How the West Was Won?

Having already proved herself willing to counter generic convention in River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), Kelly Reichardt dispenses with such a clichéd view of frontier life in Meek's Cutoff, which revises the wagon-train formula perfected in Anthony Mann's Bend of the River (1952) to examine the role played by women in America's achievement of its Manifest Destiny and the extent to which the West was won by chauvinism, racism and sheer good fortune.

In 1845, three groups of pioneers hire ex-army scout Bruce Greenwood to guide them along the Oregon Trail and through the Cascade Mountains to the promised land of the Willamette Valley. However, Greenwood is as arrogant as he is unreliable and his decision to take an unmarked shortcut leaves the settlers questioning his insistence that they are not lost, but merely finding their way.

Wives Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan and Shirley Henderson confide their misgivings while cooking over campfires. But husbands Will Patton, Paul Dano and Neal Huff retain their blind faith in Greenwood, even though the water supply is running out and they have strayed into territory belonging to the bellicose Cayuse tribe. Consequently, the women are left with little alternative but to trudge along beside the wagons and try to keep up the spirits of Henderson's young son, Tommy Nelson.

Eventually, after being tailed for many miles, the menfolk capture Cayuse lookout Rod Rondeaux and keep him chained to stakes in the ground to prevent him from escaping or attacking them in the night. Unsurprisingly, he refuses to help when the trekkers have to use ropes to lower the wagons down a steep incline and he appears utterly indifferent when the last one breaks lose and is wrecked.

Yet he is fascinated by Williams's sewing basket, after she uses it to repair his moccasin, and he carries it proudly after agreeing to lead the party through the increasingly inhospitable wasteland to some water. However, Greenwood continues to distrust Rondeaux and Williams is forced to raise a rifle to prevent him from being executed. But, while her faith in him is finally repaid, he has no desire to prolong their unspoken pact.

Drawing on the diaries kept by 19th-century frontierswomen and shooting in an Academy ratio format that reinforces the sense of historical authenticity, this is one of the finest Westerns made in the last 50 years. Combining the intimate and the epic, Reichardt emphasises the vastness of the wilderness and the distances between the sexes and the races. But she also gives her story a contemporary feel by restating concerns for the poor and dispossessed that she broached in Wendy and Lucy.

The performances are admirable, with Williams displaying a flinty moral determination that contrasts tellingly with Greenwood's haughty intransigence and Rondeaux's taciturn dignity. Jonathan Raymond's spare script is equally astute, as are Vicki Farrell's costumes, David Doernberg's production design, Jeff Grace's score and Roger Faires's location choices. But the standouts are Christopher Blauvelt's natural light imagery and Leslie Shatz's meticulous sound design, which bring a documentary realism to the endless skies, towering rocks, parched terrain, whistling breezes and creaking wheels.

Most outstanding of all, however, is Reichardt's direction. Maintaining a pace that suggests the arduousness of the journey, she follows the example of John Ford in locating her characters within their environs and Clint Eastwood in refusing to waste words on superfluous speeches. But she also manages to slip in a sly Bush-Obama allegory of her own, while also conveying that white America still has a long way to go in learning how to deal fairly with the indigenous and imported populations with which it shares a land whose bleak beauty continues to resist complete conquest.

A similar air of bittersweet nostalgia pervades Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), which is being re-released to mark its 40th anniversary. Adapted by Larry McMurtry from his own novel and exquisitely photographed in black and white by Robert Surtees, this is a masterly evocation of small-town life in a Texas caught between its mythical past and a cheerless Cold War present. Moreover, it's also a shrewd insight into the state of contemporary American cinema, as critic-turned-director Bogdanovich muses on the passing of the oaters, screwballs and soaps that had sustained Golden Age Hollywood and their replacement by the dumbed-down genre flicks that were aimed at the new juvenile market.

It's 1951 and time is passing Anarene by. Once a thriving outpost, it's now something of a backwater, with the only games in town being owned by Ben Johnson and Robert Glenn. The latter struck it lucky with an oil well and now employs the likes of Clu Galager, who is secretly cuckolding him with bored wife Ellen Burstyn. But these arrivistes are despised by Johnson and the clientele at the café, pool hall and cinema he manages with a gruffness that betrays a hankering for his cowboy heyday.

Johnson also acts as guardian to Sam Bottoms, a gentle adolescent of limited capacity. But neighbourhood teens Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges also regard Johnson as a surrogate father and they are desolate when he dies, leaving the pool hall to Bottoms, the café to Eileen Brennan and the movie theatre to kindly Jessie Lee Fulton.

The death of his mentor prompts Bottoms to kick out against Anarene's hypocritical conservatism and he ditches prim girlfriend Sharon Taggart to begin an affair with Cloris Leachman, the wife of his high school sports coach, Bill Thurman. Bridges is also keen to spread his wings and tilts his cap at Glenn's spoilt daughter, Cybill Shepherd, who needs him to deflower her so she can take up with Gary Brockette, a brattish rich kid with a penchant for skinny dipping to whom she was introduced at a Christmas dance by the disreputable Randy Quaid.

However, when Bridges fails to perform in a cheap motel room, Shepherd dumps him and makes a play for Bottoms, who breaks Leachman's heart by spurning her and eloping for a marriage that Glenn has annulled as soon as Bottoms and Shepherd are returned to town by some Oklahoma state troopers. As the picture ends, Bridges is en route to a Korean War boot camp and Bottoms is hoping to repair his relationship with the depressive Leachman. But, most significantly, the Royal has fallen dark after a final screening of Howard Hawks's Western, Red River (1948).

Owing more to the nouvelle vague than the classical narrative cinema of the America it depicted, The Last Picture Show proved as influential on New Hollywood as the period's other exposé of rebellious youth, Easy Rider (1969). But, whereas Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's road movie exhibited an anger that chimed in with the 60s counterculture, Bogdanovich's pastiche was subversively elegiac in providing the missing links between Mickey Rooney's idealised swing era teenager Andy Hardy and James Dean's Jim Stark, who set the tone for the rock renegades who were to be unleashed by the success of Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

Although Johnson and Leachman took the Best Supporting Oscars, the performances are universally exceptional. Bridges, Shepherd and Burstyn would go on to bigger things. But they are more than matched here by the Bottoms brothers, with Timothy adding a rawness to the vulnerability he had previously displayed in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971), while Sam Bottoms was memorably moving as the mute innocence who suffers most from Johnson's demise.

Several of the cast would reunite for the 1990 sequel, Texasville. But the moment had passed for both the characters and Bogdanovich, who struggled to follow up the success of What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973), although both At Long Last Love (1975) and Nickelodeon (1976) are both overdue for reappraisal.

Another dead-end town provides the setting for Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, a mumblecore mix of film noir, domestic melodrama and wisecrack comedy that confirms the good impression made with Dance Party, USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007). Making splendid use of locations around Portland, Oregon and boasting some waspish byplay between its brother and sister leads, this is a deliciously seditious genre parody that strikes a decisive blow for low-concept film-making.

Having dropped out of a forensic science course in Chicago, Sherlock Holmes obsessive Cris Lankenau returns home to mope on the sofa reading crime fiction. However, sister Trieste Kelly Dunn refuses to let him wallow and insists he takes a job at the local ice factory, where he strikes up a half-hearted friendship with Raul Castillo. But it takes the sudden disappearance of old flame Robyn Rikoon to rouse Lankenau and he decides to put his amateur detection skills to the test in order to track her down.

Intially nettled by the fact that Rikoon had attended a Star Trek convention with Castillo, Lankenau takes the fact that she vanished without going to watch her new friend DJ as a signal that he alone can rescue her. But, for all his familiarity with Conan Doyle, Lankenau proves to be a flatfooted sleuth and it's more by luck than judgement that he ascertains that Rikoon was using a business trip to deliver some money to a photographer named The Cowboy, for whom she had posed naked for a pornographic magazine. However, the case containing the cash had been stolen and Lankenau, Dunn and Castillo snoop sufficiently to discover that it had been snatched by The Cowboy himself.

Employing the clumsiest of surveillance techniques, the trio follow their suspect to a diner and watch him rendezvous with an unknown contact. Determined to help Rikoon, Dunn snatches the bag and Lankenau punctures the tyres of their potential pursuers. But their getaway scarcely proves to be the stuff of high-octane thrillers.

Containing possibly the slowest car chase in screen history, this is a knowing debunk of hackneyed pulp traits that never once over-reaches in its efforts to be amusing and enthralling. The Rikoon aspect of the plot is essentially a MacGuffin, as Katz is far more intrigued by Lankenau and Dunn bantering with an affectionate sibling fractiousness that is as acerbically laconic as anything penned by Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich or Cain. But the shambolic manner in which they accumulate clues is hugely satisfying and Katz's smooth change of direction is perfectly complemented by Andrew Reed's moodily nimble imagery and Keegan DeWitt's percussive score.

Lankenau has more personality than the average mumblecore Joe, but he is outshone by Dunn, who has real star potential and it's to be hoped she gets to do more than TV-movies and little-seen indies like Brett Haley's The New Year and Doug Clark's Vacation! , which both merit at least a DVD release in this country.

It's a shame there isn't an enterprising label covering this specialst field with the same diligence that Terracotta bring to Asian cinema, as countless watchable pictures keep slipping through the UK net. Fortunately, Johnnie To's Sparrow is not among them, which is just as well as this variation on the Hong Kong auteur's trademark gangland scenarios is one of his most original and daringly brilliant achievements.

Pickpocket Simon Yam initially dismisses warnings from underlings Lam Ka-tung, Law Wing-cheong and Kenneth Cheung that his early morning encounter with a sparrow in his apartment is a bad omen. But relationships become strained after Yam meets mainlander Kelly Lin while pursuing his photographic hobby on the street and she begins to flirt with each of his cohorts in turn. Ultimately, her plan is to lure the quartet into a showdown with her sugar daddy and Yam's implacable enemy, Lo Hoi-pang, with her freedom being the prize. But, with her passport locked in Lo's safe and her would-be rescuers dislocated in competition for her affections, Lin's deliverance is far from assured.

Taking some three years to bring to the screen and bearing similarities to To's little-seen 2004 outing, Throw Down, this triumph of style over content is a delicious treat that uses Yam's monochrome snapshots to pine for the lost soul of Hong Kong. Photographed with delicate intensity by Cheng Siu-keung and luxuriating in a score by Xavier Jamaux and Fred Avril that's alternatively bluesy and jazzy, but always insouciant, the action occasionally meanders, as Lin casts her spell over the malleable thieves. But the set-pieces are spectacular, with the climactic, rain-drenched pickpocketing contest being almost balletic in its intricacy, ease and grace. Indeed, a musical feel pervades much of the proceedings, with To's mastery of mood evoking the artless innocence that typified the then colony's Cantonese cinema in the 1950s and 60s.

If To demonstrates that movies don't always have to have a thousand and one plot twists to be riveting, so Jennifer Arnold's A Small Act proves that documentaries don't always have to be innovative to make an impact. This account of the consequences of a Holocaust refugee's humble act of generosity couldn't be more conventional. But, as it shows how Hilde Back's contribution to a Kenyan educational charity enabled Chris Mburu to become a human rights lawyer and sponsor his own scholarship initiative, this well-intentioned film becomes increasingly uplifting.

Back in the 1930s, German Jew Hilde Back was transported to Sweden and given a chance of life that was denied the rest of her family. She never married and lived in the same apartment for 35 years, as she taught generations of Swedish children and contributed $15 a month to a charity helping to educated underprivileged children in Kenya. Among the students to benefit from her small, but sincere act of generosity was Chris Mburu, who was plucked from a mud hut in the remote village of Mitahato and did so well in primary and secondary school that he gained entrance to the University of Nairobi and from thence graduated as a Fulbright scholar from the Harvard Law School, en route to becoming a United Nations Human Rights Commissioner.

Mburu was so grateful for his opportunity that he founded a scholarship in the name of his benefactor and Arnold shows how Patrick Kimani Nyambura, Caroline Gaceri Muraga and Ruth Wairimu Wambui knuckle down to their studies to benefit from the Hilde Back Foundation. Moreover, she also shows how Mburu and cousin Jane Wanjiru Muigai returned to Kenya following the disputed 2007 election to emphasise how ignorance poses as big a threat to the unity of the nation as the tribal rivalries between the Kikuyu and the Luo. The 85 year-old Back plays little part in the film until Mburu asks to meet her for the first time and she travels to Africa to be serenaded by a local choir, feasted and presented with ceremonial robes. But, while this encounter is genuinely poignant, Arnold strives a touch too hard to generate some dramatic tension by depicting the hopeful trio awaiting the crucial test results that could possibly deliver their families from poverty.

Arnold tells her tale simply and effectively. The message is indisputable, while Patricia Lee's photography, Carl Pfirman and Tyler Hubby's editing and Joel Goodman's score reinforce the feel-good mood. But, despite its cinematic modesty, this is a picture that could easily help change lives, if only enough people are prepared to follow Hilde Back's example and if the global film industry recognised that it has a duty to do more where education, donation and inspiration are concerned.

The clash between the world's advanced and emerging economies is played for laughs in Dilip Mehta's Cooking With Stella, as the housekeeper in the New Delhi residence of a Canadian diplomatic family does her bit towards the redistribution of wealth. Yet, despite being co-scripted by Mehta's uncompromising director sister Deepa (who caused major controversy in India and its diaspora with her Elements trilogy), this is a rather mild dish that fails to make the most of its spicy ingredients.

Devoted to the Virgin Mary, but not above raiding the larder or pocketing valuables that aren't securely locked away, Seema Biswas has ruled the roost at the Canadian High Commission for over 30 years. However, her sense of propriety is offended by the dual fact that the new ambassador is an Indo-Canadian woman and that her husband is a chef, who wants her to teach him the secrets of Keralan cuisine.

Initially resistant to his overtures and piqued by his gift of some kitchen knives, Biswas eventually allows Don McKellar into her kitchen and is quietly impressed by his efforts. She even encourages him to start giving cookery classes to staff at other embassies, so she can be left to do her pilfering in peace. But when McKellar and Lisa Ray hire Hindu country girl Shriya Saran as a nanny for young daughter Alexiane Perreault, Biswas recognises a threat to her profitable sideline, as Saran not only challenges the crooked accounting of gardener Kalyan Puri and laundry man Kanhaiya Lal Kaithwas, but also returns the wedge of banknotes that McKellar had misplaced. .

Failing in her bid to cast aspersions on Saran's honesty, Biswas coerces godson Vansh Bhardwaj into romancing her in order to stop her from bleating to the memsahib. All goes well until Saran learns that Biswas and Bhardwaj are related. But, instead of exposing their scam, she becomes an inspired co-conspirator and concocts an abduction scheme to land them a bumper payday. However, a bigger opportunity arises when High Commissioner Maury Chaykin doubles the ransom demand as a reward for information about Biswas's kidnappers.

Despite being handsomely photographed by Giles Nuttgens and smartly played by an eager cast, this is a somewhat muddled affair that too often puts plot dictates before character logic. It's not made clear why, having seemingly become fond of McKellar, Biswas would so readily fleece him for so large a sum or why the scrupulous Saran would so readily fall in with Biswas's chicanery. Moreover, too little is made of Ray's bid to discover her ancestral homeland, while McKellar's attempt to teach others his favourite dishes feels like unnecessary padding.

Biswas manages to rise above what is essentially a caricature to capture the delight that Stella takes in crimes that seem to have a post-colonial subtext. But the screenplay pushes its luck too far in the final third and only foodies seduced by the preparation of shrimp curry, kheer and the various dosas, chutneys and sambhars will derive much genuine pleasure from this under-cooked comedy.

A few years back, Vijay Singh made a much more appetising job of One Dollar Curry and he makes a welcome return to the Phoenix on Sunday 17 April to introduce his first feature, Jaya Ganga (1998), and his latest documentary, India By Song.

Inspired by an incident in Singh's past, Jaya Ganga's passage along India's goddess river is far more than a poetic travelogue. The first film to shoot at the source in the southern Himalayas, this mesmerising adaptation of Singh's own 1989 novel chronicles the soul-searching pilgrimage of exiled writer Asil Rais from the Parisian tomb of Surrealist writer André Breton to the sacred city of Benares, where his fate is decided.

Rais is visiting the Cimetière des Batignolles when he meets Paula Klein, who informs him that she has learned from a holy sadhu that she is the reincarnation of Nadja, the mysterious girl who provided the spark for Breton's celebrated 1928 novel of the same name. But, no sooner has Klein betwitched Rais than she disappears and he decides to take a journey along her favourite river in the hope that he will find literary inspiration of his own.

Travelling between shrines by boat and bus, Rais begins to feel the power of the Ganges and becomes convinced he has met his soulmate in tawaif dancer Smriti Mishra. He persuades her to risk the ire of the network of spies and leave the brothel where she works. But he is aware that her attraction lies in her similarity to Klein and an encounter with her at Benares leaves him confused as to whether he has just communed with Jaya or Nadja.

Despite being based on themes by Eric Piederriere and Smriti Mishra, faint echoes of Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) can be heard behind Vanraj Bhatia's haunting soundtrack, which enhances the mood established by Piyush Shah's glorious cinematography and Shahnaz Vahanvaty's evocative period costumes. Singh himself cameos alongside screenwriting legend Jean-Claude Carrière. But good though the performances are, the star of this lyrical odyssey is the Ganga itself.

Nevertheless, this treatise on spiritual and emotional rebirth and the illusory nature of freedom doesn't simply proffer unchallenged mysticism. There is a good deal of ironic wit behind the discussion of Hindu myth, star-crossed passion, magic realism and Surrealism. Nor does it overlook the seedier side of the subcontinent, with the sequence in Mishra's brothel being as grotesque as it's enraging.

The harsh facts are harder to avoid in India By Song, a chronicle of the subcontinent since Independence in 1947. Laced with numbers from the Bollywood movies that best captured the spirit of the times, this is a highly personal and quietly perceptive history that could well be emulated worldwide.

Masala aficionados will readily recognise the clips, but for those who don't know their Mukesh from their Lata Mageshkar, they are `Awaara Hoon' from Raj Kapoor's Awaara (1951),`Aao Bachho Tumhein Dikhayein' from Satyen Bose's Jagriti (1954), `Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya' from K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (1960), `Inhin Logon Nein' from Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah (1972), `Dil Ke Armaan Aansouon Mein' from B.R. Chopra's Nikaah (1982), `Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai' from Subhash Ghai's Khal Nayak (1993), `Kajra Re' from Shaad Ali's Bunty aur Babli (2005) and `Crazy Kiya Re' from Sanjay Gadhvi's Dhoom 2 (2006).

Travelling to key locations across the country and narrating the events that shaped India's destiny, Singh concentrates on the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira and Rajiv Gandhi to show how policies of non-alignment, nationalism, nationalisation and educational, industrial and agricultural reform created a state that is simultaneously crippled by poverty and ready to take its place among the economic titans. He also canvasses the opinions of an impressive array of experts and onlookers to assess the impact of these developments on ordinary people.

Spice tycoon Mahasha Dharmapal recalls the carnage that followed the Partition of India and squarely blames the British for abandoning the country and allowing Hindu-Muslim tensions to erupt into unspeakable violence. However, Rajasthani lawyer Kishan Singh Bhatti is more upbeat in his recollection of the first election in the world's biggest democracy, while Punjabi farmer Suvinder Singh Kathunangal considers the mixed blessings of the Green Revolution that facilitated self-sufficiency, while also introducing the insecticides that have had increasingly detrimental effects on crops, animals and humans.

Illustrating his account with newsreel footage of pivotal domestic occurrences, as well as the wars with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1971, Singh allows historian Romila Thapar to comment on the rule of Indira Gandhi, which included a period of national emergency that she equates with fascist dictatorship. Cricketing legend Bishan Bedi is equally emotive in recollecting the assault on the Golden Temple at Amritsar that provoked Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, which was followed seven years later by her son Rajiv's murder by Tamil separatists after his intervention in Sri Lanka.

Yet, amidst the uncertainties created by these crises, as well as the Bhopal chemical disaster, an ongoing feud with Pakistan over Kashmir and the increase in Hindu-Muslim terrorism, India enjoyed an unrivalled economic boom that spawned a middle-class taught by television to covet the trappings of Western consumerism. Scholars NR Narayana Murthy and Nishant Singh explain the reasons for and ramifications of this transformation, while network executive Uday Shankar reveals the role played by the Star India in changing expectations and tastes.

Not everyone was happy with this socio-economic metamorphosis, however, and choreographer Saroj Khan castigates Michael Jackson for popularising moves that diminished the subtlety of Bollywood dance routines. But actress Tirrtha welcomes the changes that have enabled her to play more independent women in her pictures, although the sight of her working in a market stall to research a role grates alongside Mumbai maid Anjali's experience of pandering to a bourgeois family while dwelling in a slum. Yet this contrast encapsulates the Indian dichotomy and Singh shrewdly concludes by wondering how long such disparities can continue to exist as the population increases and resources dwindle.

Some may complain that Singh's coverage is superficial and his stance too neutral. Others may lament that the songs are too compressed. But this is always more of a musical snapshot than an operatic treatise and the extracts deftly delineate the shifts in attitudes towards patriotism, capitalism, multi-culturalism, self-image and sex that have taken India from post-imperial incertitude to the verge of superpowerdom.