Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 27/10/2016)

Brussels academic Marie (Bérénice Bejo) arrives home with daughters Jade and Margaux (Jade and Margaux Soentjens) and begins fussing over supper, homework and bathtime. She is furious when Polish handyman husband Boris (Cédric Kahn) puts in an unscheduled appearance and proceeds to play with the girls while she is trying to impose some discipline. She gets her own back after the meal by allowing the twins to eat ice cream instead of stewed fruit and, after she has put them to bed, she criticises Boris for texting loudly when she is trying to read.

Although nothing is said about the rest of their 15-year relationship, Boris and Marie have clearly drifted apart. He appears to be sleeping in the study, although Marie is keen to limit his access to the children and he is always ready to rebel. She wants to sell their ground floor apartment, but they can't agree on a division of the proceeds.

Marie borrowed part of the deposit from her wealthy parents and has since paid the mortgage and bills without complaint whenever Boris was strapped for cash. The problem is, he has also run up debts (how is not explained, but the creditors are prepared to use intimidation when necessary) and Marie doesn't believe that the DIY improvements he has made around the place justify his demand for an equal €200,000 share of the sale. Marie's widowed mother, Christine (Marthe Keller), is keen to offer Boris work renovating the family house. But Marie refuses to let him near a place that holds so many special memories, even though the cash in hand would help him find a rented apartment.

Realising that their rowing has begun to unsettle the girls, Marie and Boris try to explain what is going on. But Marie is left speechless when Boris announces that they might split up after all and asks Christine if she would consider selling the family house so that she can buy Boris out and be shut of him. Yet, when her father's old friend, Antoine (Pascal Rogard), offers to lend her money, she declines with a sad smile.

Struggling to sleep, Marie invites some friends for dinner in the garden. She pours out her troubles and is livid when Boris shows up and one of the male guests invites him to join them for a drink. He tucks into the cheese board and asks if they have been talking about him and a lively discussion breaks out, in which Marie's female friends take her side and Boris vigorously defends himself. When the guests offer to leave, Marie orders them to sit down and they laugh with nervous relief when Boris leaves them alone to eat their cake.

The following day, Boris shows an estate agent (Annick Johnson) around the apartment and informs Marie that he doesn't trust her evaluation. Yet, that night, when Marie gets up for a drink, she sits silently with Boris while he chugs beer in his `dog house' before returning to cry in bed to the accompaniment of Bach's `Prelude in C Minor'.

For weeks, Boris has been promising to get Jade some new football boots and he feels undermined when Marie buys them herself on the eve of a big match. She goes away for the weekend and returns to learn that Jade lost her boots at the ground and that Boris has purchased some new ones. Moreover, Boris has suggested that the girls can spend the summer with their cousins at his mother's and she wants to be cross with him for making plans without her permission. But they wind up having fun playing a card game and Marie dances with Boris after Jade and Margaux play a favourite song on the stereo. They copy their parents as they huddle together and are disappointed to be hustled off to bed so that Boris and Marie can make passionate love.

When she wakes the next morning, however, Marie is on the sofa and only crawls into bed after Boris leaves for work. She dismisses his suggestion that they try counselling and they soon begin bickering over who has made the more substantial contribution to the acquisition and upkeep of the property. Feeling emasculated, Boris gets his revenge by accepting Christine's offer of work and accommodation. But Marie lectures him when he visits Jade and Margaux on the wrong day and she insists that he sticks to their schedules.

A couple of days later, however, Boris shows up late at night after being beaten up for failing to meet a debt deadline and Marie loans him the cash. She goes to stay with friends and leaves Boris in charge. He tells the girls that he cut his face falling over, but they seem sceptical. The last time he babysat, they snuggled up to him. But they appear distant and Boris is horrified to discover that Jade has swallowed some of Marie's sleeping pills.

He rushes her to the hospital and she is sleeping when Marie arrives. They argue in the corridor and she accuses Boris of being incompetent. But they hold hands in relief on the sofa back home. Moreover, they recognise that their incessant squabbling is having a detrimental effect on their daughters and they reach an amicable arrangement over custody and the disposal of their assets before they meet at a street café before meeting a judge, who lays out the terms of their divorce in her office.

Much of the fascination with this realist saga lies in what has occurred before the action begins. What drew the elegant, but grave Marie to the playful, but unreliable Boris? And what drove them apart? The physical attraction is evident in the passionate clench that is prompted by their transient rediscovery of family bliss. But, intellectually and temperamentally, they are poles apart and it seems clear from the excruciating dinner sequence that Marie's friends disapproved of her choice of mate.

But, while Lafosse and fellow scribes Mazarine Pingeot, Fanny Burdino and Thomas van Zuylen keep the backstory (and, to a lesser extent, their sympathies) close to their chests, they provide Bérénice Bejo and director-turned actor Cédric Kahn with some telling exchanges, as well as a couple of memorable moments of intimate calm. In truth, the living arrangements appear a bit arbitrary, but Kahn comes across as reckless and boorish, while Bejo never quite seems cut out for domesticity.

Marthe Keller might have been given more to do as the interfering mother-in-law, whose relationship with her daughter is as stiff as Bejo's with Jade and Margaux Soentjens. But Lafosse and cinematographer Jean-François Hensgens make effective widescreen use of Olivier Radot's cosily cluttered interiors to fill in some of the gaps in the fracturing relationship. The beating by thuggish debt collectors and the dash to the emergency room feel a little melodramatic in such a restrained chamber piece. But Lafosse largely tells his tale through an accumulation of keenly observed gestures, expressions and details that very much smack of real life.

By contrast, writer-director Bill Clark finds it much more difficult to avoid extremes of emotion in chronicling the troubled life of children's author Tom Ray in Starfish. As much an attempt to raise public awareness of the dangers of septicaemia as a biopic, this is a noble and more than capable venture. Yet, despite depicting Ray's battle back from the brink with sincerity and compassion, this is likely to find a more appreciative audience on the small screen than in cinemas.

Juggling writing with child-minding duties, Tom Ray (Tom Riley) enjoys his moments alone with his young daughter, Grace (Ellie Copping). While out flying a kite near Rutland Water in December 1999, he tells her about starfish and how they are able to grow new rays. The irony of his remarks comes back to haunt him within hours, as he suddenly begins to feel unwell in the night after eating some out-of-date sausages. Despite vomiting, he continues to feel cold the next morning. But, even though the daylight hurts his eyes and he has a headache and muscle pain, he is convinced he is merely suffering from food poisoning.

He rallies after taking some stomach medicine. But, when his heavily pregnant wife, Nicola (Joanne Froggatt), gets home that evening, she finds Tom ashen faced and blue lipped and on the verge of losing consciousness. She accompanies him to hospital, where no one seems entirely sure what is wrong and Tom is left in an isolated bed after undergoing a series of tests. Around midnight, Nicola notices that an angry rash has started spreading across Tom's chest and it was only after he started exhibiting more alarming symptoms that he was rushed to intensive care.

After what seems an eternity, Nicola is summoned by the senior consultant (Simon Bamford), who informs her that Tom has sepsis. He also tells her that only one in ten of patients in his condition live beyond 24 hours and Nicola is confronted with the agonising decision of whether to give her consent to the half-amputation of all Tom's limbs if he is to have any chance of survival. Within hours, however, she is asked to sign more papers because the condition has caused necrotic reaction around her husband's nose and mouth.

While Tom recovers from his disfiguring surgery, Nicola gives birth to their son, Freddy. Yet, while she comes to rely heavily on her mother, Jean (Michele Dotrice), to look after Grace, Tom's mother (Phoebe Nicholls) is more distant and we learn from flashbacks to his childhood that he was largely ignored by his father (Greg Haiste) before he abandoned the family. Tom had vowed to be a good parent, but his illness seems to have robbed him of the chance even to hold his new baby. Moreover, when Nicola brings Grace to see him in hospital, she is so distressed by the sight of his bandaged face that she says, `That's not my daddy,' before running away.

Eventually, Tom is allowed home and learns how to walk on his artificial legs. He also comes to master the use of his myoelectric hands. But parts of his memory have been erased and he finds it difficult to be nursed by Nicola when he knows she is distressed by the results of his facial reconstruction (especially as they had previously set such store by kissing). He also resents Jean trying to organise the family to lighten the load on her daughter. Thus, he is deeply resentful when mounting debts force them to sell the family home and move in with Jean.

In order to beat his depression, Tom turns to drink. But his moods darken, especially when he is denied an insurance payment because there is no identifiable source of the infection. He is in no mood to listen, therefore, when Grace reminds him about starfish. Instead, he snaps that they only live in saltwater. So, Grace steals the salt cellar from the dinner table and sprinkles the surface of the reservoir in the hope of bringing about a miracle.

Desperate to help out, Tom writes to his father (who has become a well-known actor). But he never receives a reply and feels embarrassed when Nicola begins fund-raising on his behalf. To this point, Nicola has been unwaveringly supportive and understanding of Tom's mental, as well as his physical state. But, one day, the cynical self-pity proves too much and she launches into him for his ingratitude. She reminds him of the strain that she and Jean bear so willingly because they love him. However, the time has come for him to give something back and the message hits home so hard that Tom puts himself at risk to climb a ladder to retrieve a football that a young neighbour had kicked over a fence.

This final act of may seem minor. But it's staged like a Herculean labour, as Tom struggles valiantly to achieve his heroic redemption while a scared, but proud Nicola looks on. It's at this point that Clark introduces the audience to the real Tom and Nicola. But, in fact, Tom has been body-doubling for Tom Riley in the limb close-ups and - despite the excellence of Riley's performance and Melissa Lackersteen's lifelike facial make-up - it's only then that it becomes possible to appreciate the magnitude of his fightback.

While he charts Tom's course ably enough, Clark might have replaced the heavy handed childhood flashbacks with an outline of Tom and Nicola's unlikely romance, as she nearly lost him twice after they split up following a student romance at Exeter University and only got back together after his first marriage fell apart and he sent her a note asking if she remembered him. It might also have been worth mentioning that Nicola was a successful maker of documentaries, commercials and pop promos when Tom resurfaced, although this would diminish the dramatic impact of her need to summon unsuspected depths in order to make an appeal at a charity function for a change in the law regarding compensation for those debilitated in accident and non-combat situations.

Clark (who knew Nicola in her film-making days) also plays down the fact that she had a nervous breakdown after four years of nursing a man she still loved, but could no longer make love with. But Froggatt admirably conveys the grief and frustration that Nicola must have felt in the poignant tirade that shakes Riley out of his torpor. Yet, the most affecting moment comes when Ellie Copping steals the salt, as Clark captures her innocent faith with a restraint that might have been applied to some of the more emotive scenes involving Riley and Froggatt.

Clearly budgetary constraints and a need to keep the story simple preclude the inclusion of any rallying friends. But the sense that the Rays were left to cope in near isolation is slightly misleading and somewhat melodramatic. Nevertheless, this is a well-meaning film that has already done much to publicise a condition that claims 44,000 in every 150,000 who contract it.

Considerably cosier is Roger Mainwood's charming animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs's 1998 parental tribute, Ethel & Ernest. Within a few frames of this beautifully realised record of a 41-year marriage, it's easy to see similarities with Jimmy T. Murakami's 1986 take on the nuclear parable, When the Wind Blows. Indeed, Hilda and Jim Blogg were modelled on Ethel and Ernest and it says much for the voice work of Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent that it's on a par with that of Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills.

The scene opens in London in 1928, as milkman Ernest Briggs (Jim Broadbent) leaves his humble home to cycle to work. As he passes a row of elegant dwellings, he catches sight of ladies' maid Ethel Bowyer (Brenda Blethyn) shaking a duster from an upstairs window. It's love at first sight and he is so disappointed when she fails to show one rainy morning that he turns up at the servants' entrance with a bouquet of flowers and an invitation to see Victor McLaglen in Hangman's House at the local picture palace.

Despite being five years younger than Ethel, Ernest is a chirpy chappy and she is smitten when dismisses the bright young things piling out of a flashy car to go dancing in a ritzy nightclub and affirms that they would have more fun at a neighbourhood knees-up. She takes him home to meet her parents and explains that three of her 11 siblings died in infancy. But Ernest is reluctant to take Ethel to his rough part of the East End, despite being proud of his working-class roots. Indeed, he remains a lifelong Labour supporter, while she retains her faith in the Conservatives. Nevertheless, after Ethel hands in her notice to her disapproving employer (Virginia McKenna), they marry and move into what they consider to be a spacious terraced house in Wimbledon (two bedrooms for £850), where they will spend the rest of their lives.

At first, they sleep on a mattress on the floor of their bare bedroom. But Ernest finds a secondhand mahogany bed frame and replaces the kitchen range with a new gas cooker. He also finds a mirror for the mantelpiece and does up the garden, while Ethel (who is now in her mid-30s) puts a picture of a baby over the bed in the hope that she can conceive before she gets too old. Two years later, she gives birth to Raymond - although the doctor (Roger Allam) warns Ernest that she shouldn't have any more children - and he is embarrassed when his stepmother (June Brown) pays them a visit bearing two bottles of beer and a bag of coal as a welcome gift for the child.

Proud of her son's blonde curls (she sobs when they are cut off), Ethel takes Raymond (Harry Collett) to the park and gazes in through the windows of the Balcony café. She considers the uniformed waitresses and fancy cakes the height of luxury and Ernest promises they will go for a treat. However, times are changing, as Ernest learns from the radio and his newspaper that a funny looking man named Adolf Hitler has come to power in Germany. He is appalled that Jews are no longer allowed to marry ordinary Germans and, as the years pass, he has much less faith in Neville Chamberlain's ability to deliver peace than Ethel, who has convinced herself that Hitler can't be all bad because he shook hands with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

His misgivings prove well-founded, as Germany invades Poland and Ethel becomes confused when the Soviet Union attacks the same country. But she quickly forgets the complexities of international politics when their gas masks arrive and Ernest starts building an Anderson Shelter in the back garden. Moreover, five year-old Raymond is evacuated to Dorset. She dresses him in his school uniform and weeps as his train pulls out of the station. However, she is grateful he is far from danger when the windows are shattered in a bombing raid.

Keen to do his bit after seeing his front fence taken away to be melted down and made into Spitfires, Ernest volunteers for the Auxiliary Fire Service, while Ethel gets a job with the Post Office. They are pleased that Winston Churchill has taken over as prime minister, but struggle to understand why Hitler would declare war on Joseph Stalin when they had been allies in attacking Poland. Missing Raymond (who sends them scrawly letters full of excited news), they spend their nights in the shelter, with the water in the trench lapping against their wellingtons and the fastidious Ethel cursing whenever the candle topples over and goes out.

But the strain of seeing friends perish in Blitz blazes near St Paul's takes its toll on Ernest and he is glad to be able to visit the farm where Raymond is staying. He seems very at home with Aunty Betty (Pam Ferris) and Aunty Flo (Gillian Hanna) and Ernest admits that he has always fancied the idea of retiring to the countryside. However, they have to return to London and the prospect of Christmas without their boy. Yet, they are relieved when Raymond's teddy bear alone gets showered in glass during another air raid and they have their doubts when the government assures them that it's safe for him to come home. He enjoys helping his father on the allotment and they sing the `Dig for Victory' song before they are interrupted by a doodlebug attack.

Nights are now spent huddled together in the Morrison Shelter in the front parlour. But everyone is hugely relieved when VE Day finally arrives. Ernest sings `The Lambeth Walk' during a celebration street party and feels embarrassed when he joshes a neighbour who lost his son. Ethel orders him to dismantle the garden shelter and encourages Raymond to plant a pear seed that he had brought with him from Dorset. However, she chides Ernest for cheering the Labour landslide in the postwar election, as she refuses to think of herself as one of the common people who have been ungrateful to Churchill by replacing him with Clement Attlee.

Ernest is all for reform, however, and is equally delighted when the Royal Arsenal Co-Operative dairy gives him an electric float to replace his old handcart. However, when Raymond gets a scholarship to the local grammar school, Ernest (who has resisted a pal's offer to satisfy his over-sexed wife) worries that he will get airs and graces. In fact, he is arrested for stealing snooker cues and brought home in a Black Maria by Detective Sergeant Burnley (Peter Wight). Yet when next-door neighbour Mrs Bennett (Pam Ferris) mentions the incident, Ethel fibs about Raymond helping the police with their inquiries and being an unassuming hero.

Such is her pride that each certificate Raymond earns goes on the parlour wall. But she is disappointed when he applies to art school and grows his hair. Ernest shares her concerns that he will never earn a living from drawing. Yet, while Ernest is pleased when Ethel gets a promotion, he resists any advancement that would bind him to a desk, even though this means he remains below the average pay line. Nevertheless, as time passes, he is able to buy a car and take Ethel on trips into the country. They also get a telephone (which makes Ethel nervous and she always lets Ernest answer) and a television set, which enables them to go the pictures every night, albeit with a nice cup of tea.

As Ernest retires (and puts his long service award on the parlour wall), however, the resolutely suburban couple (whose views on race and homosexuality are dismayingly of their time) begin to seem isolated from the wider world. Despite a running gag about meat rations and a passing reference to Moscow getting nuclear weapons, there are fewer mentions of politics or conflict after Raymond (now voiced by Luke Treadaway) does his National Service around the time of the Korean War. Even the social changes sweeping the country in the 1960s are confined to observations about the length of Raymond's hair and the nature of his relationship with schizophrenic art student, Jean (Karyn Claydon). They visit the cottage the pair plan to renovate, but neither Ethel nor Ernest feels too disappointed that some of their own dreams have gone unfulfilled.

When Ethel is confined to a wheelchair shortly after Apollo 11 lands on the moon, for example, they notice that the Balcony café has closed and that its windows have had to be boarded up because of vandals. But they have their cat, Susie, for company and Raymond and Jean pop over whenever they can. But, as the 1970s dawn, Ethel begins to suffer from dementia and she no longer recognises Ernest when he comes to see her at the hospital. She also dislikes the people opposite staring at her, when they are merely watching Carols from King's College on the ward television positioned near her bed. However, she soon passes away and Ernest and Raymond are distressed by the fact that her body is so carelessly left on a trolley in the morgue.

Unsurprisingly, Ernest finds it hard to get used to the empty house. He keeps setting Ethel's place at mealtimes and, even though Susie drapes herself across his shoulders as he eats, he feels unbearably lonely. It's almost a blessing, therefore, when he suffers a fatal heart a few months after losing Ethel.

One is left hoping that Raymond took care of the cat, especially as Jean succumbed to leukaemia just two years after his parents died. In the prologue, Briggs describes Ethel and Ernest as ordinary people who would have been abashed to have had their story told in book form, let alone in a film. But no one who watches this delightful study of stability in the face of change (especially those with parents who lived through many of the same events) will be able to resist them, whether they are looking round their new home for the first time or Ernest is remembering where he was on his round when Raymond was born or Ethel is marvelling at the convenience of her new dolly tub.

Snippets of familiar songs like `Foot Tapper' by The Shadows and the theme from Dixon of Dock Green reinforce the nostalgic air, while Paul McCartney's poignant closing credits track, `In the Blink of an Eye', is complemented by Carl Davis's arrangement of James McCartney's jazz composition, `Walking in the Park With Eloise', which a proud son had recorded with Floyd Cramer and Chet Atkins as The Country Hams in 1974.

Always an animation fan, McCartney wrote `Bogey Music' because of his fondness for Fungus the Bogeyman and it's gratifying that Mainwood (who worked on several small-screen Briggs projects) and animation and art directors Peter Dodd and Robin Shaw have kept so closely to the familiar brand of pastel-shaded Briggs graphics. They resort to CGI on occasion and there are moments when the sometimes expressionless characters are upstaged by the wondrous backdrops (aerial shots of London and a busy mainline station, spring to mind). But, such is the strength and dignity of the vocalisations by Broadbent, Blethyn and the supporting cast that each pencil portrait takes on a life of their own within this uniquely affectionate social realist setting.

The road movie continues to be a convenient way for film-makers to send their characters on emotional journeys. But audiences can often find themselves trapped in a tin can with crashingly dull travelling companions and, sadly, this is very much the case with Chanya Button's feature bow, Burn Burn Burn. Scripted by writer-actress Charlie Covell and taking its title from a line in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, this meandering wallow criss-crosses the country though a morass of contrivances and coincidences when the majority of the problems broached en route could have been resolved with a couple of frank conversations. Nevertheless, the leads make the most of some zinging one-liners, while Button and cinematographer Carlos de Carvalho do justice to the often spectacular landscape.

Even at his own funeral, Jack Farthing is the life and soul of the party. A video clip shows him networking at various social events before the camera settles on best friends Laura Carmichael and Chloe Pirrie, who don't think much of the mournful indie band playing in the front room of the large country house owned by Farthing's mother, Jane Asher, and stepfather, Nigel Planer. They are cross with Farthing for withholding the fact he had pancreatic cancer. But Pirrie is also fretting about her relationship with girlfriend Eleanor Matsuura, while Carmichael has been ticked off by boyfriend Joe Dempsie for sulking about her stalling acting career.

They are about to sneak away when Asher and Planer invite them to Farthing's bedroom to view a tupperware containing his ashes and a message he left for them on a memory stick. Following a volley of abuse aimed at Asher, Farthing explains that he wants Carmichael and Pirrie to scatter his remains at his favourite four places around mainland Britain. He has planned their route and prepared videos to play at each location and he jokes that the enterprise will be akin to Thelma and Louise going on a road trip with Casper the not so friendly ghost.

Driving back to London, Pirrie and Carmichael decide they are too busy to fulfil Farthing's last request. But, when Pirrie gets home to find Matsuura with another women (and throws up the 20+ Scotch eggs she ate at the reception) and Carmichael gets fired from her job as Sally Phillips's nanny, they agree to cut and run to avoid confronting their myriad problems. Moreover, Carmichael fails to tell Dempsie where she's going, as she has realised that she no longer loves him.

Driving an old Volvo loaned to them by Planer, the pair reach Glastonbury and watch Farthing's message. He informs them that this was his late father's favourite place and he remembers embarrassing him as a kid by widdling against the abbey ruins. But he wants some part of him to rest here to atone for the fact that Asher ignored her husband's wishes and had him buried elsewhere.

On arriving at the monument, however, they are prevented from dispersing the ashes by tour guide Alice Lowe, who says the bone fragments would be bad for the local badgers. Dressed in medieval garb, she takes them on a tour and shows them King Arthur's reputed burial place. Carmichael thinks it's unfair to have one rule for mythical monarchs and another for ordinary people. So, Lowe agrees to keep the ashes in a jam jar and promises to take them for walks around the site and on her breaks (if she ever starts smoking again).

As they sit in a lay-by analysing the visit, Carmichael becomes tearful and is surprised when Julian Rhind-Tutt parks his tricycle and comes over to console her. She is taken by his quiet charm and accepts an invitation to his farm commune that evening. Consequently, she ignores Dempsie's phone call about getting her job back and throws herself into the party, while Pirrie sits alone and vapes. Australian Anna Van Hoek and her friend Susan Wokoma sing Rhind-Tutt's praises as a New Age guru and Carmichael is enchanted, as he sets light to straw effigy and spouts platitudinous wisdom long into the night.

Feeling sheepish the next morning, Carmichael and Pirrie try to sneak away. But they had forgotten that they had invited Rhind-Tutt and his acolytes to join them on the trip to Cardiff. After a few miles of cod philosophising, however, they concur that Rhind-Tutt has all the charisma of a benign Charles Manson and ditch the hippy trio at a service station before pressing on alone.

As they draw up outside Pirrie's family home, she reminds Carmichael about her strained relationship with mother Melanie Walters (who doesn't know she is gay) and implores her not to get too cosy. However, as Carmichael has never met Walters during her 10-year friendship with Pirrie, she warms to her gushing welcome and accepts an invitation to stay the night after an involved conversation about a new carpet. She fails to notice a photograph showing a younger Pirrie with her baby sister, however, and manages to ignore another message from Dempsie pleading with her to call back and apologising for the fact he accused Farthing of being an oddball.

The following morning, Pirrie and Carmichael fetch up outside the Livid nightclub in Cardiff. In his video, Farthing explains how his lost his virginity in a toilet cubicle there when he was 13 during a school geography trip. He curses the one in 80,000 odds of getting pancreatic cancer at 29 and embarrasses the friends by joking that they had both given him oral relief. But, when he challenges them to reveal a secret the other doesn't know and mentions the name of her sister, Pirrie insists on pausing the video. Nevertheless, Carmichael blurts out that she wants to split up with Dempsie and she insists on returning to the club that night to have sex with a stranger in homage to Farthing's popped cherry.

Still feeling fragile after being dumped, Pirrie is furious with her friend for cheating on Dempsie and only forgives Carmichael after she rescues her from some lairy misogynists in a 7/11. Back on speaking terms, they head north to York, where they have arranged through Airbnb to stay with amdram actor Matthew Kelly. He is rehearsing for the annual Passion Play and is intrigued that Carmichael also treads the boards. However, she is as reluctant to discuss her acting as Pirrie is to confront her past and they dispose of Farthing's ashes from the city wall with a sense of glum duty.

They take the laptop to the pub to watch the latest video and are shocked to see the deterioration in Farthing's condition. However, they are even more taken aback when he mocks Carmichael's performance in a production of Little Women and belittles her romance with Dempsie. He also castigates Pirrie for keeping secrets and refusing to face facts before launching into a diatribe against Asher for marrying Planer in York when she knew this was his father's birthplace. Seething at the failure of his chemotherapy, Farthing bemoans the fact that Asher, Pirrie and Carmichael will keep living their pointless lives while he has to die. But he is interrupted when Dempsie bursts in (Pirrie had told him where they are) and lambastes Carmichael for giving him the run around before going down on one knee and proposing.

Pirrie is appalled when her friend accepts and returns to Kelly's place alone to rewatch the video, while Carmichael and Dempsie repair to a nearby hotel for a night of unsatisfactory intimacy. The following morning, Kelly (in full Roman centurion costume) asks Pirrie if she will be a stand-in to test the equipment for the crucifixion scene and she is hanging from a cross inside an old church when a drunken Carmichael finds her. Swearing like troopers, they discuss Dempsie's proposal and the fact that Pirrie caused her toddler sister to wander into the road while they were making daisy chains. She explains how her parents split up soon afterwards and that her mother used to drink and blame Pirrie for all her misfortunes. But they are interrupted when the actor playing Jesus arrives in his loincloth and asks what is going on.

Dispirited and disillusioned, the pair agree to abandon the last leg to Scotland and make their way home. But they stop for hitcher Alison Steadman, who seems so sad that they resolve to take her to her vet son (who shares Farthing's first name) in the border town of Oxnam. Along the way, she explains that she has not seen him since her husband threw him out and, when they stop at a pub, she urges Pirrie and Carmichael to remember that Farthing was angry with his illness and not with them when he recorded such a bileful message.

Having witnessed Steadman's touching reunion, Pirrie sends a text to her mum and Carmichael calls Dempsie to break their engagement. Thus, they are in a much better frame of mind, as they start to scale Ben Lomond with Farthing's farewell apology ringing in their ears. As they walk, he recalls how Planer brought him to the spot on a hiking holiday when he was 17. He had been sceptical about the expedition, but had loved every second of it and realised what a decent bloke his stepfather really was. Suddenly regretting his feud with Asher, Farthing asks Pirrie and Carmichael to keep a few ashes for her and show her the last video. However, he fails to mention in time that the mountain has a couple of false peaks and promises not to mind if they scatter his final remains from the wrong place - which, of course, they do.

Such little touches give this shambling buddy movie a modicum of charm. But they are too few and far between to redeem the lengthy passages of maudlin dullness that Covell builds into the script by failing to provide sufficient backstory to establish the depth of friendship between Pirrie, Farthing and Carmichael. She also makes it exceedingly difficult for the audience to like Farthing, who is allowed to exhibit no positive qualities in coming across (albeit understandably) as whining, vindictive and self-obsessed. In the circumstances, Farthing does a good job of making him seem so resistible with a quirkily uneven performance. But it makes no sense for him to have recorded his messages at different stages of his illness, as there was no guarantee that he could have completed them all in light of the aggressive nature of his condition.

It also seems odd that Pirrie and Carmichael would chose to play the angriest message in such a public place. But Button and Covell seem to delight in such unlikely occurrences, hence the horribly misjudged crucifixion scene (with its feeble jokes about martyr complexes) and the sloppily sentimental Steadman episode. Indeed, the only encounter that rings true on the entire trip is the uneasy visit to Walters (despite its Gavin & Stacey overtones), although Lowe and Steadman do what they can with their thin characterisations.

Carmichael and Pirrie also work hard, as they ponder the brevity of existence, the futility of feuding and the importance of making every second count. Yet, while they cope admirably with the incessant shifts in tone, they never quite convince as a ditzy actress-cum-nanny with commitment issues and a lesbian copywriter trying to quit smoking and come to terms with a childhood trauma. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that these very different women would be friends with each other, let alone with such a resistible gadabout as Farthing. But who says art has to make more sense than life?

The goal is more about survival than self-realisation in Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan, a riotous zombie horror that sees the South Korean animator behind The King of Pigs (2011). The Fake (2013) and Seoul Station (2016) venture into live action for the first time. Given the recent MERS epidemic, this was a timely release on the peninsula. But its allegorical assaults on human nature, the class divide, financial malpractice, corporate corruption and mob rule remain universally pertinent and will raise as many hackles as smiles among viewers prepared to look beneath the surface scares.

Following a prologue in which a truck driver hits a deer in the road near a quarantine zone and is spooked by the undead creature's glazed eyes, the scene shifts to the Seoul office where divorced fund manager Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) argues with his ex-wife while trying to nail down a deal with his assistant. She is angry because he won't let their young daughter, Su-an (Kim Su-an) take the train to celebrate her birthday in Busan. But he insists he is too preoccupied to worry about minor domestic issues.

On arriving home, however, Seok-woo learns from his mother (Lee Joo-sil) that Su-an is feeling low after forgetting the words to her song at the school concert. He tries to cheer his daughter up with her birthday present, but he bought her a Wii for Children's Day and, in order to atone, he agrees to accompany her to Busan the next day. Left alone, he watches the camcorder footage of Su-an's performance and is stung by the reproachful look she shoots the lens.

Early the following mornng, Seok-woo and Su-an board the KTX high-speed train to Busan. As the captain (Jung Suk-yong) climbs into his cab, conductor Ki-chul (Jang Hyuk-jin) and his staff welcome the passengers to their seats. However, they are too preoccupied to see a homeless man (Choi Gwi-hwa) and a distressed young woman (Shim Eun-kyung) burst through the doors before they close. Thus, no one hears the hobo whispering about everyone being dead or sees the runaway writhing in the corridor clutching a leg wound before falling momentarily still and contorting back to zombified life.

Sniffing the air and snarling, she charges into the nearest compartment and buries her teeth into a defenceless stewardess. Once infected, she also turns and, within seconds, dozens of ravenous ghouls are rampaging through the carriages and only a few members of a high-school baseball team manage to escape, including Yong-guk (Choi Woo-sik) and cheerleader Jin-hee (Ahn So-hee), who has an unrequited crush on him. Also spared are ageing sisters In-gil (Ye Soo-jung) and Jong-gil (Park Myung-sin), self-important transport executive Yong-suk (Kim Eui-sung) and chip-shouldered working stiff Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) and his heavily pregnant wife, Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi), who is using the lavatory when the mayhem begins.

Hearing the commotion, Su-an slips away from her distracted father and sees the wailing horde shuffling towards their carriage. She is swept to safety by Sang-hwa, who tries to hold the door closed against the revenants. However, Seok-woo realises that they don't have the intelligence to open the door and suggests that they will stop clamouring if they cover the glass with wet newspaper because zombies only respond to what their enfeebled eyes can see. Seong-kyeong blocks them off and silence reigns. But Yong-suk has been watching the TV news and tries to establish himself as the leader of the survivors with the aid of the conductor. He informs them that Daejeon has been placed under military quarantine and that they should be safe once the train stops. However, Seok-woo is in no mood to listen because he has just heard his mother being attacked by the zombies while saying her farewells down the phone.

Seok-woo dislikes Yong-suk as much as Sang-hwa bears a grudge against him. So, he calls his army buddy to see what is going on in the city and is advised to go to east rather than follow directions to the main square. When the train stops in the deserted station, the captain is uncertain what to do for the best. But Yong-suk leads everyone up the escalator, while the zombified passengers in the other compartments press hungrily and helplessly against the windows as they pass.

When they reach the concourse, Seok-woo guides Su-an to one side and she is puzzled why he is breaking away from the group. He tells her that they will be safer this way and she accuses him of putting himself before everyone else and bawls that her mother had been right to leave him. She pulls away from him and rejoins the throng desperately trying to get back on the train after encountering a battalion of voracious soldiers guarding the entrance. Seong-kyeong grabs Su-an's hand as they run and Seok-woo only just manages to get through the glass door being held shut by Sang-hwa and the last three baseballers.

Somehow, they succeed in bolting the doors and wedging bats through the handles. But, as they pelt towards the platform, the glass shatters and the zombie troops tumble through. Young-guk alone makes it back to the train, as his teammates are savaged. But, when he calls Jin-hee to assure her that he is safe, along with Seok-woo and Sang-haw, Yong-suk convinces the others that they have been bitten and are trying to trick them into letting them into the last safe compartment on the train.

As the captain calls control for advice and is urged to get to Busan before the plague hits the city, Sang-hwa gets a call from Seong-kyeong to say she is trapped in a bathroom with Su-an. Determined to rescue them, Seok-woo and Sang-hwa persuade Young-guk to bind their arms with gaffer tape and tool themselves up to battle through the carriages separating them from their loved ones. They bludgeon their way through the first compartment, but discover in the second that the zombies are disorientated by tunnel darkness and they are able to pick their way through the seats before sending them careering to the wrong end of the corridor by setting off Sang-hwa's mobile phone.

They free Seong-kyeong and Su-an and wait between compartments for a tunnel before proceeding further. However, the zombies block the aisle and they have to crawl along the overhead luggage racks to reach sanctuary. On knocking on the carriage door, however, Yong-suk browbeats Ki-chul into keeping it shut. As Sang-hwa holds back the zombies from a partially closed door, Seok-woo and Young-guk try to smash their way into the safe zone and Seok-woo finally comes to admire Sang-hwa when he uses his failing energy to protect them after he is bitten on the hand. He begs Seok-woo to look after Seong-kyeong and Seok-woo nods his assent before rejoining Young-guk.

As they break through, however, Sang-hwa is overpowered and In-gil sacrifices herself so that Seok-woo, Young-guk, Seong-kyeong and Su-an can enter. No sooner are they in the carriage, however, than Yong-suk whips his fellow survivors into a paranoid frenzy. Seok-woo punches him for wasting lives, but Yong-suk retaliates by suggesting that Seok-woo has been infected by his blood-spattered shirt and they demand that the newcomers are isolated. Jin-hee and the homeless man readily join them to get away from Yong-suk's baying acolytes. But Jong-gil is so furious with them for demeaning her sister's sacrifice that she gazes into her clouded eyes at the door and opens it so that the zombies can feast on the self-centred fools. But Yong-suk and Ki-chul manage to shelter in a toilet, while Seok-woo's party take stock in the vestibule.

As he stares out of the window, Seok-woo gets a call from his assistant. He reassures him that Busan is safe, but breaks down on revealing that one of the companies they represent was responsible for the chemical leak that has unleashed the chaos. Seok-woo tells him not to blame himself and crouches down beside Su-an to check she is bearing up. But any hopes that the worst might be over are quickly dashed when the captain announces over the tannoy that a train has derailed at East Daegu and that they are going to have to disembark and try to find another locomotive.

Stopping outside the station, the captain descends from his cab and creeps along the empty platforms. A couple of trains are packed with frustrated zombies, but he manages to find a working engine and slowly edges out into the open. Seok-woo, Su-an, Seong-kyeong and the homeless man climb down and make their way along the track. At that moment, a flaming train ploughs into the platform and a spinning carriage nearly crushes the fugitive quartet. Although Seok-woo is knocked cold.

Meanwhile, Young-guk and Jin-hee take a different route and jump aboard a stationary service to weigh up their options. However, they run into Yong-suk, who has already fed Ki-chul to the stragglers outside the bathroom to create a diversion and he has no compunction about using Jin-hee as a decoy to make good his escape across the track to the moving loco. Heartbroken at seeing the girl of his dreams suffering, Young-guk gives up the ghost and allows her to devour him.

Having witnessed the collision, the captain slows the train to look for survivors. He sees Yong-suk running towards him and courageously jumps down from the foot plate to assist him. However, Yong-suk has no intention of returning the favour and he races after the engine, just as Seok-woo regains consciousness. He slips through a gap beneath the derailed carriage and is about to reach for Su-an when the rolling stock shifts and he has to draw on all his strength to remove a piece of twisted metal to save Su-an and Seong-kyeong. Hearing the glass holding back the trapped zombies, the homeless man motions for them to go without him and he holds back the flesh-eating tide long enough for the trio to flee.

They chase after the engine and clamber aboard. The pursuing zombies grab hold of the railings and act in concert go form a giant undead brake. But Seok-woo tramples on their fingers and they are left in a heap on the track. Unfortunately, they are still not safe, as Yong-suk has been bitten and he emerges from the cab to plead with Seok-woo to get him home to his mother. They fight on the walkway and Seok-woo manages to throw him overboard. But he is wounded in the process and he tells a bereft Su-an to stay close to Seong-kyeong before making his way to the back of the engine. As his eyes mist over, he thinks back to holding his daughter in his arms for the first time and he smiles before his shadow is seen leaping into oblivion in a noble act of self-sacrifice.

At the end of the line, Seong-kyeong and Su-an stop the train and wander towards a tunnel through a scene of utter devastation. They are spotted by a couple of soldiers in a machine-gun nest, who can't make out whether they are human or not. Their commander orders them to shoot over his walkie-talkie, but the sniper pauses when he hears Su-an singing the song she had rehearsed for the concert and her voice rings out bravely as she finally reaches Busan.

As is clear from the synopsis, this is a breakneck ride and Yeon Sang-ho stages the action with an innovative panache that has recently eluded so many K- and J-horror directors, as well as their American counterparts. But, while the set-pieces are cannily handled (particularly when the massed ranks are swarming), it's the ingenuity of Yeon and Park Joo-suk's screenplay that ensures this remains tense and startling.

Credit should also go to cinematographer Lee Hyung-deok for making the most of the confined spaces, as well as editor Yang Jin-mo, make-up artists Kwak Tae-yong and Hwang Hyo-kyun, and the fine ensemble led by Gong Yoo (who regains his humanity in losing his life) and Kim Su-an, who switches from sulky contempt to childlike curiosity and hysterical misery with great conviction for one so young. Even Kim Eui-sang merits a mention for playing the caricatured fat cat villain with such hissable relish. One can only hope that the seemingly inevitable Hollywood remake combines suspense, pathos, gore and bleak comedy with the same finesse.

The walking dead are of a more slapstick variety in Dominik Hartl's Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies, which is strewn with comic allusions to the works of George A. Romero, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Dan O'Bannon, Peter Jackson and Tommy Wirkola. Bearing a passing resemblance to Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, this wastes little time on precise details and provokes more rictus grins than scary jolts. But the cast is willing, the effects are proficient and the slayings are amusingly novel - which is all you can ask of a horror around Halloween.

It's pretty clear that all is now well in an idyllic Alpine resort when the opening scene depicts a man on a snow mobile coming across a wild-eyed deer feasting on a corpse in the forest. Thus, it comes as no surprise that things go spectacularly wrong when resort owner Karl Fischer and his assistant Martin Loos give Russian visitor Kari Rakkol a demonstration of the apparatus designed to turn a cocktail of chemical into a brand of artificial snow dubbed Solonium. Indeed, Rakkol reacts so badly to the mouthful of green gloop that the machine shoots down his throat that the camera follows the molecules into his bloodstream, where they immediately begin to have a devastating effect.

High above the mountains in a helicopter, skateboarders Laurie Calvert and Oscar Dyekjær Giese are oblivious to the impending mayhem. They are filming a stunt jump for a documentary crew and Calvert's girlfriend, Gabriela Marcinková, waits anxiously on the ground, as he has a habit of messing up the simplest things because he can never take anything seriously. Giese leaps first and produces a daredevil run for director Patricia Aulitzky. But Calvert momentarily disappears on landing and, just as Marcinková begins to think he is badly injured, he hoves into sight completely naked.

Aulitzky is appalled, as she had invited a disabled teenage girl to watch the shoot as a special treat. But Marcinková is even more furious, as not only do they not get paid, but they are also left to make their own way down off the mountain after Aulitzky storms off in the chopper. Fischer also blames Calvert for ruining his demonstration and he is relieved when landlady Margarete Tiesel offers them rooms for the night and invites them to the end of season party. However, Marcinková is less than pleased to be stuck on the peak and slams a leering reveller's head into a table when he makes unwanted advances. But a girl on the dance floor is less successful in resisting Rakkola (whose face has started to pustulate hideously), as he bites her in the neck before stumbling towards the bar.

In the time it takes for Calvert to notice a deer lapping some green snow, the tavern is jumping with zombies. Calvert tries to hold one off with a tray, only for it bite a chunk out of the metal and he is forced to seek sanctuary in a toilet cubicle from the rampaging mob. As his terrified companion is dragged to his doom, Calvery clambers into the neighbouring stall to find Giese and Marcinková pressed against the wall. She is still cross with him for bungling the video, but agrees that this is not a time to argue.

They sneak out of the washroom and are glad to see Tiesel beckoning them to join her in the attic. Fischer is also up there and he fumes that his resort has been overrun by flesh-eating maniacs. As no one has any ideas on how to escape, Giese calls his horror movie-mad cousin back in Denmark for advice. However, he insists that he can't help unless he knows exactly which kind of living dead they are dealing with.

Tutting in disgust, Fischer decides to edge along the roof to his snow mobile and, hoping to hitch a ride, the others hide behind a large sledge menu board to pass through the zombies unnoticed. Their plan proves less than foolproof, however, and everyone starts slipping on the ice before Fischer, Calvert and Marcinková make their getaway, leaving Giese and Tiesel to fend for themselves. As a cartoon tracker map reveals, the trio don't get very far before they collide with a deer. Fischer chases Calvert and Marcinková away and decapitates the beast with his rotor blade. But, as he turns around, he sees two more deer closing in on him and his scream reverberates through the woods.

Wrapping his scarf around a branch, Calvert makes a torch to guide them back to the tavern. However, he steps in a bear trap and is glad he is still wearing his protective ski boots. But, as he attempts to prise the metal clamp open, he realises that he is being stalked by a zombie couple closing in for the kill. At that moment, his mother phones him and he notices that the `Blue Danube' ringtone stops the ghouls in their tracks and he and Marcinková are able to make their getaway.

Meanwhile, Giese and Tiesel have made it back to the attic. However, he has been gored in the side and he asks Tiesel to kill him before he turns. She takes a swig of schnapps and prepares to finish him off with a ski pole. But she only succeeds in stabbing him in the leg and cuddles him in remorse, as he howls with pain. He tries to think of something profound to say, but merely dies with a shrug.

Unaware of his fate, Calvert and Marcinková take the chairlift back to the tavern to rescue him. He jokes how romantic this would be in other circumstances and begs Marcinková for a twenty-second chance. She agrees to give it some thought if they survive, but he spoils the moment by asking if she could also lighten up a bit, as he only makes mistakes because she is so serious all the time.

Back in the attic, Giese re-animates just as Tiesel is about to climb down the ladder into the bar. She thrusts ski poles into his eye sockets and he is left dangling when he falls through the trap door. As Tiesel heads into the basement to find her Nazi husband's old machine-gun, Calvert and Marcinková return to find the zombies swaying placidly on the dance floor. Unable to resist, Calvert asks Marcinková if she would like to dance and they glide gracefully between the shuffling revenants. When the music stops, however, they become menacing again and Calvert and Marcinková are forced to rush outside, where they dispatch two predators by using a bench and table to split their skulls.

While they tool up with every sharp implement they can find, Tiesel reappears wearing a German helmet. She plonks the gun on top of a doubled-over zombie and begins firing indiscriminately. However, all she manages to hit is a lot of bottles and a single candle that causes the inn to explode (drolly shown in a long shot that makes the fireball look like something in a socko cartoon). Once everyone has dusted themselves off, the carnage continues, with Calvert using his snowboard to flip the head off one zombie before he snaps another in two by driving the board through his abdomen and jumping on it.

Marcinková jokes that the victim is not half the man he used to be and explains that she is no longer sure whether to laugh or scream. Calvert replies that he feels like that all the time and she smiles in quiet understanding. A slow-motion montage follows, as Calvert leaps across the screen to Strauss and blood, body parts and entrails fly across the frame in a ballet of gore. He comes to Marcinková's rescue when Giese tries to gore her and the ski poles in his eyes get stuck in the snow. Tiesel also shows some mettle when she drives a beer keg tap into one revenant and bleeds him dry. She also cleaves another in twain and stomps on its innards before luring a couple more to an outhouse, where they perish in a flurry of icicle darts.

Yet Calvert can't bring himself to kill Giese, who is equally reluctant to harm his buddy. So, he jumps on a board and plunges off a precipice just as Tiesel returns with a sit-upon snow blower that she uses to run over a zombie and send his insides splatting out of the back. When Fischer returns to threaten Marcinková, therefore, Calvert tosses a cable to Tiesel and gets her to feed it into the blower so he can pull himself over the snow to rescue her. But he gathers too much momentum and crashes through the roof with Fischer to leave themselves hanging from a rapidly fraying net.

As Marcinková clings to Calvert's hand, he spots a handy crowbar and pops the catches on his boots to send Fischer plunging into the blades of his snow-making equipment. His blood schloops into a clear glass tube and particles of his skin form a red snow that falls on Calvert and Marcinková as they kiss. As dawn breaks, Tiesel claims to hear sounds of baying in the valley and Calvert promises to get her off the mountain alive. The scene appears to have been set for a sequel, but Hartl signs off by showing Giese sliding down the slope on his board until he crashes into a tree and the screen goes black.

Although this is raucous fun, a couple of plot points stick in the craw. If the zombies are pacified by music, why is Rakkola able to bite the girl in the bobble hat on the dance floor? Also, how does Giese get down from the loft without the poles ripping his skull open? And is that a zombie foetus amidst the offal after Tiesel tears the zombie in half? Surely not, even in such an anything goes movie?

Hartl directs with plenty of vigour and he is splendidly served by Nicolay Mayer's make-up effects and Schwerthelm Ziehfreund's cervine animatronics. In places, however, the combination of Xiaosu Han and Andreas Thalhammer's oblique shakicam visuals and Daniel Prochaska's flash cutting so obscures the schlock that it is impossible to see what it going on. But such tactics are often employed to disguise budget constraints and Hartl is entitled to a little leeway for devising the inspired Fred and Ginger moment.

There's not much point lingering over Martin Owen's Let's Be Evil, as this column is about films not video games. Buried beneath the digital effects and tricksy point-of-view shots, there is a semblance of a narrative, which Owen concocted with his star, Elizabeth Morris. But it's so short on background information and so bereft of character depth and plot logic that it feels more like a pitch outline than a fully developed story. Many of the ideas and perspectives seem to have been recycled from Charles Barker's The Call Up. But Werner Herzog's documentary on the Internet (see below) is infinitely more disconcerting than this confusing technophobic muddle.

Seemingly still traumatised by the sight of her father being stabbed by persons unknown when she was a little girl, Elizabeth Morris has applied for a childcare job to help pay her ailing mother's medical bills. Entrusting her to a nurse, Morris slips away from a breakfast news discussion on the social networking revolution bequeathing America a generation of obese, uneducated kids and travels downtown. She arrives at the anonymous facility housing the Posterity Project and is subjected to a virtual reality security check in the elevator before meeting her fellow minders, Kara Tointon and Eliot James Langridge.

He is a mouthy show-off, but Tointon seems friendly enough, even though she is a good deal trendier than the sensibly plain Morris. Their discussions are interrupted by the arrival of a hologram named ARIAL (body Jamie Bernadette, voice Natasha Moore), who explains that she has been programmed to help them perform their duties. She divulges that her name means Augmented Reality Integrated Advanced Learning and invites the trio to don the goggles that will allow them to enter the virtual reality realm in which they will be working. Langridge makes wisecracks as ARIAL outlines the nature of the job and offers them a range of visual aides to help them navigate their way around the various corridors that will be plunged into darkness the moment they remove their headsets.

ARIAL also introduces the childminders to their charges. Seemingly studious and passive, the `candidates' sit at a table and absorb knowledge with such intensity that ARIAL reprimands Langridge for trying to distract them. No reason is given why these gloop-eating Midwich Cuckoos have been brought to the building or why they study so attentively. Indeed, nothing is explained at any point in a picture that hives off into depressing predictability the moment ARIAL wakes Morris, Tointon and Langridge at the start of their first day.

One of the girls seems to vanish from her bed while Morris is doing her night rounds, but she is safely tucked up again by the time she fetches her colleagues to help her search. Similarly, one of the candidates bumps into Morris and Tointon while returning to their quarters and she turns to give them a menacing stare. Then Morris's uniform goes missing and she feels a fool when she finds it neatly folded in her bedroom.

She is all set to leave. But Tointon talks her into staying and Morris is gladdened when the quietest of the candidates, Isabelle Allen, stops her in the corridor to apologise for the behaviour of her classmates. No sooner have they made friendly contact, however, than ARIAL malfunctions (along with just about everything else) and Morris becomes convinced that the children are out to kill their minders. Tointon is equally concerned, but Langridge remains bullishly cocky right up to the moment he seemingly disappears.

Allen promises to remain by Morris's side, as they seek a way out through the ventilation shafts. But they venture more deeply into danger and it's only when ARIAL regains functionality that she is able to apologise to Morris for leaving her to her fate at the hands of the malevolent Allen, who informs Morris that she has been a loser from the moment her father was murdered.

Quite how a child would know about this ghastly incident or why an outwardly sweet girl on an augmented reality programme has such a blackened soul is never revealed (despite some clumsy hints during the denouement). The same goes for how Morris got to hear about the job and why such a top secret specialist organisation would entrust its precious subjects to untrained outsiders. And why do the minders need to wear VR visors?

But, then again, very little makes sense in this dreary Brood of the Damned gamescape, which makes extensive use of computer pop-ups, extreme close-ups, obfuscatory coloured lighting and pitch darkness to prevent viewers from inspecting the brittle special effects too forensically. Alarm bells should always start ringing when a film has 31 producer credits and one of them (in this instance, Jonathan Willis) insists that it has been inspired by their `original idea'. But, with Melissa Spatt's production design being only marginally more innovative than Chase Bowman's clunky camerawork and Julian Scherle's grating synth score, there is little to commend in this tiresome chiller.

Young Isabelle Allen has a killer stare, but too few demands are made on her twentysomething co-stars. Those eager to fathom the mysteries of the storyline and its message about digital connectivity and insularity have too much spare time on their hands, as this is a movie to experience (or endure) before moving swiftly on to something worthier of considered thought - albeit with the closing blast of Kim Wilde's `Kids in America' echoing in the back of your mind.

A year after Jonny Owen scored a surprise hit with I Believe in Miracles, a tribute to the great Nottingham Forest team of the late 1970s, the same city's 1980s hip hop culture is celebrated by Claude Knight, Luke Scott and Sam Derby-Cooper in NG83 When We Were B Boys. This is much more specialised than its predecessor, but its affectionate insight into a scene that offered inner-city kids a chance to express themselves and earn a little money and respect in the process is bound to have an appreciative constituency.

The first person we meet is postman Karl Russell, who used to man the decks as DJ D2. He keeps his record collection and memorabilia in the loft and laments that modern kids lack the sense of purpose and drive that enabled his generation to seize their moment. It also annoys him that footballers make a fortune for running around when there is inifinitely more skill in breakdancing and body popping.

Now in his 40s, Danny Hayles has never lost his desire to dance. He was known as `Babytron' and performed with an outfit called The Rocatrons. However, as his mother Evadney reveals, he was a sickly child with a hole in his heart. But he was also `a tricky devil' who used to dance in the city centre on a piece of chequered lino before Evadeny took it to put under the freezer. To this day, she can't understand why he needs so much jewellery or so many trainers (when he only has one pair of feet). Yet, she is proud of his achievements and delighted that he has remained such a dutiful son.

Like Karl, Barry Shepherd was a white kid with an obsession with black culture. Often bullied for being hopeless at sports, he became a familiar figure by carrying a boom box around Nottingham. An animated sequence shows him being mugged on several occasions, but he eventually chained himself to the stereo so he could keep spreading the music he loved. As he chats, he mentions that he used to be good at beatboxing and goes into the bathroom to give a demonstration because it has such good acoustics. He also shows off his robotics moves in the kitchen.

But, while Barry was on the periphery, Tommy Thomas was at the epicentre of the Nottingham breakdancing scene. Using the moniker `Bionic Sly', he was the driving force behind The Rock City Crew, which took its name from the city's leading live music venue. He invites the crew into his house and gets into such a muddle making hot drinks that he wishes his mother was around. She still cooks for him every day, even though he has 14 children of his own.

Back in the day, Annie McDevitt danced with The Fly Girls as `Lady McD'. Initially raised in Scotland, she only discovered she had a younger brother when she came to live with her mother at the age of nine. She enthuses about how alike they were and how proud she was that Lloyd was accepted into The Rock City Crew when he was only 13. Known as `Crazy Kid', he was a firm favourite with Annie's friends and she only realised later that many of them only used to hang out with her to be close to Lloyd.

The Crew's main rivals were The Assassinators. Leader Kenneth `Prince 19' Castillo only became aware of breakdancing in 1983 after watching the WFLA dancers from New York performing in Market Square to promote a soft drink. He missed the second demonstration sponsored by Rocky City DJ Jonathan Woodliffe, as he was arrested for fighting back after being racially abused. But he quickly formed his unit and they became popular in the city and surrounding area. Indeed, they were once invited to Liverpool, where they earned an unexpected £120 for giving a display at the opening of Top Shop.

However, Steve `Panther' Kelly and Pete `Apollo 7' Dimond insists that The Crazy Legs Crew were Nottingham's first breakdancing combo and they recall the crowds they used to attract when the city centre was full of weekend shoppers. They also reflect on the fact that rehearsing new moves kept them in the gym and off the streets at a time when unemployment was high and urban discontent was on the increase. But, as Tommy remembers, the local crews weren't only in demand in their own backyard. The Assassinators were invited to Paris, while he went to Beirut to raise morale in the war zone by showing Lebanese kids how to bust a move.

Such was the reputation of Nottingham dance that John `DJ Jazzy Jay' of the renowned Universal Zulu Nation crew comes from New York to meet Tommy. He shows him the covered bridge at the Victoria Centre where they used to perform and they try to throw a few shapes, even though they are not as young as they used to be. Elsewhere in the city, Danny bumps into Carl `Cali Man' Smith from the East Midlands Massive and Darnell `Flux' Vassa from The Supreme Force. They reminisce about old times and good friends before Danny heads for The Bridge to do a little soft shoe shuffle.

Annie regrets that the craze was almost over as soon as it started and recalls it started to go downhill after the epic dance battle between The Assassinators and The Rock City Crew. But Danny insists that he is still recognised wherever he goes in Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield and says that he would happily do a windmill with his shirt off on cold concrete if it brought glory to his hometown. His mother tuts and says he is a grown man who will soon become a granddad. She also ticks him off for the drink and smoking problems that cost him a good job with the council. But, even though she chides him on camera for skylarking, he can't help but smile.

However, not everyone made it through alive. Lloyd was so devoted to The Crew that he struggled to channel his energies when it disbanded. He tried his hand at making music, but detested the way the British record industry sought to tame hip hop. Suffering from depression, he took to drink and went missing at the age of 41 in 2012. His body was eventually found in a local park and his funeral was well attended by those who remembered his glory days. A clip shows him pining for the past, while knowing he could never recapture its magic. But his friends try with a special gig at Rock City, at which Barry does some beatboxing (at a venue he was always too timid to attend in its heyday) and people of all ages, creeds and colours come together on the dance floor so as not to forget.

Despite glossing over the socio-political context, this is an affectionate paean to a bygone age and the dance craze that made it bearable for a group of Nottingham youngsters. As a former Rock City crew member, Claude Knight has plenty of wonderful home-movie footage, which is cannily accompanied by a well-chosen soundtrack and some refreshingly unaffected talking-head anecdotes. Yet, the star of the show is undoubtedly Evadney Hayles, whose readiness to call out her adult son on camera like he was a naughty adolescent is heart-warmingly hilarious.

Finally, this week, the ever-questing mind of Werner Herzog takes him online in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. Tracing the history of the Internet from its first tentative steps on 29 October 1969 to its potential applications in the future, Herzog seeks to reassure and provoke by pointing out the pros and cons of humanity becoming overly dependent upon computers. Yet, while he is well served in his 10-chapter survey by some amusing and informed experts, Herzog seems content merely to scratch the surface and, as a result, this feels much more like a primer than an in-depth analysis.

As pioneering computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock recalls in `The Early Days', the first Internet message was sent by the Interface Message Processor at UCLA. However, the system crashed after the letters `lo' had been typed in from the word `login'. But, given what has grown from this small seed, he feels it's a suitably awed beginning that is akin to Columbus first sighting land in the New World. Herzog also meets Bob Kahn, who designed many of the protocols on which the Internet relies with Vint Cerf, and they estimate that if the online data transmitted during a single day was downloaded to disc, the pile would stretch to Mars and back. Computer scientist Danny Hillis comes up with a similar statistic in showing Herzog the directory of Internet users that was published during the 1970s, as an equivalent volume now would be 72 miles thick.

Kleinrock produces a series of equations to show how the Internet became better as it grew larger because user predictability could be calculated. But rival Ted Nelson believes that the computer business missed a trick by not utilising the system of links that he devised while reflecting on a childhood memory of dangling his fingers in the water while boating on a lake. He jokes that he is considered a crank for backing the wrong horse and sticking with it, but Herzog admires his thesis and his tenacity.

Indeed, he pursues more mavericks in `The Glory of the Net', as Adrien Treuille reveals how an online game named Foldit led to hundreds of amateur scientists coming up with molecular folding solutions that have since contributed to medical breakthroughs. Roboticist Sebastian Thrun began harnessing this armchair ingenuity for his Udacity company after he realised that the brightest of the 200 students in his Stanford University class would only rank in the 410s among the 160,000 taking the same class online.

Thrun is a pioneer of driverless cars and Raj Rajkumar (who, like many of the specialists in the film works at Carnegie Mellon University) shows Herzog the computers buried in the boot of a new model. He explains how these send signals to a network that guides other vehicles in the vicinity and, when Herzog frets about who would be liable in the case of a auto-auto accident, Thrun sidetracks by stating that machines learn more quickly from their errors than humans and rarely make the same mistake twice. This faith in the power and applicability of artificial intelligence is rather daunting. But Joydeep Biswas reveals a lighter side, as he has built autonomous robots that can play football without any human intervention. Such is their ability that he is confident a team could be constructed to beat Brazil by 2050. But, when he shows off his favourite player, Robot 8, Herzog mischievously asks Biswas if he loves it and he sheepishly admits he does.

However, Herzog drastically changes the mood in `The Dark Side', which recalls how quickly graphic images of 18 year-old Nikki Catsouras went viral after she was killed in a car crash in 2006. Her father Christos (whose Porsche she was driving) was deeply hurt by some of the malicious messages he received and her mother Lesli declares on camera that the Internet is a manifestation of the Anti-Christ. Rather unsettlingly, Herzog poses this segment like one of Grant Wood's American Gothic paintings, with Nikki's three long-haired sisters sitting at a table covered with baked goods, while their parents stand behind them.

The tone shifts again in `Life Without the Net', as Herzog travels to Green Bank, West Virginia to meet astronomer Jay Lockman, who explains that the Robert C. Byrd Telescope has such a sensitive electromagnetic that the entire Appalachian community has become a cell-free zone. This means people talk to each other more and Lockman clearly enjoys playing banjo with his local folk group. But Jennifer Wood is relieved to have found such a sanctuary, as she suffers adverse health reactions to excessive radioactivity, as does Diane Schou, who is grateful that she no longer has to live in a Faraday Cage. An unnamed female companion wishes the medical profession would take the condition more seriously, just as Hilarie Cash has responded to Internet addiction by opening the ReStart rehab clinic in Washington state. She reveals how a Korean couple let their infant starve while playing a child-rearing game and Tom and Chloe concede that they came close to losing their identity and their will to live by becoming hooked on gaming.

In passing, Herzog mentions that some gamers wear nappies so that they can stay close to their screens before he moves on to `The End of the Net'. The impressively tattooed Lucianne Walkowicz from the Adler Planetarium describes the 1859 solar storm witnessed by Richard Carrington and reveals how it caused paper to catch light in telegraph machines and pushed the Aurora Borealis as far south as the Equator. She claims that similar solar flares could cause chaos with modern computers and bring life to a standstill, as it did with the New York blackout in 2003. Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss from Arizona University believes that millions of lives could be lost if a solar flare took down the Internet and Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard Law School surmises that we are four square meals from mayhem if the system ever collapses.

Continuing along these lines in `Earthly Invaders', Herzog goes to a hackers convention in Las Vegas to meet Kevin Mitnick, the patron saint of hackers, who did a year in solitary and four more in a federal prison for various computer-related misdemeanours. He once used the name Eric Weiss (the real name of his hero, Harry Houdini) to bypass security at Motorola via a series of phone calls. But, while Mitnick avers that people are the weak link in Internet security rather than the systems, Hillis explains that no one thought about security when the net was designed, as everyone knew each other.

Zittrain opines that complete openness is as potentially dangerous as total anonymity and security analyst Sam Curry concurs that some small countries have invested in hacking to give them an edge over well-armed superpowers. Fellow expert Shawn Carpenter proves reluctant to talk about the 2004 Titan Rain attack and who might have been behind it. But he agrees that cyber warfare poses an untold threat, as stock markets and satellites could be made to crash, while control over nuclear arsenals could be lost.

Rockets of a different kind take the documentary in an another direction in `Internet on Mars', which sees PayPal tycoon Elon Musk discuss his hope that his SpaceX company will lead the way in the colonisation of the Red Planet. He knows the enterprise will be expensive, but he is keen to exploit the technology before it is lost in any future natural or man-made disaster. Impishly, Herzog shows the Chicago skyline around sunrise and suggests that everyone has moved to Mars with the exception of some Buddhist monks using Twitter and Walkowicz suggests that we should solve our problems on Earth before we start dreaming of Mars, as even lifeboats need somewhere to land.

Herzog asks brain researchers Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell whether the internet dreams of itself and they are intrigued by a question similar to the one posed of androids and electric sheep by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. They admit that the Internet is an unpredictable force, but doubt whether it yet has the imagination to dream. Zittrain, on the other hand, reckons that the World Wide Web cast by Sir Tim Berners Lee already allows the Internet to dream of itself/

Naturally, this segues into `Artificial Intelligence', as J. Michael Vandeweghe explains how machines have already been invented to perform tasks that would be too risky for mere mortals. Hillis wonders whether AI is already loose on the Internet and it is too smart to be detected, while Musk worries that it will get into bad habits and cause wars to boost stock values while working for munitions companies. Thrun has more faith, however, as he claims that machines learn more quickly than humans. Moreover, they don't waste their time falling in love, as who would want a dishwasher that couldn't concentrate on its task because it was besotted with the fridge.

Over footage of the Asimo robot Asimo opening a flask, pouring a drink and handing it to a woman, Hallis mulls over the possibility that AI will force humanity to rethink its basic morality. But Kleinrock opens `The Internet of Me' by conceding his disappointment that the Internet has not become as invisible and as extensively useful as electricity. He thinks we should be able to interact directly with appliances in a room, which should have the power to tell him where he's left his keys. Curry coined the chapter title to describe a form of interconnectivity that brings the benefits of the Internet direct to users without the need for gadgets. But Kleinrock fears that such passivity would be the end of deep critical thinking.

Zittrain and Krauss share his opinion that we need interpersonal skills more than information, while Hillis implies that we are living in a Digital Dark Age we no longer leave a paper trail and those investigating our times will be puzzled why things changed so rapidly with no tangible sign of an activating agency. Indeed, Zittrain jokes that there is supposed to be a plan for Wikipedia users to preserve knowledge by printing its pages in the event of a catastrophe.

Movin into `The Future', Herzog learns from Marcel Just that the brain has its own vocabulary and he and Mitchell are confident that telepathy will be possible once scientists work out how to harness the energy provided by brainwaves. But Krauss warns about the dangers of making predictions, as sci-fi hacks put more thought into flying cars than communication networks. He insists that the future is unpredictable, but laments that the time has already come when information is more important than the individual who provided it and he worries that the Internet will spiral out of control unless humanity intervenes decisively to regulate it. But, as Krauss wonders whether people might get used to the idea of finding companionship with robots, Herzog returns to Lockman and his banjo band to affirm that nothing beats an old friend.

Typically inquisitive, eloquent and puckish, Herzog makes a genial guide through the byways of the superhighway. But, while this is both informative and intriguing, it often feels like an elongated episode of Tomorrow's World, as Herzog marvels at the imagination and intelligence that went into the net's creation and deplores the ways in which its inventors have been betrayed by the criminous, the depraved and the cruel who misuse what should have been a gift to the human race.

He certainly covers a range of topics, but the scattershot approach prevents Herzog from addressing them in much depth or from linking them with a unifying thesis. Moreover, while he is too canny to not think for himself, one is left troubled by the evident reliance on Carnegie Mellon and the NetScout cyber security company (which features prominently in the credits), especially in a film intent on challenging notions of excessive dependency. However, one hopes that Herzog raises enough issues to spark a debate, as the global population is currently sleepwalking its way into a cyber-nightmare that it might not wake up in time to redress.