Reviews

Giovanni Dé Medici was the ultimate Renaissance "condottiere" (military commander), Captain of the Pope's Army, dubbed "Giovanni of the Black Bands". He was truly fierce, ruthless and proud, but relentlessly audacious on the battlefield. Yet he was also aristocratic, charming, articulate, witty, urbane, and a libertine off the battlefield. Furthermore, as a soldier he was the antithesis of a Machiavellian, and rejected the idea that war was a politician's game. Giovanni Dè Medici may have been cruel, but no one could accuse him of cowardice. In the end, dying from a gun-shot wound at the youthful age of 28, he was also a victim of a very different, new and subtler form of warfare. Olmi's amazing, award-winning movie is set in the last few weeks of the life of Giovanni "dalle Bande Nere", played very convincingly by Bulgarian actor Hristo Jivkov. The movie also features other notable historic figures of the Renaissance, such as Pietro Aretino (the ultimate Renaissance man of letters) and the German army veteran Georg von Frundsberg. As one critic put it, it isn't so much a historic movie, as an "intimate confession from the most visceral folds of history".

The story starts from the end, with Giovanni Dè Medici's funeral. It then goes back to the cause of his death, dating a few months earlier, in the autumn of 1526, when the Imperial Army of German Lutheran soldiers led by von Frundsberg are travelling through Italy from the North. The narrating Pietro Aretino informs us that these "noble and beautiful people" are on their way to invade and punish Rome, following an act of betrayal on the Pope's part. Aware that the Germans are at a military disadvantage, Dè Medici uses quick, sudden ambushes with his fire-armed cavalry. But as an act of ultimate individualism, the Marquis of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga welcomes the Lutheran troops through his fortified gates at Curtatone. He thus allows them easy access to the papal states in order to save his own territory. Meanwhile, just a few hours later, Federico Gonzaga denies access to Giovanni and his Papal troops! This beautifully illustrates the way that the notion of national solidarity simply did not exist among different Italian Duchies and kingdoms.

To add insult to injury, Alfonso D'Este, Duke of Ferrara gives some sophisticated pieces of artillery to the Germans in exchange for von Frundsberg's daughter's hand. Yet Giovanni still manages to catch up with the Germans, despite the fact they are now no longer militarily at such a disadvantage. Meanwhile, the young Medici Captain keeps asking the Pope for additional troops through his wife Maria, who mediates. But all that the Pontiff is willing to do is send the leader of his army his blessings!

Familiar Olmi themes surface. While Olmi's magnificent movie Il Posto (1961) was about human beings as insignificant clogs in the faceless machine of a typical corporation, Il Mestiere is about man's vain individual efforts within the "faceless machine" that is history and fate. But even while being aware that he will probably be defeated, Giovanni's determination to stop the Germans survives. Ultimately, his philosophy is the opposite of a Machiavellian one: actions, even when completely useless, are still important for what they stand for. When Giovanni is shot in the leg in a final skirmish with the Germans, he is taken to the D'Este Palace in Ferrara to have his leg dressed and then later amputated. The final scenes of Giovanni lying in his sick chamber are cinematically flawless, spectacular and subtle. For the first time in his life, he is truly helpless, often in a fevered state, languishing in those magnificently frescoed interiors painted in the style of High Renaissance art. The concept of human beings always dying alone - even when they die young and are supervised by servants and medics - is poignantly conveyed.

Rather than being chockful of the spectacular battle scenes we have come to expect from lavish historical movies, Il Mestiere is mostly a meditative and quiet war movie. Olmi's flick is outstanding at bringing across the nitty gritty of life as a Renaissance soldier. Hypnotic images of ghostly soldiers on horseback and on foot, trudging through the mist, or tending to their weapons daily, also gives a tangible sense of what happened "in between" those battle, which took up maybe only about 10% of a soldier's time. The grim, damp, relentlessly cold weather, the extreme discomfort of constantly wearing an armour and the way that battles were often sudden, fast and deadly is perfectly conveyed by Olmi's movie. Which isn't to say there are no beautifully filmed, and spectacular battle scenes in Il Mestiere…

Other scenes, such as those of Renaissance aristocrats at social gatherings and at court, really create the impression you're watching an animated Italian Renaissance painting. The language spoken by the characters in this movie is achingly beautiful, but none of the lines are delivered in a contrived or actory manner - you just simply get the impression that Renaissance aristocrats spoke in such a sublimely articulate and poetic way. Giovanni's wife Maria (not Caterina Dè Medici, as listed by the IMDb!) is shown all the way through the movie reading and replying to her spouse's letters. They contain things as mundane as his detailed laundry lists, alongside crucial requests for political mediation. These were requests that every high-born Renaissance wife should have had the intelligence and sophisticated diplomatic ability to carry out. Meanwhile, Giovanni's mistress, a married Mantuan lady, is sympathetically shown living her clandestine purgatory. Last but not least, the movie has a lovely, evocative score.

The film's final quote regarding fire-arms could be lifted exactly as it is and be applied to our very own "weapons of mass destruction" - a bitter, disheartening paradox. I don't think this is a movie for everyone, but those who believe they might appreciate it are really in for a treat.

... this one's very far from being one of them, unfortunately.

Populist detractors of French cinema, knee-jerk Europhobes, phobics of subtitles, blinkered viewers who divide all cinema between Hollywood vs. "pretentious" art-house: if you really want to pick on a French movie that you think embodies all the clichés of Gallic cinema you so love to hate, take your vitriol out on this one! Leave masters like Rivette, Truffaut, Resnais, Rohmer, Denis, Varda and other, much better Leconte movies alone!

La Fille Sur le Pont's main players: Gabor, a middle-aged man played by the ubiquitous, but always pleasant to watch Daniel Auteuil and Adèle, a lithely beautiful, gazelle-like young woman who has the face of Vanessa Paradis. Predictably, Adèle is emotionally messed up, fragile and yet sexually promiscuous. The two meet when the charismatic grouch, Gabor, intercepts the girl on a Parisian bridge and prevents her from committing suicide (wasn't that also how Emmanuelle Béart's character and her boyfriend met in La Belle Noiseuse?). Gabor is an itinerant knife-thrower, by the way - sans toit ni loi. Naturally enough, since we are talking about a girl who has nothing to lose, Adèle becomes his target. Despite the rocky beginning, in which the two spend much time squabbling, there is naturally a strong attraction between them (in fact, as clichéd as all this may sound, the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which Gabor and Adèle's relationship is first established, were my favourites). We even get to meet a previous living target of Gabor's, a woman now performing in another circus number, at the venue where Adèle is about to perform for the first time. We see that this "ex" of Gabor's is also fragile and messed up, besides still preserving a clingy dependence on the knife-thrower. So, it seems that what Gabor has to offer women is somehow life-affirming, and better than sex. And in fact, watching Gabor and Adèle at work, you cannot help thinking: who needs these two to literally have sex when all that knife-throwing is more suggestive of penetrative sex than a steamy Tinto Brass scene of your choice?

In retrospect, I think this movie's main merit was to make me discover how charming and beautiful Johnny Depp's squeeze is - I had no idea. Sadly, Vanessa Paradis could not save the little movie from being just a nice-looking, superficially funny, substanceless piece of fluff, furthermore a hit-parade of French movie clichés that I thought would be beneath Leconte. Beineix's Betty Blue, Senta from Chabrol's silly La Demoiselle d'Honneur, Romane Bohringer's character in L'Appartement, even Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules et Jim, and countless others: why are so many women in a certain category of French cinema invariably characterized as fragile and irrational, unsettlingly unpredictable and self-destructive, even suicidal? Yet, they are also intoxicatingly seductive and sexually voracious, fickle and capricious. They're the ultimate misogynist's sex fantasy, a woman that frightens (the vagina dentata myth being a symbolic exasperation of this fear of femininity) and enslaves the male (because sexual attraction is biologically inescapable). Paradis's Adèle was in fact a rather tone-down, sweetened version of one such stock female creation - in fact, perhaps a part of Leconte was distancing himself from this prototype and playing with it, though the other part of him was embracing it. But the fact that in the end Leconte shows us Gabor's fragility and Adèle's nascent strength goes some way towards showing that the director was also partly turning the stereotype on its head. The "Betty Blue" is what I call the female French movie prototype of the fragile-sexy-doomed heroine, which DOES certainly also exist in other cinematic traditions, though I seem to observe it more often in French movies. It's a fictional embodiment of womanhood that can be traced right back to the doomed "femme fatales" of the 19th century French artistic movement The Symbolists.

The scenes of La Fille Sur le Pont that were set in Italy, Greece and Turkey were rather dubious in their astonishingly twee and simplistic stereotyping as well. They were the equivalent of accompanying any scene set in Paris with sappy accordion music and a view of the Eiffel tower in the background. Was Leconte trying to be "Fellinian" in that raffle scene in San Remo? Oh, puhleez! Give me Tandem, Ridicule or L'Homme du Train any day over this candy floss, Patrice.

So, I finally saw the third installment in the famous alienation trilogy (the other two movies in it being La Notte and L'Avventura). All three star Monica Vitti, Antonioni's muse of the time and girlfriend of four years' standing. Typically, L'Eclisse starts with a break-up, that of bourgeoise Vittoria (played by Vitti) and her equally bourgeois fiancé Riccardo (Rabal). The movie also ends with a break-up of sorts… or rather, the conclusion of a fledgling affair that fizzles out before it even has a chance to live, however briefly. In fact, this so-called "love affair" would have probably been but the external shell of an emotional union between a man and a woman. The rightly famous final sequence of the movie is indeed memorable - I cannot fault Martin Scorsese for gushing about it as he does in his homage to classic Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy. I can't imagine any film student not being advised to watch the last 10 minutes of L'Eclisse by a wise course teacher.

Alain Delon could not have been better cast as a shallow and materialistic, young proto-yuppie prat. Though she was only on screen for a brief while, I admired the performance of Lilla Brignone as Vittoria's Stock Exchange-obsessed mother, completely oblivious to her daughter's emotional states throughout.

Monica Vitti, with a wardrobe as varied and flattering as Maggie Cheung's in In the Mood for Love, looks beautiful but is possibly the weakest, or most predictable of the movie's performers. It's often not in Antonioni movies that I've enjoyed her performances the most. In my view Vitti is mostly in her element as a comedienne, more specifically in the tragi-comedies known as commedie all'italiana. This is the genre that she is mostly associated with in Italy anyway, often with Alberto Sordi as a co-star. Antonioni seems to get slightly affected, over-stylised performances out of Vitti. I never get a sense that the actress fully enjoyed working for her then-boyfriend. I suppose, though, that Monica's natural comic timing and slightly goofy manner could never have been put to good use in something called "the alienation trilogy"! The nocturnal sequences of Vitti and her neighbour visiting their strange Anglophone acquaintance, whose home looks like a caricature African colonialist's haven, added some subtly dark humour and a surreal touch to the central part of the movie. When the three women go looking for the African-born expat's escaped poodle, I smilingly realised how many different forms a comedy moment can take.

Last but not least, as a Roman born in 1972, I was fascinated to see the smart but cold suburb known as EUR (originally founded by Mussolini) as it looked in the early 60s, when whole sections of it were still only half-built and semi-deserted. It was indeed an architectural embodiment of alienation! If Antonioni had been an architect, he probably would have been a brilliant one, as he completely understands what effect urban and architectural spaces have on human states of mind.

As interesting as it was, as undeniably striving for objectiveness, original in its approach and well-made both visually and in terms of production values, I found Paradise Now a little weak narratively, especially in the central part. But when a filmmaker decides to tackle a theme of this calibre, a subject as thorny and well... explosive, not to mention one involving such daunting amounts of moral responsibility towards humankind, you cannot help but feel in awe of their courage a priori.

The attempt to shed light on the unfathomable – how a healthy, "average" young person could ever wish to become a suicide bomber – is quite successfully carried out, and is probably one of the movie's strength. It was the main reason I watched it and possibly Paradise Now's main purpose successfully nailed – and that really is no mean feat. On the other hand, I was confused by the shifts in focus between personal drama (Said's resentment against his father and desire to be different from him) and socio-religious-historical content at the beginning of the movie's second half. I wasn't sure what the director was trying to do... It's impossible to deny, though, that the tension never lets up during the whole time that Khaled and Said have the explosives strapped to their abdomens, much to the filmmakers' credit.

Even more shocking, though, are the accusations levelled against the movie by ordinary viewers – that it's allegedly an apology of suicide bombers, and pro-kamikaze propaganda. Not all these accusations come from Israeli viewers - though most are (while at the same time, many Jewish reviewers loved the movie). One Israeli mother I read from who lost her son in an exploding bus in Tel Aviv claims that humanising the suicide bombers is the equivalent of a direct insult to the memory of her murdered child. Though you cannot argue with the grief of a mother who loses her child in such a horrendous way, you cannot help asking yourself what such people expect: that suicide bombers be portrayed as two-dimensional monsters complete with horns, forked tongues and slitty snake pupils in their eyes? This doesn't bode well for the future of the peace process in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Hany Abu-Assad has tried to give his own personal, brave, heartfelt contribution, and this viewer looks forward to more cinematic efforts from this talent.

A deserving Oscar winner if ever there was one, though I was never one to pay special attention to the Oscars, I was almost shocked by how perfect this debut movie by a 34-year-old director very nearly was. Set in East Berlin in the mid-80s, some five years before the infamous Wall crumbled, it follows the STASI as they plot to find incriminating evidence against playwright Georg Dreyman, who'd been the regime's darling until a ruthless minister frivolously develops a lecherous desire to possess his girlfriend, renowned stage actress Christa-Maria Sieland. Though both Sebastian Koch (last seen by me as the Nazi Captain Müntze in Verhoeven's Black Book) and Martina Gedeck are excellent as the central couple trapped within the STASI's web of eavesdropping and paranoia tactics, the real hero and star of the movie is without a doubt Ulrich Mühe. I had last seen in Michael Haneke's Funny Games, where he played Georg, the unfortunate husband and dad who comes to a sticky end. In The Lives of Others, Mühe memorably fills the shoes of the STASI agent Gerd Wiesler who listened to Dreyman's daily life through the bugs in his flat. Balding, physically non-descript Wiesler conveys more with one subtle shift of an eyeball than the whole stellar cast of an Oliver Stone movie. This actor is so charismatic, he blows even the undeniably talented and handsome Sebastian Koch clear off the screen. In this movie not only are things seldom what they seem, but humanity and redemption can be found in the most ridiculously unexpected places.

Shocking, humane and moving yet never predictable, heavy-handed or melodramatic, the movie is also blessed by a solid script, a very plausible storyline free of plot holes and an immaculately researched scenario. I've read that both the movie's director and Mühe remember their experiences living in the Communist regime. Though the former was still very young, he claims to clearly remember the climate of paranoia he grew up in, while Mühe later discovered that he had been spied upon by his own wife! Oddly enough, one accusation levelled against the movie by some IMDb reviewers is that of misogyny. Being normally very sensitive to a discriminatory portrayal of women, I was very baffled by this. I've come to the conclusion that some touchy viewers expect their movie characters – especially those of women or ethnic minorities – to be paragons of virtue or role models, rather than simply human beings with flaws and plausible weaknesses. In my view Christa-Maria's main sin was not to be "weak", as some other viewers here claim, but simply "human". If anything, the movie also provided a damning portrait of the brutality of the regime against women.

Perhaps my only, very minor complaint with the movie was its ending, which felt a tad rushed - though it was a beautiful ending all the same - uplifting and sad, poetic and yet also grounded in the starkest reality.

The first 15 minutes of this movie were very exciting for me: visually, thematically, aesthetically, philosophically and just on a purely cinematic level, it sent shivers down my spine. As the movie unfolds, it becomes more challenging and less accessible, also more difficult to take in on a purely aesthetic and emotional level, though it finally has the power to truly engage you intellectually, as a complex character study in a novel would. It is an emotional movie despite being so very unemotionally executed – a Resnais trademark, from what I can see.

It's a funny coincidence that in the last six months or so, I've seen quite a few movies featuring women having their heads shaved just after WWII as punishment for having had affairs with German soldiers. This was the most challenging of the batch, bringing home the full sense of the "horror of oblivion", as the "Lui" character comments on "Elle"'s condition at one point. Hiroshima Mon Amour also reminded me of Antonioni a little, rather than the other Resnais movie that I'd seen which was also about memory: Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour. Hiroshima evokes Antonioni in a paradoxical way, since it was thematically the opposite of the Italians' movies. In Hiroshima, a man and a woman were doing the opposite of being alienated from one another, though also in a desolate emotional land/cityscape that could be superficially called Antonionian.

Regarding people calling it Nouvelle Vague, in my view this is a one of a kind movie and no more New Wave than Notti di Cabiria is Neo-realist. It is also quite obviously a literary movie – halfway between cinema and literature in nature, and very unique for it. By the way, did Emmanuelle Riva ("Elle") remind anyone even vaguely of Irène Jacob as Veronique in Kieslowski's movie?

Intentionally imitating the movie aesthetics of something like Roberto Rossellini's Germania Anno Zero during the opening credits and then looking like a noir right afterwards, Soderbergh's latest starts off seeming like it might turn out to be a gem. It keeps that illusion in the viewer for about the first 15-20 minutes, and instead gets progressively more unengaging and unremarkable with every passing minute, finally leaving you virtually indifferent by the end. Convoluted plots must work extra hard to avoid gaping plot holes – this one didn't work hard enough. The Good German hides behind an aura of mystery which quickly crumbles away as one unlikely twist starts following hot at the heels of another one, eventually testing the viewer's willingness to suspend his disbelief.

***SPOILER***: Personally, my biggest disappointment was realising that the entire movie rested upon a very unlikely premise: that of an SS Officer having been married to a Jewish woman. This is simply historically impossible, as generous as one may want to be towards the movie. ***END OF SPOILER*** The Good German is apparently based upon true events, but the character played by Cate Blanchett was actually a combination of two real women: a Jewish one and an Aryan, an SS Officer's wife. In order to heighten the drama, the movie's writers made the latter become a Jewish SS Officer's wife. A melodramatic, historically unlikely gimmick for a central premise is not what good, solidly scripted movies are usually based upon. Meanwhile, George Clooney tried his best in his undefinable role, but at least Tobey Maguire made a very convincing prat. Perhaps the most remarkable player in this was accidentally Ravil Isyanov in his supporting role as the Russian General Sikorsky, who also has some of the best lines.

Have American filmmakers ever been as experimental as Deren since this short was made? If so, my guess is not very often - not as far as I know anyway. It really is astonishing to think that this was made in 1943, in the midst of WWII! A fellow IMDb user had first recommended I watch this when a while back, I had started a thread about movies that should be taken in non-rationally on one of the boards. I can now completely see why he urged me to watch this: whatever side of the brain it is that we use when our rationality is switched off, is the side one must use to make the most of Deren's film. Symbols aplenty - symbols I wasn't especially trying to interpret, but just trying to take in with everything else that was going on - Maya Deren's own very striking, very beautiful physical presence, a Death-like figure bearing a fake flower (but they're not the only one to carry it during the course of the movie), a key popping out of Deren's mouth which reminded me of the cover of Kate Bush's The Dreaming album, shadows, light, repetitions, interiors, exteriors... just soak it in, and don't try and explain it.

Joseph Fiennes has always looked a bit like a spider monkey in my view, but in this movie he was better than in any role I'd seen him in before, doing what I thought was a competent job with the South African accent as well. Finally exempted from having to play the sex symbol, Ralph's little brother could finally concentrate on actually challenging himself with a complex role. In a movie based upon a true story, Fiennes plays James Gregory, a racist South African guard whose certainties are nonetheless shaken to the core over the span of twenty years – the time he spends as Nelson Mandela's prison warden. The movie's merit lies largely in showing us the daily application of a major historic abomination – Apartheid – through the lives of "little people", those ordinary men and women of South Africa thanks to whom it was perpetuated. These are "ordinary" white people who are neither heroes nor villains, but obtuse conformists. The violence of the system on its white citizens was considerably more hidden than on its black ones, but it was violence all the same: it was the obligation to remain as ignorant as possible. The alternative was to be persecuted by the status quo.

Dennis Haysbert as Nelson Mandela was suitably stoic and charismatic, a positive counterpart to Forest Whitaker's villainous Idi Amin from The Last King of Scotland. Diane Kruger was definitely better cast as an "ordinarily" racist, suburban hairdresser wife and mother of two, than as Helen of Troy. By the end of Goodbye, Bafana, I was also somewhat moved. My major complaint with the movie was that like the vast majority of African-set, historical movies made recently, Nelson Mandela and all the black African characters were largely viewed from the outside, through the whiteys' eyes. These movies' directors all need to sit in a darkened room and watch The Battle of Algiers together sometime

Set in England, France and Spain between the 20s and the end of WWII, it doesn't really evoke any of the places it's set in very convincingly - only rather superficially. It wasn't a bad film – nowhere near as lame as something like Charlotte Gray, for instance. It wasn't an especially good movie, either, though. Nothing about Head in the Clouds is ever dreadful, but it's also all rather skin deep, with none of the characters' plights ever really moving the viewer. When Charlize Theron's poor little rich girl Gilda had to choose between the Gestapo Officer and the nice, idealistic Irish boy fighting for the partisans in the Spanish Civil War, I was willing her to go for the sexy German. Oops – probably not what its makers had in mind. It didn't really matter, though - to me she was just having to choose between a blonde haired guy and a dark haired guy, and not much else. Finally, Penelope Cruz, who'd borrowed her limp from Audrey Tautou's character in Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles, looked like she was waiting for Almodovar to pop by any minute and whisk her off to a far more interesting film set. At least my boyfriend got to see Theron's boobies, though, so he was happy about that.

Even before the final credits rolled, I strongly suspected this movie would end up on my Top 20; in fact, perhaps even my Top 10. A teenage boy, his hearing impaired from having just been at the site of a bombing, and a young woman clutching at him, the two of them stumbling and sludging through a slimy, smelly bog. A stork in the woods as it rains. A cluster of dolls piled up on the floor with flies buzzing all over the room. You don't need vast, elaborately choreographed battle scenes to bring home the message of the senselessness and pain of war. Reading viewers' comments on the movie, it seems that most found the second half – which admittedly contained some of the most powerful massacre scenes ever filmed – as the most "satisfying". A few other viewers seem to imply the movie doesn't really get going until the second half. For me, it was the first half that got under my skin the most, for its cinematic originality, poetry and symbolic power. War is experienced by civilians as well as by soldiers: this may seem like an obvious statement, but it's only after watching Come and See that you realise how few war movies are truly about the suffering of the ordinary man and woman, defenseless child and frail senior citizen. Also, never before had I seen the plight of raped women in war so powerfully conveyed, and all this without the movie ever being voyeuristic or graphic. In cinema, rape is often portrayed as something that looks like rough sex. It isn't always quite clear why women get so upset over it. In Come and See, rape is shown as nothing but pure, unadulterated, hate-fuelled violence with only a superficial, external resemblance to sex. Unlike other raped women on film, you cannot imagine those in Come and See ever healing from their scars.

On another subject, whoever thinks this movie contains "propaganda" is obviously prejudiced against the movie simply because it's a Soviet production, and should think things over a little more carefully. It's astonishing how you can still find little traces of the Cold War mentality surviving to this day, even in younger viewers... The fact that as detractors of Come and See claim, Stalin "was no better than Hitler" has nothing to do with anything at all, in this movie's context - Klimov's picture is NOT about nationalistic oneupmanship on who had the worst tyrant - it's about the basic suffering of ordinary humanity in war - ANY war, though this one happened to be going on in Bielorussia. There was in fact ten times more propaganda in ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan than the whole of Come and See. This is painful, sublime cinema. I've always believed there's something special about Russians when it comes to producing art, especially literature - this movie goes some way towards reinforcing that impression in me.

Not having seen Flags of Our Fathers, I'll be unable to make any comparison to its companion-movie. Even on its own Letter to Iwo Jima could be seen as representing the new tendency to "humanise" what were until recently the traditional WW2 villains from an Anglosaxon point of view. History tends to be written by those on the winning side - hence, we have had decades of inhuman German war machines, cowardly Italians and unspeakably cruel Japanese. Now, over 60 years since WW2, it has become acceptable - nay, the done thing if you have a conscience, to humanise the losers and show even the winners as fallible and even individually despicable (***SPOILER:*** see the American soldier who shoots the two Japanese prisoners who've deliberately given themselves over. ***END OF SPOILER***). Letters to Iwo Jima clearly has its heart in the right place: it wants to be objective, above and beyond anything else. And it is. Japanese soldiers have mothers, adorable young pregnant wives in pretty kimonos and sons they write loving letters to. We empathise with them no less than we have with all those American soldiers in an endless string of war movies. Technically, Letters is a well-made movie. It's also genuinely moving in parts - you do end up caring for most of the main players. For my personal taste, though, it spells things out too much and too often. Still, for something produced by Mr Manipulative Spielberg and co-written by Paul "Crash" Haggis, I was impressed.

Very powerful film-making, which leaves you feeling very unsettled. Through the minutae of his days and his every gesture, nervous tick and grimaces, it describes the last days of the living God, the Emperor of Japan. It's already perfectly clear to everyone that Japan is on its knees and the war has been won by mere mortals. It's perfectly clear, and yet the nation apparently still needs to know that its Emperor is a God. Superficially, the movie could be compared to Der Untergang, The Downfall, in that it shows a previous icon of absolute power cooped up in his bunker, days before his complete demise. The mood of these two movies is so very different, though - there was life stirring in among the ashes of Oliver Hirschbiegel's Berlin, still. There is seemingly no life left at all in the devastation surrounding the Japanese Emperor's palace and bunker. You see so little of the physical destruction, possibly because the movie had a small-ish budget and they couldn't afford complete reconstructions, but you feel it everywhere. Never before have sea creatures preserved in formaldehyde been more eerie. I was blown away by the sequences of the catfish (a recurrent subject of traditional Japanese ink drawings) swimming in the sky like bomber planes over a nuclear-war devastated nightmarish landscape. All the way through, I loved the use of classical music, seemingly distant and distorted - Bach and Wagner, and others. Every little gesture and detail in the movie matters, every camera angle and perspective is carefully planned. Some might call it slow, but to be honest I was never bored. Thankfully, the movie is also completely non-judgmental of anyone. Despite the odd wooden performance, I recommend this to anyone who is used to quality world cinema.

For such an enigmatic movie, Professione: Reporter features a thematically well-treaded path. A young, slim Jack Nicholson in an understated performance, sans the familiar shark's grin, plays David Locke, a celebrated, respected, British-born, American-educated international reporter whose life has lost all sense of purpose (this is Antonioni after all!). On finding a British arms dealer he knew now freshly dead in his hotel room in an unnamed, remote African location, Locke decides to take on the other man's identity, and make the world believe that David Locke, the journalist, is dead. Why he does this is never explained, though one can easily intuit it. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, though one can guess it may have something to do with self-loathing (the bitter irony is that taking on an arms dealer's identity is hardly more honourable!). In one memorable sequence, Locke's wife Rachel (who now believes herself to be a widow) is watching a piece of footage featuring Locke interviewing an unnamed African leader. It stands out as one of the most acerbic polemics on journalism ever filmed. In it, the camera is turned back onto Locke by his African interviewee after the latter loses his patience with the reporter's narrow-minded, Eurocentric vision, betrayed by his lazy, formulaic questions. The artifice of Locke's profession (which on the contrary ought to be a search for truth) is fully exposed in this scene, as well as Locke's increasing disillusionment with his purpose in life.

Despite its power and polemic against journalism, Professione: Reporter is also an understated movie from start to finish, made for a grown-up audience. Nothing is spelt out for you. However, the movie is strewn throughout with powerful and evocative visual clues, so it's nonetheless up to you as an attentive viewer to pick up (the early scene of Locke's Jeep getting stuck in the African desert sand, anyone?), or even soak them up unconsciously. As with all Antonioni, every shot in this movie is worthy of analysis and admiration. Bergman once said about the Italian that he could create some arresting individual images, but was incapable of stringing them all together in the sequence of a palatable movie: sorry Ingmar, old man - as much as I feel in awe of your craft, you're talking nonsense, here. However, I can't believe Antonioni once had the cheek to say he improvises each scene as he goes along (see his IMDb quotes page). There isn't a chance in hell these meticulously crafted, immaculately framed and composed movies are not also carefully premeditated. Clearly, Antonioni was trying to start a myth about himself along the lines of the one about Mozart composing his music straight onto the page, as dictated by God. In Professione: Reporter, I was especially in awe of the sequence involving the single long take from the window of Locke's last hotel room in an unnamed, dusty Spanish village. Regarding Maria Schneider, it truly is a shame she wasn't the star in a greater number of successful movies. Her ambiguity makes it very difficult to keep one's eyes off her when she's on screen. She looks like a cross between a boy, a girl and something cutely ape-like (I mean it in a good way!).

I would like to warn viewers of the inclusion of footage of a real execution - again, this was a film within the film. Personally, I found it very disturbing, which is why I'm mentioning it here.

I was told it was one of those "either you love it or you hate it" movies. Well, I loved it. Obvious hippie-era, dated and easy symbolism and all. So, I probably have no taste at all when it comes to Antonioni, but this and La Notte (made exactly a decade earlier) are my favourites among his movies so far. Made two years before I was born, Zabriskie Point was supposed to have been Michelangelo's great American epic. But apparently, it turned out to be a flop. I really can't see why. Before watching it I'd read that it was rather boring, so I braced myself for a very slow movie - though I love me a slow movie. For my taste, Zabriskie didn't have a tedious minute in it. While watching it, I made a mental note of how European it was on the director's part to make such frequent use of advertisement billboards in almost every urban scene, enormous billboards dwarfing any human form in sight. This recurrent visual element is obviously there to underline the way that consumerism crushes the individual in American society. But then I watched L'Eclisse straight afterwards, which is set in Rome in the early 60s, and noticed that Antonioni often included billboards in it as well. After all, the masterful use of landscapes, architecture and inanimate objects in each frame with or without human beings is an Antonioni trademark – this is precisely the way that he evokes his characters' psychological states, with more or less understated power and great visual impact. He is virtually unsurpassed in this skill.

Zabriskie Point starred two very appealing leads that should have become big stars of the 70s, but never did. Mark Frechette, whom I'd already seen in Francesco Rosi's fine WWI-set movie Uomini Contro, had a very tragic life and died aged just 27. According to his biography page, he donated his $60,000 earnings from Zabriskie to a commune. Mark's co-star Daria Halprin, apparently also Dennis Hopper's wife later on, has the stunning, natural beauty and appeal of a young Ornella Muti – one of those luminous beauties that don't need a shred of make-up to turn heads. Like Frechette, she has only graced a couple of obscure movies and has never become a star, but at least she didn't die tragically. Most notably, Zabriskie Point contains one of the most original sex scenes ever filmed - one that brings home a sense of youthful playfulness like few I've seen - as well as a powerfully cathartic ending. It may be the most banal sequence ever filmed as far as its symbolism goes, but I can't see how anyone can deny its beauty and wonderful sense of emotional release. Never has an explosion looked so good, and so poetic. It seems to be an explosion that restores order rather than bringing chaos.

Apologies to fans of this movie, but I really, really disliked it. A successful, poetic-existential-symbolic-lushly photographed romantic drama thingie allegedly à la Kieslowski should not feature two unintentionally funny suicide attempt scenes. Plot holes of cavernous proportions, inconsistencies and cringe-worthy, cheesy, pretentious dialogue hit a peak during the last third of the movie. Since I mentioned Kieslowski, would someone please explain why this movie is compared with anything made by the late Polish master? It's like comparing rabbit pellets to chocolate drops.

The first 15 minutes may even trick you into believing you're watching something potentially good, despite an inclination towards the use of gimmicky visual tricks right from the beginning (though I did like the sequence of the letter going through various bits of machinery inside the post office). Franka Potente as asylum nurse Sissi is very aptly named indeed – her character is a wet rag, a sissy. However, you first get a sense of just how dodgy this movie may truly become when about 20 minutes in, you're treated to Benno Fürmann kick-boxing in a vest for no apparent reason, which I assume was supposed to appeal to an abstract demographic of female viewers aged 13 to 21 (very dim 21-year-olds, may I add). The movie contains yet more clichés, cheese and affectedness with every passing scene. Unlikely coincidences masquerading as "fate" abound. Kieslowski it really is not! Cliché number one: the wounded hunk who won't let another woman near his heart anytime soon, because he still hasn't elaborated the tragic death of his wife (if this had been a period drama, she would have died in child-birth). This kind of male "hero" is clearly meant to appeal to the sacrifice-prone Florence Nightengale that allegedly inhabits every woman – and funnily enough, the "heroine" here is literally a nurse, not to mention a masochist without a rational bone in her body. Cliché number two: The bank heist gone wrong. Oh, please. Cliché number three: the "colourful" assortment of loonies in the loony bin, uncomfortably reminiscent of another movie I abhor: The Million Dollar Hotel (why, Wim, why?!). All that was missing was a loony dwarf. In a moment of crisis, one of the loonies starts chewing glass because everyone's favourite nurse (you guessed it: Sissi!) isn't paying him enough attention. Another one of the loonies, who mysteriously has free access to the asylum's roof top at night, threatens to jump for the same reason, naturally forcing the selfless heroine to make a difficult choice. Cliché number four: a "shocking", "cathartic" (not!), faux-Thelma and Louise-type scene towards the end. Cliché number five (***SPOILER***): During the above-mentioned, botched bank heist, the "ugly" brother dies, the handsome one doesn't.

I can turn a blind eye to the odd plot hole, but there's a limit to everything. Example: Sissi is delegated to pick up a friend's inheritance from the bank. Naturally, before being handed a key to the safe containing said inheritance, Sissi would have had to fill in her personal details - name, address, the works. Straight after having opened the safe, Sissi participates in the above-mentioned bank heist, and is even caught on camera doing it. In normal circumstances, the police would have been on her doorstep within hours, since they had her address and all the evidence they needed. In the movie, Tykwer preferred to have the TV set playing in the asylum show a news report the following day, providing only vague information about her (approximate height, etc), because she was wanted for having taken part in the heist! I wonder if Tykwer thinks all police agents (not to mention ambulance drivers!) are required to ingest a handful of barbiturates with their morning breakfast.

Another example of Tykwerian script sloppiness: why should the audience accept that Bodo could do a tracheotomy without being offered any background on how he learnt to do one? The irony is that I was actually still enjoying the movie during and straight after the tracheotomy scene, feeling confident that we would be given a plausible background for what was happening sooner or later. The movie only took a downward trajectory for me from the infamous, kick-boxing-in-a-vest scene and what followed it: absolute nonsense that got worse with every passing scene. By the bank heist scene, I was mentally parodying everything I saw, unfortunately.

The "get out of the toilet" line and the tear duct defect that Bodo had may seem deep and poetic to some, but to me they were just elements ripe for parodying. "Get out of the toilet" wasn't deep, nor clever in an ironic, "it's meant to pretend it's deep but it's actually Tykwer winking at the audience in a post-modern kind of way." Maybe my sense of the ridiculous is too developed or just misplaced, but so much about this movie seemed unintentionally funny to me. It was also the very first time in my life that I wanted to shout "Put your clothes back on, you fool!" to a fit young man who was constantly required to run around in his birthday suit in melodramatic moments, or in revealing, "macho" attire. Like all the other characters, he was irritating, but aside from that he was also unintentionally comical. Oh, and let's be really honest: can Benno Fürmann actually act? At least with Franka Potente, I could see her undeniable charm, feminine yet androgynous, and her potential as an actress through that horrible, hickuppy performance that Tykwer got out of her!

Still, I think Tykwer might do well directing an episode of CSI or two. He's very good at doing the particle-swooshing-through-a-tight-internal-space kind of sequence you see in such TV series, when we're shown, say, a speck of a toxic substance travelling through the victim's lungs, or whatever.

Last Sunday's cinema outing with my friends here in Rome yielded a very pleasant surprise - Von Trier's unique latest flick, surprisingly enough, a comedy. I've read some comments claiming that this was one of his weakest movies - I respectfully, but firmly disagree. In fact, I would argue that even as a comedy, and thus deprived of the devices that normally make drama seem more powerful, this packed a punch on a par with Dancer in the Dark or Dogville, if not more. If understated power, rather than human agony and melodrama layered on very thick is what you best respond to, you might like Direktøren for det hele more than any other Von Trier movie you've seen so far.

Right from the opening shot, we are made to look into the windows of a cold and desolate office building in some characterless and efficient modern suburb like hundreds of others. Meanwhile, a narrator reassures us that this movie is a comedy. As such, he says, we are allowed not to think - to let this just be brainless entertainment. Hearing a narrator in a Von Trier movie make such an introduction, you just know that what you're about to watch will be anything but mindless fun! In fact, on hearing this I shifted rather uncomfortably in my seat, wondering what the Master Misanthrope had in store for me this time.

The basic plot: When Ravn, an IT company owner decides to sell his business off to a moody and irritable Icelandic businessman, he hires an actor to pretend that he's the Boss of Bosses. The pally, "cuddly", bearded Ravn, vaguely reminiscent of Robin Williams, explains his decision by saying that when he'd founded the company, he had never felt strong and charismatic enough to take on the mantle of president. He always preferred to just blend in with the rest of the staff, while actually pulling all the puppet strings. He had always told his staff that the "real" big boss (obviously non-existent) resided in America and never came to Denmark. When Ravn eventually decides to sell the company, the fussy Icelandic businessman expects the "real" president to sign the contact. For this reason, Ravn is forced to hire Kristoffer, an out-of-work, egocentrical actor, among other things obsessed with the obscure playwright Gambini and convinced that Ibsen is a talentless hack.

Naturally, Kristoffer knows nothing about the company, about IT and Ravn simply asks him to "improvise". Cue some cringeworthy company meetings with Kristoffer talking absolute crap (with one irascible employee, the "country bumpkin", constantly lashing out at him with his fist!). Cue also some inevitable office politics, involving the company's employees reacting to their new-found, flesh-and-blood figure-head, on whom they hang all their hopes and frustrations.

If this sounds like a Danish version of the British TV series "The Office" (remade also in America), please think again - the movie goes well beyond milking the comic potential of a typical contemporary office environment. The wonder of this movie lies in the way in which it plays with ethical issues. I won't give anything more of the plot away, as this would entail spoiling its central twists and surprises. Among other things, this multi-layered, dark and cynical comedy, which had my friends and I chatting for a solid two hours after we left the cinema, is about responsibility and what it means to be truly ethical. Holding oneself accountable for one's actions - how do you deal with that when the insatiable need to feel loved and approved of takes over? The movie is also a wonderful illustration of the typical contemporary corporate environment, whereby the employee is subtly demeaned in being prevented from ever putting a face to those provoking their misery on the workplace. It poses questions on what leadership really means. It shows us how a human being will become blind to the needs of others when it comes to satisfying one's vanity and emotional fragility.

Naturally, as a Lars Von Trier movie this is not a movie that has much faith in humanity. However, unlike Dancer in the Dark, it does not gang up on the viewer with its misanthropy and dramatic bullying. Unlike Dogville, it doesn't present a world in which moral nihilism is the only reality. Unlike Breaking the Waves, it doesn't revel in victimising its lead character. It's far more subtle and multi-facetted in its arguments against human integrity, not to mention that it's laugh-out-loud funny (the whole cinema was in stitches), superbly acted and truly unpredictable. I also enjoyed the cinematography, strictly hand-held digital camera with a purposefully "rudimentary" editing. Highly recommended, on several different levels.

Just half an hour ago I finished watching the Finnish director's take on Dostoyevsky's wonderful classic novel Crime and Punishment. I knew not to expect a faithful adaptation and in fact, didn't even wish to see one, feeling intrigued at the idea that this literary favourite of mine had been transposed to contemporary Helsinki. As expected, this was really very, very loose as far as literary adaptations go. Yet the core of the novel's concerns were there, so eloquently expressed by its straight-forward and non-symbolic title: CRIME and, as a consequence of the former, PUNISHMENT. And the central concern of all this is not IF the punishment occurs, but HOW and ultimately, WHY it happens.

People seldom smile in Kaurismaki's Helsinki, and have pensive, reflective ways and a deliberateness about them, whether they are police inspectors or pastry shop employees. Rather than the process that brought Antti Rahikainen (Kaurismaki's Raskolnikov) and his conscience to turn himself in to the police, I was struck by the way the movie plays with the spectator's sympathies. Rahikainen inspires sympathy one moment and lack of it the next; then, once again, you develop sympathy followed by antipathy and a desire to see him punished. At least I found it to be the case, and it wasn't that I mentally chastised him for the murder, either. As Rahikainen himself twice said during the course of the movie, you don't really feel like he's killed a man, so much as a principle. The film doesn't go to great lengths to explain what principle that might be, but you can somehow intuit it, and even approve of his actions to some degree - at least in a very abstract sense. And it's not even like the murdered man is ever presented as being repulsive! If there was ever a crime movie more cerebral than this, I would really like to hear about it! One quality I admire in Kaurismaki that's perfectly illustrated by this movie is his use of interior spaces. The way he films rooms with people in them, though it's done in an absolutely subtle, functional and non-showy way, really gives a sense of their context within the world they inhabit and the thoughts and feelings that float around them in said rooms and interiors. The very last frame of the guard shutting the prison door behind Rahikainen after he's been speaking to Eeva (roughly the equivalent of Sonya from Dostoyevsky's novel), really gives a sense that the spaces you inhabit are mostly a reflection of your state of mind, your interior state. After having seen the young murderer in his grotty rented room before, emprisoned within his own musings and guilt, the literal prison he occupies after he turns himself in seems no more restictive of his freedom than his previous mental state. In this sense, Kaurismaki's Crime and Punishment is very similar to the spirit of Dostoyevsky's novel.

Alejandro González Iñárritu's last effort is by no means a bad picture. In fact, I would say it has some remarkable qualities going for it, first among these Iñárritu's more than competent hand in directing. This lends the movie strength and narrative confidence where there are some otherwise potentially distracting contrivances and weaknesses. The accomplished directing earned the Mexican filmmaker a Best Director award at the Cannes film festival this year, in my view a well deserved win. The acting in Babel is also overall top-notch, with Brad Pitt, Rinko Kikuchi (Chieko), Adriana Barraza (Amelia) and Boubker Ait El Caid (Yussef) truly shining among a talented cast from five corners of the world. On the other hand, Cate Blanchett's limited role doesn't unfortunately offer the Australian actress many opportunities to showcase her talent. However, with this viewer the movie ultimately did not strike an emotional or intellectual chord that was more than skin-deep. Especially during the second half, I was a little too detached from it all, occasionally feeling tempted to mentally parody certain scenes and elements. After a while, I felt bombarded by high-strung drama for the sake of yet more high-strung drama.

I haven't seen 21 Grams, but considered Amores Perros an extraordinary cinematic achievement when I first saw it in 1999. In my view Babel was simply an exercise in the same vein and style, adding nothing new to Iñárritu's development as a filmmaker six years from his explosive and fresh debut picture. With Babel, there seemed to be very little in the way of a stylistic, technical or thematic evolution: the movie, albeit well made, was artistically in many ways just the pale shadow of Amores Perros, furthermore with a few too many narrative contrivances for comfort. The addition of some expertly chosen flourishes (for instance, the setting in four different countries and the addition of an Islamic terrorism theme) all strove to distract the viewer into believing they were watching something entirely new.

Babel is among other things about consequences, and the way that apparently small decisions and actions - sometimes taken with unintentional flippancy or foolishness - will bring on a whole chain of potentially catastrophic consequences, occasionally even with an earth-shattering global chain effect. This is the cinematic equivalent of the butterfly beating its wings one time too many in Canada and provoking an earthquake in Indonesia. Babel also explores fatality, another element it has in common with Amores Perros. My biggest criticism of Babel, however, apart from Iñárritu layering the drama on too thick, was its tendency to spoon-feed you big, worthy and topical issues, all neatly selected to represent humanity's global concerns du jour. For instance: the split between East and West, or wealthy and poor, or Muslims and Judeo-Christians (with America and its allies suspecting Islamic terrorism at the drop of a hat in the Morocco-set segment). Alternatively: prejudice and the dehumanisation effect of certain laws transforming a mild and warm-hearted Mexican nanny into a generic and faceless outlaw, a cypher for an illegal immigrant to be hunted down and brutally detained at all costs.

If all else fails, just add personal grief and disability to the thematic cocktail, stretching the scope from generic global tragedy to personal tragedy (thus showing that your movie embraces both macro- and micro-suffering!). Sure enough, Iñárritu does so as well: Chieko, a deaf and mute teenager in trendy Tokyo, struggles to overcome the trauma of her mother's suicide, as well as her own disability. It obviously makes attracting boys and fitting in with her peers much more difficult than it already would for a moody teenage girl. While Chieko suffers from the grief of her mother's death in Japan, Richard and Susan, two American tourists in Morocco, discover that a life-threatening accident will ultimately help them elaborate the loss of their youngest infant son to cot death. I couldn't help thinking that all that was missing from this hit parade of typical noughties topics was a homosexual theme!

I would never discourage anyone from watching Babel, as it does still have the power to entertain and even move in parts. As mentioned above, it's an extremely well directed, well acted and well presented dummy's guide to our era's most topical global issues. Personally, I would have loved to see more of Chieko and her father, the police detective and Tokyo in general. Unlike the others, I found that the Japanese segment contained the seeds for a story that could be developed into a full-length feature. As it stands, it was engaging but rather half-baked, while the other segments were more limited but ultimately came full circle. After Babel, I am now keen to see Iñárritu explore entirely new artistic avenues. I'm still convinced he is a truly talented filmmaker, and would be the first to feel saddened at the notion that he may turn out to be just a one-hit wonder (with Amores Perros being that first and only truly remarkable cinematic achievement. Although not having seen 21 Grams, I'm not really in a position to say). Instead, I would like to believe that Babel is simply a "transitional" movie, a stepping-stone on the way to something truly different and original, into an entirely new phase of Iñárritu's life as an artist.

I had never seen an Alain Resnais movie before. Despite the fact most of my IMDb friends had told me to start off with Hiroshima Mon Amour, I was more drawn to Muriel and chose it as my first taste of Resnais. In a nutshell: it was far more interesting thematically and cinematographically (also on a purely technical level) than it was enjoyable. I'm still very glad that I saw it, though. The most fascinating aspect of it was without doubt the montage, or editing. Rather than directing or acting, or even the screen writing, it was the editing that had the lion's share of the movie, as if it were its star. I cannot think of another movie where this is quite as apparent. Some of Muriel's style of editing felt like machine-gun-fire, being so relentlessly fast and aggressive in parts, but it was in my opinion very powerful and efficient in leaving an impression of "mental flashes". This emulated the nature of memory, which is the theme at the heart of an otherwise grim and pessimistic movie. Yet this darkness is masked by an appearance of everyday banality in a provincial town, making it all the more depressing, since it's easier to relate the melancholy at its core to one's own, everyday existence. Not for nothing, the movie was also set in winter, and nothing is quite as melancholy and nostalgic as a sea-side town off-season.

The last 10 minutes of the movie, more or less from the "revelation" at Hélène's Sunday lunch right to the moments in which the word "Fin" (The End) appeared on the screen, were the most powerful bout of cinematic caffeine I've experienced in a while. Until that moment I was starting to worry that the film was going nowhere too specific, or at least not somewhere that I understood or knew. Then came the final emotional earthquake, redeeming the movie tenfold, and I was virtually just as shocked as most of the characters in it.

OK, I'll admit I wasn't overly enamoured of the acting. With the exception of Delphine Seyrig playing Hélène, who succeeded in convincing me with her interpretation of the character as well as making me feel sympathetic towards her, the other players left me virtually cold. For a while I thought I'd like Nita Klein playing Françoise, then I started thinking that her character was pretty much redundant and should have been far more marginal than it actually was (and what was going on between her and Bernard anyway? That felt like a contrivance). Since I mentioned Bernard, played by Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, let me say that he was the character I was least convinced by. Quite frankly, I wasn't partial to the way the actor chose to bring him to life at all. Yet he and his drama - the traumas he'd experienced during the Algerian war, his witnessing the torture of an Algerian girl, the titular Muriel, which scarred him for life - was probably the heart and kernel of the movie! Jean-Pierre Kérien playing Alphonse, is the player that most viewers here seem to criticise. In my view there wasn't much else he could have done with the character, seeing as he was mostly a pretext for Hélène's tragedy. But in the last ten minutes of the movie Alphonse's raison d'être comes sharply to the forefront, thanks to the shocking revelation previously mentioned. It was Bernard that I expected more from acting-wise, I guess. Furthermore, the soundtrack was occasionally strident and annoying, perhaps trying to be an aural version of the editing. But while it worked on a visual level, the music's jarred quality was ultimately grating.

However, for the courage with which the movie tackled subjects which are best rendered in a novel form, for its successfully experimental editing, as well as its genuinely moving ending, I'll still award Muriel a pretty high score: 7.5/10 (it would have been 8 if the acting, not just from Seyrig, had been more accomplished).

The cinema of the silent and Fascist eras in Italy was characterised by epic movies with mostly mythology-inspired themes. Mussolini, who came into power in 1922, the founder of Cinecittà, did not underestimate the importance of cinema as a means of communicating with the masses. Fellini notoriously called Giulietta Masina's titular character in Notti di Cabiria after the 1913 movie "Cabiria" by Giovanni Pastrone, a grand production with a visual flair not so dissimilar to Satyricon. Literally hundreds of characters parade in front of the camera in this visual orgy of a movie, evoking the memory of lost "Kolossals", or gargantuan budget productions.

Fellini's movie was only loosely inspired by its literary source, Petronius's Satyricon. The nominal "plot" follows two young Roman men, the blonde Encolpio and the brunette Ascilto, introduced as rivals in love for the coquettish, androgynous slave-boy Gitone. When the latter chooses to be with Ascilto, the spurned lover Encolpio becomes involved in a series of adventures, all narrated with a familiar (to Fellini lovers), non-linear narrative structure with temporal inconsistencies and dreamlike, sudden changes of setting and mood. Encolpio attends the decadent banquet of a former slave, Trimalcione, now filthy rich. Eumolpo, an impoverished poet whom Encolpio meets on the way there, despises the wealthy man, all the more so for being rich and for having the nerve to also call himself a poet. The faint-hearted may at this point find much to object to – the lasciviousness with which the banquet guests eat, drink and act lustful with one another is anything but subtle. The Trimalcione sequences felt to me like a satirical commentary on the rise of the nouveau riche in 1960s Italy. A highlight of the banquet scene is the story that the host narrates. It tells of a young widow, an oasis of cinematic calm in among the strident cacophony of the rest of the movie.

In a narrative passage which is reminiscent of the rhythm of dreams (typical of late Fellini, betraying his Jungian tendencies), Encolpio ends up captured by the pirate Lica, who takes him on board his ship. This is where the young buck meets Ascilto and Gitone again, also captives of the tyrant. At this point I was especially impressed with the extraordinary talent of Donati as a set designer. The ship wasn't built to look like a recognisable ship at all, but was rather like a symbol of one. Needless to say that no matter how abstract it was, you knew it was a ship, as its "ship-like essence" was all there! When Encolpio is beaten in a duel with Lica, he is forced to marry the pirate in a ceremony celebrated on the deck. But Lica is decapitated by some political rivals when a new Emperor takes over. "Everything changes so that it can all stay the same" is a cynical saying you still often hear in Italy. It refers to the fact that one greedy ruler will succeed another in a ruthless battle for power and privilege. That's when you realise Satyricon is a brilliant satire of modern society as well.

Encolpio and Ascilto then wander into the aristocratic home of a husband and wife who've just freed their slaves and committed suicide through bleeding themselves to death (a symbol of the death of aristocracy while the nouveau riche are getting fat?). After a threesome with a slave-girl who was left behind in the dead couple's empty home, the two young men attend a sort of sanctuary where an old man exploits the alleged healing powers of a very sick-looking, ethereal hermaphrodite child. Worshippers, lepers, cripples and sick people of all descriptions flock to ask for favours off the allegedly divine hermaphrodite. If this isn't a dark, ruthless parody of the Catholic practice of worshipping saints' relics, I don't know what is!

Subsequently captured by some soldiers, Encolpio is defeated by the Minotaur in his mythological labyrinth. The young man's life is spared when he literally talks the Minotaur out of slaying him, in a scene which is both post-modern and subtly comical. But a new humiliation is in store for Encolpio, which has him set off looking for the sorceress Enotea. Her story is told in flashback. Yet again, the prudish and faint of heart will not find the scenes of a cursed woman literally "giving birth" to fire through her vagina as their cup of tea! Though admittedly unsavoury, I also find such elements to be archetypically symbolic, and ultimately fascinating.

After visiting Enotea, Encolpio witnesses the killing of his friend Ascilto. Desperately upset, Encolpio decides to set sail for Africa on a merchant ship owned by the once-poor and bitter old poet Eumolpo, now as filthy rich and decadent as Trimalcione, whom he had once criticised for his parvenu vulgarity. When the old poet dies, he leaves a testament stating that whoever will eat his corpse will have a share of his wealth - basically, inheritance by cannibalism! Encolpio refuses the deal, while a group of greedy Roman dignitaries are shown chewing on what must obviously be the dead poet's tough old flesh, looking like so many fat cows chewing on their cuds. If a satire of a stagnant and greedy society was ever more potent and cutting than this, I would really like to hear about it!

Fellini himself defined this movie as being "Science fiction of the past". The movie's complete and intentional artifice, its occasionally obscure symbolism and gallery of grotesque portraits and strident soundtrack may not be everyone's thing. What is especially unsettling about Satyricon is that the viewer is led into a realm in which you have no idea what boundaries might be crossed. That's exactly why this is a perfect portrayal of an epoch of complete moral decadence - it drags the viewer into the exact same realm of uncertainty that the characters experience.

This is a shimmeringly beautiful, subtle and very powerful movie about all-too-ordinary people aspiring for "a job for life", and falling into an existence which will kill off any inkling of vitality, individuality and creativity in them, day in, day out. Olmi isn't a filmmaker I often see discussed on this website's boards, not even in a context about Italian filmmakers. Along with Mauro Bolognini, another wonderful but seldom-mentioned fellow countryman of Olmi's, he is occasionally mentioned for The Tree of Wooden Clogs, but not much else. I'll confess I'm not overly familiar with Olmi's oeuvre myself - however, since watching his 1961 gem Il Posto about a month ago, I have barely been able to contain myself and have tirelessly recommended it right, left and centre.

The dehumanising effect of the large corporation, with its ant-like clerks and bureaucrats becoming tiny clog in a faceless machine, is a universal and timeless theme, starting probably with Fritz Lang's Metropolis all the way down to Naomi Klein's No Logo. I never cared for Terry Gillam's Brazil, nor did I consider Sam Lowry an adequate embodiment of the "insignificant" clerk. There was something over-styled about him, something which made him ultimately hip and cool, and something gratingly farcical and rhetorical about Brazil and all its characters generally. On the other hand, Il Posto and its protagonist, the ultimate sympathetic wet rag of a clerk, is achingly real, yet at the same time a sublimely beautiful artistic creation that could probably not have been summarised as successfully by a less accomplished filmmaker. The measured, yet powerful visual satire in Il Posto is probably what I'd wished to see in Gillam's movie, and didn't.

The New Year's Eve office party scene is pure genius and should be studied in film school as a cinematic sequence close to technical, thematical, aesthetic and atmospheric perfection. It conveys so much at once: humour, pathos, social satire and extreme loneliness, besides being beautiful to behold and incredibly original cinematography-wise. It is at once highly artistic and entertaining, accessible. Quiet desperation: there's no better way to describe these characters' condition. Though Olmi doesn't spare us their selfishness and pettiness, he never fails to depict them with humanity and respect, thus showing his eye is a disillusioned, but not misanthropic or cynical one.

One of the final scenes in the movie, in which a gaggle of clerks fight for the privilege of sitting at a recently defunct colleague's front desk, is one of the most depressing sights I've set eyes on. And yet, you can't help but feel deeply sorry for these hyenas in cheap suits and neon-pale faces, rather than feel angry or scornful against them. You just want to scream to Domenico to "Get out while you can!!!" The poor, gormless, meek, dork-boy, bumbling through his first taste of a mediocre adulthood, a boy you fear might probably never grow enough of an awareness or backbone to react against such a dehumanising system. Antonietta, also know as Magali, the pretty girl he meets during the company's selection process of the applicants and fast develops an attraction for, seems to have more individuality, more resources to survive the dehumanisation process. But then, you think for a moment about the fact that from a very early age, Domenico had been designated as the one who'd drop out of school early so that he could go out and contribute to the family's meagre income. Meanwhile, his younger brother had been chosen between the two to continue studying, perhaps even get a high school diploma or degree, thus fulfilling himself and improving his lot. One would assume that from childhood, the milder Domenico had been treated as the "dim" one, the one who'd rightfully sacrifice himself to allow his more promising brother to emerge out of their family's working-class, suburban obscurity. The scary part is that this isn't simply a dramatic plot device to increase the pathos - it's so plausible and depressingly true to life for its time and context!

I was also deeply moved and touched by the fleeting appearance of the character of the older, married man who miserably fails the first written test (the one that the corporation's applicants take in an empty, grand old palace, so at odds with the suburban squallor and Northern Italian, typical 1960s industrial modernity). He embodies, epitomises and belongs to pre-economic miracle Italy, back when illiteracy and a rural existence was the norm. Probably either almost illiterate, or unable to apply even the most basic principles of arithmetic, he's a throwback to another era, which had ended roughly around the 1950s. He desperately tries to fit into the city, the burgeoning industrial North, the new Italy, but miserably fails before even getting anywhere. How will he and all those like him survive in this dehumanising shift into a brand new, industrial era? It's heart-breaking. Though Il Posto is also so much about Italy and its staggeringly fast move throughout the 50s and 60s from backward rural country to world industrial power, it remains first and foremost a universal, timeless movie. Very highly recommended.

You realise that millennia of civilisation have been quite useless if the functioning of a whole community ultimately depends on whether a man can have an erection or not! The subject of Mauro Bolognini's movie Il Bell'Antonio – male impotence – would be audacious in 2006, let alone in 1960. Yet here, it's treated with unflinching honesty, one that surprised me for 1960. No euphemisms, no sensationalism, no malicious elbow-nudging, nor sentimental melodrama, but a heart-on-the-sleeve openness which also allows its long-suffering hero to maintain his dignity through a fierce portrait of a ruthlessly paternalistic society. This is all done without the aid of a single sex-scene, which IMO would have been redundant.

The movie shows us upper-class Sicily in the late 1950s (though actually, it's based upon a novel set in the 1930s – Fascist-era Italy). This is a society in which appearing is the essence of being and the accepted norm are arranged marriages between the children of the richest families, celebrated by the entire town in the same way as Prince Charles and Diana Spencer's was back in the early 80s. As is the case with the best classic Italian movies, Il Bell'Antonio couples bitterness/fierce social satire with comedy/humour seamlessly. Superb leads in the form of the timeless Marcello Mastroianni and the divine Claudia Cardinale, impeccably playing an unpleasant character for once, give the movie extra depth, beauty and soulfulness. Claudia is Barbara Puglisi, the "golden girl" that Antonio is expected to marry, the daughter of one of the richest families on the island and a virginal social-climber of the most conventional, blinkered, obtusely stubborn kind. The even greater tragedy is that despite their marriage having been arranged by their families, Antonio really falls for her very badly.

Marcello Mastroianni, who neither as an actor nor as a man remotely deserved to be considered the typical "Latin lover" type that Hollywood producers wished to market him as, plays the titular lead, the "beautiful" Antonio Magnano. On the verge of 30, in his prime as far as looks, health and opportunities are concerned, Antonio has just returned to his native Sicilian city of Catania after having lived in Rome for three years. We very quickly gather that Antonio is from an upper class Sicilian family, is the apple of his father and mother's eye, and something of a superstar in the whole of Catania, where his family is well-known and respected. He is adored by women, who believe him to be an irresistible seducer, a Casanova with hundreds of notches on his bed-post. He is also courted by important men, all dying to act as his patrons in some prestigious profession or the other. Women's heads make 90-degree turns when he walks into a room, and older ladies gasp in wonder at his handsomeness from their balconies when he walks past them, fantasising that he may become their son-in-law. Antonio's father is played by Pierre Brasseur, who receives much praise in reviews of the movie. In my opinion, he is actually the least credibly cast actor in this movie, losing out to Rina Morelli who plays his wife, Antonio's mother (she really comes into her own in a memorable "showdown" scene between herself and Claudia Cardinale in a church, and in the second half of the movie generally). On the other hand, so many of Brasseur's expressions and mannerism betray a blatant Frenchness, rather than a credible Italianness, or even better, a Sicilianness.

Mr Magnano Senior swells with pride at the very thought of his son's alleged sexual prowess and reputation. He pretty much bases much of the reasons for boosting his family's public image precisely on Antonio being able to continue the virile oeuvre started by himself, in his youthful days, all over Sicily! With such a premise, you just know that the movie's dramatic climax is going to be the ruinous fall from glory experienced by the poor Antonio, who seemingly carries the weight of the whole of Sicily's expectations on his all too human shoulders right from the start! It's as if this poor man were expected to lift the whole island up with his erection. You don't expect the extent of the tyranny of such a patriarchal society on its male children. The story of the dishonoured girl cast out of her society certainly finds a male equivalent in Il Bell'Antonio.

Also worthy of note is the Cuban actor Tomas Milian playing Edoardo, Antonio's cousin, the only sane, rational and detached voice among a chorus of shrill scandal-mongers. It's thanks to this character that we get to hear Antonio finally speak at the end of the movie, telling us his first-hand experience as an impotent Sicilian man catastrophically fallen from glory. I do wonder if before or since this movie, such an honest and charitable, as well as credible psychological study of male sexual problems has ever been filmed - perhaps in part only in Sex, Lies and Videotape. The conclusion of Antonio's story exemplifies the bitterest and most satirical form of so-called "happy ending" – if the movie weren't already so good overall, the ending would be worth the watch alone! For any fan of classic Italian cinema, this will be a rare treat indeed. If you love Mastroianni, you simply cannot afford to miss this. And for any fan of cinema generally… ditto.

The literary source the movie is based upon, the Sicilian writer Vitaliano Brancati's novel of the same title, furthermore lends itself perfectly to this dual mood of fierce social satire and classic Italian comedy. Few men of letters have pinpointed the true natural of latter-day Southern Italian machismo as well as Brancati. Cliché-free, with such an eye for the absurd, the comical, the down-right frightening and angering, I highly recommend not only Il Bell'Antonio, but also all of Vitaliano's major novels: it wasn't just Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and his novel The Leopard who evocatively captured a long-gone Sicily in the written form.

This is a wonderful new movie currently still showing in cinemas in my country. Its director, the Calabrian Gianni Amelio, is in my humble view perhaps the only contemporary Italian director, along with Nanni Moretti, to deserve being called great (that is, apart from the old masters who're still around and occasionally still churning out movies). It's one of my greatest regrets that contemporary Italian cinema has been ailing since the mid-70s, mostly due to a dire lack of funding and nurturing of new talent, something which can be transferred to most fields and which makes Italy one of the most static industrialised countries of our time production-wise (both in an industrial and cultural sense)... unlike, say, China. And this, among other things, is precisely the subject of Amelio's latest movie. Few directors can speak to me about the true, present state of my country and the world as Amelio can, yet his pictures also have a precious timelessness and universality. And for those already worrying that they may be slow, ponderous and worthy - rest assured: of the ones I've seen they most certainly aren't, at least not if you're used to quality European cinema.

The basic plot outline: Vincenzo Buonavolontà is a technician at an obsolete steel plant factory somewhere in Italy, probably the North. He is played by Sergio Castellitto, one of contemporary Italy's most versatile and talented actors. When a major Chinese steel company purchases some of the Italian steel plant's industrial machinery, Vincenzo, who struggles to make himself understood with the non-Italian speaking Chinese director, tries to tell him that the machine is defective and its converter needs substituting, an element he's working on custom-building himself. He warns them that not doing this might have very dangerous consequences. Meanwhile a young Chinese woman called Liu Hua acts as interpreter between the two men, but seems to struggle to find adequate translations for some of Vincenzo's technical jargon. The Italian eventually loses his patience with her, virtually pushing her aside and asking her to hand him the Chinese-Italian dictionary so that he can do the translating himself.

Despite Vincenzo's warnings, the following morning he finds that the Chinese factory director and his employees have returned to their own country while not heeding his advice about the adequate use of the industrial machine at all. Thus Vincenzo, equipped with his great integrity, sets off for China. And here begins an endlessly fascinating road movie through China, a very topical 21st century Odyssey through the Asian Giant. A latter-day Marco Polo's quest for the secrets of the mysterious nation? Not quite. As in all of Amelio's movies, the journey itself becomes far more important than whether its ultimate "mission" is carried out or not. In fact, the way in which the point is literally brought home, not without a touch of humour, is a lovely, poignant paradox and irony, which made my eyes well up while I was simultaneously smiling. The spectator is let in on the secret that Vincenzo's trip was ultimately completely useless, but he himself doesn't know it, and goes home a satisfied man, a deluded innocent. At least, you figure, he's happy. Sort of.

The journeys that Amelio's characters embark on totally uproots and strips them down to their bare, human essentials. They are momentarily without name, status or someone to put in a word for them. These Theo Angelopoulos-like themes are also explored in Lamerica, actually my favourite Amelio movie, closely followed by La stella che non c'è in order of personal preference. In the 1994 movie Lamerica, two Italian racketeers travel to Albania to "do business". Just like Vincenzo, they intend to go there, do what they have to do and then go back home. Instead, one of these two Italians accidentally ends up on an almost Homeric journey through this devastated land just after the fall of Communism.

But let us go back to La stella che non c'è: once Vincenzo is in China, he predictably discovers that the seemingly "simple" task of handing the converter to its new owner is anything but straight-forward. The piece of machinery's new location is seemingly almost impossible to determine, unless he embarks on an arduous journey through China. When he comes across Liu Hua, the young interpreter he'd mistreated now working as a librarian, he tries to speak to her but she reacts in a hostile manner, informing him that because of him, she'd lost her job as interpreter back in Italy. Played by the relative newcomer Ling Tai, Liu Hua soon becomes a Virgil to Vincenzo's Dante when she grudgingly figures that she could do worse than to act as guide and interpreter for the Italian on his trip (obviously for a consistent sum of cash). This young Chinese actress may not have the beauty of Ziyi Zhang, nor the movie star glamour of Gong Li, but her charming, expressive and pretty face oozes a combination of defiant strength, intelligence, dignity and wry humour that'll make her features difficult to forget once you've seen the movie. Furthermore, she and Castellitto have wonderful emotional chemistry as co-stars.

Amelio weaves dramas that are serious, poetic, mythical, post-neo-realist and humorous all at once, while maintaining a heart-warming ability to explore the fleeting essence of humanity in everyday, commonplace circumstances. A documentary-like naturalness conceals what is actually a meticulously conceived tapestry of faces and places, a vista which also manages to incorporate a cinematography of breath-taking beauty. The photography here is functional yet gorgeous, as befits a movie on the displaced in an industrial and emotional wasteland.

Amelio's observant eye is a grown-up, disillusioned one, yet also never a cynical or misanthropic one. The masterful camera angles also often gives a sense of Vincenzo's alienness in the eyes of the Chinese, bringing home a sense of objectivity and cultural impartiality that's very rare in movies about a "familiar" Westerner exploring an "unfamiliar" non-Western country. I cannot recommend this movie enough.

I hadn't seen my grandmother in a little while and decided to take her out to the cinema yesterday afternoon. She normally doesn't enjoy dramas, so we both opted for this comedy, Little Miss Sunshine. What a delightfully cynical, yet ultimately big-hearted movie this was! Perhaps not hugely original in all its aspects (for example, Greg Kinnear's was a bit of a stock character...), though still very fresh, very funny and unexpectedly in the end, heart-warming without the least bit of schmaltz or manipulative slyness. It got better and better, culminating in some classic sequences by the last quarter.

I left the cinema smiling at its ultimate message, a modern and more sensible twist on the usual "American dream" message (one of success as a means of measuring one's ultimate worth as a human being). As the suicidal, Proust-scholar uncle and his Nietzsche-loving nephew tell each other at one point, this movie believes that what ultimately really matters is that one should end up doing the things in life that really make one feel happy. A simple, but valuable message - one that could avoid so many neuroses if it were truly grasped by the vast majority of the world's population. Also, many of the movie's characters learnt that if it turns out you're not good enough for something - say, something you've been dreaming of achieving all your life - it usually means that that thing isn't actually good enough for YOU, and that you should hanker after something that's right and worthy of you. Basically, you can't fit a star-shaped peg into a heart-shaped hole. We can all be misled by the wrong dream, and it's all just a part of living this life to learn this, and move on - seeking out something that's more right for us, for the individual that WE are.

The little girl actress who played Olive was adorable and never in a precocious brat kind of way - this is saying something, as I often have a problem with child-actors for this very reason. The characters were generally all great - and oh, the grand-dad! He did crack me up, as well as my grandmother! And the final scene in the last 10 minutes, with the whole family dancing to Olive's tune at that grotesque beauty pageant was good enough to give you a natural high, like visual cocaine. Here in Rome where I watched the movie, it had the whole cinema in stitches - and I went to the mid-afternoon showing with my grandmother, so it was mainly other grannies who were there! But even to them, that scene was exhilarating. An intelligent, fluffy yet non-superficial feel-good movie with a core of unexpected wisdom.