Watch out for . . .

SAM CLAFLIN and asa Butterfield, who star in saul dibb’s excellent film of r.C. sherriff’s Journey’s end, which is set in the trenches during World War i. The film will be shown as part of the BFi London Film Festival tonight at the odeon Leicester square, with a second showing tomorrow evening. Claflin plays a decent officer who has turned to the bottle to hide his fear. i’ve seen the film twice now, and i think that, along with his work in another wartime movie, Their Finest, it’s the best acting he has done. Butterfield’s casting is spot on, too, as he portrays a schoolboy hurled right into the horrors of war. Journey’s end also features superb work from Paul Bettany, Toby Jones, stephen graham and Tom sturridge. see bfi.org.uk/lff for a full schedule. ANNETTE BENING, who is luminous as one-time Hollywood femme fatale Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, in which she and an incredible Jamie Bell (as a young actor called Peter Turner) star in a true story about the most unusual of lovers (pictured left). Director Paul McGuigan explores how an actress survives when the spotlight stops picking her out. Thankfully, this film — and these performances — will help restore Grahame’s professional reputation. As the real-life Peter Turner remarked to me when we were at the Telluride Film Festival: ‘She never stopped acting. It was just that Hollywood stopped calling, so she had to go where the work was.’ Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool is being shown next Wednesday, as part of the BFI LFF, at the Odeon Leicester Square.