It was one of those rare occasions where you cast off decades of ingrained journalistic cynicism and revert to being a pure, unquestioning fan. I was reduced to a gibbering groupie as I recently found myself in a late-night drinking session in a pub in Ravenscourt Park, west London, with Des Lynam I was living in a fantasy world It was My Night With Des. But why exactly was I there? Had I taken regression therapy which demanded that I return to the stage of a 13-year-old autograph-hunter? Well, no, I was there to observe Lynam finally grab the limelight he deserves and become a movie star. Lynam out-cools anything this side of the Arctic Circle. As the BBC's premier sports presenter, he has carved a reputation as more unflappable than a chicken with no wings. When a sinister character in the original Scream declares triumphantly, "Life is a movie", and his terrified girlfriend whimpers, "Then I want to be in a Meg Ryan one", you can't help feeling that she has a point. Yet the trend for these films, and their positive reception, perhaps indicates that the prevailing Western philosophy that you can choose your own life is often found wanting.

The uniting of critics and audiences in sheer delight over Shall We Dance? suggests universal emotional resonance with the simple story of a man who just wants to break free - and does, with one small step. For this mystery girl is the "what if...?", the "just suppose", the embodiment of desire for something wild amid lives that have lost their magic.Such films have clearly touched a nerve. When he inveigles his way into her plush flat (she assumes she's opening the door to her dealer), a shot is fired, a duo of cops are called, and a twisted Fate decrees that the quartet's fortunes will be forever entwined for better or for worse.As with Koji Yakusho's stifled salaryman in Shall We Dance?, it is the image of a woman at a window, her promise of colour in a monochrome existence, that provides the courage to step out from the commuter train or the city bus - and the narrow parameters of its pre-determined route - and taste life in all its pain and glory, wherever it might lead.We see a similar image in a newspaper cutting of the Weeping Madonna of Trevino that draws the terminally ill Las Vegas blackjack dealer, Maria Pitillo, across the seas to Italy in search of a miracle in Something To Believe In. As his reward for entering the world on a bus bound for a Madrid hospital, the baby is awarded a lifetime's free public transport. Fast-forward 20 years, and Victor, the hero of Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh, is otherwise going nowhere: delivering pizzas for a living, and completely forgotten about by Francesca Neri's beautiful druggie, Elena, to whom he lost his virginity in a nightclub the previous week.

So his listless clambering on to a bus no matter where it was headed, is as much a nostalgic craving for order in a luckless, lonely young life. But when Victor by chance spots Elena at her balcony from the coach window, his spur of the moment leap out onto the street represents the awakening of his instinctive lust for freedom. It's an impeccable metaphor for a Spaniard born on the day in 1970 when Franco's government declared the prohibitive State of Exception and the city streets cleared as people shut themselves away under a cloud of fear. It would be pretty heartbreaking to be lumped with someone who was crap."Liar is released on 15 May. "I wanted to make a film about kids," he says, "because I've got three." This is no cute, family comedy, however, but an adaptation of Alexander Stuart's novel The War Zone, about a boy who discovers his father and sister are having an incestuous affair.