You're Nick'd

With news reaching us that principal photography is about to start on the long awaited big screen version of The Sweeney, it's poignant to reflect on the nine years since the great John Thaw passed away.

The role he created, Detective Inspector Jack Regan, will be played by Ray Winstone this time round, with sidekick George Carter played by Ben Drew (aka Plan B). The whole modern day drama is directed by Nick Love, who finds himself on the right side of the law (kind of) after portraying bad lads and ne'er do wells in a succession of hits such as The Football Factory, The Business, Outlaw and The Firm.

Revealed: the top-grossing film star ever

Who do you reckon is the highest-grossing actor in the history of movies? Brad Pitt? Cary Grant? Henry Fonda? John Wayne? Tom Cruise? George Clooney?

Well you’d be wrong, because the answer is Samuel L. Jackson. His movies have made more than $7.4 billion -- making him the highest-grossing actor of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Jackson, 63, has made more than 100 movies since debuting in Spike Lee's 1991 Jungle Fever.

Jurassic Park ($914 million), Pulp Fiction ($212 million) and the Star Wars prequels ($2.4 billion) are among his top earners.

He averages four films a year. He made six in 2010, four in 2011 and will have three in 2012.

Harry Belafonte falls asleep on live TV

You know what it's like ... it's an early morning interview via satellite with a local TV station in California and you're in New York and you get fed up with them droning on about traffic delays on the freeway and missing cats etc so you close your eyes for a spot of meditation and zzzzzzzzzz...

Well that's what happened to the legendary singer/actor Harry Belafonte here in this hilarious clip. Stick with it to the end because that's really funny, too

First glimpse of The Avengers trailer - and a hint of more

Here’s the first glimpse of the trailer for the much-anticipated Marvel Studios superheroes movie The Avengers, due in cinemas next May.

Meanwhile cast members Chris Evans (Captain America), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson), Cobie Smulders (Agent Hill) and surprise guest Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk) and producer Kevin Feige got loud cheers here at the New York Comic-Con as they showed some footage from the film and answered fans' questions.

Feige told fans that Marvel is currently already working on Iron Man 3, which is in pre-production and which he said "will be the first of what we sort of refer to as phase two of this...saga that will culminate, God willing, in Avengers 2."

In its first-ever event at the New York gathering for sci fi and comic book fans, Marvel also screened footage that included an extended scene featuring Ruffalo's Banner as he meets Scarlett Johansson's character Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow. 

The footage also included a range of snippets with the other protagonists, such as a scene in which Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark aka Iron Man tells Loki that he has annoyed a range of his superhero colleagues.

Mano a mano with JB

Javier Bardem, who played the relentless, hulking hitman Chigurh in the Oscar winning No Country for Old Men (pictured below), is to be 007's latest adversary in Bond 23, or Skyfall, as the title is now rumoured to be.

The 52-year-old Spanish actor says his parents took him to see many of the old Bond movies so he's especially "thrilled" to be part of the action, although he has, discreetly, declined to give any details of the upcoming role.

Now all we need to know is: who will be the new Bond 'girl'? Might the smart money be on Lady Gaga, who could then also provide a title song?

Any idea who this is?

This is a very famous Hollywood star in a still from a forthcoming film called Albert Nobbs. We're not offering any prizes, but do you know who the mystery star is?

We'll give you a clue. The film is about a 19th-century Englishwoman who disguises herself as a man to make a living as a butler in male-dominated Ireland. 

The star who plays her in the film first played the title character in a 1982 stage production and has been trying to mount a screen version ever since. As well as playing the lead, the mystery star also co-wrote and co-produced the movie and there is already talk of a potential Oscar nomination. 


So who is the mystery star? It's Glenn Close

Woman sues over too little driving in Drive

A woman in Michigan is suing the distributor of the critically acclaimed Ryan Gosling thriller Drive – as well as the cinema where she saw it – claiming it was publicised as a Fast and Furious style action piece but turned out to be nothing of the sort.

In her lawsuit Sarah Deming says the film "bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film ... having very little driving in the motion picture".

She goes on to attack Drive for what she perceives as antisemitic leanings. The film "substantially contained extreme, gratuitous, dehumanising racism directed at members of the Jewish faith, and thereby promoted criminal violence against members of the Jewish faith", her suit reads.

Deming hopes to turn her appeal into a class action suit, which would allow cinemagoers across the US to sue on similar grounds if they found themselves watching films on the basis of a misleading trailer.

Both the Emagine cinema in Novi, Michigan, and distributor FilmDistrict are expected to vigorously contest. Emagine has already pointed out that it would have been happy to refund the cost of the ticket bought by Ms Deming, which is the lawsuit's only demand.

Eating people

If you're a chap and had to have your organs harvested by anyone you could choose then the comely Scarlett Johansson might come quite high on your list.

Which is why she may be playing the anti-heroine in Jonathan (Sexy Beast) Glazer's  film version of Michel Faber's darkly comic sci-fi novel, Under the Skin, which has just gone into production in Scotland.

The lovely Scarlett is, in fac,t an alien predator who has fallen to Earth tasked with trawling in suitable 'human meat' - ideally, hitchhikers - for her ravenous fellow extraterrestrials.

What larks for the industry north of the border. Only just recently Glasgow was hosting a worldwide zombie epidemic in Brad Pitt's new movie World War Z; now the great city must beware cannibal aliens.

Where will it all end?

Farewell Diane

 
It was so sad to hear that one of the most classically beautiful actresses ever seen on the big screen, Diane Cilento, has died in her native Queensland after a long illness. She was 78.

She was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of Molly in the 1963 picture Tom Jones, which won best picture and best director for Tony Richardson.  

The previous year she married Sean Connery,  her second marriage, and had a son, Jason, with him before the couple divorced in 1973.

Cilento married for a third time in 1985 to Anthony Shaffer, who wrote Sleuth and The Wicker Man, a film in which she also appeared. Shaffer died in 2001.

Cilento's friend, playwright Michael Gow told Australia's ABC TV network he was with her at a dinner party last weekend. 

"She was a performer to the end, and she put on a great display for all the guests at that dinner," he said. "She kept us all hugely entertained until the day before yesterday, when she just couldn't manage any more and we took her to hospital."

The kindest cuts

If your taste turns to the sort of film whose title is exactly what it says on the tin - you know the kind of thing ... Snakes on a Plane, Man on Wire, Spider-man ...

... then the latest decision by the esteemed British Board of Film Classification will fill you with undiluted pleasure.

After much consideration and one abstention, the BBFC have decided finally to award an '18' to The Human Centipede Part 2 (The Full Sequence) despite having rejected it only last June.

The reasons for not giving the film a classification at all first time out were laid out in a long Rejection explanation on the BBFC's website - an explanation whose content is almost as nauseating as, presumably, the film itself.

Suffice it to say, the film details the attempts of a man to recreate the events of the first film in which a scientist kidnaps victims together mouth to anus. Now fans of the franchise - and indeed, er, free speech anywhere, will be able to see this 'treat' which has now been passed with a mere 32 cuts.

What the Dickens?

So just how old is Charles Dickens' decrepit Miss Havisham meant to be? According to the author's own notes she was probably meant to be in her mid-50s.

When Martita Hunt (below with Jean Simmons) played the old girl, still clad in her wedding dress after being jilted years earlier, in David Lean's classic 1946 version of Great Expectations, the actress was 46.

Which is exactly what Helena Bonham Carter will also be when a starry new film version of the story is released next year.

Carter co-stars alongside Ralph Fiennes, Robbie Coltrane, Holliday Grainger, Ewan Bremner, Sally Hawkins, David Walliams, Jason Flemying and Tamzin Outhwaite with Jeremy Irvine - about to be seen in War Horse - as the hero, Pip.

Adapted by David (One Day, Starter for Ten) Nicholls, the director is Mike Newell whose work has ranged from Four Weddings and A Funeral to Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.