This year being a leap year, Bradford's 14th International Film Festival has been scheduled to start on a rare date - February 29.

A packed and varied programme of new releases, vintage classics, retrospectives, tributes, special guests and awards will go on until March 15.

Details have yet to be released from the National Media Museum, but the festival will include documentaries on movies and movie-makers, the old favourite Widescreen Weekend, Uncharted States of America - what's new in US independent cinema - the Shine Award for the best short film, as well as special guests.

This week a new nine-week Tuesday evening series started, The Cinema of Central Europe.

Tutors Rona Murray and Roy Stafford offer an exploration of the impact of writers, musicians and film-makers from Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungry and Poland, from the 1920s through to the post-Communism era.

The programme includes four full screenings - Intimate Lighting (1966, Czechoslovakia); Fateless (2005, Hungary); Sehnsucht (2006, Germany); and We're All Christs (2006, Poland).

The series runs from 6.30pm to 8.30pm every Tuesday until March 4 and costs £65 (£45 concessions).

Meanwhile, for this month and next it's a case of now you see it, almost, now you don't at the National Media Museum. The law of unforeseen consequences has descended.

January's film of the month at Pictureville cinema - director Ang Lee's Lust, Caution - has been withdrawn and a planned showpiece interview with veteran movie-maker Jack Cardiff has had to be cancelled.

Both the film and the talk are advertised on the front cover of the January issue of NMM's brochure, Film.

But Lee's prizewinner won't be shown until February because of a "booking error", Pictureville patrons are being told.

The wartime erotic thriller, set in the Far East, was due to run from January 4 through to next Thursday.

Bill Lawrence, head of cinema, said: "It was due to a communications error. It wasn't the distributor's fault. We thought we had it booked from January 4, but the date was the 18th. Now we're going to show it from February 8 to 14."

But there will only be 14 screenings as oppose to the 32 planned for this month. Does that mean the NMM had second thoughts about devoting so many slots to the film? "No, I was happy with the original booking; it was just an error," Mr Lawrence added.

In place of Lust, Caution four other films have been substituted. Tonight, for example, Ridley Scott's recent movie American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe is being shown.

This film is based on real events in New York City in the late 1960s and mid-1970s, when a black Harlem gangster took over drugs distribution, outdoing even the Mafia, and a New York cop is put in charge of a special unit to crack the racket. The film can also be seen on the morning of Thursday, January 17.

From January 11 to 13, the film will be Into the Wild, Sean Penn's account of the life and times of idealistic young American Christopher McCandless, who gave away his money to charity, packed a rucksack and abandoned civilisation for the wilds.

On the 14th the film will be Kenneth Branagh's interpretation of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, which he has set on the Western Front battlefield in the First World War.

The scheduled showing on the 16th and 17th is Robert Redford's Lion For Lambs, starring Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. This film can also be seen in the morning of the 24th in one of the NMM's regular Thursday Senior Screenings.

The film has the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan as a backdrop to this story about the search for the authentic life - a favourite theme of Redford's in movies such as A River Runs Through It and The Horse Whisperer.

Another setback for the NMM has been the cancellation of cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff's appearance on the night of January 16, due to ill health.

The 93-year-old cinema veteran was due to talk to Tony Earnshaw, the NMM's head of film programming, about his work behind the camera and how he came to take photographs of stars such as Marlene Dietrich, John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart.

However, the planned screening of A Matter of Life and Death will go ahead at 8pm in the Cubby Broccoli cinema.

This 1946 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger masterpiece starring David Niven as an airman who is granted a reprieve from death by Heaven, was filmed by Jack Cardiff.

One of the technical feats which he pioneered was the use of both black and white and Technicolor film.

  • For more information and tickets the box office number is 0870 7010200.