If I were Ridley Scott, I'd be proper narked. Every interview with him prior to the release of American Gangster harped on the accepted line that he's a dealer in facile imagery, a purveyor of images that are pretty but shallow. You can take the man out of the advertising industry.... the reasoning goes. No matter how many genres he works in, no matter how ambitious his intentions, he will never be an auteur.

Well, in riposte, I'd just like to compare American Gangster with The Departed, a multiple-Oscar-winning work by that great American auteur, Martin Scorcese. The former is an urgent, pacy, true-life account of one black businessman/gangster's progress to the top of the heroin trade in 1970s New York, and the ambivalent morality of the cop chasing him. The latter is a hoky tale of betrayal and corruption in the Irish mob and the Boston police force, awash with operatic catholicism and father-son conflict. The former has a washed-out, beige colour scheme true to the decade in which it is set, and rare outbursts of authentically clumsy, blunt violence. The latter has a brash colour palette and lots of flamboyant mayhem - flowering gunshot wounds etc. The former has paunchy Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe delivering understated performances, the latter had Jack Nicholson plyaing under his age and way over the top (surprise!), and di Caprio and Damon preeening. I could go on. It's not that I disliked The Departed. I enjoyed it, the way one enjoys a guilty pleasure. But American Gangster is a far superior film on almost every level. Of coruse, it won't win an Oscar. Because it's by Ridley Scott. And he's "not an auteur".

Not much time to tell you about Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf in 3-D, except that the motion-capture animation process has such a flattening, dehumanising, Botox-ing effect on the actors voicing and providing the physical inspiration for the characters, that the film seems less expressive than the average, 2-D animation. It's distancing, alienating, off-putting - even the sight of Angelina Jolie naked except for a few dabs of gold fluid and (ridiculously) built-in high heels, normally something I and the rest of the straight male population would pay good money to see. And the script is terrible, littered with snigger-worthy lines and anachronism (was the word "gobble" really a slang term in ancient Denmark?).

Next time - The Kite Runner and I'm Not There. Tune in, film fans.