Film & TV

The Bone Collector
12.25pm & 9pm, Sky Movies Action Thriller
(Phillip Noyce, 1999)

Odd-couple cops on the trail of a nightmarish serial killer: ho-hum. But Noyce brings a touch of Rear Window wit to the Seven-ish proceedings - detective Denzel Washington is paralysed and leads the investigation from his bed, directing rookie cop Angelina Jolie into those horrible dark places cops must go.

Hallam Foe
11.25pm, Film4
(David Mackenzie, 2007)

Who's that kid on the roof? It's Jamie Bell's teenager Hallam, grief-stricken at the apparent suicide of his mother and blaming his father Ciaran Hinds' new wife (Claire Forlani) for it. Taking a job at an Edinburgh hotel, he starts spying from the gables on personnel manager Sophie Myles, the spitting image of his mum. A kooky but beguiling blend of disturbed coming-of-age drama and sweet romance.

Flesh + Blood
2.15am, Sky Movies Drama
(Paul Verhoeven, 1985)

There's plenty of flesh and blood in "Robocop" Verhoeven's rough-and-ready American debut feature, an adventure packed with combat, pillage, rape and plague. A young Rutger Hauer leaps about like a meaner Robin Hood, leader of a mercenary band whose kidnap of wealthy young Jennifer Jason Leigh leads to violent retribution.

Could there be a vein of autobiography to this low-budget British comedy about low-budget British film-making?

Certainly the details ring true. Justin Edgar's tale focuses on a failed thirtysomething film director (Dominic Coleman), onetime star of the "Walsall film festival", who takes a job teaching a bunch of disabled teenagers. Naturally they make a movie together; it all goes wrong; and important lessons are learned along the way.

At times Special People feels hobbled by the very political correctness it wants to poke fun at; still, it's nicely observed and crisply played, gently confounding a gaggle of prejudices during a svelte 81-minute run.

Good news for those who missed the Spanish zombie horror when it opened here a few months back. Here comes the inevitable fast-tracked Hollywood remake, which covers the same ground without the burden of all those subtitled hysterics.

The threadbare, overheated plot dispatches a perky TV presenter to an apartment block overrun with ghouls. There she proceeds to scream at the top of her lungs while her terrified partner swings a camera around a lot of darkened rooms.

Watch out for the moment when the lens is mashed repeatedly into the blood-spattered face of one crazed assailant - it's surely the best example of the camera-as-murder-weapon since Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.

As usual, Pixar set themselves a challenge: this is their first sci-fi film and is dialogue free for its first half. WALL-E and EVE, its robot central figures, have elements of Woody and Buzz (old and rough v smooth and new), in a plot that's half Philip K Dick, half metal romance. There's an ecological undertone, but it's primarily a sweet, sophisticated entertainment with a hero, as imperturbable and patient as Buster Keaton.

It's tempting to view Ridley Scott's latest outing as a sly metaphor for America's misadventures in the Middle East. Body of Lies is big and bombastic, confused and irritable - a 20th-century blockbuster struggling to adapt to a 21st-century terrain.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Roger Ferris, the acceptable face of CIA black ops complete with a bum-fluff beard and pensive frown (suggestive of Growing Doubts). Ferris has to placate his neocon boss back home (Russell Crowe) but also has to curry favour with the suave head of the Jordanian secret service (Mark Strong). He wants to flush out a shadowy terrorist organisation, but he also wants to romance a cute Muslim nurse (a cheap plot device if ever there was one).

Scott directs in his usual stentorian, sergeant-major fashion. He's Hollywood's answer to Donald Rumsfeld, dimly aware that this assignment might call for a more nuanced approach, but too shackled to a hidebound studio system to do it justice. Far safer to gloss the production with A-list close-ups and keep marching onward to the next action setpiece; another pyrrhic victory in a losing campaign.

For all its flaws and fumbles there is a certain guilty pleasure in this bawdy, scattershot satire, adapted from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.

It showcases a puckish performance from Sam Rockwell as Victor Mancini, a serial scam artist and rapacious sex addict. When he's not tending to his demented mother (Anjelica Huston), Victor is either kicking back with his best buddy (a compulsive masturbator) or haplessly hitting on every woman he meets.

At least Choke doesn't attempt to glamourise or ennoble these encounters - Victor's antics are shown as pitiful and generally calamitous; great splurges of humiliating low comedy. If only writer-director Clark Gregg didn't have self-control issues of his own. He rushes us through scenes in order to reach the climax and ruins Huston's big moment by allowing the boom mic to bob merrily into shot. Pay attention, Clark! It's practically bouncing off her head!

45: Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

(dirs Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath)

Awesome levels of pester power will guarantee a big family turnout for this sequel to the popular animation. Ben Stiller voices Alex: the city-boy lion from New York zoo, who now is marooned with his buddies in Africa.

• Release date December 5

46: Che: The Argentine

(dir Steven Soderbergh)

Benicio Del Toro is fiercely convincing as Che Guevara in this first part of the massive two-part epic. This section shows him helping Fidel overthrow Cuba's Batista government in 1959, and later making his sensational appearance at the United Nations in 1964.

• Release date January 2

47: The Reader

(dir Stephen Daldry)

Adapted by David Hare from Bernhard Schlink's novel, this movie stars Kate Winslet as the older woman in postwar Germany with whom a teenage boy begins a passionate affair. Later, as a middle-aged man (played by Ralph Fiennes), he discovers a terrible secret in her past.

• Release date January 2

48: Lakeview Terrace

(dir Neil LaBute)

Another confrontational film by Neil LaBute. A young interracial couple move into a pleasant neighbourhood, and find themselves living next door to a stern cop, played by Samuel L Jackson. He disapproves of their relationship and begins a psychological war of harassment.

• Release date December 5

49: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

(dir Rouben Mamoulian)

This 1931 classic is showing as part of the Mamoulian season at London's BFI Southbank. Frederic March stars as both upstanding citizen Dr Henry Jekyll, and also Mr Edward Hyde, his terrifying alter-ego, unleashed by a secret potion.

• December 12-30, 020-7928 3232

50: Onibaba

(dir Kaneto Shindo)

Showing as part of the Wild Japan season at BFI Southbank, this rare chiller from 1964 remains uniquely disturbing. In the 14th century, a woman and her daughter-in-law live by robbing and killing wayfarers. One places a victim's samurai mask on her face, with disturbing results.

• December 16 and 21, 020-7928 3232.

51: As Old As My Tongue

(dir Andy Jones)

This is part of the Africa In Motion season at the Manchester Cornerhouse: a portrait of the iconic singer Bi Kidude, who lives in Zanzibar and has become a legend in world music. Jones's film shows her life and her status as a living folk-memory of Swahili music.

• Manchester Cornerhouse, December 11, 0161-200 1500

Set your faces to stunned, Winona Ryder is to play Spock's mother.

But before you let your imagination take flight, and fancy that her headscarf conceals a pair of pointy ears, remember that Spock was only half Vulcan. The whereabouts of Sarek, the career-driven, Botox-eyebrowed extraterrestrial who knocked up Winona are unknown at this stage, but the new movie is said to explore the underlying roots of Spock's tortured personality. Of course, this was previously assumed to be the result of the Enterprise's mixed-species first officer being torn between his Vulcan logic and his human impulses.

But looking at this picture - and it's always heartbreaking watching a child have to do the parenting - it seems likely that Spock in fact harboured residual trauma from having to attend Final Frontier High dressed in Marc Jacobs outfits positively riddled with holes where Mommy had chewed off the security tags.

And so to the latest dramatic episode in Ms Ryder's story arc. By now you may have heard that Winona was took bad on a flight from LA to Heathrow this week, slumping forward in her seat in a manner that apparently caused the pilot to consider diverting to another airport. As you will be aware, however, international law protects movie stars from having to go to Luton, so the craft soldiered on to Heathrow, where medics boarded the plane and gave the now-conscious Ryder some unspecified treatment before she left on a stretcher.

The facts as we know them are those, though we should add that Winona was later given the all-clear at nearby Hillingdon hospital, and flew on to Madrid yesterday. Yet none of this should prevent all truthseekers from turning their brooding gazes heavenwards and whispering: what in the hell happened up there?

Well. Several reporters have attempted to mind-meld themselves into a position of being able to speculate, but this column is not convinced that their implied explanation - Winona is back on the Percocet/Xanax speedballs again - is credible.

And so it was that Lost in Showbiz spent yesterday afternoon's occupational therapy session assembling a case file/mood board of theories. They follow presently:

1 Contemplating her forthcoming Star Trek outing, Winona, 37, collapsed at the sudden realisation that she has made the Stygian crossing from "romantic lead" to "mother". Sure, she's currently in the Fields of Asphodel limbo of the "hot mother" category, but Winona knows Hollywood is a swift and brutal town, and she'll be receiving scripts looking for "a Dianne Wiest type" before the decade is out.

2 At some point, probably 39,000ft above Greenland, Winona realised she had theoretically been pregnant with Leonard Nimoy, and freaked out accordingly.

3 Seemingly the most likely explanation centres on the painful truth that Winona is a recovering shoplifter, whose lawyer successfully argued that she should attend rehab in lieu of jail time, following her 2002 conviction for that unauthorised Saks trolley dash. Though her recovery has appeared to stay on course since this treatment for the compulsion to acquire high-end Alice bands by any means necessary, she can only take one day at a time, and it is all too possible that some point after the evening meal service on this fateful flight, Winona's resolve simply snapped, and she was found in the first-class restroom, failing to succeed in utilising the post-9/11 cutlery to hack the tag off a duty-free mini lip-gloss pack.

However, upon further consideration, all these theories were discounted in favour of the obvious explanation. What was this saga, if not an eerie mirror of approximately 437 Star Trek episodes in which the Enterprise is struck down by a mysterious illness, which will precipitate an ethical dilemma, wherein the crew realise that the extraction of a cure for the afflicted will in the process destroy a primitive culture or a delicate ecosystem - barring the insanely unlikely eventuality that they find a way around it?

Of course, the craft in this case was not a warp 5 starship, but a British Airways plane with a marginally better pretzel selection than that boasted by the Enterprise ... But something must have been at least tentatively sacrificed to ensure Winona's return to health, and until BA come clean about it, you are advised to cancel all flights with the airline out of consideration for your own astral safety.

Gingerly, once again, to the annals of Hollywood creativity. Any regular readers of this column will know it yields to no one in its admiration for Ridley Scott's decision to direct Nottingham, a pro-Sheriff skew on the Robin Hood tale that Lost in Showbiz has rechristened Russell Crowe: Thieftaker. (Naturally, the highly strung antipodean is to star.)

Yet far from this forthcoming motion picture being an isolated brainmelt, it seems that Sir Ridley is in fact engaged in the forming of a pattern. So many modern directors give us their trilogies: there's Baz Luhrmann's Red Curtain trilogy, for instance, or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. And now, Ridley Scott's Movies You're Surely Making for a Dare trilogy.

Hold on to your top hats, then, because taking its place alongside Nottingham will be Monopoly - a movie based on the board game. Ridley is now officially attached to direct this collaboration between Universal and the games manufacturer Hasbro - Hasbro! Jesus wept! - and according to the Hollywood Reporter is planning to give it "a futuristic sheen along the lines of his iconic Blade Runner". Really? Really? Because I'm just not seeing Russell Crowe as a replicant Community Chest right now.

But the Hollywood Reporter expands to say that Ridley "will shape a narrative out of the iconic real estate game", conjuring the possibility that Russell will find himself in a gripping race against time to procure all the green and navy blue properties in a futuristic London, a strategy that falters in the second act when one of his competitors boasts a full complement of stations and utilities before he has even purchased Regent Street, but which is ultimately vindicated with his fortuitous acquisition of Park Lane - the final piece in the jigsaw - and the construction of a hotel thereon, within whose confines Russell can throw telephones at receptionists to his heart's content.

What the third film in Ridley's immensely promising trilogy will be, we cannot predict at this stage. But as far as upcoming Hasbro collaborations go, you may care to know that a movie based on Battleships is in development. Genuinely. This is not a punchline.

City of God and The Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles talks to Jason Solomons about his new film Blindness, working with cinematographer César Charlone and his dream of making a hopeful, funny film

'This may be the most thought-provoking film I've seen all year,' Xan Brooks says of Ari Folman's inventive animated documentary about the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982

Steve McQueen's film Hunger is the answer to a lot of questions. Perhaps the most radical is one asked by critic Dan Fox in an editorial in this month's issue of Frieze magazine: where's the beef? Where's the content in art now? As the world faces recession, asks Fox pertinently, will the clever-clever games of the art world continue to satisfy? Won't people want art to be about something?

Perhaps I've misrepresented his view here and merged it with my own. That's quotation for you. And I've got to admit my own doubts about
21st-first century art have often been larger than any you are likely to find in a Frieze editorial. Like, why does so much of today's art seem content to remain in an adolescent or unformed state, at once abstract and uncommitted - why is it so lacking in human depth? Spend five minutes in London's National Gallery and you will experience more humanity, more emotion, more of life than you can taste in a hundred art fairs. Why can our artists not rise to those heights, sink to those depths? Where's our Rembrandt?

Oh, wait, here he is. Watching the extraordinary theatrical dialogue between two men whose faces are cast in deep shadow that is the heart of McQueen's film, I found myself thinking of Rembrandt. It was the sense of life's seriousness, the reverent attempt to respect and communicate the mystery of selves, the vividness of life and death, that made the comparison seem justified. Other artists, of course, spring to mind, and some of the greatest film-makers.

McQueen's treatment of prison life has something in common with Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped and - more crucially - his subversive concept of time makes you think of the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. Not that Hunger is "influenced" by those directors in some immature way. If McQueen's brilliant looping temporal poem is reminiscent of Tarkovsky this is quite possibly a dialogue of equals. And how good does that make
McQueen?

Well, I've already compared him with Rembrandt. The reason such lofty echoes hang in the cinema's darkness when you watch this film is not that it is visually brilliant but that it is such a rich, nuanced, profound examination of life. It is not "arty" in a pejorative sense - unless you think Pasolini's Gospel According to Saint Matthew and Scorsese's Raging Bull are arty, in which case there's no hope for you. Hunger is not the work of an artist playing at being a film director but of a great cinema artist who happened to get his start in the world of galleries. It is not the promise but the promise fulfilled.

And yet it is, also, a work that could only have been made by a graduate of the Turner prize and the freedom that film installation gives artists to experiment. After all, where else would a British Tarkovsky come from? Our film industry has always - I mean, always, going back a century - been a compromised mixture of cynical commerce, theatrical snobbery, and literary pretension. McQueen simply seems to come from another place - but a place in Britain - where you can think as profoundly as a Russian film-maker might about the kind of story that we're used to seeing told in what by comparison seem the ludicrous pantomimes of The Crying Game or In The Name of the Father.

Hunger is, finally, an answer to the questions - is the Turner prize really about discovering talent? Does all this art that is so vaunted in modern Britain amount to anything? Well, here's your answer, here's my answer. A talent like this is rare and without the Turner prize, without the world of contemporary art in all its vanity, would Hunger exist? That applies to this year's Turner, whose best competitor by far is the film-maker Runa Islam. In many ways her work reminds me of his - certainly in its clarity of thought. So here is a reason she must get the 2008 Turner prize, to continue the great new wave of film-making led by McQueen and Douglas Gordon.

This week on the Film Weekly podcast, a compelling new documentary, 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris, introduces Jason Solomons to a lost jazz singer - he talks to the film's director Raymond De Felitta about his own journey to rediscover the singer, who was held in the highest esteem by musicians such as Peggy Lee, Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus.

Xan Brooks then joins Jason in the p