Other films out this week

The Silence Between Two Thoughts

No Cert, 95 mins

Banned and confiscated by the Iranian authorities, The Silence Between Two Thoughts premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival in a smuggled-in digital version. Such thrilling details have lent the film a cachet that it does not wholly deserve.

A local executioner in rural Iran is ordered by the authorities to marry a young woman who has been sentenced to death. A law dictates that virgins are believed to ascend to paradise, so he is told to ensure that she does not remain one for much longer - and then shoot her.

Yet this man is confused: who wrote such a law? He locks the woman in his home but does not touch her, all the while falling out of favour with his village community and powerful religious leaders.

Director Babak Payami is very fond of his languid, circular shots, taking in the side of someone's face, then the space beyond that face, and then, eventually, the face of someone else on the other side of the room - all done so slowly you're convinced that Payami has fallen asleep or gone on a spa break. You long for a CGI battle between alien vampires, or a nine-mile-long genetically modified snake. During one particularly lengthy study of a brick wall I felt like a dog abandoned outside a supermarket: surely I hadn't been entirely forgotten?

Iran has a relatively secular younger generation and a theocratically despotic everyone else - a classic crucible for good art. But The Silence Between Two Thoughts is forever holding back, waiting for someone ( anyone) to make a move.

Edward Said: The Last Interview

Edward Said - musician, academic, Palestinian activist - died last year after a long struggle with leukaemia. This film is simply a long interview with the man in his New York home and is quite something.

Although the camera is just trained rather boringly on Said talking and talking, it is utterly gripping. He engages constantly, sometimes delivering unbroken monologues for up to five minutes, full of the conviction that if he gives the fullest and clearest response to whatever he is being asked about, we will really listen.

What strikes in particular is not Said's undoubted intellect, but his plain and lucid resolution about things: Beethoven, Israel, his wife, teaching. Whatever he says is helpful, and for all his talk about being tired (he died very soon after making the film), he is generous and open.

Silence Between Two Thoughts
Cert: certPG