Lost in La Mancha<br></br>Lovely and Amazing<br></br>Platform<br></br>Time of favor

Another disaster for the Don

The average documentary about the making of a film is really only concerned with the selling of the film. It might fill a gap in the TV schedules or help justify the exorbitant price of a DVD, but it's no more informative about the film-making nitty-gritty than an interview with an actor in a Sunday paper. For its educational value alone, then, Lost in La Mancha (15) is a cut above.

The directors, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, began documenting Terry Gilliam's work on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote eight weeks before production began, so we see both the intensive preparatory slog and the bittiness of the process once the cameras are rolling. For Johnny Depp, the star, hours of hanging around the set translate into minutes in front of the camera, which translate, in turn, into a few seconds of the finished product. If you want to know how a film is made, Lost in La Mancha is an essential primer – and its subject is a film that wasn't made after all.

Don Quixote was, in a very real sense, a disaster movie. The first week of shooting was plagued by flash floods, low-flying F16s, unco-operative horses and the hospitalisation of Jean Rochefort, the actor cast as Quixote. Consequently, the first week of shooting was the last week of shooting, too.

Production was shut down, admonishing us once again never to work with children, animals or septuagenarians with prostate disorders.

Lost in La Mancha keeps repeating a Gilliam-as-Quixote analogy, as if it's a tragi-comic saga of how one man's dreams can be hauled up in the air and back down to earth by the windmill of reality. In fact, it's a sad little hard luck story. Fulton and Pepe had unhindered access to Gilliam and his crew throughout, but there are no interviews with Depp or Rochefort, and a lot of the documentary consists of accountants negotiating over the phone with insurance adjusters. Much of it is shot in fuzzy digital video, too, with sound so poor that sometimes even the English speakers have to be subtitled.

It's not worth paying a tenner to see on the big screen, then. But should Gilliam ever complete The Man Who Killed Don Quixote – and he's gearing up for another bash at it – then Lost in La Mancha would be an ideal bonus feature for the DVD. Keep your fingers crossed.

If Lovely & Amazing (15) had been written and directed by a man, feminist critics would be lambasting it for disparaging women. Brenda Blethyn stars as a fiftysomething who checks into a clinic for liposuction. Her oldest daughter is Catherine Keener, an unhappily married knick-knack maker. Keener's younger sister is Emily Mortimer, an actress who frets that she's not sexy enough to get off the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder: in the film's most celebrated scene, she instructs her lover to detail all the pros and cons of her naked body. Raven Goodwin plays the third sister, an eight-year-old black girl who, despite being adopted, has inherited the family's self-esteem issues. If this coven of self-involved, talentless screw-ups is Nicole Holofcener's idea of lovely and amazing, I pray she never makes a film called Egocentric & Rude.

Like Walking And Talking, Holofcener's debut, Lovely & Amazing is too pleased with itself for the rest of us be pleased with it. It's sold as being less false than a big studio movie, with heroines who aren't perfect and an emphasis on characters and relationships, not plot and resolution.

But beneath all this, the film is just as calculated and hokey as its folksy soundtrack. Every well-written piece of dialogue stands out as just that – a well-written piece of dialogue, as if it's not there to be enjoyed, but to be congratulated for its insight and sensitivity. Lovely & Amazing is a corny chick flick in an indie film's clothing.

Jia Zhangke's Platform (15) is two-and-a-half hours of unrelated episodes in the lives of a troupe of miserable, taciturn entertainers. I'm told that it spans the 1980s, and, although I'd never have picked that up from watching the film, it certainly felt as if it lasted a decade. Time Of Favor (12) is an Israeli film – winner of six Israeli Academy Awards, no less – that limps from its love-triangle first half to its bomb-thriller second half.

n.barber@independent.co.uk