"The cinema is my church.  The darkness, the sound-absorptive atmosphere, the frisson of anticipation.  It’s practically Pentecostal.  When it is threatened I take it personally. ‘Priests in black gowns were making their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires,’ Blake wrote.  Surely the high-priests of cinematic party-pooping would be the censors.  If cinema is my church, then the BBFC must be the Anti-Pope (or Pope, depending on your point of view or century you’re living in). ..."

"The feet of a tight-vested John McClane gush with blood as he treads painfully over jagged shards of glass on his way to save his wife from the evil hands of Hans Gruber. A small-time boxer named Rocky Balboa gets a once in a lifetime chance to fight the world heavyweight champion in a bout in which he strives to go the distance for his self-respect. An archaeologist and adventurer called Dr. Jones desperately outruns boulders and valiantly outfights Nazis on his quest to reclaim mystical artefacts. Each of these are truly memorable moments of cinematic history that can never be replicated….or can they?..."

                                                                                                                      "During the Ides of the 1980s, all seemed lost for American cinema.  It was the era when comic book heroes became our reality, incarnated in Sylvester Stallone and the uber-American Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Real life characters had all but disappeared from cinema, relegated to painful nostalgia for the early 1970s. Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Jingoism, Steven Segal, Manichean politics, Hulk Hogan, Mr. T.  Bleak days.

 But then things changed..."

"There are some paths you should not walk down, there are some bridges you should never cross and there are some films that should never, ever be remade.

Most of the time I don’t mind remakes, sometimes I even encourage them. In this post-digital revolution world in which we now live, why not remake superhero movies without the strings? Let’s use the technology to enhance and improve the creations of the past. Superman Returns, Spiderman, Batman Begins and, dare I say it, King Kong have all been remade, restyled and repackaged with huge success, but there is a line.

This is the very same line that Gus Van Sant crossed when he remade Psycho shot-by-shot, but in colour. What exactly did he achieve?..."

                                                                                                                      "Johnny Depp and Tom Hanks have arguably been the most versatile actors of the last decade. Their range of roles is incomparable to most actors today.

Tom Hanks has been a child-turned-adult in Big, a toy cowboy in Toy Story, a Karkhozian national in The Terminal, a hermit in Castaway, Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code and who can forget his amazing Oscar-winning performance as Forrest Gump.  Depp, meanwhile, has played Willy Wonka, Captain Jack Sparrow (which he will reprise later this year), Donnie Brasco, Edward Scissorhands and a balding oddball journalist in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to name a few..."