Monday night’s first episode of this three-part series was a bit ordinary, as it introduced its cast of British recreational cocaine users and explained why their habit may be ill-advised.

This was the first of a two-part investigation into... well, I don't know what. The voiceover of High Society: Cannabis Café said it was an experiment “to test the alleged benefits of weed” and the people featured all had “a personal motivation for getting stoned” as they visited an Amsterdam coffee shop, where dope is sold legally.

The high, crackhead days of James Frey (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are over in five adrenalized minutes, as he dances naked to the Smashing Pumpkins, then tumbles insensibly backwards from a ledge.

The trend-hopping taste-makers who run British literary publishing have lately decided that “working-class” writing merits a small dole of their precious time and cash. To assess how long this latest patronising fad may last, check out the availability of James Kelman’s fiction: three decades of ground-breaking modernist work by a scrupulous innovator, now all but buried by Penguin, and largely consigned (a couple of titles apart) to second-hand limbo.

Being a teenager used to be fun, allegedly, but for the young cast of HBO’s controversial new hit series Euphoria it looks more like a nightmare ride through a theme park of bad trips.

Soundwalk Collective is a multi-disciplinary audio-visual collective founded by Stephan Crasneanscki, a musical psycho-geographer and field recorder, the source material of his works drawn from specific locations: in the case of The Peyote Dance, it's the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico, also known as "Copper Canyon", and as spectacular a wilderness as you can imagine.

Rocketman opens with its hero in flamboyant stage costume stomping into a drab group therapy session. Pulling the sparkling horns off his magnificent head-dress and shuffling his feathered wings into a seat, Elton John demands of his fellow addicts, ‘How long is this going to take?’ The intimidated counsellor replies, ‘That’s really up to you’.

There’s a touch of Fellini’s 8 ½ in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film. It’s a forlorn, confessional tale, with Antonio Banderas starring as Salvador Mallo, a director in the latter stages of his career. His character acts as a cypher for Almodóvar, allowing him to wrestle with themes of love, loss, and addiction.

“Do you know why I’m respected?” demands Ursula (Carmiña Martinez), a Wayuu matriarch in La Guajira in northern Colombia, of Rapayet (José Acosta), who wants to marry her daughter Zaida (Natalia Reyes, soon to star in James Cameron’s Terminator reboot). “Because I’m capable of anything for my family and my clan.”

Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to South America and the southern United States, the most well known of which are the diminutive peyote and the distinctively tubular San Pedro.