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Ken Loach's Looking for Eric is tipped for success at Cannes, which opens on Wednesday. Jason Solomons meets its star and, below, picks five other films to watchWhile Cannes is a second home for stars such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, the festival often reveals the unlikeliest heroes. When its 64th edition gets under way on Wednesday, one of its biggest stars is sure to be an unknown British actor who will be travelling from his Manchester council flat to the Croisette.Steve Evets gives a beautifully bewildered performance as Eric Bishop, the depressed postman at the centre of Ken Loach's new comic drama, Looking for Eric. The actor, previously a character player in TV dramas such as Heartbeat and Casualty, now stars alongside Eric Cantona after the Manchester United hero comes magically to life to inspire his namesake to better himself. As Evets says: 'We'll be walking up the red carpet and people will say, 'Oh, there's Ken Loach, winner

Ghosts, Gothic horror, lesbians, poltergeists, female hysteria... There are hidden depths to Sarah Waters. Here, the most 'remarkable storyteller since Daphne du Maurier' talks to Robert McCrum about effete boyfriends, postwar austerity and why she's kicked out the corsets in her latest novelSarah Waters lives in a pretty little Victorian terrace at one corner of Cleaver Square in south London, next door to the Lambeth courthouse and an easy walk from the Imperial War Museum. It's an address that seems perfect for her, and the absolute rightness of things in Waters's world is reinforced on first meeting, one sunny afternoon at the beginning of spring. When she opens the door in jeans and sneakers and shows you up the bare wooden stairs to her cluttered first-floor kitchen, there is none of that disconnect you can sometimes feel on meeting a writer whose airbrushed image adorns her many paperbacks: Ms Waters is exactly like her photographs, with freckled white skin, an almost boyish, sl

"A Nervous Smile" explores the dark side of life with a disabled child with an honesty as commendable as it is brutal.

Pick your metaphor. Like steak to a starving prisoner. Or maybe a bridge over troubled water. Simon Rattle's visits to the Philadelphia Orchestra tend to be events whenever they happen, but during this precarious stretch in the orchestra's artistic life, his performance Thursday night was not just about Rattle. It was critical evidence that the ensemble can still conquer specific musical ideals that form its core identity.

Toward the conclusion of Alexander Korda's 1934 film 'The Private Life of Don Juan,' the legendary lover (played with panache by the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks Sr.) attends the theater, where he watches a show purportedly documenting his life - one filled with the grossest inaccuracies, fantasies, and distortions. Outraged at this faux-Don Juan being passed off as the real thing, ...

It's been 38 days since Bollywood fans gorged on their weekly diet of high-laced drama and that seasonal mix of musical kitsch. Any enterprising producer could build a big-budget movie based on such gripping circumstances. But unlike reel-life ...

This is a poem about the madness that hits our lives during times of stress and depression. It has hints of suicide, but the meaning is subject to the readers interpretation. Hope you all enjoy...Source: TASALI PILAPublished: May 09, 2009

BAFTA-WINNING comedienne Dawn French is to star in a new sitcom about the lives of a middle-aged couple when they return home at the end of their working day.

CHARLIE KAUFMAN IS A WORRIED man. Ever since making his screenwriting debut with Being John Malkovich, the new york-born writer has enjoyed the 'weird, atypical and lucky&