Xan Brooks applauds this energetic black comedy, with Jim Carrey as a gay con man set on living the good life with his convict boyfriend (Ewan McGregor)

Instead, Matthew Vaughn's rather good new superhero movie is lumbered with soundtrack snippets from 28 Days Later and Sunshine

Don't get me wrong, I loved Kick-Ass. From beginning to end the film is a joy, a pleasant surprise to someone like me who had been massively unimpressed with Matthew Vaughn's previous movies, Layer Cake and Stardust. Both those films seemed to be the work of a director who had surrounded himself with a highly talented cast and crew while displaying no directorial presence himself: as a director he made a great producer. While they seemed smug and complacent in their competence, Kick-Ass is far more assured, with much more verve and character. It's up there with Iron Man and The Dark Knight as one of those superhero movies that does so much right that it'd be churlish to even mention any shortcomings. So, this is me being churlish.

In the opening titles there's something a little unusual. The "music composed by" credit lists four names: John Murphy, Henry Jackman, Marius De Vries and Ilan Eshkeri. Now that seemed interesting, four fairly prominent names in the soundtracking business working together on a movie. As someone who has enjoyed John Murphy's work for Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and Sunshine, I was looking forward to hearing his contribution in particular. Would it stand out from the others? Yes, it does, but for all the wrong reasons.

As the movie ramps up for the lengthy, action-packed finale the music is clearly Murphy's. It's Murphy's music for 28 Days Later, one of the variants of In the House – In a Heartbeat. As the movie progresses there's more from Murphy, what sounds like his music from Sunshine. Kick-Ass reuses his scores, his highly recognisable scores that have previously been heard not only in the movies for which they were written, but also achieved omnipresence on trailers, adverts and TV.

It's nothing new re-using movie music: Tarantino exclusively soundtracks his films to existing songs and film music, usually deciding on which tunes to use at the scripting stage. His choices are relatively obscure and a nice treat for movie buffs. With Tarantino's films I enjoy getting to hear music I'd only heard on VHS copies of films, all polished up, blaring out of cinema speakers, back where they belong. Scorsese has some history of this too, such as using part of Georges Delerue's Le Mepris soundtrack for a dramatic scene in Casino. Sometimes such appropriation can be used as a form of shorthand – as with Edgar Wright's usage of a snippet of Goblin's music from Dawn of the Dead for Shaun of the Dead, which reassured zombie movie fans that they were in safe hands. More often than not it's used for humorous reasons: John Williams's Jaws theme became a joke in itself when employed in Airplane!, Caddyshack II, Half Baked, K-9 and many, many others.

The most common usage of existing soundtracks is in movie trailers, understandably as most trailers are cut when the movie is still in post-production. I've lost count of the number of trailers I've seen that used James Horner's Aliens, Hans Zimmer's Crimson Tide, Clint Mansell's Requiem for a Dream and, yes, Murphy's 28 Days Later.

What may have happened with Kick-Ass is a case of temp-track love. To get the film feeling more like a film in the early stages of completion, scenes are often cut to existing movie scores as a temporary placemat. Sometimes this music fits so well that it's hard for the director to consider replacing it. The recent Watchmen film is a good example of this, with the Dr Manhattan on Mars sequence using Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi. In that instance it stood out so much from the movie's fairly anonymous actual score it had many wondering why they didn't just get Glass to do the whole thing. 2001: A Space Odyssey is an even more prominent example. While the film had an original score written by Alex North, Kubrick shelved it in favour of the classical music the film was cut to. He even achieved a sort of ownership of the tracks: any subsequent use of the Blue Danube waltz and, especially, Also Sprach Zarathustra in movies will immediately bring 2001 to mind.

But using existing scores isn't the same as using classical music. They come with more baggage. In Kick-Ass, the music used is so recent and so generally overexposed that it pulled me out of the film in a way the use of songs in the film – such as the Dickies' Banana Splits and The Prodigy's Manfred Mann-sampling Stand Up – did not. It wasn't just brief cuts either, it seemed to go on for ages. A shame as while I was supposed to be completely wrapped up in the daring rescue and revenge plot against the movie's baddies, all I could think of was "when will they stop stealing this music?"

Ever since he was a kid, Joe Queenan has loved movies featuring Vikings or Greeks. But which is the best? Hold on to your heads as he wades into a very bloody battle

In the vastly underrated 2005 Anglo-Icelandic-Canadian film Beowulf & Grendel, the actress Sarah Polley refuses to go along with the gag, stubbornly clinging to her flat, emotionless, early 21st-century Canadian accent. Everyone knows that Norse sagas only work if everybody in the cast keeps a straight face and sticks to the Hrothgar of Elfungstan intonations, if all hands on deck refrain from smirking and winking at the audience when Ulrich of Vlinkstenndntmarksendondt declares: "Great are the tales of the Spear-Danes. Some tales sail; others sink below the waves."

Gerard Butler (Beowulf) certainly understands that, adroitly fudging a fifth-century Geat accent by using his authentic, all-purpose Scottish burr: the perfect one-size-fits-all accent for any movie set in any era preceding the discovery of penicillin. The same can be said of Stellan Skarsgård (Hrothgar himself), who, as a bona fide native of the Land of the Midnight Sun, has no trouble delivering a highly credible crypto-medieval Scandinavian accent. And even Ingvar Sigurdsson (a very fine Grendel) is no slouch in the guttural cadence department, though mostly he mutters incoherent profanities in what appears to be Pig Proto-Danish while he plays bowls with his victims' skulls. Everybody else knows that Viking movies fall apart if the principal players betray any sense that they are miscast (as Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier were in The Long Ships, and as Antonio Banderas most assuredly was in The 13th Warrior) or if they refuse to enthusiastically bellow the word "Odin!!!" in their hour of need, the way Kirk Douglas did to such great effect in The Vikings.

Yet, for whatever the reason, Polley, playing the pouty, morbid, incommunicative, all-seeing witch Selma – Nostradame, if you will – refuses to deliver her lines in a plausible fifth-century Danish accent, much less a Geatish one, preferring to behave as if she had only taken the job to bankroll her career as a political activist back in Canada. Because of this petulance, a film that could have been a classic ends up as nothing more than a flawed masterpiece that went directly to DVD. Thanks a lot, Sarah. And you're still wondering why nothing happened to your career after Go?

The subject of rousing Norse sagas comes up once again because of the forthcoming release of Valhalla Rising, an extremely violent 10th-century epic about Vikings who set out to find the lost kingdom of Valhalla, but lose their way and wind up in all sorts of trouble not far from the place where Polley was last seen protesting against the Canadian government's Middle East policy. What's more, Valhalla Rising will debut at almost the same moment as Clash of the Titans, a stirring, hi-tech, gods-versus-mortals film that belongs to that vaunted genre that Norse sagas most directly compete with: Greeks in Skirts Flicks. This much anticipated mano-a-mano faceoff between Socratic Slicers and Danegelt Dicers will revive the age-old debate over which genre is best: Greeks or Vikings? My advice: get the women and children off the playing field, now! Once those battle axes and maces and broadswords and jagged spears get unsheathed, there won't be a tendon left unmangled, an eyeball left ungouged, not from the shores of Ilium to the very fjords of Olde Geatland. Verily, by the loins of Wotan, by the cojones of Zeus, these boys play for keeps!

Ever since I was a kid absentmindedly contemplating the murder of a thousand strangers, I have loved movies about Vikings and Greeks. Whether it was The 300 Spartans or Hercules Unchained or The Long Ships or The Vikings, I was always more than ready to fork over my hard-earned paper-delivery earnings to see these hulking marauders have a go at the Persians, the Saracens, the Moors, and yes, even the Cossacks, the one ethnic group I never really warmed to. For the longest time I dreamed that someone might eventually make a movie where the 300 Spartans met Erik the Red in mortal combat – McEnroe versus Laver style – just to see who would come out on top, but it never happened because the warring parties were separated by more than a thousand years of history and Hollywood never makes historically unreliable or chronologically suspect motion pictures.

To be honest, I always preferred films about the Vikings to those about the Greeks, mostly because of their superior production values: the Greek movies had better monsters, more famous heroes and meatier plots, but the Viking movies had bigger stars, bigger budgets, and better ships. Even as a kid, I could see that big-budget action movies made in Hollywood beat small-budget movies made in Italy and Yugoslavia hands down. But mostly I loved movies about Vikings because all Viking movies were equally good. Stripped to their essentials, all Viking movies were about men named Hothgar who associated with men named Rolfe who killed everything that got in their way without feeling the least bit guilty about it. By contrast, in Greek movies, the will of the gods and the hand of fate and the mood swings of the furies and the Rage of Achilles always slowed down the action. The Greeks were always going on and on about Cassandra's prophesies, or man's powerlessness before the caprices of the gods, or whose idea it was to turn over the virgin high priestess from Apollo's temple to Agamemnon, whereas the Vikings would simply whip out their swords, start hacking and get on with the job. To this day, this sharp contrast in cultural mindsets endures: where would you rather go to have a good time this weekend: Copenhagen or Athens? Think about it.

Lately, though, Greek movies seem to be having it all over their Viking counterparts. This is true even though both genres draw on the same performers: Gerard Butler stars in both 300 and Beowulf & Grendel; Anthony Hopkins surfaces in both Alexander and Beowulf. But to my mind the actors tend to be better in the Greek films, perhaps because they have snazzier costumes and better material to work with. Thus, much as I enjoyed Angelina Jolie sashaying about in the altogether in her solid-gold high heels in Beowulf, delivering her lines in her husky KGB trainee accent as her serpentine tail coiled behind her, she was far more effective as Alexander the Great's deranged, herpetologically obsessed mother in Alexander, even though she used the same strangely anachronistic East-of-the-Urals accent. And even though I thoroughly enjoyed Pathfinder, the 2007 film that deals with a bunch of mounted Vikings who materialise out of nowhere in 10th-century Canada and get their heads handed to them by a fearless warrior who is actually the lone survivor of an earlier Viking expedition, it was simply no match for 300, Zack Snyder's campy retelling of the battle of Thermopylae, as seen through the eyes of Frank Miller, rather than from the more buttoned-down perspective of Herodotus. Similarly, much as I enjoyed Beowulf & Grendel, despite Polley's seditious, disruptive acting style, it wasn't even vaguely in the same class as Troy, a searing epic that succeeds on its own merits despite getting everything about The Iliad wrong. (Hector does not kill Menelaus, Agamemnon does not die at Troy, and Paris is not nearly as much of a creampuff as Orlando Bloom makes him out to be in Troy. Bloom's performance is more of an insult to the people of Greece than refusing to give back the Elgin Marbles. Ask them.)

It is hardly surprising that movies about Vikings and movies about Greeks should command and enthral virtually identical fan-bases because the films have so much in common. In both genres, thousands of people get hacked to pieces, often without provocation. In both genres, dislodged eyeballs roll around on the ground like discarded marbles, and arrows protruding from the eye socket are a dime a dozen. In both genres, women are marginalised, occasionally chiding their husbands for making them widows long before their time, but mostly staying behind in Sparta or Athens or Geatland to upbraid the high priests and keep an eye on the kids, many of whom will themselves grow up to be bloodthirsty killers just like dad. In both genres, men fear angering the gods and then go out and anger them anyway.

In both genres, the men show far more leg than the women. The Spartans who trundle off to stem the Persian tide in 300 look like they got their duds at a Calvin Klein underwear sale. When they do finally convene at Thermopylae and confront Xerxes's Persians, torsos glistening and six-packs rippling, they look like 300 enraged West Hollywood personal trainers out on strike.

The similarities do not end there. All Viking and Greek movies include at least one character who is missing an eye. This character serves the same basic function as the quiet, black guy in the monster movie: he will probably not be around at the end of the film. Viking and Greek movies both rely on soundtracks that integrate the sinister chorus from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana with thematically appropriate selections from The Best of Enya, though increasingly a bit of world music is thrown in during the more percussive sections to give the films a more multicultural, "tribal" feel. Viking and Greek movies are always about the myth that lurks beneath the legend that lies beyond our ken. Whether it is Achilles or Hector or Beowulf or Alexander, both genres focus on young men who are willing to live very short, shockingly violent lives if it will ensure their immortality. All you have to do is mention wives and children or mothers or work around these party animals and they're right back out there in the killing fields, getting their limbs torn limb from limb, poised to meet their maker, perhaps even looking forward to it. Family guys they are not.

Both genres take huge liberties with the facts. For example, the Vikings who arrived in Newfoundland in the 10th century may have had fancy headdresses, but they almost certainly did not have horses. History assures us that Hector, Prince of Troy, had better legs than Eric Bana. If the historians of yore are to be trusted, Alexander the Great probably did not sound like Seamus McGettigan, the long-lost pennywhistler of the Chieftains, and there is no evidence in any of the Old Norse or Icelandic sagas to support the notion that Grendel's mother was in any way hot.

Here the similarities between the genres end. The Vikings were not very numerous and not very sophisticated, so the Greek movies always have better battle scenes and far more dazzling technology. They also have better villains: let's face it, a million Persians in Scream III masks are a whole lot scarier than one man-eating troll. So are Zeus, or Ares, or Hades or the Titans themselves. Greek films feature chariots, siege weapons, out-of-control elephants, war rhinos. Viking movies do occasionally have ill-tempered sea serpents and fire-breathing dragons but they are not nearly as terrifying as the computer-generated dragons in Clash of the Titans.

There is one other major difference between the genres. Toward the end of Alexander, Anthony Hopkins, a gabby Macedonian general rapidly approaching death, apprises his listeners: "Alexander once said to me, 'We are most alone when we are with the myths.'" No one within earshot has any idea what this means. Earlier in the film, Val Kilmer, playing the one-eyed Philip of Macedon, tells the surprisingly peppy Colin Farrell (Alexander the Great), "A king must know how to hurt those he loves." Farrell merely looks confused.

But lack of clarity is not the point here. The point is that no one ever says stuff like this in Viking movies. No one ever says: "Women are far more dangerous than men." No one ever says: "Conquer your fear and I promise you will conquer death." No one ever says: "Men hate the gods. The only reason we worship any of them is because we fear worse." It's all too cerebral, too introspective, too preeningly sagacious, too wise. Far more typical dialogue in your basic Viking movie is a snippy remark like: "Troll, leave here, or stay and meet your doom."

What accounts for this yawning stylistic gap between the two genres? Well, the Greeks were philosophers and poets and dreamers and seekers of truth who spent much of their time on this planet trying to unearth the meaning of life, whereas the Vikings were illiterate morons. Feisty morons, daring morons, seafaring morons who paved the way for Columbus's bold voyages of discovery, but morons all the same.

All that said, if I had to make a choice between the two ethnic groups – from the cinematic point of view – I would probably opt for the Vikings. There's something about their straightforward approach to life that appeals to me. They're less fussy than the Greeks. They're less pretentious. They seem more like lads. The Greeks are just too mopey and philosophical and self-absorbed. The only real problem with Viking movies is that everybody looks like Stellan Skarsgård, even when he's not in the movie. Everybody except Sarah Polley. Well, Sarah Polley and Angelina Jolie.

Clash of the Titans is released on 2 April; Valhalla Rising is released on 30 April

Peter Greenaway makes one thing very clear to Catherine Shoard: there is nothing more to life but sex and death

"I don't know much about you," says Peter Greenaway, sipping his mint tea, "but I do know two things. You were conceived, two people did fuck, and I'm very sorry but you're going to die. Everything else about you is negotiable."

Negligible, too. For Greenaway, there's sex and there's death and "what else is there to talk about?" He believes, he continues, as relaxed as if predicting rain tomorrow, "that all religion is about death and art's about life. Religion is there to say: hey, you don't have to worry – there's an afterlife. Culture represents the opposite of that – sex. A very stupid Freudian way of looking at it, but one is positive and one is negative. Especially against people like you. All religions have always hated females."

Steam billows up from the cup into his face. He looks half David Attenborough, breath fogging the lens as he explores the Arctic (he has the same energy, the same gleaming curiosity), half Chris Tarrant, emerging from a cloud of dry ice.

We're in a cafe on a grand, damp square in Amsterdam; Lady in Red on a loop, sausages on the menu. Greenaway, 67, lives nearby with a theatre director called Saskia and their two young children – he also has couple of grownup daughters from a previous marriage to Carol, a potter. Looming opposite is the Rijksmuseum, of which Greenaway has just given me a first-class tour, embracing the role with relish: rolling his r's, spitting his t's, hammering great deep cleaves between each syllable. Tourists stop and goggle, not necessarily at the Vermeers.

We wound up at The Night Watch, Rembrandt's musket-heavy canvas and the subject of Greenaway's latest film, Nightwatching. It's a sort of Renaissance-era CSI (a show he admires; he's also a Midsomer Murders fan) investigating the puzzles in the painting itself and the mystery of the artist's sudden fall into virtual penury. Martin Freeman plays Rembrandt: oddly plausible and often nude.

In fact Nightwatching is rather more conventional than much of his back catalogue. It's an easily digestible examination of – yep, sex and death – and Greenaway's other key concerns: painting, snobbery, conspiracy. It's the latest in an ongoing project to unpick nine art masterpieces through movies and attendant installations. He's already knocked off The Last Supper and The Marriage at Cana ("Which I think is the wedding of Christ"). The motherlode is Michelangelo's Last Judgment. Talks, he says, are underway with the Vatican.

The Night Watch, he reckons, is the first work of real cinema, on account of Rembrandt's manipulation of artificial light. Though were Rembrandt around today, "he would have been shooting on holograms. He would be post-post-James Cameron." He shakes his head. "All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil."

In Greenaway's case, that means moving towards "feature film as essay. Like Montaigne. It's much more discursive. It doesn't hang on to a psychological narrative and it's not impressionistic. I don't want to take you anywhere. It's not a piece of escapism."

At 67, Greenaway is no longer interested in cinema per se – it's a half-dead medium wasted by taking its cues from books, "telling bedtime stories for adults. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are illustrated books. Not cinema. I want to be a prime creator. As every self-regarding artist should do."

He believes cinema needs to figure out a way to get out of the dark ("Man's not nocturnal"), get rid of the frame, and the camera, too. "We have a cinema of what we see, not what we think." Until that happens, though, he's still making films. And still, apparently, enthused by their possibilities. He talks as much about two other films he has in the pipeline as he does Nightwatching: one about Eisenstein losing his virginity in Mexico, another – "my first, real, dyed-in-the-wool pornography" – about a 17th century Dutch engraver. He fishes a postcard from his blazer pocket. It's another Rijksmuseum highlight, this time by Hendrik Goltzius. "Here you can see Lot and his two daughters; this is a few minutes before they fuck him in order to produce a continuation of the human race."

Why does he do so much? "Maybe it's a hunger. A horror of the empty space. Without wishing even remotely to impress you, I'm involved in 26 projects at the moment all over the world. It's a glorious opportunity to practice being an artist."

Greenaway is an incurable self-promoter, forever ready with a barrage of stats about how many people he VJ'd in front of in Gdansk, or have seen The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. There will always be, he says, "people who travel thousands of miles to see a Greenaway film. And I'm still painting – I've got a big exhibit coming up in Milan soon. And that's even more private."

Yet it is on show to the public? "Yes. Well, do you think a person who keeps a diary keeps it for himself? Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else. So if I'm making very private films I want people to see them; of course I do."

There's a soreness beneath the swagger. In England, at least, Greenaway must be his own cheerleader. He's come under attack from his peers; even some of his defenders qualify their praise. He's also had a rough write-up in a lot of interviews. He suggests various explanations: because he's a jack of all trades, not a specialist. Because he's not Oxbridge. Because the English are "textually minded … and so those who practise the image are regarded as not kosher." He cites an ally in undervaluation: RB Kitaj, another artist of ideas. "He had a big exhibit in Tate 10 years ago and he was absolutely excoriated by people like you because he did your job so much better than you can. He understood it so much more than you did."

He's happy in Holland. He likes the lack of snobbery, the openness, the freedom. "For a long time now they've been able to talk about homosexuality, abortion and euthanasia at the breakfast table. Elsewhere people turn away in embarrassment or run for the hills." He is, he says, planning to take advantage of the freedom afforded and kill himself when he's 80. "My youngest daughter will be 21 so I can see her to full adulthood. Why would it be sad? I've got 14 years left. They say the most valuable thing about death is that you never know when it's going to happen. But I think this a curse. I think if we knew we'd make much better use of life."

To some extent, this suicide plan is another example of his eagerness to be at the cutting edge – "I think very soon we're all going to have to seriously discuss compulsory euthanasia." But it's also nobler. He's an ideas man to the end, who's keen to put them into practice – and not just in film. He has a genuine sense of responsibility.

"I've had a fantastic life and I'm still enjoying it and am an extremely happy man, but there has to be a trade-off somewhere. I'm a Darwinian. All I can think is that we're here to fuck, to procreate. And we're incredibly focused towards it. All our literature and television is pushing us towards it. But I passed on my genes a long time ago, so I have to justify my place in the human race some other way."

You may have to cook up a purpose in life for yourself "since we've thrown away God and Satan and Freud", but he's evangelical about the necessity of doing so. "I'm not here to play tiddlywinks and I don't think you are either."

He's off soon after, striding across the square in his thick pinstripes, booming into his mobile, bursting to crack on with those 26 projects while he's still got the time.

• Nightwatching is released on 26 March. Peter Greenaway will be taking part in a Q&A for Nightwatching at the ICA in London on 28 March.

• This is a longer version of the interview published in Film&Music.

Sandra Bullock accepted both her Oscar and Razzie knowing she didn't quite deserve either, but now is her moment to show her range

During the weekend of the recent Oscar awards Sandra Bullock entered the Hall of Eternal Likability. No, there isn't such an institution, but the idea exists in America and "Sandy" made it because in the same weekend she turned up to receive both her Oscar for The Blind Side and a Razzie for All About Steve. Moreover she handled the two occasions with the same easygoing attitude that guesses she didn't quite deserve either award but that knows her life has always been something of a gamble. Last year, when she had a modest hit in The Proposal – nowhere near a good film – she looked like a 44-year-old actress clinging on to lead roles. And now? Well, she looks like the same person wondering how you find more material as appealing (and as suited to her) as The Blind Side.

In truth, no matter that it's based on a real story, The Blind Side (a big hit) is a very old-fashioned film in which Bullock finds an impoverished black football player and builds his life and career for greatness and a great deal of sentimental good feeling. As such, it's a story that suggests a way ahead as Bullock hits middle age – as a tough, down-to-earth teacher with a heart of gold and no special need to admit it. And just because Bullock has a healthy cut of the profits on The Blind Side (after Julia Roberts turned it down) and helped steered it to the screen, we have every reason to think that kind of future lies ahead – including participation as a producer. After all, it's a part of being old-fashioned that Bullock possesses a kind of weary decency that could remind you of those amiable girls-next-door such as Hollywood used to possess – Doris Day, Sally Field, Diane Keaton, pretty girls but not so beautiful that they made people uneasy.

That's how Bullock built her career – she was pretty enough to hold our attention in the two Speed movies, she was gutsy and hard-working, and she wasn't so superior or glamorous that she made Keanu Reeves uneasy. More or less, being the girl in guy movies sustained her though a series of mild comedies – While You Were Sleeping, Miss Congeniality, Hope Floats, Two Weeks Notice. Yes, they do all run together, but they all did well enough to keep the money interested. In fact, Bullock began looking farther afield some time ago and so, in recent years, she did well enough in Paul Haggis's Crash, playing an unpleasant character for the first time, and then in Douglas McGrath's Infamous, where she gave a fine, quiet performance as Harper Lee. This was the second of the two Truman Capote films, and it suffered in terms of public attention because it was second, but Bullock stood out in an excellent ensemble cast and showed that she has a range no one has tested before. (I exclude the wretched In Love and War where she played the nurse looking after Ernest Hemingway in hospital in Italy – but her Hemingway was Chris O'Donnell and the director was Lord Attenborough, who should have known better.)

In Love and War is still the only film she has done that demands depth – and the result was not promising. I suspect Sandra Bullock is shrewd and candid enough to feel the degree of generosity in her Oscar for The Blind Side. (In fact, the reason she had to be talked into the film was that she felt removed from the character's religious faith.) Meryl Streep gave a far better performance as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, but even Meryl seemed content this time not to win – and that left Sandy as the beneficiary. So this is her moment. Her reputation is not just high, but made over. She did two pictures in 2009 that made money – one of them a great deal. If ever she has been nursing difficult material, where she has to show us more of herself, this is the time. As ever in these situations, the test is of an actor's intelligence more than her vanity. With an Oscar, Bullock could let herself look a little older. She might recall the classics of Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. Nothing wrong with that. For good or ill, she is an old-fashioned actor.

Two films at the Human Rights Watch film festival attempt to bring the real Iran to the eyes of the west – an Islamic republic where secularists and rockers struggle to make a space for themselves

Making a film in Iran, if you play by the Islamic republic's rules, is a tortuous business. The first step is to file a proposal on an ideologically correct subject with the country's ministry of culture and Islamic guidance. After rewriting your screenplay as it sees fit, it may issue a filming permit that might pacify the police who will be monitoring your activities, but offers no protection from the further round of cuts and censorship that are the finished film's only hope of ever making it to an Iranian audience at all.

But the young documentary-maker Davoud Geramifard ignored all that. Over three months in late 2008, he secretly shot a 68-minute film, Iran: Voices of the Unheard, about the government's least favourite subject: secular Iranians' desire for freedom. As a result, Geramifard – whose family emigrated to Canada in 2005 – is unable ever to return to Iran.

Voices of the Unheard follows the stories of three secular Iranians: a leftist high-school teacher struggling to introduce regime-indoctrinated teenagers to Greek philosophy; a Qashqai nomad scratching a living in the mountainous deserts of southern Iran; and a Converse-wearing poet who despairs of his meaningless job in Tehran's municipal office of arts and culture. All have suffered in a country whose constitution refuses to recognise the very existence of atheists (or other potentially "seditious" religious minorities). Iranian secularism, Geramifard explains, has been written out of the makeup of Iran – and is even less known in the west.

Geramifard's film is being shown at this year's Human Rights Watch film festival, which includes 28 films from 20 countries, from North Korea to Haiti. The festival is an opportunity for Iranian film-makers to address the problem that Voices of the Unheard's poet and his Tehrani friends argue over most bitterly: not how to topple the regime, but how Iran is perceived in the west. "It's a very angry obsession for young Iranians," says Geramifard. "For 30 years, Iranians have seen one picture of themselves in the international mainstream media – riots after Friday prayers, flag burning, veiled women." "Do your viewers know that Derrida, Baudrillard and Umberto Eco are available in Iran?" demands the poet to the film-maker's camera.

The same subject preoccupies another Iranian film showing at the festival, Bahman Ghobadi's drama about Tehran's underground rock scene, No One Knows About Persian Cats. Via scooter rides, scuzzy studios and trendy haircuts, the film self-consciously sets out to show the west that Tehran's fashionable twentysomethings are very much their peers.

But Voices of the Unheard ends with another image widely seen in the west: the now-famous footage of the death of Neda Soltan in the protests of June 2009. Geramifard's next project is a film, Cyber Revolution, about one of the main drivers of the "green movement" of anti-government protesters – Iran's new wave of political bloggers, Twitter users and online activists. They may, he hopes, be able to circumvent the "biased mass media" his interviewees complain of and bring the real Iran to the eyes of the world. Voices of the Unheard is his own attempt to do the same. "If we want human rights, freedom and democracy, we have to be outspoken and tell the world about our problems," Geramifard says. "Otherwise, the world will attach another story to us ­– one that is not our own."

• The Human Rights Watch film festival runs at venues across London until 26 March. Iran: Voices of the Unheard is showing on 19, 20 and 21 March, while No One Knows About Persian Cats is showing on 20 and 24 March.

This week's podcast gets down with the kids, talking to the newcomers behind British coming-of-age story The Scouting Book for Boys and the director of Sons of Cuba, a hard-hitting documentary following three young boxing hopefuls in Havana.

Written by Jack Thorne of Skins and Shameless fame, The Scouting Book for Boys is the feature debut from director Tom Harper. Starring Thomas Turgoose and Holly Grainger as two kids who hatch a plot to stay together, this is an English coastal caravan caper with a dark edge. Thorne and Harper tell Jason Solomons about how they came to work together, how they got indie folkies Noah and the Whale to soundtrack the film and how work is progressing on their miniseries spin-off of Shane Meadows's This Is England.

Sons of Cuba director Andrew Lang then reveals the lengths he had to go to to shoot his documentary in the Havana Boxing Academy, the crucible of Cuba's long line of Olympic-sweeping pugilists. He also shares how it felt to unveil his film at the Havana film festival, where it won best film by a non-Latin American film-maker.

And finally, Xan Brooks and Jason Solomons get together to review the week's key releases: the very creditable The Scouting Book for Boys; the tub-thumbing eco-doc Dirty Oil, about tar sands extraction in Canada; and the comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, which has Jim Carrey as a flamboyant con man who falls in love with his cellmate, played by Ewan McGregor.

In a world where you can download films legally and rent DVDs by post, indie video shops may find opportunities in becoming more specialised or responding to the needs of a local area

Video killed the radio star, but what's killing the video store? My local, Prime Time Video in Blackheath, London, is the latest in a long line of video shops to close down. Round here, you could plausibly screen the Onion's mock historical tour of a Blockbuster store on the evening news. A search for "video and DVD rental" in my postcode area turns up van hire and dentists.

Philip French had it right when he said video stores have provided the movie slacker's occupation of choice for the past 20 years, from Randal Graves in Clerks, who spits water in customers' faces, to Wilson, the depressed screenwriter from In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

Without video shops, Mos Def and Jack Black wouldn't have remade a stack of films in Be Kind Rewind, Will Smith couldn't "hit on mannequins at the video store" in I Am Legend, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's body-popping clerk would be working somewhere else in new film Micmacs. With more and more video shops closing, will there come a time when they only exist in movies (which you won't be able to rent from a shop)?

"There's an insane number of guns pointed at the few remaining indie video shops," says film-maker Jon Spira, who owned Oxford's Videosyncratic. "I think their fate's been sealed for a while. Rental copies are more expensive and only produced once, so you can't replace them. And supermarkets sell DVDs below wholesale price, so why go to a video shop? Hooray for the free market."

With Prime Time gone, I'll miss rummaging through actual shelves and renting films within minutes of deciding I want to see them. The postman doesn't have time to help me identify forgotten movies from lines of misquoted dialogue. Tony Gunnarsson, an analyst at Screen Digest tells me DVD rental peaked in 2005 and has been declining ever since. "You can buy a film for a few pounds more, so why rent it?" Depends how many shelves you've got, surely. Mine are already full.

So I phone Neil Snowdon of Exeter's Read and Return Bookshop, who ran video shop Brazil until May 2008. Why did it close? "We just didn't make enough money," he says. "I went a year without being paid. Location was a factor – we were at the wrong end of town. But there's a generation of people now for whom renting is not normal."

"Rental shops are an anachronism in a world where you can stream and download films legally, or order DVDs by post without having to physically return to the shop," says Branwell Johnson of Marketing Week, former editor of rental magazine View. "Where I see surviving stores, they're specialists – usually arthouse and foreign language." Neil Snowdon agrees: "Our regulars wanted something they wouldn't get anywhere else. But people weren't willing to walk the distance."

The last indie rental shops left standing deserve a medal, says Jody Raynsford, who edited Home Entertainment Week. "When was the last time you heard an advert that said 'Rent this on DVD from ... '?" But he reckons it's not all doom and gloom: "If stores can tailor their offerings to the needs of a local area with little competition, there's no reason why they can't survive."

So long as people use them, that is. "If you like something and want it to survive, you have to support it," says Jon Spira. "Use it or lose it. The temptation to spray-paint that across my shop's window is immense."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

26.2.10

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

5.3.10

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

6.3.10 – Take me to the gifting suites!

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

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

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

7.3.10

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

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

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

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

The ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) - THE SUBWAY CHASE

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

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

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

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

JULES ET JIM (1962) - THE BICYCLE SCENE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JASON & THE ARGONAUTS (1963) - THE SKELETONS SCENE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TAXI DRIVER (1976) - THE MIRROR SCENE

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

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

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

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

CARRIE (1976) - THE BLOOD AT THE PROM SCENE

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

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

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

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

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

REAR WINDOW (1954) - THE OPENING SCENE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

▲ ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE (1994)

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

▲ THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998)

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

▲ MAN ON THE MOON (1999)

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

▼ THE MAJESTIC (2001)

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

▲ ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

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

▼ FUN WITH DICK AND JANE (2005)

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

▼ THE NUMBER 23 (2007)

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

▼ YES MAN (2008)

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

▼ A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2009)

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

▲▼ I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS (2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The London theatre world's brightest stars will gather this Sunday for the 2010 Olivier awards – the West End's version of the Oscars. Here are our top tips

Unlike its glitzier cousin across the pond, the Oliviers, held at the Grosvenor House hotel, have never attracted much interest at the bookies. In fact, I'm not sure you could bet on them if you wanted to. Still, in the spirit of fun, here's my shot at some betting punditry on the nominations.

First up, the sure things. My banker is Mark Rylance in the best actor category for his turn in Jerusalem. He's a shoo-in for the award, which is a shame for the others in a strong category (Jude Law, Samuel West and James Earl Jones among others), but it should result in an entertaining awards speech from the famously eccentric performer.

Rachel Weisz is almost as much of a dead cert in the best actress category for A Streetcar Named Desire. Like Rylance, she cleaned up at the previous theatre awards ceremonies this year and will bring a welcome dose of Hollywood glamour to theatreland's big night.

On to the decent bets. Jerusalem should be a safe wager for best new play, although it faces a stiff challenge from Enron. Both would be worthy winners, and either way the Royal Court will end up smiling. Best director is also likely to be a two-horse race, but I think Rupert Goold (Enron) will edge out Ian Rickson (Jerusalem).

Spring Awakening, despite its truncated stay in the West End, should be consoled with the best new musical award, but both Sister Act and Priscilla have a chance of taking the gong in a weak field.

In the newly introduced audience award for most popular show, I'd expect Wicked to walk away with the prize; its young fans may have mobilised themselves to take advantage of the online voting system. The Phantom of the Opera could still pull this one out of the bag, though, thanks to all the hype around its sequel Love Never Dies.

In the "it's anyone's guess" categories, best revival is a pretty open field with some great shows competing this year. Any of Arcardia, A Streetcar Named Desire, A View from the Bridge or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof could win this one. My money would be on A View from the Bridge. The only two I'd rule out category are The Misanthrope and Three Days of Rain. Best actor and best actress in a musical are both toughies, but on balance, I'd probably plumb for Rowan Atkinson for Oliver! and Hannah Waddingham for A Little Night Music.

One absolute certainty, though, is that Keira Knightley won't be walking home with the best supporting actress award. She was a surprise entry on the nominations, and while her performance in The Misanthrope was good, it wasn't award-winning. Expect Ruth Wilson (for A Streetcar Named Desire) or Hayley Atwell (for A View from the Bridge) to snaffle this one, while over in the best supporting actor category, I'd have my money on Eddie Redmayne for Red.

The bookies got all their predictions right for the Oscars this year; one last certainty is that I won't have. If you want to make up your own mind, you can see the full list of nominations here.

New Sequel To Bestselling Manga Chronicles Life At A Boarding School Filled With Monsters And The Undead (PRWeb Mar 18, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/manga/rosario_vampire/prweb3745214.htm

Summit Entertainment–makers of Hurt Locker and the Twilight movies–have optioned bestselling author and screenwriter Andrew Klavan Homelanders series of young adult thriller novels for film. (PRWeb Mar 18, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/Andrew_Klavan/Summit_Entertainment/prweb3748544.htm

CEO of C. Cretors and Company talks about the idea behind the family run company’s success (PRWeb Mar 18, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/ConcessionEquipment/prweb3745224.htm

Psychic healer and consultant Maria Papapetros will be in New York City, March 18 through March 25, and will then travel to Greece. She will continue to provide intuitive, accurate psychic readings to new and regular clients in and around Los Angeles, Houston, Texas, Greece and New York. Her main office will relocate from Houston to New York City in early May, 2010. (PRWeb Mar 18, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/psychic-advisor/psychic-readings/prweb3745704.htm

An amazing wealth of extensive information that combines historical research, practical application, accurate lighting, shooting and set up for the very first time in one book! (PRWeb Mar 17, 2010)

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Independent horror makers, Roach City Films, has just signed a deal making The Devil's Gravestone available to distributors across the globe. The film, completed in early 2010, features the beautiful actress Elle LaMont battling an underworld of vampires and demons in a bloody tale of revenge, sin, and ultimately redemption. (PRWeb Mar 17, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/thedevilsgravestone/roachcityfilms/prweb3725994.htm

VIZ Media (http://www.viz.com) will be releasing the much anticipated final volume (Volume 8) of NAOKI URASAWA’S manga masterpiece PLUTO: URASAWA × TEZUKA on April 6th (PRWeb Mar 17, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3740544.htm

Publishing company Galaxy Press’ new short fiction anthology L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXV, comprised of science fiction and fantasy short stories written by new and amateur fiction authors, has earned a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. (PRWeb Mar 17, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3744194.htm

Currently starring on TLC’s LA Ink, as the new Shop Manager for High Voltage, Liz has produced enough voltage of her own to shock her way into high demand by becoming one of the main and most watched characters on the show. As the stunning, sexy, witty and sarcastic new manager Liz creates the kind of interest networks hope for when adding new talent to a show. Demand for Liz keeps growing as the audience and her fans can’t wait to see what she will do or say next. Liz loves to create anticipation and mystery, combine that with a models body and face, and sarcastic humor, she is a girl that network executives dream about. (PRWeb Mar 17, 2010)

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Lowest prices in video replication services are now available to clients worldwide at Video Production Inc. (PRWeb Mar 17, 2010)

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