Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the critics John Mullan and Bill Feaver and comedian Natalie Haynes review the week's cultural highlights including The American.

The American is Anton Corbijn's second film and stars George Clooney as a hitman holed up in a picturesque Italian hill town, considering his future.

I, Claudius - adapted from the books of Robert Graves by Robin Brooks - is a six-part drama on BBC Radio 4 set in ancient Rome. The 1976 television adaptation won Derek Jacobi a BAFTA for his performance as Claudius and he's back again, but this time he's Augustus.

To The Manor Born stars Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles are reunited in Sir Peter Hall's production of The Rivals. It's the first time they have appeared onstage together and they play Mrs Malaprop and Anthony Absolute respectively in Sheridan's romantic comedy set in Bath.

Leila Abdoulela won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. Her third novel - Lyrics Alley - is a family saga set in 1950s Sudan in which the strains between tradition and modernisation are played out in a wealthy merchant's household.

Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work is an exhibition at the National Gallery in which the veteran British abstract artist has chosen to juxtapose her own work with pieces by Mantegna, Raphael and Seurat which have influenced her.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests musician Pat Kane, writer Rowan Pelling and novelist and film-maker James Runcie review the week's cultural highlights.

Fela! at the National Theatre in London is a fusion of music, dance and drama which tells the story of Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti. Choreographed by Bill T Jones, it stars Sahr Ngaujah as the charismatic musician.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film about the last days of a terminally ill Thai tamarind farmer. It won this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes.

It is a hundred years since Mark Twain died, which is the period of time that the the author stipulated had to elapse before his autobiography could be published. The first volume of three is now available.

In his new exhibition - Homage 10x5: Blake's Artists - Sir Peter Blake pays homage to his heroes. He has selected the ten artists whose work has excited and interested him most and created five pieces in response to each of them.

Documentary maker Hannah Rothschild's film Mandelson: The Real PM? follows Peter Mandelson during the run up to this year's general election, hoping to gain some insight into one of the more controversial figures in New Labour.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests poet Craig Raine, writer Antonia Quirke and theatre writer David Benedict review the week's cultural highlights including The Train Driver.

The Train Driver by Athol Fugard was inspired by a newspaper article which Fugard read in December 2000, reporting the death of a woman in South Africa who had stepped in front of a train with her three children. This production at the Hampstead Theatre stars Sean Taylor and Owen Sejake.

We Are What We Are is the directorial debut of Jorge Michel Grau. Set in Mexico City, the film tells the story of a family of cannibals, thrown into disarray when their father and provider dies.

Rufus Norris's production of Mozart's Don Giovanni for English National Opera is deliberately dingy and downbeat. It features a free translation of Da Ponte's libretto by Jeremy Sams and stars Iain Paterson as the dissolute Don.

Jimmy McGovern's new six-part BBC1 series - Accused - places six different characters in the dock. Rather than following the traditional route of the courtroom drama, each episode explores how the accused ended up there. Stars include Christopher Eccleston, Mackenzie Crook, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Capaldi and Andy Serkis.

Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices is an exhibition at the British Library in London which takes on the daunting task of telling the story of the English language since its birth 1500 years ago. Highlights include the oldest surviving copy of Beowulf and the first printed book in English along with many other treasures from the British Library's vaults.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Kevin Jackson and David Aaronovitch and novelist Dreda Say Mitchell review the cultural highlights of the week including The Kids Are Alright.

In Lisa Cholodenko's film The Kids Are Alright, Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a couple whose children track down the anonymous sperm donor who is their biological father. When he enters the picture the family implodes.

Men Should Weep is a 1947 play by Ena Lamont Stewart which portrays the tough life of a family in a Glasgow tenement during the Depression. Josie Rourke's revival at the National Theatre in London stars Sharon Small and Robert Cavanah as the parents trying to make ends meet.

Brian Turner served in the US Army for seven years and his experiences during a year-long tour of duty in Iraq provide the subject matter for many of the poems in his collection Phantom Noise.

The British Art Show is staged every five years and aims to provide a snapshot of what is happening in British contemporary art. Its seventh incarnation - subtitled In the Days of the Comet - has opened in Nottingham. It will also travel, in 2011, to London, Glasgow and Plymouth.

Michael Winterbottom's six part BBC2 series The Trip stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon essentially playing themselves. Coogan has been asked to review some restaurants in the north of England and takes Brydon along for company. Beautiful landscapes, exquisite food and duelling impressionists.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Terence Blacker and Liz Jensen and writer and broadcaster Paul Morley review the cultural highlights of the week

Nina Raine's play Tribes has opened at the Royal Court in London. At its centre is Billy, one of three siblings in a competitive, bohemian family and deaf from birth. The play investigates family, belonging and the limitations of communication.

Adam Elliot won the 2004 Oscar for Best Animated Short with his film Harvie Krumpet. His feature-length claymation film Mary and Max concerns the 20 year pen-pal correspondence between Mary (Toni Colette) in Australia and Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a middle-aged man who suffers from Asperger's, in New York.

Lloyd Jones's novel Hand Me Down World tells the tale of a woman who enters Europe illegally from Africa to try and find her son who was taken by his father to Berlin. Her story is told, with varying degress of accuracy, from the perspective of the many different people who she meets on her journey.

Cezanne's Card Players at the Courtauld Gallery in London brings together the artist's studies of peasants playing cards - a subject which fascinated him late in his career. This exhibition brings together the different paintings and preparatory studies for the first time.

Gaby Hornsby made the BBC series The Secret Life of the Motorway and The Secret Life of the Airport, now she turns her attention to the ubiquitous but overlooked marvel of our electricity supply network in The Secret Life of the National Grid on BBC4.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests novelist Louise Doughty, poet Cahal Dallat and writer John Lanchester review the week's cultural highlights including The Social Network.

The Social Network is David Fincher's film about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Written by Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing fame) it stars Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg.

Martin Sherman's play Onassis at the Novello Theatre in London stars Robert Lindsay as the Greek shipping magnate and focuses on the last 12 years of his life and his relationships with Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy.

Bernhard Schlink is best known for his international bestseller The Reader. His novel The Weekend concerns a former Red Army Faction member, Jorg, who is released from prison after serving 26 years for murder. He is reunited with his former friends and comrades for a weekend house party.

Ai Weiwei is the latest artist to be commissioned to create an installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. He has covered the floor with 100 million handmade, hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds which took 1600 people two years to create.

Mark Gatiss has adapted the H.G. Wells novel The First Men in the Moon for BBC4. He stars as the eccentric Professor Cavor who invents an anti-gravitational paint which allows him and his neighbour (Rory Kinnear) to become Edwardian astronauts and travel to the Moon.

PRODUCER: TORQUIL MacLEOD.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests literary critic John Carey, novelist Deborah Moggach and architecture critic and writer Tom Dyckhoff review the cultural highlights of the week including Restrepo.

Filmmaker Tim Hetherington and reporter Sebastian Junger lived with a US army platoon during its year long deployment to Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. The result is the film Restrepo which won the Grand Jury prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.

German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck's book Visitation explores the secrets of a house and its inhabitants from the Weimar republic to after the fall of the Berlin Wall, simultaneously peeling back layers of Germany's history.

Handspring - the puppet company behind Warhorse - have joined forces with Neil Bartlett for the production of his play Or You Could Kiss Me. It's love story set in the South Africa of the past and the future.

In the latter half of the 18th century, politician and writer Horace Walpole spent more than 40 years transforming a modest villa by the Thames into an audacious Gothic fantasy. The result was Strawberry Hill which has just reopened to the public following completion of the first stage of its £9m renovation.

Lip Service is BBC3's six part drama set among a group of twentysomething lesbians in Glasgow. A bit of mystery here, a bit of comedy there and sex all over the place, it stars Laura Fraser, Ruta Gedmintas and Fiona Button.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Linda Grant, comedian Natalie Haynes and former cultural historian and writer Christopher Frayling review the week's cultural highlights including Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Michael Douglas returns as Gordon Gecko in Oliver Stone's sequel to his 1987 film Wall Street. Gecko's out of jail and the economy's crashing - is greed still good?

Philip Roth's novel Nemesis is set in Newark in the summer of 1944 and explores the impact of a polio epidemic on the closely knit Jewish community. Bucky Cantor is an idealistic playground superintendent who tries to manage the panic as his young charges succumb to the disease.

Sebastian Faulks's 1993 novel Birdsong sold more than 1.7 million copies in the UK alone. Now it has been adapted for the stage by Rachel Wagstaff. Trevor Nunn's production is at the Comedy Theatre in London and stars Ben Barnes and Lee Ross.

Gauguin: Maker of Myth is the first major exhibition in London to be devoted to the artist for more than 50 years. Assembling more than 100 works from public and private collections around the world, it runs at Tate Modern until January 16th 2011.

Channel 4's series The Genius of British Art comprises six individually authored films on different topics. The presenters are David Starkey, Augustus Casely-Hayford, Howard Jacobson, Jon Snow, Janet Street Porter and Sir Roy Strong. There is also an accompanying series of talks by the presenters at the National Gallery in London.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests comedian David Schneider, writer Bidisha and ICA director Ekow Eshun review the week's cultural highlights including John Simm as Hamlet in Sheffield

John Simm chooses Hamlet as his first Shakespearian role in Paul Miller's production of the play at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield

Jonathan Frantzen's follow up to his much acclaimed 2001 novel The Corrections is called Freedom and centres on the mid-West family of middle-class liberals Walter and Patty Berglund

World's Greatest Dad - a film written and directed by stand-up comedian Bobcat Goldthwait - stars Robin Williams as a brow-beaten teacher whose literary ambitions get an unexpected boost from the death of his obnoxious teenage son

Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of the Dictator is an exhibition of work produced by artists opposed to Mussolini both before and after his death. It's at the Estorick Collection in north London

Christopher Reid's poem The Song of Lunch has been adapted for television and stars Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as a pair of erstwhile lovers meeting for the first time in 15 years in an Italian restaurant.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and guests writer Miranda Sawyer, critic John Mullan and academic and critic Maria Delgado review the week's cultural highlights including Design for Living.

Initially banned in the UK, Noel Coward's play Design for Living is being revived at the Old Vic in London and stars Andrew Scott as Leo, Lisa Dillon as Gilda and Tom Burke as Otto. Set in 1930s bohemian Paris and the height of Manhattan society - the play had its origins in a real three-sided friendship between Coward, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

This week's book is Charles Yu's How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, about a time machine repairman who accidentally shoots his future self, thereby becoming trapped in a perpetual time loop. In 2007 Charles Yu was nominated by the National Book Foundation as one of its '5 Under 35' writers to watch out for.

Bandits, Wilderness and Magic, the first major Rosa exhibition since 1973 is now open at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. One of the boldest and most powerfully inventive artists and personalities of the Italian 17th century, Salvator Rosa was a rebel, a libertine and often in very real danger from the Inquisition.

Debra Grahnik's film, Winter's Bone, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival this year, stars Jennifer Lawrence as Ree and Garret Dillahunt as Sherrif Baskin. Set in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, it tells the story of a young woman struggling to keep the family home after her father - a crystal meth dealer - mysteriously disappears.

And Julian Fellowes, Oscar-winning scriptwriter of Gosford Park, pens another period drama set in a country house - Downton Abbey, the eponymous title of ITV1's new Sunday night drama.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.