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.