- On researching the piece that appeared in Monday's paper about Aldwych (from the Saxon Eald Wic meaning "new settlement") I came up against a few blanks. Inquiries about what was happening to the half-built apartment hotel at the Strand end of the Aldwych central island, on the site of the old Gaiety theatre, came to nothing. So too did my attempts to find out what is happening on the Kingsway corner plot that Bank restaurant used to occupy - now nothing more then a propped-up facade. I had some nice times in Bank, and mourn its passing, although I enjoy the sight of the sky and of the warehouse stylishly converted by Zeev Aram into the Aram Store revealed by the now-gutted building. One of the plus points of London's ever-changing landscape is the reappearance of sudden, unexpected, often temporary views. Like the novel feeling of openness and airiness over St Giles when the former MOD buildings off New Oxford St were demolished. Or the broad vista of the park revealed when Bowater House on Scotch Corner was pulled down. (Don't much like the look of the Candy Bros/Rogers development that's been slowly going up in its place and impeding my journey to work on a weekdaily basis, but at least it looks like the more-money-than-sense apartments will be porous, offering views of the park. Though I presume a road will no longer run through it. And I wonder what has happened/will happen to Jacob Epstein's magnificent sculpture, A Rush of Green, that used to be marooned between the traffic lanes running through Bowater house - and which, if viewed from a certain angle, seemed to depict a certain specialist sex act between two figures in the group). So if anyone can enlighten me about what's happening on the old Bank and Gaiety sites, or what's happened to Rush of Green, I'd be grateful.

- Talking of that whole Drury Lane/St Giles/Holborn area - a bit of London which fascinates me - I was on Great Queen St last night and tested the theory that it's good to eat spicy food in hot weather. Moti Mahal had invited me along... aha, hahaha, not just me, of course... to try out their new Grand Trunk Road menu of dishes sourced from along the titular highway. I am not, quite, yet, in that class of journalist that would go to the opening of a wound, but I have, also, never been known to refuse food. The menu really is rather wonderful, pitched and priced midway the best local curry house in your area and the overly delicate, refined and expensive flavours of fine subcontinental dining places like the Cinammon Club. Ann and I were far more taken than we had remotely expected to be by the Qabali Seviyan, vermicelli and Masala chicken baked in an egg custard, which tastes far better than it sounds. I also liked the robust flavouring and succulent consistency of both the Murghi Nazakat (chicken pieces separately marinated in mint, chilli and dill, and served - gimmickily but charmingly - in their own mini-Tandoori oven) and the chilli-soused Barra Peshawari lamb chops. The nans were the lightest I've ever had, the DIY salad a nice touch if a bit of a faff, the Mojioto-style pre-dinner cocktails rendered punchy by a belt of chili. We liked the visible chef's kitchen with its beaten brass walls and the air conditioning definitely helped on a sweltering night. Oh, and be warned: we were advised to order four dishes each but three would have sufficed. Outside, I gawped again at the massive Masonic Temple of Great Queen St, which I once went inside - to watch a semi-staged production of the musical Camelot starring Paul Nicholas and Jason Donovan, of all things. I wish I'd paid more attention then, as it seems now increasingly strange that this bonkers sect could erect such a vast, mock-Egyptian monolith in the centre of town. My great-uncle Edmund was a Mason, but his older brother, my grandfather, was not, despite being a surveyor and therefore, you would think, a prime candidate for recruitment. I like to think he was approached and spurned them. At my grandfather's funeral, Edmund's wife Gertrude questioned my and my sister's paternity: this probably did more to tarnish Masonry in my eyes than any daft conspiracy theories. That and the fact that a huge crowd of them were faffing around on Long Acre a week or so ago when I was trying to get to a pub.

- I've been having physio at St Thomas's hospital recentlyand I think the NHS is brilliant.

Sorry. That's Dafoe. Not Defoe. As you were.

Blimey. So Lars von Trier's Antichrist has been passed uncut with an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. This is despite a very, very, graphic bit of downstairs cutting performed by Charlotte Gainsbourg's character on herself. After she has inflicted some genital torture on her husband, played by Willem Defoe. I didn't, like the Cannes audience, laugh or boo at Antichrist. I was too busy covering my eyes. The brief shot of penetrative sex at the beginning? Ho hum. Old hat in the shock stakes. Or rather, old cock.

Antichrist may be one of the most gruelling and unpleasant films I've ever seen, but I'm glad it's been passed uncut. For all its brutality and (I think) perversely deliberate misogyny, it's a work of artistic merit. We are, undoubtedly, old enough to decide what we want to see these days. However nasty it might be.

On an entirely separate note, I thought the capital's theatre critics were unduly snippy about Jude Law's Hamlet. By my lights, his was a far more emotionally convincing and centred interpretation than David Tennant's. And I liked Tennant. But watching Law, one realised how much more of a 'performance' the Dr Who star gave. It made me recalibrate my opinion of Law's talent. It's a typically lucid production from Michael Grandage, too, where the simplest touches clarify reams of text: just having a set which contains indoor and outdoor space, for instance. I also like Penelope Wilton's Gertrude more than most of the Shaftesbury Avenue mob to which I used to belong, and Ron Cook's Polonius. Though there are some weak links, this is not just well-acted but well-spoken Shakespeare (I know I sound like a retired colonel when I say that, but trust me). And the text has been judiciously trimmed. Sometimes, it's good to cut.

I could tell you what I think about Tormented (cute idea for a Brit school slasher horror-comedy, too slow and could have done with several more script drafts). Or about Synecdoche, New York (pretty much like everyone else, a mix of the impressively moving and the exasperatingly pretentious). Or about the BFI's re-release of the fascinating Mondo mockumentaries London in the Raw and Primitive London, and my chat with their director, 87-year-old Arnold L Miller, who also helmed the seminal nudie "educational" film Take Of Your Clothes and Live. But right now I want to tell you about La Clique at the Hippodrome.

I'm a sucker for circus in any case, the sublime refinement of elegantly pointless skill. And without wishing to sound like Tina Turner, this is simply the best bid I've ever seen at making it flourish outside a big top setting. The cabaret/burlesque setup suits perfectly the run of louche acts - juggler, contortionist, acrobalancers, torch singer, aerialist, skating duo and the wonderful Amy Gee, who also skates like Les Dawson plays the piano and also mimes playing the kazoo with her woo-woo. Some of the acts, such as acrobalancers The English Gentlemen, are among the finest I've seen, and even those whose skill is not of the first order have polished their schtick to a high lustre. It's the only timed I've ever been forced into audience participation (carrying singer Miao Miao to the stage, and unzipping her trousers, since you ask) and not hated it. Even the tacky, nightclubby acretions that barnacle Frank Matcham's magnificent 1900 Hippodrome add to the atmosphere.

Here's the rub. It is undoubtedly a great shame that La Clique is being forced to move to the Roundhouse because the Hippodrome is to become a casino. Often I'm ambivalent about the change of use of old theatre and cinema buildings - as long as the structure is preserved, who cares about the use?

In this case, though, I do feel sad. As my old theatre pr friend Ben told me, the false roof that hangs over La Clique's performing space covers off the upper galleries of Matcham's theatre, including the still-intact minstrel's gallery below the sliding roof, from which divers used to plunge in to the flooded stage. Backstage and below stage, the Hippodrome's elephant run, through which pachyderms were paraded, also still exists. You can see more historic images and recent images of the place at the ever-fascinating theatre and music hall website www.arthurlloyd.co.uk. I hope these parts of the Hippodrome survive its metamorphosis into a casino, just as they did its change-of-use to The Talk of the Town cabaret in the 1950s, and into a nightclub.

It’s Star Trek, Jim, but not as we know it. This one’s bigger, brasher and more exciting than everything that’s gone before. JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, has very boldly gone and breathed new life into a franchise that’s already had more deaths and rebirths - from the indifferent to the inspired - than the comparable but smaller-scale Dr Who. Abrams’ version of Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic space western isn’t perfect. But it is confident, clever and above all spectacular enough to please die-hard fans and newcomers alike.

The blockbuster film, which has its West End premiere tonight, is a prequel to the original 1960s TV series. Watching the first 15 minutes is like being stabbed in the heart with an adrenaline injection. The cataclysmic space battle that heralds the birth of James T Kirk gives us a taste of the spectacular effects to come. It’s followed by a brilliantly pacy sketch of the boyhoods that formed the headstrong human Kirk and the coldly logical half-Vulcan Spock.

In no time, Chris Pine’s cocksure Kirk is enlisting in Starfleet after failing to pick up Zoe Saldana’s absurdly slinky communications wizard Uhuru in a bar. All it takes is the arrival of a wrathful, time-travelling Romulan for him, her, Spock, old Uncle Bones McCoy and all to find themselves prematurely in charge of the Starship Enterprise, and of saving the universe.

Throughout, Abrams and his writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman adhere to the three driving forces of Roddenberry’s series: action, character, and smuggled-in, high-minded morality. The pace rarely lets up, and when it does, midway through, the story starts to look thin. Everyone jabbers about falling through black holes and “red matter” until the fighting and the whipcrack dialogue crank up again. To be honest, the plot is secondary. What’s dazzling is the way the film-makers have taken ownership of a phenomenon.

The young crew’s rough-edged relationships work in their own right and as back-stories for characters we already know well. Abrams puts in plenty of witty homages to the past without overegging it. Even Simon Pegg’s comic turn as Scotty is nicely judged. There are a couple of brilliant twists involving Spock and Uhuru that even a Vulcan mind meld won’t get out of me. And Star Trek’s message of pacifism and tolerance – even if achieved with phasers and fists – is so ingrained that alien  Enterprise crew members appear without comment. (Though not, it must be said, in senior positions or speaking roles. And miniskirts are still de rigeur for female officers, it seems.)

Chris Pine is an attractive, energetic hero but doesn’t perhaps bring the same eccentric swagger to the captain’s chair as William Shatner or Patrick Stewart. Eric Bana is also effective if two-dimensional as the villain, Nero. But Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban are superb as Spock and McCoy and together the crew makes a formidable ensemble. Sequels surely follow. Full ahead, maximum warp.

Star Trek opens on Fri 8 May.

Like my colleague Derek Malcolm, I've got no hesitation in recommending Tomas Alfredson's unnerving Swedish tale of vampirism and childhood unhappiness as this week's top film. The story, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his cult novel, and set in a timelessly bleak and snowy suburb of Stockholm, is shot through with a looming sense of menace. Initially, this is because Oskar (remarkably natural Kåre Hedebrant), the 12-year-old son of separated parents, is being randomly but ruthlessly bullied at school. But there's also a killer on the loose, and then strange, watchful Eli (the magnetic Lina Leandersson) turns up, hiding a terrible secret. The film is remarkable not just for its novel take on the tropes of blood-sucker movies, and its potent stirring ability to generate fear and horror, or even for the striking performances of the two young leads. It is also very acute about the business of being 12 - the banality of playground violence and the confusion of hitting one's teenage years. I won't say any more. Except: see it. Ideally before the planned Hollywood remake

YOU'VE got to love Richard Curtis, actually.

He's a one-man Ealing Studios, turning out a reliably funny, upbeat, and above all commercial comedy every few years. It's fashionable to knock his optimistic films but we could all do with a bit of feelgood factor right now.

The Boat That Rocked, which has its premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square tonight, is Curtis's loveletter to the pirate radio stations he adored in his youth. It casts the cream of British comedy acting talent as the motley crew of Radio Rock, a shipful of reprobates broadcasting the devil's music to dolly birds and schoolboys huddled around transistors, and flipping two fingers at the disapproving British authorities. Like all love letters, it's a bit gushy and over the top in places, but it also lifts the heart.

Expelled from school for smoking, Carl (Tom Sturridge) is dispatched by his mother to the care of his godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy), Radio Rock's owner and skipper, in the hope he'll gain a moral compass. "Spectacular mistake!", as the spectacularly louche Quentin says.

The plot, such as it is, concerns Carl's coming of age by losing his virginity and discovering his father's identity, and the attempts of Kenneth Branagh's uptight minister Sir Alistair Dormandy to sink the pirate stations. Really, though, this is an affectionate, broad-brush evocation of a bygone era, furnished with a collection of character studies and a cracking Sixties soundtrack.

There's bear-like Philip Seymour Hoffman and cocksure Rhys Ifans vying to see who can be top dog DJ.

There's snarky Nick Frost as cool dude Dr Dave, and Rhys Darby, from comedy show Flight Of The Conchords, as an irritating funster clearly modelled on Kenny Everett.

In truth, there are rather too many characters, including one called Thick Kevin whose comedy value lies in the fact that he's, um, thick.

Similarly, Dormandy's sidekick, played by Jack Davenport, is called Twatt. Ho ho. The humour, like the production design, is laid on thick.

The girls, shipped out once a week to worship the DJs, are dressed like Biba models, and the men resemble King's Road fashion plates. The one element of the script that rings really true of the era is its casual sexism. Otherwise The Boat That Rocked is a bright, breezy, if slightly aimless romp. It's packed with star turns but the real star is the music, and Curtis rightly celebrates the pirates' pivotal role in bringing Hendrix, the Yardbirds, Cream and Leonard Cohen to our ears. Rock on.

The Boat That Rocked is released on 3 April, with special previews from 1 April.

FOOTBALL movies never work.

Fortunately, this isn't a football movie. The Damned United, which has its West End premiere tonight, is a tragedy and a love story about Brian Clough, who happened to be a football manager. It's a witty, wellobserved period piece in which writer Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen crawl convincingly under the skin of a real-life character as they did with Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/ Nixon.

Sheen eerily captures Clough's youthful, bushy-bouffant arrogance, his northern swagger bordering on campness. The time is the late Sixties and early Seventies when the beautiful game was first tainted with thuggery on and off the pitch, and the stink of serious money. Clough's a much-loved enabler of underdog second-league teams. But his obsession with the cheating, hard-tackling champions Leeds leads him to an ill-fated 44-day stewardship of the club, which probably cost him the England manager's job. That's the tragedy.

The love story is a small, platonic one, between Clough and Peter Taylor, the assistant he took for granted, played with wallflower dignity by Timothy Spall.

The film is based on David Peace's novel, which put the reader into the seething, alcoholic pit of Clough's mind. Director Tom Hooper can't replicate that on screen, so opts for something lighter and more conventional.

We get the familiar but distant England of muddy pitches, test cards and power cuts, when ashtrays were laid out alongside the half-time oranges in dowdy dressing rooms.

There's so much faithful period detail it's arresting when Hooper scores a genuine visual coup — a chairman's panelled office goes dim when the windows are blocked by cheering fans. For all its admirable straightforwardness, the film has a confusing structure. It flicks back and forth between Clough's time at Derby County and at Leeds, his dalliance with Brighton and a holiday in Majorca.

Though we understand perfectly why Clough earned the nickname Old Big 'Ead, there's little hint of what made him a great manager beyond the odd, inspirational peptalk.

But then, The Damned United is likely to do well at the box office because it appeals to a crowd beyond the football-crazy. It captures a perfect snapshot of an era and a great English eccentric. Sheen and Spall are excellent, as is Colm Meaney as Clough's nemesis Don Revie.

Stephen Graham contributes a pungent cameo as a gargoyle-like Billy Bremner, while Jim Broadbent exudes affronted dignity as Sam Longson, the Derby chairman Clough pushed too far.

A win, then, if not a championship performance.

Heston? Doesn't have quite the same ring to it as 'Bronson', does it? You'd be mistaken for a service station or a weird chef. Yet we learn from Nicholas Winding Refn's extraordinary and distinctive film Bronson that Britain's most dangerous prisoner, real name Michael Peterson, actually considered 'Charlton Heston' as a tasty pseudonym in his bare-knuckle days, before opting for 'Charles Bronson'. Actually, you feel that the prisoner is now bestowing hard-man kudos on the late star of the Magnificent Seven, rather than the other way round. Peterson's psychotic antics in prison seem a darn sight more frightening then the squinty-eyed vigilantism of Death Wish. But perhaps it's Tom Hardy's pit-bull powerhouse of a performance in Winding Refn's film that makes me think that. Art imitating life imitating art, and all that.

Actually, I don't think the idea that Bronson (the film, not the prisoner or the actor - keep up) glamourises violence rings true. We see Bronson (the prisoner) metaphorically and literally banging his fists and his forehead against every obstruction in his path: prison officers, bars, walls. The references above to psychosis and pit bulls are deliberate. He has been denied, or is unable to formulate, any other sort of response. And it's not pretty.

The problem is the poster quote heralding Bronson as the new Clockwork Orange. Nothing innately wrong with that. Both films critique the state's inability to respond to brutal elements with anything other than equal brutality. The violence in Clockwork Orange is horrible. You'd have to be a very sick puppy in the first place to find its murder or rape scenes "glamorous".The problem was that Stanley Kubrick, acting on scaremongering media reports of copycat gangs emulating his droogs, withdrew his own film from circulation, thus giving credence to the "glamourising" argument. It just goes to show, you've got to be careful with your poster quotes. Or your quotes in general. I once tried to damn a Philip Kerr novel with faint praise by describing him as "England's answer to Michael Crichton". They put it on the cover of the paperback.

Talking of glamourising violence, I loved Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary about the "Ozlploitation" comedies, sex romps and violent biker and horror flicks churned out of Australia in the 70s and 80s. I came out of it wanting to see at least 20 of the films referenced. Especially Howling III: The Marsupials. And the film about a rock band full of magicians and a stunt man. Mark Hartley's garish, fast paced but also highly informative film placed Mad Mad in its rightful place within the a cultural canon for me.

And a quick note: I fear the long, looming Horne/Corden backlash will finally arrive once Lesbian Vampire Killers hits the screens this week. But it did give me an idea for my own cheapo horror film, about a building suffering from lycanthropy. Any backers out there for Curse of the Were-House?

This week I used the East festival - a sprawling, six-day collection of informative events across the East End and the City, starting on March 5 - as an excuse to go and have a chat with Steven Berkoff. The Jewish, Stepney-born actor, writer and director is, of course, up West at the moment, starring in his own superb staging of Budd Schulberg's dockside drama On the Waterfront at the Haymarket. But we meet in the converted warehouse on Narrow St where he's lived for 25 years and Berkoff proves agreeably full of opinions about his old stomping ground. What's surprising is that he seems pleased - with reservations - about the area's recent colonisation by the bar and art-gallery crowd.

"I think the East End has broken away to a great extent from its origins as a kind of doss house for immigrants, which is what it’s been for centuries," he says. He ticks off the communities who have passed through, sometimes leaving a mark but often just using the area as a staging post: Huguenots, Jews, Irish, West Indians, Asians. "Now it has evolved through all those disparate elements into an incredibly dynamic society, partly because of the adventurous spirit of young English people who see it romantically, taking all the old rotting warehouses and making galleries and restaurants and even doing up flats. So the whole of the East End has undergone a fantastic regeneration."

He retains a suspicion of property developers, who he compares to the 60s slum landlord Peter Rachman, and blames for the vampiric sucking of life out of areas like Notting Hill, as well as for the demise of the characterful antiques markets of Camden Passage and Antiquarius on the King's Road. Perversely, though (he is a reliable contrarian), he believes the Thatcherite entrepreneurial push that resulted in the development of Docklands and Canary Wharf (and his own home) was a good thing, a "creative use of capitalism". He also thinks the "young people" who have created the new bars, galleries, restaurants and shops of the new East End are entrenched enough to fight off further yuppiefication, or encroachment by the chains. The "compromise" over the redevelopment of Spitalfields market (where several events in the East Festival take place) has been "a great success".

Berkoff does, however, believe the East End's Jewish heritage is neglected. Photos he took of the area and its inhabitants in the 1960s, blown up to huge size, rub shoulders with muscular Peter Howson paintings in his flat. There is no plaque commemorating the internationally famous Yiddish theatre, the Grand Palais, he says. Pivotal moments in London's history, from the Sidney Street Siege to the Cable Street riots, when united Jews and Irish dockers fought off Mosley's black shirts, are not celebrated in film or on stage. (This is partly a class thing, he suggests. One of the reasons he was drawn to On the Waterfront was that it was a rare example of a heroic celebration of working class culture.)

Most surprising of all, though, is Berkoff's attitude to the 2012 Olympics. I thought he would side with the Hackney scribe Ian Sinclair in decrying the sporting hullaballoo. But no. Although Berkoff is a fan of Sinclair's dense psychogeographical writing, he is not a fellow traveller when it comes to opposing the Olympiad. "I think it's an incredible thing, it will regenerate old, dirty, rotting areas beyond the East End, and ripples will spread from there to Hoxton and Hackney and Dalston," he says. "So I think the Olympics are fine, a good thing." He compares the scepticism over the future use of Olympic sites to the sniping at the Dome/02 Arena, "an incredible Richard Rogers building" written off as a white elephant, and now triumphantly reborn as a performance venue.

I do advise you to see On the Waterfront, and perhaps to compare it to his early work East, which is being remounted as part of the East Festival. For more details on the festival, go to www.findeast.co.uk.

On the film front - the head of Film4, Tessa Ross, although bouyed by the Oscar success of Slumdog Millionaire, warns again of dark days ahead for British film, and a likely cut in her annual budget from £10m to £8m. The interview with Ross appears the very day that ITV announces slashing cuts in its staff and drama budgets. IN such a climate, Ross's decision to set up Warp X with the Film Council and Optimum Releasing looks very smart indeed. Warp X produce genre pictures such as Donkey Punch, and oddball cheapies like A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, for around £1m a throw: the creators, mostly young, work cheap on a promise of a share of profits. I've just seen their latest, Hush, the first feature by Londoner Mark Tonderai, who has worked in radio and TV but used another previous job - putting up posters in service station toilets - as the springboard for a horrific thriller. Hush isn't perfect - the early dialogue in particular could do with brushing up - but it is grimly efficient and shot and paced with a genuine sense of menace. It doesn't look cheap. Warp X, it strikes me, could become the new Hammer.