Beyond the Clouds

Antonioni's first film in ten years, and it's like he's never been away. This is European art cinema as it used to be known: composed, stately, meditative, in every sense formal. (Modernism looks better than ever, now it's so old fashioned.) The film tells four stories - four potential films in the mind of director Malkovich (the linking material is by Wim Wenders) - in Italian, English, French, music and silence. Four brief encounters are imbued with concerted philosophical and spiritual gravitas by the grace and patience of the camera: 'I only discovered reality when I began to photograph it,' muses Malkovich. Antonioni has always been one to exercise his metaphoric droit de seigneur, and women may feel uncomfortable with the intensity of the director's gaze here, but it makes for entrancing cinema.