Gran Torino

Clint Eastwood's latest offering (as actor and director) is as elegant a piece of film-making as you're likely to come across this year. Set in Detroit - that city of crumbled industrial hopes and floundering motor companies - it rings out with a kind of pure Springsteen-like American-ness.

As Walt Kowalski, a newly-widowed, former Ford employee, Eastwood has the kind of weathered face and growly demeanour one might expect. He seeks comfort not in his family, but rather in the quiet company of cheap lager and his Labrador.

Yet this existence is interrupted by the arrival of some new neighbours; Asian immigrants who first upset him by their mere presence, and then really get him riled when their teenage son Thao (Bee Vang), pursued by a violent gang, attempts to hotwire his 1972 Gran Torino. As penance, Thao's family forces him to work for Walt. This starts badly, of course, but soon the gruffness softens into something more nurturing, and by the time the gang returns, Walt is ready to defend his young charge.

It's a beautiful film: funny, melancholic and wistful for another time - for the glory days of American industry. As much as anything, it's Eastwood's face that tells the story; there in the furrowed brow, the flinty gaze, lies the face that was once Dirty Harry, just as in those run-down streets of Detroit, in those shuttered factories and burnt-out buildings, once lived the joy and pride of America. ·