This week's cultural highlights include the return of the much-loved Motherland spin-off Amandaland, featuring Lucy Punch as the delusional, narcissistic mum Amanda. Meanwhile, Olof Dreijer, one half of the Knife, releases an album of dazzlingly inventive psychedelia. Here's a roundup of the best-rated reviews from the Guardian.
Television
If you only watch one, make it … Making Life on Earth: Attenborough's Greatest Adventure
BBC iPlayer – This retrospective on one of David Attenborough's greatest pieces of TV is packed with brilliant anecdotes. Victoria Bobin's rollicking film tells the story of a giant pop-culture moment, a gang of mates remembering how they sensed conditions were right to create a blockbuster masterpiece – if they were willing to flirt with failure and even death to get there.
Pick of the rest: Amandaland
BBC iPlayer – The return of the much-loved Motherland spin-off, focusing on delusional, narcissistic mum Amanda. Lucy Punch's portrayal of Amanda is mesmerisingly convincing. Lumley is also magnetic as her mother, Felicity.
You may have missed … My Garden of a Thousand Bees
BBC iPlayer – A gasp-inducing documentary about a man's love for the insects that bumble around his garden … and ended up changing his life. There is something pleasantly bee-like about Dohrn's award-winning film. A leisurely thing, it drifts woozily around the photographer's garden, picking up facts here and there and storing them like pollen.
The Artist
MGM+ – This period comedy, starring Mandy Patinkin as a Rhode Island robber baron, is a singular work of art. It has a similar pugnacious whimsy, but with cold steel hidden in the folds of its grubby velvet gown.
Film
If you only watch one, make it … Romeria
In cinemas now – Carla Simón's distinctive drama in which a young woman arrives in a Spanish coastal city to meet the family of her dead father, who are hiding information about his life and death. Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.
Pick of the rest: Our Land
In cinemas now – Documentary by Orban Wallace following right-to-roam campaigners as they offer bacchanalian antics and a heartfelt message in a wide-ranging exploration of the topic. Ramblers are justified in keeping the pressure up and the take-home message is: opening up the glories of the countryside and nature itself to everyone is a universal good.
Kokuho
In cinemas now – Lee Sang-il's heartfelt kabuki drama spans 50 years following the bond and rivalry between two young men who play the rigorously observed female roles in the traditional art form. The emphasis is largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.
The Sheep Detectives
In cinemas now – Hugh Jackman plays a farmer in this Babe-style family film about plucky sheep who help solve a murder. The great feelgood trick pulled off by this film is that the murder, involving a character we’ve been encouraged to like and invest in emotionally – much more so than in traditional detective stories – doesn’t get swamped with sadness and shock. The film scoots smartly past the death and brings us briskly on to the entertaining business of sheep-oriented crime detection.
Now streaming: Abouna
Mubi – Chadian writer-director Mahamat Saleh Haroun's beautifully gentle and lucid film about two boys' forlorn attempt to find their father. This movie has moments that linger in the mind: the boys running back from the cinema, the boys playing keepie-uppie in the street, the boys walking on their hands after looking for their father at the Chad-Cameroon border crossing, with all the insouciance of childhood, unable yet to comprehend the seriousness of what has happened to them.
Books
If you only read one, make it … Iran and the Revolution by Homa Katouzian
Reviewed by John Simpson. A landmark new account of the 1979 revolution provides context for current events. The history of the Iranian revolution has been written many times, but I haven’t found an account as clear and free of preconceptions as this one.
Pick of the rest: The Given World by Melissa Harrison
Reviewed by Alexandra Harris. Six months in the life of a rural English village. The small particularities are charged with a sense of cosmic change. This is concertedly a novel of, and for, an era of ecological crisis.
Solace House by Will Maclean
Reviewed by Sam Leith. Nineties-set gothic extravaganza in which students are caught up in the mystery of a haunted house. It's a great hotchpotch, working like mad to entertain and spook the reader. The 500-odd pages whip by.
Lady C by Guy Cuthbertson
Reviewed by Blake Morrison. A history of the social and cultural impact of DH Lawrence's controversial novel. Cuthbertson has been a diligent researcher, spending many hours trawling through archives and cuttings. He has even looked through the trial judge's copy of the book, with its highlighting of rude words.
You may have missed … Nobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Reviewed by Emma Brockes. Posthumously published memoir on the impact of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. Giuffre's recollections of Prince Andrew, a man with whom she was allegedly forced to have sex three times, present him in an even more buffoonish and grotesque light.
Albums
If you only listen to one, make it … Olof Dreijer: Loud Bloom
Out now – Squiggling melodies and quizzical distortion banish the winter gloom Dreijer brought to his band the Knife. Dreijer has created his own walled garden of psychedelia, conjuring the light and scent of a summer in bloom.
Pick of the rest: Aldous Harding: Train on the Island
Out now – Lyrics about naked owls and eating rocks might be irksome to some – but there's no denying that the alt-rocker's fifth album is beguiling, tightly written and richly melodic. A melodically gifted singer-songwriter, music that's subtle but never bland; these are disarmingly straightforward pleasures that all the strangeness – mannered or otherwise – can't obscure.
Helen Charlston: A Poet's Love
Out now – Schumann's Dichterliebe is at the heart of this disc from the mezzo-soprano and pianist Sholto Kynoch. Charlston's voice flows like molten lava, every word crystal clear.
Ana Roxanne: Poem 1
Out now – Essaying a broken heart, the New Yorker puts her voice front and centre for her most accessible work yet. For the first time, we hear Roxanne's lovely, wispy voice in lucid detail, as she contemplates loss and desire over slow and stripped-back compositions.
Now on … Peter Grimes
Royal Opera House, London, to 28 May – A gripping revival of Britten's opera updates the staging to a present-day, left-behind English coastal town, with Allan Clayton excellent as the titular tormented fisher. Clayton's Grimes is a role in which he currently has few rivals.
