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This is quite a low-key film from Alan Clark. It is a sad, funny, warts-and-all story about social desperation, and how people seek escape and solace from it. George Costigan is excellent as the bored, 'nouveau-riche' husband who gets his kicks from seducing less experienced teenagers. The two girls are wonderfully played and their characterisations are true to life. This is also a film about the 'little' people. Some viewers might be offended by the use of racist language used when referring to Asians, and perhaps even the portrayal of Sue's Pakistani boyfriend as violent, but this is essential to the realistic depiction of working-class life in a decaying inner-city area. The funniest characters are Sue's drunken and obnoxious father, and the nosey parker with the hosepipe who's always got his eye on the strange goings on in the neighbourhood. This film also marked the highest moment of that dreadful party band Black Lace who perform a composition entitled 'Gang Bang'. It is the films bawdiness and honesty that makes 'Rita, Sue and Bob too' a minor classic of the long gone 1980s.

'The Believer' is an extremely overrated film. Ryan Gosling gives a brilliant performance as Danny an exceptionally bright young Jewish man who lives a double life, when he becomes involved with weird right wing 'neo nazis' and conceals his Jewishness from them. Danny's rejection of the religious and moral strictures of orthodox Judaism has a narcisstic and nihilistic edge to it, he says the Jews 'are nothing'. He becomes close to a creepy 'intellectual' right-wing couple and becomes attracted to their daughter Carla (Summer Phoenix) and has an affair with her. Unlike her stepfather and mother, Carla has some degree of sensitivity and questions Danny's anti-semitic views.

In the meantime, Danny has to keep his Jewish past hidden and he is rumbled a journalist whom he threatens with his own suicide if the story is published. He becomes deeply involved with racist skinheads and plants a bomb in a synagogue. It is here, when Danny sees the damage and desecration to the Torah that his 'Jewishness' returns. He tells his fellow skins not to damage the Torah and takes it home with him. Danny repairs the damaged scrolls, and Carla starts to become curious about his behaviour. What stretches my incredulity in this film is when the naked Carla is reading the holy book and Danny demands that she put her clothes on. All of a sudden Danny is transformed back to being an orthodox Jew demanding that a woman should not be naked infront of a man.

Danny's intimate knowledge of Judaism raises suspicion amongst his skinhead colleagues. He is also sent on 'sensitivity training' as an alternative to prison for the desecration of the synagogue. He hears horrific stories from Holocaust survivors but mocks and insults them. This scene I found hard to bear, particularly the idea of the State posing as a sensitive and neutral arbitrator on the issue of racism.

The films premise lacks credibility and it is hard to sympathise with Danny and his destructive self-hatred, which he seems to blame on the rigid inflexibility of his religious upbringing. In spite of his religion, Danny lives in New York, a modern secular city. Why would such a bright person want to get involved with right-wing cranks when there are far more opportunities available to him in modern American society? Also, the concept of 'Jewishness' as a cultural identity, is awkwardly posited, one minute Danny is a repulsive fascist convert and then suddenly the sight of the Torah and religious garments turns him back into a Jew. Danny's demise when he blows himself up at a synagogue does not arouse much sympathy with me, as he, and nobody else, has willed on his own destruction. The film is confusing in its narrative structure and it forces issues down the viewers' throats. Anti-semitism is not a major social problem in America and most Jews and other ethnic groups are not under threat by a ramshackle bunch of racist, 'neo nazi' non entities. In fact Jews are one of the most assimilated groups in modern America and the idea of a perpetual, endemic anti-semitism is as ridiculous as the cranky right wing conspiracy theory about the US government being a Zionist Government of Occupation.

Jim Carrey is to 'The Truman Show' what James Stewart is to 'It's a Wonderful Life' - completely indispensable. Carrey's great performance as Truman, a man predestined to be an eternal innocent and denied the full knowledge of how his circumstances came to be, makes this film. In spite of an over-the-top 'Twilight Zone' style plot, this film has more to say about the 'human condition' (and is far superior) than 'Good Will Hunting' which aspires to the loftier heights of 'realism'.

The cruel director, played by Ed Harris, is not a million miles away from the so-called 'fly-on-the-wall' documentary directors, who manipulate real people and pepper our screens with tedious, victim based documentaries which claim to be great social insights. Carrey's portrayal of the innocent Truman has great pathos and a touching quality. In being denied the truth about his real existence, Truman is unknowingly imprisoned in a childlike existence that he has never had the opportunity to shape for himself.

Carrey's brilliant performance wins the audiences' sympathy when he finds out the reality of his 'constructed' existence and tries to break free from this cruel manipulation and tyranny. What makes this film stand out today is that it is one of the few films of recent times, based around the theme of personal liberty. When there is so much false theorising in the real world about what constitutes 'liberty' and we are being told that fewer liberties is a new consequence of fighting a 'war for civilisation', it is refreshing to watch a film that is funny, entertaining and wholly sympathetic to the idea of personal freedom.