Susan Elkin reviews the best children's and young-adult fiction to help keep your darlings entertained over the spring holidays

This uneven crime caper is full of plot-holes and clichés, but it's redeemed by a perky script, Alan Alda's convincingly shady banker Arthur Shaw, and a lovely performance from Matthew Broderick as a disgraced financier.

Even the most dreadful films are usually able find one or two positive reviews that film studios can selectively quote to display on promotional posters.

The Hollywood filmmaker - who won a Best Picture Academy Award in 2002 for 'A Beautiful Mind' - has been drafted in to oversee the prestigious event after original producer Brett Ratner quit following his use of a gay slur at a screening his new movie.

A pub landlady appealing against her conviction for using a foreign decoder to show football matches without paying BSkyB has won a landmark European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling that threatens to undermine the financial position of the Premier League and other TV rights holders.

As Dominic Cooper plays Uday Hussein and his hired lookalike in a new film, Geoffrey Macnab chronicles cinema's rich history of doppelgänger dramas

With his singles "Buzzin'" and "The Mack" built around familiar borrowings from Nu Shooz and Mark Morrison, young R&B blade Mann would appear to have his heart stuck firmly in the more recent past.

Of all our imaginings, one of the most resonant is the idea of transformation. We are instantly fascinated by people changing identities, by things becoming different things, by frogs which turn into princes. Perhaps it's because one of our principal holds on reality is our instinctive belief, so hard to dislodge, that form is fixed, not fluid, and so to encounter any fundamental shift in form or nature gives us a jolt. Not that we do come across such shifts much, in the real world – the caterpillar changing into a butterfly is the prime exception – but our myths and legends and stories are chock-fullof them.

'Shrek': the show that leaves rivals green with envy

The Prince of Wales has been to meet the cast of Shrek the musical in London.

Am I imagining things, or has the world been taken over by kids' fantasy icons?

The Oscar-nominated star of last year's sleeper hit tells Kaleem Aftab about her new role, opposite comedy hero Eddie Murphy

The room measures 6m by 5m, and could almost be a hyper-quaint visualisation from an animatronic version of a Dickens novel starring an orphaned fish with Eddie Murphy’s voice. And yet it was in this attic workshop - restored and open to the public from today at London’s Science Museum - that James Watt, inventor of the modern steam engine, presided over the industrial revolution.

Starring: Martin Lawrence, Jessica Lucas