Midnight in Paris

Writer-director Woody Allen's biggest box-office success is his latest (2011) European confection, Midnight in Paris. The English title gave it a romcom tilt, but the French title may have better suited Allen's intentions (and customary egocentric genre), Monsieur Le Souris (Mr Mouse).

Once again facing up to reality, the veteran American auteur employs a substitute for himself in the leading role of a weak-willed questioning American intellectual. This time, it's Owen Wilson, who fits the bill very well, and he's a Hollywood screenwriter and wannabe novelist visiting Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.

As always, guest stars flock to Allen's sets because he does give them the chance to have a little fun for a good cause, which is Allen's special aura. The French have long adored, and his long opening sequence of a host of picture-postcards shots of Paris, from the air, by day, in the rain, by night, illustrates his love of the French capital and its romantic and artistic history.

Wilson starts his visit in 2010, meeting an arrogant American academic (Michael Sheen) showing off to a Parisian museum guide (Carla Bruni, aka Mme Sarkozy). Rejecting his US-centric fiancee's worldview, fretting about his novel, tipsy and wandering Wilson is whisked away, after the peals of midnight, by a vintage Peugeot driven by F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (more Brits, this time Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill). Transported back to the 1920s, he meets practically tout le monde, from Cole Porter to Bunuel to TS Eliot and Picasso.

After further historical-name-dropping scenes, a movie-goer is doubly challenged when the significance of the painters, writers and personalities is not clearly spelled out at the same time was the audience is trying to recall who is who among the fast-tracked parade of international up-and-coming stars of stage and screen. Only Kathy Bates (as Gertrude Stein) and Marion Cotillard (as one of Picasso's mistresses) shone in this latest Allen version of cinematic charades.

At one stage, when Bates/Stein was also talking in French and Spanish, the game was nearly risible. I don't know of the actor who played Hemingway dourly, and Adrian Brody's Dali failed to register at all. When Wilson and Cotillard found themselves horse-and carriaged back to the 19th Century Belle Epoque, meeting its great painters (including an inevitably small cameo for Toulouse-Lautrec) at Maxim's restaurant, the game ended for me.

Maybe the high box-office takings were accounted for by returnees eager to catch all the names that were dropped, all the talents that were employed on the screen. They possibly helped some viewers to overlook the fact that Allen had given Wilson woefully unwitty and non-cerebral dialogue, while getting him to walk, talk and comment off-screen a la the older Allen who cineastes worshipped for good brain-tickled reasons. This younger Allen is a boring mouse, and there may be a good reason: Allen wanted all the Parisian residents of the past to declaim their aesthetic ideals and ambitions with an historical passion no 21st-Century Hollywood hack (Wilson's screen character) would dare to pen. Or else Allen doesn't want to create a version f himself that's both younger and just as clever.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, published in 1847, has been adapted for the screen in several languages umpteen times; the latest UK version (2011) looks and sounds good enough to explain why such a melodramatic, Gothic and proto-feminist love story should have retained popular appeal for so long.

Partly financed by BBC Films, the production benefits from shrewd choices for its director and leading roles. Fresh from his multi-award-winning 2009 debut feature as a writer-director (docudrama Sin Nombre), the young US director, Cary Fukunaga (Japanese-Swedish parentage), approached the Eng-Lit period-piece with the outsider's eye (in a similar eye-opening fashion as Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility).

Italian Oscar winner (Atonement) and nominee (Pride and Prejudice) Dario Marianelli, in danger of being type-cast as the go-to Masterpiece Theatre composer, wrote the finely-muted background music. Prolific young Irish-British playwright Moira Buffini, who'd adapted Tamara Drewe for Stephen Frears the previous year, transformed Bronte's romance for the screen. She hadn't tied up Bronte's many loose ends, which is proper, but leaves various abrupt events far from fully explained, such as the mad wife's attack on her unidentified brother, Jane's cousins, and two French-speakers' fate.

Irish-German Brit actor Michael (Hunger, Fish Tank, X-Men) Fassbender was an obvious choice for imperious Rochester, Polish-Australian Mia (Alice in Wonderland, In Treatment, The Kids are All Right) Wasikowska a wise one for the young governess with heart, soul and many opinions. The key supporting cameos were played well enough by Jamie Bell, as Jane's pious suitor, and Judi Dench as Rochester's caring housekeeper.

Fassbender had several tough shoes to fill (Orson Welles, William Hurt and Timothy Dalton) and did so creditably, with moments of facial expressiveness a la Olivier and Day-Lewis at their best. Wasikowska is an ideal plain Jane of the 19th century, displaying the charming moral qualities and repressed teenage ambitions that were way ahead of her time and gender role. The cast's northern English accents might distress Lancastrians, but to an outsider they come across as acceptable middle-class regional characters.

This Jane gazes wistfully at her claustrophobic cloudy landscape with an intensity channeling a new Jodie Foster. The production embedded her convincingly in well-detailed production and costume designs, often illuminated strikingly by candles, with the surrounding starkness left deliberately silent and menacing. Fukunaga was lucky to be given this gem for his sophomore performance, and he rewarded his producers' trust.

The legend is born

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

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

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

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

Pope Joan

As every moviegoer knows, the more outrageous a screenplay is the more likely it is to be based on historical data. Who could ever have dreamed up the idea of a 9th-Century woman cross-dressing in order to practise medicine, become Pope Joan (855-858) and die during childbirth?

The English-speaking 2009 German film has not attracted a single review from Rotten Tomatoes critics, and is not yet released in the USA. It's no worse than another recent bioepic about a high-placed woman (Agora), which starred Rachel Weisz, but Pope Joan was played by a German actress, Johanna Wokalek, known only in Europe (most recently for The Baader Meinhof Complex).

However, it did have John Goodman, happily hamming it up as Joan's predecessor and mentor, Pope Sergius. Portrayed as a cheerfully down-to-earth and divine character, he thought his medical miracle worker was "Johannes Anglicus", a child of a rigidly righteous English missionary (Iain Glen) saving pagan souls and disparaging women's rights in ninth-century Saxony.

When her older brother died, precocious quick-learning Joan took her younger brother's place at a Catholic school, and was boarded with a nobleman who became her lover (David Wenham). Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Empire was in turmoil, Joan almost died during a battle, and decided to bind up her breasts and find better safety as a male monk.

The whole semi-mythical tale (which the RC church does not endorse) was novelised by an American non-fiction writer, Donna Woolfolk Cross, in 1996. Soon after, German director Volker (Tin Drum) Schlondorff tried to set up a film project for it. It would have starred Franka Potente, a better-known actress outside Germany (for Run Lola Run and the Bourne trilogy), but the producers dropped Schlondorff and brought in Sonke Wortmann, a director with many awards in his native Germany (many for The Miracle in Bern, 2003), another little-known on the international scene.

He turned in a handsome sequence of medieval set-pieces with eye-catching costumes and battle scenes, but they can only be viewed as tableaux for a scarcely credible tale of an unconvincing transvestite. This Joan's body movements, demeanour and physique give away her game too often, undermining a viewer's willingness to suspend disbelief.

Burke & Hare

Old wine, old bottles, old brewers do not a vintage make. England's Ealing Studios (founded 1896) and American director John (Animal House) Landis used to be masters of the comic movie genre. In theory, any movie they created together should be a happy romp. More so if it was written by Nick Moorcroft and Piers Ashworth (who together had crafted Ealing's profitable revival of the St Trinian's franchise), and if its cast was headed by busy Simon (Mission Impossible, Star Trek) Pegg, who'd worked for and in Ealing on Shaun of the Dead.

Add a fashionable co-star, Andy Serkis (LOTR's Gollum, Little Dorrit, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll) and give them plum black-comic roles as Burke and Hare, the historical purveyors of cadavers to Scotland's leading teacher of surgery, Dr Knox. Have him played by ubiquitous genius of British character acting, Tom Wilkinson.

What more could you want for a blood-and-thundering farce and 1820s period piece? More than you'd ever imagined, including comedian Bill Bailey as a droll on-screen commentator, Tim Curry as the rival surgeon, and Ronnie Corbett as a bumbling military officer of the law, all assuming so-bad-it's-almost-amusing Scottish accents.

Enough? Nah, not when you can stud your cast list with cameos from Christopher Lee, Jenny Agutter, Michael Winner, 90-year-old Ray Harryhausen (Hollywood SFX maestro), Stephen Merchant and Allan Corduner, to name just some of the wasted talents involved.

Ealing, Pegg et al must be asking themselves why they opted to bring Landis out of cinematic retirement and give him the director's chair. Kindly, it's assumed they assumed he had the Hollywood expertise they'd need to create an international success: he'd made An American Werewolf in London (1981, as a 30-year-old), Michael Jackson's videos for Thriller and Black or White, Trading Places and more award-winning movie and cable successes.

But, in 1992, he was nominated for his first Worst Director Razzie (most embarrassingly, for Oscar). He earned the undesirable moment of Hollywood infamy twice more, for Beverly Hills Cop III (1995) and The Stupids (1997). Susan's Plan (1998) was his disastrous last big-screen effort at writing-directing; he shifted to TV for 12 years. Then he went to Ealing, and has reportedly kept a base in London, attached to a projected screen adaptation of Sheridan's The Rivals.

His presentation of the Burke and Hare saga, a fabulous tale of primitive market forces at work, is well-paced and competent in all technical aspects. It isn't funny, though, or comically horrific. So I'll re-watch Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, probably with enhanced respect.

Any human heart

British TV's Channel 4, one of the world's few sources of quality English-language filmed drama, maintains BBC-calibre standards of screenwriting, production values, and period stylishness. Its latest (2010) saga was Any Human Heart, William Boyd's adaptation of his own 2002 best-seller novel.

Through a set of memoirs, the life of an Anglo-Scottish writer (Logan Mountstuart) is used to represent aspects of intellectual life, literary ambitions and social mores from the 1930s onwards. It's the world, as Boyd portrays it, of the pre-WW2 privileged and moneyed classes, at university, in the Bloomsbury Set, around Paris and in London. It's the world of Hemingway (Julian Ovenden), the Duke (Tom Hollander) and Duchess (Gillian Anderson) of Windsor, and the fictional friends and lovers of the fictional writer, who also crosses paths with Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming (as spymaster).

Boyd excises various characters from his novel, such as Virginia Woolf, and concentrates attention on three periods of his central figure: young naif and lover (Sam Pillars of the Earth Claflin), middle-aged success and lover (Matthew Pride and Prejudice Macfadyen) and solitary old man (Jim Broadbent, stealing the screen, as always). Different actors portray stages of his best friends' lives in the upper class and Anglo-Jewry (including Samuel West and Ed The Pianist Stoppard). The main man's female interests are similar figures of historical import: Labour party activist, rustic lass, aristocrat, friend's wife (Kim Catrall) and true love (Hayley Pillars, The Duchess Atwell).

They're all part of the 5-hour 4-part series' basic flaw: its plot looks and feels too much like a fill-in-the-boxes DIY period-piece, a recycle of British/TV drama material from BBC dramatisations (usually by Andrew Davies) of every family saga ever written, lush Merchant Ivory movies, all the Brontes, Galsworthys, Waughs and Poliakoffs, and Upstairs, Downstairs and its derivatives. Boyd probably wrote a much more nuanced historical novel; it would be worth reading to find out, the next time I'm stuck beside a pool for a few days.

Prince of tears

Hunan-born Yonfan (aka Yeung Fan) holds a special place in Hong Kong's film industry. Best known as a photographer (first; cinematographer second) enchanted by natural and human beauty, colourful settings and romantic messages, he's been a highly distinctive director, an auteur sans equal since 1970 (when he was 23).

His latest (2009) melodrama, Prince of Tears, tells tearful tales of Republican Taiwan during its early years of anti-Communist paranoia and injustices. Somehow, it was nominated as the official Hong Kong entry for that year's Oscar for best foreign-language movie, despite being a Taiwan production and story with much post-production work done in Bangkok. The movie also competed (and also unsuccessfully) at the 2009 Venice film festival.

Yonfan once won a Best Film award, at the 1998 Milan International Lesbian and Gay festival, for Bishonen, his melodramatic overview of gigolos in Hong Kong. I recall going to watch it at the Central's original, large Queen's cinema, and being the only audience member. Yonfan had hired the place for a week (presumably to qualify for competitions requiring public exhibition), hung velvet drapes in the lobby, and produced a lavish souvenir booklet. He clearly had access to large funds.

Presumably, he still does: the executive producer for his latest movie is indie auteur and multi-award-winning writer-director Fruit Chan. Yonfan, as usual, wrote his own screenplay and created his own art designs. He also uttered the narrative notes that ensure the audience knows about plot points and ironies in the moodily mournful story about two young girls whose parents are arrested and imprisoned as suspected spies for the PRC. Their handsome father (Joseph Chang) is an airforce pilot who plays the accordion and loves Slavic music; their beautiful mother (mainland newcomer Zhu Xuan) cooks lovely meals.

Together with them in the charming rustic accommodation and leafy lanes of a Taiwan air base in 1954 are a moody limping military friend with a scarred face (Fan Chih-wei) and an even more beautiful mystery woman (Terry Kwan), the wife of a KMT general (veteran Kenneth Die Another Day Tsang). Their young daughter is a schoolmate of one of the pilot's girls. All will not end prettily, we soon realise in the movie, when a girl's favourite teacher is arrested for espionage, unwisely painting glorious coastal scenery amid exquisitely-hued wind-rustled vegetation in a military zone, and is thrown off the cliff in a bag.

The movie shows the father being executed too, although he reappears at the end of the film. By then we've learned that the oldest child had a different father, her mother had some sort of eye-flashing love affair with the general's wife, who was some sort of agent for something. Yonfan's dreamy (and beautifully dreary) script floats very prettily, but illogically. His end credits state that it was based on a real Taiwan family which experienced similar melodramatics and produced one of the island's better-known (and unidentified) actresses.

Sadly, another Yonfan creation wastes lots of good actors, technical talent and money, albeit prettily.

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.

I am Cuba

I am Cuba (Soy Cuba) is a 1964 Soviet-Cuban propaganda film justifying the Cuban revolution through four stories set at the end of the corrupt Batista regime. Emotional socio-political lessons, they portray poverty and repression effectively, but the movie's real strength lay in the astonishing parade of bravado cinematographic art displayed by its Georgia-born director Mikhail Kalatozov.

He'd won the Golden Palm at Cannes (1957) for The Cranes Are Flying, but his melodramatic and episodic Cuban saga gained few viewers after it was first screened in Havana or Moscow. Party leaders and authorities had given the Mosfilm crew some three years of financial support, and thousands of extras, but they shelved the end product. Fortunately, it wasn't destroyed.

"Re-discovered" in the USA in the 1990s, its re-mastering and distribution championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, the black-and-white film gained audiences and professional recognition more than two decades after Kalatosov's death in 1973. [It was his penultimate film; the last was a 1969 Soviet-Italian co-production, The Red Tent, starring Sean Connery and Peter Finch (and nominated for the 1973 Golden Globe).]

Few would watch his Cuban epic just for its sentimental fables. It is watched per se, its long, frenetic, weaving, flying, wide-angle camera-work more than compensating for infrequent dialogue and ponderously poetic interlude comments voiced-over by a feminine "Cuba".

In the first tale, featuring a novice Havana prostitute, the remarkably acrobatic photography, accompanied by brash period jazz and rock, leaps up and down hotel storeys, back and forth in a nightclub, circles with dancers, slithers through a shanty slum, soars over white-tinted coconut forests, and more, all intoxicatingly. In the film's first bravura wide-angle non-stop tracking shot, when the camera dances above a hotel rooftop beauty contest and dives down through many levels to join American tourists beside and then in the hotel's swimming pool, it feels as if the Russian crew had been determined to out-do the aerial wizardry of Orson Welles in 1958's Touch of Evil.

The interplay of filtered light and shadow is spell-binding, especially for close-ups where each sweaty face's spot glisten and characters' glinting eyes project passionate emotions. All is contrast, and not just the expected rich-poor divide. The young woman is sad, until she dances; her fruit-vending beau sings his wares and grins exultantly, until he learns her secret trade; her better-than-average American customer is a politely curious intruder in her slum, until he experiences its menacing poverty the next morning.

In the short second tale, a sugar-cane farmer and his teenage children are reaping the rich crop from their rented land when then are told by its Cuban landowner it's been sold to United Fruit. The weather-aged man sends the youngsters away with the family's last peso, burns down his cane and shanty, and dies. This time, the cameras hover over and swirl around the cut cane and fire, again using Russian army infra-red film to give the landscape a snowy whiteness set against a darkly tinted sky (as for the movie's opening aerial vista of palm trees).

The third episode follows a group of dissident Havana university students, torching a drive-in movie screen, meeting a group of drunken American sailors, preparing revolutionary pamphlets (thereby introducing the names of Lenin and Fidel Castro), kind-heartedly failing to assassinate a police chief, who later kills two of the students during street protests. Cinematic spectaculars for this tale include long tracking shots past shops, up and down a university block's staircases, and through marching masses bombarded by police water hoses. There's even one crowd scene on city steps that looks like a tribute to Eisenstein and Russia's own post-Revolutionary cinema.

Most memorably, a continuous roof-level shot tracks a funeral procession, the camera turning to the right to pass through a rooftop cigar-rolling workshop, whose workers unfurl a revolutionary flag down the side of the building beneath the camera which steadily progresses far above the middle of another packed street the procession has turned into, exhibiting remarkable preparatory work, perfect timing and cinematographic daring.

In the fourth and final episode, a lone revolutionary soldier hobbles into a subsistence farmer's hillside shack. Fed, but scorned, by the farmer, he leaves and the hillside is subjected to an intense bombing raid that kills the farmer's oldest son. He tells his family he must go and join the guerrillas, and the camera follows him as he's led through their mountainside encampment. Acquiring his own rifle through battle, he joins thousands of other flag-bearing happy peasants marching downhill to war.

In this episode too, it's the complex choreography - of cameramen and their technical rigging and equipment as well as the massive cast of small-part actors - that is the marvel to behold. The second time round, because the film's imagery first, and truly foremost, tells its stories without overwhelming them. Whatever a viewer may feel about Castro's revolution, the film's vitality and exuberance - and attempt to express the Cuban temperament - are joys to behold.

[Martin Scorsese's 20-minute set of enthusiastic comments in a DVD extra are helpful reminders of key scenes' special qualities. Scorsese does not include the reference to Russian army film, noted in Wikipedia; he ascribes the white-on-black effect to filters.]

Devil's whore

Andrea Riseborough has been on a lucky casting streak recently. On TV in 2008, she played the young Margaret Thatcher deliciously well. In 2010, Never Let Me Go, Made in Dagenham and Brighton Rock have given her a trio of British movie successes. In between, she'd collected two Best Actress awards for her title role in The Devil's Whore, a flamboyant BBC TV four-part drama series set in Civil War times.

"Describe in 200 minutes the Civil War period (1642-1660) in terms of interesting politico-religious groups, a sexy and wilful young woman, the beheading of a king and subjugation of brave women and the noble Irish people", is the assignment apparently given himself by Peter Flannery, the saga's screenwriter and experienced British TV writer (co-awardee for Our Friends in the North in 1996 and most recently the creator/producer of Inspector George Gently).

He added: "Do so without focusing negative attention on anti-Catholicism, class warfare, Puritanism, squalor, Scotland and all the hundreds of characters involved in England history's bloodiest period." What TV audiences ended up with was typically well-constructed BBC period piece, an above-average well-acted historical strip-tease with a fictional central character and a few warped historical strands. Fun to look at; nothing to believe.

Riseborough revels in the role of Angelica Fanshawe, the impossibly (for the 17th Century) precocious girl who marries her childhood friend, the son of a minor rural lord. They both know and adore their nicely mannered king, Charles I (Peter Capaldi, The Thick of It), though Angelica does talk much out of her social and sexual standing in society.

Civil War breaks out when the king is challenged by Parliament, and Angelica is widowed when the king orders her husband's execution for surrendering his lands to the rebel army. This is led by handsome Oliver Cromwell (Dominic The Wire West), a nicely mannered farmer, and even more handsome Thomas Rainsborough (Michael Centurion Fassbender), who knew and soon knoweth Angelica.

Watching from the wings from the very start has been Thomas Sexby (John Life on Mars Simm), a gloomy facially-gashed soldier returned from German wars and employed as Angelica's protector, which labour of sword-fighting love becomes unpaid self-employment when her second husband is assassinated. For fictional reasons hard to explain in terms of any history, the plot frequently brings Angelica into the lives of rabble-rousing republican preacher Honest John Lilburne (Tom Goodman-Hill, chewing scenery and laughing badly) and his sanctimoniously valiant wife.

Angelica, initially a loyal royalist, had become a "Leveller" with her second husband. She agrees to a marriage of convenience with Sexby so that she can return to the land become a "Digger" and, in due dramatic course, a "Ranter", while her third husband has been unwillingly helping Cromwell to batter the Irish into submission without any scenes mentioning Roman Catholicism.

She is set up to be betrayed by a false Ranter by a vindictive merchant who had acquired her ancestral lands, whom she must kill after her third husband returned from Ireland just in time to disembowel the Ranter and get set up to be betrayed himself during an assassination attempt on Cromwell. Angelica, widowed a third time, is with child from her one night of passion with Sexby, and her story ends with at home with a daughter in a land with a new king.

TV drama director Marc Munden (Vanity Fair) keeps the actors and action moving speedily through colourfully well-lit glamorous and humble settings packed with extras. The background music is irritating, but less so than the over-used computer-generated skyscapes of scudding ominous clouds. They are nagging reminders that this historical drama is a fantastical cartoon.

Pillars of the earth

Ken Follett wrote an epic 1,400-page historical novel about the construction of a medieval cathedral. Applauded by avid page-turners, The Pillars of the Earth was a global best-seller. An experienced American TV adapter and former theatre dramatist (still best known for his first play, Agnes of God), John Pielmeier, was given the task of re-working the saga into an eight-episode 7-hour US$40-million TV drama series funded by German and Canadian companies and the production house of the UK's Scott brothers (Ridley and Tony). Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, the son of a Croatian director and a long-time assistant director with Steven Spielberg, directed the whole series on location, mainly in Hungary.

Ian McShane (Deadwood's evil boss) plays evil Waleran Bigod, one centrifugal character in the tale of 12th-Century English monarchy, rebellions and passions. This was the period, apparently called the "Anarchy", when King Stephen ruled in Winchester, Maud and her brother waged the usual oxymoronic "civil" war, and prelates, priors and nobles battled for land and regional power. Out of this chaos, King Henry I emerged.

Follett's saga incorporated the famed tale of St Thomas a Becket's murder; the TV series omits it to save time for the TV-audience-friendlier romantic liaisons between Follett's group of fictional figures. Oddly, it introduces a subplot that Follett didn't think of: the incestuous relationship between the leading lady of evil and her weak-spined cutely-bearded son. Follett presumably approved, because he happily plays along with the project by taking a cameo role as a merchant. The screenwriter is also credited in the lead titles as an actor (as "Cuthbert", whose name wasn't announced during the bits of the first 3 episodes during which I paid much attention).

I stopped watching it after 3 episodes, wishing not to waste four more hours of my life on an old-fashioned pseudo-historical epic, the sort that film-makers still produce for children's TV (without incest and the series' other titillations). The urban crowd and battle scenes are worthily TV-spectacular in the usual ways (hand-held and crane cameras), and the director (and his editing team) probably learned expertise in that area while working for Spielberg.

His handling of scenes with dialogue and close-ups is far less fluent and visually interesting. The characters are wooden, their lines flat, and the cuts from one hammy facial expression to another are almost laughable. Although the tale is that of olde England, some poor Irish and Welsh accents serve only to distract viewers from listening too carefully to the banal dialogue.

Apart from McShane, who glowers in his stylish manner, other competent British actors are also demeaned, being moved insensitively from one prompt spot to the next, in period settings where carpenters, costumiers, stonemasons and lighting engineers worked well to make the series look more credible than it sounds.

Detective Dee

One of modern Hong Kong cinema's first and foremost action-adventure directors has roared back into commercial favour with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. It could become a major franchise for Tsui Hark, who has directed close to 50 movies (since The Butterfly Murders in 1979), and produced many more for both the cinema and TV.

Detective Dee is a fictional character based on a real 7th-Century magistrate in the court of Tang Dynasty ruler Wu Zetian, China's first and only female emperor. Under the name of Judge Dee, he's the hero of a series of 17 novels written by Robert van Gulik, a Dutch scholar in Oriental languages and diplomat (serving as ambassador to Japan and Korea when he died in 1967).

Tsui's film credits a novel about Detective Dee by Lin Qianyu. The screenplay was written by Jialu Zhang, working with Taiwanese veteran Kuo-fu Chen; they'd also collaborated on the adaptation of The Message, a 20th-Century Sino-Japanese espionage thriller that gained high ratings the previous year (2009)

Andy Lau plays the outcast magistrate brought back to court to solve the deadly self-combustions of two courtiers helping to prepare the coronation of Empress Wu. Tsui's trademark style of quick cuts, overlapping dialogue and fast action ensures that Lau's usual brooding glare and over-acted facial reactions provide minimal distraction. By contrast, Carina Lau (back on screen after a four-year break) is credibly dead-panned and imposing as the Empress.

There's the usual cast of hundreds of extras, palatial settings and martial artistry (designed and directed inventively by Sammo Hung, with tributes to tree-hopping, pole-leaping, high-flying and other classic movie acrobatics) in this grandly old-fashioned historical romp. The key supporting roles of a female warrior (Bingbing Li, The Message) and an albino courtier (Chao Deng, award-winning lead in Assembly) are well played, and Tony Leung (the tall one) turns in a customary screen-stealing growling performance as the one-handed supervisor of construction for a giant Buddhist statue. That's the movie's major scenic attraction, reminiscent of massive big-screen stages from Indy Jones or Lara Croft sagas (and Tsui's own past spectacular epics).

The special relationship

Michael Sheen has impersonated Tony Blair in three films written by Peter Morgan: The Deal and The Queen led to The Special Relationship, a 2010 HBO/BBC TV movie. In between, Sheen portrayed David Frost in Morgan's Frost/Nixon, on stage and film, and egocentric football manager Brian Clough in Morgan's The Damned United.

Morgan has mined a rich vein in modern British history, also writing a biopic about Lord Longford, an outstanding showcase for Jim Broadbent and Samantha Morton (as Myra Hindley). His screenplay for The Last King of Scotland brought an Oscar to Forest Whitaker and a breakthrough role for James McAvoy.

Digging further back in British history, Morgan transformed a Philippa Gregory novel into The Other Boleyn Girl, starring Eric Bana, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johannson. A few years earlier, his two-part TV drama about Henry VIII featured Ray Winstone, Joss Ackland and a crack ensemble of top British actors. His 4-hour TV drama Colditz (2005) featured many young actors who've shone in later films (Damien Lewis, Tom Hardy, Jason Priestley)

The Leeds Uni graduate Londoner has also been well served by his directors, including Stephen Frears (twice, for Deal and Queen), Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon), Tom Hooper (also twice, for Damned and Longford), Kevin Macdonald (Last King). His latest screenplay, Hereafter (2010) is executive-produced by Spielberg, directed by Eastwood and stars Matt Damon. Morgan is on a roll, and has landed in Hollywood with his first screenplay not based on major historical news-makers.

If The Special Relationship fails to grip as TV drama or political docudrama, one of its weak links may be director Richard Loncraine: his track record is lightweight (most recently, My One and Only, Firewall and Wimbledon). Morgan's less-than-90-minute coverage of the shared time in power of Blair and Bill Clinton is inevitably episodic, and Kosovo and Ulster appear to be parts of a soap opera alongside the Lewinsky scandal. They might have made a richer pageant -- and parable -- of modern political friendship if the screenplay hadn't lost much time in scenes of the characters' transportation, newscast-watching and standing around.

Ironically, the most revelatory scene is a news clip at the end, with the real Bush and Blair holding a press conference at Camp David. As the screenplay's Clinton had forecast earlier, the body language spoke volumes, and I'm sure Morgan intended his audience to suspect mischievously that the US-UK "special relationship" had unexpressed homoerotic tinges recently.

The opening and closing song choices ("Friends" for Clinton, "Trouble" for Bush) illustrated Morgan's viewpoint, but he couldn't depict their Clinton-Blair relationship as simply. The interplay was complex, with Blair being supportive over Lewinsky and sneaky in rousing US support for Kosovo, and Clinton emerged the finer character in terms of political and personal integrity.

Dennis Quaid gives Clinton a sombre, pensive and nuanced character; but he didn't catch the man's impish vibrancy in the way that John Travolta nailed him brilliantly in Primary Colors. In that drama of a Clintonesque politician's campaigning triumph, Emma Thompson presented a convincing image of a younger Hillary. In Morgan's version, Hope Davis delivers a steelier and even more admirable impersonation. As Cherie Blair, Helen McCrory re-captures the convincing image of the self-confident wife and working mother displayed in The Queen.

This fourth time assuming his Blair persona should be Sheen's last. The naivety, characterless smiling, charm and modesty created a physical presence that had a distinct Blairite haziness, but never conveyed the man's political skills, theatrical flair and piercing eyes. However, I suspect Morgan will want to extend his franchise into a Blair-Bush study, and then a Blair-Brown showdown, with a possible Hutton Inquiry installment, etc. By then, Sheen may lose his youthful twinkle and turn into a true Blair lookalike better able to express a more complex, truly Blairite, personality.

Aftershock

The PRC's movie industry has produced many art-house favourites; its mass-market spectaculars haven't earned similar international attention. Aftershock might have done so. Let's see, after January 2011, whether China's official Oscar nominee makes it to the shortlist (in competition, among around 80 others, with Hong Kong's Echoes of the Rainbow and Taiwan's Monga). [None of them reached the longlist.]

Aftershock is the first major commercial IMAX movie made outside the US. The 2010 PRC-IMAX co-production (the first of a contracted three) dramatises the aftermath of the disastrous 1976 Tangshan earthquake and adds a contemporary reference to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It's the top Chinese box-office grosser, quickly leaping ahead of The Founding of a Republic.

240,000 people died in Tangshan. If Hollywood had recreated the mass tragedy, the movie would have innumerable sub-plots catering to all major demographic groups, age ranges, races and sexual interests. In China, director Feng Xiaogang focuses exclusively on one mother and her young twin children, and there are moments when a viewer aches for a sub-plot or two to lighten the mood and present a few fresh faces.

This movie is a champion exploitative tear-jerker. It's a 10,000-tissue weepie in which the children's father dies in the earthquake, the distraught mother is faced with a Sophie's Choice, the son loses an arm, the daughter survives unknowingly and is adopted by married PLA soldiers in the earthquake rescue teams. The mother cannot forgive herself for having made her choice, neither can the daughter, and the audience is frequently given emotional dialogue, heart-rending situations and musical prompts all designed to squeeze its tear ducts, mercilessly.

The mother and daughter are played wonderfully well (by Xu Fan, the director' wife, and the very busy Zhang Jingchu respectively), considering that a forgivable reaction to each of their stiffly self-absorbed characters would be to scream and demand that they stop being somewhat tedious self-sacrificing egocentrics. But if they did, the screenplay would be a lot shorter and more rational.

The rest of the cast is admirable (especially Chen Diaoming as the adoptive father), as are the cinematography, special effects (directed by ubiquitous Phil Jones), costumes and subtle government propaganda (on behalf of the PLA, Tangshan and China's modernisation). Director Feng has a successful track record, progressing from Chinese TV series in the 90s to writing and directing many mainstream movie hits (Happy Funeral, World Without Thieves, If You Are the One). He also directed Banquet, produced and directed Assembly, produced Cellphone and has been a movie actor.

IMAX and his co-owned Chinese production company will be happy with him; his epic had a reported budget of less than US$25 million. Its earnings in China and international markets will more than compensate for its likely inability to obtain any wide distribution in the USA. A few scenes in Vancouver, where the bitter daughter somehow (unexplained) ends up married to a Caucasian lawyer, were probably designed to help its entry to the Canadian market, both on IMAX and regular screens.

[The excellent review by Kevin Ma in lovehkfilm.com is fiercely critical of Feng's commercial and political considerations.]

Centurion

British writer-director Neil Marshall gave the B-class horror genre a touch of experimental class with his 8-minute debut, Combat (1999). His first full-length movie celebrated the werewolf in a nightmare for six soldiers lost in Scotland (Dog Soldiers (2002), and he won many awards for his very special-effects-ive subterranean nail-biter about real cave women, Descent (2005). Next in his black spotlight was a futuristic plague, Doomsday (2008).

He's obviously addicted to blood and violence, as his latest UK production reveals graphically. Centurion revels in the gory tale of seven 2nd-Century survivors from the Ninth Legion who must hack their way back to Roman lines through the mists, snow and moorland territory of Scotland's merciless Picts.

The long-unconquered natives had ambushed the Legion, and captured its general. He's given a Russell Crowe-ish smiling stylishness and a buffed chest by Dominic West (back from the States and 60 episodes of The Wire). His band of valiant legionnaires are led by centurion Quintus Dias, presented primly by the equally buffed Michael Fassbender (Hunger and Fish Tank). He and West had recently worked together on The Devil's Whore, a successful UK TV four-parter, giving the casting director an easy job.

As always in a band-of-brotherly plot, and appropriately for a real Roman legion, there's a rainbow of ethnic characters, including a black and Greek. Quintus was the son of a slave gladiator, articulates better than anyone else (in modern English), and is fluent in Pict. The young Pict witch who conveniently appears in the last 30 minutes to tend legionnaires' wounds also speaks the language of the Empire, which is convenient for making her a love interest for Quintus (Imogen Poots, fresh from 28 Days Later, essaying a somewhat Irish accent).

Gorlacon, the Pict leader (Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen), is also bilingual, and his fiercesome female double agent, Etain, is conveniently mute, so that Ukrainian Olga (Quantum of Solace) Kurylenko can concentrate on her Amazonian role as a nationalist tracker, archer, fast killer and woad-wearer.

Parallels can be seen between the Roman Empire's failure to subdue the Picts and modern Western empires' disasters in Vietnam or Afghanistan, and Marshall's gory screenplay includes a demonstration of ancient water-boarding. Ironically, though they triumph in the movie (forcing the Romans to retreat southwards, behind their under-construction Hadrian's Wall), the Picts lost out eventually. Their dead language is replaced by Gaelic (with subtitles in olde-styled fontes) and historians will nod merrily, noting that Latin is another defunct language.

This movie is a valiant effort, rendered watchable mainly by the sweeping, chilling photography of Scottish wildernesses by Sam McCurdy. Less appealing to gorefest lovers are the flying blood and body parts. Marshall and his SFX team seem to have employed a wild paint technique, presumably diminishing the air of reality intentionally to create a more cartoonish, less offensive representation of carnage.

Tony Manero

Every country's film industry has historical lodes of inspiration. France had the Occupation and Algeria, England the Blitz and Thatcher. Argentina and Chile still mine their periods of military dictatorship. Chile's Pinochet regime had the rawest sources: Tony Manero is one man whose ambition, crimes, hangers-on and local neighbourhood personify that nation's sickness.

Co-written by its lead actor, Alfredo Castro, the dark and gloomy tale focuses on Raul, an impotent middle-aged man determined to win a TV competition for the best lookalike for John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever.

He's playing the part in a local theatre production, and he's obsessed with it. The movie is playing in a nearby cinema and he watches it obsessively, repeating its dialogue and Travolta's arm gestures. Raul is clearly too old for the part, and Castro the actor is more of a lookalike for Roberto Benigni on a deadpan day. The character's obsession doesn't make sense, and the minor characters in his life seem to know that too.

It doesn't help a non-Chilean's appreciation of the scenario to be shown a lead role who seems to lack any normal social morality. Soon after his first appearance in grimy Santiago back streets, Raul rushes to the aid of an old woman who's been mugged. Invited into her home, he kills her, literally with his bare hands, without apparent thought, steals her TV set and shares canned fish meat with her pet cat. Was it meaningful that she'd admired General Pinochet's blue eyes?

He rifles and abandons the still-breathing body of a political activist shot by Pinochet's policemen. He rages with an expressionless face, enlivened only by a plan to build a glass-tiled disco floor for his stage. At the end of the film, when the TV audience only awards him the runner-up prize, the screen fades to black and the audience knows his next moves.

Does Raul represent Pinochet himself, or lower-class Chilean self-delusions, or Chile's national madness? Did Travolta's film character stand for shallow US cultural influences or CIA machinations? It's hard to know. Or care. In this movie, as in Raul's world, there is no justice, no hope and consequently not enough good reasons to watch it.

Glorious 39

Stephen Poliakoff is a prodigious and prolific talent. So are male rabbits, but they do not have cartes blanches for British film industry funds, top actors' services and BBC screen time. Glorious 39 is writer-director Poliakoff's latest (2009) take on 20th-Century English socio-political history. For Poliakoff, that's the history of upper-class and Establishment families.

Such families live in photogenic mansions blessed with lovely furniture and fittings, gorgeous costumes and diffident Bill Nighy. This time, the director's favourite actor is the head of the Keyes family. Its whole class is keen to hang on to power in a world where the word "Glorious" used to refer to the beginning of the pheasant shooting season.

It is also the nickname of Keyes' eldest, adopted daughter, played by Romola (Atonement) Garai. Joining her in the star-studded scenario are Julie Christie, David Tennant, Christopher Lee, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Northam, and a chubby young actor with the memorable family name of Kubrick-Finney. Other period-drama faces appear, for this is a compendium movie for lovers of Brideshead, Gosford Park, Agatha Christie, Andrew Davies' adaptations, etc and other up-market soap operas a la Poliakoff.

Technically, they are delightful televisual confectionery in pretty wrappings. There's little to chew on in the screenplays, but the dialogue trips the light fantastic decorously. The morality playfulness of the finished products is beyond reproach, as are the anti-Nazi anti-appeasement pro-Churchillian sentiments in this one. Anyone who needs a potted history of politics in 1939, pictures of pretty symbolic cats posing, and lovingly lit shots of full dorsal nudity, may find this this to be a classy entertainment. But will Poliakoff ever stop churning them out?

Creation

No one can object to the BBC and the UK Film Council producing period dramas. They do them very well. Like the Royal Family, they are a defining element of being English. Others are love of animals and a belief in good education. Creation shows them all when it takes us off to meet Charles Darwin in his Victorian era. He and Mrs Darwin are acted by Paul Bettany and his real-life wife (Jennifer Connelly).

Director Jon Amiel, whose ground-breaking work for BBC TV's The Singing Detective led him to Hollywood, turns in a movie that looks grand. It sounds less imposing because its screenplay fails, almost inevitably, in the tough task of presenting Darwin's long-delayed and arduous writing of The Origin of the Species in dramatic and cinematic terms. Darwin's health and marriage may have been failing to recover from the death of his first daughter, but that's a melodramatic ploy rather than a critical plot detail.

Darwin's theory of evolution shook the 19th-Century world, and Connelly struggles to convey conventional God-fearing reactions to her husband's ideas about natural selection and the non-existence of God as a seven-day creative wonder. Darwin himself was sorely troubled by the realisation where his review of facts of nature was leading him; Bettany merely sickens and ages.

The movie is a finely-costumed, well-photographed history lesson. It could be a useful schoolroom primer, as Thomas Huxley (Toby Young), the local vicar (Jeremy Northam) and other contemporaries have conversations rich in quotable comments about God, apes and archbishops, science and love.

Bettany and Connelly may have known what their latest joint project lacked: they first worked together on A Beautiful Mind, a movie which did manage to make its audience sense the angst and agony of intellectual life.

Bright star

A movie of beauty is a joy for an hour if not for ever. Jane Campion co-wrote and directed a bewitching movie about romantic poetry, Bright Star, that sets fresh standards for biopic period pieces. Unfortunately, like too many poems, it goes on too long.

Its cinematic images set out to express the exchange of looks and letters, words and moods, between a poor poet, John Keats, and a neighbouring amateur dress-maker, Fanny Brawne. They meet, his sick young brother dies of TB, they part and Keats himself also dies of TB at the age of 25 in Rome. Period soap, 19th-Century middle-class romance, period drama, the film could have been a pretentious prettily-costumed bauble, period.

Instead, for that first hour, it's an audio-visual treat. Working from poet Sir Andrew Motion's biography of Keats, Campion created a screenplay with some wit and passionate pretences. Australia's Abbie Cornish (Candy) co-stars as wilful Fanny, and Kerry Fox (Storm) plays her strangely offhand mother. The Brit part of the Australian-UK co-production accounts for the lead actor, Ben Whishaw (Perfume), the settings (including a delightfully muddy, scruffy Hampstead Village) and most of the supporting cast, notably young newcomer Edie Martin as Fanny's young sister. Her young brother's is a strong screen presence too (Thomas Sangster, recently cast to lesser effect as Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy). An American actor, Paul Schneider, delivers a rousing Scottish accent as Keats' obnoxious and overly protective friend, Charles Brown.

The movie looks divine, but its lead actors are not so acceptable. Whishaw's Keats is a wimp, not an inspired poet. It's hard to sense what he sees in Cornish's Fanny, who seems too keen on sewing up a lover rather than truly wanting to understand poetry. Brown and Keats do not convey their supposed join creative process. Nothing in the movie is as remarkably romantic as it must be to be believed.

The romantic couple's real story cannot be defied. Keats must go pale and cough badly, Fanny pout and weep. Too much for cinematic comfort by the end, many lines of their correspondence and his poetry must be recited reverentially on and off screen. Meanwhile, Campion's cinematographic motifs provide repetitive refrains of windows, fabrics, sewing needles, curtains and the Brawne family's clumsy, cluttered clothing. One lengthy set-piece with butterflies is a lovely conceit, like a magically memorable verse in a poem, but it and other fine imagery cannot lift the deadening weightiness of the whole movie tome.

Campion's final captions include an unforgivable rewrite of Eng Lit: Fanny did not pine in solitude after Keats' death. Some years later, she married and had three children. Understandably, we are not told that Keats had another female muse in London. Nor was it made clear enough that Keats was trained to be a surgeon, and could therefore have married and supported Fanny. Looking between the lines of Campion's screenplay, it's tempting to suspect that Keats was a very lucky man in his loves, friendships and posthumous glory. No so lucky with this biopic.

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.