No one speaks when Queen Helen gets out her silencer

Forget the corgis, the Palace and the permanently po face. If you’ve got to see one Helen Mirren movie this year make sure it’s not The Queen , but the provocative Shadowboxer. The movie, directed by Lee Daniels, the producer of Monster’s Ball , is a compelling thriller that stars Mirren as an assassin dying of cancer who turns her final job into a journey of personal redemption — which, er, climaxes with a transgressive sex scene that involves her adopted son (Cuba Gooding Jr), a graveyard and the barrel of a gun.

Despite critical praise, the movie had a pitiful American release and will be rushed straight to DVD here on May 7. Daniels, however, isn’t bitter. “We all knew from the start, even Helen, that it might be too much for people to handle,” he says. “You either get this world or you don’t.”

He adds, however, that the safely predictable popularity of The Queen ultimately does not affect the creative integrity of his movie. “The greatest compliment Helen gave me was that she was as excited by working on Shadowboxer as she was by The Queen . And that’s saying something.” KEVIN MAHER

Samantha’s requiem for an artist

“She’s simply the best actress currently working in the UK,” says the director Paul Morrison about casting Samantha Morton in the lead in his next film, Charlotte . The film tells of the Jewish German artist Charlotte Salomon, whose highly personal and often witty paintings drew from her own experiences up until her death in Auschwitz in 1943.

“Her paintings are so vivid and powerful and full of irony and modern — they are kind of multimedia way before there was multimedia,” says Morrison.

Nominated for an Oscar in 2000 for his Welsh-language picture Solomon and Gaenor , Morrison became interested in Salomon when he saw the exhibition of her work held at the Royal Academy in 1998.

He tried at the time to secure the film rights to Salomon’s work — her paintings are, in effect, her autobiography — but found himself up against an American company that had almost completed the deal.

“So then I just wrote to the American company and said, look, if you are ever looking for a director, I love this project. Two years later, it came back to me, which was wonderful. It was that sort of heaven-sent situation that makes you think, right, I’m meant to make this film.”

Production on Charlotte will begin in the autumn. WENDY IDE

Oi, BBFC. You’re bang out of order

Shane Meadows is furious. The director of Britflicks such as Twentyfour Seven and Dead Man’s Shoes has been slapped by the BBFC with a stern 18 certificate for This is England . The film, the best British movie in years, is a tough-love rites-of-passage story set in the heart of Thatcher’s Britain. It deals with the emergence of skinheads, but it’s mostly a sensitively observed character piece — one of them played by Thomas Turgoose, pictured left . There’s one savage beating in the final reel, but it mostly occurs off camera and hardly qualifies as extreme violence.

Given the embarrassingly lenient certificates granted to Hollywood gore-fests such as Blood Diamond (15) and Flags of our Fathers (15), plus the carte blanche given to the relentlessly violent Casino Royale (12A), surely there’s something odd going on here? Could it be that without an intimidating Hollywood studio behind it This is England has given the BBFC a chance to engage in some cultural fascism of its own? KEVIN MAHER

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