Uday was unhinged to an extent that his father can appear, as he does occasionally here, as some kind of benign elder statesman, shaking his head at his son's wild exploits. A bride is systematically sexually abused on her wedding day, resulting in her suicide; a court rival has his stomach sliced open to reveal his guts; young schoolgirls are picked up and raped. Some have complained that there is nothing we didn't already know here, and that to run through it all again is simply an exercise in cheap sensationalism and voyeurism. (I'm not so sure about this — I think much of it will be news to many in the multiplex audiences.) Certainly there's a lack of dramatic depth, and little nuance: Latif and Uday are drawn like Jekyll and Hyde, even though there has apparently been some doubt cast on the reliability of the body-double's memoir. But given that's how it's being played, Cooper does an excellent job in both roles, all idiot grins and swivelling eyes as the sadistic Uday, and quiet fear and loathing as his reluctant shadow. Cooper is probably best known to you as the flirtatious, most sexually precocious of Alan Bennett's History Boys, or as the love interest to Keira Knightley's Duchess of Devonshire. In this, his first genuinely  starring role, he is like an earthier, swarthier Jude Law crossed with Peter Lorre. His extraordinarily large eyes alone require VistaVision. Given more headline roles, he could end up being Britain's biggest male movie star.

Stars of the conventional kind are not really required in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, one of the more recent blockbuster offerings and sequel — or prequel — to Tim Burton's flaccid and overblown remake of the Charlton Heston cult classic. Superior to the Burton film, its narrative is straightforward and exciting-monkeys being experimented on become smarter and smarter-and its moral is simple: don't mess with Mother Nature. The apes of course are no longer actors with monkey masks; the product of "performance capture" animation, they are what you might call "hyper-real." We might not truly believe in them, but are impressed enough with how they've been created for the screen to go along with it all. The ending leaves us in no doubt that this is just the second in what is obviously intended to be a long-running series, the success of which will rely on the producers being smart enough to realise that while it might be popular (and lucrative) there is no hope of it ever replacing the shock of the original.