Still, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.Mostow gets things briskly underway by pivoting the story upon a young naval officer, Lieutenant Tyler (Matthew McConaughey), who’s just been passed over for promotion by his commander (Bill Paxton). Tyler is deemed not ready for command of a boat, tipping us the wink that the film will eventually put his superior’s decision to the test.It’s also a kind of test for McConaughey himself, whose career so far has flattered to deceive. Some have tried to pitch him as the new Paul Newman, forgetting that the old Paul Newman can still act the socks off this pretender. There’s been something of the male model about McConaughey (A Time To Kill, the unspeakable Contact), but the opportunity to do ensemble work casts him in a better light. Aside from Bill Paxton, the only A-list star in U-571 is Harvey Keitel, in unusually subdued mode except when he has to give McConaughey a stern talking-to about securing the trust of his men: “Don’t you dare tell them ‘I don’t know’ – even if you don’t know.” From that moment, the young lieutenant looks like a man who does know, and catching that tide in the affairs of men, he inspires his crew to stirring feats of courage.Mostow, who made the tight, efficient thriller Breakdown with Kurt Russell, is good at orchestrating physical action within narrow spaces. He films the cramped confines of the submarine in a way that spookily conjures the idea of a floating tomb, and alternates between extreme stillness and frantic bolting with the Steadicam during battle stations. I kept thinking of a line from Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders: “All in our berths going to our deaths.”We become very familiar with the shot of men, their faces begrimed with sweat and blood, their eyes raised heavenwards in mute fear as an enemy destroyer unleashes depth charges overhead.

Then there are the terrible shudderings and clankings as explosions rock the hull, shaking the crew around like pebbles in a can. Most excruciating of all is the sequence, lifted entirely from Das Boot, when the sub drops right down to the ocean floor and we see the water pressure squeeze so hard that the steel begins to groan and the rivets pop and spurt.Most of the time, U-571 is carried off with confidence, and we seem to be holding our breath for minutes at a time as Mostow turns the screw a little tighter. There’s a great shot of an enemy torpedo scraping the side of the hull and then sharking blindly onwards. The imminence of a watery death, and the men’s helplessness in the face of it, are chillingly conveyed.What the film misses, I think, is the intensity and depth of characterisation that made Das Boot compelling. Jürgen Prochnow and his crew came so vigorously to life over a three-hour acquaintance that we came to care very deeply about their survival.

And these were the Germans!There aren’t any bad performances in U-571, but there aren’t any stand-outs either; when one or another of them is killed, we don’t feel that stab of grief for a character whom we’ve grown to like.As for its misrepresentation, the film-makers insist that this is a work of fiction, and they seem to have won the event’s original hero to their side. Can we help regarding it, none the less, as an act of historical vandalism? In the press notes, Jonathan Mostow says: “The sad truth is that many young people have no idea what occurred in World War II, much less the Battle of the Atlantic.” Right, and they’re not going to have a much better idea after watching this.. The film star Donald Sutherland last trod the boards on Broadway nearly two decades ago, in Edward Albee’s doomed adaptation of Lolita, and it’s 36 years since he gave a stage performance in London. So any play capable of luring him back from such a lengthy sabbatical must be pretty damn special, right?

The film star Donald Sutherland last trod the boards on Broadway nearly two decades ago, in Edward Albee’s doomed adaptation of Lolita, and it’s 36 years since he gave a stage performance in London. So any play capable of luring him back from such a lengthy sabbatical must be pretty damn special, right?
Well no, far from it, actually.

Enigmatic Variations is like Sleuth with intellectual pretensions and smirking Gallic self-regard. As with Art and Wit this hollow two-hander by the French dramatist Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is short, interval-free and there to be consumed as a sort of starter, garnished with a few untaxing, piquant ideas, to the relaxed restaurant meal you’ll have time for afterwards.It isn’t hard to see why Sutherland was drawn to the piece. After all, it can’t do the ego harm to play a reclusive Nobel laureate, as he does here with a nice laid-back, teasing superiority in the early stages, though without anything like the depth of emotional development you would expect from a man on the receiving end of the play’s tricksy revelations. His character is the memorably named Abel Znorko, an author who, in order to write in peace, has apparently forsworn love and exiled himself on a Norwegian island (a bleak set by Ming Cho Lee).