A colleague asked of me the other day, don't they all (the dozens of films I've seen at the London Film Festival) all blur into one? And in one sense yes, but rather in a good clear way so that one's final picture is minutely detailed. And all because every film (the many good ones) only help sign post you to the next. And with two actor directed 'political' features screening in the same week - Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus (opens Jan 20, UK) and George Clooney's The Ides of March (opens Oct 28, UK)- it does "give us pause" as Shakespeare said to consider the reality/the fiction/the fact/and the future nay, the past. Are we forever bound on a wheel of fire or is it that we been allowed pause to quench our thirst?

Actor/director Philip Seymour Hoffman hit the home run when he said at yesterday's press conference for Ides of March that acting for him was to "de-mystify what it is to be a human being". Some will no doubt say that the film in question is somewhat derivative not giving its audience a cleverer unseen take on the bandwagon for American Presidency. And that indeed may be true. But Clooney (no surprise playing the wannabe President) directs the adapted play with knife-like precision. It's a science/biology lesson: it doesn't immediately seem that exciting but the more one watches and questions the more you become Aristotle fleeing the boredom of Athens mediocrity and off dissecting frogs in some far off island lagoon. What is ego? What the hell am I voting for anyway? Is loyalty just some Darwinian fin that was a rather useless appendage or was it at the heart of the evolutionary chain?

Why Coriolanus has often been deemed a Shakespeare problem play I shall never know. Always it seemed rapier-like slicing through the thinly disguised pudgy flesh of false democratic ideals. It was never thus that the great general Coriolanus was arrogant/egotistical/belittling. He was a man who knew who he was, got on and did the things he believed in; didn't sit around enjoying being idly flattered by the masses great and small. Though Fiennes has updated the play its clarity of decimating the hypocrisy of democracy didn't really need it. What the adaptation does, though, is make palpably clear the hidden agendas of all the surrounding characters - James Nesbitt egging on 'the crowd' to fell Coriolanus' oak tree that his philandering thistle could never nor hope to be. Brian Cox's Whitehall honeybee buzzing from one conflict flower to the next yet none too fussy about successful pollination.

A more contemporary play about power and the people would be hard to find. As Seymour Hoffman said in the Ides press conference, there really aren't any heroes in life only flawed humans. Coriolanus' flaw isn't ego (which of course he has in spades like anyone else) it is his Hotspur temper. He denounces the populace as curs because he's sick and bloody tired of playing politics and having to be nice and 'play upon them like a flute'. He believes 'all that' should be left to his political underlings while he gets on with running the country. His underlings get him hot under the collar but have no one to put in his place. Very like protestors who want change but offer no alternatives.

People, alas, are fickle - not all but enough of them to weigh heavy on the heart of democratic realities and ideals. Coriolanus acknowledges the illusion and is smart enough to know that it's somewhat necessary: as long as he's required not to sing and dance. The Artist is a sad and wondrous film that is sort of a silent B/W grand opera (in that all - well most- opera is political in nature). Hollywood matinee idol George finds he's relegated to the potato patch with only his dog for company when the talkies arrive. His ultimate saviour is ironically the girl who serendipidously slipped under the red ropes dividing the people from their idols - George promulgating Peppy as a new starlet. The talkies embrace her though not George. The plotting is predicable but French director Michel Hazanavicius' comic execution is far from it. No surprise for anyone who saw that director's secret service spoofs OSS - every comic nuance handled like a racing car spinning hill-top curves.

Politician's lives are always to be on the knife-edge of the populace, not so for most entertainers. Arguably, so should be the former in a democracy. As Clooney's candidate confesses about the death penalty - if someone killed his family then he'd probably feel like doing similar to the perpetrator. But he would need to serve his time for that act of revenge he stresses. The awesome, sublime quality of Shakespeare's play is that ultimately Coriolanus' fatal flaw is his heart not his head. The people would never let him sit upon a hill. They wanted to bait the monster that lay dormant within themselves. And as in relationships they lost the only beautiful thing that simply dropped down dead. Life thankfully isn't like the movies (more of that debate to come...) and though George in The Artist never has a voice (or will he?) he retains his heart whilst allowing another to flourish. Who could argue with that? Not even Karl Marx!

Gus van Sant's Restless (LFF and on general release this week) - shot by Harris Savides in halcyon hues though with pin-prick accuracy - seems superficially a little old-fashioned. Rather than being lazy, though, van Sant seems to be invoking the origin of the Love Story terminal death cliche spinning a dormant web in which his teenage characters can round out their lives in a little sleep. You cry not because you're being manipulated but because so often life's beauty and crazy zest for a life outside the norm only ever comes to the fore and fruition in moments of tragedy. And photographer Andrew Dosunmu's debut about Senegalese in New York Restless City (last chance Fri at the Brixton Ritzy) avoids all the cliches conjuring a world between the cracks - immigrant lichen clinging and thriving creating a whole new sub-culture.

Peter Sasowsky interview now live and new photos.