Indie director Michael Cuesta’s first film, LIE, was something of a talking point at this year’s Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Not simply because it deals with paedophilia, but because it does so without sensationalism or hysteria. LIE has a cool, calm manner with some superficial resemblances to Todd Solondz’s Happiness, which also deals with paedophilia — but the results are different. Everything in Happiness is heightened and stylised just that little bit, with a dash of deadpan black humour, and what emerges is a kind of suburban surrealism.LIE, by contrast, is as realistic as it is possible to be. Nothing is here simply for effect. In fact, calling it a movie about paedophilia, with all the baggage and misunderstanding that word carries, is not quite right. At any rate, Cuesta tells a complex story about complicated people in an artfully simple way, allowing the viewer space to fill in the gaps. No obvious pointers are given, no moral judgement is rammed down anyone’s throat. “LIE” stands for “Long Island Expressway”; expressway being American for highway. Of course the title is something of a pun as well, but the importance of the expressway is that 14-year-old Howie’s mother died in an accident there. Howie (played with perfect naturalistic inwardness by Paul Franklin Dano) is having a hard time. Apart from his mom’s death, his dad’s world is falling apart amid various shady dealings. And the presence of dad’s new bimbo isn’t exactly helping Howie forget about mom’s absence. As if it weren’t hard enough being 14 already.The traumatised Howie hangs out with a bunch of guys given to mini-crime-sprees. They’re not really criminals; just bored suburban teens. The dangerous and attractive Gary (Billy Kay) stirs uncomfortable feelings in Howie, gets him into trouble, and leads to a connection with an older man, Big John (Brian Cox). Big John’s designs on Howie are obvious — or are they? The complexity and unexpectedness that Cuesta and his co-scriptwriters bring to the character of Big John, and the subtle brilliance with which Cox plays him, disable any simple good/evil distinctions. We are not dealing with overheated media stereotypes here; it feels like we’re dealing with real people.If the ending of LIE seems a little forced and abrupt, it is virtually the only flaw in a movie remarkable for its sensitivity and its broad sympathy for humanity in all its desperation. David Cronenberg’s new movie, Spider, also deals with extremity — and with the strange Oedipal tangles we get into with mothers and fathers, which is to say, like LIE, with love, hate and betrayal. It is about a man (Ralph Fiennes) just out of a mental home, trying to find a place for himself in the outside world. Except that his inside world won’t leave him alone.Cronenberg’s films are always interesting, but this one is particularly so because it is adapted from Patrick McGrath’s novel, which locates itself in Spider‘s delusional but eloquent consciousness. In a movie you can’t do that, at least not without too much burdensome voice-over, and Cronenberg (with McGrath, who scripted Spider) has taken it to the other extreme, externalising the story entirely. The fact that he has made it work is a sign of his sheer mastery of the film form.With calm deliberation, Cronenberg moves back and forth between Spider‘s present and his traumatic past. Fiennes is very, ahem, fine in the virtually mute lead, all twitch and mutter. Gabriel Byrne, as his father, and Miranda Richardson, as his mother, are also excellent. If this beautifully designed movie seems too detached to pull one into an emotional web, it is nonetheless able to sit quietly in one’s mind and keep spinning its eerie threads long after it’s over.