YOU'VE got to love Richard Curtis, actually.

He's a one-man Ealing Studios, turning out a reliably funny, upbeat, and above all commercial comedy every few years. It's fashionable to knock his optimistic films but we could all do with a bit of feelgood factor right now.

The Boat That Rocked, which has its premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square tonight, is Curtis's loveletter to the pirate radio stations he adored in his youth. It casts the cream of British comedy acting talent as the motley crew of Radio Rock, a shipful of reprobates broadcasting the devil's music to dolly birds and schoolboys huddled around transistors, and flipping two fingers at the disapproving British authorities. Like all love letters, it's a bit gushy and over the top in places, but it also lifts the heart.

Expelled from school for smoking, Carl (Tom Sturridge) is dispatched by his mother to the care of his godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy), Radio Rock's owner and skipper, in the hope he'll gain a moral compass. "Spectacular mistake!", as the spectacularly louche Quentin says.

The plot, such as it is, concerns Carl's coming of age by losing his virginity and discovering his father's identity, and the attempts of Kenneth Branagh's uptight minister Sir Alistair Dormandy to sink the pirate stations. Really, though, this is an affectionate, broad-brush evocation of a bygone era, furnished with a collection of character studies and a cracking Sixties soundtrack.

There's bear-like Philip Seymour Hoffman and cocksure Rhys Ifans vying to see who can be top dog DJ.

There's snarky Nick Frost as cool dude Dr Dave, and Rhys Darby, from comedy show Flight Of The Conchords, as an irritating funster clearly modelled on Kenny Everett.

In truth, there are rather too many characters, including one called Thick Kevin whose comedy value lies in the fact that he's, um, thick.

Similarly, Dormandy's sidekick, played by Jack Davenport, is called Twatt. Ho ho. The humour, like the production design, is laid on thick.

The girls, shipped out once a week to worship the DJs, are dressed like Biba models, and the men resemble King's Road fashion plates. The one element of the script that rings really true of the era is its casual sexism. Otherwise The Boat That Rocked is a bright, breezy, if slightly aimless romp. It's packed with star turns but the real star is the music, and Curtis rightly celebrates the pirates' pivotal role in bringing Hendrix, the Yardbirds, Cream and Leonard Cohen to our ears. Rock on.

The Boat That Rocked is released on 3 April, with special previews from 1 April.

FOOTBALL movies never work.

Fortunately, this isn't a football movie. The Damned United, which has its West End premiere tonight, is a tragedy and a love story about Brian Clough, who happened to be a football manager. It's a witty, wellobserved period piece in which writer Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen crawl convincingly under the skin of a real-life character as they did with Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/ Nixon.

Sheen eerily captures Clough's youthful, bushy-bouffant arrogance, his northern swagger bordering on campness. The time is the late Sixties and early Seventies when the beautiful game was first tainted with thuggery on and off the pitch, and the stink of serious money. Clough's a much-loved enabler of underdog second-league teams. But his obsession with the cheating, hard-tackling champions Leeds leads him to an ill-fated 44-day stewardship of the club, which probably cost him the England manager's job. That's the tragedy.

The love story is a small, platonic one, between Clough and Peter Taylor, the assistant he took for granted, played with wallflower dignity by Timothy Spall.

The film is based on David Peace's novel, which put the reader into the seething, alcoholic pit of Clough's mind. Director Tom Hooper can't replicate that on screen, so opts for something lighter and more conventional.

We get the familiar but distant England of muddy pitches, test cards and power cuts, when ashtrays were laid out alongside the half-time oranges in dowdy dressing rooms.

There's so much faithful period detail it's arresting when Hooper scores a genuine visual coup — a chairman's panelled office goes dim when the windows are blocked by cheering fans. For all its admirable straightforwardness, the film has a confusing structure. It flicks back and forth between Clough's time at Derby County and at Leeds, his dalliance with Brighton and a holiday in Majorca.

Though we understand perfectly why Clough earned the nickname Old Big 'Ead, there's little hint of what made him a great manager beyond the odd, inspirational peptalk.

But then, The Damned United is likely to do well at the box office because it appeals to a crowd beyond the football-crazy. It captures a perfect snapshot of an era and a great English eccentric. Sheen and Spall are excellent, as is Colm Meaney as Clough's nemesis Don Revie.

Stephen Graham contributes a pungent cameo as a gargoyle-like Billy Bremner, while Jim Broadbent exudes affronted dignity as Sam Longson, the Derby chairman Clough pushed too far.

A win, then, if not a championship performance.

Heston? Doesn't have quite the same ring to it as 'Bronson', does it? You'd be mistaken for a service station or a weird chef. Yet we learn from Nicholas Winding Refn's extraordinary and distinctive film Bronson that Britain's most dangerous prisoner, real name Michael Peterson, actually considered 'Charlton Heston' as a tasty pseudonym in his bare-knuckle days, before opting for 'Charles Bronson'. Actually, you feel that the prisoner is now bestowing hard-man kudos on the late star of the Magnificent Seven, rather than the other way round. Peterson's psychotic antics in prison seem a darn sight more frightening then the squinty-eyed vigilantism of Death Wish. But perhaps it's Tom Hardy's pit-bull powerhouse of a performance in Winding Refn's film that makes me think that. Art imitating life imitating art, and all that.

Actually, I don't think the idea that Bronson (the film, not the prisoner or the actor - keep up) glamourises violence rings true. We see Bronson (the prisoner) metaphorically and literally banging his fists and his forehead against every obstruction in his path: prison officers, bars, walls. The references above to psychosis and pit bulls are deliberate. He has been denied, or is unable to formulate, any other sort of response. And it's not pretty.

The problem is the poster quote heralding Bronson as the new Clockwork Orange. Nothing innately wrong with that. Both films critique the state's inability to respond to brutal elements with anything other than equal brutality. The violence in Clockwork Orange is horrible. You'd have to be a very sick puppy in the first place to find its murder or rape scenes "glamorous".The problem was that Stanley Kubrick, acting on scaremongering media reports of copycat gangs emulating his droogs, withdrew his own film from circulation, thus giving credence to the "glamourising" argument. It just goes to show, you've got to be careful with your poster quotes. Or your quotes in general. I once tried to damn a Philip Kerr novel with faint praise by describing him as "England's answer to Michael Crichton". They put it on the cover of the paperback.

Talking of glamourising violence, I loved Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary about the "Ozlploitation" comedies, sex romps and violent biker and horror flicks churned out of Australia in the 70s and 80s. I came out of it wanting to see at least 20 of the films referenced. Especially Howling III: The Marsupials. And the film about a rock band full of magicians and a stunt man. Mark Hartley's garish, fast paced but also highly informative film placed Mad Mad in its rightful place within the a cultural canon for me.

And a quick note: I fear the long, looming Horne/Corden backlash will finally arrive once Lesbian Vampire Killers hits the screens this week. But it did give me an idea for my own cheapo horror film, about a building suffering from lycanthropy. Any backers out there for Curse of the Were-House?

This week I used the East festival - a sprawling, six-day collection of informative events across the East End and the City, starting on March 5 - as an excuse to go and have a chat with Steven Berkoff. The Jewish, Stepney-born actor, writer and director is, of course, up West at the moment, starring in his own superb staging of Budd Schulberg's dockside drama On the Waterfront at the Haymarket. But we meet in the converted warehouse on Narrow St where he's lived for 25 years and Berkoff proves agreeably full of opinions about his old stomping ground. What's surprising is that he seems pleased - with reservations - about the area's recent colonisation by the bar and art-gallery crowd.

"I think the East End has broken away to a great extent from its origins as a kind of doss house for immigrants, which is what it’s been for centuries," he says. He ticks off the communities who have passed through, sometimes leaving a mark but often just using the area as a staging post: Huguenots, Jews, Irish, West Indians, Asians. "Now it has evolved through all those disparate elements into an incredibly dynamic society, partly because of the adventurous spirit of young English people who see it romantically, taking all the old rotting warehouses and making galleries and restaurants and even doing up flats. So the whole of the East End has undergone a fantastic regeneration."

He retains a suspicion of property developers, who he compares to the 60s slum landlord Peter Rachman, and blames for the vampiric sucking of life out of areas like Notting Hill, as well as for the demise of the characterful antiques markets of Camden Passage and Antiquarius on the King's Road. Perversely, though (he is a reliable contrarian), he believes the Thatcherite entrepreneurial push that resulted in the development of Docklands and Canary Wharf (and his own home) was a good thing, a "creative use of capitalism". He also thinks the "young people" who have created the new bars, galleries, restaurants and shops of the new East End are entrenched enough to fight off further yuppiefication, or encroachment by the chains. The "compromise" over the redevelopment of Spitalfields market (where several events in the East Festival take place) has been "a great success".

Berkoff does, however, believe the East End's Jewish heritage is neglected. Photos he took of the area and its inhabitants in the 1960s, blown up to huge size, rub shoulders with muscular Peter Howson paintings in his flat. There is no plaque commemorating the internationally famous Yiddish theatre, the Grand Palais, he says. Pivotal moments in London's history, from the Sidney Street Siege to the Cable Street riots, when united Jews and Irish dockers fought off Mosley's black shirts, are not celebrated in film or on stage. (This is partly a class thing, he suggests. One of the reasons he was drawn to On the Waterfront was that it was a rare example of a heroic celebration of working class culture.)

Most surprising of all, though, is Berkoff's attitude to the 2012 Olympics. I thought he would side with the Hackney scribe Ian Sinclair in decrying the sporting hullaballoo. But no. Although Berkoff is a fan of Sinclair's dense psychogeographical writing, he is not a fellow traveller when it comes to opposing the Olympiad. "I think it's an incredible thing, it will regenerate old, dirty, rotting areas beyond the East End, and ripples will spread from there to Hoxton and Hackney and Dalston," he says. "So I think the Olympics are fine, a good thing." He compares the scepticism over the future use of Olympic sites to the sniping at the Dome/02 Arena, "an incredible Richard Rogers building" written off as a white elephant, and now triumphantly reborn as a performance venue.

I do advise you to see On the Waterfront, and perhaps to compare it to his early work East, which is being remounted as part of the East Festival. For more details on the festival, go to www.findeast.co.uk.

On the film front - the head of Film4, Tessa Ross, although bouyed by the Oscar success of Slumdog Millionaire, warns again of dark days ahead for British film, and a likely cut in her annual budget from £10m to £8m. The interview with Ross appears the very day that ITV announces slashing cuts in its staff and drama budgets. IN such a climate, Ross's decision to set up Warp X with the Film Council and Optimum Releasing looks very smart indeed. Warp X produce genre pictures such as Donkey Punch, and oddball cheapies like A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, for around £1m a throw: the creators, mostly young, work cheap on a promise of a share of profits. I've just seen their latest, Hush, the first feature by Londoner Mark Tonderai, who has worked in radio and TV but used another previous job - putting up posters in service station toilets - as the springboard for a horrific thriller. Hush isn't perfect - the early dialogue in particular could do with brushing up - but it is grimly efficient and shot and paced with a genuine sense of menace. It doesn't look cheap. Warp X, it strikes me, could become the new Hammer.