As shockingly beautiful as it is horrifyingly brutal, actor Armando Babaioff’s deeply Brazilian adaptation of thriller Tom at the Farm leaves a rancid taste in the mouth and harrowing images seared on the retina. It’s a show to shock and provoke, but also to deeply disorientate, blurring the boundaries between pain and pleasure, desire and repulsion in a way that stays with you, whether you want it to or not.

Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English and Yemeni heritage, he came of musical age in the Bohemian hotbed of 1990s Berlin with a close-knit bunch of other Canadian ex-pats, including Peaches, Chilly Gonzales and Feist.

“There are sex maniacs out there, sodomites, murderers, suicidal people, and communists on the loose! I vote for a curfew!” 

There’s been a good deal of discussion on “the socials” about how much Janelle Monáe’s sexy image is a new thing or a big deal.

Casual viewers, still stuck on the suit-wearing image with which she crashed into public consciousness in 2010, have acted shocked at her going almost or completely unclad in recent videos and shoots. In turn fans have pointed out the obvious – that her outré sense of fashion and costumery has manifested in many ways over the years, including in plenty of flesh-baring. 

Perfect timing for the release of Lucas Santtana’s new album release. The return of Lula to the presidency of Brazil has been received with a surge of optimism and joy. We have witnessed the end of Bolsonaro’s corrupt, opportunistic and authoritarian years, in which the Amazon forest was opened up further to those who would destroy it, along with the indigenous people who struggle to survive against the depredations of greed.

Although Raf Vilar grew up in Rio De Janeiro he has been based in London for over a decade, where his second album Clichê was recorded. It appears on a label operating from Malmö, Sweden. In keeping with this internationalism, what’s emerged isn’t wholly identifiable as a Brazilian album. His 2011 first was unequivocally titled Studies In Bossa. Now, the designation is more inscrutable.

Sebastião Salgado has carved out his career by documenting the unimaginable. He takes areas of life all too often ignored by wealthy westerners and reveals them in mesmerising, teeming detail.

In the course of this short (65 minute) film, 15-year-old Sócrates wanders around Santos, in the state of Brazil’s São Paolo, and the nearby coast after the death of his mother, rejected at one point or another by everyone with whom he comes in contact, just as he rejects the worst options.

The title, translated from the Portuguese, is “now” – an immediacy that, on first listen, seems apt for Bebel Gilberto’s lush and loose Agora.

Stylish, eerie and unexpectedly moving by the time of its apocalyptic finish, the strangely titled Good Manners makes for a genuine celluloid surprise.