Music plays a big part in the life of Dwight, an 11-year-old black lad growing up in early 80s Leeds. He doesn't fit in at school, bullied because he is "slow", and he doesn't fit in outside school, would-be friends losing patience with him.

But he does fit in at home, loved unequivocally by a protective mother, somewhat enviously by a bickering sister, and rather reluctantly by a preoccupied father. Like the records he plays on the gramophone, his life is about to spin – and he'll have to hold on to the warmth of family love in a cold world.

Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a theme going back to the repressive Calvinist father and sexually anarchic teens of his wild Dutch hit, Spetters (1980).

Somewhere in the world right now, one can hear Mister Mister's AOR hit, "Broken Wings" on an MOR radio station, capturing mid-Eighties synth pop perfectly. Few listeners will know that its inspiration is a 1912 autobiographical novel by Lebanese-American poet, Kahlil Gibran. A source that worked for a four-minute pop song has now been extended by two hours and made into a West End musical. Stranger ideas have worked – unfortunately, this one doesn't.

Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive. Suddenly, South Korea is beginning to look like a powerhouse in the making, with consecutive big ratings hits with Squid Game and now Hellbound.

It’s Christmas 1971 in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and pastor Russ Hildebrandt has plans for time alone with Frances, an attractive young widow who’s just moved back into town.

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, is a familiar, ancestral tale: the story of Mehar, living in late 1929 in rural Punjab, is narrated alongside that of her unnamed descendant in 1999, who has grown up in England. Despite the hardships endured by the book's protagonists (arranged marriage and heroin withdrawal, respectively), it is a gentle, if not particularly gripping read.

There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the wilderness. “Men will never be my owners again.”

This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways. It stands out not only for its hypnotic quality as a film that feels like that of an already formed auteur, as well as for the complex psychological portrait of its central female character, but also, rather more paradoxically, for the environment from which it has emerged.

How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to represent the saviour of humankind without his swaddling clothes. The book is a miniature portrait in itself, running for fewer than 50 pages and punctuated by a series of evocative drawings by the artist Louise Bourgeois.

Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the historical scope of Judith Herrin’s wide-roving history. From the gem-like “Mausoleum” of Galla Placidia (425-50) to the flowery meadows of S Apollinare in Classe’s apse, consecrated in 549, covers little over a century of the nearly five covered here – 160 pages out of 399.