As news breaks that Harrison Ford could return as Rick Deckard in a follow-up to Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic, here are five questions the sequel must answer. What do you want to know?

Five questions Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel must answer:

1. Did Sean Young's Rachael live a normal life span, as predicted in the original theatrical release, or peg it after only a few short years, as suggested in the director's cut? Will Young make a comeback in the sequel? The actor, who checked into rehab in 2008 following an intoxicated outburst at an awards ceremony, recently said she is pursuing film work once again.

2. Will the studio once again shoe-horn in an unwieldy, last minute Ford voiceover aimed at offering wholly unnecessary exposition to bemused viewers, or stick with the sublimely enigmatic style of Scott's cut?

3. Will anyone want to take out product placement ads in the sequel, considering the famous "Blade Runner curse"? Atari, Bell and Pan Am – all featured in the film – are among the more high-profile companies which have gone out of business or lost their market-leading position since 1982.

4. If replicants only survive four years, wouldn't someone have corrected the design fault that made them perfect cold-blooded killers before the next batch were let loose, removing the need for Blade Runners and therefore Blade Runner 2?

5. Lastly, and most importantly, is Ford's Deckard himself a replicant? If he's still alive more than 30 years on, that would suggest the character is definitely human, destroying one of the original film's most enjoyable mysteries. Of course, Scott might reveal that Deckard is a special replicant with an extended lifespan: either way, Ford's presence would demand that a puzzle which has had film fans arguing for more than three decades finally be addressed.

The animal rights group instructs supporters to boycott the film after the star told reporters the cast ate wolf meat to get into character

Liam Neeson has come under fire from animal rights group Peta after claiming he ate wolf meat to prepare for his role in the action thriller The Grey. The organisation is calling for a boycott of the film based on Neeson's comments during a press conference and separate claims that director Joe Carnahan ordered wolf carcasses to be used during the making of the movie. The Grey sees the Ballymena-born actor as the leader of a group of oil workers being hunted down by a pack of wolves after surviving a plane crash in Alaska.

Neeson recently told reporters he had tucked in alongside other cast members after Carnahan asked for wolf stew to be prepared on set to help them get into character. "It was very gamey," said the Oscar-nominated actor. "But I'm Irish, so I'm used to odd stews. I can take it. Just throw a lot of carrots and onions in there and I'll call it dinner." Unlike some colleagues who were apparently sick, Neeson said that he had been back for seconds.

"Neeson's stance on kindness to animals is sorely out of step with the rest of the world," said Peta in a statement, insisting that wolves were in fact shy beasts unlikely to target humans rather than the predatory creatures seen in The Grey. The statement added: "Don't just shy away. Run away from The Grey."

Peta also criticised Carnahan for allegedly ordering wolf carcasses from a trapper for use in the film. "Many animals caught in traps chew off their own limbs in order to escape," said spokeswoman Jane Dollinger. "These animals go on to die of gangrene or other secondary infections, sometimes leaving nursing puppies abandoned to fend for themselves."

It is not clear whether any wolves were really killed during the making of The Grey, or whether Neeson and Carnahan are guilty only of making glib comments to that effect. Neither has yet made any public comment on Peta's statement. Another unlikely recent story linked to comments made by the Irish actor suggested he was about to convert to Islam.

Director Abel Ferrara confirms that Depardieu will star opposite Isabelle Adjani in his film about political sex scandals, inspired by the French politician

Gerard Depardieu is set to take the lead role in Abel Ferrara's Dominique Strauss-Kahn-inspired film about political sex scandals, the maverick US film-maker has told a French newspaper.

Ferrara, the iconoclastic director of Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, told Le Monde his movie would be shot in New York, Washington and in France: "In all spots of power in fact: it's a film about rich and powerful people." Depardieu has been tipped to take the lead since December last year, when news of the project first broke. Ferrara also confirmed that Isabelle Adjani will play his wife.

Ferrara's producer, Vincent Maraval of Paris-based Wild Bunch, last year denied reports that the project was close to entering production after earlier appearing to suggest the opposite. "Vincent doesn't want to talk about the project, that's normal, he's the producer," Ferrara told Le Monde. "But I'm the director! No one can stop me from talking about my movie."

Earlier reports suggested Ferrara's film might also include elements from the lives of other politicians, such as Bill Clinton and Silvio Berlusconi, who have found themselves embroiled in sex scandals. Interviewed on the subject by Le Journal Du Dimanche, Depardieu refused to be drawn, saying only: "In general, I'm very good at playing characters that I don't like or don't resemble."

Ferrara's latest film is 4:44 Last Day on Earth, which chronicles the events of the final 24 hours before a global apocalypse and stars Willem Dafoe. It played in competition at the 68th Venice International Film festival in September.

The great New Wave film-maker François Truffaut would have been 80 today. As he's honoured with a Google doodle, Xan Brooks salutes one of cinema's most sorely missed

Apologies to Bob Marley, Ronald Reagan, Eva Braun, and all the other dead luminaries who celebrated their birthdays on February 6. Today, it transpires, is not their time. Instead, the world's biggest internet search engine has opted to honour the 80th anniversary of the late François Truffaut via the medium of the Google doodle. When Sibelius made his crack about no one ever erecting a statue to a critic, he clearly reckoned without the rise of the Google doodle.

Arguably the foremost of the New Wave film-makers, Truffaut was also the first to go: killed by a brain tumour at the age of 52 after a life spent in perpetual motion. In his teens he had been the juvenile tearaway and in his 20s a crusading film critic, railing against the impoverished state of post-war French cinema and refining the auteur theory to allow the inclusion of Hollywood titans like Hitchcock and Ford.

Yet Truffaut went on to prove himself one of the most fresh and vibrant directors of his generation. His reputation, understandably, is primarily built on his astonishing early work: the fierce, freewheeling 400 Blows …

and the gloriously poignant and playful Jules et Jim.

But completists would also be advised to check out the handsome films from his mature, middle period, not least the troublesome L'Enfant Sauvage or the Oscar-winning Day For Night. Plus let's not forget his deft acting role as Claude Lacombe, the sympathetic government scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The tragedy of Truffaut was that was to be no late period. Having once vowed to make 30 films and then retire, the director bowed out after 25, leaving a rash of unfinished productions in his wake. Who knows how he would have fared as he pushed towards old age? Who can tell how his work would have matched up against the films of his former New Wave rivals? What seems obvious, however, is that French cinema has missed him. Softer than Godard, warmer than Chabrol, and more meaty than Rohmer, Truffaut was the man who brought the nouvelle-vague to the mainstream; who took cerebral film theory and made it sing. Happy birthday, François Truffaut. And wherever you may be, we hope there is cake and candles and that Eva Braun hasn't drunk all the Blue Nun.

Exploding heads, Ballardian pile-ups – and a spot of spanking with Keira Knightley. Does David Cronenberg need therapy? No, he says: he's just a regular guy

It's always tempting to imagine you can psychoanalyse a film-maker on the basis of their movies, especially so when it comes to David Cronenberg. What should we make of a director who has seared on to our collective unconscious images of exploding heads, rapist slugs coming up through the plughole, video cassettes being inserted into vaginal stomach openings, avant-garde gynaecological instruments? The fact that his new movie deals with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and the infancy of the psychoanalytic movement only adds to the urge.

Cronenberg is sitting opposite me, on a comfortable couch, but there's little prospect of getting him to lie down on it. If anything, it's he who puts me on the couch. I tell the 67-year-old director that Scanners (its aforementioned exploding head in particular) was a formative experience for me, illicitly viewed and reviewed in slow motion on VHS, a good six years before I was legally allowed to. "Oh my God, I hope it didn't do you too much damage," he laughs. In the 1970s, Cronenberg was your typical science geek: greasy black hair, bottle-top glasses. These days, he looks pretty cool: like Ted Danson's smarter brother.

Legions of horror fans have expressed dismay, even anger, at Cronenberg's apparent desertion of the special effects-heavy stomach-churners with which he made his name. Cronenberg, they argue, has sold out, moving into the mainstream with films such as A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. "Yeah, yeah, you shrug that off," Cronenberg says, "because they have no right to be angry. It's the downside of having fans. Freud would have called it repetition compulsion: they just want you to keep doing the same thing. They want to be 10 years old again and see Scanners when they weren't supposed to. But that's their project. My project is to explore things and keep myself interested and excited by film. Two different things."

On the surface, A Dangerous Method, could be his most conventional to date: there's an A-list cast, historical characters and a period setting. Adapted from Christopher Hampton's play, it is based on the apparently true story of the short-lived alliance between the young Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his mentor, Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and the pivotal role played by Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), first a patient of Jung's, then his lover, then his student. But A Dangerous Method mischievously subverts its period trappings. Bestial impulses squirm beneath the decorous facades of 19th-century Vienna, and occasionally flare up spectacularly. In the absence of any gore, the spectacle of Knightley first raving hysterically, then being spanked by Jung in masochistic delight provide the film's abiding images. "Of course, Keira was a little worried about the spanking scenes, but that's normal," Cronenberg says. "Often the actors' fear is that they can't give you what you want. But she's very down-to-earth and we could have a straightforward discussion about it. I said, 'Don't hold back.'" Some critics have judged her jaw-jutting portrayal over-the-top, but Spielrein's case was well-documented, Cronenberg says, and Knightley's version of it is "absolutely accurate".

More than just an exceptionally articulate love triangle, A Dangerous Method lays out a landscape of repression and release, strained civilities and deep neuroses, before stopping on the brink of the first world war – as if to suggest these issues would shape Europe for the rest of the century. "Freud has never been more relevant," Cronenberg says. "Because of his understanding of what human beings are, and his insistence on the reality of the human body. We do not escape from that. Jung went into a kind of Aryan mysticism, whereas Freud was insisting on humans as we really are, not as we might want to be. That's often hard to take, but it keeps coming back to us: the possibility of descending into tribal barbarism was very shocking to Europeans of the era. To suddenly be engulfed in flames and barbarity was the shattering of their ideals. And we've had Kosovo and the Balkans to remind us it can happen again."

Has Cronenberg any direct experience of therapy? "No. It's something you use as a tool in your life if you feel you need it, and I don't feel I've needed it. It's like taking an antibiotic when you don't have an infection."

For all the perversions he has put on screen, he considers himself completely normal – and try as they might, his critics have found little to contradict this self-evaluation. His parents were "warm and loving and sweet and not demanding", he says of his Toronto childhood. They died relatively young, before he'd really got into his stride as a film-maker. He doesn't think they'd be shocked by anything he went on to do. "They never pushed me to get a real job or anything like that. They understood art." He switched from science to English at university. He smoked marijuana but not much, because it hurt his throat. He took LSD once. "I found it a very revealing and potent experience, and I was sure I would take it many times, but I never did." He enjoys bicycling through the countryside.

If anything, Cronenberg's films have revealed more about their audience than their director. Look at the way Britain lost its head over Crash, back in 1996: the reaction of the press in this country to the film's vehicular eroticism was so disproportionately hysterical, it looks comical in retrospect. "Ban This Car Crash Sex Film," frothed the Daily Mail, until the matter was taken up by politicians and councillors. "Crash surprised me totally, the reception," Cronenberg says now. "It was a 20-year-old novel, well accepted as part of JG Ballard's canon. I really didn't think this movie that was fairly faithful to the tone of the novel would be so shocking to people here." Ballard described the furore as "little England at its worst", symptomatic of a "strange, nervous nation". There was no Crash controversy in France or Canada, Cronenberg points out. "Different countries have different reactions. Some films are successful in some places; some not. I think Shivers played in Glasgow for three years non-stop. Why was that? I have no idea."

He suggests that A Dangerous Method has brought him full circle, in a way. His very first film, a seven-minute short called Transfer, was a surrealist skit about a psychiatrist and his patient. He has broached the subject since, most notably in 1979's The Brood, in which Oliver Reed played a renegade psychiatrist whose experimental techniques consisted of him pretending to be his patients' abusive parents or neglected children. (It doesn't end well for him, what with the demonic Samantha Eggar hatching homicidal mutant children in the attic.) Cronenberg later admitted that the story, which takes a pretty scathing view of psychiatry, was inspired by his separation from his first wife and the custody battle over their daughter.

As with much else, Cronenberg's stance on therapy seems to have changed a great deal since. If there is any constant to his work, change would be it. Or rather, transformation – of the body and mind, and usually society, too. By some external force, Cronenberg's characters are routinely thrown into a radical new mode of existence, and it's not necessarily a negative experience: Videodrome's toxic TV transmissions create "the new flesh"; Crash's auto accidents are described as "fertilising". A Dangerous Method fits this mould, too. There's no need for body horror any more; it's simply ideas that infect the host and catalyse the transformation.

"You could easily view the psychoanalytic circle in Vienna as the Crash cult," Cronenberg says. "That is to say, a subversive group who have a handle on reality not accessible to society at large, and who band together to explore it. I'm interested in people who don't accept the official version of reality, but try to find out what's really going on under the hood."

Uncharacteristically, after A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg went straight on to another movie: an adaptation of Don DeLillo's novella Cosmopolis, starring Twilight's Robert Pattinson. The story is set entirely inside a billionaire's limousine, cruising around New York. Cronenberg looks as surprised as anyone that he moved so fast. "Usually I take three or four years between movies, but suddenly there it was and I wanted to make it. I haven't turned my back on my past, but when I'm making a new movie, my other movies are irrelevant. The critics think about your imprint, or your sensibility. 'Is it Cronenbergesque or not?' But creatively that doesn't give me anything. It's nice to be an adjective, but it can also be a trap."

This year's biggest blockbusters were trailed in last night's Super Bowl, from John Carter to Battleship – here's what we learned

Contrary to popular belief, the Super Bowl isn't actually about American football. Nor, for that matter, is it about the half-time performance. No, the best parts of the Super Bowl happen when the ads are on. This is down to two reasons: first because it's fun to loudly wonder if Jerry Seinfeld and Matthew Broderick really need the money that much and, second, because it's when we get to see spots for all this year's big blockbuster movies, one after the other. Here's what last night's Super Bowl had to offer:

Sadly, The Avengers still isn't offering very much in the way of plot secrets. Parts of a city blow up, Robert Downey Jr looks stern, Thor continues his quest to become the next Timotei model and everyone does their level best to ignore the presence of Jeremy Renner. That's about it. Hopefully the next trailer will be a little more explanatory.

Out to prove that it's more than just a shameless Avatar cash-in job, the new John Carter spot threw everything it could at the wall. Literally everything – it opened with a montage of what seemed like every shot from the entire film, smashed together to form the title. Plus, the new spot contained a snatch of Led Zeppelin's Kashmir, which signified that the film will either be as good as the song that Puff Daddy did for the horrible Godzilla remake, or the bit on The X Factor where Dermot O'Leary walks on stage. Hopefully, it can live up to this heady promise.

Peter Berg's Battleship spot lasted a full minute – around twice as long as most of its competitors. And, at this point, it needed to. That's because, before last night, nobody really knew what Battleship was even about. Some thought it was going to be a straight board-game adaptation. Some, who saw last year's first preview trailer, assumed that it was going to be a film about Liam Neeson punching a Transformer in the face. However, now we know that it's a board-game adaptation where Liam Neeson punches a Transformer in the face, and where also there are Predator things and at one point Rihanna says the word "boom". Glad that's cleared up.

As an animated Dr Seuss adaptation, you probably had a pretty good idea that The Lorax's Super Bowl spot would contain all sorts of brightly coloured whimsy. And it did, but it also had plenty of Danny DeVito raspingly insulting everyone in sight, too. Hopefully that'll be enough to cut through the rest of the film's saccharine tendencies, but it's a delicate balance. A little too much snark and this could be the next The Cat In The Hat. It goes without saying that nobody wants that.

Not even a Super Bowl advert could explain the curate's egg that is Act of Valor. The ad promised not just a movie, but a "movie event" starring active duty Navy Seals. The trailer, however, made it look like less of a documentary and more of a conventional action drama. Cleverly pitched patriotism aside, there's a chance that Act of Valor might end up being little more than The Only Way Is Helmand.

Finally, straddling the gulf between effort and laziness is Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator. Yes, we've already seen most of the footage here – the deliberate athletic hobbling, the Megan Fox/Kardashian joke - but recent events mean that Kim Jong-il is now collated into the "dead dictator" montage at the start. And Cohen gets to make an exclusive, if a little weak, Super Bowl gag. Who could ask for more?

Did the Super Bowl make you any more excited about this year's big movies? And where was the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises? Leave your thoughts below.

From South Pacific to Archipelago, cinema and fiction has long explored island paradises and hell-holes. But why are film-makers enchanted by islands time and time again?

Jules Verne's works have much to offer the makers of CGI-prone, 3D-disposed kids' adventure flicks. The 2008 version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth did well enough at the box office, so a sequel was obligatory. We could have had Captain Nemo's submarine odyssey, the exploration of Africa from a balloon or a voyage to the moon by cannon-fired projectile. Instead, we get a trip to an island.

Even in Verne's day, this was considered a bit of a let-down. The author's publisher rejected the first version of what was to become The Mysterious Island with the reproach: "Where is the science?" To beef things up a bit, Verne got his adventurers blown off course while escaping from a war zone by balloon. Less thrillingly, the heroes of Journey 2: The Mysterious Island travel instead by downmarket tourist chopper.

Still, their destination is an island, and islands enjoy a special place in the human imagination. Those who can, including Marlon Brando, John Wayne and Mel Gibson, have insisted on actually owning one. Tiberius preferred to rule the Roman empire from Capri, while to create Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell felt obliged to maroon himself on Jura. A poet called Kimon Friar lived on 46 different islands; a decorator called Andy Strangeway has slept on 162; a conservationist called Philip Conkling has visited a thousand.

The allure prompting such behaviour infected cinema from its beginnings. The first big-screen version of Verne's The Mysterious Island appeared in 1929, though the 1961 stop-motion animation is better remembered and the little-known Soviet version has its admirers. Island settings have sustained films as different as Jaws, South Pacific, The Wicker Man, Dr No and Il Postino, or more recently Mamma Mia!, Shutter Island and Archipelago.

Our preoccupation with islands goes back to classical times, while since the middle ages, both paradises and hell-holes have typically been envisaged on islands. This year, the BBC celebrates the 70th anniversary of its longest-running programme, Desert Island Discs, and Danny Boyle presents his Olympian extravaganza, entitled, fittingly enough, Isles of Wonder.

The role of islands in the human psyche has been much pondered, but the artefacts that they've inspired offer clues enough. Works such as The Tempest, Utopia, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies may seem very different, but they utilise the same obvious but distinct features of isolation.

Islands are necessarily extrinsic; but, unlike deserts, forests or mountain ranges, they're also peculiarly finite. This makes them theatres in which alternative worlds can readily take the stage.

Evolution makes this happen automatically, as Darwin discovered in the Galapagos. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island relies on Foster's rule, which asserts that island life-forms may get larger if cut off from predators or smaller if denied mainland nutrients. That's why Michael Caine is subjected to the indignity of having to ride on a giant bee. However, as in so many island fictions, human character also evolves.

Islands provide distance from familiar ways of thinking and invite or require reassessments. Visits to them, real or imaginary, can be as conceptually disruptive as any sojourn in the contrived landscapes of science fiction. They enable us, as one writer has it, "to know ourselves as distinct from those around us, and, in so doing, forge a more articulated relationship with the world". So it is, sort of, in Journey 2.

The film's protagonists are peculiarly unappealing. As romantic leads, Josh Hutcherson and Vanessa Hudgens are both vacuous and unpleasant. Luis Guzmán is drearily gross and The Rock seems to have wandered in from another movie. The quartet's adventures are mechanically predictable. When we reach the bog-standard redemptive climax to which they're subjected, we might weep with weariness, but for one thing. It's that island locale. This makes the whole thing somehow work.

Journey 2 is based on the idea that Verne, Stevenson and Swift's books were rooted in fact; that they were prompted by rumours of an uncharted island that does actually exist. The film ends up by reminding us that just such an enchanted isle is indeed real enough. It lies, however, not in the wide ocean's stormy embrace, but amid the boundless seas of the human soul.

A poster for The Artist Oscar nominee's new film has been removed following fears that Academy voters would disapprove

Posters advertising Jean Dujardin's new comedy, Les Infidèles (The Players), have been replaced after it was suggested that the controversial adverts could adversely affect The Artist star's Oscar chances.

The pictures, which show Dujardin's character holding the spread-eagled legs of an anonymous woman under a caption saying "I'm going into another meeting", were removed from Parisian billboards after the French advertising regulator, the ARPP received a number of complaints about sexism. "The posters have been taken down, and the distributor excused himself – it's over. It's finished," The Artist's producer, Thomas Langmann, told The Hollywood Reporter. He said the near-silent film's makers had "no opinion" on whether the Les Infidèles campaign would damage The Artist's chances.

Dujardin, who won best actor (comedy or musical) at the Golden Globes, is still the favourite to take the home the best actor prize in LA later this month, but the French media had speculated that the use of Dujardin's image in this way would be seen as offensive by Academy voters. A comment piece in Le Parisien warned that America "doesn't joke about this kind of saucy picture", while L'Express compared the Oscar race to a political campaign in which "everyone is ready to exploit the slightest weakness of their adversary".

Les Infidèles consists of a series of vignettes exploring the mindset of an adulterous man. Dujardin's co-star, Gilles Lelouche, has defended the film, telling Premiere magazine that it was the opposite of misogyny.

Dujardin became a star in France thanks to the satirical TV sketch show, Un Gars, Une Fille, which made a point of mocking the often boorish behaviour of Dujardin's character, Jean "Loulou".

Using a QR code in the design of a movie poster risks allowing it to date fast – but then adverts for films are not principally designed with posterity in mind

Using an image from currently-fashionable technology in a movie poster risks producing an image that will date quickly, and that will almost certainly be the case with this striking poster for Martha Marcy May Marlene - but then film adverts are not principally designed with posterity in mind.

The poster is based around a QR code, a form of barcode that can hold much more data than the traditional version, including links to videos and websites. QR codes have been around since the 1990s but have become increasingly popular in the UK in the last year or two because smartphones such as the iPhone are able to read them.

Many businesses have started to incorporate them as a design element, but this is the first time I have seen a film poster do so – although strangely the QR code on the poster does not actually seem to contain any information.

Whether or not it will date, for now, to my mind, the Martha Marcy May Marlene image looks attractively elegant and modern. But more importantly it fits neatly with the the themes of identity the film is built around.

The QR code in the poster hides or gradually reveals an image of the film's star, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the former child stars the Olsen twins), who has fled a cult where she was given the name Marcy May. (All the women in the cult also have to use the name Marlene when they answer the phone.) The film flashes back and forth from the present, when Martha is living with her sister and her husband in their spacious lakeside home, to her life in the cult, under the spell of charismatic leader Patrick (John Hawkes).

The idea of Martha's identity being hidden behind a layer of something fits neatly with this premise. That this layer needs to be decoded before it can be understood also seems apt. In addition, the image is strongly suggestive of Martha's imprisonment: her eyes gaze out from behind the code as if from behind the bars of a jail cell, while the framing of the image, the thick white margins either side of it and the way the name of the film and its stars are squared off so neatly all seem to contribute to boxing Olsen in. She seems trapped behind the poster, rather than a part of it.

As the trailer shows (above at 1min 29s), when the film uses the same image, director Sean Durkin frames her face in a similar way, this time behind the bars of curtains or an opening door.

Another version of the poster (left) uses the same image but with an M replacing the QR code - essentially a more conventional version of the same idea.

The principal poster for the film (below left) takes a different approach, emphasising the dual identities of Martha and Marcy May by merging two photographs of Olsen's face to create a gauzy, sundrenched image.

Jack Crossing of Empire Design, the company responsible for main poster as well as well-received ads for Drive and A Single Man, said he had wanted to create something that was "beautiful but also haunting", just as the film was.

"It was basically trying to capture that beautiful feel," he said, but with hints of something "horrific" involved too.

His intention in overlaying the two images had been that "you didn't know where one started and one finished". Olsen's hair blowing in the breeze in the left-hand image was meant to represent her freedom in the present day, he said, while the blurred image of Patrick hanging in the background was intended to give the right-hand picture a menacing feel.

• Martha Marcy May Marlene is out now

Actor set to reprise role as Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's forthcoming follow-up to his 1982 sci-fi classic, reports say

Harrison Ford is lining up to make a surprise return to the role of Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel, Twitchfilm reports. Ford is apparently in early talks to return as the replicant nemesis in Scott's forthcoming followup to his 1982 sci-fi classic. If the prediction turns out to be true, it would be even more of a shock than the news in March last year that the veteran British film-maker was to shoot a new Blade Runner film. Scott had dismissed rumours of another Blade Runner film for nearly three decades, and his producer Andrew Kosove denied suggestions Ford might be involved in the new film as recently as last August.

"Twitch has learned that Harrison Ford has entered into early talks to join the new Blade Runner," reports the US site. "While this is still very early stages and it is quite possible that things won't work out the obvious implication is that what we are looking at is not a reboot but a direct sequel to the original."

Based on the 1968 Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner was not a hit at the time but has gathered plaudits over the years. Set in an overpopulated future Los Angeles that never sees the sunlight, Scott's movie is about a "blade runner", played by Ford, who is tasked with hunting down a gang of replicants (android outlaws) who have escaped to Earth from an off-world colony. The film-maker left the audience to decide whether Deckard himself is a replicant.

Negative criticism of the film was largely reversed with the arrival in 1992 of Scott's director's cut, which excised the original's voiceover and a pegged-on "happy ending". Dick never wrote a sequel to the book, so Scott will probably be aiming to produce an original story. Three follow-up novels by Dick's friend, KW Jeter, were written between 1995 and 2000 to try to resolve some of the differences between Blade Runner and its source novel, but they were poorly received.

Prior to working on Blade Runner 2, which may or may not be his next film, Scott will make his long-awaited return to science fiction with Prometheus, a film "set in the same universe" as Alien, his cult 1979 slasher in space. The film, which stars Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce and Idris Elba, opens in the UK on 1 June.

A roundup of the best culture stories in the Guardian and elsewhere, a look at the weekend's activity on the web, in case you missed it, plus share your arts and culture tips and links

Our top stories today

David Cronenberg: analyse this
Interview: Exploding heads, Ballardian pile-ups – and a spot of spanking with Keira Knightley. Does David Cronenberg need therapy? No, he says: he's just a regular guy.

Lucian Freud Portraits
Five stars
Review: The National Portrait Gallery's tremendous show celebrates the unexpected moments that were ever present in the artist's work.

Ebenezer Scrooge named most popular Dickens character
News: Penguin Books poll to mark 200th anniversary of author's birth reveals miser from A Christmas Carol as best loved.

Daniel Radcliffe ends support for Liberal Democrats
News: Harry Potter star describes Nick Clegg as 'whipping boy' of Tories and says he will vote Labour.

Best of the rest of the web

Madonna rocks Super Bowl halftime show with old hits, new friends
Billboard: The pop icon took to the world's biggest stage to rock three-and-a-half older tracks and a playful new song during the Super Bowl halftime show.

From museum to Sundance: how to see Sundance's art-on-film hits
Indie Wire: A handy guide to films about artists, and the artists themselves.

Fine art reimagined with science fiction themes
BoingBoing: Tor.com's Irene Gallo gathers together an absolutely fantastic gallery of science fiction artwork that quotes famous works of fine art.

OK Go 'play' 1,000 instruments with a car
Mashable: The band OK Go outfitted a Chevy Sonic with retractable pneumatic arms, and then drove it around with the arms hitting more than 1,000 actual instruments posted on the side of the road in a desert near Los Angeles.

In case you missed it at the weekend

Sundance film festival: how it got its edge back.

Chastleton House – 360º interactive panoramic

Charlotte Gainsbourg: 'If I'm good in a scene it's a miracle'.

Infomania: Lana del Rey.

The Defence of the Book: a story by Julian Barnes.

What else?

What's on your cultural radar this week? What's the best piece you read at the weekend? Share your arts and culture tips and links in the comments below.

Harry Potter star describes Nick Clegg 'whipping boy' of Tories and says he will vote Labour

Daniel Radcliffe has announced that he is no longer a supporter of the Liberal Democrats after emerging as one of the party's most high-profile celebrity backers ahead of the last British general election, and will probably vote instead for Labour under its "genuinely leftwing" leader, Ed Miliband.

In what is turning into a hemorrhaging of support for the Lib Dems among a list of celebrity backers it unveiled in the run-up to last year's vote, the star of the Harry Potter franchise described party leader Nick Clegg as a "whipping boy" for the Conservatives. He also hit out at the "homophobia" of some of the US Republican presidential candidates.

Colin Firth, another actor and A-list Hollywood star declared in December that he was ending his support for the Lib Dems. The party has also lost the support of Bella Freud, the fashion designer, and Kate Mosse, the author.

Radcliffe made the comments in an interview that will be published on Monday in the latest issue of Attitude magazine, the same forum he used in 2009 to announce that he would "almost certainly" be using his first ever vote in a general election to vote Lib Dem.

Asked if he is happy with the Lib Dems's place in the coalition, he said: "No, of course not. Nick Clegg asked to meet me after that Attitude interview and we talked about issues such as gay rights and faith schools.

"I was initially supportive. For me it was good that the Lib Dems would be fighting our corner. But he has become a whipping boy and it seems to me that he has been totally used by the Tories - anything they don't want badly reflected on them they reflect on to him."

The actor, who is estimated to have a £30m fortune, cited "so many concessions" by the Lib Dems' on education and taxes. He added: "I think, if you make a lot more money than most people - like I do - you should pay more tax and subsidise people who work just as hard as you, but don't earn as much."

Radcliffe, whose current film, The Woman in Black, was estimated to have made $21m at the US box office during its weekend opening, said he "will probably be going to Labour".

He said: "From what I've seen of Ed Miliband, I really like him and he speaks for what I believe in. I think he's genuine, genuinely leftwing, and will act as such if he gets in."

The actor — who is straight — also used the interview to call for gay marriage, relationship education in schools that would cover both gay and straight relationships, and attacked some of the US Republican presidential candidates.

Radcliffe said that he wished more educational establishments, especially in the US, were not in thrall to religion, stating: "I'm not religious, I'm an atheist, and a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation. We need sex education in schools.

He went on to say that he has been "disgusted, amazed, stunned" by candidates seeking the Republican presidential nomination, such as Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann, who have been openly hostile to gay rights.

"But they disgusted me less than candidates like Rick Perry, who made that ridiculous advert wearing 'the Brokeback jacket', and I think pretend to be homophobic just to win votes." .

Asked if he wished that Barack Obama would publicly back gay marriage, he replied: "Yes, I do, but can he really? Of course he's in favour of it, but he has to be careful about saying so. I'd rather have someone like him in the White House than the alternative."

The people behind the film are all on board. But how on earth will they get the DeLorean to do 88mph on stage?

Anyone who has seen Back to the Future as many times as me (43,672, roughly) might be supposed to feel aggrieved at the idea of the best ever film getting the Ghost treatment and being turned into a musical. But we Bttf-heads are open-minded types, wise to the surprises of the space-time continuum; raised on a story that teaches you responsible libertarianism; that every action (such as bumping into your mum after you've accidentally travelled 30 years into the past) has a consequence, but also that free will is always an ally (perhaps that mad scientist can return you to 1985 if the DeLorean going at 88mph hits the bolt of lightning that strikes the clock tower at 10.04pm precisely).

And so the news that director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Bob Gale and composer Alan Silvestri are all on board for a Broadway transfer only excites. Music was already a driving force through the movie, from the Huey Lewis theme tune The Power of Love to Marty McFly's futuristic rendition of Johnny B Goode. But it's the original compositions I'm most looking forward to. Will Biff's goons go in for barbershop harmonies? Might they use lutes in that car-chase toe-tapper The Libyans!? And how the heck are they going to find a rhyme for "jiggawatts"?

Titanic director James Cameron pays tribute to his deep-sea brothers who had accomplished 'extraordinary things'

The American cinematographer Mike deGruy and Australian television writer-producer Andrew Wight have been killed in a helicopter crash in eastern Australia.

Police said two people – a pilot and a passenger – died on Saturday when their aircraft crashed soon after takeoff near Nowra, 97 miles south of Sydney, but did not immediately release the victims' identities. ABC News reported that Wight had been piloting the helicopter.

The pair's employers, National Geographic and the Titanic director, James Cameron, confirmed the victims' identities, adding that "the deep-sea community had lost two of its finest" with the deaths of the underwater documentary specialists.

David Bennett, president of Australia's South Coast Recreational Flying Club, said the men had set off to film a documentary when they crashed.

DeGruy, 60, of Santa Barbara, California, had won multiple Emmy and Bafta awards for cinematography. Wight, 52, from Melbourne, was the writer-producer of the 3D film Sanctum, which took $100m (£63m) at the box office and was Australian cinema's biggest hit of 2010.

DeGruy spent 30 years producing and directing documentaries about the ocean. An accomplished diver and submarine pilot who spent many hours filming deep beneath the sea, he was the director of undersea photography for Cameron's Last Mysteries of the Titanic, National Geographic and Cameron said in a statement.

"Mike and Andrew were like family to me," the director added. "They were my deep-sea brothers and both were true explorers who did extraordinary things and went places no human being has been."

• This article was amended on 6 February 2012. The original said that Nowra is 97 miles north of Sydney. This has been corrected.

Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody follow up their bright, optimistic teenage comedy, Juno, with a dark variation on the homecoming/nostalgia-trip movie, a familiar genre that probably originated with Julien Duvivier's Un Carnet de bal in 1937. Charlize Theron plays the depressed, borderline alcoholic divorcee Mavis Gary, ghostwriter on a once popular series of high school novels that's about to be axed. Out of the blue she decides to revisit her native hometown of Mercury, Minnesota, where 20 years ago she was prom queen. Mavis's mad aim is to win back her handsome high-school boyfriend, Buddy (sweet-natured Patrick Wilson), who's just become a father, and wrest him from a life of small-town mediocrity.

At first it's funny and superior as Mavis patronises her despised Hicksville roots and prepares herself for conquest. It modulates into funny and embarrassing, before it becomes unadulterated embarrassment verging on the deeply sad and even tragic. Theron is excellent and heartbreaking as she experiences her midlife crisis and sees how much she's misread the world around her. But the star of the film is stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt as the pudgy former classmate she'd ignored who becomes her new confidant. As a teenager he briefly achieved a sort of fame as the victim of a hate crime when he was permanently crippled by bullies who attacked him in the belief that he was gay. When he proved to be straight, his case was considered less interesting, and he settled for a life as an eccentric, friendless stoic. The film's moral is that you can go home again, but you'd be wise not to.

Protecting Our Children, a hard-hitting series that follows a team of social workers, has been accused of exploiting a vulnerable family – and praised as the antidote to reality TV

Within minutes of broadcast, Mumsnet was buzzing with indignation about BBC2's controversial documentary Protecting Our Children. Screened last Monday, the first of three parts followed a team of Bristol social workers dealing with sensitive cases. "Am I being unreasonable," one user demanded, "to be fuming at the Protecting Our Children programme on BBC2 tonight? I do not understand how a young child can be filmed like this." The face of the three-year-old boy, Toby, was pixellated throughout.

Another wrote: "I think it gave a good insight into what social workers do. But I don't believe the child's rights were taken into consideration at all."

Protecting Our Children: Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't raised as many questions about responsible, meaningful film-making as it did about the rights and wrongs of the decisions made by social workers. This was complicated stuff, almost shockingly nuanced compared to those TV offerings billed as "documentary" which offer very little more than voyeurism. As well as blowing the lid off social services, the series has now sparked a debate about the future of the documentary. Are audiences now so used to reality TV and documentaries with ironic voiceovers that they prefer "staged reality" to morally complicated real-life stories?

This week award-winning documentary-maker Nick Broomfield praised "open-minded film-making" and said reality television was "like fast food – it's junk and rots people's brains". Heather Croall, director of the annual Sheffield International Documentary Festival, described the mere existence of Protecting Our Children as "extraordinarily impressive – it was commissioned three years ago at a low moment for documentaries at a time when reality TV was taking off".

Other industry figures cited Big Brother-style productions as a "low point" that television is now moving past. "Reality TV has had a very bad effect on documentaries," says Nick Broomfield. "It has nothing to do with reality, because the whole premise is false. It's set up and staged. In terms of adding to our understanding of the world we live in, its contribution is zero. Or maybe even it's a minus thing. The falseness of reality TV has had a terrible effect on British television.

"It's a piece of fiction masquerading as something real. It creates an expectation and becomes what people are used to. It represents everything I want to get away from [in my own work] because it's so sensational and misleading." Many believe Protecting Our Children points to a revival of traditional film-making.

Monday's film does not make for comfortable viewing. It follows Susanne, a newly qualified social worker, dealing with a family classed as "low risk". Parents Mike and Tiffany live in cramped, messy conditions with three-year-old Toby, who has learning difficulties. As Susanne attempts to give them support, she finds herself having to deal with the fact that Toby had been found to have bruises on his arms. As more social services agencies get involved, the father, Mike, becomes hostile. Then Tiffany gets pregnant and is taken into hospital with complications. Social services decide a court must decide whether Mike can look after Toby on his own. Toby is taken into foster care. The couple's newborn daughter later goes to a separate foster home.

Several months pass, the couple split up after a violent row, and Tiffany, hoping to keep her children together and having tried desperately to work on her parenting skills, makes the heart-breaking decision that both children should be adopted. The film is at its most painful when it shows Toby's distress at being taken away from his parents. But it also shows the developmental progress he makes once he has been in foster care.

Love them or hate them, few documentaries like this even exist because they take so long to make and their outcome is unpredictable. It's the polar opposite of the "reality-TV-eats-itself" scripted facade of The Only Way is Essex. This kind of programming has dominated the schedules and almost completely replaced the old-school method of filming used in classics like Granada's Seven Up series. This followed 14 British schoolchildren over a 49-year period and often tops "greatest documentaries ever" lists.

Described as a "unique perspective on child protection", Protecting Our Children was filmed over 12 months after two years' preparation with all the crew following a working protocol drafted by a QC working with the local council, amended by the BBC and ratified by the most senior family court judge in Bristol. Sacha Mirzoeff, director of Protecting Our Children, said: "Documentary-making is about being able to make open-ended stories. We had to take the view: 'This is very difficult. Just get access and follow it.'

"It's a rare thing to do now, but it's a traditional form of documentary. It's about establishing long and close relationships with contributors and being open and honest with them, so that they have an understanding of what's going on."

The key to the three films in the series, Mirzoeff said, was "rolling informed consent". Subjects could withdraw their permission at any time during filming and after the edit. "These were informed decisions which came from a whole group of professionals, including solicitors, children's guardians and professionals working with the families." He said that "for a number of different reasons – some of which were our judgment", they lost at least half the footage. "We had one full film which went down the tubes because it ended in a criminal matter."

Protecting Our Children drew an audience of 1.86 million. Compared with 3.6 million for the recent final of Celebrity Big Brother, this is seen as a small triumph for quality non-fiction programming. The second part, Expecting Trouble, is about Shaun and Marva, a couple "living on the edge of society" with a history of homelessness, violence and alcohol.

The cameras follow Annie, their social worker, as she works with them during Marva's fourth pregnancy. The couple have already had three children removed after social workers decided they were not fit to care for them. In the third film, I Want My Baby Back, two drug addicts who have had their baby placed in temporary care attempt to beat their habits while their parenting capabilities are assessed.

The viewing figures and largely positive critical response to Protecting Our Children may reflect a new trend. "Reality television is already on the decline," said Nick Fraser, editor of the BBC's documentary strand Storyville. "In Denmark and Sweden, they are putting out big documentary strands at peak times and pulling big audiences." The picture is complicated, though. BSkyB recently withdrew funding from the documentary-heavy channel Current TV, led by former US vice-president Al Gore. Current TV's managing director Jane Mote said: "It takes a lot of time to develop a channel like this commercially. Documentary has become the poor relation in recent years, despite the fact that it sells well internationally. It's worrying. More4, for example, launched with Morgan Spurlock and an amazing range of documentaries. Now it's wall-to-wall Come Dine With Me."

It was documentaries, however, that dominated at last month's Sundance festival, the independent film-makers' showcase. One critics' favourite was Ethel, a film about Ethel Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's widow, by her film-maker daughter. Others receiving plaudits included the global warming documentary Chasing Ice, featuring evidence from 30 cameras filming melting ice across three continents, and The Invisible War, about sexual assault in the US military. The grand jury prize went to Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In, which documents the US's 40-year "war on drugs".

Croall, a member of the Sundance jury, said the key to building on this moment was a new funding model, based on that of the music industry. "This is the beginning of a revival. And it's being led by the fact that audiences are proving that, if documentaries are not on telly, they will find them anyway." The success of iPlayer and film festivals proved this, she said.

She pointed to the fact that ITV1 had started to invest in documentary as a sign that TV commissioners were starting to see it as a viable commercial option: 5.1 million viewers watched ITV's 9/11: The Day That Changed the World last September. "Just a few years ago people were saying that online the ultimate length is seven minutes. One day we'll able to walk down the street and pop into a cafe to watch any documentary we like on our phones," said Croall.

That day might not be far off. This week iTunes announced the appointment of Matt Dentler as its indie film partner manager. Dubbed "the indie film whizz kid" by industry press, Dentler is currently head of content at Cinetic Rights Management-FilmBuff, a New York-based company that releases independent films into the digital marketplace.

The move was described as "a potentially signficant shift" for iTunes. Dentler blogged in June last year about the possibilities for iCloud as a storage option for movies. If independent films and documentaries could be streamed to users as part of a subscription model or for one-off payments, this would throw a lifeline to the industry. Currently iTunes film content is seen as being "studio-heavy" and low on offerings from independent film-makers.

Croall adds: "Everywhere I go, people tell me, 'Oh, I love documentaries, they're my favourite.' In the end the audience will win and get the documentaries they deserve. We just need a breakthrough on the technology side."

As international tensions rise, critics close to the regime dismiss praise for A Separation

It has picked up award after award, including a Golden Globe last month for the best foreign language film and the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin film festival. And it has delighted ordinary Iranians grateful for some glory at a time when international tensions are rising and the country's regime is ever more isolated.

But not everyone in Tehran is happy that Asghar Farhadi's hugely successful work, A Separation, is now a racing certainty to win an Oscar for the best foreign film at this month's Academy Awards.

The backlash was apparent on state-run television recently when Masoud Ferasati, an Iranian writer whose views are close to those of the Islamic regime, said: "The image of our society that A Separation depicts is the dirty picture westerners are wishing for." Ferasati added that political motivations were behind the many awards for Iranian films in the past two decades, and said an Oscar for A Separation should not be welcomed by Iranians.

"On one hand they [the US] impose sanctions against us, and on the other they give awards to our film, to send us a positive signal. I think this [the film's success] is an illusion. This is not a good film."

Ferasati's remarks have been publicly echoed by other influential supporters of the regime, which is currently enduring western sanctions as a result of its nuclear programme. Fars, a semi-official news agency, has even attacked Farhadi for shaking hands with women at award ceremonies.

Senior government officials appear unable to decide whether to associate themselves with the success of Iranian cinema or clamp down on its practitioners. Despite widespread censorship and systematic harassment of independent film-makers in recent years, Iranian cinema has had numerous international hits in recent years, not least with Abbas Kiarostami, the director who won a Palme d'Or at Cannes for Taste of Cherry.

A Separation, Farhadi's fifth major film, follows the story of two Iranian families – one secular and middle-class, the other religious and working-class – whose fates become intertwined. A powerful portrait of social tensions in modern Iran, the film managed to obtain government backing, although permission for its production was briefly removed when Farhadi voiced support for Jafar Panahi, the Iranian film-maker imprisoned in 2010 after allegedly plotting to undermine the regime. After its nationwide release, A Separation attracted huge audiences for an independent film and even won government-sponsored awards.

In comparison to his colleagues, the criticism of Farhadi is relatively mild, partly because of the subtlety of his work. Speaking to the Observer, Parviz Jahed, an Iranian film critic and the editor of the recently released Iran edition of the Directory of World Cinema, said: "Farhadi's approach to politics is not direct but implicit and that's why A Separation, as a subtle film, with ambiguity… leaves space for various interpretations. Farhadi is a democrat in the way he treats the film's plot and characters and avoids judging anyone. That's why his critics among the regime accuse him of being passive."

But no one could say film-makers in Iran have it easy. Panahi's colleague Mohammad Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in jail. Last year Iranian actress Marzieh Vafamehr was sentenced to a year in jail and 90 lashes (later reduced) for appearing with her head uncovered in an Australian film critical of the regime, while popular actress Pegah Ahangarani has faced jail for her activism. The regime also recently closed the country's independent film institute, Iran's House of Cinema.

But despite suspicion of the motives of foreign festival juries, the sheer popularity of A Separation meant the authorities had little choice but to put Farhadi's film forward for the Oscars.

Last month an Iranian opposition television based in London, Manoto TV, broadcast the Golden Globes live to the many Iranians who watch it through illegal satellite dishes back home. Farhadi later said: "When I was coming up on stage, I was thinking what I should say? Should I say something about my mother, my father, my kind wife, my daughters..." wondered Farhadi on the stage. "But now, I just prefer to say something about my people. They are a truly peace-loving people."

The UK's black stars are succeeding at the American box office – but are they working there because some parts offered in the UK are off limits, while others play to stereotypes?

When Resident Evil: The Retribution, starring Milla Jovovich, is released in cinemas in the autumn the arrival on screen of the man they call One, the mysterious leader of a commando unit, may surprise British audiences. And not just because he was chopped up into pieces by a laser in the first of this franchise of American action films. No, the reappearance of One is unexpected because he is played by British actor Colin Salmon, also known to television viewers from the ITV1 show Law and Order: UK, among many other popular homegrown television drama series.

Salmon, 49, is one of a growing group of distinguished black British stars making big budget US film and television projects to supplement a British acting career. But whether black talent is drawn to Hollywood by the money, or by the more substantial roles on offer, is not clear.

Last week David Harewood, 46, the acclaimed Birmingham-born actor who played Martin Luther King in The Mountaintop on stage in London in 2009, criticised the British TV industry for failing to take risks with black casting. He was speaking in London at the launch of Homeland, the Golden Globe-winning US thriller series shortly to be aired on Channel 4.

"Unfortunately there really aren't that many roles for authoritative, strong, black characters in this country. We just don't write those characters, that's a fact," he said. "I don't want to trash this place, but I do think there is a certain lack of ambition in terms of telling a global story."

Like Salmon, who has made regular appearances in the US TV show Single Ladies, Harewood has gained kudos from crossing the Atlantic for a role in a TV hit. Fellow black actors Idris Elba and Adrian Lester have both executed a similar manoeuvre. Elba has just won a Golden Globe for the British show Luther, but first made his name in The Wire, while Lester, who returns to the National Theatre next year to play Othello, has appeared in Hollywood-made films and TV shows such as Girlfriends, the sitcom produced by Kelsey Grammer.

"It's not possible to sustain a film career just by working in Britain. Black or white, whoever you are," Lester said last year.

London born and bred Chiwetel Ejiofor, who received a Laurence Olivier Award for his Othello at the Donmar Warehouse in 2007, has punctuated his stage roles with Hollywood work too, notably in the films Salt and 2012. Another acclaimed star of the British stage, David Oyelowo, the first black actor to play an English king in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2001 Histories series, starred in last year's release The Help and now has a part in Steven Spielberg's Abraham Lincoln biopic to occupy him. It is a career path already taken by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who went from Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies to the hit US television show, Without A Trace.

Yet the strong evidence that worthy parts come only to those black actors who travel is disputed by the iconoclastic US director Spike Lee. Speaking at the Sundance film festival last week, Lee said he had made his latest feature, Red Hook Summer, with low-cost kit partly to avoid Hollywood. "They know nothing about black people," he said, questioning how Hollywood producers could have any idea about the area of Brooklyn where his film is set. "Fuck no! We had to do it ourselves!" he concluded.

Lee's words echo those of Viola Davis, the Oscar-nominated US actress who stars alongside Oyelowo in The Help. Last autumn she told the Observer: "We're made up of so many different pieces of a puzzle as human beings and I find that when you're a black character, you only have maybe seven puzzle pieces to work with all the time… Really all you have is funny, strong, sassy, dignified, wise, and that's pretty much it."

Last month Pam Grier, the veteran US star of 1970s blaxploitation movies and a Golden Globe-winner in the lead role in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, made the same point. Speaking in Toronto last week, she said: "I know a lot of African American women that didn't want to see The Help because they had lived it as little girls and it was a circumstance that shouldn't have been and it was so problematic for them. It brought back horrible memories and they couldn't see it, nor will they read the book," she said.

Star Wars director George Lucas has also recently complained about how hard it was to raise the money to make Red Tails, his film about black US airforce pilots, because there were no white stars. The film, which also stars Oyelowo, was eventually completed, however, and made $19m at the box office on its opening weekend in the US last month.

Since Hattie McDaniel won the first Oscar for an African American with her part in Gone With The Wind, black actors in Hollywood have had to struggle with the accusation they are taking stereotypical roles, drawn up by white men. But British actors seem to have no such fears. The issue is all too clear, according to Harewood: "I can remember talking to Idris years ago about these frustrations and he told me 'I'm going to America' and I kind of thought, 'What are you doing that for?'

"Look at him now. He's a huge star; he made the right decision, even though it took him a long time to crack the US. I knew what I needed to do. I simply wouldn't have been given a role of that strength and authority in the UK."

British actor Giles Terera, 35, who has played Sammy Davis Jr in the West End as well as appearing at the National Theatre, has heard this advice many times. "A friend of mine who has just come back from LA said to me what black actors always say: 'Go out there and get parts rather than just playing another drug dealer or mugger over here'." But Terera is happy with the mix of work he finds in Britain. "I can do the work that suits me, but it is true there is an issue here that goes very deep."

Terera has noticed that while actors of mixed race are cast in black roles, they are not cast in white roles. "It is all to do with what audiences will accept, as much as to do with directors and casting directors," he said. "Sometimes I am frustrated at the parts white friends get, but it is more difficult to be black anyway, not just in the theatre. When I want to hail a taxi in London, I know it's going to take three or four before one will stop for me."

Terera played Horatio in Hamlet at the National last year and remembers a friendly, older white audience member explaining to him that Horatio would "never have been black in real life". The actor, who is 35, felt like pointing out that the cast were also all speaking English, not Danish. "It is all about suspension of disbelief again," he said this weekend. "A lot of people feel like David Harewood, because you can feel excluded from a whole area of casting, say from that Sunday night costume drama area. It is off limits."

Cush Jumbo, 26, star of the National's new production of She Stoops To Conquer, is more optimistic. "The majority of roles I have played so far have been classical and that is not what I expected, growing up in Lewisham and having a bit of a south London accent. And I hope it was not because the director wanted to make a statement."

Jumbo, who attended the Brit School before going on to Central School of Speech and Drama and who appears in ITV's crime series Vera, believes there is good television work for black talent in Britain too. "I understand what David Harewood is saying, though, because there is so much good quality television made in America. Here it's about having an agent who will push you towards roles that are non-colour specific.

"When I go back to the Brit School to talk to kids, especially to black kids, I tell them to make themselves the most versatile actor they can. That way you can give them 'the kid from the council estate', if they want, but you can also give them Shakespeare's Rosalind."

Viggo Mortensen channels the spirit of Sigmund Freud, Southwark says no to Brit grit, and let's hear it (again) for Undefeated

Viggo's Freudian slip

One of the strangest interviews I've ever conducted happened last week when I met Viggo Mortensen in Sigmund Freud's study in London. Viggo, of course, plays Freud in David Cronenberg's crisp new film A Dangerous Method, and the actor immersed himself in Freud for three months before filming. He'd visited the Freud museum in Hampstead before, but for the purposes of our interview we were allowed behind the velvet ropes and into Freud's study, right next to the famous couch. Viggo was clearly unsettled by such close contact with Freud's personal artefacts, and affected some shivers of recognition as he pored over Freud's notebook which sits on his desk, a pair of fold-up pince-nez placed neatly beside it.

"Ah, I did pretty well then," nodded Viggo, who'd trained himself to copy the great man's actual handwriting. As I tried to interview him, Viggo kept jumping up and scanning Freud's books. "Ah, Shakespeare," he'd say. "Freud loved Lady Macbeth. Of course, Stefan Zweig. They met regularly."

The big moment came, however, when Viggo gingerly felt his way towards the couch. As he gently touched it, a PR rushed in: "You can't lie on that, sorry." Viggo was crestfallen. The PR lady continued: "Not even David Cronenberg was allowed on there." That seemed to satisfy Viggo for a moment and he reverted to examining the ancient carved artefacts and sex objects that lie around the study. The room is clearly immaculately recreated in Cronenberg's film, where Viggo's Freud conducts long conversations with Michael Fassbender's Carl Jung.

"Do any of these objects seem familiar from the film?" I asked. "Oh yeah," said Viggo, grinning. "The penises, we had a lot of those on set." You can hear the full interview on my Film Weekly podcast next week.

End of Brit grit

Where can British film-makers go now in search of gritty locations for their urban dramas? The question arises as Southwark residents in south London have followed Hackney in the east by banning film crews for reflecting their areas in a poor light on screen. With the Olympics approaching, I understand Hackney's film officers are refusing requests to any film-makers whose scripts are about hoodies, riots, drugs, council estates and crime. In a report for Radio 4's Front Row last week, my friend John Wilson revealed that the denizens of the Aylesbury and Heygate estates are fed up with film crews, following the grimy representation of their homes in movies such as Attack the Block, Harry Brown and Shank. Although filming has been a lucrative sideline for Southwark council, the residents' associations of the estates — currently undergoing demolition — have rebelled, even despite the recent presence of Brad Pitt, filming sci-fi dystopia movie World War Z in what was once called "muggers' paradise". But where does that leave our poor social-realist film-makers? Will they have to make nice Richard Curtis-like movies from now on?

Admit defeat

I must apologise for a grave error I made in last week's article about the Oscar nominations. I confused a pro-Sarah Palin film called Undefeated with another film, also called Undefeated, about a Memphis high school's American football team, which is the film that has actually been nominated. I hadn't seen either film at the time of writing, but I'm thrilled to say I have now watched the nominated Undefeated — which hasn't yet secured UK distribution — and it's a terrific and inspiring film, with echoes of the great Hoop Dreams. Beautifully directed by Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin, it follows three underprivileged players of the Manassas Tigers and their extraordinary coach trying to help them on (and off) the pitch. It's an excellent sports doc and must have a very good chance of winning the Oscar, although it doesn't have the wow factor of Pina or the devastating impact of Hell and Back Again.

In this curious sci-fi thriller, directed by Josh Trank, three high school misfits from a Seattle suburb, all vaguely acquainted with the ideas of Schopenhauer, accidentally discover a source of telekinesis and become supermen. Unfortunately, like Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, neither the boys nor the film's director and screenwriter (Max Landis, son of John Landis and costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis) can think of anything to do with these special gifts that is not frivolous, playful or malevolent. Maybe that's the point.

This feature debut by the Israeli photographer and installation artist Alma Har'el is an impressionistic, poetic portrait of down-and-outers living lives of desperation in a desert slum in inland California. A compelling, highly self-conscious documentary, it's involving, mystifying, unpatronising and carefully orchestrated.

This new Jules Verne adventure yarn is a sequel to the ingenuous but surprisingly popular 3D version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The morose Josh Hutcherson, the only survivor from the earlier film, receives a coded message from his long-lost grandfather, the intrepid explorer Alexander (Michael Caine). He bonds with his new stepfather (Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock) when they discover it directs them to maps in Verne's Mysterious Island, Stevenson's Treasure Island and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. These reveal that granddad is stranded on a Pacific island with an active volcano, prehistoric beasts, the ruins of the lost Atlantis, and Verne's submarine Nautilus hidden in a cave. That's about as smart and as literate as the film gets. Otherwise it resembles King Kong written by Enid Blyton for undemanding children, though Blyton would have disapproved of the philistine way Johnson tears the maps out of his stepson's books. The adults – Caine, Johnson, Luis Guzmán – laugh and smile inanely; Hutcherson and Vanessa Hudgens (as a teenage Polynesian beauty) scowl.

The title sounds like a demented worshipper counting her beads, which is perhaps not entirely inaccurate. They are in fact the various names imposed on a girl (Elizabeth Olsen), caught up in a rural cult of a mystical nature dominated by a sleazily charismatic Manson type (John Hawkes) in the Catskills. The brainwashed Martha escapes and rejoins her elder sister, who's living with her British husband beside an idyllic lake in Connecticut. But their initial sympathy turns too easily, and not entirely convincingly, into a shocked, insensitive exasperation at her strange conduct. Most of what we know about the commune is mediated through brief flashbacks by the unreliable sleepwalking Martha, and what many of the film's admirers at Sundance and elsewhere have greeted as suggestively enigmatic insights in the girl's mind, strike me as unnecessarily obscure, even perfunctory. Olsen, however, does have a disquieting presence.

The BBC Storyville editor on his stint as a judge – and competitor – at Sundance film festival

20 JANUARY It's 10pm and after the endless flight and drive up the Rockies, it's good to finally arrive in Park City and get a whiff of night-time air. As film fests go, Sundance is, if not the biggest, certainly the best. I've attended before – to gawk at the celebrities and rich liberals as well as win the odd prize. This year, however, I'm in a somewhat anomalous position of great privilege; as editor of the BBC's Storyville, I have two films in the American competition. I am also judging films for the world documentary jury. Assailed by jet lag, I wonder how to negotiate this double role.

21 JANUARY There are lots of ways of celebrating one's birthday. This year I'm spending mine with Robert Redford - on a panel to discuss documentaries - and I am distinctly nervous. But I notice similar symptoms in the other guest - the redoubtable Sheila Nevins , head of documentaries at HBO and acknowledged queen of the genre in the US. We exchange anxieties. How will we behave in the presence of cinema royalty? Do we call him Bob, Robert or Mr Redford? We cannot decide. Stuck in ski resort traffic, he arrives late, and it is reassuring to find that near-deities are subject to the same vicissitudes as the rest of us.

Smallish, courteous, very handsome, Redford is dressed in trademark black. I have only rarely glimpsed him at his own festival. Once I sat behind him, watching him squirm with boredom rather than leave halfway through an interminable French doc. Onstage, quizzed by a glamorous CNN reporter, he has the practised talkshow manner that important Americans of a certain age possess. So, it turns out, does the formidable Sheila. She asks him what he would like to be called. He then asks me what I would like to call him, and I say Robert. He says he'd rather be called Bob. He then insists on calling me Nicky, a name I have never owned up to.

We're here to talk about whether docs change the world. I say they don't, or rarely, and probably only in ways we can't measure, though that doesn't mean that we shouldn't want them to do so. Sheila believes that docs are a form of drama. They render reality more interesting. Although Redford's Sundance Institute has sponsored wannabe world-altering work, he wonders aloud – how do things change? Afterwards, I ask Sheila what she thinks. "In the 1930s, people watched musicals," she says. "People want entertainment in bad times."

22 JANUARY My co-jurors are an African film-maker and an Asian-American curator of an arts centre. We are not allowed to talk to others about what we are watching. Communicating with film-makers is strictly forbidden. These prohibitions are difficult to observe. I am anxious about my range of facial expressions. If I wrinkle my nose, what will people think? What will happen if I fall asleep? Will I prove to be as good at disguising boredom as Bob?

24 JANUARY Mild jet lag combines with high altitude to induce wooziness. We have watched films about the Egyptian revolution, boxing in China, creators of online games and Canadian author Margaret Atwood's views on personal and public debt. I attend most of the Q and A sessions. The audiences at Sundance particularly warm to contributions from the Middle East. They love 5 Broken Cameras, a villager's account of the occupation of the West Bank shot over many years filled with neighbours and families as well as protests. In The Law in These Parts, an Israeli director interviews the judges who have meted out justice on the West Bank in the military courts set up after the occupation of 1967. The film depicts, graphically and painfully, how it is possible for the highly educated to impose a system of oppression while remaining under the illusion that what they are doing is compatible with the highest legal principles.

The Ambassador stirs controversy. Mads Brügger is a Danish journalist who goes undercover and manages to buy an ambassadorship in central Africa which then allows him to, officially, open a factory to employ locals, and unofficially to buy "blood" diamonds…

25 JANUARY We jurors are allowed to communicate with each other, and we discuss our preferences in places where our lips can't be read. Late at night, from members of the US documentary jury a common theme emerges. "America is fucked and the blame goes to white American males," according to one juror.

26 JANUARY Panic. Eugene Jarecki, director of one of the Storyville films in contest (The House I Live In), calls to express anxiety. I check out his rivals in the US doc competition. In Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (a film about the Chinese artist), his large and elegant marmalade cat is shown to be capable of leaping up and opening doors. Ai Weiwei is good at opening doors himself, and uses his stature to get away with provoking the Chinese police. This film could win .

I go to see The House I Live In again. Sitting through Jarecki's painstaking investigation into the terrible effects of America's war on drugs, I wonder how jurors will react to the suggestion, by David Simon, creator of The Wire, that American judges, penal authorities and police are involved in a "slow-motion Holocaust".

At The Queen of Versailles screening (the other Storyville entry), I agonise again. Would I choose Lauren Greenfield's often hilarious account of billionaires Jackie and David's doomed attempts to build the biggest house in the US in the midst of a slump? How would I react? Eugene is upset that there have been no reviews, and I try to calm him.

27 JANUARY Deliberation time. Sequestered in a posh hotel with the other jurors, we review the options over pinot noir. We have few disagreements, which surprises me. We loved Searching For Sugar Man, a British-Swedish film that tells the strange story of US folk singer Sixto Rodriguez, who enjoyed modest success in the 1970s and then disappeared. His music became popular among rebellious whites in South Africa but no one knew what had become of him. The Swedish film-maker found him in Detroit, demolishing abandoned houses. Here he is at Sundance, still singing, a charming survivor. We're told that the film has won the audience award, and we decide on a special jury prize for the film as well.

We want to give awards to both the Israeli film and the Palestinian one. After a short discussion, we decide to award the big prize to The Law in These Parts, which needs to be shown to as many people as possible.

28 JANUARY Awards time. Superlatives are delivered from a huge stage in a freezing barn of a local sports centre kitted out for the night. It's nerve-racking to be onstage in front of so large a crowd. I am on the edge of my seat when the American docs jury announce their winners. Lauren Greenfield gets an award for The Queen of Versailles, but the big prize goes to The House I Live In. I recall with satisfaction that in the past few years Storyville has now won two grand jury prizes and two awards for directing. Winning a prize for a doc at Sundance is as good as picking up the Oscar. (Storyville films have also picked up three Oscars, and If a Tree Falls is in the running this year.)

29 JANUARY Flying back to New York, in a private plane belonging to the Jarecki family packed with the film's editors and producers, I think about the Sundance experience. There's something special, and alarming, too, about so much privilege hooked up to the desire to alter the world. As 60s radicals used to say, we may ultimately be part of the problem rather than the solution. I'm no more convinced than I was that films are an effective means of social change. Some do alter the world, some do not. But the high of winning at Sundance lingers over the Rockies, into the American night.

Roman Polanski's claustrophobic comedy brilliantly unpicks the veneers of middle-class politeness

In 1996, I wasted an evening (actually an hour in the theatre and a journey into the West End) seeing Art, Yasmina Reza's vapid play about three French friends arguing over the aesthetic merits of a blank canvas one of them has bought. So I didn't bother with her much vaunted God of Carnage when it opened here and around the world three years ago to the masochistic amusement of enthusiastic middle-class audiences, apparently pleased to see themselves and their friends in a corridor of distorting mirrors.

The prospect of seeing yet another exposé of bourgeois hypocrisy reminded me of a 1950s New Yorker cartoon in which a bland, middle-aged hostess is presenting a bearded, long-haired young man in jeans to a tweedy, middle-aged guest, who's saying: "No, madam, I do not want to meet a spokesman for the Beat Generation."

Now Reza's play has come into the misanthropic hands of her fellow Parisian Roman Polanski and the match is perfect. Polanski has dropped the "God of" from the title but otherwise retained the claustrophobic setting of a single apartment, where two fortyish couples meet up through a need to talk about Zachary. He's the 10-year-old son of one of them, who has had a playground row with Ethan, the other couple's 10-year-old, and knocked out a couple of his teeth. The play exists in two settings, one French, as originally produced; the other American, as presented on Broadway, and it's the latter that Polanski and Reza have adapted for the screen.

The comfortable, tasteful but not ostentatious flat belongs to Michael and Penelope Longstreet, parents of the victim, Ethan. Michael (John C Reilly in rumpled teddy bear mode), it transpires, is something of a roughneck, a salesman of kitchenware and sanitary equipment, hypergamously married to the prissy, humourless Penelope (an aggressively thin-lipped Jodie Foster). A concerned liberal, she writes earnest books about Africa's problems and is bent on improving Michael and elevating herself. She talks in the argot of self-improvement texts, wears her heart on her sleeve and displays her culture on the coffee table.

The visitors are the more confident, socially somewhat grander Cowans: Nancy (Kate Winslet in edgy designer clothes) is an investment broker, Alan (Christoph Waltz performing a variation on his SS officer from Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds) is a suave, brutal, corporation lawyer, constantly on his mobile about the defence of a dodgy pharmaceutical company facing a class action. He's the one who worships "a god of carnage".

We encounter the two pairs at the end of the warm-up phase. They're still exuding conventional, slightly strained politeness as they complete typing out a joint statement that will obviate any public or legal engagement.

The mistake the younger couple make in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not leaving, as they're too much in thrall to George and Martha. The mistake Mike Nichols and his screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, made in their 1966 screen version of Edward Albee's play was to open it up. Once having left the house, the visitors would never have gone back again.

Neither of these errors occurs here. Three times the Cowans get out of the door but never beyond the lift. Initially, they return out of politeness, then in anger, as if getting back in the ring, or on to the court for ruthless alternations between singles and mixed doubles.

The velvet gloves come off the iron fists. Fingernails dig into flesh. Dishonesties, self-deceptions, shallowly buried prejudices and self-loathing are revealed. Everyone knows Larkin's line: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad". That's clearly what's happening to Zachary and Ethan, whom we see at a silent distance in a pre-credit scene and in a brief coda. But in his second stanza, Larkin refers to the fuckers-up being fucked up by people "who half the time were soppy-stern/ And half at one another's throats", both styles on display here.

Penelope and Michael call each other "Darjeeling" (a private version of "darling" they coined during their Indian honeymoon). Nancy and Alan's term of endearment, "Doodles", comes from a song in Guys and Dolls. But obscenities take over from coy nicknames as the bloodletting starts and the marriages are torn apart. Nancy vomits over Penelope's art catalogues, a moment as startling as the monster jumping out of John Hurt's stomach in Alien. Whiskey becomes the final great catalyst of revelation and the men unite by lighting up aggressively phallic Cuban cigars. We're not invited to like these people.

Carnage belongs in a dramatic tradition of exposure, misogyny and painful-truth telling that descends from Strindberg through O'Neill to Osborne and Albee. It also fits neatly into Polanski's oeuvre as he approaches his 79th year.

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

From his first movie, Knife in the Water, and his British masterpiece Cul-de-sac, through his American triumphs Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, down to his version of Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Ghost, he's been fascinated by people in claustrophobic conflict, victims of a malign destiny playing dangerous games with each other.

The work of a master, this wickedly funny film is beautifully orchestrated and controlled. Each edit exploits the dramatic space between the characters and dictates the film's emotional rhythms but gives the actors freedom to perform within the limits of the director's vision. A limited vision, perhaps, and Carnage is an arena where the corridas end in moments of half-truth.

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