This week the panel discussed:
The Day Britain Stopped
The drama-documentary imagines a catastrophic collapse in the British transport system. In effect, the film takes several recurrent British news stories about travel - rail crashes, rail strikes, near-misses above Heathrow and gridlock on the M25 - and imagines that all these nightmares coincide in their worst possible form on the same day in the near-future: 19th December 2003.
The Day Britain Stopped is on 13 May 2003 on BBC2 at 9pm.
No Way To Treat A First Lady
One of the big books of the summer will be the memoirs of Hilary Clinton but the American comic novelist Christopher Buckley has got in first with a blackly comic fantasy version of the life of the ex-first lady, current senator from New York and possible future presidential candidate. Washington gossip often claimed that Hilary was prone to throwing heavy objects at Bill when he strayed. In Buckley's No Way To Treat A First Lady, Beth McCann goes on trial for killing her philandering husband by hitting him with a spittoon.
No Way To Treat A First Lady is available in paperback now.
I Capture The Castle
...remarkably good... beautifully directed
Mark Lawson
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The Lancashire-born author Dodie Smith - who died in 1990 - was a prolific writer but three of her works have spectacularly survived her. Her children's story The One Hundred And One Dalmatians has littered editions and adaptations like puppies. The play Dear Octopus - a family drama - became a repertory-theatre favourite. And her 1954 novel I Capture The Castle is regarded as a feminist classic. That book - which takes the form of a diary kept by the adolescent daughter of a blocked novelist - has now become a film with Romola Garai as teenager Cassandra Mortmain who suffers poverty and temptation from American suitors while living in a Suffolk castle in 1934.
I Capture The Castle opened at selected cinemas around the UK 9 May 2003.
Anthony Gormley
Best-known for one of the biggest figures in modern art - the Angel of The North beside the A1 - Gormley frequently works from casts of either his own body or those of others including a series of works which he calls Field - including a recent one in China - which fill vast spaces with a population explosion of small models. The Gateshead exhibition includes a similar piece cast from the bodies of local volunteers.
Domain Field and other work by Anthony Gormley is at Baltic in Gateshead.
The panel are:
Newsnight Review, BBC Two's weekly cultural round-up, follows Newsnight on Friday evenings at 2300 BST, 2200 GMT.
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