Season 2003/4

Rabbit Proof Fence

In 1901 the Australian government built a transcontinental fence in Western Australia to contain the exploding population of rabbits that the white settlers had introduced. Not too long after, the government introduced a scheme by which all mixed-race children were taken away from their Aboriginal mothers to be raised as good Christian Australians, the Aboriginal part bred out of them through two generations of enforced marriage to whites. This practice apparently continued until the 1970s, and Noyce's film is the true tale of its impact on one poverty-stricken family in 1931, when three little girls, each with a different itinerant white father who'd worked on the rabbit-proof fence, were taken away from their mother and sent to be reared at a special school 1,500 miles away.

The story concerns their escape and heroic journey home and the people they meet on the way, including an Aborigine maid who is the enforced mistress of a white farmer. The children use the fence as a guide, and Noyce doesn't stress the irony and symbolism. It's a gripping, unsentimental tale; the awesomely bare landscape is beautifully photographed by Christopher Doyle; and there's a haunting score by Peter Gabriel. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Nine Queens

The recipient of seven Argentinian critics awards, including best film, this black comedy thriller was made before that country's economy collapsed and can thus claim to be extraordinarily prophetic. It presents us with a corrupt and collapsing society where everyone cons everyone else for the money which may not be everyone's due, but is at least what they each think they deserve. It's like a Latin-American version of The Sting crossed with David Mamet's House of Games.

Even a summary of the plot would require double the number of words available. Suffice to say the two central characters are both petty conmen who not only try to con each other but practically everyone else they meet. The nine queens of the title are a set of Weimar Republic stamps that are worth a fortune, presuming they are not fakes. What is unusual about the film, played out by a cast that includes the excellent Ricardo Darin as the senior crook and Gaston Pauls as his younger helpmeet, is the way it cons its audience too - you never quite know who is going to do what to whom next. It's a clever, entertaining and amusing piece of film-making which will almost certainly be remade - and probably much worse - by Hollywood. (film.guardian.co.uk)

The Quiet American

Caine plays Thomas Fowler, the Times's man in 1950s Saigon, a weary expatriate in the rumpled-white-suit-wearing mould, drinking regularly and abundantly in his favourite haunts, but conscientiously filing copy about an embattled French administration failing to contain communist insurgency. Fowler lives with a beautiful Vietnamese girl called Phuong, or Phoenix, played by Do Thi Hai Yen. This approximation of domestic and professional contentment is upended with the arrival of a quietly spoken young American aid worker, Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser). He badgers Fowler with naive visions of a "third force" to save Vietnam, innocent of both colonialism and communism, and then humiliates him by saving his life during a night raid and falling in love with Phuong. But this is not a simple Jamesian duel between American innocence and British experience. Pyle turns out to have direct links with a renegade Vietnamese army commander, earmarked for this "third way" destiny, and directly assists in the planting of horrific bombs, targeted at civilians.

Greene said that only a sense of humour allowed him to believe in God; the same thing applies to believing in Michael Caine. He's as stately as a galleon as he pads about the bars and streets of Saigon. But when he has a sharp comment, a witty remark, a passionate insult, his performance flashes with energy. He groans at being called home by the paper, and his assistant says: "I thought you liked London?" "I like it fine. I like it just where it is," he snaps. For a second he's transformed; Fowler is human. The same goes for his rampaging appearance in the American legation, denouncing Pyle for stealing his girl. "I know I'm behaving badly. This is the sort of moment when one is entitled to behave badly!" he says in that unmistakable voice, and the performance comes to life. Moments like these shine like needlepoints of light at dusk in this film's heavy, marshy landscape. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Abouna

The second feature of the French-educated writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Abouna (aka Our Father), is set in his native Chad and begins with the striking image of a man in Western dress crossing a desert in the southern Sahara, pausing briefly to look the camera straight in the lens. He's everyman on the move, but more specifically, as it transpires, the father of 15-year-old Tahir and his eight-year-old brother Amine, and their good-looking mother is distraught when she returns home on her smart little motorbike to discover his absence. She tells the boys their dad is 'irresponsible' and they try to work out the exact meaning of the word as they go in search of him around town, across the border in Cameroon. They don't find him but they do discover he hasn't been to his place of supposed work for two years. Then they go to the local open-air cinema where they think they see him playing the lead in a black-and-white film. In order to recover him in some magical way, or to possess his image, they sneak in and steal the reel of film, a prank that leads to their arrest.

This comic incident takes a carefully paced picture in a different direction. Their exasperated mother, her resilience wearing thin, takes them over the desert to a Koranic school run by cruel mullahs and their lackeys. A darker tone sets in, though in their hardship and isolation the brothers draw closer together. Up to this point the younger brother, a sufferer from severe asthma, seems the dominant character. Then 15-year-old Tahir takes over. As he falls in love with a beautiful deaf-mute girl in a golden dress and comes to cope with death and madness, it becomes his story.

Abouna is a simple, beautifully told tale with affecting music by the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure. It's also a most sophisticated piece of filmmaking. The director's awareness of the tradition he's working in is expressed through the three posters outside the cinema Tahir and Amine visit - Chaplin's The Kid , Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Idrissa Ouedraogo's Yaaba from Burkina Faso. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Lawless Heart

One of the best new British films of the past few years. Writer-directors Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter have contrived a funny, touching, cleverly constructed and beautifully acted film about three men and their lives, in a small Essex town. Douglas Henshall is a chirpy Michael Caine-ish Cockney bloke back from foreign parts; Tom Hollander is a recently bereaved gay man; Bill Nighy is the reticent, emotionally stilted partner in a stagnant marriage. Relationships, gay and straight, are explored with marvellous intelligence and delicacy, Nighy gives a jewel of a performance and Tom Hollander just gets better and better. (Peter Bradshaw - film.guardian.co.uk)

Lilo and Stitch

The title Lilo & Stitch suggests a realistic drama about an illegal immigrant working as a seamstress in a sweatshop. In fact it's a Disney cartoon about a destructive gremlin-like mutant, the result of a failed experiment on planet Truro, who is exiled to Earth. He lands in Hawaii where he's adopted by the cute little orphan Lilo (pronounced Leelo), who names him Stitch and introduces him to the music of Elvis Presley. The CIA and extra-terrestrials intervene, but the loveable creature becomes a member of Lilo's family. It's a mixture of ET, Alien, Blue Hawaii and Men in Black, and should amuse small children, though the opening minutes might disturb some of them. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Donnie Darko

Most moviemakers seem to arise quite naturally from the temper of the times, from prevailing currents of thought and from the dominant fashions. Others - a relative few, and not necessarily the best, though always intriguing - seem to come from nowhere, and their work usually occupies some ground between realism and surrealism. The 26-year-old Richard Kelly belongs to this group and, like the protagonists in most of their early films, the adolescent hero of his debut as writer-director, Donnie Darko, is a sad loner set apart from family and society.

Hard to categorise, the movie is a combination of the general and the specific, of fantasy and reality, of the apocalyptic horror movie and the high school comedy. When we first see the handsome 18-year-old Donnie (played with posed ambiguity by Jake Gyllenhaal) he is stretched out on a country road at dawn, sleeping beside his bicycle, an image reminiscent of the vulnerable James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Like a good many American movies of the past 30 years, it takes place at a very specific time in the recent past and is intended to gain a certain resonance from public events going on elsewhere. The related event in Donnie Darko is characteristically somewhat quirky - the autumn of 1988 in the weeks leading up to the presidential election. A little eruption takes place at the dinner table of the Darko family when his bright elder sister announces she's going to vote for Mike Dukakis.

Like much of the film, the choice of this particular historical juncture is disconcerting. Is its social significance the lack of change, the absence of hope? Certainly few people remember with any clarity what they were doing in the days before Bush Senior became President. But it is attached to another date in Donnie's consciousness. He has received an announcement from Frank, a 6ft rabbit with a head like a satanic emissary, that the world is going to end in 28 days, six hours and 42 minutes. That's around Halloween and before the election. Of course Donny is undergoing analysis with a hypnotherapist (Katharine Ross) who is better at prescribing pills than providing understanding. But if the prophetic rabbit is unreal, the 747 engine that falls from the sky and destroys Donnie's bedroom is real enough. He was sleepwalking at the time so he survives to have yet another piece of evidence to weigh while discussing the questions that obsess him: is life chaotic or are we at the mercy of fate? Are we subject to a course pre-set by God, or is there a way of escaping this world through some black hole? He presses these questions on a sympathetic science master until the teacher confesses that to probe further would cost him his job. But he is put in touch with a retired teacher, a former nun who wrote a bizarre book called The Philosophy of Time Travel which has ideas pre-dating Stephen Hawking and which Donnie has anticipated.

Donnie is in some sense a figure trapped between the questioning, revolutionary style of the Sixties and the complacent 'Me Generation' ethos of the Eighties. Richard Kelly has said of his picture that 'maybe it's the story of Holden Caulfield resurrected in 1988 by the spirit of Philip K Dick, who was always spinning yarns about schizophrenia and drug abuse breaking the barriers of space and time'. In a scarily comic way, Donnie becomes a danger to the stability of the community, especially in undermining a fundamentalist guru, Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), who has a grip on the town. This dangerous playfulness in part derives from a story assigned for class discussion by the permissive English teacher (Drew Barrymore). It's The Destructors by Graham Greene that infuriated Picture Post readers when it was published in 1954. This fable is about a gang of south London schoolboys deliberately setting about destroying a beautiful early eighteenth-century house in Clapham that has been left standing after those around it have been razed in the Blitz. The story puzzles or bores the other kids, but Donnie seizes on Greene's dangerous line that 'destruction after all is a form of creation'.

One of the film's strengths is that while a few teenagers and adults are mocked, most of the people in the picture are treated sympathetically. Donnie's parents are not insensitive monsters, several teachers respond in an understanding way, and he's given an attractive girlfriend, a newcomer to the school, whose father has made attempts on her mother's life. The film ends in a manner both puzzling and oddly satisfying and we leave the cinema feeling that we have been in the company of a highly interesting new talent. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Chicago

Putting their best hoofin' feet forward are Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere. Renée plays Roxie Hart, the hardworking gal who dreams of showbiz glory. A no-good low-life uses her sexually and tries to dump her, so she fills him full of lead. Pending trial, Roxie winds up in the women's prison, meeting über-vamp Velma Kelly, a nightclub chanteuse who has just handed her sister a one-way ticket to Violentdeathville for fooling around with her husband. Catherine Zeta-Jones impersonates her in a Louise Brooks bob, looking sleek and sexy and about 8ft tall. Finally there is the pewter-haired, crinkle-eyed heartbreaker himself: Richard Gere, filling his chalk-striped, double-breasted suit and snap-brimmed fedora as if to the manner born. He plays Billy Flynn, an appallingly venal criminal lawyer who specialises in this kind of case, adept not merely at manipulating juries but credulous newspapermen as well, spinning them sensational tales to create the publicity and marketing deals which are going to pay his monster fee. He's Clarence Darrow and Max Clifford rolled into one.

But what glorious songs! Razzle-Dazzle, All That Jazz - these are showtunes with nuclear warheads. Chicago doesn't have the visual flair and invention of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, but what it does have are these showstopping musical numbers, properly embedded in the fabric of the show itself. They're not, as in Luhrmann, a miscellaneous bunch of old pop tunes, but wonderful original classics. I laugh out loud every time I hear the cheeky lines from Razzle-Dazzle: "Give them an act with lots of flash in it/And the reaction will be passionate." That's a rhyme Byron would have been proud to write. John C Reilly plays Amos, Roxie's poor, deluded schmuck of a husband and with his hang-dog, victim face, he's ideal casting. Marshall throws away some of his song Mr Cellophane; he isn't allowed to get to the end of it uninterrupted so that we get the full pathetic effect of him whimpering: "Thanks for listening." Great song, though.

These are unstoppable numbers; not enough on their own, however, to get a film into orbit. And after seeing the principals strut their stuff, striking choreographed poses with one knee bent and hat tipped with devilish sexiness over one eye, you begin to suspect a whiff of naff. Or if not that, then sameness: familiar-looking shots of supposedly louche nightclubs with a single spotlight in which the dust-motes are circling, the camera doing an adoring and celebratory swirl around the leading lady as she belts out the final note - and it's all sugar-coated with ersatz glam-sleaze and unthreatening toughness.

It isn't that anyone's neglecting to give one hundred and one per cent or that there isn't loads of fun to be had in the set-pieces. Richard Gere has a terrific moment when he tap dances his way out of a tight spot in court, and into the jury's affections. But that works because the action is happening outside the prison; it has removed to another location in the blink of an eye. In short, where it starts to look like a film. Chicago is a very good bet for those who don't have the leisure to make it to London for the stage show, and want a reliable, cheaper ticket-price approximation with (mostly) proper Americans in the cast. (film.guardian.co.uk)

The Hours

James Joyce’s Ulysses, a day in the life of a Dublin advertising salesman, was the inspiration for Mrs Dalloway, a day in the life of an upper-middle-class Englishwoman preparing to give a party. Its working title was 'The Hours' and Mrs Dalloway is at the centre of the cleverly symmetrical The Hours, which David Hare has adapted from Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning American novel inspired by Virginia Woolf.

The movie is about a day in the life of three women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, separated from each other by a continent, an ocean and many decades. In Richmond, Surrey, in the early Twenties, the 41-year-old Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is embarking on Mrs Dalloway and about to entertain her sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson) and her children. (It was at this time that Virginia recorded in her diary: 'I feel time racing like a film at the Cinema. I try to stop it. I prod it with my pen. I try to pin it down.') In 1951, in a lower-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a heavily pregnant, deeply discontented housewife with a six-year-old son, is planning to celebrate the birthday of her kindly, insensitive husband (John C. Reilly) and is reading Mrs Dalloway. In 2001, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a lesbian editor at a New York publishing house, is throwing a party to celebrate a literary prize awarded to her former lover, a gay novelist dying of Aids (Ed Harris). Partly because of her first name, he has nicknamed her Mrs Dalloway and he parallels the old flame of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. The movie is about being pinned down by social conventions and familial obligations, creating structures to make them bearable and thinking of breaking free from these fetters and liberating others.

Suicide, contemplated or achieved, occurs in all three strands as it does in Mrs Dalloway, where the shell-shocked Great War veteran, Septimus Smith, kills himself. To emphasise this, the movie begins and ends with Woolf's suicide. Before going into the water, she puts large stones in her pockets to keep her under. This is a powerful metaphor. By adding to the forces that pull her down, she ensures her liberation through death from her mental afflictions and frees her husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane) from the pain of caring for her.

Cunningham has found a sympathetic adapter in Hare, who believes in the transience of most human relationships and once wrote a television movie called Dreams of Leaving, which might have been the title of this film. Likewise, Stephen Daldry, looking for something to direct after his debut film, Billy Elliot, must have been attracted by the situation of people in three generations attempting to break free from social suffocation. The casting is astute and the performances are remarkable, even though Kidman with a prosthetic nose looks neither like Woolf nor herself. In addition to the main three woman and three men in each strand, there are significant contributions from Allison Janney (of West Wing renown) as Clarissa's lover, Claire Danes as Clarissa's daughter by an unknown donor and Toni Collette as the cancer-stricken friend of the Los Angeles housewife.

The Hours is a moving, somewhat depressing film that demands and rewards attention. (film.guardian.co.uk)

City of God

This electrifying picture is part tender coming-of-age film and part gang-warfare epic from the Brazilian slum, or favela, told from the viewpoint of the children who manage to be both its underclass and its criminal overlords. It's a movie with all the dials cranked up to 11, an overwhelming, intoxicating assault on the senses, and a thriller so tense that you might have the seat in front of you gripped in both fists.

A swaggering gangster is about to slaughter a chicken in the middle of the favela; it escapes, and there is a hilarious but still oddly gripping chase sequence as the bird makes its bid for freedom. As it exits an alley and scampers into the nearest the place has to a main thoroughfare, the chicken, with a hundred bullets and cleavers with its name on it, finds itself face to face with the movie's leading character, 18-year-old Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who has every reason to think he is going to be murdered. Behind Rocket appear a number of law-enforcement officers in armoured vehicles making one of their periodic terrified and ineffective forays into the 'hood; in front of him, the gangster and his courtiers all produce weapons. A wacky, black-comic interlude has morphed with appalling speed into a potential bloodbath. The sacrificial purpose of the chicken conveys with the force of a blunt instrument how cheap life has come to be in the ghetto, and how victimhood and aggression have become fused together. The wiseguys, their cowering subordinates, their stoic womenfolk and the dead bodies around them are all chickens - and they are mostly all children.

The movie tells the story of this slum, a grim housing project for the poor, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s; it tracks the story of both Rocket, a would-be press photographer (and a character whose purpose is probably to ventriloquise the sensibility of Paulo Lins, on whose novel the film is based), and Li'l Dice, who follows his gangster vocation with the passionate severity of a monk - the latter renaming himself, having notionally grown to man's estate, as Li'l Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora).

Meirelles's storytelling rushes forward at a full, breathless tilt, swerving, accelerating, doubling back on itself, amplifying the roles and experiences of incidental characters. A bravura narrative moment reveals itself when he discloses the history of one single apartment, showing how it becomes degraded and denatured as it ceases to be a family home and becomes a drug-dealer's den. Meirelles's film flashes and sweeps around you, dizzying, disorientating, intoxicating.

His mastery of his material consists not merely in the adaptation of Paulo Lins's novel, but a direct engagement with the ghetto itself, and his triumphant recruitment of a veritable army of non-professionals is the result of an almost military raid on this dangerous territory. This is something that combines film-making with oral history. It is a compelling piece of work. (Peter Bradshaw - film.guardian.co.uk)

Finding Nemo

Offering further proof that the folks at Pixar are ceaselessly, unflaggingly more clever and imaginative than anyone else working in big-budget feature animation, the underwater CGI-animated "Finding Nemo" is smarter, funnier and more entertaining than any other all-ages film so far this year. While Disney's in-house animators have been assembly-lining prosaic sequels, the computer-'toon platoon at Pixar is supplying the Mouse House with delightfully creative products like this new adventure, in which an apprehensive, over-protective clown-fish father traverses the sea in search of his missing son.

The youngster was scooped up near his reef home by some monstrous, two-legged land creature in scuba gear and deposited into a Australian dentist's fish tank, populated by a colorful crew of fellow captives who help little Nemo (voice of Alexander Gould) hatch an escape plan. In the meantime, Marlin -- his fretful father with the perfectly anxiety-ridden intonations of Albert Brooks -- ventures deeper into the deep blue than he has ever dared before, determined to find the boy.

Helped along the way, if "helped" is the word for it, by a dingbat blue tang with short-term memory problems (and the oh-so-apropos voice of Ellen DeGeneres), Marlin finds his courage in dangerous adventures (mines and shipwrecks) and discovers friends in the forms of a surfer-dude sea turtle (voiced by Andrew Stanton, the movie's director), an astute pelican (Geoffrey Rush) who becomes his transportation into the dentist's office, and a trio of 12-stepping sharks who are trying to go vegetarian (including "Hulk" Eric Bana and Barry Humphries, aka "Dame Edna").

Resourceful in its storytelling (the East Australian Current which Marlin must travel is akin to an underwater freeway crossed with a roller coaster) and reliably, steadily hilarious ("Hey, you're a clown fish," observe all the dopier sea critters who meet mopey Marlin. "Tell us a joke!"), "Finding Nemo" is also astounding to look at. Like a fantastical scuba dive, the picture's always-in-motion undersea universe would be downright photo-realistic if Stanton and his animators hadn't dialed up the cartoonishness just enough to give all the fish googly ping-pong-ball eyes.

From the background plankton to the plastic plants in the fish tank to the way the skin on Bruce the shark (named after the mechanical star of "Jaws") jiggles when he laughs, there isn't a single visual detail overlooked in this three-dimensional wonderland. Yet with the film's refreshing originality, rich comedy, occasional heartfelt poignancy and extremely vivid characters, it's easy to forget all about the how and the wow of the cutting-edge animation technology. In fact you may forget you're watching animation all together. Such is the complete immersion in "Nemo's" world, created by those magnificent Pixar wizards. (www.splicedonline.com)

The Girl from Paris

A very charming and utterly French film about a young Parisian woman (Mathilde Seigner) who abandons a dull career in computing to follow her dream: taking over a farm in remote, rural France. She buys one from cranky old farmer, Adrien - a lovely performance from Michel Serrault - and to his intense chagrin makes it far more profitable than he ever could with her new business methods. But then a hard winter sets in, and she needs his help.

This is a movie with an unfakeably real sense of landscape and countryside. And be warned. There is a very unsentimental view of what life down on the farm is really like, with some stomach-turning shots of pigs and cows being slaughtered. Squeamish townie types need not apply. (film.guardian.co.uk)

The Pianist

Roman Polanski's heartfelt and high-minded Holocaust movie - based on the true-life memoir of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. Gaunt Adrien Brody plays Szpilman, a famous pianist who at the moment of the 1939 Nazi invasion is broadcasting live on Warsaw radio; the studio is blown to pieces - an inspired image for the impingement of life on art. He and his family (Maureen Lipman and Frank Finlay are the querulous parents) are moved into the notorious ghetto. They refuse to join the Jewish ghetto police - collaborators who affect grotesque Hitler moustaches - but Szpilman's celebrity nevertheless allows him to pull strings; he gets his firebrand brother out of detention, gets a work permit for his father and just as his family are loaded on to the cattle trucks headed for Auschwitz, Szpilman is hauled off and allowed back into the devastated city, to fend for himself and deal with his survivor-guilt as best he may.

The scenes Polanski contrives in occupied Warsaw are truly horrifying: the Nazi officers who tip a wheelchair-bound old man off a balcony, the boorish guards who humiliate Jews by making them dance in the streets, the starving man lapping up spilt soup like a dog. It is unwatchably harrowing. And the images of devastation are positively retina-scorching, like surreal canvases by Ernst or Di Chirico. But the story of Szpilman is the story of escape. He avoids the death camp, so the film does not enter that epicentre of hell; but he is not in the resistance either, so the film does not go inside the great Warsaw Uprising. He spends a lot of his time holed up in safe flats, and, peeking out of the window, has a ringside seat at much military action, but remains strangely marginalised. Szpilman does not even get to play the piano much, and there is not a great deal of insight into his existence as a pianist or an artist.

However, a resolution to these tensions is offered by the climactic confrontation between Szpilman and a Wehrmacht officer. Entranced by Szpilman's performance of Chopin's Ballade No 1 in G minor on a miraculously undamaged piano in the bombed-out house in which he'd been hiding, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann) helps him to survive. This is evidently based on fact, and - who knows? - the scene might make the Chopin Ballade as famous as the Warsaw Concerto from Dangerous Moonlight, another movie about a wartime Polish pianist.

The Pianist is a weighty and moving film. A genuine achievement. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Calendar Girls

In April 1999, the real-life ladies of the Rylstone and District Women's Institute in Yorkshire produced a cheeky nude calendar to raise money for a hospital that had cared for one of their husbands before he died of cancer. They could hardly have known that their story was going to be the female Full Monty. Or maybe they could. The ladies obviously had a brilliant, untrained knack for publicity and a shrewd sense of how appealing their naughty-but-nice calendar was going to be. They were pictured doing traditional WI things like jam-making, but - corks! - in a state of undress, concealed behind cider presses and what have you. It led to them being massively praised by newspaper columnists throughout the land, for raising money for charidee and raising a smile at the same time. Without anyone explicitly making the connection, the courage involved in taking their clothes off was assumed to be related to the courage displayed by the husband, his wife and their friends and neighbours, and the combination of heartbreak and British wit and pluck was irresistible.

This genial comedy, directed by Nigel Cole, with an excellent, tightly constructed script by Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi, accentuates the positive. There's lots of wit and pluck and not much heartbreak. The uneasy suspicion that this nude calendar might be actually be a delusional, or even harmful way of avoiding grief, is touched upon only briefly.

At the centre of the story are two best friends, destined to fall out as their calendar becomes stratospherically successful. Casting anyone but Julie Walters for the lead in a film like this is practically illegal, and Walters does the picture proud as Annie, with her gutsy humour and iron-clad common sense concealing hurt and vulnerability. Helen Mirren is her glamorous best friend Chris. Together they are stalwarts, if rather subversive stalwarts, of the WI, giggling together at the back at the weekly meetings while some nerd gives an illustrated talk about broccoli. Chris is the wild child of the local branch: her one contribution has been to organise a vodka tasting which led to unspecified calamity and she wins a baking competition with a cake she bought at Marks.

Their lives change when Annie's gentle husband John, likably played by John Alderton, dies of cancer, filling the widow with a need to do something to fill the aching void in her heart. Between them, Chris and Annie come up with the idea of the calendar, roping in the sceptical and terrified WI ladies as models. A terrific cast of character performers is assembled, including Linda Bassett, Penelope Wilton, Annette Crosbie and Celia Imrie. Again, as with Walters, not casting Imrie in this sort of film is unthinkable.

Calendar Girls is based on the now familiar template of British Embarrassment: butch Sheffield blokes become male strippers; young lad becomes ballet dancer; respectable WI ladies get their kit off. But with The Full Monty and Billy Elliot, the public performances come at the end. In Calendar Girls, the big revelation comes at the beginning. It's the narrative reverse of striptease. The ladies remove their clothes and then put them back on again to face their families, their menfolk and the uptight hierarchy of the WI who will need to be persuaded that what they are doing is not just some mass loony meltdown. The crisis is not the baring of bodies, but the baring of souls.

The calendar's success takes them to Hollywood and Chris, Annie and their friends get a jaunt to Los Angeles to appear on the Jay Leno Show. But Annie accuses Chris of selling out to commercialism; Chris accuses Annie of becoming over-enamoured of her new Mother Teresa status, brooding over her fan mail from the stricken and the bereaved. The calendar itself, however, is never portrayed as being glitzy or shallow, something that their friendship will have to rise above; nor is it shown to be contaminated or compromised in any way at all by its head-spinning success. It's just a thoroughly good thing, and that's that.

Or is it? When Chris and Annie have their row, Annie furiously demands to know how Chris, whose marriage is rocky, can swan off to LA and leave her husband at such a difficult time. She herself, she says, would give up all of this for one more minute with her beloved John. It's the one acknowledgement of a darker and more complex story behind Calendar Girls: the suggestion that this whole thing, far from being a healthy and healing process, might be a vain, neurotic attempt to distract oneself from death and grief. I was reminded of a moving interview with Nigella Lawson in which she said that the media brouhaha with which her late husband John Diamond chose to surround his own cancer, might actually have been damaging for him.

I suspect that its release might be another stage in a huge diversionary tactic whose consequences have yet to reveal themselves to the actual women involved. Like the ladies themselves, strategically hidden behind their jam jars and Eccles cakes, Calendar Girls does not reveal all. (film.guardian.co.uk)

The Magic Pudding

Take a spoonful of magic, add a large helping of adventure and a healthy dose of humour - mix well with fantastic characters and you have The Magic Pudding - a truly unique animated film about a pudding - or rather puddin' - that talks, enjoys being eaten but never runs out and can turn itself into just about anything. Pretty much. Oh and everyone is trying to steal it.

The very grumpy John Cleese stars as Albert the Magic Pudding. As brilliant and as barking mad as ever, Cleese's Albert is a highly vocal puddin', blessed with a passion to be eaten hungrily at every sitting. The puddin' is the star of the show and he knows it. Oscar winner and life long Magic Pudding fan Geoffrey Rush is Bunyip Blugum, a fourteen year old, determined and articulate koala on a journey to find his parents. He's at that earnest age where sometimes things are just a little serious, but that doesn't stop him tucking into the regular chunks of Albert's finest. Bunyip's on a mission and there's no sense going hungry. Bill Barnacle is one of the few humans in the story. Voiced by Hugo Weaving, Bill is a loud, land locked sailor who's happy to tag along on all the adventures as long as he gets his fair share of puddin' at regular intervals. Sam Neill is Sam Sawnoff, Bill's first mate, a performing penguin no-less, whose flippers have floored more than one puddin' thief. Lastly there is Uncle Buncle. He's the big baddie - a ruthless wombat who is determined to get his greedy paws on the puddin'. As it turns out there's also a connection between him and Bunyips's missing parents - so two reasons to watch out for this evil puddin' pirate.

So there you have it. Grab your biggest spoon and make sure you're ready to tuck in, because Albert The Magic Pudding is in town and its huge helpings all round! (http://www.business.australia.or.jp/osaka/english/events/pudding.html)

The Man without a Past

The film-making style of Aki Kaurismaki - gentle, charming, quirky and utterly unique - could hardly be seen to better effect than in this deadpan comedy. A welder, played by Markku Peltola, turns up in Helsinki looking for work, dies in hospital after getting savagely beaten by muggers but is then reborn as a man with no memory and joins a community of homeless folk living in genteel contentment in empty container units. From here, the nameless man embarks on a diffident courtship of the Salvation Army lady, Irma (Kati Outinen), who won an acting award at Cannes for this performance.

Kaurismaki's compassion for the dispossessed is all more the engaging because of his lack of brow-furrowing seriousness; his movie is like a cork bobbing amiably on waves of lightness and unforced gaiety - always on the edge of surreality but never quite going further. I found myself giggling at loads of Kaurismaki's dialogue long after the final credits. Accused of being fat, a security guard deadpans: "Keep my metabolism out of this." An electrician surreptitiously hooks up our hero to the main power supply. "What do I owe you?" he asks. "If you see me face down in the gutter, turn me on to my back," the electrician replies with a shrug. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Dirty Pretty Things

A very entertaining, intelligent thriller from director Stephen Frears and scripted by Stephen Knight, the prolific TV writer who brought us, of all things, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? On second viewing it looks every bit as bright, though I think describing it as a film about asylum seekers makes it sound more earnest and less enjoyable than it really is - though this theme is what gives the film its generosity of spirit and also its intriguingly unlocatable tone. Knight's unusual script is an engrossing noir romance, couched in the language of both thriller and urban myth, and brought to life by three actors whose expertise is a joy to watch: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tautou and Sergi Lopez.

Ejiofor plays Okwe, a Nigerian "illegal" in London, hotel-portering by night, minicabbing by day, and all the time chewing dodgy herbal leaves to keep himself alert. Audrey Tautou is Senay, a young Turkish woman, also illegal, earning a pittance as a maid in the hotel where Okwe works, and the incomparably sinister Sergi Lopez is the hotel manager, who tells his employees that London hotels are places where strangers come to keep secrets, and wise people look the other way.

One morning, Okwe is brusquely instructed to clean up a room where a guest has been with a prostitute, and has to unblock a lavatory overflowing with blood - a gripping scene in which nausea gives way to astonishment, then fear as Okwe realises that the obstruction is caused by a human heart. That's a metaphor which encapsulates the film's unusual willingness to function both as horror story and love story. It's all heart. From here, a creepy network of control is revealed, which relies on keeping asylum seekers and immigrants, desperate for an EU passport, real or fake, in a state of mendicant servility and fear. Owke and Senay have only each other to rely on; they begin the movie in a sweetly innocent brother-and-sister set-up, and their relationship deepens into a gallant affaire de coeur as Okwe tries to protect Senay from the grisly forces that encircle them both.

Frears' film has been criticised as being too broad-brush, and it's true that the hotel's resident lovable tart, played by Sophie Okonedo, is a touch sentimentally conceived - though Okonedo has a nice comic touch which saves Okwe's final speech about London's invisible underclass from being too heavy-handed. Frears always keeps his drama on the right side of plausibility, if only by a whisker. With its caper-ish elements, it has more sugar in the mix than movies it resembles, like Mona Lisa, My Son the Fanatic or Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort. Yet Dirty Pretty Things has serious things to say about swinging 21st-century London - how it is "multicultural" chiefly in exploiting immigrant labour for the service economy. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Master and Commander

Not released until November there are currently no reviews for this much anticipated film. Here though is a brief synopsis: Based on the best-selling novels of Patrick O'Brian, the film stars Russell Crowe as "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, who pits his crew of the H.M.S. Surprise against a much better armed and ruthless privateer, in a chase that takes him all the way to the far side of the world. Rising newcomer Paul Bettany ("A Beautiful Mind") plays the ship's surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin (www.rottentomatoes.com)

Son of the Bride

As has often been remarked, a good many of the best movies of the past couple of years have come from Spain and Latin America. A pleasant addition to this group is Son of the Bride, directed and co-scripted by Juan José Campanella, a filmmaker who divides his time between the United States and his native Argentina. It's another movie with a restaurant setting, though this isn't a picture in which the audience is stuffed with cinematic food like a flock of Strasbourg geese.

The picture centres on Rafael (Ricardo Darin), the good-looking 42-year-old manager of a popular restaurant in Buenos Aires that his Italian immigrant parents created. He's troubled by unreliable suppliers, unsympathetic bank managers, a difficult ex-wife, an alienated young daughter, a young lover from Spain he doesn't properly appreciate and a restaurant chain that's trying to buy him out.

This isn't the adult life he saw ahead of him when he'd dress up in a Zorro costume as a carefree child. Moreover, his mother is in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer's, and his charming father, who loves his wife as if nothing had happened to her, wants to give her a full-scale church wedding to make up for the civil ceremony he'd insisted on 44 years before. Not surprisingly, Rafael has a heart attack, which puts things into perspective, if not into order.

This is a comedy that touches sensitively and truthfully on tragic matters in a kindly, sympathetic way. The performances are uniformly excellent. The veterans Héctor Alterio and Norma Alean dro are magnificent as Rafael's parents, and there's a lovely turn by Eduardo Blanco, a Roberto Benigni lookalike, as Rafael's boyhood friend, a minor movie actor. The wonderful climactic sequence elicits laughter and tears and carefully skirts sentimentality. (film.guardian.co.uk)

Whale Rider

Whale Rider, adapted by its director Niki Caro from a novel by the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, is a kindly, modest New Zealand film that draws on both Hollywood's Free Willy children's movies and the more ambitious pictures that deal with legendary aspects of the whale. It is set in a small coastal Maori village, and behind it lies the myth of Paikea, the founder of the community. While crossing the Pacific from the tribe's ancient lands 1,000 or more years ago, Paikea was rescued by a whale on which he rode ashore in New Zealand. His statue stands on the roof of the tribal meeting house. Ever since then, the title of chief has descended by the male line.

The village's current chieftain, the ageing Koro (Rawiri Paratene), is desperately trying to keep ancient traditions alive in the face of corrupting modern life, in a community that hasn't yet become entirely deracinated in the way the urban Maoris are in Once Were Warriors. The chief's handsome elder son, a gifted sculptor working on Maori themes, was the natural successor but left to pursue his career in Europe when his wife died in childbirth after bearing twins, a boy who died immediately and a daughter, Pai.

The old man won't countenance the idea of his granddaughter (Keisha Castle-Hughes), now a confident 12-year old, being considered as a possible leader. This overbearing macho patriarch refuses to let her even witness the lessons he gives her male peers in stick fighting, storytelling and chanting, and the rites he puts them through to decide who'll be the next chief.

The inflexible Koro and the determined 12-year- old child, so eager for his approbation, are well matched. There doesn't, however, appear to be any great division in the town. The dumb, macho, conservative guys look down on females in general, but the enlightened, if cowed, women take the girl's side, and she's taught everything she needs to know by her boozy, easygoing uncle, a secular layabout who once had the talent for leadership.

The conflict between the old man and the rebellious Pai, both devoted to the community's spiritual welfare, is topical in the way it confronts the prob lem of adjusting long-standing traditions to social change. It could as easily have been about a woman wanting to be a priest or a gay man a bishop, and suggests that Maoris are perhaps rather more advanced than Anglicans, Catholics and Muslims.

The movie is infused with a sense of uplift which inevitably leads to a moving, redemptive climax. The whole community is drawn together on the beach, Pai gets the chance to ride a real whale, and her heroism and fitness for leadership is recognised. Pai is the kind of girl whose air of moral superiority makes the village women stub out their cigarettes when they hear her coming. She could have been a terrible prig, but the 12-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes is an appealing and yearning presence, and gives one of the most affecting performances by a child these past couple of years. (film.guardian.co.uk)