Watch out for . . .

EMMA THOMPSON (below), who exudes luminosity with a breathtaking performance (so brilliant I saw it twice within 24 hours) as a High Court judge in Richard Eyre’s film The Children Act, which the director made using Ian McEwan’s own adaptation of his novel. It’s a study of betrayal, wisdom, religion, love, and a 17-year-old lad — played with fierce intelligence by Fionn Whitehead (the young newcomer who’s the main focus of Christopher Nolan’s masterful Dunkirk). He and his parents (who, like him, are Jehovah’s Witnesses) are seeking court action to prevent him from being forced to have a life-saving blood transfusion. Meanwhile, Ms Thompson is back in the UK, after visiting Toronto for the film festival, to shoot Johnny English 3 (she plays the Prime Minister). Amusingly — to me, at least — her judge in The Children Act is called . . . Mrs Maye.

ImoGEn PooTs (above, right), who will star in the British premiere of amy Herzog’s super play Belleville, which michael longhurst will direct at the donmar Warehouse. dates haven’t been fixed yet, but the word is it could be running from december 7 until February 3. ms Poots, who was in Toronto for screenings of her latest film I Kill Giants, made an auspicious stage debut in the scorching revival of Edward albee’s Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? earlier this year. In Belleville, she plays a young american living in Paris whose marriage is in a precarious state. I remember finding it gripping, but deeply upsetting, when I saw a production four years ago at the new york Theatre Workshop.