Writer-director Sophie Barthes marks our card with her first film, a smart existential comedy.
A New York actor named Paul Giamatti (played by Paul Giamatti, below) is spiritually exhausted preparing for the lead in Uncle Vanya, until he reads
about a solution: soul extraction. For a fee, David Strathairn sucks out and stores souls, to lighten the burden of angst. But soullessness turns Giamatti's Chekhov cheery, forcing him to retrieve his depressive mojo – only to discover it has been stolen and given to the girlfriend of a Russian mobster, who believes she now has the soul of a great actor helping her new TV soap.
Cold Souls has more than a touch of Being John Malkovich in its loopy metaphysical ingenuity, and maybe it doesn't quite fill out the promise of its premise, but if you can't enjoy Giamatti's inappropriately randy, bottom-pinching version of Vanya, then you have no soul.
Selected release from FridayHARRY BROWN (18) *** Michael Caine, right, is the main reason to catch this efficiently made but politically asinine cousin to Death Wish, in which Caine's pensioner tackles the rampant crime in his housing estate after his closest friend is bumped off. Emily Mortimer co-stars as the sympathetic police detective who begins to suspect Caine of meting out vigilante justice. Riveting for all the wrong reasons.
General release from Wednesday THE WHITE RIBBON (15) ***Unsettling Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is back with another morality tale, this time set in a small German village before the First World War, where children are ritually humiliated for sinful behaviour. Lengthy, ruminative but worthy of attention.
Selected release from Friday • This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 08/11/09