After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of almost every film-making nation on earth with the authority of a specialist – and that’s before his narrative has formally progressed beyond the arrival of the talkies, let alone colour.

This year’s Venice Film Festival has been awash with great directors from what one might call the old guard: David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Aleksander Sokurov, Philippe Garrel. But when the jury presents its prizes tonight, I hope that it honours some of the new, young film-makers who have been the ones to set this festival alight.

Post Mortem is Chilean Pablo Larraín’s follow-up to the extraordinary Tony Manero, and another, even tougher take on his country’s troubled past. While the first film was a blackly comic look at the dictatorship years of the Seventies, this one deals with the coup itself. It’s a harrowing experience, but one that confirms Larrain as a major talent.

I wonder if it’s possible for a film festival to kick off with a bigger bang. For your first three competition films to be directed by one of the world’s biggest movie stars, one of its most celebrated (and controversial) auteurs and arguably the world’s most famous woman, is no mean feat. And two of these films are pretty damn good. Italy’s economy might be down there with the dregs of Europe, but its premier film festival, now in its 68th year, shows no sign of being knocked off its perch.

Directing and writing his first full-length feature, John Michael McDonagh fully exploits the wild and windswept landscapes of Connemara, and similarly extracts maximum value from his leading man, Brendan Gleeson. Perhaps he picked up tips from his brother Martin, who directed Gleeson in In Bruges.

There is an interesting tension at the Sarajevo Film Festival which, though this was my first time, I suspect exists as a matter of course. And this is a tension between the spirit of the people I meet here – ebullient, good-humoured and indefatigable (they really know how to party) – and the films themselves, which suggest a country and a region still reeling from the turmoil of its recent past. It’s a strange experience, then, poised between light and gloom.

I was once shown around Anglia TV’s studios by the bloke who used to say, "And now, from Norwich - the quiz of the week!” by way of introduction to the immortal Sale of the Century. A tremendous thrill, as you can imagine.

It is all in black and white, and undoubtedly very beautiful. Delphine Seyrig, the flighty, baffled siren at its heart, is undoubtedly very beautiful. The setting, which could be Versailles or a château in the Loire (it was in fact filmed at palaces in Bavaria), is undoubtedly very beautiful. The 1950s society mannequins, men in black tie, women in Coco Chanel, who're mysteriously occupying a central European spa hotel are undoubtedly very beautiful. It was undoubtedly directed, in 1961, by the then more or less unknown Alain Resnais and scripted by the better-known Alain Robbe-Grillet (author of Le Voyeur, 1955, and La Jalousie, 1957). Beauty agreed, it must be admitted that Last Year in Marienbad also remains as impenetrable on its rerelease as it was 50 years ago.

It is all in black and white, and undoubtedly very beautiful. Delphine Seyrig, the flighty, baffled siren at its heart, is undoubtedly very beautiful. The setting, which could be Versailles or a château in the Loire (it was in fact filmed at palaces in Bavaria), is undoubtedly very beautiful. The 1950s society mannequins, men in black tie, women in Coco Chanel, who're mysteriously occupying a central European spa hotel are undoubtedly very beautiful. It was undoubtedly directed, in 1961, by the then more or less unknown Alain Resnais and scripted by the better-known Alain Robbe-Grillet (author of Le Voyeur, 1955, and La Jalousie, 1957). Beauty agreed, it must be admitted that Last Year in Marienbad also remains as impenetrable on its rerelease as it was 50 years ago.

David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social mores of English life in films such as Mona Lisa (1986), Personal Services (1987) and Wish You Were Here (1987). However, it was Made in Britain (1982), a television play written by Leland for Channel 4 and directed by Alan Clarke, that first brought Leland widespread acclaim and the story of Trevor, a sociopathic skinhead, indisputedly destined for a life of incarceration, is assured of its place in television history.

It's the hard-hitting hoedown of high summer. Old Vic supremo Kevin Spacey being reunited with director Sam Mendes for the first time since 1999's American Beauty was bound to make 'em whoop, and their new production of Richard III doesn't disappoint. It's big, bellicose and full of braggadocio, as it should be: the play works best as a series of melodramatic blasts - Gloucester's opening soliloquy, his wooing of Lady Anne, Queen Margaret's curses, Gloucester's mock reluctance at becoming king, his nightmare and defeat as King Richard at Bosworth.