Catherine Tate's Nan, BBC One

Sweary old curmudgeon returns

Everyone knows a Nan – whether their own grandmother, someone else's, or maybe an elderly woman you see on the bus rudely (but rightly) telling youngsters they shouldn't be sitting when she has to stand. My grandmothers were nothing like the foul-mouthed curmudgeon that Catherine Tate has so vividly created, but the version of her I knew was a childhood neighbour; like Tate's character, dear old Mrs J would be perfectly nice to someone's face but when they left the room she would spit out: “Never liked him/her.”

DVD: The Czechoslovak New Wave - A Collection, Vol. 2

DVD: THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW AGE - A COLLECTION, VOL. 2 Three stylistically different films from one of the most remarkable cinema movements of the 20th century

Three stylistically different films from one of the most remarkable cinema movements of the 20th century

Distributor Second Run’s second collection of the Czech New Wave (strictly speaking, Czechoslovak, although the three films included here are from the Czech side of the movement) reminds us what an astonishing five years or so preceded the Prague Spring of 1968. What a varied range of film-makers and filmic styles it encompassed, making any attempt to impose any external category – whether political or artistic – redundant.

DVD: The Look of Silence

DVD: THE LOOK OF SILENCE Joshua Oppenheimer brings a human scale to the horror of Indonesian massacres

Joshua Oppenheimer brings a human scale to the horror of Indonesian massacres

Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his much-acclaimed The Act of Killing is a much more accomplished film. Once again, he is concerned with examining the large-scale, American-inspired massacre of Indonesian "Communists" in 1965.

Red Army

Outstanding documentary on ice hockey and politics charts changing mood of Russia

There’s a screen quotation late in this remarkable documentary that reads, “An outstanding athlete cannot belong totally to himself.” The words are those of Soviet ice hockey trainer Anatoly Tarasov, who's one of the presences behind this story of the sport seen through the eyes and experience of the legendary defender Vyacheslav (Slava) Fetisov. But director Gabe Polsky has made a broader film, one which touches on the uncertain journey Russia has undergone over the last three decades.

DVD: Dragon's Return

Immaculate restoration of 1967 Slovak film, complete with remarkable score

It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.

The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern

THE WORLD GOES POP, TATE MODERN The boundaries of Pop art redrawn in a compelling global account

The boundaries of Pop art redrawn in a compelling global account

There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the comforting bright colours and clean, supermarket-aisle lines blackened, singed and fragmented as if salvaged from some unimaginable disaster.

theartsdesk in Bucharest: Loving Enescu

THEARTSDESK IN BUCHAREST: LOVING ENESCU A cultural weapon of the Cold War has matured into a magnet for world-class orchestras

A cultural weapon of the Cold War has matured into a magnet for world-class orchestras

Where in the world will you find the most glittering line-up of international orchestras? The Proms? Salzburg? Lucerne? Edinburgh? Bucharest, actually. The Enescu Festival, which began on 30 August, this year boasts appearances by the Concertgebouw, Vienna Philharmonic, Dresden Staatskapelle, Israel Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St Petersburg Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra. And that’s leaving out the jewel in the crown, an appearance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle.

theartsdesk in New York: Folk City

THE ARTS DESK IN NEW YORK: FOLK CITY Bringing it all back home: NYC as a folk-music hub in the Fifties and Sixties

Bringing it all back home: NYC as a folk-music hub in the Fifties and Sixties

If you liked the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, with its Dave Van Ronk-esque hero in Greenwich Village in 1961, you'll enjoy the new exhibition Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival, a celebration of NYC as the centre of folk music from its beginnings in the Thirties and Forties to its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties. It's at the Museum of the City of New York, far uptown at 103rd Street in east Harlem, a block or two from Duffy's Hill, the steepest in New York and the scene of many cable-car accidents in the 19th century.

The Look of Silence

THE LOOK OF SILENCE Distressing and powerful companion piece to 'The Act of Killing'

Distressing and powerful companion piece to 'The Act of Killing'

Any suggestion that the companion piece to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, his disturbing documentary on the state-supported mass killings undertaken for Indonesia’s Suharto regime, could actually be a more troubling film might seem surprising. The Act of Killing was extremely unnerving. The Look of Silence is even more distressing, even more frightening. Inong, a death-squad leader interviewed in the new film, chillingly says, “if we didn’t drink human blood, we would go crazy.”

Child 44

CHILD 44 There's a killer on the loose in Stalin's Communist paradise

There's a killer on the loose in Stalin's Communist paradise

"There is no murder in paradise" is the official line of the authorities in 1950s Russia, but nevertheless Child 44 is the blood-drenched tale of a hunt for a mass-murdering paedophile in Stalin's deathly shadow. The source novel was the first in Tom Rob Smith's trilogy about Russia during and after the Great Dictator, and Smith based it on the real-life killer Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper".