"During this depression, when the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time, it is a splendid thing that, for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles," Franklin D Roosevelt stated in 1935, referring to the world's biggest and littlest star.
"It'll be my first proper movie, with lots of cameras and a big crew," Meadows told me.
However we diverge politically, I have enough faith in Eastwood's artistry and intellect to trust that he is not a black-and-white ideologue – or, at least, that he knows that the limitations of such a worldview would make for an extremely dull movie.
Director Sarah Maldoror studied in Moscow, worked on the classic The Battle of Algiers, then grabbed African cinema by the scruff of the neck, forcing it to engage with feminism, loss and movie aesthetics.
If our movie memories weren't Hollywood-skewed, we'd think of Chronicle of the Years of Embers as a classic but, despite winning the Palme d'or in Cannes in 1975, Mohammad Lakhdar-Hamina's film has fallen into the shadows.
It was a similar story for Battleship, an alien attack movie as American as McDonald's apple pie, which dropped anchor in 26 territories on 11 April, five weeks before it will dock on US shores.
Discover how they achieved that specific Heineken taste, marvel at 140 years of beer advertising, or get 'brewed' yourself in a 4D movie.
Guru-Murthy steps away from the movie – dangerous when you have eight minutes, an A-lister with a reputation and four bristling PRs in the room.
Making a strong impression in third place was another new entry, the social media horror movie Unfriended.
But the studio has turned round matters with its $200m £120mm) sequel: all those greenbacks are now firmly trapped in Spidey's web, waiting for Hollywood to collect them as the movie drives all before it at the box office.
