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.

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.

This colourful documentary on the current state of Jamaican popular music as practised in Kingston begins with the death and grand funeral of a leading figure in the Dancehall movement who styled himself Bogle, sang songs advocating extreme violence and was assassinated by a rival group at a petrol station after a fight in a nightclub. “The music is our life saviour,” someone says, and most of the songs concern sex, religion and slavery, though one suspects the film-makers have deliberately excluded numbers of a homophobic nature.

Some of the performers are hugely likable, especially the older ones. But a couple are extremely unpleasant, most especially Animal Man, who encourages members of the audience to simulate sex on stage and invites young women to stretch up and “feel my anaconda”. The film concludes with him singing the Jamaican national anthem.

Shot in Liberia and set during a civil war in an unnamed African state where the official language is a form of English, this is a gut-wrenching, documentary-style look at a company of Kalashnikov-wielding kids, some not yet teenagers. They have been torn from their families, pressed into the service of a self-styled guerrilla general, brainwashed with chants borrowed from Hollywood action movies and turned into ruthless killers, rapists and looters.

Most of them have fierce noms de guerre such as Small Devil, No Good Advice, Never Die and, of course, the eponymous Johnny Mad Dog, and they act without remorse, taking vengeful pleasure in their ability to menace and humiliate.

The most excruciating scenes involve two of the youngest raping an educated woman at a captured TV station as punishment for having called the insurgents terrorists in a news bulletin, and the intimidation and murder of an elderly couple, teachers at a local school, who attempt to retain their dignity. Almost as chilling is the moment the kids retrieve an automatic weapon from one of their victims, identifying it as an Uzi of the sort carried by Chuck Norris in Delta Force.

Parallel to the tragic story of the boys is the comparatively hopeful one of a 12-year-old girl trying to take care of her little brother and their father, who is presumably a doctor or other sort of professional person, who has lost his legs.

There is a brief glimpse of a residual human decency when one of the boy soldiers doesn’t reveal her hidden presence to his comrades, but sadly it’s the one moment that’s a bit Hollywood and doesn’t really convince.

(1988, 15, Nouveaux Pictures)

Brunel University has joined the Nouveaux art-house label to launch Cine-Excess, a welcome new series devoted to “Taking Trash Seriously” featuring low-budget exploitation classics from around the world. It’s off to an excellent start with this stylishly atmospheric Dutch thriller written and directed by Dick Maas, a fast, gory, immensely entertaining horror flick that cleverly crosses Dirty Harry with Jaws and throws in a dash of Don’t Look Now. A mad serial killer in a diver’s wetsuit emerges from the murky water of Amsterdam’s canals to murder people in nasty ways: the Mayor is furious and a maverick cop (Huub Stapel) is assigned to track him down before travel agencies boycott the city. There are ingeniously staged killings, terrific chases, a visit to the Rijksmuseum where the heroine works, and a sharp green socio-political message given a new topicality by the current Trafigura affair. The film can be viewed either with subtitles or dubbed into English and is accompanied by a fascinating “making of” documentary.