Magneto wanted to fight anger with anger.Bryan Singer's movie is a weaving together of those two strands, the personal and the political. The X-Men in his film are more mature, later recruits rather than the original Sixties line-up. Cyclops (James Marsden) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) are there. But so, too, are Storm, (Halle Berry), who can control the weather, Rogue (Anna Paquin), who can absorb the powers of other mutants by touch, and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), whose violent, feral nature is matched by deadly sharp claws that spring from his knuckles. The film centres on Wolverine's attempts to piece together his fragmented identity, his memory having been mysteriously wiped clean. But Singer also gives due weight to the ideological conflict between Xavier and Magneto. Still, my favourites scenes are none of the big set-piece confrontations I prefer the movie's smaller, incidental moments.

Xavier's school is full of pupils who revel in their duality as normal teens and extraordinary mutants. A girl heads off in a hurry to her next class, walking like a ghost through the nearest wall. A boy makes a snowball out of thin air and hands it as a love token to the girl he's smitten by. A teenager playing basketball throws the ball, whizzes down the court at superspeed, catches it and makes a basket before his fellow players have even moved. Watching those scenes I thought of my desperate longing as a child for difference to be honoured instead of scorned And I felt a rush of nostalgia Not for my actual childhood. But for how, through reading The X-Men, I imagined it might be.'X-Men' (12) is released on 18 August.

Film Studies Film Studies The technicians on a movie will tell you they can do anything these days. You want the Colosseum in ancient Rome filled with 50,000 citizens? There! Or the greatest storm ever beheld in the middle of the greatest ocean? Got it! But don't ask them to track the camera.What's that, Max, you want the camera to track across the floor at a diagonal, pick up the actress as she comes in the door, and then crane up with her as she climbs the spiral staircase, and end on a perfect close-up as she sees herself in the bedside mirror? You mean, track the camera, Max? We'd need 40 feet of track, we'd need grips, we'd have to light the whole room... Couldn't we just have the camera upstairs and fix on the door downstairs, and then a nice zoom? The zoom makes life easy, Max And then we cut to the mirror close-up I mean, that's a couple of hours max, Max. We do it your way Max, we don't have the grips and we need a rack focus on a flying rig I don't think we can do that. Now, we might put her on a treadmill and morph in the background? That'd be fun.I'm making this up - it's a not a scene from an actual film.

But Max Ophüls needed rack focus on a flying rig all his life. Indeed, so far as he was concerned, that was life - movement, time, human panic or joy, and all of it captured in the most beautiful moving camera shots you ever saw.Max Ophüls was a kind of constant refugee. All he wanted to do was to make moving pictures - they are called moving pictures, aren't they? - yet he was hounded for being Jewish, foreign, fussy, difficult, a perfectionist, who wanted to do films as if the people were butterflies and the camera was the net. He needed to see the wings flutter and feel the desperate heart beating like a clock.

His characters were angels in risk of falling, and his films were the story of jeopardised flight. So the shots were complicated and needed grips the way a Habsburg palace had footmen. Nowadays, he'd never get a job.Max Ophüls died of a heart attack in 1957; he was 54. And you have to see that early demise as a reaction to the harried, itinerant life and all the crews who were placidly resistant to his dreams. At the same time, his people are romantically strenuous and yearning - they want to fly, even if they know it is bad for their hearts.Born in Saarbrücken, in the Alsace, Max Oppenheimer was pushed around by dictators as varied as Hitler and Howard Hughes, by the vagaries of political history and the chance of getting a film made.