Crispy Ambulance: The Plateau Phase/The Durutti Column: LC/The Names: Swimming/The Wake: Harmony

There’s an episode in the first season of Mad Men in which the ad execs of Sterling Cooper brainstorm a campaign for Richard Nixon, just prior to the 1960 presidential election. Dramatic irony being what it is, it’s a rare opportunity to watch our anti-heroes working on a pitch (based chiefly around smear tactics) that is predestined to fail. By contrast, Pablo Larraín’s No chronicles how a team of ad men in 1980s Chile, led by Gael Garcia Bernal’s maverick René, put together a campaign to topple a dictator that we know will succeed against all odds.

"Gonna shake the house," rasps Mark 'E' Everett on "Bombs Away". It is the first track of his tenth album and it certainly sounds like a statement of intent. Everett has often come across as something of a gloomy rock and roll runt in recent years, but this time around the worm appears to be turning and he ain't taking any cotton-pickin' nonsense any more.

Feast aims high. Very, very high. Steered by experienced and much-lauded director Rufus Norris, five playwrights and one choreographer seek to make a fusion of physical theatre, dance, onstage music, straight drama, abstract poetic dialogue, projected animation and knockabout comedy to tell no less a story than 350 years of the history of the Yoruba people of west Africa. It spans four continents through recurring manifestations of a group of their “Orishas”, or gods, a series of meals, and an ongoing quest for eggs. Yeah, that old chestnut.

Aimee Mann must surely be one of the most unstarry of stars. While most of her fans were still in the bar thinking about what they might have as a pre-gig aperitif, she strolled onstage to join support act Ted Leo for a couple of new songs they have written together. No grand diva entrance here, she just strapped on a bass guitar and stood next to the Costello-ish Leo pulling at those strings. Moral? Never ignore the support act, it might feature the person you've paid to see.

“Punky young girl needs a middle aged man/ Whose mid-life crisis you began/ …such a work of art…lift up your skirt, let me lick the alphabet/ …what’s under there? I hope to Christ it’s lingerie.” The voice is sinuous, cajoling. The creepy, ridiculously catchy Kate Moss-inspired “Punkyoungirl” immediately grabs the attention on the former dandy highwayman’s first album since 1995. Along with “Stay in the Game”, a spindly, eerie dirge which could have been in Adam and the Ants' repertoire circa 1977/78, it revisits an era when whips were withdrawn from the valise.

"There's a lot of nudity in The Sessions." That's what people will be thinking - and maybe fearing while also being curious - when they consider seeing this uplifting drama. 'Do I really want to see a naked sex surrogate have naked sessions with a naked journalist crippled with polio? Isn't this going to be maudlin, or perhaps worse, Oscar-drama territory?' After all, the film won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and we all know how 'out there' that could be.

David Bowie already had a bit of previous with Christmas, of course, after pa-rum-pa-pumpum-ing through the tinsel with Bing back in 1977. He plays a very different kind of drummer boy in Nagisa Oshima’s uneven but oddly haunting 1983 film, in which he stars alongside Tom Conti (last seen in Miranda, of all things) and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Zombie Flesh Eaters was at the heart of the early Eighties’ video nasty furore. Pilloried without being seen, it was cast as revolting and shocking, and subsequently banned from release. This pin-sharp, definitive restoration of Lucio Fulci’s 1979 over-the-top zombie fest isn’t going to suddenly elevate it to classic status, but it does show it to be good, workmanlike exploitation cinema of the highest calibre. Nothing in it is unwatchable, even if a few scenes are mildly disgusting.