He has no friends, no past and no name. “I drive,” he says. He does. Opening with its coolest set-piece – an intense, tightly constructed stop/start getaway – Drive immediately shows us how.

Having spun the story of Brit criminal Charles Bronson into a 21st-century Clockwork Orange, hotshot Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn joins forces with Ryan Gosling to take a classic American genre-engine– a girl, a hero, a dark lord, cars, guns, dirty money – and give it a gleaming new Euro-cool chassis. Crazy to think this was meant to be a Neil Marshall blockbuster vehicle for Hugh Jackman.

Just as Refn streamlines his movie for pure vibe, Gosling stylises his own performance right to the brink of absurdity – and makes it mesmerising instead. He’s a Hollywood stunt racer who moonlights as a getaway driver (or is it the other way round?), wearing a strange half-smile and a scorpion-embossed satin jacket. He’s gentle, beautiful, almost wordless in a dreamy first-half love story with sweet mom Carey Mulligan, who’s lovely as the innocent pixie-princess in a role that’s hardly there. He gazes at her, we gaze at him. Mulligan summarised shooting Drive as “staring longingly at Ryan Gosling for hours each day.” We get it. He doesn’t even need to whip his shirt off to make us swoon this time.

But Gosling’s lonely mystery-man says so little, you almost start wondering if he’s right in the head. Turns out, he’s not. Not at all. As Mulligan’s jailbird husband (Sucker Punch’s talented Oscar Isaac) brings ruthless gangsters crashing into their world, Gosling’s soft-eyed chivalry is suddenly revealed as unblinking psychosis.

Underneath those handsome looks, he’s a dangerously unstable cut’n'shut of Travis Bickle (socially weird, prowling the streets at night alone, burning fuse to power-keg violence) and idiot-savant Raymond ‘Rain Man’ Babbitt (he’s an excellent driver). Gosling’s nameless “Driver” is also the most modern descendant of Jean-Pierre Melville’s noir loner Le Samourai. Seems odd that the lean screenplay (adapted from James Sallis’ 2005 pulp novel) was written by a writer best-known for his Oscar-nominated work on The Wings Of The Dove. Odd, until you discover Hossein Amini’s next script is Keanu Reeves’ feudal Japanese adventure 47 Ronin.

Sure enough, Drive shifts like a Samurai movie as Refn constantly feathers the accelerator pedal for maximum tension. Clocked to the adrenaline pulse of a Cliff Martinez’s excellent techno-pop score – College’s ‘Real Hero’ already feels iconic – the hypnotic rhythm is detonated by sudden, shocking eruptions of violence.

If the romance is chaste, the action sure isn’t. When Refn slams his foot down for the first-time, a breakneck road battle jack-knifes into a slo-mo motel shootout that leaves your jaw hanging. That first smack of a leather driving-glove on a woman’s face is a stinger. Once someone’s head explodes at the end of a shotgun, it’s open season. Gosling impales his first victim with a shower rail, goes for some DIY dentistry with a hammer, then stomps clean through a skull – in the same breath as a dreamy slo-mo smooch with Mulligan.

It’s right at this point you start wondering if the entire movie is really taking place inside Driver’s unhinged mind. “I used to make movies in the ’80s,” says comedian Albert Brooks, amping up the menace as a sinister crime-lord. “Action films, sexy stuff—one critic called them European.” Nods to Michael Mann, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen and Ryan O’Neal are all there. But we can go even further back.

In the 1968, English director John Boorman’s made his American debut with art-noir masterpiece Point Blank about a reluctant heist gone wrong. It starred Hollywood hero Lee Marvin as a man named ‘Walker’, who barely spoke and glowered with the promise of brutality to transform a seemingly simple story into an existential quest for meaning.

For all the parallels, that film had Marvin’s emotional sad-core to anchor its cerebral stylistics. We can’t say the same about Gosling’s unknowable charismaniac. Truth be told, Drive doesn’t have anywhere to go with him. In the second half, it has no more set-pieces for us, no psychology for Gosling and pretty much forgets about Mulligan completely in this male world of machismo and violence.

Refn has suggested that his American debut is both a fairytale and – brilliant, this – an ultraviolent remake of Sixteen Candles. But what’s really under the hood? There are no emotions here, just moods. Stripped down for pure style, Drive is content to cruise on a retro-mythic mojo that feels different to anything else you’ve seen this year.

That’s not enough for greatness – the coolest B-movie of 2011 fades on second viewing.  But playing a man with no name, no friends and no past just made Ryan Gosling the hottest name in Hollywood with a lot of fans and a big future. Cross your fingers and maybe he can persuade Refn to do the next Fast And Furious.

RATING: ★★★★

For once, no one gets whacked, stabbed in the neck with a pen or beaten to a bloody pulp. For once, it isn’t that kind of ‘Family’ movie. In fact, the film most unlike anything Martin Scorsese has ever made is really the most personal of his career.

Swooping from the sky through tumbling snowflakes, volcanoes of steam and crowds of travellers, Hugo’s exuberant opening shot arrives at a pair of peering wide eyes. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas) is a 13-year-old orphan (aren’t they all?) who lives behind the giant clock in a Paris train station in 1931.

We spend almost half the film scampering after Hugo – as Scorsese’s camera whooshes joyfully through a labyrinth of ladders, shafts, cranks and cogs – without ever seeming to get very far. He’s chased by the orphan-hunting station guard (Sacha Baron Cohen), he’s trying to fix a broken automaton left by his father, he’s bullied by a grumpy toy-shop-owner named Papa George (Ben Kingsley).

But, after about an hour of this busy meandering, Hugo finally gets where it’s going. And what’s revealed is something rather wonderful: an enchanting, funny, heartfelt love-letter to immortal French film pioneer Georges Méliès – and to cinema itself. We see how Méliès took movies to the moon and back in 1902, how silent cinema’s filmmakers were magicians who can still make us smile and gasp, and how precious things are lost between the grinding gears of technology and time.

There’s something truly perfect and poignant about using cinema’s breakthrough 3D technology to reach back into its past – and Scorsese revels in it. He shows us how the Lumière brothers’ famous Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat terrified audiences in 1895 by sending a runaway locomotive thundering through the screen in 2011. From Edwin S Porter to Harold Lloyd, from Cabiria to Fantômas, Scorsese (quite literally at one point) riffles through the history book of cinema. He’s Doc Brown, time-travelling, taking us with him.

But for a film that hangs off clockwork imagery, Hugo is way too mechanical for most of its over-cogged 124 minutes. A seat-squirming runtime, duff romantic subplots and repetitive chase scenes mean it’s never the marvellous children’s adventure craved by Hugo’s bookworm friend (Chloe Grace Moretz). Almost fittingly, Hugo’s wordless parts work best. Kingsley’s expertly balanced turn is full of buried pain and pride, much subtler than Cohen’s accent and Butterfield’s slightly tense performance, which falls short of the Cinema Paradiso wonder that Scorsese is shooting for.

But it’s easy to see why Scorsese has overindulged here. Despite being set in a storybook Paris, Hugo’s story is secretly Marty’s story: growing up watching the world through his window frame, falling in love with movies, restoring the reputation of his hero Michael Powell and becoming the patron saint of lost cinema. Moving images, indeed – but Hugo never fully manages to make them resonate.

RATING: ★★★

Based on Brian ‘cousin of David’ Selznick’s award-winning children’s novel, Martin Scorsese’s 3D debut is a technical marvel whose heart is tediously scaffolded by too many (non)working parts. But for anyone who loves cinema – who really loves cinema – it shouldn’t be missed.

1. Jamie Lee Curtis

Arise, your Majesty. Graced with a killer combo of legs and lungs, Curtis ran screaming through the genre. Debuting in Halloween, she survived six slashers in five years (including The Fog, Prom Night and Terror Train). Tender yet tough, Curtis redefined horror heroines forever. Her mother must have been proud…

2. Janet Leigh

Like mother, like daughter. Janet Leigh gave birth to a) Jamie Lee Curtis and b) the greatest scream in cinema history. Between screeching violins and slashing edits, her scheming bitch was sliced to naked ribbons in the shower in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Legend has it, she only took baths after that.

3. Fay Wray

Grabbing a blonde wig and a $10,000 paycheque, 5ft 3ins Fay Wray went iconic versus 50ft King Kong. She’d warmed up her vocals in ‘30s Technicolor horrors like Doctor X and The Vampire Bat, but becoming the beauty that killed the beast would seal her rep as cinema’s very first “Queen of Scream”.

4. Neve Campbell

Sharp as a knife. Campbell became postmodern horror’s belle du jour in the hipster Scream trilogy, surviving by wising up to the rules of the genre. While cleavage-heaving bimbos were put to the sword, she played horror at its own game – and won. She even grabbed an extra slice of The Ghostface Killer in Scream 4.

5. Debbie Rochon

Don’t recognise her? Hardcore horror fans worship her. Once voted “Scream Queen Of The Decade”, Rochon is the cult star of more than 100 B-movie fear-flicks, including Troma classics Tromeo And Juliet and Terror Firmer. Even a prop machete that nearly severed her right hand couldn’t stop her.

6. Asia Argento

Italian scaremonger Dario Argento used to read his daughter horror scripts as bedtime stories. No wonder little Asia grew into a tough-grrrl for the Suicide Girls generation: raven-haired, tattooed, naked. Dad put her through the ringer in Trauma and The Stendahl Syndrome before she kicked zombie ass in George A Romero’s Land Of The Dead. More than just sweet meat on the slab.

7. Sarah Michelle Gellar

Surviving her role in Scream 2, Gellar became the face of I Know What You Did Last Summer and J-horror remakes The Grudge and The Grudge 2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She also played Daphne in the Scooby Doo movies. Horrors, in both senses of the word.

8. Naomi Watts

Surprised? Think again. With The Ring, King Kong and Funny Games, Watts has completed the unholy trilogy of horror opponents: ghost, monster and psycho. She’s not done yet. Apparently, Watts is first in the queue to star as the new Tippi Hepdren in a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

9. Danielle Harris

Not even Jamie Lee Curtis as appear in as Halloweens as Harris, who has also starring in everything from Urban Legend to Cheerleaders Must Die!. As if that wasn’t enough, she even had a real-life stalker experience, when an obsessed fan rocked up at her house armed with a teddy bear and a shotgun.

10. Adrienne Barbeau

Cheekily nicknamed “Adrienne Barboobs”, the former Broadway star turned lung-busting lovely thanks to a role in husband John Carpenter’s The Fog. She went on to channel (literally) naked fear in in Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing and George Romero/Stephen King’s Creepshow. Recognise her sultry voice? She’s Catwoman in Batman: The Animated Series.

Published: MSN HIM

Captain America: First Avenger ends with the saddest last line in blockbuster history. Chris Evans delivers it beautifully: unexpected, gentle, agonisingly poignant. But the movie doesn’t seem to notice. It triumphantly roll the credits, you walk out of the cinema wondering why your heart just decompressed inside your chest, and off we zoom to next year’s superhero-a-thon The Avengers.

Is that what this was all about? Having apprenticed in Fantastic Four, Push and Scott Pilgrim, 30-year-old Evans has waited a long time for his first franchise starring role. But in Captain American, he finds himself playing Marvel’s dullest superhero in a movie that might be a two-hour prologue for another movie.

First seen socking Hitler in the mouth on the cover of a comic-book in 1941, skinny-runt turned WWII super-soldier Steve Rogers was more of a 2D piece of US propaganda than complex characters like pre-Pearl-Harbor crusaders Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent. But right from his opening scene, Evans underplays him with quiet, surprising shades of pathos and personality.

Thanks to an amazing digital effect, Evans transforms with utter believability into a short, scrawny New York kid whose weakling health means he’ll never pass an army medical. It’s Evans performance, though, that makes us believe Rogers’ feeble body packs a mighty heart. He’s the kind of humble, earnest ordinary hero you just never see in this kind of movie – good but not goody-goody, masculine but not macho – and he’s massively likeable.

Ironically, the movie starts losing its powers when Steve gains his. Injected with a top-secret military serum that gives him huge strength, agility and healing speed, he emerges – muscular, glistening, amusingly Aryan – as Captain America. And it rapidly becomes clear that beefing-up the Cap means losing all the meat on his character. This all-American action-figure doesn’t have the powers (strength, speed, healing, a magic shield), the weaknesses (er, he can’t get drunk) or the inner pain (his problems just vanished) of the greatest supermen.

Which is partly why screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Chronicles Of Narnia) aren’t sure what to do with him next. Suffering a similar dipping arc, director Joe Johnson once looked like an exciting junior Spielberg with the inventive charm of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and the retro-pop of The Rocketeer. Twenty years later, he’s the journeyman who directed Jurassic Park III and The Wolfman with the same vanilla style on show here.

Embracing the pulpy vibe, Johnson keeps things old-fashioned and square – there’s no Tool on the soundtrack, like in the trailer – although dusty sepia-toned colours and deco-modern production design invokes just the right kind of nostalgia. And, in a lovely nod to Cap’s origins as a ‘40s propaganda weapon, the smartest sequence sees Steve touring America in a silly costume with a troupe of chorus girls and appearing in a line of comic-books.

Those nice early touches – Rogers busting into a superhuman sprint for the first time, misjudging a corner and crashing through a shop window – soon give way to a series of repetitive action montages in which Cap (joined by an irrelevant multi-ethnic band of soldiers) never really seems in danger from retro-techno Nazis with glowing laser-guns.

Luckily, Evans has serious reinforcements in the shape of a near-perfect support cast. Stanley Tucci can scientifically do no wrong on screen (even viz ze Jur-man ak-zent, ja?). Tommy Lee Jones probably brushes his teeth like a gruff military man. Brit new-girl Hayley Atwell feels fresh in a love-interest role that doesn’t. Dominic Cooper has fun as Howard ‘father of Tony’ Stark, as Marvel desperately synergises. Toby Jones is another class act.

But it’s Hugo Weaving who pulls the masterstroke, channelling his megalomaniac Nazi freak The Red Skull through – of all things – a magnificent Werner Herzog accent! Well played, sir. Despite a ludicrous backstory (some sort of all-powerful magical – what?), Weaving’s fiery menace gives Captain America a proper villain.

Juicy hero/villain contrasts and parallel-histories are ignored, though, and it isn’t until that tragic dying second of the movie that Captain America gets interesting. What happens when a superhero whose real power is his heart has it broken? But then it’s over and Evan’s Cap is briskly shuffled into the pack with Marvel’s box-office top trumps Thor, Iron Man and The Hulk. Oh well. See you next year…

RATING: ★★★

Publication: MSN Movies.

It was like capturing a picture of the Yeti or the end of a rainbow. But in the middle of a lecture at Columbia university in March 2009, one student with a camera-phone finally snapped it: James Franco asleep. Head hung back on his shoulders. Jaw gently unlatched. Hands folded over his notebook.

So this dynamo actor/student/artist/writer/model/ joker was human, after all. But Franco wasn’t sleeping. He was busy. Busy answering the question, the same question he would keep asking Danny Boyle. Trapped down a hole, unable to move, 12 hours a day, six days a week, for five weeks, James Franco would often turn to his director and declare: “What do you want from Franco?” That was the question.

Oscar-tilting survival drama 127 Hours might have been the story of climber Aaron Ralston, but it was also Franco’s story. You could tell he loved the metaphorical kick – he’d been here before. Wedged, frustrated and stuck with the only question that mattered. What did they want from Franco? No, what did he want from Franco?

And which Franco? Blockbuster Star Franco, jetting around on a hoverboard dressed as a goblin in the box-office-smashing Spider-Man trilogy. Student Franco, taking planes from movie sets to study (and snooze) through postgrad university seminars and poetry classes. Experimental Franco, guest-starring in TV series General Hospital as a performance artist named Franco. Performance Artist Franco, creating poetry, paintings and video installations in which he wanders around Paris with a prosthetic penis on his nose. Viral Comedian Franco, recording self-mocking acting-lessons with his kid brother for Judd Apatow’s FunnyOrDie.com.

“Sorry, I’m just going to relax a little bit,” he says, with a chuckle. “I’m just a little tired. I just flew in this morning. Anyway…” Reclining back on a sofa in a baggy knit, check shirt, jeans and beaten-up trainers, James Franco is thinking about it. We’re in a room in London’s Soho hotel, it’s lunch time, but Franco’s just sipping from a glass of coke. For a man with a hyperbolic life-pace, Franco really likes pauses. For a second, you wonder if he’s learned to sleep with his eyes open. Then he grins. It’s a big grin. Big, lopsided, squinty and irresistibly knowing. It won Franco “Student with the best smile” back at high school and at 32 years old, crinkling his handsome face gently at the edges, it’s like an invitation and a dare.

If the pauses hold you off, the grin pulls you in. Like all real movie stars, Franco can keep you simultaneously close and at a distance. There’s a lot going on. He rubs chin. He pauses. He sighs. He says, “Hmmmm.” He laughs, often to himself. But if you feel it’s a private joke, Franco wants you to be in on it. “So I realised…” he begins, finally sitting up. “My role as an actor is frankly limited. I’m one piece in a larger puzzle.”

And to think, right at the start, it all looked so simple. Ditching school to start acting lessons, Franco won a breakout role in Judd Apatow’s cult TV series Freaks And Geeks alongside future star Seth Rogen. One year later, he won a Golden Globe for a remarkable impersonation of James Dean in a made-for-TV-biopic, taking up smoking and shutting himself off (“I got it into my head that I needed to be isolated and so told my girlfriend at the time that I wouldn’t be talking to her for four months,” he recalled. “It did not go down well.”). Next year, Hollywood came calling. After losing the lead to Tobey Maguire, Franco signed on as Spider-Man’s rival Harry Osborne in the Spider-Man blockbuster trilogy. When Robert De Niro cast him as his on-screen son in City By The Sea, Franco was being touted as the intense young heir to the Method master’s throne. And sure, he bought it. “I try and emulate that,” he said earnestly at the time. “I will try to bring as much of myself into these roles because I think it gives it a more genuine feel, that’s what people are into.”

The problem was, they weren’t. In the rear-view mirror, Franco’s career arc shares a fascinating symmetry with that of Hollywood’s other handsome boy-king brooder Heath Ledger. Both played teen idols, knights in armour, junkies, supervillains. But where the doomed Australian was going stratospheric, Franco seemed to be disappearing into the void. While Ledger was winning an Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain, Franco was killing himself for films that nobody liked.

He earned a pilot’s license for his role in feeble WWII drama Flyboys (he didn’t get to fly in the film) and spent eight months learning dangerous horse-riding stunts for medieval flop Tristan & Isolde (his big battle scene was cut). When De Niro cast him as a drug-addict, he hung out with users and sleeping rough (“I gave myself no money, so I had to beg,” he told one interviewer. “I made signs on the freeway , I met up with some people who showed me how to sleep with cardboard boxes.”).

There was, of course, a problem: Franco Worse of all, he didn’t like them. But he took them seriously. Very seriously. Too seriously. “Oh, I did…” he says, raising his eyebrows dramatically. “I did take myself too seriously before. And I shouldn’t have.” He smiles, squinting sideways. “I hadn’t done anything that merited that seriousness! You could look at it from the outside and say, ‘Well, comparatively everything is going great,’” says Franco. “But I couldn’t deny that I was just really unhappy.” He sighs. “It was a lot of things. I was making films that I worked hard at but I didn’t believe in. And I had other interests that I wasn’t giving time to. I was driving myself crazy.”

Intentions, intention, in tension. Franco was spinning his wheels in the mud and, to his credit, he knew it. So to the bafflement of everyone in Hollywood, he took a pause, one of those long ones, and then made some changes. “I realised, I had to kinda let go…”

Re-enrolling at UCLA almost a decade after he’d dropped out to become an actor aged 19, Franco studied literature and creative writing. He completed the three-year course in two years. “I was almost 10 years older than the other students,” he says. “And I knew that it gonna be a little weird, but I just bit the bullet. In turns out it wasn’t too late. Actually, it was the perfect time.” From there, the “projects” never stopped. Moving to New York to simultaneously take more post-graduate courses (writing, filmmaking, fiction writing), the Gucci campaigns, the art installations. the painting, the poetry. “But I always had these interests,” explains Franco, cracking out the grin. “I had just always done them on my own. I wanted to go to art school and my parents wouldn’t let me apply. By doing what seems to be expanding my interests, it’s really just taking my interests that I’ve had all along more seriously. In my life, I do a lot because I have a lot that I’m interested in.” Until that photo at Columbia went viral, rumours began churning that Franco never slept.

In reality, he’d just woken up. The energy that he’d poured into pointless films, Franco now poured into things he cared about. And with gratifying irony, the moment he stopped trying to create a great acting career, Franco got one. Seemingly cruising as a dreamy pot-smoker, he effortlessly stole stoner-bromance Pineapple Express from co-star Seth Rogen. Then he beautifully underplayed a touching mini-role as a soldier in Paul Haggis’ bracing Iraq war drama In The Valley Of Elah before casually pulling a revelatory performance in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, going lip-to-lip with Sean Penn and reminding everyone something they’d long forgotten. This boy could really act. But the bemusement of his co-stars, he never stopped studying: Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer on the set of Spider-Man 3, 16th-century Jacobean drama during Pineapple Express and Thomas Pynchon on the set of Milk. “We used to laugh because in between takes he’d be reading The Iliad on set,” joked Pinepple Express producer Judd Apatow. “We still haven’t read The Iliad. It was a very difficult book…”

“When I first went back to university, nobody understood,” says Franco, cranking his eyebrows again. “People would literally say, ‘Well, do you want to be a movie star or a student?’ But I suddenly started getting opportunities to work with my favourite directors. And it’s not coincidental, because I think a lot of that came out of core changes I made in my life.” There’s the grin again. He leans forward. “And actually, you know what? That’s a little advice that Barack Obama gave me.” True story? “True story. I asked him, ‘What do you do when you get all this criticism?’ And he said, ‘Humour. Basically, humour.’ And that’s how you get through these situations.”

Take Eat Pray Love, not Joyce or Dostoevsky but a travel-porn fantasy for middle-aged women in which Franco plays a dilettante actor. (You can imagine his delight). “You know, Eat Pray Love, not the story I’ve been dying to tell my whole life,” he grins, leaning forward conspiratorially. “But it was only a week out of my life. I’m not gonna say, ‘Well, Eat Pray Love is silly, I’m not gonna tell that story…’ I sign on and I get my experience with Julia Roberts.” Five years ago, Franco would have read Eat Pray Love, twice, then gone on a pilgrimage to Bali.

Take Franco’s role as the face of Gucci, He was immaculate and beautiful, throwing slo-mo noir glances in the ad campaign for Gucci’s first men’s fragrance Gucci by Gucci Pour Homme. Then, just in case anyone thought he was taking it seriously, he recorded a four-minute spoof-skit of his attempts to film voiceovers of the commercials. Possibly not exactly what Gucci’s creative director Frida Giannini meant when he talked about Franco’s “nonchalance” and “unforced appeal”.

But when Franco returned, muscular and wet-through in a black v-neck, for the brand’s Gucci Sport Pour Homme fragrance, his looks proved essentially too good to puncture with parody. Clean-cut, sporty, stubble-rugged. Franco just works. And three years ago, science proved it. A picture of the actor was fed into the “beautification engine” of a new computer program that used an algorithm to take one photo and digitally alter it into a more traditionally attractive face. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of Franco were identical. Basically, he was born perfect.

The DNA of Franco’s beauty is a Portuguese-Swedish father (shipping-container company owner) who wanted his son to pursue mathematics and a Russian-Jewish mother (poet, author, editor) who fuelled his love of art. Neither of his parents, who met each other at Stanford University, wanted him to drop out of UCLA in his freshman year to pursue an acting career. Despite the Jimmy Dean looks, Franco will claim to being a shy teenager unable to notch up girlfriends (“Sure, girls told me I was cute or whatever, but I was so shy I could never really make anything happen or cash in”).

Not that you’ll ever hear him talk about his private life. After dating co-star Marla Sokoloff at the start of his career, he’s been in a oh-so-quiet relationship with actress Ahna O’Reilly since 2006. It infuriates the tabloid media, who’ve attempted to link him to everyone from Sienna Miller to Agyness Deyn. When they’re not trying to out him, that is. “There are lots of other reasons to be interested in gay characters than wanting myself to go out and have sex with guys,” said Franco during an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Part of what I’m interested in is how these people who were living anti-normative lifestyles contended with opposition.” Franco, being Franco, couldn’t leave without a satirical kiss-off: “Or, you know what? Maybe I’m just gay.”

It was bromantic comedy Pineapple Express that led director Danny Boyle to cast Franco in 127 Hours, a one-man blockbuster stage play in the mountains. Now, suddenly, he’s is everywhere. He’s playing Allen Ginsberg in Beat biopic Howl, resparking his comedy cool in the Pineapple Express team’s medieval romp Your Highness, then heading back to Hollywood to star in the Planet Of The Apes prequel. After hosting the Oscars with Anne Hathaway – a night when nerves defeated him and he retreated behind his looks - he’s now working on not one directorial debut but three: adaps of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and a biopic of serial-killer Richard Ramirez.

Franco is burning, awake and, best of all, free. He’s out of the hole and running. “I don’t necessarily need to the best, whatever that means,” he shrugs. “But I don’t want to just dabble. I want to engage. To me, that is inspiring. And I guess what I’m saying is: getting inspired is the best you can ask for and working hard. Those are the things you can control.”

In tension, intention, intentions. “I feel like… Um.” He sighs, surely more punctuation than fatigue. “It’s hard for me, and I think this is just part of my personality, it’s hard for me to have just ‘hobbies’.” He thinks again. Another… long… pause… “I’d say I have a couple of hobbies,” he offers. “You know, playing ping pong. When I play ping pong, I don’t have the need to go to the Olympics.” He says that now. Just don’t rule it out.

Publication: GQ Style

Which places on Earth would still love to visit?

There are few out there that I know I should see before I die. But let’s not talk about it, because otherwise I’ll find a horde of tourists there.

So where is your favourite place on Earth?

Of course I’m very fond of the jungle, of Amazonia, but as a landscape and for the people, I really like the arid north east of Brazil a lot.

You turned your documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly into a feature film starring Christian Bale. Will you ever do the same for Grizzly Man?

No, it shouldn’t be made into a feature film. That’s an interesting case because one of the greatest Hollywood stars has acquired the rights to a feature film. It never materialised, because the moment they saw my film, they knew you cannot be nearly 10 percent as good as Timothy Treadwell. It is disaster for an actor to be compared to Treadwell.

Will you say who it was?

No. When you look at the three of four greatest stars, one of them.

What did you hear on the tape recording of Treadwell being eaten by the bear?

I can only say that apparently Treadwell’s girlfriend was very, very brave and attacked the bear with a frying pan. A frying pan was found next to the few remains of Treadwell. In the tape, you hear some banging noise, like metal, and apparently it’s the frying pan she’s used to hit the bear. She was eaten as well, of course.

Did you hear the recording of Christian Bale’s infamous outburst?

I have to say something. It is shame for the media. You will probably wipe it under the carpet, what I am saying, but it is the media who are vile and debased not Christian Bale. Yes, he had an outburst. But nobody in the media tells you that for three decades this man has been the most charming, diligent, noble of them all. But I know you will not mention it.

We will.

Okay. By the way, during Rescue Dawn, I had one moment where there was a misunderstanding and we yelled at each other. ‘Christian, are you crazy??’ He yelled back. It lasted 15 seconds. Then we decided we had to see each other face to face at arm’s length. In 10 seconds, the misunderstanding was gone and we hugged each other.

Can you name the film that made you fall in love with cinema?

This film doesn’t exist. The first time I saw films was when I was 11. Until I was 11, I did not even know that cinema existed. The films I saw which were brought by a travelling projectionist to the little school house in the mountains. They didn’t impress me at all. Later I saw Dr Fu Manchu and Zorro and Tarzan and things like that. They didn’t impress me very much. I always had the feeling I had to make better films than Dr Fu Manchu.

The men in your film always follow their dreams. Do you dream?

No, I do not dream at all. You see, there is this common agreement among the psychologists that every person dreams during the night time. And I am the living proof that there are some people out there who do not dream at all. I do not dream, no. It’s possibly because of the absence of dreams that I make movies. Well, it’s a feeble explanation, don’t take it that seriously.

Maybe you’ve just forgotten them when you wake up.

No. You can wake me up anytime in the night and there are no dreams.

What might you have been if not a filmmaker?

I don’t know… Maybe a musician. That’s something I missed unfortunately. I would give 10 years of my life if I could play the cello with same ease as I am breathing.

You think it’s too late?

If you really want to play it well, you have to start before you are six. Or mathematics. I would have loved to be into specific forms of mathematics. But I am aware that I am too old for that. Every single monumental breakthrough in mathematics was done by kids between 14 and 24.

What ambitions do you have left to fulfil?

I never had any ambitions. I only have a life. I do what I love to do.

What do you think of the digital age? Are you embracing it?

I was asked recently, ‘What is your social network?’ My social network is my table here, which holds six persons. My wife and me invite four guests maximum. We eat and feast and laugh and tell stories. And that’s my social network – my dinner table.

Do you watch many films these days? Do you ever watch YouTube?

No, I don’t. Two or three films are my average per year. But I do watch, for example, Premier League or Bundesliga. I want to see how Bayern Munich is doing. They are not really that good at the moment. They had the most abysmal start to the season. They really have to get their act together now.

Do you have personal heroes who have inspired you?

Yes, but they are all dead. Leonidas, the leader of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Or the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Or a writer that you have never heard of, Philippe de Commines. They had a vision way, way, way beyond their time. Akhenaten was more than a 1,000 years ahead of his time.

When will we see you next?

I’ve seen my apotheosis now in American popular culture by being a guest actor on The Simpsons show. The title of the episode is A Scorpion’s Tale. I didn’t even know that The Simpsons were animated creatures. I had seen them only in print. I thought it was like Charlie Brown. They were completely baffled that I asked them to send me one or two samples on a DVD. They thought I was joking.

What character do you play?

I’m playing the part of a German pharmaceutical industrialist who creates some type of LSD-like pills to sedate and make happy unbearable old people like Grandpa. I enjoyed it.

Publication: i-D

Two things before we start on Terrence Malick’s philosophical, spiritual, experimental, transcendent, cosmic odyssey. One: it’s shorter than Transformers 3. Two: it has dinosaurs in it. But really, where on earth do we start? Not on Earth. Not at the start. Further back. In The Beginning…

Over four films in as many decades, near-mystical US director Malick has conjured huge arthouse-blockbuster tone-poems about seismic periods of human existence like the Great Depression (Days Of Heaven, starring Richard Gere), World War Two (The Thin Red Line, starring everyone) and the discovery of America (The New World, starring Colin Farrell and Christian Bale).

The Tree Of Life makes them look like crayon scribbles on the back of a napkin.

A philosophy lecturer turned visionary filmmaker, Malick has finally gone for the big one, unpacking his massive butterfly net and setting out on a quest to capture the existence of God in Nature, the meaning of human life and the mysteries of the universe. Whoa.

In terms of crazy ambition, there’s nothing like it. Right from the start, Malick stretches out his arms and attempts to pull together the awesome and the intimate. But at first, it seems like business as usual: some lovely, drifting shots of a beautiful woman (Jessica Chastain) receiving a telegram telling her that one of her sons has died. She asks, “Why?” and Malick’s mission begins. He hits the warp button, beaming us into the cosmos and back to the dawn of Creation itself. We just lost cabin pressure…

Wondrous, mindblowing images immerse us for the best part of an astonishing opening hour. We see the universe being born. Heavenly Hubble-visions of distant galaxies. Gases, light, matter. Cells splitting. Volcanoes splurging. Jellyfish drifting. Dinosaurs. Yes, dinosaurs! Asteroids crashing. An embryo’s eye. A child being birthed.

Like we said: whoa. Created with the help of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s special-effects legend Douglas Trumbull, it might be the most audacious sequence of cinema since Kubrick’s jump-cutting giant leap from the rise of the apes to the 21st century. And to be honest, The Tree Of Life never quite touches those heights again.

Malick’s Genesis ends in the Eden of ‘50s Texas, in the town where he grew up, and where strict father Brad Pitt and angelic mother Jessica Chastain raise their three boys. This is where The Tree Of Life lays roots, as Children Of Men cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki watches Pitt and Chastain’s young son Jack (Hunter McCracken) coming of age in a series of drifting life-fragments. Very little happens, but the 67-year-old auteur’s touch for evoking the strange, magical, half-forgotten, half-understood sensations of childhood is extraordinary.

Drenched in grandiose classic music, Chastain wanders around looking at trees while Malick tries to make her look like a living angel (she even dances on air at one point) and gives her murmuring lines like, “In what shape did you come to us? What disguise? What are we to you?” Meanwhile, Brad Pitt scowls imperiously and the kids scamper around.

The Tree Of Life is beautiful. Ridiculously, rapturously beautiful. You could press ‘pause’ at any point and hang it on your wall. But you soon get the feeling that Malick could have made his film 30 minutes shorter or 30 hours longer and it would have made no difference.

His goal here is to connect the tensions within this little family (Pitt’s stern Nature versus Chastain’s loving Grace) with the giant forces of the universe. Oh, this isn’t us being clever. Malick tells us exactly this in one of the hushed voiceovers that float over what we’re seeing. There’s no story, no dialogue, no direction home.

Weighed down by its own ambitions, The Tree Of Life feels more solemn and vague the longer it goes on. We’re regularly teleported to the 21st century – for the first time in Malick’s career – where grown-up Jack is now Sean Penn, looking angsty, wandering around, not saying much, and staring at rocks.

Even if much of the movie does take place in Jack’s mind, it doesn’t really come together. However gorgeous it is, you’re often left waiting for attention-grabbing scenes (a toddler staring at a baby, kids tying a frog to a rocket) that don’t arrive often enough. You’ll feel amazed, confused, preached to, ignored, lost, found… and still Malick’s camera keeps searching.

And then it ends. But not before a fumbled finale in which everyone from Jack’s past steps out of time to hug each other on a beach like some sort of Thomson’s holiday advert.

But if Malick (and the small army of four editors who worked in the cutting room on 600,000 metres of film for three years) never wins his struggle with the film’s impossible ambitions, maybe that’s half the point. Much of The Tree Of Life’s beauty is in its yearning and wonder. It’s a magnificent grasping stretch – across space and time – to touch something that will always just out of our reach. However close it gets, it’s a captivating experience. And, you know, makes a whole lot more sense than Transformers 3.

VERDICT: To infinity and beyond… Terrence Malick’s spiritual odyssey is mystifying, unique and overspilling with wonder. Don’t wait for the DVD.

RATING: ★★★★

Published: Total Film

Love has taken a battering lately. Blue Valentine, Rabbit Hole and The Kids Are All Right have all shown it busting up, breaking down and dying hard. Love’s had it tough. Love’s had Twilight, for pity’s sake. But things weren’t always like this.

One of the most wonderful romantic fantasies in cinema history, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter Of Life And Death was illuminated by an idea so simple and so beautiful that it makes your heart beat harder just to say it: that a single tear shed for love might stop heaven in its tracks. More than 60 years later, The Adjustment Bureau swings for something just as special. That a kiss can change the course of your fate. And that True Love will find a way. On a marginally less profound level, it also proves that even if he was an angel, Terence Stamp would still scare the bejesus out of you.

Adapting Phillip K Dick’s shortie Adjustment Team, writer/producer/director George Nolfi’s genre-jumping mystery sells itself as a thriller but is in fact one of the most heartfelt romances
for some time. It starts with an accidental meet-cute in a men’s room, as hotshot US-senate candidate David Norris (Matt Damon) runs into a flirtatious ballet dancer named Elise (Emily Blunt). One surprise kiss – and she’s gone forever. At least, that was what was supposed to
happen.

But two things happen instead. Just by chance, Norris meets Elise again. Just by chance, he stumbles on the existence of an army of mysterious men dressed in grey hats and suits whose job it is to stop things happening just by chance. As employees of “The Chairman”, these unseen agents of fate keep mankind on “The Plan” by constantly nudging us in the right direction.

At this point, The Adjustment Bureau sets off on an aching, urgent surge as both desperate love story and sci-fi thriller. Pursued and roadblocked by Mad Men’s John Slattery and his cohorts – and helped by Anthony Mackie – Norris chases the woman he loves but was never supposed to meet through the streets of New York. With Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll brushing the mood between light and dark (the weather seems to track Norris’ storming emotions and the
uncertain heavenly shifts), Damon probably has as much running to do here as he did in any of the Bourne movies.

“We actually tried Free Will before,” rumbles Terence Stamp, the Angels’ dark destroyer brought in to prevent Norris from disrupting Destiny. “You gave us the Dark Ages for five centuries.” From theological metaphors to pre-determinist minefields, we’re on seriously tricky ground here. It tackles some difficult, adult questions about life and choices. Between being a president or a
husband. Between changing the world or settling down.

And for sure, The Adjustment Bureau is chock full of holes. Why doesn’t Elise ever phone the well-known Norris after the Angels prevent him calling her? Aren’t the Angels causing infinitely more “ripples” than Norris as they charge around trying to stop him? What exactly are the Angels’ powers? One minute they have amazing telekinetic gifts (knocking out phone lines, lifting paving slabs) and can predict the future (thanks to magic books that map our interweaving fates). The next minute they can’t even stop a taxi and must sprint after Damon like normal men. In fact, the whole movie is set in motion when one of them nods off on a park bench.

But if The Adjustment Bureau often feels like a long episode of The X-Files, it’s the beautiful, believable romance between Damon and Blunt that keeps us gripped. Like few other films in recent memory, The Adjustment Bureau makes us believe in a thing called love.

It helps that Damon and Blunt don’t look like gorgeous superstars. They’ve just two ordinary people who’ve both felt that rarest of sounds: click. When Elise playfully flips Norris the bird at the end of their second chance meeting, you get why he’ll never stop running till he catches her. Blunt is funny and anarchic, Damon is determined and disarming. The chemistry is perfect and Nolfi, who previously wrote screenplays for Ocean’s Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum,
gives them some lovely, pure, romantic dialogue (“If I’m not supposed to be with her, why do I feel like this?” asks Norris, angry and hurt).

Truth be told, it’s hard to say who’ll turn up to see them. Guys expecting a sci-fi thriller will be wrong-footed by the romance, girls who’d watch the romance will try to dodge what looks like a sci-fi thriller. Take a chance – it might be in The Plan anyway.

VERDICT: ★★★

Despite wobbling under the weight of some hefty ideas while straddling two genres, this sci-fi mystery surprises by emerging as one of the most romantic films of the year.

Publication: Total Film

Life-eating obsession. Dizzying detail. Surgical precision. This two-disc Director’s Cut DVD slams home the point: this gripping true-life procedural is as much as about David Fincher’s hunt for the Zodiac killer as it is about the story of the men who burned up two decades of their lives looking for him. 

“I think the reason why the Zodiac still haunts us is the letters,” says Fincher on his intelligent, considered commentary. “The crimes themselves are, by today’s serial-killer standards, not that grotesque. But the letters are the key for me. This ongoing correspondence with someone who is ‘in process’, the evolution of his thinking.” The filmmaker might as well be talking about himself. Once again, he goes about meticulously, methodically recording his own process via another fantastic DVD package.

In Fincher’s hands, the tale of cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) hunting the San Francisco serial killer brilliantly fuses crime thriller, newspaper potboiler and period time-capsule. But Graysmith’s self-obliterating obsession is really Fincher’s target – piling up more and more facts, burrowing deeper into the labyrinthine mystery, chasing the truth until nothing else matters.

The devil in the detail. Fincher talks through decision to ditch the stylistic pyrotechnics of Fight Club and Panic Room (“I don’t want people to be distracted from anything the characters are saying”). His superhuman attention to the little things: camera, sound, editing, props, period intricacies (running 25 takes to get a three-second shot where someone compares two sets of handwriting). Forcing Gyllenhaal to carrying on shooting when he was sick with a 102 temperature (“I think it focused him – he’s truly great in that scene”).

Surprisingly, Fincher’s Director’s Cut adds just four minutes of extra footage. More dialogue. More of the process. “People just could not abide by a scene where three guys are talking into a speakerphone,” says the director, of one sequence in which the cops talk their boss through the case. “This scene cracks me up. Anytime you can cut to a speakerphone, it’s like Charlie. I just love the idea of these guys laying it all out for Charlie!”

Great banter and, yes, more process in a second commentary by Gyllenhaal, Downey Jr, producer Brad Fischer, screenwriter James Vanderbilt and particularly James Elloy. After introducing himself as “James Ellroy, king of American crime fiction, acknowledging this as one of the half-dozen great American crime films”, the author hurls out nuggets like, “You know there are systemic inequities in the death penalty system, but motherfuckers like this have to die.”

Split into The Film and The Facts, Disc Two unloads hours of featurettes dissecting everything you could possible want to know about the history of the Zodiac and the making of Fincher’s film. And probably plenty you didn’t. Case in point? Nearly three hours of interviews re-telling the story of the Zodiac case and prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen.

It’s gasp-snatching stuff. Not only do we have vivid, deeply personal first-hand accounts from the policemen who worked on the Zodiac case, but survivors talking through in staggering detail horrific encounters with the Zodiac. Bryan Hartnell was stabbed six times and watched his girlfriend murdered. He coolly explains what he and the Zodiac said to each other (“Don’t worry, I just want your car”), what he was feeling (“I was taking a sociology class and I thought I might be able to squeeze a paper out of it”), what happened when the stabbing started and what he thinks of the scene in the film (“I couldn’t have scripted it better”).

Vanderbilt explains his own quest for the killer, researching the story through hours of interviews. “So you’re sitting having dinner with a very nice man and you know that at some point you’re gonna have to ask, ‘So… when you were tied up, how did you first know he was going to stab you?’” Then comes the eye-popping Making Of footage: Fincher pulling the strings on set and building his world, great and small (helicopters winch in giant trees, while production designers grovel in the mud planting individual weeds).

Copious FX featurettes also reveal the invisible magic behind Zodiac’s apparently ultra-realist drama. Ruffalo seems to spent much of his time wandering around a blue-screen set, while tech-experts fill in blood, knife blades, people walking their dogs on sidewalks and whole cityscapes.

Best of all in this fascinating insight into Fincher’s process? The director’s description of directing: “Imagine painting, but you’re 200 yards away from the canvas. And 80 people are holding the brush. And you’re a on walkie-talkie, going, ‘We need a little blue there. No, no, no, darker blue. DARKER BLUE!’”

FILM: ★★★★★

DISC: ★★★★★

Publication: Total Film.