A new album on the way?

Classics that should be seen and not heard

Frederica Sagor Maas went to Hollywood in her early 20s determined to be a writer.

Uncle Marty seems to have little clue how to amuse kids in a film supposedly made for them

What better film to celebrate the season with than Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, particularly when it comes with orchestral accompaniment and Carl Davis?

Frank McGuinness's emotionally rich and highly enjoyable new play has a Chekhovian structure. As in Uncle Vanya, an outsider descends on a provincial community, throws the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons and then departs, having caused changes for good and ill. McGuinness is not the first Irish writer to work humane and tragicomic variations on this formula. The unique selling point of his new play, which is premiered in Nicolas Kent's atmospheric and beautifully acted and designed production at the Tricycle, is a fresh sexual and cultural twist.

A master of verbal humour obsessed with the comic constructions of the silent era, Paul Merton celebrates the gags of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd with expert insight and a fan's enthusiasm.

"Why another book?" asks Simon Louvish, at the beginning of this dense tome. It's more than 30 years since Charles Chaplin died, there's no anniversary in the offing, and there are lots of books about him, as the bibliography at the back of this one confirms. Louvish's sources are mainly secondary and he makes no boasts about new revelations. Yet it's a mark of his rich scholarship (and the richness of his subject) that you finish this book feeling glad he wrote it, rather than wondering why he did.

The French do things differently from us in the Anglo-Saxon world. And comedy is no exception. The cinematic work of Jacques Tati has been likened to that of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, even Rowan Atkinson, whose Mr Bean recalls many of Tati's mannerisms.