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The difference, this time, is that she has a witness – Richie (Jack Rovello), her adoring, anxious young son.As seen through Seamus McGarvey’s lens, everything about post-war LA appears bizarre – half-illuminated aquarium, half-Good Housekeeping illustration. Laura’s crisis is brought on by a visit from her neighbour, Kitty (Toni Collette), who pops over, looking stiff and clean as a meringue. As soon as she sits down, though, she crumples, admitting she has a “growth” in her uterus, and rootless Laura kisses her, out of grief and desire. Of the three kisses in The Hours, this is by far the most “trivial” (Kitty brushes it off with the words, “You’re sweet”). It’s also the most erotic; a twilight-zone smacker that comes out of the blue and knocks you for six.Where does that leave us? So much about The Hours is oppressively cosy.

Like many films about creative, “modern” females (Iris, Frida), it features lesbianism, but ends as a hymn to the enduring heterosexual marriage. Servants, too, are treated as a joke – for all the postmodern wizardry, there’s a real Upstairs Downstairs divide.And yet, it’s a must-see. Mainstream epics routinely privilege the father-son bond, and invariably come bursting at the seams with glamorised swordplay or shoot-outs. In The Hours, patriarchs barely figure (literally, in the case of Clarissa’s daughter), and the only phallic weapon on display is Virginia’s pen.Most important of all, it contains Laura Brown, a character who illuminates every scene that she blunders into, a character who causes devastation, but is never judged good or bad. This ghost of a mother will last longer than any Oscar din; which is to say, she’s worthy of Woolf. More than the sum of her parts, she makes the hours fly by.Anthony Quinn is away.

You have to be pretty sure of yourself to fend off rival divas as powerful and determined as Jennifer Lopez and Madonna, but that’s exactly what Salma Hayek did when she persuaded Miramax to pick up her Frida Kahlo project. It’s not clear how many she owns but Self Portrait with a Monkey was lent to the Tate some years ago.I think we can all be thankful that Madonna and Jenny from the Block did not take on the Kahlo role, although it has to be said that Salma Hayek’s acting is rather more enthusiastic than good, and she has benefited greatly from hiring Julie Taymor as the director.The opening sequence – Kahlocarried on her bed to her first one-woman show before she dies – sets the tone and the episode of her near-fatal tram car crash seals it. As Kahlo is retrieved from this freakish accident, Taymor devises a brilliant dream sequence, using images from Mexican folklore. It’s worthy of Svankmajer.After this she learns to paint and catches the eye of the much older artist Diego Rivera, played bearishly macho by Alfred Molina. However the best sequences come with the arrival of Leon Trotsky, played by Geoffrey Rush.