Film news

Horrid Henry: The Movie 3D – review

2011-08-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

Down with (private) skool: Anjelica Huston as Miss Battleaxe in Horrid Henry.Horrid Henry: The Movie 3DProduction year: 2011Country: UKCert (UK): URuntime: 92 minsDirectors: Nick MooreCast: Anjelica Huston, Mathew Horne, Noel Fielding, Parminder Nagra, Prunella Scales, Richard E Grant, Theo StevensonMore on this film

The work of a highly regarded British editor, Horrid Henry is a broad, noisy comedy based on a series of popular books and TV films about a rebellious primary-school boy in revolt against his family, school and all things genteel. The most interesting aspect is that Henry comes out in defence of his coeducational state school against the villains of the piece, who are the slimy headmaster of an expensive private school (Richard E Grant) and the snobbish parents who send their kids there to learn to sound their aitches and despise their contemporaries.

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Movie plots that technology killed

2011-08-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

In the harrowing film 127 Hours, an outdoorsy type played by James Franco finds himself trapped in a mountain ravine with his arm wedged beneath a boulder. A few years from now, with Google Earth tracking everybody everywhere, the Franco character wouldn't have much of a problem; after he's gone missing for a day or so his friends or family would simply contact his cell phone provider, and they would instantaneously track his phone to the ravine and dispatch a search party to rescue him from his predicament. All he would need to do is sit tight, ration his water supply, and hope the rats and rattlers don't get him first.

But because 127 Hours is set in an era where a person without mobile phone service is still pretty much left to his own devices, the hiker played by Franco finds himself in quite a pickle. Ultimately, he has to hack off his own arm to avoid starving to death. Film buffs who enjoy this sort of thing – myself included – should gather rosebuds while they may, since a day is coming when technology will be so pervasive, so intrusive, so ubiquitous, so inescapable that it will no longer be possible to make a film like 127 Hours, no longer possible to make a film where James Franco has to suffer as much as everyone who watched him co-host the Academy Awards broadcast suffered this spring. Unless, of course, the mountain climber decides to go out into the wilderness without any communications device whatsoever. Or if the film was set underwater. Or at the earth's core. Or on another planet. Or in a parallel universe. Or in a mountain ravine completely sheathed by a coating of lead. Which is just like … OMG … impossible. Though such a fantastic plotline would be … totally … awesome.

In recent years, directors have incessantly been forced to confront the narrative-busting intrusion of new technologies, resigning themselves to the fact that plotlines that were completely plausible as recent as 10 years ago are no longer plausible now. Sometimes, directors simply choose to ignore this; the coppers would only need an emailed or even a faxed photograph in the recent thriller Unknown to prove that Liam Neeson is not the scientist he says he is, but a professional assassin. Unfortunately, that would mean that the whole premise of the film disintegrates before our very eyes. So the director simply chose to act as if his audience consisted of nitwits.

But most directors are not going to take that route, and won't pretend their characters lack the most basic, obvious information-gathering and communications skills, because it leaves such a gaping hole in the middle of the story. This is particularly true when younger, tech-savvy audiences are the target market. Resentment of the long shadow cast by technology may explain why a number of recent high-profile movies – Inglourious Basterds, Robin Hood, Secretariat – have been set in the past, where modern technology cannot ruin things for everybody. Frankly, I think this could lead to a lot more films like Gladiator. Or a revival of the western genre. No, not Cowboys & Aliens.

To illustrate this point, in the following paragraphs we will examine instances where mobile phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google and LinkedIn and Droids and iPads and the internet in general would have altered, and in many cases destroyed, the plots of classic motion pictures down through the ages, often making it impossible to film them in the first place.

Psycho

Before checking into the Bates Motel in a deserted California backwater, Janet Leigh consults Trip Advisor on her iPhone and reads: "Smelly, dirty, really creepy owner, constantly talks to a mother no one ever sees. Filthy shower, manager's office smells of stuffed birds, no Wi-Fi. Often travelling alone on business as a cutting-edge website designer, I foolishly checked into the Bates for a night with a gift voucher my ex gave me, and let me tell you, I spent 10 sleepless hours with the chest of drawers propped up against the door, sharpening my toenail clipper, terrified that the owner was going to come in and hack me to pieces with a butcher knife. Oh, another thing: No cable." So Leigh doesn't check into the hotel, there is no horrific shower scene, and Psycho does not become a classic.

Dial M for Murder

You can't get somebody to strangle your wife to death with a phone cord anymore because nobody under the age of 70 still has a land line. Since it would take a long time to beat somebody reasonably fit, like Grace Kelly, to death with a mobile phone, the murderer tries to do it with a portable shredder, but she bludgeons him with her iPad. Or with a totally out-of-date netbook she happens to have lying around. Or with the server she uses to store all the music from her old vinyl records. Or something.

Play Misty for Me

Sultry psychopath Jessica Walter doesn't get a chance to harass Clint Eastwood every night by calling him on the phone and purring, "Play Misty for Me," because Eastwood puts her on the no-call list, a tactic that was not possible in 1971, when the film was shot. So she calls another DJ, maybe somebody like Jon Voigt, who doesn't know about no-call lists, and Play Misty for Me does not jump-start Eastwood's directing career and none of us get to see those Sondra Locke movies.

North by Northwest

The whole plotline of the film revolves around a bunch of mysterious foreigners who mistake advertising executive Cary Grant for a fictitious federal agent they wish to do in. Now retrofitted with modern technology, Grant insists that he works on Madison Avenue, and not for the state department in Washington, whereupon James Mason and the boys log on to his firm's website, realise their error, apologise profusely, and send him on his way. The scene with the crop duster never happens. Eva Marie Saint doesn't climb down Mount Rushmore in high heels. North by Northwest goes south.

The Ring

Both in the Japanese original and in the very fine American remake, everyone who looks at a creepy videotape dies within seven days because a scary little girl comes slithering out of the television and scares them to death. VHS is now obsolete, so this would never happen today. DVDs are on their way out, too. Maybe if people downloaded the film illegally from some server in Holland, the creepy little girl would only kill the guy running the file-sharing system first, making law enforcement officials everywhere happy. But even in this scenario there might be problems because a lot of people watch illegally downloaded videos on their cell phones and even the creepiest little girl would have trouble slithering out of a screen that small. As soon as she made her appearance, menaced parties could just remove the sim card or chuck the phone into the river. They're not expensive. Realistically, if The Ring were made today, the creepy little girl would probably upload her film onto Netflix and a million people would get an unexpected visit from her. Meanwhile, thousands of film buffs would blog that Ringu was a much better horror film, because Japanese streaming services are scarier than Netflix. Everyone knows that.

The Spiral Staircase

In this classic 1945 thriller, a mute housekeeper (Dorothy McGuire) is unable to call the police and tell them that she is trapped inside a spooky, isolated mansion where she is being terrorised by a murderer who knows she cannot speak and is not that handy with her fists. Email, smart phones, texting, tweeting, what have you render the entire plotline obsolete. Luckily, nobody makes these kinds of movies anymore anyway. They're offensive to mutes.

One Missed Call

In Takashi Miike's excellent 2003 film – the 2008 American remake is not quite up to snuff – innocent Japanese kids get phone messages from beyond the grave warning them that they are next in line to die a horrible death. Phone messages make great cinema, due to the evocative power of the human voice. But One Missed Text? One Missed Tweet? Just not the same. Another thing: In more than one Asian horror flick, photographers developing film in their dark rooms get murdered by people who unexpectedly come to life during the developing process. Those days are gone. Thanks, digital camera.

Chinatown

This Roman Polanski classic revolves around Jack Nicholson's dogged attempts to unearth the identity of the nefarious individual who owns valuable water rights in the San Fernando Valley. It takes Nicholson the entire film to figure out that John Huston is the puppet master here. Today, all this stuff about crooked developers and water rights would already be on thesmokinggun.com, so no feisty gumshoe would be needed. The film would simply never get off the ground. "Forget it, Jack," would be the final line in the film. "It's WikiLeaks."

The Fugitive

Harrison Ford, on the lam, Googles "One-Armed Thugs in the Greater Chicago Area" and solves all of his problems. He might even Google "One-Armed Security Experts at Illinois Pharmaceutical Firms" and achieve the same result. He could even put an ad on Craigslist, saying: "Straight white one-armed psychopath seeks same for casual sex. Watersports a plus." Who needs Tommy Lee Jones when you've got the net?

The Bonfire of the Vanities

A few years ago, there was a whole series of movies, like Grand Canyon and Doc Hollywood, that involved innocent people whose lives were changed forever when they made a wrong turn off the freeway, all sired by The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which Tom Hanks found himself far from his Manhattan penthouse. GPS eliminates all that; nobody ever gets lost anymore. Nobody drives through bad neighbourhoods without global positioning systems these days. If you don't have GPS, you're an idiot. And if you're an idiot, you deserve to die.

The Talented Mr Ripley

Matt Damon doesn't look anything like Jude Law. He just doesn't. Facebook, YouTube, Google, the whole shooting match would just blow Damon's pathetic little masquerade right out of the water. You're not that talented, Mr Ripley.

Goldfinger

James Bond would know in advance to be on the lookout for Odd Job's deadly chapeau because Q would have seen one of these hats for sale, dirt cheap on eBay.

Jaws

Sharks, even humongous great whites, aren't that hard to kill. That's because sharks are dumb. Still, if at first you don't succeed in ridding your otherwise congenial summer resort of a ravenous great white, you simply convene an impromptu gathering of resourceful, experienced shark hunters on Twitter and your problem's solved. It's not a case of, "We're going to need a bigger boat." It's, "We're going to need a bigger flash mob here in Amityville."

The list of motion pictures whose plots get deep-sixed by modern technology goes on and on. Silence of the Lambs. Die Hard. Memento. Scream. And any movie where little kids or damsels in distress are hiding in closets or basements or under the bed won't work anymore because at some point their smart phones will make that annoying "powering down" beeping sound and Chuckie or the Beastmaster or the little girl from The Ring or Al Pacino will know exactly where they are. If you're smart enough to turn off your phone before you hide under the bed, you'd be smart enough not to be in that house in the first place. Or smart enough to text the FBI before you dive into the linen closet.

Here is the central paradox in all this: directors have no problem getting an audience to believe in ghosts, vampires, succubi, extraterrestrials, poltergeists, gremlins, wizards, giant worms, latter-day dinosaurs or rustic werewolves who seem to have unlimited access to steroids; all that is deemed perfectly logical and believable. But it is impossible to get anyone to believe that a character in a horror film or thriller would not be armed with the technology needed to foil the depredations of his rampaging, bloodthirsty stepfather.

This is the impasse to which technology has brought us.

One bright spot: Deliverance. I recently visited the rural south, and I couldn't get my email or make a cell phone call for two whole days. Those poor fellas out in the wilds of Georgia would still be in a world of trouble.

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How Observer critics spend their holidays

2011-08-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

Music critic Kitty Empire in Springfield Park, Stamford Hill, London. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

Let's be honest – the notion of summer as an extended golden period of rest and re-stimulation really now only applies to the young, the retired, or those in the teaching professions. The rest of us slog on, hoping to catch the odd festival (or maybe just gig in a park), marking time until camping in Cornwall or fly-drive to France, where finally luxuriating in the latest Alan Hollinghurst will come a distant second to stopping the youngest weeing in the hotel pool.

Once, though, I was artfully feckless too, making the rent by working as an usher for the Royal Shakespeare Company. "Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Barbican theatre for this evening's performance of Henry IV, Part 1," I used to say over the public address system in the summer of '92, before getting the ice creams ready for the interval. Sometimes, I got to watch: Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew. The free Bard stopped when I was promoted to stage doorkeeper, where I deepened my appreciation for the theatre by learning that many of our finest actors are nice to lower-order factotums (Dame Judi, Emily Watson, take a bow); while many are not.

That long summer, though, hot- and cold-running Shakespeare on tap could not compete with the first Spiritualized album, Lazer Guided Melodies. Released in March, it never left my turntable till the autumn – cued up first thing in the morning, soothing me to sleep last thing at night. All other music – even garage on pirate radio – faded into insignificance in that special iteration of OCD that music fans will ruefully recognise. Jason Pierce's previous band (Spacemen 3) had a bootleg album called Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To; his Lazer Guided Melodies subbed magnificently for the opiates I was too responsible to take myself.

Playing something over and over is a given if you are a music fan, but there is something about the repeated listens of summer – the way they sound in the garden, turned up loud to educate the neighbours; the way they go with light nights and burnt shoulders – that sears them into your affections. This summer, I will be hoiking Hollinghurst around, and reading up on standing stones in Julian Cope's Megalithic European in advance of our trip to Carnac. The vorticists exhibition at Tate Britain is still there, beckoning, awaiting time without other calls upon it. There is no one album of summer. Those gilded levels of monomania don't usually withstand the transition from shared rented accommodation. We are so much more fickle now, dipping in and out of African stuff, a soon-to-be-issued lost Screaming Trees album, Hal Willner's Rogue's Gallery compilation of piratical songs and the one album in the car that everyone can agree on: Lykke Li's Wounded Rhymes.

Wild Strawberries starring Bibi Andersson and Ingmar Bergman. Photograph: SNAP/Rex Features

I have a special affection for a sad little film of the early 70s in which middle-aged housewife Joanne Woodward, partly prompted by seeing Bergman's Wild Strawberries, spends her time remembering and regretting aspects of her life. It's called Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams and maybe it's the circular, double-edged title that gets to me. It suggests a lifetime of springs spent making plans for the summer that are never quite fulfilled, and are then reviewed in the winter when fresh dreams keep the carousel of life hopefully turning. However, I did once pull off a perfect summer exactly 60 years ago in a burst of energy I've been trying to capture ever since.

In June 1951, having completed my Higher School Certificate exams (the predecessor of A-levels), I embarked on an ambitious cultural journey in anticipation of spending two fallow years in the army before going to university. I hitchhiked from Bristol to London, my first visit there on my own, and stayed for a week with friends of my parents in Croydon. I went to the theatre eight times in six days, and on the seventh day, instead of resting, I saw Max Ophuls' wittily erotic film La Ronde at the Curzon, a luxurious cinema like none I'd previously seen. The plays included Alec Guinness in Hamlet, Ralph Richardson in The Three Sisters and Paul Scofield in Ring Round the Moon. The whole theatrical experience cost ?1.

I went to the National Gallery and the Tate for the first time, which were, of course, free, and toured the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain, which was an exhilarating view of a post-austerity future. Before leaving home I'd bought a set of 10 paperbacks by Evelyn Waugh, simultaneously published that month by Penguin. I devoured them one after the other, Brideshead Revisited putting me in the mood for both the army and for Oxford.

I've never had a summer quite like that again, though I've never given up trying, and I've spent the past 52 summers in Sweden with my Swedish wife and half-Swedish children working on a succession of books and radio programmes, and churning out God knows how many articles and reviews, all of which seemed significant at the time. The most strenuous summer was 1988 when, as a Booker prize judge, I had 105 novels to negotiate. I set out to read at least one a day for the month I was in the Swedish countryside. It gave my July and August a sense of purpose. I got up at four each morning, aiming to deal with a shortish book before breakfast, and then set about The Satanic Verses, a three-day assignment. Because I'd agreed to write an article for the Observer on the taxonomy of current literary fiction I jotted down the cars the characters drove, where they spent their vacations, and so on. This led me to note that "the most cherished middle-class household object appears to be the Aga cooker, mentioned in at least nine books". It was, however, a reader of the piece and not myself (the article was headed "The great fiction Aga-bargy") who jumped in and coined the term Aga saga.

Attentive readers will have inferred from my recent month's absence that I've already had my 2011 summer vacation. So how well did I spend my time? Wisely, I didn't take Proust this time, so I can still only say, as Sam Goldwyn did of The Wizard of Oz, that I've read part of A la recherche all the way through. I struggled with three academic works of film history for a longish essay in the TLS and read an enjoyable collection of American film criticism for a review in Sight & Sound. Blue Monday, the latest psychological thriller by Nicci French, the joint nom de guerre of my eldest son and his wife, gave me great pleasure, and I caught up with Freakonomics, which proved to be smug and disappointing. My biggest job of the summer was going through the index of all the movies I've reviewed over the past 48 years to make an anthology of some 150 of them. Memory Lane has never seemed more deeply rutted.

Four days from the end of my time in Sweden, I suddenly realised that once again I'd forgotten to read the complete plays of Shakespeare. So I read at random King John, which I'd last seen in 1974 in John Barton's much-edited RSC production. What a remarkable play it is. How bizarre the first act in which Falconbridge establishes his illegitimacy and thus his royal lineage. I'd forgotten the rousing last three lines: "Come the three corners of the world in arms, /And we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue,/If England to itself do rest but true."."

So now I'm back home, with Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes still unread in my bag. No country's newspapers have obituaries like ours and I'm catching up with those I've missed, the chief one being that of the great Swedish cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who shot Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries. He shaped my vision of the unique quality of Swedish light, and died last month aged 100.

Three big attractions appeared in my absence and are at the top of my list to catch up with: the Magritte exhibition in Liverpool, Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life and Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child. They're three good reasons to stick around for the rest of the summer.

This summer, instead of sending postcards, I shall be writing about them. For years, I've collected old cards: faded pictures of storms in south coast resorts and winsome beauties popping out of bathing huts, inscribed in curling script to a Sybil from her aunt, or with sad and saucy lines from lovers. What began as a desultory pastime has turned into a minor obsession, and is now about to become a book.

I've been meaning for ages to spruce up and expand my collection of theatrical cards: I keep sending particularly teasing items. But I've been too busy looking at plays. That will change this season. No blameless specimen will be safe from my grasp. I'll be rushing through art exhibitions in order to get to the card shop and hauling friends across the road to a junk shop which may have a bundle of eloquent examples. Still, my main excursion will be to a shop in the centre of London commanded by an inspired collector of theatrical memorabilia. The one room, stacked high with books and dusty brown boxes, is organised like a garden shed: apparently haphazard, it's actually a miracle of arcane categorisation.

My aim will be to do what I've never managed before and spend the best part of a day there. I'll be seeking out examples of the midget postcard series (each about the size of a fag packet) featuring brown close-ups of Edwardian actresses: Violet Vanbrugh with her cloud of dark hair and glittering ear-rings; Edna May looking peevish under a hat like a cake; Marie Studholme flirting over her fan with a look of Penelope Wilton. I'm hoping to find some dramatic scenes along the lines of the one I have from If I Were King, which shows an enthroned George Alexander gracefully attended by minions in tights and armour; he's reading a letter which proclaims: "You are the Castor and Pollux of purity." And I'll be trying to winkle out some playbill posters, to go alongside the picture I have of a sad-eyed woman with out of control hair who is sitting, floppy handed, at a manual sewing machine, under the title: "The Girl Who Took the Wrong Turning".

An opulent room in The Wallace Collection, London. Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy

As a child I had problem teeth. Once every few months I had to travel from our house in Sussex to London for sessions with a quietly spoken man in Harley Street. I'd go up in the train with my father, he doing the Times crossword, me contemplating the ordeal ahead. Sometimes there would just be the scream of the drill and the smell of burning dentine, sometimes there would be anaesthetic gas and extractions. It was all unspeakably ghastly, and when it was over, and I had staggered out of the chair, my mouth sour with blood and oil of cloves, my father would take me to an art gallery to recover.

The Wallace Collection in Manchester Square is an easy walk from Harley Street, and at some point in my dental evolution I developed a taste for 18th-century French painting – Lancret, Pater, Fragonard and the rest. I longed to occupy the green Arcadia of their imagination. A place in which classical statuary was half concealed by the billowing branches of trees, wood nymphs lolled in a state of undress, and no dentists or anaesthetists roamed.

The master of this genre was Antoine Watteau, and the collection has one of the dreamiest and most atmospheric of his paintings, Les Champs-Elysees. In the foreground a lone spectator surveys a sensual late-summer scene, in which four young women recline on the grass. Their hair is braided, their dresses are silk, and their attitudes languorous. This foursome is attended by only one gallant, and one of their number looks out of the canvas with a look of cool invitation, an invitation that the lone spectator appears to be considering. Surmounting a fountain above him, as if embodying his thought process, is a suggestively naked statue of Antiope, an Amazon queen. But our spectator also sees three small children playing in the grass, a reminder that lovemaking has its consequences.

So he stands there, indecisive. In the background is a sunlit field, and at its edge, shadowed woodland in which other couples dance and flirt. The spectator will never make his move, and that summer will never end. And that's why I come back to it, year after year. Because my summers do end. Some years, like this one, they don't even start. That said, I do still have my own teeth.

August is the month that Simon Mayo and I hand over the reins of our 5 Live film review show to Floyd and Boyd and take a few weeks respite from our continual on-air bickering. Significantly, we go our separate ways: Simon goes east to Suffolk, I head south-west to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Some years ago I shot a documentary about Sam Peckinpah's "West Country western" Straw Dogs on location around the village of St Buryan, which used locals as extras, and still draws movie tourists today. For years, the video of Straw Dogs was banned in the UK, but apparently it was always available to rent from St Buryan's local shop. Cornwall is full of cinema history, and also boasts a thriving offbeat cinema scene; check out Screen 7 at the Regal cinema in Redruth, a luxury licensed auditorium with plush seats and ample leg room, accessed via a stairwell labelled "Stairway to 7".

Whatever the weather, a primary occupation in Cornwall is surfing – a recreation which has boomed in the years since the British surf pic Blue Juice was seen as little more than a joke. Nowadays, the surfing beaches are packed, with surf documentaries and locally produced "board shorts" regularly projected in the local cafes and bars. Apparently, anyone can surf, but the instructor who first taught my then eight-year-old daughter took one look at me and said: "I can get her up on a board in a morning – you'd take a month." So my job is to stand in the sea in a wetsuit, looking like a fat sea lion for hours on end, making sure the waves don't get the better of my kids, and waiting for my feet to go numb.

Other Cornish wonders include Trebah Gardens, with its jungle valley etched down to the sea; the Eden Project, whose giant geodesic domes always remind me of my favourite science-fiction film, Silent Running; and the beach at Marazion, from which (at low tide) you can walk out to the medieval castle at St Michael's Mount, which featured in the somewhat silly Brit horror pic Revelation. There's also the Minack theatre, an extraordinary arena carved into the side of a rock face which presents spectacularly tempestuous productions, best viewed at sundown with a thunderstorm brewing over the sea behind.

At some point, we take the brief helicopter ride to Scilly, first to luscious St Mary's (Harold Wilson's respite from politics), and then on the boat to St Martin's (empty white beaches and a world-famous bakery) and edge-of-the-world St Agnes (last stop before Bishop Rock, which you might have seen on that BBC ident). I remember reviewing Joanna Hogg's acclaimed Britpic Archipelago, in which a fractured family spend a month in Tresco, indulging their complex emotional problems and generally having a terribly dysfunctional time, despite the spectacular scenery. Many critics loved the movie. Personally I admired it, but spent much of the running time figuring out how much it would cost to rent that jaw-dropping house and wondering why the hell I should sympathise with anyone who could whinge and complain while holidaying in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Honestly, if you can't be happy in Scilly, you should just give up. Maybe that was the point.

One of Kensington Palace Gardens's many impressive houses. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features

Night walks shape my summer. One in particular: the half-sprinted dash, music still ringing in my ears, from the Royal Albert Hall to Notting Hill Gate, where I catch a bus home. I may do it, depending on weather, two dozen times between July and September. The BBC Proms have been the backbone to all my summers since childhood, first listening, then attending and eventually reviewing. What, as music critic, do I do in summer? I prom. What did I do when I wasn't a critic? I prommed.

My route, the quickest after dark, takes me along Kensington Palace Gardens, "billionaires' row", the half-mile-long avenue built on crown estate lands in the 1840s which cuts from north to south by the side of Kensington Palace. The moment you enter this hidden world, urban noise drops to sudden silence. Sodium street glare softens to the buttery glow of gaslights. Traffic stops. Queen Anne-style houses, blank-faced and often in total darkness, stand like big doll's houses behind locked gates. In one, chandeliers burn in an empty room. Another has an ugly anti-terrorist barrier which blocks the pavement and protects the villa behind. An Israeli flag hangs from the facade. Two armed policeman chat idly like the watchmen at Elsinore. "So I said to her…"

Ambassadors, oil magnates, sultans and princes live here. A house might cost you ?70m. As you walk north the style changes, from red-brick Dutch to stuccoed Italianate. You rarely see anyone come or go, in the houses or on the street. If they party, they do so deep in the interior of these massive buildings.

Last week I stared at the darkened windows of the Norwegian embassy, lit only by a few night-lights. A scribbled note – 'to those who died in vain" – was attached to the railings with a rose.

If, as sometimes happens, I dawdle too long, I may see my bus pass along the Bayswater Road, too far away to catch. As I wait at the stop, another prommer may turn up from another direction. "Bus to Oxford just gone?" Yes, I say. We see each other carrying Proms programmes. I fear he, rarely she, may ask me what I think as we sit down for the long wait.

Mariinsky Ballet's production of Swan Lake. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis

This summer, in my dreams, I'm going to fly to America and spend three days in the Art Institute of Chicago, because it is full of paintings I want to see all the time – Seurat's La Grande Jatte, Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day, Watteau's Fete Champetre, the great Spaniards Cotan and Zurbaran.

But because that isn't going to happen, I'll get to America through the incomparable Richard Ford, whose novel The Lay of the Land I haven't yet read. And I'll get to Seurat through Robert Herbert's Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte, a wonderful art book almost unconsciously harbouring a tragic tale.

From Chicago I will fly to Denmark, hooked by The Killing but also by a desire to see the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi and Christen Kobke in their native Copenhagen (relatively recent discoveries for me) and to travel to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art out on what I imagine to be the ominously overcast Zeeland coast. Since this isn't going to happen either, I'll watch Danish director Susanne Bier's superb portrait of young and old love, After the Wedding, on DVD, starring Rolf Lassgard, who also happens to be my favourite of the three Kurt Wallanders. That will take me everywhere I want to go in Denmark.

I would love to see the Mariinsky Ballet's Swan Lake at Covent Garden, just to witness the famous chorus of Russian swans all moving in hypnotic harmony through the ice-blue light. But I will settle for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life because even those friends who think the movie maddeningly cosmic say the stream of images is magnificent.

Summer holidays with small children means reading in brief bursts, preferably something passionate or pungent. I've got Oliver Sacks's The Mind's Eye, on the sense of sight and his experience of nearly losing his own, and Simon Schama's model essays on Dutch art in Dead Certainties. These will alternate with disproportionately longer stretches reading aloud from Little House on the Prairie.

I saw Kobke in one of those National Gallery shows, under Nicholas Penny, that have brought so much Scandinavian art to this country. The latest is Forests, Rocks, Torrents, a show – despite its title – full of mountains, steep viewpoints and high skies that I want to see on one of the gallery's Friday late openings, after which I'll walk home through the blue dusk. There is an exhilarating painting by Alexandre Calame that shows the triumphant view from a mountain summit: you could almost feel you'd climbed there. Art can take you anywhere.

I read all the year round: a book or two a week, usually. But life being what it is, the volumes on my bedside table will be mostly fiction, which seems to fit best with exhaustion, distraction and general busyness. The summer, then, is for more demanding stuff: for nonfiction and (whisper it) poetry. More specifically, it's a time for trying to recapture the experience of reading as a teenager when, exams over, the holidays would open out before me like some great, inviting canyon: in those halcyon summers, no work to do, no house to run, no person to care for but myself, I could really read. A sunny field. Me in my bikini. A Penguin Classic. Oh, the books I then bashed through like meringues!

This year I'm reading Graven With Diamonds, Nicola Shulman's sort-of biography of Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor poet. I have a thing about Wyatt, and here's why. When I was 18, and a hopeless case, I went for a university interview. It was conducted by two clever but (luckily for me) rather kind blue-stockings who asked me to read aloud Wyatt's "They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek". I didn't know who Wyatt was. Nor did I know how to pronounce all the weird Tudor spellings. I made a real hash of it. But I remember that the sense of the thing – paralysis! fear! betrayal! – nevertheless hit me like a bullet. Who was this fellow? And to whom was this mesmerising poem of his addressed?

I'm only a little way into Shulman's book but it's really exciting: a literary thriller. And it's all here: Wyatt's life as a courtier under what Shulman calls a Tudor Stalin (Henry VIII), and his careers as diplomat, spy and lover (Wyatt may have romped dangerously with Anne Boleyn). Shulman is brilliant on the poetry, performing a kind of high-wire balancing act in combining cool academic analysis with a 21st-century feeling for autobiography (she knows the scholars will think this mucky but she is too good a storyteller to care). She makes you understand why, in spite of the passage of 500 years and the disdain of most of the critics ("when he is good he is hardly one of the irresistible poets", said CS Lewis), these ghostly lyrics have somehow survived. I'm already dreading finishing it – though when I do, perhaps I will go back to the poems, which I haven't looked at properly for 20 years. What a swot. And then? Well, if we're really going to be honest about this, I still haven't seen Bridesmaids.

Roberto Bolano's The Skating Rink

When I was a child, August was about buildings more than beaches. Armed with a Blue Guide my parents would take us around towns in Italy, France or Portugal, scoring the monuments deemed worthy of the guide's stars, which were awarded with some parsimony and, I would later realise, arbitrariness. We of the younger generation would sometimes rebel, preferring to stay indoors and murder each other over games of Monopoly, but in the end I couldn't resist the conditioning.

So I now spend a lot of my year travelling to look at buildings. But the childhood pattern is reversed – August is the month when I try not to look at buildings. Not much, anyway. I like the month to be quite vacant, and my children seem to be less docile than I was; attempts to see anything architectural have long been met by cries of "boring boring boring". I will be somewhere rural, near Bordeaux, where the things I won't be seeing include the house designed by Rem Koolhaas for a severely disabled man, whose centrepiece is a lift that was also his client's study, a whole room that rises and falls through the house. I also won't see Jean Nouvel's hotel, Le St-James, and several works of Lacaton & Vassal, a French couple who do nice things, inter alia, with off-the-peg greenhouses.

I may find it harder to resist (for the tragically nerdy reason that I forgot my camera when I was last there) Le Corbusier's Quartier Modernes Fruges, a colony of houses built for a sugar-cube manufacturer. As it happens, they look quite like sugar cubes. The place is famous for the way the residents jollied up their purist houses with kitschy bits of ornament, which is sometimes taken as sign of the architect's failure to give people what they want, but I find that the architect's and residents' contributions each make the other more interesting.

What else to do there? I've heard there's some nice wine, and I might read a book, possibly by Roberto Bolano. I loved his The Skating Rink, a tale of desire, skulduggery and ice set on the Costa Brava, and his vast work 2666 is now giving me menacing/enticing looks from the shelf.

Chapelle du Rosaire in Saint Paul de Vence. Photograph: Hemis/Alamy

My summers will always be refracted through the prism of my first European summer, aged 17, hitchhiking southwards towards the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnese. Nothing I do this summer can begin to compare with those moments of lost time, and lost freedom. Never again will I read a novel as I read Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy on the bone-white road down the Dalmatian coast, ingesting those pages like a fierce, unappeasable drug.

That was the summer I made my first visit to the Uffizi, to the forum in Rome, got falling-down drunk in the streets of Ravenna and, most magical of all, crossed into Venice at sunset, stepping on to a crowded vaporetto as it ploughed up the Grand Canal towards the Rialto.

En route to la Serenissima, my friends and I had drifted round the south of France and somehow chanced upon one of the jewels of 20th-century art, the Matisse chapel just outside Vence, some 20km from Nice. This summer, if I could be transported anywhere on a magic carpet, that is where I would most want to be.

The work of great artists at the end of their lives can be austere and demanding. This little piece of paradise, however, finds a great artist communing with eternity in the most playful, airy spirit imaginable. Matisse's contributions to the Chapelle du Rosaire transform it into a sublime secular jewel: three stained glass windows of abstract design, three black and white murals, a stone altar, a bronze cross and a vibrant display of colourful ecclesiastical robes.

This summer, with the responsibilities of a parent, and no doubt struggling to catch up with the longlist for the 2011 Booker prize, especially the new novels from Jane Rogers and Sebastian Barry, I shall be putting my daughter on a flight to Marseilles for a summer camp in Provence. I've looked at the map. Greoux-les-Bains is an easy drive to Vence. Something tells me that the temptations of the Chapelle du Rosaire will win out.

? What are your tips for summer culture? Join the discussion

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Arrietty – review

2011-08-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the quality of the product, the world of animated film is dominated at the moment by Japan's Studio Ghibli and America's Pixar. And with the latter's current offering, Cars 2, being something of a disappointment, Ghibli's entrancing Arrietty is the clear choice for a family outing this summer. The film's youngish director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, worked as an animator on such Ghibli classics as Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo, but the idea of an animated version of Mary Norton's The Borrowers has been a long-cherished project of Ghibli's great film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, and the original Japanese title translates as "Arrietty and the Borrowers".

ArriettyProduction year: 2010Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): URuntime: 94 minsDirectors: Hiromasa YonebayashiCast: Keiko Takeshita, Mark Strong, Mirai Shida, Olivia Colman, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Saoirse Ronan, Shinobu Ohtake, Tom Holland, Tomokazu MiuraMore on this film

Several generations of children have now grown up on Mary Norton's books about sweet-natured little people living beneath the floorboards of British houses and supporting their modest lifestyles by "borrowing" their simple necessities from the ordinary human occupants. They have no special powers and they are not, in any real sense, thieves, borrowing only things that have been discarded or will not be missed – an old hat pin, for instance, or a cube of sugar. The first book was published to considerable acclaim in 1952, five years before the same idea was used by Richard Matheson for his celebrated novel and horror flick The Incredible Shrinking Man. In Matheson's story, a suburban husband, after exposure to nuclear radiation, steadily shrinks until he is forced to live first in a doll's house and then in a matchbox in the basement, fending off spiders with a pin he wields like a sword. There have been several TV series based on Norton's books, but only one film, Peter Hewitt's 1997 The Borrowers, in which, symbolically, the full-size people living upstairs in a timeless London house are American while the eccentric tiny folk living by ingenious scavenging below are English. It seemed to suggest that the borrowers were a non-productive, disregarded underclass. The result wasn't bad but lacked magic and wonder.

The Ghibli version is set in a verdant Tokyo suburb, but except for a pair of dim-witted insect-exterminators the people don't look particularly Japanese. As in Norton's original, a sickly teenage boy comes to stay at a rather grand house with his pleasant aunt and a surly old housekeeper, and on his arrival he spots Arrietty, one of the little people, as his own father and grandfather had also done as children. Arrietty is a pretty 14-year-old borrower who's been protected by her concerned mother and father from human contact, a little reminiscent of Miranda in The Tempest, and like her is swept away on encountering the dangerous, brave new world of humans from upstairs. The movie is beautifully drawn, universal in its combination of east and west, and has a narrative that flows as elegantly as its graphic line. There are wonderful sequences: Pod the father taking Arrietty on his first borrowing expedition in the house upstairs; a tour of the human family's elegant Edwardian doll's house; a crow trapped in a mesh window screen as it swoops down in an attempt to seize Arrietty; her mother imprisoned in a bottle by the vindictive housekeeper; an escape in a floating tea kettle to a new home.

At the heart of the film, however, is the tender, trusting friendship between Sho, the boy of the house, and Arrietty. Theirs is a beautiful, perfect love, but ultimately doomed like so many relationships in myths and fairytales. This moving, amusing and resonant tale also touches on environmental and ecological concerns, on xenophobia and the fear of the threatening other. And it has taken on new meanings about the respect and preservation of disappearing species and the need to treasure and recycle valuable resources.

Arrietty is being shown in two versions in this country, a Japanese one, and one dubbed into English. Given the choice last week, I opted for the dubbed one, which I normally do with foreign animated pictures, because after all we're not concerned here with losing the actors' real voices the way one is with customary dubbing. Of course I noticed a superior smile on the faces of some purist colleagues as they descended to the basement viewing theatre (the appropriate place for those who sympathise with the borrowers) to hear the Japanese version. But all the children present attended the dubbed version upstairs and seemed to enjoy it hugely. I might have felt differently had we been invited to see Disney's dubbed version, with teenage American accents. But I doubt if a better cast could be found anywhere than the British actors assembled for Arrietty by Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, who were also the producers of the 1997 The Borrowers. Saoirse Ronan is a heartbreaking Arrietty, Mark Strong a splendidly decent dad.

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The film that changed my life: Richard Ayoade

2011-08-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

Philippe Noiret, Catherine Demongeot and Carla Marlier in Louis Malle's Zazie dans le metro. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

Zazie dans le metro isn't necessarily my favourite film, nor is it really "in the canon" as a great piece of story construction. It's not even Louis Malle's best film. But I associate it with pure pleasure and joy. It was the first film I wanted to study and rewatch; it sparked my interest in film?making.

I recorded it as a teenager but missed the beginning. I must have watched that video 10 times before I ever saw the title sequence, which – with its whistling music – remains one of the best I've seen.

The story is a very flimsy one, really. It's just about a little girl (Zazie) who visits Paris and fulfils a dream of riding on the metro. Similarly, the characters aren't nuanced. They have a very simple energy about them. It's not that the acting isn't good, but this is a film less about performance than style. It feels like pop art. The characters don't exist in the real world, lending Zazie dans le metro a childish spirit and charm.

What's really striking about this film is its "madeness". Before I saw it, films were Hollywood to me. They didn't seem made by people. But Louis Malle invites the viewer to see how his decisions involving look, music, colour and editing create a compassionate whole.

All of Malle's creative decisions feel correct. He had characters look directly into the camera, pioneered the use of camera ramping, and applied very artificial lighting and phoney-looking backdrops. Yet, because it's so expertly made, it doesn't feel kitsch. Similarly, his erratic choice of music works brilliantly, flitting between the lyrical and plaintive whistling at the opening, and strange jazz.

Zazie dans le metro is an adaptation of the novel by Raymond Queneau. Malle sought to create filmic equivalents to the various literary styles with which the author experimented. I love this – adapting the verbal into something so visual. And Malle did so very inventively.

But this "madeness" of Zazie dans le metro genuinely creates the world of a 12-year-old girl, not the director. Malle's directorial solutions fit the material perfectly, conjuring a simple and youthful delight at Paris.

Richard Ayoade directed the acclaimed British indie film Submarine, out now on DVD

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Our Day Will Come – review

2011-08-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

Olivier Barthelemy in Romain Gavras's Our Day Will Come: 'all sensation without revelation'.Our Day Will Come (Notre Jour Viendra)Production year: 2010Country: FranceRuntime: 87 minsDirectors: Romain GavrasCast: Justine Lerooy, Olivier Barthelemy, Vanessa Decat, Vincent CasselMore on this film

A discontented schoolboy in run-down north-west France is given a lift by a deeply troubled shrink (Vincent Cassel), who persuades him that popular prejudice against redheads is what's responsible for their joint troubles. So they acquire a red Porsche and set off for Ireland, where carrot-tops are welcome, but their folie a deux escalates exponentially as they acquire a crossbow and a shotgun and they get no further than Calais. All sensation without revelation, the film has ambitions but they end up as hollow pretensions.

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This week's new film events

2011-08-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Doubtless catering to its core demographic, Canary Wharf's free outdoor screen has primarily hosted live sports events so far this summer, but now the holidays have set in, its selection has broadened. From Tuesday to Thursday the Barbican present three lesser-known family friendly Japanese animes: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Nintendo puzzle hero Professor Layton, and the acclaimed Summer Wars. Then, there are classic silent comedies for the next three Mondays (Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, with live piano accompaniment), and coinciding with the Canary Wharf Jazz Festival (12-14 Aug), a few choice documentaries on Thelonius Monk.

Canada Square, E14, Tue to 22 Aug

Project Nim

Few anticipated that the story of a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers would make for a wildly entertaining documentary, let alone an Oscar-winner, but 2008's Man On Wire catapulted James Marsh from the status of an interesting film-maker to an important one. It's also heaped expectation on his follow-up, Project Nim, about an ape raised to be human that says a lot more about mankind than chimpkind. Add in Marsh's dramatic work (Red Riding, The King) and newfound celebrity, and you're in for an interesting night.

Curzon Soho, W1, Thu

Funeral Parade Of Roses

Those intrigued by Norwegian Wood's recent recreation of 1960s Japanese radicalism can check out the real thing with this crop of strange, fascinating and little seen works, subtitled Films From The Art Theatre Guild Of Japan, which represent the flowerings of Japan's new wave and the birth of its indie cinema movement. In the 1960s and 70s, the Art Theatre Guild provided a haven for film-makers too adventurous for the major studios such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura – and with their new-found creative freedom, they didn't hesitate to explore controversial topics like sexuality, death, radical politics, and capital punishment, and experiment with new stylistic approaches. The titles say it all – Death By Hanging, Double Suicide, Pandemonium – although the lyrical Silence Has No Wings follows a butterfly's journey, while Funeral Parade Of Roses is a landmark drama on Japanese transsexuals. Far out.

BFI Southbank, SE1, Mon to 31 Aug

Horizontal 8

It's a while since Poland produced giants like Krzysztof Kieslowski, Roman Polanski or Jerzy Skolimowski (though the latter two are at least still active), but perhaps their successors can be found in this travelling showcase of seven features, plus shorts, documentaries and an exhibition of world-beating Polish film poster designs. Most accessible is Decalogue 89 Plus, which marks the 20th anniversary of Kieslowski's landmark film cycle with a new set of films by 10 young directors. Kieslowski veteran Jerzy Stuhr also leads Mystification, on the mysterious suicide of a real-life artist, while pop sci-fi Horizontal 8 and satanist drama Black get closer to the Polish cutting edge.

Various venues, Tue to 15 Dec

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UK Film Council's winners and losers revealed

2011-08-01T04:37:00.000-07:00

UK Film Council success Nowhere Boy starring Aaron Johnson as John Lennon. Photograph: Publicity image

Royalty is good. Raucous schoolgirls are even better. But steer clear of Derbyshire mining towns or revisiting Brideshead.

An analysis of productions funded by the UK Film Council has revealed huge variations in what the defunct quango has seen as a return on its recent investments.

According to figures recently released to parliament by the culture minister, Ed Vaizey, the council made 33 film production awards between 1 April 2006 and 31 March 2011 that have so far received "recoupment income".

Recoupments chiefly commence when films are distributed and when they make money abroad. They are wholly reinvested in new productions.

Predictably, The King's Speech, the hugely popular Hollywood-backed film starring Colin Firth, which won three Oscars, was a success for the council, having so far returned 95% of the ?1m lottery money invested. A further 5% was returned by the council directly to the film's producers for them to invest in future productions.

But it was another film featuring Firth, St Trinian's, a comedy set in an all-girls school (described as "monumentally naff" by the Guardian), that was the council's biggest recent success, returning ?1,440,017 on the ?1,432,000 invested.

Other successes include Man on Wire, a documentary following French wire-walker Philippe Petit's tightrope crossing between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Centre, which returned 101% of the ?385,000 invested.

Nowhere Boy – Sam Taylor-Wood's John Lennon biopic, described by Rolling Stone as a "smart" film – returned 87% of the ?1.2m invested.

If those films were the principal winners, there were also some notable losers, at least in box office terms.

Brideshead Revisited, a sumptuous reinterpretation of Evelyn Waugh's inter-war novel of Catholicism, love and nobility, described by the Daily Telegraph as "good-looking" but "empty", returned only 1% of the ?1.4m it was handed.

Big names, it appears, do not necessarily guarantee a good return. Harry Brown, which featured Michael Caine as a retired Royal Marine who takes revenge when his only friend is beaten to death by a gang, returned only ?22,300 of its ?1,002,225.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a comedy starring Simon Pegg as a writer for an upmarket US magazine, returned only ?9,977 of the ?1,471,145 lottery money invested.

Nor does critical acclaim correspond to financial success. Summer, a story of friendship and tragedy in a Derbyshire mining town, for which Robert Carlyle won best actor at the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival, returned ?11,792 of the ?467,750 production budget stumped up by the council.

"We need to remember that the UK Film Council was the one-stop shop for commercial and cultural support for the British film industry, so it was never expected to return a profit on its investment," said Martin Spence, assistant general secretary of Bectu, the media and entertainment union.

However, some films backed by the council have been neither a commercial nor a critical success.

The 2008 horror film Donkey Punch, which follows British holidaymakers in Spain as they take drugs, have sex and end up killing each other, received ?457,490 from the council. Total Film explained that the film's title referred to the action of hitting "a woman on the back of the neck while shagging her from behind".

The film was panned by critics. "I can't say that this casually sadistic, misanthropic little movie persuades me that it is any contribution to, or reflection of, our national culture," said Daily Mail critic Chris Tookey.

So far, only ?58,931, or 13% of the council's initial investment in Donkey Punch, has been recouped.

The core of the council's activities – spending ?15m a year of lottery money on independent UK-made films – has now been transferred to the British Film Institute. A spokesman for the BFI said 99 productions were funded by the council over the past five years, 28 of which are still waiting to be released. Around ?8m, 19% of the lottery money invested in the past five years, has been recouped so far.

"Not all of the ones that have been released have started to recoup," explained the BFI spokesman. "The rationale for investing in films is not necessarily on the cultural strength of them. A large part of it is for developing new talent.

"Donkey Punch was invested in under the Warp X new talent initiative – it's new talent, a new director, and one of its cast, Jaime Winstone, has gone on to do new things, and to make a name for herself."

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Zookeeper – review

2011-08-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

Kevin James stars in Zookeeper.ZookeeperProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): PGRuntime: 101 minsDirectors: Frank CoraciCast: Adam Sandler, Cher, Donnie Wahlberg, Ken Jeong, Kevin James, Leslie Bibb, Nick Nolte, Rosario Dawson, Sylvester StalloneMore on this film

A romantic comedy long on sentimentality but short on jokes, this is a vehicle for the ungainly, overweight Kevin James, a specialist in roles as supposedly lovable all-American slobs. Here, he plays a caretaker at Boston's Franklin Park Zoo who, having been jilted by his girl, is instructed by his friends, the menagerie's talking animals, in how to woo her back using the mating techniques of the plains and the jungle. I would rather lie on a bed of nails watching Dr Doolittle for a week than see a single reel of Zookeeper again.

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Antonio Banderas: Almodóvar and me

2011-08-01T03:04:00.000-07:00

'I said to Pedro several times when we were shooting, ‘Hey, we have to do a comedy! It’s good for you, come on.' Photograph: Nick Ballon

Three decades ago, an impoverished young actor named Antonio Banderas was sitting with friends outside Madrid's National theatre when a curious figure happened by. The new arrival sported a backcombed goth bouffant and brandished a bright red briefcase that could only contain documents of national importance. He ordered a drink, cracked some jokes then turned abruptly towards Banderas. "You have a very romantic face," he said. "You should do movies. Bye-bye!" And with that he was off, swinging his briefcase through the crowds on the Calle del Principe.

The Skin I Live InProduction year: 2011Directors: Pedro AlmodovarCast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa ParedesMore on this film

Nonplussed, Banderas turned to his friends. "Oh, that's Pedro Almodovar," they told him. "He made a movie once. But he won't make any more."

Banderas and Almodovar went on to make five films together. These were wild, bawdy and exuberant; joyous yelps from the underground that caught the ears of the world. They installed the director as the most feted Spanish film-maker of his generation, and they also provided a springboard for the actor, who abandoned the old gang, lit out for America and remade himself as a Hollywood star. And this was all thanks to Almodovar, Banderas says, and all down to that chance encounter.

It's high summer, roasting hot, when I meet Banderas at Almodovar's production office on a quiet Madrid side street. Banderas has his herbal tea and his cigarettes. His conversation is a rush of accented English, peppered with italics, face-pulling and extravagant waves of the hand. At the age of 50, there is still something of the wide-eyed, beautiful boy about him, although the brow has crinkled and the hair is now threaded with grey. And that's OK, he insists. Ageing is fine; it brings fresh challenges. He was getting sick of all that "Latin lover shit" anyway.

In Hollywood, Banderas played Latin lovers and Che Guevara, Puss in Boots and the dashing Zorro. But his latest film reunites him with Almodovar for the first time since 1990's Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and turns out to be the best thing he's done in years. The Skin I Live In is a giddying, psycho-sexual Frankenstein tale, loosely based on a French novel (Tarantula) by Thierry Jonquet and layered with false trails and flashbacks. Banderas plays mad scientist Robert Ledgard, a driven plastic surgeon, shunned by the establishment and plotting revenge against the young buck who assaulted his daughter.

The film's first half plays out as a prolonged, perfectly managed tease. Ledgard is a widower, except that maybe he's not. His daughter was raped, except that maybe she wasn't. The audience is led by the nose, groping blind. Then, out of nowhere, the trap is sprung; the plot spun on its head. In one fell swoop, Almodovar's thriller throws off its clothes, shucks off its skin and dances around in its bones.

Banderas initially struggled to acclimatise to the film. The picture darts across so many registers that he found himself running to catch up. "Sometimes, swear to God, I thought I was playing Shakespeare," he says. "And sometimes this cheap Mexican soap opera."

Ledgard, too, proved a tough nut to crack. Banderas plays him as stealthy, steely and all-but impassive – but this was not his first approach. "Rehearsing the film in Pedro's house, I figured, 'This guy is bigger than life, so I'm going to go big. Square my shoulders. Show off all my acting skills.' " And Pedro said, "No, we're not going that way, my friend. The story's told in the script, you don't need to push it. Hold your horses. Keep it minimalist.' " Banderas shrugs. "Well, he was right and I was wrong. Yet again, he gave me a lesson."

The way Banderas tells it, The Skin I Live In is not a homecoming so much as a happy accident, another carefree step in a career that has already carried him from Malaga to Madrid and Manhattan to Malibu. He was born to a strait-laced Andalucian family (mum a schoolteacher, dad an officer in the Guardia Civil) and became turned on to acting after catching a performance of Hair. He arrived in Madrid at the tail end of the 1970s, a kid from the boondocks, out of his depth. The Franco regime had drawn to a close and the city was in the throes of a cultural renaissance. The sudden relaxation of decades-worth of state censorship lifted the lid on a thriving subculture of new-wave bands, low-budget film-makers and comic-book scribblers. Homosexuals hopped out of the closet. Recreational drug use exploded. This period has since been enshrined as La Movida Madrilena ("the Madrilenian groove scene"). Back then, it was just a bunch of oddballs, starting afresh and celebrating their new-found freedom with a wild abandon.

Banderas stumbled upon them unawares. "When I first came to Madrid, I used to go to this park where people were protesting. They all had big beards and were very serious and political. I had a friend, Joaquin, a singer, and he said, 'Do you want to see something interesting?' So he took me to this bar, La Penta. I said, 'My God, what's this?' I saw people with painted hair and men wearing beads and girls in miniskirts. And there were no beards and no political issues and it was all fun. I knew I didn't belong there, but it was great."

Why didn't he belong there? "Because I was not like that! I had long hair and a moustache. I thought I was cool, but I was completely square. I was into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And these guys, they didn't give a shit about those bands, they were going in a totally different direction. Shuffle the cards! Kill everything! Clean slate!"

At the time, Pedro Almodovar had recently quit his 12-year stint as an assistant at the telephone exchange in order to pursue his dream of shooting outrageous, poverty-row pictures on a Super-8 camera. His first feature – 1980's Pepi, Luci, Bom And Other Girls On The Heap – was playing at the Alphaville theatre and the ticket receipts provided the funding for his second. Labyrinth Of Passion cast Banderas in a supporting slot as Sadec, a gay terrorist who kidnaps a princess. "Big scandal," he says gleefully. "People storming out of the cinema. People insulting us. We were in the back seats waving a Spanish flag. Oh, it was un-fucking-real. People smoking grass. People applauding, cheering, booing. I was the only one wearing a jacket and tie." He giggles. "It was my first premiere, so I came dressed up. I was like the formal guy in this crazy group."

How did all of this play back in Malaga? Were his parents aware of what he'd got himself into? He pulls a face. "Oh, they didn't like it all. Big fights with my mum – particularly my mum." He proceeds to mimic their exchanges. "Argh, my friends won't talk to me now! You hang out with punks!" Him: "They're not punks, mum, they're film-makers. They're breaking the rules." Her: "Breaking the rules? Breaking the rules?" Banderas shakes his head. "And then when I did Law Of Desire, oh man, that was pandemonium. I didn't go home for a year."

In Law Of Desire he played Antonio, a one-night-stand turned psychotic, murderous stalker. I've read that the film featured the first gay kiss in Spanish cinema. "Could be," he says. "Could be. And probably the third in Europe." Banderas explodes with laughter, then reaches for a cigarette.

Almodovar has described Banderas as the perfect vessel for his transgressive early pictures: "The puerile guy with overwhelming sexual charisma." But this largely monogamous partnership between mentor and muse abruptly fell apart with the breakthrough success of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. Banderas was offered the lead in The Mambo Kings, a Hollywood production based on the prize-winning Oscar Hijuelos novel. Poised to shoot yet another picture with Almodovar, he duly bailed out at the 11th hour. The director, he concedes, was unimpressed.

The whole thing was happenstance, he insists. He had no special desire to move to America, it was just the way the pieces fell. In any case, he spoke no English. He remembers sitting down with agents, producers, casting directors; nodding and smiling without understanding a word. He wound up faking his way through The Mambo Kings, learning the lines phonetically, "like singing a song". Banderas rolls his eyes skyward. "I was in a panic, it was a disaster. I finished the movie and came back to Spain and thought, 'Oh well, that's that.' But then Jonathan Demme called me to screen test for this movie with Tom Hanks." So he returned to play Hanks's lover in Philadelphia, then stayed for The House Of The Spirits. He shot Desperado for Robert Rodriguez and Interview With The Vampire alongside Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Somehow or other, he fell ass-backwards into a Hollywood career.

On the set of a middling romantic-comedy, he met Melanie Griffith. She was minor Hollywood royalty, the daughter of Tippi Hedren; a recovering wild child who came trailing a history of drug and alcohol problems. Griffith had a son (with actor Steven Bauer) and a daughter (with Miami Vice star Don Johnson). All at once, Banderas had a family on his hands.

Does he now think he would have returned to Spain if he hadn't met Griffith? "That's very possible," he shrugs. "But I met her. She had kids and I didn't. And the kids were from American parents and they had to see their fathers, la-la-la, every 15 days. So if we brought them to Madrid, we'd have to be putting them on a plane every two weeks. It's not fair." Banderas divorced his first wife (Spanish actor Ana Leza) to marry Griffith in 1996. Their daughter, Stella, turns 15 next month.

Judged at face value, Banderas and Griffith make for an unlikely union: the earthy Spaniard with the avant-garde pedigree and the hyper-real, surgically enhanced daughter of Beverly Hills privilege. Banderas's character in The Skin I Live In is a maestro of the slice and dice; an expert in conjuring his patients into somebody new. Did this give him any qualms about Griffith's own experience under the surgeon's knife? "No, no, it's never bothered me," he says. "Because she'd already done it when I met her. That's who I knew. That's the face I accepted. But I don't have any moral issue with it, particularly. People can do what they want. If you want the face of a donkey, do it. I wouldn't do it myself. That's not because I'm so pure, just that I don't like that rictus smile. It would horrify me to look in the mirror and not see the person I know."

Surely he has his moments, if only because his career has played out as such a series of spontaneous reinventions. Banderas was an earnest theatre actor at 20, the poster boy of the Movida Madrilena at 30 and an English-speaking Hollywood film star as he eased towards middle age. These days, he admits, he tends to think in English, dream in English. He suspects that English has even made him move differently; that language speaks you as opposed to the other way around. "In Los Angeles we have two maids who are Mexican, so I speak Spanish with them. My secretary speaks Spanish. With my daughter, I alternate – it depends on the situation. And with Melanie, always in English." He frowns. "I read something the other day that said people who speak different languages have less chance of getting Alzheimer's. You're exercising different parts of your brain. You're having to pay more attention. Maybe I should start learning French."

Basically, he says, he is good at adapting. Maybe this is the great skill of all actors: to take the temperature, learn the lines and fit in with the scenery. Coming to America was no great stretch. "Somewhere like Hungary or the Czech Republic is physically closer, but culturally it's a million miles away," he says. "Why? Because of the movies. The first time I came to New York was not really the first time. Yellow cabs? I'd seen yellow cabs in every film since Hitchcock. Skyscrapers. Women coming out of the supermarket with paper bags in their arms. I knew all that. Los Angeles was the same. To be in Malibu and Hollywood, all those places I'd seen in the movies – it was fun."

He's not sure where his career will take him next. Chances are he'll make some more pictures in Spain, whether as director, producer or actor. Maybe one day in the future he and Griffith will base themselves in Manhattan, to be closer to Europe, "live between two worlds". Who knows? "I'm always open to fucking up," he says.

On heading home to work with Almodovar, Banderas confesses that he was nervous. There was so much water under the bridge. Of course the two men had kept in touch down the years, but people change and life moves on, and who could say whether they'd still click in the way they used to? In the event, he says, he needn't have worried. "All the way through filming, Pedro kept turning to me and saying, 'You know what? You didn't change a bit!' It's like those 22 years didn't happen." Banderas grins. "It was almost like he was annoyed with me."

And what of Almodovar? The ungainly telephone assistant with the bright red briefcase has covered some ground himself. Following Banderas's defection, the director spent a brief period in the doldrums before rebounding with mature, luscious later-period work like All About My Mother, Volver and the Oscar-winning Talk To Her. Today, his reputation is arguably more burnished than ever.

Banderas mulls it over. "In terms of the films, Pedro got more formal, more minimalist. He got rid of all the baroque issues he had before. As a person, he's pretty much the same." He shakes his head. "Maybe he's more profound, more serious, more interested in transcendental things. I said to him several times when we were shooting, 'Hey, Pedro, we have to do a comedy! It's good for you, come on. Let's laugh like we did in the old days. Let's dance and be silly, before we both get too old.'" This time, I think, the mentor can learn from the muse.

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Jude Law interview: 'I was an optimist. A champion of the human spirit'

2011-08-01T01:43:00.000-07:00

Jude Law can't speak about phone hacking. I'm told this by his publicist before the interview. And when I bring it up during our chat – it's the day after the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks have given testimonies to the Commons committee – Law smiles and makes a zipping action with his finger across his lips. "I just can't because I'm in legal proceedings and it's in various stages with various people, and part of that is classified, and they've promised to keep it quiet if I keep it quiet, so I've got to be really careful. But believe me, there's an awful lot I want to say, though. An awful lot."

But then he can't not speak about it either, because he's right at the very heart of it all. The peak phone-hacking years coincided with the peak Jude Law tabloid-mania years and he has not one case pending against News International but three. It's a very big deal, not just to him – his relationship with the tabloid press, and particularly News International, has both defined and circumscribed his life for much of the past decade – but a big deal, too, in terms of what will happen to Rupert Murdoch's media empire. His cases are the very crux of the story.

We're in an empty meeting room at the Jerwood Space in south London, where Law is in the thick of rehearsals for his new play, an Eugene O'Neill revival, Anna Christie. It starts at the Donmar Warehouse this week, and his head is full of it: it's a gritty love story set in 1920 between a prostitute and a ship's stoker. "I've got really sucked into the world of the play," he says. "So it's very much get up, go to rehearse, go home, learn lines, go to bed." And watch the news. He's right in the middle of one drama – he plays the ship's stoker, Mat Burke – but, of course, he can't help but be compelled by the other thrilling spectacle playing itself out on the television news. "I mean, of course I'm watching it," he says. "Who isn't?"

It's just so dramatic, I say, isn't it?

"It's a movie. It's a scene from a movie."

And you've already got your role sorted, I say, meaning that, of course, if it ever was a film, he could simply play himself. But he doesn't catch my drift.

"James, you mean?" And then realises his mistake. "Oh! You mean myself? Oh dear. I can't believe I said that." But, of course, he'd be brilliant as James Murdoch. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before. He's specialised in characters who have an edge, a slightly slippery elusiveness, and there are obvious overtones of what is still, perhaps, his most famous role – the role that saw him burst into public consciousness in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley in 1999: the heir to a shipping fortune, Dickie Greenleaf. There really is more than a touch of Dickie Greenleaf to James Murdoch, isn't there, I say.

"Oh dear," he says. "I've got to be really careful what I say here."

He's obviously itching to speak about it. Phone hacking, privacy, press intrusion – these are matters that he has thought long and hard about, but because he can't go into detail, he ends up delivering slightly gnomic one-liners. "The thing is," he says, "it involves us all." What do you mean? "It involves us all. All of us. That's the closest I can come to talking about it. We're all involved. We're all complicit. On some level, if you think about what has happened and what will come out in the end. I think it's easy to think that things are mending if we think, 'Oh things are over now.' Or: 'It's their fault.' But we're all complicit."

Do you think it's just the beginning, I say. "I hope it's just the beginning." And he makes the zipping action across his lips again. "I don't want to quote myself so I'm going to quote someone else. There was an interesting Thought for the Day on Radio 4 yesterday. I came in halfway through so I don't know who it was, but he was talking about Murdoch being sorry. No, not being sorry, he was saying that he was asking for atonement. He was asking for forgiveness. And the guy said, he hasn't been judged yet. He hasn't any right to ask for that yet because we still have to judge him. And judgment is what this whole thing is about. They judge people. Those papers have judged people. I have been judged. They have yet to all be judged, and I hope they are ready for it."

He's referring, of course, to the time when, for a while, he was one half of the most glamorous couple on earth, the Jude Law-Sienna Miller coupling, a gift to tabloid editors and celebrity magazines everywhere. He was the Oscar-nominated, chisel-jawed actor (he was shortlisted for his part in The Talented Mr Ripley and Minghella's next film, Cold Mountain), and Miller, whose face launched a million boho skirts, was his golden-haired consort. They seemed to embody beauty and talent and a certain slightly louche London-LA lifestyle at the heart of the Primrose Hill-Hollywood Hills nexus, right up until the News of the World printed a story which detailed how Law had had an affair with his children's nanny and all tabloid hell broke loose. Miller left. Law made a public apology. Soap opera ensued. And then just as that was dying down, in 2009, another story in the News of the World detailed he'd had a fling with an American model, Samantha Burke, who was subsequently carrying his child.

They're obviously not incidents that Law is particularly proud of, but they're also not incidents which have got anything to do with his day job – acting – and what the phone-hacking case seems to have done, I say, is to throw open the whole concept of privacy. Of precisely who is entitled to a private life and what that means. "Well, again I use this word judgment. It's someone thinking that they have the right to have a moral judgment when a) there is no recourse. I'm not going to be able to morally judge them back and say, 'Well, let me look at your life.' And b) is that healthy? For everyone reading that… what about the person reading that who's done a similar thing. You know it's part of life. Don't make moral judgments, just give me some information. Give me some facts. Get off my page."

Jude Law shot at the Jerwood Space in London. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

The new play, Anna Christie, is part of the final season of the Donmar's artistic director, Michael Grandage, who in 2009 directed Law in Hamlet, a role that saw him feted by the critics and nominated for an Olivier award. He started out in the theatre and was a successful stage actor long before he was an international film star: he was nominated for his first Olivier (best newcomer) for his first West End play, Les Parents Terribles.

I wonder if he's nostalgic for that period of his life: when he had success without this all-encompassing fame. "I don't really look back, if I'm honest. I've always been someone who's really tried to live in the here and now. My memory isn't very good so maybe that's why, but it just seems like I've been living this life, my current chapter, for a really long time and I don't really remember what it was like before. It's just been sort of ingrained in me. What I deal with day to day."

He has a whole slew of new films coming out later in the year, but he was also determined to go back to the theatre.

"I was still very excited by my experience of playing Hamlet and was keen to keep the relationship with the theatre up. I'd really dropped the baton and had a gap of about seven years and I didn't want that to happen again."

So he's back and while Hamlet was a great triumph, it was overshadowed in some ways by the Samantha Burke episode ("Jude knows he's been a Bard boy" was one of the headlines), and this time around, it's inevitable that phone hacking will also cast a certain light. But then the play, he says, and his character in particular, is about youth and experience, and loss of innocence, and the gaining of knowledge, themes which are close to his heart too, and which have preoccupied him for much of the last few years.

His 30s (he's 38 now) have been, at best, a mixed time. "I think everyone goes through chapters in their life and there was a time when I wasn't feeling terribly positive about what I was contributing to film, or wasn't feeling as if I was going in the direction I wanted and I re-evaluated what I was doing. I've never been a fan of just doing. I like to do things for a reason."

As a young man, he was a self-described idealist. "I was an optimist, a great champion of the human spirit. And I lost that for a time. I feel like I've regained a bit of that in the last few years but there was a period of my life in which I had a very low opinion of people in general."

What, I say? Everybody? The entire human race?

"Well, yeah. I just felt a little bit down on what people seemed to be interested in. And down on what the general consensus of what the interesting things were. It was just so far away from what I found interesting and what I was interested in and what I found fascinating about people. It just felt like this slurry pit."

And at the heart of the slurry pit was the tabloid press. It's hard to overstate how profoundly his experience of the press seems to have affected his life. And how profoundly, potentially, his life could now influence the press. Because the three cases he is bringing against News International are some of the most crucial, and possibly damaging, of them all. The first accuses the News of the World of tapping his and his assistant's phone in New York in 2003: the first case to be brought that is alleged to have happened on US soil and which opens the way for News International to be prosecuted in the US, potentially jeopardising Murdoch's entire American news operation. Another is against the Sun for allegedly hacking into his phone in 2005 and 2006 – when Rebekah Brooks was editor – and which suggests the problem went much wider than just the News of the World. And the third is against the News of the World which has been selected to be a test case in a civil litigation action brought by 30 public figures. His case was selected to determine how far up the chain of command the decision went: Law's QC alleges it was a "very senior News of the World executive" who authorised Law's phone to be hacked.

But it goes even deeper than that. When looking through old cuttings, I find an interview that Jude Law did with the Observer in 2003 before any of this came to light, in which he talked about two instances in which he called the police to the house he was then sharing with his wife, Sadie Frost, and their children, and which subsequently ended up in the newspapers. And another instance in which his decree nisi was sent directly from the high court to a British tabloid "before it was sent to me". It was, he claimed, "the high court and then the police selling stories, so how are you going to live in the country and feel safe?"

I read back his quotes to him and he nods. "That's right, yeah. That's where I've been. That's where a lot of people in this country have been living for years."

You really felt like the establishment wasn't working? That it was corrupt?

"Yes. Truly. That's certainly how I felt. I was aware back then that certain avenues, even the most official ones, would ultimately lead to media exposure so you were left with a situation where you don't know quite where to go. I've been in scenarios, several times, often involved in being chased, often involved being stalked, having my privacy infringed upon, and not been able to go to the police because having done it in the past I knew that those stories would then end up being leaked.

"Having said that, I've also been treated really well by the police where they've been really respectful and really helpful, so it's clearly individuals."

But it's a fundamental pillar of democracy, I say, to have a police force that you can trust…

"Apparently, yes. It's funny, isn't it? It does come down to fundamentals. I still believe in the democracy of our parliament. Even though none of it has clearly been working. But I still believe in it, I have to. I also, for the first time for a long time, wouldn't want to live anywhere else, even though it seems like the pillars of our institutions are crumbling. I went through a long period of feeling really uncomfortable in this country, in this town in particular, just feeling really harassed and chased, and really hating it.

"And I couldn't move because my children are growing up here, and their mum lives here, and we've got a really good setup where we have a very healthy 50-50 custody arrangement and we live close by, so moving abroad was just impossible. But I came back in 2009 from New York – I'd been living there for three months with the kids – and I completely fell in love with London again."

What he's done, he says, is to "work out a way around the system". There's been a process of renegotiation, of finding a way of being in the city with his children – Rafferty, 14, Iris, 10, and Rudy, eight (he's also supporting Sophia, 22 months, his daughter born to Samantha Burke in the US). "I've created a haven that works for me and my family that hasn't necessarily involved the law. That's just my way of doing things. Having said that, it's not like I've been a prisoner in my home. I don't want some sort of sob story. I still enjoy a very normal life with my kids. We use trains and buses and that's often the best way. If you build up some sort of psychological bubble around you, I think you're asking for trouble."

In some ways, it sounds as if Law has got his midlife crisis out of the way early. But then he's done everything early. Growing up in Blackheath, south-east London, with his teacher parents and an older sister, he joined his first theatre at 12 – the National Youth Music Theatre – left school at 17 to film his first television series, Families, and had his first child by the age of 23.

"People often say that to me [that he did things early]. Especially about being a father, but it was just the way I did it. It never felt like an issue at the time… But I really feel that the years between 40 and 50 are going to be the 10 most productive years of my life. It's just a great age to be an actor. It's a bit of a minefield being 20 because you've got all these aspirations and ideals. Well, I had. I had all these aspirations and artistic ideas that I wanted to fulfil. And then you get cynical. And for me, my 30s have been about re-evaluating what I'm doing. And my 40s and 50s, I think, will be a really interesting time. I want to get back into production, which I've done a bit of, and I've always been interested in directing and my kids are all at an age where I don't have to be tied to London necessarily."

He wasn't even sure, for a time, if he wanted to carry on being an actor. "But I'm a father and I have to provide and that's my job." He was named after Jude the Obscure ("my mum just liked the book") and what he wanted more than anything was to be recognised by the world "but I don't know if I do any more. I did and I think any performer who claims not to have, at some point in their career, is probably telling a fib. But there's part of you, or at least part of me, where you think, 'Oh God. What will people make of this?' But it doesn't have a bearing on why you're doing it. It certainly didn't when I was doing Hamlet.

"It was the doing it which was the achievement. It was a very inner experience."

As a younger man, Law struggled against being defined by his looks. At 38, even heavily muffled by the beard he's been growing for Anna Christie, he's still an undeniably handsome man. But there's a wider range of roles available to him now: he had the looks of a romantic lead, but always hankered after the character roles. "I just think that I felt a bit disappointed that that's what people wanted me to be, whereas I felt that I had lots of things to offer so I wanted to choose roles that went against it."

Growing older has possibly come as something of a relief. His new films due out later this year include Anna Karenina, with a new script by Tom Stoppard, in which he plays not dashing Vronsky, but cuckolded Karenin opposite Keira Knightley. He is also reunited with two of the cast of The Talented Mr Ripley – Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow – in a hotly anticipated Steven Soderbergh thriller about a killer virus, Contagion.

And his role in Anna Christie has made him think about ageing too. "I guess part of it is simply wising up. Growing up. There's an interesting scene in the play where my character criticises his father, Chris, because he blames the sea for making his life a misery, whereas Mat loves the sea, the sea is everything. You rove the earth, he says, and you don't give a damn for landlubbers, and yet what you're actually hearing is the innocence of youth. And what's happened to Chris is that life has happened to him. He's lost his wife, he's lost his brothers, he's lost his father… life has an effect on us all. It's why we don't look younger as we get older."

In Law's case, getting older, has been accompanied by a rather enforced getting of wisdom. It's been a long, hard, public process, although I'd read one interview in which he'd described the washing of his dirty laundry in public as "liberating" in some ways. "Well, what else are you going to do? I mean, it's either going to force you into a hole and you're going to be a hermit and you're going to be in some sort of state of shame. Or you are going to go, oh well, all right, then. So what? Well, sorry. Am I saying sorry? I don't know. It also makes you look at things on a broader level. Don't tell me there isn't anyone who has done things they regret, or done things they shouldn't have. Or done things that are silly. Or said silly things. That's life, right? That's what's wonderful about life. We all do this stuff we shouldn't do. And then we say, I won't do that again. I mean, so be it."

The other effect of it has been that he's wary not just of the press, and interviews, but of talking about anything; his life, his work. "I just want to be seen doing my work and I'm just a bit tired of being talked about for what I'm wearing, or what I'm not wearing, or what my hairline is doing, or who I've been seen with. Any of that. Jesus. I don't want any of this. I don't even want to talk about my acting, because I think the acting should just talk for itself." He even doesn't really want to talk about the causes he supports.

I've met Law before, on two occasions, when he's come out to support the work of the Belarus Free Theatre and its artistic director, our mutual friend, the dynamic Natalia Kaliada. On both occasions, he was notably unstarry, simply turning up when asked and doing his best to be supportive in a commendably low-key way. He just doesn't seem to play the A-list celeb, but then he "hates the word celebrity… which means that I am in some sort of messy, mushy bracket with people who have won reality shows and chefs and socialites, and it's just not something I see myself as. I don't invite people into my home and I've never courted the press unless I'm talking to them about some work I'm doing. And I don't do that very much. I used to talk to the press about things like this and I even find that pretty hard now, because there's just been so much cynicism. Why are you banging your drum about this? Or why are you going on about that?"

His other big cause is Peace One Day, an organisation which is attempting to make 21 September recognised as a day of peace throughout the world. In many ways it's an outlandishly ambitious idea, dreamed up by an Englishman called Jeremy Gilley. Law agreed to make a video appeal for Gilley back in 2007 and ended up travelling out to Afghanistan with him to try and make the ceasefire actually happen. What's interesting to me about this is that for all Law's world-weariness, his talk of the "slurry pit" and the self-described "cynicism" that has marked his 30s, this is not the action of a cynic. Two weeks ago, at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, I heard Gilley talk about how he came to set up Peace One Day – a preposterous tale of how he'd had this idea "because basically I was really worried about humanity" and had tried to organise the whole thing from a bedroom in his mum's house. And how for a decade he struggled to get anyone to pay any attention to it at all, until, that is, he got Law involved.

Gilley is an idealist. A dreamer through and through. And to be sucked into his world, I say, it seems quite obvious to me, that you'd have to be something of a dreamer too. And in some ways, it seems as if the trip marked Law's return to himself. "It's interesting. Because I've never really put those pieces together like that," he says. "But yes." And he's rightly proud of the trip: in 2007, Peace One Day managed to broker a one-day ceasefire between the Taliban and UN forces and to arrange for 1.4 million children to be inoculated against polio on that day. A similar result was achieved in 2009 too.

But then he's wary again. "I have to be careful. I don't want to be too highfalutin. It's also been that working with people in my field has reignited the possibilities of what you can do in acting. I've just had this fantastic experience in Cannes, judging these incredible films from around the world. They were just great pieces of art and it really made me believe in the medium all over again."

If Afghanistan seems to have been one turning point in his life, the phone-hacking cases will almost certainly be another. "I think people in the public eye are often seen as cosseted and spoiled. This idea of what have you got to complain about? But when you come down to it, it's basic civil rights and basic demands of privacy. The argument that 'We write about you so we make you money' is just not true. And what blew this all open was the public outcry about the appalling abuse of people in heightened places of anguish. And yet in a way, people's privacy being invaded, whoever they are, is always the same issue. And if you turn it around and say, 'Well, would you like that done to you?', you really wouldn't. Because the bottom line is that it's your life being invaded, being used to make stories, not to report stories, but to make stories."

So, does it constitute a revolution, I ask him, as some people have suggested? "We'll have to wait and see, won't we? You never know when you're in the middle of something. You can only tell later." And the same probably applies to him too. It's yet to be seen what the net effect of this will be on his life. But he could be right – his 40s may well be his best years yet.

Anna Christie is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 from 4 August to 8 October. Box office: 0844 871 7624; www.donmarwarehouse.com

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Poetry – review

2011-08-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

Yun Jeong-hie in the Korean drama Poetry: 'a remarkable central performance'.

The body of a teenage girl floats down a river in Korea. Mija, a neatly dressed, 65-year-old, working-class widow, is diagnosed with early Alzheimer's. Every afternoon, she attends to an old man suffering from a stroke who seeks sexual relief from her and she waits hand and foot on her lazy, ungrateful grandson while her daughter is working in Seoul.

PoetryProduction year: 2010Countries: Rest of the world, South Korea Cert (UK): 12ARuntime: 139 minsDirectors: Lee Chang-Dong, Lee ChangdongCast: An Haesong, David Lee, Kim Hee-Jeong, Kim Hira, Kim Yongbaek, Yun JungheeMore on this film

Meanwhile, she joins a poetry class at a social centre and wonders about personal creativity. What unites the various strands of an apparently simple woman's life and a society she struggles to understand? The answers are gradually provided by a thoughtful, cleverly developed script.

As her mind becomes clouded by dementia, Mija is drawn into a conspiracy by a group of parents at a school to cover up a suicide brought about by rape and humiliation involving her grandson. Steadily, she acts with a new moral and social awareness, organises what remains of her life and discovers the inspiration to write poetry. A fascinating, satisfying film with a remarkable central performance.

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Story of love and tomatoes leads Bollywood's global charge

2011-07-31T23:03:00.000-07:00

Actors Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif in the Tomatina scene from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

It took more than 16 tonnes of tomatoes to turn the coming-of-age film, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, into the latest international cinema hit from Bollywood. The feelgood road movie's subsequent huge success, both inside and outside India, is being taken as evidence that the country's cinema is ready for global lift-off.

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Won't Get Life Back Again) follows three young friends on a raucous trip through Spain. The film has grossed more than $3.8m internationally, the best figures for an Indian release this year. It has also led the charge in a record-breaking domestic summer at the box-office.

The tomatoes were used by the film's director, Zoya Akhtar, to recreate the chaos of the La Tomatina festival in the small Valencian town of Bunol. Such attention to detail was another sign of a growing confidence that Bollywood could eventually mount a serious challenge to Hollywood for world cinema takings.

London-based Kishore Lulla, executive chairman of the film company Eros International, believes that thanks to India's economic boom, its film business will grow exponentially during the coming decade. "Once that happens, marriage between Hollywood and Bollywood will take place," he said in a recent interview. "Bollywood will be of a size that will matter to the world."

Eros, which purchased and marketed Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, has seen its share price rise by more than 10% in the past month alone. Established by Lulla's father in Mumbai in 1977, the company's initial focus was on distributing Bollywood films abroad. Things began to change after Lulla moved to London and took over control a decade later. Today Eros has an annual turnover of 75 films as a producer, co-producer or buyer, and made a net profit last year of $55m on revenues of $164m.

"Eros began in a very small way, but today we're India's biggest vertically integrated company," said Kamal Jain, the chief financial officer in Mumbai. "We have the largest film library with 1,100 films; we dub films into 27 languages and distribute them in 50 countries; and we have a presence in every segment of the business, from production to satellite TV to new media."

India produces around 1,100 films a year in several languages, with Bollywood a major centre for Hindi film production. Management consultancy KPMG sees tremendous potential for growth for the media and entertainment industry during the next five years, from the current $17bn annually to an estimated $29bn by 2015. Bollywood moguls such as Lulla appear confident that $100bn is possible in 10 years.

Their optimism is based on demography. More than 350 million Indians are now ranked as middle class, most of them young with much more money to spend than their parents had. There is also a diaspora of 50 million South Asians with estimated assets of $1 trillion and a passion for cinema.

Bollywood is changing as India surges ahead. "The film business became more professional during the last decade once the government made bank finance available," said Jehil Thakkar from KPMG . "Professionalism still remains a challenge, but companies such as Eros have brought in a new dynamism."

The old drawbacks in Indian creative industries have also begun to recede. Producers are no longer dependent upon shady financiers, many of them from the criminal underworld. Professionally managed film companies have brought in American-style studio practices.

Though the number of cinema screens is still very low for a country of India's size, multiplexes in glittering new malls charge high ticket prices and are increasingly attracting a well-heeled audience. And diversification has taken away the earlier life-and-death dependence on box-office hits. "Even before a film gets released it brings in 60% of its income," said Jain. "Slicing and dicing is the name of the game. We pre-sell the music, the satellite TV rights, the radio rights, new media such as mobile telephone ringtones – which is seeing enormous growth – inflight entertainment rights, and so on. To top it all, our huge library accounts for 20% of our revenue, providing considerable financial stability."

But even if Bollywood films are better made and better marketed today, they still sing an old tune. As Lulla said, "all Indian films are love stories – we Indians are very emotional people. Like Hollywood in the 30s, it's escapism cinema."

Zoya Akhtar believes that the huge impact of satellite TV is changing audience tastes in India, but the content of Bollywood films limits their appeal internationally. "In India, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara made more money than Harry Potter, which is crazy," she said. "But for a non-South Asian audience, I would make the film differently, I would change the idiom."

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Best and worst of Britain's subsidised film-makers revealed

2011-07-31T22:15:00.000-07:00

In the balance ... the majority of subsidised films in the UK (James Marsh's Man on Wire excepted) haven't repaid their debts. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Who is Britain's most commercially successful film-maker of the past five years – at least among those backed by lottery money from the UK Film Council? Take a bow, James Marsh. His Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire repaid 100% of its UKFC investment, and his chimpanzee documentary Project Nim is set to follow suit.

According to figures published quietly in Hansard last week by culture minister Ed Vaizey, only two other films since 2006 – St Trinian's and The King's Speech – have so far returned their lottery cash in full. Streetdance 3D is also expected to do so.

And who must own up to being the least successful of Britain's lottery-subsidised film-makers? According to the figures, that unwanted honour goes to Stephen Frears. Two of his recent films have received some ?1.7m in funding from the UK Film Council – ?1m for Cheri and ?780,000 for Tamara Drewe – but have yet to pay back a single penny.

The information has come to light after Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt asked Vaizey to provide details on returns from all films backed by the UKFC, and he duly obliged in a written answer. Vaizey identified 33 films which recouped some or all of the lottery funding they were awarded between April 2006 and March this year, when the UKFC closed and its duties passed to the British Film Institute.

But this answer failed to mention all those movies that have paid back nothing. A trawl through the data on the UKFC website reveals a further 25 films in the same time period – between 2006 and 2009 – which received at least ?300,000 but have paid back precisely zero. (For the sake of fairness, our research excluded films from 2010 that haven't had time to earn anything, as well as experimental projects awarded less than ?300,000).

By 31 March 2011, the date of its shutdown, the UKFC had, from its investment of ?41.1m into these 58 films, earned a grand total of ?8.1m. That 20% rate of return may seem modest, but many films – particularly those from 2009 – still have a lot of earning ahead of them.

There are some obvious quirks on the list. The King's Speech has officially recouped 95% because the UKFC gave the producers a 5% share – and is likely to single-handedly double the average recoupment figures when its profits start to flow back to the BFI over the next few years.

Marsh's Project Nim is currently showing a zero return, but that will change dramatically when its recent American sale to HBO is banked. Even Tamara Drewe is expected to save some of Frears's blushes by paying 20-30%, although the expensive Cheri, with its ?23m budget, is almost certainly a lost cause.

There are some unexpected success stories, however. Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy has paid back a surprisingly robust 87% of its ?1.2m award, despite only grossing ?5m worldwide. Jane Campion's Bright Star managed an 81% payback from just ?8m in receipts. Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham has already returned 80% from a ?9m box office take. All earned their money from strong foreign sales.

By contrast, Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray grossed ?15m worldwide, but has reportedly repaid nothing, a victim of its sizable budget and an underlying deal structure which left the UKFC at the back of the queue for repayment.

Other losers include expensive flops Brideshead Revisited and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which have both returned a mere 1% of the ?1.4m they each received. The Michael Caine vigilante film Harry Brown was a notable UK box office hit in 2009, but has repaid only 2% of the ?1m it was given from lottery funds.

Films not mentioned by Vaizey, and therefore drawing a complete blank, include Stephen Poliakoff's 1939, which received ?970,000, Armando Iannucci's In the Loop (?515,000), Michael Winterbottom's Genova (?500,000), Anand Tucker's When Did You Last See Your Father? (?570,000), Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts (?800,000), and Gabor Csupo's The Secret of Moonacre (?1.23m).

By international standards, any project that pays back more than half its public subsidy is doing well. Outside the UK, it's increasingly rare for any subsidised film to recoup 100%. But the UKFC always took a more aggressive approach to getting its money back than other national film agencies. In fact, its insistence on doing so was arguably one reason for its downfall. Producers complained that the UKFC used its recoupment to pay its own overheads at the expense of film-makers.

That's why the UKFC changed its terms in its final year to share its position with producers and reinvest its recoupment into production. But by then it was too late. Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt decided the UKFC was paying its staff too much, and required elimination.

But there was a reason why the UKFC execs were paid so well. Getting money back from tricksy distributors isn't a job for amateurs. Without the sleuthing skills of the UKFC's debt collectors, perhaps only half of that ?8m would have been found.

There are already whispers that the BFI isn't quite so hot on the trail. But it needs to be. The acid test will be how much of the King's Speech income it can claw back from the Weinstein Company. It's unlikely to be a mission for the fainthearted.

• Read the full figures regarding recoupment of UK Film Council awards between April 1 2006 and March 31 2011

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Whisky Galore – review

2011-07-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

High spirits: Basil Radford in Whisky Galore. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The year 1949 was a pretty miserable time in Britain. Postwar austerity was at its height. Many city centres were still largely bomb sites. The cold war was getting chillier. The British film industry was in crisis after the Labour government had imposed a punitive tax on American films, which led to Hollywood studios withholding their product. Then suddenly, in the early summer, three pictures opened on consecutive weeks that together defined what we now know as "the Ealing comedy". The films got darker and Ealing Studios' reputation greater as the month wore on.

Whisky GaloreProduction year: 1949Country: UKCert (UK): URuntime: 81 minsDirectors: Alexander MackendrickCast: Basil Radford, Joan GreenwoodMore on this film

In the first, Passport to Pimlico, a London borough, supported by a recently discovered medieval document, declares itself to be part of ancient Burgundy and thus an independent state. In the second, Whisky Galore, the thirsty inhabitants of a remote Scottish village hijack the cargo of a whisky-laden merchantman wrecked on their shores during the second world war and defy the authorities to repossess it. The third film, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, has as its hero a bitterly aggrieved Victorian outcast from an aristocratic family who avenges his mother's death by killing all the relatives between himself and a seat in the Lords.

The populist politics of discontent were later to be identified as Poujadism, a term attached to a short-lived revolt of the petite bourgeoisie against the stifling bureaucracy of France's Fourth Republic, and led by shopkeeper Pierre Poujade in 1953. These Ealing films were skilfully scripted, visually observant and performed by what we now see as a rep company of stars and character actors, and a collegial team working behind the camera.

The comedies were part of their times and yet transcend them – they live on to comment on later eras. Whisky Galore, for instance, based on a novel by the early Scottish nationalist Compton Mackenzie, is a colourful contribution to the current debate on the future of Scotland.

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Cross of Iron

2011-07-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

James Coburn as the 'undemonstratively courageous' Sgt Steiner in Cross of Iron. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

In this Anglo-German film of Willi Heinrich's 1956 novel, life is very noisy on the Eastern Front in 1943 as ex-US Marine Sam Peckinpah turns a savage but compassionate eye upon a demoralised German unit fighting a rearguard action against the Russians by the Black Sea. In particular, he examines the conflict between an ambitious, cowardly Prussian aristocrat, Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell), and the undemonstratively courageous Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn). James Mason as the commanding officer and David Warner as his adjutant are both first rate, as are Coburn and Schell. This was Peckinpah's last important work and his only war movie. Robert Aldrich, whose war movies include Attack and The Dirty Dozen, was greatly admired by Peckinpah. Aldrich had wanted to film Heinrich's novel ever since it was published and except for Peckinpah's characteristic use of slow motion, this classic movie (only available on Blu-ray) is fairly close to the way he'd have made it.

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A Better Life – review

2011-07-31T17:31:00.000-07:00

Jose Julian and Demian Bichir in Chris Weitz's tense A Better Life.

Chris Weitz is nothing if not eclectic. Having worked alone or in collaboration with his brother, Paul, on the envelope-pushing American Pie, screen versions of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and Nick Hornby's About a Boy and one of the overwrought Twilight teen-vampire films, he's now made what is in effect a transposition to California of the 1948 neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves, the work of another highly eclectic moviemaker, Vittorio De Sica.

A Better LifeProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 97 minsDirectors: Chris WeitzCast: Bobby Soto, Chelsea Rendon, Demian Bichir, Josie JulianMore on this film

The oppressed hero is now an illegal immigrant from Mexico (played by leading Mexican actor Demian Bichir) and the bike has become a pick-up truck, an essential tool for his job as a gardener in Los Angeles. The thief is again a pathetic figure in as desperate a position as the hero. The son, however, is no longer an adoring little boy but a surly teenager estranged from his father. In many ways, the protagonist's situation is worse here than in the Italian original, because any false move could put him in the hands of the immigration department, with the almost certain prospect of deportation. It's a small, convincing, tightly constructed movie about an urgent, seemingly insoluble problem.

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This much I know: Samuel L Jackson

2011-07-31T16:08:00.000-07:00

"The best advice I've been given is: when the camera passes you, look like there's something on your mind": Samuel L Jackson Photograph: James Cheadle/James Cheadle /eyevine

I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I'd learned to play golf when I was younger. It's my peace of mind for the day: when I'm off work I'm at the golf course by 6.30 in the morning.

I've heard I have a temper. I can get annoyed. I try not to, because I always look at film sets as a place of joy – we're coming to work to make believe.

All my theatre training has served me well in terms of preparation – my agent tells me my greatest flaw is that when I go to work on a movie set I expect everyone to be as prepared as I am.

I'm surrounded by myself in my office. When I look around I see lots of little "me"s – it's kinda fun.

Being famous is something I enjoy. I'm not going to deny it, because it allows me access to a lot of things. It's good to be famous and liked, not famous and disliked, put it that way. People like me.

The best advice I've ever been given is: whenever the camera passes you, always look like there's something on your mind.

It amazes people to see me walking around by myself. I guess they get used to famous people having bodyguards. I walk the streets of London all the time. People say: "Do you know who you look like?" and I go: "No, who?"

Lots of people quote my lines at me. That's how I met Marlon Brando. I was at a benefit when this voice appeared behind me doing Ezekiel 25:17 [Jackson's speech from Pulp Fiction] and it was Marlon. I was just like: "Get outta here." He gave me his phone number and I gave him mine. From time to time I'd get a message saying Mr Brando wants you to call him, and every time I called it would say it was a Chinese restaurant.

I go and see my own films all the time. I'm not one of those actors who claims they can't stand to watch themselves. I'm like: well, if I can't stand to watch me, why would I expect you to go pay to watch me?

I'm most proud of the fact that my daughter is a well-rounded individual who has never been arrested and never been in a tabloid.

I read way too much to have a favourite book – I'm always looking for new stuff to read. At the moment I'm reading a history of the word "motherfucker". I'm actually in it as one of the great purveyors of the word.

There's a distinct correlation between me being successful and me being clean. Rehab gave me a chance to find out that I could get outside myself and be OK with who I am without a substance. Since I became successful I've been offered more cocaine than I could ever possibly use, but I don't feel the need to do it.

I enjoy every day above ground that I get to have. Getting older is just one of those things that happens – if you keep getting up every day, you're going to get older. I'm amazed when I look in the mirror sometimes. I go: wow, do you know how old you are?

Samuel L Jackson is hosting the Fitflop Shooting Stars Benefit 2011, raising vital funds for Make-A-Wish Foundation UK (make-a-wish.org.uk)

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Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché – review

2011-07-31T14:32:00.000-07:00

Jeanne Moreau in Francois Truffaut's 1962 film version of Jules et Jim. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

A shadowy figure amid the 20th-century beau monde – friend to Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and buyer for the American art collector John Quinn – Henri-Pierre Roche waited until his 70s to publish his teasingly semi-autobiographical debut novel, which became one of the 20th century's most famous depictions of a menage-a-trois.

Jules and Jim are best friends – perhaps soulmates – who together pursue a charmed life of bohemian indulgence in turn-of-the-century Paris. Drifting from liaison to liaison they share their women as easily as wine, without jealousy or regret – and then they meet Kate. With her "archaic" smile and lips made for "milk – and blood", Kate is obedient only to the diktat: "He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword." Marrying first Jules and then Jim, Kate draws all three into an ecstatic cycle of intimacy and betrayal, unleashing a seemingly limitless capacity for tenderness, forgiveness and revenge until their passions eventually burn out.

Roche's guileless prose lends the quality of a parable to his story, which is startling in its erotic candour and its visionary pursuit of love. Kate owes much – perhaps too much – to the figure of the eternal feminine: cruel, beautiful and volatile, she is more archetype than actuality. But that is not really Roche's concern – instead he probes the "essential quality of our intimate emotions", laying bare the complex and paradoxical dynamics of desire.

Today the novel is eclipsed by Francois Truffaut's celebrated nouvelle vague film starring Jeanne Moreau, and Truffaut contributes a valuable afterword to this edition. Reflecting on the film in 2000, Moreau described it as "the dreamed image of amorous life"; in its exuberant rejection of conventional morality, Roche's novel describes an emotional logic that is both inscrutable and compelling.

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All aboard the Floating Cinema

2011-07-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

Ship shape ... The Floating Cinema. Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Guardian

It is possibly the only cinema in the UK equipped with life jackets and buoyancy aids – and it is in the vanguard of the cultural events that will surround the Olympics. Two years ago the Cole was a tattered narrowboat with no roof, plumbing or electrics: now it has been transformed into a 12-seat floating cinema that for the next two months will be navigating the waterways of east London.

The Floating Cinema is funded by the Arts Council and commissioned by the Olympic Delivery Authority and it is the brainchild of curator Emma Underhill. "The waterways are the arteries that run through the Olympic parks," she said, "so when we were invited to put forward a proposal for a project that would engage the communities that live in the host boroughs it seemed natural to explore the waterways."

On a traditional British summer evening with the weather veering wildly from lashing rain to bright sunshine, the Floating Cinema hosted a talk from screen historian Ian Christie. As the narrowboat set off from Old Ford Lock in east London, assistant curator Laura wound the windlass to allow water in the lock to reach a high enough level for the boat to move through.

Christie gave a PowerPoint lecture about films shot in the area. He pointed to gas holders near Mare Street Bridge featured in David Cronenberg's Spider and indicated locations used in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies and Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things.

As the boat cruised through the green water of the canal, talk was occasionally punctuated by cries of "Oh my God! A floating cinema!" from bemused drunken young people staggering along the footpaths that line the canal. The cinema's programme has been created by Hackney-based arts group Somewhere, which comprises Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope.

"The films we are showing are mostly documentaries," said Pope, "and they are all relevant to the canal or this part of London."

So no chance of a narrowboat screening of Titanic or The Poseidon Adventure? "I'm afraid not." As well as talks, the Floating Cinema will also present larger outdoor screenings for canal-side audiences – with the films projected from the boat – and informal drop-ins on Thursdays that don't require pre-booking, and where visitors can meet the crew and watch a selection of short films. There are also guided tours, including some to the Olympic site.

"The only way the public can ordinarily go to the site is on a bus tour," said Pope, "but we are taking tours right into the Olympic park on a part of the river that has only recently been dredged. It will give people the chance to see the stadium, the Anish Kapoor orbital and the Zaha Hadid aquatic park."

The rain had cleared and the sun was out by the time the Cole moored up at the Waterhouse Restaurant in Shoreditch. Those who had booked tickets for the film tour disembarked and a lively queue had already formed for the evening's film screening. At the front of the queue was a small group of Germans. "I am with some friends from Berlin," said Nicholas, "and this seems a nice way to show them London and have a beer."

"I like this is alternative way to see London," said Charlene, "and I think its cool there is renewed interested in the city ahead of the Olympics." The Floating Cinema is due to end in September but its creators say if they can find more funding they hope to revive it next year when the Olympics finally reaches London.

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Captain America: The First Avenger 3D – review

2011-07-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

Chris Evans as comic superhero Captain America: 'deadly dull'.

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes," says someone in Brecht's Life of Galileo, to which Galileo replies: "No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes!" Make that superheroes and I'd say: "Hear, hear." Hollywood, working with Marvel Comics, is currently giving us a surfeit of these caped crusaders with camp costumes and special powers, the latest being the deadly dull Captain America, originally created as a comic book figure in 1941.

Captain America: The First AvengerProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 124 minsDirectors: Joe JohnstonCast: Chris Evans, Dominic Cooper, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Natalie Dormer, Richard Armitage, Sebastian Stan, Stanley Tucci, Tommy Lee JonesMore on this film

He's a 90lb weakling turned into a powerful democratic protagonist by a German emigre scientist (Stanley Tucci) as the US enters the second world war. He has an opposite number in Hitler's Nazi superhero, Red Skull, a Teutonic villain with a strong physical resemblance to Harry Potter's nemesis, Voldemort. There are borrowings from the superior Raiders of the Lost Ark (for which Captain America's director won a visual effects Oscar) and it's altogether inferior to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It ends, depressingly, with a trailer for a sequel due next May.

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This week's new DVD & Blu-ray

2011-07-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

Dressing up in a silly costume and fighting crime is only heroic in the movies and comics. In real life, it's more likely to be the result of a mental breakdown than a quest for truth, justice and the American way.

It's the real-world approach that Super takes and pursues relentlessly. Rainn Wilson (Dwight from the US The Office) plays a delusional cook whose life collapses when his ex-junkie wife, Liv Tyler, leaves him for local criminal Kevin Bacon. He snaps and becomes The Crimson Bolt, wielding a monkey wrench while delivering his goofy catchphrase, "Shut up, crime!" He teams up with a far too enthusiastic sidekick, Boltie (a very game Ellen Page), and sets out to right wrongs, hospitalising drug dealers and muggers with wrench blows to the head. He also doles out the same punishment for relatively minor infractions like butting into cinema queues. Director James Gunn did his training in the zero-budget exploitation of Troma films before writing the Dawn Of The Dead remake and directing enjoyable monster satire Slither. He's a director who doesn't pull punches, which is what this story needs to work. It's darkly funny, with a message that is far more complex than The Dark Knight, Spider-Man, etc. Plus, with no stupid rocket jetpack to shatter the mood, it kicks Kick-Ass's ass.

DVD & Blu-ray, G2 Pictures

Bittersweet coming of age comedy, directed with bags of style and a sure hand by first-timer Richard Ayoade.

DVD & Blu-ray, Optimum

The Rock stars in a surprisingly merciless and effective revenge thriller. Score by Clint Mansell.

DVD & Blu-ray, Sony

Average Joe becomes a brainiac thanks to an untested pill with sinister origins. Bradley Cooper stars with Robert De Niro in this limited but entertaining thriller.

DVD & Blu-ray, Momentum

Impeccably written, acted and directed classic Ealing comedy. Essential.

DVD & Blu-ray, Optimum

Parisian TV crime thrillers don't come much grittier than this.

DVD, 2 Entertain

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Marcel Lucont: what we French think about your British cinema

2011-07-31T09:36:00.000-07:00

As I say in my wonderful book, What We French Think Of You British … And Where You Are Going Wrong, it is a myth that the French hate the British. Most of the time we choose simply to ignore you. And, of course, the same can be said of British cinema.

When I see what is on offer at most British movie theatres, it is difficult not to recall Truffaut's belief that the words "British" and "cinema" seem to be at odds when placed together in a sentence. Often you seem proud of your productions only when handed statuettes by the USA, like only being proud of a child for winning an eating contest, while we insist on a certain quota of French films being shown in our cinemas (for which the cinemas, in fact, pay less tax).

The French are keenly aware that cinema is so much more than an accompaniment to popcorn, and here are just some of the myriad ways in which we do it so much better …

Gritty drama Of course Trainspotting elicited pathos here in France: heroin addiction aside, we felt for the Scottish for not even having a body of water to separate them from the English. But for those who require more plausibility than the lead junkie walking off into the sunset, choose monochrome miserablism, choose French, choose La Haine.

Nudity In France, our women are proud enough of their bodies to get naked without the aid of a Chinese gay man. This is reflected in our films, so with French cinema you certainly get more loins for your coins.

Comedy While the French were being amused by the subtle quirks of Tati's Monsieur Hulot, the English were clutching their sides at large-breasted women losing their bikinis, and men saying "phwoooar" or "oooh" a lot. English, you are welcome to the phrase "double-entendre," we have little cause to use it.

Heroes and heroines Our film icons are often more rounded, sometimes in every sense of the word. In a wooing contest, Gerard Depardieu beats Hugh Grant every time, by more than a nose. Audrey Tautou you wish to take home and cuddle. Beatrice Dalle you wish to take home and do things I am told The Guide will not print. Keira Knightley you wish to take home and feed.

Taking our time Like the enjoyment of a fine wine versus a beery binge, French cinema knows how to pace itself. Often I feel a British audience has barely the patience to sit through the trailers, let alone the unfolding Nouvelle Vague masterpieces of Rivette or Rohmer.

Et voila. It is clear that, barring a Leigh or a Loach, British cinema has some way to go before surpassing a Bresson or a Besson. This debate, of course, could go on and on. It is therefore best to admit that I am right and to move on. See you in Cannes.

Marcel Lucont Etc: A Chat Show is at Underbelly Cowgate, 4-28 Aug

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The Light Thief – review

2011-07-31T08:51:00.000-07:00

The Light Thief: 'a touching, pawkily amusing example of satirical tragedy'.

In the godforsaken, physically awesome Kyrgyzstan, left struggling after the break-up of the Soviet Union, an electrician tries to help his impoverished rural neighbours by providing them with illicit free electricity. He falls foul of the bureaucrats for his Robin Hood altruism but is then taken up by exploitative entrepreneurs, who want to use his skills to produce wind-generated power. However, he rebels against their venality, immorality and general corruption and pays a terrible price for his decency and probity.

The Light Thief (Svet-Ake)Production year: 2010Country: Rest of the worldRuntime: 80 minsDirectors: Aktan Arym KubatCast: Aktan Arym Kubat, Asan Amanov, Askat Sulaimanov, Stanbek Toichubaev, Taalaikan AbazovaMore on this film

Written and directed by its star, this is a touching, pawkily amusing example of that fairly rare genre, the satirical tragedy.

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The incidental director

2011-07-31T07:34:00.000-07:00

Gianni Di Gregorio in a scene from The Salt of Life.

Gianni Di Gregorio became successful, suddenly, at 60. But what if he hadn't? How might his life have been? "Allora!" He shakes his head, gummy eyes a-twinkle. "Terribile! Dead under a bridge. Alcoholic, at least." He laughs, sips his wine and rolls a fag, and isn't kidding.

The Salt of LifeProduction year: 2011Country: ItalyRuntime: 90 minsDirectors: Gianni di GregorioCast: Alfonso Santagata, Gianni di Gregorio, Valeria Cavalli, Valeria de FranciscisMore on this film

What changed everything was Mid-August Lunch, which Di Gregorio wrote, directed, starred in and shot at his own flat. A gentle comedy about a man caring for his imperious 93-year-old mother, who then has three extra ageing mammas dumped on him by friends, it won the debut director prize at the Venice film festival in 2008 and hoovered up many other awards. It took ?7m round the world from a budget of ?400,000: a rare Italian arthouse hit, and one that relied on neither melodrama nor glamour (the average cast age nudged 80).

After a career backstage, first in theatre, then assistant directing and writing for film (most fruitfully on Gomorrah), Di Gregorio was thrust into the spotlight. "It was disorientating. But I see it almost as an act of providence. To be able to express yourself like that comes as a positive after years of forced enclosure within one's self. Perhaps I'm not being very rational today, but I feel it to be a natural compensation."

Good for the soul, then, as well as the wallet and, presumably, the personal life. After all, at the time he made Mid-August Lunch, Di Gregorio noticed an unwelcome development: women no longer noticed him. And when they did, it was paternally, not romantically. Nothing like new-found fame to change that, right?

"That's what I thought! Instead it became much more evident that the underlying problem – my age – remained the same. Younger women were out of bounds; not that they'd see me anyway. And older women also would consider me too old. That combination completely threw me. I didn't know what to do.

"It was at that point I began to develop this film as a therapy. Rather than despairing, like my friends, I would try to make light of it, to exorcise my fears." He flashes a sweet, fanged grin. "But as a therapy, it's been absolutely ineffective. Nothing has changed!"

The Salt of Life has Gianni back in a flat with a wife who hasn't shared his bed in years, a student daughter (his real-life daughter), a dog (his own) and no employment other than running errands for them. And for his mother, now in her own villa, living it up with lavish lunches, cared for by an attractive blonde – one of the women Gianni pursues after a pal urges him not to resign himself to a romance-free future. The others include a flirtatious neighbour whose St Bernard he dutifully walks round Rome, an operatic family friend, some identical twins, and an old flame who blames their split on his mother.

It's a view close to Di Gregorio's heart. "I think that mothers in Italy quite deeply affect the romantic and sexual lives of their sons, wherever you are on the social spectrum. Today even more so, because young men are held back by other forces. It's much harder to afford your own home."

Di Gregorio, an only child, was raised by fairly elderly parents under what he describes as formal conditions. His mother, whom he nursed for 10 years before her death, was, he says, "very kind, very lovely. But I was totally enslaved to her. She would say things in the nicest possible way, but it created a relationship that was absolutely impossible to move out of."

And for all The Salt of Life's sunny charm, the domestic servitude set-up feels frightening. Di Gregorio smiles. "Perhaps all those things like food and wine and sun and pleasure are another form of compensation for what is the underlying reality. If you reduce things to a skeleton, then life is terrifying.

"I didn't realise it at the time but it's a film about solitude. These themes of loneliness and melancholy I wanted to keep in the background, but somehow they were pervasive."

For a comedy, it seems steeped in dismay – isolation, even. What does Di Gregorio fear about ageing? "Mental immobility," he says, after a pause. And then: "The passing of that hope of love, of that idea that something still could happen. I think we should have those feelings for ever, until we're 100. But you have to take account of reality: one's own age; that of a potential partner. But that little flame must remain alive."

It's a moving answer: for its frankness and piquancy. And it turns out Di Gregorio is still married. It's clearly a complicated situation – The Salt of Life, he says, is 99% autobiographical. Does he feel it's inevitable that long-term relationships cool?

"You must not pretend a marriage won't have its up and downs, or that you'll have the same raging sex life after 30 years. The most important thing is respect. Not to hurl abuse. All it takes is one word to unhinge the whole edifice. But there are very personal things that happen to you that you can't begin to share with your partner. You can't go to your wife and say: women just don't see me any more. I have done it – my wife just laughed."

This gender difference is crucial, and it's something Di Gregorio is especially alive to. While Gianni's mother and her cronies in both films enjoy a blissful existence, thriving on Krug and the poker channel, the men are discontented. Are women simply not as persistently interested in sex?

He sees it less crudely. "In the end, we're all slaves of our desires and lusts. But women are better able to cope with the passage of time, while men are less accepting of change. They're in denial and they say an awful lot of bullshit – stories about romantic episodes that are completely untrue to big themselves up a bit. Men are much less mature, less able to regard themselves with irony."

Save Di Gregorio himself, perhaps. For its his combination of personal candour and slightly reckless benevolence that makes him such an unusual film-maker – maybe the most incisive male director to tackle domestic life since Bergman. But in the flesh, the person he reminds you of is Larry David: they share the same loose-limbed cheer, the same passivity in the face of female force, the same basic frustration, despite material ease. What separates them is confidence: Di Gregorio may be appreciative of attention – at a Q&A the night before, he seems to bloom – but he has miles less of it than you'd imagine.

Though the success of Mid-August Lunch may have saved him from a boozy end beneath a bridge, it appears to have only vaguely aided his sense of self-worth. "I'm not sure I have taken the acclaim onboard, or understand it myself properly. But people around me, my daughter especially, experience it with great joy. And my pleasure is in their pleasure; it's easier to access it like that. In reality, I don't give myself a lot in life apart from film – I'm always rather surprised and confused when someone gives me a present. It's almost as though I didn't exist."

It's a startling statement: when asked to unpack it, he gets smilingly tangled. The translator – who's known him some years – steps in to offer, with his assent, her analysis: "As a personality, Gianni has such a degree of self-abrogation he doesn't know how to feel those things directly. He's reserved, and that's why he has a sense he doesn't exist. But the pleasure he has in telling stories and making other people proud of him is easier to process."

It's sounds a dignified way to live, I say. Does he feel others veer too far the other way? "Yes. You shouldn't force yourself to be aggressively the protagonist."

How curious that someone who's finally found fame by making himself the hero should be so self-effacing. He nods: it is a strange space to inhabit. "It's not dignified to force yourself to be the centre of attention, but neither is it to suppress who you are. There is virtue in the right balance. It's just I'm incapable of finding it!"

The Salt of Life is released on 12 August.

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