Amelie

Amélie Poulain (Tautou - big dark eyes and a pout) is a kooky café-bar waitress. When she finds a box that belonged to a boy in the 50s, she tracks down the middle-aged owner (Benichon) and discreetly returns his childhood relics. Observing the man's rapture, Amélie resolves to do good deeds. She orchestrates a romance between Joseph (Pignon), a café regular, and Georgette (Nanty), a hypochondriac who runs the tabac; helps liberate Lucien (Debbouze), assistant to bullying grocer Collingnon (Cancellier); and expands the experiences of Raymond (Merlin), a neighbour whose congenital bone disease makes him so fragile he hasn't left his flat for 20 years. Soon, however, she herself has fallen for one of the oddballs she encounters, Nino (La Haine writer-director Kassovitz), and begins a playful courtship.

The film is replete with poetic, magical unreality, quirks and visual inventiveness - just what you'd expect from Jeunet. Pictures talk, Amélie watches newsreel documentaries about herself on telly, and time lapse and fast forward propel the narrative. In these terms, Jeunet has stylistic traits in common with Fincher, Aronofsky or Wong Kar-Wai (Amélie even mischievously meddles in a flat, like in Chungking Express). But what dominates the film is a sense of nostalgia and the picturesque. Lens filters lend a soft, sepia tone and Paris is devoid of anything as unsightly as tourists. In this sense, the film's Paris is redolent of that in the 30s and 40s films of René Clair, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné (it even shares a locale with Hõtel Du Nord) and Jacques Prévert.

The easiest comparison, however, is Delicatessen itself. With its action largely limited to one apartment block and one neighbourhood, a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, and an obsession with whimsical detail, Amélie is the light-humoured, sweet-natured, romantic inversion of the dark Delicatessen. If you're feeling open-minded and open-hearted, it will leave you with an indelible smile.

The second drummer drowned, their album sleeve could be none more black, they're big in Japan. Spinal Tap: the funniest non existent rock band - ever 

It is difficult to imagine now that a long time ago when This Is Spinal Tap arrived in Britain there was only a nagging suspicion that the band whose rockumentary this was couldn't be quite for real. The scene where a stage prop inspired by Stonehenge turns out to be no larger than a footrest (a moronic musician did the sketch in inches not feet) should have made it quite clear that this was a spoof, but a look at any number of real heavy-metal documentaries makes the distinction between reality and parody very difficult to spot.


Now we're all in on the joke, This Is Spinal Tap has become a legend. Hilarious, bitingly perceptive and cinematically assured.

© Dave Wateridge