BREATH   : [6/10] : Soom : S.Korea 07 : KIM Ki-Duk : 84m : seen CW 18.8 (press)
   The latest from the tireless Kim - at least one film a year, every year, since the decade began - is in a similar mode to, but isn't really in the same league as, his 2004 standout 3-Iron. This time he's exploring an intriguing intersection of amour fou and performance-art, as a desperate housewife becomes infatuated with a death-row prisoner. Although her creativity had previously found outlet via sculpture, the housewife now devotes herself to planning and staging colourful musical-numbers in the visiting-room - with the connivance of the jail's unseen boss, who observes the 'action' via surveillance camera.
   Though realistic and downbeat in execution, the picture's script is fundamentally fable-like in its details and in the episodic repetitiveness of its development. This is another mildly-metaphysical romance probing the painful, ineffable mysteries of the human heart - and while the results ultimately fall a little short of Kim's lofty ambitions, there's more than enough originality and emotion here to sustain our interest over the brief-ish running time.

THE STRUGGLE   : [4/10] : US 1931 : D.W.Griffith : 76m : seen FH 18.8 (public - paid £5.20)
   Griffith's final film is, sad to report, all too appropriately named: after a sprightly start, this corny melodrama about the evils of alcohol - and, by extension, the failures of Prohibition - becomes something of a slog for the audience. Indeed, you may feel the need for a reviving tot of the hard stuff by the time it's all over.
   Focus is on Wilson (Hal Skelly), a regular-joe family-man whose nicely-spoken, book-reading wife (Zita Johann, with perpetually furrowed brow) and precocious-moppet daughter look on in dismay as booze and naive ill-judgement derail his promising steel-mill career and send him on a steep spiral into penury. 
   The film's strong suit is the way it shows - in the early stretches - how Prohibition forced drinkers from high-grade beer to low-grade, often poisonous "liquor". But when Wilson starts going downhill, so does the movie: America's general economic/political background (after a 1911 prologue, the action mostly takes place in the mid-20s) is only vaguely sketched, Griffith's stagy direction is functional at best - seldom straying from a series of drab interior settings - while the script's weepy third-act touches of religiosity ("Mommy, do you trust in the Lord?") feel particularly gratuitous. As the whiskey-sodden protagonist, meanwhile, Skelly repeatedly goes from sober-genial to stumbling-blotto with implausible speed - typical of a film which takes a two-dimensional approach to a complex social issue.

JOSHUA   : [6/10] : US 07 : George Ratliff : 103m : seen FH 18.8 (public - paid £6.76)
   To a well-heeled, liberal, loving Manhattan couple (Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga) is born a daughter, Lily - a sister to nine-year-old Joshua (Jacob Kogan). Joshua doesn't seem overly elated by this new arrival - perhaps he's even a bit resentful. Not that it's easily to tell, the lad being a conspicuously self-possessed, quiet, bookish sort whose chilly demeanour, oddball pronouncements and morbid habits lead his father to wonder whether he's harbouring a proto-sociopath under his roof...
   Joshua is very careful to position itself within a certain long-established cinematic sub-genre: the "creepy kid" chiller (The Bad Seed; The Innocents; Village of the Damned; The Omen; The Sixth Sense, Birth, etc.) So careful, in fact, that the attentive viewer will wonder if there's actually something else going on here - and so it proves, though to explain exactly what and how would be unfair, as the film depends on keeping us disconcerted and even discombobulated with its tonal shifts and rug-pulling revelations.
   Most joltingly, there's a "reveal" about 15 minutes from the end - which comes after Joshua's parents have finally called in a child-psychologist (a turn of events which, given their location and financial status, and the nature of their son's disturbing behaviour,  would surely have been closer to a first resort rather than a last) - that casts everything we've seen before in a radically different light. That said, it's decidedly debatable whether there's been sufficient ambiguity in the film's early and middle stretches to quite justify this audacious coup de cinema. 
   There is considerable ambiguity, however, in the final scene (which culminates in a very odd freeze-frame) to the extent that we wonder to what extent Joshua is intended as a dark comedy, despite the seriousness of much of the subject-matter and the way Nico Muhly's nerve-jangling score leads us to believe we're experiencing a flesh-creeping horror movie. It's this mixture of tones which gives Joshua much of its appeal - though on reflection the teasing script could be interpreted as taking a rather tasteless approach to an unambiguously serious social issue.

THE MAN FROM LONDON   : [4/10] : A Londoni ferfi : Fr (Fr/Ger/Hun/UK) 07 : TARR Bela (co-director HRANITZKY Agnes) : 135m : seen CM 18.8 (public - paid £6.36)
   There have been many troubled, lengthy productions in the history of cinema, but The Man From London is unusual in actually telling the viewer, via a title card, just how long it took to make: 2003-2007, so we're informed. It's a rather ostentatious, portentous touch - as if the simple act of spending four years on a single movie was to be celebrated and admired for its own sake. This gesture might not have been quite so irritating had film itself proved worth the palaver: The Man From London, however, feels more like something that was knocked up in about a week, from (mis-)conception to final "edit" - although one has to wonder what, if anything, ended up on editor Hranitzy's cutting-room floor, so punishingly lengthy are the film's shots.
   The film premiered in competition at Cannes, and reviewers have noted that the film is based on a novel by Georges Simenon. That's kind of true, but there's a little more to it than that [synopsis and analysis below*]. Simenon's short novel L'homme de Londres was published in 1934, and translated into English as Newhaven-Dieppe. It's already been filmed three times before - twice in France as L'homme de Londres (by Henri Decoin in 1943 and Jan Keja's Dutch-language version for TV in 1988), and once in Britain: Lance Comfort's Temptation Harbour, a little-seen 1947 production starring the intriguing threesome of Robert Newton, Simone Simon and William Hartnell ("an interesting bridge between the gloomy French melodramas of the '30s and American film noir," according to Time Out.)
   It's a safe bet that none of these predecessors resembled Tarr's version in anything but the basic details of the plot and setting. He relocates the action to a nameless, seemingly fictional port - actually Bastia in Corsica - and, despite most of the character-names being English, all of the dialogue is Hungarian (Tilda Swinton, as the protagonist's wife, is visibly speaking English throughout.) The story is related in numbingly slow fashion, so much so that the audience will struggle to keep track of the 'action' and the tortuous convolutions of cross and double-cross which so creakily unfold via cinematographer Fred Kelemen's carefully-composed monochrome-chiaroscuro images.
   At times, vision and sound - via Mihaly Vig's hauntingly repetitive score - do combine to striking effect, and at certain junctures the film functions less in terms of narrative and more as a kind of inescapably static, nightmarish reverie. But this is nowhere near enough to justify the kind of investment Tarr and Hranitzky demand: on close investigation and reflection, there's really very little substance here, nothing that really lingers in the mind after the lights go up and the credits begin to roll. It's perhaps a kind of anti-cinema - the medium being deployed to intimidate audiences into cowed, awed submission, to force them towards a kind of hushed, humbled reverence by the supposed presence of capital-A art.

YELLA   : [8/10] : Ger 07 : Christian Petzold : 89.5m : seen CW 18.8 (public - paid £6.76)
   After arguably losing his way a little with Wolfsburg and partially redeeming himself with Ghosts, Petzold now really gets back on track with existential-psychological drama-thriller Yella - the movie which has finally earned this outstanding writer-director (by general critical consensus one of Europe's leading film-makers over the past decade) commercial distribution in the UK for the first time.   
   Presumably the poster-campaign will emphasise the alluring presence of Nina Hoss - winner of Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance as the title-character. Yella is a thirtyish woman from a remote village (in what we may or may not deduce to be an eastern part of Germany) who lands a well-paid accountancy job in Hanover. She's anxious for a change of scene, partly to escape the puppyish/stalkerish attentions of her ex-husband Ben (Hinnerk Schonemann) - a small-time businessman who's clearly still besotted with his former spouse. 
   Ben volatile behaviour reaches a worrying new level when, driving Yella to the train station, he suddenly steers his car off a bridge and into the river below. Emerging bedraggled but seemingly unharmed from the mucky water, Yella narrowly makes it to the train on time and her new life begins - including what quickly develops into a professional and personal relationship with ambitious venture-capitalist Philipp (Devid Striesow). It isn't long before Ben shows up, however - and there are other ominous signs that Yella won't be able to escape her past so easily... 
   A textbook example of narrative concealment, Yella eventually reveals itself as belonging to a venerable sub-genre of movies (and literature) which can, when handled incorrectly, prove frustrating for viewers (and readers - although to identify exactly which sub-genre we're talking about would be to ruin what is a meticulously-crafted narrative structure.)
   Petzold, however, manages to "get away" with it - and then some - thanks to the crystalline directness of his style, the grounding of his story in all-too-believable real-world settings (an anonymous corporatised zone of business-parks, chain hotels and blandly opulent trappings) and by the way he coolly explores his heroine's complex psychology in a manner that's consistently engrossing, revealing and, once we're finally privy to the full facts, entirely appropriate.
  

*
   In L'Homme de Londres (1934, translated as Newhaven-Dieppe), Maloin is the avatar of the ordinary prisoner, immediately recognizable by his cage. A night-shift signalman enclosed in a box above the railway lines along the Dieppe quayside, he spends hours of his life in a kind of working isolation ward. The night when the unexpected occurs finds him in a bad humour which he fails to diagnose as a premonition. From his box he watches passengers disembarking from a ship. Two men remain on deck. A struggle begins. One of them throws a small suitcase overboard. A moment later, the other kills him, then leaves the ship.
   Instinctively, Maloin neither calls for help nor reports the incident. He retrieves the suitcase instead and finds it packed with English banknotes. Gripped by a criminal impulse that he can't sustain, he hides the case and tries to decide what to do next. He behaves strangely and guiltily enough to arouse the suspicions of the man from London, the murderer searching for the case, and ends by accidentally killing him. Exchanging the signal-box cell for the prison cell, he lies on his narrow bed and thinks about the dead Englishman. Once again, two lives seem interchangeable. Each has his wife and family, the same kind of house overlooking the English Channel from the cliffs of Dieppe and Newhaven. Each is a victim of the same mysterious force of circumstance, 'the kind that occurs every day: sometimes it's an accident, sometimes a shipwreck, sometimes a crime'. The man from London murdered for money and ended as a victim without money. Maloin tried and failed to become a thief and found himself an involuntary murderer. Both men had the opportunity to break out from an imprisoning routine, and fumbled it. Accident reveals the destiny of failure.

   Gavin Lambert