The baby bridesmaid with hands clamped firmly over her ears and a fretful frown notched across her brow is Grace van Cutsem, the 3-year-old god-daughter of Prince William, and an internet-meme in the making.

Like a high-class infant photo-bomber, little Gracie has managed to spoil enhance a historic image with unexpected panache.

The poor mite seemed pretty unhappy with the level of noise going on, initially the result of lots of raucous cheering from the crowds as Wills executed his long-awaited smooch with the new Duchess of Cambridge.

As if that wasn’t enough, there followed an eardrum-shaking fly-over by World War II era planes - including a Spitfire, Hurricane and a Lancaster – which did not appear to improve Grace’s mood – see photo no.2.

Perhaps she is simply getting tired of the whole rigmarole of being a bridesmaid, for she is clearly a flowergirl-of-choice when it comes to a certain kind of wedding – see here and here for two previous engagements.

Here’s hoping that in the formal photographic mementoes of the day, the adorably pouting Ms Grace is not cropped out.

Detective Sarah Lund, played by Sofie Gråbøl

If you’re not already watching The Killing, the stylish Danish police thriller showing on BBC4, you’ve got a treat in store.

Head down to the iPlayer where you’ve got a month to catch-up on the 10 episodes you’ve missed so far – episodes 11 and 12 are on Saturday night.

The plot may tread familiar territory – a teenage girl goes missing, a couple of quarrelsome detectives get on the case – but in execution, the show’s Danish creators have done something exceptional.

They leaven the dark tragedy of Nanna Birk Larsen’s disappearance with a parallel story of political intrigue, set against the backdrop of Copenhagen’s mayoral election.

Troels Hartmann, a troubled candidate for city mayor, played by Lars Mikkelsen

And they counter-balance the familiar science of the police procedural with an insight into the broader impact of the girl’s disappearance.

Thus we spend almost as much time with the family of 19-year-old Nanna – her stalwart, hard-working father Theis; her warm, loyal mother Pernille – as we do with the two detectives searching for her.

Most importantly, by casting the subtle, magnetic Sofie Gråbøl in the role of detective Sarah Lund, the producers have provided a deeply watchable lead who acts as a centre of gravity for each episode.

As Lund wades deeper into the mystery, she never loses our attention and rarely tests our sympathy – except perhaps in her personal relationships, which increasingly suffer from her workaholic devotion to the case.

A kind of yang to Lund’s yin, Lars Mikkelsen, with his blonde good looks and striking cheekbones, is equally compelling as the liberal politician Troels Hartmann, whose campaign to become mayor is constantly on the brink of being derailed by unknown forces.

At times it’s hard not to compare The Killing to the BBC’s State of Play, another gripping TV series that begins with a tragedy involving a young woman, but which is more deeply embedded in the political world. The Killing does not quite match the compact panache of the BBC series, although that is partly by nature of its far longer running time – 20 episodes compared to State of Play’s six. It does offer comparable levels of suspense. Ten episodes in, we still don’t know what happened to Nanna on the night she disappeared, although pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to emerge.

But while I’m a fan of her picturesque settings, thoughtful pacing and eminently stylish fittings (music, clothes, actors, it’s all good) there’s something about Ms. Coppola’s favoured plotlines that niggles. Granted, I haven’t yet seen Somewhere, so I’m pretty much going by the trailer and the poster – risky. Still.

What do we know? Our two lead characters, played by Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, are not just ‘somewhere’. They spend their time in environments of extreme luxury. They have their every whim catered for. They bask in sunshine, swim underwater, lay about in bed ordering room-service, eating ice-cream and watching films. Sometimes, beautiful, slender, glamorous people enter their lives.

Most of the time the main protagonist is troubled – in spite (in spite!) of his luxe life. Who would have guessed it? And who would have guessed that spending ‘quality time’ (that means, basically, any time at all) with your beautiful, talented, playful daughter might make you a little bit happy?

I enjoyed Lost in Translation. I surprised myself by enjoying Marie Antoinette, quite a lot. I’m sure I will enjoy Somewhere. But my problem is: how could one not? It’s furniture porn, hotel porn, fashion porn, travel porn, all parcelled up with a cool soundtrack.

Perhaps this isn’t fair. After all, great art often comes from telling stories about the places you know best, and Coppola apparently based Somewhere partly on her own experience, travelling around hotels with her father.

And there are moments of genius: the shot of Stephen Dorff having a plaster mask made of his face is a great natural metaphor, full of pathos.

The truth is, I would really like to see Sofia Coppola, who is undoubtedly talented, make a film that isn’t set in five star surroundings. There is something so hypnotic about watching these poor rich people with their neuroses, their addiction to opulence, their everyman need to be loved. It’s fun to watch them just traverse the locations, like watching an exclusive travel show. But I’d like Coppola to challenge herself and her audience, by going somewhere that isn’t naturally beautiful, and then making us watch.

He followed that up with Insomnia, which pitted Al Pacino against a villainous Robin Williams in a perpetually light Alaska. Though somewhat less original than Memento, it still did the job of a psychological thriller very well.

I wasn’t super keen on The Prestige, with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians, but with Batman Begins, and later, The Dark Knight, Nolan returned to the visionary filmmaking he demonstrated in Memento.

I’m hoping that Inception, with its stellar cast and mindboggling conceit – Leonardo DiCaprio can mess with your dreams (like a better looking version of the BFG?) – will prove to be another Nolan masterwork.

French filmmaker Thomas Balmes has made a documentary starring four babies, born and being raised in four very different locations: Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo.

Look out for ace Namibian baby balancing a pot on head while walking.

[P.S. I know it's been a long time since I last posted anything, indeed SO long that even my DAD wants to know what's going on... to which my only excuse is that I've been busy learning things, about the retail sector, and then the media sector. But with the summer lengthening of the days, I am hopeful I will find time to blog more often.]

Perhaps this vacuum exists because the stories behind contemporary poverty seem too familiar, too inevitable. Because we know there are no simple solutions and therefore happy endings are unlikely.

In 19th century England, many outrages were brought to light through parliamentary lobbying, popular fiction or local campaigners. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies we meet Tom, a child chimney sweep, who

cried half his time, and laughed the other half. He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week..”

The book proved a partial catalyst in the passing of the 1864 Act for the Regulation of Chimney Sweepers. Dickens’ Oliver Twist helped usher in reform of the workhouses.

Perhaps these past social wrongs – child chimney sweeps, malnourished orphans – were in some sense easier than ours: easier to identify, to condemn, to regulate. The abuses we are left with seem truly obstinate. If you watch Lukas Moodysson’s heartrending film, Lilya 4-Ever, about sex trafficking – one of the worst scourges of our society – you will be left feeling not only traumatised but also powerless: there are already laws against it, there are whole police divisions working on it, and yet still women are being trafficked for sex.

All of this is partly why the Dardenne brothers are cultural heroes of our time: they make films that star the poorest and most marginalised of our society. The other reason is that they are simply outstanding film-makers.

Their latest film, Lorna’s Silence, is about an Albanian immigrant in Belgium, who wants to open a snackbar with her boyfriend. In order to do this, she must become a citizen. So she marries a heroin addict, on the proviso that after some time, they will divorce. The problem is, the heroin addict starts to get better. And her underworld handler, who arranged the marriage, has another scheme: Lorna is to marry a Russian mafia member who also needs citizenship, and if necessary, kill her addict husband. Talk about moral dilemmas.

Exploring the limited options of impoverished people in tight corners is a Dardenne speciality. Their 2005 film, L’Enfant, which won the Palme d’Or, is shocking because it shows with brutal honesty what happens when a ‘child’ – someone who, though adult, has been given no moral or ethical guidance – conceives their own child. It is a film that, like Moodysson’s Lilya, is difficult to watch, yet it manages to be compelling, and more extraordinarily, to make us care deeply for its damaged protagonists.

These are filmmakers on the outskirts of the industry, and their films are only ever given limited release; they do not promise escapism. But still we should be grateful they exist at all.

In terms of telling complex stories to mass audiences, film is the most effective communication medium we have. So I’m pretty excited about this new film: Fair Game will document the Valerie Plame affair.

It’s a story that truly deserves to be immortalised on celluloid, providing an astonishing insight into the depth of iniquity reached by the Bush administration and the ruthless power of a corrupt political machine.

Directed by Doug Liman, who made The Bourne Identity, Swingers and Go, it also stars two of my favourite actors, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, and is due for release some time in 2010.

Bomb disposal scenes are a surefire shortcut to suspense. Doom-laden while at the same time full of hope; engrossing but maddeningly tense. The pared-down simplicity of the narrative – after all, there are only two possible endings when a bomb is within inches of your protagonist – is easy for audiences to grasp and even easier to hold onto. And the tiniest, momentary actions, the snip of a coloured wire, weigh heavy with potential catastrophe.

All this should help Kathryn Bigelow‘s new film The Hurt Locker, which follows an elite bomb disposal unit in Baghdad, escape the curse of unpopularity that’s beset Iraq-themed films thus far. Her refusal to wade into the ideology of the war could also make the film slip down a little easier with patriotic americans.

The film promises to be more than just a succession of mindless set pieces: Bigelow is an artist who studied painting before moving to Hollywood; she’s also an intriguing, provocative aesthete of violence, whose first short film in 1978 showed two men fighting, accompanied by an academic voiceover deconstructing the scene and its significance. That fascination with destruction as art – the “cinematic heart attack” – translates into incredible film-making. You can have a peek at her style – courtesy of the NY Times -  here.

And, obviously, in the trailer below.

You can see it, all 90 minutes of it, on youtube, for free.

It took 2 and a half years to make, with 500 hours of footage filmed across 54 countries.

It may make you cry.

In 50 years, in a single lifetime, the earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity”

An hour and a half might seem a long time to devote to a documentary but I promise you every single perfectly shot image will show you something you have never seen before, have never contemplated or never fully understood.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon complains the film has “no brains and no soul; it’s just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints”, while the Hollywood Reporter says it’s “terminally sullen”.

More supportive – while riffing playfully on the same robot theme – is A.O. Scott in the NY Times, who starts off by calling it “sturdy and serviceable” – hardly ringing praise – but goes on to applaud the film’s “brutal integrity”:

With its clanks and creaks and broken-down contraptions, this movie is a battered Wall-E to Star Trek‘s sleek and seamless Eve.

Which is fitting, since part of the point of the Terminator movies is to register ambivalence about technological progress, which fills our lives with all kinds of cool, convenient stuff that somehow brings an intimation of our eventual obsolescence.”

I quite like the sound of that, but as with any cult franchise, there are of course many purists squirming in horror at the idea of the ridiculously named McG trying to steer the Terminator behemoth into glory. As my interest in the films was fairly late acquired (I was far too scared to ever watch them before I was officially allowed to aged 18, and only then because my dad told me they were works of considerable cinematic achievement), I don’t feel too concerned about where the franchise goes next – I’m just happy the others were made, and so well. I am however, slightly put off Christian Bale after I heard his ridiculously aggressive on-set rant against the director of photography on the film. Unbelievable scenes.

Terminator: Salvation is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 3rd June.