MAYBE it's just another milestone along the road to decrepitude (which road, in my case, appears to be an autobahn without speed restrictions), but I find myself increasingly less and less enthusiastic about going to the cinema these days.

It's not that I don't think they've made any decent films since I used to go to the Saturday matinee to eat Cornish wafers and watch Champion The Wonder Horse.

And God knows the standard of picture houses has improved vastly since those merry hours I spent scratching bites and tripping over old carpets at the fleapit of my youth.

The problem lies not in the facilities, but rather in the nature of films these days, and here is where I start to wonder if I am morphing into Mary Whitehouse.

Am I the only one who feels that film violence is becoming more - well, violent, these days?

For example, I've recently fought shy of going to see Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's latest project.

I will admit to a degree of no-doubt-groundless prejudice against Mel Gibson; and call me shallow, but the very word Apocalypto, especially delivered in an American accent by the sort of man who normally does aftershave adverts, doesn't promise great things to me.

But the film did have a number of rave reviews, and I'd had several personal recommendations about it.

I dilly-dallied for a while before eventually deciding to stay away, principally because it deals with the dying days of an ancient civilisation in Central America, and I feared this would give ample opportunity for a film-maker to stage a nice fat close-up of a still-beating heart being wrenched from the chest of a human sacrifice.

Those who have seen the film have told me it's great, but that I wasn't far wrong about the sacrifice stuff.

Apparently, though, I'd failed to dream up another choice scene, in which a jaguar enjoys a spot of human face for lunch. Nice.

It may well be that it was intrinsic to the plot, or necessary to show character development of some sort (though presumably not on the part of the jaguar).

But just because you've got all the latest sophisticated computer wizardry/make-up/special effects, does it automatically follow that you must use it? Isn't suggestion often just as effective as the full gory box of tricks?

I'm now having similar doubts about The Last King Of Scotland, which I understand is another great film, and it stars James McAvoy (Steve out of Shameless, who also impressed me in Inside I'm Dancing, a film which, as its title suggests, wasn't about Things Exploding).

The King of Scotland is, however, about the dictator Idi Amin, and I suspect his parties got rather wilder than those on the Chatsworth Estate, Salford; so I reckon I'll be giving this film a miss, too.

I do sometimes go through with it; I actually feel in retrospect that the first, gruelling, 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan was required viewing for someone who, like me, hadn't the first idea about war. I still got nightmares for several weeks afterwards, though.

Maybe it is just me. After all, when in an unguarded moment I went to see Pulp Fiction, and someone accidentally got their brains blown out in a car, the audience burst out laughing.

I, meanwhile, all but threw up, and my boyfriend had to force me back into my seat to stop me from leaving.

Ah well. Maybe I should just stick to Merchant Ivory from now on.