heart's a hole, Billy," his mother says. The short, fragmented scenes make it hard to engage with the character, particularly in the first half (under the aegis of the Arcola Theatre's artistic director Mehmet Ergen, the scene changes in this almost-in-the-round production aren't always as swiftly and smoothly managed as they could be).

From time to time Turner holds forth to the members of the Royal Academy on his theories of art, full of contempt for the no-talent nobs, his mind never quite on the task in hand. Then, at the end, he turns to address the audience on his breathtakingly ahead-of-its-time Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1810-1812, now in the Tate Britain and pictured right): "The sun is God and it's a battle. Or dark against light... And... the light has to win."

This should be Turner's big, redeeming, barnstorming speech: a transcendent vision of sublimity, the victory of hope over despair. But at first you assume it's just another of his boring lectures. And far from being the intended coup de théâtre, you can barely make out the slide projection of the painting on the back wall.

So look to the women to pick up the slack. The play has three of them. Turner's mother, Mary (Amanda Boxer) lost her wits when she lost her adored daughter; her son treats her ambivalently and she returns the favour. Jenny Cole, an Irish prostitute (Denise Gough), poses for him and they form an intimate, curiously Platonic relationship which he ultimately betrays.

Sarah Danby (Niamh Cusack), a widowed actress clinging onto respectability, tries to domesticate Turner and unsurprisingly finds him a lost cause. They are all - especially the first two - given stonking, emotional scenes. In a production bursting overall with talent and ideas, all that's needed is for Turner's elusive being, as mazey as his explosions of painterly light, to be brought more clearly into focus.