Radio Times

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in the movies it's parody rather than imitation that counts. You know your film has entered the wider public consciousness when someone is prepared to invest manpower and money in taking the Michael out of it.

For me, timing is everything, and not just in terms of the jokes. The self-explanatory Superhero Movie, now in cinemas, parodies Spider-Man, an ongoing franchise, as well as other comic-book staples, and strikes me as opportunistic.

Team America: World Police, an exquisitely executed and scurrilous send-up...

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When Hollywood runs out of new ideas, it has two options: remake an old movie or update an old TV show. With the latter, audiences of a certain age are then expected to troop along to relive their childhoods, as with the 2004 revival of US buddy-cop favourite Starsky & Hutch.

Even though Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson brought the cops back to life with gusto, I thought it was sad to see a classic brand undermined by mocking irony and facile homoerotic quips. At least Mission: Impossible and The Fugitive were...

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The read-out on the spaceship that crash-lands at the beginning of Planet of the Apes helpfully informs us that the year is 3978. But in the second sequel, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, three of the simians from that distant future take a trip back to the 20th century to, frankly, mess with the fabric of time.

Film-makers love to monkey with us like this. But the trouble with the future is that it eventually becomes the present; science fiction becomes either science fact or science "that never actually came true – did it?”

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Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain wasn’t the first film to depict a gay, male relationship and win Oscars. That honour goes to Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme's unapologetically mainstream Aids drama starring Tom Hanks, which won two out of five nominations at the 1993 Academy Awards. (Brokeback won three out of eight.)

At the time, outside of the art house and specialist circuit, films about homosexual relationships were still rare – Personal Best, Torch Song Trilogy, Cruising.

But at least a shift in attitude in the 1980s had superseded the previous cinematic norm: a hint...

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The career of Frank Sinatra, who died ten years ago this week, is marked by a season of films on TCM.

As a pin-up of the 1940s, he made such popular musicals as Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Till the Clouds Roll By.

A grittier role in From Here to Eternity in 1953 marked a change of pace, leading to more dramatic fare such as Some Came Running, but also comedies like The Tender Trap. And, yes, even the odd musical of the calibre of High Society – all...

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Since one of my favourite ever films, The Poseidon Adventure, falls well outside the critically accepted canon, I’m used to the idea of the guilty pleasure. A high-wire 1970s disaster movie designed for its popular appeal, whose dialogue has been derided as "waterlogged" and its characters "cardboard", it'll never trouble Citizen Kane, The Godfather or Bicycle Thieves in any critic's Top Ten.

But do you know what? I'd sit down and watch it right now if it was on – while I'd really have to be in the right mood for, say, confirmed classic...

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Let's not beat around the bush: films about football just don’t work, do they? Boxing translates brilliantly to the screen. Athletics gave us Chariots of Fire. But think of the beautiful game and you’ll only come up with ugly films.

It’s saying something when films about football supporters (Fever Pitch, Purely Belter) – or even hooligans (The Firm – not the Tom Cruise one, the Gary Oldman one – and The Football Factory) – are more dramatic than those about what happens on the pitch.

Although it’s now become something of a guilty pleasure,...

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With the fourth Indiana Jones movie about to premiere at Cannes (it’s released in the UK on 22 May), Harrison Ford seems to be back on top of his game. At 65, he wears the ageing action-hero mantle with more credibility than Sly or Arnie – thanks to his laconic approach to the iconic role.

After small parts in American Graffiti and The Conversation, Ford took off as the sardonic Han Solo in the first Stars Wars movie. Now a bankable star, he proved his effortless, slightly weary authority in hits like The Fugitive...

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It used to be so easy: a woman would take off her glasses and shake her hair out of its bun. Aghast, a male co-worker would exclaim, "Why, Miss Jones, you're . . . beautiful!" But perceptions and images of women have come on a long way since those prehistoric days. Having your hair tied back and being short-sighted is no longer acceptable visual shorthand for "ugly".

Or is it? In Her Shoes is a comedy drama in which chalk-and-cheese sisters find common ground, and I seem to recall it has something to do with a pair...

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French director Jean-Luc Godard famously said, "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end . . . but not necessarily in that order." It's a theory that Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has taken to heart with the non-linear plotting of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and now Babel (starring Brad Pitt, left).

This multi-stranded drama skips between three continents and four stories, involving Brad Pitt, a Japanese teenager, a Mexican nanny, and two Moroccan goatherds. Of course, these “fractured” narratives are familiar from art-house movies, but Babel is a major studio...

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When the news of Charlton Heston's death was announced on Sunday 6 April (he was 83), images of Moses and Judah Ben-Hur dominated the coverage thanks to his career in epic movies.

Raised during the Depression and toughened up by military service, Heston's 6ft 3in physique and booming voice made him the definitive CinemaScope leading man, with parts such as the circus boss in The Greatest Show on Earth. He said Planet of the Apes was his most physically demanding role, but still made sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

Yet, despite his commanding...

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At times, Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator feels like a big-budget episode of Stella Street, in which John Sessions and Phil Cornwell created an English suburb populated by the very famous.

In Scorsese’s movie, we have Cate Blanchett’s note-perfect, Oscar-winning turn as Katharine Hepburn, for which she had freckles painstakingly painted onto her face, arms and chest, wore a red wig, studied Hepburn’s films and did daily voice exercises. Then there’s Kate Beckinsale, who’s nowhere near as convincing as Ava Gardner, Jude Law as Errol Flynn (he wishes) and pop singer Gwen Stefani as Jean...

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I'm aware that the TV schedulers no longer control our lives, thanks to VCR, DVR (digital video recorder) and PVR (personal video recorder), but it's still nice to sit down in front of a decent new film when it's actually on.

However, you must be an insomniac or shift worker to catch this week's first terrestrial showing of Kinsey, which Channel 4 is sneaking out at 1.30am – an inglorious fate for a film that features Liam Neeson and Laura Linney.

Other channels treat premieres equally shoddily – ITV1 considered ten past midnight the optimum start time...

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As someone who spends much of his working day writing, I can vouch that it's not a cinematically appealing occupation. Thanks to computer technology, there's little that's visual about it. You can't even yank a sheet of A4 from the jaws of a typewriter, screw it up in writerly frustration and throw it in the general direction of the bin.

But the film industry still seems obsessed with the great literary figures from history. Admittedly, these biopics tend to steer clear of the act of writing itself, and concentrate on the trials of the author's private life. And...

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