The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 15

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday November 27 1986 15 BRIEFING High notes: Left, Ruben Blades in Crossover Dreams, centre, Dexter Gordon in Round Midnight, top right, a fright in Critters and Muse Dalbray in The Princes Ttin Pulleine reviews the accomplished Round Midnight and the other new releases gQQ(Q)S dS Best films Aliens (Prince Charles). Brilliantly paced and structured exercise in sci-fi horror which manages to sustain tension for over two hours. The Mission (Screen on Green, etc). David Puttnam's epic of 18th-century South America, remarkable for its visual scale and scope. After Hours (Warner).

Best black (or any hued) comedy of the year, orchestrated by Martin Scorsese to make misfortune agonisingly funny. Psycho III (Release). The Bates Motel open for nasty business as usual as Anthony Perkins directs himself in inventive second sequel to the Hitchcock classic. Gone to Earth and I Know Where I'm Going (Metro). First-rate double bill of Powell and Pressburger, the fatalistic rural romance of the former contrasting with the Celtic humour of the latter.

Best on TV Cluny Brown (today, C4, 230). Lubitsch's last completed film (1946), with Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones in stylish comedy in odd English setting. Detective and Alphaville (Saturday, BBC-2, 9 55). Godard double-bill, from 1985 and 1965 respectively. The former, it must be said, is a considerable puzzlement, but then so was the latter 20 years ago.

Kes (Sunday, BBC-2, 3 pm). Impressive look at aspects of northern working-class life, made on location by Ken Loach in 1969, when its struggle to get a release became quite a cause celebre. Bail the Conquering Hero (Sunday, C4, 945). One of the most frenetically typical of Preston Sturges' satirical comedies of the 40s, with Eddie Bracken getting staunch support from William Demarest et al. A Star Is Born (Tuesday, BBC-2, 2 pm).

The original 1937 version of the infallible Hollywood-set tearjerker; Fredric March as the falling idol, Janet Gaynor as the rising star. A Man Alone (Wednesday, BBC-2, 6 pm). Ray Milland is star and director of well-told, slightly offbeat 1955 Western; high-class villainy supplied by Raymond Burr. Special interest The Scala, Kings Cross, has preview, screenings on Saturday of Jim Jarmusch's new film Down By Law. Films in the Museum of London's British film series this week are Laburnum Grove (tonight) and The Chiltern Hundreds (Tuesday).

At the Cambridge Arts Cinema, Jean-Jacques Beneix's Betty Blue runs until December 6, and on Sunday evening the director will be interviewed by Neil Norman. Hugh Hudson's Revolution can be seen at Plymouth Arts Centre from tomorrow until Sunday, and Hudson will be present at Sunday's screening to answer questions. Marisa Silver's Old Enough shows tomorrow at the Tivoli, Eastbourne; Cinema 3 at the University of Kent, Canterbury, shows a Carl Reiner double-bill, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Man With Two Brains, tonight, and Alan Bleasdale's No Surrender on Tuesday. The Dovecot, Stockton-on-Tees, shows Sid and Nancy until Saturday, and a double-bill of Streetwalkin' and Not A Love do as the put-upon police chief than to swallow his wad of chewing tobacco at the sight of the interlopers. Tony Gatlifs The Princes (Phoenix, East Finchley, 15) addresses itself to the situation of France's urban Gypsies.

The tone is initially that of a quasi-documentary: Nara, expertly played by Gerard Darmon, is observed living with his aged mother and young daughter in a decaying tenement, and no bones are made about his reactionary rejection of his wife (because she has gone on the pill unbeknownst to him) or about his no less unenlightened distrust of the child's educational progress. As matters develop, however, the approach turns increasingly to somewhat simplistic melodrama, with the trio driven on to the road by petty officialdom, and the old granny's death finally bringing about a tentative reconciliation The film has enough responsiveness to its characters to maintain a degree of involvement, in spite of recourse to atmospheric effects of a rather manipulative sort. But the use of a caricatured woman journalist to raise questions about the contradictions of Nara's philosophy fails to gloss over the realisation that these same issues are ones that the film itself has touched on but not really confronted. ters make me nervous," confessed Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. The critters to be found in the patch of Kansas countryside which provides the locale for Critters (Cannon Haymarket, etc, 15) are calculated to make anyone nervous, since they have crash-landed from outer space, approximately resemble the embryonic stage of the thing from Alien crossbred with a porcupine, and go whizzing about, gobbling into anything that crosses their path.

The early stages of the film get rather bogged down in diversionary plotting involving an annoying small boy, and his shrill teenage sister, not to mention the local half-wit, who is forever blathering on about UFOs and flying saucers. As a result, the balance between farce and fright is not too satisfactorily struck. But later on, as the rampage gets underway and the soundtrack mainly resolves itself into screams, explosions and wails of disbelief, the picture provides 'a fair amount of knockabout fun, with some sprightly incidental jokes of a suitably unsubtle variety. Given the juvenile tenor of the whole, in fact, the 15 certificate seems rather inappropriate. A pity, too, that M.

Emmet Walsh, memorable as the corrupt private detective in Blood Simple.r is not given much more to unforced progression of Round Midnight. On the one hand is Turner, self-destructively "tired of everything but the on the other is the young Frenchman Francis, -who has idolised Turner for years and now by chance not only comes into contact with him but finds himself becoming his protector. Francis, as edgily embodied by an unfamiliar actor, Francois Cluzet, is by no means a readily likeable figure, emotionally self-indulgent and resentful of his young daughter. But in a witty variation on the theme of apprenticeship associated with American westerns and adventure stories, the younger man finds himself in loco parentis to the older, and ip the process achieves a kind of maturity. Tavernier is not, as Un Dimanche a la Campagne recently demonstrated, afraid of courting the risk of sentimentality: witness the sequence in which Francis takes Turner to visit his parents.

But the end of the story is not conventionally happy. Francis accompanies Turner back to New York a brilliant cameo here by Martin Scorsese as a fast-talking impresario r- and observes his idol's estrangement from his own teenage daughter. "Don't let it happen to you," Turner warns. In these sequences, given hard-edged impact by Bruno de Keyser's Panavision camerawork, we sense, through the unexplained presence of a sinister stranger, the imminent doom that lies in wait for Turner. There is a proper sense of inevitability about his failure to arrive at the airport to go back to Paris with Francis.

All the same, the final impression left by this highly accomplished movie is affirmative. A more contemporary musical scene is featured in Crossover Dreams (ICA), that of Spanish harlem and "salsa" singing. This is a slightly alternative version of the hallowed rock-musical scenario of the poor boy who makes good and then turns his back on his erstwhile cronies, but realises the error of his ways in time for the closing concert. Here, though, there is no big finale, with matters concluding on a very indeterminate note. The other chief difference is that the singer and most of his associates appear to De on the far side of 30.

But older in this case does not mean wiser or less silly, and it would take more than some gleaming nocturnal cinematography and one or two sharp observations to invest any genuine interest in the posturing numbskull of a protagonist. "I don't like the countryside the crit "WE'LL' always Have Paris" the line frdm Casablanca comes to mind early in Round Midnight cinemas, 15), prompted perhaps by the fact that the first music we hear is As Time Goes By. The echo, though, is ironic. -For. Paris is the last resort for the jazz musician Dale Turner (a wonderfully 'detailed performance by a real jazz Dexter Gordon), who has gone haunted by memories and ravaged by alcohol, to make a stab at self-recovery.

But while, thanks particularly toVthe art- direction of the great veteran Alexandre Trauner, Round Midnight lovingly recreates the milieu of expatriate jazzmen the period is 1959 this is not primarily a film about jazz but a study in relationships. Bertrand Tavernier, the director and co-writer, began as a critic on Cahiers du Cinema in its heyday, as a champion of American mainstream cinema. But his subsequent directorial career (Une Se-maine de Vacances, Coup de Torchon) has' demonstrated that where his work echoes that Hollywood tradition it is not in terms of imposing a "signature" but of responding to particular subject-matter land atmosphere within a carefully wrought narrative structure. And structure is what unifies the long. Derek Malcolm, below, and Heather Lawton, right, on the films that are bringing in the crowds to the London Film Festival IPnflgffnffiffl ItoQtfllneiPs took the view that the only way to build a thriving new world was to release the energy of self-interest.

But the film deliberately and definitely puts the pin in a certain American historical myth. It shows that, even if they didn't succeed, the first pilgrims tried to live out a communal way of life closely parallel perhaps to a more modern communist one. That the first Americans originally shared everything, that this key experiment failed after seven years are facts the "guardians of the pilgrim legends" don't like to be reminded of, says Nicholson. New World at NFT1, 11 am and 6 15 pm today. private playpen, I'll soon find I'm playing alone.

But there is a process we all collude in, and that's the constant rein-terpretation of our past in the light of our present obsessions. Was New World actually a collision between proto-socialism and proto-Thatcherism? "Yes, but I must qualify with some ifs and buts," says Nicholson. "The socialism was Christian communalism. They really did set up a society where all the wealth, the land was held in common. They really did labour together, in common fields.

They saw the community as one loving family under God. That was their 'new The other lot Story on Tuesday and Wednesday. Braving view worlds: Nanni Mbretti's The Mass is Ended and, right, James Fox and i V- Betsy Brantley in New World Tim Pulleine adian director of The Fly, which had a vast audience at the Odeon, Leicester Square, the next morning called the Tarkovsky "Bergman's The Shame in colour." Someone should ask the Soviet director what he thought of The Fly. Still, only one person fainted during that show, which was a relief at that hour of the morning. It could well become a horror classic.

The other major success at the Festival was Comencini's 4'2-hour History to which the audience rose, though when it finally surfaces here in the New Year? The festival audience received it well, and in the absence of Tarkovsky, still fighting his long and severe illness, gave Anna-Lena Wibon, its doughty Swedish producer, the warmest of receptions. Her handling of the questioner who said the film gave him bum-ache was quite masterly, and no one could have put the case for this magnificent piece of cinema better. David Cronenberg, the Can WITH box office receipts rapidly approaching the 200,000 mark, London's 30th Festival has already broken all previous attendance records. When the ball rolls like this, do you wonder why cinemas are still closing. But festival crowds are one thing and runs in the theatre afterwards are another.

What, for instance, will become of Tarkovsky's long and difficult but rewarding, The Sacrifice shown to a packed house at the LFF, with queues waiting to get in TODAY is Thanksgiving Day, and The London Film Festival is screening New World, a film made by the BBC team responsible for the award-winning Shadowlands (which won an international Emmy this week, along with the BAFTA award and the Golden Bear) and the earlier Martin Luther. The story tells of those early emigrants to America and does seem to be about actual, historical events. New World, briefly, has a Mayflower but that's about it. Chiefly it centres on a sort of clash over the role of government, and the question of leadership. It seems that The Mayflower, rather than being a harmonious barque filled with adventurous high-thinkers, was a floating two-party system, one half being religious idealists as advertised, the other half being enterprising fortune-hunters who were, getting on the only bike then available.

The central characters are the idealist William Bradford (James Fox) who wants to build a "new world" where the strong help the weak and sharing is the key verb; and the cynic John Billington (Bernard Hill), a materialist, a realist who thinks in terms of self and son rather than the community. Billington, a thinking individualist, lacks hope; has no vision of goodness in the world. But is this story true? Unlike The Mission, for example, New World makes no pre-emptive strike for historical accuracy on screen. However there is a didactic quality and it should be taken seriously. Certainly Bradford and Billington lived.

Bradford was the governor of the pilgrims' colony in Plymouth, Mass, for 37 years and wrote a careful history of it, which writer Bill Nicholson used as one of his primary sources. Billington was a "real" person, although executed ten years later than in the film. Nicholson says: "All the key events happened. Let's say the film has a skeleton of facts. But the flesh is fiction.

I've built up some characters, invented others, and compressed the time-scale from ten to two years. "So it isn't straight history brought to the screen. How could it be? We don't have that kind of detailed knowledge of the period. Even with heavily-recorded recent events, like say the Falklands war, you can't bring them to the screen as straight history. You're forced into a selection among the known facts.

How does this differ from raiding the past to prop up the prejudices of the present? "It just isn't as easy as that. History is a common resource. If I turn it into a I AND ALL CANNON CANNON CANNON STARTS FRIDAY OVER LONDON 1 1-4 December Italian Neo-Realists Ossessione (PG) Bicycle Thieves (U) Stromboli (PG) Miracle in Milan (U) encouraged to do so by the presence of Claudia Cardinale, its star, and the veteran director on the stage. Made for Italian television, Elsa Morante's novel has been transposed to the screen like a real piece of cinema. Comencim sees the story set between 1941 and 1947 simply and effectively as one about the consequences of a German soldier's rape of a Jewish woman.

There are no frills whatsoever, and though there is a cut-down cinema version one hopes the longer version will eventually be shown here. If trends can be discerned thus far, the LFF has shown that its persistent advocacy of Third World cinema has finally paid off, with full houses for almost all of the Serformances of Indian, hinese, Latin-American and African films and distributors taking a much closer look at them than usual. To see queues forming for Taiwan's extraordinary The Time To Live And The Time To Die, which had recently drawn only 300 people to an at the New York Festival, was an extremely satisfying experience. Today is Thanksgiving, and the programme at the NFT is virtually ail-American, at least in subject. It includes John Badham's American Flyers, with a script by Steve Tesich, which will probably only be shown on video in this country despite the fact that it is one of Badham's best films.

There are still tickets left for this and for Norman Stone's New World. Others not yet over-subscribed are Georgi Shengolaya's Journey Of A Young Composer (Saturday, NFT, 2 pm), and Moretti's arize-winning comedy The ass Is Ended (Sunday, NFT, 6.15 pm). MUM.mvi iwim eimiL( MAGCilK SMI TH DEN1 IOI.M ELLIOTT JUDI DENCM SIMON CALLOW HELENA HONIIAM CARTER JULIAN SANDS DANIEL DAY LEWIS i itmMUN 9 A Room wily a Vmi jAhtilfctlr fjtmt njfrrj Huprn irn hn I Irnhi and H'wnun 1 th I hmtrd ht jMmr PhtiMP.i ImlVnr.lli'itm lu KnluiJ K'Wm I t'' llumphfn h-m 'THROBBING WITH ENERGY the excellence of the playing and sheer force ol Tony Gatlil's direction provide a piece oi cinema wnose power 5-11 December Russian Visionaries cannot De denied Der mucoim VIVID FUNNY AND Dana hodihidii, TlmTlmei ParadjanovTarkovsky II I 1 1 Advance booking all perls: Credit Cards: 01-638 8891 Phone now lor full details of Programmes and Times Directed by TONY GATLIF (J starring GERARU UAKW1UH NOW AT CURZOti WEST END Shaftesbury Avenue, W1. 01-439 4805 Seats bookable In advance for 8.40 perl daily Film at 1.30pm (not Sun), 3.45pm. 6.10pm.

8.40pm 96-98 Baker Street, W1. 01-935 2772 4.00pm. 6.25pm, 8.50pm.