The Facebook film The Social Network and TV's Glee were the big winners at the Golden Globes last night, though much attention has focused on the best acting awards to Colin Firth for The King's Speech and Natalie Portman for Black Swan. Not to mention Ricky Gervais's British sense of humour as host. Christian Bale was another eminent British actor who won an award, for his supporting role in The Fighter, but Helena Bonham Carter, Judi Dench and Romola Garai missed out despite nominations.The British have traditionally done well at the Globes, which are awarded by film and television Read more ...

The multiplatform franchise might sound like a modern concept - the film that leads parallel lives as video game, TV spin-off, T-shirt and toy. But no, ‘twas ever thus. Entertainment moguls have always known how to squeeze every last dime out of a popular hit, none more than The Green Hornet. Created in Detroit as a radio drama in 1936, it has buzzed across the decades and the genres, from film to comics to television to fiction and back to comics again. It’s now returned to the big screen with a bang. And a nod and a wink.The Green Hornet was conceived as a different kind of superhero. By Read more ...

Episodes may prove to be the zenith of television’s obsession with making television about making television. It was certainly a handy primer for anyone who fell asleep around 2000 (perhaps during My Hero; you are forgiven) and missed all the dominant strands of TV comedy emerging over the next decade. We hadn't simply been here before; Episodes was incubated in the post-ironic, multilayered comedic landscape in which we all now live. The success of the US version of The Office was referenced within the first five minutes. I’m surprised it took so long.Episodes seems to want to have it all: Read more ...

For a while back there, Russell Crowe was incapable of a false move. LA Confidential, Gladiator and The Insider all flagged up a thrilling talent for pugnacious individualism. Here was an actor with a bit of dog in him, a street-smart upgrade on Mel Gibson. Then he went and inherited Gibson’s gift for naff headlines. Maybe it’s an Aussie He-Man thing. Either way, the pictures got a bit smaller as tales of the incredible expanding ego did the global rounds. The films that could channel and contain Crowe’s animal aggression stopped happening. Does The Next Three Days spell a redemptive return Read more ...

Pete Postlethwaite, who has died from cancer at the age of 64, was an extremely amicable man whom Hollywood had down as a lugubrious baddie. It happened in Aliens 3, in The Usual Suspects, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.You could see Hollywood's point. His greying itinerant preacher's hair flailed behind him wildly. His green irises blazed bright around pupils the size of pinpricks. And then there were the cheekbones jutting beneath them. "They are quite whopping, aren't they?" volunteered their owner when I met him. "Who was it said, 'He looks like he's got a clavicle stuck in his mouth Read more ...

Avatar or The Hurt Locker? Although the Academy Awards are by no means the only barometer of cinematic trends, at this year’s Oscars the two centrifugal strains in contemporary movie-making went head to head. For Best Picture and Director, James Cameron’s digitally created sci-fi-scape locked horns with Kathryn Bigelow’s visceral visit to Iraq. One demonstrated Hollywood’s ever-increasing capacity to wish away actuality as we know it. The other went in where the bullets fly for real. You could see why the two directors, formerly married, had untied the knot. Our reviewers are Jasper Rees, Read more ...

2010 will go down as the year I fell out of love with Johnny Depp. And not just because of his cringe-making Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, an over-produced farrago which reduced Lewis Carroll's dark Victorian whimsy to a dull computer gamelike chase-rescue-showdown scenario. The Deppster sealed the Double Whammy of Dreadfulness with his uncanny impression of naff comedian Rob Schneider in The Tourist, a would-be rom-com thriller that somehow sacrificed the romantic, comedic and thriller elements of its remit to fawning close-ups of the increasingly prognathic Angelina Jolie. If only it Read more ...

The third instalment of the Meet the Parents franchise, which began in 2000 and was followed by Meet the Fockers in 2004, moves the story on a few years. In Little Fockers Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) and Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo) are now married and have twins, Sam and Henry.As Sam and Henry’s fifth birthday approaches we see Pam’s dad, paranoid ex-CIA man Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro), newly obsessed with genealogy, confronting his mortality. In one of the movie’s early and funnier scenes, he suffers a heart attack and, alone in the house, defibrillates himself with the leads from his lie-detector Read more ...

A nostalgified panacea of pine, tinsel, and tintinnabulation? Or a black hole of loneliness, bitterness and melancholy? Films about Christmas, wholly or partially, have straddled both polarities over the years, producing a surprising number of classics. In compiling this list, I hummed and hahed over Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), starring Billy Bob Thornton as a hard-drinking (if redeemable) misanthrope who poses in the red suit and white beard to get at a department store’s Christmas takings. It's wicked fun, but to have included it would have been disingenuous: at the time of writing [ Read more ...

“Show a little more, show a little less. Add a little smoke – welcome to burlesque.” The coy, wittier sister of stripping, and first cousin to musical theatre, the 19th-century art of burlesque is currently enjoying a revival. With comely champions in Dita von Teese and our own gloriously named Immodesty Blaize, the art has shaken off its cruder associations and shimmied into the diamante-studded mainstream. Naughty enough for a red-cheeked thrill, wholesome enough for a BBC documentary, the paradox of burlesque is made for Hollywood and its contradictory values. Add one ex-Mouseketeer, an Read more ...

One would like to think a great deal of thought goes into which leading man pairs up with which leading lady in a big-budget Hollywood product. Yet the practicalities of Hollywood movie-making – scheduling, financing, availability and so on – mean it’s far more likely you cast whoever you can get, and afford, and hope for the best. One can only assume it was random happenstance which saw Johnny Depp combined with Angelina Jolie in The Tourist, there being little else to connect them beyond their status as slightly left-of-centre box-office draws.He, after all, is Mr Eccentric – a bag of Read more ...

Sofia Coppola proved, with Lost in Translation from seven years ago, that there’s hardly a better location for showing the nuances of emotional dysfunction than the anonymity of an international hotel. No surprise then that much of her new film Somewhere, winner of the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, is set in the characterless corridors and rooms of the celebrity hang-out Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, though her investigation here of a central father-daughter relationship delivers a stronger emotional reflection than in the earlier film. Understatement remains the key in a Read more ...