This week's Newsnight Review - BBC Two, 2300GMT - is presented by Kirsty Wark.
THE PANEL:
Pablo Mukherjee |
Denise Mina |
Tom Paulin
No Country For Old Men
The Coen brothers' dark new thriller is based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
Set in modern day Texas, where the wild west has given way to even more lawless times, when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the bodies from a drug deal shoot out and removes an abandoned case containing $2m he sets off a chain of violence. Cool psychopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is armed with an air compression gun designed to kill cattle and out to track him down. The disillusioned yet unflappable Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is on the trail of both of them.
Exploring big themes with vast landscapes, mounting tension and plenty of shoot outs, will our guests be blown away?
No Country For Old Men, certificate 15 is on general release from Friday 18 January, 2008
His Illegal Self by Peter Carey
Australian author Peter Carey is one of only two authors to have won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and for True History of the Kelly Gang.
In his new novel, His Illegal Self, Che is born to student radicals from Harvard at the height of activism in the late 60s. He's raised in privilege but isolation by his moneyed New York grandmother until one day, he's kidnapped by a woman called Dial whom he takes to be his mother. Desperate to get to know his parents, Che is initially excited about 'going underground' across the United States but the thrill wears off when Che and Dial settle in the wilds of Australia.
His Illegal Self by Peter Carey is published by Faber
Sweeney Todd
Tim Burton's gothic horror show, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim, stars Johnny Depp as serial killer barber, Sweeney Todd, who slits the throats of his customers and dispatches their carcasses to the pie shop downstairs to be minced up as filling by his adoring accomplice Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter).
With a stellar cast including Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall this is not a film for the faint-hearted.
Sweeney Todd, certificate 18, is on general release from Friday 25 February, 2008
Land of the Dead / Helter Skelter
Ruth Gemmell in Land of the Dead (Image by Nobby Clark)
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A double bill of plays from the American writer and director Neil LaBute make their UK debut at the Bush Theatre in London this week. Both are set in New York over the course of a day and focus on how two different couples react to extreme changes in their lives. The couples are played by Ruth Gemmell, John Kirk and Patrick Driver and Patricia Benecke directs.
LaBute's previous plays include The Shape of Things staged at the Almeida in 2001 and Some Girls at the Gielgud Theatre in 2005, and he is perhaps best known for his 1997 film In The Company of Men starring Aaron Eckhart.
Land of the Dead and Helter Skelter continue at the Bush Theatre until 16 February, 2008
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