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Charlie Chaplin first played the little tramp for which he is best remembered in 1914. By Chaplin's own account, Mack Sennett, to whose Keystone Film Company Chaplin was contracted, had [...]

Of all the pictures in 'American Sublime', Tate Britain's exhibition of 19th-century American landscape painting, perhaps the most awe-inspiring is Thomas Moran's Nearing Camp, Evening on the Upper Colorado River, [...]

This year marks the 50th anniversary,of the National Film Theatre. The present building s main auditorium is located underneath Waterloo Bridge and, the next time you go there indeed, the [...]

PHILIP KERR on why you don't need special effects when you've got Nicole Kidman The trouble with most Hollywood ghost stories is that they leave almost nothing to the imagination. [...]

PHILIP KERR is entertained by some blonde froth If gentlemen prefer blondes, does that mean brunettes have better sex? And what is the reason for Hollywood's enduring fascination with the [...]

PHILIP KERR looks at file in Afghanistan from beneath the burqa On the evidence of Kandahar, a timely film from the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it strikes me at there [...]

PHILIP KERR is left cold by the brothers' latest farrago The setting for The Man Who Wasn't There, the latest Coen brothers film, is quiet, clean, sleepy Santa Rosa, California, [...]

PHILIP KERR looks for the key to a curious Hollywood roman a clef Like Narcissus, or the BBC, there is nothing Hollywood likes to look at so much as itself. [...]

PHILIP KERR welcomes a good performance from a pocket-sized ham As the film director Luis Bunuel once admitted, being a film director is the most bourgeois profession in the world. [...]

PHILIP KERR is won over by the romantic comedy that has seduced the French Ever since the year 1206, when King John lost lands amounting to half of France to [...]

FILM PHILIP KERR defends the integrity of time-wasting, second-rate cinema Any fool can name his or her favourite films. But, without meaning to sound too much like Nick Hornby, I [...]

PHILIP KERR on how Steven Spielberg has delivered a really intelligent vision of the future According to Richard Dawkins, the true function of life is DNA survival: 'Everything makes sense [...]

PHILIP KERR gets a mouthful of Nicole Kidman I have read how the British have bad teeth. I used to have bad teeth. Now I have quite good teeth. The [...]

PHILIP KERR recommends a knight to remember This film is not Chaucer's The Knight's Tale; it's not even a parody of The Knight's Tale; this film is a hugely enjoyable [...]

PHILIP KERR is unmoved by much publicised scenes of gritty sex Intimacy, starring Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox, directed by Patrice Chreau, and written by Chreau and Hanif Kureishi, was [...]

PHILIP KERR says third time lucky for the makers of Jurassic Park Costa Rica, once famous for coffee and bananas, is now, thanks to the author Michael Crichton, perhaps better [...]

PHILIP KERR watches Mel Smith's latest comedy thriller fall flat on its face Watching a film - even a good one - usually requires that you hoist Disbelief into the [...]

PHILIP KERR finds nothing novel about the latest le Carre adaptation Rather like Hegel, Hollywood has fairly earned the honour of having ruined many a good idea by a series [...]

PHILIP KERR on a British formula that has delighted us long enough Looking at this old-fashioned relentlessly bourgeois, Giles cartoon of a film, based on Helen Fielding's best-selling book, it [...]

PHILIP KERR discovers that Robert De Niro is following the money, and not good scripts Fifteen minutes is slightly longer than it took me to realise that I was not [...]

PHILIP KERR on the film that moved him to a change of heart about asylum-seekers At the recent Bafta ceremony, the director Pawel Pawlikowski appeared quite surprised to win the [...]

Once, writing was avocation. Now it is just something that multi-talented celebrities fit into their busy schedules. Writing a novel is an act of egotistical self-assertion. When I was 18, [...]

Lee Harvey Oswald had a predecessor: a man who plotted to kill Kennedy three years before Dallas. Philip Kerr unearthed the story Wednesday 22 November 2000 marked the 37th anniversary [...]

Philip Kerr decides he has had enough of the Stalinist regime that runs Wimbledon tennis Each year that I go to the Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon, I promise my [...]

Adventures of a Suburban Boy John Boorman Faber & Faber, 314pp, 20 £ A river runs through it. Or so the film director John Boorman would have us believe. At [...]

Pompeii Robert Harris Hutchinson, 432pp, 17.99 £ On 23 August 79AD, Pompeii looked like arty other prosperous city in the Roman empire. People were moving about, trading gossip, and making [...]

London. Michaelmas term not yet begun, and Lord Hutton sitting in Court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Sticky summer weather. As much litter in the [...]

'We were called thrill-freaks, death-wishers, wound-seekers, war-lovers, hero-worshippers, closet queens, dope addicts, low-grade alcoholics, ghouls, communists, seditionists, more nasty things than I can remember.' That was Michael Herr, describing Vietnam [...]

PHILIP KERR on the nominations for the hits and misses of the year Emerson once wrote that one should never read a book that isn't at least a year old. [...]

And Why Not? (As I Never Did Say): memoirs of a film lover Barry Norman Simon & Schuster, 349pp, £16.99 Discounts at www.newstatesman.co.uk 'And why not?' Did Barry Norman ever [...]

It was the best of times, it was the worst at times... it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we [...]

Last year, while being limo'd from New York's JFK airport into Manhattan, and exchanging the usual jet lagged conversational bromides with the driver, I was quizzed about the weather in [...]

Exactly 30 years ago, a young film director started to write a movie treatment that was a hybrid of Buck Rogers movies and the novels of Carlos Castaneda. By May [...]

I've been thinking about Billy Wilder, who died at the end of March aged 95, and recalling a conversation I once had with him about why he was selling his [...]

I have no objection to Sidney Poitier receiving a lifetime achievement award at last month's Oscars ceremony, but the truth of the matter is that he has not made a [...]

Nearly every time Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr met for a beer, they argued about two things: space-time and the movies. Einstein believed that a movie could give a complete [...]

As the father of two small boys, I am obliged to go to a A lot of films for children; to their consternation, I rarely ever watch the movie, preferring [...]

'All happy families resemble one another,' wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, 'but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' This is one of the most famous first lines [...]

'There is no great genius without some touch of madness,' wrote Seneca. He knew a thing or two about madness, having been the emperor Nero's speech-writer; even so, Seneca was [...]

I recently returned from Goldeneye, in Jamaica. Built by Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, Goldeneye is possibly the most luxurious house in the whole of the [...]

Ernest Rutherford, who made his chief contribution to science with his nuclear theory of the atom in 1911, was later of the opinion that the idea of liberating atomic energy [...]

A couple of years ago, I had a meeting with the film director Michael Mann in a penthouse suite at London's Metropolitan Hotel. Soon, I had formed the impression of [...]

Johnny Depp was hailed as the best actor of his generation for his performance in Donnie Brasco; but based on the evidence of some of his other films, it's difficult [...]

Love-in-idleness. It's a herb, the juice of which, on sleeping eyelids laid, makes man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature seen. You can't buy it at the [...]

It was with a sense of real trepidation that I sat down to watch Fred Schepisi's film of Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winning novel, Last Orders. After all, several recent film [...]

The other day, in search of the perfect Christmas gift for my mother, I tried to buy David Lynch's Blue Velvet on DVD and discovered it was out of stock. [...]

They don't make'em like this any more. It says everything about the state of cinema in 2001 that the best film I've seen on the big screen this year was [...]

In April 1894, the world's first Kinetoscope Parlor opened at 1155 Broadway, in New York City. The Kinetoscope was a peephole machine that showed a short film strip, processed at [...]

As Michael Hofmann makes clear in the introduction to his excellent new translation of Ernst Junger's book Storm of Steel (Penguin, 14.99 £), Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the [...]

The movie Seabiscuit is for those like me who tend to feel that 'they don't make them like that any more'--because clearly, on the evidence of this excellent little film, [...]