Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have come a long way from Spaced, the Channel 4 sitcom Pegg created with Jessica Hynes (then Stevenson). When it was canned after two series in 1999 and 2001, Spaced - a very funny and edgy comedy about a group of assorted idlers and oddballs - assumed cult status; now More4 are unashamedly cashing in on Pegg and Frost’s Hollywood debut, PAUL, by repeating Spaced on Sunday nights, which is good news all round.

@Wossy seems to have been cast as second baddie in #PiratesduCaribbean 4

This intro is entirely about namechecking the films so they can cut away to the US stars who've jetted in from #Tinseltown

Lame string of Little Fockers jokes.

These clips montages always make films look like the complete Shakespeare. Then you go and see them...

@Wossy seems to have been cast as second baddie in #PiratesduCaribbean 4

Metcentric New Yorkers tend to think an opera hasn’t achieved classic status until it arrives at their vast inner sanctum. Whereas other cities worldwide know that the inimitable Peter Sellars production of grand opera’s last masterpiece (to date) has become a virtual brand since its 1987 Houston premiere. John Adams's first, and biggest, opera was an obvious here-to-stay triumph at the Edinburgh Festival the following year, and its strengths become more apparent with the passing of time.

“The problem is that you’ve been told and not told.” While Ishiguro and his discerning fans would never indulge in anything so crass as hype, there have been whisperings in North London wine bars, over the coffee-morning brews of Home Counties ladies, on terraces of rented villas on the Amalfi Coast. Yes, Never Let Me Go is the one about human cloning, whose characters are living organ farms, existing solely for harvest.

We’ve heard a lot about the American experience of Iraq: the internecine politicking in Green Zone, the deadly combat of The Hurt Locker, the tedium of camp life in Jarhead. In the cinematic reproduction of tumult in Iraq, one thing you never see a lot of is Iraqis.

Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit famously won John Wayne his solitary Oscar for Best Actor.

This is not the first starring role in cinema history for an orang-utan. That honour belongs to King Louie, the banana-clad jungle VIP in Disney’s 1967 version of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It’s not actually the second either, or even the third. Students of the Primates on Film sub-genre will fondly recall Clyde, the orang-utan who hung out with Clint Eastwood so winningly in Every Which Way But Loose (1978) that the studio gave him another shot at the big time in Any Which Way You Can (1980).

A paean to working-class bellicosity set (and shot) in the rundown industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, David O’Russell’s boxing film The Fighter relishes its brawls. In one inspired scene, a character is unceremoniously slammed to the ground and punched repeatedly in the face. Not Queensberry Rules? That’s because the assailant is the eponymous pugilist’s girlfriend and her victim one of his seven sisters, who have arrived on her porch with their mother one morning to wrest him away from the siren’s clutches.

So many stage shows (musicals, mostly) are these days fashioned from films that the arrival of Rabbit Hole reminds us of the time-honored habit of plundering yesteryear's Broadway hit for this movie season's trophy-minded bait. And so we have Nicole Kidman Oscar-nominated for her turn as the grieving mum in a part that won Cynthia Nixon New York's Tony Award five years ago.

Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.