Saturday Review - 17/07/2010

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Rowan Pelling and Terence Blacker and playwright Mark Ravenhill review the week's cultural highlights including the film Inception. In Christopher Nolan's film Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a skilled thief who can steal valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious of his victims while they are dreaming. Neil Simon's 1971 play The Prisoner of Second Avenue is being revived at the Vaudeville Theatre in London with Jeff Goldblum as Mel - a man forced to the end of his tether by a recession and a heatwave - and Mercedes Ruehl as his wife Edna. Heartbreak is poet Craig Raine's first novel. Through a series of narratives involving a large cast of characters, Raine explores the different breakages to which the heart is prone. In 1959 Raymond Cauchetier was engaged by Jean-Luc Godard to take photographs on the set of A Bout du Souffle. A selection of the photographs he took on various film sets over the next ten years have been assembled for the exhibiton La Nouvelle Vague at the James Hyman Gallery in London. The Normans Season on BBC2 and BBC4 is centred around Professor Robert Bartlett's 3 part historical series The Normans. It also features The Making of King Arthur in which poet Simon Armitage traces the Norman reworking of the Arthurian legend. Producer Torquil MacLeod.