'No Direction Home', Martin Scorsese's two-part documentary film was broadcast on Monday and Tuesday nights on BBC2. It focuses on the early creative life of Bob Dylan, in particular the period up to 1966, which saw Dylan become the thing he remains - a hugely influential songwriter. 'No Direction Home' is available on DVD from next week at €24.99.

David Cronenberg's latest film, 'A History of Violence' tells the story of Tom Stall who becomes a local hero when he shoots dead two men out to rob his diner. The subsequent media attention changes his life when Carl Fogarty arrives in town convinced that Tom Stall is really Joey Cusack - an old mob associate whom he has scores to settle with. 'A History of Violence' opens this Friday at the IFI and at cinemas nationwide.

A refugee centre in London is the meeting place for two very different characters in Calypso's latest production, 'I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda'. Simon is a jaded, middle aged writer and Juliete, is a young Rwandan refugee who has seen her entire family killed in the genocide of 1994. It stars Michael Forde as Simon and Madeline Appiah as Juliette. 'I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document...' runs at the Liberty Hall Theatre until Saturday.

'Pigtopia', the new novel by Kitty Fitzgerald tells the story of another unlikely friendship. This time, it is Jack, a reclusive man with physical deformities whose only real relationship is with the pigs he rears in his basement, and Holly, an adolescent girl who is herself something of an outsider. 'Pigtopia' is published by Faber and Faber and costs £10 sterling.

From his early days in the Gripewater Blues Band Nigel Mooney has become one of Ireland's best-known blues guitarists and writers of blues songs. He has played with Georgie Fame and B.B. King and he has just released his debut album entitled 'All My Loves in Vain'. Here, with 'Turning Over an Old Leaf', is Nigel Mooney.