Formerly successful film director Peter Bogdanovich bemoans the absence of old-time movie stars in a BBC interview.

He also said, despite the obsession of many people with Hollywood's celebrities, there were few actor personalities; what he termed the "old-fashioned concept of a star".

"Think about it - Tom Hanks is a very good actor and so is Tom Cruise, but what is a "Tom Cruise film"? It could be anything," he said.

"Do me a Tom Cruise impression - you can't do it. So you don't know exactly what that is."

Bogdanovich also thought modern movies are overly dominated by computer graphics and lack the 'craft' of older films (his creative heyday was the 1970s).

"I'm not seeing films that are particularly interesting - they don't have the weight of films from the past," he told BBC World Service's The Ticket programme.

"There isn't the cumulative effect of beginning, middle and end, and an impact that grows."

 Frankly, I agree with him.

One of the more suspenseful movies I've seen this year was Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 classic Shadow of a Doubt.

Check out the forthcoming issue of Digital Journal; I'll have a lament on how the wonders of CGI haven't left me any more thrilled than the classic action movies of days gone by.