The Dream/Connectome/The Concert, Royal Ballet

THE DREAM/CONNECTOME/THE CONCERT, ROYAL BALLET A summer reverie you won't want to wake from

A summer reverie you won't want to wake from

The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history), but the partnership of Titania and Oberon themselves. Regal, fickle, fast, flighty, and dangerous, these two are equals as lovers and as rulers: it is their quarrel that starts the story and their smouldering reunion that brings it to a happy conclusion.

Murmur/Inked, Aakash Odedra, Patrick Centre, Birmingham

MURMUR / INKED, AAKASH ODEDRA, PATRICK CENTRE, BIRMINGHAM Two new works establish the Birmingham native as a dance creator to watch out for

Two new works establish the Birmingham native as a dance creator to watch out for

It might be quite unnerving for a young performer to have the première of a new solo show take place in the same building, at the same time, as Sylvie Guillem is dancing William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián. But Aakash Odedra, who presented two new pieces, Murmur and Inked, in the Patrick Centre inside the Birmingham Hippodrome on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, has had more dealings than most with superstar dancers and choreographers: his mentor Akram Khan is both (and incidentally a collaborator of Guillem’s).

Pompeii

POMPEII Strong performances, dynamic action and a natural cataclysm make Pompeii a superior B movie

Strong performances, dynamic action and a natural cataclysm make Pompeii a superior B movie

Best known for the Mortal Kombat twosome, the Resident Evil franchise (one of the DVD extras noted how the zombie dogs constantly ate off their zombie makeup) and big, bulging swipes at other genres with Event Horizon, AVP: Alien vs Predator and The Three Musketeers, director Paul W S Anderson’s Pompeii has been neither a critical nor box office hit in America. It is not, however, without charm. Call him old fashioned but Anderson knows how to stage a fight and pace a story.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS No faulting classic game offering deep mobile experience

A classic game delivers a deep mobile experience

For lovers of PS2-era games, the conversion of titles like GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City to mobile platforms has delivered a welcome dose of retro-gaming thrills, but for real fans of Rockstar's crime epics, a visit to San Andreas is the one they have been waiting for. The eighth game in the GTA series was a big step forward in terms of the explorable area and the sheer number of things you could do in the game.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

Heroism and self-destruction collide in a revealing look at Julian Assange

The story you think you know slides beneath your feet in this rigorous investigation of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. “I’m a combative person," WikiLeaks’ founder says, setting out his motives. "I like crushing bastards.” Director Alex Gibney’s intentions are more nuanced. An Oscar-winner for Taxi to the Dark Side’s exposé of US abuses in Baghdad, he has similarly probed the poisonous roots of banking (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and the paedophile-protecting Catholic church (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God).

Technology's New Fields of Dreams in Dance

TECHNOLOGY'S NEW FIELD OF DREAMS IN DANCE 3D surreality, ballet on your mobile - technology's changing the way we see dancers

3D surreality, ballet on your mobile - technology's changing the way we see dancers

Technology and dance have long been ardent bedfellows. No other theatrical art gobbles up illusions and tricks quite as greedily and spits them out quite as intriguingly altered. Gaslight was a new technology without which the romantic ballets Giselle and La Sylphide could not have existed. Without electric light such exotic adventures in sunshine as Le Corsaire or Don Quixote could not have partied over the late 19th-century St Petersburg stage.

Black Mirror: The Waldo Moment, Channel 4

Second run of Charlie Brooker's dystopian drama gets our vote

After the nightmarish vision of justice system turned spectator sport that was last week’s Black Mirror, you’d be forgiven for feeling a little disappointed that writer Charlie Brooker hadn’t ramped up the horror at the start of the final episode of this all-too-short second series. There were many adjectives one could consider throwing at Waldo, the inexplicably popular blue cartoon bear at the centre of the action, but “horrific” probably wasn’t one of them.

Side by Side

Film vs. Digital? There's only one way to find out, says Keanu Reeves

Does it matter if film dies? Keanu Reeves, always cannier than his limited acting style suggests, produces and presents this even-handed documentary on analogue’s apparently fatal decline in the face of a very recent digital onslaught. His contact book brings enviable witnesses to the stand for director Chris Kenneally. If the world-famous directors and generations of legendary cinematographers don’t know the answer, maybe there isn’t one yet.    

Swan Lake in world's cinemas tonight launches new offensive on elitism

32 countries will hook up to Royal Opera House relays of opera and ballet

Tonight the Royal Ballet's live Swan Lake opens the most extensive season yet of live screenings to cinemas worldwide of the Royal Opera House's productions. Zenaida Yanowsky and Nehemiah Kish, in the leading roles of the Swan Queen and her evil counterpart Odile, and Prince Siegfried, will be beamed across oceans to cinema-goers in St Julians, Malta, to the Montevideo Moviecenter in Uruguay, as well as to the Apollo, Burnley and the Enfield Cineworld.

Opinion: Bazalgette is welcome at the Arts Council

OPINION: BAZALGETTE IS WELCOME AT THE ARTS COUNCIL The man who debased British TV now holds the public arts purse - a crazy choice? Not necessarily

The man who debased British TV now holds the public arts purse - a crazy choice? Not necessarily

So the chairman of Big Brother TV becomes chairman of the Arts Council. Is it good or bad that Sir Peter Bazalgette will now hold the purse-strings for our publicly supported arts, the most debated, the most fragile, the most ephemeral elements of our national cultural consciousness, the most opposite of the time-wasting that is reality TV?