As anyone who has seen 'The Artist' knows, cellulose nitrate is explosive stuff. Matthew Bell reports from somewhere in Warwickshire...

Dressing up for that sashay down the red carpet can quickly turn into a dressing-down in print the next day. So how can you, dear Oscar nominees, ensure you're a hit with even the most hostile fashion commentators?

The hamlet of Küstendorf is like a Disneyland for cinema auteurs. Built by double-Palme d'Or-winning director Emir Kusturica, the village has streets named after Federico Fellini and Jean Vigo. The cinema is called the Stanley Kubrick Theatre and the restaurant carries the moniker Visconti. It's also been home to the Küstendorf Film and Music Festival since 2008.

Scorsese may not have won over the critics, but he'll still take on the French silent movie, says Guy Adams

The Artist has continued its love affair with American cinema, winning best-produced film at the Producers Guild Awards and boosting its chances for an Oscar nod at the Academy Award nominations this week.

On Saturday night, in a cinema in Dalston, the audience clapped. They may or may not have clapped after the event that took place next, which was a "happening", involving live, human beings, and which sounded to me as weird as the outfits of the trilby-headed hipsters I had to squeeze past. But what they clapped when I was there wasn't human, and it wasn't alive. What they clapped was a film that had just finished called The Artist.

Classics that should be seen and not heard

The actresses behind portrayals of Margaret Thatcher and Marilyn Monroe are set to face off at next month's glitzy Bafta ceremony; and so too will their characters' iconic hairdos.

Simone Fassari and Camilla Pessi, the award-winning double act Baccala Clowns, bow in triumph because they’ve managed to juggle a single apple. Then they flip coolly through challenging acrobatics, Pessi poised on one hand on Fassari’s head. Pss Pss is a children’s show that works for its young audience, and for adults too.

The old adage about silence being golden was certainly true in Hollywood last night, after The Artist, a silent, black-and-white movie by a little-known French director emerged with three trophies at the 69th annual Golden Globe awards.

Frederica Sagor Maas went to Hollywood in her early 20s determined to be a writer.

Gwyneth Hughes explains how she adapted a great literary whodunit for TV