The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, inspired by the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, is soon to return to the West End with Will Young. Its less well-known source is John Van Druten's 1952 play I Am a Camera. The title comes from the opening page of Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood's memoirs published in 1939 inspired by his years in the capital of a country reeling from the last war and suffering from the global Depression: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition. And there it is again in the anarchic dystopia of The Road (less impressive because, despite Hillcoat’s flair for brutality, it perversely shied away from some of the key violence of the source novel).

Accolades are due again for the tiny Finborough Theatre, whose production of JB Priestley's all-but-unknown Cornelius constitutes the most exciting reclamation from the English theatrical canon since the same venue produced Emlyn Williams's startling and welcome Accolade some 18 months ago.

I am keenly looking forward to seeing the new production of JB Priestley’s play Cornelius at the Finborough Theatre. This will be the first time I have seen the work performed, though I have of course read it. But my father always said his plays were made for the stage rather than the page. They need the skill of a cast and director to bring the characters alive and the active engagement of the audience to enhance the experience. 

The Storyville documentary strand must rank as one of the special glories of British television. As its opening titles unfold in different languages, we can only celebrate programmes that still give time to international stories, told in their own time, and allowing an eclectic, sometimes oblique view on their subjects. Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, a film by George Carey (pictured below), serves as a rallying cry to endorse exactly that.

Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of apparatchiks in your name and mine to compel artists and small businesses not to infringe their entirely dubious copyright in the Olympic motto.

Anyone familiar with the 1915 spy thriller The 39 Steps and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1935 adaptation – fleet, déclassé, and oneiric – knows the movie is a superior piece of entertainment to John Buchan’s coincidence-laden potboiler, which as a gentleman's adventure is smugly establishmentarian. In its depiction of a pre-war Britain mired in political complacency yet socially discontent, the film better caught the tenor of the times.

If the three-day Songlines Encounters Festival got off to a rousing start with folk-punk rowdiness from Poland’s R.U.T.A, by last night things were decidedly more genteel. The Festival, anyway, was an exhilarating musical voyage. Spiro’s last album is called Kaleidophonica, and sports a dizzying cover. Rather than the lysergic rush that might suggest, their music is pastoral but as intricate as a Swiss watch, seemingly restrained but with visionary undercurrents.

Island of Lost Souls might be from 1932, but its release on DVD verifies that it’s one of the freakiest, most disturbing films made. This adaptation of H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau is dominated by Charles Laughton as the eponymous Doctor. Creepy and monomaniacal, he puts in a towering performance. Convinced he can turn animals into humans via surgery, he’s undermining evolution and playing – as he declares – God.

The release of Jean Vigo’s wonderful L’Atalante on DVD is cause enough to celebrate, but the arrival of everything he committed to film in one place is more than that – it commemorates this special filmmaker’s genius and humanity. Zero de Conduite and L’Atalante are thrilling films, whatever their context and influence on the French New Wave. They need to be seen.