Parky at the Pictures (DVD 3/5/2012)

No one would suspect that 35 year-old Michael Fuith has a dreadful secret. Bespectacled, balding and utterly unremarkable in appearance and demeanour, he arrives back at his metal-shuttered suburban home and unpacks the shopping after parking in the garage adjoining his kitchen. He prepares a meal and sets the table for two and then pads down to the basement to unlock the heavy metal door that ensures 10 year-old David Rauchenberger remains an isolated prisoner.

Schleinzer is at pains to stress the mundanity of the pair's routine. They wash up together, watch television and even do jigsaws. But the tension in the silences betrays the simmering resentment that Rauchenberger confides to the letters he writes to the parents he can't quite believe abandoned him into the care of a stranger whose curt kindness is always compromised by his quietly insistent sexual demands. Apart from one embarrassing dinner encounter - when Fuith exposes himself and repeats the hilariously inappropriate line he heard the previous evening in a porn film - Schleinzer leaves the abuse to the audience's imagination. But the sordid reality pervades every scene, whether Fuith and Rauchenberger have a rare day out at a petting zoo, make preparations for Christmas or build a bunk bed in anticipation of the arrival of a new boy.

This last sequence takes on a chilling aspect when Fuith is shown prowling a go-karting centre for a suitable prey. Yet sister Ursula Strauss suspects nothing of his secret life when she meets him for coffee and accepts unquestioningly his assertion that he has a girlfriend in Germany. Similarly, at the insurance company where he works, he gets on well enough with colleagues like Gisella Salcher (whose uncle turns out to be one of his neighbours) and even earns a promotion. However, there is a forced levity at the office party Fuith throws in celebration and the atmosphere is equally strained during his skiing trip with mates Simon Jaritz and Florian Eisner, especially when Fuith gets invited back to barmaid Margot Vuga's room and he spends the next day avoiding everybody after mortifyingly failing to perform.

Despite being spared the nightly visitations during the Tirol interlude, Rauchenberger deeply resents being left alone and this sense of abandonment, combined with Fuith's failure to find him the promised playmate, prompts him to become increasingly truculent. Finally shattering the illusion of affection that he has allowed to linger, Schleinzer reveals the true nature of the relationship as Fuith laughs off the boy's pathetic attempts to fight him and this sudden revelation of cruelty presages the act of carelessness that results in the captor's downfall and shocking posthumous exposure.

Having refused to judge Fuith while he was perpetrating his unspeakable acts, Schleinzer can't resist lacing the funeral oration given by Catholic priest Hannes Benedetto Pircher with bitter irony. Moreover, he allows the air of suspense that he had previously striven to exclude to seep into the closing scenes, as mother Christine Kain and brother-in-law Victor Tremmel get ever closer to making an appalling discovery as they clear out the supposedly empty house.

The closing stages reinforce the brilliance of Katrin Huber and Gerhard Dohr's set design and Gerald Kerkletz's unobtrusive camerawork. But they also reveal the extent to which Schleinzer is content to employ the generic thriller tactics of manipulating characters and viewers rather than confronting the sociological and psychological issues that arise from the scenario. In presenting a portrait of a monster as an ordinary man, he skirts any assessment of Fuith's sexual personality. The wretched tryst with Vuga suggests he is attracted to women and they like him, but no hint is given of any childhood trauma or epiphanal moment that might explain why he would kidnap a child and treat him as a cross between a surrogate son and a sex slave.

Fuith's reaction to a television news item about missing children intimates that he knows he is doing wrong and fears both being caught and Rauchenberger discovering the truth about his deception. But Schleinzer delves no deeper. He even bypasses the evident pain that Fuith feels on confiscating Rauchenberger's latest letter home or on having to force himself upon the boy rather than be enthusiastically embraced. Yet, in circumventing such topics, he succeeds in coaxing the audience into speculating upon them and this ambiguity makes the performances of Fuith and Rauchenberge all the more potent and persuasive.

Confinement of a different, but equally pernicious sort is examined by Bertrand Bonello in House of Tolerance. Aware he is considered something of a sensationalist by some after The Pornographer (2001), Bonello seeks to signal his good intentions by basing his study of fin-de-siècle prostitution on Laura Adler's book Daily Life in the Bordellos of Paris, 1830-1930. He also alludes to Kenji Mizoguchi's geisha tales, the `La Maison Tellier' segment of Max Ophüls's La Plaisir (1951) and Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978), as well as countless pieces of Impressionist period art, to create the mood of a brothel that once operated at 24 rue Richelieu near the Opera. Yet, while Alain Guffroy's opulent sets, Anaïs Romand's sumptuous costumes and Josée Deshaies's evocative lighting cannot be faulted, the episodic structure and slight characterisation make this feel more like a case study than a costume drama.

Middle-aged mother of two Noémie Lvovsky owns L'Apollonide, a luxuriantly decorated house of commerce that attracts patrons of all ages from the upper echelons of Parisian society. Her most requested girls are Céline Sallette, a 28 year-old who has been in Lvovsky's employ for 12 years; Alice Barnole, a handsomely melancholic beauty who is nicknamed `The Jewess'; Adele Haenel, a statuesque blonde who can barely disguise her disdain for her clients; and Hafsia Herzi, a haughty Algerian, whose exoticism is only matched by the cheerful Jasmine Trinca, who has been dubbed `Caca' because of her kinky speciality.

Trinca is doted upon by ageing aristocrat Jacques Nolot, while Sallette has hopes that artist Louis-Do de Lencquesaing will clear the debt she owes to Lvovsky. Barnole has also developed an attachment to the taciturn Laurent Lacotte and she confides a dream in which he proposes to her with an emerald before he ties her to the bed and slashes her mouth with a knife. Reduced to helping out in the kitchen and laundry, tries to stay out of sight because her face has been so hideously scarred. But the portly Vincent Dieutre (who always attends with his pet panther, Ninon) develops a fetish for her and Lvovsky agrees to parade her before the curious when the local prefect refuses to intervene when her landlord doubles the rent.

Indeed, Lvovsky is not above acceding to any request that will enable her to pay the bills. Consequently, 16 year-old newcomer Iliana Zabeth is sent to bathe in champagne with one of the regulars, while Haenel is forced to behave like an automated doll. However, Sallette rejects De Lencquesaing suggestion of a ménage and she becomes increasingly addicted to opium after he jilts her for the more accommodating Zabeth. Even though he continues to pay for her services, Nolot similarly abandons Trinca after she contracts syphilis and no one takes responsibility when Herzi discovers she is six months pregnant.

The latter diagnoses come during one of the debasing medical examinations to which the women are regularly subjected. But, while he doesn't shy away from depicting the less salubrious aspects of their routine, Bonello also stresses the sense of community that exists within L'Apollonide by showing the residents sharing meals, playing games, telling fortunes and enjoying a picnic on the banks of the River Marne. Lvovsky is also happy for her children to socialise with the girls and seems genuinely distressed when Trinca dies and she is forced to sell contracts to rival houses after staging a farewell masked ball on Bastille Day.

Bonello attempts to tie a number of loose ends during these closing sequences, with Lacotte most notably being lured back to receive his just desserts at the very moment that Barnole reaches a disconcertingly lachrymose climax with a disguised stranger. However, the decisions to show the women dancing morosely to the 1967 Moody Blues hit `Nights in White Satin' and end the picture with a shot of a modern-day Sallette getting out of a car after servicing a john seem as flawed as Madonna's use of `Pretty Vacant' and Wally's visit to Mohamed Al Fayed in W.E.

Extending the comparison, the performances are fine across the board. Lvovsky's Madame displays a persuasive blend of grim experience, maternal concern and self-preserving pragmatism, while Sallette succumbs piteously to the fear of ageing and rejection and Zabeth exudes the misplaced confidence of innocent youth. The standout, however, is Barnole, whose sad eyes prove as mesmerising as the gaping wound gouged into her cheeks, which seems deliberately to recall the rictus expressions sported by Lon Chaney's Gwynplaine in Paul Leni's adaptation of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs (1928) and Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's Batman (1989).

Despite accusations of prurience, Bonello strives to expose the exploitative conditions prostitutes endured at the dawn of the 20th century, while also highlighting that, for many women, this was a preferable profession to being a seamstress, servant or farm worker. Moreover, he condemns the chauvinism of the clientele, who deceive their unseen wives as shamelessly as they disregard the feelings of the paramours for whom they proclaim such affection. Nonetheless, in the true DeMillean manner, Bonello also ensures that he presents plenty of sinning before broaching any semblance of redemption. Thus, the camera frequently lingers on the actresses in various states of undress and many of these tableaux appear to have more voyeuristic than artistic or dramatic purpose.

Reacting against cinéma vérité and the stark diktats of the Dogme95 manifesto, French auteur Bruno Dumont has consistently eschewed manipulative realism to focus in excruciating detail on the bodies and often aberrant behaviour of his characters in order to coerce audiences into feeling emotion rather than pondering the political and intellectual consequences of spectating. Rooted in the stark truthfulness of Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, uncompromising features like La Vie de Jésus (1997), L'Humanité (1999) and Flanders (2006) have divided critics as to whether they were fearlessly poetic or fatuously pretentious.

The debate is bound to continue with Hadewijch, which arrives in this country three years after its domestic release and seems likely to spark controversy with its intense discussion of the connection between spirituality, worldly disillusion and terrorism. Many will find the central conceit deeply flawed. But there is no denying the cinematic power of this audacious comparison of Christian and Islamic concepts of love.

Such is the fervour of her love of Christ that 20 year-old theology student Julie Sokolowski has entered a convent to test her vocation. However, so conspicuous are her acts of abstinence and self-abasement that prioress Michelle Ardenne complains to mother superior Brigitte Mayeux-Clerget and Sokolowski is sent back to her parents, low-ranking government minister Luc-François Bouyssonie and the haughtily disapproving Marie Castelain.

Initially distraught by her ejection, Sokolowski sobs at the shrine situated outside a chapel in the woods near the convent. But she soon resumes a mundane routine of watching television, walking her pet dog and wandering into churches to pray and listen to rehearsing musicians. However, she meets Arab youth Yassine Salime in a café and he invites her to a concert that evening on the banks of the Seine. Despite his clumsy attempt to put his arm around her, Sokolowski invites him to lunch on the Île Saint-Louis and is embarrassed by her father's awkward attempts to make conversation and her mother's utter disdain for her guest.

Back on the street, Salime is nettled by a bourgeois stranger's deprecating reaction to seeing him with a white girl and speeds off across Paris on his stolen scooter, with Sokolowski momentarily forgetting her piety to enjoy the illicit sense of liberation. However, when they stop for a drink, she tells Salime that there is no prospect of them becoming a couple as she has dedicated her chastity to Jesus. He shrugs off his evident disappointment and suggests Sokolowski meets his older brother (Karl Sarafidis), as he is equally committed to his faith and even gives classes in the high-rise project where they live.

While setting up this side of the story, Dumont pauses to introduce David Dewale, a labourer working on a site close to the convent, who was arrested for breaching the terms of his parole on the same day that Sokolowski was expelled. But, while he serves his time, Sokolowski becomes convinced by Sarafidis that God has chosen her to turn her devotion into action and she accompanies him to an unspecified war zone to see the mistreatment of Muslims at first hand and meet the jihadists leading the fightback.

On returning to Paris, Sokolowski conspires with Sarafidis to plant a bomb near the Arc de Triomphe before seeking sanctuary in the convent. Following an off-camera police interview, Sokolowski shelters from the rain with novice Sabrina Lechêne and Dewale, who is repairing the guttering of a garden outhouse. They exchange the merest glances, but Dewale seems to recognise a kindred spirit and, when Sokolowski hurries away to submerge herself in a nearby pond, he raises her from the water like a latterday John the Baptist.

Making compelling use of Yves Cape's close-ups almost to peer into Sokolowki's soul in the same manner that Carl Theodor Dreyer did with Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), Dumont earnestly examines the ease with which religious faith can become fanaticism. Few will be able to draw ready comparisons between her beliefs and those of the eponymous 13th-century Flemish mystic who advocated divine adoration over romantic love. But this is infinitely more accessible than Dumont's earlier outings and it's only the shocking Middle Eastern sequence and the suddenness of both Sokolowski's conversion and salvation that strain credibility.

Recalling Émilie Dequenne's determined opacity in the Dardenne drama Rosetta (1999), Sokolowski gives a touching neophyte display of vulnerable impassivity. But she struggles to convey the impressionable immaturity and hopeless sense of betrayal that would persuade someone so besotted with a God of contemplative love to despair at his distance from her and throw in her lot with a deity demanding affirmative action. Moreover, Dumont himself labours the point that, regardless of one's creed, total detachment from the corporeal world is fraught with danger. Thus, the connection between relentlessly pursued faith and violence is never satisfactorily made, with the consequence that the climactic narrative leaps seem all the more specious and self-consciously ambiguous.

Debuting Icelandic director Baldvin Zophoníasson clearly made a study of American and European teenpix before embarking upon Jitters. However, this soapy study of adolescent angst seems to owe its biggest debt to the E4 series Skins, as not only does it catch the attitude and argot of modern kids, but also it also shares a tendency to pack the action with so many incidents that those that don't meander down dead-ends grow increasingly melodramatic. Thus, while this is ably scripted and splendidly played by an impressive ensemble, it fails to say anything particularly new about identity, sexuality, friendship or growing up in an increasingly hedonistic and complicated world.

While on a study trip in Manchester, 16 year-old Atli Oskar Fjalarsson has a drunken snog with fellow Reykjaviker Haraldur Ari Stefánsson, who is about to start a summer job at a hairdressing salon. Refusing his posting to an old people's home, Fjalarsson is so mopey on his return that mother Ingibjörg Reynisdóttir summons father Thorsteinn Bachmann to have a family meeting with stepfather Bergur Ingólfsson to discuss his erratic behaviour. However, he reassures them he is fine and throws himself into the problems of his friends.

Best buddy Elías Helgi Kofoed-Hansen is a party wastrel who keeps cheating on girlfriend Kristín Pétursdóttir, who takes him back each time despite threats to dump him for good. Introspective classmate Hreindís Ylva Gardarsdóttir fancies Fjalarsson and is frustrated by his inability to pick up on her less than subtle hints. She lives with grandmother Lilja Gudrún Thorvaldsdóttir, who is so overly protective (because Gardarsdóttir's mother died after running away to Denmark with a ne'er-do-well) that she disapproves of her friendship with Vilhelm Thór Neto, a Russian immigrant who works with her at a nearby 7/11. And bespectacled Birna Rún Eiríksdóttir has similar problems with drunken mother Katla Margrét Thorgeirsdóttir and decides to rent a room in a house with older students Ólafur Ásgeirsson, Saga Líf Fridriksdóttir, Árni Gestur Sigfusson and María Birta, who both develops a crush on Fjalarsson and poses as a massage client to help Thorgeirsdóttir make contact with the father she has never met, Gísli Örn Garðarsson.

Everything proceeds pretty much as one might expect. Fjalarsson lets Stefánsson put blonde streaks in his hair, but keeps him a secret from his pals and, following awkward trysts with both Gardarsdóttir and Birta, he stops taking his calls because he doesn't want to face up to the possibility he is gay. Gardarsdóttir also holds back from a romance with Neto, after she is traumatised by a robbery at the store that was committed by one of his mates. Moreover, she knows that the bigoted Thorvaldsdóttir would never allow them to be together. Only Eiríksdóttir makes any progress in connecting with Gardarsson. But, like her friends, she remains uncertain who she is or what she wants.

Considering the inexperience of the cast, this is a highly creditable first feature. It's not in the same league as Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love (1998), but Baldvin Z (who co-scripted with Reynisdóttir) directs steadily and captures the growing sense of awareness among the group that having fun sometimes has its consequences. The death of one of the principals is rather signposted, but the funeral aftermath is as sensitively handled as the touching denouement.

The same can also be said for Konstantin Bojanov's debut, Avé, which captures the sense of grief and impotence among the mourners at another requiem for an unfulfilled soul. But what makes this scene all the more poignant is the playfulness of what comes before, as Ovanes Torosyan's attempts to get to the Bulgarian town of Ruse to pay his respects to a deceased friend are complicated by the clinging presence and furtive imagination of fellow hitcher Anjela Nedyalkova. Drolly scripted by Bojanov and Arnold Barkus, this routine, but diverting road movie is adeptly photographed by Nenad Boroevich and Radoslav Gotchev to convey the look and feel of terrain that manages simultaneously to seem familiar and disparate.

Although he could probably afford to travel in comfort, art student Ovanes Torosyan decides to thumb a ride in heading from Sofia to the north-east after an old friend commits suicide. But, as the first driver pulls over, he finds himself having to share with 17 year-old runaway Anjela Nedyalkova, who appears from nowhere and informs everyone that she is on her way to visit a dying grandmother. However, her story changes with each lift, as she claims in succession that Torosyan needs her with him because he cannot speak English, that he is her sexually eccentric boyfriend and that they are siblings going home to mourn a brother killed in Iraq.

As he never knows what she is going to say next, Torosyan becomes increasingly stressed by Nedyalkova's fabrications and orders her to leave him alone. But, as is so often the case in such `loathe at first sight' scenarios, Nedyalkova keeps turning up where least expected and gets under the taciturn Torosyan's skin. Essentially, this is a freewheeling variation on the screwball format that occasionally misses its step and sometimes comes close to grinding to a halt. However, the leads strike up a pleasing rapport, with Torosyan stooging genially to the vicacious, but obviously vulnerable Nedyalkova's flights of fancy.

Their reunion before the funeral is inevitable, but Bojanov takes the quaint curse off their hesitantly growing attraction by casting fresh doubt on Nedyalkova's reliability by having her devise an entirely new backstory that involves a drug-addicted brother and some painfully intimate surgery that prevents her from consummating their new-found love. Yet, for all her selfish deceit, Nedyalkova's detestation of her domestic situation is palpable and she can scarcely be blamed for seeking to invent alternatives and dupe a querulous, but eventually congenial stranger into sharing them. Indeed, she succeeds in teaching Torosyan the value of a strategic fib and the fact there is no point trying to understand parents. Moreover, she forces him to deal with emotions he had long striven to suppress and, thus, she ultimately merits the narrative imbalance in her favour.

Despite being divided into three segments, the plot emphasis of actress Mélanie Laurent's directorial bow, Les Adoptés, is equally skewed. Yet, while the first-time script co-written with Morgan Perez and Chris Deslandes becomes increasing dependent upon calculating lachrymosity, this is a laudably accomplished technical achievement for a debutant, with cinematographer Arnaud Potier often bathing the muted pastels of Stanislas Reydellet's production design in an opaline luminescence that contrasts with the deft use of chiaroscuro and shallow focus that gives the imagery a deceptively reassuring feel. Similarly, Jonathan Morali's evocative score is sparingly employed (at least until the overly manipulative denouement), while some of Laurent's framing decisions are inspired.

Ever since she was adopted as a child, Marie Dénarnaud has felt comfortable around mother Clémentine Célarié and sister Mélanie Laurent. She works in an Anglophile Lyon bookshop and seems content to read, watch sentimental old films and help Laurent care for her young son, Theodore Maquet-Foucher. However, Dénarnaud develops a crush on bashful customer Denis Menochet that drives a wedge between her and Laurent and neither is feeling particularly positive about their relationship when Dénarnaud is hit by a motorbike. The doctor doesn't expect her to wake from her coma. But she is pregnant with Menochet's child and he becomes increasingly reliant on Laurent as he tries to come to terms with this tragic, but far from desired turn of life-changing events.

Anyone who has ever read romantic pulp or seen a soap opera will know what's coming throughout this dramatically undemanding saga. Yet Laurent directs with considerable intelligence, whether focusing on Dénarnaud's dealings with the tipsy Célarié and the frustrated Laurent (whose music career hasn't quite gone according to plan) or in keeping the camera on Maquet-Foucher playing innocently with a toy truck while the adult conversation in the next room centres on the ramifications of Dénarnaud's accident. Unfortunately, this proves to be the picture's peak, as Laurent allows too many situations to dissolve into tears, with the result that a potentially touching human interest story becomes a series of mawkish set-pieces.

Equally enervating is a tendency to indulge in winsome humour that seems contrived to invite comparison with the American indie film-maker Miranda July. Much more amusing is Audrey Lamy's splendidly buttoned-up turn as Dénarnaud's controlling boss, which is matched by Menochet's shambling sweetness. But Laurent's penchant for kitschy close-ups makes everything feel a tad predetermined and untrusting of the audience to draw inferences for itself.

By contrast, in reuniting with the stars of their 2006 outing, One to Another, co-directors Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr require Pierre Perrier and Lizzie Brocheré to take numerous dramatic, political and physical risks in American Translation, a psycho road movie that laces a rather formulaic `lovers on the run' scenario with plenty of full-on eroticism and graphic violence that will entice some and enrage others. Recalling such explorations of sexualised brutality as Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi (2000) and Catherine Breillat's A ma soeur (2001), this may not be able to match the former's reckless energy or the latter's searing intensity. But the laudable performances help the narrative through its stickier patches, while the blatant refusal to pander to PC dictates on the positive representation of gay characters is bound to provoke heated debate.

Struggling to reconnect with rich, but estranged American father Jean-Marc Barr, Lizzie Brocheré is smitten at first sight when she bumps into charming drifter Pierre Perrier in a hotel bar. As viewers have already seen the half-naked Perrier fleeing a murder scene, anxiety levels rise as he ferries her back to the woods in his Peugeot camper van. But, instead of slaying her, he engages in a prolonged bout of vigorous coupling that leaves Brocheré on the verge of physical and emotional exhaustion and Perrier convinced that she is the special one he has long been seeking.

Tattooing a wedding ring onto her finger, he coaxes her through a `wedding' ceremony and they move into her luxury apartment. But, when a rent boy they have hired for a ménage is accidentally killed, Brocheré suddenly realises she is in cahoots with a serial killer and she soon finds herself helping him dispose of the victims as the body count mounts.

Trading on road movie tropes that were established in the early 1930s, this may not be the most original conceit. Indeed, Arnold and Barr make little effort to subvert genre convention or use the situation of the couple on the lam to comment on current socio-economic conditions. Instead, they concentrate on the intensity of the sensations experienced during coitus and homicide and challenge the audience to assess their response to scenes of an aroused Perrier giving Brocheré a lap dance and him slaughtering young men in cold blood.

Supposedly based on true-life testimonies and the Freudian interpretation of the Greek myth of Eros and Thanatos, the screenplay is something of a mess. Driven by Perrier's compulsive manias, but wholly dependent on the notion that Brocheré is so utterly besotted that she will unquestioningly accept his criminality, the story lurches between cavortings and killings without providing much insight into the thought processes of either. It's vaguely hinted that Perrier has been disturbed by his relationship with a priest and the suicide of a friend, but the reasons for his sexual and lifestyle choices remain as obscure as Brocheré's determination to stand by her man.

Acting as his own cinematographer (in collaboration with Chris Keohane), Barr favours a handheld approach that enables him to get close to the characters and, thus, implicate the spectator in activities that generate in Perrier equal amounts of psychotic pleasure. Yet, for all the bleak humour and self-conscious eagerness to shock, this is nowhere near as daring or dangerous as it purports to be, with the achingly hip soundtrack betraying the fact that this is more a piece of slick slasher entertainment than a serious study of the connection between murder and la petite mort.

Having misfired in Hollywood with The Roommate (2011), Danish director Christian E. Christiansen returns home with ID:A to cash in on his country's burgeoning reputation for classy thrillers in the mould of The Killing. For an hour, he succeeds in creating a teasing tale of amnesia and tainted trust. But the rewound reveal packs in enough plot for at least a couple more movies and the resolution proves to be a major anti-climax.

Waking on a riverbank in rural France with a head wound and a haversack full of cash, Tuva Novotny has no idea who she is or how she landed in such a remote spot. Wandering into the nearest town, she takes a room in a hotel run by handsome Arnaud Binard and his suspicious mother Françoise Lebrun and learns from the TV news that politician Slavo Bulatovic (who has been leading the fight against Third World debt) has been assassinated. Opening the bag, Novotny realises she is somehow connected to the slaying and is forced to cut and dye her hair after being pursued by the sinister John Buijsman and Rogier Philipoom on going shopping next morning.

Smuggled to a hideaway by Binard, Novotny makes the discovery she is Danish by reading brochures in the tourist information office and decides to take the bus home. En route, she hears a familiar voice on a sleeping passenger's mp3 player and, on arriving in Copenhagen, books a ticket to see Flemming Enevold in concert. Much to her surprise, she ascertains she is the singer's wife and has to pretend she recognises everybody at the post-show party. But it's only after she snoops around the house next day and reconnects with estranged sister Marie Louise Wille that she finds out her husband is not only viciously possessive, but is also linked to the same shady political group as her vanished brother, Carsten Bjørnlund.

It's at this point that Tine Krull Petersen's screenplay begins piling up the improbabilities. In the middle of a brutal attack by the jealous Enevold, Novotny remember how she fled after a similar assault and, following a chance encounter with kindly transvestite Finn Nielsen, sought sanctuary with Bjørnlund, whose involvement with a bank robbery resulted in her being stranded in the French countryside. Luckily, the recovery of her memory coincides with the intervention of Jens Jørn Spottag, the private eye she had hired to determine the identity of Buijsman and Philipoom, and all ends predictably well. But the sudden onrush of undeveloped characters in half-cocked situations will frustrate those who had settled into the measured mystery of the first hour.

The daughter of Czech director David Novotny and Swedish actress Barbro Hedström, Tuva Novotny impresses as the heroine trying to piece together the truth. But characterisation and plausibility quickly become casualties of Christiansen's need to show how the various plot strands are interwoven and tie up the loose ends as neatly as possible. Thus, the slickness of the enterprise robs it of suspense, especially when it becomes clear that Novotny is merely a victim of circumstance rather than a pivotal player in a conspiracy that is essentially the kind of necessary irrelevance that Alfred Hitchcock used to call `a macguffin'.

Finally, Tatsumi, directed by Singaporean auteur Eric Khoo, reflects on the career of Japanese comic-book artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi and interweaves pivotal incidents from his life with five of his best-known stories. However, while creative animation director Phil Mitchell switches adroitly between monochrome vignettes and colourful, self-narrated extracts from the 75 year-old's autobiography A Drifting Life, the various segments fail to gel into a satisfying whole and only dedicated manga fans are likely to be engrossed.

Tatsumi starts his odyssey with a salutation to his artistic inspiration, Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and the father of the youth-targeted manga form that Tatsumi would abandon in 1957 when his comic Black Blizzard launched the gekiga style of graphic works for adults. However, it wasn't until the 1970s that Tatsumi became a household name and the featured quintet emanate from this period and reflect aspects of the social, economic and political changes that transformed Japan in the decades either side of the Second World War.

Born in Osaka in 1935, Tatsumi grew up in a country occupied by a foreign power and still shattered by both the humiliation of defeat and the horror of the atomic assault that forced the militarist regime to surrender in August 1945. Indeed, the first story, `Hell', captures the national mood in its depiction of how a young photographer named Koyanagi forged his reputation with a snap of the shadow formed on the wall of a decimated Hiroshima house seeming to show a devoted son giving his mother a massage at the moment of detonation. However, as Koyanagi finds himself at the forefront of a movement to prevent future conflagrations, he learns the truth about what was actually happening in the Yamada household at that fateful moment.

The postwar trauma placed a strain upon the marriage of Tatsumi's parents and money was often tight. But, much to the frustration of his sickly older brother Okimasa, he began winning artistic competitions and learned a harsh lesson when he returned from school one day to discover that his sibling had torn up his drawings. This sense of betrayal and not knowing how best to respond to a change in circumstances informed `Beloved Monkey', which centres on a factory worker named Yoshida who dislikes the bustle of everyday life and cherishes the isolation he shares with a simian who spends much of its time cowered resentfully in a corner of a cramped Tokyo bedsit. However, everything changes when Yoshida meets bar hostess Reiko at the monkey enclosure at the Ueno Zoo and an act of daydreaming carelessness at work not only costs him an arm, but also his only true friend.

Despite idolising Tezuka, Tatsumi failed to find a niche in his child-friendly brand of illustration and began producing darker tales aimed at a more discerning audience. However, this left him feeling as vulnerable as Japan in the decade after American forces finally withdrew and as isolated as Hanayama, the salaryman in `Just a Man' who is facing imminent retirement and the prospect of drifting towards death in the company of the detested wife and spoilt daughter who have both slept with the latter's ingratiating husband. Thus, he withdraws the savings he has kept secret and decides to blow them on satisfying his long-suppressed sexual urges. But a visit to a bathhouse proves as unsatisfactory as a date with an escort and it's only after seeing a monument fashioned from a giant gun at a shrine to the war dead that he vows to invest his cash in the seduction of his younger and recently jilted work colleague, Okawa.

The disappointing misogyny of this story recurs in the final pair, which serve to show how the boom years of the 1960s (which coincided with the growing popularity of the gekiga genre) could not entirely erase the guilt and shame of the misbegotten imperialist adventure under the Emperor Hirohito. A hint of this afflicts both Shimokawa - the cartoonist in `Occupied', who becomes obsessed with the pornographic graffiti in a downtown public toilet and is arrested while making his own contribution after being hired by a new publisher - and Mariko, the prostitute in `Good-Bye' who responds to being deceived by a GI named Joe in the immediate aftermath of defeat by sleeping with her own father so she can treat him as just another exploitative man and no longer feel duty-bound to subsidise his drinking.

The harshness of the storylines is striking and Khoo (himself a onetime comic-book artist) commendably conveys historical Tatsumi's significance in introducing a radical new realism to the comic aesthetic. But, while the deftly shaded images adhere closely to their sources (which have never been filmed before), they have been awkwardly animated - apparently through a mix of traditional cel and digital processes - and many will find them more than a little melodramatic, not to say sensationalist. Only `Hell' is genuinely compelling, although its twist ending establishes a trend that recurs in each of the ensuing episodes, which contain compositions by Khoo's 13 year-old son, Christopher. Consequently, one is left admiring the ambition and artistry of the project, while also wondering whether the biographical and portmanteau elements might not have benefited from being in separate pictures.