Jasper Rees

If you don’t want to spend hundreds of euros on a good seat, the best place to watch the Palio di Siena is by the start. For my first time — decades ago — I arrived early in the apron-shaped Piazza del Campo and sweated out the long afternoon as a tide of tension rose. By early evening, when the horses and jockeys finally entered from the courtyard of the towering Palazzo Pubblico, 50,000 spectators ached for release. I clambered on to a temporary fence for a better view. A Sienese woman who was maybe 19 hauled herself up and, for balance, grabbed me from behind. As the jockeys embarked on the long, casuistical process of lining up at the start rope, she began to moan, then weep.

Were you ever not very nice at school? A bit of a tosspot to others, perhaps. Ever so slightly a jerk now and then and here and there? Were you inclined to take advantage of the weak, the vulnerable, the defenceless and lonely, to tease and wound and give not a single thought to the profound and lasting consequences that may come back to bite you in the posterior decades later? No, neither was I. At least I don’t think I was. Still, The Gift is enough to give you pause. If you are affected by any of the issues in this film, best log on to Friends Reunited, locate anyone to whom you may once have said even the teensiest mean thing. Just in case. And grovel, abase yourself, say you’re really really sorry and mean it. Because you just never know.

Brace yourself, reader. This is an account of a conversation with the director of the yucky trailer-trash comedy Pink Flamingos. Perhaps you won’t recall the final scene in which the overweight transvestite Divine munches on an actual dog turd. No, it wasn’t faked — this was in 1972 and there was no budget for trickery. ‘Because we were on pot all the time it didn’t seem that strange,’ John Waters recalls. ‘It’s lost today, but it was a political commentary. At the time Deep Throat had just come out; pornography had become legal. What’s left? What can’t you do?’ Waters is celebrated for his pencil moustache and transgressive movies, which shake a (knowingly limp-wristed) fist at the tyranny of good taste.

Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops at SeaWorld. Super Size Me reduced neither the all-American waistline nor the profit margin of McDonald’s. The Cove did not prevent the Japan whale industry slaughtering dolphins. So what possible chance, more than a decade after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, has a mere film of bringing about that most chimerical of holy grails: an admission that the case for invading Iraq was knowingly built on a lie? We Are Many revisits the anti-war marches of 15 February 2003.

No one goes slack-jawed in wonder at the movies any more. In our cyber-enabled times, kid designers can mega-pixelate any old apocalypse on to the screen of your local Imax. It puts the new Mad Max in a strange relationship with its hoary forebears. Mel Gibson first fired up his turbo-jalopy back in 1979 (two sequels followed with ever bigger engines and hair extensions). All these years on, Mad Max: Fury Road has a narrow strip of tarmac to navigate: it must keep faith with the trilogy’s pre-digital va-va-voom, while serving up enough throaty thrills to raise a tingle on the desensitised dermis of today’s lard-bucket gamer. Does it pull this off? Does his Holiness ride a popemobile? This fourth instalment has been on director George Miller’s to-do list since the Nineties.

The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made a packet out of saying the unsayable about race. Richard Pryor kicked down the door, but it was Rock who stamped a registered trademark on the N-word. He also had a rapper’s sensibility in the area of gender politics: his breakthrough set had much to say about — and I merely quote — dick and pussy. And what about the movies? For children, Rock voiced a jive-talking zebra in the Madagascar mega-franchise, perhaps a quadrupedal hommage to Eddie Murphy’s donkey in Shrek. Alas Rock’s own pet projects have a tendency to misfire. Head of State posited the cockamamie notion of a black dude running for POTUS and winning.

Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this year’s election. It’s one of the reasons she never made it to see the Tower of London poppies. Too busy. She also had to dash to Russia where she is on the board of the Moscow School of Political Studies. ‘It is all about teaching people about democracy and has fallen under the frown of Mr Putin, which is why I had to go.