Cinematic sudoku

Mark Kermode's description of The Prestige, the 2006 magic film starring Huge Action, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson and David Bowie and his non-determinate Eastern European accent. The analogy was that although absorbing, the film was a sequence of logical steps working themselves out in a kind of overly clever cerebral exercise. Essentially, it was too clever for its own good.

Although the film is noted for a number of qualities, the question of the accent, and Bowie's acting ability more broadly, dominated the Film Review Show assessment - in both James King's review on the week of release and Mark's later view during the Box Office Top 10 countdown.

As Simon put it: "Do you get a movie in which you can say, 'look at that guy David Bowie, he's a really good actor?' Because I was pressing Andy Serkis on it a couple of days ago, and he said something like 'he's really great in the part, it's entirely right he should be doing this part', which is not quite answering the question."

Matthew Bannister did not understand the end of the film, and asked Mark to explain it to him - which, owing to spoiler-proofing, he had to do off air after the show.