As I Lay Dying

American Nobel laureate William Faulkner's experimental novel, a gruelling 1920s-set tale of a family's horse-and-cart journey to bury their mother, takes the form of a series of 59 stream-of-consciousness monologues and has unsurprisingly long been declared unfilmable. Inevitably that meant that someone would eventually have a go and James Franco, who both directs and stars in his own adaptation, gutsily takes it on. And he makes as good a job of it as can realistically be hoped. While it's not exactly an involving or emotionally satisfying film - the book simply doesn't lend itself to that - it is an impressive and often mesmerising one. Franco uses split screen, voiceover and some admittedly irritating actorly mumbling to reflect the fractured, experimental nature of the novel, while preserving the sense of emotional isolation and physical privation that the characters endure. The acting is top notch with Tim Blake Nelson standing out as toothless, stubborn patriarch Anse. Ironically it's only Franco himself as Darl, the reflective but unstable brother, who is a little disappointing, perhaps a case of the actor/director/writer spreading himself just too thin.