The world’s press has descended upon Sochi, home of this year’s Winter Olympics, to discover that you really shouldn’t let former KGB agents with latent sexuality issues to design an international sports centre. Twitter is rife with stories of missing floors, broken doors and filthy water in the official press hotels; although we obviously have zero interest in sports journalism, here are some Hollywood hostelries that, on balance, we’d rather frequent.

The best role model for a girl child is a witch. This is true. Nowhere else in film is so solely the preserve of excellent, kick-ass ladies; no other character trope so thoroughly and utterly dominated by clever, fierce, complicated women who get things done and get them done their way. And they are funny. And they are cool. And they dress well. And they are- some of them- pretty brilliantly evil, proper villains, proper, Halloweeny, haunty villains worth fighting. There’s something to aim for, girl-children, on this Halloween night: be worth fighting. The best role model for a girl child is a witch, and here are five of our favourites.

Harald Zwart, while speaking about his adaptation of young adult fantasy novel The Mortal Instruments, has cited The Exorcist and the original version of The Thing as influences. Zwart says he thinks it’s good for kids to be scared, and I agree to some extent. Children use films to explore feeling. Fear, loss, confusion; they’re all up on screens from the get go. But Zwart’s desire to scare seems too outspoken, too full-frontal for a children’s tale.

Let The Right One In director Tomas Alfredson has taken the helm of the new adaptation of The Brothers Lionheart – frankly, we’re just staggered by the fact that not one but two separate studios have wanted to introduce new generations of kids to Astrid Lindgren’s deeply odd classic. The Wikipedia entry for the first film notes, gravely, that it is “softened a bit [from the book] and does not explicitly show the brothers committing suicide”, which probably tells you all you need to know. In dubious celebration of Alfredson’s odd career choices, we’ve collected ten other children’s books that should never have been committed to celluloid.

We love films. Well, we love most of them. Some of them are only OK, and some of them we’d like to get our greasy paws on and re-cast and re-direct all together. Here are five of them, because ten would have gotten me over-excited and I’d never be able to settle for my nap otherwise.