Wednesday 22 January (8:45pm)

@ Cine Lumiere, 17 Queensberry Place, SW7 (020.7073.1350) Tube: South Kensington

Volker Schloendorff is a living legend as far as German cinema is concerned. He started his career as an assistant director in France (working for the likes of Alain Resnais, Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Melville) only to become almost solely responsible for the long awaited revival of German cinema. Almost forty years after his first movie, he will be appearing in London for the 40th anniversary of the Elysee Treaty. His talk will follow the screening of his 1976 film Der Fangschuss (aka Le Coup de grace). Set in a Baltic country during the Russian Civil War, it is just as much a historical film as it is a tale of sadomasochistic relationships and suppressed sexuality. Interesting to note, is the strange similarities between this early film set in 1919 eastern Europe and his 1998 film Palmetto set in contemporary America.

NB: Q&A also includes Christian Viviani, editor of the French Film journal Positif (arch-rival of Cahiers du Cinema).

Thursday 23 January (6pm - 2am)

@ Notting Hill Arts Club, 21 Notting Hill Gate, W11 (020.7460.4459) Tube: Notting Hill Gate

One World, Worldwide, Future World Funk, Orchestral World Groove -- there's evidently something very attractive about the word "world" when names are chosen for club nights espousing deck-deployed funky leftfield soundscapes. But we can't hold it against them when they're as good as Ross Allen's regular Thursday One World Live excursions. Alongside residents Paul Tomas (Radio 1) and Oliver Tison (Lumima), he'll be spinning (as they themselves very nicely put it) "A Nu Yorica for the 21st century if you like, spanning hip-hop, drum & bass, house, funk, jazz, latin & afro inspired mayhem". Their guest this week is prolific DJ and producer David Holmes. As well as releasing three albums of his own distinctive soulful breaks and beats, he's also responsible for the Oceans Eleven, Out of Sight and Resurrection Man soundtracks and somehow also found time to form his own funky hip-hop soul group, The Free Association. The Notting Hill Arts Club is a venue highly complementary to such proceedings, complete with comfy sofas, mini art exhibitions, and a healthy-sized dancefloor. A dancefloor bound to be rammed with punters playing their part in some seriously cinematic shenanigans.

Thursday 23 January (7pm)

@ ICA, The Mall, SW1 (020.7930.3647) Tube: Charing Cross/Piccadilly

It's everyone's dream to be without a past, then there're no mistakes, shame and embarrassments. That moment of being fresh and newly shaved again, that's why we travel, and stay in hotels; it's mental pampering so as to be able to face ourselves in that space where memory overrides fact. So, to go with Finnish tragic-comic filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki's The Man without a Past, the ICA is hosting a series of talks on amnesia and memory. Revered German poet, dramatist and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b.1929) will go head to head with eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm (b.1917) who has recently released a memoir: Interesting Times. With German birth-rights and formidable interests in politics and aesthetics, this will no doubt be a memorable tete-a-tete. After all, writing is just that translating memories and events -- imaginary or otherwise -- into a series of sentences... don't forget to come along...

Thursday 23 January (7:45pm)

@ Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, SE1 (020.7960.4203 or 4242) Tube: Embankment/Rail Waterloo

Tonight's gig should be an interesting one -- electronic beats and free jazz... John Coxon and Ashley Wales formed Spring Heel Jack in 1994 and rose to prominence 1996 through their production work on Everything But the Girl's track Walking Wounded and with their drum 'n' bass album 68 Million Shades.... They hit right when drum 'n' bass was at it's peak... Fast forward to 2001 and they began to change and collaborate with Matthew Shipp (pianist), William Parker (bassist), and Tim Berne (saxophonist) -- all three highly repected avant-garde jazz musicians -- and created electronic backdrops to improvised jazz... their first outing with this new sound was with their much talked about Masses album. They basically record a live show and then tweak these recordings in the studio by adding additional musicians and electronic sounds. Their most recent work is Amassed (September 2002) that again showcases this unique hybrid sound... neither electronic soundscapes nor free jazz.

NB: Tonight they are also joined by Evan Parker, J Spaceman (aka Jason "Spiritualized" Pierce) and Han Bennink.

Friday 24 January

@ Various cinemas all over London

This is Roman Polansky's latest and possibly best work to-date, due no doubt in part to his being able to draw from his life as a Jewish boy during the Nazi occupation of Krakow. The Pianist is based on the true story of Vladiyslaw Szpilman (brilliantly acted by Adrian Brody), a successful Jewish Pianist, who lived through the Nazi occupation in Warsaw and bravely survived life in the ghetto. Polanski delivers the film with an unusually authoritative perspective, such that to the point that one is often given the impression of watching a documentary. In choosing to tell the story of a single individual, Polanski presents us with a slice of history, making the viewer more sympathetic to the story and the hardships endured by this one, most unique character. The Pianist won the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

Friday 24 January (Fri & Sat 8:30pm; Sun 6:30pm)

@ Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, SW11 (020.7326.8200)

Wishbone were recently hailed by Lyn Gardner of The Guardian as one of the hottest new fringe theatre companies of the moment. With this pronouncement ringing in their ears, Wishbone are at the BAC as part of the London International Mime Festival (10/01 till Sun 26/01). Scapegoat is a piece of consummate style and invention, where Karen Glossop and Paul Murray are a self-help writer and her boyfriend who take a trip into a peculiar country policed by goats. It's a transfixing tale of love and abandonment that never quite reveals itself entirely; such is the ingenuity of the design. Go on, exorcise those Marcel Marceau reservations and see this beautiful offering from these newcomers.

NB: Scapegoat is part of the London International Mime Festival 2003 (which ends on Sun 26/10) -- for the full line and a list of all the venues taking part in the festival see the website.

NB: There is also a perforamance of Scapegoat on Sat 25/01 at 8:30pm and Sun 26/01 at 6:30pm.

Saturday 25 January (11 am)

@ Curzon Soho, 93-107 Shaftesbury Ave., W1 (020.7439.4805) Tube: Leicester Square/Piccadilly

It is time for another Extreme Cinema at the Curzon. Carefully working their way through a broad range of directors, the theatre is now set for three Europeans. Top-billing has been carefully dedicated to the much hated and loved, Danish director Lars von Trier of Dogma fame. His early flirt with fascism in the short Images of Relief renders it clearly a piece for fans of his early trilogy The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa Der Fangschuss. Patrice Leconte (La Veuve de Saint- Pierre and Ridicule) is represented by the eight minute short Le Batteur du Bolero. Concluding the programme, less controversial than von Trier, but more famous than Leconte, Stephen Frears. His career has centred much around Hollywood and its ways, in the latter years but in between the failures of High-Lo Country and High Fidelity, the success of Dangerous Liaisons and Dirty Pretty Things can be felt. Represented here with a thirty minute short called The Burning, you may discover that there was more to the early Frears than BBC productions.

NB: Q&A with director Stephen Frears follows the screenings.

Saturday 25 January (2 - 4:30pm)

@ Whitechapel, 80-82 Whitechapel High St., E1 (020.7522.7888) Tube: Aldgate East

As a part of their Crash Course lecture series, and to coincide with the Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938 exhibition, the Whitechapel Gallery presents their latest course; Unravelling Modernist Architecture. Designed to give the novice an easy entry point, the Crash Courses require no prior knowledge and aim to "unravel Modernist architecture and outline the ideas of this influential group of architects." Modernist architecture has had a significant impact on the London in which we live today, giving us such controversial and prominent developments as the Trellick "Goldfinger" Tower and the Barbican Centre as well as widespread impact through its adoption by government authorities such as the London County Council's Architects' Department. To understand why a much vaunted, and allegedly utopian movement continues to be blamed for much of our existing woes requires at least a crash course and after the lecture you can take a stroll around the Mies exhibition (ends 02/03).

NB: The course will be given by Wyn Davies -- who has previously taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture and is Director of keepthinking/SkeneDavies Design.

Saturday 25 January (8:45pm)

@ National Film Theatre, South Bank, SE1 (020.7928.3232) Tube: Embankment/Waterloo

Remember June 2000... the Economist cover with Kim Jong-il waving, and the two-word caption stating: "Greetings, Earthings!"... Well it now seems prophetic that North Korea is the new -- or should we say -- possibly the next Iraq, even the sharpest barometer of Western foreign policy, the new Bond movie seems to think so... But how much do we really know about the North Koreans: except that their leader's favourite food is roast donkey and he wears a toupe? We digress... back to the documentary: this amazing, light-hearted film, which went down very well at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival last year, is guaranteed to improve international understanding... It tells the story of North Korea's unlikely 1966 football heroes, the year that their team managed to beat Italy, a defeat which sent the Italians home. Stranger things have happened -- afterall England won that Cup. This documentary team went back to North Korea to find the seven surviving members of the team, and brought them back to their adopted British town of Middlesborough, the site of their victory. Four years in the making, The Game of their Lives is a heart-rending piece of history-telling and definitely not just for football fans.

NB: Dan Gordon (Director/Producer) and Nick Bonner (Asociate Producer) are schedule to be hand to introduce the film -- check with the box office for confirmation.

Sunday 26 January (3pm)

@ The Foundry, 84-86 Great Eastern St., EC1 (020.7739.6900 ) Tube: Old St.

"A patchwork of digitalia, audioscapes, collage and ethnographic forgery" is how the Slow Sound System describes itself. What? Put simply, Slow is not the only word to describe this sound system. Other applicable adjectives are long, low, smooth and maybe soft; all of which inspire a very chilled relaxatory experience. The order of the day here is more to just provide arrays of sounds (both organic and synthetic) which are just nice to hear, rather than sculpt them into any specific musical form. This month sees guitar and synthology from experimentalists Dual and an "electronic glitch excursion" from Thorsten Sideb0ard, amongst others.

Monday 27 January (7:30pm)

@ Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, N1 (020.7226.1686) Tube: Highbury & Islington

Monday sees Chicago's The Sea and Cake return after a long absence for the London leg of their world tour. The tour coincides with the release of their comeback album One Bedroom (due for release January 21st), which holds music with an ability to tickle you gently with soft synth and guitar melodies embroidered with delicate vocals -- a bit like a multicoloured feather duster in the hands of the Mull Historical Society: altogether pleasant and surprisingly relaxing. Well suited support is provided by masters of mellow The High Lamas and Monade.

NB: For tickets click here or call 0870.120.1349.

Monday 27 January (also Tue 28/01 and Thu 30/01 - 7:30pm)

@ Barbican Centre, Barbican Centre, EC2 (020.7638.8891) Tube: Barbican

It was in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers that Wynton Marsalis first made his mark, playing music with them whilst studying classical trumpet at Juilliard School in New York. He went on to join Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, before forming his own groups, and soon became known as one of the most talented hard bop trumpeters alive. In 1984, he achieved the unprecedented, winning Grammys in both the classical and jazz categories and is nowadays, one of jazz's most vocal advocate and educator as director of the Lincoln Center Jazz. Next week he plays three London dates with the Center's superb big band, each exploring a very different head of that jazz hydra. "The Music of Art Blakey and Wynton Marsalis" (Mon 27/01 - first date) will no doubt involve reinterpretations of the music from the period in the early eighties when he played with the legendary jazz drummer. The second date with Arturo O'Farrill and members of the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra (Tue 28/01) will explore jazz's long-running love affair with the music of Latin America. The third date (Thu 30/01) is "The Music of Benny Goodman", definitely a riotous evening of swing, evoking the sound of all cool dancefloors circa 1930.

Monday 27 January (7:30pm)

@ Scala, 275-277 Pentonville Rd., N1 (020.7833.2022) Tube: Kings Cross

Masatoshi Nagase suggested in the closing moments of Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's 1996 Icelandic road movie Cold Fever, that a journey can take you to places you won't find on any map. Right then, nine Icelandic musicians, filmmakers and DJ's, taking their name from the German pronunciation of couscous in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's movie Ali Fear Eats the Soul, began taking us to these places with the albums Polydistortion and This Is Normal, giving us one of the sexiest live act of visuals, poetry and jump-up and down dance of the late '90s. And despite the creative map eventually leading them apart; keeping in mind the fact that they were never a group but a collective, they have re-emerged as a foursome with two brand-new members. GusGus remind us that the most rewarding experiences in life are unplanned and have little to do with leisure, the harder you work the more valuable, satisfying, and pleasing your results. Though Iceland is now certainly on the map, GusGus continue to offer worthwhile, offbeat journeys.

Ends Saturday 25 January (Tue to Sat 10am - 6pm)

@ Sprovieri Gallery, 27 Heddon St., W1 (020.7734.2066) Tube: Piccadilly Circus

Very simply, Cristiano Pintaldi watches a lot of television, or at least gives the impression he does when he's not devoting hours towards depicting it's cellular matrix -- beat that Keanu. What the Italian achieves is visually maddening, quite literally he works with three colours (red, blue, green) like TV pixels, hence like Roy Lichtenstein has translated the world via television's matrix. However, unlike Lichtenstein, Pintaldi works more directly with television culture (Star Trek, Space 1999...). Perhaps inspired by the M. Night Shyamalan's film Signs, he's broadened his sci-fi interests now to include crop circles. Quite literally, this show of paintings looks like giant images from television. Perhaps a meditation of the alienating nature of modern life, but more about the mediation of our entire lives through TV, maybe Pintaldi will cure our need for telly just by replicating that which we need most. He's boldly going where no man has wanted to go before: making images of modern nature.

NB: Ends this Saturday (25/02) and make sure you check out Gagosian's Richard Hamilton show after Sprovieri.

Ends Thursday 13 February

@ Various cinemas all over London

City of God comes tagged as the "Brazilian Goodfellas" which does it a disservice. No disrespect to Scorsese but Fernando Meirelles' film deserves to stand in its own right and on its own merits. From the opening chicken chase -- yes, chicken chase -- right through to the final climactic sequence, it's breathless and breathtaking stuff. City Of God is a true story, the actors are not professionals and Meirelle spent six months working with them (106 of them!). It's a story of life on the streets in the favelas (specifically the eponymous City of God) and it is brutally frank -- but never gratuitously so -- in it's depiction of the poverty, violence and hopelessness of much of that life. What could be a relentlessly grim experience, is anything but, as the sheer energy, vitality and infectious rhythms of the multi-layered narrative sweep you along like Carnival. Hands-down the film of the year thus far...

Ends Thursday 20 February

@ Various cinemas all over London

If City Of God is the "Brazilian Goodfellas" then Scorsese's own Gangs Of New York must presumably be the "19th Century Goodfellas", except it's actually less gangster flick than revenge western, for all that it's set on the Eastern seaboard. Think Sergio Leone at his most operatic, and Once Upon a Time in the West rather than in America. Whatever the comparisons, this is epic film-making of the old school. 1860s New York recreated on a vast outdoor lot at Cinecitta in Rome, cast of thousands, massive budget overruns and production delays amid rumours of bitter fights between director and studio... they really don't make 'em like this any more. Who cares if it's any good or not -- and in parts it's great in others terrible but never less than a truly great spectacle -- you just have to see it, and on the biggest screen you can.

Ends Saturday 22 February (Tue to Sat 10am - 6pm)

@ Gagosian, 8 Heddon St., W1 (020.7292.8222) Tube: Piccadilly Circus

Richard Hamilton's 6 Richard (the modified Ricard Pastis drink) signs sum up his generation: a witty Pop-Conceptualism. He negotiates that territory between life, Pop and Concept-Art. Now, Gagosian's mini-retrospective, Products -- in parrallel with MACBA, Barcelona's retrospecitve and his inclusion in the Tate Triennial -- bring together some of the Octogenarian's best "objects": vibrating teeth or The critic laughs (his response to Jasper Johns' lead relief The Critic Smiles), Toaster, and Lux 50 - functioning prototype (a functioning radio in a painting). Less criticism than celebration of the technological world that was beginning to overtake his life, Hamilton's later more politicised and socially critical work lack the wit and Duchampian-cheek of the products here. Also famous for reconstruncting Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (aka Large Glass) in 1966 and then diagramming it on a computer in 2001; and a key particpant in Design historian Reyner Banham and Pop Art critic Lawrence Alloway's 1950s Independent Group at the ICA, a line can certainly be drawn from Hamilton to Hirst. So if you have post-Christmas ennui and placebo-shopping has worn you down, why not take a toke from Hamilton's products and get your groove back!

NB: Show ends Saturday 22/02.

Ends Friday 28 February (See NFT website for details)

@ National Film Theatre, South Bank, SE1 (020.7928.3232) Tube: Embankment/Waterloo

That Bergman is a genius is something few would contend, and his continual stylistic reinvention puts him in the premier league of European auteurs. Watching a Bergman film is an uncomfortable experience, his themes of sexual and religious longing, tied to ontological crisis and self doubt are as unsettling now as they were in the '50s. Bergman, now well into his 80s, is undeniably the child of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen whose plays he continues to direct. In fact, the discomforting nature of what Antonin Arteau called the theatre of violence is certainly at play in his work and yet, in spite of the violence they are capable of unleashing on us, the influence of these films is so far reaching that watching them even for the first time produces a faint sense of deja vu, spooky and comforting. If you can only make it to one of the showings, try to make it to The Seventh Seal (Thu 23/01), the most iconic Bergman film, and the subject of pastiches from French and Saunders to Holsten Pils. You may need a drink afterwards though.

NB: This Bergman festival runs until Friday 28/02 -- for the full schedule see the NFT website.

Ends Sunday 23 March

@ British Museum, Great Russell St., WC1 (020.7323.8000) Tube: Holborn/Tottenham Court Rd.

The British Museum's comprehensive survey of Albrecht Durer, begins with a self-portrait of the artist at age thirteen. With a grace and skill far outreaching his years, the young Durer set about securing his own, enduring image. Elevating the status of printing to an art form, Durer received international fame, creating reproducible, printed images and branding them with that famous initialled logo. In a brilliant act of self-publicity, subsequent self-portraits cleverly merged his own face with that of Christ's. However, if God is in the details, then the intense religiosity in Durer's work shines forth. Nothing escaped his eye, his works on paper reveal all that we see, and yet do not always notice. With each hair carefully delineated, and each undulation of bone structure expressed through a collection of tiny strokes of cross-hatching, the human face is laid bare. And with each differing nuance of tree bark and rock face, and every vein on each fig leaf etched in, nature emerges in all its magnificent beauty. In Durer's work, reality is heightened, becoming so vivid it is almost brought into the realm of myth. Yet, in this pre-literate age, the magic of myth is conveyed without words, in such intricacy, it is rendered gloriously real. Just don't forget your looking glass.

NB: To see even more works by Durer visit the British Museum's Students' Room in the Department of Prints and Drawings. Open 10am -1pm and 2:15 - 4pm Monday to Friday, or 10am - 1pm on the first Saturday of every month. Standard ID will be requested at the door.

Ends Saturday 1 March (Mon to Thu 10am - 7pm; Fri to Sun 11am - 6pm)

@ Proud Camden Moss, 10 Greenland St., NW1 (020.7482.3867) Tube: Camden Town

You certainly have to hand it to Proud because they rise to the occasion... after several successful shows ranging from Sinatra, to Formula 1, they now give us an exhibition -- and a 272 page coffee table book -- on a phenomenon that stuck an annoying finger into the white-middle-class ribcage of America, and kept it there to show us. The success of this exhibition is not from the impressive wealth of image from Janette Beckman's early Grand Master Flash through to mainstream breakthrough and today's media superstars, nor the ironic use of Stars and Stripes, the cartoonish stances, the parody, or the humour, or even Nitin Vadukal's, fantastic digitally manipulated images. Success lies in the fact that it succeeds in sticking a cap in your ass and making you realise that Hip Hop cannot be experienced in a gallery or by holding a cup of coffee, but by getting involved with a microphone from a stage, looking down at an audience, because "Hip Hop ain't no spectator sport."