Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 21/6/2012)

Having lost interest in acting, Maïwenn reinvented herself as a director and made a lacerating debut with Pardonnez-moi (2006), a painfully honest and partially autobiographical saga in which she played an expectant mother who buys a video camera to make a film for her unborn child and forces her family and friends to confess their secrets and failings. The mood lightened considerably for Le Bal des Actrices (2009), an audacious mixture of thesping exposé, luvvie satire and musical comedy that follows Maïwenn's documentary maker as she tries to coax Charlotte Rampling, Karin Viard, Jeanne Balibar, Romane Bohringer, Julie Depardieu, Muriel Robin, Marina Foïs and Karole Rocher into betraying confidences about their professional and private lives.

However, having proved herself to be thematically and stylistically fearless in her first two pictures, Maïwenn resorts to solid, dependable social realism to tackle the provocative topic of child abuse in the hard-hitting, but not always sharply focused drama. Polisse. Closer in spirit to The Wire than classic policiers like Maurice Pialat's gritty Police (1985) and Bertrand Tavernier's masterly L.627 (1991), this examines the impact that investigating often unspeakable crimes has on the members of a Parisian protection unit, several of whom are enduring domestic crises of their own. But Maïwenn becomes distracted by the characters' personal problems and, thus, dissipates the power emanating from juvenile testimonies that are alternatively deeply harrowing and darkly hilarious.

Commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior to make a study of its everyday routine, bashful photographer Maïwenn quickly discovers that the Child Protection Unit in the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville has more than its share of problems. In addition to Romanian immigrants teaching their kids to pick pockets, there are also any number of Muslim fathers trying to force their underage daughters into arranged marriages, gym teachers obsessed with their students and confused tweenagers like Malonn Lévana, who can't understand why their fathers have suddenly become so interested in them. There is little wonder, therefore, that so many of the squad find it hard not to take their work home with them and nearly all are facing a domestic crisis of one sort or another.

Anguished by a messy divorce, Karin Viard has been told to watch what she eats and finds herself constantly being nagged by Marina Foïs, who is desperate to have a baby and is in deep denial about her own bulimia. Lesbian Emmanuelle Bercot is also struggling to come to terms with her real self, while Nicolas Duvauchelle and his pregnant partner Karole Rocher keep ignoring the fact that there is more to their relationship than camaraderie. And if chief Frédéric Pierrot didn't already have enough to worry about, he is also keeping an eye on Joeystarr, the team hothead, who is crashing on his sofa after a domestic incident.

As cases come and go, Maïwenn finds her becoming less of an outsider and her pictures start to capture the intimacy that the cops establish with the juvenile victims of abuse, exploitation and poverty. Some of the vignettes (the majority of which are based on actual records) are intended to be bleakly amusing, such as the teenager who resorts to fellatio to recover a stolen mobile phone. But most are dismaying and expose the differences and similarities between cultures and classes in the (mis)treatment of children.

The sequence in which Joeystarr becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to find a shelter willing to take African mother Bine Sarambounou and her son Gaye Sarambounou is perhaps the most harrowing, especially as the mother ultimately decides to give the boy up so that he might have a better chance than she will ever be able to afford him. But the segment featuring the cameoing Sandrine Kiberlain and Louis-Do de Lenquessaing is equally potent, as he uses his business contacts to bury the case, even though he admits to having terrible thoughts about his eight year-old daughter, and Joeystarr winds up being carpeted by boss Wladimir Yordanoff for taking the law into his own hands.

Yet, Maïwenn always seems more interested in the problems of the CPU crew than the children they are trying to help. Thus, she drifts back to Viard and Foïs, as their friendship strains to breaking point, and to Duvauchelle and Rocher as they finally admit their feelings for one another after he is wounded in action. Moreover, she is not averse to building up her own part, as she embarks upon an affair with Joeystarr after they kiss during a night out to celebrate the resolution of a particularly tricky case.

Keeping Pierre Aïm's digital camera in the thick of the action, Maïwenn elicits fine performances from a committed ensemble. However, she and co-scenarist Bercot disappointingly allow the picture to end on a melodramatic note that somewhat undermines its authenticity. What's more, the humour is occasionally misjudged and some of the slanging matches feel forced. A tighter narrative structure might have helped things seem less fragmented, although the climactic shopping mall and hospital scenes would still feel rushed. Nevertheless, despite the odd moment of ill-discipline and self-indulgence, Maïwenn continues to develop as a director and fully merits her place alongside such emerging talents as Mia Hansen-Løve, Céline Sciamma, Katell Quillévéré, Isabelle Czajka, Pascale Ferran, Eléonore Faucher and Karin Albou.

While France has a proud tradition of encouraging women film-makers, the Middle East has proved much more resistant to affording them freedom of expression. Things had improved in Iran before the Green Wave, while a handful of female artists have started to find their voices in the Maghreb since the Arab Spring. But Nadine Labaki pretty much stands alone in the Lebanon and with Where Do We Go Now? she builds steadily on the reputation forged with her excellent debut, Caramel (2007). Taking its inspiration from Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata, Labaki once again suggests that the world would be a very different place if women had more of a say in how things were done. Yet, for all its bright spots, this offers few new perspectives and it's a shame that it has been released so close to Radu Mihaileanu's similarly themed, but markedly less attuned battle of the sexes, The Source.

In an unnamed village in a country that bears many similarities to Lebanon, the Muslim and Christian residents manage to remain civil to each other, in spite of the occasional flare up. As the story opens, a funeral procession weaves its way to the cemetery, only for the grieving women to divide into two columns, as they shuffle off to pay respects to their fallen heroes in a conflict that seems about to rear its head again, as a prankster has put chicken blood in the holy water font at the local church and allowed goats to invade the mosque.

Determined to prevent the situation escalating, widowed Christian café owner Nadine Labaki summons her neighbours and they agree that they must do everything possible to distract their trigger-happy menfolk from ramping up the tension. With the surrounding fields being pocked with landmines and a broken bridge over the only road already restricting access to the outside world, the women sabotage television and radio connections to prevent any contentious news from getting through. They even hire a troupe of Ukrainian dancers from the nearby Paradise Palace to pretend that they are lost and need somewhere to stay until they can be rescued.

All seems to be going well, with mayor Khalil Bou Khalil's wife Yvonne Maalouf even claiming a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary to defuse a potential flashpoint. Indeed, Labaki even has time to slip away for a furtive rendezvous with tattooed Muslim handyman Julien Farhat. But the temperature rises again when shoes are stolen from outside the mosque and Claude Baz Moussawbaa has to hide her distress when son Kevin Abboud is killed in the crossfire while collecting provisions on his motorbike and keep the peace by informing visitors that he has highly contagious mumps and must remain in quarantine.

Yet still the accusations and rumours fly and priest Samir Awad and sheik Ziad Abou Absi begin to lose control over their factions. Consequently, the women resort to lacing a banquet with hashish and sedatives to keep their husbands, sons and brothers doped long enough for them to concoct a plan.

Despite the lively performances, a couple of adroitly choreographed musical sequences (composed by Labaki's husband Khaled Mouzanar) and a splendid sense of place achieved by art director Cynthia Zahar and cinematographer Christophe Offenstein, this genial fable never quite strikes the right balance between wry wit and distressing tragedy. Playing overly on the audience's emotions rather than challenging their preconceptions, Labaki too often settles for caricature in the depiction of the male inhabitants. Moreover, she lets too many subplots drift and fails to prevent the dialogue in the closing sequences taking on a moralising tone.

What makes this all the more disappointing is that Thomas Bidegain, who wrote Jacques Audiard's acclaimed prison drama A Prophet (2009, is among Labaki's fellow scenarists. Yet this remains an easy film to like and its message of cross-faith co-existence can never be stressed often enough.

The equation of humour and solemnity is much more deftly achieved by Aleksei Fedorchenko in Silent Souls. Adapted from a novella by Denis Osokin, photographed with sepulchral beauty by Mikhail Krichman and counterpointed by Andrei Karasyov's brooding score, this is a moving treatise on the solace of death that is speckled with thoughtful insights into childhood innocence, fleeting happiness, rivalry, grief, tenderness and the disappointing reality of existence. But, bearing in mind that Fedorchenko debuted with the impeccable mockumentary First on the Moon (2005), which amusingly claimed that the Soviets had pursued a space programme in the 1930s, there is every chance that this is also a spoof that seeks to mock the myth of the dark Russian soul.

Despite the best efforts of tsars and dictators, the ancient Merjan culture has survived in the remote Volgan outpost of Neya, where paper mill manager Yuri Tsurilo lives with his younger wife Yuliya Aug and their frustrated writer friend Igor Sergeyev, who also works at the mill as a photographer. When Aug dies suddenly (and somewhat mysteriously), Sergeyev readily agrees to tell no one about her passing and help Tsurilo carry out the Finno-Ugric tribe's pagan funerary rites, which include tying threads to the deceased's pubic hair in an echo of a wedding night custom.

Unwilling to leave behind the pair of caged buntings that he has just purchased, Sergeyev packs them into the car along with Aug's blanketed body. As they drive across a suitably desolate wilderness, Tsurilo recalls bathing Aug in a tub of vodka, while Sergeyev reflects in a voiceover how local gossips were convinced that she had never really loved her husband and goes so far as to imply that he might once have been her lover. However, he is quickly distracted by memories of his own childhood confrontations with his tempestuous poet father, Viktor Sukhorukov, who once threw his typewriter into a frozen lake during one of his drunken rages.

On arriving on the banks of Lake Nero, where Aug and Tsurilo spent their honeymoon, the pals build a pyre and cremate the body so that Tsurilo can scatter his beloved's ashes on the water. En route back to Neya, however, they stop off in the once-thriving town of Molochai, where they pick up local girls Leisan Sitdikowa and Olga Dobrina for a meaningless fling. But, as they near home, the buntings escape their cage and the car careers off a bridge, leaving Tsurilo to scour the murky depths for Aug, while Sergeyev goes in search of his lost typewriter.

Tapping into a Merjan lore that was supposedly suppressed by the Slavs in the 16th century (and yet which is almost certainly the product of be a figment of Osokin's imagination), Fedorchenko exposes the near-totalitarian disregard of the current Kremlin regime for ethno-cultural diversity in broaching such age-old issues as passion, mortality, identity and loss. But, for all the gravity of its subtext and symbolism, this seems suffused with a Kaurismäkian sense of deadpan that makes one question the astonishing melancholic beauty of imagery that would not be out of place in a Tarkovsky picture.

Yet, while Sergeyev and Tsulio seem to be intent on outdoing each other in Dostoevskyan miserablism as they contemplate their traumatised pasts or dead-end futures, there is genuine poignancy in the confidences they share during the traditional Merjan `smoking' exchange of intimate details about Aug and her body. However, despite their fondness, these reminiscences could easily be seen as callously chauvinist and will be as hard to accept for many as the exploitative encounter with Sitdikowa and Dobrina. But this is a film where meticulous authenticity simply cannot be taken at face value and Fedorchenko is as likely to be castigating as celebrating accepted notions of Russian masculinity and the state's cynically imperialist attitude to minorities and majorities alike.

The South Korean couple profiled by Yi Seung-jun in the documentary Planet of Snail also has its distinctive rituals and routines. But, even though Jo Yeong-chan has been deaf and blind from an early age and wife Kim Soon-ho has remained diminutive owing to a childhood spinal injury, this is never a sentimental or condescending account of their relationship. Indeed, taking its title from the pace at which Yeong-chan jokingly insists he lives his life, this is one of recent cinema's most honest and affecting insights into loving togetherness.

Despite being deprived of sight and hearing, Yeong-chan is articulate and ambitious. He fashions models out of clay, produces plays for the local theatre company, takes Hebrew lessons and makes notes for a book about the sensations and frustrations of his situation. However, he freely admits that he was incomplete before he met Soon-ho, who not only guides him through the streets around their Seoul apartment and browbeats him into doing his daily exercises, but also taps out a constant commentary on his wrist in Finger-Braille. Moreover, when perched on her husband's shoulders, she can also fix the flickering light bulb in their bedroom and has developed into quite the hostess for the dinner parties and soirées they are forever throwing for their large circle of friends (many of whom are disabled in some way).

Yet Yi is only passingly interested in presenting the pair as vibrant members of their community. Instead, he accompanies them on walks in the park, as Yeong-chan feels the sun on his face and raindrops on his fingertips and finds reassurance in the trunk of the tree he hugs with unfeigned enthusiasm. Even more remarkable, however, are the close-ups of the subtle, supple gestures that enable Soon-ho and Yeong-chan to communicate. Such is their dexterity that one is irresistibly reminded of musicians caressing a fretboard as they form their notes and few can derive such simple fulfilment and joy from a loved one's touch.

Towards the end of the picture, Yeong-chan has to go on a course to teach him how to cope in Soon-ho's absence and the depth of both his affection for and dependence on her is readily apparent. But, even though he shows Soon-ho picking at a lonely dinner and waiting expectantly for her spouse's minibus to return, Yi is occasionally guilty of marginalising her as he marvels at Yeong-chan's energy and capability. It might also have been instructive to learn a bit more about how they met and how they learned to complement each other so perfectly. But there is little room for saccharine romantic recollection and the fact that Soon-ho trains Yeong-chan to throw pine cones with deadly accuracy at Yi's camera demonstrates that this is a team that gets on with things rather than pondering the whys and wherefores of their conditions or how they are viewed by the outside world.

If this discreetly observed portrait contains several moments of poignant poetry and captures the unique rapture of silence, Thomas Lawes's The Last Projectionist goes to the other extreme, as it packs in the talking heads in a potted history of Birmingham's Electric cinema that also doubles as a dissertation on the decline of picture-going in this country and the utter disdain that the Hollywood machine has for the arthouses and independent venues that strive to bring their audiences something other than the latest blockbuster, kidpic, date movie or gross-out comedy.

As the current owner of the Station Street site, Lawes clearly has a dual purpose in chronicling its chequered past. But he does a solid, if somewhat convoluted job in recalling its various incarnations since it opened for business in 1909. Known as The Select from 1920, the theatre was purchased by solicitor and property developer Joseph Cohen a decade later and was refurbished with balconies for its conversion into the Tatler News Theatre in 1937. It continued to show newsreels and cartoons until 1962, when the rebranded Jacey found itself struggling to stay afloat in the face of both the barring system devised by bigger competitors Rank and ABC to ring fence popular pictures and the 1960 Film Act that forced cinema owners to show a certain number of British films in order to boost the box-office tax known as the Eady Levy.

Along with many of its ilk (including the Phoenix in its Studio 1&2 days), The Jacey survived by showing X-rated softcore pornography. It was fitting, therefore, that following a brief stint as The Classic 1&2, The Tivoli was acquired by adult film producer Barry Jacobs in 1988. On becoming a two-screen arthouse in 1993, it reverted back to its original name and emulated Oxford's The Penultimate Picture Palace and Not the Moulin Rouge by adding a John Buckley sculpture to its façade. The figures in the alcoves became known as `Thatcher's Children', as manager Simon Middleton felt they symbolised the country's unemployed.

Yet, even with PPP supremo Bill Heine as the leaseholder, the Electric lost its way and it closed in 2003. Determined to restore it to its former Art Deco glory, Tom Lawes embarked upon a major renovation prior to a grand re-opening in 2005. A second screen was added three years later and it has since become Birmingham's first all-digital venue, selling some 60,000 tickets annually to a loyal audience of fugitives from the nearby multiplexes. Consequently, Lawes can be forgiven for using the final reel to blow his own trumpet and promote an enterprise into which he has evidently invested considerable capital, affection and effort.

However, while the case history is as engaging as Philip Hind's The Ultimate Survivor, it's the way in which Lawes places the Electric's situation in the wider socio-cultural context that makes this so valuable. In addition, veteran projectionists Paul `Ginger' Curtin, John Brockington, Les Castree, Graham Lee and Phil Fawke also explore how the technique of screening movies has changed over the decades and how what was once a skilled craft that required years of training is in danger of disappearing altogether in an age of computerised systems that virtually anyone can operate with the push of a button.

The story is enhanced by adroit animations inserts by Ben Lewis and Icky Dhesi and clips from such flicks as George Nichols's The Star Border (1914), Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927), Martin Campbell's Eskimo Nell (1975) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). But Lawes doesn't always shoot his interview subjects in the most interesting manner and he has an over-courteous tendency to allow anecdotes to ramble. Furthermore, he is prone to losing focus, with a segment on Cyril Barbier's detailed model of the Odeon on nearby New Street seeming as out of place as the discussions of 3-D and Imax technology and the politicised protestations of other indie cinema owners and executives from the various UK trade associations. Nevertheless, this is a capable account of British exhibition whose lament for the passing of celluloid is tempered by cautious optimism for the survival of cinema-going as a social pastime and an artistic pursuit.