Four weeks till Christmas! Argh. Funds are all focused on present buying and getting through the party season but we still want to go out and about because the heating isn't working properly at home. We can't afford to go and see Gandalf drop his trousers in King Lear but, thankfully, there's lots of cheap and interesting stuff about as usual. Monday: Start the week with an event truly in the spirit of London......

This is the story of a very strange Sunday that started with eight audience members sitting in shop doorways and concluded at a dining table set up on the busy St John’s Road near Clapham Junction. We went through a lot together – a phonebox, a cashpoint, a wedding in a piss-sodden alleyway, a funeral in a car park and then this surreal Sunday lunch. We were family by the time Barry broke his......

If the London movie map created by FilmLondon and VisitLondon is to be believed, there are few places in this city that haven't been filmed. So next time you have a 'this could be in a film' moment when you're out, that's probably because it was. London's most often depicted as a jolly place full of Routemaster buses, rather than afloat with porridgey puddles of pavement sick and confused tourists. And yes, there's a......

Time Out have announced the details of their 'London on Screen' season designed to celebrate "the very best of filmmaking in London from across the decades": The streets, buildings and monuments of our city appear regularly in films from around the world, from big-budget Hollywood movies seeking a European interlude to Bollywood films looking for a dose of European 'exoticism'. But it's much rarer to see a film in which a filmmaker, British or......

Mike Leigh's new play now has some reviews to go along with its recently revealed title. After a shaky start last week when the first two previews were cancelled, it's now all systems go for Leigh's new venture, which is called Two Thousand Years. What's it about? Well, first, what it's not about is the war in Iraq or Jewish settlers in 1948 Israel. The actual plot is nicely summarised in The Telegraph: "This......

The big film this week is, without a doubt, Mike Leigh's Vera Drake. After all you know a film must be good when grumpy old Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian calls it "a masterpiece". Other loving adjectives that Bradshaw chooses to shower on this film include: "masterly", "gripping and fascinating", "stunningly acted and heartwrenchingly moving", and he calls Imelda Staunton's titular role "one of the most moving, haunting performances I have ever seen in......