THE KILLER INSIDE ME - They fuck you up, your mum and dad Part Two

Lou Ford is a courteous, softly spoken cop in 1950s Texas. He has a sweetheart called Amy who dotes on him: the townsfolk think he's a stand-up guy. But when he was a kid, Lou's housekeeper got off on his spanking her. And this poor little fucked up kid grew up into the kind of guy who can only express love through violence. Lou is something of an enigma - he is alienated from himself - from real emotional engagement with others - and thus from the viewer. Far more intriguing, from a psychological standpoint, are the two women - his girlfriend and his hooker-mistress - who love him. It's mysterious that they love such an emotionally avoidant man - let alone that they continue to do so despite suffering at his hands. Maybe they too were fucked up by their parents? Maybe it's just another case of people being attracted to people whose pathologies enable their own.

Whatever the answer, this is not the kind of film that deals in straightforward answers. Rather, Michael Winterbottom gives us a more or less faithful adaptation of the celebrated pulp novel from Jim Thompson - its triumphs and failures in tact. The film works best as a sinister mood piece, anchored by the superb central performance of Casey Affleck and embedded in superlative production design. I was genuinely surprised that actresses known best for fluffy rom-coms - Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson - would want to appear in such a film, and yet more surprised to see how well they acted in the demanding supporting roles as Lou's mistress and girlfriend respectively. They really hold their own against a supporting cast of the calibre of Ned Beatty and Elias Koteas. This movie is worth watching for the quality of the performances and the cinematography alone.

Nonetheless, this is a flawed film. Yes, there's a crime caper that propels the plot, and some faint dramatic tension between the unions, big business, and a cover up, but this movie is basically a psycho-drama. The fault of the piece lies in the fact that, as psycho-drama, it always holds the viewer at a distance from the motivations of the three key characters. This makes for a frustrating film - a teasing provocation.

One final word about the violence in the movie. THE KILLER INSIDE ME got a lot of press coverage in the UK on account of its graphic depiction of violence against women. Moreover, the movie was accused of misogyny on the grounds that the women in the movie apparently get off on being victimised. To my mind, THE KILLER INSIDE ME is not at the extremes of graphic violence in cinema. Viewers used to the cinema of Haneke or Noe will have seen far worse. Moreover, there is no sense in which this film is "torture porn". Winterbottom's intentions are manifestly earnest. I also find accusations of misogyny misplaced. Yes, the fact that these women go back for more is disturbing. But surely the movie/book are saying something about a particular psychopathology - and in this case it happens to involve the man as sadist and women as masochists. But there is no general point to be made about the role of men and women in such relationships. After all, just look at the dependent relationship between Johnny Papas and Lou.

Additional tags: Mags Arnold, Melissa Parmenter, Tom Bower, Simon Baker, Liam Aiken, Jay R Ferguson, Jim Thompson

THE KILLER INSIDE ME played Sundance and Berlin 2010 and is currently on release in the UK, USA and Denmark. It opens next weekend in South Korea. It opens in August in Belgium and France; in September in Switzerland, Greece and Taiwan; in Finland and the Netherlands in October.

NINE - a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit

Rob Marshall directed two movies before NINE and I didn't like either of them. His movies are pretty on the surface and are obviously the product of much care and attention to detail. But somehow they miss the essential point of the story, not to mention any subtlety or subversion. And this is a major flaw in movies that deal with the the appearance and reality of sexual domination (MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA) and sexual and judicial corruption (CHICAGO).

And yet, still flush with the some-time success of CHICAGO, Marshall had the ambition to tackle NINE, a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical that was itself an adaptation of Fellini's seminal movie - perhaps one of the greatest movies of all time - 8 1/2. How can I explain to you what a technical, psychological and dramatic achievement Fellini's film was? It was a movie that dared to depict the impossibility and insanity of trying to create art in a commercial, celebrity-obsessed environment. Even more daring, it was a movie that threw its own director's psyche onto the screen - his narcissism, his eroticism, his conflicted relationship with his childhood, his relationship with his mother, his wife, his lovers....8 1/2 was a movie so radical and so brilliant that it redefined cinema. It was a movie so great that other directors tried to compete with it and came up short - Henri Georges Clouzot, with his INFERNO, had a heart attack trying.

If great artists have tried and failed to match Fellini, what can we say about Broadway composer and lyricist, Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston? Sadly not much. Yes, they have gotten the bare bones of the story - the narcissistic movie director battling writer's block and a kind of personal crisis - running between his wife and his lover - but never finding the pure adoration that only an Italian mother can give. But they fail to translate Fellini's daring and subversion to the Broadway stage. Worse still, the songs are rather anonymous. "Be Italian" has a decent melody but the rest are utterly forgettable. Worse still, the lyrics have none of the rapier-like wit of CHICAGO or CABARET. No, this is a poor vehicle indeed on which to hang a Hollywood film.

Rob Marshall takes poor fare and does nothing to improve it. Yes, there are a couple of new songs but none of them have any more punch than the originals. Indeed, the 60s pastiche Cinema Italiano, is truly bad. Worst of all, Marshall didn't have the balls to change the incredibly weak opening number. And, after all, what's a song and dance show without a bravura opening number? Catherine Zeta Jones in CHICAGO gripped the audience.

Okay, so the music is weak - hardly Marshall's fault. What about the purely cinematic choices? The casting is variable in its success. Daniel Day-Lewis is either miscast as the director, Guido Contini, or mis-directed by Marshall. Day-Lewis' attempt at an Italian accent distracts from his perfect physical embodiment of the distracted, harrassed, hunch-shouldered director. Penelope Cruz and Judi Dench have a lot of fun and perform with gusto as Guido's lover and loyal friend. Marion Cotillard is superb as Guido's suffering wife. Fergie of The Black Eyed Peas is the best singer and performer by far in the best song in the piece, despite Marshall saddling her with frightful hair and make-up and entirely missing the eroticism of the encounter with the kid. Less happily, we have Nicole Kidman doing nothing special as the Anita Ekberg inspired movie star Claudia. Sophia Loren survives on her iconic status. Kate Hudson is entirely out of her depth but luckily only has to do a MTV dance routine before she's off stage. Her part is entirely disposable.

Most importantly, Marshall doesn't attempt to translate the complexity at the heart of the piece. And without that, Guido comes across as merely annoying, unsympathetic and whiny - a big kid with a mamma complex and an over-extended libido. The women, with the exception of the wife, are not really developed. As a consequence, when one of them does something dramatic, it seems not so much out of character, as we don't know what her character really is, but out of the blue. It's just hard to care. The movie becomes a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit. And frankly, there's nothing entertaining about that.

NINE is on release in the US, UK and Slovenia. It opens next week in Greece and Canada. It opens in January in Israel, the Netherlands, South Korea, Cyprus, Denmark, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Spain, Taiwan and Romania. It opens in February in Argentina, Hungary, Sweden, France, Finland, Belgium, Germany and Singapore. It opens in March in Japan.