She also has a moustache rotten teeth more pairs of shoes than Imelda Marcos and a voice that could strip paint

She also has a moustache, rotten teeth, more pairs of shoes than Imelda Marcos and a voice that could strip paint. The film is narrated by an equally irritating character, a Scot in a kilt with a tartan-bound copy of Burns’s poems in his pocket, who talks as if reciting a history lesson. But it could have an afterlife as a post-pub video rental.It’s not the worst film to open this week. That honour belongs to Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil, which relives a little-known episode from 19th-century history as grotesque farce. The net effect is still juvenile; it’s hard to imagine anyone parting with pounds 7 to see it. A few jokes are quite funny, in a silly, sub-Python sort of way. Somehow the jape has been spun into a full-length feature, shot in the far West (Somerset), with an ivy-clad pub standing in for the town saloon.A Fistful of Fingers is – given the budget – filmed and edited with some energy; there’s a good music track and even a nifty little animated sequence.

This cheap and cheerful spoof Western, shot for a very small fistful of dollars (pounds 10,000), was conceived, the press notes officially tell us, from some “general arsing about” during a school lunchbreak. Watch and marvel.The young man who nervously introduced himself at the screening as the director of A Fistful of Fingers barely looked old enough to get his own movie (it has, slightly surprisingly, a 15 rating) Nor, for that matter, did most of the cast. The story, as so often in Antonioni’s work, concerns a loss and a search: a young woman disappears under mysterious circumstances; her friend (Monica Vitti) tries to find her. But what counts are the tiny subtleties of the characters and the relationships between them, nailed in a breathtaking suite of cool, elegant, precision-tuned images. Technically the film can’t be faulted, but the story, with its neat “vicious circle” ending, is predictable and a little too pat – we expect more from this world-class director.One film that can be unreservedly recommended comes from a master, Michelangelo Antonioni, at his peak; L’Avventura resurfaces looking both very much of its era (1960) and bracingly modern. Set in China in the Thirties, it stars Gong Li as a gangster’s moll who becomes a pawn in the internecine warfare between two mobsters. Events are seen from the viewpoint of a small country boy who becomes her factotum, so that all the manoeuvrings and the violence occur on the margins of the story: the film starts as a lushly operatic Chinese Godfather, but instead of, as we expect, using the triads to explore a country’s corruption, becomes an intimate chamber piece, as Gong discovers the extent of her betrayal.

At the end, DiCaprio, whose trashed beauty has survived his season in hell, is seen turning his experiences into a playlet for an ecstatic audience of off-off-Broadway trendies.Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad disappointed me at Cannes, and a second viewing didn’t change my opinion, although it certainly shines more brightly amid some of the dog-eared specimens now on show in Britain. For all its claims not to glorify drugs, The Basketball Diaries bears an uncomfortable resemblance to this romantic tradition of poets who do junk to fuel their talent – characteristically, Carroll himself makes a cameo appearance as an addict hymning the exquisite ritual of preparing to shoot up. Alas, this fascinating vignette of street life hasn’t made it into The Basketball Diaries, a movie based on Carroll’s story, although most of the obvious cliches are present and correct.The lead role is taken by Leonardo DiCaprio, who will shortly play Rimbaud in another forthcoming film. It’s odd to have Bond acknowledging that this was a dark moment of our island story, just as it’s odd to have him examine the new-generation BMW that Q issues him with no mention of its foreign origin.

Perhaps in future films he will murmur “for the European Economic Community” rather than for “England” as he unleashes his latest bout of mayhem. It’s a tricky business, trying to modernise Bond’s patriotism without making it dissolve altogether.Martin Campbell directs fluently and even with flair. A sequence of a tank chase in St Petersburg at about the halfway mark is probably the high point in terms of action – old-fashioned but undeniably exhilarating. The script, by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein from a story by Michael France, is never stupid and leaves little dead time between excitements.Pierce Brosnan turns out to be well suited for the role of Bond. Of course, to think that the film couldn’t be made without him would be like saying that McDonalds would stop making burgers if it couldn’t buy one particular cow. But he doesn’t suffer from Connery’s moral impatience with the role, Moore’s suave floundering or Dalton’s nagging superiority to the acting assignment – his inability to forget he had played Antony to Vanessa Redgrave’s Cleopatra.