Plunging into the Heart of Her Dark Materials

The latter theme has been key to Denis's cinema since she debuted with Chocolat (1988), which not only established her fascination with constructing pictures from captured fragments of time, but also drew on her childhood memories of following her civil servant father around French colonial Africa. She returns to the continent for the first time in a decade for White Material, a provocative insight into the reprehensible actions that can seemingly be justified by a love of country. Yet, while this disturbing study of societal breakdown boasts a typically enigmatic performance from Isabelle Huppert, this is a fussily structured and brusquely concluded story that is over-run with peripheral characters and half-made points.

Despite lawless militias and child soldiers roving the wilds of her unspecified country, Huppert refuses to heed the warning of retreating French forces and abandon her coffee plantation. Intoxicated by the land, her lifestyle and the courage required to sustain a business that is disregarded by former father-in-law Michel Subor, ex-husband Christophe Lambert and indolent son, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Huppert redoubles her determination to harvest the crop in the teeth of the civil war that has caused much of her workforce to flee. But, while she ranges the frightened town and the outlying villages in search of labour, Lambert strives to sell the property to corrupt mayor William Nadylam, whose private army is seeking Isaach de Bankolé, the rebel leader the juvenile warriors are desperate to protect and install as their leader.

With De Bankolé lying wounded in one of her outhouses, Huppert learns of Lambert's attempted treachery and despairs of the seemingly deranged Subor, as he wanders the grounds he bequeathed to her, as he did not trust his son. Battling to keep the generator going so she can sift the beans, Huppert detours to the local school to collect Lambert's son with new wife, Adèle Ado. But she neglects Duvauchelle, who is so traumatised by a humiliating encounter with a couple of machete-wielding child soldiers that he shaves his head, steals Subor's rifle and heads into the bush with a cache of drugs plundered from the nearby pharmacy.

Cross-cutting between footage of Huppert riding a crowded bus through a ravaged landscape and the incidents on the plantation, Denis and Marie N'Diaye's screenplay has a spartan, novelistic feel that reflects Huppert's original desire to have Denis direct her in an adaptation of Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing. But, for all the Conradian sense of dread, the elliptical structure imposes a rather self-conscious mood of confused memory that Denis nevertheless uses adeptly to emphasise how alone and rootless Huppert has suddenly become.

Wearing a thin pastel dress that reinforce her vulnerability and the outsider status she simply fails to recognise, Huppert eschews the faux white liberal sentiment that blights so many post-colonial films to cut a fearlessly unsympathetic figure, whose obsessions have alienated everyone on whom she might have hoped to rely in a time of crisis. Occasionally, it feels as though she is playing a variation on the anti-heroine she essayed in Rithy Panh's The Sea Wall, in which the focus on Huppert similarly reduced too many secondary characters to ciphers. But her intensity and enigmaticism cannot be faulted and the same goes for Yves Cape's handheld photography, Guy LeCorne's editing and Stuart Staples's score, which neatly melds tribal rhythms and melancholic cellos.

However, having taken such pains to place Huppert at the heart of darkness, Denis seems to rush the denouement, which obfuscates the nature and purpose of Huppert's actions, as she reacts to the nocturnal eruption of slaughter and destruction that has eradicated her entire life's work. Moreover, Denis leaves herself too little time to explore the notions of belonging, globalisation and class, domestic and tribal rivalry that she raises in pondering who is to blame for the poverty, violence and ignorance prevented so many African nations from finally reaping the benefits of independence.

The family feuds eventually prove to be equally murderous in Derick Martini's Lymelife, a semi-autobiographical study in 1970s dysfunction that the debuting director wrote with his brother Steven. However, there are sufficient echoes here of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) and Michael Cuesta's L.I.E. (2001) to make this dark Long Island rite of passage feel somewhat overly familiar.

With mother Jill Hennessy duct taping him from head to toe to protect him from the wood ticks responsible for spreading the debilitating Lyme Disease, 15 year-old Rory Culkin makes a natural target for bullies, just as he is trying to tip his friendship with older neighbour Emma Roberts into romance. However, she only has eyes for a senior at school and is less than impressed when Culkin is pulped by a white trash thug and then follows up soldier brother Kieran Culkin's brutal retribution with a cowardly beating of his own. Indeed, she is further enraged when he starts an envy-fuelled rumour in their Catholic community that her morals are not all that they should be.

But Culkin's problems are only just beginning. Roberts has realised that mother Cynthia Nixon is having an affair with Culkin's father, Alec Baldwin, and that they are using their hectic real estate schedule as cover for their clandestine trysts. What's more, Roberts's Lyme-afflicted and drug-addled father, Timothy Hutton, has also discovered his cuckolding and he lets Baldwin know that he knows during a tense encounter at a local bar. But, worst of all, the long-suffering Hennessy has also learned the truth and she orders Baldwin to leave home, forcing him to move into the adjoining modern monstrosity he had commissioned without informing his wife, who misses her old block in Queens and loathes her husband's obsession with social mobility.

Staging the set-pieces around Thanksgiving and Culkin's confirmation, Martini coaxes solid performances from an able cast. Everyone has their moment in the spotlight, with Hutton's dishevelled disorientation contrasting barbedly with Baldwin's macho workaholism and the homely Hennessy and the manicured Nixon both succumbing to their pent-up disappointment to launch into seething diatribes to their selfish spouses. But it's Rory Culkin who steals focus, whether jousting with the older sibling whose heroic attempt at saving his parents' marriage belies his non-combative status in the military or allowing Roberts to take the lead after they patch up their relationship and retire to his bedroom to lose their virginity on the night he officially becomes a man in the eyes of the church.

In a nod to executive producer Martin Scorsese, Culkin even riffs on Robert De Niro's famous mirror monologue in Taxi Driver (1976). However, he is much more a child of the Star Wars generation and his reflected showdown with a life-size cut-out of Han Solo is much more in character. The teasingly ambiguous sense of period is reinforced by the splendid soundtrack and even though there seems something more than a touch anachronistic about the plot's insistence on the proximity of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Falklands War, Martini nevertheless generates a slyly satirical nostalgic yearning for a pre-Reaganite age of innocence when there was more to the American Dream than making big bucks by peddling sub-prime mortgages.

The illusion of a good time being had by all similarly imbues Joseph Lovett's documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, which chronicles the first decade of liberation in New York between the 1969 Stonewell riots and the onset of AIDS in 1981. Making admirable use of still photographs, clips from porn flicks and grainy archive footage, Lovett succeeds in celebrating the excitement, camaraderie and promiscuity that contributed to this being `the most libertine period the Western world has known since the Roman Empire'. But the narrowness of the focus and the overuse of talking heads gushing about the hunks they seduced and the drugs they consumed render this as frustrating as it's fascinating.

Essentially, this is an exercise in confessing illicit thrills and name-dropping trendy venues. Academic Arnie Kantrowitz, doctor Larry Mass, activist Rodger McFarlane, artist Barton Benes, author Larry Kramer, pornographer Robert Alvarez and photographer Tom Bianchi are the principle contributors and they clearly still have fond memories of the nights of lust they enjoyed on the abandoned Hudson River piers off Christopher Street, in darkened trucks in the Meat Packing District, behind the Rambles in Central Park, in bathhouses and gyms like St Mark's Baths, in clubs and bars like the Ramrod and Anvil and in the opulent waterfront villas of holiday hideaways like the Pines and Cherry Grove on Fire Island.

Some of the recollections are amusing, including details of a legendary Bette Midler gig, during which she showered her audience with poppers. But mostly, they are characterised by saucy wistfulness and a strong sense of entitlement after decades of oppression, prosecution and homophobic barbarity. Even more striking, however, is the lack of compunction, as the only regret any of these lucky survivors seem to have is that nobody told them about condoms in time.

The action on the dance floors of Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage couldn't be more different to that on show in Laís Bodanzky's The Ballroom, a superbly choreographed compendium of six stories that are effortlessly interwoven during a night of terpsichorean passion at a São Paulo gafieira. Majestically photographed by Walter Carvallho, this belies the fact it's the work of 10 writers to achieve a sinuous unity that recalls both the ensemble outings of Robert Altman and, more specifically, Ettore Scola's Le Bal (1983) and La Cena (1998).

The clientele at Chega de Saudade are mostly elderly, but sound technician Paulo Vilhena's girlfriend Maria Flor provides some young blood and charmer Stepan Nercessian is irresistibly drawn to her, even though he has just been flirting with Cássia Kiss, whom he loves, but has never summoned up the courage to tell. The same is true of Leonardo Villar, the onetime king of the ballroom, who has broken his foot and becomes increasingly testy with forgetful partner Tônia Carrero, who just wishes he would be more courteous to her in public. Betty Faria similarly craves companionship and feels betrayed when the womanising Luiz Serra makes a beeline for her neighbour, Miriam Mehler, whom she had only invited as an act kindness. Domingos de Santis also regrets his decision to take wife Marly Marley dancing for her birthday, as she is set on a collision course with his mistress, Conceição Senna, while neglected tycoon's spouse Clarisse Abujamra sits in a booth and eyes up a likely contender to be tonight's sexual conquest.

With Elza Soares and Marku Ribas providing the sensual Latin numbers that keep the dance floor packed, this is a masterly blend of music, comedy and melodrama that explores the old adage about being as young as you feel with deceptive discretion. The cast is uniformly magnificent, with Beno Bider and Marcos Cesana also meriting respective mention, as a portly loner forced to dance solo and the put-upon waiter dreaming of his own life of leisure. Set-pieces like the ladies' excuse me and a power cut add a certain frisson, while Villar's monochrome reveries about his deceased wife and his former glory reinforce the pervading moods of fond nostalgia and melancholic regret. But it's Bodanzky and editor Paulo Sacramento's exemplary use of Carvallho's gliding tracks, bustling handheld images and forensic close-ups that best allows viewers to catch every gesture and expression as the ageing revellers confront the woes, frustrations and disappointments of their senectitude, while desperately seeking to recapture the all-too-fleeting pleasures of their long lost youth.

A remembrance of things passed also informs Skeletons.

Three years after teaming Ed Gaughan and Andrew Buckley in his 12-minute debut, Rebecca, Nick Whitfield reunites them for this tantalising paranormal comedy that might itself have worked better as a short. Handsomely photographed by Zac Nicholson and jauntily scored by Simon Whitfield, the action opens promisingly. But it stalls just as it should have taken off, with the consequence that the longueurs and contrivances have piled pretty high by the denouement.

Striding through the countryside in regulation suits, trading euphemisms and carrying the briefcases containing their bizarre apparatus, Gaughan and Buckley answer calls to exorcise the skeletons from people's cupboards. Gaughan is a stickler for bureaucratic accuracy and tends to order Buckley around. However, he is also prone to slipping back into his own past to relive the security of having his parents tell him a story on the sofa. Such `glow chasing' regressions earn him periodic reprimands from Veridical boss Jason Isaacs, who warns him that he will never get promoted unless he keeps his mind on the task in hand.

After a couple of successful operations, Buckley and Gaughan are summoned by Paprika Steen, whose husband vanished eight years earlier and she keeps digging up the land around her remote home in the hope of finding him. Daughter Tuppence Middleton was so traumatised by the disappearance that she hasn't spoken in ages, leaving brother Josef Whitfield feeling alienated and confused. Despite their best efforts, the duo fail to find a trace of the errant spouse and agree to take up residence until Isaacs can suggest a strategy. But they make the fatal mistake of getting too close to their clients, with Buckley hitting it off with Steen and Whitfield and Gaughan and the now garrulous Middleton forging a bond in psychological adversity.

Ultimately, the family secret is revealed and the interlopers settle into their new lives. But, in the process, the witty Godotian banter is replaced by specious psychobabble that reduces a potentially novel premise to the level of misfiring Charlie Kaufman pastiche. Buckley and Gaughan begin brightly, but they lose momentum as the demands of the plot cut across their double act. However, even the usually impeccable Steen struggles to sustain the illusion that this is anything more than a shaggy dog story in no particular hurry to reach its punchline.