This exhibition of work comes from the collection of The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  While the institute is being renovated, a substantial amount of their work has been loaned to the Royal Academy of Arts.  They are good art works, very much to my personal taste, and ones that could significantly contribute to a wonderfully twee afternoon gadding about Piccadilly.

These are near-classical masterpieces, seventy in total, by artists including Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley and Jean-François Millet, Morisot, Renoir, Corot, Rousseau, and others.  There are no surprises here, but looking for bombshell bombastics in this exhibition is nothing short of perverse.  Instead, we have ballet dancers, flowers and still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes, nudes and self-portraits.  It's almost the archetypal exhibition for the Royal Academy to host.  It's traditional, historic and somewhat timeless.  It's sumptuous in its aspiration to gorgeousness.  Follow it up with afternoon tea at Fortnums and a hansom cab to St. James' Park.  These are paintings that reflect the exoticism of the past and foreign lands.

From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism is at the Royal Academy of Arts until 23 September.

This film is rereleased as part of the nation's celebrations (led by the British Film Institute) in honour of the UK's most famous filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock.  His fifth film as director is only his second earliest to survive and has undergone extensive restoration to be complete for this summer.

Ivor Novello (the famed balladeer and performer) plays a shy boarding house tenant who inadvertently becomes chief suspect in a serial killer investigation.  Someone is going around London killing pretty blondes, and the fingers are being pointed at this mysterious man.  This film is also significant for being Hitchcock's first 'wrong man' mystery; the archetype of film wherein our hero is mistaken for being someone more dastardly, and acts a precursor for films including The Man Who Knew Too Much (both of them), Rear Window and North by Northwest.

Many people believe that this film, from 1926, is the first that can be truly described as 'Hitchcockian', and the director takes clear influence from his counterparts in Berlin practicing the sinister, fetishistic German Expressionism.  The film has been restored with a newly commissioned soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney.  The film, though, is reason enough to be inside a cinema auditorium for an hour and twenty minutes during this Indian Summer of ours.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is at the Curzon Mayfair and BFI Southbank now.

Faust is the final film in the biographical tetralogy of power examined by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov.  Following Moloch, Taurus and The Sun, which looked at Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito respectively, Faust is a reworking of Goethe's masterpiece via Thomas Mann's masterpiece in its own right, set in the nineteenth century.  It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 and is one of the most critically regarded films of the 2010s.

The tale is well known.  In this iteration, Heinrich Faust cannot resist the fair Gretchen.  Consumed by his desire for existential enlightenment, a pact with the devilish Mauricius (filling in here for the damnable Mephistopheles) sees our hero (in the broadest sense, that is) sealing his own fate with a series of decisions made by temptation and crave.

It's not a barrel of laughs, this film.  If you know the myth, you understand the complexities of emotion and personality that the legend explores.  Regardless, there is an inherent truth about humanity lightly woven within the complex narrative.  It's a work of art that explores what it means to be human and what it means to want.  It's a film that attempts to mirror and reflect its audience.  Disturbingly, it makes this all reassuringly satisfying, and that's a difficult thing for a film to pull off.

Faust is at the British Film Institute tonight, until 02 August.