Part Deux of the Audrey Hepburn recap/retroactive crush. In Paris When it Sizzles, we get typist Gabrielle Simpson (one of those high-low name pairings that just doesn't work) and William Holden as screenwriter Richard Benson – together in a penthouse apartment with a looming script deadline to meet. They get on swimmingly. Conceptually, you can picture this as being a sort of Twelve Angry Men, only with a boy, girl and stack of blank paper, shot from a thousand different angles in pseudo-realtime. But dang, it's also one of those films-within-a-film, carved out entirely from the contrived fictional prose of a stumped-for-ideas Benson and his inspiration-for-the-weekend Gabby.

Scenes from a marriage. In twilight sixties form, Stanley Donen directs in a triple threat: himself, master of wit, rhythm and all that jazz; Henry Mancini on the keys; the incandescent Audrey Hepburn winging it in about a thousand different outfits. That's she's lovely is no less than a cinematic truism, but what really makes this is the wry, monotone outbursts of Albert Finney that has both him and her bouncing off the walls with considerable, considerable zing.

Short films tend to rely heavily on clever ideas and small budgets, but more so on the sort of 'Damn, wish I'd thought of that' feeling. This feeling, dear readers, is a rare and painfully exotic one to those generally attending film school short fests. I am qualified to make this damning statement because I was in film school for a year and have sat through many, many said student film fests. In fact we can safely say (or should I say I can safely say because this is my review, not yours) that having a solid script and then skillfully crafting it into a nimble little film is similar to an endangered species. It's like the Giant Panda of the film world. That said, I can safely report that my evening at Elam Past and Present was like seeing a whole herd of Giant Pandas.

In Black Looks, bell hooks said that American audiences tend to resist the idea that images have an ideological component. Well certainly, but shit works both ways lady, and sometimes the picture can get a little fuzzy once you start fine-combing in the interests of an agenda. Not only does it deny art the part-autonomy it thrives on, but it also turns critics into bloated activists, bent on unearthing the great big “system of oppression” at work in our lives – because everyone’s a trophy-suspect, waiting to be mounted on some wall and exposed for the disposable fraud that they really are.