EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION   : [5/10] : UK 07 : Jim Threapleton : 77m : seen FH 24.8 (press)
      A hot-button current-affairs issue is dramatised to only lukewarm effect in Extraordinary Rendition - which plays like a slightly more 'Hollywooded-up' variation on Michael Winterbottom's docu-style In This World and The Road to Guantanamo, but looks intended for small-screen exposure rather than cinematic distribution.
   Omar Berdouni is seldom off-screen as Zaafir, a college tutor whose classroom rhetoric doesn't sound especially inflammatory ("in history," he asks, "how many times did violent struggle lead to democracy?"), but who comes to the attention of shadowy government organisations on the lookout for potential Islamist terrorists. He's kidnapped while out jogging and is spirited off - via an unspecified central European country - to an unspecified middle-eastern destination, where an unnamed interrogator (Andy Serkis) tries to force him into signing a confession. When the interrogator's verbal methods fail ("you think you have rights?!", he sneers), his thuggish (American?) colleagues are on hand inflict all manner of brutalities...
   Writer-director Threapleton succeeds in putting us into Zaafir's shoes as he endures the various privations and indignities concocted by his implacable captors: the torture scenes are suitably harrowing, and there are shades of The Wind that Shakes the Barley in the way Zaafir is visibly radicalised before our eyes. Though he'd not previously seemed especially religious (he's married to a Catholic, Caucasian woman) he starts reciting the Koran and praying to Allah in his spartan cell as his beard sprouts to mullah-like proportions.
   At only 77 minutes, however, there isn't enough space here to explain the background of Zaafir's plight. Threapleton presupposes much prior knowledge on the part of the audience, such as the meaning of the now-notorious phrase which provides the film with its title. Instead of delving into the nature and purpose of extraordinary rendition, Threapleton (whose flashily sub-Paul-Greengrass directorial style favours hand-held DV camerawork, frenetic editing and an intrusively manipulative score) concentrates on Zaafir's subjective experience, with particular emphasis on his time in captivity as related in a series of repetitive scenes.
   But he doesn't really give us enough information to judge Zaafir's "guilt" or "innocence" - which isn't to say, of course, that "guilt" would remotely excuse the activities of his tormentors. And while it's easy enough to rouse our consternation and righteous anger, it's so much harder to genuinely deepen our understanding of the issues involved.

SAN FRANCISCO   : [7/10] : US 1936 : W.S. Van Dyke : 113m : seen FH 24.8 (public - paid £5.20)
    "The most Godless city" in America gets its comeuppance in San Francisco: a fanciful dramatisation of events leading up to, during and immediately after the catastrophic earthquake of 1906. It's a full 90 minutes before the 'quake hits, however - plenty of time for us to get to know Blackie Norton (Clark Gable), a "selfish, sinful, adorable scoundrel" who, despite imbibing nothing stronger than "a little water," is one of the most successful bar-owners on the notorious Barbary Coast.
   Blackie's latest find is a naive songstress from Colorado - preacher's daughter Mary Blake (Jeanette McDonald) - whose talents extend from popular song (including several renditions of the knockabout title number) to the more rarefied realms of "opera" (more accurately, operetta). Previously motivated solely by commercial interest, Blackie now finds that romance adds unwelcome complications - his turmoil observed with increasing disquiet by Blackie's lifelong best friend Father Mullin (Spencer Tracy), who fears that Mary may be imperilling her "immortal soul" by hanging out on the Coast rather than in the city's upscale opera house...
   As an example of the 'golden age' Hollywood crowdpleaser, San Francisco has got the lot: dance and song (an eclectic range, thanks to Mary's versatility), passionate romance (including some raunchy moments), political context (Blackie is urged to run for local office in an attempt to tighten the Coast's woeful fire regulations), engaging leads, spectacular disaster (the earthquake sequences are still powerfully impressive 70 years on), plus all manner of opulent costumes and period decor.
   And whereas we get rather too little of Tracy and rather too much of MacDonald (director Van Dyke is desperately keen to milk the singer's contemporary popularity), it's easy to see how both Mullin and Mary are besotted with the blokishly charismatic Blackie - although, given the mores of the time, Mullin's obvious infatuation with his "pal" is never explicitly acknowledged. Gable is on cracking form here as "the most Godless, scoffing and unbelieving soul in San Francisco"- so much so that it's a real pity that the final, cloying religiose scene sees Blackie - a poster-boy for refreshingly earthy, practical, live-and-let-live atheism if ever there was one - succumb to an altogether unconvincing Damascene conversion amid the ruins of his own, beloved , lost Gomorrah.

THE HOME SONG STORIES   : [5/10] : Australia 2007 : Tony Ayres : 113m : seen CW 24.8 (public - paid £6.36)
      Dirty family laundry is given a thorough airing - or perhaps Ayring - in The Home Song Stories, a stolidly by-the-numbers plod though the rollercoaster early life of its Chinese-Australian writer-director. Its chief purpose is as a welcome showcase for Joan Chen, a talented and appealing actress who, in what's turning into a long career (it's 20 years since The Last Emperor, 16 since Twin Peaks), has only intermittently achieved the prominence she deserves.
   She's able to channel aspects of both Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce) and Maggie Cheung (In the Mood for Love) here as nightclub singer Rose, who in the film's 1964 prologue is a nightclub singer in Hong Kong. Among her admiring customers is Australian sailor Bill (Steven Vidler), whom she romances and marries - the pair resettling in Bill's native Melbourne along with Rose's two young children: Tom (Joel Lok) and the older May (Irene Chen). But Bill is often away from home, leaving his family under the disapproving glare of his mother (Kerry Walker) - a glare which turns positively basilisk-like when Rose starts romancing youthful, nogoodnik restaurant-dishwasher Joe (Qi Yuwu)...
   While the picture he paints of his knockout, tempestuous, mercurial mother is, to say the least, far from flattering, Ayres adopts a generally reverent attitude towards his own torrid domestic history. This material could easily have been handled in a more colourful, perhaps even campier manner, as with Steve Jacob's gaudy, thematically similar immigrant-culture-clash comedy-drama La Spagnola (2001) - and one can only speculate what, say, a Pedro Almodovar or Todd Haynes would do with this particular story. But Ayres can only provide a predictable, squarely perfunctory framework - he even begins with a surrogate author-figure tapping out his memoirs on a word processor - for his actors to develop their characterisations.
   And the performances are very much the strong suit here - the kids so appealing and engaging that it's not really a problem that they barely seem to age over the course of a decade (the picture's chronology is, to put it charitably, somewhat fuzzy). A shame, then, that the film gradually succumbs to soapy melodrama - no less than four suicide bids from various characters, each of them resulting in a hospital dash - and a traumatic final act ("of all the things I remember about my childhood, this is the one I remember the most") that's more maudlin than poignant.

PHANTOM LOVE   : [3?/10 - walkout] : US 07 : Nina Menkes : 87m approx [walkout after 48m] : seen FH 24.8 (public - paid £7.95)
       According to the Edinburgh Film Festival catalogue, Phantom Love is "a gorgeous, troubling psychosexual tour-de-force" where "fears and fantasies merge. Shot in stunning black and white, with scenes that could be outtakes from some surreal haute-couture photo shoot, Phantom Love might just be the most beautiful film of the year. Looks aren't everything, however, and this is no hollow aesthetic exercise.... There are shades of Alain Resnais and David Lynch here, but this film's lush mysteries are all its own - and the road that Lulu travels makes Mulholland Drive look like a layby."
   Hmmm... I lasted three reels down Menkes' particular "road" before escaping the cinema on a detour of my own. Actually, 'endured' would be closer to the mark, as from very early on there were ample warning signs that Phantom Love wasn't going to fulfil my high expectations - including the arbitrary and quite gratuitous on-screen death of an ant, which had been going about its business blithely unaware it was about to be sacrificed on the altar of "art". Or rather, the kind of technically-accomplished but creatively-redundant faux-avant-gardery which will delight connoisseurs of the most exquisite cinematic pretension.
   Our heroine Lulu (Marina Choif) is deeply unsatisfied by her love life - the film opens with an (audaciously) protracted shot of her engaged in joyless humping with her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And she isn't exactly stimulated by her work in a stygian Los Angeles casino, whose clientele seems to be almost entirely Korean in origin. Family is also a source of pressure: phone calls from her domineering mother; harrowing visits to a mentally-ill sister.
   A glamorous Russian fish-out-of-water (sterlet rather than starlet, perhaps), Lulu, who's clearly suffering from a kind of generalised anomie, finds herself addicted to the grim TV news reports chronicling what (ersatz) on-screen captions baldly describe as "Turmoil in the middle east." She finds solace in fantasies - some of which involve walking down a hotel corridor occupied by a large, indolent snake...
   Phantom Love - inspired, apparently, by "months working with a shaman in Israel" ("I was quite ill, physically, for much of the seven months", sighs Menkes) - is an example of a modish, indulgent surrealism in which (undeniably) striking images are offered as windows into the soul and psyche of its woman-in-trouble protagonist. These images are the most effective when they're simple, direct and without explanatory context - such as the sensual close-ups of an octopus in a tank.
   Elsewhere, however, Menkes (who cites among her influences André Breton, Frida Kahlo, Robert Bresson, Max Ernst, Francis Bacon and Lisandro Alonso) strains much too hard for enigmatic effect, resulting in a very familiar kind of gloomy ominousness - to the point that the picture often feels like a spoof of archly humourless, supposedly envelope-pushing experimenta (the kind of thing glimpsed in other movies, where one of the characters is a self-obsessed avant-garde film-director) complete with galumphingly glib and opportunistic stabs at topicality via those glaringly faked-up news-reports. A "hollow, aesthetic exercise"? Yep, that'll do.

SAXON   : [4?/10 - walkout] : UK 07 : Greg Loftin : 100m approx [walkout after 50m] : seen FH 24.8 (public - paid £6.36)
   Stilted dark-comedy-cum-nightmarish-thriller Saxon tries to combine elements of J G Ballard, The League of Gentlemen, Doctor Who, The Avengers, Twin Peaks, Alphaville and Harold Pinter - though such lofty comparisons emphatically aren't to the film's advantage, as it's very much less than the sum of its parts and influences. This is a shame, as it's all too rare to see Sean Harris - one of British cinema's more notable and offbeat acting talents (24 Hour Hour Party People; Outlaw; Brothers of the Head, etc) - in a big-screen leading role.
   He plays Eddie Pearce, a lanky, somewhat taciturn loner who, after losing an eye to loan-sharks, is hired to investigate the disappearance of a TV quiz-show-winning millionaire (has somebody been listening to The Fall's ropey 2001 album Are You Are Missing Winner? by any chance?). Said millionaire was the local celebrity on London's Saxon estate, a sixties development now in a state of semi-abandonment as it's in the process of being gradually taken over by the adjacent airport - hence the aeroplanes constantly passing overhead. As unlikely gumshoe Eddie nervously trawls the estate looking for leads, he encounters all manner of oddball characters, including a hairdresser who leaves him with half a haircut - a fetchingly avant-garde look which recalls Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element and Crispin Glover in 'real' life.
   Rather optimistically billed as a "surreal western," Saxon (sadly, nothing to do with the Barnsley NWOBHM outfit) is a hotchpotch of genre tropes in search of a plot - but writer-director Loftin keeps falling back on a very hand-me-down sort of ominous-quirky weirdness, a little bit of which goes a very long way. There's talent here - the opening titles are striking; Harris is always watchable; an uneasily claustrophobic/purgatorial atmosphere is occasionally evoked. But there's a certain paucity of imagination at work, the intermittent attempts at belly-laughs fall flat, and the pin-sharp digital cinematography gives everything an off-puttingly ersatz feel which makes the requisite suspension of disbelief uncomfortably difficult. And the cinema screen does it absolutely no favours whatsoever - edited down to an hour or so, it might perhaps pass muster late on a weekday evening on Channel 4.