Five of the best ... films

1 Pitch Perfect 3 (12A)

(Trish Sie, 2017, US) 93 mins

The previous sequel strained to hit the high notes, but everything’s in harmony with the singing sisterhood this time around. There is a lot to cram in: Beca (Anna Kendrick) has career issues, Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) finds her long-lost dad (John Lithgow doing “Australian”), there’s a European military base tour with DJ Khaled ... and even some a cappella routines.

2 Star Wars: The Last Jedi (12A)

(Rian Johnson, 2017, US) 152 mins

Episode VIII does everything you hoped it would: move the story on, fill in the history, mount thrilling action scenes and take us to exotic new places. It’s a welcome return for Mark Hamill’s wise, old Luke Skywalker, brought out of reclusion by Rey’s visit. Add in an imperilled Resistance and you’ve got a dense, hugely satisfying space epic.

3 Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (12A)

(Jake Kasdan, 2017, US) 119 mins

Four teens are zapped into entry-level Indiana Jones adventures and the bodies of Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart and Jack Black. Being a sequel structured as a video game, there’s a certain inevitability to their CGI-heavy proceedings. However, the body-swap angle makes for some amusing, mildly subversive comedy.

4 Better Watch Out (15)

(Chris Peckover, 2017, Aus/US) 89 mins

Those seeking a safe space from overbearing Christmas cheer should head for this gleefully wicked horror, which serves up a secret Santa of nasty surprises. Levi Miller and Olivia DeJonge play a horny adolescent and his babysitter, whose night alone doesn’t go as planned.

5 Bingo: The King of the Mornings (15)

(Daniel Rezende, 2017, Bra) 113 mins

We’ve seen showbiz rise-and-fall sagas, but an anarchic, coke-snorting clown seems right for our times. What’s more, this primary-coloured 80s tale is based on the true story of an underemployed actor (Vladimir Brichta) who takes his kids’ TV character off-script and up the ratings.

SR

Ten of the best ... next year’s pop and rock gigs

1 The Killers

Back in May, it came to light that there hasn’t been a year since its release in 2004 that Mr Brightside has not charted. If that’s not proof that the Killers will still be here after the zombie apocalypse, what is? They play a short stadium run next summer.
Liberty Stadium, Swansea, 23 June; Macron Stadium, nr Bolton, 13 July

2 Kasabian

No jokes about wooden performances: the Leicester rockers are playing a gig in support of the Forestry Commission next summer. Before that, they will also be heading up a Teenage Cancer Trust show in March.
Royal Albert Hall, SW8, 24 March; Thetford Forest, Brandon, 30 June

3 Rejjie Snow

The rising Irish hip-hop star has had a rather good year, releasing a much-lauded mixtape, collaborating with major fashion brands and even releasing his own facial oil (yes, really). With debut album Dear Annie on the way, he heads across the country early in 2018.
23 February to 14 March, tour starts Leeds University Union

4 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Patti Smith, St Vincent and Courtney Barnett are among the other big names for this exciting one-off show, part of the jumbo All Points East festival.
Victoria Park, E3, 3 June

5 Simple Minds, The Pretenders

The two bands will play hits old and new on this joint tour – the first time they have shared a stage since Live Aid in 1985.
4 August to 9 September, tour starts Kent Event Centre, Maidstone

6 Little Mix

The UK’s biggest girl band packed in two tours during 2017. Hopefully they’ll have time for a little shut-eye before this bumper summer stadium run.
6 to 29 Jul, tour starts The County Ground, Hove

7 Goat Girl

The Rough Trade signees are helping to keep the indie scene alive with their evocative rock. Their biggest headline tour to date kicks off next March, so you’ve got some time to familiarise yourself with their excellently named singles, including Cracker Drool.
31 Mar to 21 Apr, tour starts The Deaf Institute, Manchester

8 The Cure

With a lineup that’s sure to feel just like gig heaven for many, Robert Smith and co turn 40 with a huge British Summer Time show, featuring Interpol, Slowdive, Ride, Goldfrapp, Editors and the Twilight Sad.
Hyde Park, W2, 7 July

9 Steps

Claire, Lee, Faye, H and Lisa have had an impressive year, self-releasing an album that reached No 2 in the charts and even selling out the O2 Arena. Aqua and Blue will add to the nostalgia this time around.
26 May to 10 July, tour starts Cheltenham Town FC

10 Billy Idol

Punk rock posturing from the 80s icon, who is unlikely to be dancing by himself on his first UK tour since 2015.
20-23 June, tour starts O2 Apollo, Manchester

HJD

Four of the best ... classical concerts

1 The Return of Ulysses

Two years ago, the Royal Opera staged L’Orfeo very successfully at the Roundhouse, and it returns there with more Monteverdi. The new production of The Return of Ulysses is directed by John Fulljames, with Roderick Williams as Ulysses and Christine Rice as Penelope, and Christian Curnyn conducting the Early Opera Company.
Roundhouse, NW1, 10-21 January

2 London Sinfonietta at 50

Fifty years to the day after they made their debut, the London Sinfonietta celebrate with a programme looking forwards as well as back. There is music by Stravinsky, Ligeti, Birtwistle and Abrahamsen, as well as new works by Deborah Pritchard and Samantha Fernando. George Benjamin, Vladimir Jurowski and David Atherton share the conducting duties.
Royal Festival Hall, SE1, 24 January

3 La Forza del Destino

Welsh National Opera’s spring season sees the launch of the company’s Verdi project, which will present a new production in each of the next three years. It begins with David Pountney’s staging of the epic Forza del Destino, with Mary Elizabeth Williams and Gwyn Hughes Jones; Carlo Rizzi conducts.
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 2-17 February; touring to 21 April

4 Total Immersion: Leonard Bernstein

Although the centenary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth doesn’t fall until August, the Barbican is already well ahead with its celebration, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra are devoting the last of their immersion days to him. The highlight comes in the final concert, with David Charles Abell conducting Songfest, his touching orchestral song cycle.
Barbican and Milton Court, EC2, 27 January

AC

Ten of the best ... exhibitions

1 Harry Potter: A History of Magic

This is one of the best historical exhibitions of the year. The British Library has dug a fascinating trove of magical books out of its collections and added spectacular art and objects including loans from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall. You can see everything from a Renaissance woodcut of a werewolf to Joseph Wright of Derby’s powerful painting The Alchymist – and some fine Hogwarts memorabilia, too. JJ
The British Library, NW1, to 28 February

2 John Stezaker

It may well have become a lazy art student mannerism, but John Stezaker got there first and does it with most consistent poignancy. His Mask series splices together junk-shop snaps and B-movie film-still portraits with postcard fragments of romantic landscapes – seaside caves, weepy waterfalls, railway tunnels and babbling brooks – to surprisingly melancholic effect. The bland facade pierced, the nature of human nature spills out. We glimpse, it is implied, what awaits us all. RC
The Whitworth, Manchester, to 1 June

3 Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

There is a fairytale quality to the art of the Kabakovs, with its magical stories told through beguiling installations. You can peep through a broken door into a tiny apartment out of which a man appears to have escaped by launching himself into space by catapult. There is also an eerie underground station and an almost endless corridor to explore. Yet it all tells the dark history of Russia since the 1917 revolution. JJ
Tate Modern, SE1, to 28 January

4 Rebecca Warren: All That Heaven Allows

In the first show at the extended Tate St Ives, Rebecca Warren messes with the historical vocabulary of testosterone-infected figurative sculpture to produce prancing and wriggling sculptural cheek. Barefaced samplings abound. The elevated late romanticism of Rodin is perked up with slinky Helmut Newton poses. De Kooning’s expressionistic forays into sculpture are given a wry twist of stoned indelicacy courtesy of Robert Crumb. RC
Tate St Ives, to 7 January

5 Dalí / Duchamp

Modern art has rarely looked such good fun as it does in this delightful romp through the imaginations of two lifelong pranksters and mavericks. Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa and gave up art for chess. Salvador Dalí projected his dreams in lurid paintings and became the first celebrity artist, posing as a mad Catalan genius. JJ
Royal Academy of Arts, W1, to 3 January

6 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-garde

A fascinating show of photo and sound recordings of an avant-garde opera that caused a sensation when it hit Broadway in 1934. The libretto by the genius writer Gertrude Stein retains its uplifting air of stream-of-conscious commotion to this day. The photographic portraits were taken by Lee Miller. Featuring an all-African American cast, this was an unprecedented intermix of classical and jazz, straight and gay, white and black cultures. RC
The Photographers’ Gallery, W1, to 11 February

7 Cézanne Portraits

This has been the year’s truly unmissable exhibition. Paul Cézanne invented modern art. He took apart centuries of tradition in paintings whose acute observation of reality is so intense it becomes a meditation on the nature of perception itself. Cézanne’s portraits reveal his revolutionary vision more clearly than any other genre as he stares at the faces of his family and friends so hard they become ageless masks. JJ
National Portrait Gallery, WC2, to 11 February

8 Rose Finn-Kelcey: Power for the People

If you presume conceptual and performance art are sober-minded affairs of self-righteous preaching, think again. The late Rose Finn-Kelcey was an inexhaustible source of deadpan intellectual provocations. A flag bearing the slogan Here Is a Gale Warning flutters in the wind. Another flag pronouncing Power for the People is hoisted up Battersea Power Station. Her 1999 vending machines selling prayers were installed outside the Millennium Dome. Finn-Kelcey was always on the move, dreaming up childlike questions for the powers-that-be. RC
Firstsite, Colchester, to 4 March

9 Soutine’s Portraits

The rough, raw, quirky faces and squirming gangly bodies of young waiters, bell boys, cooks and other people who worked at posh Paris hotels in the 1920s are preserved in Chaim Soutine’s exquisite portraits. They obey no rules and follow no fashions. They are so expressionistic they resemble cartoons. You won’t forget them. JJ
The Courtauld Institute of Art, WC2, to 21 January

10 Arp: The Poetry of Form

This is the first exhibition of the dada and surrealist abstractions of the French-German poet-sculptor Jean Arp in a UK public gallery since his death in 1966. There has been a tendency over here to belittle Arp through association with lesser talents who worked under his influence (Moore and Hepworth). But Arp worked in a more radical spirit of psychic automatism. He shape-shifted organisms inside out, releasing a spirit that can still give off a frisson of almost comforting unease. RC
Turner Contemporary, Margate, to 14 January

Five of the best ... theatre shows

1 Cinderella

The panto season is in full swing and around the country people are making their yearly pilgrimage to the theatre. At Nottingham Playhouse, Adam Penford takes up the role of artistic director with an upcoming season that includes Mark Gatiss in The Madness of George III, Louis Sachar’s Holes, and Beth Steel’s mining tale Wonderland. He may well tempt some of the panto crowd back with that lineup, but for the next couple of weeks it will be hisses and boos all round at one of the most celebrated pantos in the land.
Nottingham Playhouse, to 20 January

2 Barber Shop Chronicles

One of the most infectiously enjoyable shows of the year, Inua Ellams’s deceptively simple play is a journey around the world, stopping off in six barber shops in London, Lagos, Johannesburg, Accra, Kampala and Harare over a single day. The barber’s chair becomes a place for confessions in a show in which nothing much happens but men relax and reveal themselves and their attitudes to masculinity and male relationships. Exhilarating.
National Theatre: Dorfman, SE1, to 9 January

3 La Soirée

There are two versions of this stylish cabaret-style show this year: the familiar slinky, adult offering featuring a mix of circus, song and sly jokes; and a family version, La Petite Soirée. If it is impossible not to lament the absence of Ursula Martinez, who has retired her clever Hanky Panky act, there is plenty to enjoy in an evening that, at its best, combines dexterous acrobatic feats with saucy wit.
Aldwych Theatre, WC2, to 3 February

4 The Grinning Man

The mystery of a gruesome smile is revealed in this new musical, which originated at Bristol Old Vic in 2016 and arrives in London tighter yet just as appealing. Based on Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, it’s a show that revels in the grotesque, features terrific puppetry from Gyre & Gimble and eye-catching design, and has a distinctive and original sensibility. The story is transposed to late 17th-century Bristol, where disfigured fairground freak Grinpayne becomes the talk of the town.
Trafalgar Studios, SW1, to 17 February

5 Beauty and the Beast

The Tobacco Factory initiated Sally Cookson’s 2011 Christmas hit Cinderella, and has had festive success with Hansel and Gretel. New International Encounter, which was responsible for the latter gem, is back with this delightful, pared-back retelling of the daring young woman who falls for a beast. It’s a show full of quirks, theatrical inventiveness and buckets of charm.
Tobacco Factory: Factory Theatre, Bristol, to 14 January

LG

Three of the best ... dance shows

1 Birmingham Repertory Theatre: The Snowman

After a stage life of 20 years, this adaptation of the Raymond Briggs book remains a happy stalwart of the season. Robert North’s choreography and Ruari Murchison’s designs animate a chirpy cast of prancing reindeers, Ice Princess, Jack Frost and Santa Claus.
Peacock Theatre, WC2, to 31 December

2 Birmingham Royal Ballet: The Nutcracker

Peter Wright’s vintage production of the Tchaikovsky classic is vamped up with video projections and Simon Callow as the voice of the magician Drosselmeyer.
Royal Albert Hall, SW7, 28-31 December

3 Ballet Ireland: Romeo and Juliet

Last chance to see Morgann Runacre-Temple’s ingenious small-scale adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy.
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, 23 December