Death at a Funeral

2007, US/UK, directed by Frank Oz

I often feel that the farce is more dependent than almost any other genre on the complicity of the audience: if you're not in the mood, or if the actors don't nail the timing to the millisecond, the entire exercise is pointless, but if things go smoothly then the cascading effect takes over and it's hard to resist once you give in to the first sheepish laugh. I saw a production of the 1960s farce Boeing Boeing last year in London, and for the first five minutes I was wondering what I had signed us up for, since my wife and parents had entrusted me with the choice of entertainment. But the actors quickly took over, got the thing humming, cranked up through the gears, and any second thoughts were quickly forgotten.

Death at a Funeral doesn't quite reach those heights - it needs a good deal longer to get the engine warm, for starters, and it occasionally feels a little too perfectly planned, without the ever-present sense of high-wire bravado that comes with live theatre - but it's still a fine example of the genre, with an additional tingle of morbidity given that almost the entire film takes place at a funeral where everything - and I mean everything - that could go wrong inevitably does. It's not always especially subtle - you can see some plot developments a mile off, while some of the cruder material simply comes off as crass - but the performances generally steer things back on the rails whenever things threaten to go too haywire: Kris Marshall, Alan Tudyk (perhaps best known as Wash in Firefly/Serenity) and Andy Nyman are especially funny, while Matthew Macfadyen is a fine straight man.

Tristan + Isolde

2006, UK/Germany/US/Czech Republic/Ireland, directed by Kevin Reynolds

This version of the Tristan and Isolde mythology plays fast and loose with the usual tale, adding in a new plotline to ensure that the titular star-crossed lovers fall into each other's arms sooner rather than later - but complaining about adherence to the veracity of a legend is beside the point when it comes to Hollywood scriptwriting. The filmmakers are unashamed about presenting the mythology as a stripped down version of Romeo and Juliet, with Celts instead of Capulets - and the marketing gurus went as far as purloining the "+" from the posters for Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film version of the Shakespeare play.

The film opens with scenes of surprising brutality, as if director Kevin Reynolds wishes to emphasize that he will go beyond the usual costume drama to capture something of the feel of post-Roman Britain (and Ireland, where the filmmakers use the west of Ireland as an unconvincing stand-in for the east), though Monty Python ultimately did a far better job of conveying the grime and the gore that were probably the lot of most of the population in the darker part of the medieval era. Still, the script does a halfway decent job of portraying some of the issues of loyalty and political expedience that characterised the medieval nobility's interpersonal relations, and Rufus Sewell is especially good as King Marke, a man who is aware of the confines of his station and yet remains in many ways powerless to do anything about it. James Franco is less interesting as Tristan, but the very appealing Sophia Myles is fresh and vibrant as Isolde, albeit an Isolde who owes much more to the twenty-first century than the eighth.

S'en fout la mort

1990, France, directed by Claire Denis

The opening of Claire Denis's second film points up, in striking ways, the gap between reality and aspiration: a hand-held camera combines with a soundscape that captures every scrape and scratch of opening doors and moving cages as a shady transaction takes place, while a voiceover provides insight into the mind of one of the main characters, a mind that wanders far beyond the gritty night-time scene. It's a strategy also employed to good effect by Abderrahmane Sissako, particularly in the opening of his film La Vie sur terre, where the disparity between a Parisian supermarket and a letter home to his father in Mali, read in voiceover, seems an unbridgeable gulf.

Denis's use of sound is especially interesting: it's as though the volume has been turned right up to emphasize the mundane, to further stress the contrast between the voiceover and the world on the screen. As the film progresses, Denis manages to extract a kind of poetry from that soundtrack, just as, later, she finds something hypnotically beautiful in the repeated work that her characters do with the fighting cocks that are at the heart of the film's narrative; there's a real tenderness to those interactions, but also a non-judgmental fascination, on the director's part, with work done by human hands (the scenes are as absorbing as those which depict more conventional artisanal talents in Claude Sautet's Un Coeur en hiver).


Denis's film is set on the margins in every possible sense: it takes place on Paris's southern fringe, near Rungis, the town best-known for its gigantic food market (blood-smeared butchers feature among the customers at the cock-fighting ring, though the audience is by no means restricted to working class spectators); its main characters exist on the fringes of the law; and the central duo, Dah (Isaach de Bankolé) and Jocelyn (Alex Descas) are from Benin and the French Antilles respectively, and thus cut off from their roots. Within the world of the film, their marginalization is often expressed by their silence; while we see them converse with one another, forming an almost brotherly bond, and we hear Dah's commentary in voiceover, they only rarely intervene when there are white characters present, with their boss (played by Jean-Claude Brialy) doing much of the talking on their behalf.

Given the set-up, it's not difficult to discern the likely direction of the story, but Denis is less interested in the narrative outcome than in creating a richly detailed portrait of the physical and psychological realities of her two central characters, and perhaps in challenging perceptions of what we deem to be culturally acceptable. At times, it feels as though we're watching a documentary about the underworld (both criminal and literal, since the two central characters live far beneath the ground), notwithstanding the presence of recognizable actors (de Bankolé, Descas and Brialy are all excellent, the latter mining an unpleasant vein not normally seen in his work), an underworld that's otherwise too easily ignored.

The Dark Knight

2008, US, directed by Christopher Nolan

Or In Which It Is Shewn That a Summer Blockbuster Is Not The Ideal Vehicle For Coherent Political Commentary. It's clear that Christopher Nolan aspires to something more than the average big-budget action flick, and that Batman and the cinematic universe in which he exists could be read as a partial analogy for the current US administration and, but it's not an analogy that hangs together all that well, with the political subtext ultimately subordinate to the need to ratchet up the thrills (I wonder to what extent I was influenced by David Bordwell's comments, which I read a few days before I saw the film; he makes a pretty good case for deliberately muddled movie politics). Nolan's directorial style also distracts from any subtler point he might be trying to make: his camera spins around in dizzying fashion, whether we're circling a tall building in Hong Kong or following the Joker as he swings wildly around the terrorised crowd at a party, and he has a tendency to underline every point in the action with loud, sometimes portentous music.

I won't deny that the film is good big-screen entertainment, best enjoyed with a crowd, but as soon as the closing credits roll, the seams start to come undone. Given that we're talking abut flying superheroes, realism is not the primary concern (though I did like the way the first film made some attempt to ground things in our own world), but even so the timeline for some of the events seems utterly implausible: there's simply too much going on at any one time. While there are some striking visual images - that circling camera on the rooftops is quite impressive on the big screen, and there's a brilliant sequence where the lights shut down on Batman's lair - too many of the action scenes aren't sufficiently coherent: in one big chase scene, we're supposed to be concerned about the Joker's approach, but we never have the sense that he's actually in the same physical space so the menace is undercut.

Then there is the obligatory word about Heath Ledger's performance as said Joker. While his work is a fine bit of scene-chewing acting, all manic energy and wild mannerisms, it's also a very showy bit of work - presumably at the director's bidding - that seems to me far from his finest hour. I'd much rather remember him for his eye-catching work in the otherwise unappealing Monster's Ball or his exceptionally controlled performance in Brokeback Mountain. Or perhaps I'd best like to remember him as a high school kid in 10 Things I Hate About You, where he looks just like what he was: a kid off the plane from Australia who's just won the Hollywood casting lottery and is enjoying every second of the ride.

Dan in Real Life

2007, US, directed by Peter Hedges

Peter Hedges' fascination with family dynamics surfaces again in Dan in Real Life, although here he's primarily dissecting an actual group of relatives rather than observing the ways in which people create new and unique quasi-family groups as they leave their childhoods behind (with "real" and constructed families sometimes clashing). Hedges has a pretty sharp eye for much of the minutiae of family life - that rich texture of events and memories, highs and lows - and he captures the dynamics of a sprawling, lazy, sometimes tense family gathering with considerable skill.

It's hard not to see something of Steve Carell's character from The Office, Michael Scott, in Dan - while the latter isn't anywhere near as Crass as Michael, he does have that knack for saying utterly the wrong thing, and transforming himself into a social outcast even amongst those who should be most willing to tolerate his foibles. Juliette Binoche, too, is hardly stretched in playing the beguiling European stunner, smart, sexy, and capable of turning everyone's world on its head, and yet despite a degree of typecasting she's ultimately as bewitching as the movie needs her to be, convincing as the kind of person who could snap a man like Dan out of a profound funk. In the end, there's nothing all that new in Hedges' film (plot twists show up on cue) but the fine performances - including from the young actresses who play Dan's daughters - make the gathering worth sticking with.

Papy fait de la résistance

1983, France, directed by Jean-Marie Poiré

In her book French National Cinema, Susan Hayward notes that "[A]part from a couple of comedies", of which this film is one, French cinema of the 1980s did little to tackle the legacy of Occupation period, an especially troubled part of France's historical record.* It's a shame, then, that she provides no analysis of what these few films might have achieved; Papy fait de la résistance was a substantial box office hit on its first release, with that success augmented through subsequent television showings and the home video boom.

Jean-Marie Poiré attempted to deflect some of the controversy that surrounded the film by claiming that it was intended as a satire on films about the Occupation period, but it's clear that Papy takes on some of the well-honed mythologies of the difficult post-war period, particularly the scale of the Resistance. There are plenty of references to prior films set during the same years - particularly La Grande vadrouille, with which it shares major plot elements, and also dramas like Jean-Pierre Melville's intense, bleak L'Armée des ombres - but this film emerged from the often anarchic and rarely respectful café-théâtre movement, not known for its tendency to avoid sacred cows.

As with most of the café-théâtre films, Papy is primarily a set of sketches loosely strung together. Several of the briefer scenes seem designed expressly to allow appearances by members of the Splendid theatre troupe, and while Michel Blanc does a nice job with his few minutes of screen time, other such cameos -- Thierry Lhermitte's in particular -- fall much flatter. Of the main Splendid actors, only Christian Clavier and Gérard Jugnot have major parts, and the latter is especially amusing as a more-zealous-than-the-Germans local Gestapo functionary.

While there's a scattershot tendency to the humour that rarely allows for much genuine reflection on the Occupation period (and a casual homophobia to one of the characters), the film is occasionally inspired, whether in the song performed by Adolf-a-like Ludwig von Apfelstrudel, and especially at the end, when - Monty Python style - the modern world intrudes in the form of a televised debate that scathingly satirises then-contemporary discussions of France's wartime history and role, and which leaves no-one looking entirely admirable.

--

* p. 286 of Hayward's book; the book is a survey, so a lengthy analysis would hardly have been appropriate, but it still feels like a missed opportunity.

Definitely, Maybe

2008, US, directed by Adam Brooks

Adam Brooks also penned the screenplay for the dreadful Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (this must be Adam Brooks month for me); Definitely, Maybe might not win many awards, but it is, thankfully, a huge improvement on the earlier film. For a start, there's something approaching a coherent story, there's a real sense of place and time, and while Brooks doesn't do anything too radical, at least the film has the guts not to follow the easiest possible road as it ties up its loose ends.

I confess I was frequently nonplussed by the central storyline in which a father (Ryan Reynolds) tells the sanitized story of his past to his daughter (Abigail Breslin) as he prepares to finalize his divorce from her mother, perhaps the result of missing a key few seconds at the beginning, but Reynolds is charming enough to distract from the silliness of the set-up, and there's some decent support, particularly from Kevin Kline, enjoying himself as a roué. The unusual backdrop to his youthful romances - the 1992 Clinton campaign - is surprisingly effective, too, recalling a very different political moment but also depicting the erosion of youthful ideals.

Away From Her

2007, Canada, directed by Sarah Polley

In many debut films the director seems to throw every trick into the mix first time out, as if there'll never be another chance, with the unfortunate result that the story frequently gets lost in the process. Sarah Polley, though, has far more confidence in her material, and in her own ability to unfold the ties between her characters, never departing from a calm, almost hypnotic style that allows real - rather than paper - people to emerge as she narrates the story of a woman (Julie Christie) dealing with the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

While she doesn't sugar-coat the realities of the disease - particularly from the perspective of those forced to watch a loved one slowly disappear - Polley chooses not to depict Alzheimer's as simply a decline: instead, Fiona's illness becomes a revelatory experience, unveiling the depths of her love toward the man (Gordon Pinsent) with whom she has spent her life, despite his flaws, and in turns the lengths to which he is prepared to go to ensure his wife's continued happiness, even as his connection with her seems to slip.

It's extraordinary to realize just how young the director is, given her acute ability to portray the small transactions that regulate the lives of this long-married couple; her depiction, particularly, of the ways in which Fiona allows her husband to understand how she has come to terms with his behaviour is tender yet utterly unsentimental, as though her disease makes honesty not just possible but essential.

Christie has one of those extraordinary faces that seems to develop a new radiance with age; every moment she's on the screen, your eyes are drawn to her, while she moves and speaks with a quiet, dignified grace that has an unmistakable edge of steel. As her husband, Gordon Pinsent is a fine match for her, a man who looks as though he's been hewn from the Canadian wilds, but who is also, despite his mistakes, possessed of acute intelligence and sensitivity. It's a fine performance from an actor who has rarely had the opportunity to shine.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

2004, UK/US, directed by Beeban Kidron

I'm not sure if it's a symptom of the kind of project offered to female directors these days, or whether Beeban Kidron's early work, especially for TV, was something of a flash in the pan - she's been behind the camera for several undistinguished Hollywood projects by this stage - but this is just dreadful. It plods along with almost no sense of style or wit - it's not entirely impossible to inject a film like this with a little verve - and the script displays no indication that some of its more outlandishly offensive ideas (such as the scenes in a women's prison) are intended ironically. The scenario is ridiculous, and padded out far beyond the length needed, the actors seem tired (Hugh Grant gives things a minor lift, but it's a Sisyphean task), and this second Bridget Jones film reveals Colin Firth's character rather brutally for the pompous arse he is; if this is a man to aspire to, we're in worse shape than I thought.

Viens chez moi, j'habite chez une copine

1981, France, directed by Patrice Leconte

David Bordwell has an illuminating and amusing post on movie titles (how many writers on film have a breadth of reference that extends from Rodney Dangerfield to Robert Bresson?), and when it came to scribbling some notes on this film it struck me that there was a wave of outsize French comedy titles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many of them are attached to Patrice Leconte's earlier films: in addition to this movie, he directed Circulez y'a rien à voir, Ma femme s'appelle reviens and Les vécés étaient fermés de l'intérieur. Others got in on the act with Pour 100 briques t'as plus rien, Les hommes préfèrent les grosses, T'empêches tout le monde de dormir and other titles in a similar vein, though the number of syllables in the titles in no way guarantees the thoughtfulness of the end product.

As is the case for Viens chez moi, j'habite chez une copine, most of these films were based on plays, particularly plays which emerged from the often scattershot café-théâtre comic tradition that was such a key part of the post-1968 entertainment scene (and which launched the careers of actors like Josiane Balasko, Gérard Jugnot, Michel Blanc and Bernard Giraudeau, the latter pair featuring here). Leconte's film has little of the more outlandish humour that characterised his earliest film work - films like Les Bronzés - and he has also moved beyond the sketch-based nature of those previous films to construct a far more coherent narrative, albeit a fairly simple one that revolves around the friendship between two men and the put-upon woman who has to deal with the duo.

While in several of Leconte's other films (Tango or Tandem), women are a peripheral presence, here they occupy a more central place, but it's hardly an exalted status: Thérese Liotard's character is constantly picking up the pieces after her boyfriend (Giraudeau) and his staggeringly feckless friend (Blanc) screw up again and again, and at times you wish she'd just walk out and let the two of them get on with their lives. Blanc, though, is quite brilliant as Guy, almost completely oblivious to the chaos he brings in his wake, and yet so tremendously charming and cocksure that he's virtually impossible to dislike (Blanc mined a rich vein with characters like this, men so thoroughly blind to their own failings that there's a kind of beguiling quality to them in the end).

It's appealing, too, to find a Parisian film preoccupied with men and women who have to work each day, rather than people whose sources of income remain unclear: we frequently see the main characters at their jobs, while their precarious employment situations - an echo of the rough times that characterised the second half of the 1970s - are a constant refrain. While not attempting to take on the mantle of social realism, the film also provides the occasional glimpse into corners of the French capital not frequently seen - such as the (then relatively new, though far from loved) tower blocks of the 13th arrondissement.

Tandem

1987, France, directed by Patrice Leconte

Tandem marks a concerted attempt by Patrice Leconte to move away from his earlier, broadly comic films to a style more concerned with detailed character development and a greater degree of visual sophistication (the film announces this intention right from the opening, with a lovely tracking shot that progresses from the side of a busy road right onto the blacktop, as we watch a car approach). While Leconte had already moved beyond the sketch-based comedies that made his name, this film shows a greater degree of control over tone, working carefully in a bittersweet register that largely skirts sentimentality.

The film is focused on Michel Mortez (Jean Rochefort), a middle-aged radio presenter who travels the length of France with his down-to-earth quiz show, with his driver/engineer Rivetot (Gérard Jugnot) in tow to smooth out glitches both electronic and interpersonal. There's an essential ambiguity in Mortez's - and the film's - attitude to the provinces where he makes his living. Mortez is a master of surviving the incessant round of local dignitaries he encounters, but views his Parisian apartment as a kind of refuge from what he must endure while on the road. Similarly, the small towns we see throughout the film are generally presented as grim places where little happens (or, indeed, has ever happened: Mortez's patter is brilliantly modeled on real radio shows, highlighting each community's points of pride, while implying that such local fervour is misplaced).

Those ambiguities notwithstanding, the film is often a strikingly good examination of much of what separates France's capital from the provinces. It's also a balanced account, dissecting the foibles of the various petites bourgeoisies with glee while also finding warmth and human connections along the same narrow roads. Most of all, though, it's a wonderful account of the spiky friendship between Mortez and Rivetot, a relationship born first of professional necessity and slowly accreting layers of genuine affection. Rochefort is a master at this kind of thing, beautifully playing the aging pro who is capable of throwing off the worst circumstances to ensure the show goes on, but Jugnot is the revelation. At the time, he had virtually no substantial non-comic experience, and while later dramatic roles have shown that he has a Robin Williams-like instinct for the sentimental jugular, Leconte reins him in here and in the process helps to craft perhaps the most nuanced and appealing performance of the actor's varied career.

Ne le dis à personne

France, 2006, directed by Guillaume Canet

It's tempting to read Guillaume Canet's film as the revenge of the provinces on those who've constructed their settled adult existences in Paris - you can't, as it were, escape your origins even if you leave them far behind. The film begins with the disappearance and apparent death of a young woman, whose husband (a paediatrician, played by François Cluzet) is left to pick up the pieces of his life. However, events quickly throw that (only marginally successful) effort entirely off balance, in a manner that initially implies one of those vast international conspiracies so beloved of the movie world. It's bracing, then, to see the tentacles of the French country bourgeoisie, rather than a Jason Bourne-esque rogue agency, emerge from the shadows, and the revelations come thick and fast in the film's finale, with versions of the truth piling up on each other.

The film is based on an (American) crime novel by Harlan Coben, and like Claude Chabrol or Pedro Almodóvar's adaptations of the English writer Ruth Rendell, the raw materials are embroidered with layers of local material that result in an invigorating hybrid. Canet takes the adrenaline-filled aspects of the original book and grounds his film in a specific and carefully-constructed French reality, albeit a reality peopled with a tremendous cast of actors (in addition to Cluzet, the credits include Kristin Scott-Thomas, André Dussollier, Nathalie Baye, Jean Rochefort and Canet himself in a small role). The director moves things along swiftly - swiftly enough that you're unlikely to question some of the plot's larger holes too closely while enjoying the ride - and with an unexpected vein of black humour, particularly in the sequences where Cluzet's character makes use of the services of a member of the Parisian underworld (Gilles Lellouche, hijacking the middle of the movie), whose young son he has treated. Cluzet, an actor whose low-key style is easy to overlook - his co-stars in films like Chabrol's L'Enfer or Assayas's Fin août, début septembre always seem to grab more of the attention - makes an entirely convincing transformation into a man of action, in the mould of another doctor trying to solve the mystery of his wife's death, Dr Richard Kimble of The Fugitive.

Garde à vue

1981, France, directed by Claude Miller

Though Claude Miller's primary cinematic mentor was François Truffaut -- Miller even filmed one of Truffaut's scripts, for La Petite voleuse -- the director has clearly paid attention to the work of another nouvelle vague stalwart, Claude Chabrol, for he invests this potentially mechanical cat and mouse thriller with a chilling sense of dead-end provincial life. The film doesn't have quite the bite of Le Boucher or La Cérémonie, which showcase Chabrol's fine eye for the details of the French class structure, but it breathes some of the same air. Miller steadfastly refuses to sensationalise his material, preserving a spare tone when referring to the crimes that underpin the action.


The film is centered on a confrontation between a policeman (Lino Ventura, in one of his last really meaty roles) and a lawyer (Michel Serrault) who is the prime suspect in a series of murders. It's not entirely a face-off between the two leads, though: Guy Marchand has a nice part as Ventura's colleague, and Romy Schneider, in her penultimate film, makes a short but critical appearance as the lawyer's wife, giving her own version of the events that have led to her husband's extended interview.




Ventura and Serrault are well-matched, with Ventura playing the burly cop as a by-the-book kind of fellow though the actor was no stranger to rough-edged roles, some on the other side of the law entirely. Serrault, for his part, makes intelligent use of his own ambiguous sexuality, allowing the lawyer to appear alternately emasculated and potentially possessed of terrible demons (it's a much subtler performance than the one he gave in the Cage aux folles films around the same time). The film doesn't, ultimately, have quite the same sense of personal investment that Miller has brought to other projects, especially his wonderful first film, La Meilleure façon de marcher, but it's an effective guessing game with a stunning conclusion.

Charlie Wilson's War

2007, US, directed by Mike Nichols

The storytelling style of Charlie Wilson's War is of a piece with the man whose work it purports to depict, a Texan good old boy who happens to be a liberal Democrat rather than a Republican, and whose hedonistic ways seem tailor-made for a good Congressional scandal (it's hard to imagine him surviving long in the era of the Internet, and perhaps that's a shame). As such, it's a self-consciously rollicking good time which plays fast and loose with the facts, implying essentially that we owe Charlie Wilson for the end of the Cold War (and, less nobly, the arming of Afghanistan). The movie makes use of old mythologies of the west, specifically that of the straight-shooter out to set things right and save the oppressed - and as such radically simplifies the byways of Washington politics.

Some of those simplifications come with the territory of cinema, which often seems better suited to telling tales of individual action rather than collective decision-making. While Nichols and his scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, a man utterly captivated by the corridors of Washington power, make occasional attempts to paint in some of the background complexities, such as in a visit to Pakistan, the film's breezy pacing (not always a strength of Nichols's film work) and frequently comic tone - particularly in one extended sequence where Wilson attempts to fend off a breaking scandal while discussing the details of a CIA operation - generally leave little room for shades of grey. If it were all fictional, this probably wouldn't seem of great note, but the fact that such shenanigans take place against a backdrop of very real conflict is sometimes discomfiting. On the plus side, Tom Hanks, playing a less squeaky-clean character than usual, is surprisingly strong as Wilson, a political player if ever there was one, while Philip Seymour Hoffman is outstanding as his blunt CIA contact, always ready to cut to the chase.

Cleaner

2007, US, directed by Renny Harlin

Samuel L. Jackson seems like a nice guy, and he's certainly a hard-working actor, so it's a shame that he often ends up in forgettable rubbish like this (though that said, he's worked with director Renny Harlin several times now: it's not like he doesn't know what he's getting into). Harlin must be getting a little desperate himself, for his movie often comes across as an audition tape for an episode of CSI, with that show's discomfitingly aestheticized crime scenes - all artfully lit blood and brain matter, and not much humanity. There's the germ of a decent B-flick in here - the cast is generally strong, even if Harlin tends to use them a little too much to type, making the outcome more than guessable - and the attempt to balance Jackson's unusual work with his fraught home life often succeeds, but the film ultimately comes across as too convoluted, and too self-conscious, for its own good.

Ouaga Saga

2004, Burkina Faso/France, directed by Dani Kouyaté

Dani Kouyaté's third feature - after Keita! L'héritage du griot and Sia, le rêve du python - is one of the strongest recent movies I've seen from Africa, a film of tremendous energy and warmth that, sadly, hasn't received the distribution it deserves. While Kouyaté's previous films deal to a great degree with mythologies of the African past - and the ways in which they impact on the present - Ouaga Saga feels more determinedly modern, playing with mythologies of a very different kind, as it draws in images, in particular, from American popular cinema. In that, the film follows in an African filmmaking tradition set in motion by Djibril Diop Mambéty, a tradition likely to co-opt images and ideas from across different cultures - one of Mambéty's films is an adaptation of a Swiss play - and given sustained life by Cameroon's Jean-Pierre Bekolo.
Kouyaté's film makes reference to an extraordinary breadth of cinematic history, challenging some academic analyses of African cinema, which have a tendency to obscure the rich popular cinemas - American and Indian in particular - that also beguile African audiences and African filmmakers (I remember attending a question and answer with the Burkinabé director Fanta Regina Nacro, who mischievously upended a questioner by indicating that the main inspirations for her first short film were not from Africa at all, but rather from Chaplin and Hitchcock).

The first section of Ouaga Saga is reminiscent of sequences in Sembène's novel Les Bouts de bois de Dieu and Tierno Monénembo's later work Cinéma, both of which underline the tremendous popularity of cowboy movies; in those novels, the characters throw plot points and favourite titles back in forth in a kind of conversational combat. Here, we see the cinema audience in an early scene transfixed by every gunfight and horseback chase, while later one of the characters - known as Sheriff, and clearly the most obsessive of the bunch - gives an account of a film viewing that conflates parts of The Magnificent Seven with The Wild Bunch and Gunfight at the OK Corral, and many more besides (that the audience is depicted in front of Rio Bravo, a film with little of the kind of action we see imitated, is perhaps just a filmmaker's in-joke).
Kouyaté's reference points aren't limited, however, to westerns, or to the West - later in the film, the title of one of Claire Denis's films, S'en fout la mort, which deals with African immigrants in France, is painted on a minibus, while one of Ouaga Saga's characters dresses in clothes that recall the male protagonist from Mambéty's Touki Bouki. What's remarkable about all this, though, is the expert way in which Kouyaté weaves the cinematic references into the fabric of the film so that they enhance rather than distract from his story: his film breathes deeply of the air of Ouagadougou, insisting on the idea that there's hope to be found in those streets too rather than simply in far away cinematic worlds.

Despite the global points of reference, explicitly celebrated in the film's conclusion, Kouyaté never loses sight of the specificity of his setting, and the economic realities - and institutional challenges - his characters are likely to face, but he refuses to envelope them in miserabilism, adopting instead the kind of upbeat, celebratory tone of the Congolese success La Vie est belle - notably one of the most successful of African films in Africa. If Kouyaté were able to get his film distributed - in Africa and elsewhere - he might find himself with a similar hit on his hands.

Kung Fu Panda

2008, US, directed by Mark Osborne and John Stevenson

Kung Fu Panda opens on a high note, with a stunning dream sequence that's animated in bold colours and shapes by James Baxter, who very consciously channels the story's Chinese setting. After such an introduction, it's hard not to feel a little let down by the return of the film's regular world, which is animated in a much more conventional (digital) style; it has the beautifully rendered down-to-the-last-hair characters familiar from modern computer work, and which sometimes seem more interesting as an animator's challenge than as an artistic achievement that comes fully to life.

That's not to deny, however, the tremendous energy of the enterprise: even if the story is schematic and predictable, the film has great verve, with a brisk running time and several cleverly constructed set pieces (there's a prison escape that's genuinely thrilling, filled with foreboding). As the voice of Po, the titular Panda, Jack Black is excellent, wittily narrating that opening dream sequence - filled with Po's wildest hopes - and capturing the character's almost inexhaustible optimism in the face of what seem overwhelming odds. While there's quite an array of voice talent elsewhere in the film, it mostly seems under-utilised: only Dustin Hoffman as the kung fu master really develops a distinctive vocal identity, world-weary yet willing to take one last spin with a new pupil.

Bad Company

2002, US, directed by Joel Schumacher

Ah, the things you'll watch late at night on a hotel TV in a strange city. Like many a sleek Hollywood vehicle, Bad Company passes the time effectively enough, but as soon as it's done, it's banished from the brain. Perhaps that's no bad thing, for the film makes terribly light of nasty nuclear-bomb stealing terrorists and messy bloodbaths, as it tries unsuccessfully to graft Chris Rock's rapid-fire patter to an often violent thriller. The film presents itself as a face-off between Rock and straight-laced Anthony Hopkins, a CIA veteran who barely cracks a smile, but even this confrontation is a damp squib since the pair have relatively few scenes together; the film's (absurd) premise results in Hopkins spending what seems to be much more time watching Rock on surveillance cameras rather than actually acting with him. In any case, while Rock brings some energy to proceedings - making the absolute most of his lines - his co-star mostly looks as though he's sleepwalking his way to a paycheck on this occasion. As the film progresses, the brutality seems ever more jarring when juxtaposed with Rock's routine, while the coda is incongruous, with no justification in what precedes it.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

2008, US, directed by Andrew Adamson

The second of the Narnia films pre-supposes a pretty solid grasp of the back story inherited from the first film, despite subsequently heading off in new directions and introducing additional characters, and I confess that - perhaps because of my jetlag - the early going was something of a challenge as I tried to remember the series's mythology on the fly. The filmmakers clearly assumed that this might be an issue, since there are several expository scenes that regurgitate the key elements for our benefit, rendering the first half hour or so a little flat-footed. 

The obvious point of comparison is with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, which spent far less time filling in these gaps, though he had the benefit of a clearer narrative quest, whereas the Narnia saga takes place in distinctly different phases that no amount of scriptwriting ellipsis can avoid. Jackson's films rear their heads during the action sequences, too, since Andrew Adamson has clearly taken a page or two from his predecessor's book, though in truth recent CGI-rendered battle sequences are all becoming rather similar in their use of sweeping overhead shots of digitally clashing armies.

As you might expect from a filmmaker who cut his teeth on the Shrek franchise, Adamson sometimes seems more at home when dealing with the animated animal characters than with the human action. Individuals like the badger Trufflehunter and, especially, Reepicheep, a rapier-wielding mouse amusingly voiced by Eddie Izzard, are nicely rendered, and are also well-integrated with the "real" action. Reepicheep provides essential comic relief against a backdrop that is sometimes surprisingly grim, with the young humans involved in battles and political intrigues that push them to decisions for which they're not yet ready.

The Incredible Hulk

2008, US, directed by Louis Leterrier
If nothing else, the 2007 incarnation of The Incredible Hulk could serve as something of a master-class in the problems of big-budget Hollywood superhero cinema. It starts out brightly enough, with a real and, for American cinema, unusual sense of place in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; director Louis Leterrier makes excellent use of the cramped, sweaty locales in an extended chase sequence (though one can't help thinking that in reality escape would be a whole lot easier in a location that makes the casbah seem like a well-ordered place), while it seems like an authentically teeming place in which to lose oneself in a more metaphysical sense. The film also takes the time to sketch in at least some of the human dilemmas that come from Bruce Banner's unusual situation, while Edward Norton deftly conveys Banner's conflicted feelings over what he himself has unleashed.

However, once the Hulk shenanigans kick in, the film quickly becomes a much more conventional beast. The film is centered around three major confrontations, each bigger than the last, so that it becomes a little like watching an extended boxing bout where the weight class keeps increasing, and the lumbering heavy- and super-heavyweights bludgeon each other repeatedly. Despite all of the manoeuvring, there's inevitably no real sense of suspense - why kid yourself about the outcome? - which in retrospect makes me think that perhaps the abbreviated climactic face-off of Hancock has a certain intelligence, since at least that way we spend more of the film's running time dealing with recognisable human beings rather than CGI effects, however expensive. At times, Leterrier makes reference to monster movies of an earlier generation - a rare quiet scene in the Great Smoky Mountains evokes both King Kong and the memorable, if bowdlerised, scene from the 1931 Frankenstein when the monster picks flowers with a little girl - which only serves to re-emphasise that the contemporary tendency to fling special effects dollars at the screen guarantees little more than a big opening weekend.