Reviews

A troubling little film about an eleven year old boy in Amsterdam called Ciske (Franciskus) Vrijmoeth, who has no friends and is only called "the rat". The setting is in Amsterdam in the 1930s. Ciske has to change school, because he poured ink over his teacher's head. After school, he helps out in a pub, where his mother Marie also works. His beloved father Cor is a fisherman and therefore not at home. The story is told by his new teacher Bruis, who gives him a chance, and he who lives a troubled life, until a Crippled boy turns up at his school Ciske is the only one to befriend the poor boy, after that everyone in his school including his once friends gang up on him for bullying the crippled boy and then if you thought that was bad, Ciske gets into tragic trouble and gets locked up!

There was a rumour doing the rounds a few years back that rats had been observed at some of the larger London cinemas. Apparently they would steal in during the show, prowl the aisles under cover of darkness and vacuum spilt popcorn from around the feet of the punters. Of course this is alarming and of course this is horrible ... and yet after sitting through the latest offering from Pixar (and at a large London cinema to boot), I feel oddly sanguine at the prospect. Among its many, myriad delights, Ratatouille is a film to make you love the rat.

And there is no escaping it: Ratatouille's rats are unmistakably ratty. They have snaking tails and skittering claws and rapid heartbeats that make their flanks quiver and their fur tremble. Sometimes they bite. While Brad Bird's film is being distributed by Disney as part of an ongoing deal with Pixar, it's safe to assume that these vermin would never have passed muster during the wholesome heyday of Uncle Walt. In one early scene, an entire horde of them is forcibly flushed out of their nest and the sight is so viscerally shocking that it takes a second to check yourself and realise that, hang on, we're not against these rats, we're on their side. Fortunately, it is only a second.

The film's hero is Remy, who would probably not be caught dead eating discarded popcorn in any case. This is because Remy (voiced by US comedian Patton Oswalt) is a culinary genius. He totters on his hind legs to keep his front paws clean and generally conceals the soul of a poet inside the body of an incontinent, disease- riddled rodent. Alighting at a top Paris restaurant, he promptly becomes the puppet-master of Linguini (Lou Romano), a lowly kitchen boy. Installed beneath a chef's hat, the rat communicates his gifts by pulling at Linguini's hair; a complex series of tugs, yanks and passes that has the kid jerking like a marionette from the oregano to the saffron and over to the pan. Naturally the diners love Remy's cuisine while lavishing Linguini with all the credit. None of them come down with botulism.

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Read more Judged solely in terms of animation technique, Bird's film is a masterpiece. The over-bright, fauvist colours that typified those early CGI outings have now been tempered by a richer, more subtle palette. There is a tangy sense of authenticity to the kitchen scenes, where the medallions of monkfish are lovingly prepared by a band of ex-cons and cardsharps before being bussed through to a palatial dining room that thrums to an undertone of clinking glasses and murmured conversation.

Ratatouille is equally confident when it scurries outside. Pixar productions have always boasted a distinctive architectural nous, as witnessed in Monsters Inc's recreation of America's blue-collar neighbourhoods or The Incredibles' pristine sweep of retro 1950s suburbia. Here Bird's animators concoct a Paris of bustling little squares and misty riverside walkways. Certainly, Remy's first sight of the city, scuttling up a rooftop to check out the skyline, is as swooningly romantic as anything you'll find in Amélie or Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.

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Except that's just the half of it. The perennial cliché trotted out about Pixar movies is that they are smart and soulful enough to be enjoyed by adults as well as children, as though this is somehow a shock and not a quality shared by every great family film right back to The Wizard of Oz. True to form, Ratatouille contains plenty of exuberant set pieces (fraught chases along the Seine, some gaudy slapstick involving a visiting health inspector). But this riff on Cyrano de Bergerac also works as a heartfelt parable of illegitimacy and a passionate plea for the role of the outsider. The clue is in the DNA of the three main characters. Colette (voiced by Janeane Garofalo) is a talented cook struggling to find a niche in a male- dominated profession. Linguini is revealed to be the unacknowledged bastard son of a noted celebrity chef. And Remy, of course, is a rat and therefore reviled by polite society. The diners love his food but want him dead.

When Ratatouille stuttered at the US box office this summer, the subsequent fallout hinted at a growing rift between the Pixar animators and their paymasters at Disney; a marriage of convenience that is now pulling in opposite directions. Bizarrely, Bird's film gives the impression of anticipating this clash, this tussle between art and commerce, and bows out with a scene that places itself firmly on the avant garde, in a shabby bistro frequented by beret- wearing students and thrill-seeking hip-cats.

For good measure, it gives the last word to a snooty food critic (Peter O'Toole) who sees the light and argues that the best role a reviewer can play is to champion the new; hailing those unsung heroes who are trying something different, regardless of their background, colour, creed or species.

GOD playing tennis: that's what Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a privileged British schoolboy living in high colonial style in the pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai of 1941, sees in one of his dreams. God taking a photograph: Jim thinks he sees that four years and seemingly several lifetimes later, as a starving, exhausted prisoner witnessing the brilliant light of the atomic bomb.

What transpires in between, the sweeping story of Jim's wartime exploits after he is separated from his family, is set forth so spectacularly in Steven Spielberg's ''Empire of the Sun'' that the film seems to speak a language all its own. In fact it does, for it's clear Mr. Spielberg works in a purely cinematic idiom that is quite singular. Art and artifice play equal parts in the telling of this tale. And the latter, even though intrusive at times, is part and parcel of the film's overriding style.

Yes, when Jim crawls through swampy waters he emerges covered with movie mud, the makeup man's kind; when he hits his head, he bleeds movie blood. It's hard not to be distracted by such things. But it's also hard to be deterred by them, since that same movie-conscious spirit in Mr. Spielberg gives ''Empire of the Sun'' a visual splendor, a heroic adventurousness and an immense scope that make it unforgettable.

There are sections of ''Empire of the Sun'' that are so visually expressive they barely require dialogue (although Tom Stoppard's screenplay, which streamlines J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, is often crisp and clever). Its first half hour, for example, could exist as a silent film -an extraordinarily sharp evocation of Shanghai's last prewar days, richly detailed and colored by an exquisite foreboding. Jim is first seen singing in a church choir (the Welsh hymn ''Suo Gan'' will echo again hauntingly later in the story), then gliding through crowded streets in his family's chauffeur- driven Packard. At home, he asks his parents off-handed questions about the coming war. When the three of them, elaborately costumed, heedlessly leave home for a party on the other side of the city, it's clear that their days there are numbered just from the way the Chinese servants wave goodbye.

That first glimpse of the choirboys will prompt audiences to wonder which of these well-groomed, proper little singers is to be the film's leading man. Mr. Bale, who emerges from the choir by singing a solo, at first seems just a handsome and malleable young performer, another charming child star. But the epic street scene that details the Japanese invasion of the city and separates Jim from his parents reveals this boy to be something more. As Mr. Bale, standing atop a car amid thousands of extras and clasping his hands to his head, registers the fact that Jim is suddenly alone, he conveys the schoolboy's real terror and takes the film to a different dramatic plane. This fine young actor, who appears in virtually every frame of the film and ages convincingly from about 9 to 13 during the course of the story, is eminently able to handle an ambitious and demanding role.

But other episodes are less sharply defined. When Jim, who has proudly won his right to live in the American barracks, returns to the British camp in which he formerly lived, it takes a moment to remember why he's back - not because the motive is unclear, but because his departure from the one place and return to the other are separated by intervening scenes.

Still, there are many glorious moments here, among them Jim's near- religious experiences with the fighter planes he sees as halfway divine (in one nighttime scene, the sparks literally fly). And there is a full panoply of supporting characters, including Miranda Richardson, who grows more beautiful as her spirits fade, in the role of a married English woman who both mothers Jim and arouses his early amorous stirrings. It is the mothering that seems to matter most, for Jim's small satchel of memorabilia includes a magazine photograph of a happy family, a picture he takes with him everywhere. For a surrogate father, he finds the trickier figure of Basie (John Malkovich), a Yank wheeler-dealer with a sly Dickensian wit. Basie, who by turns befriends Jim and disappoints him, remains an elusive character, but Mr. Malkovich brings a lot of fire to the role. ''American, are you?'' one of his British fellow prisoners asks this consummate operator. ''Definitely,'' Mr. Malkovich says.

''Gone With the Wind'' is playing at the biggest movie theater in Shanghai when the Japanese are seen invading that city, and ''Gone With the Wind'' is a useful comparison, at least in terms of subject and style. The makers of that film didn't really burn Atlanta; that wasn't their method. They, too, as Mr. Spielberg does, let the score sometimes trumpet the characters' emotions unnecessarily, and they might well have staged something as crazy as the ''Empire of the Sun'' scene in which the prisoners find an outdoor stadium filled with confiscated art and antiques and automobiles, loot that's apparently been outdoors for a while but doesn't look weatherbeaten in the slightest. Does it matter? Not in the face of this film's grand ambitions and its moments of overwhelming power. Not in the light of its soaring spirits, its larger authenticity, and the great and small triumphs that it steadily delivers.

Dir: Wes Anderson Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, F Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton

In his new comedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson has found an elegant solution to gripes about how stifling, how annoyingly perfect, his films can be. He ignores them wholeheartedly. Obsessive design which forbids any sense of spontaneity? Check. Feelings put in inverted commas, or swept aside to concentrate on the colour palette? Check that too. Non-devotees might be bracing themselves, but the scales could just as easily fall from their eyes when they sit down to watch this. The trouble is: it's wonderful. It does all of the above, and it's still wonderful. You could get light-headed on the pure fun of it, which unleashes fresh waves of fun-within-fun at every point where you worry it might dry up. There are three prologues, each nested within the last as storytelling conceits to bring us back, in stages, to 1932, and Chapter 1. Here we're introduced to the story's prime mover – a famous concierge called Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes), who is the meticulous heart and soul of his establishment, a monumental pink palace perched high up somewhere in a misty Mitteleuropean mountain range. The will of one eminent guest, an 84-year-old widow called Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis, becomes the contested centre of a farcical bust-up between Gustave and her money-grubbing family. Brief as it is, the role of this old lady is vastly enlivened by having a magnificently crusty and bizarre-looking Tilda Swinton play it. Madame D departs the Grand Budapest on the same day that a young lobby boy called Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori) first comes to the concierge's attention. Gustave must school this pup in the ins and outs of the hotel, not least explaining his own peculiar role in the sex lives of its weathered residents. "When you're young, it's all fillet steak," he tells his new protégé, "but as you get older, you have to move on to the cheaper cuts."

Forrest Gump is a movie heart-breaker of oddball wit and startling grace. There's talk of another Oscar for Tom Hanks, who is unforgettable as the sweet-natured, shabbily treated simpleton of the title. The Academy is a sucker for honoring afflicted heroes. In Hollywood, it's always raining rain men. Credit Hanks for not overplaying his hand. He brings a touching gravity to the role of an idiot savant from the South who finds strength in God, country, his childhood pal, Jenny (Robin Wright), and his good mama (Sally Field). When Forrest falls a few IQ points shy of minimal school requirements, Mama knows who to sleep with to bend the rules. Her son has a gift. As Forrest makes his pilgrim's progress from the '50s to the '80s, he becomes a college football star, a Vietnam war hero, a shrimp tycoon and even a father.

Taking a cue from Zelig, director Robert Zemeckis places Forrest in a vivid historical context — he talks with JFK, LBJ and Nixon, among other luminaries. The effects dazzle, though never at the expense of the story. Winston Groom, who wrote the 1986 novel, saw Forrest as a modern Candide, an optimist in the face of strong opposing evidence. But Groom is no Voltaire, and neither is screenwriter Eric Roth (Mr. Jones, Memories of Me), who blunts his satire with choking sentiment. It's Hanks who brings humor and unforced humanity to the literary conceit of Forrest, though the slim actor scarcely resembles the 6-foot-6-inch, 240-pound bruiser of the book.

In a college dorm with Jenny, who lets him touch her breast, the virginal Forrest ejaculates instantly, losing her interest and his self-respect. In the Army, Forrest saves his captain (Gary Sinise), whose legs are later amputated, and the captain resents him. Forrest is everything we admire in the American character — honest, brave, loyal — and the film's fierce irony is that nobody can stay around him for long.

Zemeckis doesn't fall into the trap of using Forrest as an ad for arrested development. He knows the limits of a holy fool who can't understand the hypocrisy of postwar America that this picaresque epic so powerfully reveals. The peace-love pretensions of the '60s are skewered as neatly as the greed decades that follow. But there is something of Forrest that Zemeckis would like to see rub off on us: his capacity for hope. It's an ambitious goal in this age of rampant cynicism. Godspeed.