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Elf The Musical, the cheery – very, very cheery – revival opening tonight for a limited holiday run on Broadway, is an entirely suitable gift from a hard-working cast for fans of the well-liked 2003 Will Ferrell Christmas perennial. If you crack up at memories of Mr. Narwhal, Elf has your tinseled name on it.

For the everyone else – adults anyway – the updated Elf remains as much a mixed bag as it was during its previous two Broadway stagings in 2010 and 2012, with one major improvement: Grey Henson, the immensely likable, pitched-to-the-rafters firecracker from Mean Girls and Shucked, steps as easily into Buddy’s green winklepickers as Cinderella ever did a glass slilpper.

Henson and the rest of the cast go big and loud in the style of children’s theater,...

A brand new Audible Original dramatization of David Copperfield is being executive produced by Academy Award-winning film director Sam Mendes. It features a star-studded cast including BAFTA nominated actor, Ncuti Gatwa in the title role, Helena Bonham Carter, Theo James, Jessie Buckley, Richard Armitage, Jack Lowden and Toby Jones. David Copperfield is the second in Sam Mendes’ Dickens collaboration with Audible.

"How do you make a world come alive?" Thunderbird Releasing has launched the UK trailer for the new holiday drama titled The Man Who Invented Christmas, telling the story of Charles Dickens and the creation of the character Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. Dan Stevens stars as Dickens, and Christopher Plummer plays Scrooge, in this tale that mixes reality and imagination to tell us the story of how Dickens created this characters that would "forever change the holiday season into the celebration we know today." Also starring Jonathan Pryce, Simon Callow, Donald Sumpter, Miriam Margolyes, Ian McNeice, Bill Paterson, and Justin Edwards. We already featured the first Us trailer last month, and while this looks intriguing, I'm not too sure it's going to become the next holiday classic. Watch below. Here's the brand new UK trailer for Bharat Nalluri's The Man Who Invented Christmas, on YouTube: You can...

We are now getting our first look at the official trailer and poster for a holiday drama about Charles Dickens titled The Man Who Invented Christmas. The movie follows Dickens and the creation of his iconic character Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. Dan Stevens stars as Dickens, and Christopher Plummer plays Scrooge. As you know, The Christmas Carol has become a major part of Christmas culture.

The film is directed by Bharat Nalluri (The 100) and is written by Susan Coyne. The cast includes Jonathan Pryce, Simon Callow, Donald Sumpter, Miriam Margolyes, Ian McNeice, Bill Paterson, and Justin Edwards. 

Here's the first trailer (+ poster) for The Man Who Invented Christmas, which is set to be released on November 22nd.

"I'm the author here!" Bleecker Street Media recently released the first official trailer for a holiday drama titled The Man Who Invented Christmas, about the story of Charles Dickens and the creation of the character Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. Dan Stevens stars as Dickens, and Christopher Plummer plays Scrooge, in this tale that mixes reality and imagination to tell us the story of how Dickens created this characters that would "forever change the holiday season into the celebration we know today." The full cast includes Jonathan Pryce, Simon Callow, Donald Sumpter, Miriam Margolyes, Ian McNeice, Bill Paterson, and Justin Edwards. This reminds me of the other film Goodbye Christopher Robin, about an author and his creation, but this one seems much more dark and fantastical. Have a look. Here's the first trailer (+ poster) for Bharat Nalluri's The Man Who Invented Christmas, on YouTube: The Man Who Invented Christmas...

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It's the final entry in Wesley's top 100 Christmas TV episodes of all time list, numbers 20 to 1. Merry Christmas to all!

Read entries 100 - 81 here, entries 80 - 61 here, entries 60 - 41 here, and entries 40 - 21 here.

Since the medium’s infancy, viewers have enjoyed sharing holidays with their favourite television characters. We grow invested in our friends on screen over the years; spending Christmas with them is a rite of passage, a chance for us to share tradition from our world with the fictional ones we see on screen. Some shows embrace the season wholeheartedly, characters in good spirits and enjoying the trappings of the season; others skew a little darker, bringing the more oppressive, burdensome side of the holidays to life. Either way, Christmas episodes tend to demonstrate the strengths of our favourite series, and it’s long been a festive ritual of mine to wheel out old...

Ron Moody as Fagin in 'Oliver!' based on Charles Dickens' 'Oliver Twist.' Ron Moody as Fagin in Dickens musical 'Oliver!': Box office and critical hit (See previous post: "Ron Moody: 'Oliver!' Actor, Academy Award Nominee Dead at 91.") Although British made, Oliver! turned out to be an elephantine release along the lines of – exclamation point or no – Gypsy, Star!, Hello Dolly!, and other Hollywood mega-musicals from the mid'-50s to the early '70s.[1] But however bloated and conventional the final result, and a cast whose best-known name was that of director Carol Reed's nephew, Oliver Reed, Oliver! found countless fans.[2] The mostly British production became a huge financial and critical success in the U.S. at a time when star-studded mega-musicals had become perilous – at times downright disastrous – ventures.[3] Upon the American release of Oliver! in Dec. 1968, frequently acerbic The...

Caroline Quentin, Peter Firth and Pauline Collins have all been added to the cast of a new Charles Dickens drama.

The 20-episode series for BBC One has also cast BAFTA award winner Stephen Rea.

Dickensian brings together some of the writer's most iconic characters as their lives interweave in 19th Century London.

Characters from a range of classic tales will appear in the programme, including Scrooge, Fagin and Miss Havisham.

Rea, who plays Inspector Bucket from Bleak House, said: "Dickensian is the most beautiful re-working of the world of Dickens that you could ever imagine. The characters take on a fresh life, and any actor would be mad not to accept the challenge these great scripts offer."

Collins, who plays Martin Chuzzlewit's Mrs Gamp, added: "You don't need to know Dickens' novels to fall in love with the stories we're telling. It's going to be a real treat to watch.

From The Twilight Zone to Penny Dreadful, Doctor Who and more, Den Of Geek’s writers revisit the TV episodes that truly terrify them…

It’s Halloween! Icicles are glistening from window sills. Chestnuts are roasting on open fires. North Pole elves are… hang on, no. None of that nice, fluffy stuff is happening. At Halloween, demonic creatures hunt for flesh, monsters creep out of their graves, and TV does its level best to freak us all the hell out.

In the spirit of all that, we asked our writers to select and share the TV episodes, horror or otherwise, that have made them whimper with fear. Here they all are, 31 of them, because, well, at Halloween, we like things to add up to 31.

Note that this isn’t a Top 10, or a Best Of, nor is it listed in order of scariness. It’s a collection of the particular...

Mike Leigh's first period biopic in 15 years is a feat of confidence, with an outstanding performance from Spall as the Romantic landscape artist

 Full coverage: Cannes 2014

What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.

Mike Leigh has made a period biographical drama before: Topsy-Turvy (1999), about the rewarding but tense association of Gilbert and Sullivan and their own rewarding but tense association with the theatre-going public. Now he made another utterly confident excursion into the past and into the occult arcana of Englishness and Victoriana: a study of the final years of the painter Jmw Turner, played with relish and sympathy by Timothy Spall.

In the past, I and others have commented that Leigh's dialogue...

‘The Thief and the Cobbler’: Original version of Richard Williams’ animated film has first public screening at the Academy The first public screening of the original version of Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler will be held at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 10, 2013. Williams will be in attendance to introduce the recently reconstructed original workprint from 1992. The Thief and the Cobbler will be accompanied by Richard Williams’s 1972 Oscar-winning animated short A Christmas Carol, adapted from Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella. Featuring animation by Ken Harris and Abe Levitow, among others, A Christmas Carol has, according to the Academy’s website, "a distinctive and dark tone" inspired by John Leech’s engraved illustrations of the Dickens’ tale. In conjunction with the screenings, the Academy’s public exhibition “Richard Williams: Master of Animation,” featuring film clips,...

Simon Callow will return to the West End this autumn for a limited run of Peter Ackroyd's The Mystery of Charles Dickens. Following his turn as William Shakespeare in Being Shakespeare at Trafalgar Studios, Callow treads the boards as Dickens to cover 49 of the writer's characters, from Scrooge and Oliver Twist's Nancy to Miss Havisham and Tiny Tim. The play runs at the Playhouse Theatre for a limited season from September 13 to November (more)...

Miriam Margolyes' mother had a stroke after her only child told her she was gay. The actor talks about her feelings of guilt – and regret – about coming out to her parents

Miriam Margolyes is the first person to acknowledge that being an only child can be a mixed blessing. There was always going to be a price to pay, she makes clear, for being so cocooned in love by her Gp father Joseph (Joe) and property-developer mother Ruth during her childhood in Oxford that they formed what she calls a "fortress" family.

"I don't for a second regret my closeness to them because they were wonderful, golden parents who gave me so much confidence," says Miriam, who began her career as the only woman in the 1962 Cambridge Footlights alongside the Monty Python stars John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and has since worked with everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio and Barbra Streisand to Martin Scorsese.

Thirty years after making his debut, John Cusack is still a Hollywood outsider. Now 45, the star of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven talks about mortality, his Brat Pack past – and why he wishes he could work a room

John Cusack is puffing on a fat cigar. It's incongruous, seeing him dressed all in cool, casual black, sucking on a Cohiba, like a goth who has crashed a Hollywood mogul's house party. "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't mention the cigar," he says. "I don't want people to think I'm this movie cliche. I'm certainly not a mogul – in fact, nothing could be further from the truth."

I don't think there's any danger of Cusack being mistaken for a movie mogul. But the cigar begins to feel somehow appropriate. The more he smokes it, the more at ease he becomes with it, until he owns that damn cigar and waggles it like a spare,...

Karen Gillan and Stephen Fry are among the stars who will feature in Sky Arts' series of programmes celebrating the works of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. The In Love With series, which will air in February and March, will feature stars of stage and screen performing readings of the authors and playwrights' finest works. Miriam Margolyes, Simon Callow, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Douglas Booth will pay tribute to Dickens. Doctor Who's Gillan - who will tackle the voiceover from Brief Encounter - Patricia Hodge, Celia Imrie, Robert Sheehan and Sheila (more)...

New stage and film adaptations of The Great Gatsby attest to Scott Fitzgerald's enduring brilliance and his relevance to our boom and bust age

In one of his most famous and personal obiter dicta, F Scott Fitzgerald once bitterly observed: "There are no second acts in American lives." The author of The Great Gatsby, arguably the supreme American novel of the 20th century, knew what he was talking about.

Few writers have ever enjoyed a more brilliant first act. Fitzgerald's 1925 debut was sensational in a way that's only possible in a feverish, self-inventing society such as the Us. This Side of Paradise was a first novel whose language, characters and attitude haunted the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald's phrase) like a hit song. A five-year creative spree followed, culminating in the book originally titled "Trimalchio in West Egg". As The Great Gatsby, it was a novel that had awestruck critics, led by the young Ts Eliot,...

'I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor'

'Dickens was the most gorgeous person you could possibly meet. He was just amazingly affable. Your day would be absolutely made if you bumped into Dickens. More than that, he possessed the power to make you funnier and more attractive. He would laugh so generously that he actually empowered you. What a gift. No wonder that even during his lifetime people knew he was one of the immortals."

Simon Callow is explaining a lifelong fascination that has led him to write about Charles Dickens, to adapt his work, and to play the man – twice in episodes of Doctor Who alone – as well as his characters on both stage and screen. It is an engagement that reaches something of a culmination next year with the Dickens bicentenary, when Callow will publish a new book about...

Prolific author Peter Ackroyd talks to Euan Ferguson about his monumental six-part history of England

For anyone struggling to summon the self-discipline and due diligence to write even one book, a visit to Peter Ackroyd's first-floor Bloomsbury flat could prompt a month's worth of guilty nightmares, the comparison between his workload and those of lesser mortals being so instantly, odiously obvious.

He's sitting in what looks like his library but isn't really: every book on these wall-to-wall shelves is being employed in researching the second volume of his latest venture, which is nothing less than an entire history of England. Before him, beside his computer, sits a long, fat, neat row of books on Charlie Chaplin, which catches my eye. "Oh yes, I'm also doing a short biography of Chaplin. Well, maybe not so short. He's fascinating. I just thought I'd have a go at him."

He's short of time,...

I have a dream. It's an old dream, and probably not likely to become reality soon, if ever; but I cherish it enough to share it with those of you who may share my love of Victoriana in general and the work of Charles Dickens in particular.

Just once, I would like to see the vast and genuinely alien realms of the Victorian age given the same care and attention in movies that the rustic environments of Tolkien have enjoyed - and, with the forthcoming Hobbit movies, will continue to enjoy - over the past decade. If I concentrate on the works of Dickens in this regard, it's because I am a fan, and because these works have not only become iconographic in regards to the modern conception of the 19th century, but also share with Tolkien and other fantasy authors a truly unique and surreal flavour. And this combines...

DVD Playhouse December 2010

By

Allen Gardner

America Lost And Found: The Bbs Story (Criterion) Perhaps the best DVD box set released this year, this ultimate cinefile stocking stuffer offered up by Criterion, the Rolls-Royce of home video labels, features seven seminal works from the late ‘60s-early ‘70s that were brought to life by cutting edge producers Bert Schneider, Steve Blauner and director/producer Bob Rafelson, the principals of Bbs Productions. In chronological order: Head (1968) star the Monkees, the manufactured (by Rafelson, et al), American answer to the Beatles who, like it or not, did make an impact on popular culture, particularly in this utterly surreal piece of cinematic anarchy (co-written by Jack Nicholson, who has a cameo), which was largely dismissed upon its initial release, but is now regarded as a counterculture classic. Easy Rider (1969) is arguably regarded as the seminal ‘60s picture, about two hippie drug dealers (director Dennis Hopper...