Her voice, never the most sheerly lustrous, cuts through bel canto convention to find beauty in pain. Sometimes it sounds strangulated, the chest register is fierce and frightening, but this is acting through the voice, and it makes for uncomfortable drama. William Hague, the Secretary of State for Wales, yesterday ordered councils and the three experts who carried out the inquiry to produce a version of the report that can be safely published. If the point is that people can’t escape their pasts, then she seems to have got off pretty lightly. Then it is announced by a flurry of Vertigo references (“It’s just like what is happening to us”) and lashings of the cod-Liebestod that Bernard Herrmann wrote for that film.

This too seems like a perverse red-herring derailment of a project that has not properly got in the groove yet.What with the visual clutter, the echoes of past mastery, the narrative clutter, and even the philosophical clutter (what is real and what is not?), 12 Monkeys does not disclose until the last half hour what its focus is, the theme by which it wants to be judged. The hero of The Fisher King, on the other hand, abandons his cynicism and seeks to take seriously the benign delusions of his friend, and is thereby healed.The possibility that James, too, might be mentally divergent – and so not really a visitor from 2035 – is raised by closely parallel sequences of him being decontaminated in the future after a foray to the surface, and being scrubbed roughly down by prison guards in the present. A director who is doing things characteristic of himself may not make the effort to surpass himself – as Gilliam did on Brazil, where every element of design and performance was memorably coordinated.Gilliam has done a visually overwhelming retro-futurist hell before (in Brazil, in fact), and it does not count as a breakthrough to make the colour scheme less filing-cabinet green and more liver and mucous. “We went to great pains to be sure we got the right sound for the machine guns letting rip in the concrete canyons There’s a certain pattern to the reverberation.

And you can either pay attention to it or let it go and let technicians do it To me that’s wasteful. Michael Mann’s time has finally come. The box-office success of his high octane heist movie, Heat, following the 1992 success of Last of the Mohicans, has promoted him to Hollywood’s A-list of directors. But it’s been a long wait for the 53-year-old, Chicago-born director who was hailed back in 1979 as the new Spielberg on the strength of a made- for-TV prison drama, The Jericho Mile. He’s made only five films since then and the first three – Thief (1981), The Keep (1983) and Manhunter (1986) – were overshadowed by the phenomenal worldwide success of Miami Vice, the Eighties cops and cocaine show that Mannexecutive produced. Even so, one critic has gone so far as to call him “the key American auteur of the last 10 years”.
That might be pitching it a bit high, but certainly Mann fits the bill as an auteur, given his consistent vision, the thematic continuity of his films and the fact that he is involved with every aspect of the film- making process – he writes, directs and, when possible, executive produces.A Michael Mann film, whether a period epic like Mohicans or a high-tech thriller like Thief, is a visceral experience, with a strong visual style and potent use of music. What he’s after, he has said, is “the intensity of the experience, the power of film to …