Roll those credits, the ego has landed

His Majesty Schnabel's Grand Return

His Majesty Schnabel's Grand Return

It's four years since Julian Schnabel (self-proclaimed lion of the New York art world) unveiled his debut feature, Basquiat, in Venice. Perhaps worried that we might have forgotten him, he gives himself an enormous credit - JULIAN SCHNABEL in letters which fill up the entire screen - at the start of his second film, Before Night Falls. Once the movie is over, his name appears again in huge type.

Schnabel's Godzilla-size egotism often rubs critics up the wrong way (Robert Hughes calls him the "Rambo" of the art world). But, for all his pomposity, he is an accomplished film-maker. Before Night Falls is about the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban writer relentlessly persecuted by Fidel Castro's regime. Schnabel elicits a superb performance from Javier Bardem as Arenas. There are eye-catching cameos from Sean Penn and Johnny Depp. The former plays a Cuban yokel, the latter is Bon Bon, a beautiful transsexual whom Arenas meets in prison. For a fee of several hundred cigarettes, Bon Bon agrees to smuggle out Arenas' new novel - by hiding the manuscript up his backside. Depp also briefly pops up as Lt Victor, a handsome, crotch-stroking prison commandant who takes a shine to Arenas.

The film combines bawdy humour with moments of extraordinary lyricism. Schnabel also does full justice to his subject's colourful love life. Arenas, who died of Aids, aged 37, while in exile in New York in 1990, once calculated that he had had more than 5,000 sexual encounters by the time he was 25. As a kid, he even enjoyed a few unholy liaisons with the local farmyard animals. "He (Arenas) equated sexuality with freedom," Schnabel remarks. "One reason for somebody so promiscuous not to have sex in prison was that he felt that sex without freedom was humiliating. He was very connected to his childhood and the memory of the absolute freedom he had then. He felt Castro robbed him of that."

Schnabel clearly feels a close affinity with the Cuban. "I know something about being an outsider. I'm not broke and I haven't been locked up, but most people don't really understand painting. And most people want to make money, not art." He is particularly hostile toward the "philistine" British critics who attacked Basquiat. Castro locked up Arenas. Schnabel says, perhaps jokingly: "Those guys should be imprisoned too".

Biggest Crowd Pleaser

The idea of a saga set in a Swedish hippy commune in the mid Seventies doesn't immediately appeal, but Lukas Moodysson's Together was the most warmly received film in the festival. The hippies believe in free love, death to all dictators, and the right not to have to wear undearwear in the kitchen when suffering from fungal infections. Moodysson doesn't patronise or mock his characters, but he doesn't ignore their pretensions, selfishness and eccentricities either. The eclectic soundtrack encompasses everything from Abba's "SOS" to "The Internationale".

Most perverse costume drama

Imagine the Marquis de Sade as a quietly spoken bourgeois gentleman living in enforced retirement in a country-house asylum, putting on plays and sweet-talking aristocratic ingenues for recreation. That is the image of the notorious satyr that Benoit Jacquot presents in his new film, Sade, starring Daniel Auteil.

Jacquot throws in the occasional montage sequence, showing aristocrats having their heads lopped off by Mme Guillotine, just to remind us that these were bloody times. However, generally, his film-making is as restrained as the acting style of Auteil, who plays Sade as a melancholy roué.

The whip only comes out once when, in a truly bizarre scene, Sade invites the asylum's gardener to give him a good thrashing. However, it's a moot point who actually suffers more - the Marquis or the film's audience.

Biggest anti-climax

Robert Altman wasn't the oldest director in Venice (he is 20 years younger than 93-year-old Portuguese auteur, Manoel de Oliveira), but Dr T And The Women was the work of a film-maker rapidly running out of gas. Richard Gere stars as a gynaecologist surrounded by strong, wealthy Texan women - wives, mistresses, patients, daughters - all of whom he reveres. They dress as flamboyantly as Divas in old Hollywood melodramas. The film is shot in Altman's usual free-wheeling, improvisatory style with overlapping dialogue, the camera forever on the prowl, and dozens of different characters flitting in and out of frame. But Dr T is messy and half-hearted by comparison with, say, Nashville or Short Cuts. Helen Hunt, Laura Dern, Farrah Fawcett, Liv Tyler and Shelley Long ham it up shamelessly, as if auditioning for the role of Sue-Ellen's in Dallas.

Best film from a Makhmalbaf

Film-making runs in the Makhmalbaf family. Mohsen Makhmalbaf (who had a short film in Venice) is one of Iran's most acclaimed directors. His daughter, Samira (who was on the Venice jury) is barely into her twenties, but has already completed two award-winning features, The Apple and Blackboards. Now, Marziyeh Meshkini (Samira's stepmother and Mohsen's wife) has completed her first feature. Roozi keh zan shodam, like almost every other recent Iranian movie, stars children. It's an allegory about the treatment of women in Iran. Rather than sermonising, Meshkini uses elaborate comic imagery to make her points. In one surreal sequence, a young girl is shown with her head covered competing in a women's bike race. As Ahoo pedals furiously, mullahs and patriarchs ride alongside her on horseback, demanding that she abandons the race. Her bike, they warn her, is "the Devil's mount". Whatever it has to tell us about the battle of the sexes, the scene looks like something out of a Tati movie.

Best New Discovery

In Kenneth Lonnergan's You Can Count On Me, single mum Sammy (Laura Linney) and her delinquent brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) are stuck in stagnant small-town America. She has a monotonous job at the local bank where she is continually scolded by her unpleasant, lecherous, Gordon Brittas-like boss, played by Matthew Broderick. Terry is a drifter who hasn't made anything of his life. The pair drive each other nuts, and yet they remain intensely loyal to each another.

Beautifully written and acted, Lonnergan's debut feature (exec-produced by none other than Martin Scorsese) even boasts a fine performance from eight-year-old Rory Culkin, the latest of the infernal Culkin brood to hit the big screen. The film was shown in Critics' Week rather than the main competition. Otherwise, Linney surely would have won Venice's Best Actress award.

Most cerebral thriller

Robert Lepage's intriguing but baffling thriller, Possible Worlds, is billed as a "cubist love story". It starts with cops investigating murders in which the victims' brains are stolen. George (Tom McCamus) is the suitor, Joyce (Tilda Swinton) his lost love. What startles George (and confused most of the audience) is that there are four Joyces, each existing in a different world. As much a Mensa puzzle as a movie.

Biggest downer

No festival is complete without a film which leaves its audience in despair, something Robert Guediguian's La Vie Est Tranquille easily achieved. A Marseilles-set epic, its gallery of malcontents includes debt-ridden ex-dockers, suicidal bar owners, National Front supporters, and a mother who turns to prostitution to keep her drug-addict daughter in heroin. If you thought Christiane F was depressing, you should try this.