All week A CHANGE of tack this week, as this column emerged from its heavilycurtained sitting room, hairy and haggard and blinking in the daylight, before being escorted to an even darker room with a bigass screen and more expensive snacks. A tough station and no mistake. This year's Dublin film festival had a section devoted to soccer, and all the films featured had the good grace not to clash with the Champions League matches midweek. Good work there.

Yesterday saw the screening of George Best: Football Like Never Before.

Experimental German filmmaker Hellmuth Costard travelled to Coventry v Manchester United on 12 September 1970 with eight 16mm cameras that had lenses for only one man, George Best.

They linger on Best for the entirety, at the expense of the action itself. It's unadorned by graphics, is barely edited, and the only sountrack is the crowd at Highfield Road. That is until Costard inserts some organ fuelled soul-lite pap at inexplicable intervals, as jarring as it is unnecessary, compromising the artistic integrity of the piece by making it look more like an aftershave ad.

Maybe he put it in to keep people awake, but there was really no need. It's an oddly gripping 90 minutes, despite Best having a quiet performance in a nothing game. There's a hypnotic quality to watching him move around the pitch, and the occasions when he actually gets the ball and the crowd noise rises as he unleashes his electrifying pace have you sitting forward in anticipation.

Beyond the highlight reels, it strips the legend down, showing every second of a normal day at the office. But it's as much an ode to the icon as the player, the camera often lingering on his face or torso, even when he has the ball. At 'half-time' Best lures the camera into an empty room and simply stares at it for two minutes.

A curio, to be sure, but one worthy of your curiosity.

Once in a Lifetime is a funky documentary about the dramatic rise and fall of soccer in the US in the late 1970s, specifically its most famous side, the New York Cosmos. Kicking their heels (and others') in front of paltry crowds, the team were going nowhere until Steve Ross came along. The mogul behind Warner Group, he threw his considerable financial weight behind a team with a pitch even worse than Roman Abramovich's.

An indefatigable entrepreneur, Ross saw the chance to get in on a sport at the ground level and bring it to the masses. And he succeeded, thanks to one vital ingredient. Pele.

Despite having a team of part-timers and a painted pitch full of broken glass, Ross got his man, for somewhere in the region of $7m. Pele arrived and the media frenzy began, forcing this odd sport with no obvious snack breaks onto the American consciousness. The spotlight shone fiercely for five or six years, before it was realised that nobody was going to watch this stuff on TV. But man, it looked fun while it lasted, as Pele and Italian Giorgio Chinaglia dragged the Cosmos from the lower reaches of the North American Soccer League to championship glory . . . in Pele's last game, obviously. On the way, this mix of no-marks and global superstars became Grade A famous and partied hard on the road and in Studio 54.

Expertly made, with a cast of superb backstage characters and an impeccable soundtrack of period music, this is a bright and breezy jaunt through a remarkable rise-and-fall story. Pretty much everyone who was along for the ride took part although Pele, curiously, declined to be interviewed. But he featured so much that the lack of his low drawl was barely noticeable. Excellent stuff, and certainly worth seeing on the big screen. Look out.

The best of the fictional bunch was The Longest Penalty in the World, a brilliant comedy from Spain.

One-nil up in the league decider, a team of underdogs concede a dodgy penalty in the final moments after their goalkeeper is injured by the opposing striker.

Fernando, the biggest nohoper of all, puts down his beer and fag to step in as sub keeper. But the locals invade the pitch and cause the game to be abandoned. The penalty is re-fixed for a week later, so we follow a week in Fernando's life as he tries to woo the coach's daughter and prepares for his biggest moment. The farce is actually funny, the touching moments are schmaltz free and it's all eminently likable.

If it gets a cinema release here, go see. You'll go a long way to find a better football film.

From Germany came Liberated Zone. The Brandenburg backwater of Sasslen make their way to the German FA Cup final thanks to a prolific striker of African descent. As is the norm in such filmic small towns everyone seems to be having sex with everyone else before some form of tragedy strikes. It features possibly the worst attempt at on-pitch action ever committed to film but it makes for a diverting kitchen-sink comedy drama.

One Day in Europe tried to cover all the bases. Focusing on a fictional Champions League final between Galatasary and Deportivo La Coruna in Moscow, it consists of four vignettes involving an English woman in Moscow, a German backpacker in Istanbul, a Hungarian pilgrim in Santiago de Campostela and a pair of French performance artists in Berlin. A comment on how Europe is united in some ways but rife with divisions in so many others, it's a worthy, if occasionally dull offering.

Finally, there was Keane.

According to the festival programme, it was 'a beautifully filmed portrait of a man in crisis' who 'looks like he could be slightly unbalanced'. Nah, it wasn't him. Still, it's only a matter of time.