So it begins: £45 million cut to London Film Centre

Tigris Timidity: Why we can’t have the films about Iraq we need

The Hollywood system has often come under fire from critics and viewers alike, owing to its persistence in continually churning out the lightest of entertainment and ever-more diluted movies about nothing much in particular, though easily marketable toward a sometimes desperate buying audience. Take for instance the recent best picture Academy award winner, The Hurt Locker. The six Oscars and albeit minor box office receipts for Kathryn Bigelow’s film could either demonstrate the film’s genuine power to evoke the pain of war in the viewer, or indeed its promotion of a skewed vision where as journalist and documentary-filmmaker, John Pilger, notes “the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion”.

Inappropriate children's books based on films