What Hollywood can learn from its elders

Ageism in Hollywood is hardly a secret. Ask almost any writer or actress older than 40. But, as two terrifically satisfying movies opening this week in Britain show, directors - well, white male directors anyway - seem magically immune to Hollywood's Botox fascism.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a tense, looping thriller from 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet, and Charlie Wilson's War, a delicious romp through war and politics in the 1980s, directed by 76-year-old Mike Nichols, show that the wrinklies have more than a thing or two to show their younger colleagues about old-fashioned story-telling and sheer joy in the skills of their actors.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead features wonderful turns from Philip Seymour Hoffman as an executive who plans the heist of his parents' small jewellery store, Marisa Tomei in a career-changing performance as his disaffected wife, and Ethan Hawke (left), in the best performance of his career, as Hoffman's hapless younger brother, who is tasked with pulling off the robbery, which, of course, goes seriously awry.

Hoffman, coincidentally, also features prominently in Charlie Wilson's War, playing an idiosyncratic CIA officer who helps congressman Charlie Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, finance the Afghan resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s.

But it's in the fine and classical art of story-telling that these old hands, and other veterans like 70-year-old Ridley Scott with American Gangster, and almost any film from 77-year-old Clint Eastwood in the last decade, most delight.

Lumet honed his skills when TV drama was broadcast live in the 1950s, and was responsible for many of the great New York-based movies of the 1970s including Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network.

Nichols's background was in theatre, directing on Broadway before Hollywood realised how, in films such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate and Heartburn, it could best utilise his classical European sensibility, refined on Chekhov, to tell engaging moral tales about the social and sexual changes that have transformed America over the last four decades.

But what's most intriguing about both Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and Charlie Wilson's War is how they stand out from the most lauded new films from younger directors. Unlike them, neither Lumet (right) nor Nichols is in the least bit embarrassed about wanting to satisfy their audiences. At least five other films from much younger directors that are now in serious Oscar contention have left many critics exulting but audiences infuriated because of strange, dissonant or just plain baffling endings.

No Country for Old Men, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, meanders off into some strange, tangential conversation about the nature of evil, "a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed", said the reviewer for Slate.

The serial killer is never caught in David Fincher's Zodiac. At the end of Atonement, directed by Joe Wright, we learn, annoyingly, that much of what we have just seen may have been concocted. And the ending of Sean Penn's Into the Wild, admittedly based on a true story, is almost too tragic for any sentient being to bear.

In these films the directors, all in their 30s and 40s, seem to care far more about proving their post-modern credentials to highbrow critics, by offering deliberately deconstructed endings, than they are about satisfying the audience's basic human need for narrative conclusion.

Neither The Devil Knows You're Dead nor Charlie Wilson's War, both directed by men who should be well past their sell-by dates, fall into this insidious modern trap. But then both Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols were weaned during the great days of classical Hollywood cinema when what really counted was how well a story was told. Call me old-fashioned, but their new films are much more engaging movie experiences because of it. ·