Throughout, brutality and sadism are churning just below the surface, threatening to shatter the eerie calm, to twist the affability and easy-going climate of its small town languor into a gnarled and hateful confusion, always daring us to look away. And when it does explode, inevitably, it is unrepentant and repulsive, unquestionably grotesque.

It is hugely problematic but it is fundamental, too. It is the essence of the film; the beating pulse of the narrative. Diminish it and the film collapses. It has helped make it one of the most controversial and challenging of this or any year, but it also makes it one of the most important.

Jim Thompson’s novels were, invariably, disturbing trips into the minds of intelligent psychopaths. Though scruffy and childish at times his writing could be beguiling nonetheless, and was certainly deemed “cinematic” enough to attract Hollywood producers several times in the latter half of the last century.

Yet past adaptations have always taken a step back, baulked at the true perversity of the author’s imagination or, worse still, fluffed their lines. Even Sam Peckinpah, a hard-bitten filmmaker and man not known for his modesty or reserve, seems only reluctantly committed to the writer’s brutality in The Getaway (1972). Killer… is different.

Casey Affleck, continuing in the same vein as his sinister portrayal of Bob Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is the reptilian, murderous small town deputy sheriff, Lou Ford, a man with a tortured morality and a contemptuous indifference. Part smiling, part sneering, teasing, eyes glazed and half closed, crawling listlessly in the long grass of self-righteousness, he dispenses his own perverted form of justice with flying fists, boots and a wicked line in evasion. He provokes and taunts.

He punches his lover Joyce (Jessica Alba) into a cleaved and scrambled pulp while whimpering his love for her as she, gargling pathetically through a mouthful of bone and blood, asks why. He kicks another, Amy (Kate Hudson) until she bleeds and pisses across his kitchen floor, then pulls her skirt over her head (to both cover and expose her simultaneously – a duel act of humiliation and preservation) moves casually to read the newspaper while she lies dying, before rising to swing his foot into her abdomen once more – a sickening, spiteful coup de grace, self-hatred mixed with sexual loathing, a violent act born, perhaps, out of the S&M enjoyed in the bedroom but which he has become unable to constrain.

He eludes, skulks, denies and deceives; he is charming and lifeless in the same breath, a toxic ferment of provincial bonhomie, backslapping charisma and quiet malevolence. Lou Ford is a genuinely gruesome character and this is indisputably his film. He saturates it.

But where does the violence leave us? It is true that the more brutal acts (if brutality can be measured comparatively) are meted out to women. Men are killed in, by comparison, more merciful ways or take their own lives as a consequence of Ford’s slippery manoeuvrings. But accusations of misogyny or glamourisation feel hard to pin down because unlike, say, the cartoonish carnage of Tarantino or some Asian Extreme cinema, this is all so very, very real.

Winterbottom has created a stomach-turning visual realization of Thompson’s torrid world and does so without recourse to special effects or theatricality. So one could argue, even, that he has acted with considerable restraint, working within the very clear limits of realism.

Pragmatism does not negate authorial responsibility, of course, or we would be on very thin-ice indeed, but in truth the film is not the source text and in translating the violence from page to screen with such honesty Winterbottom has simply stayed true to the novel. It is upsetting, it is very difficult to watch and it is hard to say, unequivocally, what he intended with such truthfulness, but anything less would be a negation of that directorial responsibility and a denial of Thompson’s intent.

Perhaps, though, the debate over meaning is more critical self-indulgence because The Killer Inside Me is also, or rather is first, a splendid piece of filmmaking. It is beautifully shot – Michael Zyskinds’ cinematography is wonderfully polished and understated – the narrative is perfectly balanced and the acting superb.

Its delicate touches are as beautiful as the violence is horrifying and it has been some time since I have watched a film in which the atmosphere – the heat, the dust, the unhurried pace – feels so tangible. Winterbottom may have acted as a premeditated provocateur and, despite the somewhat bemused nature of many of his publicity interviews, relished his role in doing so. But with Killer… he has proven himself to be, once again, a frighteningly rare, talented and eclectic filmmaker.

As its title suggests, this is a book ostensibly about the war. In truth it is about very much more. Junger judiciously avoids politicizing the conflict or attempting to find crude meaning in America’s presence in this most inhospitable terrain, no doubt aware that true meaning now lies beyond even the most hawkish logic. He doesn’t try to unpick the Korangali way of life, project meaning or unearth specific political principles. Instead he focuses on the men stationed at the front line; men living amongst bullets and mortars and flies and dirt; men who volunteered for combat for many different reasons but who now find themselves inextricably bound by an extraordinary, potent sense of brotherhood.

This specific neutrality enables him to offer a deeper discourse, to explore the personal cost to combatants, the psychological price paid by each and the remarkable effect that isolation, frustration, shards of intense violence and prolonged empty chasms of boredom can have on groups of disparate young men (they are, in the main, heartbreakingly young and they are all men.) Dividing the book into what are essentially three long essays, “Fear”, “Killing” and “Love” Junger breaks down the lives of the soldiers, often into minute detail. From the particular brand of physical and verbal roughhousing that underpins their relationships; the extraordinary acceptance of firefights fought in flip-flops and “gym shorts and unlaced boots, cigarettes hanging out of their lips”; the concentrated rush of adrenaline that precedes enemy attacks and becomes eventually, and incomprehensibly to the reader in the anesthetized shelter of his own life, irreplaceable; the hours spent sitting aimlessly in the heat and dust ruminating and reeking of ammonia (as their fatless bodies burn muscle); and, most tragically, the trauma brought on by the deaths of men with whom they have faced enemy bullets and bombs until luck (and Junger expertly explains quite how important a part luck has to play in front line life, and death) catches up with them.

Certain characters within the platoon stand out – the thrilling, protective Lt. Col Bill Ostlund, Sgt. Brendan O’Bryne, the platoon’s grounded and teak –tough NCO, among many – but for Junger no single part is greater than the whole and ‘The Rock”, as the 2^nd battalion is known, is the true protagonist. The extraordinary effect (psychological, social and neurological) that it has on its members is the driving force within the narrative and Junger dissects it up superbly. The love (of a very different kind) that these men have for each other and the loyalty that runs though the platoon’s core, loyalty that sees them aching to return to combat from leave, unable to cope with the triviality of civilian life, and would have them throw themselves onto a hand grenade to save another’s life, is almost incomprehensible to anyone beyond its confines. For these soldiers it is the essence of being human.

War is a gripping book written in a stark, beautiful prose. It is challenging and upsetting and covered in extraordinary detail. Junger risked his life across five tours into Korangal Valley to document the lives of these men who risk their own lives every single day. The result deserves to be read by as wide an audience as possible.

Very rarely a film will break out from the fringes of the medium, from the rarified world of cineaste festivals and art house screenings into a broader mainstream consciousness and, through a series of mesmeric flourishes, transcendent jolts, diaphanously nuanced performances or the sheer scope of its artistic ambition will reaffirm the power of cinema to conjure magnificent and unique acts of arousal and awakening. As 2009 tipped into 2010 films such as Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Clare Dennis’s 35 Shots of Rum created an exceptional and rich seam of brilliance confirming that a small part of the British cinema-going public does indeed have an appetite for more than teenage vampires, boy wizards and CGI simulations. These films broke no records – today’s myopic benchmark for success. They may even have barely registered inside the monolithic Cineplex’s of middle England. But they did scramble determinedly out from the cracks to whisper quietly that a thrilling brand of originality, fuelled not by bottom lines, cross-pollinated teenage talent or ancillary merchandising but by the fertile imagination of a few passionate and committed visionaries, is alive and kicking.

Luca Guadagnino’s elliptical I Am Love (Io sono l’amore), produced by, and starring, the superlative and singular Tilda Swinton, is not a flawless film but it is so wondrously majestic, so enthralling and charismatic that to resist it, to deliberately seek out fault, feels almost barbarian. It is melodramatic, for sure, and accusations of visual histrionics, even self-indulgence, will surely be plentiful, but this is a melodrama, a sweeping dynastic saga of inter-generational conflict, of a struggle for power and an exploration of politics and of female sexual discovery and emancipation. It is baroque filmmaking based on heightened emotion, a deep sensuality and an overt theatricality that makes no excuses for its grand and ravishing ambition. Guadagnino peppers the film with discreet, understated moments that counter the sumptuousness and work beautifully in their own right, creating something a visual dialogue that slots perfectly into the pace of the narrative, but this is a film that wears its style and splendor proudly. It is grand, operatic and studied in the manner of Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963) and far from flaunting unanchored visual trickery it weaves its impressive aesthetic identity firmly into the central narrative and its several intriguing offshoots.

That storyline, of a wealthy Milanese patriarch subverting the established family lineage, preferring to share his empire between his son, Tancredi, and a favored grandson, Edo, rather than his son alone, is, respectfully, a familiar Shakespearian one. However, around this central act other more absorbing tales emerge, counterpointing that drama and providing both Guadagnino and, in turn, the audience with the opportunity to explore more personal, delicate themes. Not least of these is the sexual re-awakening of Swinton’s character, Tancredi’s wife, the Russian Emma, in the arms of her son’s handsome friend, a humble chef, Antonio. Having abandoned her Eastern past, in favour of her frigid, privileged and caged present, in this secret romance she rediscovers something of herself, something more personal and rewarding and embarks on a journey, both literal and metaphorical, with her lover. Alongside her daughter Elisabetta’s revelation that she is a lesbian (a repressed secret within such conservative circles) and some grave ethical dilemmas faced by her son in the management of his grandfather’s business, both private and broader social moral issues are addressed seriously, and with elegance.

With a spectacular, commanding score by John Adams that is so entwined with the unfurling drama as to become inseparable, I Am Love is a film of grand and breathtaking risks that deserves to be seen by a far wider audience than it will inevitably reach. It is unmistakably and resolutely European and succeeds in being simultaneously both classical and contemporary, meshing the high drama of the past with the bold, sometimes intimate experimentalism of the present. It is fascinated by the human emotions that play out on both the largest and smallest of stages and brings these to life with a distinguished poeticism and confidence of style that is utterly exceptional in cinema today. I urge you to seek it out, to embrace it and simply to take pleasure in Guadagnino and Swinton’s brave, arresting vision.

Where James Toback’s 1978 drama Fingers was the inspiration for Jacques Audiard’s celebrated 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, for the pulsating, brutal and achingly tense prison drama A Prophet the French director has mined the likes of Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jules Dassin and Jean-Pierre Melville to create a instant genre classic and an audacious piece of cinematic story telling. It is the standout film of the last 12 months, quite possibly of the 12 to come, and places Audiard firmly in the pantheon of great European filmmakers. Indeed, there must be a claim that over the course of a career in which he has directed a comparatively bashful five films in 16 years (including, A Self Made Hero, Read My Lips and The Beat…), Audiard has assembled a beautifully refined collection of work to rival, or better, the notional cream of the cinematic world. In an industry that celebrates overindulgence and lavishes praise on creative gluttony, Audiard, much like that other inspired recluse Terence Malick, proves that sometimes less is almost certainly more.

In A Prophet he has created a complex but hugely rewarding film about growth and survival. It is the story of an illiterate young inmate rising through the ranks of the prison criminal classes, from nervous greenhorn to formidable player. It tells of his transformation, his manipulation and his shifting status under the (precarious) guidance of the prison kingpin until, armed with a new cunning and swagger, he ruthlessly and decisively acts to usurp his tutors-in-violence. It is moving, vicious, grimly cynical and entirely dispassionate, claustrophobic and elaborately constructed. It is also utterly absorbing.

The film’s star, Tahar Ramin, gives a beautifully nuanced performance as the enigmatic Malik, the cornered, wide-eyed innocent cast adrift into the fierce bear pit of blood-soaked prison hierarchies who grows in confidence, and influence, as he slowly unpicks the complex and nefarious web of tribal codes that underpin criminal life. While Niels Arestrup, as the toxic Corsican overlord, Cesar, who rules obdurately over the fate of others and commands Malik’s allegiance by ordering him to murder a fellow Arab inmate, is fearsome and convincing. The sequence in which Malik is trained and prepares for that assassination is one of the most tense and unsettling I have ever experienced and the murder itself, clumsily executed in cocktail of panic and naivety, is filmed with absolutely no concession to audience sensibilities. Cesar’s desperate decline, too, from tyrannical ogre to ineffectual bit-part player, coldly pushed aside in the unrelenting battle for a very tenuous kind of power, is perfectly played out.

Watching A Prophet I was reminded of another towering prison film of recent years, Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008); but where that film played out almost serenely, just below the surface of prison life, A Prophet mines a far deeper seam of realism, one submerged in the shadowless spaces. Audiard disentangles the labyrinthine, poisonous realities of state captivity without sentimentality for the protagonist and with a dramatic momentum that underscores the survival-at-any-costs mentality required to endure, from lights-up to lockdown. It is an inevitable and gelatinous mire into which Malik is pulled but from which he emerges formidably schooled in a unique strain Darwinian darkness. At 2h30m this is a long film, but it is impeccably paced to capture this conversion in all its callous glory.

A Prophet throws up many intriguing questions about ethnicity, post-colonialism, loyalty and (im)morality, but first and foremost it is a wickedly compelling film. Its power derives from the density of its plot – one that requires absolute surrender to its numerous, interwoven strands – its uncommon refusal to pass judgement on any of its players and, aesthetically, on the stark juxtaposition between bleak realism and heightened fantasy, and all that it implies within the context of the narrative. The result is a triumphant film that demands viewing, and reviewing, and one that confirms, along the work of Micheal Haneke, Claire Denis and Andrea Arnold among others, quite what a strong year it has been for European filmmaking.

Gil Scott-Heron, arguably the most influential poet to come out of America in the last fifty years, the master chronicler of American mistrust and arch social provocateur, has released his first album since 1996’s Spirits and twenty-eight years after his last release for Arista Records, Moving Targets. The great pioneer of socially conscious soul and rap has emerged from this extended hiatus, part spent incarcerated on Riker’s Island for cocaine possession, with the searingly brilliant I’m New Here and, if he has taken a step away from the acid-jazz and soul that made him famous a quarter of a century ago, placing him among yet detached from the pantheon of great soul revolutionaries of the era, including Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, a new rawness acquired with age makes this album a match for anything that he released at his zenith.

It is an album so sparse, so rare and desolate, set against the simplest electronic and acoustic canvas, that it exploits every nuance and shade of Scott-Heron’s ravaged vocals to the most magnificent, hypnotic effect. Me and the Devil is a cover of Robert Johnson’s blues classic remolded with a dark electronic undercurrent; Bobby Bland’s ambiguous blues appeal, I’ll Take Care of You, is rendered dense with hope and heartache, positively bending under the weight of love’s ambition, impelled by a steady bass drum and lingering beautifully over measured piano chords; Where Did the Night Go is a short, sharp burst of ambient darkness tracing the singer’s unresolved relationship with his own existence and ideologies; while The Crutch mines the similar territory with stripped back and powerful effect. Throughout Scott-Heron displays the most captivating, free-flowing and soulful curiosity and the effect is mesmeric.

I’m New Here is an album that advances Scott-Heron’s reputation as an outstanding poet but one that simultaneously strips away and demystifies all that made him such a powerful revolutionary force in the first place. No one more than the man himself is as acutely aware that his legacy means little across the time that has elapsed and the changes that have occurred in his absence and from this modest, introspective foundation a new, more meditative artist has emerged. It is a hugely charismatic album, soaked in a lifetime’s experience and wisdom; it is bold, beguiling and triumphantly fashioned. I’m New Here might just come to be the album that defines this mighty artist’s career.

Photograph: Terrence Jennings /Retna Ltd./Corbis

In Sarah Bakewell’s versatile, brilliant and joyful account of Michel de Montaigne’s life and work there is a quote from poet and author Leonard Woolf proposing the 16^th century French philosopher to be “the first completely modern man” with an “intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and all other human beings.” Reading Bakewell’s book, and Montaigne’s Essays themselves, one becomes acutely aware of exactly how modern he is, of quite how relevant he is today as he was some 350 years ago. The time that has elapsed since first committing his thoughts to paper seems to have concertinaed into the briefest of moments and his ambiguity, his uncertainty and his energy, his awe and innocent perplexity at the vagaries of life, remain entirely undimmed. They are, even in the swirling miasma of twenty-first century living, some of the most exciting and thrilling and instructive ideas one is likely to come across. Indeed, it is this notion that the Essays transcend history that, for Bakewell, makes them such important writings.

Not that Montaigne’s age was devoid of incident, far from it. Sixteenth century France was a nation beset by rebellion, war, religious enmity, fraught political infighting, domestic uprisings and a succession of weak and ineffectual monarchs; but it was also an age of great philosophical introspection and few were as introspective as Michel Eqyuem de Montaigne. It is this that made, and still today makes, Essays so captivating or, in the words of the man himself “both wild and extravagant”: the subject matter is, quite simply, the author himself. Montaigne spares no aspect of his life, however trivial, in the pursuit of some meaning, doing nothing more than merely inviting his readers to watch him think. It was as beautiful a conceit then as it is today and in his easy-going and accessible style he creates an intense familarity, disarming in his honesty (“I am free to give myself up to doubt and uncertainty, and to my predominant quality which is ignorance”) and appealing in his idiosyncrasies. The result is a free-flowing ramble, a saunter through the mind of a man who, by a series of incidents scattered across his lifetime (including the death of all but one of his children, that of his most cherished friend La Boétie to the plague and his own near-death experience in a riding accident) had learnt that the best way to deal with life’s episodic inconsistencies was simply happy acceptance, just to relax; what we might call today “letting it slide.” As he says himself, “the only thing certain is that nothing is certain.”

Bakewell, rightly, places this attitude firmly within the lineage of the Hellenistic philosophy of the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics and their collective encouragement of “mindfulness” through “equilibrium”, that is to say having complete control of one’s emotions – the goal should be happiness in this world (eudaimonia) not Heaven. But Montaigne extricates himself from the fanaticism, often violent, that can beset both philosophy and religion by remaining entirely grounded in the quotidian. It is an approach that would later drive some to distraction, notably Pascal and Descartes, but it is one that has ensured an unbreakable bond with the common reader. So, he writes on his forgetfulness, his cat’s role in his understanding of differing perspectives, liars, thumbs, “That we laugh and cry for the same thing”, smells, sleep, the scent on his moustache, pedantry, cannibals…the essays are as varied as they are simple. And they are more accomplished and relevant for it.

Bakewell’s thrust that Essays has passed through the ages undiminished is hard to dismiss. So much of what Montaigne concluded then, in that he concludes anything at all other then there are no simple conclusions, might help us to better grasp the violent shifts in today’s changing world should we choose to embrace it. The notion that the best way to tolerate randomness and uncertainty, to understand and engage with haughty ideologies that pass as universal codes of behaviour, to comprehend the multiplicity of the human condition, would be simply to suspend judgment is a wonderfully truthful one. And it is one that, while counterintuitive to a modern world where we are encouraged to seek out only definitive answers, should really command our attention. For this reason alone How to Live is a fantastic, enjoyable and enthralling primer into a world of relaxed thinking and tolerance and it, and of course the essays themselves, thoroughly deserve to reach as wide a readership as possible.

Image courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library

In its favour, Winstone is magnificent as ever. There are very few actors who can pull off such fraught inner-turmoil, a heady mix of sensitivity, innocence, confusion and extreme violence, with quite the same conviction. His screen presence is alarmingly intense and his delivery, jumbling rapid-fire, staccato despair with drawn out and prolonged agony, a man completely unable to express himself, is beautifully nuanced. While his character fails ultimately to live up to his promise, Winstone is clearly an actor at the very top of his game. McShane, too, is magnificent as a sinister, homosexual gangster boss, a Pinter-esque figure calmly and menacingly pulling the strings from the corner of the room in which much of the drama is set. And in that room, other than the disappointing script, lies one of the film’s main problems: it all feels very “stagey” and so, from a cinematic perspective, very limited. Whereas other “theatrical” films, such the David Mamet-scripted formidable Glengarry Glen Ross, excel precisely because they are so tightly written, the characters so finely realised and the pace pitch-perfect, here there is simply not enough at the heart of the narrative, enough spark, to keep the film moving forward. There are no interesting puzzles or plot devices to maintain momentum and while the characters are, broadly, an intriguing bunch they are nowhere nearly fascinating enough to sustain an entire film.

This is a great shame because amongst all the relentless machismo, swearing and bus pass cockney bravado there really is much more interesting film pushing to get out. Like Sexy Beast it is one of loyalty and love, of men testing the boundaries of friendship and exploring the lengths that they might go to protect their extraordinary brand of honour. Here, however, it is too cartoonish, too bluntly finished to be anything other than only mildly interesting or entertaining and ultimately all we are really left with is a group of faakin’ ‘ard old geezers shoutin’ and yellin’ and whackin’ people. Which, even with some brilliant star turns, makes it if not dull then just a little tired.

The plot is a starkly simple, if troubling one. An unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), both deserted by their wife/mother (Charlize Theron), cross a decimated and desolate America in an ongoing fight to preserve their own humanity. Exhausted, cold and hungry, their journey, ceaselessly and perhaps pointlessly pushing their trolley of threadbare and limited possessions (the shadow of Beckett again) is both a physical and symbolic test that takes them through wretched landscapes, derelict, skeletal towns where monuments to man’s follies once stood, to the barren sea and deep into their own souls. Morality has been cast adrift in the aftermath of this cataclysmic event and the question of whether the man can maintain self control in the face of the depravities against which he is trying to protect his son – cannibalism being the starkest and darkest – looms large. As the journey evolves the pair encounter a succession of dangers and while the man becomes ever more resolute in his role as protector, and concurrently ever more resigned to their condition, then the boy begins to assume the role of a soulful, broader moral conscience, questioning their own behavior in this theatre of malevolence. Their relationship, while frequently tender and moving, is, one senses, heading in opposite directions, compelled by competing urges. It is a fascinating development.
Hillcoat was also at the helm of another fantastic, and woefully overlooked, exploration of morality, loyalty and betrayal, The Proposition, and here as there the landscape plays a central role. Where that film was scorch-dry and dripping red with the dustbowl wastelands of the Australian outback, then The Road, terminally grey and washed out is, too, in so many ways defined by the palpable realism of its nightmarish setting. This is surely a rendering of a decimated planet that we can relate to in its striking resemblance to the one we are already committed to, and it is all the more terrifying for that. It is real and heartbreakingly authentic (Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography is magnificent, there is no CGI and the film is shot on location in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and, most poignantly, in the suburbs of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans) and so the question that one must ask is, in the face of such wretchedness, when one is all alone and the only reason to live is the relentless fight to survive, then what exactly is there to survive for?
This is the existential question that, in the absence of any traditional narrative drive, propels the film forward and is one that translates well from book to film. And for that reason, for that intelligence, The Road, while desperately bleak and demanding, should be warmly praised. It is a beautifully realised film and among the growing cycle of apocalypse films that has emerged over the last decade it is, while not without fault, a standout work.

I was ambling happily along Camden High St on my way back from lunch today, running the usual gauntlet of heroin addicts, charity muggers and Kestrel drinkers and dreaming lazily of nothing much in particular, when I skidded wildly across a particularly fruity patch of ice and landed squarely on my coccyx. As I writhed limply on the busy pavement in mixture of agony and humiliation, roundly ignored, stepped over and certain that my stock could sink no lower, a long shadow loomed over me and I was finally offered the assistance of a passing good Samaritan. This everyday hero? This guardian angel with a sturdy gait and rippling forearms like hocks of ham….?

A grey-haired, hunched lady of at least 90 years. With a walking stick. And outdoor slippers. How utterly and hopelessly degrading. Humiliation over, at least……Not so! Once I had clawed myself to my feet, clinging pathetically to her BHS anorak, it became quickly apparent that a group of unruly local youths had gathered ringside with the express intention of laughing at me. Loudly. And pointing to draw maximum attention. And shouting incoherent abuse. And possibly filming it on their phones. It was hard to tell in the red-hot fug of total embarrassment. Have you noticed that the freckled, cheeky n’er-do-wells of yesteryear have morphed into a herd of crack-fuelled, malicious little sh*tsticks not satisfied until they have, at the very least, sliced up some poor innocent with a blunt and rusty Stanley knife. What ever happened to nipping over the garden fence to pinch a couple of mouldy apples from miserable old Mr. Miggins? Or postman’s knock? Or setting fire to your sister’s valuable collection of Beatrix Potter books?

Thanking the generous, and now possibly quite self-conscious old lady, I scurried and skidded away, keen to retreat to the sanctity of my office, a cockle-warming brew and a medicinal afternoon on YouTube, only to be met with yet more peels of laughter and mocking invective. In the name of Satan’s burning crotch, what had I done to deserve such further cruelty? The large, muddy damp patch swelling handsomely across the seat of my trousers gave me my answer, it making me look, no less, like some frantic, howling escapee who’d shat is undercrackers in some sort of filthy protest now that the heavy sedatives were wearing off. Brilliant!

Forced to make my way back to my desk by edging slowly through the streets with my back to various walls and fences like a midnight peeper, once returned I contemplated removing my strides and drying them on a radiator. However, the added humiliation of appearing like the weird kid who defecates himself on the school trip and has to spend the rest of the day sitting on the minibus with the dinner ladies, in a pair of borrowed yellow Y-fronts, was just too, too much. So I just sat there like a damp, muddied, red-faced tit.

Just thought I’d share this with you. To get it off my chest, you see. And possibly brighten the end of your day.

Happy New Year, folks! Happy New Year! x

Precious, Lee Daniels’s screen adaptation of the 1997 novel, Push, by New York poet Sapphire, is less a rollercoaster of emotion than a nine-pound sledgehammer of unrelenting torment that hits you right between the eyes. From a critical perspective this is both a curse and blessing. Indeed, so disturbing are some of the key moments that, dare I say it, by the final quarter one starts to become relatively inured to the ordeal. What starts out as a stark, often grotesque, but never-less-than compelling film begins to feel strangely tired, so mired in its own horror that it feels uncertain about how it should bring itself to a satisfying, narrative resolution. Because despite its Indie credentials and its triumphant reception at the Sundance and Cannes festivals, Precious is, structurally, very much a mainstream film that does demand a resolution. It does finally end with hope of some sort, although knowing the political and social trajectory of late-Eighties New York (the film is set in 1987) one can assume that nothing hopeful should be taken for granted. That is not to say that it fails as such, or that this should detract from the remarkable performances of its two main stars in particular, but it does suggest that it is so heavily loaded with suffering that the storytelling begins to dull slightly, ultimately deferring to the weight of the message. For obvious commercial reasons the literal expression of the unfolding tragedy is in many ways artfully done, anesthetised even, but the overarching implication is never less than crystal clear: for a certain and not insignificant proportion of American society, life is only tragedy, little more than a remorseless succession of personal, familial and systemic failures against which any flecks of hope and light, any gestures at breaking the cycle, however small, will ultimately be snuffed out without the help of an extraordinary coterie of golden-hearted guardian angels. And if that sounds rather like a variation on a fairytale, then herein lies one of the films flaws. Precious is powerful, affecting and important but it falls frustratingly between camps, caught between two, or arguably three, narrative and aesthetic impulses: horror, hope and beauty.

Claireece “Precious” Jones (a remarkable debut by Gabourey Sidibe) is an obese, illiterate, African-American teenager growing up in New York’s Harlem borough. She is pregnant with her second child by her own father, who rapes her under her own mother’s impassive gaze; she is repeatedly physically and mentally maltreated by her mother (an extraordinary, intense performance by US comedian and chat show host, Mo’Nique); she is humiliated by her peers on a daily basis; and, it later transpires to our horror as we imagine, and hope, that she is through the very worst, she is HIV+ as a result of her sexual abuse. Expelled by her school because of her pregnancy she transfers to an alternative facility, Each One/Teach One, where her (saintly/serene/beautiful) teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton) urges her to search deep inside herself for salvation from the living hell in which she is trapped. For while she is physically impassive, a near-silent, murmuring mass of unyielding, repressed agony, inside she is a richly imaginative young woman (although in imagining herself to be white on one occasion she demonstrates palpable self-loathing.) It is a contradiction that Daniels plays out through a series of woozy, fantasy vignettes. On her journey to self-realisation and a relative empowerment she encounters a supporting cast of compassionate individuals – a nurse (Lenny Kravitz), a social worker (a revelatory Mariah Carey), her assorted band of new misfit classmates – who encourage her in their own unique ways to push herself to escape.

Precious will provoke two polarised responses when it is released in the UK: one from those who are shocked, shattered but ultimately inspired by a powerhouse narrative and the scorching emotion that demands you engage with the horrors against which some people must battle merely to wake up each morning. And one from those unable to see beyond a heavy-handed sequence of hackneyed clichés that assault them with every emotional trick in the book, forcing a passive audience to engage with a situation with which they have, ultimately, little in common. This makes Precious, in many ways, a contradictory film, one at once propelled by the hope that must prevail and yet one simultaneously pulled back by the sheer scale of horror that its protagonist has to endure. This makes it stylistically ambiguous, too, for while it is genuinely harrowing in parts it is also undeniably attractive, particularly as more colour and light floods in, literally, as the metaphorical light shines brighter also. Accusations of exploitation and “pornographying” the violence will surely follow. This inherent stylistic/narrative conflict is one that looms large in realist cinema and is one that Daniels, in as much as this is a “realist” film, has failed to resolve. Yet one can understand from a commercial perspective why he may have baulked at a visually more repressive approach, in the manner of, say, Gary Oldman’s 1997 tour-de-trauma, Nil By Mouth. The subject matter may be unpalatable but the film, to attract the Cineplex audience at which it is ultimately now targeted, needs to be, at the very least, bearable (one of the film’s Executive Producers is that most vigorous flag waver for mainstream American positivity and self-actualisation, Oprah Winfrey.)

For all these reasons I found Precious a difficult film, in every sense. It is courageous, no doubt, and is superficially a remarkable story bolstered by some remarkable performances. So I urge you to seek it out. But as to whether it lives up to the Sundance and Cannes hype, I am less sure. To me it feels like Daniels has missed the resolution that he sought when adapting the book, and the hope and the power of ”pushing” back at adversity, however ubiquitous, never really materialises in full. The US playwright John Guare once said that audiences should not be fed a replication of life but “have to earn the truth.” If this is so, and I am inclined to agree, the danger with Precious is that these contradictions will leave this audience in a kind of suffocating no-mans land, unable to decide where to go from here.