The Kyle Eastwood Quintet is another outstanding act who will be performing. Son of actor/director Clint Eastwood, Kyle has made a name for himself on the jazz scene, releasing eight albums and composing numerous scores for his father’s films including Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby.

Other noteworthy acts on the schedule include; Randy Brecker, the acclaimed trumpet player, Tia Fuller, the saxophonist, who not only has her own highly successful band but also plays alongside Beyoncé and Richard Galliano, the renowned accordionist. Galliano’s performance at the festival will be inspired by the work of Coppola and the music from The Godfather.

I hope to be down at some point over the weekend. Tickets are on sale at ticketmaster.ie now.

I really enjoyed ‘Man on Wire‘ (directed by James Marsh), which documented Philippe Petit’s daring, but illegal, high-wire routine performed between New York City’s World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974. Marsh’s new film, Project Nim, is released in Ireland on August 12th and tells the story of a chimpanzee taken from its mother at birth and raised like a human child by a family in a brownstone on the upper West Side in the 1970s. The trailer looks really good so I’ve got high hopes.

I’m a big fan of the FIFA titles and I was lucky enough to travel to EA’s London headquarters for culch.ie to check out the next instalment, FIFA 12, which is due in the autumn. I’d been on a similar trip last year but this year’s trip came a month earlier as the team were keen to get even a pre-alpha version in front of people to test out the new features. If you’ve played FIFA 11 then you’ll know how faithful it is to the real thing and it’s clear that the team at EA, led by producer David Rutter, has tried to push on. David spoke to me about three key innovations for 2012:

• Player Impact Engine: This has been in the works for two years and really improves on the believability of the models in how they interact with each other. Players feel more resilient on the ball, push and pull during the fight for possession and recover from light challenges more easily, preserving their natural momentum. It must have been so hard to get momentum right but they’ve nailed and it’s something you’ll notice from your first game.
• Tactical Defending: Defending has never been a big element of the FIFA titles in the past (David described it as ‘boring’ ) with your control over defenders extending to track the player in possession and possibly commit to a challenge. The system has been re-written though and no places an equal importance on positioning, intercepting passes and tackling at the right moment. Tactics and timing are now crucial.
• Pro Player Intelligence: Skills, strengths and attributes have been part of the game for the past couple of years but now CPU players will make better decisions based on those factors. Players who possess exceptional vision, for example, will see opportunities for through balls that other players won’t. Real Madrid’s Kaká will be more likely – and quicker – to pick out a run from a teammate farther away than a player with poorer vision. Additionally, teams can target weaknesses in opposing players, creating a more authentic feel. We were treated to a stripped down version of how the game uses this feature and it’s really cool.

Those points are also augmented by an improvements in:

• Precision dribbling: You can take close touches to keep possession without pushing it too far away from you.
• True injuries: The Player Impact Engine monitors contact between players in real time, analyzing the force of the collision and impact on the body to detect real injuries, creating a deeper more challenging Career Mode.
• New menu system: If it’s one thing I was frustrated with constantly in FIFA 11, it was the menus and it looks like they’ve overhauled them.
• Game flow: If a player wins a throw in and is ready to take it, there’s no gap in the gameplay as there was previously and the team have tried to reduce occasions where the game flow is broken.

I asked David about the use of Andy Gray in the finished game (considering all that has happened at Sky Sports) but he was non-committal at this point explaining that FIFA 12 uses generic assistant officials. UPDATE: Alan Smith will join Martin Tyler in the commentary box this year and tournament games will be voiced by a second team of Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend.

With E3 underway in LA this week, EA have announced another feature of FIFA 12 which we didn’t get to try out in London. It’s called EA Sports Football Club and there seems to be a couple of different aspects to it including:

• a portal on easportsfootball.com to track matches, progress etc throughout the whole season
• Support Your Club: enables fans to represent their club and compete against rival clubs in everything they do in FIFA 12. Earn club points and lift your club higher in the Support Your Club League Tables or help them avoid relegation. Virtual league tables are reset each week to create new challenges, renewed rivalries, and fresh storylines.
• Challenges: new challenges pushed to the game like get your team back from 3-1 down etc.

We’ll bring you new FIFA 12 info when we have it in the lead up to release on September 30th. In the meantime, they’re on Facebook here and Twitter at @easportsfifa

If there’s one festival more than any other that I’ve attended in recent years, it’s the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. I went along to the launch event on Tuesday evening in Tripod to get the lowdown. Running from the 17th – 27th February, the 2011 programme features over 130 screenings plus a myriad of special events, panel discussions, public interviews and industry masterclasses. It’s a tribute to the hard work of the festival team and sponsors that they’ve managed to pull together one of the best lineups the festival has ever seen. It’s even more of an an achievement when funding for the arts has been hit as much as it has over the past year couple of years.

Launching the festival programme were award-winning actors Maura Tierney (ER, Liar Liar), who is currently in Dublin for rehearsals of God of Carnage at The Gate Theatre, and Charlene McKenna (Raw, Dorothy Mills). The festival opens strongly with a debut Gala Screening of Richard Ayoade’s (The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh) Submarine. Audiences will also be treated to a succession of Irish premieres, including: George Nolfi’s action-packed The Adjustment Bureau starring Matt Damon; Emilio Estevez’s second film starring Martin Sheen, The Way; the tense thriller Unknown, starring Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn; Irish film Wake Wood from the legendary Hammer Films starring Aidan Gillen, Eva Birthistle and Timothy Spall; Ken Loach’s thriller Route Irish, set on the most dangerous road in Iraq, and his son Jim Loach’s first feature Oranges and Sunshine as well as two of the shortlisted films for best foreign language Oscar, Incendies (Canada) and Life, Above All (South Africa).

Brand new for 2011 is the Jameson Cult Film Club, a series of special screenings which take place in unexpected non-cinema locations. First up is Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects with none other than Oscar winning star Kevin Spacey flying in to discuss the film. Details for the screening will be posted on the JDIFF Facebook page so keep your eyes peeled.

Supporting Irish film is an integral part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, and this year the Irish programme includes 18 new features and documentaries and 20 short films. The 2011 Irish Talent Spotlight casts its gaze on the work of director Juanita Wilson, animator David O’Reilly and actor Aiden Gillen. There will also be a focus behind the scenes of the industry with a number of events: Screentest is a series of careers related panel discussions; a Screenwriting Panel discussion held in association with Dublin City Libraries, and the new screenwriting competition Untitled. Exploring the blurring boundaries between cinema and computer games, the Off The Grid event will also bring gaming ‘industry legend’ Charles Cecil to Dublin for a masterclass in interactive storytelling.

The festival celebrates the intrinsic role of music in many films with a captivating 90th anniversary screening of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse accompanied by a live score by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in the National Concert Hall. Many documentaries in the festival will also turn the lens on music, with Upside Down, the story of Creation Records, the label that brought us The Jesus and Mary Chain and Oasis; Good Cake Bad Cake: The Story of LiR, the band tipped to succeed U2; Kinshasa Symphony, a stereotype-dispelling view of the Congo through the eyes of L’Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste and Ballymun Lullaby, the inspirational account of Ron Cooney’s Ballymun Music Programme.

Each year, Festival Director Grainne Humphreys, spotlights a number of international seasons. This February the focus is emerging Romanian cinema, highlights including the fascinating The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu and the bittersweet comedy Hello, How Are You? The hugely anticipated Latin Cinema Season includes Diego Luna’s (Y Tu Mamá También, Milk) skillful directorial debut, Abel, and the extraordinary Preludio, shot in a single take and exploring the development of love. French cinema is also well represented, with a screening of Little White Lies, directed by the multi-talented Guillaume Canet (The Beach, Tell No One) and François Ozon’s multi- Cesar nominated sparkling comedy-of-manners Potiche, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu as the Closing Gala.

Augmenting all of the above will be the Discovery programme of new work from emerging filmmakers; Out of the Past showcasing the best in classic cinema and a fantastic array of documentaries including The Simpson’s Harry Shearer with his exposé of the reaction to Hurricane Katrina The Big Uneasy.

Before the main launch, we sat down with Grainne Humphreys who gave her top three of the festival as:

1) Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, with a post-screening satellite Q&A.

2) Le Quattro Volte: a playful yet philosophical documentary about daily life in a remote Calabrian village with a scene that will ‘have you laughing until the end of the festival’.

3). The Woman with the Five Elephants: A beautiful documentary featuring the indomitable 85-year-old Svetlana Geier and her quest to translate Dostoyevsky’s five novels into German. “A film that really had an effect on me and one that I really had a connection with”.

You can download the full festival programme in PDF here. Tickets are on sale now (from €8-18) from the web site at www.jdiff.com, phone on (01) 6877974 and the Ticket Office at Filmbase, Curved Street, Temple Bar. There’s also the Facebook page and Twitter (@dublinfilmfest) account.

Here’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams trailer:

The film is based on the real-life story of boxer Micky Ward from Lowell, Massachusetts. Micky has grown up in the shadow of his older half-brother and trainer Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). It’s clear that Dicky was once a fantastic fighter but over the years has slipped in with the wrong crowd.He’s still living off the prestige of his high flying days and believes that there’s still time for his comeback. If there’s a single film this year that manages to capture blue collar life as well as The Fighter does, I’d be surprised. Micky works on the roads and struggles to make his family realise that he deserves a genuine shot at success in the ring. It’s a testament to the spirit of the man, and Mark Whalberg’s performance, that he makes you believe he can go all the way. Charlene (Amy Adams), a smart local barmaid, becomes the stable influence Micky needs to make him realise that he can’t waste any more time. It’d be remiss not to mention the excellent performance of Micky’s mother played by Melissa Leo. Whilst being the foundation of her extensive family, she’s content to focus on Dicky to the detriment of his brother.

I’m always struck by how Christian Bale constructs his complete being into characters. Here he has lost weight and become a frail frame on which he hangs a delusional man, haunted by who he was and who he could be in the future. The interplay between Whalberg and Bale is utterly convincing of a sibling respect tested to the extreme by the choices Dicky is making. When Micky finally gets some fights under his belt it’s clear that he’s learning from the errors his brother made in the ring. The creative decision to use TV cameras for the fight scenes is inspired as it lends a visceral quality to the action. Ward takes a lot of punishment and I’ve never been more convinced of how brutal the sport is. I won’t go into any further plot details as I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice is to say that you’re treated to a fantastic acting ensemble, a sharp script and beautiful urban cinematography. The Fighter could go twelve rounds with Rocky any day. Highly recommended.

The Fighter is on general release from February 2nd.

Arcade Fire’s gig in the o2 on the 5th December was truly special. The stage setup was one of the best I’ve seen and the band were really up for it. Someone caught Wake Up in HD and is embedded above. Fourteen thousand people pretty much lifted the roof off.