After seeing two excellent and very different films last night this has been a relaxed day in general. The world premiere of Disney’s new film Enchanted this afternoon meant that the auditorium was full of children dressed as princes and princesses all day, so that I began to feel I must be regressing back to childhood.

The highlight of the day for most was the press meeting with Halle Berry and Danish director Susanne Bier following the press screening of The Things We Lost in the Fire. After seeing the hysteria that surrounded people like Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, and Sean Penn, what struck me was the relative calm of both the people in the meeting and the almost serene countenance of Halle Berry. For such a big star she struck me as the most down-to-earth person I have seen here, a refreshing change from the practiced likeability of some of the others. The European premiere is tonight, along with the Italian Parole Sante and the homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini, La rabbia.

It is fitting that The Things We Lost in the Fire should be an understated, “feminine” film about grief, loss and the tenacity of the human spirit. Audrey Burke (Halle Berry) is shattered after the tragic death of her husband Brian (David Duchovny). Searching for solace she turns to his oldest friend, ex-lawyer and recovering heroin addict Jerry Sunborne (Benicio del Toro) and together they try to rebuild their lives.

Not wishing to sound cynical, but this is simply pumped full of Oscar-winning performances. Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro are both suitably wracked by pain, self-doubt, and guilt and the film is unflinchingly honest when dealing with the horrors of heroin addiction. It’s not that it isn’t a very good film, it is. And it isn’t that the actors aren’t convincing, they are. I just felt that I was so aware of how good it was and what it was doing that it put me off somehow.

Susanne Bier manages to capture the atmosphere of delicate isolation beautifully through a wonderful use of light and contrast, but after the nth meaningful closeup on Berry or del Toro’s eyes it felt like being in bed with someone who only has four moves - they’re great to start with but after a while you want to ask, “Is that all you’ve got?”

This morning I also saw a documentary called The Gates about the project created in New York’s Central Park in February 2005 by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The installation comprised of 7,503 metal gates, each supporting a curtain of saffron-colored material from the central cross-bar, lining 23 miles of pathways around the entire length and breadth of the park. The gates were one of the most controversial pieces of artwork ever to hit NYC. The documentary charts the initial hostility the artists encountered when the project was first proposed in 1979, to their final completion 26 years later.

This is an uplifting film with the simple pleasure of seeing something beautiful. Largely made up of shots of the miles of gates, their golden flags shimmering in the winter light, and the reactions of the thousands of people that came to see them with mixed reactions: joyous, religious, confused, angry, as well as the derisive news coverage by David Letterman and Keith Olbermann

It’s refreshing to watch something that isn’t trying to convince you of anything or push some subliminal message, but simply present you with something that happened and leave it at that.