Amélie

Leave your cynicism at the door when you see Amelie, the charming new film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet. After the Delicatessen director's troubled Hollywood excursion Alien: Resurrection, he's back on home turf, specifically Montmartre, Paris.

Amelie Poulain (Tautou - big dark eyes and a pout) is a kooky cafe-bar waitress. When she finds a box that belonged to a boy in the 50s, she tracks down the middle-aged owner (Benichon) and discreetly returns his childhood relics. Observing the man's rapture, Amelie resolves to do good deeds. She orchestrates a romance between Joseph (Pignon), a cafe regular, and Georgette (Nanty), a hypochondriac who runs the tabac; helps liberate Lucien (Debbouze), assistant to bullying grocer Collingnon (Cancellier); and expands the experiences of Raymond (Merlin), a neighbour whose congenital bone disease makes him so fragile he hasn't left his flat for 20 years. Soon, however, she herself has fallen for one of the oddballs she encounters, Nino (La Haine writer-director Kassovitz), and begins a playful courtship.

The film is replete with poetic, magical unreality, quirks and visual inventiveness - just what you'd expect from Jeunet. Pictures talk, Amelie watches newsreel documentaries about herself on telly, and time lapse and fast forward propel the narrative. In these terms, Jeunet has stylistic traits in common with Fincher, Aronofsky or Wong Kar-Wai (Amelie even mischievously meddles in a flat, like in Chungking Express). But what dominates the film is a sense of nostalgia and the picturesque. Lens filters lend a soft, sepia tone and Paris is devoid of anything as unsightly as tourists. In this sense, the film's Paris is redolent of that in the 30s and 40s films of Rene Clair, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne (it even shares a locale with Hõtel Du Nord) and Jacques Prevert.

The easiest comparison, however, is Delicatessen itself. With its action largely limited to one apartment block and one neighbourhood, a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, and an obsession with whimsical detail, Amelie is the light-humoured, sweet-natured, romantic inversion of the dark Delicatessen. If you're feeling open-minded and open-hearted, it will leave you with an indelible smile.