Patrik, age 1.5

The simplest concepts are often the best, even for gay-film-makers. What happens if a male gay married couple in Sweden get permission to adopt a 1.5-year-old boy, but a clerical error delivers a homophobic 15-year-old to them? That was the hard-to-believe idea in Michael Druker's 2008 play, Patrik, Age 1.5, quickly adapted for the screen by director Ella Lemhagen.

She's specialised in movies about children, and she cast the movie very well. Tom Ljungman, a TV actor from his early teens, is charmingly obnoxious orphan Patrik for a few scenes, then becomes a charmingly lovable involuntary house guest with green fingers in the garden and good technique on a skateboard.

His new two fathers are a charmingly typical couple welcomed into their new suburban home by charming neighbours. One wink-winks approval for the active spouse (the one with a beard and an amiable ex-wife, of course) to have fun with his houseboy like he does with his Polish maid, which upsets the divorced father. His Gothic daughter is still resentful of her daddy, a state of angst sure to vanish by the movie's end.

Meanwhile, the passive spouse (the one who decorated the baby's room and fusses over bric-a-brac, in case an audience may not be sure) starts his first job as a local doctor, supported by a cheery, motherly and tolerant middle-aged receptionist and a fierce-faced female colleague who will surely blossom into an understanding friend warmed by the doctor's charming smiles and manners.

Even the local police and social workers are charming characters, so how could Patrik do anything else but reject their well-meaning efforts to find him new heterosexual adopters? How could he not become a charming, trustful young boy helping his fathers get together again, keep him, and promise him a pet dog?

The pun is unavoidable: how could anything go wrong in a fairy story? The conclusion is inevitable: this was a play and film designed to humour the suburban gay market. It's as charming as an overdose of white sugar.

Seventh seal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metropia

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

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

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

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

Girl who played with fire

The Girl Who Played with Fire (right poster) and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest (left) were the second and third titles of thrillers written by Stieg Larsson. They comprise a publishing phenomenon, the Millennium trilogy, that has sold millions of copies globally. A few years after their appearance and the sudden death of their Swedish author, they were adapted for the cinema. The first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was Sweden's biggest-ever box-office winner and the most successful European film of 2009.

Swedish TV's Daniel Alfredson directed both of them; Denmark's Niels Anders Oprev directed the first episode (the screenplay for which was written by two Danish adaptors). Sweden's Jonas Frykberg adapted the second and third books. Availability of production funds and/or facilities may account for the movie trilogy's twin nationality.

Michael Nykvist and Noomi Rapace continued their starring roles as investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. In the second thriller, they're solving gruesome deaths again, this time involving international trafficking of women, and Lisbeth is suspected of multiple murder too. In the third, the pair of unconventional sleuths clear Lisbeth's name and she wreaks revenge on the evil men in her harsh life.

Something went amiss with the production of the two "Swedish" adaptations, which were surely filmed simultaneously. The murky old-fashioned film quality lacks the digital brightness of the first film, several exterior scenes were shot on poorly-lit or rainy days, and the pauses to show the lead actors' facial reactions don't have the same depth as before. These two adaptations look more like TV productions.

The second movie introduces the cast of bizarre characters associated with Lisbeth's Russian father; it's a compact 2-hour murder mystery and criminal freak show. The third and final installment adds 20 minutes more in its doomed effort to accommodate most of Larsson's vast line-up of bit parts - evil secret agents, vengeful motor bikers, the Millennium magazine's team, prosecutors and policemen, secret service investigators and psychiatric hospital staff. It was a mission truly impossible for any adaptor.

It's made a harder visual challenge because the only non-typical Swedes on view are a gratuitous Jewish police inspector and a Turko-something auto-hire manager. There is one typically over-populated and confusing scene near the end when the government's secret investigators assemble in one room in five or more big teams, their presence only being necessary in the screenplay to explain how all the baddies can be swept up individually at the end.

Lisbeth, supposedly now 28, looks closer to the real age of her actress, and her relative lack of dialogue until the final courtroom showdown illustrates her character's silent truculence, a character flaw that was under-stated in the first installment.

Maybe the third volume needed a 4-hour two-parter. Maybe the Larsson trilogy's far-fetched plot devices and coincidences can only gain credibility inside a reader's imagination.

Girl with the dragon tattoo

Movie versions of best-selling books either succeed well enough (think of Harry Potter) or fail disastrously (try not to recall Captain Corelli's Mandolin). There's no middle ground as far as book lovers are concerned. For those whose loved Swedish thriller-writer Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of feminism and violence, success depended on the casting of Lisbeth in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The first of Larsson's best-selling books was an epic mystery in which a disgraced middle-aged investigative journalist and a young Goth-style female computer hacker join forces and detective skills to solve the 40-year-old mystery of a vanished rich girl.

The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, a man of integrity and many affairs, is so well suited to Michael Nykvist, a veteran Swedish TV actor, that one could imagine Larsson writing the character for him. The crucial role of the very eccentric Lisbeth Salander went to Noomi Rapace, a TV actress and former punk rocker. The movie dialogue tells us Lisbeth is 24, but Rapace was almost 30 when the full trio of Larsson stories was filmed in 2009. She looks her age, self-possessed and mature, distracting me from the younger, edgier outcast I'd envisaged while reading. This movie Lisbeth looks stronger; credible, but less disturbing and surprising. She smokes cigarettes a lot too, which wasn't such a noticeable feature in the books of course.

The original book was hundreds of pages long, with an overlong introductory economic and socio-political framework for the many characters in the lives of Mikael, Lisbeth and the vicious Vanger family whose millionaire octogenarian head employs Mikael. In the book, there's an elaborate cover story for his detective work; the movie cuts that, along with many subsidiary characters and events.

Mikael's penchant for affairs is only hinted at. Lisbeth's sexual ambiguity is illustrated more clearly, as is her mastery of the Internet hacker's skills. It's tougher cinematically to present the evil natures of men who torture and kill, and their actors perform the tough tasks convincingly. Other cameo roles are also sharply drawn and well acted, and the settings - solemn Stockholm and isolated inland waterways - augment the overall mood of repressed anger.

Much to admire, little to fault in the direction by Denmark's Neils Arden Oplev. Another director worked with the same cast on the other two Millennium adaptations, and comparisons of style and technique will add interest to their signposted plots.