Don Cheadle plays Washington D.C. radio personality Ralph "Petey" Greene in Talk To Me, which is released on 22 March. Here he chats with DVD & Blu-ray Review about what it was like to tell the story of an ex-con who became a popular talk show host and community activist in the 1960s...

How did you prepare for the role?

Whenever you try to condense someone’s life story into 90 minutes, there are going to be changes and omissions, characters get amalgamated and re-invented. When I prepare, I research the character and read up about the person but I do try to read between the lines as we’re only trying to tell the story in one particular way. As far as Petey goes, I wanted the audience to get a real sense of who he was. [The real] Dewey Hughes was around a lot and he was a great help, somebody we could talk to. I also had some archival audiotapes of Petey, though most of that stuff had been erased or recorded over many years previous. Radio and TV stations just didn’t keep stuff back then.

What do you think made Petey Green so outspoken?

He had a rough life, he spent a lot of time in jail and it was his mouth that had gotten him through that. He just had the gift of the gab and could talk himself in and out of problems. When you hear stories about him, he was drawn to controversy – he would always put himself in the centre of the picture, he wanted people to talk about him. That’s where he found his gift as a DJ on a radio station. He had Howard Stern on his show before Howard Stern was Howard Stern and that pissed a lot of people off, but that’s just the reaction he wanted as that proved he was cutting edge.

From the few recordings you did hear, what was most compelling?

Just that he was a live wire and you never knew what he was going to say or where he was going to go with something. His perspective on things was dangerous, yet precise and insightful. He never tried to talk around the edges of an issue and figure out a different way, he just went straight to the heart of it, which is what I think was great about him.

Director Kasi Lemmons said she wanted you in this film regardless of whether you played Petey or Dewey. Why did you choose Petey?

I first heard about this movie from Ted Demme over 10 years ago when he was due to direct it and at that time I was due to play Petey. However, these movies go through many states and at one point, when Terrance Howard was attached, I was going to play Dewey. Terrance then fell out and Chiwetel came on board, but I don't actually recall the exact moment my role was decided.

How did you find working with Kasi?

Kasi is really tenacious, but I knew that before we started shooting because of the drive she needed just to get the film made. It was great to do this film with a female director, too because it's such a male story. Kasi brought a different perspective and approach to things that may not have happened with a male director. She’s also got a really good eye and is very open to the way we all worked, which was really supportive and I think made for a really good result.

Dewey seemed like the only person willing to take a risk on a character like Petey...

Absolutely, and that was Dewey's gift. He recognised something in Petey that he didn't have. He knew the town would want it and that the community would respond to it but Dewey is very open about saying that he and Petey knew their dreams were not in union. Ultimately, Dewey wanted something for Petey that Petey didn't want, and Petey rebelled against that. That’s why they fell out, They did finally make up, but they didn’t speak for a long time because Petey resented being pushed in a direction he wasn’t happy with.

Iron Man 2 yesterday, Tron 2 today! Yes, there's a new trailer for Disney's sequel Tron Legacy available online. Review thinks there's a definite Dark Knight vibe going on.

You can find it online here...

We're going to let the action in this one do all the talking...

This weekend saw a famous awards ceremony take place in LA.

And once The Razzies were done (big shout to Sandra Bullock for picking hers up personally), there was something called The Oscars. No, us neither. Anyway, here are all the winners in what turned out to be a great night for Kathryn Bigelow...

Best Picture
The Hurt Locker

Best Director
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)

Best Actress
Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)

Best Supporting Actor
Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Best Supporting Actress
Mo’Nique – Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire

Best Original Screenplay
Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker)

Best Adapted Screenplay
Geoffrey Fletcher from Push by Sapphire (Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire)

Best Foreign Language Film
El Secreto de Sus Ojos (Argentina) – Juan Jose Campanella

Best Original Song
'The Weary Kind' (Crazy Heart) – Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett

Best Original Score
Up - Michael Giacchino

Best Film Editing
The Hurt Locker (Chris Innis and Bob Murawski)

Best Sound Editing
The Hurt Locker – Paul N.J. Ottosson

Best Sound Mixing
The Hurt Locker – Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett

Best Documentary Feature Film
The Cove (Louie Psihoyos and Fisher Stevens)

Best Documentary Short Film
Music by Prudence – Roger Ross Williams and Elinor Burkett

Best Animated Feature Film
Up

Best Animated Short Film
Logorama – Nicolas Schmerkin

Best Live Action Short Film
The New Tenants (Joachim Back and Tivi Magnusson)

Best Cinematography
Avatar – Mauro Fiore

Best Visual Effects
Avatar (Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones)

Best Art Direction
Avatar – Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair

Best Makeup
Star Trek – Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow

Best Costume Design
The Young Victoria – Sandy Powell

We couldn't leave you without some comment, so here's a word from one of Review's funnier freelancers who shall, for legal reasons, remain nameless:
"HA HA, 14 years of sitting on your arse building Smurfs and their fantasy playworld of Thundera, then 18 months of over-pitched hype, speculation and ridiculous embargoes and you STILL don't win an Oscar. Mr Cameron, your blue boys took one hell of a beating..."

We know Where The Wild Things Are, y’see. They’re on DVD and Blu-ray.

That's us being all clever.

Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s much-loved picture book will be sailing onto home formats this May, with a choice of single-disc DVD, Multi-play Blu-ray (a bundle of Blu-ray, DVD and a digital copy) or a download via digital telly or your Xbox 360/PlayStation 3.

The DVD will feature four webisodes as bonus features. The Blu-ray will add another four of those, as well as a Making Of, too. It'll also include a new short entitled "Higgelty Piggelty Pop!" which is about…something. Our cleverness has run out and we have no idea.

The film will be available to buy from 24 May, with the DVD costing £15.99 and the Blu-ray pack going for £22.99.

Go on, show off your detective skills. Work out what we’re talking about. It’ll be fun! Honest.

Yes, Guy Ritchie’s take on Sherlock Holmes should have been arriving on DVD and Blu-ray combo (BD, DVD and digital copy) next month, but we've just heard that it'll now be here on 17 May.

When it does finally get here, the DVD will offer up “Sherlock Holmes: Reinvented” as an extra – a behind-the-scenes look at how Robert Downey Jr approached his take on Doyle’s master detective.

Meanwhile, the Blu-ray will have Maximum Movie Mode, with walk-ons by Ritchie, eight focus points, 60 minutes of Picture-in-Picture commentary and BD-Live connectivity. Our reviewer Dan's already seen it but he's not allowed to talk about it, so don't ask.

We’ll leave you to work out how much each version will cost, because we want to test your detecting skills, of course - we've already pointed our magnifying glass at Amazon...

The Borat and Brüno star was supposed to present an award with Ben Stiller while performing a sketch based on the film.

According to The Guardian, the British comic would have appeared as a blue-skinned female Na'vi, with Stiller providing the translation. The final gag would have seen Cohen claiming to be pregnant with the love child of director James Cameron.

"Let's just say that Cameron isn't known to be, shall we say, self-deprecating," an insider apparently told New York magazine.

However, Cameron has since cleared away any fears, telling E! Online: "If they want to poke fun at Avatar on Sunday night, that's OK by me."

Cohen's agent has confirmed that he won't be attending due to "creative differences."

Director Antonio Campos tackled the tough subject of internet addiction with his feature Afterschool, which is released on 8 March. He reveals to DVD & Blu-ray Review how he cast an unknown in the lead role and the reaction most parents have to the shocking subject matter.

Afterschool is quite a modern film with its look at a boy who is addicted to the internet. Do you have a personal view about today’s internet use?
The story of the boy in the film is something that I don’t think will be about every single person. I think that’s where people get very sensitive about the film, where a lot of adults will start going, ‘That’s not my child’ or ‘My son didn’t do that.’ That may very well be, but I think there are people that have this inappropriate relationship with the internet where they’re consuming so much and that what they’re consuming has more weight than their experience in that world. Whether it be video sharing or it could be social networking or live streaming, whatever their choice is – that tends to become their reality, because it’s an easier reality. In the writing of the film and discovering the character I started to find this boy and then try to understand where his obsession came from. How does the boy get so displaced that he’s so taken by these kinds of images. It comes from a place where he’s so isolated that the things he’s experiencing on the computer feel more real and are safer for him to experience because real life is tricky.

There’s some powerful stuff in there. Is that the real clip of Saddam being hanged at the start of the film? Because we’d never seen that before...
Yeah. It’s interesting. There are so many things I took for granted, that everybody had seen Saddam Hussein hanging. A lot of the other things I knew that if you hadn’t seen that particular clip then you’d have seen something like it. You’ve seen a baby being cute and you’ve seen a cat doing something funny or some sort of skate video. Saddam’s hanging we put in there because that became a news piece on such a wide level but that clip has been the most polarising I think. A lot of people get very upset about that clip because they had made a concerted effort to not see it. And then in the film they’re forced to watch it and then they get very upset about it because at that point they’re thrown about the film. That’s the point where they’re going to decide whether or not they like the film. But for me I think these things are kind of important to see because they do cross into news and the fact that it’s out there and so many people are consuming that image and seeing it over and over the way it was played. So it was interesting to me that that became the really polarising clip from that montage.

Was the lead actor Ezra Miller an unknown when he was cast?
Yeah. He had never done anything before /Afterschool/. He had done some community theatre in school, he was 14. The funniest thing is that when I cast him and I was seeing as many kids as possible and you get everybody’s CV and their headshot and you look at it briefly, what their hobbies are, what their skills are and skim their credits but openly it’s whatever they’re presenting in the room. The credits aren’t necessarily something that’s going to be worthwhile unless they’re famous. So I hired him based on what he had done in the room and how he interacted with the other kids. The funny thing is that on the first day of filming he came up to me and said, ‘Ha! I got you. I’ve never done a film before.’ And I said, ‘I didn’t fire you because you were famous.’

His performance has to be very restrained because of the kind of character that he’s playing. When you were directing him did you have to stop him going too far or emoting too much?
If someone’s committed to something and they’re doing it right or they’re doing it truthfully you don’t usually want to stop them. I did pull him back a bit but it was only to pull him back to something that was simpler and more honest. The idea about the character in the beginning was that Robert doesn’t feel anything. What Ezra came to find out and embodied very well was that this character was feeling so much that he didn’t know how to deal with it. That he was scared to express what he was feeling because there was this fear that it would turn out badly. When you look in his eyes you can’t see nothing, yet there are these eyes full of something that you can’t necessarily figure out what yet. He carries the film. For a 14-year-old boy who’d never made a film before I think it’s a pretty impressive feat.

We assume you shot during the summer. Did you have to take over the whole school?
That was the challenge, finding a school as soon as possible because if we hadn’t found a school by that summer we would have had to wait another year. We needed a school that would let us take it over for about a month and a half.

Were the extras from the school?
Because that school’s a boarding school a lot of the students go home for the summer but that said there are a few... about 15 to 20 kids that lived in the area and came to school every day. So there were some kids that were day students at the school and then a lot of the kids were from neighbouring towns. We had put out ads on radio stations and Craigslist and did everything that we could to get the word out. Hundreds of people showed up from all over Connecticut where we shot, even from Massachusetts, from Rhode Island. The people that lived in the area in the neighbouring towns they would show up every day and sometimes a whole family would come. If you look at the extras credits it’s a big list and there are several names like Mary Scholinski and Bobby Scholinski... so whole families came and it was pretty amazing and they were all very excited to be there. Unlike if you make a film in New York City, where people are just annoyed that you’re in their neighbourhood.

There’s some interesting framing in the film where people are often out of shot or the shot follows an unusual line. Did you have to plan all of that out before you did it in order to capture what you wanted to see?
All that stuff happens naturally. What I can say is that I had a very intricate shot list. Before shooting commenced my cinematographer and I took the shot list and walked through the school in the order of the screenplay and all the different locations and photographed those with either him or myself in the frame. So by the end of those three days we had that entire storyboard of images that we could remember. So a lot of it was very carefully storyboarded. On the day, when you have actors there moving around, that’s when things start happening organically. There was always the idea that people were going to be in and out of frame. That’s something that I’ve done before and I think it works to create tension, it works to make the universe the story is being told in bigger because the walls of the frame aren’t the end of the world. It goes beyond what you can see. And what happened was in a scene like the one where the girls’ parents come in to speak to the camera, the position of the camera was decided on very clearly. Our cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes and I had a long discussion on whether it was going to be symmetrical or whether it was going to be off at a 45-degree angle. I decided ultimately that it was going to be at a 45-degree angle to centre. And the actors came in and rehearsed and during that the mother came in and landed right off frame. It was perfect. She obviously didn’t know that she was off frame, she thought she was in the frame at that point. And that’s just where people start landing. Once actors figure out where they’re going to be that’s where they are when they get to the scene so a lot of it happens organically. You set up the camera, you don’t tell the actors where the frame is and you let them go where they’re going to go and maybe you adjust the camera a little bit or tell them to move a little to the left or to the right. In that sense what I liked about it was that there was something very populated about the frame but at the same time there had been elements to that population that were wild cards. Tthat to me made the frame feel a lot more interesting and organic. You’d see a very pretty frame and then you’d figure out a way naturally to dirty it up and make it seem almost like a documentary in some scenes.

Were scenes storyboarded to be a certain length or did you just allow situations to develop and shoot until it was done?
I’ve always taken the stance that the scene is going to unfold the way it should if you let your actors play it naturally. So a lot of times I would really just give them the freedom – if a two page scene takes four minutes, then that’s what it was going to be. And then in the edit I figured out what part of the front and the back and where it gets interesting and where it’s necessary and then just focus the scene on what was important. The edit was really about finding the core of the scene and then figuring out how I could have such a long scene with a lot of other plot points being delivered but when you got to the next scene you didn’t forget the key information from the previous scene. Even though the film is taking an unconventional approach, the plot structure was still moving forward in the traditional way.

What are you doing in Paris?
I’m writing. Or trying to, at least. I did a series of commercials in New York for Citibank. I got paid and I had some extra money and so I’ve been wanting to get away from the city for a while to focus on writing, so it worked out.

Can you tell me what you’re working on?
It’s called Mamma and it’s about a boy and his mother and her family. It takes place over the course of a long period of time in New York City. We watch their relationship develop and it’s a family film. [Laughs]

I hear a laugh there. Is it really a family film?
You know, it’s a film about family, so it’s my version of a family film. I think it’ll be interesting. If it all goes right it could potentially be funny but it’ll be a very intimate portrayal of the relationship between this boy and his mother and family dynamics.

Afterschool is released on 8 March.

According to research from Screen Digest's Cinema Intelligence service, there were 16,405 digital cinema screens around the world at the end of 2009 - an increase of 86.4 per cent on 2008. However, Screen Digest said it expects further growth in 2010 as digital 3D pushes the market towards a 35mm-free cinema sector.

The company described the growth rate of 3D screens in 2009 as "nothing short of explosive", with a global growth rate of 254.5 per cent that was helped by a 614 per cent growth in Western Europe.

"The rush towards equipping screens with 3D was driven by the release of Avatar in December 2009, a film that is heading towards being the highest-grossing film of the modern cinema era, and has done much to convince exhibitors that at least a proportion of their screens should be equipped with 3D," the research found.

David Hancock Screen Digest's head of film and cinema, described the release of Avatar as "the BC/AD moment for digital cinema".

"Avatar took us from the prehistory of the first 10 years, characterised by research, false commercial starts, standards development and early pioneers, to the modern world of commercial cinema as it will be in the decades to come," Hancock said.

"Digital 3D, opera, theatre, music and comedy in cinemas, live 3D sport, and interactive adverts are all a part of cinema in the future.”

However, only 14.8 per cent of the world’s cinema screens are currently digitised and Screen Digest said that full digital cinema will take the best part of another decade to complete, although some countries will be all-digital well before then.