Edinburgh Film Festival reviews: The Visitor | The Wackness | Somers Town | Donkey Punch

Since 9/11, good films about New York have been very rare. But now, thanks to the Edinburgh Film Festival, two have come along at once

THE VISITOR
****
DIRECTED BY: THOMAS MCCARTHY
STARRING: RICHARD JENKINS, HAAZ SLEIMAN, HIAM ABBASS

THE WACKNESS
****
DIRECTED BY: JONATHAN LAVINE
STARRING: BEN KINGSLEY, JOSH PECK, FAMKE JANSSEN

SOMERS TOWN
****
DIRECTED BY: SHANE MEADOWS
STARRING: THOMAS TURGOOSE, PIOTR JAGIELLO, KATE DICKIE

DONKEY PUNCH
***
DIRECTED BY: OLIVER BLACKBURN
STARRING: JAIME WINSTON, ROBERT BOULTER, NICHOLA BURLEY

IT'S hard to make good films about New York these days. The weight of 9/11 tends to burden them with a sense of profundity their stories can't always support, especially when they're small, personal films that don't have big set-pieces to distract from the issues they address. In their own ways, both The Visitor and The Wackness – each making their UK debuts at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this weekend – confront this difficult territory head on and, against the odds, each manages to avoid falling into any sentimental traps or fatuous pitfalls.

Instead they offer up two rich and distinct portraits of the city that, period-wise, may straddle either side of the World Trade Centre attacks but in terms of their setting remain inextricably linked by a shared understanding of what, historically, makes New York one of the greatest cities in the world.

The Visitor, writer-director Thomas McCarthy's first film since debuting with his low-key charmer The Station Agent in 2003, has by far the more daunting task ahead of it, mainly because it is set in present-day New York and directly deals with the issue of illegal immigration in the wake of the Homeland Security crackdown. Yet this potentially overly worthy theme is precisely why the film seems like such a miraculous achievement. This unassuming picture quietly gets on with the business of telling an intensely moving human story by letting its distinguished cast breathe life into their characters in such a way that we never question their authenticity or the circumstances that bring them together.

Chief among that cast is veteran American character actor Richard Jenkins (if you don't recognise the name, you'll recognise the face from various Coen brothers films or his role as the deceased father in Six Feet Under). He plays Walter Vale, a vaguely depressed sixtysomething economics professor at a Connecticut college who has been drifting through life since the death of his wife. Reluctantly forced to present a paper that he is credited with co- authoring (despite lending only his name to the finished article), Walter leaves the stultifying confines of Connecticut for New York, where he returns to the apartment he's kept in the city for years but hasn't visited in a very long time. This is how he meets Zainab (Danai Gurira) and Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a couple of illegal immigrants (she's from Senegal, he's from Syria) who have been scammed by an associate into believing Walter's apartment was available for rent. Not wanting any trouble, they agree to move out, but after letting them walk out the door, Walter has an inexplicable change of heart and allows them to stay for a few days.

Illegal immigrant Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) brings some joy to the life of Walter (Richard Jenkins) in The visitor

What follows appears (initially at least) as if it is going to lead to a gentle exploration of the way genuine friendships between different cultures can evolve from simple acts of kindness, and on one level that's precisely what the film does. There's a real celebration here of the value of talking and listening to one another instead of just condescendingly pretending to take an interest. But when Tarek falls victim to anti-Arab racial profiling and ends up in a detention centre threatened with deportation, the film becomes a much more pointed critique of the less visible damage that has been inflicted on the city in the wake of 9/11 by the enforced removal of citizens who may technically be illegal, but who have nonetheless made a life in the city and given something valuable back – a piece of themselves.

In less assured hands this development could easily have transformed The Visitor into a dreaded "issue movie", particularly since the plot essentially revolves around that hoary old cliché of the life-damaged white guy spiritually rehabilitated through helping out some poor racial minority. But so carefully does McCarthy excavate this theme with spare, meaningful writing, and so beautifully handled and acted are the relationships he develops between Walter and Zainab, Tarek and, especially, Tarek's mother, Mouna (played by Hiam Abbass), that all such cynicism flies out the window. Just check the final scenes between Walter and Mouna. With barely a word uttered they say so much about the way the smallest, most unexpected things can transform a life, yet with palpable sadness and suppressed anger they also rail against the way panicked and thoughtless attempts to create the illusion of safety in New York are eliminating the very conditions that allow such things to thrive.

The Wackness arrives at a roughly similar conclusion about the changing nature of the city, albeit via a hipper and funnier route. Set over the long, hot summer of 1994, Rudolph Giuliani's much publicised clean-up of New York is the background event informing this coming-of-age flick about a hip-hop-loving 18-year-old who deals pot to a psychiatrist in exchange for therapy. As "the most popular of the unpopular" kids in his graduating class, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is the kind of outsider who has convinced himself that he doesn't need friendships, mainly because he's been kept on the fringes of all the cool cliques throughout high school (he'll supply a party with weed, but won't be invited to hang around and smoke it). Instead he has focused his attention on making mix tapes of the latest hip-hop (he doesn't listen to CDs) and plying his dubious trade to both save up for college and to distract from the eviction notices that are making his home life with his parents more complicated than he'd like.

Rather than popping happy pills to help him get through these tricky latter stages of adolescence, though, he's encouraged by his shrink-cum-client, Dr Squires (played by a long-haired Ben Kingsley, on showy but amusing form), to pursue every life experience possible, especially sex. But when Josh falls for the doc's stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), their professional relationship evolves into a more complicated friendship, with Squires undergoing a full-on midlife meltdown and Luke dealing with being in love for the first time. Deploying lots of sun-kissed lens flares, bleached-out colour schemes and impeccable soundtrack choices (A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-1, Biggie Smalls), writer/director Jonathan Levine delivers an unashamedly romantic vision of what it was like to be young in mid-1990s Manhattan. But it's the way he equates the period specifics of Giuliani's clean-up with the search for quick-fix solutions to help people through every bump in life that raises this a notch or two above other hipster coming-of-age dramas. As Luke comes to realise, hard-times are a vital part of life that shouldn't be swept under the carpet. Like his home city, it's these things that will give him character. And soul.

Speaking of character and soul, Somers Town continues to demonstrate why Shane Meadows is the best director working in Britain. This is England's Thomas Turgoose stars as a young Nottingham lad who runs away to London where he's promptly beaten up and robbed but soon finds friendship in the form of a Polish émigré (Piotr Jagiello) living with his dad in a housing estate in the shadow of St Pancras station. With impressive economy Meadows gives us a clear sense of who these boys are and what their environment means to them and he develops their friendship in lovely and surprising ways. Shot in black-and-white and running to just 75 minutes, this may be more of a cinematic novella than a major work, but it's such a sweet, witty, and compassionate film that it's impossible to feel short-changed by its modest ambitions.

Definitely not sweet or witty, the incredibly slick Brit horror flick Donkey Punch is as nasty and unpleasant as you'd expect from a film named after a horrific-sounding sexual act, the execution of which is the plot kicker that transforms a hedonistic holiday orgy on a yacht into a bloody battle of the sexes. A sort of cross between Dead Calm and Saw, Oliver Blackburn's striking-looking debut certainly has its moments. But with characters that are amoral to the core, the potentially intriguing dilemma facing each of them as they contemplate their newly wrecked futures gives way to slasher movie theatrics.

• The Visitor, Cineworld, tomorrow, 7:15pm, and 22 June, 2:30pm; The Wackness, tonight, Cineworld, 6:30pm, and tomorrow, 9:45pm; Somers Town, today, Cineworld, 5:30pm and tomorrow, 2:30pm; Donkey Punch, Cameo, tonight, 9:15pm, and 22 June, 6pm