While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything from taking photographs of Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the historic Selma-Montgomery marches through producing oil paintings inspired by the scale of billboards to making pop-art assemblages, abstracts, and painting large-scale figures appropriated from commercial advertising.

The world isn’t exactly sending up distress flares urgently demanding more cop shows, but this new effort from ER’s producer John Wells proves that the genre can still be cranked into life if the writing is strong and the performances feel authentic. Catching the precise tone is always critical, and evidently some pushing and shoving went on about exactly where Southland should be pitched. Its original Stateside host, NBC, started it at 10pm, planned to air the second series at 9pm, then dropped the show altogether.

The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.

Anyone who saw Ben Stiller in Zoolander will know that he is a very fine actor. He made his over-the-top character both believable and lovable (well, up to a point on the latter, but you know what I mean) while playing the fashion model’s absurdities for every laugh he could get. And now a fascinating counterpoint comes with his touching and beautifully reined-in portrayal of another narcissist, Roger Greenberg, a 41-year-old failed musician turned carpenter who is recovering from a breakdown.

As in his first concert this season with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Adams the composer-conductor moved last night from the natural phenomena of an older master to his own illuminated chronicle of man-made unease. City Noir, his latest orchestral symphony in all but name, bears his trademark knit of rhythms both bludgeoning and capricious with sinuous melodic nocturnes: the mixture rather as before, but with a fresh twist of LA jazz. You'd think the marriage of harmony and invention would free up his conducting of other men's music. Oddly, though, that remained doggedly beat-bound, to be saved at the last minute by Jeremy Denk's astounding sense of fantasy in Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind.As in his first concert this season with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Adams the composer-conductor moved last night from the natural phenomena of an older master to his own illuminated chronicle of man-made unease. City Noir, his latest orchestral symphony in all but name, bears his trademark knit of rhythms both bludgeoning and capricious with sinuous melodic nocturnes: the mixture rather as before, but with a fresh twist of LA jazz. You'd think the marriage of harmony and invention would free up his conducting of other men's music. Oddly, though, that remained doggedly beat-bound, to be saved at the last minute by Jeremy Denk's astounding sense of fantasy in Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind.

For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a decade ago with a story of the drug-induced implosion of one of the city’s top agenting talents. As parallels with a real-life career melt-down were all too obvious to the in-crowd, sourcing to the Tolstoy story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” may have crept in as a cover-up.

The Hoxton area of Shoreditch is a strange place for gigs by bands with general appeal. Specialist acts bring specialist crowds who know what they're going to get, but any like Music Go Music – whose records show a huge pop sensibility – will attract a fair few curious local scenesters, which sadly in Shoreditch means a load of drunk posh twits and Peaches Geldof clones falling over themselves to photograph one another every three seconds and show how fabulously bored they are with everything. These were out in force last night and it didn't, frankly, set up a celebratory atmosphere for the Californian band's show.

Londoners, we know, can be spoilt. Certainly the crowd, predominantly of nerds in rare and expensive trainers, at the Lightbox last night didn't seem to be overly bubbling with enthusiasm despite an exciting lineup of talent and astonishing surroundings. The main dancefloor area of Lightbox lives up to the club's name, being an arched space with the entire wall/ceiling surface covered in colour-changing LED lights that allow pictures and patterns to dance across the room.