Lionsgate dropped a new trailer for Ballerina —or, as the studio is now calling it, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina , because what every film needs is a needlessly clunky title. There's nothing clunky about this new trailer, however: It's the stylized, action-packed dose of pure adrenaline one would expect from the franchise, and it ends with Ana de Armas' titular ballerina facing off against none other than John Wick himself (Keanu Reeves).

(Spoilers for 2019's John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum .)

Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum . As previously reported , Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). That's where we learned Wick was originally named Jardani Jovonovich and trained as an assassin with the syndicate. The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina , now played by de Armas.

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Daughter of Oscar-winning special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi hopes item will ‘continue to inspire’

It was last seen standing at the entrance to a spaceship with a potted plant of chrysanthemums, its chest glowing bright red as it stared down at the tearful young boy on the ground below.

Now, the original body model of ET, the Extra-Terrestial, is expected to fetch up to $1m (£700,000) when it is sold at Sotheby’s auction house at in April.

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With tiresome pseudo-progressive additions that tie the whole thing in knots, this is a waste of estimable entertainers like Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot

That title is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders. Those otherwise estimable performers Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot are now forced to go through the motions, and they give the dullest performances of their lives.

Traditionally, the heroine’s name refers to her skin, with lips red as blood and hair dark as ebony; now it refers to the snowstorm that accompanied her birth. Zegler’s Snow White had loving parents in the King and Queen but after her mother’s death her father becomes infatuated with a witchy new noblewoman at court; Gadot’s lips are at all times seductively and contemptuously pursed. But later the King simply vanishes from the story and the script ties itself into a few pretzels explaining what is supposed to have happened to him and when. The stepmom-witch keeps Snow White in Cinderella-style serfdom below stairs where the poor child wanly sympathises with the population’s poverty. As Snow White grows up, the magic mirror breaks the bad news about a change in the prettiness-ranking; Snow White is then forced to flee to the forest and stay there once the huntsman has lied to the witch about killing her. And then she meets her seven new best friends …

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Ellen Pompeo plays a mother disturbed by her adopted daughter in a mostly entertaining limited series based on the tabloid saga

There remains unending interest in the bizarre story of Natalia Grace , the Ukrainian girl adopted by an American family who then claimed she was actually an adult. The saga starts in 2010 but a similar tale had already been told in 2009’s Orphan , a horror film hinged on a similar twist, itself inspired by the real case of the Estonian imposter Barbora Skrlová. It’s the ghoulish stuff of nightmare, shocking enough to turn Orphan into an unlikely franchise (the second was released in 2022 , the third now in the works) and Grace into a tabloid sensation and, easily vilified, hate figure.

But the lurid People.com headlines only told half of the story or barely a third as it turns out, an unfolding series of revelations soon starting to show that things were not what they appeared to be. After a popular, and even more revelatory, docuseries, we now have the inevitable narrative version – the long-read-to-documentary-to-limited-series pipeline remaining robust – but how to tell a story when no one involved is willing to agree on what actually happened? In Hulu’s efficiently watchable eight-parter Good American Family, The Affair and Sunny writer Katie Robbins decides upon a structure that allows for competing perspectives and a shifting timeline.

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Readers respond to a piece by the author Jeanette Winterson in which she praises OpenAI’s metafictional short story

Jeanette Winterson asserts that “humans will always want to read what other humans have to say” ( OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving, 12 March ). But she neglects the fact that every piece of writing, film‑making or art created by artificial intelligence and then consumed by humans is one less piece of writing, film-making or art created by a human being that will have the chance to be read and enjoyed by humans.

One can only wonder if Winterson would hold the same view were she now at the start of her career, rather than having 40 years of success behind her.

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Gill Saunders urges a rethink of a ban on the London Underground. Veronica Porter says everything should be done to encourage book ownership

Zoe Williams says that since the King’s Cross fire it has been against fire-safety regulations to have combustible material in any part of a station ( My beloved tube station book-swap has gone. Who’s to blame for its passing?, 18 March ). My own tube station, Willesden Green, is an “above-ground” station with two wide exits at street level, beside one of which the bookshelf was situated, so even in the very unlikely circumstance of the books catching fire, there would be no danger to station users. And perhaps someone can explain why, if two dozen paperbacks constitute a fire hazard, large piles of free newspapers do not.

The book-share at Willesden Green was a much-loved community resource, especially for the growing number who cannot afford to buy books these days. And our local library (like too many others) was closed long ago, so free books are valuable to many. I regularly saw elderly people browsing the shelves, as well as mothers with small children (children’s books were regularly deposited). I enjoyed passing on books I’d read myself – as well as serendipitously discovering new writers. So a rethink of the ban, at all those stations where books can be deposited safely, is needed.
Gill Saunders
London

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In response to a social media post asking who ‘ruins a movie for you’, the author alluded to Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, with whom she has fallen out over trans rights

Harry Potter author JK Rowling appears to have criticised the three leading actors of the eight-film franchise in a post on social media.

Rowling was responding to a post that asked: “What actor/actress instantly ruins a movie for you?” She wrote : “Three guesses. Sorry, but that was irresistible,” adding three laughing emojis.

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The actor, who shares a number of sex scenes with co-star Chalamet in new film Marty Supreme, said ‘I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on’

Gwyneth Paltrow has said she felt uncomfortable about the presence of an intimacy coordinator on the set of her new film, in which she shares a number of sex scenes with co-star Timothée Chalamet.

Speaking to Vanity Fair , Paltrow, 52, said that working on Marty Supreme, which is her first leading role in a film since 2010, was her first experience of the relatively new profession, introduced after the #MeToo movement to try to help protect actors on set after multiple instances of abuse were exposed.

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Aviva Studios, Manchester
Featuring whips, chains, swords and dragons, this versatile three-act extravaganza showcases the singer’s unique catalogue of abstract pop

At Manchester’s sold-out Aviva Studios, smoke curls around a giant, ominous black box that resembles a freshly landed spaceship. It’s the perfect warm-up act for Cheltenham-born experimentalist FKA twigs, whose abstract take on pop has always felt inscrutably alien: from 2012’s dark, trip-hoppy debut EP1 to her new club-inspired album Eusexua, her first to hit the UK Top 10. If the latter’s title proved slippery – it’s a term she coined for the elevated state of clarity she likened to “the moment before an orgasm” – this three-act show is even trickier to pin down, and irresistibly so.

A title card on a screen introduces Act I: The Practice. Twigs slowly emerges from behind the box in a dress, singing a medley that threads backwards through her catalogue: from Thousand Eyes on 2019’s Magdalene to Weak Spot from EP1. Then she snaps to the present, namely the club vibe of Eusexua. Her dancers strip to their underwear and dance to the airy techno of Room of Fools. It’s a striking showcase of FKA twigs’s versatility, held together by her acrobatic live vocal and closing in the drum’n’bass outro of Striptease.

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