We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that the person or the performance? When Ellie walks in, he leaps up like a cat on a hot tin roof, nervous as a kitten, and we know – it was the person.

One wonders what sitcom writers will do when supermarkets finally sweep the last corner shops away with nobody left old enough to buy cigarettes, nobody so offline that they buy newspapers and nobody eating sweets, priced out by sugar taxes. The convenience shop is already acquiring a patina of nostalgia, crowned by a warm glow of happier days. My mother used to send me out aged seven to buy her Embassy Number 1s with me levying a charge of one gobstopper in payment - see, I’m a victim already.

Going to the theatre can be a little like going to church. One communes on the individual level, one’s faith in the stories underpinned by a psychological connection, but also on the collective level, belief rising on a tide of shared emotions. Those complementary sensations, in an ever more individualised, screen-and-earplugs world, are rare – and an example of why people pay big bucks for Glastonbury, Taylor Swift and Oasis.

El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking out a living there.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest is a test of stamina: a 3hr 15min study of a man paralysed by negative thinking. It also contains striking freeze-framed portraits of people and places that you want to pause and look at even longer than the editing allows, so beautiful are they.

We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big fridges and why they’re always shouting up the stairs.

NMC Recordings has spent 35 years promoting contemporary music by British composers, and this commitment to both emerging and established voices was represented at this birthday concert in London last night, part of the Spitalfields Festival. From their emergence in 1989 in a different musical and technological world (“NMC” standing for “New Music Cassettes”) my early days of CD buying were guided by NMC’s developing catalogue and they are still a go-to for finding interesting new things.

In Marie Amachoukeli’s Àma Gloria there’s a remarkable performance by a child actor, Louise Mauroy-Panzani. So key is her contribution that It’s fair to say the director couldn’t have delivered the film she had planned without her,.

Manchester Collective have come a long way since their early days of chamber music in dark and dingy Salford basements and former MOT test centres. But they haven’t forgotten what made those pioneering performances special: the sense of a unique experience, and a readiness to chat to the audience as well as playing.

We open on one of those grim, grim training rooms that all offices have – the apologetic sofa, the single electric kettle, the instant coffee. The lighting is too harsh, the chairs too hard, the atmosphere already post-lunch on Wednesday and it’s only 10am on Monday. We’ve all been there – designer, Rosie Elnile certainly has.