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Alan Turing, the man who developed the Enigma code that saved the Allied war effort, was not merely disregarded by his country. A homosexual, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and chemically castrated via forced oestrogen injections. Under unimaginable duress, he committed suicide. That it took until 2009 for the British government to apologise only compounds the scandal. Turing’s story is told in Codebreaker, a docudrama that combines reenactments of conversations between Turing, played by Ed Stoppard (above), and his psychiatrist (the German Jewish refugee Franz Greenbaum), and interviews with experts on his life and work. One after another, they attest to Turing’s brilliance as the man who created modern computing.

Here’s a documentary called Chronicle of a Summer. Which summer? Why, the summer of 1960, in Paris, when fag-end colonial struggles were burning away in Algeria and other parts of Africa. And how is it chronicled? An anthropologist and a sociologist, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, put cameras on the streets and ask questions of the people they find. Who are you? Are you happy? The usual French existential stuff. The results are gripping, even from a distance of more than 50 years. Rouch and Morin focus on the personal; the everyday lives of factory workers, artists, immigrants, models and students. But when France’s present and recent past break into shot, it’s as dramatic as could be.

The word ‘concert’ means different things to different people. For some it evokes dinner jackets and not clapping between movements; for others, jumping up and down in a stadium, desperately trying to spot the band through a sea of blinking smartphones. But Secret Cinema’s latest brainchild, dubbed Secret Music, is something else entirely: its inaugural production brings Laura Marling’s new album to life and places you right at its core. Stepping into the grounds of a grand Victorian hospital in East London, transformed for the night into a 1920s hotel, you’re left to explore its various rooms, with their eclectic and unfailingly interesting occupants, at your leisure.

Technology is turning the human urge to consume information into an unhealthy addiction. Some of this consumption — reading, following the news, exposing ourselves to culture — has obvious merits; I’d have no trouble downloading the entire works of Shakespeare in the time it would have taken someone ten years ago to find their keys before setting off to a bookshop. But with so much around us to consume we seem to have lost the ability to make things ourselves. How can we be creative when every waking moment is spent trying to keep up with the feeds, updates and new releases volleyed at us from all sides? Take, for example, the iPad, that pinnacle of consumption, that manages to fit TV, record store and library into a retina display and a single button.

An oversized St Bernard’s body masked with a sheep’s head and a regal peacock with penguin feet and flippers punctuate the start and end of Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing at Turner Contemporary, Margate (until 15 September), curated by Brian Dillon. Art and artifacts from around the world represent the glory, revelations and threat of mankind’s inquisitive nature. Thomas Grünfeld’s taxidermy misfits are just two examples of a witty and wondrous collection of objects that we wouldn’t usually have the opportunity to view outside their own dedicated museums or private homes.

When the Marquess of Cholmondeley inherited Houghton Hall, the Palladian palace by Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, he started rootling through the cupboards and drawers. In one drawer, he found a treasure map — the original picture-hanging plan for the house, as built by his ancestor Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister. The only problem was, he didn’t have the pictures any more — Walpole’s cash-starved grandson had flogged them to Catherine the Great in 1779, in a sale arranged by James Christie, founder of the auction house. Now the best pictures have been brought back, mostly from the Hermitage, in a show (until 29 September) that is less an exhibition, more a recreation.

Man, I love the Flaming Lips. Psychedelic rock sublimity. They movingly address the deepest human concerns without a whiff of irony, while also seeing the point of confetti cannons, dancing penguins, having the lead singer surf the crowd in a giant plastic bubble, and so on and so forth. This week, mind you, they played the Camden Roundhouse the day after a tornado killed 24 people in their hometown and (in other news) they had to cancel a gig because singer Wayne Coyne had so bad a cough he couldn’t speak. No wonder they weren’t entirely bouncy. The material from their new album The Terror saw their usual ecstatic lift and soaring melancholy give way to a sort of minatory chug — like Led Zep played through an industrial rock-breaker.

If ever a director’s decision to cast an actor based solely on looks could be excused, it would be Pier Paolo Pasolini’s choice of Terence Stamp for the lead in 1968’s Theorem. As the mysterious, nameless, selfless houseguest of a well-off Milan family, Stamp (above) combines the insouciance of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange with a passive saintliness appropriate to Pasolini’s satirical intent. Stamp didn’t even have to be able to speak Italian — his character barely talks, and everyone’s dubbed anyway. Somewhere between the profound and the Pythonesque, Theorem ticks all the boxes for a 1960s European art film: allegorical Christ figure exposes middle-class hypocrisy with his sexual magnetism and non-linear narrative.

A knight and his lady awaken, naked in the forest. She pins up her embroidered gown while he begins his ablutions in a pond. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! He plants a stick between his shoulder blades before getting dressed himself. On goes his tunic, gauntlets and plated armour. And then they both climb on to his motorbike before riding out into the morning mist. Hang on a second – a motorbike?! It sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it is in George Romero’s Knightriders (1981), now out on DVD for the first time in the UK. Our knight in the forest is actually Ed Harris’s Billy, the leader of a troupe of men and women who travel around America putting on shows in small towns.

There were two Joan Eardleys, according to a new biography of the Scottish painter by Christopher Andreae. There was ‘the tender and gentle Joan’, as revealed by her bosom friend Audrey Walker, and ‘the tough, cussing, swearing, bulldozing, indomitable creator of what may be masterpieces’. Both are reflected in the Portland Gallery’s new exhibition of drawings and paintings from the last 20 years of her short life (until 17 May). The tough Joan chose the challenging subject matter, dividing her time between the rotting tenements of unreconstructed Glasgow and the leaky fisherman’s cottages of Catterline, south of Aberdeen.

The Philippines: An Archipelago of Exchange at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris (until 24 July) brings together an impressive range of objects that demonstrate the fluidity of ideas and forms dispersed through exploration, trade and the blood of battle. The exhibition focuses on the fertile interactions between Filipino tribes and naval traders preceding the 16th-century Spanish colonisation. Housed under the canopy of Jean Nouvel’s extraordinary building, the display treads a fine line between fetishisation and objective examination. On entering, you are surrounded by semi-circles of carved wooden rice gods, expanding outwards like shockwaves; you leave through a dark chamber lined with funerary objects.

Welsh miners, Basque child refugees (above), Tyneside shipbuilders, Paul Robeson: In the Shadow of Tyranny at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (until 16 May) offers a compelling portrait of Britain in the mid-20th century, as seen by an émigrée communist Austrian Jew, who also happened to be a Soviet espionage operative. Edith Tudor-Hart, who had fled her homeland in 1933 after marrying an English doctor, worked with spymaster Arnold Deutsch from 1926 onwards. As a photographer, her political sympathies were evident throughout her career, from early work documenting protest marches of ‘Red Vienna’ and its subsequent Nazification to representations of British inequality and deprivation.