Pavel Novák is a composer I know something about because he has been much played by the Schubert Ensemble, who were for a time resident at Cardiff University, where I teach. But broadly speaking his music is virtually unknown in the UK. When William Howard played these 24 Preludes and Fugues in St Giles' Cripplegate four years ago, hardly anyone came to hear them – perhaps not surprisingly. Obscure Czech piano music in a chilly City church in December is hardly the most enticing prospect. But now that Howard has made a brilliant, compelling recording of this 75-minute cycle, its composer’s British reputation might (or should) expand.

A time-tested formula gets tantalisingly tweaked in Friends with Benefits, in which Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis attempt to confine their relationship to the purely sexual without the ick factor of emotions getting in the way.

In his later years, Stanley Spencer cut quite a figure in his native village of Cookham in Berkshire: he would often be seen pushing his rickety pram, with its battered umbrella, paints and canvas, and a hand-painted sign requesting all curious onlookers to desist from disturbing the artist at work. He spent most of his life in the village - even acquiring the nickname “Cookham” at the Slade, since he’d rush back by train after lessons every evening, presumably in time for tea.

From 69 hours of King James Bible reading over Easter Week to this racy evening of adapted medieval pith as we head towards Assumption Day, the word they tell us is God moves in fluid if not necessarily mysterious ways around the Globe. “Mysteries” refers to the guilds that put on these popular street shows in the Middle Ages, real enough for the company of York Pinners, say, to supervise the nailing to the cross. It needs the forthright actors and everyday props of Deborah Bruce's alternately funny and quietly moving production, as well as the blood and sawdust you can taste in Tony Harrison’s latest performing version.

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If you thought Bible stories were just for Sunday school, think again. Shakespeare’s Globe - the open-air reproduction of the original “wooden O” on London’s Bankside where past and present collide and eager groundlings jostle in the Yard for the best view - is bringing them to vibrant life in this summer’s revival of The Mysteries. Based on medieval dramas created by guildsmen in York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry, poet and playwright Tony Harrison first tackled The Mysteries for the National Theatre in 1977 and has adapted his iconic version to create The Globe Mysteries - featuring no fewer than 60 characters played by an energetic cast of 14, and telling a range of biblical stories from The Creation to Doomsday. But do modern audiences really want to listen to a sermon from the Middle Ages?

In the spirit in which these reviews are intended, I can report that all the bits of Anne Boleyn are working. The chrome is gleaming; all cylinders are firing. It’ll be good – roadworthy, Globe-worthy – for another year at least.

Apocrypha is a word that has acquired a dubious meaning, for books of questioned value and authenticity, texts in various religions that may not necessarily be held divine. The Belgian-Moroccan dancemaker Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's dance work Apocrifu applies the word and its queries to the holiest of texts themselves, the Koran, Bible, Kojiki, in a secular era where religion is more about politics than faith.

The King James Bible, that great monument in the biography of the English language, is 400 years old this year. To use its own wording, it is as old as the hills, as old as Methuselah. Contemporaneous with Shakespeare, it has given us as many of the richly colourful phrases by which we still live: a nest of vipers, a thorn in the flesh, a fly in the ointment, a lamb to the slaughter, the skin of your teeth, in the twinkling of an eye. And so on and on. It was created, to quote it again, as a labour of love.

Time, and a scruffy beard, can't dim the unshowy magnificence that is Robert Duvall, the actor's actor among American film stars who turned 80 earlier this month. That milestone might represent a cue in some quarters to hang up your cleats or, at least, to coast into old age via a kindly supporting role or two, of the sort Duvall essayed in Crazy Heart.

The missing dimension in this low-budget British horror film is the one that would make it deserve a cinema screen: the element that leaves so many home-grown genre films earth-bound. Locking the characters in a high-rise flat to hack into the Vatican computer system and trigger the End of Days artfully combines the cheap and cosmic. But writer-director Brad Watson can’t make us believe in his contrived, flatly filmed scenario.

The missing dimension in this low-budget British horror film is the one that would make it deserve a cinema screen: the element that leaves so many home-grown genre films earth-bound. Locking the characters in a high-rise flat to hack into the Vatican computer system and trigger the End of Days artfully combines the cheap and cosmic. But writer-director Brad Watson can’t make us believe in his contrived, flatly filmed scenario.