Saturday Review - 14/11/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by historians Amanda Vickery and Dominic Sandbrook and professor of theatre and screen arts Maria Delgado to review the cultural highlights of the week. Michael Haneke's film The White Ribbon, winner of this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes, is set in a northern German village in 1913. In striking black and white, recalling the photographs of German photographer August Sander, a succession of mysterious acts of malice and cruelty unfold and the pillars of this small society are revealed as compromised. Typically ambiguous, this is being feted as Haneke's finest film to date. When it was published in 1889, Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata was banned in both Russia and the US for its explicit argument on the corrupting power of sexual obsession and jealousy. In Nancy Harris's adaptation at the Gate Theatre in London, Hilton McRae plays Pozdynyshev, a man in a train carriage pouring out his confession and self-justification to a captive audience. In Natalie Abrahami's production we intermittently see his wife and his best friend, behind a screen, playing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, the piece of music which indirectly leads to tragedy. In Joan London's novel The Good Parents, Jacob and Toni are an ageing, hippyish couple who live in a small town in Western Australia. Their 18-year-old daughter, Maya, has moved away to Melbourne, but when they go to visit her they find that she has disappeared. As they wait for her, the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, showing that they too have run away from things in the past and, in some ways, are still running. Video games are big business these days. The newly-released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke all sales records by notching up 1.23 million sales in its first 24 hours of release. It also attracted some media attention for a sequence in which the player takes part in a terrorist attack on civilians in order to maintain his cover. It is the first game to get a Leicester Square premiere and has been described as 'the Citizen Kane of repeatedly shooting people in the face'; will Tom and his guests get off on the state-of-the-art adrenaline rush? Nottingham Contemporary opens its doors to the public this weekend. It's a new space for contemporary art, designed by the architectural firm Caruso St John. The inaugural exhibitions are a David Hockney retrospective and work by young Los Angeles artist Frances Starck. Part of the programming strategy is to point out connections between older contemporary work and new pieces. The Hockney show - A Marriage of Styles - features work from 1960 to 1968 and traces his career from student days at the Royal College of Art to his first move to southern California.