At the World Cinema Showcase, Jean-Claude Van Damme. By JACOB POWELL.

FIRST UP, I just need to get something off my chest: JCVD is awesome! If you don’t read any further I want you to know that.

So why? You might think that I’m indulging some romanticism for action flicks watched in my teens? Yeah okay, I’ll buy that. The allure of seeing the eponymous Jean-Claude Van Damme in a film, seemingly possessed of depth we wouldn’t expect from him, paid off with probably the most satisfying and interesting performance we might ever get from him. Who knows, maybe he’ll find his third act resurgence a la Bill Murray? Whatever the case this self-reflexive film from Belgian filmmaker Mabrouk El Mechri captures the long since faded glow of celebrity with keenly ironic eye whilst retaining considerable warmth for its beaten down protagonist.

At the World Cinema Showcase, a man obsessed. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

THE GERMANS made a great fist at exploring sociopaths at times of great social cruelty in their cinema. On the basis of Tony Manero, it looks like the Chileans have got in the act too – this is a bleak, bleak film looking at a sociopath during the Pinochet era. Raúl is obsessed with the character of Tony Manero – John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever – so much so that he’s willing to go to rather extreme lengths to live out his fantasy. And while disco was seen as the ultimate escapism in the late 70s, an excess which ignored the economic shocks (and particularly in its early days, the racism and homophobia of everyday society), the escapism envisaged by this film is rather chilling. Unfortunately for Raúl, when his fantasy is being able to impersonate Tony Manero on a shitty Chilean variety show, the film’s hardly making a point about the redemptive power of popular culture.

At the World Cinema Showcase, Liverpool then and now. By TIM WONG.

SCANDALOUSLY under-financed and out-of-action since 2000’s The House of Mirth, Terence Davies carries a less-than-sunny disposition into his latest film, Of Time and The City – a sensual, if unusually prickly recollection of hometown memories and bitter resentments. Liverpool, for better or worse, is memorialised through an arrangement of found archival footage and occasional hurdles into the present, to which the city’s earthy brick and mortar is gradually overwritten by municipal concrete tumours, and the endless symmetry of modern, industrial planning. Davies though is far more eloquent as a essayist when moving across time and in between personal transformations – Catholicism to Atheism, pop to classical music (and back again: see soundtrack), growing up gay – than he is unleashing throaty, often monotonous tirades on soul-destroying architecture and Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

At the World Cinema Showcase, a visit to Soulsville USA. By BRANNVANAN GNANLINGAM.

THE SIMPLISTIC dichotomy within the 60s Civil Rights movements in the US – integration (Martin Luther King) and ‘separatism’ (Malcolm X) – were loosely matched in the 60s soul music scenes too. On the one hand you had Motown, that glorious label which tried to downplay ‘blackness’ with sunny melodies and unthreatening performers in order to sell records. You also had figures on the other end of the spectrum like James Brown who would go on to sing things like ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’ as the decade collapsed into assassinations and racial turmoil. Then there was a label which didn’t actually give a shit about the colour of your skin – a mixed race label which produced some of the most seminal soul music of the 60s where artists such as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Rufus and Carla Thomas and the Staple Sisters frolicked. That was until racial harmony collapsed. And while this pretty run-of-the-mill documentary carries the whiff of being created for the sole purpose of advertising the re-minted Stax, it does celebrate something much more vital and important: the music.

At the World Cinema Showcase, a blackboard jungle. By BRANNVANAN GNANLINGAM.

ONE OF the key planks to those naïve enough to subscribe to either free market ideologies or socialist ideologies is that education is the key to fixing the social ills. Loosely speaking, there is the belief that social inequalities can be fixed between the walls. The top prize-winner from Cannes last year, and the first French film to win the honour for decades, Laurent Cantet’s The Class takes place in such a sealed environment – one teacher (François Bégaudeau) and a gaggle of students jostle over words, actions and mood swings while trying to learn French. Based on Bégaudeau’s own memoirs, the film shows the societal inequalities and frustrations breaking their way into this classroom, leading to, relatively speaking, devastating consequences. As far away from the usual Hollywood glamorisation of ghetto kids being saved by one inspirational teacher, The Class is a resonant and powerful film experience, a film where a whole bunch of individual notes and motifs are collected to become a symphony by the end.