TWILIGHT

 Clearly influenced by Bela Tarr and determined to outdo him when it comes to pacing, (funereal at best), and general moroseness Gyorgy Feher's "Twilight" isn't so much like watching paint dry as staring at the grey wall before it's painted. Based on the same Friedrich Durrenmatt novel as "It Happened in Broad Daylight" and "The Pledge" Feher strips it of all suspense yet gives it a sense of dread as it moves with all the slowness of a lackadaisical snail from scene to scene, image to image that is both disquieting and disorientating.

An eight year old girl is found murdered in the woods and the policeman whose last case it is is determined to find the killer even after retiring. We can just about figure this out from the material onscreen but really it helps if you've read the book or seen the other films. This is more like a palimpsest of Durrenmatt's novel, something not quite fully formed, a series of beautifully grim images rather than an actual narrative and not helped any by the monosyllabic performances of its cast.

It is, in other words, the worst kind of art-house movie, one determined to hold onto its 'masterpiece' credentials whatever the cost. Amazingly it's never really boring; you watch it transfixed in the vain hope that something might actually happen and, of course, it never does. As Jean Brodie might say, 'For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like'.

SHIP OF FOOLS

 It has become fashionable to deride Stanley Kramer as nothing more than a maker of turgid polemics and his early standing as a director of intelligent trailblazers passed quickly and, despite its success at the Oscars, by the time he got around to making "Ship of Fools" the critics really had it in for him. It may be no masterpiece and despite its subject, (antisemitism), it's no trailblazer but it's certainly intelligent, superbly acted, (particularly by Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret), and a fairly faithful rendering of Katherine Anne Porter's novel; Abby Mann did the outstanding screenplay working with sometimes highly melodramatic material.

The setting is a liner on its way from Vera Cruz to Germany in 1933 with the kind of sundry group of passengers on board you might find in a mini-series. They are a mixture of Germans, a few Americans, (including Vivien Leigh in her last film as an amalgam of Blanche Du Bois and Mrs. Stone), and for dramatic purposes the obligatory Jews, ostracized and heading unknowingly perhaps to a concentration camp.

Mercifully, these are more than mere stereotypes thanks to a superb cast, (Kramer was always a good actor's director). The problem is we've met them all before and since and more successfully. Nevertheless, whatever its faults Werner, in a career-best performance, and Signoret together raise it to the level of art whenever they are on screen. It's a joy to watch acting this good.

SEPTEMBER 5

Making a movie now about the 1972 Munich Olympic terrorist attacks might be considered something of a political hand-grenade since political opinion is clearly divided between those who side with Israel's continuing attacks on Gaza and those who are sympathetic to Palestine.

In "September 5" the 'villains' are clearly the Palestinian terrorists and the horrors of what is currently happening in the Middle East may put many people off seeing this film but then you could also say that "September 5" isn't so much about the hostage taking as it is about the reporting of the situation by ABC and this is definitely the best film about political journalism since "All the President's Men".

Director Tim Fehlbaum films it like a documentary and his remarkable cast respond beautifully. Every performance is pitch-perfect as is Markus Forderer's cinematography, Hansjorg WeiBbrich's editing and Fehlbaum's screenplay co-written with Moritz Binder and Alex David which doesn't feel like a script at all but a piece of actual news reportage and the thrills come not so much from hostage taking as from the dangers involved in simply recording it. The result is terrific cinema that simply shouldn't be missed.