Three generations of a depressed family making their way in a clapped-out vehicle across America, hoping to find their share of the American Dream in California. That sounds like the Joads travelling hopefully in The Grapes of Wrath. It is also the plot of an amusing comedy, Little Miss Sunshine, the joint feature film debut of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, a husband-and-wife team whose background is in documentaries, commercials and music videos.

The Hoover family from Albuquerque, New Mexico, are presented to us as classically dysfunctional, struggling together with a Medusa-like raft of problems. Widowed Grandpa Hoover (Alan Arkin) has been thrown out of an old folks’ home for snorting heroin, swears incessantly and is obsessed with sex. He believes girls are at their sexual best around 15 and urges his virginal 16-year-old grandson to take advantage of this while he can get away with it.

That grandson, Dwayne (Paul Dano), has enough on his mind without this. He’s a nay-saying devotee of Nietszche, is obsessed with flying and has taken a vow of silence until he’s accepted by the Air Force Academy. Dwayne’s father, Richard (Greg Kinnear), believes his future lies in motivational teaching. He’s convinced that his unpublished book, Refuse to Lose, explaining the ‘Nine Steps to Success’, will make him rich and famous. His seven-year-old daughter, the plain, bespectacled Olive (Abigail Breslin), thinks she can become a beauty queen and has entered the national ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ contest.

Long-suffering Mom, Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette), is the family’s fount of common sense, but she has a problem, too. Her destructive devotion to complete honesty rivals that of the truth-crazed Hickey in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. And she’s brought an additional worry into the family. Her brother Frank (Steve Carell), a depressed gay academic who regards himself as America’s number one Proust scholar, has come to live with the Hoovers after a failed suicide attempt. He tried to kill himself after losing both his job and his handsome young lover, who left him for a rival Proustian. All six actors are excellent, working together impressively and gradually winning our respect and sympathy.

Little Miss Sunshine opens with a brilliantly sustained dinner-table sequence in which they clash hilariously and give us the impression that the resolution of their individual problems and the establishment of domestic tranquillity are further away and less reachable than Mars. The movie eventually and unsentimentally establishes that both are possible. The first stage in this progress is a journey to California undertaken, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance, to accompany Olive to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. She has accidentally got into the finals of the contest through the withdrawal of a regional winner to whom she was runner-up. The Hoovers can’t afford to fly, Grandpa and the suicidal Frank can’t be left behind, so they go in a decrepit VW minibus which is only a slight improvement on the Joads’ jalopy.

Along the way, they learn a good deal about themselves, some of it extremely painful – things to do with failure, with a future less promising than expected and with death. But the directors and their screenwriter, Michael Arndt, undercut the film’s awareness of the tragic sense of life with a bracing and healing humour.

One running joke, which continues to the final frame, centres on the VW bus. The clutch is ineffective and to keep going, they have to get the vehicle rolling at such a speed that only the top gears are necessary. So everyone gets out to push. Then one by one, as the car accelerates, they run alongside and jump or are pulled aboard. It’s like a crazy, non-vocal version of the ‘Goodbye’ song from The Sound of Music and becomes a comic image of working together in the face of adversity.

All the jokes arise naturally from the situations and are carefully prepared for. One of the biggest laughs comes when the gentle inquiry of a pageant official – ‘Is there anything else?’ – is met by the request: ‘Yes, is there a funeral parlour around here?’

The pageant at Redondo Beach is as amusingly handled as the canine competition in Christopher Guest’s Best in Show. The officials are pompous and self-regarding. Ogling the little girls and serenading them with an oleaginous version of ‘America the Beautiful’, the master of ceremonies seems to be providing evidence for the prosecution in a trial for paedophilia. The child contestants, in their make-up and skimpy adult clothing, knowingly ape adult ways.

They exhibit that ‘dimpled depravity’ Graham Greene discerned in the performances of eight-year-old Shirley Temple in his libellous review of Wee Willie Winkie. Had I not recently seen photographs and film clips of seven-year-old JonBenet Ramsey strutting her provocative stuff, I would have thought this an extravagant parody rather than reality.

It is in confronting this pageant and their own involvement in it that the Hoovers are finally drawn together in their rejection of celebrity, conformity, success-seeking and self-deception and their readiness to embrace a human reality that is so often dismissed as failure. Without getting smug or pompous, the movie takes on a moral dimension. Unfortunately, this is accompanied by a forced exuberance that isn’t altogether in keeping with the plausibility that has informed the rest of the film. But this is a minor matter in a refreshing and ultimately affirmative movie.

Talent is luck, they say, and right about now, no comedian has more of either than Sacha Baron Cohen. The taxpayers from the sovereign state of Kazakhstan have been lavishly subsidising the publicity for Baron Cohen’s new movie with fury-filled full-page government ads in the New York Times, a personal complaint from the Kazakh president to Mr George W Bush, followed by a belated and half-hearted official invitation to Baron Cohen to come visit.

Borat is the hero of this extraordinary mocu-reality adventure: a film so funny, so breathtakingly offensive, so suicidally discourteous, that strictly speaking it shouldn’t be legal at all. He is the naive provincial TV reporter supposedly from Kazakhstan, though it is clear that this “Kazakhstan” is a joke cardboard country, a post-Soviet neverland picked at random, as cheerfully as Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, the spin doctors in the political satire Wag The Dog, once picked “Albania” for their diversionary hoax war. Reportedly, Baron Cohen was actually inspired to create Borat by his youthful travels as a student in the then Soviet republic of Georgia. The character coincidentally resembles Alex, the Ukrainian guide with the bizarre mangled English in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated. Borat is however immeasurably funnier.

Our hero leaves his dirt-poor Kazakh village, and travels to New York with a cameraman and his obese and unreliable producer to make a documentary for state TV. He experiences an epiphany there in his budget hotel-room, whose opulence has already reduced him to tears of incredulous joy. Watching a re-rerun of Baywatch, he falls in love with Pamela Anderson and journeys across the United States to Los Angeles, where he dreams of subjecting her to the Kazakh forcible-marriage ceremony, whose legality he believes will be just as valid in America as at home. Grinning nervously, unable to comprehend anything of what he sees or hears, Borat is an innocent of the guiltiest sort: he is boorish, he is grotesquely misogynist, he is crass. Above all he is an anti-semite, and for cinemagoers who have become used to the unwritten convention that anti-semitism is not represented on screen other than in the period garb of Nazi Germany, it is almost a physical shock to feel the swipe of Borat’s contemporary bigotry. The last time I experienced this was listening to Terry Jones’s sentimental cleaning-lady in Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life in 1983: “I feel that life’s a game, you sometimes win or lose/And though I may be down right now, at least I don’t work for Jews.” But this really is something else.

One of the first sequences is Borat introducing a TV clip showing one of his community’s oldest folk traditions: the Running of the Jew. It is quite incredible, and conceived on an epic scale to rival the chariot race from Ben-Hur. Obviously, Sacha Baron Cohen is himself Jewish and perhaps we should here quickly rehearse the saloon-bar truisms: only Jewish people are allowed to tell Jewish jokes, if these comedians wanted to be dangerous why don’t they take on Islam – yes, yes, quite … but is Sacha Baron Cohen really allowed to do this? Is anyone? It is a sensational provocation, a 19th-century anti-semitic cartoon gigantically reborn in the 21st century, in which anti-semitism is alive and well all over the world, in places where they have incidentally never heard of the liberal west’s carefully nurtured distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism. It goes beyond satire into pure anarchy, pure craziness. And it’s also very funny.

From the way it is shot, some of Borat’s encounters could be staged. I certainly hope that Pamela Anderson’s final encounter with Borat happened with her connivance. But the best moments, and that’s pretty much all of them, have the unmistakable look of real people really being astonished and horrified by Borat. He hits a comic goldmine simply by going up to male New Yorkers on the streets and trying to kiss them on both cheeks. One screams abuse; another skips away, zig-zagging, hunching his shoulders and flapping his arms at the elbow like a 10-year-old evading a wasp. It is sublime.

Baron Cohen really shows his class when Borat is a guest at a Texan rodeo. He fearlessly strides into the centre of the ring with his mic, loudly praises his hosts’ “War of Terror”, leads wild cheering when he expresses the hope that Iraq is bombed so that even the lizards are killed, but then with magnificent effrontery allows his audience to suspect they’ve been duped by singing a transparently absurd “Kazakh national anthem” about potassium production to the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner. The sheer miasma of wrongness and unease that washes over the crowd causes a young cowgirl demonstrating horse-riding techniques to lose her concentration and fall off her horse at the end of Borat’s song: a brilliantly surreal moment.

The fascination of Borat’s comedy situationism, his theatre of cruelty, is that its hero is deeply unsympathetic. Ali G had a kind of goofy charm, but Borat is just so horrible, with a deplorable quality mitigated only by his ineffectuality. Borat 2 must surely now be in the works: perhaps a face-off with a rival TV star from the hated neighbouring republic of Uzbekistan? (Will Ferrell? Jonathan Pryce? Stephen Merchant?) Like Freddy Krueger, that living nightmare on bad taste street, Borat will surely be back. Fools don’t come unholier than this.

Bound and hooded by a group of activists-turned-terrorists-trying-to-turn-activists-again, a kidnapped Clive Owen sits in a shelter papered in a decade’s worth of tabloid headlines. They scream of war, nuclear mishaps, and ecological disaster. It’s real end-of-the-world stuff, presented in the form of everyday material, much like the film around it. Children Of Men, directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También), is set in 2027, but each strand of its dystopian vision comes tethered to 2006. It’s all chillingly, disgustingly plausible, and the familiarity only amplifies its power to shock.

There’s much more to Cuarón’s film, adapted from a P.D. James novel, than a tour of a world gone terribly wrong, but the story comes tightly bound to its intricately realized setting, a fascist Britain that’s also apparently the last nightmarish refuge of civilization. The parts of humanity that haven’t already been destroyed wither away due to the mysterious onset of widespread infertility, which has prevented anyone from giving birth for 18 years. The British government rounds up all non-native residents for the good of the state, shipping them off to refugee camps, and beyond doubt, even worse fates. Animal corpses litter the countryside, and people with agendas are always blowing up something or other.

As a former radical now whiling away his time drinking scotch and manning a desk in a low-level bureaucratic office, Owen seems content to watch the world go to hell, until his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), a leader of the pro-immigrant Fishes, presses him into retrieving a pair of illegal travel passes in the hopes of reaching a group of much-rumored, never-confirmed benevolent off-shore scientists called The Human Project. Their motives, tied to the well-being of a young immigrant (Claire-Hope Ashitey), will soon become clear, but only after the cost of failure has been made equally clear.

Cuarón directs Children Of Men with remarkable long takes and indelible images, but it isn’t the kind of craft that immediately calls attention to itself; Cuarón moves the story along with an intensity that makes it hard to pay attention to anything else. It’s a film of astonishing immediacy, with all the urgency of a late-night phone call, but the human element drives it. Owen begins a broken man with little to sustain him beyond his relationship with a paternal Michael Caine, whose activism has devolved into a vague hopefulness and a routine of smoking pot, listening to music, and caring for his semi-comatose wife. By the film’s end, Owen has been transformed and the possibility raised that the world might change with him. Cuarón has created a dire warning of the world that could be, but he’s also made a film about faith, love, sacrifice, and all the other hard-won virtues that keep the world alive. It’s a heartbreaking, bullet-strewn valentine to what keeps us human.

The best of Antonioni’s three English-language pictures (which also include ‘Blow-Up’ and ‘Zabriskie Point’), ‘The Passenger’ has been off our screens for around two decades now, the result of a legal quirk that demanded that either Jack Nicholson, the film’s lead actor (and, until recently, owner of the rights to the film) or Antonioni himself had to be present at any public screening of the movie. Finally unleashed, the film will now play at the NFT after being conspicuously absent from the venue’s otherwise comprehensive Antonioni season last summer and will also enjoy a DVD release in a fortnight’s time.

The film opens in the heat of the North African desert. David Locke (Nicholson) is a famed television reporter at the end of his tether. Trudging through the sand on the trail of political rebels, he’s on a sweaty mission to nowhere that’s compounded by harsh terrain and desperate temperatures. When his Land Rover buries itself in a sand dune, it’s a symbol of deeper frustration. He’s a man alienated from his world, reporting on nothing, slipping slowly into the sand. His identity is crumbling.

All of which helps to explain why when he finds his fellow hotel guest, a Brit named David Robertson, dead in his bed, he takes strange advantage of the situation. He swaps sweaty shirts, passport photos and hotel rooms and assumes Robertson’s identity, leaving the dead Robertson his own name. And so David Locke is dead, and Jack Nicholson is now ‘David Robertson’ – an identity which brings with it a whole host of new dangers…

It’s the beginning of a languorous, mysterious and quite captivating thriller that moves from Saharan Africa to London to Munich and, finally, to Barcelona and the Spanish countryside. On paper, it all sounds like classic Graham Greene territory and a standard international thriller, but Antonioni’s direction and Mark Peploe’s script offer something more artful. Events familiar from many such films (the unlocking of secret deposit boxes; car chases; crucial documents; anonymous men lurking on foreign pavements) are mere catalysts and background noises for a stylish mood piece that is as interested in emotion and landscape as plot. The conventions of the thriller are mere starting-points for an examination of Locke’s always ambiguous character. This ambiguity is mirrored in the film’s aesthetic: time and time again, Antonioni’s coolly detached camera, indulged in long takes, wanders off to examine a passing car, perhaps, or a sand dune. The photography is stunning.

Although the pairing of Nicholson with a random, anonymous girl (Maria Schneider, no less, fresh from ‘Last Tango…’) for the latter part of the movie, which is essentially a road-trip through Spain, is perhaps the film’s most superficial tic, ‘The Passenger’ lacks any of the embarrassing contemporary touches that let down parts of both ‘Blow-Up’ (frolicking models) and ‘Zabriskie Point’ (cavorting hippies). Peploe’s screenplay offers a solid inquiry into journalistic nihilism and professional and personal identity, which, coupled with Antonioni’s imagery – as captured by cinematographer Luciano Tovoli – make for an endlessly satisfying experience. Its final, famed seven-minute shot remains a delight to behold.

The Métro scene in “Code Inconnu” feels uncomfortably real. A Parisian actress (Juliette Binoche) is on her way home after a hard day of rerecording film dialogue. A man (Arab) begins to harass her. (“Don’t talk to commoners?” he asks. “How can you be so beautiful yet so arrogant?”)

She moves to the other end of the subway car. He follows and sits down beside her. Then he spits in her face. The man (European) sitting opposite her confronts the harasser, who backs down but tries to frighten them both as he leaves the train.

An equally racially charged encounter begins the film. On a Paris street, a smart-aleck white teenager, Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), finishes his snack and tosses the empty paper bag into the lap of a Romanian beggar. A young black man (Ona Lu Yenke), who has obviously been taught some manners at home, accosts Jean and insists that he tell the lady he’s sorry. Jean rudely refuses, the argument turns into a physical tussle, and when two white police officers arrive, guess which boy they decide is the troublemaker?

“Code Inconnu” won an award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival: the Special Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, an interfaith honor for works that deal with universal themes. This does not mean that the film succeeds. Michael Haneke, who wrote and directed, is a skillful, minutely observant filmmaker who trusts his audience to be able to put two and two together. Unfortunately, he’s often too cryptic, which leaves viewers still trying to make connections when they should already be reacting to the moral lessons implied by them.

The rest of the film is a follow-up to the street incident, a look at how each of the people involved was affected. This includes Ms. Binoche’s character, whose war-photographer boyfriend is Jean’s older brother. To her it was a momentary distraction, which she might never have thought about again had she not seen the young black man not long afterward at a restaurant. For at least one character, though, the incident is life-changing.

Mr. Haneke loves to play with our assumptions of reality and does it frighteningly well in Ms. Binoche’s scenes, some of which may also be scenes from a film her character is making. Ms. Binoche does her part by striving for just as much authenticity when she’s playing the actress acting. Also happily, the symbolism of the title (“Code Unknown”) is spelled out just enough to have the proper put-yourself-in-another’s-shoes impact.

In the fiercely modern, anglobalised Hong Kong, on Asia’s cusp with young America and old Britain, where the cops intersperse Cantonese with phrases like yessir and sorry and a police funeral comes with the skirling of a piper, this blistering thriller packs an almighty punch.

It combines exhilarating action with liquid-nitrogen existential cool, gleaming and shimmering with the city’s glass and steel. When going to the movies can seem like a pretty earnest business, it’s good to have one that gets you hugging yourself with excitement.

Infernal Affairs hangs on the operatic confrontation of cop and villain that feels a little like the great De Niro-Pacino face-off in Michael Mann’s Heat. But for my money, it’s got something more elusive and complex than Mann ever achieved.

Tony Leung, one of the most sympathetic, attractive presences in Asian cinema, plays Yan: for 10 years, he has been a deep-cover police mole in the triads, immersed in their culture for his entire adult life, and certainly long enough to endure a hellish crisis of identity.

Yan has risen to be the most trusted lieutenant to thuggish gang boss Sam (Eric Tsang). He began this appallingly thankless task as a bright, observant 18-year-old cadet, and his recruitment was camouflaged by being publicly thrown out of training college in disgrace and then run in secret by his hardbitten chief, Superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong), the only man who knows his identity and who refuses his increasingly desperate requests to be brought in.

But there is a triad mole in the police. Andy Lau plays Ming, a cadet from Yan’s graduating class, who secretly reports to Sam, sabotaging all the police swoops on Sam’s cocaine deliveries. And when the police suspect a mole in their ranks, it is Ming who is approached by the Internal Affairs bureau to find the culprit. This natural born killer embarks on some character-assassination: suggesting that it is Supt Wong who is the corrupt cop.

To add to these delirious, headspinning ironies, both men have unusual domestic situations. Lonely Yan suffers from insomnia and discovers that the one place he is able to sleep is on his psychotherapist’s couch: an expensive arrangement to which this beautiful, female analyst drolly consents.

Ming has moved into a spiffy apartment with his fiancee who is a writer, working on a novel whose leading character suffers from multiple-personality disorder. She is covertly basing him on Ming, never guessing just how much of the truth she has intuited. It is a pleasingly elegant and playful invention.

The two men meet face to face at the very beginning and end of the picture: when Ming buys some stereo speakers from Yan, at one of Sam’s “front” businesses – and then in the thrilling rooftop finale.

This movie carries the DNA of undercover thrillers like Serpico, French Connection, Donnie Brasco, and the dual influence of Ricky Lam’s City on Fire and Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. But the emphasis contrived by director Andrew Lau and screenwriter and co-director Alan Mak is not on violence but on the cat-and-mouse business of outsmarting the enemy and the paranoia of not knowing who the enemy is – within and without – and not knowing how far to push any victory without compromising your inside source.

Tony Leung has revealed in interviews that Alain Delon is an influence on his acting style – and his face really does have that sensitive, dreamy, yearning quality which his wispy facial hair is inadequate to conceal. Of the two men, he looks younger, even boyish.

Andy Lau is quite different. The face of Hong Kong’s biggest action star is extraordinarily sharp and fierce, almost feral, with eyes, nose and chin formed like some kind of nunchuck or martial arts weapon. When he smiles, he looks like a character from a manga comic or computer game, grinning with implacable and malign certainty. How curious then that it is his character which evolves more unreadably than Yan’s and it is Ming whose ambitions are to make such a quantum leap.

The opening credits have a 007-ish clamour, and Eric Tsang would make a terrific Bond villain, especially in a scene where he addresses his own “graduating class” of corrupt police cadets. But the movie’s allusions to Buddhist visions of hell, and the residual British empire still lingering in Hong Kong’s gleaming cityscape, for me had the tiniest and most unlikely batsqueak of Le Carré, whose fallible, traitorous heroes were reputedly inspired subconsciously by Le Carré’s father’s rackety life as a confidence trickster and jailbird.

Yan and Ming come from backgrounds in which serious self-examination and self-knowledge are as impossible as unaided human flight – witness Yan dozing on the analyst’s couch – but they are nevertheless creepingly aware that they have each built secret careers betraying the people with whom they have grown up. More importantly, they are aware of each other; the existence of each is a mirror in which they glimpse their own life-long anxiety and deceit.

All this unease and discontent is dammed and channelled into action. Sam cheerfully declaims a Thomas Campbell line to his troops: “What thousands must die so Caesar may be great!” But there is no Caesar here, no master of empire, just minor potentates ruling an unstable bipolar turf with its black economy of police snitches and corrupt cops.

Infernal Affairs is a gripping thriller with grandstanding drama, muscle-clenching suspense and two great action leads in Tony Leung and Andy Lau.