Tackling the best known of all biographical subjects is a tall order, but Martin has achieved an enthralling and original portrait. Despite his Stephen Fry-like celebrity ("I believe there is hardly a day in which there is not something about me in the papers"), Johnson emerges as sad and afflicted, in keeping with his dark reflection shortly before death on "the general disease of my life".

Paul Schrader's 1985 biopic of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima is a brave but flawed attempt to tell a sensational story in a formalist manner. The author's last day in November 1970 – when he committed ritual suicide after addressing an army garrison – is interspersed with black-and-white flashbacks to his painful boyhood and dramatic excerpts from his novels, remarkably visualised by the designer Eiko Ishioka. Yet the cerebral cool of Schrader's perspective sacrifices emotional connection to its subject: Mishima's life will always be a mystery, but the careful layerings don't give much of a clue as to why he became an object of cult worship to the Japanese.

An elderly gunman opened fire inside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum today, wounding one security guard before two other officers returned fire. The assailant and his victim were both hospitalized.

The Turner-winning artist Steve McQueen turns Bafta-winning writer/director with this mesmeric film about Bobby Sands’ hunger strike. Unstintingly brutal, yet often fabulous to look at, it rejects the structure of a traditional chronological biopic.

Not so much a biopic as 'I'm a rebel ... get me out of here'

Zelda Sayre was one of the most controversial literary figures of her time. Some claim that her marriage to F Scott Fitzgerald inspired him to produce the Jazz Age's best novels. Others say she stifled his creativity.

Even if he were to cover his sort-of namesake's "Grace Kelly", Micah P. Hinson would still sound like a backwoods mechanic hiding something in the cellar.

Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story (Sony BMG)

Reading about the McMaster review of arts funding, headlined in one newspaper as "Britain on verge of 'new Renaissance', minister claims", I was reminded of the – possibly apocryphal – Hollywood biopic in which one artist turns to another and says furiously: "Don't you understand? You can't paint like that any more – we're in the Renaissance now." The point is, of course, that the Renaissance wouldn't even exist as a concept until some 300 years later: a renaissance isn't something that you can identify at the time.

Norman Sherry has spent almost three decades on an all-consuming struggle: to write the definitive biography of the enigmatic Graham Greene. The attempt nearly killed him. Now, on the eve of the publication of the final volume, he talks exclusively to Andrew Gumbel about his attempts to achieve the impossible

Godfather of MI5 revealed as William Melville, master of disguise and friend of Houdini