Pinewood Shepperton studios slumped to a £3.9m loss in 2011 after it failed in an attempt to build replicas of Paris, New York and Amsterdam on green belt land.

Billy Connolly is going from Big Yin to tiny dwarf to complete the cast of Peter Jackson's movie version of The Hobbit.

Peter Jackson's dramatisation of The Lovely Bones has become the most complained-about film of the past year.

A social services boss has apologised after a High Court judge ruled that a local authority unlawfully detained a 21-year-old autistic man by keeping him in a care unit for nearly a year.

Bradford have confirmed Peter Jackson has been appointed as manager on a permanent basis.

A best-selling novel unnervingly brought to life by the British film-maker Lynne Ramsay has so far been the competition highlight of the Cannes Film Festival. Based on the 2003 book by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin stars Tilda Swinton and is directed by Glasgow-born Ramsay, who made her feature debut in Cannes in 1999 with the acclaimed Ratcatcher and whose last film was Morvern Callar in 2002.

Cameras started rolling yesterday on director Peter Jackson's production of The Hobbit, after months of delays on the prequel to his Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy.

A High Court judge gave his reasons yesterday for ruling that media organisations can attend hearings in a case involving a father's struggle to care for his autistic son. The Court of Protection rules on the affairs of people unable to do so themselves and most cases are heard in private.

A father's struggle to be allowed to care for his autistic son made legal history yesterday when a judge ruled that the story of his ongoing battles with his local council could be made public.

Budget blow-outs, an industrial dispute, even a race row have threatened to derail the latest JRR Tolkien blockbuster, The Hobbit. To that list can now be added a perforated ulcer, courtesy of director Sir Peter Jackson, who was taken to hospital in the New Zealand capital, Wellington, on Wednesday.

Just 5ft tall and a fan of The Lord of the Rings, Naz Humphreys believed she would make a perfect hobbit. So when the chance of a bit-part in Peter Jackson's new film project came up, she seized it. What she did not expect was to be told she was not white enough.

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).

Ray Harryhausen – the daddy of stop-motion animation – turns 90 next week. Tomorrow, BFI Southbank rounds off a month of screenings and events with a celebration hosted by the director John Landis. It is comforting to know that though computers dominate special-effects nowadays, his pioneering techniques are still admired.