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Tomorrow BBC2 is showing a couple of classic films during the daytime. At 11.00am there's Holiday from 1938 with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. And then at 12.30 is 1940's His Girl Friday.

This is a film that I've mentioned before as it's one of my favourites of all time.

But Wikipedia noted a couple of things that I hadn't come across - the radio adaptions. Nine months after its January 1940 release, it was adapted by the Lux Radio Theater - the subject of a recent Radio 4 Archive on 4 programme. That adaption featured Claudette Colbert, Fred Macmurray and Jack Carson in the main roles.

Six months later, however, it was again adapted by the rival Screen Guild Theater, this time with Grant and Russell in the main roles.

Happily the Internet Archive has both versions available to download! Of course, these radio versions do lose quite a lot of the original panache of the film, and in the Screen Guild Theater version, lose over two thirds of the running time (even with the famous rapid-fire dialogue, that's a lot of missing action).

Lux Radio Theater version.

The Screen Guild Theater version.

Anyway, if you've never seen this film, set your Sky+, Freeview+, V+ or other PVR.

2010 is the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. We've had a special series of In Our Time earlier in the year, the president of the Society, Martin Rees has given the Reith Lectures, and there've been numerous talks and lectures.

Over the weekend, the Royal Society's annual summer exhibition moved to the Southbank Centre where it has became the See Further Festival. All around the South Bank and Royal Festival Hall, were exhibits of what British scientists are currently doing. Various research labs and companies were present with live demonstrations explaining the practical applications of what they're doing.

Amongst many things I saw over the weekend were a new holographic method being developed for finding landmines, what we can learn from how insects navigate, and the development of an incredible new magnifying lens. And they're just a handful of the exhibits. On Friday, I saw Material World's Quentein Cooper interviewing someone about volcanoes, and reporters from a variety of international media talking to the scientists involved. Elsewhere, a little girl was being CT scanned by a large pink Siemens magnetom. And Festo had an Air Penguin that was very gracefully flying through the enclosed Royal Festival Hall's atrium and was as elegant a flying machine that I've ever seen.

Outside the BBC's Bang Goes The Theory roadshow seemed popular, with Dr Yan in attendence.

The exhibition is open to next weekend, and if you're near London, is well worth a visit.

The reason that I reached the exhibition so early is that on Friday the "Premiere" of 2001: A Space Odyssey with live orchestral accompaniament was taking place. I first saw this film in one of its re-releases (they still used to do things like that in the late seventies) with my dad and brother at the Barnet Odeon. It is one of the few times I'd experienced an intermission in a film. Indeed, so unusual was such a thing, that I remember wondering whether the projectionist hadn't just introduced it on the cinema manager's orders so that he could sell more Kia Ora and popcorn. But it left an indelible memory - not least as 9 year old tried to understand "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite".

To my young mind, it opened with a tediously long sequence involving apes - "The Dawn of Man". But I remember watching and being mesmerised nonetheless. The moment that one of the apes throws a bone skywards and it becomes a spaceship heading towards an orbiting space station, accompanied by the Blue Danube, is one of cinema's most glorious moments. The piece is roughly 11 minutes long, and Douglas Trumball's effects, still stand up perfectly fine today. I guess that working with Arthur C Clarke for verisimilitude, Kubrick's ceaseless quest for excellence meant that he did as good a job in 1968 as anyone could do today.

For this production, Warner Bros had gone back to the film's audio master and separated the music cues from the dialogue and sound effects so that the Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices could be added in live. While music is vital to 2001, it's actually used relatively sparingly; think of those scenes where all you can hear is Keir Dullea's breathing within his spacesuit. Conductor André de Ridder had a timecode alongside him to ensure that the cues were all met in timely manner.

Kubrick's widow, Christiane, introduced the evening's event, and noted that Stanley would have been shocked for his wife to have been speaking in public (when she sat down near me, and I realised that I was surrounded by friends and family, I must admit to being quite thrilled). Famously reclusive, it seems uncertain whether he would have attended at all. He might not have been completely taken with the projection. While the picture - I suspect an HD version - was pin-sharp, and perfect technically, he might have been a little annoyed that the orchestra needed any light to work beneath the screen.

Yet, all said and done, it was a wonderful experience, and was given a standing ovation at the end.

It's a long time since I properly watched the film. Although I have an early version of it on DVD, it's not great. So it was interesting to note some of the things Kubrick and Clarke got right about their film. While Pan Am may not have survived, the commercialisation of everything else seems right (the space station is basically a Hilton). Meals on board are "microwaved". On board Discovery One, the two pilots are seen using devices that are staggeringly similar to iPads! (The chap in front of me also noticed this, and was so excited that he had to tell both the person to his left, and right). A news broadcast comes from BBC 12. Sadly Kubrick wouldn't have known that BBC Executive would be reigning in their channels rather than expanding them from the current main 4 TV services.

Anyway - it's unclear if and when this event might be seen again. But I do feel a need to return to Clarke's novel.

This evening Newsnight had a lovely little report about Ray Harryhausen, the film genius behind such films as One Million Years BC, Jason and the Argonauts, and Clash of the Titans (no - not the recent one). They are the films of my childhood - regularly repeated every Bank Holiday. You'd always happily watch them.

Next week he'll be 90 years old and he's in London to be recognised by BAFTA.

Earlier this evening I was lucky enough to attend a screening of King Kong at BFI Southbank which Harryhausen introduced. As a boy, he'd seen the film when it came out in 1933, and he went on to discover how Willis O'Brien had produced those effects. This, he explained, was during a time when the magic and mystery surrounding film production was still maintained. Audiences simply had no idea about things like stop-motion.

King Kong is still a great film to watch. As Harryhausen points out, it's a tight 100 minutes with no flabbiness. The story moves forward the whole time. Viewed over 75 years later, it still holds up, even if there is occassionally some unintentional humour. And Fay Wray does scream an awful lot.

But you still feel sadness and sympathy for Kong - the Eighth Wonder of the World - when he's atop the Empire State Building being gunned down by planes.

And there's that famous final line...

I note that there's also a London exhibition about his work opening next week. I'll try to get along and see it.

Anyway, it's a privilige to have been in the same room as someone who's had such an impact on cinema as Ray Harryhausen has done over the years.

I saw this while I was away recently, and somehow neglected to note it here (mind you - I've been going to the cinema so infrequently recently, this isn't entirely surprising). I suspect that the real reason that I'd not got around to mentioning Robin Hood thus far is that I'd completely forgotten that I'd seen it.

Even now, as I think hard about it, I can't really remember a great deal about it.

Unlike some, the one thing that I didn't really worry too much about, it was Crowe's accent. That might be because I saw it in a cinema in Oban where the sound possibly wasn't the finest on the planet. But mostly, it was because it's Russell Crowe, and his voice is so deep, he could be adopting a Russian accent and you'd hardly notice.

I'm a Ridley Scott fan, and to be honest, this film is fine. It's not bad, but it's not great. It just really doesn't hold you. There were a number of children in the cinema where I was watching, but they were in and out to the toilet like yo-yos, and I think that's largely because they were losing interest.

Cate Blanchett's subplot was dull. The Sheriff of Nottingham barely features, and only really Mark Strong's villainous Godfrey was a strong character.

In many respects, it reminds me more of Kingdom of Heaven rather than Gladiator. And that's probably not a good thing.

PS. If you've been seeing some odd "Test" entries appearing in this blog, it's because I've been upgrading to Movable Type version 5 and that invariably means I have to try to fix stuff after I've broken it.

Green Zone is the latest film from Paul Greengrass and his team. And by team, I don't just mean Matt Damon. He's clearly assembled together a very tight group of people who work with him. There's cinematographer Barry Ackroyd who worked on United 93, composer John Powell who worked on that and all the Bourne films, and especially, editor Christopher Rouse who edited both Greengrass's Bourne films and United 93 again.

Green Zone is presented as a thriller in which Matt Damon's team are sent into Iraq in the early part of 2003 post invasion, to neutralise the threat of WMDs in locations already highlighted by intelligence reports. He quickly discovers that these reports aren't worth the "packets" they're written on, and questions the source.

This isn't something that the Pentagon official, Greg Kinnear, is particular eager to hear. So instead he goes to CIA operative Brendon Gleeson who is more responsive to his concerns. That's not the prevailing view.

In the meantime, Kinnear has a team of US special forces led by Jason Isaacs who seem to be getting in the way of things.

Oddly, this must be the first Iraq set drama in which, after a while at least, you don't believe that there are snipers and insurgents around every corner and that Damon's team might get it at any moment. That's probably because it is set in the early days of the conflict, with the film suggesting that had another approach been taken, making use of the Iraqi army rather than disbanding them (and all their years of training and action), a more peaceful settlement might have taken place.

There are some lovely set-pieces like the scene set in the tranquil oasis of the Green Zone where various high ranking officials enjoy a beverage at the pool-side in one of Saddam's palaces. It seems to be more like a Vegas hotel than a warzone. Then there's the incredible stash of money that Gleeson's CIA team have at its disposable - millions of dollars sealed in plastic and piled up on the floor in the corner of the room.

Amy Ryan plays a journalist who works for the Wall Street Journal and begins to realise that she's been led astray by her sources who let her publish evidence that was simply untrue.

Overall, a great film. It would have been nicer for the plot to have had one or two more twists, but that'd have made it unrealistic, whereas as it stands, it's incredibly believable. That's not surprising since it's based on the reminiscence's of Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

Quite why certain reviewers - and yes, Peter Bradshaw, I'm talking about you - have rated it so poorly, I simply fail to understand. It's well worth seeing.

One nice touch I noticed is that along with The Guardian, one of whose journalist Greengrass has previously killed in a Bourne film, a report at the end of the film is also emailed to Panorama. Sadly, it can't be emailed to Greengrass's "alma mater", World in Action, because that programme no longer exists on a 21st century ITV. So instead its long time rival would have got this particular scoop.

One of my favourite series of novels of recent years has been Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. I've read all three of the novels in hardback no less, having read interesting things about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ahead of its English language publication in January 2008.

By October last year, the final volume of the trilogy had been published and I'd read it apace.

In the meantime, I'd heard that Yellow Bird, the same people who'd produced the recent Swedish version of Wallander, were filming the trilogy. From what I heard, the initial idea was that the first film would get a cinema release, while the second two novels - effectively one big story - would follow as a mini-series on Swedish television.

The success of the film's release in Sweden meant that they re-thought that idea, and instead released the two subsequent films in cinemas too. I believe, but may be wrong, that the eventual TV screenings in Sweden will be extended versions of the films.

Anyway, this is all a long way around of me saying that I've been looking forward to seeing this film for quite some time. When I was in Stockholm briefly last autumn, the first two films were already on DVD, but didn't come with English subtitles, and the third film was opening in cinemas. So I've been impatiently waiting for the UK release.

This weekend, that release is finally upon us after several festival screenings over the last six months or so. This has all probably worked in favour of distributor, Momentum, as the books are now mainstays in the paperback fiction charts. The final book in the trilogy gets released in paperback in just three weeks' time.

So my credentials and the back story out of the way: what should we make of the film?

Well it's actually really done very well indeed. The books are chunky and there's a great deal of plot and backstory to be found in them. So any film adaptation has to, of necessity, cut down on the book a great deal. But this is very faithful to the overall feel of the book.

Key in all this are two strong pieces of casting in Michael Nyqvist as "Kalle" Blomkvist, and especially Noomi Rapace as the mixed up Lisbeth Salander - the eponymous "Girl" of the books' titles.

As the film opens, Blomkvist is personally responsible for libelling a major Swedish industrialist - something that sees him getting a prison sentence no less. But before he has to serve it, he hands his resignation from Millennium magazine and takes on a private commission to look into the background behind incidents that took place over forty years earlier amongst the Vanger family - one of whom may well be a murderer.

The film may seem long at the outset - at two and a half hours - but it speeds along at a fair pace, and is tightly directed. The revelations come thick and fast, and the central relationship is interesting. Salander, in particular, is such a fascinating character, that you want to learn more about her. There are plenty of hints about her background and life that won't be opened up properly until later films. Yet the film works on its own too.

In terms of feel, something of the brooding feel of the Kenneth Brannagh Wallanders is present, and if you've enjoyed those excellent films, then you'll love this.

If you've read the book, then you'll certainly want to see this. If you haven't, then you're missing out on an excellent series of books anyway, and as a whodunnit, it's a cracking story.

I can't wait until I see films two and three...

What links these two films? Absolutely nothing, although both were showing in the Curzon Mayfair last week, I only saw A Prophet there. For better of for worse, I saw Up In The Air in my local Cineworld. They offer very different cinema going experiences, yet not at a colossal price differential.

I'll get onto the films themselves shortly, but I really should visit the polite environment of the Curzon chain a little more. The print we saw of A Prophet was digital, and the sound excellent. The only issue I had with the cinema was that their soda machine had broken. This would be a greater problem at Cineworld, but the superior Curzon-goer is more likely to take a glass of wine into their screen. Personally, if you're seeing A Prophet in the cinema then bear in mind it's two and a half hours, and you might want to think twice about drinking too much of anything.

At Cineworld, Avatar still seemed enormously popular, with everyone else seemingly wandering around with 3D glasses. Knowing how popular the cinema is, I pre-booked my tickets in advance. Sadly of the three machines printing pre-booked tickets in the cinema lobby, only two were working, and neither would print my tickets. When I asked a security guard who was diligently searching everyone's bags as they entered the cinema (although had been absent as I walked in with my bag), he told me to go to the front of the long queue where someone printed out my tickets for me. And unlike previous visits to this cinema, the number of people working behind the concessions stand meant that I was served pretty quickly there.

The only downside was that as the adverts and trailers began, it became clear that I as only hearing mono sound from the speakers behind the screen. The speakers all down either wall were off. That might have been a problem with the ad reel, so I waited until the ads ended (including one proclaiming the power of cinema advertising with its flat sound and scratchy print).

When the film itself began the sound problem hadn't been fixed, so I found the only person available and asked him. He immediately phoned the projection room saying he'd get on the case. I left him to it, since I didn't want to miss anything. Sadly, the sound never was fixed. I saw Up In The Air in mono.

Final grades:-

Curzon Mayfair: A-
Cineworld Enfield: C+

(And I'm being generous because I think sound is a vital part of any film and far more important than things like 3D).

Onto the films. French cinema is evidently having a good time in making sprawling epic crime dramas. Last year we had the two parts of Mesrine which was excellent although it could have been released as a single film with some length cut. At least the DVD which has just been released contains both films.

A Prophet is one of those films that really is worth going into knowing as little as possible. We follow a young Arab - Malik - as he begins to serve his first prison sentence in an adult prison, starting a six year stretch.

In the prison, are two main camps - the Muslims and the Corsicans. It's the latter group who grab Malik and tell him he must either murder someone for them or be murdered himself. What follows is based entirely around the choice he makes here. The performances throughout are excellent and with the exception of a couple of scenes set outside the prison I found a little hard to believe, it was all very real.

If you enjoyed Mesrine or the Italian film, Gomorrah, then you must see this.

Up In The Air is something entirely different. Quite light in flavour but with a slightly offbeat humour, we follow the life of George Clooney's corporate firer. He jets in to different businesses where it's his job to make people redundant. That's his only job. But he tells us at one point that he spent 322 days the previous year on the road. And this is his life. He dreams of reaching 10 million frequent flier miles; an achievement only reached by six people previously. He actively dislikes his dismal little apartment that he spends as little time as possible.

As is the way with these things, his world is shaken up when Nathalie (Anna Kendrick) joins his firm and persuades their boss that her video-conferencing firing should be adopted. They'll save vast amounts of travel expenses. Not something that Clooney's character wants.

Along the way Clooney has met a kindred spirit in the fantastic Vera Farmiga who plays Alex. Soon the two are having a liaison set in hotel rooms across the mainland USA as and when their schedules collide.

How it all plays out is fun and while it's not a gag-fest, there are some laugh out loud moments.

There's one thing I was left wondering: why had American Airlines and Hilton seemingly partnered up with this film since the life is presented as soulless. While both companies are presented efficiently, a scene where Clooney queue-jumps at a Hilton check-in because he's a high-ranked member of their corporate scheme leaves me cold.

It's all about the status and getting the "carbon fibre" card. While the film essentially presents it as lifeless, it doesn't totally paint an awful picture. Clooney's flights are on time, and there are never any problems with his rooms.

Up In The Air has had some so-so reviews, but I really liked it. And Farmiga is absolute fabulous in it.

Look - it's my own fault. I should have gone to see An Education instead. But somehow, even though I knew in advance it'd be garbage, actors like John Cusack and Thandie Newton drew me in. And I went and saw 2012. I'll try to atone next week when the new Coen brothers film comes out.

In the meantime, I was disappointed that Sunday evening saw the cinema as full as it was. I was hoping that the lure of Shite-Factor would keep people at home. In the event, many of them rushed out of the cinema at the end anyway - perhaps to catch the result; perhaps to visit the loo after more than two and a half hours; or perhaps because they wanted to get out of the cinema as fast as possible after watching such rubbish.

In fact a couple of families left well before the end, although I tend to think that they were parents with particularly young children who'd paid little to no notice of the film's 12A certificate. Just because you can take young children with you to 12A films, as the big slide at the start of the film says very clearly, it's the responsibility of the accompanying adult to determine the film's suitability for their kids. GIven that clearly this film featured millions of people dying (not graphically - but clearly ending up dead), it's not going to be suitable for the more sensitive.

Anyway, back to the film. For reasons that aren't very clear at all, the sun's activity is getting higher, generating something or other under the earth's crust, resulting in - well - carnage really.

Some Indian scientists discover this early on - I seem to remember that The Day After Tomorrow, also by Emmerich, had something similar. Before you know it, the governments of the world have joined in a secret cabal to do something in time for the impending crisis. It'd spoil the film for me to tell you what this is, but it's not exactly explained how what they built was built, and in the location that it was placed. We do know that it was all built by Chinese slave labour.

In the meantime, John Cusack, who has to be separated from his wife and kids, is desperately trying to save his family's lives. Cue a series of basically the same schenes, as repeatedly he ends up in one plane or another that only just takes off in time as the runway crumbles beneath him. The pilot, on every occassion, takes the opportunity to continue flying low rather than soar to great heights.

To say that this film is scientifically inaccurate is utterly pointless. When Yellowstone park explodes as a super-volcano, the pyroclastic cloud is surprisingly slow. Indeed the relativley slow planes always outrun them without trouble.

We get lots of international bits. While US President Danny Glover stays with his people (as well as the Italian PM - who clearly has nothing to do with Silvio Berlusconi), everyone else runs away, including the Queen with her Corgis. Someone's bumped off in a Parisian underpass. And just in case you didn't understand the reference, we're explicitly told that this was the same place that Diana died.

Elsewhere, the entire conspiracy is somehow known to a mad Woody Harrelson, who's busy broadcasting his beliefs on AM radio. Given that elsewhere people are being bumped off left and right for spilling the beans, quite how he's surviving when he lives on his own in a trailer, isn't really explained.

The first time we saw the White House destroyed - in Independence Day perhaps - it was quite exciting. But it's now getting a bit dull. We see some different cities getting destroyed this time, but of course we see the White House get it again. Las Vegas is hit this time around (Michael "Let's get ready to rumble!" Buffers gets a cameo), as well as large parts of India, all of California, and - well - all over the place really.

A cruise liner gets knocked over by a tsunami, although I was kind of led to believe that the water tends to flatten out and just move very fast only really forming a tidal wave when it hits shore.

Strangely, even the very high Himalayas seem to get a large volume of water hit them. I couldn't begin to explain the physics that would make this possible.

At one point, the Emmerich seems to switch to digital video, to give a heightened reality as the end seems nigh! It's a bit like he's been watching too many Michael Mann films and likes what he sees. The problem is that the spectacle we've been watching up until now is so divorced from reality, that I believe in the goings on of Middle Earth more than in this film. I'd argue that a hand-drawn animation would somehow have more resonance than these technically fine, but still not believable computer graphics. There's simply an absence of peril here.

The film is made by Columbia Pictures, and that means that Sony product placement is all pervasive. Every computer you see is a Vaio (the White House is particularly well-stocked with these), every phone a Sony Ericsson and so-on. It gets a little dull. Then there's the Bentley, and the use of Microsoft's Bing to find a satellite photo. None of it's accidental. I know I shouldn't find it distracting, but it is and I do.

The film's overlong, the story's obvious, most of the Americans survive (I'm not giving a great deal away), while most of the foreigners die. But not the dog... There are pointless speeches that are supposed to moving, uplifiting and heartwarming. And the film's essentially vacuous. You don't learn anything, and the subplot about John Cusack's character's book (the names here are pointless) is vomit-inducing. It sounds like the novel deserved to fail.

I love a good disaster movie, but the direness of imagination that means every film has to now raise the stakes of what's gone before it, as well as the over-the-top graphics, mean that the genre is losing any credibility. This film is a cliché of itself.

Don't bother. Catch up with this evening's Doctor Who, which was much much better, and will linger a lot longer than the grandiose destruction of 2012.

I've been quite a fan of Jon Ronson for ages, and read The Men Who Stare At Goats when it came out. In it Ronson went out and met some very strange people who'd been funded by the US military to develop psychic abilities for the aid or prevention of warfare.

For this film version of the book, some dramatic liberties have been taken, and an overall narrative thread added to what Ronson had told us. So we get Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton, a small town journalist who embarks on a somewhat unlikely set of discoveries. In some respects he's playing Ronson - although the two aren't perhaps the greatest lookalikes!

His marriage is disintegrating, and he heads off to Kuwait in the aftermath of the invasion, in the hope of getting into Iraq and prove himself to be a man. While he's holed up in a hotel, he runs into George Clooney's Lyn Cassady, who's seemingly involved with a private contractor. But that's not the whole story. Making some connections WIlton falls in with Cassady, and we have a road movie of sorts as they attempt to reach Iraq.

Throughout the journey, Cassady fills Wilton in on the bizarre and downright mad things that the military has been attempting to do. Not least, kill a goat just by looking at it.

The characters are all memorable from the original source material, and although the over-arching story is perhaps a little wayward, the theme and the essence of the book and the overall insanity is there in spades. You can't help but laugh all the way through.

The top-notch cast also features Jeff Bridges as a character not a million miles away from The Big Lebowski's Dude, and an unpleasant Kevin Spacey character.

The super-soldiers that they were trying to develop were informally called "Jedi" and there's lots of fun to be had with McGregor's character not knowing what this means.

Overall, a quirky comedy that stays remarkably faithful to the book, despite having created a completely new story to base itself around. Well worth catching!

I got invited to a bloggers' screening of Bunny and the Bull, and went in knowing little to nothing about the film. The film's writer and director, Paul King, has directed nearly every episode of The Mighty Boosh, but although I like that programme, I've only seen it intermittantly, whereas some live and breathe all things Boosh.

Both Julian Barrett and Noel Fielding show up in Bunny and the Bull, but Edward Hogg and Simon Farnaby (who introduced the film with his director at our screening, and who's family life some aspects of the film are based on) are the real stars. They play Stephen and Bunny. Stephen, we find living in his ordered but cluttered flat which he won't leave. We're introduced to his best friend Bunny who has something of a gambling habit.

As Stephen examines the contents of various boxes - all carefully labelled - we flash back to a year earlier when a lucky win on the horses raised enough funds for the pair of them to go travelling across Europe and leave behind the joys of the Captain Crab fast-food chain that Bunny likes eating in.

The film put together in an imaginative manner - employing various forms of animation to denote different settings, and almost wholly being studio bound irrespective of the scene being set.

Stephen has to pretty much go along with whatever Bunny wants - and that becomes ever more apparent when they reach Poland and run into the beautiful Eloisa who's working in a branch of Captain Crab there. They hook up with her and decide to drive her across Europe to Spain and the fiesta in her town.

Clearly Stephen immediately falls in love with Eloisa, but that doesn't necessarily stop Bunny getting in the way.

It's not worth me even attempting to describe some of the things that take place en-route, but they involve a stuffed bear, homeless Swiss, and a would-be matador.

What happens isn't for me to spoil but you care about the curious characters and the end is well worked.

I enjoyed it a lot, although how wide the film's appeal will be isn't immediately obvious. There's a surplus of creativity in here though, and it deserves an audience.

An imaginative accompanying website is online.

Paranormal Activity is a great little film that seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. It was actually made a couple of years ago before it was snapped up from a festival and has had a little gloss added to it. But not much.

Like The Blair Witch Project, everything we see is from the point of a view of a camera as Micah documents procedings. There's a single camera and Micah is out to try to prove whether or not something supernatural is going on. He videos everything all the time - in particular setting up a wide-angle shot each night with the camera recording in night-vision.

Slowly but surely, things are cranked up. Because the film is shot in this verité style, there's no soundtrack - just ambient noises within the San Diego house where Micah lives with his girlfriend Katie.

The house becomes relatively claustrophobic and apart from a shot of the drive at the beginning, and a couple of brief sorties into their back garden, we never leave it. Katie believes in the supernatural while MIcah seems more intent on catching some cool video footage.

Ultimately, if you love "things that go bump in the night" you're going to love this film. I went to a fairly busy screening by myself and just before the film started a lady I didn't know sat next to me. She very nearly found herself jumping into my lap on several occasions! It really is one of those films that some may prefer to watch from behind a sofa.

It's not a gorefest. Everything feels real - well as real as ghostly or demonic behaviour can be. The performances are relatively naturalistic and in some small way the film also reminded me of Open Water.

Interestingly, the film has practically no opening titles to speak of - and nothing beyond a copyright slide at the end. This all adds to creepiness. People nervously left the cinema at the end. Well worth catching when it opens in a couple of weeks.

The Informant! (I guess the exclamation mark is important) is the latest film from director Stephen Soderburgh, and if I said that it was about one man taking on liars and corporate greed, you might wonder if Soderburgh was revisiting the territory he first examined with Erin Brokovich.

But this is a very different film - even though recognising that took me (and the audience I was with) a while. The film is sort of based on a true story, we're told, although details have been changed, "So there." Based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald, it tells the story of Mark Whitacre, an executive at a company called ADM.

He begins to get uneasy about the fact that ADM is price-fixing of lysine, with its competitors on a global scale - setting the prices at which they'd sell their products. Matt Damon plays the naiive Whitacre who's wife persuades him to tell the FBI that there is corporate price-fixing taking place, and that he's a part of it.

The key FBI agents are played by an endearing Scott Bakula and Joel McHale (currently to be seen in the not-at-all-bad NBC comedy Community, as well as E! network's The Soap). They listen to his story, and persuade a reluctant Whiteacre to begin recording his dealings with colleagues and competitors at the secret meetings that take place all over the world.

As the film unfolds, it seems to be told straight, with humour deriving from the characters rather than necessarily their actions. The light soundtrack and on-screen captions would make you feel that this was taking place during the swinging sixties or perhaps seventies. Yet in fact it takes place throughout the nineties - Whiteacre's ties being a particular point of interest. And his wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) seems to be mostly wearing a beehive from the sixties.

The story then begins to unravel further and further. Having somehow accumulated enough evidence to instigate an FBI raid, without being suspected or caught, things that we've seen earlier begin to come into play, and Whiteacre is revealed to not be entirely as we've hitherto had him presented to us.

Is he really as naiive as all that? Is he, in fact, utterly stupid?

Things that we've seen on-screen - that seem unlinked an unimportant suddenly jump out at us, as we realise what we'd seen, but not seen, earlier in the film. While this isn't quite a cinematic equivalent of the reveal in The Sixth Sense, it's handled very deftly.

The gaped mouths of the protagonists of the various legal jurisdictions that are involved leaves you laughing out loud, and although there's a serious subject at heart - corporate price fixing on a major scale - the disbelief of some of Whiteacre's behaviour leaves the viewer stunned.

This really is a curio then, and well worth seeing if you like some of Soderburgh's quirkier and more interesting pieces. I suspect that this will be a hard sell at the box-office, being neither a thriller nor a comedy, but sharing elements of both. But it's good that someone as smart as Soderburgh is able to gather a quality cast and make a film like this.

Dear Lemon Lima is one of those many films that you have see completely blind at a film festival. According to IMDB it's only had a screening at one other film festival and I can't see details of a release date which is a terrible shame.

Vanessa Lemor (Savanah Wiltfong) is a young teenage girl living in Fairbanks, Alaska who's completely infatuated with Philip (Shayne Topp) who works with her for a summer job selling ice cream at a stand. But Philip has well to do parents who've taken him away to Paris for part of the summer, so by the time they both start school again, he's no longer a geek - the glasses have gone - and he's rather thoughtlessly ditched Lemor who certainly hasn't got over him.

Can she retain his affections? Can she fit into the school that she's won a scholarship for?

She's not very good at physical education, so the super-keen PE teacher banishes her with the others who have problems or notes from home in the "weights room." There she finds some kindred spirits.

Lemor is half-Eskimo (Yup'ik) - that's how she attained her scholarship - and is therefore expected to know things that frankly her distant Eskimo-father never taught her and her mother certainly didn't.

The film is laced with finely tuned humour, never coarse, and the characters are very believable. There are the uptight neighbours who are concerned that Lemor may be a bad influence on Hercule, their son who seems more interested in living nature than joining the rifle club and killing deer (there's a wonderful family photo of a happy father and mother standing over a dead animal while their child looks on disgusted). The weights room misfits slowly bond together and then there's the Snowstorm Survivor competition which this year takes place in broad sunshine rather than snow. The games played are supposed to reminiscent of the Eskimo heritage of the people of Alaska.

Fine performances by most of the cast, including once again the much underrated Melissa Leo as Mrs Howard, the uptight mother next door who's turn is more than simply comic.

In the end, the plot is perfunctory, but that shouldn't detract from the overall feeling of the film which is less cutesy in the way that some of its would-be peers might be treading the same ground.

My only real disappointment came as I read the credits and it was obvious that like so many Alaska-set films and TV shows before it, this one was also shot in Washington State. I suppose I don't complain that most series and film are shot in California regardless of their setting, but it'd be nice if a few more films set far afield were actually filmed there. Many of the actors, as well as director Suzi Yoonessi are Eskimo however.

I only managed to get my ticket for the Surprise Film the day before the screening. I'd managed to miss out by the time booking was open for Times readers (I'm not a BFI member, and I'm not really an enormous Times reader, but I was glad of their sponsorship nonetheless). Then last week, the BFI Twitter feed announced that more tickets had gone on sale - while I was stuck in a two hour meeting. Then on Saturday, a load of seats were released which I managed to see in time and book.

The London Film Festival tells you that most screenings have returns and that however sold out they appear, it's always worth coming along early to see if you can get one. The surprise film might be one too many though because the returns queue was simply enormous yesterday. While some got in, people definitely turned up more than 20-30 minutes early to get them.

In the cinema itself, there was discussion about what the film was. Clearly some knew - perhaps from the relevant distribution company. I was also in the 20:45 screening and there was a 20:30 screening who were almost certainly texting people in our audience. Anyway, I managed to still be in the dark before the credits started to roll and it became clear that it was indeed Capitalism: A Love Story - the new Michael Moore film.

When the title came up, one person actually left the cinema. Well more fool him, as this was a passionately made film and quite easily the best film Moore's made since Bowling For Columbine, and indeed perhaps his best film ever. Indeed although Moore was on screen for some of the film, it really wasn't about him. It was about the American - indeed world - system of capitalism and what it means and how it's changed the way we work.

The film opens with families being foreclosed and evicted from their homes where they may have lived for dozens of years. There's nothing that can be done, and in the US, the local police force is employed to throw these families out.

Moore makes fantastic use of archive material, not always relevant archive, but he uses it in a way similar to Adam Curtis uses it in his documentaries like The Power of Nightmares(Incidentally - what happened to the proposed feature version of his documentaries? His current work can be watched on his fascinating blog.).

Slowly we turn to the bank bailouts. This is a section of the film that's passionately related by a handful of politicians who tried their best to reject the bailouts asked of them. At first, as we know, the package was rejected. But once the coterie of Goldman Sachs and other politicians had put the pressure on, and greased the palms that needed greasing, the package was passed.

What happened to that money? Well look around you today. The bonuses are back. Moore tries a couple of stunts, which really only provide some much needed humour amidst the otherwise gloom and despair we see around us. And despite the evident happiness of so many when Obama was elected, even Moore doesn't try to persuade us that anything's really changed.

This is a film which obviously only finished being edited very soon before its recent screenings in Venice and US opening. It needs to be seen by lots of people - now. Moore basically implores his audience at the end as he relates a couple of good stories of people who've refused to leave their foreclosed homes, a sheriff who's refused to help administrate them and a factory taken over by its workers. Go and see it (although you may have to wait for February frustratingly).

The London Film Festival opened on Wednesday, and this week I caught a few films: Fantastic Mr Fox, which was the opening film of the festival (I wasn’t at the premiere sadly), a UCLA restored version of Topper, and a Columbia restoration of Dirigible.

Fantastic Mr Fox is a terrific stop-animation version of the Roald Dahl tale which you may remember, although I personally didn’t (perhaps my free audio CD from Saturday’s Guardian of Dahl reading the tale himself will remind me). The film has an almost naturalistic acting style employed – with George Clooney leading the voice talent. Director Wes Anderson has adopted a different style to something like Wallace and Gromit where the voice acting is a little more larger than life.

Despite the cast all speaking in American accents and using Americanisms, the scenery still feels British. It’s an odd combination. And the evil farmer Bean played by Michael Gambon does speak in an English accent with a slight cockney twang.

Is the film too scary for kids? No. It’s a PG, but kids should be fine. The only slight issue I have is the use of the word “cuss” to replace swearwords all the way through the film. It’s used the same way that “frack” is used in Battlestar Galactica. But while that latter is aimed at adults, this isn’t and the nascent parent in me found it a bit uncomfortable. “Cluster-cuss” anyone?

Topper is a Cary Grant film from 1937 and a film that I’d never seen before – but 30s screwball comedies are always favourites of mine. As Anthony Slide told us before the film, Topper was a very popular film at the time and was later followed by a couple of sequels neither of which featured Cary Grant, but it has fallen out of favour in recent years and I certainly don’t recall it ever showing up on TV.

Early on, we’re introduced to Cary Grant and Constance Bennett who play Mr and Mrs Kerby – a rich and wild young couple. Mr Kerby is a director of a bank but really that’s just a means to his wealth’s end. They couple have a wonderful car (or “contraption” as it’s later dismissed as) – a Buick Roadmaster roadster that’s utterly gorgeous. But that’s their problem. Returning to their home somewhere in upstate New York, although clearly somewhere in Southern California, they have a fatal crash. Not a good start for a comedy, but they have ghosts!

The ghostly couple decide that before they hear the trumpets and get to enter a better celestial place they probably have to do good. They decide that their benefactor should be Cosmo Topper (Roland Young – the film’s real co-star along with Bennett, although Slide told us that Grant was paid much more than Young) the bank’s manager. He’s a put upon fellow with a wife and butler who organises his every moment of the day, and determines his diet at every turn.

This is a great comedy, and the print has been lovingly restored by UCLA. As it was explained to us, the image all the way through the film was slightly diffused and not as sharp as might be expected. That was a deliberate choice made by Norbert Brodine, the cinematographer, who used that diffusion to hide wires and other things used to create the ghostly special effects. The Kerbys are able to appear and disappear at will although they only have a limited amount of “ectoplasm” to keep them visible.

The film is more risqué than you might think – but I’d guess that this film pre-dates the Hayes Code. A pair of knickers are a small plot point, but they’re the type worn by less savoury types. And Mrs Kerby takes a most definite shine to Topper and spends a lot of time alone in his company which was surely “not the done thing.” Given that the Hays Code at the time was pretty strict, it’s amazing that some of the jokes and allusions were allowed through.

The biggest scene stealer of the film was Alan Mowbray who played the Kirby’s uptight butler. You might believe that plenty of portrayals of Jeeves have been based on his superciliousness. He even gets the final laugh of the film with the closing line.

With any luck, this restored version of the film will be get a release on DVD so that more people can rediscover this classic comedy.

Finally, there’s Dirigible, a very early talkie, dating from 1931, and directed by Frank Capra. It’s an adventure film involving airships and planes attempting to reach the South Pole. While some of the acting seems quite stiff to our modern sensibilities – resulting in unintentional laughs in the audience I saw it with – it’s incredibly well made. The “dirigibles” of the title were US Navy airships and Capra obviously had access to real ones to film. But there is also plentiful use of models for some of the special effects scenes. The scenes at the pole itself are remarkably well rendered, despite having actually been shot in the desert – it all looks the same in black and white. Clearly, the screenwriters were well aware of the likes of Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton, because some of the scenes feel like they’re simply reworkings of those true stories. The central love triangle features a torn Fay (King Kong) Wray who’s at the centre of a love triangle. But it’s always clear what the “right” thing to do is and despite talk of going to Paris to get a divorce, the marriage survives.

It’s lovely to see films like this on the big screen, although I’m now looking forward to seeing a few newer films.

Here's the latest in my somewhat infrequent rundowns of recent films that I've seen.

The Hurt Locker is the latest film from Kathryn Bigelow, who always seems to go quiet for a bit between films. Previously she made such fare as Point Break, Strange Days and Near Dark.

This film is set in Iraq and it's terrific. To say that this film keeps you on the edge of your seat is really doing it a disservice. We follow a group of three unexploded bomb experts - or more accurately one, and his two "team-mates." Bomb defusing is tense enough, and put it in a film where you're never entirely sure which characters will live and die, and you have something that even the most die-hard horror fans will find uncomfortable.

The film opens with Guy Pearce leading a team as they send a robot in to defuse an IED somewhere in an Iraqi street. Something happens that means the company need a new bomb specialist and in comes Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renny). He's a bit gung-ho and Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are immediately concerned that their lifespan might be colossally foreshortened. They only have just over a month left before their tour of duty is completed - getting blown up now is not on the agenda.

But we begin to learn more about the individuals through both a series of bomb defusing/detonation jobs and their evening rest and relaxation.

Despite being set in the army, we rarely venture beyond the threesome, with just an army psychologist and a handful of fellow soldiers ever seen on screen. Even then, the film creates a sense of claustrophobia and conversation rarely if ever extends beyond the three. There's no radio chatter and no big scenes in mess halls or anywhere.

In one sequence our trio run across a group of British special forces out in the desert led by Ralph Fiennes, but even then there's minimal communication between the groups, and the Brits are deliberately missing from the action. It's a very purposeful device from Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who based this film on experiences he saw as a journalist shadowing real bomb specialists.

In terms of story, the development is really to do with our characters, who just take on the jobs they're given. To that end, the only real objective is to simply stay alive. Every so often you wonder why there aren't hundreds of other troops backing up the team, but we're left on our own.

The performances are exceptional and the whole film feels enormously real.

One final note - the posters feature Lost's Evangeline Lily. Now while it's true she's one of the few "names" in the film - Pearce and Fiennes having brief roles - Lily is also only in the film for less than five minutes. But don't let that stop you seeing this film.

Mesrine is part one of a two part French gangster epic, and I'm impatient to see the second part. Vincent Cassell plays the title character and the film is based on a true story. We're to believe that his "qualities" were based as a torturer in Algeria during the fifties, before Mesrine returns to France and gets mixed up in criminal activities. The level of crime ramps up and before long he has to escape to Quebec to avoid capture from both the police and other criminals.

The film has some excellent performances, and part two is imminent.

Frozen River has taken an awful long time to reach these shores. Starring Melissa Leo who won an Oscar nomination that nobody now remembers as Ray Eddy and Misty Upham as Lila Littlewolf, it's set in upstate New York close to the Canadian border. When Eddy's husband runs off with all their money just before Christmas leaving her with her kids, she ends up getting involved in cross border smuggling making use of the laxer law enforcement in the Native American territories and the frozen river of the title along the US/Canadian border.

I'm not surprised Yeo was up for an award, and if the Oscars weren't just a mainstream marketing exercise, perhaps she'd have won. I remember her from David Simon's first fabulous police series, Homicide: Life on the Street. And I see that she's now working on Simon's latest production Treme, set in New Orleans.

Finally a mention of Once Upon A Time In The West which was recently showing in a new print at the BFI Southbank. It's still a visually stunning piece of work, and Morricone's score is supreme. If you get a chance, this is the kind of film that simply isn't the same on the small screen and needs to be seen in a cinema.

In a genius masterstroke of marketing, Twentieth Century Fox today persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to go to the cinema to see 15 minutes of footage from the forthcoming new film from James (Terminator 2, Titanic) Cameron.

And of course I was one of those who happily clicked on the free link and went along to see this footage at the sold out screening in the BFI IMAX in Waterloo. People were being turned away from the cinema when I got there. (Congratulations to the BFI, by the way, for a very well handled system of exchanging our printer tickets for reserved seat numbers in the cinema itself).

Much of the pre-publicity about this film has based around the 3D process, about which I'll say more another time. But I will say that I run a bit hot and cold over 3D wondering to what it extent it genuinely adds to the experience of going to the cinema versus just being a gimmick that effectively minimises the impact of piracy and lets you charge the customer more.

The trailer for Avatar was released to the world online yesterday and is in cinemas today, but I'd avoided it just so that this experience was fresh. Similarly, I didn't really know anything about the genesis of the film or the plot. I just knew that Cameron's not made a traditional film for an awfully long time - unless you live in the world of Entourage where Vincent Chase starred in Aquaman!

So what did I think?

It was pretty spectacular for sure. The footage we saw seemed to be made up of short unedited sequences from various parts of what Cameron himself in a filmed introduction told us was from the first half of the film. The first couple of sequences took place in a familiar "real" world before the "Avatar" world took over and we were fully immersed in CGI.

We saw a series of action sequences featuring a very unusual  looking hero and heroine, and bizarre alien beasts including some kind of distant elephant and tiger creatures as well as some that were akin to pterodactyls or even dragons (a taming sequence reminded me of SF books where dragons are tamed to fly). The action was fast and the CGI top notch.

Yet somehow I wasn't as completely bowled over as I'd perhaps liked to have been. There were a few too many "pointy" incidents where sequences had been filmed in such a way as to purely show-off the 3D. While things weren't quite coming out of the screen in a cheesy manner, they were clearly there for no other reason than to remind the audience that it was watching a 3D film.

It's possible that this is because Cameron has edited together lots of sequences that exaggerate this to an audience that's only seeing 15 minutes, but it was overdone in my view.

The other issue is that while the world Cameron's created is bizarre and thoroughly imaginative, it's also a little - well muddy. I don't know if it's the 3D process and the polarising lenses in the glasses as opposed to the colour palette Cameron has used to portray this imaginary world, but it all felt like it needed brightening up a bit. I'd love to compare the same footage in 2D and 3D to see whether this is the case. Remember that I was seeing this footage on perhaps the best IMAX screen in the UK with representatives of Fox in attendance. I don't think it was any shortcoming of the screen/cinema itself (Fox, incidentally, was grabbing video vox-pops from people on the way out. I snuck past. They were also taking plenty of photos of people wearing 3D glasses in the cinema itself).

The Cameron film that this feels closest to is actually The Abyss, which I did enjoy and is one of his better films - in particular the extended version where there was more time spent with the underwater aliens. I'll certainly go and see this film when it comes out, although I'm not actually sure that I want to see it in 3D on the basis that it might actually sparkle a little more in 2D.

It's impossible to judge on a film on the basis of an extended trailer, and the final film may capture my imagination to such an extent that any perceived technical failings will be irrelevant.

(This picture is vaguely of summer, and has nothing to do with the film!)

I got invited to a blogger's screening of this film next week but couldn't make it - so I saw a separate screening and I'm really glad I did.

Superficially this is light-hearted romantic film, but it's really not. A voiceover at the start of the film pretty much puts you straight on this, although you never know quite whether to believe the voiceover (it's a deep throaty one rather than one of the characters). But an "Author's note" sets you straight too. Somebody got hurt badly when they were dumped. At that someone was co-writer Scott Neustadter. He says as much in his piece in the production notes.

The "Summer" of the title isn't the season but Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), an assistant that Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets in his workplace - a greetings card manufacturer. He's an architect by trade but has slipped into the card business where his job is to dream up the words in cards for previously un-heard of card occasions.

He has his two male friends - one a co-worker who he goes karaoke singing with - who are there to help him through his difficulties.

You see the thing is that we know this relationship isn't going anywhere. The film's timeline spins around and we very quickly learn that for no obvious reason, Finn dumps Hansen. From there, we swing back and forth through good times and bad, as we learn how the relationship was formed and what happened to end it.

Throughout the film there are flash backs to the earlier lives of the characters, although an unusual licence has been used to place those characters in the correct timeline. The opening credits run across cine camera footage of our two main characters, yet given that they'd have grown up in the eighties you'd expect video footage rather than Super-8. Then another flashback to an incident seems to be placed in the fifties or sixties for no real reason. Somehow it just works.

Other techniques are used through the film. There's a dance number at one point, just after a very happy Hansen has been high-fiving strangers in the street and brilliantly at one point looks in a car window to check the reflection of himself and sees a beaming Han Solo smiling back at him. And during another sequence we get a split screen with what Hansen hoped would happen alongside the "reality" of it.

The music in the film is great by the way. Although Hansen seems too young for it (Gordon-Levitt is 28), he seems to be heavily into music like The Smiths and Joy Division. He has an endless selection of T-shirts for said artists, and early in their relationship Finn and Hansen compare notes on The Smiths. And somebody really loves The Boy With the Arab Strap by Belle and Sebastian. I'm really looking forward to the soundtrack. And at one point Deschanel sings a song herself during a karaoke sequence. Of course we know she can sing because she released an excellent album, She and Him, last year (she also appears on the soundtrack of Yes Man I understand).

Anyway, it's out on 4th September, and it'll be well worth seeing. The official website is here.

Moon is a great little film - a debut from Duncan Jones (aka David Bowie's son). It's nice to see a proper science fiction film based on ideas rather than space ships shooting other space ships - or more likely, blowing up landmarks.

Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell. He works in a base on the moon where he caretakes automated "Helium 3" harvesting. This is some super new fuel source that's shipped back to earth every so often.

At first glance, it's not really obvious why he should be alone in this base; there's plenty of room for more individuals. But the company that employs him don't even seem to have enough resource to fix the live link back to earth. All his communications have to be delayed.

Then one day he goes out to fix one of the harvesting machines and has an accident.

And there I'll leave the plot. It'd spoil it if you knew.

What I can say is that Bell does have some company in the form of GERTY, a HAL-type robot voiced by Kevin Spacey and with a nice line in emoticons.

And there is obviously something a bit deeper and darker happening on the moon base. And although it's based around a tried and tested SF standby, it's handled beautifully and Rockwell is superb.

The look and feel of the film is good. Yes I could ask why the moon's gravity seems more earth-like inside, why a robot communicates with earth via speech rather than data, and why things make noises outside, but I realise that this is me over-analysing things.

You never quite know what's going to happen. The end isn't guessable. You don't know what GERTY will or won't do (he's not entirely like HAL).

And the design of the film's great. It's nice to see model work rather than CGI all the time. Clint Mansell's music is great. I loved the fact that Bell's alarm clock woke him every day with Chesney Hawkes' The One and Only. At another point when Bell's having an argument he insists on dancing to Katrina and the Waves' Walking on Sunshine (Which I noted also turned up as one of David Mitchell's records on Desert Island Discs).

I've been most remiss about noting recent films that I've seen on this blog - if only to serve as a contemporaneous record for myself as to what I thought of various films.

But before I begin, can I just say that it really can't be healthy that I've had to tell people off twice in the last three visits for using their mobiles or Blackberrys in the cinema. I'm not talking about making calls or actually answering a phone they forgot to switch off or turn to silent. I mean people texting other people, checking their email, Twitter or whatever.

Well if you end up in the cinema with my, and your LED lit device is waved around by you, then be warned - I will ask you to switch it off. It's curious that at various screenings security strictly monitors whether I might be surreptitiously recording a film with the camera on my phone, but I've never seen cinema security asking somebody to switch off their phone.

Seriously - if you're not really interested in the film you've paid to see, why bother going at all. The cinema is not the same as your home where you can do what you like.

You wouldn't like it if I waved around a torch. I don't like you using your mobile.

Anyway, back to the films:

Public Enemies is a fairly decent return to form for Michael Mann after Miami Vice which was just a little bit too moody. Here we're on safer ground with a decent gangster film. Johnny Depp is good as Dillinger, and Christian Bale didn't annoy me too much as Purvis, the FBI agent Hoover puts in charge of his manhunt. Marion Cotillard didn't have enough to do until towards the end. And it was good to see lots of familiar faces from Brotherhood and The Wire filling out some of the roles. Overall a very fine film, and the music was terrific. I thought I recognised the night club singer, and of course it was Diana Krall.

The only thing I wasn't too sure about was Mann's use of video as a shooting medium. It felt very strange - especially in a period piece. I think the only time it really worked was during a fight out scene when along with his shooting style, it suddenly felt very visceral. At other times it just drew attention to itself - particularly in low lighting conditions where video really struggles and it suddenly became quite grainy. While it worked very well for Collateral, I'm not at all sure it was so successful here.

When I went to a preview screening of Bruno (or should that be Brüno?) a couple of weeks ago, everyone in the auditorium was forced to sign an embargo promising not to publish anything on the film until the Monday just gone. Also included in the embargo, by name, were blogs, Facebook and Twitter! Anyway, with the film hitting cinemas tomorrow, I'm not "allowed" to say what I think about it.

It's true to say that I laughed quite a bit. I never saw Borat, because I had mixed feelings about the use of the character and what people were being told. In particular, I was uncomfortable about what I knew were early scenes filmed in Romania where people weren't quite told what was going on. I did see a documentary on BBC Four called When Borat Came To Town, and although that showed some money grubbing lawyers just trying to get some cash from the film producers, the whole enterprise still felt uncomfortable.

Bruno was going to be looking at the fashion industry - at least I thought it was. And I felt a lot more happy with that industry being targeted. In fact, very quickly Baron Cohen is "busted" and he moves on from the European catwalks to the US where his character wants to become famous.

There's a sort of narrative to this film, but it's really been put together in the editing suite. It's clear that director Larry Charles and company have basically shot lots of material all over the place, employing the same techniques that Baron Cohen has been using since the 11 O'Clock Show and even earlier on Paramount Comedy Channel. Sometimes it'll work; and sometimes it won't. It doesn't matter - just keep going until you have eighty odd minutes of footage carefully edited together. It's pretty cheap to make, and the rewards and high.

This is a pretty crude film. As I say, I've not seen Borat so I can't compare it, although people I saw it with said it was ruder and cruder than that film. I'm not sure it's joking at the expense of homosexuals, and in many cases it's more a case of targeting the bigoted. But some earlier scenes are a little uncomfortable.

That said, the single most uncomfortable scene involves a US TV reality star and some nonsense about Britney Spears' sister. We'll leave it there - but I thought that it was bit poor. Another scene involving La Toya Jackson may well have been snipped out of the film that goes on general release given subsequent events - I'm not sure.

What's also clear is that in some cases, certain people have been primed and set-up. We're not told which, but the presence of cameras from multiple angles makes it clear it's not quite what we're being (or not being) told. In particular, a particular character at a swingers' party was surely sent in by producers.

There are "brave" elements - in particular an ultimate fighting style scene at the end of the film where, while there are obviously security in attendance, there was a danger to the actors.

So I laughed. It's crude. Would I recommend it? Probably not. I think Baron Cohen can do better and it doesn't need to be a race to the bottom. Ali G showed that he could be smarter (not that the resulting film with that character did anything to help).

I really loved Little Miss Sunshine, and Sunshine Cleaning comes from the same stable. It has no link with the previous film, and frankly the name "Sunshine" has been shoe-horned into the film. It could probably be safely removed and then we wouldn't make comparisons.

I enjoyed this film, although it's not as funny as its predecessor. But I can't say I totally loved it.

The main problem - and I'm not sure why - was that the plot seems to have been put together with a formula from one of those Robert McKee courses (and I say that never having read his book or been on his course). What I mean is that there are very obvious acts. Setup. Hero does well. Hero has a set back. And so on. It's just too formulaic. And the ending feels very rushed.

That all said, the performances are terrific - especially from Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.

Finally a word on the utterly wonderful Let The Right One In. This is a vampire film, but it's so much better than you might think that makes it. The performances from a young cast are superb. The 1970s setting is as real as anything I've seen since the somewhat more harrowing Breaking The Waves.

Anyway, see this film ahead of all the others I've talked about here - assuming it's still on in cinemas. Otherwise, pre-order the DVD.

Now I must try writing about really good films when they're still on in the cinemas in future!

I must admit that although the enormous build up for this film had left others frantic with excitement, I'd not really been one of them.

But by the time it arrived in cinemas at the weekend, I was certainly intrigued enough to want to go and see this "reboot" of the Star Trek franchise.

I've never been a massive Star Trek fan. I enjoy it and I'm sure that I've seen all the original series. I've also seen many of the Next Generation, but Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise only ever saw me dipping in and out.

I'd also begun to wonder if JJ Abrams had been taking on too much recently. I've actually stopped watching Lost - not having caught any of this series, and only really watched the last series half-heartedly. Perhaps I'll catch up with it on DVD. Then there's Fringe which is basically a new take on The X-Files although perfectly decent for all that.

Then we've also had Cloverfield, another cancelled TV series, and any number of unnamed projects associated with Abrams on IMDB.

That said, I thought his edition of Mission Impossible was pretty decent and word of mouth sounded good.

The new Star Trek film is actually really good. The story they've come up with lets them move on without what has come before (or will happen), and the characters are all pretty much as we grew up with them (assuming you grew up with the old 60s series). The action is good, and the effects are excellent. This isn't a mess like even the trailer for Transfomers 2 before this film was.

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto completely inhabit Kirk and Spock and were it not for the fact that Leonard Nimoy's in this film (and it feels much more than a cameo by the way), you'd almost forget they existed.

They've even managed to pull off things like updating the uniforms while retaining the feel of the sixties originals. The overall feel of the film is right - the scale's right for the big screen yet it feels like it has some relation to the original series.

I'm sure I didn't spot half the hidden fan references littered throughout the film, but that was all to the good, because you could come in fresh and watch this film without knowing anything else about the Star Trek universe.

It's not the best science fiction film you'll ever see, but it's set the bar high for the rest of the summer's blockbusters, and it's certainly the best Star Trek film.

Last night the NFT BFI Southbank had a showing of Coraline, the new stop motion film from Henry Selick (the director of "Tim Burton's" The Nightmare Before Christmas) and based on the book by Neil Gaiman.

Now I've not read the book, although I believe many have - and some of them were in the audience last night.

The film has a wonderful feel to it, with the hand crafted models beautifully animated. The 3D is superbly realised without the showy "coming-out-of-the-screen" effects too many 3D films in the past have been known for.

In the Q&A afterwards, Selick explained how the physical dimensions of the two worlds was actually different...

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. The story is about a little girl, Coraline, who's moved into the Pink Palace Apartments - basically a big house divided into three. Upstairs and downstairs are an array of colourful characters but when Coraline discovers a secret doorway it takes her into another world - the same, but different. Here, her parents spend time talking to her, and feed her lovely food. The small difference is that they have buttons for eyes.

There is, of course, much more to this world. Is it quite as wonderful as Coraline first imagines? What do you think?

The voicework is great, and the imagination is exceptional with wondeful flights of fancy all realised with inordinate creativity.

As I mentioned, we had a Q&A with Selick and Gaiman after the film, and it was informative hearing the genesis of film, the time it took to get into production (I'll give you a clue - it was years), and the various iterations of how the film would be made before it was produced in this form.

We also heard about the differences between the book and the film. And in the audience were Ian McShane (Bobinsky) and John Hodgman (Father and Other Father). Well, I say McShane was there. He actually left early. Hodgman, however, came up on stage and joined in the discussion.

It really is fascinating listening to a discussion about how much you can scare children. We've had the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and of course, the Daleks in Doctor Who. Children like being scared, and the "other parents" in Coraline are the latest iterations in a long line of scary villains. Buttons for eyes are intrinsically scary. And it's great that a film like this exists to scare a new generation of children.

And lots of adults should go and see this film too - preferably in 3D.

This is a film I went into completely blind. I knew it couldn't have had the best reviews of the week, but I hadn't seen a trailer and didn't really know anything about it.

First things first. Nic Cage's hair is very strange in this film. At some point soon he's going to have to acknowledge it's receding, because hair cuts like this don't really, umm, cut it.

To the film. I suppose not knowing what the film's about is a strength in this instance. We open in 1959 school where there's a very strange little girl. She's suggested that their school celebrates its opening by placing a time capsule in the ground. Her classmates all draw pictures of spaceships and robots to bury, but little Lucinda writes two sides of seemingly random numbers. They all get buried.

Flash forward to 2009 and Nic Cage is John, a lecturer at MIT who seems to give quite facile lectures. He also looks at Saturn in his garden with lights all over the place, surely making it really hard to see the night sky. He doesn't believe in god, and hasn't talked to his pastor father for an indeterminate period of time. He's a widower with a son, Caleb (a very biblical name for a non-believer, but then Caleb appears in the Book of Numbers, so that'll be the reason).

Strange things begin to happen when the time capsule's opened up and Caleb gets Lucinda's scribblings. Late at night John spots the date of 11 September, and then manically finds loads of other dates, along with spookily accurate numbers of people who died in each event (are the total fatalities for 9/11 even known that accurately?).

He shows his findings to his cynical physicist friend. It's all numerology. But there are three dates left, and each date has some more numbers attached which haven't been decoded.

And so we embark on something that's not too clear, and feels as though it might have strolled in from an M Night Shyamalan film. There are some strangers who are following Caleb around. He's seeing strange visions.

The first date arrives and there's an almighty accident that's a little too CGI for its own good.

I won't spoil the film any more as the direction it follows is uncertain, but anyone who's watched the films of Steven Spielberg should have a good idea where it's heading before it gets there.

Rose Byrne, seen most recently in Damages, gets an interesting role that doesn't inevitably become a romance with Cage - Byrne might be 15 years younger than Cage, but that wouldn't stop such a plot development in any other film.

What can I say about the ending without giving anything away? There's too much CGI that feels out of step with the rest of the film. I'd have saved the money and gone for something simpler.

The story didn't hang together well enough, and even when disaster was striking, Cage was seemingly able to stroll around with impunity. When everybody else's mobile phones were down, Cage's was up. Having Cage's character drink from a bottle of whiskey at any given evening was fine, but it wasn't really followed up. This was no Leaving Las Vegas.

All in all, interesting, but not great. Not terrible, but just OK.

Obviously, any film that was going to set itself on a pirate radio station in the swinging sixties was going to pique my interest. And so it was with the new Richard Curtis film.

Richard Curtis films are big affairs - you don't make films like Love Actually and Notting Hill and decide that your next project is going to be a small one. So despite the relatively niche interest in something as obscure as British radio broadcasting history, we still get a sampling of some of our finest comic actors and a top American actor to boot.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is the obvious star, playing The Count, an American DJ broadcasting to the UK. The film tells us that something like 25m people a week were listening to pirate radio, and although I'm not sure how accurate that figure can possibly be, it's clear that for a long time before the BBC gave us Radio 1, Brits had to look elsewhere: legal or otherwise.

Is this an accurate history of what it was like to be on a pirate ship in the North Sea? Almost certainly not. They all look like they're having far too much fun, and of course the boat is manned by just about nobody else but DJs (there are other people who work at a radio station believe it or not). But that's not really the point. Curtis' films are never framed as social documentaries. They're supposed to give you a good time and leave you smiling at the end.

And The Boat That Rocks does that. It's laced with music from the period, and for the most part - despite some sexual escapades between the locked up men, they all get on well. The laughs are broad - sometimes too broad for my liking - but it all looks like fun.

If anything, the story is too slight. There's evil Kenneth Branagh, the government minister who's trying to close down the perverted pirates, and his henchman "Twatt" (Jack Davenport). Branagh is clearly having a whale of a time being evil with a Hitler-esque moustache to boot.

But aside from that, and Bill Nighy, the station's owner trying to combat the government, there's not really a lot to say. A young lad joins the boat, falls in love, and gets his heart broken before... Well you know. It's a Curtis film. Then there are some fallings out between DJs - I'd love to see two DJs sort out their differences by, say, climbing to the top of the Crystal Palace transmitter as the two do in this film.

Throughout the film we get cutaways of swinging Britain listening eagerly to "Radio Rock" from their transistor radios, quite often dancing around in public. We get montages of them at various points as the plot unfolds. But mostly it's just all about having a good time, and finding some appropriate music to play.

It'll do pretty well in Britain with a cast that includes the excellent Rhys Darby, Nick Frost, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Chris O'Dowd (playing a DJ, unlike his character in ITV2 comedy FM who is... a radio DJ) and Katherine Parkinson. But I wonder how it'll be sold in the US? This is a big film that's had a few quid spent on it, and although it sets up the story and explains why there were pirates, it's not part of the heritage.

Still - who cares (apart from Universal and Working Title)? I'm here to talk about the film, not worry about its commercial viability.

Overall, I'd say it's definitely worth catching, even if it's not the funniest comedy you'll see this year. It's a tad too long to be honest with a few surplus scenes, and some of the plot is just a little predictable.

The end sequence of the film explains that by the summer of 1967 the pirates were over (I'm not spoiling anything - you should know this). It doesn't then point out that Radio 1 launched using lots of DJs who'd been on pirate ships. But the film does then say that there are now 299 music stations playing rock and pop twenty-four hours a day (It'd be churlish to point out that on the day that another batch of Global services turn into "Hearts" that's probably over-egging it because so many sound alike, and indeed, are alike), but it then goes on to say that in the subsequent forty years, the music has had a good innings. And we get a feelgood montage of clips of the characters and classic album covers from the period - starting with Sgt. Pepper.

I'm really not at all sure what I think about Duplicity, the new film from writer-director Tony Gilroy starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. It's one of those twisty films that keeps you on your toes as it jumps back and forward in time to tell a story of industrial epsionage. Indeed one suspects that Gilroy may have been quite envious when he saw the TV series Damages, as that's what it most reminds me of in form.

Roberts is ex-CIA and Owen ex-MI6, who first meet on missions for their respective intelligence agencies in Dubai. But Roberts drugs Owen and makes off with something or other.

Flash forward and Owen is now working in corporate counter-espionage. There are two big corporations who may as well be P&G and Lever - except they're not. It slowly becomes clear that Roberts, who works in counter intelligence of one company is a double agent for the counter-intelligence division of the other company. She is being "run" by Owen's character.

There's a new product launch imminent, and amongst enormous secrecy, all are desperate to discover what this game-changing product is going to be.

Throughout the film, you're never too sure who to trust. This is an old-school Cold War spy film updated to become corporate US. Roberts and Owen never trust one another either despite having an ongoing relationship. Of sorts.

It's certainly a good film, but somehow, it's not quite as good as it might be. It's intelligent, and demands that the audience pays attention. If you don't you might lose the thread (sadly I think that's what happened with some of the premiere audience that I saw this with - they were unduly restless).

The performances are strong, but in the end, I don't think it's quite as good as it might be.

Doubt is another "Oscar" film adapted and directed from his own play by John Patrick Shanley. And up front, it's fair to say that it feels very much like a stageplay adapted to film. It's claustrophobic and has powerful set pieces that scream "play" at you.

Meryl Streep is a strict nun who's principal of a Catholic school in 60s New York (I'll be honest - I had to look up whether it was New York, Boston, or somewhere else on the north eastern US seaboard. It wasn't immediately clear to me). She begins to suspect that Philip Seymour Hoffman's priest might be behaving inappropriately with one of the boys.

Given the recent history of the Catholic church in the US, and the number of awful cases of priests who were indeed behaving like that, you might think that either this piece is about the unmasking of such a priest, or a role-reversal film - perhaps he's the priest who's not stepping out of line.

Because we follow the action from Sister Beauvier's point of view, we're not sure. And that's really the point of the piece.

There are some nicely observed sections of the film. Streep's character is feared by all who come before her. She knows when kids are misbehaving and strolls around smacking kids and dishing out punishment without hesitation. She reminds me of a teacher at my primary school (not a nun) who managed to maintain a similar fearful hold over all who faced her.

And the sections where the boys act as altar servers also reminded me of my own experiences. They even dressed the same as we did.

Everything is nicely observed and the performances throughout are excellent. I liked the development of Amy Adams' Sister James who's told to pin a framed picture of the Pope on her blackboard by Sister Beauvier. "But it's the wrong Pope," she complains. "He passed away."

"You can use the refelection in the glass to see what the children are doing behind you when your back is turned," she's told. "They'll think you've got eyes in the back of your head!"

Amy Adams is up for a best supporting actress role for her performance which is fine, but I'm much less sure about Viola Davis who's in the same category. She has a couple of good scenes and that's about her total contribution. Yes, they're important and powerful scenes, but others who have less obvious "drama" are equally as good - if not better. With Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona the only performance I've not seen in the category, I'd have to give it to Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler; a much deeper and more polished performance.

Overall though, it's another good, if not great film.

I saw a preview of this at the weekend, although it was a close run thing. When I turned up at the cinema at 10.30am on Sunday morning along with a hundred and fifty or so other people, my local multiplex seemed to know nothing about it.

Cue lots of delays and uncertainty about whether we would see this film, another, or any. But they managed to get it sorted out, and so we saw one of the award season's most nominated films.

But I've got to ask why it's so nominated. It's certainly a decent film, and it's very unusual. But award winning? I'm not so sure.

It's about Brad Pitt's character, the aforementioned Benjamin Button, who is born as an old man and as he gets older, his body gets younger. In other words, the plot's utterly bizarre. But you fairly quickly forget about that and get into the interesting ideas the film presents, as he falls for a family friend who's the same age as him in years, if not in body. That means that there's a sort of "sweet spot" somewhere in the middle of the film. But it'd be a shame to spoil the story any more.

I've no idea to what extent this film really is based on an F Scott Fitzgerald story, but it's interesting if a tad long - it's getting on for three hours.

Cate Blanchett plays Daisy, the aforementioned friend, and a fine job she does too. While Pitt's is pretty decent. But I'm just not sure that these are the best performances that I've seen in the last twelve months. They're assured, certainly, but I'm really not sure that's enough.

The most interesting part of the film is that set in Russia as Button meets Tilda Swinton's somewhat more interesting bored diplomat's wife. The relationship the two have is much deeper than anything else in the film, but in reality it's just a sideshow to the main story.

To be honest, this film has been better made by the French. It has the feel of either Amelie or A Very Long Engagement - the playfulness it sometimes employs.

None of this should put anyone off seeing the film, but it's just not as strong as some of the others.

Oh yes, and it's nice to Julia Ormond on the big screen again? Where's she been for these last few years?

Professional wrestling has always had a strange alure for me. I can't say that I've ever watched very much of it, but the idea that something that was presented as sport, wasn't fairly contested is just something that goes against all my sensibilities. Of course, these days it's presented at "Sports Entertainment."

There's also the somewhat seedy side away from the "glamour" of the WWE. Us Brits of course (fondly) remember ITV Saturday afternoons with Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks et al. And that was seedy enough.

But that's nothing to the town hall circuits that seem to exist all over the place. Stray far enough down the EPG on Sky in the sports section and you'll find the Fight Network which features much of this. Often taking place in small venues with keen fans, you'll occasionally recognise the name of someone who was once on the books of the WWE.

I guess that it's at this level of wrestling that we find Randy "The Ram" in The Wrestler. In a role that surely nobody else could have played, Mickey Rourke is The Ram, a wrestler who was at his peak in 2009. An opening montage shows us wrestling memorabilia from his biggest ever bout when he took on The Ayatollah.

Now he lives on a trailer park somewhere on the east coast, where he struggles to make rental payments. Scarily, he's still appearing in the ring in local town hall bouts. It's clear that the years and the profession have not been kind to his body. The camera, which often follows him around, in a documentary style, is also not scared of showing how he has to practically tape is his body together. It's also clear that the cocktail of drugs he needs to keep the pain at bay would put down a horse.

We know that wrestling bouts are fixed, but the scenes in the dressing room before the bouts where wrestlers determine who's going to do what to who are enlightening. As is the fact, for those who were unaware, that they're constantly telling each other what they're going to do for their next move.

The wrestling feels very real, and given that plenty of real wrestlers were involved in the film's making, that's not surprising. That's despite the fact that nobody is going to come away from this film thinking that the "sport" is in any way glamorous.

One hardcore bout features glass, staple guns, and barbed wire alongside more familiar fare like tables, ladders, bins and folding chairs. In one scene, we see The Ram going around a supermarket picking up suitable kit to throw at one another. Yet when the bloody bout is over, the staples have to be pulled out, and stitches put into some of the deeper cuts. It's not pleasant.

Marisa Tomei plays Cassidy - a stripper - who is beginning to feel, like The Ram, that her best days are behind her, as she struggles to make perhaps as much money as she once did. She's not really his girlfriend - he's a client. But it's a fascinating relationship. As is the one he has with his daughter, Stephanie.

At it's heart, it's a sad film. There's a wonderful scene where The Ram and several other ex-wrestlers are sitting in a room somewhere to meet the fans. Only a handful come through the doors, where they pay a few dollars to have a Polaroid taken with them, or collect a signature. When Randy looks around he sees one uses a walking stick; another is in a wheelchair; and a third has a colostomy bag. Is this to be his future?

There is humour though - a wonderful scene where he works in his local supermarket behind the deli counter, amazed that the manager is willing to put him front of house.

All in all, a cracking portrait of someone who feels real, and I'm certain does exist. Like the professional boxer who goes on too long. Despite the cinema being packed this evening, few were going to see The Wrestler (goodness knows what garbage they were seeing), so catch this while you can. Next week gets another three "serious" films.

I'd been looking forward to seeing Slumdog Millionaire from director Danny Boyle since I first heard about it. It was such a remarkable idea for a story, based on the book, Q&A.

Now despite what you may have seen in the film's own advertising, this is not the "Feel Good Film Of The Year" - at least not unless you're a fairly sick individual. Life is tough for the kids from the Mumbai slums.

The film is episodic with each question basically introducing an extract of Jamal's (Dev Patel) life. He's being interrogated by the police who believe that he must be a cheat for someone like him to have got so far in Who Want's To Be A Millionaire.

There's an amazing sequence at the start of the film with a group of kids being chased from a runway where they're playing cricket by police on mopeds. The visceral thrill of them running into the nearby shanty town whilst being chased by the police is precisely the same as you had when Ewan MacGregor was running down Princes Street at the start of Trainspotting.

There are some tough scenes in this film - and at no point, despite what some might think, are we really presented with some kind of idealised picture of life in the slums. There's religious intollerance, organised crime, murder, torture, kidnapping and more. Life is tough, but the film has heart and I can't recommend it highly enough.

The music, incidentally, is absolutely awesome, and feels very cross cultural. It's a CD that I'll be tracking down.

J. Michael Straczynski is someone best known to me as the creator and driving force behind Babylon 5, a series that was almost certainly ahead of its time.

Now comes Changeling, a superb new film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie. Straczynski dug up the story - infamous at the time - based around a mother who's son disappears. The police, in the shape of Jeffrey Donovan's Captain Jones, return a different boy, and then try to shut up Jolie's Christine Collins when she complains.

Then there's the powerful Rev. Briegleb played by John Malkovich, who is pretty much her supporter. But he has a radio station to continually berate the corrupt Los Angeles Police Department.

There are more elements to the story, but I won't mention them here as the really spoil it.

Eastwood does a fine job directing it in his usual manner, and the 30s period is depicted in a way that never detracts from the story. But it's lovely to see the operator manager using rollerskates to move swiftly around the office. Eastwood also composed the music.

A lot has been made of the lack of jokes and seriousness of the film, but I don't think that's fair. So it's not always especially pleasant, but it's always watchable and the incredible story just keeps you going as you want to discover what happens.

A fine cast fills out all the minor roles, but again I don't want to highlight anyone in case I give away plot details. The film certainly headed off in a direction I seriously wasn't expecting although I'm not familiar with the history of that part of California in that period.

I know a lot of people find Angelina Jolie annoying, but just when you begin to think she is, up she pops with something like this to make you forget.

Eastwood, it seems, pretty much used the script as it came without changes, and his next film, hot on the heels of this - Gran Torino - also uses the script as it came to Eastwood. Unchanged. The guy's got class.

Another year - another Ridley Scott film. Scott is responsible for some of my favourite ever films. They tend to be earlier films like Blade Runner and Alien than later ones, but American Gangster last year was superb, while 2006's A Good Year (also starring Russell Crowe) was abysmal.

So where does Body of Lies fit? Well it's not had wonderful reviews, and while it feels a little workmanlike at times, the story is interesting and it certainly feels contemporary. Crowe plays the Hoffman, a CIA director who runs Leonardo DiCaprio's Ferris - an agent in the Middle East. When we first meet him he's based in Iraq, but he moves on to places such as Jordian, Dubai and Syria at various points during the film.

Ferris is trying his best to nurture agents on the ground, but Hoffman, who inhabits a suburban Washington DC lifestyle and seems to permanently have a mobile headset wired to his ear, is in a rush to find the operator of an Al Qaeda cell currently causing misery in Sheffield, Manchester and Amsterdam.

The real intelligence of the piece turns out to be the Jordanian head of intelligence, Hani (Mark Strong), who's men are everywhere and really understand the geopolitics of the region.

We continually see surveillance imagery taken by drones high in the sky, although the Al Qaeda operatives know how to stop the drones tracking them, with a clever desert manoeuvre.

Others have taken against the immorality of most of the film's characters, including the otherwise likeable Ferris. But that's not really a problem in a spy film. I suppose the bigger problem is the speed with which the conclusion of the film's reached. It's all a little too neat and tidy - but then a film has to have some kind of resolution.

So worthwhile? Undoubtedly. But like the Coen's and Burn After Reading, it's not as good as the film that came before it. I just hope that the next film Scott makes is The Forever War and not Monopoly The Movie.

I must admit that I managed to turn down two sets of free tickets for screenings I couldn't make before finally paying to see the new Bond today.

First the good things: Craig is still excellent as Bond, the premise of the story might not have been especially dwelt upon, but it was relevant, and the product placement was far more subtle than last time.

Sadly these are outweighed by a plot that was really pretty lacking. We just had A to B to C. When M tells Bond to stop killing the next person, time after time, we realise that this is indeed all that he's doing. The film really drags in places, and the reasons for travelling to film's various locations are thoroughly random. The set piece at the Viennese opera was fascinating, but ultimately a waste of time.

A few people questioned the title, but we hear the name of the criminal organisation - Quantum - at least a couple of times before the denouement. If anything, it's the rather pointless criminal organisation lapel pin that all members get given as part of their gift packs that seems more questionable. Quantum, it seems, is supposed to be the new SMERSH or SPECTRE.

The action sequences were a little pedestrian really. They were perfectly well done, but there wasn't the horror of the Aston Martin flip in Casino Royale, or some of the more inventive chase sequences of previous Bond films. On the other hand, the Bourne films have done the more realistic car v car chase better - especially the Moscow sequence in the Bourne Supremacy. The opening chase was fine although ultimately baffling since we basically joined the action mid-flow. I was most disappointed with a sequence in which Bond leaps out of plane without a parachute. He has an accomplice in Camille (Olga Kurylenko) who has a parachute to share with him, but it felt much less real than a similar stunt performed at the start of Moonraker. That time around, it was done "for real" by a stuntman (you can see that the stuntman must have had a parachute under his shirt). This time we clearly see Craig's face, but CGI has obviously been employed.

The film really could have done with a few wider shots giving the audience a broader perspective on the action. The Bourne films, and to an extent Saving Private Ryan or Ronin have increased the verisimilitude we expect from action films. But sometimes the wide shot giving us a clear picture of what's happening makes the stunts look better.

While overall, there weren't the crashing product placement bits that we saw in Casino Royale, driving around Haiti in a Ford Ka seemed a little odd compared with the island's other vehicles.

I'm sure that people who suggest that the script ran out of time before the writers' strike are pretty much on the money. The plot really wasn't there, and you begin to wonder how many expository sequences ended up on the cutting room floor. Gemma Arterton's agent Field was woefully under-written. While she jumped into bed with Bond instantaneously, and that should always happen with a Bond film, it does rather reduce the amount of empathy we have with Bond over the death of Vespa, who he's supposed to be avenging even though she'd double crossed him. Aside from that, she had nothing to do aside from reprising a death last seen in Goldfinger.

As much as anything this film is very much setting up the next film. Quantum is surely going to be the cloudy terror organisation of at least one more film. I suppose that Al Qaeda or the like could never work, because there'd be no opportunity for Bond to swan around in a dinner jacket at a casino or similar.

It's not the worst Bond film of recent times - that prize has to remain Die Another Day with its invisible car. But let's hope that next time, the producers spend some time getting a script together first. The habit today of knowing the exact date a film is due to open before the script is finished and the first day's shooting has taken place is reckless. And I think that's why Quantum of Solace is so poor after we'd had such a good re-start with Casino Royale.

Finally, a small addendum. The print we saw was prefaced by a slightly different FACT anti-piracy ad to the usual. We had a Daniel Craig voiceover informing us that thousands of people are employed by the film industry as we saw a few seconds of behind the scenes footage from Quantum of Solace. He implored us not to record the film.

On the way into the cinema, a security guard was searching bags to stop precisely this, although an HD camcorder would easily have fitted in my jacket pocket without the need for a bag.

But it's probably a nicer thing to do than just tell the audience that you'll go to prison (v. unlikely). It should still be pointed out that everyone in the cinema had paid to watch the film on the big screen and not download it. But it was the least bad anti-piracy warning I've seen yet. FACT still need to note that their number is actually (020) 8xxx xxxx not 0208 xxx xxxx. That really annoys me for some reason.

I must admit that I've been pretty poor at writing about films of late, and you might think it was because I hadn't seen any. To be honest, I haven't been to the cinema this year as frequently as I have in the past and it's not solely because the experience is so dreadful these days. But then who, besides the cinema in question, should be responsible for the fact that the digital screening I saw of The Dark Knight seemed to flicker the whole way through because there was a problem with the projector.

Speaking of projectors, I actually got to peer into a projection booth a week or so ago (we were showing some ads at a plush London cinema), and there's a fascinating amount of kit in there. It was also obvious that the projectionist who ran all four of that cinema's screens from a single corridor, was a big Jessica Alba fan with a variety of life-size cut-outs and posters in the room.

Anyway - to the films. Jar City is based on Arnaldur Indriðason's novel of the same name. Well - I say the same name - but in the UK, the book was published as Tainted Blood. The film seems to have had a release in the UK mainly because it's directed by Baltasar Kormákur who previously made the only other Icelandic film anybody might be able to name - Reykjavik 101. But it's still taken its stately time to cross the stretch of the Atlantic to reach us, having been made back in 2006. Of course, we barely have diplomatic relations with Iceland these days, but this is very much a worthwhile film.

As Indriðason's novels have begun to gain ground in the UK, it's worth saying up front that this film is an incredibly good dramatisation of the novel. Iceland as we usually see it, is filled with dramatic scenery, yet here we have a somewhat bleaker portrait of the country. Well worth seeing, although disappointingly, I can't find news of any further books being filmed. A US remake does seem to be on the cards though.

Gomorrah is simply fantastic. The praise it has received in the press is fully deserved. I've always hated films like the Al Pacino version of Scarface (which has nothing on the original) that essentially glamourise gangsters. In Gomorrah, two of the characters - a pair of youths - re-enact scenes from that very film before they find a stash of the Camorra's weapons. When you see them playing with the guns in a river estuary, you genuinely fear for them as they mess around with these very dangerous armaments.

The film is a series of stories that don't so much interlock as take place in the same milieu. The squalid setting of the Naples suburb which feels utterly lawless. While some stories reveal the pettiness of it all, as the various factions of these mafia break up causing tensions, and inevitably deaths, others are more revealing. I think many are aware of the dreadful waste industry scandals that have hit Naples. This film makes it clear, as we see a seemingly respectable businessman heading to places such as Venice to sign deals to get rid of waste. In turn it's buried, mostly illegally, with little regard for safety, in farmers' fields. The land becomes toxic. Nobody cares.

The other fascinating story is of a tailor who tries to escape the Comorra, by teaching Chinese workers how to produce garments to the quality required by the Italian fashion industry. At one point a Milanese fashion house representative seeks bids for a batch of haute couture outfits. The various tailors outdo themselves to underbid one another and offer to complete the outfits in faster times. Nobody in charge really cares about the workers who will literally have to work around the clock to meet the deadlines they've been signed up for.

A Coen brothers film is always worth watching - well with the singular exception of their remake of The Ladykillers - which I only finally saw when it was on TV. Burn After Reading's their latest, and it seems to have disappointed an awful lot of people after last year's No Country For Old Men.

To be honest, I went in knowing exactly what I was going to get, and I got it. This comes from someone who found Intolerable Cruelty to be entertaining in its own way, and The Hudsucker Proxy to be an under-appreciated classic. So a nonsense tale of some supposed lost CIA secrets on a disc, is perfectly fine.

Is there much to be said about society in this film? Not really. There are gags aimed at much slighter subjects, but that's not really the point. Everyone here is just having fun. There are brief moments of violence, but that's par for the course in a Coen brothers film.

The showing I saw was the first packed, paid-for showing of any film I've seen in years. And that was for a 6.30pm screening (albeit in Islington). While it's not joke after joke, I came out feeling that I'd had value for money. George Clooney's goofy; John Malkovich's supercilious; Brad Pitt is dumb; Tilda Swinton is overbearing; and Francis McDormand is insecure - at least initially. And the conversations between CIA officer David Rasche and his superior JK Simmons are fantastic. Well worth a trip to your local cinema - assuming it's not too terrible.

Back in 2003 one of my favourite directors, Ang Lee, gave us Hulk, a film that I never saw. It's not that I don't like superhero films - I've probably seen most of them. But I'd heard so much negative press about it that I just couldn't bring myself to see it.

Anyway, it didn't do especially well at the box office, but now we've got a "reboot" of the series with The Incredible Hulk. From the opening sequence, which in many ways mirrors the old TV series' intro, you realise that we're not going to get a slow build up to the hows and whys of Bruce Banner getting experimenting on himself with gamma radiation. All the backstory you need is basically covered during this opening sequence.

We then see Banner (Edward Norton) in a Brazilian slum trying to live in secret. He still loves Liv Tyler's Betty Ross, but he's trying to blend in with the locals working in a soft drink bottling plant. Unfortunately some of his blood gets into a drink, and when an old American gentleman (no less than Stan Lee in a customary cameo) falls ill, that gives William Hurt's General Ross all the information he needs to chase after Banner. His crack team of commandos are led by Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky, who for some reason is Russian but was educated in the UK - hence his no attempt at a Russian accent. There were a few titters in the audience when Blonsky announces that he's 39 (Roth's 47).

And so the chase is on, with Banner returning to the US where he's still trying to find the serum that will reverse his changes. We get a massive battle on the green lawns of an Ivy League university, and it all leads to a rather inevitable showdown.

Overall, it's all quite good fun, but more so than with most recent superhero films, you simply feel at times that you're watching an animated cartoon. I mean you are watching animation - CGI animation. But it always feels like that another really reaches reality. Now obviously when you're a ten foot tall green muscled green thing, you're never going to look real, but actually I was really disappointed with the CGI, and it doesn't feel as real as Gollum or even King Kong - two other CGI characters who we've felt empathy for. There's one scene between Ross and the Hulk which feels like a direct lift from Kong as Ross calms the beast it some sheltered rocky outcrop.

Add to that the fact that helicopter gunships are also routinely CGI without ever feeling real, and some poor and unrealistic green-screen work, and you feel that for all the reported rough edges of the previous Hulk film, not a great deal's been learnt.

There are some nice cameos. As well as the aforementioned Lee, there's a scene where Banner is flicking TV channels, and briefly the original Banner, Bill Bixby, is seen. And there's Lou Ferrigno, the original TV Hulk, getting a couple of lines as a security guard (IMDB tells me that he got a similar cameo in the previous Hulk film).

There are also two very clunky product placement deals. We all know that the operating systems in films are never usually Windows or OS X - they're some clever different OS that usually involves not using the mouse, but using the keyboard quite a lot (perhaps because the users know keyboard shortcuts really well?). Anyway in this film at one point somebody logs into a system to find some data, but first we see Norton 360 protecting this non-Windows/non-Mac computer. Clunky. Then later Ross takes a photo of Banner using her Panasonic Lumix camera. There's no real reason for it. She just does. Later we see the camera battery go flat and her picture disappear in another scene that makes no sense since who leaves their cameras in playback mode? And anyway, even if your battery is flat, it's not as though you lose the picture.

The opening for the sequel is so wide that you could drive a truck through it. But there is one nice little scene right at the very end that sits alone from the main film. It works alongside a very similar scene at the end of Iron Man - although it's interesting that they didn't put it post-credits this time around. Anyway, the idea that two of the summer's superhero films are somehow linked and might be involved in an ongoing story is interesting, but I'll say no more (even though there'll be spoiler ahoy all over the net, and if you were brought up on Marvel comics, you might have a good idea).

Overall, a disappointing film. Not bad, but by no means good. Iron Man was much better.

In a turn up for the books, I've now seen two of the summer's blockbusters, and you know what, Iron Man's not too bad at all (this week's major title is Sex and the City, and having not seen a single episode of the TV series, I'm certainly not bothered about the film). Iron Man came out a few weeks ago now, but I've only just got around to seeing it, and I really was pleasantly surprised.

I suppose the best thing about it is Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark, a brilliant engineer and head of Stark Industries. We see him captured by an outfit in Afghanistan who aren't the Taliban, and aren't Al Qaeda. But they're a bit like both, except they're armed to the teeth and are going around killing villagers in Afghanistan for no discernible reason. Downey plays the character in a relaxed manner, and he just does what he wants.

Anyway, before you know it, Stark's modelled himself on MacGyver, and has built a flying rocket man. Back in the US he develops it and is a changed man. Unfortunately for him, his business partner is an evil Jeff Bridges. We're tipped off pretty early that he's evil because he's bald and has a beard. Stark's aided and abetted by Gwyneth Paltrow who plays his long suffering PA.

The plots implausible, but the action sequences are good, and the big set pieces largely don't go over the top. There's no unnecessarily enormous SF spectaculars that just bore the audience (cf. the third X-Men film), and what there is feels pretty visceral, aside from some slightly dubious flying sequences.

As a piece of cinema it's pretty good. And it's really worth staying through all the credits right until the very end where there's a great coda, which sets up the sequel very nicely indeed.

Just one thing to note. This film's a 12A, which the BBFC defines thus:

Suitable for 12 years and over. No-one younger than 12 may see a ‘12A’ film in a cinema unless accompanied by an adult. No-one younger than 12 may rent or buy a ‘12’ rated video or DVD. Responsibility for allowing under-12s to view lies with the accompanying or supervising adult.

Now that doesn't stop children younger than 12 going in, but it's down to parents to determine whether their kids are mature enough for the film. I wouldn't pretend that this is easy unless you pre-screen the film yourself. But you should be aware. The film is not going to be PG rated. Iron Man has a nasty opening sequence which sees soldiers shot, there's a torture scene, Robert Downey Jr's character is shown to be something of a playboy and all told there are more than a few scenes that younger children will find scary.

I know this because the lady in front of me had brought her kids along, the oldest who must have around 12 or 13, and the youngest being 5 or 6. Unsurprisingly the youngest girl was pretty scared on multiple occasions and her mum had to take her out of the cinema several times. This film is simply not suitable for such children and she really shouldn't have taken her youngest to this title.

I must admit that I had to go away and double check that title. Perhaps, in the fullness of time it'll come as second nature, but it's unnecessarily complicated it for you ask me.

Anyway Indy's back, and it's been a while. We first meet him having been kidnapped and brought to that secret warehouse we saw at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark all those years ago. Time has moved on to 1957, and the enemy now is Commie rather than Nazi. This particular gang of Soviet citizens are led by the rather wonderful Cate Blanchett playing Irina Spalko in a severe cropped haircut and carrying a sabre. Some might suggest that she has a dominatrix look about her.

Indy soon escapes, and there's a chilling sequence in which he realises that he's in the middle of the desert at the scene of an imminent nuclear test. Things have rather moved on from the fear of Nazis.

The reds under the bed theme is nicely played out as the FBI becomes suspicious of him, despite his impeccable record suggesting otherwise.

And so we're led on a journey around Latin America, as the chase gets underway looking for the secret kingdom of the title. There's a gaggle of British character actors en route including an entertaining if slightly underwritten Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent filling in for the late Denholm Elliot (who's character still gets a knowing nod via a university statue), and a great mad turn from John Hurt. We also get to re-meet Raiders' Marion (Karen Allen) and are introduced to Shia LaBeouf's Mutt, who's obviously been lined up to continue the franchise into the 60s should Lucas and Spielberg decide to continue.

The story's tosh of course, but then they always have been. This time, perhaps, it's a little more tosh than usual, but you put that to one side and get on with the action.

There's been a certain amount of criticism of this film which is as much as anything due to the high standards of those that came before it, the affection that many of us hold the originals - in particular Raiders (although I still love the opening of Temple of Doom - I suspect I'm alone in that) - and the knowledge of what we've seen since then.

While I don't think that any of the films that have tried to carry the mantle of Indy have done so in the intervening years, I think that perhaps this film could have been a little rawer. There is still plentiful CGI, not that there ever wasn't lots of special effects in Indy films. I could have perhaps done with a swifter denouement that wasn't quite as "showy-offy".

But I still really enjoyed the film. The pace was good at the start and the end - perhaps only slipping in the middle. The film still felt true to the spirit of the originals. The John Williams music was all present and correct, and the stunts felt pretty real, although I'd have liked to have seen less CGI employed in the clifftop chase sequence. Yet this film is so superior to many of effects-laden tentpole blockbusters that have filled the cinemas in most of the recent summers.

So in the end, is it as good as Raiders? No. Does it matter that Harrison Ford is at a pensionable age? Not really in fact, and you can completely buy his action sequences. But the film is as good as the other two in the series. It's had love and affection placed on it. Lucas has not been allowed to sully his own previous reputation as he managed with the Star Wars prequels. It'll be really interesting to see if anything this coming summer matches or beats it (and from the trailer, that won't be Hancock).

Right - I'm off to rewatch Raiders on DVD...

...But before I go, I couldn't help but notice the three minute BBC Radio 1 ad that was shown ahead of Indy. That must have been a cheap use of my licence fee! It was very good, and it was to promote the variety of music Radio 1 plays post 7pm, but I'm not sure that with audiences at a record high, the BBC needs to be spending quite so much advertising the second most popular station in the country. Perhaps Radio 3 could do with the promotion? Probably not in the most expensive cinema ad-reel of the summer though...

Here's a bit of an oddity. Heartbeat Detector is a French film focussing on the headquarters of the French division of a German company. We follow Simon, a psychologist employed by the firm. He's recently overseen the downsizing of the company - it's into fuel in some way, but we never hear a great deal more about it - and has now been told to investigate the CEO who's number two thinks is having a breakdown.

What follows is a strange and disturbing journey as we learn more about the CEO's life, what's really going on, and learn more about Simon too who's got some pretty strange behaviours and compulsions of his own. At a certain point, the film takes a different direction, although I suspect that you're supposed to have read the runes and seen this telegraphed in advance (Top tip: for once, don't read Philip French in advance).

The film is very leisurely, with long takes often with fixed cameras that barely seem to react even if characters walk "off stage". At times this can be intensely frustrating as seemingly little is happening. There's also an extended scene featuring two songs that, quite frankly, I found utterly interminable. Interesting though the story is, it really didn't need to take two hours and twenty minutes to get to the end.

Simon, is an a very odd character, but then so are both his girlfriends. He seems to be going through some serious difficulties of his own, most strangely in the aftermath of some very strange kind of company retreat which ends in a fairly riotous rave. Is this really what French company away weekends are like?

I could believe the male domination of the company though. I once attended a conference at a hotel in France which was being shared with a Peugeot conference. I didn't see a single woman amongst the very smartly turned out French managers.

If you've read that this film is in some way a French Michael Clayton, then think again. It's not. It's also not really very satisfying in the end, and you're left a little uncertain why you've made the journey.

I went to see The Orphanage today, and I'll get onto that shortly.

But first, can I just highlight what a joyless experience Cineworld made it for me. It began when I phoned the cinema's automated ticket booking line. As is the way with these things, it's all voice activated these days, which invariably means saying "No" repeatedly when the system thinks that you're trying to book tickets to "The Hottie and the Nottie" or worse.

Eventually the system drops away from the pointlessly flawed voice activation system when it gets my clear instructions wrong and reverts to the somewhat more sensible button system. If my mobile phone supplier believes that's the smarter way of doing things, why do cinemas insist in continuing to use these voice systems?

Maybe it's the cynic in me who thinks that it's all a ploy to get a bit more cash from the 0871 phone number. It eventually takes nearly five minutes to find out what films are on and what time my selection is showing at.

I didn't book the film over the phone incidentally, as I thoroughly object to paying a "booking fee" for the privilege of buying my ticket automatically rather than paying a (more expensive to employ) person. In any case, it seems that half the time, the collection machines are out of action meaning that you don't miss out on queuing anyway.

I began to regret my principled stand when I got to the cinema with just a few minutes to go before the film was scheduled to start and saw a long and trailing queue. There are only two ticket windows open out of a possible six. And despite someone putting their head into the ticket office, they don't bother opening a further window, preferring to leave their lonely colleagues to cope with the hoardes.

I purchase my tickets (the cinema hasn't bothered with chip and pin devices - too expensive?) and with a couple of minutes spare, I think that maybe I'll buy some over-priced popcorn and a Diet Coke. I know why the prices are high, and to an extent accept them. So I head over to the concession stand ready to hand over many pounds. There are two long queues, but a further five people are standing behind the counter talking to another but not serving. When I approach one of them, I'm politely told that they're not on duty and that I need to stand behind the ten kids. If staff are on a break, can I suggest they retire to a staff room rather than annoying queuing patrons?

Needless to say, Cineworld lost out on my purchase. I headed into the screen.

The adverts had just started, and I couldn't help but notice a giant stain right down the middle of the screen. It's right in the centre, and it's enormous, running well over half the height of the screen. Every time we see a well lit bright scene in one of the ads, I can't help but stare at the stain which looks like it might have been made by someone throwing a soft drink at the screen.

Fortunately The Orphanage is fairly dark, so I'm not distracted too much during the feature, although the stain is staring out at me in well lit parts of the film. But there's one final little surprise in store. During the screening, a security guard traipses through the cinema on no less than three separate occasions. At one point (and bear in mind that this is horror/thriller film that works by building quiet suspense) his radio actually goes off and he starts to have a conversation with a colleague while he's still inside the screen. Orange spend millions on their excellent campaigns to have customers switch their mobile phones off. But security guards can wander around the screen talking on their radios as much as they like.

The question must be asked: why do I bother going to see films in such surroundings?

Well you know what, I'll be thinking long and hard before I go back to this particular cinema. If I'm to pay a premium price for the experience of seeing a film on the big screen, then cinemas need to actually make the whole thing an easy and pleasant experience. Today, that wasn't the case. With large widescreen high definition TVs becoming the norm, alongside digital surround sound systems, I get a better quality experience at home. And the DVD will end up being cheaper than the price I paid to watch the film. I suggest that Cineworld and others who mismanage their multiplexes had better buck their ideas up.

So what about the film itself? Well it's excellent. I need to be really careful about what I say about it, because it could really affect your enjoyment of the film. Suffice to say that two parents and their young son move into a large house on the Catalan coast which was once an orphanage that the mother lived in.

But their son has his some unusual friends. Are they imaginary? Are they real? I'm not going to tell you, and I'm not going to say any more about the plot except to say that it's tone is very reminiscent of The Others. It's well worth hunting down.

I'm not quite sure why, but I always treat a Daniel Day Lewis film with some trepidation; he doesn't exactly produce films at the same rate as Samuel L Jackson. But There Will Be Blood has been talked about with such great praise, that I was really keen to see it.

The distributors have gone for a limited release in the first week that seemingly builds word of mouth, so that next week when it opens nationally, I'll have told all my national friends (well those who don't read this blog) that it's wonderful and that they should rush out to see it.

It'd be a shame to say much about the plot, involving the birth of the oil industry, but so much more than that. The two key performances are those of Daniel Day Lewis who plays Daniel Plainview, a man who is driven to succeed, paying lip-service but perhaps not much more, to those around him as he strives for success, and Eli Sunday, upon whose family's land oil is found. Eli is a preacher, and he and Daniel continually fight and strive against one another as each somehow needs what the other has.

At 158 minutes, the film might seem long, but when the end finally comes, you know that you could have easily watched another thirty minutes.

As it is, the film opens with a long sequence in which no dialogue is spoken, but we do get to hear Jonny Greenwood's incredible score which is like no other, and yet is completely appropriate. For some reason it's not eligible for an Oscar because some of it predates this film. Just another reason why I don't like the Oscars (actually, the more I think about, the more I hate all awards ceremonies).

Anyway, you need to go and see this film, you really do.

I must admit that I hadn't been looking forward to Cloverfield with quite the same enthusiasm that some on the internet had been. But the teaser trailer was good fun, as did the idea of a film with no stars, and all that it brought with it. I will just mention that having two brothers look quite so similar meant that I could barely tell them apart towards the beginning of the film.

Cloverfield's premise is that the whole thing is seen through the eyes of a video camera that begins videoing a going-away party and continues as the attack on New York begins.

I do have a couple of issues about how they did it. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, this isn't shot on a video camera. It may have been shot digitally - it looks like film - but it's certainly not made with any kind of consumer camera. Somehow, that detracts from the idea. And I suppose it would be a little unfair to note that the beginning of the film - colour bars and a timecode - the contents are labelled as coming from an SD card, when the premise of the film, with bits of previous footage being recorded over, requires a tape. The characters also refer to a tape.

But I'm being a little disingenuous since I think that this is a pretty good monster attack film. The characters' point of view as we run around New York at first trying to escape, and then looking to save a girlfriend, means that we never really find out what's going on, how the monster was unleashed, or even ultimately how the end comes. Instead it's bits of TV news in apartments and in a looted electrical store.

The monster itself is interesting and dinosaur like, although it also has a certain post-Lord of the Rings element to it, with the skin not dissimilar to Gollum.

The film has a devil may care attitude that I quite enjoyed, and the unknown cast meant that like Starship Troopers, you didn't know who was going to live or die, or what would happen. That's just so refreshing, as heroes being invulnerable can be no fun.

The whole thing comes in at under an hour and a half which is thoroughly refreshing. So well worth a brief diversion.

By now, if you're like me, you'll have bought the 5 DVD boxset of Blade Runner with every version known to man including this new "Final Cut."

But before Christmas I did actually see the film projected in the cinema, and it really was a sight to behold. This film does have a bit of history having originally been released in 1982 in a version that famously had a deadbeat Harrison Ford voiceover. It ended with some outtakes of footage of a green valley that was taken from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Then in 1992 having gained something of a cult reputation, the film reappeared as The Director's Cut. That was before every film ever produced came out with a "Director's Cut" DVD a year or so after the original release.

But this wasn't quite the cut that Ridley Scott had hoped for, and he couldn't spend either the time or the money that was really neeeded. But the voiceover went, and a couple of scenes reappeared including, famously, a scene involving a unicorn.

Now we've got the real director's cut - or the "final cut" - which has seen the film getting a proper clean and spruce up, as well as few more subtle edits and changes. It must be said that the changes really are quite subtle. There's no really obvious new CGI introduced George Lucas-style. New technology has been employed, but the film still feels true to itself. And that's not surprising as it still feels like a thoroughly believable dirty future. So many other films and adverts have taken their lead from the stylings of Blade Runner that it's sometimes hard to realise quite how revolutionary this film and 1979's Alien were.

I haven't really touched upon the full story of the making of Blade Runner and its many incarnations. For a fuller picture, can I commend Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner which has just had a new edition published in time for this film.

One way or another, now is a good time to revisit this classic.

Now I hear that there's a new edition of the soundtrack out too...

Gone Baby Gone is the directorial debut of Ben Affleck and stars his brother Casey. When you learn that, you're probably thinking that things don't bode well for this film. Well in fact that's not the case. Based on novel by Denis Lehane, and set in a very realistic feeling working class Boston, it involves the disappearance of a little girl from a family. Affleck's character is called in to investigate by the family since the police don't seem to be getting anywhere.

And so begins a very murky story that doesn't necessarily turn out well for anyone involved. It'd be a shame to hint at any of the twists and turns, but this is a worthwhile effort and makes a change from the standard middling thriller fare that Hollywood can produce by the yard.

Casey Affleck is very watchable, and I hear he's also been getting good reviews for his appearance in The Assassination of Jesse James. To be honest, it's been a while since I really enjoyed a film by his brother, but there's undoubtedly some talent in that family.

Sadly, I can't see a release for this film in the UK which, given some of the dross that gets released here, is a bit sad.

Michael Clayton is another film I saw a while ago, but didn't note at the time. George Clooney is a bit of a fixer for a law firm who ends up in a convoluted story involving a major class action lawsuit.

It's another one of those films that's constructed in a non-linear fashion as we start near the end of the tale before jumping back to what happened.

I quite enjoyed this legal tale, although perhaps the ending was a little forced, and I'm not entirely sure that I believed in Tilda Swinton's character who was so insecure despite her meteoric rise to the top.

Having now seen the opening episode of TV series Damages, there are obviously some similarities between the two.

Since it's long disappeared from cinemas, you'll probably need to wait for the DVD which I'm sure is coming any day now.

I saw this on a recent trip to New York, and I've been meaning to write about it for a while (I saw a few other films there that'll I try to note in the next week or so).

The Coen brothers are always worth watching, although recently their run of form has gone off the boil a little. Intolerable Cruelty wasn't wonderful (and hasn't been worth another viewing for me), while The Ladykillers remains their only film that I haven't seen.

Well No Old Country For Old Men is a fantastic return to form. It's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel that I've yet to read, and details what happens when Josh Brolin's character stumbles across a drugs deal gone wrong. With men dead and dying everywhere, he simply walks away with the cash.

This leads off what effectively is a chase movie; but a chase with one of the nastiest and most vicious film villains you've seen for a long time. Javier Bardem's character is someone who kills for fun. Literally.

Everytime he's on the screen your heart is in your mouth wondering what he's going to do, and who the innocent victim is likely to be.

Tommy Lee Jones is the local sheriff who gets an idea what's going on but has his own issues to face.

The rest of the cast is good; I liked Woody Harrelson's brief appearance as someone else searching for the missing money. He was cocksure of himself. And I realise that I've not seen Kelly McDonald in anything recently, although he she has a nice turn as Josh Brolin's wife, who's kept out of the loop.

I want to go and see this film again. It's a great piece with a fascinating ending.

In my review of Juno the other day, I mentioned that I hadn't seen the film that I understood to be Ellen Page's breakthrough film, Hard Candy. Well now I have, having picked up a copy of the DVD.

Wow - what a film. In essence, it's about a paedophile played by Patrick Wilson, who tries to tempt Ellen Page's character into meeting him having groomed her via the internet. So far, so sleazy. But it quickly becomes apparent that this girl is not quite all she seems, as she turns the tables and drugs her prospective attacker.

What plays out is sometimes painful to watch and very well written. Sometimes the piece feels as though it could have been written for the stage, with nearly all the action taking place in a single home. There are twists and turns and the piece even has some very definite acts.

The film is the feature debut of David Slade, who has since produced a zombie movie - 30 Days of Night. It looks fantastic with some fabulous focusing at times.

The DVD also comes with a superb "making of" documentary that's way ahead of the usual rubbish that you get on DVDs. If you're interested in the process of how this film came to made and indeed how a small independent film is put together, then this is invaluable. Slade also talks us through some of the technical aspects of movie making meaning that you end up learning things.

Overall a fantastic little package and I thoroughly recommend a viewing.

You've got to love Ang Lee don't you? He consistently makes some fabulous films. The first of his that I saw was The Wedding Banquet, but before you knew it, he'd turned his hand to Jane Austen and made Sense and Sensibility (now re-appearing in a new "sexed up" Andrew Davies TV production). Then there was the wonderful Ice Storm set in a remarkably real feeling seventies. Ride With The Devil followed - another period drama but this time against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Then he went back to the Far East to make a phenomenally successful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Next he turned to The Hulk - the only Lee film I've yet to see, before returning to form with Brokeback Mountain.

Now we have Lust, Caution which is drawing lots of attention because of its sex scenes.

Wei Tang plays Wong Chia Chi who is part of a student group who decide that they must kill Tony Leung's character - a Chinese sympathiser with the Japanese during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan.

The murder attempt goes wrong and we jump forward a few years where the resistance takes Wei Tang's character into its heart to have another go at killing the politician.

The film jumps around a little as it tells its wonderful little tale at a stately pace. It was quite surprising to walk out of the cinema and discover that I'd been in there for well over two and a half hours.

As ever with Lee, you really feel that he's got the period detail spot on. The students are naive yet believable in their hatred of the Japanese oppressors. While Shanghai is beautifully rendered during the second world war, with English speaking establishments that somehow wouldn't have been out of place in England during the war.

The relationship between the two key characters is what's at the heart of this film, and it's crushingly believable. This is an exceptional piece and well worth seeing. I can't wait to see what Lee turns his hand to next!

Oh, and I don't understand the rules of mahjong, so the opening scene took me a while to get into.

Like books, I'm behind in writing about which films I've seen recently. So lets try to catch up in reverse order, starting with the film I saw last night - Juno. I know quite a few bloggers saw it at a special screening that I couldn't make before Christmas and the reaction to it was pretty positive.

I'm going to agree with them because I thought it was a wonderful little film. Juno is a 16 year old girl who's a bit of an outcast at school, but who's managed to become pregnant. A visit to Women Now doesn't inspire her to have an abortion - perhaps less for moral reasons than the general awfulness of the place. A classmate acting as a lone picket outside the clinic tells her that her baby already has fingernails. This doesn't really make a great deal of difference to her.

Having decided to keep the baby, she and her friend go through the freesheet newspapers looking for a likely set of adoptive parents. The perfect couple turns out to be Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner who are desperate to have a baby.

That's the bare bones of the plot, but it doesn't really scratch the surface. The dialogue is punchy, fizzing with aphorisms, lending it a very "quirky" humour. Sorry. I like to avoid that word. But it's pretty appropriate here. Indeed it'll definitely be worth seeing again on DVD for the dialogue alone.

And the casting is exceptional. Ellen Page plays Juno, and I've not come across her before, although I do know that I need to see Hard Candy. Her maybe-boyfriend is played by Michael Cera who's best known as George-Michael in Arrested Development. Filling out the cast are JK Simmons and Alison Janney who play Juno's father and step-mother.

A subtle comedy like this could easily become schmaltzy if it wasn't careful, but this has a deft lightness of touch that keeps you smiling all the way through.

Thoroughly recommended. It opens in a month's time.

I must admit that I'm a bit behind on my film reviews. There are as many as half a dozen that I've still to write about. Anyway, without further ado, here's the latest - Beowulf.

There are currently three versions of this film available to see: the bog standard 2D version; a traditional red/blue glasses 3D system; and an IMAX 3D system which uses polarised glasses. It was this latter version that I saw.

Technically it looks spectacular on the enormous IMAX screen, with the film evidently designed to solely be seen in 3D. Swords constantly get pointed in your direction and bits of exploding wood or rocks constantly come flying straight towards you.

But what of the story and the film itself. Well first I have to admit something. Years ago - 1999 to be precise - I bought a hardback version of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. I've still not gotten around to reading it.

Then a few years later, while shopping in the Norwich branch of Waterstones, I heard some students from UEA talking about the book which they were obviously studying. They were looking for the audio version of the book which their tutor had said was a good way of tackling the book. So I got hold of the audio version of it. I ripped it to my iPod. And I've not listened to it.

I do know the story of course, and there was the, uh, interesting version of the film - The 13th Warrior - back in the late 90s which was pretty poor but evidently based on the book.

What of this version. Well it took me a little while to get through the computer animation. I guess I was expecting something a little closer to Sin City where the actors were effectively real, but the backgrounds all green-screened in. But the actors in Beowulf have been motion captured and digitally touched up (quite a lot in Ray Winstone's case) before being rendered in a full CGI world. It'd actually be interesting to know to what extent the actors "acted." Were they recorded making the motions or were they animated after the event. I suspect that there's a little of both, and perhaps when the DVD comes out, we'll know.

But overall I liked it. The action sequences were good, and there was plenty of tension when you knew that an attack was imminent.

The film's pretty violent throughout, but like Zatoichi from a couple of years ago, CGI blood somehow lessens the impact. I couldn't quite draw a comparison with a Looney Tunes cartoon, but something you know is CGI means the realism is not as much of an issue.

The story's not the most complicated tale, but it's well told, and the 3D definitely gives it impact. I had an enjoyable time watching it.

Ridley Scott is back with a new film which stars Russell Crowe. Now, those with long memories may recall that these two have made films before. First there was the enormously successful, and very good, Gladiator.

And then there was A Good Year. That's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back.

Well this time, we're back to drama, which Scott does rather better, and also onboard is Denzel Washington.

American Gangster tells the true story of Frank Lucas, a black gangster based in Harlem, who took on the Mafia to run his own major drug ring.

Crow plays Detective Richie Roberts, a cop who's almost too good, who takes on the job of tracking down the drug dealers.

The film takes place over a period from the late sixties through to the mid seventies, and reminds me most of a Martin Scorcese film like Casino or Goodfellas, taking a long look at a particular criminal family. The setting is wonderfully realised, with a dirty Harlem that reminds you of old cop shows.

It's actually very easy to empathise with Washington's character, since as well as the Mafia families, there are corrupt cops to take on, as well as the racism of the period. But he's not good. He might look after his mum, but there's a vicious streak engendered into him by his previous boss. In one shot, over the Christmas period, we see a junkie having overdosed and died with her baby crawling around her fly-infested body.

And this film has more black characters in it than any film I've seen since early Spike Lee films, which is a pleasant surprise. Maybe Scott's watched some episodes of The Wire.

In many respects this is not the usual fare for Scott. With very few exceptions, there are not glorious vistas for the eye to wander across; instead, much of the action takes place in rooms and in close up. There are no fancy camera shots, and the only CGI in the film is likely to have been employed to remove modern buildings.

I suppose I'd like to see Crowe not play an outsider, but he gives a strong performance. And Washington's is even better, as the very calm and measured Lucas. The rest of the cast are excellent including Josh Brolin's nasty New York cop, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Carla Gugino.

Despite the film's length, the story is fast and you're never distracted. Thoroughly recommended.

This evening I saw Stardust, the film based on Neil Gaiman's novel. The film has already had its US release, and it's fair to say that it didn't perform outstandingly there. But is that a fair reflection of the film?

I'd say not.

The problem is that it's a really hard film to market. The closest comparisons are either the wonderful The Princess Bride or perhaps The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It's a fantasy tale set just the other side of the village of Wall, as Tristan goes in search of a fallen star to give to his true love.

Much as Charlie Cox gives a great performance as Tristan, and Claire Danes is lovely as the star - Yvaine. The real scene-stealers are Michelle Pfeiffer as the evil witch Lamia, and a brilliant turn by Robert De Niro as a camp sea captain. De Niro is great at comedy.

The film doesn't take itself enormously seriously, and you'll recognise just about every person in the film. As I suspected, Ricky Gervais is a relatively minor character, over-used in the trailer.

But overall it's a cracking film.

It doesn't open in the UK until October 19, but it'll be worth searching out when it does.

Just one small other point. In the past I've been known to moan about preview screenings where the distributors insist that you hand over your mobile phones before the screening, leading to inevitable bunfights afterwards when several thousand people all try to get them back simultaneously. After tonight's experience, I beginning to think that maybe they've got it right after all, and I've got it wrong. Because this film opened in US some time ago, security was relaxed and nobody asked me for my phone. Naturally I turned it off. Not so, the woman in the row just in front of me who arrived late to sit with her friend. Even though the film had started, she fired off a text. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But ten minutes later she was still texting and even phoning. In a darkened cinema, the effect was akin to someone waving a torch around in front of me. Eventually, with no end in sight, I leant forward and asked her very kindly if she would turn it off. She did, but five minutes later, she and her friend left the cinema. Good. People like that deserve to be kicked out of cinemas. It's relatively common for security guards to peer at audiences during early releases to check we've not somehow smuggled a camcorder into the cinema. I wish that they'd instead deal with anti-social mobile phone users. That way, I might actually begin to enjoy the cinema experience some more.

Well here's a film that's not likely to get shown in Saudi Arabia - The Kingdom of the title.

The Kingdom is the first of a series of films set in a post 9/11 world with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fairly bogged down.

It begins with a skilfully edited credit sequence that uses smart graphics and archive footage to tell a potted history of the United States' involvement with oil in Saudi Arabia following its unification in 1932. It runs right through to the identification of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being Saudi.

The film proper begins with life in a Western compound being savagely interrupted by a series of murders and explosions that kills over a hundred. Then we meet a small and elite FBI team run by Jamie Foxx with Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper, who all want to travel to the kingdom and investigate the attack on the ground. But it's politically sensitive, and they're warned off.

Foxx doesn't take no for an answer and soon they're on the ground, and trying to work with a Saudi government who's suspicious of them and doesn't necessarily want to help either. There are one or two good guys, but effectively it's an uphill battle, not helped by Jeremy Piven's US government official locally based.

The politics of the piece are quite interesting, with an explicit understanding made that the only reason the US is involved is because of oil, yet the whole of Saudi Arabia is made to feel incredibly dangerous.

Whenever the characters are out and about, the close-cut camera work is constantly finding suspicious cars and people for our eyes to fall on. Could any one of these contain a bomb or harbour attackers? The Steadicam-free handheld camera work makes us feel more uncertain. You never quite know what's around the corner. While it's not quite of the same calibre as Greengrass's, it all adds to the general unease.

The performances are superb, and although a couple of action sequences feel a little too "Hollywood", it's really well made. Ashraf Barhom and Ali Suliman are good as the two assisting Saudi police officers. There are couple of things that remind me of a John Sayles film - obviously the presence of Chris Cooper in the cast, but also Danny Huston's Attorney General. Could Sayles have script doctored this film? Actually I note that writer Matthew Michael Carnahan is now working on the big screen remake of State of Play which possibly isn't a bad thing.

And although the ending begins as being a little too twee, there's a wonderful little coda, that makes you think about everything that's gone before.

The only tiny thing I'd have changed is to rename the arch villain of the piece - he's named Abu Hamza, the same as the infamous hook-handed cleric from the Finsbury Park mosque.

But well worth a viewing when this film opens in October.

The Bourne Ultimatum is the final* part of the Bourne trilogy which bears little to no resemblance to the Robert Ludlum books. Incidentally, Ludlum is one of those masterful authors who manages to publish new titles despite being long dead.

Anyway, back to the film which is once again directed by Paul Greengrass. What can I say? It's superb. It begins seconds after the previous film, The Bourne Supremacy has finished, with Bourne on the run in Moscow. He's getting ever closer to finding out who he is, but he's still against some mean CIA black-ops who will stop at nothing to get rid of him. The action moves from Italy to Paris to London to Tangiers to New York. And along the way we get some fabulous visceral set pieces.

In London there's a frightening CCTV sequence set in Waterloo Station as Bourne tries to rendezvous with a Guardian journalist.

In Tangiers, there's a great sequence set on the rooftops with Matt Damon's Bourne and Julia Stiles' Nicky. You really don't know what's going to happen, and although Bourne is always likely to survive, the same is not true for anyone else around him.

Once again, there's an awful lot of handheld work here, with fast-cutting meaning that you're really in the midst of the action. It's done superbly well, and the action and pace just never lets up. It really is like a skillfully designed roller-coaster with the occasional chance for you to gather your breath before the next thrilling element.

I came out absolutely full of admiration for all concerned.

*Paul Greengrass jokingly told Simon Mayo that if Spurs finished in the top 4, he'd make another one. This is obviously unlikely in the extreme (Greengrass himself is a Crystal Palace fan), but even then, with Mayo taking his joke too seriously, he found himself backing out of it in the course of the interview. Not that Spurs is going to manage it, with Martin Jol surely counting the days not until he's out.

I had a bit of a hangover, and despite being one of the few sunny days, I thought I'd go and see one of this week's big movies. I don't normally talk about films as movies, but I think these two count.

So it was either The Simpsons Movie or Transformers. My local multiplex was basically just showing those two films and the latest Harry Potter, so you don't have to worry about start times, as they all basically get a screening every half an hour all day long.

Now knowing me, some might be surprised by my choice - the title above kind of gives it away. And it's not that I don't like The Simpsons. It's just that I really don't watch it all that much. When I do watch it, it's funny, but, it's not the most important thing on TV.

So why Transformers?

I'm a bit too old to have every played with the toys, so it has no real heritage to me. Indeed, I'd no idea who the good guy was between Optimus Prime and Megatron (OK - the names do kind of give it away, but you know what I mean). But I've not really watched a major franchise film this summer with the exception of Die Hard - and that was a freebie. I didn't see Spiderman 3. I certainly couldn't bring myself to see Pirates 3. Fantastic Four means nothing to me, and I didn't see the first one. Yet, I was intrigued, so I went in.

I really really should have known better. Two and a half long hours later, I saw the four words that every real film lover should hate to read: "A Michael Bay Film."

Yes, I knew it was by him before I went in. And yes I've seen previous examples of his oeuvre. But I'll give the man a chance.

Let me first get out the one decent thing about the film. The effects are really good. It's kind of shame that you don't really get much of a chance to appreciate them, since the cutting and camera work means that everything goes by in a blur. Maybe they're actually terrible, and by not having the camera dawdle, you can't tell.

Everything else is pretty terrible. The script is too long, and is basically rubbish. It makes little to no sense, and while it's always pretty ropey the way that young kids are roped into the plot, in this case it's especially so.

The cast are inoffensive, but that's about the best you can say for them. They mainly come from TV aside from cameos-for-cash from John Tuturro and Jon Voight. Megan Fox is a particularly unlikely romantic interest for Shia LaBeouf, with the camera lingering a little too long on her body when it gets the chance. There's nothing wrong with that per se, except it some way shape or form, this is supposed to be a kids movie - albeit a 12A. She certainly doesn't seem like a high school student. And while we're at it, there's an American Pie moment that also feels like it should be in another film.

Basically, the whole thing just doesn't hang together. The plot makes no real sense, and there are holes all over the place. At various points different Transformers appear and disappear to meet the needs of the plot, but it's never quite clear why Optimus Prime has only just chosen to appear, apart from dramatic effect. And I even found telling the difference between them all problematical.

The dialogue was just about drowned out by the sound effects, although that might actually have been a good thing.

Overall, then, an awful film with very little redeem itself.

Taking Liberties is that rarest of things - a low budget British documentary released in the cinema. It covers a subject that's very close to my heart, the reduction of civil liberties we've seen under the premiership of Tony Blair over the last ten years.

It tells its tale using a combination of archive clips, illustrative pieces of old film, and fresh interviews and pieces.

The film takes turns in examining the loss of several liberties including the right to protest, free speech, privacy, detention without trial, extradition and torture. It does these in a clever and witty manner.

Right from the beginning, you're scared quite what the authorities are now able to do. We're accompanying three coach loads of middle aged people who want to protest at an American airforce base. There are a lot of police watching them. They decide to turn the coaches around. There's no discussion. These are peaceful people. The police force the coach to return all the way to London. The drivers aren't even allowed to stop at service stations.

Some of the areas it covers are obvious, but at other times, even someone who likes to think they're aware what's going on is shocked by what they see. So we meet someone who's basically a prisoner in his own home. He's a suspected terrorist, yet he hasn't been charged with anything. Instead, he's under virtual house arrest, with a tag preventing leaving an arbitrary area around his North London home.

And I never expected to feel sympathy for a member of the NatWest 3. These, you'll remember, are three ex-bankers who have been extradited to the US. The member in the film even acknowledges that he's not likely to be the most loved person. Yet, with no evidence whatsoever, the British Government is happy to ship him off to America, where he must sit around and await a trial.

Of course there are sections on ID Cards, and there are bits on Torture. They cheekily use a clip of 24 which does indeed tend to suggest that torture works. It probably does help the populace at large believe that torture really does work. It doesn't of course. I'll tell you anything you want to hear if you start to hurt me.

The only problem I have with this film is that it's not going to be seen very widely. I rather suspect that most of the people who go along and see it will be the converted. I watched it at an early-evening midweek screening that wasn't especially busy. And I can't see that it's going to be very easy to get shown on TV because it is enormously partisan.

That said, I hope the DVD is released nice and cheaply and passed around as much as possible. It really is scary what is happening while we sit back and let it happen. We really are letting the terrorists win and we lose our freedoms.

The film's website is here.

I'm sure earlier in the year, or perhaps late last year, I saw trailers for Live Free or Die Hard. But in the meantime, somebody noticed that Web 2.0 was a bit of a buzzword, and since this film is all about using the power of computers to bring down the state, it was renamed Die Hard 4.0. To be honest, it's a better title.

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is back, some twelve years after the last entry in the franchise. Relative new boy Len Wiseman takes on the directorial reigns, with John McTiernan who directed the first and third films getting a Producer credit. Who's Len Wiseman? Well he's directed those Underworld films and is married to Kate Beckinsdale. I'm not sure that thought thrilled me as I entered the cinema.

McClane's daughter is now a teenager and as soon as we meet her, we know that she'll be involved in the plot later on. McClane has to pick up a teenage hacker (they're all teenagers, right?) in a routine sweep for the FBI. But the fact that a hit-squad is trying to kill him alerts McClane to something more nefarious.

Bad guy Timothy Olyphant is leading a high-tech attack on the US, employing a group of skilled hackers to shut down transport, communications and power around the country with something called a fire-sale. Fortunately, while Homeland Security et al are left paralysed, McCane is able to get around with his young hacker accomplice to thwart their every move.

The production notes to the film explained that they wanted to do stunts with as much realism as they could before resorting to CGI. That seems to be true to a point, but there's also a lot of CGI as well, especially later in the film. A chase sequence where McCane, in a car, is being chased by a helicopter is good fun, and the denouement brings a cheer in the cinema. And a scene that ends with an SUV in an elevator shaft is also good.

But there's also a scene involving some kind of fighter jet and a truck. I won't say any more, but obviously CGI is used enormously, and the whole big budget sequence is terrible. It just doesn't work, and reminds you of that awful bit in True Lies that involved Arnie hanging onto a Harrier.

It's a shame really because overall the film's pretty good. Yes McCane keeps getting back up every time he's knocked down, which is a good effort considering Willis is now 52. But the story just about holds together, the villain is good, and the pace keeps up pretty well. But I suspect that for some visceral "real" thrills, we're going to have to wait for The Bourne Ultimatum later in the summer.

I'm not sure what the UK certificate for the film is going to be, but if my eyes and ears didn't deceive me, it looks as though a single strong swearword (inevitably added to ensure the film doesn't get too low a rating in the US) has been dubbed out for the UK - probably to get a 12 or 12A rather a 15. It's the first time I've noticed a dubbed word on a film soundtrack. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am.

I saw this film at a preview screening, and can I just say that however much you might just have enjoyed a film, there's nothing more of a downer than facing a bun fight of 2,000 people (approximately the capacity of the Odeon Leicester Square) all trying to retrieve their mobile phones simultaneously. I know that phones like the Nokia N95 have five mega pixel cameras on them these days, but is phonecam shot movie really going to a major piracy concern? There's got to be a better solution. All that happens is that 2,000 people end their evening a bit pissed off.

[UPDATE] It seems that in the US, this film is still called Live Free or Die Hard whereas in the UK (and much of the rest of the world) it's Die Hard 4.0. A very curious state of affairs.

I love stories set in newspapers. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is quite probably my favourite ever book - riotously funny. TV has had its fair share of programmes set around plucky newspaper reporters; most recently State of Play, but I even remember Lytton's Diary! And then there are films. Another favourite is The Day The Earth Caught Fire set in the offices of the Daily Express (back in the sixties I should rapidly point out).

I also quite like the films of Woody Allen. I've not seen every film, and I've missed a couple of his more recent entries like Melinda and Melinda, and Match Point. I suppose that like many others, I was put off a bit by the little local difficulty he had in his personal life.

But when I heard he'd made another film in Britain (Match Point was too), and it was set in the newspaper world, I was intrigued and looked forward to it. The fact that it starred Scarlett Johansson was no bad thing either.

Woody no longer gets big releases. He makes films as regularly as clockwork and I guess the sums all add up because the same people go and see them, and the studios keep backing them. Big name actors love to work with him (for much reduced fees one suspects) and the whole thing ticks over nicely.

Scoop (nothing to do with aforementioned Waugh novel) was released in the US last summer, and has since opened in a number of countries around the world. But noticeably, not Britain.

This is unusual in that there's a reasonable following for Woody over here, and the film was actually made here. On top of that, many famous British faces have parts to lesser or greater extents (mainly lesser, but we'll come to that). The latest word I hear is that no British distributor is going to pick up the film. So aside from the odd festival screening, it's likely to first pitch up on DVD or TV. The latter is a dead cert. since BBC Films co-produced the film.

I picked up a North American copy of the DVD to see the film, getting impatient with obviously foolish distributors in the UK. It couldn't be that bad could it? I mean as well as Johansson, the film stars Hugh Jackman and Ian McShane as well as Allen himself!

Well, I'm sorry to report that it really is that bad.

Woody has something of a starring role in the film alongside Johansson. She plays a young American visiting her British friend (the thoroughly underused Romola Garai), and she also happens to be a cub reporter on her college newspaper. For very feeble characterisation reasons, she stalks a famous film director (Kevin McNally in practically a cameo) and immediately jumps into bed with him to get her story. She fails.

Then she goes off with her friend to see a magic show being conducted by Woody Allen. I'm not quite sure where such magic shows are held, but they find one nonetheless. Allen's character is a hackneyed conjourer with a supposedly razor-sharp wit. But it isn't really. And Allen just plays Allen as he always does. Johansson is chosen from the audience to be made to vanish in a wooden box, but whilst inside she meets the ghost of legendary tabloid hack Joe Strombel (Ian McShane). Stay with me. He's been told in the afterlife that the renound "Tarot Card Murderer" who's killing prostitutes all over the streets of London is actually playboy rich-kid Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman).

Johnansson and Allen team up in the most unlikely manner to try to get close to Jackson and find out if he's the real murderer. This will be her big break after all!

What follows is a mess. The jokes are feeble, with more laughs in the average episode of My Family. The dialogue is poor, and the plot just freewheels along on its own without any care for logic.

Along the way, every incidental character our heroes run into is a famous face playing blink and you'll miss it roles. Especially bad is Charles Dance playing the editor of The Observer, and forced to say lines that he practically winces at on camera so terrible are they.

The end comes relatively quickly and you're not exactly surprised.

The only reason I stayed with this film is because I'd paid good money for it, and as I say, Johansson's not exactly unappealing on the eye. But the film is a stinker. Expect to see it cropping up sometime between Christmas and New Year on BBC2 without too much fanfair despite its stellar cast.

I see that Allen's next film, Cassandra's Dream, has also been made in Britain - it simply can't be any worse than Scoop.

I must return to Sunshine, which is now finally in cinemas.

First off, a bit of background. Back in May 2005, I accompanied a colleague at work on set-visit to 3 Mills Studios over in the East End to see the filming of this Danny Boyle science fiction epic. Now I've never been on a film set before, and it was a bit lucky that I went this time, but I wasn't about to say no.

Sunshine had just about taken over the 3 Mills studio complex. The only other production taking place at the time was the Sky TV series Dream Team. Danny Boyle's team had taken over most of the sound stages, and we were to be given a guided tour. First of all we assembled in the art department where there were incredibly detailed scale models of the various sets as well as the main spaceship, Icarus. Around the walls were various pictures and designs pinned up along with detailed posters of the solar system.

We met the films shy producer Andrew MacDonald. He's worked on all Danny Boyle's films to date as well as plenty of others including recent Oscar nominated films like The Last King of Scotland and Notes on a Scandal. Sadly the day we were there, there was a closed set where they were actually filming. But we were able to tramp all over the other sets. So we got to see the main crew area, the cockpit and area, the oxygen garden, and a massive green-screen where two airlocks were separated by a large gap. I won't say much more because it'll spoil the film, but suffice to say that there are reasons for all of these. I also won't say what condition the sets were in when we saw them.

Now as I say, I've never been around a film or TV set before. I've seen TV shows recorded, but they're very different. What was really unusual here is that the sets were 360 degrees. That is to say that there were four walls and a ceiling everywhere. Ordinarily sets are built to remove walls so that the camera crew can point into the set. Then for a different set-up the wall might be replaced, and another removed for a different angle. In this instance, to keep a fairly claustrophobic atmosphere on set, no walls were going to be removed; the camera operators et al were going to have to fit inside the set.

And the sets were so detailed. Everywhere you looked, the attention to detail was extraordinary. Nobody was ever going to see much of the detail, yet it was there. For example, each of the crew members had their own cabins fully decked out with things like family photos and books that they might be reading. In the final film, you simply don't see all this detail - but it's there. I guess that a real-feeling set gives you more from your actors.

The other really fascinating thing was that everything seemed to work. All the video screens were lit-up and had graphics displayed. Not only that, but a flip of the switch turned all these lights on at once. It was explained to us that although many films would have added this later in special effects, it was far easier and cheaper to do it at the time.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of trampling around the set, sitting in the captain's seat (yup - I got to fly Icarus II), and getting a good idea of the plot, it was time to go. And wait. For nearly two years.

Fast-forward to the film itself.

Everyone else has already explained that this film is not your run-of-the-mill SF shoot-em-up film. Some critics have taken issue with George Lucas and his original Star Wars trilogy for ruining what had been a very intelligent sequence of SF films with titles like 2001, Solaris and Silent Running having some really interesting ideas to impart. I think that's a bit unfair on Lucas since it's hardly his fault that after the stunning success of his SF-Westerns, nobody wanted to make anything else. But this film is certainly a much more grown up film than we've come to expect in recent years.

The crew are sent on an unlikely, and obviously doomed, mission to send a missile into the sun. We won't worry about why an unmanned spacecraft wouldn't be much more able to carry out the mission. Like the science in the film, it's not really relevant. Instead, we have a study in what happens when a group of people, is cooped up in small area. And there's the appeal of the sun - that single entity that literally ensures that we have life in our solar system.

It's ironic that the mission's shrink is the first to go mad, but things change some more when the crew finally come across a signal from the first Icarus - a ship that disappeared years before and hadn't been heard from.

Psychology takes quite an important role in the film as each of the oppression of the circumstances seem to drive each of the characters to some kind of logical conclusion.

The ending of the film is at once satisfactory and not-so. Yet it's the perfect ending.

The sun has quite simply never looked so beautiful, and the special effects are exemplary. Given that live-action filming finished so long ago, it's clear that the SFX have been slowly and carefully crafted. Sound too is important - see this film in a good cinema. I'm already on the look out for a nice sub-woofer to plug in for the film's DVD release.

But don't wait for the DVD - this is a film that demands to be seen on the screen. Go and see it on the biggest screen you can find. It'd look great on an IMAX screen because seeing this film is really immersive.

The film cost around $40m and it's wonderful that Fox Searchlight let Boyle, MacDonald and their team do whatever they wanted. So they haven't turned in some kind of all-action nonsense. That's probably why they don't know when or how to release it in the States. It doesn't fit into one of three or four different film genres. It's effects-laden, yet isn't a tentpole May/June film when every weekend sees one big blockbuster open after another (with the inevitable failure of many of the titles). But on the other-hand, it's not a breakout small indie film like Little Miss Sunshine or Sideways. Still - that's their problem, but if they give it a marketing push like the one it's had here, it should do just fine.

So am I biased when I write about this film? Undoubtedly. I was conditioned to like this film. But you know what? It doesn't matter. It's still a wonderful film. One that demands to be seen in cinemas.

And let me end with a plea. I've heard Danny Boyle in interviews claim that he won't be returning to science fiction. Please do Danny! Ridley Scott made Bladerunner and Alien, the latter certainly informing this title. I'm sure you could manage another in a couple of years!

So this weekend it was all things Spartan, and in particular the Battle of Thermopylae. Frank Miller, that doyen of graphic novels, wrote a five-parter called 300 some while back, and this morning, before seeing the newly released film, I read it.

It's a fictionalised telling of King Leonidas leading his 300 Spartan troops into a thankless - hopeless - fight against Xerxes' Persian Army numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The comic version is very gritty and down and dirty. The only real backstory that we get is just enough to put the battle into some kind of historical context. There are only a very limited number of characters, and a certain stylised aspect to them. So the Oracle at Delphi is perched precariously at the top of a rock pillar and is just about impossible to reach. While Ephialtes, the Greek who'd betray that Spartans by telling Xerxes the whereabouts of a hidden goat path through the mountain and round the back, is depicted as some kind of monstrous hunchback.

But it's a thrilling tale that's told well - I wouldn't have wanted to wait a month between installments when it was first published.

This has now been turned into a film, 300, which is nearly a straight retelling of Miller's graphic novel. The sylised feel has obviously followed on directly from the manner in which the same sorts of techniques were used previously for Sin City - another Frank Miller set of graphic novels. Indeed, I did initially think that Robert Rodriguez must have been responsible for the film, so similar is the feel and SFX techniques employed to give an other worldly feel to the film. Indeed, nearly the entire film was shot against either blue or green screen and supplemented by effects.

The film does differ from the book in a few ways - most notably in the addition of a subplot involving Leonidas' wife Gorgo.

And the film features practically no known stars, vastly reducing the production cost, and meaning that it's likely to be enormously profitable given its success in the US to date. What this means is that you should expect to see more films such as these in the near future.

It's a film which is exactly what you expect. Nothing more - nothing less.

Both graphic novel and film are of course inspired by true events, recorded most notably by that original historian Herodotus. These in turn were fictionalised in a 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, which was on BBC2 yesterday. It's not a film I can remember seeing before, and falls squarely into the typical swords and sandals epic feel. It opens with a panoramic view of the Persian army on the march, which was undoubtedly made without special effects and probably employed thousands of members of the Greek army or similar. Unlike 300, The 300 Spartans takes a much more leisurely approach, with plenty of subplots involving wives and others, while the Spartan life seems much more comfortable. There are also far fewer bare-chested six packs on display in this older film.

Xerxes appears as an almost Ming the Merciless style bad guy, and the battle itself is limited to the end of the film rather than taking up most of it. Not the greatest epic of the period to be honest.

Sadly, I missed Discovery Civilisation channel's reshowing of The Spartans, Bettany Hughes' Channel 4 series!

Idiocracy is a film that never actually got a cinema release in the UK. Made by the creator of Beavis & Butthead, as well as King of the Hill, Mike Judge, this film was made after the cult success of Office Space - a film that only really did well on DVD.

Well this time Fox has pretty much forced success to come via DVD since it sat on the film for two years before opening the film without showing it to critics in a paltry six cities in the US. It comes to us straight to DVD here.

Luke Wilson is a very average soldier who's put into a cryogenics chamber as part of an army experiment. The programme gets shut down and he's forgotten about for five hundred years. In the meantime, the stupid people have taken over, with evolution taking a downward spiral. It's into this world that Wilson's character arrives - where the president is a three-time Smackdown champion, where Starbucks no longer sells coffee in the manner we currently have, and where water has been replaced by a Gatorade type drink ("it's got electrolytes").

Basically this is an at times heavy-handed satire on the dumbing down of society. While it's not the funniest film of the year, and probably isn't as good as Office Space, it's a crying shame that something like this doesn't make it to the cinema while a travesty like Norbit does.

Blades of Glory is the latest Will Ferrell film, and if you're like me, you won't know if you're going to see a good Will Ferrell film (like Anchorman) or a bad one (like Bewitched).

Fortunately, Blades of Glory is in the former camp. Now you're going to have to suspend your disbelief a little as I explain the plot of this film. Ferrell and Napolean Dynamite's Jon Heder are two mens' figure skaters. They're rivals - similar to Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan (who has a cameo - indeed most recent US skating stars get one kind of cameo or another). When they share the gold medal at the Stockholm Olym... er... "Championships" they get into a fight on the medal podium. As a result, St Elsewhere star, and voice of KITT, William Daniels bans them for life from the sport.

Fast forward three and a half years (i.e. just before the next... er... "Championships") and both are plumbing the depths of the ice skating world, with Ferrell's character drinking his way through a kids ice show, and Heder's working in a skating shop. Then suddenly Heder's stalker (keep up) realises that there's a way back. As long as Heder partners up and goes into the ice dance pairs competition, he can get back into the tournament.

As it happens, he ends up pairing with Ferrell. Hilarious consequences ensue.

The best camera trickery in the world isn't going to make Ferrell look like an ice dancing champion, so they just don't really try that hard. There are a few doubles and some obvious special effects, but that's about it. Essentially the film has the feel of Ben Stiller's Zoolander, which isn't surprising since Stiller is one of the executive producers.

The film really doesn't care a great deal and just has gag after gag. The unlikely duo's mortal rivals are another American pair played by Arrested Development's Will Arnett and Amy Poehler. While The (US) Office's Jenna Fischer plays Heder's love interest - essentially reprising Pam from The Office. There are also cameo's from The Daily Show's Rob Corddry and other small screen stars. You get the feeling that everyone had a great deal time making this film.

If a comedy is judged simply on whether or not it makes you laugh then this success in spades. It's silly, it's throwaway, it's as camp as Christmas; but it's great fun.

If you ask me to describe the plot of Inland Empire, David Lynch's latest, I'm going to struggle. If you'd previously seen either Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive and thought that they were weird, then you ain't seen nothing yet.

The plot revolves around Laura Dern's character, who's trying to revitalise her film career with a remake of a strange Polish film, the making of which saw everyone die. Then there are excerpts from a sitcom involving people dressed as bunny rabbits wearing clothes. There are no discernable jokes, but the canned laughter makes up for it. Add in a strange coterie of hookers (I think), Jeremy Irons' film director, Harry Dean Stanton's strange hanger-on (can you spare some change), and you've got a heady mix.

Lynch has made this film on video tape - PD150s seemingly - and it does show. I thnk that that biggest criticism that I have of the film is that the camera work at times doesn't seem that great. People drop in and out of focus depending on how the look at the camera - it's a problem because Lynch uses some really extreme close ups and depending on whether the subject is looking face on, or in profile determines the extent to which they're in focus. The same problem also affects scenes shot in extreme darkness where theoretically the camera should cope, but it is struggling.

The film was projected digitally when I saw it, which is fine, but if it was shot on PD150s I'm surprised. Why didn't Lynch use an HD camera? Digital can look nice and be perfectly in focus. A good example might be Sex and Lucia which was made a few years ago now and still looks great. And obviously a lot of TV is being made in HD these days including things like Bleak House (looks good) and Torchwood (doesn't look so good). I guess that there's a learning curve for these new formats.

But back to the film. What to make of it? The person in front of me managed two hours of the three hour running time before eventually walking out, and plenty more people than normal availed themselves of toilet breaks. But it's certainly worth a watch if you know what you're going to see. I think you just need to let it wash over you. Seeing this kind of film is more of an experience than a normal cinema visit. I notice that Lynch currently has an art retrospective on display at Cartier Foundation in Paris. And to me, in some respects, this is a video installation (a phrase I hate) rather than a "normal" film.

It's just a shame that Lynch is unlikely to reveal all, and explain his thinking on, say, a DVD commentary track. He doesn't really believe in that sort of thing. Indeed Mulholland Drive didn't even have chapter stops as he didn't want people dipping in and out of the DVD. Watch the whole thing in order, or not at all is his view. Maybe we'll get something this time around? Not just a list of clues as we had last time out.

So here's a film I can talk about openly. I'm a bit of a sucker for films about magic, and Ricky Jay was a consultant on The Illusionist so I had to see it.

We've had quite a long for this film, since it's similar in story to The Prestige which came out around the same time in the States. I still haven't seen The Prestige (although I note it's released on DVD on Monday), although I did read the book.

And there's a similar problem with both stories in that although they're superficially about magic, they're really about magick, with unexplainable things that aren't performed so much as added-in in FX.

Edward Norton is an Austrian magician called Eisenheim who once fell in love with Jessica Biel' Sophie when they were kids. Now he's travelled the world studying magic and a chance encounter reawakens their feelings for one another.

Cue various seemingly impossible tricks performed in 19th century theatres. It's all passably entertaining, but I came away disappointed.

Thanks to Gia, I saw Sunshine last night at a bloggers' screening. There are strange rules coming down from Fox that say I can't "review" the film until March 26, but can say how much I liked (or otherwise) the film in the meantime.

So this is just a trailer of a review until I write the fuller version.

I've been looking forward to this film for ages, being something of a Danny Boyle fan (can we please have a UK release of the wonderful TV film Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise). I was also lucky enough to get a set visit to this film nearly two years ago. I did hint at this back in May 2005 but rather annoyingly that entry seems to have disappeared. Basically a friend at work took me with her down to Three Mills Studios for a set tour organised by Fox. But I shall say no more until the full review because some of what I saw does impact on the storyline - not that I'd spoil it.

In short, it's a great film that looks absolutely stunning. I also really enjoyed the soundtrack - I only found out that it was by Underworld who've got "history" with Boyle having contributed to both Trainspotting and The Beach.

What's it like? Maybe a cross between a Event Horizon and 2001. But it is different.

Well worth checking out.

Hot Fuzz is the new Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright film. You know? The people who brought you Shaun of the Dead, and more importantly, Spaced.

This time around we have Simon Pegg's diligent Sgt. Angel being transferred from the Met, where he's showng everyone else up with his tremendous drive and arrest rates, to rural Gloucestershire, where things aren't conducted at quite as high pace as they are in London... Or are they?

Nick Frost plays PC Danny Butterman, in a station full of archetypes, including "The Andys" (a pair of CID detectives that have strolled in from the set of Life on Mars), Olivia Coleman's double entendre-laden Doris, Edward Woodward's citizen liaison (a nod towards The Equalizer with his character) and Jim Broadbent's inspector. Every face is recognisable, including various townsfolk ("Sandford" is described as a village, but feels more like a small market town to me. It does have a branch of Somerfield after all), not least of which is Timothy Dalton's pantomine villain. Such is this team's star in the firmament at the moment, it feels as though Pegg only has to pick up the phone and familiar faces sign up immediately.

A series of "accidents" happen around and about the place, but only Angel (or Angle as Adam Buxton's local journalist would have it) is seeing the real truth. There's something darker going on in Sandford than the possible threat of hoodies or the living statue that keeps appearing in the townsquare.

There are pop-culture references aplenty, and here's hoping that they'll get their own subtitle track on the DVD when it's released. But the film is probably just a bit slow for a comedy. It's one hour fifty-six minutes long which is just about half an hour too much. It's the middle bit that needs cropping where there's a fine line being trodden between knowing nods to melodrama, and attempts at, well, actual drama.

There are plenty of laughs, although they don't come as frequently as I'd have liked. And some of the cinematic devices used are little well-worn, like the fast-cuts used to indicate Angel's incredible work ethic.

The finale is great fun though, as we get what's essentially the finish to a film like Bad Boys II (referenced directly more than once) but in a quiet English village. It's a pistol packing sequence that's pastiching (the again referenced in dialogue) Straw Dogs as well as genre Hollywood fare.

Overall, it's absolutely worth seeing, but is perhaps a little off the best form I know that this team is capable of. That said, it's a level higher than most garbage that passes for comedy on our screens. Roll on La Triviata should it actually happen (Did Jonathan Ross mention it in his interview with Pegg before Christmas? I thought he did).

Pan's Labyrinth is one of those films that I just knew I'd like before I saw it. I could have been setting myself up for a fall, but it's safe to say that I didn't.

Set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, events take place in a mountainous region as Captain Vidal moves a garrison of his troops along with his new wife and stepdaughter into a remote retreat in order to take on the rebels living in the hillside. His wife is pregnant with a child he believes to be a son - something he's desperate for. His stepdaughter, Ofelia, has not taken to this vicious military man and takes solice in her books filled with fairy tales.

But things begin to come to life for Ofelia as she first meets a fairy and then is introduced to Pan (or the Faun as he is in the original Spanish title - El Laberinto del Fauno) in his labyrinth - an ancient stone construction that sits nearby. Pan sees that she has special powers but must test her before she can fully join this fantasy world.

In the meantime, Vidal is setting about mopping up the weakened rebels, despite the secret help of Mercedes the housekeeper and the local doctor.

To say that this is a strange story would be to do the plot a disservice, but you quickly get completely wrapped up in procedings. It's a wonderfully beautiful film to look at, and is evidently something the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has been working towards from Cronos through to more recent films like Blade II and Hellboy. I was completely won over and loved this film.

Apocalypto is the latest effort from Mel Gibson, someone who's had, er, a difficult time of late. It's set in ancient Maya and the film is made in the local dialogue.

We meet a group of villagers who seem to live a fairly idyllic life on the edge of a forest capturing wild boar and coming to grips with infertility issues. In particular we meet Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) and some his mates. But Jaguar's uneasy; the previous day a dispossessed people have passed through their forest seeking a "new beginning" having been forced to leave their lands. Early one morning, the village is brutally attacked with women and children amongst those who are murdered by a seemingly powerful rival tribe. Jaguar manages to hide his pregnant wife and young son in a pit but he's caught along with many of his fellow villagers and his wife is left trapped.

And so we embark on a tale of slavery, and a Mayan civilisation that seems to be crumbling with failing crops and disease ravaging the people. They're building large cities, and through the eyes of Jaguar and his friends, we look in awe and wonder on a society that I can't remember ever being properly depicted on film before.

The film is pretty well constructed and solidly made. It's certainly brutal, and it has a feel of authenticity about everything. Overall, it's an adventure film, and the latter quarter of it is an out and out chase film. It's a well made chase film, but nonetheless, that's what it is. My only real problem with that is that a few movie clichés find their way into the film. A drop of blood gives away a hiding place; a long jungle chase inevitably ends at a river - you just know exactly when some of these things are coming.

But the biggest cliché must surely be the use of a solar eclipse of the sun to get out a particularly tricky spot. It's amazing how often these come just at the point of a human sacrifice (and how quickly they last - in this instance a matter of seconds). Oh, and I guessed the ending in advance too despite having next to no knowledge of Mayan history.

I'm being unfair to just dwell on these points, as I think overall it's an entertaining action adventure film that just happens not to feature a pair of white Americans running through the jungle from, say, drug smugglers. Worth seeing.

So finally the new Bond is with us - Daniel Craig. Frankly, after the last film, the only possible way was going to be up.

Recently we've had The Bourne Identity and more specifically, The Bourne Supremacy where the realism was heightened and the visceral thrill of something perhaps not working out returned to the cinema. At the time of its release, many commentators were hoping that Paul Greengrass would helm the next Bond. But instead we get Martin Campbell. He previously directed Goldeneye, and that was a deserving return to form of the series when it introduced Pierce Brosnan as Bond. I must admit, however, I was a little worried that he wouldn't be the right man for the job, and that they really did need some new blood.

Fortunately, I was wrong to worry. This is the man, after all, who previously directed the quite wonderful Edge of Darkness - which still holds its own.

Eon Productions and the Broccoli family have seen the way films are going and aren't going to be left behind. So this time out, we get real violence, with Bond blooded and bruised after brutal fight scenes (well, brutal enough to warrant a 12A certificate). There's no Q with John Cleese hamming it up. Gadgets are few and far between, and are spectacularly un-sensational. His Aston Martin is not able to make itself invisible; indeed the only special features it seems to have are compartments to hold silenced pistols and emergency medical kits.

In Daniel Craig, we have a strong, tough, "real" Bond. He gets hurt, but he doles out pain too. Craig first came to attention in the astonishing Our Friends in the North where he played Geordie, and his star has been in the ascendant ever since. In many respects he reminds you of Connery, although the film is much more reminiscent of From Russia With Love (possibly my favourite Bond film thus far).

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen plays the villain, but this isn't a normal Bond film in the sense that he's not out to take over the world; he's simply a banker for terrorists. He doesn't even have an enormous lair, perhaps hidden away on a south-east Asian island.

The music's an improvement on last time too. Actually, that's a little unfair on composer David Arnold, who's now been with the series since Goldeneye. I remember when that film came out, and I really wasn't sure, but I've warmed to him. The title song is streets ahead of Madonna's nonsense from last time out. Can anyone hum that now? And indeed the opening titles, while quintessentially "Bondian" take on a 21st century tone. Sorry. No silhouettes of scantily clad women this time out. It's just a shame that we had to wait until the closing moments to hear Monty Norman's fine Bond theme. This was obviously because only at the film's conclusion did Bond really attain his mantle as the fearless "00" operator that he is: dispassionate and cold-blooded.

The action scenes remain strong with the standout sequence being a long "free running" chase between Bond and an African villain. The stunts are fine, and there are only a couple of back-projected scenes that stand out to let the side down.

I'm not so sure about the opening black and white montage. I have no problem with the acting or the scene itself. However, the black and white process feels like it's a post production thing, and it doesn't look as good as it should. Perhaps they should have actually shot those scenes on real black and white film?

It's a shame that the game played in the Casino Royale itself was not Baccarat, as it was in Fleming's novel, but Texas Hold 'Em poker which somehow feels a little base. Yes, the audience is more keenly able to follow the rules of poker and understand who's winning, but a good script could get around this. It felt as cheap as it did when in a previous Bond, Brosnan was seen drinking Smirnoff rather than a more expensive brand. Speaking of which, would Sony perhaps like to layoff quite so much obvious product placement next time? And it was really cheap to have a character ask Bond if he was wearing a Rolex to hear him say that no, it's an Omega. Come on. Perhaps he'd like to let us know which Saville Row tailor he uses, and his favourite brand of aftershave too?

The only piece of the film that didn't really hang together was the way Bond got through a potential life-threatening situation to himself in the middle of the competition. Somehow, he was back at the table within an hour - just a bit too remarkable.

The supporting performances are fine with Eva Green playing Vespar Lynd with great aplomb. I noticed in the closing credits that she was supplied with a dialogue coach. As she's French, but has spent time in England, that's understandable. But her accent was still a little curious, and not dissimilar to that that she had in The Dreamers.

Judi Dench had much more to do as M than she's always had in these films. Well I guess that if you've got an actress of her calibre in your cast, it's a shame not use her. Caterina Murino plays a sultry Solange, and Felix Leiter reappears in the guise of Jeffrey Wright.

So overall, Casino Royale's a great return to form for the series, and hopes should be high for the next. After all, as the end credits said here, and always say, "James Bond Will Return."

A Good Year is Ridley Scott's latest film. Once again, he's working with Russell Crowe who plays Max, a bond trader in London. Max inherits a large Provencal house with its attendant vinyard. As a tough, cruel money-making man, he doesn't suffer fools and his immediate response is to sell the place for as much cash as possible. But things take a turn, and not everything goes to plan.

Oh. Did I mention that this is a comedy? It's not obvious at first as you're not sure quite what Crowe's trying to do.

Well at least that's what it tries to be. I think that it's possible that this could have been a charming gentle comedy. Indeed that's the way a lot of the other actors play it. But nobody seems to have told Crowe, who plays it for non-too-subtle laughs. Indeed it's often like he's in another film altogether. Actually it's unfair to lay all the blame at his feet since Ridley Scott is the man who's directed this film and he seems to have watched a few too many Carry On's and Pink Panther's. There's actually a sequence with Crowe driving where they speed up the film - always a bad sign.

The scenery's spectacular, but the film is from so. A big disappointment.

Oh, and is it compulsory for all films set in London to feature the Gherkin? Crowe's offices are actually based in it, and there seems to be an awful lot of wandering around Picaddilly Circus which is nowhere near the city.

Little Miss Sunshine is the debut feature of directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris who've previously specialised in music videos. So does this mean that this comedy is some kind of XXX/Fast & Furious MTV edited affair? No it does not.

The film has a superb cast featuring Steve Carrell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Alan Arkin amongst others as part of one of the most dysfuntional families you could meet including a drug-taking grandfather, a put-upon mother, a failed suicide, a mute teenager and an as-yet unsuccessful motivational speaker. For perfectly good reasons they all embark on a roadtrip to take their daughter to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine contest on the west coast. Travelling in a VW camper van, problems ensue, but delightfully, these aren't always the obvious problems.

The film is a comedy, but throughout, there are truly tender moments, and jokes are not always the obvious ones. I laughed out loud plenty of times, and was in tears during a scene involving a car horn. The point is that although maybe not everything that befalls this family would happen all at once, this isn't a film that relies on unlikely and improbable events to find jokes.

This is quite easily the funniest film I've seen this year. Thoroughly recommended.

Today I went to see Superman Returns at my local multiplex. More of that in a minute. I just thought I'd highlight what a joy it now is to pay my money and watch a film at the cinema.

It begins with the box office. There's some stat that I've seen at work that says that something like 25% of all cinema bookings are now made online or over the phone in advance. Unless I really want to see a film at a busy time, I'll never do this. I object to the fact that using a nice cheap and human-free method of booking tickets, I somehow have to pay a premium for my "booking fee". So I was faced at the cinema with a queue of people being served by two attendants. The fact that there were another four empty desks and employees at large did not mean that they were going to put any extra staff on. One of the two that they did have on was helping someone fill out a complicated form for their "Unlimited" card. This took a while.

Next to the cashiers was a table that I'd not seen at this particular cinema before. It was staffed by a security guard who had a metal badge on that made him look like some kind of Sheriff. A sign on his table explained what he was there for. It was from FACT. It explained that for our security and to prevent unauthorised videoing of films there was a random bag search in operation. Incredibly, it went on to say that this was happening to ensure that this cinema was able to continue to show first run films!

What???

Am I supposed to believe that a film distributor in the fight against piracy is considering pulling films from cinemas? How does that help. If my local cinema isn't showing first run films then surely I'm more likely to download dodgy versions, not less likely. Later, on my way out, I noticed that there were two other guards in the cinema. The ad reel also had one of those anti-piracy ads explaining why it was so much better to see Superman Returns in the cinema than on a dodgy download. One of the reasons given is that I wouldn't get heads appearing in the middle of the video. Actually, yes I will. I went to an early screening that was full of kids going to and from the toilets. But more of that anon.

I should also mention that midway through the film, the security guard put his head round into our screen to make sure that I hadn't somehow smuggled in a video camera and tripod. Or perhaps was using my camera phone to video the whole thing.f

Onto the concession stand where I just wanted a bottle of water. There were four staff on the stand, but only one was was serving. My screening was due to start soon so I bailed over the Ben & Jerry's counter where I found I could also buy water. 750ml of water cost me £2.10!

Once seated, it was time for the ads. It's a tough world in media at the moment, with much less advertising than you'd hope for at the moment. I expect that was why we saw not one, not two, but three road safety ads of various types. All showed pretty realistically what would happen if you weren't careful.

Then it was onto the film. Superman Returns is a 12A in the UK which means that noone under 12 should be admitted unless accompanied by an adult, and that responsibility for taking children lies with the adult. This is a great idea, but not enough parents really understand it. The BBFC don't rate these films lightly. So quite why so my parents felt that their toddlers could come and see Superman is a bit of a mystery. There are scary bits in the film. There mightn't be any gore, but he gets a good beating at times, and Lois Lane is in peril in a few places. As a result, kids were toing and froing from the toilet all the way through. They were also seeking reassurance from parents by talking. This annoyed a man sitting in my screen today who told off the toddler in front of him. Queue a pissed off mum telling him to mind his own business. I felt a little sympathy for both parties. But if you really hate young kids in the cinema, don't go to the pictures on a Saturday afternoon. Personally, I find the glow of people texting far more annoying.

Can I just say to cinemas that if they want to get box office figures back up they need to stop treating their customers like potential criminals and the experience so great that we're going to want to come back again and again. That's not what's happening at the moment.

OK. Onto the film. Bryan Singer has taken on the franchise and he's done a pretty decent job. I love the fact that unlike the revifalised Batman, he's produced an effective continuation from the Christopher Reeve films - especially the early ones. Brandon Routh really looks like Reeves, and the film opens with John Williams majestic Superman Theme which is still awesome. Later we have Marlon Brando's computer regenerated Jor-El.

The film does take a little while to get going until we finally get a big disaster sequence involving the launch of a space shuttle from the back of a jetliner. Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor is superb ably assisted by the amusing Kitty (Parker Posey). It's interesting that in Superman's Metropolis, despite the advent of 24 hour TV news, newspaper reading is still really strong - which is just as well for the Daily Planet.

The main problem that I always have with Superman is that he is "super". That means that putting him, or the world, in peril is no mean feat without kryptonite somehow being present. It's used here of course, but I'd hope that a sequel can be made without it. There are a few twists and turns along the way, but I won't spoil anything here.

The most disappointing aspect of the film was surprisingly enough the CGI. Luthor's boat was an entire CGI creation and really showed. The island he "makes" also ilooked mpressive but at the same time fake. I almost thought that the slight comic-book look was a deliberate attempt to take some of the realism out. I'm not sure though. It certainly wasn't bad - like Die Another Day. It just wasn't great. I really think that Peter Jackson still has set the benchmark. Although even relatively cheaply done TV work in, for example, Battlestar Galactica can be good.

So not bad. I'll definitely look forward to a sequel.

The Last Stand (or X-Men 3 as it was known until pretty recently) is the latest, and possibly final entry in the X-Men film series. Although Bryan Singer was univerally praised for his first two, they always left me a little cold; perhaps because I was more a DC comics reader than Marvel. Singer, of course, has gone over to the DC universe and made Superman Returns, a trailer for which ran in front of this film. And was that John Williams's score I heard in it? So the mythology of X-Men was not as deep-seated with me as Batman or Superman. Indeed, even Spiderman was a bigger draw for me. In fact, I only got around to watching the second film on DVD a month or so ago.

Anyway, back to The Last Stand. There's lots of backstory revolving around the seemingly dead Jean Grey, and a businessman has developed a "cure" to mutantism.

The film has all the necessary bangs, explosions and over the top action sequences. I can't fault the CGI, but it just feels so-so. There's no real suspense, and I don't especially empathise with any of the characters. Hugh Jackman's Wolverine growls, Halle Berry's Storm does nothing very special at all, and the rest of the cast feel like they've stepped off the set of one of those teen soaps.

I didn't completely lose interest, but if it weren't for the fact that I really can't bring myself to see The Da Vinci Code, I mightn't have gone to this film at all. It's really just so-so.

It'll be curious to see if there's a malaise in big summer releases this year. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 could be interesting, but I won't hold my breath, and the Poseidon remake looks dreadful (and that's just from the trailer). Only Superman Returns really appeals.

This remake of The Omen is very interesting. It's quite a while since I first saw the original Omen from 1976 which came, I guess, as something as a riposte to 1974's The Exorcist.

This version has been described as a re-imagining, but I'd say that it's more of a shot-for-shot remake, with David Seltzer being credited as the writer of both films. There are twenty-first sensibilities to this film, but this is some kind of post-ironic take on the original. The look, style and feel are very close to those of the earlier version. There are certainly scary sequences, but there isn't as much blood and gore as we tend to get nowadays. This isn't a Final Destination type of film.

It's been a while since I saw that version, but the famous sequences are still there intact with Liev Schreiber and Julia Styles taking the Greogory Peck and Lee Remmick roles of the American ambassador to Britain and his wife. Mia Farrow takes on the disturbing Mrs Baylock role - little Damian's nanny.

David Thewlis plays the reporter's role that David Warner had in the original, while Patrick Troughton's Fr Brennan in the original is now Pete Postlethwaite.

The two films do differ from each other, but not enough to be considered a long way apart. The pacing is very deliberate, and the performances are pretty good. This film's been remade with serious intent, and even some of the original Jerry Goldsmith score has found its way in.

The one thing I did find very noticeable was that the whole thing was made in the Czech Republic. The scenes in London were patently in no such place, with CGI London Eyes grafted into a couple of scenes. I don't proclaim to know every square foot of London, but the scene where Thorn meets Brennan under a bridge in the rain, was certainly not in the capital, and was quite possibly actually in a studio. But the real tell-tale signs were the police vehicles which simply weren't accurate, and most of all, the locale of the car chase that occurs towards the end of the film. You've got to be suspicious of any streets with tram-tracks, unless they're in Croydon or Manchester, and when a car headlight briefly lit up a Czech bank sign (complete with Czech signage), you know that the production was shot on a budget. Having said all that, it was equally the case that London wasn't London in last week's Dr Who.

A completely separate aside now. For years, I've always linked films to the IMDB, a database that I first remember compiling in UNIX from a newsgroup download back in 1989, before the advent of the web. But I've got to be honest - I really hate the pop-unders that it serves up all the time. Get rid of this nonsense now.

Do you like the TV series Alias? You know, the series from JJ Abrams, it's just finishing its run in the US now after five series. In Britain, the series floated around various stations. I think Bravo show it now.

Anyway, if you, you're going to love M:I 3, because it's essentially a big screen version of that. That's not surprising since Abrams is the director of this film. And he's done a pretty good job. After the dire simplicity and pointlessness of the second in the franchise, Abrams has pushed everything up a notch. In many ways Abrams is completely the right choice for this film. Alias was effectively a modern day version of the old Mission: Impossible TV series, and he doesn't put too many feet wrong.

The big "thing" about this edition in the franchise is that Cruise's Ethan Hunt is involved on a personal level. The opening scene in the film shows him having a wife or girlfriend threatened until he gives up some information. It's quite a scary scene in what's a 12A film. I probably could have done without that plot point to hang the film on, but the film series has very little relation to the TV series. Gone are the days when the team would carefully mock-up the interior of a submarine in a warehouse somewhere in order to persuade the bad-guys that they were in the middle of the Atlantic or something. The film series is all about international locations and gadgets. But the life-like masks are still retained.

Abrams seems to have spent quite a lot of time watching The Bourne Supremacy to study the Paul Greengrass style of action film. The cutting is fast and the camerawork not always clear. It all adds to the verisimilitude of the piece. Abrams has brought his TV composer with him, Michael Giacchino, and he does a great job of giving us a traditional M:I score. The action is pumped up and full-on with the very able-bodied Vic Armstrong doing a sterling job.

I won't go into the actual plot of the film too much, except to say that the Rabbit's Foot is possibly the ultimate cinema McGuffin. And I did like the sequence where Cruise goes through an ornate process to break into building to collect something. But once he's "on" the building, we're left in the dark as he's inside, and instead stay with the supporting cast in the cars outside.

The only downside in this Alias love-in is that, aside from the lack of Jennifer Garner, there is one of those typical at-home-with-easy-listening-music scenes near the start that were always my least popular bits of Alias.

The cast is relatively star-studded, with Ving Rhames as the only carry-over that I noticed from previous films. Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in a believably nasty villain. Jonathan Reys Meyers in pretty anonymous, and Maggie Q doesn't have to do much to look good. Simon Pegg completely steals his scenes playing a cross between Q from the Bond films and Marshall from Alias - more of the latter really.

Overall, it's back on form for this series then. Very enjoyable, good special effects, well-equipped bad guys, great locations (NB. If I was in charge of organising social events at The Vatican, I expect I'd be a little more careful about who I invited), and outrageous stunts. A good start to the summer season then.

Thank You For Smoking is the film that Lord of War probably wanted to be. That is to say, we're supposed to empathise with the lead character despite him having a, frankly, despicable job. And you know, you do.

But let's step back a second. Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, one of the most prominant public faces for Big Tobacco. He's a lobbyist. It's his job to defend smoking. With smoking being vanquished from more and more places, Nick is tasked with making it more popular. He quickly decides that getting cigarettes smoked by cool Hollywood stars in films is the perfect way to get the job done (Rob Lowe has a great role as an agent).

This film is a comedy by the way. A black comedy.

Along the way, Naylor also has to pay-off the Marlboro man who's dying of cancer - two of whom have died of cancer in real life.

A great little film that doesn't get preachy. As I say, despite his job, you do have sympathy for Naylor, yet the ending is believable and isn't what you might think it's going to be when you sit down at the beginning.

Finally, a word about the opening credits. Long gone are the days of Saul Bass or Maurice Binder. But here, we have a fabulous concoction of 50s cigarette packets, with the main players' names reproduced in the style of big brands (the graphics are just far away from the real thing to avoid lawsuits, one suspects). Marvellous.

Prior to a couple of days ago, what I knew about Johnny Cash could have been written on a very small postage stamp. I knew a couple of his more famous lines, and also knew about his some of his latter sounds when he recorded songs by such artists as Depeche Mode and even Nine Inch Nails with Hurt which I remember Nick Stewart (aka Captain America) once giving a talk about at work.

I was quite excited about going to see Walk The Line because I knew that Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were supposed to be good in it, and Cash is someone that I felt I should know a bit about (in the same way that the Dylan documentary from Scorcese also filled in a few holes in my cultural knowledge last year).

The film does follow a typical rock biopic route: a few childhood recollections that impact on later life, the success, the highs, the lows, the depressions. But it works very well and the performances are really good. In actual fact, I think Reese Witherspoon gives an even better performance than Joaquin Phoenix's.

The film opens with the beginning of a foot-tappingly spectacular prison concert which we return to later in the film. We see fellow young stars from Sun record - Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis.

In fact, the film does bend a few stories and twist a few things to meet a required structure. But then what film doesn't? How do I know? Well I've just watched a BBC Four documentary on the man, and I'm slightly more inclined to believe that than the film.

The singing, by the way, is indeed superb - with both leads taking the honours. I note that both actors have been duly nominated in the Academy Award Nominations (And while we're on the subject, I'd love someone to explain how Heath Ledger is up for Best Actor, while Jake Gyllenhaal is only up for Best Supporting Actor. I'm pretty sure that if Gyllenhaal's character had been a woman, she'd have been a Best Actress contender. It's not a small role).

On the way out of a party that was held after the film (and which in no way prejudice's this review), I was given a "goody bag" which included the Cash CD that has Hurt on it. I listened to it both on the way in and out of work today, and that's despite visiting HMV for some other Cash bargains at lunchtime.

Dad's going to love this film.

I've got a lot of time for Ang Lee, although I'll fully admit that I've still yet to see The Hulk, but I'm reasonably sure that I'm not missing an awful lot.

Brokeback Mountain is a great return from someone who hasn't made a proper film since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Based on a short story that I haven't read (although I did pick up the copy of Time Out that came bundled with it recently), it tells the story over quite a period of time of two cowboys, who, yes, are gay. Well it's more complex than that. What we've got are two very real people with their complicated lives, and the time they spent together one summer looking after an enormous flock of sheep.

If truth be told, you can see how this is adapted from a short story rather than a full-length novel. But then anyone who's watched a movie version of a favourite novel will be able to vouch for how much material has to be left out.

The two stars are great, with Jake Gyllenhaal easily better in this than he is in Jarhead. Mind you, he has much more likeable character here. Heath Ledger, on the other hand, is something of a revelation. He puts in an exceptional performance, and despite some slightly dodgy make-up in latter parts of the film when he's been aged a little, you really understand his situation.

The scenery is spectacular, although I found it ironic that given the film's Wyoming setting, it was basically all shot in Alberta. It certainly can't harm the Canadian tourist industry.

Towards the end of the film, you're never quite sure how things are going to resolve themselves. In reality, they probably wouldn't until either the men drifted apart, or they became very old. So the way things are wrapped up feels like it was necessary from a short story's point of view rather than, perhaps, reality. But that shouldn't detract from an excellent piece of work.

Let's have another attempt at this, since my first review from a couple of weeks ago seems to have disappeared from the site.

Munich, the latest Steven Spielberg film, is much more Schindler's List than War of the Worlds. A few years ago, there was a fantastic documentary feature, One Day In September, that examined in almost forensic detail, the taking hostage and murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games.

This film broadly speaking is a "what happens next". The Israeli government puts together a hit team to kill the Palestinians who are said to be responsible.

We follow Eric Bana and his team around Europe as they take these people out one by one. The group of hitmen are out there on their own, and seem to have to rely on a strange French middleman, who can, for cash, point Bana's team in the right direction.

The acting is very strong, and we never quite know what's going to happen. Spielberg is able to play out these set pieces with consummate skill. You simply don't know what's going to happen.

Of course, the big theme of the story is Bana's character beginning to question the worthiness of his "quest".

Overall, this is a powerful film, and the story's well told. A little long, but very worthwhile.

Hidden, or Caché, as it is in French, is a very strange film. I think the only previous Michael Haneke film I've seen is The Piano Teacher, which a very disturbing film. But this is probably more unusual.

Overtly, it's something of a thriller, with a couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) receiving strange video tapes of the exterior of their house in a nice part of Paris. They're being stalked in some kind of a strange way. They whys and wherefores are probably best left to the film, because it is an intriguing story.

However, the style of the film is very odd. We get very long takes, with very fixed and singular shots. A long wide shot. Then a long close-up of one character, followed by a close-up of the other. Sometimes, we discover our POV is actually the camera recording the tape images, with no attempt to display the image in a video style, but on other occassions, the camera will suddenly move, and we realise that it's not. That makes you a strange observer.

Sound is unusual too, with audio being very "real". So if we're at one end of a telephone conversation, the other end is so faint as to be inaudible, although this being a subtitled film, we're let in on the conversation. I don't think I'd have understood what was being said had I been watching this film in France. On other occassions, overlapping conversations make it hard to hear what the main characters are saying, and in one instance, a television is blaring out the news without a care for the dramatic scene that's being played out in front of it. Neither character rushes to switch it off, as they would in reality.

And there's no music either.

The other really notable thing about this film is that, although calm, controlled and realistic, there are a couple of scenes of nearly excuciating horror. One of them actually lead to shouted gasps in the auditorium where I watched this film. Once seen, not easily forgotten, and a reminder of the power of The Piano Teacher in a similar regard.

So what to make of the film? I'm not sure. I won't spoil the ending, but I don't think I was alone in being unsatisfied with it. Once we'd been taken on this merry dance, I suppose I wanted something a bit better. The performances were superb - in particular Auteuil, who was very naturalistic. But I find it hard to agree with the critics who in today's papers found this to be a better film than Munich.

Jarhead is the new Sam Mendes film, and I suppose for that reason alone, is worth paying attention to. It's based on a book that came out a couple of years ago written by Anthony Swofford recounting his experiences as a fairly new Marine as he becomes part of, first, Desert Shield and then, eventually, Desert Storm.

I'm guessing that this is one of those films that didn't get much military assistance from US forces, as the picture painted isn't the prettiest one. We meet Swofford as he goes through his training drill, before he joins his unit and undergoes the kind of initiation that we can be absolutely certain doesn't go on in Deepcut.

This isn't a pretty picture of life in the forces. It's not even as though there's a great deal of action. Most of the film takes place in the Saudi desert as they just sit around waiting to go into combat. In the meantime, wives and girlfriends are leaving them, and they're going stir crazy.

And that brings me to something you see in all too many US military films. I've no idea how accurate this (or any other) film is, but I wouldn't want to serve with US armed forces if there was a good chance that one of my brothers in arms was likely to point his firearm in my face as he slowly went mad. It strikes me that there's not a great deal of psychological profiling going when the recruits are dragged in. Actually, I guess that there's less than ever these days with, I'm guessing, recruitment becoming ever harder.

The film does feel a bit long in places, and there are actually brief bits of footage that you feel could have been safely excised form the final film. But overall it's pretty good. Whether it's worthy of the Oscars that it's no doubt in the frame for, is another question. But then, very few Oscar candidates are really that worthy.

The 1933 release of King Kong came at an interesting time in Hollywood's history. Self-censorship was still the order of the day, and of course it was at the height of the depression.

The story at the heart of the film could in some ways be described as a unrequitable love story.

Fay Wray was great in the film as Ann Darrow, who's fallen on hard times and is 'found' by film maker Carl Denham. In Peter Jackson's remake, the same scene with Darrow getting caught stealing an apple to fight off her hunger is captured again, this time with Naomi Watts being spotted by Jack Black.

This film is immense - in length at over three hours, and scale with possibly the greatest amount of money ever spent on a film at a reported $207m.

I loved it.

There are two massive difficulties that had to be overcome with this film. The first is that most of us know the story, although black and white films from the early thirties aren't seen as much as they once were; the second is that something that is unbelievable has to be made believable in a real world setting - albeit a slightly stylised 30s world. This second is actually the harder of the two to achieve, since in Jackson's previous Lord of the Rings trilogy, we saw plenty of fantasy creatures and buildings, but they existed in a universe where their existance was believable. But if there really was such a thing as a 20ft ape, what would it look like and could we possibly believe in it and invest emotion in its story?

Well, the answers are just like a regular sized ape scaled up, and yes we absolutely can with some of the technical trickery now available to film-makers.

By far the greatest achievement of this film is for the audience to genuinely care about the tragic events that befall the ape. He's on his own - at least until any sequels get made - which is a fate even the dinosaurs don't seem to have. And by the time he's in New York you really don't care about anyone else in the story.

All round there are great performances. I was wary of Jack Black at first since he can be a very over-the-top character, but he's been reined in pretty well here. Adrian Brody, as screenwriter Jack Driscoll is OK. I struggled to believe him becoming the all-action hero he's required to be. The rest of the cast had lesser roles and were all fine. But I did think that Thomas Kretschmann as the SS Venture's captain had the right amount of grit and distrust about him.

That just leaves Naomi Watts and Andy Serkis's performance as Kong. Watts is fantastic and this is easily the best film I've seen her in since Mulholland Drive. And Serkis really does need to be recognised. Kong seems real. Yes, he's sometimes embued with suspiciously human characteristics - witness his feigned disinterest with Ann Darrow after she's been entertaining him with her vaudeville. But overall it's an incredible combination of great acting and technical achievement.

I suppose I should say at this point, that unless Jackson had turned in a complete turkey, I was always going to love this film. I've mentioned before on a couple of occassions that Jackson has opened up some of the mysteries of film-making to an incredible extent. Some have seen these as showing us some of the DVD extras before the film's even come out, but you really need to watch these videos to appreciate that this was more about the art of film-making rather than always being specifically about this film.

The last post-production diary has just been put up on the net and the first batch - amounting to several hours - have been released as a double DVD set in parallel with the film's release. However, the DVD only reaches the end of production and the post-production videos are still on Kongisking.net. I suspect that eventually there'll be some kind of massive DVD set that'll include all the production diaries. And Jackson himself alludes to there being unused footage, so could there be an extended DVD like he had for the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

So what, if anything is wrong with the film? Some have commented on the length, but I was happily sucked into his world and away from the real world for three hours, so I have no problems.

Some of the effects shots could probably do with some additional work on them. Not Kong himself, who's fantastic. Nor the other creatures or the CGI New York which is stunning. But some of the boat shots didn't quite work - in particular the rowing boats trying to reach the Skull Island shoreline. One suspects that since the film was on quite a tight deadline, some bits were rushed.

So if you haven't already, find three hours to see it on the big screen this Christmas. By all means get the DVD when it comes out - I know I will - but this is a spectacle that deserves to be seen on the silver screen. (Or, in my case, the slightly imperfect silver screen with a few off-white bits. Let's see, my local cinema is in business solely to project celluloid against a white screen. If the screen's damaged then fix it!)

I think I've mentioned it here before. But I really don't like musicals all that much. I'm not sure why - maybe I'm lacking a gene or something. But, with the notable exception of West Side Story, the stuff that fills up half the West End leaves me cold. I went to see Les Mis when I was at school and I can't remember anything about it. I'd read a good book any day before I'd bother queuing to see Phantom of the Opera, and even Guys and Dolls which is spitting distance from work doesn't get me excited.

So when the Broadway musical adaptation of the 1968 Mel Brooks film finally opened in London a year or so ago, I was pretty indifferent. A friend was organising a trip to go and see it, and I think a minor football match was on that night that I preferred to see.

But a cold Monday and a free screening with drinks and nibbles in a smart hotel was enough to keep the curmudgeon in me at bay and at least give the show the benefit of the doubt. I mean, I did enjoy the story involving The Producers that ran throughout the fourth series of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And I had found the 1968 version of the film mildly entertaining (if not rip-roaringly funny).

So I have to report that I actually quite liked this new version of the musical back on celluloid featuring a good selection of the original Broadway cast. I don't think anyone can really claim that the songs are ever going to be deemed all-time classics destined to be played ad nauseum in elevators for the rest of your natural life, or covered on album collections released at Christmas. But they pass the time and in a couple of instances work quite well.

Even though I haven't seen the stage version, it's obvious that like your average filmed version of a musical, they haven't added or taken away much. Exterior shots are sparing and could easily have been replaced with scenes on set instead. Indeed in the majority of sets, there's no third wall since that's where the camera spends most of its time - a bit like a sitcom really.

I think the performances really won me over. This isn't the funniest film you're going to see this year (although at this point I'm struggling to think what might be - Sideways probably), but the premise of the story remains good, and almost despite the slightly too theatrical performances of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the title roles, a good time is had by all. Uma Thurman's great as the sexy Ulla (well I found her sexy anyway), and Roger Bart and Gary Beach as the production's director and choreographer steal nearly every scene they're in. Most surprising of all is Will Ferrell who's is a revelation by virtue of the fact that he's actually funny in this. OK - I did once see him do a fantastic impersonation of Dubya.

So overall, recommended.

"Good night and good luck" was the sign-off given by Edward R Murrow, and it's the title of an astonishingly good film directed by, and co-starring George Clooney which examines Murrow's battle against the tyrant Joseph McCarthy.

Clooney plays Murrow's produced Fred Friendly, but the real star of the show is undoubtedly David Strathairn as Murrow, who plays the role with a fine sense of understatement.

The film's made in monochrome, and everybody's smoking in just about every scene all the time. The music is muted, largely used to break up scenes, and the film is altogether finely crafted.

One could easily believe that it was another age when US networks genuinely cared about news ahead of profits, although even the supportive CBS is seen to moving Murrow out of primetime and into Sunday afternoons.

This film closed the London Film Festival tonight and I hope that it's fantastically successful. I think I'll get my order in for the DVD now.

As a long time fan of Wallace and Gromit, it was only a matter of time before I had to drag myself along to the cinema to see this. One of the key reasons for not going immediately was the prospect of being in a cinema packed to the rafters with kids. I've got no problem with kids, and of course they should go to the cinema very frequently. Just not when I'm there.

Fortunately the showing I caught was mainly full of adults - a teatime showing during term time. I remember seeing The Wrong Trousers in the cinema at the opening of the Bristol Showcase Cinema along with the UK premiere of Speed. A strange combination indeed.

This film was, of course, made for the big screen and all the usual charm is there. Possibly it's a little longer than it needs to be, but it's great fun and thoroughly recommended.

The Farrelly brothers certainly have managed to offend various people over the years with their brand of humour. This is taken to the extreme in the forthcoming The Ringer, which they've executive produced.

Essentially they've gone out on a limb to try to make it as hard possible to like a film - at least from the synopsis. Let me explain.

In The Ringer, Johnny Knoxville plays Steve, an office cubicle drone who wants to improve himself. His boss is willing to give him the chance, but also gives him the job of firing the nice janitor, Stavi. Steve feels sorry for him and offers him a job cutting the lawn for his apartment complex, with cash coming out of his own pocket. But a tragic lawnmower accident leaves Stavi minus three fingers and it becomes clear that as his employer Steve should have taken out medical insurance. Without this, he needs $28,000 to pay for surgery.

Meanwhile Steve's crooked uncle, played by Brian Cox, needs even more money to get himself out of a gambling hole. Then he dreams up a quite brilliant scheme...

He'll get Steve to act as though he's mentally disabled, and get him to enter the Special Olympics in this guise. His uncle will bet against the Special Olympics superstar Johnny, and win lots of money. With his name as Jeffy Dahmor, Steve goes undercover against his better judgement.

What follows could be considered some of the most tasteless humour to ever be committed to celuloid, but it's actually very good.

There's no doubt that one of the worst things a human can do, is laugh at another because of a handicap they have (and have no control over), but this film, with it's cast full of disabled actors, is not malicious, and like Steve/Jeffy we, as an audience, feel far less alienated than we might otherwise.

Needless to say, "Jeffy" falls in love with Lynn, a helper at the games and is left in an impossible position as a result.

I've got to be honest and say that I laughed my way through the entire film. I may go to hell as a result, but I honestly believe this to be a good film with a kind heart and good spirit. I'll say right here and now that it's going to get some very tough press and some people are going to need to come out batting on its side.

But then the Lars Von Trier Dogma film The Idiots had worse scenes, when the group went out and about on "outings", "spazzing" when they met people who'd show them around factories or whatever. There was no redemption there.

Could this be the first half decent film Johnny Knoxville has made?

Completely unrelated to anything else, James Cromwell was in the lobby of the hotel where the screening of this film occurred today. At the time I couldn't recall his name, so out came the mobile and a bit of surfing later revealed it. But then came the intriguing note that he's soon to be seen as Prince Philip in a Stephen Frears film called The Queen. And I note that the Queen herself is played by Helen Mirren, giving her an unlikely 2005 double of playing both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II!

But seeing James Cromwell doesn't trump my best celebrity spot of the week - seeing Chris Morris in Soho. That beats seeing David Walliams (twice in one day), and June Sarpong. And that doesn't even take into account, seeing Paul Weller and Eric Sykes at work (not together, obviously). I'll stop there, because whenever I flick through it, I always despise those pages in Heat magazine that show celebs out and about being snapped in the street. Horrible.

Now here's a curiosity. If you happen to see a little of the trailer, or happen upon the poster for Lord Of War on the tube you might be forgiven for thinking that this is some kind of Con Air 2 - Nic Cage in a big action movie.

But that's not remotely the case. Lord Of War is about the arms trade and in particular Cage's character Yuri who travels the third world selling arms to various parties without a care in the world about what happens to them or to what use they're put.

I watched Jonathan Ross review this yesterday evening and I think he was very unfair on it. He talked about the classic three-act structure into which all films seem to fall, with redemption at the end. But that's simply not the case with this film.

Cage's character is completely amoral, and although he gets scared from time to time, it's not really enough to make him see error of his ways.

There are a couple of very clever scenes in this film: the first sees a bullet manufactured until it's fired (into the head of a young African child), and the second is the overnight dismantling of a cargo plane.

We're not left with any doubt where the feelings of the film's producers as a caption at the end of the film reveals the five largest arms trading nations in the world - US, UK, France, China and Russia - as also being the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

David Cronenberg films are always worth watching - although I admit I didn't see his last film, Spiders. But eXtistenZ was a very interesting film.

A History Of Violence is one of those films that you probably don't want to know a great deal about before you see it. Viggo Mortensen is Tom, a nice guy married to Edie (Maria Bello) who seem like a lovely family in Indianna where Tom runs a diner.

One day two criminals try to hold up the diner, and out of the blue, Tom saves the day by spectacularly disarming and killing his vicious attackers. He becomes a national hero, and with this brings some unwanted attention as some dubious characters believe him to be someone else.

And that's all I'll say about the plot. Mortensen and Bello play an enormously believable husband and wife in a film full of good performances. Of course, we're always in Cronenberg's world, so nothing's quite that straightforward.

Well, it's the film that everyone's talking about at the moment - well the Browncoats are anyway.

I only recently saw Firefly having read a few decent things about it on the net (I certainly never caught any of its airings on the Sci Fi channel). Then it appeared quite reasonably in the current HMV sale. So a couple of weeks or so ago, I bought it and watched nearly the whole series over three days.

The first thing I should say is that I'm not especially a Joss Whedon fan. I saw a few Buffys here and there, and even tried to watch a bit of Angel, but I found it all a bit disposable.

Firefly's different, with a believable setting, although I'm still not quite sure how the planets and moons relate to one another. Are they in the same solar system? And the dialogue is witty and sharp with jokes and characters who develop. As everyone now knows, the show got cancelled and only really got a resurrection when it was released on DVD.

But the story, incomplete as it was, didn't die there, and Universal picked up where Fox had left off, greenlighting a feature film - Serenity.

Of course the challenge of the film in such a situation is that it has to appeal to more people than were fans of the TV series. It should be intelligible to all, yet you don't want to annoy those who're fully aware of the situation. In fact this potential conundrum is skillfully handled and doesn't prove to be a problem.

What we get is a fast entertaining and intelligent science fiction film with humour. Serenity is the ship our heroes are based on and its captain, Mal, has more than a passing resemblance to Han Solo. Of course I'm not remotely the only person to observe this, and nor am I the only person to think that the zip and buzz of this film just shows how short changed we were with the three Star Wars prequels.

People get hurt in this film, and the plot is moved on. In that respect, this is absolutely not like an extended episode of the TV series.

Thoroughly recommended.

First some honesty - I've come very very late to the whole Family Guy thing. I'd been told how good it is, and like The Simpsons, I knew it to be well written. But also like The Simpsons, I'd not really cared that much.

I don't what it is in my bones that makes me show such disinterest in comedies that I know to be so good. But it's there.

Anyway, that's a long way around of saying that I came to the whole Family Guy thing completely afresh, and I'm glad I did finally come to it. This extended DVD-only episode (85 or so minutes) is very good indeed, very caustic and very funny.

The animation's your typical early 21st century fare - that is to say basic. But for things like this it doesn't really matter. I came out of the screening room completely won over.

Now if only someone could see fit to release some of the old Tex Avery cartoons on DVD. It's criminal that some of his classic screwball comedies haven't yet been released. Red Hot Riding Hood is a fantastic cartoon (I first saw it on Rolf Harris' Cartoon Time many years ago).

Michael Bay's latest film, The Island, has seemingly had disappointing box office returns in America, and while I couldn't call it a great film by an means, it does do exactly what it says on the tin. That's to say, lots of explosions, big chases, pounding soundtrack, beautiful stars, camera filters aplenty, and a powerful momentum.

The opening half hour or so is a little slower than some audiences have come to expect, with the set-up slowly becoming clear, as our two heroes, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, realise that they're clones who're being raised in super-quick time, to harvest body parts for rich clients in an outside world they know nothing about. They're told something about a contamination.

The Island refers to a mythical place of beauty that "winners" of the a lottery get sent to. In reality, it means their time is up, and someone's after their kidneys or lungs.

Of course the film is really Logan's Run updated a bit, with some of Coma chucked in for good luck.

The action really takes place once they escape and are chased down by Djimon Hounsou's crack team, with their seemingly endless supply of helicopters, armoured cars, SUVs and guns... lots of guns.

The best sequences in the film take place at this point with some dynamic stunt-heavy chase sequences. No doubt CGI helped a lot, particularly in a sequence involving a lorry shedding its load of wheel axels (a cargo that seems strangely incongruous in a time when so many vehicles seem to hover) along a motorway. As is always the case, the driver is completely unaware of his diminishing load, but it makes for some great obstacles to face the bad guys with.

And the effects are a superior set in this film, with very little "obviousness" which I find incredibly intrusive. I suspect that in the inevitable 3 disc DVD set, there'll be copious documentaries and features detailing the incredible lengths the production went to, and to be honest, it shows on the big screen. Compare and contrast with the rushed efforts of Stealth.

On the downside, there's the small matter of product placement which completely blights this film. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick had some of his characters heading off to a space station in a Pan Am branded craft. I'm sure that Kubrick didn't take a shilling for what amounts to advertising, but it does add verisimilitude to the setting, so seeing brand names in context in SF films is fine, when it's done unobtrusively. In this instance, I immediately thought back to the great scene in Waynes World in which Wayne holds a slice of Pizza Hut pizza up to the camera.

In this film, we get very obvious product placement for Puma (seemingly the bad guys' trainers of choice to outfit clones in), Nokia (if the future of mobile phones involves standing them up and beaming a projection at a wall in front of them, I don't think I want one), Cisco Systems, Ben & Jerrys and most obviously of all Microsoft. The two heroes play a futuristic Xbox game involving holographic reprentations of themselves in a beat-em-up (Johansson wins needless to say). The system comes complete with exactly the same Xbox logo as we have today - and it's not Xbox 3600 or whatever iteration they'll be up to in 15 years' time. Then later, they need to search for someone, and it seems that mobiles, pocket computers and the like have not done away with phone-box type things, since they enter an MSN Search-box. I swear that there was actually laughing in the cinema, so overt was the branding on this box. Aside from the fact that surely it should be Google that they're using, the crassness of the camera lovingly presenting the pristine logos for contractual length of time.

We're media savvy these days, and I reckon that placement such as this actually harms the brand. Still, no doubt Nokia will bring out an Island themed phone, and Ben & Jerrys a new flavour ice cream, and all will be happy. But I did walk out of the cinema thinking more about the fact that I'd watched an extended commercial than a popcorn movie. The future of commercial television is bound to mean more product placement, but indelicately handled, and viewers won't come back for more. I suspect that the cloning storyline was the bigger problem for US audiences, although coming towards the end of the summer blockbuster season, they might just have been exhausted by the endless explosions and car pile-ups from other FX fare.

So get your big bucket of popcorn, and large drink to sit back and relax with.

Ken Livingstone was at the premiere's after show party, although I'm not convinced he actually went to the film [Update: These photos rather prove he did]. Maybe I should have barged up to him to suggest my bike plan? Also saw Jimmy Carr, and had a horrible flashback experience of actually living in one of those Channel 4 top 100 shows. Otherwise it was the director, Michael Bay, the couple who produced it (Laurie MacDonald and Walter Parkes), someone who may be from Girls Aloud, and several non-entities (myself included I suppose). The "worst, yet most photographed dress" award must surely go to the woman who was wearing a very brief white dress that she'd then seemingly taken a hedgetrimmer to, to ensure that there was no more than a handkerchief's worth of material covering her entire body. I find reading the safety warning's on fire extinguishers slightly more edifying than Heat, OK and the rest, so I remain clueless as to what reality TV show she might have emerged crawling into the light out of the gutter from.

Return to Sender is a very Scandinavean film, that seems to have been inadvertantly set in the USA. Given that the film's about death row prisoners, the US setting (Oklahoma) is correct, but everything else about the film shouts "Nordic".

That feeling is obviously aided and abeted by the fact that it's directed by Danish director Bille August, known to British audiences as the director of Pelle the Conqueror and Smilla's Feeling For Snow. It also stars the wonderful Connie Nielsen (Russell Crowe's wife in Gladiator) who's also Danish.

The film revolves around Aidan Quinn's character, a former death-row layer who now earns a disreputable crust by befriending who seem likeliest not to have their sentence commuted, in the hope of getting given their last letters for valuable publication purposes.

He's chasing Connie Nielsen's baby killer, but it slowly becomes clear that despite her lack of denial, there are other factors at work.

The film is slowly paced, and although a thriller in name, it's not a rushed affair. An interesting and well made film.

Whether it gets a proper UK release remains to be seen - it was made in 2004, and despite being a British co-production (Stephen Woolley is the executive producer), there's very little sign of it going "wide".

It's taken a while for John Sayles latest film to reach these shores. In the US it was released in the run up to last year's presidential election, since it addresses State politics.

Included in the cast are some of Sayles favourite actors. Chris Cooper plays would-be Governor Dickie Pilager, who should in no way be confused with a certain ex-Governor on Texas who went on to bigger things. While Kris Kristofferson has a fleeting role as the local big-business guy.

But we spend most of our time in the company Danny (Danny Huston), once a journalist for the local paper, at a time when it did actually investigate things, but stitched up. Now he's an investigator for a small town firm, who's embroiled in a case that Cooper's right hand man (a great Richard Dreyfuss role) has him look into when a photo-opportunity at a lakeside ends up with a dead body being reeled in by the governor-to-be.

The film gets into the dirty business of American politics and it's spider-like links with local business interests. We also have pictures painted of the dubious employment practices with the trade in illegal immigrants from Mexico being used in the fields, factories and swish Colarado skiing communities.

As usual, Sayles has found an interesting location in the States and taken a close look at how things work there. It all feels very real, with naturalistic performances and a pace and plot that doesn't feel too rushed.

Michael Murphy has a cameo as Cooper's father, a Senator. Obviously this is supposed to be a political family, and again, I'm sure no direct links should be made!

Daryl Hannah has a fabulous little role as the black sheep of Cooper's family, and Tim Roth plays a grungy ex-editor who now runs a counter-culture website from where you can really learn what's going on while big-media plays it safe and gets sucked into large corporate ownership. Billy Zane's sleazy PR guy is great too - he once appeared on television explaining the Big Tobacco position that smoking does not cause cancer.

Maybe the end is a touch laboured, but the points are all well made. Sayles just can't actually make a bad film. Well he might act as script doctor on some pieces of work that end up as bad films, but that's not really his fault, and they obviously pay the bills and let him do things like this.

And I haven't mentioned that the film has a soundtrack to kill for. Well any film that has three different Cowboys Junkies tracks in it is going to get a big thumbs up from me to begin with. They're all taken from The Trinity Session, and we get Mining For Gold over the opening titles before later hearing Misguided Angel and Blue Moon Revisited. But there's plenty of other stuff including Lucinda Williams and a great track from Steve Earle over the end credits - Amerika v 6.0. The crying shame is that there doens't seem to be a proper soundtrack album available. I suppose that the film's too small a proposition to worry about such things. It looks as though I'll have to put my own compilation together using the handy music listings from IMDB.

I've been meaning to write something about this since I saw it a couple of weeks ago.

Critical opinion has been very mixed, and a couple of people of work seem to have found the whole thing enormously disappointing.

But first things first, Spielberg's transported H G Wells' classic from nineteenth century Surrey to 21st century New Jersey. But liberties with the setting aside, he's been remarkably true to the book.

The aliens arrive quickly (although not noticeably from Mars), and quickly terrify humankind who have no hope of defeating them. The special effects are, needless to say, outstanding.

Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, an estranged father of a couple of kids, who starts the film taking them in for the weekend. He then spends the rest of the film, effectively impotent as he tries to protect them and is largely helpless.

The big thing about this film, and indeed, the book, is that things sort themselves out, and it's not some kind of heroic Cruise intervention that saves the planet (a la Will Smith in Independence Day, when he has no problems finding the right cable to dock his Apple with the alien spaceship). Of course, Cruise does manage a couple of smallish heroics along the way, but fails to manage many more. And I think we really understand his complete helplessness as he has to try to be a father to his children.

Yes, his daughter screams just a little too much, but a young child probably would scream a lot in the cirumstances. And his son is annoying beyond belief, but then aren't all teenagers?

Overall, the best Spielberg film I've seen in absolutely ages (and I speak as someone who hasn't even seen The Terminal).

Stealth is the new film from Rob Cohen, the guy who brought us The Fast & the Furious and xXx, and let me say from the outset, if you know any thirteen year old boys, they've going to think that this is the best film ever made.

It's set among an elite Navy fighter plane squadron - so elite in fact that there are only three of them, Josh Lucas, Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel (Question number 1: what on earth was Jamie Foxx thinking when he accepted this part). They're quickly assigned to an aircraft carrier where their futuristic (read CGI) planes do lots of stunts. So far, so Top Gun, but that's not actually where the film's heading. There's a fourth member of the team. Yes it's a computer-controlled plane! Think KITT from Knight Rider and you're there. It does speak, and for a second I thought that they might even have some glowing LEDs. Instead we get a kind of CPU with a red "eye" that observes all around it, and for which there's probably a good case of breach of copyright from HAL in 2001. It's just a shame that they didn't get William Daniels to voice the plane (it does speak in a sub-HAL manner).

Their first mission takes them to "Myanmar" - that's Burma to the rest of the world - where a terrorist meeting's taking place. Fortunately CIA operatives have told them it's happening in 24 minutes on the top level of a building in downtown Rangoon.

The planes head off at hypersonic speed and reach Rangoon in minutes (it quickly becomes apparent that being based on an aircraft carrier is pretty pointless since their fighters can reach all corners of the planet pretty easily - in this case travelling from somewhere around the Phillipines to Burma in no time).

But there's a problem! It quickly becomes obvious from Biel's character running various computer simulations in her cockpit (this lot can multi-task like no others), that if the use their current weapons, they'll kill thousands of innocent Burmese in the busy surrounding areas. We get a few brief cutaways showing the dastardly terrorists arriving, closing off the busy streets surrounding this international terrorist summit meeting. It seems that the mission can't be accomplished until "KITT" works out if you come from above you can do it. The pilots don't trust the plane, so Lucas decides to take on the manouevre himself even if there is a "73% chance of blackout".

Needless to say, the building is destroyed and nary another soul, aside from the evil terrorists, is hurt. You might have thought that discrete surveillance might have revealed more information about the bad guys, but it doesn't make good films.

On the way back to their aircraft carrier - and yes, it does seem like the US Navy actually assisted in the making of this film - the "KITT" plane gets hit by lightning and its highly advanced circuits get frazzled. Now if there's one thing we all know about computers, it's that if they get hit by lightning, they don't just break like our home electronics does. Instead their "neural networks" get all mixed up and confused and they become vaguely evil and irresponsible.

So you can imagine the problems when the guy running the computer plane scheme forces them to take "KITT" with them on the next mission. He detonates a series of missiles in Tajikistan, and although concern (again from Biel who's the humane member of the team) is expressed about the radioactive cloud that will kill thousands of farmers nearby before heading on to a populous part of Pakistan, that's about the last we hear of this tragedy.

I won't give away any more of the plot, but it's fast moving, people die, someone ends up in North Korea on the run, we get a Sky News flash (from a Columbia film), we visit Alaska, we see a refuelling dirigible (one guess what happens to that), and innocent Russian planes are shot down without a care in the world. It doesn't bear thinking about the kind of diplomatic mess the US would be in by the end of this film.

Needless to say it's heavily CGI'd, sometimes well done, other times really badly done. There seem to be a few minitures used too, although obviously if I'm noticing that there are minitures, then that's a bad thing. All the camera work in the sky has that shaky look that they've used recently on the new series of Battlestar Galactica to give it veracity. The acting is perfunctary at best, and the whole thing comes across as one of those straight to video Top Gun knockoffs that tended to be filmed with the Israeli air force back in the eighties, except that they've removed the need for real planes and done the whole thing with computers.

You know that it's a PG-13 in the States because there's precisely one "fuck" carefully placed in the latter part of the film, and unlike, say Owen Wilson in Behind Enemy Lines, US Navy pilots (well female ones anyway) seem to get to run around in cropped T-shirts and tight fitting "pants". Incidentally, my top survival tip for when you get shot down in North Korea and feel the need to drink some water desperately is to go upstream of the local village you stumble across rather than run the risk of being spotted by kids playing in the river.

Leave your brain at home if you really feel the need to go and see this film.

Just a brief entry to mention that some weeks ago, I did actually see this film. And guess what, it's not as bad as some will have you believe.

It's not Gladiator, and Orlando Bloom isn't Russell Crowe, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, I'm a big Ridley Scott fan, but don't think that I'm some kind of apologist.

The picture of the Saracens painted was very relevant and not especially revisionist.

I caught this amazing telling of the Frank Miller graphic novels (i.e. "comics") when I was away.

Sin City - the name comes from "Basin City" according to a sign - is a dark and ugly place. It's not Las Vegas despite what you might have thought. The story interweaves several different noirish tales from the comics and it has the boldest comic book sensibility of any comic to film adaptation I've seen. For the most part it's black and white and the violence is very comic-esque. All the men hard-nosed types who'd have been played by Humphrey Bogart if the film had been made fifty years ago. And all the women are drop dead gorgeous, and wear very little. So a male fantasy film? Well yes. But done with style and panache - so that's OK.

All round I really liked it, and not just because it features Carla Gugino from the late, and much lamented short-lived series, Karen Sisco. (She also stars in the forthcoming series Threshold, that Sky One's bought).

So finally the second trilogy ends in a full circle and we meet ourselves back as we once were in 1978 (or 1977 if you lived in America).

The first thing to say about Episode III, as we must call it, is that it's much better than both Episodes I and II. Overall, Lucas has improved on his work over the course of the three films, but it's still not brilliant.

The film opens with the traditional scroll, and I'd hate to be an 8 year old trying to make head or tail of the political intrigues. When I saw the first Star Wars (I refuse to call it A New Hope, since it certainly wasn't called that at the Odeon Barnet where I saw it), it was an 8th birthday present and for a long time to come, rebels were always to be the good guys. I think confustion set in when some terrorist activities reported on the news were said to have been committed by rebels. But I digress.

We're fortunate that Lucas flings us into an elongated action sequence taking in space fights and the works. We quickly encouter General Grievous, and battles ensue. When the action is moving along like this the film is at its best.

It's almost an unfortunate necessity that we have to keep letting the "story" get in the way as Anakin must become more and more besotted by the dark side. The problem is that we all know what's going to happen to him - we have done for the past two films. Everything else is just eating up screen time.

Some of the problems of the earlier film remain. Aside from the political nature of the story, the dialogue remains clunky. Now I know that when I saw the first film I was 8, and what I regarded as the best thing in the world ever at that age, might not be the same now. But that first trilogy still stand up. There was more slapdash about. Certainly the effects are far superior now, and everything's that much more polished, but sometimes too much. The rawness of the snow battle on Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back felt real. That's because they did do it in a real snowy landscape (of course they also had models and stopmotion), but you knew that snow was going everywhere when explosions happened. Now it's just CGI bits and pieces that fly everywhere.

OK - now this all seems terribly negative, but it's not meant to be. The emergence of the Emporer is powerful, and seeing Vader "rise" is a genuinely chilling moment as he takes his first respirator breath.

Some parts owe a little debt to Peter Jackson - particularly the scenes set on a vulcanic planet surface. And there was a lack of space flight time. Everyone could get everywhere pretty much instantaneously. Indeed given the presumed timeframe of the film taking several months, you could be mistaken for believing that it all happens in the course of a long weekend.

But at the end of the film, you're handsomely paid off. The spacecraft have been subltly getting closer to what we recall from the earlier films. Uniforms are slowly becoming close to those amazing stormtrooper outfits. And it's great to see things settle down to be setup for the earlier trilogy. So overall, a good ending to an underwhelming trilogy.

They thought it'd never be made. Lots of times it didn't. But now it has. Finally the Hitchhiker's film has arrived.

Obviously this was a preview screening, and I was surprised by the scale of it, with it getting an Empire Leicester Square screening, with a queue winding through Leicester Square on arrival. This was because a significant bag and phone check was taking place. Bags I understand, and I can appreciate that they don't like you taking cameras into preview screenings. But phones?

Yes - if your phone has a camera, then they were holding onto them for you for the duration of the film. And what proportion of mobile phones do you think have cameras these days. Nearly all of them, that's what. Particularly in hip and trendy London. And they were basically running a cloakroom for cameras in a cinema that must seat a few thousand (The Empire is either the biggest or second biggest screen in London). Now they may be able to collect the phones in reasonably easily, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that getting them back at the end of the film is going to be a nightmare. It was. It could have been worse but I was close to the exit and am big enough to "push" through to the front of the "scrum" that was trying to reclaim their phones at the film's end. Can film distributors really be so scared of phone camera images of their films? Am I really likely to try to film the whole thing with the built in video cameras that many phones have. Not exactly DV quality are they?

Anyway, enough of my travails, since I was in the privileged position of getting a free screening of a film a week or so before it opens. And they did give us all a free Hitchhiker's towel - which was rather a nice touch, and a very imaginative gift.

But what about the film itself?

I've got to be honest. I went in with some trepidation. I've listened to the radio series many times over the years. And I loved the books, and the TV series was very good too. So I know the source material pretty well, and I had read an outstandingly negative review of the film from MJ Simpson, who knows his Hitchhikers very well and runs an excellent site that's as up to date as anything on the web.

First the good news. It's not that bad by any means. The film's well made, with distinctive and impressive effects. And it doesn't stray far from the plot that we all know and love. In fact, it's almost takes too few liberties and is perhaps just a bit too reverential to the source material.

Martin Freeman plays Arthur Dent, and is probably a little young to my mind, and just a little too like Tim from The Office. But I was perfectly happy with Mos Def as Ford Prefect which I though was going to be a harder character to accept. And Sam Rockwell is pretty good as Zaphod. Yes, his second head is done a bit differently, but he was fine. I don't think I've seen Zooey Deschanel before who plays Trillian, but she's pretty right for the part. You can quite believe that Arthur met her at a party in Islington once and could get her out of his head.

All the voice actors are fairly good too with Stephen Fry as the book, Alan Rickman playing the depressed Marvin amongst others.

As I say, the film follows a well trodden path reasonably closely. Sometimes it feels rushed, but then they probably actually needed to cut a bit more out (I can't believe I just typed that). So we get the house getting knocked down and before you know Arthur and Ford are onboard the Vogon ship, having poetry read and being expelled from the airlock.

It's worth mentioning at this point, that "The Book" sequences are awfully similar in style to the animation that was in the TV series. When I say that, I mean a simplistic, cartoon-like style rather than flashy computer graphics. Think of one of those safety notices you get in plane seat pockets. Now animate it. I thought it worked well.

Many of the usual diversion are included along the way, and the film is stylistically in keeping with what I'd have hoped for. There doesn't seem to have be any especially jarring music to flog a soundtrack album with, the graphics in the Slartibartfast scenes are particularly well rendered.

But. There is a but. I was just a little under whelmed by it all. It just wasn't funny enough. All the lines were there... well most of them anyway. But maybe it was the delivery. Sometimes it was the film's audibility (which seemed to be an issue with Mos Def and some of the Vogon dialogue), but I wanted more chuckles, if not exactly belly laughs. I was smiling all through the film, but I thought it could have been that bit better. I didn't begrudge the removal of much loved jokes, but I wanted well delivered lines, and I think more could have been done.

But the film's by no means terrible. It's just not fantastic. The book and radio series are rightly held up so highly, that they're always going to be a tough act to beat. That's not to say, however, that we shouldn't strive to try.

I've got no idea how the film will play in the States, since the one serious worry I did have was that the quintessentially English humour would be lost in a big-budget Hollywood extravaganza, but that's not the case. I don't know what the budget of the film was, but it can't have been small, and one would think it'll need to do well in America too. I'm not sure it will though.

I suspect that there were a lot more references to previous incarnations than I picked up on, but it was good to see the TV series version of Marvin in a queue, and Simon Jones (Arthur from the radio and TV series) appears as a disembodied head warning people to stay away from Magrathea.

In the last three weeks, we've had updates on three different classic British science fiction properties: Dr Who, Quatermass and now Hitchhikers. I don't think that this has been as successful as Dr Who, but it's a decent effort, and deserves to be seen.

In the meantime, the BBC have been press releasing stories about the last ever series of Hitchhikers on the radio, so there's still more to look forward to.

I finally caught this at the weekend and it's a stunning film with an amazing performance in the title role from Imelda Staunton. The minutiae of life is really well represented - with the family gathering at home around the dining table in a manner so different from how it is today. So polite. I really enjoyed it, if that's the right word, and there's no moralising. We just have the story presented to us.

Back in the days when I read comics regularly, I was a big fan of the Alan Moore Swamp Things and it introduced the character of John Constantine. He then got his own comic, Hellblazer which I began to read at the start. On a primary level, Constantine is blond and British.

So when Keeanu Reeves pops up speaking a decidedly American accent and with his trademark dark hair, you know something's amiss. In fact Constantine doesn't deviate massively from the mood of the comics, but it does commit the cardinal sin of being dull.

I'd explain the plot, but it really isn't worth bothering with. He hooks up with Rachel Weisz and lots of CGI effects ensue. To give it's due, the effects are first rate, but overall it amounts to not very much. It's just dull.

Robots is the latest film from Fox's CGI animation division Blue Sky. A few years ago I saw Titan AE, their first feature, and now comes Robots, picking up where Pixar have left off.

The robot world is colourfully envisioned and there are jokes a plenty, a good deal of them going straight over the heads of the kids in the audience. As usual in such films, an all-star voice cast has been gathered together. And, as is becoming very usual, we get a few UK-specific voices in our version. So that means cameos by the likes of Terry Wogan, Cat Deeley, Chris Moyles and Vernon Kay.

I've got to be honest - I think I'd prefer specialist voice artists to the star names.

Overall, it's a creative and inventive film, but not one I'd go out of my way to see. In some respects the Heath-Robinson nature of the machines mirrored some of the Wallace & Gromit shorts.

Since this is a Fox film, they could have shown the new Star Wars trailer, but instead we just got the teaser. Still I did get a Robots lunchbox complete with Robots slinky, so I can't complain.

I'm a massive Wong Kar Wai fan, so it was inevitable that I'd be dashing out to see 2046 (well maybe not quite dashing, since it opened a couple of weeks ago, and I've only just seen it).

The genesis of this film has been well reported with its gestation taking a good five years (I believe it's true that he made the magnificent In The Mood For Love after he'd begun 2046).

Tony Leung is the star - well actually Christopher Doyle's camera work is the real star - and he's accompanied by some Chinese cinema's most stellar (and most beautiful) names. We've got Gong Li (from Shanghai Triad amongst many others), Faye Wong (from one of my favourite films, Chungking Express, also from Wong Kar Wai), Ziyi Zhang (recently seen in House of Flying Daggers, but also, of course, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and the peerless Maggie Cheung (from numerous films including many Jackie Chan films including the Police Story trilogy as well as a several previous Wong Kar Wai films including the aforementioned In The Mood For Love).

The plot is not easy to explain. Leung is a writer who makes his living writing pulp columns of a sleazy nature. He lives in a hotel adjacent to room 2046 (2047 in fact). But it's the occupents of room 2046 who capture his attention as we progress at a stately pace through the latters years of 60s Hong Kong. He narrates the story back to us, from the viewpoint of his science fiction story set in the year 2046 when "nothing changes".

So that's pretty clear then! If that attempt at a plot synopsis isn't clear enough for you, then you're probably not going to like this film.

It's meandering and ponderous, and very touching. As I say, it looks incredibly beautiful with nearly all the shots having something or other so close to the camera that it's out of focus, so that we appear to be discrete voyeurs viewing the scenes as they play out. The music is exceptional as usual. I find that I just about always have to pick up the soundtrack to a Wong Kar Wai film - usually a blend of the familiar and the unusual. This was no exception, and on exiting the cinema, a swift trip to the Picaddilly Circus Virgin Megastore (previously Tower Records) was called for.

NB It's probably worth not doing what I did, and arriving late to buy your ticket at the Curzon Soho, condemning you to the seats in the first couple of rows of screen 3. To say that you'll get a cricked neck is putting it mildly, and if you happen to be unfortunate enough to have a seat on the end of the row (say 11, 12 or 13) then it might be worth coming back another day.

Day two of my freebie cinema week, and I went to see Clint Eastwood's new film, Million Dollar Baby. Now I like Clint Eastwood and he's matured well, making some really interesting films, and in this instance, starring in it too (he even composed the music here).

Eastwood's a boxing trainer at a gym where old pro Morgan Freeman also hangs out. Neither of them have got much cash to speak of - particularly Freeman's character who lost an eye towards the end of his career.

Into this world steps Hilary Swank as a female (obviously) boxer with ideas of getting Eastwood to train her.

The film continues as you might expcet it to, with Eastwood reluctantly taking her on, and despite her age (31), Swank's character doing well. Then the film changes tack in a dramatic fashion. Rocky this 'aint.

I won't say what happens, but it's not a road that you're really expecting to travel down.

Swank's superb, and won a Golden Globe for her performance. Eastwood's... well just Eastwood. Morgan Freeman narrates, and let's face it, it'd be worth turning up to a performance of the phone book read by Freeman. A very worthwhile film.

Never one to turn down a bargain, I collected several Evening Standards last week for the free cinema vouchers - one per day for Vue cinemas seven days hence.

Now some time ago, a similar offer was run with Odeon, and that time it took some effort to get to see any film at all. As usual with these offers, you can't book in advance - you have to buy your ticket on the day. "Aha," I thought, "What if I buy my ticket at lunchtime?"

Well it turns out you can, although I was not at all the only person to have also come to this conclusion. But five minutes later, I had my ticket to see The Aviator for that evening. The performance ended up being sold out, and although the queues were large, it wouldn't have been impossible to get the ticket in the evening. Incidentally, this was the first time I've paid for a ticket to a film in the West End for a while. Well obviously I didn't pay. But if I had, it'd have cost me £11! There's a bargain. And to think that by Christmas this year, you'll be able to own the film on DVD for less than that (allowing for a summer release in the shops, and then a sale).

But what of the film? Well it's not bad. It's certainly no Scorcese's best, but broadly speaking it holds your interest for its three hour duration. Di Caprio is strangely believable as Hughes, and Cate Blanchett is wonderful at Katherine Hepburn. Somehow, I'd love to see her do a lifestory of Hepburn herself, who's a thoroughly interesting character. In fact the planes were more interesting than Hollywood, with some good sequences, but somehow the computer graphics just weren't right. It's not that they weren't good - although I think they could have been better. But I think to create a believability, you really need to shoot from "real" camera angles, and not repeatedly have the camera zoom into the cockpit until we can clearly see Di Caprio's eyes. You can't do the same kind of Steadicam work that Scorcese gets away with on land in the air with computers.

The supporting cast is great, with Kate Beckinsdale giving warmth to Ava Gardner, and the most of Hughes supporting workers looking after him sensitively. The toughest watch was the madness that began to overcome him in later life - in particular a drawn out sequence where we find Hughes living naked, and in some squalour in a screening room at his offices.

Is Di Caprio worth his Golden Globe? Probably. But then I don't think that they should be considered that valuable a set of awards anyway.

Creep is a good "old-fashioned" horror film. It's a British/German co-production and has a relatively low budget, although it sports a strong cast lead by Franka Potente (of Run Lola Run and the Bourne films) as a woman who heads off into the night to party but falls asleep in the tube at Charing Cross Station. Finding herself locked in, she ends up getting on a train, and then the fun begins.

Someone or something is stalking her, and after it attacks her own would-be attacker, she enters a subterranean world. The tunnels that she spends her time running through are all set in the "real world" - there doesn't appear to be anything supernatural going on, but I'm bound not to give away the ending (anyway I hate reviews that do).

There are jumps in the requisite places, and although the last third of the film deteriorates into a run of the mill "escape from the monster" routine, there's fun to be had.

Potente has done horror before (in Anatomie and its sequel), and she makes for a tough woman to be chased around underground London. But although I shan't say what may or may not be stalking her, when all is revealed, the filmakers' influence isn't hard to fathom. Light and fluffy stuff to while away an hour and a half if like that sort of thing.

A couple of years ago I fell in love with Audrey Tatou. It wouldn't be untrue to say that in actual fact I fell in love with her character in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Amelie. Jeunet had previously made Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and, er, Alien Resurrection.

But Amelie was when he really hit the big time, and I loved it - as well as its star, Audrey Tatou.

Now Jeunet is back, and once again he has Audrey Tatou starring, with A Very Long Engagement in which he takes a slightly different direction to his previous French language films - but only slightly.

The story, co-written by Jeunet, is set in during the latter years of the First World War through until 1920. Mathilde (Tatou) is engaged to Manech, but he has to go off to war where the horrors leave him to try to get out of the frontline by deliberately getting his hand shot. Along with a group of similar soldiers he's sentenced to death for desertion and is sent "over the top" to a certain death in the middle of no-man's land. But things aren't that simple. We fast-forward until 1920 and Mathilde still believes that since she has no hard evidence to the contrary, her lover may still be alive and somehow have survived his ordeal.

That, put very simply, is what the story of the film is about. But of course that loose description barely touches on what happens. As before there are hallmark "oddities" of some of the characters (Mathilde, for example, enjoys playing single notes on her tuba). But before you think that this is a frivalous and light hearted story, you really need to know that the scenes on the front line in the trenches, are every bit as horrific as those at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan.

In that respect, the film has a slightly schizophrenic character, but nothing is out of place, and despite the horror of some of the scenes, I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it.

Interestingly, this film is partially funded by Warner Brothers, and as such, seems to have been at the centre of some controvosy in France for not being a "real" French film. Irrespective of where the cash may have come from (and, as usual, there TF1 and Canal+ cash there too), it's as French a film as you can imagine. I also understand that it was made for a minimal amount of cash, which is all the more remarkable given the outstanding representations of post-war Paris that are evoked.

I was lucky enough to attend the premiere and Jean-Pierre Jeunet introduced the film himself. He invited Audrey Tatou, and co-star Gaspard Ulliel onto the stage at the beginning. Then after the film there was a little function I managed to get along to, but it was only as I departed that I noticed that Audrey was in attendence! How annoying is that? I may have to look through some of the tabloids and "celebrity" magazines to see if any of them have any good photos of her!

I went into Sideways knowing very little aside from the fact that it was about a wine taster. Indeed, for all I knew it might have been a documentary. All of which goes to show that I'm not reading enough about upcoming films - it's fantastic.

Paul Giamatti (who'll you'll recognise from bit parts in many a film) plays Miles, the aforementioed wine taster. He lives like a slob, and we quickly discover that he's something of an alcoholic - not good for his profession. He's actually a teacher, but he's written his first novel which he's desperately trying to get published.

His longtime friend from college is Jack, who's getting married in a week's time. Before then, he and Miles will go on a trip into Calfornian wine country for a bit of freedom before the big day.

In one of the small towns, around which are dotted the vineyards, they eat in a restaurant where they run into Maya, who waitresses there. It quickly becomes evident that Miles quite like Maya but is nervous to do anything about it - he still thinks he might be in love with his ex-wife. Jack, who was once a TV actor and now does commercial voiceovers, behaves like he's a dog on heat. When they come across Stephanie, Jack sorts out a date between the four of them.

What ensues is funny and moving. I probably can't do it service here, but it's enormously quotable. Miles is by no means perfect - an early scene sees him "steal" money from his mother.

The film that this most reminds me of is Swingers, another film which I loved. This could almost be Swingers + 10 years.

I loved it. Go and see it!

Alexander has been roundly criticised by many as being almost laughable. In particular, in America, it has performed poorly at the box office, taking something like $35m dollars when it cost something nearer $150m.

It's certainly not a great film, but it's not nearly as bad as some would have you think. I think the greatest lacking it has is its pace. There are some scenes that while worthily trying to get under the skin of what made Alexander tick, they don't drive the film forward. Occassionally the exposition is a little crass, and the structure of the film is strange being told in flashback, by an elderly Anthony Hopkins, with one strange episode being told completely out of sequence.

But I've got to say that some of the things it does are done well. The big battle sequences are tremendous, employing special effects well. The battle in India against an elephant driving enemy is exceptional, and although gory, the cutting is fast enough that we get the gist of what's going on without lingering on it unnecessarily. Similarly, the realisation of places like Babylon is stunning.

Unlike some, I didn't find Colin Farrell speaking with an Irish accent jarring. The alternatives are surely English accents (which are as good), American accents (always feel wrong), or simply speaking English with Greek or Arabic accents dependent on where you are. And Farrell isn't bad, while Angelina Jolie comes across as manipulative as Sian Philips Livia from I, Claudius. I'm not saying that she's as good, but she's still not bad.

So put this in context, it's a little slow, but Troy was far worse.

The House of Flying Daggers is Zhang Yimou's latest film, except that unlike his last film, Hero, we haven't had to wait three years to get it.

The plot involves lots of double-crossing and a secret society - the House of Flying Daggers - of whom Ziyi Zhang is a member. She seems to be the blind daughter of the former head of the society.

The film is beautiful to look at with some wonderful set pieces including a fight in a forest of bamboo, and finale that takes place in a blizzard.

I really enjoyed it, but somehow I was left slightly disappointed - it just didn't grip me quite as much as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did.

I don't know exactly when this film began production, but a smart mover like Jerry Bruckheimer could probably have greenlit and turned around this film in pretty short order. To say that it shares certain traits with The Da Vinci code would be putting it loosely. It's a romp around north eastern America in search of a treasure supposedly hidden by a combination of Templar knights and early US freemasons.

Nicolas Cage leads the charge with Diane Kruger amongst others in tow. Meanwhile, the bad guy is Sean Bean who seems to have rarely got a completely heroic roll since the Sharpe TV series.

Entertaining fare, with plot holes aplenty - but it moves with such a pace that you don't have time to think about them too much.

There's something particularly ridiculous about getting dressed up in black tie to go to the cinema. But it's fun to dress up and for no clear reason, I got an invitation to the Royal Command Film Performance of Ladies in Lavender.

This is the new film featuring the two Dames - Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. It's the directorial debut of Charles Dance, who's also adapted it from a short story by William J Locke.

Ursula and Janet are sisters living in an idylic Cornish cottage, who one day find a half-drowned young man (Daniel Bruhl from Good Bye Lenin) on the beach. They nurse him back to health and they discover that he's actually a Pole. They also find out that he has a talent for the violin, and a visiting tourist (the lovely Natascha McElhone) hears him and realises he has talent.

I won't go any further, except to say that the film's tagline about a "stranger who stole their hearts" is profoundly apt. A thoroughly enjoyable film that never turns in the direction you expect it. And the music is wonderful.

I don't know if the Queen enjoyed it, although she stayed for the credits. But Philip wasn't there - I suspect he wanted to catch Spooks on TV.

If there's one classic novel that's well known in the UK, it's Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It's been dramatised many times, with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson in 1940 and televised on the BBC in 1967. But the most famous version to date has been the 1995 Andrew Davies adaptation with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Colin Firth still struggles to escape his wet-shirted Darcy. And next year we have Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen to look forward to in another film version.

In the meantime, Gurinder Chadha who previously directed films including, most famously, Bend It Like Beckham, has reset Pride and Prejudice in a contemporary setting with the locations being Amritsar, London and LA. Oh, and it's a Bollywood style musical too.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film, although so far I haven't found many people who agree with me on this. Jonathan Ross didn't like it, and neither did some of my work colleagues who were also sat in the gods of the London Palladium last night for the World Premiere.

You can't take the film enormously seriously. We all know the story, and therefore know how it's going to end. The villain is of course a pantomine, and the comic turn is precisely that. I can't pretend that I really know and understand Bollywood cinema, but I know enough to realise that we're not talking about gritty realism here. The girls are supposed to glamourous (none more so than Aishwarya Rai who plays the Elizabeth Bennet character), the villains evil, and then there are the musical interludes.

I don't think I've seen a contemporary musical for a long time. Is that because they don't make them any more, or because I avoid the few that do get made? But quality of the songs not withstanding (and I'm sure they're as good as any on the London stage), I was thoroughly carried away with the piece.

There are plenty of in-jokes and references, many of which I'm sure I missed. Let's just say that they manage to stage a fight in front of the main screen of the NFT during a Bollywood film season.

For those who worry that this film might stray too close to Bollywood habit of producing three hour plus melodramas, have no fear that it runs under two hours. Just go along to have a couple of hours of escapism and fun.

Saw this new Michael Mann film earlier this evening, featuring Tom Cruise as a professional hitman who kidnaps Jamie Foxx's taxi driver forcing him to help out on his night of hits.

The whole thing looks like it was shot on hi-definition video, and it lends an almost noir-ish feel to the film. There are lots of very tight close ups, and the use of video seems to open up the kinds of angles that are available to the cinematographers on the movie. This is true in much the same way as it was in the Danny Boyle film, Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise.

The end is a tiny bit disappointing, as Tom Cruise suddenly becomes a bit too much like a superhero. But you can't really take it totally seriously despite the overall grit of the film - there are just too many scenes that don't make a whole deal of sense, like the shootout in the nightclub (it's a great scene nonetheless, superbly choreographed).

Music is massively important in this film and is well chosen. From the Miles Davis to Audioslave. Worth seeing.

I've just spent a good part of this evening watching the great Stephen Poliakoff play Caught on a Train starring Peggy Ashcroft and Michael Kitchen, which was released last year on DVD.

I've watched it at least once, and maybe twice before, and it really leaves an impression. We follow the story from Peter's (Michael Kitchen) point of view as he boards a train off the ferry in Ostende heading towards Vienna. This is the story of his journey, and in particular the impact that Frau Messner's (Peggy Ashcroft) Viennese elderly character has on him.

Everything feels so real about the story, with football hooligans, a variety of Europeans, an attractive American and various other elements. I don't want to say too much more because it'd spoil it, but it's really worth checking out (and is again available at a bargain price in the old Piccadilly Virgin Megastore).

I got around to seeing this little masterpiece that dissects Fox News piece by piece. Of course, it's not news that Fox News massively distorts the real news, and takes a consistently right wing approach to its coverage. But the really interesting parts of this film were those that covered the techniques that Fox engages to take this line - "Some people say" for example.

I think some more of this would have been good. I'd also like to see some more evidence of the impact of what Fox News has being doing, on other news networks. I suppose that these things are enormously hard to illustrate easily - you need to take a story and compare the coverage from several outlets to see any slants that are being taken. This film was a slickly and quickly edited film, and it's hard to do that in this kind of filmic environment. Worth catching.

But a quick question. Murdoch is not known as being a good loser. In the UK he's switched sides in the past to ensure that he backs the winner. What happens to Fox News if Kerry wins? Does the channel just shift round to attack mode, or does it try to reflect the views of the majority of the country given that they'll have just elected a Democrat? Or does the party divide in the States vary so much from that in the UK, that you could never do an about turn in the same way as The Sun does here?

[As I type, the Republican convention is starting in New York, and BBC Parliament is taking the C-Span feed. It's fascinating to watch un-commented on cameras just roaming around the relatively empty convention centre (it is early afternoon New York time, and the big speakers don't get on until later in the evening when the networks may possibly show some live coverage).]

A dreadful film. I only recently came to Pitch Black, and it's not a bad low budget sci-fi thriller. But this is an atrocious sequel. OK, it's technically competent, but the plot is dull, and there are some dreadful sequences that simply make no sense.

For example, when escaping across Creamtoria, being chased by the rising sun, I'm sure we see one of the characters die, only to be alive moments later. Then there's the bit where seemingly only Riddick and the girl make it too the top of the mountain before the sun comes into view, facilitated by a last minute rope swing. His two colleagues are still further down the hill, and although they can hide behind a rock, they've not reached the mountain top. Moments later, up they pop! How?

And then Riddick is seemingly dead in the sunlight later on in the sequence. I understand that there was no way he was "really" dead. Heroes don't die in these things, and yet, when he is revealed as alive, we don't see or know how he achieved this miraculous escape. Did someone else pull him to safety? Did he make a Herculean effort and drag himself to the shade? Who knows. And is it me, or has the little girl of the first film aged far too much in four or five years?

The trouble with this film is that loads of money was chucked at a poor idea. From a small film, there's suddenly a supporting universe that makes little overall sense. I suppose I should be pleased to see a space opera of this sort, but you've got to believe in the universe. And in this instance, it's obvious that the producers have been watching The Lord of the Rings way too much.

Interesting to note that I saw the fabled nightvision goggles being worn by a cinema employee, and also couldn't help but note that the print seems to be barcoded. In at least one scene (with Riddick on a very plain background), there are quite definite marks on the print for a couple of frames or so. I assume that this ties a particular print to a location so that internet and boot sale pirates can be easily traced back to a source.

A couple of years ago Matt Damon starred in a reasonably good thriller called The Bourne Identity, and last night it was on Sky Movies so I watched it again. I liked this thriller based on the Robert Ludlem novel (and previously filmed some years ago with Dr Kildare himself) because it had a believable plot that didn't pander completely to a simpleton audience. The characters were good, and the action was set entirely in continental Europe.

The same is nearly also true of it's sequel, The Bourne Supremacy. Matt Damon and several of the previous film's characters are back - for varying lengths of time. Last time around the film was directed by Doug Liman who made Swingers and Go. At the time it seemed like an odd choice for an action-adventure movie like this, but he definitely added something to it.

This time out we have Paul Greengrass who seems like an even odder choice with his background in British docudramas and the like. But he turns out to be an even classier director and the film as a real raw edge to it. The car chase feels very real, and the fight scenes too. Much of the action is shot with handheld cameras (without Steadicam) and at times the cutting is so sharp and fast it's difficult to see what's going on. (Admittedly this wasn't helped by the poor projection at my local multiplex with saw the first few adds projected on the ceiling rather than the screen, and a distracting "blob" moving around the projector lens throughout the film).

A sequel that's certainly better than the original, and I'd echo those people who've already helpfully suggested that Greengrass be signed up immediately for the next Bond film. Personally, I'm looking forward to the next of these - I believe that there are at least a couple more available...

I've categorised this entry as "Films/DVD" but I was watching my videos. I got the video set of Fortunes of War years ago (the pre-copyright tape suggests a duplication date in 1998), undoubtedly in an HMV sale, but never got around to watching them. Of course I watched the series when it was first broadcast in 1987. I was maybe even mildly obsessed by it. I read Olivia Manning's original books - The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy - that told the story of Guy and Harriet Pringle as they moved around Europe trying to stay one step ahead of the Germans during the Second World War. I've even got the 12" single of the theme tune.

This production was the BBC's big autumn drama series for 1987, and starred Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson who were to marry and become Britain's number one pair of theatrical luvvies. But put aside any preconceptions that last sentence may conjour up. This is a wonderful portrait of an other-worldly English language lecturer and his wife as they begin married life first in Bucharest and then slowly have to move first to Athens and then to Cairo. There's a wealth of colourful characters who move in their circles. Including the Irish Russian Prince Yakimov, the diplomat par excellence Dobson, Byronnic expert Professor Lord Pinkerton, poet Castlebar, and many many more. Many of the characters are absurd, and Harriet is forever just stopping short of having affairs with various English servicemen.

The production didn't seem to want for money, and the locations are spectacular - not least the various scenes that take place around the pyramids and in Luxor. The hotels that are stayed in are the kinds of hotels we all wish we could stay in permamently with their always-open English Bars and the like.

If it hadn't been for the need for sleep, I'd have probably watched all five hours in one go, instead of the two chunks it did take me.

The only disappointment was that the videos I've got are edited into one long chunk with the final credits at the end of the second tape. That's a shame because you don't hear the main theme enough, and almost certainly, we're missing some lingering scene-settings that are probably chopped out. Some day I suspect this'll come out on DVD and these thing's will be righted.

I've been looking forward to seeing this film since I heard that Michael Moore was making it. It's been doing excellent box office in America, but given the sales of his books, that's maybe not surprising.

The film starts with the well-trodden Bush election fiasco. Actually, it wasn't a fiasco, it was a travesty of justice. How the world's largest democracy can screw up the election of its president is quite shocking. Moore's been through this in his books, but in an election and with peoples' short memories, it's always worth reminding ourselves what happened.

We then get into Bush family links with the Saudis and the Bin Ladens. Then there's all the extended connections with Bush's friends. It's all enormously incestuous, and it's incredible to think that Clinton got such a tough time over things like Whitewater.

Finally we get into Iraq and the reasons, or lack of, for the invasion. And it's here, when we meet the families of soldiers and soldiers themselves, who've been sent out there, that the film is at its most powerful. Although it's slightly fatuous to go out and ask Senate members why their sons and daughters aren't serving, it's always worth pointing out that it's the poor who really have to do the grunt work. And there's the incredible profiteering that's going on right now in Iraq with the contracts that have been won. I'm staggered that Moore was able to film some of the stuff he did at a conference where big businesses came together to discuss how best to profit from the war.

The title really refers to the climate of fear that we've all been put under, with ridiculous warning lights to tell us how dangerous things are, and to put us in a mind to hand back some of those civil liberties we've gained over the last few centuries. This isn't just happening in the US but right here in Britiain.

I'm sure that this film is going to find a voice in the UK too, and with the popular John Edwards now standing alongside Kerry as the Democratic ticket, Bush has got to be gone now.

It's apparently very important that this film is Good Bye Lenin, and not Goodbye Lenin. I can't say why really - not because I'd give the plot away, but I simply don't know. It's set in the months either side of the Berlin wall coming down, and a wonderfully communist mother who goes into a coma, and comes out in a new free world, the reality of which might harm her.

The lengths her son and his friends go to, to keep her under this disillusion are wonderful. An entertaining film - if a tad longer than it needed to be. It probably told me more about life in East Germany than I'd ever have otherwise known (although this book might be enlightening - it's made the Samual Johnson shortlist).

The science in this is dubious in the extreme, but you go to see a film like this for the special effects and the ride. I admit that I quite enjoyed it, and the effects are well done. I'll ignore the blatant plugs for fellow Fox channels Fox News and Sky, the painful references to Man Utd, and the fact that I seriously doubt any helicopter pilot in their right mind would have been flying around a downtown LA that was being ripped apart by multiple tornados. The plot's lousy, and the twists can be seen a mile off (if twists they really are).

It's just a roller coaster ride, and you get what it says on the tin - New York being washed away; twisters in Hollywood; snowstorms in Scotland. Better seen on the bigscreen than on video, although I expect it'll make a killer "demo DVD" for a good home cinema audio setup.

Payday, so what better way to treat myself than pick up a DVD at HMV on the way home. I got this classic Roman Polanski film because it's simply wonderful. I think it's safe to say that the makers of Dead Calm were probably over-so-slightly influenced by this Polish debut feature.

There are only three characters in the film, and we're introduced to them all pretty quickly. Andrzej and Krystyna are a married couple - she somewhat younger than him. They're on their way to spend a day and a night sailing around in the Polish lakes (I'm guessing somewhere in the northwest of Poland), when they stop and pick up a hitch-hiker. He ends up joining them on the trip, even though he's never been sailing before and professes not to be able to swim.

The film is tautly made, and it's a joy to see it again. Like Polanski's later Cul De Sac, you get a real feeling of isolation. There aren't any other boats (although given the weather's so wonderful, this is perhaps surprising).

The DVD's not bad, although there seems to be a degree of less important dialogue that's left untranslated which annoys me. And the subtitles suffer from Americanisms - I doubt anyone in 1962 Poland described someone as an "Asshole". But the film comes with a fine documentary detailing the making of the film, with nearly all the main participants showing up (only Jolanta Umecka who plays Krystyna isn't represented).

And finally, I should mention that the soundtrack comprises of a series of wonderful jazz pieces, which all add the edgy moodiness of the film.

Big historical epics are my kind of films, and I'll always go and see them. We went through a long phase of not really getting the sword and sandals epics of old, until Ridley Scott made Gladiator a few years ago. I remember when we used to get massive TV movies set in Roman times, like Masada - real event television.

Anyway, it all disappeared, with maybe the odd Hallmark production showing up now and again for better, or more likely, for worse despite the all star casts.

Now we're in a CGI age, and along comes Troy. So straight down to catch an early preview (ie. a showing which will count towards next weekend's box office take, in one of those strange movie accountancy ways).

The trailer really didn't do it for me in this instance, but I went along with it anyway, because Wolfgang Peterson has done some pretty good stuff in the past, like Das Boot.

The dialogue at times is more than a little clunky, particularly at the beginning. And of course we've got the usual question of what accent did the ancient Greeks use when they spoke English? Well obviously, we've all been brought up to expect received pronunciation. So it's a little unsettling to hear Brad Pitt speak with an American accent, while the largely British remaining cast all speak with regional British accents to one extent or another. Brian Cox as Agamemnon has a Scottish lilt, and Sean Pertwee has his god-given Yorkshire accent. Eric Bana doesn't speak in an Australian accent, and Diane Kruger as Helen, certainly doesn't have a German accent. But European accents are fine, while American accents aren't for this fare I'm afraid!

I suppose the biggest problem with a film like this, is that you don't especially like any of the characters that much. Orlando Bloom's Paris has taken Menelaus' wife Helen back to Troy. Menelaus seems to be something of a dirty oold man since he's old enough to be her father. But Paris is a spoilt child. Achilles isn't interested in anyone but himself. Agamemnon is an empire builder. Priam is a misguided individual. Helen is helpless. Only Hector is really likeable, and well, you probably know what happens to him...

The tale is well told, even if events have been somewhat tightened up timewise. And the story runs along nicely, although the wooden horse sequence seems a little tacked-on, with minimal build-up or tention derived from it. Yes we all know what happens, but that doesn't mean that you can't keep us on the edge of our seats.

The special effects are fairly well used - sparingly even - since Troy would have been quite small, we don't need to see a city the size of Gladiator's Rome. My main issue with the effects is that someone has watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and tried to ape it. Except the numbers are now over the top. We're told that a 1000 ships sail to Troy, and this seems to be about right when we see them. But they equate to around 50,000 troops, and the campsite seems pretty small all things considered. Then we see the massed ranks of the Greek and Trojan soldiers facing off for the various battle scenes, and we run into real trouble. 50,000 is a lot of people, but I was at Highbury yesterday to see Arsenal complete their historic unbeaten season, and there were 38,000 people in the stadium. While we might have all been fairly tightly packed in, even spread out, we wouldn't have taken up that much room. The Stop The War march last year had nearly a million people marching - 20 times as many as the 50,000 here - and again, they took up comparatively little floor space. I guess that it all just looks good.

Anyway, I feel that I need to get back to Homer, for a slightly more enlightened viewpoint of the story. And complete sucker that I am, I'll probably catch Sky Movies' showing of Helen of Troy later this week.

Try as I might, I really can't cope with the title of this film. When I wandered into the Odeon, and reached the cash desk, my eyes were wandering around until I saw a poster from which to read the title.

The fact that Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay was always going to be enough to make me go and see it, and I wasn't disappointed. You have to stay on your toes to make sense of it all, but it's a blast of fresh air compared with most of the crap that makes the big screen.

Finally got around to seeing Shaun of the Dead, and well worth a visit to the cinema it is. Essentially this is zombie spin-off from Spaced, but that'd do it a disservice.

I was a big fan of Spaced... OK, I became a big fan of Spaced. You see, I entirely missed out on the first series, and only caught some of second after my brother expressed surprise that I wasn't watching it since it'd be so much up my street. So I turned to DVD, where a series like this absolutely belongs.

Whether there'll ever be any more Spaced seems doubtful, although we can but hope for the odd one-off. But in the meantime, Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright have handed us the first decent British comedy film since, well, I don't know really.

The setting's not quite the same, although Pegg still seems to be living with Nick Frost in a flat, although this time without a landlady. But we all move on. Pegg has a girlfriend played by Kate Ashfield, the only face that's not completely familiar in the whole production. Lucy Davis from The Office, and Black Books' Dylan Moran provide other characters along with Bill Nighy and a cast of lots of other familiar faces.

Funny and scary at times, this is a great zombie movie, even if it seems wrong that the whole thing's set in North London. Worth catching at the cinema, and I feel the DVD will be a compulsory purchase.

As a side note, I watched Resident Evil on video this morning, and the poorness of that zombie film was amplified by my having seen Shaun the day before.

Zatoichi is directed by and stars Beat Takeshi Kitano. Well, he's Beat Takeshi the actor Takeshi Kitano the writer/director.

Most of Takeshi's work makes it through to the west one way or another, but this is probably one his better pieces that I've seen. The story is set in 19th century Japan with Takeshi playing The Masseur, a blind man who's cane doubles as a razor sharp sword which he's not afraid of using. Meanwhile there are two "Geisha girls" seeking revenge for the death of their family. This all involves plenty of fights and lots of CGI blood. The latter seems very strange, and near enough none of the blood you see on screen is "real", but computer graphics. In that respect it's like the blood you get in a zombie computer game - lot's of it when you shoot a bad guy, but it immediately disappears.

Philip French, in the Observer, said that it's as good as, and probably better than Crouching Tiger or Kill Bill. I don't think I'd agree. The "ballet" in both of those films surpasses anything you see here, and the story's not that amazing. In actual fact, the best thing in the film is the music (seemingly unavailable in the west, although a Japanese soundtrack is available). In particular there are sequences which involve percussion performed by extras in-vision, and a great tap dance sequence with which the movie ends. In fact, I paid a trip to HMV on my way home to see if I could pick up a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers DVD - none were available in the Trocadero branch. Looks like I'm going to have to hunt out this box set.

Oh and it was only when I looked him up on IMDB that I realised that this really is the same man behind Challenge TV's Takeshi's Castle!

I spent a large chunk of the weekend watching The Singing Detective for the first time since it was originally broadcast in 1986. Here's an admission - I've still got the Radio Times from that week with a rather cool cover featuring the artwork from the series (think 1940s paperback pulp paperbacks).

The series has been available for years on video, but has just been released on DVD following the release of a Hollywood remake of the film which I think was released last year, but pretty much sank without a trace (talk about remaking the impossible. It'd be like remaking Citizen Kane or something).

Watching the DVDs, you realised that you were going back to a time where the writer had total control over a production. There's no way that this story would get six hours these days. Four hours maybe. Actually it didn't get six hours in 1986, it got more. The episodes run for random lengths of time, determined in the main by how much time it felt necessary to tell the story.

Should I attempt to summarise the story for any reader unfamiliar with it or who has hazy memories? Probably not. But Michael Gambon plays Philip Marlow (no "e") a pulp fiction author who's lying in bed in hospital with an especially acute case of psoriasis. He dreams alternately of his wartime childhood, and a story about a postwar "Singing Detective" of the title. This being written by Dennis Potter, there are musical interludes using old songs, as Marlow's imagination runs away with itself. Everyone and everything is linked.

The series caused quite an outcry at the time with Gambon's character being treated in hospital by a young Joanne Whalley who rubbed cream onto his skin-flaked body while he tried not to "embarrass" himself. And then there were Patrick Malahide's heaving buttocks in the Forest of Dean. Extras on the DVD include excerpts from Points of View with Barry Took doing his best to defend the series from accusations of filth and obscenities.

As well as profiles and interviews with Potter, the DVD features a commentary through every episode from director Jon Amiel and series producer Kenneth Trodd. With the series approaching seven hours in total, this is quite a labour of love, although I must admit that I've only sampled it in a few places. I think I'd have to be studying it qutie seriously to work through the whole thing.

Overall, a landmark TV series from a writer that we'll never see the likes of again, given a freer reign than anyone on television today. (OK Stephen Poliakoff doesn't do too badly, and I daresay that Paul Abbott could get away with murder if he really wanted to).

Bernardo Bertolucci's latest is The Dreamers, about which I wrote a little recently. Now I've finally got to see the film.

Set in 1968 Paris, Matthew is an American student and cinephile who's befriended by twins Isabelle and Theo. He moves in with them in their wonderful Parisien flat. And then things take a turn for the... well... stranger. Isabelle and Theo's relationship is not quite as most brother/sister relationships are. A step away from incestuous would be accurate.

The film doesn't really go anywhere, and the ending is ultimately unsatisfying, but as movie for cineastes, it takes some beating. Wonderful music too.

But why was there a "thank you" to the Isle of Jura in the credits? Is someone a big whisky drinker?

Ron Howard's latest film is The Missing, which the distributors seem at pains to not call a western. Well it is a western - of that there can be no doubt. We're in 1885 Arizona, and if that's not the west, then call me the man with no name.

Cate Blanchett is the local medicine woman who lives with her boyfriend, Aaron Eckhart, and her two girls. Along with a farm hand they look after cattle and tend the locals' ailments. Into this mix comes Tommy Lee Jones, dressed and behaving every bit like an Indian (or should that be Native American). He turns out to be Blanchett's estranged father, although Blanchett wants nothing more to do with him. But when one of her children is kidnapped, and others are killed, she reluctantly allows him to help her follow the strange party of natives and white men who are heading south to Mexico with a group of girls to sell.

The vistas are fine, and the tension sustained throughout, although at over two hours, a bit of trimming here and there wouldn't have gone amiss. Blanchett is a fine performer, and this is probably Tommy Lee Jones' finest performance for a while.

Certainly some of the story is guessable, the ending's a little obvious, and without giving anything away, you can probably work out who'll ultimately live and die. I quite enjoyed the film nonetheless, and Hollywood really does deserve to make more westerns (even if they'd have it as being a thriller with a serial killer at its heart).

Not a bad western at all.

Two Scarlett Johansson films in as many weeks? But you are spoiling us.

It took a little to persuade me to see this film. Colin Firth isn't exactly a box office draw in my book, but the beauty of the film was mentioned by everyone I heard talk about it. So I relented.

Taking a popular book that I haven't read as its source, it tells a fictional story behind a Vemeer masterpiece (side note here: I notice that the film tie-in version of the book hilariously has removed the Vermeer from its cover, replacing it with a close-up photo of Johansson and Firth), as Vermeer becomes slowly infatuated by his young maid to the jealousy of his wife.

The pace is slow and deliberate but never less than fascinating. In some respects Johansson is playing exactly the same role as she did in Lost in Translation acting as an untouchable love interest. She plays the role wonderfully.

I should mention that this seems to be a lottery funded film, with other funds seemingly gathered from around the continent (Film Fund Luxembourg, etc.). If Alexander Walker were alive today, I'm sure that he'd mention this information, although it's the best use of lottery money I've seen in a long while.

This is director Peter Webber's first film, but rightly everyone mentions Eduardo Serra's cinematography. It's a beautiful recreation of 1665 Delft drawing on Vermeer for just about every shot. I can't pretend I know much about Serra, so I looked him up on IMDB. That explained a lot since his work includes the cruel world of Jude, the lusciousness of Wings of a Dove, and a pair of terrific Patrice Leconte pictures, the Hairdresser's Husband and Le Parfum d'Yvonne.

From the outset, let's just say that this is not a good film. Ben Affleck is so so, Uma Thurman seems to be on autopilot after Kill Bill, and there's no chemistry between them whatsoever.

Based on a Philip K Dick story, the producers no doubt thought they'd be more than happy with Bladerunner or Total Recall type business. They're going to be in for a shock - although not that big a one if they sit down and watch the finished article.

The film is messy, has plot holes you could get a small oil tanker through and is just not fully thought out. Affleck is a technician who reverse-engineers products for unscrupulous companies who want to rip-off their rivals. He then has his memory wiped at the completion of a job. Quite why this should happen is a little unclear to me, since he knows he did something for them, and the resulting product usually makes waves. But let's just leave that be.

He gets offered a really big job that's going to take three years, and next thing he knows is that it's three years later and the job's done. But he hasn't got his "Paycheck" since he seems to have purposefully rescinded it.

I won't go into all the details but he has a serie of clues to help him fill in the blanks. It's a run-of-the-mill actioner, which nobody would complain about if it showed up on video. But the knives are really out for Affleck now he's tied up (so to speak) with J-Lo. Jonathan Ross gave it a horrendous review, and I'm informed that Metro really tore it to bits today, not that I give an enormous deal of credence to Metro's reviews. It's poorly done rubbish, but it's nothing more or less than that. I daresay it cost $100m to put together, when it should have had Jean Claude Van Damme and cost $10m, but it's harmless.

It's just a shame that John Woo is behind this. He once made Hard Boiled, Bullet in the Head and The Killer. Now he does this and Face/Off. And get over your motorbike fetish John! We had them in MI2 and now this. His films were never that deep and they're all out and out action flicks, it's just that they can be done with more pizzazz.

I'd been curious about this film from the poster alone, so when I didn't manage to get along to the cinema at the weekend, tonight seemed a good time to go, and what a marvellous film.

It's slightly disconcerting to discover that director Sofia Coppolla is a couple of years younger than me - well eighteen months - but her dad no doubt gave her a head start in life. I'm not bitter though, and if she carries on producing this kind of work, the bitterness will disappear the same way it did for all those sportsmen and women who are younger than me.

Above all, I'd say this film is about loneliness. Bill Murray plays a movie star of some past repute, spending time in Japan to advertise whisky. He's by himself, and he plays the comic angles of this very well in front of the eager to please Japanese attendents who're catering to his every whim.

Meanwhile Scarlett Johansson's character is a young wife married to the vague and detached Giovanni Ribisi, a photographer who's shooting Japanese pop stars.

They're all holed up in a large anonymous hotel in the middle of Tokyo, and slowly a relationship between the two main characters begins, despite the gulf in age. I won't detail exactly how this relationship progresses, but let's just say that dirty old man syndrome is not an issue (Murray is 53 to Johansson's 19).

I really enjoyed this film. Johansson is something of a sensation at the moment - and I don't just mean that she's enormously attractive. She's soon to appear alongside Colin Firth in Girl With A Pearl Earring, and you can't avoid her profiles in the papers and magazines at the moment.

Anyhow - go and see this film.

I bought my first ever video recorder on 27 October 1990. How can I be so certain of the date? Because I was in Edinburgh on my placement year, I'd just moved into a new flat, discovered that I needed a new TV aerial fitted, and Twin Peaks was starting on BBC2 which I knew was going to be a classic and wanted to record. It aired on Tuesday nights with a repeat on Saturday, and it was the Saturday night repeat that I wanted to watch. I bought a second-hand "Orion" video which didn't come with a remote, and cost around a hundred pounds. I still have my tapes, although the DVD set of season one is enormously tempting.

But the other reason I know exactly when I got this video was because having bought the video in the morning, I needed something to watch on it in the afternoon, as well as some blank tapes for Twin Peaks later that night. And you know what the first tape I bought was? Ice Cold In Alex.

It's some time since I last watched my tape (I'd say at least ten years - which does beg the question, why do I buy so many tapes and DVDs), but it's still a fine film. A few years earlier than my video copy, footage from the film was used in a couple of TV ads. In the mid-eighties there were a series of Holsten Pils adverts in which Griff Rhys Jones was "placed" into old black and white films, one of which was Ice Cold in Alex (one of these ads came in at no. 54 in the top 100 UK ads of all time). Someone from Carlsberg went back to the original film, and saw that when our protagonists eventually arrive in Alex[andria] in the last reel they enter a bar to have the fabled "best lager in the Middle East" promised by John Mills. But in the original film, the lager they are drinking is quite clearly Carlsberg - even served in Carlsberg glasses. The resulting Carlsberg ad was basically untinkered clips of the film. Sylvia Syms said on Wogan that it couldn't possibly have been a German beer that they were seen to drink at the end. (See my original 1991 post on this subject).

It's interesting to see that the recently republished novel on which the film was set, details the beer as being a very German Rheingeld beer. I must read this book.

That's all very nice, but it takes us back to the DVD that I've just been watching. Ice Cold in Alex was at first only available as part of a WWII Warners box-set which was full of fine films, but I don't especially want them all. Just before Christmas I saw it for 7.99 in the HMV sale on its own and snapped it up at that price.

The DVD is disappointing in that it doesn't have any extras beyond the trailer, but it seems to be presented in a nice wide aspect ratio (the box says 1.66:1, but I don't think that's right - I'd need to check to be certain). The struggle is well paced and you could easily see this film being much longer if remade today. I really enjoyed watching it again after so long. And wasn't Syms attractive in 1958? Just worked out that she was my current age back then, so maybe that explains it a bit.

I shall say right up front that I readily dislike remakes. If the film was good the first time, what possible reason, beyond monetary, gain can you have for remaking it? The list of poor remakes is endless, although as one of my favourite films of all time, I will admit to a massive contradiction with His Girl Friday.

So I didn't see the Al Pacino remake of Insomnia in the cinema since I'd loved the Norwegian original so much since I saw it in the cinema years ago. Is it my fault that US audiences just won't go to see subtitled films?

All of which begs the question as to why I bought the DVD of the remake in a sale. Well it was in the sale certainly, but I suppose I do admire Christopher Nolan, and I knew that Robin Williams was finally not playing one of those dreadful schmaltzy characters that he's tended to do on autopilot of late. Then there was the fact that it was set in Alaska (although largely filmed in British Columbia), and I was hooked.

It's a while since I saw the original, but it soon came back to me, and I'll admit that Nolan's done a good job. It's not quite as cold as the original (I'm not talking about the weather, since the long daylight hours mean the film's set in summer), and the rougher realistic edges have been smoothed off a little, but at least they haven't introduced a romance that they might easily have done had a less able director been involved.

By the end of the film you can really believe that Al Pacino's been awake for six days straight, but I suppose that he always looks like he's been up a minimum of 48 hours anyway.

As an aside at this point, I suppose I should remind readers of the woeful Touch The Truck remake that Channel Four have been broadcasting - Shattered. From all accounts, it's been wildly successful in curing insomnia amongst viewers.

But finally back to Insomnia. The one thing I'd say about the film that doesn't work with Pacino is his constant battle with light in his hotel bedroom. Stellan Skarsgaard in the original seemed a bit more diffident, and didn't strike you as a character who'd go down to reception to either demand a new room, or that his curtains be fixed. Pacino is throwing his weight around from the outset, so you simply can't believe that he'd be piling cushions in front of the blinds and taping them up at the sides. He's have stormed off shouting and swearing until the management gave him a new room!

Well thank you very much to The Mirror. In today's paper for just 45p, they included a copy of Cabaret on DVD. And since I had nothing better to do (obviously a complete lie), I sat in and watched it.

Now I'm not exactly a musical fan, but then I wouldn't really class this as a musical. In any case, I must admit that I've never fully watched this film before, so I really enjoyed seeing it properly for the first time.

Whatever happened to Michael York? I last saw him in walk on parts for series 3 of Curb Your Enthusiasm. OK that link answers my question, but you know what I mean. Maybe it's because I'm not the world's biggest fan of Austin Powers (first film quite funny, next two were the same joke over and over again).

But back to Cabaret. This version wasn't anamorphic, and there weren't any extras, but you can't really complain for 45p. The whole Nazi thing was interestinig and I'd be interested to learn what the background of those kind of clubs was really like. And I can honestly say that I though Liza Minnelli was really good in this film. I don't especially like her as a performer, and she can certainly overact, but she was perfect in this film. A good way to spend an afternoon.

First a confession. I don't think that I've ever sat through the whole of Spinal Tap. And I've never seen Best in Show despite my best efforts (no pun intented); one of these days, I'll get hold of a cheap version of the DVD.

But I was keen to see A Mighty Wind as I know that Christopher Guest is a funny man. The film takes the form of a documentary built around a folk reunion concert to celebrate the life of Irving Steinbloom, a folk "mogul" from the sixties. The three bands being reunited are: The "NeW" Main Street Singers, a group of nine twee singers now full of replacements in their matching shirt and tanktop combinations; The Folkmen, a trio of elderly gents; and Mitch & Mickey, a duo who had an uneasy relationship with Mitch having since spent some time in a psychiatric hospital.

The cast of characters is entertaining, and we have multiple flashbacks to their TV performances from their sixites heydays, as well as a series of amusing album covers.

I've got to say that this hit the spot with me, with the petty rivalries and jealousies, the backstories and the music. In fact the music was played very straight, and if I knew the music from the period better I think I'd agree that it was spot-on from a parody's point of view.

The film culminates in the commemorative concert in New York.

I didn't get out to see this on the first day in the Odeon Leicester Square, as I did with The Fellowship of the Ring. But then I didn't manage that with The Two Towers either. I guess that Christmas just isn't a good time for squeezing in three and a half hour movies.

Let's just first say that I'd have equally as happily gone along if it had been five and a half hours (and let's hope the DVD is!).

I've been waiting for these films since they were announced, and somehow the two year gap between first and last doesn't feel too bad. In some respects they could have been spaced out longer apart - I think that might be guilt that I haven't yet watched my extended edition of The Two Towers DVD.

I don't know what more there is to say that hasn't already been spoken by others with better writing skills than myself. The tension is maintained, the story doesn't drag. The whole thing looks stunning, with an outrageous battle sequence and beautiful set pieces such as the lighting of the beacons.

The scale, scope and audacity is breathtaking, and Peter Jackson has served the novel(s) well.

The special effects lead you to think that nothing is impossible to show in the cinema from this day forth - and that every time you sit there watching an effects sequence in a film in the future, admiring it as an effects sequence, then it's being done badly.

It's going to take me some time to get over dreadful effects sequences such as those in XXX and Die Another Day (neither are worthy of linkage).

The acting is first class, and I look forward to all the cast that wasn't already big names, going on to some excellent work.

It'll be interesting to see who's first to attempt a big fantasy film outside the Harry Potter franchise. They're going to be measured up against these films, and will know it. Even some years down the line, noone has yet attempted another Gladiator in the cinema, although we have Troy coming next year, and at least two versions of Alexander the Great.

In 1985 Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, a pair of young climbers, went to Peru to climb an unscaled face of a 21,000 ft Andean mountain, Siula Grande.

The journey went horribly wrong on the descent, with the pair getting separated and Joe Simpson being left, quite probably dead. Now obviously he wasn't because he later wrote his bestselling book, Touching the Void, and he's the first narrator we see in the film.

I can't remember exactly when I first read the book. But this slim volume, recommended somewhere on the web I expect, was a revolation, and I've since read all Simpson's other work.

Which brings us to this film. It's made by Kevin McDonald as is a dramatised documentary - in a form that we don't usually get to see, and certainly not on the big screen. McDonald previously made the excellent Oscar winning documentary One Day in September, and again he tells a thrilling story simply and ably. The only voices you hear are those of Joe, Simon and a non-climbing traveller they met and who looked after their camp. Alongside these are dramatised clips of the journey.

The dramatisation is impressive and the grandeur just has to be seen on the big screen. I must admit that I'm always thoroughly impressed by the methodology that must be employed in making a film like this (something for the DVD I guess). We're told at the end of the film that no-one has ever repeated their feat of scaling that face of the mountain, yet it seems some climbers did do quite a lot of it from the images we see. Of course there are plenty of tricks of the trade to use, and the credits reveal that portions of the film were shot in the Alps, but I didn't see any sign of special effects teams working on the film.

I'm glad this is getting a decent release, and hopefully a good number of people will see it.

The novels of Patrick O'Brian are the preferred reading of a significant part of the population - and previously I've thought them to be a type of Telegraph reader.

Anyway, this film comes along, and despite what I thought was a quite dreadful trailer, I went along anyway.

I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this boys own romp. It's very well put together and the way they welded together special effects, models and real boats was totally seamless. I simply couldn't tell.

I like to think that I learnt a great deal about life on these boats, and it felt real. Very male, but I will give the books a go at some point.

Such a lot to catch up with!

Anyhow, I saw Kill Bill finally last week, even though I do have a fundamental problem with what was originally one film, being broken into two. Twice the lucre then? Two DVDs followed by a limited edition boxset DVD with previously unreleased extras ad nauseum...

And I had thought that all this "4th film" nonsense was a marketing thing, until I saw the opening credits which included it. I can't recall any other film maker doing this, and it seems a little ahead of yourself to do it. Let film historians put the film into the context of the rest of your oeuvre.

Those two things aside, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lots of OTT violence certainly, but lots of great staging, and homages. I loved the anim� section too which blended nicely into the rest of the film. And even if it was one film cleaved into two, the end came quite naturally leading in to the sequel whenever that's released next year.

Finally got around to seeing the last part of the Matrix trilogy, although I'd argue that it was never going to be a trilogy in the first place.

Anyway, this was better than I expected. I'm not sure that I went in with especially high expectations, but the story was better than the last, and the performances are fine. Keanu isn't actually in it all that much, but the effects are pretty good all the way through.

I hope that the Wachowski brothers leave at this, and that they've got enough clout that Warners don't start adding extra parts.

It's interesting to think where effects go now. The special effects really are fine, and so I want to know where they can go now?

I went to see In The Cut on a complete whim, as I'm not the world's greatest Jane Campion fan. Holy Smoke was so-so, The Portrait of a Lady a little dull and The Piano - well the music really made The Piano. I haven't seen it since the first time I watched it, but I've listened to the soundtrack endlessly.

But it had a couple of good reviews and I went along. Certainly we see Meg Ryan in a whole new light, and Mark Ruffalo is a very interesting actor. The photography is very stylised and quite beautiful, although all sorts of digital effects seem to have been applied.

But the story is actually the sort of nonsense you expect to see on a late night Channel Five "erotic" thriller. In fact, this is what this film is - a classier version. Ryan suspects Ruffalo of getting a blow-job from the woman who died in a grissly murder, and still she goes out with him. Hmm. Doesn't really make a great deal of sense does it?

The case is wrapped up efficiently but it's all a bit stale.

Well it's been out a couple of weeks, and hasn't exactly set the review world alight, but I simply have to see everything that the Coen brothers put out.

Intolerable Cruelty starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones has everything going for it. It's supposedly based on those fast talking screwball comedies of the thirties and forties, and both leads are likeable. But something hasn't gelled quite right. The opening credits were fine, and the music is great, but the script does not whizz along at the rate of knots I was expecting.

There are a few laughs to be had, but not nearly enought. I was wondering where the screwball element was supposed to be until I recognised one set-up as being the whole of His Girl Friday - was Billy Bob Thornton directly playing Ralph Bellamy?

It's really painful to write this, and sadly critics who said they didn't like are right, it's just not very good. It's not terrible, but you expect oh so much more from the Coens. Clooney and Zeta-Jones don't even have the chemistry you come to expect from them. Clooney can play comedy well, and think of the chemistry between him and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight - they sizzled. OK - that was a different type of film, but still...

Bright Young Things is Stephen Fry's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies.

If you hadn't already realised, I absolutely love Evelyn Waugh's novels - indeed all his books. It's a while since I last read Vile Bodies, and needless to say that I'll be rereading it fairly shortly.

But this is about the film, which has received mixed reviews so far. I've got to say that I totally loved it. Yes it's thoroughly inconsequential, and many of the people are unlikeable if you sit down and think too much about their lives, but it's all such a riot.

Our hero Adam, begins the film having his new novel confiscated by customs as he returns to Britain. Now he can't afford to marry his fianc�e Nina (incidentally, why do I always fall in love with fictional characters called Nina?). There are some fabulous other characters including the incredibly camp Archie, the thoroughly mad Agatha and the hilarious Peter O'Toole cameo.

I couldn't possibly begin to explain all the intricacies of the plot, but it's not a million miles away from Wodehouse, a TV version of which Stephen Fry famously starred in. And incidentally, Anne Dudley has done the soundtrack (with the Pet Shop Boys according to the IMDB listing). But sadly there doesn't seem to be a soundtrack available to buy at the moment!

Well I sat down on Saturday night at a loss for anything to watch on TV, and on a whim, decided that I'd rewatch The Perfect Storm on DVD. Not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of fun. The interesting thing about it is that obviously it has stacks of CGI throughout it, a lot of which takes place at sea. And they don't do a bad job with it. Not totally brilliant, but pretty damn good. Now compare and contrast with Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, which has a big sequence that takes place on a watery planet. This film was made two years later than The Perfect Storm and it's rendering of a stormy planet is much worse. OK, there are bigger problems anyway with this film, since there simply is too much CGI throughout, leading to the film looking more like a cartoon than a live-action film, but I simply don't think that Lucas has the best technicians in this regard anymore. Peter Jackson seems to have those - a make believe world you can believe in!

Anyway afterwards, I recalled that I got the book years ago, and had never actually read it. So I picked it up, and by the next day I'd finished it off.

The first thing to say is that the film is actually quite a good adaptation of the book, bearing in mind that nothing that happens on the boat is known about. The book makes clear it's all supposition, but the film has to tell a tale. They use events and other things that are mentioned in the back as the kind of things that can happen on a fishing trip. I guess that the trip detailed in the film really is the worst ever since many eventful things happen before they even hit the storm. There are contractions of plot and characters, but it's all told fairly well.

The book reads well, and it's no surprise to discover that like the story of the Everest disaster in 1996, Into Thin Air, it started out as a magazine article for Outside. The book just has a certain style to the way it's written. Still, it's quite eye opening, and a story well told.

I sat down to watch this wonderful Sergio Leone epic on TV last night, and wake up to hear that Charles Bronson's died!

It's a few years since I last watched this, and the first thing that strikes you is the long drawn out sequences - they're wonderful. From the opening credit sequence as three gunslingers await the arrival of "Harmonica" on the train. I think that the whole thing lasts around 14 minutes. And then of course there's the wonderful Morricone score. Simply superb stuff.

Well I bought my copy of The Two Towers on Saturday, but I've still to hear the real story about the ins and outs of Sainsburys apparently breaking the embargo on Friday, and all the other chains feeling that they have to follow suit. Only East Anglian Daily Times shows up when you do an internet search. Given that these are the dog days of August, I'd have thought that someone would have the story!

Bob Hope's died.

This great TV film told me more than I'd previously known about the life of Philip Larkin. Granted, that I didn't know anything at all before, aside from one famous line from one of his poems.

Outstanding performances from Hugh Bonneville (who seems to be something of a literary actor coupled with his performance in Iris), Tara Fitzgerald and Amanda Root.

Last night I went along to a BBC Four screening of a series of short films. The enterprise is called Shortest Night, and in about three weeks, BBC Four will seemingly be showing these and many others on, what is, the shortest night of the year. Somehow, I think Swedes will be otherwise occupied on that day.

The first film was a very strange, supposedly Russian "test" film of pelting a woman with potatoes.

But we soon got to what was a wonderful and totally unexpected surprise - Rendezvous. I'd never heard of this short film until earlier this year when I read an article about the film. It's a very simple concept. A camera is strapped to front of a fast car (a Ferrari?), and in the early hours one morning, it's driven around Paris at exceptional speeds. It's breathtaking, because you know it's real.

I'm looking forward to recording it for posterity in a few weeks time (fifteen quid for an 8 minute film is a bit much!).

There were other equally weird films, although the most memorable was a film with simply words on the screen voicing the real thoughts of several protaganists, who's phone calls we hear.

And there was a funny Swedish film - Svitjod 2000+ - about extending Sweden's population.

I look forward to rewatching the collection, and more.

So I got to go to the (UK) premiere of this last night. The tickets said that doors open at 6.30 and that everyone should be seated by 7.30. We arrived at 7.00 in torrential rain. I can honestly say that I haven't seen quite as big a premiere as this previously in Leicester Square. I haven't been to all that many, but you don't usually get the whole square closed off.

Fortunately it was being held in the Odeon which is my favourite cinema - great screen, and it looks wonderful outside - particularly last night, when it was bedecked with flashing green lights. There were also two giant screens relaying pictures of the stars arriving, to the waiting throngs of fans and autograph seekers.

These pictures are also rebroadcast onto the main screen inside the cinema so that you can eat your small bag of complimentary popcorn whilst watching Radio 1's Colin Murray trying to interview Michelle Collins who doesn't seem to really have understood the first film.

Eventually we get Lawrence Fishburn, a couple of Brits who used to be downmarket versions of Handy Andy, Hugo Weaving and of course Keanu. Sadly, no Carrie-Anne Moss or Monica Bellucci.

Anyhow, what of the film. Well there have apparently been some disappointing reviews. I say "apparently" because I have deliberately ignored all the reviews to date to avoid spoiling plotlines.

I think the disappointment is probably a result of the film not being non-stop action. There are some massive set pieces which go totally OTT with action. In particular the fight with all the Agent Smiths, and a monumental car chase sequence. But there are also long periods of plot exposition and dialogue, and they seem to bore some people.

The plot isn't that simple.

But I couldn't construe it as being complex either. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I made one mistake.

I didn't stay until the end of the credits, where, I believe, there's a trailer for the next film!

I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Being John Malkovich a couple of years ago or so, and Spike Jonze is still on something of a roll. Jackass is his baby, and he seems to have several other irons in the fire.

So I was quite impatient to see Adaptation. It begins with the a credit sequence over a black screen, as Nicolas Cage's Charlie Kaufman tries to convince himself - unsuccessfully - that he is successful.

Then we cut to a piece of video diary supposedly shot on the Beinng John Malkovich shoot. Charlie Kaufman, the author of this screenplay was also author of that one. So he's written himself a part in his own film... That's just the beginning. He's adapting a book called The Orchid Thief - a real book about a real character who did indeed go about stealing orchids.

So far, so confusing. Then we're introduced for his twin brother (played also by Cage) who gets the girls and is busy trying his own hand at this screenwriting lark. He even attends lectures given by Robert McKee (a real life screenplay lecturer, although here played by Brian Cox). His hackneyed thriller ideas go down well, while the tortured genius struggles to make a screenplay from the book about flowers.

At this point I think I'll give up trying to summarise the plot, and just report on the film. I enjoyed it immensely and it is one of those few films that do give you something to think about. It's safe to say that the ending goes off course a little, but nonetheless, I'll forgive a few things like that for a script such as this one.

One final point: the film's screenplay is credited to both Charlie Kaufman and his brother Donald. Does the real Charlie have a real brother? And what do the Screenwriting Guild in Hollywood make of all this?

What an excellent little film this is. I missed it in the cinema but a chance to get the DVD for six quid including postage was too good an offer to miss, and it proved to be excellent.

I won't even bother going into the plot too much, but it puts the likes of A Beautiful Mind to shame in the way it covers (possible) mental illness, and it's intelligently conceived. Excellent.

Oh dear. Free tickets etc., so I went along, and in parts it was quite fun. But overall I'm not sure about the whole thing. The series is pretty juvenile, and if it continued much more (I think they've pretty much stopped producing it now), would surely result in either a major accident or fatality.

Imagine a rugby crowd gone nuts after one too many lagers. That's pretty much it. It's gross out humour, it's cheap to make, and in places it is very funny. But I'm not sure about using the public to make a mockery. I doubt it takes very much armtwisting to get them to sign releases.

Anyhow, it'll clean up, particularly on video/DVD.

We watched this 1997 Aussie film to celebrate Australia Day. I've seen a bit of it before, but it's a good example of what the Australians can do so well. They have character actors par excellence, and aren't afraid to take the piss out of one another.

OK, so the ending is a tad melodramatic, and ever so obviously signposted ahead of time, but it's the rest of the film that makes it so good. Indeed, you could remove the overall plot and the characters themselves would carry a Royle Family type sitcom.

Saw a preview of The Ring today, and was pleasantly surprised. I saw the original Japanese version a earlier last year on Filmfour. This version is very nearly a shot-for-shot remake of that earlier film.

I wouldn't go to say that it's superior to the original, but it doesn't fall far short, and doesn't sell out into some kind of teen slasher flick.

In short, very disappointing. This seemed to be an average two part Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with a bigger than usual special effects budget. The script was poor from the outset, and it was just dull overall. Certainly, Patrick Stewart's a fine actor, but this was Star Trek by numbers. Right down to a pointless sequence between Riker and a Romulan on the Enterprise which began trying to be a sequence from Aliens but served absolutely no purpose.

Not the worst film ever - just no good.

This new Martin Scorcese epic has famously been in production for a long time, and in the editing suite even longer. Now it finally reaches our screens (after a Christmas Day release in the US), but has it been worth the wait?

Well a qualified yes. It is undoubtedly a spectacular film, and Daniel Day-Lewis is fantastic in it - he doesn't make nearly enough films these days, preferring to do other things in far flung corners of the world (well Italy by all accounts).

The sets, built in the famous Cinecitta in Rome, are remarkable with a very vivid picture of what it was like 150 years ago in New York. I must admit that I had no idea it was quite so lawless. I guess I think about it being more like that in the wild frontiers of the country, not on the docks where the immigrants all arrived.

I'm not sure about di Caprio though. Cameron Diaz is fine, although sometimes a little too made up. And there's a good supporting cast with plenty of faces to recognise from British TV! The music is excellent, particularly the drum beat led piece as they march to fight in the opening sequence. Although, as someone behind me in the cinema said, the odd sequence sounded very Lord of the Rings-ish. Not surprising as they're both scored by Howard Shore.

Spectacles like this don't come along too often, so should be savoured.

I'm not sure why I went to see this. I do think that Reece Witherspoon is an excellent actress, and if Election is cheap on DVD I'll get hold of a copy. Aside from the fact that I had a voucher to get me in free which expires tomorrow, the reason was this review from Philip French of The Observer. I am of course already tracking down a copy of Pursuits of Happiness. Any reference to the classic screwball comedies from the Hollywood of yesterday is probably enough to make me check it out.

So this is overlong, and not nearly as full of one-liners as those films were, but not as bad as it could have been. Oh dear - that's not exactly a ringing endorsement is it. I guess I thought that the Alabama characters were just a little bit too forgiving after Witherspoon's character was well and truly foul to them. And a few more gags along the way would have been welcome. The sheriff was the only really funny character and more of him would have been welcome.

Well I wasn't nearly as quick off the mark seeing this as I was The Fellowship of the Ring last year which I saw at about 11.00am on the opening day. And this, after I waited a year to see it!

Was the wait worth it? It most certainly was. This is epic cinema at it's finest. Massive armies participating in believable battles. And finally a computer generated character you can believe in.

This was always going to be a tricky film, since there are three stories at a time that have to be told, with very little interweaving of them, so there's a lot of jumping around. But it works, and you wouldn't know that the film was three hours. It could easily be longer - particularly the sections with Frodo and Sam.

I am now looking forward to the final part with massive impatience. Indeed, even the normal DVD will no doubt not be ready until August, so more trips to the cinema are in order. I must see it at the Odeon Leicester Square.

The Quiet American seems to have gone through something of a long gestation between being made and arriving on our screens. According to this article from the Washington Post, the film has been ready to screen for over a year, having previewed on Sept 10 2001. But things are not that easy for a film which has some anti-American sentiment. It's not hard to see why, but the fact that it has been censured for all this time, goes a long way in explaining what's missing from the American psyche. Finally it has had a limited release in the States, and gets a proper one after Christmas.

Michael Caine plays Fowler a British journalist in Saigon in early fifties, and Brendan Fraser plays Pyle, an American medical aide. The film's based on the novel by Graham Greene, and here I must confess that at time of writing I'd only read about half the novel. This novel has been filmed before, but it's some years since I saw it on TV, and I can really remember very little of it.

The French are in trouble, and there is talk in the American camp of a Third Force to seek a middleway between the French and the Communists. Into this political turmoil, we have Fowler and Pyle, and between them Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen) who they both love. The film is skillfully constructed and looks wonderful thanks to Christopher Doyle's cinematography, not pandering to the simplicities on many recent political thrillers. That would always be the wrong way to adapt a Greene novel in any case.

Nothing is as simple as it seems, and no-one can be totally divorced from what takes place around them. From what I've read, a lot of the conversations and first person thoughts in the book have had to be jettisoned, but it's very good for all that.

Does Caine deserve an Oscar? Who knows. I don't believe that I've seen any other films said to be in the running, but his performance is very strong. The age difference between Fowler and Phoung is probably too great to be glossed over, but that's a trivial matter besides a thoroughly enjoyable film.

Thanks to Geoff, I now have a copy of the Extended Version of Fellowship of the Rings. Of course the first thing I had to do was look for my name on the fanclub.

Yes - I spent good money on joining the official fan club as a charter member, and my year's subscription bought me an additional credit on the extended version. And check out which hobbit is just below me!

Oh dear. I really wanted to enjoy this. I really love Bond films. I'm a fan. But there are some major problems with this film.

First of all, let me say that director Lee Tamahori has done a couple of interesting things here. Bond is captured and tortured through an opening credit sequence that does take the story along. Bond smokes a cigar in Cuba, and beds more than one woman. And he gets to drive an Aston Martin once more.

On the other hand... Where to begin. Well let's start with the song. Bond has had dud songs before, but Madonna's effort is terrible. It can be easy to just expect all Bond songs to sound the same - resulting in anaemic tracks like The World is Not Enough by Garbage last time around. In this case however, the producers should not have just settled for whatever Madonna turned in and said no. Then there's the car. Of course Bond shouldn't drive a BMW, and the new Aston Martin is a welcome return. But an invisible car! Come on. It's ridiculous even in the Bond world. The technical chameleon characteristics don't wash. It's something out of Star Trek. The story's poor, and the villain pedestrian (we don't just need a single world domination bad guy every time - find something new), but the worst is yet to come.

When I saw XXX a few weeks back, there was an abysmal CGI scene where our hero out-skis an obviously computer-generated avalanche. It's not that it didn't look real, it was just that when you see impossible point-of-view camera angles you know it's all false. It may as well be a cartoon. Up until now, the great thing about Bond, is that he (or rather a stuntman) has always really did it. Jumping out of a plane with no parachute in Moonraker, the car flip in The Man With The Golden Gun, and of course the bungee jump at the start of Goldeneye (OK we'll forget about the jumping into the plane at the end of the same sequence). Yes, there have always been cheesy close ups which were obviously back-projected/green-screened, but the stunts look real. I was disappointed in a hovercraft fight that the close-ups followed this tradition, but my real venom is for the iceberg/parasurfing scene. This is quite possibly the worst CGI I've seen on the big screen since "The Rock" in The Mummy Returns. The cinema I saw this is was stunned into silence it was so bad. If they had animated cartoon-style it would have looked more realistic. I'm reasonably sure it was probably due to time limitations, but if that's the case they should have ditched the scene or come up with an alternate ending. It just doesn't work at all.

I've got to say that all this really disappointed me, and I hate to say it.

And then there's Halle Berry. I have no problem with her, but all this nonsense about being a new kind of Bond girl... come on. Michelle Yeoh was equally as independent in Tomorrow Never Dies, and last night I watched On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Diana Rigg plays a very independent Bond girl. That was really a Bond that tried to be different (and had an exceptional score).

This was the closing film at the London Film Festival, and I must admit that I'm at little disappointed with it. Based on a novel by Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove, the film tells the story of Rickie Masters (Paul Bettany), his wife Madelaine (Olivia Williams), and in particular her sister Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter). Rickie's having an affair with Dinah, miscarries Rickie's baby, and for a time sees to it that Rickie and Madelaine's marriage is at an end. Then an illness comes along, and a mother intervenes. The filmis set in two time frames - the mid thirties, and just after the war, when the sisters meet once more. This is melodrama pure and simple, and is undoubtedly well acted, with Bettany showing a much more restrained performace than some of his recent films.

But I was left dissatisfied in the end. The revelations (as always there must be) were nothing special, and the story really didn't work well on the big screen.

I'm lucky that I work in London, since I have most things available to me - that includes books signings. David Blaine is in London to promote his new book, and I must admit that I do find books on magicians fascinating, particularly if they include some history and maybe a little bit of explanation. I heard an interview with him on Danny Baker yesterday morning, so thought I'd go along to Waterstones after work to and get a signed book.

Well I wasn't the only one. The end of the queue was a long way off, and Waterstones staff were telling us that they couldn't guarantee getting a signed book. Added to that, it was raining. Well I stayed, and eventually, after much queuing, and some joker with a megaphone who mucked around with the queue, I got my book signed. I reckon that most people in the queue were there specifically because it was David Blaine, but there was a guy behind me who evidently turned out for any celebrity signing at all, all for collecting purposes.

As for the book, well it certainly looks more interesting than the cover would suggest, but you'll have to wait for my review!

Every year the London Film Festival has a surprise film, and this was the second time I've been to it. It always sells out, and the simple thing is that you don't know what you're going to see. It will be a different film to the rest of the festival, a preview of something forthcoming. So what was it going to be? Gangs of New York, Die Another Day, The Two Towers? No. It was never going to be any of them.

Far From Heaven is the first Todd Haynes film I've seen, so I didn't really know what to expect. Now I must say that afterwards he came on for a Q&A with Sandra Hebron, the LFF's Artistic Director who told us she really wanted to get this film for the festival.

So before going into a little of what I learnt afterwards, here are my first thoughts. The film is very much a melodrama - it's very stylised, and enormously evocative of the 50s. It was obvious to me that it was trying to pay respects to a certain style of fifties film, but without trying to be post-modern. The story is about an all-American couple who have the perfect life in Hartford, until the husband (Dennis Quaid) faces up to his homosexuality and the wife (Julianne Moore), begins to have feelings for her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) in segregated America. It made enormously clear that Quaid's character's sexuality is something you could barely even talk about it that setting. And crossing racial boundaries is seen as bad from a black perspective as it is from a white one.

The film's colours are vivid, and the Elmer Bernstein score is unmissable. The set decoration and clothing are fantastically realised for the 1957/8 setting.

Afterwards, having thoroughly enjoyed it, I learnt more from the Q&A. The film is not just an homage to the fifties, but specifically to the films of Douglas Sirk. He made a certain type of melodrama particularly througout the fifties particularly for Universal. I went to IMDB and looked at his films, and must say that I don't recall seeing a single one. Probably a lapse on my part, but these films, making stars of the likes of Rock Hudson, simply don't get shown on TV these days.

Overall a fascinating talk, and I will certainly be looking out for the films of Douglas Sirk from now on.

There's nothing like a successful promotion is there? Last Thursday's Evening Standard had a free cinema token in it that gave readers a free ticket to any screening this evening at any Odeon cinema. I dutifully felt I had to take up the offer. I perused their website and chose Talk to Her, the most recent Pedro Almodovar film which I know is supposed to be superb. Well let's just say that I wasn't exactly on my own when I turned up at the cramped Wardour Street cinema, where you have to get a lift to the third floor to even buy a ticket. It was sold out and crowds of people were queuing backwards and forwards to get in to another film.

I beat a hasty retreat and thought I'd try the altogether bigger Covent Garden Odeon (not that close to Covent Garden incidentally). There was another big queue and Rabbit Proof Fence was already sold out and Donnie Darko was doing good business, but I plumped for the always reliable Mike Leigh film All or Nothing. A couple of weeks ago, I was going into Picadilley Circus tube station when I saw Mike Leigh riding the escalator up. Later that evening when I got in, I switched on the local news, and there he was at his own opening. Good on him taking the tube to a film premiere!

But back to the film in which Timothy Spall plays a minicab driver whose bleak life with his family is the main focus, with his wife who cycles to the supermarket, overweight daughter who works in an old people's home, and obese son who does, well, nothing at all. Then there are their friends and neighbours, and not so friendly other halves. The film draws out the back stories slowly and carefully, and the lives seem real. Yet there's humour throughout, and it's superbly acted. Would I have gone to see this without a free ticket? Probably not to be honest, but I'd have missed out. Yet I don't know why, since you're never short changed by Mike Leigh.

Finally I got to see this at the London Film Festival screening this evening, and it's fantastic.

Of course I managed to show up without my tickets. I was convinced that I had left them at work, but of course I brought them back with me on Friday night, and had left them in my jacket pocket. Anyway, a bit of gentle persuasion did it's bit (I'm getting used to this - I had to do similar to get on a plane at Schiphol Airport on standby a couple of weeks ago when we were stranded there following storms), and I got in. And this was despite the enormous queue out the front of the cinema of people awaiting returns.

But back to the film. Stunning. Lots of desperately sad facts and people, but interlaced really cleverly with humour. My favourite quote was from the brother of one of the Oklahoma bombers: "The pen is mightier than the sword.... but it's still good to have a sword around." This was followed a little later by: "There are some real whackos out there." We were fortunate to have Michael Moore comeby and answer a few questions after the film.

I couldn't really begin to do the film justice in these few lines, with so many issues that it raised.

The link between arms production and gun crime.

The ease of purchases of guns.

The culture of using violence to sort out the US's national problems.

The arming of people who later become our enemies.

The sheer number of guns out there.

Charlton Heston and the NRA.

What do American kids have that kids from other countries don't.

The media depiction of black violence, and violent crime.

I could go on, and maybe I'll have another rant later, when I've digested this important film more fully.

After enjoying Arsenal's imperious 1-0 defeat of Newcastle yesterday afternoon, I headed into London with vague notions of watching one of the films in this years London Film Festival. Working on the basis that screenings are never full and you can always get in line for a return, I consulted by Guardian Guide to see what was on. I quite fancied The Quiet American starring Michael Caine, but as I turned up, it was obviously a premiere, and tickets were not likely to be two a penny. I'm not too bothered about this, since it goes on release in a couple of weeks and I get a chance in the meantime to read Graham Greene's novel. I do find it fascinating that so far America has not felt itself able to release this film yet. Somehow it's un-American. More on that once I've read the book and seen the film.

Instead it was going to be something else, and I randomly chose Avalon as it seemed interesting. Now I must admit that I've been meaning to watch Ghost in the Shell for quite some time. I've got it on tape from a Sci-Fi Channel showing, along with a profile it's director Mamoru Oshii. This is a video I shall be returning to fairly soon.

Avalon was filmed in Poland, with the characters speaking Polish for the most part (although much of the computer text is in English - was this done several times for different markets? And the book spines may even have been in Japanese). In a near future an illegal virtual reality game called Avalon allows players into a role-playing gameworld, where they must fight one another and bad computer generated characters. Our protaganist is the attractive Ash, one of the stars of the game. The film is beautiful to look at in a washed out sort of manner, and the music is stunning - I shall be hunting the soundtrack down. This site seems to be the best there is on the web for English language speakers.

I suppose Avalon appeals to the videogame player in me, yet it is also the work of an exceptionally accomplished film-maker, and is the kind of the film, that it's refreshing that can still be made somewhere in the world. Still unreleased in the US I see. There seems to be a theme developing.

Well I saw this last night, and I must admit that I went in knowing that it was not going to be exactly brilliant. Well I wasn't short changed. So it was never going to be Oscar material, but I thought that it'd at least be an entertaining way of spending a couple of hours. How wrong can you be. It's dreadful.

Vin Diesel is so monotone it's dull, with barely a laugh to be had (and if he's going to be a tough guy then he'd better have laughs along the way). For a film that is so obviously using Bond movies as its blueprint, the location work seems to stretch to Prague alone, where as we all know from Blade II, they're all into nu-metal, just off Wencelas Square.

Even the denouement (which I shan't spoil) had absolutely no dramatic tension. There was no doubt that the hero would succeed, and no-one else was left in any peril.

I could go on, but really, it's not worth the effort.

Sadly I fear that it's done well enough at the US box office to see a sequel rushed into production. Maybe they could combine it with the next Austin Powers.

Entertainingly, the film was preceded by a trailer for Day Another Day, this year's Bond film.

Finally got around to watching the first of my Godfather DVDs. Got the trilogy a while back and hadn't sat down and watched them. The combination of a twisted ankle and bad back afforded me the chance to watch the first film. It'll be interesting to compare this masterpiece with the forthcoming Road to Perdition.

So here's another one that I haven't seen. Some years ago, the film critic David Thomson wrote a piece in The Independent on Sunday Review section explaining why he loved this film so much. I tore out the article, but never read it, because the first line warned that I should watch the film first if I had never seen it. As I hadn't, I didn't read it.

Move forward a year or so, and I remembered the article, so one Friday after work I bought the video in HMV, Oxford Street. But it was a Friday evening, and I knew the prospect of me sitting down to watch a pre-war French film in black and white with subtitles was fairly remote.

I felt the guilt. Really I did. For a year or two more, the video sat forlornly in my bookcase, awaiting a play. This isn't so unusual for me - I have a library's worth of books that I've bought and not read. And there are more than a couple of videos and DVDs in the same position. There's always something else to watch or read.

So move forward to yesterday, and revitalised by both the Sight and Sound list, and another David Thomson article, I put the video in on Sunday morning.

What a great film. I'm not going to try to describe the film, as others can do that better than I, but it has fabulous technique. There are so many key characters, and there is constant interaction between them all.

After watching the film, I went out to buy The Observer, and what do you know? Cameron Crowe had written a piece about why he thought it was so good.

One final question... Why is this not available on DVD?

Spurred on by the Top Ten List below, I decided it was time to get around to watching a couple of films that I've had on video for ages but unbelievably have never gotten around to watching.

There's a game in David Lodge novels where academics in English departments have to name works of literature that they've never read - Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick etc. The winner is the person who has not watched the most famous work. Hamlet normally does this.

So I get to do the cinema equivalent. I like to think of myself as fairly well versed in cinema, but here is one of those films that I just had not seen before. OK, it's entirely probable that I was in a room somewhere when I was young and it was on TV, but that doesn't count. Even the fact that it's regarded as one of the best films by one of my favourite directors hadn't prevented me from never having watched Rio Bravo before.

I suppose one of the reasons that I'd not seen it is that it stars John Wayne. I just never have been a big "Duke" fan. In fact I've probably gone out of my way to avoid watching him in films - they just always seem the same. He was, however, undoubtedly made for the Western. He plays Sheriff John T Chance in a small town over-run with the Burdette gang - and chance has locked up Joe, one of the brothers. With only Dean Martin's washed-up drunk, the Dude, and Walter Brennan's comic character Stumpy, Chance must wait until the US Marshal arrives with Joe locked up, and brother Nathan Burdette looking to free him. This is the classic set-up.

I'd never seen Angie Dickenson in such a good movie. Dean Martin too is excellent (although I'm not at all sure about the musical interlude). Then there's Ricky Nelson as sharpshooter Colarado, and you have a classic western. I was hooked. Loved it.