Entry One.

Leatherheads: George Clooney's attempt at a modern update of the screwball classics of the 30s and 40s isn't as bad as I'd been led to believe. Clooney stars as 'Dodge' Connelly, an over-the-hill pro-football player, who, in trying to save his team from bankruptcy, enlists the services of war hero 'Bullet' Rutherford (John Kraskinski), while a sassy reporter (Renee Zellweger) is hot on his trails for a big story. It's pretty funny in places, and features good performances from the three leads, but it's more like Bull Durham than Bringing Up Baby. Whether that's a good thing is up to you.

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising: Abysmally dull fantasy, starring a whole lot of people who should probably know better. Will Stanton is a 13 year old American living with his recently emigrated family when he is told that he is the legendary "Seeker": a person who has the ability to see the signs so he can collect The Signs to help battle the forces of darkness. Accompanying him are some fabled "Old Ones" who don't really do anything apart from explain everything to death and get in the way a lot. The bad guy is even worse: the director could've looped one of Christopher Eccleston's lines ("Give me the Signs!") 50 or 60 times over and been finished with the actor in about 10 minutes.

Bright Eyes: Comedy drama from the 1930's starring the prolific youngster Shirley Temple, as a recently orphaned girl who is caught in a custody battle between a curmudgeonly uncle and her devoted God-Father. As with most of Temple's early films, your enjoyment will depend on how much you can take of her oh-so-cutesy performance. I find her kinda adorable, but wince whenever she breaks into song and her voice enters the "glass-breaking" vocal range.

Little Miss Marker: Another Temple film (she really was prolific in the 30s), though this one's a little better: buoyed by the presence of Adolphe Menjou as the grouch she charms into submission. Here, Temple plays a girl left orphaned by the suicide of her father, who has left her as a marker for a bet to the miserly Sorrowful Jones (Anime name alert!), played by Menjou. Initally bad tempered, with a few sweet words (and some hilariously unsweet ones) she wins him over and everything ends nicely.

Futuropolis: 40 minute animated sci-fi film from the 80s, which mixes traditional hand-drawn stuff with stop motion. 4 spacemen are sent out to investigate a series of galactic-wide disasters, which have resulted in the mutation of several species. With it's slightly crazed pace and non-sequitir humour, it at times resembles some of the more recent work of Robot Chicken, though it's more of a pastiche of old sci-fi serials than a mockery of them. I'd say at 40 minutes, the movie is slightly too long as the movie gets bogged down in unfunny and overlong sketches, but it's undeniably well made and features one or two laugh out loud moments.

Video Vixens: Pretty lame sex comedy from the 70s, where an insane TV executive, paranoid that the goverment is intentionally turning everyone gay, decides to put pornography on prime time TV. What follows is a patchy attempt at satire, where normal commercials are replaced by ones using explicit sexuality - i.e. Passion is the perfume rapists prefer! - and lousy punchlines. In the same mould as, but nowhere near as good as Russ Meyer's best films.