Front Row

Peter Capaldi talks about his latest album – Sweet Illusions – a nod to the thriving 80s music scene in Glasgow where Peter made his musical debut fronting The Dreamboys. Through the Shortbread Tin is a new National Theatre of Scotland production about the supposed third century Scottish bard Ossian. Its writer – poet Martin O’Connor – and director Lu Kemp, share their exploration of one of the gr...

The actor and director Peter Mullan talks about taking on the role of Bill Shankly in the new theatre production in Liverpool, Red or Dead, about the much-loved Liverpool football club manager. In April 1925 the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a seven-month exhibition of contemporary design, opened in Paris. Arts Décoratifs’ was soon shortened to Art Deco, an...

Bryan Ferry discusses his latest album, Loose Talk and reflects on his long career in music. Disney's new live action version of Snow White has just opened and has attracted criticism from those who felt it departed too far from the original film. Film critics Larushka Ivan Zadeh and Al Horner explore why Disney's reinterpretation of its own canon has become so controversial. The Windham Campbell...

Critics Hanna Flint and Boyd Hilton join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss Clueless, a new musical based on the 1995 film staring Alicia Silverstone. They also discuss Flow, Oscar-winning, dialogue-free, animated film based around the story of a cat who must find safety after its home is devastated by a flood. Plus Robert de Niro playing two gangsters in the Mafia drama The Alto Knights. Plus, ahead of Wor...

French auteur Francois Ozon, whose previous films include 8 Women, Swimming Pool and Potiche, talks about his latest, When Autumn Falls, a bittersweet story of age, youth and breaking the rules, set in a picturesque Burgundy village. As the centenary of his birth approaches, leading pianist Tamara Stefanovich and musicologist Jonathan Cross discuss the legacy and reputation of the iconoclastic com...

Sculptor Antony Gormley and Professor of French literature, Catriona Seth discuss Victor Hugo's visual art with Tom Sutcliffe. Victor Hugo was a 19th century cultural colossus, known for monumental works such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables as well as his poems, plays and political writings. It's not so well known that throughout his career Hugo drew with pen and ink - the same t...

Front Row's artist in residence, acclaimed Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, reflects on five years since lockdown and we have another listen to his Front Row lockdown performance of the Adagio from Bach's Organ Sonata Number 4. How were the arts affected when the country locked down five years ago? Matthew Hemley of The Stage and Louisa Buck of the Art Newspaper discuss how the Covid crisis im...

Samira Ahmed and guest critics - the novelist and anthropologist Tahmima Anam and Ben Luke from the Art Newspaper - give their verdict on the week’s cultural releases. They’ve been to see Cate Blanchett in Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull at the Barbican Centre. The classic drama still features characters from Russian nobility – but it’s given a modern-day treatment including VR headsets and quad...

Songwriter and musician Edwyn Collins performs live from his latest album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, a series of 11 optimistic and defiant tracks released two decades on from two devastating cerebral haemorrhages. American novelist Torrey Peters, whose book Detransition, Baby became a bestseller and was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction, talks about her new book Stag Dance, a colle...

As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard is dramatised for television, director Tom Shankland and film critic Peter Bradshaw discuss the power of this classic Italian novel. Natasha Brown's first novel, Assembly, saw her favourably compared to Virginia Woolf and won a Betty Trask award. Her eagerly-awaited second novel Universality has just been published and she discusses leaving her c...

Adolescence – the new Netflix series starring Stephen Graham – explores every parent’s worst nightmare: a teenage son accused of a knife-crime. Co-writers and directors Jack Thorne and Philip Barantini join us to explain how the “single-shot” filming technique sheds light on the way toxic masculinity spreads online among young people. Fantasy fiction generated almost £25 million more in 2024 than...

In Front Row's Thursday review, Ellah Wakatama and Rhianna Dhillon give their take on Bong Joon Ho's new film Mickey 17 starring Robert Pattison, David Szalay's new novel Flesh, and Get Millie Black, Channel 4's Jamaica-set crime drama from Marlon James. Plus we hear from Sophie Elmhirst, whose Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck Survival and Love has just been awarded th...

Actor Jessica Lange discusses her latest film, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winning play Long Day's Journey Into Night, in which she plays Mary Tyrone, a woman with a morphine addiction at the centre of a dysfunctional family, and a role for which she previously won a Tony Award on Broadway. Welsh National Opera's new joint CEOs Adele Thomas and Sarah Crabtree talk about their...

A new exhibition at London's National Gallery hopes to shed light on artists in 14th Century Siena, who have often been overshadowed by their Tuscan neighbours in Florence. Samira is joined in the studio by one of the curators, Imogen Tedbury, and by Maya Corry, a Renaissance expert from Oxford Brookes University to discuss the astonishing colours and use of gold by artists like Duccio, the Lorenz...

Sean Baker made Oscar history, becoming the first person to win four Academy Awards for directing, editing, writing and producing a single film, Anora. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh joins Samira to look at this year's Oscar winners and what they say about cinema today. The RSC's co-artistic director Daniel Evans discusses playing Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. Filmmaker Laura Carreira talks about her awar...

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the film critic Ryan Gilbey and art critic and author Charlotte Mullins review the week's latest cultural releases including Tate Modern’s exhibition on the unconventional artist and performer Leigh Bowery, the Greek film featuring gay romance, The Summer With Carmen and Michael Amherst’s first novel, The Boyhood of Cain. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Corinna Jone...

Kirsty Wark talks to Anjelica Huston about playing a magnificent matriarch in the adaptation of Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, which begins on BBC One this weekend. The director of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, talks about the appointment of an architectural firm who will be redeveloping the Museum's galleries, about the pressures of running a national cultural institution and about rece...

As the Oscars hove into view this weekend, the news is the women are coming - Stacey L Smith from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative on their research showing more women leading Hollywood box office hits. Berlin ER is the new medical drama from Apple set in a run down A&E department in the German capital. Creator and former doctor Samuel Jefferson on swapping his medical scrubs for television...

We look back at the quarter century in performing arts, exploring the changes in live stage performance and asking how the theatrical landscape has changed over those years. Samira Ahmed hears about some of the big trends that have changed the experience - such as immersive theatre and discusses the challenges the sector has faced. She is joined by playwrights Mark Ravenhill and Lolita Chakrabarti...

John Mullan and Caroline Frost join Tom to review Steven Knight's new historical drama A Thousand Blows, Nicolas Hytner's production of Richard II staring Jonathan Bailey and novel Perspectives by Laurent Binet Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Kirsty Wark and guests discuss how visual art and architecture have evolved over the last 25 years. In the latest of our special series reflecting the changing cultural landscape since the start of the millennium, Kirsty Wark discusses the significant shifts in visual art and architecture in the 21st century with Director of Exhibitions and Programmes at Tate Modern Catherine Wood; Sunday Times ar...

Playwright Ishy Din on his new play, Champion inspired by the 1977 visit of celebrated boxer, Muhammed Ali, to South Shields. Art historian Frances Spalding and curator Eleanor Bradley on artist Sheila Fell - the subject of a major exhibition at Tullie Museum and Art Gallery. As a new biography of concert pianist Dame Myra Hess is published, its author Jessica Duchen, and Adam Gatehouse, artistic...

Samira Ahmed talks to Brazilian director Walter Salles about his film I'm Still Here - which has already won multiple awards including the Golden Globe for Best Actress for its star Fernanda Torres. it's based on a true story about a family Salles knew when he was growing up in Rio de Janeiro - whose father was detained and disappeared during the military dictatorship which lasted for more than 20...

Robbie Collin and Louisa Buck join Tom Sutcliffe to review the fourth Bridget Jones film Mad About the Boy staring Renée Zellweger, the Oscar nominated animation Memoir of a Snail and pioneering artist Linder's Danger Came Smiling retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Claire Bartleet

As scheduling changes are made to ITV soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale, and as the 40th anniversary of EastEnders is celebrated with a live special on BBC One, how is the future looking for continuing drama on TV? Former Executive Producer of EastEnders John Yorke and Entertainment Journalist Emma Bullimore discuss the impact of the audience's viewing habits on commissioning. Renowned Irish n...