This week the panel discussed:
Buffalo Soldiers
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It should be seen primarily as a flimsy but enjoyable black comedy.
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The dream of film producers is that the subject of a movie suddenly becomes topical, bringing extra publicity. Their nightmare is that the topic becomes so hot that the studio won't release it.
The latter happened to Buffalo Soldiers: a dark comedy set on an American military base in Germany at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The film was bought for distribution on September 10th, 2001: a date which seemed random but which turned out to mark the final day on which American soldiers could be treated in their homeland as a joke.
Several planned release dates have been postponed as U.S troops headed for Afghanistan and Iraq and now it's Britain which is first to see this picture of drug-crazed psychos more interested in running a black-market than the free world.
Buffalo Soldiers opened around the UK 18 July.
Edmond
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...it's tedious, but over quickly.
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Kenneth Branagh - in his first London stage appearance for 10 years and his first ever at the National Theatre - plays Edmond in a David Mamet drama written in 1982 between his two biggest successes: American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.
Edmond lasts less than 75 minutes but manages to include 23 scenes in which the title character loses his wife, his wallet, his clothes, his dignity and his mind and responds with racist tirades and murder: leading to his being jailed and sodomized before edging towards a messy redemption.
Edmond continues in repertory at the National Theatre until 4 October.
In Tocororo - a Cuban Tale
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I was shocked by how banal the narrative was.
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In Tocororo - a Cuban Tale which opened at Sadler's Wells this week - the new young star of classical ballet - Cuban-born Carlos Acosta - offers a biographical piece in which a poor boy from the Cuban countryside discovers that he has a new world at - and indeed in - his feet.
Tocororo - A Cuban Tale continues until 26 July at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London.
Tietam Brown
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I would have paid not to have to finish it.
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Because writing novels is seen as a cushy job, journalists and publicists are always excited if a writer has done some real work first: especially if it's something unusual like traffic warden or working in a condom factory.
But, by any standards, a recent literary success in America represents an unusual career switch.
Mick Foley - three times World Federation Wrestling champion - has published his first novel.
This invites scepticism - we wouldn't expect Giant Haystacks to challenge for the Booker Prize - but the book - Tietam Brown - isn't some pot-boiler set in the wrestling ring but a book about a disturbed teenager and his father.
Tietam Brown is published in hardback now.
Carol Shields
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she expresses the huge through the tiny and ordinary
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The Canadian novelist Carol Shields - who won the Pulitzer and Orange prizes and was short listed for the Booker - died on Wednesday night at the age of 68.
Her early books - including Small Ceremonies - were patronised by some critics because they dealt with material considered trivial in the 1960s: marriage, family and everyday life.
As Shields's career progressed, she increasingly showed that these were large subjects and also - in books such as Swann and The Stone Diaries - played exhilarating games with literary genres such as the detective story and biography.
Her most recent novel - the Booker-short listed Unless - was written while undergoing treatment for the cancer which finally killed her.
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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