From a drama about Muhammad Ali’s early years to a Blade Runner spin-off BBC News

British novelist and playwright AA Milne needn’t have worried. The first Winnie-the-Book was published 100 years ago in October 1926, and introduced a cast of characters modelled on the author’s son and the soft toys he played with: lovably dim Pooh Bear, nervy Piglet, hyperactive Tigger, pessimistic Eeyore. Far from …

Was 15th-Century ‘royal witch’ Eleanor Cobham a satanist or a political pawn? BBC News

The husband-and-wife film-making team behind Wicker, Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, tell the BBC they have been tickled by the responses and understand exactly why so many have fallen in lust with this magical pairing. “They’re having sex, the roof is leaking, and he just says, ‘I’m going to …

Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Miles Teller are on top form in Paper Tiger, another gritty, New York-based crime drama from James Gray (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night). Echoing events from the writer-director’s own childhood, it’s set in the borough of Queens in 1986. Johansson and Teller …

The story of one woman’s fight after suffering a sexual assault in 1472 BBC News

The cabinet was divided over what action to take, with further U-2 flights revealing that the missile bases were nearing completion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff preferred a course that involved military action. “There had to be a final decision made… as to what our reaction was going to be,” …

Stars step into the BBC’s exclusive photo studio BBC News

The theme had been adapted by various male artists, including Giorgione, Titian and Veronese. But these artists “had not dared depict the goddess’s buttocks being touched”, says Dal Pozzolo. Lavinia, in her Mars and Venus, painted around 1594-5, did. “That it was a female painter who crossed this boundary can, …

Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, followed Holmes, her partner, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the weeks just before she reported to prison. Her decision to give them such access seems part of a strenuous attempt to declare her innocence and reform her image. Shortly before going …

If La Bola Negra is proof of anything, it’s that Calvo and Ambrossi know how to frame an image and make it sing. Lavish, ambitious, and formally daring, their film is heavenly to look at – shot on location in remote abandoned villages or in hyper-real sets. Shot by cinematographer …

From a ‘gentlemen’s haven’ to film-star refuge and high-end, low-profile enclave BBC News

The Norse had found Iceland in around 870, and Greenland 100 years later. From there, it was just 200 miles across the Davis Strait to Baffin Island in modern Canada, which they called Helluland, the land of slabs. According to the sagas, they followed the coast southwards to Labrador, or …

Artificial arrives with off-screen baggage that has only raised its profile. Amazon MGM Studios developed and financed the film, but in June announced that they would not release it. The timing raised eyebrows because, four months before that, Amazon invested $50m in a partnership with Open AI, where Altman is …

But the influence was not restricted to the ancient world. During the Renaissance, artists began to seek out and copy classical sculptures with more determination than they had for a millennium. And one of the most admired was the Venus Pudica type. So, Aphrodite, in her nude, seductive and humble …

Sorkin tries to add some momentum to his uneventful narrative by flipping back and forth between two timelines. In one of these, Horwitz and Haugen have their chats, all of which consist of her handing him some information, claiming that she loves her job, and insisting that she won’t help …

The era’s chaotic energy was the last hurrah of analogue, 20th-Century life BBC News

But on 10 October 1961, a sudden volcanic eruption blasted the islanders out of their splendid isolation and into the industrialised modern world. “We heard the rumbles first, then the ground just automatically cracked… Then the smoke and the fire started coming out the ground,” one of them told the …

Why grand country houses built to look like they’re centuries old are in demand BBC News

Flanagan’s new version, which is set in the present day and is being promoted with the tag line, “If you think you know her story, you’re dead wrong”, is likely to upset book purists even further. Without giving away spoilers, it introduces some major departures from, and very significant additions …