30 May 2003

This week the panel discussed:

Click here to watch the programme

Ripley's Game

...Malkovich is just so superb in it.

Paul Morley

Click here for the review

"I'm a creation, a gifted improviser" says John Malkovich in character as Tom Ripley, American novelist Patricia Highsmith's main man. But it could easily have been Malkovich being John Malkovich, such is the ease with which he plays the cold cultured psychopath in Ripley's Game.

The film is adapted from Highsmith's third novel in a five part series. The first, The Talented Mr Ripley was most recently put on the screen in 1999 by Antony Mingella with Matt Damon, as the young Tom. In it the gauche misfit begins a life of murder in order to reinvent himself and finds he can do it without a care or a conscience.

Ripley's Game is on general release.

Kingdom of Fear

...he has got an amazing mind, but it is raddled.

Jude Kelly

Click here for the review

Hunter S Thompson is an American legend. Now a raggedy sixty something, he has been true to his "outlaw " status as a journalist and writer for more than forty years. Born out of the counter culture in the nineteen sixties, his most famous book is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, an account of his chaotic drug and drink fuelled failure to cover a magazine assignment.

But he has always brought his sharp psychedelic pen to bear on what he first called " the politics of unreason" - tracking Nixon until his death, when he wrote an obituary saying his body should have been burned in a trash can, to one of the targets of his new book George Bush, the whore beast and leader of the "New dumb".

Kingdom of Fear purports to be his memoirs, but it is really a series of episodes, interviews, details about gun toting near disasters, and observations about wisdom gained from a misspent youth.

Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star Crossed child in the final days of the American Century by Hunter S Thompson is published by Penguin.

Barbara Hepworth exhibition

Everybody should go on an art break and spend the day there.

Paul Morley

Click here for the review

During her lifetime, the artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth, was often measured against Henry Moore, and seen as part of a group of artists and intellectuals who formed the modern movement in the years before the war. But an exhibition to mark not only her centenary but also the tenth anniversary of The Tate at St Ives gives Hepworth her own personality, and demonstrates that her preoccupations were all of her own.

The exhibition is arranged through 5 galleries, each devoted to work in a single material ;directly carved works in marble wood and stone.

Barbara Hepworth: Centenary continues at Tate St Ives

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures

It's just wonderful stuff...

Alkarim Jivani

Click here for the review

Big Brother, Room 101, The Thought Police. 1984 George Orwell's satire about totalitarianism has been appropriated for the masses, and has proved there's nothing original in television.

But A Life In Pictures, part of the BBC's season celebrating Orwell's centenary, sets out to do something different. As the narrator at the start of this ninety minute docudrama explains there is not a frame of footage or any radio recording featuring Orwell, so the filmmakers have used as actor to play the writer. Thus we follow Orwell through his life, appearing in archive of The Spanish civil war, surveying Cologne after the bombing, in hospital with TB, in home movies, and interviews.

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures is on BBC Two in two weeks time.

The panel were:

Presenter Kirsty Wark

Alkarim Jivani

Jude Kelly

Paul Morley

Newsnight Review, BBC Two's weekly cultural round-up, follows Newsnight on Friday evenings at 2300 BST, 2200 GMT.