Rum old business, espionage – at least in the way we Brits are still pursuing it. For all the reality that the existential threat has long moved locations, in its television incarnations we remain addicted to the Cold War, the attraction to those gloomy postwar years seemingly a fatal one. The BBC’s new spy drama The Game was back in prime le Carré territory and the early Seventies, with industrial unrest and power cuts further turning down the visual wattage.

Retrospectively, two things help The Blob stand apart from the glut of late-Fifties aliens-invade-small-town-America science fiction films. It gave Steve McQueen his first starring role and its theme tune was an early Burt Bacharach co-write. Either of these – or even both together – are probably not enough to make the 1958 regional independent production into a classic piece of American cinema. But it is pretty good.

“The righteous traitor” must be as provocative a subtitle as any when the subject is espionage. Director George Carey nevertheless used it in this highly revealing film about George Blake, the “spy who got away”, which proved as much about the anatomy of treachery – its correlation with the uneasy relationship of the outsider to a dominant establishment – as it was an investigation of the intelligence world in which Blake played so notable a role.

“A frivolous piece of hysteria. I liked it in a confused sort of way but when it was all over I must confess I couldn’t really see the point.” So ran the Daily Express review of The Manchurian Candidate on 5 November 1962. Other fascinating newspaper appraisals quoted in the booklet of this new Blu-ray/DVD edition of John Frankenheimer’s Cold War-era drama detect the shadow of Hitchcock looming over the film.

That the truth will always be so much bigger than we can comprehend is something I had to accept as I started to write Oppenheimer. There are so many sources, so much information, so many hundreds of books, declassified files, interviews and history. One biography of the man took its authors 25 years to write. And there are still the hidden thoughts that were never written down, conversations long forgotten by people now long dead. There have to be so many omissions that it is an impossible task to tell this "truth" over the course of one evening’s entertainment.

Writer Anthony Horowitz has imbued Foyle's War with longevity by anchoring it among some lesser-known and frequently shameful occurrences in the margins of World War Two, and this ninth series opener duly embroiled us in murky shenanigans involving unscrupulous oil barons and cynical German industrialists. The former DCS Foyle is continuing in his post-war role with MI5, as the Russians continue to infiltrate remorselessly from the east while the West is still struggling to pick itself up off the cratered and rubble-strewn floor.

In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.

It has long since become a cliché that the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination is implanted on the memories of those who remember hearing it for the first time. As that generation thins out, their children are now likelier to think of the breach of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago this weekend.

John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Animal Farm, adapted from George Orwell's 1945 allegorical novel about the emergence of Stalinism, was Britain’s first animated feature film. Clearly influenced by Walt Disney's early 1940s classics, the husband and wife team (he was from Budapest, she from Watford) necessarily avoided sentimentalism but were unafraid to milk pathos in depicting the plight of Orwell’s oppressed proletarian beasts.

When Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan opens in Russia early next year it won’t be in the director’s cut. Given new legislation effective from this past July, it will be against the law to include the very distinctive Russian expletives, known locally as mat, that are plentiful in the director’s film, and add a very distinctive quality to his depiction of contemporary Russia.