Does a review of a 25-year-old film need a spoiler alert? Much of the success of The Crying Game – its 1992 release earned both six Oscar nominations and huge box office returns (although not enough to save its producers from bankruptcy) – is due to its mid-narrative revelation that one of its central characters is not quite as they first appeared.

This new wartime drama launched on Remembrance Sunday is a curio. The setting of My Mother and Other Strangers is rural Northern Ireland in 1943, where it’s green and wet and a long way from the conflict. Into the midst of the fictional Moybeg on the shore of a lough a squadron of bombers from the USAF has been introduced. Their planes careen across the cloudy skies of a farming community where previously the loudest noises would have been the mooing of heifers in labour, while their pilots swarm into the pub and the fleapit. So they’re the strangers of the title.

Do we see enough in the UK of continental European drama in translation? No. Is what we actually get the best? Probably not in the case of popular German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest. Still, it's rendered into pithy, convincing vernacular by no less a writer than Conor McPherson, well enough directed by Ian Rickson and plausibly characterised by two fine Irish actors.

Although the reformed Undertones, with Paul McLoone replacing original singer Feargal Sharkey, have been a popular live draw since 1999, John Peel’s anointing of “Teenage Kicks” from their debut EP as his favourite recording suggests this is what they were about: a single, timeless song.

There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.

The Barbican has built a steady reputation for almost unclassifiable large-scale art exhibitions, particularly in architecture, design and photography: they have been underestimated pioneers, often working in areas themselves under-scrutinised. Thus they often manage to surprise, and so it is here.

Whatever one may feel about Bellini’s music, it’s hard to think of him as in any sense a political composer. So you could almost hear the hearts hit the floor when the curtain went up – or rather was as usual already up – on the opening of Bellini’s Puritani with Orangemen and a scruffy Catholic Arturo instead of good old Roundheads and Cavaliers. Surely Annilese Miskimmon isn’t trying to make Bellini relevant and meaningful, with Elvira’s madness as some kind of reductio ad absurdum of power-sharing.

“You’ll only be staying here until one of the paddies shoots you.” The blunt caution given to Private Gary Hook on his arrival in Belfast sets the tone for the army’s attitude towards where he’s been posted, and the tone of locals towards an army any of them might ostensibly join. The breathlessly hard-hitting ‘71 not only captures these tensions with flair, but does so from the incompatible, irreconcilable points of view of those caught up in and sucked into them.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton's musical was first seen in the West End in 2000, where it received mixed reviews and ran for just under a year. In 2009-10, they reworked the show for productions in Canada and South Africa under the title The Boys in the Photograph, and now it receives its first London revival in Union Theatre. Although it has the original title, Lotte Wakeham's spirited and thoroughly enjoyable production is essentially the revised version, with its more uplifting ending.

Director David MacKenzie has made a prison drama for those who don’t like the genre and an ace in the hole for those who do. Starred Up is an example of how quality filmmaking captures an audience no matter what the topic – and here, that quality includes skilful cinematography, a tight script and tremendous performances from both leading and supporting cast. The result is that we get to see how the horror of prison life reflects the violent pockets of society outside.