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.

London Film Festival

The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career.

Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After Reading.

Here they are heading to the suburbia of 1960s mid-west America for an elaborate, slippery, fable that feels, strange as it may sound, like a novel that Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud never quite got around to writing.

A Serious Man starts off odd, and gets odder. The first five minutes is entirely in Yiddish, a Coen-ised version of a shtetl folk-horror tale featuring a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (wandering spirit). Suffice to say, the Coens don’t muck about when it comes to the use of stabbing weapons.

Then we flip forward from the old country to the new world, to where our protagonist, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is your archetypal harassed and neurotic Jewish-American college professor.

His apparently unimpeachable lifestyle is crumbling rapidly: one of his students is trying to bribe his way through exams, his application for tenure is being undermined by ^­ anonymous threatening letters, his deadbeat brother is sleeping on the sofa and attracting the attention of the police, and – this is the killer – his wife is planning to leave him for another man, one of those swinging middle-aged types who embraced the permissive culture with desperate fervency.

To offset this Gopnik goes looking for answers from his religion, but unlike Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, he does not come up against the blank wall of a  Godless universe; what he encounters are perplexing rabbis telling him baffling parables that just leave him feeling more and more confused.

It’s this refusal to neatly resolve their narrative that gives A Serious Man its distinctive flavour; it has the same open-ended spirit of The Graduate, an authentic classic of late 60s Jewish-American culture. (A Serious Man could easily have been conceived as a sequel to that film, with Gopnik as a grown-up Benjamin Braddock.)

The Coens, though, don’t quite do deeply felt alienation like anyone else. Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there’s something very personal going on here.

It’s not autobiographical exactly, but the Minnesota setting is the Coens’ own childhood universe, and they revved up for their barmitzvahs at pretty much the same time as Gopnik’s son, Danny. The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It’s  paid wonderful dividends.

In spite of the lingering sense of necrophilia, Michael Jackson’s jerry-built swansong has enough juicy titbits to provide succour to die-hard fans

For everyone who’s thirsted for more Michael Jackson since his death little more than four months ago, the wait is finally over. For the rest of us, it’s time to look on in awe as Jackson’s memory – and the legendary fervency of his fans – is ruthlessly exploited till the pips squeak.

As is all too well known, Jackson was carried off shortly before embarking on a 50-date residency at London’s O2 Arena to try and pay off his rumoured $500m debts; footage shot during rehearsal for this series of shows forms

the vast majority of this much-heralded and hyped film, and goes some of the way to plugging both fans’ disappointment and his estate’s balance sheet.

So, to the burning question: is there any intimation of Jackson’s impending demise? I can’t honestly say there is. In the footage we are permitted to see, Jackson appears in pretty good shape for a 50-year-old – even if his general spindliness makes him occasionally look a bit like Skeletor in a lamé tuxedo. He performs at walking pace for much of the time, but makes it clear he is holding himself in.

As for the film itself, I can simply report that it isn’t too bad at all. It’s pretty much unadorned rehearsal footage, artfully stitched together to create complete song sequences; and since the O2 gigs were intended to present his crowdpleasing hits, they’re all here in their toe-tapping glory. Director Kenny Ortega puts himself in the frame quite a bit (sucking up to Jackson something rotten, it has to be said), and we learn that Jackson appeared to prefer culinary metaphors to describe his music: it must “sizzle”, or “simmer”, or indeed “nourish”.

The big fear, though, was that fulsome homages to the man and his talent would smother This Is It in a coating of treacle; thankfully, Ortega limits it to the occasional sobbing outburst from the dancers or choreographers. We are instead offered genuinely interesting tidbits of Jackson’s stagecraft, in the shape of intense discussion of cues, cherry-pickers and trapdoors – presumably to demonstrate how hands-on he was.

And there’s some fun sequences showing the creation of specially filmed inserts, such as the intro for Smooth Criminal having Jackson being Photoshopped into black and white movie clips from the 1940s, fending off Bogart and Cagney.

Jackson’s penchant for drivel couldn’t be entirely eliminated, as evidenced by the sickly little scene, built around a small girl wandering through an enchanted forest, that heralds Earth Song.

Still, this could have been a lot worse. It’s a bit much to claim it’s any kind of viable substitute for the live show, and since Jackson avoids conversation as much as is humanly possible it’s also a bit much to claim we get to know anything more about how he ticks. But This Is It a testament of a kind, and one that is no disgrace to his memory.

London film festival: Stephen Poliakoff’s pre-second world war conspiracy thriller never zips the way it should, but it’s still a solid, old-school entertainment

There’s a decided whiff of the John Buchans to Glorious 39, a rollicking conspiracy thriller set in the run-up to the second world war. Glorious 39 gives us dotty aunts and dodgy spies, showbiz starlets and imperilled young firebrands. Here, one feels, is the sort of yarn that Alfred Hitchcock might have had fun with: he would have kept it crisp and witty and light on its toes. Writer-director Stephen Poliakoff elects to play it straight and keep it sober. This never zips the way it should.

For all that, Poliakoff’s film deals out a solid, old-school entertainment. Romola Garai stars as Anne Keyes, the adopted actor daughter of Bill Nighy’s venerable elder statesman. In the palatial grounds of their country estate, the talk is all of war and appeasement, Churchill and Chamberlain. Under the cool, watchful eye of Jeremy Northam’s Foreign Office spook, a sabre-rattling MP (David Tennant) urges action against Hitler and then abruptly winds up dead.

This, naturally, is Anne’s cue to turn Miss Marple. Her subsequent investigation uncovers a stash of incriminating recordings, conveniently tucked away in the family outhouse, and a previously overlooked reel of movie footage in which her doomed fellow actor (Hugh Bonneville) urges her to “listen to them again, Anne”. Bonneville doesn’t quite go on to tell her that “the real villain is … aarrrgh!” before dropping dead from a poison dart. But I’m guessing it was a close-run thing.

If Glorious 39 strains credibility in its owl-eyed pursuit of a dark and terrible truth, then the polished, committed performances from the likes of Garai and Nighy keep it part-way honest. But Poliakoff’s film also deserves credit for offering a tangential spotlight on the motives of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasers. In recent years Chamberlain has become adopted as a kind of cover-all bogeyman by neo-con pundits keen to justify the merits of “preventative war” on Iraq or Iran. Glorious 39 at least roots this argument in its proper historical context. It shows how the pacifist counsel of the Great War survivors was hijacked and twisted by rogue elements within the Tory government; a cabal of influential aristocrats that was determined to preserve the status quo at any cost.

Glorious 39 is generally diverting and mildly political; conservative with a lower-case c. It frolics in a land of idyllic hunting grounds, picturesque castles and hearty gatherings, and then lets the whole house of cards come tumbling down.

This Australian thriller, a late addition to the “cuckoo in the nest” cycle of the late 1980s, is virtually Fatal Attraction transposed to a small fishing town in South Australia. A desperate housewife has a fling with a young, psychopathic Irish stalker, who pursues her when she becomes pregnant. Murky, predictable, but well enough played.

George Clooney’s wily Mr Fox outwits the bad British farmers in Wes Anderson’s entertaining animated version of the Roald Dahl classic, says Philip French

The precision, brevity and clarity of Roald Dahl‘s literary style probably derived from the way you learn to give orders, keep logs, write situation reports and contribute to debriefings as an officer in the armed forces. His realism, lack of sentimentality, distrust of the adult world and streak of cruelty came from experiencing childhood, the class system and public schools from an alien perspective (a boy of Norwegian parents observing British institutions), followed by Second World War service as an RAF fighter pilot and subsequent intelligence work in Washington.

Apart from an awareness of his varied audiences, there isn’t a great deal of difference between Dahl’s writing for adult and juvenile readers, and one of the chief challenges in adapting his stories is opening them up. He was a perfect source for Alfred Hitchcock’s 25-minute TV mysteries. Indeed, one of his stories, “Man From the South”, was used twice by Hitchcock, and again by Quentin Tarantino for his macabre contribution to the 1995 portmanteau film Four Rooms.

But his first work to reach the big screen, “Beware of the Dog”, his classic wartime tale with a brilliant twist in the tail, was a four-page story expanded into the two-hour film 36 Hours. Equally, Fantastic Mr Fox, his 1970 children’s story, provides Wes Anderson and his co-screenwriter, Noah Baumbach, with the central characters and the narrative core for their highly diverting stop-motion animation film.

Dahl’s fable touches on issues of intensive agriculture and ethology, which were very much in the air at the time it appeared. The wily Mr Fox, who lives a natural life, loses his tail to the loathsome trio of exploitative agribusiness farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean. (The symbolic castration inevitably evokes the tail lost by Squirrel Nutkin to Old Brown the owl in the Beatrix Potter story.) The vicious trio then lay siege to Fox and his family, driving them further underground until Fox unites his threatened fellow creatures. Together, they penetrate the three farms from underground and live off the poultry, meat and vintage cider they steal while the dumb farmers sit waiting above.

In such films as The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson has shown a fascination with sibling rivalry, eccentric matriarchs and dysfunctional families uniting against the outside world and he introduces these themes into a more complicated, and sentimentalised version of Fox’s life. Like many a western gunfighter or gangster, the cool, suave Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is persuaded by his wife (Meryl Streep, Hollywood’s voice of balance and maturity) to give up a life of rapine for a more settled existence. So he becomes a journalist, moves from his underground lair to live in a tree sold to him by a local estate agent, inevitably a weasel (Wes Anderson himself).

Inevitably, bourgeois conformity goes against Fox’s nature and, like the super-crook Danny Ocean in the series of heist movies Clooney made with Steven Soderbergh, he recruits a dim possum for a few final raids on Boggis, Bunce and Bean, which result in the siege Dahl so admirably creates. Meanwhile, Fox’s adolescent son, Ash, has to compete with his visiting cousin, Kristofferson, a karate ace and all-round athlete who can dive from a tree into a barrel of water without causing a splash. The Anglo-American or mid-Atlantic setting is amusingly sustained by having the two cousins attend the local high school where they’re coached by Anderson regular Owen Wilson in “whackbat”, a bizarre cross between cricket and baseball.

When the film escalates into hectic action, it draws on Hollywood genres, westerns in the Sergio Leone mode and crime movies; the treacherous Rat (Willem Dafoe) has a redemptive death scene, a parody of a classic gangster film that happily produces laughter rather than tugging at heart strings.

In a tradition that has been going on since the 1950s, when the brutal Romans in Ben-Hur were played by British actors and the gentle Jews by Americans, the animals in Mr Fox are voiced by Americans and the oppressive humans by Englishmen. Bean, the most detestable farmer, is played by Michael Gambon using his menacing gangster accent from The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & Her Lover and Layer Cake.

But if the movie is Americanised, even to the extent of Mr Fox making his entry to the “Davy Crockett” theme from the 1950s Disney TV series, a significant contribution to the film’s beguilingly stylised graphic quality comes from British artists. The puppets are created by the team of MacKinnon and Saunders and the exceptional photography is the work of Tristan Oliver, who collaborated with Nick Park on most of Aardman’s stop-motion pictures, including Chicken Run, a film that compares favourably with Mr Fox.

In 1967, Roald Dahl scripted the fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, which opens with a disturbing comic scene of an American space capsule being swallowed in orbit by Ernst Blofeld’s giant spacecraft that opens up at the front like a shark’s jaws. This is a black joke about the food chain and the survival of the fittest and his Mr Fox is part of this process. Anderson adds a coda to Fantastic Mr Fox that softens and domesticates Dahl’s ending. He removes Fox from his natural world red in tooth and claw and makes him an urban creature targeting supermarkets.

This outstanding documentary is as exciting as a thriller and centres on a character as fascinating as William Wilberforce’s mentor, Captain John Newton, the skipper of a slave ship who took holy orders, wrote “Amazing Grace” and became a fervent abolitionist. In the 1960s, the handsome, charismatic Richard O’Barry trained the performing dolphins used in the popular, long-running American television series Flipper, which resulted in the creation of dolphinariums the world over.

He then did a complete volte-face and for the past 35 years has been attempting to undo his work by using all means possible to keep dolphins from being captured and exploited.He is an articulate, middle-aged man, exuding an undemonstrative decency and this picture records how he gathered an intrepid team of film-makers, divers, electronics experts and special-ops people who infiltrated the Japanese fishing port of Taiji to record and expose its dirty secret.

This is a first-rate heist movie in which the good guys are the gang and the bad guys the supposed honest citizens upholding law and order. Every year, the local fishermen, in league with various commercial interests, drive dolphins into a local cove where dolphin trainers from around the world select the best specimens, for which they pay up to $150,000.

The rest are pushed around a peninsula to another cove, as closely guarded as Dr No’s lair, to be slaughtered and sold as whale meat. It’s an astonishing story, carefully told, and along the way we learn a great deal about greed, human nature, various kinds of private and governmental chicanery and the working of that dubious organisation, the Japanese-dominated International Whaling Commission.

Clive Owen and Viggo Mortensen impress with their unsentimental portrayals of fatherhood, writes Jason Solomons

Scrabbling around for unifying themes at film festivals often feels like a forced journalistic device but the 53rd London film festival does seem to have plugged into fatherhood. Giving the most rounded performance of his career, Clive Owen starred in Scott Hicks’s beautiful film The Boys Are Back, playing a British sports journalist in Australia who, after his wife dies, is left to bring up two young sons alone.

Whenever men do the washing up in Hollywood films, it has to be in a comedy (Mr Mom, Daddy Day Care) while the death of a mother is usually the cue for violins (Stepmom), so it’s rather refreshing to find a film that handles the subject without turning into a soup of sentimentality. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Owen getting an Oscar nomination for The Boys Are Back, slogging it out with Colin Firth in A Single Man (which also played at the LFF) when the awards race hots up next year. Both are much-liked British actors who’ve never quite nailed awards-worthy roles before but who have built up much goodwill in Hollywood and the male-dominated voters in the best actor category do love films about men coming over all soft and sensitive.

The Boys Are Back is based on a memoir by former parliamentary sketch writer Simon Carr. As he told me at the film’s premiere last week: “The role of the father has been rather eclipsed in the last 30 years. He was seen as someone useless, sat on the sofa, just paying for everything. Thankfully, it’s being more subtly evaluated now.”

Curiously, almost the exact same line even occurs in two festival films. “I wish I was dead so I could be with Mummy,” says the little son to his father in both The Boys Are Back and in The Road, the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s book, and for which Viggo Mortensen is also likely to find himself among the future Oscar nominees (the LFF has been fertile breeding ground for these of late: Forest Whitaker, Imelda Staunton, Frank Langella and Mortensen himself, for Eastern Promises).

Mortensen’s father and young son journey through a blasted American landscape, evading bands of cannibals, a sort of latterday Abraham and Isaac as Mortensen wrestles with the moral quandary of whether his son would be better off dead. The film is beautifully, bleakly made by John Hillcoat but it feels more depressed than depressing, a one-note whinge, like being stuck in an asthmatic cloud.

Memoirs are also popular this year. An Education is based on one by journalist Lynn Barber and built into a lovely, witty screenplay by Nick Hornby, forming a canvas for the career-making performance by Carey Mulligan in the lead role, as a 16-year-old in 1961 Twickenham seduced by a debonair Jewish businessman (played by American actor Peter Sarsgaard). The design details and Mulligan are a constant delight and it was a joy to witness the blossoming of a genuinely gifted young actress.

While George Clooney‘s voice opened the festival in Fantastic Mr Fox – another film about a father’s relationship with his son – his presence continued in Up in the Air, by Jason Reitman. I’d heard encouraging things about this comedy, about a corporate man obsessed with clocking up gold loyalty card points and air miles as he travels America firing people. Alas, it was a disappointment, drably directed with no real feel for the soul-crushing architectural space of airports and hotels, captured so eerily in Patrick Stettner’s The Business of Strangers. Elsewhere, I was driven to the point of insanity by Jean Pierre Jeunet’s restless, unamusing comedy Micmacs, about Dany Boon and a group of rubbish-collecting Parisian oddballs (Les Wombles?) including a cook, a human cannonball and a contortionist, ganging up to humiliate some arms dealers.

I enjoyed Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, with the Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé as a Ghost Dog-type assassin who always orders “two espressos in separate cups”, while on a mission in Seville. It’s the director’s most Jarmuschian work for years and boasts the most eclectic cast of the festival: Gael García Bernal, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Bill Murray.

The new British cinema strand was encouraging this year. Lindy Heymann’s Kicks had great energy and style and Tom Harper’s The Scouting Book for Boys also marked a significant directorial debut. A twisted Romeo and Juliet for the Skins generation (it was written by Skins scriptwriter Jack Thorne), set in a Norfolk caravan park, it starred Thomas Turgoose as monosyllabic David in mad love with his childhood friend Emily, played by Holly Grainger. Director Harper has an innate feel for space and landscape and the shots, captured by Robbie Ryan, of the pair running along caravan roofs were among the most exhilarating cinematic moments of a lively, constantly evolving festival.

Most weeks nowadays, there’s a vampire film from some corner of the globe. This week, there are two, one of a certain merit from the States, the other an execrable British film (Colin). The American film, Cirque de Freak, is handsomely mounted and relatively ambitious in trying to reinvent the genre by juxtaposing life-enhancing vampires with death-dealing “vampaneze” through the story of two Los Angeles teenagers who join different sides. Based on a series of books by Darren Shan, it’s infinitely more inventive than the sweetly romantic Twilight books aimed at the vulnerable jugulars of teenage girls and clearly intended to launch a new cinematic franchise. It is, however, a rather muddled affair redeemed by striking performances from John C Reilly, Michael Cerveris and the imposing Ken Watanabe.

Vulgar, pointless, unfunny comedy produced by Will Ferrell about a team of ruthless hustlers called in to save a Californian used car firm from extinction. They’re salesmen whose deaths even the compassionate Arthur Miller would greet with equanimity.