Front Row

Samira Ahmed and guest critics - the novelist and anthropologist Tahmima Anam and Ben Luke from the Art Newspaper - give their verdict on the week’s cultural releases.

They’ve been to see Cate Blanchett in Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull at the Barbican Centre. The classic drama still features characters from Russian nobility – but it’s given a modern-day treatment including VR headsets and quad bikes.

They have also watched Sister Midnight, a film about a young bride called Uma who joins her husband in Mumbai but struggles to adapt to her new life and connect with the man she knew as a childhood friend. She wanders the streets, drawn to the moon and becomes an accidental outlaw.

Also under consideration are portraits in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery by Edvard Munch – an artist best known for his painting The Scream.

Plus we pay tribute to Five Star’s Stedman Pearson who's died at the age of 60.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Songwriter and musician Edwyn Collins performs live from his latest album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, a series of 11 optimistic and defiant tracks released two decades on from two devastating cerebral haemorrhages.

American novelist Torrey Peters, whose book Detransition, Baby became a bestseller and was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction, talks about her new book Stag Dance, a collection of four novellas which examines trans life past, present and future.

And as exhibitions around the world celebrate the centenary of Scottish poet, writer, visual artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay, poet Alan Spence and the founder of Jupiter Artland sculpture park outside Edinburgh discuss his life and legacy.

Presenter: Kirsty Wark

As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard is dramatised for television, director Tom Shankland and film critic Peter Bradshaw discuss the power of this classic Italian novel.

Natasha Brown's first novel, Assembly, saw her favourably compared to Virginia Woolf and won a Betty Trask award. Her eagerly-awaited second novel Universality has just been published and she discusses leaving her career in finance to write fiction.

Low Kee Hong, the new Creative Director of Manchester International Festival, shares his vision for the festival and talks about the 2025 programme which has been revealed today.

Ceramicist Elizabeth Fritsch is the subject of a major retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield. Curator, writer, and editor Natalie Baerselman le Gros, who specialises in contemporary ceramics, reflects on the work of an artist who describes herself as a painter who makes pots.

Presenter: Nick Ahad

Adolescence – the new Netflix series starring Stephen Graham – explores every parent’s worst nightmare: a teenage son accused of a knife-crime. Co-writers and directors Jack Thorne and Philip Barantini join us to explain how the “single-shot” filming technique sheds light on the way toxic masculinity spreads online among young people. Fantasy fiction generated almost £25 million more in 2024 than the previous year - and, a big part of that is the surge in Romantasy, the literary genre fuelled by booktok and YA fans. So, what is Romantasy and what’s the appeal? We meet author Alwyn Hamilton whose fourth book is out this month and editor Natasha Qureshi. Ludovico Einaudi is the most streamed classical artist of all time, with nine billion streams a year and a track which recieved 16 billion TikTok views alone. He discusses his compositions for the screen and plays from his latest album The Summer Portraits.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

In Front Row's Thursday review, Ellah Wakatama and Rhianna Dhillon give their take on Bong Joon Ho's new film Mickey 17 starring Robert Pattison, David Szalay's new novel Flesh, and Get Millie Black, Channel 4's Jamaica-set crime drama from Marlon James.

Plus we hear from Sophie Elmhirst, whose Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck Survival and Love has just been awarded the Nero Gold Prize for Book

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Actor Jessica Lange discusses her latest film, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winning play Long Day's Journey Into Night, in which she plays Mary Tyrone, a woman with a morphine addiction at the centre of a dysfunctional family, and a role for which she previously won a Tony Award on Broadway.

Welsh National Opera's new joint CEOs Adele Thomas and Sarah Crabtree talk about their plans for the organisation.

And acclaimed artist Alison Watt talks about her latest exhibition, From Light, inspired by 19th century architect Sir John Soane and showing in his former home, Pitzhanger Manor in London.

Presenter: Kirsty Wark

A new exhibition at London's National Gallery hopes to shed light on artists in 14th Century Siena, who have often been overshadowed by their Tuscan neighbours in Florence. Samira is joined in the studio by one of the curators, Imogen Tedbury, and by Maya Corry, a Renaissance expert from Oxford Brookes University to discuss the astonishing colours and use of gold by artists like Duccio, the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini.

The death has been announced of Bill Dare, the creator of Radio 4's The Now Show and Dead Ringers. He nurtured new writers and performers including David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt, of The Mary Whitehouse Experience as well as the comedian Jon Holmes, who explains how they first met.

Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, best-known for his Oscar and BAFTA nominated documentary about James Baldwin 'I Am Not Your Negro', discusses his latest film 'Ernest Cole: Lost and Found', about the brief life of a young South African photographer who had to flee his homeland in 1968 to publish his book of photos which exposed the horrors of apartheid to the world.

The Booker and Oscar-nominated writer Colum McCann discusses his thrilling new novel Twist, a dive in to the dark depths of the modern human condition set on board a ship repairing the fragile cables which connect us on the ocean floor.

Sean Baker made Oscar history, becoming the first person to win four Academy Awards for directing, editing, writing and producing a single film, Anora. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh joins Samira to look at this year's Oscar winners and what they say about cinema today. The RSC's co-artistic director Daniel Evans discusses playing Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. Filmmaker Laura Carreira talks about her award-winning debut feature On Falling, about the social isolation and the injustices faced by a Portuguese woman working in the gig economy in Scotland. And, we look back at the work of late artist Jack Vettriano with Rachel Campbell Johnson.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the film critic Ryan Gilbey and art critic and author Charlotte Mullins review the week's latest cultural releases including Tate Modern’s exhibition on the unconventional artist and performer Leigh Bowery, the Greek film featuring gay romance, The Summer With Carmen and Michael Amherst’s first novel, The Boyhood of Cain.

Kirsty Wark talks to Anjelica Huston about playing a magnificent matriarch in the adaptation of Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, which begins on BBC One this weekend.

The director of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, talks about the appointment of an architectural firm who will be redeveloping the Museum's galleries, about the pressures of running a national cultural institution and about recent controversies.

And actors Tim Roth and Koki discuss their roles in the opening film at the Glasgow Film Festival, director John MacLean's reinvention of the samurai movie tradition, Tornado.

Presenter: Kirsty Wark