Reviews

To make a biographical study of your own mother is a challenge to any documentary maker; it is even more formidable when your mother is a famous artist. Yet Nick Willing's portrait of Paula Rego succeeds beautifully as this film recounts the unlikely story of Rego's career. From her bourgeois background in Salazar's Portugal, she arrives at the Slade School of Art in the randy 1950s, where her future husband Victor Willing greets her at a party with the command, "Take down your knickers." A tumultuous marriage to Willing and three children never impede Rego's exploration of her own imagery, memories and fantasies. A life split between Portugal and London culminates in critical acclaim for Rego's paintings, patronage from Charles Saatchi and stellar price tags attached to her work by the Marlborough Gallery. Rego's compelling imagery and her unflinching honesty make the film a visual and psychological treasure trove.

Intoxicating meditation on mortality by legendary axe man Wilko Johnson. Served a death sentence by pancreatic cancer, Johnson vows to live in the moment. And Temple's overflowing visual cocktail serves up Bunuel, Tarkovsky, Cocteau and Michael Powell as fellow travellers on this death trip, with literary contributions from Shakespeare and Thomas Traherne ("And all the world was mine and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it"), while the terminally articulate Wilko happily quotes Blake and Milton straight to camera. It's a moving account of a man looking at death without an ounce of self-pity or false piety, while the verbal and visual richness provide a bouncy metaphysical trampoline of ideas. Despite the cinematic leitmotiv, from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, of Death playing chess with Wilko on the shore of Canvey Island, it's Johnson's rock'n'roll stoicism, and his love of life that live on in the viewer's mind, and make you feel you've had a glimpse of both death and resurrection, pulsating with R&B urgency.

This marvellously subtle profile of photographer Jane Bown conveys how she combined a self-effacing presence (the opposite of what you expect a Fleet Street photographer to be) with what Bown describes as "a sharp pair of elbows". The film allows you to enjoy Bown's greatest images in silence while situating her in her social context: a now-vanished world of print journalism, where the editors and owners were from the officer class, and the journalists and photographers were often regarded as NCOs or lower ranks. There is also a sub-text about a talented woman, never quite sure who her parents were and passed around "like a parcel", who adopted The Observer as her family. And the film conveys poignantly how encroaching Alzheimer's can render childhood memories more vivid than this weeks's events. Bown looks back on sixty years of photo-journalism and celebrities - from The Beatles to Sam Beckett to the Queen - still looking for the light.

Energetic and concise account of six young poets emerging from the Leeds Young Authors project, and heading for Washington DC to compete with the best and brightest young Americans in the prestigious poetry slam contest. Beginning with a brilliant slow motion montage of everyday Leeds set against the verse of "I come from" by Joseph Buckley, the film is lyrical and engagingly positive. The youngsters are all likable, articulate and capable of impressive focus when transforming their emotions into verse. The rhythms of their poetry have more in common with rap than Shelley or T S Eliot, raising the question of how their poetic talent will mature. A tantalising and oddly inspiring glimpse of what poetry can mean to teenagers.

"Sound It Out" is an observational documentary film about life in a small record shop in Stockton-on-Tees. But that's a bit like saying that "Anna Karenina" is a book about a bored Russian housewife. Within these small premises, strong emotions surge and identities are defined and re-negotiated. A wryly affectionate look at the staff and customers evokes a sense of how music is the life-blood for a lot of people stuck in boring jobs in boring places. Naturally, the film has a great soundtrack and there are a few startling moments. A debate about what genre Pisschrist belongs to. An exploration of the technology of a coffin made out of vinyl. But what comes across is a sense of community and human contact, before the brave new world of digital downloads turned music into solitary pleasure. These is some discussion of why 99% of the shop's customers are male, as the female director delivers a compassionate account of blokes' culture.

Films set in Nazi extermination camps are always confronted by certain production problems. Will the Jews look thin enough? Will they look like they're eaten by lice and other vermin? How to convey their interaction in such a wretched and desperate place? A place that most of us cannot begin to imagine. This drama succeeded (against my expectations) because it doesn't feel naturalistic. Of course Anthony Sher and Stellan Skarsgård and the others look like well-fed actors. But this does not detract from their performances because the emphasis in this film is on the arguments. How can anyone affirm a belief in God in Auschwitz? It's a good question, and many approaches and interpretations of God's actions are offered. The production could be criticised for feeling a little like a stage play. A bit wordy with many monologues. But the acting, the direction, and, above all, the writing are first class.

This film amazed me. One reason it worked for me is because it's drenched in Dylan's music. I wasn't expecting that. Most of the time, it's Dylan's voice when 'Blind Willie McTell' or 'Moonshiner' or 'Idiot Wind' (the slow, acoustic version) suddenly erupt on the sound track to huge emotional effect. Other times instrumental teasers from 'Man In The Long Black Coat' or 'Nashville Skyline Rag' are planted in the mix like fragments of dreams you can't quite focus on. All the pre-release publicity had revolved around Cate Blanchett is girl Dylan! and Marcus Carl Franklin is African American boy Dylan! but the film itself unfolds like a kaleidoscopic dream where the pieces never quite meet. A bit like me and all my friends scratching our heads in the 1960s and 1970s and earnestly wondering how John Wesley Harding related to Blonde On Blonde, or how Slow Train Coming related to Blood On the Tracks. Well they don't. In "Chronicles, Volume One" Dylan dwells on the moment when he stumbled across Rimbaud's declaration "Je est un autre" which translates into English: "I is someone else". Dylan writes: "When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wish someone would have mentioned it to me earlier." That insight has sustained Dylan thru all his multiple personalities, finger pointing folkie, rock & roll rebel, Nashville good ol' boy (Oh me oh my, love that country pie), tormented lover, Born Again Christian. When he performed on his first album, aged 21, he was trying to summon up the voice of a 60 year old blues singer.

That insight sustains this movie because Haynes and his team have been able to match a visual style to each image of Dylan's life. From the burnt out black & white textures of 'Fellini's 8½' which seem to lock Blanchett inside an amphetamine-fuelled bubble of superstardom to the mellow colour photography of 'McCabe and Mrs Miller' which frames Richard Gere. I was surprised by the long Gere sequence. He seems like a recluse in the backwoods but all these strange characters and circus animals roll past, capturing the mood of those bizarre Basement Tape songs: 'Please Mrs. Henry', 'Open The Door Homer'. It seems to be set in a realm that Greil Marcus called 'The Old, Weird America'. And there's a visionary flash where Gere peers into the landscape and has a glimpse of Vietnam. It made perfect sense to me. There's a moment in the Sing Out! interview with Dylan in 1968 (when Dylan was secluded in Woodstock) when Happy Traum asked Dylan "Why don't you speak out against the Vietnam War?" and Dylan replied: "That really doesn't exist. It's not for or against the war. I'm speaking of a certain painter and he's all for the war. He's ready to go over there himself. And I can comprehend him. People just have their own views. Anyway, how do you know that I'm not, as you say, for the war?" When Charlotte Gainsbourg (who seems to be playing a composite of Suze Rotolo and Sara Dylan) suddenly drops the divorce settlement into Heath Ledger's lap, the film cuts to newsreel shots of Henry Kissinger and Lo Duc Tho signing the Vietnam ceasefire accords in Paris. This film isn't a biopic, this film works in a free association surreal way, like Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, or Highlands works. It's true to the spirit of one of Dylan's greatest songs, a song which goes places where no words can go, a song which gives this film its title: "Now, when I keep believing I was born to love her /But she knows that the kingdom waits so high above her /And I run but I race, but it's not too fast or slow /But I don't deceive her. I'm not there, I'm gone...

Digital "motion capture" Beowulf looks more like a computer game than a movie. Anthony Hopkins's Welsh voice evidently proved infectious for the rest of the cast who turn the Anglo-Saxon epic, set in 7th century Denmark, into a succession of sub Under Milk Wood accents. Ray Winstone fights various battles stark naked, his naughty bits strategically masked in many imaginative ways. Angelina Jolie plays Grendel's Mother as a nude she-devil in high heels. Her phallic tail fails to frighten the audience. Her lack of nipples is slightly more disturbing. Laughable script is perfectly matched by crashing over the top score & power ballad. This makes Jackson's Lord of the Rings look like King Lear.