LIMBO ****

 Ben Sharrock's absolutely superb new movie "Limbo" manages to be politically prescient while still channelling all the attributes of an Ealing comedy. The setting is a fictional Scottish island, as remote as they come, where asylum seekers wait, in a kind of limbo, to find out if their applications to come to live in the UK are successful. It's hero is Omar, (Amir El-Masry, excellent), a young Syrian who finds his new, hopefully temporary Scottish home, a place as alien as any on the planet. His loneliness is alleviated when he falls in with three other asylum seekers. He also has a gift for music, (he plays the oud), and it is this that finally sustains him and lifts him beyond the bleakness of a Scottish winter and the situation he finds himself in.

This is definitely a minimalist movie, a throwback in its way to the days of Bill Forsyth, and it certainly won't make anyone rush off to visit the islands of North and South Uist, Berneray and Benbecula, (whatever beauties they may have are hidden in the mist, the rain, the snow and the sea-spray). It's also very funny at times in its surreal fashion as well as heartbreakingly sad and it's superbly shot in the Academy ratio which gives the enclosed, claustrophobic feelings of its characters room to breathe but exploding, magnificently, into widescreen at a crucial moment and is further proof, should you need it, that British cinema is alive and kicking.