Still Afloat After 70 Years

Buoyed by the reception of La Chienne (1931), Renoir and Michel Simon re-teamed on this adaptation of René Fauchois' boulevard comedy, in which Simon had starred on stage in 1925. Always a fan of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, Renoir was keen to explore how an inveterate vagabond would respond to traditional bourgeois values. But while the intention was clearly satirical, this is not the declaration of class warfare that some critics have claimed.

Hobo Priapus Boudu (Simon) falls into the Seine while searching for his missing dog. He is fished out of the water by bookseller Édouard Lestingois (Charles Granval), who extends his hospitality to the heavily bearded stranger, in spite of the misgivings of his prudish wife Emma (Marcelle Hainia) and his uppity maid, Chloë Anne Marie (Sévérine Lerczinska). Boudu is a boorish guest and, in addition to eating Lestingois out of house and home, he also makes amorous advances towards Emma and Chloë Anne Marie, who is her boss's mistress.

As the neighbours lobby to have Lestingois rewarded with a medal for his bravery, Boudu visits a barber and discovers that he has won a fortune with the lottery ticket that his host gave him on his first night to cheer him up. However, he soon finds wealth and domesticity burdensome and he makes his escape during an afternoon's boating.

Charles Grandval plays Lestingois as a thoroughly decent idealist, with a reverence for culture and a genial humanism that inspires him to seek the best for Boudu, even when he's at his most boorish. Indeed, this is a classic example of Renoir's pet theory that everyone has reasons for their actions and he resolutely refuses to judge, either the Lestingois's affectations or Boudu's inability to come to terms with an entirely alien lifestyle.

Renoir slyly suggests how easy it is to be seduced by comfort, but he is much more interested in celebrating nonconformism than condemning middle-class cosiness - hence Fauchois's hearty disapproval of Renoir changing the ending to allow Boudu to resume his life as a child of nature. Perhaps he would have been better disposed towards Paul Mazursky's remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), which panders to American audiences by reducing the characters to more obviously recognisable anti-heroes and villains.

A vein of Greek mythology runs through Boudu. But there's nothing fantastical about the location shooting, which uses long, fluid, deep-focussed takes to capture the flavour of both the Seine around the Pont des Artes and the Marne countryside. Looking out on to the neighbouring rooftops, the Lestingois apartment similarly feels like the scene of real life and this contextualising of the household within its milieu adds authenticity to Renoir's wry observations on contemporary society.

Another household is thrown into disarray in Ferzan Ozpetek's Loose Cannons, a gentle blend of gay romcom and generational soap that's set in the luminous southern Italian town of Lecce and is as appealing as it's contrived. Notwithstanding a couple of misfiring subplots and a predilection for circular tracking shots, this is a slick and sweetly sentimental saga that deftly deploys overly familiar tropes to explore entrenched attitudes, foolish hopes and unfulfilled dreams with knowing wit and stylish delicacy. Moreover, it's a must for all fans of Ozpetek's distinctive brand of domestic drama.

Returning to Puglia from Rome (where he is supposed to be attending business school, but has actually dropped out to move in with doctor Carmine Recano), aspiring novelist Riccardo Scamarcio is all set to inform father Ennio Fantastichini that he is homosexual and wants to relinquish his claim to the family pasta business when his stay-at-home older brother Alessandro Preziosi steals his thunder and disappears into the night having caused Fantastichini to have a minor heart attack. What makes Perziosi's gay revelation all the more shocking, however, is that Fantastichini was about to announce a new investment deal with Giancarlo Monticelli and his daughter Nicole Grimaudo, who had earlier caught Scamarcio's eye when she wreaked vengeance on a cheating beau by scratching the paintwork of his sports car.

Leaving daughter-in-law Lunetta Savino to prevent the scandalous news from leaking to their enviously gossiping neighbours, diabetic matriarch Ilaria Occhini retreats to her room and her memories of a thwarted passion, while lonelyheart aunt Elena Sofia Ricci seeks her inevitable solace in the bottom of a glass and takes another stab at insisting that she has caught a thief in her bedroom.

Realising he has no option, Scamarcio agrees to stay and run the business with sister Bianca Nappi and her hopeless husband, Massimiliano Gallo. Much to his surprise, however, he begins to enjoy working alongside Grimaudo. But when Recano arrives from the capital with screamingly camp pals Gianluca De Marchi, Mauro Bonaffini and Giorgio Marchesi in tow, his closely guarded secret seems set to be exposed.

Occasionally trespassing into Almodóvar territory, this is a wholly engaging picture that benefits from superb playing and Maurizio Calvesi's glorious imagery, which is particularly striking in Occhini's recollections of her wedding day (when she deserted the love of her life to do the honourable thing and marry his brother) and Scamarcio's final reverie, in which characters from all parts of the story come together for a touching courtyard dance.

There's an intriguing spark between Scamarcio and Grimaudo that is never quite fully explored and plenty of sly social comedy involving Savino's relationships with maid Paola Minaccioni and Fantastichini's tarty, but loyal mistress, Gea Martire. But the hilarious highlight is the Roman invasion, as Scamarcio's family continue to view Recano, De Marchi, Bonaffini and Marchesi as strapping ladykillers even when they can't resist flirting with Gallo or trying on Ricci's drag queeny wardrobe.

Some might find the humour a little broad here. But it adroitly provides some light relief before Occhini's suicide by chocolate and Preziosi's poignant return and reunion with the wiser, but sadder Fantastichini. Moreover, it forces Scamarcio to question his commitment to Recano in the light of his growing fondness for Grimaudo that lingers as he wanders away from his waltzing family into a less than certain future.

Scamarcio's confusion is nothing compared to Laura Fraser's in Cuckoo, writer-director Richard Bracewell's disappointing follow-up to his impressively quirky debut, The Gigolos (2006). Bracewell and cinematographer Mark Partridge make evocative use of disconcerting spaces, particularly within the sets constructed in a disused Yarmouth grain warehouse by Simon Scullion and Tim Blake. Andrew Hewitt's soundtrack is also insidiously disconcerting. But this confused psychological thriller struggles to generate sufficient intrigue or suspense.

Fraser works for cardiology professor Richard E. Grant at a London hospital. She was once a star student, but her career has rather stalled and she is now applying for a new post to kickstart her prospects. However, her musician boyfriend Adam Fenton has disappeared and Fraser becomes reliant on waitress sister Antonia Bernath to retain a grip on her sanity, as she becomes increasingly convinced she can hear noises (including Fenton's voice) around her dingy apartment. With the polymathic Grant being sinisterly solicitous and Bernath fighting her resentment at having none of her sibling's social or professional advantages, Fraser edges inexorably closer to falling apart at the seams. But the discovery of the true nature of Bernath's relationship with Fenton galvanises her into shocking action and determines her future course.

Ponderously obsessed with its own sense of ingenious obfuscation, this is a resounding misfire. Indulging in creepy consolation and sneaky surveillance, Grant manages both to underplay and chew the scenery, while Tamsin Greig potters around to no apparent purpose as an eccentric assistant with a penchant for fiddling her expenses. But it's Fraser's failure to provide a sympathetic focus for the mystery, as much as the deleteriously smug scenario, that makes this so resistible.

Self-satisfaction and an antipathetic protagonist similarly blight Srdjan Spasojevic's debut feature, A Serbian Film. However, these are perhaps the least of the crimes committed by a picture that required 49 cuts - amounting to four minutes and 11 seconds - before it was awarded an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. According to the BBFC ruling, the changes were made to remove both `elements of sexual violence that tend to eroticise or endorse sexual violence' and `scenes in which images of children are intercut with images of adult sexual activity and sexual violence'. Nevertheless, this clumsy attempt at political allegory still contains allusions to bestiality and paedophilia that will make this discomfiting for even the broadest-minded viewer.

Despite the devotion of wife Jelena Gavrilovic and son Luka Mijatovic, ex-porn star Kabir Tourani is struggling to adapt to retirement. So, when onetime co-star Katarina Žutic informs him that producer Sergej Trifunovic is keen to hire him for a lucrative shoot, he signs the contract without knowing precisely what will be required of him.

This oversight quickly comes to haunt Tourani, as he returns from work each day with a growing sense of apprehension after filming sequences in which pre-pubescent Andela Nenadovic is forced to watch as her mother (Ana Sakic) is assaulted for disgracing the reputation of her war hero husband by selling drugs and behaving in a lewd manner. Indeed, Tourani becomes so disturbed by what he sees that he asks cop brother Slobodan Bestic to investigate Trifunovic's background. But things are about to become a good deal more sordid.

In fairness to Spasojevic, this is a more than capably crafted piece of torture porn. It may lack the knowing intensity of James Wan's Saw (2004) or Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), but the flashbacking denouement, in which Tourani pieces together what happened after he was injected by doctor Lena Bogdanovic with a potent cocktail of tranquilisers and animal Viagra, is slickly handled - even though much of its content is reprehensible.

However, this is much less successful as either an exposé of the Serbian psyche or a treatise on the abuse heaped upon the populace by its leadership since the break-up of Yugoslavia. Trifunovic may protest that Serbia is `no country for real art', but the occasional references to war orphans and atrocity trials in the Hague fail to make the case that it is capable only of churning out snuff movies and the repugnant genre of `newborn porn'.

Spasojevic was reportedly reluctant to allow this to be marketed as a horror film. But, for all the attempts to invest scenes of rape, incest and murder with grimly ironic satire, incidents like the ithyphallic attack on an empty eye socket ensure that this always feels more like a cynical exercise in exploitation than a serious political tract.

The BBFC's intervention is regrettable (if understandable), as the cuts only emphasise the grotesqueness of the now off-screen barbarism. Moreover, the controversy the excisions have generated distracts from the excellence of Nemanja Jovanov's relentless widescreen cinematography, Nemanja Petrovic's fearsome production design and Darko Simic's sharp editing. But few will view this dispassionately, even though it is - as Tourani says of the hardcore DVD he catches his six year-old watching - little more than `a cartoon for grown-ups'.

John Pilger's documentary, The War You Don't See, is also likely to divide audiences, albeit for very different reasons. Showing briefly in cinemas before its television transmission and release on disc, this is a trenchant, if occasionally self-contented discussion of the media's relationship with both governments and the industrial military complex.

Pilger has assembled an impressive cast list. Former BBC correspondent Rageh Omar recalls how the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad was stage managed by the US brass, while top anchorman Dan Rather concedes that patriotism occasionally got the better of his judgement while presenting invasion bulletins. The Observer's David Rose similarly consumes humble pie in regretting his supportive coverage of Colin Powell's specious presentation to the United Nations, while former Foreign Office diplomat Carne Ross proves equally penitent on the sanctions issue and joins ex-CIA analyst Melvin Goodman in condemning the restrictions imposed upon embedded journalists covering crisis and combat zones.

Elsewhere, freelancer Dahr Jamil recollects his experiences in Fallujah and how difficult it was to persuade a major outlet to carry his revelation that American forces had been using white phosphorus on the city. Photojournalist Guy Smallman concurs in describing the carnage he witnessed in an Afghan village bombarded by the USAF and joins the Guardian's Mark Curtis and Steve Rendall from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting in averring that the networks are rarely interested in `the unworthy dead', as civilian and insurgent casualties are often called.

However, Pilger's biggest coup is an interview with Julian Assange, the Australian founder of Wikileaks, whose woes have recently become as much front page news as the revelations made by his website. But what makes this meeting so fascinating is that Pilger clearly sees Assange as a fellow maverick and there is a cosiness to their conversation that is less apparent in his matey chat with David Mannion, the defiantly defensive Editor in Chief of ITN News, and is utterly absent from his peevish exchange with Fran Unsworth, despite the fact that the BBC Head of Newsgathering accepts that events in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Occupied Territories might have been covered differently.

Pilger conveniently seems to forget here that it was the BBC's Andrew Gilligan who first exposed the so-called `dodgy dossier' and was subsequently castigated by Labour's press machine. He also can't resist reminding everyone about his own exploits during the Vietnam War. But, these quibbles aside, Pilger does a first-rate job in taking the British and American media to task for allowing the Establishment to dictate their editorial agenda.

He also reveals that such collusion is nothing new by citing the examples of Edward Bernays - the godfather of PR, who helped President Woodrow Wilson precondition the public for America's entry into the Great War - and Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who missed the press junket to witness Japan's surrender in August 1945 to gather the evidence that contradicted the Pentagon assertion that radiation sickness had not followed the atom-bombing of Nagasaki.

But Pilger is at his most acute in challenging US Assistant Secretary of Defence Bryan Whitman's complacent attitudes to embedding, whistleblowing and his nation's supposedly clean conduct of the war in Iraq, which is flagrantly compromised by leaked cockpit footage of the aerial execution of suspected insurgents and the subsequent criticism that trooper Ethan McCord received for trying to help a couple of innocent children seriously wounded in the action. This refusal to tow the party line has characterised Pilger's career. But one wonders who will have the opportunity to follow his lead on mainstream television, as spin doctors tighten their grip on information and channel executives take an increasingly safe line in packaging it.

Maybe the internet is now the sole place where the first duty is to the people rather than the powers that be. But e-truth is often as notoriously unreliable as the official version.