Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's acclaimed career came to a crushing halt in the late 1940s when he and other Hollywood figures were blacklisted for their political beliefs. Starring Bryan Cranston as Trumbo, Jay Roach's film tells the story of the Oscar winning writer's relationship with the US government, studio bosses and Hollywood icons such as John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Edward G Robinson and Otto Preminger.
A new ten part Sky Atlantic / HBO tv series Vinyl, created by Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter, is set in the music business in 970s New York City and stars Bobby Cannavale, with the first episode directed by Scorsese himself.
At the age of 36, on the verge of completing eleven years of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. His reflections on doctoring, illness and the meaning of life form the basis of his memoir "When Breath Becomes Air" - which includes an epilogue from his wife.
A new production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opens at the National Theatre in London - one of the ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle by August Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright whose work chronicles the twentieth century African American experience. Written in 1982 and set in a recording studio in Chicago in 1927, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom features Ma Rainey, played by Sharon D Clarke, who is determined that 'Black Bottom', the song that bears her name, will be recorded her way.
The Rhubarb Triangle & Other Stories is the largest Martin Parr exhibition in the UK for over a decade, comprising more than 300 photographs that span the past 40 years, and including a new commission The Rhubarb Triangle, focusing on an area of countryside known between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell in West Yorkshire, which is famous for producing early-forced rhubarb. Parr's photographs capture the back-breaking work of moving the rhubarb from field to shed, the freezing cold and exhausting labour of picking the vegetable by candlelight and the consumption of the rhubarb by coach parties and food tourists.