Borderlines Film Festival - Review by David Parkinson as seen on Empire on Line

Empire on Line / Festivals & Seasons Borderlines Film Festival 2013 review

by David Parkinson

Borderlines Film Festival 2013 Media Date http://www.empireonline.com/festivalsandseasons/ 1st March 2013

As dedicated as ever to bringing the best in world cinema to the towns and villages of the Marches, Borderlines heads into its second decade with another splendid programme. No other screen event comes close to matching the ambition of this admirable festival and it is to be hoped that other rural communities follow its example and cater to far-flung audiences in assembly rooms, community centres, churches, cinemas and village halls across their own region.

This year, the participating venues include the village or parish halls in Acton Scott, All Stretton, Bedstone & Hopton Castle, Bodenham, Bosbury, Brilley, Burghill, Chapel Lawn, Clungunford, Dilwyn, Dorstone, Michaelchurch Escley, Ewyas Harold, Eye, Garway, Gorsley, Moccas, Much Birch, Pudleston, Ross, Tarrington and Wem, as well as such diverse settings as The Three Tuns and the SpArC Theatre in Bishops Castle, the Conquest Theatre in Bromyard, Church Stretton School, Booth's Bookshop in Hay, The Courtyard, the College of Arts and the WRVS Hall in Hereford, The Market Theatre in Ledbury, the community centre and The Sun Inn in Leintwardine, the Playhouse Cinema in Leominster, Ludlow Assembly Rooms, The Haywain in Lyde Arundel, The Edge in Much Wenlock, the Attfield Theatre in Oswestry, the Assembly Rooms in Presteigne, and the Rock Car Park in Symonds Yat. Kicking things off is a relishable slate of oldies, comprising Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1926), Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Ken Loach's Kes (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970), Federic Fellini's Amarcord (1973), Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), Roman Polanski's Tess (1979), Roland JoffÊ's The Killing Fields (1984), Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987), Chris Menges's A World Apart (1988), Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun (1992), Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands (1993), Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (1996) and John Maybury's Love Is the Devil (1998). Also worth catching is the choice selection from the BFI DVD set Roll Out the Barrel: The British Pub on Film, which includes Richard Massingham's typically droll Down at the Local (1945), Philip Trevelyan's The Ship Hotel – Tyne Main (1967), which contains some artily photographed portraits by Richard Stanley, Arnold Louis Miller's lively Under the Table You Must Go (1969) and Digby Turpin's Henry Cleans Up (1974), which stars Michael Palin as a publican who turns to rival Terry Jones for tips on how to keep his pipes clean and how to pull a perfect pint of Guinness. Judging by the look on Carol Cleveland's face, however, Jones seems pretty adept on pulling other people's wives, too.

As always, the programme contains generous smatterings of sneak previews and chances to catch up with recent box-office hits. Among the former on offer are Sonthar Gyal's The Sun-

Beaten Path, Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children, Neil Jordan's Byzantium, Sally El Hosaini's My Brother the Devil, Juan Antonio Bayona's The Impossible, Franรงois Ozon's In the House, Carlos Reygadas's Post Tenebras Lux, Haifaa Al Mansour's Wadjda, Sarah Gavron's Village At the End of the World, Yaron Zilberman's A Late Quartet, Nathan Williams's short Roadkill, and Ken Loach's The Spirit of `45, which lauds the achievements of Clement Attlee's postwar Labour landslide government before decrying the evils of Thatcherism and calling for a return to old values (while conveniently overlooking the damage done to the Attlee legacy by fellow socialists Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown).

The recent release slate contains fictional features like Ben Wheatley's Sightseers, Woody Allen's To Rome With Love, Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths, Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano's Untouchable, Ang Lee's Oscar-winning Life of Pi, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (complete with an Oscar-decorated performance by Jennifer Lawrence), Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (which has its own Oscar winners in the writer-director and Best Supporting Actor Christoph Waltz), as well as such documentaries as Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey's African Cats, Bart Layton's The Imposter, David Gelb's Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Chris Kenmeally's Side By Side and Ron Fricke's Samsara.

Also worth keeping an eye out for are: AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY As much an activist and a performance provocateur as a conceptual creator, Ai is a Warholian superstar, who has put his genius for social-networked self-promotion to heroic use in exposing police brutality, the darker side of the Beijing Olympic dream and a conspiracy over the number of schoolchildren killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. But, while she extols Ai's courage and ingenuity in baiting the Communist hierarchy, the debuting Klayman presents few insights into the value of his art and glosses over issues in his private life that seem at odds with the carefully concocted Confucian image of `Teacher Ai'. Thus, while this engaging portrait ends on the chastening note of Ai being humbled by the regime he had striven so hard to discomfit, this frequently compelling portrait is ultimately somewhat scattershot and lightweight.

The son of controversial poet Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei spent the first 16 years with his mother Gao Ying in the remote town of Shihezi after his father was sent to the labour camp in Xinjiang. In 1978, Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, where his classmates included such Fifth Generation pioneers as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. However, he was more committed to the Stars avant-garde art group before spending two years in New York in the early 1980s, where he became interested in creating conceptual pieces from ready-made objects.

He returned to China when his father fell ill and published Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995), and Gray Cover Book (1997) to publicise the growing significance of the experimental movement based in Beijing's East Village. In 1997, Ai co-founded the China Art Archives & Warehouse and began introducing local audiences to works by the younger generation and major international names. The following year, he moved into architecture when he designed his own studio house in Caochangdi, from which he curated several landmark exhibitions and where he started the online blog and the Twitter account that were to become increasingly key to both his creative and socio-political activities.

As stills from a famous series showing Ai extending a middle finger to a variety of famous buildings suggest, Ai is quite prepared to take risks in order to express his views. So, having contributed to the design of the Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics, Ai became increasingly critical of the policy of bulldozing entire neighbourhoods to make room for the Games facilities. He then became even more provocatively vocal in challenging the official casualty figures of the Sichuan earthquake and conducted exhaustive research in order to publish the government-suppressed names of the children who perished in the calamity.

Moreover, he further antagonised the Party by pressing charges against the Chengdu policeman he claims struck him so fiercely on the head in a hotel room in 2009 that he required emergency surgery. There is something Michael Mooerish about the way in which the portly Ai strides into a police station to have his statement taken in the presence of

Klayman and his own videographer. But the subsequent pursuit through the adjoining streets by cops intent on demonstrating who had the upper hand in this situation should have set the alarm bells ringing.

The chance to travel to London to supervise the filling of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall with 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds gave Ai a brief respite. But he relaxed sufficiently to let slip that, even though he had been married to artist and selfless supporter Lu Qing for some 15 years, his affair with Wang Fen, an actress-turned-editor who had collaborated on Ai's underground documentaries, had resulted in the birth of his only son, Ai Lao. Yet rather than pressing Ai on his casual attitude towards both Lu and Wang, Klayman shifts the focus to present Ai as a victim, as a technicality prompts the demolition of his new Shanghai studio and Ai himself is subjected to an 81-day detention from which he emerges subdued and sad, but possibly not wholly vanquished.

Incorporating footage from Ai's own documentaries Hua Lian Ba'Er and Lao Ma Ti Hua, Klayman ably captures the diversity and dynamism of the artist's manifold projects. But no attempt is made to contextualise or evaluate his achievement. Instead a who's who of Chinese worthies is encouraged to eulogise about his courage as both a creator and an activist. Among those falling over themselves to extol his virtues are cinematographer Gu Changwei, rock star Zuoxiao Zuzhou, performance artists He Yunchang and Hsieh `Sam' Tehching and photographer RongRong, assistants Lee Ambrozy, Liu Yanping and Inserk Yang, critics Karen Smith, Philip Tinari, Feng Boyi and Hung Huang, patrons like Ethan Cohen, telecelebs like Hung Huang and such artists as Zhang Hongtu, Chen Danqing and Li Zhanyang Much of what the above have to say is illuminating and/or amusing. But, bearing in mind the unprecedented access that Klayman had to Ai Weiwei over several months, this is a sloppily unstructured and hagiographically unquestioning fan letter. Moreover, just as Klayman demonstrates no overall vision, she fails to convince that Ai is any less dilettante in pursuits that often seem content to bait the establishment rather than make a coherent statement.

Given that he has devoted his entire career to forging an enigmatic persona, Klayman can be forgiven for both being manipulated by her quarry and for failing to solve his carefully constructed riddles. But the absence of in-depth analysis of his museum shows or any intimation of what Ai and his work mean to ordinary Chinese leaves this looking rather naive and slight.

AURORA Five years after announcing his arrival with The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Romanian director Cristi Puiu has produced in Aurora another uncompromising dissection of a country struggling to come to terms with the ramifications of socio-political upheaval in the second of his projected Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest series. As fascinated with quotidian detail, but less darkly satirical than its predecessor, this is a shockingly matter-of-fact study of a killer awaiting his moment. However, Puiu (who also takes the lead) refuses to judge actions whose motives slowly emerge after the fact.

Having left girlfriend Clara Voda crying in bed, Puiu impassively prepares food in the kitchen before heading to the metallurgy plant where he works. A distant confrontation with a superior seems to suggest that he has been dismissed and he causes a scene in his office by menacingly demanding the repayment of money loaned to an erstwhile colleague. Stopping off in a workshop to collect the new firing pins for his shotgun, Puiu returns to his apartment and potters around with the blinds pulled before receiving an unwanted visit from mother Valeria Seciu and his detested stepfather, Valentin Popescu.

On discovering a damp patch in his bathroom, he marches upstairs to accuse a neighbour's son of causing the leak that has damaged his ceiling. But, no sooner has he returned to his routine than he is disturbed by workmen who have been detailed to clear his belongings prior to redecoration. Seeking an escape from such domestic ennui, Puiu picks his way across railway lines and muddy fields to spy at a safe remove on a family starting its day. He then endures a miserable shopping expedition that turns the purchase of a new gun and a piece of cake into as much of a battle against hostile forces as the confrontation with his ex-wife's colleagues at the boutique where she used to work. Even collecting his son proves an inconvenience and Puiu billets him with a neighbour before embarking upon his mission of vengeance.

Unlike the shooting of a well-heeled man and his female companion in an underground car park, the murder of an elderly couple occurs off-camera and it's only when Puiu has surrendered himself to the police that his motives become clear. His first victim was the lawyer who had brokered his divorce, while the second pair were the in-laws who had encouraged their daughter to escape from the dead-end existence in which he had entombed her. He makes his statement with the same detachment with which he committed his crimes.

But rather than seeming like a curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder or a sinister stalker, Puiu suddenly appears to be a man broken by circumstances, whose actions were a final hopeless bid to regain some control over a life he had lost interest in living.

Keeping Viorel Sergovici's camera at a pryingly discreet distance and adopting the measured mundanity employed by Chantal Akerman in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Puiu succeeds in aggregating the slings and arrows that might drive an ordinary man to such desperation. Moreover, he provides a sobering account of the frustrations and disappointments inherent in the daily grind that says much about Romania's post-Communist progress. But his performance is as crucial as his direction in conveying the muted fury and bitter resentment of a crushed soul with nothing left to lose.

BARBARA Although it is set in a place best known to most of us through the cinema screen, Christian Petzold's Barbara occupies a very different East Germany from the one seen in Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006). Stasi agents still prowl the streets and confidantes are still likely to be exposed as informers. But Petzold wishes to present such chilling clichĂŠs as facts of everyday life in a country where human traits and emotions are nonetheless identical to those on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

Arriving in a remote coastal town after being removed from her post at a prestigious hospital in the capital because she made an application to emigrate, doctor Nina Hoss is watched as she smokes a cigarette at the bus stop by Stasi officer Rainer Bock and her new boss Ronald Zehrfeld. The latter tries to make her welcome, but junior doctor Christina Hecke is put out by her insistence on sitting alone in the staff canteen and even landlady Rosa Enskat finds Hoss aloof when she offers her a bicycle that has been left in the basement of her new lodgings.

Despite going about her duties with quiet diligence, Hoss is subjected to regular harassment

by Bock and is forced to endure a full cavity search by a female accomplice whenever he calls at her rooms. Undeterred, however, she cycles through the blustery countryside and catches a train to a hotel near the border. She is handed a package containing money by one of the waitresses and hides it under a stone beside a large crucifix on the road back into town.

Zehrfeld tries to reassure Hoss that he sympathises with her plight as he explains the hidden meanings contained in Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, a copy of which hangs in the small laboratory where he mixes his own medicines because outside supplies are so unreliable But she remains suspicious of him when he refuses to shelter Jasna Fritzi Bauer, a young woman from the Torgau labour camp who is both pregnant and suffering from meningitis.

Having cycled into the forest for a tryst with West German lover Mark Waschke (who gives her a present of stockings and cigarettes), Hoss returns to the hospital to read to Bauer from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She urges Zehrfeld to give her patient special treatment, as otherwise the authorities will abort her baby and force her back into the fields where she contracted her potentially fatal disease. However, Bauer is returned as soon as she is sufficiently fit and Hoss is unimpressed when Zehrfeld tries to explain that he is in no position to play games because he was only allowed to continue practicing after he promised to assist the Stasi following the accidental blinding of two young children.

Zehrfeld tries to atone for upsetting Hoss by arranging for a piano tuner to fix the upright in her sitting room. But she turns down his suggestion of a cycle ride to the sea and instead sneaks out for a nocturnal rendezvous with Waschke in a hotel on the outskirts of town.

When he goes downstairs for a meeting, Hoss unexpectedly encounters Susanne Bormann, a twentysomething blonde who is having an affair with Waschke's colleague, Peter Benedict.

She feels uncomfortable discussing the gifts she receives from her lover and is relieved when

Waschke returns to inform her that he has arranged for a boat to smuggle her into Denmark at the weekend.

However, Hoss finds herself compromised when Zehrfeld protects failed suicide Jannik Sch端mann from the police and they begin to work closely on finding the cause of his sudden amnesia. A clue comes from Sch端mann's visiting girlfriend, Alicia von Rittberg, and Hoss agrees to assist a surgeon from the city in operating on the youth's brain. She is further taken aback by the discovery that Zehrfeld is treating Bock's dying wife and the realisation after Zehrfeld lends her a copy of Turgenev's novel The Country Doctor - that she can be more use in the GDR than in the West prompts her to make a courageous decision when Bauer escapes from a work detail and shows up on her doorstep in the middle of the night.

The closing sequence, in which Zehrfeld smiles unquestioningly when Hoss comes to sit at Sch端mann's bedside as he recovers from surgery, runs the risk of being melodramatic. But Petzold exercises the same restraint that stops this bleakly credible account of quotidian existence behind the Iron Curtain from becoming another Cold War thriller. He is considerably assisted by KD Gruber's production design and Anette Guther's costumes, as well as cinematographer Hanks Fromm's use of warm tones to offset the chill of the sea breeze and the icy grasp of the Stasi.

However, what makes this so engrossing is the way in which professional compassion leads Hoss to discover a tenderness that she comes to appreciate is more important than the passion and freedom that Waschke can offer her. As in her previous four collaborations with Petzold, the impeccable Hoss puts a Germanic spin on the kind of emotional austerity we have come to expect of Isabelle Huppert. But she is superbly supported here by Zehrfeld, who remains something of an enigma even as he is melting Hoss's glacial exterior, and one is left to wonder whether their union survived the collapse of the Democratic Republic in 1989.

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD Nine year-old Quvenzhan辿 Wallis became one of the youngest-ever Oscar nominees for her performance in Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, which has been adapted by the debuting 29 year-old and his longtime friend Lucy Alibar from her stage play, Juicy and Delicious. As the six year-old living by the maxim `when you're small, you gotta fix what you can', Wallis holds together a father-daughter saga whose flights of fantasy will enchant many and frustrate those who would have preferred to see the story stick closer to Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1948) or Elia Kazan's Wild River (1960) than something like Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) or Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011).

Ever since her mother `swam away', Hushpuppy (Wallis) has been raised by her father Wink (Dwight Henry) in a settlement known at The Bathtub that is cut off from the rest of the Mississippi Delta by a levee. Living in shacks made from reclaimed junk, this inter-racial community relishes its isolation and celebrates its hardscrabble existence with nightly dancing and drinking. Wink has taught Hushpuppy to take only what she needs from Nature, but she also learns harsher lessons from teacher Miss Bathsheba (Gina Montana), who tells the children about savage creatures known as aurochs that will come seeking human flesh the moment they thaw from the prehistoric ice.

The most pressing problem for Hushpuppy, however, is rising water, as the enclave is flooded by a hurricane and Wink suggests blowing a hole in the levee to drain the deluge.

But, despite Bathsheba's warning that such folly would submerge their eco-fragile home with salt water, the deed is done and the authorities take the bedraggled survivors to a relief centre on the mainland. While there, Wink learns that the mysterious illness that has been debilitating him is fatal and he lets it be known that he wishes to die at home. However, Hushpuppy cannot bear to watch her father fade and, with the aurochs now on the prowl, she runs away and has to be rescued by a skipper who takes her to his favourite dockside haunt, the Elysian Fields Floating Catfish Shack.

This is a bordello, but Hushpuppy is well cared for by cook Joyan Hathaway, who provides her with the first maternal affection she has ever known. However, she knows she has to say goodbye to her father and returns to The Bathtub to share a last supper and face down the rampaging aurochs before taking her place alongside her friends and neighbours in striving to preserve their unique way of life.

Seemingly intent on producing a Huckleberry Finn-style fable for the post-Katrina

generation, Zeitlin and his cohorts in the Court 13 collective have merely cobbled together a mix of comic-book myths, cornball aphorisms and New Agey melodramatics that appears to drip with social, political and cultural significance, but ends up saying more about the makers' patronising preconceptions than the realities that might be endured in any real or imagined alluvial utopia. Ben Richardson's restless 16mm camerawork enhances the mood of uncertainty, while Ray Tintori's marauding monsters supply a little suspense. But, even though young Wallis has abundant charisma, she is often confounded by the calculated quaintness of her narration and dialogue, while her fellow non-performers frequently struggle to convince that they are free spirits living by their own rules. The ambition is to be applauded. But the concept and execution leave so much to be desired that it is difficult to detect the magic that so many others have extolled.

BULLHEAD Michael R. Roskam's Bullhead was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 2012 Academy Awards. Prompted by the 1995 murder of a government veterinarian investigating the illegal use of growth hormones on cattle, this avowedly non-linear blend of crime thriller and psychological study lacks the discipline to be entirely persuasive. But Roskam's diegetic and stylistic ambition is undeniable and he also coaxed a star-making performance out of Matthias Schoenaerts, whose follow-up role in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone is assessed in this week's DVD column.

Haunted by the childhood accident that changed his life, thirtysomething Matthias Schoenaerts works on the family cattle farm. Times are tough, but he is sufficiently spooked by the recent killing of a cop on the trail of some hormone traffickers that he declines when vet friend Frank Lammers offers to introduce him to local beef baron Sam Louwyck. However, it's not just Louwyck's possible connection with the murder that prompts his caution, as sidekick Jeroen Perceval witnessed the distant incident that Schoenaerts would rather forget and is keen for the police never to discover.

Laying low in provincial Limburg is easier said than done, however, as Perceval is not only Louwyck's trusted lieutenant, but he is also a police informer. Further muddying the water are the bungling efforts of Walloon mechanics Erico Salamone and Philippe Grand'Henry to dispose of the assassin's getaway car. Then there are those flashbacks to two decades earlier that keep bothering Schoenaerts as he pumps his body full of testosterone and shadow boxes naked with a terrifying ferocity. And, complicating matters still more, is his undying crush on Jeanne Dandoy - the sister of childhood foe Juda Goslinga, whose father had supplied his own father and uncle with illegal chemicals - that he is desperate to pursue, despite knowing it could expose him to ridicule and heartbreak.

Whether concentrating on the drug crisis that keeps threatening to engulf Schoenaerts or the recollections of himself (Robin Valvekens), Perceval (Baudoin Wolwertz), Goslinga (David Murgia) and Dandoy (Jeanne Remy) as kids, Roskam makes no concessions in challenging the audience to keep up with the twisting timelines. The narrative structure is actually unnecessarily fragmented, but Roskam is deeply indebted to editor Alain Dessauvage for sustaining suspense across both storylines (although he might have suggested fewer slowmotion sequences).

Composer Raf Keunen and sound designer Benoît De Clerc deserve similar credit, as does cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis, who makes evocative contrasts between the verdant Flemish landscape and the murky interiors, while also catching every shift in posture and expression made by Schoenaerts, whose display of short-fused, animalistic brutality is tempered by a vulnerability that makes him emotionally unstable and eventually places him in considerable danger. The supporting roles are underwritten, while the subplot involving Dandoy is allowed to drift. But, as a study of the dual crises of confidence in Belgian agriculture and masculinity, this often makes for compelling viewing and leaves one wondering why more dark dramas aren't set in the British countryside.

A CAT IN PARIS French animation is on something of a roll at the moment, with Jacques-Rémy Girerd, Michel Ocelot and Sylvain Chomet building on the foundations laid by Paul Grimault, Jean-François Laguionie and René Laloux. Now, Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Feliciolli state their case for

inclusion in this exclusive cabal with A Cat in Paris. Not since Disney's The Aristocats (1970) has the City of Light looked so romantic and exciting in cartoon form and those raised on the traditional 2-D graphic style will delight in the fact that work of this calibre is still being produced in Europe in the face of the Japanimation invasion and the almost unanimous industry switch to soulless CGI. Seven year-old Zoé (voiced by Oriane Zani) has not said a word since her policeman father was murdered by ruthless mobster Victor Costa (Jean Benguigui). Her mother, Jeanne (Dominique Blanc), is a superintendant with the force and has been assigned the case to find her husband's killer. But this means she often has to leave Zoé with her nanny (Bernadette Lafont) and her tabby cat Dino.

What none of the household know, however, is that Dino leads a double life. As soon Zoé falls asleep, he sneaks away to join cat burglar Nico (Bruno Salomone) on the rooftops of Paris, as they seek out the undeserving rich and purloin their ill-gotten gains. Occasionally, Dino brings Zoé a trinket from his night's work. But paths inevitably have to cross, as Jeanne is ordered to arrest the cracksman baffling her superiors and keep guard over the valuable statue known as the Colossus of Nairobi that Costa longs to own. However, it takes Zoé's decision to follow her pet on one of his nocturnal perambulations to set in motion the chain of events that will reach their thrilling climax atop Notre Dame.

Slickly voiced and jazzily scored by Serge Besset - who even finds room for Billie Holliday's `I Wished on the Moon' on the soundtrack - this is the perfect family film. There are few surprises in the storyline, but the characters are well delineated and the dialogue (which was supplemented by Jacques-Rémy Girerd) is often amusing. But it's the majestic realisation of the capital's evocative architecture and the atmospheric use of light and shade that makes this a visual treat, as well as chic entertainment.

CHASING ICE Jeff Orlowski's Chasing Ice represents a massively missed opportunity to use the breathtaking time-lapse photography of James Balog to alert audiences to the very real dangers posed not just by global warming, but also by the drastic changes currently occurring in the basic science that governs our fragile planet. There have been countless eco-documentaries since Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and it makes sense to find a new angle to entice viewers into cinemas. But, by opting to present Balog as a daredevil shutterbug who risks life and limb to capture irrefutable evidence of the decline of the world's great glaciers, Orlowski risks trivialising the serious message that the Extreme Ice Survey is trying to convey. Moreover, he leaves too little room for the unique photographic sequences that can only convert detractors to the cause of reducing greenhouse gases in the hope of averting an environmental disaster.

James Balog began taking photographs while studying geomorphology at the University of Colorado. For the first part of his career, he specialised in covering endangered species. But he gradually became more interested in glaciology and established the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007 to show how the dual processes of melting and erosion were irrevocably changing the landscape in some of the Earth's most crucial frozen wildernesses. As wife Suzanne and daughters Emily and Simone reveal, Balog strained himself to the limit as he sought to find the most effective way of using photography to record scenic change. Yet, despite needing frequent surgery on his damaged knees, Balog assembled a team that included Svavar Jónatansson, Jason Box, Tad Pfeffer and Adam Lewinter, who shared his reckless spirit and determination to make a difference.

After much trial and error to construct time-lapse camera rigs whose casing and computer chips could withstand the vicissitudes of the severest weather conditions, Balog was able to mount over 40 different systems in locations as distant as the Rockies and the Himalayas.

Serving as his own cameraman, Orlowski joined the EIS crew on its missions to glaciers in Montana, Alaska, Iceland and Greenland and witnessed at first hand the risks taken to secure mountings in suitably immovable vantage points and take regular readings.

However, the thrill of the expeditions clearly convinced Orlowski to include excessive footage of his adventures, which might have been more profitably replaced by more in-depth discussion of Balog's findings by such experts as the Aspen Institute's Kitty Boone, National Geographic's Dennis Dimick, oceanographers Sylvia Earle and Synte Peacock, ecologists

Gerald Meehl, Terry Root, Martin Nørgaard and Richard Ward, glaciologist Martin Sharp, dendrochronologist Thomas Swetnam, foreign policy analyst R. James Woolsey and geo risks advisor Peter Hoeppe.

Given the perils faced by the director and his subject, a degree of vanity and hagiography is excusable. But the gauche montage of news clips showing sceptics spouting hot air and the inclusion of Scarlett Johansson's rendition of J. Ralph's plaintiff cry `Before My Time' are less forgivable. Indeed, instead of asking director Louie Psihoyos to eulogise about Balog, the debuting Orlowski might have been wiser to follow the example of his Oscar-winning exposĂŠ of Japanese dolphin hunting, The Cove (2009), and focus on the issues rather than the personalities.

This may seem a harsh verdict on a film whose heart is entirely in the right place. But one only has to see the staggering images of glacial retreat that Balog amassed over a three-year period to realise their importance and the urgency of the need to have them seen minus the Boy's Own encumbrances. Yet Orlowski was fortunate enough to capture one sequence of extraordinary power and few will forget the sight of a 300ft chunk of ice shearing away from the Store Glacier in Greenland.

ELENA Andrei Zvyagintsev was hailed as the heir to Andrei Tarkovsky when he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his 2003 debut, The Return. However, the mixed reception accorded his follow up, The Banishment (2007), led some to question his credentials. But, despite winning the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes, Elena has prompted less debate about Zvyagintsev's qualities as a film-maker than about his patriotism, as he has been accused of painting a less than flattering picture of his compatriots in exposing the moral turpitude that led to Vladimir Putin regaining the presidency following a disputed election in December 2011.

Ageing Andrei Smirnov has been dependent upon fiftysomething Nadezhda Markina since she nursed him through appendicitis a decade ago. However, after two years of marriage, the pair no longer have much to say to one another and have almost reverted to a master-servant arrangement. Their shared meals are invariably taken in silence, while they watch television in different rooms and sleep in separate beds. Yet Markina enjoys living in a luxurious apartment near the Kremlin in the centre of Moscow and has no intention of returning to the rundown, post-industrial Biryulyovo neighbourhood, where her son Alexei Rozin and his wife Evgenia Konushkina are raising teenager Igor Ogurtsov and his infant brother.

Markina regularly takes public transport across the city to visit her family and promises the unemployed and invariably drunken Rozin that she will ask Smirnov about funding Ogurtsov's university place so that he can avoid military service. But rather than asking him directly, she leaves her husband a note and he promises to give her a decision when he is good and ready.

However, circumstances change when Smirnov has a heart attack while swimming at his gym and he suddenly finds himself wholly reliant upon Markina once more. Yet, instead of acceding to her request for money, he asks her to send for his estranged daughter, Elena Lyadova, who has no time for her father and even less for Markina and her kin.

Determined never to have children because she hails from a bad seed, Lyadova still lives off her father and willingly makes her peace at his bedside to ensure he continues to keep her in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed. But, when Smirnov announces that he is going to change his will and leave his daughter everything apart from an annuity for his wife, Markina sets aside her deeply held religious faith and spikes his daily cocktail of pills with Viagara and he suffers a second, fatal seizure. Destroying the handwritten note that Smirnov had prepared for his lawyer, she also breaks into his safe and steals the cash that Rozkin needs to help the thoroughly undeserving Ogurtsov.

Moreover, Markina makes a suitable show of sorrow at being widowed and graciously accepts the legal verdict that she should share Smirnov's fortune with Lyadova, as he has died intestate. Yet, no sooner has she given her grandson the sum that should change his future, he gets badly beaten up while persecuting a group of homeless people with his worthless mates and Markina decides that it would be better for everyone if Rozin brought his brood to live in her newly inherited apartment.

For all the specificity of its discussion of the shiftless grasping that has come to characterise

the modern Russian mindset, this treatise on gender, generational and class difference could be set almost anywhere. Indeed, it's possible to compare Markina's actions with those of a film noir anti-heroine like Joan Crawford in Michael Curtiz's 1945 adaptation of James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce, which sees a mother doing whatever it takes to protect a thankless child. Yet, despite admitting that his film is designed to urge Russians to abandon their feudal heritage and slavish mentality, Zvyagintsev insists that he has not caricatured the lower classes, but has lampooned the new bourgeoisie to which he belongs. hatever its political intent, this remains a compelling drama that makes controlled use of long takes and oppressive silences to draw the viewer into the dark heart of the story.

Notwithstanding a compassion that comes from an innate understanding of human nature, Zvyagintsev and co-scenarist Oleg Negin make little effort to court sympathy for their characters, with Markina and Smirnov exploiting each other with the same callous cynicism displayed by their respective offspring. Yet, while Smirnov is cold and ruthless, it is easier to commend his views on hard graft and civic and moral responsibility than it is Rozin's indolent expectancy and Ogurtsov's mindless thuggery. But it is the paradoxical pragmatism of the outstanding Markina and the Lyadova that proves most fascinating, as each compromises beliefs as her respective maternal and self-preservation instincts kick in.

Chillingly photographed in steely shades by Vasiliy Gritskov and designed with a keen appreciation of what makes a home by Valeriy Zhukov, the picture acquires added intensity from the use of Philip Glass's Third Symphony on the soundtrack. But it is Zvyagintsev's rigour as both an artist and a citizen that makes this so enthralling and potent.

5 BROKEN CAMERAS there is nothing cobbled about the footage captured by Emad Burnat for 5 Broken Cameras, as he participated in the battle between autumn 2005 and spring 2010 to save the Palestinian village of Bil'in from encroaching settlers. Situated 12km west of Ramallah, the settlement was seized by Israeli forces during the Six Day War in 1967 and the indigenous population endured occupation until 1995 when it came under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian National Authority. However, the Israeli settlement of Modi'in Illit kept expanding on the other side of the West Bank Wall that cuts into Palestinian territory and, when bulldozers arrived in 2005 to start removing the olive trees on which his livelihood depended, farm labourer Burnat began recording the destruction.

His camera was smashed during the ensuing chaos. But, resisting his wife Soraya's pleas to desist, he kept filming the peaceful protests of his neighbours and saw four more cameras damaged in the process. Salvaged from 500 hours of material by Israeli Guy Davidi (who is credited as co-director) and French editor VĂŠronique Lagoarde-SĂŠgot, this is a remarkable testament that shows ordinary men, women and children resisting bullets, grenades, raids and provocation with dignity, determination and good humour. But there is also more than a grain of truth in the accusations of manipulative sentimentality that have been levelled against the resulting feature and, while it is undoubtedly heartfelt, there is something calculating about the scene in which the redoubtable Burnat's five year-old son Gibreel asks why the Israeli Defence Force has just killed a well-respected member of their community.

All four of Emad and his Brazilian-raised wife Soraya Burnat's sons were born at crucial times for the Palestinian cause. Mohammed arrived amidst the hope generated by the 1995 Oslo Accords, but this had faded by the time Yasim arrived three years later. Indeed, Taky-Adin came into the world on the very day the 2000 Intifada was declared and no sooner had Emad captured the birth of Gibreel with his new camera than the bulldozers came to Bil'in.

Recording the peaceful demonstrations that quickly become a part of village life each Friday after prayers, the camera only just made it into the new year, as it is damaged during the gas grenade attack that injures Emad's hand and he has to borrow a new one from his friend Yisrael Puterman. Among the first images caught with the new equipment was Adeeb AbuRahma being shot in the leg by Israeli soldiers. Something of an exhibitionist, Adeeb loves to taunt the interlopers, but he is nowhere near as popular with his neighbours as siblings Asraf (aka Daba) and Bassem, who is known a Phil (from the word for `elephant' because he is such a gentle giant.

Gibreel takes a particular shine to Phil and they often spend time together. But children are legitimate targets for the IDF and several are arrested during a night raid after being seen

chanting `we want to sleep' near the barrier that the settlers had erected shortly after appropriating Palestinian land simply by erecting cabins upon it. The arrogance with which the Israelis taunt Emad as he tries to film them is reprehensible, but it should not be forgotten that the villagers counted several Jews amongst their supporters and that some of the funding for the documentary came from the national government.

However, it is during this scuffle with the settlers that Emad's second camera is destroyed and he ordered shortly afterwards to cease filming in public spaces and even within his own home as it is now part of a Closed Military Zone and he is violating the law by even residing there. Emad is charged with throwing rocks at an IDF patrol and is jailed, only to be released into house arrest before the case is eventually dropped because the crucial evidence against him has been lost by prosecuting forces.

Ignoring Soraya's pleadings to stop filming because it is placing himself and his family in danger, Emad goes on a holy day protest and is spared death only by the fact that a bullet lodges in the camera he was holding. Having already been twice repaired, this one is declared broken in the winter of 2007, by which time several of the surrounding villages have adopted Bil'in's method of civil disobedience. Thus, when a protester is killed in nearby Nil'in, Emad and his friends attend the funeral as a mark of respect, only for Daba to be arrested and deliberately shot in the leg by the occupants of an IDF truck.

An 11 year-old boy is gunned down by a sniper soon afterwards and a 17 year-old perishes at his funeral. Non-violent protest seems an impossible message to preach in the face of such provocation and disregard for human life. But the Palestinians refuse to resort to retaliatory aggression and are rewarded with an Israeli court verdict that the barrier erected by the settlers is illegals. Yet, despite wild celebrations, no effort is made to dismantle the wall over the ensuing months and Emad smashes his fourth camera when he steers his truck directly into it in late 2008. He is lucky to survive the accident and appreciates after coming round from a 20-day coma that he owes his life to the medics treating him at a Tel Aviv hospital.

Moreover, he is also acutely aware of the irony that he is not entitled to compensation from the Palestinain Authority for no longer being able to work because he didn't sustain his injury in the service of the resistance.

With Israeli forces active in Gaza from late 2008, politicians seek to exploit the situation in Bil'in for their own ends and a new batch of settlers are presented with the keys to their homes. Yet Phil remains optimistic that a solution can be found, as he watches the 2010 World Cup at the outpost the villagers created close to the perimeter fence. However, he is fatally hit in the chest with a gas grenade while pleading through the wire with the IDF to give peace a chance and, when Adeeb is arrested for screaming accusations at the soldiers, Gibreel cannot understand why Emad doesn't take bloody revenge with his knife for the death of his beloved friend.

The demonstrations against the continued presence of the barrier intensify after Phil's death and Soraya loses patience with Emad for putting his liberty at risk once more. Yet parents Muhammad and Intisar are proud of the fact that each of their sons has been in trouble with the IDF: Eyad for denouncing the burning of olive trees; Riyad for complaining about Eyad's arrest; Khaled for resisting the IDF; and Jafar for protesting at the shooting of a neighbour.

Consequently, Emad is on the frontline again when his fifth camera is shattered by a bullet in spring 2010 and he feels entirely justified in his actions when the wall finally comes down around the time of Gibreel's fifth birthday.

Typically, an even larger structure rises closer to Modi'in Illit and, while some of the confiscated land has been restoted by the time Emad takes Taky-Adin and Gibreel on their first visit to the seaside, the bitterness remains and the sense that Emad and his comrades have only won a Pyrrhic victory is confirmed by the closing caption that a sixth camera was wrecked in the spring of 2010, when Emad was hit by a stun grenade while filming the last day of demolishing the barrier.

Narrated by Emad to the plangent accompaniment of a score composed and played by Le Trio Joubran, this stands as one of the most important accounts of passive resistance ever captured on camera. An entirely different story might lurk in the discarded footage, but there is no reason to question the integrity of Emad and Davidi in seeking to show how differently Israelis and Palestinians approached this struggle. Of course, there are numerous shots of innocent children looking plaintively into the lens. But actuality cameras have stressed the

suffering of the most vulnerable since the Great War and it is worth noting that the only suggestion of violent reprisal by any Palestinian comes from the wide-eyed Gibreel (whose first words included `wall', `cartridge' and `army') after Phil's tragic demise.

The rough-and-ready nature of Emad's imagery greatly enhances its immediacy and power and it is very much to Davidi and Lagoarde-SĂŠgot's credit that no attempt has been made to give it undue polish in the edit. A little more reference to the wider political context might not have gone amiss. But the pair have done well to retain much of the wit exhibited by Emad and his fellow villagers in the face of incessant harassment. As a result, this comes across as a compelling human interest story, as well as a sobering indictment of how a democratic 21st-century state treats some of its own citizens.

GINGER AND ROSA Sally Potter is a distinctive voice in British cinema. Making amateur films from the age of 14, she dropped out of school two years later to pursue her ambitions and initially found a niche within the London Film-Makers' Co-operative in the early 1970s. At the end of the decade, she garnered festival acclaim for Thriller, a deconstructivist variation on Puccini's La Bohème, and landed Julie Christie as the lead for her first feature, The Gold Diggers, in 1983. She achieved a measure of mainstream success with her Virginia Woolf adaptation, Orlando (1992), and has since explored the relationship between film and dance (The Tango Lesson, 1996), music (The Man Who Cried, 2000) and verse (Yes, 2004). Indeed, her commitment to innovation even saw the digitally shot Rage (2009) become the first film to premiere simultaneously in cinemas and on mobile phones.

Yet, when she comes to making her most personal picture to date, Potter has embraced cinematic narrative convention so whole-heartedly that it is difficult to distinguish Ginger and Rosa from such early 1980s rite-of-passage teleplays as Michael Apted's P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Philip Savile's Those Glory Glory Days, which respectively explored aspects of the young lives of writers Jack Rosenthal and Julie Welch in 1948 and during the 1960-61 football season when Tottenham Hotspur won the league and cup double. In each case, Apted and Savile used location and period detail to root their droll dramas in a specific time and place, as did Lone Scherfig in her adaptation of Lynn Barber's 1960s memoir, An Education (2009). But Potter struggles to evoke the London of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and, consequently, fails to provide a convincing social, political and cultural context for what is, essentially, a disappointingly formulaic domestic melodrama.

Inseparable friends Christina Hendricks and Jodhi May give birth to daughters on the day that America drops the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Around a decade later, May is abandoned by her husband and left to raise Alice Englert and her younger siblings in a maisonette estate, while, across the capital, Hendricks struggles to play happy families with Elle Fanning and her college tutor father, Alessandro Nivola. Considering how close they once were, May and Hendricks no longer seem to be in each other's pockets. But their girls have followed their lead in doing everything together and, as they hit 17, Englert starts whisking Fanning away from school to teach her how to smoke, wear grown-up clothes, ride in cars with boys at the beach and get home tipsy in the wee small hours of the morning.

The conservative Hendricks heartily disapproves of such behaviour. But Nivola is proud his daughter's rebellious streak and also clearly approves of the way in which Englert has matured, as he drives her home in his open-topped car through a brightly lit tunnel that gives way to the neon-flecked darkness of a lower-end inner-city suburb. Moreover, the fatherless Englert is touched by Nivola's solicitude and writes a letter empathising with both the pain he has endured since being jailed as a conscientious objector during the war and the desire to live a more bohemian lifestyle away from the stifling norms of everyday society.

Thus, when Nivola invites Fanning and Englert for a weekend sailing trip on his boat, he uses the opportunity to flirt with his daughter's impressionable friend and Fanning starts to feel a nagging resentment at the fact the two people she most admires are squeezing her out as they grow closer. This sense of impotence similarly overcomes her when Nivola picks a fight with Hendricks over her desire to have her cooking complimented and the sacrifice she made in becoming a home-maker instead of a painter acknowledged by a man who has done exactly what he likes since getting her pregnant as a teenager.

Exploiting the row to justify his decamping to a flat in a rundown neighbourhood, Nivola

allows Fanning to move into the spare attic room and she celebrates her new independence by tucking her teddy bears into her bed and turning up the volume on the jazz record she seems to prefer to the rock and pop that would surely have been enticing kids of her age in the autumn that saw the release of The Beatles's first single. However, Fanning seems to take most of her cues from the people around her and, having heard about the growing threat of nuclear war on the radio while brushing her teeth, she follows the example of homosexual godfathers Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt and their feminist friend Annette Bening in joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and dragging Englert to meetings chaired by duffle-coat-wearing bearded activist Andrew Hawley (in the same manner that Englert had insisted that they pray in a church and wear rosaries around their necks as a kind of Christian lucky charm).

Despite claiming to despise Hendricks, Fanning had felt sorry for her when she heard her playing sad songs on her accordion in the middle of the night and had made her a consoling cup of tea. Yet she continues to idolise Nivola, even after the noise of him seducing Englert in another part of the boat cabin had reduced her to tears and the sight of them canoodling as he types one of his philosophical tracts at the kitchen table fills her with confused revulsion.

However, when Englert breaks the news that she thinks she might be pregnant, Fanning finally loses control and gets herself arrested at a CND sit-in and refuses to co-operate with either the police or the psychiatrist who informs Spall, Platt and Bening when they come to bail her out that he thinks her need to protest is a sign of psychosis.

The inevitable showdown that takes place amidst the tumbling revelations in Hendricks's front parlour would not be out of place in a soap opera and it is this casual attitude to telling her tale that sets this apart from all previous Potter pictures. Maybe she was too close to the characters, incidents and ideas to tackle them with sufficient perspective. Or, perhaps the erstwhile avant-gardist found the task of making the action as accessible as possible trickier than she had anticipated. Whatever the reasons, this turns out to be an earnest, but wholly unconvincing saga that suffers from having too many non-Brits in key roles and from lacking either the budget or the desire to make the physical and psychological milieu seem more authentic.

Thirteen year-old Elle Fanning tries hard to convey the angst and guilelessness of a young woman four years her senior with a penchant for scribbling lines of intense, but inexpert poetry at times of crisis. Alice Englert (who is director Jane Campion's daughter) seems more attuned to the romantic notions of a character caught somewhere between beatnik and hippie. But she drifts out of the story in the second half and becomes as inadequately delineated as the ciphers played by Hendricks, Spall, Platt and Bening, whose slogan-spouting American radical seems to come from nowhere.

With Carlos Conti's production design and Lucy Donowho's costumes smacking of selfconscious accuracy, it's left to cinematographer Robbie Ryan and editor Anders Refn to inject a little nouvelle vague energy into visuals that wobble and jump-cut with laudable proficiency.

But even these effects feel as calculated as the inclusion on the soundtrack of tunes by Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus that suggest a greater concentration on the fumbling hipness of the period than its perilous politics and the hypocritical chasm that exists between Nivola's pontificating intellectualism and his own personal morality.

HITCHCOCK Comparisons are odious. But they are also wholly unavoidable in the case of the respective portrayals of Alfred Hitchcock by Toby Jones and Anthony Hopkins in Julian Jerrold's The Girl and Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock. Although Jones merely bears a passing resemblance to the rotund auteur, his vocal impersonation is uncanny. Hopkins, on the other hand, may be more physically convincing, but he often sounds like a Welsh Michael Caine. Similar problems beset the depictions of Hitch's long-suffering and artistically underrated wife, Alma Reville, with Imelda Staunton coming much closer to a persuasive representation than Helen Mirren, who struts around in her underwear and a scarlet bathing suit in a kitschy attempt to suggest that her crush-prone husband had failed to realise that the real hottie in his life had been occupying the neighbouring twin bed all along.

There is no escaping the fact that Hitchcock is a terrible travesty of both the making of the 1960 horror classic Psycho and the near-undoing of a 35-year partnership that started when

Reville became the young Hitchcock's boss at the Famous Players-Lasky studio in London in the early 1920s. The biggest miscalculation is the inclusion of imagined encounters between the corpulent director and Ed Gein, the serial killer on whom novelist Robert Bloch based motel-running mommy's boy, Norman Bates. But nothing convinces here, with Hitchcock's relationships with actresses Vera Miles and Janet Leigh being as half-heartedly explored as Reville's dalliance with Whitfield Cook, a dashing author who had helped script Stage Fright (1950) and Strangers on a Train (1951) and who hoped that Alma could convince Hitch into optioning his latest opus, Taxi to Dubrovnik.

Primarily culpable for this botched charade is screenwriter John J. Laughlin, who elected to jettison much of the fascinating behind-the-scenes material in Stephen Rebello's outstanding 1990 book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, and replace it with some showbiz tittle-tattle that supposedly gives the story a human interest angle. Gwyneth Hughes similarly opted to downplay the mechanics of movie-making in reworking Donald Spoto's Spellbound

By Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies for The Girl. But, at least her script sought to show how Hitch's off-set preoccupations impacted upon his work. By contrast, Laughlin and Gervasi afford him a couple of tantrums whilst directing Leigh before consigning him to suffering in sulky silence as he comes to suspect that Reville is having an affair. The result is bad soap opera that fails so resoundingly as screen history and celebrity melodrama that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.

The action opens with a scene from the life and crimes of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott).

However, as he slaughters a man outside his ramshackle Wisconsin home, the camera slides across to Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) sipping tea and addressing the audience in the manner of one of his television monologues about the problems of finding inspiration and keeping the audience on the edge of its seat. In order to understand how Hitch became obsessed with mass murder, we have to go back to the Chicago premiere of his 1959 Cary Grant romp North By Northwest, when he was nettled by a question from a waiting reporter about doing something different. Further peeved by a newspaper article about upcoming masters of suspense, he vows to make his next feature a radical departure and rejects The Diary of Anne Frank and Casino Royale to adapt Robert Bloch's Gein-based shocker, Psycho.

Having convinced his initially dubious wife-cum-collaborator Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) of the plot's potential, Hitchcock orders loyal secretary Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette) to buy every copy of the novel in the United States to limit advanced knowledge of its twist. Then, when studio chief Barney Balaban (Richard Portnow) proves reluctant to invest Paramount's money in such a distasteful tale, Hitch has agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg) cut a daring deal that involves the studio distributing the film for a 40% share of the profits, while Hitchcock puts up $800,000 of the budget himself.

As Hitchcock summons the press to announce the subject of his next venture, Alma delights in seeing her husband regaining the creative spark that had dimmed during the production of such box-office misfires as The Wrong Man (1957) and Vertigo (1958). However, she cannot resist the entreaties of Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), who wines and dines her in a bid to coax her into helping him develop a screen treatment from his latest spy thriller. Thus, she spends her days at Cook's secret beach house while Hitchcock interviews screenwriter Joseph Stefano (Ralph Macchio) and gets better acquainted with his stars, Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson), Anthony Perkins (James D'Arcy) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), whom he has not forgiven for getting pregnant while he was grooming her to become the next Grace Kelly.

Amidst this frantic activity, however, Hitch finds time to imagine Gein snuggling under the bed covers with the corpse of his dead mother and even has a couch session with Gein as his psychiatrist in order to channel his fury after a meeting with Geoffrey Shurlock (Kurtwood Smith), the head of the Production Code office that has the power to censor scripts and grant the seals of approval that are vital to pictures being screened by the major theatre chains.

But, once Hitch has made the cast and crew take an oath of secrecy, shooting progresses well, with the famously flirtatious film-maker for once focussing on the job in hand after both Leigh and Miles make it abundantly clear that they are happily married. This doesn't prevent Hitchcock from spying on Miles in her changing room (in the manner of Norman Bates peeking at the undressing Marion Crane through a hole in his office wall), but he is more put out when he peeps through a window blind and sees Alma chatting with Cook on the Paramount lot when she comes to deliver some script revisions.

Despite jealously mocking Cook at every opportunity, Hitchcock becomes increasingly fearful that Alma is betraying him after she mistakes him for Cook on the telephone and he takes out his frustration by bellowing at Leigh during the shooting of a driving sequence and furiously forbidding Balaban from seeing any footage until the film is completed. When Alma gets home late, Hitchcock sneaks out of the bedroom to read her treatment and passes snide remarks about her `stillborn' efforts before thrashing the swimming pool with a leaf net and subjecting Leigh to a disconcerting assault with a prop knife in demonstrating to Perkins's stand-in how he wants the stabbing to be done in the notorious `shower scene'.

Unsurprisingly, the conviction that he is being cuckolded and the pressure of operating on a tight budget and schedule take their toll on Hitchcock and he is confined to bed for several days after collapsing. Seizing the opportunity to regain some control over the project, Balaban attempts to impose a studio hack to keep the cameras rolling. However, as Alma strides on to the set to insist that they stick to Hitch's storyboards, he is led by Ed Gein into the bathroom of their luxurious home, where he finds traces of sand on the floor near the shower. He accuses Alma of infidelity when she returns and complains that she should be supporting him st this most difficult time in his career.

But, when she catches Cook with another woman at the beach hideaway and Balaban castigates the rough cut of Psycho, Alma rallies to the cause by helping Hitchcock re-edit the picture and suggesting the addition of a Bernard Herrmann shrieking strong score to make the shower montage that Hitch had concocted with Saul Bass (Wallace Langham) even more visceral and terrifying. Wasserman also does his bit by concocting an ingenious publicity campaign, while Hitch flatters Sherlock into awarding the MPPA seal. Thus, he is able to pace the foyer during the first public screening and conduct with gleeful satisfaction the screams emanating from the auditorium, as he audaciously kills off his star after just 30 minutes. No wonder he beams for the photographers on the pavement outside before confiding to Alma that he had waited three decades to tell her that she is his favourite blonde because he is the Master of Suspense.

This closing line epitomises everything that is wrong with this glib, self-satisfied and wholly unpersuasive picture. In spite of his documentary background, Sacha Gervasi singularly fails to capture the atmosphere of Hollywood at the end of the Eisenhower era. The depiction of studio life is lazily superficial, while little or no attempt it made to contextualise or assess the boldness of Psycho's content or style. Judy Becker's sets, Julie Weiss's costumes and Jeff Cronenweth's photography are all solid enough, but Danny Elfman's score cannot hold a candle to Herrmann's, while Gervasi struggles to keep pace with Julian Jerrold, let alone Hitchcock.

Saddled with some crass dialogue, the principals do what they can. But significant figures like Leigh, Miles and Cook are sketchily drawn, while potentially compelling characters like Stefano and Perkins are consigned to the margins. Although the Cook-Reville liaison appears rooted in fact, Mirren feels physically and temperamentally wrong for Alma, while Hopkins only occasionally hints at Hitchcock's hopeless romanticism and mischievous crudity, let alone his cinematic genius. Moreover, he seems sceptical of the validity of the Play It Again, Samstyle exchanges with Ed Gein and, as a consequence, they come to seem increasingly ludicrous and fatally undermine the picture's already tenuous pretence at authenticity.

HOLY MOTORS It was fascinating to see how Leos Carax's Holy Motors divided the press between those desperate to praise at all costs and those unable to fathom its self-proclaimed weirdness. As is so often the case, the truth (if such a concept applies in the realms of surreality) lay somewhere in between, as some sequences dazzled and delighted, while others dumbfounded and dispirited. Yet the film almost seemed to invite these mixed reactions, as its is a study of the changing personalities and moods we experience during the course of our days and lives and, if some of the vignettes seem to go to extremes, don't we all?

In an opening coda whose nod to David Lynch provides the first of the picture's numerous cine-allusions, Carax himself plays a man who discovers a cinema behind the wall of his bedroom and wanders on to a balcony to look down on an audience so intent on watching King Vidor's 1928 silent drama The Crowd that they fail to notice a giant hound slinking down the central aisle. Stuttering images follow from one of Étienne-Jules Marey's

chronophotographic studies of human motion, which seemingly invite us to see a man in his most natural state and to note how far the science, technology and art of the moving image has come in the intervening 130 years.

But there is really no point trying to discern meaning in the action that ensues after Denis Lavant's Monsieur Oscar climbs into the back of a white stretch limo being driven by chauffeur Edith Scob. As he bids farewell to his young children and discusses high finance on the phone, he has the outward appearance of a banker. But, even as he pores over a file related to the first of his nine appointments for the day, the feeling grows that all is not what is seems - with the first clue being his luxurious home, which is actually the Villa Destin, which was designed by modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens (who created the sets for Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 Impressionist classic, L'Inhumaine) for Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, who financed such key works of avant-garde cinema as Man Ray's Les Mystère du château du dé (1929), Luis Buñuel's L'Âge d'or and Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poète (both 1930).

The suspicion that we are entering an alternative reality is confirmed by the fact that when Lavant emerges from his vehicle on the banks of the Seine near the Pont Alexandre III, he has assumed the character of a crook-backed old woman, who hobbles on a stick to begin begging on the pavement opposite a wedding party. Her wizened torso and endless muttering seem to alienate the passers-by, although her claim to see nothing but stones and feet could apply to anybody in a modern city, as everyone strides head down in an almost determined effort to avoid making contact of any sort with their fellow beings.

Returning to the car, Lavant sinks sadly into the back seat and begins readying himself for his next assignment. He dons a motion capture suit and enters a studio in an anonymous industrial complex, where he performs martial arts gyrations that irresistibly recall Lavant's furious dance at the end of Claire Denis's Beau Travail (1999). Having run on a treadmill against a green screen that gradually fills in with blocks of colour that resemble flashing bar codes, Lavant executes a series of moves with a staff and a pair of axes before joining Zlata (clad in a skin-tight red PVC suit) for a session of gymnastic frottage that climaxes with a camera move that reveals that they are simulating the movements of fantasy serpentine creatures that will presumably appear in a movie or video game. In fact, the acrobatics were doubled by Reda Oumouzoune. But, at every juncture in this teasing odyssey, seeing is (dis)believing.

Back in the car, Lavant transforms himself into Monsieur Merde (the character he played in Carax's segment of the 2008 portmanteau, Tokyo!) and proceeds to eat delicately from a neatly packed lunchbox that is entirely at odds with his wild man guise of gnarled fingernails, long ginger beard, vitreous right eye and leprechaun-like green suit. Scrambling from the limo in the middle of the city, he removes a manhole cover and descends into the sewers.

Emerging in the Père Lachaise cemetery to the theme from Ishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954), Lavant starts terrorising mourners and tourists as he lopes between tombstones, hissing oaths and chomping on wreaths.

Having knocked over a blind man, he happens upon a photo shoot being conducted by oddball Geoffrey Carey, who has lashed model Eva Mendes to a monument and is keen to include Lavant in a `beauty and the beast' shot. However, when assistant Annabelle DexterJones asks if he would like to pose, Lavant bites off two of her fingers, unties Mendes and carries her into the sewers, where he strips naked and (with a somewhat unnecessary erection) lies with his head in her lap and eats banknotes before jumping up to redesign her outfit so that instead of emphasising her curves it covers them up like a designer burqa.

Leaving the bemused Mendes to find her own way back to street level, Lavant returns to the sanctuary of his car. However, he soon discovers he is not alone, as Michel Piccoli is skulking in a corner. He asks Lavant (who may or may not have been an actor at one time) why he keeps pushing himself through such a rigorous schedule when his heart is no longer in his work. But he insists he continues for the beauty of the gesture and begins to apply the makeup for his next persona - a father collecting his daughter from her first Parisian party.

Driving along to the Sparks track `How Are You Getting Home', Lavant waits outside a suburban apartment for teenager Jeanne Disson to emerge. She claims to have had a nice time and boasts of dancing with several boys and he is quietly proud of her. But when her friend calls Lavant to let him know that her mother is picking her up, he catches Disson in her lie and she is forced to admit that she spent the entire evening locked in the bathroom

because she is convinced that everyone dislikes her. However, rather than trying to boost her fragile confidence, Lavant drops her off with the punishment admonition ringing in her ears that she will have to cope for the rest of her life with being herself.

At this point, a card announces an intermission (with the word `entr'acte recalling René Clair's gleeful 1924 Dadaist experiment of the same name that introduced the throwaway concept of `instantanéisme' and included cameos by the likes of Eric Satie, Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp). However, there is no rest for Lavant, who struts into a church that looks a lot like Sainte-Eustache and leads an accordion band in a rousing rendition of Doctor L's `Let My Baby Ride' that is easily the highlight of the film.

Unfortunately, it also marks the spot at which the picture starts to lose its momentum. A lacklustre sequence in which Lavant becomes a scar-faced assassin to stab a hirsute stranger in a warehouse (who turns out to be a doppelgänger who administers his own murderous blow to the neck) ends with him requiring Scob's assistance to get back to the limousine, where he simply peels off the disguise and prepares for his next interlude. However, he suddenly demands that Scob stops the car and rushes across the Champs Elysées to gun down his banker alter ego outside a café while wearing a red head mask. Again, he relies on Scob to rescue him. But, once more, the situation curiously has no adverse consequences and Lavant continues on his merry way.

Similarly, an encounter with Elise Lhomeau in a posh hotel feels decidedly prosaic, as Lavant impersonates a dying man who has done a great kindness to a waiflike niece only for her life to be made miserable by the gold-digging husband who was attracted solely by her wealth.

This soporifically over-extended scene ends with Lavant rising from the dead, as he apologises to Lhomeau for having to leave and she reveals that she is also merely taking a part and they bid farewell as though this kind of role-playing was entirely normal (which, in a way, of course, it is).

Languor also blights the chance meeting with Kylie Minogue, after her limo nearly collides with Lavant's in a narrow side street. Clearly, they had once been an item and yet they resist the opportunity to catch up after some two decades apart in the empty Samaritaine department store that is littered with dismembered mannequins. Styled in homage to iconic actress Jean Seberg (who seems to have strayed into a Jacques Demy musical), Minogue sings a song composed by Carax and The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon about the way in which we change over time. But she also spends her days incognito and asks Lavant to leave before her new partner arrives and her air stewardess has to commit suicide from the shop's neon lettering.

Distraught at seeing Kylie's crushed corpse on the pavement, Lavant has Scob drive him to the small house he shares with a chimpanzee and their child. But Carax still has time for a couple more oddities. Firstly, Scob parks at the Holy Motors garage and dons the mask she wore in Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) before phoning a loved one to say she was on her way home. And, secondly, the stretch limos lined up in rows start discussing their days the instant darkness falls (with their red rear lights flickering as they speak) and fret that humans no longer respect machines and prefer the virtual to the tangible.

Even critics who have admired the film have questioned the inclusion of this climactic idiosyncrasy. But, given the peculiarity of all that has gone before, why shouldn't motors have the power of speech? It's no less likely a notion than that of a man cruising the City of Light adopting personas that cannot possibly co-exist in reality. As with every cinematic provocateur, Carax revels in sparking senseless debate and it is best to let each viewer identify their own meaning rather than impose speculations about the recession, the cult of celebrity, the decline of film artistry, the rise of internet immediacy and the breakdown of the traditional family model of society.

Instead, we should simply commend the exceptional cinematography of Caroline Champetier and Yves Cape (who recapture the lost magic of Paris on screen), the luminescence of the 74 year-old Edith Scob and the chameleonic brilliance of Denis Lavant, whose shifts from respectability to reprehensibility are achieved with a blend of pathos and grotesqueness that simultaneously recalls Charlie Chaplin and Lon Chaney. As for Leos Carax, this return to features 13 years after the dourly misfiring Herman Melville adaptation Pola X is most welcome. His work has never made for easy viewing. But Boy Meets Girl (1984), Mauvais sang (1986) and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) have all contained moments of genius and

Holy Motors is equally inconsistent and occasionally inspired. With too many scenes outstaying their usefulness, this often feels like a chore. But countless ideas and images linger and the surest sign of a great film is that it continues to play in the imagination long after the flickering light has faded.

THE HUNT It all seems to be going right for Mads Mikkelsen at the moment. Shortly after being named Best Actor at Cannes for his performance in Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, he landed the role of Hannibal Lecter opposite Hugh Dancy's Will Graham in a new American TV series based on Thomas Harris's flesh-fancying serial killer. Yet, while he is best known to international audiences for his portrayal of the villainous Le Chiffre in Daniel Craig's James Bond debut, Casino Royale (2008), Mikkelsen is an established star in his native Denmark and was, therefore, the natural choice to headline Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair as German physician Johann Friedrich Struensee, who exploited his position treating mentally unstable 18th-century monarch Christian VII to seduce his dispirited British spouse, Queen Caroline Mathilde.

Opening in 1775, as Caroline Mathilde (Alicia Vikander) writes to her estranged children, Frederick and Louise Auguste, from her exile in Celle Castle in her brother George III's Hanoverian territories, the action flashes back nine years to the teenage princess's arrival from London to discover that not only is her suitor, Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), completely disinterested in her, but he is also psychologically fragile and utterly under the control of his manipulative stepmother, Dowager Queen Juliana Maria of BrunswickWolfenbßttel (Trine Dyrholm), and his scheming tutor Ove Høegh-Guldberg.(David Dencik).

Nevertheless, Caroline succeeds in producing an heir and tolerates the king's childish outbursts and the cold indifference of a court populated by self-seeking aristocrats who compete for favours while paying little heed to the plight of the serfs on their neglected estates.

In 1768, Christian embarks upon a year-long grand tour of Europe and progressive nobles Count Schack Carl Rantzau (Thomas Gabrielsson) and Enevold Brandt (Cyron Melville) dupe him into becoming reliant on Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mikkelsen), a doctor from the Danish-controlled town of Altona who has the medical skills to moderate Christian's moods and the personal charm to gain his confidence. Moreover, he also has an overweening ambition to put into practice the Rousseauian ideas that he has published in a series of anonymous tracts. Thus, he accompanies the entourage to Copenhagen, where he quickly makes an impression on the lonely Caroline, with whom he conspires to coax Christian into playing an acting game that involves him presenting reforms to his intransigent legislative council in the form of a prepared script.

Arcel and co-scenarist Rasmus Heisterberg exaggerate Caroline's role in the emancipation of the peasantry, the introduction of freedom of speech, the building of public hospitals, the abolition of censorship, torture and capital punishment for theft and the overhauling of the taxation system to ensure that both the nobility and the clergy became liable. Yet the sequences depicting this 10-month period when 1069 cabinet orders were issued (as the rate of three per day) are among the most exhilarating in the film, as Mikkelsen claims a seat on the council and becomes increasingly dictatorial in his attitude towards a monarch who, himself, may not have been quite the shill that history has suggested.

Somewhat inevitably, this unconventional triumvirate soon finds its enemies massing and Juliana and Guldberg make cynical use of the new powers of free expression to spread rumours about the nature of Struensee's relationship with the queen. Consequently, when she gives birth to a daughter, it is widely assumed that Christian is not the father and the reactionaries move quickly to secure a divorce and bypass the king to topple the now isolated Struensee, who was executed with Brandt for the usurpation of royal power on 28 April 1772.

Although it was the subject of Victor Saville's The Dictator (1935) - which starred such British stalwarts as Clive Brook as Struensee, Madeleine Carroll as Caroline, Emlyn Williams as Christian VII and Helen Haye as the Queen Mother - this seismic period had never previously been filmed in Denmark. Executive produced by Lars von Trier, it inspires an epic tale of infatuation, ideology, intrigue and vested interest that benefits from exceptional production design and costumes by Niels Sejer and Manon Rasmussen and lavish visuals by

Rasmus Videnaek that are always more controlled than Gabriel Yared and Cyrille Aufort's sonorous score.

Arcel also directs steadily, without departing too far from the conventions of the heritage picture. His screenplay is occasionally declamatory and the bookending epistolary device emphasises too early for those unfamiliar with the saga the doomed nature of Caroline's Danish sojourn (she would die soon afterwards at the age of just 23). Nonetheless, the performances are admirable, with Vikander ably conveying the queen's trusting naivetĂŠ and Mikkelsen exuding a dynamic blend of Enlightenment decorum and megalomaniac zeal.

However, the romantic spark isn't always evident, with the result that both Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (who won the Best Actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival) and Trine Dyrholm are frequently able to steal focus as the unpredictable king and his ferocious guardian.

THE HUNTER The great outdoors proves more forbidding than welcoming in TV veteran Daniel Nettheim's big-screen debut, The Hunter, a gripping adaptation of a 1999 novel by Julia Leigh, who recently made an impression with her own first feature, Sleeping Beauty. Majestically photographed by Robert Humphreys in awe-inspiring locations across Tasmania and boasting an atmospheric sound design by Matteo Zingales, Michael Lira and Andrew Lancaster, this measured parable works as both an eco-thriller and a human drama. However, the sketchiness of the characterisation prevents it from being entirely satisfying.

Summoned to Paris, American hunter Willem Dafoe meets with Jacek Koman, a shady representative of the Redleaf military biotech company, who instructs him to go to Australia and investigate rumoured sightings of a Tasmanian Tiger. A carnivorous marsupial with a striped coat and a vulpine head, this species dies out in captivity in 1936 and has been officially extinct since 1986. However, Koman's bosses want Dafoe to track and kill any surviving thylacines and bring back samples for Redleaf to clone so it can lay exclusive claim to the venom it supposedly excreted to paralyse its prey.

Refusing the assistance of the brooding Callan Mulvey, Dafoe insists on travelling alone and he arrives in a backwater town posing as an academic researching Tasmanian devils. Local guide Sam Neill has arranged accommodation with Frances O'Connor, who is struggling to recover from the disappearance eight months earlier of her environmentalist husband and cope with the task of raising chatty tweenager Morgana Davies and her taciturn younger brother Finn Woodlock on her own.

Having already been informed by Sullivan Stapleton in John Brumpton's bar that strangers are fair game for the loggers who stand to lose their livelihoods because of the green protest being staged by tree-huggers Jamie Timony and Dan Spielman, Dafoe is reluctant to get involved with O'Connor and her somewhat feral kids. However, the fact that she rarely gets out of bed and leaves Davies and Woodlock to fend for themselves pricks his conscience and he helps clean up the bathroom and fix the generator in between expeditions to the inhospitable wilderness.

Neill rather resents Dafoe muscling in on his patch, as he has been keeping an eye on O'Connor since her husband vanished. Moreover, he is suspicious about the true nature of Dafoe's mission. But he is powerless to object when Dafoe stops giving O'Connor the pills prescribed by her doctor and she begins to make a speedy recovery. Indeed, she even hosts a party for Timony and Spielman when they obtain an injunction to halt all tree felling and develops something of a crush on Dafoe when he stands up to Stapleton and his bully boys and agrees to take the family on a picnic.

However, Dafoe is ordered by Koman to concentrate on his task and he returns to the cave to which he was led by one of the eerily well-informed Woodlock's drawings to await the tiger he is convinced is eking out a lone existence. Challenged at gunpoint by Mulvey to reveal the whereabouts of the lair, Dafoe leads him into one of the steel traps he had planted in the undergrowth. But, what he doesn't know, as he hides his stalker's corpse and waits for his quarry is that Mulvey had paid a visit to O'Connor's cabin before heading into the wilds.

The conclusion to the hunt is somewhat inevitable, as Dafoe realises his duty to help the sole surviving Tasmanian Tiger. But, while this is touchingly done, the denouement of the human drama is more contrived and less credible. Much of the fault lies with screenwriter Alice Addison's decision to jettison the backstory that Leigh originally gave her anti-hero, as his

gradual transformation from bullet-headed loner to compassionate everyman feels flimsy without reference to the unhappy childhood and demoralising army experiences that so dissuaded him from close contact.

Nonetheless, Dafoe excels as the mercenary learning to value life and he is ably supported by the ever-reliable Neill and O'Connor and the hugely impressive Davies and Woodlock.

Moreover, Nettheim adroitly equates Dafoe's meticulous, but potentially deadly fieldcraft techniques with the simple chores that help preserve a household that was itself drifting towards extinction. The symbolism may not be subtle and neither are the recurring contrasts between destruction and conservation, tradition and progress, and isolation and community.

But the action is often tense and the computer-generated creature fashioned by the Fuel VFX studio is sufficiently authentic to make the long-anticipated encounter genuinely moving rather than cornily mawkish.

I WISH Every bit as unmissable is Hirokazu Kore-eda's I Wish, which confirms the maker of such gems as Maborosi (1995), After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008) as cinema's foremost commentator on family life and childhood. Often compared to Yasujiro Ozu and Edward Yang for this sensitivity, wit and insight, Kore-eda effortlessly incorporates numerous subplots into his charming central tale about two siblings reacting in very different ways to the separation of their parents and their relocation to opposite ends of Japan.

Indeed, it is this ability to capture the rhythms and resonances of daily life within a meticulously crafted narrative that makes Kore-eda such a master. But it's his genius for coaxing performances of energy, naturalism and poignancy out of young actors that makes this odyssey so memorable.

It's six months since marital breakdown drove 12 year-old Koki Maeda and his younger brother Ohshiro Maeda apart. While Koki moved with mother Nene Ohtsuka to live in a cramped apartment belonging to her parents Isao Hashizume and Kirin Kiki in Kagoshima on the south-western island of Kyushu, Ohshiro opted to follow father Joe Odagiri to the northern city of Fukuoka to protect him from himself and prevent him from dating any unsuitable women. Although Ohtsuka and Odagiri haven't spoken in months, Koki and Ohshiro communicate daily in order to keep up with news about life at home and school.

While Koki misses Ohshiro and wishes the family could be reunited, Ohshiro is relieved that the rowing has stopped and rather enjoys helping his father grow vegetables in the back garden and encouraging him to relaunch his career as an indie rock musician. He has also made friends with Kyara Uchida, whose mother, Yui Natsukawa, is a failed actress who is desperate for her daughter to avoid repeating her mistakes. Koki also palled up with classmates Ryoga Hayashi and Seinosuke Nagayoshi, but he cannot fathom why they and his grandparents are so unconcerned about the fact that they live in the shadow of Sakurajima, a simmering volcano that frequently coats the streets with ash.

Koki hopes that Sakurajima will erupt and force Odagiri to invite him and Ohtsuka to stay with him. But he is impatient for something to happen quickly and puts his faith instead in the rumour he has heard that bullet trains passing for the first time at 170 mph on a new line create a magic force that allows the granting of wishes. When he discovers that a new Shinkansen is to be opened between Hakata and Kagoshima, he calculates that the trains will pass outside Kawashiri and implores Ohshiro to meet him there so that they can change their destiny.

While Ohtsuka is preoccupied with her new job at a supermarket checkout and Kiki starts taking hula hoop classes, Hashizume becomes fascinated with the new railway and spends hours with his drinking buddies discussing ways of adapting a traditional sponge cake recipe to create a special bullet train design. Keen to make plans for his adventure, Koki somewhat resents the well-meaning interference of teacher Hiroshi Abe and wishes he could share his secret with kindly librarian Masami Nagasawa. However, he does take Hayashi and Nagayoshi into his confidence and they agree to accompany him so they can make wishes of their own.

Uchida also offers to go with Ohshiro and even arranges for them to stay overnight with her grandparents en route.

Ultimately, Ohshiro finds himself at the head of a quartet anxious for an escapade and their progress through the countryside evokes a more innocent time when children were free to

wander unmolested wherever they pleased. But this isn't a nostalgic paean for a lost past or a slice of sentimental feel-good. Consequently, while there is an enchanted moment when the trains pass and the screen fills with still-life images of incidents from earlier in the story, the brothers learn a salient lesson when Koki admits that he forgot to make a wish and Ohshiro confesses that he asked for something other than the family getting back together. Maybe fate knows best after all?

Fluently photographed by Yutaka Yamazaki and impeccably edited by Kore-eda himself, this is an almost perfect picture. The storyline has a deceptive simplicity that is cleverly cluttered with minor, but affecting incidents to reaffirm the maxim that life is what happens while we're busy making other plans. Indeed, it is one of the screenplay's greatest strengths that experience comes to supplant craving, as it is what we do not what we dream that determines who we become.

Kore-eda is certainly fortunate in having two such confident youngsters as his heroes, as the timing they have developed as part of the MaedaMaeda comedy duo enables Koki and Ohshiro to interact with their adult co-stars with a spontaneity that carries over into the exchanges with their peers. But there isn't a single false performance here and even the most outwardly unsympathetic characters seem to be motivated by the best of intentions.

The logistical prelude to the grand expedition could easily have become bogged down in petty detail. But nothing is ever extraneous in a Kore-eda film, with even the jaunty score by the soft-rock band Quruli enhancing the mood without forcing a response. It's a shame that so few kids will get to see this, as it's one of the century's most honest, astute and attuned studies of growing up and would not only make a magnificent introduction to foreignlanguage cinema for teenagers, but it would also teach them a thing or two about who they are and how they fit into a world that often seems to make no sense at all.

THE LAST PROJECTIONIST Thomas Lawes's The Last Projectionist packs in the talking heads in a potted history of Birmingham's Electric cinema that also doubles as a dissertation on the decline of picturegoing in this country and the utter disdain that the Hollywood machine has for the arthouses and independent venues that strive to bring their audiences something other than the latest blockbuster, kidpic, date movie or gross-out comedy.

As the current owner of the Station Street site, Lawes clearly has a dual purpose in chronicling its chequered past. But he does a solid, if somewhat convoluted job in recalling its various incarnations since it opened for business in 1909. Known as The Select from 1920, the theatre was purchased by solicitor and property developer Joseph Cohen a decade later and was refurbished with balconies for its conversion into the Tatler News Theatre in 1937. It continued to show newsreels and cartoons until 1962, when the rebranded Jacey found itself struggling to stay afloat in the face of both the barring system devised by bigger competitors Rank and ABC to ring fence popular pictures and the 1960 Film Act that forced cinema owners to show a certain number of British films in order to boost the box-office tax known as the Eady Levy.

Along with many of its ilk (including the Phoenix in its Studio 1&2 days), The Jacey survived by showing X-rated softcore pornography. It was fitting, therefore, that following a brief stint as The Classic 1&2, The Tivoli was acquired by adult film producer Barry Jacobs in 1988. On becoming a two-screen arthouse in 1993, it reverted back to its original name and emulated Oxford's The Penultimate Picture Palace and Not the Moulin Rouge by adding a John Buckley sculpture to its faรงade. The figures in the alcoves became known as `Thatcher's Children', as manager Simon Middleton felt they symbolised the country's unemployed.

Yet, even with PPP supremo Bill Heine as the leaseholder, the Electric lost its way and it closed in 2003. Determined to restore it to its former Art Deco glory, Tom Lawes embarked upon a major renovation prior to a grand re-opening in 2005. A second screen was added three years later and it has since become Birmingham's first all-digital venue, selling some 60,000 tickets annually to a loyal audience of fugitives from the nearby multiplexes.

Consequently, Lawes can be forgiven for using the final reel to blow his own trumpet and promote an enterprise into which he has evidently invested considerable capital, affection and effort.

However, while the case history is as engaging as Philip Hind's The Ultimate Survivor, it's the

way in which Lawes places the Electric's situation in the wider socio-cultural context that makes this so valuable. In addition, veteran projectionists Paul `Ginger' Curtin, John Brockington, Les Castree, Graham Lee and Phil Fawke also explore how the technique of screening movies has changed over the decades and how what was once a skilled craft that required years of training is in danger of disappearing altogether in an age of computerised systems that virtually anyone can operate with the push of a button.

The story is enhanced by adroit animations inserts by Ben Lewis and Icky Dhesi and clips from such flicks as George Nichols's The Star Border (1914), Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927), Martin Campbell's Eskimo Nell (1975) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). But Lawes doesn't always shoot his interview subjects in the most interesting manner and he has an over-courteous tendency to allow anecdotes to ramble.

Furthermore, he is prone to losing focus, with a segment on Cyril Barbier's detailed model of the Odeon on nearby New Street seeming as out of place as the discussions of 3-D and Imax technology and the politicised protestations of other indie cinema owners and executives from the various UK trade associations. Nevertheless, this is a capable account of British exhibition whose lament for the passing of celluloid is tempered by cautious optimism for the survival of cinema-going as a social pastime and an artistic pursuit.

A LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE UNTRUE STORY OF MONTY PYTHON'S GRAHAM CHAPMAN Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett gleefully dispense with reality and adopt their subject's indifference to veracity in making A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman, a comic reverie that employs 17 animation styles in tracing a life that began in Leamington Spa during a Luftwaffe air raid and ended 48 years later with a virulent strain of throat cancer. However, Chapman refused to be silenced and an audio recording of his bestselling and deliciously unreliable memoir is the highlight of this well-intentioned, if patchy tribute to a gay hedonist, inspired surrealist and unrepentant misfit.

The story opens on stage in the 1970s, as Graham Chapman forgets his lines during Monty Python's Oscar Wilde insult sketch and his life flashes before his eyes as he is sucked into a spaceship through a hole in the theatre roof. Having survived his blitz birth, he relates how his mother used to take him for walks in his pram while his policeman father pieced together the body parts of those killed in the previous night's bombing. Amidst the tall tales of youthful excess, Chapman recalls his time at Eton, where he cut a dash on and off the cricket pitch and even got to kick Harold Macmillan up the backside.

But the real turning point of his early years was a rain-sodden holiday in Scarborough. As his mother fretted about buying fish while sitting in the car on the waterfront, Chapman discovered Robert Graves's I, Claudius and realised the folly of his father's suspicion of reading. A sudden daydream pitches him into a homosexual adventure with Biggles and he lands on the couch of Sigmund Freud (voiced by Cameron Diaz), who reveals that his tangled subconscious thoughts and obsession with maps means that he is keen to find his own way in life.

A rapid run through a series of juvenile pranks and sexual fumblings culminates in Chapman declaring that it is pointless searching for the man in the misdemeanours of childhood and the scene cuts to a wildlife park, where monkeys bearing a curious resemblance to Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (but not Eric Idle, who chose not to participate in the project) debate the merits of calling their new TV series Owl Stretching Time or A Horse, a Bucket and a Spoon.

This is a mere digression, however, as the main narrative resumes with Chapman heading to Cambridge, where he endures a chemistry practical and a grilling about his prospects in physics before being accepted to read medicine at Emmanuel College. When not studying, playing rugby or drinking beer, Chapman treated himself to a hectic sex life that involved several women and numerous intrusive fantasies about men. Such was his confusion that he felt like he was riding in a phallic rollercoaster car and he finally decided he was `a raging poof' after realising on a bus that he would rather sleep with the male passengers than the female ones.

Having determined his sexual orientation, Chapman began having doubts about his medical

vocation. As a longtime fan of the satirical show Beyond the Fringe, he joined the famous Footlights Club after arriving at his audition dressed as a carrot and performing a sketch about a man with metal fingers being attracted by a magnet. He quickly became friends with John Cleese and credits the Queen Mother (who seemingly laced her tea with gin) for encouraging him to go on tour to New Zealand and the United States. On returning, he quit his course and started writing for The Frost Report with Cleese. Indeed, David Frost played a key role in both his creative and personal development, as it was during a screenwriting sojourn in Spain (during which Cleese romanced first wife and Fawlty Towers co-creator Connie Booth) that Chapman met the love of his life, David Sherlock.

Back in Blighty, all attempts to break the news of his new happiness fell flat, with Cleese, Marty Feldman and Keith Moon being either preoccupied, bemused or befuddled during a coming out party. However, there was no time to dwell on their disinterest, as Monty Python's Flying Circus had become a cult hit on the BBC and a live-action clip of the Spanish Inquisition sketch is interrupted by an extract from the Letter of St Paul to the New Zealanders, in which God urges people not to grovel or have more children than they can manage.

A stage rendition of `The Bruces Song' returns us to the narrative path, just as Chapman begins to succumb to the temptations of success. Among the many sexual conquests (which are relived to the accompaniment of `Sit on My Face'), Chapman has some eccentric encounters with female fans and becomes increasingly dependent upon drink, as he fronts Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) and, at the insistence of his confreres, confesses his peccadilloes to chat show hosts Michael Parkinson and Germaine Greer. An attempt at sobering up is illustrated by the Python sketch about Colin `Bomber' Harris wrestling himself, a vision of a pantomime appearance opposite a talking cat and a ditty on the perils of boozing delivered to the tune of the Souza match that became the Monty Python theme. Yet such is the blithe blurring of fact, fiction and fantasy that it is impossible to detect the extent to which Chapman acknowledged his addiction or wished to be cured of it.

Chapman's recovery seems complete as he plays Monopoly with his friends and records the linking sequences for the Life of Brian soundtrack album. But he returns to the party circuit while living in tax exile in Los Angeles and a furious session of name-dropping is followed by his decision to hire a door-opening agency because he has become too grand to deal with such menial tasks. At David Frost's 40th birthday party, Chapman is advised to seek help and he decides to host a farewell party. Despite having issued the invitations in a spacesuit (after a possible alien abduction), Chapman finds himself alone on the big night and seeks solace at the grave of Oscar Wilde, which conveniently brings him back to the Python stage sketch, where he disguises the fact he has dried up by blowing a raspberry that brings the house down.

A caption records Chapman's death on 4 October 1989 and the closing sequence shows Cleese giving his brilliantly disrespectful eulogy at a memorial service attended by the rest of the Pythons. It's a fittingly iconoclastic conclusion to a film that tries so hard to honour the anarchic spirit of Chapman's comedy by breaking the rules whenever possible. The trouble is, the graphic shifts quickly become something of a distraction, while the wildly differing interpretations of the brief mean that some passages are incredibly literal and others abstract to the point of wilful quirkiness. Furthermore, the digitisation of Terry Gilliam's celebrated photomontage style is a disastrous miscalculation, while the use of 3-D will doubtless add to the sense of visual overkill.

Compensation comes in the form of Chapman's splendid voice-over (from the 1980 tome he co-wrote with Sherlock, Douglas Addams, David Yallop and Alex Martin) and the contributions of fellow Pythons Cleese, Palin, Jones, Gilliam and Carol Cleveland (who play a range of characters in addition to themselves), as well as such guests as Stephen Fry, Tom Hollander and Troma producer, Lloyd Kaufman. But, while this defiantly represents something completely different and has its moments of hilarity and self-deprecating poignancy, there are few genuine insights into either Chapman's personality or his career, which Jones (who is Python Terry's son) and Timlett had already covered in pretty exhaustive detail in the epic six-hour documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth. Thus, while die-hard Pythonites will revel in the affectionate mayhem, this bold conceit grows increasingly vignettish, repetitive,

inconsistent and superficial and has to be considered a missed opportunity.

McCULLIN This profile of photographer Don McCullin that has been produced by his former assistant Jacqui Morris and her brother David. Given the nature of the relationship between the director and her subject, this could easily have lapsed into a work of conscience-salving hagiography.

However, such is the innate modesty and melancholic bluntness of a man who witnessed some of the late-20th-century's most horrific conflicts and courageously used his camera to expose their cruelty and inhumanity, this is less a paean than a rebuke to those who sanctioned such carnage and the latterday press barons who decided that such hard-hitting photojournalisn no longer had a place in the modern media.

Raised in postwar austerity in Finsbury Park, Donald McCullin had little formal education and first realised his gift for photography when he snapped his pals in a gang known as The Guv'nors around the time one of their rival mobs became embroiled in a murder case. Shot in a bombed-out building, the black-and-white picture managed to look both composed and spontaneous and, as former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans points out, this became the McCullin trademark, as he travelled the world bringing his readers images that political and military establishments on all five continents wished had been kept hidden.

He was on a visit to Paris as a newlywed when he spotted a newspaper photo of an East German soldier jumping over a barbed wire fence. Convinced a big story was about to break, he arrived in Berlin in time to see the Wall being erected and this sense of timing and knack for being in the right place was to serve him well for the next three decades. Back in London, he covered peace protests and the violence that broke out during Sir Oswald Mosley's rallies in the East End. But, once he landed a contract with The Observer, McCullin became known for his international coverage.

His first major mission took him to Cyprus in the early 1960s, as the tensions between the majority Greek and minority Turkish populations came to a head. Recollecting calmly, but vividly, McCullin describes how he made his way into the northern Turkish enclave and explains how he came to take such evocative pictures as the ones of a man in a cap and raincoat bursting out of the back door of a cinema brandishing a rifle; a dog sitting placidly in the midst of a unit waiting to go into action; the victims of a village massacre; and a woman imploring the heavens in a Goyaesque manner for the mayhem to cease. McCullin skirts over the moment he carried a disabled woman to safety during the evacuation of her hamlet and insists he is not an artist or a poet, but a photographer whose respect for the vulnerable and the suffering gave his work a distinctive sensitivity.

Shortly afterwards, he found himself in the Congo, which had been troubled since gaining independence from Belgium in 1960 by the Simba rebel resistance to the regime of Prime Minister Mo誰se Tshombe. Thousands were killed and many Western civilians were taken hostage. Arriving in Leopoldville for the German magazine, Quick, McCullin smuggled himself into a mercenary brigade destined for Stanleyville under Mike Hoare and saw atrocities being committed by the local gendarmerie before he was taken to a remote mission where the nuns had been butchered with machetes. Yet, he was equally appalled by the behaviour of the soldiers of fortune and remembers one Rhodesian who tried to rob the bank in a decimated settlement before killing a couple of African servant boys who had incurred his displeasure.

Although he sometimes feels he is drowning in the red-tinged silence of his darkroom, McCullin claims only to have nightmares in the daytime. But he clearly feels a pang at having so often been a helpless onlooker and reconciles any sense of regret with the knowledge that his pictures helped alert the wider world to crimes that might otherwise have gone unseen.

Indeed, a montage of spreads produced for Harold Evans's `Insight' team at The Sunday Times shows how widely McCullin travelled in search of scoops. His images of sharecroppers, jazz musicians and Ku Klux Klansmen in close proximity in the Mississippi Delta are juxtaposed with those of The Beatles, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba and the Six Day War. Indeed, he even concedes in a monochrome TV news clip that he enjoys being in war zones and wonders in an interview with Michael Parkinson whether his passion for adventure is sometimes stronger than his need to reveal.

The chronology goes a little askew in this section, as Morris seeks to leaven the quotidian mix of talking-head reminiscence, newsreel footage and classic McCullin stills with informal shots

of the 77 year-old rifling through his Somerset archive for pertinent pictures. However, the documentary gets back on track as McCullin heads for Vietnam at the height of the Tet Offensive in February 1968. Accompanying the Marines in a bid to drive the Vietcong out of the city of Hue, McCullin took several defining photographs, including one of a shell-shocked trooper whose expression remained identical in five separate frames; an African-American having his sniper-shattered hand treated within minutes of throwing a grenade with macho athleticism; and a wounded soldier being held against a wall by two buddies in a pose that irresistibly resembles a Renaissance painting of the Deposition from the Cross.

Colonel Myron Harrington recalls in a telephone interview how McCullin refused to be treated any differently to the conscripts and he laments that such reckless independence is no longer possible because the military insist on embedding journalists to restrict their movements and their access to unseemly sights. But, as he implies in a sequence dedicated to the elderly homeless people he got to know in London in the late 60s, he didn't always have to go abroad for shameful stores, as they also existed on his own doorstep.

In 1969, McCullin went to Biafra, as the civil war with the Nigerian government intensified amidst a famine that shocked the world. He remembers the dignity of the starving children he encountered at a camp and shows images of the Albino boy to whom he gave a barley sugar, the mother who had no milk for her baby and 16 year-old Patience, who posed demurely in what were probably the last hours of her life. Trips to Cambodia (during which he was wounded in a mortar ambush), Northern Ireland and Vietnam (for the sixteenth and final time) between 1970 and 1972 proved equally sobering, with the experience of the `Vietnamisation' that followed the American withdrawal leaving a particularly deep impression.

Yet, while he detested being labelled a `war photographer', he remained driven to record momentous events. In 1976, with his marriage recently ended, he went to Beirut and was granted permission by the Christian Phalangists to cover their side of a struggle that was heading towards civil war. Six years later, he returned after being refused a passage to the Falklands War, and captured the aftermath of the massacre of 3000 refugees at Sabra and Shatila. He was also taken to the asylum wing of the camp hospital, where he was left distraught by the children tied to beds for their own safety and the blind toddlers locked in a stinking and stiflingly hot room because only one female nurse had chosen to stay with her patients.

Yet this turned out to be McCullin's last major assignment for The Sunday Times, as Rupert Murdoch had acquired the Thomson family empire and instructed editor Andrew Neil to change the nature of the colour supplement so that it was easier to secure lucrative advertising contracts. Evidently embittered that his brand of war correspondence was no longer considered valid, McCullin turned his attention to the British landscape. However, Morris opts to neglect the last 30-odd years and contents herself with a couple of captions stating that, in 1993, McCullin became the first photojournalist to be awarded the CBE. But, while this is a disappointingly tame ending, the power and poignancy of what has gone before (both in visual terms and in the discussion of the ethical issues involved in cataloguing human misery) remains as undiminished as the spirit that recently saw McCullin venture out to do his bit to publicise the horrors of the Syrian crisis.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT A captivating stillness characterised the performance piece that brought crowds flocking to the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 14 March and 31 May 2010. However, Matthew Akers and co-director Jeff Dupre are not content with just recording the event in their exceptional documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present. They also place it in a career context and go some way to fulfilling their subject's lifelong ambition to have performance defined as something other than an `alternative' artform.

Born in Yugoslavia in 1946 to military parents whose commitment to Communism left them little time to show their children any affection, Abramovic concedes that she may well have become a performance artist to receive the attention she had so craved as a girl. She started out in the early 1970s producing audacious physical pieces that required her to cut and whip herself, run into walls and lie at the centre of a flaming star. But she shifted her attention from the angry analysis of bodily limitation to the relationship between men and women when

she forged a partnership in 1976 with Uwe Laysiepen, a German artist who went under the name of Ulay.

For many years, they toured Europe in a small van putting on impromptu performances and Abramovic insists on the vehicles inclusion in the MoMA retrospective curated by Klaus Biesenbach. She also resurrects one of their most famous works, Imponderabilia (1977), which saw them standing naked in a doorway so that anyone passing through would have to brush against their flesh.

In order to ensure this and the live-action revivals are executed to her exacting standards, Abramovic puts the models through a rigorous training programme at her Hudson Valley home. She also has a reunion with Ulay, from whom she parted in 1988 after they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle and say their goodbyes.

However, the centrepice of her new show, The Artist is Present, is clearly inspired by their epic item Nightsea Crossing, which saw them sitting completely still opposite each other throughout a series of 22 performances staged in different venues between 1981 and 1987.

Abramovic confides in assistant Davide Balliano and gallerist Sean Kelly that the meeting with Ulay has stirred up some long-dormant emotions. But she regains both her composure and her focus, although Kelly has to dissuade her from allowing magician David Blaine to steal her thunder by incorporating a mock assault into proceedings. Thriving on the pressure of mounting the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA history, she also begins preparing herself for the 736-hour and 30-minute challenge of sitting motionless on an armless wooden chair in the museum atrium and looking impassively into the face of the person occupying the seat opposite her.

Including encounters with Ulay, the actor James Franco, some self-serving attention seekers, some curious bypassers and many devoted admirers, this enterprise takes up the final third of the film. Akers perfectly captures the intimacy and intensity of the piece by alternating between close-ups of Abramovic and her companions and establishing shots of the hopefuls queuing to participate and the onlookers fixated on the dynamics of interactions that eventually have to be time-restricted as the exhibit becomes a cultural phenomenon.

Considering it's a secondhand experience, the process of watching Abramovic offer herself for strangers to project their thoughts and feelings upon is surprisingly and deeply moving.

Several sitters are reduced to tears, while a few more a rewarded with the occasional flicker of a smile. But the inscrutable Abramovic imposes nothing but quietude in accepting every reaction with a generosity that is humbling in its ingenuity, simplicity and completeness.

Moreover, she never betrays a hint of physical discomfort during any of the 100 sessions and even insists on the table initially placed between the chairs being removed to allow a greater sense of reciprocity.

Biesenbach (who was himself a former lover) has the privilege of sharing the last session before Abramovic rises to tumultuous applause. Yet, even though the show has been a triumph, one local newscast still questions whether naked torsos, projections of screaming faces or the endurance of pain qualify as legitimate art. One only has to watch this fine mix of archive footage, interview and MoMA magic and appreciate the inspiration, effort and sincerity that Abramovic puts into every creation to realise that it most certainly is.

THE MEXICAN SUITCASE King Juan Carlos has now been head of state in Spain for longer than Francisco Franco. Yet the influence of El Caudillo remains strong on those who lived through the Civil War and the dictatorship he imposed, those who endured three decades of exile and those among the younger generations that still knows little about a conflict whose wounds run so deep that few can discuss it with any hope of objectivity. The second part of Trisha Ziff's The Mexican Suitcase centres on the recollections of survivors who remember the hunger, the injustice and the constant sense of danger. But, while it is vital that the war is finally understood and its consequences and lessons are never forgotten, it seems somewhat odd that this task has been taken on in a documentary about three cases of presumed lost photo negatives.

At the height of the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa, his partner Gerda Taro and their Magnum Photos colleague David `Chim' Seymour risked their lives to capture images for newspapers around the world. At one point, 4500 negatives were carefully stored in three suitcases that were smuggled out of the country on the defeat of the Republicans. The cases

were long thought lost, but they were discovered by film-maker Ben Tarver among the possessions of the former Mexican ambassador to Vichy France and handed over to Cornell Capa, the photo-journalist's younger brother, who had founded the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Experts like Sebastiaan Faber and Juan Villoro trace the story of how the images managed to survive and attempt to assess their significance. However, rather than dwelling on the circumstances under which they were taken, the relationship between the photographers or the pitiless brutality they depict, Ziff keeps insisting on placing them in a their wider context, with the result that focus is lost and neither the photographs and their legacy nor Franco's rule and its ramifications for the disenfranchised and their descendants is considered with any depth or trenchancy.

The debate about the ownership of the images that are easily reproducible, for example, seems less pressing than the need to ensure young Spaniards to hear the testimony of their elders. But Ziff struggles to prioritise and, though the monochrome shots are beautifully reproduced by Claudio Rocha to the accompaniment of a sublime Michael Nyman score, the historical perspectives (which seems to have been shaped by creative advisor John Sayles) almost feel like an afterthought to pad the content to feature length. Moreover, she fails to do justice to the Mexcican aspect of the story by exploring either the motives of a government that welcomed the anti-fascist exiles or the conditions in which they lived in places like Veracruz.

Nevertheless, such is the intrigue of the Capa-Taro story (she was killed when a tank rammed the car on whose running-board she was standing during the Battle of Brunete in July 1937) and the striking immediacy and haunting beauty of their work, that this remains compelling and leaves one wondering how far Michael Mann has got with developing his adaptation of Susana Fortes's 2009 novel, Waiting for Robert Capa.

MONSIEUR LAZHAR Tactfully opened out from a stage play by Évelyne de la Chenelière, Philippe Falardeau's French-Canadian Oscar nominee Monsieur Lazhar is a potent mix of coming-of-age saga, bereavement melodrama and political parable that could so easily have been unbearably mawkish. Yet, while not avoiding platitudes altogether, Falardeau has succeeded in producing a touching human story whose insights into such complex issues as ethnicity, duty, violence, communication and integration are both shrewd and deceptively provocative.

It seems to be just another morning at a Montreal middle school, as sixth grader Émilien Néron fetches the recess milk and heads towards his classroom. However, as he reaches the door, he sees his beloved teacher Héléna Laliberté hanging from a pipe and the camera remains fixed as he runs off in blind panic to find someone to come and help her. There is nothing to be done, however, and Néron and best friend Sophie Nélisse are crushed both by the nature of the discovery and the loss of one of the few grown-ups not to treat them as children.

Principal Danielle Proulx is keen to play down the tragedy and keep it out of the press. She also wishes to spare the students undue distress and is, therefore, relieved when 55 year-old Algerian Mohamed Saïd Fellag applies to be the supply teacher. Even though the rest of the staff is exclusively female, Proulx thinks it would do the kids good to have a man about the place, especially one whose otherness would provide a welcome distraction.

Despite claiming to have some two decades of experience in his homeland, Fellag has a very different approach to education and his new charges are more than a little bemused by his accent and eccentric locutions. Moreover, they are totally flummoxed when he suggests they do a dictation from Balzac. However, he is sensitive to the atmosphere and swiftly switches to the fables of La Fontaine and sets the pupils the task of creating their own. He particularly hopes that the exercise will help Néron deal with emotions that his parents, Proulx and an outside psychologist are anxious to suppress.

But Fellag refuses to buy into the theory that Laliberté is a pitiable victim and upsets several of his new colleagues by condemning her for selfishly choosing her classroom as a place to end her life in the knowledge that her corpse would most likely be found by a child. Moreover, not everyone approves of his tactile methods. Yet, in talking to Néron, he uncovers the real reason for the boy's distress and finds the right words to console him because he has

endured a trauma of his own.

Back in Algeria, Fellag had been a civil servant before opening a restaurant. But business had not been good and he decided to try his luck as an illegal exile in Canada, while his teacher wife remained at home with their two children. However, she was a vocal opponent of the government's reconciliation policy and, on the night before she was due to join Fellag in Quebec, she was murdered in an arson attack provoked by a controversial book she had recently published. But there is no guarantee that the revelation of either Fellag's political persecution or Néron's guilty secret will bring them both the peace they crave.

Some may find the denouement overly contrived, but Falardeau and De la Chenelière (who cameos as Nélisse's mother) largely prevent the drama from becoming excessively maudlin.

However, much depends on the naturalism of the teaching sequences - which owe much more to Laurent Cantet's The Class (2008) than Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989) - and the beautifully judged performances of Fellag, Néron and Nélisse, who rapport is entirely believable. Ronald Plante's discrete camerawork is also key, but Falardeau retains the original emphasis on words and the discussion of so many tricky topics related to the treatment of children by both parents and teachers is both cogent and quietly forceful.

Ultimately, this was never going to pip Asghar Farhadi's A Separation for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. But it is well worth seeing, if only for its unfussy dismissal of nannying correctness and its willingness to trust in the intelligence and integrity of youth.

NO Pablo Larrain's No follows Tony Manero (2008) and Post Mortem (2010) in a trilogy of scathing exposés of the Pinochet tyranny that held sway in Chile between 1973 and 1990.

Adapted by Pedro Peirano from Antonio Skarmeta's acclaimed stage play Referendum, this has been boldly photographed by Sergio Armstrong in the U-matic video format that was not only current at the time of the October 1988 plebiscite on the future of the ruling regime, but which also allows Larrain to incorporate archive material to reinforce the authenticity of a story that otherwise might have started to feel like a Chilean episode of Mad Men. Indeed, there is more than a hint of Don Draper about Gael García Bernal's character, who is actually a skateboarding composite of José Manuel Salcedo and Eugenio García, who take knowing cameos as Pinochet supporters. Bernal may be the son of a leading dissident and be estranged from left-wing activist Antonia Zegers, but he entirely misses the irony of preparing commercials for a new cola named `Free'. Consequently, he is surprised when his father's old friend, Luis Gnecco, asks him to devise a series of 15-minute election broadcasts backing the campaign to remove Pinochet from power.

Aware that they will only be shown once a day in a graveyard slot because the administration exerts an iron grip on the media, Gnecco is essentially going through the motions by organising promos that Pinochet had been persuaded to let air by overseas allies keen to have him vaunt his democratic credentials. However, Gnecco is keen to concentrate on such detestable aspects of the dictatorship as torture and the desparecidos and is appalled when García emerges from discussions with mentor Nestor Cantillana and temperamental cameraman-director Marcial Tagle with a spot that is filled with sunlit meadows and exuberant dancers and is so resolutely upbeat about the future that it even ends with a rainbow logo.

Although convinced that the lower classes will only be persuaded into voting for change if they can get a glimpse of a better tomorrow, García draws instant flak from Zegers, who conspires with Tagle to slip some of the more damningly negative publicity back into the broadcasts. However, such is the positive feedback that minister Jaime Vadell hired García's boss, Alfredo Castro, to come up with an equally effective film for the Yes camp and the pair find themselves collaborating by day on harmless consumer products and devoting their nights to sabotaging each other's best political efforts.

More might have been made of the genuine threat that García begins to feel that his opponents could resort to kidnapping his young son, Pascal Montero, in order to secure his co-operation. But his efforts to reunite his family are nowhere near as riveting as the struggle for the hearts and minds of a divided nation and Larrain and Peirano ably convey the sense that something momentous is about to occur. Moreover, by shooting in the square Academy ratio style on U-matic stock, Larrain creates a mood of immediacy and unpredictability that is

reinforced by Andrea Chinogli's precise editing and the razor sharp performances of a fine ensemble.

As the prodigal returning home after many years in exile, Bernal cleverly combines out-ofstepness with a freshness of perspective that makes his approach to the referendum so inspired. His duels with Zegers, Tagle and Castro are darkly amusing, but Larrain never loses sight of the gravity of the situation and even hints that the cul-de-sac in which Chile has been trapped since 1990 has a good deal to do with the dumbed down method of debating the key issues that was coined by the No campaign. Unfortunately, however, the picture itself is tainted with the same craving for accessibility and acceptance and Larrain's admirers will miss the psychological depth, dramatic ambiguity and unsettling detachment that made his earlier outings so compelling. Nevertheless, any film that examines socio-political methodology in such minute detail and with such a courageous disregard for artistic nicety has to be worth watching.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA Stillness has always been a key facet of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's cinema. Having studied photography since the age of 15, he applied the static camera technique developed while taking portraits to the films he started making while doing his national service in the Turkish army. However, such passivity is highly deceptive, as much is revealed in the long takes employed to study the crises of existence endured by the protagonists in such acclaimed features as Distant (2002), Climates (2006) and Three Monkeys (2008), which drew comparisons with such masters of measured dissection as Robert Bresson and Michael Haneke.

But Ceylan's unique ability to capture of environment and atmosphere is road tested in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, as he brings his distinctive brand of composed observation to picture that is in equal parts an odyssey, a police procedural, a whodunit and a satire on official corruption and ineptitude and the growing insecurity of the modern Turkish male.

In the sleepy southern backwater of Keskin, Firat Tanis confesses to killing buddy Erol Erasian with his slow-witted brother Burhan Yildiz. However, as he was drunk on the night in question, he can only remember that he buried the body beside a fountain and police chief Yilmaz Erdogan insists on bundling the suspects into driver Ahmet MĂźmtaz Taylan's car and heading off in a convoy containing another car and a jeep to locate the corpse. As everything has to be done by the book, the party is accompanied by Ankara prosecutor Taner Birsel and local doctor Muhammet Uzuner.

Following a break in the journey to dine with small-town mayor Ercan Kesal (whose pretty daughter, Cansu Demirci, has a profound effect upon them all), Birsel attempts to relieve the tedium by telling Uzuner the story of a woman who predicted her own death, However, he succeeds merely in unintentionally initiating another mystery, as the sceptical medic is curious to know if an autopsy was ever performed on her body. But, while suspicions rise that the woman in question may well have been Birsel's own wife, Kesal cracks under the pressure of tiredness and remorse and reveals that Erasian was killed in a fracas after he let slip that he was the father of his son Fatih Ereli with wife Nihan Okutucu. The body is recovered and taken back to town, where Ereh throws a stone at Kesal as he is led into the police station.

But one final secret remains to be unearthed and re-concealed.

Ceylan confirms his reputation as a cinematic master with this audacious meld of disparate screen genres. What appears to be a simple crime story, as three vehicles snake across a bleak, storm-threatened nocturnal landscape in search of a buried murder victim, slowly evolves into a compelling road movie, a dense human drama and a deceptively trenchant socio-political critique. The cadaver proves hard to find, but attentive viewers will note the significance of Chekhovian snippets of information dropped into seemingly casual conversations about everything from yoghurt and lamb dishes to ethics, social hierarchies and the complexities of family life and will begin to piece together a profound, poignant and pessimistic snapshot of Turkish manhood and its ambivalent attitudes to the law, faith, bureaucracy, death and, most tellingly, women.

The actors appear to be upstaged by the majesty of GĂśkhan Tiryaki's cinematography, but the devastating denouement reveals the full extent of their subtle brilliance. Nonetheless, the star here is Ceylan, whose control of composition, character, mood and pace is impeccable.

Yet, what is perhaps most striking about the scenario written by Ceylan, his wife Ebru and Kesal, is the dry wit that prevents the compassion for these hapless males from becoming mawkish.

PING PONG Just as Steven Walker celebrated the indomitable enthusiasm of the members of a geriatric choir in Young@Heart (2007), so Hugh Hartford captures the competitive zest of eight veteran table tennis players in the amiable documentary Ping Pong. Adhering to the standard format of introducing the contenders in their domestic environments before following their fortunes in a major event, Hartford does a solid job in conveying the drive and determination that keeps these seven remarkable octagenarians and single centurion going. But the climactic scenes at the 2010 world championships in China feel rushed and there is too little sense of either the trajectory or the quality of the mens' and womens' competitions.

Hartford also allows some of his subjects to slip into sidelines, with Stockholm's Rune Forsberg (85), Sun Yong Qing (80) from Hulun Bir in Inner Mongolia and Inge-Brigitte Hermann (89) from Preetz in northern Germany receiving scant attention, even though the first is the new pin-up of the Over-85s circuit, the second is convinced that a training regime based on beer and cigarettes has improved his game and the last has courageously battled back from a stroke and continues to practice whenever she can at her nursing home. The focus also quickly passes from 100 year-old Dorothy DeLow from Perth in Australia after the media fuss surrounding her dies down and she is eliminated from the tournament.

Much better served are the British duo of Les D'Arcy (89) from Wakefield and Stockport's Terry Donlon (81) and the bitter Austro-German rivals Lisa Modlich (85), who now lives in Houston, Texas, and Stuttgart's and Ursula Bihl (89).

As Les's children Paul and Jane recall, he was a sickly child who began body-building after the Second World War. However, while he dabbled in athletics, cycling and the triathlon, he found his mĂŠtier later in life and has emerged from numerous health scares to win 12 world titles. Despite making light of seriously diminished lung capacity after a lifetime working with asbestos, Terry has also struggled in recent times with prostate cancer. But he is bent on getting to Hohhot, even though his doctors fear he only has a short time to live.

By contrast, both Ursula and Lisa are hale and hearty. The former lives with her son Gerhard, who helps with her training regimes and never ceases to be amazed by her tenacity in striving to defend her world crown. But she faces stiff competition from the irrepressible Lisa, who helped smuggle Jews out of Vienna during the war and won the Croix de Guerre for her service in France with the Maquis. A brassy blonde with an opinion on everything, she now lives with her toyboy shooter husband Joachim (they have been together over 40 years) and consistently astonishes coach Blanca Alejo-Jackson with her energy and fierce will to win.

Having established the personalities with such deft strokes, Hartford rushes through the championship segment. Dorothy regrets not putting up a better fight as she loses by three games to love, while Sun succumbs in the second round after a confident 3-2 victory. Inge does well against Japan's Yoshiko Rikima, only to lose a tight match, while Rune, who has devoted a fair amount of time to trash-talking Les before their meeting, accepts his comprehensive defeat with good grace.

Clearly feeling the pace, Terry soldiers on against Australian Bill Bates and heroically plays to a conclusion, with Les cheering him on from the sidelines. But there is no such camaraderie between Ursula and Lisa when they meet in the semi-final, with Ursula opining that her opponent is `a silly cow' after she struts away from her victory with a resistible swagger that returns following her success in the final as she waits impatiently to be presented with her trophy.

Les has to settle for being the gallant runner-up in his draw, after his lucky bat mysteriously disappears just moments before the final. However, he quickly forgets about his disappointment to return to Blighty to rally round Terry, who defies the doctors during another hospital stint to enjoy the publicity surrounding Ping Pong's release. Ultimately, this happy ending goes some way to atoning for the hotch-potch of the Hohhot sequences. But, while the picture might have been significantly improved if Hartford had concentrated on his principal quartet, it still engages and entertains and should encourage seniors everywhere to give wiff-waff a try.

POST MORTEM Pablo Larraín's third feature Post Mortem reveals some disturbing facts about Chile in the September week in 1973 when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Socialist Party government of Salvador Allende. Staged with a troubling deliberateness that is reinforced by Sergio Armstrong's disorienting widescreen framing, this macabrely mesmerising drama is dominated by a deadpan display by Alfredo Castro that contrasts sharply with his murderous turn as the John Travolta obsessive in Larraín's much-admired Tony Manero (2008).

The lank-haired Castro lives in a quiet Santiago street opposite union activist Ernesto Malbran and his children Antonia Zegers and Santiago Grafigna. The younger boy helps Castro type up the morgue reports he has to produce for coroner Jaime Vadell, while Zegers dances in a downmarket burlesque run by the charmless Luis Gnecco. Despite a past fling with medical assistant Amparo Noguera, Castro is obsessed with Zegers and slips backstage during an afternoon performance to see her being fired for losing her allure to anorexia.

Seizing upon her vulnerability, Castro invites her for a drink and Zegers seems quaintly amused by his respectful earnestness as they drive through the city. However, he is powerless to protect her when their route is blocked by a Communist youth rally and Zegers is hauled out to join the throng by her father's radical friend, Marcelo Alonso. However, she eventually makes it home safely and seeks sanctuary in Castro's shabbily cosy abode to avoid the meeting taking place in her own. She bursts into tears over a simple supper and Castro bawls with her and is rewarded for his empathy by joyless intercourse that clearly means more to him that his self-obsessed guest.

Determined to impress Zegers, Casto takes her to a Chinese restaurant and proposes marriage. Humiliated by her incredulity, he tries to reel back to a suggestion they become an item. But the damage is done and, even though he gives Gnecco his car to have Zegers reinstated in the show, he only sees her again after her father and brother are abducted by troops during the coup that takes place while Castro is distracted in the shower. He willingly agrees to protect Zegers and even patches up her wounded dog. But his workload has increased enormously at the hospital, as captain Marcial Tagle orders him and Noguera to abandon their usually meticulous procedures and simply label the dead and count their bullet holes.

After a day of wheeling corpses through narrow corridors to the morgue, Castro is exhausted and wholly unprepared to be bundled into an army truck with Vadell and Noguera to perform an autopsy on Allende in front of the military brass. Unused to operating an electric typewriter, Castro has to be replaced by a more competent soldier, while Noguera proves unable to open the dead president's abdomen, leaving Vadell hurriedly to cover his corpse and pronounce him a suicide.

Although Castro seems happy to go along with the verdict (which was proved correct in July 2011), Noguera is convinced that Allende was murdered and, thus, readily conspires with Castro to spirit a badly wounded survivor of the reprisals into the main ward. However, when he is found among the pile of bodies next day - along with the nurse who tried to help him Noguera launches into a bitter diatribe that is only halted by a trooper firing his weapon repeatedly into the victims at her feet.

Castro and Vadell look on impotently. But when he discovers that Zegers has been sleeping with Alonso while under his protection, Castro proves himself to be as vindictive as the new regime and remorselessly piles furniture in front of the shed in which Zegers is hiding to barricade the door and bring about the death by malnutrition that had earlier been signposted by a provocative flash forward.

From the opening shot taken from the undercarriage of an armoured patrol vehicle rumbling through a debris-strewn street, this is as bleak as the desaturated palette that suggests the cadaverous decolorisation of an entire country. Larraín has stated the film is dedicated to the silent majority of Chileans who tolerated a genocidal policy of disappearances in order to avoid falling prey to it. However, this is the most back-handed of tributes, even though Larraín ensures that no one is wholly sympathetic in this sorry situation, with even revolutionaries like Alonso and such respectably bourgeois as Noguera having decidedly dubious morals.

The performances are outstanding, with Zegers and Noguera respectively conveying a

selfishness and a selflessness that attract the opposite (and, thus, wrong) responses from Castro, who is too naive to recognise his error. Yet, while his refusal (or inability) to register emotion causes his romantic problems, it also enables him to survive the brutal transition to military dictatorship and Larraín leaves the viewer in little doubt that he will always know which direction to jump when pushed.

Such subtlety makes Post Mortem so chillingly dark. But it would be only half as accomplished aesthetically without Matías Valdés's sound mix (which comes brilliantly to the fore as the shower all-but drowns out the cacophony of the coup) and Sergio Armstrong's 16mm widescreen imagery, which, thanks to Larraín's compositional audacity, always manages to suggest that something is occurring or lurking beyond the edges of the frame in a tangible and very dangerous reality.

QUARTET Much has been made of the fact that Quartet marks Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut at the age of 75. In fact, he started out behind the camera for the 1978 crime drama Straight Time, but found calling the shots so difficult that he handed the megaphone to Uli Grosbard and concentrated on his acting role. Wisely, he has chosen not to double up in this adaptation of a 1999 Ronald Harwood play set in a retirement home for musicians and the result is an assured, relaxed comedy that could have been made at any time during Hoffman's 45-year cinema career and, yet, which benefits enormously from its bucolic British setting and its sensibly mixed cast of seasoned thespians and veteran singers and instrumentalists.

Each year, the residents of Beecham House stage a gala performance to mark the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi. The show is directed by the swanningly pompous Michael Gambon, who dresses in the affected garb of an eccentric genius and barks out orders that meek sidekick Andrew Sachs and accompanist Patricia Loveland ensure are carried out to his exacting standards. However, Gambon always has trouble with Billy Connolly, a roguish tenor who moved into the sprawling facility after visiting old pal Tom Courtenay and who recently lost the last of his inhibitions following a stroke.

This pair breakfast each morning with erstwhile co-star Pauline Collins, whose memory isn't what it used to be, but who flits around cheerfully under the watchful gaze of head doctor Sheridan Smith, who is as concerned by the state of the home's finances as she is by the health of her charges. Connolly delights in flirting with Smith and encouraging old music-hall duo Trevor Peacock and David Ryall to wind up Gambon by crooning jolly ditties at every opportunity. But even he recognises the gravity of the situation when ageing diva Maggie Smith arrives to reawaken in Courtenay painful memories of the nine-hour marriage that she destroyed by having an injudicious affair with a handsome virtuoso at La Scala.

Cognizant that the show alone can replenish the coffers for another year, Connolly, Courtenay and Collins decide to coax Smith into reprising the `Bella figlia dell'amore' quartet from Rigoletto that made them all famous. However, Smith has lost the will to perform, as she feels it would be a betrayal of her talent to give anything but the best. Thus, she is angry that the trio has an ulterior motive for taking her to dinner at a nearby restaurant and only changes her mind when a rant at Collins causes her to have a funny turn and sickbay patient Michael Byrne (with whom Smith once had a passionate fling) encourages her to do the right thing.

A montage follows showing the vocalists rehearsing and gardener Ronnie Fox and assistant Luke Newberry setting up the stage in the main hall. But not once do we hear the principals singing together. Indeed, only Connolly warbles at all and, then, only very briefly. Yet this timorous sleight of hand fails to detract from the feel-good nature of the finale, as Smith regains her confidence on hearing detested rival soprano Gwyneth Jones performing with enviable power and poignancy and also on accepting Courtenay's backstage marriage proposal. What it can't do, however, is disguise the thinness of the material and the fact that Hoffman allows his leads to ham it up just a touch too much.

Harwood attempts to bolster his sketchy scenario with half-hearted subplots involving Connolly and Newberry's crushes on dining-room waitress Eline Powell, clarinettist Colin Bradbury's worsening respiratory condition and Courtenay's musical appreciation sessions with a class of local kids that affords Jumayn Hunter the chance to rap a lame comparison between opera and hip hop. Moreover, given that his inspiration came from Daniel Schmid's

1984 documentary Tosca's Kiss (about the Casa Verdi retirement home that was founded in Milan by the composer himself), Harwood seems more intent on celebrating friendship and nostalgia than considering such geriatric realities as accepting the loss of former glories in order to make the most of the time remaining. Despite being ideally placed to discuss late-life efficacy, Hoffman adopts an equally cosy approach, staging several sequences in the grounds of Hedsor House in Taplow so that cinematographer John De Borman can capture the restful beauty of the scenery.

As for the performances, Courtenay contributes a typically understated display of disappointed decency, while Collins is charmingly dotty, Gambon is positively pantomimic and Sheridan Smith is winsomely sweet. By contrast, Dame Maggie delivers another masterclass in haughty vulnerability that irresistibly recalls her turn in John Madden's similarly themed The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. But Connolly, inheriting a role intended for the indisposed Albert Finney, seems a little out of step as the irrepressible roué content to be an artisan rather than an artist. His twinkle is a tad too refulgent, while his gait is too strident to require a cane. Indeed, the sudden dizzy spell that seems to presage a sad twist that never comes is the least convincing moment of the entire picture. But nobody can spit the F word with such venomous conviction, although Dame Maggie gives him an unexpected run for his money.

A ROYAL AFFAIR It all seems to be going right for Mads Mikkelsen at the moment. Shortly after being named Best Actor at Cannes for his performance in Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, he landed the role of Hannibal Lecter opposite Hugh Dancy's Will Graham in a new American TV series based on Thomas Harris's flesh-fancying serial killer. Yet, while he is best known to international audiences for his portrayal of the villainous Le Chiffre in Daniel Craig's James Bond debut, Casino Royale (2008), Mikkelsen is an established star in his native Denmark and was, therefore, the natural choice to headline Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair as German physician Johann Friedrich Struensee, who exploited his position treating mentally unstable 18th-century monarch Christian VII to seduce his dispirited British spouse, Queen Caroline Mathilde.

Opening in 1775, as Caroline Mathilde (Alicia Vikander) writes to her estranged children, Frederick and Louise Auguste, from her exile in Celle Castle in her brother George III's Hanoverian territories, the action flashes back nine years to the teenage princess's arrival from London to discover that not only is her suitor, Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), completely disinterested in her, but he is also psychologically fragile and utterly under the control of his manipulative stepmother, Dowager Queen Juliana Maria of BrunswickWolfenbüttel (Trine Dyrholm), and his scheming tutor Ove Høegh-Guldberg.(David Dencik).

Nevertheless, Caroline succeeds in producing an heir and tolerates the king's childish outbursts and the cold indifference of a court populated by self-seeking aristocrats who compete for favours while paying little heed to the plight of the serfs on their neglected estates.

In 1768, Christian embarks upon a year-long grand tour of Europe and progressive nobles Count Schack Carl Rantzau (Thomas Gabrielsson) and Enevold Brandt (Cyron Melville) dupe him into becoming reliant on Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mikkelsen), a doctor from the Danish-controlled town of Altona who has the medical skills to moderate Christian's moods and the personal charm to gain his confidence. Moreover, he also has an overweening ambition to put into practice the Rousseauian ideas that he has published in a series of anonymous tracts. Thus, he accompanies the entourage to Copenhagen, where he quickly makes an impression on the lonely Caroline, with whom he conspires to coax Christian into playing an acting game that involves him presenting reforms to his intransigent legislative council in the form of a prepared script.

Arcel and co-scenarist Rasmus Heisterberg exaggerate Caroline's role in the emancipation of the peasantry, the introduction of freedom of speech, the building of public hospitals, the abolition of censorship, torture and capital punishment for theft and the overhauling of the taxation system to ensure that both the nobility and the clergy became liable. Yet the sequences depicting this 10-month period when 1069 cabinet orders were issued (as the rate of three per day) are among the most exhilarating in the film, as Mikkelsen claims a seat on the council and becomes increasingly dictatorial in his attitude towards a monarch who,

himself, may not have been quite the shill that history has suggested.

Somewhat inevitably, this unconventional triumvirate soon finds its enemies massing and Juliana and Guldberg make cynical use of the new powers of free expression to spread rumours about the nature of Struensee's relationship with the queen. Consequently, when she gives birth to a daughter, it is widely assumed that Christian is not the father and the reactionaries move quickly to secure a divorce and bypass the king to topple the now isolated Struensee, who was executed with Brandt for the usurpation of royal power on 28 April 1772.

Although it was the subject of Victor Saville's The Dictator (1935) - which starred such British stalwarts as Clive Brook as Struensee, Madeleine Carroll as Caroline, Emlyn Williams as Christian VII and Helen Haye as the Queen Mother - this seismic period had never previously been filmed in Denmark. Executive produced by Lars von Trier, it inspires an epic tale of infatuation, ideology, intrigue and vested interest that benefits from exceptional production design and costumes by Niels Sejer and Manon Rasmussen and lavish visuals by Rasmus Videnaek that are always more controlled than Gabriel Yared and Cyrille Aufort's sonorous score.

Arcel also directs steadily, without departing too far from the conventions of the heritage picture. His screenplay is occasionally declamatory and the bookending epistolary device emphasises too early for those unfamiliar with the saga the doomed nature of Caroline's Danish sojourn (she would die soon afterwards at the age of just 23). Nonetheless, the performances are admirable, with Vikander ably conveying the queen's trusting naivetĂŠ and Mikkelsen exuding a dynamic blend of Enlightenment decorum and megalomaniac zeal.

However, the romantic spark isn't always evident, with the result that both Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (who won the Best Actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival) and Trine Dyrholm are frequently able to steal focus as the unpredictable king and his ferocious guardian.

RUST AND BONE Reputation goes a long way in cinema. Had Rust and Bone been made by a newcomer and featured an unknown cast, it might have been selected for the odd festival and been lauded for an ambition that couldn't quite disguise its shortcomings. But because Jacques Audiard has become something of an arthouse darling after The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and A Prophet (2009), the melodramatic excesses have been forgiven and this tale inspired by the short stories of Canadian author Craig Davidson has been lauded as a masterpiece of lyrical realism.

Of course, it helps to have Oscar winner Marion Cotillard in a leading role and the Dardenne brothers offering their support from the sidelines. And, if anybody could persuade an audience to take such wilful narrative contrivance seriously, it's Jacques Audiard. But there is no escaping the fact that this is the kind of downbeat saga that would have been churned out

by Hollywood second units in the 1950s with Robert Ryan or Jack Palance as the palooka and Linda Darnell or Marie Windsor as the suffering broad. This comparison doesn't prevent the picture from being slick, engaging and even occasionally moving. Many a studio potboiler rose above its station. But it does warn prospective viewers to lower their sights, as this is classy pulp not great art.

Having rescued five year-old son Armand Verdure from the mother who was using him to smuggle drugs, pugilist Matthias Schoenaerts leaves Belgium for Antibes to stay with estranged sister Corinne Masiero, who works at a supermarket checkout and is married to long-distance lorry driver Jean-Michel Correia. Physically imposing, if not particularly bright or emotionally intuitive, Schoenaerts gets a job as a bouncer at the Annex nightclub and soon finds himself rescuing Marion Cotillard from a drunken brawl.

She trains orca whales at the nearby Marineland park and fearlessly stands at the side of the pool giving the hand signals that coax the creatures into following her every command.

During one public performance, however, a normally obedient beast leaps out of the water and mauls Cotillard so badly that she has to have both legs amputated beneath the knees.

Four months later and sick of being goaded into considering rehab to rebuild her life, Cotillard separates from unfeeling boyfriend Yannick Choirat and contacts Schoenaerts, who pays her a reluctant visit, shows her little sympathy and shruggingly suggests that they go swimming on the Riviera beach.

Somehow buoyed by his indifference, Cotillard starts walking on artificial limbs with the help

of best friend Céline Sallette. Moreover, she asks Schoenaerts to sleep with her to check she hasn't lost any sensation below the waist. But, while he agrees to a no-strings fling, he backs off when Cotillard proposes a more romantic arrangement.

Schoenaerts has found a new job as a security guard and joins colleague Bouli Lanners in fitting illegal CCTV cameras in premises across the town so that employers can spy on their staff. Lanners also suggests that Schoenaerts has potential as a bare-knuckle boxer and offers to act as his manager. Cotillard comes to see him fight, but he still insists on keeping her at a distance. Lanners is fired when his boss discovers that he has been moonlighting and Sallette orders Schoenaerts out of her home when she learns that he installed the camera that caught her stealing the out-of-date produce that got her fired.

Leaving Verdure behind and without telling Cotillard, Schoenaerts heads to Strasbourg to join a professional boxing squad. However, Correia drives Verdure back to his father and they go skating together on a frozen pond. Unfortunately, the ice cracks and the boy hangs between life and death at the local hospital after Schoenaerts damages his hands in plunging into the freezing water to rescue him. As the picture ends, Schoenaerts has become a champion and formed an unconventional family with Cotillard and Verdure. But there is no guarantee they will stay together, let alone live happily ever after.

Aided by some deft CGI, the ever-compelling Marion Cotillard delivers a powerful display of melancholic tenacity that is effectively complemented by the hulking inarticulacy of Matthias Schoenaerts, who builds upon the reputation forged in the Oscar-nominated Bullhead (see In Cinemas). But the characters created by Audiard and co-scenarist Thomas Bidegain and pitched into numerous implausible situations never feel fully fleshed and it reflects well on Cotillard and Schoenaerts that we end up caring so much for what are essentially pawns in a capricious game.

The clue to appreciating the aesthetic that Audiard has striven for here can be found in the mix of Alexandre Desplat's score and a string of rock and pop hits on the soundtrack.

Stéphane Fontaine's roughly naturalistic handheld camerawork and Michel Barthélémy's rundown interiors serve a similar purpose in rooting the antic plotline in something approaching the real world. But, even though it often feels as though Audiard is making it up as he goes along, he never quite loses control and retains the eye for telling detail that makes his cinema so fascinating. Thus, while this may not be as authentic as earlier outings, it is even more assured in its execution and its refusal to peddle the inspiration and optimism of too much contemporary Hollywood drama ensures this Audiard is the more genuine heir to such 50s realists as Eliz Kazan and Nicholas Ray than any of his American counterparts.

THE SAPPHIRES Back in the 1960s, Laurel Robinson and her indigenous girl group accepted an invitation to sing for the troops in Vietnam. Four decades later, her son, Tony Briggs, retold her story in his stage play, The Sapphires, which he has now adapted for the screen with Keith Thompson. Directed with brio by the debuting Wayne Blair and lovingly photographed by Warwick Thornton (who directed the harrowing Aboriginal drama Samson and Delilah in 2009), this often feels like a mash-up between Alan Parker's The Commitments (1991), Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Bill Condon's Dreamgirls (2006). But the spirited performances and some standout musical numbers ease this engaging saga through its more awkward tonal shifts to ensure it manages to make its trenchant socio-political points without overwhelming the air of bittersweet feelgood.

In 1968, sisters Deborah Mailman, Miranda Tapsell and Jessica Mauboy enter a pub talent contest as the Cummeragunja Songbirds. Mother Kylie Belling is convinced they are special and Irish host Chris O'Dowd (who is himself a washed-up musician) is blown away by their rendition of Merle Haggard's 'Today I Started Loving You Again'. However, the judges are small-town bigots and rig the contest and the girls are about to storm off when O'Dowd persuades Belling to let him become their manager, changes their name to The Sapphires and arranges for them to audition in Melbourne for an upcoming troop show in South Vietnam.

Despite agreeing to the addition of their mixed-race cousin, Shari Sebbens, who had been taken away from her family and raised as white, Mailman is less than convinced by O'Dowd's insistence that they should junk their old material in favour Motown soul. However, she is won over when the audience in Saigon erupts at the end of Mauboy's version of Linda

Lyndell's 'What A Man' and, as they make their way around the Mekong Delta, she begins to develop a crush on the fecklessly charming O'Dowd, even though they bicker endlessly.

Meanwhile, Sebbens is courted by bashful pilot Tory Kittles, Tapsell struggles to stay loyal to Meyne Wyatt and Mauboy is feted by hot-shot agent Don Battee. But the troops keep cheering and the combo's reputation keeps growing.

More enthusiastic than organised, O'Dowd accepts a gig in a combat zone, but forgets to check whether they are entitled to a military escort. Fortunately, Sebbens comes to their rescue when they are challenged by a Vietcong patrol by answering their questions in the Yorta Yorta dialect and they are allowed to pass unmolested. On arriving at the base, however, O'Dowd admits that he is already married and hands the heartbroken Mailman a letter. But, an attack is launched in the middle of the concert and O'Dowd is shot while leading Sebbens and Mauboy to the helicopter and Mailman (who has just been informed that Martin Luther King has been assassinated) breaks down when she reads O'Dowd's poetic marriage proposal.

Naturally, he is found safe and well at a medical point some weeks later and the family not only sanctions the wedding, but also welcomes Sebbens back into tribe. But such gushing sentiment is as excusable, as it is inevitable. Briggs and Thompson may touch upon contentious issues like Australia's active involvement in Vietnam and the plight of the Stolen Generation, but their main aim is to entertain. Some of the plot pieces fall into place a little too easily and the pace noticeably slackens when the focus diverts away from the music and the Mailman-O'Dowd. But the leads are appealing, the songs are slickly done and Melinda Doring's production design and Tess Schofield's shimmering costumes slyly reinforce the Supremes pastiche.

THE SESSIONS There seems to be something of a vogue at the moment for films about males suffering from debilitating or fatal conditions seeking to lose their virginity. The majority of the `heroes' of pictures like Antonio Naharro and Ă lvaro Pastor's Me Too, Bruce Webb's The Be All and the End All (both 2009), Hans Van Nuffel's Oxygen (2010), Justin Lerner's Girlfriend and Geoffrey Enthoven's Come As You Are (both 2011) are young men wanting to sample life's pleasures before it is too late. But the focus falls on a much older man in Ben Lewin's The Sessions, which centres on a writer in his forties who contracted polio at the age of six and is now paralysed from the neck down and spends much of his time encased in an iron lung.

The story of Mark O'Brien's friendship with Cheryl Cohen Greene has been told before in Jessica Yu's Oscar-winning short Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien (1996). But this sensitive dramatisation also takes into account the feelings of the married sex therapist from Berkeley, California who was hired some time in 1988 to provide a detached service, but found herself becoming emotionally involved with a client whose courage and respect proved so unexpecredly enticing.

Although he has overcome insurmountable odds to graduate in English Literature and pursue a career as a writer and poet, 38 year-old John Hawkes is finding it difficult to cope with the rough treatment being meted out by carer Rusty Schwimmer, who gives him disapproving looks during bed baths and wheels his gurney through the streets with little enthusiasm. So, Hawkes takes advantage of the arrival of new priest William H. Macy to ask if it would be a sin to sack her. Despite his long hair, Macy is only cautiously progressive. But he suggests God would turn a blind eye if Hawkes recruited a new assistant.

Hawkes becomes so smitten with doting student Annika Marks, however, that he cannot help blurting out his love for her when they go shopping for shirts. Fortunately, replacement Moon Bloodgood is made of sterner stuff and she quickly forms a dependable partnership with W. Earl Brown to provide constant care outside sleeping hours. But, when Hawkes's editor offers him an assignment on sex and the disabled, he becomes so envious of interview subjects like wheelchair-bound Jennifer Kumiyama that he confides in Macy that he wishes to experience the sensations of intercourse for himself.

Once again providing Hawkes with a celestial thumbs-up, Macy encourages him to contact an agency specialising in sexual surrogates and it dispatches Helen Hunt, a middle-aged therapist married to self-styled philosopher Adam Arkin and the mother of teenager Jarrod Bailey. She is a lapsed Catholic preparing to convert to Judaism and her frank acceptance of

Hawkes's condition means that they establish an immediate rapport when Kumiyama loans him her bedroom for their first meeting. She informs him that they will start off with a body awareness session so that they can get comfortable with each other. But she also reminds him that they can only meet six times and that their connection has to remain purely physical.

However, Hawkes is so embarrassed by his premature ejaculation that he needs Macy's encouragement to keep his second appointment. Unfortunately, things scarcely improve the following week and Hunt confides to her dictaphone that Hawkes could well be suffering from repressed childhood anxieties. A chance change of scenery works wonders, however, when Kumiyama double books her bungalow and Hunt takes Hawkes to a nearby motel, where clerk Ming Lo tries to chat up Bloodgood as she waits in reception. Her indifference contrasts strongly with the growing affinity between Hawkes and Hunt, as she coaxes him to remember happy thoughts from before his illness and he relaxes sufficiently to allow penetration. The moment is over all-too-quickly, but both are moved by the intimacy they have shared.

Macy is happy for Hawkes, as he relives the encounter while lying in the nave of the church, while Hunt feels a similar sense of well-being as Rhea Perlman supervises the total immersion of her Mikvah cleansing ritual. However, Arkin has noticed that Hunt has been affected by the liaison and intercepts a poem that Hawkes has written to her. She retrieves the verses from the trash and realises the depths of her own feelings. Consequently, the pair agree, after a fourth session (during which they both achieve orgasm) to call it a day before anyone gets hurt.

The separation coincides with Hawkes meeting hospital volunteer Robin Weigert after he is rushed into intensive care after his iron lung fails during a power cut. But, while she becomes the constant companion of his final years, Hunt, Marks and Bloodgood are all present as Macy conducts the funeral service and Weigert reads the poem that brings a tear to Hunt's eye in gratitude for having known such a remarkable man.

Although there is a passing similarity between the lives of Mark O'Brien and those of Christy Brown and Jean-Dominique Bauby - who were respectively commemorated in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot (1989) and Michel Gondry's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) - this is much more the chronicle of a relationship than a paean to a tenacious soul. It is also much cosier than either of the aforementioned and makes little attempt to explore the severity of O'Brien's condition and the impact of the resulting confinement upon his standing as a journalist and artist and his morale. The obvious complexities of Cheryl Cohen Greene's domestic arrangements are also glossed over, as is any real discussion of the Catholic Church's stance on sex outside marriage, while the supporting characters ably played by William H. Macy and Moon Bloodgood are even more sketchily drawn and almost exist solely for narrative convenience.

But, in adapting O'Brien's article `On Seeing a Sex Surrogate', Ben Lewin's intentions are self-evidently good and his decision to eschew coyness in the depiction of the sex sequences is highly laudable. Moreover, he rightly directs with an emphasis on O'Brien's humanity and humour rather than his limitations and lust. He is well served by cinematogapher Geoffrey Simpson and composer Marco Beltrami, as well as by his leads. Notwithstanding the naive one-dimensionality of the role, John Hawkes can count himself unlucky to have been overlooked by the Oscar electorate, while Helen Hunt perhaps owes her Best Actress nomination less to the sensitivity of her performance than to her willingness to forget her star status and appear so fearlessly naked for such long periods of the action. Nonetheless, even though the depth of their affection ultimately feels somewhat contrived, their byplay is authentic and touching and their refusal to succumb to saccharine sentimentality in the face of surprisingly little adversity gives the picture an honesty to match its delicacy.

7 DAYS IN HAVANA As is so often the case with anthology films, 7 Days in Havana is an inconsistent collection of vignettes that is all the more disappointing considering the talents behind the camera.

Despite being co-ordinated by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura and his wife Lucia Lopez Coll, the screenplay lack a unifying thesis and concentrates on local colour and seductive rhythms rather than the pressing socio-political issues that have arisen from five decades of socialist revolution. Consequently, this is more an upbeat travelogue than a serious attempt to

capture the mood of the city and the state of the nation it dominates.

Setting each story on a different day of the week, the anthology opens on a Monday with actor Benecio Del Toro's directorial bow, `El Yuma', which takes its title from the local slang for an American. In the city for a week-long film school seminar, Josh Hutcherson is shown the sites by cabby Vladimir Cruz, who takes him back to his humble home for a meal of fried bananas cooked by his testy mother.

Following a misunderstanding with a flirtatious sister, Hutcherson hits the capital's nightspots with Cruz and his girlfriend and, as he becomes more intoxicated, he grows increasingly desperate to hook up with a local beauty. Unfortunately, his choice turns out to be transvestite Andros Perugorría, who nearly gets him into trouble with security at his hotel.

Another visitor strays from the tourist path in Pablo Trapero's `Jam Session', which opens with a striking one-take tracking shot that follows Serbian director Emir Kusturica from the bowels of a seedy bar into the back of Alexander Abreu's taxi and out on to the ocean terrace of the Hotel Nacional. Reluctantly in Havana as the honoured guest of a film festival, Kusturica seems intent on getting plastered after a stressful phone call with his wife back home and throws up backstage before accepting his accolade.

Refusing to attend the official dinner, he sticks with Abreu when he goes to play trumpet at a jazz club and is so moved by the music that he promises to hire him to score his next picture.

As he bids farewell to the driver and his young daughter at the airport, Kusturica forgets his award and Abreu suspects that he won't be hearing from him any time soon.

Promises of overseas celebrity also inform Julio Medem's `Cecilia's Temptation', as Spanish producer Daniel Brühl tries to persuade singer Melvis Estevez to sign a contract and return with him to Europe. Aware of his crush on her, she comes back to his hotel room and slips into the shower while he makes phone calls on the balcony. However, she has misgivings on hearing Brühl joke with a colleague that he hasn't slept with her yet and she returns to the cramped apartment she shares with Leonardo Benitez, a baseball player who once passed up the chance of a lucrative contract in Puerto Rico to stay with her.

He tells her to forget Spain and says he has lined them up a raft to sail to Miami. They make love vigorously before Benitez leaves for his game, but Estevez is still tempted by Brühl's offer and is all set to take a cab back to his room when Benitez attacks them in the street.

Packing angrily as Benitez slugs rum in a chair, Estevez has every intention of leaving the next morning. But, instead, she follows her heart rather than her head and meekly lies beside Benitez on the bed.

If this episode feels like a telenovela, Elia Suleiman's `Diary of a Beginner' has all the hallmarks of a wry arthouse satire. Unable to find his room in a labyrinthine hotel, Suleiman has to ask directions from a black female cleaner. Waiting for a car to take him to the Palestinian embassy, he watches a photographer snapping a pretty girl on the back seat of a vehicle that refuses to start. His own journey proves frustrating, however, as the diplomat he is meeting has problems making an appointment for him over the phone. Retaining his deadpan expression, Suleiman visits a bar once frequented by Hemingway and ignores the enticements of a hooker at the bar to take a photo of a drunken tourist and his unenamoured escort posing in front of the writer's statue.

Heading to the waterfront, Suleiman watches three women of different ages looking out to sea. Two rendezvous with friends, but the oldest continues to gaze into the distance as some youths dance to a car radio nearby. Still getting nowhere at the embassy and bored by the TV coverage of one of Fidel Castro's famously rambling speeches, Suleiman himself scans the horizon and perhaps compares Cuba and Palestine as places waiting for something to happen after decades of empty reassurance by charismatic leaders like Castro and Yasser Arafat.

There is every possibility that black schoolgirl Cristela De La Caridad Herrera is among the kids seen partying on the beach and Gaspar Noé 's `Ritual' shows her becoming so lost in the music that she kisses a white girl and takes her home. However, she is found spooning with her lover the next morning by her disapproving parents and her father takes her to a `palero' priest for a santería exorcism.

While a drum maintains a steady beat in the half-light, the priest cuts Herrera's clothing with a sharp blade and performs a series of rites before stripping and dunking her in the swamp to cleanse her of any wicked thoughts. Wrapping her in a towel, he returns Herrera to her mother, who dresses her in a clean white garment to symbolise her purification.

Across the city, Saturday arrives and Mirta Ibarra and Jorge Perugorría are woken by an alarm clock at the start of Juan Carlos Tabío's `Dulce Amargo'. Ibarra has a catering order to complete and sends her husband (who used to be somebody in the army before he started drinking) to fetch the ingredients, while she chats to soap-obsessed daughter Beatriz Dorta.

Ibarra is also the mother of Melvis Estevez, who comes to collect some things and wants to let both Ibarra and her stepfather know that she loves them. Connecting the family into another storyline, Andros Perugorría pops in from the bakery to drop off some flower and try on Ibarra's new black wig.

Despite the chaos, everything seems to be running to schedule. However, a sudden power cut ruins Ibarra's meringues and she sends her spouse to find some more eggs (which seem to be in short supply in spite of a radio announcement boasting about record production by Cuban hens). Eventually, everything is ready and Ibarra takes a shower before dashing off to her second job as a behavioural psychologist on a TV show. But, while she is out, Perugorría gets a call from Estevez as she readies to set sail on a raft with Leo Benitez. Having stood by the sea wall crying in the moonlight, Ibarra lies still when the alarm goes off on Sunday morning. However, we never discover if she has died of a broken heart or simply lost the will to carry on the struggle.

The conclusion of Laurent Cantet's `The Fountain' is equally ambiguous, as elderly Nathalia Amore thinks back with quiet satisfaction on a remarkable Sunday. It started with her having a vision in which the Virgin Mary orders her to create a shrine in the corner of her tenement room. Never doubting her word for a second, Othello Rensoli and his fellow neighbours start demolishing a wall, while one group makes for a nearby building site to steal bricks and cement while another heads for the docks to bribe a warehouse manager into letting them have some cheap paint.

While an old lady sews the yellow dress that Amore has ordered, she bosses everybody around and complains about the size of the pool she wants to surround her cherished statue.

But her chivvying gets results and, as Rensoli finishes the brickwork, youths go scampering to the sea to bring back buckets of water to fill the fountain. They even toss in a few fish and Amore looks on admiringly as Ibarra's food arrives and everyone gathers to sing hymns.

Pleased to have brought everybody together and temporarily relieved the strain of their arduous existence, Amore sits alone and dips a hand into the water. But has she merely fallen asleep as her fingers suddenly fall still?

As a cartoon recaps highlights from the seven segments in an insert alongside the closing credits, one is left to wonder quite what this portmanteau was supposed to achieve. For the most part, Havana is presented as a vibrant city that is full of beautiful buildings, friendly people and sublime music. But fleeting allusions are also made to the poverty, intolerance, superstition, restriction and incompetence that undermine the Marxist idyll, as well as to the decadence of the foreigners whose lifestyle is supposedly so envied by some that they would risk everything to sample it.

With its hackneyed plotline, glossy visuals and melodramatic tone, Julio Medem's contribution is easily the weakest. But Benicio Del Toro's opener is little more than a shaggy dog story, while both Juan Carlos Tabío and Laurent Cantet's bustling domestic sagas feel a touch contrived in their efforts to meld Castro and Capra. Similarly, Gaspar Noé seems more intent on experimenting with avant-garde sensuality than examining Cuban life, leaving only Pablo Trapero and Elia Suleiman to reflect on the country's place in the wider world and the attitude of its citizens to endless promises of better tomorrows.

The performances are solid enough, as is the camerawork of Daniel Aranyo (who shot four of the episodes), Diego Bussel (who teamed with Trapero and Cantet) and Gaspar Noé, who produced his own chiarascuro close-ups. And, as one might expect, the music is splendid. Yet this always feels more like a promotional exercise than anything more concerted or captious.

SISTER Dysfunction was the key theme of Ursula Meier's first feature, Home (2009), which saw Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet refuse to leave their family property even though it becomes almost uninhabitable after a long-abandoned stretch of motorway is unexpectedly completed. She broaches the subject again, albeit in a much more salubrious setting, in Sister, which brings a touch of Dardenne-style social realism to the Swiss Alps. Yet, while this

is a laudably earnest attempt to contrast the lifestyles of the haves and have nots, it is also more than a little melodramatic and over-emphatic in its symbolism. Consequently, despite an exceptional performance from young Kacey Mottet Klein (for whom Meier specifically devised the project), this doesn't escape the class sentimentality that has become an increasing factor of Ken Loach's recent pictures.

Twelve year-old Kacey Mottet Klein doesn't have time for school. It's the height of the skiing season and he spends his days on the slopes stealing whatever he can grab to sell to tourists unwilling to pay the prices charged in the Alpine resort's stores and lacking in the scruples to ask how a scrawny kid came to be in possession of such expensive skis, poles, goggles and gloves. Ironically, neighbour Dilon Adémi is more aghast when his buddy presents him with a brand new pair of skis, but his qualms are eased when Mottet Klein simply scuffs the runners so his dad won't question their origin.

Mottet Klein doesn't have a father and relishes informing anyone who asks that he has lived with twentysomething sister Léa Seydoux since their parents were killed in a car crash.

However, she is anything but protective towards him and snatches the jacket and cash he offers her before heading off for another night on the tiles with boy racer Simon Guélat, leaving her brother to feed himself in their unkempt flat in a charmless tenement block in the valley. But Mottet Klein never feel sorry for himself and self-possessedly proposes a partnership when Scottish kitchen worker Martin Compston catches him hiding contraband in a cupboard to the rear of the summit chalet where he works. Moreover, he blithely passes himself off as the son of a hotel owner in order to strike up a conversation with Gillian Anderson, a well-heeled American mother who is lunching with her two children at the restaurant.

But things are about to change dramatically, as the season comes to a close. Having narrowly escaped the clutches of angry skier Magne-Håvard Brekke after failing to steal his goggles from a café table, Mottet Klein and 10 year-old accomplice Gabin Lefebvre are caught trading by Compston's boss, Jean-François Stévenin, who orders them to keep off the mountain. Meanwhile, Seydoux has taken up with the BMW-driving Yann Trégouët and Mottet Klein feels deserted when she disappears for Christmas and only comes back to demand more funds.

Thus, when Seydoux tells Trégouët that Mottet Klein is only staying with her for a couple of days, the boy loses his cool and blurts out that she is actually his mother rather than his sister. Furious that his outburst has scared Trégouët away, Seydoux tells Mottet Klein that she bitterly regrets keeping him and he craves even more the affection that Anderson lavishes so unquestioningly upon her own children. Yet, when Seydoux lands a job as a cleaner at the hotel, Mottet Klein steals a watch from Anderson's room and she not only shames him into returning it, but also into revealing his true relationship with Seydoux.

Ashamed at disappointing someone who had been so kind to him, Mottet Klein flees into the wilderness. But a suggestion that his situation might be about to improve comes in the final shot, as he sees Seydoux coming to look for him as he makes his way back down to normality.

Much depends here on how one responds to the supposedly shocking revelation about Mottet Klein's parentage. Meier stages it adroitly enough by having the boy calculate its impact before shouting it out during an otherwise happy car trip with Seydoux and the genial Trégouët. But, even though the pair patch up after the boy drags his dishevelled mother inside after finding her insensible following a drinking binge and they share an awkward cuddle, the news scarcely changes the way in which they interact and, therefore, the manner in which it is broken feels almost soap operatic and wholly out of keeping with the restraint of the remaining action that is subtly counterpointed throughout by John Parish's sombre guitar score.

Aside from this misstep and the occasional difficulty in binding the Compston and Anderson sub-plots into the main storyline, Meier works well with cinematographer Agnès Godard and production designer Ivan Niclass to emphasise the unglamorous aspects of the pylons supporting the cable-car, the lift station machine room and the storage and dumpster areas vital to the working of the chic restaurant. She also handles Mottet Klein superbly, so that he seems chirpily resourceful when foraging in luggage and selling his ill-gotten wares and pitiably vulnerable as he savours pilfered sandwiches and tries so desperately to elicit fond

feelings from Seydoux and Anderson. Indeed, nothing sums up this duality better than the sequence in which he drags a loaded sledge through the pristine snow of the mountain paradise to which he aspires and then through the sludge and mud of the estate where, for the moment, he belongs.

STARBUCK Ken Scott's Starbuck topped the national box-office poll last year and has made such an impact in North America that Scott has been hired to direct the Hollywood remake for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks outfit.

Named after a Canadian Holstein bull who fathered thousands of calves in the 1980s, this droll domestic comedy has its similarities with Jerry Rothwell's 2010 documentary, Donor Unknown. However, Scott and co-writer Martin Petit take the tale into Capracorn territory, as its hapless anti-hero realises the need to grow up and take some responsibility for his past actions.

Patrick Huard is a delivery driver for immigrant father Igor Ovadis's butcher's shop. His siblings despair of him and girlfriend Julie Le Breton can barely bring herself to believe she is dating such an overweight loser, who owes $80,000 to mobsters who are quite prepared to use violence unless they get paid. But, just as it seems that things cannot get any worse, lawyer friend Antoine Bertrand informs Huard that his past is about to catch up with him.

Back in the 1980s, the cash-strapped Huard donated sperm at $35 a deposit. However, owing to a clerical error, his contributions were used on an abnormally large number of occasions.

Consequently, 142 of the 533 children he helped conceive have decided to sue the clinic in order to discover the identity of their biological father.

Already reeling from this revelation, Huard then learns that Le Berton is pregnant and he is dismayed when she admits she has doubts about allowing him to be involved in raising the child. Bertrand, who is the father of four troublesome brats, assures Huard that fatherhood is not all it is cracked up to be. But the thought of not being there for his own child prompts Huard to open the file containing details of the 142 litigants desperate to meet him and he becomes sufficiently intrigued by them that he finds ways to mingle with them anonymously and even start acting as a guardian angel, as he intervenes in their lives to sort out a range of problems, including saving one daughter from an overdose.

Although the emphasis is firmly on the comic, Scott doesn't always resist the temptation to let a little sentimentality seep into the proceedings and David Laflèche's score often borders on the mawkishly manipulative. Some of the montage sequences also seem more intent on tugging on the heartstrings than furthering the plot, while the spate of good deeds ultimately becomes a distraction from the problems that Huard faces with the class-action suit, the legbreaking goons and the hesitant Le Berton. However, such is the schlubby charm of his performance that this remains amusing and engaging. Moreover, it means that Vince Vaughn has quite an act to follow.

TONY MANERO A dark and dangerous cinephile provides the resistible, but riveting anti-hero of Pablo Larrain's second outing, Tony Manero. Set in 1978, as General Pinochet's reign of terror was plumbing new depths of fascistic depravity, the action revolves around Alfredo Castro, a shady fiftysomething whose obsession with the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever prompts him to enter a TV talent contest impersonating his idol. But there's nothing quaint about Castro or his fixation, as we discover when he murders the woman he has saved from muggers because he can pawn her television to raise the money he needs for a glass dance floor.

The psychotic Castro's private life is no more salubrious, as he leches after needy girlfriend Amparo Noguera's nubile daughter Paola Lattus and strings along Elsa Poblete, who owns the shabby Santiago cantina where Castro reproduces the moves he has studied dozens of times at the neighbourhood cinema that seems to have John Badham's disco classic on permanent display. Indeed, the possessed and ultra-possessive Castro refuses to allow it to show anything else and he goes so far as to pulp the projectionist when he dares to screen Grease and scatologically sabotages fellow fan HĂŠctor Morales's white suit before he can take a tilt at the transient fame that Castro so craves.

However, this is much more than a quirky study in monomania. It's also a disconcerting memoir of Pinochet's pitiless tyranny and the genuine fear of arrest, torture and murder that all Chileans felt at a time when political activism and even breaking a curfew could carry a death sentence and when feuds between friends, relations and total strangers could be solved by a CIA-sponsored policeman's knock on the door. In moments that teeter between the darkly comic and the sickeningly creepy, Larrain uses Castro's dismal sex life as a metaphor for the deluded potency of the dictator's self-image and the grotesque decrepitude of the country's infrastructure. But even though it unremittingly strives to present the growingly unhinged Castro's amoral perspective, Sergio Armstrong's dogged, Dardenne-like 16mm camera still sees enough brutal truth to distinguish grim reality from absurdist fantasy.

TU SERAS MON FILS Given the number of film folk with connections to the wine trade, including Francis Ford Coppola, Gérard Depardieu, John Lasseter, Carole Bouquet, Antonio Banderas and Dan Aykroyd, one might have expected a few more pictures on the subject. Perhaps they might take inspiration from Gilles Legrand's Tu Seras Mon Fils, which combines the simmering incident of a dynastic soap opera with the authentic detail of one of Laurent Cantet's workplace dramas. Co-scripted by Legrand, Sandrine Cayron and Delphine de Vigan and evocatively photographed by Yves Angelo to contrast the sunlit expanses and dingy cellars, this feels as though it could have been made in the 1960s, with Jean Gabin as the flinthearted patriarch, Maurice Ronet as the hapless son, Michel Simon as the once loyal lieutenant and Alain Delon as the returning prodigal. That said, this ensemble excels from the opening sequence, as Lorànt Deutsch leaves a funeral parlour with no great sense of desolation at the loss of his father. Instead, he has a look of determination that is explained in the remaining action, which is, essentially, an extended flashback Finishing an interview with journalist Hélène de Saint-Père, vintner Niels Arestrup returns to the house dominating the sprawling Saint-Emilion estate that has been his life since he inherited it from his father in 1963. Despite being widowed for many years, he occupies the main part of the building, while son Lorànt Deutsch lives in a side wing with wife Anne Marivin. They have long been hoping for a child, but their ill luck seems to confirm Arestrup's verdict that Deutsch is a trier who lacks the spark, let alone the nose and expertise, to be his successor.

Moreover, when he learns from doctor Jean-Marc Roulot that trusted right-hand man Patrick Chesnais is suffering from inoperable pancreatic cancer, Arestrup realises that he will be hard-pressed to find a suitable replacement. So, he summons Chesnais's son Nicolas Bridet from his high-flying job with the Coppola vineyard in California and delights in allying with him in mocking Deutsch's inability to judge the bouquet of the bottles that Arestrup brings to supper.

Arestrup is also aware, however, that Deutsch still has a part to play if the business is to retain its reputation and tries to convince him that a steady administrator is just as important as a gifted wine-maker. He illustrates his point about doing what is best for the brand by recalling how he convinced everyone his father had drowned in the nearby river rather than in a butt of his own wine. But, while he continues to put a pinch of his ashes into each new vintage, Arestrup insists it is hard work and determination not heredity that goes into producing a quality wine. However, the conservative Chesnais disagrees and, in the humble cottage where he lives with wife Valérie Mairesse, he warns Bridet about getting ideas above his station and reminds him that, no matter how big a part he plays in maintaining standards, it will never be his family name on the label.

As Deutsch and Bridet had been friends since childhood, the latter is keen not to step on his toes and suggests they celebrate the gathering of the harvest by going clubbing. However, Deutsch gets jealous when Bridet flirts with waitress Shirley Bousquet and, when Arestrup hears about their quarrel, he accuses Deutsch of being a snob who puts personal ambition above the good of the firm. In order to teach him a lesson, he invites Bridet to be his guest when he travels to Paris to collect the Legion of Honour. They stay in the Grand Hotel and Arestrup treats Bridet to a pair of expensive handmade shoes before offering him Chesnais's job and a full partnership in the company Furious at seeing Bridet being labelled Arestrup's son in a newspaper report, Chesnais

lectures him on tradition and flatly dismisses his old friend's request to let him adopt Bridet so the estate can pass into safe hands. Undaunted, Arestrup attempts to bribe Marivin into relocating far away and, when this gambit fails, he takes Deutsch to his mother's graveside and informs him that he will not allow him to destroy the business in the same way that his fecklessness killed her.

Distraught at his ostracisation, Deutsch gets drunk and is hospitalised following a car crash.

While Marivin visits with the news she is finally pregnant, Arestrup seeks to reassure the suddenly scruple-stricken Bridet by telling him that he was also adopted and that the land has now chosen him to be his heir. But the dying Chesnais is determined to prevent the natural order from being disrupted and he locks Arestrup in the cellar with the ventilation off so that the fermentation fumes can do their worst.

On returning from the crematorium, Deutsch scatters Arestrup's ashes and treads them into the soil. In so doing, he seems to curse his own tenure, as he clearly knows nothing about his grandfather being a secret ingredient in Arestrup's recipe. However, the ending is somewhat ambiguous, as there is still a possibility that Deutsch will make a success of the venture and pass it on to his own son. One wonders how an American film-maker will conclude the seemingly inevitable remake.

Although this may not be the most artistically ambitious picture, Gilles Legrand wisely allows the focus to fall on the family feud and, thus, ensures this makes for satisfyingly potent viewing. Arestrup delivers another imperious performance as the ruthless pragmatist prepared to exploit legal loopholes to secure his succession, while Chesnais captures the proud integrity of the faithful retainer stung into opposing his master. Bridet also convinces as the prodigal needing to be reminded of his place. But it's Deutsch who most impresses, as he battles the doubts arising from his personal and professional shortcomings and, in the process, merely confirms his father's suspicions.

The script is a tad over-deliberate in places and Legrand might have added more detail about the wine-making process and explored how the trade is holding up in the recession. But, as his primary inspiration came from the relationship between Hal Holbrook and Emile Hirsch in Sean Penn's Into the Wild (2007), this is evidently intended to be a father-son rather than a workplace study. Moreover, Legrand's sense of place is exemplary. Thus, even though the denouement descends into whodunit-style melodrama, this is a solid piece of film-making in the best `tradition of quality' manner.

WAR WITCH Following in the wake of Luigi Falorni's Heart of Fire (2008) and Jean-StĂŠphane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog (2008), Kim Nguyen's War Witch marks something of a departure for a Quebecois director previously known for his debut period study of puppetry and prejudice Le Marais (2002), the sci-fi fantasy Truffe (2008) and the colonial pandemic saga, La CitĂŠ (2009). Submitted by Canada for the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards, this is an uncompromising exposĂŠ of the miseries endured by African child soldiers. But, while Nguyen is anxious to makes his political points, he avoids overt displays of carnage and, thus, prompts the audience to focus on the impact that committing war crimes has on the children involved rather than the grotesque nature of the atrocities themselves.

When rebels attack her village in an unnamed central African republic, 12 year-old Rachel Mwanza is forced at gunpoint to kill her own parents, Alex Herabo and Starlette Mathata. She is then abducted and issued with an AK-47 rifle and informed by unit chief Mizinga Mwinga that this is her new protector. Terrified of being abused, Mwanza befriends albino Serge Kayinda, who is reputed to have magical powers and he introduces her to a tree sap that can induce hallucinatory states that take her mind off the traumas she has suffered and the exhaustion she feels after spending long hours digging for coltan, a blood mineral that lies at the heart of the civil war. .

One day, however, when Mwanza is scouting for a patrol through the forest, she is urged by the ghosts of Mahata and Herabo to be on the look out and, thus, she is able in time to thwart an ambush by the lurking government forces. Unit leader Mizinga Mwinga is impressed by her skills and proclaims her a `war witch' and awards her immunity from the whipping of the overseers at the mine. Nevertheless, when the opportunity arises to escape following another bloody skirmish, Mwanza and Kayinda disappear into the forest and find sanctuary

with his butcher uncle Ralph Prosper.

After a prolonged search for a ritual white cockerel, Kayinda proposes to her and they are permitted a brief taste of normality. But Mwanza knows that their idyll cannot last and she soon finds herself pregnant and back under Mwinga's merciless protection. However, she refuses to be cowed by his cruelty and plans to return to her village so that she can restore peace to her family by burying her parents' remains.

Told as a flashback by a mother to her unborn child, the story ends on a note of vague optimism, as Mwanza hitches a ride on a truck taking her out of the war zone where she has spent her first 14 years. But such is the aura of docudramatic authenticity created by Nguyen and cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc that the closing sense of ambiguity will fill many viewers with as much trepidation as the earlier sequences of battle and brutality, which are made all the more chillingly real by their restraint and the wondrously natural performances of Mwanza and Kayinda.

WHAT RICHARD DID Having established himself as Ireland's pre-eminent director with Adam & Paul (2004) and Garage (2007) - the latter of which stands as the country's finest feature in recent times Lenny Abrahamson moves away from offbeat comedy in reworking Kevin Power's novel Bad Day in Blackrock as What Richard Did. Based on the killing of Brian Murphy outside Club Anabel in 2001, the book explored the impact of the Celtic Tiger on the Dublin class divide and Abrahamson and screenwriter Malcolm Campbell dot this measured melodrama with copious references to the Republic's economic predicament. But, for all the confidence of the subtext and the efficacy of the mix of scripted and improvised sequences, this always feels more like an arthouse elongation of a Hollyoaks episode than a revealing recessional allegory.

Eighteen year-old Jack Reynor has the world at his feet. The son of a successful Danish father (Lars Mikkelsen) and his glamorous Irish wife (Lorraine Pilkington), Reynor is a promising rugby player about to go to university and is fully intent on enjoying his last summer with his school pals. He plans a camping trip to the beach near his family's holiday home at Blackrock and piles into a car with teammates Gavin Drea and Fionn Walton and female friends Rachel Gleeson and Liana O'Cleirigh. However, while drinking in the local pub, he develops an instant crush on R贸is铆n Murphy, the girlfriend of Sam Keeley, who is something of an outsider on the squad, as not only is he working-class, but he is also a Catholic.

While Keeley sings Gaelic folk songs in the bar, Reynor clumsily attempts to flirt with Murphy under the watchful gaze of Mella Carron, a younger girl on the periphery of the group who is smitten with Reynor even though his aspiring magician mate Patrick Gibson is desperate to ask her out. But his cause looks more hopeless than ever when Reynor rescues Carron from some lads forcing their attentions upon her and his heroics clearly impress the demure Murphy. Convinced he has a chance, therefore, Reynor persuades the reluctant Drea and Walton to go to Keeley's birthday bash at the rundown Gaelic Athletic Association clubhouse.

However, he is frustrated in his efforts to give Murphy his phone number by Keeley throwing up and he sidles ruefully away.

Murphy is surprised that a posh boy would fancy her and she shows up at the beach house as much out of a sense of intrigue as infatuation. But they strike up an immediate rapport and make love in the open air. Yet Reynor's sweetness soon gives way to possessiveness, as Murphy tries to break the news to Keeley with as much tact as possible when they meet in a suburban park and Reynor is genuinely taken aback when Keeley snubs his suggestion that they can still be friends when they bump into each other in a shop. Consequently, when he sees Murphy chatting with Keeley at a house party after the bouncers have refused him readmission, Reynor grows increasingly agitated and corrals Drea and Walton to give his rival a good kicking when he departs.

Next morning, however, Reynor is horrified to hear on the radio that Keeley has died from his injuries and he summons his cohorts to square their story. He also urges Murphy to stand by him and she is sufficiently intimidated to agree to lie to the police. But the guilt gnaws away at Reynor and he tearfully confesses his crime to Mikkelsen, who admires the way in which his son has handled the matter and suggests that he lies low at the beach house until the fuss dies down. Tormented in isolation by a combination of regret, fears for his future and the enormity of taking a life, the terrified Reynor screams in anguish. But he is soon recalled

when the GardaĂ­ announce that they are seeking to question some gatecrashers and attends the rugby club wake as just one of the boys. .

Relieved at having survived the ordeal without betraying himself, Reynor joins Carron, Gibson and their friends as they drink around a bonfire behind the cricket nets in the park.

Much to Gibson's annoyance, Carron stays with Reynor when everybody else leaves and they have reckless sex without considering the consequences. At the funeral the following morning, Reynor is shaken by grieving mother Gabrielle Reidy's emotional appeal for information to help catch her son's killers and has to be steadied outside the church by Murphy. Despite being distressed by her part in the tragedy, she feels pity for Reynor and accompanies him to the beach house, where he vows to turn himself in after they spend a final night together. However, as he drives back to Dublin, he seems more composed and, safe in the knowledge that the ranks have closed around him, he appears to have a change of heart as the picture ends.

Cinematographer David Grennan bathes the early sequences in a golden haze redolent of the first carefree glow of teenage emancipation and gradually imparts a grey-blue chilliness as Reynor's situation deteriorates. But, notwithstanding the relaxed performances and the almost casual delivery of the dialogue, the film lacks stylistic distinctiveness and frequently suffers from laggardly pacing.

Having captured the plight of the outsider with such affectionate acuity in his previous films, Abrahamson seems less in tune with the affluent youths seizing every opportunity to indulge, enjoy and improve themselves. Indeed, an air of disapproval pervades proceedings, although the reproofs seem to be aimed as much at the country as a whole as the hapless Reynor himself. Even so, the nationality of his father seems a little cumbersomely coincidental when Ireland received a crucial â‚Ź400 million bailout loan from the Danes in the spring of 2012.

Similarly, the attempts to cast a noirish pall over the action by making Reynor a kind of naive palooka undone by a temper tantrum and a twist of fate are let down by the fact that Murphy is too vaguely drawn to make much of a femme fatale and that, besides his own crushing remorse, Reynor never seems in real danger of being apprehended or let down by his circle. As a result (and despite Stephen Rennicks's ominous score), the central drama is short on tension, while the ease with which Reynor's crisis simply evaporates feels more expediently contrived than unsettlingly ambiguous.

WHERE DO WE GO NOW? The Middle East has proved resistant to affording women film-makers freedom of expression.

Things had improved in Iran before the Green Wave, while a handful of female artists have started to find their voices in the Maghreb since the Arab Spring. But Nadine Labaki pretty much stands alone in the Lebanon and with Where Do We Go Now? she builds steadily on the reputation forged with her excellent debut, Caramel (2007). Taking its inspiration from Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata, Labaki once again suggests that the world would be a very different place if women had more of a say in how things were done. Yet, for all its bright spots, this offers few new perspectives and it's a shame that it has been released so close to Radu Mihaileanu's similarly themed, but markedly less attuned battle of the sexes, The Source.

In an unnamed village in a country that bears many similarities to Lebanon, the Muslim and Christian residents manage to remain civil to each other, in spite of the occasional flare up.

As the story opens, a funeral procession weaves its way to the cemetery, only for the grieving women to divide into two columns, as they shuffle off to pay respects to their fallen heroes in a conflict that seems about to rear its head again, as a prankster has put chicken blood in the holy water font at the local church and allowed goats to invade the mosque.

Determined to prevent the situation escalating, widowed Christian cafĂŠ owner Nadine Labaki summons her neighbours and they agree that they must do everything possible to distract their trigger-happy menfolk from ramping up the tension. With the surrounding fields being pocked with landmines and a broken bridge over the only road already restricting access to the outside world, the women sabotage television and radio connections to prevent any contentious news from getting through. They even hire a troupe of Ukrainian dancers from the nearby Paradise Palace to pretend that they are lost and need somewhere to stay until they can be rescued.

All seems to be going well, with mayor Khalil Bou Khalil's wife Yvonne Maalouf even claiming a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary to defuse a potential flashpoint. Indeed, Labaki even has time to slip away for a furtive rendezvous with tattooed Muslim handyman Julien Farhat.

But the temperature rises again when shoes are stolen from outside the mosque and Claude Baz Moussawbaa has to hide her distress when son Kevin Abboud is killed in the crossfire while collecting provisions on his motorbike and keep the peace by informing visitors that he has highly contagious mumps and must remain in quarantine.

Yet still the accusations and rumours fly and priest Samir Awad and sheik Ziad Abou Absi begin to lose control over their factions. Consequently, the women resort to lacing a banquet with hashish and sedatives to keep their husbands, sons and brothers doped long enough for them to concoct a plan.

Despite the lively performances, a couple of adroitly choreographed musical sequences (composed by Labaki's husband Khaled Mouzanar) and a splendid sense of place achieved by art director Cynthia Zahar and cinematographer Christophe Offenstein, this genial fable never quite strikes the right balance between wry wit and distressing tragedy. Playing overly on the audience's emotions rather than challenging their preconceptions, Labaki too often settles for caricature in the depiction of the male inhabitants. Moreover, she lets too many subplots drift and fails to prevent the dialogue in the closing sequences taking on a moralising tone.

What makes this all the more disappointing is that Thomas Bidegain, who wrote Jacques Audiard's acclaimed prison drama A Prophet (2009, is among Labaki's fellow scenarists. Yet this remains an easy film to like and its message of cross-faith co-existence can never be stressed often enough.