THE CRITICAL LIST: THIS WEEK'S RECOMMENDATIONS

The film

The latest issue to be hijacked by the novelist Michael Crichton, for Disclosure, is sexual harassment in the workplace. Demi Moore does it to Michael Douglas in the inevitable Hollywood adaptation. The director is Barry Levinson, clearly playing it safe after the early demise of his previous film Jimmy Hollywood (which went straight to video in Britain). Opens Friday.

The play

Alan Ayckbourn brings his production of Conversations with My Father to London's Old Vic on Tuesday. Herb Gardner's Broadway hit spans 40 years of a Russian Jewish immigrant's espousal of the American Dream. Peter Bowles and Lisa Harrow are in the West End this week, co-starring in Terence Rattigan's In Praise of Love, a play inspired by the relationship of Rex Harrison with his wife Kay Kendall. It opens at the Apollo, on Monday.

Old Vic: 0171-928 7616;

Apollo: 0171-494 5070

The gig

P J Harvey's music comprises a boiling morass of neuroses played out at the edge of comprehensibility in the throaty language of menstrual trauma. It's not pretty but it does work and, as demonstrated by Polly Jean's latest album To Bring You My Love, it's getting more comprehensible all the time. Catch the tour early in Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Cambridge.

The opera

Hot (on a silver platter?) from the Salzburg Festival, Luc Bondy's striking staging of Strauss's Salome arrives at Covent Garden on Saturday with the mountainous Bryn Terfel (above) as the Bible-bashing preacher man and the diminutive Catherine Malfitano as the 16-year-old sex-kitten. Christoph von Dohnanyi conducts, with Mrs Von Dohnanyi (aka the soprano Anja Silja) as Herodias.

Royal Opera House: 0171-304 4000