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Newsnight Review

Len Freeman | 18:02 UK time, Friday, 26 September 2008

Here's Kirsty with details of Newsnight Review.

Righteous Kill

And then on Review, FINALLY Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get to co-star in a movie (rather than just sharing a desultory cup of coffee as they did for a few minutes in Heat). In Righteous Kill director and producer Jon Avnet cast the old friends as grizzled New York cops, on the edge of retirement who are on a last big investigation, tracking down a serial killer who just might be one of their own. Will these two American movie stars earn the critical acclaim so elusive since Raging Bull and Insomnia?

Rothko - Tate Modern

Mark Rothko's late work forms the first major exhibition of his paintings in the UK for two decades and reunites at Tate Modern half of the Seagram murals for the first time since Rothko completed them and then refused to hand them over to the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. The Four Seasons, in the Seagram Building had commissioned them. The Tate has had nine of them ever since they arrived on the day Rothko committed suicide on February 27th 1970. Rothko said "Maybe you have noticed two characteristics exist in my paintings; either their surfaces are expansive and push outwards in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say." The idea of inner light too remained a constant in Rothko's canvases and at the Tate you can - as Rothko often desired - get up close to experience the paintings with their layers of paint and glaze - sharp and soft, translucent and opaque, smooth or brushstroke textures.

The Believers by Zoe Heller

Zoe Heller's new novel takes us into the tormented anger-ridden heart of an outwardly radically chic New York family, whose frailties and secrets are exposed when the father Joel Litvinoff falls into a coma. He is a famous and feted human rights lawyer who came to prominence in the sixties and dazzled his future wife Audrey whom he met on a trip to London. They raise three children or "trainee humans" as the increasingly angry and frustrated Audrey calls them, and each one now in their twenties tries to break out from the suffocating strictures of the brownstone in Greenwich Village that is the Litvinoff home.

Leaving by Vaclav Havel

When Vaclav Havel was catapulted from a dissident banned Czech dramatist who had endured several spells in prison to the role of his country's President, he set aside his artistic endeavours including a play he was working on about a leader who loses office but cannot bear to relinquish the trappings of high office. When Havel himself lost power in 2003, he returned to the play titled "Leaving". It had its British premiere this week at The Orange Tree Theatre in London and Havel himself takes the role of the offstage authorial voice.

Ian Hislop, Natalie Haynes and Emily King are our reviewers this week. Do join us for what I think will be some robust views.

Kirsty.


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