Two films originating from Mexico, both focusing on the increasing divide between that country’s haves and have-nots, but in radically differing ways.

La Zona, the debut feature by director Rodrigo Plá sets up a more artificial environment in which to explore the issues surrounding this subject. The titular ‘Zone’ is an exclusive area of Mexico City, walled off from the rest of the capital, filled with expansive American-style condominiums and tree lined boulevards, seemingly a Westernized idyll when compared to the packed slums just outside of its gates. The residents are naturally the more well-off classes able to afford such luxurious surroundings, though their constant fear of incursions into their particular Eden means that they are surrounded by closely-monitored CCTV cameras and their houses fitted with ridiculously loud alarm systems.

As we join the film, a thunderstorm leads to the collapse of one section of the Zone’s wall, creating a temporary way in for a group of teenage boys who decide to use the opportunity to burgle some of the houses of its rich residents. What they hadn’t banked upon was the response to their incursion; the Zone’s residents, in their paranoia at such an event, run a vigilante security force of their own, and seem to have no qualms with dealing with intruders in as brutal ways as possible.

Plá’s film is unmistakably polemical; the artifice of the Zone is illustrative of a less visible but all-too-real wall circling off the rich and poor in modern Mexico. While his message could seem a little preachy, the tight scripting and characterizations, plus a more subtle directorial style than, say, the overblown theatrics that fellow countryman Alejandro González Iñarritu has begun to foster, mean that La Zona gets its message across in a powerful, sympathetic way. Expect great things to come from Rodrigo Plá.

In stark aesthetic contrast to La Zona, Déficit, the directorial debut of Mexican cinema’s poster-boy Gael García Bernal, is a much lighter affair, though with similar thematic concerns. An obvious spin on the upper-class country house farce, in the tradition of Jean Renoir’s La Regle Du Jeu (1939) or Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), Déficit takes aim at the spoiled scions of Mexico’s nouveau riches, giving them all just about enough rope to hang themselves. Bernal plays Cristobal, who is throwing a party for his friends at his parents’ large mansion, located just outside of Mexico City. They have money as his father is a famous economist, and Cristobal seems intent on following in his footsteps by planning to go off to Harvard in the autumn.

The guests begin to arrive, and it becomes clear that some are more welcome than others. Cristobal is placated when introduced to a beautiful Argentinian girl, who he seems intent on having his wicked way with, at least before the arrival of his actual girlfriend, who through a series of phoned misdirections seems never likely to find the place. The film is for the most part light and breezy, with only small hints of resentments beneath the exterior facade, but when things begin to go awry the tensions really begin to surface – what brother thinks of sister, what friends think of other friends, what the rich brats really think of the Asian gardener, and indeed what the central rich brat really thinks of himself, and the expectations that he finds himself unable to live up to.

An excellent ensemble cast keeps things flowing nicely, with moments of comedy and real charm. Bernal under-directs to the point of whimsy at times, but this ultimately is an exercise in mockery rather than satire so there is little need for flashiness. A low-key, personal project then, but an entertaining and somewhat poignant one.

There is a certain degree of charm and innocence to seeing Indiana Jones return to our screens once again; after all, most franchises these days are keen to stress their post-9/11 seriousness, giving us the raw edginess of the Bourne films, a new hard ugly James Bond in Casino Royale and a camp-free Batman as played by Christian Bale. What is good about the new Indy film is that it makes no concession to this, jumping straight back into the same territory of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a film released no less than 19 years ago.

To judge the film by any other standard than the one set by the original trilogy would be foolhardy, so lets proceed this way; there are the requisite action sequences, scenes of moody tomb-raiding, encounters with strange backward tribes and man-eating insects, dodgy foes with even dodgier accents, and the usual cacophony of fist-fights, chases and occasional pithy one-liners that we are all familiar with. The plot, for what it’s worth, revolves around some sort of alien race, nuclear testing, Russian spies, double agents and other similarly preposterous things that, let’s face it, we all love and don’t really care about the details too much.

Some of these aspects are good – two chase sequences in particular are so ridiculously over-the-top and fun that one can’t help grinning like the Cheshire Cat through them. Spielberg can lay at least partial claim to hegemony on a certain type of action sequence, and makes direction of this seem almost effortless. Harrison Ford still cuts a mean cinematic figure too, and though lacking the boyish charm of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, he makes up for it with a bumbling clumsiness that never seems played-out or annoyingly cloying. There is some terrific scenery chewing by the likes of Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent and John Hurt, though a little more from all of them would not have gone amiss.

The film seems to press most of the right buttons, and yet in my opinion fell rather flat in places. The presence of some of the exposition, whilst understandable, did drop the pace for long periods, and there was a lack of either urgency or humour to these passages. Indy’s famously sharp tongue was a little blunted throughout, the dialogue never feeling snappy enough to match his previous outings. And what a waste of the returning Karen Allen as Indy’s first love Marion, her initial feistiness quickly pacified by a throwaway cheesy line. Shia LeBeouf is not nearly as irritating as he could have been, but if you can’t see his ‘surprise’ revelation in store a mile off, then a trip to the opticians may well be called for.

Overall, I did end up asking myself why Spielberg chose to come back to Indy after all of these years. Sure he still has the directorial chops, and maybe time is running out to hand the baton over to a younger Jones before Harrison Ford is finally unable to run and jump convincingly for the cameras, but there is neither the vitality of the story nor the sense of completing unfinished business here that spells out that returning to this familiar ground was entirely necessary. Yet for all of its shortcomings, there is still a small part of me that likes the idea that there is still a place for this kind of old-fashioned action movie film-making, without too much knowing self-satisfaction, unnecessary irony, camp nostalgia or post-9/11 grittiness, which so many of the summer blockbusters this year will undoubtedly be full of.

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.