The tourist cruise boat chugging up the Amazon pauses for another photo opportunity. A dozen or so tribesman with clay-daubed faces and loincloths are discovered posed like a tableau: a colourful addition to the rainforest fauna. The boat marks time for a beat till the natives, glowering resentfully, fire off a stream of half-hearted arrows. Then it quickly revs up and motors on. But wait: a reverse angle shot shows the action from another perspective. The rubberneckers barely out of sight, the naked savages hurriedly swop their loin cloths for t-shirts and trainers, and flock to collect Read more ...

As graceful in his approach to death as he was in life, Patrick Swayze died yesterday at the age of 57. I met the actor in 1995 at a turning point in his career, just as the sexy lustre of Dirty Dancing and Ghost was beginning to wear thin. It would have been easy to mock Swayze as a crank for his New Age eccentricities, but his charm, his ingenuousness and his can-do ebullience - a determined energy that also distinguished him in his fight against pancreatic cancer - all proved irresistible. Here is a slightly edited version of that encounter.Before starting a film, Patrick Swayze likes to Read more ...

It is, as the best cinema should be, always all about the image. Andrea Arnold's films are born, she says, with just this: a visual imprint - strong, unsettling, inexplicable. The stories then slowly unfurl in her mind from that starting point. On paper, they sound grim: the director goes for terse, no-nonsense titles, and her working-class world seems at first unforgiving. On screen, they are thrilling, intriguing, instantly gripping, the work of a natural-born, utterly original director.Distinctively female in perspective, there's generally a woman at their centre and a rugged piece of male Read more ...

Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”Wilde was in fact a keen recycler of his own bon mots. Many of those clever-clever inversions that ornament the plays first did service in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The author’s pragmatic calculation was that if they worked on the page, why not the stage? But for some reason, not a lot of them seem to have made the onward journey to the Read more ...

Superbad was a modern-day coming-of-age comedy with inexplicable 1970s trimmings (the title, groovy credits sequence, Richard Pryor references and so on). Now its director, Greg Mottola, has made a period piece proper in the form of Adventureland, set in the mid-1980s in a cheesy, dilapidated Pittsburgh theme park where the rides make you throw up, and the stalls are rigged against any customer hoping to win more than a dying goldfish.The movie is breezy and well-observed, but also deeply conventional. It may poke fun at a tacky nightclub called Razzmatazz, which bills itself as “A Read more ...

Does Britain have too many film festivals? Not so very long ago, there were only two of these games around: the London Film Festival - which unveiled its full line-up this morning and begins on 14 October - and Edinburgh. Now, though, there are hundreds.The London London Film Festival website remains the behemoth in size and scope. Long a "festival of festivals", which selected the cream of films already unveiled on the international circuit, it has slowly built the clout to command its own major world premieres: this year there are 15. With increased funding from Film London, it has also now Read more ...

Michael Deeley, the veteran British producer, has a theory about how the Academy Awards are decided (and he is eminently well-placed to know, having won the Best Picture Oscar for The Deer Hunter in 1979). "There are four bases upon which the average member decides his vote," according to Deeley, and Hollywood myth. "His first cast will always be for any picture with which he is connected, however remotely. If there is no such picture, then he will vote in a way to spoil the chances of any enemy he may have. Category three is that he will vote for a friend, irrespective of the quality of Read more ...

Michael Caine has made more than 100 films: from Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie and Get Carter to The Italian Job and Educating Rita. He won best supporting actor Oscars for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules. This interview dates from 2007 when his more recent films were the remake of Sleuth with Jude Law and The Dark Knight. A sharp dresser, in black trousers and polo shirt, he was slim and fit and did not look 75, despite the lines and thinning hair. The actor lives in Surrey with Shakira, his wife of more than 30 years. They have a daughter, Dominique, and Caine also has a Read more ...

Hunter S Thompson always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskills and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would immodestly compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition.He kept files of self-portraits, which he took by setting the timer on his camera, and was even cataloguing photographs of the many empty rooms in which he had ever lived. An ardent letter-writer, he made carbon copies of Read more ...

Another year, another animated film which plonks us down into the ruins of civilisation. After WALL-E , it's the turn of 9, but this time the causes of the apocalypse are not ecological; it's the fault of big bad machines which, like the ones in The Terminator and The Matrix franchises, have turned against us and reduced our cities to rubble.The flesh-and-blood folk are all dead - there are a few glimpses of corpses which are discreet if slightly unnerving. The idea that mankind didn't make it casts an interesting pall over proceedings, but flashbacks show a scientist-cum-inventor trying to Read more ...

If you tried to cross chefs, romantic comedy and cyberspace, you might end up with a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson recreating the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. As much fun as that would be, it would hardly justify two hours of screen time. That’s where Julie & Julia comes in.From the same pen as When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron, come the stories of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), the diplomat’s wife who brought French cooking back to America, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a frustrated government worker who starts a blog where she records cooking her way through all 524 recipes in Read more ...