While the embers of the concert year are dying out around the country, you can be sure of a great blaze-up at St John’s Smith Square. The annual Christmas Festival of quality early-music groups and top choirs – this is the 29th – now traditionally culminates in two great works for chorus and orchestra. Over the past three years I’ve reeled at the best of Messiahs, four cantatas out of the six making up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio – and now that God of music’s ultimate demonstration of his omnipotent range.

There have been legendary conductors, and then there was Herbert von Karajan. He was a colossus of post-World War Two classical music, equipped with fearsome technical mastery allied to a vaguely supernatural gift for extracting exquisite sounds from orchestras. But that wasn't all. An expert skier with a passion for high-performance cars and flying his own jet, he was as charismatic as a movie star or sporting idol.

There is ice at the heart of German director’s Dietrich Brueggemann’s Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg). Winner of this year’s Berlinale Silver Bear for best script – the director wrote the film in collaboration with his sister Anna – it’s a chilling look into the psychology of extreme religion, in this case very traditional Catholicism, set in small town Germany. Formally impressive, it’s unsparing in its point of view in telling a tragic tale.

Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.

Most pianists never truly master one of Brahms’s two piano concertos, those colossal symphonies for soloist and orchestra, let alone both. To present the two in one concert, then, seems foolhardy – and apparently was when András Schiff went for the marathon at the Edinburgh Festival during the Brian McMaster era. No-one expected anything but true majesty, though, when Elisabeth Leonskaja asked to do the same. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra duly obliged, taking up her suggestion of Okko Kamu, a Finnish master I haven’t seen for decades, as conductor.

There’s no denying that this one-woman show, starring Tricia Kelly, is mightily ambitious. Written by East German playwright Manfred Karge and rarely revived, Man to Man depicts a German widow – Ella Gericke – who decides to impersonate her dead husband, Max, and take over his life. The play opens with Hitler’s army advancing, spans 50 years, covers dozens of characters and includes a number of surreal dance, dream and fantasy sequences. Demanding indeed – but a bit of a mess.

We seem to have spent most of 2014 examining the social, political, historical, geographical and military ramifications of the First World War. You would have thought, therefore, that the upcoming Remembrance Sunday commemorations could have been allowed to stand alone, uncluttered by further efforts to explain or dramatise the events of 1914.

Alan Yentob’s culture programme, Imagine, returned for its autumn season with a two-part examination of one of the most potently disturbing episodes in the history of art, let alone culture. Even before the programme’s title, masterpieces by such as Kirchner, Beckmann and Klimt flashed before our eyes. Thus began an exploration into how Hitler – a failed art student -– acted out his hatred of the great art of the 20^th-century avant garde, which he thought to be as sickly and degenerate as the Jews he was also determined to destroy.

Another October and another Frieze week just passed. This means the biggest of big hitters have been turning up in London. The economic quantifiers aren’t precise, but there have been plenty of estimates. Hordes of well-heeled visitors mean big profits for hotels, restaurants, shops and transport. All the people employed to literally make the fair, and the huge cluster of shows, events and happenings which take place because of Frieze, from auctions to ancillary fairs, mean conservative estimates are now hovering around £50m+ for the London economy.

As the bald title suggests, Fury is a work of righteous, focussed rage. It's a combat film which swaps preaching and profundity for pure anger at the brutalising, destructive war machine, and still manages to be illuminating. For, even at its most thrillingly Hollywood, Fury retains a keen sense of the waste of life. Director David Ayer's fifth film features explicit, immersive and impactful violence and works best when it's pummelling the audience and Nazis alike, with deafening, meticulously executed action that threatens to punch a hole through both the screen and your ear-drum.

Set in April 1945 in the dying days of World War II, Fury finds the American forces exhausted, diminished, bested by superior weaponry and deep in the heart of enemy territory. With Hitler having declared "total war" and the Germans defending their own soil, the fight is at its most terrifying, desperate and bitter. Brad Pitt (pictured below right) plays Don "Wardaddy" Collier, a tough, seemingly invulnerable tank commander who's made acting sergeant as the Allied numbers dwindle. His devoted, dishevelled team consist of Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal) and Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Peña).

Don's replacement for his fifth man, decapitated by enemy fire, is the baby-faced Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who can type 60 words a minute - not terribly useful given the context - and no-one disguises their disappointment at the new addition to the crew. Told not to get too close to anyone, Norman's ominous and unbelievably disgusting first assignment is to clean his predecessor's blood and bodily fragments from inside the armoured vehicle. Fury is set significantly in the Sherman tank these men call home; snapshots and girly pictures are displayed alongside the Nazi trophies they've ripped from corpses.

With its macho camaraderie and sense that the men are hopelessly and relentlessly outnumbered and outgunned Fury resembles nothing more than a western (The Wild Bunch springs most to mind). It occasionally threatens to tip over into "The Little Tank That Could" territory, and is saved from doing so by its strong handle on not just the colossal, continuous loss of life (with blood and bodies everywhere and danger around each corner), but what is lost in these men, perhaps forever. The animalistic Grady (excellent work from Bernthal) is the prime example of what war does to a man, but even the more sympathetic Don is frequently forced to hide his humanity, adopting a savagely-cruel-to-be-kind approach in order to save them all.

It's much more powerful during scenes of combat

Tight-jawed and thick-skinned with his baby blues twinkling from a battle-scorched face, Pitt is a picture of holding-it-together heroism. The heavy losses see him continuously promoted and there's the slightly hyperbolic sense that the burden of the Allies' success lies solely on his shoulders - but that's perhaps how many in his situation felt. It's a committed and restrained performance, which may even bag him his fourth Oscar nomination. And it's rather a case of Pitt the older and younger here with the similar-looking Lerman establishing his acting chops, and showing a firm grasp of a tough character arc.

Fury is far from perfect - the grim predicament of German women is squeamishly skirted around despite an awkward attempt to address this, and it's much more powerful during scenes of combat than during scenes of (relative) quiet. Filmed in 2012, Ayer's last film Sabotage was released earlier this year and in its wasted cast and messy execution it had all the hallmarks of a film that had been slung together. With the release of the considerably more polished Fury so hot on its heels, we can now see where Ayer's heart was.

BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS

Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood

Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history

Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble

Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball

The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis

The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring

The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story

PLUS ONE TURKEY

World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Fury