Jeane Smith, 84, hasn’t been to the cinema for nearly 40 years. So where better to take her, and four friends, than the London film festival, to see An Education, a coming-of-age movie set in swinging 60s London?

This tale of a young John Lennon, torn between his legendary mother and equally formidable aunt, is an accomplished feature debut from Sam Taylor-Wood

“A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror,” wrote Sigmund Freud – and Sigmund Freud was never twirled by his mum lasciviously around in a coffee bar to the novel sounds of rock’n'roll on the jukebox, and furthermore gigglingly taught by her that “rock’n'roll” actually means sex.

This was the dizzyingly erotic experience of the young John Lennon – played by 19-year-old newcomer Aaron Johnson – in this account of his painful, messy teenage years in 1950s Liverpool, written by Matt Greenhalgh (the author of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic, Control) and directed by Sam Taylor-Wood.

The mother in question is the legendary Julia, played by Anne-Marie Duff, a cheerful lover of good times and rock’n'roll in all senses, who had a mysterious breakdown after John’s birth and surrendered parental control to her sister, the Tchaikovsky-loving and equally legendary Aunt Mimi, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who brought him up strictly with genteel, middle-class values.

As adulthood dawns, John’s increasingly rebellious discontent manifests itself in re-establishing contact with the dangerous Julia, who passionately introduces him to his musical destiny. She and John begin a strange kind of Oedipal affair, with Julia as the mistress and Aunt Mimi the wronged wife. John’s story is the story of the duel between these two women – an intolerable situation for which music is the only way out.

Taylor-Wood interestingly begins her film with the opening, jangling chord from A Hard Day’s Night, left hanging in a protracted silence until its potential for implied menace and even tragedy has been allowed to float free. It’s a witty opening, but apart from pointed references to “nowhere” in the script and in the title, to a glimpse of Strawberry Field children’s home and to a schoolbook doodling of “Walrus”, Greenhalgh notably avoids cute prophetic touches. However, it has to be said Julia does hang around a bit possessively backstage, to the unease of both John and the young Paul McCartney, played by Thomas Sangster. Heroically, Greenhalgh avoids gags about John letting a woman get between him and the band.

It’s a handsomely made film, with a very game lead performance from Johnson, hampered perhaps only by the fact that Lennon is really a rather callow figure at this stage; unlike, say, the more interesting, more grownup Lennon that Ian Hart played in Iain Softley’s 1994 film Backbeat. When John shows Julia an EP record of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, she asks where he got it, and John says he swapped it with a bloke at the docks. “Swapped it for what?” Julia asks sharply, and John has no idea what she’s implying.

Throughout the movie, I had the sense that Lennon was really a supporting turn and the stars were Julia and Mimi, but that, frustratingly, we were only ever allowed to see them from John’s lairy and semi-comprehending point of view. John has to be the focus, and part of the movie’s point is his youth, his poignant inability to appreciate how much these women love him.

And the film does contrive a tearful crisis in which the awful secret origins of the Mimi-John-Julia love triangle are laid bare. But for me, this finale was a little stagey, is resolved too easily and disconcertingly discloses a more intense story which has been happening, as it were, behind the movie’s back.

None the less, this is an accomplished feature debut from Taylor-Wood, and a satisfying follow-up to her likeable short film Love You More.

Nick Hornby tells Michael Hann why scripting the film based on Lynn Barber’s memoir of 60s London was a gift and why he can never adapt his own novels again

The second world war supreme allied commander was a fascinating character. This 1977 biopic signally fails to live up to his reputation

Director: Joseph Sargent
Entertainment grade: D+
History grade: C+

American five-star general Douglas MacArthur served in the Pacific during the second world war and went on to command US forces in Korea. He was wildly popular with the public.

In military and political circles, though, he was criticised for his self-promotion, arrogance and alleged recklessness.

War

The film’s first action scenes are set in Corregidor in the Philippines, scene of a rout at the hands of the Japanese. Ordered to leave for Australia by President Roosevelt, MacArthur (played anaemically by Gregory Peck) bids an emotional farewell to his adoring men. They’re a little too adoring. In reality, many of MacArthur’s officers were fed up with him by the time he left the Philippines. Of 142 communiques he issued during his first period of war service there, 109 failed to mention the bravery of any soldiers apart from himself. There was also a fuss over $500,000 he accepted as a personal reward from the Philippine president, which, while technically legal, was ethically dubious. To be fair on the film-makers, that story was not made public until 1979 – but MacArthur’s patchy reputation was no secret.

Geography

In Australia, MacArthur plans to return to the Philippines and force the Japanese out. Gesturing at a gigantic wall map, he proposes the attack: “Land at Leyte beach on Luzon, and then carry the fight to Manila.” Fine, except he is pointing – in extreme closeup – at Lingayen Gulf, over 400 miles from Leyte. Also, Leyte is not a beach on Luzon: it’s another island, and the two are separated by a substantial archipelago. MacArthur may be accused of many things, but an ignorance of Philippine geography is not one of them. In real life, he fought to retake the Philippines on both Leyte and Luzon; but not at the same time, because that would have been physically impossible unless he was 500 miles wide and could float.

Politics

After the war, MacArthur oversees the democratisation of Japan. He seems to have some rad ideas. “I want these privileged landowners stripped of their holdings!” he barks. “And the rightwing industrialists … I want them expunged! The workers must have a strong voice in the means of production.” “General,” stutters an aide, “this reminds me somewhat of … well, it’s like …” Marxism, thinks the viewer. “… the New Deal.” Oh, OK. Clearly this film is aimed exclusively at an American audience. Pointing out that General MacArthur was not a Marxist is not unlike pointing out the Pope’s religion or the lavatorial habits of bears. Still, since the question has come up: no, he was not. It’s also a myth that MacArthur personally directed Japanese development. Multiple documents prove that Washington set the goals and policy of occupation.

Dialogue

In the final scenes, set during the Korean war, the film’s MacArthur regains his political footing. “It’s my destiny to defeat communism, and only God or those Washington politicians will keep me from doing it,” he growls. That is almost a direct quote from the man himself. It’s a pity it wasn’t left in its original, more lyrical form (“Only God or the government of the United States can keep me from the fulfilment of my mission”). This is one of several occasions on which the writer has presumed to tweak MacArthur’s words (or, as he called words, “those immortal heralds of thought which at the touch of genius become radiant”), to make him sound more down-to-earth and folksy, and less like the ostentatious intellectual he really was. The real MacArthur once barged in on a subordinate, catching him in a clinch with a lady. The general’s immortal heralds of thought: “Eject that strumpet forthwith.” Folksy he was not.

Verdict

Controversy aside, the real MacArthur was a coruscating personality. Had he written and directed this film himself, it might have been even less accurate, but a lot more entertaining.

A deadly rivalry that never was, a dried-up bachelor who was actually a father of eight, and flops that were hits in reality … even getting Mozart’s toilet humour right cannot redeem it

Director: Milos Forman
Entertainment grade: D
History grade: D+

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who went on to become one of the greatest composers of all time before dying at 35.

Rumours persist about his rivalry with fellow composer Antonio Salieri.

Illness

Salieri (F Murray Abraham) opens the film by cutting his own throat. This is based on a rumour spread by Ludwig van Beethoven’s nephew, Karl, but there is no evidence for it – meaning Amadeus gets its first inaccuracy in before the opening credits. Salieri did reportedly sustain a minor knife wound to his neck after being committed to Vienna’s general hospital on suffering a breakdown in 1823. In his deranged state, he was also said to have confessed to killing Mozart – though, when he regained some of his senses, he denied it. In the film, a priest arrives at the hospital to hear his confession, and gets an earful about how God reneged on a pact Salieri made: he would offer God his chastity, and God would give him musical genius. In real life, this wouldn’t have worked too well. Salieri was not, as the film suggests, a sexually frustrated, dried-up old bachelor. He had eight children by his wife, and is reputed to have had at least one mistress.

People

The film flashes back to 1781, when Mozart (Tom Hulce) arrives in Vienna. Salieri hides behind what appears to be the tower of Ferrero Rocher from the ambassador’s reception to watch Mozart cavort with Constanze Weber. Mozart’s wooing consists of fart jokes, which Constanze finds so irresistible she allows him to dive face-first into her prodigious bosom. The refined Salieri is aghast, but this portrayal of Mozart is justifiable: he was known for crass humour and pranks. Among his works is a canon for six voices in B flat called Leck mich im Arsch (K231), translating literally as “Lick me in the arse”. Had there been a South Park musical in the 18th century, Mozart probably would have given his fluffiest wig to write the score.

Rivalry

Vague rumours of a rivalry between Mozart and Salieri were whipped up by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, whose short play Mozart and Salieri (1830) depicted the latter murdering the former onstage. Amadeus takes up Pushkin’s theme of deadly rivalry, though it isn’t quite as inaccurate. Instead, it shows Salieri sabotaging Mozart’s career. At one point, Mozart did believe that a “cabal” opposed him, but neither Salieri nor anyone else succeeded in making Mozart’s operas fail. So enraptured were the audiences of The Marriage of Figaro, which the film implies was a flop, that the emperor was obliged to restrict its encores after the first three performances. Don Giovanni, shown in the film as an even floppier flop, was an immediate and sensational hit.

Death

A couple of hours into the movie, all but the most saintly of viewers will have had enough of Mozart’s toilet humour, boundless arrogance and intensely irritating laugh; a few may even be hoping Salieri will just poison the gibbering nitwit already. He doesn’t, but he does try to freak Mozart out by dressing up as his dead father and commissioning the Requiem. The Requiem was really commissioned by Count Walsegg-Stuppach, who did try to keep it a secret, though Mozart almost certainly knew his identity. Salieri did not, as the film suggests, assist in writing it, though Franz Xaver Süssmayr did. Meanwhile, Mozart was on good terms with Salieri at the time of his death, inviting him to The Magic Flute and writing warmly of him in his diary. Later, Salieri gave his bereaved younger son free music lessons.

Verdict

Some fine research into Mozart’s annoying personality doesn’t really make up for the fact that the entire premise of this film – that Salieri loathed Mozart and plotted his demise – is probably not true.

Andy Garcia plays Saakashvili in ‘anti-war’ film directed by Renny Harlin of Cliffhanger fame

His fans portray him as a plucky leader defending his small country from Russian aggression. The Kremlin depicts him as an unstable madman, fond of chewing his own tie. But now Hollywood is to give its own take on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s controversial pro-US president, in a new movie set during last year’s Russia-Georgia war.

The leading US actor Andy Garcia plays Saakashvili in the film, which began shooting in Georgia earlier this week. Directed by Renny Harlin – whose previous credits include the testosterone-filled blockbuster Die Hard 2 – the movie follows the fortunes of an American journalist and his cameraman caught up in last August’s fighting.

The PR-savvy Saakashvili has given the project his full support and on Monday even loaned Garcia his cosy presidential office in Tbilisi, complete with leather armchairs, books and a Georgian flag.

Garcia, as Saakashvili, discusses tactics with his aides amid Russian invasion. The Georgians have also lent the Hollywood producers fighter planes, helicopters, and tanks.

Observers suggest that Garcia – who starred in The Godfather: Part III – bears a striking similarity to Georgia’s dark-haired 41-year-old leader.

“Garcia does it very well,” Zaza Gachechiladze, the editor-in-chief of the Georgian Messenger newspaper said.

“He’s taken on some characteristic features of the president, like when he moves he walks in a very hasty manner.”

Asked whether the film would bear any resemblance to the real events of August 2008 – when Georgia’s ill-fated attempt to recapture the breakaway province of South Ossetia led to a punitive Russian invasion – Gachechiladze said: “It depends how the film ends. We are a defeated country. We should admit that.”

He added: “The ruling administration has hinted it wants this film to be shot.”

Saakashvili is still locked in a bitter propaganda battle with his Kremlin enemies over who bears responsibility for the war. A much-publicised EU report by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini last month blamed Georgia for starting it. But it also chastised Russia for supplying passports to the South Ossetians, as well as for other misdeeds. Earlier this year Russia’s state television premiered its own film about the August war, reflecting the official Russian version of events.

Speaking in August, Harlin described his so-far untitled film as an anti-war drama. “I’ve waited a long time to find something with substance and reality,” Harlin said. “I want to make a film that says something about the human condition, and even if only a few people see this and feel its impact and its anti-war message, then I will have done something that’s important and I will be proud of it.”

“Our main concern was to show war as a bad thing,” executive producer Michael Flannigan said, according to Reuters. “We had an opportunity to make a really anti-war film.”

He said the budget was “pretty restrictive”, in a departure from Finnish-born Harlin’s previous big-budget action thrillers which include Die Hard 2, starring Bruce Willis, as well as Cliffhanger, starring Sylvester Stallone.

Writing in his blog, Harlin last week described the film’s screenplay as “brilliant”, and said he was busy casting local Georgians for several roles.

“Spent today with fighter-jets, and make up effects. Things are getting better and better,” he said.

The young and upcoming British actor Rupert Friend plays the lead as a US journalist caught between compassion for the war’s victims and telling the truth.

Yesterday downtown Tbilisi ground to a halt as the filmmakers recreated a patriotic rally on 12 August 2008, marking the end of the war. Demonstrators celebrated Georgia’s victory – even though it was Russia that actually won. The leaders of several eastern European countries appeared with Saakashvili in front of Georgia’s parliament building in a show of solidarity against Russian attack.

The New Zealand-born director of The Piano talks to Peter Conrad about her forthcoming film, Bright Star, a study of John Keats’s final days

Publicising her new film Bright Star in Cannes earlier this year, Jane Campion grumbled about the “old boy network” of the Hollywood studios, lamented the lack of opportunities for female directors and declared with righteous gynocratic outrage: “After all, women did give birth to the whole world!”

When I read the remark, I crossed my legs in self-preserving alarm. Was I due to interview Gaia, Magna Mater, the antipodean incarnation of Mother Earth? Even Harvey Keitel, cast by Campion as a tattooed wild man in The Piano and a sexually predatory guru in Holy Smoke, once admitted to a certain superstitious dread when discussing her: “Jane Campion is a goddess and I’m a mere mortal. I fear being struck by lightning bolts.” Keitel later diplomatically muted his account of the weather she generates and called her “a warm breeze, at play”.

Waiting for Campion in a London hotel suite, I listened for rumblings of thunder next door, where the divinity was being photographed. I needn’t have worried. She breezed in playfully, just as in Keitel’s description, and grimaced about the ordeal of having to be scrutinised by someone else’s camera: “I always come out looking like an albino gorilla.”

In person, Campion is neither gorilla nor goddess. The breeze derives from her quirky humour and the mercurial play of expression on her face; her greying hair and her black clothes suggest severity, but the woman herself is a riot of frank, flushed emotion. “I found myself sobbing,” she said about reading John Keats’s letters to Hampstead seamstress Fanny Brawne, on which Bright Star is based. A minute later, Campion was suppressing a scream as she remembered the delays on the film’s set as wardrobe assistants fiddled with the Regency bows and hooked bodices worn by her cast: “It was like being in casualty; there was always another fashion emergency being wheeled in. I yelled, ‘Just use Velcro!’” She then let loose a peal of hilarity that Keitel might have called Olympian. “Oh, I love a tantrum,” she admitted.

Women give birth to the whole world; this particular woman has given birth to a small, idiosyncratic world of her own in a series of films that are darkened by psychological anguish and irradiated by poetic wonder. Campion’s heroines are adventurers whose self-discovery sets them at odds with conventional reality. Sweetie is about a fat fantasist who comically terrorises her suburban Sydney family, An Angel at My Table about the painful growing-up of eccentric New Zealand writer Janet Frame.

In The Piano, a colonial wife in 19th-century New Zealand preserves her autonomy by speaking only through the music she plays, while The Portrait of a Lady shows an American heiress being captured and destroyed by old, corrupt Europe. In Holy Smoke, a young woman who finds enlightenment in an Indian cult is vindictively de-programmed, normalised by force; the heroine of In the Cut escapes from tame normality into a world of unbridled, dangerous eroticism.

Bright Star, nominally about Keats, is an addition to her portraits of ladies, women and girls. Its centre is Fanny Brawne, regarded by many Keats biographers as a minx who trifled with the dying poet but seen by Campion as one of the 19th century’s unsung female martyrs, able to express herself only through her needlework. “She had to be content,” Campion said, “with a life made up of very small things. Back then, women just waited for men and sewed or mended while they were doing so. I got myself into the mentality by learning to embroider pillow slips.”

The film’s triumph is to make Fanny’s demurely stoical routine more moving than the agony of the tubercular Keats, played with raw sensitivity by Ben Whishaw; its study of thoughts that go unvoiced and desires that are never satisfied made me understand what Keats meant when he said that he believed in “the holiness of the heart’s affections”.

The domestic interiors of Bright Star are monastic cells for the women imprisoned in them. Outside, the light-suffused landscapes seem to pulse. “I was thinking of Monet’s haystacks,” said Campion. “They’re just lumps, but they have the sun inside them, they vibrate. Images like that can’t help but be moving; they’re pictures of life and you can feel it palpitating!”

Campion is the most emotionally generous of film-makers. The opening shot of An Angel at My Table is her primal scene and it coaxes each of us to disinter our earliest memories. The camera looks up at a looming shadow, an indistinct form with the sun behind it. The shape rocks to and fro, then leans down; it extends arms that might belong to a seraph compassionately embracing the world. Lying on grass as pristinely green as that in Eden, a baby stares at this figure that bends down from the sky. A maternal voice says: “Come on, darling, come on!”

Next we see the baby’s feet, tottering with brave independence through the grass. This is how Campion operates – protecting, encouraging, then retiring into invisibility to watch her dependents take their first steps. Hence her skill at directing children. Anna Paquin won an Oscar for her astonishing performance as Holly Hunter’s manipulative daughter in The Piano; Edie Martin, with no experience of acting, is even more touching and truthful as Fanny’s wide-eyed young sister, Toots, in Bright Star.

“She was wonderful,” said Campion, “but because she was such a baby she got frightened, she’d say she had tummy aches. I calmed her down by showing her how to create a bubble for herself. It’s easy; you stretch out your arms and that excludes all the people who are making you nervous. My job was just to help her to relax and be herself. I told her to forget about the camera, then I left her alone.”

Directing Abbie Cornish as Fanny, Campion played the mother who resigns herself to an offspring’s newfound freedom and cuts the cord. “Abbie bonded with Fanny straight away and if I disagreed about something she’d insist she knew better. So I just said, ‘OK, the character’s yours.’ I suppose some men would be allowing in the way I am, but Abbie told me she’d never had this kind of empathetic connection with a male director. For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it’s like being a mirror; if they didn’t have me to look at, they wouldn’t be able to put the make-up on.”

A documentary on the DVD of The Portrait of a Lady shows how Campion patiently mothers her cast. Nicole Kidman, distressed during a scene of marital strife with the scary John Malkovich, is soothed in a whispered confabulation, with Campion drying her tears. After being drenched by an artificial storm, Barbara Hershey is towelled dry by her solicitous director. When the raddled, querulous Shelley Winters seems to forget what film she’s in, Campion is as patient and tactful as if she were taking care of an elderly relative with dementia. “Performers are so vulnerable. They’re frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it’s warm, where it’s OK to fail – a kind of home, I suppose.”

Campion’s 14-year-old daughter, Alice, serves as her household muse, a touchstone of veracity like the ingenuous, trusting Toots; she was almost an unofficial consultant on Bright Star. “Keats didn’t keep Fanny’s letters, so when I was writing the script I wondered how I’d be able to get her voice. Whenever I was unsure, I thought, ‘How would Alice react?’ She has the same kind of personality, always flying off, fantastic emotional ups and downs, yet very tender and kind under it all. I’ll show you, we should get her in here.” She strode into the adjoining room to collar Alice, who accompanies her everywhere, a pretext probably, since I suspect Campion was missing her daughter after a separation of 15 minutes.

Following some mumbled negotiations, she returned alone, shrugged helplessly and recited the lament of parents everywhere: “Alice can’t come, she says she’s busy. Actually, she’s on the phone!”

With more seasoned performers, Campion adopted the shorthand of suburban housewives who swap recipes over the back fence. Kerry Fox, so heart-wrenching as the bewildered adolescent in An Angel at My Table, has graduated after two decades to the status of wise matriarch and plays Fanny’s mother. “I’ve known Kerry so long that I can just dial her up. It’s like baking a cake: I’ll say, ‘That needs to go on the back burner for 45 minutes at 300 degrees’ and the result is always perfect.”

The culinary metaphor is revealing. Along with the usual battalion of gaffers, grips, best boys, propsmen, crowd marshals, trainee runners and suppliers of artificial snow, the credits of Bright Star list a home economist, the gloriously named Katharine Tidy, who ensured that the pots and pans in the Regency kitchens were authentic. “I’m a slow cooker,” Campion added, sustaining the analogy. “I took four years off after In the Cut because I wanted to see who I’d be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden’s hut two-and-a-half hours off the Routeburn Track through the fjords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water. I lasted about five days!”

Preparing to direct The Piano, Campion rehearsed unbossy, non-belligerent behaviour with the second-unit director, Colin Englert, Alice’s father, to whom she was then married. Over the years, she has found ways of communicating that rely more on sympathy and semaphore than on analytical dissection. “What Keats wrote about negative capability was very helpful – it explained the way I work, staying in the mystery, not intellectualising. That’s how it was with Ben Whishaw; we didn’t talk, we kept the head out of it. I used a kind of sign language to show him what I wanted. It doesn’t always come across. I once had an actor say to me, ‘Jane, can you please use verbs?’ That night I wrote down a list of verbs that might come in handy on the set when I needed to explain myself! It can be frustrating, but I’m not a verbal person.”

Was that, I wondered, a disqualification for making a film about a poet? Campion laughed or, rather, guffawed in her boisterous, self-mocking way. “Well, Janet Frame’s a writer, though in my film you only see her writing in the last minute! And Meg Ryan’s character in In the Cut is a creative writing teacher. But that stumped me: I thought, ‘I just don’t know anything about this.’ On the way to work, she reads the poems pasted up above the seats on the New York subway and I realised I didn’t understand poetry either. So just to create a diversion and a delay, I picked up a biography of Keats. That’s where I found the answer; he said he wanted a life of sensations, not thoughts, and I understood that I was trying to photograph sensations.

“That came back to me when I was writing Bright Star at this holiday batch I have in Australia.” (A batch, let me explain, is the local equivalent of an English country cottage, named after the unwived bachelors who used to live in such outback huts.) “I took my flask of coffee out to the paddock and I was reading Keats’s poems when a horse sidled up and very quietly stuck its nose in the bag I had beside me, to see if there was anything worth eating. It was so delicate, it took such care not to disturb me or damage the bag. I just froze as this enormous, strong creature nuzzled me and tried to work out what I was doing and whether I had anything to give it. Well, you can see that I’m still a country girl!”

It was a truly Keatsian moment, like the passages in his letters or poems when he watches an owl or a hare and speculates about their feelings and the consciousnesses inside their fragile heads. The cast of Bright Star includes a cat, so alert and slyly intelligent that I wondered whether it had an agent, and Whishaw’s Keats is equally feline. “When I saw him,” Campion said, “I thought, ‘Oh you’re beautiful, like a cat.’ He had the wrong colouring for Keats, he’s not blond, but I couldn’t alter that. You wouldn’t dye a cat’s fur!”

The epiphany with the horse clarified the challenge Campion faced. She had, she told me, “to make that tenderness visible on film – but how?” Action is the hormonal fuel of films made for and by men: we watch Matt Damon running, Jason Statham driving cars, Tom Cruise jumping out of planes. The kinetic art of cinema delights in making machines speed, collide, crash and burn. Campion, for all her grounding in physical sensation, has more abstract concerns. She asks questions like those with which Keitel confronts Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke: “Why do people believe in God? Why do they believe they’re in love?”

Tantalised by such speculations, she often eliminates action altogether. An Angel at My Table skips Janet Frame’s suicide attempt, In the Cut elides the climax when the heroine kills the cop who menaces her, and Bright Star leaves out Keats’s death, making Fanny’s response to the news the emotional climax of its story.

Campion is interested in images, not events, and at her finest she composes a pantheistic poetry that is made of light. The drowning of Holly Hunter’s piano is the best-known example, though Bright Star contains an equally delirious image of a butterfly farm in a hot, closed room. In the Cut begins with a petal shower in a Manhattan spring, miming the defloration that is the film’s subject. “That just happened. The wind picked up and we were quick enough to film the blossom falling. We couldn’t credit our luck.”

There’s a similar but gentler moment in Bright Star, when a fluttering curtain suggests the respiration of nature, briefly agitating the closeted, corseted Brawne house. “I was desperate for that to happen, but I refused to use a wind machine. And the air outside was so still. We got sick of waiting and shot it anyway – and then, just at the right moment, the curtain quivered. I seem to be good with winds, even though I wouldn’t pretend to be directing them.”

I remembered Keitel’s description of Campion as a friskily spontaneous breeze. “I’m someone who loves to play,” she said. “I make films so I can have fun with the characters.” At the very least, she is a breath of fresh air, reinventing an art staled by commercial cynicism. The wind she stirs up is also a manifestation of the creative spirit, which in less grudgingly democratic days was known as genius and in even remoter times was attributed to God, or perhaps to a goddess. During our conversation, she described herself as “a visual person”. But New Zealanders are modest to a fault and I’d prefer to call Campion a visionary. On the set of Bright Star, she told Whishaw that for her poetry means “openness to the divine”; her films open us all to that possibility that such a realm might exist.

Richard Attenborough’s epic 1982 biopic of the Mahatma is over-sanitised, but Ben Kingsley’s performance captures why Gandhi was a great soul

Director: Richard Attenborough
Entertainment grade: B
History grade: C+

Mohandas K Gandhi, known as the “Mahatma” or “Great Soul”, was a figurehead of the Indian independence movement.

Politics

The first half of the film follows Gandhi’s career from his political awakening in South Africa through to the Amritsar massacre. On 13 April 1919, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer cornered several thousand men, women and children in a walled garden in Amritsar, where they were listening peacefully to political speeches. Without warning, he opened fire. Even the low official figures admitted at least 379 were killed, 1,200 injured. Richard Attenborough’s recreation of this event is gut-wrenchingly horrible and precisely accurate. As the film correctly implies, Amritsar immediately radicalised Jawaharlal Nehru, among others. It does not acknowledge that the effect on Gandhi was slower. His first reaction was to criticise the victims for having “taken to their heels” rather than face death with composure. It was over a year later before he finally handed back his British Empire Medal and declared himself in favour of independence.

People

The film’s most glaring bias is its depiction of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and ultimately founder of Pakistan. It shows Jinnah sitting around with Congress party leadership in Gandhi’s ashram after the 1931 Round Table Conference, being mean to the Mahatma: “After all your travels, after all your efforts, they sent you back empty-handed.” Jinnah attended the Round Table Conference, from which everyone came away empty-handed, including him – so this would have been an odd thing to say. It’s even odder to picture Jinnah casually hanging out with Congress leadership in the 1930s: he had left the party in 1920, deploring Gandhi’s “pseudo-religious approach to politics”. The film writes him off as a motiveless baddie, seemingly making a career out of hanging around looking sinister while wearing natty suits and smoking cigarettes. (The suits and cigarettes are accurate. The New York Times called Jinnah “one of the best dressed men in the British Empire”, and he got through 50 Craven A every day.)

War

During the second world war, Gandhi is shown saying sadly that “Jinnah has co-operated with the British”. He did, but let’s not forget that, whatever their crimes as imperialists, the British were on the right side in the war. At the time, Jinnah’s co-operation was viewed by many as more morally defensible than Gandhi’s non-cooperation. The film steers well clear of exploring Gandhi’s thoughts on Axis powers, some of which might have made a western audience choke on its popcorn. For instance, his suggestion that Jews should sacrifice themselves to Hitler to demonstrate their moral superiority: “I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators,” he wrote in 1939, adding in 1946 that “the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

Power

After Partition, Calcutta was ripped apart by Hindu-Muslim violence. Gandhi announced he would fast until it stopped. It did, in little more than a day. Surprisingly, the film downplays this, showing Gandhi weakened and struggling in Calcutta. In real life, this fast was one of the most stunning demonstrations of the moral power for which he was justly famous. As Lord Mountbatten, then Governor-General of India, wrote to him: “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.” That, surely, is a great soul in action.

Casting

Ben Kingsley’s performance as Gandhi is sublime: he has the intensity, the wit and even the distinctive determined walk. He also has the Gujarati heritage, though (ironically, considering Gandhi is the role which made him famous) he was obliged to drop his birth name – Krishna Bhanji – to facilitate his acting career.

Verdict

Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is beautifully filmed and moving, but its uncomplicated Mahatma is less interesting than the real thing.

• Alex von Tunzelmann appears on Gandhi: The Road to Freedom, on BBC2 at 8.15pm on Saturday

Scary Movie actor looks set to replace Eddie Murphy in the planned biopic Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?

Marlon Wayans looks set to impersonate Richard Pryor in a biopic of the late, great comedian. The Scary Movie star is in talks to take on a role originally earmarked for Eddie Murphy in Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?

Variety reports that the Columbia production is budgeted at just under $20m (£12.4m) and will be directed by Bill Condon, creator of the Oscar-winning Dreamgirls. The film is due to shoot in the US next spring.

Wayans, 37, first came to fame in the TV sitcom The Wayans Brothers before finding big-screen success with the likes of White Chicks, Dance Flick and the Scary Movie franchise. He also appeared in Darren Aronofky’s Requiem for a Dream and the Coen brothers’ remake of The Ladykillers.

Condon’s film will chart the turbulent life and times of Pryor, a man described by fellow comic Jerry Seinfeld as “the Picasso of our profession”. Pryor electrified the 1970s with his profane, taboo-baiting standup, co-wrote Blazing Saddles alongside Mel Brooks and starred in such films as Stir Crazy, Lady Sings the Blues and Superman III.

Yet Pryor’s onstage genius went hand-in-hand with his offstage troubles. In 1980 he set himself alight after freebasing cocaine while drinking rum and almost died. Pryor’s later years were blighted by multiple sclerosis. He died from heart failure in December 2005.

Khan is to play Nehru opposite Hugh Grant and Blanchett as Lord and Lady Mountbatten in the director Joe Wright’s period drama set in the final days of the British Raj

Bollywood star Irrfan Khan is set to join Cate Blanchett in the controversial Indian Summer, a period drama that charts the alleged romance between prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the wife of Lord Mountbatten.

Directed by Joe Wright, the film will be shot in India and is set for release in 2011. The script has already been subject to a stringent vetting process by the Indian authorities. Production has reportedly only been allowed on the understanding that the romantic scenes are either toned down or removed entirely. Indian Summer is based on the book of the same name by guardian.co.uk/film columnist Alex von Tunzelmann.

Khan is poised to play Nehru, the first prime minister of India, who served between 1947 and 1964. Blanchett plays Lady Mountbatten, the wife of the last Viceroy of the British Indian Empire. Hugh Grant is due to take the pivotal role of Lord Mountbatten.

Khan has been a mainstay of the Indian film industry since the 1980s. In recent years, however, his international profile has been boosted by roles in Asif Kapadia’s The Warrior and Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, building to his breakthrough role as the police inspector in Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.