Fantastic Mr Fox

Stop-motion animation has always had an alienation effect on me. Characters move in little jerks, with minimal eye and mouth movement, rendering even less credible the comic scenarios they inhabit. When you've seen one Wallace and Gromitt adventure, you have seen them all.

Tim Burton has created some typically blackly comic settings in his animations, but no one had made me suspend disbelief and sense a strange reality in stop-motion until Wes Anderson did his magic on Fantastic Mr Fox. Maybe he couldn't have done it so well for any other writer than Roald Dahl, whose tale he co-adapted for the screen.

He assembled an ideal cast of voices to represent Mr Fox, his wife Felicity (named after Dahl's wife), their son Ash, his lawyer Mr Beaver and his arch enemy, Mr Bean, the worst of three neighbouring factory farmers. How could Mr Anderson go wrong when George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Michael Gambon sound as if they're having sly fun expressing their characters' comic depths?

As one of the dvd's mercifully short extras shows, the director took his cast to a farm to record their characters' role-playing antics. Their voices huff and puff, fade and overlap, doing what their characters do, from digging foxholes to driving motorbikes, more naturally than vocal actors usually can in a barren recording studio.

The 75-minute plot is a typical Dahl fable that plays on different levels for children and adults. Slapstick and sentiment blend, and Anderson's editing dashes back and forth between scenes and characters as if he were making an action adventure. It is. Rich in detailed cameo characters, visual jokes, offbeat sets filled with imaginative props, and charmingly complex lead characters, the movie delights in rushing through cliff-hanger plot twists at a speed that grabs its audience's attention.

There almost isn't time to notice how often fox hairs wave. Or consider how cotton-wool explosions and pine grenade trajectories must have been crafted painstakingly, frame by frame. When foxes dived into a pool and water flew up, when a pack of animals bulldozed holes at high speed, every scene throughout the movie, I stopped noticing it was stop-gap animation. It was a fast, fluid production, a little masterpiece in its own genre.

White ribbon

Michael Haneke has earned a clutch of top awards recently for his direction of angsty German-speaking art-house movies. A White Ribbon, Austria's entry for the 2009 Best Foreign-Language Oscar, has done especially well in other award races. Should it have won the Oscar? The simplest answer is No, mainly because its screenplay only really appeals to intellectual sensibilities.

Technically, it's a superb accumulation of skilled work by its technical crews and actors. Filmed very aptly in sharp, piercing B&W, it's a depressing tale of a plague of evil that afflicts a rural, semi-feudal German farming community at the start of the 20th Century. In its severely Protestant environment, strait-laced adults and resentful teenagers seethe, conspire and hate.

It begins with a never-explained mystery - the village doctor deliberately trip-wired off his horse - and ends with an unexplained calm settling on what was shown for more than two hours to be a very troubled community. Does the movie, as many critics guessed, depict a repressed social background that may explain the subsequent rise of National Socialism?

Why does the parson, revealing his inner anguish as a loving and fearful father only to the movie audience and only once, treat his family and flock with such vehement righteousness? Would the enforced wearing of white armband ribbons have helped children appreciate their innate sinfulness, or merely reminded them how to hide their true feelings? Does a field of butchered cabbages represent more than the vengeance of a dead farmhand's grieving son?

Above all, what are we to make of the hopefulness and loving feelings of the community's anti-heroic outsider and commentator? He leaves the village in the end, and promises to explain how certain events came to pass in later years, thereby prompting many to see the movie as an allegory or morality tale.

But no precise explanations are offered, or clearly hinted at. Instead, there's a Bergmannesque iciness to the movie, a conscious refusal to draw conclusions. We end up, frustratingly, with a damning portrait of rural society at a certain period in history, but that's enough of an achievement to warrant Haneke's awards. The ensemble acting and cinematography create the director's disturbing review of human behaviour brilliantly, in an engrossing B&W spectacle.

All's well, ends well

All's Well, Ends Well is an archetypal Hong Kong movie that inevitably prompts wordplays about archness, archives and stereotypes. It's a classic Chinese New Year movie, designed solely to appeal to local families seeking holiday happiness through shared laughter while watching local movie stars having silly fun together.

Bustling along with deliberately ham acting, slapstick, Cantonese wordplay, and references to contemporary Hong Kong and Hollywood icons, it's an evergreen example of the traditional Hong Kong movie version of the English variety theatre's Christmas tradition, the pantomime. Produced by Raymond Wong, it has been followed by his four sequels (including those for the Chinese New Years of 2009 and 2010). In several ways, it can also be seen as the Hong Kong equivalent of the UK's Carry On comic series, without the ogling crudity.

The 1992 movie's lead actors became even starrier stars during the 90s. Then-handsome young romantic actor Stephen Chow first flaunted his manic comic nonsense in it, and exuberant Maggie Cheung was his ideal sparring partner as a movie buff madly lost in her make-believe world of Ghost and Pretty Woman. Not yet a pop superstar, the late Leslie Cheung camped it up wildly as gay florist entangled with a very butch Teresa Mo. Beating them all at the comic game, Sandra Ng showed the screen-stealing talent showcased so brilliantly later in her Golden Queen triumphs. She returned, less memorably, to the local screen for the 2010 version.

The productivity of its acting talents two decades was prodigious, and clear evidence of the hyper-activity of the Hong Kong movie industry, then the world's third-largest, surpassed globally only by the States and India. In this quickie movie production, there are more than enough funny visual jokes, and clear enough subtitles, to delight non-Cantonese movie-goers.

Secret in their eyes

The 2009 Best Foreign Language Oscar was won by an Argentine outsider, The Secret in their Eyes. Like a well-trained thoroughbred from a lesser-known stable, it slipped past the two odds-on favourites at the last minute. Those Austrian and French entries, which had romped home in other award races, probably cancelled each other out in the Oscar voting stakes and left the field clear for the Argentine entry.

Its highly-fancied competitors were also carrying the sort of foreign-language weight that Oscar members don't always welcome. The White Ribbon was a B&W critique of early-20th-Century northern European Protestantism, while The Prophet presented a disturbing overview of French penal policies and racism. Both presented unpleasant reviews of human behaviour and relationships.

By comparison, the Argentine movie provides two gripping, old-fashioned (ie Hollywood-style) hours of character studies in a political thriller. Akin to Cold Case and other US TV dramas in which old mysteries are solved, by convenient coincidences and modern technology, it tracks the efforts of three Justice Department officials and a vengeful husband to catch the rapist who killed a young woman.

The movie operates in two time zones, back in a post-Peronist era of populist military dictatorship and 25 years later, when the retired chief investigating officer has the time and continuing determination to catch the killer. The scenario would be more credible if the lead characters' dyed hair, make-up and fashions changed more perceptibly.

Fortunately, good acting ensures that viewers aren't lost in time for long (though fans of Alan Rickman will be distracted by the lead actor's very Rickmanesque glances). The plot has a trove of twists to hold audience attention. The director (Juan Jose Campanella) adopts stylish camera angles - unexpected heights, distant glimpses, sudden close-ups - to further boost the dramatic tension, as does his very limited usage of background music.

A classy piece of work until its last few minutes, the movie ties up loose ends too happily, resolving all mysteries too conveniently for cineastes' comfort. The Oscar race's pair of highly-rated losers weren't so kind to their audiences. Hollywood loves happy endings in any language.

Single man

On the surface, A Single Man is simply a glossy depiction of a day in the life, and death wish, of a gay university professor in California in 1962. He's a Brit, teaches Eng Lit, lost his longtime lover and is preparing to commit suicide. It's easy to guess why designer Tom Ford (Hardwick, Gucci, YSL, own label) chose the story for his directorial and movie production debut.

He re-worked a screenplay written by a Canadian lawyer, David Scearce, who had adapted the same-name Christopher Isherwood novel, with the permission of the late author's longtime male lover. According to Wikipedia, Ford is also in a long-term relationship. The Texas-born self-made fashion industry millionaire is an architecture graduate, as is the movie professor's dead lover.

A mainstream production of the movie would probably have changed the professor's nationality. It wouldn't have cast two little-known English actors as the professor's American love interests, and it wouldn't have been happy keeping the professor's alcoholic best friend as another Brit emigre. However, mainstream Hollywood would never have financed this movie. Ford could afford to stay faithful to the book and his cast justified his faith in them.

Colin Firth has been a stalwart, and almost deadpan, actor whose one moment of movie magic was a gift from the director who asked him to do a wet-shirt scene for a BBC TV production of Pride and Prejudice. That led Helen Fielding to make him the dream lover for her Bridget Jones comedy romances. Their movie versions rightly chose Firth to play himself, which he did charmingly despite being overshadowed by Hugh Grant's rival character.

As the Brit professor, he has a role that perfectly suits his subtly mannered acting style. His BAFTA Best Actor award recognised his achievement, even if Hollywood didn't want to deprive Jeff Bridges of his Oscar and Golden Globe. Julianne Moore shines too, crafting a convincing accent as a California-set Londoner and portraying a beautifully drunken poignancy that should prompt Steven Spielberg to sign her up asap for his long-mooted bio of Dusty Springfield.

Matthew Goode, as the professor's dead lover seen in flashbacks, conveys gay-toned straightness impeccably and has other, mainstream, starring roles to remind Hollywood that he is a straight talent. Nicholas Hoult is also known by casting directors as a cross-Atlantic import; his long career as a child actor included the co-starring role in About a Boy (well supporting another Brit, Hugh Grant). The chubby boy grew into a handsome blue-eyes-flashing provocateur.

Going his own well-funded independent way, Ford chose to employ a top Spanish male model who'd walked his fashion catwalks as a hustler for his movie. Ideally, as his cameo scene is one of the more self-consciously artfully-framed and dramatically-lit passages in the movie. As in many other scenes, Ford focuses lovingly, lustfully, almost leeringly, on facial features. Eye and mouth movements reveal a person's thoughts and hopes, and they are manna from a heavenly director for restrained actors such as Firth.

Anyone who wants to sense the moods of the 60s will feel them throughout the movie. We are also reminded, too frequently for modern mainstream movie-makers' consciences, how much of a role smoking played in that generation's lifestyles. And the importance of social niceties then.

The movie is not perfect. There are plotting incongruities, the actors seem too artificially posed at times, the attempted-suicide scenes are strangely comic interludes that demean the central figure, and the sensually adventurous character of the professor's supposedly confused student seems unreal, almost as if he were a wish-fulfillment fantasy. The ending has been called ironical, but it's really a cop-out.

I should now read Isherwood's book, to discover what plot details were changed, and I will re-watch the movie at least once. And then again, just to spend more time savouring the richness of the soundtrack. In the early stages, I wondered if its insistent tones were going to overwhelm the visual messages. Instead, more often, they embellished the images.

Nine

What went wrong with Nine? The question must still prompt autopsies at TWC, the Weinstein Company. The movie lost a fortune, with a North American box-office take of less than US$20 million. Yet it surely sounded like a box-office bonanza when it was lined up alongside Rob Marshall's debut multi-Oscar-winning Chicago.

What's not to love?, the production team probably exclaimed. Nine is another Broadway smash-hit musical. Marshall's a great choreographer-turned-director. He's back in his element, as he was with Chicago. We've got a star-studded line-up of award-winning acting talents who can actually really sing and dance, like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah and Richard Gere did. We've got more this time in fact. Who wouldn't spend good money to see Nicole(Moulin Rouge) Kidman, Marion (Piaf) Cotillard, Penelope Cruz (gee, she even walks like a song!), Kate Hudson and Judi (Little Night Music) Dench, and we got Sophia Loren! Salivate, guys!

TWC surely now knows it made a mistake casting the central character in the theatrical pageant that depicted the life and loves of Italian movie fantasist Federico Fellini. Daniel Day-Lewis is a good actor, almost too good for this tale of a Lothario with screen-writer's block. He has the intensity Gere rightly didn't in Chicago, the only award-winning performance of his career. That dark menace worked, although OTT for my taste, for Day-Lewis's recent Oscar-winning screen-stealing megalomaniac in There Will Be Blood, but not for a frothy stagy biopic. Maybe, in an unfair slur on Italian artistes, I just don't expect actors with broad Italian accents to fret and frown so psychotically.

The plot's contrived leaps from dramatics to musical numbers, acceptable as stage devices, create an enormous alienation effect in a movie. Include B&W flashbacks from the director's imagination, and the tribute to an unconventional movie director ends up feeling more like a self-conscious parody.

Another negative factor may account for the dire word-of-mouth non-recommendations the movie must have earned during its opening weekend. "How will it play in Peoria?" is a cliche of American showbiz, and it contains a basic truth. "New York isn't part of America", as the Beyond the Fringe team noted almost half a century ago. Going to see a Broadway musical is an integral part of many programmes for tour groups, but their members don't go to musicals back home. Chicago was an exception, because it had a bustling storyline, interesting characters, an infectious sense of humour, effectively happy Amateur Night song-and-dance acts by Gere and Renee Zellweger, some show-stopper routines, jolly tunes and, above all, an all-American joie de vivre.

Nine has none of those plus factors. Neither did another recent Broadway hit, Rent, the movie adaptation of which also bombed, though due to many other negative factors. TWC might well think of relocating its production office to Peoria.

Blind side

If it's time for the Oscars, you know it's Schmaltz Season. Academy members live their working lives in a make-believe world. In their world view, audiences only go to a multiplex or rent a movie so that they can share a cry, gasp and laugh for close to two hours. To prompt such audience emotions, many movies -- from Hollywood to Bollywood, Nazi propaganda and soap operatics to BBC period dramas -- present larger-than-life appeals to heartstrings, funny bones and community loyalties.

Sometimes the Academy recognises movies that also appeal to viewers' intellects and souls. They even acknowledge foreigners. When a foreigner is an icon of schmaltz, like Robert Benigno, the Academy voters will abandon their usual preference for all-American schmaltz. Some years, the sentimental stuff is a shoo-in.

For the 2009 Awards, Crazy Heart covered C&W music and generation gaps; Jeff Bridges romped home, playing himself. In The Blind Side, college football and inter-racial relations formed the winning all-American team to rush Sandra Bullock over the line. She played a very dominant rich suburbanite. Judging by her other starring roles, she may also have been playing herself.

Hollywood is less schmaltzy than it used to be and must be praised for realising that neither film should win any other major gong. It would be nice to think that the Academy has not forgiven itself for over-honouring Driving Miss Daisy.

Crazy heart

The Oscar-awarding "Academy" of Hollywood has around 6,000 eligible voters. In the technical categories, their restricted electorates presumably are fairly good, if not always fair, judges of their co-professionals. In the open-to-all major categories, the members often get seduced en masse by a movie or actor whose appeal to their personal vanities is blindingly apparent.

It was very likely that Jeff Bridges would win the 2009 Best Actor statuette for his role in Crazy Heart. He was an ageing, four-time nominee playing an ageing, grumpy C&W singer with relationship and family problems. Getting cast for such an emotive hammy part gets a high proportion of Academy votes on side immediately. Turn in a competent performance, and the actor is way ahead of the pack in gaining an Oscar nomination. Because, a lot of Academy members seem to be ageing, retired and have unresolved issues with their kids.

They help to explain why Michael Rourke (The Wrestler), Richard Farnsworth (Straight Story), Henry Fonda (On Golden Pond), Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), Peter O'Toole (Venus), Marlon Brando (Godfather) were all nominated. In the Best Supporting Actor category, recent nominee veterans include Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine), Jack Palance (City Slickers) and George Burns (Sunshine Boys).

The list of Best and Best Supporting Actress nominees also creaks with geriatric nominees apparently earning tacit Academy lifetime-achievement awards, the achievement being the ability to live and work at a ripe old age. That's something ageing members appreciate.

Bridges has delivered some fetching, under-stated performances during his career (The Fisher King, Tucker and K-Pax spring to mind). Unfortunately, his red-carpet posturing and acceptance-speech strutting were not under-stated.

If Buggins' Turn applies in Hollywood, it may have been his turn for glory. But mainly because the competition this year was below par. It comprised another veteran (Morgan Freeman, but he's already been Awarded well), another previous winner who could be passed over (George Clooney), a much younger actor who can await his turn if his talent permits (Jeremy Renner), and Colin Firth portraying a homosexual. He could have had a big block vote if more old Academy members had come out in time in their past -- and if he wasn't British.

Were the indie movie itself and Bridges' performance worth the win? And watching? On TV perhaps. It's easier to yawn at home. The movie's little-noticed plus factor was Colin Farrell's supporting actor/singer role. At least he's young enough to still believe that his turn could come one year.

It will help him if he learns a Hollywood Life lesson from this movie. Learn to help Fate: if you get a juicily sentimental role as an older man, it will surely help you to surround yourself with a few other admired older talents. Bridges, who co-produced this maudlin musical tale, got Robert Duvall to co-produce and play a cameo role. Then elderly C&W singer T-Bone Picket got on board as another co-producer and sang some melancholy numbers, including the Oscar-winning title song. Bingo!

Lovely bones

The world of movies would seem to be an ideal setting for dreamscapes and heavenly visions. For a movie can be seen as a reel of individual celluloid paintings given a greater wholeness through the artistry, technical talents and ensemble efforts of lighting, set, sound and costume designers, cinematographer, director and editors.

A visually mind-blowing example of their surreal, CGI-tinged teamwork is What Dreams May Come, in which a dead husband (Robin Williams) strives to obtain eternal bliss with his doomed painter wife. More recently, Peter Jackson thought he'd have a go at the genre's arts and crafts in an adaptation of a reportedly much-loved novel by Alice Siebold, The Lovely Bones. Sadly, both movies ended up as cringe-makingly sentimental tales of lost spirits.

Ms Siebold's novel may be an ingenious thriller, in which a murdered girl gains mortal vengeance and eternal understanding. Jackson's over-decorated, under-plotted movie version doesn't enhance the credibility of a ghost story woven around a child, not in the way that The Sixth Sense cleverly teased its audience.

Saoirse Ronan, whose soulful depiction of a wicked girl gave Atonement a disturbing intensity, provides excellent flesh for the bare bones of the movie plot. I was prepared to believe she was a ghost in Limbo, and Oscar-nominated Stanley Tucci turned in another sterling characterisation as her subtly twitchy serial killer. It's a shame for him that, in a year when he also shone as the truly supporting actor of a husband for Julia Child, he has no chance of Oscar glory when there was a German actor chewing furniture and stealing scenes for Tarentino.

At least he's able to fortify his reputation. Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg fail to salvage the ludicrous characters of the girl's emotionally challenged parents, and Susan Sarandon can do nothing with the grandmother's role other than ham it up even more than the script might have suggested was dramatically or comically possible.

Also way OTT are the movie's representations of the heavenly settings through which the girl wanders, and of her murderer's earthly cornfield of death. They are garishly coloured, lit too much or too foggily, somewhere over a CGI rainbow between the ground and the sky, where only one other girl acts, poorly, as the dead girl's fellow spirit.

Back on earth, unseen but aware that her presence is felt by her semi-catatonic father, cipher siblings and vaporous English schoolboy poet, she mopes. The killer mopes too and develops a new itch, while her sister gets a boyfriend who's a laughably ill-explained plot contrivance.

Obviously, it's hellish difficult to portray heavenly visions in a mainstream movie.

Handsome suit

It's been reported that the 2008 hit Japanese comedy, The Handsome Suit, closely resembles a South Korean movie in which a fat woman becomes svelte. Well, what's original under any sun, Hollywood's or Japan's?

In this frothy version of a cliched plot line, a self-consciously ugly and unhappy Osakan diner cook is transformed by a body suit into a fashion world icon of handsomeness. Shrek meets The Mask, so recognisably in terms of plot strands and moral conclusions that no one in Hollywood, least of all Jim Carrey, will think of purchasing the rights of remaking it.

From a non-Japanese viewpoint, the movie has problems of credibility. The "beautiful" diner assistant the cook loves has a scrawny face, uneven teeth and possible anorexia. The "handsome" model into which the cook is transformed has a wrinkled weak chin, floppy long hair, and facial, physical and vocal traits even his best friends might think a bit too camp.

Ironically, "ugly" actors always need to gain audience acceptance by conveying character better than non-uglies. Happily, comic dramatic brilliance is also provided by the actors portraying the obese middle-aged cook and the equally chubby waitress who replaces the loved one who rejected him. They are a fun-filled giggly pair who are fun to watch.

A small squad of thinly-etched supporting actors have physical distinctions reminiscent of any Brit comic movie set in Notting Hill. All of them are garbed in retro clothing items chosen by a director and/or set designer who clearly adore bold bright colours. Such dabs of blatant blue, glaring greens and ravishing reds also decorate the indoor and outdoor sets. Together with the soundtrack collection of late 20th-Century pop, they embellish the movie's deliberately old-fashioned and simple stylishness. I suspect non-Japanese will miss comic echoes in many of the period references.

Alice in Wonderland

Tim Burton's latest fantasy, Alice in Wonderland, could be compared with his previous cinematic exercises in CGI and edgy surrealism. Each of them is uniquely different, though, using various techniques and varying levels of noir-tinged whimsy.

In fairness, his Alice should be only be compared with past efforts by others in the same genre : hi-tech adaptations of classic children's stories. Viewed like that, as most movie-goers would see it, it's more spectacular and entertaining than the tedious Narnia epics and the failed franchise that starred a wasted Nicole Kidman.

At first sighting, I found Alice a more bewitching set of fables and fabulous characters than Burton's screen version of Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This time, Burton's marital partner, Helena Bonham Carter, has the juicier role, pouting with engagingly menacing melancholy as the enormously-big-headed Red Queen. Burton's other long-time movie collaborator, Johnny Depp, has less fun. As the Mad Hatter, his on-screen charisma is diminished by enormous green eyeballs, a wild orange wig, front-gapped teeth and Brit accents that switch from the Home Counties to Scotland (deliberately, Depp having thought they'd represent different psyches in the Hatter's character, not that an audience would know that unless they watch the making-of dvd bonus). Depp's madcap swishes and sighs recall both his piratical Jack Swallow and one of Burton's earliest lead actors, Pee-Wee Herman.

On reflection, though, Alice pales in comparison with Burton's previous cinematic eccentricities. The movie lacks the OTT charms of Chocolate, Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd and the rest of a unique movie maestro's dazzling concoctions.

His new movie's visual appeal depends much on an array of cute CGI and SFX. Some work. The fatter half of Little Britain doubles up neatly as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Crispin Glover, who deserved a supporting Oscar nomination for playing feeble father George McFly in Back to the Future, is a suave eye-heart-patched villain. As dragons go, the Jabberwocky is fine, but the Bandersnatch's better and Bayard is another lovable canine.

However, the Cheshire Cat's grins don't convey enough character, a key factor lacked too by the Dormouse and March Hare and, most tellingly, Alice herself. Looking like Gwynneth Paltrow on a bad-hair day, she's played by a young, presumably Polish-American, actress called Mia, who really has to change her surname. She's competent, but not a commanding presence. Ditto, regrettably, for Anne Hathaway's icy White Queen.

A galaxy of British acting talents sparkle as comic faces and voices, and some of the SFX may be side attractions when the movie's seen in 3D/IMAX. Overall, however, they are nowhere near as eye-popping or integral to the storyline as those in Avatar.

Burton and the screenplay adaptor loyally kept a lot of Lewis Carroll's manic wordplay, which will befuddle modern youngsters and any movie-goers who never had the Victorian writer's fantasies read aloud to them.

I ought to re-read the endings of her adventures to verify whether Alice, back from Wonderland ("Underland" for Burton's younger Alice) really did set sail for China to expand her father's trading business. Is that truly curiouser ending the sign of a sequel in the making at the back of Burton's brain? Or yet another gesture by Hollywood in the direction of its potential biggest emerging market? Mission Impossible went to Shanghai, 2012's world was saved by Chinese speed-workers, so who'd be surprised if Alice popped up again beside the Yangtze.

Me and Orson Welles

Me and Orson Welles is an oddity, as its title suggests. It covers a week in the coming of age of a teenage wannabe actor (Zac Efron) who lands a small part in Orson Welles' Mercury Theater production of Caesar. That renowned adaptation of Shakespeare's historical play became part of American theatrical history, and it inspired writer-director Richard Linklater to create this brightly-illuminated self-consciously stagy movie. Or did it?

Linklater isn't a Hollywood stereotype. The Texas-based movie-maker creates unique images, both in acted movies, notably Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and in animated versions of live films, such as A Scanner Darkly. Linklater may well have admired Welles as the ultimate movie industry outsider, but I suspect Christian Mckay was the real inspiration for this period piece.

Linklater saw the English actor at the 2004 Edinburgh Festival, giving a bravura one-man performance in Rosebud : The Lives of Orson Welles. When the director got the funding for his 2008 Welles movie, he reportedly insisted that the unknown Mckay was indispensable. He was; the financiers may have insisted already that the headline star, the "Me", was to be Zac Efron.

Efron is a Prince Charming of Hollywood. On the boards from the age of 11, he twinkled and dimpled on-screen too, from Disney TV to High School Musicals to Hairspray before he was 21. As "Me", he's Richard, a plump-faced 17-year-old who has to convince us that a level-headed stage beauty at least a decade older (Claire Danes) will desire and seduce him, that Welles would identify and care about the youngster's prodigious talents.

Ay, there's the rub. Efron is no embryonic Brad Pitt, who flexed his ingenue acting chops so beguilingly in Thelma and Louise. He's no match for Christian Slater in The Name of the Rose, and he isn't even comparable with young Tom Cruise. Making his tough task tougher, his character's dialogue is hardly credible, ranging from banal boastfulness to fake melodramatics. In one comically incredible scene, when he has to console a young authoress, he scratches the back of his neck. A lot. If it's a tribute to the young Brando, it isn't.

But Mckay as Welles works so well that poor Efron never had a chance to do anything but twinkle wanly. Mckay speaks, looks, breathes, bombasts, flourishes, confides and curses as we instantly sense that Welles himself would have done and been. The accent, vocal resonance and stage presence are spot on. This is beyond impersonation. It's a reincarnation.

For that alone, this film will be part of American movie history. Eddie Izzard and Robert Downey Jr each made Charlie Chaplin re-live on-screen. Mckay is better than them. His Welles will surely be an unrepeatable piece of acting craftsmanship.

Serious man

Unless they are silent movies, foreign-language films cannot be appreciated if they lack subtitles. Even more difficult to understand are English-language films created by ethnic minorities. Then there is the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man. This is a movie unlike any other. Deliberately so, it would appear.

This is a Jewish mystery movie. I would not be surprised to learn that most Jewish viewers also remain very mystified at the end. The ending is itself such an amazing multi-dimensional cliff-hanger that it is possibly an elaborate in-joke in which the Coens pretended to themselves that they creating a franchise.

The beginning of the movie is a four-minute warning of funny-peculiarity. Fortunately, there are various funny-haha scenes in between the end and the beginning. Some of them will be dissected avidly as classic blackly comic set-pieces by future generations of Jewish-American Film students. The tale of the goy's inscribed teeth is just one glorious non-sequitor blooming in an exquisitely-manicured script.

There was happy-go-lucky mayhem in their previous star-studded dark-black comedy, the wildly whimsical Burn After Reading. With this movie, the Coens have floated way out of their version of mainstream movie-making into a stagnant cul-de-sac in 1967. Lacking any star names, A Serious Man is set prosaically in an American prairie's suburban estate where Jewish-American families try to establish a New World community for themselves and their carefully-cherished tribal heritage.

The seemingly irrelevant prologue shows us an Old World of Jewish-Polish fears and ethnic terminology. The New World of the anti-hero, a dedicated schoolteacher of Math, is shown as not being too different. What can go wrong with his life, will. The reasons why, and any reason why God wishes that fate on him, cannot be answered by his three despicable rabbis, the youngest of whom sees God's purpose in a parking lot. Every Jewish-American character in the rambling-cum-cascading scenario of disasters is despicable. So are the goys, and a couple of sharply-etched Korean-American immigrants, in this prairie fable.

I'd mused recently whether Hollywood ever permits the representation of despicable Jewish characters, and this movie might suggest otherwise. Until the producers' credits roll by and it's revealed that Hollywood didn't bankroll the Academy Award-winning Coens' latest little masterpiece. Credits go to the UK's Working Title Films, swallowed up and wisely left to go its own way by Universal. More British kudos : cinematographer Roger Deakins continues to give the Coens a very personal sense of colour and shadow.

The Coens' anti-hero (Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg), possibly a pained family- or self-portrait, is a humble striver lacking the strident self-awareness of a typical Jewish-American comic figure a la Woody Allen, Adam Sandler, Eugene Levy or Larry David. He wants to be a real mensch, a serious man, trying to find a reason, any reason for being alive. Although he's a pathetic loser, lousy parent, cuckolded husband, he's the least despicable person in the movie. He's likeably lack-lustre.

"No Jews were harmed during the making of this picture", the Coens advise in small print, near the end of the credits, just after the customary Humane Society platitude about animals. It doesn't look or feel like a joke that Mel Brooks might have made. In this movie, the Coens were probably trying to say something, more likely a lot of things, about the business of being Jews in the American boondocks. In 1967, it was clearly much harder than being Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld et al in New York at any time in American history.