Blindness

In this English-language adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, director Fernando Meirelles introduces us to a nameless modern city in which people are losing their sight, seemingly without cause.

Those afflicted are quickly shooed off to a nearby hospital, where they soon descend into a kind of tribal existence, engaging in rivalries and power-struggles, even as they attempt to fathom what the heck is going on. In truth, this could be a quite painfully awful movie, the sudden onset of blindness revealing itself as linked to the grimacing unkindness of society.

One braces oneself for a mawkish morality play, and on one level that is sort of what one gets.

However, the fact that it is being performed by some of our greatest actors - Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal among them - and is directed by the splendid Meirelles (City of God, 2002; The Constant Gardener, 2005) means that while it never escapes its awkward preachiness, that very preachiness becomes something impressive to behold. ·