This album has been about in virtual form since last autumn but now receives physical release. In more ways than one. Since theartsdesk didn’t review it back then, its reappearance on CD and vinyl gives us an excuse to now. After all, Swedish musician Karin Dreijer – once of The Knife – is fascinating, an artist who pushes at the boundaries. She revived her Fever Ray persona last year amidst videos revelling in sci-fi weirdness and orgiastic BDSM imagery. Plunge is the musical life statement that follows.

Five years ago Dreijer divorced, shaking off the “Andersson” that once double-barrelled her name. She has since been exploring her mostly gay sexuality in an untrammelled physical manner, according to both interviews she’s given and the lyrics here. Where Fever Ray’s eponymous debut album, nine years ago, was morose, the sound of a woman trapped, depressed even, by parenthood, Plunge is an explosive liberation. With it comes a twisted electro-pop that upon occasion, as on the celebratory “To the Moon and Back”, is even light and accessibly melodic.

That’s not to say this is all easy stuff. On “Falling” she seems to be exploring her sexual identity via a chugging Gary Numan-esque machine rhythm, while the techno pulsing “IDK About You”, with its occasional orgasmic yelp samples, may be about Tinder hook-ups and trust. The true centrepiece and manifesto, though, is “This Country”, which stridently identifies sexual repression with political will. Many will turn to the line “The perverts define my fuck history” but, perhaps, it’s true core lies in the couplet “Free abortions and clean water/Destroy nuclear, destroy boring”.

Plunge is less art-obtuse than much Dreijer has been involved in, closer in tone to Björk and, musically, Santigold’s underheard 2016 album 99¢. She remains her own creature, not releasing this through commercial imperative but as a necessary proclamation, yet it’s as pop as anything she’s done since The Knife’s second album 12 years ago.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "To the Moon and Back" by Fever Ray

Peter Gill has been a quiet if invaluable mainstay of the Donmar over time. But the Welsh playwright-director has rarely been better served than by this emotional stealth bomb of a revival of his 2002 Royal Court play, The York Realist, presented here as a co-production with the Sheffield Crucible, where it will transfer following the London run.

“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.

In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.

Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the white American privilege and you'd be getting close, although In Between most reminded me of another director who made their debut film focusing on a feisty female central character, Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It, back in 1984. 

She has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times

Although In Between is an ensemble piece, Laila, played by the stunningly beautiful and super-smart Mouna Hawa is the strongest figure. She’s a lawyer with a mane of curls who sees nothing wrong in showing her cleavage at work. Laila is a secular Muslim who knows exactly what she can expect from her Jewish colleagues in the legal business. And in her downtime she also takes no prisoners; she’s got an appetite for drugs, dancing and female solidarity but is still looking for a man to be her soul mate. Her friend Salma (Sana Jammalieh) finds life a little tougher; she’s a DJ who works shifts in a restaurant as a sous chef where the Israeli boss doesn’t want the kitchen crew speaking Arabic. Meanwhile back home her Christian parents endlessly line up potential husbands because Salma hasn’t dared tell them she’s gay.

As there’s a lot of wild partying in their apartment, it’s not the obvious place for new flatmate Nour (Shaden Kanboura) to find a quiet room to finish her computer studies degree. Nour is a hijab-wearing Muslim with a disapproving fiancé who sees Tel Aviv as a city of sin. He wants Noura to marry him and return to their ultra-conservative hometown of Umm al-Fahm on the West Bank. Their relationship provides the film's most shocking scenes. There’s plenty of vivid drama along the way, all beautifully shot by Itay Gross and made wholly credible by semi-improvised dialogue scenes as not all the actors were professionals.

In Israel the film has been a huge and controversial hit. Maysaloun Hamoud has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times (pictured above: Mahmud Shalaby skinning up with Mouna Hawa). The film was banned in Umm al-Fahm while others criticised the director for receiving some funding from the Israeli government. Hamoud has received death threats because she is challenging fundamentalist religions, casual racism from Israelis towards Arabs and the endemic cultural repression that traps women (and to a certain extent men) in restrictive roles. In Between would make a fascinating double-bill with Menashe – both sympathetic portraits of normally inaccessible communities, ultra-orthodox Jews in Menashe; bohemian, radicalised Palestinians in In Between.

Intended as the first in a trilogy, I can’t wait to see more of the central characters. The DVD release comes with a scrappy short feature compiled from on-set footage and interviews with Hamoud and her Israeli producer, Shlomi Elkabetz. It looks as if they all had fun making the film – there’s a lot of hugging and high spirits – which makes In Between’s cool coherence even more impressive. 

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for In Between

Transangelic Exodus is a roller-coaster ride. Songs twist, turn, have sudden shifts in tempo, are punctuated by unexpected instrumental interjections, and come to a dead stop after which they resume their unpredictable course. Although Ezra Furman's musical touchstones of late Fifties pop and The Modern Lovers are still apparent, the follow-up to 2015’s Perpetual Motion People comes across as nothing less than a vigorously shaken-and-stirred take on pre-Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen.

Furman says the narrative thread running through the frenzied Transangelic Exodus is his being “in love with an angel, and a government is after us, and we have to leave home because angels are illegal as is harbouring angels. The terms ‘transangelic’ refers to the fact people become angels because they grow wings. They have an operation, and they’re transformed.” He’s also said James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni's Room, a consideration of the tensions between being straight, gay and bi, has been an influence. Anger courses through the album as he sings of encountering a maraschino-red dress in the charity shop Goodwill and a hair-raising drive to Los Angeles during which he and his companion are visited by what seems to be the devil.

Given that Furman is self-declared as gender-fluid it’s not hard to see Transangelic Exodus as a commentary on his home country, the United States. His relationship with the Jewish faith is another topic he is not shy of discussing. He’s also been very clear about his appreciation of Lou Reed as well as his inability to settle in one place. The drawback with being so open is that the music can be left behind. For any potential audience, the man and his music can become disconnected: autonomous entities.

All of which means Transangelic Exodus comes freighted with expectations, chiefly whether as a whole it can deliver this singular artist’s vision in a unified fashion. Unsurprisingly, the resultant album indeed turns out to be a roller-coaster ride through a very particular worldview. Could it be anything else?

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Overleaf: watch the video for “Driving Down to LA” from Transangelic Exodus

It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and La La Land had to cede ground to Moonlight.

Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe is a true prince of darkness here, picking out Leslie Caron’s beautiful eyes and gleaming mouth despite the gloom of a seedy Notting Hill boarding house. Taking a break from her usual roles as a happy hoofer, Caron plays Jane, a serious young French woman adrift in London with an unplanned pregnancy who finds herself renting an attic bedsit.

Adapted from Lynne Reid Banks’s best-selling novel, The L-Shaped Room was very daring in 1962 and the film faced several battles with the censors. Not only does Jane visit a Harley Street abortionist (a creepy Emlyn Williams) but her fellow lodgers include a gay black musician (Brock Peters, fresh from To Kill a Mocking Bird), a couple of prostitutes in the basement (Pat Phoenix on fine form), and an elderly lesbian missing her theatrical days (Cicely Courtneidge). All of them are sympathetic, rounded characters who take Jane (Leslie Caron, pictured below) under their wing.

But it’s another tenant, Toby (Tom Bell), an aspiring writer, who provides the love interest. The most radical departure in the transfer from book to film is the cultural background of the two central characters; Jane is not the failed English actress of the novel but an au-pair escaping from French provincial life and rigid, wealthy Catholic parents. In the novel Toby is a Jewish Londoner (perhaps based on Wesker or Pinter), but here he's played by Tom Bell, a Liverpudlian in his first leading role. It's possible that the producers in casting him were influenced by the success of those other angry young provincials, Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Richard Burton in Look Back in Anger, or perhaps dealing with anti-Semitism along with antagonism to foreigners and homosexuality was just one step too far in a film that isn't otherwise afraid to challenge the status quo. 

Fascinating as social history, The L-Shaped Room is a downbeat slice of post-war realism, tackling taboos around unmarried mothers, racism and sexuality in its own discreet way. It can't exactly be hailed as a lost feminist work, but Jane does refuse to take easy options, asserts her own independence and is impressively honest about the value of love. While this is very much a studio film with claustrophobic interiors, the location shots of Notting Hill have a documentary realism. This is the era of Colin McInnes's Absolute Beginners and brutal landlord Rachman's grip on the bomb-damaged rental market. In the opening sequence, Jane is accosted by a sleazy teddy boy played by Anthony Booth on a street corner, while Caribbean men are turned away from lodging houses. Later in the film, Smiths fans will recognise the Christmas sing-song with Cicely Courtneidge leading the chorus, which was sampled in The Queen Is Dead.

This restoration showcases Slocombe’s excellent framing – this film is all about close-ups and intimate conversations, dynamic encounters on stairs and dark corners. Bryan Forbes stepped up from his role as scriptwriter to direct when Jack Clayton dropped out – consequently he’s not afraid of letting the dialogue run on a bit, which can make it feel like you're watching an adapted play rather than a novel. 

Sadly there’s no commentary as the key film-makers have died, and the supplementary material with this new edition is a little underwhelming. Extras include a drab analysis by two low-key film academics who don't inspire with their insights. Filmed in the same dull cinema setting are two separate interviews with Leslie Caron and Lynne Reid Banks, who is amusing on how much she hated the adaptation but changed her position over the years. Caron,still stunningly beautiful, describes asking Forbes to make Jane less passive and acknowledges that the role was a breakthrough after years of playing smiling ingénues. She was Oscar nominated for her performance as Jane, and well deserved the British Academy award that she did win. 

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The L-Shaped Room