Trip, the

It's exciting to watch a movie genre being developed, creating its own standards and challenges. There's one that lacks an officially recognised title so far, but might be named the "biocom" or "reality caper". It fictionalises comedic pseudo-reality in a bogus sitcom-style setting, and has primarily been a TV phenomenon in the past few years.

On TV, the concept has been used by Larry David for Curb Your Enthusiasm in the USA and by Ricky Gervais for Extras in the UK. There were precedents in cinema, where many of Woody Allen's New York-set films featuring his own persona were virtually autobiographical and/or wish fulfillment exercises. Various other comedians appeared in movies framing their stage or TV personalities, and Jim Jarmusch showcased a galaxy of comic actors playing "themselves" in Coffee & Cigarettes (2003), a delightfully mixed bag of short sketches.

Which, by the way, illustrates the movie industry's inability to operate beyond anywhere near as many as six degrees of separation. One of the cleverer sets in the Jarmusch compendium was a two-hander featuring Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina as a pair of English actors at opposite ends of the success scale (Coogan being cast as the top dog, even though he didn't get a big Hollywood breakthrough until the remake of Around the World in 80 Days was released the following year, in 2004).

Back in the UK, Coogan had been best known as TV comic character Alan Partridge since 1994 (a decade after his first TV work consisted of providing impersonations for the Spitting Image animated satire series). His first major movie acting role arrived in 2002, with 24 Hour Party People, directed by Michael Winterbottom, already a prolific and prodigious British talent. They worked together again in 2005 on A Cock and Bull Story, a partly-improvised depiction of a movie company attempting to film Laurence Sterne's classic, and supposedly unfilmable, fictional autobiography, Tristram Shandy (co-produced by BBC-TV).

Coogan's comic sidekick as a fellow actor in that movie forerunner of the Extras TV concept was Rob Brydon, a Welsh-born British TV comedian and character actor. (Other special ingredients in Winterbottom's beguiling experimental, mock-period drama included Michael Nyman's music, Marcel Zyskind's cinematography, and Jeremy Northam playing the director.)

A few years later, Coogan, Brydon and Winterbottom joined forces again, and BBC-TV backed their idea of a six-episode, buddy-cum-road-movie sitcom featuring a "Coogan" character commissioned to write newspaper reviews of gourmet restaurants in scenic northern England settings. "Brydon" joins him on The Trip for the meals, driving tour and the pair's love-hate friendly banter. It ticked a bonanza of boxes for an audience-friendly British TV series, blending photogenic cuisine and wry comic personalities, beautiful rural scenery and family dramas, semi-documentary and odd-couple sitcom.

Like The Thick of It, it was an addictive TV series that demanded concentrated viewing; one episode was never enough. Being a sequence of vignettes and sightseeing excursions directed by Winterbottom, it was also an above-average TV production with ravishing shots of exquisitely-plated food, quick-cut shots of each kitchen's chefs at work, and beautifully composed scenes of Yorkshire and Lakeland natural beauty. Every now and then, lines from Lakeland poets were recited, mostly in impersonated actors' voices, with serio-comic local history footnotes used as material for comic set-pieces and inter-play.

Ben Smithard was the series' very note-worthy cameraman, and he and Winterbottom achieved marvels of close-up filming in the cramped settings of a Range Rover and country hotels' dining rooms and bedrooms. Occasional side glances at the two actor's fictionalised families in London varied the pace and mood of each episode well, while serving to amplify the supposed character traits and flaws (especially egocentric Coogan's) of the comic leads. Throughout, of course, they are ad-libbing (or riffing on pre-scripted comic ideas), playing comic ping-pong across the dinner tables and their auto's front seats. Most memorable are their competitive impersonations of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Billy Connolly, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton and other distinctive voices.

Unlike Larry David and Ricky Gervais, Coogan and Brydon don't rely on guest stars to add fun and frissons to their comic vignettes. Only one appears in the six episodes, and it's no surprise to see that it's Ben Stiller, who'd already visited one of Gervais's Extras sets for a delightful display of self-mockery. This time, he plays a cameo, as himself, being a Hollywood pal in a dream encouraging Coogan to grab the chance of a seven-year TV drama series contract.

Happily (one hopes), it's been reported that Winterbottom has created a feature film from the six episodes, to be released in 2011; it'll be interesting to see what ideas are thought best for the big screen. If it succeeds, will it help Coogan and Brydon to make a new series, if they want to? Or will they feel that one series of edgy self-teasing may be enough of a good thing?

[The second disc in the BBC's DVD set includes deleted scenes, and real documentary coverage of the six host restaurants' kitchens and exquisite dish presentations.]

Horrors of malformed men

"Banned for decades! The most notorious Japanese horror film EVER made!" What a grand sales tag that is, all in upper-case characters: could a movie possibly live up to it, even one called Horrors of Malformed Men?

Its director, Teruo Ishii, was a cult figure in the erotic-grotesque sub-genre of Japan's "pink" movie industry of soft porn, in which firm nubile breasts were flaunted with pseudo-aesthetic abandon. Initially an indie phenomenon, its large audiences appealed to Japan's mainstream production companies, including Toei. The studio funded Ishii's "eroduction" of a screenplay he'd co-adapted from a sensational novel.

The plot is mostly not bad enough to be laughable, but a horror movie it is not. It is a tale of a medical man imprisoned in a lunatic asylum where bare-topped young women scream. He escapes and discovers he has an unknown recently-deceased brother, whose wife has her way with him, then dies, as has another young woman. His unknown father has webbed fingers and has exiled himself to a rocky island where he's developing a paradise comprising deliberately malformed humans, including two-sexed Siamese twins joined at their back.

Daubed with much white mud, lurid make-up and contorted limbs, the malformed are portrayed by one of Japan's strangest fringe groups, Butoh performance artists. A post-War anarchic form of modern dance, influenced by contemporary homosexual culture and anti-Western feelings, Butoh (originally a term describing ballroom dancing) and its white-painted practitioners found favour in the West (and were a featured aspect of an offbeat 2008 German romantic film, Cherry Blossoms). One of the dance form's leaders jerked and jumped, leered and laughed manically in full Butoh fashion in Ishii's film, playing the demented outcast father.

The movie also incorporated a detective story, introduced as a deus ex machina at the end, thereby tying up lots of loose ends and silly plot devices, explaining them all, laboriously, to the audience and the very confused movie characters, using a series of colour filters and shadowed close-ups. The last few minutes do become almost joyously laughable, when the unintentionally son and his sister choose to die atop a fireworks storeroom, their body parts (including clasped hands) soaring above the island, calling out to their much-abused but not malformed mother.

Why was the movie banned, for four decades? Breasts (naked or knife-carved), incest, perverted surgical experimentation, lesbian caresses and cavorting maidens were not graphic, and it's somewhat cheering to learn that Japanese censors decided the film was horribly insensitive to the feelings of handicapped people.

Ever since the first recognised pink film (Flesh Market in 1962), directors working in the genre usually knew its limitations better than Ishii did this time. The genre survived industrial ups and downs and still thrives in Japan. Eventually, of course, the "pink" movie phenomenon did get around to churning out gay-themed movies too (Legend of the Big Penis: Beautiful Mystery is a 1983 movie that will have to be seen to be believed).

This movie was lead actor Teruo Yoshida's penultimate career movie. He made one the following year (1970) and only reappeared once again, for the same director, 25 years later. There may be a strange professional tale or coincidence to be discovered, because Ishii also took a long career break, being uncredited between 1979 (when he was 55 years old) and 1991, when he returned, making six more movies. He wrote, produced and directed his final movie in 2001 at the age of 77: Blind Beast v Killer Dwarf, a low-budget effort focusing on Tokyo's all-girl Asakusa Revue company and bodiless limbs.

House

Who could resist a comic horror fantasy in which schoolgirls are consumed by a haunted House? The 1977 Japanese smash hit was recently reissued in a Criterion DVD set, its informative extras including comments from director Nobuhiko Obayashi (now 72 and working on his 43rd film). House was his first feature-length work, and its wildly experimental style helped win him the Blue Ribbon Best New Director award the following year.

The DVD's 45-minute set of subtitled, well-edited interviews mixes interesting production notes from Obayashi, his screenplay writer Chiho Katsura, and his daughter Chigumi, who provided her father with the movie's original story ideas when she was a 12-year-old.

Her commercial-making father had been asked by the Toho studio to write a Jaws-style film. His daughter told him she'd enjoy seeing a house that consumed schoolgirls, suggesting such lethal weapons as a grandfather clock, piano, well, futons and mirrors. Obayashi chose to create a standard Japanese group of seven (a practice in reality as well as in Disney and The Seven Samurai), while Katsura's development of the idea was inspired by a Walter de La Mare short story. Other influences included the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Obayashi's home city) and grieving post-Pacific War lovers.

Many factors illustrate the creators' determination to make a new type of movie, one designed to please young audiences and not high-brow critics, one that would look and sound uniquely fresh, be exciting cinema to watch and hear. Most amazing, Toho let Obayashi keep his English-language title, after a two-year media campaign had transformed it into a radio production, musical album, graphic magazine and marketing stunt. When none of the studio's own contract directors would touch the populist project, it was finally given to Obayashi himself, to be made in Toho studios.

The story was simple: young Gorgeous, distressed by her widower father's intention to marry a beautiful woman, invites herself and six schoolfriends to stay at the Western-style country house of an aunt she'd only seen once before. A snow-white blue-eyed Persian cat arrives at her home, at the same time as her aunt's written invitation. The girl, the cat and her friends (epitomising their given names of Fantasy, Kung Fu, Mac (for Stomach), Melody, Prof and Sweet) reach the house, are welcomed by the love-lorn cat-loving wheelchaired aunt, and then disappear one by one in grisly (and bizarrely comic) ways.

Every shot and frame is innovative (Obayashi acknowledging that his team mischievously filmed typically artistic scenes in ways that would most infuriate directors such as Ozu and Kurasawa). Self-conscious alienation effects pop up constantly, with inappropriately raucous pop music, luridly colourful painted backdrops and gaudy set props, a dancing skeleton, delicate compositions to accompany the cannibalistic piano, fast jump cuts, glossy imagery, animation and cartoon effects. The three lead actresses are credibly beautiful and bewitched, while the six novice teenage actresses - models the director had worked with on commercials - sport airs of joyous fun and terror.

Audacious and joyful itself, the movie is memorably entertaining cinematic art.

[One similarly OTT fantasy that now needs re-viewing is the wonderfully exuberant Thai homage of 2000 to cowboy movies and romances, Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger. Like Obayashi's movie, it belongs in a genre of its own: pastiches to celebrate the art of cinema.]

Seventh seal

Only 3 of the 47 reviews in the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate are negative about The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman's 1957 Special Jury Prize winner at Cannes (tied with Kanal). The B&W allegory about Death, also written by Bergman, is acknowledged to be classic cinema and, like all revered objects, warrants extra attention.

Clad in a black robe, the character of Death (Bengt Ekerot) arrives on a barren Swedish shoreline to claim the life of a mournful knight (Max von Sydow) returning home from the Crusades with his disrespectful squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand). Death accepts a challenge to play chess with the knight.

Meanwhile, a jolly traveling actor (Nils Poppe) sees the Virgin Mary and Child in a field, and his loving wife (Bibi Andersson) teases him about his visions. The leader of their troupe of three proves to be a cunning, grumpy Lothario.

Bergman adds additional characters as the knight rides towards his castle, passing superstitious medieval settlements ravaged by the Black Plague. A witch will be burned, priests pass harsh judgment, the figure of Death is painted on church walls, processional flagellants bear whips, drinkers in an inn cheer vicious attacks. The knight and Death meet and parry words while playing out their game, until the knight and his remaining travel companions reach his castle, his wife and Death. Only the loving actors and their baby boy survive.

Such a deliberately contrived sequence of morality-cum-mortality tales, reviewing faith and life's meaning, works best in B&W and in medieval settings. Bergman's is reminiscent of contemporary dramas constructed by Christopher Fry and other literary commentators, and it's no surprise to learn that his film was originally a stage presentation written for university actors.

With the exception of Poppe's eye-boggling semi-comic scenery-chewing character, the lead roles are credible figures of human pride, love, loyalty, lust, and fear of death. The threads that link them, and the journey they share, are far less believable. Bergman's cinematography, though starkly attractive (both for mood-setting distant shots and close-ups) and richly shadowed most of the time, is generally as static in its framing as the dramatic set-pieces it photographs ponderously.

Over-rated? Probably not in 1957. In this century, it should slip further down the list of must-see classics.

Last train home

Chinese-Canadian cinematographer Lixin Fan traveled with a couple of migrant workers on annual return trips from a Guangzhou garment factory to their home village in Sichuan, 2,100 km away via train, buses and ferries, visiting their two children for Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) holidays. He edited his carefully-framed fly-on-the-wall cinema verite into an emotionally exhausting overview of modern China, peasant life and family tension, in Last Train Home.

The lightly-bearded father represses his emotions silently throughout the film, until a scene when his teenage daughter reveals the "real" self she says the director wanted her to show. She curses her parents for their year-long absences, using foul language that prompts her father to slap and hit her repeatedly. When his mother-in-law also upbraids the girl, the man pushes the woman aside, almost as if to ensure that the cameraman can focus on his daughter.

It's the movie's one scene in which the family openly acknowledge their awareness of the camera intruding quietly in their lives. The rest of the time, their awareness can only be sensed oblique expressions and careful choice of words (often clearly tackling a pre-agreed topic such as the girl's education and religious rituals). Amazingly, for a Chinese rural family, they do not try to mask or make light of the hardships of their dour lives and painful annual treks, the children's bad temperaments, and the maternal grandmother's burden of raising the two children. Life, they note once, is lived for one's children and parents, or else it's pointless.

Scenes in horrifyingly crowded railway stations, on luggage-crammed trains, and in cramped garment factories and poorly-curtained sleeping bunks, are discreet indictments of a socio-economic system that exploits peasants and stunts their lives and family feelings. A similar film could be made in any industrialised country, and tiring travel nightmares (albeit at a lesser scale of discomfort, with lesser levels of tolerance) could be photographed at Western seasons of family gathering, and the movie tacitly portrays the universal dehumanising effects of polluted cities. Nevertheless, the movie doesn't naively laud its contrasting panoramas of the harsh beauty of China's hinterland or the stifling emptiness and toughness of rural communities. As the parents frequently comment, there's little choice for them, and none is desirable.

The Zhang family's daughter abandons schooling in her grandmother's village, accompanies her upset parents back to Guangdong to work in a factory, and ends up fleeing that environment to become a trainee waitress in a Shenzhen nightclub. Her mother returns to the village, to ensure her son continues his schooling, leaving the husband alone in Guangzhou.

An optimist would sense that one or more of them may find more happiness. A pessimist would guess that they can never be happy. The movie's viewer cannot be either: one can only admire the documentary, and the workers who have to accept such fates.

Kingdom, the

U.S. box-office takings provide interesting data for market analysis by knowledgeable analysts. They will know why the US$70-million military action-thriller The Kingdom, set in Saudi Arabia, grossed only US$45 million in theatres but amassed close to US$80 million in rentals.

Some may guess that it was the sort of movie appreciated by the sort of people who cannot afford to go to regular-priced cinemas.

Some will suspect an unusually good word of mouth, and it must be confessed that the movie is better than expected.

The action-adventure military-detective-procedural war movie covered a lot of ground in its dramatisation of real-life bombings on an American base in Saudi Arabia. It was one of newcomer Matt Carnahan's two screenplays to appear in 2007, when his star-studded (Cruise, Redford, Streep) Lions for Lambs also bombed at the box office (that Redford-directed political thriller, also focusing on the Middle East, grossed less than half of its US$35-million budget). The writer's good start in Hollywood (at the top, with some of the best) may have been helped by brother Joe Carnahan's track record (writing and directing Narc and Smokin' Aces).

Director Peter Berg had done well with his first feature in 1998, Very Bad Things, which he also wrote. The experienced movie actor subsequently directed an action adventure (The Rundown) and a sport epic (Friday Night Lights). The cast was strong too, headed by Jamie Foxx as the calmly forceful leader of a US army investigative team, assisted by a grizzly grunt (Chris Cooper), female forensics ace (Jennifer Garner) and foul-mouthed youngish character (Jason Bateman), enabling the producers to tick a bunch of demographic targets (blacks, middle-aged white blue-collar males, white wives and TV viewers). To attract discerning audiences, minor roles went to even stronger acting talents (Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Piven and Danny Huston).

Although filming was impossible in Saudi Arabia itself, location work in Arizona and Abu Dhabi provided convincing backdrops, as did a lot of ethnic Arab actors. The key one was Ashraf Barhom, a Galilee-born Arab-Israeli, engagingly credible as the American team's sympathetic liaison officer (leading to roles in Agora, Lebanon and Clash of the Titans). Another Arab-Israeli, Ali Suliman, was his assistant, a Morocco-born actor played an influential Saudi prince, and an Iraqi veteran actor portrayed lead plotter Abu Hamza. Even the stunts were fully professional, earning award nominations for their tricks of the multi-auto-crash trade.

Admirably, no sex scenes were squeezed into the plot. Melodramatics were limited to grieving family members and bonding soldiers. The editing, background music and sound effects helped to maintain a high level of edge-of-seatedness, and the screenplay didn't pander to anti-Muslim and/or anti-Arab post-9/11 audience prejudices. It acknowledged them, but incorporated an ironic set of opening and closing whispers designed to remind audiences that hatred and the desire for vengeance run two ways in a military campaign.

More astonishing, in terms of standard Hollywood gung-ho movies, the opening credits appeared over an outline history of the Saudi kingdom with relatively objective captions and images. Such an educational effort may have been wasted on many, but it's cheering to think that more than a handful of US renters (with pause buttons) may have paid closer attention than movie-goers could. One of the details that made The Kingdom seem way more worthy than expected.

Gates, the

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the French couple who constructed public art for public places, always pulled down their creations after a couple of weeks. However, they immortalised them, and themselves, by producing their own documentaries. Like the artists' works, these were also highly professional exercises, using leading documentary director Albert Maysles, and/or his brother David, six times; most recently, in 2007, for The Gates.

Bulgarian-born Christo and his Morocco-born French wife were stage managers of elaborate and gigantic public art displays designed to amuse the masses and give the naturalised American pair an interesting living and lives.

In New York, they'd starting planning the Gates project in 1979, and the full title for its eventual installation in 2005 included "Central Park, New York, 1979-2005". Its commemorative documentary enabled Maysles to incorporate old film of their initial efforts to convince New York decision-makers to accept their "gift" of a US$4-5 million temporary erection of thousands of tall poles sporting saffron-coloured cloth.

The opponents' reasons for denouncing and rejecting the proposal were often reasonable, but two key factors changed fate for the artists (whose home base was New York). Michael Bloomberg had been elected mayor in 2003, and he always did what he wanted with little debate. More important, for his and the project's PR purposes, 9-11 had happened. Anything that would brighten up New Yorkers' lives in wintry February 2005 was now welcomed.

The resultant movie notes the negative reactions, and lets the artists and their supporters promote their proposal. Its supposed cost of US$20-21 million has been queried by the New York Times and other researchers, but it may be true that it cost the city nothing in terms of cash to allow astronomical amounts of iron, mechanical devices and orange material to be flaunted on 7,500 archways along 37 kilometres of paths of differing widths heading north and south through Central Park.

The documentary constantly advises that the artists always financed their works through pre-sales of Christo's paintings, sketches, prints and other memorabilia. His wife (who died in 2009) was his sharp-witted manager, her hair dyed red in contrast to his silvery locks. Their shared birthday was the most romantic detail of their extraordinary partnership (swathing landmarks from Sydney's Little Bay to Berlin's Reichstag, Paris's Pont Neuf and islands in Biscayne Bay).

The Gates is not an objective, fact-seeking, mood-exploring documentary. It is, simply, too simply, a promotional film, a vanity project, an historical document.

Rabbit hole

Nicole Kidman knew that the lead role in the film version of Rabbit Hole was a gift for an actress. The play by David Lindsay-Abaire had won the 2007 Pulitzer prize for Drama, and Cynthia Nixon won a Tony award for Best Actress as a mother mourning the accidental death of her infant son. Kidman's production company optioned the play, signed the playwright to adapt it for the screen, and took a risk by entrusting the movie to indie actor-director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus).

Kidman's subtle performance, coping with grief and the need to re-bond with her husband, has already earned her a 2011 Golden Globe nomination, and she might reach the Oscar shortlist. That would help recoup her portion of the film's modest US$10 million budget.

Mitchell wisely lets close-ups provide much of the narrative drive, relying on the cast to do what they do so well as supporting actors: Aaron Eckhart (her husband's repressed anger and sense of humour), Dianne Wiest (knowing frowns and giggles), Sandra Oh (comfort group's understanding member) and Tammy (Emmy-winning Judy Gardland) Blanchard (newly pregnant sister).

Newcomer Miles Teller underacts neatly as the student whose swerving car kills the child, and whose comic-book creation provides the story's title and the mother's calming images. Through his Rabbithole graphic book, Kidman's non-religious character delights in the idea of parallel universes where many of her myriad selves are having happy lives.

The movie is a pleasant, mind-pleasing, heart-warming family drama and love story, which means it's a good movie to watch on TV. Great cinema, no: I'm curious why the original play won the Pulitzer but not the Tony.

[Idle answers: None of its Pulitzer competitors (which can only be from American writers) gained Tony nominations. None of the other three nominees have been given Wikipedia pages.

The Tony was awarded to Alan Bennett's The History Boys; a filmed adaptation by Nicholas Hytner of his stage direction, with its original cast led by Richard Griffiths, was released that year. The play was commissioned by London's National Theatre. The UK's Royal Shakespeare Company had commissioned another imported Tony nominee that year (The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a black comedy set in Ireland), while the fourth short-listed competitor also arrived from London (the Royal Court Theatre having first staged Shining City, an Irish ghost story).]

My dog Tulip

J.R. (Joe) Ackerley is usually described as a "man of letters"; he worked for the BBC for 31 years until 1959, as arts editor of its Listener magazine from 1935. He's also well known for having been openly gay and long seeking an "Ideal Friend". He found her in 1946, when an occasional gay lover asked the 50-year-old bachelor to take care of his Alsatian bitch while he was in prison.

Ten years later, he wrote about his experiences with the dog in My Dog Tulip (a new name his publisher recommended using, as Ackerley's friend had actually named his dog Queenie). It's been filmed, brilliantly, as a computerised and hand-drawn animation by Americans Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, mainly employing New Yorker-style sketches.

British film buffs may recall that Ackerley's only novel, We Think the World of You, was filmed in 1988. It told the story of a working-class gay (Gary Oldman) who asks a middle-aged acquaintance (Alan Bates) to look after his dog. Thus immortalised twice in his books, Queenie/Tulip was indeed the real love of the writer's life, the Ideal Friend to whom he devoted his loyal attention until her death in 1961.

She was a socially-clumsy, over-enthusiastic lover, wildly determined to protect her saviour and owner, always ready to bark at and attack any threats to their relationship. After struggling comically to cope with her toilet training, he then needed to find a vet whose handling she would accept. Her struggles with, and victory over, his sister (one of Lynn Redgrave's voices in her last film) during a year of shared residence produced Ackerley's next set of canine misadventures. Her disaster-prone behaviour provided another series of comic tableaus when they went to stay with an indolent old army colleague on a small farm.

The writer imagines a sequence of wry explanations for Tulip's failure to mate with any of the chosen Alsation studs, whose owners are delightful vignettes of middle-class English manners. He'd wanted Tulip to know sex and maternity, and ended up having to let her let the next-door mongrel runt do the deed and present him with eight puppies to handle. The whole set of humourous marital tales is mostly portrayed in a primitive hand-drawn stick-figure manner, its crude artistry discreetly diminishing the images of sexual activities.

Such a parade of animal bodily functions is very unlikely material for a cartoon movie, one that could only expect to be appreciated by adults and dog-lovers. Ackerley's wry, dry, very English and misanthropic (and naturally misogynist) comic style is conveyed perfectly by the commentary voice of Christopher Plummer, reading directly from the adoring memoir. The book is reportedly a minor classic, and I'd like to think its animated version will also become a cult classic.

Uncle Boonmee

Any film with a long title asks for troubled reactions: it's demanding that its audience do not expect standard cinema experiences. In the same way that Terry Gilliam probably decimated the potential audience for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the critically well-respected director Apichatpong Weerasetha didn't ensure public eagerness for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Maybe it sounds snappier in Thai.

Movie-lovers who sat through any of his previous highly-rated features knew what to expect, and only a sense of duty and masochistic curiosity prompted me to see if Apichatpong (aka "Joe") had developed film-making talent since his low-budget, technically-maladroit and muddled Tropical Malady. That won a jury prize at Cannes in 2004, following a path of glory started at Cannes in 2002 with a top award for Blissfully Yours, leaving few surprised that Boonmee won the Palme D'Or in 2010. Cannes has a special place in the hearts of cinephiles, and often provides warning signs for less sensitive movie buffs.

A grand total of 17 European sources of production funds, plus the Thai government, financed the film, which indicates that Joe and/or his agents have a lot of friends in useful places. They can be commended for enabling Joe to create a technically adroit film this time.

His camera placings may be mostly static, turning scenes into barely moving photographs, but they are in focus and steady. Although he still has a tiring obsession with night filming, using available light in forests or caves, it is now possible to get a vague idea what might be happening or, most of the time, not happening, in non-action slow pans.

Dialogue is sparse, and occasionally risible, as when the red-eyed large monkey ghost of a lost son is asked by his aunt why he grew his hair so long. Plot advances are few and far between, and feature such deliberately bizarre blends of Thai myths and nonsense as an ugly princess transforming herself into a waterfall's beautiful talking catfish.

The nature-loving director's sympathy for the Isaan people of his home province around Khon Kaen is clearly stated again, and a non-Thai might guess that ethnic-Chinese Joe identifies with both the locally distrusted Lao-speaking borderland people and previous communist-inspired uprisings in the area that were crushed by the Thai military (again used as a screenplay motif). This time, though, there's no evident homosexual reference point.

As for Uncle Boonmee, he's a Thai widower farmer dying of a kidney complaint, visited by his living sister-in-law and her children, and the ghosts of his wife and son. The elderly man shares a few memories, is treated by a Lao male nurse, and has a nicely-photographed funeral. That's it, for close to two hours.

The film's most interesting aspect is its nomination as the official Thai entry for the 2010 Oscars: will it be chosen for the long list and short list. Instinct tells me there must be at least six other non-English-language that were better than this one. [It missed the first cut of 9 selections.]

Brotherhood

Is it possible to construct a credible gay romantic movie telling a tale of two young members of a National Socialist party branch experiencing same-sex attraction for each other? In 2009, Nicolo Donato, a Danish photographer and video/short film director, almost achieved the cinematic mission impossible with Brotherhood (Broderskab).

"Almost", because only devout romantics could believe that a long-time neo-Nazi skinhead with a strongly tattooed body might suddenly acknowledge his repressed tendency after a few beers, a skinny dip and a hot shower with his new slightly less repressed flatmate. It might be called the Brokeback Mountain syndrome, in which two lonely randy young men play games and find out they're serious.

As with Ang Lee's almost credible movie, much depends on the acting prowess of the two lead men. Donato's Danes are very believable even though their contradictory characters are not. Voluntarily, they do and say things in public that are both gratuitously evil or prejudiced, far from the level of human awareness they show each other. They take some anti-Muslim actions that the narrative doesn't show to be essential plot or character developments in terms of their personal standing or safety within the neo-Nazi brotherhood.

Three minor neo-Nazi characters are more credibly nuanced: a drug addict who betrays his older brother, a fat local party leader with charisma and cunning, and a patrician national party leader with political skills. At the end of the movie, the plot for its sequel was heavily signposted. It will probably be equally surprising: this director is worth watching.

I am Cuba

I am Cuba (Soy Cuba) is a 1964 Soviet-Cuban propaganda film justifying the Cuban revolution through four stories set at the end of the corrupt Batista regime. Emotional socio-political lessons, they portray poverty and repression effectively, but the movie's real strength lay in the astonishing parade of bravado cinematographic art displayed by its Georgia-born director Mikhail Kalatozov.

He'd won the Golden Palm at Cannes (1957) for The Cranes Are Flying, but his melodramatic and episodic Cuban saga gained few viewers after it was first screened in Havana or Moscow. Party leaders and authorities had given the Mosfilm crew some three years of financial support, and thousands of extras, but they shelved the end product. Fortunately, it wasn't destroyed.

"Re-discovered" in the USA in the 1990s, its re-mastering and distribution championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, the black-and-white film gained audiences and professional recognition more than two decades after Kalatosov's death in 1973. [It was his penultimate film; the last was a 1969 Soviet-Italian co-production, The Red Tent, starring Sean Connery and Peter Finch (and nominated for the 1973 Golden Globe).]

Few would watch his Cuban epic just for its sentimental fables. It is watched per se, its long, frenetic, weaving, flying, wide-angle camera-work more than compensating for infrequent dialogue and ponderously poetic interlude comments voiced-over by a feminine "Cuba".

In the first tale, featuring a novice Havana prostitute, the remarkably acrobatic photography, accompanied by brash period jazz and rock, leaps up and down hotel storeys, back and forth in a nightclub, circles with dancers, slithers through a shanty slum, soars over white-tinted coconut forests, and more, all intoxicatingly. In the film's first bravura wide-angle non-stop tracking shot, when the camera dances above a hotel rooftop beauty contest and dives down through many levels to join American tourists beside and then in the hotel's swimming pool, it feels as if the Russian crew had been determined to out-do the aerial wizardry of Orson Welles in 1958's Touch of Evil.

The interplay of filtered light and shadow is spell-binding, especially for close-ups where each sweaty face's spot glisten and characters' glinting eyes project passionate emotions. All is contrast, and not just the expected rich-poor divide. The young woman is sad, until she dances; her fruit-vending beau sings his wares and grins exultantly, until he learns her secret trade; her better-than-average American customer is a politely curious intruder in her slum, until he experiences its menacing poverty the next morning.

In the short second tale, a sugar-cane farmer and his teenage children are reaping the rich crop from their rented land when then are told by its Cuban landowner it's been sold to United Fruit. The weather-aged man sends the youngsters away with the family's last peso, burns down his cane and shanty, and dies. This time, the cameras hover over and swirl around the cut cane and fire, again using Russian army infra-red film to give the landscape a snowy whiteness set against a darkly tinted sky (as for the movie's opening aerial vista of palm trees).

The third episode follows a group of dissident Havana university students, torching a drive-in movie screen, meeting a group of drunken American sailors, preparing revolutionary pamphlets (thereby introducing the names of Lenin and Fidel Castro), kind-heartedly failing to assassinate a police chief, who later kills two of the students during street protests. Cinematic spectaculars for this tale include long tracking shots past shops, up and down a university block's staircases, and through marching masses bombarded by police water hoses. There's even one crowd scene on city steps that looks like a tribute to Eisenstein and Russia's own post-Revolutionary cinema.

Most memorably, a continuous roof-level shot tracks a funeral procession, the camera turning to the right to pass through a rooftop cigar-rolling workshop, whose workers unfurl a revolutionary flag down the side of the building beneath the camera which steadily progresses far above the middle of another packed street the procession has turned into, exhibiting remarkable preparatory work, perfect timing and cinematographic daring.

In the fourth and final episode, a lone revolutionary soldier hobbles into a subsistence farmer's hillside shack. Fed, but scorned, by the farmer, he leaves and the hillside is subjected to an intense bombing raid that kills the farmer's oldest son. He tells his family he must go and join the guerrillas, and the camera follows him as he's led through their mountainside encampment. Acquiring his own rifle through battle, he joins thousands of other flag-bearing happy peasants marching downhill to war.

In this episode too, it's the complex choreography - of cameramen and their technical rigging and equipment as well as the massive cast of small-part actors - that is the marvel to behold. The second time round, because the film's imagery first, and truly foremost, tells its stories without overwhelming them. Whatever a viewer may feel about Castro's revolution, the film's vitality and exuberance - and attempt to express the Cuban temperament - are joys to behold.

[Martin Scorsese's 20-minute set of enthusiastic comments in a DVD extra are helpful reminders of key scenes' special qualities. Scorsese does not include the reference to Russian army film, noted in Wikipedia; he ascribes the white-on-black effect to filters.]

Hotel

Writer-director Jessica Hausner's fourth film, Hotel (2004), is a chilly thriller that evokes comparisons with movies from fellow-Austrian Michael Haneke, Denmark's Lars von Trier and Hitchcock in humour-less mode. Technically, it's above par, highlighting natural and available sounds (banishing any additional soundtrack music, but finding valid excuses to include musical moments). It also uses available light well; (starkly so, almost suggesting the movie should have been shot in black and white). Dramatically, however, the movie bombs.

The central character, Irene (Franziska Weisz, an actress and King's College master's degree holder in development and environment), is a newly-hired live-in receptionist living at an old-fashioned hotel deep in Austrian pine forest. The girl she replaced, and closely resembles, had vanished suddenly, and other hotel staff are eerily watchful and edgy.

Local history tells of a 16th-Century witch who was burned to death: the Lady of the Woods is a bogeywoman, but the screenplay understates her presence. Irene is taken to see her legendary cave by a young artist she meets at a disco. Kisses lead to him staying a night in her hotel room, but do not lead anywhere in the plot and her or his character development.

Other red herrings or loose ends hang around the sombre hotel and surrounding forest, which seems to lure Irene into staring at it and walking through it many times without any explanation. Some of her hotel colleagues pray, tell lies, eye her suspiciously, and two detectives pass through the lobby to conduct unseen interviews. Irene swims in the hotel pool in off-duty hours, and smokes outside a locked basement door.

And then the official Artificial Eye DVD ended, abruptly, inexplicably, after its advertised 73 minutes. The movie lasted 83 or 86 minutes when it appeared at European film festivals; it was impossible to care what had been excised, and why. A short story with a lot of potential had become a short film without any meaning.

Exiled

Johnny To is a Hong Kong film auteur who ended up with more commercial success (a la John Woo) than arthouse appreciation (Wong Kar-wai). His production company's name, Milkyway, has become a short-hand way of describing an audience-pleasing distinctive blend of quirky humour, balletic gunfights, vivid colours, and a corps of actors relishing action-thriller roles as sentimental macho (some critics say homo-erotic) gangsters.

Exiled, a 2006 gangland saga set in pre-1999-Handover Macau, has been described as a "Greatest Hits of To" film. It amalgamates standard tricks of his movie-making trade, and those of such regular associates as Szeto Kam-yuen (screenplay), Cheng Siu-keung (cinematography) and David Richardson (editing).

Many of To's favourite actors go through their stylistic motions, well, and the movie's opening tingles with promise and sharp editing. A pair of middle-aged hitmen (grim Anthony Wong and smirking Lam Suet) arrive at a rundown Macau tenement (amid Mediterranean colours beloved by To), and tell a woman (Josie Ho) with a baby they'll wait in the street for her man. Another, younger, pair of triad members (Francis Ng and Roy Cheung) arrive in the street, and the four men acknowledge each other and regret what they must do; it's clear the second pair have appeared to defend the threatened man.

The first pair have been ordered (the audience soon learns) to kill Wo, an exiled Hong Kong gang member (mournful Nick Cheung), who'd failed in his attempt to kill a triad chief (snarling sneering Simon Yam). Wo drives up in a decrepit deep blue van, and so, accidentally, and not for the only mood-lightening moment in the movie, does an undercover police car's comic inspector.

The eventual shoot-out is a typical To work of cinematic art, full of gunshot sounds and furious camera movements, in which none of the five former colleagues dies. The plot then sets up suitably dramatic settings (shadows and curtains, quarry cliffs and pine forests) for other gunplay choreography, with the screenplay providing breathing places in which the gangsters can eat, chat, bond, consider options, and glare or stare at each other.

Like all To movies, this one is made for showing on a big screen to a responsive cinema audience, which expects to be swept through wild coincidences and unnaturally empty streets into long-running pitched battles. One gangster may get wounded, but it'll be clear who it will be: a movie from To is too much of a formulaic cinema experience. Maybe he could have been a Hong Kong Eastwood, and he may believe he's an oriental Sergio Leone making Noodle Westerns.

Exiled is occasionally mesmerising, through pace, lighting effects and set design. At times, when shadows and hues are especially good, one senses the artfulness of Wong Kar-wai's productions, and realises why To eagerly displays his movies in international film festivals and competitions. Exiled was invited to Venice in 2006, and it must be suspected that To and his Milky Way team yearn for more arthouse appreciation. He's won awards a few times in Sitges (for Exiled too) and many times in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but major international appreciation eludes him.

Devil's whore

Andrea Riseborough has been on a lucky casting streak recently. On TV in 2008, she played the young Margaret Thatcher deliciously well. In 2010, Never Let Me Go, Made in Dagenham and Brighton Rock have given her a trio of British movie successes. In between, she'd collected two Best Actress awards for her title role in The Devil's Whore, a flamboyant BBC TV four-part drama series set in Civil War times.

"Describe in 200 minutes the Civil War period (1642-1660) in terms of interesting politico-religious groups, a sexy and wilful young woman, the beheading of a king and subjugation of brave women and the noble Irish people", is the assignment apparently given himself by Peter Flannery, the saga's screenwriter and experienced British TV writer (co-awardee for Our Friends in the North in 1996 and most recently the creator/producer of Inspector George Gently).

He added: "Do so without focusing negative attention on anti-Catholicism, class warfare, Puritanism, squalor, Scotland and all the hundreds of characters involved in England history's bloodiest period." What TV audiences ended up with was typically well-constructed BBC period piece, an above-average well-acted historical strip-tease with a fictional central character and a few warped historical strands. Fun to look at; nothing to believe.

Riseborough revels in the role of Angelica Fanshawe, the impossibly (for the 17th Century) precocious girl who marries her childhood friend, the son of a minor rural lord. They both know and adore their nicely mannered king, Charles I (Peter Capaldi, The Thick of It), though Angelica does talk much out of her social and sexual standing in society.

Civil War breaks out when the king is challenged by Parliament, and Angelica is widowed when the king orders her husband's execution for surrendering his lands to the rebel army. This is led by handsome Oliver Cromwell (Dominic The Wire West), a nicely mannered farmer, and even more handsome Thomas Rainsborough (Michael Centurion Fassbender), who knew and soon knoweth Angelica.

Watching from the wings from the very start has been Thomas Sexby (John Life on Mars Simm), a gloomy facially-gashed soldier returned from German wars and employed as Angelica's protector, which labour of sword-fighting love becomes unpaid self-employment when her second husband is assassinated. For fictional reasons hard to explain in terms of any history, the plot frequently brings Angelica into the lives of rabble-rousing republican preacher Honest John Lilburne (Tom Goodman-Hill, chewing scenery and laughing badly) and his sanctimoniously valiant wife.

Angelica, initially a loyal royalist, had become a "Leveller" with her second husband. She agrees to a marriage of convenience with Sexby so that she can return to the land become a "Digger" and, in due dramatic course, a "Ranter", while her third husband has been unwillingly helping Cromwell to batter the Irish into submission without any scenes mentioning Roman Catholicism.

She is set up to be betrayed by a false Ranter by a vindictive merchant who had acquired her ancestral lands, whom she must kill after her third husband returned from Ireland just in time to disembowel the Ranter and get set up to be betrayed himself during an assassination attempt on Cromwell. Angelica, widowed a third time, is with child from her one night of passion with Sexby, and her story ends with at home with a daughter in a land with a new king.

TV drama director Marc Munden (Vanity Fair) keeps the actors and action moving speedily through colourfully well-lit glamorous and humble settings packed with extras. The background music is irritating, but less so than the over-used computer-generated skyscapes of scudding ominous clouds. They are nagging reminders that this historical drama is a fantastical cartoon.

Restropo

Restrepo, a fly-on-the-wall documentary feature observing US soldiers at work in Afghanistan during a 15-month tour of duty, has been long-listed for the documentary Oscar in 2011. The platoon was sent to the Korangal valley, a Taliban stronghold, to win hearts and minds.

Those key targets had not been gained by the previous platoon, as a platoon commander admits to a gathering of village elders (dozens of ancients with dyed beards and expressionless faces). The new platoon is trying hard but getting nowhere, and the movie indirectly shows why through such incidents as the uncompensated slaughter of a cow and the collateral damage suffered by a bombed hillside village.

Two photo-journalists, American Sebastian Junger and Englishman Tim Hetherington, were embedded with the platoon for a year in its small main base and the outpost the soldiers create on a nearby hilltop. It is called OP Restrepo in tribute to a medic killed soon after the platoon arrived in the lethal valley.

Nearly all of the time, the dozen or so soldiers (all men) in the small outpost sit, watch and wait. The platoon's mission is to help organise the building of a new road through the mountains, but the elders won't or can't provide labourers or support. Reports are phoned back to the base all the time, where a decision is made eventually that OP men will attack a dangerous Taliban position.

The documentary-makers (probably only one of them) join the hillside clamber, during which enemy fire kills a sergeant and injures other soldiers. Their assault clearly scares the young men at the time, and leaves them with distressed memories (stated in face-to-camera interviews back at a US army base in Italy). The bitter footnote, shown in an end-caption, is the fact that the US abandoned the outpost in April 2010, after the film was completed.

The making of the feature film must have had official approval, and the individuals on which the documentary focuses are notably above-average young grunts with pleasant dispositions and accents, and a minimal usage of four-letter words. They obviously accepted, and mostly ignored, the presence of non-combatant watchers: they joke, relax, stare into gun sights, smoke, sunbathe, eat (well), burn faeces and exercise, they do their job.

Restrepo is a very good, quietly respectful portrait of young men struggling, and it draws no simplistic anti-war, anti-occupation conclusions. Their moments of doubt regarding their mission are few. None of them are heard to wonder why Vanity Fair magazine commissioned the journalists, why the Pentagon approved (or proposed) their assignment, why their filming became a movie screened by the National Geographic channel, why they only spent a couple of days of their 15-month tour actually attacking the enemy.

Vengeance

In 2008, French producers introduced Johnny To, one of Hong Kong's leading action movie directors, to ageing French singer-actor Johnny Hallyday. They'd suggested he could replace Alain Delon, who'd backed out of an English-language thriller they'd planned. Within six months, Vengeance was made, and it competed at Cannes the following year.

It didn't win any prize, and it's easy to sense how it could have done if it had been given a script with stronger characterisations and a subtler examination of the nature of vengeance. Hallyday's Frenchman arrives in Macau to identify his murdered Chinese son-in-law and two grandsons, and send his shot-up daughter back to Paris where her father owns a restaurant. It's on the Champs Elysee, he tells the trio of hit men he hires to exterminate the trio that massacred his family, and it'll be part of your reward.

He knows they're professional, because they eliminate their boss's girlfriend and her lover in Hallyday's hotel. They soon realise he's a retired hit man when they discuss guns. They bond, in simple English, and Hallyday and the three Hong Kong actors (ever-reliable Anthony Wong, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) succeed via facial expressions and body language in making the new partnership credible. The trio's regular boss is played (to the maniacally grinning hilt) by another ever-present Hong Kong lead actor, Simon Yam, and it's inevitable that the other gang will also have been working for him, ensuring To can set up wild gun battles on waste ground.

There are many magical To-style directorial moments to savour: a street of umbrellas in the rain, a pitched battle fought with huge cubes of scrap metal, flickering red neon lights, sunset on a beach, a bright red dress in Macau's city centre, shadowy alleyways and staircases. The actors could have carried an even richer plot, but the script seems to run out of energy.

In Leconte's truly rich The Man on the Train, Hallyday's character was a tired old bank robber happy to swap lives with a dying poetry teacher. This time, Hallyday (looking very lined and much older than his then 65) is a man losing his memory, reliant on Polaroid snaps to remind himself what his dead family and hired South China gangsters look like. What is revenge, he asks his gang, and it's already obvious by then that the movie won't try to give us answers. At the end, Hallyday laughs: he has seen happiness, and one wonders if he remembers that he has a daughter recuperating in Paris. At the beginning, she was the one demanding revenge.

Pillars of the earth

Ken Follett wrote an epic 1,400-page historical novel about the construction of a medieval cathedral. Applauded by avid page-turners, The Pillars of the Earth was a global best-seller. An experienced American TV adapter and former theatre dramatist (still best known for his first play, Agnes of God), John Pielmeier, was given the task of re-working the saga into an eight-episode 7-hour US$40-million TV drama series funded by German and Canadian companies and the production house of the UK's Scott brothers (Ridley and Tony). Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, the son of a Croatian director and a long-time assistant director with Steven Spielberg, directed the whole series on location, mainly in Hungary.

Ian McShane (Deadwood's evil boss) plays evil Waleran Bigod, one centrifugal character in the tale of 12th-Century English monarchy, rebellions and passions. This was the period, apparently called the "Anarchy", when King Stephen ruled in Winchester, Maud and her brother waged the usual oxymoronic "civil" war, and prelates, priors and nobles battled for land and regional power. Out of this chaos, King Henry I emerged.

Follett's saga incorporated the famed tale of St Thomas a Becket's murder; the TV series omits it to save time for the TV-audience-friendlier romantic liaisons between Follett's group of fictional figures. Oddly, it introduces a subplot that Follett didn't think of: the incestuous relationship between the leading lady of evil and her weak-spined cutely-bearded son. Follett presumably approved, because he happily plays along with the project by taking a cameo role as a merchant. The screenwriter is also credited in the lead titles as an actor (as "Cuthbert", whose name wasn't announced during the bits of the first 3 episodes during which I paid much attention).

I stopped watching it after 3 episodes, wishing not to waste four more hours of my life on an old-fashioned pseudo-historical epic, the sort that film-makers still produce for children's TV (without incest and the series' other titillations). The urban crowd and battle scenes are worthily TV-spectacular in the usual ways (hand-held and crane cameras), and the director (and his editing team) probably learned expertise in that area while working for Spielberg.

His handling of scenes with dialogue and close-ups is far less fluent and visually interesting. The characters are wooden, their lines flat, and the cuts from one hammy facial expression to another are almost laughable. Although the tale is that of olde England, some poor Irish and Welsh accents serve only to distract viewers from listening too carefully to the banal dialogue.

Apart from McShane, who glowers in his stylish manner, other competent British actors are also demeaned, being moved insensitively from one prompt spot to the next, in period settings where carpenters, costumiers, stonemasons and lighting engineers worked well to make the series look more credible than it sounds.

Metropia

Movies are like all other arts, either commercially exploiting consumer tastes or non-commercially exploiting official funding organisations. The former sink or swim in the big hard capitalist world, the latter gain lifebelts that support their creative visions. Terry Gilliam struggles with reality, reaching such heights as Brazil (and various loss-making nadirs), while a Turkish graffiti artist he reportedly inspired, Tarik Saleh, obtained Europe-wide funding for his debut computer-generated animated movie Metropia.

A Swedish writer, Fredrik Edin, cooked up the scifi idea of a grim and grimy Europe in 2024, its cities' subway lines linked by an all-powerful corporation and its citizens increasingly connected secretly to a central thought-control system via call centres (and a potent shampoo). Stig Larsson (a namesake of the Millennium author) co-wrote the screenplay with Edin and Saleh, and the fund-dispensing agencies didn't cavil at the idea of re-making 1984, Kafka and Brazil.

They must have been enchanted by Saleh's concept of animating edited and deliberately deformed photographs of ordinary people and settings, and adding real actors' voices. It's not an innovative concept, and it's not attractive when the animated heads (big) and bodies (shrunk) sport minimal movements and are stuck in stiff posed positions in spooky gloomy settings.

In addition to the Swedish soundtrack there's an English-language version, employing some vocally distinctive offbeat movie stars (with Vincent Gallo, Juliette Lewis and Udo Kier in lead roles). Their talents are not well used, with bad syncing highlighting the animated characters' lack of screen presence and action. The predictable story of a bald average Joe (Gallo) meeting the shampoo model (Lewis) and battling a global conspiracy takes far too long, far too slowly, to unfold and moments of magic animation effects are too few to justify the movie's funding.

Lebanon

Of all the wars fought by Israel, the ones that probably most damaged both the country's overseas image and its self-respect were waged in neighbouring Lebanon. Samuel Maoz was a young Israeli army recruit stuck in an invading tank in 1982, and his experiences led him to write and direct Lebanon. It won the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, the Israeli film industry's first win there, and stirred up controversy and no film awards at home: its anti-war sentiment exposes the brutality and lies a country's leaders impose on their young soldiers.

Four novice army recruits are posted to a tank ordered to enter an air-bombed Lebanese village. One drives the "rhinoceros"; the gunner, loader and tank commander squeeze into the turret. Their only views of the outside world are through periscoped gun sights, which highlight their killing machine's purpose: the outside world is a landscape of targets inhabited by people who seem to be in an alien, impersonal world.

The tank, even more than the submarine in Das Boot, is a harsh, ugly military environment filled with the smells of fuel, urine, sweat and explosives. For a time, it also contains the corpse of an Israeli soldier the tank crew had caused to die. A professional commanding officer enters too, browbeating the scared, tired and dirty crewmen. They are instructed to fire illegal phosporus bombs in a clandestine way, and hold a Syrian POW inside the turret. Their nastiest outside visitor is a vicious Arabic-speaking Phalangist (Lebanese Catholic) who, unknown to the crew, puts the fear of Allah into the POW.

The gun sight shows bloodied corpses, maimed bodies, terrified children and women, eyes staring hatefully, buildings demolished. The reality of war, as the writer-director presents it, is never a matter of personal heroism or nationalist pride. It's shown as a living nightmare its participants have to learn how to live through, or die. The tank's dark and dingy setting, its claustrophobic atmosphere, the space restrictions and inevitable mechanical problems and personality conflicts do not glorify this type of mechanised warfare. It's condemned vividly, by a man whose first-hand experience and disgust can be sensed, almost smelt and felt, throughout the docudrama.

4.3.2.1

Four girls, 3 days, 2 cities (London and New York) and 1 ("chance", or whatever) comprise the recipe for another British crime drama, 4.3.2.1. It was written and co-directed by Noel Clarke, a black English TV actor (Doctor Who and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet) who wrote and acted in a youth crime movie, Kidulthood (2006). That led to his directorial debut for its much more successful sequel, Adulthood (2008), which he also starred in and wrote. Two years later, he's written himself a smaller role (as yet another tough guy) in a crime caper featuring young women, three English and one American.

One's quite tall, very black, sassy and a female-lib martial artist (Shanika Adulthood Warren-Markland), another's very tall, blond, virginal and sardonic (Tamsin St Trinian's Egerton). Their shorter brunette friends (American Emma Inflows Roberts and Brit Ophelia Holby City/Chatroom Lovibond) have dysfunctional families, personal problems and work full-time or when it's dramatically convenient (in, no wordplay probably intended, a convenience store, alongside Clarke's character).

The plot frequently manages to drop into the girls' lives when they're in the underwear, because Clarke clearly reckoned he'd hit the jackpot with a plot combining Charlie's Angels, Sex and the City, teen sex, Guy Richie crime capers and abrupt Tarentino action and jump-cuts.

One event brings the girlfriends closer together: their accidental run-in with a local mixed-race gang of diamond thieves and its fiery bosswoman. And, yes, the villainess does survive in a self-mocking (it must be, please) ending that overwhelmingly hints at a sequel. It's unlikely to be made unless this movie's very many credited executive producers need more offsetting tax losses.

The movie's credited co-director, Mark Davis, an experienced TV film editor, gained his first credit as editor in 1999 for the Metrosexuality blaxpoitative/gay series, which starred Clarke as the lead hetero character. His presence on Clarke's latest movie gave it a self-consciously quick-jumping, screen-splitting, nervous energy that has a probably unintentional alienating effect and definitely unintentionally highlights the poor ensemble acting.

Also alienating this audience was a guest cameo appearance by offbeat American comedy film-maker Kevin Smith, as a courier on a plane. It was an irrelevant spot, but his screen charisma illustrated the failings of the other cast members: he knew what he was doing and how to do it.

I'm still here

If nothing else, the mockumentary I'm Still Here proves that you cannot always fool a lot of people for a long time unless you're a very talented con man. The English artist Banksy is, and his Exit Through the Gift Shop has reaped awards and financial reward and will surely be nominated for the 2010 Best Documentary Oscar. I'm Still Here probably won't get any nominations anywhere, not even for Razzies.

Its misguided creators were Casey Affleck (co-writer and -producer, supporting actor, main cinematographer and lead editor) and his brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix (co-writer and -producer and lead role), who spent almost two years of Phoenix's life pretending that he'd retired from film acting and was going to be a hip-hop artist. A handful of pals joined their charade, some acknowledging their participation (Sean 'P.Diddy' Combs, as his new career's manager and glam-rocker Englishman Antony Langdon from the Superhog band as his resident assistant), some not confirming they were fully in on the act (David Letterman).

One of the movie's ironies is the fact that Phoenix had really (reportedly) sung, more than adequately, during his Golden Globe-winning role as Johnny Cash in Walk The Line (which earned him a 2006 Best Actor Oscar nomination to display alongside his Best Supporting Actor nomination in 2001 for Gladiator). In his mockumentary role, he's hopeless as a rapper or stage presence, and he must have known it during the many months of getting fat and hirsute and turning out for fake performances, interviews and public appearances.

All concerned defended themselves by claiming that they'd set out to illustrate how easy it is to get public recognition in an era of instant celebrity, scripted "reality" TV shows and hyped talent competitions. That makes up a big target, one deserving a piercing documentary or a satirical send-up a la This Is Spinal Tap. The target is woefully missed because Phoenix seems to have genuinely over-estimated his popularity, sex appeal and musical abilities.

Affleck and he also misjudged public tolerance for full frontal male nudity and excretory jokes that were presumably designed to add levels of entertainment usually welcomed by Jackass audiences. They filmed their rehearsed version of crude reality, creating really crude cinema.

The final irony may be Phoenix's success in ending his movie career. The maudlin mess of Two Lovers has proved to be, as he'd announced in 2008, his "last" film. He's not lined up for any future movie role, and it's unlikely he'd be welcomed back in Hollywood. Not so much because of what he said and did, but because his supposed self-examination bombed at the box office, grossing only half a million dollars in the USA.

Wallander

The first volume in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of novels was published in 2005, the year after the radical Swedish investigative journalist's suddenly died of a heart attack. His heroes, philandering journalist Mikael Blomkvist and cyber-hacking outcast Lisbeth Salander, made two more annual appearances and earned millions of readers worldwide. Sweden was a new star on the map of international book publishing, whose agents soon realised that Larsson had been preceded by playwright Henning Mankell, another left-winger with connections to Communist parties and a very successful crime-writing franchise, the Wallander series.

The eighth in the series of crime thrillers had been published in Sweden in 1999; all of them had been adapted for local TV (1997-2007). Mankell began planning an English-language series, choosing to join forces with the BBC (its Scotland unit, for unpublished reasons that surely include logistics and funding) and, most important, with actor Kenneth Branagh eager for the title role.

Twice making three films in summertime in the fictional police inspector's home town of Ystad, in 2007 and 2008, the production achieved its goals of creating a popular new TV crime solver (filling gaps left by the end of Morse, Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison, Cracker and others), while maintaining the unglamourous reality of Mankell's books.

The key multi-award-winning factor was Branagh, forgoing theatricality for a restrained presentation of a divorced workaholic middle-aged detective whose father (David Warner) is getting dementia, and sole child, a daughter, is also estranged. His warts-and-all Kurt Wallander is a troubled soul, as concerned about modern Sweden's national character as Larsson's Blomkvist was. His cases bring him into contact with female abuse, serial murder, racism,sexual exploitation, sale of human body parts, perhaps leading Larsson to push the envelope of gore and sensationalism further with Blomkvist's exposes.

The strength of the BBC TV series lay in its production team's creation of a distinctive style (combining cinematography, set design, music and editing) to showcase a credibly bleak and beautiful environment in an isolated town and its wild rural surroundings. Just as Oxford's pretty quaintness was an ideal backdrop for Morse, Ystad looks just as pleasantly chilly as Mankell made it feel in words. The city was wise to invest in the film production company, and reportedly happily awaits Branagh's availability for a third set of movies.

Holes can be picked, of course, in Mankell's plots and/or the screenplay adaptations. Crime thrillers and detective fiction are natural targets for viewer scrutiny far above the level given to family dramas or soaps. There's a major irritant in the over-used reliance on cellphone rings to announce plot developments, and the police station five regular detective team of back-up characters are little-defined and never look in obvious places where Wallander finds clues.

Yet, for just one example, The Man Who Smiled, the fifth 90-minute movie in the UK TV series, is as coldly effective, well-directed and character-driven as a top-notch cinema release such as Insomnia, Christopher Nolan's 2002 remake of a Norwegian detective movie. TV movies are too often wrongly under-rated, their existence and quality not even acknowledged by movie critics who only worship the big screen.

Detective Dee

One of modern Hong Kong cinema's first and foremost action-adventure directors has roared back into commercial favour with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. It could become a major franchise for Tsui Hark, who has directed close to 50 movies (since The Butterfly Murders in 1979), and produced many more for both the cinema and TV.

Detective Dee is a fictional character based on a real 7th-Century magistrate in the court of Tang Dynasty ruler Wu Zetian, China's first and only female emperor. Under the name of Judge Dee, he's the hero of a series of 17 novels written by Robert van Gulik, a Dutch scholar in Oriental languages and diplomat (serving as ambassador to Japan and Korea when he died in 1967).

Tsui's film credits a novel about Detective Dee by Lin Qianyu. The screenplay was written by Jialu Zhang, working with Taiwanese veteran Kuo-fu Chen; they'd also collaborated on the adaptation of The Message, a 20th-Century Sino-Japanese espionage thriller that gained high ratings the previous year (2009)

Andy Lau plays the outcast magistrate brought back to court to solve the deadly self-combustions of two courtiers helping to prepare the coronation of Empress Wu. Tsui's trademark style of quick cuts, overlapping dialogue and fast action ensures that Lau's usual brooding glare and over-acted facial reactions provide minimal distraction. By contrast, Carina Lau (back on screen after a four-year break) is credibly dead-panned and imposing as the Empress.

There's the usual cast of hundreds of extras, palatial settings and martial artistry (designed and directed inventively by Sammo Hung, with tributes to tree-hopping, pole-leaping, high-flying and other classic movie acrobatics) in this grandly old-fashioned historical romp. The key supporting roles of a female warrior (Bingbing Li, The Message) and an albino courtier (Chao Deng, award-winning lead in Assembly) are well played, and Tony Leung (the tall one) turns in a customary screen-stealing growling performance as the one-handed supervisor of construction for a giant Buddhist statue. That's the movie's major scenic attraction, reminiscent of massive big-screen stages from Indy Jones or Lara Croft sagas (and Tsui's own past spectacular epics).

Town, the

Ben Affleck has been known as a child actor, Matt Damon's distant cousin and close friend (and co-winner of the 1997 Oscar for their Goodwill Hunting screenplay), a mediocre leading actor (Pearl Harbor, Daredevil), the elder brother of Casey Affleck, and the boyfriend of various lead actresses. Since 2005, when he got married (to Jennifer Garner), he's established better recognition as a Boston-focused writer-director, with Gone Baby Gone (2007) and now The Town (2010).

A mutual friend of him and Damon co-wrote the screenplay with Affleck, joined by a first-timer on the adaptation of a novel. It depicts a square-mile Boston district, Charlestown, as the world's record-setting home base for bank robbers. Within the city's Irish families, hold-ups are an ancestral business.

This is a world of cliches too. Motherless Doug (Affleck) has been raised by another family while his father (Chris Cooper) is in prison. His adopted brother is a violent ex-con (Jeremy Hurt Locker Renner chewing the Boston scenery well), and the proxy sister is a promiscuous addict who'd supposedly long been sensitive Doug's bed-mate. The young men's gang of robbers includes three other local lads and works on assignment for an Irish florist and heist idea man (Pete Postlethwaite).

The masked gang robs a bank, takes its female manager (Rebecca Hall) hostage temporarily, escapes, and decide to keep an eye on the woman - at which point, so early in the movie, the plot raises a movie-goer's eyebrows. They flutter angrily when Doug takes a big fancy to the woman, the feeling's reciprocated, and the psychotic ex-con catches them out in public. Meanwhile, inevitably, there's a local cop working alongside a determined FBI agent (Jon Mad Men Hamm), and the gang, abetted by the addict, has two more jobs to do for the florist.

The final heist, in the Red Sox stadium, is paced and edited well, but the loose ends are resolved with further incredibilities that defy logic (and moral justice). As a crime movie, The Town is a technically competent piece of work for which Affleck deserves credit. As a narrative and love story, though, it fails, and the DVD's unrated cut (148 minutes) clearly shows why and how it could lose 23 minutes in its cinema version. The extensive trim may explain why the movie gained high favourable ratings from critics. At its full length, it looks very over-rated.

Legend of the guardians

Legend of the Guardians probably broke even within a couple of months of its 2010 opening, reportedly grossing close to US$140 million worldwide (against a budget of US$80 million). It's a pleasant surprise that the computer-animated feature made US$55 million in North America, where enough movie-going families were not put off by its plot's many dark moments, the lack of human characters in an owl saga, its Australian voices, and an Irish-sounding subtitle, The Owls of Ga'Hoole.

The saga is derived from a set of popular children's books written by Kathryn Lasky, under the subtitle brand name. That may have brought in much custom, as did the 3D/IMAX formats and the track record of Australia's Animal Logic animators (Babe, Happy Feet). Word of mouth among parents would have been the best advertising, for this must have an enchanting 3D movie experience.

Bursting with true flights of avian fancy and glorious colour composition, the movie is a marvelous collage of animation skills. Owls have the biggest eyes of all birds (the equivalent to humans having eyes the size of large oranges, a DVD extra notes) and they are used to good effect to convey the various characters' emotions. As saga go, however, and as Ms Lasky's books presumably did, the characters and their action adventures are standard fare.

Two young Barn Owlets, Kludd and Soren, are abducted by evil owls, the Pure Ones, led by masked Metal Beak (Joel Edgerton) and his white-feathered queen (Helen Mirren). Soren escapes, together with a small female Elf Owlet. They meet a Burrowing Owl (David Wenham) who's called Digger, naturally, and his pal, a Great Grey (Anthony LaPaglia). Soren's family nursemaid snake, Mrs P (Miriam Margolyes), goes along for the ride, and they all reach the secret home of the good Guardians, where an old Whiskered Screech (Geoffrey Rush) and a treacherous Great Grey (Sam Neill) debate the best way to meet the external threat.

Lord of the Rings performed by a typical Hollywood band of oddball creatures? It could have been, but first-time animation director Jack Snyder was wisely asked to give the saga his distinctive action-packed big-screen-filling surround-sound style (as in 300, Watchmen and the next Superman). The net result is a movie whose looks and sounds, special effects and pace deserve a storyline that's stronger. Most comic moments seem contrived, with stereotypical characters such as a pair of bumbling baddies and a poet-warrior with a lute and off-key songs.

More credibly, the wayward brother is allowed to die (after trying to trick his sibling once more) and the moral lessons can be easily explained to their youngsters by human parents. They won't need to explain why the evil queen is allowed to flee with some survivors, and the newly qualified Guardian Owl utters warnings. A sequel was hoped for, but I suspect we'll see Happy Feet 2 first.

Genova

Writer-director Michael Winterbottom and lead actor Colin Firth joined forces on a 2008 romance and family drama. It was never distributed in the USA, although a couple of trade journals reviewed it favourably. Its only marketable points in the States would have been its main supporting actress, Catherine Keener, and its location work in a pretty ancient Italian city, Genova. But potential art-house audiences couldn't be expected to flock to a tale of two young daughters of an English professor (Firth), all seeking a new start in Italy after the death of their mother/wife in a car crash.

The father, who'd had a youthful fling with an American colleague (Keener), starts an affair with a young student. The older daughter has a secret relationship with an Italian youth, the younger girl sees the ghost of the mother she accidentally killed ... yet all's well that must end well in such an exquisite environment.

Laurence Coriat wrote the screenplay, which follows the path taken by a British family in his first (1999) movie, Wonderland, on which he also worked with Winterbottom. An even more frequent collaborator partnered the director on the cinematography, Danish Marcel (9 Songs, 24 Hour Party People) Zyskind. Winterbottom's usual penchant for improvised dialogue is also evident, tediously so in too many "natural" scenes when messy conversations needed pruning.

Winterbottom cobbled together some finely-photographed outdoor settings (narrow lanes, crowded beaches, coastal scenery) and set designs (darkened bars, shadowy bedrooms). But he

hasn't identified this beautiful bustling Italian port-city's eerie beauty in the way that Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now captured Venice as the vital feature in a mystery movie. The mystery element, which should be closer to a horror motif in the lonely younger daughter's visions of her dead mother, is highlighted ineffectively and too late in the movie. The high-pitched nightmares of the young girl needed to build a tension, as did the older daughter's clandestine affair and their father's re-discovery of loving feelings.

British viewers may enjoy an unexpected laugh early in the movie, when the family flies to Europe on Ryanair and receives immaculate consideration and speedy service from a stewardess. Such product placement may be valuable PR but in Europe it's far-from-subliminal comedy too.