Wonders and horrors

There was the feel of a Hollywood premiere about the gala opening of the 42nd London Film Festival last weekend, with hundreds of people gathered behind crash barriers to watch the black-tie audience enter the city's largest cinema, the handsomely restored Odeon on Leicester Square. As the opening ceremonies got underway, the first cinematic images of the evening came in the form of a very short film shot last month in Ireland. It begins with a creaky old bus making its way over a hill and revealing its destination as Dublin. Seated inside the bus are filmmaker Alan Parker, along with Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle and the young stars of Angela's Ashes, which Parker is shooting in Ireland. Parker is chairman of the British Film Institute which stages the London Film Festival, and, with his filming commitments keeping him in Dublin and away from the big event, this amusing short film was his entertaining way of welcoming the guests.

The opening film, Little Voice, was a perfect choice for the occasion - a crowd-pleasing British production that proved solidly accomplished on all levels and a fine showcase for its well-chosen British cast. It is based on the acclaimed stage play, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, written by Jim Cartwright as a vehicle for the young Lancashire actress, Jane Horrocks, with her remarkable ability to impersonate the singing and speaking voices of divas such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey and Marlene Dietrich.

Horrocks plays the central character who is known as LV (for Little Voice). She is painfully shy and her whole world revolves around her room and her late father's formidable vinyl collection, which she treasures and which, since his death, is the only thing that gives meaning to her life. She lives with her mother, a brassy harridan played in a gloriously outsized performance by a cast-against-type Brenda Blethyn. And Michael Caine plays the seedy, failed talent-agent who manages to persuade LV to perform her gifted impersonations at a local club.

This captivating film is directed by Mark Herman, who adapted Cartwright's play for the screen, and it marks a significant improvement on Herman's rather overrated previous film, Brassed Off, another filmed play concerned with humour, tragedy and music. Herman triumphantly pulls out all the theatrical stops for the big numbers when the crunched-up, withdrawn LV is wholly transformed by performance, and Horrocks sets the screen alight.

Caine, in his finest performance since he won an Oscar for Hannah and her Sisters in 1986, is on vintage form, and he contributes an amazing, anger-fuelled rendition performance of Roy Orbison's It's Over. The fine cast also features an effectively subdued Ewan McGregor and a brash Jim Broadbent.

This year's London programme boasts 153 features and 75 shorts, yet there are some curious omissions, for whatever reasons - among them such notable films as Happiness, Run Lola Run, Pleasantville, Claire Dolan, Apt Pupil, Orphans, Hilary and Jackie and Dancing at Lughnasa, all of which were at the Toronto festival in September.

Among the films selected for London there were, inevitably, some disappointments. I was drawn to Motel Cactus, Park KiYong's South Korean movie because of its brilliant Australian cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, whose work on it proved as inventive and sensual as ever. However, all that visual style could not disguise the lack of substance in this meandering four-parter about various sexual encounters in the same Seoul hotel room. Lauded in the festival programme as "a daring variation on a familiar theme", Philippe Grandrieux's deeply pretentious French film, Sombre, deals with a serial killer (Marc Barbe) who gets involved with an intended victim (Hal Hartley regular Elina Lowensohn) whom he spares, and also with her sister. The film's combination of meaningless silences, out-of-focus camerawork and irrelevant asides renders it irritatingly incoherent.

As he approaches his 60th birthday next year, the great British actor Ian McKellen is enjoying a long overdue film career in leading roles. Following his riveting performances in Richard III and Apt Pupil, McKellen is on sublime form in Gods and Monsters, playing the highly imaginative English film-maker James Whale, who directed the 1930s classics, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and Showboat.

Written and directed by Bill Condon, Gods and Monsters is set in California in 1957, during the last year of Whale's life, and deals with the initially awkward relationship which forms between the openly gay Whale and a muscular, heterosexual young Korean war veteran (Brendan Fraser) whom he hires as his gardener and gets to pose as his model. George Cukor, Elsa Lanchester and Princess Margaret are among the real-life characters integrated into the narrative of this inventive and touching film, graced with atmospheric flashbacks to Whale at work on some of his best movies.

The provocative young Mormon writer-director, Neil LaBute follows his abrasive and chilling contemporary drama of misogynist male corporate executives, In The Company Of Men, with an even more coruscating picture of the sex lives of misanthropes in Your Friends and Neighbors. This time LaBute broadens his scope to focus on both sexes, for a revealing picture of three men and three women and their mostly unsatisfying sexual relationships. LaBute's insightful scheme of things allows no space for upbeat contrivances as he sharpens his focus on these disparate characters to chilling effect. The excellent ensemble cast features Ben Stiller, Catherine Keener, Nastassja Kinski, Amy Brenneman, a fattened-up Aaron Eckhart from In the Company of Men, and Jason Patric, who's on terrific form.

The London Film Festival closes on Thursday night next week on a comparatively less provocative but nonetheless audacious note with the irresistibleBulworth.

Warren Beatty co-wrote, produced, directed and stars in this caustic political satire in which he plays an incumbent US senator, Jay Bulworth. In the middle of a nervous breakdown, he arranges his own suicide by hiring a hit man to assassinate him during the final weekend of campaigning - after making a deal with a corrupt lobbyist for a life-insurance deal to benefit his daughter. Like Jim Carrey's lawyer in Liar Liar - or, more pertinently in the context, Peter Finch's unhinged newscaster in Network - Bulworth for the first time in his long political career starts telling it like he sees it, and in the process profoundly offends Jews, blacks, the Hollywood film industry and various other interest groups, all in the course of a whirlwind 24 hours.

Halle Berry, Oliver Platt, Jack Warden, Paul Sorvino, Christine Baranski and Don Cheatle all figure impressively in this topical and often hilarious dark comedy in which Beatty, now in his early 60s, dazzles with his most energetic and adventurous performance in many years.