Charlotte Gray

Sebastian Faulks' wartime romance is the latest novel to be reduced to big-screen slush.

Cate Blanchett is the Scottish heroine who falls in love with young RAF pilot Peter Gregory shortly before his plane is shot down over occupied France.

Desperate to find Peter, Charlotte enlists with the Special Operations Executive, which sends agents into southern France to work as couriers between the British Government and the Resistance.

Working under the identity of Dominique Gilbert, a woman from Paris whose husband is being held as a prisoner of war, she is posted to the village of Lezignac, not far from Peter's last confirmed location. There she makes contact with passionate local resistance fighter Julien Levade (Billy Crudup). Charlotte finds her emotions torn between her RAF lover and Julien.

Charlotte Gray (15) is screened nightly at Keighley Picture House.

A Beautiful Mind

Hollywood has always had a problem with the truth, which is fine as the main thing we look to LA for is fantasy, an escape, a little make believe, a chance to dream.

The trouble comes when movie-makers use real-life stories to weave their magic. They do it all the time of course, but real life has its own drama, its own charisma and rarely benefits from the injection of big studio hyper-reality in order to make it fit neatly into Formula Hollywood.

John Nash is a brilliant mathematician whose life has been wrecked by mental health problems. His theories inform international trade negotiations every day.

He won a Nobel Prize in 1994 and still lives and works in Princeton University and, by all accounts, is a right miserable old git.

Ron Howard's film is a well-mounted, slick and generally pleasing tale of triumph over adversity.

It offers plenty to think about, a cracking story and a lump-in-the-throat ending, but it ISN'T the truth.

While it's clearly ludicrous to approach such biopics as documentaries, it's a very thin line between artistic licence and outright fiction. For instance, Nash's descent into paranoid schizophrenia is delivered with compassion and moments of humour, but, in order to keep our sympathies where they belong, we are told nothing of an illegitimate child, a divorce, or his dalliance with bisexuality. However, Russell Crowe turns in a barnstormer of a performance as Nash.

A Beautiful Mind is screened each evening at the Picture House.

Showing daily are family movies Ice Age (U) and Jimmy Neutron (U).

Nick Churchill