Producing

If an old-age-pensioner were menaced in the street by a teenage boy, the police might well be summoned. It seems it is fair enough in the cinema however for Harry Potter to take on James Bond head-to-head.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, opened nationwide on Friday five days ahead of James Bond’s 20th "official" outing, as if the ageing secret agent can no longer quite keep up. That does not take into account extensive Harry Potter "previews" last weekend, which gave the lad an £8 million start.

Sanjeev Bhaskar talks about the current trend in Bollywood movies and British Asian comedy's influence on the UK mainstream. He plays the chef in The Guru alongside Jimi Mistry and Heather Graham.

An advertisement in cinema magazine Screen International launches James Bond rights holders on path of shadowy agent. 

Not only is James Bond up against an old adversary he thought he had killed off, he is also facing a mysterious agent from Amsterdam, who communicates with the world through the press. What the Dutchman is selling would make any self-respecting secret agent twitchy - he is offering James Bond to the highest bidder.

What do you get when you put George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Don Cheadle, plus veteran producer Jerry Weintraub and Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh in a room with journalists? Enough heat to melt by.

The room in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Los Angeles is, not unexpectedly, buzzing. A group of eager journalists have gathered on a Saturday night in December to discuss Steven Soderbergh's smooth and ultra-cool reworking of the Sixties Rat Pack caper flick, Ocean 's 11.

The Lord of the Rings saga has created a fanatical following, but the New Zealand director, Peter Jackson, says he is no "slavish Tolkien interpreter".

The production company behind the first Harry Potter film scrounged its first copy of the book, but that was long before big-shot film directors came knocking at its door. 

Shrek is unlike any animated film you have ever seen. A cartoon for adults, it’s a fractured fairy tale for everyone. The film’s directors, DreamWorks head honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg and director Andrew Adamson, share the inside scoop on the making of Shrek.

“When we started Shrek, we wanted to make a fairy tale come to life,” says New Zealander Andrew Adamson, who directed the film with Vicky Jenson, “as if you opened a storybook and stepped into that world.”

On paper, it should have been a cinch ­ reassemble the team that turned Thomas Harris's thriller The Silence Of The Lambs into an Oscar-winning phenomenon and crank out another edition of everyone's favourite cannibal franchise.

In practice, the story of Hannibal's evolution from best-selling novel to blockbuster film unwinds with all the ease of a Gordian knot, the only certainties being that it was a best-selling novel and it will be a box office smash.

What does a Swedish film director look like? More to the point, what does a Swedish film director whose early work includes Abba: The Movie and a segment for The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour that was dropped from the final edit look like? Bitter, probably.

Waiting to meet Lasse Hallström, then, I'm half expecting a grim Benny Anderson-Bjorn Borg hybrid: wispy beard, blonde hair, good English, bad headband, white flared Elvis-in-Stockholm jumpsuit. 

Twenty six years after it was initially withdrawn from cinema screens Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is finally receiving a full UK wide distribution. Rajan Malhotra looks at how, with its notorious scenes of violence, A Clockwork Orange became one of the most darkly enigmatic works of the cinematic age.

During its absence, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange has taken on a mystique which has rarely surrounded a film since. It has achieved a notoriety which has, over the years, given it something akin to legendary status.