Poetry – review

Yun Jeong-hie in the Korean drama Poetry: 'a remarkable central performance'.

The body of a teenage girl floats down a river in Korea. Mija, a neatly dressed, 65-year-old, working-class widow, is diagnosed with early Alzheimer's. Every afternoon, she attends to an old man suffering from a stroke who seeks sexual relief from her and she waits hand and foot on her lazy, ungrateful grandson while her daughter is working in Seoul.

PoetryProduction year: 2010Countries: Rest of the world, South Korea Cert (UK): 12ARuntime: 139 minsDirectors: Lee Chang-Dong, Lee ChangdongCast: An Haesong, David Lee, Kim Hee-Jeong, Kim Hira, Kim Yongbaek, Yun JungheeMore on this film

Meanwhile, she joins a poetry class at a social centre and wonders about personal creativity. What unites the various strands of an apparently simple woman's life and a society she struggles to understand? The answers are gradually provided by a thoughtful, cleverly developed script.

As her mind becomes clouded by dementia, Mija is drawn into a conspiracy by a group of parents at a school to cover up a suicide brought about by rape and humiliation involving her grandson. Steadily, she acts with a new moral and social awareness, organises what remains of her life and discovers the inspiration to write poetry. A fascinating, satisfying film with a remarkable central performance.

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Story of love and tomatoes leads Bollywood's global charge

Actors Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif in the Tomatina scene from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

It took more than 16 tonnes of tomatoes to turn the coming-of-age film, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, into the latest international cinema hit from Bollywood. The feelgood road movie's subsequent huge success, both inside and outside India, is being taken as evidence that the country's cinema is ready for global lift-off.

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Won't Get Life Back Again) follows three young friends on a raucous trip through Spain. The film has grossed more than $3.8m internationally, the best figures for an Indian release this year. It has also led the charge in a record-breaking domestic summer at the box-office.

The tomatoes were used by the film's director, Zoya Akhtar, to recreate the chaos of the La Tomatina festival in the small Valencian town of Bunol. Such attention to detail was another sign of a growing confidence that Bollywood could eventually mount a serious challenge to Hollywood for world cinema takings.

London-based Kishore Lulla, executive chairman of the film company Eros International, believes that thanks to India's economic boom, its film business will grow exponentially during the coming decade. "Once that happens, marriage between Hollywood and Bollywood will take place," he said in a recent interview. "Bollywood will be of a size that will matter to the world."

Eros, which purchased and marketed Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, has seen its share price rise by more than 10% in the past month alone. Established by Lulla's father in Mumbai in 1977, the company's initial focus was on distributing Bollywood films abroad. Things began to change after Lulla moved to London and took over control a decade later. Today Eros has an annual turnover of 75 films as a producer, co-producer or buyer, and made a net profit last year of $55m on revenues of $164m.

"Eros began in a very small way, but today we're India's biggest vertically integrated company," said Kamal Jain, the chief financial officer in Mumbai. "We have the largest film library with 1,100 films; we dub films into 27 languages and distribute them in 50 countries; and we have a presence in every segment of the business, from production to satellite TV to new media."

India produces around 1,100 films a year in several languages, with Bollywood a major centre for Hindi film production. Management consultancy KPMG sees tremendous potential for growth for the media and entertainment industry during the next five years, from the current $17bn annually to an estimated $29bn by 2015. Bollywood moguls such as Lulla appear confident that $100bn is possible in 10 years.

Their optimism is based on demography. More than 350 million Indians are now ranked as middle class, most of them young with much more money to spend than their parents had. There is also a diaspora of 50 million South Asians with estimated assets of $1 trillion and a passion for cinema.

Bollywood is changing as India surges ahead. "The film business became more professional during the last decade once the government made bank finance available," said Jehil Thakkar from KPMG . "Professionalism still remains a challenge, but companies such as Eros have brought in a new dynamism."

The old drawbacks in Indian creative industries have also begun to recede. Producers are no longer dependent upon shady financiers, many of them from the criminal underworld. Professionally managed film companies have brought in American-style studio practices.

Though the number of cinema screens is still very low for a country of India's size, multiplexes in glittering new malls charge high ticket prices and are increasingly attracting a well-heeled audience. And diversification has taken away the earlier life-and-death dependence on box-office hits. "Even before a film gets released it brings in 60% of its income," said Jain. "Slicing and dicing is the name of the game. We pre-sell the music, the satellite TV rights, the radio rights, new media such as mobile telephone ringtones – which is seeing enormous growth – inflight entertainment rights, and so on. To top it all, our huge library accounts for 20% of our revenue, providing considerable financial stability."

But even if Bollywood films are better made and better marketed today, they still sing an old tune. As Lulla said, "all Indian films are love stories – we Indians are very emotional people. Like Hollywood in the 30s, it's escapism cinema."

Zoya Akhtar believes that the huge impact of satellite TV is changing audience tastes in India, but the content of Bollywood films limits their appeal internationally. "In India, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara made more money than Harry Potter, which is crazy," she said. "But for a non-South Asian audience, I would make the film differently, I would change the idiom."

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Best and worst of Britain's subsidised film-makers revealed

In the balance ... the majority of subsidised films in the UK (James Marsh's Man on Wire excepted) haven't repaid their debts. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Who is Britain's most commercially successful film-maker of the past five years – at least among those backed by lottery money from the UK Film Council? Take a bow, James Marsh. His Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire repaid 100% of its UKFC investment, and his chimpanzee documentary Project Nim is set to follow suit.

According to figures published quietly in Hansard last week by culture minister Ed Vaizey, only two other films since 2006 – St Trinian's and The King's Speech – have so far returned their lottery cash in full. Streetdance 3D is also expected to do so.

And who must own up to being the least successful of Britain's lottery-subsidised film-makers? According to the figures, that unwanted honour goes to Stephen Frears. Two of his recent films have received some ?1.7m in funding from the UK Film Council – ?1m for Cheri and ?780,000 for Tamara Drewe – but have yet to pay back a single penny.

The information has come to light after Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt asked Vaizey to provide details on returns from all films backed by the UKFC, and he duly obliged in a written answer. Vaizey identified 33 films which recouped some or all of the lottery funding they were awarded between April 2006 and March this year, when the UKFC closed and its duties passed to the British Film Institute.

But this answer failed to mention all those movies that have paid back nothing. A trawl through the data on the UKFC website reveals a further 25 films in the same time period – between 2006 and 2009 – which received at least ?300,000 but have paid back precisely zero. (For the sake of fairness, our research excluded films from 2010 that haven't had time to earn anything, as well as experimental projects awarded less than ?300,000).

By 31 March 2011, the date of its shutdown, the UKFC had, from its investment of ?41.1m into these 58 films, earned a grand total of ?8.1m. That 20% rate of return may seem modest, but many films – particularly those from 2009 – still have a lot of earning ahead of them.

There are some obvious quirks on the list. The King's Speech has officially recouped 95% because the UKFC gave the producers a 5% share – and is likely to single-handedly double the average recoupment figures when its profits start to flow back to the BFI over the next few years.

Marsh's Project Nim is currently showing a zero return, but that will change dramatically when its recent American sale to HBO is banked. Even Tamara Drewe is expected to save some of Frears's blushes by paying 20-30%, although the expensive Cheri, with its ?23m budget, is almost certainly a lost cause.

There are some unexpected success stories, however. Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy has paid back a surprisingly robust 87% of its ?1.2m award, despite only grossing ?5m worldwide. Jane Campion's Bright Star managed an 81% payback from just ?8m in receipts. Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham has already returned 80% from a ?9m box office take. All earned their money from strong foreign sales.

By contrast, Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray grossed ?15m worldwide, but has reportedly repaid nothing, a victim of its sizable budget and an underlying deal structure which left the UKFC at the back of the queue for repayment.

Other losers include expensive flops Brideshead Revisited and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which have both returned a mere 1% of the ?1.4m they each received. The Michael Caine vigilante film Harry Brown was a notable UK box office hit in 2009, but has repaid only 2% of the ?1m it was given from lottery funds.

Films not mentioned by Vaizey, and therefore drawing a complete blank, include Stephen Poliakoff's 1939, which received ?970,000, Armando Iannucci's In the Loop (?515,000), Michael Winterbottom's Genova (?500,000), Anand Tucker's When Did You Last See Your Father? (?570,000), Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts (?800,000), and Gabor Csupo's The Secret of Moonacre (?1.23m).

By international standards, any project that pays back more than half its public subsidy is doing well. Outside the UK, it's increasingly rare for any subsidised film to recoup 100%. But the UKFC always took a more aggressive approach to getting its money back than other national film agencies. In fact, its insistence on doing so was arguably one reason for its downfall. Producers complained that the UKFC used its recoupment to pay its own overheads at the expense of film-makers.

That's why the UKFC changed its terms in its final year to share its position with producers and reinvest its recoupment into production. But by then it was too late. Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt decided the UKFC was paying its staff too much, and required elimination.

But there was a reason why the UKFC execs were paid so well. Getting money back from tricksy distributors isn't a job for amateurs. Without the sleuthing skills of the UKFC's debt collectors, perhaps only half of that ?8m would have been found.

There are already whispers that the BFI isn't quite so hot on the trail. But it needs to be. The acid test will be how much of the King's Speech income it can claw back from the Weinstein Company. It's unlikely to be a mission for the fainthearted.

• Read the full figures regarding recoupment of UK Film Council awards between April 1 2006 and March 31 2011

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Whisky Galore – review

High spirits: Basil Radford in Whisky Galore. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The year 1949 was a pretty miserable time in Britain. Postwar austerity was at its height. Many city centres were still largely bomb sites. The cold war was getting chillier. The British film industry was in crisis after the Labour government had imposed a punitive tax on American films, which led to Hollywood studios withholding their product. Then suddenly, in the early summer, three pictures opened on consecutive weeks that together defined what we now know as "the Ealing comedy". The films got darker and Ealing Studios' reputation greater as the month wore on.

Whisky GaloreProduction year: 1949Country: UKCert (UK): URuntime: 81 minsDirectors: Alexander MackendrickCast: Basil Radford, Joan GreenwoodMore on this film

In the first, Passport to Pimlico, a London borough, supported by a recently discovered medieval document, declares itself to be part of ancient Burgundy and thus an independent state. In the second, Whisky Galore, the thirsty inhabitants of a remote Scottish village hijack the cargo of a whisky-laden merchantman wrecked on their shores during the second world war and defy the authorities to repossess it. The third film, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, has as its hero a bitterly aggrieved Victorian outcast from an aristocratic family who avenges his mother's death by killing all the relatives between himself and a seat in the Lords.

The populist politics of discontent were later to be identified as Poujadism, a term attached to a short-lived revolt of the petite bourgeoisie against the stifling bureaucracy of France's Fourth Republic, and led by shopkeeper Pierre Poujade in 1953. These Ealing films were skilfully scripted, visually observant and performed by what we now see as a rep company of stars and character actors, and a collegial team working behind the camera.

The comedies were part of their times and yet transcend them – they live on to comment on later eras. Whisky Galore, for instance, based on a novel by the early Scottish nationalist Compton Mackenzie, is a colourful contribution to the current debate on the future of Scotland.

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Cross of Iron

James Coburn as the 'undemonstratively courageous' Sgt Steiner in Cross of Iron. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

In this Anglo-German film of Willi Heinrich's 1956 novel, life is very noisy on the Eastern Front in 1943 as ex-US Marine Sam Peckinpah turns a savage but compassionate eye upon a demoralised German unit fighting a rearguard action against the Russians by the Black Sea. In particular, he examines the conflict between an ambitious, cowardly Prussian aristocrat, Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell), and the undemonstratively courageous Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn). James Mason as the commanding officer and David Warner as his adjutant are both first rate, as are Coburn and Schell. This was Peckinpah's last important work and his only war movie. Robert Aldrich, whose war movies include Attack and The Dirty Dozen, was greatly admired by Peckinpah. Aldrich had wanted to film Heinrich's novel ever since it was published and except for Peckinpah's characteristic use of slow motion, this classic movie (only available on Blu-ray) is fairly close to the way he'd have made it.

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A Better Life – review

Jose Julian and Demian Bichir in Chris Weitz's tense A Better Life.

Chris Weitz is nothing if not eclectic. Having worked alone or in collaboration with his brother, Paul, on the envelope-pushing American Pie, screen versions of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and Nick Hornby's About a Boy and one of the overwrought Twilight teen-vampire films, he's now made what is in effect a transposition to California of the 1948 neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves, the work of another highly eclectic moviemaker, Vittorio De Sica.

A Better LifeProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 97 minsDirectors: Chris WeitzCast: Bobby Soto, Chelsea Rendon, Demian Bichir, Josie JulianMore on this film

The oppressed hero is now an illegal immigrant from Mexico (played by leading Mexican actor Demian Bichir) and the bike has become a pick-up truck, an essential tool for his job as a gardener in Los Angeles. The thief is again a pathetic figure in as desperate a position as the hero. The son, however, is no longer an adoring little boy but a surly teenager estranged from his father. In many ways, the protagonist's situation is worse here than in the Italian original, because any false move could put him in the hands of the immigration department, with the almost certain prospect of deportation. It's a small, convincing, tightly constructed movie about an urgent, seemingly insoluble problem.

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This much I know: Samuel L Jackson

"The best advice I've been given is: when the camera passes you, look like there's something on your mind": Samuel L Jackson Photograph: James Cheadle/James Cheadle /eyevine

I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I'd learned to play golf when I was younger. It's my peace of mind for the day: when I'm off work I'm at the golf course by 6.30 in the morning.

I've heard I have a temper. I can get annoyed. I try not to, because I always look at film sets as a place of joy – we're coming to work to make believe.

All my theatre training has served me well in terms of preparation – my agent tells me my greatest flaw is that when I go to work on a movie set I expect everyone to be as prepared as I am.

I'm surrounded by myself in my office. When I look around I see lots of little "me"s – it's kinda fun.

Being famous is something I enjoy. I'm not going to deny it, because it allows me access to a lot of things. It's good to be famous and liked, not famous and disliked, put it that way. People like me.

The best advice I've ever been given is: whenever the camera passes you, always look like there's something on your mind.

It amazes people to see me walking around by myself. I guess they get used to famous people having bodyguards. I walk the streets of London all the time. People say: "Do you know who you look like?" and I go: "No, who?"

Lots of people quote my lines at me. That's how I met Marlon Brando. I was at a benefit when this voice appeared behind me doing Ezekiel 25:17 [Jackson's speech from Pulp Fiction] and it was Marlon. I was just like: "Get outta here." He gave me his phone number and I gave him mine. From time to time I'd get a message saying Mr Brando wants you to call him, and every time I called it would say it was a Chinese restaurant.

I go and see my own films all the time. I'm not one of those actors who claims they can't stand to watch themselves. I'm like: well, if I can't stand to watch me, why would I expect you to go pay to watch me?

I'm most proud of the fact that my daughter is a well-rounded individual who has never been arrested and never been in a tabloid.

I read way too much to have a favourite book – I'm always looking for new stuff to read. At the moment I'm reading a history of the word "motherfucker". I'm actually in it as one of the great purveyors of the word.

There's a distinct correlation between me being successful and me being clean. Rehab gave me a chance to find out that I could get outside myself and be OK with who I am without a substance. Since I became successful I've been offered more cocaine than I could ever possibly use, but I don't feel the need to do it.

I enjoy every day above ground that I get to have. Getting older is just one of those things that happens – if you keep getting up every day, you're going to get older. I'm amazed when I look in the mirror sometimes. I go: wow, do you know how old you are?

Samuel L Jackson is hosting the Fitflop Shooting Stars Benefit 2011, raising vital funds for Make-A-Wish Foundation UK (make-a-wish.org.uk)

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