The Independent Recommends

The Five Best Films

The Truman Show (15)

Peter Weir's ingenious and unsettling fantasy is, in the end, an escape movie - in the case of Jim Carrey's Truman Burbank, it is breaking out of the round-the-clock TV docu-soap that is his own life.

Out of Sight (15)

This tale of love on opposite sides of the law from director Steven Soderbergh knocks spots off every previous Elmore Leonard adaptation, and boasts in George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez the most romantic pairing of the cinematic year.

My Name is Joe (15)

All that one would expect from a Ken Loach film - humour, indignation, emotional sympathy - driven by Peter Mullan's scary, intense performance as a recovering alcoholic (right).

The Dream Life of Angels (18)

Erick Zonca's fine debut draws its strength from the personalities of Isa (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Regnier), whose close friendship comes alive amid the drab environs of Lille.

Antz (PG)

Computer-animated comedy voiced by a stellar cast and starring Woody Allen as a worker ant who becomes an opponent of the colony's totalitarian regime. Allen's best work in a while.

Anthony Quinn

The Five Best Plays

Love Upon the Throne Comedy Theatre

The Charles and Diana story (well, up to the divorce) presented by the National Theatre of Brent. Hilarious and oddly touching. To 9 Jan

Martin Guerre West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

It's third time lucky for this much- rewritten Boubil/ Schonberg musical (right). In Conall Morrison's starkly involving production, it finally emerges as a tighter, magnificent show. To 13 Feb

Mr Puntila and His Man Matti Albery Theatre

A well-deserved transfer for this Almeida hit. Comedy duo The Right Size are inspired casting for Brecht's witty fable about a split-personality landowner. To 9 Jan

Angela Carter Cinderella Lyric, Hammersmith

This feast of inspired seasonal silliness and visual magic by Angela Carter has lashings of drag and double entendres, plus the best mice to be found anywhere on a West End stage. To 9 Jan

A Month in the Country Swan Theatre, Stratford

Ireland's finest living dramatist, Brian Friel, adapts Turgenev's proto- Chekhovian comedy. To 20 Feb

Paul Taylor

The Five Best Shows

Charlotte Salomon Royal Academy

"Life? Or Theatre?", Salomon's life in pictures. Her 405 raw gouaches tell the story of the German Jewish girl's haste before Auschwitz - an expressionistic operetta in three colours. To 17 Jan

Grinling Gibbons

Victoria & Albert Museum

The best chisel-work of the great 17th-century English woodcarver, who made intricacy and the abundance of nature his trademark. To 24 Jan

Chris Ofili

Whitworth Gallery, Manchester

This 1998 Turner Prize-winner is an upbeat original, his surfaces dense and decorative, with swirls of dots, Afros and black icons, and incorporating elephant dung. To 24 Jan

Goya: The Disparates

Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery

Goya was deaf, ill and in his seventies when he produced his last series of etchings. Mysterious in intention, it is a void world: life is folly, men fly off on wings into darkness. To 23 Jan

Edward Burne-Jones

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

This centenary exhibition (right) gathers together many favourites illustrating Burne- Jones's romantic and medievalist nether world. To 17 Jan

Tom Lubbock