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There was TV before The Sopranos, and there was TV after The Sopranos. David Chase's Mafia saga kicked off the current Golden Age of TV, put HBO on the map, and made a star out of a bearlike character actor named James Gandolfini with a role most actors would strangle a degenerate gambler to get. (Not for nothing did our TV critic Rob Sheffield name it the single greatest TV show of all time in our current cover story.) In a new video interview exclusive to Rolling Stone, two...

After powering through The Guest and The Room Three in succession, the parallels between these first-person puzzle adventures became effortless to draw. They share similar foibles, like protagonists whose identities and occupations are secondary to the mystery at large, and that each title seems something of a misnomer. The Room (the first one) plants players in a space barren of detail, apart from an elaborate and ornate box, while The Guest thinks nothing of the player as a visitor in its world. The hotel suite that somebody traps you in ‒ a setting burdened with riddles ‒ establishes itself as the star instead.

The Guest replicates the inherent technology of 1986, and so I pictured my lodgings as a time capsule, combing corners of the room for finer details beyond puzzle solutions. A record player replaces surround sound stereos, a projector fills in for modern cameras, and a typewriter gets more love than any computer.

A Fake Moon rises over Bristol at the Ibt festival, Philip Pullman's I Was a Rat! scurries into Birmingham, and James McAvoy tackles the Scottish play in London

North

The big opening this week is Roger McGough's new version of Molière's The Misanthrope at Liverpool Playhouse, which should be fun. Theatre meets music gigs in 154 Collective's Dancing With the Orange Dog, which is at Stockton Arts Centre on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Hairspray is out on tour again and is at the Lowry in Salford. In Manchester, meanwhile, Queer Contact celebrates the best in Lgbt art and culture this weekend. The moving first-world-war drama, The Accrington Pals, continues at the Exchange. David Copperfield begins at the Oldham Coliseum tonight. This looks intriguing: at Haphazard at Z-arts on Saturday is Word of Warning's day of live art for all ages. The Edinburgh hit, Unmythable – all the Greek myths in 70 minutes...

It looks set to be an intriguing year on stage that will also see Philip Pullman take on Cinderella and the RSC tackle Voltaire

The Audience

After starring in Peter Morgan's The Queen, Helen Mirren gets a second go at Hm, this time on stage, in the same writer's account of the monarch's weekly audience with prime ministers from Churchill to Cameron. Presumably it'll be a battle of the handbags when it comes to those allegedly frosty encounters with Thatcher. Stephen Daldry directs. Gielgud, London W1 (theaudienceplay.com), 15 February to 15 June.

Feast

This epic exploration of Nigerian Yoruba culture is a multi-authored show focusing on three sisters separated by a mischievous trickster and obliged to travel the world. Top actors such as Noma Dumezweni and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith join forces with drummers and Cuban dancers. Young Vic, London SE1 (youngvic.org), 25 January to 23 February.

Peter and Alice

In 2009, John Logan...

We start the Top 7. You finish the Top 10.

In honor of That’s My Boy, a comedy that pairs together Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg as father and son, let’s imagine other pairs of actors who would make for dynamic father/son duos. And we’re not gonna just put two actors together and let you imagine the rest. We’ve got plot summaries too. So now I’ll just sit by the phone and wait for agents and Hollywood executives to green-light this gold.

Read Nick Allen’s “That’s My Boy” Scorecard Review (2/10)

Here are the Top 7 Actors Who Should Play Father & Son in a film.

7. Christopher Plummer (“Priest”) & Michael Fassbender (“Prometheus”)

Tentative Title: “Ice Cream Men”

Reason: Fassbender plays the world’s biggest Cher fan, who earns his keep by driving an ice cream truck for a picky boss (played by Jackie Chan) to the different towns of Death Valley.

Actor and children's television writer known for Catweazle, Robin of Sherwood and The Borrowers

Richard Carpenter, who has died of a blood clot aged 82, brought intelligent, imaginative entertainment to generations of young television viewers through the fantasy series he created. After almost two decades as an actor, he found his first success as a writer with Catweazle (1970-71), starring Geoffrey Bayldon as a dishevelled, eccentric, 11th-century magician transported to the 20th century. Comic misunderstandings were mixed with slapstick as Catweazle befriended a farmer's son, Carrot (played by Robin Davies), who unravelled for him modern-day mysteries such as "electrickery" and the "telling-bone".

In the second series, Carpenter had Catweazle searching for symbols of the 13 signs of the Magic Zodiac and being taken in by another boy, Cedric (Gary Warren), at his parents' country estate. "I've always been interested in the person who is outside society," said Carpenter in a 1990 interview with the magazine Time Screen.

Each year New York residents can look forward to two essential series programmed at the Film Forum, noirs and pre-Coders (that is, films made before the strict enforcing of the Motion Picture Production Code). These near-annual retrospective traditions are refreshed and re-varied and repeated for neophytes and cinephiles alike, giving all the chance to see and see again great film on film. Many titles in this year's Essential Pre-Code series, running an epic July 15 - August 11, are old favorites and some ache to be new discoveries; all in all there are far too many racy, slipshod, patter-filled celluloid splendors to be covered by one critic alone. Faced with such a bounty, I've enlisted the kind help of some friends and colleagues, asking them to sent in short pieces on their favorites in an incomplete but also in-progress survey and guide to one of the summer's most sought-after series. In this entry: what's playing Friday,...