Saturday Review

A new film, The Selfish Giant, loosely based on an original Oscar Wilde fairy story, brings the story up to date and follows the lives of a couple of teenage boys who bunk off school to go trading scrap metal. It's director Clio Barnard's second film set in the north of England; what sort of performances has she got from the two main leads who have never acted before?

From Here to Eternity, a new musical based as much on the 1951 novel by James Jones as it is on the 1953 film (which starred Burt Lancaster canoodling in the Hawaiian sands with Deborah Kerr), opens in London. It's the story of G Company of the US Army, based in Waikiki just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. With an original score, singing prostitutes and GIs, and lyrics by Tim Rice, is it set to run and run?

Autobiography by Morrissey is exactly what it says; the self-penned life story of the singer best known for his work as leader of Manchester band The Smiths. It deals with his childhood growing up in a poor area of Manchester in the 60s and 70s and settles scores with people he holds responsible for making his life a misery at various stages. Does it make for a great read?

Masterpieces of Chinese Paintings 700-1900. This exhibition at the V&A in London charts the evolving styles and subjects of painting over 12 centuries, from early religious figure paintings on silk, through landscape painting to the introduction of Western influences.

In The Escape Artist David Tennant plays a highflying barrister who finds himself on the other side of the fence after defending a murder suspect in the new BBC TV legal thriller, written by the creator of Spooks.

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Michael Arditti, Giles Fraser and Gillian Slovo

Producer: Oliver Jones.

Tom Sutcliffe and guests Sarfraz Manzoor, Natalie Haynes and Peter Kemp discuss David Tennant's starring role in Richard II, in Gregory Doran's first production as Artistic Director at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, following on from David Tennant's successful performance as Hamlet in 2008. Richard II is the first in a cycle of Shakespeare's history plays which will be performed over subsequent seasons.

Donna Tartt's long awaited third novel is The Goldfinch, published 11 years after The Little Friend and 21 years after her memorable debut The Secret History. The entire book revolves around a stolen painting, Dutch artist Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch, which in reality hangs in The Hague's Royal Picture Gallery. Starting like her previous two novels with a gripping account of a death, will it live up to the hype?

The Ey Exhibition Paul Klee - Making Visible opens at Tate Modern Bankside, and focuses on the decade Klee spent teaching and working at the Bauhaus, the hotbed of modernist design. The abstract canvases Klee produced there, such as the rhythmical composition Fire in the Evening 1929, took his reputation to new international heights.

James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus star in Nicole Holofcener's new film, a rom com Enough Said. Gandolfini starred in the hit television series The Sopranos and died suddenly of a heart attack earlier this year.

And in a new BBC Two comedy drama, David Mitchell and Robert Webb star as the British ambassador and his Mission deputy who are busy in Tazbekistan, trying to secure a 2 billion pound helicopter deal for the British government.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, the Dublin-set musical arrives at the Palace Theatre in London. With Killian Donnelly as lead singer Deco, will it win the public's hearts as the book and the film did?

Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent are a long-married couple who go to Paris for Le Week-end to celebrate their 30th anniversary - in a trip that soon puts the marriage to the test. Scripted by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell, it's their third feature film collaboration.

The Circle by Dave Eggers is the story of Mae, a naive young employee of the world's most powerful internet company. Is it a Brave New World or 1984 for our time, as some have called it?

Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 at the National Gallery in London is a look at the flourishing of portraiture in the multi-cultural, multi-faith city during and after the fin-de-siecle, including work by Klimt, Schiele and Richard Gerstl.

Hello Ladies is Stephen Merchant's new California-based comedy which will be showing on Sky Atlantic here. He plays an Englishman lost in LA and looking for love - but does he deserve to find it?

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Deborah Bull, Naomi Alderman and Patrick Gale.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Irvine Welsh's book Filth hits the big screen with a bang - and bagpipes - as James McAvoy takes on the role of Scotland's bad lieutenant. It is directed by Jon S Baird and also stars Imogen Poots, John Sessions and Eddie Marsan.

Richard Eyre directs a new production of Ibsen's controversial masterpiece Ghosts starring Lesley Manville at the Almeida Theatre in London.

Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art at the British Museum and The Night of Longing at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge are complementary exhibitions showcasing the extraordinary body of erotic pictures in early modern Japan.

Masters of Sex starring Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan is a new American tv drama on Channel 4 which brings to life the 50s research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson in their pioneering work on sex.

And Marriage Material is Sathnam Sanghera's transposition of Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale to the Black Country of more recent decades, as he tells a tale of two generations of a Punjabi shopkeeping family in Wolverhampton.

Antonia Quirke, Kevin Jackson and Kamila Shamsie join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Cate Blanchett stars in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine - new territory for him as much of it's set in San Francisco. He's rumoured to be back on form: will the West Coast and a plot that owes a debt to A Streetcar Named Desire inspire a great film?

Back in New York, Thomas Pynchon, author of V, Gravity's Rainbow and Mason and Dixon, has always divided readers between those who are geekily entranced by his vision and wordplay and those who just can't work out what's going on. Bleeding Edge is thought to be one of his most readable novels yet, set between the burst of the dotcom bubble and 9/11.

The acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid's Serpentine Sackler Gallery has just opened in Kensington Gardens, London. It adds what one critic has already described as a Mr Whippy extension to an old gunpowder store: does it add up to a successful gallery space? There's a visit to the opening exhibition, Adrian Villar Rojas' Today We Reboot The Planet.

A play that first ran off-, then on-Broadway, The Lyons, is a darkly comic view of a dying man and his family - does the telling of home truths make for good drama? Opening at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, it stars Isla Blair and Tom Ellis.

And James Spader stars in The Blacklist, a new US drama about to begin here on Sky Living. It has elements of Silence of the Lambs, Homeland and 24 - can it carve out its own distinct place?

Ekow Eshun, Susannah Clapp and Kerry Shale join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is the latest star-studded production in the Michael Grandage season at the Noel Coward theatre in London. Starring Sheridan Smith and David Walliams, one of its aims is to bring a fresh audience to Shakespeare.

Eleanor Catton's novel The Luminaries is on the Man Booker shortlist. At 27 she's the youngest ever writer to be in that position. It's an intricate account of extraordinary interwoven happenings around the goldfields of 19th century New Zealand.

Australia at the Royal Academy is a major new exhibition: some work has never travelled to the UK before, including Sidney Nolan's iconic Ned Kelly pictures. It foregrounds the work of many Aboriginal artists including Rover Thomas and Emily Kame Kngwarreye and offers both a historical survey and a showcase for contemporary work.

InRealLife is Beeban Kidron's new documentary posing the question of what the internet is doing to our young people, taking in the free availability of online porn, cyberbullying and the nature of the corporations behind the search engines.

And The Wrong Mans is James Corden and Mathew Baynton's new comedy for BBC2 - it's aiming for American production values with some very British laughs as a county council employee gets taken for someone very different indeed.

Kit Davis, David Benedict and Louise Doughty join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Fasten your seatbelts as the Formula 1 rivalry of the Seventies between James Hunt (Daniel Bruhl) and Niki Lauda (Chris Hemsworth) comes to the big screen. Ron Howard directs Peter Morgan's screenplay in Rush.

There's a double bill of science as Richard Dawkins' memoir An Appetite for Wonder details his early life in Africa and at Oxford, until the publication of The Selfish Gene; and Professor Brian Cox looks at the history and future of British science in the BBC2 series Science Britannica.

Tacita Dean's latest exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery in London includes her new film JG, inspired by a long-term correspondence Dean held with the writer J G Ballard. They had a mutual fascination with the earthwork created by American sculptor Robert Smithson known as the Spiral Jetty. It also includes her re-working of original postcards of pre-war Kassel, c/o Jolyon.

And Farragut North opens at the Southwark Playhouse in London, starring Max Irons and Rachel Tucker. Will the tale of American politics that was transformed into the George Clooney film The Ides of March work for a British audience?

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Helen Lewis, Sir Christopher Frayling and James Runcie.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Paolo Sorrentino's film The Great Beauty starring long-time collaborator Toni Servillo was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It opens with a tourist swooning at the beauty of Rome: will audiences too fall for it?

Mark Ravenhill's take on Candide for the RSC is time-hopping and visually rich and offers a view for our own times on optimism and its dangers - how successful a response is it to Voltaire's classic?

Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Lowland illuminates an era of Indian history through the eyes of a family torn apart when two brothers choose different paths - it's longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Victoriana: The Art of Revival is the Guildhall Art Gallery in London's take on the current trend of Victorian revivalism. It gathers recent works responding to the Victorian era by artists ranging from Paula Rego to Grayson Perry, and includes Paul St George's Crookes Tube enabling viewers to "see" another viewer from a different part of the gallery.

And Peaky Blinders on BBC2 stars Helen McCrory and Cillian Murphy in a stylised tale of a Birmingham gang just after the First World War, with strong echoes of westerns and gangster movies.

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Bidisha, Ellah Allfrey and Professor John Carey.

Simon Schama explores The Story of the Jews, in a big new history strand on BBC 2. Does his personal approach work for this massive subject?

In Blue Stockings, Jessica Swale's new play, the year is 1896 and Tess Moffat and her fellow first years are determined to win the right to graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, the first college to admit women.

Upstream Colour, Shane Carruth's new film, is a haunting, enigmatic tale of destiny, free will and mind-controlling bugs.

And Saturday Review asks its guests - this week it's Kathryn Hughes, John Mullen and Dominic Sandbrook - to select just one picture from Tate Britain's permanent collection for a kind of fine art equivalent of A Good Read.

Produced by Anne-Marie Cole.

Saturday Review from the Edinburgh Festival

Theatre: Leaving Planet Earth. Old Earth has nothing left for us, so it's time for a new beginning. The audience is transported to a New Earth for this site-specific 'out of this world' theatre production by the award winning theatre company Grid Iron. Following the story of humanities first migration into space, it asks questions about our connection to this planet. Should we leave this world, and if so, who will endure and at what cost?

The film Elysium also explores humans leaving planet Earth, this time the rich, who leave for the luxurious Elysium, a vast space station orbiting the planet, with technology to treat all diseases, while the rest are left behind to fend for themselves against a harsh and unjust regime in an over populated society and can only dream of a new life amongst the stars. Matt Damon is Max, a man determined to be cured on the satellite and Jodie Foster is Elysium's Secretary Delacourt, the hard-line protector of the mega wealthy colony.

The internationally renowned artist Peter Doig is known for his inventive style and huge vibrant canvases. For the first time, the Scottish National Gallery is mounting a major exhibition of his work in the country of his birth. Called No Foreign Land, it showcases works created since 2000, a time Doig has spent in Trinidad, and shows how this tropical island has inspired his work.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus tells the story of General Caius Martius who returns to Rome a hero. Having conquered the city of Corioles he is named Coriolanus and runs for Consul. But too proud, and rejected by the people, he seeks revenge on the city. Director Lin Zhaohua's production for the Beijing People's Art Theatre includes two heavy metal bands and Pu Cunxin, one of China's most famous actors.

And guests David Schneider, Gail Tolley and Peggy Hughes discuss the favourite moments from the Edinburgh Fringe.

Producer: Andrea Kidd.