Bonne Vacances

This is a seaside-destination holiday film that has a beautifully judged scent of torpor, emptiness, drift, dog-day, and inconsequentiality.

A believable teenage girl (why do French actresses effortlessly do Teenage, while their Brit equivalents are struggling to be any more convincing than Byker Grove) visits a tatty seaside town with her paralysingly beach-ready and hopelessly self-regarding cousin, on the rebound from a brief failed marriage. Men notice them. There is flirting and posturing from the adults, already far too attached to their dramas.

The most wonderful element to this is the disregarded, unhip, virtually deserted town all the heaving sexual gamesmanship (and gameswomanship) plays itself out against. There's literally no audience worth the mention for the adults' arch, bored manipulation of eachother. Beautifully judged stuff.

Family Snapshot

"Tokyo Story" is a static and glacially paced film, with the camera consistently below the eyeline of a person sat on a mat on the floor. Slightly dowdy, dusty interiors, shot from the disregarded far sides of rooms, lit by diffused sunlight and un-shaded bulbs predominate.

I've never seem Kabuki theatre before, but assume that the quietly effective use of the almost unchanging expressions on the mother and father's faces, is what gives the power to their responses to the bumptiously, offhandedly graceless behaviour of their children, whom they've travelled a long distance to Tokyo to see.

There's genuine heartbreak in the moments when the preoccupation of in-laws and high-minded social probity mean that the elderly parents are essentially homeless for the night, and simply work out for themselves where they might best be housed.

It's a very simple moral universe, but a wonderfully restrainedly drawn one.

Kitchenette

It's a brilliantly titled play, as even the characters don't have surnames; they're identified only as 'Peter, grilled fish', 'Hans, fry', 'Gaston, grill'. The set is a cluttered dance-floor of a space, with some wonderful choreographed moments of stirring, whisking, spooning, and triumphant pouring and a celebratorily deranged act-ending danse-culinaire.

The pan-European staff lapse into French and German, East-End slang regularly, giving the dialogue a smorgasbord texture, and Tom Brooke as Peter, the German fish cook is noisily the best of the cast: aloof, arch, stagey and very fragile.

River's Edge

Wonderful stuff from Lesley Hill and Helen Paris, taking a group of Stratford-Upon-Avon locals' stories of their relationship with their locality, and weaving a hallucinatory Tourist River Trip around them.

On board the boat, our tour guide quickly began to unravel in terms of her relationship to our locality, seeming to see Venice and the Nile where the Avon Rowing Club and a slightly foxed riverside restaurant stood. People on the riverbank began to further tear open the fabric of the screen between the audience, the stories and the 'real world' we had quite definitely left behind.

Curious' productions always seem very graceful in achieving these quite shocking shifts away from the comforts of the quotidian world, and the comforts of the audience seat; we are spirited to a disturbing Elsewhere but always in very good humour and fine style.

The production achieved the unlikely feat of transforming a sleepy stretch of the Avon into a re-enactment of Odysseus' life-and-death sail between Scylla and Charybdis, and of the always-arresting moment when characters appear of whose 'reality' we are genuinely unsure.

Excellent cocktail-pouring technique too, which we don't see nearly often enough, especially on a river boat that's about to run aground.

Repetitive Acts

Definitely not to be filed under "shows" or "entertainment". Sean H and I hit the arches under the Elephant and Castle mainline station last week for Craig Clouse (of Shit'n'Shine) to tweak, prod and interfere with a table full of tone generators and FX boxes to very similar effect achieved by S'n'S. Ugly wrenched bricks of rhythm, tortured every few bars into a new(ish) posture, and a continuous reel of 70s/80s hardcore penetration porno flickering on a white sheet where I guessed the bands usually play. It wasn't any old random porno either; each sequence had a glassy inevitability to it that only the most industrially mass-produced stuff would have, and Clouse had selected only close-up penetration of the most mind-bombed Workmanlike facial expressions. There were a very small handful of woman in the audience, and strangely the atmosphere was slightly less nasty as a result.

Die Munch Maschine (I'm not certain whether that 's' is really supposed to be there. I'm likely superimposing it to make my memories of the music appear more attuned to the group's sense of itself) did well to even find cultural space for themselves after Clouse, but a bracing sequence of nicely-fluctuating distorted Hammond motorik attacks, propelled by some outrageously far-flung drumming did the trick.

Tourist Trap

Even harder, this one. Even though it's technically a documentary, it looks like a 90 minute MTV gangster rap video- endless posturing, threats, platitudes, empty promises set against a relentlessly bleak stage of the grinding poverty of a shanty town. There's no sense of hope or community at all here, which makes for a deadening, empty movie.

The interjections of political and news footage is oddly natural; the stagey, cliches of network news reporting from a comfily distant warzone, the evasive pronouncements of the corrupted politician sit completely naturally with the ethically bankrupted aid worker and slurred moralising of the heroes.

By the end of the film, it's possible to see the threads of manipulation and advantage-taking that hold each take together.

City Of Tiny Lights

This is a properly difficult one.

It kept bringing to mind "Bus 174", a billiant, cold-eyed documentary about a compulsive, truly nerve-jangling horror-stricken hostage scenario in a bus in Rio de Janeiro. The documentary film that comes with the DVD of City of God is similarly gripping, unarguably real. "You might say it's not a job, but it is" says one guy about his life in the favela.

"City of God" itself is too awash with flashbacks, cheeky captions, crowd-pleasing music, self-consciously knockabout comedy, stagey changes in film stock, and lengthy chase scenes to build up real menace or engagement with "Rocket", the likeable kid who wants to be a photographer.

There are a few moments when it comes alive: Little Ze stalks the nightclub, genuinely out of control, needing to take revenge on any figure he can pin his rage on. In some ways, the film is too small for anything but this 18-year-old's volcanic anger, and in trying to capture another personal story or deliver an impression of a community the film simply gets too diluted.