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Last broadcast on Thu, 16 Oct 2008, 21:15 on BBC Radio 3.
Synopsis
Bidisha gives the verdict on Burn after Reading, the latest film from Hollywood film director siblings Joel and Ethan Coen. Boasting a star-studded cast including George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt, the film tells the story of what happens when a disk containing the memoirs of a CIA agent ends up in the hands of two unscrupulous gym employees.
Burn After Reading
Bidisha is joined by the critic Muriel Zagha to give the verdict on the latest film by Hollywood siblings, the Coen brothers.
Burn After Reading boasts a star-studded cast, including George Clooney and Brad Pitt, and is a return to the mad-capped comedy of earlier Coen brothers films such as Intolerable Cruelty and O Brother Where Art Thou.
The film centres round a missing disk containing CIA information, and blends outlandish comic twists and turns with jolts of violence. After winning Oscar nominations last year for the brooding, sinister No Country For Old Men, will this new film score another hit with the Academy and at the box office?
Arts criticism
Is the arts critic under greater threat than ever before? Music critic Norman Lebrecht argues that is the case.
With the rise of talent shows on television and the democratisation of criticism through the internet, he feels that the expertise of the professional critic is being eroded at an astonishing rate.
He joins Andrew Dickson, arts editor of Guardian Unlimited, to debate whether we really are witnessing the dying days of arts criticism or if, in fact, this is a new golden age.
Oedipus
Night Waves’s resident theatre critic Susannah Clapp will be in the studio to review a new production of Sophocles’s Oedipus, starring Ralph Fiennes in the title role.
Loneliness
Is King Lear the archetypal play about loneliness? The American academic Thomas Dumm explains why Shakespeare’s play is at the heart of his new book on loneliness and the self.
Loneliness As A Way Of Life by Thomas Dumm is published by Harvard University Press.
Broadcast
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Thu 16 Oct 200821:15
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