Guardian Unlimited Film News

American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

Ben Child: The critics have universally shouted "Bah, humbug!" at Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon's festive romcom. What's your view?

Between the lines: Changeling could have been a portrait of motherhood in all its complexity. Instead it asks Angelina Jolie to play a saint

Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire cleans up at the 11th annual BIFAs, held in London last night

Any British police officers who joined up to fulfil their Robocop fantasies got one step closer to living the dream last week with the announcement that 10,000 more Tasers will be waiting in the kit room for any zap-happy, zero-tolerance junkies.

This is what they call American-style community policing - and you would have thought the Hollywood liberal club would be the first in the protest line. But the blockbuster industry has so consistently fetishised weaponry, giving it names, masturbatory monologues - top billing, in other words - that you have to assume the average studio serf must gaze dreamily out of the window at that bulging law-enforcement holster and wonder what life would be like if they could mix it up for real (let's see the studio head refuse to fast-track that vanity project then).

1) The Magnum .44 has to compete with Clint's bouffant, Clint's leather elbow patches and Clint himself for the marquee spot, but edges it thanks to an iconic speech (3mins 11secs). I'm also impressed with the fact Dirty Harry manages to continue eating a hot dog throughout the firefight.

2) Further proof that inside every Hollywood rebel lies a titanium-plated, diode-eyed control freak: the destruction of Alderaan by the Emperor's ne plus ultra the Death Star is really a metaphor for what George Lucas did to the millennia-old tradition of human drama when he made the second Star Wars trilogy.

3) Having endured a zillion YouTube clips recut to slurry from the emo cesspit, I am relieved to see that someone has chosen the dependable crass option to re-soundtrack Oldboy's hammer melee: a certain MC. And here's the original.

4) Hammer? Hmm. Baseball bat? More like it. Chainsaw? Awesome - "A katana!!?!?" Butch Coolidge plots his return to the dungeon in Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery's escalating vignette drips with the droll pulp love of violence (far more subtly unsubtle than QT's laboured samurai homages in Kill Bill).

5) Necessity is the mother of inventive extreme violence in Scum - framing Ray Winstone in long-ish shot as he faces up to a borstal rival brings it home how painful being thwacked in the face with a couple of pool balls in a sock must be.

A feeling of heightened awareness will have come over those who were fully attuned for last week's sensory testing. These were the five without whom the world would make no sense:

1) Lycanthropy has side benefits for Jack Nicholson's publisher in Wolf - good thing his senses are sharpened, because his performance is flatlining in the 1994 thriller.

2) A key on the tongue, a black-palmed hand, a giant foot on a Californian beach - aided by stunning imagery and elemental film technique, Maya Deren's short Meshes of the Afternoon, from 1943, seems to unlock the root meanings of sensory experience.

3) There have been various attempts to lead film-goers by the nose - I shudder to think at what unholy pongs came with the scratch and sniff cards that accompanied the original screenings of John Waters' Polyester (the number pops up at 7mins 33secs in this clip, if you fancy recreating the smell).

4) Holly Hunter's skills on the old joanna, apparently not a popular form of entertainment in 19th-century New Zealand, come to have a highly charged sensual force in The Piano - though personally I'd have preferred to see Les Dawson in the role.

5) And the winner is ... nilpferd, for picking the cuisine riot at the start of Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman. In truth, it was a close-run thing between this and the epiphanal clip from Ratatouille, where Pixar's reliable reality fetishism and fauvist palette are designed to pluck our sensory inputs like a master harpist. But you can't beat the real thing - and Lee's orgy of chopping, gutting, frying, slicing etc had me reaching for the number for the Golden Valley takeaway within seconds.

Thanks to MrWormold, steenbeck and StevieBee for the rest of this week's picks.

• Action and adventure

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Despite the proceeds being intended for charity, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hopes to block the sale of Mary Pickford's Oscar

Chile's Oscar contender takes best film while Nanni Moretti enjoys a triumphant second shot as artistic director after a difficult first year in charge

Baz Luhrmann's epic, expensive Australia opens poorly in the US while Four Christmases hits the number one spot

James Wignall: If this is a good example of communal cinema, I'd rather lose the goody bag and stay at home with a DVD

As Mamma Mia! becomes Britain's fastest-selling DVD, James Wignall immerses himself in the full Meryl Streep experience

Ronald Bergan: The only useful lists in the arts are those of bestselling books and top box-office films as a guide to what to avoid

An uplifting yet grimly realistic tale of a young chai-wallah scraping a life out of poverty was last night being talked of as an Oscar contender after it took three awards at the British independent film awards (Bifas).

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the story of a Mumbai teenage boy who astounds all around him by doing well on the Indian Who Wants To Be a Millionaire quiz show, won best film, best director and best newcomer for its British lead.

In a night when honours were spread about, there were also three wins for Hunger, Steve McQueen's unflinching portrait of Bobby Sands and the hunger strikes; two for Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky; and one for In Bruges, Martin McDonagh's comedy about two Irish assassins sent to Belgium.

But Boyle was the talk of the night. The former artistic director of the Royal Court theatre is already on many pundits' Oscar prediction lists after a film career which has seen him happily flip genres: from Edinburgh heroin addicts in Trainspotting to Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach to zombies in 28 Days Later.

Last night he was named best director at the Bifas and Slumdog Millionaire was best film. The film's young lead, Harrow-born Dev Patel - best known to British audiences as Anwar in E4's Skins - won best newcomer.

Slumdog Millionaire, written by The Full Monty's Simon Beaufoy, tells the story of a Mumbai street child. As he does well on the quiz show, flashbacks chronicle his life, the realities of which Boyle does not flinch from showing.

Boyle's film, a third of which is spoken in Hindi, opens in the UK on January 9 but has already gone down well on the festival circuit and opened to fantastic reviews in the US.

A Rolling Stone critic said: "What I feel for this movie isn't just admiration, it's mad love."

USA Today was similarly won over: "The beautifully rendered and energetic tale celebrates resilience, the power of knowledge and the vitality of human experience. Horrifying, humorous and life-affirming, it is, above all, unforgettable." The Los Angeles Times declared it "the best old-fashioned audience picture of the year".

The Turner prize-winning artist Steve McQueen, who represents the UK at next year's Venice Biennale, won the best debut director award for Hunger and the film's cinematographer Sean Bobbit, won best technical achievement. Leading man Michael Fassbender won best actor for his astonishing - not least in the 33lbs of weight he had to lose - performance as Sands.

Hunger is not a film for a cheery romantic night out. It shows the reality of the dirty protests in the Maze prison in stomach-churning detail. Nothing from the Sands story is stepped away from: the brutality, the torture and the alarming effects starvation has on a man's body.

At the other end of the movie spectrum, Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, which follows a relentlessly cheerful London teacher called Poppy, won two acting awards. Eddie Marsan won best supporting actor for his role as the crazed racist driving instructor, and Alexis Zegerman won best supporting actress as Poppy's best mate, Zoe.

The well-fancied In Bruges, featuring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of chalk-and-cheese killers sent by their psychotic boss (Ralph Fiennes) to Bruges, came away with the best screenplay award for its writer and director Martin McDonagh. It was the playwright's film debut.

Vera Farmiga won best actress for her role in concentration camp drama The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas, while the Israeli animation Waltz With Bashir won best foreign film.

At the ceremony in Old Billingsgate Market, London, special awards were also given out. The actor David Thewlis was rewarded for his outstanding contribution to British film, while Michael Sheen - best known for being able to pass himself off as Kenneth Williams, Tony Blair and David Frost - was given the Variety award.

It was the 11th Bifa ceremony, with the awards seeming to grow in stature each year. Co-directors Johanna von Fischer and Tessa Collinson, said: "It's been another stellar year for independent film in Britain, as represented by the diverse spread of nominations across the board.

The winners

Best film Slumdog Millionaire

Best director Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire

Best debut director Steve McQueen, Hunger

Best screenplay Martin McDonagh, In Bruges

Best actress Vera Farmiga, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Best actor Michael Fassbender, Hunger

Best supporting actress Alexis Zegerman, Happy-Go-Lucky

Best supporting actor Eddie Marsan, Happy Go Lucky

Most promising newcomer Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire

Best achievement in production The Escapist

Raindance award Zebra Crossings

Best technical achievement Sean Bobbitt, cinematography for Hunger

Best documentary Man on Wire

Best short Soft

Best foreign Waltz With Bashir

Outstanding contribution to British cinema David Thewlis

Variety award Michael Sheen

Special Jury prize Joe Dunton

• Danny Boyle

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When stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby's book was turned into a Bafta-winning film, the world wept for his tragic on-screen wife. But why was his lover, Florence Ben Sadoun, airbrushed from the story? She tells Janine di Giovanni a different version of events

Seth Gordon's crass Four Christmases is one of those grisly yuletide comedies that starts off attacking the bogus spirit of Christmas and the horrors of family life and ends up as a sentimental carol exalting the pleasures of both. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon play a yuppie couple who avoid celebrating with the four households of their divorced parents by pretending they spend Christmas doing volunteer work in the developing world. Instead, they go scuba diving at luxury resorts.

But fog strands them at San Francisco airport, their families see them interviewed on TV and they're forced to visit their two dads, two mums, each extremely off-putting (and each played by an ageing Oscar winner) and mix with ghastly siblings, nieces and nephews. At the end, I felt that rather than pull a wishbone with any one of those involved, I'd join a Christmas caravan crossing the Sahara through bandit territory, with Mark Thatcher as guide.

• Comedy
• Family
• Reese Witherspoon

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If you make comic films in Belgium, you have to bring your jokes with you, as the London-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh did with In Bruges. The country's leading moviemakers, the Dardenne brothers, don't think life is any laughing matter, and The Silence of Lorna, their fourth film in a row to win a major prize at Cannes, is no exception.

The eponymous Lorna (raven-haired, unsmiling, sad-eyed Arta Dobroshi) is an Albanian working at a laundry in one of Liège's less attractive suburbs. She has agreed to contract a fake marriage with Claudy, a hopeless local junkie (Jérémie Renier, who makes a brief appearance in In Bruges), to gain Belgian citizenship. But a seedy gangster plans (with Lorna's consent) to kill her husband so she can then marry and provide citizenship for a Russian mafioso. Lorna and her Balkan boyfriend intend to use the proceeds to buy a snack bar. Things go awry when Lorna's conscience thaws and she gets cold feet over the scheme.

As in the Dardennes' earlier films, the main characters are victims of a cold, cruel world, where survival is the aim, exploitation the rule and some form of redemption the only reward. Using their customary long takes, the Dardennes work close to their characters, giving the film a harsh physical intimacy. They also go out of their way to prevent the conventional excitements of a thriller by leaping past climactic moments and compelling us to guess at what we've missed.

There is something admirably pure in their artistic resolve, but also something puritanical in the implied suggestion that if we balk at their aesthetic austerity, our moral seriousness is brought into question.

• Drama
• World cinema

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In Usmonov's last movie, the black comedy Angel on the Right, a hard man is lured from Moscow to his remote native village in Tajikistan to be shaken down by the corrupt mayor. His new film is set in a similar godforsaken corner of the former USSR. The guileless 20-year-old Kamal, incapable of consummating his three-month-old marriage, sets off on a therapeutic journey. Along the way, he stalks a succession of unresponsive women until he's taken to bed by a factory seamstress. But nothing happens. Her husband, a sadistic crook, takes Kamal under his wing for a series of robberies that culminates in murder and rape.

Kamal turns on his mentor, blows his head off with a shotgun, goes back to have rough sex with the man's widow and heads off home cured. This is an unconvincing example of a genre that might be dubbed Art House Machismo.

• World cinema
• Drama

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We forget that movement in films is an illusion. We' re just looking at a succession of rapidly projected stills. This Mexican film is another attempt to make a narrative from actual stills, telling the story of the edgy friendship between a 14-year-old Mexican boy and a New York undergraduate over the four seasons. It's moderately enjoyable, but not in the class of the greatest film of this kind, Chris Marker's sci-fi masterpiece, La Jetée

• Drama
• Romance
• World cinema

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Hancock | Meet Dave

In 1944, Hitchcock returned from Hollywood to direct these two fascinating half-hour films for the Ministry of Information in London. The plan was to show them as morale boosters in liberated France and they were made with the Molière Players, a group of French refugee actors. Only Hitchcock is credited, though German expressionist photographer Günther Krampf shot both. Both look more like Hitchcock's prewar movies than his Hollywood ones and are formally rather clever. In Bon Voyage an RAF sergeant (played by British actor John Blythe) is debriefed in London by a Gaullist officer about the assistance given by French Resistance to get him home after being shot down. Aventure Malgache centres on a confrontation between a lawyer heading the Resistance and a police chief working for Vichy. Bon Voyage was screened in Paris in late 1944. Aventure Malgache was considered far too controversial and was never shown.

• DVD and video reviews
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Drama

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Set in a thinly recreated 1960 London, this dim thriller stars Michael Caine as a septuagenarian office cleaner who lures City high-flyer Demi Moore into joining him in a preposterous jewel robbery at the London Diamond Corporation where she works. There's a very fine film buried in Flawless and struggling to get out, i.e Basil Dearden's masterly 1960 heist thriller, The League of Gentlemen, which Caine and Moore are watching when he pitches his scheme to her. The film's chief villain is a crooked aristocrat played by Derren Nesbitt, who moved on from clobbering Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top (1959) to blackmailing gay barrister Dirk Bogarde in Victim (1961).

• Thriller

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