Saturday Review - 19/06/2010

Tom Sutcliffe and guests Sarfraz Manzoor, Kathryn Hughes and John Mullan review the week's cultural highlights including Nicole Holofcener's film Please Give Please Give is set in Manhattan and features Alex (Oliver Platt) and Kate (Catherine Keener) as a couple who make a living from buying old furniture from the apartments of the recently deceased and selling it on at a substantial profit. Catherine O'Flynn's novel The News Where You Are is set in Birmingham and concerns Frank Allcroft, presenter of a regional TV news programme, and the results of his curiosity about an old man found dead on a bench. Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film Through A Glass Darkly won that year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. The stage adaptation at the Almeida Theatre stars Ruth Wilson as Karin, a young woman who has come to a remote Baltic island with her family to recuperate following a mental breakdown. Francis Alys is a Belgian artist who lives in Mexico. His show at Tate Modern - A Story of Deception - features film of various of his 'enactments' including leading a flock of sheep around a civic square in Mexico City and recruiting 500 volunteers to move a hill on the outskirts of Lima. Rev is a new sitcom on BBC1, written by James Wood and starring Tom Hollander as Reverend Adam Smallbone. The vicar has just moved from a sleepy rural parish to take up his new post in east London and struggles to deal with the challenges he faces. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.