Saturday Review

Steven Soderbergh's film Behind the Candelabra tells the story of flamboyant piano star Liberace and his five-year relationship with a young lover, Scott Thorson: Michael Douglas plays Liberace and Matt Damon Thorson. It failed to find a distributor in the US until HBO backed it but was then selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Is there substance under the sequins?

Chagall: Modern Master at Tate Liverpool is a major new exhibition which takes an early decade in the artist's life, 1911-22. It was a time during which he travelled to Paris and married his childhood sweetheart and gives a opportunity to witness the impact of movements such as Cubism and Orphism in his work.

Strange Interlude won Eugene O'Neill the Pulitzer Prize but its 5 hour running time and its experimental asides to the audience mean that it isn't performed as often as some of his other work. With abortion, mental illness and adultery at its heart, will its dramatic impact resonate in this new shortened version at the National Theatre, with Anne Marie Duff?

The Returned began life as Les Revenants, a French film which was adapted into a television series. It was a great hit there and now Channel 4 have taken it on as their first subtitled drama for decades. Will this Alpine tale of the Undead wow the British?

Hammond Innes was a master of adventure and suspense but his works have been less read since his death in 1998. Now Vintage are re-issuing several of his works, including his early success The Lonely Skier and his great bestseller The Wreck of the Mary Deare. Do they stand the test of time?

Historian Kathryn Hughes and writers and journalists Sarfraz Manzoor and David Aaronovitch join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Tom Sutcliffe and guests, Ellah Allfrey, Misha Glenny and Kevin Jackson, discuss the cultural highlights of the week including the £27m Mary Rose Museum opening in Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard and David Mamet's Race

In the UK premiere of David Mamet's play, "Race," starring Jasper Britton and Clarke Peters - known to television audiences from "The Wire" - Mamet sets out to write a play which explores racial tension. Mamet himself says, "Race, like sex, is a subject on which it is near impossible to tell the truth." A playwright who likes to shock, most famous for his Pullitzer Prize winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, how close does he get to providing a truthful analysis in this play which explores one of contemporary society's most controversial themes, both in the UK and in the US.

The new £27 million Mary Rose Museum opens in Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard, showcasing the Tudor ship in a unique hot box. The Mary Rose is the only sixteenth century warship on display anywhere in the world, and the museum displays 19, 000 Tudor artefacts found on board King Henry VIII's favourite warship as well as bringing to life those who worked on board. Described by David Starkey as the "British Pompeii," the exhibition also documents the amazing story of the Mary Rose's 1982 rescue from the sea bed.

"Money, The Unauthorised Biography" by Felix Martin sets out to answer the question: "What is Money and how does it work?" Martin argues that the conventional answer - that people once used sugar in the West Indies, tobacco in Virginia and dried cod in Newfoundland, and that today's financial universe evolved from barter - is not just wrong, but dangerous. So what is the true nature of money, and how crucial is our understanding of it to our economic recovery?

And ITV's answer to Channel 4's "Homelands" is "The Americans" - set in 1980s America, when the Cold War is in full swing, it follows the lives of Soviet agents posing as an all-American family. It's written by Joseph Weisberg, who himself worked for CIA in the 90s, and is inspired by a real life incident in 2010 when the FBI discovered 10 undercover agents who had been living nationwide for over a decade.

Producer: Hilary Dunn.

The acclaimed US novelist James Salter is often described as "the writer's writer". He's now written his first novel in 30 years, at the age of 87: All That Is. Will his exquisite prose work for readers as well as writers?

Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar has just won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama in America. A play about ambition, culture and faith set in New York, its topicality is undeniable. Now it opens at the Bush Theatre in London with Hari Dhillon and Kirsty Bushell.

Michael Landy has been associate artist at the National Gallery for two years. His new exhibition of extraordinary kinetic sculptures of saints, Saints Alive, has been inspired by what he's seen there.

The Iraq War is a series of 3 films made by Norma Percy and Brian Lapping. As before in their work, they've managed to persuade nearly all of the major players in the conflict to talk on camera, often sharing thoughts for the first time.

And Something in the Air is the director Olivier Assayas' film set in the early 70s in the aftermath of what happened in France in May 1968. He's said it started with autobiographical anecdotes but wants it to mean something broader. Has he succeeded?

The writers Tom Holland and Naomi Alderman and the anthropologist Kit Davis join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Baz Luhrmann's long-awaited The Great Gatsby with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan hits the 3D screens promising a great party. F Scott Fitzgerald's book has had a troubled history in film... will Luhrmann be the one to make it work?

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion at the British Library is a major and thought-provoking new exhibition that brings together wartime material alongside public health messages, banknotes and social media. Does it make a convincing argument about the definition of propaganda?

Up the Women (BBC4) and Psychobitches (Sky Arts) are two new comedy shows highlighting women performers and writers; both star Rebecca Front. The number of women featuring in comedy has been the subject of scrutiny in recent years. How funny are these series?

The Round House by Louise Erdrich was the winner of the US National Book Award 2012. It's the story of Joe who lives on a North Dakota reservation. His mother is brutally raped and the book considers the aftermath of that attack, highlighting the difficulties of prosecuting the perpetrator as tribal and federal law fail to bring him to justice.

And Ibsen's play Public Enemy - more usually translated as An Enemy of the People - arrives at the Young Vic in a heavily cut, updated version with a striking set and performances. Does its story of an individual and the masses work for our times?

The novelist Louise Doughty and writers Ekow Eshun and Hadley Freeman join Tom Sutcliffe to review.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

John Simm and Simon Russell Beale star in a new production of Harold Pinter's The Hothouse at the Trafalgar Studios in London. When Pinter first wrote the play in the fifties, he put it in a drawer and pronounced it useless. Was he wrong?

Mira Nair's film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, based on Mohsin Hamid's Booker-nominated novel, stars Riz Ahmed as Changez, who finds his loyalty questioned and torn post 9/11.

Terry Eagleton is one of the best-known literary theorists in the world. His new book is How to Read Literature. Will it enhance the reading experience?

Mud, written by Jeff Nichols and starring Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, was nominated for the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes film festival. It's a coming-of-age movie set on the banks of the Mississippi.

And The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson, is a tense search for a serial killer set in Belfast, beginning on BBC2 next week.

Joining Tom Sutcliffe are Professor John Mullan and the writers Michael Arditti and Aminatta Forna.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Pedro Almodovar's new film I'm So Excited! is a sky-high romp with The Pointer Sisters on the soundtrack but its plane stuck in mid-air is also a metaphor for Spain caught in economic crisis.

Richard Eyre's production of The Pajama Game comes to Chichester with Joanna Riding and Hadley Fraser; a triumph on Broadway in 1954, the film version with Doris Day wasn't a critical success. Can a musical based on industrial relations in a nightwear factory prove zingy and uplifting?

Lionel Shriver has turned her attention to obesity in the West in Big Brother. It's the story of a woman who tries to save her overweight brother from his own path of self-destruction.

The first major solo exhibition in the UK of US artist Ellen Gallagher's work, Ellen Gallagher: AxME, opens at Tate Modern, featuring funny and challenging images from black cultural history.

And US series Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, is about to begin on Sky Living... Hannibal Lecter is back. Fuller says the violence in the show is deliberately heightened and unreal - but will audiences be ready for it?

Novelist Malorie Blackman, writer Stephanie Merritt and priest and journalist Giles Fraser join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear star in the long-awaited production of Othello at the National Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Do the talent and charisma of its leads and a striking setting in a modern-day military conflict add up to the great theatrical event the audience is hoping for?

Paul Raymond was a strip club and soft porn tycoon who became the richest man in Britain but he couldn't save his daughter Debbie from a drug-fuelled lifestyle and early death. Steve Coogan plays Raymond in Michael Winterbottom's new film The Look of Love and Imogen Poots plays his daughter, with support from Anna Friel and Tamsin Egerton. How illuminating is this biopic about his life and times?

Vicious is a new sitcom on ITV starring two Sirs: Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen. Frances de la Tour features too in the show which is written by Gary Janetti, who's written for Will & Grace and Family Guy, and is co-created by Mark Ravenhill.

New Order: British Art Today at the Saatchi Gallery showcases 17 artists who might come to form a new Sensation generation. Are there stars in the making?

And a first novel from Sam Byers, Idiopathy, proclaims on its cover that it is a novel of love, narcissism and ailing cattle... and depicts a couple broken up by relentless arguing who have to meet again when a friend from their past re-appears.

Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Dreda Say Mitchell, Cahal Dallat and David Benedict.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

John le Carré's new novel A Delicate Truth centres on the aftermath of a counter-terror operation codenamed Wildlife which takes place in Gibraltar. It raises difficult moral and emotional territory for all involved and is described as one of le Carré's most personal novels for many years.

Promised Land is set in rural America and centres on whether a community will say yes to fracking when a big corporation arrives to try to buy up their land. Matt Damon and Frances McDormand star; Gus van Sant directs.

Ben Elton's first sitcom for 8 years is The Wright Way, set in the Health and Safety department of a local council and starring David Haig. Will it repeat the success of The Thin Blue Line?

Howard Brenton's new play focuses on the arrest of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and was written at his request: #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei opens at the Hampstead Theatre.

And Richard Patterson lost 4 paintings in the warehouse fire that destroyed many of the works in the Saatchi collection in 2004. Now he's re-created one of them and it's amongst the work in his latest exhibition at the Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Miranda Sawyer, Bidisha and Christopher Frayling join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson.

The Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum of art and history, has re-opened after ten years of rebuilding, renovation and restoration. The building houses the country's collections of fine and decorative arts.

In the film A Place Beyond the Pines a motorcycle stunt rider (Ryan Gosling) turns to robbing banks as a way to provide for his lover (Eva Mendes) and their newborn child, a decision that puts him on a collision course with an ambitious rookie cop (Bradley Cooper) who is navigating a department ruled by a corrupt detective.

Americanah is the title of the new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the Orange Prize award winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Americanah tells a story of love and race centred around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.

The musical Once, which, on Broadway, won eight Tony Awards, including Best New Musical, has now come to London. Once tells the story of an Irish guy and an Eastern European girl who meet in a traditional Irish pub. Both musicians, their love affair is told through the songs they write for one another.

Tom Sutcliffe is joined this week by Paul Morley, Deborah Bull and Julia Peyton Jones.

Producer Anne-Marie Cole.

The film A Late Quartet features a beloved cellist of a world-renowned string quartet who receives a life changing diagnosis. The quartet's future now hangs in the balance as suppressed emotions, competing egos, and uncontrollable passions threaten to derail years of friendship and collaboration.

Levels of Life, Julian Barnes's new novella, blends history, fiction and memoir around love, grief and ballooning. It opens in the nineteenth century with balloonists, photographers, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt, whose adventures lead the story into an entirely personal account of the author's own great loss.

A history of our love affair with tea features in Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea TV two-parter. She travels from the back streets of Calcutta to the bright lights of Shanghai to find out how one small plant united East and West, triggered wars and helped win them. Along the way she witnesses a world of chai wallahs, opium smokers and Assam tea-pickers, and asks how the cuppa became such an important part of British life.

In the play My Perfect Mind which is in turn funny, poignant and autobiographical, King Lear's demons are unleashed and entwined with the actor Edward Petherbridge's recovery from a major stroke. Despite suffering the effects of a stroke, rendering him barely able to move, Petherbridge discovered he was word perfect in the role he was rehearsing - King Lear. This bizarre situation forms the basis of an exploration into not only surviving, but overcoming such trauma.

The photographer Bert Hardy's work features in a centenary exhibition in London's Photographers' Gallery. Hardy is best known for his work as a photographer for the iconic magazine Picture Post. This exhibition focuses on his post-war images, when he was assigned to capture the daily lives of his fellow Britons.

Producer: Anne-Marie Cole.