Films of the week

That said, there’s a rattling good twist to Gore Verbinski’s lavish yarn. Come the moonlight — and there’s a fat full moon every night in this part of the world — and the dastardly crew of The Black Pearl, led by Geoffrey Rush’s pensionable salt, Captain Barbossa, are revealed as rotting skeletons. Zombies in fact — comic too; one of them keeps losing a false wooden eyeball when he should be gutting pompous idiots in Port Royal (wherever that may be).

“We were compelled by greed. Now we are consumed by it,” snarls Rush to the virginal Knightley, downing a bottle of rum which sloshes straight out of his ribcage. “You best start believing in ghost stories,” he adds, like a rheumy plumber whose best drains are behind him. “You’re in one.”

It would be a travesty if the accents weren’t mangled, but Rush’s ghastly Oirish is perfect for the part. This is priceless footage for those of us who thought the pirate genre was banjaxed forever by smart such animations as The Road to El Dorado or Treasure Planet. Who needs that cartoon treacle when there are enough live-action broadsides here to sink the Armada? It’s the pirates’ ruthless pursuit of the last piece of Aztec gold, and the blood of Bootstrap Bill’s child (ahar, and who might that be?) that will redeem the crew of the Pearl of their undead folly. The joy is that they’ve spent aeons trying to find both; the thrill is that their mortal fate is in the slippery hands of Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) and the humble, love-smitten blacksmith, Will Turner (Bloom).

These two young chaps are poles apart, but their impact on the film is sensational. Depp is the high, lucrative tease. His arrival in stuffy Port Royal (population 50, tops) is an expensive work of art. He doffs his cap to three pirate skeletons twisting in the wind, and scuppers his boat next to the dock, tap-dancing his way to dry land along the yard arm. His eyes are smothered in black kohl. His hair is a mop of dreadlocks. And however many times you thow him in the drink he always turns up for the next scene like a freshly pressed daisy.

Bloom has none of that camp art, but holds all the aces. He is a sword-throwing swashbuckler with Knightley’s heart in his locker. He is Errol Flynn, even if the moustache, sex and goatee belong to Depp. But just how bad is Depp, and how noble is Bloom? These are the tensions that drive any Jerry Bruckheimer production you care to mention — and this is one of them — over the edge of sentimental decency. As I said, you’re about to be mugged.

Respiro, a terrific film by Emanuele Crialese, adds some much needed briny to love in a hard place. Valeria Golino is a breath-catchingly beautiful mother of three in a parched fishing village in Sicily. The kids are small thugs, forever wrestling with rival gangs around the rocks and fissures.

Hunky Dad (Vincenzo Amato) fiddles around on his boat and chinks beers with his beefy fisher friends, leaving his two sons, Pasquale and Filippo, to tell their mother to cover up her breasts when she goes swimming, and to make sure their elder sister Marinella is thoroughly escorted when the carabinieri come calling. The judge and jury in these village matters are vindictive spinsters who alight in the kitchen like vultures at the first whiff of scandal.

It’s life in the funeral lane if you’re as angry as Golino. So she stages her own demise, to heart-stopping effect. She might be a public menace who fits and screams when her boys are beaten, but she’s a martyr when her red shift is discovered on the beach. It’s the boys who inform the feral jolt and lilt of the film. And the 13-year-old Pasquale (Francesco Casisa) is magnificent. There’s a lot more wisdom about Crialese’s film than meets the eye.

I doubt whether Ventura Pons, the Spanish maestro behind Food of Love, has ever been near a fish tank. This gay comedy of manners, plucked from a novella written by David Leavitt, could have been quite brilliant with a feisty editor. If anything, Pons is too true to the scripted word, and too mistrusting of his cast.

Food of Love plots the romance between a gifted concert pianist, Kennington (Paul Rhys), and his hunky teenage page-turner (Kevin Bishop) — surely the most thankless job in classical music. Kennington courts the young acolyte under his mother’s nose. Bishop is a useless Salieri, but he’s the eyes and ears of the movie and he quivers between lust and despair. Kennington has the instincts and expensive habits of a vampire.

His lover and agent (a terrific turn by Allan Corduner) is not far behind.

Juliet Stevenson is hysterical as Bishop’s clueless mother. But the real drama is never quite knowing who seduces whom. Bishop is so real he bleeds. Rhys delivers a haunting performance: melancholic, prickly, cruel and surprisingly comic. But he is matched by Corduner, the jealous manager playing a subtle game to prise the lovers apart.

These are characters who could so easily run to camp, but the cast keep their touching manipulations spry and sharp. I wish Pons could have done the same with the story.