Two-wheel revolution

Two years ago in Cannes, Walter Salles described his next film to me as "Easy Rider meets Das Kapital". The result, The Motorcycle Diaries, has now arrived and it both fulfils and exceeds that early, tongue-incheek pitch. Its not-so-easy riders are two young Argentines, Alberto Granado and Ernesto Guevara, who in 1952 set out on Granado's battered Norton 500 to explore Latin America. What starts out as a romantic escapade turns into something profoundly life-changing.

The two journey through Chile to Peru and, forced to hoof it after the Norton prematurely expires, find poverty and injustice that prompt Ernesto's transformation from a withdrawn asthmatic into the revolutionary Ché. Gael Garcia Bernal's Ché is smart and charismatic if, at times, almost too self-righteous to be true; Rodrigo De La Serna makes the exuberant Alberto much more than a tubby, comic sidekick. It's a superbly crafted film with abundant humour and some breathtaking locations.

Youthful revolt is also the theme of The Edukators, an over-long but gripping confrontation between a trio of anarchic, disaffected youngsters and the fat-cat businessman whom they kidnap and who turns out to have been himself a former radical. Daniel Bruel (Germany's answer to Bernal) is one of the kids and The Edukators could well replicate the success of his last film, Goodbye Lenin.

Under new direction, the festival has focused on unknown names, but it is pleasing to report that two members of the old guard have weighed in with impressive works. Our Music, by Jean-Luc Godard, 74, offers a playful and poetic meditation on the futility of war, while the short film Michelangelo's Gaze is a dramatic, sensuous, near-silent encounter between the 92-year-old Italian maestro Antonioni and a sculpture by his namesake, a blissful island of contemplation in a town of madness.