Father Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) calls himself one of God’s lonely men. The term given to Paul Schrader’s anti-heroes since Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is usefully explained by the priest: his loneliness is a divine attribute letting him sympathise with fellow sufferers. Take one look at Hawke’s face, though, which seems sucked into hollow-cheeked, unnatural nobility, and it’s clear few need help more than him.

To suggest an absence is to imply a presence. Philosophers, novelists, dictators, politicians – as well as almost every “ism” you can think of – take the stage in this absorbing, precisely and elegantly written study of various kinds of atheism. All assumptions are up for grabs, everything brought out into the light and questioned.

Mary Magdalene’s story hasn’t suddenly become the second greatest ever told, despite its radical expansion here. Garth Davis’s follow-up to Lion is, though, a profoundly thoughtful and convincing telling of the Christian main event.

“Would you like a veil?” asked a steward, offering a length of black gauze, and when you’re at a production by Birmingham Opera Company it’s usually wisest to say yes.

There’s a terrific drive to Kornél Mundruczó’s Jupiter’s Moon, a cinematic powerhouse of both technique and ideas. The maverick Hungarian director’s film, which premiered in last year’s Cannes competition, may occasionally bewilder – such is the spectrum of subjects upon which it touches – but rarely fails to impress.

The energy of its opening takes us right into the frantic disorder of Europe’s refugee crisis, as an attempted border crossing – a rush from a crowded lorry onto boats – is intercepted by troops. A single figure flees, only to be felled by gunfire, before rising into the sky in a whirl of levitation: in a moment Mundruczó has stepped away from realism into its magical variety. His young hero is Aryan (Zsombor Jéger, doleful, soulful), a Syrian refugee separated in the confusion from his father, whose bewildered negotiation of the new world that he has entered, one that will prove far from kind, provides the film’s sometimes surreal journey.

The youth’s new ability has not passed unnoticed. He’s pursued by the same security forces that failed to apprehend him, while falling into the care of refugee camp doctor Stern (played by Merab Ninidze, the Georgian actor last seen in the BBC’s McMafia, as pale as ever, pictured below with Jéger). The latter, with his own murky associations and a past to expiate, becomes something of a father-figure, though his motives – to hawk these miraculous talents around ailing patients, refreshing them with some new, transcendent wonder – are initially mercenary. But a closer bond gradually establishes itself between these two lost souls, despite the hesitant English that is their only means of communication (it’s a somewhat "Europudding" combination not enhanced by some haphazard doubling).Mundruczó and his co-writer Kata Wéber dial up the mystical element as the levitation scenes – they may not have quite the same angelic connotations as Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, but they’re not far off, either – bring religion into the equation, with Aryan (son of a carpenter, no less) pitched as a contemporary Christ figure. The world he has possibly come to redeem is sorely in need of said treatment, including a presentation of contemporary Hungary’s political extremism (as incisive as it was in Mundruczó’s previous film, the canine-themed White God), plus a plot cross-strand (ultimately rather extraneous) involving terrorism.

Technically it’s all extremely accomplished, from the levitation elements – what a long way a little CGI can go – to a terrific single-take car chase through the streets of Budapest, and a shape-shifting interior scene that surely riffs on Christoper Nolan’s Inception, all the product of outstanding cinematography from Marcell Rév. But all such invention on big visual elements would be nothing if the director didn’t convey the micro-mood of his world so well: its theme colour is a sickly nocturnal yellow, Mundruczó’s characters pallid and clearly still dealing with the traumas of the 20th century as well as the issues that the new one has brought. It’s a potent and somehow very European cocktail – the title’s allusion is to a planetary moon, apparently a cradle of possible new life forms, that is named after our continent – from a director who is never afraid to set his sights as high as his characters fly.

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Jupiter's Moons

One question dominates any staging of Dialogues des Carmélites. How will the production team deal with the cruelty and tragedy in the 12th and last scene when all of the nuns, one by one, go through with their vow of martyrdom and calmly proceed to the guillotine, singing the Salve Regina? No spoilers here, but this new production at Guildhall School (a very different one from that staged in 2011) sticks to a tone which is calm, and humane.

Rungano Nyoni’s debut feature premiered at last year’s Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, and immediately marked the Lusaka-born, Wales-raised director down as a figure to watch. Putting her film into any category is more challenging, though, with its elements of fable and somewhat surreal satire, although “surreal” and any associated hints of the absurd risk saying more about the perspective of the observer than the world Nyoni herself depicts.

But however you look at it, I Am Not a Witch is a startling, vibrant piece of filmmaking. Over a spare 90 minutes Nyoni follows her nine-year-old heroine on an unlikely journey: rejected from one community because she stands out as an unlucky outsider, she is attached to a state-supported witch colony, then exploited as a curiosity and for commercial ends by her semi-official “minder”. The name she is given by the community of much older women into which she is partly absorbed is Shula, which tellingly means “uprooted”. She’s outstandingly played by Maggie Mulubwa, a tribal girl found by Nyoni, whose silence through most of the film leaves her face to speak, indelibly, about unspoken fear and apprehension and plaintive bafflement.There’s such sadness there: the few moments when Shula seems to be discovering something about herself, for herself, are so tentative that the film’s conclusion almost comes as a tragic relief. In parallel to the wider position of women in society, Nyoni has come up with an unnerving central image for her community of witches: they are tethered on long ribbons, attached to huge bobbins, that supposedly prevent them from flying away. Her opening scene shows a witch camp (the director spent time in one such place, in Ghana) being visited by tourists, a pitiful place where impassive old women sit around apathetically, their faces daubed in white.

At least when they are taken out to work – they travel on a special lorry, converted to accommodate their bobbins, a bizarre and unforgettable sight – there’s a certain sense of community, of personality, laced with unlikely, sometimes dark humour (the visit of a wig-seller peddling the latest models, mis-named after US pop celebrities is just one such moment). Gin is another consolation for them. Surrounding official structures, nominally perhaps benign but in practice indifferent, are resolutely male, embodied by the rotund Mr Banda (Henry BJ Phiri, pictured above, centre) – he’s attached to “Tourism and Traditional Beliefs” – who exploits the girl for money, making her adjudicate village disputes or perform to bring on rain. He’s not actually cruel to her, though: his own wife is a “reformed” witch, having earned nominal respectability “because I did everything I was told” (she puts her bobbin in a supermarket trolley when she goes out).

This is a society in which superstition is a convenient garb for prejudice

Nyoni leaves the plentiful elements of mystery in her story to speak for themselves, not least because Shula remains the passive protagonist throughout, but there’s no escaping the fact that this is a society in which superstition is a convenient garb for prejudice. There’s an undeniable aesthetic consolation – not perhaps the right way of putting it – especially in the work of cinematographer David Gallego (previously seen in the no less strange jungle exploration of Embrace of the Serpent), whose compositions capture the arid beauty of the film's scrub landscapes and delight in its particular visual details. A score from Matthew James Kelly is dominated by treated Vivaldi effects for violin, complete with snatches of Schubert and Estelle’s “American Boy”. 

This DVD release includes two of Nyoni’s short films. From 2011, her 23-minute Mwansa the Great is a playful Zambia-set story of a village boy attempting to assume the mantle of his late father, in a family environment where the female presence, in the form his assertive younger sister, looms large. There are lovely moments that touch on the contrasting worlds of children and adults, a theme also there in Listen, from 2014. The 13-minute film, codirected with young Finnish-Iranian filmmaker Hamy Ramezan, was in Directors’ Fortnight too, its story of immigrant experience, and how past attitudes can’t be escaped even in new worlds, all the more chilling for the concentrated, formal control with which it is executed.

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the trailer for I Am Not a Witch

Faced with yet another new work premiered by the Borodin Quartet, Shostakovich asked a daunting question: "but have you played all of Haydn's quartets yet?". Of course they hadn't, and felt justly rebuked.

Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal history of the birthplace of Jesus with a Christmas pudding. He carries not gold, frankincense and myrrh but this “dark cannonball” of spices, fruit and stodge as a festive gift to his girlfriend’s parents in their home town of Bethlehem.

In the most unlikely of places, there is one of the world’s most prolific directors. He has produced over 110 films, he’s mobbed wherever he goes, and he inspired people through the darkest of civil wars; yet outside of Afghanistan, no-one knows the name of Salim Shaheen, the self-proclaimed "Prince of Nothingwood".