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Michael Sheen & Timothy Spall

The Damned United
Michael Sheen & Timothy Spall in The Damned United

This engaging film, a winner for soccer fans and soccer idiots alike, focuses on Brian Clough, one-time English footballer turned failed manager of the Leeds United club. Michael Sheen, who played David Frost in 'Frost/Nixon,' portrays Clough

 

Sam Worthington & Zoe Saldana

Avatar
Sam Worthington & Zoe Saldana in Avatar

The first 90 minutes of Avatar are pretty terrific -- a full-immersion technological wonder with wonders to spare. The other 72 minutes, less and less terrific. Director James Cameron's futuristic story becomes intentionally grueling in its heavily telegraphed narrative turn toward genocidal anguish, grim echoes of Vietnam-style firefights and the inevitable payback time and sequel setup

 

Emily Blunt & Rupert Friend

The Young Victoria
Emily Blunt & Rupert Friend in The Young Victoria

Starring Emily Blunt as the 18-year-old queen of England circa 1837, this delicious historical romance is a rich pastiche of first love, teen empowerment, fabulous fashion and fate. Filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee has captured that hot blush of pure emotion that comes before kisses, sex and heartbreak. Credit also goes to Blunt and to Rupert Friend

 

Hugh Grant & Sarah Jessica Parker

Did You Hear About the Morgans?
Hugh Grant & Sarah Jessica Parker in Did You Hear About the Morgans?

Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play the Morgans, a Manhattan power couple on the outs and the brink of divorce. He cheated on her, citing reasons of infertility-related stress; she is not in the forgiving vein and has already begun thinking about adoption on her own. He wants her back and proposes a trial reconciliation

 

Penelope Cruz & Lluis Homar

Broken Embraces
Penelope Cruz & Lluis Homar in Broken Embraces

Sleek and swank, director Pedro Almodovar's latest movie is destined to be overlooked come awards time. Broken Embraces reworks a slew of noir plot lines for a stimulating story of an affair between a call girl turned actress and her director

 

Ursula Werner & Horst Westphal

Cloud 9 (Wolke Neun)
Ursula Werner & Horst Westphal in Cloud 9

The German film Cloud 9, which is being distributed by Chicago's own Music Box Films, makes a case for a third, broader and more expansive image of mature sexuality. It's a small picture but a good one, truthfully acted and calmly compelling.

 

Invictus

Invictus
Morgan Freeman & Matt Damon in Invictus

This stately, impressive film from director Clint Eastwood is anchored by its actors. Morgan Freeman plays South African president and revolutionary game-changer Nelson Mandela, and Matt Damon plays rugby captain Francois Pienaar. In the South African rugby team's long-shot chances for a victory in the 1995 World Cup Final, Mandela sees a grand opportunity.

 

The Princess and the Frog

Me and Orson Welles

Up in the Air

Everybody's Fine

Brothers

The Maid
Catalina Saavedra & Mariana Loyola in The Maid

A spiky social comedy from Chile, Sebastian Silva's 'The Maid' features a marvelous, moon-eyed actress, Catalina Saavedra, as a sphinx-like servant who has lived, worked and, slowly, calcified for a bourgeois Santiago family for 23 of her 41 years.

 

Tony Leung & Takeshi Kaneshiro

Red Cliff
Tony Leung & Takeshi Kaneshiro in Red Cliff

Red Cliff tells the story of the pivotal Battle of Red Cliff, which finds vile Prime Minister Cao Cao leading an armada into the Southland of China to take on a rabble of rebellious warlords.

 

Ninja Assassin

The Road

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Old Dogs

 

Kristen Stewart & Robert Pattinson

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Kristen Stewart & Robert Pattinson in The Twilight Saga: New Moon

This much-anticipated sequel is actually pretty good -- a tick better than the first 'Twilight,' which wasn't bad, either. The second film in the series is bigger, better in the effects and more vibrant visually.

 

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

The Messenger

The Blind Side

Planet 51

Pirate Radio

2012

The House of the Devil

Ong Bak 2

Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day

Gentlemen Broncos
Michael Angarano & Jemaine Clement in Gentlemen Broncos

The latest collaboration from Jared and Jerusha Hess is about a home-schooled square of a kid who writes cheesy sci-fi fantasy books that belie his introverted demeanor. After his best manuscript is plagiarized by a pompous author whose career is on the skids (Jemaine Clement), our young hero finds himself facing a weird series of personal and creative challenges.

 

Gabourey Sidibe

Precious
Gabourey Sidibe in Precious

Precious is an exceptional film about nearly unendurable circumstances, endured. The story is about a teen living in 1980s Harlem, raped by her barely glimpsed father, abused by her unfathomably cruel mother. Precious is illiterate but bright, and she switches to an alternative school where she comes under the life-saving tutelage of Ms. Rain. There'll be an Oscar nomination or two in this film's near future

 

Disney's A Christmas Carol

 

Michael Jackson's This Is It
Michael Jackson in Michael Jackson's This Is It

Produced with the cooperation of the Jackson estate, "This Is It" has no interest in telling the full story of anything, or the crumbling state of anyone. Director Kenny Ortega -- Jackson's partner in staging the London concert that never came to fruition -- is simply trying to suggest in some detail what sort of overstuffed career retrospective Jackson was attempting

 

An Education

Amelia

Astro Boy Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

Where the Wild Things Are

Law Abiding Citizen

New York, I Love You

Couples Retreat

A Serious Man

Capitalism: A Love Story

The Invention of Lying

Zombieland

Whip It

The Boys Are Back

Big Fan

Paranormal Activity

 

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

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

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

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

 

Star Trek
Chris Pine & Zachary Quinto in Star Trek

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

IN THEATERS: MOVIE REVIEWS & MOVIE TRAILERS

In the Time of the Butterflies: feisty but it doesn't really fly

This Salma Hayek-starring TV movie about the Dominican Republic resistance figure Minerva Mirabal is pretty good on the history, but she was even more daring than the film suggests

Director: Mariano Barroso
Entertainment grade: C
History grade: B–

The Mirabal sisters were famous figures in the resistance to Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961.

Power

The film begins with pictures of Trujillo's real-life victims (nasty, but accurate) and a few title cards. "His secret alliances with the church, aristocrats, intellectuals and the press were the foundation of his dictatorship," it tells us. Hang on. Church, yes. Aristocrats, to some extent, yes. Intellectuals and the press, hell no. Trujillo didn't ally with those groups: he harassed, repressed and censored them, and had individuals connected to them thrown to the sharks. Literally. Anyway, since when has anyone become an all-powerful dictator by allying with intellectuals? The historian loves intellectuals and even aspires to be one, but most of them can barely find their spectacles in the morning, let alone run one of the most efficient tyrannies of the entire 20th century. Trujillo's real foundations of power were in the far more obvious quarters of the army, big business and the United States government.

People

The young Minerva Mirabal (Salma Hayek) meets a student activist named Lio. He is played by Latin singer Marc Anthony, who some blogs unkindly but accurately point out bears a passing resemblance to Count Dracula. In between worrying about the hungry look in his eyes whenever he gets near Minerva's neck, and wondering why so few of his scenes are filmed in direct sunlight, audiences may wonder if Lio was a real person. He is based on Pericles Franco, known as Periclito, a communist dissident. Minerva Mirabal did indeed fall in love with Periclito, and he was, as Lio is in the film, exiled. He was more interesting and more notable than Lio. In Chile, he published an essay, La Tragedia Dominicana, for which the Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda wrote the foreword.

Scandal

Invited to one of Trujillo (Edward James Olmos)'s parties, Minerva is invited to dance with the creepy old dictator. He cops a feel. She slaps him and storms out, to the horror of everyone present and particularly her family. The next day, her father sends a telegram to Trujillo apologising, but it is no good: he is thrown in jail. Improbable as this might sound, it's true. The party was on 12 October 1949. In real life, Minerva was even more daring than she was shown in the film. During the dance, she argued with Trujillo's politics, and told him to stop hounding Periclito. There is not a record of her slapping the dictator, but she did walk out after he made a pass at her. She and her parents were afterwards imprisoned.

Menace

The game of cat-and-mouse between Trujillo and Minerva shown in the film is accurate. In real life as in the film, Trujillo allowed Minerva to train as a lawyer, but then denied her a licence to practice. And he did really suggest that she could end the misery her family suffered at his hands by sleeping with him. When a Trujillo emissary informed her of this offer, Minerva is said to have shouted: "I won't! Better that you shoot me here! I would rather kill myself!" She and her sisters joined the anti-Trujillo resistance, and became known as the Butterflies.

Murder

Finally, Trujillo tires of the game. Minerva and her sisters, Maria Teresa and Patria, are ordered out of their car. The audience knows as well as they do what is going to happen next. One of Trujillo's newspapers announced that the Mirabal sisters had died in an accident. The film overstates its case by claiming that their death was "the final blow to the regime of Leonidas Trujillo" (also, he was called Rafael Trujillo; Leonidas was his middle name). His falling-out with the United States was considerably more significant.

Verdict

Historically, it's a respectable version of Minerva Mirabal's life. Cinematically, it doesn't quite live up to the passion of the novel by Julia Alvarez on which it is based.

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Blockbuster DVD chain warns it faces bankruptcy

Heavily indebted movie rental chain warns of danger of bankruptcy as it fights to keep up with interest payments and changing technology

After 15 years as a high street stalwart, the heavily indebted DVD rental chain Blockbuster has warned that it is in danger of declaring bankruptcy as it faces a possible credit squeeze by Hollywood studios and struggles to keep up with movie buffs' changing technological habits.

The Dallas-based company is labouring under $975m (£635m) of debt, largely inherited when the business was spun out of the media conglomerate Viacom six years ago. After hefty interest repayments, Blockbuster lost $569m during 2009.

In a filing with US regulators, Blockbuster revealed it was in negotiations with top Hollywood studios about the financial terms on which they provide DVDs to its stores. If the studios decide Blockbuster's finances are impaired, they could rewrite the day-to-day credit terms on which they do business with the company – forcing it to make upfront cash commitments.

"We are currently experiencing significant liquidity constraints," said Blockbuster's disclosure. "Should we not be able to generate sufficient cashflow from operations and should the studios tighten or eliminate credit terms, we may determine that it is in the company's best interests to voluntarily seek relief through a pre-packaged, pre-arranged or other type of filing under chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy code."

Under bankruptcy, Blockbuster would stay in business but would seek court approval to renegotiate its finances. The warning prompted Blockbuster's shares to dive by 13 cents to just 26 cents on Wall Street, giving the business, which has 5,200 stores around the world, a market capitalisation of barely $50m.

Blockbuster has found it tough to keep up with technological changes in movie viewing. In its core US market, the company lost customers to a phenomenally popular mail-order DVD service, Netflix. More recently, it has faced a challenge from $1-a-rental movie vending machines at supermarkets and convenience stores operated by a rapidly expanding nationwide firm, Redbox.

In an effort to fight back, Blockbuster is introducing new services, including movies streamed via the internet directly to customers' televisions or phones, and download services allowing people to load films onto memory cards at its shops. But experts say it has not moved fast enough.

Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co in New York, said Blockbuster's underlying operations traded close to break-even level but were hamstrung by annual debt interest payments of about $100m.

"They're not going to be a viable competitor in the marketplace with the kind of debt burden they have," said Wolf. "Until that's attacked, this company is really like a dead man walking. Ex that burden, we have a viable story."

Blockbuster suffered a key setback some years ago when it had to curtail the lucrative late fees it charged tardy customers, in response to competition from mail-order firms that allowed unlimited rental periods.

In Britain, the firm has been trying to cut costs by renegotiating leases on its 630 stores, which employ about 5,000 people.

Blockbuster's chief financial officer, Tom Casey, told the Guardian the bankruptcy warning was merely "precautionary language" and customers should not be alarmed.

"Our customers will continue to enjoy the Blockbuster experience through stores, kiosks, by mail and by digital download," Casey said.

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What is it like to be Kate Winslet?

A star must, presumably, expect to have their private life raked over in the media. But it must still be a horrible experience.

So, it isn't very nice that Kate Winslet's marriage has broken up. But it was very nice to have her on all those newspaper front pages the other day, looking so glamorous, poised and other-era-ish, like a proper star. I guess she knows that part of being a proper star is having your private life raked over and speculated about, or being photographed when you don't want it, as well as when you do. But that doesn't mean the frenzy of attention now focused on her isn't horrible, a process that is as ugly as she is beautiful.

In the Victorian era, when the vast majority of women were expected to be respectably married for life, actresses and entertainers had a special cultural dispensation to take lovers, be single mothers if they chose, and generally organise their lives as they pleased. Sometimes it feels now as if they are the only women who can expect really forensic and unforgiving scrutiny for doing such things. Very strange.

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Is Hollywood big enough for two Spideys?

Descendants of Marvel comic-book artist Jack Kirby sue for film rights to some of the publisher's best-known superheroes

For Hollywood studios, which have spent billions on the rights to icons such as Spider-Man and the Hulk, it is a nightmare scenario worse than any tale from the golden age of comic books. A forthcoming court case could hand the children of legendary Marvel comics artist and writer Jack Kirby the right to create rival movie franchises based on some of the publisher's best-known characters, who also include Iron Man and the X-Men.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Kirby's four offspring have filed a suit at the US district court in Los Angeles asserting their rights to characters their father worked on while at Marvel between 1958 and 1963. The case echoes a similar battle over Superman being fought by the heirs of co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – last year they achieved a ruling that handed them key rights to the DC Comics character.

Kirby, who died in 1994, worked with Stan Lee to create many of Marvel's best-known figures. The suit therefore suggests that his heirs be handed the right to license competing versions, which would not infringe the current agreements between Marvel and studios such as Sony, which owns Spider-Man film rights, and Fox, which has brought X-Men and Fantastic Four to the big screen. Marvel's standalone film production unit, bought by Disney for $4bn last year, would also lose sole rights to characters such as Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Captain America, all of which have been or are set to be adapted for the big screen.

The suit reads: "With respect to co-owned Kirby works, as of the respective termination dates, defendants will jointly own the copyrights to such works for their renewal terms: both plaintiffs and defendants will have the non-exclusive right to exploit such jointly owned copyrights."

Finally the suit, which does not state how much it believes the heirs are owed, argues that two recent films, 2008's The Incredible Hulk and last year's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, ought to have been identified as the work of Kirby. The estate is seeking "up to three times the damages they sustained and will sustain" from the release of the movies.

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George Lopez: give this man a proper movie

George Lopez's latest bland supporting role is in the new Jackie Chan film The Spy Next Door, but he's known on the US comedy circuit as a tough and funny standup, and turned in a brilliantly nasty performance in Bread and Roses. Time to sing his praises

This week I have found myself pondering the screen career of someone whose name may not ring a bell: George Lopez. Brits who watch Hollywood movies, even Brits like me who watch an awful lot of them, may well be sublimely unaware of the extra-textual showbiz baggage that bit-part actors bring to the film. It's rather the opposite of a disorientating phenomenon I blogged about a while ago, which I provisionally named "inappropriate cultural flashback" – an inability to get out of your head the previous telly career of an actor appearing in a classy feature film – such as Keith Chegwin in Polanski's Macbeth and Leonard Rossiter in Kubrick's 2001. 
 
There's a so-so Jackie Chan movie out this week called The Spy Next Door. Jackie plays an outwardly nerdy suburban type who is actually a top-level Chinese spy and martial-arts specialist on loan to the CIA. His agency colleagues include George Lopez, a Mexican-American actor who (briefly) plays a bland and slightly uptight intelligence operative. Hmmm … George Lopez. It's possible that those watching this film will remember Lopez from an excruciating ensemble romantic comedy called Valentine's Day. Lopez played the co-worker and supportive best friend of Ashton Kutcher. His performance was … OK. Bland. If they notice him at all, British audiences may justifiably assume that Lopez is a small-time actor in bland family comedies.

Actually, Lopez is hugely well known on American television and on the standup scene as a tough comedian, inspired by Richard Pryor. If you have an hour or so to spare, watch Lopez's terrific standup show Why You Crying? about his upbringing in the Latino neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Very funny stuff, especially his bit about the man of the house having a heart attack and his coldly resentful wife refusing to help him. Lopez is the opposite of bland. It's possible that for US audiences his bland, fleeting performances in family movies are effectively magnified and "flavoured" by memories of his ferocious standup set – a flavour unavailable to the British public.
 
There's a piece of Lopez's non-bland hinterland that I reckon his US comedy fans still don't have a clue about: his terrifying performance in Ken Loach's excellent and still underrated 2001 film Bread and Roses. It's a straight role, and one of the scariest, nastiest bad-guy characters in any film I can remember from the past 10 years. He is Perez, the manager of the non-unionised cleaning staff in an office complex. He is a poisonous bully who humiliates and sacks an old woman for being two minutes late for her shift: an unwatchably horrible scene.
 
The dark edge of his comedy – particularly that pop-eyed expression of scorn and rage that you can see in Why You Crying? – feeds into his screen technique, in a way that is utterly absent from those mainstream family comedies.
 
All the time I was watching Lopez's standup set – in which he does some great material about how white people speak, in the Pryor-Murphy tradition – I was hoping he would reminisce about working with Loach, and attempt an impersonation of the great man's gentle, polite English voice. But it didn't happen: it may be that Lopez has only the smallest memory of doing Bread and Roses, or that it was important to him only as a stepping stone to mainstream Hollywood work. I hope not.
 
I reckon you can live without seeing Lopez's dull performances in those dull films The Spy Next Door and Valentine's Day. But Bread and Roses and Why You Crying? are a must.
 

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Four reasons why James Cameron mustn't re-release Avatar

For it is on the cards. Please help prevent calamity and add your own entreaties below

The assorted voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must be feeling pretty remorseful at the moment. Thanks to their collective decision that The Hurt Locker is better than Avatar, James Cameron has chosen to take his revenge by unleashing hell on the world.

That's assuming that your definition of hell involves the theatrical release of an extended version of Avatar later this year, obviously. And if it doesn't, it should. I can understand Cameron's decision to give Titanic a 3D makeover – since I was a teenager I've longed to see a man's head bounce off the propeller of a sinking ocean-liner in all three glorious dimensions – but not Avatar. There are a million reasons why James Cameron should rethink his decision to drag Avatar out for another go around the cinemas; here are just some of them.

1) It looks like it's motivated by the wrong reasons. Cameron's official rationale for the Avatar re-release is that "It's kind of gotten stomped out [of cinemas since the release] of Alice in Wonderland" - a sign that James Cameron is either determined to keep wringing pennies out of the film until everybody becomes completely sick of it, or that he's uncomfortable with the notion of other people making popular films. Either way, it seems a little distasteful.

2) Nobody knew what film James Cameron would direct after Avatar. There was talk that it'd be a Battle Angel Atila adaptation, or maybe Cameron's pet Hiroshima project – but, no, it's going to be Avatar 2. And that won't be released until James Cameron has written his Avatar novel. And maybe given the go-ahead to a Saturday morning Avatar cartoon. And an Avatar Earth Day special. In short, it looks like we're already going to be lumbered with Avatar until every creature from every single moon of Polyphemus has been given its own three-act narrative, so the last thing anybody needs is to see the first one again.

3) It doesn't need to be extended. Really, it doesn't. Sitting through the original version of Avatar was gruelling enough – by the time the tree fell down I was too busy concentrating on how uncomfortable the 3D glasses were to realise that I'd long since lost all feeling in my legs - so an extended version promises to be torture. And surely James Cameron got all of his messages across the first time round. It's hard to see how he could make them any more thumpingly unsubtle, anyway – unless this new version features a scene in which a man wearing a placard reading "Government" attacks a box of eggs labelled "The ecosystem" with a hammer, obviously. And, yes, we still haven't seen the fabled sex scene yet. But would you really want to risk DVT just so that you can watch a couple of blue Thundercats mash their hair-tendrils into each other two-thirds of the way through an overwrought environmental allegory? Hopefully not.

4) Perhaps more than anything, James Cameron should be wary of re-releasing Avatar so close to next year's Oscars. What if Ben Stiller decides to smear himself in blue paint and goon around like a sad clown for the second year running? Witnessing a grim spectacle like that once was bad enough; twice would be little short of a tragedy.

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On the set of The Scouting Book for Boys: 'There's an awful lot of waiting around'

This Is England star Thomas Turgoose finds love in a caravan park in The Scouting Book for Boys. Xan Brooks backed up his kit bag, took the train to Great Yarmouth and spoke to cast and crew on set

Twilight: Gus van Sant and Sofia Coppola among contenders to direct fourth instalment

Gus van Sant has reportedly had talks with Summit studios, while Sofia Coppola and Bill Condon are also names being mentioned to take the reins on Breaking Dawn

Oscar-nominated film-makers Gus Van Sant, Sofia Coppola and Bill Condon are the surprise frontrunners to direct the fourth film in the box-office smashing teen vampire series, Twilight, according to reports.

A spokesman for Van Sant, director of Milk and Good Will Hunting, confirmed that talks had been held with Summit studios, which oversees the franchise based on Stephenie Meyers's best-selling books. Coppola, who shot Lost in Translation, and Condon, director of Dreamgirls, are yet to confirm their potential involvement.

It is understood that the screenplay for Breaking Dawn is still in the hands of regular Twilight writer Melissa Rosenberg, so a decision is not imminent. There have been suggestions that the final tome in the series might be split into two films.

Kristen Stewart, who plays heroine Bella, told MTV.com: "I'm glad that's out and about. I didn't know that was something that people knew. I think it's awesome. I think it's so cool that they're reaching out [to these directors]. I think any one of those people would be great."

Whoever takes the reins on Breaking Dawn will have to contend with some pretty contentious scenes. The book sees Bella become pregnant by her vampire lover Edward Cullen and almost dies in childbirth due to the unorthodox nature of the half vampire, half-human child she is carrying.

The first two films in the Twilight Saga have taken more than $1bn around the world, with Eclipse set to arrive in cinemas this summer.

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Shutter Island: 'A cut-price Cape Fear'

Martin Scorsese's latest, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a US marshal on the trail of an escaped killer, is a pacy and muscular studio potboiler, but pales in comparison with the director's mighty back catalogue

Baron Cohen on track for Scorsese's Invention

Sacha Baron Cohen is tipped for roles in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret as well as the third Men in Black movie

Ali G, Borat and Brüno may now have taken their final bow, but Sacha Baron Cohen remains flavour of the month in Hollywood. The British comic is in talks to star in Martin Scorsese's next film, an adaptation of the children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. For good measure, he is also tipped to star in the third Men in Black movie.

According to Deadline.com, Baron Cohen would play a station inspector in the Scorsese project, which centres on a 12-year-old boy who lives in the walls of a train station in 1930s Paris. Ben Kingsley is being tapped to play French film-making legend George Méliès, director of A Trip to the Moon, who has a pivotal role in the story.

The screenplay by John Logan is based on Brian Selznick's illustrated novel, which won the 2008 Caldecott medal. Its author has described it as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things". Warner Bros originally acquired the rights for Scorsese in 2007, but the director stepped out to work on other projects before opting back in. Young British actor Asa Butterfield (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) will play the title role, while Kick-Ass's Chloe Moretz will star as an eccentric girl who runs a small toy booth in the train station.

Selznick's tale appears to have appealed to the famously cinephilic Scorsese's passion for movie history. Méliès's final, poverty-stricken years were spent working in a toy booth at a Parisian station following the liquidation of his film studio. Kingsley recently worked with the Oscar-winning film-maker on Shutter Island, the psychological thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio which opened in UK cinemas last Friday.

Baron Cohen's involvement in the new Men in Black film also looks likely. Horror movies blog Bloody-Disgusting.com reports that the comic is up against Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement for the role of a new character named Yaz. Josh Brolin is also in talks, while Tropic Thunder's Etan Cohen is lining up the screenplay.

The first Men in Black film, featuring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as special agents in charge of Earth's alien inhabitants, took nearly $600m worldwide in 1997 and was followed by a sequel in 2002.

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Green Zone invades a grey area

Paul Greengrass has made a bold assault on the boundary between fact and fiction

It's all very well to win Oscars for a film about Iraq. However, The Hurt Locker was never going to have much influence on attitudes to the war, simply because most people won't ever get to see it. It was famously the lowest-grossing title ever to take best picture. In any case, it opted to concentrate on the war's explosive ordnance rather than its explosive politics.

Green Zone is different. Not only does it field Matt Damon and deploy a tried and trusted Hollywood allegory, it goes straight to the ugly heart of the matter – the war's murky origins. Its opening weekend performance suggests that it too will disappoint at the box office, as have not only The Hurt Locker but all the other Iraq films to date. All the same, it seems likely to reach many cinemagoers whose grasp of what actually happened is still understandably hazy. Director Paul Greengrass has said himself that he wanted to explain the origins of the war to the kind of people who go to the Bourne films.

Cinema must surely have done more than anything else to shape people's perceptions of Vietnam and the two world wars. Green Zone will doubtless make its contribution to the eventual verdict on Iraq, and here there's plenty of work to be done. Half of the American people apparently believe that Iraq did have WMD at the time of the invasion. On that at least, they're going to be put right.

Greengrass told the Guardian that he'd been prompted to make the film by a "sense of affront and anger". He'd swallowed the story that Saddam had WMD, and therefore felt betrayed when they failed to materialise. "I wanted to say 'I know what you did' ... in the vernacular of popular genre cinema," he explained.

So what does he say he knows about what they did? According to his film, it was all a plot. A schemer in the Pentagon fabricated the WMD intel, even though a helpful Iraqi general had set him straight on the facts. This guy fed his lies to the gullible media, which unleashed them on the unsuspecting public.

There are doubtless cinemagoers who could only be attracted to this topic by an effective action thriller. Green Zone's account of it should certainly grab their attention. Bad guys get what's coming to them, there's a heart-stopping chase and the obligatory helicopter explodes, as a good soldier going rogue in the cause of truth uncovers evil at the heart of government.

All the same, this isn't quite what actually seems to have happened. It's still not altogether clear how we came to be misinformed, yet the idea that belief in Iraqi WMD was based wholly on evidence deliberately faked within government can surely be discounted. The Pentagon was far from alone in maintaining that Saddam possessed weapons which, after all, he'd actually used in the past. Such data as there was may have been both misconstrued and misrepresented, but it doesn't seem to have been entirely invented by those tasked to assess it.

Of course, Hollywood has always played fast and loose with history, and in doing so it's dreamed up many a fanciful conspiracy. Nonetheless, Green Zone surely pushes the envelope to the edge of what's acceptable. It's one thing to suggest that the church suppressed the truth about Christ's bloodline or even to make hay with the assassination of JFK. The Iraq war, however, is one of the key events of our own day, and our understanding of it matters a great deal.

You might think that since we were clearly misled about Iraq's supposed WMD, it doesn't much matter exactly how this happened. Yet the case can be made that it does. It's one thing to learn that our leaders relied on dodgy info whose significance they were prepared to exaggerate. It's another to believe they took us to war on the basis of a story they knew must be untrue because they'd made it up while in possession of irrefutable proof of its falsity.

The first reading allows for the response that we should keep a closer watch on our politicians. The second could perhaps feed the notion that it's all hopeless because we're at the mercy of a ruthless conspiratorial system that will dictate our destiny whatever we do. This is the kind of thinking that causes so many to be sure that 9/11 was an inside job or that MI6 killed Diana. It's becoming ever more widespread, and it's distinctly unproductive. It leads those in its thrall to turn away from the political process and treat those who struggle to influence events as deluded idiots.

Still, would it be better for people to continue to believe that the Iraq war had fulfilled its stated purpose? Suppose a rightwing film-maker had shown Damon actually finding the wicked weaponry. Would that have been OK? Greengrass has provided us with a pretty arresting watch, but he's also posed some disconcerting questions.

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Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes separate after seven years

Celebrity partnerships have a habit of imploding in public, with the messy details playing out in tabloids or gossip sites. But actor Kate Winslet and film director Sam Mendes, for all their fame and fortune, were never your typical showbusiness couple.

The pair married in secret and split on the sly. Today the Oscar-winning duo confessed that they had actually ended their relationship some months ago.

The closing credits were confirmed in a brief statement from their lawyer. "Kate and Sam are saddened to announce that they separated earlier this year," said Keith Schilling. "The split is entirely amicable and is by mutual agreement. Both parties are fully committed to the future joint parenting of their children."

Winslet and Mendes have a son, Joe, who was born in December 2003. Winslet also has a nine-year-old daughter, Mia, from her first marriage, to film-maker Jim Threapleton.

The actor and director met in 2001 and married on a whim in May 2003, while on holiday in Anguilla. "We hadn't been planning to do it," Winslet said at the time. "But we thought it was rather a good idea, so we just did it." The couple went on to divide their time between a family home in the Cotswolds and a luxury apartment in New York.

Despite being regarded as the power couple of British film, Winslet and Mendes appeared keen to preserve a sense of normality behind closed doors.

"As a family we do normal things that other families would," the actor told one interviewer. "It's important to us that the children are just regular kids, so we go to the park, kick a ball around, go to a museum, watch a movie together or just hang out at home playing Monopoly."

Originally acclaimed for his stage work, Mendes won an Oscar for directing his debut feature, American Beauty, back in 2000. His other films include The Road to Perdition, Jarhead and the low-budget road movie Away We Go.

After five Oscar nominations, Winslet scooped the best actress award last year for her performance as an illiterate Nazi in Stephen Daldry's drama, The Reader.

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Tim Burton's Alice still in US box-office wonderland

Disney's 3D extravaganza is the first 2010 release to cross $200m in North America, as latest MPAA figures show that 20 3D movies accounted for 11% of US box office last year

The winner
Over the past 13 weeks all the hyperbole in box-office circles has been reserved for Avatar, so it would be remiss not to praise the achievements of Alice in Wonderland. After less than two weeks in release, Disney's fantasy has already crossed $200m (£133m) in North America, becoming the first 2010 release to do so. It is also single-handedly propping up the box office: thanks to Alice's commercial heft, box-office revenues are running about 9% ahead of the same period in 2009 – which, lest we forget, was a record year. Incidentally, combined with its international run, Alice has already amassed more than $420m worldwide.

Summit's decision to re-release its multi-Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker is paying small dividends. Because the movie has already completed its theatrical run and gone out on DVD, cinemas won't accommodate a wide release, ie more than 600 cinemas. However, nobody's grumbling about $828,000 from 349 venues. That puts Kathryn Bigelow's best picture winner on $15.7m. It's still the lowest grossing best picture winner since the dawn of time, but if it can get to $20m that would be a nice round number for financiers who think box-office grosses are all that matter.

The loser
Universal executives were expecting more from Green Zone than the $14.5m debut in second place. You'd think that the potent combination of Paul Greengrass and his Jason Bourne star Matt Damon would muster more than this, but it was always going to be a tough weekend with Alice still so fresh and several other new releases to choose from. Green Zone is a thrilling ride, and even though the protagonist's Bourne-like antics in the second half beggar belief, it deserves to prosper. As the only action thriller in release for a while, Green Zone has a chance to gain momentum. This week will be crucial as the movie heads into the second weekend and either thrives or dies on word of mouth. And it's brutal out there. Summit's romantic drama Remember Me, with the distributor's Twilight hero Robert Pattinson, crept out in fourth place on $8.3m and will also do well to keep going in a significant way, but this has more to do with the quality of the script than anything else. Also, does Pattinson amount to much on screen without Kristen Stewart? Time will tell.

The real story
Each year, Hollywood's lobby group, the Motion Picture Association of America, unleashes a volley of statistics designed to tell us how cinemagoing is the most affordable and magnificent pastime anybody could possibly contemplate, yielding ever-increasing revenues and profits for the distributors. We-ell, as we all know, that's not really the whole story. If it's true that the market can expand to accommodate more episodes of Harry Potter and Twilight and a second Avatar movie, it's also true that consumers are choosing to watch movies in different ways.

And that's where the MPAA's annual Theatrical Market Statistics Report, published last week, fails to tell the whole story. It tells us that ticket sales in North America in 2009 reached a record $10.6bn, while international and global revenues reached new highs of $19.3bn and $29.9bn. We learn that the average US ticket price climbed 4.4% to $7.50 and there were 1.42bn admissions, the first rise in two years and the highest level since 1.5bn five years earlier in 2004. 3D screens are booming all over the world, and 3D movies accounted for $1.14bn or 11% of that $10.6bn North American box office, with 20 3D movies coming out in 2009, compared with eight in 2008.

Nowhere does the MPAA adjust the figures for inflation, and nowhere do we learn about levels of consumption on VOD, cable, DVD and online. We know that repeat visits by moviegoers will turn a humble blockbuster into a glistening titan like Avatar, and indeed the report notes that "frequent filmgoers", defined as people who visit the cinema once a month or more and who currently make up 10% of the population in the US and Canada, accounted for half of all tickets sold in 2009. What the report doesn't say is how they were seeing movies when they weren't at the cinema. That's important, because once they can agree that cinemas and cable and VOD etc are all viable ways of consuming movies, maybe the studios can start to talk openly about the data.This may be the era of high-fidelity viewing, but the overall picture is murkier than ever.

The future
Next week brings an action comedy from Columbia called The Bounty Hunter, starring Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston – action comedies are notoriously difficult to pull off, so it's going to have to be very good indeed to stay afloat in the coming weeks. Fox has the comedy Diary of a Wimpy Kid, while Universal finally releases the action sci-fi Repo Men featuring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker.

North American top 10, 12-14 March
1. Alice in Wonderland, $62m. Total: $208.6m
2. Green Zone, $14.5m
3. She's Out of My League, $9.6m
4. Remember Me, $8.3m
5. Shutter Island, $8.1m. Total: $108m
6. Our Family Wedding, $7.6m
7. Avatar, $6.6m. Total: $730.3m
8. Brooklyn's Finest, $4.3m. Total: $21.4m
9. Cop Out, $4.2m. Total: $39.4m
10. The Crazies, $3.7m. Total: $34.2m

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Kinoteka unspools new views of Poland

At the annual Polish film festival, a pair of sensational new films – Mall Girls and Snow White, Russian Red – give a glimpse of life in post-communist, post-EU accession Poland

When it comes to the Poles in their midst, your average Brit's grip on the facts tends to be a little shaky. There are more than a million Poles in residence in the UK, aren't there? Or is the number closer to half that? Some say they're toughing out the recession; others declare they are being lured home in droves by repatriation campaigns. It seems as if there's a Polski sklep on every high street, but where the hell's a shop selling kiełbasa when you need one?

But if most of us are unsure what it's like for Poles in Britain, we're utterly in the dark as to what it's like back in Poland. A pair of sensational (if not sensationalising) new Polish films could be just the spotlight needed: Mall Girls and Snow White, Russian Red, which were recently given their UK premieres at the Kinoteka Polish international film festival. Each is a glimpse of Poland's first post-communist generation, and shows a country beset by social ills: teenage prostitution, drug use, cheap consumerism, hooligans in ladies' furs terrorising fast-food employees. In other words, they seem to depict a country not far different from the UK.

Poland's Trainspotting is the marketing hook most often Velcroed on to Snow White, Russian Red. The film is a flashy adaptation by Xawery Żuławski (son of cult director Andrzej) of the novel by Dorota Masłowska, who was all of 19 when her book stormed the Polish literary scene. Our hero is Yobbo, whose name says it all – unemployed, violent, directionless, with a taste for white powders and seeing red. And he's just been dumped. He attempts to cope via the twin expedients of amphetamines and incoherent political discussions with a motley crew of goth chicks, butch thuggettes and, for a hilarious few minutes, a dorky student whose interest he rewards by peeing on her budgie. But Yobbo also has a certain garrulous way with words, a babbling stream of consciousness – and he's about to learn the words are not his own.

The film plays on Polishness: not only in the language which, in the original (though not the somewhat clunky translation) is a highly inventive slang, but in Yobbo himself, who walks around in a white football jacket marked Polska (Poland). "In the irony of the level of the language, we Poles can find ourselves, our sense of humour," Żuławski told me after the UK premiere. Yobbo is a "dresiarze", which translates roughly as "tracksuit guy". This is the Polish equivalent of the British hoodie, their tight jeans and leather jackets a typical sight in smaller Polish towns. "He is representative of a state of mind of men in Poland nowadays, a kind of typically male consciousness," Żuławski says. For Yobbo, the game is rigged: the west is corrupt and a shadowy figure named Robert Sztorm calls all the shots at home. There is a hopelessness in Yobbo's having "no future" that, the film suggests, makes him a character or puppet: at the beck of outside forces, his life not under his own control.

If Snow White is a kind of metafictional chav poem, Mall Girls is straight-up social realism, and harder to watch for it. The girls in question are a gang of bubble-popping 14-year-olds in pink plastic jackets and white knee-high boots who sell their bodies to older men in exchange for heart-shaped jewellery from the local equivalent of Accessorize. Ala is the "good" girl who gets swept up in the mall girls' world, half-seduced and half-belittled by Milena, who supposedly wants nothing more than to help Ala enjoy the "high life" – which to her means going back to a man's apartment rather than just sucking him off in the car. Ala's tragic attempt to try to catch up sexually makes Katarzyna Rosłaniec's film an affecting, occasionally agonising experience.

Both films seem to suggest a generation gap has stranded young Poles. The mall girls don't know any better than to trade virginity for jeans because their elders never taught them otherwise. "It seems that sex for clothes or other things is becoming the new kind of prostitution in Poland," says Małgorzata Szwarocka, a sexologist in Warsaw. "Without proper sexual education in schools, and the consumptional lifestyle, it is unfortunately a natural consequence." Poland is still a "land of prudery", she says, and the film has shocked the communist generation and started a national debate, similar to the ongoing one about enjo kosai ("compensated dating") in Japan – another country with a huge generation gap.

This very shock is symptomatic of the problem, Rosłaniec seems to suggest, of older Poles being vastly out of touch with their progeny. When a tearful Ala asks her father for advice, he tells her to go to sleep. From her philandering mother, Ala learns either of two things: a) cheating on your lover is fine, or b) nothing. Her cynical teacher, meanwhile, strangles Ala's fledgling work ethic by announcing, "I'll throw away the tests that are an embarrassment to us all," and simply passes the entire class. In Snow White, Yobbo's mother is conspicuously absent, and we glimpse the author Masłowska's own "real" life: drab, unhappy drudgery both at home and at school.

Poverty also raises its squalid head: the financial promise of the EU is still a fairytale. Milena's friend Julia's desperate parents beat her, not because she's pregnant but because the young mothers' centre charges a fee. Julia's own financial goals have started so low, her friends have to lambast her before she demands her sexual "patrons" buy her what she wants – whereupon she finally scores that sparkling plastic ring she had her eye on. Ala's father can't afford tomato for his sandwiches, let alone a newer mobile phone to replace his daughter's brick. If her social status depends on it, then what's a girl to do?

These two arresting films seem to suggest young Poles are being exposed to all the lures and temptations of western consumerism, but without the crucial protection of an older generation wise to its dangers. Capitalism can be nasty: those rhinestone nails may glitter, but they sure ain't gold. It seems as if parts of the new EU Poland really are becoming more like Britain every day.

• The 8th Kinoteka Polish international film festiwal runs until 13 April at venues across London. Visit kinoteka.org.uk for details.

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Oscars 2010 diary: In the Loop with Jesse Armstrong

The co-writer of the Oscar-nominated British comedy shares his experiences of LA's biggest night out

Jesse Armstrong wrote In the Loop with Armando Iannucci, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche). The film was nominated for best adapted screenplay.

26.2.10

A week before the Oscars and I am starting to view imperfections, minor eruptions and abrasions to my face with suspicion. Right now the Oscars feel like the biggest school disco in the world and I am stalked by the fear that like the school disco I'm going to turn up with a honking great pustule on my nose.

5.3.10

On the plane I watch the DVD we got mailed out with our invites: What Nominees Need to Know – an Insiders' Guide. It feels like the sort of material that might self-destruct after watching. I learn a few crucial facts. If you win you have 60 seconds in which to receive the award. 15 seconds to make it from your seat to the microphone, 45 seconds to speak. And after you leave the stage there is a dedicated Thank You cam where you are encouraged to dump all your gratitude rather than boring the viewing public with it.

6.3.10 – Take me to the gifting suites!

So, nominated for an Oscar. Sounds nice. But let's get down to brass tacks. The approbation and respect of your peers is nice. But what do you actually, physically, get?

I could write an essay, a book, on my feelings around the "gifting suites", where you're supposed to be able to go to get the free stuff. The whole thing is clearly slightly disgusting. You're affluent, you're successful: here, have more stuff! But then, like a lot of things, once you're invited yourself it doesn't feel quite so disgusting. It seems more amusing. You tend to give yourself a pass. You, after all, are you, and you're not really disgusting, are you? You're going to the gifting suite playfully; amused, by this gauche and slightly repellent tradition. But also, you'll notice, carrying a fucking big laundry bag.

Well, it turns out, that for us the gifting suite is a big empty studio on the Universal lot and it has all the glamour and exclusivity of a jumble sale in an aircraft hanger. It is full of people who are giving away their knickknacks with the hope of greater profile for their new products. A bra with a pocket in it, socks for dogs, a voucher for an injectable nose-job. There are "celebrities" in attendance. Including the man who played Potsie in Happy Days. But I do not have to elbow George Clooney out of the way at any point to get to the trays of Old Time Candy.

7.3.10

The day of the ceremony has the rhythm and feel of going to a wedding. The possibility of a nervous breakdown over the misplacement of a cufflink. Anxiety about when or where you will next be allowed to eat, urinate. The film distribution company send over some hair and make-up stylists to help out the gang. My wife worries that she will appear looking like something from Avatar. The hair stylist informs her that he's going to give her "big hair, porn hair".

On the whole I think my wife has been a disappointment to her friends in her reluctance to go mental about what she's wearing. Although in the build-up to going she did admit to trying on something called a Miraclesuit. An elasticated iron maiden undergarment that forms you into a UN-agreed approximation of perfect womanhood. Like someone watching the guillotine go down, she was impressed with the technology without necessarily wanting to get involved herself.

My lack of facial recognition means that the red carpet is less impressive than it should be. People look familiar to me, but like at a family party I'm trying to fit them into place, imagine them 10 years younger. What is the name of that man who you look like? And are you him, or someone else who is just a person? Armando's ex-assistant texts to say he's watching the build-up on TV and he's just seen us on the carpet next to Ryan Seacrest! "Who is Ryan Seacrest?" I text back.

The world's press does not clamour for our attention. I feel that after the photographers have dutifully taken a group shot of us they all look at each other and say, "Well it's only a negligible amount of memory we'll save on our memory card by wiping these megapixels, but, what the hell, better safe than sorry!"

The ceremony

I have to say that the best part of going to the Oscars, was in fact, going to the Oscars. Reading about it in the British and US press afterwards there is quite a lot of snarky commentary. But for me, critical faculties are suspended. I am sitting, across the aisle from, but effectively next to, Lauren Bacall, in front of Harvey Weinstein, behind the writers of District 9. I sit there pretty much throughout with a stupid fat grin across my face.

A woman tells us our award will be near the start of the show – just four ad breaks in. We've never really felt optimistic about actually winning. But immediately before the result is announced, despite knowing it's unlikely, and despite knowing that Rocky beat Taxi Driver and it's all really a load of nonsense, it's hard not to want to win. And before you know it you're thinking well maybe actually… and then just as the award is about to be announced I am distracted. I suddenly spot Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi Deng so I'm not totally concentrating as the surprise result is announced – Precious rather than Up In The Air has won. Geoffrey Fletcher is a worthy and decent and very likable winner.

We're seated right in front of the teleprompter, the screen that the presenters read their script from. But unlike a regular autocue this one has a conductor. A man in white gloves gesticulates around the words as they pass, suggesting a diminuendo here, a rousing finish there. He gesticulates wildly once acceptance speeches hit their allotted time – pointing madly at the "Wrap it up" written in red letters followed by the simple big red cross that is the final warning before the music plays and the Oscar winner is left chasing the mic into the ground as it disappears out of view.

We head off to Elton John's Oscar after-party but it has wound down by the time we arrive, and anyway, like a celebrity New Year's Eve it feels like everyone at every party is looking for the hotter one to move on to. We make text contact with Simon and Armando at the Vanity Fair party – surely the hottest ticket on the planet. "It's a hellhole," Arm texts.

I had imagined I'd be up till four party-hopping. But the truth is that looking at celebrities is kind of fascinating, but ultimately not that sustaining. So in the end I think we're all pretty happy to end the evening not being sparky with Graydon Carter or pitching to Harvey Weinstein, but having late-night tea and biscuits in Simon and Jenny's hotel room and talking it all over.

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The greatest film scenes ever shot

We all have film sequences that stick in our minds. Some are shared by many – such as the shower scene from Psycho – others are particular to us. Here our film critic and a panel of leading movie-makers reveal their favourites. What are yours?

Who will ever forget the first time they saw the 45-second shower-room murder in Hitchcock's Psycho? I remember 1959 and 1961 as the years when my first two children were born. But the first thing that comes to mind about the year in between was seeing Psycho, which I'd been looking forward to since a radio programme I'd produced the previous October, when Hitchcock had enticingly described Psycho as "my first real horror film". Entering the Plaza, Lower Regent Street, the day the film opened, I passed the cardboard cut-out of Hitchcock in the foyer, from which a tape recording of the Master's familiar Leytonstone undertaker's voice warned us what would happen if we gave away the ending.

Half an hour into the movie, when Janet Leigh stared out at us from the floor, a man sitting in front of me staggered into the aisle and vomited: testimony to the sensitive stomachs of the time, or (as several other people I know witnessed a similar incident at the Plaza that week) evidence that Paramount's publicity department had hired a method actor for the film's opening run?

Such indelibly iconic moments have been part of moviegoing since the Lumière brothers' first public screening of a dozen short scenes in December 1895. One of them had the audience recoiling from a train entering a station, another had them chuckling when a cheeky boy tricked a gardener into spraying himself with a hosepipe. People judge a movie by the strength of its story and overall impact, but ultimately what they remember are individual moments and sequences. This perhaps reflects the very nature of film, which is a rapid succession of still pictures that provide an illusion of motion. And until the coming of cassettes and DVDs, few of us were able to see a picture over and over again or re-view a sequence. So we had to replay it in our minds, and naturally we'd often get it wrong. Which is how "Play it again, Sam" entered the language instead of: "Play it, Sam, play 'As Time Goes By'."

James Stewart seems to have been thinking of this approach to cinema when he talked to Peter Bogdanovich about his craft: "What you're doing is… you're giving people little… little, tiny pieces of time… that they never forget." This is echoed by Walker Percy in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. Some people, his narrator says, "treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise", but "what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man". Likewise Jean-Dominique Bauby, the paralysed French writer, describes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly how he'd lie in the hospital recreating favourite scenes from Touch of Evil, Stagecoach, Moonfleet and Pierrot le fou. Canny film-makers have cottoned on to the idea, like James Cameron, who says: "You try to create one or more emotional, epiphanous moments within a film."

These moments come in many forms – simple, complex, lyrical, violent, gentle, witty, romantic, revelatory – and, if they stick, become as real as any other memory. They can range from the split-second close-up of the suave spy's missing half-finger in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps to the protracted pursuit of Cary Grant by the crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest, from the in-your-face eye-slicing in Buñuel's first silent movie, the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou, to the puzzling sequence of the Chinese businessman's mysterious box in the same director's mainstream success Belle de Jour 40 years later. Like your favourite jokes, your cherished movie moments reveal something about you and, if shared, they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, especially if one of them is the final sequence in Casablanca that features that line.

My own favourites? The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. The love at first sight between John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man, the lust at first sight between Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. The children running through the woods to see a train in Pather Panchali and finding grandmother dead on the way back. The cruelly comic soccer match in Loach's Kes. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love in a Venetian hotel in Don't Look Now. The slow-motion mayhem let loose in The Wild Bunch after William Holden says: "If they move, kill 'em!" Perhaps my single favourite moment comes in Citizen Kane, where Kane's now elderly friend Bernstein tells the reporter about an epiphanic memory of seeing a girl in a white dress on the New Jersey ferry in 1896. "I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." It's a moment about remembering a moment, and the actor Everett Sloane makes it so vivid we think we've seen that girl ourselves.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) - THE SUBWAY CHASE

Chosen by Ryan Fleck, the American indie film director, writer, editor and cinematographer, best known for co-writing and co-directing with partner Anna Boden Half Nelson and Sugar correct(out now on DVD).

The villain's on the elevated subway. You think he's going to get away because a person on foot can't keep up with the subway… But Gene Hackman jumps in a car and starts chasing the subway, riding underneath it, going at 80mph, swerving in and out of traffic. I first saw this scene on video when I was 18 or 19, in college. I loved it.

In action scenes nowadays you can chalk everything up to some kind of computer effect. Audiences no longer really believe that what they're seeing exists anymore. When The French Connection was made that notion didn't really occur to people. What you saw was usually really happening in front of the lens. It was raw. I did a little bit of research about how they shot the scene. Phenomenal. Basically they just did it. There was no security blocking off other traffic, just Hackman in a car with a camera mounted on the front. They went crazy, lost their minds, and went for it.

It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days. I'm editing a movie right now that has a teenager walking on the Brooklyn Bridge, considering suicide. He steps out on to a ledge, over traffic… It never even occurred to put the actual kid out on the ledge, on a bridge, over traffic because we knew there was no way authorities would let us do that. So there's camera trickery. Back in the 70s we'd have just thrown a child out over the ledge, seen what happened, and shot it.

JULES ET JIM (1962) - THE BICYCLE SCENE

Chosen by Ken Loach, writer/director of the influential docudrama Cathy Come Home, and director of nearly 30 films including Kes, Riff-Raff, My Name is Joe and Looking for Eric. He won the 2006 Palme d'Or at Cannes for The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

This scene always cheers you up. Jeanne Moreau and the two guys on their bicycles in the sun in France, the music that goes with it… Partly it evokes what you imagine to be the perfect French vacation but also it's a very fine bit of film-making.

When you're in the business and have been in the business a long time, you tend to dismember about 99% of films as you're watching. The time when you used to watch a film just for enjoyment is difficult to recapture. But just occasionally a film will transcend that. The sense of enjoyment with this trio on their bicycles is perennial. It's completely evocative of that carefree young moment, the age when people are carefree. And then of course, for these three, it will all be ruined by the war.

The song that was composed for the film – "Le tourbillon" – became very famous. I'd sing it for you if I wasn't surrounded by colleagues who would take the piss. I think film music that tells you what to think is cheap – the film should do that without that prompting. But in Jules et Jim it is music in relation to the images, the music has an independent existence and there's a relationship between the two.

It is not something subterranean, there to steer you through every second and push you into feelings that the pictures don't generate themselves.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) - BILL'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Chosen by Beeban Kidron, who came to international attention directing the BBC's adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in 1990. She has since directed several feature films including Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.

Every single line in this scene is quotable. It's the most beautifully written thing, from an era of cinema very closely knitted to the theatre, when the words were supposed to evoke things rather than just be things for people to say while the pictures were going on. That's something that's very often lost 60 years later.

Margo, played by Bette Davis, is a great Broadway actress at the pinnacle of her power: brilliant, sophisticated, bitchy. Her assistant Eve, meanwhile, played by Anne Baxter, is simpering, beautiful and very, very ambitious. Eve is trying to replace Margo, trying to get her next part on Broadway and take her lover, Bill. This is the scene where Margo finally loses her rag, having waited upstairs for Bill to throw him a party before discovering that he's been downstairs with Eve for 20 minutes.

The scene sums up the central themes of the film, to do with Margo's insecurity about age and about the way that Eve is eating into her life. This is referred to in the dialogue all the time: Margo finds Eve and Bill talking and immediately asks if she can join in – "Or isn't it a story for grown-ups?" Bette Davis, despite being so powerful, gives a phenomenal performance of insecurity. That is very, very rarely drawn in the cinema.

The question of ageing and of being replaced by the younger, more beautiful woman is something we can still understand today.

JASON & THE ARGONAUTS (1963) - THE SKELETONS SCENE

Chosen by Nick Park, Oscar-winning animator and writer/director of the Wallace and Gromit films.

As a boy I was into monsters, heroes going off on adventures – and stop-motion animation. I saw trailers for this film and it seemed to be everything I wanted. I remember being at a school fair, just before Christmas, and being desperate to get home to watch it.

The scene that stood out the most, that I found both horrifying and enthralling, was the skeleton fight at the end. The heroes are all live action and the monsters are all done with stop-frame animation. It was a terrific technical feat – I think there were eight animated skeletons or more, cut together quite seamlessly with the live action. The whole choreography of it was amazing. But the story, too, really caught my imagination. These skeletons were planted like seeds, by a wizard chap spreading dragons teeth, and then dead soldiers grow up to fight the Argonauts. So exciting.

At around the same time I saw Ray Harryhausen, the animator, explain on television how he had done the skeletons. I immediately went and built my own models with wire and foam – I think I was planning to film something with my friends, live action, cut together with a sea monster made out of a coat hanger and nylon tights.

Disney films didn't make me want to go home and do it myself because it was shrouded in mystery and technique. But when I saw the skeletons in Harryhausen's film I wanted immediately to do it myself, because you got a sense of how it might be done.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) - THE FINAL SCENE

Chosen by Stephen Poliakoff. After starting out as a playwright, Poliakoff turned to writing and directing television dramas including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and the award-winning The Lost Prince. His feature films include Hidden City and most recently Glorious 39.

Still, after 40 years, people are arguing about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What the ending means to the film. The computer taking over, the menacing computer howl, the foetus – it has passed into cinema folklore. Science fiction was not a genre that attracted me much, and it was very unsexy in the 1960s. But Kubrick's film was the most original I had ever seen. It came at me for the first time, completely alone, in a cinema on a summer afternoon in 1968. I was 15, and it made an extraordinary impression on me. There was a lot more mainstream "auteur cinema" than there is now, Hollywood studios producing personal films. Nevertheless Kubrick stood alone, a titanic figure that obsessively made films, under great secrecy, and with nobody interfering.

I had never seen such a bold use of cinema, and certainly never such an incredibly obscure ending. To have spent all that time and money and to have the daring – some would say foolhardy daring, but nevertheless a magnificent daring – to end the film on such an elusive and obscure note, I found it amazing as a 15-year-old that anybody should have the balls to do that. It excited me and changed my whole view of what you could do as a writer, whatever medium you were attempting – Kubrick's aspiration to be original. Now it's been much imitated but 2001 was extraordinarily ahead of its time, and has continued to survive and influence generations.

TAXI DRIVER (1976) - THE MIRROR SCENE

Chosen by Stephen Woolley, the award-winning producer best known for his collaborations with director Neil Jordan including Interview with the Vampire and The Crying Game. Recent projects include How To Lose Friends and Alienate People and the forthcoming Made in Dagenham. In 2005 he made his directorial debut with Stoned.

I remember seeing Taxi Driver for the first time in Paris in the 70s. The taxi gliding across New York's wet streets, smoke coming out of the subways, it was all incredibly delicious. It had this thundery Bernard Herrmann score, and when Robert De Niro did his "are you talking to me?" sequence in front of the mirror you suddenly sensed the degree of anger there. It was all bottled up until he explodes with this bravura performance. It's very clever, very economical, everything concentrated on his eyes.

Sequences like this are not only successful because they are so beautifully created but also because they often come at a point in a film where you begin to realise where it's going, you think, "oh my god, I know what this is about". Here you become aware that not only is Travis Bickle schizophrenic but he's aware of his own schizophrenia. He's like a genie in a bottle and you're waiting for him to let the genie out – which he does brilliantly in that horrific sequence later on where he shoots Harvey Keitel's character and saves Jodie Foster's.

The scene was improvised but De Niro had tried out a version of it in an earlier film he made with Brian De Palma, I think it's called Hi Mom! I didn't see it until years after watching Taxi Driver and I remember thinking "I can't believe it – the thing he does in Taxi Driver!"

CARRIE (1976) - THE BLOOD AT THE PROM SCENE

Chosen by Edgar Wright, who co-created Channel 4's Spaced, and has collaborated with comedian Simon Pegg on hit films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. His latest directing project, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, is out later this year.

I always describe Carrie as the Grease of horror movies: it resonates with all ages because everybody remembers their awkward teenage phase and can watch it and say – I was the bully or the victim or the person who did nothing. It explores how apocalyptic your rage can be as a teenager. Carrie's not a killer, she's a girl who has been bullied and through a terrible confluence of events ends up burning the school down.

It's also unusual for a horror film. It doesn't have someone being killed every 20 minutes and then a climax – it builds to one huge climax at the prom. School bullies have fixed the prom so that Carrie White will win and they can humiliate her by tipping a bucket of pig's blood over her in front of the whole school. The scene and the excruciating build-up to it is one of the greatest set pieces of all time, full of suspense, with a monumental payoff.

A crane shot sets up the sequence so you know where everyone is positioned and that the bucket of blood is above Carrie and Tommy's heads. Once the plot is set in motion Pino Donaggio's score takes over. The resulting sequence is pure opera.

I first saw Carrie on VHS with my brother's friend when I was about 12. I obsessively read about horror movies and was dying to see it. I've watched it so many times since. De Palma planned the sequence for months and battled the studio over the time spent on filming it. But it was worth the blood, sweat and tears. It still leaves audiences speechless.

REAR WINDOW (1954) - THE OPENING SCENE

Chosen by Claire Denis, who made her directorial debut in 1988 with Chocolat. Subsequent films include Good Work and 35 Shots of Rum. Her latest, White Material, is out in the summer.

We don't have courtyards in France like they do in New York, where Hitchcock's film is set, but we have street buildings that are set very close to each other. From where I stand in my kitchen or my bedroom I can watch neighbours' windows very easily. I'm intrigued by voyeurism, about what is behind windows, and often in my films I stage a scene as if I was peeping in from outside.

The situation Hitchcock establishes in the opening scene of Rear Window is the ultimate voyeuristic situation. The character played by James Stewart has broken his leg, has nothing to do but linger behind his window and watch. He is passive but eager to find something – to be a witness of something, or to give his imagination something to chew on. As a spectator in a cinema theatre, you are a sort of prisoner in a chair, like he is.

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Sergei Paradjanov: film-maker of outrageous imagination

Sergei Paradjanov made some of the most beautiful films ever seen, writes Elif Batuman. His reward was to be sent to the gulag for 'surrealist tendencies'

Between his abandonment of socialist realism in 1964 and his death from lung cancer in 1990, Sergei Paradjanov made four of the weirdest and most beautiful movies ever seen. An ethnic Armenian, Paradjanov was born in Soviet Georgia in 1924. His mother was "very artistic": she "used to adorn herself with Christmas tree decorations and curtains and join her friends on the roof to enact legends". In 1947, Paradjanov spent a brief stint in a Georgian prison for committing "homosexual acts" (which were illegal under Soviet law) – with, of all people, a KGB officer. He later disavowed the seven films he shot in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962, he saw Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and completely changed his artistic method, which had previously been quite normal.

The first film in Paradjanov's mature style, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), brought him instant fame and notoriety. Filmed in the Ukrainian Carpathians, in a regional dialect that couldn't be understood by most Russians (Paradjanov refused to have it dubbed), Shadows tells the story of the doomed love of Ivan and Marichka, children from feuding families. Marichka drowns relatively early in the film, and critics have justly celebrated its representation of lost childhood love, brutal slayings and various Ukrainian folk ceremonies. To me, however, the most moving and surprising aspect of the film is the depiction of Ivan's second marriage.

After Marichka's death, Ivan lapses into grief and madness – this part of the film is shot in black and white – before finding himself attracted to the comely Palagna. (They share an erotically charged moment when she is holding a horse's hoof for him to hammer on a shoe.) The two are united in a bizarre ceremony which involves blindfolds and a wooden yoke. They seem happy at first, but Ivan grows distant and brooding, and Palagna is unable to conceive a child. One gorgeously composed scene shows the couple at the dinner table: both are facing the camera, and a calf is sitting under the table, looking cramped and miserable. Every unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion – but how recognisable and universal Paradjanov renders this highly particular unhappiness! Both the spouses, it turns out, are dabbling in sorcery: Ivan has taken to inviting the spirits of the maimed and drowned into their home, hoping that he may be visited by Marichka; Palagna, meanwhile, wanders naked in a forest, exhorting the dark forces to bring them a child. In a mind-blowing convergence of literal and symbolic narratives, Palagna starts cheating on Ivan with the local sorcerer. Then the marriage really hits the rocks.

Shadows has the most legible storyline of all Paradjanov's films. He followed it with The Color of Pomegranates (1969), a 90-minute, Armenian-language meditation on the life of the 18th-century poet-troubadour Sayat Nova. The film consists of a series of dreamlike tableaux, designed to "recreate the poet's inner world". Particularly astounding are the courtship "scenes" in which the poet and his lover are both played by the lithe, unearthly Sofiko Chiaureli: a trick that renders visual and literal the union of the poet-lover and the beloved-God in eastern mystical poetry. The only "narrative" is provided by the successive replacement of a small boy with a youth, a monk and an old man: it's like an illustration of the riddle of the sphinx.

Though Paradjanov was eight years older than Tarkovsky, he described the younger film-maker as his "teacher and mentor", and Pomegranates clearly invites comparison with Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966), based on the life of the great 14th-century Russian monk and icon painter.

In Andrei Rublev, nearly 200 minutes of black-and-white narrative are followed by a meditative colour slideshow of Rublev's icons. Pomegranates is a hallucinatory mash-up of these two types of material: a life story told in brilliantly coloured and animated Persian miniatures. The actors, dressed in outlandishly detailed handmade costumes, move as if by some strange clockwork, performing repetitive stylised gestures, tossing a golden ball in the air or gesturing enigmatically with some symbolic-looking object: a seashell, a candle, a rifle. Paradjanov himself compared Pomegranates to a "Persian jewellery case": "On the outside, its beauty fills the eyes; you see the fine miniatures. Then you open it, and inside you see still more Persian accessories." An accurate description: every last article and action in the film seems precisely placed, exquisitely detailed and designed to serve a particular purpose in some unknown ritual.

The Color of Pomegranates was the last film Paradjanov would make for 15 years. In 1973, after indictments for art trafficking, currency fraud, "incitements to suicide" and surrealist tendencies, the director was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security gulag, where his duties included sewing sacks. An indomitable spirit, he became an expert at making dolls from leftover sackcloth. He made a doll of Tutankhamen and another of his friend Lilya Brik. Through the offices of Brik, Tarkovsky and other powerful friends, Paradjanov was released one year early, in 1977. He wasn't allowed to work, and lived in utter destitution in Tbilisi. At one point, Tarkovsky gave him a ring to pawn, but Paradjanov decided to keep it as a souvenir of their friendship.

In the early years of the thaw, Paradjanov finally returned to the studio and made his last two movies: The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988). Suram Fortress, shot in Georgia, is a Poe-like patriotic yarn involving an accident-prone fortress in Tbilisi that is destined to remain standing only when a young hero has been buried alive in its walls. The fortress also apparently has to have a giant cart full of eggs dumped into the foundation and crushed with a sledgehammer – a peculiarly disturbing and indelible image.

Based on Mikhail Lermontov's retelling of a Turkic folktale, Ashik Kerib is the story of a troubadour obliged to spend 1,001 days wandering the land, in order to make enough money to marry his beloved. The hero is played by Yuri Mgoyan, a picturesque 22-year-old Kurdish "hooligan" and car thief recruited by Paradjanov for his "plasticity". (In one behind-the-scenes clip, Paradjanov demonstrates this plastic quality by wrapping a blanket around the young man's head and declaring: "A complete metamorphosis! He's a pharaoh!") These last two films somehow manage to seem at once naive and sophisticated, with the hyper-realism of a puppet show. Mastiffs rest their great weary heads on their paws, as evil henchmen force a slave to toss pomegranates for them to impale on their sabers. A gigantic flock of running sheep, filmed from overhead, shifts into strange formations. Endless rites and rituals unfold to unheard-of music.

Ashik Kerib is the only one of Paradzhanov's films to have a happy ending. The lovers are reunited and a white dove alights on a movie camera, representing Tarkovsky, to whose memory the film was dedicated. But to me, the outrageousness of Paradjanov's imagination is best encapsulated by the final scene of The Color of Pomegranates, in which death comes to the poet in the form of a shower of live chickens. Dressed in white, the troubadour lies on the floor, surrounded by candles; the chickens, who seem to be upset about something, fall on to him from a great height, dispensing a flurry of white feathers and extinguishing the candles. It's not the way you would expect a national poet, or anyone really, to depart this world – but Paradjanov makes it look inevitable.

• The Paradjanov Festival 2010 runs in London and Bristol until 9 May. paradjanov-festival.co.uk

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Jim Carrey: Ace or Yes Man?

Will the star's latest, I Love You Phillip Morris, be any good? We study the form

Will you watch I Love You Phillip Morris when it's released this week? Hard to say.

Just because it's a Jim Carrey film, that's no guarantee of anything. You could end up watching a broad knockabout comedy, but it could just as easily mean you'll get a patchy horror film about some scary numbers instead.

There's only one way to work out the quality of I Love You Phillip Morris – by gauging Jim Carrey's career trajectory so far to determine his current form.

▲ ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE (1994)

Hey, who's this rubber-faced newcomer with an endless array of wacky voices and a slightly unsettling lack of basic human inhibitions? Why, Jim Carrey, if you stick to making harmless knockabout comedies for the rest of your life, you might just turn into a worldwide star!

▲ THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998)

Wait a minute, this film made us laugh AND cry! Maybe there's more to you than meets the eye, Jim Carrey. You're not the tiresome attention-seeker we first thought you were. You can actually act!

▲ MAN ON THE MOON (1999)

Hold on, this portrayal of Andy Kaufman is not only accurate, it's also heartbreakingly sincere. This is a revelation. Jim Carrey, you can act. You can really act!

▼ THE MAJESTIC (2001)

Oh God, that's too much acting. That's way too much acting. Enough already.

▲ ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

Perfect. Jim Carrey, you've got the balance exactly right. The result – a downbeat, understated turn that roots this high-concept existential comedy firmly in the realms of reality – is exactly the sort of thing you should be doing. More like this, please.

▼ FUN WITH DICK AND JANE (2005)

Maybe you didn't understand us properly. By "more like this", we didn't mean "remake an unfunny George Segal comedy with David Duchovny's wife in a less funny way for no apparent reason". You're a well-respected actor now, Jim Carrey. For the love of God, save your reputation by making something a little more serious next time.

▼ THE NUMBER 23 (2007)

No. When we said serious, we meant another Spotless Mind, not an embarrassingly hamfisted horror about the world's spookiest number. You're a comedian at heart, Jim Carrey. Do another comedy and remind everyone why they originally liked you.

▼ YES MAN (2008)

No! We meant age-appropriate comedy, not a weird Liar Liar retread where you end up falling in love with a woman who's easily young enough to be your daughter! You're making a fool of yourself, Carrey! Do more acting!

▼ A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2009)

NO! Real acting, in a real film! Where you get to play a real person, not a cartoon of a gay Irish ghost candle! You're an idiot, Jim Carrey! Why can't you do anything right any more?

▲▼ I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS (2010)

Oh, God knows. It might be a good idea to just wait until it's on TV or something.

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The return of religious films

Apocalyptic angels and satanic shadows are creeping back on to cinema screens. Don't be surprised, says Anne Billson – biblical themes have only ever been one global crisis away

There's been a distinct whiff of the Good Book at the cinema of late – literally so in the case of Denzel Washington's latest, The Book of Eli. "Dear Lord," he says, "thank you for giving me the strength and the conviction to complete the task you entrusted to me." Denzel is on a mission from God, and not in a Blues Brothers way; his task is to convey a leather-bound book with a cross on it from A to B while killing lots of evil people en route. You don't need to have seen the film to guess the book in question is not The Da Vinci Code.

Meanwhile, in Solomon Kane, James Purefoy says: "Satan's creatures will take me if I stray from the path of peace." Nevertheless, he kills hordes of evil beings and gets crucified in his quest to rescue an innocent. Elsewhere, in Legion, Paul Bettany plays the archangel Michael, who rebels against God's orders to destroy mankind, saws off his wings and teams up with a handful of humans in the Mojave desert to shoot flesh-ripping zombies.

"Any artistic work that sensitively explores the stories of the Bible will be welcomed by many Christians," says Ben Wilson of the Church of England communications office, "but clearly the extent to which any particular film helps to develop an individual's faith will depend on the specific work and the specific viewer." On the other side of the Atlantic, at Christian film campaign group His Only Son for Us, executive project manager Brittany Hardy says, "Though they still seem to have some way to go, it seems that Hollywood studios may be realising that biblically themed movies that herald justice, compassion and perseverance appeal to audiences."

OK, some of the biblical themes in the aforementioned films are a little confused by Sunday-school standards, especially in Legion, where an unseen God acts like a stroppy teenager, while the archangel Gabriel comes on like an evil henchman with a rotating mace that looks like the Phantasm killer-ball on a stick. And that's not the end of the holy horrors. Coming soon: Black Death, set in the dark ages, with Sean Bean's faith tested by a beautiful witch. But you get the picture: horror and fantasy have gone all biblical on us.

Catherine von Ruhland, who reviews films for Third Way (a British magazine offering "Christian comment on culture") points out: "Hollywood is undergirdled by the Judeo-Christian tradition, so the plentiful films that tell of a battle between good and evil in which good ultimately triumphs replicate that cultural myth. It also fits classic plot structure." Von Ruhland adds that however secular and liberal the American film industry might appear, in a nation where the president must make a declaration of Christian faith, at least some of that nation's cinematic output is bound to chime with traditional Christian values.

In fact, religion has long been a vital ingredient in horror movies, pretty much up there with the Big Two: sex and death. "Religious imagery provides a shorthand to meaning," says Von Ruhland, "and if you want to capture ultimate and eternal dread, where else do you go?" In days gone by, when vampires were evil instead of soppy milquetoasts, they were kept at bay with crucifixes, holy water and men of the cloth. There's no shortage of horror movies in which religion, or at least religious extremism or perverted faith, is itself the Big Bad; Witchfinder General springs to mind. But Von Ruhland considers The Exorcist a classic battle between spiritual good and evil. "Many Christians would not touch it with a bishop's crook because of the possession theme, yet it is a profoundly Christian film," she says.

Explicitly religious-themed horror movies have proliferated in times of global crisis and cultural unease. In the early 1990s, Michael Tolkin's The Rapture starred Mimi Rogers as an ex-swinger who becomes a born-again Christian, prepares for Armageddon with a shocking act of violence and asks, "Who forgives God?" Tolkin's film, along with the bigger-budgeted The Seventh Sign (Demi Moore versus the apocalypse) and The Unholy (Ben Cross versus a hot demonic babe), was part of a minor surge of relatively mainstream biblical horror that appeared towards the end of the Reagan/Bush era, coinciding with Black Monday and the first signs of an imploding economy.

But since the 1970s, beneath the radar of the average filmgoer, there has also been a steady trickle of low-budget apocalypse horrors funded by Christian-backed production companies and often distributed through churches and evangelical missions. In the 1990s, that trickle became a flood, though the films were still preaching to the American Bible belt. In Left Behind, the introduction of the euro is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse; in the forthcoming edition of his book Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman writes of Megiddo: The Omega Code 2, "As with most End Times films, the subtext is a paranoid justification of America's tendency to demonise the United Nations, the Kyoto agreement or any other international body which opposes its interests."

With the millennium looming, Hollywood joined the end times party. The low-budget Prophecy, clearly an influence on the angel versus angel deathmatch-in-the-desert of Legion, starred Christopher Walken as an evil angel Gabriel, battling the good guys for a crucial soul. Bigger budget biblical horror included Denzel Washington getting in some early anti-demon action in Fallen; Arnold Schwarzenegger versus Satan in End of Days; Pittsburgh hairdresser Patricia Arquette speaking in tongues in Stigmata; Johnny Depp searching for a satanic prophecy in The Ninth Gate; Kim Basinger learning her autistic niece is the second coming in Bless the Child; and Winona Ryder, in Lost Souls, telling Ben Chaplin: "You are about to become the antichrist who becomes the door to eternal suffering in this world." Even Kevin Smith tackled God in Dogma.

But 2000 came and went without apocalypse, and the world as we knew it didn't end until 11 September 2001. Since when, the trumpets have been sounding more or less continually for the global economy, western civilisation and the planet. Hollywood and allied film industries have stepped up their depictions of apocalypse, post-apocalypse and Manichean struggles between the forces of light and darkness. End-of-the-world films can be downbeat (The Road, Children of Men, 28 Days Later) or upbeat (2012, Zombieland), but in each case the protagonists are faced with quasi-biblical choices and questions of faith.

Explicitly religious thrillers such as The Body or The Sin Eater may not have made much of an impact, but Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ showed that a mutant hybrid of explicit religion, arthouse (subtitles, Aramaic and Latin dialogue) and horror movie (gore and demons) was capable of cleaning up at the box office. Budgeted at $30m (which came out of Gibson's own pocket), it earned more than $600m, making it the highest-grossing subtitled film in US history.

With profits like that, it may seem odd we haven't since been swamped with Jesus-horror, though The Reaping and The Gathering did reenact the plagues of Egypt and the tale of the wandering Jew. The Christian subtext isn't exactly hidden in the Narnia films, like the CS Lewis novels on which they were based, but while the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost might not have made many guest appearances as themselves, they've had plenty of sci-fi surrogates in the form of Will Smith (I Am Legend), Keanu Reeves (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Constantine), Frank Langella (The Box) and assorted aliens (Knowing).

The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films may not have been officially approved by the church, but they depict mighty struggles between good and evil empires, with Sauron and Voldemort essentially cast as antichrists. Even if some Christians have been avoiding the Potter films because of the magic, and the church frowns upon the idea of aliens being seen to do God's work, secular audiences, whether they like it or not, are being fed a steady diet of Christian symbolism. Who needs explicit religious themes when they've been sneaking on to our screens in disguise all along?

Legion is out now. Black Death is released on 28 May

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Why Hollywood still loves the banks

Where is the full-scale filmic assault on the evils of global finance? Will Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel be it?

As well as its import for female directors and general reassurance that the forces of right do occasionally prevail, perhaps the most enduring legacy of The Hurt Locker's Oscars landslide will be its reminder that Hollywood can actually deal with that quaint location known as the real world. Which makes it all the more glaring when other areas of it have been so conspicuous by their absence from the screen.

Call it what you like – the almost-Depression, the new economic order, the age of Lidl – but for all that we're not quite yet eating each other in unlit basements, these remain profoundly jittery times for those of us locked into the chaos created by western banks. And yet thus far, with the exception of Michael Moore's documentary(ish) Capitalism: A Love Story, both the banks themselves and the bedlam they unleashed remain oddly and persistently off-camera. It's a strange omission, even allowing for the fact that plenty of projects that might have dealt with the subject in some way will, in something of a proving of the point, have been denied a place on the production line on account of the film industry's own frantic tightening of purse strings.

But we will, of course, shortly have Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps – the open-goal sequel to Oliver Stone's 1987 romp, now being ushered into the waiting room of pre-publicity, the trailer out in the world and the film the subject of a Vanity Fair cover story. As a takedown of global capitalism, it may not approach (or aspire to) the high dudgeon of Moore, the gist of the thing being Michael Douglas's master insider trader Gordon Gekko finally getting himself released from jail in the autumn of 2008 and, failing to singlehandedly avert the oncoming train crash, aiming instead to repair his relationship with his estranged daughter. Essentially, what we have here is The Wrestler in Armani – with the script, as pointed out by the Independent Eye, not averse to a crafty sight gag involving Gekko checking out of prison complete with vast mobile phone (you know – like in the 80s!).

Maybe playing it for laughs shouldn't surprise us here. After all, Gekko aside, Douglas in self-parodic mode has been called on to represent big money's human face more than once. Witness his scowling turn as übermensch financier Nicholas van Orton in David Fincher's inscrutable The Game – or the hambone performance as fiendish hedge fund manager Steven Taylor in garish Hitchock remake A Perfect Murder, ineptly attempting to off trophy wife Gwyneth Paltrow.

Indeed, fittingly, given as it was also the moment when the "financial innovations" that later sent us all to Cash Converters quietly began to slip into gear, it was around the same time in the sleepy late 90s that cinema last showed any productive interest in the banking system. Revisited now, Patrick Bateman's zinger in American Psycho about the real nature of his business carries with it an even more malevolent crackle, while from the same era came Boiler Room, an engagingly pulpy melodrama about life on the furthest fringes of Wall Street that, now we know what the big boys were about to get up to, surely deserves a small footnote in history. (Certainly, either of those movies feels like a more coherent response to the ongoing crisis than, say, the epically glib Up in the Air).

Of course, what complicates all this is that Hollywood is hardly a disinterested observer when it comes to the banks. While studio heads might be seen as masters of all they survey, much of their clout in recent years came on loan from many of the same institutions who were then caught up at the heart of the crisis. For Disney, there was Bear Sterns, for Paramount Deutsche Bank, and so on, with $10bn lent by Wall Street to the studios just between 2004 and 2008. As such, you can understand the onscreen reticence to bite the hand that fed. But while suited men in a burnished boardroom discussing credit derivatives may not have the raw cinematic appeal of disabling bombs on Baghdad roadsides, it might just help save Hollywood's soul if it admitted that banks were more than simply places in which to set heist movies.

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Lourdes finds favour at Birds Eye View

Jessica Hausner's tale of one woman's life-changing visit to the pilgrimage site adds to its awards haul from Venice, Vienna and Warsaw

Lourdes, Jessica Hausner's stark, gripping account of one woman's religious pilgrimage, was tonight awarded the crowning prize at the annual Birds Eye View film festival in London. The film, which stars the French actor Sylvie Testud, has already picked up awards at film festivals in Venice, Vienna and Warsaw. It goes on general release in the UK on 26 March.

Hausner's drama took the award for best feature. Elsewhere, Jenna Rosher's Junior was named best documentary while the award for best short film was split between the Oscar-nominated The Door, by Juanita Wilson, and Slaves, which was co-directed by Hanna Heilborn and David Aronowitsch.

The festival was set up to champion the work of female film-makers in a male-dominated industry. Reports suggest that only about 7% of feature film directors are women. Recent successes, however, suggest that this may soon be changing.

"This has been a brilliant year for women film-makers, not least with Kathryn Bigelow's historic win at the Oscars," said Amy Mole, managing director of Birds Eye View. "[This] has really helped focus the international spotlight on the lack of women film-makers within the industry."

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Film piracy: Lord Puttnam targets tween curriculum

Schools must devise new ways to teach children the importance of intellectual property, says the FDA president

The Oscar-winning head of the body which distributes films in the UK today called for new methods to be employed in the battle to defeat internet piracy.

During a keynote speech as president of the Film Distributors' Association, Lord Puttnam said young people needed to be educated at an early age that it was wrong to illegally download copyrighted material.

"The concept of intellectual property and its value needs to be embedded inextricably into the school curriculum," he said. "We need to establish beyond doubt that if people want films on offer in a variety of ways and formats, as we hope and believe they do, then they are required to pay a fair price."

Puttnam, who won an Oscar for best film in 1982 as a producer on Chariots of Fire, highlighted a recent FDA project aimed at the vital "tween" generation of 8 to 11-year-olds, a teaching resource designed to stimulate classroom debate about why copyright existed.

"Today, it's encouraging to report that this resource has been supplied, free upon request, to almost one in five primary schools in the UK – that's 4,000 out of a little over 20,000 schools," he said.

Speaking afterwards to the Guardian, Puttnam said the film industry itself also needed to adopt new ideas, if internet downloading was to be defeated. In particular, it should follow the example of the music industry and make limited content such as film clips free to viewers, he said.

During his speech, Puttnam challenged TV producers to come up with a successful show to capture the imagination of the British moviegoing public, which he said had powered the UK and Ireland box office to an all-time high of £1.06bn last year, up 11% year-on-year despite a 4.8% shrinking of the European economy over the same period. He said broadcasters should not be put off by "the well-rehearsed arguments regarding clip clearances", when there was a genuine opportunity to capitalise on the UK's current love affair with movies.

"Where on earth are the edgy magazine shows or the contemporary panel shows or the audience participation shows themed to the movies?" Puttnam asked. "The mass public interest in films – enjoyed by millions of people every week – is all but ignored in the current output of our national broadcasters. Here's a gap crying out to be filled with a smart, modern format."

"When TV producers are having to negotiate a fee for the clips they want to show – that's barmy," Puttnam said, after his speech. "Either accept that there's not going to be a programme of this kind on TV, or give them the bloody clips and be thrilled that they're being seen by millions of people."

He agreed that the industry needed to follow the example of the music industry, which routinely makes some content free to bloggers and online audiences in order to attract music lovers to check out new acts."These are the nonsenses that this industry has always been susceptible to," he added. "You are building the next generation of audiences and they should be all over it like a rash. It's this inability to see the big picture, this narrowness of thinking, which has for many many years muddled matters."

Puttnam suggested that the government's new digital economy bill, which is partly aimed at reducing internet piracy, might not be capable of bringing a halt to illegal downloading in its present form.

"For me it's a staging post," he said. "One of the mistakes made is allowing the ISPs to pretend they are not part of a retail chain. If you or I wanted to open a chemist shop we would have to pay attention to health and safety and the nature of the products that we sold. We couldn't just serve anyone, for instance. Somehow or other we've allowed the ISPs to drift into a mindset that's allowed them to think that they are somehow inured to the forces of the law. Government has failed to get that message across."

Puttnam said he felt that one of the best ways to encourage film fans to make legal purchases was to ask popular film-makers to join the education campaign. "You've got to get Ken Loach out there, Mike Leigh out there so that people understand that this is a cycle of finance," he said. "If you cut off their ability to raise money there aren't going to be any movies. There's a generation of film-makers who audiences have respect for, that have got to come out and make this clear."

During his speech, Puttnam suggested a rather more direct approach, in the shape of a change in the law to make the use of camcorders in cinemas specifically illegal. He also said film content must be available legally online "in ways consumers want, and at prices they can afford" if people were to be dissuaded from using illegal download sites.

"I don't believe for a second – and see no evidence – that today's young generation of consumers is inherently evil and has no intention of ever paying for anything," he said. "But multi-channel broadcasting and the web have brought a massive proliferation in viewing options and an explosion of choice, and as we've learned to our cost, content in a digital form is relatively easy to transfer and copy."

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Hugh Jackman steps in for Lipton ads

X-Men and Australia actor Hugh Jackman shows off dancing skills in worldwide campaign for iced tea brand

Australian actor Hugh Jackman, star of films including X-Men and Australia, is to show off his dancing skills in a global TV campaign for Lipton Ice Tea.

It is the first time that Jackman, perhaps best known as Wolverine in X-Men and the rugged stockman Drover opposite Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann's Australia, has appeared in a TV ad campaign. The first of two ads will break internationally from Monday.

One ad, "Tokyo Dancing Hotel", sees Jackman call on his theatrical skills in a choreographed routine reminiscent of his song-and-dance performance as a host at last year's Oscars. The second ad, "Hard Day's Work", sees Jackman in a love scene with Latin American actress Ana de la Reguera.

The ads were directed for the agency DDB Paris by Michael Gracey, the man responsible for Evian's Roller Babies and T-Mobile's flashmob-style dance.

"For Tokyo Dancing Hotel you see an image of Hugh Jackman standing, dancing on water with two Japanese girls in a rooftop garden and that single image becomes iconic and something that people will always reference back to Lipton," said Gracey.

Lipton Ice Tea, which is produced by Lipton in a joint venture with PepsiCo, signed Jackman in a three year-deal in January, identifying his performance at the Oscars as evidence of his appeal to a global fan base.

The campaign, which will run online in the UK, forms part of Lipton Ice Tea's "Drink Positive" marketing strategy, which launched earlier this year.

Lipton Ice Tea used celebrities in its TV advertising during the 1980s and early 1990s, including Magnum PI's Tom Selleck, Sylvester Stalloneand tennis star Jimmy Connors.

But the brand has not used a "face" since 2002, when Eric Cantona fronted a campaign across Europe.

• 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.

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Watch Hugh Jackman in a Lipton Ice Tea ad

X-Men and Australia actor stars in TV campaign for soft drinks brand

Clip joint: identical twins

On this week's clip joint, Spoom does a double take on the best film clips featuring identical twins

Identical twins or "multiples" as I believe they're more correctly termed, in a slightly unsettling, Minority Report sort of way, hold – for me, at least – a unique fascination. Can you imagine having someone who looks exactly like you hanging around all the time?

Actors probably wouldn't mind though. Any actor who loves themselves – and, if we're being honest, that's probably the majority – would give their right arm to play identical twins. What better way is there to show your range, your sheer, awards-worth versatility, than appearing as two different people in the same movie? Plus: double screen time! You do the maths.

No wonder they've proved popular fodder for the cinema, then – as Matt Lucas's Tweedledum and Tweedledee double-act in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland reminds us. So in honour of identical twins everywhere here are my top five onscreen siblings with the same face. Some are controlling, some are sweet and some are … well, some are something else.

Here are my picks, please give us yours below. And feel free to shout "Snap!" to any double post …

1) Boris Karloff (with great hair) plays the De Berghman brothers in The Black Room, a sinister tale with a strikingly good tagline: "Embraced by the Devil Monster … his kiss the password to oblivion!"

2) Warring sisters battle for the love of Glenn Ford in Curtis Bernhardt's 1946 melodrama A Stolen Life. Bette Davis does all manner of strange and clever tricks with her face in this amazing scene.

3) Ever wondered what two slightly fat, Nic Cages with afros would look like? Adaptation revealed all. Here, cocksure Donald gives socially stunted Charlie some life advice in a swamp while hiding from Meryl Streep.

4) Jeremy Irons creeps everybody out twice in David Cronenberg's classic Dead Ringers. Here we have double trouble as the twins discuss another set of twins.

5) "Come and play with us, Danny!" An untempting offer in an endlessly-referenced scene from The Shining.

On last week's Clip joint, Becky Carroll dished our her own personal awards for the best film clips featuring the Oscars. Here are her top prizewinners from your suggestions.

1) An Oscar-winning Matt Dillon takes his lead from Tom Hanks by inadvertently outing his mentor in the 90s comedy In and Out.

2) Mike Myers makes a blatant Oscar pitch with his tearful tour-de-force in Wayne's World. And in French, no less.

3) Does Myers have a monopoly on Oscar-themed comedy? Here he is again, getting shot down by an award-wielding Steven Spielberg on the film of the the film of Austin Powers.

4) Veering off-topic but impossible to ignore: your foolproof guide to making the perfect Oscar-bait blockbuster.

5) And the Oscar goes to … Mr Wormold for reminding us that Robert Downey Jr really was nominated for an Oscar for playing a dude who was playing a dude who was playing for an Oscar. Here's Kirk Lazarus out of Tropic Thunder.

Thanks to nodule, rossvross, windupbirdchronicles and steenbeck for taking the role of gallant nominees.

Fancy writing Clip joint? Email Catherine Shoard for more details.

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Cinema snacks: the latest projections

Would you buy a healthy snack to eat in the cinema or is half the fun of the flicks the terrible food?

This week, the CEO of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, urged cinemas to offer healthier snack options to movie goers.

Lynton was promoting the idea at the ShoWest convention of cinema owners in Las Vegas, encouraging the industry to help fight obesity - a large portion of sweet popcorn contains around 1,800 calories. He cited results from a survey showing that two-thirds of people said they'd be likely to buy healthy snacks if they were sold at cinemas. Suggestions apparently include fruit cups, vegetables with dips, yoghurt, granola bars, baked crisps and unbuttered, air-popped popcorn.

Let's leave aside the fact that the survey was taken in only 26 cinemas (or theaters, given it was in the States), and that there's often a gap between what people say in such surveys and what they do in reality, and give the idea some consideration.

Lynton doesn't so much want to banish popcorn and nachos from the auditorium (hardly surprising given that in the US cinema popcorn yields profits of 90 cents on the dollar) and would rather add healthier options, but this calls into question several aspects of the whole cinema experience.

Isn't shirking buttered popcorn and ice cream at the flicks a bit like shirking dessert at a Michelin-starred restaurant "because you're slimming"? In other words a complete waste of the treat? The point of big multiplex cinemas, surely, is that they offer spoonfed entertainment - big chairs, a big screen and a bit of quiet time. A trip to the cinema isn't supposed to be good for you, is it?

Is it now cultural law that what you eat should be so bad, it's good? Actually, I think environment has a lot to do with it. It's a real treat to find yourself in one of the smaller independent cinemas munching on cakes and sipping tea in a big comfy seat in a character-filled velvet-clad cinema. This might be partly because of the novelty of eating real food in such surroundings, or perhaps it's the winning fact that some of them let you take beer into the auditorium.

The Curzon chain, probably Britain's finest mini-chain of cinemas showing accessible art-house, leads the battalion with its offerings of popcorn, Maltesers and Coke alongside homemade cake from their Konditor & Cook concession, proper cocktails (a recently launched venture), wasabi peanuts and posh crisps. Sheffield's Showroom Workstation is an institution, showcasing Oscar-winning, art-house and auteur-led cinema, with a delightful café which allows you to take your choice of the traybakes, Derbyshire hot dogs and tea on offer into the cinema. Or my local, Richmix in Shoreditch, which serves up a very limited array of pic'n'mix and popcorn outside the screens and by default places an emphasis on the salad bar and fresh panini stands which are placed strategically right by the front door, thus winning the custom of the majority of punters. It's almost as if the sweet stand is there for diplomacy (if I'm really on a health drive I do the dirty and sneak in my own foodstuffs in a bag. Oh come on, you've all done it).

What do you prefer? Do you resent paying through the nose for fizzy ice or do you think half the fun of the cinema is the terrible food?

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Gordon Brown: our zombie PM | Ally Fogg

There is only one explanation for Gordon Brown's lumbering survival. He is actually a member of the great undead

Just a few months ago, we all agreed, Gordon Brown was a dead man walking. Any trace of fire had been extinguished from the eyes, which had sunk deep back into his puffy visage, his jaw hanging dumbly open as he lumbered towards electoral oblivion. Even such basic physiological functions as smiling seemed to be beyond him. One by one his detractors lined up, not to praise but to bury him.

But something odd happened. The would-be assassins found their reputations and careers splattered off the walls of Westminster while Gordon lumbered on. He stomped without blinking through the gory entrails of Clarke, Flint, Purnell, Hoon, Hewitt and the rest, all the time inching gradually closer to his ultimate foe and the impossible prize.

Even allegations of bestial temper, uncontrolled aggression and violent malice towards innocent furniture failed to dent his recovery. The very cream of political punditry scratched their heads in bemusement; their every prediction confounded, their augury embarrassed. That was because they missed the obvious explanation: for the last year or two, Gordon has been an Incredibly Strange Creature Who Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie. I can't pinpoint the exact date this happened, but can it be coincidence that a certain Dark Lord rejoined the central coven in October 2008? I think not.

Yes, we have our very own zombie prime minister and a quick sniff of the wind will tell you that people like zombies. We'll indulge them a lot. So what if Gordon bites the heads off his advisers and furiously disembowels the upholstery? Zombies will be zombies.

While some fools may be sceptical of my diagnosis, there can be no questioning the popularity of zombies. Since George A Romero's unsurpassed Living Dead trilogy of the 1970s, the zombie has been undisputed master of the monsters. While the seductive predation of the vampire may offer a thrilling frisson to the teenage virgin, and the simple savagery of the lycanthrope still resonates with our inner primitive animal, it is the zombie that has provided creative auteurs with a near-bottomless well of metaphor. Over the years, our undead friends have conveyed the mindless frenzy of consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, and the brainless absorption of reality TV in Charlie Brooker's Dead Set. They have played the stormtroopers of fascism in an entire subgenre of underground shockers and even the tragic, innocent victims of voracious global capitalism and big pharma in Wes Craven's obscure classic The Serpent and the Rainbow. Later this year, hedonistic youth culture will get the treatment, thanks to Warp Films and Noel Fielding, in I Spit on Your Rave. With the celluloid barely dry on Zombieland and The Crazies, there is no sign that our love of zombies will be abating any time soon.

Within all of those, however, there is one overriding symbolic theme, and that is the relentless creep of mortality. As Simon Pegg argued brilliantly, the zombie is the literal personification of death, an ever-present, creeping stalker, which can be dodged for a while but which might pop out and munch on our vitals at any moment. That surely explains our ongoing fascination with the creatures, but something else too. It explains why, of all monsters in human imagination, none is quite so funny as the zombie. As any comedian will tell you, there's nothing more hilarious than death. We cannot defeat it, we cannot avoid it, and we can only dodge it for so long. Our only defence is laughter.

David Cameron might well despair at the true nature of the task facing him. However, a lifetime's study of zombie avoidance strategy has put me in a position to offer him some advice. Step one should be to immediately sack Andy Coulson and replace him with the incomparable Bruce Campbell, a man who has surely defeated more zombies than anyone alive. New Labour might be pretty damned evil, but they still score lower on the frightmeter than the massed Army of Darkness. Just.

Secondly, nobody ever stopped a zombie with a billboard campaign. Forget the slogans and the party political broadcasts and go straight for the power tools, the sawn-off shotgun, or ideally the lawnmower, as demonstrated in Peter Jackson's Braindead. I've checked the Representation of the People Act, and while there are clear sections on campaign contributions, false advertising and bribing candidates, there is nary a word on decapitation, dismemberment and immolation. So poll what you like, Mr Ipsos-Mori, Dave's got a chainsaw.

Finally, Cameron should probably come to terms with the most profound aspect to the zombie story, the one shocking, self-evident truth: zombies always win in the end. Yes, you might think you've seen them off and finally found your safe space, behind a heavy black door with armed guards outside. But somewhere out there the virus is still leaking, the survivor's bite is still festering or the cursed amulet sits innocently in a junk shop. Whatever else happens, there has to be a sequel.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'll be keeping a close eye on those Milibands.

• Thanks to neilmac1921 who suggested this topic in our fourth birthday open thread

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India's film industry 'to grow 50% by 2014'

Bollywood set to reverse recent shrinkage, while US entertainment market is also expanding, though at a slower rate

India's troubled film industry will back bounce back, and is set for growth of more than 50% by 2014, according to a new report. Bollywood has struggled in the past year, shrinking by 14% to $1.9bn, but yesterday's announcement from the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry and research company KPMG suggested it would rise to $3bn within four years.

The industry's travails have been a combination of the global financial crisis, a stand-off between studios and cinema owners and a series of box office failures, reports Variety. The arrival of the new Indian Premier League cricket tournament is also said to have hit profits.

The relative success of the Indian film industry in the last decade has not been lost on Hollywood. Will Smith's production company is producing two films with Indian counterpart UTV, while the sub-continent's Reliance Entertainment is a major backer for Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks.

The US's entertainment media market, which includes TV and gaming industries as well as film, remains the largest in the world. It is currently projected to grow by 5.3% year-on-year, reaching $754bn by 2011.

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The sorority of the Ring | Cath Elliott

How can I be a feminist and a The Lord of the Rings geek? Because Tolkien has more to offer women than critics may think

I know it's not exactly The Second Sex or The Women's Room or any of the other great titles you might expect to find on a feminist's bookshelf, but I love Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Well, OK I am: but only a bit.

And while I may have all the films on extended DVD, and the collector's gift box sets that came complete with the statues of the Argonath and Gollum; and while I may also have my own, almost complete set of collector's models, with display stands, that doesn't make me a nerd. And nor does the fact that I went to the Lord of the Rings exhibition when it came to London's Science Museum back in 2003 (where I came away with a fantastic poster of the Witch King). It just means that I'm a fan. Or something.

Anyway, I don't hold with the theory that LOTR geekdom is an exclusively male preserve. In fact some of the most ardent LOTR fans that I've ever come across have been women. Take my aunt for instance: she reads LOTR from cover to cover every single year, and has been doing so for as long as any of us can remember. Then there's a former colleague of mine, Lucy, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of LOTR, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion is matched only by her equally encyclopaedic knowledge of Star Trek.

I also don't hold with the view that LOTR has nothing to offer women, or that it's about nothing more than, to quote Bidisha: "a club of white men (who) flee (a) a big burning vagina and (b) some black guys in hoods". OK, so it's not the most progressive read you're ever likely to come across, with its all-male fellowship and its dearth of female characters, but it's also not the misogynist tome that some have tried to paint it as.

Granted, most of the women in LOTR are nothing more than background characters, but there are three (four if you count Shelob, but I don't because she's a spider) who have significant roles to play in the plot. There's Arwen for instance, Aragorn's love interest, who defies her father's wishes and renounces her Elven immortality so that she can remain with Aragorn in Middle Earth. Then there's Galadriel, co-ruler of Lothlórien and giver of absolutely spot-on gifts. And last but by no means least, there's Éowyn, niece of King Théoden and heroic slayer of the Witch-King of Angmar, Lord of all the Nazgûl.

For me, Éowyn is up there with all the best kick-ass feminist heroes. She's brave, she's rebellious, and most importantly of all, she's gender non-conformist. In fact, it's her refusal to bow to patriarchal conditioning and accept her designated gender role that ultimately saves the day.

Desperate to be allowed to fight alongside the men, and thwarted from doing so by both Théoden and Aragorn, Éowyn asks: "Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?" And when Aragorn asks her what she fears if it's not pain or death, she replies: "A cage. To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire."

Tolkien might not have had much time for women as some have claimed, but in Éowyn he showed that he certainly had some understanding of the frustrations we experience when we're expected to conform to sexist stereotypes.

In the end, of course, Éowyn disguises herself as a man and goes into battle anyway. And its then, when she's face to face with the Witch-King in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, that we understand she absolutely had to fight, and that the war couldn't have been won without her. "Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!" screams the Witch-King as Éowyn draws her sword. But Éowyn simply laughs at him, and retorts: "But no living man am I! You look upon a woman." And then she pulls off her disguise and kills him.

There's plenty more to be said about Éowyn, about her suicidal tendencies and her ultimate decision to abandon soldiering and become a healer instead, but at the end of the day it's her pivotal role in the plot that matters. Éowyn disproves the myth that The Lord of the Rings is a story that could only appeal to male geeks, and she also disproves the myth that Tolkien was incapable of creating fully rounded female characters.

Obviously Éowyn's not the only reason I love The Lord of the Rings, but when people question how, as a feminist, I can be a LOTR fan, she's definitely my excuse, and I'm sticking with her.

• Thanks to JayReilly who suggested this topic in our birthday open thread.

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Politicians and their pasts | Hadley Freeman

Whether it's David Cameron or Lib Dem candidate Anna Arrowsmith, it's not where a politician went to school that interests me, it's what they did afterwards

Wow, personality: it's so in these days. So we are told from the world of politics, anyway, although how a political wife describing her husband as if she were in a 1950s sitcom ("Oh, that pesky man – never picks up his socks, he does") imbues him with a "personality" is debatable.

This would be a perfect time to talk about the leaders' wives because, heavens above, the only thing harder to find in the media recently than a political wife has been complaints about the amount of coverage of said wives. Yet let's resist the siren call of Sam Cam and her dolphin tattoo (only in politics could that tattoo be seen as rock'n'roll, not a permanent badge from the Girl Guides for achievements in sloaniness) and focus instead on the "back stories" of two political figures which have attracted much attention over the last few days – namely, David Cameron's Eton days, and Lib Dem candidate Anna Arrowsmith's years as a porn director. Insert obvious joke here. And then another involving the word "insert".

That Cameron emerged from the playing fields of Eton has long been a matter of record, and is obvious anyway the minute he opens his mouth. Yet in the big ol' ITV plug for Cameron on Sunday night, almost as much time was spent on justifying or decrying Cameron's Etonian background as on, well, anything.

Like Mr Faraday, the American arriviste in The Remains of the Day who fails to appreciate the importance of dinner-party protocol, a politician's alma mater has never really bothered me – or, at least, it bothers me a lot less than some other journalists, particularly those who kept it real by being schooled in the hardcore ghetto of Oxbridge.

My nationality is, no doubt, the cause of this blind spot. We Americans don't mind politicians going to posh schools – in fact, for better or worse, we tend to take it for granted. No, what would bother most Americans about the present political situation in this country is an unelected leader ruling Britain for the last three years. But then, this is a royalist land.

Where someone went to school is a much less interesting subject than what someone did after school. Where someone went to school is merely indicative of the aspirations of their parents; what someone does afterwards is a lot more revealing about the person, and to get a truly interesting story here one must turn to the Liberal Democrats (first time I ever typed that sentence, that's for sure).

Nick Clegg seems to be under the impression that Arrowsmith's gender makes her involvement with porn OK – or, at least, OK in the eyes of women voters, proving the Lib Dems think women are just as sappy as the Conservatives ("My wife, my secret weapon") and Labour ("My husband, my hero") do. This is not that far off from what the Republicans tried to do with Sarah Palin during the US election: sure, she's against abortion or, in Arrowsmith's case, a porn director, but hey! She's a woman! Do you see that, ladies?

It's rare to find a fig leaf in the porn world, but the frequent claim that Arrowsmith made "feminist porn" has the distinct air of delusional coy euphemism. It doesn't matter if the porn is for men or for women, any more than it matters if a thief is a man or a woman – even if the latter claimed stealing the car was done in revenge for centuries of sexism. All pornography exaggerates and fetishises sex, and to claim this is somehow connected to feminism is akin to Lady Gaga insisting all the crotch-shots in her latest video reflect female empowerment.

"The unfortunate truth is that there are far too few female MPs in this country," Arrowsmith wrote in a delightfully pretentious piece in the Observer. And while this is true, as Gary Younge said in this paper on Monday, greater representation is not the same as greater equality, which brings us back to Palin.

So back to the original argument: porn or Eton? Cameron freely admits he had "a very privileged" upbringing, while Arrowsmith insists she is merely a "pro-sex feminist". I am, however, yet to encounter any feminists who are anti-sex or, incidentally, make porn – so it seems that Eton is the more real, more honest choice. I feel slightly soiled.

The curse of the Oscar

"There's going to be a lot of speculation about [Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes's split]," sniffed GMTV's Carla Romano yesterday, shaking her head at the very thought of it, just after suggesting that "maybe, perhaps" the divorce was spurred on by the divorce storyline in Revolutionary Road, which the couple worked on together.

Well played, Carla. There is always an inverse correlation between people who know anything about a celebrity's personal life, and the amount they talk about it. So, as fascinating as it would be to speculate on the role of novelist Richard Yates in Winslet's love life, a more fact-based point would be that winning a best actress Oscar is officially bad for your personal life. Fact!

Out of the last 10 winners, six broke up with their partners soon after the ceremony (Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank, Reese Witherspoon, Winslet), while Nicole Kidman gazumped tradition by ditching Cruise the year before she won for The Hours. Whatever could this mean? That men are threatened by Oscar? That all actresses are husband-hoppers? God, speculation is so distasteful. Has anyone checked how Sandra Bullock's marriage is doing?

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

 

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The BBC wins 18 prizes out of 25 main categories at the RTS Awards, including best soap for EastEnders.

Krankies back after panto tumble
The Krankies return to pantomime in Glasgow for the first time since "Wee Jimmy" almost died in an on-stage accident.

Spooks star 'cast as Luther King'
British actor David Oyelowo is to play Martin Luther King in Precious director Lee Daniels' next film, according to reports.

Talking Shop
Meet the man who dresses Cher in her outrageous costumes

In the frame
Who carried out the biggest art heist of all time?

Shock television
French fake show turns contestants to electrocutioners

In pictures
Robert Pattinson on the red carpet

Behind the veil
Letters by reclusive author JD Salinger go on show

Winslet split
Film couple's career and marriage in profile

In pictures
Stars turn out for Royal Television Awards

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

 

Bullock no-show linked to husband?

Sandra Bullock has pulled out of the UK premiere of The Blind Side after her husband Jesse James was linked with a tattooed model.

R-Patz mania at London premiere

Robert Pattinson was welcomed by hordes of screaming fans as he stepped out in London for the premiere of his new movie Remember Me.

Jim Carrey's tomato juice diet

Jim Carrey was left drained and "exhausted" after embarking on an extreme diet to shed the pounds for his new film, I Love You Phillip Morris.

Ben Stiller: I feel grown up at 44

Ben Stiller has revealed he feels like he has finally grown up - at the age of 44.

Seyfried condemns focus on image

Amanda Seyfried has branded the acting world "twisted" for putting so much emphasis on being thin.

Rose McGowan lands role in Conan

Rose McGowan has signed up to star as a femme fatale in Conan.

Cillian: Inception is 'special'

Cillian Murphy has revealed Christopher Nolan's Inception will be "something special".

Toy Story 3's abandoned toys focus

Toy Story 3 poses a new question for the gang from the 1995 hit that launched computer animation into the feature-film world: Is there life for a toy after your kid grows up?

Sandra pulls out of UK premiere

Sandra Bullock has pulled out of her scheduled appearance at the UK premiere of The Blind Side, causing the event to be cancelled.

Emily Mortimer's wasted education

Emily Mortimer has confessed she feels she wasted her degree in Russian by becoming an actress.

Sigourney gets fangs into Vamps

Sigourney Weaver has joined the cast of horror rom-com Vamps.

Director trio up for Breaking Dawn

Gus Van Sant, Sofia Coppola and Bill Condon are reportedly in the running to direct the Twilight finale Breaking Dawn.

Byrne appointed culture ambassador

Gabriel Byrne has been appointed Ireland's ambassador for culture.

Naomie chilled by Cornish Pirates

Naomie Harris wouldn't relish the prospect of filming the next instalment of Pirates Of The Caribbean in Britain.

Shia talks about Carey romance

Shia LaBeouf has opened up about his romance with Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan.

Kristen Stewart's no rock star

Kristen Stewart may play a rock star on screen, but has admitted she isn't one in real life.

Jim Carrey wins top website gong

Jim Carrey's official website has taken top prize at the SXSW (South By Southwest) Web Awards.

Girlfriend of Douglas's son freed

The girlfriend of actor Michael Douglas's son has been freed after spending seven months in jail for becoming embroiled in Cameron Douglas's downward spiral with drugs.

Robert Downey Jr in Gravity talks?

Robert Downey Jr is in talks to play an astronaut in Gravity.

Gabourey's mum defends her size

Gabourey Sidibe's mother Alice Tan Ridley has hit back at outspoken US radio host Howard Stern for his comments about the Precious star's size.

Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut

Dustin Hoffman is teaming up with BBC Films to make his directorial debut.

Ryan Phillippe for Captain America?

Ryan Phillippe is the latest actor to reportedly be in talks to play Captain America.

Kate Winslet and husband separate

Kate Winslet and her husband Sam Mendes have separated after nearly seven years of marriage.

Paul Bettany joins The Tourist

Paul Bettany has joined Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp in The Tourist.

Seyfried and Bloom join Nobbs cast

Amanda Seyfried and Orlando Bloom have joined the cast of period drama Albert Nobbs.

Garcia wants to work with Hopkins

Andy Garcia says he's working flat out to secure financial backing to make a movie with Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Garcia steps out with daughter

Andy Garcia was every inch the proud dad at the Los Angeles premiere of his movie City Island.

Farrell, Duvall set for Tribeca

Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall are among the stars taking films to the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Carey Mulligan for Dragon Tattoo?

Carey Mulligan is rumoured to be the favourite to star in an English remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Hurt Locker No 1 in DVD chart

Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker is No 1 in the Official DVD charts.

Eric Idle up for Spamalot movie

Eric Idle has revealed he'd love to do a film adaptation of Spamalot.

Drew curious to see herself age

Drew Barrymore has said she won't have cosmetic surgery - because she is curious about how she'll look when she's older.

Ugly Betty's Henry joins The Ledge

Ugly Betty star Christopher Gorham is joining Liv Tyler in The Ledge.

GI Joe star Taghmaoui joins Conan

GI Joe's Said Taghmaoui is to appear in upcoming action movie Conan.

Jaden wins award for Karate Kid

Jaden Smith has been named ShoWest Breakthrough Male Star Of The Year for his role in The Karate Kid.

Alice In Wonderland still US No 1

Johnny Depp's latest movie Alice In Wonderland is still at the top of the US box office.

Forest Whitaker for Treasure movie?

Forest Whitaker is in talks to star in Little Treasure.

Airplane! actor Graves dies aged 83

Peter Graves, the tall, stalwart actor perhaps best known for his portrayal of Jim Phelps, leader of a gang of special agents who battled evil conspirators in the long-running television series Mission: Impossible, died at 83.

Shortt champions young filmmakers

Comic turned actor Pat Shortt has given his backing to the next generation of Irish filmmakers.

Penn helping hand for Haiti victims

Hollywood actor Sean Penn is helping out with earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

Jennifer Aniston on stylish stunts

Jennifer Aniston has joked about how she manages to look so glamorous while on the run in new action movie The Bounty Hunter.

Tate 'targeted by poison pen note'

Police are investigating claims that comedian Catherine Tate was targeted by a poison pen letter writer.

Haim 'had illegal prescription'

The late actor Corey Haim had a fraudulent prescription for a powerful painkiller that authorities said was obtained through a major drug ring.

No contest plea in burglaries case

Prosecutors said a man pleaded no contest to receiving a Rolex watch stolen from Orlando Bloom's house during a spate of celebrity burglaries.

No going blonde for Sandra Bullock

Sandra Bullock has revealed she won't become a full-time blonde.

Film festival to honour Bachchan

The Hong Kong International Film Festival plans to honour Indian screen star Amitabh Bachchan with a lifetime achievement award at the event's Asian Film Awards.

Haim probe: No illegal drugs found

Authorities investigating the death of Corey Haim have recovered four prescription drug bottles bearing the actor's name - but no illegal substances.

Leonardo DiCaprio: Family important

Leonardo DiCaprio has revealed he is starting to think about family "more and more".

 

Australia's earliest film seen for the first time
Long before Mel Gibson fought Outback biker gangs in Mad Max, Nicole Kidman sang and danced her way through Moulin Rouge, and Paul Hogan wrestled giant reptiles in Crocodile Dundee, there was Patineur Grotesque: a short black and white film featuring a rollerskating busker with a white hand cheekily painted on his bottom clowning around in a park.

Sony chairman Michael Lynton calls for healthy alternative to popcorn in cinemas
For many, a night out at the movies would not be complete without the sound of popcorn and chocolate wrappers from the stalls. One of the most powerful studio bosses in Hollywood, however, would like to see cinemas selling healthier snacks.

Curtain call for a showbiz marriage as Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet split
When Kate Winslet landed a Best Actress Oscar for The Reader with her sixth nomination last year she knew exactly whom to thank. Shaking with emotion she told the watching world: “I’m so lucky to have a wonderful husband and two beautiful children who let me do what I love and who love me just the way that I am.”

Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes separate
British actress Kate Winslet and her director husband Sam Mendes have separated, their lawyers announced today.

Mission Impossible star Peter Graves dies of heart attack at 83
The actor Peter Graves, who starred in the 1960s TV show Mission: Impossible and the Airplane! movies, died on Sunday after returning home from brunch in Los Angeles with his family.

John and Kaye Ure sell lost Christmas story to Hollywood's Furst Films
When a café owner went to the shops to buy a Christmas turkey and was then unable to return home for a month because of the blizzards, the last thing that she expected was worldwide fame and the attention of Hollywood.

Green Zone

Rab C Nesbitt inspired Mad Hatter accent says Johnny Depp
It is method acting Govan-style. Johnny Depp, the Hollywood actor, has revealed that he perfected his Glaswegian accent for his role as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland by watching old episodes of Rab C Nesbitt.

Sandra Bullock on having her moment
You already know, dear reader, how Sandra Bullock’s Oscar night turns out, but at the time of going to press, I am reduced to crossing my fingers for her. Sandy, as the people who know her call her, has come a long way since she first starred in NBC’s television spin-off of the film Working Girl. In fact, she is now the most reliably popular female star in Hollywood (Forbes has her earnings at more than $100m), and, holed up at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, she now waits to learn whether her role in The Blind Side has earned her an Oscar for best actress.$

Bollywood musical Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge runs for 15 years
The fading adverts for Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, arguably India’s favourite Bollywood musical, implore audiences to “come fall in love all over again”. At one Mumbai cinema they have being doing just that — every day, for the past 15 years.

Sword and sandals epics are back
Somewhere in the North of Britain, AD117. A rain-sodden band of Roman soldiers from the infamous Ninth Legion bemoan their lot while keeping guard at midnight in a fort. It’s the start of Neil Marshall’s Ancient-era action movie Centurion, and the hero, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) grumbles, “I know this enemy well. They will not be drawn into open combat. This is a new kind of war!”

Kreutzer Sonata

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Shutter Island

Green Zone

Thomas Turgoose grows up
Thomas Turgoose nods earnestly and begins. “I can tell you this now,” says the 18-year-old who made his name in Shane Meadows’s This is England. “I was a little shit. I was abusive to teachers. I threw chairs. I got expelled from school. I used to walk the streets smashing windows and stuff like that. Even now I often getting people saying: ‘Hey, you owe me money for my windscreen!’ ”

Kathryn Bigelow's great leap forward — or was it?
The Great Leap Forward supposedly occurred this week when Kathryn Bigelow became the first female director to win an Oscar in the 82 years since the awards began. In fact, anyone in the mainstream film industry will tell you that Bigelow is an Amazonian aberration, not proof of a coming trend. A recent study of the 100 top-grossing films showed that 3 per cent of them were made by women. Great directing requires a level of insanity, brutality and selfishness that few women C and men — can sensibly sustain. As Billy Wilder once explained: “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”

The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights

Hachi: A Dog’s Tale

Corey Haim dies, aged 38
The Eighties teen heart-throb Corey Haim has died, aged 38.

Oscars organisers intentionally snubbed Farrah Fawcett
Farrah Fawcett was intentionally left out of the "in memoriam" segment at Sunday’s Oscars, organisers have admitted.

Alice in Wonderland smashes Avatar’s box office record
Alice in Wonderland has smashed Avatar’s record as the most successful opening weekend for a 3D film.

Birth of a star, Carey Mulligan, lifts gloom for British talent
Britons were in contention for sixteen Oscars on Sunday night but won only two — for sound mixing and costume design. On the face of it the 2010 Academy Awards were a sobering comedown after the heroics of 2009 when Kate Winslet won a Best Actress Oscar with her sixth nomination and Slumdog Millionaire won eight including Best Film and Best Director for Danny Boyle. However, on a night of few surprises, there was ample evidence of Hollywood’s love affair with British talent and, in Carey Mulligan, a bona fide new world star.

Hurt Locker explodes on to the scene to help change Hollywood for ever
The Hurt Locker was a slow-burning fuse that ignited imaginations and this year’s Oscar nominations, ending in a big bang that changed Hollywood for ever. On Sunday night, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in the 82 years of the awards to win Best Director — for a resolutely masculine war movie. Bigelow had barely finished her thanks when she was back on stage with both hands full, clutching a second gold statuette for Best Picture.

The Oscars: Let’s get this party started
This is like an obstacle course!” booms a voice from behind me. Then: “Hang on, I just need to climb over this . . . dah . . . oof!” A heavy, pointy metal object almost cracks me in the back of the head. I turn around, and there’s Sandra Bullock, Oscar statue in hand, almost falling headlong over a lighting cable as she pushes her way through a mass of tuxedos in search of her chauffeured S-Class Mercedes.

Film News from Times Online
Film News from Times Online

 

Why is women's fiction so miserable?
As the Orange Prize judge admits she 'felt like a social worker' reading a slew of misery-fuelled novels, Jojo Moyes asks whether female writers are derided if they give their fiction a happy ending

Twilight star Robert Pattinson launches new film
Sreaming fans greet Robert Pattinson at Remember Me launch.

Zehetmair Quartet, Wigmore Hall, review
The Zehetmair Quartet gave hyper-alert performances at the Wigmore Hall, but strained too hard for vividness. Rating: * * *

George Clarke and his fight to restore Britain's architectual treasures
The presenter of Channel 4's new series The Restoration man writes about his TV mission to save some of the country's quirkier buildings.

Eigengrau and A Sentimental Journey, review
Eigengrau is manipulative and unpleasant while A Sentimental Journey passes the time harmlessly enough. Rating: Eigengrau * *; Sentimental Journey * * *

Lady GaGa's Telephone video
The outrageous video for Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' has become an instant global phenomenon.

Juliet and her Romeo at the Bristol Old Vic, review
A production set in a care home reinvigorates an over-familiar play with intelligence, imagination and rare tenderness. Rating: * * * *

Chatsworth House: a masterpiece in every room
Chatsworth is one of England's grandest country piles. It has just reopened following a £14 million refit.

Photography sites of the week
Every week we scour the Internet for interesting, inspiring or amusing sites and stories related to photography.

Sisters at the Sheffield Crucible Studio, review
Stephanie Street's Sisters at the Sheffield Crucible Studio is a richly absorbing show. Rating: * * * *

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

Sons of Cuba: fighting for survival - and Fidel
A moving documentary reveals the sacrifices young Cuban boxers will make for their dreams.

Agony and Ivory
Dominic Nahr documents the vast killings of Africa's elephants for ivory.

Agony and Ivory
The Chinese lust for ivory has led to the vast killing of Africa's elephants. Is it too late to save them?

Bebel Gilberto: All in One, CD review
It's the more moodily reflective acoustic material that best suits Bebel Gilberto's exquisitely composed delivery.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Picasso set to raise £30m for charity
A Pablo Picasso masterpiece owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber's charity is expected to raise more than £30 million when it goes under the hammer this year, Christie's said.

Orange prize judge tells authors: 'spare me your misery'
Daisy Goodwin, the chair of this year's Orange prize panel, has criticised the 'grim' nature of modern women's fiction, saying judging the award made her feel "like a social worker".

Royal Television Society Awards shun talent shows
The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, two of Simon Cowell's hit TV shows, were overlooked at the Royal Television Society Awards.

David Beckham's Achilles injury commemorated by Poet Laureate
A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy immortalises David Beckham's Achilles injury in a poem that compares the former England captain to the classical warrior.

John Grisham: best-selling author's novels to be sold as e-books online
The author, who has sold more than 250 million hard copies, announced that all of his political and legal thrillers will be sold as e-books.

How Billy Elliot swept the globe
On the fifth anniversary of the show seen by millions, Sarah Crompton talks to its creators .

Jerusalem: whatever happened to sensible prices?
The cost of West End tickets risks deterring the young from seeing a play they can't afford to miss.

The ENO's Katya Kabanova at the Coliseum, review
David Alden's Katya Kabanova never suggests the cramping smallness of a village but cast and conducting are exceptionally good. Rating: * * * *

John Bishop tour, review
Soaraway Scouser John Bishop looks set to become a comedy circuit fixture. Rating: * * * *

Dom Joly: 'Dressing as Tintin nearly got me beaten up'
Trigger Happy TV's Dom Joly explains why he's made a special tribute to the famous boy reporter.

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

 

Curse of the Oscars strikes again: Sandra Bullock's husband is accused of affair with tattooed lady

Michelle McGee said she called James her 'Vanilla Gorilla' and has revealed salacious details of their time together. Bullock became James's third wife five years ago.

Martin Clunes recreates Reginald Perrin's fake suicide for new series

Following the first series of the BBC remake Reggie Perrin last year, Clunes is reprising his role as the executive suffering a midlife crisis who fakes his own death.

Kirsty Gallacher denies online rumours that she had an affair with Tiger Woods

The rumours have been ricocheting across the internet since revelations emerged about Woods's prolific infidelity.

Peter Crouch and his footballer friends count their cash after cheering home a winner at the races

Lee Cattermole and Titus Bramble were seen counting bundles of £50 notes as they placed bets at the Cheltenham Fesitval.

Time to pay the plastic surgeon another visit? Heidi Montag reveals dimply thighs

After recently undergoing 10 plastic surgery treatments in search of perfection, it came as a surprise to see reality star Heidi Montag sporting dimply thighs.

Is Mrs Ross trying to be even more outrageous than her husband Jonathan?

There's always been something of the princess about privately-educated Jane. A wild child in her mid-teens, she would go clubbing in green lipstick, taking a kettle lined with fur as a bizarre handbag.

'I'll read the TV news in the nude': BBC presenter fights for tax relief on her clothes bill

For those in the public eye, finding the right style can be particularly time-consuming - and expensive.

Why we women just can't warm to Kate Winslet

When Jennifer Aniston's latest love affair imploded, millions of women across the globe felt her pain. News that fellow A-lister Kate Winslet has split from husband Sam Mendes has had a very different effect.

Now David's crocked, will lonely Victoria finally take control of Brand Beckham?

Although the injury will trigger a major shift in the balance of power in their relationship, this crisis will not make the couple's long-distance marriage any simpler.

Green Zone: Matt Damon's Bourne again in Baghdad

Director Paul Greengrass teams up again with movie star Matt Damon - their previous outings together were the last two Bourne sagas - to create a preachy political thriller disguised as an action flick.

Shutter Island: Scorsese's Psycho is a stylish, scary masterpiece

Shutter Island won't attract universally favourable reviews, but that is not because it is bad. It's just unusual, outrageous and made with a splendid disregard for 'refined' critical taste.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: It's just tattoo much to believe...

Thanks to Wallander on the telly, many of us are familiar with the idea that Sweden is a sexist, racist society, and Swedish capitalists are murderers who will do anything for a quick buck.

Hachi: A Dog's Tale - Cute and cuddly, but enough about Mr Gere

Some may think it's brave of Richard Gere to co-star with a small, furry animal, but that's just what he does in this painstakingly innocuous family film.

Alice In Wonderland: Burton's epic is just like a quest found in role-playing computer games

Writer Linda Woolverton has merely followed Terry Gilliam's example in taking Carroll's nonsense poem Jabberwocky and dramatising that.

Ondine: The plot of Neil Jordan's film is a bit fishy...

The plot of this film depends on our willing suspension of disbelief, as the young woman's singing helps our hero catch record quantities of fish.

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

 

Aiming for truth in Baghdad


NOT MANY people saw Paul Greengrass's Oscar-nominated United 93, at least in comparison to his Bourne blockbusters with Matt Damon, because the 9/11 subject matter was clearly so distressing. His latest picture, Green Zone, feels a whole lot more depressing than the story of Flight 93, the hijacked airliner brought down by a passenger revolt.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review and trailer


IS there anyone who hasn't read the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy? They are the kind of page-turning treats that encourage you to lose track of time. Niels Arden Oplev's film of the first novel, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is a faithful adaptation.

Hachi: A Dog's Story review and trailer


THERE isn't a surer way to make a grown man cry than a celebration of unconditional canine loyalty.

White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights review and teaser


IN 2007 Jack and Meg White undertook one of the more unconventional tours of their career, playing small shows in small towns in every province of Canada.

The Kreutzer Sonata review and trailer


IT'S 10 years since director Bernard Rose and actor Danny Huston collaborated on ivansxtc.

Green Zone review and trailer


THE Hurt Locker may be the least commercially successful Oscar-winner in living memory.

The Ape review


JESPER Ganslandt's edgy, unconventional The Ape (Apan) is a good example of what can be achieved with a modest budget and an acute focus.

Shutter Island review and trailer


NOBODY is more steeped in film history than Martin Scorsese.

Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland beats Avatar at British box office


TIM BURTON'S 3D fantasy Alice In Wonderland has beaten Avatar in the box office sales race, taking £10.5million at cinemas in its opening weekend.

Oscars 2010: Full list of Academy Award winners


IT WAS a night of triumph for The Hurt Locker at last night's Oscars, as the Iraq war thriller scooped six Academy Awards.

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

 

Flamenco: Sara Baras: Royal Albert Hall, London


THERE is something wilfully controlled about Sara Baras.

London Assurance: National Theatre, London


THE Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault was the theatrical toast of London on March 4, 1841, with this rip-roaring comedy.

The Sleeping Beauty: Royal Ballet, Birmingham Hippodrome


THE BRB's first production in the year of its 20th anniversary could hardly be more auspicious. Sir Peter Wright's 1984 version of Petipa's classic juggernaut is an absolute stunner.

Tamerlano: Royal Opera, Royal Opera House


IN THE days before the first night of this new Covent Garden production there was a flurry of seats being offered for sale on eBay. The great Placido Domingo had dropped out through ill health and his fan club was jumping ship.

La Fille Mal Gardee: The Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, London


JUST when you think you've seen everything Carlos Acosta has to give, he delivers a performance of such warmth and mischievous charm that you see him with fresh eyes.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies: Adelphi Theatre, London


LOVE NEVER DIES has suffered a rocky journey to the stage.

Satyagraha by Philip Glass: English National Opera, London Coliseum


HALFWAY through the first act of this modern opera, I found myself wondering: Is this one of the most exquisite productions I have ever seen on a London stage, or is one of the most pretentious things I have ever seen outside an art gallery?

Hedda Gabler: Theatre Royal, Bath


JUDGING from the front of the -programme, it is tempting to assume that Ibsen's most famous play has been transformed into a rip-roaring musical called Hedda Get Your Gun: we see an unnervingly beautiful Rosamund Pike brandishing a pair of pistols a la Annie Oakley.

Phantom Of The Opera sequel Love Never Dies: Ramin Karimloo interview


MARK SHENTON meets Ramin Karimloo, who is facing the biggest challenge of his life as he prepares to play The Phantom Of The Opera again in the show's sequel Love Never Dies, which opens in the West End on Tuesday.

Danza Contemporanea De Cuba: Brighton Dome


IF NOTHING else Cuba's most prestigious modern dance company knows how to grab attention from the start.

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

 

Kevin Costner to be a dad again?

Kevin Costner is reportedly about to enjoy fatherhood again - for the seventh time.

Amy Poehler expecting second baby?

Amy Poehler and husband Will Arnett are expecting their second child, according to reports.

Stephen Fry is top dinner date

Stephen Fry has been voted the country's most desirable dinner companion.

Robert Pattinson is all smiles at Remember Me premiere in London

It’s taken a few years but grumpy vampire R-Pattz has learnt to smile – and even be a bit charming.

Jason Manford considers retiring

Jason Manford has revealed he is already thinking of retirement.

Demi left speechless by Ashton

Demi Moore has revealed she was so struck by Ashton Kutcher that she was often left speechless.

Ben Stiller: I feel grown up at 44

Ben Stiller has revealed he feels like he has finally grown up - at the age of 44.

Cheryl Cole: I fancy a pot-bellied bloke

Form an orderly queue please, gentlemen...

Box Tops star Alex Chilton dies

American singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, known for his influential work with the Box Tops and Big Star bands, has died aged 59.

Fishermen seek to storm into charts

A group of Cornish fishermen has netted a major record deal - and aims to sail to the top of the charts with sea shanties.

Parky faces grilling from Gene Hunt

Michael Parkinson finds the tables turned when he is the one under interrogation for a spoof edition of TV hit Ashes To Ashes.

Fiennes tackles literary classics

Joseph Fiennes is to get fans' pulses racing with literary readings in an adult version of Jackanory.

I hope Jedward enjoyed the journey

Jedward, X Factor’s Duracell hermaphrodites, have been dropped by record label Sony after their debut single flopped.

T4 host Miquita Oliver taken off air after swearing at US star Ke$ha

Miquita Oliver has been suspended from T4 for having a potty-mouthed pop about Kesha.

John Terry quizzed by police over steward's broken leg

John Terry was questioned by police and breath-tested after he hit a security guard while leaving Chelsea in his Range Rover – then drove off.

Sandra Bullock axes UK trip as tattoo model claims fling with husband

Sandra Bullock has axed a planned UK tour amid claims her husband Jesse James has been cheating on her.

The new lunch hour beauty boosters

No pain? No downtime? Low-cost? Michelle Margherita tests the next generation of non-surgical beauty tricks to see if they deliver what they promise

TV presenter Kirsty Gallacher denies she had affair with Tiger Woods

TV presenter Kirsty Gallacher last night denied worldwide rumours that she had an affair with Tiger Woods.

Sian Williams: I'll read the news naked in tax protest

BBC news presenter Sian Williams said she would read the news naked to prove her clothes budget should be tax deductible.

Snoop Dogg set for Malice N Wonderland superhero movie

Snoop Dogg is about to unleash a short film on the world, Malice N Wonderland The Movie. In the 40-minute flick Snoop, aka superhero Malice, fights crime to restore peace to his neighbourhood. Jamie Foxx has a cameo in the film, out on March 24, which also features tracks from Snoop's album More Malice. Hmm, probably not quite what Lewis Carroll had in mind...

Kiefer Sutherland hits the bottle at Hollywood party

Booze has got Kiefer Sutherland into so much trouble, you'd think he'd steer well clear. But the 24 star seemed destined for another blurry night at a Hollywood party, when he grabbed his pal, a bottle of Jamesons, right.

Bafta strikes deal with BA for Hollywood star flights

We're still in the midst of awards season, but next year's ceremonies are already being planned. And, er, flights booked. Bafta has signed a deal with BA to fly A-listers to and from Tinseltown, and ensure all the in-flight movies are up for gongs. We're told: "Celebs are competing to see who will be awarded the prestigious 1A seat in first-class."

The 3 best things on3am.co.uk RIGHT NOW!

All the R-Pattz gossip from last night's Remember Me premiere Plus, we've found out how to repel him (warning: it's rude and disgusting) Win tickets to see 50 Cent at Wembley on Saturday, thanks to Orange

Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale cheer on pal Roger Federer at Paribas Open

It wasn't only Roger Federer who took his eye off the ball as he lost the Paribas Open in California on Tuesday. His celeb pals Gwen Stefani, Gavin Rossdale and wife Mirka didn't look too interested either. Gwen was catching flies, while Gav and Mirka were engrossed in their BlackBerrys. Yawn tennis anyone?

Miquita's T4-letter outburst

TV HOST TAKEN OFF AIR AFTER SWEARING AT US STAR KE$HA

Liam Gallagher blasts "unmusical" brother Noel

Those Gallaghers are at it again. Liam has blasted big bro Noel, claiming Oasis were "unsophisticated" and "unmusical". Ouch. Talking about his new band, he tells GQ: "We are going to be more musical than Oasis. It's not going to be so f****** full-on, heavy chords, you know? More sophisticated. Not up its own arse.. but more musical."

3am's wicked whisper

Which famous showbiz PR "treated" onlookers to an impromptu skinny dip during a swimming pool photoshoot with an all-girl band?

Jennifer Lopez looks sleek in black at Manhattan party

Jennifer Lopez appears to have given her curvy derriere the bum's rush..

Snogging in Street

Have these Boyz no shame? Coronation Street stars Keith Duffy and Antony Cotton share a goodnight kiss for all to see. The pals, who play barman Ciaran and camp knicker-stitcher Sean, had been partying after the RTS Programme Awards at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on Tuesday. Earlier Keith was boasting to us about being a metrosexual and using posh face creams. He told us: "We all do it. Stephen Gately drummed it into us how important it is to look after your skin." You should keep an eye on your tonsils while you're at it...

Katy Perry blocks Russell Brand's rock 'n' roll wedding plans

No prizes for guessing who wears the skinny black trousers in the relationship between Katy Perry and Russell Brand.

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Hollyoaks: Mercedes romps with Calvin - again


SEXY Mercedes Fisher (Jennifer Metcalfe, 26) peels off her dress and flashes her undies as she romps with Calvin Valentine (Ricky Whittle, 28).

Coronation Street: Tina in suicide shock


CORONATION Street sex kitten Tina McIntyre will try to commit suicide by starving herself to death.

Country House Rescue


Ruth Watson is in Derbyshire this week, dropping in at Carnfield Hall to meet owner James Cartland.

Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man


Continuing my theme from above, here's the final part of this remarkable documentary, following comedian Eddie's attempt to run 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief.

Sport Relief: The Million Pound Bike Ride


Celebrities, eh? When it comes to raising cash for a good cause, they seem to love putting themselves through hell.

Reality: The Business Inspector


New troubleshooting series in which straight-talking millionaire Hilary Devey aims to transform struggling small businesses.

Documentary: Tourette's: I Swear I Can't Help It


In 1988 teenager John Davidson featured in a BBC documentary about Tourette's.

Comedy: Life Of Riley


Caroline Quentin is back as the multi-tasking mother who tries to be all things to all people within her complicated, extended family.

X factor: Jedward dropped by label


X FACTOR twins Jedward have been axed by music giant Sony after just one single.

Missing


Pauline Quirke returns in this daily drama, centred on a police missing persons unit.

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Justin Timberlake's a mystery


PEOPLE think Justin Timberlake's a ladies man, especially following his dalliance with a go-go dancer earlier this week.

Girlbands just wanna have fun


GIRLBANDS plus flowing bubbly equals carnage - and it was a real pop love-in at the Wrangler Jeans party at London's Whisky Mist.

Björk's 3D flick


BJÖRK is set to do a Na'vi and appear in 3D.

Set List: Delphic, Heaven. London


THESE Manchester lads should become ambassadors for British live music.

Inna takes Eastern Europe by storm


FOXY Romanian dance chic Inna has taken Eastern Europe by storm and is set to do the same here.

Jedward aren't dead


JEDWARD are back bigger than ever after winning a new three-album record deal.

Jack White defends White Stripes Meg's drumming skills


JACK White has blasted critics of his White Stripes partner Meg's drumming skills and insists she is a "winner".

Grimes laughs off tabloid rumours


90210 star SHENAE GRIMES enjoys reading the tabloids because she's fascinated by untrue rumours about her private life.

Sevigny's booze binge with Ifans


CHLOE SEVIGNY received a crash course in Welsh social life when she filmed her role in upcoming movie MR NICE - her co-star RHYS IFANS took her on a drinking binge in Cardiff.

Witherspoon to judge women's awards


REESE WITHERSPOON is using her experience as a domestic violence campaigner to judge a pioneering women's awards ceremony.

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Review: The Bounty Hunter


ANDY'S rating 2/5

Review: I Love You Phillip Morris


ANDY'S rating: 4/5

Review: The Spy Next Door


ANDY'S Rating: 2/5

Review: Green Zone


Green Zone (15)

Review: Hachiko: A Dog's Tale


Hachiko: A Dog's Tale (U)

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo


The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18)

Green Zone review: Bourne Again


MATT Damon broke the hearts of Jason Bourne die-hards when he announced he was quitting the franchise along with Brit director pal Paul Greengrass.

Review: Legion


WHEN Archangel Paul Bettany lands on Earth, he chops off his wings and sets out to save mankind (which God has decided to eliminate) in a lurid slice of supernatural B-feature hokum sort of redeemed by smart special effects.

Review: Alice In Wonderland


IF YOU'RE wedded to the much loved tale of a 12-year-old girl on a weird trip down a rabbit hole then beware!

Alice In Wonderland review


ALICE In Wonderland is all geared up to be a Hollywood movie blockbuster thanks to Tim Burton's gnarly, distinctive hand and the acting geniuses of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter.

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To understand Shakepeare's later work we must note the close links between the Bard and his Scottish king, James VI and I
THIS week, the prestigious Arden Shakespeare series has been making headlines. The third edition of the heavily annotated scholarly volumes will include an unfamiliar title: D

Making an opera of the story of Kaspar Hauser has become a serious undertaking
NEVER let it be said that opera students won't go that extra mile to prepare a dramatic role.

Folk music: Local talent and big names take their partners for a birl round the capital
CEILIDH Culture, Edinburgh's annual gallimaufry of folk song, dance, storytelling and related antics, kicks off on 26 March, continuing its policy of interspersing grassro

New World order for sensual Festival
THE voices of the New World return to the old in this year's Edinburgh International Festival.

US support for festival climbs to new heights
A NEW and perhaps surprising logo appears beneath several productions in the Edinburgh International Festival's programme this year: the eagle, with wings of the red, whit

Jedward get second chance of pop career
X FACTOR twins Jedward have been signed up by Universal, only 24 hours after it was revealed they had been dumped by their former record label, Sony.

Sandra Bullock pulls out of premiere
THE UK premiere of The Blind Side has been scrapped after its Oscar-winning star Sandra Bullock pulled out of the event.

Ashes of 'Archers' actor scattered
THE ashes of the late Archers veteran Norman Painting were scattered in a wooded area planted in his honour.

‘There was no thought at school about black history, any of that, not like now’

Comedy review: Stewart Lee
STEWART LEE: IF YOU PREFER A MILDER COMEDIAN PLEASE ASK FOR ONE **** CITIZENS' THEATRE, GLASGOW

Gig review: Alasdair Roberts/Kiila/Emily Portman
ALASDAIR ROBERTS / KIILA / EMILY PORTMAN *** STEREO, GLASGOW

Theatre review: East of the Sun and West of the Moon
EAST OF THE SUN AND WEST OF THE MOON ** THE ROXY ART HOUSE, EDINBURGH

Interview: Peter Brook , director
TO GET to Peter Brook's office, you come in off a grimy Parisian street at the back of the Gare du Nord, head along a nondescript corridor, cut across the stage of the Bo

Imagine a museum where everything is for sale - that's the European Art Fair
THE art market has taken quite a knock. Its global value has dropped from an all-time peak of £48 billion in 2007 to £31bn in 2009, a fall of almost 40 per cent. Even so, the

XXXX-rated Australian opera 'Bliss' comes to Edinburgh Festival
AN Aussie accent comes to the Edinburgh International Festival this year – along with the kind of language you don't usually hear in an opera house.

Ianucci in the thick of the television awards
OSCAR-NOMINATED screenwriter Armando Ianucci was a winner at the Royal Television Society's awards last night.

Jedward dropped by Sony after 'failure'
X FACTOR twins Jedward have been dropped by their record label after their debut single failed to top the charts.

Tories question logic of 6 Music closure
SHADOW culture secretary Jeremy Hunt today said he could not understand the BBC's logic in dropping 6 Music while retaining another "niche" service such as Radio 3

Gig review: Homegame
HOMEGAME ***** VARIOUS VENUES, ANSTRUTHER

Theatre review: Empty/Mr Write
EMPTY **** MR WRITE *** TRON THEATRE, GLASGOW

Comedy review: Arnold Brown
ARNOLD BROWN: JOKES I HAVE KNOWN ** THE TRON, GLASGOW

Comedy review: Neil Cole
NEIL COLE: NEIL BY MOUTH *** BREL, GLASGOW

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