Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the writers Susan Jeffreys, Don Guttenplan and Miranda Sawyer review the week's cultural highlights including Bridesmaids.

Bridesmaids is the latest film from the successful American producer Judd Apatow which differs from his previous gross-out comedy hits in that it stars and is written by women. Kristen Wiig - who co-wrote the film with Annie Mumolo - plays Annie whose life, already on a downwards trajectory, gets worse when her best friend announces that she is getting married and asks Annie to be her maid of honour.

Trevor Nunn was in the frame to direct the first professional production of Tom Stoppard's 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but it didn't pan out. 45 years later he's finally directing the play at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London. Samuel Barnett and Jamie Parker star as the two minor characters from Hamlet who are at a loss as to how they should fill the time between their brief engagements with the action at Elsinore and are no longer sure that they have any free will of their own.

Cain is the final novel by the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author Jose Saramago who died last year. The book retells the story of Adam and Eve's fratricidal son, revisiting key moments from the Book of Genesis and framing these events as an ongoing argument between Cain and God.

Rene Magritte: The Pleasure Principle is an exhibition at Tate Liverpool which brings together some of the Belgian surrealist's best known works alongside paintings from his Vache period - a looser, wilder style which includes cartoonish figures - and some of his commercial work for fashion houses and magazines.

In the BBC2 series Secrets of the Pop Song, songwriter and producer Guy Chambers investigates what goes into a great pop song via a series of three collaborations. He writes a ballad with Rufus Wainwright, teams up with Mark Ronson to create a breakthrough hit and tries to create an anthem with The Noisettes.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Rowan Pelling, poet Paul Farley and novelist Deborah Moggach review the week's cultural highlights.

Harold Pinter's 1978 play Betrayal tells the story of a love affair, starting two years after it has ended and travelling back to the moment when it began. In Ian Rickson's production at the Comedy Theatre in London Kristin Scott Thomas plays Emma, Ben Miles is her husband and Douglas Henshall her lover.

The visit of a young undergraduate poet to a suburban house in Middlesex in 1913 sets in motion the events of Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child. Over the course of nearly a century the reputation of both the poet and his most celebrated poem - written during that pre-war visit - are wrestled over and reappraised.

Kevin MacDonald's film Life In A Day was actually filmed by some of the 80,000 people from around the world who responded to his invitation to record a short video clip of what they were doing on 24th July 2010. The resulting 4,500 hours of footage was edited down to create this 95 minute film.

Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her performance in the 1945 film adaptation of James M Cain's novel Mildred Pierce. Now Kate Winslett is playing the title role in Todd Haynes's five part TV version (which is more faithful to Cain's book) about a California divorcee struggling to bring up her imperious daughter, Veda, during the Depression.

Although it was christened by Ezra Pound, Vorticism was a self-consciously British branch of Modernism, reacting to the Italian Futurists. The Tate Britain exhibition The Vorticists: Manifesto for the Modern World gathers together many of the works which appeared in the two shows the Vorticists put on before the movement fizzled out and includes work by Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier Brzeska.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Patrick Gale, writer Jim White and creative director of the Royal Opera House Deborah Bull review the cultural highlights of the week.

Simon Gray's 1971 play Butley is being revived in a new production by Lindsay Posner at the Duchess Theatre in London. Dominic West is the misanthropic academic Ben Butley whose scornful attacks on everyone around him are matched only by his deep self-loathing.

Aravind Adiga's first novel The White Tiger won the Booker prize in 2008. His new book - Last Man in Tower - is set in an ageing apartment building in Mumbai. Bitter divisions emerge between its inhabitants when a developer offers them a seemingly generous incentive to leave their homes.

Dmitri Tcherniakov is a young Russian opera director whose bold updatings of the classic repertoire have sparked controversy. He makes his debut at English National Opera with Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Bruno Caproni sings the part of the buccaneer turned political chief.

The new Channel 4 comedy drama Sirens stars Rhys Thomas, Kayvan Novak and Richard Madden as a team of world-weary paramedics. The drama is inspired by the blog of real-life paramedic Tom Reynolds published as Blood, Sweat and Tea.

At the end of May the online retailer Amazon announced that sales of e-books in America had overtaken print versions around the beginning of April -- and in this country -- even though their e-book reader, the Kindle, was only launched last August -- it has sold 242 e-books for every 100 hardbacks since the 1st April. This shift in publishing has a lot of implications, and among them is the question of what happens to book covers. Our guests choose the most notable covers from recent titles and also bring in the best examples of cover design from their own bookshelves.

Producer Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests film-maker James Runcie and writers Lisa Appignanesi and Kevin Jackson review the cultural highlights of the week including Much Ado About Nothing.

Josie Rourke's production of Much Ado About Nothing at Wyndham's Theatre in London stars David Tennant as Benedick and Catherine Tate as Beatrice - the pair of bickering lovers who overcome their mutual antipathy. Rourke has relocated the action to somewhere resembling Gibraltar in the early 1980s complete with Princess Di masks and lurid cocktails.

Senna is Asif Kapadia's film about the three times World Champion Brazilian Formula 1 driver. Using only archive footage, the documentary follows Senna from his first Formula 1 season in 1984 to his final race at Imola ten years later and also charts the increasingly bitter rivalry between Senna and Alain Prost.

Veteran American writer Cynthia Ozick's new novel Foreign Bodies is partly set in early 1950s Paris - a city still recovering from war and populated by many displaced people. Bea travels there from New York to retrieve a nephew who she barely knows on behalf of her overbearing brother, but her attempts to resolve the family's problems have their own unforeseen consequences.

There are two new comedies on BBC TV this week. Angry Boys is Chris Lilley's follow up to Summer Heights High and sees him playing six characters including twin brothers Daniel and Nathan and their grandmother who employs unconventional methods in her work at a young offenders institution. In With the Flynns is a family-based sitcom starring Will Mellor and Niky Wardley as a Manchester couple juggling work and parenthood.

The Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition is the world's largest open submission contemporary art show and this is its 243rd year. This year's co-ordinator is sculptor and painter Christopher Le Brun who says that because of some of the Royal Academicians' mixed feelings about the exhibition in previous years, a greater emphasis has been placed on how the work is hung and curated. Most of the work in the exhibition is for sale.

Producer Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests literary critic John Carey and writers Natalie Haynes and Sarfraz Manzoor review the cultural highlights of the week.

One Man Two Guvnors is Richard Bean's adaptation of Goldoni's 18th century comedy A Servant of Two Masters. Updated to Brighton in the early 60s it's directed by Nicholas Hunter and stars James Corden as the perpetually hungry Francis Henshall - a man who has to go to great lengths to prevent his two employers from meeting.

Ann Patchett's novel State of Wonder has echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Marina Singh, working for a US pharmaceutical company, is sent into the Amazonian jungle to track down a rogue researcher and find out what happened to her colleague who was previously assigned the same mission.

Heartbeats is French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan's second film. With a nod to the Nouvelle Vague it revolves around Marie and Francis - a pair of twentysomething friends living in Montreal - - whose lives and friendship are disrupted when the attractive but callous Nico appears on the scene.

Rockstar - the games developer behind the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto franchise - have brought gaming to the mean streets of postwar Los Angeles with LA Noire. The player rises through the police ranks as Cole Phelps (voiced by Mad Men actor Aaron Staton), investigating a series of murders and unearthing the corruption at the heart of the booming city.

Richard Long has been practicing his idiosyncratic style of land art for more than four decades. His latest show - Human Nature at the Haunch of Venison in London - comprises work which has taken him to China, South Africa and his own home turf of Dartmoor. It appears alongside an exhibition by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone whose work also explores the relationship between man and nature

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests playwright Mark Ravenhill, novelist Louise Doughty and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling review the week's cultural highlights including Win Win.

Thomas McCarthy's film Win Win stars Paul Giamatti as a struggling New Jersey lawyer who also coaches a lacklustre high-school wrestling team. For a while it looks as if his problems may have been solved when he becomes the guardian of wealthy, elderly client and, inadvertently, carer of his wrestling champ grandson.

In Ali Smith's novel There But For The a guest at a Greenwich dinner party locks himself in his hosts' spare room and refuses to come out. His self-imposed incarceration has an unexpected impact on people who hardly even know him.

Deborah Warner's production of The School For Scandal at the Barbican in London draws parallels between Sheridan's satire on 18th century hypocrisy and gossip and our own preoccupation with privacy and the rights of scandal mongers. Alan Howard plays Sir Peter Teazle, anxious not to be cuckolded, while Leo Bill is the rakish Charles Surface.

Love Is What You Want at the Hayward Gallery is the first major survey of Tracey Emin's work to be held in London. A wide, chronological selection from her work, it includes embroidered quilts, monoprints, paintings, pieces in neon and found objects.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is a series of three television essays by Adam Curtis on BBC2 in which he argues that, despite the utopian predictions of the post-war era, computers have failed to liberate us and have left us even more in thrall to powerful political and economic elites than we were before.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Gillian Slovo and Michael Arditti and writer Ekow Eshun review the week's cultural highlights including A Delicate Balance.

James MacDonald's production of A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee at the Almeida Theatre in London stars Penelope Wilton and Tim Piggot-Smith as Agnes and Tobias - a middle-aged couple who share a home with Agnes's alcoholic sister (Imelda Staunton). The couple's lives are knocked off balance when their daughter returns home and their friends Harry and Edna turn up in flight from some existential dread.

The aftermath of the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Independence provides the setting for Tahmima Anam's novel The Good Muslim. Maya and Sohail are siblings who have both played their part in the ideological struggle, but their ways of dealing with the disappointments and betrayals that come with their new nation set them at odds.

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's film A Screaming Man is another human drama played out against the background of a civil war. Adam and his son Abdel live in Chad's capital city N'Djamena. Adam (Youssouf Djaoro) is a former champion swimmer who takes great pride in his job as a hotel pool attendant, but when he is usurped by Abdel (Diouc Koma) his instinct for self-preservation has tragic consequences.

The BBC4 documentary This Green and Pleasant Land explores the development of British landscape painting from the 18th century to the present day. Contemporary artists including Ralph Steadman, John Virtue and the film-maker Nick Roeg augment this history by responding to the work of their predecessors who looked at and recorded the British countryside.

Holburne Museum in Bath is the former home of Sir William Holburne and contains his extensive collection which comprises a wide variety of items from majolica and porcelain to silverware and paintings by artists such as Gainsborough and Stubbs. The museum has just reopened after an £11m renovation which includes a new extension that provides more space to display the collection and also a temporary exhibition room. The opening exhibition is Peter Blake's A Museum For Myself.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests poet Craig Raine and writers Susan Jeffreys and David Aaronovitch review the cultural highlights of the week.

Saoirse Ronan plays the title role in Joe Wright's film Hanna. Raised by her father (Eric Bana) in the seclusion of northern Finland and trained as a clinical killer, the teenager is pursued by a rogue CIA agent (Cate Blanchett) when she ventures into the wider world.

At Last is the last in the series of Edward St Aubyn's novels featuring Patrick Melrose and his family. At his mother's funeral Patrick finds that his transition to orphanhood isn't necessarily the liberation he had so long imagined.

All's Well That Ends Well comes to Shakespeare's Globe in London for the first time. Janie Dee is the Countess of Roussillon in Jonathan Dove's production and Sam Crane is her son Bertram who flees to the battlefront when the King of France compels him to marry the low-born Helena (Ellie Percy).

The BBC2 documentary strand Wonderland returns with an unusual insight into the work of the relationship counselling organisation Relate. Producer/director Zac Beattie was allowed to record some of the charity's clients during their counselling, but then replaced the visuals with Jonathan Hodgson's animated images, thus allowing the individuals to remain unseen.

When Simon Norfolk discovered the pictures which fellow photographer John Burke had taken in Afghanistan during the Second Afghan War between 1878 and 1880 he felt compelled to return to the country and record his own complimentary images of conflict involving the British and their allies there over a century later. The resulting exhibition - Burke and Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan - at Tate Modern brings the two men's work together in the same gallery.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Aminatta Forna and guests novelist Bidisha, historian Kathryn Hughes and theatre critic David Benedict review the week's cultural highlights.

This week sees the release of the new film Thor, the Norse God of thunder and lightening, directed by Kenneth Branagh. The powerful but arrogant warrior Thor, one of the super heroes of the Marvel comic books, is cast out of the fantastic realm of Asgard and sent to live amongst humans on Earth, where he soon becomes one of their finest defenders.

Jane Harris's first novel The Observations was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2007. Harris was brought up in Glasgow which is where she has set her new novel Gillespie and I, during the Great Exhibition of 1888 . Harriet Baxter makes friends with the Gillespie family but matters take a more sinister turn when Harriet is accused of abduction.

The Shadow Line is a seven part television drama for BBC2 which has already been described as Britain's answer to The Wire and The Killing, written, directed and produced by Hugo Blick, best known for the comedy series Marion and Geoff. Jonah Gabrian is an amnesiac detective with a bullet lodged in his brain, trying to solve a violent murder.

And The Horse I Rode In On is Told By An Idiot's production of experimental theatre with at political theme at The The Pit, at London's Barbican theatre

Lebanon: The Next Generation is a Radio 4 documentary of John McCarthy's return to Lebanon, the land in which he was held captive for five years between 1986 and 1991.

Producer: Anne-Marie Cole.

Best of the week's arts review. Man Booker Prize winner Anne Enright's latest novel The Forgotten Waltz details an illicit and complicated love affair; How I Ended Last Summer is a gripping, award winning Russian film, by Alexei Popogrebsky, which maroons two meteorologists in the bleak landscape of the Russian arctic; photographs that have defined modern history are on exhibition in London; Russians in space with Rona Munro's play Little Eagles, about the man who put Yuri Gagarin into orbit and a moving, BBC One, psychological thriller created by Paul Abbot, who devised the series Shameless.