Sorry. That's Dafoe. Not Defoe. As you were.

Blimey. So Lars von Trier's Antichrist has been passed uncut with an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. This is despite a very, very, graphic bit of downstairs cutting performed by Charlotte Gainsbourg's character on herself. After she has inflicted some genital torture on her husband, played by Willem Defoe. I didn't, like the Cannes audience, laugh or boo at Antichrist. I was too busy covering my eyes. The brief shot of penetrative sex at the beginning? Ho hum. Old hat in the shock stakes. Or rather, old cock.

Antichrist may be one of the most gruelling and unpleasant films I've ever seen, but I'm glad it's been passed uncut. For all its brutality and (I think) perversely deliberate misogyny, it's a work of artistic merit. We are, undoubtedly, old enough to decide what we want to see these days. However nasty it might be.

On an entirely separate note, I thought the capital's theatre critics were unduly snippy about Jude Law's Hamlet. By my lights, his was a far more emotionally convincing and centred interpretation than David Tennant's. And I liked Tennant. But watching Law, one realised how much more of a 'performance' the Dr Who star gave. It made me recalibrate my opinion of Law's talent. It's a typically lucid production from Michael Grandage, too, where the simplest touches clarify reams of text: just having a set which contains indoor and outdoor space, for instance. I also like Penelope Wilton's Gertrude more than most of the Shaftesbury Avenue mob to which I used to belong, and Ron Cook's Polonius. Though there are some weak links, this is not just well-acted but well-spoken Shakespeare (I know I sound like a retired colonel when I say that, but trust me). And the text has been judiciously trimmed. Sometimes, it's good to cut.