20/10/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests playwright Laura Wade, broadcaster John Tusa and anthropologist Kit Davis review the week's cultural highlights

Benh Zeitklin's film Beasts of the Southern Wild stars Quvenzhane Wallis as Hushpuppy - a young girl living an almost feral existence in the swamplands of southern Louisiana.

Adrian Lester stars as 19th century actor Ira Aldridge in Lolita Chakrabarti's play Red Velvet at the Tricycle Theatre in London. Aldridge causes a sensation when he is brought in to replace an indisposed Edmund Kean in Othello - the idea of a black actor playing the role meets considerable resistance.

Ginger and Rosa is a film by Sally Potter set in the early sixties and stars Elle Fanning and Alice Englert as the two girls of the title - teenagers who are preoccupied by the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The comic strips that Posy Simmonds drew for the Guardian from 1977 - first under the title of Mrs Weber's Diary and then simply Posy - have been collected in Mrs Weber's Omnibus. The cartoons map the marriage and career problems and characteristic anxieties of three middle-class families.

Billed as a blockbuster exhibition, Hollywood Costume at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London brings together over 130 outfits from some of the most celebrated films in cinema history that defined their characters as much as the actors who wore them.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.