Almost time for the London Film Festival again! This year the event is opened by David Cronenberg's London-set Eastern Promises - Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen following up A History of Violence with this violent tale of Russian organised crime, penned by Steve Dirty Pretty Things Knight. One to watch for sure. Closing the festival is the new Wes Anderson movie, The Darjeeling Limited. In between there are some 180+ feature films and 133 shorts,......

While the London Film Festival was having its gala opening in Leicester Square, a decidedly less glitzy and less James McAvoy-related film gathering was taking place down at BAFTA headquarters over on Piccadilly. Just Watch Me: Award Winning Canadian Short Films brought together some classic National Film Board cartoons with newer shorts by David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin and Chris Landreth (who won the Oscar in 2005 for his animated film Ryan). Also, there was......

Renowned barrel of laughs Nick Cave is set to make his follow up to The Proposition right here in London. He's dumping the outback, but keeping Ray Winstone: His new movie tells the story of a travelling salesman who trawls the south coast of England hawking beauty products. The salesman, played by Ray Winstone, finds this the perfect way to meet lonely women and feed his need for sex. Sounds seedy. Maybe Naomi Watts......

A 15-year-old boy was stabbed to death outside the London Academy school in Edgware yesterday afternoon. The former Midland Grand Hotel, next to St Pancras, is to reopen in 2009 after a 100 million-pound refurbishment. Ken has published a report which calculates that this year's Living Wage for London is £7.05 an hour. Thames Water will not be imposing a drought order...yet. Ken again: writing in the Independent this time, and claiming that Blair's......

Late as in this should have been up yesterday but it wasn't and is therefore late. A couple of instores worth checking out are London's Rakes on Monday at the Virgin Megastore and melody driven rock types Morning Runner on Wednesday at 6 at the big HMV on Oxford Street. But we'll concentrate on this month's Blang night at the 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street. With bands like The Broken Family Band and......

Don't panic if you don't as we're always losing things too. Ok we tend to misplace pens and the occasional NME incriminating list rather than actual human remains, but there is some tupperware at the back of our fridge that at this point could contain anything. We'd need a CSI team to be sure. Anyway, if you're the proud owner of a six-pack of one hundred year old foetuses and can't lay your hands......

End of a Tuesday is almost mid week, and since there's been a flurry of activity within the Londonist Music inbox, always a sure sign that the music world is shaking off it's fluffy winter feathers and gearing up for another year of doing damage to our collective eardrums, we thought it was time to catch up with a few friends hanging around various stages over the next few days. It's a little late......

Face transplants are coming to London. Actual face transplants - although that is a pretty good name for a band. The first partial face transplant was of course big news - a woman whose face was mutilated by a dog was the first ever recipient of the new flesh (more John Woo than David Cronenberg). Now surgeons in London are keen to give full face transplants a bash. There are of course a lot......

Shunt has been a Londonist favourite for a while now, ever since they put girls in feathers and made them dance on trapezes above a hearse in a vault under London Bridge station and then put everyone to sleep with anaesthetics They're back with a new show and once again make the most of their dark and eerie vaults in SE1. Amato Saltone promises audiences an eccentric view of the city, with games of......

There's only one film we could kick off with this week and that film is...Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Ok, not really. Although we will get to that eventually. No, the film we're most interested in this week is David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. It's arthouse meets Hollywood with Vigo Mortensen, so it really shouldn't work. But somehow Cronenberg seems to have pulled it off, that is if this week's broadsheet reviews are anything......

Well it beats chickens. Two disgusting interesting wriggly stories in one day. First it was the ferocious Scolopendra gigantea - evil looking bastard thing in plain English - and now we have your actual tongue eating parasite. This cute little fellow was found inside a fish dish in South London and although we all had a good dry heave it's actually made the people at the Horniman Museum quite excited while Lewisham council are......

London has more corners, and secrets, than anyone could imagine; every now and then, visionaries latch onto one neglected aspect of it and bring it to general attention, in the process transforming our view of the city we thought we knew so well. Of late, the National Theatre has been rich with that sort of insight. Who really noticed, or cared about, the theatre's flytower until they struck on the idea of projecting films......