You’ve heard of the Curse of Frankenstein. You know all about the Curse of Hello! But you may not be aware of the deadliest hex of them all. It goes by the name of the Curse of Cruise and, you just never know, it may be about to strike again. Film-goers have nothing to fear personally, not even if they find themselves watching potent soporifics like Interview with the Vampire or Eyes Wide Shut. No, the only way in which the Curse can possibly affect you is if you’re a young actress, and only then if you’ve been cast as Tom Cruise’s leading lady.

It had to happen. Until now, I've always resisted. But last Thursday, I had, finally, to tear open the plastic container to get to the protection inside. A nice man from Screen International gave me his before leaving - he'd have no use for it. He added that he wouldn't have handed it over had it been stamped with the festival rubric; you know, something that would make it a keepsake.

While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything from taking photographs of Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the historic Selma-Montgomery marches through producing oil paintings inspired by the scale of billboards to making pop-art assemblages, abstracts, and painting large-scale figures appropriated from commercial advertising.

Fifty years ago this April, a city-loving film-maker already internationally famous for such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries took the ferry from Gotland to the windswept, still snowy island of Fårö (the nearest  we can get in terms of pronounciation might be "Four-er").

The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.

Martin Amis always had his own idea of who should play John Self, the anti-heroic slob narrator of Money. "The only regret I have in the whole book-to-film department,” he told me, “is that Gary Oldman never played John Self. We had a meeting with Gary and he was so unbelievably good, and so instinctively got the character and made me laugh so violently when he did it, that I thought that was a great shame.” Oldman was even prepared to go the extra mile. “He said, 'I'm going to give up smoking and take up drinking and put on the weight.'" That version never happened.

Freak storms battered the Croisette in the run-up to Cannes this year, wrecking many of the tents, marquees and beach-front cafés that create a rim of exclusivity between the Med and the mainland in this well-populated corner of the Côte d'Azur. That, the ongoing volcanic ash disruption and a slight paucity of celebrity wattage were enough to convince some that the 63rd Festival du Film was peculiarly ill-starred, a suspicion organisers may have inadvertently stoked by selecting Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood re-do for their opening night gala.

Freak storms battered the Croisette in the run-up to Cannes this year, wrecking many of the tents, marquees and beach-front cafés that create a rim of exclusivity between the Med and the mainland in this well-populated corner of the Côte d'Azur. That, the ongoing volcanic ash disruption and a slight paucity of celebrity wattage were enough to convince some that the 63rd Festival du Film was peculiarly ill-starred, a suspicion organisers may have inadvertently stoked by selecting Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood re-do for their opening night gala.

Jews may or may not have built the pyramids, but we know for certain that they built Hollywood. The names of the men who founded MGM, 20th Century Fox and Paramount speak for themselves: Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Marcus Loew, Joseph Schenck, William Goetz, Adolph Zukor et al. It's no wonder, then, that Hollywood history overflows with Jewish filmmakers, actors and producers. But for all the Spielbergs, Allens, Hoffmans and Weinsteins, one corner of Jewish life has often escaped the cinema: the world of the Orthodox Jew.

Within the space of a single year - 1979 - Barrie Keeffe  wrote two scripts which together summed up the very essence of the East End on the eve of Thatcherism. The first, which barely needs introduction, was the now-classic The Long Good Friday. The other was Sus, an explosive play about a black man detained by two racist police officers on the night of the General Election.