Format: DVD

Release date: 24 March 2008

Distributor: Eureka Video

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra

Cast: Marcello Mastrioianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti

Italy/France 1961

122 mins

For the first 45 minutes La Notte appears to be a beautiful but cold study of sophisticated ennui. At any rate this is a good excuse to photograph Jeanne Moreau (Lidia) and Marcello Mastroianni (Giovanni) against the angular modern cityscapes of Milan, or more austerely still against bright blank backgrounds. If the aim of cinematography were to produce a series of beautiful images, then it could hardly be done better than this. Any still from these scenes would glow on the wall of the Photographers’ Gallery. But it is supposed to be a narrative art as well. To the extent that La Notte is a dramatic rather than a photographic work, its drama is one of existentialist angst, with Antonioni on the psychological trail of two individuals who find themselves alienated from their lives and each other in a world which needs them to give it meaning. The mood is not improved by a distinct sense of menace, particularly in the scenes where Moreau wanders the city alone, in search of the lost soul of her marriage.

But as the night approaches, the film shifts – geographically, visually, and dramatically. We move to a luxurious mansion outside the city, from low-key scenes of individuals and couples, restrained in movement and sparing in words, to the flux of a party. And soon the malaise of the protagonists is grounded, as the travails of their relationship come to the surface. Gianni Di Venanzo’s precise, swooping photography of the ensemble scenes through which Mastroianni wanders immediately calls to mind their famous collaboration on 8킽. But this is a more sombre counterpart, in which Antonioni offers affectless beauty and slow, steady development instead of Fellini’s chaotic charm and irony. And Lidia perhaps more than Giovanni is the emotional fulcrum of La Notte. She faces the deaths of two relationships: with her husband and with her terminally ill admirer, the one who is and the one who might have been.

So if you’re looking for a date movie, approach with caution. It’s not (quite) as depressing as I make it sound, though, and there are plenty of delights, not just photographic. Admirers of Monica Vitti will find her particularly good value as the sophisticated daughter of Giovanni’s would-be patron. The film is vividly evocative of affluent Italy just before the 1960s wave of Anglophone popular culture swept away the soignée elegance of the European elite for something looser and brasher. And Antonioni’s skill in shaping a visual expression of the emotional drama of a single day is all the more impressive for being so stealthy.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: Cinema

Release date: 14 March 2008

Venues: Renoir, Rio Dalston (London) and key cities

Distributor: Tartan Films

Director: Harmony Korine

Writers: Avi Korine and Harmony Korine

Cast: Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant

USA 2007

112 mins

It has been eight years since Harmony Korine’s last film, the Dogme-inspired Julien Donkey-Boy. In that time, the one-time wunderkind of American experimental cinema has written a couple of books, directed a few music videos and a documentary, suffered one or two nervous breakdowns and struggled to write, finance and shoot this, his third film as a director. But the wait has been worth it: Mister Lonely is a revelation, alive with genuine passion and wonderment, hysterical, tragic and deeply moving.

A brief synopsis can never do the film justice: Diego Luna plays a Michael Jackson impersonator living and working in Paris, consumed by his role and eking out a meagre living through street shows and old folks homes. He meets Samantha Morton’s Marilyn Monroe, who invites him to join a commune of like-minded souls in a remote castle in the Scottish Highlands. But as Michael and Marilyn’s friendship blossoms, trouble arises in the shape of her husband Charlie Chaplin, whose jealousy and erratic behaviour are more reminiscent of that other moustachioed 1930s joker…

Mister Lonely is clearly the work of a man clawing his way out of a long darkness: the film is about acceptance and rebirth, the need to find kinship amid the confusion of modern living. Michael is, as the title suggests, completely cut off, the focus of attention but always for his appearance, his mannerisms, never his true personality, if such a thing even exists. But in this community of his peers – which include Madonna, James Dean, Little Red Riding Hood and the extraordinary double act of James Fox as the Pope and Anita Pallenberg as the Queen – he finally finds somewhere he can call home.

The comic possibilities inherent in the set-up are explored to full effect, as Sammy Davis Jr. throws shapes on the parapets, or Abraham Lincoln drives a mini-tractor through the sheep paddock, screaming obscenities at the Three Stooges. But there’s so much more to Korine’s script than mere kitsch: these are rounded, fascinating characters, and each gets their moment to shine. Every one of the actors seems completely absorbed in their role – during shooting Korine and his cast lived together at the location, and you can feel the camaraderie.

What’s initially perplexing about the film is a seemingly unconnected second narrative which occasionally interrupts the main story: in Panama, Werner Herzog’s priest is flying relief missions when a nun accidentally falls from the plane. But as each tale unfolds the parallels become, if not clear, then understandable – both stories are about isolated characters on the verge of wondrous discoveries, both deal in matters of faith and self-worth, and if the links between them aren’t entirely justifiable, each is so rewarding in its own right that to complain would seem churlish.

Perhaps the only sour note the film strikes is in the way each narrative strand concludes, for here Korine the wide-eyed innocent is replaced by the familiar disillusioned art-cynic, and although the effect is undeniably powerful one wonders if a little faith wouldn’t have benefited the director as much as his characters. But this is a minor gripe – overall, Mister Lonely is something of a masterpiece, rich with emotion and character depth, and consistently surprising in all the right ways.

Tom Huddleston

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 March 2008

Venues: Vue West End and nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: George A. Romero

Writer: George A. Romero

Cast: Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Shawn Roberts, Amy Lalonde

USA 2007

94 mins

George A. Romero has been synonymous with the horror genre since the ground-breaking Night of the Living Dead (1968), his low-budget, independently made masterpiece which introduced a new, relentless strain of zombie and whipped up a storm for its explicit onscreen violence and wry observations of American society. The smashing sequel Dawn of the Dead, with its ruminations on consumerism, further proved Romero to be an astute and innovative director; while the apocalyptic Day of the Dead was a rewarding finale to the trilogy, ensuring his status as the undisputed king of the zombie film.

Romero returned to the genre in 2005 with Land of the Dead, a schlocky B-movie gore fest in which cerebrally evolved zombies join forces and dine on the brains of their capitalist fat cat oppressors. Now the director brings his unique brand of the undead back to the screen with Diary of the Dead. Despite being firmly set in the twenty-first century, the era of MySpace, YouTube, media saturation and 24-hour surveillance society, Diary is something of a return to Romero’s roots: independently funded and stripped back to basics, the film attempts to recreate the atmosphere of terror and anxiety that made Night of the Living Dead so alarming.

Diary opens as a group of film students, shooting a horror movie in the woods, receive disturbing news reports that the dead are coming back to life and feasting on the flesh of the living. As they struggle to make it home in a rusting Winnebago, cameraman Jason obsessively records the details of their journey, documenting each horrific and deadly encounter along the way, piecing together a candid portrait of chaos and bloodshed. This recording is the film we see, narrated by his girlfriend Debra, who offers a chilling indictment of a world in the grip of its own undoing.

This first person, shaky-cam style gives Diary a realistic edge of tense urgency, and lends itself to some darkly comic moments. Yet it also feels somewhat derivative, particularly since the technique became commonplace in the wake of The Blair Witch Project. It is through Debra’s narration that Romero comments on the omnipotence of mass media and the way it dictates our lives, but this message becomes trite and confusing in its constant reiteration, undermining the potential of the image to evoke and suggest, which in part is what made his original trilogy so compelling. However, the film is not without some inimitable Romero characteristics: the amiable Amish chap whose preferred method of zombie management is dynamite; the tough black rebel group who politicise their fight for survival; and I don’t recall ever having witnessed a zombie dispatched by a bottle of Hydrochloric acid.

After forty years Romero’s incisive wit and inventiveness are still intact, making Diary of the Dead an enjoyable and often gripping film and a small beacon of hope in a genre that’s becoming increasingly dominated by turgid remakes and tedious ‘torture-porn’ sequels. However, it lacks the raw energy, insight and rebelliousness of his earlier films, and as such is not quite the return to form that a hungry horror fan might crave. It’s unlikely Romero will be throwing in his crown quite yet; let’s just hope he gives it a good polish before he does.

Lindsay Tudor

Format: Cinema

Release date: 14 March 2008

Venues: Curzon Soho and key cities

Distributor: Slingshot Studio

Director: Céline Sciamma

Writer: Céline Sciamma

Original title: Naissance des pieuvres

Cast: Pauline Acquart, Adí­Â¨le Haenel, Louise Blachí­Â¨re

France 2007

85 mins

Twenty years after Simone de Beauvoir upset the general consensus with her revolutionary thesis that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one’, she was forced to recognise that the biological differences between the sexes undermined her theory. What remains true though, is that culture shapes our perception of femininity, a perception that constantly fluctuates between idealisation and demonisation. Both extremes are represented in Céline Sciamma’s compelling Water Lilies, a smart and refreshing cinematic study of nascent womanhood that throws us (and this doesn’t necessarily exclude male audiences) right back into the purgatory of teenage love and sexual confusion.

With little dialogue it is an intense film that, one feels, deeply reflects the director’s personal experience. At only 27 Sciamma has produced a debut feature of emotional strength and beauty, within which psychological insight and social commentary flow easily and implicitly. From the film’s opening scene, which sees young heroine Marie observing the girls of the regional synchronized swimming team frantically paddling underwater in an effort to keep their smiling heads and graceful torsos afloat, Sciamma demonstrates a keen eye for a visual metaphor.

The film charts a few weeks in Marie’s summer of first love. With her big wide eyes and grave gaze, she is quite cute but almost creepily introverted, preferring to observe people to talking to them. Her best – and only – friend Anne (Louise Blachí­Â¨re) is Marie’s opposite, girlish and fun-loving, if occasionally uneasy about her curvy body. While Anne has a huge crush on male swimmer Franí§ois, Marie (Pauline Acquart) is gradually consumed by her desire for the beautiful Floriane (Adí­Â¨le Haenel), captain of the swimming team and the most admired girl in school. As the precarious, uneasy relationship between the two girls develops, the palpable emotional and sexual tension reaches its climax. In a scene of great sensibility and intimacy, Marie gives Floriane her first sexual experience; while Franí§ois, disappointed by Floriane’s lack of response to his advances, wilfully ‘does it’ with Anne.

Although the story of troubled teenage girls trapped in the turmoil of young love is overly familiar, Water Lilies has a unique atmosphere, mainly due to Sciamma’s use of the setting. Beautifully photographed and perfectly served by its emphatic electronic soundtrack, the film captures the sheer awfulness of growing up in a suburban hinterland without having to show more than the swimming pool, a few houses and Marie’s overgrown backyard. With a minimal cast, from which adults are carefully excluded, the film is built around soft close-ups of faces and stunning underwater shots of the swimming team. Its essence is vividly fleshed out through the sparse conversations and visceral, heartbreakingly honest performances of the young actors who are all wonderfully natural.

With obvious sympathy for the three, very different girls portrayed, Sciamma’s concern is to track their painful but determined quest for self-realisation. In the end, nothing is resolved, but everything has changed, and at that very moment being a teenage girl in a teenage world feels oddly right.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 March 2008

Venues: Coronet Notting Hill, London and nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Juan Antonio Bayona

Writer: Sergio G. Sí¡nchez

Original title: El Orfanato

Cast: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Prí­Â­ncep

Mexico/Spain 2007

100 mins

Produced by Guillermo del Toro, The Orphanage is the debut feature of young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. A ghost story set in a Spanish orphanage, it has much in common with its mentor’s masterful The Devil’s Backbone, not least in its thoughtful use of the horror genre to explore the troubled mindset of a character confronted with loss and death.

The film opens on an idyllic scene from the past as a group of children play in the garden outside the orphanage on a windy spring day. Over two decades later, Laura, now a grown woman, returns with her husband Carlos and son Simí­Â³n with the intention of turning her former abode into a house for special needs children. Soon after their arrival at the orphanage, Laura is visited by a strange old woman, Benigna, who reveals she knows confidential details about her family. When Simí­Â³n disappears after a party at the house, the police immediately suspect Benigna. But six months later the search for Simí­Â³n has yielded no result and strains start to appear in the couple. While Carlos wants to move on, Laura is prepared to try anything, including paranormal experiments involving a medium, to find some answers.

While the plot is at times clumsy and unconvincing, the locations are well chosen: the house’s antique, dark wood manages to simultaneously evoke the warm cosiness of the past as well as the disturbing secrets it holds, and the rugged Spanish coast provides suitably gloomy and mysterious caves in which Simí­Â³n meets a strange, invisible friend. With a genuinely creepy atmosphere that really grows on the audience as the story progresses, The Orphanage is a subtle, moving horror film. Just as in The Devil’s Backbone, ghosts are manifestations of a forgotten, tragic event and Bayona paints a deeply affecting portrayal of a grieving woman inexorably and fatefully drawn to the past. In that he is well served by Bélen Rueda’s magnificent performance as Laura. It is all the more surprising, then, that the generally restrained tone of the film should be marred by a couple of rather gory, unnecessarily shocking moments, in particular a grisly scene involving the victim of a road accident with a dislocated jaw. In spite of such faux-pas, however, The Orphanage remains a very worthy addition to the type of soulful horror movies that del Toro himself has helped define.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 March 2008

Venues: ICA

Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang

Writer: Cheng Ah

Original title: Wu Quingyuan

Cast: Chen Chang, Sylvia Chang, Akira Emoto, Takayuki Inoue

China 2006

104 mins

Part of Spotlight Beijing: China in London Film Season
20 March-10 April 2008
ICA

Back in 1992, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s bleak and controversial The Blue Kite, which follows the daily lives of an ordinary Beijing family in the times of Mao’s Cultural revolution, fell victim to the hypersensitive Chinese authorities who pulled the plug after seeing the first cut of the film. The raw footage was smuggled out of China and post-production was completed without the director having seen the final cut. In this form, the film found its way into the international festival circuit where it became a major critical and commercial success. Meanwhile, the blacklisted Tian was sent to the countryside for ‘re-education’ and it was feared that he’d lost interest in filmmaking until he made a triumphant return with the excellent Springtime in a Small Town in 2002. Tian Zhuangzhuang’s latest film to date, The Go Master, is now opening at the ICA as the centrepiece of the China in London 2008 film programme, which features a long overdue retrospective of Tian’s small but ground-breaking body of work.

The Go Master, in contrast with his earlier films, which mainly focused on ethnic minorities in China, portrays the legendary master of the ancient board game ‘Go’, Wu Quingyuan, and his struggle to cope with life as a prodigy. The film traverses some forty years of turbulent Chinese-Japanese history, from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s through the Second World War and into the 1960s, bringing to life the political and social upheavals of the time through the details and circumstances that shape Wu’s extraordinary existence.

Born in China in 1914, Wu moves to Japan at a young age and is soon identified as a naturally talented Go player, establishing his reputation through a long competition against a Japanese master. Tutored by a harsh mentor while also battling tuberculosis as a young man, Wu is not driven to play Go merely by his love of the game but also by a search for inner peace, which also leads him to join a Buddhist sect.

The narrative charts Wu’s turbulent life, going backwards and forwards in time as though one were browsing through his diary, which is sometimes confusing. Audiences expecting the lush imagery that is associated with contemporary Chinese cinema might be disappointed and some might find its extremely slow pace boring. However, the film is a moving, intimate domestic drama, played out with subtle intensity on the characters’ faces. Perhaps Tian’s smartest move is to focus not on the wartime turmoil or on the nature of the chess-like game, but on the immense psychological struggle the master of Go faces every time he enters a new game. Chang Chen as Wu gives an outstanding performance of quiet power and brilliantly conveys the strangeness of being a prodigy. When not confined to the game board, he maintains an almost conspicuously low profile with his pale looks and introverted temper, whereas in competition he shows the intensity of a world champion, with a laser-sharp stare and a completely unshakeable concentration. In the film’s most startling scene, when the game is interrupted by an explosion after the atomic bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima, Wu’s only concern is to resume the game without delay.

Just like his central character, Tian maintains an even mood throughout the film. The characters may not all be well shaped; and the power of the images is undermined by the sometimes confusing sequence of events; but his strategy is one of understatement and it wonderfully complements the carefully elaborated visual style to create a beautifully shot and coherent whole.

While it seems a little odd that the China in London film programme features no films by Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou, who are usually ranked first among China’s Fifth Generation film directors, the season is an opportunity to screen Tian’s lesser-known films together with other recent Chinese films. One wonders what Tian would have been able to achieve if he had not been banned from filmmaking for a decade; although The Go Master is not his masterpiece, it is an elegant biopic with sufficient psychological complexity to draw audiences deeply into the characters’ lives.

Pamela Jahn

Spotlight Beijing: China in London Film Season runs from March 20 to April 10 at the ICA, London.

Format: Cinema

Release date:8 February 2008

Distributor: Walt Disney

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Based on: Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Cast: Daniel-Day Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Ciaran Hinds

USA 2007

158 minutes

There Will Be Blood is a brilliant, if at times difficult, film about greed, vengeance, and the loss of faith that comes with the overwhelming, burning desire for success. The power that emanates from Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest cinematic epic has as much to do with the intensity of Daniel Day-Lewis’ enthralling performance, as it does with its remarkable depiction of an America on the brink of industrialisation. Set in the early decades of the last century, it follows the sweep of the California oil boom, which helped transform the pristine, almost innocent landscape into an oil-blackened scar.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays the archetypal self-made man, a silver prospector named Daniel Plainview, whose discovery of black gold in Texas leads to an enormous and corrupting change in his fortunes. Plainview builds an empire to rival the corporate giants at Standard Oil, with the help of his young adopted son, H.W., who is pivotal in helping to soften his father’s grizzled image and win over their potential victims (the charismatic H.W. is played by Dillon Freasier, a first-time actor who delivers a perfectly attuned performance). Anderson contrasts Plainview’s blood-and-grits determination with the polished capitalism that presides over America, but his tremendous success leaves only a desolate and bitter legacy.

As his fortune grows, Plainview travels to Little Boston, California, after receiving a tip about a vast, unexploited oil field. His attempts to secure a concession are challenged by the local preacher, played by Paul Dano, virtually unrecognisable from his role as a sullen, angst-ridden teenager in Little Miss Sunshine. Dano is superb as Eli Sunday, the young evangelical minister determined to bring Plainview and his oilmen into his flock. Many of the film’s best moments unfold in the confrontation between the bible-thumping Sunday and the cynical, unbelieving Plainview, who’s forced to humiliate himself in front of the preacher and his congregation in order to gain access to the ocean of oil seething below the surface of the frontier town. Their tempestuous relationship courses through the film, their hatred and contempt for each other driving them both towards the mutually-assured destruction that closes the film. Through the characters of Dano and Plainview, Anderson pitches spirituality against profit in what is essentially a study in the nature of power.

Along with the quality of the cast, much of the film’s strength lies in its iconic imagery, captured brilliantly by Robert Elswit’s fantastic cinematography, and its excellent score, composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. From the entirely wordless fifteen-minute opening, the music drives the action, as we’re introduced to the filth and brutality of the silver mines and early oil-pits, and the poverty and tragedy that accompanied the gruelling work. The riveting music perfectly complements the transcendent images of a wild west: the dusty, scorched desert almost burns your eyes, while the oilmen and their rigs exist in brilliant silhouette against the enormity of the Californian sky, evoking the pioneering photography of American artists like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.

Though epic in scope, There Will Be Blood is a lengthy character study of a vile, often despicable and alienating man. Corruption wrought by success has been an enduring theme in American cinema, from the classic Citizen Kane to the tepid Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator. Day-Lewis’ riveting performance at times risks veering towards caricature, while Anderson also struggles to avoid the usual clichés. But despite its flaws, There Will Be Blood is the most evocative, visually stunning portrayal of ambition to emerge from America in decades.

Sarah Cronin

Format:Cinema

Release date: 1 February 2008

Venues: Clapham Picture House, Renoir (London) and selected key cities from 22 February

Distributor Contender Films

Director: Nick Broomfield

Screenplay: Nick Broomfield, Marc Hoeferlin, Anna Telford

Cast: Elliot Ruiz, Yasmine Hanani, Andrew McLaren

UK 2007

93 mins

Again utilising a stripped-down skeleton crew and drawing on the aesthetic of Ghosts, a harrowing and authentic account of the plight of Chinese immigrant workers in the UK, Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha is another compelling human drama drawn from real-life events. On November 19, 2005 in the western Iraqi city of Haditha twenty-four men, women and children were killed by four US Marines. Initial reports claimed that Marines had returned fire after ‘gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire’. A day after the incident, a Haditha student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred, which provoked a Time Magazine article disputing the original account. A subsequent Pentagon probe alleged a retaliatory US massacre in response to the death of a unit member in a roadside bomb attack. Commentators in certain sections of the media immediately began to refer to the event as ‘Iraq’s My Lai’.

Widely acknowledged for his documentary work, and specifically for his re-invention and re-popularisation of the discipline, Broomfield has continued to use extensive research as the foundation of his recent pursuit of ‘fictive’ filmmaking and his ongoing quest for truth. Before a single page was written Broomfield and co-writers Marc Hoeferlin and Anna Telford spent over nine months on research, scouring government and witness reports and conducting lengthy and revealing interviews with Marines, survivors of the massacre and insurgents. The journalists who had been involved from Time Magazine and The Washington Post were also sought out and consulted. The result of this meticulous drive towards authenticity is the fact that the viewer often feels uncomfortably close to events. More importantly perhaps, it allows Broomfield to achieve his stated objective of making the film as ‘an attempt to understand the event from the three different points of view in a very human and compassionate way’.

Though still relatively low-key in terms of scale and budget, the brilliantly balanced Battle For Haditha undoubtedly operates on a broader scale than Ghosts and it is in this regard that Broomfield shows his progression as a filmmaker. Again casting non-professional actors, many of whom are actual Marines and massacre survivors who improvised dialogue under instruction, the director offers a visceral recreation of the sounds and images of combat to ultimately reveal the cost of this combat in terms of human life. There’s a startling realism to the presentation of the language of war which makes the consideration of how humanity is compromised by acts of barbarism and conflict all the weightier.

The film was shot in Jordan, where the conservative and traditional Muslim culture presented numerous problems, not least a difficulty to enlist the on-screen participation of family members and females. The incredibly diverse backgrounds of those cast to appear and the hostilities that divide them would also, one assume, make for a tempestuous filming environment but Broomfield claims that tensions were evaporated due to an incredible letting of emotion and the seizing of an opportunity to share experiences. Offering conclusive proof that the director, who cites Battle of Algiers as his inspiration, has found a method of working with which he feels entirely comfortable and which intelligently blurs the line between documentary and ‘real’ cinema, Battle For Haditha is a work of both authority and integrity.

Jason Wood

Jason Wood is the author of Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons (Faber).

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 February 2008

Venues: tbc

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Wong Kar Wai

Screenplay: Wong Kar Wai, Lawrence Block

Cast: Norah Jones, Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman

Hong Kong/China/France 2007

111 minutes

It seemed sadly inevitable that Wong Kar Wai’s first American film, starring songstress and first-time actress Norah Jones, alongside the consistently mediocre Jude Law, would be a disappointment compared to his earlier, Hong Kong-based work. Billed as a romantic road trip that explores ‘the distance between heartbreak and a new beginning’, My Blueberry Nights is a flimsy, saccharine confection that suffers from a weak script, trite dialogue and miscast actors.

In its favour, the acclaimed director’s first English-language feature does echo some of his earlier films, such as the excellent Chungking Express. His continued fascination with the nocturnal city as a symbol of alienation and loneliness is both evocative and visually striking, his actors framed by the lush hues of neon lights, reflected in the surfaces of the bars and diners in which his characters exist. However, while it may be beautiful to look at, My Blueberry Nights lacks the spontaneity and subtlety of his earlier films, while the dynamism that actors like Tony Leung, the late Leslie Cheung and Faye Wong – a singer like Norah Jones – lent them is sadly missing from this latest work.

Jones plays Elizabeth, a young woman living in New York who’s just discovered that her boyfriend has been seeing another woman. She finds solace in a café run by Jeremy (Jude Law), a charismatic expat from Manchester. Night after night, Elizabeth sits on a stool at the counter, seeking answers for her loneliness and betrayal. Jeremy, with his own story of heartbreak, feeds her banal philosophies and blueberry pie as consolation. Just as he predictably begins to fall for her, Elizabeth decides to set off across America in an attempt to ease her heartache, waitressing along the way. She encounters one miscast actor after another as she travels from New York to Nevada, with the exception of David Strathairn, who plays a cop down on his luck, drinking away his sorrows in a bar in Memphis, trying to forget his Southern bombshell of an ex-wife, played by the vampy Rachel Weisz.

Strathairn’s performance is the only one in the film that feels both natural and credible. He has a screen presence that the other actors, despite their A-list status, all seem to lack, and one that even further diminishes Jones’ acting capabilities. She may be a talented singer, but on-screen she’s incapable of conveying emotion, instead seeming listless and aloof from her own role in the film. As she travels from Memphis to Nevada, it becomes increasingly difficult to empathise with her journey from one lonely figure to another, all typically seeking some kind of redemption. In a seedy, third-rate casino, she meets a tough-talking, peroxide-blonde gambler, somewhat unconvincingly played by Natalie Portman, who, estranged from her dying father, buries her own sorrows in poker chips. Adultery, alcohol, gambling – they’re commonplace vices that should have been handled by the filmmaker with greater subtlety and dexterity, and much less banality.

While the film is visually enticing, most of the actors seem to have been cast for their fame and looks rather than their abilities. They simply aren’t strong enough to salvage the predictable, insubstantial script, co-written by Wong and Lawrence Block, who’s better known for his crime novels than his screenplays. Nothing more than a light piece of entertainment, My Blueberry Nights is a minor footnote in Wong Kar Wai’s brilliant body of work.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 February 2007

Venue: BFI Southbank, Renoir (London)

Distributor: BFI

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Based on: novel by Alberto Moravia

Original title: Il Conformista

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda

Italy/France 1970

111 minutes

The Conformist is screening as part of a BFI season of European noir, films that take the distinctively American concepts and clichés of 1940s crime fiction and filter them through a more experimental and internalised European new wave aesthetic. In its narrative, The Conformist looks back to the early days of Italian fascism, detailing the efforts of a zealous convert to submerge himself in the new conventions of his country. But in its style and subtext the film is very much of its time, a child of the late 60s, loaded with existential questions of identity, sexuality and gender.

Marcello Clerici lives with psychological scars inflicted in boyhood, sexual traumas which have driven him to seek out the most ordinary life possible. In Mussolini’s Italy this means marriage, procreation and an unquestioning acceptance of the new political order. Eager to follow his masters’ instructions, Clerici takes his new bride to Paris, ostensibly on their honeymoon but actually to contact Professor Quadri, an old tutor who has since become a leading light in the anti-fascist movement. But when Clerici’s orders change from assignation to assassination he balks, his innate cowardice warring with his overwhelming desire to obey.

The first act of the film is restless and at times frustrating, toying with ideas and then discarding them, giving us insight into Clerici’s tortured past and newly fanatical present but struggling for coherence. Events shift back and forth in time, seemingly key characters are introduced never to reappear, and bizarre events, such as a festive dance at a local centre for the blind, cause jarring interruptions to the narrative flow. But following Clerici’s departure for Paris the main thread of the plot becomes clearer. Tension is permitted to build, characters to develop, as the narrative progresses inexorably towards its gripping, horrific conclusion.

As a central figure, Clerici is at first enigmatic, then reprehensible, then pitiable and finally simply pathetic. For Bertolucci the most terrifying face of fascism is not the sneering demagogue but the willing follower, the one who takes the path of least resistance, offering tacit support and justification. Clerici is repeatedly offered the opportunity to act – either in support or defiance of his leaders – but at every turn he does nothing, floundering in self-pity and confusion. Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance is restrained but achingly effective, assuming the character of a man who has none.

But the real star of The Conformist, and justifiably so, is Vittorio Storaro’s breathtaking photography. Hailed as a textbook example of the cinematographer’s art, the film luxuriates in washes of soft colour and pale, gauzy light, contrasting the hard, grey architectural edges of fascism with the warm, vulnerable contours of the human form. The climactic sequence on a remote mountain road is utterly devastating, a scene of pure savagery played out amid the towering tranquillity of the silent, shimmering forest.

The Conformist is a problematic film, in its structure and coherence, and particularly in its portrayal of women, who seem either to be brainless ditzes or predatory hunters, but who pay the price either way. But still it is regarded as a masterpiece, and with good reason. The film explores a complex and vital topic with intelligence, insight and emotional clarity, asking important and relevant questions about humanity’s desire for acceptance, while creating a visual spectacle unmatched in modern cinema.

Tom Huddleston