The panel discussed:
Big Fish
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...it's very, very light Tim Burton.
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The film director Tim Burton says he grew up in a house where people spoke few words to each other, far less told him stories. So perhaps his career has been an antidote to that - full of fairy tales and fantasy, expressed so perfectly in Edward Scissorhands.
Now after films as diverse as Batman, Mars Attacks, and Planet of the Apes he has returned to the weird fairyland of the American suburbs with Big Fish.
It is the story of Edward Bloom, a dying father played by both Ewan Magregor and Albert Finney who tells fantastical tales obsessively in which he is the star, and his exasperated and eventually estranged son Will, played by Billy Crudup, who wants to know the truth before it's too late.
Big Fish is in cinemas now.
Philip Guston
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...you can have a difficult and not very compelling painter and a wonderful show.
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The painter Philip Guston, born in 1913, was part of the New York School with others such as William de Kooning and his close friend Jackson Pollock - in fact as school boys Guston and Pollock had been expelled for publishing an anti establishment pamphlet calling for more art, and less sport, at school.
Guston felt momentous events in his country viscerally from the Ku Klux Klan, to the race riots, Vietnam and the Nixon scandal, and made them his subjects. He also had more than his fair share of personal tragedy.
In a career spanning five decades he moved quickly from figurative painting to abstract expressionism which made his reputation. But then suddenly in 1970 he changed again and shocked the art world with his often grotesque emotionally charged sometimes bloodcurdling paintings, many of them reflecting his own excesses, anger and sadness.
The Philip Guston retrospective is at the Royal Academy in London.
Old School
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I think this is really a classic.
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A recurring theme in the short stories and novellas of the American writer Tobias Wolff is how we create ourselves, how we dissemble, and cherry pick the best from others.
Old School is set in 1960 in a snobbish New England boarding school imbued with a Kennedy like aura where the boys vie through a writing competition, for an audience with visiting literary heroes. This term the trio are Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and the narrator's own personal god Ernest Hemingway.
Old School by Tobias Wolff is published by Bloomsbury.
The Soul Sessions
Joss Stone who's from Devon, is being hailed as the new soul sensation - a white Aretha.
She won a British TV talent contest, was put in the hands of seventies Miami soul star Betty Wright, and having been hailed in the States already, her debut album The Souls Sessions is released here this week.
She performs covers, rather than her own material, including a selection of almost forgotten classics - Super Duper Love, Chokin Kind and Dirty Man, and a funk version of The White Stripes Fell in love with A Boy.
The Soul Sessions by Joss Stone is released by Relentless.
On the panel were:
Newsnight Review, BBC Two's weekly cultural round-up, follows Newsnight on Friday evenings at 2300 GMT.
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