no country for old men (d. the coen brothers)

Cormac McCarthy functions in strange territory. Somewhere between Jack London (think of the passage with the wolf at the opening of The Crossing) and Tolstoy. A writer who appears to be able to locate the epic and the spiritual within timeless narratives, but someone whose work retains the popular touch. Furthermore, many of his books occupy the strange territory between the apparent order of the United States and the described lawlessness of Mexico. Drifters bleed across the border (literally in the case of No Country...), driven from the locatable security of the first world to the anonymous safety of the dangerous third. In a country which tends to turn its back on the disparity between its wealth and the poverty of its neighbour, McCarthy is an exception. He knows where the line is and he writes as though he knows what it means to cross it. In his latest book, The Road, the whole world has crossed the line, so much so it's eradicated. The border protects no-one anymore, on either side.

No Country for Old Men is far from his best work. It features a remarkable villain with an unpronounceable name, Anton Chigurh, a great deal of acutely observed violence, and some of McCarthy's least cryptic down-home Texan wisdom. The book's ending is surprising in so far that the writer seems to lose interest in his central narrative, which ends abruptly, and the final section heads off at a tangent to offer a valedictory portrait of Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff who's retiring in the face of the mounting warfare caused by the drugs trade.

The Coen Brothers have adapted the book with a high degree of fidelity. McCarthy's sparse and precise dialogue is lifted wholesale. The film relies on the shifts in the book's narrative for surprise. In an early scene, when Chigurh strangles a cop with his handcuffs on the floor, the camera holds on the scuff marks left on the lino after the struggle, at which point it seems as though the adaptation is going to pay dividends in heightening detail and nuance. Whilst it's true that the Coen bros eye for detail complements McCarthy's precision, it is ultimately less rewarding than might have been anticipated, as the brothers retreat into conservative story telling. They successfully extract the tension from the book, but unfortunately they've selected a text which runs out of tension some time before it reaches its conclusion.

The film has been a critical success. Speaking to someone who didn't know the book, you can see the way in which McCarthy's narrative, in particular the characterisation of Chigurh, might seem surprising and fresh on first acquaintance. Yet one can't help feeling that what the critics are doing are awarding points for competence, rather than cinematic flair. The Coen brothers seem, of late, to have lost their appetite for visual panache and narrative whimsy which made them so compelling when they were at their peak. Perhaps damaged by occasional failures, they've resorted to delivering high-quality, user-friendly product. McCarthy's novel is just about powerful enough in itself to warrant the reverential treatment, but the marriage though functional and effective, is passionless. The film gives glimpses of McCarthy's power, as well as reminders of the Coens' rare talent, but it ultimately fails to take the viewer into the heart of the strange territory both occupy when they are at their most beguiling.

alice in the cities [d wenders]

1974 seems like a long time ago. We know that's where we are from the opening frames when Rudiger Vogler's bell bottoms hone into view beneath the boardwalk. His character, Phil Winter, dresses like an embodiment of a time which has become the territory of kitsch memorial. There are other hints of the way the world has changed: is that a woman smoking behind the protagonists on the Pan-Am flight from New York to Amsterdam? And the in-car phone used by the policeman on the ferry at the end, a slightly lugubrious plot device in such a free-wheeling film, looks curious and unlikely.

Phil Winter spends the first twenty minutes of the film drifting around the United States, taking photos. He's supposed to be writing an article, but the 'images' swallow him up, as he explains to his editor. In one of the few scenes of the film inveighed with any tension, he visits an old girlfriend in New York, looking for a bed for the night, and she throws him out, telling him he's only there to tell her his stories, and he's only doing this to prove to himself that they might be real, the same reason he's taken the photos. Edda Kochl's remarkable cameo as the 'friend' opens the door to another movie Wenders chose not to write, perhaps like the article that Winter's writing and of which we only catch a glimpse. The unwritten film would be the one in which the lead character's neurasthenia is explored and revealed. (There are hints in the film that Winter is an alter-ego for Wenders himself, not least when an announcement is made at Amsterdam airport for 'Mr Wenders' - and for a moment we in the audience think this must be for Mr Winter. Winter's name also seems like an obvious pun on a psychological state.)

However, Wenders chooses not to go down this route. Instead he explores the margins of Winter's condition. The film may be called Alice in the Cities, but it is really about Winter's sense of alienation and drift. (When he goes to see a Chuck Berry concert, the song Wenders' chooses to use is - Driving along in my automobile/ No particular place to go...) Alice in some ways offers the loner a sense of selfhood which nothing else in the vastness of America or Europe has done. Much as he might complain about being stuck with her, and although he says, on occasion, exasperated, do you not think I've got better things to do? - It's clear that he doesn't. In a mutable world, Phil needs something to hang on to, and Alice offers him a hook.

In this sense then, perhaps, 1974 is not quite as distant as the bell-bottoms would suggest. Part of the success and cachet of Alice in the Cities may well have been, at the time, the modernity it embodied, the way in which it suggested the path the future would follow. The film opens with a shot of a plane, going we know not where. The shot pans down to reveal Winter on the beach, taking polaroids. The film ends with a sweeping helicopter shot, panning from Phil and Alice up over the Rhine (strangely reminiscent of the closing shot of Into the Wild). Since the film was made, we have entered the era of globalisation, expanding migration, ever-increasing rootlessness. The solid houses of the Ruhrgebeit, an old man informs Phil, are being demolished. In their place will be built flats and smaller houses (the like of which my parents' once lived in in Essen).

Which finally leads us to Alice, who is nine when the film takes place, and would be in her early forties now. In constructing the film's narrative, Wenders decided that Phil needed a foil to his blankness, someone to offer shape to a character he was reluctant to excavate beyond the image. (For the first twenty minutes of the film, the character of Phil barely speaks, mainly reading signs in his pidgeon English. We never learn about Winter's past or why he ended up in America or even what kind of articles the journalist usually writes). Besides the effectiveness of having a charismatic child character fronting his film, the beauty of playing Alice against Phil is that it means Phil never has to explain anything. Rather than exploring the character from the inside, we slowly piece his personality together from the outside. This is shown through the way he interacts with his companion, sometimes affectionate, sometimes irritable, always learning more about himself in the process. And the reason he feels so at home with Alice, the child, is that she has so much in common with him. She too enjoys drifting, feels herself to be rootless, has no particular sense of place. As comfortable in New York as Oberhausen, Alice possesses an aura of world weary modernity, which is as pertinent now as it must have seemed then. She's nine years old and she's already seen it all.

Alice in the Cities is a picaresque movie, of detail and incident. The only thing I could remember from my previous viewing of it, two decades ago, was the modernistic Wuppertal transport system. It is neither gripping nor taught. It's a movie with no particular place to go. Which engenders the paradox that it goes all over the place, going nowhere. When we leave Alice and Phil on the train to Munich, it seems unlikely that this will actually prove to be their final destination. Who knows where they eventually ended up.

I'm Not There (dir Todd Haynes)

It's several weeks since I frittered away another afternoon in the build-up to Christmas with Haynes' take on the biopic in the depths of Soho. My memories of the movie are already splintered, erratic, imprecise.

Which could be exactly what they're supposed to be. The conceit at the heart of the film, that Dylan is played by half a dozen different actors, is an adventurous hook. Intellectually, it's an effective vantage point. No biopic can capture the complete essence of the star it portrays, so to acknowledge the fiction, and explore it, is a bold but strangely sensible decision.

Haynes knows he's scoring rock 'n roll points by casting a black kid or an australian actress as the legend. The Blanchett scenes ultimately seemed overblown, in the vein of Velvet Goldmine; whilst the Franklin scenes strived for and just about achieved the right level of winsome charm. Every viewer is going to walk away with their own favourite from the assorted Dylan selection; and every fan is likely to find one of the incarnations more convincing than the others. The conceit is liable to be as effective as it is counter-productive - there were some Dylans I was waiting to see more of, and others I could have done without.

All of which is part of the game Haynes is playing with the viewer. The only trouble with all this is the knowingness of the game's author. When Dylan is knowing, it is within the context of an audience which has travelled his journey with him - he's earned his right to tell it like it is. Haynes doesn't yet have that authority, no matter how fine a filmmaker he might be. We end up participating in his Godardian jeux d'esprit, without quite knowing what we're going to get out of it, or whether it's worth our while. Unlike Dylan's songs, there never seems to be any real body behind the film's games, or anything at stake. When Dylan sings: 'It was gravity that pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart', the line is endowed with the power of someone who sounds like they've been to that place we all believe we've been to at some point.

At no point does Haynes connect with his audience in the same way. As a result his film is entertaining but rarely compelling, and another that suffers by comparison with the voice it's paying homage to.

Having said which, the memories are now as splintered as the movie itself; and I did love the Black Panther scene.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (dir. Cristian Mungiu)

By 'eck it's grim up North. Or out East, in this instance. Mungiu's tale is one of austere miserabilsm, which clearly caught the consciences of the pampered Cannes jury, who awarded it the Palme D'Or.

This fact is stressed in the trailer, when a thespian voice declaims the film's Cannes victory. Mungiu is part of the new Romanian cinema boom. His film, which describes the circumstances of an abortion, is cleverly set in a world which almost seems like it might be contemporary, but is actually set in the last days of the Ceausescu tyranny. It's a world where everything is a hassle, and everyone's on the make. Trying to do something as simple as book a hotel room becomes a trial, with the hotel staff acting like they have a mandate from the Politburo to piss everyone off.

Mungiu establishes this world with a sharp eyed camera, which follows Otilia (played with a survivor's verve by Anamaria Marinca) as she goes about trying to help her friend Gaby, who is seeking the abortion. Otilia evades the bus conductors and deals with the hotel staff. She collects the creepy abortionist, Bebe, and does what needs to be done to ensure that the abortion goes ahead.

Bebe is a borderline psychopath, and Vlad Ivanov plays him with an understated menace. It's after he leaves that the film seems to lose direction, unsure whether it's in the genre of psychological horror, as the trailer suggests, or gritty social realism. It plumps more for the latter, with the discarded foetus lying on a bathroom floor acting as a visceral money shot. But even this image looks like it could belong to another genre. Mungiu has seeded various plot twists which are all red herrings - the knife; the missing ID papers etc. The audience's greatest fear is what will happen when Bebe returns, but Mungiu shies away from this as he explores Odilia's dark night of the soul on the streets of a relentlessly menacing but ultimately harmless Bucharest.

Mungiu's skill as a filmmaker is not in doubt. His ability to capture the nuances of social interaction is surgical, notably in the scenes between Odilia and her out-of-his-depth boyfriend. He lets the camera roll to generate a high level of tension in the Bebe scenes, and has no fear of inflicting merciless realism on his audience in the abortion scene. However, the red herrings, rather than adding to the story, in the end get in the way. Odilia's last line to the friend who's dragged her through a night of hell feels like a soft soap pay off. We've been taken to some bleak places, but nothing like as bleak as we'd feared.

Perhaps this is what the Cannes jury appreciated - Mungiu's ultimate good taste. In contrast to a film like Cargo 200, we come away from 4 Months... grateful that our society is supposedly more tender than this bleak vision of Bucharest, but hardly alienated by what we've seen. Mungiu's vision is harsh but never deranged. It represents a clinical, observational eye which mirrors the one we like to think we possess, when we stir ourselves enough to rise from the primordial soup of our materialist lives. The ultimate appeal of the film is the way it triggers our own better natures to engage with the screen, which leaves the cinema goer feeling enlightened by the misery, rather than disturbed by it. As such 4 Months... thrives on the strengths and ultimately succumbs to the weaknesses of social realism, a 'realism' all the more palatable for being set in a long-lost world of monstrous tyranny.

the sacrifice (d. tarkovsky)

I first saw The Sacrifice when I was at university in York, presumably upon its release in 1986 or 87. I used to go to the film club in the large comfortable auditorium, frequently in N's company. The auditorium was built on what was claimed to be the largest artificial lake in Europe, though that now seems doubtful, and word had it that it was sinking, as the direct result of a Boomtown Rats concert the year before I arrived. I vaguely realised that the film I was watching was supposed to be the work of a seminal director, but my memories of that viewing remain vague, and dominated by the spectacular closing scene.

One's reaction to a work of art is always conditioned by the conditions under which one sees it. These conditions might include one's state of mind, the person in whose company one sees or experiences the work, one's age, or countless other factors. It seems pertinent to allude to this earlier watching as the film itself is so self-consciously addressing the issue of ageing. It is the last film Tarkovsky made; it is dedicated to his son; the final scene is of Alexander's young son addressing a question to his father who is being removed in the manner of a modern day Lear. One cannot help but feel that, perhaps like Lear, which it so consciously echoes, this is a film best seen from a reflective perspective, located not so far from the threshold of death; even if that death were merely the starting point for the next round of eternal recurrence (or 'return' in the script's translation) as the mysterious postman, Otto, suggests.

Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are all name-checked in the opening twenty minutes. The parameters are laid down. But the influence of two other northern artists seems stronger. It's impossible not to feel the shadow of Bergman looming over Alexander's struggles. Alexander is played by Erland Josephon, a long term collaborator of Bergman's. His depiction of an isolated soul, seeking not merely to create but actually to become a work of art, references the filmmaker, as does his character's name, an echo of Bergman's childish incarnation in Fanny and Alexander. The other key influence seems to be Chekhov. In some ways The Sacrifice feels like a dystopian reading of Chekhov (through Beckett). Although two of the characters arrive in a nifty BMW, the women wear dresses that look more like something out of turn of the century Russia than an Abba influenced Sweden.

All these influences are brought to bear and, as one of the key moments of the film shows, they all count. The reason the characters are gathered is to celebrate Alexander's birthday. Otto, the postman who seems more like the boatman at the Styx, brings Alexander a large 16th century map of Europe as a present - a present which is a sacrifice, as all presents, he says, should be. They talk about how Europe has altered, and what those early inhabitants might have made of it. All this precedes the film's central tenet: the occurrence of the fabled nuclear strike. Unless Alexander is prepared to sacrifice himself to redeem time and the world, nuclear winter is upon us. In the lead-up to the moment when the world ends, the film explores what it is that will be lost, and what it might be that has brought us to that point.

At the time the film was made, Europe was still the front line of a potential nuclear war. Now, twenty years later, the terms of the chess match have changed. The fear of a third world war, which clearly haunted Tarkovsky, has receded, to be replaced by other millennial fears. The slow, sepia shots of crowds rushing through a devastated street, which punctuate the movie, seem just as pertinent in this era of ever-more-dramatic Hollywood apocalypse movies; or McCarthy's The Road. Alexander's sacrifice may have staved off one damnation, but it hasn't kept the others at bay.

In a film so steeped in Western culture, (this review hasn't mentioned the influence of Leonardo, Pierro della Francesca or Russian icon painters), the latter stages suggest that Tarkovsky perceived another direction for the world to turn. Alexander listens to Japanese music, and wears an oriental cloak, decorated with the Yin and Yang, as he summons up the courage to take the step of destroying his home in order to save the world. His son tends to the tree he has 'created' in a Japanese manner. He carries water to nurture it. This echoes an idea Alexander expresses at the film's opening, as he 'plants' the tree, that if we were to find one ritual to perform every day, at a set time, even were that just to pour a glass from the tap and then throw that water away, it might create a foundation of meaning in our lives.

This notion, redolent of Zen Buddhism, allied to the restoration of faith (those who fail to believe in God are those who have never been desperate enough to need to, Alexander claims as he prays) offer, so the filmmaker seems to suggest, an escape route from the terminal end that centuries of Western culture have created. In burning his home, Alexander destroys his possessions, books, maps and all. There is a way out, but it requires sacrifice.

Tarkovsky's film is no easier to watch twenty years on. It is still a long haul of a movie, demanding the viewer's exhaustive attention. The underlying themes the film explores seem no less pertinent today than they did twenty years ago. The notion of sacrifice, personal, societal and cultural, in the quest for nothing more than survival, seems even more relevant. The conditions under which the film is watched have altered less than time might have lead one to expect.

The lake still may or may not be the largest artificial lake in Europe, (this remains debatable), but the auditorium would still appear to be sinking.

silent light (dir. reygadas)

In Santa Cruz, Bolivia, after a night on the Tren del Muerte, there were Mennonites wandering the streets, looking like something out of an Edward Hopper painting, with their dungarees and wispy beards. They seemed exotic within the context of their exotic locale, and oblivious to this exoticism, as they presumably were.

Silent Light deals with a husband in a Mennonite community who's conducting an affair, and grappling with the consequences of this. It's a film set in Mexico, even though almost all of the dialogue is in the curious German spoken by the community. There's a remarkable moment when Johan, the adulterous husband (a dead ringer for the art critic Robert Hughes), hears a song being played in Spanish on the radio, and starts singing along. At another point his wife brings tacos to the workers in the field. When his wife collapses at the road side a couple of Mexican truckers stop to help. But by and large the film is set in a world of its own, beneath the great rolling sky and the starry night.

This sense of an isolated world within the world must have appealed to Reygadas. The film opens and closes with time lapse sequences of dawn and dusk. It wells up out of the darkness of night, before retreating back there at the close. This gives the film a biblical, elemental quality, which frames the devout Mennonite community Johan belongs to. He has been lead astray, but he is also genuinely in love with Marianne (played with remarkable placidity by Maria Pankratz). He doesn't know if this development in his life has been brought about by God or the devil. Reygadas presents him as a good man in the thrall of greater powers. His father, a preacher, tells him that he would not be in his shoes for anything in the world, and yet he is also envious of him. Later, when the consequences of his actions become clear, Johan's father tells him he cannot hold himself responsible - this has all been ordained.

Underpinning the film's narrative is a latent humanism. None of the characters are unsympathetic, neither the adulterer, his mistress, nor the wife. The film resolutely avoids melodramatic plot developments. (At one point Johan and Marianne sleep together. Johan has left his children with a man in a van. As he approaches the van, looking for them, we fear the worst. But they are fine, laughing in the van, listening to Jacques Brel.) In the end, the plot finds its resolution in an other-worldly twist, which could be seen as evangelical, or magic realism, or both. People are likely to find themselves in situations which are beyond their expectation or rational understanding. And there's not much one can do in that case but trust in God, or fate.

The film's relentlessly slow pace re-affirms this message. Reygadas is never afraid to let the camera linger. He will film an open doorway, with the interior nothing but blackness, and slowly pan in until an image is revealed beyond the darkness. There are things there to be seen, but we need to learn to have the patience to observe them. Our expectations of rapid solutions to vast problems (such as the reason for an affair, or the cause of death, or the existence of God) is presented as naive. Reygadas appears to be encouraging us how to learn how to see oncemore, with new eyes. We stare at a screen and see only darkness. Slowly glimmers of light appear. These give way to the subtle forms of the world, revealed with the rising of the sun. Finally we, the audience, know what we're looking at, and everything is clear.

Cinema, the exercise of training our eyes on a screen lit by silent light, gives us the opportunity to do this. To learn how to look at the world as though it has been made anew.

the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford (d. andrew dominik)

There's an odd moment well over half way through the film when Robert Ford meets a senior politician. Played by a bald-headed man who's recognisable but hard to pin a name on. It turns out to be James Carville, the former Clinton campaign manager. Someone who knows the workings of power inside out. Former figures from the world of politics playing at acting usually look foolish and make the film they've been placed in look foolish too, but Carville doesn't and neither does Dominik's movie. Somehow, in the breadth and weight of it's study of power, fame and destiny, his presence seems appropriate.

The Assassination... comes in at 16o minutes. It's not a jaunty ride. A lot of the most interesting material takes place in the final 15, after Jesse James' death. In the subsequent fate of his killer, Robert Ford, there's a whole other movie lurking. There might be legitimate questions about the conservatism of the script's reluctance to play around with time frames, using a voiceover which feels like the film's weakest link instead. Ford's destiny is inextricably linked to that of the gunslinger he grew up admiring. This instigates a wonderful circularity to the narrative, which could have been explored in a less teleological fashion.

That's about the only criticism that can be levelled at Dominik's epic. Like many non-native directors filming in North America (most of the film was shot in Canada) - Dominik seems to have fallen in love with a vast attritional landscape. The space that's given to the landscape by the cinematography is redolent of Malick, snowy wastes deputising for rippling corn fields. The voiceover is also, perhaps, a nod in the old master's direction. The other spirit hovering over the slow-burning narrative is that of Leone. The creation of atmosphere requires time; language needs to be allowed its richness; tension mounts the longer the note is held.

At it's heart, as the title implies, this is a film about a relationship between two men. Accordingly the film sinks or swims on the strength of the twin lead performances. Pitt's job is the harder. He has to play not merely a posthumous myth, but a living one. Jesse James, as depicted in the film, was a convoluted idol. Ruthless killer and loving family man. It's not easy to pull off these masculine contradictions, but Pitt manages it. And he conveys something more (with its own echoes of Eastwood in Leone's films) - which is that the gunslinger does not excel through speed or courage, but through a knowledge of his fellow man, an ability to read what his enemy is thinking behind the eyes. Jesse James, in Pitt's portrayal, doesn't look like he's ever read a book; but he knows the workings of a man's mind.

However, the film requires more than just a fine performance from Pitt. Casey Affleck as Ford needs to match him. From the moment he first appears, to be scolded by Sam Shepherd, Affleck captures the wistful blend of dreamer and wannabe that Ford may well have been. The performance builds through the film, with the parentless Affleck conveying in the sullen twitch of an eye everything you need to know about the adolescent's reaction to the thing he's grown up loving. The final 15 minutes, after the deed has been done, gives a glimpse of how he could have mastered the more subtle psychological genesis of the child becoming a man damned by his youthful hubris.

Dominik's film rides its ambitions. In a way it shows that what a filmmaker needs to do is attend to the details. Nick Cave's score is suitably powerful, Roger Deakins' cinematography acquires the epic touch that the tale requires. The dialogue is artful, yet convincing. The words smell of damp nights camped out in the woods; or the slip of the tongue that can prove a death sentence. The performances across the board stand up to the presence of the two leads. Once all these and the thousand and one other details are in place, the narrative of how power attracts and corrupts can unfold. In the manner of a 19th century Russian novel, Dominik allows the intranigence of fate to play itself out in the twinned destinies of the idol and the worshipper who becomes a Judas.

the darjeeling limited (dir Wes Anderson)

The camerawork in Anderson's mordant railway road trip ranges from the frenetic to the measured. Robert Yeoman, the DOP, is not scared to use his zoom, and the camera frequently chases a scene around, veering from one point of interest to the next. On the other hand, the film sets up stately set pieces, such as the sequence where the 'mythical' Darjeeling Express, carrying all the movie's characters, trundles past the camera; or within the opening short, where the camera glides around Jason Schwartzman's suite in the Hotel Chevalier in an uninterrupted take; or finally when the three brothers leave a hut in slow motion during the funeral and make their way to a rickshaw.

These variations in style can be interpreted in two closely connected ways. On the one hand as evidence of a playful willingness to experiment. On the other as 'kid in the sweet shop' syndrome.

Anderson's film is dealing with the notion of adults still trying to grow up. The three brothers at the heart of his film live in the shadow of their late father, whose funeral is alluded to in a flashback. Their quest is to find their mother, which they do. She is living in the tiger-infested foothills of the Himalayas, and tells her children that the people there need her more than they do. The children come to some kind of acceptance of this, and end their trip having gained some kind of collective understanding of each other's peculiarities.

The script includes a moment where Owen Wilson's brother responds to an Indian man's question: What are you doing here? With the line - We came on a spiritual journey but it hasn't quite worked out. Anderson and Co are conscious of the issues that their movie generates: the wealthy westerners frolicking in search of their karma in the impoverished backwoods. It's possible that the juxtaposition with the opening short's opulent Paris hotel room is a kind of nose-thumbing to the whole notion of political correctness. In the quest for the self, all rules, including those of cinematography, are there to be broken. The boys get thrown off the train for breaking the rules, but the journey keeps going and in the end they find themselves catching...another train. There will always be more trains.

It is tempting to say that there's something Fitzgeraldian about Anderson. The creation of idealised, flawed icons of americana, with their jazzy clothes, outrageous manners and idiosyncratic wit. But in the end, The Darjeeling Limited feels more like a Waugh novel without the narrative tautness. The self-indulgent emissaries of the latest great power using the exoticism of an alien background to explore their foibles.

In the film's final sequence, the brothers run to catch another train. In their rush to make it, they fling their baggage away in wonderful slow motion. This literal metaphor suggests that they will proceed on their journey lighter in soul and possessions. The scene is a mirror image to the opening sequence of the film, where Bill Murray's hapless businessman runs for the train and is overtaken by the more athletic Adrien Brody, who leaves him standing. In that opening sequence, which uses the slow motion trick for the first time, I felt exhilarated. It felt as though we were about to be taken on a remarkable, revelatory journey. By the time of the closing sequence, my engagement had dwindled. That baggage should have been ditched weeks ago. The slow-motion running still looks pretty, but like a kid in a sweet shop, I'd had one too many liquorice allsorts and the sweetness was starting to pale.

eastern promises (dir. cronenberg)

The film opens with a scene of dramatic violence. A barber tries to convince his son to cut his customer's throat. The son doesn't want to. The barber does it. The director shows the blood emanating from the great tear in the throat. The victim convulses and the audience flinches.

Cronenberg opens his movie with a scene of high drama. By the end, the drama has been extinguished. A child plays with its adopted family. A man sits in the restaurant he now controls. Their stories are far from over, but the film is moving on, and the credits roll.

This contrast between the implied dramatic weight of the film and the actual dramatic weight is curious. It could be interpreted as the director running out of steam, editing together a short cut ending because he wasn't sure how to finish it. However, the pace and the tone feel in keeping with the rest of the film, so it may be something else.

Increasingly, Cronenberg's films come to feel like fables. He has lost interest, if he ever had it, in the mechanics of plot. He creates characters who have a timlessness, belonging to timeless societies. The villains who arrive at the beginning of History of Violence could be from any stage of US history. They arrive like something out of a Western. The Russians from Eastern Promises belong to a secret criminal society that has a mythical, preternatural aura.

Cronenberg doesn't seem interested in the details of the drug smuggling the criminals are involved with. The revelation that Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is an undercover cop, seems incidental. He doesn't even seem interested in the brewing love affair between Mortensen and the fragrant Naomi Watts. What seems to fascinate him nowadays is the notion of how close the forces of anti-sociality, the secret codes of violence, are to our own society. How they are closer than we think, and when they arrive, they have no connection with the world as we see it, and their destructive power is incalculable.

Eastern Promises consciously pulls its punches. The audience knows this because we know how hard it can punch. The scenes of violence establish this - the throat cutting and the bath-house bloodbath. But just as we're anticipating the mother of all finales - it doesn't happen. The child survives and Naomi Watts sits in the garden wearing a pretty dress. Nickolai's takeover of his wing of the Russian mafia is painless, his mentor, Semyon, simply vanishes. It's like the Godfather with the ruthlessness implied but not demonstrated.

Cronenberg's movies no longer have the snap, crackle and pop of his earlier frightners. They are meditative works, where the violence has become a part of the scenery, rather than a means to a dramatic end. London is a grey, damp world in his movie, a land of no promise, and the forces of darkness are lurking, just around the corner.

the band's visit (dir Eran Kolirin)

Kolirin knows how to frame an image. The opening shot shows a man trying to fit a yellow balloon into the front seat of a camper van. We don't know why the man is doing this, nor will we ever learn. The man gets in the van, drives off, and is never seen again. What lies behind the van is a group of eight policemen, members of the police band who have arrived in Israel to perform. They stand there, puzzled, immobile in the their faintly comical powder blue uniforms. The camera has never moved.

This eye for a set-up continues throughout The Band's Visit, lending the film a crafted, dispassionate aesthetic. A military band carrying instruments of various sizes through a dusty desert is a visual treat, and the director is not afraid to spoil us, lingering over their haphazard progress. However, there is more to this dispassionate eye than mere pretty pictures. The danger that the film's narrative runs is that it will become too sachirine. Kolirin resists this with his pared back script and the cast's understated performances.

The film tells the story of a military band who get on the wrong bus and end up in the middle of deepest Israel. They are befriended by Dina, a free-spirited and bored cafe owner, with a curious history, never revealed. There are no more buses, so the band is forced to accept the hospitality she and a friend offer. The next day they leave for the concert. That's it. The drama is all in the culture clash, the coming together of old enemies. In Dina's cafe, one of the policeman hangs his blue hat over a picture of an Israeli tank.

Any hint of sentimentality would undercut the film, and leave it open to charges of implausibility. Wisely, Kolirin's script is as carefully composed, and restrained, as his shot composition. There's no Hollywood ending. The characters don't find it easy to get on with the enemy. They have to negotiate for common ground, scrabble around for moments where they can trust and alight upon the field of their common humanity.

Music helps, nowhere more so than in the scene where three bandsmen sing Summertime lugubriously, in the company of an awkward Israeli family. Perhaps oddly, the other thing that assists them is their lack of a common language. They are forced to resort to English, and in their mutual uncertainty with the second language they find common ground.

You can see why The Band's Visit has been so successful on the international festival circuit. The band finally find their way to the site of their performance, and the film concludes with Tawfiq, the weather-beaten bandleader, singing a traditional Arabic tune. Israeli and Egyptian flags flutter in the background. The hope is tangible: culture alone gives a framework for the possibility of understanding. The most intractable of divisions can be overcome.

However, The Band's Visit's restraint, and gentle pacing, alludes to another truth: that these divisions will not heal in a rapidly edited hurry. They healing must be allowed to proceed at its own pace. It must be handled with due care, and great consideration.