The Lives of Others was such a brilliant achievement that it is hard to believe that writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck could make a misfire as dire as The Tourist. The involvement of Julian Fellowes in the screenplay makes it seem even more of a bizarre failure.

A romantic thriller-cum-comedy, it stars Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, flanked by the likes of Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton and Rufus Sewell (Jolie is the only female character).

Do not believe the misleading action-packed trailers; The American is not really a thriller.

Directed by Anton Corbijn, a Dutch photographer justly famous for his music videos, it is a sombre, minimalist, very slow-moving exercise in arty style. Packed with film-buff references, it strains to evoke various alienated, "cool" spy/hitman/gangster films of the late '60s and '70s, ranging from Melville's pretentiously laconic The Samurai with Alain Delon, to paranoid American thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.

There is something wonderfully counter-cultural about the Harry Potter series. Mainstream mass entertainment product is increasingly aimed at people whose faculties of concentration and memory have been dulled by the sensational junk they have already consumed. But the Potter films, like J K Rowling's books on which they are based, have gone in the opposite direction. They get longer, slower and more complex (and therefore duller for non-believers), and expect ever more knowledge and effort from their audience.

It has been described as a “billion-dollar Zionist project” by an Iranian newspaper and criticised for “corrupting” young souls by the pope. Now it turns out that Harry Potter does have a connection with the Holy Land.

Tourists have been flocking to the Israeli town of Ramla to visit the grave of Harry Potter, a British soldier who died as a teenager in 1939.

Private Potter, unlike his fictional counterpart, grew up in Birmingham and joined the army in 1938.

He was posted to what was then British Mandate Palestine and killed in battle the following year.

In the "Big inning" there was God, a few Yeshiva students and an ex-prisoner. The Yankles is a comedy about a group of Yeshiva students who have a calling from God to start a baseball team, aptly named, The Yankles.

It is a true comedic sight as an army of Yeshiva student baseball players, dressed in their uniform black and white suits, march on to the baseball pitch, with Tzizit hanging freely and Payot tumbling from their baseball helmets.

The work of a Jewish filmmaker has been honoured alongside actor Clint Eastwood at a Los Angeles awards ceremony.

British-born writer and director Joshua Newton was praised for his Holocaust thriller Iron Cross at the Museum of Tolerance International Film Festival.

The film received one of two awards from the museum. The other was given to Mr Eastwood for "encouraging tolerance, justice and human rights" through his work.

William Hague is to sign a groundbreaking agreement cementing ties between the British and Israeli film industries.

The Foreign Secretary, who is in Israel for a two-day trip, is expected to sign the co-production deal tomorrow.

It will give Israeli film-makers the chance to benefit from the facilities and reputation of the British film industry and open up new channels for both countries’ film industries.

If it were not for documentaries like Havana Marking's Afghan Star (about the local version of Pop Idol) which was a sensation last year, we in the UK could be forgiven for thinking of Afghanistan as simply a war zone rather than a fascinating country in which extraordinary changes have taken place since the overthrow of the Taliban regime.