Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgard, Natalie Portman, Randy Quaid, Michael Lonsdale.

Running time: 117 mins . . . .

QUEENMaria Louisa climbs up on a wooden horse and sitting astride turns to Goya, who is standing at his easel, brush in hand. "How do you want history to perceive you?" he asks. "The way I am, " she smiles, ironically.

"Young and beautiful." The portrait does indeed show her as she is, but old and ugly. Goya was a painter for hire, as all painters were, but he painted what he saw, not what people wanted him to see. Some of his greatest paintings were of the Spanish royal family . . . Las Meninas keeps drawing crowds to the Prado Gallery in Madrid . . . but as well as these, he also painted the poor and the deprived, the prostitutes and the petty criminals and was an unflinching witness to the horrors of war and destruction.

The idea of Milos Forman's Goya's Ghosts is simple, but brilliant: to tell through Goya's eyes the story of people caught up in an era of violent historical change at the turn of the 18th century. The later years of the Spanish Inquisition and the invasion of Spain by Napoleon's Army . . . in the aftermath of the French Revolution, claiming to bring freedom and democracy at the point of a bayonet (much like in US-occupied Iraq today . . . is followed by the defeat of the French and the restoration of the corrupt monarchy by Wellington's invading English army, providing the backdrop to the imagined lives of a trio of people who pose for Goya.

Between sittings with Maria Louisa at her palace in Vinuelas, Goya is also back in his studio completing a study of his teenage muse, Ines, and he's about to start a portrait of a cunning and ambitious priest, Brother Lorenzo, who has persuaded his superiors to reactivate the notorious Inquisition courts to prevent the spread of the godless enlightenment then rife in France . . . as evidenced in a popular series of licentious etchings by Goya. "Do you think in burning canvases the reality they depict will go?" he warns.

His solution of torture and redemption is personalised by the arrest of Ines after spies report that she preferred chicken to pork on a visit to a tavern, the implication being that she must be Jewish. She is strung up from the ceiling of a dungeon until she confesses, but to what? "Just tell me what you want me to say, " she pleads. Her father offers Lorenzo a chest of gold coins to rebuild a chapel if he'll release Ines. "But she confessed, " Lorenzo says.

"People confess to anything if they're tortured, " replies the father. To prove it, his servants seize Lorenzo and string him up until, screaming in agony, he confesses to being a monkey.

Forman doesn't attempt to rival the imagery with which Goya captured the unspeakable horrors of years of persecution and revolution. He opts instead for a surreal juxtaposing of the mundane with the extreme, much in the manner of Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie which was also scripted by Jean-Claude Carriere. Forman too has been witness to the barbarism of ideology gone mad. His parents died in Auschwitz. He grew up under a Communist regime in Czechoslovakia which he satirised in his movies in the 1960s, helping to bring about the 'Prague Spring', but was then forced into exile in the US where his movies highlighted the absurdities of western life.

Ridicule is his weapon and laughter the natural voice of despair, an approach that does justice to the unflinching humanity of Goya and draws compelling performances from Javier Bardem and Stellan Skarsgard as Lorenzo and Goya.

Natalie Portman is more problematical as Ines, her innocence lacking vulnerability and her degradation closer to caricature. Goya's Ghosts is, however, haunting in its dissection of the hypocrisies of public virtue and private vice.