Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them review – JK Rowling goes steampunk

The latest film from Harry Potter author Rowling’s wizarding world is a wonderfully enjoyable adventure featuring Eddie Redmayne as a “magizoologist” who stumbles into a dark magic adventure in New York

The Accountant adds up to a big deal at the UK box office

Ben Affleck action thriller tames A Street Cat Named Bob and Nocturnal Animals as Doctor Strange hangs on to the top spot

American Pastoral: why can’t cinema get Philip Roth right?

Ewan McGregor’s directorial debut continues a tradition of weak adaptations of the novelist’s work. Perhaps film should look at Roth’s own life instead

Johnny Depp to co-star in JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts sequel

The actor, who has a cameo in the first film, will take a prominent role alongside Eddie Redmayne in the second in JK Rowling’s Potterverse franchise

Brenda Blethyn: ‘How did my mum manage with nine kids and just one tap in the house?’

Playing the mother in Ethel & Ernest, the film version of Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel about his parents, brought back tough childhood memories for the star

After The Maltese Falcon: how film noir took flight

Ushering in an uneasy world of femmes fatales and shady sleuths, The Maltese Falcon marked the beginnings of film noir. Seventy-five years on, how can this genre speak to our times?

Kes’s David Bradley: ‘I can’t watch the end of the film. It’s just too much’

As a 14-year-old boy from a mining community, he won a Bafta for his role in Ken Loach’s bleak film Kes. He explains why the sequel never got off the ground

Ice Cube to star as Fagin in new Oliver Twist film

NWA rapper will play Fagin in new musical adaptation of the Dickens story, with Tony-winning director of Broadway hit Hamilton behind the camera

Peter Jackson to produce film based on Mortal Engines books

Lord of the Rings director will write and produce, while his longtime protege Christian Rivers will direct adaptation of steampunk fantasy series

Colin Firth to float into Mary Poppins sequel

Actor would join Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer and Lin-Manuel Miranda in Mary Poppins Returns, set 25 years after events of original

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back review – pecs, punchups and popcorn galore

Tom Cruise rattles through every trope in the book as the vigilante ex-soldier, this time fleeing corrupt bosses in a high-octane sequel that revels in its absurdity

Leonardo DiCaprio looking to star in real life tale of Jim Crow south

Beth Macy’s Truevine tells the story of albino black boys displayed as circus freaks in racially segregated Virginia, and DiCaprio’s production company is negotiating rights to the book

Horror in the outback: Jane Harper, Charlotte Wood and the landscape of fear

From Hanging Rock to Bitter Wash Road, the Australian bush has long provided writers with a backdrop of terror. A new wave of crime fiction is taking it up a notch

The Girl on the Train still UK’s top ticket as Bridget Jones’s Baby makes history

Emily Blunt’s thrilling commute outpaces Tom Hanks’s globetrotting adventures in Inferno in a clash of book adaptations

Don DeLillo’s White Noise to be adapted for film

Michael Almereyda is set to adapt the 1985 story of professor of Hitler studies forced to confront his mortality when a toxic black cloud appears above his town