The passionate allegory on Stalinism is outrageously reduced to happy-ending panto in this defanged animation featuring the voices of Seth Rogen, Laverne Cox and Glenn Close

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is not a sacred text. There’s no rule that says it can’t be changed in adaptation, especially if, say, you wanted to add some historical perspective from the world that came to exist after the book was published in 1945. But this unforgivably sugary animation from screenwriter Nicholas Stoller and director Andy Serkis, as well as having a pretty cheapo digital look, betrays Orwell by outrageously blandifying and defanging its classic allegory of Stalinism and failed revolution with a dumb happy ending in the Disney style.

The pivotal moment when the pigs and the humans look the same happens not at the end, but around the one-hour stage into a 94-minute film, signalling that a new third act is in the offing. I was initially intrigued, wondering if there would be some ingenious finale in which a wall on the farm is knocked down. But no. The evil pig Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen with many a yuk-yuk-yuk) has eliminated his rival Snowball (Laverne Cox), then gobbles up corrupt human money from a newly invented agribusiness corporate character from the human world called Pilkington (Glenn Close) and takes to addressing his followers with the aid of a Big Brother-style giant screen.

From frontline reporting to a trailblazing comic novel and a prophetic dystopia, which of Eric Blair’s books is the best?

Imagination was not George Orwell’s forte. In each novel the protagonist is to some extent an Orwell surrogate doing things that Orwell did in places where Orwell had been. Here, somewhat unconvincingly, the author’s representative is a repressed young woman, Dorothy Hare, who loses her memory, identity and faith. Orwell considered it “tripe” except for the dream-like, polyphonic chapter where Dorothy sleeps rough in Trafalgar Square – a fascinating legacy of his youthful infatuation with James Joyce.

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Raoul Peck’s film about the Nineteen Eighty-Four novelist makes a compelling case for its continuing relevance but could ask more searching questions about its author

Raoul Peck’s documentary about George Orwell and his enduring relevance takes as its keynote the heretical masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four and its famous scene about the state compelling people to believe whatever it says is the truth: that two and two make five. That Orwellian anti-arithmetic of tyranny has become a political meme often repeated in social media debates about gender politics, although these are not mentioned here, perhaps because they are not considered sufficiently important. This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

The simple experience of hearing Orwell’s prose, both from his published work and letters and diaries, read aloud by Damian Lewis, is invigorating and refreshing. There’s an interesting emphasis on Orwell’s physical frailty, with him effectively composing his masterwork in the shadow of death. It was written, as he put it, “under the influence of tuberculosis”. That such a fierce, muscular, assertive book should be conceived under this influence is a startling thought, and Peck amusingly juxtaposes Orwell’s sickness with Winston Smith being made to do exercises and the infatuation of tyrannical regimes with public displays of physical fitness. Perhaps it is truer to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four was written under the influence of cigarettes and their unregretted consequences.

The Haitian director was given unprecedented access to George Orwell’s archives – and found a fellow crusader for truth. His extraordinary new film highlights the sinister links between Big Brother, Trump and Putin

‘I must admit,” says Raoul Peck from his book-lined Parisian apartment, “George Orwell was not top of my list of authors who I thought would fit my current view of the world.” That view – anti-imperialist, intellectually curious and fiercely independent – has been shaped by an extraordinary life. Born in Haiti, Peck grew up under the notoriously violent Duvalier regimes, before his family fled in 1961. He was variously educated in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, then New York and Orléans in France before moving to Berlin, where he studied industrial engineering and economics. He spent a year as a New York taxi driver and five as a journalist and photographer, before getting his film degree in Berlin in 1988. In 2010, he was made chair of the French state film school.

He is best known for his dramas and documentaries, which often zoom in on his intellectual heroes. He has profiled Patrice Lumumba, the DRC’s first leader; shot a drama about the friendship of the young Engels and Marx, the crucible that created communism; created a tender portrait of South African photographer Ernest Cole; and won a Bafta for his 2017 documentary about the writer James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro. In 2021, he made Exterminate All the Brutes, a four-part TV series about colonisation and ethnic cleansing. His 2005 film Sometimes in April dramatised and explored the Rwandan genocide. No one – with the possible exception of Adam Curtis – has consistently interrogated big ideas and the structures that shape our world in a more inventive and probing way.

From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?

This year marks 100 years since the first demonstration of television in London. Elizabeth II sent the first royal email in 1976. The first meeting of the Lancashire Association of Change Ringers took place in 1876. All notable anniversaries. But I’m going with 2026 as the 85th anniversary of a great short story: Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). It’s about chance, labyrinths and an impossible novel. Ts’ui Pên, an ancestor of the narrator, sets himself the task of writing a novel with a cast of thousands: “an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time”. In most novels, when a character reaches a fork in the path, they must choose: this way, or that way. Yet in Ts’ui Pên’s novel, all possible paths are chosen. This creates “a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times”. The garden of forking paths is infinite.

It’s often said that Borges’s story foreshadows the multiverse hypothesis in quantum physics – first proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957, then popularised by Bryce DeWitt in the 1970s as the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In a 2005 essay, The Garden of the Forking Worlds, the physicist Alberto Rojo investigated this claim. Did the physicists read Borges? Or did Borges read the universe? It turned out that Bryce DeWitt hadn’t known about Borges’s garden. When Rojo questioned Borges, he also denied everything: “This is really curious,” he said, “because the only thing I know about physics comes from my father, who once showed me how a barometer works.” He added: “Physicists are so imaginative!”