Rabbit-Proof Fence<br></br>Orange COunty<br></br>Laissez-Passer

Last year in The Conspiracy, Kenneth Branagh played Reinhard Heydrich, the SS officer who pushed through the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference. In Rabbit-Proof Fence (PG), Branagh is back as A O Neville, a British-born official who was Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia between 1915 and 1940. Shockingly, there are parallels between the men.

Neville was afraid that miscegenation between aborigines and whites would strengthen the natives' hand, so he had "half-caste" children snatched from their aboriginal parents, raised in dormitory camps, where they were taught to sew, sweep and speak "proper" English, and encouraged to marry whites. Neville envisaged that their aboriginal blood would be diluted to leave only a trace within three generations. Right up until 1970 thousands of children were kidnapped by government order.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on the true case of three such girls, aged 14, 10 and eight, who escaped from a camp in 1931, and walked 1500 miles back to their home, using the coast-to-coast rabbit-proof fence as a compass. It's directed by Phillip Noyce. He's been churning out Hollywood thrillers (Patriot Games, The Saint, The Bone Collector) since he left Australia, so it's a relief that his return down-under isn't dressed up with impassioned speeches, stirring music or cliff-hanging peril. The story is told simply and conscientiously, and the girls, led by the defiant Everlyn Sampi, tramp through the outback without lows of despair or highs of elation. They just keep walking.

Maybe Noyce is too restrained. Rabbit-Proof Fence is never as moving as you think it's going to be, and you come out wondering if the girls' trek was the most illuminating or powerful tale that could have been told about the Stolen Generations. The film doesn't convey how arduous their journey must have been: the children could just as well have walked for nine days rather than nine weeks. More fundamentally, the walk itself, incredible as it was, is less so than the reasons for it.

Which brings us back to A O Neville. Branagh plays the eugenicist as a headmasterly bureaucrat, certain that he's acting in everyone's best interests, even as he refuses to let one aborigine buy new shoes ("They bought a pair last year") and refuses to let another, who is "becoming quite agitated", see her daughter. It's such a tantalising portrait that we want to know more about him. What opposition did he face? Did he never have any doubts? With any luck, Noyce's worthy, well-shot film will be only the first to be made about the Stolen Generations.

Orange County (12A) is an American comedy about a high-school boy, and as such it features drugs, bodily fluids, semi-nudity, the infliction of pain and the demolition of property. For once these ingredients haven't been slopped in indiscriminately by someone with a balance sheet in one hand and an American Pie video in the other. The jokes are integral to the plot and the characters, and while they press up against the bounds of possibility, they don't quite go beyond them.

Tom Hanks's son Colin plays the one aspiring intellectual in a town of surfers. He applies to Stanford, but an administrative snarl-up drives him to adopt more and more desperate methods to get into the university, helped and hindered by three very funny supporting turns. His pompous father (John Lithgow) is addicted to work, his depressive mother (Catherine O'Hara) is addicted to wine, and his alternately wired and catatonic brother (Jack Black) is addicted to everything.

Laissez-Passer (12A) poses questions about the movie business as it was conducted in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Could someone work for a German-run film studio without being a collaborator? And how could you build a set when half of your timber was being requisitioned for military coffins? Dealing with these quandaries are real figures, Jean Devaivre, an assistant director and family man who spied for the Resistance, and Jean Aurenche, a bohemian screenwriter.

Bertrand Tavernier, the director and co-writer, is as much a film historian as he is a film-maker. He adapted Laissez-Passer from his two old friends' reminiscences, but reveres the men so much that he squeezes in every last anecdote, from the painting of props to an escapade right out of 'Allo 'Allo. The camera pans industriously to keep up with all 125 actors, and the viewer works just as hard, for three overcrowded hours. I couldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't as ardent about the subject as Tavernier is.

n.barber@independent.co.uk