A young film director writes a script based on his father’s life story and invites his dad to play the part. It’s an interesting gambit, given that the son, Jorge Thielen Armand left Venezuela with his mother at the age of 15 and has not returned since. His father stayed behind, so their relationship has stalled. Can it be reignited?

“My worst fear? What am I scared of?” Amy Winehouse ponders. She pauses thoughtfully: “Myself.”

The extraordinary story of motor industry executive Carlos Ghosn is a heady combination of power, money, corruption and international politics, with a Mission: Impossible-style ending that carries it over the finishing tape in dramatic style. It might be considered a cautionary tale, except that Ghosn’s experiences and personality were so unique that a repeat performance could never happen.

Last year, Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-part documentary about the notorious financier and convicted sex offender. Now, here’s a Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow (Sky Documentaries), a three-parter about the woman accused by Epstein’s victims of helping him entrap them in his sordid pit of vice.

Back in 2017, a non-speaking autistic teen, Naoki Higashida wrote and published The Reason I Jump. He hoped it would offer some insight into the minds of people with autism. The book was subsequently translated by Keiko Yoshida and her husband, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell. 

In the UK, we usually get a peek inside The Villages in Florida every four years, when intrepid reporters take to their golf carts in the retirement community to test the water in presidential elections among its 132,000 residents. Their views provide a useful guide as to where the silver-haired vote stands.

Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto.

From deep within the bowels of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop came the sounds of the future. Strange howls and beeps, unnatural yet recognisably human-made. And while this was the dawning of a new epoch for music, it was also the frontier of a larger societal shift. A space where women could invent, compose and lead.

It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.

Director of the Courtauld Institute, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and a particular expert on the art of Poussin, Sir Anthony Blunt spent decades at the epicentre of the royal family and the British Establishment. He was, as the so-called “Fourth Man” of the Cambridge espionage ring, also a spy for the Russians who handed over countless documents and nuggets of top secret information during and after World War Two, including super-sensitive details about the D-Day landings.