Glasgow Film Festival: Men on a mission, group therapy, haunted heroes and tension in a tank

THE sixth Glasgow Film Festival got off to a fun start last night with Jean-Pierre Jeunet attending the Scottish premiere of his latest film, Micmacs. A charming, inventive, whimsical revenge movie, it revolves around a destitute former video store shop worker, Bazil (Dany Boon), who sets out to get payback against the Parisian arms dealers who have inadvertently set him on the path to ruin by not only manufacturing the stray bullet that lodged itself in his head during a gangland shoo

Heavy on cinematic references, and shot through with the playful wit and oddball charm that made Amlie such a joy, Micmacs may seem trivial on the surface, but Jeunet offers a slyly subversive exploration of the collateral damage caused by modern warfare and even manages to get in a pop at French president Nicolas Sarkozy. What's more, with the band of fellow down-and-outs Bazil assembles to help on his quest (including a contortionist, a human cannonball and a toy inventor), he puts his typically kooky stamp on men-on-a-mission movies such as The Magnificent Seven.

Men on a mission may well prove to be a dominant feature of year's festival; an impossible-seeming quest is certainly at the heart of Do it Again, an entertaining documentary following US journalist Geoff Edgers on an obsessive attempt to reunite the Kinks. Delving into the history of the band, in particular the long-standing fraternal friction between frontman Ray Davies and his guitarist brother Dave Davies, the film puts a more engaging, personal spin on their story by focusing on Edgers' motivation for mounting his mission. A writer for the financially troubled Boston Globe – and a dead ringer for Jurassic Park-era Jeff Goldblum – Edgers doesn't hide the fact that a looming midlife crisis (he's rapidly approaching his 40th birthday) might be behind his quest. Supplying his own Rosebud moment in the form of an anecdote about his thwarted teenage rock star ambitions, his long-suffering wife hints that the film might be his way of getting a little bit of closure on his unrealised teenage dreams.

To this end, Edgers adds an additional frisson of tension to his impressive roster of interviewees by bringing his guitar (or in some cases, a banjo) along in the vain hope that the likes of Sting, Robyn Hitchcock, Zooey Deschanel, Peter Buck and Paul Weller will sing a Kinks song with him.

Though unceremoniously rebuffed by Weller – "That's just naff, mate, it's f***in' rubbish" – what's surprising is that these potentially cringeworthy moments turn out to be some of the film's sweetest, most insightful ones, capturing the way great music can form a common bond between disparate people.

I won't ruin the film by telling you if Edgers is successful, but the film makes you care enough to want to follow him through to its conclusion.

That's more than can be said for Against the Current and Handsome Harry, a tedious pair of middlebrow US indie dramas revolving around haunted men embarking on missions to confront their past. The former finds Joseph Fiennes as a grief-stricken widower who decides to swim the entire length of the Hudson River to mark the fifth anniversary of his pregnant wife's death before he tops himself. Unfortunately, the film's glib treatment of a serious issue ensures that that fate can't come soon enough.

Handsome Harry, meanwhile, casts Law & Order's Jamey Sheridan as a former navy man inspired by the dying request of an estranged friend (Steve Buscemi) to embark on a redemptive mission to atone for a violent transgression in their youth that left a fellow seaman badly beaten. Melodramatic and clunkily structured, the film's exploration of homophobia among a generation for whom sexuality remains problematic may be worthwhile, but the film fails to do anything interesting with it.

But enough with the emotional missions, there's a very literal one in Lebanon, an intense, nerve-shredding war movie set inside a tank during the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War. Based on the experiences of writer/director Samuel Maoz, the film – a big hit at last year's Venice Film Festival – uses the limited physical space of its setting to cracking effect, keying us into the frazzled headspace of its four Israeli protagonists as they find themselves in the midst of a situation they don't really understand and are ill-equipped – both psychologically and technically – to deal with.

Think of it as Das Boot in a tank. Just try not to grip that armrest too tightly.