Sunday Times - Sunday, 5 September, 2004

It's a complex plot that constantly turns back on itself, and just when you think the last bullet has been fired and the last bad guy caught, the story twists into a new shape. At the heart of the drama is a relationship between Creasy (Denzel Washington) and Pita (Dakota Fanning), the child of a rich businessman he is hired to protect.

This encounter between the child, wise beyond her years, and the man whose softer nature has been eroded by a life of perpetual violence and cynical self-justification, is beautifully handled. Fanning is an exceptionally accomplished, highly intuitive performer who makes Pita a vivid, strikingly real character. It's not just the sentimentality that child actors usually evoke; it is a genuinely powerful performance.

We understand why she touches the scarred heart of her keeper and we under stand the intensity and brutality of his response when she is placed in harm's way.

Washington inhabits Creasy's grimy soul convincingly, and the truth of these two performances makes the film so involving.

Without them it would be little more than a clever action thriller, but director Tony Scott uses his trademark ornate editing and bold, flashy camerawork to keep the visual surface dazzling, and the presence of old pros Christopher Walken and Mickey Rourke give it a sense of practised ease.

I must say that with a running time of well over two hours, it tests audience endurance to the limit but, despite that, it really does deliver the goods and puts Washington back in the forefront of his craft.

By contrast, there's the South African film Yesterday, in which Darrell James Roodt tells a simple but hugely significant and tragic story of the impact of HIV/Aids on the rural communities of South Africa.

Yesterday (Leleti Khumalo) is a young wife with a child whose husband works in the city, leaving her to fend for herself in a remote rural village. Roodt captures the slow rhythm of life in these places where a walk to a travelling clinic is an epic journey and a taxi ride an almost impossible extravagance.

It's a society in which teachers walk from village to village looking for work, where life revolves around the labour of drawing water and tending crops. Her community is barely touched by modern life, so when the modern plague of HIV/Aids mani fests a presence, the village falls back on the most basic and cruel forms of protection - ostracism and banishment.

Roodt makes the brave choice of letting the story unfold at its own slow pace, focusing on details and allowing Khumalo's heartfelt performance its full measure of time and emotion. It's not a film that will please a large audience but it is beautifully made and it tells an important story.

Another tale of dark events in the tranquil countryside is I'm Not Scared, a dazzling Italian thriller that takes us into a remote corner of southern Italy to explore the brutality and greed of adults as seen though the eyes of a child.

It starts almost like a horror story with an inquisitive boy poking around in the country side near his house and uncovering a truly horrible object hidden in the fields. He cannot comprehend what it means and builds a kind of fantasy story around it, turning the grim reality into part of a childish fantasy in which he is the hero.

In reality he does nothing about his discovery, fearing the consequences, but even while he spins the protective webs of his defensive fantasy, he knows evil is being done. His innate moral sense drives him to understand the nature of what he is seeing and eventually he must act to stop it.

I know that sounds vague, but I'd hate to spoil the film's meticulously staged revelations, which are chilling. On one level it's a coming-of-age film that owes a debt to Stephen King's Stand by Me, but on another it's a compelling view of how a child confronts the cruel corruption of adults who are supposed to be his mentors and protectors. It's an eerie, unsettling film that you should not miss.

King Arthur starts well with a radical revision of history. Gone are the enchanted turrets of Camelot, the plumes and gleaming armour of the knights and the medieval pageantry of the Arthurian legends.

This film suggests that Arthur and his knights were adopted Romans, European warriors conscripted to fight for the Roman Empire. But as the power of the Caesars fades and the empire crumbles, they are left to maintain order in a war-ravaged country where the power void left by the Romans is filled by hostile, warring clans.

It's a clever idea. Guinevere (Keira Knightley) appears as a warrior princess in leather fight-suits and lashings of blue woad that dye her skin to a kind of barbaric beauty. Merlin is a Druid shaman, one of the last of a dying tribe who decides that siding with Arthur is the only way to preserve and pass on his ancient knowledge.

I was fascinated by the audacity of the concept and the sleek, lively visual designs with which it is carried out. But for all that it is a Jerry Bruckheimer film, directed by Antoine Fuqua. Once the look and the atmosphere are established, revisionist history goes out of the window and in come the trademark chases and battles that producer Bruckheimer does best. Indeed, the battle on a frozen lake is one of his finest moments.

British actors Clive Owen, who plays Arthur, and Ioan Gruffudd, who is Lancelot, shine in the dramatic scenes but they don't register as heroic figures. They seem too complex to fit in with the slash-and-burn Bruckheimer template. They are too reso lutely human and flawed to come across as epic heroes, and a popcorn epic without heroes is an extremely hard sell.

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