Three underrated boy bands

1. Ultra

It's no surprise I have little recollection of the release of Leeds Uni foursome Ultra's self-titled debut album in February 1999 as it barely dented the Top 40. It's a shame as it's packed with some of the sharpest, freshest pop you could hope for, from opener Say You Do, through single Say It Once to the unlikely prog close, New Dimension, made up of two tracks - Way to Go and No Place Like Home - that segue into each other.

2. 2wo Third3

In the mid-1990s, former Pet Shop Boys/East 17/Bros manager Tom Watkins picked up gay, synth-driven quartet 2wo Third3. Singles I Want the World, I Want to Be Alone, Ease the Pressure and Hear Me Calling were marketed with a cartoony East 17 meets Clockwork Orange-style image and a plethora of remixes. Around the same time, Watkins also put together boy-girl quartet Deuce but they didn't amount to much either, despite hits Call It Love, I Need You and On the Bible.

3. Let Loose

Before Cathy Dennis was vaunted for her pop craft, this mid-90s band shrewdly harnessed the writing and production skills of Nik Kershaw. Kershaw had a slew of hits in the 1980s, including Wouldn't It Be Good, I Won't Let the Sun Go Down On Me and The Riddle, as well as penning The One and Only for Chesney Hawkes in 1991. He went back to working on his own material, producing a couple of pleasing albums, 15 Seconds (1999) and To Be Frank (2001), more notable for their tunefulness than lyrical concerns.

Le grand Gérard

It's been a while but I'm looking forward to a couple of new Gérard Depardieu films. French cinema's biggest international star made his name in the 1970s with movies for Bertrand Blier (Les valseuses, Buffet froid), Bernardo Bertolucci (1900, alongside Robert De Niro) and François Truffaut (Le dernier métro, with Catherine Deneuve).

In the 1980s he cemented his status with a remarkable run: The Return of Martin Guerre, Danton, Moon in the Gutter (Jean-Jacques Beineix's David Goodis adaptation), Under the Sun of Satan, Police (both for Maurice Pialat), Tenue de soirée, Trop belle pour toi (both back with Blier), Drole d'endroit pour une rencontre (with Deneuve, again), Camille Claudel (opposite Isabelle Adjani), Cyrano de Bergerac and Claude Berri's Marcel Pagnol adaptation, Jean de Florette, alongside Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil.

An attempt to break into English-language cinema at the start of the '90s was hilariously misjudged: director Peter Weir may imbue Green Card with some charm but My Father the Hero is cringingly awful, not least in its semi-incestuous subject matter. Only another actor might resent an actor working too much but over the next two decades Depardieu appeared in an incredible amount of cod-historical dreck - and as Asterix's barrel-chested chum Obelix, a role seemingly destined to take advantage of the actor's ever-expanding girth.

There are subplots to this period of Depardieu's life: his interest in his vineyard and the volatile relationship with actor son Guillaume, who made his feature debut proper alongside his father in 1991's Tous les matins du monde and went on to pursue a series of great choices, including a couple of terribly underrated films with Pierre Salvadori (Cible émouvante and Les apprentis), Pola X (for Leos Carax) and Don't Touch the Axe (Jacques Rivette). (Guillaume had to have one leg amputated when it became infected following a motorbike accident and died in 2008 from pneumonia, aged 37.)

A hint that Gérard Depardieu was returning to something of his past form came with a self-referential turn as a gangster in Mesrine: Killer Instinct (pictured, 2008) and in Claude Chabrol's Inspector Bellamy (2009), though we still had to endure the lazy schmaltz of My Afternoons with Margueritte (Jean Becker, 2010). Now we can look forward to Potiche (out 17 June) - directed by Francois Ozon, starring Catherine Deneuve - and Mammuth, screening tonight at the Ciné lumiere.

Yolande Moreau returns for Gustave de Kevern and Benoît Delépine's follow-up to Louise-Michel, which also stars Isabelle Adjani, and continues the directors' typically inspired, bad-taste exploration of individual rebellion in capitalist society. As he enters his sixth decade, Depardieu has a remarkable, dismaying, 11 features pencilled in over the next two years, according to IMDb. The list includes more English-language productions, cod-historical dreck and the dubiously titled Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia. Not promising.

He shoots, they score

If you're looking for an alternative to the royal nuptials, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is rereleased tomorrow in what looks like a beautiful restoration. Films as various as Brazil and The Untouchables have paid tribute to the famous scene on the Odessa Steps and it continues to be relevant. Though Eisenstein is said to have felt his film should be rescored every decade, this new print revives the first, 1926, soundtrack.

Before their fantastic ballet The Most Incredible Thing, orchestrated by Sven Helbig, Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe created their own score for Potemkin. Premiered on a drizzly evening in Trafalgar Square seven years ago, the British pop duo were keen to play up the location's importance as a site of protest.

Tennant wrote a little piece a few years later to accompany a free Guardian DVD release of Battleship Potemkin. In it he explained how to cue up their soundtrack to the film: 'You have to pause the CD during the second scene. It goes on for nine minutes and we thought our music was a little repetitive and edited it. But if you start the film again on the track/scene Drama in the Harbour, the film and CD will sync right up to the end.'

Roo shoot

The 17th London Australian Film Festival opens at the Barbican in a week's time and one of the highlights amid the week-long programme must be a rare screening of Wake in Fright in the Dark Side of Down Under strand. Notorious for its inclusion of a violent kangaroo hunt, Ted Kotchefff's 1971 movie was long thought lost until a negative was saved from a bin in Pittsburgh marked 'for destruction' a few years ago.

A teacher dreams of leaving his remote posting to meet his girlfriend for Christmas but instead is lured into an outback town's hellish backroom culture. Donald Pleasence - who else? - emerges as an alcoholic nemesis, and there are turns from Chips Rafferty (who also appears in one of Michael Powell's last films, They're a Weird Mob, 1966, set in Australia), Jack Thompson and John Meillon (who starred in the first two 'Crocodile' Dundee movies).

Kotcheff went on to direct the original Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) and Weekend at Bernie's (1989), before apparently settling on episodes for the softcore Red Shoe Diaries series. The wildlife slaughter, we are assured, was filmed as part of a monitored cull but still manages to pack a kangaroo punch.

Kate expectations or, what's in a name?

ROYAL WEDDING SPECIAL

Friday the marks the passing of Kate Middleton to Catherine. Prince William will be aware of the import of his fiancée's first name - it's not for nothing William Shakespeare named the main role Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew around 420 years ago.

Despite the play's inherent misogyny, its message has carried enough resonance to be worthy of more recent adaptations, notably Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate (filmed - in 3D! - in 1953) and teen movie 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), starring Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

There's another Catherine in Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), where Jeanne Moreau's character first marries Jules (Oskar Werner), with whom she has a daughter, but seduces Jim (Henri Serre). The trio set up home together but she finds herself thwarted at being the centre of attention as Jim tries to extricate himself from the situation and her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic.

It turns out she slept with another man on the eve of her wedding to Jules to punish him for a perceived slight and, when Jim returns to his lover Gilberte, she throws her continued adultery in the men's faces. 'She's usually sweet and generous but when she feels unappreciated she becomes terrible and violently goes from one extreme to the other,' we're told.

Flighty and capricious, secretive and headstrong, 'She'll never be happy here on earth,' the boys decide. The trouble lies in the name: how to reconcile traditional Catherine and modern Kate. (There are real-life icons, too, from Katharine Hepburn to Kate Moss.) Now Ms Middleton is moving from the latter to the former, royal courtiers must be hoping it's the Kate escape.

Luc Besson's debut: Le dernier combat

French director Luc Besson famously swore he would only direct 10 films but The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec - based on the comic books by Jacques Tardi and due out in the UK tomorrow - will be his thirteenth, with at least two more in the pipeline. (He's also writer-producer on the Taxi and Transporter series.)

Many of the tropes familiar from his movies were already in place for 1983's Le dernier combat (The Last Battle), his remarkably assured, near silent, first feature. Its opening shot is of a man shagging a blow-up doll, which slowly deflates: it establishes the search for (heterosexual) sex in a vogueish, post-apocalyptic, black-and-white world by the character, played by co-writer Pierre Jolivet, who also co-scripted Besson's follow up, Subway (1985).

For his first films Besson kept quite a team around him: cinematographer Carlo Varini shot Le dernier combat, Subway and The Big Blue (1988), while editor Sophie Schmit worked on the first two. A couple of Besson regulars share the screen: ageing character actor Jean Bouise (Subway, The Big Blue) and Jean Reno, cast in the slow-brute role that would become familiar to him in Subway, The Big Blue and, most successfully, Leon (1994). There are echoes, too, of the penchant for slapstick humour rife in those movies - the dumb show and prat fall being particular favourites - and a reflexive reaction shot used for comedy.

Besson's sense for visual setpieces is immediate - despite budget restrictions, some flying sequences reflect the visceral pleasure the director clearly feels when diving in The Big Blue. Soundtrack regular Eric Serra is already in place (there's a gag with a screwed up tape here reprised in Subway's opening chase), pleasingly experimental at rare moments, otherwise pure lounge.

As a young teenager, Subway was one of the first films to open up the possibilities of cinema to me, and when I was a student in Paris I caught a repertoire screening of Le dernier combat in a cinema off the Champs-Elysées and sought out different versions of The Big Blue, including a giant projection at Le Grand Rex and one with scenes I'm sure have still not been included on any DVD edit I've seen. I haven't seen any of his films since The Fifth Element in 1997, a run that includes Joan of Arc (1999) and Angel-A (2005); forthcoming feature The Lady, about Aung Saan Suu Kyi, sounds simply alarming.

Books galore: Newfoundland in fiction

I have developed an unwitting penchant for literature set in Newfoundland. The first book I read set in Canada's eastern province was The Shipping News (1993) by E Annie Proulx, my fascination cemented by the remarkable work of another American writer: Howard Norman. In what could loosely be termed a trilogy, from The Bird Artist (1994), through The Museum Guard (1998) to The Haunting of L (2002), he toyed with the themes of parental death, infidelity and murder, set mainly in Halifax (Nova Scotia), St John's, the largest city of Newfoundland and Labrador (as it is now), a distant presence.

Despite its size, I don't remember much of Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), other than a vague sense of disappointment that put me off attempting his follow up, The Navigator of New York (2002). Now, a Canadian friend has introduced me to the truly wonderful Galore by Michael Crummey, another local author. Recently available in Britain (thanks to New York's Other Press), Galore tells of the various residents of fishing town Paradise Deep, trading in a rich history of community and storytelling. Part one is biblical in its fecundity, part two so poignant you have to stop every few pages to draw breath. Nevertheless, I raced through it with a pleasure I haven't experienced from many recent reads.