Relax ... it's just sex!

Since the mid-1980s, P J Castellaneta has written and directed one short and two features portraying gay scenes in the USA. Together Alone focused on a talkative couple and won several gay film festival awards. Relax ... It's Just Sex! (1997) was talkative too, and tried very hard to be serio-comic. It probably didn't win awards because gay film goers like to take themselves seriously when it comes to handing out awards. Apart from which, the movie is not good as a movie, let alone a gay movie.

Gay movies rarely feature both male and female homosexuals, as singletons and couples, alongside heterosexual friends. At first, Relax looked as if it might be a prejudice-challenging version of TV's Friends. In Castellaneta's movie, ten buddies dine in each other's apartments and take an unhealthy amount of interest in each other's private lives.

You can guess that one of them has just been diagnosed HIV-positive, another has met the latest love of his life, the lesbian couple will get confused, and that a pregnancy-hungry fag hag (Jennifer Tilly) is holding them all together. The only other known faces were Paul Winfield, playing a black agony of an auntie, and Kristin Scott Thomas' younger sister as a lady-like Englishwoman swapping a black for her male Latino cousin. Yes, it's another rainbow-worshiping movie.

The major plot detail sounded original (drunken gay man rapes one of his hetero muggers) and looked almost comically hard to believe. Some artfully OTT jokes and cute insults were tossed into the characters' verbal ping-pong games. There's a lot of data about HIV/AIDS. Nothing else is memorable in a positive way.

Storm

This movie reflects on a genocidal event of minimal interest in Hollywood: the victims were Bosnian Muslims, not Jews. Therefore, I suspect, the worthy Film Movement distribution company packages the little-known Storm on a DVD with yet another Oscar-winning short film about the Holocaust.

Storm has a German director, English-language dialogue much of the time, and multi-European production funds; it would appear to be primarily a made-for-international-TV movie. UK-based New Zealand-born Kerry Fox has to carry this docudrama about the trials and true tribulations of the U.N.'s International Court in The Hague. She's prosecuting a Serbian politico, a general charged with ethnic cleansing in Sarajevo.

When the key witness commits suicide, the prosecution needs to persuade another witness to testify, who's understandably hesitant to stand up in a man's world. Well played by Romanian Anamaria Marinca (4 Months ...), she's a bitterly repressed counterpoint for Fox's angrily aggressive female fighter and their joint battle for justice and the truth could have been an offbeat legal thriller.

Director Hans Christian Schmid highlights the docu more than the drama, possibly wary of slipping into feminist melodrama. That's probably too kind, giving him an excuse for presenting a depressing overview of bleak landscapes, blank courtrooms and unprincipled men on either side of the international law. He's paced his wordy screenplay too statically, punctuating it with boring longueurs in which legs walk and women stare woefully.

Fox is credible as a legal underling, working again with Stephen Dillane (as her boss). She's also in familiar territory geographically, having starred earlier in Welcome to Sarajevo. Her role should have been comparable with Roberts or Streep in legal mode, but the slow-paced monotone script deprives her of the chance to shine.

If someone in Hollywood can ever find a Jewish angle in Bosnia & Herzegovina, a better-received movie might get made about Balkan ethnic cleansing. A small consolation for this one was its Amnesty International award at the Berlin film fest.

Bad lieutenant 2

When Nicholas Cage has a good script and director, he's able to be so outrageously over the top that he seems scarily normal. As the blackly comic title character in the reincarnation of Bad Lieutenant, Cage totters and rages and snorts under Werner Herzog's direction. Subtitled Port of Call: New Orleans, this is a detective thriller, police procedural and a black comedy that marks a high way-OTT point for both actor and director.

Maybe they should not make a sequel, but I hope they'll work together again and as well as they did for this update of the Abel Ferrara-Harvey Keitel cult favourite. This Bad Lieutenant will also become a B-class classic.

The meticulously bizarre screenplay from William Finkelstein, a veteran TV series writer (LA Law, Law & Order, Murder One), begins in a Katrina-flooded police station in New Orleans. Detective Terence McDonagh (Cage) checks it out with his partner (Val Kilmer), talks tough, finds drugs (which he keeps) and is in two minds about rescuing a trapped Latino suspect.

At the end of the movie, Cage has been promoted but he's still an addict appropriating drug finds, and he squats silently with the Latino beneath a giant aquarium tank. Both stare vacantly at the camera, then Cage gives a gruff laugh. Like much of the movie, it's perversely memorable.

Cage's cop is complexly amoral. He lies, steals, gambles, breaks all the rules, terrorises old ladies, solves crimes through stealth and cunning, and loves his drunken father and call-girl girlfriend (Eva Mendes). A painful back is his excuse for chasing drugs, and Cage makes the most of a role that calls on him to highlight a hunched shoulder and off-balance gait. He smooths his shock of hair, rubs his coked nose, bursts into moments of disjointed movement and words, and sees giant iguanas no one else does.

The camera notices a dying alligator that may, or may not, have caused an auto crash, and no one on the set notices him. Only the audience sees the alligator's presumed partner, observing, maybe grieving, at the side of the highway.

That mystery is left unsolved, but every major inter-connected strand in the bizarre plot is tied up neatly, with noir and witty twists that defy the laws of logic, decency, common sense and B-feature cop movies. Herzog paces the action both calmly and frenetically, and the whole supporting cast appear to be happily making the most of juicy cameo roles.

The plot's key detail is the gangland execution of a Senegalese family of five. Does the bad lieutenant's means of solving the crime justify his sly means? Not enough moviegoers were allowed to find out. This bravura Cage role, and welcome return of Herzog from a life of prolific documentary-making, only earned a limited release and US$1.5 million in the US. Distributors there don't think their customers will buy amorality. Or cinematic magic.

Mao's last dancer

Has anyone ever made a movie about nasty ballet people? Maybe the art form doesn't have any. [So Black Swan is awaited with delight.]

Some balletomanes are less sweet than others, naturally, and Mao's Last Dancer shows a few cultured folks with momentary sour edges. Not enough, of course, to mar the movie's overall sense of sugar-plumminess.

Once upon a ballet time, as so often in movies, a talented young dancer from a totalitarian regime seeks freedom to be himself in a land of the free. This time it's the tale of Li Cunxin, whose autobiography sported the same marketing-savvy title.

A Beijing Dance Academy graduate, he was invited to become an exchange student with the Houston Ballet for three months in the 1980s. He fell in timely love with (and married for six years) a physically-challenged dancer, becoming a diplomatic pawn when he was kidnapped by the local PRC consulate. Members of the Houston Ballet and its board had mixed feelings about thwarting Beijing's wishes, but an immigration lawyer had been called in. A deal was struck (okayed by Deng Xiaoping himself, the screenplay notes). The dancer could stay in the USA, lose his PRC citizenship and never return to China.

He does return, of course, and during the movie he flashbacks a lot to his childhood home in Shandong. "After enough time", the PRC lets his parents visit him and then allows him to return to his home village so that he can dance in the main village yard with his second wife, an Australian ballerina, and an off-screen orchestra.

The movie is only bearable because of the availability of a real Chinese dancer, Chi Cao (from the UK's Birmingham Royal Ballet) to fill the lead role. In his screen-acting debut he proves he can act well, dance divinely, speak English with enchanting British accents, and flaunt a finely muscled body in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

The supporting cast has a tougher task presenting stereotypical characters in Houston. Bruce Greenwood is just about credible as a choreographer (real-life Ben Stevenson) with a discreetly gay air, but no one else really has a chance with the cliched screenplay.

The overall impact of this Australian biopic was soporific. Director Bruce Beresford cannot have been expected to find cinematic flourishes in rural Chinese sets, rehearsal rooms and consulate offices. Sadly, he couldn't create them either for theatrical performances in Sydney. They were as stagy as the film itself. Not surprisingly, the end-credits notes do not reveal that Li became an Australian stockbroker.

End of love

One of Hong Kong's better gay movies, screened at the city's annual film festival in 2009 with a III Rating, was shown at the Berlin festival but didn't gain a public release in its home city. End of Love seemed to deserve it, judging by the positive review in the Hollywood Reporter. There's none of the usual Asian angst about being gay, its review noted happily.

Its writer-director, Simon Chung, has delivered several technically competent gay movies since his first (1997) short. Stanley Beloved was a neatly crafted 20-minute study of a self-repressed teenage Hong Kong student trying to cope with gay feelings for a Caucasian schoolmate. A year later, First Love and Other Pains looked at a relationship between a forward gay Chinese student and his Caucasian teacher. In 2005, Innocent told tales about a young Chinese gay being out in Canada. Clearly not caring if he's typecast himself as a one-track film-maker, Chung now focuses on a young gay Hong Kong drug-addicted prostitute trying to get himself and his love life better organised.

When he's arrested on a drugs charge and sent to a Christian-run rehab centre, Ming (Chi-Kin Lee) meets and falls in brotherly love with a straight former addict, Keung (Gutherie Yip). Back on the outside, given a room by Keung in the flat he shares with a wayward girlfriend, problems arise as they have to do in such scenarios.

If this had been a tear-jerking Hong Kong gay fantasy from Scud, the two men from rehab would have shared a bed. Instead, more realistically, Ming never gets that close to Keung; instead, he's seduced by Keung's girlfriend. Throughout the movie, Ming is experiencing an on-off sexual and emotional relationship with a shopkeeper's son, Yan (Ben Yeung effectively conveying the man's conflicted character as closeted gay, interfering lover and caring son). That affair provides the gay genre's customary scenes of bedroom action, swimming on empty Hong Kong beaches, and wistful gazing.

Chung and his team seemed to have conducted valid field research into drug ingestion, male prostitution and Hong Kong's party-goers' behaviour. The detox camp's Christian leader and older inmates are especially well cast, and the Hong Kong location work is never incredible. But, as the dvd's set of stagy interviews reveal, everybody concerned knew they'd produced a sad story.

What happens next to Ming? Apparently, the movie-maker won't be telling us soon. In his dvd interview, he says his next project concentrates on a Westerner lost in a Chinese town. It's a safe bet that the lost man will be gay.

Broken embraces

Audiences are not supposed to take Pedro Almodovar's films seriously. They are supposed to giggle, guffaw and groan. The prolific Spanish director is an entertainer, a master of soap operatics.

He composes cinematic arias for his leading ladies and they revel in performing his high notes. Every actress in an Almodovar movie is so clearly in her element, and their male counterparts are treated almost as well. In Broken Embraces, it may seem that this is another vehicle (the fourth) that Pedro built for Penelope Cruz. It is, but it's also got a handful of extra seats for other ladies to fill passionately.

Cruz is Lena, the mistress of an ageing magnate. She's a wannabee actress, and he funds the production of a comedy she wants to make with director Mateo (Lluis Homar). Her father is dying, reason enough for a veteran actress to emote as her mother. Another Almodovar favourite, Blanca Portillo, is the director's loyal agent and the single mother of a sickly boy.

Fourteen years in the future, the director's blind and has sought sanity from bad memories by adopting a pseudonym, Harry Caine (yes, Michael must be chuffed by such an offbeat honour). Bit by bit, we are shown scenes from the comedy's sets, and scenes of the "making of" documentary being filmed by the magnate's son. He's gay, gratuitously so, but you knew there had to be at least one somewhere in an Almodovar concoction.

It's easy to sense that the master chef of serio-comic cinema adores sexual romps, outrageous plot twists, the whole movie business, and actresses with super-expressive eyes. The dvd extras reveal more of Almodovar's free-wheeling scripting genius with a trio of wonderful deleted scenes and one script read-through in which Pedro advises Penelope what her character's inner thoughts are. Best of all is the specially-shot comedy short, The Cannibalistic Councillor, expanding the hilarious character of the chubby, cocaine-snorting, cake-munching, sexually avaricious, foot-fetishist friend in the film within a film. That role is a gift, surely written specially for another longtime pal of Pedro, comic actress Chuz Lampreave.

Naturally, Cruz triumphs as a woman with a life comprising at least three roles. One of them is pretending to be an Audrey Hepburn lookalike who can't act very well on-screen. She alone is reason enough to enjoy the latest Almodovar quality soap opera. All the other women are great bonus reasons.

Cove

The Cove is subtitled The Bay of Shame and it's put the Japanese fishing community of Taiji on the map of eco horror sites. In one small cove, every year in the fall, more than 20,000 dolphins are slaughtered. They are said to be the ones that no dolphinarium wants to buy and train.

A dolphin suitable for show business is worth around US$150,000; the meat of a dead dolphin sells for around US$600. The dolphin trade is a big business for a few villagers. They had managed to keep the dirty tricks of their trade secret until an American activist gained well-funded support for a documentary expose.

The resulting movie won the 2009 Best Documentary Oscar, and it's a first-class example of activist propaganda that knows how to get its message across effectively. Louis Psihoyos, a nature-photographer and leader of the Ocean Preservation Society, didn't present too many facts about dolphins, the fishing village or Japanese machinations in the Whaling Commission. Instead, he blended the elements of heist and horror movies, using infra-red and hidden cameras, dramatic music and ironic cuts (greatly aided by the innate smirk on the face of Japan's Whaling Commission delegate).

Divers, sound technicians and cameramen gather in Taiji in the manner of an Oceans 11 caper, recce the cove's isolated location, plan their secret filming and keep the local police and guards at bay. Then one day, they switch on their equipment and record the slaughter of the corralled dolphins. The horrific scenes of the blood-filled bay are presented without soundtrack or commentary. Mission accomplished, the team departs (presumably after retrieving their high-tech gear).

To further bolster its advocacy, the documentary also highlights the potential health danger of the mercury-tainted dolphin meat. Although it lets the trade's supporters utter a few defences, this is a movie with a one-sided outlook. It's primarily the viewpoint of Ric O'Barry, a co-creator of the Flipper TV series; he captured and trained its female dolphins. After a Saul of Tarsus epiphany, when his star mammal committed suicide -- as he saw it -- in his arms, he set out to free the world's captive dolphins (and their cousins, whales and porpoises).

His story is an inspiring one, but not yet acknowledged in Japan or the Whaling Commission. In June 2010, the film's delayed launch in Japanese cities had to be cancelled due to nationalist protestors. And Japanese officials were reportedly continuing to gain IWC votes by funding useless projects. The documentary suggests that whaling is one issue on which Japan fights for what it sees as its cultural rights and as a way to defy imperialistic Western moral pressures.

The Cove unintentionally also illustrates Japanese virtues. In the USA, local police and officials would not be so polite and willingly lied to. Local thugs would not just take photos and try to block intruders. O'Barry claims that two female activists had been killed elsewhere, and believes local fishermen would knife him if they could, but his paranoia is not proved.

By the end of the movie I felt that there must be some method to Taiji's gory madness. There must be credible folk-historical reasons, albeit ones unacceptable to outsiders, why such coastal communities regularly cull dolphins, whales or seals. Why don't Taiji's fishermen sense the intelligence and fellow feelings that the campaigners sense in dolphins? The Cove is entertaining special pleading for animal welfare, but it cannot ask all the questions.

Last station

By accident, I watched a movie's deleted scenes before I'd seen the feature. I'll try not to do it again, even though The Missed Station showed me that its stars had a lot of four-lettered fun missing cues and mugging on the early-20th-Century Russian sets of The Last Station. On several occasions, they'd clearly found their dialogue not just funny but daft. Me too.

Michael Hoffman wrote and directed the adaptation of a novel about Count Leo Tolstoy's last years. I guess the book was also a twee portrait of an ageing writer (Christopher Plummer) who founded a pacifist, atheistic and anti-materialist movement; his histrionic, money-conscious and overly loving wife Sofya (Helen Mirren); and the inexplicably influential associate Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) who wanted Tolstoy to bequeath his copyrights to the socio-political movement.

The tale is told through the eyes, and diaries, of Tolstoy's new private secretary (James McAvoy). Serving his master mostly as a conversational companion, the young, vegetarian, virgin disciple of the peace-seeking Tolstoyan movement lives in the Count's rural mansion and the movement 's commune, a two-hour buggy-ride away in the countryside. Seduced by an emotionally brazen commune member (Kerry Condon), McAvoy's nervous sneezer discovers the passion of love. That is the one fundamental belief in Tolstoy's life and thoughts, we are told, frequently.

Even so, it's hard to sense what Hoffman is showing us. Is his movie simply an historical period piece, a la Merchant-Ivory costume dramas, or a parable about generations of love? A tale of disappointed dreams or political chicanery? A scenery-chewed showcase for a pair of old superstars or an ensemble work of lushly-filmed Russian reality? The initial sense of tweeness was reinforced by whimsical soundtrack music, ostentatious period details and an overall air of detachment. At the end, one may ask why Tolstoy's daughter Sasha was incorporated in the screenplay, but not the son we saw briefly and the Tolstoys' other children.

Did I care if Tolstoy died happily, if Sofya ensured her children's inheritance, if McAvoy's loving puppy became a wiser dog, if the unbelievably liberated young woman was merely a late-20th-Century invention? She was, and the screenplay totally avoided the fact that everybody and everything they believed soon became irrelevant, after Lenin arrived at the station in Moscow.

Green zone

They're back! Director Paul Greengrass and action star Matt Damon. A junior US army officer is the maverick truth-seeker in a world where his government lies. Is this the fourth installment of the Bourne franchise? No, it's Green Zone, the filmed version of the Washington Post's Baghdad correspondent's book about the USA's "Imperial" follies during its invasion and early occupation of Iraq in 2003.

Brian Helgeland, who'd also worked on Bourne scripts, wrote the docudrama's screenplay, and crafted a thing of joy for editor and co-producer Christopher Rouse to hop, skip and jump through (as he'd already done to award-winning effect for Greengrass's Bourne Ultimatum and United 93). Another United 93 colleague, Barry Ackroyd, was the cinematographer (and stayed in the same award-gaining setting for The Hurt Locker). Other talents rejoined forces; Greengrass has developed a crack production team for action-adventure features.

Movie buffs have a natural tendency to be conspiracy theorists, or that's one of my excuses for preferring plotlines that dramatise conspiracies. The alternative explanation for human madness, the cock-up theory, works well for comedies but not for action movies.

Damon's character is, of course, very incredible if one stops to think about the plot developments. That's why the Greengrass-Rouse combo is so crucial: there's no time to analyse their non-stop action. Would a warrant officer in charge of one unit looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Baghdad actually try and find out why all Intel's supposed WMD sites held nothing sinister? Would he choose to go off-task to follow an unknown limping Iraqi's tip-off? Would the local CIA chief take him on board? Would the US political regime let him keep one step ahead and try to singlehandedly get a deal with the leading Baathist general?

Did the Wall Street Journal actually publish a pack of official WMD lies? Well, yes, that one I can believe; I'm a devout conspiracy theorist.

The Arabic actor portraying the anti-Saddam limper has a tough job with the least credible character. He's too easily absorbed in the plot by Damon's CWO and too many US military personnel as an official translator, and his role in the film's conclusion is a very incredible foregone conclusion. Igal Naor has a more solid role as the Sunni general awaiting a call from the Americans. If his face looks familiar, you've probably seen his fine impersonation of Hussein in the British TV House of Saddam 4-part series.

The three key American occupation officials are well played cliches too, by Greg Kinnear (the standard sneering plotter, Brendan Gleeson (customary overweight world-weary CIA station chief) and Jason Isaacs (obligatory vicious hit man). The most telling, ironic lines of dialogue appear to be direct quotations from the US Imperial consul, Paul Bremer and George W himself.

The Bush regime told itself the lies it wanted to hear, the movie reveals. Did US movie audiences want to hear that truth? Only to the box-office value of $35 million. To be fair, as even conspiracy theorists must try to be, the lack of sexual antics and a Bourne-like heroic conclusion obviously didn't help.

I love you Phillip Morris

It is so not surprising that the USA release of I Love You Phillip Morris has been delayed yet again, to December 2010, perhaps. There were initial doubts, more than a year ago, that it would ever get distributed in the USA. Meanwhile, it has appeared around the rest of the world, won some awards and a lot of recognition for the acting of its two leads, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. So what's the hold-up, you might ask?

Simple: the almost incredible story of an odd couple of gay men is true, and the alpha male caused almighty embarrassment for the legal system in the state of Texas. Steven Russell (Carrey) is a married man, father, Christian and secret gay who outed himself after a near-death auto crash. He moved to Florida, got a handsome lover, funded their high life through fraud ("Being gay is so expensive!"), and went to prison. Falling in love with a fellow prisoner, Philip Morris (McGregor), escaping custody several times, he dreamed up elaborate scams to be with and take care of the gullible Morris.

End-credit notes tell us that George Bush's Texas was so upset by his antics it sentenced him to life imprisonment and 23-hours-a-day lock-up.

The production team's next docudrama should be a making-of (and showing-of) feature. It would be fun to hear commentaries from Carrey and McGregor, a Canadian and a Brit, and its executive producer, Frenchman Luc Besson. They might have a lot to say about the American movie industry and its self-regulated moral codes.

The movie's writers, Glenn Ficcara and John Requa, have worked together for more than a decade (Cats & Dogs, Bad Santa and the remake of Bad News Bears), this is their debut as co-directors, and their distribution problem must be a nightmare. How much will they have to cut or re-dub in order to get even the most restrictive rating? If there is ever an American dvd, it'll be interesting to compare its length and contents with the international version.

As two of Hollywood's best-known straight guys, Carrey and McGregor clearly had no fear about playing unusually open gays (unusually unashamedly too, as active and passive types) and they do it brilliantly. There is none of the usual coyness or angst that made Brokeback Mountain a sombre misery.

These real gay guys kiss and suck passionately, and their tale jokingly notes that survival in prison depends mainly on sucking dick. There's a comically shocking fucking scene at the start of the movie, but the screenplay thereafter avoids anything suggesting sodomy (or the virtues of condoms). One secondary character dies of AIDS, and other four-letter words punctuate the dialogue. There's also broad comedy, wittily amoral moments, and satirical studies of the straight world.

All of that is enough to discourage US multiplex proprietors. Another negative factor for the movie's acceptance by mainstream audiences will be the Carrey character's personality. He's an egomaniac, although his con artistry is made credible by Carrey's relatively subtle non-Liar-style performance. He makes it easy to sense that both his ex-wife and McGregor, Southern-accented sweetness personified, loved the man.

Will Texas ever release Steven Russell? That'll be a crucial bonus feature in the movie's 25th-anniversary edition.

Nowhere boy

Former child-actor Aaron Johnson had a tough task in Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy. He had to look, sound and emote the way a global audience would expect John Lennon to have done as a teenager. Yet the biopic had to be faithful to the realities of Lennon's early years, which were those of a self-defensively sardonic lower-middle-class Liverpool boy with a troubled absent mother (Anne-Marie Duff) and over-loving guardian, his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Perfect casting for those two key female characters secured the movie's success. While they are on the screen, Johnson need do nothing more than look easily impressionable, egocentric and unformed. His mother teaches him how to play the banjo and appreciate Elvis; he's acquired his sarcastic tongue and superiority complex from Mimi. His father was an unknown factor in Lennon's character.

Matt Greenhalgh's tactful screenplay and Taylor-Wood's modest direction and tight editing focus not so much on Lennon as the home lives and social environment that fostered his self-conscious serio-comic songwriting genius and subsequent egomania. In 1955 in Liverpool, his adolescence offers a microcosmic study of a generation and a country finding itself leaping into unknown territory.

The future Lennon is visible in the older Johnson's personality, but it's hard to imagine adult versions of McCartney and Harrison emerging from the other, younger cast members. All that really matters, though, as the movie's postscript suggests, is the character of Mimi for whom Scott Thomas delivers another triumphant performance of a unique conflicted woman. In English as well as French movies, she's a unique screen presence. Far from a classic beauty, she's an angular, bony Lorelei whose eyes and body language convey bewitching depth.

Valhalla rising

Valhalla Rising was the title of an action adventure in Clive Cussler's series of Dirk Pitt novels. Although the title of the book and author's name feature in the movie version's opening credit, I've only traced one connection : the novel referred to signs of Vikings having visited the Hudson River.

From that fictional notion, the Danish movie-maker Nicholas Winding Refn appears to have dreamed up an offbeat and cinematically individualistic tale of Norsemen a millennium ago. Co-funding by Scotland obliged the location, plot details and actors' accents to be set on the bleak hillsides of Scotland, with the credits suggesting Skye was one key setting.

Refn can only be described as a studied director. Every scene is artfully composed, mostly in dominant tones of overwhelming brown, misty grey and occasional flashes of rabid red. Those disturbing shots are seen through the vision of One-Eye, a mute prize fighter owned by a pagan Scottish clan. The brutal character's muteness enables Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (seen recently as the Bond-baiting villain in Casino Royale) to stay silent and stare malevolently for long periods with his one good eye. The bad eye is a consistently excellent piece of make-up artistry.

Sold to another clan, One-Eye escapes from his neck braces and wanders off, followed by the young boy who'd been his feeder. They join a band of Scottish Christians setting off for riches in the Holy Land. Becalmed at sea in a menacing mist, they land up on an unknown mountainous forested shoreline. Sudden flights of arrows, ritual funeral scaffolding and decorative details let the audience know the small band had reached North America, but the crusaders can only assume they've been led into hell by One-Eye and the nameless boy.

For almost an hour, the movie is spellbindingly enchanting. There are moments of shocking gore from disembowelings. Characters are credibly unusual, unlike any other movie Vikings or medieval warriors. The film is paced cunningly and feels as if it's leading to dramatic allegorical conclusions. The colour schemes are magnificent cinematographic art; many shots are framed memorably. One by one, the band of Christian brothers dies, and almost as if the director needs to fill his allotted time span, the pace slows to a halting limp. By the time the Native Americans appear, the end is in sight and a welcome one.

For that first hour, though, Refn has created a fascinating work of movie art. His previously ignored Bronson must be sought, along with any future productions that are equally non-mainstream.

Balibo

Every country has local stories that become major myths, fables in which there are no surviving witnesses to separate fact and fiction. In Balibo, an East Timorese village near the Indonesian border, five Australian journalists went missing, presumed killed, in 1975 during the invasion of the former Portuguese colony by Jakarta's military forces.

The 2009 docudrama chronicles their last few days in tandem with the story of the Australian foreign correspondent, Roger East, who followed their jungle tracks four weeks later. Based on a damning expose, the screenplay (co-written by playwright David Williamson) depicts East (Anthony Lapaglia) as a surprisingly emotional veteran who accepted an offer to head up the self-proclaimed independent republic's official news agency. The offer was made, in Darwin, by the new nation's young foreign minister (and eventual president) Jose Ramos-Horta, portrayed as a shrewdly pragmatic Che lookalike by Oscar Isaac (between other starring roles as Agora's Orestes and Robin Hood's King John).

In this version of the tragic fable, Horta gained East's acceptance by revealing the journalists' disappearance and then helping the paunchy middle-aged reporter investigate it. Soon after, when Indonesia fully invaded and occupied East Timor, the country's former independence fighters, Fretelin, sent Horta abroad to be their international spokesman (for 24 years). East stayed in the capital, Dili, and was killed, supposedly during an army round-up of civilians.

Director Robert Connolly builds tensions well in the two time frames. The quintet of TV newsmen, all in their mid-20s, are naively ambitious front-liners. A generation older, East is equally out if his depth. The youngsters sketch the Aussie flag on a wall, and East insistently cries out "I'm Australian" as if it were a mantra capable of lowering Indonesian rifles.

Connolly may have amplified geopolitical details in his commentary. I hope so, because there are only brief, though pointed, references to the secret support provided for Indonesia by both the USA and Australia. PM Whitlam, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger are named, but the movie fails to explain why Jakarta and Washington, and Canberra, feared an independent East Timor.

All concerned, outside East Timor, were alarmed that its example might encourage other separatist movements in Indonesia. Neither does the movie explore the religious divide that had long created mutual antagonisms between the Catholic Portuguese colony and its Muslim neighbours on Timor island. Inevitably, there's no time either to note that the colony had two separate enclaves, or that neighbouring and divided Papua island was a very big political elephant in Australia's living room.

Fables, especially those about young men working in the media, have to be simple, and there is just one hint at the complexity of media competition in Australia that indirectly led to the journalists' deaths. They worked for two commercial channels; it's indicated that the national public broadcaster, ABC, pulled its news team out of Timor ahead of the expected invasion. Media nabob Packer is the only name named. The full stories of Balibo and Roger East (and Fretelin and Horta) will probably never be known. Funded by a slew of official Australian film commissions and produced with official East Timor government support, Balibo is the official fable. The dvd with a full package of background documentaries will be worth looking out for, if "History of East Timor and Balibo" etc contain information kept out of the docudrama feature.

Agora

The sheer old-fashioned opulence of the sets, costumes and special effects for Agora prompts an obvious question.

Why did its financiers agree to produce a toga-clad saga about Hypatia, the 4th-Century female philosopher and astronomer who also taught mathematics at the Library of Alexandria during the period when Christianity was conquering the Roman Empire and fighting the Jews?

That question leads to others. Did the movie's Spanish producers really think it would be a block-bluster in the English-speaking world by letting its co-writer and director (Alejandro Amenabar) employ a host of international acting and creative talents, most of whom were English? Did they get an offer they couldn't refuse to go on location in Malta, thereby clearly employing hundreds of Maltese extras and craftsmen for a few months?

Amenabar reportedly conceived the project during a vacation on Malta, seeing modern relevance in the ancient multi-cultural tale of conflicts between religion and science, fundamentalism and tolerance, slavery and freedom, women's rights and men's desires. At first glance, like the financiers, one might foresee a wide-ranging audience-pulling bonanza in a saga combining an historical heroine, early Christianity, Jewry, men in togas and bloody riots.

However, second glances would have revealed a writer-director who hadn't clearly decided what dramatic highlights he wanted to showcase in his two-part slice of ancient history. The parts cover the periods before the destruction of the Library by rampaging Christians and the eventual death of Hypatia a year later.

It's hard to think of any actress who could have made the asexual Hypatia an engrossing lead character for two hours. Rachel Weicz tries valiantly to emit academic sagacity but the Mummy movies' Evy reincarnates herself during unintentionally comic set-pieces in which Hypatia uses a sand pit and torches to discover the elliptical curves of the heavens.

Her loyal young slave is also a portrayal of valiant character (Max Minghella getting few chances to be anything other than dour, as boy or man). Two of Hypatia's cleverest students are also tediously valiant and earnest, trying to save their former teacher from Bishop Cyril's invincible anti-pagan Christian mob. Orestes (Oscar Isaac, subsequently happier as Robin Hood's King John) becomes the Imperial Roman prefect after he adopts Christianity, while the future Bishop of Cyrene (Rupert Evans) is prissily Christian all the time.

Other secondary roles are monotonal bores too, and the screen comes to life only when there's carnage and stone-throwing to advance the plot. It's not surprising that, despite its Spanish-language version breaking box-office records and collecting many awards in Spain, the movie took more than a year to find a distributor in the US, and only for a very limited release.

It probably offends Christians and Jews alike, has no sex, and there's not enough gory violence to titillate teenagers. Even female astrophysicists will wish their historical beacon shone more brightly.

Shutter Island

Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese work well together, and Shutter Island is another of their good workmanlike movies. It's apparent that Scorsese honed many tricks of the horror genre while making Cape Fear. Audiences for such scary entertainments get what they'd expect, from insistently melodramatic soundtracks to villains with bulging eyes, from very fishy red herrings to raging sound-effected storms and expertly lit spooky cinematography.

Based on a novel be Dennis Lehane, the screenplay assembled many of the usual horror suspects. A mental hospital for convicted murderers on an isolated island in Boston Harbor, possibly funded by a secret government agency, staffed by a possible former Nazi or two, loses a female killer. It's the mid-50s, and two US marshals arrive from the mainland, seeking answers to inexplicable questions.

Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mark Ruffalo as his newly-appointed sidekick, are a pair of credibly plump, middle-ageing cops getting out of their depth, place and mind on the island. Psychiatrists with contrasting styles and mesmerising evil character defects run the prison -- Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow underplaying their juicy roles with chilling effect.

DiCaprio's cop is a WW2 veteran, haunted not only by memories of Dachau. His wife (Michelle Williams) and daughter had been killed in a fire, and he's grabbed an assignment that he hopes will let him discover the vanished arsonist.

Confusing cameo roles (as for Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson) appear and disappear, in settings that sometimes seem modeled on Hitchcock classics. Scorsese's customary nimble direction, aided greatly by his regular film editor, gives many scenes eye-catching angles, shadows, lighting and abrupt jump cuts. Much of the time, in subterranean corridors and cells, in windy woodland and atop sea-whipped cliffs, the movie feels black-and-white, its chilling bleakness highlighted brilliantly by sudden patches of richly coloured flashbacks and crowd scenes.

The twists in the tail of the movie gain grudging acceptance, leaving this viewer eager to watch the movie another time in order to better appreciate the dazzling flair of Scorsese and the cunning complexity of DiCaprio's performance.

Daybreakers

There seems to be a fad for pairs of brothers to co-create movies. The Weinsteins just produce them, while the Coens, Hugheses and the unpronounceables from the Matrix series share directorial honours too. Australia's Spierig brothers have joined the international band of cinematic brothers with their third feature film, Daybreakers. It's a good effort to assuage the critics of their two Undead bloodfests.

Accused of producing camply comic horror films with weak scripts, the brothers returned to the fray with a glossy action epic headlined by two Hollywood stalwarts. Ethan Hawke is a vampire and blood research boffin in a future world where humans are an endangered species. Its few surviving rebels are led by a re-humanised former vampire and master auto mechanic (William Dafoe) and a female interest (Australian TV star Claudia Karvan).

Most non-zombied humans are farmed for their blood by an omnipotent conglomerate headed by Australia's ubiquitous movie star Sam Neill. He and Hawke have to look at their non-sunlit world through zombie contact lenses, which may explain Hawke's zombie-like dearth of physical and ocular activity. Neill copes better with his lenses and is suitably unctuously boo-able.

Dafoe's performance is, by his usual standards, remarkably restrained, even when he's hoisting his crossbow. It is a highly effective weapon against lasers and tranquillizer guns, and almost as incredible as the fire-and-sun wine-making technique used to turn vampires back into humans with hearts that beat again.

The saving graces of this far-fetched homage to horror films are several non-cliched plot details and a lot of neat nerve-jangling special effects. Gore splatters and spurts giddily from decapitated and chewed bodies. Outstandingly ugly vampires and "subsiders" zoom, dash and suck blood convincingly, enough to make me flinch and squirm with guilty pleasure.

Good, silly entertainment and only 90 minutes long.