Hippies, vampires and the spirit of David Lynch loom large

Writer-director Peter Strickland cites a viewing of David Lynch's nightmarish Eraserhead ("this strange, beautiful piece of atmosphere"), followed by years of triple bills at the King's Cross Scala ("New York underground, sleazy European art porn, creepy Italian horror"), as his cinematic inspiration. It's easy to imagine the creator of Katalin Varga (2009, Artificial Eye, 15) gorging himself on such exotica. From the brooding, amorphous guilt of Lynch's industrial noisescapes to the emotive violence of so much "exploitation" fare, Strickland clearly appreciates the strange mysteries of cinema's most dark and troubling dreams.

His eye-opening first feature is a gothic-inflected Romanian tragedy in which the vampiric spectre of Transylvania's prince of darkness is replaced by an altogether more human monster. Hilda Péter is mesmerising as the innocent outcast, banished from her village when her husband discovers that he is not the father of her son. With horse, cart and nine-year-old in tow, Katalin sets off across the haunting vistas of the Carpathians, hellbent on revenge, the landscape almost singing to her as she goes – an eerie murder ballad. But when she finds the beast who brutally scarred her years ago, will she be able to plunge a stake into his heart? Does revenge or redemption cast the longer shadow? Brooding, sensual and brilliantly unsettling, Strickland's film moves seamlessly between horror and wonderment, a visually enrapturing modern myth with its head in the darkening clouds and its feet firmly planted in the soil of a spine-tingling soundtrack.

While it may be hard to imagine a "good Megan Fox movie", Jennifer's Body (2009, 20th Century Fox, 15) comes close to being just that. Admittedly, Fox herself is the least of this satirical high-school slasher's virtues, its main strength being a spunkily genre-literate script from Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. Likable Amanda Seyfried takes centre stage as "Needy", the allegedly dowdy teen (clearly Cody's cipher) whose best/worst friend turns out to be a man-eater, in every sense.

Like all the best teen-terror romps (from Carrie to Ginger Snaps), the supernatural elements are based upon down-to-earth adolescent anxieties. There's real recognisable bite in the spectre of Jennifer's dawning vampirism ("she's evil… and I don't just mean high school evil"), and the best moments combine sarky humour and creeping horror with post-Mean Girls aplomb. Sadly, it doesn't quite sustain the initial promise as prom night looms and subtextual meat gives way to more formulaic softcore scares. Yet there's plenty here to entertain young-at-heart horror fans (both male and female), who will appreciate Cody's evident love of the genre and hopefully respond with appropriate good cheer.

The cover for the mirthless dirge-fest The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009, Pathé, 15) cites a review which proclaims that this is "as funny as any Will Ferrell or Judd Apatow film". Talk about damning with faint praise. What scant laughs are on offer here are in fact duly stolen by co-producer Ferrell, who drops in for a supportive cameo involving skydiving, Abe Lincoln and dildos (readers are invited to insert their own cheap knob gag here). Elsewhere it's a chuckle-free zone as Jeremy Piven and co attempt to do for cowboy car salesmanship what Blades of Glory did for figure skating: make it seem funny, ballsy, quirky, comic but ultimately (and not entirely ironically) uplifting. Sadly, it is none of these things, at least not on the evidence of The Goods.

It's hard to know what exactly attracted Ang Lee to the hippy-dippy comedy of Taking Woodstock (2009, Universal, 15), a tale of peace, love and understanding which is somewhat hobbled by being quite so benign. Everyone involved seems absolutely lovely – from the quaint Catskills townsfolk whose rural idyll is overrun by vagrant longhairs, to the cops, the TV squares, the bread-head promoters, the security guards (Liev Schreiber in scene-stealing drag) and, of course, the sauntering druggy peaceniks themselves, who are peculiarly polite and well-behaved throughout. OK, so Imelda Staunton's marauding mum starts out screechy and shrieky, but even she mellows under the tide of niceness and a large plate of hash brownies. In knowing counterpoint to Mike Wadleigh's Woodstock, we never actually get to see the festival itself, Lee's focus being on the crowd which seems to exist in a bubble of Brigadoon-like bliss. Only a heavy-handed closing reference to the impending catastrophe of Altamont (which gave birth to the Maysles's terrifying Gimme Shelter) strikes a note of doom – otherwise it's nostalgic sunshine and light all the way.

With Julien Temple's wonderfully gritty Oil City Confidential playing in cinemas and duly raising the bar of the contemporary "rock doc", it's tempting to be snotty and scornful about Michael Jackson's This is It (2009, Sony, PG), a hagiographic montage of rehearsal footage from Jacko's unfulfilled final tour. Yet despite never being intended for public viewing, the resultant patchwork is a peculiarly charming and occasionally poignant affair. Jackson was clearly pacing himself and rarely hits his moonwalking stride, gesturing towards dance steps rather than throwing himself into them, and occasionally talking rather than actually singing the songs. Yet anyone who felt a morbid tingle at the posthumous release of Elvis's "Twelfth of Never" rehearsal tapes will be similarly intrigued by the apparent intimacy of these "non-performances". Of course the real showman here is Kenny Ortega, heroic helmsman of the High School Musical series and the guiding hand behind this ambitious enterprise which somehow weaves a silk purse out of a potential sow's arse. Go Kenny!

• DVD and video reviews

Mark Kermode
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Corey Haim, a Hollywood teen star of the 1980s who became as famous for his struggles with substance abuse as his acting, died in Los Angeles of an apparent drug overdose, police said today. He was 38.

Corey Haim - best known as the star of 80s classic The Lost Boys - has died in L.A. at the age of 38 according to the L.A. coroner's office.

As well as the vampire-classic in which he co-starred with Jason Patric, Dianne Wiest, Kiefer Sutherland and Corey Feldman, the Canadian actor was best remembered for License To Drive which also starred the other Corey and still stands up as one of the best teen movies of the decade.

More recently Haim had battled an addiction to prescription medicine and taken repeated stabs at getting back into the business.

No further details are known about events surrounding his death.

SL

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Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino have been accused by Dannez Hunter as using without credit ideas he submitted in a concept to Miramax in 1999

Quentin Tarantino is being sued for more than $1m by a man who claims the Oscar-winning film-maker's martial arts-themed double feature Kill Bill was partly based on his ideas, according to US reports.

Celebrity website TMZ.com says Dannez Hunter filed a suit on Monday, claiming he submitted a concept for a movie to studio Miramax, the company which produced Kill Bills 1 and 2. He says his 1999 story outline posited the idea of a character named Ren, who witnesses her mother's murder: 2003's Kill Bill Vol 1 features a character named O Ren Ishi, played by Lucy Liu, who suffers a similar fate as a young child.

Hunter goes on to claim he applied for a job at Miramax but "was never given a return phone call, as numerous similar situated less qualified Jewish and white people were bestowed job after job after job".

Miramax was run by siblings Harvey and Bob Weinstein until 2005, but the pair have since left to run new firm The Weinstein Company. It was speculated last month that they might be in the running to buy back the troubled film-making unit, which they founded in 1979, from Disney.

Tarantino has made no comment on the case filed against him, but he did say on the red carpet at Sunday's Oscars that he might have considered shooting parts of Kill Bill in 3D had the movies been made today.

"I liked Friday the 13th in 3D," he said. "Actually, one of my favourite movies of the year was My Bloody Valentine 3D. That was a great 3D movie! If I had to do Kill Bill all over again, I probably would do Volume 1 in 3D."

• Quentin Tarantino
• Law

Ben Child
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Corey Haim, the star of The Lost Boys and Lucas, has died aged 38. We pay tribute to an actor who grew up in the limelight, but whose adult career was spent sadly in search of it

The road to adulthood for the child star is frequently a rocky one. For Corey Haim, who has died at the age of 38, it proved, in the end, too much to negotiate. Haim's guileless, fun-loving, all-American brand of youth and confidence won him many admirers. But it was a hard brand to carry into adulthood.

Born in Toronto in 1971, Haim enrolled in acting lessons to help cure his shyness. He proved a natural, with a great grin and an easy way with a one-liner, which won him a small role, aged 12, on TV show The Edison Twins.

His debut feature film was Firstborn, an early vehicle for then-couple Robert Downey Jr and Sarah Jessica Parker.

But it was, however, a supporting role, as were his parts in Secret Admirer and Murphy's Romance.

His first lead was nothing if not ambitious: as a sweet-natured but mischievous paraplegic in a very spooky and rather accomplished adaptation by Stephen King of his novella Cycle of the Werewolf. Silver Bullet is about a smalltown community terrorised by a half-man, half-beast. It was a performance of sweetness and subtlety in a rather adult film notable for the high quality of its child stars; Haim's sister was played by Megan Follows, a fellow Canadian who took the lead in the big-budget TV adaptation of Anne of Green Gables.

The film won good notices, and Haim became hot property: for TV movie A Time to Live he won the Young Artist award as an Exceptional Young Actor Starring in a Television Special or Movie of the Week.

But his major break came in 1986, when he won equal billing alongside Kerri Green, Charlie Sheen, and Winona Ryder in Lucas.

As the cute, bespectacled geek who wins round a whole town and, unwittingly enables romance, he won a legion of fans. The success of the film led to a TV series of his own, Roomies.

But it was a return to the themes of Silver Bullet - siblings, werewolves and smalltown America - that resulted in Haim's best-loved film, The Lost Boys (1987). Joel Schumacher's cult classic was, though not his strongest, certainly his definitive role, not least because it marketed the beginning of his partnership with Corey Feldman: another child star, with whom he starred in over 10 films and, later, a reality TV show. Here we see him at his sudsy, youthful best, singing in the bath, blissfully unaware of his brother's troubles. It's a charming, carefree snapshot of young teenage life; part Fred Savage, part Macaulay Culkin.

The following year, Haim and Feldman co-starred in two more films together, teen comedy License to Drive, about a dream date thrown into jeopardy when the lead fails his driving test.

And then a horror film, Watchers, in which Haim takes in a genetically mutated mutt.

Haim won his second Young Artist Award, tying Feldman for the Best Young Actor in a Motion Picture Comedy or Fantasy award for License to Drive.

In 1989, they cemented the partnership with the film Dream a Little Dream, which gave rise to a No 1 single, Rock On, sung by Michael Damian, with the pair appearing in the song's music video.

That year Haim released a self-promotional video documentary entitled Corey Haim: Me, Myself, and I.

It makes for strange viewing: Haim seems both out of his depth, completely carried away with his lifestyle, and keenly aware of the challenges he faces, as well as very ambitious (he wants to write, direct and make music). He also looks terribly young. And sounds it, particularly when comparing kissing to dolphins.

The early 90s were considerably less successful. A string of straight-to-video titles was followed by a full-motion video game called Double Switch and sequels to Fast Getaway, Last Resort and Dream a Little Dream.

But even this harking back to past glories couldn't quite save his career. After a handful more direct-to-video films and flops, he filed for bankruptcy in 1997.

The early years of the new millennium were spent trying to get back in the business and in and out of rehab. "I started on the downers which were a hell of a lot better than the uppers because I was a nervous wreck," he recalled. "But one led to two, two led to four, four led to eight, until at the end it was about 85 a day – the doctors could not believe I was taking that much. And that was just the Valium – I'm not talking about the other pills I went through".

He seemed increasingly consigned to being defined by his previous career. There was an E! True Hollywood Story in 2001; a sad cameo in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. But by 2004 he had resettled in Toronto and appeared to have overcome his drug habit, and in late 2006, he and Feldman took steps to embrace their lot by co-starring in a reality show, The Two Coreys.

There was some controversy - rebutted by both actors - that the show was scripted, a stunt. But neither actor showed themselves to major advantage.

And the two eventually fell out entirely in 2008 after Feldman allegedly said he'd break all ties until Haim was truly drug-free.

Last year he joined the cast of Shark City; he was also in Crank 2: High Voltage. He was unusually frank in promotional interviews - too frank perhaps - allowing himself to be seen as himself, smoking, in a car park, rather than protected, in a TV studio.

2010 was, however, shaping up to be a busy year for Haim: he had no less than 10 films on his schedule. Some of these are no doubt in the can. Some are doubtless rather good. It's a real shame Haim is no longer around the reap any rewards.

Catherine Shoard
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Sure, The Hurt Locker wasn't a box-office hit and Precious positioned itself as outside white-bread commercialism, but all the big Oscar winners were irredeemably Hollywood

The Academy may still be congratulating themselves on picking for their best picture award arguably the least commercially successful winner of all time (over the most successful). But if we step back a bit, we can see that this year was one of the safest ever. All the top awards went to American films, even if, as far as Precious was concerned, they tried to position themselves outside white-bread mainstream. But The Hurt Locker, Avatar, The Blind Side, Precious, Crazy Heart, Up and Inglourious Basterds represent traditional, conventional American cinema in all its various guises. Outsiders often get a look-in in the acting categories– not always Brits; sometimes there's someone from France or Spain too – but there was no Kate Winslet or Tilda Swinton, let alone a Marion Cotillard. Obviously, it helps if the foreigner in question is propping up an American film; the only chink of an outward glance came with Inglourious Basterds's Christoph Waltz, an Austrian playing the kind of role once reserved for ice-eyed Englishmen. That's progress, of a kind.

This may be a little ungenerous; the Academy could easily be a forum for rewarding commercial success, and it does its best to step away from it. The Hurt Locker has taken nearly $15m (£10m) at the US box office (with an opening weekend of $145,000); far less than the last recent best picture "weakie", Crash, which had taken $53m when it won in 2006. But just because hasn't been a monster box office hit doesn't mean The Hurt Locker is not thoroughly Hollywood: it was made by the same people who made Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Likewise, Precious may have all the attitude of an out-of-the-ghetto scrapper, but it was paid for by your classic film-production dilettante types: fashion entrepreneur Sarah Siegel-Magness and her husband, cable TV heir Gary Magness. And no one is going to question the Hollywood credentials of the other big films.

Does this mean that we are seeing American cinema going through one of its introspective phases? The Oscars have never been much of a guide to the state of Hollywood: they're customarily a parade of well-meaning wish-fulfilments. Is Jeff Bridges the best male actor in America right now? No; he should have won for The Big Lebowski, but outside Coen cultists, that film's virtues didn't emerge for a while. Is The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow's best film? No; it's just her best one since Point Break, way back in 1991. Can Sandra Bullock really hold a candle to any of her fellow nominees? Not by a long shot, but she's made a lot of money for a lot of people in the last decade. But with the world-destroying success of Avatar, and the excitement-momentum generated by 3D, Hollywood is briefly feeling like it's on the front foot.

But it is a shame when the Oscars gets over-American. One of Hollywood's great virtues is, like America, its ability to absorb outside influences and reconfigure them – not always successfully, it has to be said. But the hope is always there. (Anyone remember that great picture of Coppola and Kurosawa sitting in a garden together, looking at pictures?) But the film industry moves so quickly that this year's winners will soon be footnotes, and we can get behind next year's big British/Japanese/German hope.

• Oscars
• Film industry
• Kathryn Bigelow
• Sandra Bullock
• Kate Winslet
• Tilda Swinton

Andrew Pulver
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Following the recent string of 3D Blu-ray Disc player and 3D TV launches, Deluxe Digital Studios is rolling out 3D Blu-ray production services next month, with capacity ramping up to finish four movies a month by the fourth quarter.

'Did I really earn this, or did I wear you all down?' asked the star of The Blind Side after winning her first Oscar. Good question ...

Brian Cox and Vanessa Redgrave are to appear together on the big screen in Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut "Coriolanus," fresh from the duo teaming up for the small screen update of "The Day of The Triffids."

The director is likely to direct a new adventure featuring the knights of the round table, scripted by John Hodge, the man who took Trainspotting from page to screen

Guy Ritchie looks set to take on another great British icon, King Arthur, following the box office success of his all-action Sherlock Holmes movie. The film-maker is being tapped to direct a new reimagining of the dark ages tale of the Celtic leader who fought against Saxon invaders (and in many stories, marauding magical creatures).

According to Variety, the screenplay by Trainspotting's John Hodge will be based at least in part on Thomas Mallory's 1485 Le Morte d'Arthur, a compilation of French and English Arthurian romances which is one of the main sources of the famous myth. At one point Mallory has the king travelling to Rome, where he defeats Julius Caesar and takes the crown of emperor, though his book also features many traditional Arthurian stories and characters, such as Lancelot, Guinevere, Mordred, the quest for the Holy Grail and the knights of the round table.

The stories of Arthur have proved fertile ground for Hollywood over the years, with the most recent reimagining being Antoine Fuqua's 2004 tale King Arthur, starring Clive Owen as a Romano-British soldier during the last days of the Roman Empire in Britain. It departed significantly from the traditonal myth and was poorly received by the critics, despite taking a respectable $203.5m across the globe.

Other versions include the Disney animation The Sword in the Stone, from 1963, 1981's Excalibur, starring Nigel Terry and Helen Mirren, and Richard Thorpe's 1953 effort Knights of the Round Table.

Studio Warner Bros will be overseeing the new production. Ritchie also has two further projects lined up, historical action flick The Siege of Malta and action thriller The Gamekeeper. There is also the small matter of a sequel to his blockbusting Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law, which took $470m globally. It is expected to hit cinemas in 2011.

• Guy Ritchie

Ben Child
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John Krasinski (It's Complicated) is in negotiations to star alonside Ginnifer Goodwin in the romantic comedy Something Borrowed, to be directed by Luke Greenfield.

The film is based on a series of novels by Emily Giffin. The story centres on a Manhattan attorney (Goodwin), who falls in love with her best friend's fiance on her 30th birthday. Alcon, who picked up the rights to the first book also has rights to the novel's sequel, Something Blue, and has plans to adapt both for the big screen.

Krasinski is negotiating a two-picture deal that will see him play a supporting role as Goodwin's friend and confidant in the first film and then evolve into the lead male role in the sequel.


Georgine Waller

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