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Paranormal Activity

 

Angels & Demons
Tom Hanks & Ewan McGregor in Angels & Demons

On the heels of the 2006 adaptation of Dan Brown's best-seller "The Da Vinci Code," Tom Hanks returns to the dullest role of his career, once again under the direction of Ron Howard, who takes the material as seriously as a kidney stone on the way out.

Every Little Step
Bob Avian & Baayork Lee in Every Little Step

"A Chorus Line" celebrates the itch to perform and the exquisite, control-freaky showmanship that is the Broadway musical at its greatest. You can assess the stage original's influence through this wonderful new documentary, which intercuts the story of how the original 1975 show came together with a step-by-step, fly-on-the-wall account of how the custodians of the recent 2006 Broadway revival came to cast whom they cast and why

 

Star Trek
Chris Pine & Zachary Quinto in Star Trek

The new "Star Trek" seeks to extend a lucrative brand with a young demographic. But it's a real movie -- breathlessly paced bordering on manic, but propulsively entertaining.

The script ping-pongs early on between Iowa and Vulcan, as the destinies of James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) entwine.

 

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Hugh Jackman & Liev Schreiber in X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Here and there you get what you want from an "X-Men" prequel, thanks to the irrepressible Hugh Jackman and several other members of the cast, including Liev Schreiber as Wolverine's nemesis, Sabretooth. But there's a rote quality to the proceedings ...

 

 

IN THEATERS: MOVIE REVIEWS & MOVIE TRAILERS

How Paranormal Activity became a frightening success

Social networking sends $15,000 shocker inspired by Fawlty Towers into box-office hall of fame

There is nothing remotely scary about the beige library in the Soho Hotel. It's calm, quiet, bland. Yet towards the end of a low-key interview with Oren Peli, who's in London for less than 24 hours to promote his smash-hit low-budget horror flick Paranormal Activity, there's a loud creak in the corner of the room and I find myself leaping out of the armchair. Peli sits deep in the sofa. He doesn't move. I think I've been hearing things. Peli simply smiles. He nods; he heard it too.

Weeks after watching Paranormal Activity it's easy to be spooked by every creak, even in the middle of the day. Filmed over seven days and nights in Peli's suburban San Diego house in 2006, Paranormal Activity is a mock documentary in the style of The Blair Witch Project; we watch a young couple set up a video camera in an attempt to discover what exactly is going bump in the night. Doors crash closed, the bed sheets billow, prints are found in the white powder scattered on the polished floor. There is no monster, virtually no blood. There are tantalisingly long moments of silence and static shots are preferred to the usual jerky, handheld frenzy of DIY horror movies. The film looks, sounds and feels very homemade. Yet it's scary as hell.

'There were strange noises at night that made us both jumpy. You know, stuff falling off shelves ...'

Paranormal Activity was made for just $15,000 (it's been reported elsewhere as $10,000 but he reveals, "The overall budget was closer to $15k"). Incredibly, the film's takings have now passed the $100m mark in America. Fans speak proudly of not being able to sleep for a week after seeing it. Some go back for more just to see if they can handle freaking themselves out all over again. Peli looks serious when he says that if Jaws stopped people swimming in the sea and Blair Witch stopped people camping in the woods, then he is pleased that Paranormal Activity is stopping us from sleeping. He shrugs: "It means it's been effective."

Peli – 39, black shirt, black jeans, black trainers, ultra-white socks – looks dazed and distracted. He glugs Coke from a glass bottle and constantly checks the messages streaming into his BlackBerry. He doesn't appear to be thriving on his success; he certainly doesn't look like the writer, director, producer and editor of the most successful budget horror since Blair Witch, which was filmed for $35,000 and made close to $250m. Born in Israel, he moved to America at 19 and became a full-time software designer. Until, that is, his then-girlfriend started to hear strange things in their new San Diego home. "Actually there were strange noises at night that made us both jumpy. You know, stuff falling off shelves ..."

He thought of setting up a video camera in their bedroom, didn't get round to it, and turned the idea into a film. "After seeing Blair Witch and Open Water, I realised that anyone can buy a video camera and start shooting a movie. I thought the basic concept of setting a video camera up at night when you're asleep and vulnerable was pretty scary because it plays on people's primal fear." So he bought a camera for $3,000 and auditioned for two naturalistic actors: first-timers Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat got the job because of their authentic response to Peli's opening question: "How do you think your house is haunted?"

'After The Exorcist I couldn't watch any movie that had anything to do with a haunting or a ghost … even Ghostbusters'

Peli wasn't interested in emulating the "torture porn" of the Saw series. He didn't want blood and gore. He wanted to hint at an invisible but malevolent presence and let the audience's imagination fill in the blanks. He namechecks The Sixth Sense, The Others, Steven Spielberg's 1971 television film Duel and Rosemary's Baby. He then visibly shudders and tugs at his white socks at the mention of The Exorcist. "I saw it when I was 11. It totally freaked me out. After that I couldn't watch any movie that had anything to do with a haunting or a ghost. I was in my mid-teens when Ghostbusters came out and although I knew it was a comedy, I couldn't handle the idea of it. I didn't see another horror film until I was well into my 20s."

As part of his pre-production research, Peli watched horror films – but still not The Exorcist – and endless DVD extras. He talks of being inspired, bizarrely, by Fawlty Towers. "It's one of my all-time favourite TV shows. John Cleese deconstructs the dynamic of Basil and Sybil's relationship, explaining how they have the freedom to say what they like to one another because they've been together for so long. I told Katie and Micah to do the same; usually at the centre of a movie there's a fairytale love story or the emotional drama of a break-up, but I wanted Paranormal Activity to show a realistic relationship put under pressure by freaky things going on in the house."

After an exhausting week-long shoot, Peli spent a year editing the film on his PC. He added the CGI and did the audio mixing. Every few months he'd invite friends and neighbours over for a viewing and respond to their feedback. He was still editing in autumn 2007 when the film was accepted at Screamfest, the small Los Angeles festival for homemade horror. Audience members covered their eyes, cuddled each other, screamed and howled. Peli was relieved.

People started blogging about Paranormal Activity but it didn't have a distributor. Then, over the course of the next 18 months, several things happened to propel the film into the stratosphere. Peli met Jason Blum, a producer who had passed on Blair Witch ten years ago, and Blum got a copy of it to Steven Spielberg. In what is fast becoming either an urban myth, a smart piece of marketing or a scary true story, Spielberg was not only disturbed by the film but also petrified to find a door in his house inexplicably locked from the inside. The DVD was promptly taken away in a bag and Spielberg became one of the film's biggest advocators.

Yet it is Paramount Pictures' online marketing department who've galvanised the grass-roots frenzy around the film in America. In a move inspired by the web-based marketing that helped Blair Witch become a hit, they gave Paranormal Activity fans the unique opportunity to bring the film to their local cinema by clicking a "Demand It" button both on Facebook and on the film's own website. A "Tweet your scream" campaign was launched. Unsettling footage of fans screaming at a Paranormal Activity screening is all over the internet. After just five weekends in America, the film is now the top-grossing R-rated thriller of the decade.

Is Peli concerned that the marketing of Paranormal Activity might become more important than the film itself? "The two are interlinked," he says, with another shrug. "The marketing automatically relied on the fact that people would see the movie, enjoy it and tell their friends. Without word of mouth the film would have done nothing."

He dismisses the potential harm of hype and says he'd always go and watch a movie with an interesting story attached to it "just out of curiosity".

The co-writers/directors of Blair Witch have yet to repeat their success of a decade ago. What of Peli? Did he just have one good, simple idea? He is cagey about his next project, Area 51, allegedly filming in Utah with a budget of $5m: "Sorry, I don't like to talk about any future projects."

He swigs his Coke and stifles a yawn: "As soon as I get the chance, I want to take a long, long vacation." For now, however, his life is taken up with promoting Paranormal Activity around the world and finding out just how many people can no longer sleep at night.

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The second outing of John Hurt

He got his big break playing Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and now, 34 years later, John Hurt is at it again

There's something disturbing about John Hurt. That familiar Mount Rushmore face seems to have ironed itself out. It was once compared to a komodo dragon – even his lines seemed to have lines – but today he looks peachy as a schoolboy. You've been on the Botox, haven't you? He roars with how-dare-you laughter. "Nah! Hahahaha! No. Don't say that. That would be awful. Not in a million years would I do that." He's got a point: take away the cracks and creases, and his job prospects would diminish no end. His face is one of the most distinctive in the movies. Almost as distinctive as his voice, dripping with honey and acid, often at the same time. Look, he admits, there might well be a reason for his fresh-faced appearance – he has led a more restrained life in recent years. He sips his coffee. Only coffee these days. "Yesssss, it got to a state where it was quite bashed up."

Hurt, 69, has just returned to the role that made his name – Quentin Crisp. It's 34 years since he first played the gay icon in Jack Gold's film The Naked Civil Servant. It was an unforgettable performance in one of the great TV dramas – all louche defiance, feline elegance, catty wit and understated loneliness. Crisp became a celebrity after the film, Hurt became a star.

Crisp once said, "I told Mr Hurt it was difficult for actors to play victims, but he has specialised in victims. When he stopped playing me, he played Caligula, which was only me in a sheet. Then he played The Elephant Man, which was only me with a paper bag over his head." Crisp had a point – Hurt has a formidable line in victims: as the stuttering, schlurping, hideously deformed John Merrick in The Elephant Man, he is heartbreaking ("I amb dot an elephant! I amb dot an adimal! I amb a human being! I amb a man!"); as prematurely wizened Winston Smith in the adaptation of Orwell's 1984, he provides a terrifying portrait of paranoia. In the movie Scandal, about the Profumo affair, he plays the caddish osteopath Stephen Ward with a cackling charm that makes it so much more painful when the world closes in on him. One of his favourite roles is Giles De'Ath in the adaptation of Gilbert Adair's Love And Death On Long Island – an ageing gay author humiliatingly obsessed with a young man.

Although Hurt featured in A Man For All Seasons as far back as 1966, one of his first leading roles came in 1971 in 10 Rillington Place, alongside Richard Attenborough's unctuous psychopath John Christie. Hurt is brilliant as Timothy Evans – a Welshman hanged in 1950 for murdering his daughter, then posthumously pardoned. Hurt's Evans first appears as a wife-beating, Jack-the-lad fantasist – a character for whom we have zero sympathy. As the film progresses, Hurt cracks up, his face dissolves into a cascade of snot and tears, his skin becomes so pale it's almost translucent, and his thuggish abuser morphs into the ultimate victim. It's a devastating performance. On second thoughts, perhaps Hurt's executive officer Kane in Alien is the ultimate victim – Kane is the host for the alien, and dies when the phallic monstrosity bursts from his chest.

It was in 1975 that he first played Quentin Crisp, a man every bit as queenly as Timothy Evans had been brutish. "It changed the business's perception of me as a performer. It was what you call a big break. I was warned not to do it – they said you'll never work again, it was such a dodgy subject at the time."

But Hurt, director Jack Gold and writer Philip Mackie were determined the project would go ahead. "We'd sworn, like the Three Musketeers, that if we got this going, we'd drop everything and make it. Well, suddenly Verity Lambert took it up with Jeremy Isaacs at Thames Television, and we had to drop everything. I was supposed to be going to New York with Tom Stoppard's play Travesties and the director, Peter Wood, tore strips off me. Those were the days when directors were directors – they were big beasties. He said, 'How dare you take a poxy little English television instead of a third lead on Broadway.' I said, 'I'm terribly sorry, but I don't think it is a poxy little English television. I think it's a terrific piece, and I have to do this.'"

In An Englishman In New York, Hurt plays the older Crisp who emigrates to America in his 70s. Like the younger Crisp, he's a supremely complex character. After decades of being taunted in London, he finds himself ecstatically liberated in an anything-goes New York that embraces his wit and exhibitionism. But things gradually sour. The dandy bohemian, who had been regarded as a radical in an era when homosexuality was still fiercely closeted, comes to be seen as a reactionary by New York's politicised gay community. In a world where gay men are out and proud and sexually belligerent, Crisp talks of his homosexuality as a curse and Aids as a fad. Not surprisingly, it doesn't go down well.

Hurt's performance is, once again, superbly nuanced. Crisp is both of his time and a relic, an adored showman and loveless loner, as infuriating as he is admirable. More than anything, Hurt conveys the cruelties of old age for a man who had prided himself on his youthful beauty – the shoes that pinch so tight he can't walk, the arthritis and the thinning, shoulder-length hair wrapped pitifully round his head to give the impression that age has not withered him.

When Hurt was asked to reprise the role, he was tempted to reject it: "My first instinct was to let sleeping dogs lie." But then he read the script, written by Brian Fillis, liked it, and got the Crisp bug all over again. He'd spent so many years with Crisp in one way or another, it would have been perverse to let somebody else play him. After all, for so many people, John Hurt is Quentin Crisp.

Although Hurt's life has been so different from Crisp's, there were similarities and overlaps. After Grimsby School of Art he went to St Martins school of art, where he painted Crisp who modelled nude for the students – not that he knew who Crisp was back then. At the same time, he hung around many of the same Soho haunts as Crisp had done all those years earlier. And, like Crisp, for much of his life he felt he didn't belong.

Another new film gives more clues to Hurt's nature. In Jim Jarmusch's The Limits Of Control, Hurt plays Guitar, a travelling philosopher from the university of babbling nonsense. Beautifully shot, great music, dreamy cast (Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Gael García Bernal), the only problem is the story. There isn't one. Sure, it's about a hit man, but that's all we learn. In fact, we probably learn more about Hurt from his 90-second cameo than we do about any of the characters. Jarmusch hand-picked him to play the roving bohemian rasping about the origins of Bohemia.

Yes, Hurt says, bohemian is an important word for him. "If I was going to affiliate myself to any lifestyle, it would be along that way." What does bohemian mean? "It's to beat the middle-class mentality, isn't it, really? That's what you're allying yourself with." That was important to him? "It was huge. I was brought up in the manse. I didn't feel I ever fitted there – if you can fit there. You're automatically an outsider if you're the son of a vicar."

Hurt came from a family of working-class high achievers. His father studied maths at Cambridge before becoming an Anglican clergyman; his mother was a draughtswoman. He had a good sense of humour, but was strict and dogmatic; she was aspirational and didn't like young John playing with the "common" local children. Hurt felt stifled by the attitudes, the godliness, the smallness of their lives. The second world war had turned everything on its head – after all the destruction and austerity, Hurt belonged to a new generation that wanted to experiment and create.

At eight he moved from Derbyshire to a boarding school in Kent where he discovered acting. He was unusually pretty, showed an aptitude, and got to play some of the great female leads.

By 16, he was bored with school, had given up on God and was headed for art school. His new-found agnosticism would have caused ructions in the family were it not for the fact that his older brother Michael had created a far bigger shock wave by joining the Catholic church. "That was the blackest day in the family history ever; that was my brother joining the Antichrist. It acted as a complete smokescreen to my agnosticism, so I got away with it." His brother went on to become a monk at Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, then left the order and fathered three children, before returning as Brother Anselm.

It was at St Martins that Hurt got his introduction to London's bohemians. He frequented the Colony Room, the famously dissipated private drinking club, and befriended Francis Bacon. Hurt still paints today, and starts to mumble and rub his hands together when I ask what his paintings are like. "I, erm, ummm, I'm not sure where it's going to lead. They are figurative, but not in a naturalistic way. I hate describing them." He smiles. "I'm still finding my way with paint."

Hurt doesn't much like talking about himself. But, boy, does he like to talk. He adores conversation. That's his big thing, these days. So he talks about art. The trouble is, he says, ever since Picasso, art has been primarily about ideas rather than the end product. "Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don't think he painted a masterpiece."

And he talks about the relationship between science and godlessness. "Of the last 100 Nobel prize winners for physics, only one was a Christian, all the rest were atheists." What a weird fact to know, I say. He laughs. "I'm interested... It's something Richard Dawkins brings into his book The God Delusion." Hurt so wanted to agree with Dawkins, but found him every bit as dogmatic as his father had been, only in the other direction. "I liked his early books, then when I read The God Delusion, I thought, you're making a huge mistake, you're being so strident and you can't back it up. I kept thinking, you haven't proved a thing, and you're going on about science having to have the proof. We still don't know what the business of life is, and I'm perfectly happy not to know."

And he talks about how cultures constantly evolve, and how Britain has changed in his time. Now punk, he says, here was a movement he could understand . Before that all the youth movements were idealistic, even rose-tinted, but not punk. "Its philosophy was totally two fingers up to everything, fuck you. You don't want us, fuck you, too, bollocks. Well, we don't want you too. 'I did it maaaaaaaaaa way.'" He spits a decent impression of Sid Vicious. "That was enormously significant to me. Punk recognised the fact that the establishment had no room. There's no point in saying you've got the establishment wrong because they hadn't got the establishment wrong, they'd got it absolutely dead on." He's fabulous when he gets into grumpy old anarchist mode. But even then he wrong-foots you a moment later by saying he has a soft spot for the Lib Dems.

Somehow, he says, the world seems so much more conservative and timorous than it was. Take drink. "What worked in the early 60s certainly wouldn't work now and what works now certainly wouldn't have worked in the early 60s. We were crawling away from the gargantuan horror that was the second world war and getting into an area where you could be creative again in the 60s. I think Peter O'Toole put it well. He said the thing about alcohol at that time was we didn't drink for the sake of drink, we drank to channel it for some­ thing else." Really? "It was true. It created a kind of excitement, a platform of excitement from which there was a huge amount of artistic energy."

And is alcohol still used creatively? "No, I don't think so. I don't think anything comes out of it that is positive. Everything's changed. Go to a meal at lunchtime and you see one glass of wine over there and one glass of wine over here. In the 60s, there would have been so many bottles and God knows what going on. It was a different way of approaching it all. If you approached it that way now, you'd be considered an old joke. Fuck off, they'd say."

Hurt knows what he's talking about when it comes to drink. He was famous for it – even acquired a reputation as a drunk and a hell-raiser. But, he says, it wasn't justified. "No, some of my friends were. O'Toole was a friend of mine, he was a hell-raiser, but I wasn't. And Richard Harris, he was, too." The Irish crew. Hurt was a little upset recently when his past was explored in the television show Who Do You Think You Are? and it was revealed that he didn't actually have Irish ancestry as he'd always assumed.

However much he protests, he wasn't always as quiet as he likes to think. In 2004 he was thrown out of the lap-dancing club Spearmint Rhino for being abusive to staff. On reflection, he says, he never considered himself a proper drunk. "No, because I had a fail-safe. I always had work to save me, and I worked throughout." Did he get bored with the lifestyle? "Errrrrmmmm, yes. Yes. Yeah. Actually, it became unpleasant." It or him? "Well, it and me, I guess."

The drinking was only part of a somewhat turbulent private life. Hurt has always believed in the institution of marriage. So much so that he's married four times. Is it because he's an incurable romantic or has a high boredom threshold? He rubs his hands again and says things are never quite so simple. "If life were that easy to dissect... I don't think it is, do you? I don't think you can say I've got the seven-year hoo-hoo-hoo and I can't get past that. I think it's so complicated, the whole of it."

Obligingly, he provides a mini guided tour of each marriage. "The first time I was very young and it was a disaster. The second time I didn't want to get married for ages because I lived with Marie-Lise for 16 years and she was killed in a riding accident." It was 1983 when he and his partner, the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, were out riding in Oxfordshire. His horse bolted, she went after it but lost her stirrup and landed on her head. Her death was hugely traumatic for Hurt. "That was a long, big, productive relationship with swings and roundabouts. It was upsy-downsies and sideways and this and that. Kicking against it, and loving it, and all sorts... All of that... That was brought to an end and I married on the rebound. It was a nonsensical thing to do. But as I say, you can only see things from retrospect. At the time it seemed to be correct."

Marriage number three, to Jo Dalton, provided him with his two sons (Sasha, 19, and Nick, 16). And four years ago he married film producer Anwen Rees-Myers. Has he got it right this time? "Yes, I seem to have done. Or maybe she did."

Does life seem more sober, in every sense, now he's stopped drinking? His eyes light up. "Nonononono, anything but," he says in a giddy blur. "I feel more electrified by life than I did ever. I don't miss any of that at all. You could say that's age, but I don't know that it is." What electrifies him most? "Conversation. The business of living. Work still excites me."

Would he have liked to have been a painter? "I'd rather have been an actor. I like entertaining. I adore it. I feel I'm in the right place. Without question." As far back as he can remember, he entertained. "I improvised, then I was put into school plays. I played girls cos it was a boys' school and I was quite pretty and had a very high voice. But it didn't worry me whether it was a girl, boy or beastie. It didn't make any difference to me. I had huge fun playing girls. I played Lady Bracknell when I was 16. Not many people get the chance of playing one of the great female parts as a man at 16. It was forrrrrrmidable to play."

Perhaps it's revisiting Quentin Crisp that has made him think so much of the past. Hurt kept in touch with Crisp until he died in 1999. Both were aware of the strangely symbiotic relationship – Hurt had made Crisp famous, Crisp had made Hurt famous. This time round there was an added poignancy: Hurt is almost the same age as the Crisp he plays at the start of An Englishman In New York. "You have to treat it more introvertedly, softer. He's older. It's a lot to do with age." It's not the older Crisp's glamour or celebrity that has remained with Hurt so much as his loneliness. "He refused, just refused, to let anyone be that close to him. It was an impossible situation for him. As he says, the great dark man syndrome – what you wish and what you long for is not a possibility." Crisp dreamed of love with the right man, but thought it an impossibility. If anything, returning to Crisp has made Hurt grateful for the way things have worked out for him in later years. He's never been quite so close to contentment.

It's funny that, despite all the women in his life, he is probably still best remembered for his portrayal of a gay man. "Oh yes," he says, "everybody thought I was gay anyway."

Was he ever tempted that way? "To be gay? I don't think you can be. You know what you fancy, don't you?" Has he ever dabbled? "Oooooooh," he says with an outlandishly stretched syllable. "How do you answer it? I think I went through what could be called a classic Greek cycle, from monosexuality to homosexuality to heterosexuality. The homosexual stage was at school. It was masturbatory, not penetratory, if that's a word." Did it go on into adult life? "No, it stopped dead, absolutely dead, when I left school. Extraordinary. The cycle of life is lemonade and boys, to beer and fast cars, to whisky and women, and finishing up with port and boys. So I don't know..." He stops to consider that final stage, and grins. "I think my wife might have something to say about that, don't you?"

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The view: John Woo's departure from Hollywood is a loss to us all

Once hailed as the man to shake up Hollywood, the maestro of dizzying, exquisitely choreographed action movies has returned to the far east

Let's say from the start that the life of a major league film-maker, with a thriving career in several corners of the globe, is not one to be sniffed at. That said, it's hard not to feel some small twinge of fellow feeling for John Woo, Hong Kong's onetime bullet-spraying master of the action genre. You may not have heard his name for some time but he was, in the early years of this soon to be ex-decade, still being spoken of as the dominant force of the film industry's future. "The most influential director making movies today," The New York Times called him back in 2002, adding, "Woo embodies the globalising forces that have shaped motion pictures in the last two decades."

Which makes it all the more poignant to witness how his star has dimmed dramatically in the west. To wit, this week sees the US release of his vastly-scaled epic of ancient China, the made-in-Mandarin Red Cliff. In China itself, it broke box-office records. That, however, was almost 18 months ago. In the States, it's now belatedly slipping out in a truncated version that also contains a chunk of its similarly epic sequel – first on a limited run in New York, then the kind of national release schedule typically enjoyed by mumblecore films. Here in Britain, it crept out this summer and attracted warm reviews for its lavish sense of spectacle. However, its box-office performance means it may be some while before a Woo movie sees the inside of a UK cinema again (the one I saw it in was empty but for me and two men with backpacks).

Depressingly, this is the fate of all manner of foreign language cinema on both sides of the Atlantic. But to find Woo so marginalised is doubly striking given that in another time – not so long ago but a world apart from now – he was the director who was meant to reshape Hollywood. That time was the early 90s, the vehicle a body of work assembled in his native Hong Kong that had already half-revolutionised the action movie: bloody, exquisitely choreographed tableaux of gunplay contained within the dizzying likes of Hard Boiled and The Killer. Then, his profile raised by fond tributes from Scorsese and Tarantino, he was all but borne into Beverly Hills by sedan chair – such was the eagerness of the studios for him to fill the gulf left by the decrepitude of Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It was to be a new age: one in which Hollywood would be regenerated by the energy and imagination of another culture, another country, one that spoke a different language both literally and artistically.

There were not one but two false starts (the generic Hard Target and Broken Arrow, a confused nuclear heist movie involving John Travolta). But by 1997 Woo hit his stride with an awesome panache. The result was Face/Off – the heroically demented tale of an FBI agent and comically venal terrorist whose features are surgically swapped for reasons that cease to matter after about 30 seconds. The movie had Travolta returning opposite Nicolas Cage in what was probably the most inspired moment in the "Before" stage of the latter's career (the one with the good films). Drawing out every ounce of Guignol genius from a script with a premise at once LA-loopy and timeless enough to have come from Chinese legend, Woo realised the brilliant concept of a marriage between Hollywood's steely glitz and the purist grace of his films in Hong Kong. It seemed, in short, to have worked.

Until it didn't. Because after that, in the space of just six years came the series of missteps that served to undo Woo's career in the west. The first, as missteps often do, involved Tom Cruise, with Woo taking the greasy baton of Mission: Impossible 2; the result managed not to make its director look bad so much as (far more damagingly) anonymous. Then there was Windtalkers, his portrait of the US army's second world war Navajo "code talkers" (or at least their guardianship by Nicolas Cage). Fleetingly beautiful, more often dreary, its attempt at broadening its director's range ended up attracting criticism over the relegation of its Navajo characters to supporting players. That, and losing an estimated $60m.

If that was a long drop to come back from, his next project cut the guide rope completely. Paycheck, a woeful Philip K Dick adaption that starred a "Bennifer"-era Ben Affleck, was the kind of film that serves only to act as a punchline in an episode of Family Guy. From there, the only path left open for Woo was the one he took – out of the studio lots, and back to Asia. He has now recast himself as a maker of monumental historical epics for audiences in Beijing and Shanghai. There is of course a far worse fate for a director than to be hugely popular in modern China. But still, you can't help but wonder if Woo occasionally broods on what might have been. Or do the same yourself at the now lost idea of ultra-mainstream Hollywood being shaped by a man inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville and The Wizard of Oz, not Michael Bay and McG.

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A Serious Man: 'The Coens' most personal film to date'

Reel review: The comedy that takes the Coen brothers back to their roots is slick, funny and gloriously misanthropic, but Xan Brooks finds it hard to love

Working Title renews Johnny English's licence

The UK-based film company plans a sequel to the 2003 Rowan Atkinson-starring spy spoof, as well as a new adaptation of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Bad news for anyone who thought that Johnny English's licence had been revoked. The Guardian can exclusively reveal that the bumbling British spy is set for another mission, with Rowan Atkinson in talks to reprise his role from the 2003 comedy.

The Johnny English sequel forms part of a raft of new projects from the UK-based film company Working Title, explained chairman Tim Bevan. Also in the pipeline from the firm behind such global hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and Notting Hill is a film version of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, to be directed by the Swedish director Tomas Alfredson from a script by Peter Morgan. Alfredson won rave reviews earlier this year for his 80s-set vampire drama Let the Right One In.

The original Johnny English offered an energetic spoof of the James Bond franchise, casting Atkinson as an accident-prone British agent. The hero was partly based on a character Atkinson played in a series of TV commercials for Barclays bank in the 1990s, though it also contained aspects of Mr Bean, Atkinson's most famous comic creation.

Johnny English opened to largely scathing reviews in the summer of 2003, with the Observer's Philip French dubbing it "an unnecessary, pointless Bond parody" and the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw accusing it of cynically targeting "a Mr Bean-style audience in lucrative foreign territories".

If so, it seemed to work. Johnny English went on to earn upwards of $160m (£96.5m) in cinemas across the world.

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Will Ferrell tops Hollywood's most overpaid list

The star of Elf and Anchorman zooms up from No 9 last year in the Forbes annual list on account of the box-office disappointment of this summer's Land of the Lost

A year is a long time in Hollywood. This time 12 months ago, Will Ferrell was sitting pretty as one of America's most bankable comic actors, renowned for his pitch-perfect impression of George W Bush. Today there is a new man in the White House and Ferrell has just been named as the industry's most overpaid star.

Ferrell, 42, topped the Forbes annual list of overpaid Hollywood actors, shooting up from No 9 in last year's rankings largely on account of his flop film Land of the Lost, which failed to recoup its $100m (£60m) budget.

Britain's Ewan McGregor finished in second place. His latest film, Amelia, has so far earned just $13.3m from a budget of $40m.

Forbes compiled its list by offsetting the financial performance of a film against the salary paid to its featured actor. It is estimated that Ferrell makes up to $20m a picture. However, Forbes claims that his films now earn back only $3.29 for every $1 paid into his bank account. By contrast, the films of Shia LeBeouf – reportedly the world's most bankable star – earn a $160 return on every dollar spent on him.

Other stars who featured in the top 10 include Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy and Leonardo DiCaprio. Drew Barrymore was the only woman on the list, placing at No 7. This suggests that female actors are currently providing better value than their male counterparts. The 2008 hall of shame contained six women in the top 10 and was headed by Nicole Kidman.

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Film Weekly: Romola Garai and The Twilight Saga: New Moon

This week Film Weekly goes from Britain on the eve of the second world war with Stephen Poliakoff's Glorious 39, to the American midwest in the 60s with the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, to the fangtastical environs of contemporary Washington state in The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

First up, Jason Solomons meets rising star Romola Garai, who adds to an impressive CV (Atonement, Angel, Vanity Fair) by appearing in almost every scene in Glorious 39, a conspiracy thriller based on true events in Chamberlain's government. She tells Jason how the film plays with the nature of the truth and why it's the "twisted sister" to her breakthrough film I Capture the Castle, plus how she can never live down Dirty Dancing 2.

Xan Brooks then joins Jason to review the week's key releases: the Coen brothers' fascinating, brilliantly acted A Serious Man, Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh's "too clever" The Informant! and the film that teen girls everywhere have been waiting for, The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

Finally, Jason finds out all about the London Children's film festival from young festival ambassador Jubir Hussain and Barbican film programmer Robert Ryder. The festival, now in its fifth year, opens on Saturday with Hayao "Spirited Away" Miyazaki's Ponyo and will be on until 29 November. Jubir, who is 13 and from Redbridge, particularly recommends The Crocodiles, a German film by Christian Ditter.

On the Pashtun wild west

Sydney nurse Benjamin Gilmour had to win the trust of local tribesmen to make his film, Son of a Lion, about Pashtun identity

If one of the plethora of film award ceremonies had a category for the most insane attempt to make a movie, then those behind Son of a Lion would be the hot favourite to win. The subject matter is difficult enough; a story set in the so-called crucible of terror, on the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, focusing on the Pashtun community, requiring the trust of that community to make the film.

On top of that, it was made for less money than some films spend on catering in a day, and by a nurse from Sydney, Benjamin Gilmour, who had never made a movie before. The film has just started a limited run in Britain, at a time when the country is agonising over its involvement in the conflicts in that region.

After being released abroad, Gilmour's film has won critical acclaim, all the more satisfying given the incredulity of film bosses when they heard his proposal. "How naive I was, cold-calling BBC films, asking them to fund a unit nurse with no directing experience wanting to shoot a feature drama in locations even BBC news crews can't get access to," Gilmour says. "But I pitched it, and they laughed. But I suppose its part of the pleasure mingling at A-list film festival parties with those who once told me I was insane."

The film is set in the town of Darra Adam Khel, in the tribal area of Pakistan. Gilmour did not bother trying to get a permit from the Pakistani government to film, he just turned up in the area. The town hosts gun manufacturing, and almost resembles a place from the American wild west. The locals came to trust him, and became the actors in the film: "I was moving freely in areas a foreign soldier would have lasted less than a few minutes. This would not have been possible without the protection of the tribes. I don't think I was crazy, brazen perhaps, but not crazy."

The Pashtuns saw the project as a way to tell their story and improve their image in the west, which has been tarnished by association with terrorism and radicalism. For Gilmour, he learned not just how to make a film, but how to work with a proud people. The Pashtuns themselves came up with the dialogue: "I realised early on, while trying to direct this film that Pashtuns, in fact, cannot be directed. They can certainly be negotiated with, reasoned with, but never told what to do. When I tried this in my first week of shooting, resistance was immediate."

Relying on the Pashtuns to come up with the script led to some comedy moments in the film. There is a great barbershop scene where the men refer to their beards as their "al-Qaidas". The way the film and script developed help deliver a movie that while accessible to western audiences, has an authentic and nuanced Pashtun voice, says Gilmour: "Son of a Lion may romanticise the Pashtuns to a degree, but it does not romanticise radicalism. With this film I wanted to make clear the difference between Pashtun culture and Islam. Pashtuns have historically considered themselves Pashtun first and Muslim second."

The film centres on a boy, Niaz, whose father wants him to continue in the family gun-making business. Niaz, with support from his uncle, wants an education, believing that gives him the best chance of a better life. "Considering all we seem to get in the news is anti-Pashtun, those involved in Son of a Lion saw the making of this film as a way of showing the world a slice of life in the tribal belt," Gilmour says. "In the midst of intense Pakistani propaganda on one side and Taliban propaganda on the other, the Pashtuns are clutching at opportunities to regain ground for the culture on the verge of its obliteration."

Son of a Lion is screening at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford, on Sunday, then tours. sonofalion.com

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Michael Keaton: 'There's a price to pay for making your own choices'

He used to be Beetlejuice and Batman. Now Michael Keaton is a first-time director and a contented man

Michael Keaton is standing in the middle of his London hotel room, transfixed by the widescreen television before him. He holds out the remote control as if he's offering a gift to the gods. The volume goes up, the volume goes down. The image freezes, then fast-forwards. The urge to wrest the handset from him and take charge is overwhelming, and lasts at least until you remember the fabled Keaton temper. ("I'm a good thrower," he once said. "And kicker.") But his doddery behaviour in the face of technology is endearing. Eventually, he hits on the scene he was hunting for. "Wait, you gotta see this," he says breathlessly. "Listen, you hear that song? Oh, man. That's the one we wanted to use but it was too expensive."

The film that's monopolising his attention is The Merry Gentleman, a romance of sorts in which he plays a suicidal hit man who falls for a woman recovering from an abusive relationship. It marks Keaton's directorial debut, too, and if his protestations about the minuscule budget are to be believed, he probably dished up the lunchtime chilli into the bargain. The picture's muted feel is matched by Keaton's vanity-free performance. He clearly didn't move into directing to nab himself a grandstanding part – he must have all of 20 lines in the entire film, and half of those are mumbled out of the side of his mouth. He looks weather-beaten on screen; there's a hint of the velvety sadness he brought to Tim Burton's two Batman movies, but none of the pop-eyed mania of his early roles as an amateur pimp in Night Shift, or as a vaudevillian, frazzle-haired ghoul in Burton's afterlife farce Beetlejuice.

In person, Keaton is tanned and peppy, and seems a decade younger than his 58 years. He's wearing jeans, a green Adidas tracksuit top zipped up to his Adam's apple, and silver-and-yellow trainers. The look suggests a hip drama teacher, or an assistant manager at JD Sports. He dangles his tortoiseshell sunglasses from his fingers as he talks me through his favourite scenes, pacing up and down in front of the TV. But when we adjourn to opposite sides of the coffee table, he puts the shades on as though barricading himself in advance against any prying inquiries.

He says he's proud of The Merry Gentleman, unhurried pace and all. "I never wanted the audience to feel they knew what the movie was or where it was going. I hoped they'd be, like, 'Oh, it's this kind of movie? But I thought it was that kind of movie.' If I've done it right they'll enjoy spending time with these people, and they'll want to see how the relationships play out." Aside from Keaton and Kelly Macdonald, the cast is largely unknown. "I like people-people rather than movie people. Did you see Gomorrah? You could be watching real people in that. I have all these actors you haven't seen, so hopefully you go, 'Oh, I'm watching some guy,' as opposed to, say, Tom Cruise in a Nazi uniform."

If The Merry Gentleman feels out of step with modern US cinema, that's in keeping with the image Keaton has always cultivated. By the time he got his break in 1982 in Night Shift, he was already 31, with a wife and young child. Born Michael Douglas in Pennsylvania, he had come to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and changed his name when he began getting TV work and standup spots at the Comedy Store. During the 1990s, he developed a fondness for pointing out that there were already two other Michael Douglases, "one of whom I hear is doing quite well for himself, while the other is making cheap porn movies". Pause. "Like Basic Instinct."

It was after one of Keaton's Comedy Store gigs that he was invited to try out for the part of Billy Blaze, the hyperactive morgue attendant-cum-pimp in Night Shift. First-time director Ron Howard was dazzled by his audition, and assuaged the producers' concerns. "They saw the dailies and they were telling Ronnie I had to stop chewing gum, I had to get my hair cut. Eventually they were, like, 'We have to fire him! What the fuck is he doing?' They didn't get it. To Ronnie's credit, he told 'em to wait and see until it was all cut together." Night Shift launched Keaton, and remains one of the few movies that accommodated his full range of contradictory qualities. He could be naif and cynic, clown and con-man, puppy-dog and sleazebag.

In the five years between Night Shift and Beetlejuice, it seemed possible that all that promise could fizzle out. Keaton toed the line in formulaic comedy (Mr Mom), and was convincingly intense in "straight" films (Touch and Go, Clean and Sober) that no one went to see. But he was in danger of becoming better known for the projects he turned down (Splash, Ghostbusters) or was sacked from (The Purple Rose of Cairo) than for the ones he actually made. Beetlejuice changed that. His current assessment of the movie that kicked off a short but fruitful collaboration with Burton is "100% mind-blowing. Tim and I both have the same sensibility," he explains. "He has this darkness and melancholy about him that's kind of funny. People weren't ready for that at the time."

The late 1980s was a period of upheaval for Keaton, some of it positive, some less so. His partnership with Burton was ratified when the director cast him as Batman, to the horror of comic-book fans everywhere. In that pre-Twitter era, some 50,000 of them were incensed enough to crack open the green ink and dash off letters to Warner Bros. But Keaton's subtle, even sexy, portrayal of Batman as a tentative loner represented an oasis of contemplation in the midst of that chaotic movie, as well as laying the groundwork for Christian Bale's recent interpretation. Keaton became an authentic star without sacrificing his integrity. But it was during that time that his marriage broke down. There were also revelations of an affair with the porn star Serina Robinson, whose films include of Black Magic Sex Clinic and Honey Buns.

Once Batman Returns rolled around in 1992, Keaton was harbouring doubts. There was the film, which he felt wasn't up to scratch. "I liked it," he shrugs, "but I didn't love it. I thought we needed to regroup, to go back to the core." Then there was the actor himself, who seemed inhibited by his celebrity status, and eager to flex his muscles. In between the Batman blockbusters, he had played a psychopath tormenting a pair of smug yuppies in the thriller Pacific Heights; it was, to put it mildly, behaviour unbecoming a superhero. The film was absurd – Keaton remained so charismatic that you couldn't help rooting for him against the apparent victims – but it resembles now a cry for help from inside Batman's suffocating mask.

"I guess it wasn't the obvious way to go if you wanted to carry on being a big star," he says. "People said to me, 'You can't do that.' And I would say, 'Oh yeah, you're right, but you know what? I gotta do it anyway.'" When a third Batman instalment was proposed, Keaton argued that the series should return to the character's roots, which would later become the concept that underpinned Christopher Nolan's 2005 reboot, which took the franchise away from the campery of the Joel Schumacher era. The studio didn't see the merit in Keaton's suggestion, and the actor walked away from the franchise; in light of the abysmal third and fourth Batman films, it was probably the best decision he ever made, even if it's true that his pay packet, bolstered by back-end bonuses, would have nudged $45m.

The post-Batman years have hardly been barren. Keaton scored a brilliant double-whammy playing the same wannabe-cool drug-enforcement officer in two Elmore Leonard adaptations, Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight and Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, and channelled the spirit of Beetlejuice in the cloning comedy Multiplicity and the deranged thriller Desperate Measures. But he seemed very different from the Michael Keaton who boasted in 1994: "I've proven I'm courageous. I'm gutsier than anybody; I've got a better imagination than anybody; I'm essentially more creative than any other actor I know, and I've proven I take risks. I don't think I need to prove anything to myself any more." None of which explains how he could make a film as dire as Jack Frost, in which he played a dead musician who bonds with his son after being reincarnated as a snowman.

Keaton has none of his former bluster now. About his brush with superstardom he is both sanguine and insightful. "It's great to make your own choices," he says, "but there's a price to pay. I could've made more money or been more famous. I could be the current groovy guy. You don't want to lose your status, but I was never willing to preserve it by doing things I didn't want to do. I put myself in a position where the studios were saying, 'It's not obvious what we should do with him.' I'm not calling them stupid. It's not their job to figure out where to put me. Hey, it's a business. They know I make X amount of money when I play a certain guy, so they want me to play that guy, whoever he is. But my take is: I've done that, and if I do it again I'll end up blowing my brains out. I always thought that was smart. I never wanted to play the short game."

The Merry Gentleman opens on 4 December.

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Film oracle CinemaScore spells doom for The Box

CinemaScore is the audience-reaction research tool of choice for the film industry - because of its uncanny accuracy. Not good news for Richard Kelly, whose latest film The Box has just been awarded a rare-as-Ed-Wood's-teeth F-grade

There can be no doubt that Cameron Diaz's new film has flopped. The Box, a horror thriller adapted from a short story by Richard Matheson by Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, took just $7.5m (£4.5m) in its first weekend of release in the US. The critics, too, were far from convinced.

But that's not the worst of it. Many films are panned far more viciously. Many films fail to make back their budget (The Box's is said to be about $30m). But few suffer the ignominious fate of being awarded an F grade by CinemaScore, the market research company which tots up opening-night audience reaction to major new releases.

How it works is that punters are issued with cards to fill out – or rather tear off at the appropriate juncture – indicating how much, and why, they like the film. And it's these tatty little bits of card - more than the notices or the box office results - that the studio execs really care about. For CinemaScore has proved unerringly accurate at forecasting a film's future commercial prospects.

Surely the damage is done by the time the film's been released? Well, marketing spend can still be staunched or stepped up; DVDs rushed off the presses, or production scaled back; extra prints zipped over the country, or FedEx alerted to send them back to sender. CinemaScore is useful for high-street retailers and programmers, as well as the people with films to sell.

CinemaScore's system may be low-tech compared to the computerised wizardry used to work out TV ratings, but it's simple, effective and, most of all, detailed. Audience members are invited to report on what attracted them to the film in the first place: star, genre, director. Whether they'd recommend it to their friends. Whether they'd consider buying (or renting) the DVD. And, of course, to award a grade – a system everyone understands; though its only after some familiarity with CinemaScore you realise just how generous most people generally are. Most films score an A or B. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen got a mildly disappointing B+; Pixar's Up an A+. Julie and Julia an A. The Invention of Lying, however, got a C+ - pretty near catastrophic.

Fs, however, are few and far between. "People really thought [The Box] was a stinker," explained Ed Mintz, who runs CinemaScore. Mintz could recall just three films ever making that grade in the past: The Bug, William Friedkin's psycho-horror starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, backpackers-in-peril horror Wolf Creek and haunted house shocker Darkness.

Mintz founded CinemaScore in Las Vegas in 1982, after spending 20 years processing statistics for dental groups in LA. Away from the storm of Hollywood, he had the vision to see that if studios knew what people wanted, they'd be able to mould their product accordingly. He was the first man to make pie-charts out of movie-goers, and them sell them to the studios. Mintz made the correlation that highly rated films tend to be successful at the box office. It all sounds pretty obvious, but studios now know in forensic detail what they're films are rated for and by whom.

Still cynical? CinemaScore's success is a product of its unerring accuracy. Brüno was a perfect test case. Its producers were expecting a $45m+ opening weekend after the success of Borat. CinemaScore awarded it a dreaded C grade. The debut box office wasn't bad - $30.6m – but it dropped off fast as poor word-of-mouth travelled like wildfire. Mintz crunched the Brüno scores further, and predicted it would make a total of $57m in the US; in the end, it made $60m.

There was a similar outcome with Land of the Lost, which scored a C+, was predicted by Mintz to make $48m, and ended up on $49m. The Hangover scored an A, was predicted a $228m total, and eventually made over $275m. Mintz may not always be spot-on, but he's certainly in the ballpark.

There is, however, a fly in the ointment. A fly called Twitter. CinemaScore's cred in the industry partly relied on its confidentiality. Before Twitter, poor films could get away with a reasonable weekend. Now, Saturday-night audiences can be primed by the Friday nighters almost instantly. CinemaScore runs the risk of looking increasingly outmoded – despite its depth of investigation. So Mintz may be perversely pleased by The Box's F score: bad news for the film, great publicity for his company.

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Michael Moore's Capitalism snubbed by Oscar longlist

However, hard-hitting eco-film The Cove and Agnès Varda's acclaimed The Beaches of Agnès are included in Academy's 15-strong longlist for best documentary Oscar

Michael Moore has touted it as his boldest, most ambitious movie to date. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, however, appears to disagree. Previously seen as a frontrunner for next year's documentary Oscar, Capitalism: A Love Story surprisingly failed to make the cut when the longlist was announced last night.

Moore's picture, which accuses capitalism of being both unchristian and anti-American, was not the only notable omission. The Academy's longlist of 15 pictures also snubbed James Toback's illuminating Tyson documentary and RJ Cutler's The September Issue, which went behind the scenes at Vogue magazine.

Among the films vying for next year's Oscar are Agnès Varda's acclaimed The Beaches of Agnès and the hard-hitting eco film The Cove, spotlighting the annual slaughter of dolphins off the coast of Japan. They are joined on the list by Burma VJ, Every Little Step, Facing Ali, Garbage Dreams, Living in Emergency, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Mugabe and the White African, Sergio, Soundtrack for a Revolution, Valentino the Last Emperor, Under Our Skin, Food Inc, and Which Way Home.

Another cull is due on 2 February, when the longlist will be whittled down to the five official nominees. The 82nd Academy Awards take place in Los Angeles on Sunday 7 March 2010.

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Sean Connery and Shirley Bassey reunite

Their distinctive tones, last heard in the same film in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever, will feature in an animated adventure about a vet attempting to rescue a beaver

It's a far cry from Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever. But animated tale Sir Billi the Vet, about the attempts of a retired Scottish animal doctor to rescue a fugitive beaver, will have one thing in common with the James Bond classics: the voices of Sean Connery and Shirley Bassey.

The veteran Scots actor has signed up to voice the lead, while Bassey takes singing duties on the title song, Guardian of the Highlands, according to the Hollywood Reporter. It's the first time their vocal talents have appeared in the same film since Diamonds Are Forever in 1971.

The husband and wife creative team behind the project, Sascha and Tessa Hartmann, always had Bassey in mind to sing the title track.

"There was no persuading needed here, I liked the song from the moment I heard it. Sascha and Tessa made the process incredibly fun and easy for me and we got a great result," said Bassey, whose first collection of original material in 20 years entered the album charts at No 20 at the weekend.

Connery, who takes an executive producer role, has been heavily involved in the development of the film, an all-CGI affair which is due to be completed next year. Alan Cumming, Miriam Margolyes and Ruby Wax are also in the voice cast. The project marks Connery's first big-screen outing since the 2003 comicbook caper The League of Gentlemen.

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Precious director may march to Selma

The story of the pivotal civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama is to be made into a film, with Lee Daniels poised to direct

It is the Alabama town forever associated with the civil rights struggle after state troopers clubbed and tear-gassed activists as they tried to march on the state capital, Montgomery, 54 miles away.

Now the story of the historic marches from Selma in 1965, which led to legislation that finally brought equal suffrage for African-Americans through the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is to be told on the big screen, reports Variety.

Lee Daniels, whose inspirational film Precious is being seen as a potential Oscar contender, is in advanced talks to direct Selma. The film is being put together by the British producer of Slumdog Millionaire, Christian Colson, and its screenplay will be by Paul Webb, who is also writing Steven Spielberg's long-gestating biopic of Abraham Lincoln.

The film will trace the events that led to what became known as Bloody Sunday on 7 March 1965, when 600 black and white marchers were assaulted and tear-gassed by state troopers as they tried to cross the Pettus bridge over the Alabama river. The activists were demonstrating against violations of voting rights laws; in 1961, although African-Americans were officially allowed to vote, fewer than 1% in the area were on the electoral roll, and the state government and police regularly used force to defy attempts to register voters.

At least 50 people were injured that day, with 17 needing hospitalisation. Americans reacted in horror at televised scenes of the violence, leading to an outpouring of support for the marchers – who would finally make it to Montgomery on 25 March 1965 after federal troops were dispatched to protect them.

At the climactic rally on the steps of the State Capitol building, Martin Luther King delivered his "How Long, Not Long" speech to 25,000 people. Five months later, President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed the use of such hurdles as literacy tests that had been used to prevent blacks from registering to vote.

So far there are no cast details for Selma, but filming is planned to start in the early spring.

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And cut … UK Film Council announces drastic overhaul

• Shake-up aims to better use dwindling resources for film-makers
• Almost a quarter of council's jobs to go

The UK Film Council today announced plans for the biggest overhaul of how it gives out money since it was created by Labour in 2000.

Its chairman, Tim Bevan, and chief executive, John Woodward, set out proposals which they hope will make the council a leaner, more efficient body but one that can still give as much money to the movies.

The most pressing problem is a £25m cut, over three years, in its lottery money, the bulk of which is being redirected to the Olympics. Some of the money will be saved by cutting council overheads by 20%, or £2.2m a year. There will also be 22 job losses from the 94-strong staff. The Los Angeles office will be scaled back from five to two people.

Woodward said it felt like "the best of times, the worst of times".

It is not all bad news, however: £45m was recently confirmed for the new film centre on London's South Bank; the council gained £3.5m to fund Olympics films; while British films are on something of a high, artistically.

The real problems are the economic downturn, which is making it far harder to make films, and the digital revolution. Bevan said video and DVD sales had been "the engine room" of film production for the past 20 years but that was changing.

Proposals for reform are up for consultation, with one of the most significant being how the council distributes its money. At present, the council has three pots of money for film-makers to use: the development fund; the new cinema fund; and the premiere fund. In total, £17m a year. It now wants one fund of £15m.

Woodward said the aim was that the money that returns to the council when movies do well commercially would now be ploughed back into the production fund. "We are not anticipating any diminution in the amount of money available," he said.

The new fund would offer more help to first- and second-time film-makers because "the market is becoming more risk averse," said Woodward.

Bevan added: "Second-time film directors are the biggest problem in this country, they make a decent first movie and then choke on their second film." But he stressed that the change in emphasis did not mean that Britain's best film-makers would not get council money.

There will be a reduced skills training budget more focused on cutting edge technologies, such as 3D. It is also planning to halve, to £2m a year, a fund created to help difficult-to-market films advertise themselves and earn a bigger distribution. Films such as Red Road, Control and Tsotsi have all benefited from this money.

Some of the biggest losers financially would be the regional screen agencies – with a 20% cut – although the film council is trying to sweeten this with a new pledge that a quarter of all film production money will be spent outside London.

The proposals come amid changing times for British film. The department of culture, media and sport, has announced its intention to merge the film council with the British Film Institute, the protector of the nation's film heritage. Talks are continuing.

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Jennifer Hudson to play Winnie Mandela

Hudson, who won an Oscar for her supporting turn in 2006's Dreamgirls, will take the lead role in a new biopic of the former South African first lady and is also expected to sing the theme tune

The Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Hudson is to play Winnie Mandela in a new biopic about the former wife of South Africa's first black president, Variety reports.

South African film-maker Darrell J Roodt, whose film Yesterday was the country's nominee for best foreign film at the 2006 Oscars, will direct Winnie, which starts shooting in May 2010. Hudson, a former American Idol contestant who won her Oscar for a bravura supporting turn in the musical Dreamgirls, will take the lead role and is also expected to sing the theme song.

"I was compelled and moved when I read the script," Hudson said. "Winnie Mandela is a complex and extraordinary woman and I'm honoured to be the actress asked to portray her. This is a powerful part of history that should be told."

The screenplay is based on Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob's biography Winnie Mandela: A Life. Despite Hudson's involvement, the movie is not a Hollywood production: the financial backing comes from firms in South Africa and Canada.

The news means that both Nelson and Winnie Mandela are being portrayed by American Academy-anointed actors in new films; Morgan Freeman is starring as the former president in the Clint Eastwood-directed Invictus, which centres on Nelson's attempts to unite his country behind the South African team in the 1995 rugby World Cup. The film, which co-stars Matt Damon as the team's captain, Francois Pienaar, is due out early next year.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, 72, remains a popular figure in South African politics despite her 1991 conviction for involvement in the kidnapping, assault and death of a 14-year-old alleged informer, Stompie Moeketsi. She and Nelson Mandela had been married for only a year before he was forced into hiding and then imprisoned in 1962 – he would only be freed in 1990. While he was in gaol, she became an increasingly powerful figure in the African National Congress and went on to run the ANC Women's League. She was deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology in the first post-apartheid government for 11 months, until allegations of corruption led to her dismissal.

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Star Trek: boldly going where no hot young body has gone before

JJ Abrams's shiny, sexy revamp of the sci-fi classic is out on DVD this week. But if you don't want to fritter away 127 minutes of your time on it, try this condensed screenplay instead

Star TrekBy Paul MacInnes, with apologies to Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and, of course, Gene Roddenberry

SCENE 1

EXT: Night. Or day. It's hard to tell in the depths of SPACE. The good ship USS Enterprise is BOMBING along like a Mazda MX5. The only difference is no one's playing SNOW PATROL out of the window.

Cut to INT: The bridge of the Enterprise. Imagine a fashionable nightclub full of the HOTTEST BODIES, clad in something SKINTIGHT. Then substitute glow-in-the-dark cocktails for phaser guns, and you're pretty much there.

JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK stands, legs akimbo, on the bridge. He graduated from the Star Fleet academy 24 MINUTES AGO and is now captain of the Enterprise. He looks sexy. And angry. But mainly sexy, as he SHAKES his muscular fist at the remains of destroyed planet Vulcan.

JT KIRK
Damn you!

LT HIKARU SULU turns around. He is not as handsome as Kirk, but has a striking fringe.

LT SULU
Captain! Don't take it out on yourself!

JT KIRK
What?

Lt SULU
The destruction of Vulcan! It's not your fault.

JT KIRK
Oh, that? No, I was cursing the makeup artist. She said she could make my skin glow. This is more of a gentle hum.

LT SULU inspects his captain's face.

LT SULU
Affirmative, captain. Diagnostics suggest your glow is at 38%.

JT KIRK
Dammit!

From the other side of the bridge comes the noise of a working transporter. It is the same noise as in the TV series, except it is performed by Green Day with a GUEST RAP from Lil Wayne. The sound heralds the arrival of SPOCK, whose absence of emotional feeling doesn't stop him looking HOT.

JT KIRK
(shifting around to get his best angle)
Dammit, Spock, the renegade Romulans have destroyed your planet. It's a war crime!

SPOCK
Yes, stand-in Captain Kirk. It is a war crime. And it is a genocide.

JT KIRK
Like what they had in the 20th century on Earth.

SPOCK
Yes.

JT KIRK
God, that's poignant. And, to my mind, adds real emotional depth to this whole movie. OK, let's kick some CGI ass!

Cut to 45 minutes of racing, jumping, crashing, dashing, saving and raving (actually there is no raving). It's all very engrossing, as long as you don't THINK too hard about why it's HAPPENING.

SCENE 2

Finally, KIRK and SPOCK arrive at the heart of the renegade Romulan retreat. At its heart, in a chair, is NERO, a ruthless baddy who not only indirectly killed KIRK's dad, but also dragged SPOCK through a time portal and made him look like Leonard Nimoy.

JT KIRK
Damn you, Nero!

NERO

JT KIRK What? I'm sorry, I didn't hear that.

NERO

JT KIRK
No, I'm sorry, still nothing. You'll have to speak up.

NERO
(screaming)
I SAID, I'M TRYING TO CULTIVATE A BROODING SENSE OF MENACE!

JT KIRK
Oh, sorry about that.

SPOCK
I wish to address the subject of my home planet, Vulcan.

NERO
What of it? I destroyed it in the quest for energy.

JT KIRK
(aside)
Another theme that might prove relevant in the early 21st century.

SPOCK
I want you to apologise to the Vulcan people. And maybe do some community service.

NERO
Never!

JT KIRK
Well then, I guess we're gonna have to blow you up just like you did Vulcan!

SPOCK
If I experienced any emotion, I would high-five you, stand-in captain.

JT KIRK
(standing legs akimbo again)
YeahHHHHH!

KIRK thumps NERO to the floor and sets his phaser to "rupture renegade Romulan retreat". With the retreat in the process of collapse, SPOCK and KIRK transport back to the Enterprise where there's a party going on on the bridge.

JT KIRK
Ferengian mojitos all around!

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2012 brings Indian summer to UK box office

Roland Emmerich's disaster blockbuster heralds a period of sunny box-office receipts, with the vampires and werewolves of Twilight set to keep the winter chill at bay next week

The winner
Question: when is a summer blockbuster not a summer blockbuster? Answer: when it's released in November, of course. Roland Emmerich's patented formula of awesome planetary destruction and human heroics always screams out for a summer release, but this year Sony chose not to throw his 2012 into a competitive market already crowded with Transformers, Terminators and Wolverine. And the strategy has paid off, with an opening gross of £6.49m, proof that audiences will line up to see a big, dumb action flick no matter what month it is.

It's not the biggest opening of the year – it is behind both Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But if you strip out the paid previews from the likes of Terminator: Salvation and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, then 2012 has scored the third highest opening of 2009, just ahead of Up (£6.41m).

It's a big return to box-office form for Emmerich after the commercial misstep 10,000BC (which debuted in 2008 with £1.93m). 2012's figures are in the same ball park as his previous disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow (£6.46m plus previews of £864,000). Incredibly, Independence Day opened on just over £7m as long ago as August 1996, when ticket prices were a lot lower.

The recovery
Disney put a brave face on the £1.92m opening of A Christmas Carol last weekend, but it now has genuine reasons to celebrate. Any weekend-to-weekend decline of less than 35% is considered healthy, but the festive motion-capture animation did a lot better than that: it went up 32%, with takings of £2.51m, and a 10-day cumulative total of £5.47m. A Christmas Carol was always a title that was likely to have continuing and growing appeal as families' thoughts turned to holiday treats, but to have this confirmed so dramatically so quickly will be a massive relief to Disney, which has experienced significant executive turmoil in recent weeks. Meanwhile Disney's Up (£32.75m so far) has just overtaken The Incredibles to become the fourth biggest ever Pixar hit, behind Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo.

The surprise
Michael Caine, 66, does not exactly guarantee box office, and London gangland pictures are hit and miss, so the backers of his new film Harry Brown will be well pleased with a £1.27m opening, including previews of £314,000. This compares with Caine's recent flick Is Anybody There, which debuted earlier this year with £123,000 (admittedly with less than a third of Harry Brown's screens), and a £166,000 opening for the recent Sleuth remake. The total is highly comparable with Adulthood's £1.2m opening – both films feature Ben Drew, aka rapper Plan B, in a major role – although Noel Clarke's film achieved its debut figure on half Harry Brown's screens, and without the benefit of paid previews.

Arthouse war
The battle between An Education and Bright Star continues to rage, although the arthouse slug-fest has now opened a new front with the arrival of Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning White Ribbon. The newcomer achieved a healthy screen average above £4,000, distributor Artificial Eye having opened on a relatively tight 18 cinemas with a view to longevity. An Education added 32 sites this weekend, which has eroded its screen average (to £1,532), but that number remains higher than Bright Star's average (£1,255), and it has grossed £800,000 more than the Jane Campion film so far. With these three strong arthouse titles in the market, it was lean pickings for the likes of Cold Souls and the well-reviewed Tulpan – see Other Openers, below.

The losers
With a number of commercially strong titles in multiplexes, and several well-reviewed arthouse pictures competing for upscale viewers, two movies landed with a predictable thud. Mira Nair's Amelia, starring Hilary Swank as the pioneering aviator, landed at lowly 17th place, with less than £50,000 from 133 screens, for a £370 average. Taking Woodstock, from Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee, is right behind it, with just over £41,000 from 102 screens, and a slightly better average of £405. Meanwhile, several titles are plummeting down the chart, notably Michael Jackson's This Is It, which fell from second to seventh place, with a drop of 65%. Maybe all the fans took Sony at its word that the film would play for two weeks only, and made time in their calendar to catch it.

The future
Following three consecutive weeks where box office significantly underperformed against the equivalent period from last year, the arrival of 2012 has seen a reversal in fortune: the latest weekend is 37% up on the same frame from 2008, when Quantum of Solace topped the chart for a third week in a row. Healthy comparisons with 2008 should continue for at least another week, as 2012 will be joined on Friday by The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Like the Austin Powers and Matrix franchises, this is a case where the second movie is likely to massively outperform the first. Twilight opened last December with £2.51m; New Moon's debut should easily top that.

UK top 10, 13-15 November
1. 2012, 480 sites, £6,489,809 (New)
2. A Christmas Carol, 446 sites, £2,507,053. Total: £5,469,764
3. Harry Brown, 351 sites, £1,271,814 (New)
4. Up, 486 sites, £985,722. Total: £32,754,463
5. The Men Who Stare at Goats, 331 sites, £796,080. Total: £2,759,335
6. Fantastic Mr Fox, 489 sites, £675,753. Total: £7,714,879
7. Michael Jackson's This Is It, 418 sites, £475,437. Total: £9,301,428
8. The Fourth Kind, 333 sites, £428,115. Total: £1,813,458
9. An Education, 132 sites, £202,230. Total: £1,369,940
10. Jennifer's Body, 295 sites, £181,554. Total: £1,196,718

How the other openers did
The White Ribbon, 18 screens, £69,603 + £6,053 previews
Amelia, 133 screens, £49,224
Taking Woodstock, 102 screens, £41,352
Heer Ranjha, 13 screens, £25,593
Tum Mile, 16 screens, £22,681
Cold Souls, 17 screens, £19,140
Tulpan, 6 screens, £8,196
We Live in Public, 2 screens, £1,215
Lalo Pippo: A Lot of People, 1 screen, £461
The Magic Hour, 3 screens, £231
Love the Beast, 1 screen, £130

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'We had a camp to teach young actors how to be hippies'

Ang Lee tells Jason Solomons what the Woodstock meant to him as a teenager in Taiwan, about approaching movies with an outsider's eye and how sexual repression drives his work

Green Zone trailer: Bourne again, only different

Paul Greengrass's Matt Damon-starring film of the award-winning book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran may well be a subtle, nuanced examination of the US occupation of Iraq. But that's not what the trailer is selling

The world needs a hero. The world often does. And when Matt Damon hears that, he's always willing to step up.

And that is why we find Damon, returning to his buff Bourne action mould after a tubby, 'tasched turn in The Informant, in the very second frame of the trailer. He's in uniform, with the name "Miller" on his chest (showing that this is probably not another Bourne instalment).

Unless Bourne is undercover, of course.

But maybe I'm being unfair. Comparing everything Damon does to Bourne seems mean. And, after all, this is a trailer for a totally different film, with no relation whatsoever to those previous, very successful films.

Oh. Apart from those relationships, of course. And the Matt Damon factor.

But everything else must be very different, surely. After all, Green Zone is based on the award-winning book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a complex examination of US-occupied Iraq. And if you have read it, or glanced through any of the reviews, you could only imagine the big-screen version would be a multilayered, highly-nuanced portrait of a deeply complicated situation. And that might well be the story the film itself does tell.

But that isn't the story this trailer is telling. This is the story of a tough, taut, bottom-kicking military man sent into a severely dangerous world. He's a man, on a mission.

Until, that is, ponderous CIA man Brendan Gleeson gives him a mission within that mission. Somehow, this goes wrong. Thus begins a mission within a mission within a mission, involving a million dollars, hidden truths, a dreaded cover-up and dubious higher powers.

And then it would appear Damon's character is suddenly forced to defend himself against the very people he thought were on the same side as him. He goes on the run. You can see him on the run here:

He's the blob in the middle of the green area. Running.

And the more times you watch this trailer, I'm sorry to report, the more it starts to seem reminiscent of … well, that film they reminded you of within the first 10 seconds of the trailer by presenting the star, the director and the names of the films in big, bold letters to jog your memory.

And lots of footage of Matt Damon running. And shooting guns.

Sure, it might be the most un-Bourneish film in the world once you're in the cinema. But from this set of clippings, you imagine the marketing people would have been much happier if they could have persuaded Paul Greengrass to tweak the title to The Bourne Resuscitation: Bourne Again. Or maybe something subtler, such as The Green Zonepremacy.

And just for those people who are saying, "Well that's all very well, but who cares how like the source material or derivative of past successes it is, as long as there are exploding helicopters. Will there be exploding helicopters?", the last moments of the trailer confirm that yes, there WILL be exploding helicopters.

Admittedly in that shot it looks a little more like a flambéed carp, but trust me, it's an exploding helicopter.

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With Law Abiding Citizen, payback is making a comeback

Why does recession bring with it a thirst for dumb revenge dramas?

Law Abiding Citizen, which I should say at the outset is a terrible, terrible movie – either the stupidest of the year so far or the most unintentionally funny – takes the urban revenge movie and grafts on to it certain depressing innovations from other genres, including the serial killer-as-genius trope from The Silence Of The Lambs, and the post-Saw/Hostel enthusiasm for torture-porn and mega bloodshed. Let's just say it doesn't tell us much except that the revenge movie is back with, um, a vengeance.

Gerard Butler plays a man who takes complicated, detailed and violent revenge against the killers who raped and murdered his wife and daughter. Thing is, he's already in jail when most of the killings occur (cue evil genius!), which doesn't stop one victim from being surgically deprived of various extremities, up to and including his Johnson (hello, Saw!).

I have this half-baked theory that vengeance movies do well in times of economic or social stress. Look at the first wave of rightwing fight-back flicks, jump-started 35 years ago by Michael Winner's noxious Death Wish, which had audiences leaping up and down in their seats cheering. Around the same time – a time, lest we forget, when New York City was a bankrupt hellhole of muggings and murders, America had just disengaged from the most divisive war in its history, seen its most corrupt president resign in ignominy, and lost all faith in the institutions charged with protecting them – we also had Walking Tall (which like Death Wish, spawned numerous sequels) and Wes Craven's more thoughtful Last House On The Left, which nonetheless had the more Cro-Magnon sections of the audience cheering not just the revenge murders, but the rapes and killings that prompted them.

Now, with America divided into irreconcilable political factions, we get more of the same. Mel Gibson, whose Bible, we should recall, contains just the one Testament, seems to have a secret hand in this. He produced Paparazzi, in which a movie star offs the snapper slimeballs who nearly killed his family, and he starred also in Payback, Ransom, even Hamlet, where a lone avenger takes his pounds and pounds of flesh with a certain gruesome relish. We've also seen The Brave One, Taken, Death Sentence, a Walking Tall remake with The Rock, and even a rehash of Last House. All were steeped in the kind of sputtering, incoherent rage and frustration that animated those Town Hall meetings in August here in the US.

They need to take a tip from the two best revenge movies ever made: Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, which showed the avenger becoming as animalistic as his enemy, and Robert Hamer's sublime Kind Hearts And Coronets, which makes revenge a delicious, intoxicating dish, best served funny.

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This week's new cinema previews

A Serious Man (15)

(Ethan & Joel Coen, 2009, US) Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind. 105 mins.

A "proper" Coens movie after the brothers' recent, atypical efforts, and it's one of their, and the year's, best, striking that contradictory, tragicomic, mundane-surreal tone only they can achieve. Harking back to their own late-1960s youth, it's a portrait of one man's suburban hell, with Stuhlbarg's Jewish physics professor plagued by all manner of uncertainty: domestic, religious, scientific. He doesn't even know whether to laugh or cry. The result is a procession of unforgettable scenes and characters, with a mighty metaphysical wallop.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (12A)

(Chris Weitz, 2009, US) Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart. 131 mins.

Legions of fanatics have had this film's release date tattooed on their brains for a year already. For non-Twi-hards, it's more of the same swoony, hormonal teen angst with a supernatural edge and hot young stars to die for – literally.

The Informant! (15)

(Steven Soderbergh, 2009, US) Matt Damon, Scott Bakula. 108 mins.

Pudged-up Damon has fun as an utterly unreliable hero here, as Soderbergh steers what might have been a dull true-life whistleblower thriller towards something approaching an absurdist corporate farce and a bizarre character study.

The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life (15)

(Rémi Bezançon, 2008, Fra) Jacques Gamblin, Zabou Brietman. 114 mins.

Generous, likable, well-soundtracked domestic saga, focusing on a key day from each family member's life and expertly evoking all the history in between without piling on the camembert.

Glorious 39 (12A)

(Stephen Poliakoff, 2009, UK) Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Julie Christie. 129 mins.

TV maestro Poliakoff crams as much plot and as many Brit stars as possible into this 1930s thriller, although it could have done with a bit less of both. The plot weaves together upper-crust family history and pre-war political intrigue.

The Sea Wall (NC)

(Rithy Panh, 2008, Fra/Cam/Bel) Isabelle Huppert. 115 mins.

A far from rose-tinted view of French colonialism, as single mother Huppert struggles to hold family, wits and coastal defences together in 1930s Cambodia.

Examined Life (NC)

(Astra Taylor, 2008, Can) Slavoj Zizek, Cornel West, Judith Butler. 87 mins.

A playful way of bringing philosophy to the masses, prising eight philosophers out of their studies and out on to the streets. Revealing about its subjects as much as their challenging ideas.

Machan (15)

(Uberto Pasolini, 2008, Sri L/Ita/Ger) Dharmapriya Dias, Gihan de Chickera. 108 mins.

Sweet but sharp comedy based on the real-life bogus Sri Lankan handball team, who entered a German tournament to get the entry visas, then scarpered.

Southern Softies (U)

(Graham Fellows, 2009, UK) Graham Fellows. 79 mins.

Fellows takes his alter ego John Shuttleworth to Jersey to test if southerners really are soft in this amiable lo-fi mockumentary.

Ulysses (15)

(Joseph Strick, 1967, US) Milo O'Shea, Barbara Jefford. 131 mins.

Brave, faithful, but pretty dated attempt to translate Joyce's Dublin opus to film.

Christmas In Wonderland (PG)

(James Orr, 2007, US) Patrick Swayze. 96 mins.

Undignified posthumous Swayze cash in: a kids' Christmas comedy set in a shopping mall.

OUT ON FRIDAY

Bunny And The Bull

Imaginary road trip comedy (pictured) with touches of Boosh/Michel Gondry.

Paranormal Activity

Maximum terror with minimal resources.

Law Abiding Citizen

Gerard Butler sets a criminal maze in this action-revenger.

Mr Right

London-set gay romantic comedy.

De Dhana Dhan

Romcom starring Akshay Kumar.

Séraphine

Biopic of a French cleaner who turned out to be a great painter.

Nativity!

Primary school Xmas play comedy with Martin Freeman.

COMING SOON

In two weeks ... Cameron Diaz leads 1970s-set thriller The Box … Zac Efron learns form the master in Me & Orson Welles …

In three weeks ... Spike Jonze takes us Where The Wild Things Are … Jim Jarmusch returns with The Limits Of Control …

In a month ... James Cameron finally lets us into his new, blue world with Avatar …

Steve Rose

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This week's DVD and Blu-ray releases

Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Terminator Salvation
DVD & Blu-ray, Warner, Sony

If nothing else, watching McG's Terminator Salvation at least puts Christian Bale's infamous on-set meltdown into perspective; if you had to pretend to be angry for so long in front of the camera then you'd probably end up angry in real life. Bale's angry John Connor is a one-note performance, the problem being it's the wrong note. That's not the only drawback: McG has a similar one-dimensional take on the material. He seems to think the Terminator films are about robots and explosions and nothing else. And Bale has to share the narrative with Sam Worthington's turn as an unwilling cyborg, the result being the film plays as if it has two competing co-stars and no real direction. Far more Terminator-ish is the now-cancelled TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles, led by Lena Headey. Science-fiction television shows, perhaps more than any other genre, live on borrowed time, and this one was lucky to get two seasons, but rather than gloomily bide its time, it pushed things as far as the meagre budget allowed. Sure, it's a bit soapy at times, but there's plenty of great stuff here – particularly the smart, paradoxical tales to do with time travel and artificial intelligence. The robots here are thoughtful and creative without ever letting you forget they are ruthless killing machines – much more effective and than the blunt instruments McG paints them as.

Coco Before Chanel
DVD & Blu-ray, Optimum

Audrey Tautou shows her serious side in this rags-to-haute couture biopic of the self-made designer.

Ice Age 3: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs
DVD & Blu-ray, Fox

The prehistoric animation mammoth marches on.

Robsessed
DVD & Blu-ray, Revolver

Documentary on Twilight heart-throb Robert Pattinson, including his TV drama The Haunted Airman, and a calendar!

Lone Wolf & Cub Box Set
DVD & Blu-ray, Eureka

Collection of cult 1970s father-and-son Japanese samurai movies, including Shogun Assassin.

Fight Club
DVD & Blu-ray, Fox

Anniversary edition with tons of extras, including a choice of four different commentaries.

• DVD and video reviews
• Robert Pattinson

Phelim O'Neill

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This week's film event previews

London Children's Film Festival, London

Is it wrong that the prospect of a Tim Burton Bedtime Stories Pyjama Party is as appealing to adults as it will be to movie-loving kids? With a sweet-making workshop and screenings of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride, it's just one of loads of great activities over the festival's two weekends, which also include a play-along musical session to two Buster Keaton classics. Adult fans will be dribbling with excitement at the UK premiere of Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, and there are scores of international features and retro TV treats.

Barbican, Sat to 29 Nov, visit lcff.org.uk

Andrea Hubert

German Film Festival, London

Modern German cinema continues to capture the same spirit of innovation pioneered by 1970s trailblazers Fassbinder and Herzog, with films such as The Lives Of Others gaining a swathe of international awards. And the subject matters at hand grow wider every year – this year's highlight is Same Same But Different, starring The Reader's David Kross as a backpacker in Cambodia who falls in love with a local girl who turns out to be HIV positive. Germany's fractured history is never far from the minds of its film-makers – docu-drama The Miracle Of Leipzig reconstructs a peaceful demonstration in East Germany in 1989 which escalated into a mass uprising, and Berlin '36, topical as the 2012 Olympics grows nearer, tells the true story of a high jumper forced out of the German team for being Jewish. There's also a new version of 19th century drama Effi Briest, starring Julia Jentsch and The Lives Of Others' Sebastian Koch.

Curzon Soho, W1, Fri to 3 Dec, visit germanfilmfestival.co.uk

Andrea Hubert

Pan-Asia Film Festival, London

One of the great things about fixtures such as this is that they aim to present an overview of what is currently being produced across Asia without the baggage of too much foreknowledge and hype. Until the fates decide which will be a crossover hit, it's up to you to discover any tigers crouching or dragons hidden in the lineup. Will it be Those Three, a stark tale of AWOL Iranian soldiers, or the diving scrap metal scavengers of the Philippines' Bakal Boys, or the mixed-up French-Taiwanese teenager of Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang that western cinemagoers take to their hearts? There are six features and a selection of shorts here, and even if none become the next big thing, they're at least all worthy of your attention.

Apollo Cinema Piccadilly Circus, SW1, Fri to 11 Dec

Phelim O'Neill

London African Film Festival, London

Digital film-making is proving to be the great leveller, giving those previously excluded from the industry a medium with which to produce and distribute their tales cheaply and quickly. Africa's film-making landscape has been transformed and invigorated by this accessible technology.There's an intensive, one-day conference here to discuss its impact, but of course, the best way to see how it's ringing the changes is to see the films. Among others, there's emotive Moroccan drama Burned Hearts, Chadian youth drama Captain Majid, award-winning Nigerien documentary For The Best And For The Onion, and the powerful anti-violence message of Algeria's What Happened To My Country.

Various venues, Thu to 3 Dec, visit africaatthepictures.co.uk

Phelim O'Neill

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This week's internet reviews

Jim Carrey

This month Jim Carrey has been spending his billions on his website, which is just about the daftest and most brilliant official actor's site imaginable. Indeed, it is the website for which the word "awesome" was invented. Godlike magnificence awaits you as a tableau of giant sea monsters, skyscrapers and cut-out Jims (the one with his head stuck on top of a bird's body takes you to his Twitter page) unfolds to yet more Terry Gilliam-esque collages of Carrey in various heroic poses. Click around and you'll discover trailers, family pictures, TV clips and music by his 21-year-old daughter.

Information Is Beautiful

David McCandless believes that an "amazing all-graphic future of civilisation" awaits us. Not really, but he is very keen on charts, venn diagrams, mind mapping and information art which he puts to regular use at the Guardian's magnificent Datablog and here, where he collates the artistic collisions of statistics and design. These visualisations offer a quick way to gain knowledge and can often make a better point than words alone; such as the graphic on which countries have sent the most troops to Afghanistan. Many of the charts relate to economics and politics but plenty offer trivia and mind-blowing nonsense, like the baffling timelines of Star Trek and the correlation between drug use and a nation's happiness.

BLOG ROLL: TWITTER

Jimmy

What happens when a Portuguese scientist gives Jimmy the monkey a keyboard and a Twitter account.

Shit My Dad Says

A son, back living with his parents, reports his dad's opinions on life, sex and young people's hair.

Big Ben

You want to tell the time? Go to the big guy for regular bong updates.

Steve Roommate

Steve's roommate secretly tweets about what Steve is doing all of the time.

Future Reality

Tweets from three, 10 and 20 years in the future.

New Moticons

A bold attempt to create fresh alternatives to :)

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Apparently it is not a moon, but a space station.

UFO Sightings

Micro blogging the latest evidence of visitations from other galaxies.

WHAT WE LEARNED ON THE WEB THIS WEEK

If you're going to moan it may as well be tuneful

20 things you always see at non-league football grounds

On Sunday, 30 April, 2265 everyone in the UK will become a Sugababe

How long it takes to form a habit

Why Americans are addicted to cuteness

How to eat a chicken wing

Where cats and physics co-exist

The most embarrassing moments in video game voice acting

Singing "happy birthday to you" contravenes copyright

What to write when you're robbing a bank

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Our guide to the 'straight to CD' genre

The Guidelines: random notes from pop culture

There are copious strings to 50 Cent's platinum bow. As well as being a rapper, self-help guru and inspiration to many, he's an actor and videogame voiceover artiste. Recently added to that list is "short film auteur". Before I Self Destruct is a semi-autobiographical tale of murder and revenge – with added lesbian sex scenes – which will be included with Fiddy's forthcoming album of the same name, creating a whole new genre: straight to CD. Here's how to make your own ...

WHEN TO DO IT

There comes a point in the career trajectory of major pop stars when the people employed to say "no" to things become surplus to requirements. Without them, ill-advised concept albums are recorded, strange product endorsements are accepted, or, in extreme cases, diamond-encrusted necklaces shaped like a weeping Virgin Mary are worn to display your love of religion. It's at this point that the music video format becomes too stifling, too de rigueur. It's now that they need at least 15 minutes to fully display the true core of their creativity.

WHO WILL DIRECT IT?

Hiring a visionary to translate the garbled mess of your dreams into a coherent "mini movie" is a must. Michael Jackson – surely the overlord of the extended video concept – roped in John Landis for Thriller, then switched to Martin Scorsese for Bad.The scourge of young country singers everywhere, AKA Kanye West, recently released the Spike Jonze-directed We Were Once A Fairytale. Sometimes, however, no one can be trusted; 50 Cent directed, wrote and starred in Before I Self Destruct.

DON'T HIDE YOUR ASPIRATIONS

Film references are often plundered as if to say, "I'm versatile and desperately trying to get into acting." Specimen A: the "female James Bond" embarrassment of Mariah Carey's Honey. Specimen B: Meat Loaf's eight-minute mini epic, I'd Do Anything For Love, directed with beautiful understatement by Michael Bay, a smörgåsbord of filmic references, centred around Beauty & The Beast, and in no way an excuse for the facially challenged Meat Loaf to cop off with a young lady encumbered only by a floaty cotton dress.

GIVE A LITTLE BIT OF YOURSELF AWAY

West's We Were Once A Fairytale starts out like a typical night in the life of a superstar, with Kanye drinking in a club and seducing a lady friend before discovering he is actually getting amorous with some soft furnishings. The second act sees him carve a rodent out of his hand before it commits suicide. We're assuming it's a comment about the pressures and loneliness of fame. Michael Jackson's 40-minute-long Ghosts is easier to decipher; creepy, shadowy figure feels ostracised from society so builds his own version of Xanadu until some kids arrive to hound him out but learn to love him.

REMEMBER YOUR MANNERS

Note to Kanye; rushing the stage at the Oscars when your acting debut proper fails to bag you an award will not be accepted.

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Royal flush: five of the best play Queen in new film

C4 documentary drama to portray the monarch in key moments since the 1950s

Playing the Queen brought Helen Mirren international fame and enough awards to fill a trophy room. Now five more British actors are taking on the role in a new Channel 4 documentary drama series.

The Queen, a five-part series starting next Sunday, focuses on crisis moments since the 1953 coronation. Emilia Fox stars in the first episode, centred around events in 1955 when Princess Margaret was considering marriage to a divorced equerry, Peter Townsend. Samantha Bond, best known as Miss Moneypenny in the Bond films, plays her during the early 1970s era of power cuts, strikes and IRA threats. Susan Jameson portrays her in conflict with Margaret Thatcher over the South Africa sanctions row that threatened the Commonwealth.

Barbara Flynn picks up the role during the "annus horribilis" of 1992, when Charles and Diana's failed marriage was laid bare in the press and part of Windsor Castle burned down; leaving Diana Quick to play the Queen in the lead-up to Charles and Camilla's 2005 marriage.

The programmes mix archive footage, commentary from palace insiders, and fictional drama sequences that suggest how the most traumatic and significant conversations played out in private.

None of the actors compared notes before filming began – although they wore the same pearls throughout. "The only one I've managed to speak to is Barbara," says Quick. "I ought to have phoned up and said: 'How did you do it?' Bit late now anyway."

None are daunted by the inevitable comparisons with Helen Mirren's performance in the 2006 film The Queen, for which she won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta. "I don't think it's relevant," says Quick, who had already played the Queen in Alan Bennett's stage play A Question of Attribution. Flynn played Mary Queen of Scots in the 2005 TV drama Elizabeth I, opposite Mirren in the title role. "I had my head cut off. That's the last time I saw Helen."

Flynn began filming four days after accepting her latest part, using YouTube for research. "I thought: lucky Helen – she must have had a wee bit longer." Jameson, meanwhile, says: "The only reason I thought about her was because I wore some of her skirts. And I think I might have had the same corgis."

Jameson found herself adapting quickly to the role: "After a couple of days you get a bit queenly yourself. On the first day, I might say: 'Is it possible to have a glass of water?' On about the third day, you are more inclined to say: 'A glass of water please.' It makes a change from playing librarians."

So do they consider themselves royalists or republicans? Jameson abstains: "I do worry about the enormous cost of some of the ridiculous ceremonies. But it certainly humanised her for me." Bond says: "I know that emotionally I ought to be a republican, but somehow I can't help thinking that she does really rather a good job." Quick also has mixed feelings: "I think really we should live under a republican system. Having said that, she is a hard act to follow."

However, Flynn is a firm supporter: "She holds the promise she made. She has the most comprehensive knowledge of this country from the 50s to this day. She doesn't phone in sick."

Fox agrees: "I think we should be proud and celebrate what an extraordinary woman she is."

The stars on playing HM

Emilia Fox (1950s) 'The way she talks is so specific it's almost uncopyable. I wonder whether our ears can take it as an audience. It sounds slightly Spitting Image.'

Samantha Bond (1970s) 'I thought of her sitting on a horse. She is a very upright woman, there's a sensibleness to her walk. My walk is slightly frivolous – hers is well planted.'

Susan Jameson (1980s) 'I was very aware of sitting back all the time. When you're incredibly famous and powerful you don't need to lean forward to anybody unless you want.'

Barbara Flynn (1990s) 'You have to have that sense of innate authority that is totally unquestioning. So the dedication and commitment shows in her demeanour.'

Diana Quick (2000s) 'She has eliminated all superfluous movement. She has this capacity to be absolutely still, ramrod straight. And that takes practice.'

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Surrealist artwork from The Red Shoes to go on display

BFI Southbank to exhibit paintings and sketches of 'Freudian ballet' created for the film by Hein Heckroth

The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger's 1948 masterpiece, is one of the most visually spectacular movies in British history, and an abiding inspiration for artists such as Martin Scorsese, who counts it among his favourite films.

Now, ahead of its re-release in a newly restored version, its colours returned to their original Technicolor vividness, visitors to BFI Southbank in London will have the chance to see some of the original artwork for the film, created by surrealist painter Hein Heckroth.

The Red Shoes, the story of a dancer's struggle to achieve greatness against the demands of "normal" life, has entranced balletomanes and cineastes in the 61 years since it was made.

The most ambitious aspect of the film is the extended ballet sequence at the heart of the story, in which The Red Shoes ballet is danced in full by a company created especially for the film and with Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann and Léonid Massine in the lead roles.

The 17-minute long Red Shoes sequence may begin as a conventional scene of dancers on a stage set, but it almost instantly departs from realism. As Michael Powell put it in his autobiography, A Life in Movies, "once the curtain had gone up for the performance, we would no longer be in a theatre, but inside the heads of two young people who were falling in love." Those two people are the ballerina, Vicky Page (Shearer) and the conductor/composer, Julian Craster, played by Marius Goring.

Drawing on the surrealist tradition, Heckroth created an astonishing visual world for this "Freudian ballet" as Powell called it. After the first seconds, we are no longer watching a stage, but we experience the piece through the fantasy and subconscious of its lead ballerina, Vicky.

The idea was to create as near a Wagnerian complete artwork as could be done through film. Choreography, music, art, dance, storytelling: all would be combined to create an artistic masterpiece that ran entirely contrary to the then current British fashion in film for documentary-style realism.

Heckroth, a Hessian who had trained at the Bauhaus, moved to Britain the 1930s with his Jewish wife. His "straight" painting career was championed by critics such as Herbert Read, but he had also created avant garde designs for Ballet Jooss, and had worked on Powell and Pressburger's previous film The Black Narcissus.

To create the world for the ballet sequence, he made 130 beautifully worked oil paintings – several of which are to be shown at the BFI. The works were turned into an animated film, which can also be seen in the exhibition. Then, using the animation as the basis for the work, the choreography, by Helpmann, and the score, by Brian Easdale, were created.

In fact, according to BFI curator Nathalie Morris, Heckroth and his collaborator Ivor Beddoes created around 2,000 storyboard sketches, drawings and paintings for the film as a whole. But the work put into the design of the ballet sequence was something special. "Something on this scale was unprecedented," said Morris. "These are beautiful works of art in themselves."

It is the artistry of the ballet sequence – as well as its setting in a ballet company, headed by the extraordinarily charismatic Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) – that accounts for its hold on artists such as Scorsese, who knew Powell and Pressburger in their later years. Speaking about The Red Shoes at this year's Cannes festival, he spoke of "the spell that this film casts" and its concentration on "the mystery of the obsession of creativity and the creative drive". It is a film about the compulsion to make art. At the start of the film, Lermontov asks Vicky, "Why do you want to dance?" She flashes back, "Why do you want to live?"

According to Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor for 30 years and Powell's widow: "It's such a beautiful portrayal of artistic collaboration. It's stunning for us who work that way all the time. It is also about committing yourself to art and what that does to your life. For anyone who has a strong pull towards art, it's a seminal film."

Scorsese has lent various items to the exhibition, including a script of the film inscribed from Pressburger to "My dear Martin – giving you the last copy of my Red Shoes script has made me not poorer, it made me richer." Other items in the show include letters between Powell and Pressburger, early versions of the script, and a portion of the ballet score manuscript.

In The Red Shoes, art begins to bleed into reality as the Red Shoes ballet seeps into Vicky's life. A similar blurring of art and life occurred during the making of The Red Shoes. Easdale took on the score at short notice – recounted in Powell's autobiography in such a way as to uncannily recall the passage from the film in which Julian Craster is commissioned to write the ballet music. Meanwhile, the character of Lermontov was, according to Pressburger a mixture of "something of Diaghilev, something of [Alexander] Korda, something of Michael [Powell] and quite a little bit of me".

The Red Shoes exhibition opens at the BFI Southbank in London on 26 November. The restored version of The Red Shoes is released on 11 December.

Martin Scorsese and the trail of The Red Shoes

Scorsese has made no secret of his love of The Red Shoes. According to his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who is also Powell's widow, it is "a huge influence" on Scorsese. "You can probably see touches of it in every film." In their forthcoming movie Shutter Island, look out for a shot of a spiral staircase. It is, says Schoonmaker, a quote from the famous passage of The Red Shoes when Vicky rushes down a spiral staircase to her death.

Ballet and boxing may not appear to be natural bedfellows, but the film theorist Lesley Stern argues in her book The Scorsese Connection that his Raging Bull (1980) is essentially a reworking of The Red Shoes. Both films depict characters in the grip of a powerful obsession that threatens to escape the confines of the stage (or ring) and destroy them; both are interested in the nature of performance – whether in a theatre or a boxing ring; and both are powerfully concerned with totemic objects – the red shoes for Vicky and the boxing gloves for Jake La Motta.

• Exhibitions
• Ballet
• Martin Scorsese

Charlotte Higgins

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Darwin at the movies: A festival of apes, aliens and troglodytes

Would we have had Alien, Planet of the Apes and The Time Machine if it weren't for a certain bearded Victorian?

Darwin, Evolution and the Movies is a one-off festival of film and live comedy to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859.

Over this weekend the festival is running at three separate venues across London. Classic films you rarely get a chance to see on the big screen, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and brand new shorts commissioned as part of Darwin200 make up this small but perfectly formed festival.

If Darwin had chickened out in 1859 and decided to put his dusty manuscript back in the drawer, allowing Alfred Russel Wallace to take the fame, and the flack, the genre of science fiction that we take for granted probably would not have evolved to become the seductive, cultural force that it is.

Wallace was younger than Darwin and as a self-made scientist he was an intellectual outsider. It is possible that opponents of the theory of evolution may have been able to silence and suppress his lone voice. If this had happened the narratives of evolutionary themes that today's lovers of science fiction readily embrace, such as the threat of future evolutionary changes, metamorphosis and man's descent into savagery, would not have the cultural prominence they do.

Charles Kingsley was an ardent supporter of Darwin and in 1862 wrote The Water Babies, in part to praise Darwin.

HG Wells – who had been taught at school by TH Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog" – was directly influenced by the notion of evolutionary change over geological timescales and in 1895 published The Time Machine.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs explored atavisms and evolutionary regression in Tarzan of the Apes, and Arthur Conan Doyle speculated about a world in which dinosaurs have survived in The Lost World. These novelists directly inspired later generations of science-fiction writers such as Arthur C Clarke and Michael Crichton.

By the 1930s science fiction filmmaking had become big business. Darwin, Evolution and the Movies is London's only film festival celebrating Darwin's contribution to fiction.

What would civilisation on Earth be like if evolution transformed nonhuman apes into the superior species? The festival will screen the original Planet of the Apes movie. This film was so popular (1968 Academy award winner for make-up) that sequels and several TV series followed. But the original was never surpassed.

It explores the compelling themes of the threat of future evolution and man's descent into savagery by offering a neat reversal of primate dominance. Orang-utans are cast as conspiratorial elders, gorillas as aggressive law enforcers, chimpanzees as sinister intellectuals and humans as the dumb animals.

If we believe Darwin's theory that natural selection is an inevitable, self-propelling phenomenon that gives rise to divergent species, we must also believe the process isn't limited to Earth. It is estimated planets number millions of billions in the universe and as the iconic poster and trailer for Alien states, "In space no one can hear you scream ... "

For the movie HR Giger designed a parasitic killing machine with a segmented exoskeleton of great beauty. In its adult form the alien is reminiscent of a terrestrial vertebrate, but its highly acidic blood suggests internal organs distinct from life on Earth. The lifecycle of the alien is integral to the narrative, as the creature develops from egg, to face-hugger, to chest-buster, to devastating adult alien.

Director Ridley Scott had wanted to conclude Alien with the creature biting off Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver's) head and then making the final log entry in her voice. But the producers refused, (spoiler alert!) believing the alien had to die at the end of the film.

Since 1979 many aliens have perished and Ripley has died and been cloned back to life. The three sequels have taken these beings on a symbiotic journey of selection, culminating with Ripley and the alien genetically becoming one.

Darwin's theory of sexual selection is frequently overlooked in discussions of evolution. I've tried to redress the balance in my own comedy show Carole Jahme is Sexually Selected, which will also feature in the festival, at The Shortwave Cinema.

Darwin, Evolution and the Movies runs from 20 to 22 November 2009 (and late night at The Rio on the 28 November).

Check individual programme details at:

The Lexi Cinema
The Rio
The Shortwave Cinema

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Chris Weitz on directing The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The director reveals the challenges of making the Twilight sequel in 10 months, why the film's werewolves transform so quickly, and how fans can get their fill of Robert Pattinson

Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg team up, weirdness ensues

Beck and Charlotte teamed up for the album IRM earlier this year, and this week the video to their song Heaven Can Wait was posted online. The song we like, but the video (courtesy of Keith Schofield) we love.

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Film | guardian.co.uk
Latest news and features from guardian.co.uk, the world's leading liberal voice

 

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Television queen
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Anti climax
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The White Ribbon

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Hatred and fear. Themes that never pass their sell-by-date, especially if you read comics. If you're a comic fan, you're already an outcast, a geek, a mutie, but the X-Men are there, standing at your side, and even though their superhero fantasy world is nothing like ours, their emotions are universal; their pain, their joy, their mistakes can be shared by anyone.

Spider-man is part of the family: Marvel artist John Romita Jr opens his heart
"Spider-man is a pain in the neck to draw," laughs John Romita Jr. "All those webs!" It's a surprising confession from an artist who has been pencilling the wall-crawler's adventures on and off for more than 30 years. More so when you realise that the man who spun those difficult webs throughout much of childhood was his father, John Romita. Spider-man is an important part of the Romita family.

Jacko tried to buy Spider-man: 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
To celebrate 70 years of Marvel Comics we have dug up 70 nuggets about the comic company - one, however, is an outright fib. Try to guess which one. The answer appears at the end of the piece.

Bright star: how Keats opened a pathway into my soul and imagination
I would not have read Keats’s poems if I had not been avoiding adapting a book for the screen in which the protagonist was a creative-writing teacher. The thought was that before proceeding I should enlarge my knowledge of English poetry and literature. It was on this account that I bought a biography on Keats by Andrew Motion. It was a very big book and I really could not escape learning about John Keats and his poems.

Nowhere Boy at the London Film Festival

War films are pernicious lies, says Lebanon director Samuel Maoz
Films that depict combat as heroic, thrilling or comical are a pernicious and irresponsible misrepresentation of the truth, according to the director of the year’s most acclaimed war film.

A Serious Man at the London Film Festival

The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010
It’s an uncertain business, trying to predict next December's ‘Movie Of The Year’ list. This year, it’s trickier than ever, as the reverberations of the credit crunch continue to shake the capricious world of film finance. Even a minor hiccup in funding can delay a film for months or even years until a suitable release slot can be found.

Review and exclusive trailer: Cracks

Still calling the shots: Manoel de Oliveira, aged 100, can’t stop making films
Film buffs have an opportunity to witness a unique cinematic document today at a screening of what is almost certainly the first film by a 100-year-old director.

Film News from Times Online
Film News from Times Online

 

Why Yes Minister is as true as ever
Yes Minister the classic BBC comedy series has just been sold to the Ukraine. Proof says its cocreator Antony Jay that incompetent politicians are something the whole world can relate to.

Today's TV highlights
The day's best TV programmes on BBC ITV Channel 4 Five Freeview Freesat Sky and cable as chosen by the Telegraph's critics.

Opera North's Swanhunter Jonathan Dove interview
Composer Jonathan Dove explains why a womanising folkloric Finn makes the perfect hero for his latest family opera

Machan review
Uberto Pasolini Dharmapriya Dias Gihan De Chickera

100 TV shows that defined the decade
The West Wing Planet Earth the Doctor and The Office - plus a big dose of reality.

Rihanna: Rated R CD review
Rihanna's 'Rated R' is a sleek and dynamic hard pop record. Rating:

Mrs Warren's Profession review
Michael Rudman's 'Mrs Warren's Profession' is a witty and moving production. Rating:

Horoscopes: the week ahead from Saturday November 21
Telegraph weekly horoscope for Saturday November 21 to Friday November 27 from astrologer Catherine Tennant.

Public Property at Trafalgar Studios review
Public Property at Trafalgar Studios which features a videorecorded cameo from Stephen Fry is a cautionary tale for our celebobsessed age. Rating:

Funny how cartoons still have bite
A visit to the Cartoon Museum proves that the British satirical spirit is as vital as ever.

Departures is not what people expect from Japanese cinema
It's not Departures' fault that Oscar voters preferred it to two terrific contenders Waltz With Bashir and The Class.

My Perfect Weekend: Sharon Small
Actress Sharon Small loves Friday night family time and walking on the beach in Fife.

Gary Numan at the Brighton Dome review
Thomas H green finds the synthpop pioneer on top form

Sasha Grey interview for The Girlfriend Experience
Porn star Sasha Grey has bridged the gap between underthecounter movies and mainstream Hollywood.

Norman Painting's final Archers scenes to be aired
Devotees of Radio 4's The Archers will hear the final scenes recorded by the late and longserving actor Norman Painting this weekend.

Lady Gaga booked for Royal Variety Performance
Lady Gaga the controversial singer has been booked to perform in front of the Queen for this year's Royal Variety Performance.

Barbara Kingsolver: Interview
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible was a controversial bestseller says Tom Leonard and her new novel set in Mexico is just as provocative

Inside the Kingdom by Robert Lacey: review
Richard Spencer is fascinated by Inside the Kingdom by Robert Lacey an insider's view of the rulers of Saudi Arabia

Examined Life review
Astra Taylor Slavoj Zizek Peter Singer Cornel West. Rating:

Glorious 39 review
Stephen Poliakoff Bill Nighy Julie Christie. Rating:

Digital Composer in Residence at Wilton's Music Hall review
Ivan Hewett sees a competition for contemporary composers yield a potential new star. Rating:

Schnittke Festival at the Royal Festival Hall review
The London Philharmonic Orchestra's principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski has produced a costly and bizarre mishmash of mysticism and doggerel. Rating:

Nine: the film that seduced Hollywood's biggest stars
Everyone from Penélope Cruz and Nicole Kidman to Judi Dench wanted to be in 'Nine'.

Adrian Wilson shoots for Sang Bleu Magazine

The Twilight Saga: New Moon review
Chris Weitz; Robert Pattinson; Kristen Stewart; Rating:

Arts news reviews and previews: culture movies music theatre books and TV
The latest arts culture and entertainment news from the Telegraph. Your source for arts movies music theatre books and TV reviews and previews.

 

Strictly Come Dancing: Jade Johnson may be forced to quit with knee injury after BBC say she cannot continue

Olympic hopeful Jade Johnson has revealed she was battling the BBC to be allowed to return to the BBC ballroom show.

Children In Need: Taylor Swift donates £13,000, JLS perform and fans get Doctor Who sneak peek

Taylor Swift performed on Children In Need last night - and then donated £13,000 of her own money. There were performances from EastEnders, Peter Andre, JLS, Spandau Ballet, Doctor Who and Madness.

X Factor's Danyl Johnson brought to heel by Simon Cowell after threatening to quit show

He has been his staunchest defender throughout the X Factor. But now even Simon Cowell has lost patience with Danyl Johnson over his arrogant and smug attitude.

X Factor's John and Edward admit they get upset by the constant boos

The Irish double act reveal they have been trying to block out criticism and stay in their own Jedward bubble to ward off any upset.

Sharon Stone squeezes into leather trousers to launch charity jewellery line

She might be in her 50s, but Sharon Stone hasn't shied away from notoriously hard-to-wear leather trousers.

'I was a loser until my son came along': Comedian Michael McIntyre on the moment his life changed forever

Not so long ago the funnyman was a penniless failure. But he got his act together when he became a father - only now he's terrified he'll throw it all away.

From lads' mag favourite to Lady Macbeth: Abi Titmuss on playing Shakespeare's famous villain

She's the nurse who defended John Leslie against rape claims - then reinvented herself as a sex symbol. Now she's attempting an even more unlikely transformation.

Killed by the curse of Michael Jackson: What drove the father of Jordy Chandler to put a gun to his head?

He earned millions in hush money after exposing Michael Jackson for abusing his son - then underwent plastic surgery 19 times to hide from vengeful fans. But why did Jordy Chandler's father put an end to his life?

Gavin & Stacey: Ten things you didn't know about the popular comedy

Can't wait to find out what's occurring in the final series of Gavin & Stacey, TV's most captivating comedy? Here are ten tidy facts to keep you going.

The Informant: The inside information? Matt's weirdly watchable

The film is quirky and eccentric rather than laugh-out-loud funny, mildly amusing rather than fully involving.

A Serious Man: An ultra-sadistic, cynical comedy

It feels nasty and pointlessly vindictive. There's a hole in the middle of this movie, where a modicum of empathy and humanity ought to be.

Glorious 39: Bumbling villains, a clunky plot - run, Romola, run...

For a thriller, the pace is much too sedate, and it's easy to lose patience with a heroine who is this slow on the uptake.

Twilight New Moon: First review of long awaited sequel

This is a mere six minutes longer than the first Twilight movie, but it feels like six hours. I gave the original four stars, but the sequel is tedious, long-winded and not so much undead as almost entirely devoid of life.

Ice Age 3 at the Ice Hotel: Sweden's coolest destination hosts Manny & Co as Ice Age comes to Blu-Ray

To mark the DVD launch of Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, we travel to the Ice Hotel in Sweden to get a taste of what life was like in a never-ending winter.

2012: Chin up, it's not the end of the world. On second thoughts...

If you want massive spectacle, an orgy of disaster-movie clichés and schadenfreude run riot, you won't be disappointed. Cinematic popcorn doesn't come poppier, cornier (or cheesier) than this.

TV&Showbiz | Mail Online
All the latest celebrity news, gossip and pictures from the world of Showbusiness

 

The Sea Wall (review)


THE prejudices and injustices of the colonial era are the familiar ingredients at the heart of The Sea Wall, a languorous adaptation of a Marguerite Duras novel.

A Serious Man (review)


A SERIOUS MAN has to rate as the Coen brothers' most idiosyncratic film.

Glorious 39 (review)


NOT everyone was ready to march off to war in 1939. Influential politicians thought Britain's best interests might lie in a pact with Hitler.

The Informant! (review)


MARK WHITACRE was a shameless chancer with an infinite capacity for self-delusion.

The First Day of The Rest Of Your Life (review)


ALL of life's joys and sorrows unfold in The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life, a bittersweet French drama that explores one family unit across 12 years and five key days.

Machan (review)


UBERTO PASOLINI gained fortune and a measure of fame as the producer of The Full Monty.

Twilight: New Moon (review)


THE Twilight Saga: New Moon

Childhood demons that drove Charlie Chaplin


GRAHAM BALL investigates a new biography that reveals how the appalling upbringing of Charlie Chaplin drove him on to achieve worldwide success and acclaim as the first global entertainment icon.

Twilight saga: Dark side of the New Moon


ON Friday, New Moon, the second episode in the highly successful Twilight vampire movie series, opens at cinemas across the UK. Sandro Monetti spoke to the cast, then had a lucky escape from overexcited movie fans, who chased him through the streets...

White Ribbon


THE latest film from European master Michael Haneke is typically enigmatic.

Daily Express :: Film Review Feed
Simply The Best 7 Days A Week

 

The Habit of Art: National Theatre, London


THE opening of a new play by Alan Bennett is, theatrically speaking, a national event.

Cock: Royal Court Theatre, London


LIVING in a country where Gordon Brown has made dithering a political art form, a play involving vacillation strikes a familiar chord.

DANCE: A Christmas Carol: Theatre Royal Nottingham/Grand Theatre Leeds


A CHRISTMAS CAROL has been a staple of NBT's festive season since 1992 and working in perfect harmony with the breakaway walls and atmospheric backdrops of Lez Brotherston's cunning set, Christopher Gable and Carl Davis's trim dance version is perfect Christmas entertainment.

Theatre round-up


IN THE league of blockbuster musicals, Blood Brothers isn't a show where you come out humming the sets or the special effects but it does something even more potent: it stops, then steals, your heart.

DANCE: Quantum Leaps, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler's Wells


BRB DIRECTOR David Bintley ventures away from his comfort zone with his ambitious new work E=mc 2.

Duke Bluebeard's Castle/The Rite of Spring


WARNING:the following review may be unsuitable for readers of a nervous disposition.

Mixed Up North, Wilton's Music Hall, London


THE 2001 race riots that scorched the old Lancashire mill town of Burnley proved an inspiration for playwright Robin Soans.

Thomas Arne's Artaxerxes: Linbury Studio Theatre


WITH THE exception of the great patriotic hymn Rule Britannia, written as part of the masque Alfred, the work of the composer Thomas Arne has languished in obscurity for nearly two centuries.

Theatre round-up


LONDON THEATRE is, as always, putting up a fantastic showing on Broadway.

Agon, Sphinx, Limen: The Royal Opera House, London


WAYNE McGregor is to dance what Heston Blumenthal is to food.

Daily Express :: Theatre Feed
Simply The Best 7 Days A Week

 

TV show Jordan must eat jungle bugs
Katie Price is gearing up for yet another Bushtucker Trial on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! - but this time she will be partnered by a fellow contestant.

Kelly Brook on why Danny Cipriani is her perfect match but marriage is not on the cards
It’s been a bruising year for  Kelly Brook. Axed from Britain’s Got Talent in January after just six days, she believed her career here was over.

X Factor critics like Sting shouldn't rob the kids of glory
What this series of The X Factor reveals is that the talent gap between the stars and the wannabes is closing fast.

Peter Kay unveils first tour in seven years
Peter Kay yesterday announced his first UK tour for seven years – four nights in one city, Manchester.

X Factor star Cheryl Cole blasts rumours of a split with husband Ashley Cole
Cheryl Cole has crushed rumours her marriage to Ashley Cole is in tatters and insisted their relationship is still full of sparkle.

Jordan thinks she'll end up doing all I'm A Celebrity Bushtucker trials as public think she's a 'baddie' since Peter Andre divorce
Katie Price believes I’m a Celebrity viewers will vote for her to do every Bushtucker Trial because she’s seen as a “baddie” since her divorce from Peter Andre.

X Factor chiefs have Sir Paul McCartney lined up for live final
Sir Paul McCartney to be the special guest star on the show’s live final next month.

Children in Need passes £15m mark
BBC newsreaders have turned "bootylicious" as they braved a Beyonce dance routine for Children in Need.

Katie triumphs in latest Trial
Katie Price has successfully completed her latest fearsome Bushtucker Trial despite reacting badly when she was picked for a challenge for a fourth time.

Stars out for BBC Children in Need
Children in Need burst into life in its usual blaze of colour as BBC big guns pulled out the stops in a bid to smash last year's fundraising total of £38 million.

Children In Need single revealed
Vintage characters from The Woodentops, Thunderbirds and The Wombles have lined up with more modern shows such as Postman Pat and Bob The Builder for Children In Needs's 2009 single.

One killed in Miley tour bus crash
One person was killed when a tour bus belonging to Miley Cyrus overturned, but the 16-year-old Hannah Montana star was not on board.

Lady Gaga joins Royal show line-up
Lady Gaga is to sing for the Queen at this year's Royal Variety Performance.

Oprah Winfrey confirms end of show
Oprah Winfrey held back tears as she confirmed that her show will end in 2011.

Driver killed in Miley Cyrus tour bus crash
The driver of Miley Cyrus’s tour bus has been killed after the double-decker overturned in central Virginia.

Eminem's Relapse 2 out in 2010
Eminem's new album Relapse 2 will be released in 2010, it has been announced.

Heidi Klum, Miranda Kerr and Fergie lead Victoria's Secret parade
Heidi Klum and her post-baby body led the parade at the annual Victoria's Secret fashion show, which returned to New York with some fresh faces after four years on the road.

X Factor: Cheryl Cole and The X Factor finalists model bizarre headwear
This year’s X Factor has been the most fashionable yet, with Dannii Minogue and Cheryl Cole’s ongoing style war, Stacey’s dazzling frocks and even Jedward’s PVC costumes.

Moss: Skinny motto out of context
Kate Moss has claimed her use of a phrase in which she suggested it was better to be skinny than eat had been taken out of context.

Alex Turner surprise guest at Mencap’s Little Noise Sessions
Although the audience were told a surprise act would be playing at last night’s Little Noise Session, there was an audible gasp when Coco Sumner announced that it would be X Factor John and Edward.

Twilight star Robert Pattinson ‘to seduce Uma Thurman’ in new film Bel Ami
Uma Thurman will play Robert Pattinson’s love interest in the new film Bel Ami, according to US reports.

Oprah Winfrey quits: Chat show queen's top ten video moments
Following on from the news today that Oprah Winfrey plans to quit her hugely successful chat show in 2011, we look back at some of the star’s career highlights.

Celebs including Kara Tointon and Joanna Page gear up for Pantomime season – pics
Celebrity couple Kara Tointon and Joe Swash will be reunited on stage for this year’s pantomime season, with the pair taking on lead roles in a production of Snow White.

Paul O'Grady's dog Buster dies
Paul O'Grady is mourning the death of his faithful sidekick, Buster.

Oprah Winfrey to quit talkshow in 2011
The Oprah Winfrey Show, a broadcast that grew over two decades into a daytime television powerhouse and the foundation of a multibillion-dollar media empire, will end its run in 2011 after 25 seasons on the air, Winfrey's production company said.

Oprah Winfrey to quit talk show after 25 years
Oprah Winfrey is preparing to announce the end of her talk show, after 25 years on the air.

Scripts for EastEnders Christmas specials stolen
Scripts for EastEnders Christmas specials were stolen during a burglary at a writer's home, the BBC said today.

Peter Andre shuns Katie Price on I’m A Celebrity for late night gym sessions
Peter Andre has revealed that he hasn’t been watching Katie Price suffer on this year’s series of I’m A Celebrity, because he is too busy pumping iron in the gym.

Susan Boyle breaks CD order record
Susan Boyle was unknown a year ago - but now her upcoming album has become the largest global CD pre-order in the history of Amazon.

Winkler helps launch panto season
Henry Winkler joined forces with Mickey Rooney, Joanna Page, Kara Tointon, Chris Fountain and Anthea Turner to launch the pantomime season.

mirror.co.uk - Home - Celebs
Read today's News Headlines at the home of the Daily Mirror Newspaper - get the latest breaking News, Sport and Celebs updated throughout the day at Mirror.co.uk.

 

Strictly Come Dancing: Jade Johnson's fitness drama


OLYMPIC athlete Jade Johnson must take a last-minute fitness test before tonight's contest.

Oprah Winfrey quits chatshow


AMERICAN chatshow queen Oprah Winfrey stunned fans by announcing that she is to quit after a quarter of a century.

I'm a Celebrity: Gino D'Acampo to be quizzed by RSPCA


TELLY chef Gino D'Acampo is to be quizzed by Australian RSPCA officers after killing a bush rat and cooking it for supper.

I'm A Celebrity: Infested with ticks


THE jungle campers were put on red alert when the camp became infested with ticks.

X Factor: Simon Cowell sick of Danyl Johnson and backs Stacey Solomon


FURIOUS Simon Cowell has turned on "diva" Danyl Johnson over his behaviour in the X Factor house.

The Impressions Show With Culshaw and Stephenson


THERE'S a double helping of Tess Daly tonight. First, she does her usual turn on Strictly.

I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!


IT'S at roughly this stage in the contest, if previous years are anything to go by, that the madness sets in.

Casualty


GOOD Lord, it's TV's very first Antony Costa-themed weekend.

I'm A Celebrity: Shock twist for Katie Price and other celebs


I'M A Celebrity contestants got a shock yesterday when they were told of a major twist - as they were ordered to form two camps.

X Factor twins John and Edward found by U2 music man Robert Stephenson


X-FACTOR twins John and Edward Grimes were found by Roberst Stephenson who discovered Irish band U2.

Daily Star :: TV Feed
Simply The Best 7 Days A Week

 

N-Dubz star Tulisa feels pressure of fame


N-DUBZ star Tulisa is preparing to pack her bags and ditch her north London roots due to the pressures of fame.

Rhydian Roberts holds raven in video for new single


X Factor runner-up Rhydian Roberts is back and has turned ghoulish for his new single O Fortuna.

Arctic Monkeys and Richard Hawley at Mencap's Little Noise Sessions


WITH his uniquely dramatic songs and delivery, Sheffield's Richard Hawley is fast becoming the Scott Walker of our generation.

JLS promise top tour performance


JLS promise to give a splashing performance when they hit the road in February.

James Morrison covers Michael Jackson's Man In The Mirror


JAMES Morrison hopes people don't think he's cashing in on the death of his childhood hero Michael Jackson.

Mariah Carey is joined by Pixie Lott, Kelly Brook and Geri Halliwell at Jalouse nightclub


THE most expensive bubbly in the world, topless male models drenched in glitter and gazillions of fans packed into London's most elite night spot.

James Corden snubs Mariah Carey in hunt for ladies


FELLAS can be so fickle. When we bumped into giant joker James Corden at Mariah Carey's album launch, he had one thing on his mind.

Geri Halliwell hits the dancefloor at Mariah Carey's party


WONKY Geri Halliwell got fed up of being kept in the VIP area at Mariah Carey's bash and hit the dancefloor.

Peter Crouch and Abbey Clancy in love row


Ah, the drunken row. One minute you're smooching, the next you are reaching for a loaded weapon.

South Korean supermodel found dead in Paris


Supermodel DAUL KIM has been found dead at her Parisian apartment, aged just 20.

Daily Star :: Celebrity Feed
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What a ride!


If you've checked your Mayan calendar you'll already know we're facing a terrible fate in 2012 when the Earth is set to come to a cataclysmic end.

Caine proves so very able


MICHAEL Caine films are like the little girl with a curl on her forehead. When, like this taut, gripping revenge thriller, they are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad they are... well, remember Jaws 4?

Bright Star


BRIGHT STAR (PG)

The Men Who Stare at Goats


THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (15)

Hot bod Megan's so foxy


JENNIFER'S BODY (15)

A scary Carrey


A CHRISTMAS CAROL (PG)

Cartoon caper is all dolled up


THESE days special effects can be taken for granted but the movie magic that brings the rag-doll fighters and their metal monster enemy to life in 9 is first-rate. Unfortunately the movie isn't.

Dead man running


ANOTHER week, another British gangster thriller. Tamer Hassan faces apparently insuperable odds to raise £100,000 in 24 hours to pay off vicious loan shark 50 Cent - or die.

Teen love's a sweet dream


A STAR is born as Carey Mulligan superbly portrays a suburban 16-year-old in the 60s who comes of age the hard way when older man Peter Sarsgaard affair.

Tragic Jacko's final show is real triumph


THE legions of Jackson fans will be in seventh heaven watching this fascinating documentary showing the star's relentless rehearsals for the 50 concerts he was scheduled to give at London's O2 Arena.

Daily Star :: Movie Reviews Feed
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Literary giant Gray mixes whisky with a dash of Walt Disney
HE has designed album covers, murals and penned the eccentric and elaborate illustrations for his own books.

Oprah sets date for show's final curtain, after 25 years at the top
OPRAH Winfrey will end her popular US TV show in 2011 because it "feels right in my bones" to stop after 25 years, she said yesterday, urging viewers not to believe

Professor slams games consoles as learning tool
CLAIMS that computer games consoles can improve pupils' maths ability have been dismissed by an Edinburgh University neuroscientist.

Joining the ranks of world-famous names…
THE BEST-known artists' labels for wines and spirits have been produced for Château Mouton Rothschild, the classic French vintage wine. The tradition began with a 1945 bot

Film review: A Serious Man
DIRECTED BY: JOEL COEN, ETHAN COEN *** STARRING: MICHAEL STUHLBARG, RICHARD KIND, FRED MELAMED, SARI LENNICK, AARON WOLFF

Film reviews: The Informant! | The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life | Southern Softies
THE INFORMANT! (15) **** DIRECTED BY: STEVEN SODERBERGH STARRING: MATT DAMON, SCOTT BAKULA, MELANIE LYNSKEY

Video: Radio Forth awards
A STANDING ovation in memory of fallen firefighter Ewan Williamson was given last night at the star-studded Radio Forth Awards in the Capital's Assembly Rooms.

Film review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon
DIRECTED BY: CHRIS WEITZ *** STARRING: KRISTEN STEWART, ROBERT PATTINSON, TAYLOR LAUTNER, ASHLEY GREENE

DVD reviews: Love The Beast | Star Trek
LOVE THE BEAST METRODOME, £15.65 STAR TREK PARAMOUNT, £19.65

Sinbad The Pantomime: All the nice girls love a sailor
It's that time of the year again, folks – panto time. 'Oh, no, it isn't!' Oh, yes, it is. 'Oh, no, it isn't!' Oh, yes, it is! And it's coming t

Interview: Gary Numan - Eighties synth supremo is still flying high
IN a year when artists ditched guitars in favour of synthesisers, Gary Numan finally got his due. Which is superb, even better that he's touring to celebrate the 30th anni

The Informant! The strange tale of whistleblower Mark Whitacre
The last time Matt Damon had to change the way he looked for a movie role, he lost 40 pounds in 100 days and ended up on medication.

Television: Bear with us
Yes, it's that time of the year again, when must-see entertainment, emotional appeals and the feel-good factor of helping others in need come together for an evening that

Now it's opera on water skis
Ask most people what they know about opera and chances are you'll get the same response. That it's stuffy, high-brow nonsense; expensive, centuries old entertainment s

Dishing the dirt: First select your pineapple, then throw it at Calvin . .
Well, well, well. Another week, another opportunity to get some of the contentious issues about music off my chest. No shortage of bees in my bonnet this Friday, folks, so let

Film review: The Informant!
The Informant! (15) ****

Up front: Madeleine Peyroux
SULTRY songstress Madeleine Peyroux, it's fair to say, has a history of erratic behaviour.

Animal Magic legend's suit for sale
THE zookeeper's outfit of one of Britain's best-loved television personalities, the Animal Magic presenter Johnny Morris, goes on the auction block in Edinburgh tomorr

Eddy Grant rolls back into Electric Avenue after a 20-year break
AFTER a 20-year hiatus, there's been a steady roll of gigs for reggae rocker Eddy Grant since hitting the road again last year.

Film review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon
THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON (12a) ***

Music matters: And the winner is . . Cowell
THEY can't sing, they can't dance, but somehow the British public are fascinated to the point of obsession by John and Edward Grimes, aka Jedward.

So that's what the Romans gave us – more historic camps than anywhere
SCOTLAND already has more identified Roman camps than any other European country – reflecting Rome's repeated attempts to stamp its rule on the troublesome north.

Spoilt for choice on stage
Too many theatre shows on? Spoilt for choice? Not sure which show to spend your money on?

Gig review: Yes, Usher Hall
***

Film review: A Serious Man
A Serious Man (15) ****

Reel Time: Inverness festival shows shape of some good things to come
VIKINGS, vampires, gangsters and young lovers were just some of those converging on Inverness last weekend as the city once again hosted its annual Film Festival – and I made

Makars turn to the queen of crime mystery
You can always rely on the queen of crime to dish up a juicy story line. Just ask Sheila Clarke. Such is the theatre producer's affection for Agatha Christie's work, t

On the box with Gareth Edwards: Confessions of a Traffic warden
Confessions of a Traffic warden (C4, 9pm, last night)

A 19th century romcom, Italian style
As part of Scottish Opera's unashamedly Italianate autumn season, most people would expect to see The Elixir Of Love around Valentine's Day instead.

Here Come The Girls
ON his 1988 album Lovesexy, Prince has a track called Anna Stesia. I Feel For You, a song written by his purpleness, remains Chaka Khan's biggest hit. It's not for the

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