Zidane — a 21st Century Portrait

It's all been done before, of course. In 1971, Hellmuth Costard focused solely on George Best in Football Like Never Before. But, this 17-camera portrait of an artist as an ageing star still captures the magnestism and balletic genius of a player whose reputation will surely survive the jobsworthy naysaying of holier-than-thou commentators following his World Cup dismissal.

What's so striking about this compelling collage of close-ups and fan's-eye views is Zizou's expressionless concentration, which seems to isolate him from his team-mates - even after he lays on Ronaldo's equalising goal. And it's this emotional control that makes his needless involvement in a penalty area scrum so surprising and his dispatch to the dressing-room so iconically tragic.

This is definitely one for footie fans only - which should include Damian Lewis, who has been making quite a name for himself on the Pro-Celebrity scene of late. However, he's also a fine actor, as he demonstrates in Lodge Kerrigan's Keane, a disturbing study of paralysing grief held together by Lewis's courageous display, as a father struggling to cope with the abduction of his six-year-old daughter from a New York bus depot.

With John Foster's hand-held camera thrust into his face, Lewis's mumbling perambulations teeter on excess. But they are movingly reined in when he seizes a chance for redemption by babysitting Abigail Breslin, the daughter of motel neighbour Ann Ryan, while she goes to make-up with her estranged husband. Hints of romance and malevolence alternate, as Lewis battles with his demons. But his plight is empathetic and enthralling.

d=3,3,1A gnawing obsession also grips Latvian archivist Egons Dombrovskis in Krisana, a disconcerting monochrome noir, in which director Fred Kelemen explores the demerits of being a Good Samaritan in the modern age. Dombrovskis's loner is determined to atone after ignoring stranger Aija Dzerve in the moments before she jumps from a Riga bridge. But Kelemen is equally keen to highlight the unreliability of evidence, as he callously disproves the theories that Dombrovskis forms from the photographs and discarded love letters that he uncovers while delving into Dzerve's past.

As in previous pictures, Kelemen suggests a dislocated world with brooding, long takes that reinforce the hopelessness of the human condition. But there's also a compassion here that laments Dombrovskis's inevitable withdrawal into isolation after his brave bid to make contact with his alienated neighbours so spectacularly backfires.

Guilt and compulsion also drive Christoffer Boe's Allegro. But this baroque blend of sci-fi and psychological melodrama collapses under the weight of a conceit whose clumsiness renders an otherwise intriguing premise faintly ridiculous. Pianist Ulrich Thomsen's quest for perfectionism has made him something of a recluse. But his deepest isolation stems from his inability to tell girlfriend Helena Christensen that he loves her. Indeed, it causes him to lose all memory of her - until a stranger invites him to revisit Copenhagen and reclaim his emotions from a forbidden zone that arose after a convenient apocalypse. A pale imitation of Godard's Alphaville, Tarkovsky's Stalker and Boe's own debut, Reconstruction, this is a pompous piece of work, whose high-concept scenario is gussied up by arch voiceovers and pretentious dialogue that utterly fail to disguise its specious vacuity.

Music plays an even more integral part in Kornl Mundrucz's opera, Johanna. In expanding his short, Joan of Arc of the Night Bus, Mundrucz joins an exclusive club that also includes Carl Theodor Dreyer and Luc Bresson, in re-examining the betrayal of a martyr whose conviction in her cause provoked dire envy. However, none of the aforementioned couched her demise in such venturesome terms as this steadicam musical, in which addict Orsi Tth emerges from a coma with the power of sexual healing. The fluid, stylised visuals bear the distinctive imprint of co-producer Bla Tarr - especially in their sinister evocation of the nocturnal corridors and wards. But it's the avowedly modern score by Zsfia Tallr that gives this striking picture the eccentric audacity and disarming power to transcend its narrative inconsistencies and conceptual implausibilities.

The connection between the sexual and the miraculous is also examined in Echo Park L.A., Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's exploration of an Amer-immigrant community's bid to integrate while retaining its cultural identity. As the Hispanic virgin who discovers before her Quinceaera (or 15th birthday ritual) that she's pregnant by aspiring artist J.R.Cruz, Emily Rios conveys both the all-consuming obsession of a teenage crush and the horrified innocence of a child forced to confront the realities of womanhood. But this latest venture into territory previously covered by indies like Raising Victor Vargas and Real Women Have Curves also employs a gay subplot involving Rios's cousin, Jesse Garcia, to expose the extent to which one-time ethnic ghettos are being gentrified by trendy Caucasians in search of cheap accommodation.