To make bricks you torment the soft, moist and fluid material of clay and sand in a prison of fire until it becomes dry, hard and unyielding. In Selva Almada’s rural Argentina, that’s also how you make – and break – men. Brickmakers is the third of her books translated as part of the expertly-curated series of contemporary Latin American literature published by the Edinburgh-based Charco Press.

Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like many authors before him, the Argentinian novelist and curator is also a bit obsessed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially as played by the maverick Canadian genius Glenn Gould. Well, Luis – snap.

Ever since Latin American cinema re-emerged in the 1990s from years in the shadow of dictatorships, films have been distinguished by a number of trends, including dramas about the dictatorship years and the social and psychological consequences; social and family dramas; the experience of young people; the quirks and characters of everyday life.

Following a triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ Superstar, now playing at the Barbican, the Park works its magic on another of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Seventies rock operas.

There's something unsatisfying about the fact that Asif Kapadia's new documentary on the controversial 1980s sporting legend Diego Maradona has a two-word title. It would have created a neat synchronicity with his previous two films (Amy and Senna), but we soon learn why this is the case.

Director Asif Kapadia's documentary on the controversial 1980s sporting legend Diego Maradona premiered at Cannes this week, and there's something unsatisfying about the fact it doesn't have a one-word title. It would have created a neat synchronicity with his previous two films (Amy and Senna), but we soon learn why this is the case.

Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early longeurs in her depiction of a downtrodden functionary hero who is existentially trapped in a crazed colonial world.

Played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, Don Diego de Zama has been festering for years as a magistrate in a riverside hell-hole that must be one of the Spanish Empire’s most far-flung possessions (apparently Paraguay, though geographical location is as loosely defined here as is the 18th century historical setting). If his tricorn hat and crimson jacket must have initially suggested an element of louche elegance, the rot obviously takes its toll on those who remain too long in these parts. It’s manifested in a distracted lethargy, with energy expended between apparently meaningless bureaucratic tasks and desultory engagement within this enclosed would-be garrison of civilisation.

The chaos of 'Zama' seems to be everywhere, and outside time

Beyond it lies the world of the natives, who are presented more as clusters that respond with servile obedience to any random demand than as individuals, and the diversion of a liaison with a local woman has given Zama a mestizo child. But any attachment there is as empty as the lackadaisical (and bruisingly futile) flirtation he carries on with the wife of a senior official. “Europe is best remembered by those who were never there,” she advises, perceptively highlighting the vacuity of society’s rituals copied in a location in which they can only ever be irremediably alien.

Zama’s every petition for relocation – at some stage in the past he has even acquired a wife and children in Buenos Aires, but their existence is vrtually fabular – is met by absurdist rebuttals that evince the particularly Kafkaesque bureaucracy that rules this remote corner of empire. The casual dismissal with which his requests are treated is nothing, however, to the casual brutality that pervades the whole colonial enterprise, in which human ears, supposedly cut from the corpse of a local bandit, are treated as a gambling token.  An adaptation of the 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, the film’s sense of absurdist confinement in a meaningless world surely recalls the work of the Argentinian writer's contemporary Samuel Beckett, as well as his literary master, Dostovesky. The existential gesture of escape that Zama takes in the film’s final reel changes the visual tone of Martel’s world almost beyond recognition. From the dusty, claustrophobic brown hues that define the settlement, his bedraggled group of adventurers sets out on a sort of Heart of Darkness journey into a luscious wilderness, the deceptive beauties of which disguise dangers lurking both without and within.

Portuguese cinematographer Rui Pocas captures those closing landscapes as almost hallucinogenic in their wide vistas: they seem to shatter any colonial illusion that the European interloper can ever find a place here. Martel is a director for whom sound has always been as important as image – if not more so – and both dominate here over text. Her sound designer Guido Berenblum melds the insistent sounds of nature into an aural fabric of dislocation, made all the more abtruse and disorientating by snatches of human speech that seem to hang in the air, neither dialogue nor voice-over in any traditional form. It’s a crazed sensual tapestry that is completed by easy contemporary guitar duo melodies (from Los Indios Tabajaras) that only emphasise their beguiling anomaly. Martel may compel us to accompany her legion of the lost on their particular 18th century journey, but the chaos of Zama seems to be everywhere, and outside time. Oneirically intense, it’s auteur filmmaking at its most ambitious.

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Overleaf: watch the preview for Zama

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die.

Watching tango dancers Gisela Galeassi and Nikito Cornejo own the apron of the stage during the second half of m¡longa, the brain finds it difficult to process what the eyes are seeing. The pair seem to be one writhing, dark-toned dervish of jutting, sensual, passionate movement. Back and forth they go, he spinning her round his body like a silk scarf, fluid as mercury; her feet attacking the stage, staccato, kicking out, kicking down, so fast it really is the proverbial blur. Nigh on two hours of tango with a 20-minute interval might sound like too much, but with only the smallest of lulls in interest, this show grips, from start to finish.

Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s international breakthrough was his award-winning 2008 collaboration, Sutra, with the artist Anthony Gormley and the Shaolin monks. He has since become a leading choreographer, always willing to explore global influences and sources. He’s revelled in the Hispanic before on the flamenco-themed Dunas, with Spanish dancer María Pagés but m¡longa is as very different affair, unwrapping the Argentinian tango and opening it out to a kind of visual concept album, based around six couples, coming together and apart, in different moods, in what we may imagine to be a Buenos Aires cityscape of streets, cafés and nightclubs.

The bandoneon-led sound of tango is an easy delight

As well as dancers, m¡longa utilises film and visuals to potent effect. There is a wonderful scene where a dancer stands with his back to us manipulating a giant screen of photos via gesture, like Tom Cruise in the film Minority Report. And another where dancers rush about trying to keep up with landscapes speeding past behind them, like Hollywood actors at the dawn of cinema comedy. On one occasion these visuals precede the show’s most enjoyable moment of outright clowning, when brightly auburn-haired dancer Vivana D’Attoma plays a woozy drunk, trying to pull the suavely dismissive, evening wear-clad Gabriel Bordon. Her floppy moves, precisely estimated, are a well-portrayed twist on the rest.

Some set pieces are isolated moments, such as the somehow shocking dance wherein Esther Garabali and Martin Epherra act out, via tango of course, an explosive relationship, bordering on the violent, or a sequence where three male dancers perform a particularly frantic, energetic routine. Other themes, however, run throughout, interspersed with the rest of the action. Particularly notable is the relationship between the couple played by Silvina Cortés and Damien Fournier who, often surrounded by the ensemble as an intrusive hubbub of night world activity, find each other, have a one-night stand, go their separate ways, and, perhaps, find one another again.

There's a minimum of props – a flag, a few chairs – and music plays a key role. The bandoneon-led sound of tango is an easy delight anyway, and composer Szymon Brzóska’s interpretation of it via a five-piece musical group, stage right, is well-estimated, bursting with life where required but also dropping to loose downtempo arrangements suitable for the more interpretive modern dances. M¡longa is an eyeful, and holds the attention with vim, vitality and sheer hard-practiced skill.

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Overleaf: Watch trailer for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui m¡longa

Flawlessly uniting atmosphere and melody is challenging. Especially so when creating music is approached unconventionally and with the desire to be individual. Having set her bar high, Juana Molina triumphs on all counts, again proving herself as a virtuoso artist who executes her vision with enviable assurance.