Now for something completely different. I went on a film tour of Shepherd's Bush yesterday. I like Shepherd's Bush. A number of my friends and colleagues live there, and they, too, savour its rackety charm. Some years back, there was a gun battle at the local Nando's, which resulted in a wounded crim crashing his car through the front window of an estate agent's and then dying. A W12-resident journalist I know rang that same estate agent the next day, purporting to be a buyer interested in moving to the area, stressing that he was looking for somewhere safe and quiet, and gleefully reported the agent's assertions that Shepherd's Bush was as safe as Godalming (presumably while gore and glass were being sponged off his desk) in a subsequent article. Anyway, it's to combat this sort of image problem (as well as to promote the distinctive character of the area before it is potentially annihilated by the vast shopping/media/hotel/space station development on the old White City site, and to accord with the mayor's scheme to pry tourists away from the centre and into the more interesting bits of London), that Hammersmith and Fulham Council have inaugurated a number of tours.

So I went on the film one. Our blue badge buide Simon Rodway (www.silvercanetours.com)took us through the history of cinema in Shepherd's Bush. On screen, it was the location for several bits of Quadrophenia (Cooke's Eel and Pie shop in Goldhawk Road, the old 1905 public bath-house, the market where Ray Winstone, for probably the only time in his career, gets his head kicked in), which is perhaps unsurprising since W12 was The Who's old stomping ground. Harry Palmer's flat in The Ipcress File was also reportedly in the area, the opening credits of Minder were shot in Blythe Road, and much of the Sweeney was set in nearby Hammersmith, while the doctor in Hitchcock's Rebecca resides at "165 Goldhawk Road" (a name plucked out of a hat, apparently, since the film was made in Hollywood and the address now houses a wine warehouse).

Most important to Shepherd's Bush, though, says Simon, was the BBC, which moved in from Alexandra Palace in the 1940s and bought up anything film-related, including Riverside Studios, the Lime Grove Studios (built by Gaumont in 1915, used by Hitchcock and Balcon, sold off in 1992 and demolished in favour of a housing estate) and the former music hall the Shepherd's Bush Empire, which I didn't know had been designed by Frank Matcham as the twin of its Hackney namesake. Even more revealing for me was the fact that the garishly painted but still handsome building that now houses that circle of Antipodean hell The Walkabout, began life as the Cinematograph Theatre in 1910. There is still a huge, beautiful terracotta sign running along the side of the building advertising "continuous performance", with seat prices in the old money. And next to it is the Shepherd's Bush Pavilion, which I must have walked past a hundred times and which I've never paid full attention to. This 3,000 seat cinema won a RIBA award for its frontage, inspired by classical buildings in Rome, in 1923, and was later turned into an Odeon, with the Cinematograph/Walkabout co-opted as a second, smaller auditorium. Most tours don't get to go inside, but we did. The building now exudes an air of decrepit desperation, but it is still magificent, and wears the scars of its various guises with pride. The stalls were roofed over to contain a bingo hall at some point (some 70s decor and light fittings remain). But the swoop and scoop of the ceiling and what would have been the upper circle in what is left of the auditorium still inspire a sort of awe - like a ruined version of the splendidly preserved State Cinema on Kilburn Road. The Pavilion has been used as an events company but has now apparently been sold, and although it is Grade II listed (the facade at least), planning permission has been granted to turn it into a hotel. (Don't you hate people who say "an hotel"). Anyway, I feel privileged and only slightly smug to have seen the interior, and I heartily recommend the rest of the tour, which is just one of many embracing food, history, the river, etc. For details, go to www.visitshepherdsbush.co.uk.

I was hoping to tell you about Spider-Man 3 here, but they wouldn't let me into the last screening this week. Bastards. But I can tell you a bit about 28 Weeks Later, which is almost as good a sequel to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later as Aliens was to Alien. In the first film, you recall, Britain was quarantined from the rest of the world while the zombie-creating Rage Virus swept the country: the last moments (at least in the more upbeat of the two endings shot) showed American jets zooming over the green and pleasant land, apparently scanning for survivors after the virus had burned - or rather starved - itself out. The new film, directed by Spanish newcomer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo under the supervision of Boyle and the original's writer Alex Garland, starts - you guessed it - 28 weeks after the first film, when returning refugees are reunited with survivors in the first 'security zone'. In a brilliant but logical stroke, the film-makers imagine this would be the Isle of Dogs, a part of London surrounded by water and so isolatable, full of spanking new accomodation at Canary Wharf etc for refugees, and with its own telecommunications systems and power supplies (true, apparently). Ariel shots echoing the first film's startling imagery of a deserted capital therefore segue into footage of a DLR chain full of returning Brits trundling past tanks and American snipers fortifying/occupying the isle. Later, there are more wonderful sequences of plague- and zombie- ravaged London locations (Shaftesbury Avenue, the Millenium Bridge, Whitehall and, er, Blundell Road, Holloway) and a deftly brilliant use of Wembley Stadium, that are worth the price of admission alone. (Admittedly, Fresnadillo's idea of London geography seems a little cockeyed, but the film's ending, conversely, strikes me as a witty riposte on an old and very British rivalry: I'm interviewing Mr Fresnadillo tomorrow, so I'll ask him if I'm right on both counts.)

I won't say much more about the plot, except to say that focusing it on a family is another adroit way of moving the story on from the original and opening it out. And I won't say much about the acting, except that the defiantly unsentimental playing of stalwarts Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack is nicely balanced by unassuming American and Australian support, and by two very impressive new young acting talents with the highly improbable names of Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots. Ms Poots, by the way, has the most attractive nose I've seen on screen for a long time, although, as she's only 17, I feel like a dirty old man for saying it. Maybe I can balance it out by observing that I sat next to Catherine McCormack at dinner once, and she is one of the most charming and intelligent people I have ever met.

Anyway, all this set me thinking. Any other nominations for sequels which are as good as, if not better than, the films that inspired them? Let me know. Oh, and the Star Wars films are banned on the basis that it's impossible to know what order to put them in...

Finally, a plea: go and see This Is England, especially if you are a fortysomething like me who remembers how deeply scary skinheads were in the 70s. Even if you aren't, go and see it. I'm interviewing director Shane Meadows next week immediately prior to the film's release, and he used to be a skinhead. Hope he doesn't chin me...

Tenby was lovely, since you ask. Effortlessly straddling the line between picture perfect and proper-working-town. Beautiful, chilly weather, friendly people, and a cinema - the Royal Playhouse - so handsome I was almost tempted to see Meet the Robinsons. Almost.

A quick heads up for Flyboys, due in June. It's the story of the young America lads who, before the US entered the First World War, volunteered to fly in defend France from the air in the Lafayette Escadrille, whose biplanes were made out of rope-soled footwear. That's the last cheap joke I will make about a film that is old-fashioned and uncomplicated in its approach to heroism, and which somewhat disarms criticism by the fact that each of the flyboy characters is based on a real figure, including the black flier who was the son of a slave, left racist America for not-quite-so-racist France where he became a boxing champion, flew with honour with the Lafayette, and was then denied the chance to join his country's air force after the war.

So it's a bit hackneyed? The dogfight scenes are superb, evoking the chunka-chunka-chunk of basic machine guns chewing up the fragile planes, which, like the men inside, were pretty much "all skin". There's something fitting about the fact that a film about volunteer flyers should have been made by a bunch of flying enthusiasts (propellerheads?) who raised the money to finance it themselves. It'll probably get snippy reviews and enjoy a long life on the afternoon schedules of the movie channels.

Talking of movie channels, have those of you with Sky ever flicked through the alphabetical schedule of films just to see what's coming up? Had I not done so before going to Tenby, I would not have been able to record The 300 Spartans, an earlier version of the Thermopylae battle on which the critically divisive 300 is based (and thanks for the post, Katrineholm, I agree). I would also have missed Paul Bartell's Death Race 2000, because it was on Movies4Men2, a channel I very rarely look at. This very witty cheapo exploitation film was produced at great speed (in every sense) by Roger Corman to steal the thunder of the dreary, plodding Rollerball. I watched it again, having first seen it in my teens at what was then the NFT with my dad, then hired a knackered old video from a shop when I was ill at my girlfriend's flat when I was 20. I was glad to see the race scenes are still exhilarating, the dialogue just as funny. ("What's that?" asks Simone Griffeth's Annie of David Carradine's ace driver Frankenstein, pointing at the bomb built into his false hand. "It's a hand grenade," he says.)

Serious film point of the week. Thinking again about Danny Boyle's flawed but rather wonderful Sunshine (you can sort of see the budget run out at the end), I was struck by the thought that cinematic science fiction thrives best at times when society is paranoid and uncertain. Think of the 1950s nuclear paranoia of The Incredible Shrinking Man and the anti-commie fear underling Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Think of the Nixonite dismay behind Silent Running, Soylent Green, Capricorn One, Close Encounters... even Logan's Run. Even Star Wars fits neatly into the scenario, a fairy-tale corrective as simplistic in its way as Flyboys or the most gung-ho of Wayne Westerns. When I was describing Sunshine to a colleague, I was struck by how much it reminded me of those other 70s movies mentioned above, with their doomy, lonely bleakness. It's subtext is that even if we all work together - and the bickering crew are almost as carefully ethnically representative as an episode of Sesame Street - we'll still screw up the world, if not the universe. No argument there.

Finally to John Giotta - yes, I did bail out on Ghost Rider because I found a grinning skull inexpressive. Then at home last weekend I thoroughly enjoyed the skeleton battle in Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts. Despite my defence of CGI last week, there are times when only stop-frame will do (as the producers of Flushed Away may well be reflecting). Or maybe Nic Cage was the problem....