Arts journalist Sinéad Gleeson, film critic Donald Clarke and actress and writer Jeananne Crowley.

Charlie Kaufman is well known as the screenwriter of 'Being John Malkovich', 'Adaptation' and 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'. Now with the movie 'Synecdoche, New York' he makes his directorial debut. It's the story of an ailing theatre director, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who turns a warehouse into a massive set and gets his actors to play out the lives of everybody he knows - hoping that by dramatising real life he can come to makes sense of it. As for his own real life - domestic and otherwise - well, it's a little tricky. 'Synecdoche, New York' goes on release in selected cinemas on Friday.

'Brooklyn' is the new novel from Colm Tóibín - a story of emigration which begins in Enniscorthy in the 1950s. Eilis Lacey leaves home with hopes of new life in Brooklyn. But being alone, young and homesick for Wexford, things aren't easy. She does find happiness of sorts as she gets to grip with her new life - working in a department store by day and, by night, taking her class at Brooklyn College. But when bad news brings her back to Ireland, she finds herself between a rock and hard place - somewhere between love and happiness. 'Brooklyn' is published by Penguin Viking.

Thanks to the efforts of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, hundreds of thousands of people in over 30 countries have been experiencing something they otherwise would never get a ticket for: live opera performances from the Met broadcast in their local cinema. Since last December, seven 'Met Live' High Definition broadcasts have been coordinated by Opera Ireland at three cinema locations in Dundrum, Swords and Dungarvan, with radio simulcasts on RTÉ Lyric FM. The highlights of the past season, have included Anthony Minghella's production of 'Madama Butterfly' and Angela Gheorgiu in Puccini's 'La Rondine'. The broadcast also includes live backstage features and interviews which are shown during the intermission. The next 'Met Live' season opens with 'Tosca' on 10 October and runs until 1 May in cinemas nationwide, with a programme of nine operas including 'Aida', 'Carmen' and 'Der Rosenkavalier'. Details can be found on operaireland.com.

'Closing Time' is a memoir from Joe Queenan, a well-known commentator on everything from movies to sport to politics. Here he returns to his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s and a life very much Irish-American and Catholic and with all that might entail - not least a hard-drinking father with a tendency to beat his son with a belt. Worse again - and certainly less of a stereotype - was the mother who didn't seem particularly taken by her children at all. As Queenan says about the time he got a bicycle: "I loved that bike like a mother loves a son - unless it was my mother." What saved Queenan, however, was his love of books - words were his escape and eventually became his livelihood. 'Closing Time' by Joe Queenan is published by Picador.

Also worth checking out is the 2009 Dublin Dance Festival, which started on Friday. The Dublin Dance Festival is running until 23 May; you can find the details on dublindancefestival.ie.

We leave you with a piece of music from Finghin Collins, who is among a host of artists from around the globe appearing at this year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which takes place from 27 June to 5 July. With the Intermezzo from Schumann's 'Carnival Scenes from Vienna', Finghin Collins.