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More than a year and a half after Simon Pegg debuted the first trailer for A Fantastic Fear of Everything on his Twitter page, we have the second trailer for this upcoming comedy. The actor portrays a children's author who becomes paranoid while researching serial killers for his new novel, which turns his life upside down while a Hollywood executive expresses interest in his story. Writer-director Crispian Mills' comedy debuts on iTunes January 7, before its theatrical debut February 7.

Jack (Simon Pegg) is a children's author turned crime novelist whose detailed research into the lives of Victorian serial killers has turned him into a paranoid wreck, persecuted by an irrational fear of being murdered. When Jack is thrown a lifeline by his long-suffering agent, and a mysterious Hollywood executive takes a sudden and inexplicable interest in Jack's script, what should be his "big break" rapidly turns into his "big breakdown...

Many months after David Seidler stood on stage at the Academy Awards clasping the Oscar for Original Screenplay we can experience The King’s Speech as the writer first envisaged, with a sharper political edge and a deeper exploration of the personalities circling the central relationship of the reluctant King and his antipodean, unqualified, speech therapist.

Though the spectres of Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush haunt the first moments of the play, and never truly leave the stage, Adrian Noble’s direction allows the play’s central themes to flourish at a brisk pace, setting the sad and perilous state of the monarchy up against the dark and uncertain future with an exceptional central performance from Charles Edwards whose external timidity and volcanic internal anger are perfectly balanced as he is buffeted between duty and desire. His transformation, the discovery of his voice, is deftly handled with a sympathetic and...

The King's Speech opened on the 22nd March at Wyndham's Theatre. Check out these pictures of the cast taking their bow on the press night, plus the after-show party featuring Charles Edwards as King George VI, Jonathan Hyde as Lionel Logue, Emma Fielding as Queen Elizabeth, Ian McNeice as Winston Churchill, Michael Feast as Cosmo Lang, and Joss Ackland as King George V.

At Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud theatre, playwright David Seidler has much more room to explore the story's historical background than the cinema version allowed

Watching David Seidler's play induces a strong sense of deja vu. That's not simply because it was the source of a hugely successful, Oscar-winning film. It is also because Seidler's perfectly enjoyable play taps into our recollections of other, more resonant works.

Until I saw it on stage, I had not realised how much Seidler's piece owed to Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III. In both we see an embattled royal subjected to all kinds of curative humiliations by a rogue outsider: in Bennett's play it was a bluff Lincolnshire parson whereas in Seidler's it is a tough Aussie speech specialist in the shape of Lionel Logue. I was also reminded of Tom Murphy's outstanding 1983 play, The Gigli Concert, in which a charlatan...

Chicago – Similar in style, structure and ambition to his 2007 kaleidoscopic portrait of Bob Dylan, “I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes’s 1998 effort “Velvet Goldmine,” takes a hallucinogenic trip through the ’70s glam rock period reigned over by David Bowie. Yet instead of centering his tale on Bowie, Haynes explores the era’s impact through the eyes of a haunted observer.

The film is less dramatically satisfying but far more interesting than a straightforward biopic. Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s striking features fit perfectly into the role of Bowie clone Brian Slade, but he remains an enigmatic object of interest and desire throughout the picture. That’s because his life is viewed solely through the perspective of others, as investigative reporter Arthur (Christian Bale) attempts to piece together the mystery of Slade’s whereabouts ten years after the singer faked his own death onstage.

Blu-ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

On a superficial level, “Goldmine” borrows the formula of “Citizen Kane,...

Lyric Hammersmith, London; Theatre Royal Bath

People go to Saved thinking they know what they will see. They've been told often enough. A baby is stoned to death in a park by a group of youths; a middle-aged woman has her stocking provocatively darned (she's inside it: 'You watch where yer pokin') by her daughter's young admirer. These are the scenes that caused Edward Bond's play to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain in 1965; these are the scenes that have made it famous.

Yet in Sean Holmes's superb production, the play looks less simply confrontational and rebarbative than the stoning suggests. It is intricate, far-reaching and believable. Intervening history – the killing of James Bulger, the Baby P case – may have added to its credibility, but its real force isn't adventitious. The horror begins to look inevitable.

The action uncurls with a series of terrible small blows. A young mother...

Chicago – There are few things more excruciating to sit through than a botched adaptation of Shakespeare. The Bard’s language is so intricately textured and poetically structured that it must be fully understood in order to be adequately delivered. An audacious mess like Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo and Juliet” recalls memories of amateur high school productions where students raced through the dialogue in order to sound naturalistic.

Luhrmann’s film is also a prime example of an oft-failed stunt: Shakespeare in modern dress. Adaptations that stick to the script while changing the scenery run the risk of distancing the audience even further from the material. The modern period detail in the sets and costumes leap out like distractions whenever the audience attempts to concentrate on the words. Yet Rupert Goold’s 2010 made-for-tv version of “Macbeth” is the rare production that actually manages to pull off the stunt, albeit with mixed results.