Thirty years ago this month, the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 pits that were deemed "uneconomic", a decision which would incur the loss of 20,000 jobs. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, responded by calling a strike that would become the longest industrial dispute in British history. It was also probably the most bitter, as the recollections of the former miners and their wives assembled for this documentary painfully demonstrated.

It is the fate of political leaders to be played by actors. In the circumstances Richard Nixon hasn’t been dealt a bad hand. He has been portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, by Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon on stage and screen and by tall handsome Christopher Shyer in Clint Eastwood’s J Edgar. But towering over them all is Harry Shearer, who has been impersonating Tricky Dicky since Nixon was actually president.

For a film that opened with Ai Weiwei’s statement, “Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one,” there was an irony in the fact that Andreas Johnsen’s Big Brother Watching Me… started practically without words. When the artist was freed in June 2011 following 80 days in prison, one of the conditions of his release was that he would not talk to journalists. For a while we wondered if this Storyville film might be purely observational, without an utterance from its central character.

Having brought us to the end of Homeland, Channel 4 are hoping lightning will strike twice by introducing another American series based on an Israeli original. Where Homeland was the American version of Hatufim, Hostages is derived from Bnei Aruba, made by Israel's Channel 10, who sold the format to CBS before the original had even been completed.

It took the last 16 years of Nelson Mandela’s life, almost to the day, to bring his autobiography to the screen. South African producer Anant Singh eventually handed Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to British director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson to make a film for international audiences. The iconic weight of a violent rebel who became a living saint can’t wholly be thrown off in this authorised (though freely made) biopic. It does, though, remind you that Nelson Mandela was very far from Mother Teresa.

It’s been a confusing week for British fans of Borgen. As they prepared to say farewell to Birgitte Nyborg and co, their beloved statsminister’s factual avatar was trending in the global media. If you know your Borgen, Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie with a President and a Prime Minister looked more like a brilliant script idea than a pesky news item.

This political satire is hardly a case of rapid-response playwriting. Opening in London's West End last night, after a month touring the regions,The Duck House is a farce about a fictional MP caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal which hit the headlines way back in 2009. One certainly might have expected Dan Patterson (of TV’s topical Mock the Week) and Colin Swash (from Have I Got New for You) to have been swifter out of the blocks in co-authoring the script.

Special Dialogue is a frothy, lunchtime news-and-chat programme on Indonesia's national television channel. One day – not a special day – its bubbly female anchor hosted three older men. One was called Anwar Congo. She smilingly introduces them by saying “Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating communists. It was more humane, less sadistic and avoided excessive violence.” It’s one chilling moment amongst many in a powerful film.

There is a wonderful play to be written about the month in 1502 when Cesare Borgia was holed up in a castle in northern Italy with Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli. Which of these two was working for the fearsome Borgia? Wrong. It was the creator of the Mona Lisa, not the author of The Prince. Machiavelli was a young diplomat of the new Florentine republic without a thought of realpolitik in his idealistic young head. Meanwhile back in Tuscany another young republican was working on that symbol of civic liberty, the statue of David.

Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital is the place where both JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald died and it serves as the central setting for the most recent film to investigate the assassination of the 35^th President. Former journalist Peter Landesman directs and approaches this much pored-over incident with a fresh perspective by putting the doctor who operated on the President, the man who filmed the footage of the assassination, the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald and the special agent in charge of security under the microscope.