More than a decade ago, Simon Russell Beale was an unforgettably rapt and humane Hamlet at the National. More recently, he made Timon of Athens look central to the repertoire. Now, in one of the most keenly awaited openings of the year, he will take on one of the mightiest and perhaps the most difficult of all Shakespearean parts. In the title role of King Lear, he will be directed by Sam Mendes, who staged the marvellous Donmar Twelfth Night in which Russell Beale was Malvolio. The cast also includes Anna Maxwell Martin as Regan and Adrian Scarborough as the Fool. The production, which opens at the Olivier on 14 January, is booking until 25 March Photograph: National Theatre, London
You know the Wes Anderson formula by now. Some regular cast members (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray) sprinkled with fresh signees (Jude Law, Saoirse Ronan, Ralph Fiennes); a whimsical premise, in this case the adventures of a concierge and a lobby boy who work in a pink hotel, plus extensive use of the Futura font and a killer soundtrack. The Grand Budapest Hotel is out on 28 February Photograph: Martin Scali/Film company PR
Titian & the Golden Age of Venetian Painting, at the Scottish National Gallery, will celebrate the acquisition of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto jointly with the National Gallery in 2009 and 2012 respectively, and will draw on the Scottish National Gallery’s exceptionally rich collection of 15th-century paintings, drawings and prints, the better to contextualise them. Virtually all the major names will be represented, among them Lorenzo Lotto, Palma Vecchio, Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Veronese. Also on show will be Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, on loan from London. A must-see for all those who love painting – Titian’s astonishing versatility and peerless skill never fails to take the breath away – and one that will happily coincide with the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. On from 22 March to 14 September Photograph: National Gallery, London
The elder statespeople of song seem to be working overtime of late. After this year’s Bowie bombshell, 2014 promises Croz, the first David Crosby solo album in 20 years. The forecast? “Warm and wet,” says the man himself. Bruce Springsteen, meanwhile, has given us High Hopes, a gritty cover version heralding an album of the same name, which scatters a few more covers (including one of Suicide’s) in among rerecordings of key texts. Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello – guesting live with Springsteen on his recent tour – seems to have played the catalyst here. Two venerable doyennes of country music – the evergreen Dolly Parton and Rosanne Cash – rejoin the fray too. The River and the Thread is a far rootsier offering than you might expect from Cash, in which other deep south forms and the civil war loom large Photograph: Jemal Countess/Getty Images
A big year lies ahead for online streaming giant Netflix. Not only has it moved into theatrical film distribution in the US (with Oscar-shortlisted documentary The Square its first acquisition), but plans are afoot to begin producing its own in-house films. It will be a force to be reckoned with in that department if it can harness equivalent talent to that of its first original TV series, House of Cards, the second season of which premieres on Valentine’s Day. Kevin Spacey returns as venal Washington wheeler-dealer Francis Underwood, whose already bad behaviour is sure to reach compelling new lows in his lofty appointment as vice-president Photograph: Allstar
So keenly awaited is this computer game for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, shares in developer Ubisoft dropped by 26% after its release was delayed until spring 2014. Watch Dogs will cast gamers as trench-coated vigilantes, free to roam Chicago, hacking into its systems (traffic lights, police databases) to deliver what Ubisoft wants to call the player’s “own brand of justice”. Expect explosions and lots of fun Photograph: PR
Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures always score highly with its literary and film adaptations, and its new dance theatre production Lord of the Flies (it opens at the Lowry, Salford Quays, on 2 April, before touring), based on William Golding’s novel and Peter Brook’s film about a party of schoolboys who regress to savagery on a remote island, promises to be a splendidly dark treat. Bourne directs, choreography is by Scott Ambler. The new season’s other notable adaptation is Kes. Originally a novel by Barry Hines (A Kestrel for a Knave), and later filmed by Ken Loach, the story of a lonely, troubled Yorkshire boy whose imagination is unleashed when he finds and trains a wild falcon has been set to dance by former Royal Ballet dancer Jonathan Watkins. At the Crucible theatre in Sheffield from 27 March Photograph: PR
A celebrity line-up of organists – you never knew there was such a thing – is joined by trumpeter Alison Balsom (pictured), the London Philharmonic and Philharmonia Brass Ensembles, the Elysian Singers and more for the reinauguration of the Royal Festival Hall’s famous Harrison & Harrison organ, 60 years after it was installed – with its 7,866 pipes and following a multi-million-pound restoration begun in 2005. The programme of virtuoso music (18 March-7 June) ranges from Bach and Liszt to John Tavener and Peter Maxwell Davies and is followed by a three-month festival. FM Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Pina Bausch named her plaintive dance piece 1980 after the year her partner, Rolf Borzik, died. Sadler’s Wells hosts a Tanztheater Wuppertal revival of the piece, rarely performed, from 7 February. Up the road, a day later, Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s new adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 begins a six-week run at the Almeida. The production, a joint enterprise with Headlong and Nottingham Playhouse, won five-star reviews on its debut in Nottingham Photograph: Ulli Weiss/Sadlers Wells
Superhero sequels have a mixed pedigree, mostly terrible, but there are reasons to believe that The Amazing Spider-Man 2, out 18 April, will be more Superman II than Batman Forever. In Andrew Garfield the franchise has a bona fide star – nimble, credible, fun as Spider-Man – and he’s ably backed by Emma Stone as his romantic squeeze. Jamie Foxx and Paul Giamatti join the cast for this sequel as super-powered baddies (a shooter of electrical bolts and a rhino-like thug, respectively) and rising star Dane DeHaan comes aboard as a chum Spidey will need to keep an eye on… Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
As well as new series of Girls (January) and Mad Men (spring), Sky Atlantic will broadcast a new HBO drama, True Detective, in February. The cast alone is exciting: Matthew McConaughey paired with Woody Harrelson (genius!) as a pair of Louisiana cops. Guess what? They’re on the trail of a serial killer. Cary Fukunaga, responsible for Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre, directs Photograph: PR
Those of us who grew up with Postgate and Firmin’s Noggin the Nog will, perhaps, be particularly looking forward to Vikings: Life and Legend at the British Museum (opens 6 March), though such are its excitements, I predict it will be every bit as popular as the museum’s blockbuster, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. The exhibition, which will explore the extraordinary Viking expansion from Scandinavia from the 8th century onwards, will have at its centre the remaining timbers of a 37m-long warship excavated from the banks of Roskilde fjord in Denmark in 1997, and never seen before in this country. Comprising some 20% of the original ship – dating from around AD1025 – it will be displayed in a special steel frame that will reconstruct the full shape of the original boat. Just jaw-dropping Photograph: John Lee/British Museum/AP
In 2013, Dream River – Bill Callahan’s fourth album under his own name – raised the game considerably for this cult American songwriter, long feted for his bone-dry delivery and bleak humour, and for leaving out far more than he leaves in. This time around his extraordinary band have proved as eloquent as he is, adding flutes, swing and percussion where previously there was a skeletal kind of Americana; accordingly, it was Mojo magazine’s album of the year. Callahan’s 2014 tour (starts 31 January at Gateshead Sage) is simply not to be missed Photograph: PR
She is 88; he is 93. She, who has a long history in the women’s movement, provides “mistress services”; he, who is wealthy, supplies her with a house and income. Abi Morgan (pictured), who wrote the screenplays for The Iron Lady and Shame, has based her new play on the contract made by this pseudonymous real-life couple, and on tapes they have recorded – in bed, on the phone, over dinner – during their 30 years together. The Mistress Contract will run at the Royal Court from 30 January to 8 March. It will be staged by Vicky Featherstone: a striking beginning to her first full year as the theatre’s artistic director Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Observer
Expect Peter Capaldi capering everywhere in 2014. Freshly cast as the 12th Doctor in Doctor Who (we saw a glimpse of his furrowed brow in a recent episode, though we’d guess Capaldi’s formal run on the show won’t begin until autumn), the Scottish actor will appear in another family-friendly BBC drama early in the year. Musketeers revisits Alexandre Dumas’s classic 1844 story, with four newcomers as the charming French militants and Capaldi tormenting them as the wicked Cardinal Richelieu. We know he can do bad from his role as Malcolm Tucker on The Thick of It, but can he do it in a cassock? TL Photograph: Rankin/BBC
According to Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, for many people, Henri Matisse: the Cut-Outs (Tate Modern, 17 April-7 September) “will be one of the most beautiful, evocative and compelling exhibitions ever seen in London”. And few would disagree. The show will bring together 120 of Matisse’s late works, many of them seen together for the first time, including the Tate’s The Snail, its sister work Memory of Oceania, and Large Composition With Masks (all 1953), an astonishing mosaic of colour that is some 10 metres long. All were made by cutting into coloured paper at a time when Matisse was too ill to paint. It will be startling and spectacular, so the queues are likely to be long Photograph: Union des Mus
Overrated, underrated, masterpieces, messes… Lars von Trier’s films reliably seize attention. The director’s next offering, Nymphomaniac, the explicit study of a sex addict, has already been labelled “a really bad porn movie” by one of its own stars, Stellan Skarsgård, which bodes well. There have also been difficulties getting it down to a digestible running time; the film will be released in two parts, the first on 21 February, the concluding part following a month later. But the last LvT, 2011’s Melancholia, had a troubled run-up to release (remember the Nazi scandal?) and was a critical hit. This one should get interesting Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
Downright uncategorisable, Annie “St Vincent” Clark’s reached a far wider audience than the Brooklyn cognoscenti thanks to her 2012 hook-up with David Byrne. She’s now on a major label but it doesn’t seem that she has tidied up her sound on her fourth solo album proper (out 24 February). Birth in Reverse, a taster, is full of cranking guitars and talk of masturbation Photograph: PR
Suddenly Shakespeare’s contemporaries are all over the stage, offering fierce and fascinating parts for women. At the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole opens his new indoor theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where he will direct, by candlelight, John Webster’s terrifying The Duchess of Malfi from 9 January to 16 February. Gemma Arterton, who made her professional debut at the Globe, will take on the title role. At Stratford the RSC will be showing the enlivening influence of its new deputy artistic director, Erica Whyman, who has devised a season of three rarely performed Jacobethan plays to run in the Swan. First to be staged is Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s comedy The Roaring Girl, last seen at the RSC with Helen Mirren in 1983. It runs from 9 April to 30 September Photograph: Hugo Glendinning
Opera North has assembled a top cast led by Alwyn Mellor as the “girl” of the title for Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, best known as The Girl of the Golden West, conducted by Richard Farnes and directed by acclaimed choreographer Aletta Collins. Set during the California gold rush, it explores the tough life of the mining community via a dark love triangle, which has Puccini’s most touching female character, Minnie, at its centre. The score is thrilling and explosive, the story heart-rending, yet the work is not often staged. Don’t miss this opportunity; Leeds, 21 January to 21 February, then on tour Photograph: Opera North
Since the triumph that was 212, rapper Azealia Banks has become more infamous for her vicious Twitter feed than her art, as the release of her debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste, slid from 2012 into 2013 – it’s now due out in January 2014, followed by a tour (starts Glasgow on 25 March). One of Banks’s many Twitter dust-ups involved our own Lily Allen, no noble follower of the high road herself on social media. Having topped the singles chart twice now with her Keane cover and having confirmed a Glastonbury slot to boot, Allen will release a new album later next year. It should feature a song (possible working title: Hoe! Bitch!) about that very beef Photograph: PR
Anyone lucky enough, way back in 2011, to have watched Page Eight will be practically pupating to learn that there are another two parts in David Hare’s trilogy to come, respectively Turks and Caicos and Salting the Battlefield. What could have been a routine piece involving a spy turned maverick, loyalty to a dead friend, and dark conspiracies and dodgy dossiers, was raised to sublime tension thanks to Bill Nighy’s tender nuances and Hare’s script and direction. The next two pair Nighy with Christopher Walken – apparently they’re enormous fans of each other. Has any screen pairing shared such stoic cheekbones, or such small, evocative mouths? Sparks will fly Photograph: David Levene for the Observer
The archives of three great maverick American artists, William Burroughs, David Lynch and Andy Warhol, have been raided for this intriguing show, which sets out to show how photography was – and, in Lynch’s case, still is – central to their creative practices. Warhol’s Polaroids are well-known, but this exhibition (the Photographers’ Gallery, London, 17 January to 30 March) focuses on the often diaristic 8x10in black-and-white photographs he made in the last 10 years of his life, as well as some of the grids that make up his “Stitched Works”. Lynch shoots the insides of derelict factories in Europe and America in monochrome, creating a brooding atmosphere that will be familiar to anyone who has watched Eraserhead. William Burroughs’s images are mostly random snapshots that he processed in high-street chemists but they supposedly shed light on his creative vision. Let’s see Photograph: Estate of William S. Burroughs
There’s a short, inglorious history of “comedy police drama” – The Thin Blue Line, anyone? But if anyone can pull it off, it will be Danny Boyle, in one of his rare forays into telly. It helps immensely that this is scripted by the writers behind Peep Show and Fresh Meat. Jimmy Nesbitt’s slated to star alongside Brit Marling (pictured), and early suggestions are that it will be taking the rip out of, among other tropes, police filming people while people film them while someone else films them all. I am a camera: me no Leica. Could be wonderful. But if Boyle flops, Rowan Atkinson did too, once Photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images
