Wage-slave purgatory in three different flavours is the subject of Seth Gordon's comedy, as his trio of downtrodden leads decide that the only way to break free from remorseless professional abuse is by murdering their respective bosses. George Cukor this ain't - in fact, Gordon has succeeded in making Carry On up the Khyber look like a revered art-house masterpiece - but as long as you leave your brain in "Park", there are just enough laughs to drag you to the closing credits.

In the days before there were any paparazzi to catch celebrities unawares, the pictures of the stars that reached mere mortals like ourselves were carefully staged by the film studios. Establishments like MGM, Warner Bros and Paramount Pictures employed stills photographers to produce atmospheric shots of the action as it unfolded on the set and to make studio portraits of individual actors for release to adoring fans.

Interesting movie news. Arnold Schwarzenegger, having wrapped up his term as governor of California and pretty much completed the bankrupting of the state, will be taking time out from impregnating the payroll to return to the day job: making movies. The film is to be called The Last Stand. Make of that what you will.

So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard. And a trio of young actors cast before puberty have missed out on a decade’s worth of regular schooling.

Do you know where your teenagers are? If they're smart, they'll be somewhere watching Trust, the sophomore directorial effort from actor David Schwimmer that turns out to be as deftly compelling as it is unnerving.

In its second year under creative director David Ansen and in its new home at the LA Live complex, the Los Angeles Film Festival seems to have recovered from the slightly rocky start of its downtown debut last year. While one or two of the several hundred volunteers still seemed to be in it for the free T-shirt, most were clearly film enthusiasts themselves, eager to swap tips with patrons about screenings and potential sleeper hits.

An unreleased live recording from a much missed conductor provides heartwarming food for the soul, while another podium giant brings musicality to uncompromising Modernism, aided by a phenomenal pianist. Meanwhile, a Hungarian exile in Hollywood takes a break from composing film scores and thinks of home.

What is it with Hollywood and education? Hot on the heels (shamelessly come-hither pumps, in fact) of Cameron Diaz in the lamentable Bad Teacher, we now get Julia Roberts as a disaffected babe who, we're told, is a teacher even though she spends precious little time in actor-director Tom Hanks's new film doing anything of the sort. Still, at least Roberts's unquenchable radiance lends Larry Crowne some measure of class; otherwise, here's another movie that merits detention for failing to make more than a passing detour in the direction of real life.

A few years ago I chanced upon something truly surreal. I was driving along a track in New Zealand. The way you do. There was a field on the left. In it there was a man sitting on a portable chair, a sketchpad in his lap, a pencil in his hand. Gathered in front of him, like a cluster of attentive disciples, was a tight semi-circle of cows. The man was wearing a black suit in a style popular at the end of the 19th century. The surreal bit is that, despite the grizzly beard, this was Columbo. None other than.

When the infantilisation of Hollywood started in 1977 with Star Wars, as a 10-year-old I was all in favour. The hugely successful Transformers franchise based on a series of clever 1980s toys - they’re a car; some Origami-style fiddling later, they’re a robot! - probably isn’t where that trend bottoms out. Michael Bay, the most bombastic, critically derided and commercially unsinkable director around, has as the title suggests gone prog rock for this third film, pumping up the Transformers “mythos”, and dragging it out to triple-album, 154-minute length.