In JJ Abrams’s retro sci-fi Super 8, a group of budding film-makers are terrorised by a mysterious creature. With credible camaraderie and poignant performances from its young leads, it’s as much about growing up and the thrill of first-time film-making as it is a dalliance with the fantastical.

The Rhythm Method by Nicky Forbes dives into the working, gigging, cash-free underbelly of real rock’n’roll life. Whereas most music biographies are written by or about those who’ve made it, who live in the gilded cage of pop stardom and all that entails, The Rhythm Method is about Forbes’s life as drummer in The Revillos, a cartoonish post-punk outfit born from the ashes of the more successful Rezillos. It is a chattily told saga of bad decisions, misfortune, dissolution and a persistent inability to realise when the game is over.

WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering fistfuls of rave reviews, and has just won this year’s Evening Standard and Theatrical Management Association awards for Best Musical.

The life-swap doc comes in sundry guises. Emissaries of simpler cultures visit our broiling cities to gawp at streets swimming in fresh spew and rivers of piss every Saturday night. Alternatively our lot pop off to places where people shit in holes and praise the Lord. Whichever way the story gets sliced, it’s always about the same thing: holding up a mirror to ourselves and not tending to like the view. Here’s what we look like when we stand next to this or that person with whom we wouldn’t change places for anything.

Rich with cinematic life but existing doggedly in the shadow of death, Lynne Ramsay’s epically disquieting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is fluid and imaginatively realised. It's an emotional ambush, but executed with extraordinary precision. Steeped in a magnificent malice and caked in frosty beauty, We Need to Talk About Kevin deals with the lead up to and aftermath of a high-school massacre, and gives us every parent’s worst nightmare – spawning a monster.

Those of us un-Zeitgeisty enough to miss the Royal Ballet’s first new full-length ballet in 20 years during its first run can now catch up. Opus Arte’s DVD release of the televised Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tells a different story from the one any audience members other than front-of-stalls ticket holders would have caught. With more focus on the characters and less on the potentially overwhelming special effects, we probably get a better deal.

From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families, bickering over breakfast and complaining about the burnt fish fingers. Oh and look, there’s John Sessions playing the quirky buffoon of a vicar.

This warm-hearted production of E Nesbit’s most famous novel premiered to glowing reviews at its site-specific venue last summer.

At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what? Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is certainly elliptical and impressionistic, but it’s also spellbinding, and as lofty and luminous as the stars in the sky. Above all, it’s a film which is buoyed – and which sometimes threatens to be sunk - by its own formidable ambition.

Mainstream television drama has always shone a searching beam into the Stygian murk of society’s ills. But however laudable its campaigning credentials, a drama’s first duty to its audience is to work as drama. Cathy Come Home changed the public perception of homelessness, unemployment acquired a catchphrase in Boys from the Black Stuff, and institutional racism met its match in The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. But we know them first and foremost as great television.