This week’s film releases

Serge, je t’aime: Eric Elmosnino and Lucy Gordon in ‘Gainsbourg’

Celebrity is not drama. The question every biographical movie should ask of itself, or of its individual scenes, is: “Would this be interesting if we didn’t know the character(s) as famous?” If not, throw it out. By that measure, the 135-minute Gainsbourg
(

) would last an hour.

Yet listen to us, the audience, as the makers would like to hear us. “Ooh that’s Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) getting her kit off for Serge Gainsbourg (played to the life and living likeness by Eric Elmosnino), the Gauloise-puffing, ill-shaven Jewish songwriter, who was once the coolest thing on earth. Ooh look, that’s Juliette Gréco, the haute culture chanteuse who dressed like Death and sang of heartache. (Anna Mouglalis plays her, bizarrely, like a mincing Fenella Fielding. Remember her? Camply purring British sexpot?) Look, here’s Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon, who sadly has died since this performance), flexing her Franglais and singing with Gainsbourg that naughty, naughty song ‘Je T’aime’, which in 1969 sold about a billion copies.”

I barely remember the 1960s, thus proving I lived through them. But I recall the Gainsbourg phenomenon osmotically. Yes, that song was everywhere, so breathy, so bedroomy, so full of French forbiddenness. And Serge G was a hipster existentialist, a pop-world Camus, who told us all about the finitude of life, love and death.

Brilliantly filmmaker Joann Sfar, in his prior or parallel career a cartoonist, gives his hero a tall, walking, long-fingered alter ego with a Gainsbourg caricature-mask who in some scenes shadows, mimics or surrogates his every move. The cartoonish touches are so good – I loved the other alter ego, the fat one, squashed like an unwanted friend into the back of a car one Bardot/Gainsbourg date night – that the realistic scenes go flat, and increasingly so. The movie is too long and the predominant colour is that dismaying reverential brown (Dulux will soon market it as Biopic Burlap) in which we have had to fog around in recent years after Edith Piaf, Coco Chanel and co. Like I said: should be 75 minutes shorter. Good things, though, in the best hour.

Julia Deakin and Robert Hill in ‘Down Terrace’

The 1980s. Do I remember them? Much more clearly. The combined testosterone-filled magnitude of two nations ruled by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – and the macho screen culture engendered – was too mythopoeic to ignore. Now, they are back. Not Ron and Maggie, but films such as The Karate Kid (

) and The A-Team (

). Sadly, the first, recycling the 1984 hit movie that pedalled on through two sequels, is a waste of time and space, although Jaden Smith (son of Will) has star quality at 12. Jackie Chan too is a natural for the Chinese martial mentor role (in KK1, Okinawan). Elsewhere, yawny stretches of People’s Republic Tourist Board scenery abound in a script whose only agenda is to get the hero to face up to the playground bully.

The A-Team, issuing from the 1980s TV series like a muscle-bound genie from a dust-gathering lamp, barely bothers with a plot at all. Iraq in turmoil; stolen US currency engraving plates; four maniacal military misfits led by an oddly cast Liam Neeson. Action sequences are over-the-top – although you have to marvel at the skydiving tank firing its gun over and over to steer a way through enemy skies – while the script is stuck in the desert, its cliché-clad tyres scrunching round and round.

The British gangster film has been buried so often we are no longer surprised when it lurches forth again, green and ghoulish. Down Terrace (

), shot in Brighton on what looks like spare bingo money (low-tech digital video), is a comedy thriller about a family of small-time drug racketeers. They speak in non sequiturs that would have Harold Pinter purring in his grave. The old man (Robert Hill) goes on about eastern mystical self-improvement – “I feel like a teenage tantric Superman” – while his son (Robin Hill, the film’s co-writer) is trying to get a new family started between killing members of the old.

When dad looks at his freshly pregnant prospective daughter-in-law and says, “I’ve heard of sudden death, but sudden birth”, you don’t think the script can get any better. It does. Violent quarrels, fatal bludgeonings and the near-daily disposal of corpses alternate with debates about when to get the sitting room painted. None of the comedy is arch or nudging. This is just life, and death. The film has been called a British Sopranos. But it is more a contempo-British Ladykillers, bringing up to date, for a bleaker, rougher, more gnomic age, the Anglo-Ealing tradition of crime as serious knockabout.

In South of the Border (

) Oliver Stone has secured a clean flush. Every living South American leftwing dictator – sorry, “democratically elected ruler” – gives the filmmaker an audience in this continent-trotting documentary. From Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez to Evo Morales (Bolivia) to Rafael Correa (Ecuador) and onward. My theory: Fidel Castro, after his recent documentary for Stone, put out an all-parties bulletin: “This man is a safe pair of ears”. He is. The film is 78 minutes of shameless soft-soaping – “Oliver, you are one of us”, the new Marxists keep gurgling – as the maker of JFK and Nixon extends all the bland, acquiescent cordiality he leaves out (thank goodness) from his feature films. Valuable document even so? Oh yes. The Latins get the chance to snap back, in measured disquisition, at the CIA, Fox News, the neo-cons in the post-Bush bunkers (including a Dick Cheney looking more than ever like W’s Richard Dreyfuss) and the rest of the American propaganda machine. All the abuses of power and/or ruthless centralising of it, with which Chávez and co have been branded, are ignored by Stone. So, largely, are the pacts of convenience with Iran and North Korea. But in the Age of Fox, what do you expect? The wages of a one-sided argument from the right are that the left, at some point, gets its time to orate one-sidedly at the mic.