LE SILENCE DE LA MER (Eureka). A German officer in Occupied France during World War 2 is billeted in the home of an old man and his young niece. They never speak to him. French Resistance author Vercors’s novella, a tribute to the Resistance, was published clandestinely in 1942. The 1949 film, which marked Jean Pierre Melville’s debut as a film director, is very literary; essentially a long monologue and somewhat stiff, it nevertheless grips.The officer, a decent, scrupulously polite, cultured man, who loves France, dreams of a happy outcome to the war and a marriage of equals between the two nations. His naïve idealism is shattered.

THE TEMPEST (Touchstone). Julie Taymor, who directed an excellent film version of Shakespeare’s Titus and Andronicus, is completely defeated by The Tempest. The result is a surprisingly and singularly insubstantial pageant unexcitingly directed and generally poorly acted. Prospero is now a woman. There is nothing special about Helen Mirren’s performance to justify the change of sex. The best and most imaginative filmed Tempest is Peter Greenwell’s Prospero’s Books with John Gielgud.

DROLE DE DRAME (Contemporary). Marcel Carne’s 1937 jolly and very silly classic French farce, with a script by Jacques Prevert, and set in Edwardian England, is acted by a host of well-known French actors, including Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, Francoise Rosay, Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean-Pierre Aumont. The eccentric performances are very stagey, very Feydeau and very funny.

THE MYSTERIES OF LISBON (New Wave). Raul Riz’s final work, an interminable, rambling and melodramatic Portuguese epic, set in the 18th and 19th century, is a highly complex diary of suffering. The interweaving fictions of abandoned children get less and less interesting the longer they go on; and they go on for four and a half hours.