Billy Elliot (15) General release
After Dancer had its world premiere at Cannes in May, it was re-titled Billy Elliot to avoid any confusion with the Palme d'Or winner, Dancer in the Dark. By far the more accomplished of the two movies, Billy Elliot takes its new title from the name of its central character (played by Jamie Bell), an 11-year-old English schoolboy living with his widowed father (Gary Lewis) and older brother (Jamie Draven), both of them striking miners, in a Durham mining village in 1984.
When the ground floor of the local boys' club is taken over as a soup kitchen for the strikers, Billy's weekly boxing lesson is moved upstairs, where the boys have to share the space with the ballet class given by the chain-smoking, plain-speaking Mrs Wilkinson (Julie Walters). Billy is so clearly fascinated by the young ballerinas that their teacher invites him to join in at the barre - and recognises a potential talent in him that none of her female students has. Billy becomes a closeted ballet student, hiding his dancing shoes under the mattress, until his father eventually discovers his secret and instinctively fears the boy is gay. This intimate family drama is set against the mounting tensions in the village as some of the miners return to work and are branded scabs by their former close friends.
The story's themes of the importance of self-belief and of standing up to adversity are treated with a deceptive simplicity by Stephen Daldry, the justly renowned theatre director whose stage triumphs include the radical treatment of An Inspector Calls produced on Broadway by Noel Pearson. Displaying a strong cinematic flair and an evident ease with the medium, Daldry's auspicious film debut vividly brings to life Lee Hall's compelling screenplay for Billy Elliot which treats its characters with affection and sympathy.
It is rooted in naturalism and credibility and features at its centre a spirited, expressive performance from newcomer Jamie Bell. It helps, of course, that this boy can dance. Gary Lewis firmly catches the pride and innate decency of Billy's father, and Julie Walters is refreshingly free of mannerisms as the boy's teacher and surrogate mother. This gem of a movie shamelessly taps into honest emotions, to which even the hardened Cannes audience responded audibly by choking and sobbing.
Saltwater (15) Selected cinemas
The family at the centre of Conor McPherson's Saltwater also comprises a widower and his two sons separated by more than a decade in age. This Irish-Italian family runs a chip shop in a Dublin seaside town, and the film explores the repercussions which ensue when the two brothers respond in different ways to taking on responsibility for dealing with the actions of others.
The older brother, Frank (Peter McDonald) decides to intervene and help his father (Brian Cox), who is heavily in debt to a local bookie and loan shark Simple Simon (Brendan Gleeson), while the younger brother, Joe (Laurence Kinlan) is unsure how to respond when a rebellious new school friend takes unscrupulous advantage of a girl after a disco. Meanwhile, Frank and Joe's sister (Valerie Spelman) is involved with an arrogant university lecturer (Conor Mullen) who cheats on her with a student (Eva Birthisle) and is planning to humiliate a famous, visiting philosopher. Saltwater has been adapted by McPherson from his stage play, This Lime Tree Bowe, which took the form of three overlapping monologues, but there is not a trace of its stage origins in the assured film he fashions from that material. There are echoes of McPherson's I Went Down screenplay, not least in the casting of McDonald and Gleeson, about this keenly-observed picture which makes effective use of its out-of-season seaside setting and punctuates the drama with bursts of unexpected humour, most uproariously in a startling vomiting sequence. The cast is uniformly satisfying and includes a young talent well worth noting in Laurence Kinlan, who also features impressively in the imminent Irish rural drama, Country.
Not One Less (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The latest film from Zhang Yimou, an award-winner at last year's Venice film festival, is on a smaller, more intimate scale than previous works from the same director, such as Raise the Red Lantern and The Story of Qiu Ju. Using a non-professional cast of actors who actually work in the professions they portray (teachers, restaurant owners, petty bureaucrats, etc), Zhang's film tells the story of a 13-year-old girl (Wei Minzhi), appointed against her will as the replacement teacher in a remote rural village. At only a couple of years older than her students, and barely able to read or write, it's not surprising that she has difficulty asserting her authority. But children are disappearing, sent off by their parents to work in the city. When one such pupil vanishes, Wei sets off to rescue him.
This is all a long way from the lush romanticism and epic scale of Zhang's earlier films. Not One Less, shot in a semi-documentary style, examines the plight of poverty-stricken children both in rural and urban China in a highly effective, realist style, although there is an element of comic melodrama in the denouement, set in a local TV station. It's a simple, at times rather sentimentalised story, but remarkably effective for all that.
There's Only One Jimmy Grimble (12) General release
It was a truth universally acknowledged for a long time that soccer and the movies just didn't mix. But, with Purely Belter and A Shot at Glory on their way to your local multiplexes in the next few months, and Best already out on video, film-makers seem to have thrown that particular nostrum out the window. The atrociously-titled There's Only One Jimmy Grimble is the latest in the current crop, a somewhat formulaic rites-of-passage tale of the Grim Up North variety which bears some resemblance to another of this week's releases, Billy Elliot.
The eponymous Jimmy (well played by Lewis McKenzie) is a lonely 15 year-old Manchester City fan, subject to regular bullying by his United-supporting classmates. Miserable at home with his mother (Gina McKee) and her oafish boyfriend, Jimmy dreams of football glory but shows little sign of any skill until he receives an unexpected present from an old baglady - an ancient pair of football boots which turn him overnight into the best player in the school. Soon he's leading his team to glory in the local cup competition and heading for the final at Maine Road. Along the way he strikes up a friendship with his cynical PE teacher (Robert Carlyle on autopilot), there's a half-hearted romance and the possibility of a rapprochement between McKee and her former boyfriend (Ray Winstone).
There's nothing particularly groundbreaking or surprising about any of this - the screenplay is full of crudely signposted emotional crises, and John Hay's direction isn't particularly subtle either - but There's Only One Jimmy Grimble is kept watchable by McKenzie's affecting performance. As usual, the football itself bears no similarity at all to the way the game is actually played.
Hollow Man (18) General release
There are certain truisms which movie characters persist in blithely ignoring, regardless of all the many precedents which ought to serve as cautionary tales. One is never to tamper with science or nature, but there's always someone who knows better. In Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man it is Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), a gifted but cocky US government scientist who develops a serum which unlocks the secret to invisibility. When the formula works successfully on animals, he delays telling his Pentagon employers and experiments on himself. His colleague and ex-lover (Elisabeth Shue) is supportive, commenting: "Salk tested the first vaccine on himself. Was he insane?" But Caine begins to regard invisibility as a state outside the general moral constraints and one which allows him to play by his own rules, with predictably dangerous results.
The narrative may be essentially familiar, but this is primarily a big-budget, effects-driven entertainment which regularly echoes Verhoeven's more inventive hi-tech extravaganzas, RoboCop and Total Recall. Verhoeven draws on a wealth of highly impressive state-of-the-art special effects for the grisly transformation sequences and the elaborately staged journeys through invisibility. Form will always take precedence over substance in a Verhoeven movie, but it's unfortunate that what passes for substance here is so obvious and formulaic.
