Call it Spiderman Syndrome. The reason that - I fervently hope and pray - Pirates of the Caribbean is as unlikely as old webhead to make it from a trilogy to a quadrology is the sheer strain of keeping its protagonists apart. In the three Pirates movies so far, Keira Knightley's Elizabeth and Orlando Bloom's weedy Will have been constantly united and sundered, united and sundered, in order to keep the story moving and the idea of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow as a potential romantic lead alive. IN a similar fashion, the Spiderman series had to reinvent reasons why Peter Parker and MJ couldn't just get together, marry and have little arachnobabies together. After a while it gets daft.

Not that P3 - as they apparently called it on set - is anything less than daft. The script sounds like the writers were making it up on set as they went along. Depp's mincing, mockney showboating as Captain Jack is getting tiresom (in fact, it was never that good. Didn't you think when everyone else was praising the performance that it was just rubbish, that he was channelling Dick van Dyck not Keith Richards?). At least Keira gets to be feisty as well as fetching, and Geoffrey Rush throws himself into ahaaaaarrrrrring with gusto. The effects, though, as well as the production design, are terrific. If you fancy a bit of empty spectacle, movies don't come much more spectacular. Or empty.

Elsewhere, Jindayne by Australian Ray Lawrence, director of the 2001 hit Lantana, is a measured, considered, low-key (you're getting the idea it's slow, right) and very well-observed study of ructions in a small town. Gabriel Byrne's Stewart and his fishing mates discover an Aboriginal girl's body in the river, but delay reporting it while they continue to prey on the pisceans. Their callous behaviour splits the town on racial lines, and also lays bare the problems in Stewart's own marriage to Claire (Laura Linney). Both leads turn in sterling, understated, with Linney particularly particularly affecting - she can put a world of hurt in her eyes. It's heavy, but worth it, and reminds me somewhat of the Sean Penn-directed, Jack Nicholson-starring film The Pledge. If you haven't seen the latter, it's on terrestrial TV this weekend.

Cheeni Kum - avoid.

The Bothersome Man - worth catching if you fancy a dystopian, paranoid Norwegian comedy and happen to be near the ICA.

Wild Tigers I Have Known - probably only worth catching if you are a gay teenager uncomfortable with or confused by your sexuality, and need to be reassured that others feel the same way too. And if you happen to be near the ICA.

Julien Temple's biopic of Joe Strummer, The Future Is Unwritten, is impressive in its use of archive material and in the number of Strummer fans (Strumpets?) he has drummed up, including Martin Scorcese. But I can't help feeling it could have been a bit less hagiographical. Also, the use or archive footage to illustrate Strummer's old-fashioned, middle-class background, suggested that he'd been to an all-boys school. Which rather surprised my wife, who also went there (although some time after Mr S, which is a source of some romantic disappointment to her)...

By the way, I accidentally ran the web address for film tour guide Simon Rodway into the next word in the sentence, to the direct click-through didn't work. It is:

www.silvercanetours.com

One of the great fictions perpetuated by most actor-interviews is that thesps have control of their own careers. They don't. Insecure, mindful of keeping in the public eye (if they have made the awful decision to be a 'movie star' rather than an impecunious jobbing actor), and beset by money worries like the rest of us (you should see Michael Madsen's overheads), they will - apart from a select few - accept work when it is offered. If the project then turns out to be pants, they are contractually stuck with it: remember the $8m lawsuit levelled against Kim Basinger when she (wisely, self-respect-wise) dropped out of the execrable Boxing Helena. Hence I think Mena Suvari's payoff line in the latest Orange cinema ads, where she plays Joan of Arc recast as a cheerleader,  is more telling than it at first seems: "Can someone untie me so I can quit?"

These thought were prompted by seeing Nicolas Cage in Next (a movie without an ending, in which he plays a character without a personality) and Ghost Rider (a movie without a spine in which he plays a character without a head). I was going to suggest Cage hired Bruce Willis's agent, given the way the ageing, balding Willis has entered a late-period career-revival in the likes of Sin City, 16 Blocks, even his defiantly unsympathetic turn in FAst Food Nation. But then I saw Perfect Stranger, and that idea went to hell. Because in this deeply rubbishy thriller-with-not-much-of-a-twist, Willis plays a leery ad exec. So naturally, the smirk is back. The smirk that was bolted to Willis' face from about the time of Moonlighting until he and Demi Moore broke up. We love to punish actors for their supposed hubris in making us worship them. Bruce's recent, downbeat roles (drunks, deadbeats, disappointed men) seemed like an act of penance. But the smirk wiped it all away.

I am not going to crow, however. Especially not over Perfect Stranger's other casualty, Halle Berry, who is now exhibiting the weird physical perfection of a waxwork, and who genuinely hasn't had a decent role since Monster's Ball (Jinx in Die Another Day was eye-catching at best, and as someone else said, her X-Men character should have been called Cleavage rather than Storm). Perfect Stranger is not Halle's fault. It is probably not her agent's fault. (The film could have been The Last Seduction rather than the Poundstretcher Basic Instinct.) There is something deeply unplesant over those who mock actors stuck in turkeys, especially when that actor is the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar. We should commiserate, and understand... but we should not, under any circumstances, go and see Perfect Stranger.

Two quick notes. I'm only guessing here, but I reckon the creators of Moliere, in which comic events in the writer's life foreshadow his creation of Tartuffe, might just conceivably have seen Shakespeare in Love. And the publicity notes for the Tony Gatlif's forthcoming Transylvania describe star Asia Argento as having "a venomous beauty that eats away at the screen. I can't argue with that. But her character Zingarina is also EXTREMELY ANNOYING, and I wouldn't be surprised if the suffers from the kind of objections from Romanians that Kazakhz levelled against Borat. More later...

Finally saw Spider-Man 3, which should almost definitely mark the end of the "franchise" as the film-makers insist on calling it. It cleverly refreshes the romantic troubles of Peter Parker and Mary Jane, and furnishes reasonable reasons for MJ's further imperillment, but any further films and these necessary tropes drawn from the comics are bound to look strained. There's also a lack of a distinctive central plot in this third insallment, and a sense that director Sam Raimi is scurrying to update us on the separate narrative strands; the subplot involving Thomas Haden Church as the Sandman is particularly inconclusive, although I will say that he has an excellent face for comics. Shame the Affleck-fronted Daredevil was such a turkey: the best possible way of moving the Spidey films on would have been a webhead/hornhead crossover.

A tip though: 11am on a bank holiday Monday is the best - possibly the only tolerable - time to see a movie in Leicester Square. You arrive just as the scum and detritus of Sunday night has been hosed off the all-but empty Square, and leave just as the tourist hordes descend. And the Odeon really is a great place to have a big-screen experience.

One of the delights of this blog is that it gives me an excuse to visit cinemas I've never been to before. So it was that, in the short interlude before going to see the stage version of Absolute Beginners at the Lyric Hammersmith (more fun, I'd say, than the reviews suggested), I took myself to the Cineworld Hammersmith to see the Ed Norton/Naomi Watts adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil. This picturehouse was threatened by developers not long ago, only to be saved by concerned Nimbys, I mean local residents, such as Vanessa Redgrave. Although defaced by the obligatory multiplex decor and vulgar concessions, its seats in dire need of refurbishment, one can see in the elegant curve and lofty height of the lobby, and in the remaining original fixtures, the shadow of the magnificent building it must have been before its auditorium was chopped into smaller screens. Not much to say about the film. Lovely scenery, stiff upper lips. Watts more convincing than Norton as a Brit, but in some shots she looks as if she's secreting food in her cheeks. Odd how some writers return in cycles - that this film should appear just as Maugham's creaky old warhorse The Letter is back in the West End, and as I've just finished a book called All the Devils are Here by david Seabrook, an engagingly eclectic and partial account of the louche weirdos who inhabit the isle of Thanet, of whom Maugham's nephew Robin was one.

Sorry, I'd never allow myself sentences that long in the paper.

A digression. It was my eighth wedding anniversary this week, so Ann and I went to Magdalene on Tooley Street. Excellent nosh, the foie gras a highlight (although my rabbit shoulder and liver was also good), very charming, very camp staff. And since we've cut down on drinking in the week (Ann's almost stopped completely on weekdays, doing much better than me, even though it was me who was warned about liver damage in a battery of overpriced tests I took for the paper), the bill was less than £50 a head, which I regard as extraordinary for a decent restaurant these days. So, yeah, right, it was all great... apart from the couple next to us. They were married co-workers, and even though she was heavily pregnant, he began hectoring her after he returned his starter (the selfsame foie gras), about saying I-told-you-so, about her deficiencies at work, about the fact that she hadn't adequately briefed the builder who was rebuilding their kitchen. ON and on and on, all in a yammering, overloud voice, as if he suffered a combination of Tourette's and autism (don't write in, I know people with both).

Basically, all I wanted to say was: pregnant lady, if you are reading this - divorce him.

Looking forward hugely to the bank holiday weekend, partly because it's great to be in London when everyone else has buggered off, and partly because of an unusually hectic social programme. Tonight is ladies' night at Ann's father's regiment, the Honourable Artillery Company, which is always a joy, not least because of the way sixtysomething men become like awestruck schoolboys around Ann's dad, who was wounded in the war. Saturday I'm having a session in a floatation tank - a birthday present - then it's cocktails with the gang in the private members bar above Ronnie Scott's, followed by dinner at Sofra. Pub lunch Sunday, Spider-Man 3 on Monday morning. Assuming you've read this far, what's everyone else doing...?