Saturday Review

By BBC Radio 4Society & Culture

Saturday Review episodes

May 14, 2016 Lionel Shriver, Everybody Wants Some!!, Green Room, The Complete Deaths, Gillian Wearing
Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles imagines a dystopian America of the future
Richard Linklater's follow-up to his Oscar-nominated tour de force Boyhood is meant to be the spiritual sequel to 1993's Dazed and Confused. Everybody Wants Some!! looks at a group of baseball scholarship students settling-in at a Texas university
Horror Thriller film Green Room has been making some audience members vomit and faint -how well will our reviewers cope?
At the Brighton Festival: Spy Monkey's The Complete Deaths brings all of the grim and ghastly killings from Shakespeare's works into one gruesome play
Gillian Wearing's A Room With Your Views captures a snapshot of views from windows around the world - what does it reveal?
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Damian Barr, Viv Groskop and Rebecca Stott. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
May 07, 2016 Upstart Crow, Midsummer Night's Dream, Knight of Cups, Louise Erdrich, Mona Hatoum
Ben Elton has a new sitcom on BBC2; Upstart Crow starring David Mitchell as The Bard of Avon. Could it be a return to his golden form of Blackadder?
A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first production by Emma Rice, the new Artistic Director at London's Globe Theatre. Does it auger well for her residency?
Terrence Malick is a much-admired film director whose recent work has received very mixed critical responses. Will his latest, Knight of Cups, be admired or reviled?
Novelist Louise Erdrich is of North American Indian descent and her work reflects this. Her newest - LaRose - is set in the world of the Ojibwe tribe
Mona Hatoum has a retrospective of her work at Tate Modern - how well does or can it chronicle her conceptual art?
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Elif Shafak, Denise Mina and Boyd Tonkin. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
April 30, 2016 Son of Saul, Mark Haddon, Kings of War, Love Nina, Pablo Bronstein at Tate
Son of Saul is an award-laden Hungarian film dealing with the sonderkommandos at Auschwitz, Jewish inmates who were forced to prepare and mislead new arrivals.
Mark Haddon's latest book is a collection of rather dark short stories which he hopes can "create empathy for unloveable people in difficult circumstances".
Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove has condensed several Shakespeare royal plays into Kings of War; four and a half hours in Dutch, telling English history.
Nick Hornby has adapted Nina Stibbe's Love Nina for BBC TV
Pablo Bronstein brings dance to Tate Britain
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Ekow Eshun, Antonia Quirke and Kate Bassett. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
April 23, 2016 Arabian Nights, The Flick, Garth Greenwell, Sicily at the British Museum, All the World's a Screen
Portuguese film director Miguel Gomes has created a trilogy based on The Arabian Nights. We've watched the first volume of the 6 hour epic
The Flick is a transfer from Broadway to London's Dorfman Theatre. Set in a rundown movie theatre, it explores the dynamics of the relationships among an increasingly unmotivated staff
Garth Greenwell describes his novel What Belongs To You like this; "I'm a queer writer writing in the queer literary tradition for queer people". Is it a straightforward book?
The British Museum in London has a new exhibition: Sicily, Culture and Conquest. It looks at the island at the toe of the boot of Italy, whose strategic position and rich soil means that - over the centuries - it has been ruled by many different nations and absorbed many different cultures
BBC TV's All The World's a Screen is an Arena special on the global history of Shakespeare's work as seen on the silver screen
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Christopher Frayling, Helen Lewis and Lynn Nead. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
April 16, 2016 Eye in the Sky, Hotels of North America, The Suicide, Flowers, Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979
Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman and Aaron Paul star in Eye in the Sky, a contemporary thriller set in the world of counter intelligence and drone warfare - is the life of a 9 year old girl acceptable collateral damage?
Rick Moody's new novel Hotels of North America has an unusual narrative voice. It takes the form of a series of hotel reviews, as written by Reginald Edward Morse, one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels -they tell his life story.
Playwright Suhayla El-Bushra takes Nikolai Erdman's Soviet classic The Suicide and sets it in contemporary urban London at London's National Theatre, starring Javone Prince from E4's Phone Shop.
A new comedy drama on Channel 4, Flowers, stars Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh) and features an eccentric family struggling to hold themselves together in a crumbling old house.
Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979 at Tate Britain shows how artists working in Britain transformed the nature of art, bringing together 70 works by 21 artists.
42 min
April 09, 2016 Dheepan, X at the Royal Court, All That Man Is, Shakespeare at Compton Verney, The Five
French film Dheepan won the 2015 Palme d'Or, with a tale of Tamil refugees fleeing Sri Lanka and arriving in France, finding a whole new set of opportunities and problems
Alistair McDowall's newest play X is set on a space station on Pluto. It opens at London's Royal Court Theatre; will our reviewers think it's out of this world?
David Szalay's was named as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013. His new novel All That Man Is looks at 9 young men in modern Europe
Shakespeare In Art is an exhibition at Compton Verney looking at the many ways that artists in different disciplines have depicted the work of The Bard.
The Five is a new thriller TV series where a group of friends is reunited when one of them is implicated in a murder.
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Malorie Blackman, Kerry Shale and Alice Jones. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
April 02, 2016 Ran, Long Day's Journey into Night, Camping, 6 Facets of Light, Museum of Brands
Akira Kurosawa's Ran,originally released in 1985, was - at the time - the most expensive Japanese film ever made. It won awards galore and is considered a classic. Is it still as breathtaking as on first release?
Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night is at Bristol's Old Vic starring Jeremy Irons and Lesly Manville. It's directed by Richard Eyre.
Julia Davis' newest TV comedy Camping follows several couples (with varying degrees of dysfunction in their relationships) as they spend a ghastly holiday under canvas
Ann Wroe's book 6 Facets of Light is a series of meditations on the essential nature of light.
The Museum of Brands offers a peculiar and unique view of 200 years of British society through packaging, design, toys, magazines and other items. Formerly in Gloucester, it has now moved to a new location in London
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Andrea Rose, Geoffrey Durham and Maev Kennedy. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
March 26, 2016 Hamlet, Paul Strand, Hot Milk, Court, Undercover
Paapa Essiedu is the first black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC in a new production opening in Stratford directed by Simon Godwin.
Booker short listed writer Deborah Levy explores the complex emotional dynamics of the mother / daughter relationship in her new novel Hot Milk.
Court is Mumbai born Chaitanya Tamhane's feature film debut - an Indian courtroom drama film which explores the limitations of Indian legal system through the trial of an elderly folk singer at a Sessions Court in Mumbai.
Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century at the V&A in London shows how the pioneering American photographer defined the way in which fine art and documentary photography is understood and practised today in the first major retrospective of his work for 40 years.
And barrister turned writer Peter Moffat's new political thriller Undercover on BBC One, stars Sophie Okonedo as Maya, who is about to be appointed as the first black Director of Public Prosecutions. Adrian Lester plays her husband Nick, an under cover police officer with a complex past.
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Arts Editor at the New Statesman, Kate Mossman, novelist Patrick Gale and writer Susan Jeffreys.
42 min
March 19, 2016 Better Living through Criticism, High-Rise, Jane Horrocks, Charlotte Bronte, Russia and the arts
A O Scott's book Better Living through Criticism looks at the very stuff of Saturday Review - who needs critics nowadays?
Ben Wheatley's film High-Rise is an adaptation ofthe 1972 novel by JG Ballard - an urban dystopia set in a brutalist tower block.
Jane Horrocks' newest production is a genre hybrid; "a theatrical experience with music" . If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me at London's Young Vic is her tribute to the music she loved as a teenager
Charlotte Bronte came to London from Yorkshire five times in her life. A small exhibition at The John Soane's Museum commemorates her visits.
London's National Portrait Gallery has an unprecedented exhibition of Russian works normally displayed at The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It's part of a cultural exchange between the two museums, both founded 160 years ago.
Sarah Crompton's guests are Tiffany Jenkins, Francis Spufford and Louise Doughty. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
March 12, 2016 Motown the Musical, Anomalisa, Giorgione, Eileen, Art of Scandinavia
Motown, The Musical - with one of the best pop songbooks to draw on; how could this stage show fail?
Charlie Kaufman's latest film is a stop-motion tale of loneliness, isolation and the possibility of redemptive love: Anomalisa
In The Age of Giorgione at London's Royal Academy, examines the development of The Venetian Renaissance, through works by Giorgione and his contemporaries such as Titian and Durer
The central character of Ottessa Moshfegh's novel Eileen is a lonely self-loathing secretary at a boy's prison, looking after her alcoholic father. And then along comes hope...
Art of Scandinavia on BBC4: Andrew Graham Dixon looks at the art of Denmark, Norway and Sweden
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Lisa Appignanesi, Rowan Pelling and Elizabeth Day. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min