YES
Directed by Sally Potter
Certificate 15

WHEN least expected, the characters in this intriguing, all-encompassing drama by Sally (Orlando) Potter slip into speaking rhyming couplets.
Rather than sounding forced or artificial, it lends a Shakespearian elegance to the dialogue. And, like Shakespeare’s works performed at their best, the film is transformed by its nimble and talented cast.
Set in contemporary America, we are privy to the intimate life of a long-married couple (Allen and Neil) whose relationship is as cold and clean as their home – made tidy by a fastidious, psychoanalysing cleaning lady (Shirley Henderson) who reads deeper meanings into stains and whatever's in the rubbish.
At a formal dinner, the wife catches the eye of a Lebanese chef (Simon Abkarian) and so begins a torrid affair which opens both of their eyes.
The cadenced dialogue brings a lyricism to their love affair and its dangers.
Beautifully filmed with incredibly high production values in sound, lighting and camerawork, this is a testament to low-budget filmmaking that doesn’t look as if there were any budgetary restraints at all.
While Yes may not be for everyone, it is a beautiful bold visual and aural adventure into the psyche of modern life.
Music by Philip Glass adds further depth to a surprisingly enchanting, extremely well formed dramatic film.

Fasten your seatbelts for a really bad flight

STEALTH
Directed by Rob Cohen
Certificate 12A

BEAUTIFULLY filmed with a sharp soundtrack, this is a high-octane, high-action combination of Top Gun, Knight Rider and Triple X along with a touch of The Fast And The Furious – it is also an extremely expensive-looking film that is so bad you have to watch it.
Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx play three top naval pilots who are given a fourth to join their team – Eddie, a robotic plane, fully functional in all pilot-like, warrior-focused ways.
Alas, the plane gets struck by lightning and becomes human – or at least a teenager as it illegally downloads songs off the net. This is, as one critic put it, an 1980s rock video only longer, more costly and louder.
Without trying to be stupid, it manages to fly the thin line between a nifty exciting dumb-as-heck actionfest and an insultingly badly plotted airborne thriller.
Here we have a living fighter plane which tells another pilot that his girlfriend wasn’t reported as having flown back to the aircraft carrier. Too bad that the planes explode the atmosphere, leave nuclear dust on unsuspecting innocent villages and, in one scene, uses a huge missile to blow up a body of water to put out a small fire on Eddie’s back. What about the environment, anyone?.
We should have know we were in trouble when the two romantic leads – Lucas and Biel – fight over a purple ice-lolly.
With Jamie Foxx just hanging out until something happens in the script, Stealth is the most action-packed lifeless film ever to be seen on the screen this year.
But if you like your movies young and dumb and loud and silly, buy your tickets now.
Sam Shepard and Richard Roxburgh round up the cast in this naval flying adventure directed by Rob Cohen, and written by W D Richter who brought us the cult Buckaroo Bonzai.

Also showing

Arakimentari
A documentary on Japan’s Helmut Newton may not sound like a must see but this entertaining filmic portrait of Nobuyoshi Araki, by Travis Klose, is a vivid if somewhat puzzling and often erotic look at one man’s work; this documentary is as surprising as the man himself.

Dear Wendy
From Lars Von Trier with director Thomas Vinterberg, this strange wild west fable of gun love features Jamie Bell in the lead role as a pacifist who ends up falling in love with his gun and inventing an entire community of like-minded others whose lives revolve around firearms.
Amusing and strange, it could be retitled Guns R Us and no one would bat an eye.

The Devil’s Rejects
A well-made if ultimately disappointing follow-up to the cult horror hit House of 1,000 Corpses, director Rob Zombie’s second outing in what is being called art-house schlock continues to follow the exploits of the homicidal Fireflys.
Not quite a horror film, this odd confection is chock full of homages to many classic films.

Herbie: Fully Loaded
A perfectly acceptable updated version of the Disney family film, this features Lindsay Lohan (pictured) as her family’s first college graduate who gets a VW Beetle from her father (Michael Keaton) as a graduation present.
But the car has a mind of its own.
Allegedly, Lohan’s distractingly large breasts had to be digitally reduced for this family feature.

Shake Hands with the Devil
A disturbing, devastating and amazing documentary about the massacres in Rwanda where 800,000 people lost their lives, this examination centres on the now retired Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian leader of the 60 UN peacekeepers who were in the middle of the slaughter in 1994.
A must-see for anyone who saw Hotel Rwanda and would like to see the real people and places involved.

Pick of the indies

Black Narcissus
This week sees an unmissable opportunity to see a new print on the big screen of this classic film of religion, life and eroticism by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Based on the Rumer Godden novel, Black Narcissus was on the cutting edge of psychological drama in 1947, set in an Anglican convent in the bleakest part of the Himalayans.
Deborah Kerr is brilliant as the reverend mother who has to keep to her vows despite the wild nature of her charges and the environment. An extremely important part of British cinema history, this Oscar-winning film meshed an intimate erotic story set in surrounds so exotic that they could have dwarfed the human story. An exceptionally evocative drama, steaming with repressed passion, it also won Jack Cardiff an Oscar for his cinematography.

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