"Magnolia," directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Cruise and Julianne Moore, paints the picture of desperately lonely lives in Los Angeles in a vignette-style that recalls filmmaker Robert Altman.

Just over three hours long, "Magnolia" verges on being unremittingly bleak.

There are two cancer-ridden, dying fathers who realize they have failed their children, a gold-digging wife who is unable to show her love to her husband and an evangelistic-style huckster - Cruise's role - who gives lessons to men on how to sexually conquer women, rather than love them, which stems from bitterness left over from his own broken family.

The film ends with people reaching out to other.

"My movie is a hopeful movie ... (but to get there) you have to go through darkness," Anderson told a press conference at the festival, the Berlinale.

Still, it is a devastating indictment, set in the prosperous San Fernando valley, of the so-called American way of life.

And "Magnolia" is not alone.

The four other US films so far screened at the Berlinale, which opened last Wednesday, have all been dark.

"The Million Dollar Hotel" by German director Wim Wenders and starring Mel Gibson tells of a bunch of losers at a Los Angeles hotel who end up betraying the only one among them capable of pure love.

"Three Kings," directed by David O. Russell and starring George Clooney condemns US hypocrisy in failing to back Iraqi resistance fighters when Washington decided to halt the Gulf War short of toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

"The Beach," starring teen heartthrob Leonardo Di Caprio, is set in Thailand but is about how paradise on a beach can turn rotten.

And "The Talented Mr Ripley," with three former Oscar winners - director Anthony Minghella, and stars Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow - shows a bunch of self-indulgent Americans living abroad in Italy in the 1950s and how an outsider trying to take on their lifestyle turns into a murderer stealing their identities.

The key to the American films is that the Americans are the source of their own problems.

Two European films at the festival are a sharp contrast to this.

In "Nebeska Udica" (Sky Hook), a Yugoslav movie, residents in Belgrade pull together against, who else, US-led NATO planes bombing them.

And in the German film "Paradiso - Sieben Tage mit Sieben Frauen" (Paradiso, Seven Days with Seven Women) a composer unites his former wives and lovers with his current family for his 60th birthday - and everybody has a great time together and bonds.

(Agencies via Xinhua)