REVIEWED - EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATE SOME of the most interesting recent movies have been based on novellas or short stories, including the imminent Brokeback Mountain and Shopgirl.

It eases the burden of literary adaptation for the screen. For his directing debut, actor Liev Schreiber wisely opted to adapt the short story on which Jonathan Safran Foer based his successful novel, Everything Is Illuminated, rather than attempting to condense the entire, reputedly unfilmable book into a manageable movie.

The film stars a heavily bespectacled Elijah Wood as Jonathan, an uptight young Jewish New Yorker obsessed with collecting family mementoes and neatly packaging them in Ziploc bags. It goes on to follow his misadventures when he travels to the Ukraine, seeking out fragments of information on his ancestry, and specifically, to find the woman he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

His local guide for this quest is Alex (played by a remarkably engaging newcomer, Eugene Hutz), who mangles the English language in a succession of very funny malapropisms in a movie which, given its theme, carries a surprising lightness of tone. Their driver is Alex's father (Boris Leskin) who claims to be blind and is accompanied by a dog he describes as his "seeing-eye bitch" and answers to the name of "Sammy Davis Jr Jr".

As they travel through the countryside in a battered old Trabant, Jonathan gradually lightens up and opens his eyes to the human story behind all his meticulously filed mass of mementoes.

As both director and screenwriter, Schreiber adopts an understated approach to his material that generally suits it, and his appealing film is handsomely photographed by Matthew Libatique and impressively designed by Irish art director Mark Geraghty. It builds to a moving resolution. Michael Dwyer