Rose Macaulay often tried out many different styles when she wrote her novels, and was often very successful. Here, alas, she seems to have wandered into the territory of her protegeé Elizabeth Bowen with less than ideal results. Here, a typical Bowenesque unwanted teenage girl, Barbary, is forced to leave her once divorced, once widowed mother in Provence after World War II to live with her bourgeois father Sir Gulliver and his new wife in London and attend the Slade Art School. Left to her own devices, the heavyhandedly named Barbary (who used to fight with the maquis in France) wanders the bombed-out ruins in the City instead. The unusual setting is just about irresistible, and you wish Macaulay could do somehting more with it, but the obvious resonances to THE DEATH OF THE HEART keep hampering the book, and Barbary and her selfish mother and chilly father and stepmother are too shallow to care much about. There's also practically none of Macaulay's trademark humor.

The British, for some reason, were obsessed with historical pageants in the 1930s, and this peculiar product (one of the most expensive films made in Britian up to that time) is an odd by-product of that obsession. It plays like Noel Coward's CAVALCADE in reverse. It opens in 1940, when war against a foreign power is declared at Christmastime (these are the best and most famous sequences, and are performed nearly like a kind of pantomime). Then the film advances episodically at first about decade at a time, showing the devastation wrought by war and plague, the barbarian society that becomes built over the carnage, and finally the superscientific cryptofascistic organization that defeats the barbarian power and its own problems.

Aside from Alfred Hitchcock's work, british cinema just wasn't very good prior to the Second World War, and this film shows why: everyone from the evil barbarian dictator and his Lady MacBeth to the children in the street speak with absurdly posh BBC accents, and there's a ridiculous amount of posturing and posing. The film is mostly of interest today as a kind of curio, especially in its relaization onscreen of the popular futuristic fantsies of the period: giant Art Deco turbines, and oversized flying wing aircrafts that sweep the skies. The striking visualization of the Wings over the World society, with its towers and plazas, and its citizenry bedecked in caped togas with plastic tubing (the costumes were co-designed by the Marchioness of Queensbury!) clearly provided the inspiration for DC Comics illustrators in the United States in their depictions of Superman's Krypton for the next fifty years or so.

The great thing about zombie films is that you don't really need to spend any money on special effects if you don't want to: just the idea of the dead silently moving is horror enough. Many directors with low budgets and great imaginations have thus turned to the genre, producing such classic variations on the theme as I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE EVIL DEAD, and 28 DAYS LATER. But they all owe a debt back to this, probably the first "true" zombie film. Fortunately, this Haiti-set film holds up beautifully, with wonderfully evocative images. There's a completely wordless satanic mill, where the silence isn't even broken by the fall of one of the zombies into the great millstone; a haunted ruined castle by the sea like something out of Doré; a vulture that is used to wonderful effect in the film's last moments; and a beautiful undead heroine stalking around in her filmy negligee. (Inevitably she's named "Madeleine," so her irritating boyfriend can call after her, in BBC tones, "Oh, Madeleine... Madeleine... oh, Madeleine...") Bela Legosi, who was clearly not out for subtlety as the evil zombie master Legendre, is the perfect center figure for this expressionistic nightmare.

Two films were made at about the same time based on, of all things, the Arthur Conan Doyle scandal from the early 20s about the supposed photographing of actual fairies playing with children. FAIRY TALE: A TRUE STORY garnered more attention, and largely took the children's perspective; this little thriller from the same year used the tale more as a point of departure, imagining instead an adult fantasy with erotic and philosophical overtones about a photographer haunted by the death of his first wife who becomes involved in a similar incident.

The film has unusual and wonderful effects that stay with you for a long time, and wish it were up to the ambitions the first-time director, Nick Willing, clearly had for it. Unfortunately, his inexperience shows, and the odd bridge he tries to naviagte between fantasy and realism doesn't always hold together. His use of expressionistic techniques--the bloodied head of the hero at the funeral, the linking image of the pocketwatch (brought out even when the hero is in a full body cast!)--just seem silly rather than evocative. The film has an unusual hero in Toby Stephens: while not very sympathetic, he's a superb actor, and his decided carnality and corporeality work startling effects on the character. Unfortunately, these same qualities makes it impossible to believe that Ben Kingsley (of all people), as a grieving country vicar, could ever get the better of Stephens so many times physically as he does in the film. Still, the ambition of the film, and its many evocative images, make you wish it were released on DVD with a director's or writer's commentary.

Welty's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is largely told in the third person through the observations of its heroine, Laurel McKelva Hand, the daughter of a prominent and wealthy smalltown Mississippi judge who comes to New Orleans to help her father who must see a doctor for an eye affliction. On hand is the judge's second wife, the silly and vulgar Fay, whom Laurel and the doctor basically ignore. When the father unexpectedly dies, Laurel (who is older than Fay) must return to the smalltown with her stepmother for his funeral.

The reasons for Welty's popularity with THE NEW YORKER editorial board are much in evidence: the story is told subtly and in small pieces, and accrues a remarkable level of hospital and genteel smalltown detail as it proceeds. Its measured rhythms are the best thing this novel has going for it. Unfortunately, it seems to proceed too much along the lines of a contest between discreet Southern gentility and refinement (embodied in the quiet and grieiving Laurel) and no-'count Southern lower-class vulgarity (championed by Fay and her obnoxious Texas relatives). Although Laurel comes to realize why her father's late-life optimism explains why he married Fay, Welty doesn't really allow Fay any sort of appeal to the reader at all, and so you finish the novel thinking how much *nicer* everything would have been had the judge never married her. (At least Tennessee Williams allowed Stanley Kowalski animal magnetism.) The novel seems too much on the side of delicacy , especially given that Welty's own fine feelings are so manifest in her method of telling of the story--though paradoxically some overobvious symbols (a carved boat, a breadboard, the judge's degenerating eye) weigh things down a bit much. The work is most interesting at the end, when Laurel must confront some truths about her real mother's final illness which complicate the overly schematic family alignments in some welcome ways.

Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Michael Cunningham's novel of three interwoven stories concerning the composition and reception of MRS. DALLOWAY is really a throwback to the great so-called "weepies," or women's pictures of the Forties and Fifties. The strongest of the threads (and the most affecting) concerns an emotionally fragile housewife (Julianne Moore) barely keeping it together on a summer's day in the 40s in Los Angeles: the rhythms Moore and the wonderful child actor who plays her son are so assured and unnerving that it's almost painfully beautiful. Nicole Kidman garnered a great deal of critical attention (and an Academy Award) for wearing a prosthetic nose and playing Virginia Woolf herself during the composition of her greatest novel. Kidman looks and seems almost nothing like the real Woolf, but the performance is exceptional nonetheless: she almost seems to come unglued by dint of her sheer intellectual strength and sensitivity. In the weakest of the stories (a fault of the original novel), Meryl Streep is quite fine as a contemporary Mrs. Dalloway putting together a party for her best friend, a famous poet (Ed Harris) dying of AIDS, and she redeems the material here a good deal. The movie is knit together with a very beautiful score by Philip Glass.

Charlie Kauffman decided to write a screenplay adaptation of Susan Orlean's THE ORCHID THIEF mostly about how impossible it was for him to write an adaptation of it, and while that sounds like it might have been a good idea it actually winds up not working out at all. It's all pretty much the sort of thing you expect from a college creative writing class when a student doesn't have any ideas for an assignment and instead writes about writer's block. Nicolas Cage works hard as Cage, but he's pretty unappealling in his sweatiness. All the movie really has going for it is Meryl Streep in a miraculous turn as Susan Orlean herself, a woman who yearns for transcendance in her daily professional life.

Rose Macaulay's TOWERS OF TREBIZOND is unlike any other novel ever written. Basically a kind of travelogue of the narrator's travels through the Levant with her eccentric Aunt Dot, the smug Anglican Reverend Chantry-Pigg, and Aunt Dot's crazy camel (an important character in its own right), the novel comes to encompass much more: a meditation on East and West, a study of the contrasts between diffeerent forms of religion, and a very searching analysis of the need for religion in human experience. It's the kind of book you don't want to end, and even when it becomes somewhat wild and unbelievably allegorical (such as when the narrator trains an ape she acquires in Turkey to drive a car late in the work) you stay with it. It's the kind of book you can dip in again and again throughout your life: it works as well in bits and epigrams as it does as a sustained narrative.

This alien invasion film, the third in M. Night Shyamalan's run of supernatural films with horror overtones has inspired some of the most mixed of all his reviews, both with the press and the public. Shyamalan plays upon his Hitchcockian influences very much here, and on the plus side this allows for the film (like THE OTHERS, another superior horror film from the last few years) to play more on suggestion and long takes and suspense rather than on cheap thrills. The music and cinematography are superb, and some of the sequences are nothing short of magnificent: the sequence with the Brazilian children's birthday party is one of the scariest (and most beautifully paced) uses of mise en scene with a handhold camera ever done. And the performances from Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix are exceptional, even from both these actors.

The film has several glaring weaknesses, to be sure. The largest are its plot holes: the ineptitude of the aliens is pretty remarkable, considering their sophisticated technology, and even a young child will laugh at the silliness of their One Big Weakness. The religious themes of the film also become heavyhanded, especially in the film's gratuitous and poorly faced final scene. Finally, the pointed homages to "The Birds" also become just a bit too much in the sequence towards the end in the cellar (you keep expecting Tippi hedren to show up down there with the family). This is an effective chiller , and stays with you, but next time we can only hope Shyamalan has some second thoughts about his more heavyhanded devices.

Instead of a director's commentary for the DVD Shyamalan opted to make an extended multipart documentary with himself narrating: while in many ways this is very engaging (it's impossible not to like him as a personality), it seems a bit ego-serving as well, and doesn't tell you as much as a director's commentary would have (it seems too cheaply self- promotional).

This Blake Edwards film is a sort of valentine to the many gifts of his amazing wife Julie Andrews more than ten years since her last musical, and wouldn't you know it, it was a gigantic hit. It helped that the book poked a great deal of fun at the homophobia of the nascent Reagan era, that James Garner, Alex Karres, Robert Preston and (especially) Lesley Ann Warren (in her funniest role ever, as the idiot dancehall bimbo Norma). But the real reason the film takes off is because of Julie Andrews. She may be utterly unbelieveable passing as a man, but she does get to show her great gift for dry humor, and she sings several fine, fine songs, including what may be one of her absolute careeer highlights, "Le Jazz Hot." No one has ever been less appropriate for a jazz number than Julie--she of course sings every single note exactly on the beat, and with her siganture perfect diction--, but she gives the number so much zing and warmth and excitement it just doesn't matter. When she's up there in her Josphine Baker outfit snapping her fingers and smiling expansively, and showing off her astonishing and perfect vocal range, she is every bit as showstopping and iconic as when she was spinning round the Salzburg mountaintops in THE SOUND OF MUSIC: she's up there in movie history heaven at such moments. And if that weren't enough, you also get to hear her pronounce the word "heterosexual" (several times!) like no one before or since.