This year's Venice Film Festival got off to a cliché-ridden start: the sun beat down, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, Italy's favourite Americans, flashed their dazzling Hollywood smiles and signed autographs for adoring fans, the water taxis threatened to go on strike and the new festival complex was only half-built (it will be ready by 2011).

 read more

On Monday, the Today programme tackled the question of Britishness, with reference to the London portion of the Olympics closing ceremony, in which the nation was represented by a double-decker, dancers waving umbrellas and "Greensleeves" set to a disco beat. Today's discussion didn't clear up the evident confusion – indeed, by handing the question over to a journalist from the Daily Telegraph and the cockney comedian Arthur Smith, I'd say they deepened it; but where do we go for symbols of national identity?

 read more

Einstein successfully predicted that a massive heavenly object would be able to bend light, in a process known as gravitational lensing. He didn't, as far as I know, fully explore the application of this theory to the field of television drama, but big stars can affect our observations here, too. To watch Uma Thurman in My Zinc Bed, David Hare's television adaptation of his own stage play, was to contend with a kind of distracting optical shimmer, in which the celebrity kept on threatening to blur the character she was playing. That's really Uma Thurman, you thought. Uma Thurman! – on the BBC – and jammy old Paddy Considine gets to snog her!

 read more

"Report back to me when it makes sense," the CIA boss tells an underling midway through the Coen brothers' deliriously confusing comedy thriller, which opened the Venice Festival last night. Infidelity, divorce, murder, online dating, personal fitness, spying and cosmetic surgery are the ingredients in a plot which pulls in many directions at once.

 read more

An "unremarkable" British family have sacrificed their private life to let 21 cameras into their home for a new, primetime TV show.

 read more

Tom Cruise's ill-fated World War II epic 'Valkyrie' has been hit by a $11m (£6m) law suit filed by a group of film extras who suffered broken bones, cuts and bruises after they were thrown out of a lorry during shooting in Berlin last year.

 read more

The 65th Venice Film Festival gets under way today, with the premiere of a film starring heartthrobs George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

 read more

We all have different ideas of how to round off a nice bank-holiday weekend, but listening to a monologue from a terminally ill woman, rehearsing her final words to her husband while waiting for euthanasia in a clinic in Zurich, is probably not up there in the top 10, even if she is played by the splendid, ever-reliable Sheila Hancock. At the same time, mind you, ITV1 was showing Pierrepoint, about the state-appointed hangman Albert Pierrepoint. It was "death night" on our two main terrestrial channels.

 read more

John C Reilly is ranting. The 43-year-old actor is furious about some of the less-than-complimentary reviews of his new film, Step Brothers, a brash comedy about two overgrown adolescents still living at home. "We were in some way commenting on real things in this movie. Things like family relationships and this phenomenon of the man-child. We were trying to talk about what it's like to be in America right now and how spoilt we are."

 read more

Before sex and drugs were co-opted by rock'n'roll, they belonged to Edith Piaf. A diminutive woman whose looks were far from stunning, Piaf rose from singing on the street to become the highest-paid performer in the world, while engaging in countless affairs and, later, developing a morphine addiction. In this new production of Pam Gems's 1978 play-with-music, the Donmar has struck gold.

 read more

The cast list for ITV2's first sitcom is impressive. A comedy about the personal lives of off-duty superheroes, it stars Patrick Baladi (The Office), Nicholas Burns (Nathan Barley), James Lance (Teachers), Claire Keelan (Nathan Barley) and Rebekah Staton (Pulling).

 read more

We all have different ideas of how to round off a nice bank-holiday weekend, but listening to a monologue from a terminally ill woman, rehearsing her final words to her husband while waiting for euthanasia in a clinic in Zurich, is probably not up there in the top 10, even if she is played by the splendid, ever-reliable Sheila Hancock. At the same time, mind you, ITV1 was showing Pierrepoint, about the state-appointed hangman Albert Pierrepoint. It was "death night" on our two main terrestrial channels.

 read more

When it was produced in 1979, the film Caligula was meant to be the most lavish historical drama of its day, designed for an art-house audience with star casting and spectacular sets.

 read more

Take 200 passengers, a bank holiday weekend, a Spanish airport not overly generous with its provision of air conditioning and a delay nearing seven hours and what do you have?

 read more

The film studio Warner Bros has taken umbrage at the title of a Hindi film called Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors for its resemblance to the Harry Potter franchise.

 read more

A war of words between two of the nation's best-known news presenters has erupted after the BBC's chief interrogator, Jeremy Paxman, said it had become impossible for middle-class white men to make it in the television world.

 read more

We all have different ideas of how to round off a nice bank-holiday weekend, but listening to a monologue from a terminally ill woman, rehearsing her final words to her husband while waiting for euthanasia in a clinic in Zurich, is probably not up there in the top 10, even if she is played by the splendid, ever-reliable Sheila Hancock. At the same time, mind you, ITV1 was showing Pierrepoint, about the state-appointed hangman Albert Pierrepoint. It was "death night" on our two main terrestrial channels.

 read more

We all have different ideas of how to round off a nice bank-holiday weekend, but listening to a monologue from a terminally ill woman, rehearsing her final words to her husband while waiting for euthanasia in a clinic in Zurich, is probably not up there in the top 10, even if she is played by the splendid, ever-reliable Sheila Hancock. At the same time, mind you, ITV1 was showing Pierrepoint, about the state-appointed hangman Albert Pierrepoint. It was "death night" on our two main terrestrial channels.

 read more

Since the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, two powerful documentaries have looked at the Twin Towers through the eyes of a man faced with death. The first, Henry Singer's The Falling Man, tries to piece together the final moments of an unknown 9/11 "jumper" who was made immortal in a photograph taken by Richard Drew. He was a reluctant victim for whom death came looking. The second film is Man on Wire, the story of the marvellous high-wire walker Philippe Petit, and his nonchalance in the face of death.

 read more

Every so often during an episode of Britain from Above, Andrew Marr seemed compelled – either by sheer emotion or because it was in his contract – to tell you how important it is to take an aerial view of the nation. "If you really want to understand how this country works, then there's only one way to get the big picture: from above" or "It's only from above that we get some sense of the scale". I wish he hadn't done this. I like Marr best when he's understated, and the aerial stuff provided its own hyperbole. A lot of the series was spent, as it turned out, close to the ground. Last night, Marr went panning for gold in a Northern Irish stream and strolling along crumbling cliffs in Norfolk; one sequence even went deep underground, showing us a 3-D computer image of the mineral formations on which these islands are built: scarlet points of rock thrusting down into the crust, a flat grey blade for the fault beneath the Great Glen.

 read more