Anne Fontaine’s Coco Avant Chanel is an elegant film. It tells the story of Coco Chanel’s early life from her time in an orphanage as a small child, to the birth of her fashion empire in Paris as a young lady.

“Never work with children and animals”.

Experts say these two groups are the most difficult to work with, yet director Luc Jacquet (The March Of The Penguins), has successfully negotiated these opposing creatures and shot the two at play in picturesque surroundings in his new film The Fox & The Child.

Initiation time: Health are a noise-rock band from LA. Releasing their self-titled debut album in 2007, they followed it up with a remix album, entitled //DISCO (enlisting the help of such acts as Crystal Castles and Pictureplane), and were then headhunted to tour with Nine Inch Nails in the US.

Undeniably the kings of alternative rock, Devonshire trio Muse return with their most ambitious effort to date, dabbling with orchestral, pop and even rhythm and blues influences. The fifth studio album is a place where the likes of Chopin, Freddie Mercury, and Goldfrapp all peacefully coexist.

David Hare is not shy about expressing his discontent with modern politics in the most emphatic manner. Stuff Happens was a blistering attack on the Iraq war and Gethsemane comes from a similar place. While it is somewhat less potent, Gethsemane will perhaps last longer than Stuff Happens because it asks broader questions about loyalty, powerbroking and manipulation.

This is a play about sex, sex, drugs, sex and people being bad in such a good way. Patrick Marber is definitely one of Britain’s best active playwrights, his scripts are hilarious, serious, witty, tender and satirical. In his latest script, Don Juan in Soho, he turns his attention to the individualistic nature of our society. He exposes the fundamental flaws in a world that encourages instant gratification, instant notoriety and a disregard for the consequences. Without ever lecturing the audience, Marber forces us to question our involvement and complicity in this world.

Margaret Atwood wrote The Year of the Flood as a prequel of sorts to her Booker-prize-nominated novel Oryx and Crake. Atwood has created a Dystopia of stunning depth that is as weighty and ominous as the fore-runners of the genre; George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. What sets The Year of the Flood apart from those other works is that, where they were set in a future that was not-too-distant, Atwood’s novel appears to be set in a future that is scarily and inescapably imminent.

Smoke in the Room is Emily Maguire’s third novel. The highly charged sexual content of this distinctly Australian novel reveals that her latest non-fiction work, thePrincesses and Pornstars, has been an obvious influence.