Radio Times

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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It may be that images of the mighty polar bear balancing on the last piece of receding Arctic ice as if it were a Fox's Glacier Mint, will be enough to spur the human race into climate change action. Never underestimate the power of a cute animal. But does global warming explain cinema's current obsession with snow and ice?

I detect a definite planet-wide appreciation of the poles in the proliferation of animated features like the musical penguin extravaganza Happy Feet and its inferior, beach-set cousin Surf's Up.

Since the stirring, Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary March...

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He was short and thin. His ears stuck out. His beaky nose was so embarrassing that he stuck tape to the tip of it and his forehead, praying it would develop a tilt. When teams were chosen for any game, he was always the last to be picked.

Not my description of the young Steven Spielberg, but biographer John Baxter's. The boy who would become arguably the greatest popular film-maker of our time was never cool. At high school in Phoenix in the early 1960s, he joined the Boy Scouts, learned the clarinet and was obsessed with movie...

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Christopher Nolan's tale of duelling Victorian magicians, The Prestige, begins with a fine explanatory passage from Michael Caine. To paraphrase: every great magic trick consists of three parts. The first is "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards or a bird. The second is "The Turn", where he takes the ordinary and makes it do something extraordinary, like disappear. But the hardest part is the third, in which he has to bring it back – that's "The Prestige".

Movie-making pulls off a similar trick. As any screenwriting course will tell you, equilibrium...

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During the war, American GIs were said, with a mixture of male envy and female admiration, to be "oversexed, overpaid and over here". Well, we're finally getting our own back, having parachuted an entire regiment of British comedians into America's backyard, there to beat them at their own game.

I don't know about oversexed – although if lurid tabloid stories are to be believed, Steve Coogan will keep the British end up – but a new wave of comics like Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg and Sacha Baron Cohen are certainly reaping big bucks "over there", without...

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As a fan of westerns, I will always return to the classics of John Ford (My Darling Clementine), Howard Hawks (The Big Sky) and Anthony Mann, whose Winchester '73 was one of five collaborations out west with James Stewart. These examples come from the genre's heyday.

In his book The Crowded Prairie, historian Michael Coyne sets the premature demise of the western in 1980 (the very year, he reminds us with some irony, that Americans elected screen cowboy Ronald Reagan as president). In short order, three revisionist westerns flopped: The Long Riders, Tom Horn and...

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There are many reasons why you might wish to see Elizabeth: the Golden Age at the cinema – the imperious yet impish performance of Cate Blanchett, the ravishing wigs, an entire Spanish Armada created by computer – but historical accuracy should not be among them. Director Shekhar Kapur's film takes countless liberties, not least showing Elizabeth in search of a husband with whom she might produce an heir – she was in her 50s at the time of the Armada. Some critics have taken issue with this, but I think it's an unimportant criterion upon which to...

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In 1989, Meryl Streep, greatest screen actress of her generation, played a romantic novelist and sex object in She-Devil, while Roseanne Barr filled the role of the dowdy-turned-satanic housewife who sets out to bring her down. Crucially, Streep was 40, and just about to cross that invisible Hollywood divide where the glam female roles dry up and you get to play mums ... or monsters.

For a few years, Streep slipped into a domestic holding pattern. Then, entering her 50s, she forged a new and rewarding sideline in fearsome harridans. First, the monstrous, machiavellian senator in The...

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It strikes me as significant that Tony Soprano drove a red Chevy Suburban in the early days of The Sopranos. Throughout the entire six series we saw inside the mind of a Mafia boss who existed on the outskirts. Operating from New Jersey, Tony's "family" were forever expected to genuflect to New York.

But the suburbs are certainly not lacking in action. Supposed utopias, they promise a better life with their barbecues, sprinklers and long driveways.

In the movies, however, the suburban dream usually masks something much more nightmarish. While affectionately pastiched in films like Edward Scissorhands,...

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The British road movie is rare. And here's an example of why. 2001's moving and funny Last Orders saw Ray Winstone, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings and Bob Hoskins driving from south-east London to Margate, on the Kent coast, to scatter Michael Caine's ashes. This journey of 73.5 miles takes just under two hours. If they'd forgotten the urn, they could have turned back at Medway Services and still made it before nightfall.

To compare: last year's surprise indie hit Little Miss Sunshine, in which a dysfunctional family head from Albuquerque in New Mexico to the titular junior...

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When Pedro Almodóvar's captivating modern ghost story Volver was shown at the Toronto film festival last year, its Spanish star Penélope Cruz told reporters she'd had trouble leaving her character behind – not to mention her character's behind! She had been asked to wear what she delicately referred to as a "false ass" for the part of Raimunda because Almodóvar wanted her to resemble an Italian film heroine of the 1950s and 60s, and her own backside was deemed too "slender".

Cruz certainly cuts a suitably voluptuous figure in yet another celebration of womanhood from the...

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When John Ford was dying, fellow director Howard Hawks would visit and they'd discuss "how tough it was to make a good western without John Wayne". The Duke proved a rock and lucky charm to both – he made over 20 pictures with Ford, and five with Hawks – and because of that remains perhaps Hollywood's most famous muse. Both directors made their best westerns with him – for Ford, Stagecoach and The Searchers; for Hawks, Red River and Rio Bravo.

In Greek mythology, the muses were nymphs who provided artistic inspiration – not quite the macho...

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I sincerely hope you missed the instalment of BBC2’s British Film Forever devoted to thrillers, in particular the extended section on London to Brighton. For a debut feature released last year to merit so much airtime in the company of Brighton Rock, Get Carter and The Long Good Friday is testament to its power and instant modern classic status. Unfortunately — an irksome habit of the series — they blatantly gave away the ending.

In the film, written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, big-hearted prostitute Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) and juvenile runaway Joanne (Georgia Groome) escape London’s...

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