That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken.

There's quite a bit to admire in DR Hood's debut feature. There's the cast for a start, headed by nascent superstar  Benedict Cumberbatch alongside Brit-dram It-girl Claire Foy. Beguiling, too, is the piece's setting in the fenlands of East Anglia (quite near Mildenhall airbase, one would guess, judging by the eerie shots of American aircraft drifting overhead).

How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully qualifies for that currently fashionable status "outsider artist", there’s nothing remotely edgy about him. He’s as cuddly and quintessentially English as Thora Hird. Anyone likely to have an opinion on him will long since have formed it. Everyone else will simply be indifferent.

Ever since 9/11, political theatre has mobilised the techniques of verbatim drama, and the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, has an impressive reputation for its tribunal plays, often staging the proceedings of judicial enquiries. Earlier this year, they bought us Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry. Now, as an instant response to this summer’s disturbances and apparently provoked by outrage at the Government’s unwillingness to hold a public enquiry, comes The Riots, which opened last night.

There were those who laughed and those who spat outrage when Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, said in a press interview that he was simply “doing God’s work”. Although Blankfein did have the insight to add that if he slit his wrists everyone would cheer, post-crash we would much rather our rich bankers expressed their religiosity by donning hairshirts and crawling on knees through broken glass - or at the very least stopped rewarding themselves so generously for the mess they got us in.

Kate Bush has always steered a dangerous course between pure genius and mannerist excess. Her latest album, a hymn to snow and the icy element’s soft and crystalline associations, is no different. There are moments when she teeters on the edge of self-parody and cliché and others when she makes music that dazzles as much as it moves. She is a unique British artist, existing in a creative bubble well outside the mainstream yet never marginal or beyond the reach of popular taste.

Cosmo Jarvis (b 1989) was born in New Jersey but grew up in Devon. He has produced two albums, Humasyouhitch/Sonofabitch (2009) and Is The World Strange or Am I Strange? (2011), that combine incisive lyricism, goofy humour, rap, rock, terrace-chant choruses, studio orchestration and an unlikely fusion of musical styles, sometimes more jovially eccentric than hip. His highest-profile song is "Gay Pirates", a musical hoedown about love on the high seas that garnered Stephen Fry as a vocal fan.

Witchfinder General, along with The Wicker Man, has latterly been claimed as a pinnacle of a peculiarly British style of film. “Weird Britain” is a default description. It’ll do fine for these unsettling, intense horror films which draw from the British landscape and its history. This sparkling restoration of Witchfinder General can only enhance its status.

You can forget “I am Heathcliff”. And abandon hope of “I cannot live without my soul” and “I love my murderer” while you’re at it. Andrea Arnold’s newest addition to the canon of Wuthering Heights adaptations is the story flayed so raw you can see bone. Jettisoning such fripperies as dialogue, fixed cameras and even for the most part avoiding professional actors, she takes period drama by the wing-collared throat and throttles it with gonzo relish.

You might think that a sharp-talking, cross-dressing potter-artist with a teddy bear obsession would present a challenge to the British public. Not a bit of it. Grayson Perry is music hall, he’s pantomime – there’s even a touch of Brideshead in the teddy bear thing. One of Britain’s most intelligent and articulate artists, Perry was barely in the public eye before he was hived off into that comfort zone the British reserve for the loveable eccentric.