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This week the panel discussed:

Secretary

It's the tenderness in the film that redeems it.

Tim Lott

Click here for the review

There can't be many secretaries who have to get on a table on all fours with a saddle on their backs and a carrot in their mouths, a la one of Helmut Newton's photographs, but that's just one of the not unwilling positions Maggie Gyllenhaal takes up in Secretary, co starring James Spader, an actor well versed in the more colourful side of human nature.

In the film, which won the special jury prize at Sundance last year, Gyllenhaal plays Lee, a damaged young woman from a dysfunctional suburban family, just released from a mental institution, who still has a penchant for cutting herself. She's hired by the mysterious controlling lawyer E Edward Grey, and what follows is an intense ritualistic relationship where S and M appears to dominate the relationship, but in which tenderness is the undertow.

Secretary opened around the country 16 May.

Henry V

Henry V

...this is easily the first great Shakespearean production of the 21st century.

Bonnie Greer

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When Nicholas Hytner took over the National Theatre in April his first booking was Gerry Springer, the opera, an early signal that things were going to be a little different. But when it came to his own directorial debut as the man in charge, he turned to Shakespeare and a play never before performed at the National.

Henry V was a role made famous by the man who founded the National theatre Laurence Olivier, who starred in the 1944 film, and perhaps for that reason at least subliminally, the theatre has shied away from this drama about England at war.

Conflict was in the air when Nicholas Hytner decided to stage a contemporary Henry V, but he could not have imagined that war with Iraq would have ended days before opening night.

Henry V continues at the Olivier at the National Theatre in London.

State of Play

It's beautifully written.

Adam Mars-Jones

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An ambitious married Labour MP headed for the Cabinet is shattered when his researcher, who is his lover, falls under a tube train. That's the first thread from which the writer Paul Abbott spins an intricate web of deceit, murder, ruthlessness, and the power of big business.

In State of Play, Abbott, who created a string of hit series from Cracker to Clocking Off and Linda Green, has made a six part conspiracy thriller whose storyline is as much about emotional and sexual betrayal, as it is about the murky world of politics and journalism.

David Morrissey shadowed Peter Mandelson, among others to prepare for his role as the Labour MP Stephen Collins. John Simms plays Cal McCaffrey a leading Fleet Street investigative journalist, who had been Collins's friend and campaign manager some years before.

State of Play starts 18 May on BBC One at

The Lady From the Sea

Beautiful play, go see it.

Bonnie Greer

Click here for the review

Henrik Ibsen created memorable roles for women - Nora and Hedda Gabler among them, displaying a feminist sensibility and sensitivity towards the moral and social constraints of the time, but in his febrile heroine Ellida in The Lady From the Sea, he took notions of freedom and choice further.

Ellida Wangle is the wife of a rural doctor living in the fjords, and step mother to his two daughters but she is obsessed with a past relationship with a seafarer - a stranger who has promised to return and claim her, an obsession which not only blights her marriage, but is driving her insane.

The Lady of the Sea continues at the Almeida theatre in London until 28 June.

Big Read
We'll revealed the 100 favourite novels chosen by the public for the BBC's Big Read - there were a few big surprises!

Click here for the Big Read web site

The panel were:

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


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