Some heavyweight Acting, with a capital A, from Christian Bale and Melissa Leo bagged them both Oscars in this formulaic but authentic, enjoyable boxing drama.

Mark Wahlberg has revealed he got into his last fight when a man attacked his friend in a nightclub.

Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale star in a look at the early years of boxer Micky Ward.

A dance to the music of hard times

It could be worse but the squeeze is already making itself felt at English National Ballet. "We're taking a 9.6 per cent cut, that's £485,000," says artistic director Wayne Eagling. "Or four weeks of touring. Some of the new repertory will have to be postponed."

Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker's eclectically barbered thinker-in-chief, is to turn his hand to a discipline in which he has somewhat fewer than 10,000 hours of experience: television production. The bestselling non-fiction writer (one of whose theories is that a genius requires 10,000 hours of practice to master his or her craft) has teamed up with "Marky" Mark Wahlberg to produce a drama series for HBO set during the Cold War. According to the Deadline Hollywood blog, the unnamed project will be based in Berlin, and "centers on a missionary who becomes involved in the CIA". It's not yet clear how much creative input the pair will have in the show. Wahlberg has past form at HBO, having produced the hipster "dramedies" Entourage and How To Make It In America, as well as the amply funded new Prohibition-era drama, Boardwalk Empire, with Martin Scorsese. Gladwell, on the other hand, has just one IMDb credit to his name so far, as co-writer on a TV movie unpromisingly titled Runaway Virus.

Will Ferrell reunites with Adam McKay, director of his most popular work (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), in a comedy-action movie that begins far more engagingly than it ends.

When a 14-year-old (Atonement's Saoirse Ronan) is murdered by the world's most obvious serial killer (Stanley Tucci), she wakes up in a surreal CGI limbo, and peeks back through the ether at her grieving family (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon).

Peter Jackson, having delighted the world as Ringmaster of the epic Tolkien trilogy, has gone for a change of style in adapting Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones – and come a terrible cropper.