Edinburgh in August is a notoriously vibrant, sociable city. The main comedy showcase is even called 'Late and Live'. If you are here to cover the film festival, however, then it is all 'Early Mornings and Celluloid'.

'Delegates' to the film festival and the revellers attracted to the world's largest cultural festival share a city but must work to different body clocks. Bars stay open till 3 each morning. But the first - usually the most essential - press screenings begin at 9am. To enjoy the benefits of the Fringe, you must live a nocturnal life, but film junkies are destined to spend the sunlight hours in dark rooms, blinking at the screens before them.

Fortunately the International Film Festival prizes eclecticism. The four films I have stumbled into so far have each been distinct and entertaining but seen in such a short period of time there is the danger they begin to meld. But really they have little in common - except maybe the death of parents, lipstick and our relations to the chicken.

The first film of the festival, for the hacks, is simply the first of many rather than a lavish gala. The press screening is a Black Cab Gala with a steady stream of bleary-eyed journalists tumbling out without fanfare or red carpet.

This year's opener was Amélie - Jean Pierre Jeunet's French success. It was a gentle baptism to the festival. With two good looking and drippy leads and it is unmistakably a romantic comedy. The thrill of the chase - what romantic comedies are all about - is very elaborate, and very circuitous. The film has charm, but it is tedious if you are not totally bowled over.

In one shot Amélie's heart is exposed: an example of the snazzy trickery flaunted by Jeunet and a symbol of the main thread of the film. The young Amélie is caught between her mother and her father - 'between a neurotic and an iceberg'. Her father believes her to have a heart condition; she is therefore confined to the home. In fact the racing pulse that he diagnoses is brought on by his frosty medical inspection.

Amélie's mother dies - comically crushed by a plummeting suicide attemptee. But this is less consequential to Amélie's life than the news of the death of The Queen of Hearts, Diana. Already a fantasist, Amelie blossoms into a meddling, do-gooder with a vindictive streak.

Amélie invites its own comparisons with Don Quixote but Candide is as credible an inspiration. Amélie plays out her adventure, following her heart, while underlying the film is a homespun wisdom that feels more than a little twee. The difference is that in Jeunet's Montmartre, all really is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Amélie would undoubtedly sympathise with Dum, the maudlin hero of Tears Of The Black Tiger - a unique Thai Western send-up. His 'heart is wounded'; later his 'heart rebels'. Complete with guns and gore, affairs of the heart are as central, and as obvious, as in Amélie. Tears Of The Black Tiger is just as knowing: it is a solemn, laugh-a-minute weepy: a romantic comedy at the outer most extremes of the genre.

But while Amélie fate is to waitress in a cheery Paris bar, Dum's whole family is brutally wiped out by bandits. Dum must roam Thailand as an outlaw and avenge the death of his father. He thrashed Dum as a boy. Dum is punished even though he rescued the daughter of the local Lord who grows up to be the damsel of the tale.

Tears Of The Black Tiger takes bland clichés and creates a lurid Technicolor spectacle. Even lilies and shells appear a vivid pink. At times, the men wear lipstick. The shoot-outs are great and the tender moments are gloriously hammy. The subtitles are superfluous. They distract. (What the characters actually say is irrelevant - the meaning is clear.) It is much better to wallow in startled amazement.

Meanwhile, in Long Island, New York, Howy Blitzer, the confused adolescent at the centre of L.I.E., furtively experiments with lipstick. The Long Island Expressway is the fatal highway where his mother recently died in a car crash. (Echoes of the deaths of Amélie's mother and Diana) Whilst tiptoeing along the handrail of the bridge over the expressway he introduces it as a road where some of the lanes 'lead to hell'. It is painfully clear that his coming of age is going to be precarious.

In Amélie the Diana theme is mercifully kept to a minimum; L.I.E. manages to avoid heavy-handed automobile allusions. The cruising is mostly homosexual.

As American adolescents, Howy and friends seem on the surface to have a lot going for them - their faces are pierced rather than blighted by acne. But while Dad is preoccupied with his new woman and accusations of fraudulent business practices, Howy breaks into houses, and becomes increasingly caught up with his fellow juvenile Gary.

The japes turn sour when they bungle the burglary of the house of John Harrigan. Brian Cox's character is the self-proclaimed 'greatest cock-sucker in the Western Hemisphere'. He is 'Big John' (Terrible use of initials; never has a personalised number plate been more cringe worthy.)

Cox is excellent: his paedophilic tendencies clash with a paternalistic interest in Howy that swells within him, surprising even himself. Paul Franklin Dano as Howy put in a good performance too. He is bad at lying, bad at sulking and bad at acting tough - exactly what is required. Unfortunately, the film meanders; its points became muted.

The Natural Life Of The Chicken is a very different examination of the little peculiarities of American life. A documentary made by Mark Lewis, it is dedicated to Italian renaissance natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi who 'perceived the chicken as part of a much larger order of things'.

It is full of absurd accounts - not least that of the chicken who survived decapitation. (This undermined somewhat the claims that were being made for the chicken's intelligence). There are earnest, heartfelt pieces to camera and a man in a field in dungarees imitating chickens.

I am not totally sure that The Natural Life Of The Chicken is not a spoof; it maybe just pro-poultry propaganda. If so, the compelling case made - that factory farming is unnatural at the very least - is undermined by the juxtaposition of battery farming with the platform it provides for complete fruitcakes. First prize is awarded to Karin Estrada who described her Silkie Bantam rooster Cotton as her 'soul mate' and takes it swimming.

The vox pops were full of contradictions. I learned that 'you can't judge chickens by our intelligence … they communicate just like we do'. But best of all was the one chicken fanatic who elucidated the relationship of the cock to the hens: 'He is like a father figure and a lover'

Which, if I'm not mistaken, is a pretty good summing up of the paradoxical relationship between Howy and Big John which L.I.E. tries to explore.

PART TWO: PASTFORWARD, KANDAHAR, GHOST WORLD, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH

Lardy film critics may not appreciate it, but Edinburgh is a walking city. Indeed, the greatest attraction is not the Fringe, and certainly not the International Film Festival - it is the Military Tattoo. Each night by the coach load they flock to the parade ground at the Castle. They come to ogle men with guns who walk in regimented lines. It is a curious phenomenon. There must be a lesson to be gleaned from the evident enduring appeal of watching people walk.

The International Festival (separate to the Film Festival) is rightly sensitive to accusations that it is the preserve of esoteric high art. After all, the ultra popular and increasingly commercial Fringe Festival has long dwarfed it - at least in terms of sheer presence. (Although artistically, last year’s Fringe is most remembered for introducing to the world The Puppetry of the Penis.)

It won’t rival the Tattoo, nor upset the Fringe, but this year the International Festival has its own parade of sorts. The dance show PASTForward might shed some light on the unfathomable fascination with walking, but one thing is for sure - it is anything but a sop to the accessible mainstream.

Courtesy of Mikhail Baryshnikov and his White Oak Dance Project, PASTForward re-stages the radical, experimentalist work of the hallowed Judson Dance Theatre. In New York of the 1960s they pushed the boundaries of dance back - right back, to the most minimal of sparse performances.

Motivated as a reaction to the received knowledge of ballet and modern dance, the Judson group strove to make the ‘ordinary visible’. PASTForward showcases one performance (Satisfyin Lover) in which members of the local Edinburgh community walk across the Playhouse stage - seemingly just as they would down Princess Street.

Can PASTForward be easily and confidently dismissed as pretentious? After spending all day in the cinema, it was unexpectedly stimulating because video screens were used (an addition to the original Judson Church shows). Partly this was documentary - supplying the history - but the screens also became integral to the performances themselves.

A line of people walking is not eloquent in and of itself: the ordinary may be un-obscured, but the effect is not particularly illuminating. That it provokes reflection on movement, revealing profundity in the mundane is a pretence; it is an unjustified and excessive claim. But when movement, seemingly insignificant, is captured, relayed and projected - having a gesture highlighted and accentuated by video screens - then that more than fulfils the pretensions: it does demand that an audience watch and observe closely, and think about the simplest action. It is supremely articulate.

How bodies are held, gestures controlled, and emotions expressed can all be thought provoking and moving. And so it proves on the big screen.

The best walking at the Film Festival so far was by the legless. At a Red Cross base in the middle of the Afghan desert, victims of landmines hobble back and forth on their new metallic limbs. From the sky drift pairs of artificial legs, each with its own parachute. A frenetic race begins.

That is only one memorable scene in Kandahar, a startling Iranian film from Mohsen Makhmalbaf, in which Nafas, an émigré Afghan, must reach Kandahar before the solar eclipse when her sister will commit suicide. Travelling by foot, Nafas’s head-to-ankle burqa may cloak her body, but can’t hide her walk: humanity is made all the more transparent.

Kandahar has a deliberate documentary feel, and is all too vivid a description of the living history of devastated Afghanistan. Nafas’ tape recorder is her black box recorder, into which she explains her journey and collects little sheds of evidence of humanity from the bleached landscape through which she passes. In Ghost World, the equivalent of her tape recorder is Enid’s sketchbook.

Ghost World is the creation of Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes, together adapting Clowes’ comic book of the same name. Thora Birch is Enid, thus managing to play a character with an even dowdier name than her own. Enid is their mature adolescent protagonist who is at odds with the world around her: ‘Freaks and weirdoes’ to her are ‘our kind of people’. (‘Our’ because Enid is supposedly speaking for best friend Becky; their relationship is fracturing as after graduating from high school they fall out of step.)

Enid refers to her sketchbook as a kind of diary. In it she depicts the weirdoes. Chief among them is lonely heart and prize ‘clueless dork’, Seymour (Steve Buscemi).

Kandahar suffers because of Nafas’s uninspiring, flat narration. But at least the audience can read into it what they will. In Ghost World, the more serious flaw is the plodding and conclusive nature of what is said, not necessarily how it is said.

Early on, Becky turns - mid conversation - to the television. Staring straight at it she is face on; the camera must be inside the television; we must be inside the television looking out. Such a warping of reality is to be expected from Ghost World, but it is a rare example of under-explored possibilities.

Rather than drawn in, more commonly the audience is crowded out; there is scant room for the imagination to be fired. A wry rather than a funny film, the observations are all the film’s rather than the audience’s. The audience is unengaged, relegated to a passive observer.

Enid attends a summer school course titled ‘Art as dialogue’. Despite an ensemble cast, Ghost World is too much of a soliloquy. All the characters are encountered through Enid and she comes across as a surprisingly empty character - not helped by Birch who lacks verisimilitude and whose acting is markedly expressionless.

Ghost World doesn’t do enough to justify the transfer to film - it doesn’t take the possibilities and have enough fun with them. The same cannot be said of Hedwig And The Angry Inch - until recently a stage hit, now a living, breathing, pouting movie as well.

Hansel is destined to walk on the wilder side. As a boy in East Berlin he listens to American radio with his head in the oven. (Lou Reed is not one of his mother’s favourites). To escape to the west, he undergoes a sex change operation. The results are imperfect - inch imperfect. Still, Hansel becomes Hedwig and in land of the free leads a merry band - Hedwig And The Angry Inch.

Entertaining the local wildlife in diners across America, the intro to each song is a cue to flashback and Hansel’s metamorphosis. Dominating the plot lines is Hedwig’s estranged relationship with Tommy Gnosis - the protégé who made it and then spurned her. In desperation Hedwig has told all to the supermarket tabloids.

The jokes are good even if the same cannot always be said for the music. But above all it is a star performance. To steal the praise dished out recently from OK magazine to Martine McCutcheon, John Cameron Mitchell as writer, director and Hedwig is ‘nothing less than an unmitigated sensation’.

Usually very conspicuously, someone always walks out of the film festival press screenings. As is to be expected, PASTForward created a mini-stampede towards the door. How ironic, and what an opportunity to assess their different gaits.

PART THREE: PLANET OF THE APES, STORYTELLING, BATTLE ROYALE, LA VILLE EST TRANQUILLE

Each year the festival boasts a ‘surprise film’, chosen especially by the Director of the festival. Right up until the opening credits roll, the film is a secret that only she is privy to. It is always a sell out as hungry punters are sold on the promise of a ‘revelatory experience’ – the prospect of seeing a great film in blissful ignorance of plot twists, and where the only advance hype is that there is none.

In the past Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects proved such pleasant shocks. This year: Planet Of The Apes – a surprising choice maybe, but certainly not a surprise movie. Thanks to the publicity machine, the hype-surrounding Planet Of The Apes has been unavoidable. To have no preconceptions about the film, not only must you not have seen or even heard of the original (can a re-make ever be that much of a genuine surprise?) but you must have been on another planet over the last few weeks.

The only possibility is that, as Tim Burton’s film has been publicly branded a turkey, one might be surprised, pleasantly surprised, to discover it not quite as bad as predicted – but this seems to be stretching the justification for a surprise film somewhat.

Even if the concept of a surprise movie has been reduced to farce and little more than a gimmick, then the sentiment behind it remains attractive. It is the same promise which, if you are willing to be incautious, seeing films at press screenings potentially offers. To make each film as much of a surprise as possible, only impulse or the advice of those in the know can be followed. The alternative is the festival brochure – but if you want to remain wilfully uninformed then it can’t be relied upon. It discloses too much, and besides, the polished previews tend to be indiscriminately effusive.

Not knowing quite what to expect, of course, does not eliminate personal foibles or illuminate blind spots. Merely being minimally informed does not heighten objectivity or diminish prejudice. The undisputed appeal of sampling the unknown is simply that it is potentially more thrilling.

Such is the hope. But films are never watched in a total vacuum: context does always intrude – for better or for worse. For example, Todd Solondz’s new film Storytelling will inevitably be compared to Happiness. The expectation as Storytelling begins is that it will pick up with the profane – i.e. exactly where Happiness messily left off. As a headlong assault on political correctness, Storytelling does not disappoint. Containing two separate sections, each is self-consciously uncompromising. No sensibility is supposed too close to the bone.

But the film is also conscious that it must fend off the type of knee-jerk reaction which deems Solondz condescending to his subject matter. Consequently, Storytelling seeks to be its own, pre-emptive, rebuttal to such criticism. It passes comment on the relationship of the writer/director to their material. To manage both – to comment, and provide commentary – Solondz has set himself an ambitious, arguably an unnecessarily ambitious, challenge.

Very funny in parts, Storytelling is entertaining rather than interesting, provocative without being thought provoking. And it does feel uneven: a series of comical sketches, cobbled together, more than a carefully constructed composition. One is left with the feeling that Solondz should stick to creating uneasy viewing, rather than concurrently seeking to defend his methods.

Solondz was tempted to depict a Columbine style High School massacre in Storytelling. He decided not to. The Japanese film Battle Royale is marked by a lack of similar restraint. A class of school children is placed on an island, equipped and ordered to kill each other – it is one long massacre. However, should Solondz choose in the future to make an intelligent, telling, film about adolescent monstrosity, then the opportunity is still very much alive.

Battle Royale is a lost opportunity, for although the premise may not be original, the futuristic twist does have potential. Japan, a few years hence, is suffering from an epidemic of delinquency, and Battle Royale – the island ‘game’ – is a response devised by the adult authorities.

Devoid of meaningful and interesting characterisation, the film’s ‘characters’ are dumped on the audience as suddenly as the teenagers are stranded on the island. As a polemic on Japanese attitudes and concerns – discipline, group loyalty and identity – it is dismal. In a deeply off-putting film about alienation, the only sentiment to sympathise with is the pleading by one child: ‘God, if this is a bad joke, please stop it’.

Far more nightmarish – and for all the right reasons – is La Ville Est Tranquille. Storytelling and Battle Royale both want to pass comment on inter-generational friction. Both are also loosely interested in the theme of modern blurring of non-fiction and fiction (the bloodletting on the Battle Royal island is supposed to be a ‘reality TV’ event; Storytelling explicitly offers two separate narratives: ‘Non-fiction’ and ‘Fiction’). La Ville Est Tranquille trumps the efforts of both – saying much more besides and in spectacular style.

In Robert Guédiguian’s contemporary Marseilles there are no easy relationships between parents and their offspring. Nor are there any easy plot devices – and the characters certainly don’t drop out of the sky. La Ville Est Tranquille does not settle for the ‘documentarian’ (Solondz’s word) or the flight of fancy fairy story of Battle Royale – but a bigger fiction: the ‘grand narrative’.

The setting is the globalised 21st Century: held up to the new reality, the traditional total explanations of Left and Right – the ‘grand narratives’ – no longer make sense. This is a world turned upside-down. Thus, in La Ville Est Tranquille a wizened, former revolutionary condones his son’s decision to break the strike at the docks. He sighs: ‘today, all the stories are the same’. Guédiguian relentlessly unpacks statements.

La Ville Est Tranquille is about principles and practicalities, it is about power and ideas, but above all it is about people and their existence in a food chain. Faced with the collapse of old certainties, the grand narrative is frayed, matched by a suitably rough-hewn depiction of the city and life within it. But nothing is threadbare: the dialogue is considered and the images crystal clear.

The acting is captivating. Guédiguian has worked with this ensemble many times before. This may explain the closeness and intensity of their playing: but it can be appreciated by all viewers, whether this is known or not.

La Ville Est Tranquille is better, far better, than Magnolia – the obvious American comparison. When the characters cross it feels natural, not forced. La Ville Est Tranquille is a measured, wonderfully self-assured picture. When watched for the first time it is a brilliant surprise. One suspects that it will be remain brilliant on repeated viewing, even when every last detail is familiar: even when every plot twist is known backwards there will still be threads to unravel.

And surely that is one definition of a great film.

PART FOUR: NO MAN'S LAND, ATANARJUAT THE FAST RUNNER, WIT.

Great movies are the best possible advert for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. FilmFour may disagree. I became embroiled with a market researcher who was employed by the subscription channel. She was trying to ascertain how closely my colleagues and I – who together formed a ‘representative sample’ – had been watching. They weren’t interested in how observant we were to the films on show but to the corporate branding that surrounds them. Specifically, of course, had I been eagle-eyed enough to notice the huge, intrusive, red FilmFour logos?

In this market research, the quality of the films on display was incidental. Whether FilmFour’s packaging worked I don’t know, or care, but by the real measure of success, the 55th Edinburgh International Film Festival must receive a qualified thumbs-up. As these last 3 films show, there are always going to be disappointments at festivals, but if it is mitigated by some real crackers, then there can be no grumbling.

No Man’s Land won the award for Best Screenplay in Cannes – an award which it half deserves. Half the film is great; the other half shoots itself in the foot and almost ruins all the good work.

Set in the Balkan war, a Serb comes face to face with two Bosnians. They are trapped between the lines, with the twist that one Bosnian lies on a mine which will explode should he move. As befitting such a tense scenario, the drama is urgent and the dialogue immediate. The three leads are excellent.

But No Man’s Land doesn’t settle for merely the dramatic. The agenda of the makers is to highlight the complexities, and particularly the absurdities, of the Balkan War. Famously, on Christmas Day during the First World War, an impromptu football match took place in no man’s land. In No Man’s Land the film, the fate of 3 soldiers becomes a political football, booted around by the United Nations, the international community and the media. However, whereas in the trench the drama is compact and gripping, when the action becomes broader, the film loses its focus. The camera pans out for the bigger picture and the drama falls apart.

Fatuous points about the media and military replace the earlier, trenchant, action. Worse still is the egregious characterisation. In a multi-national collection of actors, to British eyes it is the Britons who are most culpable. Simon Callow as the Major General and Katrin Cartlidge as a television journalist are both shockingly bad clichés. Callow in particular seems under the delusion that he is starring in Black Adder 5.

No Man’s Land would be a damning satire if only it weren’t for its unsubtle exuberance. It is uneasy to watch because it feels badly conceived. The result should be an awkward, effective, mix of drama and satire. What we have instead is great drama and terrible satire. The suspicion, therefore, is that the script got what it deserved – great, credible, performances from the soldiers but ridiculous, hammy, lampoons from the supporting cast.

Atanarjuat The Fast Runner begins with the crunch of snow. Under the vast arctic sky, set in a timeless community is a stateless people who live on the ice. This is the debut of the Inuit – the world’s first film in their native language and indigenously produced. It is astonishing.

The film is not surprising exactly; quite what exactly should one expect? But it does strip bare film to its essence. It is cinema without any of the paraphernalia that we have come to accept. Atanarjuat is strong, pure and simple storytelling – it recites an immemorial legend. Never is there the sense that the actors are playing up to the camera. These are unaffected ‘performances’. As with much in the film, it contradicts what we expect, setting fresh standards.

The Eskimo stars may be cumbersome in their furs – polar bears of men. But rather than clumsy, there is an elegant gracefulness which defines their movements and the film as a whole. Above all, it is a film to hold the audience rapt.

Wit was the closing final film of the festival. It was also therefore the last film chosen by Lizzie Frankie as her 5-year tenure as Festival Director came to an end. It was a resolutely personal choice –a sentimental farewell, certainly, but steadfastly avoiding mawkishness.

Based on Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer prize winning play, Wit is Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson’s adaptation. Thompson’s character, Dr Vivian Bearing, dies of cancer. She is a spinster – a formidable English Professor whose specialism and life defining passion is the poetry of John Donne.

Wit is very neat and very exact. Neat because all the ironies fit conveniently into place. Bearing is a doctor of philosophy who finds herself bed-bound in hospital. She is very skilful with words, yet gauche socially. Her meditations on mortality and humanity are inseparable from Donne’s metaphysical musings. The exactness works in tandem with the neatness: the crystal clear photography and the precise script with the clinical setting mirroring the clean use of words. (It is neat and exact that the fastidious punctuation zealot Harold Pinter should cameo as Bearing’s Dad.) This might irritate, if it weren’t for the powerful emotional punch which Wit packs.

Christopher Lloyd is the ruthless clinical director, Dr. Kelekian. His acolyte Dr. Posner, is Jonathan M. Woodward. But the most remarkable performance is by Thompson’s mouth. The camera is often motionless. During her sardonic monologues, the mouth is all there is to be fixated by and it is all there needs to be.

This festival began with the frivolous Amelie, a romantic comedy in which the thrill of the chase is everything. In stark contrast to Amelie’s easy, ingratiating charm is Wit. It is nothing so clichéd as an ‘emotional roller coaster’. But it does take us on, what is described, euphemistically, as ‘the cancer journey’. In Wit the journey may be everything but there is no hiding under such fuzzy words: the journey is terminal. The end.

Jonti Small