Big pictures

Working class worries dominate the London Film Festival, writes Michael Dwyer

The London Film Festival is one of the longest-running international film events for a couple of reasons. It is now in its 49th year and it is spread over 16 days - six days longer than Cannes or Toronto - at venues across the city. However, the sheer scale of the programme does not deter audiences, and this year's Times BFI London Film Festival, as it is officially titled, attracted record attendances up to its closing ceremony on Thursday night.

There were very few empty seats at a 1pm screening in a 700-seater West End cinema on a Thursday, even though tickets cost £10 (€15) each, not unusual for central London cinemas. The cost of the new Steven Soderbergh film, Bubble, was just a fraction of the budget of his previous picture, the star-laden Ocean's Twelve, but the result was far more satisfying.

The first in a series of six micro-budget movies from Soderbergh, Bubble is his riposte to reality TV, which he describes as being "as far from reality as you can imagine and more fictionalised than the movies you see".

He set and shot Bubble in a West Virginia town and cast the movie with non-professional actors drawn from the local population.

The first half of the film constitutes an absorbing character study of struggling employees at a doll factory, and then Soderbergh shifts gear and turns it into a murder mystery. He elicits engaging performances from his leading players, Deborah Doebereiner, Dustin Ashley and Misty Wilkins, in an intriguing drama that's rooted in realism.

Actor Steve Buscemi observes a similar working-class milieu in Lonesome Jim, his latest film as a director, for which he stays behind the camera. Casey Affleck, brother of Ben, plays the title role, an aimless young man whose dreams of success in New York are crushed, and he returns home to Indiana, where he becomes tentatively involved with a young nurse (Lili Taylor). This low-key observational drama is peppered with quirky humour and persuasively played by a solid cast, in which Mary Kay Place is outstanding as Jim's doting, delusional mother.

Another fine actor, Liev Schreiber, last seen as the son of the Meryl Streep character in The Manchurian Candidate, turns writer-director with Everything is Illuminated, confidently tackling Jonathan Safran Foer's reputedly unfilmable novel of the same name. It follows the misadventures of an uptight young Jewish New Yorker (Elijah Wood) when he travels to the Ukraine in search of the woman he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Given its theme, there is a surprising lightness of tone for much of the movie, which is sprinkled with funny malapropisms engagingly delivered by Euegen Hutz as the American's guide and features a scene-stealing dog, a "seeing-eye bitch" named Sammy Davis Jr Jr. It builds to a moving resolution.

Romanian movies are rarely ever seen in Ireland, but Irish audiences may well respond to the depiction of a bureaucratic health system under severe stress in Cristi Puiu's powerful and frightening The Death of Mr Lazarescu.

In a formidable performance, Ion Fiscuteanu plays a hard-drinking widower who lives with his cats in a Bucharest flat. Suffering from pains in his head and stomach, he calls for an ambulance, but an accident has stretched the city's medical services to their limits, and after a long wait, Mr Lazarescu finds himself shuttled from one hospital to another in this remarkable black comedy.

The stress of modern living and the increasing demands of the workplace are addressed with directness and concern in Fabienne Godet's dark French drama, Burnt Out. Olivier Gourmet is excellent as the social conscience of this compelling picture of present-day malaises.

Singer-songwriter Nick Cave makes a predictably unpredictable but impressive screenwriting debut with The Proposition, a violent Western set in the Australian outback in the 1880s, which was also at the Cork Film Festival. It follows the efforts of a police captain (Ray Winstone) to capture the leader (Danny Huston) of an Irish outlaw gang, and the deal he makes with the leader's brother (Guy Pearce) to turn him over to the law.

Directed by John Hillcoat and also featuring Emily Watson, John Hurt and David Wenham, the film draws an unflinching picture of a brutal era against striking landscapes.

Irish cinema was represented at London by Perry Ogden's fine Pavee Lackeen, which won the festival's award for best first feature on Thursday, and the Ifta award for best new Irish film on Saturday. The witty, tongue-in-cheek yarn, The Matador, featuring an entertainingly self-effacing Pierce Brosnan as a jaded hit-man, was listed as a US-German-Irish production, because it was co-produced by Brosnan's own company, Irish Dreamtime.

It was one of the festival's many crowd-pleasers, as was artistic director Sandra Hebron's choice for the sold-out surprise film, which was revealed as the new Stephen Frears film, Mrs Henderson Presents, featuring Judi Dench at the top of her form as an imperious widow who, in 1937, buys a disused Soho theatre and comes up with a ruse to avoid the rigid censorship laws, by staging tableaux vivants featuring naked women, which is acceptable to the Lord Chamberlain (Christopher Guest) as long as the performers do not move.