The art and film worlds love Jonas Mekas.  It’s not hard to see why.  Mekas first arrived in New York as a refugee from his native Lithuania in 1949.  He was given a small Bolex film camera and within a few years he was writing for Village Voice and founding the magazine Film Culture, as well as the now-legendary Anthology Film Archives and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.  He could count figures including Allen Ginsburg, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren as his friends.  Serpentine Gallery celebrate the life of the nonagenarian with a career retrospective.

Mekas’ films are visual poems, typified in style as personal diaries.  There have been millions of words written about and by the man, none of which I’ll repeat here.  His work has been exhibited throughout the world, including at Documenta; the Venice Biennale; MoMA, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  Despite his advanced age, he remains a man with real warmth, humour and a zest for life that runs immanently through his films.  An auxiliary programme of events will see Mekas holding court at Serpentine Gallery with some well-known well-wishers, including Jefferson Hack and film director Mike Figgis.  In deference to the man of the moment, we shall give him the last words…

"I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema, the lyrical forms, the poem, the watercolour, etude, sketch, postcard, arabesque, bagatelle and little 8mm songs. I am standing in the middle of the information highway and laughing, because a butterfly on a little flower somewhere just fluttered its wings, and I know that the whole course of history will drastically change because of that flutter. A super-8 camera just made a little soft buzz somewhere, on New York's Lower East Side, and the world will never be the same"

Jonas Mekas is at Serpentine Gallery until 27 January 2013.

Of all the annual art exhibitions, New Contemporaries causes the most debate among your dear Culture section.  Take last year for example, which, in all honesty, annoyed the team here by celebrating a decidedly average selection, punctuated with a few truly wonderful artists (you can find our muted reaction here).  This year, there is no mistaking it.  The judges have hit on a winner.  Forget the fact that it’s both themed and annual, they have put together one of the most interesting group shows of the year.

Selected this year by artists Nairy Baghramian, Rosalind Nashashibi and the duo Cullinan Richards, we can handpick a selection of artists from the twenty-nine artists who would be worth the entrance fee alone (a turn of phrase, you understand.  It’s free).  The Swiss-born Simon Senn is by far and away a Because favourite.  His performance videos are delightfully esoteric while maintaining a balance between the playful yet menacing.  Alongside Polish filmmaker Piotr Krzymowski, the Hong Kong-born Tony Law, Scot Oliver Osbourne, there are also some women.  Most notably perhaps the two most exciting artists in the exhibition: Tara Langford and Lauren Godfrey.  Langford’s a printmaker, Godfrey an installation artist who once could have put a 43-foot beached whale into the old Dicksmith Gallery at the bottom of Brick Lane.  What’s great about this show is that practically all of the artists have a distinct aesthetic, craft and set of questions that they’re looking to explore.  Like any good storyteller, it leaves you wanting more.

New Contemporaries 2012 is at the ICA until 13 January 2013.

Matthew Bourne won’t take credit for revitalising contemporary dance – but he did. The crowning glory to an already glittering career was his all-male ballet of Swan Lake. Playing on nearly every continent, it’s the longest-running ballet in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway, and, when televised, was the most watched arts programme on British television. The maestro choreographer returns to both Tchaikovsky and to Sadler’s Wells, the site of Swan Lake’s debut, for the world premiere of Sleeping Beauty.

Bourne lets his imagination run away with him as fairies and goblins converge in this gothic reverie. Cursed to sleep for a hundred years, we first meet our heroine Aurora at her Christening in 1890, but are soon transported with her to an unsettlingly familiar twenty-first century. Aurora’s story is a dazzling and haunting romance, and a chronicle of the magical, the melancholic, the mysterious and the miraculous. Matthew Bourne is a Svengali of the stage who mesmerises audiences by translating the essence of their most personal and fanciful of dreams. With Sleeping Beauty, we can prepare to feel the rapture of his work once more.

Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty is at Sadler's Wells Theatre until 26 January 2013.