Another, more recent, film this evening; The Dancer Upstairs. John Malkovitch’s 2002 directorial debut, and based on Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel of the same name, the film is effectively a vehicle for a Javier Bardem every bit as much in control as he is in No Country For Old Men, but with the character he plays – a soft-spoken, idealistic lawyer turned detective – being diametrically opposed to the psychopathic Anton Chigurh he would portray a few years later in No Country. The action is set in a Latin American amalgam of a country, with a corrupt but basically democratic regime struggling against a populistic Maoist guerilla movement (vaguely modelled on Peru’s Shining Path). Bardem’s Detective Agustín Rejas is a good man in a bad world with a wife and a daughter and a love interest who lead him into moral and sentimental dilemmas. He gets his man, but loses his love. The regime, meanwhile, has got the figurehead but can never decapitate a movement that is everywhere. Chilling stuff…