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This mystery comedy from 1986 stars Lucy Sheen, and has some pointed comments on the racism Chinese communities faced in the UK

There’s a sweet charm to Leong Po Chih’s 1986 mystery-comedy Ping Pong, set in and around the restaurant businesses of London’s Chinatown, now rereleased. It was produced by Film Four, who two years later brought out Mike Newell’s comparably set Soursweet, based on the Timothy Mo novel, although that is more serious. Ping Pong is eminently likable, though for me there is something perhaps a little soft-edged and carefully paced which dampens the energy a bit. It is a cheerfully far-fetched caper that could have taken some influence from the Alistair Sim classic Laughter in Paradise, and there’s sharp comment on the racism and enforced invisibility for Chinese communities in Britain, then as now.

Lucy Sheen made her acting debut here as Elaine, a law...

A highly watchable and witty documentary about an Indonesian family leaves Peter Bradshaw wondering if the director has set things up a touch

This highly watchable, witty and humane film is the third in a trilogy by the Dutch documentary-maker Leonard Retel Helmrich following the fortunes of an Indonesian family from the toughest, meanest streets of Jakarta. It is like an episode of Shameless, or a page-turning realist novel about a family packed with comic characters, the sort of thing that Timothy Mo might write. There are set-pieces so artfully turned and shrewdly observed that I half-suspected Helmrich had set things up … just a little. The star is Grandmother Rumidjah who is begged by her ne'er-do-well middle-aged son Bakti to leave the countryside and come to the big city and help bring up his niece Tari, a bright girl who is the family's one aspirational hope. Bakti's alleged income derives...

More Dickens and even more Shakespeare, but also new novels from Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, plus exciting new voices – 2012's literary highlights

January

10 Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, starring Matthew Rhys and Tamzin Merchant, begins – and, unlike the book, ends – on BBC2.

13 Michael Morpurgo's much-loved children's novel War Horse, a long-running favourite at the National and on Broadway, gets the Hollywood treatment. A tearjerking saga about a young soldier and his horse – it was only a matter of time before it was Spielberged.

16 Ts Eliot prize. Despite withdrawals from the shortlist over objections to a hedge fund's sponsorship of the prize, the Eliot remains the UK's premier poetry award, and its eve-of-event reading is always a treat. This year's shortlist includes Daljit Nagra, Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside.

20 Release of film of Coriolanus, an Orson Wellesian effort directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes,...

With lavish new movie adaptations of Dickens, Brontë and Tolstoy in the pipeline, Mark Lawson wonders what keeps drawing film-makers to the same 19th-century novels

At press previews, to which movie critics are lured on weekday mornings by platters of complimentary croissants and fruit segments, a special mood of resentment greets the unspooling of a franchise in its later instalments: the ninth Nightmare on Elm Street, say, or the 12th Friday the 13th. Relentless repetition of the same characters or set-up is viewed as proof of imaginative poverty and commercial opportunism.

But recycling of storylines is not necessarily evidence of low artistic ambitions. Three films currently in production from admired directors – Mike Newell, Andrea Arnold and Joe Wright – might be billed, in line with Hollywood's numerical tendency, as Great Expectations 16, Wuthering Heights 17 and Anna Karenina 25, if we include even a rough estimate of the previous significant film and TV versions of these novels.