The ARTIST Friday July 6 at 8pm The Artist, an utterly beguiling silent, black-and-white celebration of early Hollywood won Best Picture at the Oscars 2012. PG cert, 100 min Dir: Michel Hazanavicius; starring Jean Dujardain, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell It turns out they do make ’em like they used to. The Artist, the final film to be released in 2011 and also the most heart-swellingly joyful one, is a silent movie, screened in black and white and projected in the old-fashioned boxy Academy ratio, with its occasional lines of dialogue printed on intertitle cards. It falls into the long tradition of movies about the movies, and centres on an established film star and a beguiling young actress in late Twenties and early Thirties Hollywood, during the rise of the talkies. But, while the plot and setting instantly bring to mind Singin’ in the Rain, this film pulls in the opposite direction to Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s visua...