This is a special one. A real, real delight. Unheard of until it surprisingly picked up the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’ has since left the borders of Argentina and is now finally brought to us all around the world. Having not seen the other contenders for that award, and knowing that both ‘A Prophet’ and ‘The White Ribbon’ were also very well regarded, this reviewer cannot fairly say whether it deserved to win. All he knows is that it has warmed his heart in the strangest but most sincere of ways, by being a film that is both touchingly romantic and an exhibit of aching injustice, all through the eyes of a man too gentle to deserve the tormenting of his soul for over twenty years.

That man, Esposito, never got over one of the crimes he once had to investigate when working as a federal agent, and now, as a nostalgic old retiree, he’s intent on writing a book about it to try and free himself of its pain once and for all. Through flashbacks, we learn of his life and what he went through. The crime bugging him was a rape and homicide case, in which a young, just-married woman was taken away from her lover, and the authorities then immune from real notions of justice blamed the crime on whoever they could, closed the file and moved on. As Esposito explained to his senior and then love-interest, what aggravated him so much about the case and what compelled him to fight on was the look in the eyes of the man who had been deprived of justice. The woman’s husband spent most of the next year of his life sitting on a bench in the city’s main train station, looking out for the man both him and Esposito suspected of having really committed the crime. For his sake, he fought on, reopening a case and story that continually surprises in the emotions it stirs.

It’s solemn, but it’s not all as grim as it sounds. There’s plenty of quiet humour here, especially in the film’s early stages and between Esposito and his work partner, a clumsy alcoholic who actually provides the biggest breakthrough in the case by noting that regardless of a man’s ability to change his location, relationships and work habits, no man can change his passion. Letters sent from their seemingly invisible suspect thus lead them to a football game, and in dedication to the husband’s train-watching, they spend months scouring the explosive crowd, an activity that ends up leading to both a breakthrough and one of the film’s best sequences.

It’s not possible to say much more, for it is in the context of becoming absorbed by these characters and truly caring for them that the film’s unforeseen events, when revealed to us, have their most powerful impact. You’ll just have to take this reviewer’s word for it: it’s perfectly done. A touching tale, that couldn’t have been told, acted or written much better than it is.

There was something about the first cinematic instalment of late author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy that made ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ that little bit better than most crime-related mysteries. That film felt fresh, frighteningly cold in both its storytelling and setting, and it gave us a ridiculously intriguing female protagonist that remained stunningly elusive throughout. That small, leather-wearing, short black-haired cyberpunk with a history of violence and sexual abuse returns here, and when embodied by a little-known Swedish actress named Noomi Rapace, Lisbeth Salander ensures that at least whilst she’s on screen, ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’ feels as distinctively funky as the film that preceded it.

It’s a shame, then, that this second effort in the series somehow loses the magic of its predecessor in every other respect. The solid, stern-looking investigative journalist that Lisbeth accompanied on a project in the first film – Mikael Blomkvist – returns too, but now he’s working alone to help clear her name of a triple homicide charge, whilst she goes on the run and retraces her past Bourne-style in an attempt to uncover who is setting her up.

The problem is that the list of new names is so lengthy and the strands of plot so convoluted that the film, in attempting to remain loyal to the lengthy novel, just ends up displaying an awfully messy bundle of crimes. Filmmakers don’t have the privilege of detail that writers do, and when they fail to remember this most basic of lessons, the result is muddy water of the kind so clearly present here. When added to the dull, television-thriller quality of the visuals, warning alerts start sounding loud and clear.

There are mild sources of interest, most notably in the shape of a new blonde, block-like German villain. He’s like a physical and mental fusion of the Coen brothers’ gormless serial killer Gaear Grimsrud in ‘Fargo’, and the similarly stoical, silent and terrifying Anton Chigurh of ‘No Country for Old Men’. The only difference is that the guy on the murdering rampage here has a rare genetic defect meaning he never feels any pain – not even when Lisbeth uses her notorious electric zapper on his balls.

But ultimately all this falls far too short of the mark, and is a serious let-down compared to the first film of the series. It doesn’t go over old ground, but it does cover new ground in a bad way. This is without even mentioning the premature ending, which fails to tie up one too many loose ends and demands psychic abilities of its audience. After ‘Dragon Tattoo’, there were good reasons for skepticism about the forthcoming Hollywood remakes of the trilogy, but after seeing ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’, nobody can doubt that there’s a good possibility that they might actually do a better job.

For the twelve people who haven’t heard of Stieg Larsson, he is the Swedish journalist turned novelist who wrote the ‘Millennium trilogy’, a phenomenally successful crime series which has sold over 3 million copies world wide. The first book, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, was adapted onto the silver screen over a year ago, and has grossed about $100 million worldwide since then. Larsson tragically died in 2004 before his books were published so was unable to see what a phenomenon he had created. However, it has also been rumoured that Larsson left half finished manuscripts on his computer, so we might yet witness the release of more books and films by this talented thriller writer. Having heard all about the hype, this reporter settled down in the balmy French countryside to read all three books as ‘research’ for reviewing the DVD. How’s that for dedication?

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ follows Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) as they try to solve a 40 year old mystery. Henrik Vanger, the retired head of a Swedish industrial dynasty, wants to learn more about the disappearance of his favourite niece Harriet and hires recently disgraced reporter Blomkvist to help him. The film becomes very dark very quickly as Blomkvist and Salander delve into the hidden secrets and lives of the Vanger family, all of which are suspected to be involved in the disappearance. Director Niels Arden Oplev keeps very close to the original material, even including the disturbing sexual and religious aspects that could have been downplayed by a less daring director. Larsson himself was an expert in right wing, anti-democratic extremism and Nazi organisations, and to ignore the more disturbing aspects of his book would have been an insult to its fans. Thus, many scenes are necessarily graphic, and the 18 rating strongly hints at some of the horrors you might witness; even pre-warned readers will find certain scenes hard to watch – they are far more hard hitting than words on a page.

The stand-out character in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is different, very different, to most heroines. She lacks the usual beauty of the girl-next door or the femme fatale, instead sporting the grunge look with an all black outfit and multiple piercings and tattoos. She is a social outsider, but has computer skills (amongst other talents) like no one else; she also has a strong sense of justice, an unbreakable will and a violent streak. All of these qualities make her unpredictable and therefore completely interesting to watch. Although Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth extremely well, the film’s audience cannot understand her as well as readers of the book do. Oplev is unable to get into her head fully through the medium of film, and as a result it is a lot harder for the audience to comprehend the complicated mechanics of her mind and see her as more than just another troubled young woman.

In fact, losing detail in the translation from page to screen seems to be a recurring flaw in the movie. Many minor characters and plot-lines are missed out in order to make the 500 page book into a more streamlined 153 minute film. This, however, means that the story loses a lot of depth and characterisation, and at times it feels that you don’t really get to know any of the characters that have been left in, particularly the two main ones. For instance, Lisbeth’s first guardian and Mikael’s boss both play huge parts in the book in adding dimension to the protagonists, but in the film they do not feature at all. Still, Oplev does certain effective things with the film, such as showing the beautiful scenery of Sweden (one suspects the Swedish tourist board may have been involved at a few points in its creation) as well as having it all filmed in the country’s native language. Oplev also introduces new scenes to tie in with the parts of the story that become jagged due to the loss of minor characters. This is done very effectively so the film adaptation feels closer to ‘Lord of the Rings’ in continuity rather than ‘Harry Potter’. However the great aesthetics don’t counter-balance the slight loss in depth that has occurred due to the editing and alterations.

Overall the film is very good: dark, tense and rewarding. Its a good adaptation of the book and perfect for those who want to experience the story telling of Larsson, but don’t have the time to read the novel. Tragically, our American cousins’ dislike of subtitled films meant that it only grossed $10 million. Predictably, a Hollywood version is on the way. It remains to be seen whether Rooney Mara will be able to pull off unconventional Lisbeth Salander, certainly not if the studio bosses have any creative input. So before the American rehashes grace our theatres, it would be best to check out the original Swedish version on DVD and its sequel, ‘The Girl who Played with Fire’.

OK, I really screwed up this time. I went to interview a major modern pianist without having listened to her work or, indeed, to any modern piano music. It’s people like me who give journalism a bad name.

As luck would have it though, a blagging tongue honed by dozens of tutes got me halfway there, and Lola Perrin’s no-bullshit approach to music brought the interview home.

So who is Lola Perrin? Perrin is the latest pianist to be supported by Steinway, who are to pianos what Hattori Hanzo was to samurai swords. She is a minimalist composer-pianist, with deep roots in jazz. She is collaborating with the heavyweights of the art world – but more on that later. She is also, endearingly, still just a little starstruck by her own rise.

‘There was this one time,’ she says, ‘when I was due to perform at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. That’s right next to La Scala! And a Bentley was to come and pick us up from the airport, and we were going to stay in a five-star hotel with a, erm, what do you call it?’ – she tries to grab the word out of the air in front of her – ‘a butler.’

She started out on the piano at the age of four. The youngest of six piano-playing siblings, she knew the instrument was hers by right – ‘I hogged it.’ At 13, she was invited along to exhibition classes at the Royal College of Music, and then they gave her the chance to become a concert pianist. She turned it down.

The piano still haunted her. ‘Music picks you,’ she says. ‘A born musician has no choice. You’re completely miserable if you’re not doing it.’ She read Music at university, where she began to take theory very seriously indeed. ‘You had this linear progression from Baroque to Classical to Romantic to, erm, well I suppose you’d call it Impressionism. And then you have Debussy. Debussy destroyed the Western musical form.’

And after Debussy? ‘I guess you could say that Duke Ellington was the next big composer after Debussy.’ For Perrin, jazz is the natural heir to the classical tradition. The other modern schools squandered their heritage: ‘studying a lot of twentieth-century music was very distressing for me. Listening to much of it, I feel like I’m being tortured – you can’t even tell where the end is, it’s sadistic. And when it’s over, people applaud, but I bet they’re just glad it’s finished.’

‘I started to crave narrative,’ she continues. ‘And meaning. In my dreams, the Cohen brothers would come along and make me a 10-minute film.’ She began to crave collaboration, too. As soon as she felt her style had matured, she began to reach out to other artists. ‘I had this sort of VIP list,’ she explains, ‘these artists I admired and wrote to, and only Hanif Kureishi wrote back.’

The riotously successful novelist and scriptwriter’s reply was the start of an intense exchange of emails like something out of a South American novel. ‘He said, ‘I love your tunes.’ And I said, ‘I would love to work with your work.'” Soon, he began sending her Word documents with no explanation, and she began to take them as her inspiration. They only met each other face to face two years later, at a performance of her adaptation of his short story The Dogs. ‘I was so excited,’ she remembers, ‘that I couldn’t sleep.’

‘The first thing he said was ‘we’re going to do The Turd.’ He wasn’t smiling. I remember thinking, ‘I’m a minimalist. I don’t think I can write about turds.’ Luckily it turned out he was joking.’ Since then, the composer and the writer have appeared together onstage at Latitude Festival. Their creative relationship looks set to continue. I hope they fall in love.

Her dream, however, is to write a score for multiple pianos. How many pianos? ‘Many. I’ve already done six. It sounds…like an aural jigsaw.’ She vents a shuddering breath, and her eyes close. ‘It feels so good. It’s the most expressive instrument.’

After the interview, I watch Perrin in concert at my local literary festival. She’s doing things to the Baptist church piano that have never been done to it before. Keys used to banging out ‘When I Needed a Neighbour’ and ‘Shine Jesus, Shine’ are being teased into an electrical storm of shimmering riffs and growling basslines. I find myself wondering if some of this music will linger in the piano and make all the Baptists cry come Sunday morning.

And the music sounds everything that minimalist jazz shouldn’t. It’s expressive, tempestuous, eminently listenable, occasionally a bit naive, yes, but above all this is music with something to say. Like Perrin herself. The music starts to make sense when you’ve met its composer, for there seems to be little difference between her art and her life. I begin to wonder if I didn’t meet the woman and the music the right way round after all…

News of the production of ‘Salt’ first hit the media around the time ‘Changeling’ came out two years ago. Angelina Jolie had finally taken a role in a film that involved more than mere hip swinging and gun firing and – even if she spent the majority of that film just crying and yelling, ‘He’s not my son’ – it was undoubtedly a better choice and performance than anything she had done before. Hence the annoyance that will have come over a lot of people when Jolie, asked in an interview what her next project would be, confessed she was returning to the screen as what sounded like nothing more than a rehash of her Lara Croft character.

In a way, given the amount of men-bashing and car-dodging that is packed in here, ‘Salt’ is indeed annoyingly similar to any other action film that Hollywood churns out each summer. Yet at the same time, its marketing campaign has asked a legitimate question that spices things up a little bit more than you might expect: who is Evelyn Salt?

Well, she works for the CIA, and spent time in North Korea spying on their nuclear operations. That’s all we’re really shown and told before the action starts, by which point things have become incredibly mysterious. When a Russian turns up in Washington and claims to be a defector with highly important information, it is Salt who’s first to hear it: a Russian spy, so he claims, will assassinate the Russian President when he attends the American Vice President’s funeral the next day, in a grand operation to somehow destroy the United States. That spy is called Evelyn Salt.

Whether she is indeed a mole or not is something the film refuses to tell us for some time. Her reaction to the revelation is suspicious. Rather than remaining calm and rubbishing the Russian’s accusations, she goes on the run, apparently fearing for the safety of her husband. But once she has escaped past a dozen gun-bearing men who could have taken her down at any minute if only they shot before she punched, and after jumping off a bridge and naturally landing safely on top of a moving lorry, she ends up fulfilling the prophecy and heading to New York. It’ll take some incredibly decent guesswork, in the midst of a heap of mindless action and a plethora of twists and turns, to work out what is really going on here: is Evelyn Salt actually the Russian spy she was alleged to be, or is she a grandiose utilitarian calculator using some pretty disturbing means to justify her ultimately noble ends?

It goes without saying that this is all completely unbelievable, not only in the film’s reality-defying action sequences in which Salt is lucky not to die on multiple occasions (apparently Jolie did gain some real life injuries during filming that put her in hospital for a day), but also in the film’s wholly implausible number of twists premised on the existence of a world packed with spies and double agents that have somehow reached the peaks of their rival government’s hierarchy. ‘Salt’ is marketed as an action thriller with a typically intricate plot, and indeed it is exactly that. With Jolie at its centre, however, it becomes annoyingly watchable, and also surprisingly intriguing. This film requires an audience willing to suspend its belief in reality. And if you can manage that, ‘Salt’ will deliver the goods.

‘It’s about worrying and science and faith and miracles and love and memory’. In one breath, Rachel Barnett sums up the themes that run through her new play ‘The Law of Inertia’. The plot centers on a man who survives and near-fatal car accident and is left with questions of luck or destiny and begins to see danger lurking behind every corner. Barnett says that she came up with the idea in the midst of running her theatre company for children, Peut-Etre Theatre, and writing for theatre for education pieces for schools across the country. She refers to ‘The Law of Inertia’ as a ‘grown up play’ and its staged reading as a important step in the writing process.

The story of Barnett becoming a playwright raises the same questions of luck or destiny as her latest work. Writing her first play which was short-listed at a national festival at only 12 years old, young Barnett vowed not to write another play until she was 20, because, as she says ‘I was too young to know anything’. After taking it up again in university, Barnett applied to the Central School of Speech and Drama for a course in dramaturgy but was placed instead in the playwriting course. Since then, she says, she’s been writing plays to ‘pay the bills’. It seems that the combination of children’s theatre, TIE writing and the occasional ‘grown-up play’ has enabled Barnett to circumvent the stereotype of the starving artist and she is the first to admit that, ‘I am incredibly lucky that I’ve been able to support myself on my writing for the last four years’.

Barnett adores the world of children’s theatre, saying that it is very communal and ‘simply lovely’. New writing, however, she perceives as often a competition between who can be the ‘most hip’ new playwright: ‘I’m a geek.’ she says. ‘I’m not cool. I wear cardigans. My iTunes playlists are all from before the 1940s. I’m not political and I’m not with-it. I’m happy. I’m not hungry. And I’m not pretending to be hungry’. If this is why she doesn’t identify as a new writing playwright, it is to her credit; Barnett exudes contentment, warmth, and a down-to-earth quality which are rare in a playwright who can actually survive on playwriting.

Her advice for young playwrights that would like to follow in her footsteps is twofold: ‘Write a play and don’t expect people to put it on. Why should anyone put on your play?’ And, ‘Have a giggle’. With these adages, maybe playwrights would have to sacrifice high-brow artistic aspirations for writing children’s theatre and theatre for education. But maybe they would be better at paying the bills. And having a giggle.

‘The Law of Inertia’ is having a staged reading at the Burton-Taylor Studio, Wednesday August 25th. See www.oxfordplayhouse.com for details.