A great coming-of-age story is primarily a personal document of one person’s experience in making that tricky transition from childhood to maturity, and naturally specific to a time and a place, but it must also be sufficiently universal in its themes that it can be in some way related to by the majority of the audience. This big-screen adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s massively popular graphic novel achieves that perfect balance between these two, pinning the story of a young girl’s awakening to the world against the very specific backdrop of the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war.

The bulk of the film is told in flashback, and as such is rather episodic in its structure, though it does retain a strict adherence to chronology. Our frame of reference is the older Marjane, now in Paris, sitting in Orly airport remembering her childhood days. In 1978 she is a precocious young girl growing up in Tehran; ‘back then I had a quiet life, a little girl’s life’. It is the dog days of the Shah regime, and state kidnappings and murders are frequent. But while her parents are anxious about what the future holds for them, for the young Marjane these exciting events are hold a certain glamour – when she hears about how some prisoners are tortured, this becomes jokingly referenced in the games she and her friends play.

It is only until the Islamists begin to take charge of the country that the young girl begins personally to feel what is happening; her beloved uncle is taken as a political prisoner and murdered, the subsequent war with Iraq means air-raids are common, and the new regime begins to clampdown on many of the freedoms that had been enjoyed in what was the Middle East’s most moderate Muslim country. Alcohol is forbidden, women must shround their faces away and not wear makeup, and unmarried girls must not be seen to be walking around with men.

In this climate of new restrictions, the young Marjane attempts to assert her personality: walking around in trainers and a ‘Punk’s Not Dead’ stencilled jacket, and in one particularly funny scene going to a series of shady black-market traders to procure that most illicit of contraband: an Iron Maiden tape. When it becomes too dangerous for her to stay in Iran, she is sent to Vienna, where she enjoys considerably more room to foster her interests and fraternise with people her own age, but she is always conscious of her alien status as an outsider to her new European buddies.

Everyone when they are growing up feels a certain degree of isolation, that no-one else could possibly understand what you are feeling and going through. And many of the insecurities and new pressures that our feisty young protagonist goes through are universal: a growing awareness of pubescent changes to her body, for example, is illustrated in one marvellously comic interlude, most unflattering parts of her anatomy being grotesquely expanded out of all proportion. Similarly her increasing awareness of the opposite sex, and realising the blindness of young love.

The political background to the film is what gives it its personal stamp. In starting off as a restless and imaginative young girl, Marjane’s transformation into the jaded expatriate is especially poignant, underlined by the juxtapositions offered by the flashback structure. The slow shift from the wide-eyed, if naive, optimism to weary resignation weaves together the two strands of personal and political effortlessly – here, it is politics and political systems which have exiled our protagonist, forever destroying the Iran of her childhood, and undoubtedly that of many others.

The film’s visual style is a significant point to examine, in terms of providing its cinematic qualities. On could argue that, to take a recent example, cartoons such as The Simpsons Movie (2007) are unable to entirely successfully make the leap from the small screen to the big screen, as there is nothing particularly ‘cinematic’ about what it is portraying. Conversely, something as cine-literate as Team America: World Police (2004) showed that even Thunderbirds-style marionettes can play well in the movie theatre, as long as there was sufficient care in creating spectacle. In Persepolis, the animators have been careful to construct the latter, rather than the former. The stark, jagged black-and-white shapes that make up the bulk of the film are in the Expressionist tradition, and deserve to be seen projected.

A quick note about dubbing; there are two versions circulating in English-speaking countries; the original French and an English dub. While the English dub is well done – featuring the talents of Iggy Pop, Gena Rowlands and Sean Penn alongside the original voice cast members Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve – the French is infinitely more preferable. Anyone who has seen a Hayao Miyazaki film in both English and Japanese knows that the original language of an animation works so much better.

Antonio Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista is brought to the big screen with subtlety, and no little wit, by director Daniele Luchetti, whose unflashy, intimate style of filmmaking gives this story of fraternal disharmony the space it needs to breathe without veering into oversentimentality.

The story concerns two brothers, ‘Accio’ and Manrico, played with suitable brotherly friction by the effervescent Elio Germano and the swoonsome Riccardo Scamarcio respectively. Manrico is the older and more stable of the two, unreliable in his relationships but a dedicated communist agitator. Accio, by contrast, is more introverted and unpredictable; expelled from his priest training school he returns to the family home and, searching for some direction in his life, soon falls in with the local neo-fascist party.

The ideological divide between the brothers creates friction, but they are strangely pulled together again by the arrival on the scene of Manrico’s beautiful girlfriend Francesca, a fellow communist sympathiser. Although clearly attracted to the more handsome, driven older brother, she also sees something in his quiter, less confident but more likeable younger brother, despite their political differences.

As the film rumbles on, the pace quickens, and the initially harmless political events the brothers are involved in quickly escalate into violence, sabotage, and minor acts of terrorism. What started as a conflict of ideas becomes all-too dangerous, and the political begins to affect the personal; in one crucial scene, Manrico, having discovered that Accio’s fascist colleagues are planning to torch both his and his fellow communists’ cars, asks his younger brother if he was going to warn him about it – he is slow to respond, and unconvincingly so, leaving the older brother shocked at what their differing ideologies can lead to.

While there is a little of the political background sketched out, there is not the grand sweep of a film such as Romanzo Criminale (2005), which sought to dramatize some of the larger events of the terrorism years in Italy such as the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the bombing of the Bologna train station. Instead, the focus is much more smaller-scale, concentrating on the effect of the polar radicalization of Italian politics within one family unit. Director Daniele Luchetti utilizes an intimate filming style, relying on close-ups and not favouring long establishing shots, creating an atmosphere that seems much more personal, and human. In this sense, the influence of Luchetti’s mentor, Nanni Moretti, is most keenly felt.

One aspect of the film which surprised me was just how light the tone was; I was expecting something more dry, more politically pointed, but what comes across is a real light-heartedness, especially in the film’s earlier scenes before things start majorly hitting the fan. Much of this should be attributed to the wonderfully comic performance of Elio Germano, surely a European superstar of the future; his nuanced, physical performance creates an Accio both emotionally adrift yet immensely likeable, in contrast to his more sombre, stiff older brother. Riccardo Scamarcio plays the straight-man well, though is asked of a lot less than his co-star. Supports are uniformly well-cast, most memorably for me the superb Anna Bonaiuto, who plays an older woman whom Accio develops a particularly unwise relationship with.

Italian cinema is at a crossroads; there are still some great filmmakers around, most notably the aforementioned Nanni Moretti, and new talents such as Paolo Sorrentino (L’Amico di famiglia, Le Conseguenze dell’amore) and Emanuele Crialese (Respiro, Nuovomondo) getting widespread acclaim and arthouse recognition. But there are also a host of hangers-on, the likes of Giuseppe Tornatore and Roberto Benigni, who are clogging up the system and perhaps preventing further new talents from emerging and being allowed space to breathe. As long as careful, well-made, thoughtful films such as Mio fratello è figlio unico are able to be produced and released to a Europe-wide audience, then perhaps the system can be encouraged to look to the future of filmmaking, rather than the past.

The latest in what is sure to be a long spun-out series of handheld ‘homemade’-style horror films, following on from the J.J. Abrahams-produced Cloverfield, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, and the earlier brit-zom flick The Zombie Diaries, [REC] is a fairly bland addition to the canon, lacking any real originality or genre innovation, but in its terrifying coda doing just about enough to warrant a sit-through of its brief 78 minute duration.

The film begins in purely cinéma-vérité style, with breezy television presenter Ángela and her cameraman colleague Pablo conducting a documentary about their local fire department, casually detailing the montony of their day-to-day routines. But on their first callout they, shock-horror, end up stumbling into an apartment block being slowly zombified, which is then promptly sealed off by the authorities as a biological quarantine-zone. Will all of the residents escape alive? Have a guess.

The startlingly unoriginal plot is matched by some hideously hackneyed old horror cliches, which far from being subtle tributes to other genre classics, feel a bit like recyling; the sealed-off building full of the undead trick has been done much better elsewhere, and with more of a social commentary edge – the opening of Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead (1977) springs to mind. The zombies themselves are most reminscent of the Rage-infectees of 28 Days Later (2002), but with less bite (sorry), while the inevitable zombie-child, zombie old lady, sinister authority figures and such like are all depressingly present and correct.

The handheld camerawork and faux-documentary setup obviously recalls The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Last Broadcast (1998), both of which more elegantly posited their setups; [REC] does little to make the film seem like a genuine documentary gone wrong, and the lack of any characterisation of the documentarists does beg the question – why do they care so much about filming everything, insistently refusing to stop despite the concerns of those around them? Ángela and Pablo may well be keen to get a great scoop, but surely this motivation would really only go so far?

There are other problems, too. The pacing is almost completely wrong, so when the rather laboured scares arrive, they feel far too predictable. An unwise foray near the end of the film into religious iconography, explaining away much more than is really needed about what exactly has been going on is clunky and unneccesary. Horror films are always much more sinister when not fully explained – Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for one. Instead, a tape recording of a scientist explaining his actions unfortunately recall the horror-slapstick of either Young Frankenstein (1974) or Evil Dead II (1987).

There is so ordinariness about [REC] that it comes as a complete surprise that its last few scenes are actually so successfully scary, the film having done little to suggest that it would be so; even a slightly cheesy Silence of the Lambs-style shift into night-vision can be forgiven. The final ascent into the top of the apartment block gives the willies as much as Blair Witch‘s inevitably violent denouement, illustrating that directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza are more than capable of doing a good job; let’s hope they can be a bit more original next time around. While [REC]‘s snappy 80 minute duration means it doesn’t outstay its welcome, it is a shame that the first 70 are nowhere near as tense as its final 10.

A strong central performance from Juliette Binoche holds together this slow, sedantary new film from Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose elegantly composed long takes always seemed in danger of sending me to a peaceful slumber, had I not had that double espresso before the screening. Binoche plays a Parisian mother-of-two who works as a voice for puppet shows, but is in little control of her own life; she shares a cramped Parisian apartment with her young son Simon, the downstairs section of which is somewhat unwelcomely occupied by a friend of her estranged husband, who has decamped to Montreal. As we join the story, she has just hired a new childminder for Simon, a young Asian film student called Song.

It is through the eyes of this newcomer to Paris that we see the city, a metaphorical vehicle for director Hou’s unfamiliarity with a new continent for this, his first European-based project. The balloon of the title is occasionally shown floating above the city’s streets, seen depicted in wall murals, in a painting at the Musee D’Orsay, and climactically referenced in a song. Its slow, smooth progress around is mimicked by Hou’s deliberately languid long takes, forming a highly impressionistic portrait of the French capital.

There is little story to really concentrate on; Binoche’s Suzanne permanently ping-pongs through a series of mini-crises, from her comically malfunctioning car to trying to move a piano upstairs. Could any other actress of her generation so charmingly and eccentrically play the part of a harried puppeteer? Instead of plotting, the film asks us to meditate on the nature of artifice, represented here by the puppet shows, the roaming red balloon, and film student Song’s incessant camcorder. The conflict between old and new technology appears as another major theme. It will divide audiences – after about 40 minutes of nothing much really happening, one will either go with it or head grumbling towards the exit. Personally, I found enough in its strange curiosity, elegant camerawork and the sheer watchability of Juliette Binoche’s performance to sustain me through the two hours. Others may not be so patient.

Spooky goings on in darkened houses with frightened women being tormented by creepy children may well have recently been the preserve of Japanese and Korean cinema in the last decade, but it must not be forgotten that Spanish cinema has a fine tradition of ghost stories, too. The more recent likes of Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) and Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro’s Civil War-set The Devil’s Backbone (2001) have resurrected this tradition, a sequence which is now continued by this, the debut picture from director Juan Antonio Bayona.

To an extent this is fairly standard Poltergeist-like genre fare; a couple and their son move into an old orphanage, with the intention of setting it up as a home for children with learning difficulties. The son, Simón, is known for his having imaginary friends, but this new house seems to have inspired him to fabricated other, newer ones. For parents Laura and Carlos, this new development is hardly out of character, and so is of little immediate concern to them. However, when these ‘friends’ appear to be playing games with the family, as well as revealing troubling information to the young boy, things begin to take a sinister turn.

As an introduction to their potential new carers, the new orphans are thrown a party, where they all don different, slightly grotesque, masks. But after an altercation with her son, and then a violent encounter with a mysterious masked child, Simón vanishes, leading to a high-publicity search for the boy. But the continued strange goings-on in the house, coupled with a visit from a medium, convince Laura that what has actually happened is that Simón has been abducted by his imaginary friends, and that she must play their games in order to find her child again. But how much of what she perceives is really happening, and how much is tied to her memories and fears?

The film is played for psychological shocks in a Hitchcockian vein at times, the orphanage at times feeling like the Manderlay of Rebecca (1940), but also nods towards the aforementioned The Others. But one of the main things that raises this above the bog-standard haunted house story is Sergio G. Sánchez’s delicately balanced script, and its sensitive and complex rendering of the subject matter of adoption. The film’s first scene shows the young Laura, a resident at this very orphanage herself, playing with her friends before learning that she is about to be whisked away to new foster-parents. We shortly learn that Simón is an adoptee himself, and can guess that it is Laura’s attachment to her own anonymous past, as well as to Simón’s, that has perhaps inspired her to reopen the place where she spent her happy childhood days.

The theme of the loss of childhood immediately brings to mind two of the greatest works of Spanish cinema, Victor Erice’s El Espíritu de la Colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive] (1973), and Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos [Raise Ravens] (1976). But in terms of reference points, the most striking influence would be the work of Guillermo Del Toro, Executive Producer on the project. This film, like his films, takes the traditions of gothic horror and fairy tale, and adds intertextual references to classic horror cinema to create something both familiar yet strangely fresh. There are times when stock archetypes feel a little creaky – the rationalist sceptical husband versus the imaginative wife has surely been done to death by now – but in general its conformity to horror convention is strictly from neccesity. The jumps, when they come, are thoroughly satisfying, reminiscent of the grand giallo tradition of Don’t Look Now and Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso.

On the acting front, a powerhouse performance from the ever-watchable Belén Rueda is at the centre, showing just how inadequate the Jennifer Love-Hewitts and Sarah Michelle Gellars Hollywood usually throws into its versions of these films really are. And what an impressive range first-time director Bayona shows here – infusing the film with enough subtlety and nuance to flag him up as a future star filmmaker, following in GDT’s rather large footsteps. The Orphanage is a reminder to an audience fed on too many Hostels and Saws that genuinely intelligent, disturbing genre horror is still possible in today’s cinema.

**EDIT** Of course, i completely forgot the obvious references to two truly great films, Hideo Nakata’s Honogurai mizu no soko kara [Dark Water] (2002) and Jack Clayton’s masterpiece The Innocents (1961).