Saturday Review

By BBC Radio 4Society & Culture

Saturday Review episodes

March 14, 2015 Alexander McQueen, Suite Francaise, X+Y, Antigone, Tom McCarthy
When an exhibition of the fashion creations of Alexander McQueen opened in New York, visitors queued for up to 5 hours to get in. It's now at London's Victoria and Albert Museum; will it be such a crowd-puller
Suite Francaise - Irene Nemerovski's wartime novel (discovered more than six decades after her death) was a best seller. Can it repeat its success as a film?
X+Y is a film about a young maths prodigy who is on the autistic spectrum. It deals with his participation in the International Mathematical Olympiad and growing up emotionally
Juliette Binoche plays the lead in Antigone at London's Barbican Theatre. Directed by Ivo Von Hove, it's caused a lot of advance excitement.
Tom McCarthy's new novel Satin Island is a meditation on contemporary society that some reviewers have accused of ditching traditionally novelistic techniques like plot and character. Is it all the better for it?
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Helen Lewis, Dominic Sandbrook and Kit Davis. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
March 07, 2015 Still Alice, Game, Nurse, David Vann, Forensics
Julianne Moore won an Oscar for her performance as Alice, who has Early Onset Alzheimer's disease in Still Alice. Does a great performance make a great movie?
Mike Bartlett's new play Game at London's Almeida theatre raises questions about how desperate people become when they're looking for somewhere to live.
Paul Whitehouse plays multiple characters in his TV series Nurse which is transferring from Radio 4 to BBC2. It deal with the travails of a Community Psychiatric Nurse and her patients.
David Vann's novel Aquarium is told from the point of view of a 12 year old girl whose happy life with her single mother is thrown into disarray by a chance encounter
Forensics - The Anatomy of Crime, has opened at The Wellcome Collection in London, and it looks at crime from being committed to criminal conviction.
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Tracy Chevalier, Catherine O'Flynn and Craig Raine. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
February 28, 2015 Ishiguro, Man and Superman, It Follows, Matt Lucas - Pompidou, Sculpture Victorious
The Buried Giant is Kazuo Ishiguro's first new novel for 10 years, set in Arthurian England
George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman at The National's Lyttleton Theatre starring Ralph Fiennes
New horror film It Follows has been a success in the US and could be a new teen creepy classic
Matt Lucas' is best known for Little Britain; his new TV show is entirely devoid of catchphrases - it's a wordless series called Pompidou
Sculpture Victorious at Tate Britain looks at sculpture created during Queen Victoria's reign - the innovations in style and technique
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Natalie Haynes, Jim White and Rebecca Stott. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
February 21, 2015 The Duke of Burgundy, The Kind Worth Killing, Suffragettes Forever, Art from Elsewhere, Eugene Onegin
The production of Eugene Onegin by Moscow's Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre being staged at London's Barbican sold out for a year in Russia and the international tour sells to packed-out houses
The Duke of Burgundy is Peter Strickland's latest film which looks at the love affair between 2 sub-dom lesbian lepidopterists
Amanda Vickery presents BBC2's Suffragettes Forever, a three part series trying to tell "the unknown story" of "Britain's longest war, the 300 year-long campaign by women for political and sex equality" The touring exhibition "Art From Elsewhere" currently in Birmingham displays some of The Art Fund's acquisitions of works by artists from overseas
Peter Swanson's novel "The Kind Worth Killing" is a twisty turny thing; a thriller full of unexpected surprises. Is it surprisingly good?
42 min
February 14, 2015 Anne Tyler, Indian Summers, Love Is Strange, How to Hold Your Breath, History Is Now
Anne Tyler's latest novel 'A Spool of Blue Thread' (her 20th) follows the dynamics of an American family through several generations
Indian Summers is a sumptuous drama on Channel 4 looking at life in India in 1932. It stars Julie Walters and follows the early stirrings of political opposition to The Raj
Love Is Strange is a film with Jon Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a gay couple who decide to get married after being together for 40 years and their relationship is put under a strain by forces they hadn't expected
Maxine Peake is in a new play at London's Royal Court. How To Hold Your Breath is about personal and political journeys
History Is Now at The Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery is subtitled "7 Artists Take On Britain" and looks at 70 years of cultural and social history.
42 min
February 07, 2015 Selma, Human Right Human Wrongs, The Illuminations, You're Not Alone, Better Call Saul
Tom Sutcliffe and this weeks panel discuss the film Selma, which tells the story of Martin Luther King and struggle for black voting rights in 1960s America. It charts the freedom march between Selma and Montgomery in the segregated deep south, and the high price paid for democracy.
Human Rights Human Wrongs is the latest exhibition in The Photographers Gallery in London. It charts, through photojournalism, how violent flash points through the world in 20th century have shaped our perception of conflict, race, empire and ourselves.
The illuminations is the 5th novel by author Andrew O'Hagan, it tells the tale of Anne, a Scottish pensioner who is slipping in to the slow slide of dementia and her Grandson who is serving with the Army in Afghanistan. It explores how memory and the past are intertwined in this cross continental, generational tale.
The panel also discuss comedian and artist Kim Noble's new show You're Not Alone. He uses live action, video, music and audience participation to paint a picture of darkly comic loneliness.
Better Call Saul is the prequel to cult series Breaking Bad. Its from the same creator, so can it capture the magic of the original series?
Presenter Tom Sutcliffe. Producer Ruth Sanderson.
42 min
January 31, 2015 Tom Stoppard, Inherent Vice, Adam Curtis, Joyce Carol Oates, Christian Marclay
Tom Stoppard's play The Hard Problem is his first new work for the National Theatre in 13 years; is it worth the wait?
Paul Thomas Anderson has adapted a Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice - the first time a cinema director has wrestled this famously difficult author onto the screen. How well does it work?
Documentary maker Adam Curtis's Bitter Lake attempts to explain the complicated political situation in Afghanistan. It's only available on iPlayer; might this be a new way for the BBC to 'broadcast' material? If so, what might the consequences be?
Joyce Carol Oates has published more than 40 novels in her five decade long career. Her latest 'Sacrifice' is based around a notorious alleged rape case in the US
Christian Marclay's exhibition at White Cube in Bermondsey includes a post-pub-crawl soundscape and paintings of sound effects - turning representations of audio experiences into fine art
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Rowan Pelling, Julia Peyton Jones and Robert Hanks. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
January 24, 2015 Oppenheimer, A Most Violent Year, Fortitude, Rubens, Sandip Roy
The RSC's latest production is Oppenheimer, a play about the man behind the invention of the nuclear bomb - a flawed hero, is it a flawless production?
A Most Violent Year is set in New York in 1981, a year when more than 1.2m crimes were committed. JC Chandor's film follows a man trying to build up a family business in the face of alarming violence and corruption.
Fortitude is Arctic noir TV. Set in an Icelandic Research Station where mysterious and untoward things start happening, the cast includes Sofie Grabol, Michael Gambon, Christopher Ecclestone and a host of other big names. Will it leave the reviewers cold?
Rubens And His Legacy at the Royal Academy attempts to explore the influence of the great Flemish master on artists over the last three and a half centuries.
Sandip Roy's first novel Dont Let Him Know tells the story of a young man in modern India exploring his sexual identity.
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Lionel Shriver, Sophie Hannah and Francis Spufford. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
January 17, 2015 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Wild, Wolf Hall, Adam Thirlwell and Bull
Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Pedro Almodovar's film has been turned into a stage musical with Tamsin Greig as Pepa Marcos. It flopped on Broadway, now thoroughly rejigged, can it succeed in London?
Reese Witherspoon is in the running for an Oscar playing Cheryl in Wild, about a woman who sets off to discover herself on a 1100 mile walk in the wilderness.
Wolf Hall was first a best-selling book by Hilary Mantel, then an RSC play and now it comes to BBCTV, with Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell
Adam Thirlwell is a young British writer whose third novel Lurid and Cute focusses on an ordinary egotistical young man whose life spirals out of control
Bull at The Young Vic is a play about the consequences of ruthless office bullying. At only 55 minutes long it has to come out swinging, but does it land any punches?
42 min
January 10, 2015 Whiplash, Foxcatcher, Daniel Kitson's Tree, Cucumber Banana Tofu, Weathering
A review of the week's cultural highlights.
42 min