Suddenly everyone is noticing that Richard Gere, now 63, is a much better actor than he used to be in his aloof and self-regarding youth. In Arbitrage, written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, Gere plays powerful and privileged Manhattan hedge-fund magnate Robert Miller.

When's the last time you encountered a play with a hissable anti-hero and a young heroine who radiates charity, decency, and all things good? Those polarities are on full-throttle view in The Stepmother, the all-but-unknown Githa Sowerby play from 1924 that makes up in its vigorous appeal to the jugular what it may lack in dimension and subtlety (Chekhov this ain't.) And if the opening night is any gauge, Sowerby's tale of a young wife and her unctuous, much older rapscallion of a husband has a demonstrable capacity for evoking responses from the crowd.

Greece is in economic meltdown. Austerity is hitting most of the population very hard. Businesses are closing down. The amount of homeless has increased. There are strikes and huge anti-government demonstrations throughout the country. What better time to hold a huge film festival?

Banking and the financial world may have gone into free-fall, but there are still killings to be made. Particularly personal ones. Nicholas Pierpan’s You Can Still Make a Killing is a morality tale for our time, a revenge tragedy without corpses, except for reputations. And, in the City, reputation – or rather perception - is everything.

The curators encourage you to come to Bush Bazaar with an open mind to explore the value of theatre. But I found this cluttered evening a lesson in the value of saying no. Twenty companies – 100 emerging artists in all – have taken over the building to sell their wares, including a dinner party, a cleansing treatment and one to one with Justin Bieber (hard to resist). After paying £10 to get in, you decide what to see and how much more to pay the artists. Sometimes before their show.

I always used to avoid any film that had Mark Wahlberg in it, because he seemed to have the acting skills of a park bench. Then I saw The Departed - because you have to see Marty's movies - and thought he was brilliant as the astonishingly foul-mouthed Sergeant Dignam. Now I've seen Contraband and regrettably, it may be time to revert to Plan A.

It certainly started with a bang. The whirlwind opening sequence of the BBC's new four-part drama depicted a cash depot heist by a masked gang unfolding in something close to real time, and thrummed with blood and nervous tension. Security guard Chris was shot in the leg. His boss, John Coniston, was roughed up. Back at home, his family were being held hostage at gunpoint. Both men, it transpired, were in on the job, while warehouse worker Marcus was one of the armed gang. Inside Men, clearly, was going to be why- rather than a whodunnit.

Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, put her down a mine. Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics for weekly earnings to 2011 paint a stark earnings picture for those working in the arts and entertainment industry. The weekly average earnings for last year in this most life-enhancing of sectors is just £320 - while the average weekly in the “Mining and Quarrying” industry is a whopping £1,082, including substantial monthly bonuses.

Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried twice. Refusing to deal in the Hollywood placebos of idealism and redemption, this is not a product that the big studios would have gone anywhere near.

For me, 2011 will go down as the year in which the fact that artworks have become luxury goods – playthings for the rich – could no longer be ignored. In response Damien Hirst, one of the first artists to turn himself into a brand, is sprinkling the globe with spot paintings (pictured below left). In January, 300 of the 1,400 produced so far will be shown across the world in all 11 Gagosian galleries, from New York to California, London, Rome, Paris, Athens and Hong Kong.