Mentioning you had a brilliant night at a GrecoRoman party might raise an eyebrow or two amongst those with less than a passing interest in London nightlife. But despite the questionable choice of name, the Grecoroman family, which includes Joe Hot Chip and Alex Uber Alles from K7!, have been throwing extra special parties, small and large, for a good while now and the GrecoRoman mixtape (available here) was ingenious and without doubt one of the most blogged about mixes from last year. This month has seen the first release on GrecoRoman Music, a jacking acid house call to arms from David E Sugar. The DZD monthly is one of several GrecoRoman related parties happening over the space of seven days with David E Sugar doing a laptop set and Joe Hot Chip teaming up with UK MC prodigy Dels (Ed Banger boss Busy P being a big fan). Other reasons to make it down are DJ sets from the following: Gorky of noisy Brazilian pranksters Bonde Do Role, serial scenester Dev (ex Test Icicles and several hundred other bands) and two of the hardest working DJ duos in London right now in Patchwork Pirates and Tapedeck.

When she left school, despite never having lived in a house with a garden, green-fingered poet Sarah Maguire became the first female gardening apprentice for Ealing Council. Subsequently her poetry has an intense horticultural flavour, as seen in her work The Florist's At Midnight, A Green Thought In A Green Shade: Poetry In the Garden and Flora Poetica. But Maguire's poetry also describes foreign experience. (She was sent to Palestine and Yemen by the British Council and is the only living English-language poet with a book in print in Arabic: Haleeb Muraq. It is also thanks to her translating work that contemporary Arabic and other non-European poetry is now more frequently available in English.) Maguire comes to the London Review Bookshop to talk about her latest collection, The Pomegranates Of Kandahar. The foreign is still present here: the lack of peace in Ramallah compared to Dublin's fair city, a stowaway immigrant on a plane who falls to his death, a fitful sleep in Kazakhstan. And the trademark botanical description appears as when Maguire laments Afghanistan's warring climate through the description of its luscious crop. Highly recommended and you might get some gardening tips...

Daratt, the third feature from Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Chad's most famous (and indeed only) filmmaker, continues his themes of absence and loss. Like his previous film Abouna, Daratt is concerned with the effect on a young man of a missing father -- teenager Atim's father was killed in the civil war before he was even born. When a national amnesty is declared to attempt to heal the rifts of the long war, what begins as a plan to avenge the past evolves into a different understanding. As Atim becomes an apprentice to baker Nassara -- his father's murderer -- his original plans for revenge and his overly simplistic take on events gradually blurs. Although almost dialogue-free, the film speaks volumes by means of glances, small actions and by an overwhelming sense of wordless tension generated between the two men. Together with the beautifully captured sense of the relentless heat of Chad and the monotony of routine, it's a study of repentance, reconciliation and the importance of moving on -- slowly paced and quiet, but highly recommended.

NB: Daratt is released in London on 27/07. Other films of note this week are sherrybaby and a special advance screening at the BFI Southbank of The Walker with Paul Shrader (the film's director) in conversation.

Don't expect an easy ride from sherrybaby -- it's a powerful, unsanitised, often very distressing portrait of an ex-junkie single mother's attempt to reintegrate herself, following a three-year-spell in prison, into both everyday life and more specifically that of her young daughter. Hats off to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who goes hell for leather in the title role and packs some serious emotional punches. As Sherry, her anticlimactic release from jail is troubling to watch: her journey is entirely two steps forward, one step (and frequently more) back. It's not simply that she has to face the immediate ramifications of her past misdemeanours, and prejudice from those who know her history, but she still has to face all her old demons -- alcohol, drugs and abusive relationships, for which she can only use her old skill sets -- behaving, by turns, like an attention-seeking brat, a slut, a manipulative shrew and a liar. It's a tough journey to watch, with the strength of the film's impact coming from the simplicity of the direction, which doesn't finger point or invite a sympathy-straight-up presentation of Sherry's situation. The film explores the issues it raises in a tremulously oblique way -- free from dogmatic moralising, and boldly elliptical about where the blame might lie.

NB sherrybaby is released in London on 27/07. Other films of note this week are Daratt and a special advance screening at the BFI Southbank of The Walker with Paul Shrader (the film's director) in conversation.

As part of Tate Modern's Dali & Film season, the Starr Auditorium is transformed for one evening into a fog-bound theatre of secret identities and strange filmic affinities. Artist Mark Aerial Waller founded The Wayward Canon in 2001 as a "shifting platform for the re-interpretation of cinema" -- a kind of rolling, roving anti-cinematheque produced in a salon style. La Societe des Amis de Judex II is the project's high-water mark to date: a fearless investigation of the confluence of pop and surrealism, via '60s TV Batman and Louis Feuillade's legendary silent cinema serial Fantomas. This staging will include a new soundtrack for the Feuillade -- recorded with the help of a street musician playing music influenced by arcade games -- as well as audio interruptions by the Istanbul-based artist collective HAZAVUZU. Plus, the event also hosts the launch of a publication made in response to a weekend screening of Fantomas, produced by emerging Istanbul-based artists and writers. Oh, and did we mention the smoke machine...?

The popularity of Brazilian electro funk that has surged with the rise of CSS, and enfants terribles Bonde do Role is the perfect excuse to resurrect legendary psychedelic band Os Mutantes. Not a great commercial success, they once excited Kurt Cobain, and the influence of Tropicalia over the latest Brazilian exports looms large. The man lucky enough to get a rare stab at harnessing their avant-garde sound is JD Twitch, one half of legendary Glasgow night Optimo, which boasts Alex Kapranos as a regular. Supporting are the excitable heirs themselves, Bonde do Role, who've worked up many a club crowd into a sweaty frenzy, and everyone's new favourite beatmashers Radioclit. Somewhere in amongst this wild-eyed bunch is room for godfather of Baile Funk Diplo, and SpankRock collaborator Amanda Blank.

Once the sweat has dried, there couldn't be a better flipside than an abstract and thoughtful performance from Four Tet alongside the Sao Paulo collective Open Field Church. Their low-key approach disguises an incredible breadth of folk, electronic and punk influences, often performing with bands like Belle & Sebastian or reworking classic Brazilian artists such as Gilberto Gil. Kieran Hebden's proven mastery of combining the leftfield and the familiar should have a rich vein of material to work with here.

NB: both events are part of the TrocaBrahma series. JD Twitch and co perform on the 27/07 at The Forum and Four Tet and co perform on 28/07 at Plastic People.

In the case of both Hauser & Wirth's temporary reign at old East End cloth factory Coppermill and Martin Creed's solo exhibition in the space, good things always do come to an end. But the gallery's inspired shift into offsite territory was always to be a four-project deal, which began with Paul McCarthy followed by the playful assemblages of Dieter Roth and Martin Kippenberger, climaxed with Christoph Buchel's insanely inspired installation of industrial and domestic debris and is now bowing out gracefully with Creed's quiet, saucy, yet characteristically contained show of art-referential sculpture, film and performance. Those who fancy a last look at his "hard-edged, soft-hearted minimalism" (not to mention a final art-legitimised glimpse of what may well be the world's largest, shortest silent porn film) will be rewarded with new film works and live performances culminating with a mini-gig by Creed's band. Even for the art-adverse, it's worth taking in this bit of old East End architectural history before it is redeveloped, rumour has it, into luxury flats.

Art and pop music have always rocked and rolled hand in hand. Art students are most likely to form bands while they ought to be working on their end of degree exhibitions and rock stars are often closet painters or photographers. The South London Gallery understands this immemorial complicity and celebrates it with The Weasel, a temporary music venue showcasing the work of artists exploring the social, personal and political meanings of popular music from anthems to anarchy all the way to electro pop, cabaret and rave. A plethora of film, video and live performance is presented for the oncassion on a stage specially designed by assume vivid astro focus, and the project will be documented with a unique "bootleg" of photography and sound. Keep an eye out for the final evening hosted by Matt Stokes. There is the promise of sweet old school house to nu rave beats to emanate from Real Arcadia, Stokes' replica of a mid-'80s acid house sound system, as well as live performances by Alexandra Bachzetsis and Giles Round.

NB: The Weasel: Pop Music And Contemporary Art runs till 29/07.

Continuing the recent run of quality events down at Elephant and Castle's Corsica Studios this Saturday are the Digital City crew with their trademark mix of films and bumping electro. Now in their third year of throwing parties they've built up a loyal following by making sure their events feel more like a very messy gathering of friends than just another club. Of course, having the likes of Warp legends Plaid (live and DJ set) and rave pioneers Shut Up & Dance on the bill doesn't hurt. Throw in live sets from Liberation Jumpsuit and Dub Kult and the Soul Jazz Soundsystem and you can be sure the club's brand new Funktion-One rig should be firing on all cylinders. It's not all about your ears, though, and there's plenty for your eyes as well with some of London's best VJs such as Mach V, Parallax and Dr Mo on hand and a room dedicated to showcasing new indie films, animations and music promos, ideal should you need a break from the other rooms' non stop bangers. As an added bonus, all the profits from the night go towards keeping the brilliant Resonance FM on the (digital) airwaves, well worth having a great night out for.

From the doorway of the gallery Simon Bill's unapologetically decorative paintings might be oversized Faberge eggs that have suffered structural collapse. But these flat, ovaloid works are large and compositionally complex enough to avoid being labelled trinkets. On each identically sized panel, Bill has worked through very different modes of aesthetic enquiry in oil to create a curious Petri-dish cluster of familiar abstract forms inspired by heraldic motifs and biomorphic systems. The collective title Odd hints at the obtuse specificity with which Bill has individually named each work. The flag-like portioning of Irrelevance, featuring a polite floral medley of interior greens, appears all about pitting mathematical discovery against the world of design -- a critique, perhaps, on the arbitrary superficiality of image making? The garish Harlequins Are Smashing, on the other hand, consists of a warped, diamond-shaped grid so optically sickly as to prompt associatively violent readings from the title. Quite what drives Bill's narrative journey is open to question, but the effect is far beyond pretty.

NB: runs till 05/08.

Sometimes the most effective characters in a story are the ones you have to work the hardest to figure out. For whatever reason, they elude our imaginations, only ever revealing themselves one feature at a time. Ray Bradbury's mechanical hound from his novel Fahrenheit 451 is a perfect example of a terrifying concoction of single features, unattached and incongruous, all floating together to create an amorphous anthropomorph. This is hardly a foreign concept in contemporary art -- using an array of un-marriable items to construct a composite representation of the social climate or of the absurd normity of consumer culture. Stewart Gough's solo exhibition at Gone Tomorrow Gallery follows this theme in keeping with his trademark style of assemblage, this time creating an ambiguous portrait of an even more ambiguous figure from an obscure 1960s pop song, made popular by Manfred Mann. The Mighty Quinn is part vehicle (snowmobile perhaps?), part ice- creature, part habitrail and named for "Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)", a song written by Bob Dylan about a legendary bringer of unexplained happiness. Maybe it's the vaguely disturbing anthropomorphic posture the work assumes, but it functions both as an unlikely collection of dimly recognisable objects and as an interpretive portrait.

NB: runs till 03/08.

This curious group show takes as its point of departure the filmmaker Douglas Sirk, and the themes of inauthenticity, dream, absence and artifice that pervade his work. Peer Raben's evocative music for Fassbinder, a director who himself was a fan of Sirk's films, plays continuously. Then there are a pair of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' circular mirrors, characteristically positioned beyond eye-level (Sirk used the devices of multiple mirroring), and an installation of his lightbulbs, which work well with Rebecca Warren's eclectic installations. Shannon Bool's batik paintings and Pae White's extraordinary woven tapestries of table-scraps perhaps resonate with the underlying critique of bourgeois domesticity in Sirk's films. However, sometimes the relations between the works on show and Sirk's films can seem either rather contrived, or completely absent. For instance, Salvatore Arancio's series of photo etchings of violent geyser eruptions in magnificent romantic landscapes, though beautiful, seem a bit out of context. However, an interesting group of artists, and some particularly strong individual pieces, make this show worth a visit.

NB: runs till 05/08.

Paul Schrader is best known for his legendary screenplays for Taxi Driver (written when he was just 26) and Raging Bull, and his film American Gigolo, which borrowed heavily from Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. A common underlying theme is the psychological alienation of anti-heroes who have been unjustly framed, or judged. With Woody Harrelson's character in his new film The Walker, Schrader has said that he is concluding his unofficial trilogy (begun with Taxi Driver and American Gigolo), and finally retiring the protagonist character that links them. Harrelson plays Carter Page III, a gay male escort for the ladies of Washington DC's political elite. As such, he holds the key to the deepest and darkest secrets of this powerful world, and soon finds himself implicated in a sordid scandal. To save himself, and his implicated friend (Kirsten Scott Thomas) he is forced to leave behind his carefree life of pleasures to pursue the truth. Harrelson is said to give the performance of his lifetime, and the cast includes Lauren Bacall and Willem Dafoe. The first 7 minutes of the film can be seen on YouTube.

NB: The Walker is released in London on 10/08. Other films of note released this week are Daratt and sherrybaby.

Currently riding on a wave of critical acclaim for their new album, Rothko headline at another always-interesting Arctic Circle event. Arctic Circle is an off-shoot of Chiller Cabinet radio show, sitting at the intelligent end of the "chill" genre, and showcasing the more painterly end of musical pastel shades. Rothko, with a front bass duo, were named after founder member Mark Beazley's favourite painter; in Beazley's own words: "He worked in blocks of colour, we try to work in blocks of sound." The new album, Eleven Satges Of Intervention (BiP_HOp), was described in The Wire magazine as "a combination of sparse, interwoven melodies (with) atonal classical influences" and each release has been more ambitious in scope, reviewed on KF as "consolidating their position as masters of post-rock melancholic understatement". Live, they are a brilliant example of that refined mood. Support is from Klima (from the Peacefrog label), whose front person Angele David-Guillou is a French singer-songwriter synthesising euro-pop, rock and electronica to create highly personal music, going beyond the parameters of the stereotypical French chanteuse. Also Anne Garner performs her evocative, poised and minimal ballads, plus there's DJing from Arctic Circle/Chiller Cabinet mainman Ben Eshmade and electronica wunderkind Inch-time, with visuals by Bad Hand and Mokital.

Rokia Traore is one of these rare birds that flies in from time to time to question and show her world that a different perspective is possible and required. From the get go, born into a wealthy Malian family where musical aspirations are usually left to the "lower cast" she broke the mould and developed her music under the watchful eye of mentor Ali Farka Toure. When she emerged into the influential African music scene in France at the Festival d'Angouleme in 1997, she had arrived with a sulky voice and trance-like quality which quickly turned her into the darling of the world music genre. Today she is considered one of the most amazing and unique talents of Western Africa. In this startling concert commissioned by Peter Sellars, Traore plays with the idea of yet again breaking the mould and expanding her concert into a multi media event where she questions Mozart as a court griot under the great Soundiata Keita of the Mande Empire and expends the idea to include historical musical figures such as legendary Malian singer Fanta Damba and jazz singer Billie Holiday. Traore is bound to stir some well-oiled perceptions and force you into questioning the source of your musical aspirations.

NB: this event is part of the Barbican's New Crowned Hope festival that runs till 12/08.

Dominic Cook's opening gambit as artistic director of The Royal Court is a searingly poignant social satire that aims and fires at the hollow Liberalism of nauseatingly PC white middle class America. The play presents the events of a tension-filled Thanksgiving family dinner in an elliptical collage of action flashbacks, as they are explained to an Asian guest. However, it quickly becomes apparent that this family of high-talking Liberal lip-synchers are falling over themselves to justify (not simply narrate) their actions to their guest, for reasons that are suspiciously sketchy. In their different ways they represent repellent aspects of the right-on, from the househusband reluctant to admit to his patently affluent lifestyle, to his feminist watch-guard wife who fears that her daughter, even at five or six years old, might be subjected to "male objectification". In their politically "hip" bubble, they fail to recognise their own bigotry, and are so focused on grand scale "issues" that they can't see those within their own home. That such a politically astute commentary is shot from the hip of what is essentially a farce is a feat indeed, it's just a shame it wasn't aimed at the British middle classes, for it's oh so easy to laugh at our American cousins, without a thought for our own hypocrisy.

NB runs till 04/08.

A good Victorian melodrama: there's nothing like one when it's done well, and Gaslight has cherry picked the ingredients for a sublimely stagy, stylised, and theatrically tense production. Willowy, ivory skinned, highly-strung and shrill, Rosamund Pike is the perfect vision of Victorian heroineism, psychologically abused by her draconian, bullish husband and heartbreakingly taunted by the saucy, impudent maid. Her suspicions concerning her husband's mysterious (and elaborately deceptive) trips to the locked third floor of their London home are confirmed following the unannounced visit of a retired local detective, who has secrets to spill. The short, stocky Londoner, fired up for investigative action as only a retired copper can be, is straight out of a Wilkie Collins novel, and as he conspiratorially and energetically bounces about the walls of the Hogarthian set, it's not hard to see why he wins the confidence of the neglected and terrorised little housewife. As the facts are pieced together, uncomfortable truths revealed and dangerous terrain negotiated, the thriller more than does its job, and coming in at just about two hours, it's a brilliantly pacy, flash reminder of how the Victorians set the foundations for the genre as it stands today.

NB: runs till 18/08.

Simple means to achieve results, that's what you get here -- Hreinn Fridfinnsson's work employs the kind of subtle intervention that, with its avoidance of straight-forward shock content, is missing from much of this generation's conceptual art. Born in Iceland in 1943 -- and a mainstay of the Icelandic art scene since his 20s -- Fridfinnsson has been making art for long enough to be relaxed in his approach. The work often involves found materials or the ephemera of his life -- a shoe placed by a mirror to make a pair, a strangely moving diptych of the artist drawing (as a child and as a man), an at-first-sight seemingly uninteresting series of photographs of the Icelandic landscape -- everything invoking a feeling rather than provoking a response, and doing even that almost as an afterthought. This art, despite perhaps a certain hit-or-miss quality in places, works well when it works. More intimate somehow than part-Icelandic-Tate-favourite -- and Serpentine-Pavilion-Artist -- Olafur Eliasson, who collaborated on the presentation of the show, Fridfinnsson often draws on the particular nature and folklore of his native land (though his long-term adoptive country is Holland) and his exploration of experience, landscape and object is a pleasure.

NB: runs till 02/09.

The architect John Weeks, a frequent collaborator with the Martins, once described the roofs of a hospital extension he was planning as "a nest of angles". This is at once rational description, poetic evocation of nature and geometrical model, neatly summing up what Kenneth and Mary Martin were able to do. Their world is one of re-construction, of machines for looking intended to help us see the world in a better way. Think of post war Britain, battered and grey, and radical artists and architects planning to use uncompromising excellence to re-build hospitals, schools and homes, and you have an idea of the optimism and political idealism that informs the Martin's work. This exhibition documents a rare thing, that is, an abstract art movement of political conviction, which puts visual beauty at the heart of its programme. A very contemporary take on appropriation, re-invention and intuitive models for art practice occurs in Daniel Silver's room of heads on improvised, decidedly home-made plinths. He raids the world of Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, but does so in a way that feels oddly displaced... perhaps closer to the psychological spaces generated by Mike Nelson than the modernist sculptors he seems to quote.

NB: runs till 16/09.

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