Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Ekow Eshun, creative director of the Royal Opera House Deborah Bull and literary critic John Carey review the week's cultural highlights including Alexander Payne's film The Descendants.

The Descendants - directed and written by Alexander Payne - stars George Clooney as a Honolulu lawyer and land-owner forced to take a more hands-on role parental role when a power-boat accident leaves his wife in a coma.

Gillian Slovo's novel An Honourable Man is set in Khartoum in 1884 where General Gordon is trying to organise the defence of the besieged city. An idealistic young doctor has volunteered to accompany the expedition sent to rescue Gordon and, in his absence, his wife grapples with her growing addiction to laudanum.

In Lucy Bailey's production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Lisa Dillon plays the strong-headed Kate, while David Caves is Petruchio - the young man who believes he has what it takes to woo her and subdue her.

The annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca is the subject of the British Museum's exhibition Hajj: A Journey to the Heart of Islam. The exhibition is concerned both with the treasures of the Hajj - illuminated manuscripts, hangings and ceremonial palanquins - and the experience of ordinary pilgrims.

Inside Men is a new BBC crime drama written by Tony Basgallop. Stephen Mackintosh plays John - the manager at a cash-counting depot. When he discovers that two of his employees - Marcus (Warren Brown) and Chris (Ashley Walters) - have been dipping their hands in the till, rather than turning them over to the police, he encourages them to think bigger.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers David Aaronovitch and Sarfraz Manzoor and historian Amanda Vickery review the week's cultural highlights including the film Coriolanus.

Ralph Fiennes makes his directorial debut with a film adaptation of Coriolanus, playing the title role in a modern day version of Shakespeare's play. Vanessa Redgrave plays his ambitious mother who wants him to capitalise on his success as a military leader by entering the political fray in Rome.

Julie Otsuka's novel The Buddha in the Attic tells the story of Japanese 'picture brides' who travelled to San Francisco nearly a century ago to marry men who they had never met before. They try to fit into a very unfamiliar society and to remain as inconspicuous as possible, but the attack on Pearl Harbor suddenly makes them very visible and very vulnerable.

Anthony Sher stars in Nicholas Wright's new play Travelling Light, directed at the National Theatre by Nicholas Hytner. He plays a timber merchant in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century who has a profound influence on a local boy who goes on to become a big shot film director in Hollywood.

Since the publication of Sebastian Faulks' novel Birdsong in 1993, there have been various unsuccessful attempts to adapt it for the screen. Abi Morgan has finally created a two part dramatisation for BBC1 which tells the story of the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford (played by Eddie Redmayne) - his romance in France before the First World War and then his experiences as an officer in the trenches.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in London is the first major exhibition in the UK to showcase the artist's landscape work. The vast majority of the paintings here have been made in the last few years and feature one landscape - the Yorkshire Wolds.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the writers Susan Jeffreys and Jim White and the writer and broadcaster John Tusa review the week's cultural highlights including the film Shame

Steve McQueen's film Shame stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon - a Manhattan businessman who appears to be in control of his life, but who has no control over his compulsive need for sex and pornography.

The Art of Fielding is Chad Harbach's first novel, set in the world of college baseball. A rising young star makes an entirely uncharacteristic error during a game, which has profound consequences for him and for many of those around him.

Michael Morpurgo's novel War Horse has already been adapted - very successfully - for the stage. Now Steven Spielberg has brought it to the big screen with a screenplay by Richard Curtis. Many horses were used - but none of them harmed - in the making of this film.

Just over twenty years ago John Keane was appointed official war artist for the first Gulf War. He has continued to deal with conflict in his paintings and his latest exhibition - Scratching the Surface, Joining the Dots - at Flowers Central in London includes images of Tony Blair's appearance at the Chilcot enquiry and protestors in Tahrir Square.

Cranford writer Heidi Thomas has adapted Jennifer Worth's best-selling novels about her experiences as a midwife in the 1950s for a new BBC drama series - Call The Midwife. It stars Jessica Raine as Jennifer, a young and inexperienced midwife who faces a steep learning curve when she arrives in the very unfamiliar world of London's East End.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the novelists Deborah Moggach and Michael Arditti and academic and critic Maria Delgado review the week's cultural highlights including The Iron Lady.

The Iron Lady is Phyllida Lloyd's film about Britain's first woman Prime Minister - Margaret Thatcher. Written by Abi Morgan it stars Meryl Streep in the leading role.

Edmund White's novel Jack Holmes and His Friend follows its two central characters - Jack and Will - across several decades from the early 1960s in New York City. Jack is gay and can never quite get over his unrequited love for Will who is straight.

Rodrigo Garcia's film Mother and Child weaves together various narrative strands all of which explore the relationship between mothers and - in most cases - their daughters. Annette Bening plays Karen - a woman in her fifties whose life has been overshadowed by the absence of the child she gave up for adoption when she was in her early teens.

Fog is a new play written by Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton which has opened at the Finborough Theatre in London. Cannon (Victor Gardener) is a father trying to rebuild his family after leaving the army. Wharton plays his son - Fog - who has been in care for the last ten years and moves into a flat with his dad where they both face the challenge of getting to know each other.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was the novel which Charles Dickens was writing at the time of his death - it consequently remains unfinished. Gwyneth Hughes has written a two part adaptation for BBC1, starring Freddie Fox as Drood and Matthew Rhys as his sinister uncle John Jasper. The first part takes the action up to the point where Dickens's novel ends, the second part is Hughes's ingenious extrapolation.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests historian Kathryn Hughes, writer Kevin Jackson and Canon Giles Fraser review the week's cultural highlights including The Artist.

The Artist is a silent movie which begins in Hollywood in 1927, as silent movie star George Valentin wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion. For young film extra Peppy Miller it seem movie stardom awaits.

We wade into the self help genre with our books. The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters presents a mind management model that purports to help you become a happy, confident, healthier and more successful person.

The great Dickens anniversary is almost upon us, and we look at some of the offerings coming up. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens' story of a humble orphan, who suddenly becomes a gentleman with the help of an unknown benefactor, has been adapted into a major three part drama for BBC television by Sarah Phelps, starring Gillian Anderson as Miss Haversham and Ray Winstone as the convict Abel Magwitch.

Your Paintings - Uncovering the Nation's art is the first national online museum of all publicly owned oil paintings in the UK. It was launched in June of this year by the public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC. Now a further 40,000 paintings have been uploaded to the site, over half the national collection.

And we round up the year by looking back at the best, when our reviewers and listeners pick their own cultural highlights of 2011

Producer: Anne-marie Cole.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the writers Lisa Appignanesi and Kamila Shamsie and theatre writer David Benedict review the week's cultural highlights including Noises Off at the Old Vic.

THEATRE Noises Off - Old Vic - revival of Michael Frayn's farce starring Celia Imrie

FILM Dreams of a Life - dir. Carol Morley

EXHIBITION Rabindranath Tagore - V&A - retrospective of paintings by the Bengali polymath

BOOK All Is Song - Samantha Harvey

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests review the week's cultural highlights including The Ladykillers, starring Peter Capaldi at the Gielgud Theatre in London

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the writers Liz Jensen and Natalie Haynes and comedian David Schneider review the week's cultural highlights including Martin Scorsese's film Hugo

Hugo is Martin Scorsese's first 3D film and also his first film for children. It stars Asa Butterfield as a young boy living in a Paris train station, stealing clockwork components from a toy shop owner (Ben Kingsley) to try and repair the automaton he inherited from his late father and evading the attempts of the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) to send him to the orphanage. But the man in the toy shop turns out to be cinematic pioneer Georges Melies and Hugo's life takes an unexpected turn.

Fabrice Humbert's novel The Origins of Violence won the inaugural French Orange Prize when it was originally published in France in 2009. The narrator is a teacher who has all of his assumptions about his family and his background shaken when he visits the museum at Buchenwald and notices a prisoner in one of the photographs who looks a lot like his father.

After his critical success as Othello two years ago, Lenny Henry returns to Shakespeare in Dominic Cooke's production of The Comedy of Errors at the National Theatre in London. The setting is modern, but the confusion surrounding two sets of identical twins remains the same.

Enlightened is an HBO series on Sky Atlantic that stars Laura Dern as Amy - a 40 something Californian woman who undergoes a troubled spiritual rebirth after a spectacular meltdown at her work. Dern's co-writer Mike White plays one of her new colleagues in the dismal data entry department to which she's demoted.

United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s is a new exhibition at the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds which focuses on practitioners from that era from two courses at the St Martin's School of Art - one focusing on a conceptual approach and the other concerned with making objects. The exhibition shows how their ambitions overlapped and fed into larger art movements.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Louise Doughty and Dreda Say Mitchell and creative director of the Royal Opera House Deborah Bull review the week's cultural highlights including Matilda The Musical.

Matilda The Musical is Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin's adaptation of Roald Dahl's much loved book. After a brief but very successful run in Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of last year, this RSC production has now opened at the Cambridge Theatre in London.

Jeff Nichols' film Take Shelter stars Michael Shannon as a man increasingly crippled by anxiety. As he struggles to protect his family against a threat that only he senses, he becomes more and more alienated from all those around him.

Deep Field is award-winning poet Philip Gross's new collection which focuses on his elderly father's aphasia and trying to communicate with him as he gradually loses all the words from the five languages that he spoke.

Electroboutique pop up at the Science Museum in London is an interactive exhibition by Russian artists Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin.

Charlie Brooker's new Channel 4 series Black Mirror consists of three stand-alone dramas which cast a satirical eye on our relationship with the technology around us. The first - The National Anthem - stars Rory Kinnear as a prime minister faced with an unpalatable demand from a kidnapper.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Francis Spufford and Miranda Sawyer and musician Pat Kane review the week's cultural highlights including Reasons To Be Pretty.

Neil LaBute's play Reasons To Be Pretty at the Almeida Theatre in London concerns the fallout from a casual remark that Greg (Tom Burke) makes to his friend Kent (Kieran Bew) about his girlfriend Steph (Sian Brooke). He says that prettiness isn''t everything - although Steph has a 'regular' face, he wouldn't swap her for a million dollars. Kent's wife Carly (Billie Piper) overhears this and reports back to Steph who does not react well.

Snowtown is director Justin Kurzel's debut feature and is based on the crimes of Australian serial killer John Bunting, played here by Daniel Henshall. Bunting was convicted of the murders of 11 people in a suburb of Adelaide. Seen through the eyes of abused teenager Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), the film shows how Bunting gradually co-opted the local community into becoming complicit in his crimes.

Deborah Warner's production of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin at English National Opera stars Audun Iversen in the title role - a big city dandy who toys with the affections of impressionable young country girl Tatyana (Amanda Echalaz) and relieves his boredom by provoking his friend Lensky (Toby Spence) into challenging him to a duel.

Mathematical genius Alan Turing is the subject of the Channel 4 drama documentary Britain's Greatest Codebreaker. The documentary sections assess the impact of Turing's visionary ideas about computers and these are interspersed with dramatised episodes from Turing's (Ed Stoppard) sessions with psychiatrist Dr Franz Greenbaum (Henry Goodman), following his conviction for gross indecency.

50 Words For Snow is Kate Bush's first album of new material since Aerial in 2005. The seven songs - thematically linked by snow - feature contributions from Bush's son Bertie, Sir Elton John and Stephen Fry.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.