Welles doesn't experience so much as a mild stirring in the undergrowth as he wades through

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(Welles doesn't experience so much as a mild stirring in the undergrowth as he wades through tons and tons of hard-core erotica.) Instead, Schumacher and his screenwriter - Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven - opt for a disgustingly extended climactic orgy of vigilante violence reminiscent of the work of another of the world's worst filmmakers, Michael Winner.It was at that point that I found myself asking the kind of elementary question which critics seldom pose, but which tends to nag at ordinary moviegoers. To wit: Schumacher apart (he's beyond the pale), what were they all thinking of? Nicolas Cage, for instance. Although never a favourite of mine, he has nevertheless done pretty sterling work in the past with Lynch, Coppola, the Coen Brothers, Barbet Schroeder and the like. So how could he justify making so vile a movie? Money? Did he really need the money? Or what about Catherine Keener, who plays Welles's loyal little wifey and whose sole function in the narrative is to wait patiently at home and take her husband's whiny long-distance calls, the telephone in one hand and a baby in the other? What went through her mind when she first read the script? Or Andrew Kevin Walker? How could he actually write such a script? I repeat, what were they all thinking of?Maybe it's best left a mystery All the reader needs to know is that 8mm is to be avoided.

Don't go.Go, rather, if you have the chance, to Chris Marker's Level 5. Marker is one of the cinema's authentic mavericks, an essayist in celluloid (and video), who has remained faithful to his own idiosyncratic Muse for over four decades. This latest work of his is entirely characteristic, an intoxicating cocktail of aphoristic, occasionally baffling reflections on everything from cats and owls (two constants in his work) to the great echo chamber of cyberspace and, above all, the horrific atrocity that took place in Okinawa during the ebbing months of World War II, when no less than a third of the island's population committed suicide rather than capitulate to the American invaders.Curiously, it too contains an 8mm snuff movie. Marker has unearthed grainy, black-and-white footage shot from an American aircraft of an Okinawan woman who is clearly seen to hesitate before leaping off a cliffside. She spots the plane above her and then, after another agonising moment of indecision, plummets to her death. If, suggests Marker's commentary, that camera had not been present - to record, potentially, her failure to jump and consequent loss of face - she almost certainly would have chosen to stay alive.It goes without saying that those few scratchy seconds of film are infinitely more eloquent on how easily the cinema's power can be abused than all the rancid shenanigans of 8mm..

Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged is basically a two-hander. It isn't as small a film as it pretends - the credits roll for some time - but certainly the impression it gives is of something dream-born and quietly cradled. Thandie Newton plays Shandurai, a young African refugee living in Rome. She pays her way through medical school by working as a live-in housekeeper to a British pianist-cum-composer, Kinsky (David Thewlis). He is in love with her, and tells her so, in a clumsy moment of disclosure. Newton rejects him, telling him that she is married, and that her husband is a political prisoner back home. Kinsky withdraws, and the pair pad about for months, equally baffled by each other - sometimes bristling and separate, sometimes observing one another with inexplicable joy.