Patrice Leconte (Ridicule) brings a sombre poetic realism to this elegiac meditation on the nature of fate and the road less travelled. Johnny Hallyday, battered and craggy with gravitas, is awesomely iconic as the taciturn gangster who encounters Jean Rochefort's inquisitive retired schoolteacher. The two men are inexorably attracted, seeing in the other the tragedy of the life they never lived.
Mining that fecund Field Of Dreams territory, where baseball and unresolved Oedipal complexes collide, The Rookie is a rousing real-life account of loyal Texan husband, science teacher and occasional 98mph pitcher Jim Morris (Dennis Quaid), whose small-town existence and lifelong battles with cantankerous pop (Brian Cox) are suddenly transformed by the offer of a place in the Major League.
Miraculous, much underrated adaptation of posthumous Kieslowski screenplay by Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer. Cate Blanchett is a British teacher in Turin who, as an act of vengeance, becomes an unlikely terrorist. Young policeman Giovanni Ribisi falls in love and joins her on the run, but it's more about magic realism and haunting, luminous beauty.
