Leave No Trace is a film about love and survival. A father and daughter living in idyllic remote Oregon woodlands come up against authorities who decide their life can't continue as it has done . Directed by Debra Granik (Winter's Bone) The story of the evolution of Scotland's pop music scene is told in a new exhibition; Rip It Up at The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. One For Sorrow is a new play at London's Royal Court Theatre by Cordelia Lynn, about a family who invite a stranger in...
Jun 30, 2018•45 min
Award winning writer Irish writer Joseph O'Neill's 2008 novel Netherland was endorsed by American President, Barack Obama. Good Trouble is his first collection of short stories. Arcadia, the new film from the BAFTA award-winning Scottish director Paul Wright (whose debut feature For Those in Peril premiered at Cannes in 2013), explores our complex connection to the land we live in. Combining over 100 film clips from the last 100 years and a grand, expressive new score by musicians Adrian Utley f...
Jun 23, 2018•51 min
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has been adapted for the stage at London's Donmar Warehouse to mark the centenary of Muriel Sparks' birth There's a new horror film which some critics have been comparing to The Exorcist and other touchstones of the genre; is Hereditary as scary as the publicity would have us believe? London's National Gallery is staging two complementary exhibitions: Eden to Empire looks at the work of Thomas Cole, a Lancashire-born painter who became most famous for his landscapes...
Jun 16, 2018•48 min
My Name is Lucy Barton is a one woman play starring Laura Linney in her London stage debut. At London's Bridge Theatre, it's based on the novel by Elizabeth Strout and directed by Richard Eyre There's a new documentary looking at the life and career of designer Alexander McQueen who died in 2010. It includes interviews with familiar faces and also less-well-known family and friends Rachel Kushner's novel The Mars Room is largely set within the American penal system - it's not a nice place to be,...
Jun 09, 2018•49 min
A bilingual production of Moliere's Tartuffe at Theatre Royal Haymarket, written by Christopher Hampton and updated to a setting in contemporary Los Angeles sounds like a winning formula. It has had some damning reviews elsewhere in the press; what will our reviewers make of it? Francois Ozon's newest film L'amant Double deals with a Hitchcockian plot line involving twin psychiatrists both treating the same beautiful young woman who is having emotional and relationship problems. They also both h...
Jun 02, 2018•47 min
Animated film The Breadwinner (co=produced by Angelina Jolie) is the story of a young Afghani girl in Kabul who has to disguise her gender in order to be able to support her family David Shrigley was the curator for this year's Brighton Festival. We went to see Problem in Brighton; described as "an alt-rock/pop pantomime... requiring ear plugs and an open mind". what on earth is one of those?! Sister Corita Kent was an artist, a famously charismatic educator and a Roman Catholic nun based in LA ...
May 26, 2018•50 min
Alfred Molina plays artist Mark Rothko in Red at London's Wyndham's Theatre Ian McEwan has adapted his own novel On Chesil Beach for the big screen, starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle as newlyweds whose wedding night nuptials are complicated by memories and misunderstandings The story of the scandal of 1970s Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe and his apparent homosexual affair with male model Norman Scott is now a TV series starring Hugh Grant. A Very English Scandal is written by Russell T ...
May 19, 2018•48 min
Is a world without crime a utopia or a dystopia if the price is total constant surveillance by the state? British thriller Anon is set in a world where wanting to be anonymous makes you the subject of society's suspicions. It stars Clive Owen as a detective investigating gruesome murders. Russian theatre director Lev Dodin's production of Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate comes to the UK for a very limited run Benedict Cumberbatch stars in David Nicholl's adaptation of the Patrick Melrose st...
May 12, 2018•49 min
Jason Reitman's new film Tully stars Charlize Theron as a mom coping with pressures of modern motherhood and at the edge of her sanity until a night nanny appears and everything seems to be looking up Mood Music is Joe Penhall's newest play which has just opened at London's Old Vic Theatre. It deals with the tricky business of the music biz and who can be credited with the success of a hit song. Whee there's a hit, there's a writ Rachel Cusk's novel Kudos is the third part in her trilogy which b...
May 05, 2018•48 min
British film Beast, set on Jersey observes a dark and complicated relationship between a troubled young woman and a local man suspected of committing ghastly crimes The Writer is Ella Hickson's new play at London's Almeida Theatre. Does the patriarchy work against the interests and power of women writers? Curtis Sittenfeld's collection of short stories You Think It, I'll Say It, covering subjects including unhappily married couples to happily unmarried couples, revenge and a female president of ...
Apr 28, 2018•49 min
Let The Sunshine In, directed by Claire Denis is a French film starring Juliette Binoche as a divorced Parisienne dealing with love and looking for a relationship that will work for her The latest West End jukebox musical Tina is about the tumultuous life of Tina Turner and her transformation from Anna Mae Bullock - born into rural poverty in the Southern USA - into half of Ike-and-Tina-Turner and a disastrous violent marriage into a world-conquering solo superstar Aminatta Forna's new novel Hap...
Apr 21, 2018•53 min
Quiz is the latest play from James Graham. Its subject matter is the edition of Who Wants To be A Millionaire in which a lot of coughing went on. We the audience are asked to vote on whether we think the major is guilty or not of trying to beat the system. French film Custody is a searing and unflinching look at a disintegrating marriage and the emotional and psychological consequences on all those in the family 1960's sci-fi TV series Lost In Space is returning. And this time it's on Netflix wi...
Apr 14, 2018•48 min
Black comedy thriller film Thoroughbreds is about 2 American teenage girls who hatch a plot to kill one of their step-fathers. Is it easier to hire an assassin or do it themselves? And will emotions get in the way of such a potentially messy business? Congreve's The Way Of The World at London's Donmar Warehouse is a restoration comedy. But how funny can one make a wildly convoluted 300 year old plot about inheritance funny for today's theatre goers? Richard Powers' latest novel is The Overstory ...
Apr 07, 2018•51 min
The American auteur Wes Anderson's new stop motion animation feature film "Isle of Dogs" is set in a dystopian future Japan and features the voices of Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Greta Gerwig, Scarlet Johansson and Edward Norton - as dogs marooned in a garbage dump called Trash island. This is Anderson's second animation after his adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, and tells the story of 12 year old run away Atari on a mission to save his dog, Spots, after a deadly dog flu virus sprea...
Mar 31, 2018•50 min
Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kayling star as deities who are millions of years old in the £108m mega-budget film: A Wrinkle In Time. It's a story which mixes physics, time travel, female empowerment, and bullying at school. Does the presence of Oprah et al make it divine or dreadful? The Great Wave is a new play by Japanese Ulsterman Francis Turnly about the kidnapping in the 1970s of Japanese citizens by the North Korean authorities. Some returned, others were (and maybe still are...
Mar 24, 2018•53 min
A new theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at The Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre aims to be one of the most faithful versions to the original novel. What does this add to our understanding of the play and of the Creature? This year's Palme d'Or winning film The Square, is a Swedish satirical drama dealing with the world of contemporary art and our personal boundaries and responsibilities. Chloe Benjamin's latest novel 'The Immortalists' follows the lives of a group of contempo...
Mar 17, 2018•49 min
Australian film Sweet Country is an Australian Western set in the 1920s - can there be justice when an aboriginal man kills a white farmer in self defence. High Society is a new exhibition at The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - a series of life-size portraits from the masters of art history from Rembrandt to Manet and Velasquez. The National Theatre's latest production stars Rory Kinnear and Anne Marie Duff in Macbeth. Wendy Cope's first collection of poetry in 7 years is Anecdotal Evidence David Byr...
Mar 10, 2018•51 min
Fanny and Alexander opens at London's Old Vic Theatre. Adapted from Ingmar Bergman's award-winning 1982 film, how well does such a sumptuous film transfer to the stage? Also coming from Sweden is our film this week (well, to be more accurate, it's a Swedish/German/Egyptian co-production). The Nile Hilton Incident tells the true story of an Egyptian policeman investigating the death of a nightclub singer in Cairo, as The Arab Spring is beginning. But the justice system seems intent on stymieing h...
Mar 05, 2018•51 min
Ruth Wilson stars in British film Dark River; a tragedy about a family coping with death on a rundown farm in Yorkshire, The B*easts at London's Bush Theatre is an exploration of the pornification of culture and the sexualisation of children. Kenneth Clark's landmark 1969 BBC TV series Civilisation explored the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages. It's now been remade as Civilisations. Fire Sermon is a novel by Jamie Quatro about a mother devoted to her family...
Feb 24, 2018•50 min
Greta Gerwig's latest film stars Saoirse Ronan. Lady Bird has been Oscar-nominated but will it impress our panel of reviewers? Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the finest novels ever written. How does a brand new translation improve it? For more than 35 years, Kettle's Yard in Cambridge was the home of Jim and Helen Ede and they opened it to the public allowing everyone to enjoy their art collection. Following 2 years of closure and a multi-million pound prog...
Feb 17, 2018•49 min
David Hare's first episodic television drama Collateral is a BBC and Netflix co production starring Carey Mulligan, John Simm, and Billie Piper. Set in contemporary London it explores the challenges posed by mass migration as a result of war, poverty and persecution. Hare references ground breaking television such as Cathy Come Home, The Boys From The Blackstuff and A Very British Coup as inspiration: will Collateral prove as innovative and as game changing? Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes an...
Feb 10, 2018•47 min
Journey's End opened as a play in 1928. Set in the trenches of the First World War, there's a new film version which will hold a different resonance for modern viewers as for those theatre-goers 90 years ago . The horrors of war never really change, how do artists successfully interpret it anew? The latest production at London's Bridge Theatre is of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. There have been a lot of recent productions -what do our reviewer think makes this one special? Julian Barnes new novel...
Feb 03, 2018•47 min
Peter Carey's novel A Long Way From Home tells the story of a husband and wife taking part in a round-Australia endurance race in the 1950s. The Hayward Gallery in London reopens after a multi-million pound refit with an exhibition of work by the photographer Andreas Gursky. Giant photographs on brutalist walls. Richard Linklater's film Last Flag Flying is about three Vietnam veterans who come together to bury a son who has died in the conflict in Iraq. It stars Laurence Fishburne, Brian Cransto...
Jan 27, 2018•52 min
Disney Pixar's latest release is their first with an all-Latin cast. Coco explores the Mexican tradition of The Day of The Dead and a young boy's coming to terms with his heritage The new novel from Tim Pears is the second in his proposed trilogy. The Wanderers is the story of two young people in pre-WW1 England and the horses that are part of their lives All's Well That Ends Well has opened at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at London's Globe Theatre Hauser and Wirth Somerset has opened a new exhib...
Jan 20, 2018•49 min
The controversy surrounding London's Royal Court Theatre's staging of Andrea Dunbar's semi-autobiographical play Rita Sue and Bob Too led to it being postponed and then rapidly reinstated. Written in 1982 when she was 19, can it now be seen as a period piece? 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri is a darkly comic film starring Frances McDormand, written produced and directed by Martin McDonagh Lily Tuck is a winner of The National Book Award in the USA. Her latest novel Sisters imagines a woman ...
Jan 13, 2018•47 min
A digital edition of Saturday Review presented by Antonia Quirke. Crown Heights is a new on-demand film based on an episode of NPR's This American Life, telling the true story of Trinidadian teenager Colin Warner's twenty year wrongful incarceration. The Miniaturists takes a long-running short play night and turns it into a podcast with five new short plays from up and coming British playwrights. The reviewers explore the world's greatest and strangest museums, galleries and monuments with Googl...
Jan 07, 2018•42 min
Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Kerry Shale, Tiffany Jenkins and Shahidha Bari as well as listeners around the country who choose the best of the arts from 2017 from across the genres. FILM Dunkirk Bladerunner 2049 78/52 Manchester by the Sea La-La Land Get Out Elle Frantz Land of Mine Wonder Woman Atomic Blonde THEATRE Boudica at the Globe Barbershop Chronicles Follies at the National Theatre Hamlet at the Pinter Theatre The Best Thing Finding Joy Gloria at Hampstead Theatre Network at the National ...
Dec 30, 2017•50 min
The much-anticipated musical Hamilton has opened in London. It tells the story of Alexander Hamilton; one of the Founding Fathers of The United States with intentionally colour-conscious casting of non-white actors as the Founding Fathers. It has been a phenomenon on Broadway and across the US; how will it play with British audiences? Irish film Sanctuary has a cast made up almost exclusively of actors with learning difficulties. It lightly tells the story of a trip to the cinema where the best ...
Dec 23, 2017•46 min
Crooked House: there's an all-star film adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's own favourite novels. Its being shown on Channel 5 before being released in the cinema; does that bode well or ill? The League of Gentlemen began at The Edinburgh Fringe, transferred to radio then to TV, to a stage show and then to film. They're returning to BBC TV for 3 pre-Christmas specials, reviving favourite characters from the many iterations. Cult American TV programme Twilight Zone has been adapted for the sta...
Dec 16, 2017•56 min
Menashe is a new film set in the Hasidic Jewish community in New York with almost the dialogue in Yiddish. It's a story about a hapless father trying to bond with his son and also conform to religious expectations Parliament Square is the 2017 Bruntwood Prize winning play at London's Bush Theatre about a woman on a mission Her Body and Other Parties is a collection of short stories by American author Carmen Maria Machado The story of the creative minds behind Winnie The Pooh - AA Milne and EH Sh...
Dec 09, 2017•48 min
