With his eclectic choice of material and a refusal to adhere to a recognisable style, Michael Almereyda has never made life easy for audiences since debuting with his adaptation of Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero For Our Time (1985). Best known in this country for Nadja (1994), Hamlet (2000), the documentary William Eggleston and the Real World (2005) and Experimenter (2015), Almereyda enjoyed his best notices for some time with Marjorie Prime, a transfer of Jordan Harrison's 2014 Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama about memory, manipulation and mortality that strives to remain true to the story's stage origins, while also referencing such diverse films as Alain Resnais's Last Year At Marienbad (1961) and Spike Jonze's Her (2013).

Some time in the future, as the waves crash beyond her wall, 85 year-old Marjorie (Lois Smith) shuffles back inside her beach house and sits to chat with her husband, Walter (Jon Hamm). He is half her age and speaks with a measured cadence that betrays the fact he is a Prime, a hologram programmed to process and recycle information in order to keep Marjorie company and mentally active in a bid to combat her dementia. He reminds her that she needs to eat before telling her the story of a trip to the cinema to see PJ Hogan's My Best Friend's Wedding (1997). She wants to change the film to Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) and wishes the venue had been an old-fashioned movie theatre. But Walter is puzzled by her readiness to reinvent the past to make it seem more romantic and she is cross with herself for forgetting that Walter was recalling the night he proposed.

As she eats peanut butter with a spoon, Marjorie laments that her condition often robs her of cherished memories. But Walter insists she has her good days before recalling the day they went to the dog pound and came home with a black poodle named Toni. She had adored running on the beach and had been a good pet before they had their daughter, Tess (Geena Davis). However, she had also wanted a dog and they had returned to the pound, where Tess had picked out another black poodle and Toni 2 had fitted into the family so well that her life merged with that of her predecessor. Marjorie is happy to reminisce and compliments Walter on looking so much like her late spouse and he acknowledges the compliment, as she brushes through his projected image to sit beside him on the sofa. She asks if they can just be silent and he smiles at her request, as he exists solely to do whatever she wants and has all the time in the world in which to do it.

Jogging on the beach, Tess tells husband Jon (Tim Robbins) that she doesn't like the Prime, as she feels as though she is pacifying her mother like a child that has been plonked down in front of a television. But Jon has faith in the technology and realises that Marjorie takes solace from being able to converse with her lost loved one at the age she remembers him most fondly. The pair hold hands as they turn towards home, with the sun beaming down and the ocean rolling hypnotically behind them. But Tess is bothered that her husband is helping refine a computer programme designed to deceive her vulnerable mother into believing that her past is still active. Moreover, she is peeved that her mother is nicer to Walter than she is to her and worries that she will become confused by having to deal with two versions of the same person. However, when Marjorie comes down to join them, she scolds Tess for thinking that she is so far gone that she doesn't know the difference between Walter and the Prime. Tess and Jon moved into the beach house a decade ago, as Marjorie was devastated by Walter's death. But they feel the need to take a break and have asked care giver Julie (Stephanie Andujar) to live with them. Jon introduces her to Prime and she is amused by the fact he can speak Spanish (among 31 other languages) and is entirely committed to improving the quality of Marjorie's life. To that end, he asks Jon about his career as a financial adviser and is phlegmatic when Jon suggests that this would bore Marjorie, as would too many recollections about their later life together, as there is a reason she chose his fortysomething persona to be her companion.

Caught in the rain during one of their walks, Tess and Jon drop into the club where Marjorie used to spend her afternoons. Tess fails to recognise Mrs Salveson (Leslie Lyles), an old friend who has become wheelchair-bound since suffering a stroke. She admits her faux pas to Jon, as he tinkles on the piano and justifies her slip by quoting William James's theory that memories become increasingly unreliable because we always recall the last time we thought about something rather than original incident or idea. Thus, the clarity eventually begins to diminish, as though each recollection is part of a montage of photocopies. As competitive academics, Jon seeks to top Tess's interjection with an anecdote about James giving Gertrude Stein an A grade for declaring her unwillingness to take an exam. But Tess changes the subject by suggesting that they sack Julie for taking Marjorie outside in the rain, even though she had been enjoying a quiet cigarette when Tess had called to check up on her.

However, Marjorie has a restless night and wakes next morning to Jon informing her that she had flirted with a doctor after having fallen. She is reminded of the French-Canadian tennis player she had dated before Walter and laments that her husband had not been a looker. However, she shocks Jon and Julie by declaring him a great lover and she looks forward to her next encounter with Prime after pottering around the house. She wishes she could still play the violin and he consoles her that the music will still be in her head, even though her fingers are no longer nimble enough to make the notes. He apologises for not being as dashing as her tennis pro, but she commends him for being a decent husband and asks him to ensure that her condition gets no worse even though he is powerless to make her better. However, as he is programmed to tell the truth, Prime confesses that he can only do what is in his power.

Tess and Jon interrupt and ask Marjorie if she would like to go for a drive. She hunkers up in her chair and recalls going on a business trip with Walter and sitting in a snowy park watching saffron-coloured flags fluttering on the breeze. The tranquility of the moment has never left her and she remembers being reluctant to leave and live the rest of her life. Jon is more touched by the story than Tess, who is furious with Julie for giving Marjorie a Bible, as she has been a lifelong atheist and is now being indoctrinated when her intellectual defences are down. But Marjorie insists she is not feeble prey and is embarrassed when Tess has to take her upstairs after she wets herself.

Later that night, Jon tells Prime about the New York trip and breaks the news that it took place soon after Walter and Marjorie's son, Damien, had committed suicide. He explains that Walter had never known how to show love to a reclusive child who was often bullied at school and he urges him to say nothing about him to Tess, who had never forgiven him for killing Toni. Marjorie had also clammed up about her boy and Jon gets so frustrated with Prime asking questions so dispassionately in order to burnish his knowledge that he tosses his drink in his face. Even though the liquid passes through the hologram, Prime seems stung by the gesture and his jaw tightens, as Tess comes to fetch Jon for bed.

The next day, Julie confides in Prime that this job is less stressful than her last one, as she fell in love with the patient's son and had to watch him physically assault the doctors treating his father. Prime urges her not to get upset, but she insists her tears are from allergies and tells Prime in Spanish that she knows that he is as confused as she is about what to do for the best with Marjorie. As she sit in the pool, Marjorie has a flashback to the night that Walter had proposed. They had been in bed and My Best Friend's Wedding was on the television. She (Azumi Tsutsui) had been dubious about accepting, as he was so much older than she was and she had bitten the ring he had offered her to test its quality before slipping it on to her finger.

We see Jon, Tess, Julie and Marjorie go down to the tideline and celebrate a birthday with a party. Suddenly, however, Tess sees Jon drive Julie away and she returns into the house. She sits with Marjorie and it's only partway through the conversation that it becomes clear that she is now a Prime and that Tess has chosen to remember her late mother towards the end of her life. Marjorie Prime asks for information about herself and their relationship as mother and daughter and Tess feels uncomfortable having to revisit their past. She explains that Marjorie had also had a Prime before her death and Tess admits that she had been hurt that she had chosen a Walter from a time before her birth, as it made her feel as though she had intruded upon their idyllic happiness.

Tess confesses that she has been prevented from talking to her own daughter by her therapist and it annoys her that a stranger should have any input into their relationship. It also irks her that Jon thinks she should see a shrink, as she doesn't like the idea that the man she loves considers her broken. Yet, here she is talking to a facsimile of her mother and needing emotional comfort she gets from their interaction. She appears to fall asleep and seemingly dreams of Walter Prime watching footage of saffron flags with Julie, who clings on to him in her own sadness. Tess wakes up and sits up to see she is quite alone. She goes upstairs and climbs into bed beside Jon.

They now have a Shiba Inu dog and it fusses around Jon while Tess sorts through the letters and photos that Marjorie left behind. She admonishes Jon for letting Marjorie remember Jean-Paul as a tennis player when he had owned a dry wall business and she finds a billet doux he wrote her distasteful. He reminds her that they had met after Walter had died and hopes that Tess would find a new love if anything ever happened to him. She shows him a snapshot of Damien and Toni and she admits to hating the fact that Marjorie had always loved him more and that her six year-old self had felt betrayed by her brother for driving a wedge that she would never be able to remove.

Unable to sleep, Tess comes to see Marjorie, who asks if she would like to hear some music. Tess curses the fact that they had never had the same tastes, but is moved when she hears The Band's version of Bob Dylan's `I Shall Be Released'. This proves to be the last time we shall meet her, as a series of shots establish that Jon is now alone with the dog and drinking quite heavily. He invests in a Prime and sighs because Tess Prime keeps making assumptions and he suggests that it would be better if she let him provide some background because she seems unwilling to accept the notion that Tess died even though she now exists in Prime form.

Opening a notebook, he reads a list of characteristics that he associates with Tess. They range from her being confrontational despite seeming quiet to her desire to be a better mother than Marjorie had been. However, he finds it difficult relating to something he knows is an electronic figment of his imagination and is pained when he has to recall how Tess had hanged herself from a 500 year-old tree during a long-planned camping trip to Madagascar. Tess Prime calmly asks Jon to trust her so that she can help him and asks about their early days as a couple and he flashes back to what appears to be an encounter in the garden at Versailles. But, as he kisses Tess, we see the backdrop is a large diorama-style painting in a gallery full of milling tourists. When he snaps out of the reverie, however, he finds himself alone.

Time passes and his 10 year-old adopted granddaughter Marjorie (Hana Colley) comes to visit. She asks to meet Tess Prime and tells her about how she is learning to identify plants and trees. Jon is proud of having another bright spark in the family and Tess smiles quietly. But time races on and, two decades later, Marjorie (Hong-An Tran) brings Jon (Bill Walters) a glass of water to take his pill. He is bearded with long white hair and the scene cuts away to show a dog running on the beach. It is being watched by Walter, who is chatting with the Primes of Marjorie and Tess. They miss Jon and wonder why he never drops round any longer. As they reminisce, Marjorie recalls Tess picking Toni 2 at the dog pound. But Walter corrects her and she is puzzled by his mention of Damien. Tess is also perplexed, but they accept what Walter is telling them as a happy memory and, as the snow begins to fall outside, Marjorie feels lucky that the family got to share so much love.

During this closing exchange - complete with a telling snippet from My Best Friend's Wedding and footage of the saffron banners in Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park artwork, `The Gates' - it's hard not to hear those haunting lines from James Joyce's The Dead: `His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.' But, rather than providing a neat ending, this scene prompts numerous questions. Why is there no Jon Prime? Did his relationship with granddaughter Marjorie deteriorate so badly that she would be happy to forget him or did the technology simply become obsolete? How did the Primes activate themselves without any human intervention and why has it taken the usually empathetic Walter so long to tell Marjorie and Tess about Damien and Toni? Has he developed a sensitivity to go with his intelligence, as he did appear to register an emotion when Jon threw scotch at him?

Yet, while such loose ends may tantalise, it's the philosophical content of Harrison's play that proves more intriguing than its sci-fi speculations. While the reminiscing between Marjorie and Walter is touching, the byplay between Tess and Jon is even more engaging and affords Geena Davis and Tim Robbins their best roles in years, as they play dialled down versions of Martha and George in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The way in which Jon interacts with Walter Prime is also fascinating, as he provides him with information that he can only know secondhand and it's interesting to note how much of what Jon tells Walter is withheld from the Marjorie and Tess Primes. Recreating her stage role, Lois Smith is exceptional as an artist who was never quite cut out for motherhood, while Jon Hamm invests his artificial intelligence with a sensibility that is all the more stirring for the fact that Walter is the only character who is deprived of some moments of humanity. Almereyda directs his actors with great finesse and avoids the temptation to open out the action too widely. He also lets Sean Price Williams's camera float around the Long Island location and Javiera Varas's deceptively modest interiors, while also ensuring that editor Kathryn J. Schubert keeps the transitions simple so as not to disturb the measured rhythms of the scenes. At times, Mica Levi's score gets lost amidst the Mozart, Beethoven and Poulenc. But it deftly reinforces the ethereality of a poignant, playful and poetic chamber drama that leaves a deep and affectingly consolatory impression.

It's not often that the set steals the show from the performers, but this is definitely true in the case of Stanley Tucci's Final Portrait. Designed by James Merifield and constructed on a Twickenham soundstage, the studio in which Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti paints the portrait of American author James Lord has an ambient authenticity that is noticeably missing from the well-disguised London landmarks being used as stand-ins for the environs around 46 rue Hippolyte Maindron in 1960s Paris. The interiors also have an apposite period integrity that Danny Cohen frustratingly fails to achieve with the distracting jerkiness of his pseudo-nouvelle vague camera movements.

Scripted by Tucci from Lord's own memoir, this erudite, but often stilted anecdote joins The Imposters (1998), Joe Gould's Secret (2000) and Blind Date (2007) on the popular actor's directorial CV. But he has yet to improve on his wonderful debut, Big Night (1996), which he co-directed with Campbell Scott, whose own efforts behind the camera have similarly tailed off with Hamlet (2000), Final (2000) and Off the Map (2003).

While in Paris some time in 1964, James Lord (Armie Hammer) agrees to pose for Alberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush). He promises it will only take a day (or so) and Lord is happy to sit for such an internationally renowned sculptor before he flies back to the United States. Lord is greeted warmly by Giacometti's wife, Annette Arm (Sylvie Testud), as she heads out for lunch and by his brother Diego (Tony Shalhoub), who has just completed a plinth for one of Giacometti's famously wiry creations. But, while he likes the base, Giacometti loathes his own effort and tosses it aside, as he rummages around his cluttered courtyard studio to find the paints and brushes he needs to immortalise Lord.

Sitting him down on a wicker chair in the middle of the room, Giacometti declares that Lord has the head of a brute, but reassures him that no cop would ever convict him on the basis of his portrait, as he so rarely captures what he sees. Dabbing away on a fresh canvas, Giacometti laments that portraits are impossible to do and are rarely finished. But Lord keeps his thoughts to himself as he holds his pose (as the infuriatingly skittish camera darts around him in a gauche bid to replicate the restlessness of Giacometti's gaze). Moreover, he remains polite when Giacometti informs him that he will have to return the next day, as he has doesn't want to keep him seated for too long. As he leaves, however, Lord bumps into Caroline (Clémence Poésy), a prostitute who has become Giacometti's mistress and muse and Lord is pained to see the expression on Annette's face, as she watches her husband canoodle with the vivacious brunette.

A montage shows Giacometti drinking, dining and canoodling with Caroline at a nearby café before he repairs to her room for sex before stumbling back to his studio in a state of inebriated inspiration. Having worked feverishly for a couple of hours, he tumbles into bed beside his wife and turns the light on to sleep. When Lord encounters him the next day, Giacometti is taking coffee with Pierre Matisse (James Faulkner). But he sweeps Lord off to the studio, where he resumes work and curses frequently as the paint refuses to do his bidding.

Needing more time to complete the portrait, Giacometti asks Lord if he can postpone his departure and he agrees. The artist confides that he has spent 37 years being a fraud, as he never finishes anything and has only stuck to his métier because he couldn't live with the shame of being a coward if he quit. After a while, Diego arrives with a bundle of money from a gallery. Lord laughs as Giacometti tosses the brown paper bag on to the floor and accuses him of ostentation. But the Swiss reveals that he distrusts banks and has hidden thousands of francs around his studio and only has a vague memory of their whereabouts. He insists he doesn't work to accrue wealth, but seems oblivious to the fact that his affluence and celebrity have enabled him to live his chosen lifestyle.

As he arrives on the third day, Lord sees Giacometti turning on the conniving charm in order to sell to a female collector. He jokes that he hasn't painted a nude in the flesh since the 1930s and informs Lord that he looks like a degenerate from the side. Yet, while he makes progress on the face with some white paint, Giacometti is suddenly stricken with despair and puts his head in his hands as he wonders why he bothers. Taking the opportunity to stand and stretch, Lord is bawled out for moving when Giacometti looks up. He is relieved when Annette comes to collect them for lunch and Lord feels awful for her when her husband wanders away from their table to consort with Caroline. She reassures him that she is used to his ways, just as he will be by the time the portrait is finished.

On Day 4, Giacometti is busy remoulding an existing sculpture when Lord arrives and he seems preoccupied. He suggests having a drink, but decides to work and touches up the nose before declaring himself famished. They repair to a small café, where the accustomed waiters serve him a dish of cold cuts and potatoes, along with two glasses of red wine and two strong coffees. Rather than work, however, Giacometti feels the need to walk and, as they wander through a cemetery, he persuades Lord to delay his flight for another few days. He also asks if he has ever wondered what it might be like to be a tree, just as he had previously asked if he had considered various forms of suicide.

Returning to the studio, Giacometti is distracted by Annette entertaining a Japanese man (Takatsuna Mukai) in her bedroom. No sooner has he returned from saying hello than Caroline bursts in. She is delighted that he has bought a car for her and she makes motoring noises as she takes Lord's portrait off the easel and steers it around the room. While he tries to work out what is going on, Caroline places an unfinished picture of herself in front of her lover and takes Lord's place on the chair. Pausing in the courtyard, he looks at Giacometti devoting his full attention to a gold-digger, while Annette pulls a net curtain across the window so Lord can't see her necking with her companion.

There is no sign of Giacometti when Lord arrives for the fifth day of the sitting. He chats with Diego, who discloses that he has started to read John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Suddenly, his brother storms through the wooden gate and drags a dustbin into the middle of the courtyard. Stomping up to the gallery in his studio, he unearths a bundle of sketches that he proceeds to rip up and burn because the collector didn't like the paper they were drawn on. Diego does nothing to stop him and walks Lord back to his lodgings. He gives him a bird sculpture he has done to make amends for a wasted day and opines that Giacometti is in a bad mood because Caroline has disappeared.

This bad temper continues into the evening, as Giacometti asks Annette to pose topless. He accuses her of wriggling and, when she counters that she has always tried to please him, he condemns her for wanting a home when he never did. She complains that he keeps her short of money and he throws banknotes at her so that she can buy the coat she insists she needs. Diego wanders in during the spat and knows not to get involved, as his sibling skulks off in search of a companion who is going to satisfy him on his own terms.

He walks the streets and winds up in a brothel, as his voice is heard telling Lord the next day that he used to lull himself to sleep by imagining himself raping and killing two innocent girls. Once again, the sitting goes badly and Giacometti threatens to abandon the portrait. But, as he slumps forward in despair, Caroline appears in the doorway and they exchange silent stares that restore the artist's spirit and, as he follows his mistress to a nearby bar, Lord returns to his rooms to explain in a testy transatlantic phone call why he is further extending his stay.

By Day 9, Lord has resigned himself to the long haul and is rewarded by a cemetery conversation about Cézanne being the last great artist and Picasso being a fraud who steals ideas from others and spouts nonsense in the form of pompous epithets. Three days later, after his morning swim, Lord goes to see the ceiling that Marc Chagall has painted at the Opéra. Annette is excited about seeing it and shows Lord the yellow dress she has bought for the occasion. But Giacometti dismisses the achievement as `house painting' and Lord requests a smoking break to calm himself down. He asks Diego how long this will go on and he shrugs a reply that portraits are never finished, even with a deadline.

They are interrupted by Caroline arriving in her new car and she insists on taking Giacometti and Lord for a ride into the country. The following day, however, he complains he has caught a chill and slinks off to bed after conceding that the picture might have defeated him. Annette returns home in a new yellow coat to learn that her husband is too sick to go to the Opéra and Lord leaves before being asked to stand in. He bumps into Caroline in a café, but she has no intention of visiting Giacometti, as he is no fun when he is unwell.

The next morning, Lord is happy to see Giacometti and Annette cuddling together on the bench outside Diego's workshop. Yet, when they return from another cemetery walk, they find the studio has been ransacked by Caroline's pimps, who are angry that Giacometti has fallen behind in his payments. Filling his raincoat pockets, he meets the pair (Philippe Spall and Gaspard Caens) at a cosy café and cuts a deal to pay both his arrears and a six-month advance to work and sleep with her. Lord is amazed to see him hand over such large sums so cheerfully, but Giacometti confides that he would have been lost without her.

Having promised to keep Lord for four more days only, Giacometti loses patience and smothers the portrait face with grey paint. Frustrated, Lord takes it into the courtyard to photograph for his ongoing journal and feels dismayed when Giacometti tries to boost his spirits by disclosing that he only gives up when he feels hopeful. Days 15, 16 and 17 pass in another montage, in which Annette and Diego sympathise with Lord, as Giacometti goes through peaks and troughs before once more obliterating the features with grey.

Yet again, Lord cancels his flight and returns for more punishment. But he makes a deal with Diego that he will pounce the next time he sees Giacometti reaching for the thick brush and Diego will rush in and pronounce the picture a decent start and a good place to stop. On Day 18, Lord watches for signs of resignation and leaps up when he thinks Giacometti is about to lose patience. Diego does his bit and Giacometti is convinced by their argument and the sitting finally comes to an end.

In his narrative summation, Lord reveals that the painting was exhibited Stateside and that he continued to correspond with Giacometti. The artist confessed to having enjoyed their collaboration and hoped to renew the acquaintance. But he died at the age of 65 in January 1966.

Anyone expecting a companion piece to Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse (1991) or Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun (1992) will be disappointed by a biopic that focuses more on the artistic psyche than the creative process. The camera frequently peeks over Giacometti's to see how he's getting on. But Cohen also stares deep into Lord's eyes, as he tries to fathom what is going on beneath the shock of grey hair that makes Rush look so like his character. However, Tucci prefers to leave Giacometti as much an enigma as Lord is a cipheritic American in Paris. Consequently, this feels like an unfinished sketch, which, in the circumstances, is entirely apt.

In attempting to convey Giacometti's artistic anguish and emotional turmoil, Rush sometimes lays on the patina of eccentric genius a little too thickly, while an Aussie twang occasionally undercuts the Swiss curses. Yet he nails the sense of suffering for one's art, while his conflicted affection for the ever-excellent Sylvie Testud and the rather jambonish Clémence Poésy is disarmingly touching. Also bearing a striking physical resemblance to his character, Hammer does well enough as the straight man, while Shalhoub is ironically droll as the artisan in the shadow of a famous brother who cannot function without him. However, while it complements Tucci's self-conscious efforts to prevent the action from feeling stagebound, Evan Lurie's score is less subtle, as it lurches between Gallic cliché, klezmer jazz and a rather pretty string and piano theme. But, for all the tantalising wit of the script, this is primarily a feast for the eyes, with the most indelible impression being left by that gloriously grim studio full of half-finished Giacometti figures.

With Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal having won all four Grand Slams between them during 2017, it seems apt that cinema should have focused on a couple of classic tennis rivalries. Emma Stone and Steve Carrel lined up across the net as Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Battle of the Sexes, while Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBeouf locked horns in Janus Metz's Borg vs McEnroe, which, fortunately, is rarely as prosaic as its title might suggest. This may seem like a drastic change of pace for the Swedish director behind the acclaimed Afghan war documentary, Armadillo (2010). But Metz and screenwriter Ronnie Sandahl actually made a film about the rivalry between Björn Borg and John McEnroe for the TV series, Clash of the Titans, hack in 1996.

Following some background captions and an André Agassi quotation about tennis being a microcosm of life, the action opens in Monaco in 1980, as Björn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) prepares to compete for his fifth consecutive Wimbledon singles title. Ever since he was a boy hitting against the garage door, Borg has dedicated himself to his sport and we see him dancing along a clay court baseline to return balls fired at him by a service machine. However, as a flurry of sound bites suggests, the ice-cool Swede faces a stiff challenge from John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf), a left-hander from Queens who has developed a reputation as a firebrand. Despite his outer calm, Borg has allowed McEnroe to get under his skin, so that even when he locks himself out of his car and has to do chores in a café to pay for a cup of coffee, he finds himself blenching at a newspaper story about his fiercest rival.

Across the Atlantic, McEnroe goes on a chat show and has to rein in his frustration as the host (Colin Stinton) keeps referring to Borg rather than focusing on him. Bored with the British press calling him `SuperBrat', McEnroe claims to have no interest in whether Borg ever loses his temper. Yet, as he arrives in London with Romanian girlfriend Mariana Simionescu (Tuva Novotny) to start practicing on grass with mentor Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgård), Borg has to fight back his annoyance that the court hasn't been sealed off and that Bergelin has failed to find the same car he had used during his previous Wimbledon campaigns. He also seems to be finding the hordes of screaming fans a bore and is snappish with Mariana when she tries to dissuade his business people from selling the photo rights to their forthcoming nuptials.

While McEnroe scrawls the draw on his lodging wall and Borg tests the tension of his rackets, we flashback to the tweenage Borg (Leo Borg, Björn's son) losing his temper during a match and a snooty Swedish tennis official informing his mother Margareta (Julia Marko-Nord) that winning isn't everything and that not everyone is suited to a game with certain standards. When he is given a six-month suspension for unsporting play, father Rune (Mats Blomgren) suggests selling his racket. But Bergelin (a onetime Wimbledon quarter-finalist and Davis Cup captain) has spotted something in Borg (who also excels at ice hockey) and persuades him that he can help control the demons that plague him when he plays and take him to the top of the sport.

Having irked McEnroe by being late for a pre-tournament press conference, the 24 year-old Borg worries that he will be forgotten if he only wins four titles in a row and asks Mariana if she can imagine him coping after tennis. She nods supportively, but he is nervous before his first round match against unseeded Egyptian Ismail El-Shafei (Mohamed Shabib). Bergelin advises him to stick to his metronomic style against a big hitter with little else to threaten him. But it takes some time for him to find his rhythm before he progresses, while McEnroe prepares for his own opener by hitting the town with doubles partner Peter Fleming (Scott Arthur) and compatriot contender Vitas Gerulaitis (Robert Emms). Yet, while he sinks glasses of champagne, McEnroe also hears about Borg's obsessive rituals from Gerulaitis, who claims that he is less an iceberg than a volcano ready to blow.

Another flashback shows the teenage McEnroe (Jackson Gann) donning his trademark headband and putting in the lonely hours on a New York court. Yet, rather than being praised by his mother Kay (Jane Perry) for his dedication, he is admonished for only getting 96% on a geography test because the world is a big place and the missing 4% might make all the difference as to whether he succeeds or fails. She asks if tennis is proving a distraction and we hurtle forward to McEnroe's second round tie with Australian Terry Rocavert, where he is ranting at the crowd for putting him off while serving. Watching on television, Mariana suggests he is a wild cannon. But Borg recognises a kindred spirit and thinks back to his teenage self (Marcus Mossberg) raging at every setback on court and being taught how to channel his emotions by Bergelin, who had tried to protect him from media hype after he became a Davis Cup star at the age of 15.

The sense that they have more in common than many suppose resurfaces when McEnroe storms into the Wimbledon changing-room while Borg is waiting to start his third round match against Australian Rod Frawley (Igor Tubic). Rain comes to Borg's aid, as he gets off to a poor start and he urges Bergelin to have play abandoned. But he reminds him of his duty to himself and a flashback to how Bergelin used to rile Borg during training sessions so that he would learn the value of self-control snaps him back to his best and he wins on the resumption without undue difficulty. But he blames his struggles on Bergelin failing to string his wooden rackets correctly and Mariana is stunned when the coach pulls over and gets out of the car when Borg threatens to sack him. When she tries to reassure him back at their digs, he tells her to stop pampering him and recognise that there is nothing easy about being Björn Borg.

As he goes for a run, he thinks back to the night Bergelin had told him that he was going to play New Zealander Onny Parun in the Davis Cup. But he makes him promise never to show a single emotion on the court again because it gives his opponent something to exploit and he needs to appear impregnable. Borg had thrown up before the match, but he had won and become an overnight sensation in the process. He won his first French Open in 1974 and his first Wimbledon came two years later. In each case, he was the youngest ever winner and Gerulaitis had taken him to Studio 54 in New York to enjoy his celebrity.

While Borg tries to sleep, Bergelin finds Mariana in the hotel corridor and invites her in for a drink. She recalls how Bergelin had come along on their first date after Borg had seen her play in the French Open and she asks why he got out of the car when Borg had fired him. He says he fears for him, as he has put so much into becoming the best that he has no idea how he will cope when he starts to lose on a regular basis. This drive to win is shared by McEnroe, however, who stops speaking to Fleming when they come up against each other in the quarter-final and seemingly takes an ankle support from his bag to undermine him before they even step on court. After the match, Fleming tells his friend that he will win Wimbledon one day, but that he will never be remembered as a great because nobody likes him.

As a youth. McEnroe had sought to impress his father (Ian Blackman) by doing complex multiplication sums and had been mortified when a dinner guest had posed an impossibly difficult puzzle. He still seeks his approval and has him accompany him to a business meeting about an advertising campaign pitting him as the rebel against Borg's automaton. But Borg has recognised that McEnroe uses his antics as a coping mechanism, just as he uses his sang froid. Thus, rather than being polar opposites, they are almost identical.

In the semi-final against unseeded American Brian Gottfried (Vincent Eriksson), Borg finds a way to win without playing well and is stung by press comment that McEnroe has described him as a machine that will eventually break down. He loses his temper en route to beating fellow bad boy Jimmy Connors (Tom Datnow) and then fumes at the press when they wish to discuss his behaviour rather than his talent. While he storms out of the media centre, Borg goes through his own private hell in the showers and the case is cannily made for them being driven to the edge of implosion in order to win.

But we get another insight into Borg's mania for perfectionism when he returns to Södertälje to knock the ball against the garage door for Argentinian television and struts back into his stretch limo when he can't remember which door he used to use and he has to watch old home movie footage to clarify things in his mind. Realising that he has a duty to stick with his prodigy, Bergelin seeks him out in the changing-rooms (which always seem to be conveniently empty regardless of how many matches are being played around the venue) and puts a protective arm around him. Borg rests his head on Bergelin's shoulder and accepts the empathy. But he doesn't need the reverse psychology when Bergelin barks at him to stop snivelling like a kid and either face up to the challenge that McEnroe poses or duck it by feigning injury.

A corny shot has the rivals sitting silently under the famous Rudyard Kipling quote about triumph and disaster, as they wait to go on to Centre Court. The crowd erupts as they come into view, as commentators from around the world set the scene and the BBC producer urges the sound engineer to keep the microphone nearest McEnroe turned down. McEnroe Senior sits in the box across from Mariana and Bergelin, as McEnroe takes the first two games of the first set. However, the controlled assurance that Metz has brought to the film to this juncture goes out of the window, as he throws the audiovisual kitchen sink at generating the excitement of a match whose outcome will be known to the majority of those watching.

Whereas in previous rounds he could keep the `staged' sport down to a minimum, Metz is forced to rely more heavily on his expert doubles for Borg (Finn Henrik Sillanpää) and McEnroe (Dane Thomas Kromann) and then have editors Per K. Kirkegaard and Per Sandholt cut into facial close-ups to allow Gudnason and LaBeouf to register the requisite emotions following each key point. However, not being as precise a lookalike as Gudnason, the latter struggles to capture McEnroe's on-court personality, as he loses the second set 5-7 and the third 3-6 after taking the first 6-1. The phoned-in commentaries hardly help maintain the tension levels, even though this is one of the most thrilling contests in tennis history.

McEnroe trembles with rage on his chair at the end of the third set and things don't go well at the start of the fourth, with dubious calls (in the days before on-court appeals) convincing the commentators that an eruption is inevitable. At one change round, Borg tells him to keep playing his game, as it's a great match and McEnroe rallies. Mystifyingly, Metz chooses this moment to show much of the play in top shots that only show half of the court and give no sense of the ebb and flow of the set, as Borg gets to match point. He hits an ace long and is so rattled by his failure to close out the final that he his serve is broken and misses five more championship points in a tie-break that ends with the American winning 18-16 to take the match into a fifth and deciding set.

As he sits on his chair, with Bergelin willing him to take it one point at a time, Borg recalls the strop in the forest when he was a teenager and how he managed to regain his composure by looking at the sunlight glinting through the trees. He takes the first game as though nothing untoward had just happened, as Metz cuts between scoreboard flashes, facial close-ups and random points shown from all manner of angles to the emotive throb of the orchestral score composed by Vladislav Delay, Jon Ekstrand, Carl-Johan Sevedag and Jonas Struck. We are even treated to a couple of childhood flashbacks. The intent is to turn great sport into pulsating cinema, but the fussiness of the approach simply calls attention to the technique and deflects away from the athleticism and tenacity of the players at the very moment when the game should be everything.

Suddenly, its 7-6 and McEnroe is serving to save the match. At championship point, the Swedish commentator superstitiously lights a cigar to help his countryman win and it does the trick, as Borg sinks to his knees with relief at having notched up his fifth win. As Mariana and Bergelin hug and Borg receives congratulations at his chair, McEnroe shrugs in the direction of his father, who averts his eyes in disappointment. During the presentation ceremony, the commentators opine that plucky McEnroe has won the hearts of the British public, while Borg will forever be the king of tennis.

During the post-tournament function, Borg manages a smile in Bergelin's direction, but he takes the first opportunity to leave with Mariana. At the airport, however, she is left to feel like an outsider when they bump into McEnroe in the departure lounge and Borg goes over to shake his hand. They exchange a few awkward words before giving each other a manly hug that seems to be the start of a beautiful friendship (Borg was best man at McEnroe's wedding). Closing captions opt not to mention that McEnroe beat Borg in the US Open final a couple of months later, but reveal that he became World No.1 the following year after defeating him at Wimbledon. This loss prompted Borg to retire at the age of 26 and the film closes with photos of the real Borg and McEnroe and the pivotal people in their lives (although we learn nothing about the subsequent fate of Mariana or Bergelin). The intriguing epilogue allows fictional first-timer Metz to return to the more considered style he had utilised before the final had got the best of him. However, many a fine sporting movie has been spoilt by the shaky reconstruction of the action and this otherwise fascinating biopic certainly won't be the last. In truth, the Swedish film-maker appears more interested in his compatriot, with McEnroe often being reduced to a necessary bit player alongside Mariana and Bergelin in Borg's battle with himself. However, the fact that Gudnason is such a dead ringer for Borg and nails his mannerisms on and off the court gives him an advantage over LaBeouf (no stranger to opprobrium himself), who never looks or sounds enough like the volatile McEnroe to atone for the fact that he also misses the gait that could switch from petulant strop to peacock strut in the course of a single point.

As for the central thesis, Metz and Sandahl concoct a convincing case that Borg employed the ultimate poker face to steel himself and disconcert his opponents, while McEnroe employed diametric tactics to achieve the same results. For many sports fans, however, it would be more instructive to see a documentary examination of this supposition, as, despite the excellence of Niels Thastums cinematography and Lina Nordqvist's production design, the 26-minute summation of the 1980 Wimbledon Men's Singles Final currently available on YouTube does a much better job in capturing the excitement of the occasion, the brilliance of the play and the begrudging respect that initially sparked Björn Borg and John McEnroe's four-decade friendship.

Two decades have passed since Burford's own Simon West made a magnificent impression with his debut feature, Con Air (1997). During this period, he has helmed blockbuster smashes like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and such uncompromising cult items as The Mechanic (2011) and Stolen (2012). He has even tried his hand at franchise entries like The Expendables 2 (2012) and the computer-generated horror, Night of the Dead: Darkest Dawn (2015). However, his bid to return to live-action with a bang proves something of a disappointment, as Stratton lacks the budget to enable it to stand out from its competitors in the crowded Bond-lite sub-genre. Adapted by Duncan Falconer from his own novel, this follows his memoir, First Into Action: A Dramatic Personal Account of Life Inside the SBS, in paying macho homage to the Special Boat Service of the Royal Navy. But it seems unlikely that this undemandingly formulaic actioner has enough about it to launch a series.

Following a caption explaining the wartime origins of the SBS and the influence it had on the formation of the US Navy Seals, the action pitches us somewhere near the Iranian border as ops crew Gemma Chan, Jake Fairbrother and Tom Felton use a computer feed to guide SBS officer Dominic Cooper and Navy Seal Tyler Hoechlin through a water pipe into a large industrial facility. Having nearly run out of air while swimming, the pair find the staff dead in a control room and have to fight a gun battle to get to a vehicle that will take them to a chopper pick-up. As they flee, Hoechlin is hit in the throat and his phone rings inside his body bag back at base, as his wife sends him the first picture of their newborn baby.

Distraught, Cooper returns to London to drown his sorrows with old salt Derek Jacobi, who lives on a neighbouring houseboat. However, boss Connie Nielsen breaks the news that his violation of Iranian air space and slaughter of civilians has caused an international incident. Moreover, the bio-weapons (nicknamed `Satan's Snow') that he had been sent to steal have fallen into enemy hands and, while Cooper apologises, he claims that the mission had been compromised and that his fury is reserved for those who set him up. Having been reprimanded for letting Cooper disregard orders, Chan and Felton give him a frosty reception. But he gets off to a solid start with Seal newcomer Austin Stowell, who once had his life saved by Hoechlin in Afghanistan.

At a debriefing session, Chan presents an image of the man who co-ordinated the attack on Cooper and Hoechlin and Nielsen recognises him as Thomas Kretschmann, a crack Russian agent who has been presumed dead for two decades. She confides that he is a ruthless operator and that they will need their wits about them to outfox him. Shortly afterwards, someone uses Satan's Snow on a small village and the unit wonder whether Kretschmann is taunting them or advertising his wares to a wealthy buyer. They suspect Rome-based weapons maker Igal Naor of making the device and snatch him off the street and threaten to kill his son unless he gives them the name of the person who hired him. This leads (after disposing of Naor) to the backstreet workshop of dental equipment engineer Rinat Khismatouline, which Cooper and Stowell photograph and bug before making their getaway in the nick of time. They watch Kretschmann arrive to collect the dispersal drones, but realises the room has been compromised and kills Khismatouline and his bodyguards. Stowell wants to nab Kretschmann while his goons are loading up the van and disobeys Cooper's order by making a gung-ho, gun-blazing assault on them. Chan rams the van to block its getaway, but Kretschmann speeds off regardless and, following a car chase, smashes into a bar in order to slip away through a back alley.

Back in Blighty, Cooper meets Nielsen in a park beside the Thames and she informs him that Kretschmann was sheltered by Olegar Fedoro, the man who had been sent to assassinate him and who had sheltered him while he rose through the ranks in Moscow. However, when he asked Kretschmann to ambush Cooper in Iran, he was murdered and a state espionage operation became a matter of personal vengeance. But Cooper has seen the files and has twigged that Kretschmann also has it in for Nielsen, as she had duped him into thinking she was going to defect when she was a young agent and then framed him as a double agent after seducing him. She urges Cooper to ignore the idea she might be playing a dishonourable game and he nods in acknowledgement that Kretschmann is the problem.

Needing Stowell on his side, Cooper takes him to meet Jacobi, who reveals that he had plucked him from an orphanage when he was nine and had been something of a mentor ever since. However, not everyone in the team is pulling in the same direction, as Felton is a spy and Kretschmann sends him a letter threatening to expose him unless he steals the drone that was captured in Rome. Somewhat bafflingly, Felton then tells Nielsen that her situation might be helped by negotiating the release of an American journalist being held by Chechen rebels. However, when Cooper and Stowell go to Uzbekistan for the exchange, they spot the hostage is missing his telltale tattoo and shoot the go-betweens and find their man garrotted in the back of a black van. Cooper outs Felton as a traitor, but he vanishes before Nielsen can neutralise him. However, Chan and Fairbrother have tapped into the captured drone and discovered that it contains the target data and that Kretschmann is planning to unleash Satan's Snow on London. Luckily, Fairbrother finds the ship unloading the drones at Canary Wharf and an SBS unit is sent to intercept. But, despite bullets flying everywhere during a high-speed pursuit, Kretschmann manages to escape up river, while a closing bridge enables him to slip into the canal system before Cooper and Stowell can stop him.

Back at HQ, Chan, Nielsen and Fairbrother watch with concerned intensity via a laptop link and tut with frustration when their foe evades them. However, seconds later, Chan is being abducted in her car by Felton, who tries to convince her that he didn't mean for things to go so wrong. While driving, Chan calls Cooper on her phone so he can hear Felton confess and shoot himself in the backseat. In a bid for redemption, however, he had taken Chan to the Camden bus garage and she is able to see Kretschmann and his oppos arrive with their big white parcel.

Trapped on the top deck of a red No.9 bus, Chan uses the flash on her phone to signal her whereabouts to Cooper after she passes Trafalgar Square. They follow on to a quieter park road, where they engage with the enemy. Stowell shoots and steers, while Cooper clambers aboard the bus and takes out Kretschmann's crew, while Chan cowers in the front seat powerless to stop him from preparing the drone and winding back the bus's roof to launch. However, Stowell kills the driver and flips the bus before rolling his own car into a hedge. Although badly injured, Cooper crawls out of the wreckage and tries to stop Kretschmann priming the drones. He enters the password as Stowell hauls Cooper away and a special unit arrives to bazooka the bus and the drones as they are about to take off, with the heat of the explosion destroying the chemical weapon load.

As life goes on as normal in the West End, Cooper hints at a romance with Chan, while he takes Stowell fishing with Jacobi after hearing he has decided to stay in Britain and see what happens next. But few watching this persistently pedestrian picture will hope that it takes place on screen. Falconer might shift books, but he still has a lot to learn about scriptwriting, although he is given precious little assistance by his partner in crime, Warren Davis II. Yet, while the story structure and characterisation are feeble, it's the infuriatingly fussy editing of Andrew MacRitchie that prevents the plot from gaining any momentum. The action sequences are also bereft of pace, as the incessant cutting saps the kinetic energy from Felix Wierdemann's imagery. Nathaniel Méchaly's prosaic score does nothing to raise the pulse rate, either.

As for the performers, Dominic Cooper does what he can with a role that Henry Cavill showed excellent judgement in rejecting. But only so much running around and shouting can make up for the thinness of the character delineation and the miserable reliance on expository dialogue to clunk the plot pieces into place. Derek Jacobi contributes a bluff cameo, while Thomas Kretschmann summons some hissable menace and Worcester College law graduate Gemma Chan rises above the clichéd inscrutability she is asked to convey. However, there's no escaping the transparency of Tom Felton's twitchy treachery, the peculiar inexactitude of Connie Nielsens British accent and the stolidity of Simon West's direction. Yet, he partially redeems himself with the best London bus thrill sequence since young Desmond Tester took a ride with one of Oskar Homolka's film cans in Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936).

A true-life story is related with technical aplomb but little dramatic finesse in Scott Waugh's 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain. Adapted from Crystal Clear, the account of his ordeal that former French Olympic ice hockey player Eric LeMarque wrote with Davin Seay, this owes obvious stylistic debts to Danny Boyle's 127 Hours (2010) and Joe Carnahan's The Grey (2011). But Waugh, who made the transition from stuntman to director with Act of Valour (2012) and Need for Speed (2014), struggles to integrate a string of melodramatic flashbacks into the spectacular footage amassed in the High Sierras.

Over an aerial shot of snow-covered mountains, Eric LeMarque (Josh Hartnett) explains that he always needed to go that little bit further to feel a rush and developed an ability to bounce back from anything that sport or life could throw at him. As the story starts in February 2004, as LeMarque spends the first day snowboarding to prepare himself for a court date after he crashed his car while under the influence of crystal meth. His mother Susan (Mira Sorvino) had despaired of him for throwing away his athletic career on an addiction she fails to understand. But he can't help himself and has to break the cabin door down after he locks himself out in bare feet while taking a hit of a supply that he has stashed on the verandah.

Propping the door shut with a chair, LeMarque has to run for the bus and is forced to accept a lift from Sarah (Sarah Dumont), a passing motorist on her way to work at the local mountain rescue station. Her Alsatian shows affection as LeMarque sits in the back of the flat truck and Sarah wishes him a good day's fun in the sun. All seems to be going well, as LeMarque makes several runs to driving rock music and he keeps topping up his buzz from a supply in a tin in his jacket. He calls Susan, but she lets the message go to voicemail and LeMarque decides to have one last run as visibility begins to deteriorate.

Instead of sticking to the familiar route, however, he decides to take the advanced run and quickly finds himself lost and unable to get a signal on his phone. Unable to see where he is, as the weather closes in, he snaps off his board and begins to trudge down the mountain. Slumping in exhaustion beside a tree, he thinks back to his father David (Jason Cottle) chewing him out for falling over on the ice when he was a kid (Kale Brady Culley) and this determination not to quit prompts LeMarque to get back on his board, as the dusk falls and the view clears. However, he doesn't know the route and has to grab a tree to stop himself from speeding off a precipice.

Having failed to get his matches to light to start a fire, he also has to use his board to scare off a pair of wolves that block his path and he bellows at them to send them scuttling before dashing through the snow to dig himself a hole in which to shelter for the night. As he lies under the board, he remembers coming downstairs to see his father raging at his mother for allowing his son to grow up soft and she catches sight of him peering through a half-open door.

The next morning, LeMarque tries to get his bearings, but ends up writing the he is a lost idiot in the snow with a branch. He makes good downhill progress until he comes to a flat expanse and begins schlepping across. As he plants his board in the snow and reaches into his pocket for his meth, LeMarque falls through the ice into a lake and dives down after the little plastic packet before struggling back to the surface.

Freezing cold, he shivers against a rock and thinks back to the coach of the Boston Bruins (Marty McSorely) lecturing him for not being a team player after he scored a solo goal in training and then picked a fight with a teammate who disapproved of his showboating. Stripping naked to dry his clothes, LeMarque vows to get off the mountain and empties the bag of meth into the snow. As dusk falls, he sees lights twinkling from a hotel on a nearby hill and he howls with the distant wolves as he dresses in the knowledge that he is going to be okay.

Yet, when he wakes next morning, the pain in the leg he cut kicking the door open intensifies and a lack of food and the cold causes him to hallucinate and feel weak. As he collapses in the snow, he recalls an ex-teammate offering him drugs for the first time to recapture the excitement of playing top class sport. He is reluctant to snort at first, but feels obliged to his host and his downward spiral begins.

As another day passes, he wakes to find his leg is starting to discolour and he has to rip the bandage off the dried scab in order to soldier on. Looking up, however, he can no longer see the resort on the neighbouring peak and he falls to the ground cursing God. A cutaway shows Susan reading her Bible and leaving a message on his phone and a flashback shows her trying to stop him smashing the trophies in his den because his addled self regards them as a yoke around his neck.

As Day Five dawns, LeMarque realises that he has frostbite in his right leg and he tries to compose himself before lowering the bandage. Having survived thus far on frozen snow in his meth bag, he nibbles at the scab before storing it in his pocket. With his phone battery now dead, he only has his radio transmitter to depend on and he falls asleep hoping that someone will come looking for him.

Fortunately, when he misses his court date, Susan calls one of LeMarque's pals and she drives to the mountains to find the cabin empty. She goes to the search and rescue station and Sarah recognises LeMarque from his photo and goes up in a red-and-white helicopter to find him. As she flies over him, however, he is hidden by a clump of trees and he lies on his back in despair as the search ends for the night. Back at base, Susan reminds Sarah how much she means to her mother and pleads with her to find her son or her life will no longer have meaning.

The next morning, with Sarah reluctant to send out another flight, LeMarque struggles to the top of the highest peak he can reach and records a message for Susan on his transmitter. He flashes back to the day his dad walked out on him, the day he quit the Bruins and blames himself for being a coward after all. Just as Susan is about to give up hope, a bleep comes through on the system at the rescue station and Sarah spots LeMarque unconscious in the snow. She is lowered with a stretcher and tends to him as the chopper returns to base, where Susan's prayers have been answered.

Cutting to a shot of the real Eric LeMarque giving a pep talk to a young ice hockey team, the film ends with captions explaining that he lost both legs from the knee down and now relies upon prosthetics. However, he returned to board down the mountain that had almost claimed him - rather as Kevin Pearce did in Lucy Walker's exceptional documentary, The Crash Reel (2013) - and insert footage shows him with his family and making the most of his second chance as an inspirational speaker.

The decision to end a fictional reconstruction with footage of the subject of the story always begs the question why the film-maker didn't make a documentary with reconstructions to illustrate the more dramatic incidents. This would certainly have made more sense here, as Madison Turner's screenplay singularly fails to merge the backstory with Josh Hartnett's heroic performance. He also struggles in the flashbacks, however, as the cookie-cutter dialogue offers such little insight into his personality and the self-destructive demons that drove LeMarque down the path to ruin. Poor Mira Sorvino is even more poorly served by speeches that sound like they have been imported from a mid-1970s TV-movie. But she is such a fine performer that even the 11th hour heart-to-heart with Sarah Dumont's cipher rescuer sounds less garishly mawkish than Nathan Furst's ever-swelling orchestral score.

On the visual side, Waugh and cinematographer Michael Svitak do a fine job capturing the forbidding majesty of the terrain and Hartnett's insignificance, as he becomes little more than a moving speck. But the over-reliance on melodrama consistently threatens to undermine the magnitude of LeMarque's achievement of beating the wilderness and getting his life back on track.

Despite the title, there isn't a hint of Kate Bush in Australian Ben Young's debut feature, Hounds of Love. That said, you won't be able to listen to the 1967 Moody Blues classic `Nights in White Satin', the 1970 Cat Stevens single, `Lady D'Arbanville' or Joy Division's 1980 release, `Atmosphere', in quite the same way after viewing an abduction thriller that draws on the crimes of Perth serial killers Eric Edgar Cooke (who was known as `The Night Caller') and David and Catherine Birnie, the Moorhouse Murderers, who dispatched four young girls before a fifth managed to escape and raise the alarm. Bound to invite comparisons with Justin Kurzel's Snowtown (2011), this represents an impressive step-up for Young after making his mark with music videos and the shorts The Planet Lonely (2008), Something Fishy (2010) and Bush Basher (2011).

Opening with a slow-motion tracking shot past a school netball court in Perth in December 1987, the action follows married couple Emma Booth and Stephen Curry, as they offer Lisa Bennet a lift home and proceed to chain her up in a room in their seemingly unremarkable suburban house. Nearby, 17 year-old classmate Ashleigh Cummings drops in on slacker boyfriend Harrison Gilbertson to get one of his old essays to save time doing her homework. She is coming to terms with the fact that parents Susie Porter and Damian de Montemas are about to get divorced and sits with little interest in a lesson about the mysterious 1967 disappearance of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt.

Ignoring the consoling words of the teacher, Cummings goes to see her wealthy surgeon father, who has a puppy for her. Booth and Curry also have a dog, who gnaws on a bone in a garden below the airport flight path. A Christmas carol plays on the radio, as Booth cleans up the bloody mess in Bennet's room before curling up on the bed while Curry kills their guest and bundles her body into the boot of his car. He buries her in a remote spot in dense woodland, while Booth hangs the bed linen on the line beneath a clear blue sky.

Despising Porter for leaving De Montemas, Cummings resents having to spend two nights a week at her daggy bungalow. Thus, when Porter ticks her off for cribbing from Gilbertson's essay, she sneaks out of her bedroom window to go to a party. Spooked by some yobs cruising in their car, she accepts a lift from Curry and Booth, who have stopped to offer her some dope and suggest that she calls a cab from their place. However, Booth spikes her beer and Cummings has barely noticed the kinky videos beside the television when she begins to feel woozy. Unnerved by her hosts gyrating suggestively to The Moody Blues, Cummings gets up to leave. But she is bundled screaming into a side room and chained to the bed, as Booth pleasures her moustachioed spouse.

Following another stylised ultra-slow track along Malcolm Street, Booth realises that Curry has taken a shine to Cummings, as he rejects his neatly laid-out breakfast. However, he is furious with her for allowing the dog to mess in the corridor and Cummings watches as she kneels to clean it up. Booth unlocks one of the handcuffs to change a soiled sheet and warns Cummings that they will get along fine if she behaves herself. Remembering Booth mentioning two children from a previous relationship the night before, Cummings asks if Curry is the reason they no longer live with her. But she snaps back that he takes good care of her and leaves Cummings to brood on her plight while she takes a bath at knifepoint.

Meanwhile, Porter has discovered that her daughter is missing and calls around her friends. But Curry has run into a problem of his own, as he owes money to the menacing Fletcher Humphrys, who warns him that there will be trouble if he fails to pay. Back at the house, Cummings realises she isn't being held for ransom when Booth sits her down at the kitchen table and coerces her write a letter informing Porter that she has met a man who has swept her away to Adelaide to make a fresh start. She also encourages Cummings to mention that she admires the way that Porter has stood on her own two feet and intends following her example.

As Booth is taking Cummings to the bathroom, Curry gets home and insists on accompanying her himself. He locks the door and Booth lights a bong to try and remain calm. But she is terrified of being replaced and bangs on the door. When Curry opens it, she kisses him fiercely and he is distracted enough for Cummings to force the window. She is prevented from climbing out by the barking dog in the garden, but hides in the bathtub and panics Booth and Curry to search for her outside. Cummings grabs a kitchen knife and looks for another way out, but Curry pins her down and they just get her back in the bed when an angry neighbour comes to complain about the noise and vows that he will do everything in his power to prevent Booth regaining custody of her kids.

Fearful that Curry will blame her for the intrusion, Booth whispers that she loves him. However, he callously asks how she would cope without seeing him again, as he orders her to walk the dog. She posts the note in Porter's mailbox and calls social services to request permission to visit her children. But, while she is out, Curry attempts to rape Cummings and is only stopped when she soils herself and he pulls away in disgust. Dismayed to find underwear on the floor, Booth thinks the worst when a naked Curry walks past her to take a nap. As he sleeps, Cummings attempts to convince Booth that he is using her and has bought her the dog as a surrogate child. When Curry wakes, Booth puts a knife to her throat and only calms down when he persuades her that he had been preparing Cummings for a sex game and orders Booth to check the washing-machine for the sullied sheet. Mollified, she succumbs to his sweet talk and promises that he will kill Cummings after the weekend. They close the bedroom door as Cummings screams in dread.

The following day, Curry drives to the forest to dig a grave (to the accompaniment of Cat Stevens), while Booth admires herself in the mirror before taunting Cummings about having read the diary she had found in her bag. She sneers that nothing would have happened to her if she had just obeyed her mother and suggests that Porter isn't even looking for her. But she is frantic with worry, despite the police reassuring her that Cummings has merely run away and will soon be back with her tail between her legs. However, she gets the idea to call Gilbertson and show him the message and he spots that Cummings has used their secret code to provide them with an address.

Booth bathes a badly bruised Cummings and chains her back to the bed as Curry gets home. He is livid to find the dog has dirtied the carpet again and Booth gets beaten as she tries to prevent him from kicking the animal to death. She sobs on the kitches floor and takes to her bed, as Curry puts the cadaver in the boot of his car. Sitting beside her, he apologises for letting Cummings come between them and promises to get rid of her and focus on recovering Booth's kids.

As Porter drives to Malcolm Street, Booth forces Cummings to write another letter saying she is in Adelaide and happy. She then makes her swallow some aspirin. But they are interrupted by a knock at the door, as Humphrys comes for his money. While Curry rips open the Christmas cards that Booth has stolen from an apartment block in the hope of finding cash, Humphrys watches Porter, De Montemas and Gilbertson asking a woman across the road if she has seen Cummings. Booth keeps a knife at the teenager's throat, as her mother calls her name. But Cummings derides her for lacking the courage to kill her and Booth snaps when Curry starts to throttle their captive and she stabs him in the back. He struggles to his feet to confront her, but she stabs him repeatedly in the stomach before he slumps to the floor. Seeing her opportunity, Cummings climbs out of the bathroom window and walks past the bloodied Booth on the driveway before running after Porter's retreating car, which stops for a slow-motion reunion.

Echoes of Jennifer Lynch's Chained (2012) can be heard throughout this effectively unpleasant character study. Yet, as we learn so little about the resourceful victim's mindset during her ordeal, the fascination lies less with the fate of Ashleigh Cummings than with the tensions between the wickedly calculating and humanisingly vulnerable Booth and Curry, whose swaggering cruelty is exposed as snivelling cowardice in the throwaway scene outside the corner shop when Humphrys demands his money and tosses a snatched packet of cigarettes on the pavement. Once or twice, Young veers towards torture porn. But he keeps the worse excesses off screen and leaves the audience to surmise what the terrorised teen might be enduring.

However, the final reel has been somewhat botched, as Gilbertson's codebreaking over-conveniently brings Porter to the scene of the crime just as Curry and Booth are falling apart. Booth's decision to punish Curry rather than Cummings also seems contrived, even though he quite clearly has it coming for tormenting her for so long. But Young's script will leave many puzzled why the neighbours ignored what must have been pretty voluble screams and why they weren't reported to the cops for their recurring breaches of the peace. Nevertheless, the performances are strong throughout, with Booth particularly touching as a woman who has nothing left to lose. The squalid authenticity of Clayton Jauncey's production design and the sinister stealthy of Michael McDermott's prowling camerawork also merit mention, along with Merlin Eden's adept editing and Dan Lascombe's unsettling electronica score.