Parky at the Pictures (DVD 21/11/2013)

Prompted by this notion of pointing readers in the direction of some classics and curios, we have unearthed some reviews that date back to the turn of the century and might just inspire the odd enjoyable evening.

We start with an alphabetical selection of foreign-language films from Europe and Asia.

THE BARBER OF SIBERIA (1998).

From the moment a steam train pulls into a Russian station and American gentlewoman Jane Callahan (Julia Ormond) lays down her copy of Anna Karenina to catch sight of an army cadet named Tolstoy (Oleg Menshikov), writer-director Nikita Mikhalkov's motives seem obvious. Drawing on the venerable traditions of national literature, he has decided to follow his Oscar-winning triumph, Burnt By the Sun (1994), with another sprawling period drama that not only evokes nostalgia for more innocent times, but which also drips with contemporary resonance.

But conspiracy theorists in the Russian press detected more devious intentions. Scenting foul play in the award of a $10m government contribution to the $45m budget - that made it the most expensive indigenous film of all time - certain correspondents wondered whether the Establishment was not assisting Mikhalkov in the production of a hymn to Mother Russia that could also double as an election broadcast for any future push for the presidency - hence his magisterial cameo the universally popular Tsar, Alexander III.

Yet, while such speculation is fascinating and goes some way to explaining the scale of this handsome picture, it still leaves the thorny question of why The Barber of Siberia is such a monumental disappointment. The most evident failing is the lack of intimacy that characterised such previous historical dramas as Oblomov (1980) and Dark Eyes (1987). The plot may sweep from 1880s Moscow to Siberia (via a 1905 American bootcamp) and convey something of the enormity of the country's potential (and problems), but such grandiloquence reduces the characters to dots on the landscape.

Thus, we never care about Jane's romance with Tolstoy, nor her efforts to persuade the bibulous General Radlov (Alexei Petrenko) to stump up the cash that will enable eccentric inventor Douglas McCracken (Richard Harris) to develop the monstrous deforestation device of the title. The coldness of the performances, particularly from the monotone Ormond, doesn't help much, either.

But, perhaps more serious, is the showy inconsequence of it all. The politics are superficial, the melodrama is convolutedly dull, the comedy broad and unfunny (a piano skating on an over-polished floor typifying the buffoonery) and the spectacle (from ice fair to military parade) exists in a diegetic vacuum. It's an undeniably polished production. But for all its vainglorious auteurism, it bears the hallmark of a image-conscious showman rather than a master film-maker.

BUTTERFLY'S TONGUE (1999).

There has long been a disconcerting tendency in Spanish cinema to romanticise the Civil War era. The chief culprit in recent times has been Fernando Trueba, whose Oscar-winning melodrama Belle Epoque (1992) had a naive army deserter stumble into a pastoral idyll, populated by an artist's beautiful daughters, while The Girl of Your Dreams (1998) used a co-production, staged on a UFA movie set, to suggest that Spanish fascism was somehow less pernicious than Nazism.

It's perhaps inevitable that Trueba should spring to mind in assessing this cosy rites of passage picture, as it has been co-scripted by Rafael Azcona (who co-wrote Belle Epoque) and headlines that film's star, Fernando Fernán Gómez. But what's more surprising is that it's been directed by Jose Luis Cuerda, who produced those dazzlingly inventive thrillers, Tesis (1996) and Open Your Eyes (1997), for Alejandro Amenabar, who, almost unfeasibly, composed the score for this quaint period piece.

Set in the winter of 1936, the action takes place in one of those microcosmic villages that exist only in movies to allow directors to make subtle allegorical points. Initially petrified by his brother's stories of brutal tyranny, seven year-old Mocho (Manuel Lozano) soon comes to worship his ageing teacher, Don Gregorio (Fernán Gómez), who not only instils in him a love of literature and nature, but also helps him understand girls.

However, the shadow of conflict is about to eclipse the golden light that bathes this secluded corner of Galicia and, having seen his Catholic mother browbeat his tailor father into a rejection of his atheist Republicanism, Mocho is forced to choose sides when his mentor is arrested and denounced by his cowardly neighbours.

Handsomely photographed, amiably performed and passing some astute observations on the fragility of childhood innocence and the baseness of human nature, this is heritage film-making at its most middlebrow. Awash with the age-gap sentimentality that made Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Jan Sverák's Kolya (1996) so engaging, its chocolate-box nostalgia will linger longer than the shock of the denouement.

But, surely, a grittier picture would have made more impact. By rooting this unlikely friendship in a grim, urban environment, Cuerda would have been able to give us a truer insight into why so many people were seduced by Franco's invidious doctrines. Shattering a neverland dream seems twee and inconsequential. Making reality even more hellish would have been unendurable.

LES DESTINÉES SENTIMENTALES (1998).

Disillusioned with both his calling as a Protestant minister and his marriage to the unfaithful Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), Jean Barnery (Charles Berling) abandons both. Following a distressing period of penury and illness, he finds himself at the head of the family porcelain business alongside his new wife, Pauline (Emmanuelle Béart). But the world and principles he values so highly are rapidly being overtaken by war and societal change.

At round about the time this film opens, French cinema was attempting to attract a new audience. Although hugely popular with the working classes, moving pictures lacked cultural credibility. So, around the mid-1900s, the Film D'Art company began releasing screen versions of classical plays and historical dramas. Gradually, cinema earned its social and intellectual respectability and the costume film continued to play an exalted role in its triumph. Indeed, it was considered such a prestige product by the Hollywood studios that it was entrusted with introducing key technical advances like colour (Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp, 1935) and widescreen (Henry Koster's The Robe, 1953).

But in the non-bookish, blockbuster era, the period picture seems to have had its day. The name Merchant-Ivory, say, is greeted with derision by a generation of critics and audiences reared, almost exclusively, on soundbite cinema. But this is a reaction based primarily on the inverted snobbery that has led to the dumbing down of so many aspects of our lives.

It's fitting, therefore, that Olivier Assayas should explore the passing vogue for quality in this sprawling adaptation of Jacques Chardonne's Proustian novel. A preponderance of the reviews attacked Les Destinées sentimentales for its length, pace and narrative complexity. Indeed, many have opined that the director would have been better advised to stick to the quirky contemporary dramas with which he made his name. But, like Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy and Terence Davies's The House of Mirth, Assayas's film has succeded in using the past to highlight current concerns. So, while he may have failed to convince those for whom French cinema means either Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1986) or Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995), he has still managed to produce a work of artistic merit and intelligence.

He may not have avoided every costume cliché (the seemingly obligatory ball scene is present and correct). But both he and cinematographer Eric Gautier have, at least, blown away some of that heritage fustiness by employing a modern visual idiom instead of the traditional chocolate-box approach. Assayas has also bravely attempted to retain the structure of the tripartite novel, going so far as to open each section with a chapter heading. However, he may have been too reverential towards the text, as there is so much plot to cram in that several events are disappointingly diluted. The First World War, for example, is over in a couple of frames, while the entire 1920s are compressed into a handful of airless scenes.

Similarly, too many potentially intriguing characters are consigned to the margins. But Assayas still takes time to appreciate the care and skill of the craftsman, whether he be bringing brandy to maturation or perfecting the glaze on a porcelain dish. And it's here that the film makes its most telling impact, for in these times of soulless mass production and the instant gratification of consumerist whim, it's well worth celebrating old-fashioned methods and pride in one's work.

The central theme of the enduring power of love rather gets lost amidst the socio-economic concerns of the closing third. The performances are studied, rather than inspired and the direction occasionally detached and over-cautious. But Assayas has gone some way to achieving his aim, which was to recreate the blend of intimacy, formal beauty and psychological truth that made the period dramas of Luchino Visconti so memorable.

DRÔLE DE FÉLIX (2000).

Having made their debut with the musical, Jeanne et le garçon formidable (1998), Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau turn to the road movie for their second outing. Travelling through a France outsiders rarely see, it's an amiable but frustrating picture that raises several important issues only to skirt or gloss over them.

Having lost his job as a barman on a cross-Channel ferry, Félix (Sami Bouajila), a gay, HIV+ half-Arab, decides to travel to Marseilles to find the father he never knew. Leaving his teacher lover in Dieppe, he encounters the essential decency of the majority, while also coming to terms with an undercurrent of racial and homophobic prejudice that pervades all strata of French society. Moreover, having caught the eye of 17 year-old Jules (Charly Sergue), he gains fresh insight into the nature of the family, for each of the people he meets represents for him an idealised relative - the little brother who seeks a guiding hand through a sexual crisis; the grandmother (Patachou) who defied convention and came to regret her decision; the cousin, with whom he has an unexpected woodland tryst; and the sister (Ariane Ascaride), who has three children by different fathers.

Stemming from a clumsily contrived plot device, this is more a collision of characters than a linear odyssey - even though it reaches a resolution of sorts through the final encounter with a world-weary fisherman (Maurice Benichou), who persuades Félix to abandon his quest and spare both his father and himself unnecessary hurt. But what is more disappointing than the sketchiness of the characters is the way the screenplay touches on issues without exploring them in any depth. Indeed, the only incisive social commentary comes in the most throwaway moments.

Everything else is handled with such sensitivity that there's no room for opinion, even though the topics are as compelling as loveless marriage, racial tension, the decline in organised religion, urban violence, sexual responsibility, the pronounced differences between maternal and paternal feeling and the clash between a proud heritage and an unashamedly dumbed-down present. Félix is clearly a totemic figure for a cosmopolitan society still in the throes of resolving its identity crisis. But there's no way the nation at large is going to find a solution to its problems as easily and cosily as he does in the arms of his lover on a millpond crossing to Corsica.

EAST-WEST (1999).

Regis Wargnier is the kind of film-maker the auteurs of the New Wave thought they'd eradicated for good. No one flaunts their allegiance to what François Truffaut so disparagingly called the `Tradition of Quality' with such pride. His films are glossy, verbose and composed with the calcified perfection of an Academician's still-life.Yet, he also has a knack of delving into France's chequered past and unearthing stories that are compelling almost in spite of themselves. He won an Oscar for putting Catherine Deneuve through Vietnamese hell in Indochine (1992) and then subjected Emmanuelle Béart to a string of wartime lovers in the wincingly autobiographical Une Femme française (1994). So it should come as no surprise to discover that he has placed another woman in extremis in another historical backwater in East-West.

Keen to repair the damage wrought by both his own Purges and the Nazi invasion, Stalin proclaimed an amnesty to all Russian exiles at the end of the Second World War. However, as Dr Alexei Golovin (Oleg Menshikov) and his French wife Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire) soon discover, the state is still in the grip of repressive tyranny. Seeking to survive by acquiescing in the system, Alexei begins an affair with a Party official (Tatiana Doguileva), leaving Marie to find solace in Sacha (Sergei Bodrov, Jr.), an Olympic swimming prospect who promises to smuggle her home.

No melodramatic stone is left unturned in this sprawling chronicle of one woman's misery and courage. From the moment the Golovins' fellow passengers are murdered by the KGB at Odessa (the scene of the massacre in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, no less), it's clear that stereotypes and clichés are to be the order of the day. Police spies linger on every landing in the crumbling Kiev apartment block. Decency is scarcer than food and treachery the only guarantee of security. In such circumstances, it's almost inevitable that Marie should end up in a gulag.

Yet Wargnier manages to draw us into this nest of alcoholics, cowards and informers and make us care about Marie's fate. It's readily evident that visiting French diva Gabrielle Develay (Catherine Deneuve) is going to be her saviour. But he makes us wait for her deliverance, taunting us with cruelly glib captions declaring the passage of substantial periods of time before she finally reaches Sofia as part of a prestigious choir.

It's unscrupulous manipulation, made all the more heinous by the platitudinous booming of Patrick Doyle's overbearing score. Yet, the sheer professionalism of the production sustains the frequently flagging interest and even wards off incredulity during the onrush of increasingly improbable events leading to the inevitable denouement. Menshikov impresses as the spineless opportunist. But it's the admirable Bonnaire who hauls the enterprise above miniseries melodramatics, as she continues to look marvellous despite enduring untold deprivations and torments.

THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN (1998).

Checking in at $20 million, Chen Kaige's historical epic is the most expensive Asian film ever produced. Much has been made of its length, complexity and opulence. But what is most fascinating about it is the manner in which Chen draws on range of cultural influences to explore themes that are quintessentially Chinese.

Divided into five chapters, the action takes some following. In the third century B.C., China was divided into seven kingdoms. However, Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian) believes he has a heavenly mandate to unite them around his own state of Qin. In order to lure Yan into war, he devises a plan with his former concubine, Lady Zhao (Gong Li), in which she will escape with Yan's hostaged prince (Sun Zhou) and plot an assassination attempt, which Zheng can then use as a pretext for invasion.

However, Zheng's victories have prompted megalomanic tendencies and while he's conducting a palace purge, Lady Zhao comes to realise the extent of his tyranny, as she witnesses the devastation of her own homeland. Moreover, she has fallen in love with the hired assassin, Jing Ke (Zhang Fengyi), who has avowed violence after driving a blind girl to suicide by the slaughter of her family. But, if Zheng is to be stopped, Jing's own honour will have to be sacrificed.

With sumptuous cinematography by Zhao Fei and meticulously recreated sets by Tu Juhua, this has all the formal rigour that has become the Fifth Generation's trademark. Yet, there's a danger that such splendour is edging towards pictorialism, especially bearing in mind the rougher, readier style of such Sixth Generation films as Jia Zhang-ke's Xiao Wu (1997) and Yang Zhang's Shower (1999).

The performances, though passionate, are equally stylised, with the more intense and intimate sequences evoking the emotional timbre of Noh drama. However, this is in keeping with the film's magpie approach, as there is also a Shakespearean feel to the proceedings, which is reinforced by the fact the battle scenes owe much to Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), which was a bowdlerisation of King Lear

Like Kurosawa, Chen seems to have borrowed from the Western (a genre obsessed with the forging of a nation), with Jing bearing the force of moral rectitude that comes from being a reluctant hero, who will only renege on his vow to combat a greater evil. Considering this theme of national destiny, it's surely no coincidence, therefore, that the scene depicting the corpses stewn across the Zhao battlefield recalls both the Atlanta depot sequence in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939) and the post-battle segment in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938).

Yet for all its historical significance, this is also a film with contemporary resonance. Echoing Zhang Yimou's Not One Less (see below), Chen laments the deleterious influence of the current consumerist boom, in which greed and ambition have come to replace integrity and duty. But, the most powerful subtext is the courageous criticism of Beijing's increasingly bellicose attitude towards Taiwan, which many regard as the last obstacle to a new Chinese unity.

FLAMENCO (1995).

Following the route taken by Romany culture from its origins in northern India to Spain and Eastern Europe, Tony Gatliff's Latcho Drom (1993) Was a moving and often exhilarating tribute to the indomitability of a people whose bitter experiences are reflected in their music.
Having already proved himself to be the master of the genre with his breathtaking `flamenco' trilogy of Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983) and A Love Bewitched (1986), Carlos Saura had the opportunity to perform a similar service with this paean to another song-and-dance form tempered in the fires of suffering. However, by refusing to supply subtitles to the lyrics of these impassioned songs, he has excluded the vast majority of his non-Hispanic audience and turned a potentially joyous celebration into something of a trial by lighting change.

Staged in an abandoned railway station in Seville, Flamenco is a masterclass in controlled stylisation. As each of the 300 or so dancers, singers and musicians demonstrate their art, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro employs a range of atmospheric lighting designs that not only convey the tone of the piece, but often suggest a subtle campfire glow. Consequently, the dance routines are stunning, with the minimalist backdrops allowing us to concentrate on the grace and power of a form that dates back to the 14th century, although modern flamenco emerged from an amalgamation of Indian, Romany, Jewish, Arabic and Greek influences in 19th-century Andalucia.

As in the trilogy, Saura adheres to Fred Astaire's tactic of utilising long shots to capture every nuance of the performance and ensure that it's the raw emotion of the dancer that holds the screen, not the camera's contrived choreography. If only the songs had been filmed with such democracy. But by adopting the sort of cultural integrity that characterises the Eurovision Song Contest, Saura robs us of the opportunity to engage intellectually and emotionally with the singers, as the so-called `duende' or psychological purity of the song has been withheld. Moreover, it reduces the impact of the performance, as the shading of the delivery is virtually meaningless.

The aim here was clearly to preserve the genius of performers who span the age range and prove that a proud tradition remains as vibrant as ever. It's just a shame we are not allowed to bask in its glory.

GOYA IN BORDEAUX (1999).

Francisco Goya y Lucientes lived in turbulent times. He witnessed the decline of imperial Spain under the quartet of ineffectual kings he served as court painter. He survived the Napoleonic invasion and the tyrannical restoration that saw the reimposition of the feared and detested Inquisition. And, yet, he was forced to end his days in exile, after finally recognising the futility of his liberal dreams.

Alongside these political disappointments, Goya also experienced physical and psychological trauma. Deaf at the age of 46, he became increasingly introspective following his passionate affair with the influential courtier, the Duchess of Alba. Yet, not even failing sight could prevent him from working and, in his later years, he found the artistic means to convey his torment by experimenting with a style that broke from traditional representation to anticipate Impressionism.

It's regrettable that it's necessary to preface this consideration of Carlos Saura's visually stunning study of Goya with a history lesson. But a basic grasp of the key events makes it easier both to understand the link between his life and works and more fully appreciate the ingenuity and beauty of Vittorio Storaro's meticulous compositions.

Alternating between hallucinatory remembrances and anecdotes related to his youngest daughter, the historical incidents provide Saura with the opportunity to reference canvases, sketches and lithographs from all parts of Goya's career. Moreover, the flashback structure is intended to suggest the old man's growing sense of dislocation and disillusion. But, the vignettes are dramatically uneven and often rather dry. This can partly be explained by the fact that Jose Coronado (who plays the artist as a young man) lacks the charisma of Francisco Rabal, whose physiognomy is a performance in itself. But, it owes more to the fact that Saura seems more intent on exploring how personal experience combined with the prime influences of `Rembrandt, Velazquez and Imagination' to shape Goya's art. Consequently, the emphasis is more on the paintings themselves and here Saura and Storaro outdo themselves. All the studio artifice that made Flamenco and Tango (1998) so sumptuous is channelled into creating a glorious series of living tableaux.

The 18th-century segments have the formal discipline of Goya's `silver' period, while also reflecting the cool intellectualism of the Enlightenment. But it's in capturing the visceral energy of the `black paintings' that the film excels, as it imparts both the formal liberation of  Romanticism and Goya's mental turmoil. In particular, the painstaking recreation of `The Miracle of St Anthony of Padua', `The Disasters of War', `The Follies' and `Asmodea' is a stunning achievement. As a drama, Goya in Bordeaux is frustratingly inconsistent. As a treatise on inspiration, it obscures as much as it reveals. But purely as a piece of image making, it's a majestic success.

HIMALAYA (1999).

Originally known as Caravan, the title under which it was unexpectedly nominated for an Oscar, travel writer Eric Valli's debut feature is both a spectacular portrait of one of the planet's last unspoilt regions and a respectful tribute to a passing way of life. But the drama is more incidental than integral to what is more obviously a travelogue or ethnographical study than compelling fiction..With its confrontation between tradition and progress, youth and experience, it resembles such psychological Westerns as Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), while its emphasis on the indomitability of humanity in the face of forbidding terrain, recalls another Oscar surprise, Xavier Koller's Best Foreign winner, Journey of Hope (1990).

Having lost his heir on a transhimalayan trek, Tinle (Thien Lhondup), the venerable tribal chief, hopes his younger son, Norbu (Karma Tensing Nyima Lama), will escort the next consignment of salt to market. But on his refusal, Tinle insists on heading the yak caravan himself, as he has no faith in Karma (Gurgon Kyap), the strapping herdsman whose modern methods he believes killed his son. Consequently, rival expeditions set out, only for them to meet again in the face of adversity.

There are several moments of high-rise peril and some intense encounters en route, but the action lacks momentum and the melodrama is too unfocused to engross. The film's French subtitle translates as `The Childhood of a Chief', but there's little emphasis placed on young Pasang (Karma Wangiel) and only passing reference is made to the possible ramifications of losing a father and then seeing his mother (Lhapka Tsamchoe from Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet, 1997) flirting with Karma, the man challenging his beloved grandfather for supremacy.

Yet, technically the film is astounding, with Eric Guichard and Jean-Paul Meurisse's widescreen photography providing views that are not only beautiful in themselves, but which also go some way to compensating for the comparative lack of tangible drama. The star of the show is undoubtedly the Dolpo region of the northern Himalayas, which not only provides the awesome backdrop for the story, but also plays its implacable adversary. However, Thilen Lhondup, who has made this same journey countless times during his long life, is a study in wizened wisdom and stubborn determination.

But what is, perhaps, most affecting is the film's timelessness. The trek could just as easily have taken place centuries ago as in the recent past, as the tactics and dangers of the journey have barely changed down the years. Reinforcing this temporal neutrality is a studied refusal to mention the current plight of the Tibetan people in the face of Chinese oppression. Himalaya is too slight to be fascinating and too deliberate to be elegiac. But it provides a welcome change of pace from those all-too-predictable slam-bam blockbusters.

NOT ONE LESS (1999).

The winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, Zhang Yimou's study of the widening gulf between rural and urban China is further proof of both his new-found creative freedom since the departure of Gong Li and the growing influence of Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami on his directorial style. Ironically, this tale of a teenage teacher who abandons her duties and heads for the city to recover an absconded student is heavily reminiscent of The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), in which Gong exhibited similar tenacity in seeking justice for her injured husband. Furthermore, Zhang returns to that film's neo-realist methodology by employing a largely non-professional cast and frequently shooting with hidden cameras to ensure authenticity. However, it's the Kiarostami- inspired humanism that has attracted the most attention, prompting some critics to denounce the picture as government propaganda - a charge that takes no account of the story's underlying socio-political agenda.

Although not yet of high-school age, 13 year-old Wei (Wei Minzhi) is hired by Party managers to replace the village teacher while he attends to a family crisis. With so many children being lured away to work in the nearby city, Wei is promised an extra 10 yuan if the entire class is still in situ on the teacher's return. Incapable of educating her charges, Wei is content to babysit them, until the class terror, Zhang (Zhang Huike), runs away and the accidentally resourceful Wei is forced to follow him in order to secure her precious bonus.

Based on a true story, this is a highly pessimistic analysis of consumer boom China, in which financial gain has replaced idealism as the prime motivation. There is no sense of honour either in Wei's acceptance of her post or her soul-destroying pursuit of Zhang. All that matters is her paltry reward. Yet, in focusing on Wei's crusade, the film rather overlooks Zhang's equally desperate plight and the fact that he only went in search of work to care for his ailing, widowed mother.

Bureaucratic obfuscation, media exploitation, the status of women and the lack of a coherent education policy are all explored here, as is the issue of black market juvenile labour, although censorship problems prevented Yimou from discussing the darkest side of the modern urban economy. However, the most telling critique is the allegorical suggestion that since 1948 Beijing's idea of governance has been to imprison everyone in a single rickety edifice and hope for the best. Propagandist rhetoric? Hardly.

POURQUOI PAS MOI? (1999).

An increasing number of gay and lesbian movies started reaching the mainstream around the Millennium, with the AIDS angst drama being replaced by sweet dating pics like Tommy O'Haver's Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998), Jim Fall's Trick (1999) and Greg Berlanti's The Broken Hearts Club (2000). However, there's one more staple in the Queer cine-lexicon and that's the coming-out comedy and that's where debutant writer-director Stéphane Giusti pitches this assured, if slight inversion of La Cage aux Folles's age-gap prejudice premise.

Camille (Amira Casar) is a twentysomething sci-fi freak in love with Ariane (Alexandra London), an emotionally insecure mature student. She runs a publishing house with Eva (Julie Gayet) and Nico (Bruno Putzulu), who long for love, but still enjoy the freedom of searching for it. However, only Camille has come out to her family and so she arranges a lunch at her mother's country home to provide her pals with the idyllic setting to come clean.

What happens next is perhaps inevitable, bearing in mind that Ariane's parents are a businesswoman and a neo-fascistic geneticist (Marie-France Pisier and Jean-Claude Dauphin), Eva's are a retired bullfighter and his trophy wife (Johnny Hallyday and Ellie Medeiros), and Nico's is a chanteuse who's achieved iconic status amongst the gay community (Vittoria Scognamiglio). But just to make things a touch more intriguing, Giusti also has the quartet's hetero secretary, Lili (Carmen Chaplin), pose as a lesbian to shock her supposedly liberal folk-singing folks (Joan Crosas and Assumpta Serna).

The poster line proclaims this to be a `queer comedy for the whole family'. However, this isn't just a smug play on the film's storyline, in which more than just skeletons come tumbling out of the closet. It's also a mission statement on its tone, as this is clearly a movie for straight audiences to laugh at others' homophobia while feeling good about their own tolerance. Gay viewers will presumably wince at the idealised characterisations and the physical beauty of the cast. Moreover, gay sex is presented as something you should try at least one, like polenta, rather than a way of life that many people only come to embrace after much soul-searching  and familial strife.

The Spanish setting is an invitation to link the film to Almodovar's more outrageous gay comedies. But an even more audacious association is the casting of Brigitte Rouan as Camille's mother, Josepha, as she is the director of Post Coitum, Animal Triste (1997), one of the most explosive studies of female sexuality ever to reach the screen. It's a sly joke, but, like so many others in this preciously droll picture, it's more sophisticated than amusing.

RING (1998).

Although it wasn't obvious at the time, 1998 proved something of a watershed for screen horror. For while Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson were busy playing knowing postmodernist games with the conventions of the slasher movie, subtler minds were elsewhere devising a less referential revisionism. In America, it manifested itself in Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler's The Last Broadcast, M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's The Blair Witch Project (which was released in 1999), while in Japan, it came in the form of the `Ring' series, based on the bestselling novel by Koji Suzuki. Hideo Nakata's duology and Norio Tsuruta's prequel not only smashed domestic box-office records, but also gained cult followings throughout South-East Asia.

Those more accustomed to the knockabout antics of Scream and Scary Movie may find this cerebral to the point of calcification. But anyone versed in such troubling Japanese chillers as Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan and Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (both 1964) and Kuroneko (1968) will revel in the film's unforced blend of traditional supernatural totems and modern communications technology.

Following the unexplained death of her niece, telejournalist Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) begins to investigate the urban myth of a cursed videotape, which causes the death, within a week, of everyone who watches it. But, no sooner has she viewed the distorted images than she receives the legend's telltale telephone call and, terrified, ropes in her ex-husband, tabloid reporter Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), to help her beat the hex.

Structured like a diary to keep us aware of critically passing time, the plot resembles an old-fashioned detective story, propelled by chance clues and gradual realisations. Yet, with its emphasis on the paranormal, its loudest ring (if you will) is the X Files, especially as the divorced couple have an ambivalent relationship similar to Mulder and Scully's.

Frequently slotting video footage into the mix to give it a visual texture commensurate with both the tone of the story and Kenji Kawai's eerie score, Nakata's strategy relies on the inexorable build up of suspense right up to the moment when he springs the cassette's hideous secret. Here and there, it's possible to detect the influence of such diverse film-makers as David Cronenberg (Videodrome, 1983) and Hirozaku Kore-eda (Maborosi, 1995), but the distinctive voice definitely belongs to Nakata, who is clearly a name to note.

RING 2 (1999).

One of the reasons why Ring proved so popular with critics and audiences alike was its unblinking refusal to answer every question it raised. This sense of ambiguity chimed in perfectly with the vogue for irrational horror created by The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project. Ironically, the prime reason why Hideo Nakata's sequel, Ring 2, is less persuasive is that it spends too much time tidying up the loose ends from its predecessor and not enough posing problems of its own.

The storyline is infinitely more complicated this time round and largely excludes anyone who missed the original. Yet, curiously, the increase in incident makes the action (which is markedly more linear) seem more accessible. But it's so tightly packed that there's little room for unease to seep in and take us unawares.

Determined to locate her lost love, Ryuiji, Mai Takano (Miko Nakatani) goes in search of his ex-wife, Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), who survived their encounter with the now urban legendary cursed video cassette and its vengeful progenitor, Sadako. However, it's Reiko's young son, Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka), who seems the best hope of countering the tape's malevolence. But he is as unwilling to co-operate as Masami (Hitomi Sato), a friend of an earlier victim who exhibits spirit photographic evidence of being tainted by Sadako's power, but who is unable (or at least unwilling) to speak. Running parallel to Mai's crusade are those of a TV journalist (Masahiko Ono), whose callous attitude to the curse costs a schoolgirl her life, and a cop (Kenjiroh Ishimaru), who places credence in an eccentric doctor's theories on the mental transference of evil.

This latter detail sets up an aquatic finale, which confirms the growing suspicion that Nakata  has, throughout, been more influenced by Occidental than Oriental conventions of horror. The whole sequence with the swimming pool and a phalanx of pinging machines borders on the farcical and does much to undermine the tension of the battle between Mai and Sadako that occurs at the bottom of the well in which the latter finally perished after a 30-year incarceration. Boosted in the East by Nakatani's pop celebrity, this is a less intriguing film that its precursor, but it remains superior to its US remake.

SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000).

Sometimes there is nothing anyone else can say - you simply have to experience a film for yourself. Scored by ABBA's Benny Anderson and inspired by the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo's 1936 poem, `Stumble Between Two Stars', this dazzlingly inventive picture is a case in point.

There is no way to describe it. A fantasy, a parable, a nightmare? You could say it's a series of eccentric vignettes impinging on the life of a onetime furniture salesman in the depths of a mid-life crisis. But how's that going to convey its sheer visual audacity, the empathy of its pessimistic humanism or the unexpected candour of its deadpan humour? Mention of admirals attending their own wakes, children being sacrificed as part of a town planning strategy and streets being snarled up with murderous gridlock will mean nothing to you. Yet, they are images that will live with you once you've been amazed by them.

There's no wonder Swedes call Roy Andersson cinema's `unknown genius'. He burst onto the scene with A Swedish Love Story in 1970. But since the critical mauling meted out to his second feature, Giliap (1975), he's concentrated on commercials. Four years in the making and largely self-financed, this exceptional picture (which shared the Jury Prize at Cannes with Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards) ranks among the most remarkable comebacks in movie history.

There's a Tatiesque folly about Andersson's relentless search for perfection. Each set was meticulously constructed in his private Stockholm studio. Each sequence, shot in muted colours from an essentially static camera, was the result of repeated long takes, which were improvised without script or storyboards by a wholly non-professional cast. If a scene wasn't working, Andersson simply destroyed the set and started again.

Set in a nameless town in an indefinite time, it boasts more characters (50) than edits (45). It explores capitalism, religion, millennial angst, family dysfunction, bureaucratic idiocy, age-gap prejudice, environmental meltdown and the guilt and vulnerability that makes modern urban living such a trial of endurance. Yet it draws no conclusions and offers fewer solutions. It's utterly depressing in its depiction of the contemporary human condition. Yet its sympathetic sense of the absurd suggests there's still hope for us yet.

One viewing won't do this justice. It needs to be pored over. Not for hidden significance. But for the sheer pleasure of immersing yourself again in its unique atmosphere. This may sound like pretentious tosh. But once you've seen it, everything will become clear.