Silent movie actor, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin of OSS:117 fame) is at the top of his game, but in a dull marriage to a fellow Hollywoodland silent movie star. At the premiere of his latest film, he literally bumps into the unknown actress, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) in the admiring crowd. A few playful poses in front of the press later and she's on the front page of the papers under the headline "Who's That Girl?". This chance publicity ensures she is later retained on George's picture as a dancer, and we see a chaste attraction form between the two. But it's time for a montage sequence, and Peppy attends auditions and works her way up the ladder. But while her star ascends, George Valentin's is falling, a fading silent star in a new world of talking pictures.

The advent of movies with sound means George's career is in danger of being silent forever. Cast off by his long-time producer (John Goodman – who else?) he has a nightmare of not being able to speak in a world of sound, one in which chorus girls laugh at his sudden emasculation. The threat to this once immortal star of the silver screen is hinted at in an ornament from his house, a cast of the three-monkey motif of the Buddhist Tendai sect – representing the wisdom commonly interpreted in the West as "See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil" – but a more relevant interpretation here is from the old Japanese "Mizaru. Kikazaru. Iwazaru" which means (are you still with me at the back?) "Not see. Not hear. Not speak." But, what's that? Could there be redemption for George in the form of unconditional love? Well, whaddya know!

Writer and director Michel Hazanavicius has made a swell movie, right down to the period-style opening titles. It's a tribute to the kind of old-school Hollywood romantic melodrama and dance numbers that used to play out with bombastic big-band soundtracks, and it's all done with a nod, a wink and a good dose of jazz hands and sparkling teeth.

The jazz-classical soundtrack by Ludovic Bource underscores the film perfectly, telling us when to feel sad, tense, happy or just plain drunk. Guillaume Schiffman's black and white cinematography is luxuriant, with one scene using a mirrored table and a Dutch camera angle that is just incredible – a tip of the top hat towards German surrealist film-making of the period.

In another beautiful early scene, Peppy finds herself in George's dressing room, his top hat and tails hanging on a stand. She slips her right arm through the same of the jacket, placing her hand as if it is his, lovingly on her own hip as she closes her eyes and daydreams of his embrace. It's a shot I saw in the trailer but thought was a visual effects trick. No, it's a just beautifully simple illusion, kinda like love… Ahh alright, alright, I'll quit with the lovey dovey stuff. Look, there's a dog in it, it's amusing. Go see it for the dog, at least.

This is the best romantic comedy I've seen in a long time, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. So what if it's predictable. Who needs modern toilet humour, when ya got class like this?

Cut. Print. That's a wrap.

Thank you to the staff of Sushi Say, Willesden Green, for help with the Japanese translation, and not least to Whogivesamonkeys, whose latest blog post put those Buddhist monkeys in my mind before the movie

The British Library is currently showing an exhibition on Charles Dickens' use of the supernatural in his novels, written at a time in Victorian-era Britain when seances were a parlour trick which later became a pseudo-science; that of trying to make contact with a spirit world. Decades after his death, in a time of great loss of life following the first world war, there was an intense will to believe in more than an afterlife – a belief that there was intersection between the worlds of the living and the dead where lost loved-ones could be found once more. 

The Woman in Black is adapted from the novel written by Susan Hill in 1983, set in the post-Victorian Edwardian era. It is a source that has previously been adapted for stage and screen, with the latest directed by James Watkins (writer/director of Eden Lake) and starring Daniel Radcliffe.

Kepp (Radcliffe) is a lawyer widowed when his wife died in childbirth, leaving him with a now four-year-old son. Beset by debts, he is instructed by a senior member of the firm to prove his commitment to further employment by taking on a probate case  – that of Mrs Alice Drablow, the deceased owner of the now deserted Eel Marsh House.

The house is located on an island accessible only by a causeway submerged under each sea tide. Kipps must sort through the many papers within the house to close the case and return to his infant son within the week as planned. But there is a malevolent presence there – the apparition of a woman dressed in black, the sighting of which coincides with terrible events in the nearby village.

Eel Marsh House represents Kipp's personal hell, a projection of his psyche, mangled and distorted through grief. Like the Greek hero Orpheus who made a descent into the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice from the grip of Hades, Kipps ignores the warning signs and is compelled to visit the house again and again in a quest to subconsciously reconcile the loss of his beloved wife, seen in his imagination as a spectral figure dressed in white. I need not point out the symbolism of this.

Watkins directs an enjoyable horror film worthy of the resurrected Hammer brand. There is an increasing assault of jumpy moments made good by sound design and editing, but that's all that is on offer. There is nothing to really chill you to the rattling bones of your subconscious. Radcliffe is still to green to be playing a role of this sort, and he lacks conviction when delivering the speech of a widower. The end of the story has been altered from the novel in such a way that I think makes for a decidedly less jarring ending. But perhaps you'll feel different.

I'll leave you with this thought. In the film, The Empire Strikes Back, the young Luke Skywalker is being trained to face his own dark side, and must leave the safety of his teacher, Master Yoda, to descend into a dark cave that he is told is "strong with the dark side of The Force".

"What's in there?" he asks.

"Only what you take with you," is the reply. 

Kipp's cave is Eel Marsh House. Yours is the darkness of the cinema. Don't have nightmares, now.

Isn't love like energy in the universe? A quantity that cannot be created or destroyed, but which is converted from one state to another, kinetic to potential, romance to friendship, stored in the heart's star eminating light. The imperceptible change but undeniable gulf between them.

Strangely, yet appropriately disconnected and full of space, Steve McQueen's film about a sex addict was not the tumultuous story of raw emotion I expected, but for the most part possessed of the distant voyeurism of a video installation. We see snapshots of the emotionally sterile existence that Brandon (Michael Fassbender) has chosen, a life saturated in porn and sexual stimulation to the point where it has become his evening TV and work coffee break. His life to us is a routine of in-call hookers and web-cam sessions, outside of which he cruises through a nondescript white-collar job which we are told he excels at, and goes drinking with his married boss who hits on any women in any bar, including Brandon's wayward and equally dysfunctional sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan).

When the boss takes Sissy back to Brandon's flat for sex, it becomes apparent that Brandon cannot cope with this – a sexual encounter that does not involve him. He is forced to hear his intoxicant being consumed by others. In later scenes he grapples with Sissy, naked as his towel falls away, his vice-like hand brutally gripping her jaw as what she first thinks is sibling playfulness becomes his expression of disgust at her neediness and wanton advances on men. An equally, emotional brutal exchange takes place between them in close-up as he verbally drills into her how much she revolts him, as an innocent child's cartoon plays on the TV, mocking their broken relationship as he projects his self-contempt onto her. His dedication to the high is ultimately what makes him fail his sister and her desire to form a stable, familial bond. "We're not bad people," she says in voiceover, "we just come from a bad place."

Despite the copious amounts of naked flesh and sexual acts depicted in the film, it is somehow never erotic, never arousing, just a collective portrayal of disconnected sexual encounters which paints Brandon's self-imposed isolation from love. On the one occasion when he brings a genuine date home and begins to undress her, he is unable to form the necessary emotional connection, (and erection) to make love to her, and so he is emasculated, muscles tensed and frozen in anger on the edge of the bathtub, like Rodin's Thinker, while the lady makes her excuses and leaves him. One scene later, he is back on the high, banging, quite literally, a call girl against his glass bedroom wall.

Shame is an interesting film that is worth a watch if you aren't too prudish, but the price of the many night-time tracking shots on New York sidewalks is that there is no character arc, no redemption. I felt a dull sense, empty of empathy for Brandon. But perhaps that's how he feels.

Showing the trademark reflexes of modern action film franchises, Mission Impossible and the Bourne trilogy, Salt sits more with the former in its relentless pursuit of action and implausible motives, at the expense of adrenaline-filled suspense.

The opening scene is reminiscent of the James Bond film, Die Another Die, as we see Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie, shortly to write and direct her own war film) being tortured in a dark prison cell by nasty North Koreans from central casting, convinced she is a spy despite her pleas that she works for an international oil and gas concern (wouldn’t it be better to claim to be a spy?). The only difference from the Bond film is that they don’t subject Ange to Madonna’s grisly faux-electro title track. Small mercies indeed.

Salt is handed back to the CIA in a prisoner exchange organised by her devoted, arachnologist husband, because yes, he would have security clearance to do that. On returning to work, Salt interviews a Russian defector who names her as an undercover agent of Moscow who will assassinate the visiting Russian president in a few days time. Salt gets spooked by her colleagues’ desire to hold her for questioning and goes on the run to prove her innocence.

It’s all quite entertaining, silly fun with stunts, chases, Eastern-Bloc accents and explosions. There is a twist to the story, but empathy for Jolie’s character is limited to intakes of breath as she subjects herself to painful physical punishment.  There are flaws in her character's portrayed allegiances that I can't discuss without ruining the one, possible surprise in the film, suffice to say that human collateral damage will probably not be counted when loyalties are assessed. But then, that's war, isn't it?

Emotional investment is inversely proportional to the silliness of the script, and so I felt like a spy who didn’t quite come in from the cold, but enjoyed playing in the snow.

If you'd told me I'd be lapping up a film from the director of Pink Panther 2, Harald Zwart, I'd probably have raised a sceptical eyebrow. Yet, I have to say I found Zwart's The Karate Kid hugely entertaining and as good as, if not better, than the original 1984 film. Yes, comparisons are inevitable if you are of an age to remember Mr Miyagi and 'Daniel-San'.

After Warner Bros’ risible big-screen remake of 80s TV hit The Dukes of Hazzard, I was cautiously optimistic when Fox had chosen to resurrect Saturday tea-time favourite, The A-Team.

With a theme-tune guaranteed to displace any annoying song you might find stuck in your head, the series followed the exploits of an underground, ex-military team for hire, AWOL having escaped ‘a maximum security prison for a crime they didn’t commit’.

The not so deep-structure of the TV episodes went something like this:

Small-time bad guys cause trouble in downtown LA, or plan an armed uprising in the desert regions of California, threatening to disturb the suburban peace. The A-Team arrive in a pimped, black van with a red stripe down the side, have a chat with the victims of said bad guys before disappearing into a surprisingly well-equipped barn for a rousing musical-montage of welding stuff together into some kind of super-weapon.  

Bad guys always try to drive towards said weapon/armoured bus/potato gun (yes, really) which results in their vehicles having multiple rollovers before the drivers crawl out of the wreckage like they’ve just had a minor prang in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Bad guys are arrested and suburban householder thanks the A-Team for saving the valley. And scene. It’s basically a western, and they’re the outlaw posse who ride in like The Magnificant Seven.

The better part of the comedy was in the odd-couple relationship between street-talking, black muscleman Sgt Bosco 'B.A.' Baracus (played by wrestler, Mr T) and the maniacal, skinny white aviator, Capt ‘Howling Mad’ Murdock (Dwight Schultz), who would regularly wind B.A. up, earning the ‘fool’ moniker we have come to love. B.A.’s morbid fear of flight was regularly exploited for laughs as he was unwillingly anaesthetised on many occasions to enable the ‘fools’ to get him on the plane.

Slick ladies man, Lt Templeton ‘Faceman’ Peck (Dirk Benedict, also of the 70s Battlestar Galactica) lent a dapper cool to the team, while silver-haired leader, John 'Hannibal' Smith (the late George Peppard of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Blue Max) brought a bit of silver-screen authority to proceedings, eyes twinkling as the latest ruffians were dispatched to his catchphrase, “I love it when a plan comes together”.

So what of the movie then?

From the two trailers that have been issued, it begins to look good. There’s a moody exposition as we see the court-martial proceedings that sentence ‘Alpha-team’ for the “crime they didn’t commit”, now during the Iraq war rather than Vietnam. So far, so current.

Then we are introduced to the new team. Hannibal is now played by a greyed-up Liam Neeson, Yup, I’ll go with that. Bradley Cooper, the buff stalwart of rom-coms (Valentine’s Day, He’s Just Not That Into You) moves into action to play the Faceman. Showing comedy under fire while being restrained in a bathrobe, he is the eyecandy for the ladies and possibly, some gents too.

A more vocally expressive B.A. is embodied by former Ultimate Fighting Championship holder, Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson, bringing the required muscle and van-loving expertise to the mix. The most inspired piece of casting must be Sharlto Copley as Murdock, a character surely in the grip of the strangest form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Copley suddenly came to worldwide attention in last year’s District 9, effectively carrying that film on his shoulders. From what can be seen, he positively channels the Murdoch-mania that Schultz made his own in the original series.

There are though, a couple of shots where the silliness goes too far, even if they do "specialise in the ridiculous". The team steal a transport plane and a tank that is inside, is used as an escape pod just before the plane is targeted and destroyed by an air-to-air missile. So while I’m willing my 8 year old self to accept that they will survive the impact of a parachuting tank hitting Earth, the unforgiveable happens. Faceman takes to the gun turret and in an orgy of CGI ejaculation, starts shooting pursuing planes in mid-air. No. You hear me director Joe Carnahan? No. The original was daft, but it knew it’s limits. If I want a computer game I’ll buy an Xbox.

It gets worse. In an abseiling-down-an-office-skyscraper-to-blow-out-the-window-and-parachute-someone-out-scene, the descending parachute is then hooked on the landing skid of Murdock’s helicopter, and flown away. Why can’t Hollywood directors keep their hands out of the tricks box? It ruins the movie.

So it remains to be seen whether the rest holds up. Let’s hope we don’t all get taken in like suckas, ‘cause I ain’t putting up with no jibber jabber.

See the trailer at the official A-Team website

As much as I like director Ridley Scott's work, I did ask myself whether I might be suffering from sword and sandal fatigue when I saw the trailers for his latest work, Robin Hood. We've had Scott's own genre invigorating Gladiator, the so-so Kingdom of Heaven and Troy. Recently there's been Clash of the Titans and soon, Prince of Persia. So does two hours of romping through the mud wearing chainmail and leather cut the olde English mustard?

The answer is, just about. It's Gladiator with less gore, a bit more Sunday afternoon viewing, with the battlefield antics and drink-and-be-merry village set-pieces to tick the standard medieval boxes.

Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) is an archer serving in the company of King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston), returning from The Crusades and laying siege to one more French castle before returning to England. A French cook serving soup on the battlements of said castle (this is how serious the French are about food, that it is served in the midst of a bloody battle), finds his way to a crossbow and makes a kebab out of le grand ros beouf, King Richard. Sacre bleu indeed.

Later, the King of France is plotting to stir up discontent in England by planting the Vadar-like Godfrey (Mark Strong) into the court of the newly crowned King John, intent on inciting rebellion in the north with recommendations of raising employee National Insurance contributions, or possibly tax. England will tear herself apart through civil war, and the the French king can sail the Channel and march in under the Fleur-de-Lis to conquer a new land. They hadn't counted on that Australian fella being around though.

Much has been made of Crowe's wandering accent, and it is true that it ends up drowning in the Irish Sea via Newcastle, rather than the Midlands where they were aiming for. Why didn't they just say to Crowe, "you know that actor Sean Bean? Just copy him, that's close enough"? It's really not that much of a problem as Crowe's fantastic growling voice gives the requisite amount of conviction to overrule any geographical uncertainty.

The one problem I had was that the film doesn't have the rousing, oratory qualities of Gladiator, nor does it effectively employ the role of the underdog as that film did. Robin doesn't have much to lose so the tension does seem to be lacking somewhat. British folk singer Billy Bragg unofficially advised Crowe on the contemporary politics of the 'Charter of the Forest', an act of law that said each man had the right to forage in the countryside under the entitlement of common land. This would have been the fight worth seeing rather than the international politics of kings, which while relevant, isn't the meat we wanted on the roast. The final battle on the beach is impressive though, cheekily invoking a reverse of the D-Day landings of Saving Private Ryan.

Cate Blanchett puts in a good, but underused turn as Lady Marion Loxley, there to add a little Katherine Hepburn style romantic friction. Alas, it does little to inform us of Robin's character, other than that he's that gruff, growling bloke who's good at leading a charge into battle on horseback. Perhaps more of the Robin Hood myth will be picked up in a possible sequel, but I wouldn't hold out for it.

John Mathieson BSC, having previously shot this period for both Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, provides a reliably authentic cinematography of muted browns and greens, representing an unromanticised English countryside. Composer Marc Streitenfeld now out from under the wings of his mentor, Hans Zimmer, provides a score that borrows the latter's choppy strings from the new Batman franchise, and also a phrase a little too close to Gladiator for comfort. I also think that the romantic Celtic dance for Robin and Marion sounded too much like James Horner's Irish-inflected score for Titanic. A film of this stature should really have it's own distinctive musical signature.

Robin Hood is likeable, but instead of stirring English hearts to revolution, it gets stuck in the mud of one too many battle scenes at the expense of characterisation.

In contrast to the nostalgic tone of Sam Taylor-Wood's Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, BBC Films' Lennon Naked is a refreshingly unflattering portrait of the musician, at his most narcissistic and petulant.

Christopher Eccelston (Amelia, G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra) depicts John Lennon during the years 1967 to 1971, when the creative energy at the heart of The Beatles was starting to wane, and Lennon was to begin his own creative pursuits.

At a BAFTA screening, Eccleston said, "I wasn't a fan. He was deeply flawed as a human being, and in making this film I found that I loved him more but also thought much less of him"

The film opens with an obvious tribute to Gilbert Taylor's black and white cinematography from A Hard Day's Night. We see Lennon and manager Brian Epstein (Rory Kinnear, last seen in Quantum of Solace) take a car to a press-organised reunion with Lennon's long-absent father, who wishes a reconciliation with his son. Writer Robert Jones' dialogue successfully emulates the caustic wit that Lennon was known for, as Epstein is repeatedly taunted about his sexuality, and everyone else feels the sharp side of Lennon's tongue.

Eccleston does a good job with the accent, but more importantly finds the attitude of the man. Occasionally though, perhaps due to the actor's aquiline features, I unfortunately caught glimpses of another famous Liverpudlian, Lily Savage (sorry Chris, I couldn't help it). The other Beatles fare less well, save perhaps Ringo. George's accent barely registers as recognisable, and Andrew Scott as McCartney veers into an odd, disconcerting nasal bass. I hope that doesn't conjure images of a Hofner inserted into a nostril, but it might possibly have sounded more convincing.

The film makes an intriguing psychological sketch. Eccleston envisaged Lennon as someone who "would throw a hand grenade into his life to shake it up" and Lennon's bitterness comes through as he seeks to recreate himself without remorse for those in the firing line, be it his wife, his father or the brotherhood of The Beatles. It is seemingly not good enough that he destroys the world for himself, he has to destroy it so that no-one else can have it either. "The Beatles is my band, I created it!" he retorts when told that McCartney has publicly ended the band.

Naoko Mori portrays a suitably mysterious Yoko Ono, who many Beatles fans blamed for taking Lennon away from them, but is sympathetically portrayed as someone who inspires Lennon’s new identity as an artist. The film makes the focus of Lennon’s torment his father, but credit to Jones and director Ed Coulthard, the blame lands on both pairs of shoulders.

Fans will spot references in the form of Lennon lyrics dropped into dialogue. The Hard Day's Night intro and an image of a naked Lennon curling up in a foetal position around Ono are also subtle additions. Despite a few minor flaws with bootleg Beatles, it’s an accomplished and necessary addition to the growing Lennon filmography.

Lennon Naked screens on BBC4 this June.