It’s an accepted flouting of reality that in films “based on a true story”, the first betrayal of the truth is in the casting. The reveal over the closing credits of The Fighter tells you just how well its two main characters have done out of Hollywood. For the preceding two hours these rough-edged veterans of the boxing ring have morphed into Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale.

It doesn’t augur well when the first comment you hear as the credits roll is, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.” That’s really not a great place to begin a review either, but let’s anyway. Or rather with a fnar, fnar moment - did nobody point out the other meaning of "beaver" to the film's makers?

As if the education profession wasn't beleaguered enough at present in America, along comes Bad Teacher, the Cameron Diaz vehicle dedicated to the proposition that the only sector of society more deserving of contempt than students is filmgoers. Here's a movie that asks you to believe that the scarily thin Diaz can gorge out on junk food and retain her figure, that a teacher would steal from her student's parents (during Christmas dinner, no less), and that "dry fuck the fuck out of me" is the new "you had me at 'hello'". Not quite.

AI Bezzerides, who scripted Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for director Robert Aldrich, thought Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel was trash. Spillane, offended that Bezzerides changed so much, couldn’t understand why the film became a cult favorite in France; one of its admirers was François Truffaut, who tracked down Bezzerides and congratulated him in a phonecall. Depicting the search of the bedroom peeper Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) for “the Great Whatsit” - narcotics in the book, a box of fissionable material on screen - Aldrich’s film is a Cold War masterpiece that deconstructed Spillane’s vigilante dick and the right-wing values he espouses by making him materialistic, anti-intellectual, impotent, and even more sadistic and misogynistic than he is on the page.

Mark Twain once wrote of his experience of going to German opera. It starts at 6, he said, and they sing for four hours. Then you look at your watch, and it’s 6.15. This is also an all-too-accurate description of a night at English National Ballet’s Strictly Gershwin. Except that I began to look at my watch after 10 minutes.

Old-fashioned ballroom sequins have Derek Deane fatally in thrall

As shoes to fill go, John Wayne’s dusty cowboy boots are about as big as it gets. So when the Coen brothers decided to take their shot at True Grit – the Charles Portis novel that finally won Wayne his Oscar – the world sat back with folded arms to see whether Jeff Bridges could grizzle and swagger his way into the role of one-eyed Rooster Cogburn that Wayne made so completely his own.

Movie stars and marriage have always helped the headline-writers. When in 1956 Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe tied the knot (he for the second time, she the third), they were dubbed the Egghead and the Hourglass. “Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde,” claimed the blushing bride. The civil wedding lasted five minutes. The marriage lasted five years.

Paul Merton started his three-part series on the origins of the American film industry with a deliberately clichéd shot, greeting us while standing with the Hollywood sign in view. But he quickly whizzed over to New York City, the true location of the birth of movies - or American ones at least - for it was on the East Coast that Thomas Edison, after inventing the phonograph, developed the Kinetoscope, a basic viewing device for moving pictures.

Once more unto the beach, dear friends. Pirates of the Caribbean is back for a fourth raid of the world’s wallet. This time it’s in 3D. As in Dumb, Dumberer and Depp. Film scholars may also wish to note that Pirates 4 was actually shot 6000 miles away in Hawaii. Among those places closer to Barbados are Zimbabwe, Syria, Greenland and Antarctica.

The career of Natalie Portman has always had more light than shade. Even her lapdancing sylph in Closer erred towards the porcelain. Casting her in Black Swan was a calculated risk by Darren Aronofsky.