LOOK AND YE SHALL FIND

The silly season. That's how journalists often think of the summer. A time when the "real" world is replaced with nonsense or, worse, nothing.

The phrase has not been bandied about yet, perhaps because of the weather, but there has been a sense that not much is happening in British film. Then along comes a list of new titles featuring Brits and it is clear that the talent has not been resting, just biding its time.

On the one hand, there is Tom (I Want Candy) Riley playing Nick Nolte's son in A Few Days In September, opening in mid September, and Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson alongside George Clooney in legal drama Michael Clayton, the directorial debut by screenwriter Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy), opening in late September

Over there is Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching with Martin Freeman (photo) as the Dutch master Rembrandt executing his most celebrated painting The Nightwatch as a kind of cryptic explanation of a mysterious murder.

Then Linus Roache pops up as a 1930's British colonialist having an affair with his housemaid in India in Before The Rains, by Indian auteur Santosh Sivan.

Colin Firth is a major player in actress Helen Hunt's directorial debut, an adaptation of the novel Then She Found Me, with Hunt's world turned upside down when her adoptive mother dies and a stranger arrives claiming to be her biological mother.

Finally, Emily Mortimer appears alongside Ryan Gosling in Lars And The Real Girl, with Gosling as a small-town wage slave who meets a made-to-order life-size doll.

The last four films will figure largely at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and, assuming they get the recognition they deserve, should get a screening back in the UK.

Filed July 12, 2007,/p>