Gilda (PG)

Starring: Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth, George Macready

It's debatable whether spruced-up digital restorations do old film noir classics like Gilda many favours. They're supposed to be grainy, smoky affairs.

Even so, Gilda stands up remarkably well. This is a highly stylised melodrama about sexual jealousy and neurosis set around a (very stagily recreated) Buenos Aires casino. Rita Hayworth's nightclub singer Gilda is treated in extraordinarily ambivalent fashion by the film-makers: fetishised and celebrated for her glamour and beauty but, at the same time, portrayed in near-misogynistic fashion as the root of all the male characters' problems. Bizarrely, casino owner George Macready (who wanders round with a sharpened, steel-tipped stick he calls his "little friend") seems almost as obsessed with his Bukowski-like casino manager (Glenn Ford) as he is with Gilda herself.