Three years ago this month, the first protests against the brutal dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi broke out. On October 20 2011, the tyrant was finally caught, and mobile phone footage of his bloody and abused last minutes went viral. His regime, in power since 1969, was no more. For a while, the streets of Tripoli were filled with optimism and hope. All thought peace and change had come.

In 1920, Man Ray, now better known for his solarized photographs, produced a sculpture made from found objects. L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse, named after the 19th-century French poet who used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, is a sewing machine wrapped in a wool blanket and tied with string. The title refers to the poet’s evocation of the strange, even threatening beauty of familiar objects in startling juxtaposition, and is a line later adopted by André Breton to suggest Surrealist dislocation.

Mali has been in the news this year: music was under serious threat from the fundamentalism that spread through the north of the country and ransacked parts of the ancient city of Timbuktu. The jihadists are hardly music-lovers and Mali’s creative community, one of the most productive in Africa, stood firm while feeling the cold winds of Islamist repression, and reacted with characteristic vigour. The griots or jalis of West Africa have always sung alongside the just warriors, giving them courage with their heart-warming music

She has been called “Africa’s greatest diva” but as DJ Nihal giving the award of Artist of the Year at this year’s Songlines Awards to Angélique Kidjo pointed out the word “diva” is a loaded one, and makes you think of Mariah Carey’s backstage tantrums. Not that there’s aren’t African divas – the imperious Oumou Sangare, for one, but Kidjo is more known her down-to-earth pragmatism and idealism.

Jane Bussmann may not be an immediately familiar name to some, but you will know her work. The writer, who was once a celebrity journalist, has been part of the writing teams for South Park, Smack the Pony and Brass Eye, among other quality television comedies, and wrote a hilarious memoir, The Worst Date Ever, about how a reckless whim took her to war-torn Uganda, where she helped unveil the appalling crimes of rebel leader Joseph Kony.

Doris Lessing’s storm-tossed life would make a stirring biopic. She spent her early years on an isolated farm in the Southern Rhodesian veldt, abandoned the children of her first marriage to take up with a German communist refugee during the war, then left for London, became a single mother with a third young child, and had her lifelong battles with her own mother. Much of it is recorded in the Children of Violence tetralogy about her literary alter-ego Martha Quest.

Earlier this year we saw Tobias Lindstrom's A Hijacking, a Danish-made thriller based on true events, about a freighter hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Featuring familiar faces from Borgen and The Killing, the film skipped the part where the vessel was seized, and focused on the excruciating and seemingly infinite negotiations between the hijackers and the shipping company in Copenhagen. Harrowing and claustrophobic, it evoked the sufferings of the crew incarcerated below decks while businessmen calculated what value they could afford to ascribe to their lives.

But Hollywood isn't interested in all that, and instead has fastened upon the juicy hero-battles-the-odds story of Captain Richard Phillips. He was in command of the container ship Maersk Alabama, which ran into the seaborne Somali menace in 2009 while en route for Mombasa, and Captain Phillips is based on his book about the episode. The Alabama's crew put up some resistance, but weren't able to prevent their captain being taken hostage on one of the ship's lifeboats.

The drama is so enveloping that you're hooked from intro to final credits

It's a powerful premise for an action thriller, and director Paul "Bourne" Greengrass makes the perfect man for this particular season (his father was a merchant seaman, as it happens). As the maker of earlier innocent-citizens-in-jeopardy dramas Bloody Sunday and United 93, as well as the Iraq war mystery Green Zone, Greengrass has burnished his credentials as a director of turbocharged action thrillers grounded in real life events, with a greater or lesser degree of political controversy bubbling along in the background.

The politics in Captain Phillips has been turned down to a low simmer while Greengrass concentrates on action and character, but the story is "political" simply by virtue of having taken place. It's located in the hot zone where a web of international interests clash, where Al Qaeda is ominously active in the Horn of Africa, and where any American ship might easily be construed as a provocation. Greengrass gives us a brief introductory scene where Phillips (Tom Hanks) is driving to the airport from his home in Vermont to fly out to Oman to join his ship. He and his wife (Catherine Keener) chat about their children and family stuff, but the undertone of anxiety about his voyage into the watery badlands is unmissable.There's an equally economical set-up sequence of the Somali pirates ashore. They're depicted as impoverished, desperate and driven to bloody competition by bandit leaders to fight for places on the hijacking boats, which amount to their own brutalised version of the National Lottery. They're all zapped on khat, which they chew perpetually. The convergence of the twain unfolds inexorably amid steadily-ratcheting tension, with Greengrass deploying juddering hand-held camerawork and seasickness-evoking speed-cutting to formidable effect.

After a spate of recent hijackings, Phillips is tense from the off, scouring the internet for information and keeping a close watch on radar. When he sees two blips coming up fast astern, you feel his adrenalin-jolt of alarm. He triggers emergency manoeuvres and prepares the ship's array of fire-hoses to ward off the approaching boarders, and it's hard to grasp how a handful of pirates in battered wooden skiffs could ever pose a threat to a towering ocean-going leviathan like the Alabama. But... (Boarders ahoy, pictured below)

A battle of wits ensues as Phillips lures the pirates, led by the sinister and skeletal Muse (Barkhad Abdi), away from where the rest of his crew are hiding, and tries futilely to buy them off with the wad of cash in the Alabama's safe. Fast forward to the skipper in the lifeboat with the bandits, heading back to the Somali coast, as the episode escalates into a major international incident. Soon the little craft is surrounded by a US Navy task force, while a SEAL team (appropriately led by Max Martini, reprising his character from TV's The Unit) is parachuted in to take control. As the pirates grow increasingly hysterical and unstable, the Navy remorselessly turns the screw. The director subtly plants the question of how much force is too much, and lets you take it away with you.

At 134 minutes this isn't a short film, but the drama is so enveloping and the pulse so skilfully controlled that you're hooked from intro to final credits. Hanks comfortably commands both his ship and the trajectory of Phillips's ordeal, but even if he hadn't there was no way Greengrass was going to slacken his grip. This is a cracking good thriller, even if it does perforce view the world through Hollywood-tinted glasses.

TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)

A Hologram for the King. Tom Hanks is the reason to see Dave Eggers's sentimental Saudi comedy

Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance

Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic

Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson as PL Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney track the journey of Mary Poppins from page to screen

Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism

Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission

PLUS ONE TURKEY

Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Captain Phillips

Congo has been where European adventurers have for generations gone in search of fortune. Probably not making a fortune, historian Dan Snow, an affable, energetic sort, was keen to tell us about this vast country, the size of Western Europe and these days known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, previously Zaire, before that Belgian Congo.

Bruce Goodison has been responsible for some of the more impressive television of the last decade, sometimes drama, sometimes straight documentary, and sometimes drama-documentary, like his Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. He was back in the latter genre in Channel 4’s powerful Siege in the Sahara, bringing the heightened tension of fictional reconstruction to the story of the assault on the Algerian gas plant at In Amenas by terrorists in January this year.

You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the sexiest, most charismatic figure to emerge from the whole world music phenomenon.