Armed American soldiers stand in the stone window frames of a ruined building in Berlin, curious and disturbing echoes of those classical statues that so often were used to add portentous significance to a facade; but here in a 1961 photograph by Don McCullin, they are overlooking, with some intensity, the East German military on the other side. The Wall has just been built.

Of all the curdled classics made during the neo-noir wave of the Seventies and early Eighties - including Klute, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and The Postman Always Rings Twice - Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is the most neglected.

More phantasmagorically beautiful than it ever had any right to be given its subject, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now begins as a nightmare, or a delirium, with thup-thup-thupping helicopters ghosting in and out of the frame in front of the jungle and wisps of yellow smoke rising in the foreground. Cymbals, noodling guitar and a tambourine played by The Doors on the track preface the voice of Jim Morrison, who exhaustedly croons the opening lines of “The End”. An unseen napalm strike suddenly engulfs the palm trees.

A maypole greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; don’t expect a cheery celebration of spring, though. Nancy Spero’s installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008) is a scream of rage against violence and its hapless victims. Dangling from coloured ribbons, dozens of decapitated heads hang in the air like an explosion of shrapnel. Mouths gape open in pain and terror - or is it hatred? One can’t be sure, since some seem to be spitting venom from bloody tongues as though, even in their death throws, they are intent on spreading a gospel of vengeance and destruction.

Published in 1987, Norwegian Wood was the novel that turned Haruki Murakami from writer to celebrity in his native Japan. With over 12 million copies sold internationally and a cult of devoted readers waiting fretfully, the notoriously unfilmable book finally makes its screen debut under the direction of Tran Anh Hung. Described by the author simply as “a love story”, this most conventional of Murakami’s narratives picks through the emotional detritus of a teenage suicide, exposing the strands of grief and sexuality that bind our hero Watanabe to the women in his life.

This debut feature by writer/director Thomas Ikimi was shot in 22 days on an infinitesimal budget, and while it's easy to point out some obvious flaws, it's far more constructive to look at what Ikimi has achieved. Chiefly, he wrote a script intriguing enough to lure Idris Elba on board, and he not only agreed to play the central role of Malcolm Gray, but additionally gave the project a hefty professional shove.

Americans apparently revere their great racehorses, especially if they carry their weight in socio-political resonance - or its absence. Thus, the $58 million-grossing Secretariat, about the powerful red chestnut with the inordinately huge heart whose bid to win the 1973 US Triple Crown supposedly diverted attention from Watergate and Vietnam, arrived comparatively quickly after Seabiscuit, the 2003 Best Picture Oscar nominee and second film about the undersized knobbly-kneed bay who thrilled Americans during the Great Depression.

Who would have thought that the self-described "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" better known as Hair would have proven over the years to be such a tricky customer? A defining template of the 1960s (the original cast album was one of the soundtracks of my youth), this counter-culture mother lode has spawned more cheesy revivals than some people have, well, hair.