Radio Times

When I met Michael Caine in early 2000, he was covered in blood. Stage blood – he was playing a promoter in boxing movie Shiner. That morning, a newspaper had run a story about him illustrated by a caricature. “Everybody else gets a photo,” he railed. “I’m a bloody cartoon!”

Caine was still prickly about public perception. (“A vulgarian,” was how he felt he was regarded.) Even though he’d won Oscars for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules, he still felt undervalued.

I think that prejudice has evaporated. Yes, we still...

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Francis Ford Coppola spent 16 months in the Philippines making his Vietnam War odyssey Apocalypse Now, a shoot beset by typhoons, ill-health and potential bankruptcy. After a year in the editing suite, the press nicknamed the movie “Apocalypse When?”

You could argue that without the trials and tribulations, it wouldn’t be half the film it is. The same goes for The Fountain (pictured left), Darren Aronofsky’s beleaguered sci-fi meditation. After losing star Brad Pitt over "creative differences", the plug was pulled, sets auctioned off and the budget halved for this second attempt, which was greeted with...

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Along with fellow RT contributor Stuart Maconie, I co-hosted a late-night ITV film review show in 1997. We inaugurated our own award, the Barn d'Or, to honour our film of the year.

The first and only spray-painted toy farm building was awarded to a then-unknown film-maker from Uttoxeter for his first almost-feature, crime caper Smalltime. It was just under sixty minutes long and shot for pin money on borrowed equipment with his mates, and we considered it a Nottinghamshire Mean Streets with humorous wigs. The young writer/director/producer/star was Shane Meadows, 24, and he sportingly posed...

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When Colin Welland waved his Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982 and declared "The British are coming!" it was taken as a quote from the tale of Paul Revere, who alerted colonials to attack in the American War of Independence. Welland was actually making an in-joke, but it also marked a turning point for British confidence at Hollywood's most important prize-giving.

The following year, Welland's misconstrued boast seemed to carry through, as Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough, swept the board with eight Oscar wins, and Educating Rita and The Dresser were nominated in...

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In the uplifting true-story drama The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith stars as Chris Gardner, while his son is played by…Jaden Smith, his real-life son, now aged nine. The kid can certainly act, but more importantly, he and Dad have a chemistry that's hard to fabricate.

Perhaps it's this shortcut to a convincing on-screen relationship that explains cinema's rampant nepotism. (Smith spoke of an "overwhelmingly powerful emotion" playing opposite Smith Jr, which may be why he cast seven-year-old daughter Willow in I Am Legend.)

It's still quite rare for sons and daughters to play children of...

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Go on, admit it – when Tommy Lee Jones appeared in Clint Eastwood's geriatric astronaut caper Space Cowboys (he was the baby of the group at 54), you thought it was all over. Not his career, which was soaring, but his credibility. After more than 20 years, films like Batman Forever and Men in Black had left the granite-faced Texan financially secure for life.

His acting ability was never in doubt – his role as murderer Gary Gilmore in the 1982 TV movie The Executioner’s Song won him an Emmy – but box-office bankability seemed...

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At this week's Baftas, The Bourne Ultimatum could win the award for best British film, even though it's made with American dollars, produced by Americans, stars an American as an American CIA assassin, and is based on an American book by an American author. It's eligible because its director, Paul Greengrass, and other "key creatives" are British.

Much as I love the film, this looks like a technicality too far. Bourne certainly doesn't feel British in the same way as the other nominees: Atonement's wartime reserve, Control's gloomy northern backdrop and This Is...

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Heath Ledger, who died on 22 January, finally seemed to have found his groove.

Behind the surfer dude good looks, Ledger also had hidden depths, most recently seen in his fine, sullen turn as one of the "Bob Dylans" in I’m Not There.

Born in Perth, Australia, he first showed his quiet talent playing the outsider in the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate about You, and further cemented his reputation as Mel Gibson’s son in The Patriot.

Along with countrymen Hugh Jackman and Eric Bana, Ledger found plenty of work in Hollywood...

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When I saw a preview of Paul Thomas Anderson's oil-prospecting epic There Will Be Blood before Christmas, one thing seemed certain: the performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as "black gold" tycoon Daniel Plainview had Oscar written all over it.

I don't claim Mystic Meg status for spotting that, but I was right. Thus far, he's picked up a Golden Globe and a clutch of Critics' Circle awards. Now he's been nominated for a Bafta and an Oscar, and seems certain to win both.

Among his other roles – as disparate as a 19th-century Manhattan tribal chieftain in Gangs...

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I don't want to get into a fight about it, but I'm no fan of boxing. I've no interest in watching two men beat the hell out of each other in front of a baying crowd. (Mind you, people watching fast cars going round and round a track baffles me just as much.) So explain this: why do I enjoy boxing movies so much?

Clearly, anyone with a passing interest in the grammar of cinema will appreciate the slow-motion grace of Martin Scorsese's boxing scenes in Raging Bull. And I think we all accept now that Read more...

Writing/directing brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have rediscovered the spark that rocketed them to indie glory 25 years ago with their modern western No Country for Old Men (currently in cinemas).

Set in Texas and revolving around money and bloody murder, it shares a common theme with the Coens 1983 neo-noir debut, the blistering Blood Simple.

Their leftfield success continued with wacky comedy Raising Arizona and 1930s gangster homage Miller's Crossing, before the Coens struck gold with multi-award-winning snowbound crime thriller Fargo.

Although less of a commercial hit, The Big Lebowski, in...

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If you work in brand marketing, you'd probably call it "cross-promotional synergy". The xenomorph (aka Alien) first met the yautja (aka Predator) in a 1989 comic. This led to a series of titanic clashes played out in a series of computer games and sci-fi novels.

A movie adaptation – AVP: Alien vs Predator – followed in 2004, now joined by a sequel, A V P R – Aliens vs Predator – Requiem (currently in cinemas).

In the interim, comics publisher Dark Horse have pitted Predator against Batman, Aliens against Superman, RoboCop against the Terminator, and, last year, Batman...

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For the baffled, here's the key difference between the season's two major US film award ceremonies: the Golden Globes are voted for by the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association; the Academy Awards by the industry.

Because the Globes come first, they're regarded as a dry run – as well as a tip sheet – for the Oscars. Some years, it's as if the 6,000-plus members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have simply copied the HFPA's homework.

The Golden Globes would normally be handed out at a fundraising dinner – far more informal...

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If there's one thing that ruffles the feathers of RT readers, it's giving away the endings of films. You can just about get away with hinting that the ship sinks in Titanic, but otherwise, if in doubt, remain tight-lipped.

This makes writing about M Night Shyamalan extremely tricky. If the writer/director/producer is known for one thing, it's his twist endings – to the point where he's now hidebound by audience expectation.

It was The Sixth Sense that made his idiosyncratic name (the "M" stands for Manoj and the "Night" he added, somewhat pretentiously, in college). Don't worry, I'm...

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