Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
Offeh’s show blares and jostles with life as he mimics Mammy, listens to self-help advice and gets naked for Grace Jones’s anatomically impossible Island Life pose

Mmmm ... Mm-mm. Mmmmmwwwwwmmm. MMM. Sometimes sexy and sometimes sleepy, sometimes like a kid making airplane noises or doing an impression of a creaking door or maybe a whale, the sound of Harold Offeh humming and ummming fills the lobby of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Mmm, he goes, mmm-mm-mm. He up-speaks and mumbles and wrings a whole world of feeling out of this disembodied overture. The title of Offeh’s show, including that Mmm, is a quote, from a song on Portishead’s 1994 album Dummy . “Gotta try a little harder / It could be sweet,” runs the lyric, which is also printed in big gloopy lettering on the gallery walls, behind Offeh’s video screens, his photographs and other graphic interventions. The show blares and jostles with life, with song and dance, with skits and routines, with public moments and private performances on the loo and in the bathroom.

For more than two decades Offeh has been a moving target. Here’s the Ghanaian-born Offeh as Haroldinho, in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, shuffling samba steps and wearing typical, Brazilian blue worker’s overalls, his adopted name appliqued on the back. Dancing in the streets and on the beach, he sways and smiles, an object of mild curiosity to passersby. In Rio, people often assumed he was Brazilian. Here he is again, now on the streets and shopping centres of Walsall, Oxford, Liverpool and Chester, in Stockholm and Banff, in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies, wearing a Victorian-era magnifying lens in front of his face, which distorts and exaggerates his features. Given the suspicious looks he gets on the British streets, you worry for his safety.

Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
All the major characters are present in Sonia Jalaly’s update, but this is also a journey of self-realisation with brisk songs and cartoonish humour

Most people come to Keswick for the mountains and the cream cakes. For 13-year-old Dorothy (Nimi Spiff), they are the reason she wants to get out. What need for scenery and pink icing when she could be in the hubbub of London?

Grieving for her mother and fantasising about her absent father, she is determined to escape to the capital for Christmas. But a Lake District storm is brewing and, after making a break through the upstairs window of her aunt and uncle’s house, she is propelled along a different route.

Design Museum, London
The Fantastic Mr Fox’s snappy outfits, an intricate model of the Grand Budapest Hotel and dozens of stop-motion puppets are all among the 700 objects in this sugarcoated quirkfest

Terrible things happen in Wes Anderson films. In his latest, The Phoenician Scheme , a man is casually split in half in an aircraft crash. In The Royal Tenenbaums , the patriarchal protagonist feigns a terminal illness in order to weasel his way back into his estranged and dysfunctional family. In The Grand Budapest Hotel the “heroic” concierge Monsieur Gustave is essentially a killer and the fictional Republic of Zubrowka is in the tightening grip of a fascist regime.

All this is played for knowing comedic effect (the splatted bisection resembles a Tom and Jerry cartoon; Zubrowka is a brand of Polish bison grass vodka), while lavishly sugarcoated in a set dressing of eccentric curios, outlandish costumes and saturated colour. Anderson aficionados will be familiar with the drill, a bit like finding a gnat in a cupcake, delivered in a series of perfectly composed vignettes.

The pianist played with the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and more, but remains little known beyond insider circles. This loving doc asks why – but leaves some questions unanswered

This documentary is probably, as they say, one for the heads – for connoisseurs who appreciate a great musician who was never a star. But the flaw of this film, admirably detailed and celebratory though it is, lies for me in the fact that it never pauses to wonder why exactly he was never a star, and what that precisely means. Does star quality consist, in some mysterious way, in a lack of formal musicianship?

Nicky Hopkins was a superbly accomplished pianist who played on records by the Who, the Kinks, Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles (plus solo albums by all four ex-Beatles) and many more. His brilliant work meant he was admired and even hero-worshipped by musicians and producers on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a classically trained Englishman (like Elton John at about the same time, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music) yet sounded as if he learned piano in the Mississippi Delta. And all this was while Hopkins was dealing with serious ill-health; he had Crohn’s disease and later issues with drink and drugs. The latter were at least partly due to a need to dull the pain, in order to keep up with tough recording and touring schedules; it all contributed to his heartbreakingly early death at the age of just 50.

An intimate soiree builds to a horrific climax in this visceral novel about a young woman tasked with hosting a meal for her fiance

Literature loves a dinner party. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to more recent offerings such as Sarah Gilmartin’s The Dinner Party and Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century , an intimate soiree provides the perfect recipe of claustrophobia and choreography into which a novelist can sink their teeth. The preparations are usually unduly stressful, the guest list dynamic unpredictable, the quantity of alcohol borderline obscene – in short, as a device it has all the ingredients for total, delicious carnage.

The latest entrant to this literary Come Dine With Me is Viola van de Sandt, whose debut The Dinner Party centres on Franca, a shy young woman from the Netherlands tasked with hosting a meal for her English fiance Andrew and his two male colleagues. To make matters more challenging, it is the hottest day of the year, the menu is rabbit (despite Franca’s vegetarianism) and her sous chef is their often violent pet cat.

A searing documentary on the laundries sees a determined young human rights lawyer join survivors and campaigners in a fight for truth and accountability

At least 10,000 women and girls were imprisoned in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, forced into unpaid labour and subject to cruelty and suffering. This documentary narrated by Imelda Staunton tells the story of the campaign to hold the Irish government to account for its role in the laundries, mother and baby homes and industrial schools for children. A key figure in that campaign is Maeve O’Rourke, an impressive young Irish human rights lawyer whose master’s thesis at Harvard Law School served as a key legal submission in the legal fight for justice.

O’Rourke had plans for a career in international human rights law until she watched a survivor speaking in a debate on Irish television. We see that footage here, of Michael O’Brien, a former mayor and survivor of rape and torture by priests at a residential school, as he blasts a government minister, white-hot with fury, his trauma raw. It takes your breath away. This thorough documentary hears from campaigners, historians and survivors – including Philomena Lee, forced to give up her son, who was trafficked and sold to rich Americans. Lee was later portrayed on screen by Judi Dench.

New Diorama, London
Two stories, centuries apart, are used to chart climate disaster in this ambitious musical with bitty scenes and cumbersome lyrics

This climate disaster musical takes place in a tower block overlooking the Thames. The setting is central because the dystopia has been caused by a biomedical waste dump in the river. London is flooded and this flat on the 16th floor is the safest place to live.

Or so it seems, because things are very opaque in this experimental production. Devised by director Adam Lenson, Stu Barter, Rachel Bellman, Annabelle Lee Revak, Darren Clark and Shaye Poulton Richards, it brings an electro-folk sound to bitty storylines in two timezones. There are the tower block survivors – it is unclear which century they are living in until close to the end when they mention the year 2425 – and a second storyline in the past which might be the 1990s (there is talk of DVDs) in which a couple moves into a luxury high-rise overlooking the Thames (the same 16th-floor flat?).

Punchy, old-school stunt work, inventive baddie-splattering and a simple plot as our grizzled Finish prospector finds a new foe in his Soviet-occupied homeland

In 2022, the Finnish indie action movie Sisu had the look of a one-hit wonder. Pitting a grizzled prospector against an entire platoon of Nazis, writer-director Jalmari Helander heeded the lessons of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, principally that there is serious cinematic value in going pedal-to-the-metal along a single, straight narrative line. That profitable sleeper hit now yields this choice follow-up, which somehow feels more expansive while still clocking in under 90 minutes.

Having seen off the SS, indomitable hero Aatami (Jorma Tommila) gains a tragic backstory and a new, vicious postwar foe in the tremendously named Red Army butcher Igor Draganov, played by wily James Cameron favourite Stephen Lang. Again, the economy of Helander’s approach proves striking and thrilling. No unnecessary obstacles have been placed between the audience and a good time at the movies: we get one scene of Aatami dismantling his family home beam by beam and one scene of Draganov being sprung from jail before the pair intersect in the back roads of Soviet-occupied Finland. Cutting to the chase grants Helander time to craft set pieces in which Aatami outthinks and outflanks the Red Army’s might; in this respect, Sisu 2 is a more-of-the-same sequel. The good news is that it remains terrific: punchy, old-school stunt work, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jet fighter.

Photographer Claire Beckett captured the soldiers and civilians who dress up as Afghans and Iraqis in military bases across America. They play everything from insurgents to shoppers in mocked-up firefights