Drive

A+

Artful use of lighting and shadows, high-decibel retro electronic pop and slow-paced silent pauses, warm close-ups and chilling long shots, created a cinematic experience that's exciting and disturbing.

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Many movies get made by outsiders (from Europe or Sundance) who've attracted attention with their debut efforts and gain bigger productions that seek stylish direction at small cost. In the case of Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn was already a young Danish veteran when he got the director's chair for his fourth English-language feature.

His first was Fear X, a 2003 psychological thriller adapted from a Hubert Selby story by Refn. Its lead actor was an unwise choice: John Turturro's name didn't help at the box office and the film's failure bankrupted Refn's production company. Forced back into Danish-language work, Refn made two sequels to his successful 1996 debut, Pusher, and its successor, Bleeder. Their glossy shock value gained him British production funds for two screenplays: Bronson (2008) and the virtually wordless and visually thrilling Valhalla Rising (2009).

Drive, based on a 2005 crime thriller by James Sallis, is the crisp story of a taciturn garage mechanic and part-time stunt driver who moonlights for robbery gangs. Initially a Universal project for Hugh Jackman, it ended up as a low-budget (US$13 million) indie production headlined by rising Canadian star Ryan Gosling. He reportedly chose Refn to direct the book's screen adaptation (by Iranian Hossein The Wings of the Dove Amini). English Carey Mulligan, got the key female role as a single mother who needs saving from vicious gangsters.

The film is Gosling's latest "breakthrough", like almost every other film he's ever made: The Believer (2001), Murder by Numbers (2002), The Notebook (2004), Half Nelson (2006), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Oscar-nominated Blue Valentine (2010). With two years' work as a child performer on TV (Mickey Mouse Club), and solid supporting roles recently (Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Ides of March) Gosling has a track record ready for recognition by Oscar voters.

Refn has got the recognition he's deserved for Drive, winning Best Director award at Cannes 2011. It's easy to see and sense why. His artful use of lighting and shadows, high-decibel retro electronic pop and slow-paced silent pauses, warm close-ups and chilling long shots, created a cinematic experience that's exciting and disturbing. There are moments when the facial studies of the actors is just too long for the retention of dramatic pace, and there are gruesome gory blood-letting head-butting scenes whose sense of reality is too real for comfort.

Overall, though, this is a movie that grabs the eyes, ears - and brain - from its sharply-paced car-chase opening action sequence. It's a cleverly constructed screenplay whose key elements could have been B-movie cliches: conflicted criminal (Oscar Isaac), adorable Latino boy, limping older colleague (Bryan Cranshaw), foul-mouthed racially-stereotypical gangsters (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks), slutty moll (Christina Hendricks).

Such standard characters needed above-average actors, and the whole supporting cast is a galaxy of movie acting talent; they support Gosling well. His toothpick-chewing shyly-smiling quietly-spoken man of vengeance is a very modern anti-hero with the stylishness of a repressed 1980s action hero. His survival at the end of the saga, and his parting drive, into the LA nightscape, left an open option for his reappearance. It would be unwise: a very good film is unlikely to be bettered and the attempt would be commercially and artistically unwise. For now, very wisely, Gosling has stepped into lead role for Refn's next screenplay. It sounds an extra-ordinary concept, set in Bangkok, co-produced with French funds and Kristin Scott-Thomas: something to really look forward to.

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.

Air doll

In 2007, Lars and the Real Girl enabled Ryan Gosling to have an actor's ball partnering an inflatable lover. Two years later, innovative Japanese director Hirokasu Koreeda played well with the same concept in Air Doll, his screen adaptation of a manga written the same year by Yoshiie Gouda (entitled, self-mockingly, perhaps, "Gouda's Philosophical Discourse: The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl").

Nozomi, the life-size plastic doll dressed as a maid (with optional costume changes), is the pampered companion of a lonely middle-aged waiter (Arata, whose movie debut in 1998 was in Hirokasu's After Life). He chats with her during dinner, takes her out for wheelchair rides, has sex with her and meticulously washes her detachable lower part. One day, the doll lurches to life, acquiring puppet-like cold-skinned movement, a heart and soul, abilities to sketch, hold memories and mimic human words, and lands a job in a video store, where she falls in love. Played with po-faced big-eyed mystified innocence by Donna (The Ring Virus, Host, Linda x 3) Bae, Nozomi is an enchanting fantasy character.

At its original 125-minute running length, the movie was dismissed by many critics as an over-long fable. Eight or more minutes were cut out for foreign markets; the effects are frustrating at the end of the movie, when Nozomi inexplicably enters and changes the lives of local lonely characters she'd met on her wandering. Her expanding role, growing heart and inevitable death become a series of fairly silly tableaux, and may have been more credible and meaningful within an extended narrative context. For the first hour, though, the switches from wry reality to magical realism are very acceptable logical nonsense.

I guess Japan's movie-goers (even more than those in the USA) require a movie to last at least two hours, to justify high ticket prices. That could explain the lengths that film producers need to go to, often working with slender plots. One side benefit of that is the necessity to employ directors who can fill time with rich details, artful lighting and exquisitely composed scenes; Hirakasu achieves all that, creating an intriguing visual essay on urban loneliness, human frailty and love's and life's substitutes. "Pretty basic philosophy" sounds dismissive, but isn't meant to be.

Submarine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tree of life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accidental tourist

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

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

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

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

Last days of disco

Whatever happened to Kate Beckinsale? The simplest answer is that she met and married (in 2004) Len Wiseman, an American arts department props assistant who wrote and directed the vampired melodrama Underworld (2003), in which she starred.

That profitable franchise is her main claim to fame and fortunes. They'd seemed unlikely goals after her 2001 starring role, alongside Ben Affleck, in Michael Bay's lambasted Pearl Harbor. She found her niche though, following Underworld with a similar horror fantasy, Van Helsing. Back in 1998, though, the former Oxford University student's Hollywood future looked bright after she gained a lead role in The Last Days of Disco, a satirical review of the disco era's Studio 54 heydays.

It was the third movie in a semi-autobiographical trilogy by Harvard graduate writer-director Whit Stillman, following Metropolitan (1990; Oscar-nominated screenplay) and Barcelona (1994). Fin de siecle comedies of manners about the "upper haute bourgeoisie", they told tales of WASP Harvard sons and Hampshire daughters experiencing life at the rich end, courtesy of parental grants and posh college degrees.

The Disco episode focuses on two young women working as a book publisher's readers, seeking success (associate editorship, to start) and suitable love (or acceptable sex) in New York in the early 80s, when gaining entry to fashionable disco-dancing nightclubs was the social be-all and end-all. Beckinsale plays the viciously bitchy, and socially needy, aggressive brunette, an unlikely room-mate for a more intellectual novice man-chasing blond (Chloe Sevigny).

Despite a shared behavioural trait of being unpleasantly honest (ie gauche and rude) about other people's foibles and inadequacies, the pair of brittle quasi-feminists meet, romance, swap and lose Harvard graduates of varying intelligence and desirability, including a disco assistant manager who dispenses with unwanted girlfriends by claiming sudden self-awareness of latent homosexuality. There's also an assistant district attorney with a history of mental problems, a publishing workmate with attitude problems, a third beautiful room-mate, bouncers and a nightclub operator with attitude problems, and an advertising agency man whose middle-aged clients want to go night-clubbing.

Stillman probably derived his acerbic dialogue from observation at Studio 54 and similar '80s social institutions (where Beckinsale's character enthuses about social grouping well before Facebook was a sexual glimmer in a later generation of Harvard men's minds). This was the era of Yuppies.

Their disco scene seems too well-dressed, body languages too well-groomed, the dance music too decorous, compared to the West Coast's disco scene of harder drugs and profuse sweat. The disco world of NY Yuppies showcased self-centred social poise, with a restrained volume of the music enabling conversation and snidery, enunciated with a self-conscious preciousness that looks and sounds silly and dated in Stillman's dialogue (cringefully in an attempt to deconstruct the Lady and the Tramp socio-economically).

*****

After a 13-year hiatus, Stillman has a fourth feature in post-production. Beckinsale is at work on another Underworld, while her husband's directing her in an adaptation of a Philip Dick short story (starring Colin Farrell).

Twisted romance

The first feature movie from Jose Campusano, an Argentine writer-director, was Twisted Romance in 2008. Rotten Tomatoes indices suggest that in some markets it was re-named Vile Romance in 2011. Either way, it is another indication that Buenos Aires is not a city of loving normality.

Joe Orton would have appreciated the storyboard, and been tempted to exploit its comedy noir potential. The central character is an acned teenager, a non-mercenary practising homosexual. His wrinkled cackling mother and wild-eyed manic sister earn their living as a duo providing therapeutic sexual services for needy middle-aged men. Presumably eager to find a father-figure, the lad picks up a long-haired weed-smoking be-ringed ultra-macho gay divorced man who's a gun merchant and bitterly separated from his young daughter.

The older man is a violent love-maker, and averse to the sensitive and dim-witted lad's wish to take his turn as the active partner. Inexplicably, unless it's an Argentine politeness thing, the women in his family are eager to host the lad's older friend for dinner, an offer which the older man accepts. This leads to the daughter deciding to get the same action her brother is getting.

Picking up a young Spanish visitor (symbolically, perhaps, the film's only good-looking and likable character), the lad gets his sexual need satisfied, but the Spaniard has probably been affected by the Argentine sun or psyche, falls in love with the lad, follows him home, and ends up, the audience must assume, gorily slaughtered by the older man.

The lad pretends to ignore that happening but is still upset about his treatment in bed. So he invites the older man home for dinner again, possibly knowing that the wacky sister will make good use of the big kitchen knife and he can take the old man's jewellery and home for himself.

Within a year of this film's release, Campusano had created Vikingo, and it is awaited with a masochistic level of interest: the tale of a "rude motorcyclist whose rigid principles are honor and respect" could be another character in search of an Orton.

Plan B

Argentine writer-director Marco Berger's second feature, Ausente, won the Teddy award for LGBT movies at the 2011 Berlin festival. It'll be worth looking out for, as his first movie, Plan B [2009] was an engaging romantic comedy.

Bruno (Manuel Vignau), an amiable bearded layabout, is firmly rejected as a life partner by his girlfriend, Laura (Mercedes Quinteros, in her first role). She still has sex with him occasionally even though she's got a new college boyfriend, Pablo (Lucas Ferraro). Bruno schemes to get her back by befriending her new love and trying to lead him astray. The plan backfires when their male bonding unhinges Bruno's own emotions, then those of his girlfriend and rival.

The cute concept succeeds: Berger presents a slow-paced, wry character study of modern-minded young men facing up to sexual self-awareness. The slow, episodic pace reflects the naturalistic dialogue and gradual development of the men's friendship.

At 100 minutes, it's a slightly over-long novella given unexpected depth by the lead actors' close-ups: Vignau's eyes twinkle and dare (imagine a Bloom-Beckham hybrid) while Ferraro's glare anxiously (in stereotypical Latin style a la Bernal or Bardem). Their mutual attraction is comprehensible, unlike the woman's role in their lives; their happy ending is too pat to be true to life.

Woman without love

Director Luis Bunuel rated A Woman Without Love his worst film. Churned out in 1952, six years after the Spaniard settled in Mexico, the B&W movie was a commercial project handed to him, a Spanish-language re-make of a decade-old French film, Pierre et Jean, based on a Guy de Maupassant short story.

Two brothers discover that their mother, married young to a boorish antiques dealer, had a secret affair which resulted in the birth of the younger brother. The film shows how the affair happened, and then jumps 20 years to its unveiling and the sons' reactions to their mother and each other.

Bunuel's anti-bourgeois anti-materialist sentiments were inevitably aroused by the melodrama, but this wasn't a setting for his surrealistic stylishness. It was a job, and he moved the leaden plot from scene to scene capably. The only noticeable directorial touch is frequent usage of hip-level camera positions. The acting is mostly at the level of TV soaps.

Eyes wide open

Would a devout Orthodox Jewish butcher, happily married with four young children, suddenly sense an uncontrollable desire to wet-kiss a homeless gay Torah student who's provided no clear seductive moves or signs of his homosexuality? Just after his butcher-father's death? In Jerusalem, in the old, traditionalist Hasidic quarter? Very soon after letting the younger man borrow his cellphone and giving him a job and a storeroom to sleep in? Would the younger man make passionate love while still pining for his previous Orthodox lover?

Audiences are expected to accept such far-fetched fairy-tale ideas by Eyes Wide Open. In parts, it's an interesting Israeli docudrama too, enabling outsiders to view and vaguely understand aspects of Jewish Orthodoxy: kissing entry doors, wearing two hats and vests, being bearded and conformist, the importance of cleansing rituals, ways to cut kosher meat, love of debate and questioning, belonging to an ultra-self-defensive minority. All that, and more insights, adds special value to an otherwise standard man-meets-man storyboard.

There have already been Mormon, cowboy, neo-Nazi and Muslim gay dramas, and there may well be Sikh, Amish, Tibetan Buddhist and Voodoo versions yet to be seen. There's even been a documentary feature about Hasidic gays (Trembling Before G-d, 2001). This 2009 dramatic contribution to the genre is good of its kind due to above-average pacing, lighting, editing and acting. It's a debut feature for both the writer (Merav Doster) and director (Haim Tabakman). Zohar Strauss (playing the tempted father) was previously seen in a supporting part in Lebanon and his co-lead, America-born Ran Danker, had one previous starring role in an Israeli movie (Restless). Their facial acting during silent scenes adds much to the stilted euphemistic dialogue, contradictory mood changes and fundamental incredibilities.

There's an eastern European air to the movie, a Chekhovian reticence, and a miserable final scene signalling self-repression and providing adding a touch of reality to this offbeat tale of doomed love.

Choses secretes

Choses secretes (Secret Things) was a 2002 "New French Extremity" movie, another example of French auteurs' self-conscious effort to push their envelopes without crossing the line into inanity. That's difficult creative juggling, which was beyond the skills of writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau (then almost 60).

A bisexual nightclub nude dancer opens the movie with a ponderously-staged full-frontal display that captivates a new bartendress. Cue a very long teasing tete-a-tete (one full of giggles, the other of frowns) before they get round to mutual passion. Entering a state of happy flatmatedness, they get extra kicks from wandering through Paris with nothing under their raincoats.

They organise their lives and future by both working for the same corporation. Its middle-aged human relations chief is ripe for seduction, its young maliciously rakish heir-apparent is their prime but dangerous target for marriage and wealth. In the end, they get what they want, after some semi-comic orgiastics, lovers' deceptions, sibling incest and a murder.

In non-French eyes, such soft-porn noir can either be camp or horrifying, but should be fun cinema either way. This effort isn't, and its consolatory award at Cannes 2003 is yet another condemnation of that festival's past directorate.

Crush

In 2004, writer-director Michael Saul produced seven gay video shorts and called the collection True Love. Five years later, he packaged four less short films about gay couples as Crush.

A gentle black soldier has a non-camp white lover and conflicting loyalties (Don't Ask), a camp white student designer is besotted by an Asian vampire boyfriend (Bloodline), a wannabee painter pairs up with an older artist (Strokes), and a painfully shy Asian with a Caucasian voice emotes the poeticised tale of his schoolboy crush for a chirpy Caucasian kid (Breathe).

All four had interesting ideas, competent acting and technical qualities, off-beat inter-racial couplings, and one with a generation gap. The non-porn gay movie genre needs more variety; Saul produced a likely and likable choice for most gay film festivals.

Le fil

The technically competent 2009 gay love story Le Fil (The String) stars one of the grandest dames of European cinema, Claudia Cardinale, emoting majestically in the land of her 1938 birth, Tunisia. Writer-director Mehdi Ben Attia's debut feature wraps her in a rich, sheltered environment, neither French nor Tunisian, neither European/modern nor Arabic/traditional, as a mother of an only son whose homosexuality she appears to despise, especially when it crosses class and racial lines. Then she accepts it, inexplicably, and everybody lives happily ever after: the movie serves only to illustrate that movie-making is a universal toy for any country's rich and elite.

Malik is the central anti-heroic figure, returned from France to his European mother's fairly grand estate. His Arabic father's death has died, and the young man's best friends are a boldly out fashionable couple of Arab lesbian lovers for whom he agrees to be a husband and semen donor. The director reveals his hero's preferences early on, when the man asks to be raped by a hunk of rough trade in an unnamed city (Tunis).

As a boy, he'd needed a long string (of the title) tied to his waist to guide him out of involuntary pacing in circles, and it makes occasional real or imaginary appearances - without helping the storyline, other than to suggest that he'd long needed a human link to reality. This he finds in a manly houseboy working for free board and lodging at his mother's. His homosexuality appears to be unexpressed, unrealised, and then, suddenly, it isn't, and he's in bed with the supposed fiance. This transition was so sudden I feared I'd jumped a chapter or the movie lost one.

Lead actor Antonin Stahly-Vishawanadan (as handsome, pensive, sulky Malik) does not have an extensive record in movies. He's first noted in IMDb as "The Boy" in the 1989 French TV mini-series presentation of Peter Brook's Mahabharata. In 2002, he worked for Brook again, as Osric in the TV movie, The Tragedy of Hamlet. His lover, Blilal, is played confidently by French-born TV actor Salim Kechiouche, but his role is difficult to comprehend, as a working-class artist accepted by a society of rich snobs.

Maybe the director imagined a small world where gays and fag hags could find sunlit happiness, oblivious to the barbaric realities at the gates of Tunisia. Many gay movie-goers would be happy to escape into such a dream world; many gay movies are far from real worlds.

Get low

Senior citizens are a steady niche market. They may not be as profitable as teens (valued for their consumption of popcorn and soft drinks), but they do flock to old-timers having vicarious fun on a big screen. Robert Duvall is now a very old-timer (80), and Bill Murray (60) and Sissy Spacek (61) are looking their ages too, and their charming performances in Get Low should have attracted a bigger box office. Yet, despite costing only US$7 million, it earned loss-making gross takings of only US$9 million (and just 5% extra globally).

In 1938, in Tennessee, a real old backwoods hermit called Felix decided to hold his funeral before he died. From this semi-mythical personality, US TV screenwriters Chris (Mad Men) Provenzano and Gaby Mitchell crafted a wry vehicle for Duvall. They added co-starring roles for Murray (exploitative funeral director), Spacek (old flame), Lucas (Tokyo Drift) Black (Murray's young assistant) and a veteran black actor, Bill Cobbs (76), as a preacher.

The indie production signed cinematographer and TV (Murder One) director Aaron Schneider for his debut feature; he was already an Oscar-co-winner for the 40-minute Short Film (Live Action) adaptation of a William Faulkner story (Two Soldiers, 2003). Schneider edited the movie too, neatly, and the lush photography of woodlands, carpentry and period settings creates an appealing framework for a simple tale of an old man seeking forgiveness for a 40-year-old tragedy.

For much of the time, an intriguing air of mystery builds up, well supported by Duvall's bogeyman of seemingly ill-intentioned aloofness, Murray's manipulative wrinkled smiles and Spacek's loving goodness. The actors and the story appear deliberately restrained, with a comic edge worthy of the Coen brothers; surprises and twists are anticipated. Wrongly: when the final scenes of closure arrive, the promising story becomes a disappointing sequence of anti-climaxes and sentimental Hollywood cliches.

Budget-conscious modern senior citizens are possibly even more likely than teens to take notice of word-of-mouth and social network critiques for a movie. Maybe they'll rent the DVD.

Tourist

The most irritating aspect of The Tourist is that it's a remake, obliging a conscientious movie lover to hunt down and compare the original 2005 French thriller, Jerome Salle's Anthony Zimmer, starring Sophie Marceau and Yvan Attal. It shouldn't matter if a remake is a good or bad remake, as it should be judged on its own merit. But, when it's a failure, one wants to find out if the fault is in the design rather than the execution. That's movie-loving conscientiousness: silly, but more satisfying than just slagging off the remake.

First the slags, though. The Golden Globes clique were half-right to nominate The Tourist in their comedy category, since the movie's producers clearly thought they were creating a romantic comedy. Unfortunately, they also created one of the decade's least effective rom-coms, as it is impossible to believe that Angelina Jolie's super-tough Lara Crofty British police secret agent would fall head over heels for Johnny Depp's milk-sop American math teacher. Think of coupling Sophia Loren and Mr Bean, duh.

The plot depends on that dubious premise. Jolie hasn't seen her adored English financier for a year, since he snatched a fortune from a Brit gangster (Steven Berkoff in non-typical muted mode), when he tells her to take a train to Venice and pick up any man who looks like him, to decoy the gangster's Russian henchmen and British police and tax agents chasing him (led by an irritable but not fiery Paul Bettany, under the minimalist supervision of a muted Timothy Dalton). The man she picks is a teacher, a lightly bearded widower from the boondocks, he says, but we, the audience, know that he will be her old love, even though the screenplay tells us he's now four inches shorter and had a multi-million-dollar facial rearrangement. Jolie's character doesn't see or sense the similarity, duh.

Jolie herself knew very well what she was doing when she signed on with the movie's re-maker, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (an already-abbreviated name hereinafter to be called vonD), whose previous and first feature (2006) was a German mega-award-winner he also wrote, The Lives of Others. On the strength of that global BAFTA-winning art-house hit, vonD gained production funds for his first English-language movie. Entering the big time, he apparently play safe by re-making the recent French caper, and Jolie probably saw what a glossy vehicle it had been for Marceau, and asked for it to be re-written with a British context, as she does do a good English accent.

Depp can do many things very well, but it must be supposed that he put himself on heavy-duty muting medication the first day he joined Jolie on a set. VonD appears to have thought he could make a Hitchcockian crime caper, a romantic comedy in the league of Donen's Charade. There is no way that an apprentice director is able to tell Jolie a la Hitchcock that she's just a cow to be given standing markers. She surely ran this movie show, which spends much of its time staring at her (giving her the prima diva air of a Loren or Callas) when it isn't gazing equally lovingly (and even more justifiably) at the beauty of Venice seen from the air or its canals.

For this film (unlike The King's Speech), Julian Fellowes was given, or chose to accept, a co-writer credit, for presumably adding a credible British society detail or two to vonD's rewrite of the Salle original, which was also tweaked by another Oscar winner, Christopher (Usual Suspects) McQuarrie. They are further indicators of why this cinematic trifle had a budget of $100 million; Jolie and Venice get the credit for grossing a quarter of a billion dollars globally. VonD may be happy; Depp will shrug, if he's come off the medication.

Brilliantlove

"They don't make British soft porn movies like they used to", a great-uncle might utter after watching Brilliantlove. "Nowadays youngsters have to include a real story, good actors with attractive bodies and some jolly nice sets, location work and lighting. Still don't get to see enough action, of course".

Outside the UK, the low-budget second feature from Ashley Horner (R, above) was called The Orgasm Diaries, a truer indicator of the slim plot written by Sean Conway, an even less-experienced short-film writer-director. It's primarily a series of sexual acts and full-frontal exposures performed in north-east England by horny young Manchester, a photographer, and his passionate girlfriend, Noon, who's a taxidermist.

She keeps dead creatures in her father's refrigerator, and welcomes the birds a nomadic cat lays in tribute at the roll-up door of their live-in garage. Randy Manchester tends to get inebriated, which is when he cavorts through a field of flowers and tells a tape recorder to tell Noon that he wants her every sexy thought recorded for his pleasure. He's already recording her sexual motions and gasps on his small camera, and these photos end up in the eager hands of an art dealer who transforms Manchester into a well-paid provider of fancy gallery porno.

The lead actors were called on to perform or simulate masturbation, urination, ejaculation and the usual non-visibly penetratory coitus. To their credit, Liam Browne (L, above, with one previous TV acting role) and complete newcomer Nancy Trotter Landry are believable as lovers. She has a future as a Cherie Blair lookalike. The ending of their breakthrough movie experience is far less convincing, a make-believe melodrama in which Manchester doesn't succeed in accidentally killing himself with a plastic bag during a candlelit masturbation scene.

"My only surprise was the lack of an end-credit warning note about the plastic bag technique", my great-uncle might have mused. "They did note that no animals were injured, so the dead birds must have been simulated too."

Let me in

Re-makes of successful films rarely recreate the originals' freshness, distinctive mood and cinematic quality - three key factors accounting for its original success. One recent attempt was Let Me In, the 2010 English-language version of the acclaimed 2008 Swedish vampire movie, Let the Right One In.

The haste with which it was re-made by Matt Cloverfield Reeves suggests that Swedish film industry insiders knew that the original story could play well in the USA if it wasn't screened with subtitles. Fortunately, they decided not to tout a dubbed version.

The Swedish movie was based on a novel and screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who worked with Reeves on the American adaptation (to which two other Americans contributed). The original movie was directed by Tomas Alfredson, who won several awards for it; he was not involved with or happy about the US re-make. It was co-produced by long-established British horror production company, Hammer Films (now Dutch-owned and back in business after a two-decade hiatus).

The new version kept the basic story, set in the 1980s in a snowy environment: a bullied 12-year-old boy forms a close friendship with a new neighbour of the same age. She feels no cold, lives with an older guardian, turns out to be a truly bloodthirsty killing machine, helps the boy annihilate his school tormentors, and rides off with him in a train into a vampire's world of essential sunsets.

In America, a completely new character is introduced, a detective (Elias Koteas) investigating a supposed Satanic cult. Possibly seeking to add another known face to the US film's marketing strength, the role of the girl's "guardian" is expanded to show more of Richard Jenkins. To accommodate them, details of the original film's neighbouring victims were trimmed, while a scary scene with cats was completely cut out.

Other differences in the US version are matters of style: the Swedish movie had a slower pace, an eerie quality, and its young actors seemed more spectral, their snow-clad setting more sombre and alarming. The English-speaking pre-teens are presented less ominously, most effectively by Kodi Smit-McPhee, an Australian boy who'd shone in The Road.

The evil side of the girl's character is depicted by some strikingly horrific special effects, but Chloe (a tomboy delight in Kick-Ass) Moretz has a tougher acting challenge. She is possibly too pretty to be seen as a credible Lolita and lifetime physical partner for an older man, even when the screenplay shows us that she had never aged.

This above-average (for the USA) vampire/horror movie doesn't match the cinematic qualities of the Swedish original.

Blue valentine

In 2006, Derek Cianfrance won the Chrysler Film Project award of a million US dollars to make his screenplay, Blue Valentine. His critically-acclaimed debut feature, Brother Tied had appeared in 1998; since then he'd only made shorts and pop music documentaries. The new movie was completed in 2009, shown at Sundance in 2010 and purchased by the Weinstein Company. After a stand-off with the censors, it was distributed at the end of 2010, earning several award nominations for its director and two lead actors, Michelle Williams (including Best Actress Oscar) and Ryan Gosling.

Primarily because of their performances, the tale of love and marital breakdown is also a financial success, rewarding the actors for taking on executive-producer roles too. Williams deserved her Oscar nomination, for a character who proves to be an almost pitiful victim of her own mistakes. Gosling's role is possibly too pitiful to be totally credible.

The film juxtaposes scenes from their late teenage romance and during the final days of their marriage less than a decade later. Cindy had been in deep love with a jock at school, Dean was a dropout working for a removal company. He fell in love with her at first sight, she quickly grew to enjoy his zany companionship. When she discovered she was pregnant by the jock, caring Dean proposed, and she accepted a way out that would also release her from her squabbling parents.

He tells a workmate that men marry when they feel they've found the best possible person for their life, whereas women marry the most suitable option. The screenplay illustrates how wives learn to rue their choice while men continue to chase a false dream. Dean is happy just to be married to Cindy, to be a father for her daughter, but that's not enough for Cindy. Her ennui and growing irritation, heightened by a chance meeting with her former college lover, cannot be dispelled by Dean's charm and rebuffed attempt at cunnilingus (the scene, only inferred, that roused the censors).

For almost two hours, there are well-edited close-ups and fly-on-the-wall observation of two actors playing finely off each other, possibly ad-libbing at times, making their characters seem very alive and suffering. That's not enough meat for a filling movie meal, more a depressing appetiser.

Brief crossing

Not so surprisingly, one of cinema's most successful directors of movies with bold sexual themes is a Frenchwoman, Catherine Breillat. Her 2001 movie, Brief Crossing, having been commissioned for French TV, is a short (80 mins) and bitter-sweet tale of inter-generational lust.

A 30-something French-speaking Englishwoman meets a virginal French youth half her age on an overnight ferry to Portsmouth. She has a cabin with twin beds, which she pushes together by the end of the trip. After having a cafeteria meal, cabaret-bar drinks, and exchange of views (hers, mostly) about males and female relationships, the older woman guides him to her cabin, and ends up smiling lovingly. The teenager thinks he's seduced her, loves her, and is loved.

In the early morning, during disembarkment, she slips away, revealing to the audience, and then the young tearful man, that she's a "happily" married woman with a child.

Such a simple plot requires a convincing pair of actors. Sarah Pratt, presumably of English origin, had appeared in some French TV productions. She's stereotypically aloof, with calculating eyes and cynical dialogue, while the youngster, Colombia-born Gilles Guillian (then 18), looks at her with smoldering shy stares and a growing awareness of her teasing interest. Neither of them needed to do much more than express longings and lusts through their eyes, strip for full-frontal moments, and engage in measured sexual simulations. Neither of them added extra depth, or obtained bigger or better roles in the next decade (though Pratt worked for Breillat again on Une Vieille Maitresse in 2007).

The development of their one-night affair during the sea crossing is written and directed well enough by Breillat but it's too clearly a televisual exercise, a dramatic device to present women's socio-political frustrations in a male-dominated world.