From The Prodigy to Anthony Powell, and Maggie Smith to Ewan McGregor, IoS critics offer their guide to the best in the arts in Britain this autumn

Chris Smith talks to David Lister in Cannes

Actress SASKIA REEVES talks with James Rampton

CINEMA: For four years the war in the former Yugoslavia left outsiders feeling helpless and bewildered. Once it was over, the film-makers were quick to move in to try to make sense of the conflict, and stories with a Bosnian setting are already starting to reach the screen. So has European cinema found its Vietnam? By Lee Marshall

Back in 1946, when Cannes staged its first film festival, Britain was represented by David Lean's Brief Encounter. The sight of Home Counties heroine Celia Johnson sobbing into her hanky to the accompaniment of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto clearly didn't much impress that year's jury, who awarded the main prizes elsewhere.

A one-way toboggan-ride to tragedy: `Angel Baby' is commendable for its restraint in the face of limitless opportunities for excess

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

Not yet 21, Kate Winslet is established as Hollywood's favourite young British actor. She still can't believe her luck

Apollo 13 (PG). The sole redeeming feature of this disastrous disaster movie was a gut-quaking Dolby-soundtrack launch sequence, which was loud enough to shake the popcorn from your hands. On the small screen, the picture is robbed even of that fleeting pleasure. The director Ron Howard manages to take one of the most potentially terrifying episodes in the history of space travel - when a hitch left the Apollo 13 craft suspended above the Earth, and the lives of its crew (Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton) hanging in the balance - and turn it into a tepid TV movie. (If only it really were one: you long for the brief reprieve of a garish commercial.) Where themes of patriotism jeopardised by the struggle for survival might have surfaced, the screenwriters revert to jingoistic impulses; stoicism replaces any whiff of existentialist terror; and instead of friction between the astronauts, we get that vacuum of personality that seems to open up wherever Tom Hanks, the eunuch of modern cinema, lays his hat. In this anaesthetised atmosphere, some of the supporting cast are pleasantly jazzy on the eye and ear: Gary Sinise is compelling as the one who got away - at first aggrieved, then relieved, awkwardly so, at having been left behind. But as a director, Howard is an anti-lifeforce, a vampire; he sucks films dry of tension and opportunity. He and Hanks are perfectly matched - they make everything bland. It's not all their fault. Even on the basic technical level, Apollo 13 fails dismally (look out for an unforgivable error in the early scene where Hanks is gawping at the Moon). Hollywood, we most definitely have a problem.

COMMENTARY

4. Mark Shivas The BBC is emerging as a significant player in the film business, led by a man without proven ability as an uncouth heavy. By Kevin Jackson

Catherine Pepinster sees Austen make way for Hardy on television