Ok, I have Son of Rambow to talk about, but I want that on last, so I'll get rid of this backlog and then do that separately. I saw "the dirtiest American movie" Baby Doll and I can't see the fuss the way I can for films like Peyton Place or Anatomy of a Murder for their themes and content, this is a guy wanting to sleep with another man's wife, but then we had that in Casablanca . Anyway, this is an Elia Kazan adaptation of a Tennessee Williams (who else?) play, which  has acting ranging from floppy (the usually reliable Karl Malden, who just shouts a lot here) to fantastic (Eli Wallach in a quite magnificent screen debut). Nicely photographed, the scenes between Carroll Baker and Wallach are the high points of the film and it is an interesting watch, although Mildred Dunnock's oscar nomination is completely head-scratching in retrospect.

I finally saw Equus, which I've wanted to see for years because I am a huge fan of Richard Burton and this was supposed to be his most "snubbed" performance at the oscars and, given the competition, that's probably true. Burton is magnificent, it's a tour-de-force, so much so that his co-star Peter Firth does suffer under the weight of Richard's dominating screen presence. The supporting cast is first rate (the eternally brilliant Eileen Atkins and Jenny "I was the only decent young English actress in the 70s" Agutter especially), the screenplay provides some monumental monologues for Burton, but it doesn't really go anywhere inspired and relies heavily on Burton to give the story credability. More than worth the watch for his performance alone though.

Now the best of the lot, Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair, starring Jean Arthur (who I love but haven't seen anything of for a couple of years) and Marlene Dietrich (ditto). This is a very entertaining, consistently howl-out-loud funny film about a congresswoman (Arthur) who goes to Berlin to investigate troop morale and becomes personally obsessed with the fate of a former-Nazi club singer (Dietrich) who has an official in the army covering her. Smart, clever, often hilarious, it's a gem of a movie that I saw on Sky - it's regularly on so look out for it if you can.

Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there. I had the misfortune to watch most of (I tuned out for half an hour in the middle to watch the end of a Greta Garbo programme on the biography channel) In This Our Life, a John Huston film starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. I like Bette Davis, but for all the reasons most people don't, I don't care for her playing bitches, but I adore her when she's subtle (Dark Victory and Now, Voyager are my favourite performances of hers). Here she is so heinously over the top the results are unbelievably horrendous. Every moment is completely fake, you're watching Bette Davis act, and she's going to *act*, damn it! It's a truly awful performance and de Havilland's natural, reserved approach only highlights the embarrassment that Davis is in this film.

Yet that is not the worst of it all (oh one can only dream), I saw Silent Light made by Mexico's resident incompetent Carlos Reygadas. Not content with making the most interminably dull porn film ever in Battle in Heaven (surely a candidate for the most offensively dire insult to celluloid squeezed out this decade) here he casts his non-professional actors again, not realising that people who mastered this art (think Roberto Rossellini or Satyajit Ray) had talent - a commodity which this man is not lacking in, because that might imply you have at least some to begin with. A must for aficionados of le cinema du paint-drying, it was an insult to my backside to force it to endure this atrociously risible snooze fest of a waste of everyone's time, effort and money. Other than that, it's fine I guess.