The panel discussed:
The Fog of War
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I thought it
was fabulous.
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Film-makers of all persuasions have not shied away from the Vietnam War but Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War has one or two tricks up its sleeve that makes it compellingly original.
For a start Morris has unearthed previously unheard White House tapes of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson discussing the conflict, but his central character is Robert McNamara - the former US Defence secretary now in his eighties - who reflects on his role not just in Vietnam but in American foreign policy and military operations stretching back to the Second World War.
23 hours of interview have been condensed into just over a hundred minutes of reflection, analysis and self-justification from a technocrat who became the youngest ever President of the Ford Motor Company and later on who ran the World Bank but whose most significant contributions to twentieth century history began with his work with the US Air Corps Statistical Control School and the subsequent obliteration of Tokyo in 1945 when more than 100,000 civilians were killed
The Fog of War is out on 2 April.
The Master
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I think it's an incredible, subtle, haunting, spooky book...
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The relationship between fact, fiction and memory is the springboard for Irish writer Colm Toibin's fifth novel - a homage to the eminent American Victorian man of letters Henry James called The Master.
Toibin moves away from the roots of his previous fiction - the Ireland of his childhood and concentrates instead on the inner life of the writer as if through the eyes and pen of James himself.
Through haunting recollection and flashback, The Master charts much of James's early life in New York and Boston during the Civil War but its narrative setting is just four years from 1895 to 1899 when he was living alone in Rye. During this incredibly fertile time he published The Turn of the Screw - and began to contemplate what he thought to be his greatest work - The Ambassadors.
Colm Toibin's The Master is published by Picador.
Passer By
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...a script which does have a terrible tendency to fall into melodrama.
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Most dramas about heterosexual rape understandably focus on the story of the woman - as victim, survivor or sometimes even - in the case of next week's big movie release Monster - as vengeful aggressor. But Tony Marchant has decided to explore the role and responsibilities of the bystander in a two part television drama.
Passer By is a contemporary moral fable with biblical overtones - think the Not So Good Samaritan played out on Network South East. James Nesbitt leads a strong cast as Joe - a radiographer with aspirations and a sense of social responsibility - or so he claims to his colleagues. But when he leaves a hospital party and takes the late train home to the suburbs, his words don't quite match his actions.
He watches two young city wide boys trying to flirt with increasing verbal aggression with a woman who does her best to ignore them. Having mumbled a feeble "hey c'mon lads calm it down" and received a barrage of abuse, he gets off at his stop in spite of the woman's pleas for help. Later Joe discovers a woman was seriously assaulted on a train the same night.
The first part of Passer By is on BBC One 28 March at 2100.
The Dark
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...there's some very interesting theatrical material in there.
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After the success of her play Humble Boy, which somehow brought astrophysics, bee-keeping and Hamlet together on the same stage, Charlotte Jones sought inspiration closer to home for her next work - the Dark - which opened at the Donmar in London this week.
Like the guests at Jones's own wedding, the characters find themselves brought closer together in a power cut, which paradoxically attempts to throw light on the alienated nature of much contemporary urban life.
The Dark by Charlotte Jones is at the Donmar in London until 24 April.
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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