Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 19/1/2012)

Having imposed martial law in preventing a band of discontented citizens led by Cassius (Ashraf Barhom) and Tamora (Lubna Azabal) from occupying the main grain depository in `a place calling itself Rome', Caius Martius (Fiennes) sets off for the city of Corioles to confront the Voluscian army led by the ruthless Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler). After fierce street fighting, Martius wins the day and returns to the capital to a hero's welcome from General Cominius (John Kani) and his ally Menenius (Brian Cox).

Martius insists he is only a soldier. But his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), who has dedicated her life to his career, is fiercely proud of his achievements and dismisses the fears of daughter-in-law Virgilia (Jessica Chastain) that the newly dubbed Coriolanus's elevated status will be his undoing However, her misgivings prove well founded, as tribunes Brutus (Paul Jesson) and Sicinius (James Nesbit) turn the people against her husband and he is forced into exile, where he seeks sanctuary with Aufidius and enlists his help to secure bloody revenge.

As Coriolanus is so infrequently staged or studied, Fiennes and Logan are able to hack chunks out of Shakespeare's second-longest text without too many viewers being much the wiser. Consequently, they can get away with dispensing with entire scenes and soliloquies as easily as they can turn an earnest discussion of the worsening crisis into a TV debate between David Yelland, Nikki Amuka-Bird and anchorman Jon Snow. Similarly, they can borrow from recent news footage to reinvent pitched battles as inner-city fire fights between snipers and foot patrols.

The purists will bridle at such liberties. But, taking his cues from Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995) and Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Fiennes keeps the gimmicks to a minimum in combining action man intrepidity, political intrigue, domestic strife and psychological trauma into an abrasive and accessible drama. Moreover, he succeeds in drawing unforced comparisons between the classical disconnection between the self-serving ruling elite, the armed forces and the common populace and the fissures that have widened between the same groups since the declaration of the War on Terror.

Fiennes might have limited the number of jarring accents (although this was always going to be difficult in a co-production shot in Serbia and Montenegro) and resisted the temptation to have cinematographer Barry Ackroyd repeat the handheld hijinks he performed in Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning, but highly overrated combat saga, The Hurt Locker (2008). But Fiennes does succeed in making both the verse and the internecine power games intelligible to the uninitiated and in preventing the diametrically opposed acting styles of Redgrave and Cox and Butler and Nesbitt from clashing too distractingly.

He also delivers a fine performance himself, as the seething, shaven headed and tattooed warrior who resorts to the violence he best understands after losing control of his own destiny to those seeking to bask in or exploit his glory. Making effective use of tight close-ups, Fiennes credibly creates a macho man more used to doing than communicating and his inability to ensure that his courage, loyalty and commitment (rather than his contempt for the rabble) speak for themselves against the glib barbs being used against him by careerist politicians has a contemporary relevance that is never as insistent as Ilan Eshkeri's occasionally bombastic score.

Abel Korzeniowski's music is even more problematic in Madonna's visually slick, but structurally cumbersome, historically slipshod and dramatically inert second feature, W.E. Co-scripted by Madonna: Truth or Dare director Alek Keshishian, this is more a treatise on the elusiveness of true love and the pitfalls of celebrity than a considered account of the 1930s romance that convinced Edward VIII to renounce his empire for a two-time American divorcée. Indeed, Madonna and Keshishian are so superficially engaged with the story of Wallis Simpson and her prince that they cross-cut it with a back-up plotline set in 1998, which centres on an unhappy Manhattan wife who becomes obsessed with the couple during her visits to the associated artifacts on display at Sotheby's prior to their auction.

Arianne Phillips's costumes are exceptional and production designer Martin Childs amusingly contrasts Deco chic, royal lustre and New York nouveau riche, while editor Danny B. Tull fashions Hagen Bogdanski's glossy images and newsreel facsimiles into the kind of restless montages that were all the rage in pop videos when Madonna was at her peak. There are also a couple of casting coups, with James Fox playing the dying George V and his son Laurence doing his level best to avoid comparisons with Colin Firth as the stuttering Bertie. Judy Parfitt and Natalie Dormer also pass muster as Queen Mary and the Duchess of York, while David Harbour does a nice line in decent covishness as the cuckolded Ernest Simpson.

However, James D'Arcy neither looks nor sounds like the dashing David (as the heir to the throne was known to his intimates), while Abbie Cornish is equally ineffective as Wally Winthrop, the latterday Wallis whose distress at being unable to conceive is compounded by the petulant (and sometimes violent) disinterest of philandering psychiatrist husband Richard Coyle. However, just as Wallis drifted into an affair with the playboy Prince of Wales, so Wally finds unexpected solace in the arms of Russian security guard Oscar Isaac, who spies on her via CCTV screens as her Sotheby daydreams allow Madonna to flashback to unconvincingly coincidental incidents in the life of Mrs Simpson.

Such period-hopping tactics are nothing new and it took a director and screenwriter of the calibre of Stephen Daldry and David Hare to prevent similar action from lapsing into trite melodramatics in their adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours (2002). Unfortunately, Madonna and Keshishian are not in the same league and the transitions are often as ungainly as the graceless dialogue and such excisable episodes as Wally's trip to Paris to inspect the Wallis letters owned by Mohammed Al Fayed (Haluk Bilginer) and the neverland meetings between the two women, in which they sympathise with each other's plight.

What is most disappointing about the picture, however, is that is wastes a performance of considerable poise and poignancy by Andrea Riseborough, who not only physically resembles Mrs Simpson, but also nearly pulls off the difficult task of reinventing the fortysomething gold-digger and possible Nazi sympathiser of legend by conveying something of the emotional turmoil that Madonna insists she must have experienced as what started out as a harmless affair with a future king saddled her with a puerile paramour and pitched her into a maelstromic constitutional crisis that condemned the pair to perpetual exile as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Yet, while she hints at the magnitude of Wallis's sacrifice, the director (who clearly identifies with a fellow countrywoman falling foul of the vicious British press) would seemingly rather show Riseborough gyrating to `Pretty Vacant' by The Sex Pistols at a benzedrine-fuelled soirée and Chubby Checker's `The Twist' at the dying duke's bedside than attempt any serious psychological analysis.

La Ciccone includes the controversial German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl among the thanked in the closing credits, but her debt in these instances should be to Sofia Coppola, whose 2006 costume fantasy, Marie Antoinette, was packed with similarly calculated anachronisms. Perhaps Madonna was striving for something to set the picture apart from Tom Hooper's more traditional depiction of the period in The King's Speech (2010). Or was she simply determined to show that her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom (2008), was a blip and that this sophomore effort is the `Masterpiece' to which she alludes in the Golden Globe-winning theme song?

Around the time the world was gripped by this story, Jean Vigo was completing what would be the final feature before his untimely death at the age of 29. One of the key works of French poetic realism, L'Atalante (1934) caused a sensation when it was restored a couple of decades ago and it is back in cinemas again to remind audiences jaded by 3-D and CGI of film's unique ability to tell stories in simple images from life that delight the eye, challenge the mind and stir the soul.

Accompanied by the residents of a country village, newlyweds Jean Dasté and Dita Parlo stroll to the riverbank to board his barge, L'Atalante, and resume his passage from Le Havre to Paris. She has never left home before and he only knows the canals between the coast and the capital. But second-in-command Michel Simon is a man of the world and he shows Parlo keepsakes from his travels (including a dead buddy's jar-preserved hands) in a cabin overrun with impish kittens.

Despite being enchanted by Simon's tales, Parlo sufficiently keeps her wits about her to deflect his clumsy attempt at seduction by coaxing him into modelling the dress she is making. However, she is unable to prevent Dasté from becoming increasingly jealous of her friendship with Simon and cabin boy Jean Lefebvre and he further sulks after she delights in the conjuring tricks performed by peddler Gilles Margaritis in a waterside bistro.

Thus, when Parlo defies his orders and slips away to see the City of Light, Dasté casts off without her and she is left to fend for herself on the street after being robbed. But Dasté quickly realises his error and rediscovers his feelings for Parlo after seeing her face on plunging his head beneath the water in what she insists is the only test of true love. They are reunited, but, such is the tantalising mix of fantasy and reality that Vigo employs that it is by no means certain that they will live happily ever after.

Luminously photographed in monochrome by Boris Kaufman and accompanied by Maurice Jaubert's even more impossibly romantic score, Vigo's sole feature is a fascinating blend of conventionality and nonconformism. The marital melodrama turns around the chauvinism of the crew members and Parlo's inability to find a niche in a floating milieu that contrasts starkly with the stable environment she has left behind. But, as in countless screen love stories before and since, the attracted opposite kiss and make up in the final reel and, even though some might object to the domestic tyranny to which Parlo submits, few would wish them anything but happiness.

Nevertheless, as befits the son of an anarchist, Vigo cannot resist either revisiting the Surrealist subversion of his classic school study Zéro de conduite (1933) or espousing its anti-bourgeois sentiments in his depiction of the relationship between the staid Dasté and the genially boorish Simon. Thus, rather than simply being a touching tale of two hearts, this is a political tract on the continuing merits of those revolutionary tenets liberty, equality and fraternity. However, it is also a celebration of sexuality, with the climactic shot of the phallic barge gliding along the sunlit canal being as risqué as anything by the period's chief provocateur Luis Buñuel in Un Chien andalou (1929) or L'Age d'or (1930).

The discussion of such intimate matters is considerably more prudish in Beijing-based actor Sam Voutas's feature bow, Red Light Revolution, which is somewhat surprising given that this is China's first sex shop comedy. Pitched somewhere between a Carry On film and The Full Monty (1997), this bawdy romp about little people bucking the system says as much about its Australian director as it does about shifting social and economic attitudes in a country that is increasingly open to outside influences and very much prone to the problems brought about by the global slowdown. But, while the humour may occasionally be too localised or broad, this is pleasingly amusing fare that benefits greatly from the brisk byplay between the anti-heroic Jun Zhao and the feisty Vivid Wang.

Having lost his job as a taxi driver and been thrown out by his adulterous wife, tubby loser Jun Zhao is forced to move in with parents Huimin Tian and Ji Qing, who eke out a living making traditional medicines. Jun is appalled to discover, however, that they still have a very active sex life and seeks sanctuary from their daytime canoodling in a new job promoting a diet drink at the local supermarket. As disenchanted with the product as fast-talking colleague Vivid Wang, Jun jumps at the opportunity when school friend Xiduo Jiang suggests he asks flamboyant Japanese boss Masanobu Otsuka if he can set up his own marital aid franchise, as he has been making pots of cash.

As her grandmother has a disused store in a hutong backstreet, Wang is hired as Jun's assistant. But business is slow, as potential customers are too bashful to patronise the premises in daylight. However, a nocturnal accident persuades Jun to change his opening hours and he is soon pandering to the kinky needs of such regulars as frisky couple Tess Liu and Jianxiong Yao, the demure Virgin Chen and vibrant veterans Liansheng Wang and Siwei Song.

All seems lost when snooping local official Bing Bo catches Jun trading without a licence and confiscates his stock. But the resourceful Wang realises they can make a fortune selling Tian and Qing's patented virility tonic and Jun is soon off to a sex expo to impress Otsuka and his biggest overseas client (Voutas).

Despite the subject matter, this is an unexpectedly chaste picture that largely opts for sitcom-like caricature and quirkiness rather than inspired slapstick or outright smut. Voutas passes a few gentle remarks about the ability of the supposedly staid older generation to shock the young and the ramifications of new Chinese morality (the country produces 70% of the world's sex toys and the capital now has 1999 more outlets for such merchandise than it did 25 years ago). But this takes far too few satirical risks and relies heavily on the banter between Jun and the vivacious Wang, whose deadpan delivery is often brazenly hilarious.

Fellow Aussie Jon Hewitt is far less squeamish when it comes to flashing the flesh and both Viva Bianca and Hanna Mangan Lawrence have their déshabillé moments in X: Night of Vengeance, a lurid and often laboured thriller set in Sydney's notorious red-light district, Kings Cross. Peddling a designer brand of social realism that is dismayingly inauthentic, this is a lacklustre offering from a genre director who earned a reputation for uncompromising storytelling with the likes of Redball (1999), Darklovestory (2006) and Acolytes (2008).

Having teamed with Darren Moss in a raunchy show for a group of well-heeled ladies, high-class escort Viva Bianca confides in mentor Belinda McClory that she intends jetting off to Paris to make a fresh start. Urging her to be careful on her last night, McClory toasts her health in champagne and Bianca heads to a posh restaurant to meet cop lover Peter Docker. She hasn't told him of her plans and is taken aback when he reveals he is ready to leave his wife and wants her to run away with him.

Meanwhile, out on the mean streets, teenager Hanna Mangan Lawrence resorts to turning tricks after fetching up in the city from the sticks following the death of her junkie mother, Natasha Herbert. However, after only a couple of seedy kerb-crawling encounters, she gets beaten up by punky hooker Rebecca Irwin's thuggish pimp and is grateful for a few words of advice from homeless runaway Freya Tingley. Lawrence is feeling vulnerable, therefore, when Bianca spots her while seeking a replacement partner for a private session and she is unable to resist the fee the seemingly trustworthy blonde is willing to pay.

Naturally, client Hazem Shammas is exceedingly shady and the pair are forced to beat a hasty retreat after he is gunned down by Stephen Phillips, a rogue cop friend of Docker. With Bianca deciding they would be safer if they split up, Lawrence takes refuge in a cheap hotel, where she helps addicts Rowan Witt and Billie Rose Pritchard shoot up and they return the favour by keeping quiet when Bennett bursts into her next-door room. However, Bianca feels guilty at leaving Lawrence to her fate and they place their trust in Eamon Farren, a taxi driver with ambitions to become a magician.

Co-scripted by Hewitt and wife McClory, this may not be the most original exposé of the oldest profession. The dialogue is frequently as creaky as the contrivances and the hackneyed discussion of the power dynamics involved in prostitution. Moreover, despite the best efforts of Bianca and Lawrence the quality of the performances is decidedly mixed. Yet Hewitt and cinematographer Mark Pugh capture enough of the Kings Cross atmosphere for this to pass as gritty social critique rather than simply cynical exploitation.

Turning to actuality, Phil Grabsky completes the composer trilogy started with In Search of Mozart (2006) and In Search of Beethoven (2009) by considering the maestro who inspired them both in the typically assured In Search of Haydn, which receives its world premiere at The Barbican in London on 12 January. Placing equal emphasis on the character, the career and the music, this informative and accessible profile is the ideal introduction to the prolific Austrian usually credited with being the father of both the string quartet and the orchestral symphony. However, as Grabsky demonstrates, Haydn was also capable of producing exquisite sonatas and concertos, as well as the occasional operatic aria of consequence.

Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman narrate the story which begins in 1732 in a wheelwright's shop in Rohrau on the Hungarian border. Such was the young Joseph's singing talent that he was recruited for the choir of St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna at the age of eight and struggled for a while as a freelancer after his voice broke and he was dismissed in 1749 for snipping off another chorister's pigtail.

Having contracted a disastrous marriage to Maria Keller, Haydn was offered the post of assistant to Kapellmeister Gregor Werner in the household of Prince Paul Anton Esterházy. However, it was his brother Nikolaus who became Haydn's most important patron, both at the family estate at Eisenstadt and the majestic palace at Eszterháza that was designed to rival Versailles. Indeed, such was Nikolaus's preoccupation with this sprawling palace that Haydn was forced to compose `The Farewell Symphony' (No45 in F sharp) to prompt the prince into allowing his musicians to return to their homes after a prolonged absence.

These events are related with a lightness whose authority is reinforced by the contributions of historians Tim Blanning, Richard Wigmore, David Wyn Jones, Bayan Nortcott and Theresia Gabriel, as well Eisenstadt Festival director Walter Reicher, Eszterháza tour guide Zsuzsanna Voros and British Library music curator Rupert Ridgewell. Indeed, the expert analysis is impressively lucid throughout, with conductors Sir Roger Norrington and Gianandrea Noseda providing insightful overviews and pianists Emanuel Ax, Ronald Brautigam, Marc-André Hamelin, Joseph Kalichstein and Christophe Rousset discussing Haydn's innovative composing style, while violinist Rémy Baudet, cellists Gautier Capuçon and David Waterman, trumpeters Alison Balsom and Jonathan Impett and sopranos Sophie Bevan, Camilla Tilling and Wilke Te Brummelstroete assess their own specialisms with an enthusiasm that is joyously evident and unforced.

The standard of the performances is equally high, with the Endellion String Quartet, the Orchestra of the 18th Century, Les Talens Lyriques, Ian Page and the Classical Opera Company, the Hanover Band, the Van Swieten Trio and the Florestan Trio providing polished accompaniment to the soloists. The excerpts in chronological order to show the evolution of Haydn's genius and, along with the keyboard sonatas No1 in G, No9 in D, No34 in E minor and No47 in B minor, the Concerto No4 in G, the Variations in F minor and the Trio in B flat, there is a chance to hear parts of the Cello Concerto in C, the Trumpet Concerto in E flat and the string quartets No20/4 in D, 20/6 in A, 54/2 in C, 64/5 in D, 74/3 in G minor, 76/3 in C and the unfinished 101 in D minor.

The symphonies are also well represented, with highlights from No6 in D, No30 in C, No82 in C, No84 in E flat, No86 in D major, No94 in C, No100 in G, No101 in D and No104 in D being used to show how Haydn found a new freedom after Nikolaus's death in 1790 and he was allowed to accept commissions from Paris and London, where he was treated like a celebrity after his long years of isolation at the Esterházy court. The experts are quick to express reservations about his capabilities as an opera composer - although Ana James's performance of `Placidi Ruscelletti' from La Fedeltà Premiata, Thomas Hobbs's `Wenn am beiten Firmamente' from Philemon und Baucis, Wilke Te Brummelstroete's Aria di Giannina, and Sophie Bevan's renditions of `Salamelica, Semprugna Cara' from Lo Speziale and `Navicella da Vento Agitato' from Il Marchese are as thrilling as the snippets from Missa in Tempore Belli and The Creation.

Grabsky illustrates the musical passages with still lifes depicting associated landmarks and their natural environs, while the narrative is dotted with archival images and extracts from Haydn's correspondence and/or encounters with Mozart, Beethoven and physician's wife Maria Anna von Genzinger, who became his closest confidante. What emerges, therefore, is a rounded portrait of the man and his music and it's nice to know that Grabsky intends going in search of another composer in the near future.

John Akomfrah similarly makes high culture seem accessible in The Nine Muses. Born in the Ghanaian capital Accra and raised in London, Akomfrah emerged as one of the pioneers of Black British cinema as the co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective and the director of the landmark documentary Handsworth Songs (1986). A quarter of a century on from this visceral account of an inner-city riot, he has produced another remarkable film, this time about `those ghostly traces of lived moments, those pariah images and sounds that now occupy a unique space somewhere between history and myth'.

Taking Homer's The Odyssey as his exemplar, Akomfrah revisits the theme of postwar migration to these islands and juxtaposes a wealth of archival and newly photographed footage, together with readings from a challenging selection of authors, to journey through `a museum of intangible things'.

Having explained how the Muses were born of the union between Zeus and Mnemosyne (the Greek goddess of Memory), Akomfrah proceeds to divide the action into headed segments devoted to each one. The recurring figures of men in yellow, blue and black coats make their first appearance in Caliope - Muse of Epic Poetry, as Dewald Aukema's Red camera images of a frozen Alaskan landscape are inter-cut with shots of the Windrush immigrants arriving in London from the Caribbean to the accompaniment of lines about the Fall of Eden and Telemachus going in search of Odysseus at the end of the Trojan War.

Clio - Muse of History contains footage of black men taking menial jobs in kitchens and on the buses, as they attempt to become part of a society that regards them with suspicion, while Polyhymnia - Muse of Sacred Song follows a song about a child being a long way from home with Richard Burton's interpretation of Under Milk Wood, as the visual focus shifts to heavy industry and the appalling weather conditions to which the newcomers had to acclimatise. As the flashbacks show in Melpomene - Muse of Tragedy, they were soon joined by a wave of Asians, who arrived by plane into a country finally shaking off its postwar bleakness and showing signs of embracing modernity.

Against another Alaskan backdrop (to emphasise the alien nature of the climate and symbolise the continued frosty reception of the natives), the Euterpe - Muse of Music section hints at greater integration by showing a black man and a white woman listening to a classical recording together. Indeed, the migrants were now becoming firmly ensconced as citizens and, in Urania - Muse of Astronomy, Akomfrah shows families settling into cities like Liverpool (which had once been at the centre of the Atlantic slave trade) and kids thriving in schools and using sport to make their mark.

But, Thalia - Muse of Comedy opens with a speech by Enoch Powell and features vox pops by white working males opining that their country is being overrun. Yet, the images reveal the immigrants being housed in often derelict properties and still being forced to accept jobs that nobody else was willing to take. As `Let My People Go' plays on the soundtrack, the scene in Erato - Muse of Love changes to show the religious differences between the Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities. But the concluding entry devoted to Terpsichore - Muse of Dance suggests the cultural benefits of diversity as shots of people enjoying their leisure time are accompanied by Duke Orsino's `If music be the food of love' speech from Twelfth Night.

A stylish exercise in Strucuralism that succeeds in being cerebral, artistic, cinematic and accessible, this is an immersive and inspirational experience that wears its literacy and technical mastery with laudable lightness. The mix of spoken word and music (which has been selected from an impressive range of sources) is as rich as the editor Miikka Leskinen's visual blend that often dazzles with its audacity and aptness. Poetic and challenging in equal measure, this is apparently the first part of a trilogy and it will be fascinating to see where Akomfrah takes us next.

Completists will need to know that the read extracts come from John Milton's Paradise Lost, The Odyssey, Shakespeare's Richard II, Hamlet and Twelfth Night, Dante's The Divine Comedy, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable and Molloy, Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Song of Solomon, Sophocles's Oedipus, Emily Dickinson's `Come Slowly Eden, Eden, Is That Old-Fashioned House', James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Finnegans Wake (which erroneously spelt with an apostrophe), while the captions have been gleaned from Matsuo Basho's `The Journey Itself Is Home', Emily Dickinson's `Our Journey Had Advanced', TS Eliot's `A Cold Coming We Had of It', ee cummings's `For Whatever We Lose', Li Po's `Hard Is the Journey', Rabindranath Tagore's `Art Thou Abroad on This Stormy Night', `He Journeyed Beyond the Night' from The Epic of Gilgamesh, Shakespeare's `How Heavy Do I Journey on the Way' and Zelda Fitzgerald `Nobody Has Ever Measured, Not Even Poets'. Also worth noting is that the film clips derive from Philip Donnellan's The Colony (1964) and A Stranger in Town (1969) and Richard Marquand's Home for Heroes (1964), as well as from such small-screen outings as John Elliot's A Man From the Sun (1956), Monitor (1960), Tonight (1961), 24 Hours (1968) and the Omnibus episode `Born Black, Born British' (1972).