It's a tricky business, being cool. One minute you're in, next minute... who? It's a problem that faces Tony Blair, who has done his best to glamorise Downing Street with a succession of high-profile parties drawn from the ranks of those who put the cool into Britannia. Or do they? Red or Dead designer Wayne Hemingway reckons that too many of the guests were plain naff. Far too '97. Rosa Prince helps the PM recover his street cred with a party list of the newest, coolest people in town

TITANIC (12) is one of the most spectacular films ever made. It's also one of the most badly written. And yet, despite the abyss between James Cameron's meagre screenwriting talents and the apocalyptic grandeur of his direction, Titanic stays afloat. The dialogue may be unspeakable, but the film remains unsinkable.

Despite early hype predicting box-office disaster to match that of `Waterworld', `Titanic' is now the hot tip to clean up at the Oscars. Billy Zane, one of the film's stars, recalls life on-board

the big picture

Director James Cameron has been haunted by death since he was a boy. His latest film, `Titanic', is about two-and-a-half hours in the life of people who know they face death. He tells Nick Hasted about his `metaphor for mortality'.

Two UK actresses are emerging as favourites for the Academy Awards, reports Tim Cornwell. But there's no contest between the films

Forget the summer blockbusters. Full-scale war breaks out only once a year in the movie industry, and that's at Christmas time, with the lucrative holiday box-office up for grabs and the Oscar race in its all-important final stages. The mad rush starts this week with the long- delayed docking of James Cameron's Titanic, drifting in on a tidal wave of gush from enraptured US critics. It's probably safe to say that you can see where every last cent of the $200m budget went in this lavish spectacle; my main complaint is that you also can't help but feel every last second of its three hours and 14 minutes (the "official" running time, as cited by the studio, is "two hours, 74 minutes"). In Cameron's version of events, the lookouts fail to notice the iceberg because they're busy watching Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet make out. As post-collision chaos erupts, DiCaprio's character - street-smart scamp that he is - shrewdly notes: "This is bad." (DiCaprio has already butchered Shakespeare and reinvented Rimbaud beyond recognition; Titanic merely fortifies the argument that he should never, under any circumstances, appear in a film set before 1980).

Story is everything, they used to say in Hollywood. But now studios are making big bucks with big bangs and big stars alone, it's the 'eye candy' that counts, writes Tim Cornwell

The star of Michael Collins, the controversial film about the murdered IRA hero, took one of the top prizes at a film-awards ceremony last night.

'My favourite quote of all is from Hitchcock: "Other people's films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake." ' Peter Jackson (left), director of 'The Frighteners', talks to Ryan Gilbey

Actor shows his own play's the thing - but can he upstage the award-winning Emma Thompson?

The Critics

This is not pretty costume drama. It's tragic, raw and brutal. As it should be. By Adam Mars-Jones

We shouldn't be surprised by Michael Winterbottom's bleak vision of `Jude'. This is the man who gave us `Butterfly Kiss' and `Cracker'. By Chris Peachment