England is on the brink of going to war with Nazi Germany, Edward VIII abdicates and suddenly a prince with a severe speech impediment and fear of public speaking finds himself on the throne: this fascinating historical situation is portrayed in The King’s Speech with wit, pace and subtlety. You do not have to be an avid historian or an enthusiastic supporter of the monarchy to be captivated and charmed by this understated but never dull film which centres on the spiky relationship between King George VI (Colin Firth) and his unorthodox Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).

Based on the book by Logue’s son, this film has a great sense of authenticity, unlike most recent historical films which have tried too hard to make real stories Hollywood-friendly and, in the process, have become unconvincing and formulaic. Last year Made in Dagenham, an inspirational-film-by-numbers, had an unsupportive husband turn up just in time to see his wife make a rousing speech whilst The Social Network desperately tried to make what was essentially a series of business negotiations visually interesting by placing them in a night club or a hotel room where the bedclothes were on fire. In a moment of pure cinematic Eureka, Mark Zuckerberg sprints across the Campus of Harvard because he has had the brainwave of putting the relationship status on the facebook profile: implausible scenes like these cannot help but make you wonder if these films bear even the slightest resemblance to the true stories upon which they are based. Fortunately, this is not the case in The King’s Speech – the film almost always avoids the predictable and the stereotypical and presents the story as interesting and idiosyncratic.

Engagingly written, attractively shot and impeccably acted, this January release is bound to waltz with dignity and charm into the awards season. The royal family, a speech impediment, a cigar-puffing Winston Churchill – chances are these will go down well with the Academy. Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter and Guy Pearce all put in great performances but it is Colin Firth who will be most lauded for his compelling and sensitive portrayal of the monarch. Critics are suggesting that he has finally shed the wet shirt of his old romantic roles as a reserved English heart-throb. However, he had already made a fairly clean break from this typecasting in A Single Man (2009), where he played an ageing homosexual lecturer, leading a melancholic life in 1960s LA, unable to cope with the death of his lover. In the 2010 awards season this role garnered him a BAFTA for Best Leading Actor and an Oscar nomination. With The King’s Speech, Firth looks set for another triumph.

Steven Spielberg

When Steven Spielberg releases two films in a year you can guarantee a few things: there will be at least one happy ending; one film will be heavy while the other will be light; and he will push the boundaries of film-making. In 2011 Spielberg will release War Horse, a film adaptation of the emotional child’s story about a horse in World War 1, and The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in which he will create an entire 3D film using Avatar motion-capture technology.

Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman is certainly being versatile this year. First we will see her play a ballerina on the edge in the Oscar-worthy and critically acclaimed Black Swan. She will then become Ashton Kutcher’s love interest in chick-flick No Strings Attached, an astrophysicist in Marvel’s comic film Thor and finally the warrior princess in male-directed fantasy comedy Your Highness. This year, Portman will finally get a chance to show her full range and hopefully prove to Hollywood that she can be box office gold.

Matt Damon

One male actor to look out for this year is Matt Damon who is hitting 2011 with no less than five film releases. Damon is known for being picky with roles but this is to his credit, as he often chooses meaty, interesting ones. He will narrate Inside Job, a documentary about the financial crisis, play a reluctant psychic in the new Eastwood film Hereafter, a cowboy with a lisp in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, a politician in thriller The Adjustment Bureau and then to round it all off a scientist in star-studded Contagion.

Matt Isard

Cary Fukunaga

Cary Fukunaga’s feature film debut, Sin Nombre saw him riding atop Mexican railroad cars, braving bandits, foul weather and low-hanging tree limbs. The director was richly rewarded at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, picking up the US Dramatic Directing Award and the Cinematography Award. However, Latin American railroad yards are replaced by Victorian manor houses in his latest project, an adaptation of the classic Jane Eyre, out in March, starring Mia Wasikowska as the eponymous heroine. 2011 looks set to be another successful year for this promising director.

Alisha Patel

Robert Pattinson

It may strike some as superfluous to flag Robert Pattinson as an actor “to look out for” in his capacity as one of the 100 most influential individuals on earth (dixit Time). Yet 2011 will see a new Robert Pattinson. In stark contrast to the Twilight saga, he has chosen that most salacious and amoral tale for his next role: an adaptation of Maupassant’s Bel Ami, where he plays the eponymous anti-hero, a social climber cum seducer of women.

Sam Jindani

If you felt at sea amidst the tide of new faces and genres that emerged over the course of the past twelve months, you weren’t alone. But you can attempt to find your depth this year with the return of some familiar artists who have been keeping quiet until now. We welcome back with open arms Elbow, the Streets and a much-awaited Radiohead album. If this is not enough, Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne will be appearing on shop shelves sometime this year too. Awesome.

These women can be counted among other artists who have now, regrettably, become all too familiar: is it not about time for Lady Gaga’s place as (arguably) the most prominent female artist of the moment to be usurped by a more worthy musician? This year the rise of Nicki Minaj – described as hip-hop’s answer to Gaga – will challenge the latter’s ascendancy in both the music and fashion industry. Minaj may have a penchant for fussy dressing and lurid hair colour, but the hard-hitting rhymes of her songs have more substance than her rival’s ever did. The musical eccentricity of other female singers rising to fame this year – Janelle Monae, Jessie J – will be tempered by the lyricism of some new voices that have been tipped for the BBC Sound of 2011 award. Anna Calvi and Clare Maguire are the names you will be hearing much of, as their debut albums are released in the early part of the year. Calvi’s haunting, Simone-like vocals could not be further removed from Maguire’s deep, powerful tones.

‘Indie’ music veered away from simply empty layers of dirty guitar noise overlaid with bland vocals last year. It spawned the sub-genre ‘chillwave’, a sound characterised by fuzzy production and a synth-heavy nostalgia-inducing sound. Think 80s-style Casio keyboards combined with laid-back dance beats. Last year even our pop-rock princes Kings of Leon had a half-hearted stab in the dark towards the trend, with September’s Come Around Sundown, featuring songs that they eloquently described as “beach-y”. Bands such as Neon Indian, Best Coast and Small Black do it best, and will hopefully gain the recognition they deserve this year.

One man who seems to have won the recognition he deserved towards the end of last year, is James Blake, whose musical synthesis between IDM and experimental minimalist classical caught the public’s attention. Needless to say, he is not the first electronic artist to blend unusual beats and sounds; indeed, the gap between contemporary, ambient and classical has slowly been narrowing over the past few years. Four Tet’s There Is Love In You from last year, for example, is an elegant fusion of lo-fi and dance, and a while back we had Jimmy Tamborello’s Dntel, a slow-paced mix of glitch, found sounds and basic beats. These are, of course, just a handful of examples (others include Fuck Buttons, Boards of Canada, Flying Lotus and Gold Panda), but we can expect that in 2011, the umbrella term ‘electronic’ will be encompassing more of the weird and wonderful, with James Blake as its ‘face’.

We may not be ones to speculate, but we do sense that there may be somewhat of a 70s revival to come this year, following on from the positive reception of bands who imitated this sound last year. MGMT’s beautifully crafted Congratulations – released in April last year – proved to be universally popular (give or take certain fans who were displeased with the band’s abandonment of their trademark mindless anthems). Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s Before Today, was a disco-rock album of equal stature, brimful of bizarre, surreal sounds and musically fascinating passages, further demonstrating recent interest in nostalgic sounds. Could these two albums be enough to bring about a re-revolution? We live in hope…

It seems Damon Albarn has spared us the 4-year wait between major releases and graced us with another LP just months after critically acclaimed ‘Plastic Beach’. And what makes this more exciting is that he did it all while on tour in America, using just his shiny new iPad, and all in time for release on Christmas Day! For free. What a quality guy.

While one can’t fault his festive spirit, it is still, after repeated listens, hard to gauge what exactly he has gone for here. ‘The Fall’ is a spirited potpourri of various styles, as is usually the case with Gorillaz. But it differs from the effortless fusion of Kano’s bleep-infested garage with Arabic sentiment as on Plastic Beach’s ‘White Flag’, and comes nowhere near tracks such as De La Soul style ‘Superfast Jellyfish’. Perhaps it is due to the time restraints he put himself under, but ‘The Fall’ ends up playing like a collection of B-sides plastered together, I suppose much like their previous ‘G-Sides’ or ‘D-Sides’ releases. Their sound is very much the same: plenty of interesting sounds and creative rhythms, yet for the most part it lacks the flair and groove we’ve come to expect from Albarn.

That is not to say, however, that it’s not worth listening to. ‘The Fall’ starts off solidly with a nod to Nine Inch Nails’ industrial technicality in ‘Phoner in Arizona’ and is followed up by two tracks in similar style. The unquestionable gem of the album is ‘Detroit’. Its sleepy, half-speed combination of reggae bass and warm guitar lines give it nonchalant summer sweetness akin to Major Lazer’s ‘Can’t Stop Now’. However, after this there is little that is particularly noteworthy. The latter half of ‘The Fall’ alternates between brooding electronic rumbling, tribal African drumming and neo-classical musing, believe it or not.

In this way, ‘The Fall’ has a distinctly conglomerate feel. And while you can’t really tout it as an evolution in his sound, if you take the album for what it is, an iPad-made soundtrack to his time in America, it really isn’t too bad – Albarn seems merely to be having some fun on here.

Fishscale was touted by many as the best hip-hop album of 2006 and Apollo Kids is certainly no different, doubtless throwing a large spanner in the works for many a carefully thought out ‘albums of the year’ list (at least in the hip hop category). Ghost hit forty this year, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from his music, which is still as raw, energetic and full of swagger as ever.

There are no skits and intros/outros are kept to a minimum so that the intensity is never allowed to drop, leaving a really compact, tight album. Granted it is not particularly adventurous – the feel is closer to the Wu-Tang albums of the 90s than other critically acclaimed contemporary efforts from artists such as Kanye West and Mos Def – but Ghost sticks to what he knows and does it very well, and the album succeeds because of it.

The production comes from an assortment of relatively unheard of producers but is very strong throughout. Most of the tracks have quite a marked, heavy beat which complements Ghost’s rapping style and helps drive the album forward, but within this framework there is a great diversity of styles. A particular highlight is the second track, ‘Superstar’, which sounds like it could have been taken straight out of a Blaxploitation film soundtrack, while ‘Purified Thoughts’ and ‘Handcuffin’ them Hoes’ exhibit the lilting rhythms and polyphonic synths characteristic of the more modern style of production. And as always, the album’s chock full of cracking soul samples, from funky bass riffs to wailing vocals.

As you’d expect from one of Wu-Tang’s most acclaimed rappers, the words certainly do justice to the beats. Ghost is always on the right side of aggressive, serving up punchy, quick fire rhymes full of witty boasts and slams. His refreshingly abstract style livens up the sometimes-hackneyed themes of ghetto storytelling and gangster posturing. The many contributors deserve equal praise. The Game returns to his best with a throaty, menacing verse, and Blackthought nearly steals the show on ‘In Tha Park’. But it’s Ghost’s Wu-Tang Clansmen that make this good album great. Raekwon, Method Man and affiliates Cappadonna and Redman all weigh in at the end with what are in my mind the three best tracks, bursting with same energy and clout as the best club-focused songs on Forever.

Churchill may have declared ‘this is not even the beginning of the end,’ but Ron Rosenbaum’s book will aim to inform us How The End Begins (March, Simon & Schuster). The Cold War is over but the threat of destruction by nuclear weapons sure isn’t, and with Trident renewal still up for debate, this may be an important book.

Meanwhile Atomic Postcards (April, Intellect) reproduces postcard images of test explosions and the like, complete with their handwritten messages, dating from Hiroshima to the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘A fascinating glimpse of a time when the end of the world seemed close at hand,’ the publisher says. Perfect for the coffee table in your fall-out shelter.

John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission (January, Allen Lane) may not offer much comfort, for it will no doubt shine Gray’s bleak brand of scepticism on humanity’s ‘strange quest to cheat death.’ The combination of science, philosophy, and politics is what modernity is all about. 2011 will just see us hurtling on, in the same direction.

In Lars Iyer’s Spurious (Melville House, January), two intellectuals go on a quest to understand themselves, discover the meaning of life and find out why an unstoppable fungus is taking over one of their houses. A premise which combines Goon Show-esque humour with profound questioning is certainly intriguing; all the more so as it’s a philosophy professor’s fictional debut.

If cerebral fungi aren’t your cup of tea, look at Michael Cunningham’s latest, By Nightfall (Harper, January). When an unexpected guest arrives in his home, Peter, a New York art-dealer, is affected in a way he cannot quite explain. He comes to realise that he is in love with two people at the same time. His wife. And her brother. This taboo-breaking plot, likely, judging by earlier works, to be combined with a captivating innovation of style, and coming from the award-winning author of The Hours, promises to be a mesmerising literary experience.

But if you feel that you’ve already got enough weighty books on your reading list and want a page-turner instead, there’s always Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson, Doubleday, April). After an accident in her twenties, Christine forgets everything of the preceding day whilst she sleeps. Every morning, she has to relearn the past twenty years she has forgotten. This may sound a similar premise to Fifty First Dates, but this chilling story is far from rom-com, especially when the one person Christine trusts may not be telling her the whole truth.

With the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl, the sleepy town of Hanmouth is suddenly put under the microscope of the press in Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers (Harper, March). As the apparently calm community starts to fall apart, the often comic lives of the individuals who live there are laid bare. A realist novel about a community losing its privacy – cross Middlemarch with 1984 – a crime novel, a political novel, tragic yet humorous too: King of the Badgers sounds like an amalgam of different genres, and given Hensher’s previous success, the odds are this will be one worth looking at.

Finally, for those who prefer dipping into books, there’s Anthony Doerr’s collection of short stories, Memory Wall (Harper, January), which, like Before I Go To Sleep, investigates the correspondence of the past with the present. The nature of short stories inevitably facilitates diversity – and Memory Wall looks ready to exploit this to its full potential. Like another new release, Island of Wings, this book will make you travel with it across (four) continents – and through the minds of characters of many backgrounds and ages.

Apparently only three percent of all books published in the English-speaking world are works in translation. Some small presses have made it their mission to change that. Reading another country’s literature not only enlarges our understanding of the wide world, but it sets free cultural resources that were once fenced in by language-barriers. So in the New Year’s self-improving spirit, here’s a list to get you started.

In January, Dalkey Archive is putting out Brazilian Ignacio de Loyola Brandão’s The Goodbye Angel (trans. Clifford E. Landers) described as a “cross between a noir and a Greek Tragedy” in an exploration of Brandão’s “great subject” of the city versus its inhabitants.

Europa will publish Luis Sepulveda’s Shadow of What We Were (trans. Howard Curtis) in February. Summoned by an anarchist called “The Shadow”, three ageing revolutionaries meet in Santiago to complete one final mission. In the sudden absence of The Shadow, it is the bumbling Coco Aravena to whom the others turn.

This March, Melville House is publishing Fiasco (trans. Tom Wilkinson) by Hungarian Nobel winner Imre Kertecz. Fiasco has been described as reminiscent of the works of Kafka and Camus and is set during Hungary’s almost seamless transition from Nazi to Communist occupation.

And in April, in Dasa Drndic’s Trieste (trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac) published by Quercus, an old woman sits in north-eastern Italy surrounded by fragments which form a collage (“employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices” says the publisher’s website) telling the story of the son fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen during the Second World War.

East European fiction often cannot avoid the yoke of totalitarian regimes, but those who enjoy a melancholy tempered by humor or cheek might try Bohumil Hrabal, whose novel Harlequin’s Millions was just released in English by Archipelago this past December.

Start the year by avoiding London. (Well, go and see Modern British Sculpture at the RA as soon as it opens on January 22nd because it will be just incredibly amazing. But save the rest.) Instead, take the opportunity to see artists right here in Oxford. The O3 gallery opens with Rad Cam! on the 17th: artists’ responses to what is perhaps Oxford’s most iconic structure. The North Wall Arts Centre, meanwhile, presents the work of the Oxford Sculptors Group from the 24th to the 5th only. On February 1st the Oxford Art Movement are exhibiting work on the theme The Sublime and the Grotesque at Christ Church, and the Sarah Wiseman Gallery will show landscape paintings of Rajasthan by Jenny Eadon.

Back in the capital, Tate Britain opens a historical survey of the medium of watercolour on February 16th, which would be a great complement to the Eadon show. Its content ranges from medieval illuminations to work by contemporary artists like Emin and Hodgkin. Fine Artists might also particularly like to see Art School at the V&A, documenting the transformation of art school practice in the 19th century, including Turner and Constable’s early sketches.

Modern Art Oxford does not disappoint with the next two artists in its line up: with the installations, interventions and other art happenings from Roman Ondák and Michael Sailstorfer, it’s going to be an interesting experience walking into the gallery this March. The Ashmolean, meanwhile, has a summer show which completely departs from its last blockbuster. Images and the State explores the style and content of Chinese propagandist imagery in the Cultural Revolution. Definitely an antidote to all those Pre-Raphaelites. A little further afield, another show of pictures meant to play with your mind is the retrospective of Surrealist René Magritte, on at Tate Liverpool from June 24th.

Autumn means time for the next Turbine Hall artist and this year it’s Tacita Dean, who is perhaps most famous for her 16mm films documenting reflections and alterations of light on surfaces. After Ai Weiwei’s 2010 installation of thousands of seeds became look-and-don’t-touch because of health and safety concerns, it will be hugely exciting to see how Dean employs the space on offer.

Finally, the National Gallery rounds off a year of Renaissance shows with Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. The enormous, expensive, impressive shows have been scarcer than usual this year, but don’t worry. This is the most complete display of da Vinci’s surviving paintings ever held, with loans from all over the world, and looks set to be spectacular. Enjoy.

This lesser-known publisher is now my first and favourite supplier for international fiction that diverges interestingly and refreshingly from the mainstream; having achieved global success with their translations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Quercus’ sense for the quirky and cutting-edge has now become their trademark.

The company’s passion for posterity over pulp is definitely evident in Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, launched in January under the imprint MacLehose Press. Its setting in the remote reaches of the Himalayas immediately suggests the new perspectives this novel can convey to the reader as, seeking a fresh start, Maya chooses a settlement surrounded by these hulking mountains. Secluded, yet not isolated enough to avoid the collective threats of her past, the encroaching industrial development and the seemingly unaccountable behaviour of her fellow citizens. Provocative and thrilling, this promises to live up to expectations of Roy, who has already proved her prowess with An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

Continuing the travel trend, I’m excitedly anticipating reading Karin Altenberg’s début novel Island of Wings, another of Quercus’ rare birds, to be set free in April. Spanning not only an unfamiliar geographical landscape but also a different temporal one, it traces the tribulations of a Victorian missionary and his new wife as they arrive on an island at the margins of civilization. Closer to the eerie atmosphere of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible than to the harmonious island life of the Swiss Family Robinson, this colonial mystery augurs such haunting questions as the true fate of the natives’ vanishing children and the sanity or otherwise of each of the newlyweds. On an island, as in the mountains, no-one can hear you scream.