This week the panel discussed:
Mystic River
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It was probably the most gripping first 40 minutes of a film that I can remember watching.
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As a director Clint Eastwood has a very varied filmography - some of the films he's made stay well within the boundaries of box office genre. Others - The Unforgiven and Blood Work - stretch beyond that to a more melancholy drama. Mystic River is one of the latter - a whodunit which takes time out for quieter interludes.
The film, in which he stays behind the camera, is about three friends who grew up together in a working-class Boston neighbourhood.
The story begins with the abduction of one of the boys as they play on the street but then jumps forward in time to their adult lives. The abducted boy Dave, played by Tim Robbins, is a man haunted by his experience: Sean, played by Kevin Bacon, has grown up to be a police detective and Jimmy, played by Sean Penn, lives on the very margins of the straight and narrow. And when Jimmy's 19 year old daughter is murdered its Sean who finds himself investigating.
Mystic River is on national release now.
The Weather Project
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Great sublime symbol. Slightly Japanese, slightly Nordic.
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Those who believe that modern art is all just smoke and mirrors may have their prejudices confirmed, in an impressively literal way, by the latest work to occupy Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall.
The last artist to occupy this huge space, Anish Kapoor, made it feel almost cramped, by filling it with one of the largest sculptures ever constructed, but the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has achieved something very different. He's made it look even bigger than it normally does.
His new piece The Weather Project is the latest in a string of projects about landscape and the environment - it uses a mirror 500 feet long, theatrical smoke machines and a bank of 200 sodium street lights to turn a staple of British small-talk into a vision of the sublime.
Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project is at Tate Modern until March next year.
Tales from the Vienna Woods
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...it was a very cold-hearted production.
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When Odon von Horvath's play Tales from the Vienna Woods was first performed in Berlin in 1931 the local critics loved it. The critics from Vienna weren't nearly as happy though, because Horvath's play is a scabrous dissection of Viennese bourgeois morality.
What those Berlin audiences perhaps couldn't see was that Horvath was pointing in their direction too - at the desperation and bitterness that nourished Fascism.
Richard Jones's new production of the play, in a free translation by David Harrower, is the latest in Nicholas Hytner's very successful £10 ticket season - a scheme designed to get new audiences into the National's biggest auditorium, The Olivier.
You don't get a lot of scenery for a tenner but they don't skimp on the actors or the Strauss.
Tales from the Vienna Woods continues in rep at the National Theatre.
Men in Tights
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...these great heroes of labour came over so wonderfully well.
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If you mentioned The Dying Swan to the average Geordie welder quite a few of them would probably assume you were being gloomy about the prospects of the local shipyard.
But at least some of the men who work at Swan Hunter's in Newcastle will now think of pirouettes rather than P45s when they hear those words - having taken part in a slightly startling experiment in artistic outreach.
Helen Royle's documentary Men in Tights is a kind of Billy Elliot with boiler-suits. It follows the English National Ballet dancer Daniel Jones as he attempts to recruit and train a group of eight ordinary shipyard workers to perform in a specially choreographed ballet, which will be performed in front of the entire workforce.
Picking up ballerinas turns out to be the easy part - the really tricky bit is putting up with the jokes at work.
Men in Tights is on Tuesday 21 October at 9.45 on ITV.
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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