With 2025 but a distant memory, it’s time to get stuck into a huge year of entertainment. To help with this daunting task, we’ve provided a handy, alphabetised guide to the big releases and trends coming in the next 12 months, from AI’s continued rise to a whole lot of Zendaya

Bad news: the intellectual property equivalent of The Terminator is here to obliterate the concept that the mug who actually wrote something matters somewhat. Better news: cinemas are fighting back against AI with films anxious about the new tech, including Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (13 February), in which a man apparently from the future (Sam Rockwell) wants to warn people about an incoming AI hellscape, followed by The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (title says it all really), from the film-makers behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, in March. Then, later in the year, Luca Guadagnino unveils Artificial, his biopic of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Catherine Bray

Populists rewrite the history of this nation because they were complicit in much of its ugliness. The progressive fightback must start now

A couple of the more disruptive boys in the class put red laces in their Dr Martens, because someone had told them that was how you showed your support for the National Front. “Jew” was an everyday insult and the N-word was in regular circulation. There were no more than four or five non-white kids in the whole school: I can recall one Asian girl finding her art folder had been covered in racist abuse, and some adolescent desperado singling out a black boy for a spoken version of the same treatment, before insisting that his victim was in on the joke. He wasn’t: he looked at the ground and rushed away, full of the hurt he must have felt every day.

This was what it was like in a Cheshire comprehensive school in the early-to-mid-1980s. Teenage racism was there in plain sight, and there was a scattering of people who seemed to take their prejudices – presumably passed down from parents and elder siblings – very seriously indeed. In what is now known as year 7, for example, each class was given a group of “sixth-form counsellors”, meant to show up once or twice a week and encourage ambition and hard work. One of ours was a tense, soft-spoken young man who liberally used racist epithets, backed the National Front and said he wanted to be a policeman. His view of the world, as far as I could tell, was summed up in a chant that a certain sort of playground thug knew by heart: “There ain’t no black in the union jack/Get back, get back, get back.”

A fantasy figure for men and women, a victim of press intrusion, a defender of animals … the French actor was also a mouthpiece for racial hatred whose views grew uglier over time

Brigitte Bardot inspired many fantasies, from the wanton, panting reveries of assorted French auteurs in the 1950s and 60s, to the perky-nippled bust created in 1969 as a model for Marianne, the embodiment of the French Republic itself.

With her death on 28 December, another more contemporary Bardot illusion was shattered. The singer Chappell Roan, responding to Bardot’s passing at 91, posted a photo of the actor in her beehived prime on Instagram, saying she had inspired her song Red Wine Supernova and writing": “Rest in peace Ms Bardot.”

Dystopian warnings once reserved for the far right have found a wider audience – but there are good reasons for scepticism

It is a darkly dystopian vision of Britain’s future, in which tens of thousands die in a bitter civil war in just a few years time.

Yet such forecasts are no longer limited to niche corners of the internet or the X feed of Elon Musk, condemned by Downing Street for claiming that war in Britain was inevitable after the post-Southport rioting.

Rutger Bregman, Josie Long, Michael Rosen, Meera Sodha and others on what they are no longer wasting their time on

Rutger Bregman, author

Your friend fears dependency and wants to regain control. Is there someone you can talk to about your own feelings?

I am in my 80s and an old friend has several health issues. She will probably die in the not too distant future due to the inoperable cancer she has been aware of for some years.

She has two adult children, with domestic and career problems of their own, but she sees them frequently, and I know them both.

President Nicolás Maduro is expected to make an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court on Monday after capture by US forces

• Full report: Trump says US will ‘run’ Venezuela

• Explained: Is there legal justification for the US attack on Venezuela?

Keir Starmer also told the BBC that he thinks we are living in a more “volatile” world than we have been for “many, many years” and said global affairs have much more of a “direct impact” on the UK than they have in a long time, citing the effects of military conflicts and the climate crisis.

Asked if Donald Trump is worsening global turmoil, Starmer dodges the question and speaks about the so-called special relationship between the UK and the US.

The relationship between the US and the UK is one of the closest relationships in the world. It is vitally important for our defence, for our security, for our intelligence.

It is my responsibility to make sure that relationship works as the prime minister of this country, working with the president of the United States. Not only have I stepped up to that responsibility, I have made it my business and I do get on with President Trump.

Venezuelan president accused of running a ‘corrupt’ government fuelled by a drug-trafficking operation that flooded US with cocaine

• Maduro detained in New York after – live updates

A newly unsealed US justice department indictment accuses the captured Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, of running a “corrupt, illegitimate government” fuelled by an extensive drug-trafficking operation that flooded the US with thousands of tons of cocaine.

The arrest of Maduro and his wife in a stunning military operation early on Saturday in Venezuela sets the stage for a major test for US prosecutors as they seek to secure a conviction in a Manhattan courtroom against the longtime leader of the oil-rich South American nation.

Maduro and Chávez used fears of American aggression to tighten their grip on power – but now an even greater fantasist has imposed his will on their country

• Nicolás Maduro jailed in New York – live updates

• The ‘Putinisation’ of US foreign policy has arrived in Venezuela

It was the fever dream of the revolution, a dark fantasy spun so many times – each version wilder than the last – until it almost became a joke: the Yankees are coming.

Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, conjured the scenario again and again, warning that the US president and his henchmen in the CIA and Pentagon were mobilising forces to strike.

Most of the Americas have suffered from interference from their powerful northern neighbour – and are usually the worse off for it

• Maduro detained in New York – live updates

The US bombardment of Venezuela and the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, follow a long history of interventions in South and Central America and the Caribbean over the past two centuries. But they also mark an unprecedented moment as the first direct US military attack on a South American country.

At a press conference after Maduro’s capture, Donald Trump said that “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again”.