Ryan

Ryan, which won the short animation Oscar in 2005, belongs to a very specialised genre: live action with animation. Not cutely, as in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but astonishingly, grotesquely, and very fittingly for a documentary study of a drug-ravaged master cartoonist of the 1970s, Ryan Larkin.

The 14-minute short was designed and directed by Chris Landreth, an American animator and former engineer working in Canada. Larkin was an Irish-Canadian Montreal resident, one of whose own landmark short cartoons, Walking, was itself an Oscar nominee (in 1970).

He died in 2007 from lung cancer that reached his brain. A heavy smoker and alcoholic, he'd only managed to lose his drug addictions by the time (2003) that Landreth interviewed him in the canteen of a Montreal hostel for the homeless.

Landreth's unique approach to a bio rightly wowed his Oscar academy peers. He'd "interpreted" filmed heads of interviewees (himself, Larkin, the man's former woman friend, and one of his producers) and digitally modified them with freak effects, swathes of coloured strands, metallic structures and lost parts. Ryan's limbs became wooden branches, Landreth's preachiness about Larkin's beer-drinking earned him an illuminated halo, and all of Ryan's brain explodes with anger when recalling his past lack of money and access.

The "making" of the short animation is detailed in a 52-minute documentary Alter Egos, written and directed by Laurence Green. It's more revelatory than its punning title might suggest, and it's disappointing that Green has no further entries in his IMDb page. He sat in on Landreth's interviews, production meetings and, most interestingly, Landreth's private screening of the short film's tape for Larkin in his hostel.

Already described as "emotionally fragile", the tremulous, doe-eyed, near-stammering Larkin is clearly upset by the presentation of his skeletal body, angry edginess and deformed mind. The artist hadn't fully realised what he'd let himself in for, and Green's documentary intensifies an audience's pained awareness of Larkin's psychological difficulties. Landreth claims that he'd hoped to "evoke a feeling of sympathy", and lets the artist explain his inability to cope with the "mathematics" of movie production.

He compares his labour-intensive work to that of 13th-Century monks illustrating manuscripts. One senses why cocaine brought him release and inspiration, and then killed his art by overloading him with ideas ("every 3 and a half minutes").

Landreth's only other IMDb-recorded creation since his Oscar triumph is The Spine (2009), another co-production by the National Film Board of Canada. That should also be worth a serendipitous discovery on a DVD. With luck, it too will have a useful "making-of" extra.

Centurion

British writer-director Neil Marshall gave the B-class horror genre a touch of experimental class with his 8-minute debut, Combat (1999). His first full-length movie celebrated the werewolf in a nightmare for six soldiers lost in Scotland (Dog Soldiers (2002), and he won many awards for his very special-effects-ive subterranean nail-biter about real cave women, Descent (2005). Next in his black spotlight was a futuristic plague, Doomsday (2008).

He's obviously addicted to blood and violence, as his latest UK production reveals graphically. Centurion revels in the gory tale of seven 2nd-Century survivors from the Ninth Legion who must hack their way back to Roman lines through the mists, snow and moorland territory of Scotland's merciless Picts.

The long-unconquered natives had ambushed the Legion, and captured its general. He's given a Russell Crowe-ish smiling stylishness and a buffed chest by Dominic West (back from the States and 60 episodes of The Wire). His band of valiant legionnaires are led by centurion Quintus Dias, presented primly by the equally buffed Michael Fassbender (Hunger and Fish Tank). He and West had recently worked together on The Devil's Whore, a successful UK TV four-parter, giving the casting director an easy job.

As always in a band-of-brotherly plot, and appropriately for a real Roman legion, there's a rainbow of ethnic characters, including a black and Greek. Quintus was the son of a slave gladiator, articulates better than anyone else (in modern English), and is fluent in Pict. The young Pict witch who conveniently appears in the last 30 minutes to tend legionnaires' wounds also speaks the language of the Empire, which is convenient for making her a love interest for Quintus (Imogen Poots, fresh from 28 Days Later, essaying a somewhat Irish accent).

Gorlacon, the Pict leader (Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen), is also bilingual, and his fiercesome female double agent, Etain, is conveniently mute, so that Ukrainian Olga (Quantum of Solace) Kurylenko can concentrate on her Amazonian role as a nationalist tracker, archer, fast killer and woad-wearer.

Parallels can be seen between the Roman Empire's failure to subdue the Picts and modern Western empires' disasters in Vietnam or Afghanistan, and Marshall's gory screenplay includes a demonstration of ancient water-boarding. Ironically, though they triumph in the movie (forcing the Romans to retreat southwards, behind their under-construction Hadrian's Wall), the Picts lost out eventually. Their dead language is replaced by Gaelic (with subtitles in olde-styled fontes) and historians will nod merrily, noting that Latin is another defunct language.

This movie is a valiant effort, rendered watchable mainly by the sweeping, chilling photography of Scottish wildernesses by Sam McCurdy. Less appealing to gorefest lovers are the flying blood and body parts. Marshall and his SFX team seem to have employed a wild paint technique, presumably diminishing the air of reality intentionally to create a more cartoonish, less offensive representation of carnage.

Despicable me

Despicable Me has been a critical and box-office success in 2010. It will be interesting to see whether this animated comedy looks as good in 2D as it did in 3D, for which its creative team (American) devised some cute set-pieces and crisply-drawn cleanly-executed (in Paris) colourfulness.

The titular Me is Slav-accented Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), a self-declared superbad villain who's been out-badded by a red-pyjama-ed youngster, Vector (How I Met Your Mother's Jason Segel). He stole the Great Pyramid; Gru counters with a plan to shrink and steal the moon.

His bank manager is not supportive, Vector steals the Far Eastern shrink gun Gru had stolen, and Gru's only hope of regaining it involves a trio of orphan girls who can gain entry to Vector's heavily fortified mansion. Back at Gru's home base, an army of yellow pill-shaped minions labour comically while a dour old English scientist (Russell Brand) invents bizarre robots.

Having to adopt the girls to make use of them, grumpy Gru is overwhelmed by their childish demands, taking them to a funfair in the hope of losing them (a grand pictorial excuse for high-flying 3D tricks). Obliged to read them a bedtime story (from an amusing three-fingered children's book), he eventually, of course, starts to like and love them and their ballet classes.

Can he steal the moon and attend their dance performance on the same day? Will his monstrous Eastern-European-accented mother (Julie Andrews) ever learn to respect him? Can Vector and his banker-father overcome Gru? Can he save the girls from Vector?

The plot is as childish as the forgoing indicates, and there aren't enough in-jokes for adults (one passing reference to Lehman Brothers' Bank of Evil is a cinematic swallow that isn't followed by a Pixar-style summer of witty wordplay for grown-ups). The movie, like the girls' assorted characters and the munchkinny minions, is very delikeable but not loveable enough to warrant a rave. It ends well, with inventive 3D in the minions' stretching efforts, and a sequel featuring them is inevitable.

And in 2D? It's better: undistracted by 3D effects, a viewer can revel in the brilliant tricks of the animator's trade, including some exceptional illusions of reflections (astronaut bowls), explosions, water, hair (strands) and eyes. Chosen angles are exciting, the trio of girls are neatly individualised, Gru's bad English is occasional fun and subsidiary characters are enchanting (orphanage matron, tourists at pyramid, differing minion characters). In an ideal world, this movie could be the years's animated Oscar winner and Toy Story 3 would get the Best Film award.

Defendor

Vancouver-born Peter Stebbings started acting when he was 12, went to New York a decade later and, at the age of 28 began a relatively busy career as a TV and movie actor. In 2005, he thought up a screenplay that featured a mentally challenged comic hero. As no Hollywood was interested, it took Stebbings three years to raise the production funds, helped by Telefilm Canada's contributing a quarter of them (C$1 million). Defendor could finally be made, in Toronto and Hamilton, as Stebbings' debut direction.

Some actors who move into a director's chair seem to have spent their previous on-set lives noting fun camera angles. Danny De Vito created charming cinematographic conceits for The War of the Roses, and Stebbings brings a similar comic artfulness to his spoof of the action-thriller superhero genre.

There's a fun-filled set piece showing the maladroit hero attempting to break into the villain's mansion, as seen through a door with warped glass panels. Less successfully, the camera's vantage point during the hero's examination by a court-appointed psychologist (Ontario-born Korean-Canadian Sandro Oh) seems to be through her arm. Throughout the movie, it's evident that it's a labour of love and long thought about framing and lighting effects by Stebbings. They'd all have been wasted without an effective actor for the title role, and Woody Harrelson filled the bill perfectly.

Flashbacks to his childhood construct a simple-minded and repressed character who can't help being honest. He's desperate to track down and destroy evil "Captain Industry", whose drugs killed his mother. In the process, he must fight for justice and the underdogs, donning a make-up mask and black tights. Many times he runs into a crooked cop (played wryly and dryly well by Greek-Canadian Elias Koteas).

He belongs to the big local villain, a fat Serbian (Slavs being fashionably villainous), and a young prostitute who belonged to them both accidentally becomes Defendor's accomplice (given a street-cred complexity by Kat Dennings). There's an almost too-good-to-be true former boss and friend who watches out for the Defendor's interests, a sympathetic police chief, and there's little time left for other characters because Harrelson's bumbling and insanely courageous hero is dominating the screenplay, very delightfully. The occasional arch word plays his character utters with a knowing twinkle suggest the supposedly simple man is not as foolish as he acts.

The overall plot has similar confusing contradictions, suddenly leaping from amiable slap-stickiness into a lethally black mood in the gangster genre, while the Defendor (who deliberately mis-spells his name but pronounces it correctly at times) switches from a paternal to an emotional attachment to the female interest. Harrelson gets away with it all, his eyes staring dramatically through their mask of black cream, his vocal tone and scripted jokes winning his audience over with righteous self-mockery.

Stebbings kept his day job, and is still screen-acting. Sadly for him, he has no listed writing or directing projects. Sony bought his movie's US distribution rights, but didn't release it. It was shown in a few cinemas by its producers, and went quickly to DVD. The movie and its creator warranted better treatment.

No puedo vivir sin ti

Taiwanese director Leon Dai gave his 2009 movie a Spanish title for overseas markets, maybe on the assumption that international audiences would be attracted better by the romantic No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti than the prosaic Cannot Live Without You.

That year's Golden Horse Film Festival jurors weren't bothered either way, choosing the movie for Best Film, Best Director and Outstanding Taiwanese Film of the Year awards. It also won the Best Screenplay accolade for Dai and co-writer (and lead actor) Chen Wen-pin.

A deliberately simple, under-stated and stark B&W tale of a simple, poor and uneducated single father and his 7-year-old daughter, the docudrama was based on a real-life incident. The desperate man perched on a high bridge in Taipei, threatening to throw himself and the child off in protest at society's unfairness.

An underwater mechanic and day labourer in the Kaohsiung docks, fell between the cracks in a well-meaning bureaucratic society. In order to register his daughter for school, he needed to be her registered father. He wasn't, and a succession of gently Kafkaesque encounters in various government offices in Kaohsiung and Taipei led to increasing despair. Only one friend, a fellow Hakka schoolmate, could try to help, before the failed suicide and after the man's return from prison to Kaohsiung's docks. The daughter had been taken into state care and placed with unknown foster families.

The credibility of the ending can be disputed, but everything before it is a cinematic delight, beautifully photographed in B&W, shadow and light, showcasing Kaohsiung's harbour with a clarity that evokes the best of Italian neo-realism. Lead actor Chen is totally convincing as a loving father without guile, and Dai's direction and editing meticulously present bureaucrats not as villains but understanding guardians (and prisoners) of legal processes.

Every now and then, details (such as a sidewalk beggar and protest banners) seem designed to arouse, almost subliminally, an audience's consciousness of actual unfairness and hypocrisy in Taiwanese society. Dai, a movie actor since 1997, achieves much within his short (85-minute) second feature (after the very different, very sexy Twenty Something Taipei in 2002). Chen, the co-creator, is a total newcomer. Both are worth watching in the future.

Gold diggers

English. Feminist. Renaissance woman of arts, from dance and choreography to composing, playing and singing to theatre, TV, movie and opera direction to screenplay writer. In the movie history books for writing and directing the first feature-length movie premiered on cell-phones (Rage, 2009). Who else but Sally Potter.

Like many avant-garde directors, Potter has attracted some top acting talents for her movies, starting with Julie Christie in her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983). Tilda Swinton was the centrifugal force for Potter's main award-winning eccentricity, her adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1992). For The Man Who Cried (2000), she was joined by Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett and John Turturro, who all couldn't save it from critical maulings. Undeterred by Potter's below-par ratings in conventional features, Joan Allen signed up for Yes (2004). In 1996, Potter starred her dancing self in The Tango Lesson, alongside tango master Pablo Veron. Rage had Judi Dench and Jude Law among its interview heads.

The British and international film industries seem to admire Potter. I find it tempting to dismiss her as a Jill of all creative trades and mistress of none, so I will. That subjective judgment is also buttressed by her five shorts included on the British Film Institute's Gold Diggers DVD. Three of them are experimental scraps from her London Film-makers Coop period. Jerk (1969) is a few meaningless moments of high-speed B&W head shots; Play (1970) comprises split-screen colour/B&W overhead shots of children playing on a pavement, also purposelessly; Hors D'Oeuvres (1971) is totally ignored by her Wikipedia page, which may explain why I cannot recall seeing it, or have quickly repressed any memory of it. More professional, with a semi-narrative, The London Story (1986) had odd characters (a doorman, a cabinet minister, ice skater), an uncredited Potter and a dance routine for her in a red dress designed by Sandy Powell (an Oscar and BAFTA nominee for Orlando).

After dabbling successfully (getting a name for herself) in dance and theatre, Potter returned to film with Thriller (1979), a 30-minute scrapbook of dusty images of an attic stage set for La Boheme and oracular utterings of a black actress (Collette Laffont) who was one of two Mimis. It is reportedly a Marxist and anti-Freudian fable in addition to being feminist and indie, a winning blend in some cineaste circles.

Laffont's only other film role was in The Gold Diggers, in which she utters a lot more stilted and repetitive dialogue while helping Christie's persona (as a top model) find herself. Rose English also worked on both films (writing and acting), appeared on TV a few times in the 90s, and then vanished from IMDb listings. The movie's third co-writer was Lindsay Cooper, an occasional composer.

Potter employed a female cinematographer too for the B&W debut feature: Babette Mangolte, a Frenchwoman. Her long shots of Iceland scenery (standing in for the Yukon that's part of Christie's character's heritage) are beautiful, and one small pleasure to be gained from watching an otherwise pretentious non-narrative.

$9.99

Offbeat short story writer Etgar Keret had collaborated twice with clay animator Tatia Rosenthal, supported by the Tisch School of film art at NYU. Her low-budget clumsy clay modelling work for Crazy Glue and A Buck's Worth gave early signs of talent, clearly inspired by Keret's blackly comic view of urban relationships.

In the mid-2000s, the two Israelis gained backing from their government's film promotion unit and from its counterparts in Australia, federally and in the state of New South Wales. Rosenthal gathered a team of professional animators, and recorded Australian actors' voices at long distance (from New York), for her first full-length (71-minute) feature, $9.99.

Subtitled The Meaning of Life, it blends six of Keret's bizarre and soulful tales in its magically-realistic look at the interlocking lives of a Sydney apartment block's residents. They could of course live in any city, and British TV viewers will see some similarities with the cruder and ruder Crapston Villas. Rosenthal's award-winning clay models are rough-skinned angst-ridden characters, seeking "the meaning of life", the title of a mail-order booklet bought by an unemployed lead character for just $9.99.

His father's accidentally helped a homeless man commit suicide (a reprise of the Buck's Worth anecdote). His brother, a repo man, meets a super-model whose aversion to hair prompts him to shave fully and then invert his skin. One of their neighbours loses his fiancee and finds a trio of beery dropout tiny people in his apartment. The fiancee's a schoolteacher, one of whose pupils lives in the same block and names his piggy bank after an elderly widower living upstairs, who provides accommodation for the homeless man, transformed into an angel with swan wings.

The noirish dark-lit narrative is reminiscent of the work of one master of clay animation, Jan Svankmajer. Full-frontal nudity and slyly-camouflaged sex scenes are brilliantly depicted, and far from the comic satires of Captain America. As a creative director, Rosenthal is also more studiedly dramatic than Nick Park (Oscar-winning more than once for Wallace and Gromit), and her characters are more "human" and impressionistic works of art than Tim Burton's (Nightmare before Christmas, Corpse Bride).

As other DVDs' extras have illustrated, claymation and other slow-motion animation techniques require a lot of time and patient model manipulation. It's craftsmanship that becomes an art in the hands of a well-coordinated corps of professionals, from costumiers to film editors, music composers to lighting engineers.

The animated characters' off-screen voices are crucial, and the Australian connection worked well for the Israeli creative duo. They signed up some star names (Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Barry Otto, Ben Mendelsohn) that may have helped them gain international distribution. Less fortunately, the 2008 movie was eclipsed only a year later when Australia's own Mary and Max claymation movie (from Oscar-winning Adam Harvey Krumpet Elliot) opened to even greater acclaim and an Oscar short-list nomination. Although $9.99 is very good and arouses chuckles and contemplation, it's out-classed both for screenplay and animation. To be fair, it's in a different class of claymation artistry, and it warrants further feature-making.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

Chris Miller and Phil Lord worked together as producers on 17 episodes of TV's How I Met Your Mother, writing two of its episodes. Before that, they'd co-created, along with the usual big animation team, an animated TV series that lasted one 13-episode season, Clone High. They were young talents who hadn't done much else before they co-wrote and co-directed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Sony took a risk entrusting them with the 3D/IMAX animation feature. It paid off: the movie grossed well over $200 million globally.

They presumably sold their concept and themselves to the studio on the strength of the 30-page picture-book of the same name written and illustrated by Ron and Judi Barrett, on which they based their fast-paced tale of disaster-prone amateur inventor Flint Lockwood. First published in 1978, the book was a natural for adaptation to the giant screen: its anti-heroes are parts of a meteorological nightmare that brings spaghetti twisters, pizza slice fighting formations and assorted culinary culinary horrors from outer space.

Flint had created them with the machine he'd invented to bring new life and tastes to his home island, fated to survive only on tins of sardines. Re-named Chewandswallow, the town becomes a foodie's tourist destination with an ever-fattening mayor. Other key characters are Flint's emotionally shy father, a repressed nerdish TV weather girl, the overly emotional black policeman, his infant son and Steve, a small monkey given a basic translation machine by Flint.

Other characters of varying stereotypical roles populate this truly animated spoof of disaster movies such as Independence Day and Twister. As with all animated films, its artists flaunt their skills in creating images of water, shadows, explosions, mirrors and reflections. Most memorably, they dreamed up a marvellously textured jelly palace with trampoline flooring, edible statuary and three dimensions. Overall, this is a rare example of a feature whose DVD in 2D encourages its viewers to seek out a big-screen re-run in 3D or, even better surely, IMAX.

The characters' voices convey the snappy, occasionally witty, dialogue well and credibly. They embellish the cartoon personalities rather than demand to be recognised as those of self-assertive actors. Even James Caan, as Flint's bashful father, is suitably discreet.

Appropriately for an animated feature, its opening credits announce in the style of egocentric blockbuster movie-makers that it's "A film by ..." and then adds "many people". Lord and Miller know their business and their current project (featuring Lego) is awaited with pleasure.

Wolfman

Andrew Kevin Walker has written above-average horror movies, notably Se7en and Sleepy Hollow, less notably 8MM. David Self is a younger screenplay writer and adaptor, notably for The Road to Perdition. Working together they re-worked Curt Siodmak's screenplay for the 1941 Lon Chaney classic, The Wolf Man.

The tale of a rich 19th-Century English lycanthrope, his two sons and the woman who loved them both is an inevitable downer. The second son, bitten by his father, is fated (by gypsy lore and Scotland Yard police) to die. The supposedly happy ending is that a woman's love will enable him to die as a man and not in the guise of a beast with brutal strength and gory fur.

Naturally, the key ingredient for such a blood-drenched horror movie

is its special effects, and they are good. The CGI of misty, muddy old London are credible too, akin to created so effectively for Sherlock Holmes. The mostly British cast is also commendable, doing what they usually do, emoting calmly: Anthony Hopkins (Wolfman Sr), Art Malik (his loyal Indian servant), Emily Blunt (Wolfman Jr's love interest) and Anthony Sher (the splendidly supercilious mental asylum doctor attempting to cure Wolfman's delusions).

Australian Hugo Weaving is as dependable as always, as the mostly dead-pan Scotland Yard detective leading the hunt for the beastly killer, who's played the even more dead-pan Puerto Rican Benicio Del Toro. Hollywood's SFX doyen, Rick Baker, joined the production team led by director Joe Johnston, whose slow-paced track record (only one movie every few years) began with Honey, I Shrank the Kids and included Jumanji and the third Jurassic Park.

Put all the promising ingredients together and you end up, sadly, with a dead-pan slow-paced movie that looked and felt old and uninspired. Bodies are decapitated brightly, claws flash nicely, Hopkins smirks, Del Toro dies manfully, and one character is left with a bite, of course.

Repo men

Why do Hollywood studios ever entrust a multi-million-dollar movie to a first-time director?

They want to save costs, and first-timers are cheap, maybe even below union rates? No, that would be short-sighted, per the halfpenny of tar adage. The wannabee has a strong track record of working on movie sets in junior capacities? Okay, it's admirable to workup from the ranks. He/she made an award-winning attention-grabbing film school short? Of such pretentious stuff are many careers made.

Newbie is part of the producer's package? Grin, studio, and bear it. And if the new kid on the set block brought you the movie's concept and he's part of his own package? Grin and cross your fingers, as Universal Pictures may have done with Repo Men and its director Miguel Sapochnik. Back in the second half of the 90s, in Scotland, Miguel was a credited storyboard artist on a handful of movies, including a couple with Danny Boyle. Miguel's surname was Rosenberg, then it got double-barrelled into Rosenberg-Sapochnik.

Between 1999 and Repo Men, released in 2010, Miguel has no credits in the IMDb.

In 2003 however, according to Wikipedia, Miguel was working on a screenplay with a pair of writers developing the idea of medical parts repossession. One of them, Eric Garcia, already had created the screenplay for a critically-respected movie, Matchstick Men. Maybe Miguel was a pre-production fixture, even before the less than super-stellar Jude Law and Forest Whitaker were cast in the title roles by the studio (DiCaprio being one reported signee who dropped out).

The long intro indicates that there isn't much positive news or views to share about yet another Universal movie that flopped. It only pulled in US$13 million despite various gratuitous scenes of deep knife wounds and vibrant blood clearly designed to appeal to morbid multiplex teenagers and pervs. The repo men (Law and Whitaker) are white (UK) and black (US) schoolmates who, in a SFX future a la Besson and Gilliam, become a pair of crack repossessors of organs sold to needy patients by The Union. Its wicked grinning boss is, not too surprisingly for casting directors, Liev Schreiber. Repossession, as spelt out clearly in The Union's contracts, leads to clients' deaths and a pair of gleeful blood-stained heroes.

Whitaker doesn't have much to do until the fantasy's far-fetched end. Law has a disapproving wife who wants him to move into sales, and he meets a singer (Alice Braga, a multi-award-winning actress in her home market of Brazil). Law is also a budding author and wannabee musician, creating his Repossession Mambo (the title of the book of the film that Garcia published before the film was released, which all concerned maybe thought was a good marketing ploy). Miguel was one of the movie's "executive producers"; IMDb records that he is not working on any new or other projects. Maybe, as the gap between 1999 and 2010 suggested, he doesn't need to work for a living.

Date night

Can a pair of good TV jokers produce a movie ace? Steve (Daily Show, The Office) Carell and Tina (SNL, 30 Rock) Fey are veterans of the small screen, and Hollywood's hope to turn them into a big-screen box-office duo depended on audience reactions to Date Night. The critics were certainly kind, with 135 positive Rotten Tomatoes reviews (66%, of 201). Too kind.

Next time, if Carell and Fey give themselves the time, they'll want to change their writer (Josh Klausner, whose slim track record includes 4th Floor and Shrek Forever After) and their director (Shawn Levy, whose much longer CV includes Pink Panther and Night at the Museum).

The stars are a New Jersey married couple with two spoilt brats. They give themselves a regular night out for a dinner date, always get back home to the babysitter before 9.30pm, and get their kicks from guessing what lives and/or conversations fellow-diners are having. When he senses their mutual tedium, Carrel takes Fey uptown to a fashionable restaurant and grabs an unclaimed table reservation. The identities they've borrowed get them into trouble with cops, gangsters and corrupt politicos, providing excuses for two handfuls of cameo roles.

Out-takes during the end credits show that Carrel and Fey had great fun ad libbing and corpseing on sets, to the obvious irritation of some of the guest stars portraying cliched comic characters (who include Mark Wahlberg, James Franco, Mark Ruffalo, Ray Liotta). The ad libs (if they were not scripted) suggest that Fey is as quick-witted as her Sarah Palin performances suggested, and that Carrel is a natural bumbler of some charm and little comic genius.

They'll never be a Tracy and Hepburn or Lucy and Desi. I'd sooner be able to watch a sequel to the smart and fun-filled True Lies of Arnie and Jamie Lee Curtis as a comic action couple. Yet this lack-lustre effort earned close to US$100 million at the North American box office, so there will be another chance for them to appear together and shine.

Not the Messiah

The Life of Brian was the second (1979) feature film made by Monty Python, the British comedy outfit that changed a generation and a country. Almost three decades later Eric Idle, a member of the team's "Flying Circus", transformed the classic spoof of Biblical movie epics into a multi-leveled musical spoof, Not The Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy).

Idle had already gained new fame and fortune for Spamalot, his musical-comedy adaptation of MP's Holy Grail, another classic movie spoof (sending up the Arthurian legend via many now-immortal sillinesses). For both ventures, long-time behind-the-scenes associate John Du Prez was his co-writer.

NTM premiered as a concert performance at a Toronto festival in 2007. Two years later, its UK premiere was staged at the Royal Albert Hall as a one-night-only celebration of MP's 40th anniversary. Appropriately, all but one of the surviving MP team joined the lavish production, with Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam donning costumes and reprising comic statements happily cheered and echoed by the Hall's nostalgic Proms-like audience. [John Cleese was on another of his alimony-funding global tours.]

Other old colleagues (such as Carol Cleveland) joined them for a mock Messiah oratorio that should become, at the very least, an annual event at the Hall. It has enough tuneful pastiches and comic set-pieces to become a fully-staged production in the West End, following in Spamalot's successful clip-clopping footsteps. Its Broadway transfer is slightly less likely, as it would continue to anger sensitive Christian souls.

Jewish feelings might be offended too (naturally, in New York) by the outrageously funny tale of Mandy Cohen's impregnation by a Roman centurion and birth of Brian ("a good Jewish boy") who joins a Judean political sect, has an affair with fellow-member Judith ("He's a very naughty boy") and ends up crucified.

Four operatic soloists in formal attire stand front-stage to act/sing the leading roles, alongside "baritonish" Idle himself and his guest stars (including a pipe band, a trio of fake sheep and Idle's harmonica-blasting imitation of Bob Dylan). Told mainly through its songs' lyrics, the fast-paced comedy employs almost every musical genre known to man and Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as Handel. In between, Idle and Du Prez recall the glories of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Les Miserables, etc and acknowledge their audiences' memories of When Harry Met Sally, McArthur Park, etc and, most emphatically, of course, The Life of Brian.

Viewers will inevitably love some pastiches more than others. The Amourdeus will become a classic item, and my personal favourite is What did the Romans ever do for us? Returning to its original setting (from its Spamalot borrowing) is Look on the bright side of life, and there's a grand finale of audience-delighting irrelevance when Michael Palin, more guest stars and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its massed choirs perform another MP classic, the Lumberjack Song.

As a DVD entertainment, the production is well-directed, with close-ups, fast edits and panning shots matching the varying beat, moods and lyrics effectively and unobtrusively. The show warrants the high rating, and the hopes that it will make a transfer to the West End.

Life during wartime

None of the following are essential attributes for watching writer-director Todd Solondz's latest bitter-sweet satire, Life During Wartime, but it will surely help to be at least one of them: Jewish-American, family-fixated, gay, paedophile, movie buff, needing forgiveness.

Solondz is from New Jersey, as is the movie's very disturbed Jewish family. Some of them appeared in earlier Solondz blackly-comic brittle studies of middle-class American (especially Jewish-American) mores (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Storytelling, Palindromes).

First in focus is Joy, one of three sisters. She's the medicated wife of a black recidivist pervert she'd met through her work with convicts. Shirley Henderson was obviously asked to reprise her role as Harry Potter's Moaning Myrtle. The Scottish actress (Topsy-Turvy, Bridget Jones) gets to sing the title song and looks miscast, whereas Alison (West Wing regular, Hairspray monster-mother) Janney is almost type-cast as the over-anxious eldest sister whose husband was in prison for pedophilia (raping underage boys).

He'd sired three children, and heavyweight Belfast-born Ciaran (Rome, Eclipse) Hinds portrays him credibly as a self-aware sexual outlaw determined to reassure himself that his two sons have not inherited all his genes. One boy's at college, and straight, the other's preparing for his bar-mitzvah. They think their father's dead, and their mother has found happy new love with a divorced Jewish mensch (Michael Lerner also typecast).

The third sister is an award-winning Hollywood screen-writer, providing an edgy cameo role for a guest actor (Ally Sheedy). Charlotte Rampling glares angrily well as a bitter bitch who picks Hinds up (enabling the audience to see him as a man as well as a sexual monster). Paul (Pee-wee Herman) Reubens has three juicy walk-on scenes as the ghost of the youngest sister's first suicidal lover.

This latest overview of middle-class angst sports more Jewish references than usual for Tolondz, and some seem to be strange pearls cast before an audience of swine. The screenplay is also designed to upset Republicans as well as religious and/or political conservatives. Oddly, because none of them would be seen watching a movie that offers sympathetic studies of pedophilia, child abuse, suicide and characters who end arguments with four-letter words.

The cinematography boasts a richly-hued shadowy quality, and some eye-catching sets (in artfully-lit hallways or ornamented streets) depicting the symbolically fake stylishness of Florida. Musical backgrounds occasionally are too noticeable, and there are bizarre jump cuts. Overall, though, Solondz has created a prime example of the fast-expanding Jewish-American genre, portraying the constricted, conflicted world he shares intellectually with Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and the Coen Brothers' Singular Man.

Not a feast, but a good buffet, for the eyes and brain.

Wrangler

The US movie industry's coverage of homosexuality was, until recently, mostly an indie effort by documentary-makers. Several of these were gay Jewish-Americans, following the path taken by such pioneering civil rights activists as Harvey Milk.

Jeffrey Schwarz worked as an apprentice film editor in 1995 on The Celluloid Closet, the overview of homosexuality in Hollywood co-directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. In the same year, his other editing work (at the age of 26) included a gay murder-thriller, Frisk, and a TV documentary in four hour-long parts, Positive: Life with HIV.

Schwarz soon created a profitable Hollywood niche as the producer of DVD special features and EPKs (electronic press kits). In the decade from 1999, he churned out 269, directing 102 of them himself. By 2008 he was ready to make his own full-length documentaries, starting with Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, outlining the life and work of one of Hollywood's horror movie masters. That won him two film festival awards. His 2008 release, Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon, has only earned one award, on the gay circuit.

It features the on-camera thoughts and extraordinary life of a former gay porn icon, Jack Wrangler, aka Jack Stillman, the son of a Beverly Hills couple: his father was a film and TV (Bonanza) producer, his mother a former Busby Berkeley dancer. Although of Jewish origin, they passed both as Catholic and Protestant in society.

Wrangler's other, possibly major, claim to fame, was his marriage, after a long loving friendship, at the age of 33 to the 55-year-old singer Margaret Whiting (also a "Beverly Hills brat"). It was her fourth and final marriage, and their relationship added glitter to his brief reincarnation as a straight porn actor. She'd stopped his gay porn work; when he was 40, he retired from the screen and worked with Whiting on her music projects. Their whole story is so outlandish one is glad that Schwarz was able to record Wrangler's interviews, a few years before the man died at the age of 66. Whiting is still alive (86 in 2010).

The documentary shows why Jack deserved the attention he got. He was a handsome charmer who'd started out as a typical Charles Atlas victim, a puny boy who developed his muscles and self-confidence. For a shortish man, he was well-endowed, and the versatile gay clearly led a lucky life of fun-filled self-promotion. In the interviews with Schwarz, he's an engaging silver-haired raconteur who could have passed for John Forsythe.

Inevitably, his biography reflects key features of the American gay experience. Much of the archive film material is fascinating, and Schwarz splices it all together neatly. He's reportedly working on three more feature-length documentaries focusing on other gay icons (Tab Hunter, Divine and Vito Russo). It will be good if Schwarz can stretch himself on them, as the Wrangler story doesn't add up to much more than a longer-than-usual DVD extra.

Limits of control

Isaach Bankole was French cinema's "most promising actor" Cesar award-winner in 1987 and has worked for Jim Jarmusch four times. His latest role (2009) for the American director is as the linking device for the whole of The Limits of Control. In its US closing credits, the movie is also titled No Limits No Control, and that seems an apt non sequitor for a repetitive exercise in creating variations on a theme.

One favoured descriptive word for Jarmusch's film plots is "minimalist", which can sound unfairly pejorative. As far as variationism goes, Jarmusch serves up banquets. He's an indie director with many film festival accolades and an obvious appeal to indie-minded actors. They flock to him for cameo roles containing inconsequential dialogue for offbeat characters, who are presumably great fun to portray.

Over the years, Jarmusch collected a package of such vignettes and released it, successfully at film festivals and on DVD, as Coffee and Cigarettes. Several of its episodes are well-polished cinematic gems good enough to stand on their own as finely-acted short stories, unlike the inconsequential set pieces in the latest Jarmusch .

This time there's a key central figure, the Lone Man (De Bankole), who always orders two separate espressos, but none of the lead actors smoke, even though the movie's set in Spain (Madrid, Sevilla and inland scrub). Instead, they swap boxes of "Boxer" brand matches which contain small square of white paper with coded messages which Lone Man swallows with his coffees. He does smile and emote, but very rarely. Mostly, he stares enigmatically.

So does his audience, which quickly guesses that he's a hit man receiving a series of secret instructions from international stars such as Gael Garcia Bernal (a "Mexican" with lots of skin marks), Youki Kudoh (who ponders "Molecules" on a hi-speed train) and Paz De La Huerta ("Nude", except when she's wearing a transparent plastic raincoat). Other brief walk-on roles bring previous Jarmusch movies' cast members back -- Tilda Swinton in a dazzling all-white ensemble and John Hurt in his bearded, hatted British mode.

Many of the vignettes are signposted by paintings that Lone Man has stopped to admire in an art gallery (a violin, a shroud, a cityscape) or on his solo city walks (movie poster). They all lead, eventually but without logic, to him confronting be-wigged Bill Murray (another Jarmusch fan, starring to their mutual award-winning benefit in a more mainstream collection of vignettes, Broken Flowers). The whys or wherefores of the ending do not matter; what counts presumably is the sequence.

It is devilishly attractive, in large part because of Christopher Doyle's cinematography. The HK -based associate of Wong captures and frames lovely Spanish light effects, indoors and outside, so beguilingly sometimes that a viewer could suspect him of importing tanker-loads of red paint and dye to embellish a scene. The movie is also devilishly irritating.

The variations on the theme are tiring: each character strolls in for the ceremonial coffee meeting, delivers the same opening remark in Spanish, and expounds on a fixation of no meaning to the blank-faced black actor, speaking in a mixture of English and a native language (comically in the Creole vignette). Matchboxes exchanged, the characters stroll off. Their appearances stay in the memory, though. This movie is, simply, a perverse pleasure.

Moon

The DVD extra showing the Q&A session at Sundance for Moon (2009), a standard PR exercise, shows David Jones' son to be an unaffected British bloke. Nice surprise for any moviegoer who knows that Duncan (aka Zowie in his youth) Jones, whose mother was an American model, was the 21-year-old best man for his dad's second wedding, in 1992. That's when David Bowie married supermodel Iman.

The generational links are truly spacious. Moon tells the story of an astronaut nearing the end of a three-year contract working alone at a chemical plant on the moon. Every elderly rock fan knows how much and how long Bowie used space as a musical and personality motif.

As the Sundance chat-fest indicates, multi-millionaire Bowie rightly didn't back his son's first feature film. Instead, Sting's wife says her production company stepped in to raise completion funds. But it looks (from the producer's family name and Jones' dedication) as if Bowie did support his son's 28-minute short film, Whistle (2002). It's a technically accomplished 2002 fable about a Switzerland-based British hit-man who uses hi-tech gadgetry to kill via bombs projected through space. Admirably, it's included in the Moon DVD.

Whistle may have been Jones's open sesame to the London Film School. Returning from uni in the States, he also worked in advertising, gaining useful notoriety for his lesbian-tinged work for FCUK. Like Christopher Nolan, he's an indie talent happily moving into the mainstream; one of his current projects is a Hollywood scifi epic, Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Moon may also be the movie that finally pushes Sam Rockwell into a stardom to match that of Robert Downey Jr rather than Christopher Walken. Rockwell, playing Sam the lonely astronaut, has earned a shelf of acting awards for it, adding to his long record of indie triumphs (Lawn Dogs, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Matchstick Men). Like Jones, parental divorce left him in a father's care, but there's no other clue to Jones's Q&A statement that the movie developed out of Rockwell and him talking over production ideas.

The only other meaningful role in the movie is that of a voice, Kevin Spacey's, playing the onboard computer, GERTY. Programmed to guard and guide Sam, the machine plays an increasingly crucial cog in the scenario. (As always, I regret the need for movies to give front-credits to casting directors, especially when one veteran and his assistant get those credits for maybe helping the production team find this movie's handful of blurry-faced tiny-bit parts.)

Jones assembled a good technical crew, and they created a worthy tribute to scifi classics (they reference Silent Running and Alien 1 as much as the 2001 that led to them). The script is crisp (and its blend of portent and humour is delivered with controlling charisma by Rockwell and Spacey). The moon-raking scale models and spaceship studio sets have an old-fashioned air without being cheesy. The effective musical soundtrack is rare and rarely noticeable, and Jones's pacing develops a dramatic tension culminating in a quickfire succession of final twists.

Boiler room

It's about time for a new Ben Younger movie. His debut feature as a writer-director, Boiler Room, made his name in 2000. Five years later, his second feature, Prime, starring Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep, gained some critics' respect as an above-average romcom focusing on the sub-genres of age difference, NYC and intellectual Jewish family relationships. Since then, he's directed one episode of a TV series. In the 2000-2005 period he only made a 16-minute short and two very shorts (2 minutes each).

Both his features were produced mainly by the Todd sisters (Jennifer and Suzanne), whose track record ranges from the sublime (another 2000 indie triumph with Chris Nolan's first US feature, Memento) to the profitably ridiculous (the three Austin Powers spoofs). Their guiding lights in the movie industry appear to have been Joel Silver and Mark Gordon.

Boiler Room may have got the production green light for the rookie Younger because it was a semi-autobiographical docudrama in the pattern of Oliver Stone's highly successful Wall Street. The single student son of a Jewish New York judge runs an illegal casino in his home, and switches to becoming a trainee stockbroker in a large "chop shop" out on Long Island. For its adrenalin-rushed young operators, an evening's entertainment can consist of a group watch of Gordon Gecko, whose dialogue they know and love verbatim.

The good Jewish boy learning to be a con man at the high-pressure (ie "boiler room") cold-call sales machine is a reflection of Sheen's role in Wall Street as the naive son of a good cop. In Younger's version, the judge-father has a clumsy emotional blockage with his son. His barely credible dialogue is handled well by Ron Rifkin, who went on to long-running TV successes (Alias and Brothers and Sisters).

The son's even less credible character and moral doubts are acceptable too, even though former child-actor Giovanni Ribisi looks too small, unattractive and not very Jewish. He's certainly not the one man on the crowded set of adolescent wannabees one would expect to win the eye and bed of sexy black receptionist Nia Long (who'd already reached her career peak, in TV's Fresh Prince). This movie could have been Ribisi's breakthrough, but his only relatively notable part since then was a minor one in Avatar.

Bigger names on the set were Ben Affleck, already an Oscar-winner for co-writing Good Will Hunting, and Scott Caan, the body-self-conscious son of star actor James. The best acting in the movie was delivered by Vin Diesel, who represents the "Italian" group of stockbrokers in intense competitive mode with the group of "Hebrews" led by Nicky Katt. Another former child-actor, Katt went on to make a living as a movie tough guy but his last role was an uncredited bit part in Dark Knight.

Where Are They Now? nostalgic questions were prompted by the sight of Diesel, whose charisma and sense of humour shine in this movie as they did later in the Fast and Furious and Chronicles of Riddick action franchises.

Much of his profane dialogue in Boiler Room, and that of other brokers delivering glib spiels and sly psychological gamesmanship, is a pleasure to listen to. Younger rightly includes a passing verbal tribute to Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's devastating dramatic expose of the real estate business. He really had to, because he incorporated a similar tale of a cruelly conned young husband. Mamet's original figure is more credible and interesting, as was Stone's Wall Street; Younger had given himself challenging role models.

Crazies

If at first you don't succeed, try a remake. That is a lesson Breck Eisner seems to have learned, maybe from Disney's ex-chief, Michael Eisner, his father. With that big career advantage to start with, Breck went to a film school, did well with TV commercials and directed a low-budget movie that went straight to video (Thoughtcrimes, 2003). He then directed Sahara (2005), "one of the biggest financial failures in Hollywood history".

Five years later, he's redeemed himself by directing the remake of The Crazies, a horror movie created in 1973 by George Romero (who co-executive-produced the remake). Having earned a reasonable box-office return (US$38 million), Eisner's now working on remakes of Flash Gordon and Escape from New York.

The Crazies had a standard scenario: chemical disaster afflicts small rural community, ugly zombies wield gory havoc, government sends in the troops, and the local sheriff and his deputy and their female interests must escape before the area is nuked. Much depends on the audience rooting for the sheriff, ably played by Timothy Deadwood Olyphant.

He's got twinkling eyes, and his sidekick's given the cool quizzical style of English actor Joe Copying Beethoven Anderson. A very busy Australian actress, Radha Mitchell, filled the international billing requirements as the sheriff's wife.

There is some attractive cinematography from a young master of the genre, Belgian-born Maxime The Hills Have Eyes Alexandre, and the producers wisely employed multi-Emmy nominee Billy Fox for the film editing. Putting more budget funds where they can really pay off, they added an Oscar nominee and Emmy-winning veteran composer on the team (Mark Isham), a top designer (Anglo-US award-winner Andrew Syriana Menzies) and art director awardee (Greg Memoirs of a Geisha Berry).

For sure there are other talents further down the credits list, and they're probably part of another lesson or three Breck was given by Hollywood pals: hire top technicians and you can make a B picture that looks great, and makes you look pretty good too.

Greenberg

There are 140 reviews of Greenberg in Rotten Tomatoes, of which 103 (74%) are favourable. None of the summaries of the critiques note the key plot-line of a movie directed and co-written by Brooklyn-born Noah Baumbach. It focuses on middle-aged angst as it afflicts a NY Jew; it's a 21st-Century update of a Woody Allen scenario, a genre in itself.

Its neurotic self-absorbed world-weary anti-hero is played by Ben Stiller. He's left NY, and a mental hospital, to house-sit for 6 weeks for his successful rich brother in LA. He habitually writes complaint letters, the script cleverly indicating his psychological edginess.

The family's dog is an Alsatian called, predictably, Mahler; its paid "assistant" is a young blonde doormat of a character called Florence (Greta Gerwig in a fetching Winslett-like performance). Even they have got internal problems.

Baumbach's past screenplays (Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding and more) evinced detailed understanding of intellectual Jewish families' lives. From experience: his father was a NY novelist and film critic. His co-screenwriter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, is Jewish too (and the daughter of actor Vic Morrow). She appears too, as Greenberg's college-days girlfriend. This movie's slow-paced or biting dialogue often seems to have been improvised before it was written down, in the style of Leigh's work for her own semi-autobiographical Anniversary Party.

The party scenes in Greenberg are similarly stuffed with Hollywood pals. The brothers of actors Gwyneth Paltrow and James Franco. Children of actor Dustin Hoffman, writer David Mamet and director Julien Temple. Although Stiller is the son of Jewish-American comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, the screenplay goes out of its way to tell us very self-consciously that Greenberg had a Protestant mother.

Ms Gerwig's origins are not yet known, and the only clear non-Jewish participant in the movie is Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, giving an admirably understated performance as Greenberg's college-days fellow-band-member. Stiller himself also creates an unusually nuanced (for him) character, achieving the hard task of making an audience take an interest in the fortune of a socially-inept short-tempered egocentric, who exemplifies Florence's maxim that "hurt people hurt people".

Unfortunately for Stiller, his make-up artist and credited "colorist" give him the appearance throughout the movie of a height-challenged Daniel Day-Lewis, a good actor who's not a good funnyman. Neither is Stiller, who's consequently better cast than usual as the louche, mildly manic and despicable Greenberg.

Is a Jewish (even half-Jewish) narcissist such a standard figure in the American entertainment industry that no critic felt the need to note the consequent limitations of the movie's appeal? Was the movie's apparently off-putting title enough warning? Maybe: it only grossed US$2.3 million at the American box office. Both the Fockers did much better - and were much worse; the strength of Greenberg is that it set out to be a character study first and offbeat comedy second.

Hot tub time machine

Once upon a time, in 1985, a very good comic fantasy was produced in Hollywood. It was Back to the Future, featuring a memorable performance by Crispin Glover as George McFly. In 2010, US movie producers decided to re-invent that wheel, a lot more cheaply. They called it Hot Tub Time Machine.

This time, a down-on-his-luck affable bloke from the Present (John Cusack) goes back to the Past (1985) and takes his nerdish nephew and a pair of down-on-their-luck middle-aged buddies with him. Just in case middle-aged members of the audience don't get the point of the plot, Crispin Glover appears as a one-armed hotel bellboy and the bad guys' dialogue refers to a McFly. Glover must be relieved he also got a real acting part recently (Alice in Wonderland).

Steve Pink, the movie's director, worked with Cusack on screenplays of High Fidelity (2000) and Grosse Point Blank (1997). He co-produced both (and recently made the Cruise-Dias vehicle, Knight and Day). He and Cusack employed three newish comedy writing talents to develop the idea credited to one of them (Josh Heald). In it, the quartet of male misfits are thrust back in time during a drunken dip in a faulty jacuzzi at a rundown ski resort. Older audience members will know it's a time-machine farce because Chevy Chase waddles on as the jacuzzi repairman.

How to get potential audiences to go to their local multiplex? First, get the blacks, with TV's Craig Robinson from The Office. Then, target foul-mouthed intellectuals with Rob Corddry of TV's Children's Hospital and Daily Show. Youngish parents will know the comic value of Clark Duke, who's 25, looks 15, and child-starred in 54 episodes of Heart's Afire.

The kids market? Toss in dog turds, vomit projectiles, and jokey scenes featuring fucks, sucks and gays. The popcorn brigade love that stuff.

After all that, it's almost shameful to acknowledge that much of this HTTM rip-off is amusing. The female interests, bad guys and teenage versions of the lead actors are flimsy screen presences, but the lead foursome are appealingly obnoxious anti-heroes.

Ghost writer

There's an uncredited talent (the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock) at work on The Ghost Writer, a mystery thriller starring Ewan McGregor as a journalist revising the memoirs of an embattled British ex-PM.

Pierce Brosnan fills that role perfectly, which all concerned aver isn't Tony Blair, a ham actor now treading the boards of international political theatre. Talking on a DVD extra, the author of the original novel, Robert (Imperium, Enigma, Pompeii) Harris, claims he had the basic idea before he'd even heard of Blair: a retired statesman charged with war crimes.

The politician's first ghost writer died a mysterious death, and the publishing house's overly naive replacement (McGregor) soon feels alarm. He's joined the ex-PM in an eerie seaside setting (an out-of-season French resort standing in for Martha's Vineyard), together with the politico's calculating wife (a non-Cherie Blair brilliantly portrayed by Olivia Dollhouse Williams). His PA appears to be helpful: Kim Desperate Housewives Cattrall bringing an American marquee name to an otherwise very European movie, directed very stylishly - and as a Hitchcock homage - by Roman Polanski.

During his DVD interview, he notes the story's kinship to Raymond Chandler mysteries. It is a political thriller of unusual depth and relevance. It's also an unusually well-cast movie, with a host of good actors delivering juicy cameos, as if they were guests at a party for Polanski: Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Hutton, James Belushi, Robert Pugh and 94-year-old Eli Wallach.

Polanski's proud of his very visual ending, and Harris is very happy with the cinematic treatment of his novel's conclusion. Not for nothing is the ghost writer never given a name, because that's a major conceit in this genre: the central figure is an Everyman, the audience's representative in the world of intrigue. The movie's good to listen to and watch, good enough to be allowed a little too much self-awareness and one flaw: the final scene mirrors an early red herring too patly, irritatingly because the parallel opening scene is never clarified.