Paul Thomas Anderson’s frantic One Battle After Another is a storm warning for a fascist America and both a lament and a rallying call for revolutionary fervour.

That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its predecessor, This Is Spinal Tap. The latter has become renowned as a definitive artefact in rock’n’roll history, a smartly deadpan portrayal of a deeply cretinous British heavy metal band in the throes of a shambolic American tour.

It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.

There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater” when she was growing up in the 1990s. The phrase brings the half-forgotten world of Generation X back to us from the mists of time, with its slackers and Douglas Coupland books and mumbling evasions.

You don't have to be greeting the modern day with a smile unsupported by events in the wider world to have a field day at Here We Are. The last musical from the venerated Stephen Sondheim has only grown in import and meaning since I caught its New York premiere some 18 months ago.

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect faded on subsequent viewings that the film’s pitch-black comedy became clear.

Somewhere in Germany, G7 conference leaders including German Chancellor Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and US President Wolcott (Charles Dance) repair to a gazebo to collaborate on a “clear, but not so clear” communique addressing an unnamed, possibly apocalyptic crisis. Farcically human, they pocket hors d’oeuvres, flirt and pull rank, lose tempers and trousers.

It’s always fun jabbing at the permanently open wound that is Anglo-French relations, now with added snap post-Brexit, its fading, but still frothing, humourless defenders clogging up Twitter and radio phone-ins even today. So it’s probably timely for Gallic-Gang Productions to resurrect Jean (La Cage aux Folles) Poiret’s farce Fefe de Broadway, adapted as French Toast.

On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side of the fourth wall, I can tell you that there’s plenty of crackling expectation and a touch of fear in the stalls, too. None more so than when the show is billed as a new musical.

Ten years after their last tour Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis are back on the road with We Are Not a Robot. It comes after their long-running The Now Show on Radio 4 has ended and, reassuringly for their fans, is more of the same affable humour, with the occasional barb that they can throw in now they no longer have to answer to BBC producers.