Hiam Abbass is appearing on British screens with increasing regularity. Having been in The Visitor as well as having a small role in Conversations with my Gardener, her latest film to be distributed here is Lemon Tree, which she has the lead role in. She plays a Palestinian widow who lives on the border between Isreal and the West Bank. She owns an orchard of lemons, which becomes a security issue when the new Israeli Defence Minister moves in next door to her - the secret service want the risk of a potential attack nullified by chopping down the trees and he goes along with it.

What unfolds is basically the kind of film Zhang Yimou would have made with Gong Li 15 years ago, it's one of those classic stories of a strong willed person going above and beyond in their fight against the government. Of course there are overtones and parallels with the Israeli/Palestinian dispute but this works best as one of those simple stories that people from all cultures can relate to of the little person striving for justice as she sues her neighbour and takes the complaint as far as the legal process allows.

That little person is Hiam Abbass and she is as delightfully natural as ever. It's a first rate performance of nuance and restraint and it's quite beautifully done. She is able to convey the indignity of the situation coupled with the will to see it through, it's very impressive. The ensemble as a whole does very well indeed, particularly Rona Lipaz-Michael as the minister's empathetic wife who gets the chance to show what she can do.

If there is a problem with the film it's that the overt nature of the parallels is pushed too far at times (even the Minister's name is "Israel") and an attempted romantic subplot between Abbass and her character's lawyer is forced and seems tacked on and irrelevant. It is a superbly put together film though, the editing and cinematography are very smooth indeed. At times it's quite amusing and it always holds your attention, a very nice little film I'd broadly recommend seeing if it is on anywhere near.

Not the best bunch of films I'll ever talk about. First one I saw was Japan's submission to the oscars last year, which was the chronicle/expose of the Japanese legal system I Just Didn't Do It. The story is that a young man is accused of groping on a crowded train. The girl grabs him by the arm, he voluntarily goes to the station office to explain himself but he is whisked off the police station where the court-appointed lawyer tells him to pay the fine and be out of jail tomorrow rather than risk a lengthy incarceration prior to a trial where he has a 0.1% chance of winning. He claims innocence so balks at paying the fine. The acting is fine, Ryo Kase in the lead is very watchable, but it gets so ponderous and repetetive that while you get the frustration the lead character must be feeling in his situation, it doesn't hold interest dramatically.

Whisking along I watched a film I've half-wanted to for a while, La Haine (while it has a reputation it didn't really seem my cup of tea hence it has been on online-rental queues of mine in the past, but never very high). This is one I should have missed because coincidentally (the film's title means "hate") I loathed it. The direction is one of the most immature, ill-conceived efforts I've seen in years. Mathieu Kassovitz (while a decent enough actor) has no idea what he's doing, he has all these tricks but that's all they are - directorial tricks that get you thinking "oh ... that's how he did that" and it doesn't serve the storytelling at all. It's just an exercise in showing off rather than crafting a story, it's a complete vanity-fest. The influence of Tarantino is obvious, the glorification of these characters is pathetic and there is neither comedic nor dramatic intrigue to make following these thoroughly hateful people even mildly worthwhile. Atrocious.

Another in the "half-wanted to" stakes was La Notte. I had almost gotten to the end of my rope with Antonioni, but this is to him what Manhattan is to Woody Allen for me - the one in the catalogue I've seen that I like. It follows a married couple for a day, Marcello Mastroianni the lauded author and Jeanne Moreau his seemingly apathetic wife. It's nicely shot as Antonioni's always are but he manages to retain interest in these characters and I think that has more than a little to do with the performances which are uniformly good. I don't think it says a tremendous amount (it's certainly no Scenes From a Marriage on the insight front) and some aspects of it are too indulgent but it's an intriguing enough study of a relationship going nowhere.

In keeping with the "half" theme of the day I half-watched a couple of things which I nowhere near finished/paid attention to so I can't really go into too much detail. Trouble the Water was on More4 but I was more interested in sorting out the start-up routines of our laptop to pay too much attention to it. I also tried to watch this year's submission to the oscars from Taiwan, Cape No.7 but it was such a stilton-factory I gave up within half an hour.

One I did finish and pay attention to though was The Abdication which incredibly (given its lack of reputation and general obscurity) was on TCM. I think TCM is going through a very strange patch at the moment, they're playing The Bonfire of the Vanities for crying out loud () but I won't complain at all about this one because I've tried to find it online before but to no avail. It stars Liv Ullmann in the story of Queen Christina of Sweden (whose story was so beautifully butchered in Queen Christina) - it's hardly historically accurate itself but far more in comparison with the classic Garbo film. It's about the relationship between her and a Cardinal in the Vatican (Peter Finch) who is interrogating her to assess the sincerity of her conversion to Catholicism following her abdication in Protestant-Sweden.

Ullmann is her usual excellent self, I've never seen her move so much on film before (running hither and thither) - the film itself is not great. Where they take the relationship between the two isn't very convincing and it doesn't really get into the meat and bones of why she abdicated in the first place. What remains is the appealing nature of both performers and they ensure that at all times it is a decent watch. There's not very much chemistry between the two and the script hampers that a fair deal, but it's a different side to Liv and a solid performance from Finch - probably only worth making the effort for if you're a fan of the people involved though.

It seems almost impossible to talk about this (or any Dardennes Brothers) film without referencing their previous films because they, like Wong Kar Wai, have both an extremely distinctive visual style and thematic concepts running throughout their entire body of work. Basically, in any Dardennes movie you will have someone, usually on the fringes of society, pushed into a moral dilemma, all the while shot with extremely rough handheld camerawork (In The Son one might be forgiven for mistaking it as an ode to the back of Olivier Gourmet's head  ). They've enjoyed a very successful career artistically, they are now Cannes regulars, having won the Palme D'or twice for Rosetta and L'Enfant.

The first notable thing about their latest film, Lorna's Silence, is the softening of the visual style. It's still all handheld but the grittiness and ultra-documentary feel which has been characteristic of their work in their last 4 films at least has been distilled. It doesn't make the film better or worse, it's merely an observation. The second change to what we might expect is that the script is incredibly plot heavy for them. Usually a Dardennes film will be all character and a very simple scenario (be it a man selling his baby in The Child or what have you), but in this they have a very convoluted set up. It's about an Albanian woman who is married to a drug addict to get Belgian citizenship, which she then intends to take advantage of by marrying a Russian man for money so she and her boyfriend () can set up a cafe bar, but then there's still the problem of what to do with the drug addict because the local mobster engineering all this () wants to kill him via an overdose rather than allowing a quickie divorce (which is the woman's preferred option).

The subtitles I had for this film were beyond atrocious but only half of the confusion was down to that. The almost labyrinthine plot (which has no set up, as per usual Dardennes-style, they just drop you in the middle of it all) is not helped at all by two things. Firstly the characterisation, usually such a rock-solid calling card of the directors, is very messy and doesn't help the believability of the situation. When our woman (played by Arta Dobroshi) changes her mind about things they're always out of the blue and haven't been drip-fed enough to keep up with the plot. The second problem is the inclusion of an "ellipsis", which is basically deliberately removing a key scene in the narrative (think No Country for Old Men). Doing this, it doesn't benefit the film at all, all it does is make an already complicated set up with dodgy characterisation even more confusing because they haven't shown the pivotal scene in the story and it needlessly confuses things. The only thing the audience gets out of this is 5 or 10 minutes of "what the hell is going on?" and it takes you out of the moment and makes you analyse the film when surely you should be lost in the story.

All of this is a monumental shame because it could be a good film, the writing would always prevent it from being great, but there is a lot of interesting stuff going on which is just sabotaged by the way it's presented. The acting is uniformly good, Dobroshi doesn't have a tremendous amount to do but does well with what she has but again, the script cuts her off at the knees because she isn't *so* good that she can overcome the leaps in characterisation she is asked to do. What this feels like is if the Coen Brothers were trying to do a Dardennes Brothers film, you've got the hand held camera and the moralistic story but it feels like an imitation with more commercial techniques added to their usual kind of story which only causes problems because they don't fit. It's an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying half-breed of a film and given the filmmakers' talent and reputation, it's very disappointing.

Rachel, Rachel is now almost the definition of an obscure film. Despite being a film directed by a screen legend like Paul Newman and having a lot of awards attention at the time, this is one of those films that's fallen through the cracks. There's no dvd here and I've waited for it to come on tv for years. During an oscar season on TCM it's finally been shown so I leapt at the chance because Joanne Woodward was an incredible actress but it seems pretty much her whole film catalogue is rather obscure here.

I can really see why Newman got a lot of plaudits for this film (and why Woodward was appalled that he didn't get an oscar nomination for it) because this is a director's film. There are lots of flashbacks, fantasies, etc. weaved into the narrative, which follows a lonely schoolteacher in a small town who lives with her mother. Woodward is her usual wonderful self, with a film as lyrical as this you need an actress of her level of talent to anchor the film and let everything else flow. She does that nicely and the film is a good watch, if a little dated (but that can always be forgiven).

After seeing that I had a look online to see what I could find of hers (because prior to that I've only seen The Three Faces of Eve, The Long Hot Summer and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge where she had big roles) and I found Laurence Olivier's TV production of Come Back, Little Sheba on youtube. I've not seen the original film adaptation which won Shirley Booth an oscar, so I had no pre-conceived ideas coming in to it. It's a pretty good effort, Larry does go a bit too over the top at the end, but Woodward has a very nice presence throughout and does a fine job, as does a young Carrie Fisher who sadly never really kicked on from this period.

After trying (and failing) to find Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, which was the one I really wanted to see, I downloaded another uber-obscure film of hers that I'd heard about: the ridiculously titled The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (), which was another of Newman's directorial efforts. This is a brilliant performance, plain and simple. She plays a nightmare of a mother who is raising two children and she's so perfectly natural it defies belief. It doesn't have the showy big dramatic scenes of a Rachel, Rachel but she nails it so consistently I prefer it of the two turns. The film is also less showy in general, Newman's direction disappears nicely and the two daughters (Eli Wallach's daughter Roberta and Newman & Woodward's daughter Nell) give lovely performances. Extremely watchable, very talky, but entertaining enough.

Somehow I stumbled across Ben Stiller's The Heartbreak Kid on sky and I ended up watching that rather than a nameless sporting event I was ostensibly watching. It's not as bad as I expected, but it's not very good either, they strip away almost everything about Michelle Monaghan that makes her interesting to me as an actress (so deliciously sassy in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and so soulful in Gone Baby Gone). It's a story about a guy who marries someone then immediately regrets it and starts chasing someone else on his honeymoon, and even the Farrelly Brothers who can make the strangest setups sweet (just see Shallow Hal) can never really satisfactorily make you invested in the characters and situations they're put in. Not something I'd recommend looking out for, but I won't pan it as it was certainly diverting.

So on to a film that could not be any more different to that silly comedy, I finally found some English subtitles for Liv Ullmann's second film as a director and I didn't hesitate to download it because it was never released here and of course there's no dvd either. I am a big fan of Ullmann's last film, Faithless, which she worked from an Ingmar Bergman script, but she was already a director in her own right, having had her first two films submitted to the oscars on behalf of Norway. The film I saw is Kristin Lavransdatter and it is apparantly the biggest hit in Norwegian history (something like 2/3rds of the population have seen it, which is about ... 3 million people ).

This is a medieval story of a girl (the eponymous character) who is betrothed to a man. She would prefer to marry someone else so she is sent to a convent for a year, where she meets a man whom she starts an affair with. The most striking thing about the film is the flair of Ullmann, she utilises the peerless Sven Nyqvist's talents as a cinematographer to the fullest and creates some striking imagery and fluid storytelling, in the proocess making the film feel shorter than its three hour runtime. Elisabeth Matheson does a fine job in the lead, but it is the supporting players who steal the show - Lena Endre (so unimaginably beyond exceptional in Faithless) gives a massive boost to the film towards the end and Henny Moan as Kristin's mother is even better.

The subplot between the father and mother is the most poignant of all, this is the film's problem and brilliance - the main characters are not particularly likeable and I was rooting against them getting together for the whole runtime but Ullmann still makes the film rattle on and retain an inherent interest in spite of this. The film was such a success in Norway because of the beloved novel it's based on plus the Ullmann factor and it actually received a very mixed reaction at the time. I found this to be a hidden gem that I'm very glad I found a way to see and am disappointed that Liv hasn't adapted the other novels because she fell out with the producers who own the rights. She's an ridiculously talented woman who I would love to see work more, be it in front of or behind the camera.

David Fincher has always been an emotionally distant filmmaker. After his early films like Alien 3 and Se7en, he became one of those directors who you could sense that every shot had been storyboarded in advance. In films like The Game, Fight Club and Panic Room his technique was at the forefront of his storytelling, distractingly so because you (and he) are more interested in what he's doing with the camera than what's happening in the plot. In his new film starring Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fincher has found probably the best balance between visual showiness and simply telling the story since his first film with Pitt 13 years before, but that doesn't mean he's the right man for the job.

Benjamin Button is born as an old man, then ages backwards through his life (although why he is born as a baby-sized pensioner, grows, then goes back to being baby-sized at the end rather than becoming an adult sized baby as would surely naturally follow is never even brought up ) as told by Caroline (Julia Ormond), who is reading Button's diary aloud to her dying mother Daisy (played by Cate Blanchett). It does Ormond (who does brilliantly with a nothing character) a great disservice to have her simply begin sentences then have Pitt's narration take over, and the structure as a whole seems forced, tacked on and pretentious. Hurricane Katrina is looming in the background but this adds nothing to the story except eliciting a reaction from people for whom that is still a sore wound.

The film is very watchable, it doesn't feel its almost 3 hour length and the reverse ageing of Pitt is fascinating throughout. If anything is the problem though, that is precisely it: it feels as if the whole point of the film is "Brad Pitt ages backwards". Ostensibly, this is a love story between two people who are ageing in different directions and end up "meeting in the middle", but in Fincher they've found the one director not suited to this kind of story. Daisy is a total cow to Benjamin for the whole time until she is the one who wants them to get together and *BANG* they do - it would be a challenge for any director to make such a relationship work romantically but the uber-cold, stand-offish Fincher never has a prayer.

Pitt is the glue that holds all of this together, when he gets younger Fincher does shoot him like it's a Hugo Boss advert at times, but it's a fine performance. Blanchett does what is required of her but has very little to do in the modern day segments, and the way they make her look young is very artificial, whereas they do make Pitt look just like he did 15 years ago. This again is sadly the whole point of the film. While it's well made and Fincher disappears as much as he can and it moves nicely ... the central story is so lacking in emotion (despite Alexandre Desplat's beautiful score doing everything possible to add to what's not there) it really is the gimmick keeping the audience's interest rather than the drama. While this may be fine first time round, this surely won't be a story that retains much of an interest on repeat viewings once the novelty has worn off. Worth seeing? Absolutely, it's a very good watch, albeit a very inconsequential one.

In fear of repeating many of the sentiments from the previous review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in A Christmas Tale the director (Arnaud Desplechin) has summoned a truly impeccable cast (Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos and Melvil Poupaud) and proceeded to let them down.

This is a very grand film about the reunion of a family for Christmas. Catherine Deneuve's matriarch has been diagnosed with cancer and even the "banished" son Mathieu Amalric has been invited back into the very large extended family gathering over the festive season. Desplechin does not lack ambition, but he does lack the ability to pull all of his ideas together. As a director this is very reminiscent of Sean Penn's effort with Into the Wild, in the worst of ways in that he throws all these visual tricks at the film with no thought to storytelling: they're just show-off techniques which are unbalanced as he is just making the audience aware they are watching a film rather than getting immersed in the story.

The second major problem is that the story itself is a massive conceit. He creates some interesting characters (but far too many to examine satisfactorily) but then has no intention whatsoever of looking into or explaining why they're acting why they do. The lack of insight in a film of this nature is almost risible, which is a shame because for long periods the characters themselves are interesting enough to hold the audience's attention. What adds to that are the performances, which are uniformly excellent. Deneuve and Amalric are very good, but it's Anne Consigny's depressed sister who provides the film with the most real emotions and genuine performance. The problem stems back to the writing that such an exceptional performance is undercut by a lack of depth to the relationships joining the characters together (or more accurately pulling them apart).

Despite the considerable flaws though this is very watchable for the most part and that is down to the cast. The first hour and a half fly by but the longer it goes (and in a vanity-fest such as this, almost inevitably it goes a long time) the more bogged down under its weight it gets. Messy subplots are brought up, in particular Chiara Mastroianni's, and no matter how capable an actress she is the film gets stymied. Poupaud is wasted and certain characters are just plot points, solely there to dispence information. If this were 45 minutes shorter and just concentrating on Deneuve, Amalric and Consigny then it would be much tighter and a far better film, even though as a writer he'd still duck the issues at the centre of it all.

This is a film that is good when you watch it but gets worse the more you think about it. It's emotionally cold, but the fatal flaw is it's intellectual counterfeit money - sketching characters out, not tying them together properly then relying on a wonderful cast to fill in the blanks. The cast *are* so wonderful though that they just about do it, but can't mask the patch-up job they've been asked to perform on behalf of the writer/director. That he asks them to do it is probably the worst thing about this ambitious, arctic, intellectually redundant film.

Woody Allen's new film summons the best cast he's had in years, but they are forced to work with a truly atrocious script. Allen's story of two women's summer in Spain should be an entertaining enough diversion but his screenplay fails so consistently on so many levels everyone in front of the camera does very well to drag this up to watchable.

If ever an example of how not to write a voiceover were required, then this would be right at the front of the queue. Allen consistently tells you what is happening as you are seeing it visually, he is describing the emotions of the characters as if his incredibly talented cast (Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Patricia Clarkson, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, etc. ) were unable to get those emotions across on their own. It is also incredibly inconsistent, dipping in and out, it's a complete mess, which is a shame because those scenes of characters together are edited very well. Cameron Crowe in Singles didn't need a voiceover saying "They went to the fish market and played around with the crustaceans" as you see two people laughing as one surprises another by scaring her with a crab, it's pathetic. Allen treats his audience like a 5 year old child who can't understand the images placed in front of them, it's incredibly condescending and redundant.

The cast is very varied, Cruz is good but long overdue by the time she gets in to the film, Scarlett is decent but when clearly spouting Allen-esque lines she's more doing a Woody impression than acting naturally. Bardem though has never been so bland and uninteresting as an actor, it's actually impressive the non-performance Allen extracts from him. In the midst of all this is Rebecca Hall who does the best job she possibly could have with such a poorly written character. While the story arc she has to go through is literally unbelievable due to the hackneyed, ill-conceived nature of the character, she imbues Vicky with such naturalism she almost rises above it. Allen has created 2D characters and put them into a situation that demands interest in the salacious nature of the relationships (oooh, they're having a threesome ) because as a drama between the characters it's consistently mishandled.

It doesn't work as a comedy, it's occasionally mildly amusing but won't elicit much more than the odd chuckle every 20 mins or so, there's about 5 times as much far better comedy in the average episode of House. As a drama it's hokey but the actors in the main make it watchable. In recent years Allen has stepped back from working in front of the camera, it's about time he stopped writing too and concentrated on directing because that is the one area where he can function as a relevant person of interest in the field.

I thought I'd take these two films together because neither have a scheduled release here and I saw both online, via different methods (Revanche is nominated for foreign language film at the oscars so I downloaded so I could see it before the ceremony, and Captain Abu Raed I saw on Google Video).

In Revanche we are introduced to two characters (Alex and Tamara) having sex in the shower. We then find out that she's a prostitute and he works in her brothel. She owes a lot of money being a Ukrainian immigrant and following her pimp's advances towards her that she be set up in a flat where high profile customers can come round at will and have sex with her, they start looking for a way out both physically and financially. About half an hour or so into the film it's clear Alex's idea is to rob a bank in his grandfather's small town.

The opening of the film, rather like Failan will put some people off in that while that film it was just the horrible characters, in this there's a revelling in the salacious subject matter and excessive nudity throughout. Once the opening act is over though all that dissipates and we are into the meat and bones of the film (it's title means "Revenge"). The problem, dramatically, is that it is eye-rollingly reliant on coincidence and you find yourself playing screenwriter rather than getting immersed in the drama. The "reveal" at the end is so obvious broadly the only fun is in guessing exactly how they're going to engineer its coming about, and that's the real problem, it's so engineered it fails to move or engage.

It's competently acted, they all have a nice presence on screen (Johannes Krisch as Alex recalls an older, less attractive Colin Farrell) but there's nothing mindblowing going on in front of the camera. It's solidly told too with the occasional nice shot and some good lighting. There are though some obvious and overly repetitive visual metaphors going on and it's a tad heavy-handed. It's a good watch, but it's not tremendously involving and despite its very emotional subject matter it's a rather austere experience watching, due to the mechanics of the screenwriting being so on show.

Far more emotional and never austere is the Jordanian film Captain Abu Raed, which is apparantly the first feature length film from that country in half a century. It's about a lonely janitor at the airport who, upon finding a Captain's hat in one of the bins, is mistaken by the local children in his neighbourhood for a Captain. He then, following their demands, proceeds to tell them tall stories about his life and more importantly his "adventures".

This is such a sweet, lovely film for the first half, but it does delve into some very heavy territory the longer the film goes, as a sub-plot about Abu Raed's neighbour beating his wife and son becomes the whole point of the film. Nadim Sawalha gives a beautiful performance as the eponymous character, with Rana Sultan having a very nice presence as the pilot whose parents are trying to marry her off, but becomes drawn to the janitor that can converse in multiple languages with the travellers.

This film is very smoothly put together by director Amin Matalqa, he gets fine performances out of the children and the adults are very well done. If there is a problem with the film (and it's certainly not the cinematography and editing, which are first rate), the family abuse angle is a little 2-Dimensional at times and it doesn't help that the weakest actor on show is playing the father, who has the most thankless role. That said, this in the main is a delightful little film, not without flaws, but entertaining in many senses and well worth checking out.

I didn't realise just how much non-theatrical stuff had crept up on me and seeing as the Wong is the one that can be construed as "new" I'll do that first then get on with it. I reviewed the original on this blog last year (bottom paragraph here - http://inthemoodforblog.blog.co.uk/2008/04/07/incest-drug-abuse-several-phantoms-and-s-4010473/ - if you're interested) and the only real differences to the film are that they've played around with the tints on Doyle's incredible cinematography, made the score more classical (which was a must as it was the biggest flaw with the film) and tightened up the narrative slightly (the redux version is seven minutes shorter).

It's an confused narrative to begin with, you don't know who anyone is and they all seem to bleed into each other but even on first watch everything comes together at the end. Watching it again it is entirely necessary for Wong Kar Wai to take this approach to the storytelling because if you told it chronologically you'd have the Maggie Cheung segment up top and that is the biggest scene emotionally and thematically. Holding it for the end, finally realising why the characters are who they are and have done what they have makes perfect sense dramatically. This is no 21 Grams chopping everything up into pieces to deliberately disorientate, because in that film certain scenes lose their dramatic potential because you know what's going to happen when the drama of those scenes is precisely that question: what's going to happen? Here it's the opposite, because you know what's going to happen to these characters, the drama is enhanced. In that respect this film is very like 2046 holding back the Gong Li segment because shoving that up front would lose the dramatic weight of knowing what Tony Leung turns into after that. Thematically it's very similar to 2046 as well, the memory, the regret, the helplessness to change the past. It's 2046 with swords and well worth checking out, even if you have to resort to seeing it online like I did because the distribution is so atrocious.

I caught the chinese war film Assembly on Film Four, which I'd been tempted to watch at one of my arthouses last year. The reasons I didn't were probably cash-related and also the fact that it's directed by Feng Xiaogang, who gave us the truly excreable The Banquet. This is the story is of a soldier who is the sole survivor of an attack during the civil war, who then fights the bureaucratic system to find the bodies of his lost comrades and change their status from missing in action to died in combat. It's shot in that now familiar Saving Private Ryan/Band of Brothers way that was so successful for the South Korean film Taegukgi and it is impressive from a technical standpoint. It is a little cheesy at times, it is a tad drawn out but in the main it's a very good watch.

After watching Passchendaele I decided to check out Wonderfalls, being so impressed with Caroline Dhavernas in the film coupled with my love of Pushing Daisies. I absolutely love the show but am just staggered as to how different Dhavernas is - in Passchendaele she is a woman, but in Wonderfalls her Jaye is very much a girl and the complete opposite of what I'd seen Caroline do previously. She's exceptionally talented, so I dug around for one of her Canadian films and came up with Niagara Motel, which rather nicely also has Anna Friel in it, so it's a Bryan Fuller-fest . The film is about a group of people tied together by this motel. Friel and her husband are recovering drug addicts trying to win back their child, Dhavernas is a local waitress who the hilarious Kevin Pollack is trying to solicit into erotic dancing and there are a couple of other storylines about depressed people in intolerable situations. It's far from a great cinematic effort, but it is entertaining enough for what it is. Worth a watch if you're a fan of Fuller's females but it's nothing special really.

Purely by chance I came across a film I've wanted to see for years: Tumbleweeds, which Janet McTeer was oscar nominated for. It's started doing the rounds on Sky Indie and is on again next week. It's a road movie/indie comedy about a mother who jumps from man to man and town to town, and her daughter who just wants to stay in the same place. McTeer gives a very accomplished performance but it's not really a stretch as once she decides how she's going to play her she's pretty much the same in every scene. That said the character work is impressive and that coupled with Kimberly J. Brown's performance as the daughter mean their relationship makes the film inherently watchable. It's a very predictable film and at times the filmmaking is overly ragged for ragged's sake, but it's a nice enough way to spend a couple of hours.

Finally, (because I tried to watch The Draughtsman's Contract and just gave up because I could not get into it at all ) my brother rented Vantage Point from lovefilm and threw the dvd in my direction before he sent it back. This is to Rashomon what Run Lola Run was to Blind Chance, namely a rip-off in terms of the idea behind the structure. The story opens with the US President coming to Spain in the midst of a lot of anti-American protests and we see Sigourney Weaver's news producer covering the event. The president is shot when he goes to give a speech and then we see the story unfold a little more each time from different people's perspectives. It's fairly predictable, certain aspects are flat out laughable, but it's very watchable so I can't slate it, even if I couldn't really recommend searching it out.

Last year James Christopher wrote an article in The Times detailing tips on how to become a professional film critic. His main point was that the critic should never write a boring sentence because you lose the audience: that is Meryl Streep's approach to her performance in John Patrick Shanley's film of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Doubt.

There are three main characters in this story and each of them are approached by the actors playing them in different ways. The set up is very simple, at a school run by the Catholic church in post-Kennedy 60s America a young nun (Amy Adams) who teaches the 8th Grade sees a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) summon a boy to the rectory, who returns acting strangely and having alcohol on his breath. A week later she reports this to her superior (Streep), who based on conviction rather than tangible proof starts a crusade against the priest.

Streep's performance is very much that, a performance, you rarely forget you're watching Meryl Streep act, but in the vein of The Devil Wears Prada it's deliberately like that and consistently entertaining. Adams serves her character much better giving a delightfully restrained, soulful, natural performance, which is the antithesis of Streep's approach. Somewhere in the middle is Hoffman, who is frequently pushed to overt stagey-ness by Shanley, but manages to show some real vulnerabilty and subtlety on occasion. Shanley is the reason for the inbalance of performance as he cannot reign Streep in and is probably too close to the material's roots on the stage to extract a more cinematic tone of performance from her, especially in her scenes with Hoffman. All three performances are very good, they just reach that level in varying ways and due to the nature of the medium, Adams quietly steals the show.

That said though the writing and characterisation is what makes it work because it is structured very much as a battle of wills with the innocent left in the middle, which mirrors the acting. If there is a problem with the writing it is that the question as to whether or not Hoffman's character has molested the boy is too definitely answered and doesn't address very interesting side-issues stemming from that. Shanley's direction in the main is fine, the film rattles along, and just like James Christopher suggests, is never dull, but a more experienced hand would not have gone for such overt and simplistic symbolism throughout.

Despite its flaws, which are not inconsiderable, this is a very entertaining film with flashes of brilliance and the occasional scene which is perfectly done. It's just a shame that the director prevents it from being the modern classic it could have been (due to the ridiculously talented cast) had he not had such an uneven approach between the tone of the performances and the piece as a whole, and distilled the more interesting aspects of his story in the simplification of the issues.

30 years after his death, Harvey Milk is here once again to recruit you. He was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in America and, as the film says at the very beginning, he was assassinated. This film, by Gus Van Sant, chronicles his rise as a political champion of gay rights in the 1970s. Van Sant used to be a maker of fine films, but the last decade or so has seen him immerse himself in arty ventures which have fallen flat on their face. Thankfully this is easily his best film since To Die For.

Milk is played by Sean Penn, who has never smiled so much on screen in his whole career. He plays Milk from the age of 40 until his death less than a decade later and captures the warmth and charm (not the first two words synonymous with Penn as an actor) delightfully. He has a couple of lovers in the film, the first (nice) one is played beautifully by James Franco and the second (horrible) one is played annoyingly by Diego Luna. Emile Hirsch does sterling work as one of Milk's campaigners, but Josh Brolin consistently underwhelms as one of San Francisco's local supervisors, Dan White.

The film is very well put together, Van Sant takes a back seat and just tells the story rather than showing off the way he's been doing in his other films in recent memory. The score by Danny Elfman suits the piece, the soundtrack is spot on for the setting as well as the mood of the story, and the cinematography is first rate.

If there is a problem with the film then it is in the underdevelopment and simplicity of White and Milk. There are lots of amusing moments throughout though and the film as a consequence consistently entertains. It is preachy, it is very much a film of its subject and that will obviously put some people off. The difference between this and something like Hunger though is that while people polarised on either side of the political issue will either love or hate the film, here the story of the underdog and basic human rights will appeal to any neutral. On that basis, this is broadly recommended.