Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
Tom Sutcliffe and guests review the cultural highlights of the week.
The Brave One
Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio presenter, who gets brutally mugged one evening when she’s out walking with her fiance in New York. Her fiance is killed but Foster eventually recovers in body, if not in mind. In order to calm her fears of being mugged again, she purchases a gun and is quickly confronted with a situation in which she has to use it. The film is directed by Neil Jordan and offers a different perspective on the usual vigilante genre.
Exit Ghost
This is the last book in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. Zuckerman first made his appearance in 1979 in The Ghost Writer. Now, nearly thirty years later, he is impotent and incontinent and has withdrawn from the world. At the start of the book he returns to New York for a medical procedure to help his incontinence and finds his old desires and dreams are re-awakened.
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth is published by Jonathan Cape.
Millais
Millais at Tate Britain is the first major monographic survey of his art since the Royal Academy retrospective of 1967, and the first exhibition since 1898 to examine the entirety of the artist’s career.
Traditionally, Millais has been presented as an establishment figure who swapped artistic innovation for commercial gain. This exhibition attempts a re-assessment by allowing us to see Millais in the context of his entire career, from his beginnings as the youngest ever pupil at the Royal Academy to his late landscapes.
Millais is at Tate Britain until January 13.
Parade
Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical is based on the famous case of the lynching of Leo Frank, a Northern American Jew living in Atlanta and regarded by the community as an outsider. Frank is accused of murdering a young girl in an Atlanta pencil factory and is arrested and, after a trail distorted by anti-semitism and false evidence, is sentenced to hang.
The show was first mounted by Hal Prince in New York in 1995 and it won two Tony Awards. This is its London premiere.
The Tudors
This ten part drama series was made for American television traces the ten years leading up to Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. It jettisons the traditional image of Henry as a bloated, bearded, redhead in favour of a young, vigorous and sexy monarch, portrayed by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. The script is by Michael Curtis, who wrote the screenplay for the film Elizabeth. Jeremy Northam plays Thomas More, Sam Neill is Cardinal Wolsey, Maria Doyle Kennedy is Catherine of Aragon and Natalie Dormer is Anne Boleyn.
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- Sat 29 Sep 2007 19:15Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
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Saturday Review
Sharp, critical discussion of the week's cultural events, with Tom Sutcliffe and guests