The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 31

Screen (Bf The Shawshank Redemption tastes jail life conody Sk V2E2L Ml fyy ftftTf, ITS CT lurking at every pit-stop. Tandy gives it all she's worth in a performance bizarrely reminiscent of John Giel-gud. The only redeeming feature about it is a turn by Maury hay kin, Canada's brand leader at playing large, blubbery men suffering anxiety attacks. Reality is thin on the ground this week, except for Osaka Story, which has nothing but. Toichi Nakata's unsettling documentary is about his return home to his Japanese-Korean family.

They haven't seen him for three years and he turns up with a cameraman in tow, and dragging around a six-foot boom mike. Nakata painstakingly records the tensions within his family, notably his father's philandering. The one thing you don't learn about is the psychology of a director who constantly digs for painful material, and always shows himself in the act of filming, but who somehow manages to conceal his own identity throughout. It's only at the end, for example, that he makes it clear he's gay and has no intention of carrying on the family tradition. All the raw material is here, but not always cooked in the way we expect documentary material to be.

Still, for frankness alone, it's a brave undertaking. ISABELLE HUPPERT MARTIN DONOVAN ELIMA LOWENSOHN DAMIAN YOUNG 11a III fcry ArtlMaJ Br MiiMMSwiima I Stars and bars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption, a gripping forties-style slice of life from inside the slammer lying about the lions, of course this is India but there is a tiger, several hundred monkeys, and a bear with a sore head. Literally a bear with a sore head. Black Beauty seemed promising, if only because debut director Caroline Thompson has a reputation for the Gothic stuff, having written Edward Scissorhands and Agnieszka Holland's eerie The Secret Garden. But honestly I've seen darker undertones in My Friend Flicka.

This version remains true to the Anna Sewell spirit by having the horse tell its own story. He just wants a stable relationship. Alan Cumming is the voice of the philosophical nag and makes htm as indefatigably chirpy as a Blue Peter presenter. It's not easy being a horse, especially when you're saddled with lines like, "I was losing my shoe but he had lost his mind." Assorted stout Brits (Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron, David Thewlis) prop up the stately backdrops, but mainly there's so much joyous frisking that it looks like an extended ad for Lloyds Bank. A one-way trip to the knackers' yard.

The poster tag-line of Andre is "Out of the sea and into your heart" which put me strangely in mind of those parasites in early David Cron enberg films. In fact, Andre is the vaguely true story of a baby seal. Call me heartless, but somehow I can't quite warm to a hero who resembles a giant garden slug in a false mous tache. Tina Majorino plays his young keeper, a sullen and clearly dysfunctional child whose idea of a lark is dressing hens up in wedding gowns. Keith Carradine as her dad is boyish beyond the call of dignity Smaller children will love it, but adults may find themselves yearning for a Canadian Club on the rocks.

Holy Matrimony isn't an animal film, but could well have been. Patricia Arquette plays a bad girl forced by circumstance to marry a mere child, who sensibly declares: "I'm only 12. I'd really rather have a frog. Arm in Mueller-Stahl plays the elder of a religious community, with that look that says: "Let's make this quick and painless." (Is there some US government scheme by which actors make amends for minor parking infrac tions by doing time in silly kids' films? Only that could explain Holy Matrimony, Andre, and Harvey Kei-tel in Monkey Trouble.) Arquette is screechily obnoxious and the whole thing's an unfunny, unholy mess indeed. Leonard Nimoy who must be kicking himself for getting off the Intergalactic Gravy-train Enterprise directs like a black belt in the Vulcan Death Grip.

Jolliest film of the week is the reissued Faster. Pussycat! Kill! Kill! from Russ Meyer, the DeMille of de-coUetage, the man who put the bomp in embonpoint. A little Meyer goes a long way, but this is one of his more coherent and in a peculiar way restrained essays in trash madness. Three quasi-psychotic go-go dancers go-go on a mad binge of reckless driving, murder and innuendo to make Max Miller blush. They 're led by the aptly named Tura Satana, who truly is Beelzebub in a Wonderbra.

All good clean fun. Well, compared with his other films it is. They're currently showing at the NFT. Camilla, on the other hand, is a nice film. God is it ever nice.

The late Jessica Tandy plays a posh old bird who takes to the road with Bridget Fonda to revisit the scene of her youthful triumph playing Brahms. Along the way it's endless drollery and treacle, with amiable eccentrics 9BAFTA NOMINATIONS INCLUDING BEST FILM BEST DIRECTOR ft BB8T SCREBNPLAY aOBNTDfTABANTDfO BEST ACTOR JOHN TRAVOLTA BEST ACTRB88 OMATHURMAN BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR SAMUEL L. JACKSON The real redemption here is that of director Darabont, who as one of the writers on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was responsible for some of the dippiest idiocies heard on screen last year. But here the lines resound with considerable gravitas of course, it helps to have them snarled and muttered by an array of the grizzliest character actors this side of San Quentin. He can really direct, too long as the film is.

it's only towards the end that you're aware of any longueurs. Mind you, 143 minutes is just about adequate, and if they announce a Director's Cut in which Andy comes into possession of a Sharon Stone poster, I'll have to plead good behaviour. Otherwise, it seems to be RSPCA benefit week. We have a horse film, a seal film, a lions and tigers and bears film, and Faster. Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And sundry other dogs besides.

Best of the crop by far is Rudy ard Kipling's The Jungle Book, a live action Disney return to the theme of the animated favourite, but retitled to avoid confusion. In fact, it's less a return to Kipling than to the 1942 Alexander Korda epic, and some of the lush matte shots will touch a chord with Technicolor nostalgists. Jason Scott Lee creditably fills Sabu's loincloth as the boy brought up in the jungle by wolves, and there's gamey support from Sam Neill, Cary Elwes as an old-school cad. bluff old uncle John Cleese. and Lena Headey as a Thoroughly Modern Memsahib and very probably a leading light in the Buccaneers, Madras Branch.

It's a vaguely PC revisionist Kipling, but not so PC that anyone bothered to write proper parts for the Asian actors. Still, rattling fun and the animals are good value. I was -Mfri iWM (iOOCOtiH- i net i tifr IHliMMttlt 19000000c i fill 0 to out -ifti 41fts HtygiiMfr i -HI mm AT A CELXTEIVXA NEAR YOU NOW.