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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

The tribes fight back with Native Spirit

Sick of being portrayed as helpless victims, indigenous peoples are now picking up the camera themselves. And the results, as seen in the Native Spirit film festival, are remarkable

Cinema's relationship with indigenous tribal peoples has not been a happy one. Native Americans helped get the movies up and running by providing handy resistance to the winning of the west – which proved dramatically invaluable in cowboy movies. In return, they were portrayed as feathered and painted savages, hungry for scalps and blind to the essential decency of the men who were stealing their land.

In these more enlightened times, things are different, but not much better. When indigenous people appear at all, it is usually as helpless victims of oppression, in thrall to quaint but silly customs. The recent La Terra degli Uomini Rossi, released here as Birdwatchers, painted the Guarani-Kaiowá tribe of Brazil as hapless remnants of a lost people, making a futile stand against encroaching agribusinessmen. It ended with an appeal for support.

But many of the indigenous people of the Americas, and beyond, believe the white man's lens misrepresents them. They do not see themselves merely as supplicants for benefits or as combatants in an endless war for territory. Above all, they do not see their beliefs and way of life as fodder for anthropologists and tourists. Instead, they believe they have something important to say – not just to each other but to all their fellow human beings.

So they are seizing the cameras themselves. From Inuit fishermen in Canada to Endorois refugees in Kenya, from reindeer-herders in Lapland to Quechua salt-harvesters in Bolivia, they are grabbing whatever equipment they can find to make films of their own, devising lasting messages that can travel far and wide.

Three years ago, Freddy Treuquil, a videographer from Chile's Mapuche people, decided this phenomenon deserved its own annual showcase. He founded the Native Spirit film festival, which ran in London last week. The objective, Treuquil says, is "to rescue the forgotten memory of respect for mother Earth". This year's programme included The Tunguska Project, about Siberia's Evenks; Tainá-Kan, which told how Brazil's Karajá link the birth of agriculture to events in the cosmos; and President Evo, which showed what the Aymara make of the land redistribution programme unleashed by Bolivia's first indigenous leader.

I know what you're thinking. Stand by for some of the most balls-achingly boring experiences a cinema could host. That was certainly how I felt – then I went along and saw the movies. Certainly, if you go looking for a racy tale with a twist at the end, you'll be bored. The film-making approach is as far from Hollywood as it is from the avant garde. Explosions and CGI are absent, as are the drama and momentum that western audiences expect. Here, time tends to be circular rather than linear: an event from the past will be re-envisaged rather than dramatised, the idea being to keep the memory alive, rather than turn it into entertainment.

Films called Herdswoman, This Is Me, Canoe Pulling and The Whispering of the Trees pretty much do what they say on the tin, but they are generally the result of a collaboration, rather than one auteur's vision. And, instead of the escapism that has become the primary purpose of mainstream cinema, they express deeply felt attitudes and ideas. "These films are looking for balance and harmony," says Agustin Bazzini, the festival co-ordinator. "That's something we don't have here. We've lost our centre."

Watch enough of these films and you will come to appreciate that, on whatever continent indigenous people find themselves, they share a curiously similar outlook – not just core values, but recurring symbols and prophecies. There's an assumption that knowledge and wisdom must coexist, the first being useless without the second; that the point of life is not to acquire wealth, but simply to live; that the universe is a sacred, living system; that human beings are one element in a grand symbiosis they must not disrupt; that the past must be remembered, and the future respected.

Of course, we have heard such notions in this connection before, and perhaps dismissed them as facile or even irrelevant. But in these movies they inform behaviour in a way that is highly persuasive. The Gift of Pachamama shows how a 13-year-old boy comes of age by joining a llama caravan wending its chilly way through the Andes. He learns how to bear loss and find love, but also how Pachamama, the Earth Mother, can give his life meaning. In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman shows the enduring power of female wisdom through a dialogue between a Navajo girl and her gran, while The Voice of the Mapuche explains how identity and kinship with the environment can be strengthened by persecution.

Yet, for cinema-goers more used to multiplexes, the most engaging feature of these films may be their authenticity. We are used to searching for some sliver of originality in formulaic, derivative material; the Native Spirit festival simply offers the testimony of the unrobed human soul.

The message isn't just honest, it's also pertinent. Indigenous peoples are as aware as the rest of us about the prospect of environmental catastrophe. They know that the excesses of the developed world endanger them, too, yet they are not as resentful as you might expect. Human greed comes as no surprise to them, but rather than blaming us, they pity us; we're little brothers who lost our way when we stopped understanding the Earth.

All the same, there is no escaping the tidings: to survive, we are going to have to come together and find a life beyond consumerism. Spirits for Sale shows how such a life can be not just livable but rewarding. Annika Banfield, a Swedish business consultant, records a journey she took through North America in an effort to understand the wishes and feelings of its native peoples. "What I have learned," she told me, "is to be proud of who I am, where I come from, my land and my own traditions. It is a connection with everything living – the contract to take care of the machinery called life."

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Stalking Tarkovsky at the Sheffield Doc/Fest

In the second of his diaries from the Sheffield DocFest, David Cox reports on a new documentary that lifts the lid on the troubled gestation of Tarkovsky's sci-fi masterwork, Stalker

To mark its 75th birthday, the BFI asked 75 lofty figures which one film they would most wish future generations to see. Blade Runner came top of the poll, but the runner-up was a surprise to some. Way ahead of the The Godfather, Pulp Fiction and The Third Man came Andrei Tarkovsky's sci-fi classic, Stalker.

This film's been puzzling cineastes ever since it appeared in 1979. Perhaps it puzzles you. If so, what do you really want to know about it? Not, surely, what the whole mysterious concoction might actually be supposed to mean. What you're almost certainly wondering is why the film's original director of photography had his name left off the credits.

Or if you aren't, I know a man who is. Director Igor Mayboroda worked with the DoP involved, Georgi Rerberg, and considers him one of cinema's towering figures. In 1993, Tarkovsky's diaries were published. In these, the great man justified Rerberg's sacking by accusing him not just of technical and aesthetic inadequacy, but also of a wide range of sordid personal failings.

Up with this, Mayboroda was not going to put. What could he do? What would you expect an impassioned Russian film-maker to do? Naturally, Mayboroda put together a documentary that examined in depth the way in which Stalker came to be shot. With a running-time of 140 minutes, it turned out to be almost as long as Stalker itself.

Yesterday, Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of Stalker got its UK premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest. Before the screening, Mayboroda warned us that his film would prove "long and difficult to watch". No worries! We expected no less. It's true that some members of the audience did sneak out before those all-important credits got a chance to roll. This was, however, their loss entirely.

Rerberg and Tarkovsky makes it clear that Stalker's protracted gestation was a great deal more eventful than the film to which it gave birth. Tarkovsky was determined to pull off an effect that he'd seen Bergman achieve. When Rerberg failed to deliver it, even after a special studio had been built, Tarkovsky went ballistic. Then, dud film stock proved disastrous. Should Rerberg have tested it first?

While documenting these incidents, Mayboroda makes it clear that more profound forces were really shaping events. Many of his witnesses agreed that Tarkovsky's wife Larisa was the key to the action. Seen originally as a docile simpleton intent only on gratifying her spouse's wishes, she quickly turned from an angel into a "fiend" (according to some) or a "witch" (according to others).

As a thesp of sorts, she demanded that she, rather than the slated candidate, should play the stalker's wife. Tarkovsky wavered. Rerberg asked him, "Do you want Larisa or the actress?" The intervention did for Larisa's chances, but apparently she never forgave her nemesis. Some had it that all the trouble that bedevilled Stalker's production could be put down to the machinations of "the Empress".

Certainly, Mayboroda succeeded in summoning up plenty of film greats prepared to testify to the majesty of Rerberg's talent. At one point, Tarkovsky is said to have demanded of Rerberg, "Do you think it's you who's the genius?" One sage perhaps hit the nail on the head with the comment, "Two geniuses on one set is one too many."

This film might leave you convinced that Tarkovsky was a wilful, selfish, vainglorious and treacherous megalomaniac. He insisted that 17 different versions of Stalker were made. Apparently, he demanded that most of Rerberg's footage should be reshot, but in such a way that the new work was identical to the old.

Still, nobody's (yet) made a 140-minute doc giving Tarkovsky's side of the story. After the screening, I put this point to Mayboroda. How different might such a film be from his own effort? "Several weaknesses operating in the same situation could be viewed from different perspectives," he opined magisterially. Quite so.

Yet it's not only the perspectives of his mighty antagonists that Mayboroda has managed to capture. Somehow, he gets across the way life must look to all those for whom only film-making matters. He also shows that when something matters in Russia, it seems to matter more than it does elsewhere.

Even the baleful Tarkovsky once said that Rerberg's images were shaped by "an aspiration for the truth, the truth presupposed by all his previous experience". You wouldn't get Michael Winner saying something like that of his lensman.

This premiere was part of a Russian strand in the Sheffield programme, marking the 20th anniversary of the USSR's demise. In fact, Rerberg and Tarkovsky is the one of only two wholly Russian features being shown. No matter. On its own, it's a sufficient tribute to Russia's film-making prowess, which it perhaps goes some way to explain.

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The goats who stare at men

As Jon Ronson's takeover of guardian.co.uk/film winds up, he journeys to Buttercups Goat Sanctuary and talks us through the curious history of goats' involvement with the US military

Bright Star

Jane Campion's marvellous ode to Keats is that rare thing – a biopic about a poet that does full justice to its subject

Films about poets have a poor reputation, most of them – from Dennis Price as The Bad Lord Byron 60 years ago to Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath six years back – being dull and risible, though a couple of performances have been rather good, most notably Rip Torn's exuberant Walt Whitman in the otherwise unremarkable Beautiful Dreamers. Jane Campion's Bright Star is in a different class and this is partly because it looks at John Keats from the viewpoint of Fanny Brawne, in the same way that Percy Adlon's remarkable Céleste looked at Proust through the eyes of his dedicated housekeeper.

The three-year relationship between Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and Keats (Ben Whishaw) – she was 18 when they met in 1818, he was 23 – is one of the great love affairs of English literature, but it didn't become public knowledge until a decade after her death in 1865 when some of his letters to her were published.

Using Andrew Motion's magisterial biography as her biographical source and Keats's poetry as her creative model, Campion has made what she calls "a ballad, a sort of story poem" about the relationship that begins with the beautiful, confident Fanny on her way with her young brother and sister and their mother to meet Keats and his devoted, well-off companion, poet Charles Brown, and ends with Fanny's terrible grief after receiving the news of his death in Rome in February 1821.

Campion resists the temptation to follow Keats to Italy. Instead, Brown reads a letter from painter Joseph Severn who'd accompanied Keats on his journey, and we see a brief, silent sequence of a coffin being carried down the Spanish Steps and a hearse driving off towards the Protestant Cemetery.

There's some rather clumsy exposition in the opening scenes when we're told about Keats's humble background, his parents' deaths, his sickly young brother Tom and another brother's emigration to the States. But this is uncharacteristic of a movie that subtly follows an Austenesque process as it moves from playful banter and underlying tension into the true love and mutual reliance that springs up when John and Fanny become next-door neighbours in Hampstead. The only thing standing between their two beds at that point is the thin wall dividing the semi-detached houses.

Campion is a feminist film-maker, the heroines of her films usually oppressed by insensitive families or husbands, as in her two previous excursions into the 19th century, The Piano, her most fully achieved work until Bright Star, and The Portrait of a Lady, a fine but flawed film. So one becomes aware of an absence of what might be called assertiveness or aggression of a kind we might have expected from her. There are no conspicuous point-scoring sexual politics at work in Bright Star beyond the obvious recognition that women at that time were restricted in their social lives.

This is largely confined to the admirably handled conflict between Brawne and Brown. Brown, a conventional misogynist, regards women as objects for exploitation, display or distant adoration and believes it his duty to protect the vulnerable Keats from the distraction Fanny constitutes. He represents a different kind of love from the one Keats offers and ends up making a servant girl pregnant and marrying her without any intention of remaining faithful. He also lets down Keats, first by no longer being able to provide financial support, then in finding excuses for not going with him to Italy.

From the start, Brown mocks Fanny as a flirtatious clothes horse, attracting attention to the fancy outfits she designs and makes. But she comes across attractively as a proto-Coco Chanel, the couturier as artist, taking pride and pleasure in her creations. This prevents the film going in the direction of the conflicts between poets and their lovers tendentiously dramatised in Tom and Viv and Sylvia.

Fanny comes into Keats's orbit by wanting to comfort his ailing brother Tom and through her desire to understand his poetry. She is not seeking to become his muse (though she does) and isn't jealous of him (and indeed there's little in the way of professional success or social attainment to be jealous of).

It is the man and his work that attracts her, and as played by Ben Whishaw he's an engaging figure: sociable but socially awkward, proud but not arrogant, a dreamer but not dreamy, and curiously vigorous despite the tuberculosis that so often drags him down and will soon kill him. What we inevitably miss is the larger social vision that Motion's biography reveals. Not surprisingly Mrs Brawne (Kerry Fox) thinks Keats a hopeless match for her daughter, but she is a kindly, thoughtful person and is prepared, for a mixture of reasons, for her daughter to become engaged, if only secretly.

At the heart of the film is a doomed love affair that moves gently, inexorably towards death through the seasons that the poet observes, and one thinks of The Eve of St Agnes, the great narrative poem Keats wrote in this period, which comes across like a scenario for a wonderful silent movie. Both Cornish and Whishaw inhabit their roles immaculately and there are magnificent moments when the emotions on the screen are complemented in the verse spoken, most especially perhaps when the pair recite alternate couplets from "La Belle Dame sans Merci".

The film, most of it shot on location in Bedfordshire, is beautifully lit by Greig Fraser and it ends with a fine reading by Ben Whishaw of "Ode to a Nightingale" that begins after Fanny has walked across a wintry Hampstead Heath in a mourning dress of her own creation and accompanies the credits to the very end. So don't rush for the exit when the credits start rolling. Sit and savour this marvellous film until the lights come up.

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Anna Faris and Dan Akyroyd set to join Yogi Bear pic-a-nic

A live-action/CG film of Jellystone Park's most famous inhabitant is expected to start shooting next month

He was reputedly "smarter than the average bear" and it seems that he is more durable too. Yogi, the hirsute cartoon hero who once stole picnic baskets from the campers in "Jellystone Park", is to make his comeback in a tailor-made Hollywood movie.

Yogi Bear, which is expected to start shooting next month in New Zealand, will blend live-action with CG animation in its bid to resuscitate the defunct TV favourite. Variety reports that Dan Aykroyd is in negotiations to provide the voice of the tie-wearing bear. Justin Timberlake is lined up to co-star as his sidekick Boo-Boo, while Anna Faris will play a documentary film-maker who visits the park.

Yogi Bear first appeared on TV screens in 1958, before being graced with his own dedicated slot, The Yogi Bear Show, in 1961. Produced by Hanna-Barbera and sponsored by Kellogg's, The Yogi Bear Show revolved around the star's endless efforts to outwit the officious Park Ranger Smith. Nothing, it appeared, spurred Yogi to action more than the scent of a stray "pic-a-nic basket".

The Warner Bros production is being scripted by Brad Copeland and will be shot by Eric Brevig, who directed Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It will, in fact, mark Yogi's second foray into the wilder realms of the feature-length movie. In his younger, more supple days, he starred in a 1964 cartoon movie entitled Hey There, It's Yogi Bear.

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You review: A Christmas Carol 3D

The critics have been miserly about Jim Carrey's Scrooge. Are they right, or do they just lack a little Christmas cheer? Ben Child passes the humbugs

Perhaps the critics need a visit from the ghost of Christmas criticism: there is very little real joy in their hearts when it comes to Robert Zemeckis's latest 3D motion capture spectacular, a retelling of Charles Dickens's tale of an old miser who comes to remember the joy of the festive season after getting a rough ride at the hands of a trio of spectral tutors.

The film-maker ramps up the action a thousandfold in A Christmas Carol, swooping us across the rooftops of Victorian London, out to the countryside and even up to the stars as he revels in the boundless range of virtual cameras. Yet many reviewers, with fists clenched tighter than Scrooge himself, just cannot quite see past the mask oftechnology, while some even dare to wonder whether the whole affair might not have been rather better presented in old fashioned live action with not a pixel to be seen.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times is one of the few to offer a truly charitable verdict. "Disney's A Christmas Carol by Robert Zemeckis (and Charles Dickens, of course) is an exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time he's one of the few directors who knows what he's doing with 3-D," he writes. "The story that Dickens wrote in 1838 remains timeless, and if it's supercharged here with Scrooge swooping the London streets as freely as Superman, well, once you let ghosts into a movie, there's room for anything."

Empire's Angie Errigo offers Zemeckis a three-star review, but you get the impression it's a pretty grudging one. "The advancement in technology is undeniable and the 3-D is very good," she admits. "But how well one likes this depends very much on how well one responds to motion capture. To us it's neither as 'real' as live action nor as beautiful as classic hand drawn animation could be — Pinocchio, say. And it's not as cunning as the best CGI we've come to love in a Toy Story or Shrek."

"It's a faithful adaptation," writes our own Peter Bradshaw. "But there is a weird lack of passion here, almost condescension, a sense that Scrooge's agonised moral journey into his past is potentially pretty dull, and so Zemeckis is always livening things up by whooshing the old miser excitingly through the night sky between visions – a London thrill-ride perhaps influenced by the Harry Potter movies. The hi-tech sheen is impressive, but in an unexciting way. I wanted to see real human faces convey real human emotions."

"There is something very wrong here," writes The Times' Wendy Ide. "Stories from the pen of Dickens should chug along comfortably like a steam train, not hurtle headlong at the speed of a supersonic jet on test manoeuvres.

"Like it or not, almost from the very outset, chimney pot-skimming action is what we get. At times, it's like zapping through a Dickensian version of Google Earth. We are whisked from Stepney to St Paul's in the blink of an eye, leaving our lunches somewhere near Bow."

For me, A Christmas Carol is pretty much as good as one might expect from a director who some time ago wagered his career on the triumph of a certain type of technology, namely motion capture, and looks unlikely to waver in the face of its many drawbacks. The main problem is that even though the technique is rapidly improving - Zemeckis' new film looks better even than Beowulf did two years ago, for instance - it is still frustratingly impossible to ignore the technology beneath the celluloid canvass.

This is not the case for Pixar's animated movies, by way of contrast, which do not use motion capture. So why, exactly, is the technique still being used, when it is clearly not advanced enough to allow audiences to suspend their disbelief? It seems likely that it is something to do with being a little cheaper, and a lot to do with the illusion that it allows animated fare to take advantage of the cinemagoing public's affection for particular actors, in this case Jim Carrey. And, of course, it lends itself to 3D, which Hollywood has embraced with slightly more gusto than Tiny Tim tucking into a nice fat Christmas bird.

But perhaps I'm being a curmudgeon myself. Did you catch A Christmas Carol yet? And did it fill you with the joy of the festive spirit? Or do you wish Carrey and co's performances had been beamed to you direct, rather than through a slightly unsettling prism of high-tech algorithms?

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Rebirth of the radical at the Viennale film festival

If you ever find yourself suspecting the days of avant-garde cinema are over, the Viennale festival, which ended on November 4, will restore your faith. This year's selection of rarities and experimental films was a thrilling one

As a regular film festival-goer, I often find myself asking: "What is a film festival for?" The replies vary depending on whether one is a film-maker, critic or member of the public. Film-makers may answer that it gives them an opportunity to schmooze producers, distributors and critics, while allowing their films to get some exposure. Critics and film-goers may say it gives them the chance to see the latest movies before anyone else in their country. Alas, the biggest draws at a festival are usually films that will most likely be shown sooner or later at the local multiplex.

Not so at the Viennale festival, where even the most non-commercial films play to full houses. Strictly non-red carpet, the Viennale provides reassurance that radical, experimental cinema is still a going concern. If the prime purpose of a film festival is to open up exciting new vistas and present work one is unlikely to see elsewhere, then Vienna in autumn is the place to be.

This year, audiences were able to catch up on 10 films by the prolific Lino Brocka, the Philippines' most celebrated director, killed in a car crash in 1991 aged 52. And where else could one see a retrospective of the films of the extraordinary character actor Timothy Carey, who also directed a groundbreaking underground film, The World's Greatest Sinner (1962)? Other stimulating retrospectives were a 12-film tribute to Tilda Swinton, including cinema theorist Peter Wollen's only feature, Friendship's Death (1987); a series entitled The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the USA, and early Austrian films from 1906-18.

The tone of the festival was set with the trailer by James Benning. Last year's was a hard act to follow, commissioned as it was from Jean-Luc Godard, but Benning's Fire and Rain (after the James Taylor song) was a success. It consists of a 50-second shot of work in a steel factory – which is in fact a tiny fragment from a two-hour take from Benning's new film, Ruhr. It was Benning who made 13 Lakes (2004), 130 minutes of 13 stationary takes of North American lakes, and RR (2007), comprising nearly two hours of trains passing through our field of vision - ie, that of his tripod-mounted, never-moving camera. If the word "boring" comes into your mind, then you don't really know Benning's work, or you are unwilling to commit to such levels of concentration and engagement necessary to gain the untold rewards this kind of contemplative cinema offers. Nobody pretends experimental cinema is easy watching. Some boredom, incomprehension and irritation is part of the price one pays to be equally surprised, exhilarated and inspired.

Among the examples of "minimalist" cinema on display in Vienna was Peter Liechti's The Sound of Insects – Record of a Mummy, based on the diary of a man who meticulously recorded the last weeks of his life while starving himself to death in a remote area. We hear a voice reading the diary and see nothing outside his vision and hallucinations, which forces the viewer to share his experience.

Jean-Marie Straub's Corneille and Brecht – a world premiere – consists of three almost identical sections in which a woman declaims verses of Corneille on ancient Rome and then sits in an armchair reading from Brecht's radio play The Trial of Lucullus. It is rather like listening to an opera in an unknown language, stretching your understanding beyond mere sense and content, and much of the hypnotic effect comes from the unexpected cuts – such as the way the reader's clothes keep changing.

The Anchorage, co-directed by the Swedish photographer Anders Edström and the American CW Winter, demonstrates the drama of banality. The film follows the everyday existence of an elderly woman who lives alone on an island on the Stockholm archipelago. She swims in the cold sea, goes shopping, catches fish and listens to the radio. Yet every action is significant in its own way due to the way the film is shot and the sound design. While eschewing any large themes, it is a cinematic poem to nature and survival.

In contrast were two new Austrian productions the festival was obliged to show. Unfortunately, each proved the banality of drama. Domaine, a rather unpleasant French-Austrian co-production by Patric Chiha, tried to be serious about trivial people, but turned out to be trivial about trivial people. Nevertheless, it was helped by an unnerving performance by Béatrice Dalle as an alcoholic woman jealous of her gay nephew (a promising debut by Isaïe Sultan).

Another actor who has seen better days is Helmut Berger, Visconti's prima uomo, but he gives a sympathetic performance in the unspeakable Blutsfreundschaft (Initiation), directed by the veteran Peter Kern, who acted in several Fassbinder movies. Set in a Vienna that nobody could recognise, it deals with a group of Nazi thugs who terrorise "non-pure Austrians" and "homos". One of their targets is the self-styled "old faggot" Berger, who has befriended a reluctant Nazi boy (who reminds him of the boy he loved when he was in the Hitler Youth – cut to exploitative flashbacks.) The ludicrous finale shows a group of immigrants – Turks, Orientals, Arabs – lining up in front of a large group of Nazi yobs on the march. The yobs stop, drop their banners and turn on their heels. If only.

What a relief to leave maximalism and return to films where nothing much seems to happen but where everything happens.

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Colin Firth and Robert Zemeckis on making a surreal, stylised A Christmas Carol

Actor Colin Firth and director Robert Zemeckis tell Ben Child about using performance capture technology to bring a new spin to Charles Dickens's classic seasonal tale

Michael Caine keeps coming home … more stars should do the same

Harry Brown sees Caine back on his old stomping ground. Will Connery and co follow his lead?

The Old Crowd is showing its age these days. When you see Michael Caine ridding his working-class estate of nasty little asbo 'orrors in Harry Brown, shuffling around in his granddad shoes and his woolly pully, always short of puff after delivering a dose of Bronsonian vengeance to some lairy teenage git, and generally looking fairly ancient and doddery throughout, you can't help inwardly flashing back down through aeons of postwar English movie history to the bright young gamecock of Zulu, The Ipcress File and Alfie. Harry Brown seems like a bit of a comedown in contrast, what with its Daily Mail paranoia and its Winnerish proximity to other recent nasty avengers' tragicomedies such as Paparazzi and Death Sentence.

For all that, though, Caine does something here that I wish other superstar actors of his vintage would try more often: he comes home, right back to his roots. Caine has done this before, perhaps because his East End origins form the central pillar of his personal mythos (and must never be disavowed), and because his travels away from those origins have made him an emblematic figure of his generation, of his decade, and of his class, which itself has collectively seen some fair old turn-arounds over the same period. Caine came back to his roots, and back to his own father, with his sublime performance in Last Orders, for example, and one of the great pleasures of that small, wise ensemble drama was its cast of actors from the 1960s: Caine, Tom Courtenay and David Hemmings.

Caine we know well because we all lived through his just-play-anything down-years, his Oscar noms, his tax-exile and return, and his current respectability. We remember all his glasses, every change of outfit, and every new restaurant he invested in. Courtenay and Hemmings, 1960s icons in a more precise and localised sense – as Billy Liar and the snapper from Blow-Up respectively, and ill-remembered for much else – disappeared from prominence, if not from all sight, for years at a time, giving us a less sure grip on their screen personae, but guaranteeing pleasure with their increasingly rare appearances (Gladiator for Hemmings, Let Him Have It for Courtenay).

The one person I'd love to see return to his roots is Sean Connery. There must be a million grizzled Scottish patriarchs and scary auld Jocks Sir Sean could play if he came home. Imagine him making some radical break with his past, like a James Kelman adaptation, or playing the grandfather in Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers. And he could really let rip with the full-strength Scottish accent for a change. Coming home worked for Richard Harris in The Field, for Terence Stamp in both The Hit and The Limey, and works for Caine whenever he tries it.

So Sir Sean, git yersel' on hame, son, we miss ye.

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Sergei Dvortsevoy: the man who films goats

Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoy felt documentaries were turning him into 'a vampire', so he turned to fiction – and he's still a genius

While I was teaching at a Moscow film school in 1996, I was approached by Russian television to appear in a programme about my documentaries. The producer wanted to put me together with a Russian film-maker, to contrast their work against my own for British TV, and asked if I had any ideas who that might be. I didn't know much about Russian documentaries, but I had just seen a strikingly original 17-minute film called Paradise. It was made up of five scenes filmed in a village in the Kazakh steppe, each shot in one uninterrupted take. It was all pure observation, and yet each scene fell into a perfectly timed, often funny, and seemingly God-given mise en scene. The director turned out to be a student at the school where I happened to be teaching. That's how I met Sergei Dvortsevoy.

As you'd expect, this "double portrait" turned out rather unbalanced. On the one hand, you had an established film-maker on a BBC salary working with proper budgets; on the other, a student making a film for no money at all and living with his wife, child and cat in one room on the 11th floor of a decrepit hall of residence. Yet, embarrassingly, it was my films that felt like works in progress – uneven, impatient, trying too hard – while Dvortsevoy's short was a single-minded work of art, beautifully formed and in perfect harmony with itself.

A lot changed since our meeting in 1996. The world has turned more cynical and nasty, but Dvortsevoy has stuck to his guns, making a series of extraordinary documentaries all as pure and uncynical as his student debut. He took his time over each one, working and reworking them, until they were complete. When, five years ago, Dvortsevoy disappeared off the face of the earth to make his fiction debut, I was secretly disappointed. I knew he wasn't one of these career-minded directors who treat documentary as a stepping stone to making "real" movies. Still, I suspected that plot, actors,and a larger crew would lead him astray.

I needn't have worried. It took him four years and the odd reshoot to get it right, but in Tulpan, the story of a sailor who returns home to the Kazakh steppe to find a wife, he has managed to blend his documentary method with narrative storytelling to create something fresh and original. The film's success at Cannes, where it won the Un Certain Regard award last year, may have taken the film world by surprise, but for Dvortsevoy's fans it was a continuation of a long and patient journey, one inspiringly at odds with the logic of today's film industry. Where he can go from here is hard to say, but one thing is clear; the producers and financiers who've started besieging him with scripts and deals are barking up the wrong tree.

When I met Dvortsevoy last February he'd just come out of a football game at Stamford Bridge. Typically, he appeared less excited about a late equaliser and Chelsea's stoppage-time winner than about the movement and body language of Frank Lampard and John Terry. Football was Dvortsevoy's first big love affair. Growing up in provincial Chimkent, southern Kazakhstan, his only plan for life had been to become a footballer. "From the age of 10 I had nothing else on my brain," he says. "I trained all day, slept with my ball in the bed." He got into a special sports school and at 18 he had trials with a team in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, before an injury put paid to his hopes. Instead, he fell into a traineeship as a flight radio engineer and spent nine years with Aeroflot before he came across a newspaper advert for directors' courses at a Moscow film school. "I've no idea what possessed me to apply, especially as I'd never been that interested in cinema or even photography," he says. "Literature, yes, that was serious. Chekhov, Tolstoy, I used to read a lot; but cinema was just something you went to on a Saturday night with the lads." He remains mystified how he got through the selection process. "Maybe they were tickled that here was this flight engineer from nowhereseville who had no idea about film. They probably needed one village idiot in each year."

He says it was precisely because of his naivety and total lack of cinematic baggage that he found his style so soon. "Basically I quickly worked out what I didn't like. They were showing us these Soviet-style documentaries, which were made of vérité shots, lots of commentary and talking heads, with people saying the sort of things they were expected to say; for the most part they were lying. But what seemed interesting were the images, the glimpses of reality where you could see people doing something, I was more interested in how people behaved rather than what they had to say."

Dvortsevoy shot his graduation film, Paradise, with a jobbing cameraman from a local TV station. "The man kept trying to teach me what cinema was about. I remember this scene where a small kid eats a bowl of sour cream, and then licks it clean, burps, falls over backwards and falls asleep. I wanted to shoot it all in one take. The cameraman said: 'Come on, we have to cover this scene properly from different angles, close, wide, one way, then the other, and then you put it together in the cutting room and you have a scene. That's cinema!' I didn't want to antagonise the man, couldn't afford to, so I just said: 'You're probably right, but let's try and do it my way first and then we do it your way.'"

His next film, Bread Day, was set in an abandoned Russian village, whose only inhabitants were old people, alcoholics and goats. They were kept alive by a weekly delivery of bread, which was left in a train carriage at a railway junction five kilometers from the village. The film opens with an wonderful 10-minute shot of the locals pushing the carriage with bread along an abandoned railway track.

Dvortsevoy's most moving and most difficult documentary, In the Dark, is contained in a small flat in an anonymous Moscow tower-block, where a blind pensioner lives alone with only a mischievous white cat for company. To stay sane, the old man weaves woollen bags, while the cat – his only friend and greatest enemy – keeps stealing, hiding and unravelling his wool. "I was so limited in that flat. There was so little movement, even my hero's face was quite still, though he did have his emotional moments. But basically, it was a man and a cat in a room. I thought if I can make a film out of this, I must be pretty good."

In the Dark was Dvortsevoy's last documentary. "I'd started feeling bad about spending time with these people, using their lives, turning them into art and then abandoning them to their own devices. You can't interfere in life like this and expect there won't be consequences. Paradise, for instance, seemed like an innocent enough film, but it went down badly with some local apparatchiks, it didn't show a positive enough image of the country, so they took it out on my hero. They made his life a misery, even had him arrested. Also, working with real people you're always tempted to dig deeper and deeper into their lives – but for the sake of what exactly? You become a vampire."

If, in documentaries, Dvortsevoy's strategy was to observe and lie in wait for the right moment to turn over, letting reality choreograph itself into an eloquent shot, Tulpan was a balancing act between the accidental poetry of his documentaries and the needs of drama and plot. His central character, Asa, comes back to live with his sister Samal and her sheep-herding husband Ondas, and begins negotiations to a marry local girl called Tulpan – the only eligible girl in the area. Dvortsevoy tried to organise his action in such a way as to tell each scene in a single long take, while staying open to happy accidents. A real whirlwind, for example, rises up in the steppe to engulf Asa and Ondas as they round up the herd; a goat comes up to the lovestruck Asa and kisses him on the mouth; a hyper-active toddler chases after his uncle Asa, but then changes his mind halfway through the shot and starts playing with his tortoise, which scampers off in the sand. "This could only work with a really alert camera operator, who was constantly framing things out and including events at the right moment," Dvortsevoy says. "That little boy kept looking at the camera, so it was a real challenge."

Keeping the long takes going and getting performances from the actors can't have been easy. Admittedly, the characters and the emotions involved were not very complicated, but it must have been a challenge to keep the energy and the focus through these long takes, in which so many planned and unplanned elements played together. "Yes, that's why I often talked out loud throughout the shots, to the horror of my French soundman, I had to shout stuff or make noises to energise the actors."

The key moment in the film is when Asa accidentally comes across a pregnant sheep in the steppe and helps her give birth. It's all told in a continuous 10-minute take. "We did a lot of preparation for that. We spent days getting the sheep used to the crew and the actor, and we observed a few live births to give everyone an idea how it all works. It was a major operation. We had people keeping an eye on the herd, so we'd know in advance which sheep might be giving birth and were always at the ready."

Of course, Dvortsevoy's methods are unthinkable in the context of contemporary western cinema, with nosy executives, fussy crews, agents, actors, health and safety issues, and completion bonds. More importantly, Dvortsevoy's cinema depends on a particular sort of landscape, where objects have texture and history, where people physically interact with nature – rather than sit in front of screens, commute in cars or trains, work out in gyms and live out their adventures in some virtual space.

"I must admit, I don't envy you having to make films in Britain," Dvortsevoy tells me. "It seems like this world is becoming more and more digitised. When I applied for a visa to come to the UK, I had to go on the internet and fill in a long questionnaire with questions about myself. In the end the computer said no. I was refused a visa four times! I was turned down not by a human being who looked, listened and made a decision, but by a computer. Something in my personal details didn't make sense. It seems like people's behaviour is becoming more and more predictable and programmed. Everyone knows their place, how they fit in. But there's no way you can digitise reality out in the steppe; the world is open to possibilities. There's no way of telling which way the camel might go."

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Dead Man Running's Brenda Blethyn and 50 Cent on guns, gangs and grudges

Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson and Brenda Blethyn tell Xan Brooks about making Alex de Rakoff's crime thriller on gangsters in the global financial crisis

The honorary Oscars: why you should care

The Oscars ceremony is changing its rules to stop the television audience from shrinking, but shunting the honorary awards to an earlier date only serves to make it less relevant, says David Thomson

In awarding the Oscars for 2010, the Academy has chosen to give the Irving Thalberg award (its highest individual distinction) to John Calley. Now, you may not know who Calley is, and that is a mark of his distinctive modesty. But in the 1970s, he was a crucial executive at Warner Brothers who gave the creative go-ahead or purchase order on films including A Clockwork Orange, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Mean Streets and Dog Day Afternoon. Later on, he held a similar position at United Artists and was decisive in backing Leaving Las Vegas. And along the way, as an independent producer, he has mounted Remains of the Day and The Da Vinci Code. No, I don't like The Da Vinci Code either, but Calley is one of the last of the movie-making executives who has good work to his name.

He gets the Thalberg award, and everyone in the business says: "Bravo." But the Academy is making Calley's award part of its inaugural Governors' awards on 14 November. It's a special event – not part of the Oscar night. Do you care?

There are others, set to receive honorary awards on the same night. Like Gordon Willis – do you know what he looks like? Maybe not, but you know the look he likes. Willis is one of the great living cinematographers. He shot all three parts of The Godfather, Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Pennies from Heaven, The Purple Rose of Cairo. Can you imagine – on Oscars night – a five- or seven-minute reel of great moments from Gordon Willis? But he's set for 14 November. Do you care?

Then there's Roger Corman – the cheerful, cut-price producer of shock, schlock, beach movies, biker dramas and Edgar Allan Poe stories, dripping in blood, the producer who gave first chances to Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, etc. Can you imagine the celebration of Hollywood's last great generation that might honor Corman? No, it won't happen on Oscar night. It's on 14 November. Do you care?

And last but not least: do you recall the Oscar night when Juliette Binoche won best supporting actress for The English Patient? It was a worthy victory, but a surprise. Not least to Lauren Bacall, who had been nominated in the same category for playing Barbra Streisand's mother in a thing called The Mirror Has Two Faces. Bacall was never, in my opinion, a great actor, and she did not make too many good pictures. But we care because of two movies – To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep – done when she still nearly a child, in which she dispensed with acting and gave every impression of absolute personal delight in the ball she was having. There are very few performances to touch them, and there is no real-life story that wandered into the magic of the movies as securely as that of Bogart and Bacall.

If the night of the Oscars still means anything in these barren days, it should have Bacall striding up to the centre-stage spot to a standing and building ovation and then killing the crowd with some drawling wisecrack. The glamour of the American movie depends upon it. And she will be on 14 November .

Do you care? You see, the Oscar show coming early next March has changed its rules. From now on, it has to have 10 best picture nominees – that is part of the effort to push more popular movies into the race in a desperate effort to stop the television audience from shrinking. So we'll get endless advertising for those films. I don't doubt that the 14 November awards will be filmed. And I'm sure some of that film will be shown on the big night. But not live, not for real. I don't think there's going to be time for the proper appreciation of Hollywood beauty and style.

Do you care? Because if you don't , the Academy might as well roll up the carpet and face the fact that the Oscars are a dying ritual.

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Josh Harris: The Warhol of the web

He was a millionaire who lived his wild life online. Then he disappeared. Andrew Smith tracks down Josh Harris, the subject of a new documentary We Live in Public

I couldn't have been more surprised to find Josh Harris in Ethiopia. In Manhattan in the mid-1990s, he had been "the Warhol of the Web" – one of the first internet multimillionaires, who took the $80m fortune he'd made and started to explore the possibilities and implications of this new technology, to the point of self-destruction. In the process, he became the focal point of the downtown New York scene that, for heady extravagance, rivalled anything from the 1960s or 1970s.

His Millennium Eve party, called Quiet: We Live in Public, ran for over a month, during which an ad-hoc community of human subjects lived in pods in a six-storey Broadway warehouse, each pod wired up and effectively functioning as a TV channel, streamed live to the web via Harris's online TV portal at Pseudo.com. It was 1,000 times more vital and acute than the still-nascent Big Brother. "Don't bring your money," Harris said. "Everything here is free."

Quiet featured a shooting range you could hear from the street, a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras. But more than anything, it offered its residents complete freedom. There were drugs and public sex – at one point, Harris, in the guise of a clown called Luvvy, attempted to coordinate simultaneous orgasms between three couples.

Just about anything that could happen did happen, and many people have called it an experiment. But Ondi Timoner, director of We Live in Public, a Sundance-winning documentary about Harris that opens in the UK next week, shrewdly calls it a metaphor. My feeling is that Harris wasn't saying, "This could happen" but "This will happen". This is where the technology is taking us; and what's more, it's where we want to go.

After Quiet, Josh carried on funding quirky art projects, throughout the dotcom crash and the collapse of Pseudo in September 2000. Then, at the end of that year, he announced his We Live in Public web project, for which he rigged up his opulent Broadway loft with dozens of cameras, committing himself and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin to "live in public" for 100 days.

The pressure was too much, and their relationship broke down, a blow that coincided with the last of his fortune flowing away on the stock market. He had a breakdown, and retreated to an apple farm he'd bought in upstate New York, to lick his wounds. He later returned to the web fray with a clever extension of the YouTube idea, called Operator 11; but within a year he had abandoned that, and simply disappeared. I tried every avenue I could think of, but no one knew where he was.

Then I got hold of an email address. A cautious exchange followed, including an invitation to travel to Ethiopia, his long-term home, to stay at a hotel down the road from his compound, or to sleep on his couch. I had to go. "Walking away from that last million was the hardest thing to do," Harris told me when we finally met, on the shores of Lake Awasa in the lush south of the country. "The others I didn't care about, but that one hurt."

He had asked me to bring him cigars ("my last remaining vice") and a tonne of books (Ken Follett, Tolstoy, Hemingway) along with shirts, a pair of aviator shades and loads of underpants. We developed a routine: we would get up and share breakfast, cooked by one of his three staff, then I would go off and explore, take notes for a book I wanted to write while he edited a film he had funded, about his friends going on a deep-sea fishing trip.

Then in the evening, we would share dinner, talk deep into the night, and watch one of the Muhammad Ali fights he'd asked me to bring. Outside, the hyenas, monkeys and wild dogs howled as I slept on the couch. One night a gun went off next door and the neighbourhood turned to bedlam, just as he'd been telling me that the FBI were following him, and that local gangsters were trying to tap him for money. (The last claim, at least, turned out to be true.)

Harris made his money as the founder of Jupiter Communications, the first web research firm. He told me about the day he sold part of it. He was sitting in a restaurant when $14m landed in his bank account. It was "one of the worst moments of my life". Suddenly, all he could do was worry about losing it. So he spent it on stuff he cared about, claiming to have always regarded Pseudo.com as an art project, which infuriated his former colleagues.

In fact, he spoke of Quiet as his masterwork, the event his whole life had been leading up to. "It took an essence out of your being," he said. "Everyone had a drug – the cocaine people, the pot people, the heroin people, the alcohol people, the attention people, the sex people, the relationship junkies. It's like you took the deepest part of hardcore downtown NY and you collectively blew their minds. It ran for five weeks, but it really, really worked for a week." Which week – the first? "No, the last week. It hit a groove and everyone forgot themselves. That was when we saw them."

For me, what makes Harris's story interesting is the fact that, although he was at the forefront of something big and new, he was not alone in any of this. At the start of the 1990s, New York was in deep recession. Half of the office space in Manhattan was empty. At the same time, the web was at the height of its utopian first phase, the focus of a counterculture thrilled by the idea of free, unmediated information exchange. Arts graduates – liberals, in other words – became what we would now call cyberpunks, founders of high-profile companies such as the web design consultancy Razorfish and online marketing firm Doubleclick, whose values ran to billions at the height of the dotcom mania.

The dark side of the bunker

There was a lot of money around, and it had to flow somewhere. Silicon Valley in California was dull as ditchwater, full of techies whose idea of a night out was the cafe at Fry's Electronics Superstore; but the "early true believers" of New York's Silicon Alley lived and spent colourfully. Pseudo's ever-more outlandish parties (at one point, Harris installed an entire boxing gym in his warehouse for after-hours revelling) attracted queues around the block.

Back in 1999, Timoner was a young film-maker who had heard about Harris and the scene from friends. When Harris decided he needed someone to capture Quiet on video, he called her. She admits to having mixed feelings about the darker side of what she saw in "the bunker". It was only later, when Facebook and YouTube took off, that she saw its significance.

In her film, she sees Harris as a warning of what our children might become, perpetually connected to millions but starved of intimate contact with a few. Curiously, Harris doesn't disagree with this, describing a childhood in which he drew most of his emotional sustenance from TV. Yet, for all that, I missed our evening sessions hugely when I returned from Awasa, and Timoner admits that she feels strong affection for him, too. He is what Malcolm Gladwell would call an "outlier", walking ahead in order to show us where we're going – and what we'll look like when we get there.

"Andy Warhol said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," Harris told me. "But I think he misunderstood what was happening. I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That's where we're heading, whether we like it or not."

• We Live in Public is out on November 13. Josh Harris will be conducting Q&As at the Odeon Panton Street, London on November 13 and 14

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Arabian Nights set for Hollywood makeover

Director of the Mummy spin-off The Scorpion King signs up to give a new spin to the classic characters of One Thousand and One Nights

It introduced the world to such exotic characters as Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Now Hollywood has set its heart on bringing Arabian Nights to the big screen, according to Variety.

Chuck Russell, director of the Mummy spin-off The Scorpion King, is reportedly planning a $70m (£42m) new spin which unites Aladdin and Sinbad on a mission that you wouldn't find in the original collection of Middle Eastern tales known as One Thousand and One Nights.

According to the synopsis, storyteller Scheherazade needs rescuing after being kidnapped by "dark powers" which have murdered her husband, King Shahryar. Russell has co-written the screenplay with newcomer Barry Ambrose.

"Through the use of a new generation of visual technologies, we will be able to quite literally take audiences around the world on a magic carpet ride," Russell said.

The project is announced at a time when Hollywood appears to be showing a renewed interest in Middle Eastern fantasy. Videogame adaptation Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, from the production team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean series, is due in cinemas in May. The big-budget production stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular hero, alongside Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley.

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Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno | Film review

There's a peculiar fascination about ambitious unfinished works that listeners, viewers and readers are left to complete in their minds. In cinema there are a string of pictures left in tantalisingly fragmentary form due to illnesses, accidents or deaths, among them Eisenstein's Que Viva México! , Renoir's Une Partie de Campagne, Von Sternberg's I, Claudius, Welles's Don Quixote and Munk's The Passenger. To this number must be added L'Enfer, which Clouzot, the greatest French filmmaker to emerge in the 1940s, embarked on in 1964.

The 57-year-old director of Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear set out to challenge the arrogant new-wave arrivistes by making the ultimate auteurist film, a study of pathological jealousy using state-of-the-art aural and visual effects to convey states of mind. Columbia Studios gave him carte blanche, and Clouzot went ahead with Serge Regianni and Romy Schneider starring and three full camera crews. But he began acting like the crazy director in Fellini's 8½ (a picture he sought to emulate), lost all sense of urgency, drove Regianni to collapse and himself had a heart attack. The insurers coughed up.

Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea have now drawn on the hours of material Clouzot shot (including the amazing test footage) and have interviewed everyone connected with the film who's still alive, and they've produced a fascinating picture. Thirty years later Claude Chabrol filmed Clouzot's script under its original title and using expressive decor to convey the protagonist's inner life. It was nothing to write to Cahiers du cinéma about.

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1 Day | Film review

This gang warfare movie is set in Birmingham's black community. With aggressive hip-hop figuring as a kind of chorus commenting on the action and raising the emotional ante, it tells the familiar story of a drug dealer threatened with death if he doesn't repay within three hours the £500,000 he's been holding for a fellow criminal just released from jail. The Birmingham police have attempted to have the film banned for its apparent aggrandisement of its characters and their way of life: understandable but misguided.

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Welcome | Film review

A gripping French contribution to the cycle of movies about exile and refugees, this centres on the friendship between a swimming instructor at the Calais municipal baths (the excellent Vincent Lindon) and a 17-year-old Iraqi Kurd bent on swimming the channel to be reunited with his girlfriend in London. The film's chief revelation is the way French officialdom treats both the illegal immigrants and French citizens who assist them. They are effectivement bringing back the terrible, corrosive spirit of the Occupation.

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Paper Heart | Film review

A surprise popular success in the States, this cod documentary features the hugely unimpressive young Chinese-American stand-up comic Charlyne Yi, who claims never to have experienced love. So with her director she travels the country in a haphazard way, asking everyone from fellow comic Seth Rogen to ageing Hells Angels and long-married couples about love and what it means to them. The whinging Charlyne strikes up a friendship with the young Canadian actor Michael Cera, for whom she falls – or does she? It's an extremely irritating, narcissistic picture, far inferior to Henry Jaglom's not dissimilar Someone to Love. The vox pops with elderly couples in When Harry Met Sally… were more eloquent and better contextualised.

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Disney's A Christmas Carol | Film review

Despite the title, this is Dickens's A Christmas Carol, faithfully rendered and extremely frightening, shot in 3D using the "performance capture" technique which transforms live actors into semi-animated figures. There are no inappropriate songs or additional sentimentality, and Jim Carrey plays Scrooge and the three Christmases in a variety of British accents. The production notes call him "a multi-faceted actor", which makes him just right for 3D.

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My Week: Romola Garai

The star of Emma reflects on love, marriage and why her two-year-old nephew is obsessed with cranes

"Love is at the root of everything good that has ever happened and will happen." This phrase swam into focus as I moved up the escalator at Oxford Circus tube on Tuesday morning on my way to put myself "on tape" for a part in Spider-Man 4. This is the acting equivalent of the London Marathon in that it's important to try your best as long as you understand that you aren't going to win.

The phrase appears on an advert for a "wireless device". I had an immediate surging, vomity feeling when I read it as I realised I was reading the least true thing that I had ever seen.

I wanted to complain to advertising standards, but it appears that the statement doesn't break any of the codes of conduct, even if it does perpetrate the peddling of an out-and-out lie which, let's face it, as an actor I have peddled along with the best of them.

I should give you some background. My week started when I spent the best part of two hours (and a bottle of wine) on the phone to a much-loved friend whose marriage is breaking up after nine glorious years. This marriage has been my template of love, the Pulitzer prize of relationships; everything that marriage should be and it came from love.

But as I stood at the top of the escalators and thought of my friend, shell-shocked and broken, I wanted to rip down that ad (frustratingly not possible as they are now electronic screens) and rewrite that phrase. "Love is at the root of everything good and everything terrible that has ever happened."

Love and marriage ended up taking a lot of my head space last week. I went for a beverage – or two – with a friend who had just finished watching the last episode of the BBC adaptation of Emma which I was lucky enough to be in. Before I had even slid into my seat, she rounded on me: "Where was the wedding?" I must have looked lost because she repeated the question. "I mean, I liked it and everything but...there wasn't a wedding!" She had the look of an adolescent boy watching porn on his computer, seconds from the, er, money shot, when there's a power cut.

It's true that the brilliant adaptation, by Sandy Welch, does not end with the traditional Austen heroine swathed in white and smiling blissfully at her heavily sideburned love at the altar of an appropriately quaint country church.

I can't speak for Sandy, but I think, and said, that maybe there wasn't a bloody wedding because getting married isn't just about an elaborate party where you get to be the centre of attention all day. That maybe if we all made a bit more of a fuss of people celebrating their 10 or 20 or 30 years together rather than just clearing off after the nuptials leaving them with nothing but John Lewis towels, then maybe we'd all be better off. She went a bit quiet after that. Perhaps she was watching the foam that I had accidentally spat in her beer as I was in full flow.

As I sat up in bed that night, still awake at 3.30, it didn't escape my attention that my bed and my drinks and my nice warm flat were all paid for by film, the great market stall of dreams, the presentation of life as it should and never can be. I hold those stories close to my heart and don't like to see them taken from me.

If it sounds like I've spent a lot of time thinking about myself, then bear in mind I am an out-of-work actor and navel-gazing is the traditional time-filler between jobs. On Wednesday, however, I was wrenched from my introspection by the great pleasure of introducing a magnificent new documentary at the amazing Sheffield DocFest.

The film, Moving to Mars is a brutally heartbreaking portrait of two families. Both are members of the Karen people, an ethnic minority in Burma who have been forced from the country after a campaign of systematic violence against them by the Burmese army.

These families, and thousands of others, had spent the best part of 20 years in the Mai-Lai camp in Thailand. They had both been selected for resettlement in Sheffield and the film tracks them through their journey to the city and their astonishing courage and good humour throughout their first year in an alien land. It is, quite simply, an astounding piece of reportage.

On a personal note, I realised that there is nothing quite like "presenting" a film to give the appearance of hard work and general worthiness without actually having to do anything. Must remember to pass on information to other thesps.

Babysitting is absolutely my favourite pastime at the moment. My two-year-old nephew and I spent most of the afternoon together watching a slide show of cranes (the construction, not avian, variety) which my sister had put together on her computer. He stared transfixed as each image floated peacefully into another in a seemingly never-ending visual feast. This "presentation" was interrupted only by the occasional word "crane", spoken by my nephew in an awed whisper, much as I imagine a deeply religious person would whisper the name of the Almighty.

"But where does he get it from?" I asked a male friend on the way to the cinema that evening. "Why is he so interested in construction? We haven't encouraged him, so where does he get it from?" Two hundred years of the women's movement and my nephew still can't be tempted away from his trucks and diggers. My friend made the, I think unnecessarily cruel, point that I could probably sit transfixed for hours by a slideshow of pictures of myself. How he laughed.

The movie we saw was Up, the new film from Pixar. It's beautiful and magical and transporting and .... well, everything a film should be. It is also full of heartbreaking sadness with as honest and truthful a portrait of marriage as I have ever seen. In fact, I had trouble focusing as I was crying so much I was fogging up my 3-D glasses.

I'm especially enjoying the capital at the moment as I'm reading the magnificent London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins. I bought it purely because of its title, but it's a superb portrait, in delicate tiny stitches – a beautifully woven picture of London life.

I walked back that night from Queensway to my little flat in Shepherd's Bush –with the special treat of walking through Holland Park at night, looking up at the pools of light thrown by the street lamps guiding me home.

The Garai CV

The Life

Born in Hong Kong in 1982. Studied English at London University but interrupted her studies to become a full- time actress; she has now finished her degree with the Open University.

The Work

Films include I Capture the Castle, Atonement, As You Like It and Francois Ozon's Angel, for which she became the first British actress to be nominated for a Prix Lumière. TV includes the BBC's Emma. On stage, King Lear and The Seagull for the RSC. Her new film, Stephen Poliakoff's Glorious 39, opens on 20 November.

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Frank Borzage Vols I & 2 | DVD review

Frank Borzage (1894-1962) was one of Hollywood's great romantics, a specialist in lyrical melodrama about love in adversity. But he was the son of an Austrian-born coalminer and his stories were set not in aristocratic circles, but in impoverished rural America or working-class Europe and invariably shot on stylised sets.

These two discs contain a quartet of his best movies. Three are silent – Seventh Heaven, set in Paris, Street Angel (Naples), Lucky Star (the Appalachians) – and co-star conventionally handsome Charles Farrell and petite, adorable Janet Gaynor. She's driven by circumstances into crime and prostitution, he's the lover who serves to redeem her. The sound film is Liliom, set in Budapest and based on the Molnar play that was to inspire Carousel. Farrell and Gaynor play beautifully together and all four movies afford sublime experiences to the sympathetic viewer. Gaynor won the first best actress Oscar for Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Murnau's Sunrise; Borzage (pronounced "borZAYgee") won the first best director Oscar for Seventh Heaven.

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The Men Who Stare at Goats | Film review

Like Dr Strangelove, this crazy comedy of military madness is based on a non-fiction work (Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats), and stars Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton, a frustrated Michigan journalist in search of adventure who heads for the Middle East in 2003. In Kuwait he hitches a lift into Iraq from Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of the New Earth Army, a secret, experimental branch of the US military trained in using psychic powers learned from the 1970s counter-culture. Cassady is both formidably intelligent and as mad as a brass hatter, and so is everyone to whom he introduces Wilton. For a while the film is as funny and frightening as the scenes between Peter Sellers's Group Captain Mandrake and Sterling Hayden's General Jack D Ripper in Strangelove. But the picture soon runs literally and figuratively into the sands and can't dig itself out.

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Mathematicians find the formula for a hit film sequel

Calculation aims to take risk out of deciding whether follow-ups to cinema hits will be a sure thing, or a disastrous gamble

Ever wondered why Spider-Man 2 triumphed and Basic Instinct 2 bombed? Now a group of academics have come up with a mathematical formula to predict the fortunes of a film sequel.

Hollywood has long known a follow-up is a fairly safe bet and franchises from Pirates of the Caribbean to Star Wars have dominated cinema schedules for years. But until now decisions about what to invest in a sequel or how much to pay for rights to a franchise have been based on some simple rules of thumb and a good dose of gut feeling.

Based on factors such as whether key stars are still on board, how long it has been since the last film and how that performed, the researchers say they can calculate what producers can expect to gross relative to a film in the same genre that is not a sequel.

"It is the industry of dreams, an industry of illusions, and lots of people go bust. The idea here is to put some more analytical thinking into the process," says Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, of Cass Business School in London.

With follow-up films enjoying widespread box office success and strong DVD sales, financial investors and film companies compete aggressively to acquire sequel rights. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise was recently sold for $60m (£36m) and the rights to the Terminator franchise go on sale later this month. The academics hope their formula will help those participating in a growing trend for auctions for such franchises.

"I want this industry to recognise that it is not as different to other sectors as it thinks it is. What we are talking about here is brand extension. How else would you come up with an adequate value or price? Now everyone can work out what a sequel right might be worth," says Hennig-Thurau.

The research, which will be published in the Journal of Marketing this month, examined data from all 101 movie sequels released in North American theatres between 1998 and 2006 and a matched subsample of stand-alone films with similar characteristics. According to the formula, upcoming sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon should be expected to return $34m more for the producers in its US run than a comparable vampire/ teen romance movie with the same characteristics that is not a sequel.

The figure is calculated by projecting an overall revenue of $267m in the US, of which $130.6m would flow back to the producing studio. Once this figure is adjusted for risk – at a level of 75% – the producers can expect to generate $109m in revenue. An alternative "twin" movie has projected revenues of $198m, leading to producer revenues of $96.9m, which, accounting for 75% risk, equals $65.5m.

"Movies like the Twilight sequel New Moon are highly lucrative and relatively safe bets if key parameters, such as original cast, are maintained," says Hennig-Thurau. Star continuity is where Basic Instinct 2 went wrong – no Michael Douglas. "The time difference between the two films was very, very long and actor continuity was halved in that you only had Sharon Stone and it was a pretty aged Sharon Stone," he added.

On the whole, however, sequels do well and often outperform the original. That is especially true now studios are presenting films as a franchise with a narrative woven throughout several instalments. "We are not really talking about sequels any more. We are talking about films that are conceived of as longer plays than one film... You are saying to the audience: 'This is a story, you have got to stick with it.' You buy into that particular number of films that will be coming out," says David Hancock, head of film and cinema at media research company Screen Digest.

Underlining that audience loyalty, Hancock notes that in the US last year, just 4.2% of releases were franchise films but they accounted for 20.6% of box office takings.

All this is a far cry from the law of diminishing returns of the 1970s and 80s. "The advent of home video around the mid-1980s changed the trend as larger audiences watched films at home and then flocked to see the next instalment when it arrived in local cinemas," says Mark Batey, chief executive of the Film Distributors' Association.

So in the 1990s the second film in the Austin Powers series grossed nearly five times the box-office take of the first one. A more recent example, the revival of the Star Trek franchise this summer, saw JJ Abrams's new film gross £21m in UK cinemas, which is more than double the return of any of the previous 10 Star Trek feature films.

"There is clearly a public appetite for new stories taking favourite characters on new adventures and from an industry point of view, there is arguably less risk in investing in the production and release of a property which has a proven track record," says Batey.

For film producers fighting lacklustre DVD sales, sequels bring an added benefit. Hennig-Thurau's research showed that DVD sales of the original movie often spike when a sequel hits the cinema screens. Once that sequel is out on DVD it also has a good chance of strong sales. The first week of DVD sales often outperforms the early days of cinema release, according to the British Video Association.

"It's clear, by straightforward comparison of sales data, that sequels comprise a growing proportion of DVD sales. The number of sequels that appear in the latest annual DVD sales charts has doubled since the mid-1990s," says BVA head Lavinia Carey.

DVD charts and cinema rankings packed with the likes of Shrek the Third, Transformers 2 and Ice Age 3 have, of course, incited the wrath of film critics worried about a lack of creativity. Cinema-goers have also complained of "sequelitis". Such criticism may have been justified in the days when making a sequel was a relatively lazy process of playing on the name, recognition and fan-base of the first successful film, says Hancock. But now studios have woken up to the perils of milking a brand too far.

"The nadir of sequels was Police Academy. What happened there was, hey we're essentially flogging a dead horse... But producers do learn from their mistakes. They know they flogged a dead horse in the 1980s and I don't think you are going to see us go to nine or 10 in franchises now."

The Film Distributors' Association is keen to argue, however, that sequel mania does leave room for original stories. Slumdog Millionaire is one of the top films of 2009 while The Full Monty remains one of the most successful British films ever released. "With 500 films released in UK cinemas each year, the blockbuster sequels tend to be concentrated in the top 40, but there's plenty of other choice for film fans during the year," says Batey.

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Matt Damon: The private campaigner who became Hollywood's biggest star

A clutch of new films will cement Matt Damon's reputation as the hit of his generation. But that won't change this most reserved and politically committed of actors. Vanessa Thorpe reports

Runners taking part in the annual Miami Triathlon this time last year were surprised to spot a familiar face crossing the finishing line. It looked very like Jason Bourne, the implacable, brain-washed hitman, who was coming in with a time of just under an hour for the 6.2 mile leg. In fact Matt Damon, who plays Bourne in the trio of hit films based on Robert Ludlum's character, was competing in an effort to lose some weight. He had gained 30lbs that summer to play the part of the chubby, delusional executive at the centre of The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh's new film.

Its recent premiere in America may well prove the high-water mark of an already illustrious career. Now at the height of his game, Damon can name his price in Hollywood and is being hailed as the most significant player in town.

Aside from the extra pounds, the actor had to have his face puffed up by prosthetics for this latest, slightly unappealing role. Soderbergh's film sees him playing Mark Whitacre, an unlikely crusader who exposes a price-fixing scam. For a Hollywood star who was recently named the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine, Damon found the flabby look an important way of easing into the role. "It was all a metaphor for this guy being kind of undefined," he said.

The decision to alter his appearance was an unusual strategy for Damon, who has worked his way to the top of the A-list by slotting neatly into the centre of wildly varied films without ever looking very different.

At the age of 39, he still has the boyishness that marked him out in Good Will Hunting in 1997. This film, made with his childhood friend, Ben Affleck, earned him a screenwriting Oscar and was the beginning of a journey through the film industry that has seen few wrong turns and that has now clearly slipped into top gear. As the star of huge commercial hits such as the Bourne and Ocean's franchises, he now reportedly receives $10m-20m for the big roles and has been named by Forbes as one of cinema's most bankable stars.

If not exactly amorphous, then Damon is skilled at slipping into different moods. His acting is internalised to the point of invisibility. It is an inscrutable demeanour that fascinates directors and audiences. "It's the way he frames his physical choices as an actor,'' said Paul Greengrass, who has directed him in two Bourne films so far. "It's not just: 'Oh, they're after me, I've got to run'; it's about finding in what he does an impulsion to move. There's an imminence about his acting.''

Tellingly, Damon has explained his own view of his craft: "As an actor, you have to make decisions about what their motivations are, even if you don't let on,'' he recently said.

His face remains unlined, almost blank, but it is a look that suits a paranoid age. While everyday citizens are subject to increased surveillance, celebrities are the objects of continuous scrutiny. Damon has managed to avoid scandal and keep a tight lid on his private life with Luciana, his wife of four years and their three daughters, Alexia, Isabella and baby Gia. A focus on family life is now a key part of any career decision Damon takes.

"We just can't go on the road any more,'' he said this autumn. He says he will make fewer films and nearer to home, but the long slate of current projects means that audiences will not notice any falling away for some months yet.

After a few years of film-making that included brilliant hits (his role as the unknowable Tom Ripley in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley) and the occasional flop (Billy Bob Thornton's unwieldy All The Pretty Horses), Damon has nothing but high-profile work ahead.

He is currently filming The Adjustment Bureau, from a story by the late Philip K. Dick, the prolific writer whose work was adapted for Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report, as well as Greengrass's Iraq war film Green Zone, which will be released in the spring, and the fourth Bourne film.

Before that he will star in Clint Eastwood's Invictus, where he plays a rugby captain charged by Nelson Mandela with bringing social unity to post-apartheid South Africa. He steps in front of the camera for Eastwood again in the supernatural thriller Hereafter and will also star with Jeff Bridges in the Coen brothers' adaptation of Charles Portis's novel True Grit. On the further reaches of commercial cinema, he will be in George Clooney's upcoming film about the US government's case against Osama bin Laden's driver and in another Soderbergh film, this time playing Liberace's lover.

While Damon's face seems to fit so many contrasting roles, as a man he is not scared to stand out from the crowd. He announced recently he will only give interviews that allow him to promote causes dear to him, such as the charitable group Water.org that he co-founded to set up access to safe water and sanitation in the poorest parts of the world. Recently it installed a well in an Ethiopian village. "Animals were drinking out of the same water source as people. We put in this terrific well that will last the village for ever,'' he said.

His commitment to this and other more overtly political campaigns (a year ago he voiced his concern at the idea of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin ever "having the nuclear codes'') has caused some to liken him to ethically engaged stars of yesteryear, such as Robert Redford and Paul Newman.

Damon is not happy being compared to such matinee idols. "The leading-man stuff doesn't come easily to me. I've always felt like a character actor,'' he has said, telling of his unease when he found out that the role he was playing in Redford's film The Legend of Bagger Vance nine years ago was originally to have been played by the veteran star himself.

"Before I had a chance to worry too much about it, he came up to me and said, 'You're the guy playing the part. Don't worry that I once considered playing it, because if I wanted to play it, I would have played it.' "

Damon's real acting role models turn out to be Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman – both chiefly known as character actors. And when it comes to directing, it is Eastwood he most admires. Damon enviously cites his sidestep into the director's chair. He estimates it will be five years before he tries to make the same move himself, following his friend Affleck, who made Gone Baby Gone with some success two years ago.

Having now acted for many of the greatest directors, including Coppola, Spielberg and Scorsese, Damon has had more opportunities to study the craft at close quarters than many aspiring directors ever get. "I've learnt a lot just by standing next to these great directors and watching them,'' Damon has said.

Soderbergh has noticed the actor adopting the demeanour of a student on set. "He's interested in the totality of the film,'' he said last week. "Matt has such a well developed understanding of the context of a film.''

Spielberg, too, who directed Damon in Saving Private Ryan, has commented on the way the star never stays in his trailer between takes. He watched his actor observing the details of the filming process.

For now, Damon still finds it hard to pass up on the experience of performing for a succession of top directors. "It's one reason I have trouble turning down chances working with people like this. I mean, I know I'm gonna learn stuff. I know I wanna direct. This is great hands-on training. You know, watching all these guys work in their different ways."

He knows his A-starred status will not last for ever and he is a little concerned he may become addicted to the choices it has given him. "It's a great feeling not to have to take a job other than because I really want to do it,'' he said.

Actors and activism

The fiercest campaigning in Hollywood appears before the Oscar nominations, but political activism has a history too.

Long before Matt Damon set up Water.org, or George Clooney rallied for Darfur, actors risked their careers for their beliefs.

During the First World War the stars of the silent screen era, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, promoted fundraising Liberty Bonds. But in 1952 when Chaplin left for a trip home to Britain attempts were made to revoke his re-entry permit due to his leftwing views. He decided not to return, writing: "Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who … have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted."

The child star Shirley Temple moved towards Republican activism in adulthood, being appointed to the General Assembly of the United Nations by Richard Nixon, before becoming an ambassador to Ghana and then Czechoslovakia.

During the McCarthy era an attempt to purge Hollywood of socialists led many stars to stand up for their friends. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe were among the most stylish to publicly refuse to name former communists (for a while, at least).

Marlon Brando refused to accept the 1973 Oscar for Best Actor to draw attention to the rights of American Indians, and, as a young actor in the 40s, campaigned for the establishment of Israel. Barbra Streisand has been a key Democratic supporter since the 1970s and last year her switch from team Clinton to team Obama made news. Jane Fonda holds the title for the most reviled activist. Her opposition to the Vietnam War earned her the title Hanoi Jane. The Fonda torch passed down to the anti-war duo, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, in the 1990s.

It is the right, though, that boasts the most successful Hollywood activists. Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, while the unaffiliated Clint Eastwood, a campaigner for small businesses and the environment, was mayor of Carmel from 1986 to 1988. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been governor of California since 2003.

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Loach goes to war, BFI wants sex and 1 Day in Birmingham | Trailer Trash

>> Loach and Menges go to war

Ken Loach is making his first film about the Iraq war. Teaming up again with revered cameraman Chris Menges – for the first time on a feature since Kes, in 1969 – Loach is drawing to a close on his shoot of Route Irish in both Liverpool and Jordan. The film is about two security contractors in Iraq in love with the same girl back home. When one of them is killed on Route Irish – the road linking Baghdad to the perilous Green Zone – the other vows to get to the bottom of his friend's suspicious death, no matter what the authorities say. Although Loach and Menges did work together for a section of the portmanteau film Tickets in 2005, their reunion is a major event in British film. "They're like an old couple on set," whispers producer Rebecca O'Brien. "They bicker a bit and moan at each other, but they have so much respect for each other's work." Loach is working with his regular scriptwriter, Paul Laverty, but is also using unheralded acting talent. But the biggest surprise, I hear, is that the film will contain an unusual number of special effects for this most realist of directors. "There's a car chase, kidnappings, explosions and guns," says O'Brien, excitedly. "It's the closest Ken's ever come to making a Tony Scott movie."

>> BFI wants your sex

Users have been generous in their praise of the BFI's website during the recent London film festival. However, web bosses have sent anyone who availed themselves of the service a questionnaire to build a profile of future customers and all that webstuff. One particular question, despite its best intentions, has caused some hilarity: Tick one box only: what is the gender that best represents you? Male. Female.

>> Policing the big screen

Trash is dismayed that several cinemas in the Birmingham region have this weekend refused to show Penny Woolcock's grime musical 1 Day (starring, below, Dylan Duffus, left, and Yohance Watson). Theatres apparently pulled the film on police advice, fearing the musical about drugs, guns and gangs would attract packs of local youths and gang members, many of whom featured among the non-professional cast. Cinemas say they withdrew on grounds of "public safety". Are we really still scared of a repeat of the violence that greeted Rock Around The Clock? Worse, do we live in a country where the police decide what we can and can't watch? They'll be confiscating DVDs of Superbad next and impounding any stray collectors' editions of Cannon and Ball's The Boys in Blue, lest the force's good name be brought into disrepute.

Jason Solomons

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Brüno, Night at the Museum 2 and The Informers | DVD Review

After the ill-judged scattershot "satire" of Borat (which hit far too many soft targets – ageing American feminists, for heaven's sake!) Sacha Baron Cohen raises his game somewhat with Brüno (2009, 18, Universal). Fired from his Eurotrash TV show Funkyzeit, the eponymous, gay Austrian fashionista goes west to become a "straight" star "like Tom Cruise". En route, he adopts an African "gayby", searches for a headline-grabbing good cause ("After Darfur, vot's Dar-five?") and pacifies the Middle East by confusing Hamas with houmous ("Isn't pitta bread the real enemy?").

So far so fun, with homophobic bigots getting a particularly rough ride – to Baron Cohen's credit. Elsewhere, the film-makers lose their nerve – several stunts seem comfortably set-up, a scene mocking LaToya Jackson was cut from theatrical prints in the wake of Michael's death (why?) and a grizzly musical finale allows Bono and Chris Martin to get in on the joke – boo! Flawed then, but fun none the less. And presumably the end of this format for SBC, who is now too famous to spoof anyone.

Less entertaining is Night at the Museum 2 (2009, PG, Fox) which exists solely to satisfy its backers' bank balances. Ricky Gervais (who featured prominently on UK posters) sensibly keeps his head down and barely troubles the screen, while Christopher Guest is anonymously unrecognisable as Ivan the Terrible. Only Hank Azaria provides relief as a rubber-lipped Kahmunrah and other comparably humorous historical caricatures.

Worse still is The Informers (2009, 15, EIV), a truly rotten Bret Easton Ellis offcut set in sleazy 80s LA which offers the following profound insights into the human condition: 1. Greed is probably not good for the soul. 2. Drugs are probably not great for the body. 3. Endless casual sex will probably end in tears or Aids.

That's it! Somehow, such platitudes are stretched over a 90-minute movie in which director Gregor Jordan drools over endless shots of wealth, drug-taking and casual sex. Dull, smug, and hypocritical – how's that for an authentic period outlook?

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You'll find nothing but pure logic in my retrained brain | Victoria Coren

Jury duty means I'm not allowed to speculate. So stand by for rational thinking

Everyone says the recession has ushered in a fashion for the smaller scale. Bicycles not 4x4s, bedsits rather than loft extensions, allotment veg instead of the weekly Ocado. Ever modish, I'm going to offer you a downsized column: small, home-made observations rather than a great palatial sweep.

Secretly, this is nothing to do with the general 1950s-isation of Britain and simply because I'm doing jury service. I am literally under scrutiny from the thought police. I'll tell you about it at some point, once I've worked out what I can and can't say without going to prison. (One thing I've learnt is that you certainly can't bank on a sympathetic jury).

I thought I'd make a rather good juror. I am a professional poker player, after all: I spend half my life staring into men's faces, trying to work out whether or not they are telling the truth. And I am heterosexual, so I also spend the other half doing that.

Everyone said it would be fun. Turns out it's not fun. It is the least fun and most stressful thing I've ever done. And I've flown Ryanair.

I am told by stern judges every day that I "must not speculate". This is hardcore CBT for a columnist. No speculating? I'd like to see them give that direction to Jan Moir. There'd be nothing left but a pile of smoking ashes, a pointy hat and the echo of a shrieking voice: "I'm melting! I'm melting!"

Nevertheless, my brain has been re-trained. If you find anything speculative among the statements below, go straight to the law. But I am confident you will not. I'm keeping it local. I have scrutinised the evidence that the world put before us last week and the following is nothing but pure, rational, narrow-eyed logic.

The tabloids are excited by news that the late film director Anthony Minghella "left his son out of the will". Twenty-four-year-old Max received nothing from the £7.5m estate, most of which was left to his mother, Carolyn.

Is this odd? I don't think it's remotely odd. It tells us nothing about the relationship between the two men. It's just normal. My father's estate was inherited by my mother; we didn't think that was a Massive Snub for Kids from Genial Humorist Alan Coren.

Then again, there was no £7.5m and nary a single Oscar.

Why should people's kids get their money? It is the husband or wife who has lost their partner, the person with whom all finances are shared. That partnership is not dissolved until both parties are no longer extant. The working bankroll and premises belong to the remaining co-founder, not the subsidiaries who were taken on at a later date.

In aristocratic families, widows are shoved out of the house so the newly entitled son can move in, living high on the hog while his mum scavenges for berries around the doorway of her spidery cottage. I'm not sure that principle should be rolled out nationally.

It occurs to me: wouldn't abolishing intergenerational inheritance be a great way out of the recession? Not only would plenty of money be restored to the national coffers, it would really get the old people spending. What an economy boost. They'd be splashing it about on all sorts of gold baths and bottles of ancient whisky, if the only alternative was leaving their loot to the Treasury.

Advertisers would have to target them. That means television would have to respect them. Older women would be allowed to read the news again.

When the old folk died, if they were unmarried or widowed, the rule would be that the money would have to remain within their generation. It would be collected by the government and used to create new, fat pensions for the deceased's wizened peers to buy heating, carpet, Murray Mints and gin. No more problems with "ageing Britain" or questions about whether we can afford to support it.

Dammit, this idea is brilliant. I may be a terrible juror, but I'd make a great chancellor.

I was sorry to read about the traumas of Moira Cameron, the Tower of London's first female yeoman warder, who was allegedly subjected to a campaign of harassment from long-standing Beefeaters which included nasty notes and the defacing of her uniform. Goodness, who would have expected such sexism from an all-male collective of royal guards in a 522-year-old post?

I hope Moira will be comforted by the thought that this is an inevitable part of being the first woman to do anything. She should have seen life in the poker room 15 years ago. You don't know you're breaking ground until you get hands on your arse, jokes about your tits and anonymous jibes about your ability.

Don't worry, Moira, it won't last. Think of it as no more troublesome than trying to get seven-year-olds to eat spinach: keep trying and they'll swallow it eventually.

Actress Martine McCutcheon has revealed that she wrote her novel, The Mistress, in the hope it would be adapted for a film in which she could star. She told the press: "I deliberately made the lead character the supermodel version of me."

I've since been trying to imagine the supermodel version of me. She's tall, thin and gorgeous. As a result, she was happy at school and had boyfriends from an early age. She never started making stupid jokes as a defence mechanism. She's confident at parties. She talks sincerely and directly, rather than saying any old rubbish to make people laugh because she can't imagine impressing them any other way. She enjoys shopping and dancing. She is un-selfconscious in a bikini. She and I have absolutely nothing in common at all. Right now, we're not speaking.

It's so depressing. Not only could I never be a supermodel for a living, it turns out I can't even be one in my own head.

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My favourite table: Samuel L Jackson at Marcus Wareing

Samuel L Jackson at Marcus Wareing

I grew up in a house full of women in Chat-tanooga, Tennessee. All the women in my family were good cooks, and during my early childhood I'd help with the preparation. I'd have to go out and maybe get some corn, pick some peas or string the beans and break them up – things that I couldn't mess up. And in the summertime I used to hand-crank the ice-cream machine, put the ice and rock salt in and give it to all the adults. The adults got to eat the ice cream first, and as a kid you got to scrape around the inside with a ladle – and then you had to make some more. We had different flavours: strawberry, peach and vanilla.

I grew up on Southern US food – if you wanted baked chicken they'd fry it first, then bake it. We had all the normal things that people eat but cooked in a Southern style – either fried or smothered with gravy. And lots of freshly baked bread because my grandmother and my mom were bakers. Every cake plate had a cake on it and every jar was full of cookies. I can't do bread now – it hangs around too long and I don't want to spend that much time in the gym. But I will have a cookie every now and then as a treat. And I don't drink – I've used up all my drink tickets.

My mom is an awesome cook and my daughter is a chef. At home, my wife LaTanya does all the cooking, but she's been on Broadway for the past three months so I've been on a diet. I've been having those prepared meals that people bring round to the house – but it's all organic food. They bring breakfast, lunch and dinner and snacks, but they are controlled portions. When you're filming it's easy to eat healthily – all you've got do is tell them you're a vegan or whatever and they'll stock your trailer with everything you want.

When I'm in London I love to dine out. I eat out over here more than I do in LA. You've got really good restaurants. Last night I was at Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, which I love. I had Dover sole with courgette purée and root vegetables – it was good. I just like the way everything goes together: it's a fusion of different things. I like the interesting blend of tastes and textures and even the colours on the plate – they draw you to the food. That's kind of unusual for me, because I'm usually drawn to food by smell. I asked Marcus how he comes up with such interesting combinations, and he said working 15 hours a day you just play with food, see what happens and then find something that works. I also like Asian fusion food, and whenever I'm in London I eat at Hakkasan. I've also learned to like Indian food since I've started coming here. I think Tamarind is great.

I'm not that adventurous when it comes to food – I won't eat snails or anything like that. I do crave burgers all the time, especially when I'm out of California a while. When I get back I always want an In-N-Out burger, because that's the best burger in California. My last meal would have to be a T-bone steak with chargrilled onions, roasted carrots and a baked sweet potato.

Work is my fun place to be. When I'm acting, I get to stop being me for a moment and tune out the noise of Samuel L Jackson's life. I'm a big child at heart. All boys are. That's why we like to do action movies – we get guns, we get to run, we get to jump. I never think the characters I play are that nasty; they are just guys who have an agenda. I never crave normality – who wants to be normal?

• The Samuel L Jackson Foundation supports many different charities, including the Rainbow Trust Children's CharityMarcus Wareing at The Berkeley, Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, London SW1X 7RL, 020 7235 6000

History

Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley is the first solo venture of chef Marcus Wareing following his split with Gordon Ramsay Holdings last year. Continuing the tradition held by the restaurant that was formerly known as Pétrus, Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley holds two Michelin stars and serves modern European food.

Popular dishes

Breast of quail roasted and marinated, white onion fondue, butternut squash and baked potato

Dover sole roasted with sweet peas and capers, brown shrimps, cauliflower, potted shrimp butter emulsion

Moelleux warm chocolate, banana caramel jelly, banana ice cream

Who eats there

Keanu Reeves, Pierce Brosnan, Emma Watson

Opening times

Monday to Friday, lunch 12 noon-2.30pm, dinner 6pm-11pm

Saturday, dinner 6pm-11pm

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Jennifer's Body | Philip French

Scripted by Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for Juno, this is the week's only vampire movie. A semi-serious, extremely bloody affair, it's set in the town of Devil's Kettle, where a band of Goths sacrifice the high-school beauty (Megan Fox) to Satan to take their band into the big time. Unfortunately she's not a virgin and thus remains alive to become an insatiable flesh-eating bloodsucker, terrorising the neighbourhood. It's narrated from the local correction centre by her incarcerated best friend (Amanda Seyfried, currently to be seen 24-hours-a-day on cable TV in Mamma Mia!) who declares the film's theme in her opening sentence: "Hell is a teenage girl." The film is not without merit and has more corpses and red corpuscles than the anaemic Twilight series of vampire flicks.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

What I see in the mirror: Leslie Caron

'I'm 78. There are a few wrinkles, a few sags, but very sparkly eyes'

I see a woman who has aged very well. I'm 78. There are a few wrinkles, a few sags, but very sparkly eyes and a tendency to giggle and smile a lot. People say I look remarkable for my age, which is flattering, and I am able to do an awful lot with my life, and that is the main thing for me, to be active. I have had a hip operation and eye operations like everybody else who's my age, but I keep things in running order. I had cosmetic surgery in my 40s and 50s, but I don't now. I think personality and spirit are more important than looks, but I look pretty good!

I think my blue eyes and generous mouth are my best features. I have short hair. I dye it brown, to what used to be my colour. I was blond for a short time, when I did a film called The Subterraneans and was playing an unhealthy girl. I didn't like it.

I used to be five foot three and a half, but I've shrunk, as one does. I am barely five foot. I keep slim: I don't want to be a fat sausage. I can't dance because of the hip operation, but I walk my dog. I eat sensibly – every day at lunch I have a steak with a big salad and I eat fruit, vegetables, yogurt and muesli. I seldom eat pastry – maybe once a year. I never eat desserts and I don't drink. That makes a big difference. Twelve years ago, I had a period when I was drinking. It didn't suit me and my life was going down the drain, so I stopped. I haven't had a drink in 11 years.

• Leslie Caron's autobiography Thank Heaven is published by JR Books.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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

 

Jackson's father seeks allowance
Joe Jackson asks for an allowance from the estate of his late son Michael, saying the star supported him before he died.

Sadler's Wells role for Phillips
Former Strictly Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips is to become a director of Sadler's Wells dance theatre.

Street star questioned over crash
Police quiz Coronation Street actor Ryan Thomas over a car crash which took place in Manchester city centre.

Aretha to perform at Motown gala
Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder are among the musicians set to perform at a special concert for the US record label.

Beatles tracks pulled off US site
EMI wins an injunction against a US website which it claims was selling Beatles songs without permission.

Sick Sir Elton is out of hospital
Singer Sir Elton John is released from a London hospital after being treated for flu and E. coli, a spokesman for the star says.

Ant and Dec sign new ITV contract
Presenting team Ant and Dec say they are "delighted" and "excited" after signing up for two more years at ITV.

Beyonce in MTV Europe hat-trick
Singer Beyonce has landed a trio of trophies, including best female and best song, at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin.

Golden Girl star has heart bypass
Golden Girls actress Rue McClanahan is recovering in a New York hospital following heart bypass surgery, her manager says.

Oldest museum reopens to public
The UK's oldest public museum, the Ashmolean, reopens after a £61m redevelopment.

Artist's gift of war veteran portraits
Final drawings of two of Britain's last World War I veterans are gifted to the nation for future generations.

Public art boosted by tax scheme
Works of art by Titian and David Hockney are among almost £20m worth of cultural objects accepted in lieu of tax this year, it is revealed.

Bridgend to premiere suicide play
A play based around teenage suicide in the Welsh county of Bridgend is announced by the National Theatre Wales.

Who failed to give a towering performance in Strictly?
Coronation Street star Craig Kelly has become the latest celebrity to be voted off BBC One's Strictly Come Dancing.

Lock of Elvis's hair under hammer
A strand of hair saved by Elvis Presley's personal barber is expected to fetch about £250 at auction in Devizes.

Bunnymen cancel US tour over tax
Echo and the Bunnymen cancel their US tour 10 days before it was due to begin over a tax dispute.

Morrissey is 'best musical poet'
A Scottish academic writes a book arguing that singer Morrissey is the greatest lyricist in the history of British popular music.

Rihanna warning over assault
Singer Rihanna talks on US television about being assaulted by ex-boyfriend Chris Brown, warning that "it could happen to anybody".

Eminem 'wins 3D horror film role'
Rap star Eminem is to appear in a 3D hip-hop horror movie called Shady Talez, according to trade paper Screen International.

De Niro gets top LA Bafta award
Veteran actor Robert De Niro receives the Stanley Kubrick award for excellence in film at the Bafta Awards in Los Angeles.

Freeman settles car crash lawsuit
Hollywood star Morgan Freeman reaches an out-of-court settlement with a woman who was his passenger in a car crash.

Boyle 'to make mountaineer epic'
Slumdog Millionaire director is to film the story of a climber who was forced to amputate his own arm, US media reports.

STV to go it alone with Taggart
STV is to make a new series of its police drama Taggart next year, even if ITV refuse to re-commission it.

Wogan stays at Children In Need
Broadcaster Sir Terry Wogan plans to carry on presenting the BBC's Children In Need show "until hell freezes over", he reveals.

Royle Family actress collects OBE
Veteran actress Sue Johnston, best known for her role in the Royle Family, collects her OBE from the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

TV debut for Streep daughter
The daughter of Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep is to make her screen debut in a TV series as the child of a celebrity couple.

Ladies' night in Berlin
Host Katy Perry may have an album called One of the Boys - but it was the girls who shone at the MTV Europe Music Awards

Obama inspired
Jon Bon Jovi says his lyrics are framed in the White House

Inside Ashmolean
Discover the museum's delights

Dreamscape
Tracey Emin unveils her latest exhibition in New York

The Grouch
Why did Britain fall out of love with Sesame St?

Making Dr Who
Bye to the man behind the biggest doctors

Vampire weekend
One hotel. Five actors. And 800 Twilight fans...

BBC News | Entertainment | UK Edition
Get the latest BBC Entertainment news: breaking news, views and analysis on celebrities, music, film, theatre, TV and radio plus audio-video content.

 

Mo'Nique trying to lose five stone

Mo'Nique has said it was her husband who inspired her to lose weight.

Stars lined up for Yogi Bear film

Anna Faris, Dan Akroyd and Justin Timberlake are set to star in a film version of Yogi Bear.

Fergie: Josh loved my new curves

Fergie has revealed husband Josh Duhamel loved her gaining weight for her latest movie role.

Dev and Freida are 'soul mates'

Freida Pinto and Dev Patel are "soul mates" according to the director who made them famous, Danny Boyle.

Robert De Niro on third Fockers

Robert De Niro says Meet The Parents fans will have to judge for themselves if the third movie is the best of the lot.

Emily Blunt is fan of US Office

Emily Blunt says she wouldn't rule out making a cameo in her fiance John Krasinski's US version of The Office.

Kirk Douglas honoured by Bafta

Kirk Douglas, Robert De Niro, Emily Blunt, Colin Firth and Danny Boyle have been honoured by Bafta in Los Angeles.

Boyle to film mountaineer's tale

Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle is to film the true story of an American climber who hacked off part of his arm with a knife after it became trapped under a rock, according to reports.

Stars line up at Boundaries preview

Actors Tom Hanks, Patricia Clarkson and James Cromwell have walked the red carpet before a private screening of the Hanks-produced war film "Beyond All Boundaries" held at the World War II Museum in New Orleans.

Morgan Freeman settles crash case

Actor Morgan Freeman has settled a lawsuit relating to a car accident last year which seriously injured him and a passenger, US court records have shown.

Gibson: We romanticised Braveheart

Mel Gibson has admitted "romanticising" the lead character in Braveheart.

Sundance screenings around US

Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival is going on the road.

Corden and Jones write film script

James Corden and Ruth Jones are working on the script for a new movie.

Kristen tight-lipped over Robert

Kristen Stewart has said she refuses to talk about her relationship with Robert Pattinson because "people made such a big deal about it."

Dancers honour Patrick Swayze

Patrick Swayze's wife Lisa Niemi said her late husband was now "dancing with the angels" as she accepted an award on his behalf.

Matthew McConaughey celebrates 40th

Matthew McConaughey celebrated turning 40 by "grillin' steaks and sippin' beers".

Charlize shocked on red carpet

Charlize Theron was shocked to hear that Viggo Mortensen apparently didn't wash while filming their movie The Road.

Mortensen honoured in Hollywood

Viggo Mortensen has been honoured for his work in film.

Swank: No plans for marriage yet

Hilary Swank is in no rush to head down the aisle for a second time, it would appear.

Brad Pitt on motorbike accident

Brad Pitt has admitted he suffered from a bruised ego when he damaged his motorbike while trying to escape the paparazzi.

Carey Mulligan on press attention

Carey Mulligan has admitted she is sometimes thrown by the press attention as she shoots the eagerly awaited Wall Street sequel.

Tom Hanks on his '4-D' war movie

Tom Hanks has promised his '4-D' war film won't disappoint fans.

Espionage thriller role for Mirren

Dame Helen Mirren is to star in an espionage thriller based on a series of comic books, it has been reported.

Ben Kingsley at India film festival

Sir Ben Kingsley will be one of the international actors to attend India's oldest and most prestigious film event.

Jim Carrey: Thanks for Supernanny

Jim Carrey thanked Britain for the legacy of Charles Dickens - and for Supernanny - as he switched on the Christmas lights at London's Oxford Circus to celebrate the world premiere of Disney's A Christmas Carol.

Brand to cut hair for film career

Russell Brand has said he will cut his shaggy mane for the sake of his Hollywood career.

Kate Beckinsale's daughter in film

Kate Beckinsale seems hopeful that her daughter Lily's first taste of acting will put her off a career in films.

Kate's 'mortifying' sexy title

Kate Beckinsale has joked she's found it "mortifying" being named the Sexiest Woman Alive in Esquire magazine's 2009 poll.

De Niro out for Everybody's Fine

Robert De Niro, Kate Beckinsale and Drew Barrymore hit the red carpet for the star-studded premiere of their new film Everybody's Fine at Hollywood's AFI Festival.

Celeb loot seized by LA police

Diamond rings, designer shoes and bags believed to belong to stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton have been seized from a gang of alleged burglars.

Alley to star in reality TV series

Kirstie Alley is to star in a reality TV series charting life as a single mum and her battles against weight gain.

Gerard Butler joins Coriolanus

Gerard Butler will join Vanessa Redgrave in a contemporary version of Shakespeare's play Coriolanus.

Hollywood stars light up capital

Big screen funnyman Jim Carrey has turned on the Christmas lights at London's Oxford Street.

Blackman urges Equitable payouts

Actress Honor Blackman is taking part in a demonstration to demand compensation from the Government for policyholders who lost money in Equitable Life.

SJP and Whitaker on Obama's panel

Sarah Jessica Parker and Forest Whitaker are among a group of stars enlisted by the White House to help push President Barack Obama's arts initiatives.

Sex And The City cast in Morocco

Sarah Jessica Parker has been pictured filming scenes for the new Sex And The City movie in Morocco.

Pattinson: I'm not dating Kristen

Robert Pattinson has denied he is dating his Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart.

Winona: Angelina never thanked me

Winona Ryder has claimed Angelina Jolie never thanked her for helping her get her Oscar-winning role in Girl, Interrupted.

Kate Winslet wins libel pay-out

Kate Winslet has accepted £25,000 libel damages over a claim that she publicly lied about her exercise regime.

Kristen: Being a star not desirable

Kristen Stewart has admitted she would hate to be as famous as Angelina Jolie.

Lily Cole on losing Heath Ledger

Lily Cole has said Heath Ledger's death was the first time she lost someone close to her.

Gilliam's Imaginarium despair

Terry Gilliam has said he "didn't even want to finish" The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus when he first learnt of Heath Ledger's death.

Caine: Jude miscast in Alfie remake

Sir Michael Caine has said Jude Law was "absolutely miscast" in the remake of his 1966 film Alfie.

Baby girl joy for actor Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson and his girlfriend are celebrating the birth of their first child - making the Oscar-winner a father for the eighth time.

Terminator franchise up for grabs

The Terminator will be back - but it is going to cost someone a lot of money.

Spielberg to be honoured with award

Steven Spielberg is to be honoured as a champion of human rights by the US's Anti-Defamation League.

Roman Polanski in legal bid

A US appeals court will listen to oral arguments from Roman Polanski's lawyers about why it should require a lower court to decide whether to dismiss charges against the fugitive director, whether he is present or not.

Colin Firth on skintight spandex

Colin Firth has revealed how he and Jim Carrey had to squeeze themselves into skintight spandex bodysuits to make new Disney film A Christmas Carol.

 

British film insider top tens
Julian Fellowes, screenwriter, The Young Victoria, Gosford Park

The 100 Best Films of the Decade
100 The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) Meryl Streep begins her own populist career reinvention (soon to be followed by Mamma Mia!) by playing a tyrannical and thinly disguised version of Vogue editor Anna Wintour in this satirical yet soft-centered account of life among the fashionistas.

Michael Haneke: 'It’s super to be number one'
Michael Haneke on Hidden It’s super to be number one, I’m very happy. I am surprised Caché was a success because it wasn’t an easy film. Perhaps audiences aren’t as stupid as mainstream film-makers often think. I am not preoccupied with surveillance culture, but I hope my films reflect the times they are set in.

Paranormal Activity: the new Blair Witch Project
It’s early November 2008, and in a Santa Monica movie theatre a teenage girl is huddled in the corner, alone, rocking herself back and forth, like a baby. All around her, 250 of her frenzied traumatised peers are in emotional disarray. Some are yelling out loud, some are yelling at each other. While some are simply pacing the aisles, unable to sit down, or to watch. This, it transpires, is the first public screening of a low-budget yet highly potent horror movie called Paranormal Activity. The film, which was made by a 39-year-old former video games designer called Oren Peli for only $10,000, will soon be described as $“the new Blair Witch”, will be supported and championed by Steven Spielberg, and will eventually — a full year later — storm to the No 1 position at the American box office for a $90 million ($£54 million) payday.

Bright Star

A Christmas Carol

An Education

Tales from the Golden Age

Now where was I: the uncanny Chris Claremont on rejoining the X-Men
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.

Steven Soderbergh on sex and lies
Sex and lies. Two pre-eminent subjects that boldly swirl around the inner world of the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh and just occasionally burst to the surface. Like now, for instance, in the library room of a London hotel, the 46-year-old film-maker behind Erin Brockovich and the star-studded Ocean’s Eleven movies, in smart brown jacket and jeans and black brainbox spectacles, will ping rapidly between the two poles. He speaks with a pleasing combination of unselfconscious honesty and the half-smirk of irony. A joke is never far from the surface.

Johnny Mad Dog

Fantastic Mr Fox

Real-life heroes are the stars in film about defying Mugabe
No screen heroes this year will trump the bravery of the family at the heart of a British documentary screened at The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival last night.

Underground — a return ticket to the past
Two rows of passengers sit facing each other across the Tube carriage. Leather straps hang above their heads. People read newspapers, pugnaciously chatter, eye the pretty girls or glare like statues. Some of them smoke. Everyone, without exception, wears a hat. Beyond the crowded train, escalators with wooden slatted steps convey rush-hour travellers past advertisements for ancient medicines, removal firms and theatre attractions. At the bottom, an important sign: “Step Off Right Foot First”. Useful to know, that.

Mystery over Tube escalator etiquette cleared up by restored film
Escalator etiquette in most countries tends to match the rules of the road. In New York and Taipei, motorists and escalator users keep to the right, while in Singapore and Tokyo both keep to the left.

Bill Murray: Do not disrespect the oddball
You don’t meet Bill Murray. You spend some time in his presence, and then try to figure him out when he’s gone. For the 59-year-old screen legend, star of Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation, is a man of many faces, all of which inevitably return to that famous default deadpan of hangdog eyes, flaccid cheeks and slightly protruding lower lip.

Film News from Times Online
Film News from Times Online

 

From pencils to pixels: Disney Pixar and the new golden age of animation
With a tough edgier Mickey Mouse starring in his own video game advances in technology and increasing adult appeal audiences have never had it better says William Langley.

Harry Patch: the reluctant hero
In an exclusive extract from his new biography Peter Parker charts the remarkable life of Britain's last World War One veteran Harry Patch.

The Last Veterans: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War by Peter Parker: review
Simon Heffer admires Harry Patch and the Legacy of War by Peter Parker a moving account of the last survivor of the First World War

Invisible by Paul Auster: review
Jane Shilling finds Paul Auster in playful mood in his latest novel Invisible

Joe Allston's Literary Diary
Our literary insider gets the gossip on Aravind Adiga and next year's literary heavyweights including Ian McEwan and Life of Pi author Yann Martel

Genevieve Fox's Book Club
The Outcast by Sadie Jones may be on David Cameron's shelf but what does Genevieve Fox's book club say about it?

Robbie Williams a timid return
Robbie Williams was unconfident about his return to the spotlight explains his biographer.

The Running Set review
Ashley Wass piano Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra cond James Judd Rating:

Purcell: The Food of Love review
Paul Agnew tenor AnneMarie Lasla bass viol Elizabeth Kenny theorbo guitar Blandine Rannou harpsichord organ Rating:

Britten: The Beggar's Opera review
Soloists City of London Sinfonia cond Christian Curnyn. Rating:

Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin review
Alina Ibragimova violin Rating:

Jonathan Harvey interview
Mystically inclined British composer Jonathan Harvey on his journey from choir to Buddha .

'World Have Your Say': global discussion that asks the unaskable
Christopher Middleton applauds 'World Have Your Say' a phonein radio programme that has taken the world by storm.

The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God Of Manga
Manga originator Osamu Tezuka was a seminal figure in 20th century Japanese popular culture.

The films that defined the noughties
The decade's movie culture has been fragmented. What are the masterpieces of the last ten years?

Royal Ballet Mixed Bill Royal Opera House review
Mark Monahan is impressed by the the Royal Ballet's latest triple bill. Rating

The Pros The Cons and A Screw at the Derby Theatre review
The Pros The Cons and A Screw which relaunches the Derby Theatre is a poor man's Porridge. Rating:

Haydn's Creation at the Lighthouse Poole review
Kirill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra brought vibrancy and clarity to Haydn's Creation at the Lighthouse Poole. Rating:

Oxford's best and worst
Jamie's Italian disappoints but fortunately The Ambassador Theatre Group have taken over Oxford's rundown Apollo.

Wales and the web: how the internet is reshaping British theatre
In the birth of the National Theatre of Wales we might just be seeing the death of the individual as the key drivingforce in our theatre

Austin Powers actor Verne Troyer given restraining order
The former girlfriend of the 2ft 8in star has gone to court to ban Troyer from approaching her after she claimed he sent abusive messages.

Lost Charlie Chaplin film bought on eBay for 5
Nitrate film bought on eBay for £3.20 5 could be worth £40000

Cuts to arts budgets would lower Britain's earning power
The arts can uplift excite and motivate people of all backgrounds writes Tony Hall.

Bon Jovi: 'I don't do this for money fame or glory'
With a new album The Circle out Jon Bon Jovi talks to Bryony Gordon about The X Factor - and reveals a surprising passion for politics.

Dame Vera Lynn to take on X Factor winner in chart battle
Dame Vera Lynn in a bid to grab the Christmas number one.

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: Blackpool boy Craig Kelly booted out in front of hometown crowd

After scoring just 17 points from the judges, the former Coronation Street star would have needed a huge proportion of the viewer's vote to remain in the competition.

As she becomes a national treasure, he becomes more petulant: Why Cheryl and Ashley Cole are Mr and Mrs Glum

As Cheryl Cole grows ever more successful, stylish and famous, her husband Ashley gets more petulant, pouty and vain. And the tensions in their marriage are starting to show.

'I'm not ready to sleep with another woman,' says Peter Andre

The broken marriage, the breakdown, the split with the Jehovah's Witnesses. Andre's kept a dignifed silence since breaking up with Katie Price. Until now...

Kate Moss cuts hairdresser James Brown loose

The friendship between supermodel Kate and James Brown appears to have turned a touch frosty after the hairdresser admitted they see each other much less these days.

Casualty's Simon MacCorkindale reveals he's got incurable cancer

When Simon MacCorkindale suddenly left TV’s Casualty no one suspected that he was keeping a tragic secret: he had cancer and had been given just five years to live.

Are Ali Bastian and Brian Fortuna an item? Our lips are Strictly sealed...

Romance? Frances Hardy tried to find out on a kiss-me-quick trip to Blackpool.

X Factor: Who do you think you're kidding Cowell? Clearly, Simon DOES love Jedward and HAS setup Danyl as a fall-guy

How much longer can we go on suspending disbelief over these crass stunts?

Dynamite in bed - and ruthless out of it. Lynne, the gold-digger who tricked Peter Sellers' family out of his millions

His unique comic ability enthralled millions around the world, but Peter Sellers's volatile and perplexing character left a trail of misery in his private life.

Bright Star: Jane Campion's comeback transforms the legendary poet John Keats into a pathetic wimp

Bright Star records the love affair between teenager Fanny Brawne and poet John Keats it is seen very much through Fanny's eyes, as a chaste but heightened romance.

Jennifer's Body: The new Megan Fox movie is another cadaver palaver

It is all too obviously something screenwriter Diablo Cody extracted from her bottom drawer after the Oscar-winning success of Juno - it should have stayed there.

A Christmas Carol: Robert Zemeckis' film is an entertaining period piece starring Jim Carrey

It sticks commendably close to Dickens' story and dialogue. Jim Carrey gives a spirited and enjoyable imitation of Alastair Sim.

Night at the Museum 2: Ben Stiller leads Hollywood dream team to the Smithsonian

A roll call of Hollywood's funniest men - think Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Robin Williams Steeve Coogan and Ricky Gervais - have reunited for more mischief in the blockbuster sequel, Night At The Museum 2.

An Education: Carey Mulligan - the new Audrey Hepburn

Here's a hit movie that's small in scale, but big in heart - An Education is the most charming British film of the year.

Starsuckers: Turning the tables on the celebrity gossip-mongers

Starsuckers works best as an attack on the cult of celebrity, but gets sidetracked into becoming a critique of Live Aid and political 'spin.'

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

 

The Men Who Stare At Goats


JUST the title of The Men Who Stare At Goats brings a smile to your face.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno


CINEMA history is littered with tales of the ones that got away. None are more intriguing than that of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno.

Disney's A Christmas Carol


DICKENS' A Christmas Carol is such a surefire saga of Yuletide redemption that you can understand why filmmakers constantly return to it for inspiration.

Welcome


THE desperate plight of Europe's illegal immigrants forms a poignant backdrop to the absorbing Welcome, a melodramatic, well-acted tale of the bond that grows between a middle-aged man and a young refugee from Iraq.

Jennifer's Body


JUNO proved that cult screenwriter Diablo Cody has a wicked way with a memorable line.

Paper Heart


YOU will need a very strong tolerance of whimsy to fully appreciate Paper Heart, a self-indulgent pseudo-documentary in which gormless comic Charlyne Yi travels America to discover the meaning of true love.

Bright Star


THE Piano has been a tough act to follow for New Zealand film-maker Jane Campion.

Steve Martin & Alec Baldwin unveiled as Oscars' co-hosts


HOLLYWOOD veterans Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will host next year's Oscars, it was announced today.

Mickey Rourke: I had a gun... a priest saved me


ACTOR Mickey Rourke's sad decline was turned around by his faith and love for his dogs, as Sandro Monetti's new biography of the former hellraiser reveals.

Henry Fitzherbert's film round-up


AN EDUCATION

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


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

Opera: Jenufa


BROUGHT up on an operatic diet of Mozart and Verdi, I used to think of opera as consisting of plots that were too feeble for proper plays, used as an excuse for some great singing.

Tis the season to boo and hiss (oh yes it is…)


SHOUTS of "He's behind you!", mass hissing at villains and gales of laughter (from both children and adults) will soon echo around the land as the pantomime season gets under way.

The Sleeping Beauty: Royal Ballet


WHAT a maddening ballet of two halves we got last Tuesday.

Mark Shenton's theatre round-up


THE public are used to choosing the stars of West End musicals.

Clare Colvin's opera round-up


HALLOWE'EN is an apt season for Britten's creepy masterpieceThe Turn Of The Screw, based on the Henry James ghost story. David McVicar's revived 2007 staging takes the opera back to the Victorian era of shadowy houses and costumes of black bombazine. Tanya McCallin's set of sliding translucent screens and furniture under dust-covers conjures up a sinister household of repressed secrets.

Pains Of Youth: National Theatre, London


A DARK moral plague infected Europe in the years after the First World War and with it a catastrophic uncertainty that would build a path to fascism.

Mixed Programme - Mark Morris Dance Group: Sadler's Wells


MORE than any other choreographer, Mark Morris liberated dance from the tyranny of body shape.

Mrs Klein: Almeida Theatre, London


THIS confrontational 1988 play by Nicholas Wright focusses on a moment in the life of the controversial Vienna-born psychoanalyst Melanie Klein - a woman who was not exactly Freud but a big-hitter in the field nonetheless.

The Sleeping Beauty: Royal Ballet


THE Sleeping Beauty is the grandest of all the grand narrative ballets.

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Alesha
Singer Alesha Dixon, 31, on the drama surrounding Strictly, sparkling on tour, not having time for a man, and breaking America…

Abbey Clancy: My five star buys
The model, 23, on her best beauty buys…

Subtle surgery
Always been tempted by a little nip or tuck, but been too afraid of ending up looking permanently surprised? Check out the new procedures with a natural effect. They’ll have friends asking where you’ve been on holiday, not where you got stuck in a wind tunnel

Carmen Electra: 5 minutes with a sex kitten
The TV presenter and saucy minx, 37, on being an expert with a whip and how to catch the perfect man

Emmerdale’s Carolin Stoltz… wears lace
Swedish actress Carolin Stoltz, 28, hits Emmerdale tomorrow as refugee Olena Petrovich. We sexed her up in vampy lace, just so she can show us how it’s done...

Kate Humble: ‘My guilty pleasures? Cheese, and outdoor porn’
Autumn Watch’s bubbly presenter, 40, on her down-to-earth attitude about her weight, being a naked film star, and how a good sensible rucksack is what really gets her going…

Joe Swash: ‘I’d go back in the jungle tomorrow’
The current King Of The Jungle, 27, on loving his I’m A Celebrity… experience, going back to Oz this year, and his love for girlfriend Kara Tointon…

Kelly Rowland: ‘I wear what makes me feel fabulous’
The singer and ex-Destiny’s Child star, 28, on how she keeps herself looking and feeling good, and her fashion faux pas and secrets...

WIN! Tickets to T4’s musical extravaganza
Enter our competition and you could see your favourite stars live in action at T4's Stars Of 2009

Whole lotta Rosie
Here's what Ronnie Wood’s son Tyrone is missing (a lot)…

EXCLUSIVE Alex Reid interview: The Truth
'Look, I’m no freak but I like to try everything. Sometimes I dress up as a Jedi Knight or Superman'

Jedward: 'Stop hating us'
The First Interview: Jedward tell of their hurt over ‘savage abuse’

Loose Women audience cancelled for Robbie Williams 'mates'
TV ticket row on Loose Women studio filled with Robster fans

Craig Kelly kicked off Strictly
Actor Craig Kelly became the latest celebrity to be kicked off Strictly Come Dancing after racking up his lowest score.

Good job Waterstone's didn't boycott Jordan's latest book...
It’s rumoured that many bookshops were keen to boycott Jordan’s latest book Standing Out on the grounds that it’s her fourth in five years and you can get enough of an average thing. 

Friends not reunited..
It doesn’t sound like the Friends movie is ever going to see the light of day.

Piece of Elvis' hair up for auction
A strand of Elvis' hair collected by his personal barber is expected to fetch up to £250 at auction.

Rihanna confirms Chris Brown bit her during brutal assault
Rihanna has revealed more details of the brutal assault she suffered at the hands of ex-boyfriend Chris Brown last February.

Rihanna describes Chris attack
Chart star Rihanna has described the horror she felt as her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown was biting and punching her during a violent argument, saying she saw "no soul in his eyes".

Ryan Thomas quizzed over road crash
Coronation Street star Ryan Thomas has been questioned by police in connection with a drink-drive collision, it has emerged.

Pamela Anderson: 'I'll never stop stripping off!'
She’s been dressing to kill in eye-popping outfits for the past 20 years – and Pamela Anderson says she’ll be stripping off until the day she dies.

X Factor: Jealous contestants complain Jedward are getting preferential treatment
Jealous X Factor stars have complained that Jedward are getting preferential treatment in their bid to win the show.

David Beckham made an extra £10million for off-pitch activities in 2008
He’s handsomely paid for playing football, but David Beckham made an extra £10million for off-pitch activities.

Ronan Keating: 'Losing Stephen was tougher than losing my mum'
Ronan Keating has revealed the death of bandmate Stephen Gately was the hardest knock of his life – worse even than when his own mother died.

One hour of Simon Cowell costs £19k
If you fancy an hour of Simon Cowell's time it'll cost you £19,000.

Pet Shop Boys set for Christmas re-release
If George Michael can do it.. Now the Pet Shop Boys are to reissue a festive track they gave away to fans back in 1997.

Chris Brown speaks out about Rihanna attack
Now Chris Brown has spoken out about his attack on ex love Rihanna.

Elton John beats bugs to gig again
Sir Elton John is fighting fit again after being laid low by 'flu and E. coli.

Take That star Mark Owen all set for wedding day
Congrats to Mark Owen and Emma Griffiths - this is their Greatest Day.

Leona Lewis shows she's a Backstreet Boys fan at MTV EMA Awards bash
Never have we seen Leona Lewis looking so Happy...

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.

 

Fur flies as sisters go on the pull


FURIOUS Julie Carp attacks her half-sister Eileen -Grimshaw after discovering she's behind her sacking.

Caining it for Charity


THE Dingle family celebrate the reunion of Cain and Charity, who want to give their relationship another go.

Olly nice problem


HEART-THROB Olly Murs has sparked a love war between two Essex girls - but he's only got eyes for one of them.

Little Tom has a few too many


LITTLE Tom Cunningham throws up after downing a shedload of booze. The kid is being looked after by Darren Osborne, who takes him to his local for lunch.

Sexy Jan gets her man


RANDY Ryan Malloy finally gives in to temptation - and seduces saucy minx Janine Butcher.

Baby bust-up


SURROGATE mum Susan Kinski is set for an almighty falling-out with son-in-law Dan Fitzgerald over the sex of their unborn child.

GARROW'S LAW: TALES FROM THE OLD BAILEY


THE very talented Andrew Buchan, who plays the lead in this enjoyable 18th-century legal drama, would no doubt shudder at the suggestion that he's becoming typecast.

THE X FACTOR


ONE thing has become blindingly obvious during the course of this latest series.

THE CHILDREN WHO FOUGHT HITLER


WITH the passing of the years, it's inevitable that a lot of wartime anecdotes have become rather familiar. B

STRICTLY COME DANCING


THEY warned us it could never happen again. "Logistical problems," they insisted, back in 2005.

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Hornby can't understand High Fidelity stage flop


British author NICK HORNBY is still struggling to come to terms with the fact his book HIGH FIDELITY wasn't a Broadway smash - because he thought it was a great musical.

Zemeckis wants Starr and McCartney for Yellow Submarine remake


Moviemaker ROBERT ZEMECKIS wants surviving BEATLES PAUL MCCARTNEY and RINGO STARR to play themselves in his planned remake of the Fab Four's animated classic YELLOW SUBMARINE.

Kristen Stewart graduates on the set of Twilight sequel


KRISTEN STEWART has graduated high school after passing her last exams on the set of the new TWILIGHT movie.

Jay-Z jets home to New York to celebrate Yankees' win


JAY-Z jetted back to the U.S. from Germany in the early hours of Friday (06Nov09) so he could celebrate his beloved New York Yankees' World Series win at the championship parade and toast them with a special performance.

Joe Jackson accused of threatening man over love-child claims


MICHAEL JACKSON's father JOSEPH has dismissed allegations he threatened to kill a man who is trying to prove the King of Pop fathered a lovechild.

Davies considers TV talent search for the new Kinks


THE KINKS star RAY DAVIES is considering launching a reality TV talent hunt to find the stars of his planned new musical about the cult 1960s band.

Paradise Lost rocker pulls out of tour to care for dying dad


Rocker GREG MACKINTOSH has pulled out of the remaining dates of PARADISE LOST's European tour so he can be with his dying dad.

Madonna wanted Precious


MADONNA was almost MARIAH CAREY's boss on acclaimed new movie PRECIOUS - the pop superstar was among the first people to show an interest in adapting author SAPPHIRE's gritty drama into a film.

Van Dyk pens anthem for Berlin Wall demolition celebrations


Berlin-based superstar DJ PAUL VAN DYK has paid tribute to the fall of the Berlin Wall with a new "musical monument".

Brown attacks Rihanna over candid TV interview


CHRIS BROWN has fired back at his ex-girlfriend RIHANNA's decision to go public with the details of their February (09) fight, insisting what happened should remain between them.

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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.

This isn't it


THIS Is It has received a mixed bag of euphoric praise and harsh criticism.

Sexy Salma makes a fuzz


BELIEVE me, you haven't lived until you've seen voluptuous Salma Hayek transform herself into a bearded lady in a hearty Halloween horror show.

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Director slams BBC for gag on wind farm film
A BAFTA-nominated documentary maker has accused the BBC of banning his latest film about life in a remote Highland glen because it shows a lack of impartiality about wind farm

Widower breathes life into wife's work
IT WILL be a labour of love by a committed husband for the wife he has just lost.

Taggart's returning to our screens … but it could be shown on BBC
A NEW series of Taggart, one of Scottish Television's flagship dramas, could be aired on the BBC or a satellite channel should ITV decide not to recommission the gritty cr

Interview: Louise Linton, actress
IT'S been a bit of a whirlwind week for Louise Linton. First there was jetting in from LA last weekend just in time to snap up the top female prize at the Scottish Style A

Patience – castle is nearly ready for Take That star's Highland wedding
CAWDOR Castle will provide a fairytale setting for the wedding of Take That star Mark Owen and his fiancée Emma Ferguson this weekend.

Strictly storms into Blackpool
STRICTLY Come Dancing contestants got into the seaside spirit yesterday as they donned "kiss me quick" hats to prepare for an edition from Blackpool.

Slumdog director to focus on climber's arm ordeal
DANNY Boyle, the director of Slumdog Millionaire, is to film the story of an American climber who hacked off part of his arm with a knife after it became trapped under a rock

Elton John out of hospital after flu
SIR Elton John is out of hospital and feeling "fine" after being struck down with a bout of flu and an E coli bacterial infection.

Rihanna describes attack horror
CHART star Rihanna has described the horror she felt as her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown was biting and punching her during an argument, saying that she saw "no soul in his

Star Ryan Thomas in drink-drive probe
CORONATION Street star Ryan Thomas has been questioned by police in connection with a drink-drive collision.

Warts and all, the gruffalo is favourite
THE Gruffalo has been named as the nation's favourite bedtime story.

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