I think Bluestone 42, BBC3's new comedy about a bomb-disposal team in Afghanistan, may be unique. Of course, there have been other sitcoms that tried to see the funny side of a bloody war before now. M*A*S*H did it brilliantly, as did Blackadder Goes Forth. But neither of those series went out while the war in question was still underway.

This elegiac novel of mid-life crisis brilliantly captures the decline of a superpower

A hymn to adolescent self-absorption, Ol Parker's Now Is Good stars Dakota Fanning as a teenage girl with one of those rare strains of terminal cancer which don't make you look unhealthy.

If you like 'Skins', says E4, you'll like this teen memoir. Hmm. But C4's new drama is a dazzler

"But he looks like a student," moans the midwife about the youthful doctor, Vladimir (Daniel Radcliffe), who has just started at a remote countryside practice in Russia, 1917.

Great music, great story, but the script needs serious tuning

The coincidence looks as if it might have been contrived by some ironic wag. A mere three days after the opening of Lindsay Posner's revival of Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville, the West End now plays host to this wildly alternative approach to the same play by Rimas Tuminas and the Moscow-based Vakhtangov company.

'Gone too soon' is a phrase that litters tributes to dearly departed stars. While it does apply to the likes of Amy Winehouse, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain - all passing before their thirtieth birthdays - the term has had even more resonance in recent years thanks to the phenomenon of the premature social media obituary.

Keira Knightley is reunited with director Joe Wright for the latest Anna Karenina. Geoffrey Macnab looks at the enduring appeal of Tolstoy's tragic heroine

'A novel from the author of several previous books," said the Amazon logline about Jubb, one of Keith Waterhouse's astonishing black comedies. Was there ever a less appealing sentence?

The latest of the many mawkish Hollywood melodramas to be based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, The Lucky One miscasts the elfin Zac Efron as a US Marine who tracks down a blue-eyed blonde (Taylor Schilling) he spotted in a photograph in Iraq.

Stuart's film take on Dahl was not initially a success; it was only later that the public gave it popularity

The Shining, once dubbed the "scariest movie ever", is set to provide more chills for British audiences with the release of an extended version never seen before in this country.

Director Tim Burton's new animated 3D film Frankenweenie is to open the 56th BFI London Film Festival, it has been announced.