The English abstract artist Rebecca Salter has definitely made it. A major retrospective of her work in 2011 at the Yale Center for British Art, "Into the light of things: works 1981-2010”, included more than 150 works. She was elected a Royal Academician earlier this year. And her long involvement with Japanese art has produced two books which are the standard works in English: Japanese Woodblock Printing (2001) and Japanese Popular Prints (2006), both published by A&C Black.

Never mind Alien vs Predator. Gareth Edwards's rumbustious earth-in-peril spectacular restores Godzilla to the top of the über-monster food chain. He's an indestructible force called from his sub-oceanic lair to combat hideous opponents fuelled by mankind's reckless abuse of Mother Nature.

“Mahler, with a chamber orchestra?” In his introduction to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s winter season brochure, principal conductor Robin Ticciati anticipates the reaction of an audience brought up to believe that a chamber orchestra leaves its comfort zone somewhere in the early 19th Century.

Born in an era when the Japanese were censored out of making a straightforward post-Hiroshima film, King of the Monsters Godzilla – or aka his infinitely cooler Japanese name Gojira – is a hero, cultural phenomenon and metaphor: he represents nature that can both kill and save. As a film star, however, he’s moved from ultra low-budget to high in over 28 films of various quality. The original 1954 Japanese film produced by Toho is often considered the best with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version almost killing the monster and the franchise off entirely.

The classic Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu named a number of his films after the seasons, but he restricted himself to spring, summer and autumn. I don’t believe he ever titled one after winter - not that his work doesn’t touch on the closing of the year, and its associations with death. Re-released in a wonderfully restored print, An Autumn Afternoon turned out to be the director’s last film, made in 1962; the previous year had seen the death of Ozu’s mother (the director never married, and lived with her all his life), and Ozu himself would die a year later.

Tonight Birmingham was treated to a guitar fest of epic proportions, as the Japanese, Hawkwind-esque experience that is Bo Ningen hit town. Prior to the main event, we were treated to the boisterous thrash of The Scenes, who finished their set with the flippant yet amusingly named “Anorexia Is Boring”, and the Teenage Fanclub-esque 12-strings of Younghusband. Neither, however, quite prepared the crowd for the ear-lacerating noise and mesmerising groove of the headliners.

Hayao Miyazaki's final film The Wind Rises is grand, sweeping and bursting with the kind of beautiful animation we've become accustomed to from Studio Ghibli (which celebrates its 30th birthday next year). Miyazaki delves into Japanese history with a soaring autobiography of aeronautical engineer Jirô Horikoshi, which also acts as a tribute to the writer Tatsuo Hori - who penned the original short story "The Wind Has Risen".

Sixty years a masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is being released by the BFI on DVD and in a Blu-ray Steelbook. Digitally restored by Toho from an original 35mm master positive, it ought to be a mandatory purchase for movie-struck kids raised on CGI, 3D, and hyperbolic action epics that bear no relation to reality. They and everyone else should, of course, see it in a cinema, too.

Every cinephile is going to have a personal perspective on Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film, an engrossing, affectionate, and frequently revelatory look over how aspects of childhood, and children, have been portrayed on screen over more than half a century, from almost every cinematic tradition that we’ve heard of – or, rather more often, that we haven’t heard of.

The Chinese thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice by director Diao Yinan won the Golden Bear at the closing ceremony of the Berlinale last night, as well as picking up the best actor prize for its star Liao Fan.

It was a night for Asian cinema in general, with the best actress award given to Japan’s Haru Kuroki, playing in veteran director Yoji Yamada’s The Little House, while Chinese cinematographer Zeng Jian came away with the Silver Bear for outstanding contribution in the technical categories for his work on Lou Ye’s Blind Massage.