Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 7/2/2013)

There is no escaping the fact that Hitchcock is a terrible travesty of both the making of the 1960 horror classic Psycho and the near-undoing of a 35-year partnership that started when Reville became the young Hitchcock's boss at the Famous Players-Lasky studio in London in the early 1920s. The biggest miscalculation is the inclusion of imagined encounters between the corpulent director and Ed Gein, the serial killer on whom novelist Robert Bloch based motel-running mommy's boy, Norman Bates. But nothing convinces here, with Hitchcock's relationships with actresses Vera Miles and Janet Leigh being as half-heartedly explored as Reville's dalliance with Whitfield Cook, a dashing author who had helped script Stage Fright (1950) and Strangers on a Train (1951) and who hoped that Alma could convince Hitch into optioning his latest opus, Taxi to Dubrovnik.

Primarily culpable for this botched charade is screenwriter John J. Laughlin, who elected to jettison much of the fascinating behind-the-scenes material in Stephen Rebello's outstanding 1990 book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, and replace it with some showbiz tittle-tattle that supposedly gives the story a human interest angle. Gwyneth Hughes similarly opted to downplay the mechanics of movie-making in reworking Donald Spoto's Spellbound By Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies for The Girl. But, at least her script sought to show how Hitch's off-set preoccupations impacted upon his work. By contrast, Laughlin and Gervasi afford him a couple of tantrums whilst directing Leigh before consigning him to suffering in sulky silence as he comes to suspect that Reville is having an affair. The result is bad soap opera that fails so resoundingly as screen history and celebrity melodrama that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.

The action opens with a scene from the life and crimes of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott). However, as he slaughters a man outside his ramshackle Wisconsin home, the camera slides across to Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) sipping tea and addressing the audience in the manner of one of his television monologues about the problems of finding inspiration and keeping the audience on the edge of its seat. In order to understand how Hitch became obsessed with mass murder, we have to go back to the Chicago premiere of his 1959 Cary Grant romp North By Northwest, when he was nettled by a question from a waiting reporter about doing something different. Further peeved by a newspaper article about upcoming masters of suspense, he vows to make his next feature a radical departure and rejects The Diary of Anne Frank and Casino Royale to adapt Robert Bloch's Gein-based shocker, Psycho.

Having convinced his initially dubious wife-cum-collaborator Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) of the plot's potential, Hitchcock orders loyal secretary Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette) to buy every copy of the novel in the United States to limit advanced knowledge of its twist.  Then, when studio chief Barney Balaban (Richard Portnow) proves reluctant to invest Paramount's money in such a distasteful tale, Hitch has agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg) cut a daring deal that involves the studio distributing the film for a 40% share of the profits, while Hitchcock puts up $800,000 of the budget himself.

As Hitchcock summons the press to announce the subject of his next venture, Alma delights in seeing her husband regaining the creative spark that had dimmed during the production of such box-office misfires as The Wrong Man (1957) and Vertigo (1958). However, she cannot resist the entreaties of Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), who wines and dines her in a bid to coax her into helping him develop a screen treatment from his latest spy thriller. Thus, she spends her days at Cook's secret beach house while Hitchcock interviews screenwriter Joseph Stefano (Ralph Macchio) and gets better acquainted with his stars, Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson), Anthony Perkins (James D'Arcy) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), whom he has not forgiven for getting pregnant while he was grooming her to become the next Grace Kelly.

Amidst this frantic activity, however, Hitch finds time to imagine Gein snuggling under the bed covers with the corpse of his dead mother and even has a couch session with Gein as his psychiatrist in order to channel his fury after a meeting with Geoffrey Shurlock (Kurtwood Smith), the head of the Production Code office that has the power to censor scripts and grant the seals of approval that are vital to pictures being screened by the major theatre chains. But, once Hitch has made the cast and crew take an oath of secrecy, shooting progresses well, with the famously flirtatious film-maker for once focussing on the job in hand after both Leigh and Miles make it abundantly clear that they are happily married. This doesn't prevent Hitchcock from spying on Miles in her changing room (in the manner of Norman Bates peeking at the undressing Marion Crane through a hole in his office wall), but he is more put out when he peeps through a window blind and sees Alma chatting with Cook on the Paramount lot when she comes to deliver some script revisions.

Despite jealously mocking Cook at every opportunity, Hitchcock becomes increasingly fearful that Alma is betraying him after she mistakes him for Cook on the telephone and he takes out his frustration by bellowing at Leigh during the shooting of a driving sequence and furiously forbidding Balaban from seeing any footage until the film is completed. When Alma gets home late, Hitchcock sneaks out of the bedroom to read her treatment and passes snide remarks about her `stillborn' efforts before thrashing the swimming pool with a leaf net and subjecting Leigh to a disconcerting assault with a prop knife in demonstrating to Perkins's stand-in how he wants the stabbing to be done in the notorious `shower scene'.

Unsurprisingly, the conviction that he is being cuckolded and the pressure of operating on a tight budget and schedule take their toll on Hitchcock and he is confined to bed for several days after collapsing. Seizing the opportunity to regain some control over the project, Balaban attempts to impose a studio hack to keep the cameras rolling. However, as Alma strides on to the set to insist that they stick to Hitch's storyboards, he is led by Ed Gein into the bathroom of their luxurious home, where he finds traces of sand on the floor near the shower. He accuses Alma of infidelity when she returns and complains that she should be supporting him st this most difficult time in his career.

But, when she catches Cook with another woman at the beach hideaway and Balaban castigates the rough cut of Psycho, Alma rallies to the cause by helping Hitchcock re-edit the picture and suggesting the addition of a Bernard Herrmann shrieking strong score to make the shower montage that Hitch had concocted with Saul Bass (Wallace Langham) even more visceral and terrifying. Wasserman also does his bit by concocting an ingenious publicity campaign, while Hitch flatters Sherlock into awarding the MPPA seal. Thus, he is able to pace the foyer during the first public screening and conduct with gleeful satisfaction the screams emanating from the auditorium, as he audaciously kills off his star after just 30 minutes. No wonder he beams for the photographers on the pavement outside before confiding to Alma that he had waited three decades to tell her that she is his favourite blonde because he is the Master of Suspense.

This closing line epitomises everything that is wrong with this glib, self-satisfied and wholly  unpersuasive picture. In spite of his documentary background, Sacha Gervasi singularly fails to capture the atmosphere of Hollywood at the end of the Eisenhower era. The depiction of studio life is lazily superficial, while little or no attempt it made to contextualise or assess the boldness of Psycho's content or style. Judy Becker's sets, Julie Weiss's costumes and Jeff Cronenweth's photography are all solid enough, but Danny Elfman's score cannot hold a candle to Herrmann's, while Gervasi struggles to keep pace with Julian Jerrold, let alone Hitchcock.

Saddled with some crass dialogue, the principals do what they can. But significant figures like Leigh, Miles and Cook are sketchily drawn, while potentially compelling characters like Stefano and Perkins are consigned to the margins. Although the Cook-Reville liaison appears rooted in fact, Mirren feels physically and temperamentally wrong for Alma, while Hopkins only occasionally hints at Hitchcock's hopeless romanticism and mischievous crudity, let alone his cinematic genius. Moreover, he seems sceptical of the validity of the Play It Again, Sam-style exchanges with Ed Gein and, as a consequence, they come to seem increasingly ludicrous and fatally undermine the picture's already tenuous pretence at authenticity.

Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett gleefully dispense with reality and adopt their subject's indifference to veracity in making A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman, a comic reverie that employs 17 animation styles in tracing a life that began in Leamington Spa during a Luftwaffe air raid and ended 48 years later with a virulent strain of throat cancer. However, Chapman refused to be silenced and an audio recording of his bestselling and deliciously unreliable memoir is the highlight of this well-intentioned, if patchy tribute to a gay hedonist, inspired surrealist and unrepentant misfit.

The story opens on stage in the 1970s, as Graham Chapman forgets his lines during Monty Python's Oscar Wilde insult sketch and his life flashes before his eyes as he is sucked into a spaceship through a hole in the theatre roof. Having survived his blitz birth, he relates how his mother used to take him for walks in his pram while his policeman father pieced together the body parts of those killed in the previous night's bombing. Amidst the tall tales of youthful excess, Chapman recalls his time at Eton, where he cut a dash on and off the cricket pitch and even got to kick Harold Macmillan up the backside.

But the real turning point of his early years was a rain-sodden holiday in Scarborough. As his mother fretted about buying fish while sitting in the car on the waterfront, Chapman discovered Robert Graves's I, Claudius and realised the folly of his father's suspicion of reading. A sudden daydream pitches him into a homosexual adventure with Biggles and he lands on the couch of Sigmund Freud (voiced by Cameron Diaz), who reveals that his tangled subconscious thoughts and obsession with maps means that he is keen to find his own way in life.

A rapid run through a series of juvenile pranks and sexual fumblings culminates in Chapman declaring that it is pointless searching for the man in the misdemeanours of childhood and the scene cuts to a wildlife park, where monkeys bearing a curious resemblance to Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (but not Eric Idle, who chose not to participate in the project) debate the merits of calling their new TV series Owl Stretching Time or A Horse, a Bucket and a Spoon.

This is a mere digression, however, as the main narrative resumes with Chapman heading to Cambridge, where he endures a chemistry practical and a grilling about his prospects in physics before being accepted to read medicine at Emmanuel College. When not studying,  playing rugby or drinking beer, Chapman treated himself to a hectic sex life that involved several women and numerous intrusive fantasies about men. Such was his confusion that he felt like he was riding in a phallic rollercoaster car and he finally decided he was `a raging poof' after realising on a bus that he would rather sleep with the male passengers than the female ones.

Having determined his sexual orientation, Chapman began having doubts about his medical vocation. As a longtime fan of the satirical show Beyond the Fringe, he joined the famous Footlights Club after arriving at his audition dressed as a carrot and performing a sketch about a man with metal fingers being attracted by a magnet. He quickly became friends with John Cleese and credits the Queen Mother (who seemingly laced her tea with gin) for encouraging him to go on tour to New Zealand and the United States. On returning, he quit his course and started writing for The Frost Report with Cleese. Indeed, David Frost played a key role in both his creative and personal development, as it was during a screenwriting sojourn in Spain (during which Cleese romanced first wife and Fawlty Towers co-creator Connie Booth) that Chapman met the love of his life, David Sherlock.

Back in Blighty, all attempts to break the news of his new happiness fell flat, with Cleese, Marty Feldman and Keith Moon being either preoccupied, bemused or befuddled during a coming out party. However, there was no time to dwell on their disinterest, as Monty Python's Flying Circus had become a cult hit on the BBC and a live-action clip of the Spanish Inquisition sketch is interrupted by an extract from the Letter of St Paul to the New Zealanders, in which God urges people not to grovel or have more children than they can manage.

A stage rendition of `The Bruces Song' returns us to the narrative path, just as Chapman begins to succumb to the temptations of success. Among the many sexual conquests (which are relived to the accompaniment of `Sit on My Face'), Chapman has some eccentric encounters with female fans and becomes increasingly dependent upon drink, as he fronts Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) and, at the insistence of his confreres, confesses his peccadilloes to chat show hosts Michael Parkinson and Germaine Greer. An attempt at sobering up is illustrated by the Python sketch about Colin `Bomber' Harris wrestling himself, a vision of a pantomime appearance opposite a talking cat and a ditty on the perils of boozing delivered to the tune of the Souza match that became the Monty Python theme. Yet such is the blithe blurring of fact, fiction and fantasy that it is impossible to detect the extent to which Chapman acknowledged his addiction or wished to be cured of it.

Chapman's recovery seems complete as he plays Monopoly with his friends and records the linking sequences for the Life of Brian soundtrack album. But he returns to the party circuit while living in tax exile in Los Angeles and a furious session of name-dropping is followed by his decision to hire a door-opening agency because he has become too grand to deal with such menial tasks. At David Frost's 40th birthday party, Chapman is advised to seek help and he decides to host a farewell party. Despite having issued the invitations in a spacesuit (after a possible alien abduction), Chapman finds himself alone on the big night and seeks solace at the grave of Oscar Wilde, which conveniently brings him back to the Python stage sketch, where he disguises the fact he has dried up by blowing a raspberry that brings the house down.

A caption records Chapman's death on 4 October 1989 and the closing sequence shows Cleese giving his brilliantly disrespectful eulogy at a memorial service attended by the rest of the Pythons. It's a fittingly iconoclastic conclusion to a film that tries so hard to honour the anarchic spirit of Chapman's comedy by breaking the rules whenever possible. The trouble is, the graphic shifts quickly become something of a distraction, while the wildly differing interpretations of the brief mean that some passages are incredibly literal and others abstract to the point of wilful quirkiness. Furthermore, the digitisation of Terry Gilliam's celebrated photomontage style is a disastrous miscalculation, while the use of 3-D will doubtless add to the sense of visual overkill.

Compensation comes in the form of Chapman's splendid voice-over (from the 1980 tome he co-wrote with Sherlock, Douglas Addams, David Yallop and Alex Martin) and the contributions of fellow Pythons Cleese, Palin, Jones, Gilliam and Carol Cleveland (who play a range of characters in addition to themselves), as well as such guests as Stephen Fry, Tom Hollander and Troma producer, Lloyd Kaufman. But, while this defiantly represents something completely different and has its moments of hilarity and self-deprecating poignancy, there are few genuine insights into either Chapman's personality or his career, which Jones (who is Python Terry's son) and Timlett had already covered in pretty exhaustive detail in the epic six-hour documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth. Thus, while die-hard Pythonites will revel in the affectionate mayhem, this bold conceit grows increasingly vignettish, repetitive, inconsistent and superficial and has to be considered a missed opportunity.

That said, this is an absolute masterpiece in comparison with the last of this week's biopics. It's almost impossible to debase the reputation of BritCrime, but Paul Tanter gives it a damned good go with The Fall of the Essex Boys, an expletive-strewn account of the decline of a 1990s drug gang that has been cobbled together from a mix of headlines, clichés and stereotypes by screenwriter Stephen Reynolds and played with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the groin by a cast of usual suspects whose maniacal posturing frequently borders on the risibly pantomimic.

As narrated by Darren Nicholls (Nick Nevern), the casebook kicks off with kingpins Mickey Steele (Robert Cavanah) and Jack Whomes (Tony Denham) switching a consignment of drugs from the continent for a box of pornography after they discover that Detective Inspector Phil Stone (Ewan Ross) has been tipped off about a drop. However, the focus soon shifts back to 1993 when football hooligan Patrick Tate (Peter Barrett) hooks up with wheeler dealer Tony Tucker (Jay Brown) after a confrontation about the quality of the merchandise being peddled in the infamous Raquel's nightclub. Within two years, Tucker and Tate have become major players, with Nicholls and Craig Rolfe (Simon Phillips) being drafted in to provide brawn to bolster their brains and Tate even seducing Steele's girlfriend, Karen (Kierston Wareing).

However, the death of an 18 year-old girl from a batch of ecstasy sold in Raquel's makes Stone more determined than ever to put those responsible for importing and dealing the pills behind bars, as he went to Hendon with the victim's father. But his decision to persuade a pizza delivery boss not to press charges after he is savagely beaten by Tate for dissing him down the phone prompts WPC Ramsey (Charlie Bond) to report her suspicion that he might be in cahoots with the criminals to superior George Miller (Peter Woodward), who quizzes Stone's partner, Emma (Kate Magowan), and invites internal affairs officer Daniel Waldman (Scott Hinds) to open an investigation into his conduct.

Meanwhile, Steele has invited Tate, Tucker and Nicholls to join him in a raid on a warehouse in Amsterdam and they get so carried away by the ease with which they gun down the gumbies and steal the stock that Tucker decides to take on Hackney-based thug Billy Carmichael (Eddie Webber), who is expecting a major drop at Rettendon. Gleaning information from disaffected oppo Ronnie Walsh (Joe Stamp), Tucker, Tate and Rolfe drive out to the country to grab the gear. However, Steele and Whomes have reached the conclusion that the Southend likely lads have outstayed their welcome and they coerce Nicholls (who turns out to be an embedded copper) into chauffeuring them on an assassination mission. Surprisingly, persons unknown beat Steele to the punch. But Nicholls has his cover blown and Stone has to make a last-minute dash to rescue him.

The Rettendon Range Rover shootings have already been the subject of Terry Winsor's Essex Boys (2000), Julian Gilbey's Rise of the Footsoldier (2007) and Sacha Bennett's Bonded by Blood (2010), so why Tanter and Reynolds felt there was a need for a fourth retelling in 12 years is anybody's guess. In fairness to Barrett and Brown, they deliver solid, if unoriginal displays of Mockney menace, while Cavanah holds his own as the villain with a veneer of urbane charm. Magowan, Wareing and Lucinda Rhodes-Flaherty as Stone's worried wife are hardly helped by threadbare characterisation, but the majority of the supporting turns are as ropey as the pounding rock score.

Haider Zafar's cinematography just about passes muster, but the dialogue is execrable, the structuring haphazard and the direction all over the place. Yet what most dismays about this instantly forgettable farrago is its laddish attitude to drug taking, criminality and violence, which is so resistible that it deflects attention from any fresh insights into the incident that the makers might have wished to convey.

The vanquishing of another band of ruthless desperadoes is recalled by Pablo Larrain in No, which follows Tony Manero (2008) and Post Mortem (2010) in a trilogy of scathing exposés of the Pinochet tyranny that held sway in Chile between 1973 and 1990. Adapted by Pedro Peirano from Antonio Skarmeta's acclaimed stage play Referendum, this has been boldly photographed by Sergio Armstrong in the U-matic video format that was not only current at the time of the October 1988 plebiscite on the future of the ruling regime, but which also allows Larrain to incorporate archive material to reinforce the authenticity of a story that otherwise might have started to feel like a Chilean episode of Mad Men.

Indeed, there is more than a hint of Don Draper about Gael García Bernal's character, who is actually a skateboarding composite of José Manuel Salcedo and Euegenio García, who take knowing cameos as Pinochet supporters. Bernal may be the son of a leading dissident and be estranged from left-wing activist Antonia Zegers, but he entirely misses the irony of preparing commercials for a new cola named `Free'. Consequently, he is surprised when his father's old friend, Luis Gnecco, asks him to devise a series of 15-minute election broadcasts backing the campaign to remove Pinochet from power.

Aware that they will only be shown once a day in a graveyard slot because the administration exerts an iron grip on the media, Gnecco is essentially going through the motions by organising promos that Pinochet had been persuaded to let air by overseas allies keen to have him vaunt his democratic credentials. However, Gnecco is keen to concentrate on such detestable aspects of the dictatorship as torture and the desparecidos and is appalled when García emerges from discussions with mentor Nestor Cantillana and temperamental cameraman-director Marcial Tagle with a spot that is filled with sunlit meadows and exuberant dancers and is so resolutely upbeat about the future that it even ends with a rainbow logo.

Although convinced that the lower classes will only be persuaded into voting for change if they can get a glimpse of a better tomorrow, García draws instant flak from Zegers, who conspires with Tagle to slip some of the more damningly negative publicity back into the broadcasts. However, such is the positive feedback that minister Jaime Vadell hired García's boss, Alfredo Castro, to come up with an equally effective film for the Yes camp and the pair find themselves collaborating by day on harmless consumer products and devoting their nights to sabotaging each other's best political efforts.

More might have been made of the genuine threat that García begins to feel that his opponents could resort to kidnapping his young son, Pascal Montero, in order to secure his co-operation. But his efforts to reunite his family are nowhere near as riveting as the struggle for the hearts and minds of a divided nation and Larrain and Peirano ably convey the sense that something momentous is about to occur. Moreover, by shooting in the square Academy ratio style on U-matic stock, Larrain creates a mood of immediacy and unpredictability that is reinforced by Andrea Chinogli's precise editing and the razor sharp performances of a fine ensemble.

As the prodigal returning home after many years in exile, Bernal cleverly combines out-of-stepness with a freshness of perspective that makes his approach to the referendum so inspired. His duels with Zegers, Tagle and Castro are darkly amusing, but Larrain never loses sight of the gravity of the situation and even hints that the cul-de-sac in which Chile has been trapped since 1990 has a good deal to do with the dumbed down method of debating the key issues that was coined by the No campaign. Unfortunately, however, the picture itself is tainted with the same craving for accessibility and acceptance and Larrain's admirers will miss the psychological depth, dramatic ambiguity and unsettling detachment that made his earlier outings so compelling. Nevertheless, any film that examines socio-political methodology in such minute detail and with such a courageous disregard for artistic nicety has to be worth watching. 

Every bit as unmissable is Hirokazu Kore-eda's I Wish, which confirms the maker of such gems as Maborosi (1995), After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008) as cinema's foremost commentator on family life and childhood. Often compared to Yasujiro Ozu and Edward Yang for this sensitivity, wit and insight, Kore-eda effortlessly incorporates numerous subplots into his charming central tale about two siblings reacting in very different ways to the separation of their parents and their relocation to opposite ends of Japan. Indeed, it is this ability to capture the rhythms and resonances of daily life within a meticulously crafted narrative that makes Kore-eda such a master. But it's his genius for coaxing performances of energy, naturalism and poignancy out of young actors that makes this odyssey so memorable.

It's six months since marital breakdown drove 12 year-old Koki Maeda and his younger brother Ohshiro Maeda apart. While Koki moved with mother Nene Ohtsuka to live in a cramped apartment belonging to her parents Isao Hashizume and Kirin Kiki in Kagoshima on the south-western island of Kyushu, Ohshiro opted to follow father Joe Odagiri to the northern city of Fukuoka to protect him from himself and prevent him from dating any unsuitable women. Although Ohtsuka and Odagiri haven't spoken in months, Koki and Ohshiro communicate daily in order to keep up with news about life at home and school.

While Koki misses Ohshiro and wishes the family could be reunited, Ohshiro is relieved that the rowing has stopped and rather enjoys helping his father grow vegetables in the back garden and encouraging him to relaunch his career as an indie rock musician. He has also made friends with Kyara Uchida, whose mother, Yui Natsukawa, is a failed actress who is desperate for her daughter to avoid repeating her mistakes. Koki also palled up with classmates Ryoga Hayashi and Seinosuke Nagayoshi, but he cannot fathom why they and his grandparents are so unconcerned about the fact that they live in the shadow of Sakurajima, a simmering volcano that frequently coats the streets with ash.

Koki hopes that Sakurajima will erupt and force Odagiri to invite him and Ohtsuka to stay with him. But he is impatient for something to happen quickly and puts his faith instead in the rumour he has heard that bullet trains passing for the first time at 170 mph on a new line create a magic force that allows the granting of wishes. When he discovers that a new Shinkansen is to be opened between Hakata and Kagoshima, he calculates that the trains will pass outside Kawashiri and implores Ohshiro to meet him there so that they can change their destiny.

While Ohtsuka is preoccupied with her new job at a supermarket checkout and Kiki starts taking hula hoop classes, Hashizume becomes fascinated with the new railway and spends hours with his drinking buddies discussing ways of adapting a traditional sponge cake recipe to create a special bullet train design. Keen to make plans for his adventure, Koki somewhat resents the well-meaning interference of teacher Hiroshi Abe and wishes he could share his secret with kindly librarian Masami Nagasawa. However, he does take Hayashi and Nagayoshi into his confidence and they agree to accompany him so they can make wishes of their own. Uchida also offers to go with Ohshiro and even arranges for them to stay overnight with her grandparents en route.

Ultimately, Ohshiro finds himself at the head of a quartet anxious for an escapade and their progress through the countryside evokes a more innocent time when children were free to wander unmolested wherever they pleased. But this isn't a nostalgic paean for a lost past or a slice of sentimental feel-good. Consequently, while there is an enchanted moment when the trains pass and the screen fills with still-life images of incidents from earlier in the story, the brothers learn a salient lesson when Koki admits that he forgot to make a wish and Ohshiro confesses that he asked for something other than the family getting back together. Maybe fate knows best after all?

Fluently photographed by Yutaka Yamazaki and impeccably edited by Kore-eda himself, this is an almost perfect picture. The storyline has a deceptive simplicity that is cleverly cluttered with minor, but affecting incidents to reaffirm the maxim that life is what happens while we're busy making other plans. Indeed, it is one of the screenplay's greatest strengths that experience comes to supplant craving, as it is what we do not what we dream that determines who we become.

Kore-eda is certainly fortunate in having two such confident youngsters as his heroes, as the timing they have developed as part of the MaedaMaeda comedy duo enables Koki and Ohshiro to interact with their adult co-stars with a spontaneity that carries over into the exchanges with their peers. But there isn't a single false performance here and even the most outwardly unsympathetic characters seem to be motivated by the best of intentions.

The logistical prelude to the grand expedition could easily have become bogged down in petty detail. But nothing is ever extraneous in a Kore-eda film, with even the jaunty score by the soft-rock band Quruli enhancing the mood without forcing a response. It's a shame that so few kids will get to see this, as it's one of the century's most honest, astute and attuned studies of growing up and would not only make a magnificent introduction to foreign-language cinema for teenagers, but it would also teach them a thing or two about who they are and how they fit into a world that often seems to make no sense at all.