Saturday Review

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 incarnati

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

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

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 Thame

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. Assemblin

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 SheffieldJohn Simm chooses Hamlet as his first Shakespearian role in Paul Miller's production of the play at the Crucible Theatre in SheffieldJonathan 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 BerglundWorld'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 sonAgainst 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 LondonChristopher Reid's poem The Song of Lunch has been adapted for television and stars Alan Rickman and Em

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

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests poet Craig Raine, historian Kathryn Hughes and writer David Aaronovitch review the week's cultural highlights including Tamara DreweTamara Drewe is a film adaptation of a comic strip by Posy Simmonds, directed by Stephen Frears. Tamara is a newspaper columnist who causes chaos at a writer's retreat when she returns to the Dorset village where she grew up.John le Carre has published his 22nd novel - Our Kind of Traitor - which concerns a young British couple who get mixed up with a notorious Russian money-launderer while on holiday in the Caribbean.Lebanese born playwright Wajdi Mouawad has written a series of four plays about war and its aftershocks. The second of these - Scorched - is currently being staged in the Old Vic Arches in London. Michael Sheen stars as Tony Blair in Peter Morgan's BBC2 drama The Special Relationship which charts the relationship between Blair and Bill Clinton from the time when Tony entered 10 Downing Street to Bill's departure from the White House.Eadw

Tom Sutcliffe's guests this week are writers Iain Sinclair and Vesna Maric, and the art critic Bill Feaver. Under Saturday Review's critical lens are:Tiny Kushner - a cycle of mini-plays by Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner at the Tricycle Theatre in LondonWalking to Hollywood - Will Self's new triptych of novellas This Is England '86 - a new four part TV series by the director Shane Meadows, which revisits the lives of characters from his film This Is England, three years on.Certified Copy - a new film from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, centring around a mysterious couple (played by Juliette Binoche and William Shimmell) who might - or might not - be married. And: Resonance and Renewal: Shipbuilding on the Clyde - an exhibition of the eight vast canvases created by artist Stanley Spencer to depict the wartime life of the Lithgow Shipyard in Glasgow, whose workings he was commissioned to document during World War Two. Producer Laura Thomas.