Front Row Folgen

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by reviewers Nancy Durrant and Tim Robey for this week's review.Keira Knightley stars in The Lives of Others, adapted for the stage and directed by Robert Icke, from the 2006 film, about love and Stasi surveillance in East Germany.La Bola Negra is Spain's nomination for the foreign language Oscar. It's a gay love story set during the Spanish Civil War intertwining three timeframes and the complications of love and war.Twice Booker Prize-nominated author Tom McCarthy's latest novel, The Rhyl Poster, about a jurist -turned- double agent in the Court of Justice of the European Union.We speak with Baillie Gifford Prize winner Edmund Richardson, whose book about Alexander The Great has won this year's £50,000 award.

Acclaimed artist Sam Taylor Johnson has photographed a wide range of actors, artists and musicians including Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tracey Emin, Philip Seymour-Hoffman and Alexander McQueen. She's also made biographical feature films about John Lennon and Amy Winehouse, and has repeatedly turned the camera on herself. As a new monograph of her work is published, she talks to us about the art of portraiture and what she has learned about selfhood. Oscar winning writer and director Sian Heder talks to us about Being Heumann, her unflinching feature about the Disability Rights Movement which is based on true events and stars Ruth Madeley as Judith Heumann, a lifelong activist for people with disabilities, who died in 2023. Later this month a conference commemorates the centenary of the publication of what is billed as "the wildest, most ambitious, most controversial poem in Scottish literature": Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The modernist poem, in which a drunk man on a moonlit hillside addresses the thistle, the nation and the universe is widely credited with igniting a literary renaissance in Scotland, and also contributed towards the formation of a new nationalist movement. MacDiarmid's official biographer Alexander Linklater and the poet's daughter-in-law, Deirdre Grieve, also a writer, join us to discuss the significance of the poem, how we read it a hundred years on, and the contradictions in MacDiarmid's own life. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Crossan

Musician Nitin Sawhney's latest composition has been inspired by Samantha Harvey's Booker prize-winning novel Orbital. Called Orbiting Orbital, it also includes original writing by Samantha. They discuss the work and their collaboration with Kate.Author Jasper Rees talks about the acclaimed actor Michael Gambon's life and career as his new authorised biography is released - from being spotted by Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre through to his role as Dumbledore later in life.Curator Charlene Prempeh introduces the new exhibition The Nue Black Aesthetic at the Design Museum.And we pay tribute to the musician Juan Atkins who is widely regarded as the godfather of techno.Presenter: Kate Molleson Producer: Lucy Collingwood