Parky at the Pictures (DVD 16/5/2013)

In a world in which bears live above ground in a manner not too dissimilar to humans and rodents scurry around a subterranean domain, there is no fraternisation between the species. Young mice are told scary bedtime stories about hungry bears, even though they need the milk teeth of cubs to make dentures. Despite being taught to fear bears at her orphanage, Celestine refuses to believe they are monsters and accepts a challenge to draw a picture of a bear cuddling a mouse.

As a new dental student, Celestine knows that reconnaissance parties frequently venture above ground to collect teeth from beneath the pillows of sleeping cubs. However, she is nearly caught on her first mission and has to spend the night cowering in a dustbin. The following morning, while feeling lost and cold, Celestine wanders into a cottage belonging to a bear named Ernest, who has just woken from his hibernation and is in the mood for a tasty snack. Times have been tough for Ernest since the police confiscated his instruments and he could no longer earn his living as a busking one-bear band and he is about to gobble Celestine when she convinces him that she knows a place where he can find much tastier morsels.

Having eaten his fill in the basement of a nearby sweetshop, Ernest asks Celestine to be his friend. She readily accepts, but realises she has to go home. But, when she gets into trouble for failing to meet her teeth quota, she goes in search of Ernest to ask if he can help her break into the safe where the precious teeth are kept. Ernest decides it would be easier to carry the safe on his back and let the mice take what they want. However, they are furious with Celestine for bringing a bear into their midst and they are chased by the police. Celestine begs Ernest to let her live in his woodland home. But his neighbours prove every bit as prejudicial and they are hunted down and put on trial for breaking both ursine and murine laws.

The peril sequences are handled in such a way to unnerve younger viewers without frightening them, as it is always pretty clear that Ernest and Celestine will win the day and their unique friendship will be allowed to continue. But, while the narrative is compelling and its themes are discussed with wit and tact, what most sets this beguiling feature apart is its respect for Vincent's worldview and its complete eschewal of the smug pop cultural self-reflexivity that has become such a cloying aspect of American animations bent on appealing to adults and children alike. The artwork also makes an enchanting change from the soulless computer generations that now dominate the form, while Lambert Wilson and Pauline Brunner contribute pitch perfect voiceovers.

It's not all cosy and cute, however, as both the grumpy Ernest and the reckless Celestine don't always see eye to eye and also suffer from nightmares. Moreover, there are plenty of astute sight gags, such as the mousetrap gymnasium, the camouflaging of a bright red vehicle and Celestine's efforts to disguise herself with a bear mask. But it's impossible not to be transported back to more innocent times as this wondrous fable unfolds.

Most viewers would relish the chance to be reacquainted with Ernest and Celestine some time soon, but the end of the road may be in sight for another Francophone favourite. Having introduced his irrepressible African hero in Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998), animator Michel Ocelot related his further adventures in and Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005). But, while these were complete narratives, Kirikou and the Men and Women quickly betrays the fact that it started out as a TV series and feels throughout like an assemblage of fragments loosely linked by the intrepid hero's grandfather (voiced by Emmanuel de Kset Gomes).

The first three vignettes were co-written by Bénédicte Galup, with the first centring on a villager (Sabine Bekika Pakora) who seeks refuge with Kirikou (Romann Berrux) and his mother (Jessica Tougloh) when the wicked sorceress Karaba (Awa Aene Sarr) sends her minions to burn the roof off her hut. This study in neighbourliness and charity is followed by another tale about helping someone in distress, as Kirikou rescues a grumpy old man who has been chased across the savannah and up a tree by a jackal. But he has his work cut out to convince the other children when a light-skinned Tuareg boy gets lost in a sandstorm and wanders into the village, where he is suspected of being a ferocious blue monster named Anigouran. Showing how it is possible to overcome the language barrier to reach an understanding, Kirikou reaches out to the stranger and teaches his friends a valuable lesson in tolerance and acceptance.

New Jersey-born, but French based Susie Morgenstern contributes the plotline for the penultimate mini saga, which sees Karaba become jealous when the locals fall under the spell of a visiting female griot (or storyteller). She regales them with a legend about Soundiata Keita, who founded the Malian empire, and Karaba becomes increasingly irate, as she lacks the pureness of heart to hear the griot and tries to remove her rival. If this segment tries to pack in too much incident, Cendrine Maubourguet's concluding episode feels far too slight, as Kirikou's friends and family extol his virtues and his appreciation of the magic of music.

Complete with songs by Youssou N'Dour (which are performed by Mah Sissoko and Angélique Kidjo) and an evocative score by Thibault Agyeman, this is more dependent upon music than its predecessors to create a unifying thread. But, even though the chapters stubbornly refuse to hang together, this is so full of visual delights that it is possible to forgive the narrative lapses. Once again revealing the influence of West African art, as well as the distinctive styles of Henri Rousseau and Lotte Reiniger, Ocelot makes such ravishing use of colour and silhouette that it's even possible to forget that Kirikou himself can be a bit full on, as he hurtles around with an answer for everything. Indeed, sometimes, it's even tempting to side with Karaba.

The last of the week's animated trio comes from South Korea. Although it may not be particularly graphically appealing and lacks the sophistication of Japanimation, Yuen Sang-ho's noirish feature bow, The King of Pigs, follows Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions and Yoon Sung-hyun's Bleak Night (both 2010) in making unflinching use of punishing violence to challenge conventional views of heroism and the morality of vengeance and to confront the endemic problems of peer pressure and bullying in Korean and Japanese schools.

Having just murdered his wife in their apartment, Hwang Kyung-min sobs in the shower as much out of self-pity as remorse. Meanwhile, wannabe writer Jung Jong-suk is humiliated in front of the entire office by his boss and he has whipped himself into such a frenzy by the time wife Lee Myung-mi gets home late that he accuses her of having an affair with her academic employer and beats her up before rushing into the night. Sinking to his haunches in a back alley, Jung gets a phone call and is astonished to hear for the first time in 15 years from his middle school classmate Hwang.

The pair meet in a restaurant and, in toasting the past, Hwang admits to having been thinking about their old friend, Kim Chul. They recollect the first time they even noticed he was in their form when he came to Hwang's rescue when he had his exercise book ripped in half after being caught doing his homework in class by upper-class bully Kang-min and his orange-sweatered sidekick. Kim had hit Kang so hard that he had been hospitalised for several days. But he returned as spiteful as ever and subjected Jung to a homophobic ribbing after he had noticed he was wearing his sister's jeans to school.

However, having smashed Kang's oppo in the face with the metal buckle of his swinging belt, Kim invites Hwang and Jung to the abandoned house where he has his hideout and urges them to join him in fighting evil with evil. He describes his contempt for the father who absconded and left his mother to accept demeaning jobs in order to raise him and reveals the extent of his pent-up fury by stabbing a spitting cat in the guts. Kim orders Jung and Hwang to do likewise as part of their initiation and the former is taunted by the creature's spirit as he lies in bed that night and wonders whether he has the courage to stand up to his tormentors.

Kim is suspended and, while he is absent, Park Chan-yung transfers to the school and quickly becomes a favourite of the teacher, who enters him in the prestigious essay competition that Kang had set his heart on winning. Hwang wants to make friends with Park, but Jung is less impressed by his gushing geniality and scolds Hwang for giving him the meat that his mother had packed for lunch when his own family is too poor to afford such luxuries. Unfortunately, the dish gives Park a stomach ache and he is sat in the toilets when Kang tips a pan of urine over him and he is soundly thrashed by older prefect Suk-wong when he tries to attack Kang with a knife from his pencil case.

Suitably chastened, Park withdraws from the essay contest and Jung is disgusted that he has shown so little spirit in resisting the bullies. However, his hopes are revived when Kim returns and pitches straight into a row between Kang and Hwang over whether the latter's karaoke bar is a front for prostitution. Not content with thumping Kang, Kim also pulps Suk-wong and Jung realises in that moment that he is the king of the pigs capable of ending the tyranny of the snarling pack of dogs. But the seniors could not allow such insubordination to pass unchecked and Kang is ordered to lure Hwang, Jung and Kim to the school roof for punishment.

There is no sign of Kim, however, as he has been tracked down by the police and taken to the morgue with his mother, where he learns that his father has committed suicide. Kim seeks refuge in his den. But, when Hwang begs him to return to the school to save Jung, he readily agrees and has just pulled a blade on the boys encircling him when Park appears with a teacher and Kim is expelled for carrying a weapon. The incident drives a wedge between Hwang and Jung, with the latter accusing him of betraying their friend by leading him into a trap. Kim tells Jung that he wants to commit suicide so that nobody will be able to look back on their schooldays as a golden age because it will always be tainted with his blood. He sniffs glue and goes into a reverie that is somehow shared across town by Jung, who is again mocked by the ghost of the dead feline.

Back in the present, Hwang urges Jung to go in search of Kim's hideaway. He ignores a phone call from Min and thinks back to the shame he felt when he witnessed his sister being caught shoplifting. Yet, he also remembers the potency of her justification, as it was better to steal than put pressure on their parents to buy expensive things. Hwang grows angry at Jung's refusal to answer his phone and harks back himself to the time he visited his father at the Happy Happy Karaoke bar and felt ashamed at the way he fawned over the teachers in the foyer. He also reflects on how Kim had confronted his father with a knife after he had fired his mother for being too old to be a hostess.

Having discovered that the abandoned house had been knocked down, Hwang and Jung find themselves back at their old school. They go up to the roof and recall the day that Kim had fallen to his death in front of the assembled students and staff. Suddenly suspicious about why Hwang should have contacted him after such a prolonged silence, Jung demands to know what it going on.

Hwang reveals that he had seen Kim lingering in a corridor on the day he made his jump and that he had confided that he had chosen to make a point rather than a sacrifice. Thus, he wanted Hwang to call out the moment he saw him on the ledge so that the teachers would try to talk him down. But, as he looked upwards, Hwang had seen Jung push Kim because he had overheard their conversation and had known that an empty gesture would only make the bullying worse.

Jung pounces on Hwang in blind fury and starts trying to throttle him. However, Hwang manages to say that he knew Jung had killed Kim to protect them both and, when Jung relaxes his grip, Hwang laments that he has frittered away the money his father had worked so hard so make on a failing business. As Jung makes his way down to street level, Hwang leaps to his death and Jung is left sobbing on the phone to Min that he is scared of the evil world surrounding him.

Although the edgy illustrations and severe character movements reinforce the naked brutality of the violence and the seething mood of vituperative rage that permeates this bleak denunciation of Korea's rigidly hierarchical society, they also draw attention to the repetitive nature of the school sequences and the overwrought tone of the bookending scenes, in which Hwang (voiced respectively by adult and child by Oh Jeong-se and Park Hee-von) and Jung (Yang Ik-june and Kim Kkobbi Flowerain) finally plumb the depths of depravity and despair that have been awaiting them since youth. Yuen Sang-ho's script bristles with intelligence and ire in its exploration of the class divide, concepts of honour, workaholism and parental neglect and the inefficacy of the teaching profession. But its most chilling speeches are delivered by Kim (Kim Hye-na), as he proclaims that acting monstrously is the only way to counter wickedness.

In some ways similar to John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), this is less about debunking myths than taking responsibility for one's actions. Comparisons to William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies are also tempting. But this is very much a Korean saga and its tirade against the corrupt, misanthropic, militaristic and nihilistic nation that has emerged since the restoration of democracy is deeply disturbing.

A manga by Fumi Yoshinaga that has already inspired two Japanese TV series sparks the action in Min Kyu-Dong's Antique Bakery (2008), a delirious hybrid that seems intent on breaking every generic convention in sight. As with Min's breakout picture, Memento Mori (1999), same sex romance plays a key role in proceedings. But there is so much else going on here that it would do it a disservice to attempt to categorise it. After all, where would you shelve a movie that opens like a sitcom, sprinkles the action with musical numbers and then turns increasingly dark as a serial killer and a childhood trauma gain increasing prominence?

Wealthy bachelor Ju Ji-han is bored with his privileged lifestyle and borrows some money from his doting parents to open a patisserie in an old antique shop in the hope of meeting classy women. He hires Kim Jae-wook as his pastry chef, even though he once threw a cake in his face at school when Kim tried to seduce him. Luckily, however, Kim (who was taught to bake by his French lover, Andy Gillet) doesn't immediately recognise Ju, who is all-too-familiar with his boast that he possesses a demonic charm that makes him irresistible to gay and straight men alike. Delivery boy Yu Ah-in is certainly drawn to Kim, but he is much more interested in his cakes than his body. A promising boxer who was forced to quit because of a detached retina, Yu begs to be taken on as Kim's assistant and soon notices a furtive fellow parked in a car near the shop taking photographs of the customers. Ju admits that Choi Ji-ho is his bodyguard and further reveals how he was abducted as a boy and force fed cake for two months before he was released.

At this juncture, Min abandons the overtly sitcomedic tone and allows things to become incrementally more sinister, as it becomes clear that Ju's kidnapper is still on the loose and is getting closer to striking again. Moreover, Gillet arrives to find his heart's desire. But the mischievous humour remains a constant and, fun though they are, it isn't too much of a calamity to see the end of the Busby Berkeley-like interludes, which recall those in Tetsuya Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls (2002) and Memories of Matsuko and Lee Je-yong's Dasepo Naughty Girls (both 2006). It is also something of a relief that Kim Seon-min's editorial pace slows down a tad, as it rips between Kim Jun-yeong's shakicam images at such a rate in the opening stages that it is almost impossible to switch between the subtitles and the ever-shifting visuals.

Nevertheless, Yoshinaga's storyline remains highly entertaining, while Jeon Gyeong-ran's production design and Chang Hyo-jae's costumes are as consistently quirky as the musical contributions by Chang Yeong-gyu and Dalparan. The cast also gels well, as Ju slowly emerges from his shell and Kim realises there is more to life than conquests. Thus, while this may be a bit busy in places, is overly skittish in others and never quite hits the heights of Min's genre-bending Sapphic chiller, this is still a film full of pleasures and surprises that leaves one wondering whether Terracotta might get round to importing his other features, All For Love (2005) and All About My Wife (2012).

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Hana (2008) has also yet to make it to disc in this country. Following impoverished pacifist Junichi Okada as he prevaricates after his clan orders him to avenge his father's murder, this atypical period piece still riffs on the recurring themes of life, death and family and deserves to stand alongside Maborosi (1995), After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008) and the wonderful I Wish (2011).

Often compared to Yasujiro Ozu and Edward Yang for this sensitivity, wit and insight, Kore-eda effortlessly incorporates numerous subplots into his charming central tale about two siblings reacting in very different ways to the separation of their parents and their relocation to opposite ends of Japan. Indeed, it is this ability to capture the rhythms and resonances of daily life within a meticulously crafted narrative that makes Kore-eda such a master. But it's his genius for coaxing performances of energy, naturalism and poignancy out of young actors that makes this odyssey so memorable.

It's six months since marital breakdown drove 12 year-old Koki Maeda and his younger brother Ohshiro Maeda apart. While Koki moved with mother Nene Ohtsuka to live in a cramped apartment belonging to her parents Isao Hashizume and Kirin Kiki in Kagoshima on the south-western island of Kyushu, Ohshiro opted to follow father Joe Odagiri to the northern city of Fukuoka to protect him from himself and prevent him from dating any unsuitable women. Although Ohtsuka and Odagiri haven't spoken in months, Koki and Ohshiro communicate daily in order to keep up with news about life at home and school.

While Koki misses Ohshiro and wishes the family could be reunited, Ohshiro is relieved that the rowing has stopped and rather enjoys helping his father grow vegetables in the back garden and encouraging him to relaunch his career as an indie rock musician. He has also made friends with Kyara Uchida, whose mother, Yui Natsukawa, is a failed actress who is desperate for her daughter to avoid repeating her mistakes. Koki also palled up with classmates Ryoga Hayashi and Seinosuke Nagayoshi, but he cannot fathom why they and his grandparents are so unconcerned about the fact that they live in the shadow of Sakurajima, a simmering volcano that frequently coats the streets with ash.

Koki hopes that Sakurajima will erupt and force Odagiri to invite him and Ohtsuka to stay with him. But he is impatient for something to happen quickly and puts his faith instead in the rumour he has heard that bullet trains passing for the first time at 170 mph on a new line create a magic force that allows the granting of wishes. When he discovers that a new Shinkansen is to be opened between Hakata and Kagoshima, he calculates that the trains will pass outside Kawashiri and implores Ohshiro to meet him there so that they can change their destiny.

While Ohtsuka is preoccupied with her new job at a supermarket checkout and Kiki starts taking hula hoop classes, Hashizume becomes fascinated with the new railway and spends hours with his drinking buddies discussing ways of adapting a traditional sponge cake recipe to create a special bullet train design. Keen to make plans for his adventure, Koki somewhat resents the well-meaning interference of teacher Hiroshi Abe and wishes he could share his secret with kindly librarian Masami Nagasawa. However, he does take Hayashi and Nagayoshi into his confidence and they agree to accompany him so they can make wishes of their own. Uchida also offers to go with Ohshiro and even arranges for them to stay overnight with her grandparents en route.

Ultimately, Ohshiro finds himself at the head of a quartet anxious for an escapade and their progress through the countryside evokes a more innocent time when children were free to wander unmolested wherever they pleased. But this isn't a nostalgic paean for a lost past or a slice of sentimental feel-good. Consequently, while there is an enchanted moment when the trains pass and the screen fills with still-life images of incidents from earlier in the story, the brothers learn a salient lesson when Koki admits that he forgot to make a wish and Ohshiro confesses that he asked for something other than the family getting back together. Maybe fate knows best after all?

Fluently photographed by Yutaka Yamazaki and impeccably edited by Kore-eda himself, this is an almost perfect picture. The storyline has a deceptive simplicity that is cleverly cluttered with minor, but affecting incidents to reaffirm the maxim that life is what happens while we're busy making other plans. Indeed, it is one of the screenplay's greatest strengths that experience comes to supplant craving, as it is what we do not what we dream that determines who we become.

Kore-eda is certainly fortunate in having two such confident youngsters as his heroes, as the timing they have developed as part of the MaedaMaeda comedy duo enables Koki and Ohshiro to interact with their adult co-stars with a spontaneity that carries over into the exchanges with their peers. But there isn't a single false performance here and even the most outwardly unsympathetic characters seem to be motivated by the best of intentions.

The logistical prelude to the grand expedition could easily have become bogged down in petty detail. But nothing is ever extraneous in a Kore-eda film, with even the jaunty score by the soft-rock band Quruli enhancing the mood without forcing a response. It's a shame that so few kids will get to see this, as it's one of the century's most honest, astute and attuned studies of growing up and would not only make a magnificent introduction to foreign-language cinema for teenagers, but it would also teach them a thing or two about who they are and how they fit into a world that often seems to make no sense at all.

Saskia Rosendahl and her siblings find themselves in much the same situation in Lore. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a series of trümmerfilme were produced in the partitioned Germany to explore the impact of defeat on blitzed city dwellers. A handful of these `rubble films' considered the fate of prominent Nazis trying to pass themselves off as ordinary citizens who had only been doing their duty and knew nothing of the crimes that had been committed in their name in the death camps to the east. But the summer of 1945 was largely ignored by subsequent West and East German film-makers, with even Edgar Reitz skirting over it in his magisterial Heimat chronicle.

Now, however, it provides the backdrop for Lore, the second feature by Australian Cate Shortland that comes eight years after her notable 2004 debut, Somersault. Adapted from one of the three self-contained stories contained in Rachel Seiffert's 2001 Booker Prize-nominated novel, The Dark Room, this is a compelling study of the effect of 12 years of totalitarianism on an acquiescent nation. But it is also a disconcerting rite of teenage passage, as its eponymous heroine learns to think for herself and realises the extent of the lies she has been told by the leaders and parents she had trusted so implicitly.

As previously unthinkable defeat becomes an inevitability, SS officer Hans-Jochen Wagner returns to his Black Forest home to burn incriminating documents, shoot the family dog and bundle wife Ursina Lardi, their five children and a few vital belongings into a truck bound for their country retreat. A fervent Nazi, Lardi can barely look at the husband she considers a coward as he returns to certain death at the hands of the Red Army. But she realises once Hitler commits suicide that her own slender chances of survival depend on surrendering to the Allies and taking whatever punishment awaits her in an internment camp. Thus, she entrusts her valuables to 14 year-old Saskia Rosendahl and instructs her to use them in order to deliver younger sister Nele Trebs, twins Mika Seidel and André Frid and baby Nick Leander Holaschke to their grandmother in Hamburg, some 500 miles to the north.

Having enjoyed a life of sheltered indoctrination, Rosendahl is used to getting her own way and is surprised that farmer Sven Pippig and his wife Katrin Pollitt are so reluctant to give them food. But when Frid is caught stealing, she knows that the time has come to move on and convinces her siblings that their parents will be waiting for them at the end of their journey. However, she is dismayed to learn from an elderly refugee couple that the trains have been stopped and that they will have to proceed across country on foot. It comes as something of a relief, therefore, when she finds an abandoned house and the boys enjoy themselves smashing windows while Rosendahl looks for something to eat. All she finds, however, is the body of a rape victim and a frightened boy in an upstairs room and she ushers the children away to protect them from the grim realities of conquest.

Arriving at a nearby village, Rosendahl uses a piece of her mother's jewellery to coax a stranger into breast-feeding the baby and she joins the queue for bread that has formed alongside noticeboards showing graphic evidence of the Holocaust. Her fingers get sticky with the glue used to post the pictures and she returns to look at them again after dark and tears off a portion that seems to contain an image of her father in his uniform. She is watched from across the square by a young man dressed in black (Kai Malina), but hurries away when he approaches her and makes an early start next morning so she can escape his piercing gaze.

Eventually, the family reaches a rundown farm, where everybody gets paraffin on their hands from a leaky container in the courtyard. Rosendahl ventures inside and encounters an old woman (Friedriche Frerichs), who says she can only offer them water, as she has nothing else left. Rosendahl gives her Lardi's wedding ring in order to buy food and Trebs criticises her for giving away something so precious for such meagre return. But Rosendahl steals a watch from the corpse of Frerichs's husband, who had shot himself in the head in the barn, and returns to the house to find Seidel and Frid singing a military song for the tearful Frerichs, who begs a portrait of the Führer to forgive the country for failing to realise his ambitions.

Once again sensing danger, Rosendahl makes a hasty exit and settles her siblings to sleep in the woods. As she tries to quieten the baby, she bumps into Malina, who follows at a short distance when they return to the road in the morning. When they are stopped by an American patrol, however, Malina claims to be the children's brother and they are given a lift in the back of a truck. But, while Rosendahl is grateful for the intervention (as she has no papers or travel permits), she is stung by the sight of a yellow star in Malina's wallet and has to fight the anti-Semitism she has been taught because she knows he could be a valuable protector. Yet, when he offers them food in a bombed-out munitions factory hidden in the depths of the forest, she warns him to keep his distance and refrain from touching their provisions.

She continues to regard him with suspicion as he plays with the twins in a nearby river. But, while her prejudices remain intact, she has come to realise that the family's past threatens its future. Thus, when Frid proudly shows Malina a photograph of his father, she buries it in the undergrowth along with the scrap that she had torn from the bulletin board. Moreover, she also demonstrates her growing maturity and resourcefulness by letting Malina put his hand up her dress, as she knows he is more likely to stay with them if she appears available to him.

Yet Rosendahl cannot stop herself from slapping and insulting him as she pulls away and he remains confused by her mixed signals as they reach a lake and she tries to use her naive wiles to coax eel fisherman Jan Peter Heyne into rowing them to the other side. Getting nowhere with coquettish smiles and an awkward attempt at a dance, Rosendahl starts to undo the buttons of her dress and she pulls the older man close to her so that he doesn't hear Malina creeping up on him to cave in his skull with a stone. Suddenly bound together in a pitiless crime, the pair exchange anxious glances before loading the others into the boat. Appalled by her deed, Rosendahl plunges into the water with the infant in her arms. But Malina jumps in to haul her to the bank and reassures Trebs, Seidel and Frid that she had not meant to harm their brother.

As they reach the demarcation line between the American and British zones, Malina has to stop the guilt-stricken Rosendahl from confessing to a soldier. However, in trying to pass around the frontier without the necessary documents, they stray into the Russian sector and Frid is gunned down when he rushes to greet Malina in the hope he has brought back some food from a recce. They are forced to leave him dead in the dust as they flee for their own lives into British territory.

As they camp for the night, Malina tells Rosendahl that they will now be safe, as the trains have started running again and they should be able to reach the coast without hindrance. However, she pleads with him not to abandon them and tries to hug him in the hope of arousing his pity. Against his better judgement, he joins them on the train and has to listen to the passengers claiming that the evidence of the Final Solution has been fabricated by the Americans and Rosendahl almost tries to apologise with her eyes as she sees him struggling to keep his emotions in check. But she is forced to remain equally silent when British troops board the train and Malina discovers that his wallet has been stolen. Keen not to drag Rosendahl into his predicament, he slips off the train and her face remains impassive at the window as he disappears along the platform.

Arriving in Hamburg, the children are transported across the muddy marshland by horse and cart. Seidel reaches into his pocket and produces Malina's wallet and tries to explain that he had taken it to ensure he couldn't leave them. He remarks that Malina looks nothing like the photograph on the identity card and Rosendahl is suddenly confronted with the prospect that, instead of being Jewish, Malina may well have been a Nazi using purloined papers to prevent his arrest. Yet, she is touched to see the snapshots tucked inside the wallet and reassures Seidel that he had acted out of the best intentions, even though she is nettled by his careless remark that he is glad such a decent fellow wasn't a dirty Jew.

Grandmother Eva-Maria Hagen barely recognises the children as she welcomes them to her remote farmhouse. Rosendahl breaks the news about Frid and is accused of lying by Trebs when it becomes clear that they will not be joined by their parents. Hagen stops them squabbling and insists neither Wagner not Lardi have done anything wrong and that they should never be ashamed of them. The quarrel is soon forgotten, however, as Rosendahl, Trebs and Seidel share a bath and laugh as the latter makes bubbles in the water.

However, Rosendahl has been changed forever by what she has seen and done, with the bruises on her legs matching the scars on her psyche. She wakes next morning in a warm bed and clean night-dress and puts the porcelain deer that Lardi had always treasured with the other animals on her childhood dressing-table. However, she is too sad to join Trebs and maid Antonia Holfelder in a dance in the kitchen and climbs a tree in the garden to look at the photos in Malina's wallet. Although uncertain whether they genuinely come from his past, she has learnt enough to know that they represent lives that have been shattered by the ideology espoused by her parents and still cherished by too many of the people she has encountered on her odyssey. Thus, when Hagen criticises Seidel for his table manners, Rosendahl misbehaves in solidarity and is sent to her room, where she smashes the figurines to symbolise both the end of her innocence and her rejection of everything she had accepted so unquestioningly under the Third Reich as the truth.

An exceptional performance by Saskia Rosendahl dominates this morally opaque saga, which daringly highlights the impenitence and intransigence of many Germans as the full extent of Nazi criminality became apparent. For much of the journey, Rosendahl adheres to her parents' teaching and it is only pragmatism that prompts her to accept assistance from fellow Aryans, let alone Kia Malina's Jewish vagabond. However, unlike her siblings, she comes to understand the realities of bigoted tyranny and, even though she still has much to learn, she gradually comes of age during her ordeal.

The climactic doubt raised about Malina's identity means that he becomes equally difficult to read. His watchful taciturnity would be authentic if he was either a Jew reacclimatising to freedom or a soldier trying to evade capture. Yet, while he seems remarkably sturdy for a camp inmate, surely someone examining his papers would have noticed any discrepancies between his facial features and his photograph. Whatever his origins or motives, he proves a dependable companion, whose canniness and ingenuity delivers the travellers from several scrapes. Consequently, one is much less concerned about the fate of this born survivor than one is about Rosendahl, who has all the makings of a 1960s radical activist..

Adapting in collaboration with Robin Mukherjee, Shortland has produced a cogent and plausible narrative that occasionally recalls André Téchiné's Strayed (2003), which sees Gaspard Ulliel guide Parisian Emmanuelle Béart and her two young children across occupied France. The storyline is necessarily episodic and few of the passing characters are developed in any depth. Even Rosendahl's siblings sometime feel like plot devices. But the overall ambience and the central ambiguity are ably maintained, thanks to the excellence of cinematographer Adam Arkapaw's controlled use of light and colour, the credible simplicity of Silke Fischer's production design and the unsettling intensity of Sam Petty's sound mix. We can only hope, therefore, that we don't have to wait another eight years for Shortland's next offering.

The Second World War also provides the backdrop for Gerardo Herrero's Frozen Silence, a simmering adaptation of Ignacio del Valle's bestseller The Time of the Strange Emperors that also contains echoes of Juan José Campanella's Oscar-winning The Secrets in Their Eyes (2009), which the prolific Herrero produced. There are few aspects of the 1939-45 conflict that have escaped the attention of film-makers and this appears to be the first picture to centre on the 18,000-strong División Azul, which was sent by General Francisco Franco to assist Adolf Hitler in the vanquishing of the Soviet Union. However, this is anything but a conventional combat saga, as the discovery that there is a serial killer in the Blue Division ranks outside Leningrad in the winter of 1943 means this comes closer to a ScandiCrime whodunit than a study in post-Civil War angst.

The opening shot takes the breath away, as Alfredo Mayo's camera traverses a snowy wildernes to halt before the remnants of a cavalry patrol that has frozen to death in a lake. The horses resemble grotesque statues and in their midst is a single man, whose face is contorted in hideous agony. A warning that God is watching has been carved into his chest and unit commanders Francesc Orella and Adolfo Fernández decide to entrust the politically sensitive murder investigation to Juan Diego Botto, a private who was a policeman before fighting for the Republican cause, and grouchy Falangist sergeant, Carmelo Gómez. Naturally, there are initial tensions between two men who were on opposite sides in a bitter struggle just four years earlier. But, when a second corpse turns up with another line from a popular children's song inscribed in his flesh, the pair are torn between whether they have a madman, a freemason with a secret to protect or a Communist spy in their ranks.

Impeccably designed by Edou Hydallgo and photographed with a keen eye for the starkness of the uniforms and weaponry against the metal grey skies and icy expanses, this is a cunningly plotted mystery that bears a marked similarity to Anatole Litvak's The Night of the Generals (1967). The solution lies in some incriminating letters and snapshots, although it also takes some ingenious forensic analysis and a game of Russian roulette (that is tensely edited by Cristina Pastor) for the truth to come out. Screenwriter Nicolás Saad's dialogue isn't always the sharpest and he occasionally allows the subplots to meander, particularly Botto's romance with a Russian woman, while supporting performances by the likes of Andrés Gertrúdix and the eye-patched Sergi Calleja are somewhat overcooked. But Herrero ably examines the make-up of the Spanish contingent and the mixed motives the `volunteers' had for being on the Eastern Front and never allows the irony to lapse that Botto and Gómez are trying to prevent more killings while the Red Army's heavy artillery is blazing just yards away from them.

Another brutal death sparks the action in Belgian debutant Michael R. Roskam's Bullhead, which was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 2012 Academy Awards. Prompted by the 1995 murder of a government veterinarian investigating the illegal use of growth hormones on cattle, this avowedly non-linear blend of crime thriller and psychological study lacks the discipline to be entirely persuasive. But Roskam's diegetic and stylistic ambition is undeniable and he also coaxes a star-making performance out of Matthias Schoenaerts, whose follow-up role in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone.

Haunted by the childhood accident that changed his life, thirtysomething Matthias Schoenaerts works on the family cattle farm. Times are tough, but he is sufficiently spooked by the recent killing of a cop on the trail of some hormone traffickers that he declines when vet friend Frank Lammers offers to introduce him to local beef baron Sam Louwyck. However, it's not just Louwyck's possible connection with the murder that prompts his caution, as sidekick Jeroen Perceval witnessed the distant incident that Schoenaerts would rather forget and is keen for the police never to discover.

Laying low in provincial Limburg is easier said than done, however, as Perceval is not only Louwyck's trusted lieutenant, but he is also a police informer. Further muddying the water are the bungling efforts of Walloon mechanics Erico Salamone and Philippe Grand'Henry to dispose of the assassin's getaway car. Then there are those flashbacks to two decades earlier that keep bothering Schoenaerts as he pumps his body full of testosterone and shadow boxes naked with a terrifying ferocity. And, complicating matters still more, is his undying crush on Jeanne Dandoy - the sister of childhood foe Juda Goslinga, whose father had supplied his own father and uncle with illegal chemicals - that he is desperate to pursue, despite knowing it could expose him to ridicule and heartbreak.

Whether concentrating on the drug crisis that keeps threatening to engulf Schoenaerts or the recollections of himself (Robin Valvekens), Perceval (Baudoin Wolwertz), Goslinga (David Murgia) and Dandoy (Jeanne Remy) as kids, Roskam makes no concessions in challenging the audience to keep up with the twisting timelines. The narrative structure is actually unnecessarily fragmented, but Roskam is deeply indebted to editor Alain Dessauvage for sustaining suspense across both storylines (although he might have suggested fewer slow-motion sequences).

Composer Raf Keunen and sound designer Benoît De Clerc deserve similar credit, as does cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis, who makes evocative contrasts between the verdant Flemish landscape and the murky interiors, while also catching every shift in posture and expression made by Schoenaerts, whose display of short-fused, animalistic brutality is tempered by a vulnerability that makes him emotionally unstable and eventually places him in considerable danger. The supporting roles are underwritten, while the subplot involving Dandoy is allowed to drift. But, as a study of the dual crises of confidence in Belgian agriculture and masculinity, this often makes for compelling viewing and leaves one wondering why more dark dramas aren't set in the British countryside.

Bruno Dumont has frequently made atmospheric use of rural Flanders and does so again to typically arresting effect in Hors Satan, a gnomic, but hypnotic treatise on humanity and the landscape that is set on his beloved Côte d’Opale and follows both La Vie de Jésus (1997) and Hadewijch (2009) in exploring the extent to which belief still impacts upon modern society. Once again eschewing manipulative realism to invoke the stark truthfulness of Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dumont focus in excruciating detail on the bodies and often aberrant behaviour of his characters to coerce the audience into feeling emotion rather than pondering the political and intellectual consequences of spectating. Bound to polarise opinion as to whether it is fearlessly poetic or fatuously pretentious, this is a transfixing picture that confirms Dumont among the most distinctive talents in European cinema.

Goth teenager Alexandra Lematre lives in a hamlet on the Atlantic coast of northern French with mother Valérie Mestdagh and a stepfather who persists in abusing her. She confides her pain to David Dewaele, a drifter who resides in the woods and marshes of a wilderness that is protected as a wildlife sanctuary. Yet, while some provide Dewaele with food in return for his assistance, the majority of the locals view him with a suspicion that only makes him more attractive to Lematre, who is convinced he has mystical powers and follows his lead whenever he drops to his knees in apparent prayer during their frequent walks.

Ignoring her regular requests for sex, Dewaere treats Lematre as a sister. Thus, when her stepfather forces himself upon her with excessive brutality, Dewaere shoots and kills him. He takes an equally dim view of security guard Christophe Bon's gauche attempts at propositioning her, but is distracted when Sonia Barthélémy asks him to cure her daughter, Juliette Bacquet, who has lapsed into a catatonic state. Barthélémy is worried that Bacquet has been possessed by an evil spirit and Dewaere is frustrated in his efforts to heal her. So, he resorts to raping her and she miraculously awakens and quickly returns to normality.

Despite the gendarmerie snooping around, Dewaere beats Bon to death in the woods when he continues pestering Lematre. When the body is found, the police announce that they are close to making an arrest. But Dewaere makes no efforts to conceal himself and catches the eye of backpacker Aurore Broutin. He accepts her invitation to sleep with her and he brings her to such a relentless orgasm that she begins to foam at the mouth and only recovers her composure after a dip in the marsh.

Upset at finding Dewaere asleep beside a campfire when she wanted to talk to him, Lematre wanders into the woods, where she is raped and murdered by overweight dog walker Dominique Caffier. The body is returned to Mestdagh. But Dewaere claims it and takes it to the marshes, where it revives through his intercession. Shortly afterwards, Caffier is arrested and charged with all of the murders, freeing Dewaere to leave the district with his Alsatian by his side.

Consistently blurring the line between good and evil to expose the folly of basing a belief system on absolutes and the unknowable, the unabashedly atheistic Dumont audaciously challenges here the moral authority of Christianity (although he clearly has little regard for any organised religion). Yet, he still recognises the basic human need to invest in a creative force or superior entity and makes such evocative use of Yves Cape's austere vistas as to suggest that Dewaere is perhaps the embodiment of the bleak terrain. However, Dumont is never one to give the audience clues and, in addition to ordering his leads to withhold any hint of external emotion in essaying their nameless characters, he also replaces the expected musical score with a soundtrack exclusively composed of natural sounds that refuse to obey the laws of cinematic perspective.

The cast takes the defiantly absurdist elliptical action as seriously as its director, who fills the widescreen frame with idiosyncratic and almost iconic close-ups that prove as unnerving as the almost sacrilegious revision of miracles that have their origins in the New Testament. But, for all the stylistic tics designed to distance and alienate the viewer, this often wordless parable seizes both the intellect and the imagination with its uncompromising insights into violence and faith and bestiality and spirituality. Moreover, Dumont resists offering any answers in querying whether a questing humanity even knows if it is asking the right questions.

Five years after announcing his arrival with The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Romanian director Cristi Puiu has produced in Aurora another uncompromising dissection of a country struggling to come to terms with the ramifications of socio-political upheaval in the second of his projected Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest series. As fascinated with quotidian detail, but less darkly satirical than its predecessor, this is a shockingly matter-of-fact study of a killer awaiting his moment. However, Puiu (who also takes the lead) refuses to judge actions whose motives slowly emerge after the fact.

Having left girlfriend Clara Voda crying in bed, Puiu impassively prepares food in the kitchen before heading to the metallurgy plant where he works. A distant confrontation with a superior seems to suggest that he has been dismissed and he causes a scene in his office by menacingly demanding the repayment of money loaned to an erstwhile colleague. Stopping off in a workshop to collect the new firing pins for his shotgun, Puiu returns to his apartment and potters around with the blinds pulled before receiving an unwanted visit from mother Valeria Seciu and his detested stepfather, Valentin Popescu.

On discovering a damp patch in his bathroom, he marches upstairs to accuse a neighbour's son of causing the leak that has damaged his ceiling. But, no sooner has he returned to his routine than he is disturbed by workmen who have been detailed to clear his belongings prior to redecoration. Seeking an escape from such domestic ennui, Puiu picks his way across railway lines and muddy fields to spy at a safe remove on a family starting its day. He then endures a miserable shopping expedition that turns the purchase of a new gun and a piece of cake into as much of a battle against hostile forces as the confrontation with his ex-wife's colleagues at the boutique where she used to work. Even collecting his son proves an inconvenience and Puiu billets him with a neighbour before embarking upon his mission of vengeance.

Unlike the shooting of a well-heeled man and his female companion in an underground car park, the murder of an elderly couple occurs off-camera and it's only when Puiu has surrendered himself to the police that his motives become clear. His first victim was the lawyer who had brokered his divorce, while the second pair were the in-laws who had encouraged their daughter to escape from the dead-end existence in which he had entombed her. He makes his statement with the same detachment with which he committed his crimes. But rather than seeming like a curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder or a sinister stalker, Puiu suddenly appears to be a man broken by circumstances, whose actions were a final hopeless bid to regain some control over a life he had lost interest in living.

Keeping Viorel Sergovici's camera at a pryingly discreet distance and adopting the measured mundanity employed by Chantal Akerman in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Puiu succeeds in aggregating the slings and arrows that might drive an ordinary man to such desperation. Moreover, he provides a sobering account of the frustrations and disappointments inherent in the daily grind that says much about Romania's post-Communist progress. But his performance is as crucial as his direction in conveying the muted fury and bitter resentment of a crushed soul with nothing left to lose.

A liberated spirit takes centre stage in Aleksander L. Nordaas's Thale. However, in rescuing a mythical woodland creature from her long incarceration, a pair of unsuspecting everymen alert both the huldra's vicious kinfolk and the Norwegian authorities to her presence. Proving himself to be a capable jack of all trade in his second feature after his sinister spin the bottle saga, Sirkel (2005), the 30 year-old Nordaas not only wrote and directed this intriguing, if ultimately inconsequential indie, but he also did his own photography and editing and assisted Alen Grujic with the production design. Capable of handling abrupt shifts in tone and astute enough to turn his budgetary limitations to his advantage, Nordaas is only let down by the mediocre special effects and a tendency to describe through dialogue rather than reveal through imagery. But, while this may be a tad sedate for genre fans, it makes for fascinating comparison with André Ovredal's Trollhunter (2010).

Jon Sigve Skard runs a crime scene cleansing business in a small Norwegian town. He has been detailed to remove the remains of an old man whose corpse had been shredded by wild animals. However, he is short-handed and persuades buddy Erlend Nervold to tag along, even though he is exceedingly squeamish and spends much of his first morning vomiting profusely. But, as they scour the remote cabin in the middle of the forest, the duo stumble across a network of underground chambers and find a collection of tape recordings, some surgical equipment and a freezer containing what looks like a severed tail.

As they venture further, they are astounded when a naked woman emerges from a bathtub containing a milky fluid. Not sure what to make of Silje Reinåmo and unable to communicate because she is mute, Skard and Nervold decide to play the cassettes and are bemused as Roland Astrand (whose body parts they have been salvaging) explains that Reinåmo is a Reinåmo nymph, whom he rescued from meddling government scientists and kept from her own kind by amputating her tail so they could not pick up on her scent. Convinced he is out of his depth, Skard calls the cops and reports what he has found. But, as they wait for reinforcements, Skard and Nervold gradually realise that they have been surrounded by both human and folkloric beasts and that their only hope of making it out alive is to place their trust in Reinåmo.

Lulling the audience into a false sense of security by opening in gross-out comedy mode, Nordaas steadily builds the tension as the hapless twosome go about their grizzly duties and make their disconcerting discoveries. But, instead of showing Skard and Nervold puzzling over Astrand's tapes, it would surely have made more sense to visualise his account, as even the most meagre resources could surely stretch to something more than the odd fragmentary, mind-melded flashback? Yet, he holds our attention by revealing such unsuspected aspects of the couple's private lives that Skard is suffering from cancer and Nervold has a daughter he never sees. Moreover, he keeps us guessing how Reinåmo is going to react to those pursuing her, as she prowls around her lair and it's only a shame that the poignant denouement cannot atone for the CGI effects and the fact that a few too many questions are left unanswered.