It's a rap

Nothing was left to chance with 8 Mile, the movie debut of Eminem. Curtis Hanson, sympathetic, patient, dependable, was hired as director. Top scriptwriter Scott Silver was chosen to sculpt elements of Eminem's early life into a workable screenplay. The rapper's executive producer, Dr Dre, whose reputation essentially underwrites and guarantees Eminem's own, was closely consulted at every stage, wielding veto power over scenes and storylines. And Eminem, who, it transpires, can act quite competently, stayed in charge of the soundtrack.

The result is as interesting for what it omits as for what it includes. A lot of what is not here is exactly what makes Eminem so unforgivably special: his homophobia, his extreme misogyny, his scattershot underclass rage and his sparkling gift for malice. Also absent - from the cinemas, not the movie itself - is Eminem's core teenage constituency, largely excluded thanks to the film's R rating. The few teenagers at the Saturday show I attended all looked deeply apprehensive as they settled in between their parents.

They needn't have worried: 8 Mile strives not to alienate kids or parents. No teenager could mistake 8 Mile for Cool as Ice, the celluloid catastrophe that did for Vanilla Ice 11 years ago. And parents are more likely to be impressed than disgusted with the demon they have been trained to fear and loathe by the mainstream media over the past three years. Once you see and hear that boy rap, there's no mistaking his prodigious talents.

Hanson drops us in 1995 Detroit, back before Biggie and Tupac and the east coast/west coast wars. Eminem plays Rabbit, a white kid from the black side of 8 Mile Road, a demarcation line between suburban white and poor black Detroit. We first see him at a weekly rap battle, stalking offstage in disgrace after an episode of stage-fright, hectored by the mainly black audience. He lopes home to the trailer park where his drunken, promiscuous mother (Kim Basinger) lives with Rabbit's six-year-old sister Lily, who is the only trustworthy female in the entire cast (OK, not all the misogyny has gone).

Hanson has a sure feel for lives on the edge of chaos, fragile family relationships and dilapidated inner-city landscapes. He delineates Rabbit's limited universe - pressing plant by day, domestic disharmony and rap diss-offs by night - with minimal resort to cliche. Rabbit's only escape from his crappy job and miserable home life is through his art, his rhymes. After all the tribulations he suffers, his victory at the final rap battle comes on like the last fight in Rocky. It's all the more impressive because after being roundly bawled out by his opponents for his whiteness, Rabbit resorts to class for his revenge, not race, poleaxing would-be tough-guy rapper Papa Doc as the product of a private school in dizzyingly swift and clever lines. If the movie has a message, it is "race ain't shit", and that's always worth saying and repeating.

Talking of repetition, here comes Brian De Palma with another thriller largely copped from Hitchcock. American critics are raving about Femme Fatale, calling it his best work since Body Double 20 years ago, or even Carrie in 1976. This amounts to admitting that De Palma has been mired in trash for at least two decades, and you'll find no argument there from me.

Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is the Hitchcock Blonde, a con artist named Laure who spends the first 20 minutes of the film stealing priceless jewels and then ripping off her partners, a sequence that involves five minutes of cheesecake lesbianism that wouldn't shock Mary Whitehouse. For all his purported sexual obsessiveness, De Palma is strictly white-bread kinky. It would be tedious to list the times the plot cheats us (a cribbage board has fewer holes), or how many slack stretches afflict the film, and I won't give away the ending, except to say that anyone who has seen Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window will know exactly what to expect.

I have written before of my admiration for Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, but a second viewing confirms its greatness. A lush suburban melodrama in the style of Douglas Sirk, dealing with race and homosexuality, it transcends any possibility of an ironic reception by its undiluted sincerity and emotional honesty. This is a movie that aims to make us cry and succeeds without detriment to its penetrating social criticism and political acuity. On every level it is a remarkable and beautiful movie, easily the best of the year.