Watch it again now and you realise that the film-making sequences in Cinecitta and Capri which begin and end the film are just the film’s bread and butter: the real meat comes in those terrible, pathetic long scenes between Piccoli and his young wife (Brigitte Bardot), who has suddenly fallen out of love with him and into contempt for him. They throb with such anguish and self-pity that it feels almost indecent to watch them, and however closely they may adhere to the source material, Alberto Moravia’s novel, they reek of autobiography: for Piccoli and BB, read Godard and his wife Anna Karina. The despair of some of Godard’s later work now seems more whipped up and rhetorical than it did at the time, but this is the real thing, and one of cinema’s most harrowing portraits of what can happen after a Jane Austen ending.Mario Martone’s L’Amore Molesto (15) is set in Naples, flashes between time past (bleached- out tones) and time present (vivid red dresses), concerns a woman’s quest for a dark secret in her mother’s life and strikes at least one viewer as immoderately uninteresting.Cinema details: Going Out, page 13.. When I hear “Wake Up Boo!” by the Boo Radleys, I reach for my knuckleduster.

The song is the musical equivalent of a big, fat Colgate smile, and after a grin like that has been smeared over every radio and TV set in the country for a few weeks, anyone would want to punch it. The film isn’t nearly so interested in Hailey’s fate as in Brigance’s soul: he’s a white saint who has to pass through temptations.Against the odds, and thanks (again) to some terrific casting choices, the result is sufficiently entertaining to keep drawing your eye away from the otherwise unmissable fact that while A Time to Kill appears to bristle with liberal scruples, it’s endorsing vigilante justice as heartily as any overtly reactionary movie – say, An Eye for an Eye (by chance, Kiefer Sutherland plays a violent low-life in both films). He’s plainly no Uncle Tom, but you’re still left with the strong subliminal impression that his neighbour might be Uncle Remus.Benign racism isn’t the deepest of the ideological muddles the film flounders around in. The yarn is pretty straightforward: Jake Brigance, a decent, ambitious, homeloving, handsome, humorous, sexy, brave, sporty and dog-owning Southern lawyer (Matthew McConaughey plays him, and bears the burden of all those adjectives with commendable ease), is such a thoroughly fine fellow that he takes on Hailey’s case, and stays with it despite all the pressures that mount up: he’s broke, the newly reformed KKK bombs and burns his house, his wife leaves and a pushy law student with fancy Yankee ideas (Sandra Bullock, not on screen as much as the posters suggest) keeps offering her help as well as a little extra-legal homework. Later the film is going to vent some scorching words on race, most of them spoken with thrillingly dour vehemence in a jail cell by Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L Jackson), the little girl’s father, who guns down the cracker rapists and thus faces the death penalty.

Very nasty; and it would have been every bit as nasty if Schumacher hadn’t filmed the township as an oasis of dappled sunlight and honestly worn dungarees that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Song of the South. Just about every character is some kind of stock figure, every situation a contrivance, and the distress stays warm and cosy at heart. If you don’t much care for the kind of pinko court-room movie which maintains that we are all guilty, relax: this one proves that we were framed.In the opening sequence, two scuzzy, beer-swilling rednecks – what would Dear Jane have thought? – drive their pick-up through a poor rural district, taunting and menacing its black residents before indulging in a spot of multiple rape and attempted murder on a little girl. Diligently as it tries to pass itself off as a disquieting drama of principles, the stinky old bones of melodrama keep poking up through its contemporary surface. Not that it matters: Austen’s prose is strong enough to withstand a neutron bomb, let alone a few well-intentioned solecisms.For a legal thriller which harps on about every citizen’s right to a fair trial, A Time to Kill (15), adapted from yet another book by Miss Austen’s keenest Hollywood rival, John Grisham, and directed by Joel Schumacher, is really much too eager to incriminate or exonerate its characters first and ask questions later.