In this instance such a confusion alluded to the film's political core - as Erice's film had

In this instance, such a confusion alluded to the film's political core - as Erice's film had explored the bewilderment of a country infantilised under dictatorship.As such The Spirit of the Beehive points to the way that childhood - and the misconception that films about childhood can only be about childish things - can be used as a decoy in films that have more overtly ideological concerns. Tenderness." It is an apt list of appraisal for, shot as it was in a vivid and almost documentary- like fashion, the film reflected the mad energy of its small protagonist. Meanwhile, The Spirit of the Beehive's innovation was in its fragmentary use of image and sound, which could convincingly draw audiences into the mind of a child for whom the real and fantasy worlds had blurred after seeing the black-and-white classic Frankenstein in her village's makeshift cinema. These include Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), which detailed the turbulent young life of his alter ego Antoine as he moved between a neglectful family, reform school and the Parisian movie houses; or Lasse Hallstrom's My Life As a Dog, whose impish hero Ingemar finds himself bereft of mother and father one summer. Then there is Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), set in Franco's Spain and told from the point of view of a small girl, Ana. Not to be confused with those films designed specifically for the pint- sized (though some children's films, like books, have a more mythical thread to them that can be read in an adult way), the genre has thrown up some powerful examples. It is a dazzling addition to the cluster of movies that accomplish the difficult task of persuading us to engage with the world as observed from a lower angle, proving that this is indeed a grown-up subject for cinema.

For though the film may be set amid the high rises and derelict wastelands of Govan, the territory it charts should be familiar, for the film is a perceptive account of the hazy time of childhood. "Once upon a time..." The lulling phrase that frames Small Faces, a feature film by the director Gillies MacKinnon and his co-writer Billy MacKinnon about a group of young lads growing up in Glasgow in the late Sixties, provides the prompt for the audience to shrink to the size of its sprite-like hero, Lex. Cary Grant gets hounded by a crop-dusting plane ("dustin' where there ain't no crops"), Eva Marie Saint turns lighting a match into an act of thrilling sensuality, and Hitchcock is on his most wicked behaviour.n All films are on release from tomorrowRYAN GILBEY. Artery-licking good.Just time to direct you to the pristine new print of the cruel and cunning North by Northwest. Elina Lowensohn and Jared Harris play vampire twins who get the frighteners put on them when Dr Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) hammers a stake into their father's heart. The writer-director Michael Almereyda treats vampirism the way Terry Gilliam approaches time-travel in the forthcoming Twelve Monkeys: as a metaphor for 20th-century chaos and malaise.

It works, too - even at its most metaphysical, it remains dryly funny, and the pixelvision sections (shot on a foggy Fisher Price toy camera) are hallucinatory. He establishes a spurious battle between independent cinema and Hollywood, wherein only one can be victorious That's a terribly naive attitude. Hollywood is perfectly capable of producing masterpieces - ET, say, or The Godfather Part II, or Speed. Equally, the independent sector is not above botch jobs - like a certain Swimming with Sharks, for instance.But not Nadja, an arch black-and-white comedy about vampires in New York (imagine Dracula re-written by Tama Janowitz). With his iron will and perishing wit, Spacey always retains the upper hand, even when he's covered in purple sores and tabasco sauce.The film fails on every technical level, too. No wonder Huang is so miffed at Hollywood - until he brushes up on pacing a picture, and composing and blocking scenes, and sustaining suspense, he'll be lucky not to spend the rest of his days parking cars there And rightly so - his elitist attitude is contemptible. Oh, and because he's the finest, most vibrant American actor around.

The role isn't worthy of him - he has no room for manoeuvre - but he lends Buddy a complexity that isn't in the screenplay. His characters are ciphers, except for Benicio del Toro, who has a dapper cameo as Whaley's predecessor; and Spacey, who triumphs because he wields sarcasm the way other people wield machetes. Movie nerds and withered old critics will adore it, because of the scene where Whaley despairs of his pals, who only know Shelley Winters from The Poseidon Adventure. The joke negates itself, and incriminates Huang; doesn't he have a life outside the movies, you wonder?Clearly not. There have been few relationships as torrid and incestuous as the one that the movie industry has conducted with itself.

Watching Sunset Boulevard and Barton Fink is like listening to a dear friend deride the lover that you suspect they just can't live without. Swimming with Sharks follows in this tradition (and has a macabre tinge left over from another Hollywood satire, The Player). It's about Guy (Frank Whaley), a film school graduate who's got his foot in the industry door as an assistant to senior executive Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey). Spacey makes mountains of money and ritually humiliates Whaley It's debatable which one he takes the most satisfaction in. His glee is palpable in some crisply demeaning insults - "My bath mat means more to me than you do," he blurts Their relationship is warped, but strangely warm. "You could have walked out whenever you wanted," he tells Guy later when the tables have been turned and the slave has bound his master to a chair, inflicting bizarrely appropriate tortures on him (like paper-cuts, the curse of the office junior).