Christopher Lee – aka Counts Dracula and Dooku, Scaramanga and Saruman – knighted for services to drama and charity

Finding oneself opposite a tall, baleful celluloid vampire would have most people reaching for a head of the most pungent Spanish garlic, a large crucifix or a sharp stake.

The Prince of Wales, however, opted for a ceremonial sword, even as the 1.95-metre (6ft 5ins) vision of Count Dracula leaned worryingly close to the royal neck.

Fortunately, the prince had little to fear. Christopher Lee – aka Counts Dracula and Dooku, not to mention Lord Summerisle and the Duc de Richeleau – had been invited to Buckingham Palace today to receive a knighthood for his services to drama and to charity.

The 87-year-old is one of cinema’s most prolific actors, appearing in more than 250 films over the course of a career that has so far spanned 61 years.

After making his name by poking blood-red contact lenses into his eyes and false fangs into his gums for a series of Hammer Horror films, Lee went on to play the urbane laird of the pagan manor in The Wicker Man and the bounteously nippled, bling-packing assassin Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun.

More recently, the actor has lent his imposing frame and limpid tones to the roles of the evil Middle Earth wizard Saruman in the Lord of the Rings, and the evil space wizard Count Dooku in the final two Star Wars films.

Lee, whose mother was an Italian countess, will next be seen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, in which he plays neither a vampire nor a wizard but the Jabberwock.

Actor Dennis Hopper has cancelled travel plans to focus on his treatment, manager says

Hollywood star Dennis Hopper has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has cancelled travel plans to focus on treatment, his manager said.

The 73-year-old Easy Rider star is being treated in a “special programme” at the University of Southern California, his manager Sam Maydew told the Associated Press. “We’re hoping for the best,” Maydew said when asked about Hopper’s condition and prognosis.

Among the appearances cancelled was a trip to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, which is set to open an exhibition of his photography next month. Hopper was scheduled to hold a master class on “the artistic process” there.

“Obviously his health is the number one priority and we wish him a very speedy recovery,” centre director Tony Sweeney said. “We are saddened that Dennis won’t be with us to share in the moment and we look forward with even greater determination to delivering an exciting and successful exhibition”.

Hopper was briefly hospitalised for dehydration late last month in New York after suffering flu-like symptoms and stomach pains.

Famous for his starring role in the 1969 hippy road film Easy Rider, which he helped write, Hopper appeared in numerous westerns and nearly 200 other films and television shows stretching back to 1955. He was nominated for Academy Awards for the Easy Rider screen play and for his supporting role in the 1986 basketball movie Hoosiers. He recently finished shooting the second season of the television show Crash, based on the 2004 movie.

The 53rd LFF came to a glittery close last night with the world premiere of Nowhere Boy

The film-makers have done their best to capture Michael Jackson’s old magic but this memorial gives us little chance to really get close to the singer, writes Andrew Pulver

Jeane Smith, 84, hasn’t been to the cinema for nearly 40 years. So where better to take her, and four friends, than the London film festival, to see An Education, a coming-of-age movie set in swinging 60s London?

Why put up with tat the likes of Daddy Day Care or Beverly Hills Chihuahua when there’s a treasure trove of genuinely brilliant kids’ films out there?

Let’s not be ungrateful here – for film-lovers with kids, these are heady times indeed. I’m not sure even the fond reception Fantastic Mr Fox received quite did justice to its handmade pleasures (the wolf salute alone makes me want to hug Wes Anderson and not let go). And then, of course, there’s Up, the movie that’s repeated WALL-E‘s trick of emerging as possibly the year’s finest film while being made (at least ostensibly) for an audience still doing its shoes up with Velcro. Whichever way you look at it, in the context of the careless tat parents usually have to dodge or suffer through, the autumn of 2009 has been a vintage season.

But the snag is that at some point in the future, these two gleaming moments will recede, and life for the young cinephile will return to normal. And normal is a bleak business for children’s movies in Britain, a wearying parade of the slapdash and tossed-off. Which is why it’s doubly frustrating when some of the most genuinely brilliant kids’ films ever made aren’t even available, much less as accessible and celebrated as they should be. It’s a sorry situation that brings me muttering darkly to the subject of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T.

Because here’s a film, now more than 50 years old, that deserves just as much praise as Pixar, one every bit as magical as Up, albeit far, far stranger. The only film ever scripted by Theodor Geisel (better known professionally as Dr Seuss), 5,000 Fingers is the delirious, surrealist tale of the 10-year-old Bart Collins, trapped as one of 500 enslaved child pianists toiling in the institute of the fiendish music teacher Dr Terwilliker. And trust me when I say this slim premise provides the basis for a movie that could be slipped without hesitation into a midnight triple bill between The Wizard of Oz and Mulholland Drive. At the same time, it’s the kind of children’s film kids themselves love, at once riotous fun and possessed of untold layers of psychological weirdness.

In the scowling character actor Hans Conreid’s turn as Terwilliker, we have one of the truly great movie villains. The set designs are, without fail, wildly inventive: grand off-kilter arrangements of staircases, dungeons and giant keyboards rendered in Technicolor that, as Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, seemed inspired equally by Busby Berkeley and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (and which now in turn call to mind Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle). And that’s before we even get to the music: the handful of instantly unshakable songs and a central set piece in which green-painted prisoners perform a number on drums, xylophones and each other that must rank as one of the most unnerving musical interludes ever committed to film. Throw in the twins conjoined by their beard, the story of the film’s entire juvenile cast vomiting over the ornate Seussian set in an outbreak of mass nausea and the fact the results tanked at the box office (losing a then disastrous $1m), and this really is a movie not to be trifled with.

Little wonder then that a rare appearance on the big screen would be greeted with glee by the likes of GreenCine Daily’s Vadim Rizov. Here in Britain, however, we can’t even get the thing on DVD, being forced instead to brave slapped-on customs charges with an imported Region 1 copy. That may be due to labyrinthine issues of rights or, I fear more likely, an assumed lack of commercial appeal on the part of UK distributors. But the result is the same – a kid in HMV can harass his or her parents into buying as many copies as the credit card can stand of Daddy Day Care or Beverly Hills Chihuahua, but the most unhinged epic in the history of children’s cinema will be nowhere in sight.

And it’s not alone in that. Sadly nestled in the ranks of the finest children’s movies ever made are a number of titles that either aren’t available at all, or simply aren’t procurable in Britain. For instance, nice as it was to see the marvellously odd East German fairytale The Singing Ringing Tree reissued recently, other equally choice nuggets from the same DEFA stable (including such wonders as Little Mook and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs) remain out of reach. Likewise, The Boy With Green Hair, the 1948 atomic fable with a young Dean Stockwell as the orphan transformed by a world bent on war. And then there’s the still more plaintive case of The Phantom Tollbooth, Looney Tunes veteran Chuck Jones’s semi live-action adaptation of the kids’ novel about lonely Milo and his gift-wrapped gateway to another reality – troubled in production, sublime in execution and, for reasons unclear, never released on DVD anywhere at any point.

All told, it’s a sad tale. And whether the guilty party is contractual wrangling or the dumb judgment of the market, the losers are the audience – in this case a generation of kids deprived of the chance to grow up with some of the movies most likely to (in the very best sense) mess with their heads. And even those who stayed dry-eyed at Up could surely squeeze a tear out at the thought of that.

Why put up with tat the likes of Daddy Day Care or Beverly Hills Chihuahua when there’s a treasure trove of genuinely brilliant kids’ films out there?

Let’s not be ungrateful here – for film-lovers with kids, these are heady times indeed. I’m not sure even the fond reception Fantastic Mr Fox received quite did justice to its handmade pleasures (the wolf salute alone makes me want to hug Wes Anderson and not let go). And then, of course, there’s Up, the movie that’s repeated WALL-E‘s trick of emerging as possibly the year’s finest film while being made (at least ostensibly) for an audience still doing its shoes up with Velcro. Whichever way you look at it, in the context of the careless tat parents usually have to dodge or suffer through, the autumn of 2009 has been a vintage season.

But the snag is that at some point in the future, these two gleaming moments will recede, and life for the young cinephile will return to normal. And normal is a bleak business for children’s movies in Britain, a wearying parade of the slapdash and tossed-off. Which is why it’s doubly frustrating when some of the most genuinely brilliant kids’ films ever made aren’t even available, much less as accessible and celebrated as they should be. It’s a sorry situation that brings me muttering darkly to the subject of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T.

Because here’s a film, now more than 50 years old, that deserves just as much praise as Pixar, one every bit as magical as Up, albeit far, far stranger. The only film ever scripted by Theodor Geisel (better known professionally as Dr Seuss), 5,000 Fingers is the delirious, surrealist tale of the 10-year-old Bart Collins, trapped as one of 500 enslaved child pianists toiling in the institute of the fiendish music teacher Dr Terwilliker. And trust me when I say this slim premise provides the basis for a movie that could be slipped without hesitation into a midnight triple bill between The Wizard of Oz and Mulholland Drive. At the same time, it’s the kind of children’s film kids themselves love, at once riotous fun and possessed of untold layers of psychological weirdness.

In the scowling character actor Hans Conreid’s turn as Terwilliker, we have one of the truly great movie villains. The set designs are, without fail, wildly inventive: grand off-kilter arrangements of staircases, dungeons and giant keyboards rendered in Technicolor that, as Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, seemed inspired equally by Busby Berkeley and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (and which now in turn call to mind Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle). And that’s before we even get to the music: the handful of instantly unshakable songs and a central set piece in which green-painted prisoners perform a number on drums, xylophones and each other that must rank as one of the most unnerving musical interludes ever committed to film. Throw in the twins conjoined by their beard, the story of the film’s entire juvenile cast vomiting over the ornate Seussian set in an outbreak of mass nausea and the fact the results tanked at the box office (losing a then disastrous $1m), and this really is a movie not to be trifled with.

Little wonder then that a rare appearance on the big screen would be greeted with glee by the likes of GreenCine Daily’s Vadim Rizov. Here in Britain, however, we can’t even get the thing on DVD, being forced instead to brave slapped-on customs charges with an imported Region 1 copy. That may be due to labyrinthine issues of rights or, I fear more likely, an assumed lack of commercial appeal on the part of UK distributors. But the result is the same – a kid in HMV can harass his or her parents into buying as many copies as the credit card can stand of Daddy Day Care or Beverly Hills Chihuahua, but the most unhinged epic in the history of children’s cinema will be nowhere in sight.

And it’s not alone in that. Sadly nestled in the ranks of the finest children’s movies ever made are a number of titles that either aren’t available at all, or simply aren’t procurable in Britain. For instance, nice as it was to see the marvellously odd East German fairytale The Singing Ringing Tree reissued recently, other equally choice nuggets from the same DEFA stable (including such wonders as Little Mook and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs) remain out of reach. Likewise, The Boy With Green Hair, the 1948 atomic fable with a young Dean Stockwell as the orphan transformed by a world bent on war. And then there’s the still more plaintive case of The Phantom Tollbooth, Looney Tunes veteran Chuck Jones’s semi live-action adaptation of the kids’ novel about lonely Milo and his gift-wrapped gateway to another reality – troubled in production, sublime in execution and, for reasons unclear, never released on DVD anywhere at any point.

All told, it’s a sad tale. And whether the guilty party is contractual wrangling or the dumb judgment of the market, the losers are the audience – in this case a generation of kids deprived of the chance to grow up with some of the movies most likely to (in the very best sense) mess with their heads. And even those who stayed dry-eyed at Up could surely squeeze a tear out at the thought of that.

The Shining was voted most frightening horror ever at the start of the week. But new hit chiller Paranormal Activity is being sold as such. Can they both be right? Stuart Heritage invites you to a scary movie smackdown

What’s the scariest film of all time? It’s an age-old debate, and one that many thought could never be solved. After all, fear is such a personal and individual emotion that categorising any one thing as being definitively scarier than anything else seemed like a worthless pursuit. Or at least it did until a couple of people told the world what the scariest films of all time were recently. And now we know.

The scariest film of all time isn’t The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Don’t Look Now or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’t The Wicker Man, unless you’re terrified of weird hair and bad sweaters. And it definitely isn’t any of the Saw movies, for the simple reason that Jigsaw seems like the sort of person who’d quite enjoy a nice game of Sudoku. No, the scariest movie ever made is either Paranormal Activity or The Shining. It’s definitely one of those two.

The Shining has earnt its place because this week it was named as the scariest movie ever in a survey conducted by Totalscifionline.com. Meanwhile, recent American box office sensation Paranormal Activity is in the running because a couple of blogs said that it might be the scariest film of all time about a fortnight ago. But which one is the scariest? It’s impossible to say. The only thing that can decide this once and for all is science. And by “science” I mean “a middling sort of Top Trumps rip-off”. Ready?

Best urban myth about the film

They say that Stanley Kubrick refused to tell Danny Lloyd that he was starring in a horror during the filming of The Shining, which isn’t a very scary fact. They also say that Steven Spielberg convinced himself that his screener DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted. That isn’t a very scary fact either, but it wins on grounds of outright stupidity.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Influences

Stylistically and thematically, The Shining nods to both Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Hansel And Gretel, two stories that have frightened for generations. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity takes its lead from The Blair Witch Project – a film about some runny-nosed idiots running around a forest and whining a bit.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best parody

Even though it’s brand new, Paranormal Activity already has its fair share of YouTube parodies, the best of which seems to be Paranerdal Activity. But The Shining has Shining, the recut trailer that’s still as sublime as the first time you saw it almost four years ago. WINNER: The Shining.

Best cast pedigree

The Shining: Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shelly Duvall from Annie Hall. Paranormal Activity: Micah Stoat and Katie Featherstone from nothing else at all.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best reaction video

Terrified audience reaction videos are so key to Paranormal Activity’s success that they even make up much of the film’s trailer. Meanwhile, all The Shining can muster is this. The Shining makes toddlers giggle adorably. Fact.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Scariest title

Paranormal Activity has two scary things in it – the word “paranormal” and the word “activity”, which we already know will be of a paranormal nature because of the word that precedes it. Then there’s The Shining. You know what shines? A nice pair of new shoes. Shoes aren’t particularly scary.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Amount of racehorses named after lines from the film

The Shining has Red Rum, obviously, but until someone breeds a horse called Hey, It Looks Like Something’s Bit You, then it draws a big fat zero.
WINNER: The Shining.

So there it is. The Shining is the scariest film ever made. Now let’s hear no more about it.

The Shining was voted most frightening horror ever at the start of the week. But new hit chiller Paranormal Activity is being sold as such. Can they both be right? Stuart Heritage invites you to a scary movie smackdown

What’s the scariest film of all time? It’s an age-old debate, and one that many thought could never be solved. After all, fear is such a personal and individual emotion that categorising any one thing as being definitively scarier than anything else seemed like a worthless pursuit. Or at least it did until a couple of people told the world what the scariest films of all time were recently. And now we know.

The scariest film of all time isn’t The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Don’t Look Now or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’t The Wicker Man, unless you’re terrified of weird hair and bad sweaters. And it definitely isn’t any of the Saw movies, for the simple reason that Jigsaw seems like the sort of person who’d quite enjoy a nice game of Sudoku. No, the scariest movie ever made is either Paranormal Activity or The Shining. It’s definitely one of those two.

The Shining has earnt its place because this week it was named as the scariest movie ever in a survey conducted by Totalscifionline.com. Meanwhile, recent American box office sensation Paranormal Activity is in the running because a couple of blogs said that it might be the scariest film of all time about a fortnight ago. But which one is the scariest? It’s impossible to say. The only thing that can decide this once and for all is science. And by “science” I mean “a middling sort of Top Trumps rip-off”. Ready?

Best urban myth about the film

They say that Stanley Kubrick refused to tell Danny Lloyd that he was starring in a horror during the filming of The Shining, which isn’t a very scary fact. They also say that Steven Spielberg convinced himself that his screener DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted. That isn’t a very scary fact either, but it wins on grounds of outright stupidity.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Influences

Stylistically and thematically, The Shining nods to both Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Hansel And Gretel, two stories that have frightened for generations. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity takes its lead from The Blair Witch Project – a film about some runny-nosed idiots running around a forest and whining a bit.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best parody

Even though it’s brand new, Paranormal Activity already has its fair share of YouTube parodies, the best of which seems to be Paranerdal Activity. But The Shining has Shining, the recut trailer that’s still as sublime as the first time you saw it almost four years ago. WINNER: The Shining.

Best cast pedigree

The Shining: Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shelly Duvall from Annie Hall. Paranormal Activity: Micah Stoat and Katie Featherstone from nothing else at all.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best reaction video

Terrified audience reaction videos are so key to Paranormal Activity’s success that they even make up much of the film’s trailer. Meanwhile, all The Shining can muster is this. The Shining makes toddlers giggle adorably. Fact.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Scariest title

Paranormal Activity has two scary things in it – the word “paranormal” and the word “activity”, which we already know will be of a paranormal nature because of the word that precedes it. Then there’s The Shining. You know what shines? A nice pair of new shoes. Shoes aren’t particularly scary.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Amount of racehorses named after lines from the film

The Shining has Red Rum, obviously, but until someone breeds a horse called Hey, It Looks Like Something’s Bit You, then it draws a big fat zero.
WINNER: The Shining.

So there it is. The Shining is the scariest film ever made. Now let’s hear no more about it.

This tale of a young John Lennon, torn between his legendary mother and equally formidable aunt, is an accomplished feature debut from Sam Taylor-Wood

“A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror,” wrote Sigmund Freud – and Sigmund Freud was never twirled by his mum lasciviously around in a coffee bar to the novel sounds of rock’n'roll on the jukebox, and furthermore gigglingly taught by her that “rock’n'roll” actually means sex.

This was the dizzyingly erotic experience of the young John Lennon – played by 19-year-old newcomer Aaron Johnson – in this account of his painful, messy teenage years in 1950s Liverpool, written by Matt Greenhalgh (the author of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic, Control) and directed by Sam Taylor-Wood.

The mother in question is the legendary Julia, played by Anne-Marie Duff, a cheerful lover of good times and rock’n'roll in all senses, who had a mysterious breakdown after John’s birth and surrendered parental control to her sister, the Tchaikovsky-loving and equally legendary Aunt Mimi, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who brought him up strictly with genteel, middle-class values.

As adulthood dawns, John’s increasingly rebellious discontent manifests itself in re-establishing contact with the dangerous Julia, who passionately introduces him to his musical destiny. She and John begin a strange kind of Oedipal affair, with Julia as the mistress and Aunt Mimi the wronged wife. John’s story is the story of the duel between these two women – an intolerable situation for which music is the only way out.

Taylor-Wood interestingly begins her film with the opening, jangling chord from A Hard Day’s Night, left hanging in a protracted silence until its potential for implied menace and even tragedy has been allowed to float free. It’s a witty opening, but apart from pointed references to “nowhere” in the script and in the title, to a glimpse of Strawberry Field children’s home and to a schoolbook doodling of “Walrus”, Greenhalgh notably avoids cute prophetic touches. However, it has to be said Julia does hang around a bit possessively backstage, to the unease of both John and the young Paul McCartney, played by Thomas Sangster. Heroically, Greenhalgh avoids gags about John letting a woman get between him and the band.

It’s a handsomely made film, with a very game lead performance from Johnson, hampered perhaps only by the fact that Lennon is really a rather callow figure at this stage; unlike, say, the more interesting, more grownup Lennon that Ian Hart played in Iain Softley’s 1994 film Backbeat. When John shows Julia an EP record of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, she asks where he got it, and John says he swapped it with a bloke at the docks. “Swapped it for what?” Julia asks sharply, and John has no idea what she’s implying.

Throughout the movie, I had the sense that Lennon was really a supporting turn and the stars were Julia and Mimi, but that, frustratingly, we were only ever allowed to see them from John’s lairy and semi-comprehending point of view. John has to be the focus, and part of the movie’s point is his youth, his poignant inability to appreciate how much these women love him.

And the film does contrive a tearful crisis in which the awful secret origins of the Mimi-John-Julia love triangle are laid bare. But for me, this finale was a little stagey, is resolved too easily and disconcertingly discloses a more intense story which has been happening, as it were, behind the movie’s back.

None the less, this is an accomplished feature debut from Taylor-Wood, and a satisfying follow-up to her likeable short film Love You More.