CINEMA: FILMS TO REMEMBER

Their desperate journey takes them through a silent, hostile village where all the farm animals have been killed, across a deserted  landscape, and they end up by attaching themselves to a small colony of fugitives living in a warehouse at a remote rural railway station.    The land is mist-enshrouded, there is no electricity to brighten the nocturnal gloom and life has been reduced to barter - exchanging watches, jewelry, cigarettes and sexual favors for potable water, a little food and additional clothing. Crackling news on transistor radios suggests that some sort of life is going on elsewhere and everyone's hopes center on the possibility of a passing train transporting them to a better place. Meanwhile, life limps on with every small act of generosity matched by one of callous exploitation or dishonesty. There are exciting moments such as the little boy Ben getting lost in the night and Anne and Eva searching for him, and a confrontation with the man who shot Anne's husband. But they are few, in a deliberately depressing film. What most engages Haneke, in dramatic terms, is the legend of the Just, a self-perpetuating sect of 36 people who since the beginning of time have been prepared to sacrifice themselves by self-immolation to preserve mankind.- Philipe Franch.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen . Rating:

Wacky ideas don't get wackier than the one behind The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, originally a graphic novel co-written by Alan Moore, who brought us From Hell. This is a similar Victorian counter-factual adventure, or make that counter-fictional adventure. It's 1899; an evil kingpin called Fantom is stirring up trouble, so an A-Team of super good-guys muster to defeat him. Executive producer Sean Connery plays Allan Quatermain from Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines; there's Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, RL Stevenson's Dr Jekyll, Mark Twain's grown-up Tom Sawyer, Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and Rodney Skinner, a new "sequelised" character from HG Wells' The Invisible Man - the original presumably being the only one not yet quite out of copyright. Vampiress Mina is allowed to swoop around biting people, though apparently without turning them into vampires too; Mr Hyde is a bizarrely bulbous and non-scary Hulk, to distinguish him from the essentially similar Dorian Gray who is given the extra superpower of indestructibility. It's just so silly you have to like it. Sort of. But once the novelty wears off, you are left with a very over-egged pudding low on real thrills. Shekhar Kapur's dull Four Feathers and Simon Wells' ho-hum Time Machine shows that doing Victoriana straight is a stretch for Hollywood. But Alan Moore's funky pre-postmodern fantasies aren't working too well either.- Peter Bradshow .