NOT A GOOD YEAR FOR ESTABLISHED  FILM DIRECTORS. This was not a good year for established directors. Steven Spielberg's comedy Catch Me If You Can was lightweight and forgettable. Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York was intermittently impressive but did not live up to the immense expectations it created. James Ivory's The Divorce was a tired exercise. Brian De Palma's erotic thriller Femme Fatale was enjoyable in a mindless way but suffered the fate of going straight to video. Ang Lee's Hulk, Alan Parker's Life of David Gale and Lawrence Kasdan's Dreamcatcher bordered on the disastrous. The sad thing about the British cinema was the absence of movies by Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Christopher Nolan in what was a pretty dire year with endless mirthless comedies and dull thrillers. Stephen Fry's debut, Bright Young Things, a version of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, attracted a lot of attention but generally misfired. Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Heart of Me, an adaptation of another novel about the Thirties, Rosamond Lehmann's The Echoing Grove, was better, but went largely unnoticed. The biggest British box-office success, Richard Curtis's Love, Actually, was a shamelessly calculating affair, slightly redeemed by the performances of Bill Nighy and Emma Thompson. Calendar Girls was liked by some, and The Mother was admired largely for the courageous performance of the 68-year-old Anne Reid as a widow having an affair with a much younger man. The two real triumphs of the British cinema were both harsh, unsentimental docu-dramas set abroad: In This World, Michael Winterbottom's account of two Afghan teenagers making an illegal journey to Britain from a Pakistan refugee camp, and Kevin Macdonald's mountaineering movie Touching the Void. What we lacked were Blair-era equivalents of Thatcher Britain pictures of the Eighties and early Nineties, pictures like The Ploughman's Lunch and Raining Stones. The nearest thing to this, and the year's sharpest, most imaginative film about politics and social change, was Goodbye Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker's satire on German unification. As always, there were too many unnecessary remakes, the worst being Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie, a disastrous reworking of Charade, with Mark Wahlberg trying to walk in Cary Grant's old shoes. There will be worse to come next year with Demme remaking The Manchurian Candidate (that's like Rolf Harris repainting the Sistine Chapel), the Coen brothers's Americanisation of The Ladykillers and Tom Hanks planning a new version of Kurosawa's Ikuru . Fortunately there were useful re-releases that should deter remakers, most prominently The Leopard, Sunset Boulevard, Alien and Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life. On a more positive note, some new directors emerged and several young ones confirmed their promise. Spike Jonze surpassed himself with Adaptation. Lilya 4-Ever, the third film of the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson, was a fine work marred by sentimentality. Dylan Kidd made a striking debut with the American independent production Roger Dodger, as did the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles with his devastating look at gang warfare in the slums of Rio, City of God. After an unimpressive low-budget debut with the curious road movie The Last Great Wilderness, the Scottish moviemaker David Mackenzie made a quantum leap with his second film, Young Adam , a sombre adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's bleak Clydeside thriller, in which the ubiquitous Ewan McGregor gives his best performance to date. Charlotte Rampling (The Swimming Pool), Cate Blanchett (Veronica Guerin) and Max von Sydow (Intacto) gave decisive performances in minor movies. Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven) and Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) were cardinal elements of first-rate movies. In two minor movies - White Oleander and Matchstick Men - Alison Lohman emerged as one the most gifted young American actresses of recent years. Two movie trends of the past year are intriguingly complementary or contradictory. One is a fascination with confidence tricksters - the subject of a cluster of films including Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men, James Foley's Confidence and Ji Yang's Chinese noir thriller Blind Shaft, where two homicidal con men shake down corrupt coal-mining officials. The world is being manipulated by crafty exploiters. Seemingly contrasted with this is our trust in facts. Increasingly, documentaries, carefully edited from hours of film, are finding sizeable cinema audiences. This year we've had the marvelous French film about a rural teacher and his one-room class, Être et avoir; the hilarious autobiography of the self-destructive movie tycoon Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture; and a revealing look at the American high school spelling bee, Spellbound. 

Favorite Winners and Turkeys of the Year. What Peers and Critics Think?

What were the triumphs and the turkeys of the arts world this year? Those on the scene pick their favorites and reveal their hates. Kathy Burke (Actress):  Electric Six, Big Brovaz, The Darkness and Beyoncé put everyone else in the shade but Electric Six's videos, which made even my dirty old jaw drop, get the vote for outright cheekiness. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon put a massive smile on my face. My absolute highlight of the year is The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh at the National. I've seen it twice and plan on going again. A brilliant, spooky play that made me laugh, cry and jump out of my skin. Turkey: this year's Big Brother lost me as a fan. Russell T. Davies (TV writer): Great year for television drama, with State of Play and Prime Suspect. My own cultural revolution came about with Sky Plus, I bloody love it. Turkey: television news just gets thicker and thicker. On all channels, the war brought out a simple, jingoistic reportage. And by the end of the year, we've got ITN reporters telling us that to be with Ian Huntley is to be 'in the presence of evil'. Vital, complicated issues are being reduced to limericks for idiots. We should all be ashamed. Anne Reid (Actress): Scenes from the Big Picture by Owen McCafferty is a play about a day in the lives of 21 people living in Belfast - clearly drawn, rich characters, they're made even more interesting because we are never told what their religious or political affiliations are. It was brilliantly directed at the National Theatre by the great Peter Gill. A Play Without Words, also at the National, knocked me out of my socks. The choreography is stunning. A kaleidoscope of intricate shapes and patterns. It's dramatic with wonderful flashes of comedy. But the pinnacle was at the Festival Theatre, Chichester, where Desmond Olivier Dingle was reading his The Complete History of the Entire World and Shakespeare: The Truth. I laughed until I was in real pain. Turkey: I would like to stuff all those pseudo-eavesdropping actuality programs on TV and put them in a very hot oven. Estelle Morris (Minister for the Arts): It's been a great year for Turner enthusiasts like myself, with shows in all three of the cities closest to my heart: Manchester, Birmingham and London. Turner: The Late Seascapes at the Manchester Art Gallery was wonderful. These are pictures to drink in - as powerful from a distance as they are close to. Some of the work has never been on show in this country, and it is a real privilege to see them at last, and in such impressive surroundings. Equally, Tate Britain's Turner and Venice was tremendous. The Hours is my film of the year. It is a jewel, beautifully structured and powerfully acted. The English National Ballet's Rite of Spring at Sadler's Wells was another triumph. I found the intensity and power of the dancers quite hypnotic, and a stunning complement to Stravinsky's music.  Aaron Barshak (Comic): I thoroughly enjoyed the Titian exhibition (National Gallery). When you look at the vibrant blues and reds, you can see what the Hollywood studios aimed for with Technicolor. In Titian's Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence, it's as if Martin Scorsese has commissioned Titian to do the posters for Casino. At the Edinburgh Festival, nothing so impressed me and made me bellylaugh constantly as Reginald D. Hunter's White Woman show. It taught me that everybody has an idée fixe about other groups of people and that even the most liberal of us can be racist and sexist. The most amazing art show I saw was when I attended Her Majesty's Prison Bullingdon. Charles Saatchi needs to buy the place; a triumph in Brit Art minimalism. I have never seen so many unmade beds under one roof. Turkey: the worst show I attended this year, was indeed my own Edinburgh premiere. Things got better as the run went on, but, according to age-old laws of chivalry, I, a commoner, who had touched a royal personage, had to die, and I did... frequently. Peter Conrad (Author, critic): The two performances I won't ever forget came from divas who respectively specialise in agony and ecstasy: Vanessa Redgrave strung out on morphine in the Broadway production of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and the soprano Karita Mattila exposing both soul and body in her glorious, dangerous account of Strauss's Salome at the Paris Opera. The most eye-opening exhibition was Saved! at the Hayward Gallery, sampling the treasures added to our patrimony with some help from the National Art Collections Fund. Nicholas Hytner (Director, National Theatre): Two astonishingly inventive shows did things that were genuinely new to me: Simon McBurney's The Elephant Vanishes at the Barbican and Shunt's Dance Bear Dance under a railway arch in Bethnal Green. I was overwhelmed by a Royal Ballet revival of Kenneth MacMillan's Song of the Earth. Fernando Meirelles's City of God confirmed that South America is now home to the world's most exciting filmmakers. Turkey: I've directed too many turkeys of my own to want to point the finger at anyone else. John Simm (Actor): Glastonbury Festival was incredible this year. We arrived to torrential rain, the sun came out for Echo and the Bunnymen, and from then on, it was three days of joy. Radiohead were stunning, as were Primal Scream, but the highlight for me was The Coral. It was a great year for music, old and new. Missy Elliott, Dizzee Rascal and Blur all pushed things forward, while The Go-Betweens, The Coral, Outkast and The White Stripes all released truly special albums. City of God was the best film I saw this year, it had all the energy and passion of Scorsese's finest work. I also enjoyed Être et avoir and Kill Bill Volume One. On TV I loved David Morrissey as Gordon Brown in The Deal and Chris Eccleston in Flesh and Blood. Stephen Woolley (Film producer): The production of The Pillowman at the Cottesloe; Martin McDonagh's play was astounding. The documentary Être et avoir was wonderful. I also loved the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. Turkey: The insufferably boring David Blaine in his glass box. David Lan (Director, Young Vic): The best theatre I saw was Luc Bondy's production of Anatol in Vienna. An exhilaratingly deep reading of it. Merce Cunningham in the midst of Tate Modern's Weather was the most astonishing event, while Peter Sellars's staging of an Artaud monologue at the same address was the most soporific. Manu Chao were played constantly driving into work and Michael Connelly's series of Harry Bosch crime novels proved effective at making the world go away. Colin Murray (Radio One DJ): The Darkness. I reckon that covers music, performance, art, comedy and genius. When we first started playing 'Get Your Hands Off My Woman' on Radio 1, the response was shock and awe. Thumbs up, rock on. Turkey: Elton John being cool again. Stewart Lee (Writer-director, Jerry Springer - The Opera): The best thing I saw this year was the Czech violinist, singer, composer and improviser Iva Bittova solo at St Luke's, Old Street. She came out, stalked the aisles, stared us out, screeched, scraped and soared in a performance that made me laugh, cry, tremble and then clap my hands off. Turkey: The worst thing I saw was the Daredevil movie. There are plastic Daredevil action figures with more charisma than Ben Affleck.

Alexei Sayle (Comedian and novelist): My cultural highlight was the anti-war demo. As the son of communists, my teenage years gave me an aversion to going on demonstrations. There's nothing a young man wants more than to be seen by all the cool kids walking down the road with a load of old loonies shouting about peace. Yet I have attended every anti-war demo this year and felt enthusiasm and hope. Turkey: The fake one Bush pretended to serve to the troops on Thanksgiving Day on his 11-minute visit to Iraq. Nothing symbolizes the fraudulent, manipulative way the invasion was promoted more than that rubber bird. Tim Firth (Writer, Calendar Girls and the musical Our House): The Liverpool Philharmonic Children's Concert season for their unpatronising irreverence - particularly the bloke who played 'The Flight Of The Bumble Bee' dressed as the Grim Reaper. The year would have been much duller without Cobblestone Runway by Ron Sexsmith, who looks 15, sounds 50 and writes heartbreaking melodies with unfashionably optimistic lyrics. Watching Gypsy on Broadway was an object lesson in musical book-writing. The movie highlight was the Loach-esque street-child assassination scene in Meirelles's City of God. Turkey: Martin Bashir. Beware the documentary maker who starts to use the word 'I' too much. Tony Clark (Artistic director, Hampstead Theatre): Two new plays have stayed with me: Darwin in Malibu - Crispin Whittell's witty comedy, and Roy Williams's Fallout. Taking the children to Olafur Eliasson's installation at Tate Modern was joyful and serene. Turkey: Perhaps people could stop marking artistic enterprise with stars in 2004?

REVIEWS OF MAJOR RELEASES OF THE YEAR

DAY AFTER TOMORROW: BIG, LOUD WITH A MESSAGE TO CONSIDER. Rating: 4 stars

The world hangs in the balance when global warming brings on catastrophic floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, leading perilously to the next Ice Age. A lone scientist (Dennis Quaid) tries to reverse the weather patterns while rescuing his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) from New York City where the weather will soon destroy the city. The Day After Tomorrow is a big, loud, summer action movie masquerading as a cautionary tale with social and political relevance. The film's cataclysm of climatologically chaos turns the northern hemisphere into tundra more frozen than Lambeau Field. Yet it also manages to bring people -- the right people, namely the film's stars -- and enlighten them at the right moments. High school students Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Laura (Emmy Rossum) fall in love while trying to avoid freezing to death in the New York Public Library (though we know they can't possibly die, because they're too good-looking).Sam's estranged parents, Professor Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) and Dr. Lucy Hall (Sela Ward), seem likely to reconcile, thanks to the pouring rain and driving snow. A homeless man (Glenn Plummer), with his trusty border collie in tow, teaches a rich kid from Manhattan's Upper East Side (Austin Nichols) how to keep warm using paper. And most important of all, the vice president of the United States, who just happens to resemble Dick Cheney, realizes only in the aftermath of mass destruction that, maybe he should have listened to warnings about the dangers of global warming. The familiar-looking, 50-ish president, meanwhile, doesn't say much as the situation worsens and leaves the big decisions to everyone else.(This, surprisingly, from a film being distributed by 20th Century Fox, which is owned by the Fox News Channel's conservative parent company -- your fair and balanced source for disastertainment.) Director and co-writer Roland Emmerich, who blew up the White House in Independence Day, seems to want it all here. He wants to preach environmentalism, yet pummel his audience with dizzying sight and sound. He wants to put his characters in peril, yet have them utter something witty as they're about to die. One guy who crashes through the glass ceiling of a mall jokes that he just thought he'd drop in for a little shopping. (Groan.) Yet for all its spectacular visual effects -- including tidal waves that flood Manhattan and freezing temperatures that cause British military helicopters to plummet from the sky -- the movie's most thrilling, terrifying event is one of the simplest: turbulence in an airplane as Sam and some classmates fly from Washington to New York. That's the most realistic force to fear, and the only one likely to make you feel truly anxious. Tornadoes that spin through downtown Los Angeles are actually a joke, simply because they have such remarkably good aim. They take out landmarks like the Hollywood sign and the Capitol Records building, along with a TV reporter who's breathlessly trying to tell the world what's happening around him. (Though how the twisters made it through traffic on the freeways is a mystery.) Conversely, watching New Yorkers scurry for their lives remains unsettling -- even though it's been nearly three years since Sept. 11, and even though the source of terror this time is a computer-generated storm. In the midst of all this is Sam, waiting for his father to rescue him as promised. If that means walking through blizzard conditions from Philadelphia to New York, Jack Hall will do it -- even though he's the only scientist in world who predicted all this deadly weather, and is usually the smartest guy in the room. "When this storm is over, we'll be in a new ice age," he warns several serious-faced government officials before embarking on his journey. By then, the box office will already have been heating up, and that's all that really seems to matter.

CINEMA: FILM REVIEW

Is climate change happening? Yes. Over the last century temperatures rose by 0.6^oC. 2003 saw a number of highly unusual weather events including: Droughts in Southern Africa , Forest fires in Siberia, Flooding in South America .The idea that climate change is harmless and will just mean nicer weather is dangerously wrong. What else? Temperatures are predicted to rise by between 1.4 and 5.8^oC during this century. This might not seem very much but... A warming of just 2 to 3^oC would put: 3 billion people at risk of water shortages, 300 million extra exposed to malaria, 100 million more at risk from coastal flooding. Could it happen overnight? The climate could change dramatically over 10-20 years. It would be extremely difficult for us and the natural world to adjust. The film uses one possible scenario for abrupt climate change - changes to Atlantic Ocean currents creating a cooling effect on Northern Europe. But it's very difficult to say how likely this scenario is as there simply isn't enough data. Can we stop climate change? Only if we all - Governments, organizations and individuals - take real action to combat it. Some, like the current US administration, still need a wake up call. Others are rising to the challenge.

BETWEEN FICTION, NONFICTION AND POLITICS

KILL BILL: Vol. 2 less cartoonish: More emotional resonance than first half. Rating: 3stars out of five

TOM RAIDER

Lara Croft is back. The character, played again by Angelina Jolie and based on the Tomb Raider video game,  hits the big screen on July 25 in "Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life." The film begins in a sweeping rush over the water toward Santorini, the volcanic Greek island best known for the Late Bronze Age site Akrotiri with its magnificent frescoes. We don't get to see the frescoes, however, because an earthquake strikes! The quake has shaken loose wonderful things from an ancient seafloor site, and the next day treasure hunters are diving in the area and pulling up bronze statues. When Croft makes her appearance, her crew of looters complains, "Half the world's raiders are here and you make us wait." But she has pinpointed the source of the antiquities--the Luna Temple, built, she says, by Alexander the Great, and swallowed up by the sea in 330 B.C. In reality, scuba diving in Greek waters is highly restricted and anyone lifting up bronzes like this would be arrested in a flash, such actions violating laws dating back to 1932. So the movie would be over in ten minutes, if this were reality. Since it isn't, Lara Croft can simply grab something and say, "It's mine!" A Chinese tomb-raiding gang intervenes, however, stealing from Croft the mysterious glowing orb she was stealing from Greece. The gang is obviously up to no good, but it's interesting to note, later in the film, they take more care with artifacts they're plundering (packing them in crates) than Lara's associates (who are of the stuff-a-big-sack-full-of-loot old school). It turns out the gang is in cahoots with the real bad guy: Jonathan Reiss, Nobel Prize winner, bioweapons designer, and "modern-day Dr. Mengele." Says the disease monger Reiss, "I've branched out--archaeology." He's using the orb to find Pandora Box which Croft warns is "A weapon more powerful than you can imagine." (Well, given anthrax, nuclear bombs, etc., I think I could imagine.) In the myth, of course, Pandora's Box was opened and all the evils it contained, like gout, escaped. The box should be as empty as Al Capone's vault, but this is Hollywood. So that's the basic idea--the movie is one long chase sequence, including motorcycling on the Great Wall, little wonder China refused permission for them to film there. The stand-in for China? Llyn Gwynant, near Beddgelert in Wales, and a computer-generated Great Wall (according to a BBC report, the film industry in Wales had been hard hit by foot-and-mouth disease). Other archaeological window-dressing in the film includes a cave filled with terra-cotta warriors, copied from those in the tomb of China's first emperor, Shihuangdi. Oh, yes, it isn't strictly archaeological, but what looks like Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, and a number of his siblings do make a guest appearance. As in her first movie, Lara Croft employs a number of special archaeological skills and gear, stuff they don't teach you about in fieldschools: use of the bo (staff) in fighting (in case your guns and knives aren't handy), lots of knives (good for stabbing people and prying out medallions from statues), extra-loud motorcycles (for sneaking up on bad guys), piloting space-shuttle-like gliders (to avoid immigration when entering foreign countries), rappelling upside-down and shooting at bad guys (but missing your own toes), more knives (so you can slash your own arm and make yourself into shark-bait to escape bad guys), parachuting from buildings (to escape more bad guys), jet ski stunts (just to show you can do it), rifle and bayonet drills (for sticking it to persistent bad guys), special-edition jeep (for terrorizing flocks of flamingoes and ostriches), etc. The movie is better than the first--which hauled in more than $274 million worldwide and had a $48 million box-office opening weekend, the most ever for a female-driven movie, according to Viacom--so it is sure to be a commercial success. In the pantheon of archaeology-related adventure movies, it recalls the original Indiana Jones movie, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and uses the tried-and-true formula, replacing the Ark of the Covenant with Pandora's Box, and Nazis with a bioweapons merchant who thinks many of the world's inhabitants are unfit to live. For all its entertainment value, there's nothing here of any redeeming value in terms of archaeology. It's unfortunate; I don't think it has to be that way, even with a character based on a video game. Oh well, maybe they'll do a third movie in which we'll see Lara Croft at a scholarly meeting presenting a paper on long-distance trade and kinship ties in Assyria based on her trace element analysis of metal artifacts (maybe ancient knives?) and newly translated cuneiform tablets.  I can see it now...as a distinguished professor in a tweed jacket and bow tie raises his hand to object to her conclusion, Croft reaches for her cutlery.... Hmmm. Maybe it's better to not worry about archaeology if you go to this movie. Pointing out the archaeological flaws in "Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life" is probably an unnecessary undertaking, but here are a couple of things I spotted in the one viewing of the movie I had. There must be others. Big problems with the Luna Temple. Luna was a Roman moon goddess (actually the Oxford Classical Dictionary says Sabine), so Alexander wouldn't have erected a temple to her. The Greek equivalent would have been Selene. The temple sank in 330 B.C., says Lara, but Alexander didn't get to the Indus River--where the box supposedly was found--until 326, so there's a chronological disjunction there. Also, the box is said to have been responsible for a plague among Alexander's army, but the ancient author Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander makes no mention of a plague there, the box, or, of course, the Luna Temple.