Rent or Buy

Sohlman and Kylin first exchange hesitant glances across a park, as he endures the birthday picnic that parents Lennart Tellfelt and Maud Backéus have thrown for his grandfather, Gunnar Ossiander. It's a deeply poignant occasion, as Ossiander detests being in an old people's home and his complaints about the loneliness contrast tellingly with Sohlman's nervous efforts to gaze at Kylin without catching her eye and then attempting to read her reaction to his interest from the back of her head.

In typical fashion, they employ go-betweens to sound each other out and try to look cool, so as not to appear to keen. However, they eventually get together and, even though she is only 13 and he is a barely more worldly 15, they begin to discover the depth of their feelings, with Kylin crying in despair after Sohlman snubs her after taking a beating from a local gang unimpressed by his leather-jacketed arrival on his moped. After further dalliance, they decide to venture past second base. But their first night of passion is interrupted by the arrival of Kylin's aunt, Anita Lindblom, and the shirtless Sohlman has to hide in a cupboard before making his escape.

Lindblom is engaged to Lennart Tollén, but it hardly seems a match made in heaven. Indeed, no one seems to view their relationship as anything more than a socio-economic convenience, with Kylin's parents, Bertil Norström and Margreth Weivers, being considerably less contented than Tellfelt and Backéus. Indeed, when the latter host a crayfish cookout, it's only a matter of time before alcohol exacerbates the class tensions between the guests and the evening is ruined when Norström disappears and everyone has to go in search of him.

Amidst all this dysfunction, Andersson slyly shows how Sohlman and Kylin increasingly begin to behave like adults and their adorable affection inevitably becomes a casualty of this collision with reality. It's this authenticity that invites comparisons with Milos Forman's A Blonde in Love (1965), which was reviewed a couple of weeks ago. Moreover, it's intriguing to note how much Andersson's visual style is indebted to the Czech and French new waves - with Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine (1962) also being an influence - and how little relation the mix of cross-cutting and telephoto shots bears to the wry, long-take detachment that characterised such recent works as Songs From the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007), which marked the maverick's return to film-making after a long absence.

Nothing escapes Jörgen Persson's camera, as Kylin and Sohlman play pinball, strum guitars, smoke cigarettes and test each others' feelings with their eyes. But Andersson also notes the tears shed by Ossiander and Lindblom, the pushiness of Norström's refrigerator salesman and the atmosphere of disappointment and regret that pervades the entire proceedings. These glances, gestures and grimaces could easily recur in a modern drama and it's only the clothing, décor and folk rock soundtrack that betray the fact that the picture is 40 years old.

Anderson shot his debut feature in the year that Lukas Moodysson was born. The poet-turned-director has also explored puppy pashes in Show Me Love (1998) and 1970s attitudes in the commune satire, Together (2000). But, since Lilya 4-Ever (2002), Moodysson's output has lacked consistency and he struggles to cope with the cadences of everyday English in his first non-Swedish feature, Mammuth.

Similar in many ways to Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (2006), this is an ambitious attempt to examine both the breakdown of the traditional family and the growing gulf between the world's richest and poorest people. Yet, while Moodysson ably stages scenes in New York, Thailand and the Philippines, he doesn't always succeed in exploring his complex themes with much depth. Consequently, the action ends up drifting into emotive melodrama, whose contrivance is compounded by excessive exposition and platitudinous dialogue.

Online gaming tycoon Gael García Bernal is loathe to leave surgeon wife Michelle Williams and seven year-old daughter Sophie Nyweide to private jet to Bangkok with business partner Tom McCarthy. But there's a lucrative contract to be signed and he knows he is leaving his family in the capable hands of Filipino nanny Marife Necesito. However, Bernal becomes increasingly troubled by the poverty he witnesses in the Thai capital and he escapes to a beach-side bolt-hole to do some serious thinking.

Meanwhile, an ER case involving a young boy who has been stabbed by his mother arouses Williams's maternal instinct and she tries to lure the precocious Nyweide away from the nurturing Necesito by purchasing an expensive telescope. However, Nyweide would rather continue her Tagalog lessons and attend services at Necesito's church and Williams slumps into a petulant bout self-pity just as Necesito has to rush home to be at the bedside of 10 year-old son Jan Nicdao, who has been attacked while trying to earn the money he hoped would allow his mother to return permanently to care for his unhappy younger brother, Martin Delos Santos.

Moodysson ably cuts between the storylines and uses cinematographer Marcel Zyskind's slick images to draw telling contrasts between the luxury Soho apartment and the rickety Filipino shanty and between Bernal's five-star hotel room and the seedy bar where he encounters sex worker Run Srinikornchot, with whom he spends an idyllic day after she comes to thank him for giving her cash without requiring her services. However, this episode highlights one of the picture's major problems, as neither Bernal nor Williams is particularly sympathetic and Moodysson overplays the extent to which they exploit Developing World mothers who are making genuine sacrifices in order to give their children the necessities that the millionaire Manhattanites take for granted.

Indeed, even the film's title suffers from this over-emphasis, as it refers to the $3000 fountain pen inlaid with mammoth ivory that McCarthy gives Bernal to celebrate the upcoming deal and which he leaves as a parting gift for Srinikornchot, who only receives a few coppers for it from a hawkish pawnbroker. That said, Moodysson's socio-political points are often better made with ironic visuals than laboured speeches, most notably when Bernal inhales designer oxygen while surveying the smog-hazed city, when Necesito buys Delos Santos a basketball stamped `Made in the Philippines' and when Maria del Carmen takes grandson Nicdao to a vast rubbish tip to show him the kind of humiliating scavenging he has been spared by his mother's efforts abroad. Clearly, this is a film with its heart in the right place. But such is its sentimental simplification of the effects of globalisation that any fleeting moments of authenticity are too often swamped by heedless superficiality.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is more content to allow viewers to bask in its languid aura of sensual spirituality and take whatever message they can from its droll, but deceptively demanding blend of realism and reverie. Inspired by Buddhist monk Phra Sripariyattiwetti's 1983 book, A Man Who Can Recall Past Lives, and expanding upon the short A Letter to Uncle Boonmee that formed part of the 2009 gallery installation, Primitive, this was the surprise winner of the Palme d'or at Cannes. However, its musings on myth, memory and image mesmerise and innervate in equal measure in leaving a warm glow of gentle solicitude and compassionate humanism.

Somewhere in the remote Nabua region of Thailand, beekeeper Thanapat Saisaymar is dying of a kidney-related ailment. He is tended by his Laotian servant Samud Kugasang, but sister-in-law Jenjira Pongpas insists on paying him a visit with nephew Sakda Kaewbuadee. Over supper, they find themselves in the presence of Saisaymar's long-departed wife, Natthakarn Aphaiwonk, and their son Geerasak Kulhong, who disappeared 13 years earlier and has been transformed into a simian creature with burning red eyes after mating with a Monkey Ghost. Nobody is disconcerted by their arrival. Indeed, Saisaymar draws solace from Aphaiwonk's sanguine mien and willingly follows when she leads him, Pongpas and Kaewbuadee through the jungle to a network of caves, where Saisaymar claims he was originally born in a form that was neither human nor animal.

This revelation should be surprising, but Weerasethakul has already taught us to expect the unexpected by drifting off into digressions that are, in all probability, Saisaymar's reminiscences of his past lives. He may well have been a water buffalo that broke its tether and wandered into the forest, only to allow itself to be meekly recaptured by the farmer having realised that it can't cope in the wider world. More bizarrely, he also seems to have been a catfish with the power to change reflections in the surface of a waterfall pool so that ageing princess Wallapa Mongkolprasert could recapture her lost youth and beauty.

Culminating in a curiously erotic aquatic encounter, this enigmatic episode (which pays parodic homage to Thai cinema history) is balanced by more the shocking supposition that karma is making Saisaymar suffer for killing so many insects with pesticide and Communists during the conflicts of the 1970s. These references to the country's turbulent past and troubled present are reinforced by a photomontage of soldiers rounding up Monkey Ghosts for torture and Saisaymar's vision of a future society in which subversives could simply be made to disappear. But Weerasethakul doesn't limit himself to sub-textual political commentary, as he also questions Kaewbuadee's devotion to his monkish vocation by showing him discard his robes after showering in Pongpas and niece Kanokporn Thongaram's hotel room after Saisaymar's funeral.

Despite its asides on the taste and texture of honey, the tensions between Thailand and Laos, the over-rated nature of the heavenly afterlife and the attachment of ghosts to beloved humans, this may not be as thematically complex or stylistically audacious as Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006). Nevertheless, there is plenty to engage the mind and soul in the teasing screenplay, Yukontorn Mingmongkon and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's glorious 16mm cinematography and Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr's evocative natural sound design. But, above everything, this is a picture that needs to be experienced rather than explained or extolled.

Yadi Sugandi takes us across Asia for Red & White. But, despite its noble intentions, this shamelessly patriotic account of the resistance mounted by Indonesia's Republican Army to the Van Mook offensive launched by the Dutch in the summer of 1947 feels more like a piece of wartime propaganda than a collected assessment of a 60 year-old conflict. Consequently, while this first entry in a proposed Freedom Trilogy has been solidly made, it's unlikely to change many minds.

Having witnessed the murder of his family and the wanton destruction of their home by the same Dutch troops who had so cravenly surrendered to the Nazis seven years earlier, Doni Alamsyah treks from North Sulawesi to the Republican Army's training base in Central Java. He is accepted on the insistence of the tough sergeant major who recognises his pugnacity. However, the Christian country boy quickly comes to blows with Muslim city slicker Darius Sinathrya, who steals his crucifix while he is showering and lands him and fellow cadet T. Rifnu Wikana on a punishment detail.

Sinathrya has joined up with best friend Zumi Zola and they share a billet with Lukman Sardi, a teacher who has left wife Astri Nurdin at home without knowing she is pregnant. Zola is similarly concerned for the safety of sister Rahayu Saraswati and he is relieved to see her at a party thrown to mark the class's graduation. However, a dastardly night attack decimates the barracks and Sardi not only finds himself commanding a rump unit, but he also has to find a way of getting Nurdin and Saraswati out of the battle zone.

Following on from the rather formulaic boot camp montages, the retreat through the jungle is more compelling, especially as Sinathrya is branded a coward after Zola is shot and Sardi has to draw on the memory of a student killed by the Japanese to find the courage necessary to shoulder the burden of responsibility. But the depiction of Dutch war crimes is as clumsy as the ease with which a supply convoy is ambushed on a country bridge by the rookies and a handful of resourceful peasants.

This presentation of the enemy as coarse stereotypes seriously undermines any claim the picture might have to authenticity. The colonial forces evidently committed atrocities. But Chinese director Lu Chuan demonstrated how to balance horror and heroism in City of Life and Death and screenwriters Conor and Rob Allyn should surely have made much more of the impact (alluded to in an opening caption) that five years of German occupation had had on the Dutch military psyche. The torching of villages and the slaughter of civilians is still shocking. But had Sugandi adopted the more nuanced approach used to show the religious tension between Alamsyah and Sinathrya, he might have produced a more considered memoir of a fascinating, but neglected topic.

The need to survive drives three Mexican siblings to extremes in Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are, which bears a passing resemblance to both Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In (2008) and Giorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009). Essentially, this puts a fresh spin on the old maxim that the family that slays together stays together. But Grau is as much interested in the pressures facing juveniles to assume adult responsibility as in providing gory jolts.

No one seems unduly concerned when Humberto Yáñez collapses and dies in a Mexico City shopping mall. Even the discovery of a woman's fingernail in his stomach during the autopsy raises no eyebrows and he is deemed so insignificant that nobody bothers to delve into his past. However, Yáñez not only leaves widow Carmen Beato to rear their three kids, but he also forces Francisco Barreiro, Paulina Gaitan and Alan Chávez to decide which of them is going to ensnare the victim for their next ritualistic cannibal feast.

None of the trio has any experience of life outside the home where they repair watches to make ends meet. Moreover, Barreiro is having a sexual crisis to rival his hunger for fresh flesh. Eventually, the brothers go in search of prey and resort to a prostitute when street kids prove too elusive. Beato, who suspected Yáñez of cavorting with hookers, refuses to perform the customary candlelight rite and the chastened boys quickly develop an audacious hunting instinct that enables them to seize by-passers with impunity and even prompts Barreiro to take his chances in a gay disco. However, their spree doesn't go unnoticed and even dull-witted detective Jorge Zárate manages to pick up their trail.

By focusing on the domestic dynamic, Grau achieves a claustrophobic intensity that is superbly reinforced by cinematographer Santiago Sanchez's blend of long, static takes and gliding tracks, and Enrico Chapel's oppressive score. But the need to introduce some horror alleviates the tension and Zárate's dogged investigation and the more graphic scenes of feasting often feel like intrusive sideshows to Beato's ravings, Chávez's edgy outbursts and Gaitan's possibly incestuous relationship with Barreiro. However, the debuting Grau directs steadily and laces proceedings with small moments of jet-black wit.

Sophie Fiennes alights on an equally desolate, but infinitely more deserted landscape in her documentary, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow. Anyone unfamiliar with Anselm Kiefer or the thinking behind his industrial artworks is likely to find little enlightenment in this stately profile. Viewers may also find themselves struggling to acclimatise to the ear-piercing compositions of György Ligeti and Jörg Widmann. Nevertheless, it's impossible not to be impressed by the ambition and scale of Kiefer's achievement at the abandoned La Ribaute silk factory at Bajac in the Languedoc region of southern France.

The picture opens with Remko Schnorr's CinemaScope camera performing stealthy tracks and elegant crane shots around the labyrinthine estate that the 65 year-old Kiefer has pocked with caves and tunnels and decorated with disconcerting giant objects. But, for all the sensitivity of Fiennes's approach to light, shape, texture and tone, the real fascination lies more in the artisanal than the artistic, as Kiefer and his assistants daub, burn, smelt, smash and winch materials with a precision that's mesmerisingly compelling.

But this is always more of a contemplation than an explanation of Kiefer's installations. Indeed, the practical consistently proves more intriguing than the theoretical, as Kiefer references Heidegger's treatise on boredom in scrupulously avoiding insights into either his artistic philosophy or the source of his inspiration during a lengthy interview with German journalist Klaus Dermutz (parts of which are later replayed over more challenging visuals than the pair sitting at a kitchen table). But he becomes much more animated when instructing the operator of the mechanical digger constructing the next underground grotto or the driver of the crane piling buildings to form perilous edifices that suggest the clutter and fragility of modern life. He is equally energetic when spraying paint, placing fragments of shattered glass or covering pieces in ashes. Moreover, Fiennes herself seems much happier watching and admiring, as she deftly assembles her own cinematic artefact.

Finally, the focus shifts rejuvenation to juniority in Babies. Based on an idea by Alain Chabat and following four infants from across the globe, Thomas Balmes's documentary may have a high cute factor, but its observational style consigns too many pressing issues to the margins.

Firstborns Hattie from San Francisco and Mari from Tokyo will obviously have a more comfortable existence than Bayarjargal (the second child of nomadic parents from the Mongolian steppe) and Ponijao, who is the youngest of nine living in a hut in rural Namibia. But the failure to place the families in a tangible socio-economic context leaves the film heavily reliant on alternatively adorable and amusing moments, which often feel more like clips from the home movies of proud parents than a serious study of the physical and psychological changes that babies experience in their first two years of life.

Hattie and Mari want for nothing. Their rooms are full of toys, their parents are attentive and their regular medical check-ups are tempered by days out and baby yoga classes. If Balmes is questioning the pampering of babies in the developed world or satirising the anxieties of bourgeois couples isn't entirely clear. However, the contrasts couldn't be more marked, with Bayarjargal having to settle for a homemade dummy and the envious taunting of his older brother, while Ponijao often finds herself crawling around in the dirt, as her mother and siblings go about their chores. Yet all four seem remarkably content and even-tempered, even though Bayarjargal is prone to bawl in order to snitch on his rambunctious brother and Mari is not averse to the odd tantrum when playthings refuse to co-operate.

At times educational, but mostly entertaining and occasionally enchanting, the footage has been subtly scored by Bruno Coulais. But the absence of a David Attenborough-style commentary deprives the viewer of any real insight into the biology of babyhood or the nature of the cultures in which they will grow up.