Hollywood, Apartheid and Rugby Union – it really shouldn’t work. But check out the spine-tingling trailer for Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar shoo-in, out later this year.

Tom Waits looks brilliantly cast as the devil in Terry Gilliam’s fabulous-looking new movie The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Hot in the heels of the Coen Brother's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" (which I saw last night - it did not disappoint!) comes news that two of his other novels are due to have the Hollywood make-over.

Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron will star in his extremely bleak post-nuclear fall-out story "The Road" whilst watch-out for Ridley Scott making his usual bombastic mess of McCarthy's ultra-violent western "Blood Meridian" due out sometime in 2009.

Hardly an outsider, I know, but the Coen Brothers new movie, "No Country For Old Men" has laid down the first marker of the Oscar season by picking up the best picture gong at the National Review Board awards. Three of last year's Board winners went on to pick up the golden statue.

I can't wait to see this when it comes out in the UK on 18th January. Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book on which the film is based, is one of my favourite writers and the US reviewers are unanimously calling it a cracking return to form for the brothers. Fabulous cast too.

Here's the trailer.

Michael Haneke's remake of his film, "Funny Games" - a mercilessly dark but strangely moral study of our fascination with, and the de-sensitising effect of, screen violence - was shown at the London Film Festival last week. 

What's interesting about the remake is that he has relocated it from Austria to the US but otherwise has meticulously recreated it -Gus Van Sant-style - scene-by-scene. He has also cast two high-profile Hollywood actors - Tim Roth and Naomi Watts - in the two lead roles, as if he further needed to drive home his point! 

The new version will no doubt split opinion when it is released here next year.

Haneke's too-clever post-modern approach - dialogue to camera to completely implicate the viewer in the "crime" and one hugely-controversial moment where a character winds back the film to play out a different outcome - is not everyone's cup of tea, but there's no doubt he is one of the most important and brave film-makers working today

Here's the trailer.

You can tell the Summer is nearly over - there are some decent films starting to open at the cinema.

I've heard some good things about Sugarhouse by rookie director Gary Love- the latest high octane drugs 'n' guns thriller to be set in London.

The movie stars Brit-film regulars, Andy Serkis and Steven Mackintosh (Winston in Lock, Stock...) alongside former So Solid Crew singer, Ashley Walters.

I'm a big fan of Walters (as an actor, I hasten to add) - his performance in Bullet Boy was stunning and he takes most of the plaudits here too. However, you get the sense that he needs roles other than drug dealers, DJs and gang members, if he's going to really fulfil his potential and not get typecast.

It opens on the 24th August. Here's the trailer.