Practical.” That practicality is most evident in his realisation of the potential of a monopoly in diamond production. It is rare for a major drama series to reveal an important truth about economics, but Rhodes reminded us that – for all the market rhetoric – many of the most successful entrepreneurs, from Cecil to Rupert, absolutely abhor competition.In the case of Rhodes, this competition rode in in the shape of Barney Barnato (the excellent Ken Stott). Bespectacled, with dark wiry hair and an East End/Vilnius accent in which the word “schlemiel” appeared in sentence one, Barnato was only missing a volume of Lionel Blue’s Greatest Thoughts, a yarmulka and a 20ft sign saying “I am a Jew”, to ensure that the terminally stupid got the message.It’s this odd admixture of well-judged historicism and overblown characterisation that nearly unstuck the first episode altogether. To the question of whether or not Rhodes is a significant enough figure to carry a multi-million-pound, three- continent co-production, the answer is a definite yes. In his excellent book The Scramble for Africa, Thomas Pakenham uses the word “astonishing” three times in two pages to describe Rhodes So the story was there to be made. But because Rhodes is also an immensely politically difficult subject for the modern sensibility, it was always going to be a risky endeavour.
And they carry it off – just.

The BBC’s Rhodes is a man who cannot take a leak with-out the assistance of the Berlin Philharmonic

Which is fair enough. We are never left in any doubt that Rhodes (BBC1, Sunday) is an epic. We know this, not just because the makers have provided us with a sandstorm, a cast of thousands and an entire frontier town manufactured for the cameras, but because incredibly loud, specially composed orchestral scores accompany virtually every scene and arise to fill any silence. It’s at best mildly charming, and the plot is never quite as interesting as its dozens of carefully spiky little details about living wearily and pragmatically on Yankee dollars in a besieged socialist economy.Cinema details: Going Out, page 14. With a little help from Walt Whitman singing the body electric, true Sapphic love prevails against even the nasty schoolgirls who enforce a rigid line on heterosexuality.Farce and romance, of the hetero brand, are also key components of Guantanamera (15), a fine film by Tomas Gutierrez Alea (best known for Memories of Underdevelopment and Strawberry and Chocolate), which takes the form of a digressive road movie following two groups of travellers – a funeral party and a couple of randy truckers – along the same road in present- day Cuba. Randy (Laurel Holloman) is a rock-crazed underachiever and misfit who lives with a group of like-minded relatives and lovers; Evie (Nicole Parker) is from a posh black family, waxes ecstatic over the “Dies Irae” from K626 and can not only use the word “symbiotic” in a casual sentence but can define it almost correctly.

Antonia’s Line is the first movie by a woman director to win an Academy Award for best foreign film, and is a lot more bearable than a summary suggests It’s pretty hard on men, but we can take it. Call me Snake.The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (15), written and directed by Maria Maggenti, is a sweet-natured if somewhat insubstantial tale, lightly dusted with farce, of lesbian romance between two high-school girls. You can tell that Antonia’s Line (15) is art because one of its characters has visions of smirking Madonnas and corpses coming back to life to sing “My Blue Heaven”, and because it’s set in a remote village populated by a Schopenhauerean gloom-bag called Crooked Finger, a Catholic woman who howls at the moon, a dimwit called Loony Lips, a child prodigy, a rapist .. just like Ambridge, really. Ron Shelton, of White Men Can’t Jump and other much better sports comedies, is credited as co-writer of the screenplay He must have taken a dive.And so to the realms of art. Plot: unscrupulous boxing promoter (the great Samuel L Jackson, squandered), knowing that the masses will shell out for a racial grudge match, recruits and trains a dopey white boy (Peter Berg) to challenge the reigning champ (Damon Wayans). He almost makes it into a comedy worth seeing; the key word being “almost”.At a generous estimate, about one and a half minutes of Reginald Huxley’s brash and futile comedy The Great White Hype (15) could honestly be described as not too bad. Those scant 90 seconds include a curiously erudite piece- to-camera by Jeff Goldblum, as a crusading documentarist, and a horrified exclamation by the film’s one British character, played by John Rhys-Davies: “I’d rather be turked by a syphilitic bear.” Not terribly witty, perhaps, but vocabulary-boosting.

But the man of the film is Ving Rhames, the gang boss from Pulp Fiction, playing a philosophical bouncer with a truly zinging line in dialogue. Most of the time Moore occupies centre screen, Striptease is as dead as a dead snake, and the plot need concern no one. The pleasant surprise is how much life is racing around in the sub-plots: Burt Reynolds may never have been funnier than as a lascivious Congressman (“Ah jest luhhv nekkid wimmin – character flaw”) who likes to slick his body up with Vaseline and sniff laundry lint. Carpenter may be imagining the future, but he’s living in the past.The week’s best hostage-to-fortune line is spoken by Demi Moore in Andrew Bergman’s Striptease (15): “How did I get so popular?” Beats us, Demi, and let’s not even talk about the inflated fee you trousered for taking your kit off in such a thoroughly untitillating manner. The best special effect, and best LA joke of a not particularly acute bunch, has Snake surfing a tsunami wave down Wilshire Boulevard in the company of an ageing beach bum, lugubriously played by Peter Fonda. The second-best joke, which manages a little frisson of 1950s comic-book nastiness, takes place in a grotesque clinic for plastic surgery casualties, located in the ruins of Beverly Hills. For the sake of the good old days, one tries to chuckle and find the film naughty and clever, but really it is a loser’s game.