Kick-Ass

The British movie industry produces many comic kids' adventures, and Kick-Ass (2010) is one of the more successful. It grossed US$20 million at the USA box office, which isn't fantastic given that the action-fantasy tale of a teenage superhero is set in New York (albeit on location mostly in Toronto) and its British cast members cuss profanely in American accents.

Incompetent wannabe superhero Dave (aka Kick-Ass) is well played by former child star Aaron (Shanghai Knights) Johnson, a young Brit whose John Lennon (Nowhere Boy) proved his coming-of-age as an adult actor (and led to his gossip-magazine-fodder affair with its older female director). He wears a green mail-order hero's outfit.

His rival/nemesis is Red Mist (Christopher Superbad Mintz-Plasse, a Californian), a wannabe villain in red leather and ghoulish black face paint. He's eager to help his evil father and supergangster, for whom the obvious casting choice was UK filmdom's baddie-of-the-century, Mark Strong, an Italian-German Irishman who added much to Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes.

There has to be a female interest, other than Dave's female friend at school, Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca, a former child star and half-Portuguese Californian who made 84 episodes of The Young and the Restless). She links up with Kick-Ass because she thinks he's gay. The real superheroine is Hit-Girl, a little poppet who wears a purple wig and utters "cunts" in one of her fighting moods (Chloe Moretz, born 1997 in Atlanta and a veteran TV actress). Her guiding light is her father, Big Daddy, a vengeful ex-cop, giving Nicolas Cage a neat cameo role as a mousy bespectacled teacher of gory killing techniques.

A comic book inspired the screenplay by director-producer Matthew Vaughn and his fellow-Brit creative partner, Jane Goldman. A TV producer, she'd worked with Vaughn previously on their failed franchise, Stardust. Vaughn himself is the stuff that gossip magazines are made of; his Wikipedia bio is almost too stereotypically Brit-eccentric to be believable.

His surname came from his supposed father, US actor Robert (Magnificent Seven, Man from U.N.C.L.E.) Vaughn, but he and his actress mother found out, when he was a teenager, that his real inseminator had been a minor aristocrat, George de Vere Drummond. One could guess that Vaughn (a PhD, active Democrat and Emmy winner) had grown tired of denying his parental role; lawsuits and DNA tests were resorted to in California but Vaughn Jr kept his given name.

Dropping out of university quickly in the UK, Vaughn went to Hollywood. At 25, he was back in the UK, co-producing his first movie, Innocent Sleep (a London hitman doucdrama starring Michael Gambon). A great friend was Guy Richie; together they directed (Richie) and produced (Vaughn) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a gangland romp that earned them fortunes. Their next teamwork was on Snatch, a successful pan-Atlantic gangland hoot starring Brad Pitt with a bizarre accent, and Swept Away, a disastrous re-make for Richie's then wife, Madonna.

Richie's marital star-shooting may have inspired Vaughn's own choice of a wife (2002): German supermodel Claudia Schiffer. Three children later (one bearing his real father's name), they are presumably still together, because Kick-Ass includes a lengthy plug for Claudia cosmetics. One of the movie's producers is Brad Pitt, and gossip-magazine devotees might be able to describe another 66 degrees of filmdom non-separation between all the players.

Kick-Ass 2 is already in production, with the same trio of teenage superheroes. They are fun, but can their story develop now that both the charismatic evil dads have been killed off. One burned to death, the other got shot into space by a bazooka: Kick-Ass ain't subtle and Spiderman need not fear this cheapjack competition.

Love in a puff

Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue were wise to accept the leading roles in the low-budget comedy Love in a Puff. It's a witty romcom that provides insightful glimpses into young Hongkongers' lives and loving.

Sadly, the movie was slapped with a Category III rating. As there's no violence, no hard porn or even softer nudity in creator-director Pang Ho-cheung's movie, the censors must have been glad that its dialogue (by co-writer Heiward Mak Hei-yan) was filled with salty Cantonese slang.

That was their excuse for not wanting under-18s to get access to a comedy about smokers. Even though Yeung's character (a Sephora-sponsored cosmetics saleswoman) is afflicted with asthma and shown promising to quit when she falls in love with fellow-smoker Yue ("in advertising"), she doesn't. Many of their friends - and a quartet of local cops - smoke, and their friendships seem to hinge on being members of multi-racial socially-mixed smoking cliques that gather in alleys and corners to enjoy their addiction. It would be cynical to suspect that Lucky Strike provided production funds as well as the essential props.

Within a seven-day (captioned) time frame, Yeung chases Yue, ends a five-year live-in relationship, goes to a love villa with Yue, and loses him. She finds him again during a budget-day cigarette-buying binge and they mutually agree to stop smoking. Happy ending? Anyone who left the cinema as soon as the main end credits flashed up will think so. Those who stayed a few minutes longer, thinking they were watching the traditional Hong Kong series of comical out-takes, got to see the final sting in this tale. It's a clever ending for a light but above-average romcom.

Yeung's character is identified as being older (by four years) than Yue's, but she looks almost a generation older and maturer, with a purplish wig that gives her character a soignee air that looks out of character. That makes her sudden desire for the wimpish and bespectacled Yue hard to fathom at first glance. Their courtship conversations, via SMSes as much as in person, reveal a prickly pair of self-defensive Hong Kong personalities.

The movie also reveals amusing aspects of modern Hong Kong, some predictable (karaoke and Facebook fraud), others not (sidewalk pirate lookouts, ashtray manufacture). The opening sequence is a neat short horror story (Pang being a master in the genre), and the inclusion of mockumentary interviews with the leading characters adds useful alienation and explanatory effects. The movie deserved a bigger audience, to remind Hong Kong that local cinema can supply above-average dialogue.

Inception

Whatever else Inception is or isn't, it's superb Big Screen entertainment. This is the sort of action-thriller for which cinemas are built. It's a sci-fi fantasy that plays with its audience's minds for around 150 minutes, letting them kid themselves that it would last ten years or an eternity in the third level of dreams.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, this is a cross between The Matrix, Rubik's Cube and Mission: Impossible. It's also a multi-million dollar development of his Memento thriller. This time round, a man's memories are parts of his multi-dimensional dreams.

Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh from a similar mind-blowing role in Shutter Island, is totally credible as the ace dream extractor employed by a Japanese tycoon (Ken Letters from Iwo Jima Watanabe) to insert an idea into the mind of a business rival (Cillian Dark Knight Murphy). He accepts the job in return for the chance to re-enter the USA where he's charged with killing his fellow-mind-invader wife (Marian Piaf Cotillard). To complete the mission, he needs a dream architect (Ellen X-Men 3, Juno Page), a pair of trusted assistants (Joseph 3rd Rock Gordon-Levitt, Tom Bronson Hardy) and a master alchemist (Dileep Avatar Rao).

With that line-up of first-rate acting talent (and Berenger, Postlethwaite, Caine, Haas in small cameo roles), Nolan ensured that his dialogue would also be credible. His leaping, ricocheting editing of high-octane action choreography and SFX is highlit by the reliable music of Hans Zimmer, and Brit Nolan's visions are cinematographed as brilliantly as ever by the director of photography for all his movies since Memento (2000), American Wally Pfister.

As there should be in classic heist movies (or for an inverted heist in this case), the scenario must be leavened with a few in-jokes. The most noticeable aurally is the musical motif that will switch the team back from a dream state: it's an Edith Piaf song. There are visual quotations too, I'm sure, from movies and the real world, awaiting discovery during further viewings.

The film is possibly too long, extended beyond a mind's welcome, due to frantic efforts to try and tie up loose ends and rescue all characters from dream limbos or living death. The final shot is a devilish cliffhanging cop-out. The whole scenario is surely too complex to make sense during film-goers' immediate post-movie analysis, because it's ended up operating on three or more levels, in a car chase, epic gun battle, solitary couple's empty metropolis, various people's minds, memories and varying realities.

At the time, that's part of the fun of a successful movie conjuring trick, taking its audience on a wild ride into suspended belief. When Nolan's vehicle slows down for its melodramatic denouements, only then are his crafty mechanics visible, and his directorial desire to create more than just a blockbusting summer action-thriller admirably clear.

Dr Horrible's sing-along blog

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a 3-part 40-minute musical-comedy fantasy that won an Emmy in 2009 for creator-director Joss Whedon. Its title role was played by young TV sitcom veteran Neil Patrick Harris, whose many claims to Hollywood fame include his outing as the homosexual partner since 2004 of an actor who's become a catering entrepreneur.

The actor had worked with him on Doogie Howser, M.D., for which Harris title-starred in 97 episodes (1989-1993). In 1999 he made 22 episodes of Stark Raving Mad. Many cartoon voices later, his career gained a new hit with How I Met Your Mother (since 2005 and still going strong).

Non-Americans may have been surprised to see his unannounced appearance as the singing-dancing opening star turn at the 2010 Oscars show, but not Hollywood and New Yorkers. For them, he wasn't simply a belated American answer to Hugh Jackman's previous audience-winning stylishness.

Harris had done musical theatre work, notably in Sondheim's Assassins and Sweeney Todd. He was a former child star who'd worked hard, and his coming-out on the Ellen De Generes chat-show hadn't hurt his image.

His sweetly nasty Dr Horrible is a would-be evil mastermind who loves Penny from the laundromat, but her affections are stolen by the Dr's nemesis, Captain Hammer. There's a chorus, freeze ray, frequent short bursts of song, a league of evil chaired by Bad Horse, and the surreal TV exercise looks like a vacation romp by Hollywood professionals, a la the Oceans series. Reportedly, it is.

Joss Whedon, like all dutiful members of the Screen Writers Guild, was on strike in 2008, and just like all professionals, couldn't stop working. He thought up Dr Horrible. His track record is unique, as he's the first third-generation writer in US TV. His grandfather wrote for Donna Reed's shows and his father's successes included Golden Girls. Whedon himself created Buffy the Vampire Slayer (first as a movie) and Firefly, and co-wrote the original Toy Story among many other other Hollywood screenplays.

Whedon and Harris re-united for a multi-nominated episode of Glee in 2010. Canadian actor Nathan Fillion, who hams merrily as the mock-macho Captain Hammer, had worked with Whedon on Firefly, and the third lead in Dr Horrible, appeared in eight episodes of Buffy. In Us TV, it's clear that a career depends not just on knowing the right people but on working with them often.

Dr Horrible has a cult status, and it is an amusing foot-note for the biographies of many talents. But it isn't a Singing Detective and won't be seen as a pivotal moment in the development of the entertainment industry.

Nanny McPhee returns

She's back! Emma Thompson in her latest star vehicle, with a motorbike and sidecar to transport Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (in the USA she simply Returns).

Reprising her 2005 writing and starring success, Thompson maintains the basic scenario in which the nanny teaches children five ways in which to behave better. With each lesson achieved, she loses a disfiguring feature and the children lose their need for her.

Based on "Nurse Matilda" books by Christianna Brand, Thompson's tales are simple family fables. The baddies are comic villains (primarily Rhys Ifans this time), the children are middle-class monsters (five this time) and there's a single harassed parent who needs the nanny's stern stick for the children.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is a farmer's wife during WW2. American actresses often visit UK film comedy sets, some gaining good English accents (Zellweger for Bridget Jones), some staying themselves (Roberts). The dialogue suggests that Gyllenhaal mastered the English pronunciation for "darling", so Thompson used the word a lot.

Maggie Smith looks woefully, almost insultingly, wasted as a dizzy old dame, while Ralph Fiennes has a juicy cameo role that created extra set and location costs. Ewan McGregor probably made a day trip to the countryside for his guest appearance as the farming father.

Younger viewers will love the CGI and SFX animal antics, including synchronised piglet swimmers, a putty-addicted blackbird (Mr Edelweiss) and a helpful baby elephant. Older viewers will be happy if their kids are, and Thompson deserves big thanks and profits for that, if nothing else.

Cria cuervos ...

A Spanish movie from 1976, Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos (Raise Ravens) was re-issued by Criterion's Janus Collection 30 years later. Any movie that wins top prizes at the Cannes or Venice film festivals is treated with caution by many film goers, a very different tribe to cineastes. This movie garnered the Cannes Special Jury Prize Award.

At the time, when Franco was on his deathbed, the movie was perceived as a subtle portrait of the Generalissimo's Spain, considered a land of repression and corruption by its critics. Movie critics praised writer-director Saura's calm study of good and evil in the family of eight-year-old Ana, her two sisters, their aunt and grandmother, and their dead parents.

Geraldine Chaplin floats through the film as the suffering mother, the wife of a philandering army officer. She's a figure from the past, recollected possibly only in the young girl's memories or imagination. In the present, she's a ghost who appears in the child's dreams by night and day. The actress is also the to-camera face of Ana as a young woman, recalling aspects of her own and her mother's story.

Even more important for the mystery's shifting perspectives is Ana's stoical face, grabbing the audience's wholehearted attention with the flicker of an eye or barely perceptible muscle movements. Child actress Ana Torrent had already won many awards for her 1973 performance in The Spirit of the Beehive, a Frankenstein-inspired fantasy created by Victor Erice when Torrent was seven years old. It's easy to assume that Saura saw it and Torrent and dreamt up a plot to showcase her exceptional cinematic talent. (Chaplin, the daughter of you-know-who, was Saura's life partner, appearing in ten of his movies.)

Did Ana, as she tells us, poison her father in well-planned revenge for his infidelity and heartlessness to her mother? Who else might she kill in her unlikeable family? The wheelchair-ridden mute grandmother, the domineering aunt who takes charge of the household, the military man's wife who'd had an affair with her father? She loves her older and younger sister, but are they safe? And why does her pet guinea pig die?

The ending is a bitter-sweet resolution, proving that Ana's evil imagination didn't poison anyone, even though she'd planned to. She leaves home to go to school, entering the reality of a modern Madrid previously hidden beyond their exclusive home's garden walls.

I couldn't see the connection between her escape from the past and Spain's release from a fascistic regime. Saura's cinematic skills were evident, and his screenplay artfully wove claustrophobic sets, ancient and modern songs, Hitchcockian red herrings and startling close-up photography. Is it a masterpiece? No, and Criterion rightly placed it in its second-tier Janus classification.

Tales from the golden age

Tales from the Golden Age (2009) is a bitter-sweet recollection of the last 15 years of Romania's Ceaucescu regime. Dubbed a "Golden Age" by the country's Communist Party, its one-party dictatorship is commemorated in the movie as a petty comic opera of a regime, an incompetent bureaucracy run by fools more silly than sinister.

The idea of dramatising five of the period's urban "legends" as short film stories originated with Cristian Mungiu. His 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days , a bleak and biting Ceaucescu-era abortion saga, wowed the international film festival circuit in 2007-8, winning three awards, including the Golden Palm, at Cannes.

Inevitably, this multi-parter is a mixed bag, mainly due to the uneven strengths and symbolisms of the five chosen "legends". End credits don't reveal which director was responsible for what chapter, and each of them has distinct styles. The first anecdote records the arrival of an official inspector ahead of a political visit to a village, and it's a charming bucolic 20-minute comedy. In the shorter second look at bureaucratic protocol, newspaper photographers must ensure that the president isn't seen to lose face. That's a cute docudrama.

The third tale is an overlong fable in which a chicken-truck driver cheats, and his life and luck could be portrayed the same ways in any regime. Similarly, the comic adventure of the greedy policeman and a pig is akin to the British farce A Private Function, an Alan Bennett satire on provincial snobbery and bureaucracy. The last tale had the strongest dramatic potential, showing post-Communist youth absorbing Western freedoms and capitalist opportunities.

Mungiu failed to develop a thread through the oddly-chosen legends. It's going to be tough for any Eastern European to create a worthy critique and memorial of their Communist regimes. An excellent model already exists : Germany's Goodbye Lenin!

Home

Swiss director Ursula Meier chose wisely for her feature debut, Home. Most important, she conceived a simple plot and gathered a team of screenwriters to fill out the tale of a family of five isolated beside an unfinished motorway in rural France. Second, she recruited veteran film actors (Isabelle The Piano Player Huppert and Olivier The Son Gourmet) to portray the parents. Two teenage actresses and a boy completed the household. Crucially, for the good look of her movie, Meier employed the skills of experienced cinematographer Agnes Godard.

What happens, the scenario wondered, to the family when the motorway opens, after ten years of delayed readiness? They'd crossed it every day to reach their only access road, mail box and garbage pick-up point. The boy had cycled on the empty highway, the eldest girl sunbathed beside it. Close to the back of their simple five-room house a high wall ensured that they could only look one way in their world, at the highway, not at the farm fields behind.

The road opens, inevitable noise and air pollution arrive, privacy is lost, going to school and work needs usage of a drainage tunnel. The traffic volume increases; jams create huge audiences beside the highway railings. The already fragile nerves of the insomniac mother crack, the father's repression intensifies, the second daughter becomes a masked health freak. A rural setting has become a horror movie environment.

But the horror evaporates through plot devices that creak almost comically. An audience can accept that the mother' psyche cannot cope with relocation. It can imagine that traffic noises and vibrations trigger clinical phobias, but its belief is stretched to breaking point when the parents decide to cinder-block all the doors and windows of their house. Within, they slip into squalor and sickness. The eldest daughter had fled earlier. She returns in a friend's car, looks at the bricked-up house, assumes her family too had abandoned the house and drives off.

We have to assume that the telephone line expired but the electricity supply didn't. We must believe that no work colleagues, distant farmers or schoolfriends had asked questions. Okay, for the sake of a gloomy horror story. But Ms Meier abruptly challenges her audience to accept the possibility of the frail mother's burst of hammer-wielding self-redemption and family release.

The bad choices for her movie's ending turned a potentially fascinating fiction into a silly fable. Huppert's tears are worth watching, but they're not reasons enough to see this vehicle for them.

You I love

In 2003, Russian gay cinema came out. Sort of. You I Love, co-written and -directed by a pair of female TV talents, told the prettily presented tale of a young advertising industry man who falls in love, with a female news reader first and then with a young male zoo worker in Moscow.

The movie has great curiosity value, mainly for enabling foreigners to see the Russian capital city and sense how its Westernised post-Communist society has developed. It also shows admirable technical expertise in colour cinematography, sharp editing, and set lighting. However, although the trio of lead actors is pleasant to look at, their dialogue is littered with stumbling blocks.

Hardest to get over are the central figure's accidental meetings with his two lovers. Then we are expected to believe that the woman has an insatiable appetite for food and the man won't be bothered by her face-stuffing eagerness. Beyond that, with no explanation whether the younger man is really gay, or just likes singing with his fingers, we have to believe that they fall in love at first touch.

The audience next has to accept that the woman will accept a form of threesome, or two couplings, or whatever. One cannot be sure because the men never take off their black underwear. They do go to a gay house party (last seen in such silly singing and dancing mode in mid-20th-century UK gay films that thought they were dolce-vital) and make a lot of noise behind a closed door outside which two gay Russian senators linger avidly.

Meanwhile, the plot thickens and giggles when the young man's uncle arrives from the far-off snowy boondocks and rescues the lad from Muscovite depravity. The actor playing the lad is short, perhaps a circus acrobat in real life, and his features are non-Russian, almost Asiatic, unlike those of his movie parents, who send him off for military service. In the last scene, "two years later", he's with the couple, sharing their baby-caring duties.

Oaks do grow from acorns, and a good gay movie may arrive from Russia one day, but it won't credit this corn for its inspiration.

Bancs publics

Bancs publics, aka (Versailles rive droite), has the English title of Park Benches. Moliere it isn't, or even La cage aux folles, but it is a star-studded confection of French forth from Bruno Podalydes. He appears in it, as do dozens of French actors in cameos.

The movie's first interior set shows three office secretaries and two of their male bosses deciding to investigate a banner that has appeared below a facing window. In black and white, it states Homme Seul (Man Alone). How long could the comic mystery of that simple sitcom-like premise be sustained? How many small jokes and cameo parts could it spark? 20-20, remarkably.

Some of the office workers take their lunch break in the small garden below, where the park benches of the title are filled with other oddball French provincial characters of all ages. This is Altman or Curtis territory, where the cameras scamper around the park, eaves-dropping on its conversations and mini-dramas. Many feel fresh, some are surreal, and the whole comic exercise is a joy to watch and hear, a cavalcade of funny surprises.

The third, more farcical and least successful, segment takes us into the adjacent hardware staff, over-staffed and fussily micro-managed, where additional French talents (including Deneuve) appear to create mechanical disasters and comic woes. Finally, the action shifts back to the office and its Gervais-style retirement party for a secretary. When the light goes on and then off again in the lonely man's flat, the tale is over.

As usual with his movies, Podalydes worked with his brother, Denis, on this film. It's a sequel of sorts to their 45-minute 1992 comedy, Versailles rive-gauche. That will be worth finding, as will other award-winning joint efforts (including Only God sees me, 1998; Liberte-Oleron, 2001; Le parfum de la dame en noir, 2005; Montmartre segment of Paris, je t'aime, 2006).

Girl who played with fire

The Girl Who Played with Fire (right poster) and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest (left) were the second and third titles of thrillers written by Stieg Larsson. They comprise a publishing phenomenon, the Millennium trilogy, that has sold millions of copies globally. A few years after their appearance and the sudden death of their Swedish author, they were adapted for the cinema. The first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was Sweden's biggest-ever box-office winner and the most successful European film of 2009.

Swedish TV's Daniel Alfredson directed both of them; Denmark's Niels Anders Oprev directed the first episode (the screenplay for which was written by two Danish adaptors). Sweden's Jonas Frykberg adapted the second and third books. Availability of production funds and/or facilities may account for the movie trilogy's twin nationality.

Michael Nykvist and Noomi Rapace continued their starring roles as investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. In the second thriller, they're solving gruesome deaths again, this time involving international trafficking of women, and Lisbeth is suspected of multiple murder too. In the third, the pair of unconventional sleuths clear Lisbeth's name and she wreaks revenge on the evil men in her harsh life.

Something went amiss with the production of the two "Swedish" adaptations, which were surely filmed simultaneously. The murky old-fashioned film quality lacks the digital brightness of the first film, several exterior scenes were shot on poorly-lit or rainy days, and the pauses to show the lead actors' facial reactions don't have the same depth as before. These two adaptations look more like TV productions.

The second movie introduces the cast of bizarre characters associated with Lisbeth's Russian father; it's a compact 2-hour murder mystery and criminal freak show. The third and final installment adds 20 minutes more in its doomed effort to accommodate most of Larsson's vast line-up of bit parts - evil secret agents, vengeful motor bikers, the Millennium magazine's team, prosecutors and policemen, secret service investigators and psychiatric hospital staff. It was a mission truly impossible for any adaptor.

It's made a harder visual challenge because the only non-typical Swedes on view are a gratuitous Jewish police inspector and a Turko-something auto-hire manager. There is one typically over-populated and confusing scene near the end when the government's secret investigators assemble in one room in five or more big teams, their presence only being necessary in the screenplay to explain how all the baddies can be swept up individually at the end.

Lisbeth, supposedly now 28, looks closer to the real age of her actress, and her relative lack of dialogue until the final courtroom showdown illustrates her character's silent truculence, a character flaw that was under-stated in the first installment.

Maybe the third volume needed a 4-hour two-parter. Maybe the Larsson trilogy's far-fetched plot devices and coincidences can only gain credibility inside a reader's imagination.

Girl with the dragon tattoo

Movie versions of best-selling books either succeed well enough (think of Harry Potter) or fail disastrously (try not to recall Captain Corelli's Mandolin). There's no middle ground as far as book lovers are concerned. For those whose loved Swedish thriller-writer Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of feminism and violence, success depended on the casting of Lisbeth in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The first of Larsson's best-selling books was an epic mystery in which a disgraced middle-aged investigative journalist and a young Goth-style female computer hacker join forces and detective skills to solve the 40-year-old mystery of a vanished rich girl.

The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, a man of integrity and many affairs, is so well suited to Michael Nykvist, a veteran Swedish TV actor, that one could imagine Larsson writing the character for him. The crucial role of the very eccentric Lisbeth Salander went to Noomi Rapace, a TV actress and former punk rocker. The movie dialogue tells us Lisbeth is 24, but Rapace was almost 30 when the full trio of Larsson stories was filmed in 2009. She looks her age, self-possessed and mature, distracting me from the younger, edgier outcast I'd envisaged while reading. This movie Lisbeth looks stronger; credible, but less disturbing and surprising. She smokes cigarettes a lot too, which wasn't such a noticeable feature in the books of course.

The original book was hundreds of pages long, with an overlong introductory economic and socio-political framework for the many characters in the lives of Mikael, Lisbeth and the vicious Vanger family whose millionaire octogenarian head employs Mikael. In the book, there's an elaborate cover story for his detective work; the movie cuts that, along with many subsidiary characters and events.

Mikael's penchant for affairs is only hinted at. Lisbeth's sexual ambiguity is illustrated more clearly, as is her mastery of the Internet hacker's skills. It's tougher cinematically to present the evil natures of men who torture and kill, and their actors perform the tough tasks convincingly. Other cameo roles are also sharply drawn and well acted, and the settings - solemn Stockholm and isolated inland waterways - augment the overall mood of repressed anger.

Much to admire, little to fault in the direction by Denmark's Neils Arden Oplev. Another director worked with the same cast on the other two Millennium adaptations, and comparisons of style and technique will add interest to their signposted plots.

Petit Nicolas

Rene Goscinny wrote and Jean-Jacques Sempe illustrated a series of children's comic books, first published in 1959. Director Laurent Tirard and his team of Franco-Belgian co-adaptors turned them into a live-action screenplay, et voila, they created the French box-office champion of 2009, Le petit Nicolas.

The world of eight-year-old Nicolas is middle-class provincial France in the 1950s. There are no black or Arabic faces in his classroom, or his city's streets. Even the lower-class kids are all-white. Adults are strange or buffoons, except for his class's young schoolteacher, who tries not to get exasperated with boys who are fat, sleepy, long-legged, aggressive or simply nicely egocentric, like Nicolas is.

When Nicolas's parents are discovered to be producing a second child, he panics. Rather than be cast aside, he must ensure the failure of the pregnancy. His classmates will help, of course.

This is a movie whose viewer will either feel it is charmingly, amusingly old-fashioned or insufferably, cloyingly cute. The provincial French obviously had the first viewpoint, dragging their grandchildren out to see and experience Les Good Old Days. The alternate viewpoint is mine: this movie's only bearable cuteness is its stick-up paper-cut credits.

Cinema Hong Kong

Cinema Hong Kong is worth noting as a three-part documentary series shown on US TV's Discovery Channel. Screened in 2003, it was written and directed by Ian Wright, whose only other IMDb credit is as a cameo actor in a low-budget US pizza-horror movie. The segment with the widest audience appeal in the US was issued separately with the ghastly title Chop:Socky.

The three areas covered, from the 60s and 70s primarily, are the kung fu and wu xia (sword-fighting/martial arts) genres and the female star "Beauties" of Shaw Brothers' golden years. Focusing as it does on Run Run Shaw and his studio's movies, and never ever mentioning Raymond Chow and Golden Harvest, the documentary series can be identified almost surely as a Shaw PR project to promote the company's re-mastering and re-issue of some of the 800 films deteriorating in its library.

Nevertheless, self-promotion for Shaw (whose key producer, his brother Runme, is also never mentioned) is relatively muted, and the commentary clearly suggests that Shaw (now over a century old) was an all-powerful and manipulative studio boss as well as a production and marketing genius. Many former contract stars (such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li), directors (including John Woo) and fight choreographers provide concise interview comments that amplify the well-scripted well-read never-mispronounced commentary. A personal favourite is the director who recalls one day of working on different sets for eight features he was making.

There are many fascinating details, from Hong Kong movie pioneering techniques (such as "in camera editing") to snippets of star news (Bruce Lee in a US TV interview) and gossip (the early deaths of various stars seeming like eerie precursors of the next generation of similar tragedies).

Good, the bad, the weird

Once upon a movie age, Italy, France and other Western powers of the silver screen produced generations of gifted directors. Then Japan did. It's been South Korea's turn for more than a decade, and it's fitting that Ji-woon Kim decided to make a tribute to Sergio Leone.

It wasn't called a "noodle Western", rightly. That would sound even blander than its "spaghetti" inspiration. Released in 2008, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is Kim's self-proclaimed "kimchi Western", a spicy recipe with a very distinctive flavour.

Its setting is Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the 1930s. Korean independence warriors are up there, and so are two Korean renegades, a bounty hunter, Chinese bandits, Japanese troops and Indiana Jones clones on horses, motorbikes and steam trains.

It doesn't really matter who is the Good (Woo-sung Warrior Jung), Bad (Byung-hun Hero Lee) or Weird (Kang-ho Thirst Song) Korean guy. This is a movie with the intellectual subtlety of early Clint Eastwood. All it wants to be is a technically immaculate Korean celebration of Hollywood's Western conventions and comics, from Keystone Kops to Star Wars, Mel Brooks to Spielberg. Kim apparently decided to honour all their international offspring too, from Mad Max to gun-slinging samurais to pirouetting Hong Kong kung fu acrobats.

The screen is constantly, frantically busy, elaborately set and costumed, and captivatingly choreographed so that every extra does something detailed rather than just filling space. "The money's on the screen", as Hollywood producers used to boast: if guns can blaze, bombs explode, cavalry charge, motorbikes race and eyes glisten, they will, in vibrant cinematography and surround sound.

After the movie's initial 20-minute train chase, when the camera's flown over the surrounding desert and in, out and round period carriages, and a massive tableau of crooks have been assembled on the train, then dispersed, each chasing an unidentified map for possible buried treasure, the audience has no idea where it's being led, or which character it's supposed to cheer.

The ending kills off one of the trio, and a sequel seems likely. Or not. It doesn't matter, because this is just a fun fest best devoured in a big-screen environment as a very high-class Saturday matinee treat.

Toy story 3

At last look, there were 225 reviews of Toy Story 3 in Rotten Tomatoes. Only 3 were rated negative, so they deserved immediate attention. One thought the movie even more unnecessary than the first sequel. Another felt that the 3D effects weren't good enough to compensate for the un-liked sadness of the movie. The third party-pooper objected to the level of product-placement. A trio of fair comments, but they barely dent the glittering image of the latest Pixar blockbusting work of computer-generated animation.

The creative teams at Pixar, led by John Lasseter, are master craftsmen of cinema. No other company has maintained such high standards and great box office returns for every single movie it made. One year, however, it will produce something less than perfect - that's God's Law of Human Genius.

Maybe it's started to slip off course with the studio's latest short film. Like their feature siblings, the short & sweet super-tuned Pixar cartoons have formed a steady stream of genius. This time, though, the tale of two competitive forces of Nature seemed muddled. There was one brilliant idea - employing animal noises to convey a story - and an overwhelming sense that much of the rest was an homage to Disney Fantasias. I'll watch it more than once again when the DVD appears, and am prepared to then see that it's another quantum leap in the CG animator's art.

The main feature brings back the key toy characters, all still using vocal talents that express character rather than the actors' egos. Woody is Woody with a Tom Hanksy voice, an individual in his own right unlike some animated creatures. Voices rarely dominate Pixar's screen or story (excepting, for example, Nemo's tedious father), and the wit, tearfulness and subtlety of the story is expressed clearly, not just in 3 Dimensions, through a brilliantly performed animated choreography of sights and sound effects.

Once in TS3, though, there is a clumsily stagy moment, so static it alienated me. Andy is going off to college and obeys Woody's supposedly written advice (cleverly, not shown) to give his toys to Bonnie, the young drama queen he'd met at the start of this set of adventures in the outside world. Andy slowly introduces each plastic figure to her, describing its characteristics and make-believe theatrical strengths. Bonnie may need to know those details, but Toy Story's legion of fans don't. Is the scene preparing audiences for a third sequel, which could include the girl's existing trio of star roles? (I rather hope the sweetly pompous German thespian hedgehog, voiced by Timothy Dalton, isn't a lost joy.)

More likely, the scene is akin to a final curtain call for the toys. It provides adults enough time to dab their tears and compose parental faces. Then the whole audience can enjoy the fun-filled end-credits, a cinematic romp as traditional as the opening chase sequence had been (working as well in 2D as it probably did in 3D). "Nobody's perfect" were the last words in one of Hollywood's finest live-action comedies; maybe this bunch of Pixar toys is an almost perfect CG-animation trilogy.

Tokyo!

An international bunch of producers chose three top indie directors to create short films set in Tokyo! Such compendiums are the movie equivalent of a collection of short stories by different writers. In theory, they serve to display the ideas and techniques of different artists. In practice, it's hard to find logical reasons for doing so.

Michel Gondry is a French musician who had triumphs in the US (Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine, Be Kind Rewind) following a top-rated career there making commercials. Leos Carax is also French, had two early successes (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood) and two big flops (Lovers on the Bridge, Pola X). Joon-ho Bong (Korean) was best-known for Host (until he made Mother in 2009).

Why them? Presumably because they had timely spaces in their work schedules. They do not share cinematic styles and their short films have no clear thematic approach (as there were in metropolitan movie anthologies set in NYC and Paris).

Gondry co-adapted a tale originally set in New York, showing how an indie film director's girlfriend finds purpose in life by turning into a wooden chair. Cute idea = cute title: Interior Design. Carax imagined a one-eyed Jesus-like freak emerging murderously from the city's sewers. Gross idea = gross title: Merde. Bong went into the house and mind of an urban recluse (with its own modern Japanese nomenclature, hikikomori) who re-joins the world after 11 years when he makes contact with his pizza delivery girl during an earth tremor (Shaking Tokyo).

It's possible, but pointless, to identify motifs such as loneliness, self-awareness, urban isolation and pressure. They appear dominant, almost malevolent forces in the vast organised chaos of Tokyo, in its neat narrow lanes and cramped living spaces, its human anthill of polite non-connecting citizens. Admirably, the trio of directors did take their audiences into the city's back streets, away from the cliche-ed urban images, most effectively in Bong's mildly futuristic vision of a Tokyo where everyone's a recluse and pizzas are delivered by robots.

They record moments that help an outsider recall or imagine Japanese quirks, good and bad from origami packaging artistry to apartment storage rituals, racist fears to male chauvinism. But they do not add up to an overview of a city that warrants an exclamatory title.

Oldboy

"15 Years of Imprisonment ... 5 Days of Vengeance". That was the movie's sales tag, and it's all anyone needs to know before watching Chanwook Park's Oldboy, the second (2003) feature in his so-called "Vengeance Trilogy".

This movie version of a manga "comic" book is a horror epic and its synopsis is mind-blowingly complex. In typical Park fashion, it's also shot through with scenes of outrageously noir humour. The Korean director's black artistry is as polished as ever, gleaming like evil gems adorning sets that are exquisitely composed, framed and lit.

The two lead actors perform their bizarre roles well, as old boys of the same co-ed Catholic school. One, drunken buffoonish Daesu Oh (Min-sik Choi) is kidnapped when his daughter' three years old. For 15 years, he's held prisoner and then allowed to go free, given five days to find out why he'd been confined and seek his revenge. He's introduced to a young female sushi chef, eats a live octopus at her counter, faints and moves into her apartment and love-life.

The other schoolboy, Woo-jin (Ji-tae Yu), is eventually revealed. The scheming millionaire brother of a girl who died at their school, he too is seeking revenge, in ways even Macchiavelli might spurn.

Now, spoilers are spilt. The brother and sister loved each other, perhaps incestuously, and the ex-prisoner is the father of the girl, whom he'd been accused of killing. Double incest is an unusual basis for a melodrama, horror film and fantasy, and I cannot imagine how - or why - an American version of this movie is in production.

The original plotline could never get a green light in the USA. A dozen key, gruesome and gory plot details will have to vanish. Another dozen red herrings, macabre footnotes and mood enhancers won't survive the film's first American production conference. On second thoughts, one cannot wait to see what happens to this scenario in its American reincarnation.

The multi-award-winning Korean movie earned the Cannes Jury Grand Prize and is admirable. So, some people think, is sado-masochism.

Night & fog

Ann Hui, a consistently good and personal director, studied an arch-typical Hong Kong "New Town", Tin Shui Wai, twice.

In The Way We Are [Tin Shui Wai Night and Day in Cantonese], she showed sweet-natured ordinary Hongkongers (a single mother and her teenage son) helping an elderly neighbour. The next year, in 2009, [Tin Shui Wai] Night and Fog, her production team focused on the true story of a family's murder-suicide in the distant New Territories residential outpost. The juxtaposition felt deliberate, as if Hui felt the need to absolve and bless Tin Shui Wai.

Dubbed "Hong Kong's City of Sadness" by the local media, the town had previously been covered sensationally by Laurence Lau's Beseiged City. Like other New Territories urbanisations (nearby Yuen Long and Tuen Mun gaining much media attention), Tin Shui Wai became associated with social problems, notably prostitution, gangs, suicide and unhappy cross-border marriages.

Hui's docudrama is gripping, even though its tragic outcome (stabbing to death of a family of four) is shown in the opening scenes. She highlights the greenery and spaciousness of the new town, and shows that it has a supportive social network (albeit comprising over-worked local councilors, immature social workers, an ill-equipped battered wives' shelter and a police force that cannot interfere in family disputes). Hui's reconstructions of the thoughts and actions of everyone involved, plus neighbours, family members locally and in the Mainland, also seem realistic but it appears that she could only scratch the surface. A fully fictionalised account might have found clearer reasons for a tragedy.

A middle-aged man brought his second bride and their young twin daughters from Sichuan into a government housing block in Tin Shui Wai. An unemployed renovation worker, surviving on social security and daily catches of fish, he's mentally disturbed, but only mildly at first. The young wife works as a waitress in a noodles cafe. Their initial passion in China is illustrated clearly, but it isn't made clear how they met (in Shenzhen?) or why their romance had died by the time of her arrival in Hong Kong.

Short-tempered to a dangerous extent, bitter, and feeling tricked, humiliated and unloved by the younger woman, the man lashes out and ejects her and the girls from the apartment. Reading between the movie's blurred lines, the woman and her Mainland family were probably conniving peasants eager to take advantage of a boastful Hong Kong man. His seduction of a sister-in-law is designed to minimise pity for his situation.

Simon Yam fits the role well. Many of Hong Kong's former romantic idols matured handsomely as actors, and Yam is one of the best examples of a star not afraid to sport a balding head, paunchy stomach, bad teeth and murderous leer. The young Mainland actress facing him (Jingchu Zhang) is less credible, her sweet-natured face not registering the depth of emotions that the audience needs to believe she provoked in her husband.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance [MV] was the first of three films in the "Vengeance Trilogy" from South Korean director Chan-wook Park. His fifth feature, it appeared in 2002. Old Boy [OB] followed the next year, and Lady Vengeance [LV] in 2005.

Park is a unique talent, and it's indicative that the only special feature on the DVD of MV is a sequence of story board sketches outlining the highlights of the ultra-violent movie.

In the movie, even in the goriest most shocking incidents, the aesthetics of the storyboarding are clear, in Park's meticulous composition of each scene's colour balance, lighting effects, off-screen sound effects and actors' ensemble poses. Early in MV, in the steel factory where Ryu (charismatic Ha-kyun Shin) the deaf-and-dumb anti-hero works, splashes and lines of green decorate the set. They were designed to complement Ryu's green hair dye.

The whole film is so artfully self-conscious, one knows that the seemingly chaotic jump cuts in the storyline must also be deliberate. Frequently, the audience is forced - deliberately alienated, I'd guess - into seeing a character or a plot development as both inexplicable and unrealistic.

If Park's quartet of screenwriters, including himself, were creating social melodramas, an audience might sneer at such cinematic conceits. When the scenario bristles with deep black humour and shocking moments of gore and sadism, a viewer is forced to drop his jaw and gape in disbelief. Park is Hitchcock on a much higher, riper level, at times almost sickening, always engrossing.

Can a mass masturbation scene be a comedic triumph? Has anyone ever used bottles of urine to mark the passage of time? Can the ghost of a kidnapped girl be shown to make her grieving father (another bewitching Park regular, Kang-ho Song) laugh? Can we wait ten minutes to guess why the anti-hero has a gash in his stomach?

The basic story is simple. The deaf-dumb man and his revolutionary-anarchist girlfriend kidnap a rich man's daughter to raise money for an organ transplant for the man's sister. A mentally retarded stranger, akin to Lear's Fool, stumbles by and the girl dies accidentally. From then on, revenge is rampant, blood seeps and teems, and the framing of each scene remains mesmerising evidence of a very disturbed cinematic genius.

Genius, yes, because there are few movies that compel a viewer to seek out their sequels, fewer that demand replays in order to see the creative methods in the seeming madness.

Tony Manero

Every country's film industry has historical lodes of inspiration. France had the Occupation and Algeria, England the Blitz and Thatcher. Argentina and Chile still mine their periods of military dictatorship. Chile's Pinochet regime had the rawest sources: Tony Manero is one man whose ambition, crimes, hangers-on and local neighbourhood personify that nation's sickness.

Co-written by its lead actor, Alfredo Castro, the dark and gloomy tale focuses on Raul, an impotent middle-aged man determined to win a TV competition for the best lookalike for John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever.

He's playing the part in a local theatre production, and he's obsessed with it. The movie is playing in a nearby cinema and he watches it obsessively, repeating its dialogue and Travolta's arm gestures. Raul is clearly too old for the part, and Castro the actor is more of a lookalike for Roberto Benigni on a deadpan day. The character's obsession doesn't make sense, and the minor characters in his life seem to know that too.

It doesn't help a non-Chilean's appreciation of the scenario to be shown a lead role who seems to lack any normal social morality. Soon after his first appearance in grimy Santiago back streets, Raul rushes to the aid of an old woman who's been mugged. Invited into her home, he kills her, literally with his bare hands, without apparent thought, steals her TV set and shares canned fish meat with her pet cat. Was it meaningful that she'd admired General Pinochet's blue eyes?

He rifles and abandons the still-breathing body of a political activist shot by Pinochet's policemen. He rages with an expressionless face, enlivened only by a plan to build a glass-tiled disco floor for his stage. At the end of the film, when the TV audience only awards him the runner-up prize, the screen fades to black and the audience knows his next moves.

Does Raul represent Pinochet himself, or lower-class Chilean self-delusions, or Chile's national madness? Did Travolta's film character stand for shallow US cultural influences or CIA machinations? It's hard to know. Or care. In this movie, as in Raul's world, there is no justice, no hope and consequently not enough good reasons to watch it.

Capitalism: a love story

Food Inc. was nominated for Best Documentary Oscar and earned US$4 million in its home box office. Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore's latest (2009) assault on the American system, didn't get an Oscar nomination but it grossed US$14 million. Is it more than three times better? Does that explain its relative success?

Yes and No. Yes, it's many times better as movie education and entertainment. No, a radical viewpoint such as Moore's only gets into multiplexes because Moore is his own ungainly star attraction and, more importantly, because the Weinstein brothers' distribution and publicity machine backed him. With good commercial reasons: Moore is a Woody Allen of political documentaries. He always turns out a competent product that's worth buying.

In one of his customary stunts, Moore goes to Wall Street to find out what a derivative is. Can I get some advice, he asks office workers exiting the towers. Don't make another movie, one responds, and Moore includes that mock-modest put-down. At the end of the movie, though, his commentary suggests that he's getting tired of the fight, and hopes another generation of rabble-rousers will join the battle against America's forces of capitalist evil.

The movie's title, and his customary references to his middle-class Catholic home in Flint, Michigan, are Moore's saddened assessment of an American Dream that was worth loving. It went sour and became worthy of hatred, in Moore's unforgiving eyes, when it was taken over by Wall Street, by the self-serving very rich top 1 per cent of the population.

FDR's call for a second Bill of Rights was ignored, Jimmy Carter's warning about greed was an incentive for the very rich to get Reagan into power. He was a puppet of Regan, just as W was Cheney's. Clinton consolidated the stranglehold of Goldman Sachs on America's economic and financial systems. Politicians in Congress were bought, and funds were even thrust into Obama's campaign. Moore doesn't follow that particular money trail, but his fans will sense that the next documentary of accusations is writing itself in Pennsylvania Avenue.

This time, there is a damning array of facts and opinions, designed to convince the jury of movie-goers that America needs to divorce itself from its current undemocratic and perverted capitalist system. At times, of course, Moore goes OTT with photogenic gimmicks. Less forgivably, he appears to skew an argument that he could have won without trickery.

There's a lengthy segment showing how corporate giants buy "Dead Peasant" insurance policies on their employees' lives. But Moore never gives anyone a chance to explain why corporations might want to insure that the sudden death of an employee didn't result in a loss of profitability due to retraining and re-organisational needs. He doesn't ask insurance companies and their brokers why and how they flogged this product, why no company thought of offering the employees involved a share of the proceeds. Irritated, I felt swindled too, by Moore.

That's his strength as a movie-maker. He does arouse his audience. He shows he's angry, albeit like a court jester. The very rich would have to invent him if he hadn't invented himself. He's one way that truly revolutionary cries can be ignored.

Food, inc.

Robert Kenner, the creator of Food, Inc., probably sees himself as an organic documentary-maker rather than a big-brand producer.

His hour-and-a-half survey of American agri-business practices comprises a half-dozen small case studies. They are constructed to add up to a damning indictment, with chapter headings and final notes to guide consumers' comprehension of the evils being done by the capitalist top dogs in their food chain.

Chicken production houses akin to mushroom farms. A meat manufacturing cartel which cannot be given that name. Lobbyists and executives who run the industry's regulatory bodies. Chemical giants that control a whole crop, as Monsanto does through soybean patent laws. Industrial efficiencies that now lead quicker to disease and epidemics. The phenomenal cost to the US and the world of subsidising American corn over-production. One can almost hear subliminal boos in the folksy musical soundtrack.

Kenner does offer some balance, some cheering news. Ironically, it is Wal-Mart that emerges with pass marks, because it embraced organic products in its market-savvy way. We're also shown several ethical idealists, including the organic yogurt manufacturer who industrialised his production lines. He was bought out by Danone, a major conglomerate, and allowed to go on running his own profitable business. There is, or should be, the movie avers, a lot of room for organic products, for a return to hands-on small-scale farming.

Inevitably, there's little screen time for doubting Thomases, and the food industry giants were foolish to "decline" interviews for the film. Kenner doesn't wonder if Wal-Mart squeezes organic farmers' margins any softer than their industrial suppliers. He doesn't expose lobbyists and politicians who line each other's pockets. He doesn't query organic merchandising claims. By screening too much of a free-range farmer's hectoring overbearing style, Kenner actually made me want my food to be produced out of sight and out of mind, in places where I wouldn't see live chickens decapitated.

Animal rights activists have to ask their audiences facts of agri-life and -death. Do we care if our modern chicken gets twice as big-breasted as it used to, in half the time, by being reared in the dark and fed chemically-adjusted food? If it tastes almost as good as it used to, and costs less than it did before? Do we care if agri-business workers and supermarket consumers are also blindfolded, cloned, formatted and prepackaged? It's the whole system that needs radical reform, not just the food chain. After this movie, one can only put the latest Michael Moore in the DVD player, and hope for sharper insights.

Glorious 39

Stephen Poliakoff is a prodigious and prolific talent. So are male rabbits, but they do not have cartes blanches for British film industry funds, top actors' services and BBC screen time. Glorious 39 is writer-director Poliakoff's latest (2009) take on 20th-Century English socio-political history. For Poliakoff, that's the history of upper-class and Establishment families.

Such families live in photogenic mansions blessed with lovely furniture and fittings, gorgeous costumes and diffident Bill Nighy. This time, the director's favourite actor is the head of the Keyes family. Its whole class is keen to hang on to power in a world where the word "Glorious" used to refer to the beginning of the pheasant shooting season.

It is also the nickname of Keyes' eldest, adopted daughter, played by Romola (Atonement) Garai. Joining her in the star-studded scenario are Julie Christie, David Tennant, Christopher Lee, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Northam, and a chubby young actor with the memorable family name of Kubrick-Finney. Other period-drama faces appear, for this is a compendium movie for lovers of Brideshead, Gosford Park, Agatha Christie, Andrew Davies' adaptations, etc and other up-market soap operas a la Poliakoff.

Technically, they are delightful televisual confectionery in pretty wrappings. There's little to chew on in the screenplays, but the dialogue trips the light fantastic decorously. The morality playfulness of the finished products is beyond reproach, as are the anti-Nazi anti-appeasement pro-Churchillian sentiments in this one. Anyone who needs a potted history of politics in 1939, pictures of pretty symbolic cats posing, and lovingly lit shots of full dorsal nudity, may find this this to be a classy entertainment. But will Poliakoff ever stop churning them out?

Disgrace

Australian actors Steve Jacobs and Anna-Maria Monticelli co-wrote and -produced La Spagnola, a wildly comic melodrama highlighting the vengeful anger of a passionate Spanish widow in an Australian nightmare setting. Directed by Jacobs, it appeared in 2001. After seven years, the pair of creative talents produced their second feature, and it's equally out-of-the-ordinary above-average cinema.

Disgrace is a faithful version of the Booker Prize-winning novel by South African Nobel-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, examining an unlikeable Cape Town university Eng Lit professor in a racist, sexist, post-Apartheid setting. He's played by one of America's more individualistic actors, John Malkovich. Although he dominates the screen as usual, he is strongly offset by a South African newcomer, Jessica Haines, as his lesbian daughter working a small farm. He retreats there when forced to resign his post after seducing a student of Indian background.

Malkovich's accent sounds right, academic English with a muted South African snarl. His role is that of a sardonic egocentric self-consciously living up to his own Byronic ideals, and his stay in the bush gradually forces him into an awareness of other people's harsh realities. A black farmer is encroaching on the daughter's land, black youths rob the farm and rape the daughter, and other symbols of change and ageing humiliate the professor. He will, one senses, need to change and humble himself by the end of the movie.

Coetzee's novel is a picture of white South Africa in miniature: decadent, arrogant, increasingly irrelevant and self-pitying. Those are emotions that Malkovich has long portrayed well, even comically well in Burn After Reading. He's in his element here, on location in the empty beauty of eastern Cape province.

It seems strange that official Australian production funds and yet another American acting talent were used to dramatise a modern classic novel about South Africa. Some location work in Australia may have justified it, and hopefully will be enough to ensure that Jacobs and his partner don't have to wait another seven years to deliver another masterful movie.

Shrek 4ever after

Shrek 4ever After is a punishing title, playing on the pronunciation of four, this being the fourth instalment in Dreamworks' biggest money-making franchise. At times, the movie's marketed as The Final Chapter, which it should be. There's a point at which imitation, of oneself as well as others, is not flattering to a franchise.

Shrek 4 was inspired by It's a Wonderful Life, the classic Capra movie in which a man discovers what it means to lose a life that he thought was boring and useless. This is what the big green ogre feels when a mid-life crisis explodes during the first birthday party for his three children.

This is the opportunity Rumpelstiltskin has been waiting for, and the mean little devil might have been more interesting if his design and voice hadn't constantly reminded me of the ghastly, and funnier, nerdier creep in Pixar's The Incredibles. The voice of Rumpel, Walt Dohrn, was an animator for Shrek 3, and it's hard to hear good reasons why such an unknown quality was cast for a co-starring role beside the good old faithfuls of Myers, Murphy, Diaz and Banderas.

Rumpel gives Shrek a deal of a lifetime, one day of happy retro ogreness in return for one day of Shrek's life. He takes Shrek's birthday, which means the ogre never saved Princess Fiona, or met other characters from the first three instalments of his animated life. Somewhat incredibly, he knows he did and many of them do reappear, together with a parade of cutely apt old songs from Abba and other folk that middle-aged Shrek audiences will recognise and therefore be happy to hum while their kids wonder why the parents are chuckling nostalgically.

Fans of Terry Gilliam will be tickled too, seeing Dreamworks imitate his distinctive graphic style during Rumpel's theatrical address to his Far Far Away nation. There are other doffs of the cap to masters of the animation and CGI arts, and an inevitable surfeit of 3D settings. Those depend much on Rumpel's wicked coven of broomstuck witches, who provide aerial conflict a la Harry Potter and deadpan facials in the zombie style of Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture.

There are some good jokes, some well imagined fight sequences, and enough entertainment to justify the movie's production. Shrek is of course saved in time by True Love's Kiss, but he's a thing of the past, and I'm yet to be convinced that Puss in Boots could ever succeed in filling his big shoes.

Tetro

Many reviewers have seen Tetro as a semi-autobiographical study of an artistic family by Francis Cord Coppola. His father was a composer, his mother an actress, and the two brothers in Tetro have a symphony orchestra conductor as their father. Like their writer-producer-director, the movie brothers are transplanted from the Mediterranean to America. So what, a moviegoer shrugs: is the movie worth seeing for itself rather than its cultural references?

It's a pretentious self-conscious work of B&W cinematic artistry, but they don't make many of them any more, and not like they used to, like this. Cobble-stoned Buenos Aires looks and feels a perfect setting for such a melodramatically old-fashioned tale of fraternal love and filial hatred. We are in a setting where Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, Rossellini, Fellini and other icons lurk behind mirrors and shadows. There's even a manic upstairs neighbour and a drag artist who've wandered in from an Almodovar plot, and a cameo role for that director's often-used comic muse, Carmen Maura.

Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich is Bennie, a teenage American cruise ship busboy, travelling into the grimy heart of the city to track down his older brother, Tetro (Vincent Gallo), for the first time in a long time. Gallo is a bitter would-be writer with a middle-ageing Argentine lover (Spanish actress Maribel Verdu). Gallo frowns and growls in immaculately-lit close-ups, while Ehrenreich smiles prettily as if amused at being asked to channel a young DiCaprio.

In the first of many square-screen sudden colour flashbacks, Gallo's mother is shown to be an opera singer killed in a car crashed by Tetro. We'd already been told that, and what a son-of-bitch the boys' father was. Bennie had a different, later mother who's been in a coma for nine years, we're also told early on. There's a sweet uncle too, and it's hard to credit that any Spanish-blooded family would really be this Italianate.

When dialogue for such melodramatic devices is conducted in Spanish, the scenario's moody neuroses are almost credible. Not so comfortably in the English-language passages though, especially when Gallo is uttering Methodic punctuations or Verdu is obliged to get the plot moving with clearly enunciated explanations. Meanwhile, any doubts as to the emotions a moviegoer should be having are clarified by the musical soundtrack. It tinkles, tangos, sings arias and chatters in accordion tones whenever necessary.

Although the movie can be made to sound risible, it's actually a delight to watch, a cinematic time-warp experience. It worked better for me with the volume turned off and Spanish subtitles switched on. Maybe the movie would have been more effective as an homage to silent films.

Creation

No one can object to the BBC and the UK Film Council producing period dramas. They do them very well. Like the Royal Family, they are a defining element of being English. Others are love of animals and a belief in good education. Creation shows them all when it takes us off to meet Charles Darwin in his Victorian era. He and Mrs Darwin are acted by Paul Bettany and his real-life wife (Jennifer Connelly).

Director Jon Amiel, whose ground-breaking work for BBC TV's The Singing Detective led him to Hollywood, turns in a movie that looks grand. It sounds less imposing because its screenplay fails, almost inevitably, in the tough task of presenting Darwin's long-delayed and arduous writing of The Origin of the Species in dramatic and cinematic terms. Darwin's health and marriage may have been failing to recover from the death of his first daughter, but that's a melodramatic ploy rather than a critical plot detail.

Darwin's theory of evolution shook the 19th-Century world, and Connelly struggles to convey conventional God-fearing reactions to her husband's ideas about natural selection and the non-existence of God as a seven-day creative wonder. Darwin himself was sorely troubled by the realisation where his review of facts of nature was leading him; Bettany merely sickens and ages.

The movie is a finely-costumed, well-photographed history lesson. It could be a useful schoolroom primer, as Thomas Huxley (Toby Young), the local vicar (Jeremy Northam) and other contemporaries have conversations rich in quotable comments about God, apes and archbishops, science and love.

Bettany and Connelly may have known what their latest joint project lacked: they first worked together on A Beautiful Mind, a movie which did manage to make its audience sense the angst and agony of intellectual life.

Cold souls

Andrij (Andrew) Parekh is one name to conjure with while watching Cold Souls. The movie's co-producer and cinematographer, he makes writer-director Sophie Barthes' debut feature look brilliantly, brightly melancholy. That sounds oxymoronic, which is apt for this surreal comedy-thriller.

Charlie Kaufman was clearly one of Barthes' key inspirations for her bizarre tale of a distraught actor (Paul Giamatti playing himself, a la Kaufman's Being John Malkovich). Challenged by despair while rehearsing Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Paul resorts to a surgical procedure that extract and stores his troubled chickpea-sized soul temporarily.

Soul Storage's director (David Strathairn) has a cross-border deal with a Russian gangster's soul-trafficking outfit, which employs mules to transport transplanted souls in their heads. Bereft of his soul, Paul becomes a bad actor and borrows the soul of a female Russian poet. His character having also changed, to the discomfort of his wife (Emily Watson), Paul wants his original soul back. But the gangster's wife, who's a bad TV soap opera actress, has had Paul's soul secretly lent to her because she thinks it's that of Al Pacino.

When she won't return it, Paul travels to Moscow with the sympathetic mule. As to be expected, the story gets somewhat complex and silly from then on, with people popping in and out of the soul extractor and the Russian soul's donor committing suicide. All might be well that ends well, but it doesn't and the suddenness of the lovely closing scene of sunset on Brighton Beach is like a slap in the face. A bizarre and surprisingly refreshing slap, like the movie itself.

Tarnation

Sometimes, a movie almost creates its own genre, truly sui generis as Roman Empire cineastes might have murmured. Synonyms for "in its own class" in dictionaries include "unique" and "peculiar". I can't imagine any moviegoer disagreeing that Jonathan Caouette's autobiographical documentary feature Tarnation is uniquely peculiar, a one-off cinematic experience and achievement that is unforgettable.

Caouette [JC from now on] is a young gay actor whose parents split before he was born. Following her childhood accident, JC's mother had been given electric shock therapy on and off for years, and he had been adopted by her parents, his psychologically disturbed grandparents, who had a grocery store in Texas. They indulged the boy by giving him a movie camera.

He made home movies from the age of 11, filming himself among other things as a range of neurotic sorely-troubled Southern women. An unashamed narcissist, he photographed many hours of his life, family and lovers. There is no clear explanation how he earned the money to pay for stock and processing; he spends more time acting for his own camera than professionally.

By the time he assembled his autobiopic, his mother had overdosed on lithium, he'd gone back to Texas from NYC to collect her and collate filmed recollections of her, the surviving grandparent and the father he'd located somehow. He acknowledges that he was frightened about the likelihood of developing mental problems himself.

Old out-of-focus home videos, very amateur interview sets and other odds and ends including telephone machine messages could not per se provide the tools for an engrossing documentary. They do when effective, mesmerising film editing splices them into and around a vast range of period film/TV clips, news items and montages. Large captions provide simple chronological notes, pauses, and on-screen commentary for a whirligig of images that often look like an acid trip or a riotous display of photo-shoppery, with appropriate musical soundtracks.

JC is seen developing from a wild Houston pretty boy into a low-key Eddie Izzard lookalike. He shows himself in a loving long-term gay relationship in NYC, and his only addictions seem to be those to his camera and his need to find reasons for his mother's madness.

Production credits suggest that a pair of successful independent directors enabled JC to complete his movie - Gus Von Sant and John Cameron Mitchell (for whom JC worked three years later as an actor on Shortbus). It is a movie that's worth watching, but not easy watching.