Joe Wright is best known as a film director, his work including Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and Anna Karenina. But Trelawny of the Wells at the Donmar Warehouse marks his debut as a theatre director.Richard Gere was Golden Globe-nominated for his role as businessman Robert Miller in Nicholas Jarecki's film Arbitrage, a tense morality tale set in the world of high finance.A boy arrives in a strange country and can find no room to sleep... JM Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus has obvious parallels with the story referenced in its title, but is a re-telling really the aim of the twice-Booker-winning author?Barocci: Brilliance and Grace is the title of a new exhibition at the National Gallery which aims to bring a previously under-recognised artist to more prominent attention. It includes some tender drawings and portraits as well as the dynamic, colourful altarpieces for which he is most admired.And BBC3's new sitcom Bluestone 42 touches on potentially sensitive territory: it's set amongst the troops in Afghanistan. How funny is it?The novelists Patrick Gale and Aminatta Forna and writer Natalie Haynes join presenter Tom Sutcliffe.Producer: Sarah Johnson. Published on March 2, 2013.

Joe Wright's Trelawny of the Wells; JM Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus; Richard Gere in Arbitrage

Steven Soderbergh's film Behind the Candelabra tells the story of flamboyant piano star Liberace and his five-year relationship with a young lover, Scott Thorson: Michael Douglas plays Liberace and Matt Damon Thorson. It failed to find a distributor in the US until HBO backed it but was then selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Is there substance under the sequins?

Chagall: Modern Master at Tate Liverpool is a major new exhibition which takes an early decade in the artist's life, 1911-22. It was a time during which he travelled to Paris and married his childhood sweetheart and gives a opportunity to witness the impact of movements such as Cubism and Orphism in his work.

Strange Interlude won Eugene O'Neill the Pulitzer Prize but its 5 hour running time and its experimental asides to the audience mean that it isn't performed as often as some of his other work. With abortion, mental illness and adultery at its heart, will its dramatic impact resonate in this new shortened version at the National Theatre, with Anne Marie Duff?

The Returned began life as Les Revenants, a French film which was adapted into a television series. It was a great hit there and now Channel 4 have taken it on as their first subtitled drama for decades. Will this Alpine tale of the Undead wow the British?

Hammond Innes was a master of adventure and suspense but his works have been less read since his death in 1998. Now Vintage are re-issuing several of his works, including his early success The Lonely Skier and his great bestseller The Wreck of the Mary Deare. Do they stand the test of time?

Historian Kathryn Hughes and writers and journalists Sarfraz Manzoor and David Aaronovitch join Tom Sutcliffe.

Producer: Sarah Johnson. Published on June 8, 2013.

Behind the Candelabra, Chagall at Tate Liverpool

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's film Only God Forgives has already divided critics: five stars for some while others booed it at Cannes. Set in Bangkok, it's ultraviolent, awash with red, and has an extraordinary soundscape. It stars Ryan Gosling, Vithaya Pansringarm and Kristin Scott Thomas. 

Roddy Doyle returns to the territory of the much-loved The Commitments - which will become a musical in the autumn - in his new novel The Guts. Jimmy Rabbitte is now 47 and has just been diagnosed with bowel cancer. He's not dying yet... but his brush with mortality leads him to embrace some of the passions of his youth.

Southcliffe is a new Channel 4 drama by Tony Grisoni, starring Rory Kinnear and Shirley Henderson, directed by American Sean Durkin. It's a powerful drama set in a small town in the south east of England where the run-up to a spate of shootings and the terrible grief and consequences of the deaths are played out. 

Titanic was a musical that ran on Broadway just before James Cameron's film came out. It didn't delight the critics but it did delight the crowds and ran for two years, winning five Tony awards. Its huge set cost millions of dollars; now a chamber version at the Southwark Playhouse does wonders with a set of steps and a couple of pieces of rope. Can it win over crowds and critics alike?

Mass Observation: This is Your Photo is a new exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery in London. The Mass Observation movement began in 1937 as a social science experiment cataloguing the lives and tastes of thousands. The material that resulted from its early years is featured alongside reports for the project from more recent years.

Sarfraz Manzoor is joined by Deborah Bull, Kerry Shale and Denise Mina. 

Producer: Sarah Johnson. Published on August 3, 2013.

The Guts; Only God Forgives; Southcliffe; Titanic; Mass Observation

Birdman starring Michael Keaton is director Alejandro G Inarritu's first comedy and is hotly tipped for Academy Awards - does it live up to the hype?
10 04 by Ben Lerner is the poet, essayist and novelist's second work of fiction which probes the reality of his own life and in doing so raises questions about the nature of fiction and truth itself.
Golem is staged at the Young Vic by the 1927 theatre company and combines performance and live music with handcrafted animation and film to create magical filmic theatre. Inspired by Gustav Meyrink's The Golem published in 1915 - the play's message challenges our current obsession with technological gadgets.
Crisis is a new television drama on UKTV's Watch Channel starring Gillian Anderson and revolving around a mass kidnapping of a group of teenagers on a school bus. In this case the teenagers are the children of America's rich and powerful elite.
And Kentucky Route Zero, an innovative point and click computer game in 5 acts which employs storytelling techniques as well as graphics to involve the game player in the process of the narrative itself. How entertaining is it to play and how different is it to what has gone before? Published on January 3, 2015.

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