Director: Lindy Heymann; Release date: 4 June
I found myself a little perplexed as to what to say about this film. Is it a coming of age film? A thriller? Or a comment on a celebrity-obsessed society and the brutal objectification facing young women?
The opening sequence is a beautiful depiction of Liverpool, a sequence so quiet it made me think my television might be broken. It's an understated study of quiet abandonment.
John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review; £13.95
If there was ever a case not to judge a book by its cover, this is it. Despite the rather garish and vaguely confusing cover image, this is possibly the most coherent and fundamentally serious book on the issues facing the planet that I have had the pleasure to read.
Director: John Maybury; Release date: 27 June
Dylan Thomas was an iconic poet, a lifelong socialist and an internationalist who wrote about the great issues of his age - unemployment, war and the danger of atomic weapons - with words both beautiful and captivating.
Directors: Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen; Release date: 15 February
My first thoughts on being asked to go and see Leonardo DiCaprio's climate change documentary were not terribly cheery. Much as I am delighted that the fight to get people to take climate change seriously has been largely won, the resulting jumping on the bandwagon has produced a motley crew of celebrity endorsements that do little more than present a famous face stating the obvious.
But this film is a welcome addition to the conversation surrounding the issue.
Eds: Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, The New Press, £16.99
We are always being told that the world is getting smaller. Globalisation and progress mean that the entire world is now your oyster, there for you to explore. But this only applies if you are born into the right sphere.
This new collection of essays, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, looks at how the world has fractured, from the gated communities, floating cities and dreamworlds of the rich, to the free trade zones, lax labour laws and poverty that are the reality for the majority.
Martin Crimp, one of the most innovative playwrights to emerge in Britain in the past 20 years, spoke to Kelly Hilditch about the revival of his play Attempts on her Life.
Originally written in 1997, Attempts on her Life is being given its first major production in Britain this March. The play is a series of 17 scenes or "attempts", trying to discover who Anne or Annie is. In the end she seems to be more of a "guide or pivot" around which the story is told than a character in her own right.
"I have two ways of writing," playwright Martin Crimp said. "I do still write what you would call conventional plays. But ever since I discovered this alternative way of writing with Attempts on her Life it has continued to fascinate me."
