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In Mike Leigh's new slice of life, Another Year, a married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their crumbling autumn days are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one seemingly average year by friends, colleagues, and family, many of whom appear to suffer some degree of unhappiness or at least confusion. The film is nicely segmented into chapters, following the seasons. All of life is there - from birth, to a funeral. Strangely, or conveniently, given the apparently troubled lives all round, She works as a psychotherapist, while He builds things, but both spend their spare time together growing vegetables in their allotment. Mary, the secretary in her clinic, takes over the centre of the story as she gradually moves into more of everyone's lives. Or perhaps it's just that the film gradually opens up the relationship that was already there. Just as it is with all the extra characters. As it's a Mike Leigh film, all the actors will all have been living "in character" for maybe six months before breezing through, stirring up the plot with their back story and emotional infrastructure.

Lesley Manville, as Mary, the lonely and unstable girl of a certain age - 40, going on 17, really steals this in the final part, which gets even more intense than the rest of it. One thing I noticed right away was that adding to the intensity of the Mike Leigh close-ups, it's all shot in high-definition digital. But in the end it's the total effect that works. The apparent non-acting. The marvellous thing about Leigh is the way he shows really ordinary people doing really ordinary things and makes them really important. He is so compassionate towards everyone in his stories. You just can't help caring, too.

The life story of Serge Gainsbourg had to be filmed, and as he's one of the famous Frenchmen who aren't in fact Belgian, it's only a surprise that it took so long. That his life spanned the Nazi occupation to the rise of Disco would stretch credibility if this were fiction, but as it's all more or less true the director, who is already an accomplished graphic artist, manages to lift it to the level of slightly absurd fiction. Mixing in animation, self-consciously stagey sets and a life-sized puppet as Gainsbourg's dreaded alter ego.

Even the sordid lowlife is given the big treatment, and the early days in the garret look unashamedly glamorous as they would if re-imagined for an opera set or a Salvador Dali dream sequence, as director Joann Sfar lays it on with a trowel.

The episodic nature of the story gives it a rather patchy feel though, and I couldn't help thinking that one or two episodes, especially the cute Hollywood-style musical scene with Brigitte Bardot, could have been shorter. Bardot was just one of the high-profile women Gainsbourg captured, and so was the muse of the existentialists, Juliette Greco.The casting is pretty uncanny with the possible exception of Greco, who was never that model-thin.

Gainsbourg has always been, at least outside France, more famous for being cool than for his music. But his reworking of La Marseillaise which so upset the rightwing patriots of the Seventies was nothing but excellent. I'll go back just to hear that Sly and Robbie riddim one more time.

Quite a substantial feast but it's worth building up an appetite in advance. And of course, you get Jane Birkin and... That Song.

The long-awaited follow-up to Belleville Rendez-Vous is out at last, and director Sylvain Chomet must be the number one in a field of one, when it comes to contenders for making a long-lost Jaques Tati script into a feature-length animation.

The underlying premise of the story here is the same as in all Tati's films: Old is Good, New is Bad. Variety theatre conjurer Monsieur Taticheff is one of the last of the old troupers as TV and rock 'n' roll kill off music hall in the late 1950s. In search of gigs, he takes his grumpy old rabbit and leaves Paris for London, then heads north to the Scottish isles and finally Edinburgh. Along the way he is joined by bored and lonely little Alice, who believes his tricks are the real thing. He has to take on menial jobs to keep up the illusion of magically producing yet more gifts for her.

The Paris, London, countryside and Edinburgh of the Fifties are lovingly recreated in charming detail, always bathed in the warm light of nostalgia, and all people - and even the animals - are extreme caricatures while being totally sympatico. The hand-drawn, hand-carved feel of the whole film is greatly added to by some amazing special effects, and not surprisingly with Chomet, there is some genuine magic tucked in there, too. There's just too much in almost every scene to grasp at one sitting, from the crowded country pub to the busy, aerial views of Edinburgh and, like Belleville, it will bear several return visits. It's a truly fantastic ode to the theatre, pre-motorway Britain, Jaques Tati himself and the bitter-sweet meaning of life.