Stanley Kubrick's last film opens in the US this week, and David Thomson thinks he knows what its title alludes to: the deep link between cinema and psychoanalysis

Phil Johnson talks to Jocelyn Pook, and tries not to mention Tom and Nicole

THE CHURCH of Scientology agreed to pay pounds 55,000 in damages yesterday to a former member it had accused of being a "hate campaigner", ending six years of claim and counter-claim that the woman said mirrored the trials of Job.

NICOLE KIDMAN and Tom Cruise have just embarked on what may prove to be an entertaining libel suit. They are suing an American magazine, The Star, which suggested that two of the prettiest actors in Hollywood needed the help of sex therapists on the set of Eyes Wide Shut. Apparently the couple believe that this suggestion of an "inability to portray sufficiently realistic love scenes" has "damaged their credibility as romantic lead actors".

Witty, wilful, wild... Next to the screen's scarlet women, blondes are merely bland. By Nina Caplan

www.krusch.com/kubrick/kq.html

STANLEY KUBRICK, who died last week, was considered to be the most radical of directors. But even he, it seems, could not change some cinematic traditions.

AS A film director, Stanley Kubrick was an obsessed perfectionist. He became a very mysterious personality, for he refused to give interviews. He kept out of the idiotic showbiz limelight, so his character was not diluted by over-exposure in the media. He preserved unusual artistic integrity, though he was not above sowing false trails in his personal and professional life.

STANLEY KUBRICK'S biographer Michael Ciment called him "one of the most demanding, most original and most visionary film-makers of our time". The only superlative he omitted was, the most reclusive.

HOT ON the heels of Nicole Kidman, who took David Hare's The Blue Room to Broadway, is Cate Blanchett in a revival of Hare's Plenty. This alternative ginger-and-alabaster Australian, Oscar-nominated for her role in the film Elizabeth, plays Susan Traherne, a fictional ex-Special Operations Executive whose covert wartime activities make her a liability to her civil servant husband. Traherne's mental instability and frustrations between 1943 and the mid-1960s are a metaphor for Britain's struggles after WWII. Tickets to see Blanchett, whose co-stars include Julian Wadham and Debra Gillett, are already selling out. Will the fact that she remains fully-clothed imperil her chances of a transatlantic transfer? Book early to find out if Vanity Fair's latest cover girl could be Hare's next West End emissary. RH

It was the French actor, playwright, film-maker and wit Sacha Guitry who said it first: "The cinema isn't Latin. It's American." That was in 1919.

Where once they were selfish and spoilt, Hollywood women now trade on syrupy sweetness. The irony is that if they weren't so damn nice you might actually like them.

IT IS now impossible to throw a brick in some parts of north London without hitting a movie superstar who is looking for a poorly paid part in a small, but hip, stage play.

THE ACTORS Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman yesterday accepted undisclosed, "substantial" libel damages over allegations that their marriage was a "hypocritical sham".