Russia’s national gallery, the Tretyakov, bears the name of its founder Pavel Tretyakov, the 19th-century merchant who bequeathed his huge collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow in 1892. His bust stands proudly overseeing the entrance to the gallery’s old building, a fine, purpose-built example of early Russian 20th-century architecture.

Hugely underrated, The Two Faces of January packs more filmmaking power than, at least, its poster would ever suggest. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, which puts it streets ahead of most films, Two Faces... has a superb ensemble cast: Viggo Mortensen is the alluring Chester MacFarland, travelling with his equally alluring wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) and their accidental tour guide, the charming Greek-American Rydal Keener (Oscar Isaac). Set in 1962, the couple are sightseeing and become entangled with Rydal, a small-time crook.

How much familial dysfunction and lust - whether for sexual gratification or revenge - can one take in a single weekend? Salome and Elektra back-to back may on paper seem like a feast of divine decadence but no sooner had one become accustomed to the sickly sweet air of the former when the putrefaction of the latter (I always think that Strauss’ orchestra is in the final stages of decay with Elektra) filled one’s nostrils - and ears.

The sign of a good film is one that lingers, one that you return to after days, months or even years – a snapshot of an image, a feeling that struck a chord within you, a memorable character that inspired or excited, or a line that you just can’t shake. But what of one that does the total opposite, that makes you appalled and apathetic in equal measure so that you to want to forget it immediately and never return to it?

Let's say Greek tragedies exist in a multiverse where the same stories play out simultaneously in thousands of ways. And let's say we're given free rein to argue over those stories, debate their morals and characters and disagree fundamentally over the story arc itself. This is what the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig explores in his take on the Greek general Idomeneus, who led the Cretan armies to Troy and also inspired a Mozart opera (Idomeneo). His 70-minute play embraces the possibilities of story-telling rather more than the story itself. 

Miss Violence opens with an 11th birthday party whose brightly coloured balloons, pointed party hats and forced family jollity might seem unremarkable if a little girl hadn't chosen to stick Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" on the stereo - not only Cohen at his most sinisterly sensual but a song inspired by the Holocaust. He wrote it after learning orchestras were a feature of some concentration camps, and that they were sometimes pressed into playing through brutality, so that their music became horribly anomalous accompaniments to punishments or violent death.

Tippett’s selective, often compelling and mostly well-structured take on Trojan War myths will never capture the wider public’s imagination as much as even the least of Britten’s operas. His ideas sometimes pierce the soul but don’t stick there in the same way, and the human interest level never goes so deep. The sounds, though, are something else: a splintering of interest groups, or even a single instrument, to flank each character.

“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter.

The greatest strategy videogames deliver a balance of time to think and pressure to act. The greatest strategy videogames deliver the thrill of battle mixed with clear strategic choice. Several entries in the Total War series count as great strategy games. But not this one. The eighth in the series fails on two distinct fronts, both in terms of execution – vital to keep its hardcore of fans engaged – and in terms of engaging content for new players.

Before Midnight is the third part in Richard Linklater's romantic series starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as star-crossed lovers Jesse and Celine. It's a sequence of films that began in 1995 with Before Sunrise (pictured below right), where the two spent a night wandering Vienna, falling in love. That was followed nine years later by 2004's equally delightful and even more insightful Before Sunset, which followed them on an afternoon rendezvous through Paris.