There are few film actresses working today who can embrace the extremes of beauty and ugliness as persuasively as Tilda Swinton, and fewer still, I suspect, who have the guts to try. She’s a magnificent, bold, sometimes viscerally uncomfortable screen presence, with an otherworldly alabaster glow and a piercing gaze that seems to nail you to your seat. (She’s one of the few performers who justifies that overworked critical superlative, riveting.) When she’s on screen, you don’t want to look anywhere, even if the story is so bleak, so utterly and overwhelmingly pitiless that you want to look anywhere but at the screen, at anyone but her.

There are about 20 minutes in her latest, “Julia,” a venture in extreme acting and audience provocation in which she plays an alcoholic child-snatcher, when I wanted to split the theater. Directed by Erick Zonca, who seems to have signed a mutually assured destruction pact with his star, pushing her toward an abyss both might have fallen into, the film is a perverse blend of sadism (the director’s, Julia’s) and masochism (ours, Julia’s). But Ms. Swinton demands to be seen even when her character is on a self-annihilating bender so real that you can almost smell the stink rising off her. So I sat in my seat, cursed the screen and was grateful to watch an actress at the height of her expressive power claw toward greatness.

Claw, crawl, stumble, scurry, fly like a bat out of this hell — Ms. Swinton does it all. She’s yelling with pleasure in the first shot, a gaudy image of her at a Los Angeles nightclub that Mr. Zonca frames from a slight remove so that the camera (and us along with it) has some distance from her. She’s exquisite, with long, spidery eyelashes and a wide-open laugh. Everything looks different with the lights turned low, and so does Julia as she gulps her drinks and finally gives the nod to a guy who cannot believe his luck. But that gulping mouth is more of a maw and in time the lights go up, brutally. The next morning, the glamour is smeared all over her face.

For Julia, every morning is another ugly morning after. Not that she seems to notice or care. Her whole life is organized around booze, about getting to that moment when she’s throwing another one back either alone or in a crowd, it doesn’t matter. There’s no pride here, no real friends, save for the alcohol, which is always there, keeping her company. The one person in her life, Mitch (Saul Rubinek), moons about, trying to help keep her real-estate job (at the pointedly named Reality House) and goading her toward sobriety meetings she refuses to sit through. When a woman at one meeting introduces herself, saying they’re neighbors, Julia fires back, “I’m not really down with the good neighbor” thing. No kidding.

At first, “Julia” seems to be shaping up as a portrait of an alcoholic nearly scraping bottom. The early, naturalistic scenes slip into one another seamlessly with no obvious dramatic arc, which fits with a life that feels similarly unstructured. But the story shifts gears soon after the neighbor, Elena (Kate Del Castillo), drags a passed-out Julia home one evening. The next morning, Elena spins a wild tale. Her only son, Tom (Aidan Gould), is being raised by his wealthy grandfather who refuses to let her visit the boy. But Elena has a plan and, she claims, money, and will pay Julia to kidnap Tom, whom she will then spirit off. Julia doesn’t just listen to Elena’s far-fetched scheme, she also follows through on it.

What transpires is so ludicrous, so improbable and so appallingly messy that it actually registers as far more realistic than most movie crimes, like one of those ghastly news stories about a crazy woman who runs off with someone else’s baby for love or money or just because she’s nuts. The smell of money seems to unhinge Julia, who, after a lifetime of self-destruction, decides she deserves a break. (From what? Herself?) The kidnapping is a disaster, horrible and difficult to watch because it’s always difficult to watch a child in distress, and the young actor makes his character’s fear palpable. It doesn’t help that Mr. Zonca is a French filmmaker — there isn’t a Hollywood beat in his storytelling — which means that any bad thing could happen. That’s a joke, but also true.

However heart-thuddingly real, the crime and some motel scenes that follow are so tonally relentless, so claustrophobic and harrowing that I found myself pushed right out of the movie. It was hard to get back in, particularly after Julia runs over a guy with a car, not once, but twice, a scene that drives the film dangerously toward self-parody. But Mr. Zonca, whose best-known feature is the 1998 drama “The Dreamlife of Angels,”pulls back from the edge just in time, largely by channeling John Cassavetes’s “Gloria,” about another tough broad (Gena Rowlands, who else?) on the lam with a kid. Ms. Swinton doesn’t have Ms. Rowlands’s tenderness, but, damn, she has just about everything else you need or want.

Written by Manohla Dargis, NY Times

David Mackenzie is the young British director whose debut feature, The Last Great Wilderness, was an intriguing, untidy beast of a film: a road movie which wound its way up into the Scottish highlands to uncover a sort of Wicker Man serio-comedy. I liked it; others didn't. His new film, a reverent screen revival of Young Adam, the novel of sinister and transient bohemianism by the all-but-forgotten Scottish beat author Alexander Trocchi, is a conspicuously more mature piece of work. 

Everything about this adaptation shows it to be a labour of love: the intensely focused performances, the lugubrious and sensuous cinematography by Giles Nuttgens and intelligent production design from Laurence Dorman that conveys 1950s Glasgow without excessive expense. 

It's a dreamy, disquieting study of sexual tension and guilty secrets. The movie drifts downriver, like the tatty barge on which it's set, towards its finale at a sensational murder trial, resembling something out of Witness for the Prosecution. 

It has its faults - implausibility and absurdity in its sexual imbroglios and a narrative structure that tends towards the elusive. But this is really impressive, accomplished work from Mackenzie, who is showing himself to be a natural film-maker. 

Young Adam is about a crime of passion, which is neither exactly criminal nor exactly passionate. It all revolves around the corpse of a young woman dragged out of the river Clyde one day by two itinerant barge workers. They are Joe and Les, played by Ewan McGregor and Peter Mullan; Joe is a shiftless sort of guy, always lethargically puffing at a roll-up, having an unearned sit-down and gazing broodingly into the middle-distance. Les is an older man who is married to the barge's owner, Ella (Tilda Swinton). She is technically the employer of both men, and lives cheek-by-jowl with them and her little boy on the narrowboat, hauling coal - dirty, cramped and exhausting work which leaves them black with dust. 

The men become like two brothers, matter-of-factly scrubbing each other's back and complaining to Ella, as if to their mother, about who gets the hot water and eggs for tea. But after a punishing night on the drink, Les can't satisfy Ella in bed and inevitably she begins a hungrily physical affair with Joe - an adultery which is played out with flashback scenes of Joe's mysterious past affair with Cathie, played by Emily Mortimer. 

For my money, this is the best performance of Ewan McGregor's career by a long way: subtle and complex. He's no straightforward good guy; his quiet, personable demeanour conceals weakness and arrogance - a would-be writer who abandoned his vocation and now resembles an artist only in moodiness. When asked by Les how he thinks the dead girl died, Joe riffs prose-poetically about how he imagines her undressing, her clothes fluttering "like pennants in the wind" before throwing herself into the water. Ella and Joe do not remark on this departure from his usual laconic monosyllables. But we are to find out just how culpable Joe's flight of literary fancy is. 

Peter Mullan gives another excellent performance: a humane and compassionate view of Les, the hard drinker and hard worker who sees nothing accumulating in his life. Tilda Swinton is always a riveting screen presence - a natural movie star - even when her commanding and patrician charisma cannot quite be accommodated in the confines of a particular role, which I think is arguably the case here. Her Ella is dowdy and fierce, keen to keep her menfolk up to snuff; she's angry and confused about the unruly sensuality awoken in her, and then blooms into beauty as she cultivates a long-dormant taste for pleasure in bed with Joe. 

All this happens in tandem with Joe's past romance with Cathie, which confusingly overlaps with the present as he begins his job on the barge while their love affair acrimoniously crumbles. Mackenzie gets a very strong performance from Emily Mortimer, too - and Mortimer has to carry the film's most bizarre scene. 

At the climax of a blistering row, Joe tears Cathie's clothes off, empties custard and ketchup all over her, takes what looks like a riding crop to her backside and finally forces himself on her. Is it a rape scene? Well, the mandatory 21st-century repudiation of political correctness might appear to rule out such a straightforward reading. There is, moreover, an ambiguous aftermath. Joe storms out to the pub and later returns to find that Cathie has submissively cleaned up the mess and is forgivingly waiting for him - in bed. The act appears to exist within the mysterious unknowability of what is effectively a bad marriage. But what we are to find out later about Joe's weakness and self-centredness certainly shows his readiness to betray and defile Cathie in a more intimate way still. 

The closing act shows Mackenzie slightly at a loss, I think, about where to take Joe. His sexual adventures verge on the ridiculous - is there any married woman who isn't going to get nailed? - and Ella is remarkably trusting about letting him go to the pictures with her widowed sister. But the movie is wound up with a robustly dramatic and vividly demonstrative trial scene which endows it with solidity and permanence. 

Mackenzie has a sure, visual touch and a mastery of cinematic language, at least in embryo. His movie resembles Lynne Ramsay and Terence Davies; it's a little like Richard Jobson's Sixteen Years of Alcohol and there are echoes of David Cronenberg's Spider, based on the Patrick McGrath novel, and Mackenzie is in fact now working on a version of McGrath's Asylum. He is a British film-maker to be proud of - and excited about.

- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Bold, refreshing and unorthodox as ever in her choice of projects, Tilda Swinton takes the lead in this family drama from Italian film-maker Luca Guadagnino, with whom she has worked twice in the past, on The Protagonists (1999) and The Love Factory (2002). With her vividly otherworldly and almost extra-terrestrial screen presence, Swinton is perfectly cast in this elegant, if over-determined and slightly desiccated piece of cinema. She plays Emma, a beautiful and stylish Russian-born woman who has become assimiliated into the moneyed upper-middle classes of contemporary Milan, by virtue of marrying Tancredi Recchi (Pippo Delbono); this is the wealthy, middle-aged heir apparent to a colossally profitable textile empire founded by the formidable, elderly industrialist Edoardo Recchi Sr (Gabriele Ferzetti).

Her Italian is to all intents and purposes flawless. Her dress sense is sensational. She is richly affectionate and warm to the grown-up children of the family in exactly the right way, intimate and confiding to the daughters and wives, a good mistress to the domestic staff, and to the powerful menfolk she is to the perfect degree candid, yet supportive and deferential. She understands entirely what is expected of her, in an almost constitutional sense, when old Edouardo passes on and she assumes the matriarchal responsibility for the family firm. And yet she looks and sounds different from everyone else around her – the way Swinton must, perhaps – and there is a submerged potential for disruption, which begins to surface just as Emma begins to enter into her (compromised) inheritance.

Family meals are always important, and the preparation of a certain Russian dish is to be particularly important. Emma is exacting about culinary standards. But the emphasis here is not the stereotypical affirmation of sensuality and life through food, rather it is more about ceremony and ritual: the meal is a secular high mass invoking the divinity of family responsibilities – responsibilities Emma is about to reject, spectacularly. The film begins in the snowbound environs of wintry Milan and ends in the glowing sunshine of Sanremo, a climbing temperature that mirrors the movie's emotional trajectory.

Emma's upheaval begins when we see how instinctively, even passionately she sympathises with her daughter Betta (Alba Rohrwacher), an art student in London, when she finds out that Betta is gay and has fallen in love with a woman. Betta's personal change in world view is cleverly, indirectly signalled at a family dinner, at which the tradition is that she presents old Edouardo with a new drawing. This year she gives him a framed photograph, because this is the artform that interests her more these days, and the change displeases the old man, nettled by any novelty that he has not explicitly licensed. Emma smoothes over the potential scene, and yet it creates a distinct sense of unease with the rest of the family, which comes to a head when Emma meets Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), who is going into the restaurant business with her son, Edoardo. There is an invisible, but intense lightning-flash of attraction between them.

Guadagnino's film, influenced perhaps by Antonioni, is about the ennui and withdrawal of Italy's wealthy and patrician classes, and perhaps about their psychological stagnancy – the way they have displaced their emotional lives into maintaining the institutions of family and property. Emma is an outsider. She can pastiche the mannerisms of the Italian overclass, but her bursts of Russian, which she subversively directs at her Italian son – for whom it is a kind of secret language for private communications – shows that she is in this world but not of it. But who is Emma? The answer is, perhaps, provided by the title: Io Sono l'Amore, I Am Love. Is Emma "love", an intense, dammed-up capacity for love that founds its expression for the very first time in middle age?

Maybe. There is an intense eroticism in her relationship with Antonio, but something elusive in narrative terms, because Emma does not seem to be any more personally open after this great awakening, than before it. For all the sensual abandon, Swinton's Emma is still superbly self-possessed and self-enclosed: not actressy in the way she can sometimes be, but nevertheless with a certain opacity in her performance.

The action of the movie is closed off, a little arbitrarily, with a cataclysmic event, and Guadagnino handles the resulting performances and scenes perfectly well, but I couldn't help finding something overclamorous in them. Emma is to find an instinctive ally in the household retainer – again, a slightly forced development – and her urge to escape becomes manifest.

I Am Love is an arresting film in many ways, displaying, in parallel with the Recchi family's theatrical deployment of the trappings of wealth, its own bracing and astringent sense of technique. It's a high-IQ picture – there are few enough of those – and it's fascinating, if a little bloodless. A gorgeously costumed and styled piece of work.

- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

A Second Look: Derek Jarman's 'The Last of England' still potent

A protest against Thatcher-era Britain, the 1987 film, is one of the late filmmaker's boldest experiments.

Aesthetics and politics were inseparable for the British filmmaker Derek Jarman, whose life fed his art and vice versa. It is perhaps no surprise that "The Last of England" (1987), one of his most deeply personal films, is also one of his most fiercely political.

No one did protest cinema quite like Jarman, an outspoken activist with no discernible interest in issue movies. Especially in the final stretch of his career, during which his imminent death became an inevitable focus of his work (he died of complications from AIDS in 1994 at 52), Jarman cultivated a voice entirely his own, both lyrical and lucid, brimming with wit and fury.

A full-throttle state-of-the-nation broadside against Thatcher-era Britain, "The Last of England" ranks among Jarman's boldest aesthetic experiments. The film is essentially a dense patchwork of Super-8 footage, transferred to video for editing and processing and then back to 35-millimeter film. Alongside nostalgic home movies mostly shot by Jarman's father (an air force pilot during World War II) are nightmarish vignettes, set under radioactive skies and amid vistas of post-industrial ruin.

From the startling opening sequence, which involves a hunky young man stomping on and getting aroused by a Caravaggio painting of a cupid, the film has the power of a trance. Eschewing narrative development in favor of atmospheric sweep, Jarman charts a mysterious course through a blasted post-apocalyptic world populated by an ominous masked militia and masses of huddled refugees.

The music ranges from Elgar to Marianne Faithfull; an occasional voiceover, by turns mournful and angry, further colors the mood, with quotations from Allen Ginsberg's"Howl" and T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," both of which could serve as alternate titles. ("The Last of England" is named after a mid-19th century Ford Madox Brown painting that depicts a family's emigration by sea — a scene echoed in the final moments of Jarman's film.)

As with all his best work, "The Last of England" crystallizes Jarman's contradictions: equal parts punk and dandy, a radical traditionalist. Despite being known as a provocateur, he cherished the most quintessential of British treasures (Shakespeare, Britten), and he drew openly on the example of previous generations.

His flair for the baroque calls to mind such British filmmakers as Michael Powell and Ken Russell (who hired him to design the sets of "The Devils"). Credited as a founding father of what would be called the New Queer Cinema, Jarman self-consciously situated himself in a larger, sometimes subterranean queer history, one that extended from Caravaggio to Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Jarman learned he was HIV-positive while making "The Last of England," and the film, with its visual and verbal imagery of shortening days and looming winters ("the world curling up like an autumn leaf"), is unavoidably a memento mori. (It also bears the chill of '80s nuclear paranoia.) But by the time it concludes, with Tilda Swinton's grieving bride in the throes of a frenzied danse macabre, the mood is more defiant than despairing.

Of Jarman's features, "The Last of England" remains perhaps his richest and most open-ended, the one that most rewards repeat encounters. The filmmaker himself said he had made it for an active audience. "I have my own ideas, but they are not the beginning or the end," he said. "The film is the fact — perhaps the only fact — of my life."

- Dennis Lim