Half Nelson

2006, US, directed by Ryan Fleck

From the opening frames, it's clear that Half Nelson has no intentions of conforming to the uplifting clichés of the noble teacher genre that the storyline might imply, sketching, instead, a deft portrait of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a onflicted young teacher. While there's nothing original about liberal white teachers - and the audiences who love them - Dunne is a challenge to all those around him, bringing a string of personal problems, including the conviction that he can remain functional while ingesting various drugs. He's also in possession of an unapologetic left-wing (not merely liberal) streak of a kind rarely seen in American films, and director Ryan Fleck fleshes out Dunne's political views through a series of class presentations, where the students speak about key incidents in the civil rights movement or the death of Chile's Salvador Allende.

Gosling's detailed performance - his character is often distinctly unlikeable, and yet there's something to root for at the core - is well complemented by that of Shareeka Epps, the remarkable young actress who plays a student who has a spiky friendship with her teacher; Epps played the same character in Fleck's initial short treatment of the subject, Gowanus, Brooklyn. As well as extracting credible performances from his two leads, Fleck has a strong sense of a particular community on the fringes, where the young students are caught between stark choices about their futures. The only downside, perhaps, is the insistent need to convey 'realism' by use of a shaky handheld camera, an aesthetic choice hardly needed when the director and his co-writer Anna Boden have such a sharp eye for the messy complexities of human behaviour.

Préparez vos mouchoirs

1978, France/Belgium, directed by Bertrand Blier

Although it doesn't have the rampant, sometimes scattershot energy of 1974's Les Valseuses, Bertrand Blier's second film with the Gérard Depardieu-Patrick Dewaere tandem is almost as insistent in pushing against, and through, normal standards of behaviour - as well as our expectations about the logic of cinematic narration. As in almost all of his films, Blier is intensely concerned with gender roles, and constantly toys with the viewer; while his depiction of female characters, including in this film, often prompts cries of misogyny, more often than not his real intent seems to be to call the spectator's own assumptions and participation into question (a theme given a detailed reading in Sue Harris's finely argued book Bertrand Blier). It's interesting, too, to contrast critical responses to Blier's Beau-père with this film, which also features a relationship between an adult and an adolescent, but with the gender roles reversed.

While Depardieu is more buttoned-down here than in many of his 1970's roles, where he often played a variation of the hulking loubard, there's a sense that something unpredictable is always lurking beneath the surface - as is quickly affirmed by his character's behaviour in the opening scene. Although he doesn't reach quite the peak achieved in films like La Meilleure façon de marcher, Dewaere is a fine foil for the young Depardieu, and there's a palpable sense of two actors enjoying working with Blier's finely-wrought dialogue (the sequence when they concoct an imaginary meeting with Mozart - the picture comes from this scene - is especially well-played). As on other occasions, Dewaere's onscreen work seems to foreshadow his tragic - and tragically young - death: here, he speaks of the stupidity of Mozart's death at 35, the age when the actor took his own life.

Little Black Book

2004, US, directed by Nick Hurran

Brittany Murphy can be charming enough with the right material, but the flat script and pedestrian direction leave her at sea here, mired in a film that is 30 minutes too long, with a plotline that consistently stretches credibility (the passage of time is especially confusing). The film's bite is mostly found in the secondary plot, as Stacy (Murphy) deals with workplace shenanigans in her new job - as a producer for a sub-Jerry Springer freakshow (the supporting cast at the studio is quite strong, featuring Kathy Bates and Stephen Tobolowsky, though one wonders how the strikingly youthful Holly Hunter ended up here). To its credit, the film ultimately follows through on the logic of Stacy's behaviour, rather than crafting a strained and unrelated conclusion, but it's a slog to get that far.

La Fille de l'eau

1925, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir's first film as a solo director immediately introduces one of the director's recurrent tropes, that of a flowing river. While proximity to that river is critical to the development of the film's plot, Renoir's great preoccupations are present only in embryonic form, however, as the film moves somewhat jerkily from one event to the next, sometimes across gaps of logic (or at least credible motivation). The tone, too, is at times uncertain, veering from high melodrama to outright slapstick, at times in the same breath (as in the sequence where a hot-headed young farmer threatens a violent attack, then promptly falls into a tub of water; the dunking in no way cools his ardour, as might have been expected in a more comic register).

Nonetheless, even where Renoir is clearly finding his feet, he displays great creativity with his staging, such as in the remarkable scenes where his heroine (played by Catherine Hessling, Renoir's then-wife) is entrapped first in the bunk of her uncle's barge, and later in a gypsy wagon threatened by fire; both scenes are genuinely suspenseful, with striking placement of the actors in the former sequence. There is also an extended dream sequence that makes creative use of a variety of special effect ideas, whether reversing the film or playing with scale; in the middle of the sequence, a title card with the single word "Délire" appears, which must have been reassuring to any cinema patrons who happened into the theatre during that particular portion of the film.

I Fidanzati

1963, Italy, directed by Ermanno Olmi

Like Olmi's previous film, Il Posto, I Fidanzati has the slightest of premises - here, the departure of a young Milanese man for a new job in Sicily, and the impact of the distance on his relationship with his fiancée - that functions as a starting point for a series of explorations of different forms of understanding and communication. Just as the young man's lonely existence prompts him to re-evaluate what he has left behind, and what that might imply for his future, he is also forced to confront and attempt to understand a culture that is in many ways as alien as that of a foreign country, even a century after Italian unification. Even as he narrates this encounter, though, Olmi also underlines the homogeneity of other modern institutions, with the protagonist living much of his life in a series of blandly functional buildings, which could be anywhere in the country (both films depict eating in a strikingly unromantic way, given the normal presentation of food in films from and about Italy).

Although the main characters aren't always thoroughly developed - at times, they recall the flat non-characters of a film like L'Année dernière à Marienbad - Olmi's eye for the details of human behaviour serves him well, and the sketches of minor characters are engaging and often witty, while he finds a strange and compelling beauty in some of the industrial settings of the film, whether captured in a fluid tracking shot near the beginning, or in a long shot of a building cascading with showers of welding sparks.

The Interpreter

2005, US, directed by Sydney Pollack

The Interpreter is something of a throwback, a complex conspiracy film more focused on human drama than cheap thrills, set in and around the United Nations. However, the novel setting can't quite overcome the film's derivative feel, which harks back to films like The Parallax View and Sydney Pollack's own Three Days of the Condor, from the heyday of 1970's paranoia about behind-the-scenes machinations. At times, it's also hard to entirely take seriously a film centered on an institution that has been so thoroughly marginalised in recent years, though that might be to miss the film's plea for the restoration of the agency to a central role in world affairs; there's an undercurrent of optimism that re-surfaces near the conclusion, as if to hope that things may not always be how they currently are.

Like The Lord of War, which backs away from naming Liberia's real warlord in favor of a thinly-disguised alternative, The Interpreter creates a fictional Mugabe-like despot around which to weave its twisted plot; though it might not quite have the courage of its convictions, it is, for the most part, refreshingly adult in its refusal to follow the obvious route for the two leads, who are both convincingly jaded.

Il Posto

1961, Italy, directed by Ermanno Olmi
A member of the second generation of post-war Italian filmmakers, director Ermanno Olmi combines much of the spirit of neo-realism with an extremely dry wit, using his acute observational skills to skewer the absurdities of the modern workplace. Olmi's film has the thinnest of narrative threads - a fresh-faced young man applies for a job, and meets a girl - but plot is the least of his concerns, as he develops a rich and wry portrait of a large Italian company, where dozens of young people compete for slots that will provide them a job for life (given how young some of them are, that's a very long time indeed; while some viewers may be nostalgic for the notion of job security, Olmi tends to see many such positions as long-lasting dead ends).

The company bombards the potential new hires with a barrage of tests and exercises worthy of NASA, with the young applicants themselves often mystified as to the utility of what is asked of them. Once hired, though, the employees tended to be regarded as recalcitrant pupils in the classroom, with many of the workers conforming to this treatment, including acting up at the back of the room (the contrast between the status of applicants and employees is underlined by two sequences focused on late arrivals: the employee receives a paternalistic dressing-down where the applicant is indulged). Olmi draws a clear contrast between the conformity idealized by the company and the individual lives of the employees, inter-cutting, in an entirely unexpected fashion, brief and powerful snapshots from the home lines of those we encounter, while his efficient establishment of character, and character foibles, at times hints at Tati's brilliant cinematic shorthand.

Bicycle Thieves

1948, Italy, directed by Vittorio De Sica (original title: Ladri di biciclette)
Probably the best known of all Italian neo-realist films, Bicycle Thieves (which was inexplicably translated as Bicycle Thief in the US for many years, undercutting one of the film's key points) has the simplicity of a myth: a man who requires a bicycle for his work has that bicycle stolen from him, leading to a downward spiral as he attempts to recover his stolen property. As Michelangelo Antonioni would later say, the man's importance resides exclusively in the fact that his bicycle has been stolen - there's no sustained attempt to explore his state of mind - but that simple fact is of enormous import in a society trying to recover from the wartime period, and scarred by terrible unemployment.

Simply getting the simplest of jobs in post-war Italy seems a tremendous achievement, one that brings with it the sense of restored personal dignity, and it's this which makes the otherwise unremarkable theft seem so overwhelming. The man and his family have had to sacrifice almost everything to get to that point, including their bedsheets - in a mesmerizing sequence set in a vast pawnbroker's enterprise - and the almost immediate disruption of the man's tentative dreams leads him to acts of increasing desperation, the loss of the very dignity so recently restored. The institutions of Italian life, seen here particularly in the form of the church and the police, do nothing to assist this man in his quest, and indeed sometimes seem actively to place further barriers in his way, concerned ultimately with their own well-being rather than that of individual members of society.

Beyond the focus on one individual struggle, the film is also a richly detailed portrait of Roman streets in the mid-1940's, with De Sica's camera taking in rowdy street scenes in popular neighborhoods, markets that look more third world than first, and the realities of the cheaply-built apartments that infested the suburbs just after the war (locations that would prove fertile for other filmmakers too). There's nothing of the hand-held style that functions as a marker for "realism" in more recent work, though: De Sica is a skilled professional, making artful use of fluid tracking shots and lighting in keeping with his professional origins in the studio system, however different and striking his subject matter.

Ousmane Sembène, 1923-2007

L'Empire Sonhrai (1963) (short)
Borom Sarret (1963) (short)
Niaye (1964) (short)
La Noire de... (1966)
Mandabi (1968)
Tauw (1970) (short)
Emitai (1971)
Xala (1974)
Ceddo (1976)
Camp de Thiaroye (1988)
Guelwaar (1992)
Faat Kiné (2000)
Moolaadé (2004)

Some further reading:

"The African King" - Richard Porton

"Ousmane Sembène: The Life of a Revolutionary Artist" - Samba Gadjigo

"Woman is the Future of Man: Ousmane Sembène on Moolaadé" - Ray Pride

Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers - Samba Gadjigo, Ralph Faulkingham, Thomas Cassirer

There are several other books on Sembène, but for the most part they focus on the first half of his cinema career; individual chapters in books on African cinema are more up-to-date.

Quinceañera

2006, US, directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's Quinceañera does a remarkably credible job of taking us into a unique Los Angeles neighborhood and capturing the feel and rhythm of a community undergoing great change, with the predominantly Latino area of Echo Park confronted with encroaching gentrification. That larger theme provides the backdrop to a coming of age story that is by turns sweet and poignant - as is often the case - but which remains convincing by virtue of strong acting and the directors' tremendous affection for their characters.

Los Angeles's vast sprawl is reduced to just a few city blocks here, with Echo Park a seemingly self-contained neighborhood that looks towards downtown without ever approaching it (the usually ubiquitous Hollywood sign is nowhere to be seen, enhancing the sense that the city is a series of discrete areas rather than a unified whole). Though Glatzer and Wetsmoreland are themselves partly the agents of Echo Park's gentrification in their offscreen lives, it's clear where their loyalties lie, so much so that the gay couple who might be seen as their surrogates are the film's least sympathetic characters, an interesting tension between on- and offscreen stories. The scenes inside the home of Tio Tomas (the gentle patriarch who gives shelter to two younger members of his extended family) have a particular power, with the camera moving in ways that suggest we are inside a real house rather than a flat cinematic plane. Although the film comes to a kind of crescendo near the end, there's a refreshingly open-ended feel that ensures the leads have a life beyond the limits of the screen.

The War Game

1965, UK, directed by Peter Watkins
Director Peter Watkins's best-known and most controversial work, The War Game is a pseudo-documentary that re-creates the aftermath of a Soviet nuclear attack on Britain, with the film taking the format of a television news program, complete with an authoritative BBC voiceover and a list of source materials at the film's conclusion. Although commissioned by the BBC, the project was effectively censored by the Corporation for almost twenty years, even though theatrical screenings took place (including in the US, which helped Watkins gain enough exposure to make his later Punishment Park in that country, and also netted the film an Oscar).

The depiction of a society which collapses absolutely, in both physical and moral terms, in the wake of the attack is utterly devastating, and the sense of civic disruption is achieved through the use of tellingly local details (the sight of the usually unarmed British police force brandishing guns is especially chilling, while there's something oddly unsettling in the simple fact that the men in uniforms have neither the time nor the resources to shave). Watkins is interested in the consequences of the attack at ground level rather than grand strategy, and it's this sense of individual suffering that's often unbearable; he is also blunt about the racial and social prejudices raised by mass evacuations (just a few years before Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech on immigration). In creating his depiction of a post-nuclear collapse, he draws heavily on the experiences of Hiroshima/Nagasaki but also on the firebombings of Dresden and other German cities, and it's likely that his unapologetic critique of such wartime actions was as provocative to the government of the day as his depiction of nuclear horrors; Winston Churchill, who oversaw Dresden and other bombing campaigns, died in early 1965, and his legacy was not lightly called into question.

Germania anno zero

1948, Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini (Germany Year Zero)
Germania anno zero is the most pared-down and also the most unrelenting of Rossellini's (post-) wartime trilogy, set, unlike the previous films, in Berlin and filmed two summers after the end of the war, with the city clearly still in the most abject of states. The film opens with a title that indicates that it purports to be an "objective and true portrait of Berlin", reminiscent of the documentary trappings that frame the six vignettes in Paisà, although this film, unlike its immediate predecessor, does not have a specific documentary basis.

However, what it shares with Paisà is the sense - amplified here - that the end of the war does not, in and of itself, bring true liberation: for many people, it's simply the beginning of a new, and often equally devastating phase (it's also an act of great daring to invite us to sympathize with the ordinary citizens of a country so recently vilified and defeated, although the ending might be read as a comment on the need for a kind of purge before the page can be turned).

The physical and economic destruction that we see from the film's opening scenes is paralleled by the moral collapse that has infected many people, children most of all; younger characters have peripheral, if sometimes significant, roles in the two previous films in the trilogy, whereas here they are the central focus, with the film following young Edmund as he attempts to make some contribution to his family's well-being. His downward spiral is perhaps best encapsulated by the two tracking shots that follow his progress near the beginning and end of the film: the first sees him confidently stride through the city, whereas later, the weight of experience has become crushing, and the streets themselves seem oppressive (his claustrophobic home is hardly better, with Rossellini crowding the shots to emphasize the press of humanity).

The war and its aftermath have created opportunities for predators more than for honest people, with usurers and thieves abounding. As in Roma, citta apertà there's also something sexually predatory about the ex-Nazi teacher that Edmund encounters; Rossellini isn't capable of limiting his corruption to the economic and political levels. It's a persistent cliché that weakens the film somewhat. There are moments, too, drawn from the purest melodrama rather than the well of neo-realism, perhaps most especially a sequence involving a glass filled with poison, but the film as a whole has an air of authentic despair that's on occasion quite devastating.

Lord of War

2005, US, directed by Andrew Niccol

Although Lord of War undoubtedly has some compelling - if broad-brush - things to say about the international arms trade, writer-director Andrew Niccol tries to have it both ways, combining a lesson in the ways of the world with a sometimes overly intoxicating portrait of the life of Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), a fictional arms dealer who, in short order, goes from a tedious life in Brighton Beach to the top of the international arms trade and untold wealth (it's not always a credible rise to power, while it seems persistently strange that Orlove travels to the world's most volatile places with no security staff).

It's hard, at times, to avoid the conclusion that whatever the immoralities of Orlov's life, Niccol makes the good years seem awfully fun from the protagonist's amoral perspective, and the film's political point-scoring rarely returns to the heights set in a brilliantly cynical, and ultimately brutal, opening sequence that describes the life of a bullet from manufacture to use. That said, Niccol does open a useful window to the reality that most wartime deaths, at least in the kinds of nasty civil conflicts where Orlov makes his money, are from small arms fire, not aerial bombing, with AK-47s the most ubiquitous weapon on the market, cheap, easy to transport, and reliably lethal.

Paisan

1946, Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini (original title: Paisà)

Made almost immediately after Rome, Open City, Paisà abandons that film's generally conventional structure in favour of a series of almost completely unconnected vignettes that are linked only in that they chronicle the progress of the American army up the length of Italy during 1943-44. The episodes are strikingly different in nature, though they tend toward the downbeat (a notable contrast to the usual depiction of literal and figurative liberation), and collectively paint a tough-minded portrait of the aftermath of war, which brings with it new conflicts and challenges.

Rossellini's main interest here is the meeting between two apparently alien cultures, those of wartime (and often backward and impoverished) Italy and the American military machine as it rolls up the peninsula, providential supplies in tow. It's not always a happy meeting, beginning with mistrust in Sicily, whose residents greet the Americans, and the collapse of Mussolini's regime, with some ambivalence (the complexities of Sicilian post-war loyalties are explored in greater detail in Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano). Even in areas where the Americans are actively greeted as liberators - with the film incorporating, almost seamlessly, documentary footage - the local population has difficulty relating to its military saviours, such is the economic gulf that separates them, with the US military seen by many hungry Italians, including children, as a soft target for theft. As the film progresses, however, the restoration and resumption of humanity creates a powerful bond between the two cultures, with a paradoxical optimism emerging from what is often a despairing catalogue of individual incidents. The final sequence, in particular, speaks eloquently of the power of individuals to seek to understand another culture - a theme explored by many of the filmmakers from Africa who cite the Italian neo-realists as an important influence.

Although many of the smaller parts are played by non-professionals, with various sequences filmed on the streets of Rome and other Italian cities (one part of Italy often masquerades for another: the Sicilian sequences were filmed in Amalfi, though the devastation of Naples, in the second episode, is absolutely authentic), Rossellini artfully blends in professional actors, with almost all of the American roles played by experienced theatre hands (some of whom, like William Tubbs, had interesting post-war film careers) to anchor each episode.

Roma, città aperta

1945, Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City)
Heralded as the beginning of the neo-realist movement, Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta doesn't conform to some of the key expectations that would come to be associated with later films, most notably in its reliance on professional actors as well as many of the conventions of melodrama, while much of the film is shot on studio sets, however makeshift the studio may have been in the Rome of early 1945. The circumstances of the film's shooting weren't quite as hand-to-mouth as later legend would have it, particularly with regard to the film stock (there were just three kinds of stock, and they were consistently used for interiors or exteriors, as documented, among other places, in David Forgacs's study of the film), while Rossellini was an experienced professional with several fascist-era features under his belt, something that was less than politically expedient (for him and for many critics) in the immediate aftermath of the war.

What is remarkable about the film, even now, though, is the simple fact that it was made literally within months of the kinds of events it depicts (some anchored firmly in actual incidents, an idea that Rossellini further developed in his next film, Paisà), and under extraordinarily disrupted circumstances; it's both an accomplished, sometimes manipulative bit of filmmaking and one that literally reeks of its time and place (the choppy film processing contributes greatly to the sense of a film made on the fly and in locations similar to those being depicted onscreen). The documentary air of those street-level scenes are married with passages that evoke the more regular production of the Italian (and American) studios of the time, with comic local colour bits that make great use of the talents of performers like Aldo Fabrizi (as a priest involved with the resistance), though the comedy turns sour very quickly and definitively during a search that rousts several resistants.

Rossellini's portrait of the Nazis owes much to what were already quite conventional representations: while the Italian fascist officials (petty and otherwise) are often bumbling and warm-hearted, the German characters are coldly efficient, capable of drinking and amusing themselves mere feet from a chillingly-depicted torture chamber (the Gestapo chief and his female colleague are a sadistic and callous homosexual/lesbian pair, hardly the stuff of realistic portrayals).

Throughout the film, children listen in to adult conversations and observe adult situations, growing up quickly (they both play at and live through the war), learning brutal lessons that, at the conclusion of the film, are nonetheless leavened with a certain degree of hope, a hope partly created by the audience's awareness of the subsequent course of events; it's a theme that recurs throughout Rossellini's next two films, though in more challenging terms.

Stranger Than Fiction

2006, US, directed by Marc Forster

Marc Forster is developing one of Hollywood's more eclectic directorial resumes, with this film following from Monster's Ball, Stay and Finding Neverland. If anything could be said to unite the films, it's perhaps their performances - and, less positively, somewhat flubbed execution that leaves the viewer feeling as though an opportunity has been missed, with the director sometimes, as here, coming frustratingly close to delivering something truly interesting, but backing off near the conclusion.

However, there is much to enjoy in the performances, not least from a subdued and surprisingly engaging Will Ferrell as Harold Crick, an IRS auditor who finds that he can hear his life being narrated by an unseen author. While Harold's attempts to deal with this state of affairs are nominally the main event - and allow for nice turns from Emma Thompson as the author and Dustin Hoffman as a literature professor (with Queen Latifah, by contrast, wasted in a fairly pointless role) - in reality the core of the film is Harold's out-of-character romance with quirky baker Maggie Gyllenhaal. The latter is one of the most charming performers around these days, and the two actors have an entirely unexpected and engaging chemistry which creates a sense of well-earned emotional payoff moments.

28 Weeks Later

2007, UK, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

28 Weeksl Later is that rare beast, a truly worthwhile sequel, which in some ways surpasses the original, particularly in its commitment to a more rigorous and demanding conclusion in keeping with the film's overall narrative. The bleak tone and the opening scenes recall Michael Haneke's Le Temps du loup as much as they do 28 Days Later, which focused more on the character development of a specific group of survivors as on the actual progression of the 'rage' virus, the terrifying illness that precipitates the events of both films.

The film does a remarkably effective job of combining horror and thrills - the first major action sequence is harrowing and exhausting, as well as hypnotic - with insistent, intelligent political commentary. While the obvious resonance is with the Iraq war, particularly given that the troops sent to save and secure London are from the US, the film isn't simple-minded, depicting the conflict that arises as messily multi-faceted, and prompting reflection, too, on more distant wartime experiences, particularly the moral quandaries that accompanied the fire-bombing of Dresden during the Second World War (an action which, however necessary it may have seemed at the time, has increasingly been called into question, including in Britain). It's also an intensely visceral experience - an effect that director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo also achieved in certain sequences of his previous film, Intacto, but the tempo here is far more intense and sustained.

Local filmgoing note: this is the first film I've seen at the Somerville Theatre since they acquired a license to sell beer and wine; it's the only place I know of in Massachusetts where you can enjoy a drink (without food) while you watch, and it's a thoroughly civilized experience.

Ossessione

1943, Italy, directed by Luchino Visconti
One of the key precursors to the post-war neo-realist movement in Italy, Luchino Visconti's Ossessione is particularly notable for its use of location shooting (in Italy's Po Valley) during wartime, as well as its comprehensive debunking of the romantic hero; it's remarkable that Mussolini screened and permitted circulation of the film, though his son Vittorio, who was closely involved with cinematic production, was outraged at the liberties taken by Visconti.

Unlike some of the best-known neo-realist films, Visconti does not make extensive use of non-professionals: most of the main actors were already cinema regulars, while leading man Massimo Girotti had a fine career until his death in 2003. By contrast, although there's virtually no reference to the main world event of the time, the war itself, the film drips of the atmosphere of Italy's streets, both urban and rural. Even in the apparently more prosperous north of Italy, donkeys and bicycles are as much part of the transportation web as (rickety) trains and trucks, while the truckers look as worn as the men of The Wages of Fear, a bone-weary exhaustion that infects the main characters, too, most famously in the sequence where Giovanna (Clara Calamai) falls asleep while eating pasta.

Visconti opens the film with brisk efficiency, quickly establishing the key triangle of characters, as well as the tensions that entwine them (there's also a wonderful crane shot, moving up over a parked truck, that reveals the trattoria where much of the action is centered), creating an atmosphere of desperation and foreboding that also pre-figures post-war American noir in all its bleakness. As with several of the later neo-realist features, Ossessione is something of a hybrid, amalgamating Visconti's developing personal style with conventions of lighting and music drawn from popular cinema (there are moments when the music heavy-handedly emphasizes a spoken line, particularly a sequence where the police promise to return with more questions), but the strong performances and oppressive atmosphere succeed in crafting a portrait of a society under tremendous strain, with a misguided moral compass.

Shallow Hal

2001, US, directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly

There's a core of innocent sweetness in all of the earlier Farrelly brothers films, even though it's not always immediately obvious, and that impulse is given free rein here, with the gross-out gags radically toned down - indeed, the final 30 minutes of the film contain few laughs of any kind - as the brothers make a surprisingly didactic point about the nature of beauty. While it's refreshing that they stay true to the film's proper logic at the conclusion, it simply takes too long to get there, while the uncertain tone, varying between gag moments and sweet sincerity, is ultimately a little wearing (on the plus side, the brothers include a variety of unusual actors in smaller parts, and treat them, for the most part, with great respect; this is no Freaks sideshow). Gwyneth Paltrow does a creditable job of conveying the confusion her character feels when confronted with Jack Black's uncritical worship, ignoring her own beauty and creating considerable quiet humour in the process, while lifestyle guru Tony Robbins has perhaps the film's funniest bit when he spoofs his own image near the beginning.

Written on the Wind

1956, US, directed by Douglas Sirk

From its arresting opening sequence, Douglas Sirk's glorious Technicolor melodrama plunges to the seamy underbelly of the American dream, and the decayed ugliness that underpins the opulent lives of a Texas oil family (there seems to a be a special decadence, both literal and moral, associated with oil dynasties, something that, a couple of decades later, Dallas exploited to great success, giving us a vicarious glimpse into a kind of gorgeous imprisonment). Lauren Bacall's Lucy Moore is swept into this world by Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), an oil-fueled playboy aware that he is a failure in his father's - and perhaps, more tragically, his own - eyes, never able to measure up to adoptive son Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson; the characters' names could hardly belong to another genre, or another era). It's a fairytale that has something sour at the centre from the very beginning: there's something cold in Bacall's expression as she surveys the excess, which moves her later to say that it seemed "beautiful at first, and then I thought how ugly it would be... in the morning", a despairing commentary on post-war boomtime consumerism (it doesn't prevent her from ultimately buying into the idea).

Sirk's film gives the lie to the notion that there's no concern with class in American society, using scenes in a local dive bar to effectively comment on the two sides of the tracks, with the working-class joint the site for recurrent slumming on the part of the Hadley siblings, unable to escape their small-town roots (though the nymphomaniac Marylee (Dorothy Malone) is held to a rather different standard than her older brother, a staple of the gossip columns). Sirk's use of lush colour to enhance the florid entanglements is complemented by his choice of camera angles as the story spirals towards its heady conclusion - the visual narration of Kyle's breakdown is especially effective - and he employs a brilliantly frenzied editing style in one of the film's pivotal sequences, intercutting a dancing Marylee with a horrific staircase tumble (less successful is an especially soapy "memory" sequence where Marylee recalls a lost childhood down by the river; the sequence serves neither the film nor Dorothy Malone).