No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride," according to the masterly New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay. Both views come from Englishmen working in America, hence a contradictory weathervane as to how his ballets will be received in Britain on this tour.

Gary Oldman's shrewd and skilful portrayal of mole-hunter George Smiley has prompted excitable Oscar gossip, but the biggest success of Tinker Tailor... is its creation of a melancholy sealed world where the common currency is secrets, lies and disillusion. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson has brought a supernaturally observant eye to jaded 1970s London, where a disgraced Smiley is brought back to the Circus (John le Carré's pet name for MI6) to conduct a clandestine probe for the traitor leaking secrets to Moscow.

“Smackhead, groin doctor and smut-scribe”: that’s one way in which writer Mikhail Bulgakov is described in John Hodge’s debut stage drama.

There’s a lot of Soviet art about at the moment – the excellent show that opens this Saturday at the Royal Academy has Constructivist and Suprematist paintings and drawings loaned by the George Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki. Now, at Annely Juda, a smaller, but no less excellent, show highlights one single Malevich painting, Black Square (main picture, above), a tiny gem of the early 20th century, also from the Costakis Collection, together with a series of Malevich’s working drawings.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so ambivalent about a show, and so strongly both pro and con. The pros first, then. This is an astonishing, revelatory exhibition of avant-garde art and architecture in the Soviet Union in the brief but hectic period from the Revolution to the Stalinist crackdown in the 1930s.

A master of visual cinema, primus inter pares, Sergei Paradjanov was a law unto himself in Soviet cinema of the 1960-1980s; his body of work from the Caucasus in that period is as visually innovative and brightly colourful as anything in cinema. A “magician in cinema”, indeed. Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is being reissued with very welcome and full additional commentary.

Part of the fun of watching The Hour, in the absence of a coherent plot, convincing characters and plausible period dialogue, was ruminating on the myriad different ways it could be sliced: a grown-up Press Gang meets Mad Men? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold versus Spooks? All the President’s Men crossbred with Foyle’s War?

In Tbilisi, Georgia, artists and art historians are calling for the Government to stop destroying their classic Old Town with its winding streets and wooden balconies. New organisations have been formed, exhibitions held to publicise this creeping eradication of history. Now another grand, once-protected building, the former Institute of Marxism and Leninism, has appeared in the cross-hairs.

Odessa must be one of Central Europe’s more distinctive cities, characterised by a profoundly cosmopolitan ethnic mix over more than two centuries. It was one of the most international cities in the Tsarist empire, while in Soviet times it honed that identity, based not least on the size of its Jewish population, and the brand of humour – accompanied by an almost distinct language – that resulted.

You don’t tend to get many films from the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union. And certainly not from Kyrgyzstan.