shadow dancer (d james marsh, w tom bradby)

There's something strangely out of kilter about the opening of Marsh's first drama feature. Following a highly predictable opening sequence, we see a young woman getting on a tube, supposedly in the early nineties. However, the tube carriage seems far too modern. Then she gets out of the train, having chosen not to detonate the bomb she was carrying. The station is on the Eastern side of the District Line, (It looks like Mile End) but when she emerges, having conveniently located an unknown exit, she's clearly not in East London. If I were not cognizant with the city, perhaps these details would not have bothered me. But given that I am, it seemed weird that such a prestigious film should have been so sloppy. Particularly as Marsh comes from the world of the doc, where there is nothing except for naturalism. These glitches, and the insipid nature of the plot, meant the whole film steps off on the wrong foot.

Subsequently it seemed to pick up, although, as another critic observed, one wonders why the Riseborough character is so wedded to her red, 'Don't Look Now' coat. The acting is strong and a sense of tension develops over the course of the film as we want the sympathetic mother to escape the cleft stick she's stuck in. The prominent grade lends the film a washed out, despairing look. (I suppose the red coat is supposed to make her stand out for cinematographic reasons, rather than dramatic ones). However, underpinning its eventual competence, which only just overcomes a run-of-the-mill, TV-esque script, is the question of why this film has been made, both on commercial and auteur grounds.

IMDB reveals that Marsh was born in '63. As a result he will have lived through that lost time when the IRA was The Enemy. It all seems so long ago now and the TV footage of Major has a quaint, nostalgic feel. So from a personal point of view, one imagines the filmmaker wanted to connect in some way with that period of his own life and that therein lay the appeal of the project. However, there's a difference between Marsh and Herzog, say, as a documentary filmmaker. Whereas the work of Herzog or, this year, Guzman, is inflected by their personalities, Marsh's work has a more detached feel. This works brilliantly when he unpicks a complex, unlikely story. But if Shadow Dancer is in some ways closer to home, (and if not, why is it being made?) then the lack of a vested interest on the part of the director becomes apparent. The film lacks a visceral connection with the world it depicts. Everything ticks over, but nothing grabs you. These characters (the script/ the world) are insufficiently distinctive to make mere  observation of their actions all that intriguing. The film cries out for something unlikely, or Herzogian. The one slightly vacuous and under-developed twist, which might have helped to turn the story into a Coen Brothers movie, feels like a belated bid to take a radical dramatic direction, but it's all too little, too late. As for the commercial logic of making this movie, it seems sad that a filmmaker as clearly talented as Marsh has not been steered more adroitly towards a story that would have benefited his talents as well as allowing his skills to make more of a mark.

ides of march (d. gerorge clooney, w. clooney, grant heslov, beau willimon)

It's that time of year in the twentieth century's greatest empirical force, when the farrago of selecting the next leader gets under way in earnest. It is, as Cheney might have said, a duck shoot. Candidates line themselves up waiting to be shot down; if they somehow survive, who knows, the title of the most powerful man on the planet could be waiting for them. At the moment, a man called Herman Cain is the surprise leader in the Republican polls, but already his campaign has started to falter amid innuendo and rumour. Who knows: in ten years time he could be a household name (given his political & economic strategy one is inclined to hope not) or he could be mired in obscurity, the answer to a pub quiz question.

It's this curious selection process that the Ides of March focuses on, looking at the course of rival Democratic campaigns as they reach Wintery Ohio, with the knockout blow waiting to be dealt. Who will be the last duck standing: the charismatic but morally compromised Clooney or his anodyne rival whose name is Pullman but who isn't played by Bill Pullman. (Perhaps some kind of in-joke?) This is the backdrop for the story of Stephen Meyers, played by Ryan Gosling, a naif, ambitious, would-be political strategist-guru, who is about to learn the real dirty realities of politics.

Gosling's journey is at the heart of the film and it's his performance that redeems a sometimes verbose script (adapted from Willimon's play). The opening scenes are self-consciously laden with "great" dialogue: ie the kind of dialogue where you can almost see the written words on the page. It's heavy handed and not helped by the uninspiring cinematography. Gosling sleeps with an intern who's in all kinds of trouble before she kills herself. For a moment, as he resorts to speaking on public payphones and the camerawork becomes edgier, it feels as though we're about to enter political thriller territory. But gradually Gosling begins to flex his acting muscles and the latter half of the film is all about his journey towards political anti-karma. Tellingly, it's Gosling's silence which is the most effective thing about the film; the morally compromised outsider, like Iago, who says more saying nothing than he would if he spoke. In contrast to the falseness of the words that the campaigns are made of. Gosling ditches any idealism he might have had, accepts the compromise and joins the bandwagon, which would appear to be rolling all the way to the White House.

There's something rather clunky about Ides of March. It's like a slightly undercooked Three Days of the Condor without the thrills. The polish and the resources and the cleverness have such a sheen that they can't help but feel tawdry. It would be nice to think that this is all part of a bid to authentically capture the vaudeville aspects of the campaign trail, but one suspects that in actuality it's all part of the film's own bid to pick up votes at Oscar time and in the multiplexes. Which is reasonable: that's what Hollywood films are designed to do. It's just that, given the scope of the film's political critique, it feels as though a little bit more cinematic ambition might have been warranted. What redeems Ides of March is Gosling's performance, his increasingly blank face as the film progresses encapsulating the glassy hollowness of all he is caught up in.

midnight in paris (w&d woody allen)

Everything about Allen's career over the course of the last few years has put me off. I haven't seen much, but I was unlucky enough to catch Match Point. It's felt as though this is a sad, slightly undignified twilight, the one time genius peddling his wares where he can and, from the evidence of Match Point, creating picture postcard movies with Harlem Globetrotter casts and dodgy accents which possessed neither the wit nor the depth of his earlier works.

Midnight in Paris doesn't begin auspiciously. A long sequence plays out with documentary style footage of the city. A group of not-particularly-likeable North Americans are staying in a rich person's hotel and seeing the sights. Then, like a ray of light, Owen Wilson, the would-be novelist, is given a line which is vituperatively funny and gratuitously rude about the Tea Party. Politics infiltrating the late, bland Woody Allen? It's a promising sign. Soon afterwards, the narrative conceit kicks in, the handbrake is off, and the film turns into a delirious late-Allen masterclass.

The conceit is a simple one. Which is that Wilson discovers that if he waits on the right corner at midnight, he'll be whisked back in time to the twenties. Where he gets to hang out with all the greats. Allen has already mined this vein with Zelig, but here he incorporates it into a subtler, sadder narrative. Wilson's character, Gil, dreams of living in this epoch, when the US met Europe, when art still seemed to have a value greater than mere commercialism. And all of a sudden his dreams come true.

The conceit allows Allen to get his funny bone back. The innately comic scenario of Gil knowing things about Scott, Ernest, Zelda, Pablo, Bunuel and their ilk is mined for all it's worth. Wilson deadpans like a better-looking, younger Allen. Part of Allen's problem is that his films have never seemed complete without his presence, and the leading man all too often offers a version of Allen-lite. But Wilson has enough goofiness and character to pull the role off.

A lot of the lines are classic Allen and the ambition of the narrative is a throwback to his halcyon days, taking a real risk which pays off. There's another level to Midnight in Paris which is more subversive still, speaking to the audience not so much about the past as the present. Back in the real world, whilst Gil dreams of living in Paris, his wife wants to move to Malibu. Her parents are rich and sour. They go and see US movies which they can't remember the next day and the main attraction of Paris is its capacity for supplying antiques to furnish their homes they can't find in the US. Gil, intoxicated by the city, is pitched in direct conflict with his new family, and the consequences ring true.

Meanwhile, the film playfully reveals to Gil that you can't live your life stuck in nostalgia. The sharp script allows itself to follow through the logic of its conceit, revealing that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, even when you've magically been transported there. The thwarted love affair between Wilson and Cotillard has echoes of Allen's great romances: love is a zero-sum game, where everyone's liable to end up being a loser.

You won't see another movie like Midnight in Paris, certainly not in the English language, because very few writer-directors are given the budget to indulge their whims and intellectual games in the way that Allen is given license to. He's written a script which is entertaining, effortlessly funny, wistful and subversive. Then he's filmed it with real vigour. Those who came to bury him, not to praise him, myself included, have egg on their faces. 

point blank (d fred cavayé, w cavayé & lemans)

Someone somewhere must have known when allocating the English Language title of this film that it was thereby alluding to another film made in the late 60s by John Boorman. Perhaps it was a marketing exec, reasoning that this might drag in punters through association, subliminal or otherwise. If that is the case, one can only say, as ever, don't listen to the marketing men. Next they'll be calling any old remake 'The Italian Job', perpetrating the spurious notion that it's on a par with the original, etc etc.

It's a curious aspect of French cinematic culture that they love a corny old policier. It's a fierce strand that has run through the country's cinema over the course of fifty years, perhaps more. Godard played around with it, and before that Becker and Melville created their classics. Much of Chabrol's work is crime drama, and in recent years there's been the likes of Mesrine, various Audiard movies, Tavernier movies... The list goes on. Much of this is self-consciously inspired by or in reaction to US culture. It's almost as though there's a perceived need to provide a counterweight to the notion that the French are a bunch of arty, philosophical types, who make noodly films and refuse to invade Iraq.

Cavayé's film belongs to this tradition. Unfortunately, when the French ape the US, like almost all apeing of other cultures, it doesn't do anyone any favours. Cavayé appears in Point Blank to be attempting to make a rollicking, action adventure movie with twists and turns galore, a kind of on-speed version of 24, only with a mature 'adult' relationship at its core. The consequences are not hard to guess. This is like a steak-frites cooked by Macdonalds, with neither the horrific trashiness of the latter (something which at his best, Tarantino pulled off) or the quality control of the former.

Of course, the French crime dramas which work are those which are unafraid to drop in a dash of philosophy/ introspection. Le Samourai is a small masterpiece; The Prophet is perhaps a little self-consciously brilliant, but has its particular brand of brilliance none-the-less. The French can do crime drama; they just need to keep to their own titles and inject it with a French sensibility (whatever that means) rather than a heavy dose of ketchup.

animal kingdom (d. david michôd)

I don't know if this is down to my state of mind at the moment or the film itself. Animal Kingdom's merits as a film are indisputable. The acting is impressive, the story-telling is effective, there's a bleached deadness to the grade and sufficient longeurs in the editing to allow the film to breathe. I was engaged throughout. Yet even as I left the cinema the film had already washed over me and now, less than two days since seeing it, I struggle to recollect any overwhelming feeling in response to it. As I say, I don't know if this is due to the film or my own personal sense of current alienation. Perhaps, being a film that in some ways deals with the notion of alienation, through an impressive central performance from James Frecheville, it hit a nerve that is partially dead.

There's a lot of Scorcese in the background in the tale of a crime family from the Melbourne suburbs. Scorcese gets everywhere these days. You can't move for Scorcese. The slow-motion takes, reminiscent of Mean Streets, were one of the film's weaker tropes. However, early Scorcese works not just because of its vivid technical qualities, but also because of the film-makers ability to present his world, the edges of Little Italy. In a similar way, Michod captures the low-level Anglo-Saxon tropicality of an Australian suburb. Seemingly the antithesis to gloomy , rainy England, in actuality Australia sometimes feels like a Platonic experiment at the creation of a sun-bleached nirvana that has gone weirdly off the rails. And Michod gets to grip with this sense of unease, showing us a society where sociopaths determine social structures and no-one can escape their influence.

As I say, there's much to admire in this film. I have a feeling Michod will make more films and become successful. It will be interesting to see if he stays in his native land or not. The offers will be flooding in. Making a good crime thriller is one of the hardest things to do. The audience doesn't just have to buy into the actions of characters at odds with society; they also have to believe in their world. Animal Kingdom achieves all that. Even if it leaves you as numb as J, it's monosyllabic protagonist, a young man whose future seems doomed both before the film begins and after the credits have rolled.

inception (w&d nolan)

It's always interesting to read the critical reaction to films, particularly those that are ostentatiously clever. When that occurs, the tendency of the clever critic appears to be resist the attempts of the clever filmmaker to demonstrate his or her cleverness. The very word 'clever' becomes something of an insult. Hence, in the media I read, and the comments that are appended to that media, the better half is using words like 'pretentious', 'emperor's' 'new' 'clothes', and so on. As though there is some debate over the cinematic merits of the film, and its ambition. Christopher Nolan, you're no Stanley Kubrick, seems to be the jist of things.

So what? That's like telling Tendulkar he's no Bradman. The carpers create a mental logic which accords with a vision of the world they seek to project. Which would no doubt delight Nolan, who if he does anything in this film, demonstrates an ability to explore the concept of phenomenology. There are flaws a plenty in Inception. The snow-dream lacks the poetry it aspires to; the explosions go on for to long; some of the dialogue is unintentionally comical (although there are hints of humour in the film, something one doesn't normally associate with the director, and there may be a tongue in cheek aspect to some of its more grandiose lines); and finally, and perhaps most pertinently, there's a distinct lack of what some would call 'emotional depth.' This is not the Dardennes brothers neither, and it would be true to say the Gondry/ Kaufmann film covered similar terrain with more emotionally verve.

Do these problems matter? Is not every movie susceptible to the accusation that is in some way lacking? Of course they are. Casablanca lacks a good car chase. The Conversation lacks Ingrid Bergman. Performance lacks social realism. And so on. On the other hand, if one looks at Inception in terms of what it does...

There seems to me little doubt it's a film that will become embedded in people's dream of what cinema can achieve. It will provoke an absurd number of PhD theses. It will be talked about over chapatis or cream teas or masitas for years to come. Because what Nolan succeeds in doing is stimulate the mind. He pulls off a seemingly hyper-complex premise. (Incidentally, even if he has apparently been working on the script for a decade (which is not as long as it sounds, in dream time), I suspect he might also have been influenced by the equally bonkers but slightly less comprehensible Primer.) He makes his audience not only think, but enjoy thinking. By which he reminds us of the pleasures of the mind, something we are all to prone too forget.

As The Prestige showed, Nolan knows he's a showman, and it's all trickery. In reality he has less pretension than many seem to want to attribute to him. Like another master-spinner of tall tales, Borges, his work aims to seduce the mind rather than the heart. But his facility for achieving this reminds us, if this is not too pretentious, that the mind is an organ of the body, like the heart, one that craves stimulation and love, without the gift of which we are in danger of festering. Nolan does all that cinema is capable of: he wakes us up, and reminds that even if it's all a dream, we are, indeed, alive, waking dreamers, blessed by our capacity to perceive the world around us.

mesrine part 1 killer instinct (d. richet; w. mesrine & dafri)

The biopic. Currently the French seem to be churning them out. I've missed Coco Before Chanel, but the promise of Cassel, one of the great screen actors of today, lured me in to see Mesrine. That and the self-avowedly boy-sy subject matter. Gangster flicks seem more attractive in French.

The opening shots give the appearance of a film that looks like it knows what it's doing. Split screen, Cassel in some kind of fat disguise, a bubbly French chick. But at the same time, whilst the sequence appears to be suave and composed, not a lot is actually disclosed here, a tension is summoned and then more or less exhausted as the titles roll. Then the action jump cuts to a lean young Cassel, with a neat tache, in Algeria, and its all hand held cameras and a kind of Gaspar Noe tension. Then Cassel's back in France and the journey to becoming public enemy number one begins in earnest. And continues. And continues. Mesrine seduces a pretty woman with his gallic charm. Then another. And another. And so on. Mesrine uses his gallic charm to get out of a scrape. And again. Mesrine kills someone. And again. And then he does it in Canada.

It feels as though there's two main problems with Mesrine, Killer Instinct (if we discount the corny title). The first is the curse of the biopic: a script which sprawls, trying to grab all the best bits and thereby only succeeding in diluting them. So you end with an insipid trawl through the protagonist's life, with no narrative focus and a steadily declining return of interest. Secondly, it doesn't look like Richet really knows what kind of a movie he wants to make. At moments there's an adventurous Scorceseian camera, roving round the room, implicating menace or emphasising mood. But these are against the grain, and on the whole it's conservatively shot, with static, slightly theatrical set-ups. Add to this the issue of the script's (and perhaps Cassel's) desire to have Mesrine played all ends up - lconic charmer, psychotic nutter, a family man who has no qualms sticking a gun in his wife's mouth. Again, there's a suspicion that those concerned have been watching Scorcese, including Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino, but Cassel's portrayal has none of the 'he's-going-to-lose-it-any-moment' of Scorcese's protagonists. Cassel is always too cool, too in control.

Mesrine has been critically lauded, spoken of in the same breath as Riffifi and Cercle Rouge and other iconic crime movies of French cinema. It doesn't deserve to be. Mesrine, Killer Instinct never succeeds in throwing off the shackles of the biopic, as though it's hobbling along with ankles chained and wrists hoping one day to be released from the cuffs.

slumdog millionaire (d. danny boyle, w. simon beaufoy)

There's a short interview on the Guardian website with Boyle, where he says that he doesn't want Slumdog to become this year's Mamma Mia, suggesting that any audience looking for a feelgood movie is going to find the first hour of the film hard work. It seems to me, in saying this, he's identifying the complex conundrum at the heart of the work, which we'll get to in a moment.

Firstly, though, let's talk about the grade. Boyle also mentions in the interview how much he loves digital film making. It's not every day you watch a film and get excited by the grade, more or less the last thing to occur in the film-making process. After the footage has been shot, assembled, sound mixed, comes the grade, the process whereby the pictures themselves are enhanced and an overall look can be imposed. Slumdog is a luscious visual fest. Chillies glow hyper-red; the golden hue of an evening interview room is hyper-golden. This is a world saturated in colours which seem larger than life. The colours heighten everything, giving the film a vigorous, energetic beauty which matches Anthony Dod Mantle's percussive cinematography. Boyle manipulates all the technical tools at his disposal to impressive effect, cajoling the technology to drive the narrative forwards.

The narrative is one of those too-good-to-be-true stories, both a screenplay and a marketing perfect storm. It's impossible not to admire the chutzpah of Celador: having planted themselves on the film-making landscape through the money laid by their golden goose, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, they then discover a novel manufactured entirely around their product, and turn it into a blockbuster which not only works cinematically but also re-invigorates a flagging core brand. The simple structure of each answer Jamal giving as he climbs the Millionaire ladder tying into his personal history is a wonderfully effective piece of storytelling, allowing the narrative to flit backwards and forwards in time. Beaufoy lashes this into shape, keeping the pace up, even if the film descends towards cliche in its treatment of the fraternal relationship. In the list of Slumdog's antecedents, The Full Monty is the fairy godmother. Having learnt from the rather more downbeat Yasmin, Beaufoy has gone back to the positive messages which made his name, and whilst Slumdog is very much a testament to Boyle's directorial facility, it owes a lot to Beaufoy's feelgood muscles.

Which brings us back to Mamma Mia. And Los Olvidados, ie neo-realism. And a far wider discussion which I shall try to address as succinctly as possible, raising issues rather than answering questions.

Slumdog is quite obviously a feelgood movie. The guy gets the girl, and the money, and a whole nation is delighted for him. The guy, Jamal, played with a perfect downbeat insouciance by Dev Patel, is a sympathetic hero who goes on a classic journey, encapsulated by the film's title. We want him to succeed and he does. So why should Boyle be looking to play this down? 

The director talks about how he went to film in the real Mumbai slums, surprising his Indian crew, who normally build slums when they need them. This is a token of the film's authenticity. It opens with a dynamic chase sequence, as Jamal and his brother flee the police.  The brothers' mother is killed by a religious mob. They end up living on a rubbish dump. They are slumdogs, and the audience is invited into their home. This is neo-realist territory, but Boyle's filmmaking is anything but low-key. If the experience of watching Slumdog has anything to do with living in the slums of Mumbai, its purely an accident of time and place. In Boyle's version, life there is an endless riot of escapades and adventures; losing a parent here or there is a glitch to be shrugged off as you get on with the business of living in this heightened, hyperactive environment. Even Jamal's police torturers end up seeming like people you wouldn't mind hanging out with for a while, basically jovial fellows who just happen to have a car battery and some jump leads lying around. (Irfan Khan's performance, to be fair, suggests layers of subtlety which the film by and large avoids.)

The feelgood narrative kicks in, (including the only time Ricky Ponting's likely to be happy he's scored less centuries than Hobbs), and the film heads towards a Holly/Bolly ending, the final dance sequence a splendidly throwaway feather on its cap. The perils of poverty are left behind, and the whole world can delight in the power of Celador to make dreams come true. 

I'm not sure what I think about all this. On the one hand, it seems remarkable and impressive that Boyle, Beaufoy and Celador can create a globalised product out of Mumbai. Whilst Bollywood has a global reach, its likely that Slumdog will infiltrate places no Bollywood movie can. (And the film's affectionate nods towards Bollywood felt appropriate.) In a globalised world, there's no reason why the majority of international film stories should feature white casts and suburban lawns (or crinolines). Boyle, who seems to have been re-energised as a filmmaker by his bold move, has created a film which might one day stand in the pantheon of the great feel-good movies, with not a star in sight. 

On the other, there's a hint of colonialism. Not so much with the fact that a group of Brits have returned to India and used the environment to make a film there; but in the ludicrously wish-fulfilling nature of the narrative they've employed. One which would appear to re-affirm the wonderful Western dream which Celador is founded on: we can all become millionaires, no matter where we're born. We just need to learn how to find the right answers and the world can be our oyster.

hunger (d. steve mcqueen, w. mcqueen & enda walsh)

There was only one other audience member at the Coronet for the afternoon screening of Hunger. A man who chuckled to himself for no apparent reason, before engaging on muttered asides. He was four rows behind me, and when I turned around to look at him I thought for a moment it might have been McQueen himself, chuckling at moments in his artfully grim movie which no-one else was going to find funny. It wasn't, and in the end the asides began to feel a little menacing, and I moved to a seat further back.

It's slightly strange being part of an audience of two in a cinema, and as the film opened, I thought for the first time ever about the notion of cinema as prison - a confined space to which you are sentenced for the duration. For crimes you may or may not have committed. Whilst this is, natch, a fanciful, almost Frenchian piece of thinking, it's also testament to the tactile effectiveness of McQueen's film-making. Sound, colour and cinematography are used with the kind of inventiveness you'd hope an artist would provide to convey the realities of being in the Maze prison of the early 80's (and the pertinence of this realisation in terms of Guantanamo, Baghram etc, whilst never stated feels implicit). The director uses long takes and sparse dialogue to assemble (more Frenchiness) a powerful rendition of an inhumane system seeking to break its inhabitants' spirit and resistance.

The film's narrative structure is refreshingly unorthodox. The opening section describes the dirty protest and the state violence. At first it seems as though two stories are going to be counterpointed, as the life of a prison officer is dovetailed with the experiences of a new IRA prisoner. However, once Bobby Sands is introduced, he gradually comes to displace everyone else. The prison officer is shot, without the audience ever having got to know him, and the young prisoner fades out of the narrative. The film hinges on a long dialogue sequence between Sands and a Catholic priest, as the IRA man confesses, if you like, his reasons for embarking on his hunger strike. I'd been told this sequence, mostly filmed as a single take, is seventeen minutes long, and some had suggested that was pushing it. Walsh's writing is showcased, a bit like a Roach drum solo in a Coltrane track. It feels as though the intention is to create some kind of dissonance, in suddenly introducing so many words in a film of so few. This won't be everyone's cup of tea (dissonance isn't), but I found myself gripped. Apart from the fact it's a great piece of writing, McQueen's use of Walsh's words accentuates their value. Whilst McQueen's filmmaking has built up a visceral picture of the Maze, words are needed to convey the political context and also, to an extent, the psychological motivation for men to live in their own shit, as well as starve themselves to death. Language can do this in a way that images can't, and if the film has succeeded in taking you into the Maze, then you want to know why you're there, and the revelation of this information is as gripping as anything else in the film.

The final section of the narrative deals with Sands' hunger and death, and is entirely focused on him. Perhaps oddly, this felt less compelling that what had gone before. The priest in the dialogue accuses Sands of seeking martyrdom, an accusation he refutes, but the film flirts with imagery which comes straight out of the Christian iconography of sainthood. One scene in particular, when Sands' withered body is carried by a large prison officer, looks like a Pieta, and the film's concentration on the remarkable transformation of the actor Michael Fassbender's body seemed something of a distraction. (Hints of De Niro as La Motta and other noted pieces of body-acting). The transformation impies a mutation from the physical to a spiritual state, offering echoes of portraits of Saint Sebastian, the film dwelling on the Sands's sores and emaciation rather than any psychological suffering.

No matter how this last sequence affects the viewer, it's further testament to Hunger's broad agenda. This is a film about politics, but also history. The dirty protest and the hunger strikes that accompanied it are distant memories today. The IRA campaign, which for all of my youth was considered the greatest threat to civil life in the UK, has been almost forgotten. As well as reminding us of how our fears have been replaced, McQueen's film and Walsh's script remind us how it was always a part of the political process that what exactly was going on in the Maze, and who these people were, remained obscure. (Again the resonances with recent history are powerful.) Hunger opens the doors of the prison and lets us in on an old nightmare.

The number of levels McQueen's film operates on reveals a filmmaker who's both ambitious and dexterous. In addition to its political-historical agenda, Hunger is also an exploration of the relative and complementary potency of language and image, twin components of cinema's art. There are some points of comparison with Schnabel's Diving Bell and Butterfly, another piece created by an artist taking advantage of the full palette of cinema and using the restrictions of imprisonment as a creative impetus. It is to be hoped that Hunger gets good audiences, in spite of its challenging material and intransigent artistry, which won't be to everyone's tastes.

The McQueen lookalike received a phone call somewhere towards the end of the long dialogue. He got up and ambled to the back of the cinema where he took the call, making arrangements for his future. I don't think he was talking to Spielberg or Weinstein, but lets hope that someone with some film-money is talking to the real McQueen, because it will be fascinating to see what he does next.

linha de passe (d. walter salles & daniela thomas; w. thomas & george moura)

What no flip flops? Salles' latest, co-directed film stakes out its intentions to buck the Brazil cliches by setting itself firstly in Sao Paulo, and secondly, in the Winter. The film is composed of four chapters, straightforwardly named after the months June to September, when, in the lower latitudes of Brazil, it gets cold. The film itself appears to have been graded with a muted wash, permeated with whites and greys, deliberately creating an antidote to notions of Brazil as a colour-filled, sun splashed playground. The dourness extends to the casting: the mother of the four boys whose story the film tells, Cleuza, played with fag-smoking chutzpah by Sandra Corveloni, has a hard, masculine face and wears plain clothes. The only real colour in the piece appears to be the bright orange football boots that are given to her eldest son by her employer's kid in exchange for him appearing as a ringer in the rich boys' team.

The films of Salles' I've seen, including Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, tend to flavour their portrayals of poverty with a dash of sentimentalism. Personally, I could have lived without Ernesto making his heroic swim across the river at the end of Motorcycle Diaries, and the outrageous beauty of that film's cinematography sometimes seemed to be at odds with the issues it claimed to be addressing. In the end, Salles' Guevara seemed more than suitable for Western consumption, too close to the image that sells everything from bars to T-shirts for comfort. There was an anodyne purity in the portrayal, a far cry from the asthmatic terrorist he was perceived as when alive.

With Linha de Passe it feels as though Salles is doing everything he can to rein his sentimentalism in, (perhaps aided by the input of Thomas?). In a simple but effective piece of storytelling, the narrative follows the fortunes of Cleuza's four sons over the Winter. Without laying on the drama, it tries to show how people living in Sao Paulo's sprawling favelas survive. When Dario goes to register for his football trial and says where he's from, he's asked where that is, to which he replies 'Sao Paulo'. It as though the film is seeking to chart the invisible towns that lurk within the megalopolis. Of the four stories, one ends optimistically, two in crime, and the last with the youngest son driving into an undetermined future. If the narrative is somewhat schematic, with the brothers' fates never overlapping, the film succeeds in immersing itself so thoroughly in their respective stories that it's never in danger of being predictable. The only certainty in the brothers' lives is that, at the end of the night, they will find their way back to the home their mother singlehandly maintains.

Sao Paulo is famous for not being beautiful. Salles and Thomas extract every ounce of this lack of beauty. When Dinho goes to the river to participate in the baptism, it feels like its the first time we've seen a tree in the whole film. The series of random bus fires which fascinate Reginaldo, the youngest brother, contribute to the sense of a perilous man-made environment which the brothers have been born to inhabit. Linha de Passe succeeds in illustrating how people survive in this world, and how they break in it too. It's a doggedly anti-glamorous piece of film-making, and all the more effective for it.

man on wire (d. james marsh)

This is another film that I hadn't really wanted to see. But Tuesday afternoons at the Coronet cost a princely £3.50, so I made the effort and crossed the tracks. So many people had recommended the film that I was wary of it, fearing my perverse streak would mean I therefore wouldn't like it.

It's good to be proved wrong. Marsh's film is a minor masterpiece. It's a strangely moving documentary, based on a quite remarkable story. Not for the first time this year I sat in the Coronet and wiped the odd tear out of my eye.

The film is an account of Phillipe Petit's quixotic mission to walk on a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Straightaway, this gives it a poignancy, and the detailed account of how Petit and his team planned and executed the stunt has strange echoes of both terrorist attacks on the building, as though it was made to be the object of subversive attack. Petit's relationship with the building is almost mystical - from the way he describes it, it was the building itself which prompted him to take up his eccentric vocation. In a way his tightrope walking stunts are reminiscent of the Situationists, or even the work of an artist like Christo. Because, what is clear from the account of the three missions he accomplished, these events were works of art, and Petit was an artist, who used the wire as his canvas. (There's remarkable footage of the NY cop who apprehended Petit, saying that he was 'a tightrope dancer, you couldn't call him a walker'.)

The absurd uselessness of Petit's stunts, and the dedication with which his team helped him to accomplish them, feels like an exploration of man's potential. The image of a man, walking a tightrope in the clouds, is angelic, reminiscent of Hamlet's lines about form and infinite faculty. Another contrasting image, from a similar time, would be Armstrong walking on the moon, and Petit's achievement seems no less remarkable than NASA's. However, unlike NASA, the Frenchman had the back-up of a comical bunch of amateurs to facilitate his mission, something that makes it all the more poignant: it is possible to achieve your dreams, with next to nothing, if you are only willing to believe.

Marsh's film knits the narrative together beautifully. The interviews with Petit and his former companions, guardians of the secret of their achievement, help to keep the narrative flowing, and ground the astral story in its human context. When Petit's friend and the project manager, Albert, breaks down on camera, it's a moment which reveals the immensity of what they achieved, as well as the tragedy of this then placing everything that will follow in its shadow.

Marsh is blessed by some remarkable archive footage of Petit, his girlfriend Annie, and his accomplices, suggesting that Petit knew full well he was readying himself for some kind of immortality. Yet it's fascinating to see that when the walk between the towers takes place, there's no video of it, only stills of a man in his flared black trousers, carrying the white balancing stick, framed against the clouds. It feels better this way. Film could never have done justice to the wonder of the moment; for this was an event that is, and of course now always shall be, unreproducible.

the diving bell and the butterfly [d. schnabel]

I've been trying to work out why I found this film so powerful. What it was doing that, so far as I was concerned, made it work so well. I went of a Sunday afternoon, walking across the tracks to Notting Hill, feeling on a beautiful day as though this was a film I ought to be seeing rather than one I had a desperate need to see. It caught me out like a southpaw, I was looking for a soft right, and got whacked with a jackhammer left.

The opening ten minutes are arresting, but also somewhat ennervating. In advance I'd been thinking about Schnabel's 'painterly eye'. The film is indeed beautiful. But this is a rough beauty, in and out of focus, scavenging colour and form. The trouble with beauty in cinema is that it can all too easily leave one cold. Pretty pictures are all very well, but if they are not arresting, then they might as well be ugly. What Schnabel is dealing with is not beauty, but perception.

Which is the source of beauty, in the end. There is a reason Jean Dominique Bauby's book works so well in the hands of a painterly director. Bauby's book, at the end, is a celebration of perception. Once again, (cf Reygadas's Silent Light) there is a metaphor for cinema itself at the heart of the film. Bauby's perception of life mirrors our perception of the film: we observe but cannot participate.

For the opening ten minutes at least. Which is enough to establish our identification with the paralysed protagonist. Later in the film, Bauby says he has two things going for him - imagination and memory. However, with memory comes the knowledge of loss, which is ultimately what makes this film so heart-rending. Bauby has to learn to live with the knowledge of that which he has had and shall never have again. Something we all have to do at some stage in our lives, if not in such dramatic circumstances as the film's protagonist. Likewise, we all use our imagination as an escape valve. Bauby's humanity seems hightened by his catastrophe rather than belittled by it. The distortion between physical frailty and mental fecundity provokes an increased understanding of what it means to be alive in this world.

Mathieu Amalric's performance at the heart of the film breathes life into these ideas. Playing someone afflicted by illness, be that mental or physical, often brings out the star in an actor. Amalric does remarkable things with nothing more than a roving eye, but beyond all this his performance is created by his voice, the inner voice of Bauby. The pitch of a voice often tells more about a performance than anything else. A director cannot tweak a voice, and the actor cannot hide it behind his or her attractiveness or art. The character of Bauby needs the voice to be just right, because this is what reveals his humanity, his sense of self. Amalric's delivery is beautifully weighted, as varied as a Warne over but steady as McGrath. All the humour, cynicism and pathos of the man he portrays is captured, whether you speak French or not.

Again, this voice is an article of perception, both for the speaker, and us, the listener. Schnabel is bold enough to let the voice, over which he has so little control, speak for itself. It's his surprising reticence as a director which allows the film to work. The edits within the film are sharp and unsentimental. The effects are almost always to the benefit of the narrative, as the film flowers from its opening constrained Bauby-eyed view to the tragedy of the final car journey, the one time the camera is truly allowed off the leash as it pirrouetes through a Parisian sky. Schnabel does the simple things well, such as cutting from Bauby to his speech therapist after Bauby's father's final call, allowing the emotion that wells through the scene to be released in her tears.

Finally, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly succeeds not because of its ability to elicit emotion, but through its humour. Humour is a touchstone of common humanity. Bauby is an up-to-the-minute Beckett character, trapped in his physical self. His powerlessness is that of an infant. Yet he retains the ability to find his predicament funny. One of the smartest scenes occurs when a telephone is delivered to his room and the workmen laugh at the man who can't speak being given a telephone. His speech therapist chides them, but Bauby laughs with them.

I'm not sure I've got anywhere near to the root of discovering why this film is so powerful. It is about perception, the notion of humanity, it is beautifully directed, remarkably well acted, it is funny, it's sad, it makes 'em laugh, it makes 'em cry. All this and yet, as with any cinema that really works, the sum is so much greater than the parts. All the critic can do is break the film down into its constituent elements, some of which s/he might get right, some wrong. A modest exploration of something which has been honed and worked over for years. And in this case, it is not just the film which has been worked over, but the book as well. Doubtless, most of the elements of Schnabel's film which make it so powerful are to be found within Bauby's book. Yet the director brings his own eye to that book, he mediates it through his perception. The marriage of Bauby's blinking brilliance and Schnabel's flashy modesty have produced something out of the ordinary.

When I left the cinema day had turned to night. I walked back to my side of the tracks feeling exhausted and alive.

into the wild (dir. Sean Penn)

A lot happens in the final few minutes of Into The Wild. The hero, Christopher McCandless dies an excrutiating death and communes with his parents. Most of the characters he's met along the way are shown in flashes, having some kind of positive experience. A helicopter shot pulls away from the Magic Bus, last resting place of McCandless, and spins off into the sky. Finally, a still of the real McCandless is shown, looking uncannily like the one we've been watching for the past two hours and twenty minutes, played by Emile Hirsch.

For a slow moving film, it's a busy ending, and in many ways it seems to undercut the pathos of McCandless' sad demise. It's practically screaming at its audience: He Didn't Die in Vain!

Which brings us on to the God question. Rainey, the hippie who befriends the hero early on, asks him playfully if he's not Jesus - and suggests he might like to walk on water. At this point we know he's just a mixed up kid who's got the wandering bug, so the remark's a joke. But it's a joke which seems to take over the film. McCandless wanders like a saint through the city, rejecting the way it corrupts the soul. He displays a strong asexuality, refusing the advances of a beautiful soul mate either because she's only sixteen (an unlikely prohibition for this free spirit) or because he's truly so unworldly that he doesn't do sex. He preaches on the mount, talking to the old timer who's befriended him about how God is in everything. And, the final sequence seems to be suggesting, in the end he comes face to face with God, and his quest, which has now become spiritual, has blessed the lives of all he's touched.

The God undercurrents running through Into The Wild lend Penn's story a portentousness which obscures its charm. (The scene where McCandless climbs a mountain and screams in unison with nature is oddly reminiscent of DeCaprio's King of the World moment). The story is interesting enough without the need for the syrup.

In another way, Into The Wild is Penn doing a Herzog movie. McCandless is stepbrother to Timothy Tredwell. At one point a bear saunters past him, perhaps on its way to devouring Tim, passing up the tramp's skin and bones. At another, McCandless drags a boat, in this case a canoe, up a mountain, a la Fitzcarraldo. Penn appears to be aspiring to the purism of a Herzog epic. The film has the same scale, the same episodic narrative structure as a grand Herzog opus. And yet - it never has the roughness. It looks pretty. Hirsch is no Kinski. He's a puppy of a saint, all gentle love and good vibes. Even in his death throes he looks like he could have been the Ralph Lauren model that his alter-ego, spotted in an LA bar, might be.

These contradictions swim around Penn's enjoyable movie. In spite of the film and its hero's love of solitude, expressed through a rousing soundtrack and some sweeping Alaskan cinematography by Eric Gautier, it's Alexander Supertramp's encounters with the William Carlos William's underbelly of American society that bring the film to life and lend meaning to his experiences, something the narrative suggests he belatedly came to understand. For all its inclinations to be a serious investigation (in the shadow of Tolstoy and Thoreau), of the meaning of man in modern society, the tension between nature and civilisation - in the end Into The Wild works most effectively as a gently comedic character piece, in the vein of Fielding or Cervantes. Penn has an actor's eye for characterisation, from the crazy Danes to the police ranger on the phone who tells the hero he can't paddle his canoe.

The final sequence pays homage to these characters, acknowledging their importance within the hero's life but also within the narrative. The dilemma between the societal impulse and the quest to find the natural man is apparent in both film and character. Is it appropriate to end a film which has been exploring the values of nature and solitude with a gargantuan helicopter shot, redolent of the extremes of societal technology? Whilst one's instinct might be to say - no way - in practice it has a peculiar effectiveness. The film wants to have its cake and eat it, and maybe that works. Like McCandless, it critiques American society for its venal divisions and destructive urge to wealth; but also praises it for its family values and can-do freedoms. Perhaps this is the true contradiction at the heart of McCandless's twin journeys to Alaska and death. In which case Penn has done a fine job in rendering its authenticity: helicopter shots, god complex and all.