Confessions

Shortlisted for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Japan's entry is a well-crafted tale of horror-tinged revenge. More cerebral and slower-paced, and less violent, than similar Japanese films in the revenge genre, Confessions presents a dazzling package of movie bravado.

The acting, screenplay, editing, music and cinematography frequently alienate, surprise and shock their audience. Do all the devices make it a better film than the actual Oscar-winner (a sentimentalised racial allegory from Denmark)? Yes. Could it have won? Never. Would Oscar voters applaud megalomaniac children who are cold-blooded murderers with vicious or neglectful mothers?

A widowed junior school teacher's infant daughter is killed on purpose twice by two of her pupils, on whom she will wreak horrible vengeance. She won't kill them, but eventually ensure that they kill their mothers. The stories ("confessions") of almost everyone involved are told, via flashbacks and off-screen commentaries, starting with the teacher's 30-minute detailed account of her child's death.

After their milk break, and initially unruly, the school class is told how two boys, A and B, waylaid the child and drowned her. Slowly, through finely-timed cuts, the children are seen to pay closer attention, finally panicking when told by the teacher that she's laced the two boys' drinks with HIV-infected blood (from her dead husband). A noir tale that's barely credible, it's told with gripping calmness by the lead actress, Takako Matsu.

The two boys note their formative influences and innermost wishes, while the class's quiet self-willed leading girl recounts the new young male teacher's efforts to reach out to one of the boys, who's turned into an unwashed mentally-disturbed reclusive. That boy's wimpering, doting mother blames the woman teacher for his state, but his partner in crime is sure that the teacher's HIV claim was only a scare tactic. He befriends the schoolgirl, killing time with her while he plans how to be re-united with the mother who'd abandoned him.

Loose ends in the story dangle threateningly around much of the time, most noticeably in the foolish replacement teacher's lack of knowledge of the school's involvement in a child's death. Coincidences are hard to accept, but only on reflection. During the film, visually dazzled by darkening cloud formations interspersed between artfully-composed sound, light and blood effects and aerial or hand-held shots of malicious children, an audience can only sit transfixed, waiting for explanations.

With an ending that's close to grand guignol, and a final line of dialogue that's a dramatic slap in the audience's face, the movie leaves one shattered emotionally. Disbelieving, but aware that that the original, horrific sinfulness of children has been conveyed so well, a la Lord of the Flies.

This seventh feature film from writer-director by Tetsuya Nakashima, based on a novel, prompts searches for his previous award-winners: Memories of Matsuko, Paco and the Magical Book and Kamikaze Girls. It's pleasing that the Japanese film industry sent Hollywood a film it must have known could never win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Sentimentality.

Masahista

Brillante Mendoza has amassed dozens of awards, including many from festivals outside his native Philippines. An experienced production designer (using the name Dante Mendoza), he worked on ten features in 1985-9, and on three more of his own directions in that function since 2006. His debut as a director came in 2005 at the age of 45, with Masahista (The Masseur), after a long spell working as an art director on TV commercials. Since then he's won Best Director at Cannes for (Kinatay, 2009), which also earned him a second Palme D'Or nomination, following Serbis (Service) the previous year.

Masahista's emotionally powerful story (credited to frequent Mendoza collaborator Ferdinand Lapuz) and naturalistic screenplay (Mendoza and another frequent associate, Boots Agbayani Pastor) have a pronounced gay element. So do several of the Mendoza team's movies, but their homosexual action and characters are a secondary, albeit seemingly integral, aspect of working-class Filipino existence as seen by Mendoza.

Family love and/or duties is his dominant motif. The movie's central character, a young masseur in a seedy back-street Manila house of male prostitution, is summoned back to his reprobate father's death-bed in his scruffy home city (Pampanga). Calming helping an embalmer dress his father in formal clothes for the funeral rites, the masseur's actions are counterpointed with scenes from his previous day's work, undressing and oiling a new customer.

At little more than 70 minutes, the movie is a shocking slice of poor Philippine life. Shocks abound not so much in the full nudity (mostly non-frontal), simulated homosexual intercourse, street language or intimate details of gigolos' techniques and services. What's overwhelmingly shocking is the depiction of desperate poverty in a society where amorality and cheating is masked by facades of politeness and friendliness.

The writing team avoid many of the usual soap-operatics that can blight such docudramas. The masseur's younger brother is not shown following his sibling's lead, his girlfriend is a foul-mouthed sluttish customer, and his mother is as hard to love as his aunts and adulterous drunkard absentee father. The masseur's co-workers are portrayed credibly too, reserving only their oral kisses for their girlfriends, and the screenplay employs telling overhead shots to pan across the row of tiny curtained massage cubicles. If only all such operations in Manila (or the nation's movie versions of them) weren't managed by unctuous queens twittering camp Filipino-English.

Eventually, the masseur breaks down in regretful tears over the loss of his father, but he's not allowed to walk off into any sunrise of hope or happiness, or a loyal woman's arms. A challenging focal figure, a street-wise cherub, Iliac the masseur was the first major role for Coco Martin, who subsequently starred in other Mendoza movies and is now a TV star. He's credibly faux-naif, his emotions little explored, firmly repressed.

Alan Paule is credible too as the kindly massage customer, whose stilted chat-chat conversation and price negotiations with Iliac advance the movie's docudrama, providing details that explain the two men's outside lives and commercial relationship. Paule, also a frequent actor in Mendoza films, made his first movie back in 1988: it was a similar socio-political saga, Macho Dancer, directed by Lino Brocka, one of the country's leading anti-capitalist neo-realists.

Neo-realism is a small world in a small film industry: Mendoza's main female character this time (the masseur's matriarchal aunt) is played, sharply, by Jaclyn Jose; she also starred in Macho Dancer and several other Mendoza movies.

Kinatay

Roger Ebert gave Kinatay (Butchered) his damning judgment as the "worst film ever" screened in the annual film festival at Cannes. Yet the Philippine entry won its 2009 Best Director prize for Brillante Mendoza. The Palme D'Or that year was awarded to The White Ribbon, the jury having the usual mission impossible of deliberately honouring two different films for the top prizes (and a third for its screenplay, etc). Mendoza was lucky.

For the first third of his movie, the focus of the excellent hand-held cinematography is on daylit Manila's happy-go-lucky environment. Twenty-year-old police cadet Peping (Coco Martin) is getting married to the mother of their child, in a registrar's office followed by a small family meal in a fast-food cafe.

A wealthy friend pays for the meal, and Peping filches the tip left on the table to give it to another guest who'd asked for a loan. That sudden note of amorality is intensified when night falls and Peping is seen as a small link in a long chain of small pay-offs made by street hawkers to a local gang. Promised further financial gain, the cash-strapped rookie joins another petty gangster in a van of enforcers with police connections. After a lengthy, mostly non-speaking, ride through the ugly urban nightscapes, the anxious rookie ends up realising their target is a drug-addicted go-go bar girl.

It's true cinema noir for the next hour, in naturally-lit semi-darkness in the van, beside a dirt road for the five men's group urination, and in a rural house with a basement. The woman is known to the gang leaders, who rape, abuse and chop her to pieces, which they wrap in plastic bags and throw away bit by bit on their drive back to the city. All the time, the weepy-eyed rookie looks aghast and does nothing.

Back in daylight, in a noodle cafe, he vomits, asks permission to leave, gets his cash, keeps the gun the gang boss gave him and hails a taxi. It bursts a tyre, and the rookie cannot get a bus or another cab in the rush hour. The movie waits a long time beside the highway with him, while the tax-driver changes the tyre. Very symbolically, he hesitates before re-boarding the taxi, but he does. In the final symbolic shot, his wife is in the kitchen with their baby, cooking. Clearly, the audience is told, the rookie's fate is cooked too. He's going to be another corrupt cop.

There are perhaps a few too many such symbols, on the soundtrack (dotted with chicken cries and spooky music), in the scenery (fighting cockerel, butcheries, an abattoir sign and Catholic images) as well as the storyboard and dialogue. The very anti-heroic and almost incredibly naive youngster does not provide a character the audience can identify with or pity. Instead, it is expected to observe the inhumanity of a society without adequate morals, rules or decency.

Presented not as a horror show but a docudrama, this depressing film is a damning depiction of Manila, more so than any of Lino Brocka's anti-capitalist exposes. It is a striking movie, in the mode of the deliberately repulsive extreme reality of French and other quasi-intellectual slasher movies. Its direction, especially the editing and pacing, warranted the Cannes award, and Ebert's outburst is not contradictory - if he meant the "nastiest" film ever invited to Cannes.

The writer, Armando Lao, has more than a score of movie credits since the mid-1980s, most recently making many with Jeffrey Jeturian. He worked with Mendoza the previous year, on Serbis (Service), and is helping to ensure the overseas reputation of the Philippine cinema industry as a source of excellent negative PR for its sorry capital city.

Pornography: a thriller

The gay genre is such a feverishly exploited sector of the indie film market that it's impossible to see all those that might be worth seeing, even if anyone would want to. Many of the genre's current rash of first-time writer-directors presumably gained production funding and/or distribution on account of the novelty value of their concept. Philadelphian David Kittredge probably did. With two short gay films to his credit (Fairy Tale in 1998, Target Audience in 2002), he made his debut feature in 2009, with Pornography: A Thriller.

Its starting point is the disappearance of a gay porn star. Fourteen years later, two separate investigations are being conducted coincidentally, by a curious non-fiction writer and a gay porn actor planning to direct his debut film based on the actor's life and supposed death.

The "real" story takes half-an-hour and ends mysteriously, with the apparent snuff-film killing of the retired porn star. He may have killed his agent, who'd introduced him to big money and an unseen menacing client. Another half-hour tells the tale of the gay porn researcher and his lover, who've rented a flat at a price that's too good to be true. It seems to be the setting for a snuff film, whose existence is suggested by evidence enigmatically revealed and B&W photos mailed anonymously to the writer. This time, an unexplained death possibly arrives for the writer's video-storekeeping friend.

In the last segment of the 110-minute movie, the wannabe gay porn actor director's script for the lost actor's final days seems to write itself. It also transforms the lives of the director and his actors and crew.

The potentially intriguing but non-dramatically convoluted storyboard is made even messier by self-conscious attempts at indie-style experimentalism, with non-linear progression, single-colour lighting effects and fleeting cuts to mock clues, all probably reflecting the director's wish to emulate the alienating artistry of David Lynch. Further confusion results from the employment of some actors in two roles in different segments.

Most irritating are red herrings such as a signet ring always obtained from nowhere explained and worn meaningfully by each segment's lead actor, its design matching that of a gay porn club and film production company whose ownership is unknown, like that of the writer's apartment.

The movie's conclusion, echoing earlier dialogue, has the modern-day porn actor stripping in front of a camera, telling his supposed unseen controller (probably symbolising the movie's audience) that's what it really wanted to see. Some audience members may have applauded that non-revelatory final scene: after almost two hours of non-total exposure, they get to see a bit of soft-core full-frontal male nudity.

The lead actors and some supporting cast members sport major credits in gay TV series and the hard-porn adult film industry, as the US porn industry likes to call itself. All of them are more than competent in dead-pan roles that don't provide characterisations or dialogue requiring acting stretches. The director shows promise, and can be faintly praised too for boldly going where no gay genre writer-director has been before.

Unfaithful

In 2009, writer-director Claude Peres pushed the envelope of gay movies beyond most movie-goers' tolerance level. The Frenchman's first feature, Unfaithful (Infideles), showed his night of sex with Marcel Schlutt, a German model, escort and professional gay porn actor.

Peres had a storyboard on the wall of the apartment in which they met, but there was no film crew. Peres was his own cameraman, editing the footage caught by fixed cameras (in positions fixed between scenes) and mobile cameras (hand-held by him and Schlutt). He recording what they said to each other (in English) and the ambient sounds of the apartment building.

Peres's first film, a short made in 2006, showed a man viewing photos of a kiss and recalling homosexual love (La memoire vive). His feature's in-your-face directness was not a complete novelty in France, as lesbian director Emilie Jouvet had already filmed live action with a similar intellectual g-string of sexual discussions added to the hard core. Most of that is hidden from view, though, in darkness, inadequate lighting of out of the fixed camera's position.

The concept had value, and it would have been interesting to experience an honest exchange of views and sexual activities by a pair of strangers. It need not have been at the self-consciously and overly intellectual level of My Dinner with Andre, but it did need two people with an ability to communicate in words and body languages. However, a coy Frenchman and blase German cannot be expected to spark verbal wonders in the English language when neither of them are fluent in it. Peres adds voice-over comments without adding to the overall impact or meaning. This film is "so not about sex", he comments, but fails to prove it.

As the DVD extras show, neither of the men is bursting with extrovert intelligence. They are nice young Europeans with good bodies, and their movie merely proves a basic fact of sexual life: that horny men are faithful to nothing but their penile urges. They are polite, considerate, use condoms, smoke joints and have breakfast; they don't teach their audience enough about male sex and bonding, or the relationship between a director and an actor, in terms of reality or symbolism.

Letter to Elia

Martin Scorsese teamed up with Kent Jones in 2010 to write and direct an hour-long Elia Kazan retrospective and documentary essay for a packaged collection of the director's work. Its title, A Letter to Elia, hints at the loving respect, virtual hero-worship, Scorsese feels for the man whose movies inspired him as an avid pre-teen movie-goer.

Scorsese often reviews movie history, gives lectures, and is as confident in front of the screen as behind the cameras. The one-sided partnership with Jones is presumably based on friendship, as Jones had no other movie industry experience and is a former writer (1996-2001) for The Daily Show on Comedy Channel. He'd worked with Scorsese before on a documentary study of the Statue of Liberty, The Lady by the Sea (2004, for the History Channel, marking the statue's post-911 re-opening).

In 2007, Scorsese narrated Jones's documentary about Val Lewton, Man in the Shadows, a producer of low-budget horror movies (Cat People, Body Snatcher etc) for RKO. That was a 77-minute promotional commission for the Turner Classic Movies channel. It employed Montreal-born Greek-ethnic actor Elias Koteas to provide Newton's voice, and he took the same off-screen role for the Kazan essay, reading extracts from the controversial auteur's autobiography and lecture notes. The Actors Studio graduate later took an on-screen role for Scorsese's Shutter Island.

Scorsese is an unashamed propagandist for cinema as a work of art, a higher-brow publicist than Ebert or Maltin, and an auteur whose own creations' quality justifies his pontification and enthusiasm. Most of the praise, and movie clips, in this essay highlights the classic scenes Kazan composed for East of Eden, On the Waterfront and his semi-autobiographical America, America.

Key factors accounting for Scorsese's admiration for Kazan included the director's ability to evoke the reality, through location environments that movie-goers would recognise or feel they knew. Kazan also elicited exceptional performances from his actors, Scorsese feels, and created characters and scenes with which audiences could also identify. Kazan was part of a global mood change in cinema, alongside France's New Wave and other countries' development of Italy's neo-realism genre. More interestingly, Scorsese reveals how much he identified with Kazan's family life and his films' tormented characters. What isn't so easy to accept is Scorsese's perfunctory acknowledgments to the kills of other artists without whom Kazan could not have succeeded: writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, lighting and sound directors.

Clips from a Kazan interview in later life confirm his transformation from a grinning, cocky young Armenian immigrant into a gloomy soul despised by many Hollywood colleagues. He'd provided the names of eight former fellow Communists to McCarthy's UnAmerican Activities committee. Scorsese cannot ignore the controversy but he slides past it, and lets Kazan repeat the excuse that he'd been forced to choose what was the lesser of two evils for himself (and his career). Others didn't, and fled to Europe or used pseudonyms.

It sounds like special pleading for Scorsese to claim that Kazan's work gained an independent character and superior qualities after his act of self-serving betrayal. It's irritating to be given hints, not facts, about Kazan's ruthlessness in his native Armenia and as a refugee actor in New York. In the end, this is a promotional piece that feels an unworthy, unnecessary effort from Scorsese.

Twisted romance

The first feature movie from Jose Campusano, an Argentine writer-director, was Twisted Romance in 2008. Rotten Tomatoes indices suggest that in some markets it was re-named Vile Romance in 2011. Either way, it is another indication that Buenos Aires is not a city of loving normality.

Joe Orton would have appreciated the storyboard, and been tempted to exploit its comedy noir potential. The central character is an acned teenager, a non-mercenary practising homosexual. His wrinkled cackling mother and wild-eyed manic sister earn their living as a duo providing therapeutic sexual services for needy middle-aged men. Presumably eager to find a father-figure, the lad picks up a long-haired weed-smoking be-ringed ultra-macho gay divorced man who's a gun merchant and bitterly separated from his young daughter.

The older man is a violent love-maker, and averse to the sensitive and dim-witted lad's wish to take his turn as the active partner. Inexplicably, unless it's an Argentine politeness thing, the women in his family are eager to host the lad's older friend for dinner, an offer which the older man accepts. This leads to the daughter deciding to get the same action her brother is getting.

Picking up a young Spanish visitor (symbolically, perhaps, the film's only good-looking and likable character), the lad gets his sexual need satisfied, but the Spaniard has probably been affected by the Argentine sun or psyche, falls in love with the lad, follows him home, and ends up, the audience must assume, gorily slaughtered by the older man.

The lad pretends to ignore that happening but is still upset about his treatment in bed. So he invites the older man home for dinner again, possibly knowing that the wacky sister will make good use of the big kitchen knife and he can take the old man's jewellery and home for himself.

Within a year of this film's release, Campusano had created Vikingo, and it is awaited with a masochistic level of interest: the tale of a "rude motorcyclist whose rigid principles are honor and respect" could be another character in search of an Orton.

Art of being straight

The Art of Being Straight won the Audience award at a Dublin G&L film festival. Maybe the city's movie-goers loved the 2008 US movie's shortness. It's a 70-minute vanity project by producer-writer-director and lead actor Jesse Rosen.

He presents himself from flattering angles as Paul, a half-self-delusional womanising photographer who leaves the East Coast for L.A., where he gets a couch in a college mate's apartment and beddings in the home of his advertising agency's gay boss. An ex-girlfriend from the East has turned lesbian, his male friend's mates are boorish young men, and he's confused about his identity. He parties and simpers amid well-lit technically-competent settings.

It's probably meant to be a dramedy. If it were worse, it might be amusing. It's just a yawn.

Plan B

Argentine writer-director Marco Berger's second feature, Ausente, won the Teddy award for LGBT movies at the 2011 Berlin festival. It'll be worth looking out for, as his first movie, Plan B [2009] was an engaging romantic comedy.

Bruno (Manuel Vignau), an amiable bearded layabout, is firmly rejected as a life partner by his girlfriend, Laura (Mercedes Quinteros, in her first role). She still has sex with him occasionally even though she's got a new college boyfriend, Pablo (Lucas Ferraro). Bruno schemes to get her back by befriending her new love and trying to lead him astray. The plan backfires when their male bonding unhinges Bruno's own emotions, then those of his girlfriend and rival.

The cute concept succeeds: Berger presents a slow-paced, wry character study of modern-minded young men facing up to sexual self-awareness. The slow, episodic pace reflects the naturalistic dialogue and gradual development of the men's friendship.

At 100 minutes, it's a slightly over-long novella given unexpected depth by the lead actors' close-ups: Vignau's eyes twinkle and dare (imagine a Bloom-Beckham hybrid) while Ferraro's glare anxiously (in stereotypical Latin style a la Bernal or Bardem). Their mutual attraction is comprehensible, unlike the woman's role in their lives; their happy ending is too pat to be true to life.

Pirates 4: on stranger tides

Who can blame Johnny Depp for making another Pirates of the Caribbean? On Stranger Tides is the third sequel (2011) in a franchise that's transformed an offbeat indie actor into a Hollywood stalwart. Let him make his pension while he can, collecting a reported US$55 million for headlining such a bad blockbuster.

If only he was really a modern-day Errol Flynn, with the power to veto the appointment of plodding Rob (Chicago, Geisha, Nine) Marshall as the replacement director for the series' imaginative creator, Gore Verbinski. Obviously, sadly, Depp could not argue with executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Walt Disney Studios, and the pair of writers (Ted Elliott and Terry Russio) who'd concocted the initial trilogy based on the Disney theme park ride and became executive producers too.

This time, with Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley having wisely walked away from their tired format, the screenplay mechanics tinkered with ideas from an optioned 2009 pirate novel. The only major character to stay aboard their latest creaking craft was devilishly-wicked ludicrously-bewigged Geoffrey Rush as peg-legged Captain Hector Barbossa. He and Depp's comically-camp macho-mincing Captain Jack Sparrow have become a heavily-mascara-ed pseudo-comic odd couple. Without them, the franchise would be meaningless; with them, it's barely forgivable.

Joining them on the truly sketchy storyboard is Penelope Cruz as Sparrow's former lover, and daughter of infamous Blackbeard (Ian McShane wasted in a role the champion scenery-chewer was clearly instructed to understate, lest he out-ham the Depp-Rush combo). Cruz also gets a load of make-up, and even the movie's ageing Hollywood production committees must have realised they were launching a ship of relatively old piratic fools.

Seniors are surely a growing movie-going demographic segment. Why else have Keith Richards re-appear self-teasingly and pointlessly with his wrinkled face and upper-crusty English accent, and insultingly ask Judi Dench to take a teeny cameo as a dowager wowed by a kiss from Sparrow. There is also a grumpy chorus of elderly English actors playing court to a puffed-up Richard Griffiths as King George II.

Therefore, per basic market research principles, they added a pious young English missionary (tick for Middle America demographics), tied to the main mast so that he can meet and exchange eye-watering devotion with a young mermaid (tick teen market). Their badly-written poorly-acted relationship looks and sounds like a leaky band-aid stuck on the plot, an attempt to inject a couple of drips from a fountain of youth into a geriatric movie.

Even its SFX are feeble, and rarely humorous or arresting. A truckload of blazing coal and school of man-eating mermaids were cute ideas inadequately visualised, and the overall lack of explosive visual magic, exciting pace and thrilling sounds is a nagging reminder how action-adventures used to be made for Indiana Jones, James Bond and even Caribbean pirates.

The frequency of dimly-lit night scenes also deprives the film of lighting effectiveness, and a 2D screening offered no hints when and why the movie's 3D format would be worth watching. Hans Zimmer's basic music theme is more noticeable - and irritating, repeated excessively as a noisy background substitute during unimpressive scenes of supposed action.

Occasional pun-ishing word-plays and double-entrendres encourage audiences to listen harder, in the hope that deeper ideas or characterisations, or just some wittier verbal crudities, might be found by the attentive. A foolish hope, akin to expecting Bruckheimer to nurture a once-delightful fantasy into Bond-like immortality.

He and Disney were rightly nervous, following the below-par earnings of Pirates 3, reducing the budget from US$300 million (Pirates 3) to US$200 million. That largely explains why the film is cheapskate non-entertainment. One hopes Depp's retirement fund is now large enough for Captain Jack to sail off to oblivion.

Frontier blues

The windswept steppes of Northern Iran are the setting of Frontier Blues, and the homeland of debut feature director Babak Jalali. On the border with Turkmenistan, also inhabited by Kazakhs, the harsh rural scenery is a land of yokels in this bitter-sweet and mildly surrealistic comic docudrama.

A true simpleton talks to the camera, collects car plates, has a pet donkey and constantly nibbles dried apricots. He lives in the home of his uncle, a miserably repressed owner of a tailor's shop with little stock and few customers. Sent out to work, the simpleton and his donkey work on a chicken farm where a young man learns English in order to leave his father and escape to the big lights of Baku.

Meanwhile, like a cinematic jack in the box, an Iranian photographer is composing a volume of his ideas of Turkmen life, accompanied by an unemployed minstrel and a loyal band of four boys. The minstrel's wife was stolen from him, and the farm worker seeks marriage with the seen but not met daughter of a rustic couple in a small farmhouse.

Simple and bizarre, neither picaresque nor poetic, the images of a geographical and social wilderness provide insights into a region's sources of melancholia and madness. Modern conveniences (mobile phones, cassette players and colour television) serve as escape valves while they encourage migration from such sterile environments.

The director's short film, An Afghan in Teheran, is included on the Artificial Eye DVD. Also docudramatic and simple, it depicts a day of kitchen work and housekeeping in the life of an unseen agha's Afghani manservant, also learning English from tapes.

Out in the silence

The Sundance Institute helped fund Out In The Silence, a 2009 one-hour documentary report of a gay man's return to his small-town home-town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. Provocatively, Washington-resident Joe Wilson had announced his homosexual marriage in the local paper, triggering angry letters and an appeal for help from the mother of a bullied gay student.

Back "home" 25 years after fleeing the town, with his partner (Dean Hamer) holding the camera, he meets with townsfolk and homophobic bigots, wondering whether life is any easier for minorities in the US hinterland.

Hamer is credited with a couple of other gay short films and it can be assumed he encouraged his partner's documentary project. Three years earlier, Hamer had made We Belong, focusing on the efforts of a young schoolboy, Charles Bills playing himself, to come out. The same student in 2009 is called CJ Bills, who's also credited with additional camerawork.

It's suspiciously convenient for the movie-makers' narrative that Wills's mother "wrote", presumably unsolicited, to Wilson: it's clear that the teenager is a tough kid who can fight for himself. He needed help in the school board meetings, though, where school discrimination and abuse were being wilfully ignored in a community nourished on Christian and family "values".

Another dramatically convenient local connection is the lesbian whose house lies two doors away from Wilson's old Catholic family home. She and her new girlfriend had bought and renovated a long-closed downtown Art Deco theatre with a stupendous period chandelier. The building's revival is a convenient symbol of a backwoods Rust Belt town's struggle to find a new role and personality for itself. One of the DVD extras notes the toughness of the struggle: the state is 50th in rankings for mobility, 48th for economic growth.

By covering a variety of local angles, the documentary lacks a focal point and a clear storyboard. Its producer-directors stirred up a hornet's nest, upset the local American Family Values flag-wavers, exposed small-town prejudices and pettiness, and went back to Washington without indicating whether Oil City deserved to learn and grow or fester and die.

*****

Hamer subsequently made two documentary shorts about twins described as "developmentally disabled" (in the 2010 short) and "differently abled" (in the 2011 follow-up report).

Woman without love

Director Luis Bunuel rated A Woman Without Love his worst film. Churned out in 1952, six years after the Spaniard settled in Mexico, the B&W movie was a commercial project handed to him, a Spanish-language re-make of a decade-old French film, Pierre et Jean, based on a Guy de Maupassant short story.

Two brothers discover that their mother, married young to a boorish antiques dealer, had a secret affair which resulted in the birth of the younger brother. The film shows how the affair happened, and then jumps 20 years to its unveiling and the sons' reactions to their mother and each other.

Bunuel's anti-bourgeois anti-materialist sentiments were inevitably aroused by the melodrama, but this wasn't a setting for his surrealistic stylishness. It was a job, and he moved the leaden plot from scene to scene capably. The only noticeable directorial touch is frequent usage of hip-level camera positions. The acting is mostly at the level of TV soaps.

Eyes wide open

Would a devout Orthodox Jewish butcher, happily married with four young children, suddenly sense an uncontrollable desire to wet-kiss a homeless gay Torah student who's provided no clear seductive moves or signs of his homosexuality? Just after his butcher-father's death? In Jerusalem, in the old, traditionalist Hasidic quarter? Very soon after letting the younger man borrow his cellphone and giving him a job and a storeroom to sleep in? Would the younger man make passionate love while still pining for his previous Orthodox lover?

Audiences are expected to accept such far-fetched fairy-tale ideas by Eyes Wide Open. In parts, it's an interesting Israeli docudrama too, enabling outsiders to view and vaguely understand aspects of Jewish Orthodoxy: kissing entry doors, wearing two hats and vests, being bearded and conformist, the importance of cleansing rituals, ways to cut kosher meat, love of debate and questioning, belonging to an ultra-self-defensive minority. All that, and more insights, adds special value to an otherwise standard man-meets-man storyboard.

There have already been Mormon, cowboy, neo-Nazi and Muslim gay dramas, and there may well be Sikh, Amish, Tibetan Buddhist and Voodoo versions yet to be seen. There's even been a documentary feature about Hasidic gays (Trembling Before G-d, 2001). This 2009 dramatic contribution to the genre is good of its kind due to above-average pacing, lighting, editing and acting. It's a debut feature for both the writer (Merav Doster) and director (Haim Tabakman). Zohar Strauss (playing the tempted father) was previously seen in a supporting part in Lebanon and his co-lead, America-born Ran Danker, had one previous starring role in an Israeli movie (Restless). Their facial acting during silent scenes adds much to the stilted euphemistic dialogue, contradictory mood changes and fundamental incredibilities.

There's an eastern European air to the movie, a Chekhovian reticence, and a miserable final scene signalling self-repression and providing adding a touch of reality to this offbeat tale of doomed love.

Children of invention

Chicago-born Tze Chun, a film studies graduate, produced a cute short about Sino-American kids, Windowbreaker, in 2006. He developed its Home Alone-ish concept for his debut feature, Children of Invention (2009). A single mother in Boston loses her job working for a hard-sell Ponzi scheme, and accepts an offer to live illegally in an apartment development's unused show flat with her young son and daughter.

One night she doesn't arrive home; the boy is soon obliged to find ways for he and his sister to survive in an uncaring world. The mother eventually returns, but the boy will take a long time to forgive her. A similar scenario was presented recently, with much more dramatic tension, in a Japanese or Korean movie, and there is only one major reason why this one has appeared at more than 50 film festivals.

There just aren't many English-speaking American feature films featuring the Chinese minority, in most years probably none, and Tze Chun filled a gap, if not a real need, competently. That's a patronising comment, akin to well-meaning efforts by film festival organisers to be deliberately inclusive on racial and/or demographic grounds.

The characters and narrative development of the two children or their actors are not special enough to warrant such special treatment, nor are references to contemporary socio-political issues such as mortgages and get-rich dreams.

Choses secretes

Choses secretes (Secret Things) was a 2002 "New French Extremity" movie, another example of French auteurs' self-conscious effort to push their envelopes without crossing the line into inanity. That's difficult creative juggling, which was beyond the skills of writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau (then almost 60).

A bisexual nightclub nude dancer opens the movie with a ponderously-staged full-frontal display that captivates a new bartendress. Cue a very long teasing tete-a-tete (one full of giggles, the other of frowns) before they get round to mutual passion. Entering a state of happy flatmatedness, they get extra kicks from wandering through Paris with nothing under their raincoats.

They organise their lives and future by both working for the same corporation. Its middle-aged human relations chief is ripe for seduction, its young maliciously rakish heir-apparent is their prime but dangerous target for marriage and wealth. In the end, they get what they want, after some semi-comic orgiastics, lovers' deceptions, sibling incest and a murder.

In non-French eyes, such soft-porn noir can either be camp or horrifying, but should be fun cinema either way. This effort isn't, and its consolatory award at Cannes 2003 is yet another condemnation of that festival's past directorate.

Dear Mr Gacy

Writer-director Svetozar Ristovski won two awards for his first movie, Joy of Life, a 2001 documentary made in his native Macedonia. His debut drama, Mirage (2004), also set in war-ravaged Macedonia, was another festival winner. In 2010, his third feature was a Canadian made-for-TV movie, Dear Mr Gacy. Based on a novelised memoir, The Last Victim, by lawyer Jason Moss, the screenplay portrays the evolving relationship between John Wayne Gacy, a convicted American serial killer and Moss, then a criminology student.

Twice married and the father of two, Gacy drugged, raped and killed (many by asphyxiation) 33 young men and teenagers between 1972 and 1978, burying many of them in lye in his Chicago house's crawl-space. Dubbed "The Killer Clown" by the media, Gacy created a clown character for charity appearances. He was one of five mass killers Moss corresponded with for his thesis, employing the be-friending subterfuge of adopting a personality based on those of the killers' victims.

In 1994, in a real-life drama akin to that of Hannibal Lecter, Gacy agreed to meet Moss and provoked the student into attacking him, stressing the similarity of their personalities. A few days later, after 14 years on Death Row, he was executed by lethal injection. Moss, who spitefully revealed his duplicity to Gacy, obtained his degree, got married and, according to end credits, committed suicide for unstated reasons in 2006.

William Forsythe, a busy American actor (123 credits) often cast in villainous roles, portrays Gacy's menacing nature convincingly, but lacks the clownish avuncular charm the real Gacy demonstrates in a photograph shown with the end credits. His prey must have felt safe with him, but no one would with this actor's representation. His Gacy is a self-assertive gay-hating alpha male, not a manipulative self-disguised paedophile.

Similarly, the teenage naivety of Moss is not captured by his namesake Canadian actor Jesse Moss, another busy actor (mostly in TV). The student's psychotic character and egomania are signposted but his troubled relationships with family and girlfriend are unclear, and his willingness to follow Gacy's guidance in his city's sensationalised homosexual underworld is inexplicable.

Much of the screenplay dramatises the correspondence between the two, during the last months of Gacy's life. It's hard to believe that they trusted each other's words, and even harder to accept that two warders left them alone in an interview room and countenanced Gacy "getting his rocks off" for the last time. Moss's widow reportedly approved the screenplay, and it may therefore have avoided some truths that better explain Moss's character. Gacy remains an inexplicably amoral caricature of evil.

Fast five

Soderbergh, Clooney and Damon may never assemble Ocean's gang again, but Vin Diesel and Paul Walker can look forward to making a few more Fast films before Vin gets too pudgy and Walker's hair goes grey. They are Stallone's deserving successors in the craft of milking a winning formula. Fast Five, their latest (2011), eschewed the 3-D format and used IMAX. It could give the movie an above-average shelf-life.

It's the third film in the franchise written by Chris Morgan; executive producer Gary Scott Thompson wrote the first two Fast and Furious features (and Hollow Man, TV's Las Vegas and more). Taiwan-born director Justin Lin also signed on for a third time, and the multi-racial semi-comedic team of tough, sexy or silly sidekicks was reassembled.

A happy new ingredient was Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson as a cool, gungho FBI chieftain hunting down the pair of hi-octane his-peed auto-racers in Rio. That city's hillside favelas and downtown thoroughfares are the scene-stealers when Johnson not in focus, clearly having the time of his movie-making life while showing Diesel how a real action star acts.

The plot is irrelevant of course. Vin meets a new action-woman, his buddy affection for Paul grows, there's an amoral Brazilian drug tsar, a couple of gratuitous races, lots of gunfire and a finely-edited chase scene that defies all laws of physics, mechanics and probability when a ten-ton safe is towed around Rio by the pair of super-fast daredevils.

The best of its bunch so far, Fast Five is a cartoon caper to watch, enjoy and not think about.

Thor

Some blockbusters are manufactured so competently that they defy being criticised as works of cinematic art. They are simply crowd-pleasing products, good of their kind, like a banquet prepared by a kitchen of professionals or a premier league football match. As is Thor, a live-action cartoon saga in which the Norse god lands up, i.e. down, on Earth, in Roswell's New Mexico of course.

The Marvel Comics production introduces a large fledgling actor with a well-honed physique and twinkling eyes (Australian TV's Chris Hemsworth, previously a supporting role in the Star Trek update) as the superhero. He's self-effacingly supported by Anthony Hopkins as Odin, his omnipotent father. Thor, cast out of the Norse heavens, bumps into a stellar space researcher (Natalie Portman) who has a father-figure mentor (Stellan Skarsgard) and a dizzy female assistant. Her faintly comic and dramatically pointless presence serves to make Portman's dizziness, and eye-fluttering love at first sighting of Thor's abs, comparatively less silly. Instead, it looks more like a channeling of Julia Roberts with a silly script.

Thor has an adopted brother, Loki (UK TV's Tom Hiddleston, channeling a lite-camp Alan Cumming) who's actually the abandoned son of an evil king (Colm Feore) in one of the Nine Realms. The rest of the storyboard is a totally predictable barrage of SFX featuring interstellar bridges, a quintet of assorted godly good-guy assistants (including a black, east Asian, woman, comic over-eater and female, naturally), an indestructible automaton killer, and touches of humour.

Remarkably, the production was entrusted to an experienced director, Kenneth Branagh, whose employment may have been inspired by the mildly Shakespearean tone adopted for the dialogue of the gods. His last direction was Sleuth in 2007; he's done his reputation and his bank account no harm by making a truly commercial blockbuster.

One loose end or red herring awaits resolution. When dizzy Ms Portman realises that Thor is going to enter her trailer, she flusters frantically, twice, with a packet of what may be breakfast cereals, clearly called "Golem" (a major bogeyman figure in Jewish folklore). Product placement? If it is, Google hadn't yet registered it. An in-joke? A subtle snub to the breakfast products that refused to pay for a placement?

How many blockbusters have that gripping level of detail?

Crush

In 2004, writer-director Michael Saul produced seven gay video shorts and called the collection True Love. Five years later, he packaged four less short films about gay couples as Crush.

A gentle black soldier has a non-camp white lover and conflicting loyalties (Don't Ask), a camp white student designer is besotted by an Asian vampire boyfriend (Bloodline), a wannabee painter pairs up with an older artist (Strokes), and a painfully shy Asian with a Caucasian voice emotes the poeticised tale of his schoolboy crush for a chirpy Caucasian kid (Breathe).

All four had interesting ideas, competent acting and technical qualities, off-beat inter-racial couplings, and one with a generation gap. The non-porn gay movie genre needs more variety; Saul produced a likely and likable choice for most gay film festivals.

Police, adjective

A cop movie from Romania = promising. A dual Certain Regard award-winner at Cannes 2009 = warning signals.

Police, Adjective, writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's second feature, follows his sadly comic multi-award-winning 12:08 East of Bucharest. That film looked at provincial citizens' pre-Revolutionary ideas (16 years after the toppling of the country's dictator); this one focuses on one confused man.

Would an undercover policeman have qualms about arresting, and inevitably destroying the life of, a non-criminal youngster who smokes and shares hashish? Would his superiors in the police and judiciary force him to ignore other options? Would a sardonic police captain spend a long time, in one static scene, getting the detective to read dictionary definitions of conscience, police and moral as nouns, verbs and adjectives?

Would he trail the grass smoker for days, and should a movie director trail him for minutes on end? Would a recently-married policeman have a non-communicatory relationship with his wife, and a movie director screen many minutes of him eating gruel alone in the kitchen while his wife plays banal pop music on a laptop?

Would many movie-goers want to watch very long long-shots of nothing dramatic? No, not when an anecdotal fable worth filming in a half-hour short film is spun out for more than 100 minutes. As an intellectual exercise, the movie is intriguing, and its bitter conclusion made inevitable by the cleverly-assembled detective work in the dictionary. A minor diversion for the eyes and brain, nothing more.

Green hornet

Everyone in Hollywood makes at least one mistake. French director Michel Gondry has made several, most recently agreeing to work with Seth Rogen on a comic updating of The Green Hornet. The original 1930s radio adventure was spun out into comic books and TV series, the latter featuring Bruce Lee as Kato, the Asiatic sidekick and whiz-kid partner of super-rich Britt Reid, the playboy role which Rogen imagined would suit his comic style.

That was a big mistake, as Rogen (Knocked Up, Observe & Report etc) is a one-note, charmless comedian, so unattractive and non-charismatic he makes Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler seem heirs of Chaplin. Robert Downey Jr got away with similar comic heroic posturing as the Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes, but Downey is a mesmerising screen figure and good actor. Rogen isn't.

The project got a green light when Taiwanese singer-actor Jay Chou's English-speaking ability was deemed sufficient to take the role of Kato. It isn't, nor is his acting talent. Adding a strong supporting cast (Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz, Edward James Olmos, Tom Wilkinson) and an uncredited and pathetic James Franco cameo, a US$120-million fortune was spent trying to make a 3-D (pointlessly) blockbuster.

Rogen's usual accomplice in co-writing and producing was his Canadian school chum, Evan Goldberg, a fellow former Ali G writer for Sacha Baron Cohen. Rogen gained applause as a stand-up comedian in Vancouver, was encouraged as a writer by writer-producer Judd Apatow (his mentor for Superbad and Pineapple Express), and fits into a mould that appeals to some folks in Hollywood (a reported "frat pack").

They have, one hopes, lost a lot of money discovering that Rogen did not have sufficient comic ideas or acting talent to create an offbeat superhero franchise. Gondry couldn't save them, or himself.

The legend is born

Donnie Yen's Ip Man had a sequel; a prequel was inevitable, once a suitable actor appeared to play the Hong Kong kung fu hero. Dennis To Yu-hang had roles (his first) in both Ip Man movies, and the lanky martial artist was signed up by a different production company for the title role in The Legend Is Born: Ip Man. He's not a charismatic actor, so veteran director Herman Yau was hired to deliver a product that didn't need star appeal.

Sammo Hung, a Hong Kong martial arts super-star and featured actor in both Ip Man films, plays Ip's first teacher (of the Wing Chun school), and a neat casting coup presents Ip Man's real first son, Ip Chun, also an Ip Man retread, as a comically cantankerous old teacher of new methods. Yau uses him well, for pace and to enliven the screen whenever he shares it with wooden To. There are two wistful love interests to add female allure, but the only other major character is Ip's adopted brother, an undercover Japanese agent sympathetically portrayed by Fan Siu-wong. The son of a Hong Kong martial arts actor, Fan was a supporting actor award nominee for the first Ip Man movie - Hong Kong in reality is a very small movie world.

The real-life Ip (or Yip) Man, born into a wealthy Foshan family in 1893, trained in the Wing Chun school of martial arts, moved to Hong Kong at 15, studied at St Stephen's College, gained a name for an anti-colonial stance, and returned to Foshan in 1917 to become a policeman and part-time martial arts teacher. An opium addict, he started his own kung fu school to raise funds when he moved back to Hong Kong after 1949, his best-known pupil being Bruce Lee. He died of cancer in 1972; there's a commemorative museum in Foshan.

Donnie Yen has refused to make any more Ip Man sequels, it's been reported. Other people will, and they'll be lucky if they hire a director as competent as Yau. He's the cinematographer who made Scud's gay Permanent Residence look better than it deserved to, and he gave the third Ip Man saga a good professional look.

Demonlover

At some point during the making of Demonlover, released in 2002, writer-director Olivier Assayas apparently underwent a severe mental brainstorm. A movie that had been a bizarrely entertaining account of power play, female feuding and industrial espionage in the international business of hard-core 3-D anime porn movie production and distribution collapsed, chaotically.

Chapters and/or basic plotlines seemed lost or jumbled, characters changed from dominant to passive and vice versa, leading roles died or didn't, and the collage of French, American and Tokyo motifs and moods imploded, as if time- and mind-warped by the Japanese capital's kinetic, frenetic, psychedelic neon and naughtiness.

Initially, the self-proclaimed "technological neo-noir thriller" looks set to be a intriguing case of "New French Extremity". Globalisation, the Internet, pornography and women's rights form the narrative framework, stylishly performed by Charles Berling (mostly in French) and a trio of strong female executives (Connie Nielsen, Chloe Sevigny and Gina Gershon). The production designs, soundtrack, costumes and Japanese anime drawings are all admirable, technically. Cinematically, they add up to a pretentious waste of time.

Poetry

Only a well-subsidised movie industry such as South Korea's could fund a constant stream of sad feature films. They are cinematic joys for their pensive auteurs and angstful actors, and there must be healthy (numerically speaking) national audiences that also derive pleasure from them.

Poetry tells the tearful tale of a suburban-rural village where an ageing woman learns that she has Alzheimer's, and that the selfish grandson in her care is one of the local schoolboys whose regular rape sessions drove a schoolgirl to drown herself. Painfully aware of life's cruelties and its natural beauties, the woman joins a community class to learn about poetry. Its attendees promise to complete one poem by the end of the course. Only she does so, musing wistfully on the girl's death, having turned her grandson over to the local police and decided to kill herself.

Writer-director-producer Lee Chang-dong's mesmerising 2010 study hinges vitally on the lead role played by retired actress Yoon Jeong-hee, making her first movie for 16 years. She's won deserved Asian festival awards, as has Lee (and two at Cannes 2010).

Mr Nice

The land that produced Lloyd George, Anthony Hopkins and a lot of good singers has used its local film promotion budget to present PR-savvy drug-dealing ex-con Howard Marks as an awfully nice chap. Not even Welshman Rhys Ifan in the title role can achieve such a mission impossible. There is no way that such an anti-hero can have lived up to his stolen identity as Mr Nice.

Writer-director Bernard Rose, best known for his multi-awarded 1992 Candyman, adapted Marks' best-selling autobiography and did his own (unexceptional) cinematography. As the man is still alive, Rose obviously couldn't employ any writer's licence to make Marks' stories ring truer. He was apparently a gifted Welsh lad who won an Oxford scholarship, was a typical grass-smoking student, and became an overnight marijuana kingpin with an ill-defined second wife (Chloe Sevigny), smuggling pals in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a simple-minded link (Crispin Glover) in the USA.

Eventually trapped and convicted there, Marks was given an astonishing early release maybe because he was in secret partnership with an IRA gun-and-drug-running madman. David Thewlis emotes wildly as Jim McCann, whose end fate is not made clear in the film or reality, and will eventually inspire a biopic no Sinn Fein politician would want any Irish movie promotion outfit to fund. He's 72 and last heard of, according to Wikipedia, as an official 2002 Republic of Belarus delegate to a climate change convention.

Marks ended up back in the UK as a touring one-man chat show, apparently revered by toking students. It is never indicated why Marks, self-confessedly at the top of his world for almost a decade, failed to attract the thieving attention of real murderous gangsters in London, South Asia or the States. Did fear of the Provisional IRA extend that far? An outsider can only suspect that there's a lot more to Marks' life story than he chose to divulge semi-comically: his screen character's shallow facade is therefore ideally personified by Ifans, always a slouchy actor without depth. Likable but louche.

Made in Dagenham

British film-makers have clearly decided that modern British political history can best be seen as a joke, in which all concerned are to be smiled at patronisingly. Maybe the influence of satirical sitcoms during the film-makers' youth rendered them incapable of taking anyone seriously, even Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath. The latest victims of this production syndrome (damning with faint comic praise) are working-class women - the striking sewing machinists who brought Ford to a halt in 1968 and form the cliched heroines of Made in Dagenham.

The movie's French distributors gave it a titillating yet relevant title, We Want Sex Equality. In Germany and Italy, that was re-translated as We Want Sex, which gives one a hint about those countries' marketing men.

Director Nigel Cole (Saving Grace, Calendar Girls) was handed a banal screenplay by William Ivory, whose award-winning TV work includes Common as Muck and The Sins. The real-life tale of working-class women who struck for equal pay and rights had great potential, though interview comments by some of the women concerned indicate why Ivory needed to fabricate a sassy, politically-aware strike leader, Rita O'Grady. She's a natural role for Sally Hawkins, one of Mike Leigh's few cheerful lead actresses.

A galaxy of well-known names and faces flickers fitfully on the sets (factory floor and exterior). Geraldine James is the weary shop steward with an unemployable war-damaged husband, Bob Hoskins the rebellious local union man whose single mum raised her family on unequal pay, and there's a mini-skirted doll who thinks the strike is an entree to modelling. Add Ford's ludicrously oppressive American negotiator, the union leadership's chauvinist Ford collaborators, and the elegantly bolshie-minded uni-educated wife (Rosamund Pike) of Ford's UK boss (Rupert Graves) and the PM of the time, Harold Wilson (John Sessions) sucking a pipe judiciously.

Then Labour minister Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson in a role that should be hers to play in a real drama) swallows a whisky and stomps to the rescue of the women, inspired by Rita and three acolytes, we are expected to believed, to dare Ford to do its worst. Within a couple of years (a short political period even in Wilsonian terms), the UK (and Ford) have led the world to statutory rights of equal pay.

This is modern political history written for comic-book readers, who deserve - and would probably appreciate - a more intelligent introduction to key events in 20th-Century Britain.

Another year

Mike Leigh can perhaps be compared to Woody Allen. The two veteran writer-director auteurs have been prolific commentators on family relationships. Allen concentrated on nervous intellectuals and New York Jewish sensitivities, Leigh on English working-class mores. Allen used star actors and personalities to dress up his dialogue, Leigh worked only with a repertory group of dedicated actors, improvising sketched scenes into portraits of repressed passions. Leigh's latest morality tale is an admirable cinematic miniature, Another Year. An admirable, but unlovable, display of Leigh's skill in capturing mean spirits and sad lives.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are a sweetly, happily-married late-middle-aged professional couple (civil engineer and psychiatric counsellor) with a well-adjusted sole child (Oliver Maltman) who's found a bubbly, steady girlfriend (Karina Fernandez). The older couple enjoy a simple loving relationship in humble semi-detached housing, potter around their vegetable allotment, cook ambitiously and are kind to friends and family members.

At four mealtimes during the course of a year, the constant and sometimes unwelcome presence is a hyper-tense needy secretary from Gerri's clinic, Mary (Leslie Manville). Her panic attacks over buying and trying to drive a second-hand car provide a comic storyline. The year's other major event is the death of Tom's sister-in-law and the family's trip up north to attend her funeral, console the miserable brother and cope with his alienated son. There's also a laid-back black female colleague of Gerri's and an over-the-hill university pal of Tom's who makes a messy pass for Mary, who's making messy friend-craving passes of her own to Tom's son and brother.

That's it, and it earned Leigh a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination in 2011. Why this particular slice of kitchen-sink posturing did so is a mystery. Its a microcosmic study of typical, almost cliched, working-class English misfits and the remarkably patient couple who let them moan and drift year by year through their own uneventful lives. The acting is immaculate, of its kind, particularly by Broadbent as an avuncular chuckler and Manville as a nervous wreck. The bonus is Imelda Staunton dead-pan cameo of a bitterly maudlin client of Gerri's.

Tom and Gerri are almost too good to be true characters, surely too sensible to have allowed their social annual round to be so hostage to other people's woes.

TRON: legacy

Jeff Bridges entered the ranks of movie gods in 2011. A year after winning his first Best Oscar Oscar, for Crazy Heart, he earned his sixth nomination, for the remake of True Grit, and he made a sequel of his 1982 cult hit for Disney, TRON: Legacy.

The financial incentive from the latter must have been an unrefusable offer. The original movie was an understandable box-office failure with a plot that defied logic, narrative sense and any sense of story-boarding. Most crucially, it was difficult to imagine why Tron was the titular hero who died but was actually a side-kick. Why not name it after Clu, or his creator, Flynn?

Flynn's son, Sam, is the irresponsible major stockholder in his lost father's omnipotent company. Its R&D director is the son of the first movie's villain, and appears in one boardroom scene, played by an uncredited Gillian Murphy, perhaps to confuse even further all previous viewers of Inception. He never appears again, so that is one less red herring to think about while zooming, splatting and whizzing through the imaginary Grid in which Flynn was trapped in 1982.

Sam lands up there, of course, having received a message from his dad's old pal, re-played by Bruce Boxleitner, who spawned the original Tron who, lo and behold if you can work out who's who in which plastic wraparound suit, also reappears. As does Flynn, assisted by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a voluptuous and virginal fighter, Go-player and last survivor of a tribe of extraterrestrials exploited and destroyed by Flynn's clone, Clu, who has a villainous sidekick. Quorra leads Sam to the all-knowing minister of entertainments and sooths, an embarrassingly camp OTT spectacle from Michael Sheen (who must have also had a huge financial inducement to accept a role already performed with suitable flair and classier, funnier OTTness by Chris Tucker as Ruby Rhod in Besson's The Fifth Element).

The debut director, Joseph Kosinski, was clearly entrusted with the technical tasks of splicing old and new film stock, making the new "light cycle" fighting machines even more thrilling as CGI SFX and natural 3-D features. This is a film that deserves big-screen viewing, though 3-D may not be essential if it is watched in the style that suited the original movie: sat in the front of the cinema, stoned on a substance or three, wowing when the lights and lines flash overhead.

Rio

It's almost sad to be cavalier about computer-animated 3D comic movies such as Rio. It proves that a movie-goer can feel that he's had too much of a good thing. Blue Sky's production, from the director of two Ice Age adventures (Carlos Saldanha), is an accomplished U$$90 million investment with an instant global box-office gross of four times as much (and counting), and 20th Century Fox will be a happy distribution company.

Saldanha's "original" story featured a penguin but, that species of cartoon fun being over-exposed in the past decade, his comic hero became an endangered macaw, Blu (voiced in typical US cartoon character with bashful adolescent charm by Jesse Eisenberg). A fully domesticated pet/pal, he's in Minnesota, looked after with TLC for 15 years by eco-friendly Linda.

A Brazilian researcher requests the services of Blu, as the world's only known male Spix's macaw, in Rio to work with the world's only known female Spix's, Jewel (Anne Hathaway, also in stereotypical mode as a bold, bright and brassy US-style teenager). This narrative contrivance may explain why the whole movie was initially rated PG (parental guidance) and only given an unrestricted G (general) rating on appeal (only the third time such a bizarre MPAA situation arose, after the Babe sequel and an Air Bud movie, thus indicating that many of the US movie industry's censorship panels inhabit an unknown religious cloud-cuckoo-land).

By now, our audience/readership knows what will appear next. A gang of lovably bumbling smugglers. An evil animal with a psychological case history (Nigel, a former TV-star cockatoo, voiced with furious glee by New Zealander Jemaine Clement, from Flight of the Conchords). On-off-on-again spats and romance tween the cartoon leads and their human handlers. Swooping scenic 3D panoramas in Rio skies, the lurid Carnival, lush jungle. There's a needy black boy who turns good for no reason, and supposedly comic freaks of nature who perform magic with saliva, flight training and marmoset mayhem.

What's next, pussycat? Yep, it's Puss In Boots. The season's good news is the failure of Mars Needs Mums: there clearly are limits to the CGI audience's tolerance level and movie-going budget. There may also be a limit to audience toleration of so-called 3D cinemas' viewing glasses, which need greatly-increased user-friendliness. Currently, they diminish the brightness level of movies significantly, and that's not acceptable to eyes now accustomed to the vivacity of HD TV transmissions. I'll watch the DVD of Rio with interest, because I expect its exuberant brightness and consequent appeal to be much more enjoyable in 2D.

Le fil

The technically competent 2009 gay love story Le Fil (The String) stars one of the grandest dames of European cinema, Claudia Cardinale, emoting majestically in the land of her 1938 birth, Tunisia. Writer-director Mehdi Ben Attia's debut feature wraps her in a rich, sheltered environment, neither French nor Tunisian, neither European/modern nor Arabic/traditional, as a mother of an only son whose homosexuality she appears to despise, especially when it crosses class and racial lines. Then she accepts it, inexplicably, and everybody lives happily ever after: the movie serves only to illustrate that movie-making is a universal toy for any country's rich and elite.

Malik is the central anti-heroic figure, returned from France to his European mother's fairly grand estate. His Arabic father's death has died, and the young man's best friends are a boldly out fashionable couple of Arab lesbian lovers for whom he agrees to be a husband and semen donor. The director reveals his hero's preferences early on, when the man asks to be raped by a hunk of rough trade in an unnamed city (Tunis).

As a boy, he'd needed a long string (of the title) tied to his waist to guide him out of involuntary pacing in circles, and it makes occasional real or imaginary appearances - without helping the storyline, other than to suggest that he'd long needed a human link to reality. This he finds in a manly houseboy working for free board and lodging at his mother's. His homosexuality appears to be unexpressed, unrealised, and then, suddenly, it isn't, and he's in bed with the supposed fiance. This transition was so sudden I feared I'd jumped a chapter or the movie lost one.

Lead actor Antonin Stahly-Vishawanadan (as handsome, pensive, sulky Malik) does not have an extensive record in movies. He's first noted in IMDb as "The Boy" in the 1989 French TV mini-series presentation of Peter Brook's Mahabharata. In 2002, he worked for Brook again, as Osric in the TV movie, The Tragedy of Hamlet. His lover, Blilal, is played confidently by French-born TV actor Salim Kechiouche, but his role is difficult to comprehend, as a working-class artist accepted by a society of rich snobs.

Maybe the director imagined a small world where gays and fag hags could find sunlit happiness, oblivious to the barbaric realities at the gates of Tunisia. Many gay movie-goers would be happy to escape into such a dream world; many gay movies are far from real worlds.