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This is one of those films which have so much heart that their flaws hardly matter. The film's main character is a young woman, no angel herself, who is confronted with the hypocrisy of the adult world in the aftermath of a traffic accident. That sounds like a recipe for a conventional and sentimental morality tale, but this film is anything but that. Instead it pits its young protagonist against a circle of elders who have in their different ways accommodated themselves to life's hard realities. She holds on tenaciously to what most of them lost long ago, her passion and rage and a burning desire for justice. But along the way she makes her own compromises, and her victory, if that's what it is, is both hard-won and deeply equivocal.

This film shares with director Kenneth Lonergan's previous film, You Can Count on Me, a gentle and amused but unflinching view of human nature. The vision here, though, is much darker. The film tends to proceed on the assumption that conflict in human relationships must erupt sooner or later in confrontation, and this results in a film with a somewhat episodic structure and rather a lot of shouting matches. The film nevertheless wins our trust by caring enough not to fob us off with easy answers or easy cynicism. It does not even give us a particularly sympathetic heroine to identify with, only a flawed human being who will have to come to terms with her mistakes like everyone else. A film like this wouldn't work without individual and ensemble acting of the greatest intensity and honesty, and that's what it has.

The title, by the way, is a reference to a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that is quoted in the course of the film. Another poem comes to mind, the one by Yeats that goes, "But I am old and you are young/And I speak a barbarous tongue".

Though skilfully adapted and made with a pleasing combination of solidity and flair, this film ultimately disappoints. Its tone, grandly, cinematically sombre, strays occasionally into bathos or, at the end, barely suppressed triumphalism. At times you feel that television, an intrinsically more humdrum medium, is better suited to the moral seediness of this genre. And of course it's with its BBC television predecessor that this film invites comparison. Some things come out about even. John Hurt is a charismatic Control, even if the shortened format doesn't allow us to witness the gradual and complete disintegration of the character that Alexander Knox portrays in the BBC series. But Colin Firth brings nothing to the role of Haydon to match Ian Richardson's self-tormenting irony; it would have been interesting to see what Ciarán Hinds, already in the cast but underemployed as Roy Bland, might have done with the role. As the central character, Gary Oldman is an enigma, a man who reveals nothing of himself to others. Alec Guinness gives us something more complex, a character who reveals to others exactly what he wants them to see. In showing the light in his character, he also reveals the shadows. Oldman's Smiley is, by contrast, a hero for our modern age: we don't much care who or what he is as long as he is on our side and we win.

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk film was perhaps less than the sum of its parts. Still, the parts themselves were often striking, and as long as you had nothing against exploding frogs, split screens, heavily italicized comic-book dialogue, psychedelic Dali-inspired dream sequences, Hulk poodles, and a deranged Nick Nolte, you could be more than adequately entertained for long stretches of the film. Its main problem was that its notion of the Hulk as embodying a regression to a state of infantile rage sounded better in theory than it worked on the screen. The fanboys who complained about their hero being reduced to a big green baby weren't wrong.

The new Hulk film returns to the more familiar -- to those of us raised on the TV series -- Jekyll-and-Hyde archetype, now with Edward Norton credibly stepping into the Bill Bixby role. Dr Banner is again the haunted scientist searching to cure his terrible secret affliction. The Jekyll-and-Hyde premise is a tried-and-tested formula, and the new film begins well, with shrewd borrowings from the earlier film (the first of many, right from the imagery and expository use of the opening credits) and the Bond franchise. In no time at all we are in the midst of a superbly executed street chase, culminating in our first dramatic glimpse of the Hulk.

The trouble is, none of the film's later action sequences equal the tension of this early scene. By the time the Hulk takes melancholy refuge in a hillside cave midway through the movie, a sense of deja vu is already sinking in; and when we reach the ostensibly climactic final fight, we are, as one critic rightly observed, in King Kong versus Godzilla territory. For this turns out to be a film, assuredly intelligent and accomplished though it is in places, that nonetheless has not a single original idea of its own. Can anyone doubt that, this time, the studio made sure it got exactly the film it ordered? The cast looks good on paper, but thanks to a moderate script mostly delivers one-note performances. It's particularly disappointing to see William Hurt wasted in the role of General Ross. In the earlier film Sam Elliott brought both menace and empathy to the role. Hurt can manage neither, but he is not given much to work with. I also sorely missed the earlier film's sheer visual spectacle. The new film begins amid stunning views of an impoverished Brazilian township, but there is nothing later in the film to match the first film's desert chase, where the Hulk does battle with the military against a backdrop of vast sand dunes, ancient rock formations, and finally San Francisco's traffic.

The Hulk utters one of his signature lines at the climax of that scene: "Puny human!" He is hallucinating as he falls unconscious from a fighter plane he has ridden into the stratosphere, and he is addressing his terrified human alter ego. The new film gives him his other signature utterance, also at the climax of the action: "Hulk SMASH!" At this point the Hulk pounds a hole in the ground and his opponent falls into it. The contrast just about sums up the difference in ambition between the two films.

The new Get Smart movie is not exactly a resurrection of the old TV series. While Steve Carell is a passable doppelganger for Don Adams, nothing much remains of the other characters except the names. We see Max's original car and shoe phone and a few other props in a CONTROL museum (which creates a weird sense of displacement -- if this is Max, who drove the old car?), and there's a cameo by a well-known present-day actor which, for a blissful moment, takes us back to the style and mood of the original. But for the rest, it's a completely new show. And once you get over the initial disorientation, you can see the sense in that. Nobody can be Bernie Kopell's Siegfried again, or Barbara Feldon's Agent 99, who were in any case products of a more innocent time. Instead, the filmmakers have attempted -- and actually pulled off -- something much trickier: they've taken the spirit of the original and brought it up to date. Like the TV show, the new movie is smart but canny enough not to be too knowing, and it delivers its pratfalls without any trace of meanness. Anne Hathaway's 99 is as sassy as Barbara Feldon's, but is now a career woman trying to find a balance with her personal life. Alan Arkin's Chief is an avuncular old-timer who can barely conceal his contempt for the vice-president, or for the jocks at the CIA. The old TV series was the kind of show where a KAOS ape could fall to his doom by slipping on a banana peel. The new movie's action sequences step up the adrenalin a few notches but don't lose that sense of absurdity. (Airline lavatories are, apparently, still treacherous places to be.) As for Max himself, Steve Carell's incarnation is several degrees more oblique than Don Adams', but like him inhabits a zone that his adversaries only think they can reach. The new weapon in his arsenal is emotional intelligence, and in a 60s-ish touch, our heroes prevail in a few of their battles by making love instead of war. This is a movie that uses its talents for niceness instead of evil.

By interweaving the brutal reality of fascist Spain with a child's fantasy world, the filmmakers evidently hoped to say something deep about evil. Undoubtedly the juxtaposition of the two worlds is done with considerable guile, both in the transitions and in the visual echoes between them. The problem is that the film begins with a portrayal of evil, in its realistic scenes, that is so trite that the fantasy sequences have nothing of substance to elaborate upon, and end up being merely sentimental. Del Toro appears to equate evil with mere sadism, taking computer-enhanced violence as a shortcut to presumed moral insight. The characters who populate the tale – the despicable captain, the heroic resistance fighters, the compassionate doctor – are the flimsiest of stock figures. This weekend I saw Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants, where evil is a mysterious force that indelibly marks the rites of youth. That film attains a kind of terrible moral sobriety that is not to be found here. Watching the new film's all too consciously grandiloquent ending, I wasn't sure that it amounted to much more than Spielberg meets Tim Burton.

What we have here is essentially a remake of the Cinderella story, this time transplanted (aptly enough) to the world of high fashion. If the result isn't exactly fresh it is still smart and fast. It features, in Meryl Streep, the most delectably wicked of stepmothers; and of the fairy godmother, more later. They all get to go to the ball, which means flying to the big show in Paris, but in this telling it's not the prince but Cinderella who has to choose. As the downtrodden young heroine Anne Hathaway does creditably enough, treading the line between wide-eyed and streetwise. It's the princes, the true one and the false one, who don't measure up, and the lack of a believable relationship with either of them deprives the movie of even the modest moral tension that a fairy tale should have. The regular boyfriend is so bland and nice he might as well be played by a muppet, and he practically is. As the plausible but, wouldn't you know it, deep down sleazy alternative, Simon Baker assays Hugh Grant territory. But if Hugh Grant's (or, before him, Alan Alda's) career trajectory tells you anything, it's that the public has to hate you for being nice before it will like you for being a cad, and Baker hasn't put in the mileage yet. In the end, Cinderella does the right thing: after witnessing a coldly calculated act of betrayal, she leaves the world of high glamour and goes to work for a metropolitan newspaper, where, as everyone knows, such things never happen. One critic remarked that just once he'd like to see a picture where the heroine gains fame and success *and* finds a way to stay true to her conscience. It only later dawned on me that The Devil Wears Prada does indeed have a character who does just that. In the role of Nigel, the sage and devoted offsider, Stanley Tucci warms the film without oversweetening it. Watch the scene where he thinks that, at long last, his long years of loyal service are about to pay off. His is a Cinderella story within a Cinderella story, and it's where the real heart and soul of the film is to be found.

This is the first film I've seen by Truffaut, and it's like nothing I've seen before. The deftness with which he captures both the absurdity and the gravity of the evanescent moment takes your breath away. Here the camera swerves to give you a glimpse of a black car, and you understand that it is an omen of death; there we see the lovers bicycling on a country lane, and as you catch sight of the back of the woman's head, you understand that in this moment of delighted freedom, the man's longing for her is eternal. The use of music, light and lilting, is magically apt, always with the feeling of a half-remembered tune from another time in your life. The film sets out as a comedy, and later the heartache is more piercing for being shot through with sweetness and light. In hindsight, maybe all those buddy movies from the sixties and seventies, movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, owed something to this film, but they never began to match its effortless delicacy and style and depth. In an interview on the Criterion DVD Truffaut's cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, quotes a saying the French apparently have that "the silence after Mozart is still Mozart". The comparison is apt.

Little Children is an exceptional film about ordinary suburban people living lives of quiet desperation. It invites comparison with the best films in its genre, notably Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. But where Lee's film was a remarkable evocation of a time and place by an outsider, Todd Field's film is the work of someone who knows his territory from the inside.

The film works superbly well even simply on the level of a mood piece. Field's camera captures unerringly the feel of public and private spaces in the suburbs: it registers with barometric precision the different degrees of intimacy afforded by the dining room, the study and the bedroom, or the way a change of weather can change the whole mood of an afternoon. The film also has its spectacular disruptions of mood. In one of the film's indelible images, the child molester Ronald McGorvey upends a lazy afternoon at the pool by swimming, bug-eyed and almost biologically amphibious, among the splashing crowds of children.

Jackie Earle Haley's portrayal of McGorvey is arguably the most striking individual performance in a film that is notable as an ensemble piece. Where the Ronald McGorvey of Tom Perrotta's original novel was a coarsely drawn comic figure, Haley gives us a vulnerable monster, a sort of suburban Caliban. Haley's performance is one of many ways in which Field's film, like Lee's before him, transforms the caustic satire of its source material into something rather more intimate and sympathetic.

McGorvey is the alien in this community. The other characters are figures we easily recognize, like Jennifer Connelly as the wife perpetually distracted by her roles of career woman and mother. But our identification with the characters isn't of the kind that vindicates either them or us. Rather, we share only too uncomfortably in their inadequacies and desperation. Noah Emmerich's embittered, self-justifying ex-policeman is another memorable creation, a kind of tragicomic counterpart to John Goodman's Vietnam vet in The Big Lebowski.

Field's mastery of atmosphere especially allows the film to capture the mingled heat and ennui of the illicit love affair that is at the film's centre. The development and then the unravelling of the affair between the two participants, played with wit and conviction by Patrick Wilson and Kate Winslet, follows an arc that seems fateful without overbalancing into outright tragedy or farce, though it is piquantly tinged with both. The film's sensitivity to tone is of a piece with its unpleading empathy for its characters.

The film falters a little toward the end, contriving to gather its strands into an apotheosis. The voice-over, until now ironical in its matter-of-factness, begins to cloy. What is it about American filmmakers that even the most sober of them go weak at the knees at the thought of moralistic "redemption"? Earlier the film had been content to give its characters passing moments of quiet heartbreak and quiet consolation. Those moments outlast the resolution.

Brokeback Mountain has finally come to my town, and I can finally view it at my leisure. It is a movie that rewards repeated viewings. There's been so much said about this film that there hardly seems to be any point in writing a review, but here at least are a few random observations.

Before this viewing I'd finally managed to get hold of the "story to screenplay" book. Larry McMurtry's essay, though only a couple of pages long, is a knockout piece of writing. One of the things he talks about is the contrast between the big landscapes and the small lives of the people in it. There's a recurring editing trick in the movie that makes me think of the same thing. I think they call it an inline cut, but at any rate it's where you first view an object (or a person) from a distance, then closer up from exactly the same angle.

Some visual parallels struck me for the first time on this viewing. When Ennis gets the first postcard from Jack, he strokes its border the same way he does with the postcard at the end of the film. Time and again we are shown that, for an outdoorsman, Ennis can be remarkably gentle with his hands, and this is another example of it. And when he gets the fatal postcard, the camera swings behind his shoulder to an angle reminiscent of the one we see in the dead rancher scene. His visit to the Twist home also subtly recalls his first meeting with Jack, with the truck being seen from its right as it pulls in, and Jack's mother at the door.

Another thing that struck me this time is the way Jack's posture and body language remain the same through the years, only, well, older. The passage of years takes a greater toll on him than on Ennis, if only because Ennis was never all that young to begin with. I've reversed my earlier opinion that they don't age Jack convincingly during the course of the film. The makeup tricks are there if you look for them, but *emotionally* the change in his appearance is right: he gets more drawn, more edgy, more brittle, and his costume and makeup reflect this change.

Jake Gyllenhaal is being robbed blind this awards season. Look how much he can convey with a hopeful rise of the eyebrows, or a hesitation in his speech. His character is finely drawn and all of a piece. But I also noticed this time how Heath Ledger actually manages to work some comic timing into his taciturn portrayal of Ennis. Little pauses mean a lot in this film. Oh, and how superbly Michelle Williams does the pent-up silences and the ensuing outbursts in the "Jack Nasty" scene. She's a wonderful *voice* actor on top of everything else.

I always marvel at the performances of the two older actors as Jack's parents. This time I noticed how much of the impact of Peter McRobbie's performance as the father comes from the asymmetrical lighting and the unnerving movement of his eyes. I've come to think of his character as "the black and white monster" because of the lighting: maybe he is seen black and white because that is how he sees the world. This is also the scene where religious objects hover fuzzily in the background, something I can recall from at least one Ingmar Bergman film I've seen. (My favourite Bergman film: Winter Light.) In one shot it's a cross, in another a cowboy hat hangs above Ennis' head like a halo.

In scene after scene you notice the subtly (well, everything in this film is subtle) atmospheric use of ambient sound and music. Little things like the fact that you already hear the gentle trickling of a river outside the tent after their first night together -- the river signifying, as somebody suggested here, the passage of time ("same river twice"). Or the sound of the wind in so many scenes. Or the tinny noises of the television sets and other electrical appliances in the domestic scenes. Or the way we cut from LaShawn's gabbiness to Alma Jr's quietness. I've come to love Gustavo Santaolalla's score as well, deceptively plain but full of unexpected cadences, tracking every nuance of mood. People rightly talk about the two tent scenes but the whole sequence in between them is every bit as remarkable, with shots of stark and disturbing beauty, and those strange woodwind tones in the soundtrack.

And with each viewing I marvel more than ever at Ang Lee's ability to weave together multiple emotional strands, as in the leadup to the first fishing trip, when we move in rapid succession from a sort of domestic farce to Alma's heartbreak to the liberating vistas of the mountains as the truck arcs its way towards them. Nobody can modulate emotional tone from scene to scene, or even within a scene, the way Lee can. At his best he can sustain this feat through an entire movie, as he does here. There's a kind of visual music that flows through the whole film.

More than anything else I've come to love the tempo, the rhythm, the texture of the film. There's a quiet warmth that runs right through it, a kind of savouring of ordinary life, of domestic things, of everyday toil, of companionship and solitude, of private griefs, of shared days and nights. Nothing is romanticized, yet nothing ever feels jaded. I'm no art connoisseur, but I vividly remember the effect that Millet's peasant paintings had on me when I first saw them, and there's something of the same spirit here. This is a film that, in the midst of the larger tragedy, never stops being grateful for the most commonplace things in life.

A curious film opportunistically rather than convincingly assembled from a medley of genres. Its title announces that here will be the creation story for its subject, and sure enough, just as Peter Parker was bitten by a spider, young Bruce Wayne is startled by a swarm of bats. Hey, I think I'm getting the hang of this. Batman's sidekick Robin doesn't figure in this movie, but if and when we are introduced to him in the inevitable sequel I'm expecting a homage to Hitchcock's The Birds.

Young Bruce's dad is such a nice man that you just know that he is going to meet an untimely end, and he duly does. The grief-stricken Bruce grows up and goes out into the world seeking to understand the criminal mind. Apparently not finding enough examples in America, he ends up on a mountaintop somewhere in the Orient, where he imbibes ancient wisdoms huskily intoned by Liam Neeson in a Charlie Chan moustache. In a blur of rapid editing, Bruce becomes some kind of martial arts master. Later Neeson conveniently doubles as the movie's chief villain, proving that you don't actually have to be Oriental to be inscrutable and duplicitous. We Asians should, I suppose, be grateful for small mercies.

The grown Bruce is played by Christian Bale, whose resemblance to a young George W. Bush is uncanny and disturbing, not least in the furrowed blankness he assumes when trying to look serious. It's a relief when he dons the mask and cape (evidently not heeding Edna's warnings in The Incredibles) and collects his crime-fighting gadgets. The latter are supplied by Morgan Freeman, who in effect plays Q, adding to the growing impression that this movie is basically 007 in drag.

The movie plays itself out in a tumult of smoke, raking lights and shadows. In the manner of this genre, the script is liberally sprinkled with references to personal integrity, filial loyalty, and the nature of evil in society. Some superhero movies successfully weave these themes into their stories, as Bryan Singer's X-Men movies do. But here style is never sculpted into substance, and the villains remain as unmemorable as the heroes.

Katie Holmes is the love interest and supplies the theme of romantic abnegation that the movie shamelessly borrows from the Spiderman franchise. Gary Oldman turns in solid work as the honest cop, this time cunningly disguised as Ned Flanders. Michael Caine, himself once the supreme dispenser of ironic justice, is now content to play the faithful butler. Cillian Murphy, however, is well cast as one of Batman's adversaries, and shows that Elijah Wood has not cornered the market in wimpy fiends.

I expected more from the director of Memento. Not long ago I saw a movie featuring another troubled hero who must straddle the world of ordinary life and the dark underworld of crime, and must in the process face down his own lineup of campy villains. It was called A History of Violence, and it is a much better film.

Does Kong live again? The answer for me is yes although, if you'll forgive the cricketing metaphor, he bowls off rather a long run.

But first let's get the unavoidable question out of the way: how's the CGI? Oddly enough, they seem to have got pretty good at close-up facial expressions these days, but distant full-body shots still have that rubbery look about them. Think Hairy Hulk. It's a credit to Peter Jackson, though, that this suits the story's priorities.

After a strong start, the first hour of the movie is heavy going. Jackson really likes his characters, and you have to like that about him, but he indulges them like a favourite uncle until well past bedtime. Apparently Jackson has not heard of the expression "cut to the chase", although this perhaps suits a country whose ecosystem revolves around a flightless bird. There was a nice in-joke about Fay Wray, though, if you weren't out refilling your popcorn. Happily, too, Jack Black is back to being a bad boy and as the dastardly entrepreneur puts in his best performance since High Fidelity.

The second hour or so, after our heroes disembark on Skull Island, contains some splendid set pieces and some somewhat less inspired ones. In some of them I fancied I could tell what some of Jackson's favourite movie action sequences are: some Raiders creepy-crawlies here, a bit of Crouching Tiger aerial gymnastics there, like seeing Kong in his own franchised theme park. Parents are advised not to bring precocious children who might be prone to ask awkward questions about the movie's palaeozoology. All in all, I would have trimmed the Skull Island sequences a bit and saved them for the diehards hungrily awaiting the Special Edition DVD. Unless the 3-hour cut I saw *was* the trimmed-down theatrical release and there are bonus monsters galore in an as yet unseen Director's Cut of Wagnerian proportions.

But there's another scene I would cut first. I don't see what excuse there can be for presenting stereotypes of lip-blubbering, eye-rolling "natives" these days, if there ever was one. The inability to get past these sorts of stereotypes is foolish in every possible way. It's a sad day when you put more time and studio dollars into the verisimilitude of a gorilla than of your fellow human beings.

The movie hits its stride once the crew, or what's left uneaten of it, returns to New York. There is pathos in the beast, and Andy Serkis shows his range in spite of being even more unrecognizable from his last role than Gary Oldman usually is. Naomi Watts is the femme fatale, and a wholesomely winning one. Much has been made of the alleged inter-species romance between the two, but most of the time it felt more to me like an only-child's-secret-friend story, with Watts sometimes appearing to channel Shirley Temple. Adrien Brody is kept busy as Watt's nominal human love interest, though mainly he seems to be there to prove that Naomi has a thing for flared nostrils.

But the movie delivers where it counts. The Empire State sequence is beautifully and dramatically filmed, and you'd have to be Dick Cheney on Botox to have a dry eye at the end of it. There's a great shot of the crusty fighter pilot's face when he spots Naomi pleading for Kong. Jackson doesn't seem to spare much of a thought, though, for the fighter crews whom Kong swats out of the air, or the theatregoers he tramples underfoot. It might have been a better movie if he did, for Kong might then have truly been raised to the stature of a tragic monster, and not just an enlarged and even cuddlier version of Peter Jackson. Which is the least anyone could do for him, considering what our species has put him through.

Spielberg's War of the Worlds is half of a good film.

The early stages of the movie show Spielberg at something close to his best, creating the sense (as he did years ago in classics like Jaws and Duel) of the rhythms of everyday life being disrupted by an unknown force. There is a convincingly down-to-earth feel about these early scenes, with Spielberg eschewing his usual weakness for portentous dialogue or glamourized cinematography, if not his weakness for special-effects gore. The first appearance of the alien tripods is genuinely shocking, and the mood of mounting panic in the crowd is palpable.

It is clear that Spielberg intends the film to be an allegory for America's experience of terrorism. At first the point seems to be powerfully made. Tom Cruise comes across initially as an inspired piece of casting, playing a character who is cocksure and immature and complacent, yet resourceful and basically decent -- the image of America itself. There are some striking images, some of which explicitly evoke 9/11. But as the film wears on, these images seem to be opportunistically repeated rather than being thematically developed in any way. The first sign of trouble is the gratuitous appearance of a crashed airliner in the front yard of a house. The wreckage conveniently misses the parked car in the driveway which will be the family's means of escape. Comically, the car then manages to wind speedily through stalled traffic most of the way from New York to Boston with barely a toot of the horn. In a piece of perhaps unconscious irony, the car comes to seem as important a symbol as any in the film -- a symbol, in this case, of the accustomed American way of life.

The film goes nowhere in its second half. Most of it is set in a basement where suspense is built up as routinely and pointlessly as in any teen horror film. There is no plot development to speak of. Spielberg makes little attempt to find a cinematic way of explaining the aliens' eventual downfall, lamely relegating the explanation to a voice-over at the end.

There is another allegory here waiting to be explored. It is the story of an invading power that uses its overwhelming technological advantage ruthlessly to crush everything in its path, and still fails in the end because of inadequate preparation and the inability to adapt to local conditions. Apart from one throwaway line uttered by a minor character ("occupations always fail, right?"), the film does not come within a lunging tentacle of such discomfiting thoughts.

There's something of a tradition in fiction of using the idiot savant to hold the mirror up to society and reflect its foibles. The figure of the Good Soldier Schweik was one I remember being introduced to in my early years at university. Forrest Gump is also a soldier for much of this picture's duration, but the satire is diluted to no more than a few bum and fart jokes in the presence of the great and the good.

Maybe it's this evasiveness that caused this film to attract such a storm of criticism from the Left when it first appeared. Seven years on, it's hard to see the film's reluctance to take on biting social satire as something it deserved to be damned for. More likely, it's the film's unflattering portrayal of the counter culture of the sixties that made its baby boomer critics touchy. For the most part, it's a gentle and appealingly whimsical picture. Australian - and more particularly, Melbourne - viewers will recognize in it something of the spirit of Michael Leunig's cartoons. In keeping with this spirit is the one aspect of this film that could be regarded as controversial, which is its scepticism toward causes.

Tom Hanks is excellent. It says something about the rest of the world's stereotypes about American culture that one of America's biggest movie stars can hold the screen for hour after hour while remaining the most self-effacing of actors. There is charm and real emotion in his performance. If the film sometimes veers into sentimentality (and it does) it is not Hanks' fault.

The film isn't a masterpiece. As I say, it does sometimes lapse into sentimentality, and it annoys me that, like Rain Man, it can't acknowledge disability without conferring on its disabled characters superhuman talents of one kind or another. And, as I'm sure others have pointed out, the trick shots involving Gump's encounters with various historical personages had already been done - to much sharper comic effect - by Woody Allen in Zelig. However, for me the film's greatest specific failing is that it doesn't do more with the character of Gump's love, Jenny, who doesn't do much more in this film than turn up every half hour or so and look beautiful. I thought there was scope there to explore the nature of their mutual dependence more deeply, and to illuminate both characters in the process. To some extent this does happen with the character of Lieutenant Dan, a nicely drawn character who provides the right sort of counterweight to Gump.

I don't expect that I will want to see this film again and again, the way I keep going back to Leunig's cartoons, which have a kind of natural wisdom-in-innocence that Zemeckis' film sometimes visibly strains to achieve. It's not a film that particularly goes anywhere, not that it really means to. But, a little to my surprise, I did enjoy watching it.

This is an appealing film, and the main source of its appeal is, I suspect, nostalgia for the period it depicts on the part of people who were there. But I think there's a conflict between this rose-tinted view of the past and the film's artistic aims.

The tagline gives it away: "Experience it. Enjoy it. Just don't fall for it." It's obvious that, in addition to reliving the good times, the director also wants to depict the moral and artistic compromise his characters slide into. But the film pulls its punches here. (** SPOILER ALERT **) Take the scene where a record company rep makes a pitch to the group and tells them they need new management. For a moment it looks as if they are going to have to choose between their new management and their existing manager, who is one of the group. But then, in one easy sentence, the film dodges the issue: the rep tells them they don't have to ditch him. (** END SPOILER ALERT **)There are other key scenes, notably another act of betrayal late in the film involving several of the main characters, which just don't make the emotional gut impact that they should.

You could argue that such serious sentiments would be out of place in what is, after all, a comedy. The trouble is, the film does raise them, and then it looks the other way. I would like to think that the film's comedy could have been sharper if it had also been more honest. In a way, it comes across as a comfortable middle-aged view of youth, not exactly forgetful of its torments and wildness but recollecting them in tranquillity.

Part of the problem is that Billy Crudup, as the group's leader, doesn't really succeed in bringing out the conflict in his character. I'm not sure that he managed to do more than veer between middle-class niceness and sheepishness. Good as she is, I don't find Kate Hudson's to be quite the starmaking performance that her supporters say it is either. Perhaps the comparison is unfair, but my mind went back to what Liza Minnelli did with an in some ways similar role in Cabaret.

There's a lot to enjoy in the smaller roles and incidental scenes. For all my reservations, I wouldn't want to put anyone off seeing this film.

Gladiator isn't a great film by any means, but it isn't nearly as bad as some reviews would suggest. Sure, it depends mainly on big budget spectacle and production design to achieve its effect, but it's surprising how far big budget spectacle can take you.

I disagree with those who say that Russell Crowe was more or less interchangeable with any other Hollywood action star in the main role. I thought his basic persona - the strong yet vulnerable man carrying deep hurts - was quite well used in this film, and his performance and Connie Nielsen's lent a semblance of human interest to a script that didn't give them much to work with. The film's ability to build human drama isn't helped by its failure to provide a credible villain: it's obvious from the beginning that Commodus is no more going to be a match for Maximus than Frank Burns was for Hawkeye and B.J.

Some people have also criticized the film for its gratuitous violence, but I'm not sure if I go along with that either. If you are going to make a gladiator movie, you might as well go for broke. As a number of commentators have pointed out, we go to gladiator movies for pretty much the same reason as the Romans went to the Colosseum. To see blood.

Having said all that, I don't think the film was particularly well made. The film seems if anything to get less spectacular as it goes along, and what should be a series of climactic sequences at the end come across as hurried and confused. There are also rather too many places where the film is unintentionally comic. There's the film's odd notion that the Roman ruling classes all spoke in upper-class British accents. Then there are what look like odd borrowings from, or maybe misplaced tributes to, other films: the American Beauty-style falling petals, or the slow-motion battle sequences, which looked elegiacal in Kurosawa but seem Pythonesque here. Actually, even Maximus' name struck me as Pythonesque - I kept wondering whether his first name was Naughtius, and whether he had a friend called Biggus. Perhaps Naughtius Maximus would be an apt nickname for Russell Crowe in real life.

Once or twice the film does hint at higher ambitions. It touches on the theme of Commodus', Gracchus' and Maximus' relationships with the public, and the potential was there for the film to be a very original type of political thriller - something that would have given point to all those crowd scenes and all those power plays. But that theme isn't developed. In the end, Gladiator is not that kind of film.

Some semi-spoilers below.

Top Five differences between the book and the film:

1. Thanks to Iben Hjejle's wonderful performance, Laura emerges as a real, independent person more strongly than she does in the book, where we tend to see her only through the prism of Rob's self-absorbed personality. The film also builds up our perception of what Laura means to Rob by giving us Rob's Top Five Things I Miss about Laura, which I don't remember being in the book. The film does add something here.

2. The film ends with Rob and Laura implicitly but clearly on the way to middle-class, middle-aged prosperity and contentment. Rob starts his own record company, Laura enjoys her career success. The book is more equivocal. In the book, Laura resents having to work in the corporate world, and Rob just ends up sticking with what he knows. The film ends up affirming the American Way; the book gives its characters smaller joys in the bleakness of post-Thatcher Britain. The film's relatively upbeat ending isn't overdone, but I prefer the book.

3. In the film, things take their natural course in the car scene. In the book, Rob finds an excuse to desist, as a way of hurting Laura. In a way, the book is more complex and interesting at this point, but it's probably one twist too many and, anyway, it assumes a degree of self-control on Rob's part that he doesn't show any sign of anywhere else in the story. I give this one to the film.

4. In the film, Dick meets his girlfriend by discovering mutual musical interests in the record shop. Those of us who have spent half our lives hanging around used record shops know that those places aren't exactly the Love Boat; the only people you ever meet are sad, solitary, dissolute males like yourself. The book has Dick meeting his girlfriend somewhere outside of hours, and then progressively trying to indoctrinate her with his favourite music. This is a lot more true to life.

5. Ian/Ray is a somewhat distant, shadowy figure in the book. Tim Robbins brings him to life brilliantly in the film. Rob imagines a much more physical comeuppance for him in the film than he gets in the book, and this works very well on the big screen. This is a good example of the film staying very true to the spirit of the book even when some of the details differ.

All in all, the film is very enjoyable and if you read the book you'll see how skilfully the film has been adapted from it. But inevitably the book has more time to dwell on Rob's thoughts, and since it's Rob's internal mid-life crisis that the story is all about, I think the book does have more to offer. It's a pity also that the film didn't make better use of the soundtrack to reflect the characters' emotional lives, which after all is the whole idea of the story. Still, this is a great film to sit down with in front of the video player with that pizza and that beer and those kettle chips.

This is an unusually subtle and beautiful film about the migrant experience. In small but resonant ways it explores themes of memory, identity and tradition both at the level of the culture and of the individual. In some ways it reminds me of _Hiroshima mon amour_, a much better known film on similar themes which may be a useful reference point for anyone who is not sure what to expect from this film.

Some of the simplest images in this film are also its most powerful: there's poignancy in something as unremarkable as a shot of the contents of a refrigerator, or in a young girl's distress at being told that her cherished local McDonald's is not a "traditional restaurant". It's not that the film is merely nostalgic, however. It's more about what it means to be poised in the instant between a meaningful past and an unknowable but very different future. At the very heart of the film is an unforgettable soliloquy by an old woman about her wishes for her descendants.

This is not a film that everybody will be able to relate to. But for the increasing number of us who find ourselves displaced from old certainties, it is gratifying, haunting and challenging to see a film like this one.