Movie Reviews

Hobbit: Could famous faces kill the return to Middle-earth?

As Billy Connolly joins the roll call of familiar British stars that includes Martin Freeman and Stephen Fry, how can The Hobbit maintain the originality and mystery of the trilogy?

More evidence has emerged suggesting that The Hobbit, Peter Jackson's forthcoming two-part prequel to his own Lord of the Rings trilogy, might just be a very different beast to its predecessors. With the news that Billy Connolly is to take the role of dwarf king Dain Ironfoot in his adaptation of JRR Tolkien's debut Middle-earth-set novel, Jackson appears to be taking stunt casting on the project to a level of which even Quentin Tarantino might be proud.

One of the factors which gave the Kiwi film-maker's earlier triptych its potent air of authenticity was the relative absence of familiar faces in key roles. The films were shot in New Zealand and lesser-known actors from the Antipodes such as then-relatively-obscure Karl Urban (Eomer), David Wenham (Faramir), Miranda Otto (Eowyn) and the irreplaceable John Noble (Denethor) took many of the supporting parts. It may have been a matter of convenience, but it lent the series a freshness and originality that might otherwise have been missing.

The Hobbit, by contrast, has already given us a lineup of dwarves and halflings that might have come straight from the little black book of a BBC TV casting director. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock), Richard Armitage (Spooks, Robin Hood), Aidan Turner (Being Human), James Nesbitt (everything): Jackson could not have given us more familiar small screen faces had he decided to replace Cate Blanchett as Galadriel with the woman who played Ace in Doctor Who and parachuted in Keith Chegwin to portray Gandalf.

I must admit that the decision to cast Barry Humphries as The Goblin King struck me as genius when it was announced last year. But is it really so necessary for the Master of Lake-town to appear in the smug yet cuddly form of dear old Stephen Fry and wizard Radagast the Brown to arrive in the shape of ex-timelord Sylvester McCoy? I suspect these appearances will make it rather harder for us Brits to lose oneself in the story, a bit like if Luke Skywalker had been played by a young Phillip Schofield in the first Star Wars movie, with Roland Rat as Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.

Connolly's appointment, in particular, seems likely to add an air of pantomime to the proceedings. While the Scots comic is a fine actor, his appearance as dwarf king Dain Ironfoot can be little more than a cameo at the end of part two of The Hobbit: There and Back Again. In Tolkien's fable-like novel, Dain turns up at the Battle of Five Armies to give his cousin Thorin a hand in his battle to defend newly liberated Erebor from invading forces of goblins, elves, men and wargs. The decision to cast a famous face in the role smacks of the kind of thinking that led the makers of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to send in Sean Connery at the end of that rather glib Hollywood feature. Dain won't have much screen time, yet needs to make an instant impact: casting an actor of Connolly's status and gravitas instantly does the trick, but it's a quick and easy fix to a problem that (for me) deserved a more honest solution.

I hope this post won't be misread as some kind of anti-Jackson polemic. I have high hopes for The Hobbit and plenty of trust in the director's ability to produce two excellent films. But the casting approach has clearly been very different this time around. To audiences in the US and elsewhere, it may matter little. But to those of us in the UK who'll be more familiar with the actors involved, these movies may just lose a little of the mystery that informed the earlier trilogy.

Film Weekly: Inside the mind of Viggo Mortensen

This week Jason Solomons visits the last house of Dr Sigmund Freud for a session with Viggo Mortensen, the actor who plays the father of psychoanalysis in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. Based on The Talking Cure, a play by Christopher Hampton, the film sees Mortensen as Freud spar with Carl Jung (played Michael Fassbender) over the treatment of young patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley).

James Watkins, director of The Woman in Black, joins Jason in the studio to discuss his new Daniel Radcliffe-fronted thriller. Radcliffe's first major role A.H. (After Harry) has the former boy wizard facing a different type of unspeakable horror - a vengeful apparition that's haunting his house.

Finally, Xan Brooks pops into the pod to review A Dangerous Method, The Woman In Black, Valentine-primed weepy The Vow and Jason Segel's Muppets re-patch.

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Terrence Malick's New World: a gap-year fantasy

Terrence Malick's take on the Pocahontas tale is un-Disneyfied in every way

Director: Terrence Malick

Entertainment grade: B

History grade: B+

In 1607, 104 Englishmen and boys established Jamestown. It would become the first permanent European settlement in the territory that is now the United States.

Colonialism

Grudgingly, Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) frees John Smith (Colin Farrell) on his arrival in Virginia. Smith was condemned to death during the voyage for being annoying. Oh, all right: formally, for concealing a mutiny. He's still annoying. Soon he's wandering moodily around the forests and fields, shirt open to show off his pecs, wearing feathers and beads like he's on some kind of gap year, and banging on about what noble savages the local Powhatan people are. "They are gentle, loving, faithful; lacking in all guile and trickery," he burbles. "They have no jealousy; no sense of possession." Fortunately, director Terrence Malick clearly realises this is patronising tosh. He juxtaposes Smith's airy-fairy voiceover with striking visuals of brutality, and with the Powhatan people's firm resolution (which Smith does not understand) to drive the Europeans into the sea. It's subtly done, but the film accurately sets Smith up as a fantasist.

Violence

Smith's most famous story, recounted in his 1624 book The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, is of being saved from execution by Pocahontas. Smith was captured by the Powhatan, and said they were "ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines," when "Pocahontas the King's dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death." Some historians think what Smith interpreted as an execution was actually a ritual of welcome. Others point out that there are no known Algonquin rituals of welcome which involve pretending to beat out someone's brains with a club. Everyone agrees that Smith's account is unreliable. The scene in The New World shows ritualistic behaviour of some sort going on, but it's all cut together as confusingly as possible. You're left unsure of what really happened. This is, in fact, the most historically accurate way they could have done it.

Romance

As Disney's Pocahontas and the song Fever tell us, "Captain Smith and Pocahontas had a very mad affair." Except they didn't, because she was 10 years old at the time. The New World ages her up to 14 (though actor Q'Orianka Kilcher looks like a fully-grown adult) and gives in to the myth. A historian could get cross, because it just isn't true. On the other hand, The New World is considerably more intelligent than the Disney's Pocahontas. She doesn't even have a cuddly raccoon sidekick or a talking tree. Malick uses the "mad affair" as an allegory for the takeover of America by the Europeans. While her fellow Powhatan people resist the Europeans fiercely, young Pocahontas is seduced because she does not realise the more experienced Smith is a scrub. And still really annoying.

More romance

Pocahontas marries another settler, John Rolfe (Christian Bale). Their relationship and journey to England is beautifully done, but it's also where The New World does verge on Disneyfication. Contemporary evidence hints that Mrs Rolfe may not have been quite so easily accepted and serenely happy as she seems in this movie. A letter from an acquaintance of the Rolfes says she was being dragged around by her husband "sore against her will". When she met John Smith at an inn in Brentford, she angrily upbraided him, saying "your Countriemen will lie much". Rolfe's own priority appears to have been to use his wife's image to sell tobacco, a branding opportunity he seized upon after her death from a lung illness at the age of just 20 or 22.

Verdict

Historians and film critics argue over whether or not The New World ends up perpetrating the idea of the noble savage itself. It does a bit. Even so, it's a far more thoughtful take on the legend than most fictionalisations, and gorgeous to watch.

Schwarzenegger and Stallone join forces for The Tomb

Action movie veterans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone confirm they are to star in Mikael Håfström's latest film

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone have confirmed that they will co-star in The Tomb, an - wait for it - action movie directed by Swedish film-maker Mikael Håfström.

Sly will play a structural engineer wrongly incarcerated in a prison of his own design, Arnie's the soulful inmate who'll help him escape. Schwarzenegger's character (blessed with "multiple shades of grey", according to the press release) is rumoured to be called Church, the name adopted by Bruce Willis's character in The Expendables - the last film that Sly and Arnie starred in together.

The pair, who pumped up their careers by staging a rivalry during their 1980s heyday, commented on the news from twin hospital beds, where they are apparently both recovering from shoulder surgery. "After all the action, stunts and physical abuse shooting The Expendables 2 and The Last Stand, it was time for a little tune up on my shoulder," said Schwarzenegger after posting a picture of himself and Stallone in hospital on Twitter under the hashtag #greattobeback. "Look who was coincidentally waiting in line behind me for his shoulder surgery. Now we're ready for another round of great times and action when we shoot The Tomb."

Why Midnight in Paris should win the best picture Oscar - video

In the third of a nine-part series leading up to the Oscars, Catherine Shoard explains why Woody Allen deserves the picture prize, even if Midnight in Paris is only his twenty-seventh best film

Ethan Hawke: 'Nothing went the way I thought it would'

A soul-searching fortysomething in the aftermath of divorce – Ethan Hawke's latest role is almost too close to home. There's no big career plan: he just follows his heart

^'I think that something really good can come from trying to exorcise some of your own personal demons in your work," says Ethan Hawke, sipping from a steaming bowl of pumpkin soup. We are sitting in the window of a cafe just around the corner from Hawke's apartment in Chelsea, New York, talking about his new film, The Woman in the Fifth, a small French-British co-production, directed by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski. Hawke plays an American writer in Paris, newly divorced, seeking custody of his daughter, who is drawn into a phantasmal relationship with a beautiful muse (Kristin Scott Thomas). The character seems like a napkin sketch of Hawke himself.

"In many ways it is," he says. "That jacket he wears – I had this blazer that's a little too small, like it's left over from prep school. The costume designer and I saw it as an extension of the character from Dead Poets Society: you know, his eyes have gone bad, he used to be quite promising but promising doesn't cut it at 40. He's turning in on himself. Pawel had this idea that depression is someone who can't see outside of themselves."

A paranoia piece in the vein of early Roman Polanski (Hawke calls it "an art film from 1962"), the film feels like Hawke's most thorough exploration yet of the darker claret running through his own strain of romanticism. It's been there from the beginning of his career, when, as he puts it, "the pure-bred romanticism of Dead Poets Society kind of injected itself into my psyche." Acclaimed as the actor of his generation for his portrayal of a coffee-house philosopher in 1994's Reality Bites, Hawke was simultaneously boning up on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and the early career of Jack Nicholson. "I was a little late," he says. "Two decades too late." He was stuck in the 90s, eulogising the 70s.

Then came divorce from Uma Thurman, amid rumours of an affair with the couple's nanny, and vilification by the tabloids as Public Ratbag No 1. Hawke holed up in the Chelsea hotel for a couple of years, and returned to the theatre. When he did resurface on screen, it was to contemplate adultery (Richard Linklater's Before Sunset), rob his own parents (Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), or skim money from his fellow cops (Brooklyn's Finest). If the 90s felt like a walk in the park for the actor, the last decade has seemed like a lightning dance, a canter beneath gathering clouds.

"Even this action movie I did, Assault on Precinct 13 – I saw a piece of that on TV the other day and I just looked depressed," admits the 41-year-old. "The whole movie was depressed. It's Detroit. It's snowing. My character's a pillhead. It definitely infiltrated my life." His charisma has a slightly haggard intensity these days, his face gaunt, his trademark goatee a little scruffier than you remember it; he looks like a starved version of himself. But he is still a fabulous talker, making unbreakable eye contact during long, soulful riffs on the importance of keeping your personal flame alight that recall the Huck Finn-ish sneaker-clad boulevardier who talked Julie Delpy into getting off a train in Before Sunrise. But there's no mistaking the black halo Hawke wears these days. The guy has taken a beating – the worst of it, one suspects, self-administered.

"I call it the black years," he says of the period following his divorce in 2004, sequestered in the delicious post-punk rot of the Chelsea hotel. "It was really difficult. It was difficult in ways I couldn't even see at the time. There was the obvious way in which it was difficult – the death of a dream, the inability to parent in the way that you want to. But for me it was – what's that Dante quote? 'At the midpoint of my life, I've come to the part of the forest where the straight way is lost.' Nothing teaches you like getting levelled. And I got levelled in my early 30s. Nothing went exactly the way I thought it would. Wait a second: love isn't real and, holy shit, I put all this energy into not making the same mistake my parents did and I just re-enacted them all! I thought I was so much smarter than everybody. And I'm not."

What saved him was his first love: theatre. He took a role as a sleazoid actor in the David Rabe play Hurlyburly, then Hotspur in a production of Shakespeare's Henry IV ("I put every ounce of anger that I possibly possessed into that play and I tried to ventilate it. I thought, I can't control what people think about me, but the one thing I can control is whether I'm improving as a performer. And my bet is that if I work on doing that I'll probably also, as a domino effect, improve as a person. That's been the goal of the last five or six years.")

In 2008, he married the nanny, Ryan Shawhughes, the same nanny he was rumoured to have had an extramarital affair with; the couple now live together with their two children, Clementine (three) and Indiana (six months). He is finding fatherhood a lot easier the second time around. "I'm really the right age now. I like being home. When Mia [his eldest child] was born, I was 27. It was three years after Reality Bites came out. I look at pictures of myself and wonder: what was I thinking?" What was he thinking? "I think I thought when I was younger that I would, like, get things and then it would all be easy. You'd be able to walk whatever road you wanted and then sadly you would start having arthritis, but by then you'd have kids and everything would be fine. I didn't really understand what a meandering road adulthood is."

In 2009, he wrote a lengthy Rolling Stone profile of the singer and actor Kris Kristofferson, at one time the biggest multi-platform star in America, who took a single bullet (Heaven's Gate) and heard himself described as "washed up" on the radio. An act of self-nourishing hero worship, smuggled autobiography, and half-time pep talk, the article seemed to be Hawke's way of rallying himself before returning to the fight. The piece ends with Hawke digging out his 10-year-old son Levon's copy of Margery Williams children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit: "Real isn't how you are made," says the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you… It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. Generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Of all the actors of his generation, Hawke has probably stayed most loyal to indie's art-for-art's-sake ethos. He has been offered plenty of superhero parts over the years and turned them down; he auditioned for Titanic, then watched as DiCaprio's career soared. Does he wish he had cashed in a little more? Hasn't he earned the right to don silver spandex and halt the progress of tidal waves?

"This is the biggest struggle of my life, to be honest," he says. "I never know to what extent I have to feed the snake, you know. The times in my life I've tried to sell out have failed miserably. I did this Angelina Jolie horror film thinking it would be a big hit and it was terrible. When I've followed my heart it goes well. One of the most successful movies I did was Before Sunset: we made that film for the sole reason that we wanted to make that film. The trick is to shoot from your heart, and then when the kind of work that you like is back in fashion again, you'll seem like you've stood your ground."

He laughs – a strange conspiratorial cackle, in which you detect a slightly embattled note. It makes you want to hug him and tell him how much you love his recent work (Brooklyn's Finest, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), but that you wish he would cut himself some slack and play off that still-burning charisma a little more. Instead, I end the interview the way everybody ends their meetings with Hawke, by telling him what they should do with the third Before Sunrise film, currently at the planning stage. Everyone does this, apparently: journalists, fans, directors, strangers.

"I'll go meet some fancypants director for a movie. They'll go, 'Oh this guy wants to meet you for this, that, the other.' I go, 'OK, I'll meet the guy.' We start talking about their film for a bit and then they go: 'I know what the third film should be.' And then he tells me. It's flattering, but we have to just tune it out and figure out what we want to say."

What does he want to say? "One of the things I want to get into the film is an acknowledgement of – and this is everybody's struggle – how do you keep your innocence alive? How do you keep your sense of romance alive, your sense of joy alive? But match it with realism, to get rid of all the fake naivety. To see the world for what it is. It's a very difficult aspect of life. What do you do?"

Ten films to look out for

Gallery: Andrew Pulver picks the top films showing at the 62nd Berlin film festival, which starts tomorrow

A Dangerous Method – review

A droll undercurrent of black comedy underlies David Cronenberg's drama about Freud, Jung and male hysterics

"These modern analysts! They charge so much!" declares a character in Woody Allen's collection Getting Even, "In my day, for five marks Freud himself would treat you. For 10 marks, he would treat you and press your pants." Sigmund Freud's tricky financial situation has a recurring cameo in David Cronenberg's seriocomic new movie, an adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure, about Freud, Jung and their mutual patient-acquaintance, and later colleague, Sabina Spielrein. It's an entertaining reminder that the sex-instinct once had an intimate psychological link with poverty. It meant children to feed and clothe.

This is a cool, measured, loquacious film; even its sexual adventures are shown with a clinical detachment, and there is a droll undercurrent of black comedy. Cronenberg is usually associated with body horror, but the nearest this film comes to anything of the kind is Keira Knightley's facial contortions playing Sabina Spielrein at the height of her mental turmoil; she is the young Russian neurotic carried kicking and screaming to the Swiss treatment room of CG Jung, played by Michael Fassbender with a clerkly and supercilious manner. As she screeches and yelps, Sabina's lower jaw is shoved out what looks like a couple of feet with a lower row of teeth jutting jaggedly upwards, like Ridley Scott's Alien when it comes out of John Hurt's stomach.

The lives of Spielrein and Jung are to intersect with that of the great master Freud, played by Viggo Mortensen. Ambitious Jung is excited at the prospect of applying Freud's proposed new "talking cure" to Sabina, and that he will be the first analyst ever to do so, as Freud, like Darwin, has been unwilling to go fully public with his ideas. But Cronenberg shows there are quasi-Oedipal tensions between the two men: one is a prosperous and complacent gentile whose wife has money, the other is a Jew, maintaining a large family in a small apartment; his life is more difficult and finds the younger man puppyish and naïve. Freud insists on sex as the primary foundation; Jung has other ideas, including cranky and eccentric interests in psychic phenomena and telepathy. But it doesn't take him long to diagnose sexual suppression in Sabina's case, stemming from childhood beatings that have caused masochistic desires in adulthood. Jung finds himself unable to resist an affair with Sabina, and they work through their mutual issues with spanking sessions. This was before anyone had ever heard of "boundary issues" or "inappropriate contact".

"Transference" is how Freudians describe the redirection of feelings towards your therapist, and there are weird triangular patterns of transference between Sabina, Freud and Jung, whose emotional ménage à trois is more potent than the one Jung is having with Sabina and his complaisant wife. Fassbender's Jung is pernickety and precise, a bourgeois academic, his eyes gleaming not so much at the thought of sex with Sabina but the prospect of making a name of himself and supplanting the master. Viggo Mortensen's Freud is bland, tolerant, opaque.

Cronenberg has created a drama of male hysterics with no interest in diagnosing their own condition – perhaps the career of each is a continuous, elaborate symptom. Why on earth does Jung make Sabina his assistant as he subjects his wife to a word-association test, if not to impose himself on her sexually? The director allows us to ponder Freud's own motives for referring a certain patient to Jung: the anarchic Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a man whose unrepentant sensualism tempts Jung to seduce Sabina. Who is doing the seducing here? Could it be that Freud has found a way of forcing Jung to admit the primacy of sex? Or even that he is trying to engineer a scandal in Jung's marriage, and destroy an impudent young pretender to his crown?

With some restraint, Cronenberg and Hampton do not play upon the much-discussed German puns in the three principals' names: that is, Freud equals joy, Jung equals young, and Spielrein equals either "play pure" (Spiel-rein) or "play inside", even "play inside me" (Spiel-herein). This could be because Freud's joyfulness appears in short supply. He is a man in the evening of his life, and has to reconcile this with the fact that his ideas, still in their infancy, are set to be inherited by a junior colleague of whom he can never approve.

Knightley's Sabina is highly strung, intensely persuasive and alluring, as she entrances Jung with excitable theories of creativity based on Wagner, a belief that only through a great evil or destructive reversal can something new and dynamic be born. She has been galvanised, if not precisely cured, by being taken on as Jung's lover, and then effectively as his pupil. It could even be that her own ideas, and her prospective career in analysis, will be born from the incineration of Jung's relationship with Freud.

"You're looking at the future!" says Jung to Freud, as they gaze upon the faintly surreal, digital skyline of New York from the deck of a steamship that has brought them over (briefly) from the old country. But that's what they themselves are, these fastidious, competitive intellectuals whose ideas were the shape of things to come; they have made of themselves a spectacle of the future that from our present perspective looks subtly, touchingly absurd.

Rating: 4/5

Burn after viewing: DVD screeners are part of award season – and piracy

The Baftas and Oscars begin with a DVD being sent out to thousands of members of the industry bodies. It's a vital part of marketing – but it's also blamed for the exponential rise of piracy

You want a Bafta award, but your film isn't out yet – or worse, it may have been and gone, or be a tiny release art film. How do you make the required impact? For more than a decade, in the scramble for awards votes, one particular weapon has proved of enduring effectiveness: the DVD screener.

Every year, in October and November, every voting member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) will take regular delivery of packages of shiny new DVDs, all marked "For your consideration" and accompanied by dire warnings of the legal penalties that will follow should anyone succumb to the temptation to upload them to the internet. (Several even carry the polite request that the watcher break them in half immediately after viewing.) This year, Bafta film voters received more than 70 DVDs – about 10 of which were already available in the shops, but most are specially prepared pre-release discs. This Sunday will see the outcome of all that lobbying as the winners of this year's Baftas are announced at the award ceremony at London's Royal Opera House.

Amanda Berry, Bafta's chief executive, is clear on the benefit to her members." We try and encourage everyone to see the films on the big screen, which is why we have a large screening programme, with around 50 Q&As. But with the best will in the world, it's not possible for everyone to see everything. Sending out DVDs is not about replacing the cinema experience; it's about allowing members to be as informed as possible before they vote."

Of course, Bafta don't send out the DVDs themselves: that is organised and paid for by the individual film distributors, using the Bafta members list. No one will reveal the exact cost of sending a DVD to each of the 6,500 or so Bafta members (roughly 5,000 of whom are in the UK, with the rest overseas, mostly in the US) but this unavoidable add-on to the marketing budget for an awards contender is a burden even a small distributor is prepared to shoulder – if you get the right result. Philip Knatchbull, chief executive of the art house and foreign-language specialist film company Artificial Eye, says: "They are almost essential to achieve nominations in the major categories, because this is how the majority of members will see most films. Obviously, it is the film itself that will determine whether it is nominated, but we have to make sure the Bafta members have all had the opportunity to see it. In that respect, DVDs seem to be the key tool."

Knatchbull's company sent out a package containing We Need to Talk About Kevin, Wuthering Heights, The Deep Blue Sea and Melancholia, as well as a retail DVD of Archipelago and putting the Wim Wenders dance film Pina and the Iranian divorce drama A Separation on to Bafta's online platforms. The results though, have definitely been mixed: Kevin has three nominations, including best actress for Tilda Swinton, while Pina and A Separation are up for best foreign-language film – with the latter the hot favourite.

Knatchbull says: "Certainly it is well worth the spend if you can secure a nomination in one of the key categories – best actress, best film, best director etc. But you can't know for certain whether you will be nominated though, so you spend the money regardless of the outcome."

The habit of sending out films – allowable under Bafta's rules of no gifts and no lobbying – began some 15 years ago, in the VHS days, but the rise of the DVD has also been accompanied by an exponential rise in piracy. It's been an endemic problem in the US, with near-routine leaking of Academy Award screeners and occasional prosecution of offenders. The late Jack Valenti, former head of the Motion Picture Association of America, tried to get the film industry to ban screeners, but the attempt failed.

However, recent analysis by a Wired magazine columnist, Andy Baio, suggested the tide in the US was turning, with fewer screeners – just eight out of the 33 sent out – being leaked online before release.

Bafta, fortunately, seems to be in a more respectable place, as far as piracy goes. Berry says that, to her knowledge, no member of Bafta has been responsible for an online leak. "People really do realise that having screeners is a privilege, not a right; they take their responsibility very seriously. We have a very clear code of conduct that members sign up to: they agree that the screeners are for their own use. It would be up to the individual distributors to take legal action, but any breach of the agreement would result in loss of membership. So far, we haven't had to do that."

Along with the MPAA, Bafta is trialling iTunes as a vehicle for its nominated films, and electronic delivery – which will take advantage of Apple's own security systems – looks like the future. Despite questions about its security, the Oscars look set to switch to an internet-based voting system next year – something the Baftas have operated since 2003.In the end, though, it's as well to remember awards are all about one thing: marketing. Does Bafta harm or help? Knatchbull says: "We release We Need To Talk About Kevin two weeks after the Bafta ceremony. Our three nominations, all in major categories, are no doubt going to add profile to the film's DVD release. We would hope that would add to our DVD sales – and certainly not reduce it."

Lights, action ... iPhone? Film-makers turn to smartphones

As digital photography takes over from film, smartphones are fast becoming an option for film-makers

The decisive moment for smartphones overtaking point-and-shoot cameras occurred last summer when the iPhone 4 became the most popular device for picture uploads to the image-sharing site Flickr. At the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, camera makers were scrambling to adapt to this new order, adding internet connections and more powerful zoom lenses to even basic models.

But it is not only photographers who have been quick to realise the potential of the camera in devices such as the iPhone 4 and 4S, and Nokia N8; film-makers have also been working with smartphones to produce not only quality shorts, but in some cases full-length feature films – shot completely on a mobile phone.

Acclaimed South Korean director Park Chan-wook is perhaps the most famous film-maker to adopt the iPhone when he shot his 33-minute feature Night Fishing (original title Paranmanjang) on the device. OK, he "cheated" and attached a 35mm lens to his own iPhone to use as a principle camera, but he had the crew shoot with their iPhones so he had plenty of ready-to-use footage from various angles that he could incorporate into his film.

And it is this kind of flexibility that is attracting film-makers to the smartphone as a work tool. If you know what you are doing you can whip out your phone, shoot a scene pretty much anywhere and Bam! It's in the can and ready to be edited.

Leeds-based writer and director Danny Lacey shoots with HD cameras such as the Sony EX1, Sony F3 and DSLR's like the Canon 5D MKII and 7D for his corporate work, but sees the potential of the smartphone.

"It's incredibly handy and fun to be able to film using my iPhone 4," he said. "Shooting at 720p, 30fps on that tiny piece of technology that fits in the palm of your hand, very exciting. I recently shot an experimental video on my iPhone 4 using an 8mm app called Super 8. On top of that I used a macro lens attachment made specifically for the iPhone. The idea was to film lots of random images with the main focus being on the interesting shapes and flares you can get from various light sources.

"The results were impressive. I ended up with an interesting, abstract video that I called 'Darkness and Light in 8mm'. Even though the app would only let me record at 480x360 pixels, it was still a good example of what you can achieve with this technology."

It is also possible to edit a film on the iPhone, as Majek Pictures demonstrated when they not only shot their four-minute short Apple of My Eye on the iPhone 4, but also edited the footage on the device.

Apple of My Eye is widely credited as the first film to be made on an iPhone 4 and was made soon after the its launch in June 2010.

Michael Koerbel and Anna Elizabeth James are the founders of Majek Pictures. The couple already had the story idea, but no money to make Apple of My Eye, which is a warm, sentimental story of a man's relationship with his granddaughter that evokes images of his own childhood.

While playing around with his new iPhone 4 Koerbel noticed it had a HD camera, "so I said to Anna 'you know we could shoot a movie – let's try it out'," he said.

To make their film, Koerbel and James simply used what resources they had – Koerbel's dad's train set was a main feature in the film, for example – and they were lucky enough to work with talented actors and crew who gave up their talents for nothing.

In the making-of video for Apple of My Eye, we see James editing the film on the iPhone iMovie app as they drive home in their car. Koerbel said that while they proved it is also possible to edit on the iPhone 4, it was strictly a "one off" and wouldn't recommend it for bigger projects.

"After the success of Apple of My Eye, companies started shipping us stuff," said Koerbel, "equipment like dollies, gear, sliders and lenses for example."

This led to Majek's next project, the Goldilocks, which has been described as "Bourne Ultimatum on an iPhone" and the first mobile film series shot and distributed entirely via an iOS device.

In one episode there is a scene where wine is being poured into a glass. Koerbel got the shot by placing the iPhone 4 in a ziplock bag in the bottom of the glass. The scene cost a couple of dollars, max (for the bag) – in a Hollywood production it would have cost at least a couple of grand, if not more.

Goldilocks won first prize in the first iPhone Film Festival, and was included on a longlist in the Interactive Media category at last year's Emmy awards.

While the iPhone has undoubtedly been at the forefront of this new wave of film-making, other smartphones are also being used.

The Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics, has not only proved a highly popular and cheaper option to the iPhone, but packs a much better camera than it too – resolution: 16:9 nHD (640 x 360 pixels) OLED.

The new iPhone 4S includes an 8 megapixel backlit camera with CMOS sensor that records 1080p video at 30 FPS – with an f/2.4 aperture and a gyro for video stabilisation.

Even if you don't like the idea of actually filming on the iPhone, there is a bunch of cinematography apps – to use for everything from calculating sunrise and sunset to storyboarding and camera angles – available to help you get the best shot.

Very recently Olive, starring Gene Rowlands, became the first full feature film to be shot entirely on a smartphone – the Nokia N8.

The producers also want it to be the first independently financed feature film to be distributed across 2,000+ theatres in the US without the backing of a major studio. After raising an initial $500,000 (£315,000) privately to cover production costs on the 22-day shoot, the producers are looking to raise a further $300,000 for advertising and distribution of Olive.

The film was made by adapting the Nokia N8 and crafting a 35mm lens adapter onto the smartphone in order to achieve a shallow depth of field. The N8 is also taped to a motorbike and a remote-controlled helicopter for overhead shots in other scenes.

With the demise of 35mm film, digital devices and smartphones are fast becoming an option for film-makers as traditional cameras cease production.

Koerbel says that as the next generation of smartphones is developed with larger HD camera sensor chips, filming on a mobile is going to become even more popular.

"The key to success is to exercise your imagination … and the most important thing is to get your ideas down either by writing or shooting a video. Shoot with the camera you have with you, it has been a springboard for us," is his advice to film-makers.

• Tony Myers is the editor of smartmoviemaking.com

Drew Barrymore saves the whales and melts cold war ice in Big Miracle

Hollywood fictionalises the story of Cindy Lowry, who persuaded the Americans and Russians to free trapped whales in Alaska

October 1988, Alaska: the end of the cold war. Ronald Reagan was US president, communism in eastern Europe was cracking and the ice had come in early. Cindy Lowry, a Greenpeace representative in Anchorage, read in a local paper that three young gray whales were stranded near America's northernmost city, Barrow. It was the start of a story that 24 years later has Lowry portrayed by Drew Barrymore in Big Miracle, a Hollywood film out on Friday.

Lowry was with Donny, her doberman, working on oil companies and overfishing. Then the phone rang. Could Greenpeace lend an icebreaker to get the whales out? Greenpeace never had an icebreaker. A biologist called to say the whales had little time left.

Lowry hit the phones. First she called the governer's office to ask where the coastguard icebreaker was. No interest. Then she tried a senator, the state fisheries department and Noaa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She tried whalers and oil companies, the coastguard itself, then got through to General John Schaeffer, adjutant general of the Alaska national guard. A media friend had told her the US and Russia had an agreement to help each other if their ships were in trouble. So she phoned Moscow.

Her telephone manner must have been extraordinary. By the end of the day, Lowry had the offer of an oil company barge, the US under-secretary for oceans had called from Washington pledging help, and the Russians were said to be interested. "It was getting pretty crazy. Everyone was phoning me. But it didn't seem that strange at the time. I was just so focused on the mission," she says.

Thirty-six hours later she was on her way to Barrow. "To start with there was just me, a biologist from Noaa, and the oil companies," she says.

An NBC crew with a helicopter took her to see the whales, about 12 miles away . " They were trapped in two tiny holes cut in the ice and there was only just room for two of them to breathe. We could tell right away that the smaller one wasn't breathing that well.

"The oil companies wanted to get barges to them, the Iñupiats [native Alaskans] wanted to chainsaw the holes. Every two or three days there was a new crisis. It was -20C and getting colder."

The drama was told around the world as the nations worked together, with the usual hostilities between corporations and environmentalists, media and military suspended.

By the end of week one, the ice was getting busy. The US air force diverted its largest cargo plane from Japan to bring in an 11-tonne amphibious icebreaking tractor from Prudhoe Bay, then came not one, but two Soviet ships, the icebreaker Admiral Makarov and a cargo ship, the Arsenev. The Iñupiat called the little whale Bone because its head had been rubbed raw as it tried to push through the ice.

The best hope lay with the Soviets clearing a channel, but the danger was that the ship would kill the whales. "It was one or two in the morning. We felt they were [getting] too close. The whales were getting frisky. I think they could start sensing open water, and they started swimming really fast from hole to hole," Lowry says.

The rescuers had set up a light for the Admiral Makarov to see the hole. "I thought I was going to say goodbye to the whales. I sat down by the hole on my own and one of the whales came up and spouted water. The freezing whale breath darkened my anorak.

"It was pretty surreal. You're 12 miles out and a Soviet icebreaker is [heading towards you] like a skyscraper. I kneeled down on the ice and the whale rested its head just inches away from me and we had this most amazing eye contact."

It was pure Hollywood, but the film has developed the story. It now runs: "The incredible true story that united the world. A small town news reporter and an animal-loving volunteer, Drew Barrymore, are joined by rival world superpowers to save a family of majestic gray whales trapped by rapidly forming ice in the Arctic Circle."

In the movie Donny the doberman doesn't get a part, the whales are puppets and the love interest is strictly between humans. "There was no romance on the ice. It was a romance with me and the whale," says Lowry, morphed into Barrymore's "animal lover" Rachel Kramer.

Lowry, who today has her own organisation, Oceans Public Trust Initiative, follows other US environmental women activists including Karen Silkwood, Erin Brockovich and Dian Fossey in having her story told by Hollywood.

She is not over-worried about the fictionalising. "It's not a documentary. It's pretty much the same. I just hope the movie will make people aware. I hope in my lifetime that I will see the end of whaling. The reality is that the oceans which we return whales into these days are in much worse shape now than they were just 20 years ago. The reality is that the oceans today are far more polluted than they were."

The real life story had a bittersweet ending. Three days after the whales were released a friend rang Lowry to say the gray whales were in Prince William Sound, heading south. But real life is not Hollywood: "The good news was two had survived. But Bone, the little whale, hadn't made it."

Natalie Portman signs up to The Tree of Life director's next two films

The actor will star in Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups and Lawless

Natalie Portman is the latest star to be swept up by Terrence Malick for his post-The Tree of Life projects. The actor, who took a break from filming after winning an Oscar and having a baby last year, has signed up for the director's next two films, Knight of the Cups and Lawless, according to Deadline. She was last on screen in Kenneth Branagh's Thor, where she starred as scientist Jane Foster opposite Chris Hemsworth's god of thunder.

Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Isabel Lucas will co-star with Portman in Knight of the Cups. Bale, Blanchett, Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara are signed on for Lawless. Malick, who is also developing another untitled project, rarely reveals details of his work before (or indeed, after) filming. Little is known about the plot details for either of the projects that Portman is attached to.

The Tree of Life is in the running for three Oscars at the Academy Awards on 26 February, including best picture. The film won Malick the Palme d'Or at Cannes and has picked up a cluster US critics' awards. Producer Sarah Green, who is on the Oscar ticket for her work on the film, is producing Knight of the Cups and Lawless with The Tree of Life co-producer Nicolas Gonda.

Hugh Grant levels new accusations against the Daily Mail

Leveson inquiry website publishes fresh statement saying actor has evidence of misbehaviour by Associated Newspapers

The row between Hugh Grant and the Daily Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, took a further turn on Wednesday, when the celebrity actor said he had uncovered evidence of misbehaviour by Associated Newspapers.

In a fresh statement published on the Leveson inquiry website, Grant said he had obtained letters contradicting several aspects of the Mail's version of the way it had tracked down and "persistently hounded" Tinglan Hong, the mother of his newly born daughter.

Mail reporters pretended to have a parcel to deliver in order to get details of a lettings agency linked to the mother's former address, according to a statement obtained by Grant.

The letting agency denied subsequently handing over Hong's mobile number, which the paper obtained.

Westminster register office also denies the Mail's claim that its staff had subsequently handed over details of the baby's birth, supplied privately by the hospital.

Grant says in his witness statement to Leveson that it could have been illegal for the register office to supply such details.

The Westminster registrar has written to him saying: "It is absolutely not our policy to release birth notification details to members of the public and to our knowledge we have not done so. Such disclosure would be likely to involve a potential breach of data protection legislation." The country's chief registrar – the registrar-general, Sarah Rapson – is to write to Westminster council "to urge them to consider undertaking a full investigation". Grant said: "This information would have formed part of Tinglan's confidential medical records."

In another area of dispute with the Mail, Grant discloses that his former lover Jemima Khan has now sworn a witness statement to the Leveson inquiry, saying the Mail on Sunday's version of how it came to print a libellous story about them could not possibly be true.

The Mail says a freelance, Sharon Feinstein, got a story purportedly emanating from Khan herself, that Grant had been having an affair with a "plummy-voiced woman" who called him on the phone. Khan says she was completely unaware of Feinstein until the story was published.

The Mail's editor is being recalled to Leveson on Thursday to be cross-examined by Grant's lawyers. This followed a belligerent performance on Monday in which Dacre admitted personally helping draft the phrase "mendacious smear" about Grant after the actor had suggested Associated Newspapers might have engaged in phone hacking.

Dacre said Grant "knew, or ought to have known, he had no proper basis for smearing our company". He said that "to ignore the truth behind the carefully manipulated images" of celebrities would "betray the readers".

A Daily Mail spokesman said: "We note that Hugh Grant has now accepted that his claims regarding information coming from the hospital were false. We stand by the statements already made to the inquiry." A witness statement detailing the paper's stance was submitted last year by Associated's lawyer, Liz Hartley.

In evidence to Leveson the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, told the inquiry on Wednesday that the Crown Prosecution Service would shortly release a guidance on the prosecution of journalists. He is drawing up an interim policy on the factors to consider when deciding whether to prosecute journalists over illicit newsgathering methods.

The policy on the prosecution of journalists will include a public interest defence for journalism that uncovers a miscarriage of justice. The CPS said that the potential public interest defence of revealing miscarriages of justice would be balanced against considerations including whether the journalist used threats or intimidation, or put criminal proceedings in jeopardy.

"It would be prudent to have a policy that sets out in one place the factors that prosecutors will take into account when considering whether or not to prosecute journalists acting in the course of their work as journalists," Starmer said.

The Guido Fawkes blogger, Paul Staines, in evidenceon Wednesday, said he understood that the editor of the Sunday Mirror, Tina Weaver, had personally authorised hacking and blagging.

Staines said he was told by two journalists that Weaver "personally authorised and told them to hack, blag and do all that kind of stuff".

Staines added: "She knows all the bad things that have gone on under her rule. It's ridiculous."

Trinity Mirror had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. The political blogger also claimed that the News of the World paid him £20,000 for photographs of a political adviser who shared a hotel room with the foreign secretary, William Hague, during the 2010 election campaign.

Staines suggested that the now-defunct tabloid bought the photos to "take them off the market" as a favour to its former editor, Andy Coulson, who at the time was director of communications at No 10.

The blogger also told the inquiry that his home address had been discovered by a Daily Telegraph reporter, Gordon Rayner, and claimed that could only have been achieved by his details being leaked by a Land Registry employee. The Telegraph said that Staines and Rayner had never met. "We don't propose to be drawn into any dispute with him. However, as any journalist will know, the Land Registry is a public resource, available to all."

He claimed that Rayner had used Steve Whittamore, the private investigator convicted of illegally accessing data in 2005. Staines said that Rayner appeared in the information commissioner's Operation Motorman report into trade of data by newspapers 335 times.

"If this inquiry does not act as a catalyst for criminal prosecution for those journalists who have invaded people's privacy, on an industrial scale, I think you have failed," Staines told Lord Justice Leveson.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

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To Kill A Mockingbird original artwork - in pictures

The film adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is 50 years old in 2012, and to celebrate this milestone we've put together a selection of the film's original artwork

WG Sebald film takes journey to cliff's edge

The author's The Rings of Saturn starts as travelogue and ends in melancholy and horror – a new film, Patience (After Sebald) captures its mood admirably

I came late to WG Sebald, in the early summer of 2010, although I'd known of him for years. He was one of those surname-only authors whose works it seemed everyone else had read – or else he would crop up stuffily in the footnotes of a certain sort of book.

So until I heard Will Self praising his work on the Today programme, he was simply a name on my to-do list. A task, you might say. Someone to read in hospital, if and when the time came.

But something about Self's enthusiasm persuaded me to buy The Rings of Saturn that lunchtime. Billed as an account of several days spent walking the Suffolk coast – territory I have known and loved since childhood – it ought to make perfect reading for the journey home to East Anglia that evening. And sure enough, as my train clattered and swayed across the shrinking peatlands, I found myself asking where this reluctant German had been all my life.

Over the next 24 hours I learned two things. The first was that many of the people I'd assumed had read Sebald actually hadn't. The second was that The Rings of Saturn isn't an account of a summer's hike down the Suffolk coast. Well, on the surface it is, which is probably why it's the Sebald book that newbies like me generally start with. But after the first few miles, it's pretty obvious that there's a great deal else going on besides the gorse and the deadbeat fishing towns. And that something is, to put it very mildly, man's grotesque inhumanity to man.

A lot of people toss the book aside then. If it's a novel, where's the plot? If it's a travelogue, what's the point? And that's something else I learned that summer, as I urged all and sundry to read it, even buying copies for the faint-hearted: like Michael Gove and his wretched Bibles for schools, most people don't like this stuff.

Those who do, of course, love Sebald to bits, and his death in a car crash in 2001 (he was just 57, and already there had been talk of a Nobel prize for literature) quickly lent him a cult status. Quite naturally, enthusiasts feel the urge to don their walking boots and follow in his footsteps, as if he was some sort of lowland Wainwright who dropped dim, monochrome photos into his text instead of those hiker's-eye sketches of bracken and limestone walls.

And that's so easily how the new film, Patience (After Sebald), might have turned out – a moodier version of the TV series Coast, with some lit-crit bod from the University of East Anglia standing in for Nicholas Crane, and wearing an academic jumper rather than a red anorak, but still bellowing over the screech of surf on shingle.

Happily, though, director Grant Gee has made something still and beautiful – an art documentary in the very best sense – that seemed to me to evoke perfectly the melancholia of Sebald's book while hinting at the horror which lies at the heart of its labyrinth.

Two summers ago, when I had finished The Rings of Saturn, I read Sebald's other books one after the other – ending with The Natural History of Destruction, a series of lectures in which he describes in terrible detail the firebombing of German cities during the second world war and the shroud of silent forgetfulness that enveloped his countrymen and blighted his Bavarian childhood.

After that, I felt compelled to read about the Holocaust, since this was where his route seemed ultimately to lead. And for months afterwards I was at a loss to understand how anybody could write about any other subject ever again.

And now, thanks to Grant Gee and Patience, I have taken The Rings of Saturn down from the shelf and begun once more that southerly trudge along the cliff's edge. It's a path that will never lead to happiness, but I am certain to be in the very best of company.

• Patience (After Sebald) is out now

Johnny Depp options West Memphis Three memoir

The actor and producer is the latest to declare a creative interest in the story of three men convicted of child murders in 1994

Johnny Depp looks set to become the latest high-profile film-maker to take a creative interest in the controversial case of convicted child killers the West Memphis Three after optioning a forthcoming memoir by one of their number, Damien Echols.

Echols, who is now in his mid-30s, was convicted in 1993 alongside Jessie Misskelley Jr, and Jason Baldwin, of the murder of three eight-year-old boy scouts in West Memphis, Arkansas. Investigating police at the time labelled the killings part of a satanic ritual. He was freed last year after 18 years on death row under a controversial plea bargain which got the trio out of jail but denied them permission to sue the state authorities for wrongful imprisonment.

There have so far been four documentaries made about the trio's plight, which attracted attention from celebrity supporters such as Metallica, Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins and Depp himself. The Paradise Lost series of films, by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, were instrumental in helping free the three – the film-makers had originally planned to shoot a film about what they thought was a case of cult killings in a small rural community for HBO in 1996 and wound up uncovering evidence of faulty DNA evidence and police coercion.

The first two instalments attracted attention when Metallica allowed Berlinger and Sinofsky permission to use their songs. All three of the convicted men had been fans of the rock band, and critics suggested it was their appearance and choice of lifestyle which contributed more to local suspicion than any hard evidence. The final film was screened last year as the trio were released from prison. A further, separately-commissioned documentary, the Peter Jackson-produced effort West of Memphis, screened recently at Sundance and has attracted critical acclaim.

Depp's venture, which he will produce through his Infinitum Nihil company, also looks likely to be beaten to the big screen by a dramatic retelling from the Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan, who said last year that he hoped to uncover the "human drama" behind the convictions. "It's a contemporary Salem witch-hunt," Egoyan said. "The screenplay beautifully examines the ebb and flow of grief, disbelief and anger that flowed through the community in the wake of this catastrophe. It's an amazing story of a community and the conflicting emotional needs of seeking and finding justice, but also the complexities of jumping to conclusions."

Deadline says Depp's planned film will aim to spotlight Echols' controversial conviction and imprisonment, presenting his life prior to incarceration as well as the twists and turns which led to his release. The memoir itself will be published in September. It is not yet known if Depp will take an acting role in the film.

The Avengers: meet Joss Whedon's superheroes

The Avengers trailer brings together Marvel's best-loved heroes, from Captain America to a rubbishy bow and arrow guy

You're probably all up-to-date with The Avengers, but that's because you're an intelligent metropolitan internet user. You know who's in The Avengers. You saw that photo of the chairs. You watched the first preview trailer. And, because this is the internet, you probably do a little wee every time you hear Joss Whedon's name being mentioned.

But that's just you. Not everyone is as savvy as you, which is why so much emphasis was placed on the trailer for The Avengers that ran during Sunday's Super Bowl. It would have been the first taste of the movie for millions of people, so it was important that it hit as hard as possible. What did newcomers to The Avengers learn from the trailer? Let's take a closer look:

1) Something is wrong on the streets of New York. Its citizens are running scared. All of them. The man in the suit. The woman with a bandana. The other woman trailing a handbag so big that she could feasibly sleep in it. The guy in the immediate foreground who actually looks like he doesn't actually care very much about anything that's going on at all. They're all running scared. But why?

2) Ah, it's because something is flying around New York blowing everything up. It's hard to make out what it is, but chances are it's either the Green Goblin or Skeletor from that Dolph Lundgren Masters of the Universe film. Whoever it is, he needs to be stopped. But who's going to do it?

3) Oh, phew, it's Gene Simmons from Kiss. Only joking, it's Charlie Chaplin. Whoever he is, he's wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt in a nod to the band that once recorded a song about his character Iron Man. Presumably this means that Scarlett Johansson will also wear a Mötley Crüe T-shirt, Chris Evans will wear a Jimmy Buffet T-shirt and Jeremy Renner will wear a T-shirt featuring the logo of any band that has ever recorded a song named Rubbishy Bow and Arrow Guy.

4) But back to the trailer. To defeat whatever that flying thing is, Tony Stark needs help. And he's got it in the shape of Johnny Storm from The Fantastic Four, seen here in an elaborately patriotic wetsuit.

5) And Shaft. Shaft's going to help out, too.

6) And a robot.

7) And Phoebe from Friends.

8) And either Eric Bana or Edward Norton. But they're still not done. To defeat their powerful aggressor, Iron Man, Shaft, Johnny Storm, Phoebe from Friends and either Eric Bana or Edward Norton need the help of one more person.

9) That's right, it's Scarlett Johansson, reprising her Iron Man 2 role as the woman who does nothing and then kicks three people in the head. But, judging by this skill, she's now acquired a game-changing superpower – the fart-bomb.

10) And that's the gang completed. Together they are unstoppable. They are all-powerful. They are The Avengers: and their real names are Iron Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Black Widow. And that rubbishy bow and arrow guy. Shh, just pretend he's not there.

New chance for northern film-makers

Established figures in the industry are getting together in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to run workshops for our future Spielbergs

BBC Salford job opportunities have been massively over-subscribed, but here is another opportunity for creative northern talent. Northern Film and Media in Newcastle upon Tyne has partnered-up with Channel 4 in a pilot programme for would-be creators of TV programmes and/or films.

They're calling it The Artist's Cut and acknowledge that the success of films by directors such as Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor-Wood and Steve McQueen (namesake of the legend) has influenced the idea. The plan is to run workshops aimed at producing two pieces of work which could go on for filming; these will cover pretty much everything the would-be Spielberg needs to know, from storytelling through cinematography, casting, directing and distribution to marketing methods.

Wearing, who won the 1997 Turner Prize, received investment from NFM for Self Made, her directorial debut which was shot in the North East and co-produced by Newcastle-based indie Third Films. It has enjoyed considerable success, with screenings in arts theatres across the world.

Mentors already confirmed for The Artist's Cut include the script editor and former Film4 head of development Kate Leys (The Full Monty, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting), Channel 4 commissioning editor for arts Tabitha Jackson, producer Samm Haillay (Better Things, Self-Made) and media project manager Susie Wright from Channel 4's creative diversity team. The scheme also follows Film4ward, a previous tie-up between NFM and Film4 which led to four feature films from the north east of England.
 
Agnes Wilkie, NFM's creative director, says:

The Artist's Cut will provide a structured, industry-focused development opportunity for North East artists to explore the intersection of art, film, TV and digital media. We're confident that the funding received from Arts Council England and Channel 4's commitment to new talent will deliver breakthrough results.

 Alison Clark-Jenkins, the Arts Council's regional director for the north east, says:

Thanks to the recent successes of high-profile artists, the profile of moving image has benefited from increased focus. This collaboration will support the next generation of artists working in this field to live and work in the north east.

 
The deadline for submissions is 28 February. You can apply online here or have a preliminary chat/email via roxy@northernmedia.org or 0191 275 5963

Plan B to release new album in May

Rapper and singer says Ill Manors is 'light years ahead' of his previous effort, The Defamation of Strickland Banks

Plan B has announced details of his forthcoming album, the follow-up to his multi-platinum-selling The Defamation of Strickland Banks. Ill Manors – or iLL Manors, in Plan B's typography – will be released via Atlantic on 7 May.

"You could call iLL Manors 'bassline, soul, hip-hop'," Plan B said. "The album has the lyrical depth of my first record but the musical composition is light years ahead as it's informed by everything I've learnt in the last five years – writing, producing and playing with a live band. I feel I'm better than I've ever been."

Plan B – real name, Ben Drew – has written and directed a film, also called Ill Manors, which will be released on 4 May. He's combined film and music for some time, his most notable appearance being a role alongside Michael Caine in Harry Brown.

It seems there is no end to Plan B's ambitions. He's also keen to set up a charity, he told the Sun. "I want to start an umbrella charity giving money to smaller charities in England. I'm talking about stuff within the community, protecting kids – the kind of kids that were out rioting and feel like they have no prospects."

Joseph Gordon-Levitt casts Scarlett Johansson in his directorial debut

Star of Inception and 500 Days of Summer will also appear alongside Johansson in the as yet untitled romantic comedy

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has cast Scarlett Johannson in his directorial debut, reportedly the tale of a lothario and "his journey to become less of a selfish dick". The star of Brick and 500 Days of Summer will also star opposite Johansson in the as yet untitled romantic comedy.

The actor, who rose to prominence as a teenager in the US sitcom Third Rock from the Sun, has become a familiar face on the big screen in the past few years. A firm favourite of film-maker Christopher Nolan, he took a supporting role in Inception in 2010 and has also been cast in this year's The Dark Knight Rises, the British film-maker's final Batman film.

Gordon-Levitt will also star in the thriller Premium Rush, as well as reuniting with Brick director Rian Johnson on the sci-fi gangster film Looper, with Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt, and portraying Abraham Lincoln's brother in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

Finnish sci-fi Nazi movie is hot ticket at Berlinale

Iron Sky, which imagines Nazi invasion from secret moon base, sells more tickets than Werner Herzog and Angelina Jolie films

Among the worthy films being premiered at the Berlin film festival over the next 10 days are an epic tracing China's history; three documentaries about the Fukushima nuclear disaster; Werner Herzog's look at death row; and Angelina Jolie's take on the Bosnian war.

But one of the most popular films on the day that tickets went on sale was a Finnish sci-fi comedy about Nazis living on the dark side of the moon.

Iron Sky tells how Hitler's top scientists moved to a lunar military base known as the Black Sun shortly after the end of the second world war. For more than 70 years boffins beavered away on a fleet of spaceships that one day would return to Earth and finish what the Nazis started. In 2018 the invasion begins.

The Finnish-German-Australian production was the second most popular film when the box office opened, according to Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper. It was beaten to the top spot by Don 2 – The King is Back, the latest from the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan. Fans of the Indian heartthrob camped out in a shopping centre for three days and nights to get tickets for the film, which sold out in minutes.

Elsewhere, it was business as usual at the traditionally serious festival, also called the Berlinale. This year's event, the 62nd, focuses on social upheaval and political awakening, screening documentaries and fictional works from Arab film-makers, which trace the turbulent progress of the 2011 uprisings across the region and explore political and philosophical questions left in the wake of demonstrations.

The Egyptian film Reporting a Revolution, directed by Bassam Mortada, follows six journalists on the frontline during 18 days of protests. In The Shadow of a Man, directed by Hanan Abdalla, has four women talking about how a new society should look.

Last year the festival, well known for engaging in political debate, became a platform for protest against the arrest of the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Accused of inciting opposition protests in 2009 and making a film without permission, Panahi was banned from travelling outside Iran so was unable to take his seat on the Berlinale jury.

This year the festival will continue the debate about the position of the artist in society with the international premiere of a documentary about the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

But it's not all doom and gloom. The organisers have coaxed some of Hollywood's biggest names to sprinkle a little stardust. Jolie will be hawking In the Land of Blood and Honey, her directorial debut about the Bosnian civil war, while Javier Bardem will show the documentary he produced, Sons of the Clouds: the Last Colony, about a forgotten colonial war in the western Sahara. Meryl Streep will sweep into town to accept an honorary Golden Bear – Berlin's answer to Cannes' Palme d'Or – in recognition of her reign at the top of Hollywood's tree, covering more than 30 years.

The biggest screams on the red carpet are likely to be reserved for Robert Pattinson, the British dreamboat who stars in the wildly popular vampire series, Twilight. The teen idol is expected to turn up to promote his latest movie, an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's novel Bel Ami, in which he plays a scoundrel who rises through the ranks of 19th-century Parisian society by manipulating and seducing women.

Berlin has a surprisingly starry jury. Jake Gyllenhaal and Charlotte Gainsbourg join the Dutch photographer and film-maker Anton Corbijn (who had a hit with the Joy Division film Control) on the international panel, chaired by the veteran British director Mike Leigh.

One film vying for the award, Les Adieux à la Reine (Farewell My Queen), starring Diane Kruger as Marie Antoinette, will launch the festival on Thursday. The Berlinale, which runs until 19 February, is ranked as one of the world's top film festivals.

Jack and Jill – review

Adam Sandler drags up and Al Pacino sends himself up in a dire cross-dressing comedy that will have you dialling for Dignitas

There is a type of film so bad that it is actually scary, like seeing those mawkish photographs of sweet little children in Victorian Britain dressed up as angels and realising after a few moments that they are corpses. Adam Sandler's new comedy Jack and Jill is such a film.

It was not given an advance screening for the press, and I watched it as a paying customer in the Vue Wood Green, in north London, in an eerie, echoing, almost empty auditorium. There was one other customer present. After it was all over, we walked out together in ashen-faced silence, past the pick'n'mix confectionery stand, past the Muppet posters, afraid to speak, afraid to catch each other's eye. Each knew what the other was thinking: "What's the switchboard number for Dignitas?"

Sandler plays Jack, a hassled family guy and advertising exec whose goofy, farting twin sister Jill has come to stay for "the holidays": that is, Thanksgiving. This, of course, is Sandler again, in profoundly unhilarious drag. Jack desperately needs Al Pacino to take part in a planned TV commercial. Al's not interested – but uh-oh! Hold your horses! Maybe he will agree, after all! Because the moment Al sets eyes on Jill, hubba, hubba, has he ever got the hots for the comedy unattractive man-lady who is Jack's sibling! Incredibly, Pacino plays himself.

The script is so leaden and formulaic that Jack and Jill do everything but go up a hill to fetch a pail of water. There's incidentally a scene where Jack and Jill go to a cinema, to demonstrate their zanily identical mannerisms. Perhaps to claim a high lineage for this movie's cross-dressing premise, the film they are watching is Some Like It Hot. This adds vicious insult to serious injury.

Adam Sandler's 2009 film Funny People was about a jaded self-hating comedian who has starred in high-concept movies like Re-Do, in which he was a big baby with an adult head, and Mer-Man, in which he played a Mer-Man with a big fishy tail. (A groupie girl he goes to bed with actually demands that he do the mer-man "cry" while they have sex.) Jack and Jill is very like those imaginary films – it could easily have been a single-joke poster shot in a deleted scene from Funny People. Only it is less funny and less interesting.

Katie Holmes plays Jack's wholesome, good-natured wife, and her performance looks as if it has been Photoshopped in from some other film or some other planet. As for Pacino, he socks it over gamely enough, and even sportingly sends up his reputation. Perhaps he figures that a film this awful can't hurt his prestige. John McEnroe puts in a cameo so fleeting and depressingly pointless that I may have dreamt it.

Well, there were only two of us in the audience for Jack and Jill, so maybe the cinemagoing public is voting with its feet. Only that thought stops me booking the next flight to Zurich.

Rating: 1/5

'Conservative' films reap box-office rewards, claims US group

Films promoting values such as capitalism and Christianity more profitable than 'liberal' competition, says Movieguide

Films that embody "conservative" values such as capitalism and Christian belief are more likely to prove profitable than those which take a more "liberal" standpoint, according to a US group called Movieguide, which promotes the former.

Movies from the past year that meet Movieguide's threshold for adhering to "traditional" values include Oscars frontrunners such as Hugo and The Artist, as well as less celebrated fare such as comic book film Thor and Tom Cruise comeback vehicle Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. The organisation will honour the year's top conservative films at a special awards show on Friday to mark 20 years of highlighting the merits of movies with morals. It has produced a special 76-page report on the good, the bad and the ugly of the film universe's past 12 months, which is on sale for $1,000 a copy and includes tickets to the Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala at the Universal Hilton Hotel in LA.

Other films which pass muster include Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Battle: Los Angeles, Moneyball, We Bought a Zoo and Captain America: The First Avenger – but the directors of films such as Super 8, Red State, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Bad Teacher and Happy Feet Two should not be expecting a ticket. Quite what the latter, an animated sequel to 2006's tale of perky dancing penguins, did to upset conservatives is unclear, but we're assuming it has something to do with the movie's concern for environmental issues.

Movieline calculated that the 91 films that met its criteria in 2011 earned an average of $59m apiece, while the 105 that apparently promoted a "liberal/leftist" agenda made a mere $11m each. Two of the highest-grossing films that received the thumbs down were stag-do comedy sequel The Hangover Part II and vampire romance Breaking Dawn Part 1, with $581m and $702m respectively. "Most moviegoers want good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness," Movieguide editor Ted Baehr wrote in the report.

As well as rating films in terms of their attitude towards biblical values and capitalism, Movieline uses another two dozen or so criteria, including violence, sex, political correctness, revisionist history, environmentalism, feminism and homosexuality, to decide its nominees for the year's best films.

Nominees for best movie for mature audiences

The Artist

Captain America: The First Avenger

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Sarah's Key

Seven Days in Utopia

Thor

The Tree of Life

The Way

Nominees for best movie for family audiences

The Adventures of Tintin

Cars 2

Courageous

Hugo

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never

Mars Needs Moms

Mr Popper's Penguins

The Muppets

Puss in Boots

Soul Surfer

The Muppets answer your questions - video

Kermit the frog and Miss Piggy answer some of the questions you posed them on our blog last week, while James Bobin - director of the new Muppets movie - explains why their popularity has endured

Why Hugo should win the best picture Oscar - video

In the second of our nine-part hustings leading up to the Oscars Andrew Pulver winds up to deliver his argument for Martin Scorsese's Hugo

From the archive, 8 February 1985: Marcos regime arrests outspoken Filipino film director

Originally published in the Guardian on 8 February 1985

Protests from all over the world have followed the arrest in Manila last week of Lino Brocka, the Filipino film director, on charges of suspected sedition. Brocka has been a thorn in the flesh of the regime for many years as a film-maker often at odds with the censor, and as an open opponent of President Marcos.

Last year, his film Bayan Ko was in competition at Cannes, where Brocka made an outspoken attack on the regime which had refused to pass it for home consumption. Later in the year it came to the London Festival, where the film won the British Film Institute's annual award for the most original and imaginative production shown at the National Film Theatre.

Curiously, a short time before Brocka's arrest, the Philippines' censor passed it for showing to adult audiences, though he wrote to a leading publication in Manila stating that the BFI Award was of little importance, being voted on by left-wing students who had attended the London Festival.

In fact, the award was given by a committee, chaired by me as director of the festival and including David Robinson, the film critic of the Times, and senior members of the BFI staff. Among the telegrams in support of Brocka has been one from Anthony Smith, director of the BFI.

In France, where Bayan Ko is currently running, Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture has also sent a protest to the Presidential Palace in Manila, as have the organisers of the Cannes Festival. And Brocka's case has now been taken up by Amnesty International who regard the circumstances of his arrest as highly unorthodox.

Brocka was arrested with another film-maker, Behn Cervantes, at demonstration in the Metro Manila area on January 28. Both had been members of a negotiating panel for a transport union on strike against a rise in petrol prices.

At the time of the arrest, Brocka was reported to have been standing some distance away from the demonstration, and Cervantes to have been standing with some nuns. Both film-makers are reported to have been charged, together with others, as leaders of an illegal assembly, under Presidential Decree 1834, for which the maximum penalty is life imprisonment and for which bail is not permitted.

For Brocka, in particular, this is the unsurprising result of repeated efforts to defend those in trouble with the regime. He has frequently said that he was being watched by the security police, and many of his friends have urged him to leave the country. He has always refused to do so, apart from visits to countries showing his films, because he felt that he should only make pictures in his own country where opposition to the Marcos dictatorship was vital.

The films themselves have never attacked the regime in a didactic fashion but have concerned themselves with stories about the poor of Manila and their continued exploitation. One of the most famous is Manila, which was shown in Britain several years ago after its screening at the London Festival. It is generally regarded as one of the best films from the Third World during the seventies.

Portrait of the artist: Bill Paterson, actor

'My biggest career regret? Not turning up for that interview for a part in Alien'

What got you started?

I had no desire to be an actor. But I started going along to the Citizens theatre in Glasgow in my mid-teens and got completely obsessed. I saw everything from Shakespeare to Brecht; I went so often they eventually just let me in for nothing. Later, after drifting into the building trade as a quantity surveyor, I decided to pack it in and become a drama teacher. I was asked to be in a schools' play, and the next thing I knew I was an actor.

What was your big breakthrough?

I was a founder member of the Scottish company 7:84, and in 1973 we made a show called The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, about the effects of the discovery of North Sea oil on Highland life. We toured it to places few shows had ever gone to – let alone a show about crofting and oil rigs. It really affected Scottish social, political and theatrical life.

Would independence be a good thing for the arts in Scotland?

I wouldn't want to see a narrowing down into a purely Scottish view of the world. But a lot of Scottish people will say: "We'll do it much better if we're independent; we won't have to filter everything through London." It's much too big a subject to sum up in a phrase.

If you could change anything about your career, what would it be?

Maybe I should have turned up for that interview for a part in Alien. "Nobody will watch this," I thought. "And Ridley Scott won't want me anyway."

Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?

Planned holidays and the vague possibility of a company pension.

What work of art would you most like to own?

Rembrandt's Titus, the Artist's Son, in the Wallace Collection in London. It's the most beautiful painting of Rembrandt's son, who died just a few years later. It wouldn't take up a lot of room: you could almost get it off the gallery wall without them noticing.

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

I used to do a lot of shows in schools. After a show in Glasgow, I was crossing the playground when a little girl came up to me and said, in this tone of disdain: "You were in that an awful lot."

What's the best advice anyone ever gave you?

When I told my folks I was giving up quantity surveying to do a course in drama teaching, they were very good about it. My dad said quietly: "Just make sure you make a go of it this time, Billy." Forty-three years later, I can say that I've at least had a go.

In short

Born: Glasgow, 1945

Career: Film and TV includes The Killing Fields, Truly, Madly, Deeply and The Singing Detective. In theatre, he has worked at the National, the Royal Court and the Almeida. Performs in And No More Shall We Part at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (020-7722 9301), until 18 February.

Low point: "Leaving a theatre company in a wet wee Scottish town one Christmas and saying I wouldn't be coming back – the work was very bad. But that meant I was available for a show which turned out to be a real high."

The River tackles the horrors of putting horror on TV | Joshua Alston

Horror thriller The River makes its ABC debut – but will it fall victim to the pitfalls that plagued previous series in the genre?

There's been a recent resurgence of horror television, led by AMC's zombie hit The Walking Dead, which shuffles back with new episodes this Sunday. American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy's homage to the genre on FX, has been renewed for a second season. Tuesday night marks the premier of ABC's The River, a found-footage thriller produced by Steven Spielberg and Paranormal Activity writer/director Oren Peli.

But despite the growing trend towards the genre (ABC has also picked up another supernatural horror pilot called 666 Park Avenue for possible inclusion in next year's schedule), the contemporary horror series is still in its infancy – and these shows are very much still in the process of figuring out how to solve the practical problems created when a genre known for explicitness and gore in two-hour doses is applied to a full-length television season on a network with stringent content standards.

The Walking Dead, which broke out as the biggest rating hit for the cachet-abundant yet viewer-anemic AMC, encountered a full-blown backlash for the first half of its second season. It didn't help matters that the second season was beset by behind the scenes drama (showrunner Frank Darabont left due to creative differences with the network) but the biggest issue, according to fans online, was that the show simply got boring. The unstoppable waves of starving zombies that made season one so terrifying were gone from the first seven episodes of season two, replaced by a pensive, talky story in which the gang of apocalypse survivors settle in at a barn and wax poetic about what life means after the fabric of society breaks down. It's a pacing issue that highlights the biggest problem facing a horror series: how to kill off enough characters to maintain the requisite sense of dread, but at a slow enough clip that viewers can feel hopeful that there's a hopeful resolution in sort for at least some of them.

In American Horror Story, creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk solved that problem by boldly killing off the family that occupied its haunted house. In its second season, Murphy says, the show will return with all new characters and a completely new scary story, placing the series in a previously unoccupied middle ground between a traditional series an a mini-series. It's a risky choice, to be sure, as no one who grew attached to the characters in season one necessarily has a reason to return for season two.

But it solves the horror-television conundrum by essentially stretching a movie-length premise out to a 12-episode season. The question is, what happens if and when the writers choose a direction that fails to capture the audience? American Horror Story was the most watched new cable series of 2011, but because it'll be a new show every time it premieres, it'll have to reprove itself with every season.

The River, the latest entry in the horror-television mini-boom, seems to have things figured out based on its pilot. Then again, the same could have been said about both The Walking Dead and American Horror Story. The River brings the found-footage format that Peli used to great effect in Paranormal Activity to television, as a woman and her son (Leslie Hope and Joe Anderson) go in search of his father, Emmit Cole (Bruce Greenwood), an explorer whose vessel went missing somewhere on the Amazon River.

The found-footage conceit is getting a bit long in the tooth, though Chronicle did take the top box-office spot over Super Bowl weekend, so apparently audiences haven't grown weary of it. But whatever its limitations, presenting the show as documentary footage lends it a verisimilitude that wrings genuine scares out of moments that would come off corny if presented any other way. The River also makes a point to balance the macro-mystery of what happened to Emmit with smaller horror plots that will be resolved more quickly, making it more of a spiritual cousin to Lost than to Peli's film.

But like any horror television series, how long The River will run is difficult to predict because there are unavoidable stumbling blocks of the medium. A series like The River is ultimately in the same position as its characters, tip-toeing around nervously hoping not to get axed.

Oldies are goodies – even the gags

Gossip abounds at the Oldie of the Year lunch as the great and good gather to exchange jokes, jibes and a bit of mild filth

Off to the Oldie of the Year lunch and some of the nicest gossip of the year. I noticed the magazine's slogan – "Buy it before you snuff it", which does not have quite the same cheery ring as, say, "It's naughty but it's nice". I bumped into the great children's illustrator Shirley Hughes, who was chatting to the celebrated TV critic Philip Purser, whom she had met only once since they learned ballroom dancing together in Wirral, Merseyside, some 70 years ago.

There was Lord West, the former First Sea Lord (the head of the army told him he envied his splendid title. West replied: "Then you would be the First Land Lord.") The former terrorism minister arrived wearing the first bowler hat I've seen, on a head, for decades.

He revealed that when he accepted the job under Gordon Brown, the image freaks in No 10 asked him not to wear it. But recently it has reappeared, and saved him from a nasty injury when he fell off a pavement. "I was partly careless and partly pissed," he said, "but it stopped my head hitting the kerb."

Between them the guests must have known everyone who matters in the country, at least everyone who matters over the age of 60. One was fuming about David Miliband, whom she had seen making a speech at Chatham House two months ago. "He said 'the situation in Israel is deeply sub-optimal'. And to think that a man who talks like that almost became leader of the Labour party!"

Conversation turned to the Reverend Ian Paisley, lying in intensive care in a Belfast hospital. My Irish neighbour recalled the time when the BBC's only Westminster studio was a cabin opposite parliament. It had a hospitality cupboard, and visitors had to sign for their drinks. Paisley got on with the late Gerry Fitt, leader of the SDLP, but never drank. So Fitt would sign for his own first gin and tonic, then for all the (several) he had subsequently, would sign Paisley's name – to the reverend doctor's rage when he found out.

The first award winner was the Oldie of the Year, the lord chancellor, Ken Clarke, who is now 71 and regarded by those on the Tory right as little better than Polly Toynbee in Hush Puppies. Ken accepted, then disappeared to work, shouting over his shoulder: "You ask what happened to my companions. They have all fled me by going to the Lords." And so they have. (If you ever find yourself in the House of Lords bar, you'll see it's like being in a 25-year-old edition of Spitting Image.)

Terry Wogan was chairing, and delighted the audience with his jokes. They were ancient, but beautifully told. He recounted the one about the chap who came home to find his wife in alluring lingerie. "'Tie me up!' she says, 'and you can do anything you like!' So he tied up her and went to the pub."

Peer of the Year went to Baroness Trumpington, 89, who was a codebreaker in Bletchley Park, and recently became famous for making a V-sign to Lord King in a debate in which he said something she didn't like about her age. She referred to Ken Clarke's "great honour", then made a V-sign at his back, to the delight of the assembled oldies, who enjoy a bit of mild filth.

The film-maker Ken Loach was Movie Man of the Year, saying cheerily: "I 'ave a go, lady, I 'ave a go." Then Sir Peregrine Worsthorne was named Fashion Icon of the Year, justifiably, since he was wearing – indoors – a brown trilby with a mauve hatband, a fuchsia scarf, a lavender shirt, cherry red trousers and a navy jacket.

"Having failed to become a sage, I will now be remembered as a dandy," he said, a little ruefully perhaps.

Cross-Channel Swimmer of the Year was Roger Allsop, a retired cancer surgeon who last year at the age of 70 became the oldest person to swim the Channel. And the final award went to the 106-year old Hetty Bower, who has been an antiwar campaigner since waving men off to the Great War when she was nine. And realising that many of them never came back.

Has the Amazing Spider-Man trailer put the web in a spin?

He has man-made web-shooters, a hot new romance and there's an extra layer of intrigue, but can Andrew Garfield's incarnation as the Spidey one make the reboot worthwhile?

If there's one thing Andrew Garfield's arrival as Spider-Man/Peter Parker in Marc Webb's much-hyped comic reboot is likely to confirm, it's quite what a skewwiff choice Tobey Maguire was to take on the role under previous director Sam Raimi. While Maguire revelled in the part, he made for a watery-eyed wallcrawler whose innate geekiness was ramped up and who often seemed less confident than the comic book version. The Spidey I remember from thumbing through inky pages as a kid might have been a good egg who worried about his Aunt May and struggled to get by on meagre freelance photographer wages, but he was cocksure and even arrogant when wearing the red and blue suit.

The latest footage from Webb's forthcoming film, which was shown around the world yesterday during a fans' extravaganza that linked up four cities, London, New York, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, hinted strongly that the Garfield iteration is likely to be a brasher, more insouciant Spider-Man. For a start there's a different dynamic between Parker and the object of his affections, Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy, than we saw between Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson. Garfield, for all his clowning – he turned up in a home-made Spidey costume at last year's Comic Con in San Diego and was cringeworthily over-enthusiastic on stage in LA once again for last night's event – is a strapping, handsome chap who appears just as likely to trap Stacy in his romantic web as she is to lure him in to her affections. As Stone herself said, speaking on stage in Rio: "Gwen falls in love with Peter Parker, but Mary Jane falls in love with Spider-Man." Gone is the sense that Parker is rather punching above his weight in the romance stakes: when they flirt in a school corridor during one scene screened yesterday, it seems to be as relative equals.

What else is different about this Spider-Man? One of the major points picked up by keen fans of the comic book early on about Webb's take is that Garfield's Peter Parker has man-made rather than organic web-shooters. This allows the film-makers to play up the teenager's status as something of a budding scientific genius, rather than just a talented student. This in turn ties into the key plotline within The Amazing Spider-Man, which revolves around Parker's relationship with scientist Dr Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). Connors once worked with Parker's late father, adding an extra layer of intrigue when his dodgy experiments transform him into the Lizard. Webb, speaking in LA, said his film would examine "the emotional consequence of what it means to be an orphan." He added: "We wanted to treat Peter Parker in a more realistic, naturalistic way. There are a lot of things from the Spider-Man canon: this starts off with Peter Parker and his parents."

Intriguingly, the footage screened for fans focused extensively on personal interplay rather than spectacle. As well as flagging up the chemistry between Garfield and Stone, there was plenty of screen-time for Martin Sheen's Uncle Ben as Parker's replacement father figure, and Garfield was shown in costume teasing small-time criminals with wisecracking, devil-may-care flare.

Spider-Man, with his penchant for swinging breezily through Manhattan skyscrapers, is surely the perfect candidate for 3D and Webb was keen to play up the fact that the production had been shot entirely in stereoscope. But while aerial scenes (in 2D at this early stage) were sharply realised, there were further hints that the film's focus will lie elsewhere. Speaking on stage in London, Ifans even described the reboot as a "tech-lite" Spider-Man. Such an approach may be wise, for the action scenes were not radically divergent from the look of those in 2007's Spider-Man 3: it is after all, only five years on and the film has been produced by the same studio, Sony.

The latest trailer for The Amazing Spider-man, which debuts across the world in July, will arrive online today and is in full 3D for screening in cinemas. No film in the series so far has returned anything less than spectacular box-office results, but the continuing presence of Garfield in the suit may come down to whether audiences accept that this particular iteration of the webslinger on the big screen is different enough to the last one to make a reboot worthwhile. On this evidence, the jury is still out, but there has clearly been a genuine attempt to deliver a new Spidey era.

No takers for Miro at London sale
A 1933 work by the Spanish artist Joan Miro fails to sell in a week that has seen other pieces sold for record prices at London auctions.

Mills 'did not back phone access'
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Watts lands Princess Diana role
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Whiteread to make gallery frieze
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Library appoints resident artist
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Medical drama House to end run
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Berlin to open with French drama
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Singer Tabor sweeps folk awards
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Kate attends Lucian Freud preview
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Argentina rock star Spinetta dies
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Vampire story sucks in film bids
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Coogan reaches hacking settlement
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McGowan to host ITV1 sports show
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Connolly lands Hobbit dwarf role
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Three Gatsby stage plays planned
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Mars-Jones wins Hatchet Job prize
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Taylor art auction fetches £14m
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Chronicle ends War Horse UK reign
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Payne named filmmaker of the year
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Tom Cruise film producers sued
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Nickelback lead Juno nominations
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Lembit Opik stars in music video
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Don Cornelius death ruled suicide
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Simpsons fans attempt TV record
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BBC warned over News Channel cuts
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Being Human exit was 'horrendous'
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VIDEO: War Horse star meets Duchess
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VIDEO: Ai Weiwei hopes to visit UK design
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VIDEO: Mills denies voicemail access claim
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VIDEO: James Marsh on his IRA thriller
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VIDEO: Brand/Perry divorce and more news
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VIDEO: Polka dot obsessed at the Tate
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VIDEO: 'Ham?' Pork lunch angers Miss Piggy
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VIDEO: Sinead O'Connor: 'I'm not boring'
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Tom Hiddleston on his Oscar double
Tom Hiddleston "enormously proud" of being in two films up for best picture

VIDEO: Beaton's portraits of the Queen
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Stage chiller hits the big screen
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Childish by name
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In Pictures: Yayoi Kusama retrospective
Yayoi Kusama's dotty retrospective at the Tate

GPU helps put Muppets on screen
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Stand-up comedy Qatari-style
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Cartoon chicken strolls to Oscars
British animation aiming for an egg-cellent Oscar night

American artist Karen Eland paints pictures with beer instead of paint
American artist Karen Eland paints pictures with beer instead of paint.

Joke of the year: Telegraph readers' funniest one-liners
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The Muppets, review
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Bafta Awards 2012: red carpet hair and beauty guide
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The Muppets, review
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Agatha Parrot and the Mushroom Boy by Kjartan Poskitt: review
Kjartan Poskitt's Agatha Parrot and the Mushroom is full of mischief and wit.

Naomi Watts to star in Princess Diana biopic
Caught In Flight will focus on Diana's relations with surgeon Hasnat Khan

Hugh Laurie on the last episodes of 'House': interview
Hugh Laurie talks to Jane Mulkerrins ahead of the UK transmission of the programme's final episodes.

The Underwater Project by Mark Tipple
Mark Tipple captures the battle between man and ocean waves.

Tim Vine's top ten jokes
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The Woman In Black, review
Daniel Radcliffe is plausibly grown-up in a freshly terrifying adaptation of Susan Hill's ghost story.

Is Lana Del Rey scared to step out on stage?
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Gotye: Making Mirrors, CD review
Gotye's third album, Making Mirrors, is a dizzyingly restless mix of fuzzy electronica and Eighties pop.

Top 10 art exhibitions of the week
The best art exhibitions on now across the UK - Alastair Sooke and Richard Dorment's picks of the week.

Lucian Freud and his Diamond geezer
'Looked at the clenched hand' said Lucian Freud of his painting of Soho character Harry Diamond.

Joke of the year award: give your verdict
Comedian Tim Vine has cemented his reputation as king of the one-liners after he won the prize for joke of the year at the annual Lafta awards. But do you agree with the judges' verdict?

Britain's Got Talent: has Simon Cowell found a new star?
Simon Cowell was so impressed with a 17 year-old at the Britain's Got Talent auditions this week that the youngster is now being touted as "the next Susan Boyle".

Automated art at Kinetica Art Fair
At a fair for kinetic art in London, John O' Ceallaigh makes a bemused subject for an emotionally inconsiderate robotic artist.

Two, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, review
This production of Two exudes a natural warmth, writes Dominic Cavendish.

Clement Power: new face
Clement Power is making waves as a brilliantly incisive and persuasive conductor, writes Ivan Hewett.

Anneka Rice makes TV comeback
Former Treasure Hunt presenter Anneka Rice is in talks with the BBC about fronting at least two new shows after 17 years away from TV screens.

Elizabeth Taylor's art, jewels and clothes sell for £120m
A collection of artwork, jewellery and fashion belonging to Elizabeth Taylor has sold for almost £120 million at auction in London.

Heard the one about the grumpy comedian with a big bank account?
Comics are getting serious about protecting the lucrative sources of their revenue, says Iain Hollingshead.

Hitler's secret photos reveal Nazi leader's vanity
A collection of private photographs showing Adolf Hitler in a series of bizarre poses to rehearse his public speeches has been published.

Ed Sheeran and the new hip-hop troubadors
A young generation of singer-songwriters, led by the versatile Ed Sheeran, is taking rap to the bedsits.