Luna Papa

Six years on from On Equal Terms, Khudojnazarov tries to do it again with a romantic fable about a movie-struck 17-year-old girl left pregnant by an encounter one moonlit night with a faceless stranger who claims to be friends with Tom Cruise. While her father and brother scour the land for the seducer, Mamlakat herself (Khamatova) befriends a young doctor (Bleibtreu) who agrees to be a father to her child - and just might be the real one. Semi-detached from his Tajik roots, the director seems to be aiming for some nebulous ground between Bertolucci's La Luna and a Central Asian folktale. Even before the not-very-special effects take over at the climax, the visual poetry of his previous films has been eclipsed by the clichés of roistering 'magic realism' in the Kusturica manner.