Haley Joel Osment is no mere child star. Don’t be fooled by height or age, young master Osment walks into a room with the kind of mature self-composure that most adult celebrities would surely envy.

There is a strange sort of duality about Osment. On the one hand, he jokes about playing video games on the set of A.I. Artificial Intelligence ("The grips were awesome”, he exclaims boyishly).

But when it comes to his portrayal of the deeply human robotic child of A.I, Osment is all business.

The pneumatic Lara Croft is a boy's wet dream, but Angelina Jolie says the sexuality of the videogame character made it all the more fun.

Shrek is unlike any animated film you have ever seen. A cartoon for adults, it’s a fractured fairy tale for everyone. The film’s directors, DreamWorks head honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg and director Andrew Adamson, share the inside scoop on the making of Shrek.

“When we started Shrek, we wanted to make a fairy tale come to life,” says New Zealander Andrew Adamson, who directed the film with Vicky Jenson, “as if you opened a storybook and stepped into that world.”

Film anoraks may recall Renee Zellweger starring in films such as Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (alongside the then unknown Matthew McConaughey), but it was not until hit film Jerry Maguire, where as the young woman who wins over the heart of a self-absorbed Tom Cruise, that she was thrown into the limelight.

He is one of America's great actors, and on screen is as intense and ferocious a performer as exists in Hollywood. There's only one De Niro. 

On paper, it should have been a cinch ­ reassemble the team that turned Thomas Harris's thriller The Silence Of The Lambs into an Oscar-winning phenomenon and crank out another edition of everyone's favourite cannibal franchise.

In practice, the story of Hannibal's evolution from best-selling novel to blockbuster film unwinds with all the ease of a Gordian knot, the only certainties being that it was a best-selling novel and it will be a box office smash.

Willem Dafoe is that rare breed of actor who glides effortlessly from one role to the other, from mainstream Hollywood like Spider-Man to independent fare, such as his latest film, Shadow of the Vampire. Whether he's Jesus or Nosferatu, he remains credible in the role.

Matthew Arnoldi: Could you first of all briefly describe the role you play in your latest film "In too deep" ? 
OE: I play a cop fresh out of Police Academy who goes undercover to trap a drugs lord played by LL Cool J. It’s based on true stories of undercover cops who wage war on drugs. It’s rather like a documentary, you see the story as it’s happening. 

The last time David Duchovny was in Scotland he was 10-years-old, just another American kid being dragged round the old country by a mother who had left her home near Aberdeen for a new life on another continent. 

When a man who's already played two black cultural icons tells you there is no agenda at work, that he's only an actor and it just sort of happened that way, m'lud, you'd be forgiven for lobbing an ''Aye, right'' back over the net at him. 

When the actor in question recently won a prestigious Golden Globe for his portrayal of a third black icon - Rubin ''Hurricane'' Carter, the boxer framed for murder by a racist police force in the 1960s and later celebrated in song by Bob Dylan - you'd almost certainly lob it back with top spin.