So, Die Hard 4.0 suggests we are finally in a post-post-9/11 worls. Gone are the days when every action/adventure/disaster movie had to make reference to the fall of the Twin Towers. Len Wiseman's skillful if brainless update of the John McClane story featuring a now 52-year-old Bruce Willis can't quite ignore 9/11 totally, but it can shunt it to the sidelines. The terrorists here are a mostly European but American-led and movitivated by greed and revenge: their leader is, in fact, a security expert whose insistance that America's defence was flawed was ignored. In this, he has more in common with officials who warned about the overloaded levees of New Orleans than CIA or FBI anti-terror agents. As you may have seen in the trailers, Die Hard 4.0 does feature a scene of Congress exploding, but this is immediately followed on screen by McClane telling the powers-that-be "it's a fake". The computer hacker played by director Kevin Smith (I asked Wiseman if this was a nod to his own comic-geek past, but he said no) is not concerned with international terrorists, but with the incursions of Big Government. In Bush's America, the threat is now seen as internal.

A note on a couple of other sequels. Shrek 3 proves the big green ogre has run out of puff. And the clumsily titled 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer manages quite superheroic feat of being even duller than the first Fantastic Four movie. Am I alone in thinking the FF are a fairly lame choice to cull from the Marvel stable? At least two of them have powers that are frankly rubbish, especially Ioan Gruffudd's stretchy Mr Fantastic, who looks on screen alarmingly like a condom. Comic fans (yes, me too, like Kevin Smith and Len Wiseman) must wait and hope that Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr puts a bit of smartness as well as spectacle into costumed heroics.

So, last week I took myself off to Broadgate Arena for one of the Barbican's Big Screen free outdoor film programmes. Didn't stick around for the main event, Cinema Paradiso, but I did watch French pioneer Rene Clair's first two silent films, the Dadaist Entr'Actre and the puckish Paris qui dort, in which a bunch of thieves and vagabonds run riot in a French capital frozen asleep by the "powerful rays" developed by Professor X, both accompanied the the Lotus Trio of music students from the Guildhall. It made me feel like a student again, since my university days were probably the last time I would regularly seek out the arcane and the unusual. It did make me yearn for the outdoor screenings currently showing at the Scoop near the GLA headquarters, and look forward particularly to Film4's season of films at Somerset House (www.somersethouse.org.uk) this August. There is something uniquely, delightfully inebriating about sipping a chilly pint on a summer evening, while watching a favoured film. At Somerset House I'm particularly intrigued by the double-bill of The Descent and The Thing, two masterfully paranoid suspense films.

A word about Captivity, out this week. Roland Joffe's film has already caused controversy, and further stirred the "torture porn" debate, with its billboard images of a confined and anguished Elisha (24) Cuthbert. Well, I can tell you that the film's gruesome misogynist nastiness is utterly outweighed by its sheer silliness and narrative ineptitude. What with the apparent farrago of the Grindhouse (Tarantino's bit, Death Proof, surgically separated from Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, arrives here in late summer), it's almost as if film-makers are deliberately seeing how nonsensical but controversial they can be. Certainly Joffe, who made The Killing Fields, should know better. But he obviously doesn't. His next film is Finding t.A.T.u (sic) a film about an American and a Russian girl who fall in love at a concert by the chart-topping Slavic phoney-sapphists. It's got exploitation written all over it.

Bear with me on this one. I am not intimidated by stars. I am properly admiring of their talent, if they have it, or of their allure, if they have that. But I know they're basically just the same as us. This is why, in interviews, I am quite often embarrassed about putting probing personal questions to someone I have just met. Equally, though, I despise hacks who affect a mateyness with stars on the basis that "they're just like us" and "we're all part of the same game". So when I found myself sitting slap-bang next to Jude Law and Jonny Lee Miller at Nicholas Wright's play The Reporter at the National Theatre this week, I did that typically English thing, and ignored them. Even though I very politely interviewed Law about a million years ago, when he was just Jude Law rather than TABLOID FODDER JUDE LAW, and even though I was due to interview Miller two days later, about his new film The Flying Scotsman. This is an old-fashioned but very touching biopic of Graeme Obree, a Scottish nobody who took on the international cycling lobby and won, setting various world records on a bike he built himself out of washing machine parts and BMX tubing, all this despite suffering severe bipolar disorder. Miller is very good in it, and I was looking forward to asking him about the punishing physical challenges of the film and the moral challenge of portraying a man he had come to know well. I had even given an undertaking not to ask about his personal life (for which read: ask questions about his ex-wife Angelina Jolie). But Jude 'n' Jonny, were out having a good time and didn't need me butting in. And there was the added complication that I'd have had to lean over Jude to say hello to Jonny, doubtless transgressing some unwritten but potent precept of showbiz etiquette, and then I'd have to remind Jude that I had interviewed him, and then he'd have to pretend to remember, and then there'd be an awkward silence... So I kept my powder dry, kept schtum, and looked forward to remarking to Jonny on the coincidence of our synchronised theatregoing when I was formally introduced to him later that week.

Except that, the following day, the interview was cancelled. No reflection on me, I was told, but we'd been slow responding to accept the interview (I'd been out of the country when it was offered on Friday: it was a bank holiday weekend, so arrangements were only confirmed on the Tuesday, a few hours before I saw him in the theatre). What's more Jonny, while leafing through a copy of the Standard, had changed his mind. Actually, I got the distinct feeling that Jonny himself had nothing to do with it, and that his "people" were throwing their weight about, but I may be wrong about that.

Either way, I was left fruitlessly but fretfully wondering whether it might have made a difference if I'd just leaned over and said hello. Had my reserve - call it politeness, call it shyness, call it stupid - tipped the balance between my getting the interview and not. Could I have charmed him? (When I interviewed Rosamund Pike this week this week she said I seemed like "an incredibly nice man". But she may have been acting.) The disappointment was exacerbated by the fact that I liked The Flying Scotsman, but I also believe it needs all the publicity it can get. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe millions of people are even now saying "can't wait for that movie about the depressed Scottish cyclist" and getting ready to shatter the opening-weekend box-office record set by Pirates of the Carribbean: At World's End.

On balance, I think I did the right thing. The benefits, to them and me, of not harrassing, or even just distracting, actors when they are off duty, outweigh the slim chance that an intrusive "hello" among the stalls seats might have made a difference this time. What do you think? Oh, and Jonny, if you are reading this, and you change your mind again, call me...