God, I really can't muster much enthusiasm to tell you about Speed Racer, the new one from the Wachowski brothers, except to say that for a simple, primary-coloured kids' film (parents will be bored out of their wits) it is surprisingly long and convoluted. The pulpy exploitation flick Bound and The Matrix (the original, not the dreadful sequels) are beginning to look like distant memories.

Speed Racer manages to waste an awful lot of reliable talent - not just the likes of Susan Sarandon and John Goodman and Christina Ricci, but my friend John Benfield, who plays Cruncher Block. I once had dinner at a hotel I was reviewing in Oxford with John and his wife Lil and we judged decor, food and wine on whether someone called Cruncher Block would approve. It proved a surprisingly useful critical yardstick. And if Speed Racer turns into a franchise, I might finally know someone who has their own action figure.

Watch out, though, for The Honeydripper, a small-scale and virtually all-black John Sayles film about a musician (Danny Glover) trying to keep his eponymous music bar afloat in 1950s Alabama. The script is honourable and serviceable rather than brilliant and  the performances are solid, especially Glover's, but the music is fabulous. I used to have a 1950s song called The Honeydripper on tape. Can't remember who sang it. Anyone help me out?

DOWNEY JR steels, sorry, steals the show in this latest cinematic plundering of the Marvel comics universe. He serves up swagger and swank and arch one-liners in place of the earnestness of Spider-Man, or DC's dour Batman. His charismatic performance holds Jon Favreau's film together when it threatens to lose its way between the crash-bang set pieces. Initially, Downey Jr is Tony Stark, a Scotch-swigging, philandering, billionaire arms manufacturer. Wounded by his own ordnance and captured in what is clearly Afghanistan - though Favreau keeps the politics deliberately vague - Stark escapes by building a suit of robotic armour around a generator implanted in his chest to keep his injured heart going. Back home he starts to question his trade, and builds a new suit with which to destroy his mis-sold armaments. He's hard on the outside, soft inside, and we know his heart's in the right place because we can see it glowing, like ET's, see? Fortunately, Downey Jr's Stark doesn't stop being flippant or flash. There are delightfully witty scenes of him trying out his armour like a new sports car, observed only by two dumb robots and a sarcastic electronic butler. Thank goodness for a hero whose flaws are arrogance and cockiness, because elsewhere, the human element is lacking. When Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges appear as Stark's assistant-cum-love interest and his mentor-cum-nemesis, the film slows noticeably. While Bridges just happily chews cigars and the scenery, the growing intimacy between Stark and Paltrow's fetishistically-attired but prim "Pepper" Potts feels agonisingly forced. Perhaps Favreau, who wrote Swingers and directed Elf, is happier with jokes and the ironic observation of boys and their toys. Sure enough, we're soon back to Stark's Iron Man, taking a mobile phone call in his helmet while playing aerial tag with a pair of F11 fighter planes. There's a satisfyingly climactic CGI battle, but Downey Jr tops it in the witty denouement with pure acting skill. Favreau's film inevitably recalls other superhero movies because all their storylines follow a broadly similar arc. A more telling problem is that it seems to treat itself as the first instalment in an aticipated franchise. Stark's struggles here are basically internal: only at the very end does he contemplate what it means to be Iron Man. Other characters are sketched in and cued up for future glory. "Next time, baby," says Stark's bland chum Jim (Terrence Howard) as he eyes a spare metal suit. I hope there is a sequel, though. Despite its flaws, the film delivers splendidly tense action sequences, a magnetic performance from Downey Jr, and Paltrow in tight dresses and high heels. Which, for superhero fans, is a near-perfect hat-trick. And now, forgive me if I mourn the success of Martin McDonagh's first feature film, In Bruges. For one thing, I know him very slightly, and whenever a (younger) acquaintance does well, a part of me dies. But mostly, it's because I fear the theatre has lost one of its most bracing, caustic and blackly comic talents to a world where he may feel more at home but shine less brightly. It is an oft-repeated truth that McDonagh barely went to the theatre when he began writing plays in the 1990s. All his references and inspiration came from film. But his first staged script, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, detonated like a bomb when the Royal Court put it on in 1996. It was funny, cruel, merciless in its guying of the peat-bog fictions of JM Synge and John B Keane, and beautifully written. As more funny, violent, sweary plays poured out, some lazily praised or dismissed him as theatre's Tarantino — a label he shrugged off with the politically bold, paramilitary-baiting Lieutenant of Inishmore and the extraordinary dark fantasy about creativity, cruelty and family, The Pillowman. Even those upset by his work admitted he invigorated theatre. He also became one of the few people to make serious money from it. When Six Shooter, a brutally funny short film about dying which he wrote and directed, won an Oscar in 2006, though, I knew the writing was on the wall. And with In Bruges, McDonagh has proved himself a masterly film director This tale of two trapped hitmen — close in tone, ironically, to Harold Pinter's play The Dumb Waiter — shows a deft understanding of pace and pathos as well as mordant wit. McDonagh draws career-best performances from both Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes, as well as prodding at taboos by including a racist, ketamine-addicted dwarf who gets his head blown off But hitmen and drugs and arterial spray are more common in the movies than in the theatre. What might seem radical on stage looks like a genre piece on film. Although McDonagh looks set for a brilliant cinematic career, I don't know whether he'll produce anything with the impact of Beauty Queen or the dazzling texture of Pillowman. Since the rewards, the audiences and the potential for creative control are greater in film, I suspect he may not come back. But for his and theatregoers' sake, I hope he does.

As I write this, I've got three small holes in my right shoulder and two in my left - the result of keyhole operations to remove calcium deposits from my arm sockets. As my wife takes great and repeated delight in pointing out, I had, until recently, chips on both my shoulders. They're a bit sore now, thanks for asking, and I offer this information now only as a partial excuse for not posting for ooooh yonks.

Anyway, here's my review from the premiere of Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese's film of The Rolling Stones in Concert:

IT WAS the world's biggest film premiere. Martin Scorsese's study of the Rolling Stones in concert opened at the Odeon Leicester Square with all four of the band in attendance, and was beamed simultaneously to 100 cinemas nationwide last night.

Shot over two nights of the Bigger Bang tour at New York's genteel Beacon Theatre in 2006 - one of them a show in aid of Bill Clinton's charity foundation - this is not the most raucous of concert movies. Rather, it's a chamber piece that shows how the Stones work on stage like a piece of well-oiled antique machinery. This is due, in

Shine a Light revels in close-ups of Mick Jagger's magnetic athleticism and Keith Richards's almost narcotic relationship with his guitar.

And it spies on the quietly dynamic playing of Wood and Watts, the band's engine room.

The songs, from the opening Jumpin' Jack Flash to encore Brown Sugar, sound great. The sound engineer deserves an award: I heard lyrics I'd never understood before, and each instrumental solo stands out.

There are self-congratulatory guest appearances from Christina Aguilera and Jack White of The White Stripes, but the one who really sets the band alight is blues legend Buddy Guy. He duets exuberantly with Jagger and Richards on Muddy Waters' Champagne and Reefer, a subversive choice given we've just seen the Stones glad-hand the non-inhaling Bill Clinton.

That's about as naughty as it gets. Snippets of interviews from the Stones' 40-year career are spliced between songs, partly for comic effect, but mostly to show how long they've lasted and how extensively their lives have been documented. The backstage footage is limited to some early, hilarious shots of Scorsese sweating with exasperation as Jagger exercises control over everything from the playlist to the camera angles to the lighting design ("we can't burn Mick Jagger!" squawks Marty on hearing that prolonged exposure to one light might make old rubberlips combust).

There have been harderhitting, more controversial, films about the Stones. But none, perhaps, has captured so well the ease, and occasional frustration, of four guys who have spent more time together than most married couples. My one real complaint is that a lot of the time the shots are from low-down - there are a lot of gizzards and wattles on show. Maybe you shouldn't have been so prescriptive about camera access, eh Mick? Scorcese's imprecation to his cameraman at the very end - "up! Up!! - at which the lens spirals into the sky, sounds like him finally freeing himself from the tyranny of low-level shooting.

What else? Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, released next week, is a real charmer, and despite Leigh's protestations to the contrary, his most cheerful and life-affirming film to date. Before I met Leigh, I happened to bump into a bunch of actors, none of whom had worked with him, who cast doubts on the validity of his famously protracted, improvisatory working methods. It struck me that having dealt for 40 years with such (ill-informed) complaints, plus the routine allegation (passionately refuted) that he sneers at his characters, it's no wonder Leigh has a reputation for grumpiness. Rather, I think he's just a bit weary of being endlessly asked to discuss matters or snipes that he considers irrelevant. I found him charming - even though I was late, thanks to the Sarkozys stuffing up central London. He was also tactfully silent when I asked him about Woody Allen's latest film, Cassandra's Dream, which features the star of Happy-Go-Lucky, Sally Hawkins, in a minor role. Good for Leigh, as Hawkins is the best thing about Cassandra's Dream, which looks as if it was written and shot in a week, with no retakes - you can actually see the great Tom Wilkinson fumbling for his lines on screen. It's a waste of a fine cast - Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, Phil Daniels, the indecently beautiful Hayley Atwell, and my friend John Benfield. Marc Norman, screenwriter and author of a book about the travails of screenwriting, surely got it right when he coined the term "auteuroholic" for a director who feels compelled to crank out a picture every year, regardless of quality.

Now - Persepolis. What were the French thinking when they chose this as their nominee for Best Film in Foreign Language at the Oscars, rather than the (Francophone but American-baccked and directed) Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up in Iran and coming to terms with her cultural heritage as an expat was justly lauded, but the simplicity of both the monchrome illustrations and the narrative that made it so successful as a book makes it seem clumsy on screen. Still, nice to hear Iggy Pop as Marjane's politically-active uncle - one of the more delightfully weird bits of voice casting I've ever encountered.

Finally - caught up with Disney's Enchanted on DVD last night, and while the brilliant conceit of animated fairytale characters plunged into the real world isn't followed through with quite the degree of remorseless logic necessary to satisfy childish minds, I do think that Amy Adams deserves some sort of recognition for her wide-eyed, devastatingly charming incarnation of princess-to-be Gisele. Perhaps she could go head-to-head with Sally Hawkins for a new award - most life-affirming performance?

With his blond but bluntly masculine good looks, Heath Ledger - who has been found dead in his New York apartment aged 28 - was made for himbo roles. He embraced them, but wanted more. He shuttled between generic and prestige projects, suffering successes and failures in both camps. Sporadically, he showed us what a fine actor he might be.

Early on, Australian Ledger did the obligatory soap stint in Home and Away. Long before he played a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, he played a gay cyclist rather than a straight swimmer in the Aussie athlete drama series Sweat, believing it the more interesting role. His first years in Hollywood showcased his versatility. He was as charming as a young Cary Grant in 10 Things I Hate About You and a nostril-flaring son to Mel Gibson in The Patriot. His larrikin charm made A Knight's Tale a cult hit.

Was it his fault, or the film-makers', that Ned Kelly, The Four Feathers, and Casanova didn't make him a bona fide star? A bit of both. He lacked the charisma of Gibson, and didn't choose his blockbusters well. But by now Ledger was focused on proving his acting chops, and Brokeback Mountain was a happy occurrence. He was perfectly cast  -  not because he was a better actor than co-star Jake Gyllenhall, but because he was more butch and more authentically conflicted.

Ledger then seemed to seek out darker, angrier supporting roles. In Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, he is by far the most aggressive and brooding of the six Bob Dylans. Two weeks ago I saw startling footage of the forthcoming Batman, in which Ledger's twisted, ugly Joker blows away the cartoonish memories of Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson. It might prove to be the best, as well as his last, performance.

So Cloverfield is here. A tantalising viral marketing campaign made JJ Abrams' monster movie one of the hottest tickets of 2008. It promised the destruction of New York, shot on handicam, and starring 'real-looking' unknowns - a King Kong for the YouTube generation. Nice idea. Cloverfield (named, in one of the Byzantine twists of the teaser campaign, after a street near Abrams' office) opened in the States today and had its first British screening last night. As the jerky, handheld footage unscrolled across the screen of the Empire Leicester Square, in front of the kind of audience that gives geekiness a bad name, I was forcibly reminded that Abrams' cultish reputation rests on novel premises - the TV series Alias and Lost - that quickly degenerated into repetitive cliche.

Abrams isn't the writer or director of Cloverfield - those  would be Drew Goddard and Andrew Reeves - but it is very much his ugly baby.

It begins with Hud (TJ Miller) taping testimonials at a farewell party for his friend Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is off to Japan to be vice-president of something-or-other. Rob and his group are clearly rich, influential and twentysomething - if the lofty Central Park apartment is anything to go by - but emotionally, they're teenagers. Rob has slept with his gorgeous friend Beth and then gone all commitment-phobic, a fact Hud childishly blurts out to every single guest in between thwarted, schoolboyish attempts to chat up another partygoer, the exotic Marlena. Suddenly fireballs slam into distant sykyscrapers. Alas, the superannuated brats at the party are not killed, or at least not yet. As they scamper to the street, Hud's camera captures fragmented images of darkness, screaming, rushing feet and then the film’s most potent moments.

The Statue of Liberty's head comes tubling and thumping down the street. A huge, half-seen form shivers the Chrysler Building into fragments. The resulting dustcloud, reminiscent of 9/11, is followed by people toting camera phones, then by looters. A flood of people flees the city via the Brooklyn Bridge - again, reminsicent of the panicked scenes that greeted the New York powercut after 9/11 - and Hud's jostled camera briefly captures a helicopter playing a bewildered spotlight on the decapitated Lady Liberty.

From here, though, it's all downhill into dimness and horribly familiar Hollywood tropes. Rob decides to embark on a frankly lunatic mission uptown - which has become Monster Central - to rescue Beth, apparently not noticing that his brother has just been killed ("my battery died" is his first comment after the fatality, as he petulantly shakes his cellphone). Hud goes along, as does the possibly-Jewish Malena and the dead brother's black girlfriend Lily, forming a unit that ticks most of movieland's ethnic and gender quota boxes.

These kids really do seem remarkably sanguine in the face of all that's happening to them - flirting over open wounds that have been clawed in their chests, climbing up a tower block to get into a neighbouring tower that's leaning drunkenly against it (of course! that's what we'd all do), or trying to freak each other out as they scuttle through subway tunnels. The huge monster that is eating Manhattan has, by the way, shed some rapacious insectoid parasites, the kind of hatchet-faced nasties we've seen in every film from Starship Troopers to Pitch Black. A neat way, this, for the film-makers to get round the fact that the main beast can't pursue our heroes into confined spaces.

The monster itself is only briefly glimpsed until the very end, but this seems more like evasiveness on the part of the film-makers than a coherent attempt to build suspense. Indeed, there's virtually no tension to the film at all, and it never achieves the spooky, Blair Witch style naturalism to which it aspires. A scene in an improvised army field hospital, where everyone is shouting and bleeding and where Marlena explodes (don't ask), Rob tries, passionately and at length, to try and persuade them all to go and look for Beth. A kindly sergeant shows him the door. Anyone else would have shot him. Lots of little things keep distracting you from the supposed 'realism' the handicam footage is supposed to promote: Hud never, ever stops filming, or holding the camera in front of his face; Lily keeps her stilettos on until called upont to climb 36 flights of steps; Beth runs around like an Duracell bunny moments after being impaled on a steel reinforcing strut jutting from a concrete beam.

To be fair, a lot of thought and professionalism has gone into making the cinematography of Cloverfield look amateurish, and to begin with, the whole thing was a great idea. But I was hugely disappointed by the end result. Silly me - I believed the hype.

On another note, look out in April for Paul Andrew Williams's The Cottage - the 34-year-old's follow-up to his assured debut feature London to Brighton, which won him the best newcomer gong in last year's Evening Standard Film Awards. The Cottage, which Williams also wrote is a low-budget horror comedy - a formulation of words known to make film critics weep. To be sure, it is rackety and hugely derivative, but unusually it also contains moments of genuine hilarity and genuine cover-your-face suspense. It reminded me that British film is also about Hammer and the Carry Ons, as well as films like Atonement...

No quibble with the gongs handed out this week. Not to those honoured at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, where people tend to be nicer than in the film world (Simon Russell Beale, who I met for the first time, is charming), nor to those at the British Independent Film Awards, where a colleague assures me Daniel Craig was far funnier and friendlier than the grouchy image perpetuated by the media (he was great company over dinner at last year's Evening Standard Film Awards, too). Nice to see Craig sticking up for the British film industry in a sensible rather than an emptily patriotic or wishful way, and nice to see the BIFA's offsetting crowd-pleasers (anointing Craig, Judi Dench and Ray Winstone) with a host of awards to the defiantly arty and enigmatic Control. With the kerfuffle of these two heavyweight ceremonies, a lesser known honour might have slipped your attention. Marisa Tomei has, apparently, starred in the 'best' nude scene of 2007 in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, according to the anonymous geltelemen who run a website called Mrskin, apparently an authority in such matters. Tomei beat not only Page Three girl Keeley Hawes in Cashback (must have missed that one...), but also Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan, Sienna Miller in Factory Girl, and Natalie Portman, whose chaste disrobing in Hotel Chevalier caused a media frenzy. Now, I saw BTDNYD this week and I could tell you it's a shame that a film displying the artful dramatic hand of 82-year-old Sidney Lumet, and featuring a crackling confrontation between Albert Finney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, should first come to attention here thanks to a flash of flesh. But the truth is Tomei is devastatingly sexy in a triptych of bedroom scenes, not least because she was 40 at the time of filming and looks surgically un-enhanced, but also because each scene has a tang of despair to it that strengthens the film's remorseless spiral into tragedy. I've long thought Tomei is a brilliant comedian and a strong dramatic actress, as well as a woman who could make me go weak at the knees just by smiling, but her award-winning sex scenes here aren't good because she makes them look sexy, but because she makes them look real.

If I were Ridley Scott, I'd be proper narked. Every interview with him prior to the release of American Gangster harped on the accepted line that he's a dealer in facile imagery, a purveyor of images that are pretty but shallow. You can take the man out of the advertising industry.... the reasoning goes. No matter how many genres he works in, no matter how ambitious his intentions, he will never be an auteur.

Well, in riposte, I'd just like to compare American Gangster with The Departed, a multiple-Oscar-winning work by that great American auteur, Martin Scorcese. The former is an urgent, pacy, true-life account of one black businessman/gangster's progress to the top of the heroin trade in 1970s New York, and the ambivalent morality of the cop chasing him. The latter is a hoky tale of betrayal and corruption in the Irish mob and the Boston police force, awash with operatic catholicism and father-son conflict. The former has a washed-out, beige colour scheme true to the decade in which it is set, and rare outbursts of authentically clumsy, blunt violence. The latter has a brash colour palette and lots of flamboyant mayhem - flowering gunshot wounds etc. The former has paunchy Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe delivering understated performances, the latter had Jack Nicholson plyaing under his age and way over the top (surprise!), and di Caprio and Damon preeening. I could go on. It's not that I disliked The Departed. I enjoyed it, the way one enjoys a guilty pleasure. But American Gangster is a far superior film on almost every level. Of coruse, it won't win an Oscar. Because it's by Ridley Scott. And he's "not an auteur".

Not much time to tell you about Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf in 3-D, except that the motion-capture animation process has such a flattening, dehumanising, Botox-ing effect on the actors voicing and providing the physical inspiration for the characters, that the film seems less expressive than the average, 2-D animation. It's distancing, alienating, off-putting - even the sight of Angelina Jolie naked except for a few dabs of gold fluid and (ridiculously) built-in high heels, normally something I and the rest of the straight male population would pay good money to see. And the script is terrible, littered with snigger-worthy lines and anachronism (was the word "gobble" really a slang term in ancient Denmark?).

Next time - The Kite Runner and I'm Not There. Tune in, film fans.

So I won't be interviewing Matthew Vaughn. The director of Stardust took objection to my review of the film's premiere. Although I genuinely found this British-made-and-accented fantasy charming and delightfully visually inventive, my reservations about the dialogue (which fails to come alive) and the pacing, as well as the miscasting of Robert de Niro in an unconvincing cameo as a cross-dressing lightning pirate, were enough to scupper our scheduled chat. I think this is a shame. I first interviewed Vaughn after his directorial debut, Layer Cake, which had enirely the opposite virtues and vices to Stardust (although slickly professional, it was entirely lacking in heart). He was charming and courteous, and let our interview run on: it had started late because he had been engaged in discussions on filming a Neil Gaiman book. Coincidentally, that book was Stardust, and even more coincidentally, I had a copy of Gaiman's Neverwhere in my bag at the time. I thought we got on well enough. Vaughn assured me then he had not intended to make a gangster movie like Layer Cake, and would never do so again - that his next project would be much less violent and more lyrical. I didn't ask him dumbass questions about what it was like to be married to Claudia Schiffer, and I even pronounced her name right. Sadly we won't now go to round two. Not this time.

To repeat, I think this is a shame, although I understand Vaughn's reasons. It's a pity that the journalistic tropes of criticism and feature writing are so often in opposition - since the pre-release interview tends to be predicated on a mood of uncritical admiration. It's a pity that one can't discuss a film's flaws with a director (an exception to this was Martin Campbell, who confessed to me that he wished he'd been able to make Casino Royale shorter). I realise it didn't help that my review of Stardust was one of the first to appear in a British newspaper. Although I liked the film much more than I disliked it (and was desperately trying to like it more), I can understand how my positive comments sounded like faint praise when set beside the negative ones. I hope I get to speak to Matthew Vaughn again. Next time, eh?

Anton Corbijn's Control is a beautiful enigma. It is a sensitive and painterly exploration of the life and suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis by a man who knew him, but at its heart is a yawning mystery. Was it his epilepsy, or the pressures of fame or early marriage and fatherhood that led Curtis to hang himself at 23 on the eve of the band's first American tour? Corbijn doesn't say, which is to his credit. And Sam Riley's performance, which proves as uncanny as everyone predicted, also gives no clues of what went on behind those wounded eyes. Control plays like a heartfelt funeral peroration by those still reeling from grief and incomprehension. Or it would if it weren't leavened by occasional flashes of humour. I hugged to myself the revelation that the "tss-tss" percussion on She's Lost Control, which I always thought was done with a brush and cymbal, was in fact created by someone squirting an aerosol at a microphone. And, I love the fact that, along with 24 Hour Party People, we now have a subgenre of films - well, two - which portray Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook as a handsome idiot. Surely a festival or a theme night for Hooky - perhaps including his appearances for his then wife Caroline Aherne's creation, Mrs Merton - should be organised. (The scene in Control where Bernard Sumner cooks Ian Curtis tea is also a gem).

The signs had been there throughout the opening half hour, but I realised that the Beatles-scored, Clement-and-La-Frenais-scripted musical Across the Universe was iredeemably silly and rubbish when a girl called Prudence climbed into our Liverpudlian hero's apartment through the kitchen window. Oh, the hero's called Jude, by the way. And the heroine is called Lucy. Indeed, there are so many obvious cues and clues to Beatles tracks it made me wonder how an already overlong film (directed by Julie 'Lion King' Taymor) didn't, in fact, go on for days. Surely somewhere on the cutting room floor is a scene where the protagonists, while protesting the Vietnam war (as they repeatedly do throughout) paint a submarine yellow. And an entire character called Eleanor Rigby (it's a huge suprise that a character introduced as 'Rita' turns out to be a lesbian circus performer rather than a meter maid). Not to mention a scene where Jude twists his ankle and, er, shouts.

Attempts to parlay the Beatles' back catalogue into any sort of narrative almost invariably results in schmaltz, crass commercialism, or pure inanity, and this falls into the last category. Perhaps a better title would have come from John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band: Cold Turkey.