The debate about whether violent films cause violent acts has been around for decades.

I have a confession to make: I don’t like Alice in Wonderland. I know, I know, a lot of people disagree. I do appreciate its place in the cultural pantheon – I just find all the caterpillars and tea parties and pointless riddles really, really dull. So it’s hard to be sure if it was the subject matter of Alice, A Virtual Theme Park that left me a little chilly, or its form.

At a point in the early noughties, every third film was a teen comedy about a road trip to lose one's virginity. It’s a genre most were glad to see the back of. What a pleasant surprise Come As You Are is then, which brings much needed heart and relevancy to this tired trope.

Medea is the original crazy ex-girlfriend: the wronged woman who takes perfectly understandable revenge on the man who made her life hell. In Blueprint Medea, a new adaptation premiered at the Finborough Theatre in May 2019 and available on YouTube until 2nd August, writer-director Julia Pascal gives us a 21st-century reworking of Euripides’ tragedy. 

Scooby fans have waited over 50 years for a proper big screen adaptation of everyone’s favourite cowardly dog (sorry Cartoon Network’s Courage). The 2003 live-action version starring Matthew Lillard and Sarah Michelle Gellar failed to capture the paranormal-busting mystery of the TV series, and although the follow-up Monsters Unleashed recreated the classic villains, it was still a slog.

It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.

Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling First World War novel, has been adapted quite a few times in its twenty-seven years.

In her surprisingly self-revealing collection of essays and interviews Frantumaglia (Neapolitan dialect word for a disquieting jumble of ideas), the writer who calls herself Elena Ferrante often ponders the metamorphosis from novel to film.

Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false. 

It’s taken over 18 years for Artemis Fowl to reach the big screen, with Miramax originally buying the rights in 2001. Finally, Disney have brought the world’s youngest criminal mastermind to life, but was it worth the wait? Well, the fact it’s appearing on streaming service Disney+ rather than waiting for a cinematic release probably answers that question.