With the rise of  so-called 'user generated content', a strange phrase that conjours up images of cinemagoers as drug users, and 'professional filmmakers' as dealers who would never use their own supply, it's inevitable that the film industry would have something to say on the matter. And as with buses and most films from those dealing with the massive (Armagedon, Deep Impact) to the micro (Antz, A Bugs Life), two come at once.

Interestingly, each come from cult directors - one French, one British - and both Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind) and Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow) had their roots in home-made animations and, later, music video. Likewise both skip the latest tech for basic VHS and focus on the oft' forgotten fact that making films is often much more fun than watching them.

What would Viacom's lawyers make of Rambow's Lee Carter, a film pirate of the highest order, who makes the short fan films, homages, mashups, recuts and so forth which Viacom have recently pulled from YouTube seem all the more harmless.Both are buddy movies, where the process of creation helps the characters to understand themselves and each other, while showing how filmmaking can bring a community - or family - together. And while Rambow is set in the 80s with child protagonists, Gondry, a self-declared eternal 12-year-old, paints a playful New Jersey suburb where time has stopped enough for it too to feel a work of nostalgia. Even the 'evil' property developer seems more outdated than the ultra modern Clamp in Gremlins 2.  Both feelgood movies slip, ultimately, into schmalz, but of distinctly British and American flavours. In Gondry's New York, little is resolved, but the community comes together and is, erm, United. In Jennings' Hertfordshire, the melodrama escalates, erupts with a tearful speech, and the family reconnects. Gondry's America has a far stronger community, tho Hollywood - in the guise of Signourey Weaver, perhaps looking for the gatekeeeper - is treated without sympathy. 

Curious then that the film was financed by Universal Studio's offshoot Focus Features, whose lawyers - no doubt - would have shut down the Be Kind Rewind store for copyright infringement in a heartbeat. It was, after all, Universal who tried to take Sony to court in the 80s for producing a video cassette, the Betamax, which could be used for making private copies (as well as home movies). Thankfully they lost.  

Likewise Paramount Vantage, who bought Son of Rambow at Sundance 07 for a stonking $8m, are part of the Viacom Group, who are currently taking YouTube to court in a similarly significant testcase for $1bn (a Dr Evil-shaped figure). What would Viacom's lawyers make of Rambow's Lee Carter, who in the opening scene is filming a new release in the cinema, which makes the short fan films, homages, mashups, recuts and so forth which Viacom have pulled from YouTube seem all the more harmless. The parrallels between the two films - especially when you read Tom Fogg's interview with Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith in 2000, where they idolise Gondry and talk of Rambow for the first time - is a little uncanncy.

But there are differences, namely in the filmmakers' sensibilites. Gondry paints his surreal vision on almost everything he sees, a kind of live action cartoon where realism is generally forsaken : in the film and the 'sweded films' cinema is a fantasy land where we are to fly away from reality and its problems. In Rambow, the surrealism is mostly in WIll's mind, projected onto the represive environment he's surrounded by, literally bursting out of the edges of his Bible. The humour is subtle and understated. And cinema becomes more a metaphor for personal struggle and the hero's journey. In fact the French star of the kids film is ultimately dismissed as a style-conscious fantasist (tho still largely adored).

Either way, these films are both timely and fun. And if one of them doesn't inspire you to put down the funding application and pick up a camera, and remember how perhaps before you got caught up in the 'film business' you too just loved making movies, the other one should.

Cocaine Cowboys is a documentary looking at the rise of drug gangs in 1980s Florida. It was released in UK cinemas on 23rd November, so should be on near you.

For those unfamilar with the events of the period, the documentary tracks the transformation of Miami from sleepy retirement village to a place made rich through drugs and violent killings.

Read on for the trailer, which is fairly NSFW...  

Paul Taylor takes a tragic story and makes an up-lifting, life-affirming, non-preachy film.

We Are Together (Thina Simunye) has as its backdrop one of the most urgent (and shameful) issues of our time: the spread of HIV, Africa's 1.2 million AIDS orphans and the lack of access to life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs. That less than 17% of HIV sufferers have access to the drugs in a continent already overwhelmed with famine, poverty, war, corruption and hoards of western Celebrities (collective noun - 'a reception'?) is so hard to comprehend it's generally much easier to pretend it isn't happening.

But rather than focus on the issues we all too often chose to ignore, we are offered the African approach to dealing with suffering: celebration, communion and song. Humanity's 'incredible capacity for laughter and humor' in these situations was a driving force for Taylor in his tale of the child singers of the Agape orphanage in South Africa.

Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited will close the London Film Festival tonight, with a sold-out screening in the West End. 

The film follows three brothers - reunited for the first time in the year since their father's death - who take a train journey across northern India, in the hope of renewing their relationships, finding someone they lost and, in true gap-year style, finding themselves. Suchandrika Chakrabarti, who has been covering this year's festival, takes an advance look.

Sicko was shown at the London Film Festival last week. It is Michael Moore's latest effort, looking at the mess that is America's privatised healthcare system, relying as it does upon insurance claims to pay medical bills. 

As Moore's average, middle-class, insured subjects show us, though, having the insurance may still not be enough. The industry does all it can to avoid payouts, denying the needy of healthcare.

Netribution's London correspondent Suchandrika Chakrabarti provides an extensive, absorbing review of the latest film from the documentary world's most popular (creatively) and challenged (critically) director. 

Subtitled "The Oil Crash," this is, as co-director/producer Basil Gelpke puts it, "A film that promises to be a bit of a downer." He isn't  really joking: the documentary looks at the amount of oil likely to be left in the ground (not much) and what preparations have been made for a post-plentiful-oil society (not many). It's a wake-up call that comes without the hope of rock-steady solutions.

Britain's latest and remotest filmfest in the Shetland Islands got off to a great start with a screening of BBC 4's drama Reichenbach Falls, a fast-moving drama made by a BBC Scotland team. The TV programme clearly proved that low budget does not exclude high production values - something known to indie filmmakers for a long time - but clearly the message is now getting through to TV drama bosses as well.

Will Self, I think, once blamed Hollywood in part for the current 'war on terror' because its depiction in epics such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter of good and evil as black and white absolutes leads the audience to simplify incredibly complex situations. Even Star Wars  – where Obi Wan rebuked Anakin's Bush-like 'you're either with us or against us' refrain at the end of Episode 3 with 'only a Sith speaks in absolutes' – still pits the good of the force directly against the dark side with no middle ground. But the greatest light and dark battle arguably takes place within, and Spiderman 3 takes Anakin's (failed) inner struggle with the dark side of power a step further in a film which looks at villainy and heroism with some rare maturity for a blockbuster.

So yes, once again, Mary Jane is left dangling and helpless from a great height in a role not as fully developed as it could or should have been (and the song numbers?!), but we are faced with three villains and indeed a hero who tread that fine tightrope between dark and light.