What Hollywood can learn from its elders

Ageism in Hollywood is hardly a secret. Ask almost any writer or actress older than 40. But, as two terrifically satisfying movies opening this week in Britain show, directors - well, white male directors anyway - seem magically immune to Hollywood's Botox fascism.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a tense, looping thriller from 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet, and Charlie Wilson's War, a delicious romp through war and politics in the 1980s, directed by 76-year-old Mike Nichols, show that the wrinklies have more than a thing or two to show their younger colleagues about old-fashioned story-telling and sheer joy in the skills of their actors.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead features wonderful turns from Philip Seymour Hoffman as an executive who plans the heist of his parents' small jewellery store, Marisa Tomei in a career-changing performance as his

disaffected wife, and Ethan Hawke (left), in the best performance of his career, as Hoffman's hapless younger brother, who is tasked with pulling off the robbery, which, of course, goes seriously awry.

Hoffman, coincidentally, also features prominently in Charlie Wilson's War, playing an idiosyncratic CIA officer who helps congressman Charlie Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, finance the Afghan resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s.

But it's in the fine and classical art of story-telling that these old hands, and other veterans like 70-year-old Ridley Scott with American Gangster, and almost any film from 77-year-old Clint Eastwood in the last decade, most delight.

Lumet honed his skills when TV drama was broadcast live in the 1950s, and was responsible for many of the great New York-based movies of the 1970s including Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network.

Nichols's background was in theatre, directing on Broadway before Hollywood realised how, in films such as Who's Afraid