Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests playwright Mark Ravenhill, anthropologist Kit Davis and film-maker James Runcie review the week's cultural highlights including Wuthering Heights

Andrea Arnold's film adaptation of Wuthering Heights strips Emily Bronte's novel down to the story of Cathy and Heathcliff and ditches the usual costume drama conventions in favour of a muddy realism.

Ian Rickson's production of Hamlet at the Young Vic in London places Michael Sheen's prince in what appears to be the secure unit of a psychiatric institution. Claudius (James Clyde) looks less like a king than a consultant psychiatrist and Polonius (Michael Gould) uses a dictaphone to record his observations about Hamlet.

Seven Houses in France is the latest novel by Basque author Bernardo Atxaga. Set in a small military outpost in the Belgian Congo in the early 20th century - the arrival of a pious young officer causes a disturbance among his new colleagues who all seem to be involved in various forms of colonial plotting and scheming.

Tabloid is Errol Morris's documentary about former beauty queen Joyce McKinney who hit the headlines in the 1970s amid allegations that she kidnapping a Mormon missionary and held him in a cottage in Devon.

The National Gallery's exhibition Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan brings together the largest ever number of Leonardo's rare surviving paintings, including international loans seen for the first time in the UK.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Lionel Shriver and writers Ekow Eshun and Misha Glenny review the week's cultural highlights including Collaborators by John Hodge.

John Hodge's new play Collaborators at the National Theatre stars Simon Russell Beale as Stalin and Alex Jennings as Bulgakov. It's 1938 and Bulgakov has agreed to write a play about Stalin's youth in order to increase the likelihood of his play about Moliere being performed, but it turns out to be a Faustian pact.

Miranda July's film The Future begins with a voice-over from an injured cat in a rescue centre. This is the cat that Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) have decided to adopt and which precipitates a crisis in their relationship when they struggle to adapt to this new responsibility. The film also features a talking moon and a self-propelling T shirt.

The Beautiful Indifference is novelist and poet Sarah Hall's first collection of short stories. All feature female protagonists who are experiencing some sense of loss and several are firmly rooted in the language and landscape of Hall's native Cumbria.

Ghosts of Gone Birds is an exhibition organised by the film-maker Ceri Levy with the intention of raising awareness about the threat to endangered bird species and to raise funds for a campaign to prevent future extinctions. It contains work by the wide range of artists and writers that Levy approached including a roomful of birds - some imaginary, some real - by Ralph Steadman and a Great Auk knitted by Margaret Atwood.

Life's Too Short is Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new comedy on BBC2, starring Warwick Davis as the subject of a reality soap following the day to day life of a dwarf actor. It also features cameos from Liam Neeson, Johnny Depp, Sting and Helena Bonham Carter.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Kamila Shamsie and Bidisha and historian Kathryn Hughes review the week's cultural highlights including The Ides of March.

The Ides of March - directed by George Clooney - stars Ryan Gosling as Stephen Meyers, press secretary for Mike Morris (Clooney) who is campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. Paul Giammatti plays the main strategist for Morris's opponent's campaign and makes waves when he tries to get Stephen to jump ship.

Penelope Lively's novel How It All Began begins with Charlotte - a woman in her seventies - being mugged and breaking her hip when she falls to the pavement. The rest of the book shows how this one event has profound effects on the lives of a whole network of people.

13 is the new play by Mike Bartlett at the National Theatre that takes on some big topics: faith vs scepticism, pacifism vs justified war. Its central figure is John (Trystan Gravelle) - a gap year drifter who returns to London and begins to preach in the park, opposing an imminent war against Iran and the materialism of modern life.

Peter Morgan's ITV1 drama series The Jury is based around the retrial of a convicted serial killer who has made a successful appeal. Julie Walters and Roger Allam respectively play the defence and prosecution barristers, while away from the courtroom drama, the 12 men and women of the jury are shown to have some very complicated events playing out in their lives.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has just opened a new, expanded Photographs Gallery. It has the oldest museum collection of photographs in the world, numbering some 500,000 items. The 80 photographs on display in the gallery date from 1839 to the 1960s and demonstrate the technological and artistic evolution of photography over the decades.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Rowan Pelling, Jim White and Deborah Moggach review the week's cultural highlights, including Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Lynne Ramsay's film We Need To Talk About Kevin is adapted from the Orange Prize winning novel by Lionel Shriver. Tilda Swinton stars as Eva, a former travel writer who has enormous problems forming a bond with her son Kevin - a child who, from the start, seems to go out of his way to provoke and antagonise her and whose actions spiral into the truly atrocious.

David Guterson is a writer best known for his 1994 bestseller Snow Falling On Cedars. His latest book - Ed King - takes the Oedipus myth and relocates it on the West coast of America. When Walter Cousins has an ill-advised fling with the teenage au-pair in 1962 he sets in train a disastrous series of events.

Jumpy is a new play by April de Angelis which has opened at the Royal Court in London. It stars Tamsin Grieg as Hilary - a former Greenham Common activist who is having difficulty coming to terms with the fact that she's turned 50 and also with the challenging behaviour of her teenage daughter Tilly (Bel Powley).

Dubbed 'Mad Men with wings', Pan Am is a new American TV drama - created by ER writer Jack Orman -which transports viewers back to the golden age of air travel. Centre stage are the stewardesses, wearing regulation girdles and forbidden to exceed their personal weight limit, and including a runaway bride and a spy.

George Condo: Mental States at the Hayward Gallery in London is the first major retrospective of the American artist's work. The exhibition focuses on his 'imaginary portraits' which conjure varied mental states with a mixture of absurdity and pathos.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Lisa Appignanesi and David Benedict and Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral Giles Fraser review the week's cultural highlights including Everything Must Go.

Will Ferrell stars in Dan Rush's film Everything Must Go as a man pitched with shocking suddenness from middle-class prosperity to homelessness. He is reduced to living on his front lawn after his wife throws all his possessions out into the yard and changes the locks. It's very loosely based on the Raymond Carver short story Why Don''t You Dance?

In 1990 Claire Tomalin published The Invisible Woman - a book about the 19th century actress Nelly Ternan who had a secret relationship with Charles Dickens when he was in his 40s and at the height of his fame. She has now written a biography of the writer himself - Charles Dickens: A Life - a portrait of a frenetically busy man who revealed many contradictions in his writing, his good works, his attitude to women and his treatment of his family.

When Edward Bond's play Saved was first performed at the Royal Court in 1965, it shocked audiences with its frank portrayal of disaffected youth and particularly with a scene in which a group of bored young men stone a baby to death. Sean Holmes directs the first professional production of the play in nearly 30 years at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Ronan Bennett spent two years interviewing drug dealers and gang members in East London to glean material for Top Boys - a four part drama that he's written for Channel 4. One of the drama's central strands concerns Dushane (Ashley Walters) - a middle-ranking member of a drugs gang who has his sights set on bigger things.

Film by Tacita Dean is the latest of the Unilever series of installations in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. In an elegy to the virtually extinct medium of analogue film - Dean has used one end of the hall as a vast vertical screen on which to project an 11 minute loop of images.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests - novelist Michael Arditti and writers Natalie Haynes and Kevin Jackson - review the week's cultural highlights including The Marriage of Figaro.

Fiona Shaw directs the English National Opera production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Iain Paterson sings the part of Figaro - a servant whose forthcoming wedding to his sweetheart Susanna (Devon Guthrie) is overshadowed by the fact that his master - Count Almaviva (Roland Wood) - wants to exercise his droit de seigneur.

Paddy Considine is best known as an actor, but he has turned his hand to writing and directing for the film Tyrannosaur. Set on a council estate in Leeds, Peter Mullan plays Joseph - an uncontrollably violent man - who meets Christian charity shop worker Hannah (Olivia Colman) who is, herself, married to a violent and abusive man. Dog lovers - look away now.

Stephen Mitchell adds his name to an illustrious list of translators who have rendered Homer's epic poem the Iliad into English over the centuries. "We return to the Iliad," he says in his introduction, "because it is one of the monuments of our own magnificence". Blood, guts and dabbling deities beneath the walls of Troy.

Conor McPherson established his reputation with the spooky play The Weir. His latest offering - The Veil - also deals with the supernatural, but unlike his previous works, it's set in the past - Ireland in the early 19th century, already haunted by the spectre of famine. A debt-ridden Anglo-Irish widow is pinning her hopes on the marriage of her daughter - Hannah - to an English nobleman, but Hannah claims to hear the voice of her father who hanged himself ten years earlier...

Gerhard Richter is one of the greatest exponents of painting of the last 50 years and the major respective at Tate Modern - Gerhard Richter: Panorama - demonstrates how widely he's experimented with different genres and styles - from German romanticism to Abstract expressionism - since the late 1950s.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests writers Adam Mars Jones and Susan Jeffreys and art critic Bill Feaver review the cultural highlights of the week including The Debt.

The Debt is John Madden's remake of a 2007 Israeli thriller which tells the story of a Mossad mission to abduct a Nazi war criminal from East Berlin in 1965 to face trial in Israel. The three agents who travel to Berlin are hailed as heroes on their return - having apparently succeeded - but 30 years later cracks begin to appear in the official story and the trio are forced to confront their past. Stars Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren and Sam Worthington.

Tom Lubbock was the Independent's chief art critic until his untimely death earlier this year. Fifty of the weekly essays which he wrote for the paper have been published in a book - Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored.

Frank Oz makes his debut as a theatre director with a production of Saul Rubinek' s play Terrible Advice at the Menier Chocolate factory in London. Jake (Scott Bakula) and Stanley (Andy Nyman) are best friends, so are Delila (Sharon Horgan) and Hedda (Caroline Quentin). Jake is dating Hedda, Stanley is dating Delila - then Jake gives Stanley some advice...

Frank Stella is one of the most important and influential American artists of the last fifty years. Frank Stella: Connections at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London assembles paintings from 1958 to the present day.

Christos Tsialkos's best-selling novel The Slap has been adapted for television. Sophie Okonedo and Jonathan La Paglia star in this tale of tensions between eight characters linked by ties of blood and frienship in suburban Melbourne.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests writers Don Guttenplan and Dreda Say Mitchell and poet Cahal Dallat review the week's cultural highlights including Grief by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh's new play Grief stars Lesley Manville as Dorothy - a war widow struggling to keep her grief and depression at bay in 1950s suburbia. She shares her home with an older brother and a teenage daughter both of whom become equally isolated by their own unhappiness.

Page One: Inside the New York Times is a documentary film by Andrew Rossi who was given access to those behind the paper during an eventful year which saw a vertiginous drop in advertising revenue and the rise of Wikileaks.

Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One is being marketed as 'a zombie novel for people with brains'. The world has been devastated by a plague that has turned its victims into mindless, cannibalistic zombies. Mark Spitz is a survivor who has been assigned to a project to clear lower Manhattan of the undead in preparation for resettlement. It's a tough job and the zombies just keep coming.

Costing an estimated £200,000 per screen minute, Terra Nova is apparently the most expensive TV series ever made. In the mid 22nd century, Earth is facing environmental collapse - the logical solution is to send a chosen group through a wormhole in the space/time continuum to found a colony in a parallel time-stream 84 million years in the past. Unfortunately the new Eden features carnivorous dinosaurs...

John Martin was one of the most popular artists of the 19th century - some 8 million people saw his triptych The Last Judgement when the paintings toured the country. Despite - or possibly because of - his popularity, the art establishment were dismissive of his work. The exhibition at Tate Britain - John Martin: Apocalypse - is the largest ever show of the artist's work and aims to restore his reputation.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Miranda Sawyer, critic John Mullan and novelist Liz Jensen review the week's cultural highlights including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tomas Alfredson's film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an adaptation of the classic John le Carre Cold War thriller. Gary Oldman stars (amongst a wealth of British acting talent) as George Smiley - a retired spook who is tasked with uncovering a mole at the very heart of MI6 or 'the Circus'.

My City is Stephen Poliakoff's first play for 12 years. Tracey Ullman stars as Miss Lambert - a retired primary school headmistress who is discovered lying on a London park bench by one of her former pupils. When they meet up a few days later a night of storytelling and revelation ensues.

Michela Murgia's novel Accabadora has won six literary prizes in Italy including the prestigious Campiello Prize. Growing up in rural Sardinia in the 1950s, Maria is taken from her impoverished family and given to her adoptive mother - Bonaria Urrai - who is ostensibly the village seamstress but also has a darker role.

The Channel 4 documentary series Educating Essex is set in a secondary school and focuses on pupils in their final year there. Sixty-five fixed cameras around the school recorded events without the intrusive presence of a film crew and the resulting footage has been edited to provide a fascinating portrait of life behind the school gates.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement at the Royal Academy brings together more than 80 of the artist's paintings, sculptures, pastels, drawings and prints of ballet dancers and presents them in parallel with the experiments his contemporaries were undertaking to capture movement with photography.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests poet Craig Raine, creative director of the Royal Opera House Deborah Bull and literary critic John Carey review the week's cultural highlights including the film Jane Eyre.

Rupert Goold's site specific production Decade is a performance piece with contributions from 19 writers about the 9/11 attacks on New York. Performed at St Katherine's Dock in London, audience members enter through metal detectors and a security check to find themselves in a mock-up of the Windows restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center.

Cary Joji Fukunaga's film Jane Eyre stars Mia Wasikowska as Charlotte Bronte's orphaned heroine and Michael Fassbender as the forbidding Mr Rochester - a man with a dark secret. Moira Buffini wrote the screenplay.

The Map and The Territory is the latest novel by Michel Houellebecq and the one which finally secured for him France's most prestigious literary prize - the Prix Goncourt. Its central character is a solitary artist - Jed Martin - who asks celebrated novelist Michel Houellebecq to write an essay for his catalogue and then decides that he would like to paint Houellebecq's portrait.

The Power of Making is a free exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which celebrates the traditions and innovations of craft. It brings together more than a hundred beautifully made objects ranging from David Mach's sculpture of a gorilla made out of wire coat hangers to Peter Butcher's embroidered surgical implant.

Fresh Meat is the latest comedy from Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. It's about a disparate group of students accidentally thrown together in off-campus lodging in Manchester, one of whom is Kingsley, played by Joe Thomas from The InBetweeners.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.