BOOK TO BLOCKBUSTER

CRUELLA DISNEY+, 28 MAY

Dodie Smith’s beguiling 1956 novel The Hundred

And One Dalmatians yielded one of the great villains of children’s literature: the fur-obsessed Cruella de Vil. Emma Stone (right) takes the title role here, Emma Thompson co-stars as fashionista Baroness von Hellman, and promisingly the director is

Craig Gillespie, who had a hit with his 2017 film I, Tonya, about an iceskating feud.

PETERRABBIT2 CINEMAS, 21 MAY

Blending CGI and live action, the first

Peter Rabbit film did great business in 2018, making a sequel inevitable. James

Corden again gives voice to Peter (right, with his cousin

Benjamin), with

Margot Robbie and Elizabeth Debicki as his sisters Flopsy and Mopsy, and Rose Byrne as Bea, the live-action character loosely based on the book’s author Beatrix Potter.

DEATH ON THE NILE CINEMAS, 17 SEPTEMBER

Agatha Christie wrote the book in 1937, inspired by her expeditions with archaeologist husband Max Mallowan. This is Kenneth Branagh’s second Christie following 2017’s Murder On The Orient

Express, and he again plays Hercule Poirot

(right) alongside an eclectic cast including Gal Gadot,

Annette Bening,

Dawn French and Jennifer

Saunders.

DUNE CINEMAS, 1 OCTOBER

Frank Herbert’s monumental 1965 sci-fi novel about the battle for control of the desert planet Arrakis was long considered

‘unfilmable’, and

David Lynch’s 1984 movie didn’t exactly undermine the notion.

Now director Denis

Villeneuve is having a go, in two parts.

This year sees the first instalment with

Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée

Chalamet (right) among the stellar cast.