Devil's double

B

Feebly-linked sequence of cliched scenes for Dominic Cooper's dual role as Saddam son and his double.

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Michael Thomas wrote a few screenplays based on novels or reality in the 1980s, including Scandal (the fact-based tale of a UK politician, prostitutes and Russian spies). In the 1990s, Thomas's Backbeat dramatised the fate of an original Beatle. His latest effort (2011) created a docudrama from the characters of Uday Hussein, Saddam's sadistic oldest son, and the Iraqi lieutenant lookalike (and former classmate) who was compelled to act as The Devil's Double.

The unlucky doppelganger, Latif Yahia, survived to write novels about his dangerous life inside the gilded, debauched, evil palaces of Iraq's "Black Prince". Inevitably, given the man's collaboration on the screenplay (and an uncredited bit part), he's depicted as a moderate moralist who saved his family's lives by taking Uday's place in public and in dangerous situations. The screenplay also shows Saddam and one of his doubles at work but doesn't explain why the dictator's younger son, Qusay, didn't play the same game.

The key factor for such a movie plot is the actor playing the superficially identical characters, and Dominic Cooper fills the two pairs of shoes attractively. This could have been the breakthrough movie for the young English actor, after various good supporting roles recently (An Education, Captain America, Brief Interviews), but Thomas and/or his producers (Europeans) opted not for a subtle psycho-political character study but for the R-rated Caligula/Scarface type of bio-drama, including rapes, beatings, cocaine snorts, wild gunfire and a dis-embowelling.

They gave the directing job to a known talent, New Zealander Lee (Die Another Day, Next, Along Came a Spider) Tamahori (who'd only worked on action-adventures after the failure of Mulholland Falls in 1996 and the lost promise of his 1994 multi-award-winning Once Were Warriors). Maybe the screenplay he had to work with already included poor-quality newsreel clips from Iraq's wars with Iran, Kuwait and the US, as well as its feebly-linked sequence of visually and verbally cliched scenes.

The overall tone is patronising and semi-racist. All characters speak English with bad accents, which demeans them, a la Arab stooges for Indiana Jones etc (except, remarkably, on account of his actor's facial firmness, Saddam). Cooper's two loads of changing accents are interchangeable, whether he's camply maniacal Uday or primly outraged Latif.

Uday's henchmen are heavy-smoking slouching mafiosi, the female interest who deserts Uday for Latif is an undesirably deadpan actress, and Latif's mournful court mentor and indiscreetly gay social organiser are dramatic contrivances with no dramatic purposes.

There possibly was an interesting story to be woven from the life and times of Uday/Latif. Let's hope the screenplay/s that will docu-dramatise Gaddafi's heir apparent will be a better vehicle for another deserving actor.

Margin call

A+

Commendable effort to present harsh reality of mathematic and materialist thoughts on Wall Street.

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You're a wannabe feature film writer and director, with just one short to your credit. How do you get your project off the ground? One of the better ways is to find an actor with ambition and spare funds who'll star in and co-produce your debut feature.

Zachary Quinto, a US TV series actor (Heroes) who landed the Spock role in the renewed Star Trek movie franchise, was an ideal choice for writer-director J.C. Chandor. He could play a lead role in Chandor's Wall Street docudrama, and help attract a small galaxy of big names for cameo parts as well as encourage enough co-backers. Economically, too: Margin Call was made for only US$3,395,000.

On the strength of that potentially highly profitable venture, Chandor gained a two-film writing deal from Warner Brothers, working with one of Leonardo DiCaprio's production companies. His indie debut feature is a docudrama inspired by the Lehman Brothers collapse, profiling the overnight reactions of a Wall Street firm's leading players to the discovery that over-exposure to bad market positions could wipe out the company.

Such a contemporary parable of greed and amorality depends on credible characters, and Chandor's are mostly very believable market and personnel manipulators. The plot is reminiscent of David Mamet, but without that stage playwright's larger-than-life histrionics.

The one actor in the galaxy who shines brightest is Jeremy Irons as the fiercely wily English chief executive. Quinto wisely didn't over-emphasise his own role as a real rocket scientist working in the firm's risk assessment department, standing aside and letting Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey, Simon Baker, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci inhabit the heights of Wall Street.

Chandor's non-flashy direction maintains an increasing tension for the first hour, while the firm's options and inevitable scheme to sacrifice some staff and betray the system are debated. The scheme's implementation is a rushed conclusion, messily adorned with a symbolic burial scene that's derisory rather than dramatic. Overall, though, the feature is a commendable effort to present some of the harsh reality of mathematic and materialist thoughts which create the atmosphere sustaining Wall Street.

Quattro volte

A+

Mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness ... in a fascinating offbeat art-house creation.

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How much of cinema's status as an art form depends on cinematography? Films with little dialogue and many images blur definitions, as Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) does. An NYT critic thought the Italian movie "reinvents the very act of perception", which amounts to a warning to be prepared for mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness.

As with his debut feature, The Gift (2003), writer-director Michelangelo Frammartino went on location in Calabria for his 2010 docudrama. In the first segment of the quartet of episodes, an old goatherd subsists on the fringe of a medieval town clustered atop a steep hunchback hill. He dies (after 40 minutes), and the next focal point is a newborn goat, whose fumbling infancy is observed for 20 minutes until it loses itself and goes to sleep (or death) amid the roots of an ancient fir tree.

The tree is cut down by the townspeople for an annual festival, sporting a stark tree canopy far above the town's roofs. Then it is chopped up and added to an intricately constructed charcoal oven (seen in full smoky operation in the movie's pre-title opening sequence). The charcoal is distributed, and smoke rises, as it has intermittently during the film, from a chimney on the town's roofscape.

Are the four segments a cycle of reincarnation? Or facets of the divine comedy of human life and vast variety of nature? Or, as a cynic might suspect, one shortish dramatic film with a trio of scenic documentary shorts deployed to double the overall length to one closer to that of a full feature.

The old man's story is an exquisitely composed slow-paced non-speaking parade of set pieces, a storyboard movie that turns fine photographic images into moving pictures. Many are bewitching, such as those illustrating the goatherd's ritual potions of holy dust and his awareness of an ant crossing his face. One long-pan depiction of a barking herd dog causing a runaway lorry to unloose the goats is a wonderful comic compilation, delightfully plotted and stage-managed. Similarly, the goat kids' gambols are deftly-edited, delightful documentary fun.

The lack of dialogue and background music is no handicap: attention is focused on the dogs' barks, the goats' bleats, their clanking bells, the occasional lorry trip, the dying herder's coughs.

This movie may not warrant four viewings, but a second is deserved: cinematographer Andrea Locatelli is another young talent well boosted by this offbeat art-house creation.

Meek's cutoff

Why does a critically well-rated and attractively-cast Western from a production team with a classy track record fail to get adequate distribution and promotion? Why did Meek's Cutoff only gross one million US dollars during its limited run in North American art-houses?

The history-based tale of three pioneer families lost on their 19th-century Oregon Trail wagon-ride was edited and directed by Kelly Reichardt, a multi-award-winner for Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008). Neither was mainstream fun; both were based on short stories by Oregon novelist Jon Raymond, a protege of indie director Todd Haynes. In the first, two friends go camping in the mountains; the next film followed a hassled woman (Michelle Williams) and her beloved dog (played by Reichardt's own pet).

Reichardt, Raymond and Williams pooled their talents again for the 2010 Western, adding Bruce Greenwood in the title role of Stephen Meek, a long-haired bearded mountain man employed as a guide. Besides Williams, as one of the group's three submissive wives, the cast also included Will (The Postman) Patton, Paul (There Will Be Blood) Dano and Shirley (Life During Wartime) Henderson. Haynes was an executive producer.

Chris Blauvelt (who worked on Haynes' I'm Still Here) was the cinematographer, and the production designer, David Doernberg, knew Reichardt from her (and his) first feature (River of Grass, 1994). Their work on the arid locations is a joy to watch, in small doses, and might have looked even grander if directed by a Terence Malick. The actors play reserved, tired, dead-panned 19th-century emigrants lost in a wilderness, lost in a tiring cinematic diorama.

Ron Rondeaux, in his first featured movie role, played "The Indian" captured by the ox-wagon train and forced to lead them to water. He's an experienced stuntman who'd also worked on The Postman. In the film industry, jobs arise more often from who you've worked with than from those you just "know": it's commonsense to employ talents that are tested and trusted.

As the DVD's 9-minute "making of" featurette is as self-consciously slow, static and prosaically framed as the movie, it can be assumed that Reichardt deliberately set out to make a docudrama without much drama. The conclusion is probably the least conclusive (or satisfying) of any Western ever made outside Russia. The movie's limited run is clearly explicable.

Whistleblower

A debut feature wins major awards at the Seattle and Whistler film festivals. It's a docudrama thriller re-telling post-civil-war Bosnian scandals (child-sex slavery and human trafficking). They were connected to a U.S. military contractor (Dyncorp), covered up by the U.N. and revealed by a Nebraska policewoman working for the U.N. as a highly-paid contract peacekeeping monitor. She's The Whistleblower, who went to the U.K. courts to seek justice for wrongful dismissal, and won her case. You can safely bet that, even if such a film was made by Angelina Jolie, it wouldn't get made by any commercially-minded American company.

Instead, it's a Canadian-German production, written and directed by Toronto-born Larysa Kondracki, mostly filmed on location in Romania. Remarkably, it attracted top acting talents for walk-on cameo parts. The Brit contingent included Vanessa Redgrave and Benedict Cumberbatch; Italy's Monica Belluci, Denmark's Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Californian David Strathairnalso appear.

Rachel Weisz is convincing as the real-life heroine, Kathryn Bolkovac, an increasingly angry professional disgusted not just by the Bosnian realities of racism, religious bigotry, sexism and callous brutality, but also by the tainted multi-billion-dollar business of international aid, corporate fraud and dishonesty, and international diplomatic connivance. As with Erin Brockavich, the twice-divorced whistleblower's personal failings are noted, but unfortunately for this woman's fight, the direction doesn't have a similar cinematic panache. It reports the horrors of the trafficking trade, but shies away from the necessary melodramatics that would better explain the policewoman's angst and anger.

This is a competent TV movie, akin to the European Storm production starring Kerry Fox as another real-life female campaigner. Worthy, but inappropriately flat.

Incendies

Although Oscar voters are less predictably schmaltzy than they used to be, they still spurn ugly reality when choosing Best Foreign Language Films. In 2011, they chose tediously well-intentioned In a Better World (set in Africa, from Denmark) rather than the French-Canadian entry, Incendies (Scorched).

Denis Villeneuve's direction and adaptation of the play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad opens out what must have been an histrionic tale of a Middle Eastern woman immigrant in Quebec. Her notarised last wishes ask her grown-up twin children to visit the land of their birth, where they will meet a brother they didn't know about and learn about their unknown father.

The notary, whom the mother had worked for as a secretary, has promised to aid their searches and delivery of the mother's letters. The three travel to an unnamed Middle East country, the daughter first, learning about their mother's life and their homeland's bitter history. Flashbacks illustrate the ordeals that challenged the woman's belief in love, religion and humanity.

An audience doesn't need to know that the mother was a Maronite Christian, her lover a Muslim, and their country (Lebanon) had been devastated by decades of religious conflict, civil war and invasions. The succession of tragedies and horrors are made to feel universal by well-paced direction and editing, with quiet spells showcasing fine cinematography of harsh scrub-land and bombed urban environments (on location in Jordan). Throughout, no musical soundtrack detracts from the attention focused on the excellent cast's faces.

The melodramatic sting in the tale leaves loose psychological strands waving wildly in the viewer's imagination. They may have been topics not enough Oscar voters wanted to contemplate or honour with a top award.

Contagion

When a new disease from China suddenly went really viral in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong in 2003, the local government struggled vainly to get the global medical authorities to avoid naming it as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Within a few years, bowing to inevitability, the SAR Government allowed Steven Soderbergh to do location filming for his mainstream docudrama about a similar fast-moving killer epidemic, Contagion (2011).

It shows that getting closer than ten feet to anyone, particularly shaking hands with a chef in Macau, can be lethal unless you're immune to or inoculated against an air-borne disease. The Everyman character represented blandly by lead actor Matt Damon is immune, which deprives the film's audience of any chance to care whether he lives or dies. Instead, it's more fun to note how the germ of a movie idea was mutated into a Hollywood product.

Scott Z.Burns, who wrote the screenplay, has also worked with Soderbergh on the remake of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2012) and the screen adaptation of the bio-doc The Informant! (2009). The latter starred Matt Damon, a frequent collaborator with Soderbergh. Damon and Burns knew each other too, from Burns' co-writing of the adaptation of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Damon contacted former co-star Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley) and other star names were lined up for life-or-death roles (Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, and Elliott Gould survive; Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow die).

As the Oceans franchise showed, Soderbergh appears to create a happy-go-lucky mood on his sets, and such a working environment must be akin to R&R for the acting trade. Inevitably in a quilted disaster saga, characters are quick sketches with cliched words and expressions. Jude Law has the only juicy role, as the only truly despicable person in a world of noble disease control specialists. He sports awry teeth and a nagging Oz accent as a paranoid self-righteous anti-Establishment blogger who believes in, and profits from, a homeopathic cure (and it may be tempting for Wikileak's Julian Assange to consider a libel suit).

His Messianic impact is credible, unlike the Chinese colleague (played by a Singaporean actor) of researcher Cotillard who abducts her to obtain an advance order of inoculations for his home-village survivors. There's a bossy budget-conscious boss lady at FEMA, but no other American character comes close to nastiness, other than hundreds of extras playing panicky rioting plebs who get tired of queuing for emergency food supplies or jabs.

The movie's initially fast-paced, and a credit to its editing team and Soderbergh's camerawork, with each set of scenes marked by a numbered "Day". However, a film that starts with "Day 2" made this viewer fret that the projectionist (or distant digital finger) had lost "Day 1". It appears at the very end, to show how the disease started, but by then the sequence of field reports from Hong Kong, Macau and various American cities had slowed down so much that the scenario was creaking.

The procedural CSI-style disaster-thriller had become an increasingly tedious, dare one say lifeless, docudrama that had more documentation (and medical mumbo-jumbo) than drama. Several stars frothed at the mouth fetchingly (probably courtesy of Alka Seltzer, which deserved an end-credit), but the whole parade turned into a muddled and mealy-mouthed condemnation of human weaknesses.

People on Sunday

People on Sunday, a silent B&W German docudrama from 1930, was restored by the Netherlands, splicing pieces from reels surviving in its and other countries' archives. Criterion's DVD package, using its secondary Janus label, marketed the film both as a precursor of neo-realism and a historic showcase of the talents of a film-making cooperative of Berlin-based youngsters. Most were Jewish, and soon left Nazi Germany.

Its losses were Hollywood's multiple gain:

* the movie's concept creator Kurt (aka Curt) Siodmak, a former newspaper reporter, became a Hollywood horror-writing specialist, as for the original (1941) Wolf Man.

* his younger brother and the movie's main co-director Robert (The Killers) Siodmak, a prolific maker of film noir movies in the USA, who returned to Germany in the 1950s, winning a Golden Bear for The Rats.

* The Siodmaks' cousin, Seymour Nebenzal, the film's key producer (borrowing funds from his movie-producer father Heinrich). He later made Fritz Lang's M and Testament of Dr Mabuse, then movies in Paris, before fleeing to the USA, where his independent production company's many titles included Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman and Summer Storm, and Joseph Losey's re-make of M.

* Czech-born co-producer Edgar G Ulmer, who'd returned from the States (and returned there too, to become the director of Black Cat, Detour and Ukrainian-language and Yiddish niche movies in the USA).

[He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's poverty row studios.] [IMDb]

* co-writer Billy Wilder, multiple Oscar-winner for The Apartment (film, direction, co-writing), Sunset Blvd (co-writing), and The Lost Weekend (director, co-writer), with 14 other nominations. The former journalist's main chore for the film was holding the sun-reflector.

* cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, later aka Eugene Shufftan), who invented a self-named camera special effect and won an Oscar for The Hustler. The DVD package includes the charming Schufftan-directed 1929 B&W short comedy Ins Blaue Hinein (Into the Blue), with soundtrack added, telling another happy-go-lucky tale (of three men and a girl crashing a car and starting a dog-grooming business).

* assistant cameraman Fred Zinneman, Oscar-winning director of A Man for All Seasons, From Here to Eternity, and a documentary short (Benjy).

* assistant cameraman Ernst Kunstmann was invited to the USA with Schufftan, returning to work in Germany until the 1960s (including Triumph of the Will in 1935), dying at 97 in his home city of Potsdam.

The film's non-professional actors' fates were less illustrious. The four lead roles were played by:

* Erwin (Splettstoller), who only had two other acting credits, in Robert Siodmak movies in 1930-1. The wannabee comic actor died in a car accident (according to co-star Brigitte).

In the film, chubby, affable Erwin is a taxi-driver leaving his fashion model girl-friend oversleeping in bed, to go to the Wannsee lake beach on a pre-planned trip with his friend ...

* ... Wolf(gang von Waltershausen), who made one more film for Siodmak, and another with Siodmak and Wilder, returned to his family estate in southern Germany, per Brigitte.

En route to the beach, the two friends meet up with a girl Wolf had chatted up in the city on a weekday ...

* Christl (Ehlers), whose real-life Jewish family fled to Spain, then England and America, where she had one bit part before marrying an aircraft company owner; they died in a plane crash in 1960.

Joining her for the lake excursion is her blonde best friend, a salesgirl for the Electrola record-player and disc company ...

* Brigitte (Borchert) who only made this one film; in 2000 she and Curt Siodmak were interviewed for a 30-minute documentary commemorating the restoration, Weekend am Wannsee (part of the Criterion DVD); Siodmak, then 98, couldn't recall her name and didn't like the restoration. He looked and sounded mentally active but died that year. Brigitte died in 2011, aged 100.

At first sighting, the movie's most promising talent is clearly the cinematographer. Exciting angles, shadowed lighting, story-advancing close-ups, exceptional grid-work framing and high-speed photography from moving vehicles provide bewitching images of a happy-go-lucky laid-back Berlin on a Sunday, contrasted uncritically with the city's weekday bustle. In cinematographic albums with few signs of poverty and none of oppression, the Siodmaks' self-described "reportage" presents a self-content middle-class view of the pre-Depression capital city, in which the cameras nod somewhat jocularly in the direction of Soviet Russian expressionism and Eisenstein moments.

Nothing much happens, but it does so charmingly. Wolf, an experienced philanderer, fails to hit on Christl during the foursome's picnic, but succeeds in seducing Brigitte. The girls resume their friendship on a giant pedalo boat, wryly watching the men flirt with a couple of oarless female rowers. Wolf agrees to meeting Brigitte again the next Sunday, before Erwin reminds him they'd already planned to go to a soccer match.

The DVD company's judgment is valid: not a Criterion-calibre classic, the film's a preservation-worthy Janus product.

Neds

Scottish actor/writer/director Peter Mullan has reportedly said that "Nine out of 10 delinquents are frustrated actors" and he illustrated it well in his third full-length feature, Neds (2010). His first award-winning self-directed screenplay was Orphans (1998), followed by The Magdalene Sisters (a Venice Festival winner in 2002).

The Marxist Glaswegian, a familiar face in independent movies and British TV, won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 1998 for his title role as a recovering alcoholic in Ken Loach's My Name is Joe. He'd also been a supporting actor for Loach's Riff Raff (1991), Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart. He's co-starred in many other movies (including Mike Figgis's Miss Julie (1999) and Michael Winterbottom's The Claim).

Although his craggy face can express sensitivity well (Boy A), it's best suited to surliness (Young Adam), and he cast himself as the menacing father of his latest film's anti-hero, John McGill, first seen as a plump school swot with promise. In 1974, at secondary school, his family history and genetics, abetted by his environment and peers, he matures into a typical bullying thug, a Non-Educated Delinquent, played with frightening sweet'n'sour realism by thick-set newcomer Conor McCarron.

Mullan's semi-autobiographical docudrama is a damning two-hour portrait of gang-ridden housing estates in Catholic Glasgow districts, where fathers are mean-spirited drunks, mothers are put-upon worn-out nonentities, and sons can only imagine becoming criminals, bouncers or dock workers (or policemen and soldiers). A few escape, as Mullan did (via university).

His Neds are a convincing bunch of non-professional youngsters, set amid the look and feel of the Seventies (from long leather jackets to Kubrick movies, TV's Monty Python to women's perms). All the Scottish supporting cast perform well, notably as no-nonsense schoolteachers and policemen coping with suppressed social unrest.

Towards the end, in an effort to explain his anti-hero's mental conflict, Mullan created a sequence of far-fetched serio-comic fantasies in which the confused, belligerent teenager has a knife fight with a Jesus statue, plans to kill his father, and guides one of his mentally-disabled victims through a pride of lions.

The youngster's angsts are thickly signposted, but his character changes are unconvincing plot developments. During one short summer break, the polite swot becomes a sassy rebel, and then transforms himself into a gang leader, insane anarchist and murderous homeless wretch before going back dutifully to school. Many scenes ring true, compellingly, but the whole movie doesn't.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unfaithful

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

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

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

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

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

Frontier blues

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Mr Gacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Nice

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

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

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

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

Made in Dagenham

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catfish

"Reality" is reviewed with dramatic cunning by the documentary team that made Catfish, a movie that some might see as a scripted mockumentary, a Blair Witch project for the age of Facebook. It belongs in a fast-growing genre which might be called Faction Documentary, alongside Exit Through the Gift Shop and Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here.

Once upon a movie-making time, NYC-based Ariel Schulman and his friend Henry Joost decided to keep a film record of the long-distance love story that was developing between Ariel's brother, Yaniv (Nev), and an amateur songwriter, Megan. He'd "met" her though his online friendship with her eight-year-old half-sister, child prodigy artist Melanie. She, via her mother Angela Wesselman, had sent Nev her painting of a photograph of his published in the NY Times.

The seemingly talented family lived in rural Michigan. Then the New Yorkers realised that the women had spun online lies, and they next decided to make a side-trip to confront the liars.

It's a clever storyline, involving online detective work, three handsome young men, a lovely young woman, and a precocious child. It develops into a wry tale of sad people, a social-networking tragi-comedy, that is so bizarre, so far beyond the imagination of the freakiest fantasist, that one feels obliges to accept that some of, perhaps most of it, was a really true story which the Schulman brothers (also occasional short-movie actors) re-constructed.

Their project could only succeed with the cooperation of mildly manic middle-aged Angela, and she's a good natural actress and mediocre amateur painter. Her reality is revealed to be harsh, her online escapism system intricate.

No one, even New York movie-makers, would dare to graft truly retarded teenage twin boys onto the story, so they are almost certainly real (and the subsequent death of one is noted in the end credits). All the charades, the film-makers' as well as Angela's, could only exist in the new world of social networking, the world of TwoFaceBook. Inevitably, in a land where many crave online friends and fantasies, and tote multiple cellphones for different aspects of their personalities, the Faction Documentary genre will expand. It's cheap to make and as entertaining as the best of reality TV.