Fearless; Jet Li’s much-heralded martial arts swansong, is a biopic of Chinese folk hero Huo Yianjin, a man whose unparalleled fighting prowess roused his people from a slumber which had seen Westerners and neighbours alike dub them the ‘Weak Men of Asia’ in the early Twentieth Century. Li takes a producer’s credit and has obviously poured himself into making this final action role his most memorable (and possibly to amend for Romeo Must Die). But if Li wants this to [...]

Oliver Stone and controversy go hand in hand, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise with the announcement that he was to helm America’s first feature length film on the 9/11… World trade centre attacks, in fact, it’s hard to imagine any other major director in Hollywood taking on this subject with such urgency and concern for the subject matter. This is the second film to be released in cinemas this year that focuses on the terrorist attacks of [...]

The problem with documentaries of musical icons is the tendency to reduce the ups and downs, the highs and the lows of a person’s life to a simple melodrama. And for this we can largely blame MTV. You can imagine Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, Jeff Buckley et al, scowling from the netherworlds at their lives being given the contrived, slo-mo, gravely voice-over treatment, depicting them as angels rather than troubled human beings. This is often caused by a simple lack [...]

How’s this for a delicious set-up; Simon Cowell-esque TV mogul Martin Tweedy (Hugh Grant at his most devilishly unctuous) is looking to spice up his Pop Idol-style programme American Dreamz. He finds sexy white trash girl Sally ” future Mrs Federline” Kendoo (Mandy Moore), desperate to win at all costs. He gets a call from a Cheney-lite puppet-master Vice-President (Willem Dafoe) and gets himself a Southern-fried moron of a President (obviously an entirely fictional creation), played by Dennis Quaid, as [...]