1/ Right, I've mentioned this in the newspaper today, but if you have access to Artsworld on cable or satellite TV, then you should be nailed to your sofa at 4.30 on Sunday afternoon for Michael Powell's The Edge of the World. Made in 1936, this elegaic portrait of a dying, fictional Scottish island community has all the warm lyricism of the films Powell later made with Emeric Pressburger, but is more firmly rooted in reality. (Not that I'm dissing the later films - I can pretty much recite the script of A Matter of Life and Death by heart). John Laurie is the island patriarch, but the star of the piece is really the isle of Foula itself (the fatal, early climbing race up its sheerest cliff face is a stunning piece of cinematography). If you don't have access to Artsworld, the BFI DVD also contains a charmingly stiff and stilted 1970s BBC documentary in which Powell and Laurie go back to Foula (now in full colour) and attempt to elicit fluid sentences from the stoic islanders who took part in the film all those years ago. Makes you proud to be British...

2/ It doesn't open here until April 13, and it's unlikely to wrest the best Foreign Film Oscar from the talons of Pan's Labyrinth, but do watch out for Das Leben des Anderen (The Lives of Others), first feature from German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (crazy name, serious director). This is a lengthy but precision-tooled examination of multiple layers of betrayal involved in a Stasi investigation into a 'loyal' playwright, complicated by a politician's hard-on for the playwright's actress girlfriend, in the former GDR, a paranoid state which had one secret service operative for every 166 citizens. Now, I know I may like this more than some because I'm a bit of a Germanophile, having lived in West Berlin when the Wall was still up, and because I loved Anna Funder's book, Stasiland. But it's a very assured debut with a still, striking central performance from Ulrich Muhe as the apparatchik Wiesler, and the drabness of East Berlin as it was in the 80s is perfectly captured. And if you want to know what Antonio Banderas would look like if he was German, take a look at Sebastian Koch, who plays the writer. By the way, if you want to see a slice of the Berlin Wall, I was at the Imperial War Museum for the Henry Moore exhibition this weekend, and there's a chunk standing in the grounds. And the Moore is well worth a visit: the sketches of figures sleeping in the tunnels never fail to move.

3/ Oi, Ayckbourn, no. The Scarborough-based playwright and director has dissed the casting of Hollywood stars on stage, and I have to disagree. Although I've had some of the most buttock-clenchingly awful theatrical evenings of my life when stars have been involved - Madonna's stage debut and Charlton Heston and his wife in Love Letters, spring to mind - I've also just seen The Seagull at the Royal Court, with Kristin Scott Thomas, Mackenzie Crook and Chewitel Ejiofor in the cast. They fit in as fine members of a fine ensemble cast, and don't act the least bit starry, but at least half the audience last night was there because of their names rather than Chekhov's. Of course, KST is English and lives in France, but she is surely the definition of a Hollywood star. Since The Office finished, Crook's major body of work has been ahaaaarrrring in Pirates of the Caribbean. Ejiofor balances stage work with starring roles in Love Actually and Kinky Boots. This week I also interviewed Peter O'Toole, the most coruscating stage actor of his generation, who in 1960 broke a contract with the RSC to bugger off to the desert to make Lawrence of Arabia with David Lean. When he returned to the stage, as Macbeth in 1980 and as Jeffrey Bernard in 1989 and 1999, did this make him a film star slumming it? Is it just Americans that we should object to? Or should we also tell Jude Law to sling his hook the next time he fancies a bit of spiritual atonement at the Young Vic, because he makes dreck like The Holiday? Of course, all these mentioned above had proved their talent before stardom beckoned. Oh, except KST, that is, who got her break in Prince's Under The Cherry Moon, a film that fits perfectly into my so-bad-it's-good-category, and didn't make her professional stage debut until the mid-90s.

But with the theatre world desperate for newer and younger audiences, it strikes me as folly that a producer would deny Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley, Ashton Kutscher or even Vin Diesel a chance of a West End debut if it would drag in a new crowd. Hell, it would even be worth it if Madonna fancied another crack. I'm not saying we should abase ourselves before stars or give them an easy critical ride: but one thing I've realised since I stopped reviewing plays full time is the need for theatre to be a broad church. I'll shut up about this now, except to note that Sir Peter Hall once said it was impossible to get a play on in the West End without stars, and I rang round various practitioners to see if they agreed or not. One of the most succinct replies came from Simon Callow: "Why does he think he should be able to put a play on in the West End without stars?"

4/ Having mentioned O'Toole, do go and see Venus, which is not perfect, but is funny, disconcerting, unpredictable, and unusual in that it gives tremendous roles to the great man himself, Leslie Phillips, and Vanessa Redgrave, each of them three or in some cases four times as old as the optimum age for a starlet of either gender these days. I think this may be O'Toole's Lear, in the same way that The Field was Richard Harris's, only - typically - with more nudity, booze and laughs. By the way, can anyone confirm the story that, when Harris was carried, dying, out of the Savoy on a stretcher, past rows of queueing diners, he roused himself to croaK: "It was the food!" If you can disprove it, please keep quiet.

5/ Jack S asked, after my admittedly sarky post, if I liked Hannibal Rising or not. Well, up to a point, Jack. The opening wartime scenes are very exciting, and the period detail is wonderful, but I'm always wary, to borrow an old analogy, of musicals where you come out whistling the set. A lot of it is the most absurd old tosh aimed at justifying Hannibal's excesses, a function of his having ceased to be a character we love to hate, and become a misunderstood anti-hero who just has a problem with the minor social taboo against killing and eating people. That said, Rhys Ifans does a terrifice turn, just the right side of panto, as the villain, and Gaspard Ulliel is suitably creepy and shouldn't be blamed for the script. Also the love of my life and I came out brimming with admiration for the wardrobes of both Ifans and Gong Li. If I ever get rich, we're going to hire costume desiogner Anna B Shepherd as our personal stylist.