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This film wasn't easy to track down. I wanted to watch it because I had really enjoyed and admired the novel it's based on, but Amazon didn't have copies of it; evidently it didn't get a lot of distribution outside Israel. I finally managed to track it down to an Israeli online shop.

It's the sort of film that people outside Israel should probably watch, because among other things it lifts the lid on what a corrupt, nasty and dangerous place Israel has become - in other words, it shows just how much Israel can be like any other country. The basic story is of Asaf, a young guy who works for a dog shelter (I think he's meant to be an Israeli Arab, but I'm not certain), trying to reunite a stray dog with its owner. The owner is Tamar, a teenage girl on a mysterious mission. The opening scene, in which Tamar goes into a barbershop and gets her beautiful head of hair shaved off, is shocking in a low-key sort of way. The rest of the film, like the book, is a mixture of adventure story and social commentary.

It's a good movie, with fine performances from all but especially from the two leads, Bar Belfer as Tamar and Yonatan Bar-Or as Asaf. Quite a lot of the suspense comes from the tension about whether or not the two main characters are ever actually going to meet.

David Grossman, author of the original novel, is one of the best novelists working today and this is one of the toughest and most unsentimental Israeli movies I've seen. Since most of the Israeli movies I've seen have tended to be more than a bit sentimental, that's a major mark in its favour. If there's anything wrong with it, it's that it sometimes seems a little far-fetched; the novel was more believable, for some reason. But it's still a very fine story, and it's a shame that it hasn't been seen much outside Israel; most Irish films (I'm Irish) get more hype, but are far more flimsy.

Ben Affleck's film career has been, as they say, "chequered", meaning that his resume consists of a lot of total dogs and a small handful of nice appearances here and there. Up until very lately, I had always been inclined to agree with the British film critic David Thomson, who wrote in 2004 that Affleck was "lucky to have got away with it so far".

Because Affleck really isn't a very good actor, or at any rate not a consistently good one. When Kevin Smith attempts to hang an entire movie on an Affleck performance (Chasing Amy, Dogma) Affleck looks wooden, but when Smith brings the actor in for a quick, mischievous cameo, he seems to be galvanised - he is effective as a thuggish boyfriend in Mallrats, and his smirking few minutes as both Holden and as himself in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back are good fun.

Elsewhere, though, anyone who can see the point of Pearl Harbor or Gigli needs to gain some serious perspective. Then, in 2006, he delivered an unexpectedly lovely performance as the fading actor George Reeves in Hollywoodland - overweight, sagging, stoical and with a touching sense of faded glamour. When we in our house heard that he'd a.) directed a movie and b.) it was supposed to be pretty good, we were interested - mildly.

I started watching Gone Baby Gone with a sense of let's-just-give-this-ten-minutes, and it says much for Affleck's sense of pace that the movie is, to be begin with, both thoroughly unenjoyable and totally gripping. It's a subject which has a lot to say to any parent: the four-year-old daughter of a working-class Boston woman (Amy Ryan) has gone missing, and two private investigators (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) are asked by the woman's sister-in-law to help with the police investigation. The initial twist is that Helene, the mother, is a deeply unsympathetic character; she's a bored, slobbish, neglectful mother who drinks beer in the middle of the day and seems almost uninterested in what has happened to her daughter.

Before the film is over, you will have changed your mind several times about Helene, and indeed about pretty much every other character. The film starts like a detective thriller, but it isn't one really. It's a highly intelligent and subversive film about family and morality and the cost of doing the right thing.

Full marks to an excellent cast. To begin with I found Casey Affleck's voice sort of irritating, but his performance is actually very subtle; the film plays very well on his capacity for blue-eyed innocence. Amy Ryan is truly remarkable as Helene. Everybody else is just spot on; there's a scene in a bar, featuring mostly non-professional actors, that makes you marvel at how unbelievably unfriendly the modern American drinking hole can be.

My admiration for Gone Baby Gone grew as it went on and I'm glad I watched it to the end. The final image, a simple shot of two people sitting on a sofa watching television, is one of the saddest and grimmest moments I've seen as a film-goer recently. The film sticks in the mind. Affleck should make more films as a director, because on the strength of this movie he already deserves a more illustrious place in cinema history than his acting has so far managed to earn him.

I wouldn't call myself a crazy fan of the Bond movies; I only own about three or four on DVD, all of them from the Connery era. I prefer the colder and murkier Fleming novels, which is perhaps why I like Daniel Craig as Bond. Pierce Brosnan was good fun but he was Connery Lite; Timothy Dalton was a good actor who behaved as though he was in a different film to everyone else; and with the Roger Moore movies, you might as well have been watching something like "Smokey and the Bandit".

So a darker, more tortured Bond is a good idea, I think, and Daniel Craig can certainly do tortured. With his boxer's face and deadpan delivery, he is just the guy to present a more realistic and three-dimensional version of the character. Strange, then, that it was partly on his recommendation that Marc Forster was hired to direct this movie.

Forster and his editor cut the entire film like one huge action sequence. He said somewhere how he felt that "Casino Royale" felt "too long" and that he wanted this film to be zippier. Job done, Mr. Forster. It goes by so fast you'll barely notice it. As the final titles rolled, I turned to my wife and said "Wasn't there supposed to be a story?" There is a story, at least on paper. Despite Forster's impatience with the thought of filming performances by actors, Mathieu Amalric manages to register his presence on screen as a memorably two-faced Bond villain, a scheming suit with the appearance of a scruffy, hip, eco-millionaire. The fast cutting means that the action sequences only impress - you are dazzled by them, but there is no real drama or suspense because when the cutting is this fast, there is no time to focus on what's happening to people: this Bond can jump from house to house like a lemur and take down a lift full of trained MI5 agents in a blur of kicks and punches without even breaking a sweat. I, for one, would love to see Bond chase someone in one long take, something like the celebrated chase sequence in "French Connection II" in which an out-of-condition Gene Hackman runs...and runs...and runs...after the almost oblivious Fernando Rey, getting more and more out of breath.

The story was apparently written on the fly, while shooting the previous movie, and it feels like it. The villain's lair catches fire after a single stray bullet punctures a gas line; haven't these supervillains ever heard of health and safety procedures??? For all the talk about Bond going "inward" and the franchise taking a bold new direction, this is one of the flimsiest and least involving Bond movies I have ever seen; at least the Moore movies had a sense of absurd humour. "Casino Royale" was the first Bond movie that made me actually care about Bond. "Quantum of Solace", on the other hand, is deeply frustrating: the producers, and I think Craig, want it to be more realistic but the director doesn't pause for long enough to reality to catch a breath. The result is a grim and uninvolving cartoon.

I suggest that next time, the Bond people should get a proper screenwriter to sit down and write a proper script, and then they should replace Marc Forster with a director who is not going to think that he's above all this Bond movie nonsense and that the characters aren't worth taking seriously.