Andrea Arnold’s starkly naturalistic reboot of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece of 1847 isn’t the first costume drama of the last 20 years to scorn the heritage-culture approach. In 1995, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, one of the best but least fêted of the Jane Austen adaptations, put handheld camerawork, natural lighting and grainy images in the service of the downwardly mobile Elliot clan’s shabby gentility, making poor Anne’s Cinderella plight all the more affecting.

Dvořák: Symphony No 7, In Nature’s Realm, Scherzo capriccioso Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)

You can never have enough Dickens, doctors say. Or is it exercise? Either way, the BBC has gone to town on the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth as if the moths are eating away in the Victorian closet and all the costumes need to be used as much as possible.

Wanted: classic novel, preferably 19^th-century but 18^th will do, or early 20^th. Anything reeking of period before television acceptable, though preferably not too working class. English if poss. Barnaby Rudge need not apply.

Without wanting to sound humbuggy, do we really need another Great Expectations? Let alone two. There’s yet another movie coming next year but breasting the tape first is a new three-parter from the BBC. Cinema last visited the story of Pip Pirrip in 1998 when Alfonso Cuarón transplanted the novel to present-day New York. On television Tony Marchant had a go a year later. Theatre was there even more recently with Declan Donnellan's staging for the RSC in 2005 and Watford Palace's Asian version earlier this year.

So overt it’s covert. That’s how the famous detective explains away the crassness of his disguises. In this newest instalment of the latest cinematic incarnation of the Holmesian myth, the detective rummages through the dressing-up box for silly beards, false gnashers, stupid specs. This Holmes even wears a type of babygrow whose patterning comically blends into the decor. As with Sherlock Holmes, so with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. This is another film by Guy Ritchie disguised as a detective story by Arthur Conan Doyle. You couldn’t ever mistake it for the real thing.

That a tale confronting society’s most pernicious evils, giving poverty a human face and desperation a voice, should become a cornerstone of the British festive experience is perhaps unexpected: testimony either to the moral deviance of the general public, or alternatively to Charles Dickens’s peerless skill as a writer. Personally I’m inclined toward the latter, and judging by the massed hordes at the Arts Theatre on Saturday for Simon Callow’s new staging of A Christmas Carol, I’m not alone.

“This story is not my child, or my godchild. It is not a work of fiction. It is a diary of suffering,” a title says at the beginning of Raúl Ruiz’s magnificent Mysteries of Lisbon. A sombrely beautiful 19th-century costume drama spanning decades and continents and featuring tortured lovers, deathbed confessors, abandoned sons, femmes fatales, sniping aristocrats, Napoleonic-era firing squads and duellists, Ruiz’s labyrinthine, flashback-laden movie makes for a peculiarly heady blend of Romantic epic-cum-soap-opera and Modernist disquisition on narrative self-reflexivity.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in favour of Edinburgh’s better attractions.

I don't want to get the blues at The Nutcracker of all ballets. It should be all snow and Christmas, flowers and presents, firelight, moonlight, candlelight and unearthly brilliance. What with the lush magic of the Birmingham Royal Ballet Nutcracker and the solemn rapture of the Royal Ballet one, English National Ballet have always had a daunting task to be both different enough and distinguished enough to compete, but their current one kills itself none too softly with its lighting.