“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a small city birthed some of the greatest American music of the 20th century, and of the ripples which subsequently spread. The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1969. Five years earlier they had released their version of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. Hall was behind the original, his first production.

Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India.

Bees, whenever called upon, have always been ready for their close-up. They had a sizeable cameo in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, played the lead villain opposite Michael Caine in The Swarm and got to be heroes in Bee Movie. Most recently there was The Secret Life of Bees, in which Dakota Fanning’s grieving teen finds solace in beekeeping. That was in 2008. Five years later the world is waking up to the fact that in reality there’s no solace to be had from making honey. More Than Honey explains why.

There’s a great line near the beginning of Fox’s nine-parter Meet the Russians: “Money can’t buy you taste. It can buy you a personal shopper.” If this show's participants had splashed out on a bit of PR advice as well, you wonder whether the answer would have come back to steer clear of such television exposure, even when Fox came knocking. Not because there are any dreadful secrets to be found in those ample closets – unless you count some of the interior design – but because the result makes them look a bit like they’re out of a bad soap.

The idea behind Muse of Fire was a simple one. We wanted to spend a year travelling the world and find out from as many sources as we could why Shakespeare is both so loved and so feared. We wanted to try and eradicate our own deep-rooted anxieties and help others to remove theirs.  This was the goal. How we would achieve all this was the ordeal.  It has been a five-year adventure but now the film is complete and ready for its world premiere at Raindance Film Festival, we can say that every moment of an incredible journey was worth it.

The Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa recently made an impact with the powerful In the Fog, a delicately balanced examination of the pressures at play in World War II Russia. Before that, his international calling card was My Joy (2010), a first venture into fiction. Both form part of a prodigious body of work otherwise dedicated to non-fiction. The release of the documentaries Blockade, Landscape and Revue in one package gives non-Russians a first chance to sample what dominates his output.

Blockade (2006) takes archive footage of the Leningrad Blockade of 1941 to 1944, when the city was sealed off by German forces with support from Finland. Loznitsa’s unvarnished chronological account of what was going within the city and the effect on its citizens is harrowing and at times difficult to watch. Revue (2008) is lighter and takes clips from Fifties and Sixties state-sanctioned propaganda films to show Russia as it was meant to be. Although sometimes funny, the insight into how the individual was subsumed into the collective is precious. Landscape (2003) is a contemporary portrait capturing the villagers of Okulovka as they wait for a bus with a constantly circling camera. Although comparable to the observational films of Chantal Akerman, it goes further by revealing who these people are with snippets of their conversations. When the bus finally comes, the resultant mêlée means all interaction is abandoned.

Loznitsa’s major preoccupation is what makes Russia and its people tick. Whether through fiction or fact, through the contemporary or historical he explores how Russia is defined, both by its individuals and the agencies delineating what the country actually is – or is meant to be. Naturally, he asks who he is as well. All three films are enthralling, intense, subtle and sympathetic. Above all, they are humanistic. As with In the Fog, Loznitsa keeps his distance and lets what’s seen tell its story.

This trio posits Loznitsa as a successor to Dziga Vertov, the director of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the classic depiction of city life in Russia. This collection is highly recommended.

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Overleaf: Watch Sergei Loznitsa discuss Revue

Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual identity was far from accepted by society. What a kaleidoscope of experience they have behind them, how moving a perspective they present as they view the lives they have lived from age. This is a film as much about looking back, about le temps perdu, as it is about the ramifications of sexual orientation.

The reason to obtain a DVD or Blu-ray disc of Sarah Polley's unforgettable documentary is because making sense of it requires several viewings. What starts out as a straightforward memoir centred on the presence of an absence – her mother Diane, lost to cancer at 54 in 1990, when Sarah was 11 – turns into a kaleidoscopic meta-narrative that makes the Canadian actor-director ponder her motives.

While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with 24/7 connectivity and a smart phone in their hand.

BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.