Billy Elliott

Dancer In The Dark (15), 140 minutes, City Screen, York, from today to October 12.

IT was made in the industrial north, its theme is working-class struggle and it is brimful of dancing and underdog triumph. No wonder Billy Elliott is being called the new Full Monty.

That thankless mantle has been bestowed upon a steaming heap of already forgotten films, but Stephen Daldry's downbeat comic drama really could be the film angel of the north.

Originally - as recently as June, in fact - it went by the name of Dancer, a title too narrow and I dare say too nancy to catch a broad audience. Billy Elliot is better by far, not least because 14-year-old Billingham prodigy Jamie Bell is remarkable in the lead role and fully warrants the hotter spotlight.

Billy, 11, is the younger son of an Easington miner, a single parent struggling to make ends meet amid the ravages of the 1984 Miners' Strike. Macho dad (granite-hewn Scotsman Gary Lewis) insists on Billy attending boxing training, to toughen him like his picketing brother, but Billy prefers ballet shoes and pirouettes to boxing gloves and punch bags.

Not daring to tell his family, he is coached in secret by a dispirited, serial-smoking dance teacher (Julie Walters, in best Educating Rita mode), who is newly revived by his spirit as he chases the dream of a place at ballet school. She in turn becomes his mother figure.

He may have his escape route, but always nagging away in the background like an abscess, the colliery community is being strangled by the strike.

Bell, who has danced since he was six, is as exhilarating to watch as a Fred Astaire or John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and yet there is no Hollywood or Bob Fosse gloss here. Instead, he dances among the cobbles of the grey back streets or dowdy, dank classrooms.

Not only Bell's dancing moves you, so does his acting. He brings to mind David Bradley in Kes, another northern tale of an outsider finding release through secret pleasures.

In interview, Stephen Daldry had been reluctant to make comparisons with other directors, other films. So I'll say it for him: he has transferred from theatre to cinema with the same grace and emotional impact that Sam Mendes brought to American Beauty, but his debut is closer in look and naturalistic style to Ken Loach, and Kes in particular. Here, then, is a modern yet traditional English film uncommonly good at the common touch.

As with Billy Elliott, dancing is a metaphor for escape in Lars Von Trier's mad musical Dancer In The Dark, except there is no escape for single-parent Selma, a Czech immigrant adrift in rural America. Going blind, she needs to hold on to her strenuous factory job to pay for an operation to save her son from the same fate.

Von Trier is the leader of the Dogme 95 pack, the grainy film-makers with their hand-held cameras and Ready Steady Film attitudes, and on the evidence of Breaking The Waves and The Idiots he likes to take his cast - and his audience - to hell and back.

Ever unconventional, he cast Icelandic pop pixie Bjork as Selma, and she responds by giving the most off-the-wall, unbridled yet strangely moving performance of the year in thick Buddy Holly glasses and with an English accent picked up from Dick Van Dyke. She was apparently so stressed out by the role she ended up eating her clothes, and you might well be tempted to do the same.