★★★★★/★★★★★
Drawing on hardboiled US fiction, as American film had fed on his own Seven Samurai, the director brings unforgettable intensity to his anxious noir

Akira Kurosawa’s scalding 1949 cop thriller Stray Dog (★★★★★), with its extended closeup shot of a mad dog snarling into the camera over the opening credits, is about a stolen gun; as with De Sica’s stolen bicycle the year before, the resulting search leads us on a tour of the city, scene by scene into a world of poverty, cynicism and violence.

It is a gripping, drum-tight picture, a panoramic drama of crime revealed over one sweltering summer in postwar Tokyo which culminates in an ominous monsoon downpour and it stars two alpha-dogs of Japanese cinema, both stalwarts of Kurosawa. Takashi Shimura is veteran police officer Detective Sato, tolerant, good-humoured, realistic about the prospects for containing, if not eradicating crime, and Toshiro Mifune is his partner, rookie cop Murakami, part of the new, thoughtful postwar generation concerned with upbringing and psychology. Murakami teaches the older man the unfamiliar term “après-guerre” to describe his new attitudes, although he has to be reminded that the police is different from the army, less regimented and more about initiative. Mifune is still a young man of 29 in this film, although he clearly shows that amazing natural severity and martial nobility.

A judging spectre watches as depression and heavy drinking befall Lucy Liu’s home in an intelligent film full of uncanny, sudden-chill moments

Steven Soderbergh has made a ghost story with a screenplay from Hollywood veteran David Koepp. It sticks to a single location – the haunted family home – and the main character is the handheld camera’s ghostly point-of-view. It is the mute witness to everything that happens, roaming wordlessly around the house: up and down the stairs, in and out of the bedrooms, and evidently forbidden to go out back into the garden or out front on to the porch. We see what it sees.

Presence is conceived on elegant and economically spare lines, dialogue scenes are presented blankly, shot mostly from a distance (the ghost detached and hanging back) and interspersed with blackouts; it is well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. But for me it is marred by an early, unsubtle moment of overt supernatural creepiness, which signals a retreat from ingenuity and restraint. Perhaps it was a commercial concession to the idea that, for all the cool underplaying and periodic, uncanny sudden-chill moments in which a character will glance warily into the lens, the audience has to be reassured that this is a scary horror movie; it has to be shown what happens when an invisible ghost picks something up and carries it to the other side of the room. Surging strings on the soundtrack further underline the scariness.