It is a work of thrilling beauty - the lengthy, stylised introductions seem lodged in an era when Michael Caine was cool (the first time round, that is) and the sound of the harpsichord was all the rage in pop. There are shades of Serge Gainsbourg, too, lending the album an atmosphere of cool, seductive glamour. Played live, the cinematic vision of Felt Mountain is still evident. The flourishes of violin, horns and percussive twitching all contribute to the feeling that we have somehow stumbled on to the set of The Ipcress File. The electronic frequency that signals the beginning of "Lovely Head" is as frightening as it is thrilling, while the band's forthcoming single "Human" treads a fine line between sordid and seductive.Part Portishead's Beth Gibbons, part Shirley Bassey, Goldfrapp's vocals are awesome.

They can be curiously chilling, falling so quiet you can feel the crowd stop breathing in order to hear her. But during "Human" she is an iron-lunged diva, achieving a near operatic intensity.But something has been lost. Like the large number of panting men in the audience, I imagined a femme-fatale figure in full evening dress whipping us into submission. It would be unfair to blame her for not fitting into our fantasy ideal, but her stage impact is minimal She seems oddly unaware of her surroundings. She frequently turns her back on the audience and remains conspicuously silent between songs. Even during the encore - a gloriously funereal cover of Olivia Newton John's "Let's Get Physical" - she retains the glazed stare of a window-shopper, looking but not really seeing.Sure, you could sit back and marvel at that voice for the whole night.

But then we might just as well have stayed at home and listened to the record.. It sounds like a Hollywood dream come true. Sometime today, a novice screenwriter - picked from an initial field of about 10,000 - will be declared the winner of a competition organised by two of the film business's more glamorous young guns, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck It sounds like a Hollywood dream come true. Sometime today, a novice screenwriter - picked from an initial field of about 10,000 - will be declared the winner of a competition organised by two of the film business's more glamorous young guns, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. With the victory will come not only kudos, but also $1m (£692,000) to make a digital video film of the script and, perhaps most crucially, a cinema distribution deal with Miramax films.In one fell swoop, Damon and Affleck hope that a bright new talent will be discovered without the usual hassles of the Hollywood power-play system. But the competition, and the attendant rags-to-riches publicity, also has a harder-edged business rationale: an attempt to launch a bona fide entertainment enterprise on the internet at a time when the likes of Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Ron Howard have all tried it and failed.The screenwriting competition, known as Project Greenlight, is one of two ventures being launched by the Damon/Affleck-backed website LivePlanet.(The other is a television reality show.) In both cases, the emphasis is on mixing media as much as possible.In the competition, the submitted scripts were initially posted online and read by registered website visitors, flatteringly given the title of "reviewers". The 10 semi-finalists, chosen by the "reviewers" and by Miramax executives, were then given enough digital video equipment to produce sample scenes from their work - all of it available online. The making of the winning film will be followed both on the website and by a television crew who hope to show a 13-part documentary on the whole process on the HBO cable station next year.The reality show, called The Runner, will challenge participants, hooked up to several webcams, to complete tasks around the United States (visiting a specific restaurant chain in New Mexico, for example) while remaining undetected.

Television viewers and website visitors will be asked to try to spot him in the real world. The hope is that the show will turn into a cult multimedia game of hide and seek and generate an advertising feeding frenzy.But will it work? At a Project Greenlight party in Hollywood this week, Damon and Affleck were optimistic they could pioneer a web-based entertainment future, while at the same time help young people make it in the business in much the same way their script for Good Will Hunting helped them four years ago. "Rather than the traditional gatekeeper system, this contest is based on merit," Damon said.While publicity has been good, the business omens are less promising. Several key investors in LivePlanet, including the Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, the former Disney production chief Joe Roth and the Weinstein brothers, who run Miramax, failed to show up at the Project Greenlight party. There are also reports that The Runner has run into trouble and has yet to secure a promised slot with its sponsors at ABC television.Certainly, the prevailing business climate seems to be against internet entertainment.

Pop , a site sponsored by Spielberg's DreamWorks studio and Howard's Imagine Entertainment, folded last summer before it had properly started. Another heavyweight entry called the Digital Entertainment Network, backed by some of Silicon Valley's biggest venture capitalists, folded last autumn. And, Oprah Winfrey's women-oriented Oxygen Media is still running, but barely.Many of the failed internet ventures centred around helping newcomers get their break into Hollywood. Last year's Sundance film festival was chock-full of screenwriting sites, interactive link-ups to studio executives and the like - most now forgotten.The Damon-Affleck duo has the advantage of big-name recognition and a certain generational buzz (they are 30 and 28, respectively). And they did raise $12m in venture capital in December when most dot-coms could not find funding. Can they succeed where others have failed? They had better hope Project Greenlight's winning script is a corker.. The most inflammatory French novel for years joins acclaimed works from Italy and Germany and a new voice from the Arab world on the shortlist of this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.