Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci
Writer/Director: Nora Ephron
Price: £19.99 (Amazon price: £12.98)
Released: March 8th 2010

Calling all foodies! Slight departure from the normal TMINE fare, I know, but I refuse to be confined to one little box - here's your chance to win a copy of Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep as famous US TV chef (ah, see the TMINE link now?) and writer Julia Child and Amy Adams (you know, off Enchanted, Sunshine Cleaning et al) as a blogger who tries to make all the recipes in Childs' magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year.

Review and competition details after the trailer.

So I was watching Taken again yesterday. It's a cracking movie – you can always tell when an action film isn't as dumb as the others when it gets described as a 'thriller' or an 'action-thriller'.

In it, Liam Neeson plays a retired CIA agent whose teenage daughter gets abducted while in Paris. He has 96 hours to track her down before she disappears forever. Now, it owes an awful lot to the Bourne movies, from its gritty fights and its European locations to its camerawork and stunt scenes. But it definitely stands by itself as a film intended for grown-ups, and Neeson's fantastic and the director lets him have some great moments to himself.

It also deserves a lot of credit for portraying the world of prostitution and trafficking in women as the horrific, miserable, squalid thing it is, rather than the usual glamourous Pretty Woman-esque view.

But it suddenly got me thinking. When exactly did Liam Neeson become the West's greatest martial arts action star? Okay, he started off in Hollywood doing Dark Man, so it's not like he was a stranger to action films. But over the last decade or so, he's become a real martial arts star who is also a great actor at the same time. That's pretty rare: in fact, he may be the movies' greatest martial arts actor. What do you think?

After the jump, some of Liam's recent fight scenes to prove my point – at least as far as the fighting's concerned.

• The Da Vinci Code: Possibly the longest, silliest film made in human history
• The Changeling: Excellent, with that Mad Men-eque quality of "I can't believe sh*t like that really happened"
• The Yes Man: Fun, perfectly cast and Zooey Deschanel is as wonderful as always, but the 18-year-age gap between her and Jim Carrey was just so icky
• Kate and Leopold: Otherwise known as "Sabretooth and Wolverine: The Early New York years", this was gentle but sweet, well researched for its historical details but daft in modern times
• Star Trek: The Motion PIcture (Director's Edition): Lots of Robert Wise/Douglas Trumbull repeating their classic work on The Andromeda Strain et al, but still desperately boring – and there's almost minimal difference between director's edition and regular edition as far as I can see.

I was going to write a review of Star Trek. But then I couldn't be bothered. Lovely wife loves it and wants to see it again in IMAX; I thought it was good, but all that time travel made it feel too geeky and continuity-ridden for my liking. But it's definitely one of the best, if not the best of the Trek movies, and I did love the fact they showed Christopher Pike (who was the captain of the Enterprise in the show's original pilot) as a decent captain, on a par with Kirk, rather than a simple placeholder, waiting for Kirk to come along. Plus Karl Urban as Bones was spooky.

Thing is, it's supposed to be a movie that sheds the Star Trek universe of geekiness and makes it accessible to non-fans. However, while preparing to write said review of Star Trek, I went to its IMDB page to do some research. Turns out the geeks hadn't got the message.

First thing to make me roll my eyes and laugh was the cast list. See if you can see what I mean:

After that, I checked out the goofs page. I did so love this one, not just for being wrong, but because someone cared enough to add it:

Continuity: In the final "Spock on Spock" scene, you can see the obvious height difference between the two. Young Spock should be the same height as old Spock.

I won't even delve into the forums. They're busy complaining about promotion-speed.

Still, if it makes them happy and it's a good film: an enjoyable romp, but not an absolute must-see.

Today's Joanna Page is Ready When You Are Mr McGill, a 2003 remake of Jack Rosenthal's famous 1976 play.

Rosenthal is best known for creating London's Burning and for writing the first ever episode of Coronation Street as well as famous plays such as Play For Today's Bar Mitzvah Boy and P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang. In Ready When You Are Mr McGill, he turned his attention to television.

The original play, made for Granada, focused on the filming of a single scene of a TV show, in which just about everything can go wrong, does go wrong, and Mr McGill, one of the extras, does everything he can to help out and deliver his all-important line before the end of the day.

ITV, back in 2002/3 when it had a little bit of cash and was using big names to draw in the crowds, decided to remake the play as a one and a half hour movie. Starring Tom Courtenay as Joe McGill, Bill Nighy as the egotistical director, Amanda Holden as herself and Phil Davis as the cameraman, it also featured comedy luminaries including Tamsin Greig, Sally Phillips, Sam Kelly, Stephen Moore and Stephen Mangan.

It more or less followed the original play's plot, but was updated to cope with modern television politics and production - and changing it to the filming of a cop show instead of a spy show. But to pad it out for an extra half hour runtime, there's an additional sub-plot about Babs Carter, an actress who's a bit worried about her nude scene and who does everything she can to get out of it. Playing Babs Carter: Joanna Page.

If you've watched enough movies and TV shows, the idea of the 'ticking bomb' should be familiar to you. You know: there's a bomb, it's got to be defused, usually by snipping either a red wire or a blue wire, and there's only a few minutes or seconds to do it in.

Normally, you'll find this in a single episode of a TV show or maybe in the final act of a film and it'll usually be just a regular cop or soldier doing the disarming, rather than a heroic bomb disposal expert – typically they're running late. Equally rarely will the ticking bomb scenario last the length of the entire movie or TV show or the bomb be any more complex than just that red-blue question.

In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of Danger UXB and occasionally The Unit really focusing on bomb disposal on TV; in the movies, even Speed didn't dwell on disarmament, only evasion, and Quatermass and the Pit didn't have a bomb, only a spaceship everyone thought was a bomb.

Juggernaut (also known as Terror on the Britannic), released in 1974, is perhaps the only instance of a movie that deals exclusively from beginning to end with the defusal of a single bomb and that features a heroic bomb disposal expert at the centre of the action.

Set on board a luxury liner travelling across the Atlantic, the movie sees Richard Harris try to disarm seven identical and highly complicated bombs designed by a man calling himself 'Juggernaut'. The first film to develop the 'red wire/blue wire' dilemma, it's a tense piece directed by Richard 'Superman II' Lester, with dialogue by Alan 'Beiderbecke' Plater, that while featuring an all-star cast is in reality a mesmerising monologue by Harris and a musing on the nature of death. It's a movie you should own.

Here's the very 70s, slightly judgemental trailer narrated by a bored American man.

¡Madre Mia! I've finally got round to writing it. The reasons you should own Manhunter! Will wonders never cease?

As far as most people are concerned, The Silence of the Lambs was the film that introduced serial killer Hannibal Lecter to the world. Starring (Sir) Anthony Hopkins as the ex-psychiatrist and people-eater, it was one of the first horror movies to do respectably at the Oscars and catapulted both Hopkins and Jodie Foster, who played the FBI agent trying to mine him for information, into the league of A-list stars.

Since then, we've had Hannibal and Red Dragon, both starring Hopkins as Lecter, and young Lecter movie, Hannibal Rising - all to diminishing effect.

What not many people realise is that back in the 80s, Michael Mann, director of Heat, Collateral, The Insider and Last of the Mohicans as well as creator of Miami Vice, had already adapted the original Lecter novel, Red Dragon, as Manhunter.

Way before Millennium, Profiler and CSI made popular forensic science, psychological profiling and the idea of thinking inside a killer's mind to catch him, it featured CSI's William Petersen as Will Graham, the man who caught Lecter by risking his own sanity and daring to think the same thoughts. Equally notably, it also featured Brian Cox as Hannibal - and he's a damn sight better than Anthony Hopkins.

Which is why Manhunter is a movie you should own. Here's the original trailer for Manhunter - forgive it for being made in the 80s.

Today's Joanna Page is Very Annie Mary, a little movie set in Wales that features just about every Welsh actor in existence. It stars Rachel Griffiths, an Australian actress who impressed everyone right up until she joined the cast of Brothers and Sisters, as Annie Mary, the frustrated (in every sense) daughter of Pavarotti-impersonating baker Jonathan Pryce. 

She wants to help her best friend, the seriously ill 16-year-old Bethan Bevan, get to Disneyland and singing in a talent contest might be the only way to get the money. And despite being 22 at the time, Joanna Page played that sick teenager.

However, there's also a video stream, despite the fact it's a radio show, and Radio 5 also uploads some of the best bits onto YouTube. So here are some classic Kermode reviews for your enjoyment.

Pirates of the Caribbean 3

A mash up of his Iron Man review with the trailer

Jason Isaacs accuses Mark Kermode of being wrong about Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean 3

And lastly, Paris Hilton's The Hottie and the Nottie

Today's Joanna Page is Bye Bye Harry, a British road movie released in 2006, of which she was the star, and that you will never have seen. Ever. Until now.

We've been jumping all over the place chronologically, here, so let's recap the inexorable career rise of Ms Joanna Page. After leaving RADA in 1999, she went straight to the National Theatre for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She continued to do well in the theatre, with roles in a series of medieval mystery plays, The Mysteries, As You Like It, What the Butler Saw, Aladdin, Doomsday, Camera Obscura, and Billy Liar (with Ralph Little), among others.

The world of film beckoned, too, with bit parts in Miss Julie and This Year's Love, and larger parts in From Hell, Very Annie Mary, Love Actually, and Gideon's Daughter.

And on tele, there were important roles in David Copperfield, The Cazalets, The Lost World, Ready When You Are Mr McGill, Making Waves, Mine All Mine and To The Ends of the Earth. She even found time to fit in a few radio plays and a music video in all that, too.

So by 2005/6, a starring role in a movie looked inevitable. Indeed, in his review of The Mysteries for The Independent, right at the start of her career, Robert Butler prophetically wrote, "As Eve, Joanna Page looks as if (now she's eaten that apple) she will be the love-interest in a movie very soon."

And then it arrived: No Snow which soon became Bye Bye Harry. She's the female lead – arguably the lead. It's a British road movie, a 'dark' rom-com by experienced comedy writer Graham Alborough . It's got noted director Robert Young at its helm. It's got two of the country's biggest rock stars in supporting roles. And when it was released, it featured at the country's leading film festival. 

So why haven't you heard of it until now? And why had you probably not heard of Joanna Page until Gavin & Stacey?

Problem is, I've been linguistically tricky. See, although I said it was a British road movie – and indeed it is, according to the British Council – I pulled a fast one. The bulk of the financing came from Germany and Slovakia. When I said "the country", the country I actually meant was Germany, the rock stars I mentioned were Bela B Felsenheimer and Til Schweiger (very big in Germany), and the film festival I mentioned was the Berlin film festival. 

And it's never been released anywhere else. Not France, not Belgium, not the Netherlands. It's certainly never been shown in Britain. And although you could get a version dubbed into German on rental in Germany, you couldn't get the original English language version until two weeks ago – on import from Amazon.de. 

So without fear of contradiction, may I present for your delight the very first, most comprehensive, most definitive and probably very last English language review of Bye Bye Harry aka Liebling, wir graben Harry aus.

Today's Joanna Page is Richard Curtis's Love Actually.

Curtis has dominated British comedy, whether it's been on television or in the cinemas, for nearly three decades now. Following an early stint writing for Not the Nine O'Clock News in the 70s, he started to bestride us like a laughing, Islington-loving colossus the following decade with The Black Adder, its three sequel series and a couple of one-off spin-offs. Within a few years, he became the moving force behind Comic Relief and managed to notch up a couple of movies, including The Tall Guy, starring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson.

In the 90s, he stormed through again, first unleashing Mr Bean on us all, before choosing to take over the world and introduce Hugh Grant to us all with Four Weddings and a Funeral. He went on to write Notting Hill and the screenplay for Bridget Jones's Diary. He also spent 13 years laughing at country folk for the mysteriously successful The Vicar of Dibley.

Love Actually, released in 2003, was his first attempt at directing a movie. It's kind of a composite rom com version of Crash (or a sicklier version of This Year's Love, which also featured Jo Page) in which just about every possible facet of love is explored through the inter-connected lives of various people around the world. With an incredible cast of stars, it is occasionally touching, sometimes funny, and usually irritating. But it has Joanna Page in it - provided you don't buy the censored DVD - so we'll forgive it.

It's here. It's here! After all that waiting, it's finally here.

Much like the January sales, there are strategies to be used when you're going to watch something as anticipated as Sex and the City: the movie. Either you wait all night camped outside and then be the first in before everyone else, or you wait until everyone has been crushed under foot and enter at your leisure afterwards.

Which is why I'm sauntering in with a review of Sex and the City over a week after it opened.

What do you mean I shouldn't be watching this cos I'm a bloke? Watching movies about women is 'so gay'? Do you want to have a think about that?

Today's Joanna Page is From Hell, an impressively unpleasant and bad film, which is odd*, given that it was based on a graphic novel by the lovely Alan Moore, stars the equally lovely Johnny Depp and features the very lovely indeed Joanna Page. She plays a former prostitute trying to turn good for the sake of her baby. Which is... nice? Sigh. Where's Andrea Dworkin when you need her?

* Okay, it's about Jack the Ripper, so that should have been a clue. What's the fascination there, by the way? We're talking about a bloke who was really nasty to women. I'm not really sure he's worth dwelling on unless you're a criminal psychologist or a historian...

There's a certain amount of false advertising in the trailers for Leatherheads, the new George Clooney/Renée Zellweger movie set in the early days of professional American football. The trailers suggest it's a rom-com. Yet there's not much romance and there's not much comedy.

It has its moments, don't get me wrong, but ultimately this is a drama, with a touch of comedy and a touch of romance. And it's a reasonably worthwhile drama, because even if the subject matter isn't all that interesting, especially for a UK audience, the style of the film and its 'homage-matter' will appeal to anyone who's ever watched an old black and white movie.