It blasted into action with the launch of a space shuttle and for the next half-hour showed brilliant, high-resolution, slow-moving shots of planets and nebulae. For this Future Space Fantasy Tomita took the stage alone, adding live sampling to the pre-programmed sequence. It's that "future" in the title that gives the authentic 1970s flavour. Tomita dipped in and out of his Planets favourites, orchestrating them with a quirky but fetching mix of ancient Moog sounds and inventive echoes across the loudspeakers all round the hall. His linking soundscapes sprang from the old spaced-out style and gradually took on more definition. About half-way through, his style seemed to be gelling, like Prokofiev's, with soaring violin tunes and ticking accompaniments. Except that this was real Prokofiev, a symphonic slow movement matched to a long-held view of Earth from space.

All you needed were some interesting substances to smoke, but it created its own magic anyway.The main event, The Tale of Genji, was subtitled a "symphonic picture scroll". The tale is an 11th-century epic, recently popularised by the writer Jakucho Setouchi, who showed her face to rapturous applause from those in the know. To those who weren't, the elliptical music-and-picture version needed reference to the crib sheet. This wasn't a major obstacle, since mood and atmosphere were both sharply delineated.Conducting his score, Tomita proved a master of the long phrase and the exquisitely orchestrated sound, in an idiom not so far from Prokofiev.

Except that this was Western-sounding only on the surface: as with Takemitsu, the music's sense of continuity and timing follows other rules. The Japanese instruments, including a king-size koto with 25 plucked strings, took solos from time to time; the electronic enhancement was discreet.On the screens, images of classical art gave way to frames of flowers and wildlife. An hour of it had its narcotic effect, especially since the music lingered too. The project pandered rather easily to a heritage Japan, yet Tomita can scarcely imagine an unlovely sound, the visuals were intensely beautiful, and the whole performance crept under the skin with a lasting impact you might not expect from the sum of the parts.Robert Maycock. The Lost Son is Daniel Auteuil's first English-speaking role in a film. Along the way he's gained a new language and lost a lot of sleep. The stress of preparation gave France's premier actor (sorry, Monsieur Depardieu) months of nightmares.

"People said to me, `When you start dreaming in English you've got it'," he remembers with a smile "I never did that. Nothing but these terrible nightmares with everybody saying, `I'm sorry, this is impossible, you have to go back to Paris now'." Auteuil doesn't make it easy for himself. Whereas Depardieu dipped his toes into the English language with a lightweight comedy (Green Card), Auteuil chose a dark tale about child pornography It wasn't a calculated move, he insists. "I didn't choose to work in English, I just chose to work with Chris Menges, that's all." Watch the film and you understand why This is classic Auteuil territory. Think of his past incarnations - each and every character a dislocated individual, stuck within a society they don't understand, or that has no desire to understand them. Remember lumpen, lovelorn Ugolin in Claude Berri's Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, driven to suicide for his unrequited passions.

Or Stephane, the near silent violin-maker (Un Coeur en Hiver) who manipulates the emotions of a violinist for unfathomable reasons.And under Chris (A World Apart) Menges' direction we now meet Auteuil as private detective Xavier Lombard It is a film that works on two levels. As a thriller with noirish overtones it comes packaged with an A-list cast - Nastassja Kinski, Katrin Cartlidge, Billie Whitelaw - and confidently details Lombard's search for the missing son of a wealthy family. Dig deeper, however, and you're suddenly face to face with another story; that of Lombard as a solitary, grieving individual, battling private demons while plunging into the bleak world of child trafficking.As Auteuil explains: "I am attracted by trouble inside [people's minds] This character is.. an iceberg. I love those films where you're allowed to see into the secret parts we all have."Auteuil has that rare skill indicative of a truly great actor By seemingly doing very little, he can say it all. Great explosions of emotion can detonate around him, (think of Emmanuelle Beart in Un Coeur en Hiver, her heart finally broken) and yet the impassivity of his features allows a glimpse into that character's soul. Because of this his is the face you recognise but can't necessarily put a name to. It is the characters that remain lodged in your memory.Acting, as he says, is in his genes.