X+Y (12A)
Directed by Morgan Matthews
5 stars

DOCUMENTARY film-maker Morgan Matthews makes an assured dramatic debut with this moving feature.

Armed with James Graham’s clever and sharply characterised screenplay, he draws a memorable gallery of performances from a perfect cast headed by Asa Butterfield as Nathan, a young and semi-autistic mathematics genius.

“I think I see the world in a different way to other people,” he declares and he proves it in the feud with his widowed mother Julie (Sally Hawkins, magnificent throughout) as he hides his emotional agony behind an obsession with numbers.

Encouraged by his limping teacher Humphreys (Rafe Spall), an MS sufferer, Nathan wins a place in the British team for the international mathematics Olympiad and travels with the team to Taiwan for training.

There his psychological wounds — caused by witnessing his father’s death as a child — start to heal, catalysed by his tentative love for Chinese co-competitor Zhang Mei (Jo Yang).

Butterfield’s performance — “I’m usually the weird one” he tells a fellow contestant — is both comic and deeply moving. He brilliantly succeeds in inhabiting a character who, unusually, is both funny and sad.

Elsewhere, Hawkins’s single mother is moving and credible, Spall has never been better and even the all-too-often irritating Eddie Marian — remember Warhorse? — is splendid as Richard, the British maths squad leader.

Even the potentially mawkish romance between Spall and Hawkins comes off, with their developing relationship portrayed with just the right blend of cynicism and sentimentality without undermining the genuine joy this delightful film engenders

Alan Frank

Run All Night (15)
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
3 stars

FATHERS and sons and tested loyalties all come under the spotlight in Liam Neeson’s new action film which aspires to more emotional depths than his previous efforts.

The action star plays hitman Jimmy Conlon who spends the night on the run from his former mob boss and best friend Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris) after he kills the latter’s son to protect his estranged offspring Mike (Joel Kinnaman).

Despite their long-time friendship, Maguire wants Conlon to feel the pain and anguish of losing a child even though his own was a nasty piece of work.

In the meantime, Conlon is also being pursued by a police detective (Vincent D’Onofrio) who has been one step behind him for 30 years.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra is incredibly skilled at accelerating the thrills and racking up the tension in this race-against-time crime drama.

Neeson has the drunk assassin riddled with regrets honed down to perfection. But it is his tete-a-tetes with Harris that are emotional gold and their impressive and heartfelt performances allow this flawed thriller to punch above its weight.

Maria Duarte

Far from the Madding Crowd (U)
Directed by John Schlesinger
4 stars

IT IS hard to see how Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation (above right), due out in May, can surpass this magnificent 1967 interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s first major literary success by John Schlesinger.

Hardy’s Wessex, located in south-west England, has never looked more stunning due to Nicolas Roeg’s exquisite cinematography.

Julie Christie is memorably beguiling as the wilful, flirtatious and passionate Bathsheba Everdene who plays havoc with the hearts of three very different men — Gabriel Oak, William Boldwood and Sergeant Troy, played formidably by Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp.

Although fundamentally a love story, Hardy also explores the hardships and remoteness of rural life and the class divide in 19th-century England and the tragedies depicted are still unnerving today.

Hardy’s heroine, a feminist at heart, is depicted as an independent woman who defies convention by running the farm she inherits from her uncle herself and who decides to marry for love rather than social standing.

Yet she lives to regret her choice of spouse — the handsome and caddish Troy — who, in one of the most erotic scenes in the film, seduces her with his swordplay.

After almost half a century Schlesinger’s faithful adaptation of Hardy’s novel hasn’t lost any of its visual or emotional punch.

See it while you can.

Maria Duarte