John Wilson and the orchestra which bears his name created an absolute sensation at the 2009 Proms with their celebration of 75 years of MGM musicals. A total of 3.5 million people watched the broadcast live; countless more all over the world will relive the experience on DVD. Wilson has made a speciality of restoring and recreating great movie scores and presenting them in all their very particular glory in concert halls up and down the UK.

A documentary film I made recently, The First Movie, won the Prix Italia. Wim Wenders sent an email which said, “I loved it.” When I showed it at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival last month, nearly 1000 people turned up to see it, and many were in tears. How did all this happen? I’m not sure that I know. But, looking back, I can see a chain of decisions about the making of the film and the impulses behind it. Don’t all artworks have such a chain?

Tony Curtis, who has died in Las Vegas at the age of 85, made an improbable leap from Bronx street kid - the erstwhile Bernie Schwarz, who was always getting beaten up - to Hollywood icon in the 1950s and early Sixties. That he was able to do so is a testament to his determination to be an actor on the G I Bill, Universal’s willingness to put raw hunks of beef like him and Rock Hudson (a fellow Navy man) under contract, and Bernie’s own belief in his facile charm.

Cambridge is in pre-term cocktail mood, almost. Its Film Festival slips in after Locarno and Venice, and as Toronto ends, and before Rome (increasingly important) and London (internationally a struggler) start. It tilts in the same direction as the aforementioned, with fully fledged art movies, provocative documentaries and work from a dozen language groups or so, though it's very small and many people might not know it exists.

As befits a film set in Tuscany, Certified Copy is an international affair. It stars Juliette Binoche as a French gallery owner and William Shimell as an English art historian. Its Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami. The dialogue is in three languages. It’s the latest of la bella Toscana’s many starring roles in what’s been - let's face it - a chequered sort of film career.

The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il Gattopardo, to give it its Italian name, charts the decline of the house of Salina, a once mighty clan of Sicilian nobles who watch their power slip away as Garibaldi drags 19th-century Italy toward unity and modernity. But alongside the political narrative, book and film give a starring role to another timeless Italian reality: food.

You’ve heard of the Curse of Frankenstein. You know all about the Curse of Hello! But you may not be aware of the deadliest hex of them all. It goes by the name of the Curse of Cruise and, you just never know, it may be about to strike again. Film-goers have nothing to fear personally, not even if they find themselves watching potent soporifics like Interview with the Vampire or Eyes Wide Shut. No, the only way in which the Curse can possibly affect you is if you’re a young actress, and only then if you’ve been cast as Tom Cruise’s leading lady.

It had to happen. Until now, I've always resisted. But last Thursday, I had, finally, to tear open the plastic container to get to the protection inside. A nice man from Screen International gave me his before leaving - he'd have no use for it. He added that he wouldn't have handed it over had it been stamped with the festival rubric; you know, something that would make it a keepsake.

While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything from taking photographs of Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the historic Selma-Montgomery marches through producing oil paintings inspired by the scale of billboards to making pop-art assemblages, abstracts, and painting large-scale figures appropriated from commercial advertising.

Fifty years ago this April, a city-loving film-maker already internationally famous for such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries took the ferry from Gotland to the windswept, still snowy island of Fårö (the nearest  we can get in terms of pronounciation might be "Four-er").