This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.

They don’t make films like Red Psalm any more. They rarely made them then either. In Red Psalm (1971), Miklós Jancsó imagined a corner of a Hungarian field in 1898 in which the forces of revolution were pitted against the uniformed, armed and often mounted might of the establishment. But unlike a regular piece of schlock-heroic agitprop, Jancsó envisions an encounter that is somewhere between a ballet and a debate, a folk opera and a game of toy soldiers.

Once upon a time - and for a very long time, at that, under its hard-line Marxist leader, Enva Hoxha - world cinema was represented in Albania by Norman Wisdom. Today, 26 years after Hoxha's death and 21 years after the fall of Communism there, Durrës, the country's second largest city, has just hosted an international film festival whose guests included Francis Ford Coppola, Jiří Menzel and Claudia Cardinale. Times are changing, it would seem, and Albania is emerging at last from its wretched isolation into sophisticated cosmopolitan glamour. Though not quite as quickly or smoothly as everyone had hoped.

When I interviewed the great Hungarian film-maker István Szabó (b 1938) in his native Budapest, he took me on a tour of the city centre on the Pest side of the Danube. On the way we were distracted by a flashy café designed to lure tourists. It was called Mephisto – after the film by Szabó, presumably, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1981. “I don’t know if it’s named after the film," he said, "but I think it must be because they have used the same typeface.” Then he added, “I’ve never been in there.”

A subtly haunting and brilliantly composed photograph by André Kertész lives on as a wistfully memorable image of exile: in Lost Cloud, 1937, a small, isolated cloud drifts we know not where next to a New York skyscraper. Kertész is one of the quintet of Hungarian Jewish photographers who are acknowledged as among the greatest of the last century. Kertész, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi and Brassaï are the most familiar among the staggeringly accomplished Hungarian photographers who feature in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Eyewitness.

"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other starting point. There's talk later in Wesker's three acts (taken here with only one interval) of seeing people in the round, which is exactly what the writing, not to mention Cooke's superlative ensemble, manages to do: the political and the personal conjoined in a compassion that one might describe as clear-eyed if only it didn't prompt from an audience such honestly earned tears.

If there's one thing Hollywood hates more than people bootlegging its latest blockbusters on mobile phones, it's letting a lucrative franchise go to waste. Thus, after the initial three X-Men films and 2009's Wolverine spin-off, you are invited to roll up for the prequel, skippered by Brit director Matthew Vaughn, of Layer Cake and Kick-Ass fame.

This remarkable 1988 adaptation of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with Alice addressing the audience. “This is a story for children,” she tells us, before adding a teasing note: “Perhaps.” And that “perhaps” is worth noting, for Jan Švankmajer’s Surrealist Alice is full of cruel and violent incident.

Paring the story down and dispensing with many of its most memorable characters – the Duchess, the Mock Turtle and the Cheshire Cat among them – the story becomes a disturbing duel between Alice and the White Rabbit. We first encounter the creature not hurrying across the lawn, but as a stuffed ornament in the corner of her cluttered bedroom, its protruding eyes and loudly clattering teeth suggesting an animated skull.

In his gold-braided red jacket and top hat, the White Rabbit’s role as a sinister circus ringmaster corralling the action is continually undermined by Alice. It is Alice who steers the narrative, speaking each of the characters’ lines while the camera homes in on her mouth, momentarily suspending the action. By the end of the film, one gains an insight into why this innovative Czech avant-garde film-maker was banned from his craft by Communist authorities in 1972. The absurd trial near the film’s end is defiantly resisted as Alice refuses to read a pre-prepared script. At the film’s ambiguous close we see her relishing the prospect of revenge: she prepares to act as the Rabbit's executioner, thereby turning the tables on him.

Mixing inventive stop-action animation with a live actor and animals – hens, a squawking piglet, porcupines – the film is full of brilliantly choreographed animated sequences: bird skulls hatch from a boxful of eggs; a slab of raw meat jumps out of a pot and slithers across the kitchen top; socks burrow in and out of holes in a floorboard in a flamboyant dance; and a huge frog swats real wasps with its fat tongue. Meanwhile, sound effects are exaggerated – the insistent ticking of a watch, the sharp clanking of a threatening pair of scissors - lending the film its hallucinogenic quality.

Immersing us further into dream-logic are Alice’s constant physical frustrations – the knobs of drawers always come off in her hand, and her miniature incarnation is as a tiny, helpless porcelain doll. Alice was Švankmajer’s first feature-length film, and this is the first time (with English subtitles) it’s been available for home viewing. If you’re a lover of alternative Hollywood directors such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, you can see what influenced them right here in this supremely imaginative and eerie retelling of Carroll’s tale.

Extras include a nine-minute 1903 film of Alice in Wonderland, the very first film adaptation of the story, and Elsie and the Brown Bunnie, a humorous Cadbury advert from 1921, in which a giant "Bourneville" rabbit takes Alice as his guest to the Cadbury's chocolate factory.  

ALICE'S ADVENTURES ON STAGE AND SCREEN

Alice, Scottish Ballet. It should be a capital crime to attempt an Alice ballet - off with their heads

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet. Even the best butter would not help this plot-less evening

Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Barbican. Gerald Barry's crazy velocity berserks both Alice books in rude style

Alice in Wonderland. Tim Burton takes on the fantasy classic

Alice in Wonderland, BBCSO, Brönnimann, Barbican. A curious tale gets a riotous operatic telling from composer Unsuk Chin

Alice Through the Looking Glass. Mia Wasikowska (pictured), Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp back in inventive if unfaithful Carroll sequel

Jan Švankmajer's Alice. The great Czech animator's remarkable first full-length film

wonder.land, National Theatre. Damon Albarn’s Alice musical has fun graphics, but a banal and didactic storyline

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Alice