Akira Kurosawa's centenary has been marked by a Google Doodle today. Photograph: Cine Text / Allstar

1) Drunken Angel (1948)

The youngest of eight children, Akira Kurosawa grew up in Tokyo where, at the age of 26, he began an apprenticeship at PCL studios. His first features as director, made in wartime, had nationalistic strains but No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and Drunken Angel, about an alcoholic Tokyo doctor trying to get a stagnant pool drained, established a critical engagement with contemporary Japan.

2) Stray Dog (1949)

Drunken Angel inaugurated Kurosawa's working relationship with the actor Toshiro Mifune, which was repeated in this picture, with Mifune playing a policeman on an increasingly obsessive quest to retrieve his stolen gun. Set during a sweltering summer, Kurosawa's breakthrough film confirmed both his feel for contemporary Tokyo and his admiration of American genre pictures.

3) Rashômon (1950)

Recognised at Venice and the Oscars, Rashomon was not just Kurosawa's international breakthrough but the standard-bearer for new Japanese cinema. Recounting a bandit's (Mifune) ambush of a couple in a forest from several contradictory perspectives, its radical challenge to conventional narrative was complemented by beautiful, often stylised photography.

4) The Idiot (1951)

Slashed - to Kurosawa's enduring indignation - from its original length
of more than four hours, The Idiot was an early example of the director's adaptation of European literary sources to a Japanese context. Dostoyevsky's novel is relocated to Hokkaido, with Masayuki Mori as a recently released war criminal and Mifune his temperamental friend.

5) Ikiru (1952)

Centred on the final phase of a middle-aged salaryman's life, Ikiru show Kurosawa in full-blooded humanist mode. Takashi Shimura is the bureaucrat whose diagnosis of terminal cancer initially sends him into alienated despair before he finds a kind of redemption in a project the hero of Drunken Angel might have appreciated.

6) Seven Samurai (1954)

Seven Samurai, about a band of masterless samurai defending a village from bandits, arguably remains Kurosawa's towering cultural achievement. The biggest movie Japan had seen at the time, in terms of budget, production and box-office takings, it was also an enormous influence on Western cinema, as well as enormously influenced by it.

7) Throne of Blood (1957)

Transferring Macbeth to medieval Japan reaps dividends: this is one of the most impressive of all screen adaptations of Shakespeare, streamlining the narrative and expressing it through a series of bravura visual coups. Mifune is the ambitious samurai at the centre of a stark world laced with violence, beauty and irony.

8) The Hidden Fortress (1958)

Another period samurai adventure starring Mifune, The Hidden Fortress was another Kurosawa masterclass in the conflation of Japanese and
Hollywood tropes. The filmmaker's first widescreen effort, its story of a ragtag band trying to transport a princess to safety and eventually help her free her land is the acknowledged source for George Lucas's Star Wars.

9) Yojimbo (1961)

Similarly, Yojimbo drew on film noir and classical Westerns only to
prove massively influential itself, with Sergio Leone taking inspiration from its tale of an effectively nameless lone warrior playing one side of criminals off against another. A funnier, more grotesque sequel, Sanjuro, followed the next year.

10) Ran (1985)

The final decades of Kurosawa's life saw his greatest struggles for artistic freedom, prompting him to look beyond Japan for funding. Shot in colour and influenced by King Lear, Ran, his final grand-scale project, was not without professional and personal cost but confirmed his abilities remained intact.

11) (and one for luck …) Dreams (1990)

One of three more films that followed before his death in 1998, Dreams was an elliptical collection of tales based upon Kurosawa's actual dreams. This is Crow.

TT-AFP-Reuters-DN.se

Världens två största filmindustrier, amerikanska Hollywood och indiska Bollywood har gått samman för att med gemensam kraft jaga och bekämpa såväl upphovsrättsintrång på nätet som den mer traditionella piratmarknaden på gatorna.

Henrik Arvidsson

[email protected]

http://www.sr.se/sida/default.aspx?ProgramID=3051

- Fredag 19 mars 2010 kl 18:15

I veckans Kino gläntar vi på dörren till slutna rum som få får tillträde till, men som vi gärna fantiserar kring. Vi möter även de som valt att öppna dörren till sitt innersta och visa upp sina liv för biopubliken.

I veckan går kritikerhyllade "En profet" upp på de svenska biograferna. Kino tittar närmre på fängelsefilmen som genre. En brutal, våldsam och mycket manlig värld som verkar vara oemotståndlig för filmskapare. Bland annat träffar vi X-cons förening Fängslande kultur för att försöka reda ut vad som är fängelsedramats oemotoståndliga charm.

Den danske regissören Nils Malmros saknar aldrig idéer till sina filmer. Sedan  början av 70-talet har han gång på gång hämtat inspiration från sin barndom och uppväxt till sina långfilmer. Till exempel Kunskapens träd från 1981, som till och med räknas som dansk kulturkanon på filmområdet. I sin senaste film Kærestesorger skildrar han sin gymnasietid, och den olyckliga kärlekens våndor.

Att berätta om sig själv och sitt liv är inte ett grepp som dokumentärfilmaren Frederick Wiseman gillar. Följ med den legendariske regissören in på Parisoperans balettrepetitioner. Där är Wiseman en tyst iakttagare som med kameran visar hierarkierna, perfektionen och dansens verkliga pris.

Programledare: Roger Wilson

Daniel Gustafsson

[email protected]

Karl Dalén

[email protected]

A still from Paradjanov's 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates. Photograph: BFI

Between his abandonment of socialist realism in 1964 and his death from lung cancer in 1990, Sergei Paradjanov made four of the weirdest and most beautiful movies ever seen. An ethnic Armenian, Paradjanov was born in Soviet Georgia in 1924. His mother was "very artistic": she "used to adorn herself with Christmas tree decorations and curtains and join her friends on the roof to enact legends". In 1947, Paradjanov spent a brief stint in a Georgian prison for committing "homosexual acts" (which were illegal under Soviet law) – with, of all people, a KGB officer. He later disavowed the seven films he shot in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962, he saw Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and completely changed his artistic method, which had previously been quite normal.

The first film in Paradjanov's mature style, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), brought him instant fame and notoriety. Filmed in the Ukrainian Carpathians, in a regional dialect that couldn't be understood by most Russians (Paradjanov refused to have it dubbed), Shadows tells the story of the doomed love of Ivan and Marichka, children from feuding families. Marichka drowns relatively early in the film, and critics have justly celebrated its representation of lost childhood love, brutal slayings and various Ukrainian folk ceremonies. To me, however, the most moving and surprising aspect of the film is the depiction of Ivan's second marriage.

After Marichka's death, Ivan lapses into grief and madness – this part of the film is shot in black and white – before finding himself attracted to the comely Palagna. (They share an erotically charged moment when she is holding a horse's hoof for him to hammer on a shoe.) The two are united in a bizarre ceremony which involves blindfolds and a wooden yoke. They seem happy at first, but Ivan grows distant and brooding, and Palagna is unable to conceive a child. One gorgeously composed scene shows the couple at the dinner table: both are facing the camera, and a calf is sitting under the table, looking cramped and miserable. Every unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion – but how recognisable and universal Paradjanov renders this highly particular unhappiness! Both the spouses, it turns out, are dabbling in sorcery: Ivan has taken to inviting the spirits of the maimed and drowned into their home, hoping that he may be visited by Marichka; Palagna, meanwhile, wanders naked in a forest, exhorting the dark forces to bring them a child. In a mind-blowing convergence of literal and symbolic narratives, Palagna starts cheating on Ivan with the local sorcerer. Then the marriage really hits the rocks.

Shadows has the most legible storyline of all Paradjanov's films. He followed it with The Color of Pomegranates (1969), a 90-minute, Armenian-language meditation on the life of the 18th-century poet-troubadour Sayat Nova. The film consists of a series of dreamlike tableaux, designed to "recreate the poet's inner world". Particularly astounding are the courtship "scenes" in which the poet and his lover are both played by the lithe, unearthly Sofiko Chiaureli: a trick that renders visual and literal the union of the poet-lover and the beloved-God in eastern mystical poetry. The only "narrative" is provided by the successive replacement of a small boy with a youth, a monk and an old man: it's like an illustration of the riddle of the sphinx.

Though Paradjanov was eight years older than Tarkovsky, he described the younger film-maker as his "teacher and mentor", and Pomegranates clearly invites comparison with Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966), based on the life of the great 14th-century Russian monk and icon painter.

In Andrei Rublev, nearly 200 minutes of black-and-white narrative are followed by a meditative colour slideshow of Rublev's icons. Pomegranates is a hallucinatory mash-up of these two types of material: a life story told in brilliantly coloured and animated Persian miniatures. The actors, dressed in outlandishly detailed handmade costumes, move as if by some strange clockwork, performing repetitive stylised gestures, tossing a golden ball in the air or gesturing enigmatically with some symbolic-looking object: a seashell, a candle, a rifle. Paradjanov himself compared Pomegranates to a "Persian jewellery case": "On the outside, its beauty fills the eyes; you see the fine miniatures. Then you open it, and inside you see still more Persian accessories." An accurate description: every last article and action in the film seems precisely placed, exquisitely detailed and designed to serve a particular purpose in some unknown ritual.

The Color of Pomegranates was the last film Paradjanov would make for 15 years. In 1973, after indictments for art trafficking, currency fraud, "incitements to suicide" and surrealist tendencies, the director was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security gulag, where his duties included sewing sacks. An indomitable spirit, he became an expert at making dolls from leftover sackcloth. He made a doll of Tutankhamen and another of his friend Lilya Brik. Through the offices of Brik, Tarkovsky and other powerful friends, Paradjanov was released one year early, in 1977. He wasn't allowed to work, and lived in utter destitution in Tbilisi. At one point, Tarkovsky gave him a ring to pawn, but Paradjanov decided to keep it as a souvenir of their friendship.

In the early years of the thaw, Paradjanov finally returned to the studio and made his last two movies: The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988). Suram Fortress, shot in Georgia, is a Poe-like patriotic yarn involving an accident-prone fortress in Tbilisi that is destined to remain standing only when a young hero has been buried alive in its walls. The fortress also apparently has to have a giant cart full of eggs dumped into the foundation and crushed with a sledgehammer – a peculiarly disturbing and indelible image.

Based on Mikhail Lermontov's retelling of a Turkic folktale, Ashik Kerib is the story of a troubadour obliged to spend 1,001 days wandering the land, in order to make enough money to marry his beloved. The hero is played by Yuri Mgoyan, a picturesque 22-year-old Kurdish "hooligan" and car thief recruited by Paradjanov for his "plasticity". (In one behind-the-scenes clip, Paradjanov demonstrates this plastic quality by wrapping a blanket around the young man's head and declaring: "A complete metamorphosis! He's a pharaoh!") These last two films somehow manage to seem at once naive and sophisticated, with the hyper-realism of a puppet show. Mastiffs rest their great weary heads on their paws, as evil henchmen force a slave to toss pomegranates for them to impale on their sabers. A gigantic flock of running sheep, filmed from overhead, shifts into strange formations. Endless rites and rituals unfold to unheard-of music.

Ashik Kerib is the only one of Paradzhanov's films to have a happy ending. The lovers are reunited and a white dove alights on a movie camera, representing Tarkovsky, to whose memory the film was dedicated. But to me, the outrageousness of Paradjanov's imagination is best encapsulated by the final scene of The Color of Pomegranates, in which death comes to the poet in the form of a shower of live chickens. Dressed in white, the troubadour lies on the floor, surrounded by candles; the chickens, who seem to be upset about something, fall on to him from a great height, dispensing a flurry of white feathers and extinguishing the candles. It's not the way you would expect a national poet, or anyone really, to depart this world – but Paradjanov makes it look inevitable.

• The Paradjanov Festival 2010 runs in London and Bristol until 9 May. paradjanov-festival.co.uk

källa:

We all have film sequences that stick in our minds. Some are shared by many – such as the shower scene from Psycho – others are particular to us. Here our film critic and a panel of leading movie-makers reveal their favourites. What are yours?

Janet Leigh in Psycho. Photograph: Allstar

Who will ever forget the first time they saw the 45-second shower-room murder in Hitchcock's Psycho? I remember 1959 and 1961 as the years when my first two children were born. But the first thing that comes to mind about the year in between was seeing Psycho, which I'd been looking forward to since a radio programme I'd produced the previous October, when Hitchcock had enticingly described Psycho as "my first real horror film". Entering the Plaza, Lower Regent Street, the day the film opened, I passed the cardboard cut-out of Hitchcock in the foyer, from which a tape recording of the Master's familiar Leytonstone undertaker's voice warned us what would happen if we gave away the ending.

Half an hour into the movie, when Janet Leigh stared out at us from the floor, a man sitting in front of me staggered into the aisle and vomited: testimony to the sensitive stomachs of the time, or (as several other people I know witnessed a similar incident at the Plaza that week) evidence that Paramount's publicity department had hired a method actor for the film's opening run?

Such indelibly iconic moments have been part of moviegoing since the Lumière brothers' first public screening of a dozen short scenes in December 1895. One of them had the audience recoiling from a train entering a station, another had them chuckling when a cheeky boy tricked a gardener into spraying himself with a hosepipe. People judge a movie by the strength of its story and overall impact, but ultimately what they remember are individual moments and sequences. This perhaps reflects the very nature of film, which is a rapid succession of still pictures that provide an illusion of motion. And until the coming of cassettes and DVDs, few of us were able to see a picture over and over again or re-view a sequence. So we had to replay it in our minds, and naturally we'd often get it wrong. Which is how "Play it again, Sam" entered the language instead of: "Play it, Sam, play 'As Time Goes By'."

James Stewart seems to have been thinking of this approach to cinema when he talked to Peter Bogdanovich about his craft: "What you're doing is… you're giving people little… little, tiny pieces of time… that they never forget." This is echoed by Walker Percy in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. Some people, his narrator says, "treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise", but "what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man". Likewise Jean-Dominique Bauby, the paralysed French writer, describes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly how he'd lie in the hospital recreating favourite scenes from Touch of Evil, Stagecoach, Moonfleet and Pierrot le fou. Canny film-makers have cottoned on to the idea, like James Cameron, who says: "You try to create one or more emotional, epiphanous moments within a film."

These moments come in many forms – simple, complex, lyrical, violent, gentle, witty, romantic, revelatory – and, if they stick, become as real as any other memory. They can range from the split-second close-up of the suave spy's missing half-finger in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps to the protracted pursuit of Cary Grant by the crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest, from the in-your-face eye-slicing in Buñuel's first silent movie, the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou, to the puzzling sequence of the Chinese businessman's mysterious box in the same director's mainstream success Belle de Jour 40 years later. Like your favourite jokes, your cherished movie moments reveal something about you and, if shared, they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, especially if one of them is the final sequence in Casablanca that features that line.

My own favourites? The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. The love at first sight between John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man, the lust at first sight between Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. The children running through the woods to see a train in Pather Panchali and finding grandmother dead on the way back. The cruelly comic soccer match in Loach's Kes. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love in a Venetian hotel in Don't Look Now. The slow-motion mayhem let loose in The Wild Bunch after William Holden says: "If they move, kill 'em!" Perhaps my single favourite moment comes in Citizen Kane, where Kane's now elderly friend Bernstein tells the reporter about an epiphanic memory of seeing a girl in a white dress on the New Jersey ferry in 1896. "I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." It's a moment about remembering a moment, and the actor Everett Sloane makes it so vivid we think we've seen that girl ourselves.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) - THE SUBWAY CHASE

Gene Hackman gets behind the wheel for The French Connection's famous car chase. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Chosen by Ryan Fleck, the American indie film director, writer, editor and cinematographer, best known for co-writing and co-directing with partner Anna Boden Half Nelson and Sugar correct(out now on DVD).

The villain's on the elevated subway. You think he's going to get away because a person on foot can't keep up with the subway… But Gene Hackman jumps in a car and starts chasing the subway, riding underneath it, going at 80mph, swerving in and out of traffic. I first saw this scene on video when I was 18 or 19, in college. I loved it.

In action scenes nowadays you can chalk everything up to some kind of computer effect. Audiences no longer really believe that what they're seeing exists anymore. When The French Connection was made that notion didn't really occur to people. What you saw was usually really happening in front of the lens. It was raw. I did a little bit of research about how they shot the scene. Phenomenal. Basically they just did it. There was no security blocking off other traffic, just Hackman in a car with a camera mounted on the front. They went crazy, lost their minds, and went for it.

It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days. I'm editing a movie right now that has a teenager walking on the Brooklyn Bridge, considering suicide. He steps out on to a ledge, over traffic… It never even occurred to put the actual kid out on the ledge, on a bridge, over traffic because we knew there was no way authorities would let us do that. So there's camera trickery. Back in the 70s we'd have just thrown a child out over the ledge, seen what happened, and shot it.

JULES ET JIM (1962) - THE BICYCLE SCENE

Truffaut's Jules et Jim. Photograph: BFI

Chosen by Ken Loach, writer/director of the influential docudrama Cathy Come Home, and director of nearly 30 films including Kes, Riff-Raff, My Name is Joe and Looking for Eric. He won the 2006 Palme d'Or at Cannes for The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

This scene always cheers you up. Jeanne Moreau and the two guys on their bicycles in the sun in France, the music that goes with it… Partly it evokes what you imagine to be the perfect French vacation but also it's a very fine bit of film-making.

When you're in the business and have been in the business a long time, you tend to dismember about 99% of films as you're watching. The time when you used to watch a film just for enjoyment is difficult to recapture. But just occasionally a film will transcend that. The sense of enjoyment with this trio on their bicycles is perennial. It's completely evocative of that carefree young moment, the age when people are carefree. And then of course, for these three, it will all be ruined by the war.

The song that was composed for the film – "Le tourbillon" – became very famous. I'd sing it for you if I wasn't surrounded by colleagues who would take the piss. I think film music that tells you what to think is cheap – the film should do that without that prompting. But in Jules et Jim it is music in relation to the images, the music has an independent existence and there's a relationship between the two.

It is not something subterranean, there to steer you through every second and push you into feelings that the pictures don't generate themselves.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) - BILL'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in All About Eve. Photograph: British Film Institute

Chosen by Beeban Kidron, who came to international attention directing the BBC's adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in 1990. She has since directed several feature films including Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.

Every single line in this scene is quotable. It's the most beautifully written thing, from an era of cinema very closely knitted to the theatre, when the words were supposed to evoke things rather than just be things for people to say while the pictures were going on. That's something that's very often lost 60 years later.

Margo, played by Bette Davis, is a great Broadway actress at the pinnacle of her power: brilliant, sophisticated, bitchy. Her assistant Eve, meanwhile, played by Anne Baxter, is simpering, beautiful and very, very ambitious. Eve is trying to replace Margo, trying to get her next part on Broadway and take her lover, Bill. This is the scene where Margo finally loses her rag, having waited upstairs for Bill to throw him a party before discovering that he's been downstairs with Eve for 20 minutes.

The scene sums up the central themes of the film, to do with Margo's insecurity about age and about the way that Eve is eating into her life. This is referred to in the dialogue all the time: Margo finds Eve and Bill talking and immediately asks if she can join in – "Or isn't it a story for grown-ups?" Bette Davis, despite being so powerful, gives a phenomenal performance of insecurity. That is very, very rarely drawn in the cinema.

The question of ageing and of being replaced by the younger, more beautiful woman is something we can still understand today.

JASON & THE ARGONAUTS (1963) - THE SKELETONS SCENE

Ray Harryhausen's Jason & the Argonauts Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Feature

Chosen by Nick Park, Oscar-winning animator and writer/director of the Wallace and Gromit films.

As a boy I was into monsters, heroes going off on adventures – and stop-motion animation. I saw trailers for this film and it seemed to be everything I wanted. I remember being at a school fair, just before Christmas, and being desperate to get home to watch it.

The scene that stood out the most, that I found both horrifying and enthralling, was the skeleton fight at the end. The heroes are all live action and the monsters are all done with stop-frame animation. It was a terrific technical feat – I think there were eight animated skeletons or more, cut together quite seamlessly with the live action. The whole choreography of it was amazing. But the story, too, really caught my imagination. These skeletons were planted like seeds, by a wizard chap spreading dragons teeth, and then dead soldiers grow up to fight the Argonauts. So exciting.

At around the same time I saw Ray Harryhausen, the animator, explain on television how he had done the skeletons. I immediately went and built my own models with wire and foam – I think I was planning to film something with my friends, live action, cut together with a sea monster made out of a coat hanger and nylon tights.

Disney films didn't make me want to go home and do it myself because it was shrouded in mystery and technique. But when I saw the skeletons in Harryhausen's film I wanted immediately to do it myself, because you got a sense of how it might be done.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) - THE FINAL SCENE

The Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photograph: Kobal

Chosen by Stephen Poliakoff. After starting out as a playwright, Poliakoff turned to writing and directing television dramas including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and the award-winning The Lost Prince. His feature films include Hidden City and most recently Glorious 39.

Still, after 40 years, people are arguing about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What the ending means to the film. The computer taking over, the menacing computer howl, the foetus – it has passed into cinema folklore. Science fiction was not a genre that attracted me much, and it was very unsexy in the 1960s. But Kubrick's film was the most original I had ever seen. It came at me for the first time, completely alone, in a cinema on a summer afternoon in 1968. I was 15, and it made an extraordinary impression on me. There was a lot more mainstream "auteur cinema" than there is now, Hollywood studios producing personal films. Nevertheless Kubrick stood alone, a titanic figure that obsessively made films, under great secrecy, and with nobody interfering.

I had never seen such a bold use of cinema, and certainly never such an incredibly obscure ending. To have spent all that time and money and to have the daring – some would say foolhardy daring, but nevertheless a magnificent daring – to end the film on such an elusive and obscure note, I found it amazing as a 15-year-old that anybody should have the balls to do that. It excited me and changed my whole view of what you could do as a writer, whatever medium you were attempting – Kubrick's aspiration to be original. Now it's been much imitated but 2001 was extraordinarily ahead of its time, and has continued to survive and influence generations.

TAXI DRIVER (1976) - THE MIRROR SCENE

Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Photograph: British Film Institute

Chosen by Stephen Woolley, the award-winning producer best known for his collaborations with director Neil Jordan including Interview with the Vampire and The Crying Game. Recent projects include How To Lose Friends and Alienate People and the forthcoming Made in Dagenham. In 2005 he made his directorial debut with Stoned.

I remember seeing Taxi Driver for the first time in Paris in the 70s. The taxi gliding across New York's wet streets, smoke coming out of the subways, it was all incredibly delicious. It had this thundery Bernard Herrmann score, and when Robert De Niro did his "are you talking to me?" sequence in front of the mirror you suddenly sensed the degree of anger there. It was all bottled up until he explodes with this bravura performance. It's very clever, very economical, everything concentrated on his eyes.

Sequences like this are not only successful because they are so beautifully created but also because they often come at a point in a film where you begin to realise where it's going, you think, "oh my god, I know what this is about". Here you become aware that not only is Travis Bickle schizophrenic but he's aware of his own schizophrenia. He's like a genie in a bottle and you're waiting for him to let the genie out – which he does brilliantly in that horrific sequence later on where he shoots Harvey Keitel's character and saves Jodie Foster's.

The scene was improvised but De Niro had tried out a version of it in an earlier film he made with Brian De Palma, I think it's called Hi Mom! I didn't see it until years after watching Taxi Driver and I remember thinking "I can't believe it – the thing he does in Taxi Driver!"

CARRIE (1976) - THE BLOOD AT THE PROM SCENE

Sissy Spacek in Carrie. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Chosen by Edgar Wright, who co-created Channel 4's Spaced, and has collaborated with comedian Simon Pegg on hit films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. His latest directing project, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, is out later this year.

I always describe Carrie as the Grease of horror movies: it resonates with all ages because everybody remembers their awkward teenage phase and can watch it and say – I was the bully or the victim or the person who did nothing. It explores how apocalyptic your rage can be as a teenager. Carrie's not a killer, she's a girl who has been bullied and through a terrible confluence of events ends up burning the school down.

It's also unusual for a horror film. It doesn't have someone being killed every 20 minutes and then a climax – it builds to one huge climax at the prom. School bullies have fixed the prom so that Carrie White will win and they can humiliate her by tipping a bucket of pig's blood over her in front of the whole school. The scene and the excruciating build-up to it is one of the greatest set pieces of all time, full of suspense, with a monumental payoff.

A crane shot sets up the sequence so you know where everyone is positioned and that the bucket of blood is above Carrie and Tommy's heads. Once the plot is set in motion Pino Donaggio's score takes over. The resulting sequence is pure opera.

I first saw Carrie on VHS with my brother's friend when I was about 12. I obsessively read about horror movies and was dying to see it. I've watched it so many times since. De Palma planned the sequence for months and battled the studio over the time spent on filming it. But it was worth the blood, sweat and tears. It still leaves audiences speechless.

REAR WINDOW (1954) - THE OPENING SCENE

James Stewart in Rear Window. Photograph: Kobal

Chosen by Claire Denis, who made her directorial debut in 1988 with Chocolat. Subsequent films include Good Work and 35 Shots of Rum. Her latest, White Material, is out in the summer.

We don't have courtyards in France like they do in New York, where Hitchcock's film is set, but we have street buildings that are set very close to each other. From where I stand in my kitchen or my bedroom I can watch neighbours' windows very easily. I'm intrigued by voyeurism, about what is behind windows, and often in my films I stage a scene as if I was peeping in from outside.

The situation Hitchcock establishes in the opening scene of Rear Window is the ultimate voyeuristic situation. The character played by James Stewart has broken his leg, has nothing to do but linger behind his window and watch. He is passive but eager to find something – to be a witness of something, or to give his imagination something to chew on. As a spectator in a cinema theatre, you are a sort of prisoner in a chair, like he is.

Sexist titillation? … Peter Andersson and Noomi Rapace in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Photograph: Knut Koivisto

The debate has raged ever since Stieg Larsson's bestselling thriller, the first in a trilogy, was published in Sweden in 2005, a year after the author's death. The film, released in the UK last Friday – described by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw as "a forensic procedural with explicit violence" – seems to have muddied the waters further.

Originally titled Men Who Hate Women, the book divided critics. Some saw Lisbeth Salander (the tattooed private investigator of the title) as a feminist avenging angel. Others criticised Larsson's graphic descriptions of the abuse and mutilation of women, judging the whole effort "misogynist".

It's all very confusing if you come to the story a bit after the event, which, like many, I have. Not being a thriller fan, I spurned the Dragon Tattoo bandwagon for a long time. When a book is as hyped as this, you have certain preconceptions: I imagined cliches and extreme violence. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover it is neither formulaic nor disturbingly graphic. And it was indeed Larsson's take on feminism that made it stand out as an original read.

The book promotes a very Scandinavian sort of equality. The message I took from it was that gender is irrelevant. We behave the way we do because of our individual characters and personal histories. In Larsson's world, it's the psychopaths who split the world along gender lines. And, boy, do they get their comeuppance.

But not everyone agrees. This f-word blog rounds up the initial reviews of the book, concluding that Larsson's rape and murder fantasies are little more than sexist titillation. Melanie Newman concludes that she has "difficulty squaring Larsson's proclaimed distress at misogyny with his explicit descriptions of sexual violence, his breast-obsessed heroine and babe-magnet hero".

Interestingly, in Joan Smith's original, positive review of the book in the Sunday Times she doesn't really take on Larsson's feminism, noting only that as an activist: "Larsson's other great preoccupation [alongside the fascist movement] was violence against women, and the scarcely believable horrors Blomkvist unearths are as rooted in misogyny as they are in fascism."

Others take the feminism as read. In the Times, Christina Konig describes it as combining "a contemporary feminist polemic with a good old-fashioned thriller". Feministing.com sees Lisbeth Salander as "basically a feminist avenger".

So far, the film has been less divisive. It has been universally panned as anti-women. In her review in Harper's Bazaar this month, Mariella Frostrup writes: "A potentially good mystery is lost in scenes – such as a violent rape – that dwell too much on what feels to me like Larsson's misogynistic fantasies." On the Arts Desk blog, Graham Fuller judges the film "scarcely feminist". He writes: "In frankly depicting Lisbeth's rapes and presenting an obscene array of photographs of murdered women in a killer's lair, it comes across as glibly indulgent of those visual horrors."

In the novel Larsson spares us many graphic descriptions, leaving a lot of the worst to our imagination. It seems, then, that the film has betrayed not only some of the book's original subtlety but also its feminism. I waited too long to read the book. I think I'll give the film a miss altogether.

Henrik Arvidsson

[email protected]

Mean Streets (1973) 'What's a mook?'

Robert De Niro in Mean Streets. Photograph: Warner Bros

Scorsese's uncanny ear for dialogue was evident from his first masterpiece, Mean Streets, which is set in the heart of Little Italy among debt collectors and small-time hoods. Characters were called by names such as Johnny Boy, Joey Clams and Giovanni Cappa. In one classic pool-hall scene, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and David Proval start a fight - over the jukebox sounds of Please Mr Postman - after a barman calls one of them "a mook".

Goodfellas (1990) Tracking shot entrance to the Copacabana

Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas. Photograph: Warner Bros

Ray Liotta's Henry Hill takes new girlfriend Karen (Lorraine Bracco) to dinner. They enter the Copa via the back door, go through the kitchen and are led onto the dancefloor and to the best table in the house. In one unbroken three-and-a-half minutes' shot, the camera (operated by several times Oscar-nominated Michael Ballhaus) glides with them. "What do you do?" she asks as they sit. "I'm in construction," shrugs Henry, and the shot ends.

Raging Bull (1980) 'I coulda been a contender'

Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Photograph: Warner Bros

Marty loves a mirror. Travis Bickle asked himself: "You talkin' to me?" in Taxi Driver (1976), and De Niro's bloated washed-up boxer Jake La Motta goes in front of the looking-glass to perform his one-man show, reciting from the works of "Shakespeare, Budd Schulberg and Tennessee Williams". We see the Oscar-winning De Niro, rehearsing his lines, doing Marlon Brando's speech to his brother, from On The Waterfront, and psyching himself up to go on stage, still calling himself "champ".

The Big Shave (1967) The shaving scene

Peter Bernuth in The Big Shave. Photograph: Warner Bros

Shot for a class at NYU film school, Scorsese's six-minute short features actor Peter Bernuth, yet again in front of a mirror, at a sink, shaving himself closer and closer until he bleeds and blood drips down the plughole recalling the shower scene in Psycho. It's played out over the jazz standard "I Can't Get Started" and has been seen as a metaphor for American involvement in Vietnam, probably because the asthmatic young Scorsese also dubbed it Viet '67.

Round Midnight (1986) Scorsese's cameo

Scorsese himself in Round Midnight. Photograph: Warner Bros

Marty contributes a brilliantly oleaginous cameo as corrupt nightclub owner RW Goodley in Bertrand Tavernier's jazz movie. Goodley greets Dexter Gordon and François Cluzet at JFK and talks incessantly during the cab ride into the city. "New York, for me, the music's better, because it's tougher, the people are tougher," he riffs as they cross the Williamsburg Bridge, framed by Manhattan's skyline. "SOS," says Dexter when Marty finally leaves them. "Same old shit."

Casino (1995) Sharon Stone throwing chips

Sharon Stone in Casino. Photograph: SNAP / Rex Features

One of the director's least appreciated movies, this is the story of Sam "Ace" Rothstein (De Niro) running the mob-owned Tangiers' casino in Las Vegas with his childhood friend Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) as an enforcer.

Sam is eventually brought low in this tale of greed and violence by his obsessive love for Sharon Stone's table hustler, Ginger. The film is Stone's finest performance and contains a number of breathtaking shots and sequences. The overhead of her rapturously throwing her chips in the air has become one of the most imitated Vegas scenes.

Academy Awards 2007 Winning an Oscar for The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese accepts best director award for The Departed at the 2007 Academy Awards. Photograph: Getty

At the 2007 Academy Awards, Scorsese finally won an Oscar for best director, for his take on the Hong Kong corrupt cop drama, Infernal Affairs. Scorsese's remake is set in Boston. The Departed also won best picture, as well as best adapted screenplay and editing.

Marty had lost out on five previous occasions and it was widely thought Hollywood didn't like him.

To a rousing standing ovation, he received the award from his contemporaries, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

The King of Comedy (1983) Rupert Pupkin's routine

Robert De Niro in King of Comedy. Photograph: Rex Features

Having kidnapped Jerry Lewis's TV host Jerry Langford, obsessive stand-up wannabe Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) finally takes to the TV stage as part of his ransom demand, believing his big break has come.

His feeble, miserable, tragic routine - delivered in red trousers, shiny jacket and bow tie - goes down quite well, even when he confesses how he actually got the gig. The audience thinks it's part of the act.

'I figure it this way: better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime,' he closes.

The Red Shoes (2009) Scorsese's restoration work

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948) Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/RANK

Scorsese's respect for film heritage has led to him overseeing numerous resoration projects, these include founding the World Cinema Foundation to help countries preserve their cinematic treasures and so rediscovering films such as Senegal's Touki Bouki and Morocco's Transes.

Last year at Cannes, he presented a sparkling new print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes.

Scorsese introduced Powell to his editor Thelma Schoonmaker in New York, and the pair were soon married.

Bad (1987) The Michael Jackson video

Michael Jackson's Bad video. Photograph: Warner Bros

Scorsese's love of music - he edited Woodstock in 1970 - has resulted in concert films with the Rolling Stones (Shine A Light) and the Band (The Last Waltz) as well as documentaries about Bob Dylan (No Direction Home) and a series called The Blues.

In 1987 he recreated the choreography from Cool in West Side Story in the video for the title track of Jackson's new album. The dance sequence, set in an underground car park, forms part of an 18-minute short film. It's about expensively educated Daryl (played awkwardly by Jackson) doing a dance to show his old friends 'who's bad'.

All locked up … Kathryn Bigelow is flanked by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin after winning the best picture Oscar, joining her Academy Award for best director. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

For once, the Oscars were a genuine nail-biter. Right through to the final reel, it was too close to call between the David and Goliath of this year's contenders: Avatar, James Cameron's 3D space opera, and The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's low-budget drama about a squad of US bomb disposal experts working in Iraq. That Bigelow and Cameron were once married merely heightened the drama – quietly exploited by the ceremony producers who sat them directly behind each other – as did the huge disparity in their box-office takes (with over $2.6bn, Avatar is the biggest film of all time; The Hurt Locker has just topped $21m).

But, in the end, the underdog momentum gathered by The Hurt Locker was just too much for even the mighty Avatar to withstand, despite 11th hour upsets such as the banning of co-producer Nicolas Chartier from the ceremony, and a possible lawsuit in the offing over the film's authorship. The film took six awards, including both best director – making Bigelow the first woman ever to win the award – and best picture, collecting them in such swift succession that Bigelow was left literally breathless.

"It's the moment of a lifetime," she said after being handed the best director prize by Barbra Streisand, who had herself been the first woman to win a directing Golden Globe, for Yentl in 1984. Bigelow dedicated the award to the people of Jordan, where the film was shot, and to the "women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis – may they come home safe". In her speech accepting the best picture award, presented by Tom Hanks, Bigelow extended this to all servicemen and women around the world. The film also took Oscars for Mark Boal's original screenplay, best film editing, sound editing and sound mixing.

Best actor went, predictably, to Jeff Bridges for his role as a washed-up, strung-out country singer in Crazy Heart. The star looked as comfortable ambling onstage as only one raised in the bosom of Hollywood could. His standing ovation was affectionate and deserved.

That accorded to Sandra Bullock, who won the best actress award for her role as a tough-talking woman who takes a troubled football prodigy under her wing in The Blind Side, felt slightly less so. Despite British presence in the category, including rising star Carey Mulligan for An Education and Helen Mirren for her role as Sofia Tolstoy in The Last Station, it was a relatively weak year. But Bullock is a much-loved Hollywood personality, admired as much for her gameness as her acting talents. On Saturday night she had taken to the stage at the Razzies to receive the award for worst actress of the year, for All About Steve, in which she plays a cruciverbalist-turned-stalker.

As expected, the best supporting actor award went to Christoph Waltz, who has so far won every award going in the category for his masterly turn as a sadistic "Jew-hunter" in Inglourious Basterds. But it must have been a blow to Quentin Tarantino that this was the only one of the film's eight nominations that bore fruit (James Cameron's Avatar – nominated in nine categories – did at least go home with three: for art direction, cinematography and visual effects).

Also unsurprisingly, the best supporting actress award went to Mo'Nique, who plays an abusive mother in Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire. On the red carpet outside the Kodak theatre, she had been as laissez-faire about the possibility of a victory as only one so heavily-tipped could be: "A win is when someone says [their] life is different because of Precious," she said.

It wasn't the harrowing film's only honour of the evening – there was a surprise in the best adapted screenplay category when Geoffrey Fletcher snatched it from the teeth of An Education's Nick Hornby and Armando Iannucci's In the Loop team. No one was more surprised, it seemed, than Fletcher himself, who struggled through his 45-second address, choked with emotion. "I wrote that speech for him," boasted host Steve Martin directly afterwards – one of many big laughs he and co-host Alec Baldwin received during the evening.

It was a disappointing night for the Brits, especially in the light of last year's Slumdog Millionaire sweep. There was nothing for Colin Firth, Mulligan, Mirren, Hornby or Iannucci. Nothing, even, for Nick Park – usually something of a sure thing at the Oscars, with five already. But in this instance his latest Wallace and Grommit was pipped to the post for best animated short by Nicolas Schmerkin's Logorama.

Also snubbed were the critics' favourites The White Ribbon and A Prophet, which lost out to the Argentinian film The Secret in Their Eyes. But then, when it comes to best foreign language film, the Academy has a history of singing to its own tune.

And, while the ceremony itself began with a full-throttle song-and-dance number, courtesy of TV's Neil Patrick Harris – splendid in a sequinned blazer and accompanied by a bevy of be-feathered dancers – that turned out to be the only song on offer in a ceremony that, though long on glitz, was short on bona fide razzmatazz.

Though winners' acceptance speeches were limited to 45 seconds, it was still a long evening, perhaps a product of the Academy's decision to – after a 67-year hiatus – increase the number of best picture nominees from five to 10. This meant much of the ceremony's running time was devoted to stars introducing clips from the runners and riders and, after their opening routine was complete, surprisingly little time was left to the two hosts. Martin and Baldwin began the night with a healthy dose of celebrity scepticism, dishing out insults of refreshing frankness to the assembled mob. But, as the evening wore on, the poking-of-fun descended into a Mexican wave of genuflection as they, plus guest presenters, succumbed to the pull of actor flattery.

In awarding the first ever best director Oscar to a woman, and the first screenwriting award to an African-American, this was a night of genuine progress and optimism for Hollywood. But the revolution has rarely felt so predictable.

Photos of Banksy's pop-up cinema, Lambeth Palace

See inside the underground venue showing his film, 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'

Film-maker Jafar Panahi arrested in Iran

The Crimson Gold director, who is a vocal supporter of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, has reportedly been detained by security forces

Iranian director Jafar Panahi, photographed in 2004 at his home in Tehran. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

The Iranian director Jafar Panahi has reportedly been detained by security forces in his homeland. Panahi, 49, is a vocal supporter of the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and has long been regarded as a pariah by the Iranian establishment. He is currently believed to be being held at an undisclosed location.

Mousavi's website Kaleme quotes Panahi's son, who claims that the film-maker was arrested at his home on Monday night, together with his wife, daughter and 15 dinner guests. Security forces allegedly searched the house and seized belongings. The official Iranian media is not reporting the story.

Panahi is known as one of the leading lights of modern Iranian cinema. He won the Camera d'Or award at the Cannes film festival in 1995 for his debut feature The White Balloon and took the Golden Lion prize at Venice for his 2000 drama The Circle. His other films include Crimson Gold and Offside.

Panahi's productions are largely funded by European money as a means of bypassing what he sees as government interference. His films are banned in Iran, where the authorities regard them as implicitly critical of the current regime. "[The authorities] think that anyone who is independent or not following their views is a spy of the west," Panahi told the Guardian at the time of Crimson Gold's release. "Paid by the west. Spreading western propaganda."

The film-maker is known to have criticised the outcome of last year's disputed presidential elections, which returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power and sparked opposition protests across the country. Since then his activities appear to have been curtailed. Last month, organisers of the Berlin film festival claimed that a travel ban had prevented the director from attending the event.