Film-makers looking to stay true to a particular setting should take a maple leaf out of the quirky hero's book

Near the end of Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, Comeau, the guy who "knows everybody", can be overheard having a conversation about which is better, the movie or the comic book. Lest I be out-meta'ed, then, let me carefully sidestep the issue of whether Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel is superior to its big screen adaptation (or vice versa) and just say this: Hollywood nimbly dodged a fireball and landed a 64-punch combo by staying so true to Scott Pilgrim's strange, funny and very deep-rooted Canadianness.

Which is not an easy thing to define. A surefire dinner party conversation starter with Canadians (and a quick way to send everyone else home early) is to ask: "But what ... exactly does it mean to be Canadian?" Try it. If you come up with anything other than single-tier universal healthcare, ice hockey and a sort of vague licentiousness, I have a 1kg bottle of Quebec Medium No 1 maple syrup with your name on it.

But Scott Pilgrim has Canada – or at least Toronto – down. It nails the city's confident but self-conscious sense of humour, the love of bad puns ("I was just a little bi-curious!" "Well honey, I'm a little bi-furious"), the self-deprecating jokes ("What's the website for Amazon.ca?"), and the very malleability of being Canadian ("When I'm around you, I kind of feel like I'm on drugs. Not that I do drugs. Unless you do drugs, in which case I do them all the time.")

Many Canadians feel towards their country exactly what the Scott Pilgrim comic/film feels towards its protagonist: fond contempt. Not taking yourself too seriously seems to be key when you're lying in bed with a cultural elephant that could not only squash you, but doesn't even know you're there.

This wary jokiness about America is also a key element of the plot. In search of bigger US box office takings, Edgar Wright could well have set Scott Pilgrim in, say, Seattle, but only at the expense of the comic's wonderfully pitched attitude towards the States.

Scott's love interest, Ramona Flowers, is an American, and so is the No 1 big boss ex-boyfriend, music promoter Gideon. The latter makes various disparaging remarks about Canada, but Scott (or, as Ramona calls him in the comic, "Canada boy"), fights right back: "You're pretentious, this club sucks, I have beef. Let's fight."

With a light touch, the film captures Toronto's paradoxical, smug inferiority towards the US, and specifically New York. Torontonians know they're less important, less powerful and generally less stylish than New Yorkers, but take a perverse pride in not caring. It shows off what I've always loved about Toronto: its beautiful marriage of big-city sheen and quiet, empty, snow-muffled desolation. Toronto is a romantic city, especially in winter, especially if you take romance with a grain of salt. If you can set a romcom in coffee chains in Seattle, it's about time we had one on snowy park swings at midnight.

Not all film adaptations are as faithful to setting – with often disastrous results. Fever Pitch transposed Nick Hornby's novel about his solitary, girl-free obsession with Arsenal into a romcom starring Jimmy Fallon as a Boston Red Sox fan. The US remake of the Australian comedy Kath and Kim inexplicably made the two characters educated, middle class and attractive, thus inherently negating the "bogan" hilarity of the original.

Also, in its American, Richard Gere-led incarnation, Shall We Dance? was an embarrassing misstep. This makes sense when you understand that what made the original Japanese film a hit is that ballroom dancing, and the public male-female physical interaction it requires, is fairly taboo in Japan.

But my vote for worst locale-changing in film goes to U571. This ping-and-periscope schlock about the boarding of a German U-boat in the second world war had the gall to state it was American submarine officers who captured the famous Enigma cipher machine from the Nazis, thus changing the course of the war and helping to defeat Hitler. It was, of course, British naval officers who captured the first Enigma, not to mention British codebreakers at Bletchley Park, led by Alan Turing (British), who cracked its secrets. The movie's only saving grace is that Jon Bon Jovi gets swept overboard.

U571's setting crimes may soon be dwarfed, however, if rumours of a live-action Akira set in Manhattan, rather than nuclear-afeared Tokyo, are true. (See this artist's rendering of Akira USA for further evidence.) But that's just my precious little Canadian opinion. Let's hear your votes: know any Fear & Loathing in Enfields I haven't mentioned?

A sequel to the superhero hit has been greenlit, according to the writer of the original comic book. But doubts have been raised over the film's production schedule

Kick-Ass was always rather nicely set up for a sequel, what with that open-ended denouement, so it's hardly surprising that Mark Millar, who wrote the original comic book, has been talking up a second film. Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, Millar said the film's success on DVD in the US, where it sold 1.4m units in its first week, meant the project was finally greenlit.

"The estimate is that Kick-Ass will do 100 to 150m on DVD based on the American sales, so it'll end up making a $250m (£160m) on a $28m investment," said Millar. "So it should be OK. The sequel's greenlit, we can go ahead and do the follow-up now. The first made so much compared to what it cost, it would be crazy not to."

Millar's announcement, however, has been greeted with a degree of scepticism in the blogosphere, not least because Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman are tied up with preparations for X Men: First Class. In a later interview with MTV, Millar said the film was "probably about nine months away from production starting, at the earliest".

He added: "Matthew's got to do X-Men: First Class. He just wants to get X-Men done next year, then hopefully we'll just go straight into Kick-Ass 2. That's the plan."

All of which sounds a little less concrete. And there's the small matter of Vaughn's comments immediately following Kick-Ass's release, when he seemed to indicate there would probably not be a sequel.

Could Millar, who clearly stands to benefit from a second film, be over-egging the biscuit? Probably. Having interviewed him, he's a refreshingly candid chap, saying that film-makers attempting to bring less well-known superheroes to the big screen were "fucked", following the arrival of Kick-Ass's postmodern take. And this is a man who works extensively for Marvel Comics.

The truth probably lies somewhere between the two positions. What we do know is that if Kick-Ass 2 does get made, it will likely centre on Dave Lizewski's encounters with a new breed of wannabe superheroes and supervillains, inspired by his adventures. The film will show Hit Girl struggling to lead a normal life, and I can't imagine there not being a prime role for Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Red Mist.

Millar said in March that he was planning on writing the second book in April. "The idea of Kick-Ass was: what would happen if people in the real world tried to become superheroes?" Millar told IGN earlier this year. "The second one is: what if people tried to be bad guys as a reaction to the superheroes?

Millar adds: "And it's just that simple: The same way these wee guys were contacting each other on Facebook and trying out superhero costumes, what if bad kids started to do this? You've got this horrible Clockwork Orange kind of scenario going on, where these kids are happy-slapping.

"They're out there with their mobile phones dressed up as villains doing horrible things to people, recording it and putting it online. And that becoming massively viral all over the world."

It's a vivid image that one can imagine working well for Vaughn, if the sequel does end up being made. For me, Kick-Ass was an enjoyably throwaway, fluid and vibrant slice of comic-book silliness, which made great viewing on the big screen. I'd very much like to see a sequel. They'd better get a move on though – Chloë Moretz won't stay 13 forever, and a grown-up Hit Girl would rather defeat the object, don't you think?

Drugs, murder and lesbian sex feature in Darren Aronofsky's unconventional take on world of classical ballet

Classical ballet has rarely been portrayed like this, featuring murder, ruthless ambition, drug taking, self-harming, unhealthy narcissism and lesbian sex. "I'm terrified of a ballet backlash," movie director Darren Aronofsky joked at the opening of the Venice film festival today after the first showing of his new film, Black Swan. "Those dancers are real dangerous."

The film stars Natalie Portman as a ballerina who sacrifices more than her feet to get the leading role in Swan Lake. It's a tense psycho-thriller which also stars Barbara Hershey as her mother, Winona Ryder as a has-been ballerina, Vincent Cassel as the driven company boss and Mila Kunis (also known as the voice of Meg in Family Guy) as the rival swan.

One of the most talked about scenes from the film will doubtless be the lesbian sex scene with Portman and Kunis; Portman said she first talked about the film with Aronofsky, who directed The Wrestler, in 2002. "He described it as 'you're going to have a sex scene with yourself' and I thought that was really interesting because this movie is in so many ways an exploration of ego and that narcissistic attraction to yourself.

"I found the psychological impact of that scene to be really challenging and interesting."

Aronofsky said his recollection was different. Portman, he said, had in fact said 'why?' To which the director admitted he had not quite figured it out.

Aronofsky is something of a Venice favourite, winning the Golden Lion for The Wrestler, which starred Mickey Rourke, in 2008. Today the director said he saw the films almost as companion pieces. "The more I looked into the world of ballet, the more I started seeing similarities with wrestling. They both have these performers who use their bodies in extremely intense physical ways, the entire performance is based on their physicality." Not that he had been entirely welcomed. Aronofsky said he and screenwriter Mark Heyman "spent a tremendous amount of time trying to get into the ballet world, which was incredibly difficult. It's a very insular world and they really have absolutely no interest in anything [other than ballet]. Most of the time when you show up and say, 'Hey, I'm going to make a movie about you' all the doors open up but with ballet they all shrugged and didn't return calls."

Slowly, they managed to get a "stamp of approval", persuading people that they were trying to do something cool. "We tried to capture as much of the reality in a real documentary sense. I was trying to fuse something highly stylistic with something I was doing in The Wrestler, which was more documentary."

They were helped by the involvement of Benjamin Millepied, a dancer at the New York City Ballet and Portman's real-life boyfriend, who plays the prince.

Aronofsky said it was a "huge honour" to open the festival and they had been working round the clock so it was ready in time. "I slept more on the plane coming over than I have in months."

Black Swan was the first of three opening films and is competing with 22 others for this year's Golden Lion.

Actor says in interview her husband was told nothing was wrong for months before a tumour was discovered on his tongue

Catherine Zeta-Jones has spoken of her pain watching her husband, Michael Douglas, deal with throat cancer and says she is furious with doctors for not detecting his disease sooner.

Douglas, the Oscar-winning star of Wall Street and a veteran of Hollywood movies and television, said that he spent months seeking attention for persistent throat and ear pain only to be told nothing was wrong until August.

He announced on 16 August that doctors had found a tumour in his throat and that he would undergo radiation and chemotherapy, which he has now started.

"It makes me furious they didn't detect it earlier," Zeta-Jones told People magazine. "He sought every option and nothing was found."

Zeta-Jones, herself an Oscar winner for Chicago, has been married to Douglas for 10 years and the couple have two children together, Dylan, 10, and Carys, 7.

Douglas, 65, is now undergoing radiation and chemotherapy five days a week, every three weeks, to rid himself of a walnut-sized tumour at the base of his tongue.

Zeta-Jones said she could not stand the thought of watching her husband undergoing chemotherapy and radiation and losing his strength as he battles the disease.

"I know maybe I should be stronger, but emotionally I just don't want to see that," she said, later adding: "The hardest part is seeing his fatigue, because Michael is never tired."

Douglas made his first post-announcement TV appearance on Tuesday on The Late Show with David Letterman, and told the talkshow audience that although his cancer was late "stage four", doctors say he has an 80% chance of recovery.

He told People magazine that he was optimistic about his odds. "I'm treating this as a curable disease," he said. "It's a fight. I'll beat this." But he admitted that he was uncertain about the future, and noted that "you just never think it's going to be you".

Still, after months of feeling the pain creep up on him, of having a dry throat and hoarse voice, the news of his cancer came as little surprise to both Hollywood stars.

"It wasn't a huge shock. I knew something was up. He knew something was up," said Zeta-Jones.

And while she is furious about the lack of an early diagnosis, Douglas seems more understanding. "Without having to blame anybody ... these things sometimes just don't show up," he said.

Video: Having taken home the best actress award at Cannes for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, Juliette Binoche talks to Catherine Shoard about the importance of originality and the fallout from her acceptance speech, in which she highlighted the plight of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who was jailed for criticising the state

It won the Palme d'Or, but Parisian critics have now turned on Thai film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, labelling it 'pointless, obscure and excruciatingly boring'

It beat a host of big names and blockbusters to clinch the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival earlier this year. But now the fantastical Thai film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is being turned on by Parisian critics, who have dismissed it as pointless, obscure and excruciatingly boring.

The laboriously titled film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which was plucked from relative obscurity by the Cannes jury in May, has been greeted by some international reviewers as a mesmerising and mystical insight into love, death and life itself.

To many French critics, however, it's just dull.

"I have seen it twice; I was bored twice," wrote Eric Libiot for L'Express magazine. "I am not one of those rhapsodising about this 'splendid epic' and this 'rare and extreme experience'. On the contrary, I consider it to be a work that never goes beyond the theoretical intentions of the director and which uses dramatic arbitrariness as an artistic posture."

While the highbrow left-leaning papers Le Monde and Libération have given the film positive reviews, theirs are lone voices. "Uncle Boonmee claims to be a sort of sensorial experience that, now and then, brings back memories of the worst films of the 1970s," remarked Olivier Delcroix in today's Figaroscope.

Giving the film the worst of four ratings – captioned "to be avoided" – he added: "Between the apparition of a gorilla stricken by myxomatosis and the orgasm of a princess giving into the assaults of an enterprising catfish, one no longer knows what to do. Boredom sets in."

The francophone censure has not been limited to France, with Brussels also piling in. "Uncle Boonmee is hopelessly slow, and the actors whisper their dialogue in an … atmosphere conducive to unavoidable somnolence for the audience," said Hugues Dayez in his review for Belgian radio.

There is, however, one point of relief. Bemoaning the absence of any conventional plot and the sequence of "very long, often static" episodes involving, among other things, a buffalo in a forest and a simian spirit, the critic for Ouest France offered some consolation.

"For he who cannot let himself be carried away with this experimental and abstruse experience … there is still a long love scene – intense and surprising – between a princess and a catfish."

'Bollywood's Brokeback Mountain' and a film about infidelity prove that mainstream Indian cinema is uninterested in authentic scripts and plausible performances

Bollywood rarely treats sex and relationships with any honesty, so I was intrigued to see two films that tackle these subjects at the Indian Film Festival of London last weekend.

The first, Mr Singh Mrs Mehta, was a dreary attempt at French-style arthouse with lots of moody silences, depicting the love affair that develops between the titular characters after they find out their respective spouses are cheating with each other.

Almost nothing happens throughout this pedestrian movie. The only point of interest is why these characters are so bothered by the fact that their ghastly partners have copped off with each other. Ashwin is married to an overly made-up, big-haired shoulder-padded, corporate "uber-bitch", while Neera pines for a bouffant-wearing, shiny-suited douche bag who looks and acts like something out of an Indian version of Abigail's Party.

Ashwin smokes lots of roll-ups while Neera sheds many tears and exposes her buttocks as he paints a yellow Picasso-esque portrait of her with enormous thighs. Finally, Ashwin's wife falls back in love with him, realising what a great artist he is, and Neera tells her husband to sod off. With a story that moves at a glacial pace, this isn't a film with much to say, other than how reticent Indian cinema still is when it comes to talking about infidelity.

The second film I saw left me gobsmacked. Billed as Bollywood's Brokeback Mountain, it had a cynical British audience in stitches for almost two and a half hours. The title, Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun, is as muddled as the film itself, being both textspeak and Hindi for the same thing: "Don't know why. It's the story of a family of Mumbai Christians, in which the eldest son, Ashley (Yuvraj Parashar), is a closet homosexual.

With Hindi and English dialogue, it has some of the most unintentionally hilarious lines I've heard in ages. At a birthday party, an elderly uncle spills noodles into the cleavage of a busty old dame, before making a Carry On style attempt to tidy her up, leading to his exquisite head-wobbling outburst: "I am trying to clean and you are calling me arsehole!" Not even a blacked up Peter Sellers could match that.

Ashley's mother has two boyfriends in the hope of getting one of them to buy her youngest daughter a "scooty". She and Ashley have a long anguished discussion about how they can club together and buy one for her, in which Ashley makes detailed perorations on the merits of Mumbai's public transportation system, while his mother insists that her daughter must have a "scooty" because all of her friends have their own means of "personal conveyance".

Then Ashley's cancer-stricken father, played by the gravel-voiced Kabir Bedi, returns to the family home having abandoned them more than a decade ago to live in an ashram. Trying to explain his actions to his son, he tells Ashley that he'd wanted to do so much with his life "but just didn't have the balls". Then he sits the lad down and passes him an envelope. "Take this negligible sum of money," he says, hoping to make up for his previous behaviour.

Ashley's brother is in love with Ashley's wife, and wants her to live with him in Dubai, but their secret tryst is nothing compared with what Ashley is keeping under his hat.

Halfway through the movie, what appears to be a boring family saga cuts to what looks like a Roman orgy with pole-dancing transvestites and semi-naked young men grinding their hips together on the dancefloor. Here we meet a wannabe actor and prostitute, played by Kapil Sharma, who we see perform oral sex on an old man before becoming the object of Ashley's affections after they go on a blind date.

They fall madly in love, but Ashley's lover tells him to sacrifice their happiness in order to maintain the honour and integrity of his family – especially his daughter, as "society will mock her". Ashley returns to his wife, and his boyfriend goes back on the game before hitting it big in the movies.

Though the film brings gay characters to the fore, it still has all of Bollywood's worst traits: terrible writing, clumsy editing and appalling acting. It's more likely to be a camp cult hit than serious ground-breaking cinema. The gay love affair is the most believable thing in the film, but that's not saying much at all. The laughter of the audience bordered on outright cruelty.

Adultery and homosexuality may be controversial themes for mainstream Indian cinema, but the unwillingness to invest in authentic scripts that can elicit plausible performances will continue to hold Bollywood back for a while to come.

A Hollwyood remake of a French film about a sadistic dinner party game becomes a crass comedy that completely blows Steve Carell's funnyman credibility, says Peter Bradshaw

Steve Carell's comedy stock-price takes a terrible knock with this buttock-clenchingly bad film, a deeply unfunny pseudo-French farce and a remake of Francis Veber's 1998 black comedy Le Dîner de Cons, or The Dinner Game. That was about a sadistic parlour game practised by a group of sneery metropolitan sophisticates. Each would invite the biggest idiot he could find to a regular formal dinner; the dopes would be mocked behind their back and a prize (secretly) awarded to the most egregious loser. I remember very much enjoying the original, but maybe distance now lends something other than enchantment to the view. Perhaps Veber's original has been trashed – or perhaps this crass movie has, disturbingly, located something crass in the source material itself. Paul Rudd plays a basically decent guy who finds himself dragged into this "game" to please the boss: the idiot he finds is a sad sack who stuffs and dresses up dead mice in cute costumes. He is played, with worrying lack of fun, by Carell. Our own David Walliams has a gag-free cameo as a Swiss financier. This is one for everyone to omit from their CV.

Rating: 1/5

There's an Oscar buzz growing around 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence. Jane Graham meets a determined self-starter

At first glance, everything about Jennifer Lawrence suggests honey. It's in her gleaming, golden skin, her luxuriant Timotei hair, and the warm, welcoming and well-rehearsed smile she flashes once formal introductions have established that you are someone it is her duty to talk to. Every bit of her gleams with a sweet and shiny polish: which is probably a natural residue of her southern-belle charm, but is probably also partly attributable to the professional gloss the 20-year-old seems to have acquired with remarkable ease over her nascent two-year film career.

"Oh my gosh," she says, in her rich, dewy Kentucky accent, and holds out a perfectly manicured hand. "It's really good to meet you." She sits back in her chair, the youthful epitome of good health, good genes and good luck, and only in the slight set of her jaw is there a hint of the dutiful actor at work.

It's that steeliness that has finally secured Lawrence the serious attention – and accompanying Oscar buzz – she has sought since she was a determined 14-year-old. She has the fresh, casual beauty and blooming sexuality required for the corrupted-cheerleader look much favoured by Hollywood franchises, but has set herself apart from the likes of Megan Fox and Ashley Greene by failing to exploit them; her role in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone – as Ree Dolly, the resolute big sister left to tend to her catatonic mother and young siblings after the disappearance of her meth-dealing father – studiously eschews glamour.

Set in the Ozark mountains in Missouri, where a vast, ice-white sky stretches for miles over a wasteland of barbed wire, burnt-out cars and strip-lit barns, and life is soundtracked by a loop of barking dogs and distant gunshots, Winter's Bone presents as forlorn an atmosphere as any you'll experience in cinemas this year. But Lawrence's still, graceful performance as the preternaturally strong-willed teenager doggedly juggling the multiple roles she has been forced into – her siblings' mother, her mother's carer, her father's replacement – is so intriguing and emotionally compelling that you're likely to emerge feeling unexpectedly warmed up.

"I'd have walked on hot coals to get the part," says Lawrence. "I thought it was the best female role I'd read – ever. I was so impressed by Ree's tenacity and that she didn't take no for an answer. For the audition, I had to fly on the redeye to New York and be as ugly as possible. I didn't wash my hair for a week, I had no makeup on. I looked beat up in there. I think I had icicles hanging from my eyebrows."

Lawrence employs military language when she talks about her mission to impress Granik, and admits that since high school, she has been almost pathologically focused on her career. While her friends were hanging around street corners mooning over Justin Timberlake and wondering if they'd get away with forgetting their maths homework, 14-year-old Lawrence was harassing her mother into taking her to New York to audition for a part in a script she'd got hold of.

She isn't sentimental about her ambitious younger self – "I was a stubborn little shit" – but you suspect that though she pretends to consider her naive refusal to countenance failure "totally stupid", she is proud of her intense sense of purpose. It is, after all, what attracted her to Winter's Bone.

"When I first got to New York, my feet hit the sidewalk and you'd have thought I was born and raised there," she says. "I took over that town. None of my friends took me seriously. I came home and announced, 'I'm going to move to New York,' and they were like 'OK.' Then when I did, they kept waiting for me to fail and come back. But I knew I wouldn't. I was like, 'I'll show you.'"

She didn't get that first part – "I totally sucked at first" – but she did get herself an agent, and, as far as Lawrence was concerned, that was the cue for a seismic life-change. She persuaded her parents to have her taken out of school and set her sights on her first movie role.

After attracting acclaim for her sure-footed debut as a troubled, thrill-seeking teenager in Guillermo Arriaga's Burning Plain in 2008, she shone in the gritty The Poker House, as another smart, determined kid with the weight of her dependent family – in this case, her prostitute mother and two younger sisters – threatening to kill off any chances of a normal, hope-spangled life.

Lawrence cites Charlize Theron, whom she played opposite in The Burning Plain, as an early acting hero, and Theron's portrayal of serial-killing prostitute Aileen Wuornos in Monster as one of her favourite performances. It seems likely that she has been influenced not only by Theron's choice of roles and but also by her determination not to allow her obvious allure to undermine her reputation. Lawrence is already putting together a strong set of opinions about Hollywood's attitude to young female actors, her face screwing up with contempt when she considers the kind of roles she's been offered in the last couple of years.

"I just don't like that you can either be ugly and smart or pretty and dumb, or ugly and nice or pretty and mean," she says scornfully. "It's in every studio film you see. There's not a lot of imagination out there. Nobody outside of indie films steps outside the box. That drives me nuts." It's bold talk, but so far, Lawrence's choice of roles has justified her chutzpah; her next project, Jodie Foster's The Beaver, is a "weird as hell film" (Lawrence's words) with Mel Gibson as a depressed man who communicates through his beaver   hand-puppet.

If she sounds like a cliche – another cocksure, ambition-driven engine who was "born to act" bravely battling the hazards of her youthful comeliness – Lawrence is enough of a surprise package to keep her interesting and likable. Just as Ree Dolly is at her most beguiling when her mask momentarily slips, and her face briefly twinges with trauma and adolescent uncertainty, the usually formidable Lawrence's childish vulnerability is her most affecting quality. "Being away from home is my least favourite part of all of this," she says. "That really is the hardest part of my job. I really get so homesick. I always get so scared before I go and film a movie because I know I'm going to   get homesick." Winter's Bone was the first film on which Lawrence wasn't accompanied by her mother – she turned 18 just before production. "I hadn't felt like I'd needed her before but when she wasn't there, I ended up phoning her crying and asked her to come. And she and my dad came to me. I was getting sick, and I was just so tired, so I just called my mommy, crying, and asked her to come. She loved that,   of course."

Another unlikely item on the Lawrence CV is a photo and video shoot for Esquire magazine earlier this year, in which she threw herself into the kind of role she has firmly refused to offer Hollywood thus far, frolicking (the only word for it) in a bikini in classic sex-kitten mode. When asked about it, she shrugs in a manner that suggests she is part defensive and part sick of the subject. She's said in the past that she did it to avoid being typecast after a succession of dowdy roles, which makes some kind of sense. Today though, she is more clear-cut. The point, she implies, is that she gets the industry for what it is. We won't be reading about Jennifer Lawrence's quarter-life crisis any time soon.

"There are two sides of this job," she says, her jaw setting again. "There's the artistic side, which is acting in the movie. But there's also the business side. And I understood that the shoot was a good business decision. I had many people that I completely trust – agents, publicists – and they said it was a good idea. And I agreed. I understood why it had to happen. I'm sure I've been criticised for doing it but you know what? I don't care."

Winter's Bone is released on 17 September.

Sarah Turner's challenging art film is a stream of consciousness memory-jogger, says Peter Bradshaw

Film-maker Sarah Turner investigates the boundaries of film and video art with this startling, strange, deeply pessimistic personal record: a filmic essay and visual journal that touches on the themes of autobiography, memory, identity and self – but quite without any catharsis, any emollient sense of a "journey" towards clarity or the alleviation of unhappiness. At the end of the piece, its author seems more scared and bewildered than before. In a samey week at the cinema, Turner's cold, experimental adventure stands out.

What unspools on screen is what a passenger can see from the window of the Trans-Siberian Express; Turner appears simply to point her camera out of the window and hit Rec, and this is, in part, an attempt at emotional reconstruction. She has evidently been involved in an accident involving a partial memory loss. Now, to challenge or repair this loss, she is undertaking a journey she made 20 years ago in Russia (the Gorbachev era of "perestroika", or reconstruction) with, among others, her best friend – who died in a cycling accident similar to the one that injured her. At that time, too, she filmed out of the window and Turner intersperses the "old" and "new" footage.

What is different is not so much what we see – the unending frieze of snowy landscape does not look much different, despite the fuzzier pre-digital video. The difference lies in what we hear. Before, there is the cheerful ambient chatter of Turner's mates. Now, there is just Turner's agonised monologue, muttered like an exceptionally lucid sleeptalker, and sometimes as if through clenched teeth or an appalling migraine. It is a stream of consciousness or semi-consciousness, recounting sometimes what she said and did and felt 20 years ago, and sometimes what she's feeling now. Turner herself is a kind of ghost: we get only glimpses of her face, reflected in the glass. And the viewer is confronted simply by the vastness of the snowy Siberian landscape in all its colossal indifference.

We leave the train only really to visit the derelict shell of the Intourist hotel where the group stayed in 1988: an eerie experience. I was reminded of Scott's awestruck, defeated response to the Antarctic: "Great God, this is an awful place." It is the kind of film that is arguably better viewed on the wall of an art gallery, but the concentration that comes from watching these images in a cinema gives the movie its distinctive bleak power – a rising sense of alienation, even panic, as we stare, endlessly, at these glimpsed images of cities and people whose meaning is withheld from us. Perestroika is a difficult, challenging and experimental piece and not for everyone. But it is conceived with intelligence and arresting intensity.

Rating: 3/5

Jennifer Aniston stars yet again as a woman who can't find love, in yet another sickly rom-com, writes Peter Bradshaw

Loosely based on a 1996 short story by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Switch is a romantic comedy with an interesting and ingenious high concept, initially pursued with verve, but let down by inconsistent characterisation and finally ending in gloopy sentimentality and silliness. Jennifer Aniston plays Kassie, a woman who is going to have a baby using her own form of artificial insemination; she has persuaded a handsome, married acquaintance Roland (Patrick Wilson) to donate sperm, and hosts a bizarre "fertility" party to inaugurate the event. Present is Wally, her best friend, played by Jason Bateman. He has undeclared feelings for Kassie, gets very drunk, and something terrible happens. At the beginning of the film, Roland is supposed to be a right-on lecturer in feminist history, but halfway through, he mutates into a crass, unreflective jock. It's a fundamental flaw in the script: but Wally's liberal agonies are nicely portrayed by Bateman. Jeff Goldblum has a very funny role as his friend and confidant – not so very long ago, Goldblum might well have been playing Bateman's role himself.

Rating: 2/5

Despite a nice performance from Martin Compston, this teen drama set in the 70s northern soul era is entertaining but a bit too predictable, writes Peter Bradshaw

There's a likable, open and energetic performance from Martin Compston in this period 1970s drama centred on the northern soul scene – but in the end, there is something just a little too formulaic about the film. It has a distinct resemblance to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's Cemetery Junction, amplified by the presence of Felicity Jones in another girl-next-door role. Compston is Joe, a likely lad who discovers the Dionysiac all-nighters at the Wigan Casino, gets into the dancing and falls for glamorous Jane (Burley) while shy, pretty Mandy (Jones) nurses feelings for him – but the presence of drugs at the club threatens to take the soul out of Soul. Amiable stuff, perhaps a little too derivative.

Rating: 2/5

This comedy-drama about upscale African-Americans is a little too self-satisfied for its own good, writes Andrew Pulver

Tyler Perry has made a lot of money in the US, churning out heartwarming plays and films aimed at upscale African- Americans, mounted like expensive TV soap operas. This is a sequel to a film about four married couples that was never actually released in UK cinemas; here, the (slightly reordered) couples reassemble in a Bahamian beach house where, naturally, the strengths and weaknesses of each marriage are thrown into sharp relief. Perry, himself a confident, leonine presence in one of the lead roles, displays a fondness for dialogue seemingly copied out of a self-actualisation handbook; luckily, then, Janet Jackson plays a book-writing pop psychologist. Perry has plugged a hole in the market, for sure; it's just all a bit pleased with itself.

Rating: 2/5

Juliette Binoche stars in the first film Abbas Kiarostami has made outside Iran. Peter Bradshaw finds it very odd indeed

Abbas Kiarostami's new movie has an Italian setting; it is his first fiction feature to be made outside Iran, and it really is an oddity – an intriguing oddity, but an oddity nonetheless. Certified Copy is the deconstructed portrait of a marriage, acted with well-intentioned fervour by Juliette Binoche, but persistently baffling, contrived, and often simply bizarre – a highbrow misfire of the most peculiar sort. It looks like the work of a sophisticated director with no feel for the languages he's working in, and sometimes even like the work of a highly intelligent and observant space alien who still has not quite grasped how Earthlings actually relate to each other.

The film is set in Tuscany, where visiting British author James Miller, played by newcomer William Shimell, is giving a reading from his latest book, entitled Certified Copy. This is a daring work of art history, which claims that a reproduction is as valuable as an original, and that the distinction between the two is founded on fallacious and naive assumptions about authenticity and truth. Binoche plays a French antiques dealer, invited along to his talk, who is fascinated and a little nettled by the man's provocations – her teenage son teasingly accuses her of having a crush on this handsome celebrity.

She has offered to give him a local tour, where James turns out to be prickly and difficult; their conversations are tense, and the proprietor of a local cafe tellingly mistakes them for a married couple. The idea appears to amuse them both, and without ever remarking explicitly on what is happening, the pair embark on a kind of exploratory role-play, in which Binoche finds that she can speak with unaccustomed freedom to her "copy" husband about the crisis in her marriage, and finds that this virtual-reality intimacy may be more powerfully real than the real thing.

It is a film that is pregnant with ideas, and for aspiring to a cinema of ideas Kiarostami is to be thanked and admired. But the simple human inter-relation between the two characters is never in the smallest way convincing, and there is a translated, inert feel to the dialogue.

As James, William Shimell gives a performance that is technically fine: despite being an opera singer by training, he is never showy or stagey; on the contrary, he is calm, unruffled, with an easy address to the camera. He has aplomb, even when called upon to give a rather Basil Fawltyish temper tantrum in a restaurant. But his character is perplexing. James is outrageously supercilious, arrogant, conceited and rude. But is he intended to be these things? Or just drily intellectual? It is difficult to tell if Kiarostami quite understands how unresponsive James appears, or how overwhelmingly strange the whole movie really is.

Certainly, Binoche reacts with exasperation to James sometimes, but never asks about his own life or marital situation, and seems in her way quite as weirdly solipsistic as he is. An anecdote about the copy of Michelangelo's David in Florence's Piazza della Signoria leads to the pair discovering an extraordinary connection between them – which is never developed, nor mentioned again. The unreality caused by the characters never remarking on their role-play (strange for a stuffy Brit) never leaves the film, although at one stage Binoche begs the reticent James to pretend that they were married in a particular church where a young couple's wedding is taking place; both she and the couple themselves good-naturedly beg James to pose in photographs with them. Even given that the newlyweds will never discover the truth, and that it makes them happy, it seems an extraordinarily fatuous, dishonest prank. Why does Binoche want to do it so very much? Is it because their marital "copy" has become so real, or perhaps because her resulting emotional crisis has unbalanced her? Maybe. But like so much here, it is unconvincing and uninteresting.

Certified Copy has resemblances to other Kiarostami films: there are extended dialogue scenes in cars, and business with mobile phones indicating a breakdown in communication. He contrives an elegant sight gag for an ageing French tourist, played in cameo by the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, talking on his hands-free device. Only for a moment does Kiarostami display his most eccentric tic, cancelling the shot-reverse-shot convention by keeping the camera on the listener, not the speaker. It is as distinctive a mannerism as Ozu's direct sightlines into camera – a style that Kiarostami employs when the two are talking to each other. This just further underscores the curious disconnect between the two characters, which is so distinct that I almost suspected some M Night Shyamalan-type twist in the tail. The theme of spectral absence is certainly relevant.

Kiarostami may have absorbed other influences. Certified Copy has something of Rossellini's Journey to Italy, and I wonder if he might even have been influenced by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's initial squabble in Manhattan about everything from Van Gogh to Heinrich Böll. In its very strangeness, and unworldliness, and utter unreality, Certified Copy has a species of charm. It is an intensely composed and choreographed film in its way, unmistakably an example of Kiarostami's compositional technique, though not a successful example. It may go down as the strangest "meet-cute" in the history of cinema.

Rating: 2/5

This eco-documentary about living a low-impact lifestyle is undermined by irritating devices and ersatz drama, says Peter Bradshaw

Superdownsize Me could be the subtitle of this eco-conscious documentary, presented in all an too familiar format; it advances important and laudable ideas, but in a cliched, gimmicky way. Colin Beavan is a New York blogger and environmentalist who at the end of 2006 came up with an idea that soon made him a media darling – to his own elaborate, saucer-eyed surprise. For one year, he and his family will live a lifestyle that has "no impact" on the environment: no car-driving, no TV, no buying anything new, no unnecessary packaging, no electricity, and – gulp! – no toilet paper. What is supposed to make this story cute is that Colin's wife Michelle is a high-flying Business Week journalist with a Carrie-Bradshaw-type love of retail therapy, and for her, the No Impact experiment is having a very traumatic impact indeed. The movie coyly creates a human-interest subplot about whether or not they are going to have another child, a heartwarming drama intended to sugar the pill of boring old eco-politics. A somewhat trying and self-conscious film.

Rating: 2/5

The Graduate has a film language all of its own, and a style so seductive that, as a filmmaker, it is hard not to imitate it – as Marc Webb, director of 500 Days of Summer, admits

In the beginning, there was The Graduate. It's probably the first film I saw that made me curious about its creator, because Mike Nichols developed a film language all his own. So many of my contemporaries (and myself) have borrowed or outright stolen from those sacred frames: Rushmore, Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State – its influence is clear. I once heard David O Russell say that it is almost dangerous to watch The Graduate. Its allure, he says, is so profound that you will simply try to imitate it as a film-maker. He's got a point.

It's too late for me. Anyone who's seen my movie 500 Days of Summer knows that the movie is permanently fused to my brainstem. But I'll argue the influence is a positive one – one that enables rather than limits. Let's talk about simple craft for a second. One of the oddly tricky things about making a movie is where to put the camera. It sounds like an obvious problem, but when you really consider how many options there are, it can be overwhelming. You want to be stylish – but it's very easy for style to erode emotion. If you fetishise a shot, you might capture the audience for an instant but you risk alienating them. Or maybe you shoot it conventionally in masters and close-ups, toss the footage to the editor and hope for the best. But then where's your identity? Where's the unique experience you as an artist are obligated to provide?

Before shooting 500 Days, I studied The Graduate to try to deduce why Mike Nichols put the camera where he did. How did this director know to open the movie on a close-up of Dustin Hoffman? Why did he put the fish tank behind Benjamin's head? Was he just being funny? How was he brave enough to cover the entire party downstairs in a single long take? A close-up, no less! Who the hell covers a scene like that? We don't see the other partygoers' pecking faces – but, judging by Ben's befuddled expression, neither does he. As he wanders through the party, we start to feel what Benjamin feels. Claustrophobic. Shut off. We feel like prey to the horrible swarms of the affluent middle-aged. We see the world as he sees the world. Blacks and whites. Crisp wardrobes. Cool, long takes. And then she comes along …

It's easy to think of The Graduate as an artful string of iconic shots and sequences. But a pattern emerges. Underneath, there's a deep logic: Mike Nichols puts us in Benjamin Braddock's shoes. For me, that's one of many great lessons of The Graduate: point of view. Put the camera where the protagonist is, literally and metaphorically.

For fun, I try to deduce his influences. Are those bold frames a result of Kurosawa? Do the confident long takes and superb blocking come from his days in the theatre? Is the deadpan delivery a residue of Nichols and May? I don't know. What I do know is that he is a master and an artist. Last year, I got an email from Mr Nichols after my film had come out. It was brief but generous. I parlayed it into an incredibly delightful lunch in New York. The Grad, as he called it, took a long time for people to settle down and grasp – longer than anyone except Nichols and scriptwriter Buck Henry remember. He chalked it up to a generational difference.

I think great films are not simply a diversion. Great films can recreate and articulate emotions that feel – until we see them onscreen – too confusing to talk about. Too private and deep to say aloud. When a movie cracks that for me, it becomes a friend. A warning. A guide. A conversation piece. A prism through which we can view our own experience. It's like a voice from the ether that whispers: "You are not alone."

The Grad is such a film.

The Graduate is out on Blu-ray on 13 September.

This yarn about a priest who uses exorcism as a form of therapy is a neat and scary little horror film – it's enough to restore your faith in the genre, writes Phelim O'Neill

The poster for this film makes a big deal out of the involvement of Hostel director Eli Roth. But don't worry; as producer, Roth is here using his powers for good, giving some industry weight so this excellent horror film doesn't become ignored like Stamm's previous, A Necessary Death. Cynical evangelist Cotton Marcus (Fabian) has a documentary crew follow him as he performs his lucrative sideline of exorcisms, a ritual he believes to be more an effective placebo for the mentally stressed than actual divine intervention against demonic possession. His work takes him to a backwoods farm where teenage Nell (Bell) is suffering blackouts and animals are found mutilated. Rather than go for easy jump shocks, Stamm effectively crafts a dozen or so marvellously creepy moments. Audience faith in the existence of decent horror films is reaffirmed.

Rating: 4/5

The acclaimed graphic novel about the mysterious, scarred old West bounty hunter has become a muddled, inept film, says Phelim O'Neill

Even if you didn't know how troubled this adaptation of John Albano's comic book was, with rumours of countless rewrites and reshoots, it's obvious something is drastically wrong here even before the opening titles are over. After we are introduced to gruesomely scarred semi-supernatural old west bounty hunter Hex (Brolin, in grisly prosthetics), there is a terrible expositional animated sequence; it's as if they simply forgot to film some key scenes. Otherwise, it seems like a bad case of lost nerve: Hex is never quite the bad-ass he is in the comics, while the plot attempts some clunky relevance as Hex hunts down a campy villain (Malkovich) who is making an olden-days weapon of mass destruction. It just gets louder and more nonsensical as it progresses, with Fox shoe-horned into as many scenes as possible.

Rating: 2/5

Paul Andrew Williams finally makes a decent follow-up to London to Brighton, with this low-budget home invasion movie that plays on middle class fear of youth, writes Peter Bradshaw

If Michael Haneke were drafted in to direct an EastEnders Christmas special, it might look like this raw, no-budget, home-invasion nightmare. It begins in a studied, low-key style – all the more disturbing for being so banal. A middle-aged couple sit down to a boring, yet tense, dinner in their pleasant London home. Their dialogue is so subdued as to be almost inaudible; they are clenched with unhappiness and so wrapped up in themselves and their banal marital problems that they hardly care at all about their son, who appears to be mixed up with drugs. Then there is a ring on the doorbell and the ordeal begins. The movie is effectively claustrophobic and unnerving and the more potent for unfolding in real time. It plays brutally on the liberal middle-class fear of crime and fear of the young. The acting is sometimes a little rough around the edges, and the film suffers from a lack of ideas about how it should end: this is where Haneke, with his icy rigour and pitiless clarity, scores higher. But it certainly manages some nasty turns of the screw.

Rating: 3/5

A low-budget British horror film in the style of Hollyoaks. By Phelim O'Neill

A low-budget British horror film about a group of friends who foolishly venture deep into the Welsh woods to capture (on video) a legendary local beast that has been killing livestock, and soon find themselves chased by a huffing and puffing big bad wolfman. But this feels more like an episode of Hollyoaks: when faced with actors with little talent, simply have them argue constantly, so these dead-eyed, bland beauties will at least register as living creatures. Of course, the trouble with this is that they quickly become immensely irritating, and you just can't wait for them to get killed off quickly enough.

Rating: 1/5

Stephen Frears is an amused connoisseur. I can't dispute his estimate that the less money he's had at risk on a venture, the better it ends up

Inasmuch as he will be 70 next year, and is a national treasure, I suspect some honours list will notice Stephen Frears soon. Of course, it is possible in his humble, muttering self-effacement that he wouldn't hear of such a distinction (I think there's a republican in there). On the other hand, he did make The Queen (with writer Peter Morgan and pretender Helen Mirren), the most sophisticated public relations boost HRH has had in 20 years, and all the more affectionate because it was wry and a bit of a tease.

By now, it is taken for granted that Frears – whom I count as a friend – gets away with nearly anything he cares to try, and as he grows older, he is less conventional and obvious. So his latest film, Tamara Drewe, is taken from the Posy Simmonds graphic novel, just as the previous picture, Cheri, was from Colette, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton. And both films are in love with pretty women, albeit a generation apart. Neither is Frears at his best, but he has never been too distressed by films that haven't worked completely. He is an amused connoisseur of the vagaries of production and the way hopes and dreams can be frustrated by too much or too little money. He doesn't like his own film Mary Reilly, and felt it was going wrong from early on – so I have shouldered the lifelong task of gently persuading him that it's very good. I won't win, and I can't dispute his estimate that the less money he's had at risk on a venture, the better it ends up.

So if the royal household is thinking of some award (involving a sword), I'd urge them to look at things many people may have forgotten – like A Day Out (1972), about an Edwardian cycling club going to Bolton Abbey (it was written by Alan Bennett). Or Sunset Across the Bay, another Bennett script done for television. Or even Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983), a love affair between Judi Dench and Frederic Forrest (is that daring, or unlikely?) that was written by David Hare. Or even Walter (1982) the amazingly dark opening-night offering for Channel 4, written by David Cook and starring Ian McKellen.

These are rich dramas realised with integrity and devoted to English character, irony and tragedy. Taken as a group, they cast Frears in a rather sombre, realist light that was deserved if not entirely accurate. He was, until then, a TV director despite the genre aplomb and wit of Gumshoe (1971). But then a TV venture, Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), seemed to inhale the multiculturalism and confused gender of a new Britain, and became a modest theatrical success that released energy and confidence in Frears.

His stride grew longer, his grip more relaxed, and Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid led to the international hit Dangerous Liaisons (1988) (written by Hampton). From that Frears became a director in America, and The Grifters (1990) is outstanding, fond of rotten people, without sentimentality or condescension. Hero was not a success – nor was Mary Reilly – and that seemed to send Frears home to smaller pictures: The Snapper, The Van and the characteristic A Personal History of British Cinema.

Frears seems ready to take on anything odd and piquant, as likely to be for TV as cinema: so The Deal (2003) was a pioneering work about goings-on inside politics, and a launch for Peter Morgan and Michael Sheen; Fail Safe was a shot at redoing live TV drama; and Skip Tracer was TV again. But High Fidelity was a surprisingly successful transfer of Nick Hornby to America, and Dirty Pretty Things was another artful look at the underside of Britain.

You could say that Frears hasn't quite made a masterpiece yet, and he would probably answer that he doesn't do masterpieces – as if to suggest that the concept is vulgar and pretentious. He doesn't want to be seen being that personal or vain, I suppose. So he labours on in an age when making English movies is said to be harder and harder, yet he makes it seem easier. Give him a prize.

Jean Reno stars as a gangster who survives being shot with the eponymous number of bullets in a revenge yarn that goes way, way over the top, writes Catherine Shoard

How would it feel to be peppered with bullets by hitmen hired by your former best friend? This revenge yarn, starring Jean Reno as a mamma-loving ex-mafioso who suffers just that fate, goes out of its way to recreate the sensation, with body-blow plotting, bombastic moralising and remorseless orchestration in which every line of dialogue is forced to compete with kettledrums. If you can cope with all the pummelling as Reno wreaks dreadful vengeance, then guilty pleasure can be taken in the drizzly streets and grizzly cops, as well as the great sides of Gallic jambon in the supporting cast. But the dice are too stacked for this to be taken seriously. When the chief baddie both stutters and slaughters puppies, you know you're in trouble.

Rating: 2/5

Yet another Brit-gangster film version of the Rettendon Range Rover murders; this is as shoddy and cliched as the rest of them, writes Xan Brooks

Just as the American western had its Gunfight at the OK Corral, so the British crime flick has the Rettendon Range Rover murders of December 1995, in which a trio of drug dealers were shotgunned to death on the back roads of Essex. This is the third film to revisit the scene, scampering in the wake of Essex Boys and Rise of the Footsoldier, trampling the evidence underfoot as   it sniffs excitably at a pungent mess of gangster cliche. Tamer Hassan, king of the British B-movie, stars as the thuggishly avuncular Pat Kane, who dons various outfits as he wades   from triumph to disaster. Here he is, resplendent in regulation knitwear as he tosses a snivelling grass over the prison railings. There he is, modelling a natty bathrobe as he hurls his girlfriend down the steps of their bungalow. And here he is again, poignantly swaddled in a heavy car-coat as he drives through the snow to meet his Waterloo.

Rating: 2/5

Wrestling stars are muscling their way into cinema multiplexes – but can WWE really beat Hollywood on its own mat?

Brace yourself, adjust the volume controls and get ready, in a very real sense, to rumble – because the wrestlers are coming. The good news, at least, is that they're not here to grapple or drop-kick, but instead to emote, frown, wisecrack and demonstrate the full range of the emotional register.

This summer, the drip-drip of US wrestling's incursions into mainstream cinema under the aegis of World Wrestling Entertainment's in-house movie production arm, WWE Studios, has shown its first real signs of becoming a surge. In August, former WWE wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's ascent into legitimate crossover status resumed with the US release of The Other Guys, a Will Ferrell comedy in which Johnson co-stars. And, this month, current ace face John Cena's new film, the WWE-produced Legendary, is also released. As Cena says: "WWE studios has got five movies in the can right now and every one of them has come out ahead of expectations. We have all the channels in place and I think it's going to be a good time for us." At a time when many studios are facing financial pruning, a new and aggressively resourced presence is stalking the multiplex, rippling its perma-tanned pectorals. Wrestling wants  in.

WWE has stealthily pursued its move into cinema ever since the foundation of its Los Angeles-based production arm in 2002. "We saw this as a broadening and a natural extension of the entertainment business we're already in," says Andrew Whittaker, WWE executive vice-president. "It is natural for WWE superstars who are already well known in 149 countries to extend their brand status around the world. Nine films planned for release gives you as clear an indication as you need of our ambition."

Ambition – and opportunity – aside, what wrestling can really boast is its production line of camera-ready, six-packed, violently extroverted talent. Its hottest product at the moment is Cena (pronounced see-nah), a 33-year-old nine-time WWE champion described by Whittaker as "the top world star in the current era". Cena's big break as an actor came with 2006's The Marine, a critically panned Iraq war drama but a commercial success, making $30m in its first 12 weeks on DVD. The Marine was followed by 2009's 12 Rounds, a cop revenge yarn that is, above all, extremely loud. Legendary, the new film, is an entry in the strangely undersaturated small-town high-school wrestling family action-drama genre. "It was a bit of a change to what I was used to," Cena says. "But I was really attracted to the storyline and by the chance to play somebody's brother. When I read the script, I realised it was a great chance to show I can do more than just dodge bullets. I knew it wouldn't be too far out of my range."

In fact, Cena is a convincingly weighty presence in Legendary. Within the first 10 minutes he appears broodingly stripped to the waist. He pouts, he flexes, he fights in bars. And throughout he does indeed have something of the glacially square-jawed leading man about him, coming on a bit like Matt Damon's harder, perennially cross bad-boy cousin. Legendary follows the story of a nerdy schoolboy, played by Devon Graye, who takes up wrestling to follow in the footsteps of his estranged brother, a troubled, bull-necked ex-champ (played by Cena) – a decision that causes his mother to slam down her dinner plate:

"I know wrestling … It will take you away from everything else."

"But … Dad wrestled."

"And it ate him up."

Actually, Legendary isn't all that bad, and Cena is easily the best thing in it. A college-educated native of Massachusetts, he trod a familiar pre-WWE path through minor athletic success, a subsequent excursion into bodybuilding and a stint as a chauffeur. His wrestling career took off overnight when he adopted a Vanilla Ice-style white-rapper persona that proved hugely popular with fans. Even before taking to acting, Cena already had a diverse portfolio of entertainment credits: his rap album You Can't See Me entered the Billboard chart at No 15.

Versatility is everything with WWE: even Legendary, with its chirpy sentimentality and family-orientated plotlines, is an embodiment of Whittaker's dictum that "we wanted to do things differently to what you might expect – not just action films, but all genres: comedy, drama." It is a theme Cena warms to: "Anybody who sees me automatically assumes I'm just the big, strong, beat-'em-up kind of guy. This movie, I'm so happy with the way it came out. I don't want to say it's going to shut anybody up, but it's certainly going to open a few people's eyes." Is he genuinely interested in expanding against type into other genres? Into comedy? Period drama? "Yeah, absolutely. Not only myself but the other WWE superstars. We've got a ton of talent in that locker room, and any time we get the chance, we'll show what we're all about."

Perhaps where things go from here for Cena will depend on whether mainstream audiences can absorb another likable slice of wrestling beef when they already have Johnson, now a bona fide self-employed movie star. WWE's four break-out co-productions – The Scorpion King (2002), The Rundown (2003), Walking Tall (2004) and Behind Enemy Lines (2009) – all had Johnson in the starring role. His ascent has been mirrored by his gradual shedding of the cloak of his WWE title: from "The Rock" in his early film credits, to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and now simply Dwayne Johnson. He had conquered the wrestling world so absolutely by 2001 that there were no fresh peaks left; so he began acting that same year. He made his debut with a brief appearance in The Mummy Returns, in which he so uncannily nailed the role of taciturn, muscular bad guy that he landed his own spin-off vehicle, The Scorpion King; its dizzying $5.5m fee is still the highest salary for an actor in his first starring role. Johnson has since appeared in The Rundown, Be Cool, Walking Tall, Gridiron Gang, The Game Plan, Get Smart, Race to Witch Mountain, Planet 51, Tooth Fairy, Doom, and Why Did I Get Married Too? You might not have seen them all, but Johnson has now undeniably broken through the Lycra ceiling into that other place where wrestling becomes merely his backstory.

That is no mean achievement. Wrestling has had a long and at times difficult relationship with the movies. WWE first dipped its toe in the waters as long ago as 1989, with the Hulk Hogan vehicle No Holds Barred. Hogan had previously played Thunderlips in Rocky III, a high-water mark in a short-lived period of semi-ironic muscle-hunk superstardom, which would eventually map out a familiar trajectory: from wrestling vehicle to action vehicle to zany family comedy. (Hogan's career would reach tipping point with Mr Nanny in 1993.) Around the same time, Jesse Ventura appeared in 1987's Predator, followed by bits and bobs in The Running Man, Demolition Man and Batman & Robin. Heading back into wrestling's mistier past, Tor Johnson, "The Super Swedish Angel", starred in some well-known B-movies, most notably as police inspector-turned-zombie Dan Clay in 1959's Plan 9 from Outer Space, an oddity still cherished by the movie-kitsch crowd.

In more recent times, the likes of Johnson and Cena have arrived not as tentative pioneers, but with a mob-handed back-up crew. Triple H appeared as a vampire heavy in Blade: Trinity. Kevin Nash wrestled under the excellent alias "Big Sexy" before taking a role in the 2004 action film The Punisher. There isn't that much of a stretch in all this, from one form of rehearsed and character-driven punch-up to the world of big-screen action filler. As Cena says: "It's really an extension of what we do. It's just in a different form. There's a ton of similarities."

And maybe this is simply wrestling's time for other reasons. WWE may be a venerable behemoth, tracing its lineage back to the formation of the Capitol Wrestling Corporation in the 1950s, and coming of age in the 1980s with the syndication of its high-adrenaline, high-drama, high-camp version of the grapple game; but it is decidedly cutting-edge in its intimate global reach. There is a sense that the real masterplan here may be the chance to use WWE's well-grooved pre-existing multimedia channels to outflank the traditional studio distribution methods. "We co-produced our first four movies," Whittaker says. "It was a learning experience to work with top-notch studios. Post that experience, we saw efficiencies in going on our own, with our distribution paths in DVD, digital and pay-per-view. We knew we were going to be able to expand into non-traditional release space."

Wrestling isn't just rattling the door handle – it's brushing the chalk from its hands and preparing to vault the elasticated ropes. It has the distribution, the personnel, and above all a spirit of energetic can-do, a bicep-flexing assertiveness. "The worst thing we could do would be to come out with a really crappy movie," Cena says. "Other studios make so many movies they can get away with making one that fails. We will be watched by so many people, under such a microscope, that we just have to put out good movie after good movie."

Legendary is released on 10 September, and on DVD on 27 September.

Ray Winstone plays troubled hardmen with such conviction, it's easy to believe he's not acting. He talks about his violent past, happy-go-lucky nature and love of westerns

According to an old Fleet Street adage, it is a bad idea to interview your heroes. As I don't have very many, however, the situation seldom arises. But the warning began to make sense while I was getting ready to meet Ray Winstone, for it's hard not to be at least a bit in love with him. So if he turned out to be a twit, I worried, it would be disproportionately upsetting.

Winstone is the East End's answer to George Clooney – the opposite of a luvvie, unaffected and occasionally ungovernable, the kind of man with whom men want to get drunk, and women want to sleep. Haunting performances as a wife-beater in Nil by Mouth, and a retired robber in Sexy Beast, elevated him to the attention of Hollywood, yet despite starring in films by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg he has stayed in Essex, where he lives with his wife of 30 years. He turned down the part of McNulty in The Wire just because he didn't want to uproot his youngest daughter to the US, and everyone who works with him says how lovely he is – great fun, down to earth, an authentic diamond geezer.

So I arrive at an exclusive private members' club in east London feeling mildly uneasy. The feeling lasts for less than a second, replaced by the disorientating sensation of having already met him, so exactly is Winstone as you'd hope him to be. He only chose the swanky venue, he explains, because you can smoke on the terrace, and "I was here in 30 minutes – straight dahn the M11, Old Ford Road and I'm 'ere." He likes being able to get to see West Ham easily, he adds – "keep in touch with my roots" – but is having a crisis of faith in football, after England's World Cup performance.

"I don't think I can go to football any more. It's doing my head in. The lack of passion, it was embarrassing, really embarrassing. Any other profession in the world, if you performed like that, well, you wouldn't get a job. You'd be sacked. And I'm, I'm kind of tired of watching people roll about on the floor – the cheating side of it. I think it's about time they started acting like men, I really do."

Masculinity, it would be fair to say, means a great deal to Winstone. He has that solid, low centre of gravity you find in men who are unusually at ease in their own skin, and a twinkly air of old-fashioned amazement at the silliness of modern metropolitan ideas. Was that, I ask, why he has agreed to promote a western season on the cable channel TCM?

"I just love westerns. One of my favourite actors is John Wayne, probably one of the most underrated actors there's ever been. He's quite an incredible actor. He had this way of being a big man, a big tough man, but he can almost show a sadness on his face – very much in the way James Stewart was, and Henry Fonda, you know? But because they were known as classical actors they got the recognition, didn't they?"

It sounds as if he might identify with this description. "Yeah, I think so," he agrees. "I remember watching The Long Good Friday [starring Bob Hoskins] one evening, and all the swearwords were bleeped out. Then the following week there was a film on with Laurence Olivier, Sir Laurence Olivier? Set in Italy, I think it was. And he swears in it – but he's allowed to swear. Because he's a classical actor. And poor old Bob comes from Luton. And I remember thinking to myself, why on earth is Sir Laurence allowed to say fuck? Does it sound better or something? And Bob from Luton ain't. What, is it less offensive?"

Kathy Burke, Winstone's great friend and co-star in Nil by Mouth, has complained in the past that critics "forget that we're actors. Just because we tend to appear in things with our own accents, saying dialogue that comes naturally to us, people think we're just being ourselves." When I ask Winstone if he agrees, for a moment he hesitates, as if wary of sounding like a whinger.

"Well – well, yeah. You kind of think – well, to me it's about believing in the character you're watching on screen. And I've worked with directors who want to know you're acting. But I don't want to see the acting thing in it. Gary [Oldman] used to say, 'I can see you acting, Raymond.' And I'd go right, OK, let's do it again." His dramatic realism, he says, is more appreciated in the US. "They kind of get it. But here, I see things here that say, well that's just Ray, innit? Well, OK, but no, it's not. I don't beat my wife, and I don't rape my kids, and I don't snort cocaine and go out and beat people. What, that's me? Well, what is Robert De Niro? What's Al Pacino? I don't count myself in that class, but you know, you've got to be believable. You either believe in what you're doing or you don't, and I kind of believe in what I'm doing so I just do it that way."

When Winstone first appeared in the 1977 BBC television play Scum, he was so believable as a violent borstal inmate that the programme was banned, but re-made for cinema two years later. Winstone had just returned from his honeymoon and was completely unprepared for the mayhem that greeted the film's Leicester Square premiere. "It was quite mad," he chuckles. "My wife probably thought, 'Ooh, I've had a right result here.'"

If so, she was in for a disappointment, as her husband's early promise soon began to unravel into bit parts, punch-ups, too much resting and raucous partying. Born in Hackney in 1957, the son of a fruit-and-veg market stall trader, Winstone had been a schoolboy boxing champion but got just a single CSE in drama, and was expelled from drama school for vandalising the head's car. His performance in Scum began to look like one of those rare, mercurial moments of unrepeatable inspiration – and he admits that, in truth, "technically and all that, I wasn't good enough".

Living in a two-bedroom London council flat with his wife and two young daughters, he wound up bankrupt. "I just didn't know how to handle money. It was my fault. I wasn't earning a lot of money, I got 1,800 quid for Scum, and when I worked we was just spending it. It was just like a laugh, you know?"

Wasn't he worried? "No, I've never really worried about anything, you know. Well, that's my trouble, I don't get stressed. No, if I did I'd have probably not got into the situation in the first place. I remember being indoors one day and we got a cheque through the post for Robin of Sherwood. And instead of paying the tax we went on holiday. 'Come on, let's go on holiday, you only live once and all that. We'll worry about the rest tomorrow.'

"But after a while I thought I was probably wasting my time, and I should go out and get a proper job. I couldn't really see myself as an actor. I don't know, I just thought it's not really for me, this." He doesn't know what else he'd have done – "Haven't got a clue, babes" – but maintains he'd still have been happy. "Well, knowing the mentality of me I probably would have been. Yeah, I'm sure I would have been."

I don't think he can have been quite as happy as he says, though, because he was forever getting into fights – though in fairness even this memory doesn't seem to trouble him. "I mean, I was punching people and everything," he recalls with a wolfish grin. "They deserved it, don't worry. A couple of things happened on set where I thought people were rude and that, and they got a clump. I remember years ago I was an extra, just an extra, and instead of asking me to move – he was a big fella – the director just picked me up and moved me. And I headbutted him. You know, he shouldn't have done that, but I shouldn't have done that either. I just done it."

What did you think afterwards? "Well, he deserved it. Then another director, he was so rude all the time – he was molestering [sic] people, I thought – and I was with my little girl, and he started digging me up at a party. And I give it 'im an' all, he got it." He grins, then shrugs philosophically. "But it's all part of growing up I guess." I wonder what his wife said. "Well, Elaine was with me. She said, have you finished now? She said we'd best go now. And she drove us home." She sounds remarkably sanguine, I laugh. "Well, yeah, I guess she's seen a bit." He chuckles fondly. "Not any more, thank God." So she wouldn't have said, Ray, we've got to pay the rent – sort yourself out? "No," he smiles with undisguised pride. "She'd usually join in."

It was Burke who came to the rescue, casting Winstone in a play called Mr Thomas in 1986 that reminded him why he wanted to act. More parts came his way – One Foot in the Grave, Kavanagh QC, The Bill – but he was still basically a jobbing actor until 1997, when Nil by Mouth produced a performance so devastatingly ugly and bathetic, it was impossible to imagine any other actor in the role. Winstone's instinct for the humanity buried inside the most brutalised masculinity was astonishing to witness. He knew himself, even as they were filming, that something radically different was happening.

"Yeah, I thought so. There was a magic about it. It was tough to make, but I knew enough to be much more technically minded, more disciplined. It was the first time I could really stand up on me own feet and be in control of how you was going to go about this, and not be frightened of pushing it to the limit."

The family moved to a big house in Essex, bigger parts came rolling in, and after Sexy Beast in 2000, Hollywood began calling, with starring roles alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie and Mel Gibson. It must feel strange for the fantasy future he'd hoped for more than 30 years ago to finally arrive – and now that it has, I wonder if he can still feel like the same person. "You'd like to think you were the same person," he ponders thoughtfully. "But I'm much more chilled out. I think I used to be a bit of a raving lunatic."

Life in the Winstone household sounds almost like a caricature of a working-class boy done good. There's his inhouse bar – Raymondo's – and his Sunday roasts, and a photograph of the one time Winstone ever picked up a vacuum cleaner. "Elaine caught me once doing the Hoovering, and took a picture. I do a bit of ironing. But nah, I'm quite old-fashioned." Elaine is a traditional housewife and their eldest two daughters, Lois and Jaime, are now grown-up and both actors, but the youngest goes to the local primary school. "I was all right with nappies, but I had to wear a mask. I can see blood all day long, no bother. But poo? Urggh, no. We don't have nannies and all that, we look after our own kids. It's just what you do. If you want a big family that's just what you do, isn't it?"

When I ask how he's managed to stay married for 30 years, he offers mildly: "I don't know. I suppose being a bit old-fashioned, really. Nowadays it's so easy to have a row and walk away, but I'm pretty old-fashioned, you work at it." Some people claim it's impossible for an actor to remain faithful – but at this, Winstone rolls his eyes and lets rip: "Oh, it's just bullshit. It's fucking hard for anyone. It is, 'cos you're always going to have your rows, and you're always going to have temptations. Always. I kind of look at it and go, 'Why would a 28-year-old want to look at a 53-year-old fat boy?' I don't understand when you look at the paper and see all these people getting caught out," and he pretends to read: "'Sixty-two-year-old so-and-so caught with an 18-year-old so-and-so.' You go, mate, what did you actually think she wanted? Is it hard to work out?" He shakes his head and laughs. "You're going to lose everything, your kids, your wife, your home, everything. Down to some old bird? Nah, I don't think so."

The only time he ever looks vaguely uncomfortable is when I ask why he fronts the frankly tacky TV ads for Bet365, a gambling website. "Cos it's great," he says slightly defensively. "I don't do bank ads or insurance commercials, but with betting, people have a choice. And Bet365 actually helps me to be able to afford to do a film like Fathers of Girls for no money."

I'd been dreading the moment when Fathers of Girls would come up. The forthcoming low-budget film, in which he plays a small-town solicitor whose daughter dies of a drug overdose, is so mawkishly awful, you'd need to be Winstone's own mother (or possibly his daughter Lois, who appears alongside him) not to cringe, or to wonder what Winstone was thinking. His high opinion of the film seems unaccountable - but his explanation turns out to be irreproachable.

"Karl [Howman, the director] is my mate. I read the script and I said it's great, Karl, do you want me to do it? He said: 'What?' I said: 'Do you want me to do it? I'll do it.' He said: 'What, really, would you do it?' 'Of course I'll fucking do it. You're my mate. We've known each other 37 years.' So then we went and done it."

Knowing everything he knows now, if Winstone could go back to back to Scum and 1977, I wonder what would he do differently. He doesn't even pause to think about his answer.

"Nothing. There's no way I'd change anything. Nah, I 'ad a result."

Ray Winstone launches TCM's Western Week, which starts on Monday, Sky Channel 317. Father of Girls is released in October.

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