THE Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius’s charming portrayal of love and corrosive pride at the sunset of Hollywood’s silent-movie era and the dawning of the talking motion picture, is being given another week’s run at City Screen from today.

Its first week has played to full houses – and deservedly so – and now City Screen is to provide the chance to catch up on the earlier deeds of Hazanavicius and the joyous film’s two leading lights, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, who happens to be Hazanavacius’s wife.

Dujardin stars in the lead role in both of Hazaana-vacius’s spoof spy films, 2006’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies (12A) and 2009’s OSS 117: Lost In Rio (15), on February 5 and 12 respectively at 5.30pm while Bejo appears in the first.

0SS 117 began life as a spoof spy series of novels by Jean Bruce that pre-dated Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 series by four years and have been transformed into films that nod more towards the Marx and Zucker Brothers than to Austin Powers or Bond.

In Cairo, Nest Of Spies, the French special agent is sent to “make the Middle East safe” but sets about offending women, Muslims and anyone else who isn’t an unreconstructed 1950s French male.

Lost In Rio is a madcap caper in which Dujardin’s OSS 117 is on the hunt in 1967 Rio de Janeiro for French Nazi collaborators who fled to South America shortly after the Second World War. This time Dujardin’s performance echoes the bumbling investigative skills of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau.

More immediately, you are urged to see The Artist (PG), wherein pencil-moustached movie icon George Valentine (Dujardin) faces a career crisis when the advent of the talkies signals the final curtain for the silent age.

To make matters worse, the ingénue he helped make into a star (Bejo’s irresistibly beautiful Peppy Miller) is on the cusp of becoming the It Girl of the new film generation.

Shot in the manner of a vintage silent film, with dialogue only at the denouement, The Artist is too sharp, imaginative, romantic and fabulously French witted to be a mere homage. As for Valentin’s dogged Jack Russell, no wonder this scene-stealing mutt is the subject of a campaign to receive a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726 or visit picturehouses.co.uk