Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

**** / *****

"We are meant for each other and not meant for each other. It's a contradiction."

The fourth (and apparently final, since I hear he's back in the States) film in what will be know in the future as Woody Allen's European period, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the closest to what fans of his classic relationship comedies keep hoping the 73-year-old filmmaker will produce again. It's a light, entertaining and romantic film without the strained zaniness of Scoop or the predictability of Cassandra's Dream, filled with mild humour, gorgeous actors, some wonderfully drawn characters and a lovely, lovely Spanish setting.

In keeping with Allen's late-career embrace of sensuality over awkwardness, Barcelona is a visual treat from start to finish, revelling in the beauty of both its locations (Barcelona, of course, but also Oviedo) and its stars. Rebecca Hall and recent Allen muse Scarlett Johansson are the title characters, two of those typical Americans spending a summer abroad. Vicky (Hall) is working on a master's thesis on Catalan identity (an interest that apparently began with architect Antoni Gaudí), while Cristina (Johansson) is just hoping the change of scenery will help her "find herself."

Their circumstances and states of mind are described by an omniscient male narrator in a technique that is jarring at first but soon gives the film the tone of a particularly sharp and observant short story. The narrator, for example, encapsulates Cristina's flightiness perfectly in his introduction of her, in which he explains that she has just spent a year writing, directing and acting in a 12-minute film that she absolutely hates. Snide remarks like these pop up occasionally, always with measured delivery but showing a level of skepticism (though never condescension) toward some of the characters' choices.

Staying with Vicky's distant relatives (played by Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn), the two women soon meet up with charming, easy.going Spanish painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who bluntly proposes bedding both of them during their first conversation. Engaged Vicky finds him off-putting initially, but Cristina immediately swoons, and soon ends up his devoted lover. Things continue at a frothy but sometimes sluggish pace, and just when the film threatens to lose its spark, something great happens: Penélope Cruz arrives to liven things up as Juan Antonio's ex-wife Maria Elena.

Cruz is fantastic as the passionate, mentally unstable woman who always says (often in Spanish only, in a delightful, but subtle reference that few people will get, to the Spanish way of being) exactly what's on her mind, and her presence gives both Cristina and the film itself a reason to perk up. Maria Elena insinuates herself into Juan Antonio and Cristina's relationship, leading to the understandably over-hyped (and really rather tame) threesome that made horny bloggers go crazy. Allen may be more open to exploring the sexiness of romance these days, but he still isn't interested in anything lascivious, and his depiction of the trio's relationship is more about their individual intimacy issues than it is about hot girl-on-girl action.

Meanwhile, Vicky nurses a slow-burning flame for Juan Antonio while spending time with her dull, wet-blanket fiancé, Doug (Chris Messina), such a generic corporate tool that he works for a company called Global Enterprises and seemingly talks about nothing but golf. As a character, he's a cipher, but that's part of the point - Vicky is marrying an empty suit rather than pursuing the vibrant, unpredictable Juan Antonio. Hall, a rather surprising casting choice (a British actress who appeared in her first film only two years ago) plays the closest thing the film has to the traditional Allen surrogate, and she makes Vicky's dilemma real and more problematic than it would appear on the surface. Johansson, somewhat out of her depth in previous Allen outings, imbues Cristina with the right mix of infuriating and endearing. As for Bardem, he's appropriately sensual, but also likable, which is important in plausibly setting up why Vicky and Cristina are so drawn to him.

It's Cruz who runs away with the film, though, and holds it together when it starts to feel insubstantial. Allen envelops his audience in sensuality, makes it salivate, and then uses it to offer some bitter life lessons. Still, for a romance in which nobody seems to end up getting what they want, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is deceptively satisfying, and leaves you with a sense of hope, however false. Think of that feeling you get when Annie Halls ends. Only there's no rainy New York, only sunny Barcelona.

Review: Tropic Thunder

**** / *****

"Man, I don't drop character 'till I done the DVD commentary."

More a farce (in the classic, theatrical sense) than the satire it was predicted to be, Tropic Thunder is a far from perfect summer comedy, and it may have a small problem living all the way up to the very high box-office expectations its hilarious trailer had generated as a result. But in the end, the film's intermittent audacity and overall shagginess may be its most appealing attributes. Every time it settles down into anything resembling the standard geometry of the genres it draws on - the Vietnam war film, the caustic showbiz satire, the big-budget action film and, of course, the Ben Stiller comedy, which has become a brand all its own - some inspired bit of nonsense materializes and takes things into an unexpected and hilarious new direction.

"Tropic Thunder" is the name of the film within the film - a cliché-driven Vietnam picture with echoes of everything from Apocalypse Now and Platoon to the Rambo series embedded like arrows in its derivative hide. Choppers swoop, Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield tracks wail, and yet another thoroughly needless Hollywood wallow in American military trauma unspools before our eyes. But the egomaniacal actors aren't cooperating, and when a big stunt goes wrong and the film turns out to be "a month behind schedule after only five days of shooting," director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan, in a sort of condensed-milk version of the more realized (and hilarious) work he's done back home in England) is in trouble.

He's called on the carpet by a vicious studio boss (a brazen tour de force from a fat-suited, bald-capped Tom Cruise, portraying an ink-blot test of contemporary mogul, with at least two current production chiefs the very obvious models). Damien's solution: He will save his film by stranding his prima donna players in an actual jungle, and then shoot them guerilla-style with handheld and hidden cameras for realism - a plan that goes awry instantly, stranding five actors armed with blanks and wearing period military gear in the middle of a jungle ruled by Burmese druglords. Hilarious complications ensue.

Star/auteur Ben Stiller has only directed a handful of films (the most memorable for audiences was probably Reality Bites), but his directing aspirations go all the way back to 1990 and "The Ben Stiller Show," the 13-week flop that failed so badly Fox didn't even broadcast its final episode, but which somehow launched not only Stiller's career but that of Judd Apatow, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross and Andy Dick.

The Stiller show was a great leap forward for American TV sketch comedy, in that its mockery of the usual pop-culture targets almost always bypassed the direct celebrity impersonations that are Saturday Night Live's stock in trade and aimed at subtler parodies of the substance, syntax and generalized cynicism underlying so much visual media. From its brilliant opening sequence - three bogus "pre-title" trailers establishing the characters and careers of action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller, channelling Stallone), comedian Jeff "Fats" Portnoy (Jack Black, mocking multi-character Eddie Murphy fart-fests) and multi-Oscar-winning Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr., taking down Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson), Tropic Thunder marks a clear and welcome return to the sketch-comedy priorities of Stiller's influential television work.

The loose format, which allows Stiller to mock everything from the horrific visual clichés of the post-Saving Private Ryan war film to the Oscar-baiting pieties of films like Forrest Gump and Rain Man, seems to have liberated Stiller both as filmmaker and performer. The generosity Stiller has always shown to other actors (no star working today is more committed to the notion of an ensemble) blossoms here, with Jack Black at last reminding audiences of why School of Rock was so funny, and Jay Baruchel and the veritable unknown Brandon T. Jackson holding their own against a brace of more seasoned pros, including the great Nick Nolte.

But it's Downey Jr.'s brilliant performance as a white method actor trapped inside the cliché-driven black character he's created for a film that elevates Tropic Thunder to a whole new level. I mean, a white guy who undergoes a skin pigmentation operation to play a black dude? It was destined to be the most talked about thing here, and it deserves to be, not only because he's characteristically great but because the audacity of the concept epitomizes what's best about this film. But race is far from the only hot button topic that gets poked in the eye with a sharp stick here. A partial list of the sacred cows that Stiller and co-writer Justin Theroux reduce to gored oxen would include: panda slaughter and the Endangered Species Act; child warriors in the Third World; mental retardation and other handicaps; celebrity adoption of children from developing nations; and drug addiction - each of which would be either a no-go zone for a different type of comedy or a "serious topic" in another kind of Hollywood film.

There are slack passages and unfortunate stretches where Tropic Thunder coasts along on the very action clichés it's supposedly sending up. But Stiller has broken out as a director with this one. And any comedy that mounts such a full-frontal assault on so many fetish objects of contemporary showbiz sanctimony has earned the very wide audience and cult status Tropic Thunder will undoubtedly reach in years to come.

"I don't read the script. The script reads me."

Review: In Search of a Midnight Kiss

**** / *****

''Welcome to L.A, embrace the pain.''

Alex Holdridge's In Search of a Midnight Kiss, from his own screenplay, regards démodé downtown Los Angeles with the same fiercely lyrical affection Woody Allen has lavished on Manhattan over the decades. This alone would make the film strikingly original, but in addition, its tempestuous love story, with its heartbreaking complications, is well served by a cast of comparative unknowns. This talented assemblage is headed by Scoot McNairy as Wilson, the director's alter ego, and Sara Simmonds as Vivian, the Diane Keaton-type: the salty-tongued blind date who leads Wilson on a wild frolic across the well-worn streets of a part of Los Angeles that has known better days and years and decades.

If Holdridge belongs to any school of filmmaking, it is the Austin, Texas, school of Richard Linklater, the Linklater of Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Suburbia, and Before Sunset. Linklater's and Holdridge's are the types of romantic comedies that can spend an entire film on a single date, as if a chance encounter can change one's whole existence, which often, if not always, happens in real life as well.

Where Holdridge differs most decisively from Linklater is in the comparative foulness of today's youthspeak, though our male protagonist, Wilson, is 29, and Vivian, his stormy blind date, is 27. Whether all the profanity represents an increasingly widespread lewdness of speech in the young, or, simply, a more permissive atmosphere for a filmmaker, particularly an independent filmmaker, I cannot say.

Fortunately, all the bad words are not merely camouflage for unintelligent dialogue. Quite the contrary. The talk in Midnight Kiss is uncommonly bright and realistic, a fact that gives me renewed hope for the future of so-called independent cinema.

The film is set on New Year's Eve, already an absurdity in sunny Los Angeles. It has been a miserable occasion for Wilson over the past six years. He has become so desperate for a meaningful midnight kiss that he has been reduced to masturbating in front of a nude photoshopped photo of his best friend's girlfriend, Min (Katie Luong). What's worse: He's caught doing it by his roommate and friend, Jake (Brian Matthew McGuire), who proceeds to ask Min out of mild curiosity if that is indeed a picture of her. After looking at the photo with mock thoughtfulness for a few moments, she answers in the negative, though it is obviously her face. The important thing is that everyone remains cool about the situation, though Wilson, as is his wont, remains flustered in general.

When I was in high school, someone told me that only 5 percent of the students masturbated, and the other 95 lied about it, and I have accepted these figures as gospel ever since. Yet films have seldom approached this practice except in the fringe exploitation genres. Even when we confront 40-year-old virgins of either gender, films refuse to show them compensating for the lack of a sexual partner. There is lasting shame involved in this spectacle. So, in a sense, Holdridge has started his protagonist off on an embarrassing note, and yet manages to save the character, and actually develop him into a quasi-heroic stoic navigating the treacherous shoals of deception and infidelity.

Robert Murphy expertly photographed the somber ruins of a once vital downtown Los Angeles with many dazzlingly varied perspectives. Murphy also joins the cast as Vivian's insanely jealous ex-boyfriend, Jack, whom Vivian caught cheating on her with another woman, and was thus receptive to Wilson's personal ad on Craigslist. Wilson had been virtually bulldozed into placing the ad by a helpful Jake in the aftermath of the masturbation fiasco.

At their first meeting, Vivian starts things off unpromisingly by asking Wilson to sit at another table while she interviews a speed-dating applicant waiting patiently. The logistics here don't make much sense, but the sheer outrageousness of Vivian and the situation is funny enough to make us forgive any lapses of logic and probability. In any event, the temporary delay in the meeting of Vivian and Wilson ends quickly in Vivian's somewhat cruel dismissal of a well-meaning lug who gains our sympathy by his abject need for encouragement in the game of love.

Before Wilson receives his long awaited midnight kiss, the narrative unleashes two wild twists, which, for a change, I'm not going to give away. These make the film both sadder and wiser. In Search of a Midnight Kiss overcomes patches of overwriting to end up as a film well worth watching, and Alex Holdridge as a writer-director to be remembered for future reference.

Holdridge's gift as a director resides in his conflation of the mundane and the somewhat profound. He's obviously been on some first dates and knows the way a good - no, miraculous - one can wend its way into adventure. In the real world, that transformation takes a few nights and days. In romantic comedy, 24 hours will do. But even as romantic comedy, Midnight Kiss moves sideways. It's a work of old-school, black and white American independent filmmaking that falls somewhere between Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Kevin Smith's Clerks - not just because of the lack of both colour and money, but because its maker, on the one hand, exults in the atmospherically rich oddness of romantic possibility, and on the other, finds certain types of crudeness really funny. What I think makes this kind of films (John Carney's Once would fit here too) essential is the fact that it inspires and encourages hundreds of aspiring filmmakers like myself. And I like to think at least 5 percent of us will have stopped being aspiring in a few years.

The quick symphony of locked lips that opens the film while Wilson introduces himself is, as everyone's figured out, a hat-tip to Manhattan. But Holdridge appears to have already figured out how to pay deeper, subtler tribute to Allen. A dual sequence in which Wilson and Vivian take the subway or another in which they stop for lunch are far more fun to watch. The film and its smart observations occasionally threaten to get away, never more so than when the phone rings - it's Vivian's brand-new ex-boyfriend, who seems as unstable as she sometimes does. He threatens to burn some of her stuff, and you're scared he'll take the rest of the film with it.

But he doesn't. Holdridge gets a lot of mileage out of charm. His two stars are incredibly likable and that, in a film like this, is essential. McNairy seems incurably lonely and resembles other forlorn-looking guys, like screenwriter and actor Mike White and Andy Warhol actor Taylor Mead. He doesn't have much of a screen presence, but as the film spins into full-blown craziness, McNairy's sadness suddenly has a point: That long face becomes an anchor of sanity. Simmonds, meanwhile, is a captivating species of actor. She's Cameron Diaz and Kate Hudson merged in one, a whiff of craziness, and some real struggle in her face. You're not sure you like her, in the same way that Wilson isn't sure he does. For a while, it looks as if she'll shove the film into other Manhattan territory: Martin Scorsese's comedy of bad-date surrealism, After Hours. But Midnight Kiss is a less ambitiously cruel film, and its fantastic ending (with Scorpions' "Wind of Change" popping in the soundtrack) leaves you with a strange feeling of hope.

The film is, in the end, a far cry from the comedies of inarticulation and inaction that have won a backhanded video-story shelf. In Search of a Midnight Kiss is actually not about the chronically depressed and self-loathing, it's about active souls. The films gives us two transplants to Los Angeles who discover the city's underpopulated splendours while discovering each other. That they do most of this on foot constitutes a major leap of imagination. This is the rare film about the start of something interesting that happens to look a lot like the end of the world. And it feels so good.

Review: Ghost Town

**** / *****

Hospital Nurse: [after Bertram's colonoscopy] "Come back soon.
Bertram Pincus: What a terrible thing to say in a hospital!"

On paper, David Koepp's Ghost Town sounds like a hackneyed rehash of a premise that's been, well, done to death. But ask any comedian and they'll tell you: the power of the joke is in the telling. And where it counts, Ghost Town is very well told, indeed: the comic voice of Ricky Gervais comes through loud and clear, and Koepp's vision of a classical Hollywood comedy creates a confluence not only of great performers but of considerable wit and heart.

Through misuse, "heart" has become somewhat of a dirty word when it comes to Hollywood comedies, but Koepp cultivates sentiment that's well-earned and sincere, not canned. On the way there, Ghost Town is as funny as any film to come out this year. At its essence, it's Topper multiplied, with Gervais' misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus seeing dead people all over Manhattan following a botched medical procedure (some of the film's funniest scenes involve the brilliant Kristin Wiig as a purposefully inarticulate surgeon and Michael-Leon Wooley as her in-house legal counsel). Greg Kinnear plays Frank Herlihy, an urbane ghost (he died with his tux on) who remains in limbo due to "unfinished" business with wife Gwen (Téa Leoni). Though Frank was a cad with a girl on the side, he's had time to reflect on the depth of his love for his wife, and fears she'll go through with her plans to marry a human-rights lawyer named Richard (Billy Campbell).

Since Pincus is the only conduit ghosts have with the living world, he becomes a celeb to the lingering dead, and he can't hire security to keep them from hounding (aka haunting) him. Frank's force of personality puts him front and centre with Pincus, who Frank wants to use as spoiler for Gwen and Richard's engagement. As living nightmares go, it's a perfect storm for Pincus, who would rather sit at home alone with a crossword than have to suffer through a conversation with anyone ("It's not so much the crowds as the individuals in the crowds," he explains). Now he has demanding ghosts huddling 'round his bed and, worse, feelings stirring up from long-undisturbed depths. The beautiful Gwen - a mummy expert at the Metropolitam Museum - provides a strong incentive for Bertram to get back in the game.

At 102 minutes, Ghost Town doesn't have enough time fully to develop the internal logic of a world of ghosts with no boundaries, but Koepp's approach is smart and literate, from the visual and thematic complements of the mummy trappings to the perfectly judged exchange that ends the picture. The fertile dialogue and humour emerges from strong characters with interesting foibles, performed by actors keen on both comedy and drama. Though they're an unlikely pair, Leoni and Gervais develop a credible chemistry that follows a funny and involving arc from her initial appraisal of him (well deserved) as "a little bit of a jerk." Fast-talking Kinnear uses his quirky expressiveness to full effect and downshifts as required into just the right tone of wistfulness. Kudos also to Indian actor Aasif Mandvi as Pincus' drily reactive workmate and an ensemble of ghosts led by Dana Ivey and Alan Ruck.

Above all, Gervais (in his leading-man debut) once more proves himself a major talent, borderlining on genius. Without him, it's unlikely Ghost Town would pass the funny test. With him, the film's conversational rhythms are endlessly surprising, as Pincus falls into awkward conversational traps, makes misjudged attempts at being sociable, and generally despairs over the stupidity of his fate. Koepp's comic fantasy - of death and what happens next, of first impressions and getting deeper, of second chances - locates its own distinctive way of developing the age-old carpe diem theme. As Gwen eloquently puts it, "What happens matters. Maybe only to us, but it matters." If that's not a word to the wise, it's at least a word to the selfish and cold. And any film that can send out that word while being consistently funny deserves a wide audience.

Review: Redbelt

**** / *****

"Turn to the side. Everything has a force. You embrace it or deflect it. Why oppose it?"

It's always fun to watch David Mamet Mametize another film genre: the heist picture (Heist), the red-meat war film (Spartan), and now, in Redbelt, the go-for-it sports drama. So how's the Mamet Rocky, you ask? Fast. Lively. In your face. Extremely watchable. And, like its predecessors, so bizarrely convoluted it barely holds together on a narrative level. But the underpinnings are consistent. As Mamet has evolved into a confident and resourceful film director, his world-view has hardly budged. What's changed is that his film heroes manage to protect themselves from life's inevitable betrayals.

Understatement is not part of the mix. The rhythm of the rain mixes with the rhythm of the drill as honourable Mixed Martial Arts instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an exponent of Brazilian jujitsu, teaches his prize pupil, a cop named Joe (Max Martini), how to fight with one hand bound: "There is no situation from which you cannot escape." This assertive credo makes Mike a promising Mamet-fim protagonist; that the instructor's pedagogical style is a non-stop torrent of hectoring advice mixed with colour commentary suggests the filmmaker's own faith in the power of language. One of the most truculent literary figures to strut the American stage, Mamet may lack Norman Mailer's intellectual brawn, but he suffers no deficiency of bluster.

Still, as played by Ejiofor, Mike is open, straightforward, and quietly sweet - a natural victim. His business is going broke, but he's the calmest guy in the room, if not the most honest person on the entire planet. His modest storefront academy, which also houses a fabric business belonging to wife Sondra (Alice Braga), is an outpost of Zen clarity illuminating a bleak stretch of asphalt somewhere in West Los Angeles. Reality intrudes when an apparent junkie, Laura Black (Emily Mortimer) - driving through a monsoon menace looking for a drugstore to fill her dubious prescription - dents Mike's parked car. Hysterically bursting into his dojo to apologize, she further freaks upon seeing the cop and, through some arcane form of film magic, manages to fire his gun through the academy's plate-glass window.

As illogically as this incident plays, it encapsulates the bizarre laws of cause and effect or action and reaction that govern the film's universe - everyone is at seeming cross-purposes until the final score-settling. Another bait-and-switch caper occurs when Mike visits his brother-in-law's bar to get a bouncer pal some owed back pay and finds himself intervening in a fight to protect a big-time film star (Tim Allen) out for a night of carousing... perhaps.

Mike and Sondra are subsequently invited to dine at the star's mansion. One needs only a rudimentary familiarity with Mametian paranoia to sense that these suspiciously grateful swells are fitting Mike and the missus for some sort of noose. The Hollywood conspiracy is clinched the next day when Mike visits the set of the star's new film, nothing less than a re-creation of Operation Desert Storm produced by the sinister Jerry Weiss (Mamet axiom Joe Mantegna). Somehow, they're thinking of bringing on Mike as an executive producer. But is it all a plot to force the honest samurai - who has hitherto been too pure to fight competitively - into the ring?

Cinema is a technology of deceit: No good deed goes unpunished; no bright idea remains unripped off; no one can be trusted. The film, however, wears its honesty on its sleeve. As a director, Mamet favours unambiguous close-ups and uncluttered interiors; baddies' frequent sleek offices, and chaos comes from dark rainy nights. Neither oppressive nor subtle in its symmetries, Redbelt is a cleanly constructed piece of work. The climactic fight scenes are notable less for their competent orchestration and stolidly ritualized weirdness than for their principled opposition to the HK fare (of which I'm so deeply fond of) of the past two decades.

In press notes so long, detailed, and repetitive they could only have been supervised by Mamet himself, the filmmaker is identified as a long-time student of, and purple belt in, jujitsu. Thus, Redbelt is a personal statement, as well as a sort of naturalized kung fu western, ode to all Martial Arts enthusiasts, and revisionist Popular Front boxing drama. There's a hint of Egawa Tatsuya's Japanese manga "Golden Boy" (the fighter's innate sensitivity), a few allusions to Robert Wise's The Set-Up (the fighter's desperation, the tawdriness of his final bout), and a line ("Everybody dies") ostentatiously swiped from the quintessential John Garfield flick, Body and Soul - if here contemptuously given to the evil producer.

Like the left-wing, largely Jewish writers of the '30s and '40s, Mamet identifies with the situation of a solitary fighter trapped by a corrupt system. In his case, however, the system isn't capitalism so much as show business. Therein lies a paradox - Mamet attacks showbiz while surrendering to it. The tenets of Brazilian jujitsu (a sport that, like all MMA, is all about intelligence and speed, about using your opponent's weight and strength against him, as opposed to Boxing, which is essentially punching the other guy in the face) may argue there's no trap that cannot be escaped, but the rules of American entertainment insist on it.

"There's always an escape."

Review: Elegy

**** / *****

"Beautiful women are invisible; we're so dazzled by the outside that we never make it inside."

There's much irony in the fact that it took a female director to finally successfully bring the sometimes misogynistic Philip Roth to the big screen. Based on a short story by the masterful writer called "The Dying Animal," Isabel Coixet's Elegy is one of the more interesting dramas of the year, and it has not been easy to heap praise on previous Roth adaptations like The Human Stain or Portnoy's Complaint. With other modern masters of the written word like Ian McEwan (Atonement) and Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men) finally getting cinematic treatments worthy of their source material, Roth could become the next go-to-guy for the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Elegy is not quite as good as the films that broke McEwan and McCarthy into the Oscars last year, but it is hopefully the beginning of a pattern for this excellent writer and one of the better dramas of a year that hasn't seen too many worth mentioning.

The reason why Elegy not succeeds on its own terms, but actually ends a more rounded, humane and involving experience than its source material, can be located in its choice of director: Isabel Coixet. The Catalan is the kind of filmmaker who specialises in rare cinematic birds: her 2003 film My Life Without Me is one of very few terminal-illness dramas I can watch over and over again, and its preoccupations with mortality make it very much of a piece with this latest.

Coixet seems instinctively to understand that, where matters of life and death are concerned, the tone will always sit better when understated. What's more, the casting of Sir Ben Kingsley is inspired. His character, David Kepesh, a sixty-something professor, is different from the novel in being neither American nor, apparently, Jewish; he's a Brit who escaped to New York in the 1960s, lured by the promise of sexual freedom. But in other respects Kingsley has him to the life - distant, calculating, self-satisfied, a man who gets laid a lot ("unimpeded in the world of eros," in Roth's grandiose phrase) but avoids any commitment. The perfectly bald head and neat beard only enhance his bearing as a satyr. When we first see him on a late-night culture show, Kepesh, a confessed hedonist, berates the American puritans for their attempts to outlaw "sexual happiness." But what then happens to him argues that such happiness is a chimera.

He begins dating one of his former students, Consuela, a Spanish beauty with Cuban heritage who reminds him of Goya's portrait of The Clothed Maja (this is a high-toned comparison, and hugely unfair to Penélope Cruz who, even with her girlish fringe, is about a hundred times more alluring than Goya's muse).

At first Kepesh rhapsodises about her breasts and calls her body "a work of art"; then he falls helplessly in love with her. And, to his embarrassment, he finds himself a nervous wreck, as prey to jealousy and insecurity as any lovelorn swain. In one excruciating scene, he goes to spy on her at a nightclub, convinced that she's gone there to meet another man, and his cover is blown. The look she gives him - more in sorrow than in anger - would make a less self-regarding man leave not just the club, but the country. Worse, his 30-year seniority is now a source of oppression: she's young and lovely, he's old and on the way out. But this, too, is revealed to be another aspect of the man's towering selfishness, since Consuela sees a future for them and wants Kepesh to meet her family.

What comes across in Roth's novel as crybaby indulgence - a young woman's love and he still can't be happy - is rendered in Coixet's film as a tragicomic getting of wisdom. Self-pity is softened until it looks like pity for the human condition. Some of the liveliest moments happen on the margins, where Kepesh dodges around the people who have known him best. Patricia Clarkson is terrific, again, as a no-strings lover who has kept him company for the last 20 years and now suspects she's being run in for a younger model.

Even better are the scenes with Peter Sarsgaard as his 42-year-old son, Kenny, still tight-jawed with rage at Kepesh's desertion of his family all those years ago and the "serial tomcatting" that followed it. Now Kenny's own marriage is in trouble - he has met another woman - but his father, who ought to sympathise, can think of nothing to say that might help (though he does get a very good line about an oboe). Dennis Hopper, as the professor's best friend, is the single instance of miscasting, simply because Hopper cannot be anyone's best friend, but he's interesting to watch nonetheless, and his deathbed scene has a curiosity all its own.

Fans of Roth may wonder where the nervy, disputatious energy of the writer has gone; it looks rather too discreet and tasteful for anything associated with his name. What Coixet misses out, however, she makes good in terms of humanity. Like a lawyer with a problem client, Kingsley gives a generous account of a distinctly unamiable protagonist. His ramrod-straight posture and watchful eyes betoken a man on guard against the world, and his one brief burst of laughter makes even Hopper sound vaguely human. Yet this is a portrait of great complexity that passes from pathetic insecurity to shocking regret, and it finds a complement in Cruz's doe-eyed charm. Beautifully photographed by Jean-Claude Larrieu, Cruz gives the best English-speaking performance of her career. Again, it's the restraint of the playing that touches; there are no operatic displays of anger or self-pity, just a wry philosophical acceptance of the hand that fate has played her.

Elegy ends as quietly as it begins, and its crepuscular mood will not be to everyone's liking. It's a drab title, though in truth "The Dying Animal," while more evocative, would probably draw even fewer people to the box office. It's not an obvious choice from the Roth oeuvre to put on screen - I'd love to see what Coixet might do with "Sabbath's Theater" or "The Plot Against America" - yet she has done more than honour it; she has found a tenderness and vulnerability that were so deeply buried as to be almost undetectable. She's truly a fascinating filmmaker.

"When you make love to a beautiful woman you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life."

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

***** / *****

"Jamal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees. How did he do it?

A. He cheated
B. He's lucky
C. He's a genius
D. It is written"

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is the film world's first globalized masterpiece. This extravagantly eager romantic fable is set in contemporary Mumbai, the former Bombay, but it draws freely, often rapturously, from Dickens, Dumas, Hollywood, Bollywood, the giddiness of Americanized TV, the cross-cultural craziness of outsourced call centres and the zoominess of Google Earth. It's mostly in English, partly in Hindi and is directed by a Brit, with the help of an Indian co-director, Loveleen Tandan. The young hero, Jamal Malik, is a dirt-poor orphan from the Mumbai slums. "Is this heaven?," Jamal asks after tumbling from a train and looking up to see the Taj Mahal. I had the same feeling after watching the first few astonishing scenes: Was this film heaven? The answer, as I watched it again and again, turned out to be yes.

Yes because of what Slumdog Millionaire does - gives the film medium a jolt of cyclonic power - and yes because of what it is: a timeless story of unswerving love that's been married to a madly extravagant Hindi version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Simon Beaufoy's screenplay was inspired by "Q & A," a modest though ingenious first novel by an Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup, and inspiration is the right word. Nothing else could explain the daring and sweep of Beaufoy's writing, which takes off from the book's premise, leaps from genre to genre with a Parkour athlete's agility, and evokes the rags, riches, horror, hope and irrepressible energy of "Third World" life with a zest that honours "Oliver Twist."

The premise is simple. As a plucky quiz-show contestant - a slumdog underdog - Jamal keeps giving correct answers to obscure questions and winning more and more rupees. This raises the question of how he could know what he seems to know, since the 18-year-old kid has grown up in grinding poverty. For the show's producers, and the police, the answer is he must be cheating. That's the wrong answer, and the wrong question. The right question is whether poverty and knowledge are mutually exclusive, and the answer given by Jamal's example is no, they are not, provided the knowledge is based on experience. This quiet, passionate, whipsmart kid has lived almost every answer he gives; the questions he needs are provided by destiny.

In another filmmaker's hands, this could have been the stuff of turgid melodrama, the story's contrivances laid bare. But Boyle directs with such enthusiasm and exuberance that his energy lifts the film to the clouds. Slumdog Millionaire is incredibly colourful, fast-paced and thrilling to watch as cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's frequent DP) uses film cameras, digital cameras, even the video function of a small, unobtrusive still camera, and his images come at you like light itself, in waves and pulsing clusters captures. He captures India's vibrancy with a lens that constantly roves Mumbai's teeming streets or hovers overhead, capturing the country's eye-popping colours. Boyle's storytelling is economical; a tale with the sweep of an epic comes in at exactly two hours, set to the evocative rhythms of A.R. Rahman's phenomenal score and the propulsive beat of the hip-hop-infused soundtrack.

It's funny, when you look at the role destiny plays in Slumdog Millionaire, and then at its director's career. Danny Boyle seems to have enjoyed an equally happy fate as the one of Jamal. Many of his previous films, from Shallow Grave through Trainspotting to the beguiling and under-appreciated Millions, are infused with the sheer joy of filmmaking, and all aswirl with ecstatic techniques. A now-infamous scene in Trainspotting is all aswirl with the same stuff that makes for a hideously funny sequence in Slumdog. Still, Boyle had been having his ups and downs - The Beach was a classic downer - and he'd done his most distinctive work on a relatively small scale.

Then destiny, in the form of smart and non-greedy producers (people who still understand that cinema isn't a fucking business, that it shouldn't be made inside fake studios), put him together with Simon Beaufoy's screenplay - the writer's best-known script to that point had been The Full Monty - and the result will make film history. The scale of Slumdog Millionaire is close to cosmic. Jamal's fate transcends the slums; it transcends India. He really is an Oliver Twist for the 21st century, just as his beloved Latika is a multinational mingling of Juliet, Lara and the Vivien Leigh of Waterloo Bridge. In fact, their shared fate plays out in the midst of such crowds as to suggest that every citizen of Mumbai found work as an extra. Jamal and Latika are also two of three Third World musketeers who banded together for self-protection in childhood. The third is Salim, Jamal's brother and the source of a harrowing sibling rivalry.

The children in the film come from Mumbai's slums, and their performances would put Hollywood moppets to shame. Jamal is played as an adult by Dev Patel, a second-generation Indian born in London, still most famous (until now) for his role as Anwar Kharral in E4's fabulous series "Skins." Those who were addicted to that show know that he's a hugely appealing young star, not conventionally handsome, who has mastered the art of suggesting by withholding - you can almost see Jamal's thoughts in process - along with the risky business of putting his character heedlessly out there when love or danger demand it. Great, great things are coming for him.

Then there's Freida Pinto, an Indian model in her first prominent feature role, who's exquisite as Latika, an apparently tragic heroine whose destiny is brighter than she can know. Anil Kapoor, a Bollywood veteran, plays the quiz-show host, Prem, as a supremely smarmy snake. And another legend, Irrfan Khan, adds a lot as a police inspector with a heavy hand but a quick, mercurial mind. A very special mention, too, to all the children who play the three characters at various ages. Particularly touching is Ayush Mahesh Kedekar, who plays Jamal at 7, a little boy who retains his sweetness and innocence amidst the squalor of his existence. After the marvel that was the performance of the young Alex Etel in Millions, Boyle proves once again just how adept he is in working with children.

There's sadness and tragedy within Slumdog Millionaire - starvation, genocide, child prostitution and overwhelming oppression - but there's humour, humanity and dignity as well. Boyle, 12 years after Trainspotting, a film that could be described as the polar opposite of this one, seems to have freed himself here to bring his brilliance as a director to its fullest fruition. This is Boyle's best film to date, which is saying quite a lot; He's made a joyous, fun, and wonderfully accessible film that should be able to be witnessed by everyone at least once. I can honestly say I've never seen anything like Slumdog Millionaire, and I welcomed it with open arms and eyes. In these worsening times for feature films, timidity and mediocrity bickering for bottom honours at the multiplex, Slumdog Millionaire breaks through to the top. It's the best film of 2008. It's a masterpiece.

"D. It is written."

Review: Revolutionary Road

****½ / *****

"I saw a whole other future. I can't stop seeing it."

Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes' return to the domestically dysfunctional stomping grounds that made his name nine years ago with American Beauty, has given me all sorts of grief. I thought I was pretty much done for the year, ready to call it a day on 2008 and then along comes this film. Now I've gotta go back and put Revolutionary Road on all my best of lists, not only for the year, but possibly for all time.

If I was the swearing type (I can be, but never mind), I'd have exactly the expletive to describe my reaction to this film; it's one much more closely associated with professional wrestling matches or special effects blockbusters. Revolutionary Road is that much of a shock of power and gravity. Like a kick in the gut, the performances are raw and brutal. Mendes' great achievement is levelling his actors' emotional nakedness against the veneer of the self-possession and plastic reserve of the film's 1950s setting.

"Revolutionary Road," the first and most lasting novel by the late Richard Yates, was published in 1961. It was a shake and a slap to the post-war suburban Middle Class, arguing that success in American society need not breed conformity in its trappings and a forfeiting of personal or professional ambition. Many have subsequently tried to turn the book into a film and it can be argued that 2008 is one of the least appropriate times to make the attempt. Nowadays, Yates' plea for cultural acknowledgement of the dangers of suburban malaise is no longer surprising or controversial. But even if its relevance has shrunk to a less societal (more personal) level as a portrait of a married couple trapped in the Great American Lifestyle, it still packs a hell of a punch.

As written by Yates, Frank and April Wheeler are just a couple of crazy, dreamy-eyed kids in love. At least they were before marriage, kids and the perfect house in the suburbs came along. Somewhere Frank's romantic talk of travel and April's unconventional life as an aspiring actress fell by the wayside of their quaint Connecticut surroundings. April's discomfiture at settling into the mode of the typical '50s family seeps into every aspect of her being. In the role of the breadwinner and man of the house, Frank has slipped into upwardly mobile docility far easier than his restless wife and cannot relate to April's rages against happy mediocrity. To April, the encroaching languid domesticity threatens to overtake their pledge to always hold on to the young, progressive couple they were. Desperate to seize the last gasps of their heady ideals, April pleads with Frank to come away from the stale, bourgeois existence that is consuming them and run off to live the life of true bohemians in France. One person's freedom is another's bondage and Frank and April struggle to find the common ground that will allow them to be happy again.

Revolutionary Road is a study in the moral claustrophobia of an era. The film shines a light on marital disappointment and fading dreams that aren't, after all, so far removed from this age as then. April's wrath against the dawning of comfortable mediocrity and "settling down" is relevant to anyone who's watched a lover become less than the superhero you were sure was there. That frustration, bouncing against the rubber walls of a beautiful home in 1950s Connecticut, is made all the more stifling when the entire neighbourhood is watching and judging. April's passion for life and one last grab at it is smothered by all around her, including her partner, and is ridiculed for being a childish or unrealistic decision. The utter betrayal April feels realising that she and Frank have grown into utterly different people than the two young dreamers they began as is sealed when Frank questions her very sanity at her inability to happily live in what he has decided is a perfect life.

When it comes down to it, this is very close to be the best thing that either Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Winslet have ever done. Considering that Winslet is chronically excellent in everything she does, that states much. The very antithesis of their previous hearts and flowers coupling in Titanic; one could easily muse that this might have been how Jack and Rose's life turned out had he been able to stay on that damn floating table.

DiCaprio lends an oozy charm to Frank's smug, entitled alpha-male working drone. Frank is comfortable with his place in the world because despite his initial reluctance at following in his father's footsteps at the same company, he's simply got the best a working stiff can ask for. The three-martini lunches and access to disposable, dewy-eyed secretaries are simply a matter of course. As his star rises within his company, the more frightened Frank becomes of losing the stability that April despises. DiCaprio does a lovely bit of balancing between the smarmy philanderer and the mystified young man who no longer understands the woman he is still besotted with.

Winslet's April is arch and passionate, nurturing, confident and needy. As her own dream of becoming an actress dies in a Connecticut school auditorium, ill-placed words by a well-meaning, clumsy Frank add bricks to the wall of her reserve to be more than just another suburban mum. Without histrionics, Winslet's ability to convey how trapped April is by every aspect of her life is breathtaking. Under April's constant public scrutiny, she gives more away with less - a flick of a cigarette and a downward gaze - than scores of other actors of her generation could manage with reams of dialogue. In the forcibly subdued veneer of acceptable 1950s behaviour, April fairly chokes on her distaste for everything she and Frank have become; frightened, boring and finally ordinary. When neither hysterics nor silence avail her nothing, you can genuinely feel the walls closing in on her. I think this will be it for Kate; the Oscar will finally be hers.

And then the fantastic supporting cast is the Maraschino cherry on top. From Dylan Baker as Frank's slimy, unctuous cubicle mate, to Kathy Bates as Mrs. Givings, the Wheeler's adoring, nosy friend and realtor, to David Harbour as the next door neighbour whose adoration for the Wheelers goes a bit deeper. The standout is Michael Shannon as the Givings' mentally "ill" son, John. The Givings reckon being around a model young couple like the Wheelers might help John to acclimate himself back into society. His unclouded insight and lack of verbal inhibition cuts a swathe through the fluffy veil of pretence of the Wheelers' public front, forcing even the couple to face hard truths. Shannon's nervous, imposing presence jolts a film that was already moving along quite greatly. His shattering of the Wheelers' carefully posed perfection is a band-aid torn off a raw wound. It's not lost on April that the institutionalised John is the only one who sees her life in the same way she does.

Comparisons will obviously be made to Mendes' American Beauty but, beyond taking that same suburban nightmare territory, Revolutionary Road is a totally different animal. The 1950s is much more fertile ground for the mannered, simmering desperation abundant in the piece. Sam Mendes masterfully conducts his impeccable cast, alternately reining in and allowing controlled fireworks of verbal savagery to suit the age of apropos and good reputations. It's been a long time since I was haunted by a film, but Revolutionary Road will stay in my eye for a very long time.

Brilliant, this.

Review: JCVD

**** / *****

"Every time my dad is on a TV Show, my friends make fun of me."

Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD (arguably the greatest surprise of 2008) opens with a high-powered action sequence. We see Jean Claude Van Damme dodging endless barrages of bullets, knocking out hordes of nameless villains, and getting past impossible explosions before ending up being ignored by his 20-something, disinterested director (imported from Hong Kong, in obvious reference to John Woo, who Van Damme introduced to the American market but never paid back the favour by giving him a role in any of his non-crappy Hollywood projects after Hard Target).

As the opening sequence, where we witness in one spectacular shot the action star quickly metamorphosing from indestructible hero to just another man in the film set, depicts, El Mechri's goal is to remove Van Damme out of the myths of superhuman strength his roles in films like Blood Sport, Universal Soldier and Double Team have supplied him, and turn him into something more convincingly human: a victim of circumstance, aggravated by his fame and notoriety.

The portrait of Van Damme we see in JCVD is vastly different from the characters, all of whom are exquisite representations of brash masculinity (indestructible cage fighters, no-nonsense hitmen, and virile ladies' men), he played in several of his B-films and actioners. Here, he's aging (his face riddled with lines and wrinkles), with a physique that could not have belonged to the same person who fought to the death in Blood Sport. Here, he struggles at diplomacy, turning his Brussels cab driver from adoring fan to nagging annoyance in a matter of minutes. Here, in the midst of a crisis that should logically be easy for the Muscle from Brussels, he can only imagine, but cannot actually do, the spectacular stunt moves that would get him out of trouble.

The Van Damme we see in JCVD is closer to the Van Damme that magazines and tabloids cover and more often than not, make fun of. Here, Van Damme is struggling with the impending loss of his daughter because of his uphill battle for her custody, while playing mind games with his agent whose incompetence lost him a direct-to-video project to Steven Segal (who agreed to cut his ponytail for the starring role). JCVD succeeds as entertainment because of its tabloid sensibilities, dwelling on the mostly negative predisposition of a pathetic has-been. However, it does more than expose the incapacities and failures of a fading superstar for sheer entertainment's sake. El Mechri succeeds in turning Van Damme from infamous icon to encumbered human being, worthy of our sympathies. Van Damme succeeds in exposing himself, not as a devious fraud and agent of moronic cinema, but as a victim of circumstance and his own ambitions.

JCVD may not turn prepubescent boys who never saw the '90s into Van Damme idolizers. It does, however, add a deeper dimension to a nearly forgotten pop icon, allowing him the opportunity to address the several issues that have been thrown to him (his womanizing, drug addiction, his worsening notoriety and declining fame) and in turn, transforming himself into a figure that is not dissimilar to the rest of us. His previous films may have given him the legacy of brute ability. JCVD cracks that legacy, and allows us an intimate peek to Van Damme's persona.

In the middle of the agonizing hostage drama which El Mechri composed as the narrative device to put his fictional version of Van Damme in, everything suddenly stops except for Van Damme. His chair ascends, and we see the film set's klieglights and other mechanisms behind him. The internal film logic of JCVD takes a pause to allow its hero respite from the conventional untruths of cinema and media he has been accustomed to. Van Damme breaks the fourth wall to deliver his confessional, unscripted and intimate (the still camera centering on his face, no cues, no direction except for his own). He talks about his problems, his past as a scrawny teenager who dreams of making it big in Hollywood, his frustrations and disappointments. Finally, Van Damme, the Muscle of Brussels, the sonic-booming soldier in Street Fighter and time-traveling Sci-Fi hero of Timecop, cries. This undoubtedly is Van Damme's greatest on-screen performance ever, and the fact that he isn't acting makes the sequence - and the film - more astounding.

Review: Klass

****½ / *****

"What is honour? I think we're speaking about something else. We say "that sucks" or "this blows." We don't say honour."

One (and the best) of several global dramas that clearly culled direct inspiration from the infamous Columbine High School Massacre (and evidence, given its geographic origins, of that tragedy's global impact), Ilmar Raag's harrowing Klass (The Class) unfolds in an Estonian high school where, as with any other school in the world, kids bully other kids. Amid this morass, 16-year-old Joosep (Part Usuberg) suffers from constant, sadistic belittlement and humiliation. One of his torturers, newcomer Kaspar (Vallo Kirs), soon changes sides and offers to protect the victim, as a kind of bodyguard, but in time, per human nature, the bullies also turn him into a pariah. One act of systematic humiliation too many soon pushes the two boys over the edge and sets the stage for an unremitting bloodbath of vengeance.

The film is divided into seven chapters and takes place in an anonymous Estonian secondary school. This isn't a sociological probe into the theme of adolescent bullying which might turn violently against the perpetrators, but more a universal reflection on the darker sides of the human soul, often hidden beneath an attractive exterior, ready to provoke an unexpected reaction under excess pressure. The acting performances (all first-timers, regular kids) of the leads, in particular, give the story - a linear progression where silly pranks develop into a tragic outcome - a highly credible dimension. For the first time you'll see the subject treated realistically. You'll see kids actually fighting back.

While for a long time high school shootings seemed confined to North America, with the killing sprees in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, Erfurt, Germany in 2002 and in Jokela, Finland just last November, they have started to leave their mark on the European continent and psyche. Estonian director Ilmar Raag, though nominally inspired by Columbine, tackles the subject in a very European way in this highly uncomfortable work, a film that asks a lot of ugly questions about peer pressure, bullying and one's rights to revenge or at least defend oneself (if Van Sant's Elephant purposefully seemed to offer no questions or insight, then this film makes up for it twice, though there are no clear-cut answers).

Klass won the Europa Cinemas label at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and a Special Mention in that festival's East of the West Competition. It also signals Estonia as an important new hotbed of quality European cinema. Besides Raag's feature, other noteworthy titles include Kadri Kõusaar's Magnus (which, like Klass, relied mainly on non-professional actors) and Veiko Õunpuu's Venice winner Autumn Ball, and this accomplished trifecta of films makes it clear that there is a new generation of Estonian directors in their twenties and thirties that have a lot of interesting stories to tell and are not afraid to ask ugly questions or present ambiguous answers. In a country this small (population: 1,3 million), you have no idea how hard that is.

Review: Ben X

**** / *****

"There should always be a first death. Otherwise, nothing happens. Otherwise it's never a problem. Otherwise, everything is always on. No. There must always be someone dying first."

At school, the bullies are out for blood and the good guys can do nothing about it. Back home, mum is helpless, while the absent father is guilt-ridden. In the community, social services are compassionately indifferent and the medical establishment takes too stoic a view to be of practical help. I ask you, then: What chance does an autistic teenager have for survival?

Belgian director Nic Balthazar asks the same from all of us in his directorial deut, the relevant and psychologically rich Ben X, inspired by a true story of a teenager who committed suicide after years of harassment in school. The question has haunted Balthazar over a number of years and across multiple storytelling platforms. Ben X started life in 2002 as "Nothing Was All He Said," Balthazar's debut novel for "youngsters who do not read." He then adapted it for the stage as a solo performance piece, before drawing on both his works for a feature film.

While the fictional and dramatic roots are instantly recognizable - the language is gloriously literary and delivered in one long monologue - Ben X also stakes its own claim on the big screen. Balthazar is a visual documentarian, tracing, preserving and playing back footage of an autistic teen's life.

Ben is one of two children raised by a divorced mother in a bleak, industrial European town. His daily dose of bullying starts well before he makes it to school, usually at the bus stop or at some point during the ride. Ben retreats into the on-line gaming world of ArchLord, where he has reinvented himself as a monster-slaying warrior. It's there that he meets Scarlite, a soulful love interest whose identity, if not actual existence, is in doubt. Ben reaches the breaking point after a particularly devastating incident of bullying in which he is stripped from the waist down by his classmates.

What follows is a revenge tale with some unexpected and some predictable twists. Yes, the narrative becomes more emotionally manipulative as the film reaches its final reel, teasing us with intolerable cruelty and unbearable tenderness. And there's a whiff of an after-school special, with teenage suicide and cyber-bullying among the film's "issues." The overall effect, however, is to capture a life of humiliations with dignity. And with an accusatory flair, I must add: Balthazar loves pointing fingers at those who have failed Ben, though (save for the more vicious bullies) he stops short of condemning them outright.

Withholding moral judgement is not the only tall order in the film. Ben X has an extremely ambitious emotional scope, almost all of which has to be filtered through the actor playing the title role. This is the kind of film that lives and dies on one casting decision, and Balthazar has struck gold with Greg Timmermans. His gripping performance not only captures Ben, but offers a panoramic view of the world in which he lives. We are, after all, meant to see this story from Ben's own idiosyncratic perspective.

It's not the overarching naturalism of the performance that stands out but the conceptual breakdown of the portrayal into smaller, loosely connected segments. Just as Ben enters the on-line world to discover who he can be, an audience journeys slowly through the corridors of Ben's tightly guarded mind - a mind that one doctor describes as a computer that has been configured differently. Timmermans is capably supported by Marijke Pinoy as a mother who decides not to suffer in silence and by the lovely Laura Verlinden as the apparitional Scarlite.

Ben X generated some buzz throughout 2008 on the festival circuits for integrating scenes from the virtual world of on-line gaming into the main story. As much as these flights of fantasy reveal essential clues about Ben's psyche, Timmermans and Balthazar do better whenever they place him in his immediate familial or romantic surroundings. In purely dramatic terms, Ben at home and Ben in love trump Ben as the virtual warlord. Perhaps it's that old-fashioned human touch that no computer game and no second, third or fourth life can replace.

Review: The Wave

**** / *****

"Heil Headmaster!"

Based on a real event from a California high school in 1967 and transposed to Germany today, The Wave is a cautionary tale about the roots of fascism. Seductive and horrifying at the same time, it suggests that anything is possible in today's unstable environment. And it's pretty damn scary to think it might be right.

An assured piece of filmmaking by Dennis Gansel, The Wave captures the intoxicating power of conformity. Gansel opens the film with a rush of energy and doesn't let go. Charismatic teacher Rainier Wenger (Jurgen Vogel) is driving to school with the Ramones' "Rock 'n' Roll High School" blasting in his car as the camera gazes at the calm life of the city passing outside. It's not going to last long.

It's Project Week at school, and though Wenger, an aging post-punk radical with unconventional teaching methods, is disappointed he doesn't get to teach the class on anarchy, he dives headfirst into the preparing for his class on autocracy. It's a hard sell to the indifferent students and as one puts it, "What is there left to be against? All we want is to have fun." What follows is a textbook study of how fascism starts and takes hold. When Wenger asks if a dictatorship like Hitler's would be possible in Germany today, the students either say no or don't care. But Wenger gets an idea for an experiment.

So the class elects him as leader and in contrast to his usual easygoing style he demands that students call him Mr. Wenger and stand when they have something to say. The motto for the day is "strength through discipline." Once he's got the students' attention, things escalate within a week. Fascism has traditionally taken hold among an underprivileged, alienated population, and who is more alienated than high school students? They like the idea of dressing the same to reduce social pressures and they start wearing jeans and white shirts. They name the group "The Wave," create a cool logo and a come up with a salute scarily reminiscent of Hitler's.

Much to their surprise, and Wegner's, they find that they like the power of unity, of being able to rely on others, and soon this new-found discipline spills over to other school activities, and newcomers join the group. One student, Karo (Jennifer Ulrich), who has a fairly stable familial structure, resists the rising conformity, but even her boyfriend, Marco (Max Riemelt), who comes from a broken home, is smitten.

The Wave gives these kids something to believe in for a change and some of the initial ideas about social equality and the will of the people are appealing, until they go too far. As in the rise of the Nazis, unstable and disturbed individuals latch on and feel powerful for the first time, and the most damaged become the lieutenants. That's what happens to Tim (Fredrick Lau), a disturbed, skittish student who no longer feels like an outsider.

But when the insiders start bullying other students and violence erupts outside school, Wegner realizes things might have gone too far. The genius of the screenplay by Gansel and Peter Thorwarth is that they recognize Wegner's good intentions, his psychology and mixed feelings. His wife, Anke (Christiane Paul), who also teaches at the school, holds him accountable, and he admits he loves being idolized.

Vogel (a very underrated German actor) is brilliant in the film's climactic scene as his agreeable face hardens and contorts into a scowl as he becomes the dictator he feared. The cast of kids, especially Ulrich as the dissenter and Lau as the most vulnerable, are convincing enough to command the belief that they really are high school students. Gansel is obviously dealing with complex stuff here and he does so with first class filmmaking. A pounding score of rock songs and music by Heiko Maile adds to the combustible mix and cinematography by Torsten Breuer captures the action, including some aggressive water polo matches, with a combination of outstanding hand-held and slow-motion camera work.

Although the original experimental demonstration, named "The Third Wave," in a Palo Alto high school did not end this way in 1967, Gansel has updated the climax to what could and has happened in schools today. There is something additionally chilling about seeing it take place in Germany. But as the film makes abundantly clear, the roots of fascism grow everywhere. It's just particularly brave of a German filmmaker to decide to make this film, to acknowledge his county's history for once, and not look the other way.

Review: The Wrestler

****½ / *****

"I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone, I just don't want you to hate me."

Certain films about losers have a special, desperately moving appeal. By showing us men whose lives have fallen dramatically short of their dreams, they speak to - and for - all of us. Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke as a broken-down professional wrestling star still clinging to his glory days from the 1980s, could touch a chord in audiences the way On the Waterfront and Rocky did. It has that kind of lyrical humanity.

Aronofsky doesn't speak a sentimental cinematic language. Shooting in a grainy, bare-bones naturalistic style, full of jump cuts, raw light and a handheld camera whooshing about, the director - the most talented of his generation - of Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain now strips away all frills, tapping a classic Hollywood myth - a has-been looking for redemption - and, at the same time, transcending that myth. The Wrestler is like Rocky made by the Scorsese of Mean Streets. It's the rare film fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

Back in the pumped-up, heavy metal '80s, Randy ''The Ram'' Robinson (Rourke) was a big deal, a golden-god gladiator with his own action figure and videogame. His Madison Square Garden bout with a wrestler known as the Ayatollah was seen by a million and a half people on pay per view. But that was then. Now, 20 years later, Randy is a wreck on painkillers, with pulverized bones, a hearing aid, and a face that's been mashed so many times, it's hard to believe it once seduced women. But he still wrestles before small crowds in VFW halls, eating up the bluster of the adoration, which is mostly nostalgia for the bluster of two decades before.

That's something Mickey Rourke must know a lot about. As a young star, he was a bow-lipped bad boy who wooed women on screen with his soft voice and twinkly, knowing smile. Now, it's not just his look that has changed; he seems stunted - all muscle and scar tissue, a figure of damaged loss. Miraculously, though, the softness remains. In The Wrestler, Rourke is at once an authentic former wrestling superstar, a Here's How They Look Now! tabloid curiosity, and - more than ever - a great actor. With platinum hair down to his back, he's like some bloated, freakazoid Sammy Hagar, and he makes you feel every crunched bone and pained breath, the way that Randy subjects his body to punishment to remind himself he's alive.

Aronofsky plays off Rourke's fallen-icon status by feasting on that spectacular, pulped wreck of a face. Yet from within that mountain of wounded flesh, Rourke gives Randy a deep, slow voice of disarming gentleness. Randy is the soul of decency encased in a monster's physique, with a buried sadness that, pushed far enough, explodes into rage.

The film burns through the fakery of wrestling in a touching way, by letting us see how the trumped-up ''enemies'' in the ring actually love and support each other. And they're not just sham warriors. Randy slices his forehead open with a fragment of razor to make sure he's putting on a bloody good show. In one gruesome bout, he gets lacerated by barbed wire and a staple gun. Is such a scene needed? Let's just say it expresses the cutting edge of Randy's pain-freak authenticity.

When he's not in the ring, Randy is basically a polite, saddened middle-aged man who lives in a New Jersey trailer park and works part-time in a supermarket. Aronofsky, working from a script by Robert Siegel, brings us piercingly close to the life of a relic: the visits to the tanning salon, the courteous way that Randy treats even the people who make fun of him, the two-decade-old fan paraphernalia he brings to a pathetically underattended ''legend signing.'' We see how scared he is - an insecure dude who never got over his given name, Robin.

He's a loner, almost completely isolated, yet he tries to reconnect to life through two women: Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), a stripper who has taken a liking to him (but still makes him pay for his lap dances), and Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), his furious estranged daughter, who now wants nothing to do with him. The film lets us see how Randy was a bad father whose selfishness has broken his own heart. He's a man who has lost nearly everything. Yet he can still reach for grace: Standing up on the ropes, preparing to do his theatrical pounce, he looks triumphant, tearful, and ready to enter heaven.

Review: Let the Right One In

***** / *****

Oskar: "Are you a vampire?
Eli: I live off blood...
[pause]
Eli: Yes.
Oskar: Are you...
[pause]
Oskar: Dead?
Eli: No. Can't you tell?"

Like so many films from that cold and great nation that is Sweden, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In is a film of extraordinary mood and wildly inventive directorial potency. It's a hushed, gentle story of provisional friendship, the ordeal of adolescence, and the curse of vampiric immortality. A hypnotic motion picture from beginning to end, Let the Right One In is a marvel: an ingenious genre film that manages to terrify and endear in the same instant, deftly erecting one of the most persuasive, haunting film experiences of 2008.

Based on the 2004 vampire fiction novel by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (and adapted by Lindqvist himself), Let the Right One In tells the story of a 12-year-old boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) who dreams of revenge on his classmates who bully him at school, and spends his hours wandering around his snowbound apartment complex. One night he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), a mysterious girl of the same age with whom he strikes up a tentative friendship. As the two learn more about each other, it becomes clear that something is killing off the paranoid residents of the community, but to Oskar, Eli is his friend and confidant, with powers and history he doesn't understand. To Eli, Oskar is a rare innocent soul worth protecting, finding peace in his company and encouraging the boy to stand up to his enemies. Together they bond while the world around them quickly spirals out of control.

I'm sure some of you have heard, Let the Right One In is already targeted for a U.S. remake. Relax, I won't attack the Hollywood machine, I'm beyond that phase, but I will say this: this film holds a distinct European - and Scandinavian - appeal that could never withstand an attempt at Americanization. It observes brutality and naive sensuality involving pre-teens, it treats death with a certain frightening visual poetry, and I'm convinced this Swedish film is something of a masterpiece, directed with exceptional tonal control by Tomas Alfredson. The plot concerns vampires and blood-spattered splendours of the flesh, but I swear it's one of the most endearing and sweetest films I've ever seen, embracing hesitant friendship with total commitment to character nuance and storytelling serenity.

The film is consumed with mood, drinking in long takes of behaviour and staging the action around stark snowscapes, photographed with brilliant menace by Hoyte Van Hoytema. Fearful of losing his audience at the first sign of distress, Alfredson brings Oskar and Eli together gradually, introducing bloodshed without proper explanation to drill the proper psychological holes that pay off later in the film. Eli being a vampire is not the twist of Let the Right One In, it's the opening chapter for Alfredson to play extensively with images of fright and themes of isolation, revealing the girl to be an ancient soul longing for companionship within a life that requires immediate viciousness. The director lets the uneasy sympathy grow from there, enhanced by the heavenly performances from Hedebrant and Leandersson, who never betray their years, making the central relationship awkward, exploratory, and enduring in ways that tap directly into the senses.

Alfredson (again, in the great tradition of Nordic filmmaking) places great emphasis on the unspoken, using inference and oblique approaches to get his point across. Eli's supernatural abilities are rendered through nifty camerawork and old fashioned sleight-of-hand (seeing her knocking on Oskar's window before revealing that it's two stories up, for example) and while the violence is ugly, it largely takes place off-camera. Let the Right One In also embraces the classic checklist of vampiric mythology - sunlight is fatal, if you're bitten and survive you'll become a vampire yourself, etc. - but conveys the particulars solely in visual terms. Scenes such as the morning-after surprise of one of Eli's wounded victims or the effect on Eli when she steps into a home where she hasn't been invited make a blessedly welcome break from the usual expository dialogue which most vampire films indulge in.

Then Alfredson bolsters it with a starkly silent atmosphere. The snow-covered ground is always lit up like a city park, while the sky above is pitch black, suspending the characters between two perfectly bisected halves. In contrast, the story itself entails myriad shades of grey: no heroes or monsters, but a familiar, messy reality heightened by the fact that one of these characters drinks blood to stay alive. Rather than conflicting with the imagery, it forms an almost perfect counterpoint, allowing the film's visual distinction to enhance and accentuate the plot. Let the Right One In contains few moments of overt terror, relying instead on an undercurrent of edginess to convey its supernatural tone.

The aftereffects of violence can be striking and there are tons of brilliant sequences to delight fans of the genre (a terrific shot in a municipal swimming pool towards the end had me speechless), but Alfredson has no interest in scares for the sake of scares. Instead, he combines Eli's gruesome lifestyle with a slice of adolescent sweetness that, supposedly, has nothing to do with vampires. Oskar's helpless anger hides a supremely thoughtful boy, ignored by adults and brutalized by his peers. Eli, for her part, is painfully aware of her tenuous grip on humanity, constantly threatened by animal instincts which demand that she kill to survive. Their connection to each other comes with none of the forbidden sensuality so often associated with vampires. Instead, it conveys simpler links of kindred emotions and shared understanding... coloured by the ominous, unnerving possibility that Eli may be manipulating Oskar for her own ends.

Let the Right One In has such an appealing, candid purity about it that contrasts with the violence on a spellbinding scale. The film takes astounding chances with characters, asking viewers to accept a form of evil (a child, no less) as a welcome presence worthy of compassion. It has a quiet lyricism which sets it apart from its contemporaries, settling over the viewer in alternating layers of creepiness, nostalgia, loneliness, and fulfillment. It never manipulates us or thrusts itself upon us, content to let us discover its treasures on our own. In the process, it quietly pushes the envelope of what stories like this are supposed to be: a feat more shocking than a thousand Hollywood monsters or boogeymen.

Grotesque, unnervingly gentle, forbidding, and ethereally beautiful, Let the Right On In not only re-energizes vampire cinema, but it also restores faith in the concerns of pre-teens. It seats right now on number 3 on my favourites of 2008, and anyone feeling a little punch-drunk from the stale art-house norm owes it to themselves to seek out this stupendous, bizarrely heart-warming genre bender.

Oskar: "You smell weird. Aren't you cold?
Eli: No.
Oskar: Why not?
Eli: I forget."

Review: Waltz with Bashir

***** / *****

"It's always the same dream. Always 26 dogs coming for me.

Ari Folman's brilliant and harrowing Waltz with Bashir does something incredible: it captures the surreal reality of war in an oddly apt medium: animation. In an interview, Folman, who also wrote and produced the autobiographical film, said he never considered telling his story through "real-life video." The moving drawings quite literally illustrate the inexpressible anguish of loss, not only of human life, but of memory, identity and, for want of a better term, humanness.

Folman was a conscript during the 1982 Lebanon war which was sullied by the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although it was the Christian Phalangist militiamen who carried out the atrocity, they were allowed into the camps by an Israeli army content to stand guard outside. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli defence minister of the time, was informed of the danger of this but did nothing about it, and the killings remain a distinct wound to the nation's self-image and international reputation.

Though this is discussed with some horror, it is not what Waltz With Bashir is principally about. It is more about Folman's memories of being a soldier in the war and the way those memories seemed to have been expunged from his mind for some 20 years. He interviewed his friends, witnesses of the war and fellow soldiers to try to fill in the black hole in his past. Having done that, he had many of the film's real characters painted in outline and animated. The result was always going to be risky but it succeeds brilliantly as both art and a document for future generations.

The film opens with a pack of ferocious gray dogs charging down a city street, the cloudy night sky the same ominous yellow that glints in the creatures' eyes and teeth. We soon learn that this is the recurrent nightmare of Folman's friend, Boaz, but that unlike in most dreams, the dogs are not symbolic, but represent the 26 dogs the young soldier was forced to shoot during the war in Lebanon. Boaz recounts this experience at a bar with Folman, and asks his friend what haunts him about that time. When Folman realizes he has no answer, he is shocked into seeking the very details his psyche has so successfully blocked.

Folman eventually remembers a scene, though he cannot determine if it's a dream or memory, in which he and several Israeli soldiers float corpse-like at night in the sea near Beirut. Together they open their eyes and rise up naked, walking toward the shore of a high-rise city. This enigmatic vision will recur throughout the film. One of these soldiers, Carmi, now lives in Holland, so Folman travels to ask him about it. Cold and austere as the snow-covered fields he owns, Carmi cannot corroborate the event, but recalls a fantasy he had aboard his navy ship heading to war, in which he's rescued by a beautiful, naked giantess, and floated out to sea. Here, as in the rest of the film, the detailed animation allows a fluid transition between reality and fantasy, the frightened young soldier hugging the voluptuous goddess as she backstrokes him to safety.

Returning to Israel, Folman interviews other participants, including the famous Israeli war correspondent Ron Ben Yisahi, who had covered the street fighting in Beirut. In September 1982, the Israeli Army entered West Beirut to support the Christian Phalangists upon the assassination of their leader, the charismatic Bashir Gemayel, who had recently been elected President of Lebanon. Israeli troops surrounded the Sabra and Shatila camps, and at night provided illumination rounds, as the Phalangist forces entered the camps, presumably to find Palestinian combat fighters. In fact, a truce had allowed these men safe passage to Tunisia two weeks earlier. After two days of fighting, it became clear that an estimated 3,000 refugees had been massacred.

The climactic waltz with Bashir occurs late in the film when an Israeli soldier, Shmuel Frenkel, exposing himself to a barrage of sniper fire, leaps into a West Beirut intersection plastered with posters of Bashir Gemayel and starts shooting - or waltzing - like a madman. He's like a crazed superhero, even more so because he's animated, but the nuanced style, with its noir-ish contrasts and subtle colours, places him firmly on the ground. Folman's choice to keep the animation realistic never lets us forget that these are real people, whose traumas linger more than 20 years later. And at the film's close, when Folman remembers where he had really been in September 1982, the director switches to actual documentary footage of screaming women fleeing the refugee camps toward the Israeli troops outside. And it breaks your heart.

If the animation weren't so powerfully dramatic, even magical at times, Folman, an ordinary man rather than an overtly political grunt, could never have swung all this and also included some humour and irony. His footage speaks for itself. It suggests a haunted conscience; Folman - the son of parents who survived Auschwitz - thinks this was why the memory of his time in the army were blanked out for so long. What is astonishing is how vividly it has now been brought back to life and how it links with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this David Polonsky, the film's chief illustrator, and Yoni Goodman, its head animator, deserve as much praise as Folman. Max Richter's score is also of tremendous brilliance.

Painting each frame of Waltz With Bashir took almost four years and many doubted it could be done. But there is no question that the result is one of the most resonant films of its year from any source, and quite probably a landmark in animation. It combines hallucinatory dreamscapes, the horrors of hard truth and a natural beauty of expression that has not often been matched before. Never mind that some in Israel thought it not radical enough.

And in the end it remains a soldier's story, not a polemic and, watching it, you see a view of the war that sticks in the back of your head not because it is a political diatribe but because it is an intensely human document that seeks to be true to one man's view of what has come to be known as Israel's Vietnam.

Extraordinary.

Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

**** / *****

"My name is Benjamin Button, and I was born under unusual circumstances. While everyone else was agin', I was gettin' younger... all alone."

There's no way to watch David Fincher's odd sentimental ode, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, without thinking of its cinematic cousin and spiritual ancestor, Forrest Gump. Like that Tom Hanks blockbuster, Benjamin Button deals with a good-hearted simpleton who journeys far and wide to discover overstated truisms about living and dying. Like Gump, Button's got a sweet-but-stern Southern mama (Taraji P. Henson), and an enduring love interest (Cate Blanchett) that accompanies him through the chapters of his life. The two films share a strange magic realism, stretching the bonds of credulity without caution. Most importantly, both films are shamelessly designed to tug the heartstrings of mainstream audiences, while simultaneously appearing highbrow enough to garner some year-end awards. And hell if it worked, it got 13 fucking Oscar nominations. Thirteen!

Benjamin Button, however, is much more fascinating than Gump or other treacly films in this sub-genre. (Atmospheric echoes of Big Fish, The Notebook and Titanic also find their way into Eric Roth's lugubrious screenplay.) Its magnetic power, in my opinion, is chiefly due to two artists whose biographies make them an unlikely, uncomfortable match for this material. They're the ones who deserve their respective nominations the most.

First is Fincher. Widely accepted as a modern-era visionary, his major films to date - Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and Zodiac - are dark studies in humanity, rife with heavy metaphor and duplicitous characters who, in their instincts and world-views, betray the fragile underbelly of civilization. Fincher is, on the surface, a terrible match for the soporific platitudes and feel-good moralizing of Benjamin Button. But that incongruity fuels a palpable friction between the story and the storyteller... a friction that gains intensity and resonance as the film meanders towards its conclusion. Imagine it: me, plopped precariously into starry-eyed American sentimentality. Nothing could be stranger... unless Scorsese makes a film about Hobbits.

By contrast to Fincher, his leading man, Brad Pitt, is most comfortable when exploring the peculiarities of idiosyncratic characters. After twenty years of creating iconic performances, you would think a provocative turn like that in Benjamin Button - a man who lives through the 20th century by mysteriously aging in reverse - would be a less surprising shock. But pleasantly shocking it is; Pitt brings a gentle sadness to Button, a man whose difficult circumstances inform his perspective rather than cloud it. Yes, he struggles with the character's Cajun accent (a serious problem almost as distracting as the film's Hurricane Katrina flash-forwards). But in the main, Pitt takes material that in the hands of a lesser "superstar" - say, Tom Hanks - would merely be maudlin and trite.

I confess that I've grown less tolerable of Hollywood "whimsy" in the last decade... a personal aversion that I first noticed, coincidentally, while re-watching Forrest Gump a few years ago. But if I've got to suffer through films awash in easy moralizing and pat answers to life's complexities, I'd much rather do so in the company of Fincher and Pitt, who seem to share my distaste enough to try to reconstitute and recontextualize it. Good or bad, that's an incredibly admirable achievement.

Is that achievement enough, however, to recommend the film? I'm not sure... or, rather, a blanket recommendation seems to miss the point. Your enjoyment of Benjamin Button, more than any other film I've seen this year, depends upon who YOU are, and how you like your Film menu to be filled. But know, as you make your decision, that the most important word in the title of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is "curious." It's exactly the right descriptive needed for this erratic, surprising, flawed, delightful, inconsistent, fascinating hybrid.

"Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss."

Review: Milk

****½ / *****

"My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!"

A gentle, almost tender biopic of a man who spearheaded a revolution, Gus Van Sant's Milk is appropriately itself a dichotomy. It's an almost aggressively conventional film about a premise that could not be more foreign to mainstream cinema: the fight for gay civil rights.

With clean, economic storytelling, an efficient script and wonderfully grounded performances from its impressive cast, the film on the surface might not feel like anything special. Like dozens of awards-season projects before it, Milk is a competently-made bio of an extraordinary individual that pulls all the right heartstrings and hits all the right notes. It's not until you take a step back from the film that it hits you: This is the gayest major motion picture ever made.

From its sobering opening montage (news footage of gay bars being raided in the 1960s) to the humbling final moments when thousands march in the deceased Harvey's honour through San Francisco, Milk is an unapologetic, beautiful and affecting testament to the strength, warmth and complexity of gay men and women at a landmark time in not only gay, but human rights history.

The screen is rarely without a gay character. We see gay men cooking, lounging in bed, working, dancing, loving, squabbling, joking, driving one another nuts and supporting each other in the wake of tragedy. Though the conversations are overwhelmingly about discrimination against gays, there are numerous tender moments when we see these men not marching in the streets or shouting through bullhorns, but simply living their lives.

The anticipation leading up to the highly-buzzed film has mostly been about the fact that the story of Harvey Milk, a gay rights leader who was assassinated along with Mayor Geroge Moscone by a fellow city supervisor, was actually - impossibly - making it to the screen after nearly 40 years. But its real accomplishment is something different, and to me, unexpected: it gently but without hesitation takes the audience into the world of gay men in a way that no film ever has before.

Equal parts sweetness, melancholy and rage, it's a wonderfully immersive, warts-and-all journey. Harvey and his friends aren't perfect, but they're not out to hurt anyone. They just want what's fair. And it would be near impossible to walk out of this film without understanding that. The approach works thanks mostly to the once-in-a-lifetime performance of Sean Penn as Milk, a brassy New York Jew with an infectious grin and a rascally but harmless sense of humour. Penn's Milk is aggressively flirtatious, obnoxious, stubborn and shameless... which, by many accounts, is probably historically accurate.

He's also gentle, caring, intelligent and braver than you could imagine. He says "Here I am, and what of it?" There's never a moment of hesitation, not a second that you don't believe that he is doing what he truly believes to be right, and not a moment when Penn feels counterfeit or uncommitted to the role. This isn't about a gay man struggling to come to terms with himself, it's about a gay man struggling to get the world to come to terms with him. And for that fact alone, this film is like no other that has come before it.

Surrounding and aiding Harvey in his fight are dozens of other men, nearly all of them gay. As Milk's longtime lover Scott Smith, James Franco offers an openness and emotional honestly that we've never seen from the actor before, which is essential as Smith is the real heart of the film. He's the man who ignites the spark of hope in Harvey, and he's clearly his lifetime love, even though they were separated when Harvey was killed. And ff Scott Smith is the heart, Emile Hirsch's Cleve Jones is the film's hot blood, and we see his evolution from a sassy part-time rentboy to one of the most vigilant gay rights warriors in history. A bold contrast to Smith's gentility, Hirsch's Jones is a flame that just needs fanning, and soon after he and Harvey meet he's a full-on activist wildfire.

As Milk's colleague and eventual murderer Dan White, Josh Brolin is also excellent, deftly walking the line between curiosity and abject disgust in his dealings with Milk, who is the only other supervisor who will give him the time of day despite the fact that White openly dislikes gay men. Although Milk mentions at one point that he thinks that White might himself be gay and deeply closeted, the film thankfully doesn't run with the idea, leaving White's actions somewhat of a mystery, which is indeed what they remain to this day.

The focus of the film is instead on Harvey's political career, and the issues that formed the basis of his campaign. In recapturing the era, Van Sant makes clever use of ample historical footage of both the Castro neighborhood that Milk called home (which is at times blended in so seamlessly with the modern-day recreations that it's impossible to tell the difference) and news footage of many of Milk's political foes, most notably Anita Bryant, whose conservative Christian movement pushed to get Proposition 6 (a ballot measure that sought to remove all openly gay teachers - and their supporters - from California public schools) passed in California after first finding success in Florida.

Milk packs a lot of stuff into its 2-hour running time, covering Harvey's move to California from New York and his romances with both Smith and Jack Lira (Diego Luna), his numerous runs for office, his political battles, his cautious friendship with White, his eventual murder and, finally, his legacy. But thanks to the warm performances from the central cast, the film doesn't suffer from its brisk pace, although some viewers might leave the theatre wanting to know more about Milk himself (we learn virtually nothing about the man pre-California). That, for me, is what's more important about biopics: it's not just what we see about the man/woman in the film, it's what it makes us wish to learn.

It's also worth noting that there are virtually no women present in this story. Aside from Anne Kronenberg, a lesbian largely responsible for Harvey's eventual campaign success, the Castro is curiously devoid of women. While there may have been segregation in causes at the time and while Milk's close circle may well indeed have been mostly male, it does seem strange that there is so little visibility for women (particularly lesbian women) in the film. Van Sant clearly wants to immerse the audience in a community of not just gay citizens in general, but of gay men in particular, with all their particular shortcomings and virtues.

As a straight man, but a human being to whom tolerance, humanity and respect are untouchably important, not recommending Milk isn't really even up for discussion. The fact that a renowned filmmaker and cast have managed to bring the story of a gay civil rights hero to screen is staggering to begin with, but the fact that the film that they have created is so solidly rendered, so heartfelt and so accessible is more than a relief, it's a godsend. There's a gay film about gay causes that shows the strength and resilience of the gay community without apologies, and a film like that has to be recommended without reservation.

Will the film change minds? Maybe not. Anyone rabidly anti-gay won't be seeing it to begin with. But what Milk might do is reenforce in the minds of those who are merely "tolerant" of gays or who don't fully appreciate the scope of the gay civil rights struggle that these are human issues, based around real people. Gay physical affection is presented as a matter of fact (there are love scenes and kisses abound), as is the hatred and bigotry directed at Harvey and his community. Some will be moved to tears by Harvey's story, others will be educated, and still others will leave the theatre furious at what is still happening in the world today. I entered the film prepared to be disappointed; thankfully, I wasn't. But I was also prepared to be detached from a time and a struggle that I'm relatively unfamiliar with.

However, within seconds of the film's opening there was one particular image that grabbed me by the throat and will probably stay with me for the rest of my life: During the title montage made up of news footage of gay bar raids, a group of men sit quietly with drinks at cafe tables surrounded by the harsh lights of camera crews, each with his face buried in his arms trying to hide from the cameras. Two hours later the film closes on the image of Harvey's community marching with candles through the streets of San Francisco, thousands strong. If Harvey's short legacy can teach us anything, it's that we - gay, non-gay, whatever - cannot live in fear and that we have nothing to hide our faces from. And if that is Harvey Milk's lasting message, it's one that is excellently realized, and long overdue.

"All men are created equal. No matter how hard you try, you can never erase those words."