If you thought this was the year of touchy-feely Forrest Gumpness, think again. Whatever you choose from this year's selection of 180 new features at the London Film Festival, there's bound to be a corpse hidden in there somewhere. When Reservoir Dogs played at the LFF two years ago, the concern about, and lust for, violence had just begun to stir with films like The Living End and Benny's Video. Now, with Pulp Fiction in town, not to mention Killing Zoe and Sleep With Me , it's all become too much. With that in mind, and with telephone booking opening today (071-928 3232), here's a preliminary guide to 10 films you shouldn't miss.

Liz Rideal has worked with photobooth images since 1985. In a kind of alchemical process, she ingeniously transforms them into everything from abstract representations of the seasons to renaissance paintings (above).

He has been married, so far, three times. His regular screenwriter, Paul Gegauff, was stabbed to death by his own wife after making a movie, Une Partie de Plaisir, about the breakdown of that marriage. He has just finished a film called Hell, whose original director - Henri- Georges Clouzot - suffered a heart attack, or went bonkers, depending on your information. He is an avuncular man, full of bons mots and anecdotes, who had audiences eating out of his hand on a very rare recent visit to London's National Film Theatre.

WOODY ALLEN boxing with a kangaroo and Victoria Wood's winning debut on the talent show New Faces are among the highlights of nearly four hours of 'missing', historic Sixties and Seventies television footage recovered by the British Film Institute for screening today.

TONY BLAIR will ceremoniously ditch Labour's traditional 'tax, spend and borrow' image this week, in a fundamental re-positioning of his party's economic strategy.

CHARLES RUSSELL's The Mask (PG) is an adventure-comedy crafted out of the future. Seeing it may make you feel like that startled audience, nearly 100 years ago, who first watched Louis Lumiere's image of a train and, when it hurtled towards them, as relentless and palpable as a nightmare, fled the cinema in fright. The Mask isn't that scary, yet it is a vision of cinema to come that may appal some viewers, even as it dazzles them. It takes a step further the computer sorcery of Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), which allowed cartoon figures and actors to interact. The Mask's hero switches between flesh-and-blood mortality and cartoon malleability with polymorphous aplomb. When computers are so dextrous, what price human invention? The microchips are down for the movies.

IN 1980, to coincide with a National Film Theatre retrospective, Judith Williamson mounted an offensive in Time Out entitled 'Reclaim the Day', a ground-breaking reassessment of the films of Doris Day. Far from being the all-American cheerleader for virginity, she was rediscovered as a woman who held out for what she wanted. Tomboyish and tough, or smart career woman, she may have capitulated to marriage and domesticity by the final frame, but only on her own terms.

Two nights ago I saw, again, with just a vague and faded memory of it, Buster Keaton's The Cameraman: for my new film, a tiny, tiny, modest little comedy, I was going to shoot a scene with a hand-cranked camera somehow reminiscent of the 1920s.

ALTHOUGH kind, self-effacing, yet versatile in most branches of film-making, Sidney Gilliat had a caustic manner that was often of the sort to make tyrants pause and their acolytes tremble, writes Peter Cotes (further to the obituary by Gilbert Adair, 2 June).

The pre-PC Peter Sellers/Burt Kwouk Pink Panther exchanges first introduced the conventions of martial arts cinema to non-martial arts audiences: those extended mid-air jousts, the protracted, baritone howl that is a karate squeal deepened by slow-motion. Now this loopy genre is celebrated in the NFT's 'Hong Kong Action' season comprising 14 movies, four of which were touched by the golden karate-chop of the one-man movie industry that is Jackie Chan.

That movie sucked,' snaps a dyke in Rose Troche's frothy comedy Go Fish. 'Queers are so pathetic (in it).' It's a riposte that chimes out in cinema foyers and taxis home, and it's still echoing: gay cinema has more criteria to meet than any other genre and gay film- makers must look outward. The Eighth London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which opened at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank last Saturday with Troche's film and ends on 31 March, suggests that it is doing just that.

I must say that The Ladykillers is one of the few films I'm not ashamed to be associated with. It's a perfect little movie. I was appearing on stage in The King and I, in my second year, and was desperately looking for something to get away from playing the King eight times a week, so I accepted an offer from the producer Michael Balcon to do The Ladykillers.

Remember the scene in Bedazzled, where Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, dressed as the Fruni Green Eyewash men, swindle pounds 10 from the kind old lady? Nope, you probably don't. Despite its relative success, Bedazzled is hardly ever shown on television. Neither is Robert Altman's California Split, Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now. Difficult to find on video, they are all films I need to see now or I think I may explode.

In the morning I had a coffee, then went swimming. When I came back I had oat bran with maple syrup, which I always do. More coffee when I arrived at the office, then nothing until lunchtime. I had dim sum dumplings at a restaurant in Gerrard Street, in the heart of London's Chinatown. I eat lunch out every day. I had nothing in the afternoon; I don't really snack between meals. In the evening I went to a lecture at the National Film Theatre, and after that walked to Covent Garden where I got a