BEFORE the Crucible there were halls. Some were grimmer than others. In 1972, just as the swanky new establishment in Sheffield was opening, John Spencer lost the World Snooker Championship at the Selly Oak British Legion on a Birmingham ring road. It was a bleak, forbidding sort of place, but he thought nothing of it. That was where he expected to play.

Torrid, operatic, sensual, haunting: that's how The House of the Spirits (15) sees itself. Turgid, overlong, silly, hysterical (and that spells TOSH): that's how viewers are more likely to see it. Danish- born director Bille August, who directed the handsome, inert The Best Intentions, from Ingmar Bergman's screenplay about his parents, has moved downmarket as well as south to film Isabel Allende's magical-realist novel.

The old film world maxim that good books make bad movies - or, more pungently, that you're better off adapting from James M Cain than from Dostoyevsky - has received a major body blow. Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence has not only confounded all the wiseguys who predicted that his foray into ballgown drama would turn out to be an extravagant folly (it has won rapturous notices and dollars 50m box-office to date), but proved that a good movie could be made from the kind of uncommonly good book that usually nestles in the cool tranquillity of library stacks. The novels of Edith Wharton (1862-1937) had long been regarded as classics; suddenly, they started to look like hot movie properties, too.

DUSK IS falling just beyond a western outreach of the M25, the gloomy hum of which you can hear in the background. The accent of every voice places the speakers inside that ring road. The scene is puddle-spattered Pinewood, last refuge of the British film industry, and we are standing, believe it or not, on the very spot where Gotham City used to be.

THERE have been controversial plays before. The Royal Court theatre in London was involved in numerous censorship rows in the Sixties and, in 1956, premiered John Osborne's Look Back In Anger, which redefined English theatre. But Oleanna - the play by the 46-year-old Chicago-born David Mamet, which opened at the Royal Court on Wednesday - is in a different category from any previous theatrical rows, because of the nature of the scenes and atmosphere at its performances. Kenneth Tynan famously wrote of Look Back In Anger: 'I doubt that I could love anyone who did not like this play.' Of Oleanna, people have been far more likely to observe that they could not love anyone who did like the play.

IF A MAN shows himself clearest in adversity, then Jimmy White has nothing to worry about. 'Stephen (Hendry) plays the game the way it should be played,' he said. 'He is a great and worthy champion.' The tribute came 12 months ago, an hour after White had suffered the most disappointing defeat of his life at the hands of the man he was praising.

A TOKEN to cling on to for the rest at the Embassy World Championships 12 months ago was Stephen Hendry short of his finest form. He still won, of course, but there was just a glimmer of hope in the early rounds. This time he is not offering even that hint of vulnerability.