Un air de famille: "Father Mother Sister Brother"

Much as any family is composed of disparate parts, so too Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother - surprise winner of last year's Venice Golden Lion - is made up of separate, only loosely connected items. This new film marks a return to the portmanteau form of Jarmusch's earlier Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes: it's really three shorts, of roughly thirty minutes apiece, on a familial theme. The first, "Father", finds a straight-edged brother and sister (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) venturing deep into the New Jersey woods to pay a long-overdue visit with the hermit-like father (Tom Waits) who's been scrounging money off the pair of them. "Mother", set in and around Dublin's suburbs, describes a gathering of matriarch Charlotte Rampling and her two daughters, uptight Cate Blanchett and pink-haired free spirit Vicky Krieps; it's unclear whether or not it's a good sign that all three women have shown up wearing Bergman scarlet. (Ingmar, not Ingrid.) Finally, in "Sister Brother", the most wide-ranging of the three shorts, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play recently orphaned American twins in Paris, wondering what to do with the apartment - and the material objects - their folks have left behind. A very Jarmuschian - indeed, very indie - idea of the family emerges: people have secrets they hide from one another, communication is often awkward, strained and unnatural, and were it not for the fact they share a surname and a bloodline, nobody would think to put some of these individuals together. (For starters: Adam from Girls and Blossom from Blossom. And you're telling me Tom Waits gave life to these two?!) And yet: in a moment where America's conservative faction is getting weird (again) around the family unit and the roles we play within it, there is something heartening about Jarmusch's Zen insistence we could all stand to be a good deal chiller about everything familial. So yes, some of our relatives are flawed and imperfect; and yes, those closest to us by birth are still often kind of unknowable. But - and here you can almost hear Jarmusch adding a "hey man" as a footnote to every frame of each story he tells here - that's cool, too.

Onscreen, the worldview manifests as a radical simplification of form. The shorts are self-contained units, affording ample time and space to small, manageable casts whose individual components have either worked with this director before or are hip enough to know the effect Jarmusch seeks: not straining but being, with no labouring of the point. "Father" is an especially effective platform for Waits to play the sly old goat (or Jersey Devil); one of its takehomes is that every film would be improved with a bit more Tom Waits. While we wait for Hollywood to address that issue, Jarmusch leaves us to savour the eternal pleasures of the uncluttered frame: FMSB is unmistakably the work of a creative who's been left to do his own thing for nigh-on fifty years, who feels beholden to no contemporary trend. The crisp, clear photography - credited to veteran Lynch favourite Frederick Elmes and the versatile, much-travelled Yorick Le Saux - allows a hundred tiny gestures to register; one overhead shot of a table set for tea in the second part may be the most elegant spread I've seen in the American cinema this side of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. (Jarmusch finds it so tasty he keeps cutting back to it.) If there's a slight limitation, it's that the film's overarching philosophy is consistent to the point of repetition. Jarmusch acknowledges as much, writing in links between the three shorts: shots of passing skateboarders (liberated from familial duty, unlike his main characters), a recurring use of the phrase "Bob's your uncle" (more family), an ongoing discourse on the properties and uses of water (being thinner than blood). Everything (kind of) connects, but only the third short feels like any true progression - being what happens after mother and father, and indeed "Mother" and "Father", have passed - and Moore and Sabbat work up what feels instinctively like an authentic, earnest sibling bond. (They've got one another's backs, which still counts for something in Jarmuschland.) The whole project is as vibes-based as the contemporary cinema gets without the manager hanging crystals up in the foyer, but it's fun to see Jarmusch, erstwhile king of ironic detachment, getting a little cuddlier with age: he's still chill, but he's grown into welcoming a little more warmth into his frames.

Father Mother Sister Brother is now playing in selected cinemas.

Midsummer night's dream-film: "Miroirs No. 3"

Our beleaguered arthouse distributors are having a firesale on festival favourites before this year's Cannes gets under way: everything must go on release. As of tomorrow, the new François Ozon will find its screens under threat from a new Christian Petzold, the German writer-director whose naggingly academic dramas have, in the past, left this viewer markedly more quizzical than many of my colleagues. (I'm not looking to write a thesis; I'm really just here for a good time.) Miroirs No. 3 is a miniature - an 86-minute four-hander - but also a throwback to the ambiguous artfilms of yore; like some cross between Three Colours Blue and Philip Haas's underrated movie adaptation of Paul Auster's The Music of Chance, it pivots on a car crash before making vague movements in the direction of a study of happenstance. The crash, on the backroads of the German countryside, robs pianist Laura (recent Petzold favourite Paula Beer) of her boyfriend, but throws Laura herself clear into the home and life of Betty (Barbara Auer), an older woman who was first on the scene. Betty, who initially appears hung up on painting the fence surrounding her roadside property, refers to Laura as Yelena, and wistfully recounts the story of Tom Sawyer to her bedbound charge as a means of getting her unexpected new housemate to pick up a paintbrush of her own. It feels like the kind of bedtime story a parent might well tell her child, much as the film around this scene gradually shapes up as a Petzoldian reverie, shifting away from the taut psychological realism of this director's early, breakthrough films in favour of something altogether more dreamlike.

The signs are there from the off. Miroirs' early scenes are somehow too bright, too sunny, too placidly quiet to belong to the real world. If we're being rational about it, it makes no sense for Laura to move in with a stranger like Betty, save that this is exactly the sort of spiritual connection the women have in, say, certain Bergman movies; it also makes no sense that Betty's rough-edged husband and son (Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs), mechanics who make their living tampering with the GPSes on sportscars, should have left Betty rattling around on pills in a remote country property, except that's what bluffly unthinking men do in arthouse movies. (Well, that and ply the women who pass through their lives with beer. I can't rule out the possibility Petzold is floating a free-associative pun on his lead actress's surname in such moments: it's that kind of film.) The scene strategy is generally perverse, as it would be in any dream. No character is ever quite where they ought to be, which occasions a lot of huffing and puffing around between Betty's home and the garage where the men work; whether bikes, dishwashers or cars, things keep breaking down or falling apart; and Petzold positions Beer upfront as a postergirl for preoccupation. (Setting us, in turn, to wonder whether this is a limbo of Laura's own making, or one which exists solely inside her own imagination; on the soundtrack, Frankie Valli belts out the night begins to turn your head around.) Miroirs does enough, in this way, to invite spectator speculation: this, you feel, is one reason we critics have collectively had such a soft spot for everything Petzold. (He often needs explaining.) It's also that flight of fancy a filmmaker only gets to make once the moneymen have learnt to trust in them totally. As a narrative, the film feels loose, rattly, as if it too could fall apart at any moment; this script's screws forever seem in need of tightening. But it does conjure up an idea of leisure, of being far from home with no particular plans: it wouldn't surprise me to learn Petzold made it because the money and actors were available, the weather was good, and he had a gap in his schedule. Minor, but intriguing.

Miroirs No. 3 opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Needles and the damage done: "Diamonds/Diamanti"

Completing this week's line-up of festival faves: the Turkish-born, Italy-based Ferzan Özpetek, whose early Noughties melodramas positioned him as a back-up Almodóvar. (To the extent that he would later bill himself, with no small measure of grandiosity, as simply Özpetek.) Much as the beloved Pedro has started to get self-referential with age, so too, apparently, has Özpetek: his latest Diamonds, its maker's biggest domestic hit, opens with footage of the filmmaker gathering his favourite actresses together for a meal at which he announces he has a new project for them all to star in. One of the party, observing the almost exclusively distaff line-up, wonders whether the project might be titled Vaginodrome, a suggestion her director overrules as inappropriate. Yet Diamonds does unfold within a milieu that might indeed merit such a description: a demanding costumier's female-staffed workshop in 1970s Rome, sprung into frantic life to provide the clothes for a (female) Oscar-winning director - for which cinephiles are bound to read Lina Wertmüller - as she gears up on her next production. (Özpetek, we should note, has never even been nominated for an Oscar, but a fellow can dream.) By day, the assembled minions measure, cut, ruche and stitch, pausing in between to bicker and gossip; after hours, they endure a variety of issues, from ingrate children to abusive spouses. They're the real diamonds, you see.

As a rugged, red-blooded heterosexual male keeping one eye on this year's tense Championship run-in, your correspondent is almost certainly not the target audience in this instance, but even he could broadly see the appeal: for two-and-a-quarter hours, Özpetek outlines a lavishly furnished safe space into which viewers might retreat for a few laughs, tears, sobs and swoons. (An alternative title: Glamma Mia!) Although he gets distracted when, for some reason, his women have to measure up a phalanx of shirtless young actors in tighty-whities, this is clearly a director who adores actresses, granting even the lowliest of clothiers a close-up, a moment or a signature flourish; Özpetek ends the film with a list of those grande dames he still wants to work with, which is either touching or desperate. Only if you switch on your critical faculties do you notice there's no variation of tone, no heightening of stakes, a liability in a 135-minute feature: even when Diamonds turns its hand to something more dramatic - as in the domestic abuse subplot - it soon snaps back so as to give the other gals something light to do. Everything is sunny, fabulous, bella; everyone is handsome, sassy, well-dressed; the year's most insistently applied musical theme, meanwhile, plods and pulls its strings. There are, of course, worse things for a semi-prominent filmmaker to do with the money afforded him; and there are worse ways for us to spend an afternoon than being cosseted. (It's the movie equivalent of a spa day or long lunch on someone else's dime: an indulgence.) Yet there's a reason Almodóvar is routinely hailed as a great of world cinema and Özpetek isn't; I came away from Diamonds with a newfound respect for the way Jocelyn Moorhouse's slightly under-appreciated The Dressmaker, from a decade or so ago, troubled to mix up its camp.

Diamonds opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

On demand: "My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow"

In a generally patchy year for the documentary form - too much reality for everybody, not enough funding to do those events justice - the Oscar went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the tale of a smalltown teacher and part-time videographer whose self-shot footage revealed the insidious creep of Putinism into his community as Russia began its "special military operation" in Ukraine. Had the Academy time, they might well have watched and voted for Julia Loktev's My Undesirable Friends: Part I, a variant of the same story told in granular detail at far greater length. (As a five-hour, five-chapter enterprise, no less, complete with built-in episode breaks.) Loktev, who was born in Russia before emigrating to the US as a child, returned to her homeland in October 2021 to make a film about her friend Anna Nemzer, a journalist with the independent Moscow media channel TV Rain. As the film opens, TV Rain has just been restricted to broadcasting online, and several correspondents, including Nemzer, have been designated "foreign agents" by Putin's administration, meaning their every public statement has to be prefixed with a preamble in pure legalese. (Nemzer dubs it "the fuckery"; fascism always begins with labels and tags.) Part of Loktev's project here has been to reflect TV Rain's output in the run-up to and early days of the Ukraine conflict, which provides a counterpoint to all those Putin pressers Western news outlets carry live. In her interview series Who's Got the Power?, Nemzer is seen talking with activists fighting the cause of minorities in today's Russia, be they queer, homeless, handicapped or merely opposed to the PM's policies. This programming - sober, intelligent, well-researched yet open-minded journalism - would be no issue whatsoever in a free society; trouble is, this Russia is far from a free society.

That's what's on the box, yet another critical aim of Loktev's project is to gently investigate what's going on inside Anna Nemzer's head as the state propaganda machine gears up and the war drums sound ever louder. The choice Nemzer faces, which she outlines to Loktev in car on her daily commute to and from the broadcaster's studio, is a stark one: stay put in the country you love and face mounting charges for essentially doing your job - as with so many recent Russian dissidents, including the late Alexei Navalny - or emigrate, if the visa system and international borders allow, and start from scratch somewhere else. The quandary sticks in the forefront of the film's own mind, because in the course of her day job, Anna is interviewing those who find themselves in a comparable bind, while her colleagues are under pressure themselves, worrying where and how to cache their laptops, material and sources in the event of FSB raids on their properties in the small hours. During a promotional photoshoot for the station, Anna idly ponders what she might look like in a prison uniform; a regulation passport renewal sets her to wonder how long she'll get to use it. One of the journalist's colleagues has just moved into a new flat in one of Moscow's hipper enclaves: while giving Loktev the grand tour, she confesses that, since being declared a foreign agent, she's wondered what the point is of doing up the guest room. Her friends have already started fleeing town; she herself might have to follow at some point. One way or another, Putinism arrives on your doorstep.

Visibly, this is a tentative, trepidatious, drainingly temporary way to live. The "Raindrops" - as the journos call themselves - are trying to think of the bigger picture: the future of Russia, the future of TV Rain, in some cases a future for their children or for the children they hope to have. Yet they're continually obliged to roll back their ambitions and think about themselves, their own future, their own safety: one journalist admits to thinking at length about the underwear she's choosing to put on in the event of a nocturnal raid on her home. Such quandaries may well seem oddly relatable to non-Russians who've seen their own states' mechanisms hijacked by ideologues and zealots, lunatics and maniacs in recent years: what Loktev's film most closely describes is the process whereby despotism - like so many isms, including Trumpism - can get into and foul up your head. The personal and the political, then, become utterly inseparable. Loktev's secret weapon - her stealthiest decision here in the matter of engaging an audience - is that she's basically made a diary film, the work of a trusted pal checking in, day after day, to see that Anna and colleagues were still there, still visible, still fighting, still standing. As hinted at early on by the film's second chapter, in which Loktev spends an evening drinking, smoking and chatting with Anna's colleagues Ina and Alesya, My Undesirable Friends could even, in some reality, be claimed as a hangout movie. The camaraderie and solidarity this camera observes afford us some hope, but as the film progresses and the mood music darkens, the conditions for hanging out get steadily worse and worse - to the point where you fear hanging out itself might be deemed a crime, seditious conspiracy against an all-controlling state. One of the tragedies Loktev filmed: the sudden dispersal of a close-knit friendgroup, seen from the off to be watching out for one another.

Loktev and co-editor Michael Taylor identify a clear, compelling narrative arc: by chapter four, opening on the very eve of the Russian invasion, the station is forced into round-the-clock hyperdrive, even as the restrictions on reporting and reporters ("put out propaganda and only propaganda", as Raindrop Sonya summarises) become so tight as to prove stifling. The journos, several of whom have friends and family in Ukraine, are left reckoning with what one calls "the monster" that has been growing unchecked inside Russia for the best part of twenty years. Here as elsewhere, Loktev identifies an initially curious-seeming recurring quirk: the tendency among the younger, more Westernised Raindrops to reframe breaking news in terms of the Harry Potter franchise. Chronologically, I guess, it makes sense: these twenty- and thirtysomething journos, clinging to their Insta and TikTok stories as one might a teddy bear, are part of a generation raised on such fairytales, with their olde-worlde belief in people doing right and the inevitability of good's triumph over evil. Yet if the years since The Deathly Hallows have demonstrated anything, it's surely that those rules no longer apply - and, indeed, that those pushing such fictions, as Putin pushes his claims that Ukraine requires denazification, may themselves be far more capable of evil than good. What Loktev's magnum opus ultimately bears witness to is a foul sorcery, less event-movie spectacular than grimly humdrum, whereby freedoms, restful nights and eventually any semblance of a normal life are magicked away. As Anna puts it - on the morning Putin announced his military misadventure, shortly before she too vanishes from this story - "I don't have a country any more". It's left to a veteran activist, taking her leave from the journos in the aftermath of one subsequent anti-War protest, to have the final words, infused with both the blackest Russian humour and an inkling of things to come: "Believe me, everything will get worse."

My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow is now streaming via MUBI; a follow-up, Part II - Exile, is currently in postproduction.

Being and nothingness: "The Stranger"

There's a new François Ozon; there usually is. Yet after a decade or so of middling period pieces and familial melodramas, one senses this one might mean a little more in the long run, and demand more from its maker than merely converting France's apparently infinite public funding for cinema into middlebrow festival fare. In adapting The Stranger this far into the 21st century, Ozon has set himself a proper challenge: translating the colonial-era concerns of Camus' 1942 novel, revered touchstone of post-War existentialism, for a post-colonial audience who've long sensed existentialism was just a phase our polonecked predecessors felt they had to go through. Perhaps wisely, the writer-director adopts a double-jointed approach. With one hand, he ensures this narrative looks like a thing of the past, filming the novel's Algiers setting in a lush monochrome, high-contrast blacks and whites bookending suggestive shades of grey; the choice allows this Stranger to mesh both with the Casablanca of Casablanca and the Algiers of The Battle of Algiers, to exist on a timeline somewhere between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. (Some part of Ozon has elected to make the movie the French film industry would have made not long after the book became the literary sensation it did.) With the other hand, though, Ozon gives his material a rigorous, modernising tweak, maintaining Camus' focus on the mopey Meursault (played here by emergent star Benjamin Voisin) while also fleshing out those Arab characters he encounters and finally takes up arms against.

In suspending the action between two states of being, two moments in time, Ozon preserves a certain strangeness essential to Camus's book: what we're watching feels like a dream - then a nightmare - unfolding under the blazing noonday sun, which might be as good a definition as any of the whole colonial project. Working closely with cinematographer Manu Dacosse - better known for his striking horror/fantasy endeavours (2015's Evolution, 2025's Reflections in a Dead Diamond) - Ozon affords his typically considered and handsome images a new, uncanny twist, positioning most of these set-ups somewhere between 1950s Buñuel, Welles's Kafka and de Chirico's etchings. We notice, because - after a run of chatty Ozon tales - this one is told chiefly through images, the most lingering of which is the blankness of Voisin's face. It's one of those performances that shouldn't work - where a director has clearly told an actor to do less and less, until he's finally seen to do all but nothing - and yet it's one that grows only more effective (and troubling) by the frame: a facade hiding very little. This Meursault, less obviously heroic than Camus's, is a wastrel, a benumbed observer who lets slip the odd shudder of horniness (in a relationship with Rebecca Marder's Marie, which he blows) but otherwise betrays no fellow feeling, no empathy, merely a cruel indifference to the world around him. He is, in Ozon's eyes, pure white privilege, a walking critique of every role Tom Hiddleston has played over the last decade and a half; he's an enigma to be puzzled over if not ultimately figured out (there may be nothing there; there may be nothing there but self-interest), yet no more an enigma than the colonial mindset that inspires certain states to try and lord it over others.

He also presents as one risk among the many Ozon forces himself to take here: a protagonist who's a decidedly odd and cold and slippery fish, who probably shouldn't be the hero of a motion picture. (For starters, Meursault doesn't act, he shrugs; he shrugs his way into a courtroom where, even with the advantage of time and perspective, nobody can quite explain the events to which we've all borne witness.) Ozon keeps his Meursault front and centre so as to keep an eye on him; it's an example of a director tracking a character he knows we cannot trust. But he also doesn't blind himself to the flickers of actual life around this void: the vivacious Marder, with increasingly poignant hope in her eyes; Denis Lavant as Meursault's scrofulous, dog-beating neighbour Salamano, who proves preferable company to Meursault, in that he at least misses the dog after it's gone; Algiers itself, a far livelier destination than its overlords would prefer; and Hajar Bouzaouit as the drained, exhausted sister of the Arab Meursault kills (in a scene Ozon frames as almost a cruising-ground encounter gone bad; is Meursault a stranger even to his own sexuality?), who has good reason to feel numb. Mostly, this Stranger stays at Meursault's shoulder, not to exalt him, but to detail, in as much as any camera can, his fetid, cowardly, nihilistic and finally deadly worldview. It's that rare film adaptation of a tricky text that doesn't in the least shy away from what's prickly, difficult, perhaps alienating about its source; it may, in fact, be at least as much critique as straightforward adaptation, as though someone had refilmed The Fountainhead with a pompous, egotistical jerk of a hero whose architectural dickswinging fouls up multiple city skylines. It is the work of Ozon the enfant terrible who wanted to shake up and scatter the bourgeois audience's assumptions, but also that of the worldly, professorial figure Ozon cuts today, who spies the dangers inherent in youthful posethrowing. It is, finally, a L'Étranger for grown-ups, and not the mooning hipsters and adolescents who've historically taken this book and its worldview to their hearts. If that makes Ozon's film hard to like or embrace especially, I also doubt we'll see a more admirable adaptation in 2026.

The Stranger is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Song Sung Blue"

We've arrived at the point where one of Hollywood's most pressing creative concerns, going into the year of Our Lord 2026, was paying tribute to a real-life Neil Diamond tribute act and thereby engineering a Neil Diamond jukebox musical: Song Sung Blue is one for the teenagers, and two for the show. Hugh Jackman toplines as the somewhat improbably named Mike Sardina, a jobbing musician and recovering alcoholic eking out a measly living on Milwaukee's chicken-in-a-basket circuit at the turn of the 1990s. Backstage at one such gig, he crosses paths with a Patsy Cline tribute act, Claire Stingl (Kate Hudson); the pair click, fall for one another, and re-emerge on the circuit as Lightning and Thunder, belting out "Cracklin' Rosie", "Forever in Blue Jeans" and other such standards. Despite Mike's understandable reluctance to perform "Sweet Caroline" (the most overplayed song in Christendom, an anthem for sheep, baa baa baa), the duo start to get somewhere before fate intervenes, and we realise this must have been one of those long-gestating projects afforded a leg-up by the success of 2018's A Star is Born redo: the folks putting the show on here aren't the fresh faces you'd find in Glee or any other bandcamp, rather midlifers with baggage beyond the remit of any roadie (addiction issues, depression, a family at home to raise). It's a vision of showbiz as last-chance saloon, serving until late.

Writer-director Craig Brewer, who oversaw the rap game melodrama Hustle & Flow in another life, duly sets about soliciting texture and experience: the film's backdrop is an unfussy, lived-in, come-as-you-are blue-collar America, and even as the narrative wades into sticky, TVM-adjacent territory in its second half, a distinctive editing strategy makes unusual bedfellows of unlikely developments in the Sardina household. That's one selling point: between senile motorists and Mike's dodgy ticker, the arc is never as predictable as you might think. (The wrinkles of life haven't been entirely smoothed out of it.) And it's fun in a broad-brush kind of way. Brewer evidently prefers performers who can come on and give a longish film some necessary oomph here and there: Michael Imperioli as a silver-fox Buddy Holly impersonator, Fisher Stevens as Mike's dentist manager, Jim Belushi as a phlegmy local entrepreneur. We also get an oddly miscast Eddie Vedder when this story takes a sharp leftfield turn (and the actor in question is actually supposed to be playing Eddie Vedder, not an Eddie Vedder tribute act), but elsewhere Brewer clears ample space for Jackman (wearing the sideburns well, which is to say unironically) and Hudson (who seems to be turning into Janice Long) to be as impressive offstage as they are on. You buy this pair as a double act, which is crucial; they're like an unpretentious Aldi own-brand variant of Joaquin and Reese as Johnny and June. What's around them is often cheesy and corny, caught singing an at least semi-familiar tune; we are, ultimately, many miles from the cinematic cutting edge, and at least three decades removed from where the rest of the American cinema is at in 2026. But that's part of Song Sung Blue's plaid-covered charm: not unlike the real Diamond's secular hymns, Brewer's film has a way of bypassing your most critical faculties. Stick it on, and it kinda works.

Song Sung Blue is now available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD and Blu-ray via Universal.

Dead air: "undertone"

21st century horror cinema has in certain respects been a history of terrifying technologies. It began with a new wave of video nasties (the various iterations of the Ring series), before going digital, scrolling through and past dodgy websites (feardotcom), spooky surveillance footage (the many Paranormal Activitys) and killer apps (Friend Request, Countdown) to arrive - come the pandemic - at cursed Zoom calls (Host). It's almost as though the movies have been trying to warn us about something. Now there's Ian Tuason's much-trumpeted A24 buy-in undertone, which centres on a haunted Irish singer who's become a spokesperson for the UK's rivers... no, sorry, it's podcasts, as everything else is nowadays. Some cursory preamble establishes the circumstances of an especially fateful recording session for an apparently popular paranormal pod. Sceptical host Evy (Nina Kiri) is dialling in from the US, and the home she shares with her ailing mother (Michèle Duquet). Her more suggestible co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco), dialling in from London, has a new mystery for the pair to investigate: an anonymously submitted email containing ten attached audio files, made up of what appear to be the conversations of a fraught couple, heavily doctored children's nursery rhymes, earsplitting shrieks and screams, and what even Evy starts to believe are hidden messages. It's a radio play, essentially, one that's taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Cineworld by mistake.

It is, also, a demonstration of horror cinema's recent sound design tendency run amok. One element of undertone has been prioritised above all others: the ears are duly piqued, battered and traumatised, but the eye grows bored and sleepy, and the entire lower half of the body grows terribly restless. My heart sank the minute it became apparent Tuason's main visual focus was going to be a woman sat alone at her own dining table clicking links on her laptop; for much of the movie, we're either eavesdropping on a production meeting or listening to a podcast that is the paranormal equivalent of a local radio station's misheard lyrics phone-in. The hosts incessantly tell one another they've heard something they haven't (and, more crucially, that we haven't), while Tuason cuts to a clock on the wall that, I swear, starts to go backwards beyond a certain point ("but we've still got two more files to listen to!"). So bare-bones you could play its ribcage like a xylophone, undertone is reflective of a wider trend, but it's a lamentable trend: filming people recording podcasts, thinking that'll do as either television or online content, rather than spending money on actual entertainment. Pivoting to video has sure worked out well for Tuason, who's just been tapped to oversee some Paranormal Activity reboot only four or five people on the entire planet can possibly be excited about. If there's one thing the studio system in its present form has almost been set up to effectuate, it'll be to stifle this recent horror renaissance with terminally flimsy product and morbidly unoriginal ideas.

undertone is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 3-5, 2026):

1 (new) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

2 (1) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

3 (new) The Drama (15) **

4 (2) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

5 (3) Hoppers (U) ****

6 (new) Fuze (15)

7 (4) Dhurandhar: The Revenge (18) **

8 (new) Vaazha 2: Biopic of a Billion Bros (15)

9 (5) Reminders of Him (PG)

10 (6) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Stand By Me

2. The Stranger

3. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow

4. Orwell: 2+2=5

5. Father Mother Sister Brother

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

2 (20) The Housemaid (15)

3 (new) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

4 (1) Sinners (15) ****

5 (2) One Battle After Another (15) ****

6 (30) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

7 (3) Wicked: For Good (PG)

8 (new) G.O.A.T. (PG)

9 (33) Hamnet (12) **

10 (10) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Nouvelle Vague

2. Saipan

3. Song Sung Blue

4. Marty Supreme

5. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Wicker Man (Friday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

2. Rear Window [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.10pm)

3. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Saturday, ITV1, 3am)

4. Jurassic Park (Sunday, ITV1, 2.10pm)

5. The Royal Hotel (Friday, BBC One, 11.25pm)

On demand: "Motherboard"

As gestured to by its punning title, the British indie doc Motherboard functions as a reverse-angle on Richard Linklater's much-admired Boyhood. Sometime TV director Victoria Mapplebeck picked up a camera of her own upon giving birth to her son Jim in 2004, when she was 38, and kept it running over the ups and downs of the two decades that followed. In the film's opening montage, we glimpse Jim as he is today, befringed and upright graduate of the Brit School; then we flash back twenty years to a pivotal life moment, and Mapplebeck begins to show how everybody got here. She fell pregnant from a man she confesses she went on a total of four dates with - a fellow who then dumped her, before moving to Spain - so the film's subject is more precisely single motherhood. Mapplebeck quit TV, aware it's not the most supportive industry to work in as a single parent, took a new gig teaching film, then set about raising a child and making a film about raising a child. As you can imagine, it wasn't always fun and games: dad insisted on a paternity test, there was a brush with breast cancer, and Jim had his moodier moments as he approached and passed through adolescence. But Mapplebeck wound up making a young man and a film in parallel: for an hour and a half - rather than Linklater's three - we're watching an extended process of fruition. Women tend to get things done with far less fuss than we men.

A lot of Motherboard could be described as routine: it's washing up, bedtime stories, bus journeys, mother telling son not to pick his nose, holidays, Christmas, small conversations on major topics (Jim's relationship with his dad, Victoria's medical issues). There are small but noticeable changes. Life gets rapidly more digital than it was in 2004: Jim describes his father's Facebook profile as "ones and zeroes", consumer video footage is succeeded by smartphone footage. The big change is that Jim gets bigger and stroppier, both more independent and more troubled, because that's how growing up works. Mapplebeck, for her part, seems very conscious of the fact this is mostly home video, and so strives to mix up her approach with montage, slow-motion, the South London equivalent of Ozu's pillow shots, freeze-frames, X-rays, despairing texts and answerphone or voicemail messages as well as snippets of retrospective narration; Motherboard is absolutely a film made by someone who's taught issues of film form, and resolved to convert theory into practice. Most obviously, she's reviewed the hundreds of hours she must have shot and worked out exactly what story she wanted to tell in these 87 minutes, which is bigger than it first appears, and possibly even bigger than Victoria and Jim themselves. Much as the filmmaker has a realisation while observing her cancer cells through a microscope, Motherboard curates its scenes of small, everyday activity in such a way that they start to speak to far bigger themes: adaptation and endurance, responsibility and care. (You may also wonder to what extent Mapplebeck kept on filming to show Jim's absent father just what he chose to miss out on; though dialled down over time, this is, on some level, film as fuck-you.) It may not look like much at first glance - a low-budget, independently rendered documentary, pieced together for the price of home editing software - but Motherboard remains alert and true to the contours of life.

Motherboard is exclusively available to rent via the BFI Player from Monday.

Come and see: "Stand By Me" at 40

Stand By Me celebrates its 40th birthday, albeit in more sorrowful circumstances than it might, given the murder of director Rob Reiner last December. Revisiting the film, one realises that death is everywhere: somewhere in here is the disquieting idea that looking it in the eye - whether by staring down an express train or gazing upon a fallen schoolmate - has become an American way of life or rite of passage. This was one of an odd cluster of 1986 films in which young Americans happen across decaying body parts; the other two (Blue Velvet and River's Edge) were effectively fringe items, but Reiner, coming off the back of This is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing, made his variation at the very heart of the Hollywood studio system. You sense the executives hoped the fresh-faced youthfulness of this cast (Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell as its central quartet, plus John Cusack and Kiefer Sutherland in dispatches) might give the movie a leg up before audiences got to considering the sadness Stephen King, in his source novella "The Body", was actually writing about: the passage of time, and the passing of old friends and longstanding friendships with it. Finding the body of a contemporary is here positioned as a grand day out for four boys from the wrong side of the tracks, which would itself seem pretty sorrowful; it's made even more painful by a framing device that establishes Phoenix's Chris Chambers, generally regarded as the one of the quartet bright and scrappy enough to actually do something with his life, has perished in a random act of violence. Yes, there are vague similarities to the rock 'n' roll childhood of American Graffiti and the previous year's megahit Back to the Future - to some degree, this was also boomers revisiting their glory days to the sounds of their youth - but, deep down, Stand By Me sensed that, at some point, the fun stops. Hell: at some point, you stop.

What Reiner brought to the adaptation was, primarily, an appreciable and not inappropriate economy: Stand By Me goes deep in just 85 minutes. (Some films, like some lives, are too short.) Having apprenticed on television sitcom (All in the Family), he'd learnt to get what he needed without undue fuss, and shooting Tap had persuaded him not everything had to go up to eleven, that there remained artistic value in understatement. Maybe he knew certain sequences here - the rail bridge crossing, the bit with the junkyard dog, the pie-eating contest - would expand in the mind; their anecdotal, lived experience does come to assume a far greater significance in the movie's rear-view mirror. He knew, wisely, to set the kids' innocence against the unsparing horror of this American life: the shitty dads and broken homes, the poverty and the bullying. (Stray thought prompted by the lead-in to the pie-eating contest, a curious setpiece that is at once a nerd's revenge, an elaborate cutaway gag and the Carrie finale turned inside out: was the robust Reiner likewise mocked for his weight and eating habits?) One reason King and Reiner shaped up as among the current President's most vocal Hollywood critics: they grasped that nostalgia only covers so much ground, that - for many folks - America was never that great to begin with. Here, despite the deceptively leafy and sunny location work, the land of the free starts to seem as deadly for some kids as Korea or Vietnam. Reiner is as protective of his leads as any Hollywood director can be (for all the good it did two of them): there are very few of Back to the Future's eternally jarring tonal issues, he preserves Gordy's campfire confession that he misses his older brother (as the movie, too, seems to pine for Cusack), and in the boys' roughhousing, he sees at least a consolatory solidarity. But Stand By Me struck me this time around as more than ever a displaced war movie: a small squadron of lads dispatched on a critical, life-changing mission, facing up both to enemy combatants (older lads) and their own ever-growing sense of mortality. (Note the dogtag Feldman's Teddy wears around his neck, and the war stories he tells.) One way of approaching it on this anniversary rerelease: as Rob Reiner's own Platoon.

Stand By Me returns to cinemas nationwide from tomorrow.

On demand: "My Father's Shadow"

My Father's Shadow is a notable example of a British film that probably couldn't have been made during the Working Title era 25 years ago: the co-production arrangements wouldn't have been in place, and - for one reason or another - the key creative personnel wouldn't yet be on the books at BAFTA. Brothers Akinola and Wale Davies have come up with a 90-minute extension of what seems like a hyper-specific, often overwhelmingly vivid childhood memory. The year's 1993, and two bored and squabbling pre-teen siblings in a small Nigerian village (played by Godwin and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) are taken on an impromptu day trip to the country's capital Lagos by their stern but loving father (Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù, from His House), keen to find some renewed way of showing some interest in his boys. The interpersonal business at first appears secondary to the logistics of the trip, and the new and strange images it imprints on the brothers: the idiosyncrasies of the grown-ups on their commuter bus, the vague chatter about an election the youngsters are too young to fully understand, the look on a local girl and a homeless boy's faces once this family unit arrives at its destination, the look on the faces of the young soldiers themselves bussed into central Lagos in a pre-emptive (and, it transpires, vain) bid to quell any electoral unrest. Watching My Father's Shadow, it becomes very clear very quickly why the moneymen handed over this budget to the Davieses: here are folks who seem to know this time and this place intimately - who may well have lived through it - and who are able to both recall and recreate them in ultra-evocative, close-up detail.

It's a transporting perspective, to say the least: that of wide-eyed kids looking out at the big city for the first time. Every shot here is a precious memory, even those that hurt. On a technical level, the film is a small triumph of production design: Pablo and Jennifer Anti (who helped style Beyoncé's Black is King) have turned the chaos of today's Lagos into a city that more readily reflects the period setting. More specifically yet - and only compounding a general sense of slippage - it's a version of 1990s Lagos that seems to have one foot stuck in the 1970s, underdeveloped in some key aspects: the theme of the day's election. If the kids - innocents snapping up the offers of free food and funfair rides - aren't old enough to see what's wrong, the father evidently can; the subtext of this daytrip is his effort to secure them a better and brighter future. The Davieses nod to one realist classic (Bicycle Thieves, in the film's questing structure) and to a more contemporary influence (Barry Jenkins' Moonlight; here as there, the pull of the ocean softens man and boys alike), yet they finally make this story their own by casting the exact right combination of people to occupy centre frame. Dìrísù keeps the father figure forbidding - we look at him as his boys do - yet he's also as vulnerable as anyone else on screen; if the brothers really do resemble brothers in both looks and attitude, that's doubtless in part because the Egbos actually are brothers, but this camera's sustained, sympathetic observation nevertheless reveals one as softer and more sensitive than the other. On my walk home from town, I started to revise the opening statement of this review: maybe My Father's Shadow could have been made at the turn of the century, but it would likely have been by a director who wouldn't have been certain of where he was going, and who wouldn't fully know what the father means when he sighs "Nigeria is hard". That version wouldn't have turned out as compelling and convincing as this - nor, I suspect, would it be this quietly beautiful.

My Father's Shadow is available to stream via MUBI from tomorrow.

She said: "The Drama"

With The Drama, those algorithmic whizzkids at A24 - and the merry Scandie prankster Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) - have arrived at a movie to get everybody talking, save us critics. You'll doubtless have heard the set-up by now: picture-perfect young sweethearts (Robert Pattinson and Zendaya) are waist-deep in wedding plans when, during a drunken night out with friends, she confesses to the worst thing she's ever done, causing him to reevaluate all his previous certainties and sureties. Though this confession is more revelation of (former) character than rug-pulling Shyamalanian twist, it's only fair for me to allow you to discover it in context. (Should you wish to know without forking out for a ticket, the details are inevitably already out there on the Internet, including in a report by a major news outlet that also details the concern and consternation Borgli's film has provoked in some quarters.) My problem with The Drama wasn't so much with The Revelation - which, if nothing else, is evidence of an American film daring to engage with something that apparently happens in America every other day - as with The Tone, The Framing and especially The Casting. OK, Kristoffer Borgli, so you're telling me Zendaya is the sort of person who might be inspired to do this? Zendaya Coleman, with her air of ever-upright girl scout? I spent a lot of The Drama suffering unhelpful flashbacks to 2024's Challengers, which asked us to believe Zendaya might spend her nights and days concocting exotic polysexual headgames rather than colour-coding her revision notes or organising a whist drive for local elders. (But then that film also invited us to swallow the idea Zendaya was mother to a toddling child: it grows only more ridiculous in retrospect.) That Zendaya. Doing this. Okay. Sure. Whatever.

When you're just about the hottest young star on the planet, of course, you are naturally going to be offered every last role under the sun - everybody loves you; everybody wants you; everybody wants you on their poster, selling tickets - but it's Probability 101 that only a few of those roles are going to be right for you and your persona. There are a few A24-affiliated actresses - darkly brooding, more obvious malcontents: Rachel Sennott and Odessa A'Zion come to mind - who might have stood a chance of pulling this role off, but their stars perhaps wouldn't yet be big enough to have got The Drama greenlit, and even then, I suspect they'd be more inclined to send a snarky text to the group chat rather than, you know, think about doing that. The problem is systemic: today's American cinema, hung up as it has been on franchises and squeaky-clean, family-friendly fare for the better part of the last twenty years, simply hasn't recruited the kind of actors that might do justice to the issues and dilemmas Borgli, in his cackling way, is trying to address. The sometime Mary-Jane Watson and the actor formerly known as Edward Cullen are fine as the advert characters The Drama introduces to us before The Revelation, who may as well be selling us on the Doritos available in the cinema foyer, and they give of their best as the blood-and-vomit-smeared test dummies the film subsequently invites us to sneer at. But a risky concept like this needs bruising, hard-won life experience to ground it, and actors who might conceivably have brought a weapon (or some other palpable threat) into auditions; all The Drama has in its back pocket, ultimately, is a playlist. 

My suspicions grew that Borgli was using these fresh faces to zhuzh up more than faintly hoary material: as with Dream Scenario, The Drama can seem like some coded thesis on (sigh) cancel culture. Zendaya's Emma is cancelled socially for saying something you're not supposed to say in polite society; this framework enables Borgli to write a scene in which a high-schooler points out women are as likely to do The Thing as men (#notallmen) and to have a jolly good chuckle at the implications of casting a woman of colour in the role. Any objections get channelled into Pattinson's stooge, a Diet Coke-sipping wet lefty who compares this situation to a Louis Malle movie before succumbing to erectile dysfunction. I mean, again: fine, whatever, but Lacombe, Lucien was at least a film made by grown-ups who were serious about their intentions in a way the opportunistic trolling of The Drama patently isn't. Instead, what we're getting here is another of A24's sniggery, giggling ventures - it's this year's Eddington - which suggests this studio isn't just making films for kids (with kids!) but may actually also be being run by kids. As provocations go, The Drama is shorter than Triangle of Sadness, which should count for something, but it's still a rather tiresome and self-satisfied sixth former's idea of sophisticated entertainment: a movie that wants us to pay to watch folks having a rotten time, and which continues that dead-end strain of American cinema that insists on scrubbing our best and brightest young stars of any residual trace of charm. (I'm blaming Ruben Östlund and the Safdies: it's all A24's worst instincts, wrapped up in a perversely saleable package.) Pattinson is asked to be no more than helpless in the role of a simpering wreck, and he submits to yet another bad hair movie: ruffled-floppy on those rare occasions when he has it together, terribly limp and representatively ineffectual as matters get worse in his head. As for Zendaya: highly watchable actress, very promising movie star, but she can no more convince in this role than she could beat Luke Littler in the final of the World Darts Championship. We have drifted some way from the light, people.

The Drama is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

In memoriam: Mary Beth Hurt (Guardian 04/04/26)

The thoughtful, understated actor Mary Beth Hurt, who has died aged 79, enjoyed the good fortune of seeing her early career intersect with an unusually intellectual moment in American cinema. She earned a BAFTA nomination as one of the three sisters in Woody Allen’s Chekhov-via-Bergman experiment Interiors (1978) before causing onscreen havoc as Robin Williams’ frisky college professor wife in the John Irving adaptation The World According to Garp (1982).

In Interiors, Hurt – making her movie debut – was cast as the directionless Joey, who belatedly achieves a kind of purpose in attempting to save her overbearing mother (Geraldine Page) from drowning. By far Allen’s gloomiest vision, the film nevertheless made $10m off a $3m budget, while Hurt did more than tread water in illustrious company. Though she lost out in BAFTA’s Most Promising Newcomer category to Superman Christopher Reeve, the film’s minor-key success prefigured Hurt’s four-decade big-screen career.

There were early missteps. Hurt beat out Jamie Lee Curtis to the female lead in Joan Micklin Silver’s Head Over Heels (1979) – where she played the married woman beguiling John Heard’s civil servant – but the film suffered from studio jitters and an enforced happy ending. “Mr. Heard and Miss Hurt are two of our best young actors,” sighed The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, “but the material is either thin and unfocused or rich and besides the point.”

Worse was to follow with the marital melodrama A Change of Seasons (1980), where Shirley Maclaine, Anthony Hopkins and Bo Derek formed an altogether unlikely love triangle. Hurt, cast as Maclaine and Hopkins’ daughter, had a ringside seat as her onscreen parents rowed on set; Derek, meanwhile, fell out with original director Noel Black, who was fired and replaced with Richard Lang. Even reshoots featuring Hopkins and Derek romping in a hot tub did little to tempt cinemagoers.

The World According to Garp, then, presented as a lifeline. Hurt’s Helen Holm proved central to the film’s most memorable scene, wherein Williams’ eponymous T.S. Garp, correctly suspecting his wife of infidelity, races home in a state of agitation and crashes his car, containing the couple’s two children, into another in which Helen is performing oral sex on her younger lover. (The lover is sorely wounded; one child is killed, the other blinded.)

Remarkably, this tonal rollercoaster – which also featured, in passing, John Lithgow as a transsexual football player – proved both a critical and commercial hit, gaining Oscar nominations for Lithgow and Glenn Close, a Broadway friend of Hurt’s, as Williams’ radical mother. For Hurt, it was a rare opportunity to play an unabashedly sexual woman: “I’ve never been cast as a mistress. I’m the girl men marry, not the girl they have affairs with.”

She was born Mary Beth Supinger in Marshalltown, Iowa on September 26, 1946 to army lieutenant Forrest Supinger and his wife Dolores (née Andre). In an early brush with fame, one of her babysitters was the aspirant actress Jean Seberg, whose family lived nearby. “Marshalltown went sort of crazy with Seberg,” she later recalled. “I remember there was a parade. She came back from shooting Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, I think. And all the kids just ran outside.”

The young Mary Beth studied drama at the University of Iowa and acting at the NYU School of the Arts, where classmates included William Hurt, whom she married in 1971. Her early stage career established her versatility: she debuted in 1973 playing a 98-year-old Vietnamese man, alongside the young Meat Loaf, in Jim Steinman and Michael Weller’s rock musical More Than You Deserve.

She debuted on Broadway in 1974 in a revival of William Congreve’s Love for Love opposite Close, then began to pick up TV gigs, playing a police officer in Ann in Blue (1974) and a troubled skater in “A Shield for Murder”, a two-part Kojak in 1976. That same year Hurt landed her first Tony nomination for her performance in Pinero’s Trelawny of the ‘Wells’, opposite a debuting Meryl Streep; she landed a second for a 1982 revival of Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart.

After divorcing William Hurt in December 1982, she married the director Paul Schrader the following August. (She later appeared in Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997) and The Walker (2007).) She landed a third Tony nod in 1986 for Michael Frayn’s Benefactors; had a chewy role as a suspected cannibal in Bob Balaban’s droll black comedy Parents (1989); and played Manhattan grande dames in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation (both 1993).

Hurt eventually embodied a battle-hardened Seberg – clutching a new perspective on her own celebrity – in Mark Rappaport’s inventive cinephile tribute From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995). She also earned an Independent Spirit nomination as a wife who suspects her husband may be a killer in Karen Moncrieff’s clever feminist fable The Dead Girl (2006). Her final stage role was in the 2011 revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves; her final film, before an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, was the smalltown drama Change in the Air (2018).

There again, Hurt took a supporting role, a preference she explained in 2009: “I never felt very beautiful or incredibly smart or witty, so I was always looking for something about [these roles] that intrigued me… You walk down the street and you see people and you realize that every person chose the clothing they’re going to wear for the day. It means you’ve costumed yourself, and that you’re presenting yourself in a way that you want the world to see you. And I find that fascinating; more fascinating, really, than the gold medal moments. It’s the secondary things.”

She is survived by Schrader and the couple’s two children, Molly and Sam.

Mary Beth Hurt, actor, born September 26, 1946, died March 28, 2026.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 27-29, 2026):

1 (1) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

2 (new) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

3 (3) Hoppers (U) ****

4 (2) Dhurandhar: The Revenge (18) **

5 (4) Reminders of Him (PG)

6 (5) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

7 (new) They Will Kill You (15)

8 (new) Bluey at the Cinema: Playdates with Friends (U)

9 (8) Mother's Pride (12A) **

10 (7) How to Make a Killing (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Orwell: 2+2=5

2. Amélie

3. Romeo + Juliet

4. Moulin Rouge!

5. The Good Boy

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Sinners (15) ****

2 (3) One Battle After Another (15) ****

3 (2) Wicked: For Good (PG)

4 (21) Anaconda (12)

5 (6) Spider-Man: No Way Home (12) ***

6 (4) Dune: Part One (12) **

7 (5) Shelter (15)

8 (new) Send Help (15) ***

9 (19) Spider-Man: Homecoming (12) **

10 (10) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Saipan

2. Sisu: Road to Revenge

3. Good Boy

4. Marty Supreme

5. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory [above] (Easter Sunday, ITV1, 2.30pm)

2. High Society (Easter Sunday, BBC Two, 2.15pm)

3. Speed (Easter Sunday, Channel 4, 12midnight)

4. Toy Story 3 (Easter Sunday, Channel 4, 5.10pm)

5. Gosford Park (Easter Monday, BBC Two, 10pm)

Éloge de l'amour: "Amélie" at 25

Amélie - ageless Amélie - is 25 this year, which means we've all had ample time to work out where we stand on it. Is this, as Xan Brooks argued earlier this week in The Independent, mere moodboard cinema, with a cloyingly cutesy-poo heroine who embodies all the worst aspects of the 21st century's main character syndrome? (Even if, granted, she is the main character of a film called, you know, Amélie.) Is it still, as many believed at the time, a defining modern date movie? This is an unfashionable confession, but I too had previously found Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film affecting up to a point. Beneath its sugarcoated crème brûlée toplayer, its garrulous array of kooks and quirks and talking inanimate objects, it always struck me as a rare romcom with some understanding of solitude. There are moments during that melancholy stretch in the middle - governed above all else by the sad pools of Audrey Tautou's eyes and Yann Tiersen's immediately evocative piano-and-accordion score, very much the Buena Vista Social Club sound of autumn 2001 - when Jeunet allows us to sit quietly with its heroine's (sometimes self-imposed) loneliness; a creative choice that makes it all the more lovely and moving when she does finally find someone (and someone who might actually be right for her, given his comparably curious habits). Rewatching the film again this week, I was most struck by the solitude of those around her. The denizens of the Deux Moulins cafe, walled off in separate booths, separate lives; the woman in the fake Renoir painting; the neighbours, in their own little boxes; Lady Di, killed in the pursuit of true love. All the lonely people. Where do they all come from?

It's something of a miracle that we ever notice their plight(s). Jeunet had dropped his old partner-in-crime Marc Caro some years before, yet he'd retained the insistent busyness and eccentric character playing of the pair's breakthroughs Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. Though Amélie would prove more overtly crowdpleasing, there is still a lot of clutter around the film's heart. (Much more than I remember there being, in fact.) Yet in certain moments, Jeunet still had the energy to clear the table of childish things and flirt with something tragically real: the fear of growing old alone, of dying without having known love. That's... well, that's more than we were offered in the same year's more generously reviewed Bridget Jones's Diary, which introduced a very different romantic heroine, and played out her travails as winking, cringe-inducing farce. Jeunet has Paris in the summertime, a yen to make cinema rather than Bridget's television, and Tautou, the actress as petting-zoo creature: doe-eyed yet oddly bovine in her responses, as if she were just about the last person on set to realise what Jeunet was getting at here. We can surely agree it's an acquired taste: this review may be as close as I'm going to get to responding in any favourable way to Wes Anderson's recent doodles. And it's as simplistic in its worldview as anything made in Paris with Raimu seventy years before, rewarding our gal's virtue while punishing the grocer's brutish sins. More than most recent anniversary reissues, Amélie does now seem a relic of an older world, and not just because it opened mere days or weeks before 9/11. Jeunet made one further attempt at a grand cinematic statement - with 2005's sputtering period romance A Very Long Engagement, again with Tautou - before beating a total retreat into trivia. This time round, I came to look upon his best-known film with the residual fondness one feels for an old flame, while also wondering why I fell so hard for it in the first place, and feeling a pang of nostalgia for the days when a French romcom could become not just a hit but a pop-cultural totem - a film that inspired such passions you had to take sides on it. Where have they gone?

Amélie returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.