The Artist

What a magnificent film this is. The savviest, most elegant celebration of old-school cinema since Singin' In The Rain, it is also an impeccable fable about the transience of fame and fashion, harking back to the darker likes of All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Most impressively, the film is in dazzling black-and-white and (until the final scene) wordless.

Jean Dujardin is quite exceptional as George Valentin, the silent cinema star whose popularity wanes as sound arrives. A far cry from the histrionic "mugging" typical of silent films, Dujardin's performance is a masterclass in restraint, subtlety and fragile charm. Look at his face when he overhears starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), in an interview, call for the silent stars to make way for newer, fresher faces: it begins with a sort of dazed dignity, then he hunches into his food, and then he can't help but confront her; look again as he loiters at the back of the room, head bowed, during the auction of all his possessions, perhaps the most poignant scene in the film. There is another wonderful moment where he bumps into Peppy on a studio stairwell: his smile, that matinée idol smile under the Clark Gable moustache, becomes a frail, parodic, half-rictus mask. Dujardin is compelling throughout the film (he can even dance), but he is particularly brilliant in the early, more inhibited stages of his internal collapse.

Bejo is perky and endearing, if slightly idealised, as George's protegée-cum-guardian angel. There's a fun early scene, a bit like the one in Singin' In The Rain when the microphones don't work, where the chemistry between George and Peppy ruins take after take. But she remains unwaveringly grateful to George, even once he has become a Miss Havisham-esque recluse surrounded by his former glories and nearly sets fire to himself. As much as anything else, this is a film about loyalty, which George commands not just from Peppy, but also from his driver Clifton (James Cromwell) and his lovely dog. The moment George tries to kill himself, with his dog howling at him not to, is heartbreaking, and a powerful throwback to the end of neorealist classic Umberto D., where Flike stops his master from standing in front of a train.

Before The Artist, Dujardin and director Michel Hazanavicius were best known for spy spoof series OSS 117, the French, even less funny equivalent of Johnny English. But they are now responsible for one of the most delightful, stylish and brave films in recent memory, and the best, warmest film about the cinema since Truffaut's La nuit américaine. It is not perfect: there are too many scenes with the dog (as sweet as he is), the gun joke is overflogged, the very early scenes are too hammy, and I know it was a cameo, but Malcolm McDowell could have been used more (the presence of McDowell, a sort of seventies George Valentin who went from Kubrickian iconoclast to B-movie trundler, is one of the film's many ironies). However, it is such an astonishing achievement, a modern-day cultural Fitzcarraldo, to make a black-and-white, silent film in 2011 as contemporary, funny and entrancing as this.