Pawel Pawlikowski was named BAFTA’s Most Promising Newcomer for his feature debut Last Resort (2000), then the follow-up, 2004’s My Summer of Love, won Outstanding British Film of the Year. But neither felt obviously British, reflecting border-zone existences in a sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific country.

Challenging the boundaries of reality and the way in which characters exist in and redefine their worlds has become something of a hallmark of director Pawel Pawlikowski. Considering his previous film My Summer of Love, one critic wrote of it as a study of worlds that “exist somewhere on the periphery of normality”. His new film The Woman in the Fifth pushes this further, revealing in a second-half twist that the boundaries of what we had assumed to be reality actually exist in the imagination, somewhere close to madness, to a darkness inside.

Gil Pender is in Paris with his intended and future in-laws. He wants to be a proper writer, rather than hacking for Hollywood. No one else cares about that and he’s belittled by his girl, her Tea Party father and her overbearing American friend who just happens to roll up. Strolling off on his own, midnight strikes, he climbs into a car and is transported back to a golden age to hang out with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Picasso, Hemingway, TS Eliot and Marion Cotillard’s artist’s muse Adriana. Naturally, Gertrude Stein loves the book Gil is writing.

A semantic side effect of my longish involvement in music culture has been hearing certain phrases pass from fringe slang obscurity to mainstream acceptance. Among these is the term “chill out”, purloined by ravers from the hippies to describe post-club Ecstasy comedown music, especially after the KLF used it. By the early 2000s, however, “chill out” was tired and ubiquitous, conjuring images of candlelit Primrose Hill dinner parties where Zero 7 played predictably, coolly in the background.

The news that work is to begin in February on a major renovation of the 122-year-old Eiffel Tower reminds us that no other monument in the world, including the Statue of Liberty, the Houses of Parliament or the Coliseum, conjures up a city with such immediacy, and none with so much romance. According to Roland Barthes, “the Eiffel Tower is nothing but a place to visit. Its very emptiness marked it as a symbol, and the first symbol that it called to mind, by logical association, was inevitably that which one ‘visited’ at the same time as the tower, namely, the city of Paris.

Witnesses will have been puzzled. In a southern suburb of Paris, a group of maybe 16 figures trudge with purpose along the pavement at the witching hour of half past four in the morning. Some are carrying rucksacks. We are mostly male. Mostly tattooed. We loiter, attempting anonymity.

Connecticut-born Jules Dassin graduated from lightweight suspense and comedy fodder for MGM to pungent, location-based crime dramas, hitting his stride with Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), both included in this package. However, his upward trajectory was derailed after he was identified as a communist at the HUAC hearings. Producer Darryl Zanuck gave Dassin the script for Night and the City and dispatched him to London to shoot it, days before the Committee was due to grill the director.

Manon is the planet around which a series of moons orbit, locked in place by her gravitational pull. There is Des Grieux, who gives up his seminary studies for nights of pleasure; there is her brother Lescaut, who translates her into cash; and there is Monsieur GM, the aristocrat who wants her body, both to possess it and to display it. They all see her as an object of desire, and their desires set the plot in motion, spinning ultimately to destruction.

In TV's seasonal rush of Spooks, Downton etc, we must also hail the sterling (if gruesome) work going on at the FX channel. Alongside series two of The Walking Dead, they've thrown in the additional delights of gory French cop thriller Braquo and, last night, we saw the debut of the weird and scary American Horror Story.

Is it nostalgic to constantly revisit the history of the royal family? In this new play by Nicholas Wright, which opened last night, we travel back in time to 1980 when the aged Wallis Simpson - widow of the abdicated King Edward VIII - lived as a recluse in a mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Despite the fact that a national treasure (Sheila Hancock) is starring in the play, is this a subject worth looking at again?