Departures

Any tendency to over-laud other countries' movies arises from the commercial reality that foreigners only get to see, rent or buy a nation's exportable best products. Even Japan produces trash movies, surely. Its movies cannot all be as critically successful as Departures (Okuribito).

Its 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar win gave director Yojira Takita unexpected international acclaim to offset its initially cool treatment in Japan. The subject matter - death - is a taboo topic, obliging the production team to tread tightropes. Adapting an autobiographical volume (Aoki Shinmon's Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician) Kundo Kojama crafted a screenplay both ironic and sensitive, comic and sad, manipulative and touching.

An unemployed orchestral cellist mistakenly applies for work at "Departures", a company he thought was a travel agency. Instead, he learns to care for the departed as an "encoffineer", providing a corpse with a symbolic public choreography of respectful washing, dressing and facial make-up, enabling the departed to go to heaven looking good and peaceful.

Lead actor Masahiro Motoki was a member of a top boy-band in the 1980s, and still sports a deliberately cute social awkwardness which didn't match my image of an over-ambitious cellist with a young wife (Ryoko Hirosue, simpering sweetly and silently sobbing in mildly irritating traditional housewifely style).

However, Motoki was totally convincing as a sensitive naif finding an outlet for a natural talent and artistic feelings in ritual ceremonies. His facial concentration and bodily grace rightly won him five Best Actor awards, his best haul since Masayuki Suo's comedy Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (1992). He'd also rated well for Takashi Miike's The Bird People in China (1998). Inevitably, there are a couple of gratuitous scenes allowing Motoki's fans to see him in non-frontal nudity, reminding me of a well-preserved younger version of Hong Kong's Alan Tam.

Director Takita got his start in the 1980s working on the "Molester" series of comic softcore pornographic movies (Japan's defunct "pink film" industry), and was previously best known for the satirical The Yen Family. He steps neatly along the cinematic tightropes, slipping gently from comic interludes to tear-jerking moments, relying on the excellent cast of extras (grieving families, corpses and the standard bath-house old-timers) to push the audience past the screenplay's incredibly long sequence of dramatically convenient coincidences. Notably, veteran Tsutomu (Tampopo) Yamazaki is a central pillar of the production as the self-taught master of funeral rites, personifying traditional Japanese surface taciturnity and deep emotions.

At the end, though, discretion is abandoned. When the encoffineer's socially-embarrassed wife returns to him (happily pregnant), his aged bath-house friend dies, and his long-lost destitute father's body turns up in a nearby port, the production releases all floodgates on its tear ducts. Tears stream, hover at nose ends, and the movie ends with a symbolic smooth rock linking three generations.

It's all too much, but it works splendidly. Just like the elaborate funeral beautification rite it honours, the movie is a visually enchanting display of graceful technique and professional TLC.

Mildred Pierce

Joan Crawford won her Oscar as Mildred Pierce, the title role in the 1945 Warner Bros adaptation of James M.Cain's novel about a single mother's personal struggles, class-awareness and business success during the Depression. The classic noir film, which added murder to the tale of a disastrous mother-daughter relationship, was part-written by William Faulkner, directed by Michael Curtiz and co-starred young Oscar nominee Ann Blyth as the restaurateur's scheming daughter.

The 2011 remake of Mildred Pierce, directed by co-writer/producer Todd Haynes, was given a great cast including Guy Pearce, Melissa Leo, Hope Davis, Evan Rachel Wood as the daughter and Kate Winslet in the title role. Faithful to the novel, to an extreme possible only in a mini-series, the HBO TV saga ran for more than five hours. Is it too much of a good thing?

It's almost impossible to get too much of Winslet, a charismatic actress who's maturing gracefully. Unfortunately, she cannot do evil intent convincingly: her Mildred is incredibly naive, and ludicrously doting on her vile elder daughter. There are moments when Winslet's Mildred is angry, upset and imperious, but never enough to hint at genetic traits that might have produced spitefully egocentric, snobbish and vicious Veda. She can only be viewed as a devil's spawn, because her father is a sweet-natured weak-willed unfaithful building contractor (self-effacing Irish actor Brian F.O'Byrne, probably the miniseries' most likely Emmy winner).

For the first three of the miniseries' five episodes, 14-year-old Veda is played by 11-year-old Morgan Turner, with a hi-falutin accent and prissy airs tolerated to an unbelievable extent by her parents. Only her two music tutors recognise and slap down her conceit.

When her father moves out, at Mildred's insistence, and her young sister dies of flu while their mother is meeting a caddish new beau from the right side of town (Guy Pearce), Veda can dominate Mildred even more, but the script doesn't focus clearly on their generation gap. Instead, Haynes' focal point is Mildred's expanding restaurant and pie-making businesses.

In the 1945 version, Cain's 1930s melodrama was transformed into a murder mystery. It may have been done to satisfy Hollywood codes about evil earning justice, but it also added a strong narrative punch to an otherwise maudlin family tale. Haynes drops the murder (which I really wanted for several lead characters) and finds his visual punches in gratuitously nude love-making scenes. He also indulges in too many long pans and slow tracking shots, flaunting the production's extensive period settings, indoors and out and about in Glendale and Pasadena, crowded scenes of costumed extras, and a frequent parade of chugging vintage cars.

Haynes' Far From Heaven, starring a memorable Julianne Moore as another independent-minded woman of period character, was reportedly an homage to Douglas Kirk's lush directorial style. Mildred Pierce follows suit, apparently, and it is a beauty to behold, but it's a beauty stretched beyond its natural length. To points where the narrative framework is over-exposed and the characters' incredibility is glaring. This Mildred is just a silly mother, not a tragic figure.

Route Irish

Movies on DVD have to overwhelm their viewers, compel them to sit like an obedient dog, panting, unwilling to let their gaze wander. Route Irish did that with an intensely intriguing 10-minute first "act" showing a man of Irish-accented mystery in Liverpool coping with the bombing death of his best friend in Iraq. Then, mercifully it feels, director Ken Loach and his regular screenwriting associate, Paul Laverty, give their audience a breather, cutting to a crowded pub setting.

Unfortunately it's a cut not to the quick but the cliched, in yet another of the creative pair's polemical docudramatics. Their very unlikeable foul-mouthed anti-hero (Mark Womack) is a retired soldier who became a mercenary "contractor" in Iraq and invited his best childhood friend to join him there. The pal sees a manic colleague shoot up a taxi, killing a family of four and a couple of kids, and then the pal and his team members die when an IED explodes on "Route Irish", the dangerous road linking Baghdad's Green Zone and airport. The anti-hero and his pal's widow join vengeful forces (and unhappy bodies) to find truth and justice.

Loach, who's retained his socialist beliefs during more than four decades of movie-making, hired other favourite veteran talents including cameraman Chris Menges and composer George Fenton. As usual, the Loach-Laverty team employed little-known local actors to add the required air of cine-reality (and consequent amateur theatricals) and wove archive newsreel and emotional dialogue to illustrate blood-thirstiness by Allied forces and insurgents alike. There are some striking camera shots, telling narrative moments and effective editing, but the overall effect is yawnfully uninvolving. The promise of the initial setting evaporates.

Let the bullets fly

Great film comedies demand at least two screenings. The second is needed to check if one missed a visual joke or cinematic reference while still giggling over and/or trying to fully comprehend an engrossing sight gag, farcical set-piece, non-sequitor or wild slapstick scene. I suspect Let The Bullets Fly may need a third viewing, because it's one of modern China's cleverest send-ups of, and salutations to, a host of film comventions. It's also devilishly complex.

An honest bandit chief has six lieutenants, two of whom are gay and one a virgin. A fake provincial governor pretends to be his own dead counsellor, thus obliging his wife to sleep with the bandit. Both the men gang up to outwit Goose Town's master criminal, who employs a retarded double as his stand-in and lives in one of the southern China's landmark multi-storied Western-style citadels.

Those bare bones of an early 20th Century dimsum Western (that's also a black comedy and morality tale) are fleshed out with visual delights, such as the governor's deluxe railway train being driven along its tracks by a team of white horses; fifty geese and no townsfolk following the heroes to confront the gangster; a dozen gunmen enduring a mass stand-off because they're all wearing the same mask; a gunman accused of eating two jellies cutting open his stomach to prove that he only ate one.

There are quotations from and tributes to a host of other Western films, in both meanings of the term from oaters and Eastwood to Patton and crime noir. Asian films get nods too, from kung fu epics to Kurosawa and Kitano. Very visibly, but not pretentiously, writer-director Wen Jiang clearly had enormous fun adapting a Sichuanese writer's original story and giving himself the role of the honourable bandit. His co-stars clearly shared his gleeful mood, with Ge You (the conniving pseudo-governor) and Chow Yun-fat (the evil grinning gangster and his idiot double) twisting their cheeks and laughing maniacally while still portraying credible dramatic personae.

The supporting cast is excellent too, and it's tempting to rave about another commercial success from the multi-talented Jiang (including In the Heat of the Sun, Devils on the Doorstep, and The Sun Also Rises as writer-director, Red Sorghum, Black Snow and The Soong Sisters for acting). Shrewdly issuing his movie in Sichuanese as well as Putonghua, he produced an all-time box-office triumph in China in 2010 (grossing more than US$100 million).

Movie industry insiders usually preferring art-house fare, the only Asian Films award it won was for costume design (Hong Kong designer and director William Chang). The grand big-screen cinematography wasn't even nominated, but veteran Zhao Fei, who's worked with top Chinese New Wave directors (and three times with Woody Allen) doesn't need recognition.

Most admirably, a Chinese movie seen by millions can also be seen as a quilt of sly anti-governmental anti-sloganese humanity that slipped past Beijing's censors.

This is another movie whose top rating may be reviewed downward after a second viewing, when unalloyed admiration for its audacity and flair have mellowed. I hope not.

Tempest

It hasn't been a happy decade for Julie Taymor, the acclaimed American theatre and opera director whose Frida (2002) earned six Oscar nominations (and two wins, for make-up and for original music by her spouse Elliott Goldenthal).

Her triumphant Lion King stage show (1997), for which she designed more than 100 costumes and collected Tony Awards for them and for direction, was followed a decade later by her disastrous disaster-prone direction of, and sacking from, Broadway's Spider-Man musical in 2011.

In film, her adaptation and direction of Shakespeare's Titus [Andronicus] (1999), starring Anthony Hopkins, was critically respected but lost big money (a gross revenue of only 10 per cent of its US$20 million budget). Undeterred, in 2010 she then released her re-working of The Tempest. Its budget was similar, the critics howled, and its gross ticket sales were less than $350,000.

Its lead actor, Helen Mirren as gender-changed Prospera, was award-nominated, and its costumier, Sandy Powell, earned her ninth Oscar nomination. No one else in the star-studded production boosted their CV, and the, ahem, role-call of flat performances includes David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming, Tom Conti and Djimon Hounsou (Caliban, almost nude, naturally, sporting clownish make-up and middle-aged spreads). Russell Brand is atrociously unfunny as Trinculo, but at least he's playing at his standard level.

Even promising youngsters sound jaded and move wearily: Felicity Jones, as Miranda, and Reeve (Snow Falling on Cedars) Carney as Prince Ferdinand. Sadly for talented Ben Whishaw (Perfume, Criminal Justice), Taymor envisaged Ariel as a genitalia-free nude will'o'the'wisp with ugly make-up.

The film stock used seems to have been salvaged from pre-War vaults. The locations chosen in lava-strewn or wooded Hawaii were not picked for their cinematogenic quality. Most wrongly, Taymor paced out her production in stagy, theatrical terms. Compounding the tragedy of errors, she obtained sub-standard SFX and commissioned tedious or trifling music from her spouse. One small consolation for Shakespeare buffs: the DVD's English subtitles only omit or mis-write a few spoken word. A bigger one is the ten minutes or so cut from the film's official length before it went to DVD.

Is there a word for a movie that lacks depth, vision and visual flair? In the age of 3D, this is a failed 2D movie, so perhaps it can be best categorised as 1D. To be seen only for Mirren's eyes.

Still walking

Family, death and memories are dominant themes in the work of Japanese writer-director Kore-eda Hirokazu, multi-award-winningly-so for After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004). He's gained international acclaim too for Distance (2001) and Hana (2006); his Still Walking (2008) prompted critic Roger Ebert to dub him the new Ozu of Japanese cinema, as a similar master of immaculately-observed family relationships and human behaviour.

Hirokazu dismisses such a comparison in his very informative to-camera interview for the Criterion DVD; instead he relates himself to the veteran director who also influenced Ozu (best known outside Japan for The Tokyo Story) - Mikio Ukigumo Naruse.

The Ozu comparison was inevitable. Still Walking reveals a prickly proud old local doctor and his bitter-sweet wife hosting their two surviving children's families for an annual gathering marking the accidental death of their oldest son. They bicker, cook (in brilliantly-detailed close-ups), exchange niceties, suppress emotional outbursts and grudgingly cope with the universal problems of belonging to an unlovable family.

Hirokazu once again shows his winning ways with child actors, and this film's trio are everything that Hollywood brats so often fail to be: natural, moody, coolly observant, clearly sensing their elders' social inadequacies and weaknesses. Their parents are distinctive characters; the in-laws are the nicer people to meet. As a self-confessed semi-autobiographical set of anecdotes, this film clearly sublimates the writer-director's dislike of his parents' personalities and the young man they made him become.

Each cast member, several of whom have worked for Hirokazu on other movies, present characters as nuanced as the writer's storyboard, and as finely-detailed as the director's focuses on production details. Most notably, veteran actress Kirin Kiki, as the pseudo-deferential venomous grandmother, rightly won various awards.

The director's interview includes his comment that he should have deleted the end scene, an unnecessarily poignant and happy conclusion whose pat voice-over words and symbol-packed scenes look like pretty plastic bows of platitude and pretence added to the whole movie's sincere package of home truths.

Hirokazu's next film really shunted aside the petrifying burden of being seen as Ozu reincarnate: Air Doll (2009) is a quirky delight about a blow-up model who gains a human spirit and falls in love.

Submarine

UK movie audiences have always welcomed home-made films sporting horror, gangsters, troubled youngsters and madcap social comedy. Ambitious producers try to satisfy all markets simultaneously. First-time feature-film writer-directors find it wisest to test their talents with no more than two genres, as Norwegian-Nigerian Brit TV comedy writer-actor-director Richard (The IT Crowd) Ayoade did in 2010 with Submarine, an exceptional coming-of-age social comedy.

He adapted the quirky 2008 novel by young Welsh author Joe Dunthorne, telling the tales of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an egocentric 15-year-old schoolboy who wants to have sex and get his parents' relationship out of a bad spell. Instead, to his angst-ridden adolescent dismay, his successfully seduced girl drops him. And his mother (Mike Leigh regular Sally Hawkins, a multi-awardee and Golden Globe winner for Happy-Go-Lucky) appears to have started an affair with an old fling and trendy New Age psychic (Paddy Dead Man's Shoes Considine).

The self-consciously self-obsessed boy, through wry off-screen commentaries, establishes the characters' backgrounds in the seaside South Wales community while revealing his own naivete and teenage arrogance. Throughout, from him and the other characters, there's a dazzling display of insightful moments of zany comedy, schoolyard bitchiness and family melodrama. The zombie-like depressed father (Noah Shine Taylor) provides a taped collection of happy and sad love songs to help his son cope with first romance, which has cheered his primly efficient wife who's been worried about her son's mental state and sexual inclinations.

Oliver loses his virginity to a fiendishly manipulative and self-protective girl, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), whose mother's got a brain tumour. The casting of the pair of edgy youngsters was crucial for Ayoade's old-fashioned "New Wave" style, in which close-ups of their acne and awkward body language is contrasted artfully with the mystical natural beauty and man-made industrial townscapes in which their dramas play out. Both Roberts (Welsh born) and Paige (a Londoner) are experienced TV child actors (Young Dracula and The Mysti Show respectively, among other series). They are enchanting as ironic, plain-faced star-crossed lovers.

Oliver's parents are underplayed handsomely, and Considine relishes his role as an actor-turned-shyster (whose faux-natural 15-minute promotional video is a highlight among the above-average set of DVD extras). Good cinematography, authentic-feeling production designs, and an unusually cerebral dialogue were blended well by Ayoade, providing a distinctive sense of humour, LOL at times, with a sense of emotional depth and psychological acumen.

When a movie has nothing to fault, and feels as it's achieved all its ambitions, it would be wrong to deny it a top rating just because it's a lightweight confection. So were many New Wave award-winners, and Submarine can be viewed as a classic of its kind too.

Christopher and his kind

Are there too many "gay" films being made? Will familiarity breed contempt? Could gaiety become a genre as outmoded as musical operettas, cowboys'n'Indians or the Perils of Pauline? There's probably an ever-lasting market for gay romantic comedies, and definitely one for hard-porn, but I wonder how long normal (ie non-GLBT) TV viewers can be expected to face ever more gay-focused movies made for their living-room screen?

Christopher and His Kind is another BBC TV movie presenting gays as fascinating dramatic characters. On a PC scale, it also ticks a lot of boxes coincidentally, for a dramatisation of Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical memoir of life in 1930s Berlin also documents the rise of the Nazis and increased persecution of Jews.

Not that Isherwood was bothered by politics, and apparently planned to do some writing in Berlin for an Oswald Mosley magazine. He'd been urged to go there ("for the boys") by his public-school friend (and undeclared lover) W.H Auden, to delight in a divine decadence that included many rent boys. Several eccentric people who lived in or visited his boarding house became fictional characters in his fictional tale of Sally Bowles (who became a larger-than-life lead role for Lisa Minelli in Cabaret).

The movie shows us that her real-life inspiration was a socialist Englishwoman, Jean Ross, who survived in Berlin through prostitution and singing in a cheap nightclub. She's a juicy role for Imogen Potts, a young British actress who's already had good supporting parts in Hollywood. She manages the tough task of talking posh while sounding down-to-earth, being sluttish and politically aware.

That wasn't Isherwood's style, judging by the way he's portrayed by Matt (Dr Who) Smith: he speaks very poshly, almost painfully so, and stares at life with supercilious glances, lecherous twinkles or emotionally dead eyes. It's possible to sense a continuity of character between Smith's egotistic observer and Colin Firth's troubled gay lecturer in Tom Ford's adaptation of Isherwood's A Single Man, but Smith's is a much less likeable character. Isherwood probably was too, as his memoir revealed with an honesty that disgusted his former Berlin lover (as an end caption notes).

The memoir was adapted by Kevin Elyot, a former UK TV actor who switched to writing in the mid-90s, winning the 1995 Olivier award for his stage play, My Night with Reg (about four intimate friends of a man with AIDS). It was filmed by Roger Michell for the BBC. Elyot has also written a quartet of Miss Marple movies and a couple of Poirot screenplays for TV, and another gay drama, Clapham Junction, screened on Channel Four. His Riot at the Rite, also for the BBC, focused on bisexual dancer Nijinsky, and he's cultivated a rewarding patch of gay docudrama.

Director Geoffrey Sax, a TV veteran since 1979, created well-decorated period settings marred only by too many over-composed pretty shots through windows. One extra is given full-frontery (none of the lead actors are), Jean Ross's American boyfriend is shown in full-rear nudity, and there's enough kissing and simulated buggery to delight Gay Libbers.

The excellent supporting cast of characters includes Toby Jones (Capote in Infamous) as an English masochist spied through keyholes, Tony-winning Lindsay Duncan (Rome on TV) as the writer's miserable snobbish mother, and former Burberry model Douglas (Boy George on TV) Booth as Isherwood's young German sweet-sweeper lover. It's easy to see why he won the title role in the current version of Romeo and Juliet.

To give Elyot well-earned credit, although this gay docudrama may appear to excuse, almost promote, male homosexuality, it also depicts its gay protagonist as a mean-spirited, selfish writer who'd joke about Nazis killing yodellers. I'd like to have seen Firth play this role too, if only because Matt Smith's eyes and expression are not attractive, to me.

Adjustment bureau

Prolific novelist and short-story writer Phillip K. Dick created concepts that have inspired more than a dozen scifi, fantasy and mystery movies, including such blockbusters as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. He died from a heart attack at the age of 53 in 1982, after five divorces, substance abuse and a visit from God (he claimed). His work, full of cinematically ideal mysteries and chases, continues to be adapted, as in The Adjustment Bureau (2011).

Fellow-American George Nolfi, a philosophy and political science graduate who switched to writing screenplays, crafted the storyline from Dick's Adjustment Team short story. He'd already successfully adapted Michael Crichton's Timeline for a UK-produced science thriller, one of his own screenplays as the basis for the Oceans Twelve sequel, another writer's novel for his co-production of Michael Douglas's Sentinel, and joined the team adapting The Bourne Ultimatum.

Having worked twice with Matt Damon, Nolfi was able to sign up the star actor, enabling him to raise production funds and secure Emily Blunt, the very busy Brit actress (Young Victoria, Devil Wears Prada) as his lead actress. He was ready for his debut producer-director-writer feature.

The storyline visualised the typical Dick scifi mystery well. Damon plays a NY congressman running for a senate seat. He meets a contemporary dancer (Blunt) by chance, in a men's toilet. They banter, chat and kiss, and the chemistry between the two, and the snappy dialogue, shows them falling in love at first sight, credibly. So much so that audiences root for them once their romance seems doomed and Damon must combat the forces of an invisible Chairman (ie God) and his earthly agents (angels visible only to Damon due to a time-warp slip-up one of them makes).

Damon's politician is destined to be a US president; Blunt's ballerina to become a world-famed choreographer. Their lives are recorded in four-dimensional books administered by the Chairman's bureaucracy, displaying very human irritations and frustrations with their tasks.

Damon must outrun and outwit them, and change their plans, if his love for Blunt is to live. The storyline doesn't tell us why Fate hadn't contrived to give a potential US president a suitable mate, or fully clarify why a previous plan for the couple's romance (explaining their instant attraction to each other) had been changed. Other red herrings and loose ends also don't matter at the time because Nolfi's fast-paced screenplay sprints charmingly to its inevitable happy ending.

En route, a good supporting cast includes Anthony (Hurt Locker) Mackie as a sympathetic black angel, Michael (Criminal Minds) Kelly as Damon's best pal, and Terence Stamp as the menacing divine enforcer of heavenly planning. Adding cameos of "reality", playing themselves, are various famous faces (Jon Stewart twice, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Madeline Albright, Michael Bloomberg and other NY personalities).

Nolfi created an acclaimed and profitable relatively "low-budget" (US$50 million) small-scale version of Nolan's Inception, jumping merrily through time warps, false illusions and four dimensions. He owes a lot to his lead actors, and Dick, but he can claim a lot of credit for himself in Hollywood.

Brighton rock

To re-make a classic movie is likely to be a lose-lose proposition for a novice feature film director, yet BBC Films gave the go-ahead to Rowan Joffe for a 2009 adaptation of Brighton Rock. He'd won awards for his TV feature, The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (2008) and co-writing of 28 Weeks Later, was working on the adaptation of Martin Booth's The American (an Anton Corbijn project starring George Clooney), and had good genes (mother, actress Jane Laportaire; Oscar-nominated father, director Roland Joffe).

The original B&W 1947 Ealing film, directed by the Boulting brothers, starred Richard Attenborough, reprising his breakthrough West End theatre role as Pinkie, a murderous young gangster who seduces a key witness. The plot was adapted by Graham Greene and playwright Terence Rattigan from Greene's 1938 novel about Roman Catholic consciences at work in a sordid gang-infested southern English resort town. Joffe shifted Greene's story to the end-1960s, incorporating the period's real street violence between Mods and rockers (and PC-ly changed a hoodlum into a role for a black actor).

Joffe's production included a stellar Brit cast. Pinkie was played by Sam Riley, a young TV actor who'd gained big-screen acclaim in the lead role for Control in 2007 (directed by Corbijn). Fast-rising Andrea Riseborough (Margaret Thatcher and The Devil's Whore on TV) self-effaced herself as Rose, the naive waitress who needs to be kept quiet. Backing them up with muted star cameos were Helen Mirren (teashop manager and Pinkie's nemesis), John Hurt (bookie client) and Andy Serkis (flashy rival gang-leader).

Greene's novella is a brief and brutal morality tale, and its success hinged on readers' images of the doomed youngsters and their rancid home town. In B&W, with Attenborough's little-boy-lost evil look, the movie was noir cinema at its Brit best. Joffe's richly-coloured TV film does capture a period feeling, but can't recreate the true look and mood of the 60s. Riley may have been mis-cast: he seems too mature to be a teenager, too suave, his features too chiselled, his face suggesting a heartless sneer provoked by an unpleasant smell.

Largely due to that unappealing focal anti-hero, Joffe's version looks to be a glossy charade, a re-make that serves best to prompt a re-viewing of the original. Did it sport a sly "miracle" to create the semi-happy ending Joffe presents? Did it dare to clarify, as Greene did, Catholic-raised Pinkie's psychopathic anti-sex anti-woman personality? Did the old-timers end up in cliched contentment? Was it less of a choir-ridden melodrama filled with picture-postcard shots of Brighton landmarks?

Paul

For more than a decade, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have worked together in various British TV and movie comedies (from Spaced through Shaun of the Dead to Hot Fuzz) that displayed their lower-middle-class Everyman personas. Sweeter than Ricky Gervais's snide cynic, and less bumbling than Richard Curtis characters, they form a happy comic duo of smiling shortness and bashful fattiness. Their first co-written movie, Paul, has been a worthy winner critically and at the North American box-office (which knows Pegg better from the Star Trek re-boot).

Their concept was a delightfully comic, complex send-up of sci-fi movies. A comic-book writer and his illustrator pal go to the Comic-Con trade show in the USA and then set off on a road trip to sight-see desolate spots renowned for UFO sightings. They are forced to give refuge in their RV to Paul, a pointy-headed alien with a dirty mouth, "spaceman balls" and attitude problems.

He's escaped from a government secret programme headed by an off-screen alpha female (Sigourney Weaver deploying her distinctive vocal menace), and is pursued by her laconic lieutenant (Jason Bateman on good dead-pan form) and his pair of gormless henchmen. Driving Paul to the destination where a spaceship can rescue him, the naif Brits collect en route the one-eyed daughter (Kristen Wiig) of a rabid Christian backwoodsman.

An elderly woman (Blythe Danner), who'd helped Paul after his crash-landing on Earth sixty years before, has to be taken on board too, before they and their pursuers reach a mountain whose shape recalls a movie about close encounters (whose director, among others, is shown to have used Paul with official approval as a creative consultant).

The quick-moving action comedy incorporates many other references to the sci-fi genre, and is directed with snappy panache by Greg (Superbad) Mottola, who wrote and directed the multi-award-winning The Daytrippers in 1996 and had less success with Adventureland in 2009.

The producers seem to have decided that the screenplay's Creationism-defying atheistic Darwinian tone and bug-eyed anti-hero (voiced with suitable comic bile by Seth Rogen) would never gain loving laughs in America's Bible Belt. So they also made him a smoker leading others astray while prompting them to lard their dialogue with coatings of four-letter words. These are so profuse (especially in the "Unrated" DVD version) that the well-cast cast act embarrassed by their professional duty to appeal to smutty teens in multiplex audiences. They did; the movie's shown a profit on box-office receipts alone.

In the end credits, Jane Lynch, seen in an early cameo as a diner waitress, re-appears to do her scripted bit for lesbian rights; Pegg and Frost had already tossed in a few gay male confusions. A sequel to be made (to be called, they joke, Pauls). If they really want to piss off, cock-suck, fuck up, and fart in the face of, the God-fearing, they could call it St Paul's Balls ?

Harry Potter 7-2

All good things must come to an end. That even felt desirable after the dreary cinematography, tired acting and muddled plotting of the seventh Harry Potter movie. It's hard to believe that the eighth and final instalment was made at the same time, with the same director (Peter Yates) this time achieving a level of imposing block-busting action-adventure almost as award-worthy as Peter Jackson's final TLOR spectacular. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is a fitting conclusion to cinema's all-time best-selling franchise.

Yates shouldn't get an Oscar nomination, however. Far too many times, he pauses the action and the narrative flow for a ponderous rear view of Potter thinking or nothing happening. If the resultant static frame contained eye-catching designs or 3D effects, fine. When they didn't, they were like soft flicks from a towel dotted with masonry images.

The lead trio remained a constant reminder of the crucial initial success of the franchise's first director, Chris Columbus, to oversee the assembly of the appropriate mood, cast and visual style (all of which were deliberately designed for the long haul rather than short-term spectacle). For a decade, Radcliffe, Grint and Watson gave many months of their young lives to the franchise. They've earned good money, satisfied Potter fans and may manage to create new cinema personas.

The likeliest non-technical Oscar nominees could be Best Supporting Actors Alan Rickman (his Snape a commandingly complex character for a decade) and Ralph Fiennes (an increasingly mesmerising evil presence as Voldemort). Compared to them, or the roles Rowling created and they personified so well, other fine British actors have just been having fun, playing cameos for laughs or titters.

Above all, though, the most deserving Oscar nominee is screen-playwright American Steve Kloves, one of the few non-Brits to be accepted into JK Rowling's circle of trusted interpreters of her words into big-screen validity. An Oscar and BAFTA nominee (for his acclaimed adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys in 2000), his only other previous award-nominated work was his original screenplay for The Fabulous Baker Boys back in 1989. His adaptations of the Potter series have steeped surely, albeit stodgily at times, through Rowling's fantastic blend of children's fiction, ancient myths, sorcery and teenage angst. Inevitably, he couldn't adjust any of her less skillful plotting, such as Voldemort's unbelievable belief that Potter had died or the Malfoy family's last-minute changes of hearts or Snape's willingness to simulate loyalty, kill Dumbledore and sacrifice himself.

Has 3D added strength to HP 7-II? It's worth finding out; the 2D version was good cinema, and it is nice to imagine that it might be even more thrilling.

Rango

Why do audiences gleefully accept ugly heroes in animated films? Perhaps because handsome or beautiful cartoon figures look bland and unamusing? The Shrek series has ended, but the ogre and Fiona (and Donkey) have a worthy successor in Nickelodeon's Rango.

All the movie's characters are grotesquely, brilliantly and lovably spotty, peculiar or deformed, starting with the pet chameleon who's the anti-hero, Rango. For his first animated movie, director Gore Verbinski wisely worked with the actor who'd made his tongue-in-cheeky Pirates of the Caribbean such an exceptional action-adventure loving parody, Johnny Depp. This time, Depp weaves a dozen different tones into his enchanting vocal fireworks display.

Lost on a highway in the Mojave desert, he meets a nearly-halved, wise old armadillo, Roadkill (Alfred Molina) who leads him to his quest for himself. Near the Wild Westerly frontier town of Grit, Rango encounters a bug-eyed iguana, zanily-abrupt Beans (fine vocal work from Isla Fisher, Scottish-Australian comedy actress wife of Sacha Baron Cohen). The town's humanoid desert creatures and their water supply are manipulated by sly tortoise Mayor John (Ned Beatty) abetted by outlaw gila monster Bad Bill (Ray Winstone) and Rattlesnake Jake, a huge and vicious diamondback (Bill Nighy).

Pretending to be a valiant hero to save his skin, succeeding by accident, Rango is appointed sheriff by the Mayor who's buying up the surrounding land and is thwarted only by Beans. The Spirit of the West, a shadowy human, appears to Rango in the desert in the shape of a Clint Eastwood look- and sound-alike Man with No Name (Timothy Olyphant). Haggard thirsty walking cacti join the anti-hero's search for water (evoking Tolkien Ents), and well-characterised odd-shaped, scaly-skinned, warty extras enrich the intricate sets and brain-tickling verbose screenplay, including a cheerfully morbid quartet of Mexican owl guitarists acting as a recurring chorus of woe.

They all populate a movie that's unusually entertaining for eyes and ears. For a movie buff's memory cells too, especially when the animation team (George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, making their first animated feature) create scenes of aerial thrills a la Star Wars.

German-born Hans (Lion King, Gladiator) Zimmer adds aptly spectacular music, and major kudos is earned by first-billed writer and story creator John Logan, a playwright (RED) with an impressive screenwriting portfolio (including Any Given Sunday and RKO 281 in 1999, Gladiator, the Last Samurai, The Aviator, Coriolanus). Verbinski (who also voices four minor characters) is the second credited writer; the third is James Ward Byrkit, the key storyboard artist and credited creative consultant for Verbinski's three Pirates movies.

Verbinski and his team, including British producer Graham (Aviator, Tourist) King and the director's ever-present Australian editor, Craig Wood, could triumph in animation industry awards, and win the Oscar and Golden Globe races this year. Luckily for them, Pixar released its first ho-hum critically-assaulted feature (Cars 2).

A friend said he hadn't left a cinema in such an ebullient mood for a very long time, and that was my feeling: Rango is a top-rated movie experience worth seeing at least once more to catch and admire more of its references and in-jokes.

America, America

America, America lasts almost three hours and gained Elia Kazan three Oscar nominations in 1963 for Best Picture, Direction and Original Screenplay. Its only win, though, was for Best Art Direction (in the Black & White category, separate from colour until 1966) for Gene Callahan, who worked on five of Kazan's movies. The B&W artistry glows throughout the auteur's portrait of his uncle's life in early 20th-Century Turkey and Greece.

The movie, in effect a docudrama, is an accepted classic, and an historical document depicting a typical immigrant's experience in his homeland and the USA. Kazan himself was an Istanbul-born Greek, and the 1963 movie saga earned him the last of his four Golden Globes for direction; in the year's Oscar race, however, Tony Richardson's Tom Jones triumphed.

Kazan's central character, on screen almost all the time, is Stavros, the eldest son of a Greek businessman keeping a servile profile in Anatolia during the Turkish Empire. Sent to what was then Constantinople to establish a new base for the family, he is cheated out of his family possessions and learns to suppress his "Anatolian Smile" (the film's secondary title) while maintaining his childhood dream of escaping to the land of opportunity.

After long searches throughout Europe, Kazan picked Stathis Giallelis, an unknown Athens film industry wannabe, for the lead role. Although he made no other significant screen appearance afterwards (a total of only eight), he's been immortalised by this film, having been expertly coached by the experienced stage and movie director who'd already honed the skills of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

Surprisingly, for a movie that's only 57 years old, it unreels creakily, marred by old-fashioned sentimentality, the supporting cast's ham acting for cliche-ridden characters, its over-frequent bursts of melodramatic mood music and focused glances, and its mostly poor and non-sync dubbing by very ham and very American voices. In the end, the movie feels much older, decades older, than other, earlier, award-winning Kazan films. It looks wonderful, with richly-detailed settings and costumes, and Oscar-nominated B&W cinematography (by Haskell Wexler, working on his first big-budget feature).

Maybe the material was too close to his family's heart for Kazan to have the necessary perspective and self-critical awareness. He ended up making a self-aggrandising spectacle with an earnestness that was Soviet-style and a misanthropy provoked by the class- and race-conscious people who destroyed a young man's smile. Ironically, Kazan personally had a much easier migration to American fame and fortune (and eventual repudiation by many in Hollywood and Broadway for his self-preserving betrayal of former Communist colleagues).

It's possible to guess why Martin Scorsese, a New Yorker of Italian origin, admired this film from his inspirational idol, a New Yorker of Greek origin. They are atypical Hollywood success stories, akin to but very distinct from the movie industry's Eastern European emigres.

Tree of life

The "fragmented and non-linear narrative" (so called by Wikipedia) that is Terrence Malick's 2011 Cannes award-winner The Tree of Life, isn't necessarily off-putting per se. All depends on the movie's overall dramatic impact and the individual elements that create the mental images left with a viewer.

Are the actors portraying credible characters or token figures, does the cinematography advance meanings more than just the director's aesthetic desires, do fragments blend excitingly on-screen and in the viewer's mind?

Yes and no, of course, because Malick is incapable of creating a movie that isn't encrusted with glistening, provocative and unforgettable images. At times during this 140-minute display, one wants the movie to freeze, to let one savour the beauty of a composition, its lighting, its disturbing angle. On various occasions, Malick obliges by reducing the camera movement or action to almost nothing, creating a slide-show effect that's both beguiling and alienating.

The sparse plot only comes to narrative life during the film's middle hour. In a tree-lined middle-class district of Waco, Texas in the 1950s, a frustrated power plant executive (Brad Pitt) runs a God-fearing dog-loving old-fashioned household with a dutiful wife (Jessica Chastain, an excellent US TV actress in a breakthrough film performance). His three young sons include Jack (first-time actor Hunter McCracken, a teenage Sean Penn look-alike), who has become an angst-filled architect (Sean Penn, in a constantly wandering-around and wondering-aloud role as a man with unhappy childhood memories).

One of his brothers had died (we aren't told how or why) at the age of 19, as we were told dramatically early on, evoking enormous sorrow from his parents, as we saw extensively. Was it the brother whose hair started falling out in later scenes, with no narrative explanation or off-screen information? Was it the youngest brother, whose musical talent and looks carried the father's genes? Was Jack jealous of either of them, or merely a miserable soul?

During the very refined soap operatics of that central hour, Malick's cameras focus fairly and squarely on the family, at dinner, in its grassy yards, amid Jack's playful games with his brothers or adolescent viciousness with schoolmates. His father says and shows he loves all his sons (and expects their respectful kisses) in his rough, tough, Navy-trained ways, but his oppressive persona earns Jack's hatred. The father represents Nature, the off-screen mother's voice told us; she stands for Grace, the other half of humanity. Many other recollections, mostly from Jack, contain unrelated memories, pensive asides and mumbled thoughts.

Moment by moment, the interactions of the boy and his parents are revealed like a quilt pulled from the shadows with slow gestures and sudden yanks. Not fully revealed, frustratingly for those who seek narrative clarity. We also never learn whether Jack really had an Oedipal obsession for an ethereal mother who seemed to float, whether the father was embittered because he couldn't be a serious musician, when and how Jack left home, why he's shown apologising on the telephone to his presumably still-living father, what happened to the family when the father lost his job, whether the tree Jack and his father planted in the yard grew ... and those are just some of the unconnected loose ends, seen as dramatically inconsequential as various dogs that run around the family garden.

However, it looks as if Malick realised this finely-photographed family portrait presented an inadequate overview of humanity. The audience needed to be made aware, be in awe, of the writer-director's philosophical thoughts about love, God, Christianity, losing a job and failing to be a successful parent. The film starts with quotations from Job and detours for self-indulgently exquisite long works of cinema art depicting the creation and history of the universe and Earth, including the day when a dinosaur discovers the concept of mercy for smaller creatures.

The cinematography is astonishing: Mexican Emmanuel Lubezki has been Oscar-nominated four times and deserves to win this time. The sound effects are also subtle and striking, as is some of the original music (Frenchman Alexandre Desplat, another four-time Oscar nominee). But much of the music, especially the classical extracts (presumably reflecting the father's love of music), is over-emphatic, flabby with wailing choirs and ringing requiems.

The worst conceit of all is Malick's 20-minute closing section: it's an increasingly irritating succession of closing scenes, suggesting either that the director couldn't bear to eject any one of his magniloquent images or that he delights in tantalising his audience. At the really final fade to black, the audience sighs rather than gasps: Malick has proved he's a major cinematic talent, but he's done so with such self-conscious spiritual primness and visual pomposity that his messages are drowned in his media magic. Is his story an anti-Christian morality tale dressed up as a church-goer's cinematic sermon? How can we care when Malick doesn't care to show us why.

Shakespeare retold

Maybe because the BBC reportedly over-pays its senior executives, they sometimes approve hefty funding for great, cute or memorable TV movie productions. Sometimes, those try to be all three, like the Shakespeare Retold 2005 mini-series of four made-for-TV contemporary versions of the bard's plots. One imagined Macbeth set in a Glasgow restaurant's kitchen. The other three were comic efforts, one of which envisaged The Taming of the Shrew as a modern-day rom-com.

Bizarre casting paired short and very shrewish Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, as Kate, a viperous virgin uber-Thatchery MP, and big-framed bumptious Rufus Sewell as Petruchio, a penniless earl wagered into wooing her. Her marriage is required too by party supporters if the spiteful spinster is to get chosen as Leader of the Opposition.

Screen-playwright Sally Wainwright had already been a BAFTA nominee for her work on Yorkshire Television's four-season comedy series At Home with the Braithwaites (200o-2003) and her version of one of Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath, 2003) for the BBC. She'd had what must have seemed an amusing idea for her re-working, which was directed attractively by David (Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper) Richards.

The worthy supporting cast included comedian David Mitchell (as Kate's long-suffering PPS), Jaime (Hustle) Murray as Bianca, a beautiful model sister head over heels for a beautiful Italian teenager, and Twiggy as their mother; Stephen (Drop the Dead Monkey) Tompkinson plays Bianca's manager, harbouring long-unrequited love for her.

The very incredible updated plotline has Petruchio, recently returned from Australia, falling into instant real love for Kate, who agrees within a week to a church wedding, at which her fiancee comes out as a macho transvestite who likes wearing high heels, make-up and a kilt. Not even coolly surreal, and too far from the realities of modern life and politics, the unfunny comedy framework collapses before the pair reach their honeymoon villa and Kate's taming in Italy.

***

Peter Bowker, a multiple BAFTA TV award nominee, and winner for Occupation and Eric & Ernie, had the trickier task of placing A Midsummer's Night Dream in a modern setting. His imaginative interpretation works better. The lovers' wooded fairyland, still ruled by Oberon (Lennie Jericho James) and Titania (Sharon Inspector Linley Small), assisted by unreliable Puck (Dean Lennox Shameless Kelly), is found in Dream Park, a lakeside holiday resort where Theo (Bill Paterson) and Polly (Imelda Staunton) are hosting their daughter's engagement party. Its special highlight is to be a revue organised by camp manager Quince (Simon The Fast Show Day) performed by camp staff, including oafish Norman Bottom (Johnny Benidorm Vegas)

The bride-to-be's best friend and secret lover are Shakespeare's second pair of love victims to be served inattentive Puck's mistaken applications of eyedrops of love juice. Director Ed Fraiman has quick-cut fun illustrating the potion's effect, but repeats the device too many times; the production also adds pop song tracks whose lyrics are over-obvious noisy accompaniments to plot developments.

All ends well enough and sweetly, though the comic revue and audience participation were a lot funnier in the original 16th-Century theatrical romp.

***

Brian Percival's direction of Much Ado About Nothing won him a BAFTA TV award in 2006. He'd won the BAFTA Short Film award for his 2001 About a Girl, and collected another BAFTA TV award in 2011 for his work on ITV's Downton Abbey.

David Nicholls wrote the snappy TV version of Shakespeare's rom-com, in which Beatrice (Sarah Blackpool Parish) and Benedick (Damian Band of Brothers Lewis) are sparring co-anchors on Wessex TV news programme. Hero (Billie Dr Who Piper), its bubbly bright weather girl and daughter of station manager Leonard (Martin By Jeeves Jarvis), is to be married to sportscaster Claude (Tom Eastenders Ellis), but the jealous former visual effects designer Don (Derek No Angels, Ugly Betty Riddell) plots their falling-out.

The delightfully credible lead pair of actors clearly enjoy their frolic, especially an apropos deconstruction and recital of a Shakespearean poem extolling love and marriage. The play's tittle-tattle tale of hate-love passions has been artfully re-hashed by Nicholls, whose non-TV work includes adaptations of his own novels: Starter for Ten (2006, starring James McAvoy) and One Day (2011, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess). It's clear why the BBC chose to run this story first in the four-week mini-series: this is Shakespeare rendered with comic and televisual flair.

***

James McAvoy landed the tile role in the re-working of Macbeth, who's been transformed into the young impassioned sous chef in a top Glasgow restaurant in the noir screenplay devised by Peter (Cambridge Spies) mini-series) Moffat, a multi-award nominee and BAFTA winner for his Criminal Justice mini-series. Joe Macbeth's ambitious wife, Ella (Keeley Spooks Hawes), is the maitre d' for the three-star restaurant, whose absentee owner is a TV celebrity chef, Duncan (Vincent - 300, The Street - Regan). His son, Malcolm, is a long-haired would-be poet and apprentice chef (Toby Dead Man's Shoes, The Street Kebbell.

The Scottish tragic melodrama was given a treatment reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's epic tale of a egocentric chef and his retinue, and director Mark Brozel (award-winning Holy Cross TV movie) followed suit with an artful array of dramatic lighting, raw meat, kitchen knives, gore, garbage and self-consciously well-composed close-ups of Mr and Mrs Macbeth emoting madly.

The one conceit that worked surprisingly well was the transformation of the three witches into a chorus of refuse-disposal bin-men, consoling Macbeth with the thought that his murder of Duncan will only be trouble "when pigs fly", which they do eventually. What didn't work was the concept that the Ghost could be replaced by a macabre Michelin quality inspector.

Another silly idea was corrected before the series was published as a BBC DVD. The original portmanteau title was rightly ditched: ShakespeaRe Told. Will must have groaned in his grave.

The American friend

Patricia Highsmith's mysterious, psychopathic and talented con artist Mr Tom Ripley has inspired varied film versions of her five novels featuring him (the "Ripliad"). With The American Friend, prolific German writer-director Wim Wenders presented Ripley as a cowboy American character played by Dennis Hopper in a Hamburg setting.

He's one part of a 1977 audience-maximising screenplay that also includes a French supporting actor, Gerard Blain. Conveniently, he can speak English, as can the lead character, a dying man Ripley recommends as a hired assassin. He's played well by the film's real star, Bruno Ganz.

Based on Highsmith's Ripley's Game (later remade by Lilianna Cavani as a vehicle for John Malkovich), the Wenders screenplay transforms amoral Ripley from an urbane and effete bon vivant into a petty criminal with a soft heart. Hopper makes him credible, but the quantum character leaps attributed to Ripley and the Ganz character (a picture framer with a terminal blood disease) are harder to believe.

Two famous film directors joined Wenders. Nicholas Ray played the supposedly dead painter whose "discovered" works are touted by Ripley, and Samuel Fuller is a Mafia boss whose operations are targeted by a suave French gangster (Blain, a star previously in Chabrol andTruffaut features).

Much of Wenders' two hours of mystery comprises eye-catching cinematography in which artful dabs of primary colours enrich dreary cityscapes and tawdry apartments. They're effectively alienation effects, deliberately drawing attention to specially-painted walls and carefully-positioned colourful props, clothing and autos.

When the screenplay's pace speeds up, as Ripley (an experienced killer) assists the picture-framer to kill and survive, Wenders lets the action and actors fill the screen without distractions, so masterfully that the plot's creaking illogicalities only strike the viewer at the end.

Conspiracy

In 2001, HBO and the BBC co-produced a docudrama, Conspiracy, that won Emmys for lead actor Kenneth Branagh and writer Loring Mandel, who also won the Writers Guild of America top TV award. Supporting actor Stanley Tucci won the year's Golden Globe for TV movie work, and director Frank Pierson collected the Directors Guild award for TV movies. It should have been nominated for Business Management awards too: it's a shockingly illuminating demonstration of how to really run a conference.

In the film, as in reality, the January 1942 "Wannsee Conference" lasted 85 minutes, during which 13 leaders of the German Reich's relevant government departments and military forces reviewed proposals for a solution to the Jewish "question". They had been summoned, in line with instructions from Hitler, by SS chief Reinhard Heydrich, who reported to Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. Heydrich's right-hand man and "recording secretary" for the secret meeting was Col Adolf Eichmann, who officially reported to another attendee, Heinrich Muller, a Gestapo officer who reported to Heydrich.

Other attendees controlled armies in the troubled "Occupied Eastern Territories", or administered German government ministries (foreign, justice, four-year planning, chancellery). Their common problem was deciding what to do about the impending incorporation into the Reich of millions of Jews from the east, particularly the 5 million in Russia.

With deliberate irony, the opening chit-chat between attendees tells us that the exquisite Wannsee lakeland mansion used for the conference (and now a museum) had belonged to a Jew. Later, further chit-chat repeats contemporary gossip about Eichmann's possible Jewish blood. The biggest irony not noted in the screenplay would cover the Reich's failure to realise that Poles, Slavs, Russians, Gypsies, gays and many other undesirables would also need to be eliminated. Heydrich obviously took his instruction to deal with the Jewish Question first, as the priority issue distracting Germany from its war efforts; he wisely kept the conferees' attention focused on it alone.

The way the dialogue, director and Branagh present Heydrich, it would appear that he was a remarkably shrewd, skilled commander. His death soon after resulted from the after-effects of an assassination attempt conducted by two specially trained Czechs. They were "dropped from a British bomber", as one of the end captions further notes, advising the post-war situation of each attendee. Eichmann, we are told, assumed responsibility for his dead superior's work, "regarding it as matter of honour", but one wonders what might have happened in the Reich if Heydrich had survived.

Only one of the 30 copies of the official conference minutes was discovered after WW2, in the 1950s; its contents were amplified during Israel's questioning of Eichmann following his capture in Argentina in 1960. The screenplay apparently invents additional conversational asides and character quirks, and incorporates crude political and racist jokes. The overall impact of the attendees' remarks and conclusions is astonishing.

Only a couple of the assembled leaders display any qualms about the plans to mass-murder millions of people with ruthless efficiency. Precise calculations of transportation loads, potential ghetto prisoners' work skills, death-gas strength and comparative costs (bullets being too expensive to waste) are outlined with matter-of-fact crispness in the SS folder handed to each attendee at the conference table.

More of them acknowledge the impossibility (and the waste of valuable military resources) of relying on German soldiers to carry out the desired daily death tolls (around 20,000). After fast-tracked overviews of sterilisation options and the legal tangle prompted by consideration of mixed-race German Jews, the meeting is railroaded by Heydrich into acceptance of gassing all Jews who aren't temporarily useful as a needed labour force (which will also build its own gas chambers and furnaces).

Heydrich, played with superb smiling menace by Branagh, is ruthlessly effective as the conference convener. He'd ordained that it last less than two hours and it did, partly due to well-organised stage management from Eichmann, given an almost admirable image of tense bureaucratic efficiency by Tucci. The rest of the cast (British) deliver cameos that rarely exhibit cliched characters, especially Colin Firth (the Interior Ministry's legalistic purist and creator of the anti-Jew "Nuremberg Laws") and David Threlfall (a morally distressed senior civil servant).

Short, sharp, shocking and finely edited, with drama in facial close-ups and character confrontations, this TV movie earns favourable comparison with any feature film set in a jury room or wherever talking heads discuss big issues. MBA academics would do well (and be pilloried for so doing) to screen it for their students as an exemplar of conference control techniques and how to create unanimity for a carefully defined common goal.

Scissor sisters

Movie presentations of pop groups' live shows are occasionally cinematic delights per se, and not just when Martin Scorsese directs them. If a group is confident enough, it will let a talented director frame and edit their performances, on and off stage, to create the movie equivalent of a parade of visually exciting floats conveying their music to fresh heights of thrills or meanings. Were the arch-gay NY-formed UK-resident Scissor Sisters glam-rock and honky-tonk fivesome that self-confident?

In 2004, their live concert at the Brighton Dome was recorded for their first DVD, We Are Scissor Sisters ... And So Are You. It also included a bio-documentary, Return to Oz. Both were directed by Julien Temple. Three years later in London, an O2 live show was captured in A Year of Ta-Dah, a debut direction for an unknown Benjamin Hoffman (the same family name as one of the group's founding members, NY-born Scot Hoffman aka Babydaddy).

He's the somewhat Teddy Bear-ish bearded guitarist whose stage persona is Nervousness. His be-suited lead guitar counterpoint, "Del Marquis", personifies Aloofness. There's a non-gay drummer in between them (originally "Paddy Boom"), personifying nothing special, while the group's primary foci are slim ultra-exhibitionist Jake Shears and plumpish butchy Ana "Matronic". Her to-camera remarks provide the thread for Temple's neatly-edited 26-minute documentary, showing how the group formed, starting with Hoffman and Shears sharing a bed.

Accidental tourist

The Accidental Tourist was a critical and popular success in 1988 for William Hurt and Geena Davis (who won the year's Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). It also gained many award nominations for its original score (John Williams) and direction and co-writing by Lawrence Kasdan, whose screenplay was based on an Anne Tyler novel. The nominal lead actress was Kathleen Turner.

Kasdan had already written and directed Body Heat (his 1981 debut, also starring Hurt and Turner), The Big Chill and Silverado, and co-written the second and third Star Wars instalments (1980/83) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). He made another six movies up to 2003, when he co-produced and directed his re-working of William Goldman's adaptation of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher. It lost him big money; since then he's reportedly been attached to Tobey McGuire's aborted live-action Robotech and is now completing a delayed project co-written with his wife (and co-writer of his Grand Canyon) about a woman who loves her dog more than her husband (Darling Companion, starring old hands Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton and Dianne West).

Anne Tyler's novel told of an uptight weak-willed travel writer (Hurt), separated from his bossy uptight wife (Turner) a year after the shooting death of their 12-year-old son, hiring a self-determinedly odd trainer (Davis) for the boy's biting Corgi. Dogs never hurt a film's audience appeal and are photogenic dei ex machina for its plotting; this one is a star turn.

An admirable supporting cast flesh out Hurt's three eccentric siblings and his bachelor publisher (Bill Pullman), and the richly comic details of their lives build a firm frame for Hurt's character's melancholy indecisiveness. Their dialogue is wry and charming, like much of the movie. Overall, though, at two hours it's an over-long reflection on love and marriage, insecure men and purposeful women. There are longueurs and the trio of key characters are self-centred folks with whom one wouldn't want to share one's life.

Mikado

There's much to laugh at, for good and bad reasons, in The Mikado, the first (1939) movie version of a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. The only totally negative feature is the stagey OTT make-up, visible proof that swatches of theatrical mascara and other facial paint look awful in close-ups. The gaudy costumes and lavish stage designs are more acceptably outre, as they suit the mock-Japanese setting and the Oscar-nominated Technicolor cinematography.

Although the movie was filmed at England's Pinewood studios and used many stars and choristers from the Savoy Theatre's D'Oyly Carte Company, it was a Hollywood co-production. To maximise its appeal to non-British audiences, it hired an American radio pop star (Kenny Baker) to take the role of wishy-washy Nanki-Poo, the Mikado's son and "second trombone", and an Australia-based D'Oyly Carte veteran (John Barclay) to giggle manically as the ludicrously logical Mikado.

A well-chosen Hollywood veteran talent took the director's chair. Trained as a violist and a composer, Victor Schertzinger had been Oscar-nominated for One Night of Love in 1934, and went on to make the first two Hope and Crosby Road movies. His last film, The Fleet's In, included four of his own songs, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer: Tangerine and I Remember You remain popular, explaining why the film's soundtrack (and sound recording) won Oscars in 1942. Schertzinger, at the age of 53, had died from a heart attack the previous October after completing the film (his 89th).

He worked with the then leading D'Oyly Carte stage director to add cinematic elements to a tradition-bound production that dared not stray too far from the beloved Gilbert's original 1885 staging. An explanatory prologue and a throng of extras were added, ornate costumes and sets were created, and various songs were cut (including two of baleful man-hungry Katisha's ballads). The Criterion DVD (published by its second-tier Janus division) includes one deleted scene: the Lord High Executioner's famous ditty about his "little list" of abhorred people, which included "nigger minstrels". In 1941, the producers hadn't seen the need to revise that, and also included a topical comic cut-away to an extra with a Hitlerian moustache.

English director Mike Leigh (whose Topsy Turvy focused on The Mikado and the G&S/D'Oyly Carte working relationships) provides an illuminating to-camera commentary in another DVD item. Similarly, two American academics comment in useful detail, their remarks amplified by short clips from the movie. As so often, Criterion's packet transforms a pleasant movie into a worthy cinema relic.

Broken Trail

With 16 Emmy nominations, Broken Trail, the AMC (US cable) network's first feature movie production, was way ahead of regular network products in the 2006 American TV season. It won for dramatic miniseries, male actor (Robert Duvall) and supporting actor (Thomas Haden Church).

Its director, Walter Hill, was experienced in Westerns and handsomely orchestrated more than three hours of lushly coloured cinematography of dramatic landscapes (mostly in Canada's Calgary), racing herds of wild horses, grisly gunfights (with brothel-serving evil henchmen), offbeat human interest stories (slave-trade Chinese girls), low-key romance (Duvall with Greta Scacchi as a prostitute widow), and inter-generational conflict (Duvall, a ranch-seeking uncle, bonding with Haden Church's footloose ranch-hand).

Writer Alan Geoffrion had worked as an assistant for Duvall on a 2003 Western (Kevin Costner's Open Range), but has no other IMDb credit. That's surprising as his debut work is a realistic portrait of America's West, warts and all including branding, mud, human trafficking and fast justice. The women's marital ambitions make sense in their harsh environment, where the men's bashfulness (and formalistic politeness to everyone, even foes) seems oddly but genuinely gallant.

Maybe there are too many cuts to shots of technicolor sunsets, flying horse manes and long grass, and perhaps the screenplay employs an over-sweet veil of decency for its odd couplings. They would explain why Hill and Geoffrion were both Emmy nominees but lost out to Prime Suspect: The Final Act.

Business of strangers

Good actors need great breaks in order to become A-list stars. Stockard Channing, whose movie career began in 1971, has done very well on Broadway and US TV (her own sitcoms and The West Wing), but her first big lead role in Grease (at 33, playing a teenager) may have typecast the vivacious show-stopper. Only one later film earned her Golden Globe or Oscar nominations (Six Degrees of Separation, 1993). She gained less kudos for The Business of Strangers in 2001: the indie psycho-sexual mystery cost six million dollars and only grossed one million.

It was the Sundance-backed debut feature of writer-director Patrick Stettner, an award-winning student film-maker, who has only directed one more feature, The Night Listener (2006), another over-talkative psychological thriller (starring Robin Williams, co-written by Stettner with the story's originator, novelist Armistead Maupin). Apart from a credited "thanks", among many, on 2010's Oscar-nominated Winter Bones, he's had no IMDb entry since then.

Short in stature but high in eyeball appeal, Channing has an unforgettable face and charisma. She's a dedicated, divorced corporate executive unexpectedly promoted to CEO, over-nighting in a deluxe hotel suite. Her new multi-tattooed technical assistant (Julia Stiles) was late for a meeting, got fired, is stuck at the airport, and ends up talking to Channing's regretful character in the hotel bar. So does the self-assured male head-hunter (Frederick Weller) Channing had summoned when she thought she was going to be fired. It turns out that Chiles knows his rapist history, Channing believes her, and they drug, tie up and strip him, writing his sins on his skin (maybe Stettner had read a Swedish trilogy's first instalment).

The barely believable parcel of coincidences could have led to a psycho-sexual kaleidoscope revealing lesbian and gender-bending tensions, if the screenplay and two-thirds of the three-part acting team had been stronger cinematic elements.

Stiles does pinch-eyed tight-lipped meanness well enough, but Stettner lets her do it all the time, without developing her proclaimed role as a non-fiction writer enjoying the "sloppiness" of real life. Her manipulation of the older couple isn't credible, and neither is TV actor Weller's ill-defined character as a plaything for angry females.

When she's in focus, Channing projects a frisson into the static scenes, her eyes darting, seemingly looking for meat on the writer-director's bare bones of a plot. At 75 minutes, it's a cinematic novella of inconsequence.