It’s rare to get excited about a DVD release. It is even rarer to get excited about a director. Margin Call and its director JC Chandor are rare exceptions. Devised in 2005, the idea for the film came about when the director and his chums, testing the waters of the volatile yet lucrative New York property market, were offered $10m by a bank - few questions asked. By 2006, their plan of buying a building, renovating and flipping it became an undone deal as one of Chandor’s group pushed them to sell up - an act thatproved to be prudent in hindsight.

On 25 November cinemas all over Britain and overseas will host a live relay from the Bolshoi Ballet of a rampantly OTT and enormously entertaining ballet set in ancient Egypt, The Pharaoh's Daughter. It has mummies coming to life, English tourists in timewarps, frenzied cobras, underwater ballets, jaunty tunes, and phalanxes of delectable archeresses. The original ballet premiered exactly 150 years ago, and what you'll see is a recreation of the fantastical, surreal exotica of the kind of theatre provided at the dawn of classical ballet.

Herbie Hancock has never stood still. He hit the ground running, joining Miles Davis's second great quintet on piano in 1963 at the age of just 23, and from that moment on demonstrated a Stakhanovite work ethic and appetite for the new which saw him on the crest of wave after wave of revolutionary music.

Julien Temple’s directing career has been struck seemingly stone-dead twice. After working with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1979), then again after the flop big-budget British jazz musical Absolute Beginners (1986), he was made a notorious cinema untouchable in the UK. Exiled in Hollywood, he fell back on his parallel life as a landmark pop video auteur.

Conor Maynard is a 19-year-old pop singer, originally from Brighton. He first gained a profile by posting YouTube footage of himself covering a variety of pop and R&B songs. His success increased dramatically when he started working with Virginian rapper Anth Melo. Record company attention arrived after he was spotted by the American singer Ne-Yo and in 2012 his debut album Contrast appeared, featuring three hit singles, “Can’t Say No”, “Vegas Girl” and “Turn Around”.

Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall has won two Grammys and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. Born in 1964 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, she attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1980s and had her major breakthrough with the 1995 album, All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio. Produced by T Bone Burnett and featuring Marc Ribot on guitar (and a cameo from Howard Coward, a.k.a.

Film critic and historian David Thomson has been writing on cinema for more than 40 years, and in that time has penned books both sprawling (1975’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film) and specific (2009’s The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder). His latest volume The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did To Us straddles the divide. It’s an ambitious but selective history of cinema, combining an overview (which is, by Thomson’s own admission, partial) with intimate, specific studies of noteworthy filmmakers.

The cast of On the Road is an embarrassment of riches. There’s Viggo Mortensen, high on many people’s lists of favourite contemporary actors, with a rum portrayal of William Burroughs; talented British actors Sam Riley and Tom Sturridge as those other Beat colossi Kerouac and Ginsberg; Kirsten Dunst and Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss, and indie stalwart Steve Buscemi.

Matthew Herbert (b 1972) is a leading experimental musician. His work is sometimes as much sonic exploration as music and mostly inhabits territory where the two realms meet. Recently made Creative Director of the newly resuscitated BBC Radiophonic Workshop (who have an open day at the South Bank’s Ether Festival on 7^th October), he first came to public attention through Nineties electronic dance releases as Radio Boy, Wishmountain and Doctor Rockit, melding club beats to his own “found sound” field recordings.

Clare Stewart arrived in London from Australia a year ago this month, into one of the biggest jobs in the UK film industry. For film buffs, it might seem like she entered a giant playground, a job to die for. Stewart is Head of Exhibition at the British Film Institute, a newly-created role that brings together responsibility for the day-to-day programming of the BFI Southbank and IMAX and for the institute’s festivals, including the London Film Festival, of which she is the festival director.