Front Row

Sir Ian McKellen looks back at his acting life in anticipation of a film out later this year, McKellen: Playing the Part. Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's book A Wrinkle in Time has been made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. The book itself was written in 1962 after being turned down by no less than 26 publishers. Professor Diane Roberts and Dr Vic James discuss the way in which the book...

Reluctant superhero Jessica Jones is back for a second series. She despatched her nemesis at the end of season one but season two finds her looking to find the answers for her special powers. Cultural critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw reviews. The longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction has just been published. On International Women's Day Alex Clark looks at the surprise inclusions and exclusions an...

David Attenborough talks about the art of his friend the painter John Craxton as a new exhibition Charmed Lives in Greece opens at the British Museum. Deborah Alma has edited #MeToo, an anthology of poetry by women, rallying against sexual assault and harassment. She is joined by poet and human rights lawyer Mona Arshi to discuss poetry as activism. Woody Allen's film Wonder Wheel is released this...

Radio 4 celebrates the 40th anniversary of the iconic science fiction satire by Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a new series this week. Comedy producer and friend of the originator John Lloyd stars as the voice of the book. He and radio producer Dirk Maggs talk about the return of the ground breaking show, which fans call H2G2. Tate Modern's first solo exhibition of Pablo...

You Were Never Really Here stars Joaquin Pheonix as a contract killer who uncovers a conspiracy while trying to save a kidnapped teen from a prostitution ring. The film is directed by Lynne Ramsay who made We Need to Talk About Kevin. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh reviews. What's the key to delivering a perfect performance as an award ceremony host? TV critic Emma Bullimore and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh review Ji...

Jess Thom is a founding member of Touretteshero, a theatre company that celebrates the inherent creativity and humour in Tourette's. She is taking on Samuel Beckett's Not I, a rapidly delivered monologue spoken by a character called Mouth. Jess explains why the text captures her own experience of living with Tourette's and her mission to make theatre more accessible. "Gaslighting" is a term that s...

Half a century after Kenneth Clark's ground-breaking television series on the history of art, Civilisation, the BBC has returned to the same subject - a history of visual culture - but pluralised the name and the number of presenters in the new series. Former television critic of the Financial Times Chris Dunkley and writer and classicist Natalie Haynes review. Wendy Cope is one of the country's b...

Sharon Horgan, the comedy actress and writer behind Pulling, Motherhood and Catastrophe features in her first major Hollywood film, Game Night. She tells Kirsty about the difference between working on American movies and British television and why series like Catastrophe aren't , in fact, sitcoms. Syrian musician Maya Youssef brings her qanun into the studio and performs from her album Syrian Drea...

A Fantastic Woman is a Chilean film about a transgender woman whose partner dies and she has to cope with his transphobic family. The film has been shortlisted for best Foreign Language film at the Oscars. Rebecca Root, trans actress and activist, reviews. British film director Lewis Gilbert has died aged 97. Critic Jason Solomons assesses his long career with films including Reach for the Sky, Al...

We hear about the second series of the American Crime Story television franchise which began in 2016 with The People Versus OJ Simpson. John Wilson is joined in the studio by novelist turned screenwriter Tom Rob Smith. He has written the next instalment - The Assassination of Gianni Versace - which dramatises the events surrounding the murder of the Italian fashion designer outside his Miami home...

Jennifer Lawrence stars in new film Red Sparrow as a prima ballerina turned Russian spy trained to seduce her targets. The film is based on a successful novel by former CIA operative Jason Matthews and helmed by Frances Lawrence who also directed Lawrence in the Hunger Games film series. Film critic Anna Smith reviews. David Edgar's adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, starring Phil Daniels, is cu...

Tracey Thorn describes her new record 'Record' as 'nine feminist bangers'. She talks to John Wilson about why electro-pop turns out to be her preferred style for a musical look back at various stages in her life from birth, through teenage crushes and learning to play guitar to motherhood. The Finnish National Gallery has just become the latest institution to make digital images of works in its co...

Playwright Dennis Kelly's emotional new play Girls and Boys centres on the story of a woman in an aggressive man's world. Kelly and actor Carey Mulligan, the star of the one-woman show, discuss the disturbing themes in the play and the challenges of performing it. Following a major leak from the Game of Thrones set - and the accompanying outrage - we ask writer Gareth McLean and TV critic Emma Bul...

I, Tonya is a new biopic about figure skater Tonya Harding, who was known as the bad girl of the ice rink. The film stars Margot Robbie and Allison Janney who've won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA respectively for their performances. Briony Hanson reviews. With the Winter Olympics in full swing we ask 'is figure skating a sport or an art'? Robin Cousins, former Olympic champion and current commentator...

To mark the 100th anniversary of women over 30 getting the vote in the UK we have a themed programme looking at the art that was created alongside the suffrage campaign and we celebrate the contribution of female artists. For the last two weeks we've been asking Front Row listeners to nominate their favourite art work by a woman. Jenny Éclair and Rosie Fletcher come into the studio to champion the...

The trauma of child abuse lies at the heart of two new memoirs - Louise Allen's Thrown Away Child, and The Only Girl in the World by the French writer Maude Julien. As they look back over their years of mistreatment by the adults in their lives, they explain how they found solace in art and literature - which provided both a lifeline, and an escape from pain and deprivation that was being inflicte...

Actor Ruth Wilson talks about starring in Clio Barnard's new film Dark River, a powerful psychological drama about a sheep farming family in Yorkshire. She also discusses the BBC TV drama she is making about her grandfather, a novelist who she recently discovered was also a spy with several wives. A new report, commissioned by the Art Fund, has called for greater investment in museum collections a...

Greta Gerwig recently made history as the first woman to be Oscar-nominated for her directorial debut, Lady Bird. She tells Kirsty why she wrote a coming of age drama about a confused teenage girl growing up in her own hometown of Sacramento, and why she is now keen to write a play or act on the West End stage. Writer Benjamin Markovits was shortlisted for the BBC's National Short Story Award last...

The Shape of Water leads this year's Oscars race with 13 nominations. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it's an other-worldly fairy tale about a mute cleaner (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with an alien-like creature imprisoned at the high-security laboratory where she works. Mark Eccleston reviews. As a blockbuster exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors opens at the World Museum in Liverpool, fea...

Musician and campaigner Bob Geldof discusses A Fanatic Heart, his feature length documentary about poet W B Yeats. He explains how he came to love the poetry of Yeats and why he considers the Nobel prize-winning poet to be one of the founders of modern Ireland. As Fifty Shades Freed, the third and final instalment of the Fifty Shades franchise is released in cinemas this week, literary critic Alex...

Chadwick Boseman discusses taking on the role of Black Panther, the first black mainstream comic book hero, and talks about the responsibility he feels in taking on the first black lead in a superhero film. Following the release of Black Panther, critic Dreda Say Mitchell, and comic book writer, Kieron Gillen, review the film, and consider whether the time of the black superhero has finally arrive...

Playwright David Hare talks to Samira about his latest television drama Collateral, a series that begins like a police procedural but drifts into a state-of-the-nation thriller. Carey Mulligan stars as a police detective whose investigation into the shooting of a pizza delivery man has spiraling repercussions. Carmen is opera's greatest femme fatale, the sexually liberated cigarette factory worker...

Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz on their new film The Mercy, which tells the true story of the ill-fated attempt in 1968 by the amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst to become the first person to sail solo, non-stop, around the world. Vaseem Khan discusses his latest Inspector Chopra novel, about an Indian detective with a baby elephant as his sidekick, which he has written as a Quick Read. As Irish and No...

As artists back photographer Nan Goldin's call to hold arts patrons the Sackler family to account over the US opioid crisis, we discuss the ethics of funding the arts. Soul singer Mica Paris talks about her current projects exploring the life and work of legendary jazz pioneer Ella Fitzgerald, and performs live in the studio. Jim Crace has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. He talks...

Mike Bartlett, the writer of Doctor Foster and Charles III, on his new three-part TV drama Trauma, in which Adrian Lester stars as a surgeon accused of negligence by a patient's father, played by John Simm. Last week a new prize was launched for thriller novels that do not include any violence against women. Since that announcement the Staunch Book Prize has been both lauded as much needed, and cr...