In the sitting room of the West London home of Ray Harryhausen, the special-effects pioneer and stop-motion animation legend, there is a shelf that bristles with awards, including the lifetime-achievement Oscar that he was presented in 1991. There are exquisitely crafted bronze figures of some of the most iconic creatures (he prefers the more empathetic term “creature” to “monster”) from 20th-century cinema. And on the coffee table are two mugs of tea, a plate of ginger biscuits and Medusa, one of the stars of the original 1981 version of Clash of the Titans, which was recently remade as a 3-D, CGI extravaganza. “I haven’t seen it. It’s somebody else’s interpretation. They wanted me to get involved [in the remake] but I just couldn’t.” This didn’t stop the film-makers borrowing heavily from Harryhausen’s distinctive vision.

After sitting through Sex and the City 2, all I can say is, bring back the squirting vagina. Fans of the television series will remember the outrageous episode in which Samantha was going through a lesbian phase and got a squirt as unexpected as a jet of water from a clown’s trick flower. That incident summed up the TV Sex and the City at its best: funny, frank and daring. It was a great gynaecological look at the loves and lives of the metropolitan modern girl. Look at it now. What a tame, bland, bloated and tedious thing it has become. It’s all middle-aged and overweight. (It lasts for 2½ hours!) It’s sad and saggy; when it tries to sparkle, you can see its dentures. There are stretchmarks around the lips from the strain of fake smiles.

It’s axiomatic that war is 90% boredom. When I was much younger, I couldn’t understand why my grandfather’s most potent memory of D-day was not landing on Sword Beach, but the boredom and uncertainty of the days building up to the great offensive. My book The Junior Officers’ Reading Club was born not under fire in the desert around Basra, but idly passing the time behind a tent in the sprawling Camp Shaibah, tanning on improvised loungers under the Iraqi sun. Even in the intense fighting in Afghanistan, most soldiers will spend long days in sapping routine in primitive, defensive patrol bases (PBs), simply trying to pass the time.

Stanley Kubrick described it as “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”. That’s some commendation, not least from Kubrick, who had a propensity for challenging material, and whose films — Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining — featured some deliciously warped individuals. The novel was Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp-fiction classic The Killer Inside Me. Kubrick had employed Thompson as a writer on his crime drama The Killing and his anti-war film Paths of Glory, in the 1950s, but, perhaps surprisingly, didn’t go on to make a screen version of The Killer Inside Me himself. Not even he, though, would have brought Thompson’s novel to the screen with more visceral, gut-wrenching punch — punch being the operative word — than Michael Winterbottom.

Sam Taylor-Wood leads the way out on to the roof terrace of her office-cum-HQ close to the Barbican in London and, to her relief, sees that a table has been set. “I’m afraid food is going to have to be involved,” she says, her right hand tracing the curve of her belly. “If I go somewhere and there’s nothing to eat I turn into a complete and panicking wreck.”

After a dizzyingly busy 2009 — when he and his Gavin & Stacey co-star James Corden became so ubiquitous (films, sketch shows, hosting award bashes) that it started to count against them — Mathew Horne is taking it easy. He had to after collapsing on stage during a performance of Entertaining Mr Sloane in the West End. “There was definitely a sense of my body saying, ‘That’s it, no more, you’re going to stop right now!’ ” Horne, 31, says. “I wasn’t going to slow down otherwise.” Recently he played the Culture Club drummer Jon Moss in the well-received TV biopic on Boy George, Worried about the Boy, and is judging a short film competition. “I’ve decided to choose more unique, standalone projects. I’ve been afforded the luxury of being able to be a bit more picky.” Is there the nagging feeling that he will always be remembered as Gavin? “It’s going to be very difficult for anybody to be released from a definitive role like that. So it’s important for me to mix it up now. But I’m not saying Gavin won’t prevail for a long, long time.”

Emma Roberts is not a fan of nudity. Not her own, anyway. “I would show my back and my butt on camera, but I would never go topless,” says the 19-year-old actress, tween icon and Hollywood heiress (her aunt is Julia Roberts, her father Eric Roberts). “Going topless is so tasteless, and I prefer to leave all that stuff to people’s imagination,” she pronounces wisely, from a secluded restaurant booth in an even more secluded West End hotel. She is kohl-eyed, with dirty blonde and bedraggled hair, and sports a gold Marc Jacobs safety-pin earring, a graffiti-style sleeveless Tibi top and the mock dishevelled mien of a “sk8ter-girl” supermodel. She is tiny. Kylie tiny. And though she has the frame of a sparrow, she has the handshake of a builder.

Laura Silverman Like the principle of drinking at parties, mixing your shows is a no-no unless you’re Larry David or a youngish Woody Allen. Here, the onscreen Larry creates a Seinfeld reunion to get back with his fictional ex-wife Cheryl. I missed the Nineties sitcom but even I gathered that the interplay between levels of fictional reality was multi-storied genius.

Click here to watch a clip of StreetDance on our new site, thetimes.co.uk

As Juliette Binoche took the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, she wore a strapless white dress and carried a large sign. The name on it was Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who has been imprisoned for allegedly making “the wrong kind of films” and is now on hunger strike. Tears filled Binoche’s eyes, and she said: “I hope Jafar Panahi will be here next year.”

John: We moved to Ireland when I was directing Leo the Last, starring Marcello Mastroianni, in 1970. I’d fallen in love with the Wicklow Hills, just south of Dublin, so my first wife [Christel Kruse, a costume designer] and I started looking around for a holiday home. I’d been living in Los Angeles, but I wasn’t very happy there. We already had four children — Charley was the third, born just ahead of his twin, Daisy — and it soon became clear we weren’t all going to fit into a traditional Irish cottage. An estate agent showed us this Georgian rectory, which was being auctioned the following day in Dublin, and then I just happened to be passing by the agency at the exact moment the sale started. I walked in, sat down and had this sort of out-of-body experience. There were two people bidding for it and one of them was me! Suddenly people were congratulating me and shaking my hand. I paid £21,500 for the house, a lot of money in those days.

Stage nerves aren’t a Richard Coyle speciality. Into the foyer of the Donmar Warehouse he strolls, 90 minutes from curtain-up, casual as you like. He’s dressed in a grungy check shirt and jeans, mixed with a business jacket, and the ensemble is topped with several days’ beard growth and a gloriously unkempt explosion of curls — a sort of fledgling white man’s afro. A few minutes late, Coyle cheerily lofts the reason, a shopping bag: “New five-a-side ball.”

1 The radio & TV western: The Lone Ranger (1933-) Like Old West precursors of Batman and Robin, the Lone Ranger and sidekick Tonto kept the wild frontier free of crime across radio, TV and B-movie serials. A fantasy symbol of innocent heroism, this do-gooder later inspired numerous novels, comic books and cartoons.

Cannes, from what I have seen from afar, has always seemed like the epicentre of surreality. Up close it is, if anything, even more surreal. We arrived on Sunday in a charming seaside town thronged with sightseers, journalists, aspiring actresses scarcely out of their teens, and white guys in linen blazers with tans and mobile phones. But daily this small, easygoing place is transformed, as the pressure of tens of thousands of people buying, selling, watching and writing about fantasy — with some documentary thrown in — grows. Every day the crowds grow thicker, the energy level higher and the fashion sense on the Croisette, the elegant sweep of palm-fringed pedestrian walkway by the sea, more extreme and startling.

Sex and the City is back on the big screen. After a whopping £280 million box-office haul by the first movie, in which the franchise heroine Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) finally married the swoonsome Big (Chris North), the ladies are back for another blingtastic adventure. This time there’s a week-long spending splurge in Abu Dhabi on the menu, plus a possible romantic distraction for Carrie. And yet, as the franchise that began in 1994 with a newspaper column by Candace Bushnell cruises disgracefully into its twilight years — Samantha (Kim Cattrall) celebrated her 50th birthday at the end of the last movie — what has been its abiding legacy, how has it affected popular culture, and is there life in the old girls yet? Six experts give their opinions.

For more than 20 years Valerie Plame-Wilson’s most important professional consideration was to stay below the radar.

Few albums are as soaked in the mythology of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll as Exile on Main St by the Rolling Stones.

Carlos the Jackal, one of the most feared international terrorists of the 1970s, took to the airwaves from his French prison yesterday to vent his wrath. His target was not an imperialist plot of the type that the self-styled revolutionary used to combat. He was just upset over his portrayal in a movie biography that was screened at the Cannes festival.

Ever since Charlie Chaplin went to California to make his name in silent films, British talent has moved to Hollywood for a chance to prove itself. Almost a century later at least one prominent American film-maker thinks that the tide is starting to turn.