Spotlight starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams and directed by Tom McCarthy tells the true story of the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize winning "Spotlight" team of investigative journalists, who in 2002 shocked the world by exposing the Catholic Church's systematic cover-up of widespread paedophilia perpetrated by more than 70 local priests. It has six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Booker prize winning novelist Howard Jacobson's new novel, My Name is Shylock, is a retelling of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice - part of a series of Shakespeare-inspired novels by well known writers to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Jacobson challenges the traditional anti-Semitic interpretations of Shakespeare's most performed play.

Academy Award winning director of The Great Beauty Paolo Sorrentino's new film Youth stars Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine, and is set in an elegant hotel in the Swiss Alps. Fred, a composer and conductor, is now retired. Mick, a film director, is still working. They look with curiosity and tenderness on their children's confused lives, Mick's enthusiastic young writers, and the other hotel guests, all of whom, it seems, have all the time that they lack.

Wit is a Pulitzer Prize winning play by American playwright Margaret Edson which opens at Manchester's Royal Exchange with former Coronation Street star Julie Hesmondhalgh. It portrays the final hours of Dr Vivian Bearing, a renowned expert on the work of 17th-century poet John Donne, and who is in hospital dying of ovarian cancer. Edson's first, and only, play, it was inspired by her experience of working on a cancer ward.

And Electronic Superhighway, a landmark exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London that brings together over 100 artworks to show the impact of computer and internet technologies on artists from the mid-1960s to the present day.