Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 5/9/2012)

Opening with a 35mm segment captioned `A Lost Paradise', the action begins in a Yuletide Lisbon, as devout Catholic Teresa Madruga compensates for the recent departure of a Polish lodger by fussing over elderly neighbour Laura Soveral. Showing signs of dementia, she lives with Cape Verdean maid Isabel Cardoso, who is paid for by Soveral's otherwise neglectful daughter. When not taking language classes, Cardoso dotes on her mistress and is repaid by accusations of imprisonment that Madruga takes with a pinch of salt, even when she rescues Soveral from a casino where she claims that Cardoso has used voodoo witchcraft to curse her luck on the fruit machines.

However, Madruga is sufficiently intrigued by Soveral's insistence she has blood on her hands to agree to deliver a letter to white-haired retirement home resident Henrique Espirito Santo. As the stock changes to 16mm and the stilted declamation of the early scenes gives way to a lyrical voiceover, the `Paradise' section begins with Espirito Santo revealing that the younger Soveral (Ana Moreira) lived in an African colony not unlike Mozambique with her husband, Ivo Müller, a legendary big-game hunter with a sprawling farm in the foothills of Mount Tabu. A crack shot herself, Moreira seems to have an idyllic lifestyle, as she accompanies Müller on his expeditions and enjoys playing the hostess as much as she is excited about the imminent birth of their first child.

But Müller is an inconsiderate lover and, thus, from the moment she sets eyes on Italian visitor Carloto Cotta, Moreira is besotted and struggles to keep her passion under control. The feeling is entirely mutual. But, as Cotta plays in a pop group that specialises in Phil Spector covers, he is also beholden to manager Manuel Mesquita, who trained for the priesthood before succumbing to his homosexual urges. Their relationship complicates the liaison and Moreira and Cotta try to restrain themselves. But their ardour proves too strong and the consequences can only be tragic.

As with much Portuguese cinema, this is a demanding watch. Acknowledging his debt to FW Murnau by naming his eccentric heroine Aurora after the German's 1927 Hollywood classic Sunrise and inverting the chapter headings of his final feature Tabu (1931), Gomes (who started out as a critic) often seems to be pastiching the styles of the early sound and silent eras. He may well also be referencing Sacha Guitry's endlessly innovative 1936 saga, The Story of a Cheat, which also made inspired use of an off-screen narrator. But, while the first half of the picture is laced with playful wit, the second is so achingly exquisite that it can only be seen as a sincere homage to the melodramas of yesteryear. Notwithstanding comparisons with Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, the tone is closer to Guy Maddin or Pedro Almodóvar reworking Douglas Sirk or Rainer Werner Fassbinder and cineastes will revel in the mellifluousness of Espirito Santo's narration and the shimmering beauty of Rui Pocas's crisp, Academy ratio monochrome images.

Such is Gomes's control that a version of `Be My Baby' that initially sounds risibly kitschy acquires a new-found poignancy worthy of Jerome Kern or Irving Berlin at their best when played in a second context. His direction of the cast is equally astute, with the almost robotic line readings of Madruga, Soveral and Cardoso giving way to the sublime pantomime of Moreira and Cotta, whose resemblance to a young Clark Gable or Errol Flynn is gleefully anachronistic considering his flashback occurs in the 1960s rather than the 1930s. And where else have two watchful crocodiles seemed so affectingly melancholic?

As likely to infuriate as delight, Tabu is a boldly stylised riposte to the dour realism of so much arthouse cinema and the CGI-strewn escapism of so many blockbusters. Managing to be both modern and nostalgic in discussion of colonialism, religion, sexuality and the role of women, it also reminds us of forgotten techniques and approaches to storytelling, while also insisting that they retain a relevance and value beyond the quaint or the parodic.

Although he remains best known for social dramas like Clocking Off and Shameless, writer Paul Abbott has already proved that he knows his way around the thriller format with State of Play. However, in trying to capture the mood of the capital in the run-up to the Olympics, he rather comes a cropper with Twenty8K, which he has co-scripted with Jimmy Dowdall for directors Neil Thompson and David Kew. Indeed, despite making solid use of locations around the Greenwich neighbourhood of Southwood Park, this tale of clashing cultures, ruthless gangs, bent coppers and corrupt politicians is so riddled with clichés, caricatures and signposted twists that it is only marginally superior to the glut of low-budget Mockey crime sagas that highbrow critics seem unable to resist deriding.

On the same night that news anchor Nicola Posener reports on the death of a woman killed in gangland crossfire on a London street, thug Jack Bence is gunned down at a club where Asian DJ Sebastian Nanena has just played a set he hopes will raise his profile.  However, he is arrested for the shooting and fashion designer sister Parminder Nagra dashes back from Paris to enlist the services of lawyer Pal Aron.

Having been raised by their aunt and uncle, Nagra and Nanena are close and she is distressed that he refuses to confide in her when she visits him in prison. She asks dope-dealing cousin Gregg Chillin and youth club leader (and ex-boyfriend) Jonas Armstrong for their help. But they warn her that cop Stephen Dillane and his Scottish sidekick Derek Riddell appear to have a watertight case and urge her to steer clear of Bence's Italianate gang boss, Michael Socha, who is angry with Nanena because of his relationship with his dead oppo's beautician girlfriend, Kaya Scodelario.

She works in the same salon as Nichola Burley, who has just dumped Socha for Chillin, who has footage of the shooting on his phone that he intends to use to boost his own prospects. However, Nagra finds visual evidence of her own when she spots a shadowy figure running away on a CCTV tape and she is convinced that Dillane wipes it to protect a contact. Further research establishes a connection between Dillane and newly appointed Home Secretary Tom Knight, unscrupulous council leader Ian Ralph and casino croupier Kierston Wareing, who just happens to be Socha's mum.

Despite the assistance of black journalist Alex Lanipekun, Nagra struggles to crack the case. But, when Scodelario is killed in a hit-and-run accident, Nanena finally agrees to co-operate with his sister and the sinister side of the locale hosting the 2012 Games begins to emerge.

Hurtling through the convoluted plotline without pausing to establish anything other than the most basic character traits, this is a hugely disappointing film. The principals work hard and cinematographer Mike Beresford-Jones's sharp imagery helps Thompson and Kew establish the sobering fact that no amount of Olympic gentrification can solve the problems of a multi-racial community ensnared by poverty, prejudice, greed and graft. But the action is no more sophisticated than a 1970s episode of The Sweeney, only with Dillane and Riddell resoundingly representing the wrong arm of the law.

Frank Harper's St. George's Day similarly harks back to a bygone age of London villainy. But, while it occasionally lapses into rhyming slang and nods in the direction of Guy Ritchie, Matthew Vaughn and Paul McGuigan, this is much more old school than BritCrime. Consequently, although some of the characterisation is more than a touch stereotypical and the odd performance rings hollow, this is a satisfyingly complex cops and robbers saga that makes solid use of its locations both in the capital and on the continent. 

Cousins Frank Harper and Craig Fairbrass have worked together for 25 years. Such is their bond that they trust each other far more than Harper does his older brother Tony Denham and Fairbrass does his son. Tommy McDonnell. However, the game has changed in recent years and Fairbrass has promised wife Angela Gots that he will quit and invest his ill-gotten gains in a Spanish golf complex being planned by Nick Moran and his associate Craig Henderson. For the moment, however, he is content to join Harper in executing the Albanians who have defaulted on a drug debt and in teaming with Russian mafioso Zlatko Buric on a £50 million score that can fund his fresh start.

Typically, however, things don't run smoothly. Harper discovers that one of the dealers they executed was Buric's favourite cousin. Then, despite trusted lieutenant Vincent Regan handling the shipment across the North Sea, the rib containing Chucky Venn, Ashley Walters and Buric's brother Nick Neven hits some bad weather and only Walters survives being washed up on the beach at Eastbourne. While Harper arranges for Walters to hide out with Dexter Fletcher on a traveller site near Thamesmead, Scotland Yard inspector Jamie Foreman and his shifty sidekick Sean Pertwee launch Operation Dragon Slayer to ensnare the cousins with the assistance of a mole inside their organisation.

Determined not to capitulate to Buric, Harper calls in lynchpin Charles Dance to mediate and a sum of £1 million compensation is agreed for Neven. However, Harper and Fairbrass still need to find another £20 million to pay for the lost merchandise and they decide to make themselves scarce after Walters is gunned down at Venn's funeral and they use an upcoming England international against Germany to slip across the Channel with the football hooligans being marshalled by the brutally patriotic Denham.

Gots is furious with Fairbrass for jeopardising their dreams. But Harper's mistress Keeley Hazell is more loyal and she gives Foreman's men the slip to make for the States with a bagful of cash. Over in Amsterdam, however, Harper is more concerned with identifying the snitch and his suspicions fall upon property developer Neil Maskell (who is struggling to cope with the recession) and his stepbrother Luke Treadaway, who emerged unscathed from two tours of duty in Afghanistan only to wind up in stir for striking an officer. Harper also has to find a way of raising the money for Buric and accedes when Regan suggests that they throw in their lot with his diamond-smuggling confidante, Sura Dohnke.

Following a punch-up with Ajax fans, the Barmy Army heads to Berlin for a 23 April showdown with some German thugs. But Harper uses the ruckus to create a diversion that not only enables him to steal the diamonds from Dohnke's courier, but also to expose the grass and impose suitable punishment before the pursuing Foreman can pounce

Scripting with Urs Buehler, Harper makes a more than creditable first stab at directing. Slyly examining the overlap between underworld seediness and celebrity respectability, he and cinematographer Mike Southon also capture the dark glamour of the milieu and the extent to which old firm values are being compromised by the intrusion of Eastern European newcomers.  The nocturnal Thamescapes are particularly effective, although the views of Amsterdam's canals and Berlin's major landmarks occasionally seem more self-conscious.

The same is also true of the performances, with the cameoing Moran, Fletcher and Walters being soundly upstaged by Charles Dance, who is chillingly sinister as a well-connected gentleman hood bent on preventing a turf war from breaking out in his manor. Former Page Three girl Keeley Hazell also shows well as Harper's WET (white estate trash) lover, as does Jamie Foreman as the flatfoot who has never forgiven Harper for shooting him in the derriere several years earlier.

But it's Harper who proves the most compelling, as he strives to avoid falling into the traps that accounted for Bob Hoskins in John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980). Focused on getting the job done at whatever cost, Harper allows a hint of melancholy to inflect his portrayal of an old-time crook who realises that his day is done. Comparisons could be drawn to Richard Burton's world-weary display in Michael Tuchner's Villain (1971), although the over-reliance on a florid noirish voiceover means this lacks the zing of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais's screenplay. Nonetheless, it still represents a sterling start behind the camera for one of Britain's most reliable screen hard men.

Former commercials director William Eubank also makes a confident, if slightly arch start in features with Love. Apparently produced with $500,000 donated by musician Tom DeLonge (of Blink-182 and Angels and Airwaves fame), this mix of historical reconstruction, science fiction and philosophical dissertation is laudably ambitious and innovative. Borrowing from such generic classics as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (both 1972) and Duncan Jones's Moon (2009), this is surely destined for cult status, if only because its ending is so shrouded in ambiguity that geeks will spend aeons in internet chatrooms debating its meaning and significance. But this thoughtful hybrid also demonstrates sufficient intelligence, visual sense and technical proficiency to suggest that Eubank is a genuine talent to note.

The action opens in 1864, at the height of the American Civil War. Having survived several pitiless skirmishes, Union captain Bradley Horne has acquired a super-human reputation. Consequently, with his unit surrounded by Confederate forces, General Corey Richardson decides to sends him on a mission to ascertain the nature of a mysterious object that has been reported in the nearby Colorado basin. Fleeing just before the bombardment begins, Horne keeps a journal of his trek, which ends in terrified bemusement as he gazes upon the mass of twisted metal that seems to have dropped out of the skies.

The scene shifts forward 175 years to 2039, as astronaut Gunner Wright reports back to Mission Control in Houston that all is going well with his task to gauge the condition of the International Space Station that had been abandoned two decades before and is now being readied for a new crew. Exercising vigorously on a running machine when not running tests on vital equipment, Wright is in good spirits after receiving a message from his brother that he has just become an uncle. But he keeps picking up radio interference and is concerned that mission boss Tony Cohen cannot hear it. He is even more perplexed, however, when his communication link goes down after he sees a flash on Earth that plunges the planet into darkness.

His worst fears confirmed by a recorded message from Cohen that something catastrophic has occurred and that there is no imminent chance of bringing him home, Wright decides to conserve his food supplies and begins carrying out repairs that will make the ISS run more efficiently. He also continues to exercise and starts to converse with a Polaroid that Russian cosmonaut Nancy Stelmaszczyk had left behind. As the months pass, he explores the depressurised parts of the craft and finds Horne's leather-bound journal, which echoes his own growing sense of isolation and despair.

Distraught at the system wiping his brother's video, Wright begins scrawling drawings and runes on the walls of the spaceship and even carves tattoos into his own flesh. Increasingly prone to hallucinations, he is asked by the voices in his head if he minds the fact they are not real. Yet he is so desperate for companionship that he refuses to delve too deply into their origins. After six years of solitude, however, Wright decides to venture into space and detach his tethering line. But something keeps him from casting himself into oblivion and he returns inside to experience a series of visions that may or may not explain his plight and how it links into the sight that so astounded Horne all those decades earlier.

Considering the meagreness of the budget, this is a remarkable achievement. The use of slow-motion during the Civil War battle sequence conveys the undiscriminating destructive power of an artillery shell, while the sight that Horne witnesses manages to evoke memories of 9/11, while also providing an ominous portent of Wright's ultimate fate. Despite confining the space sequences to interiors that were constructed on his parents' driveway, Eubank expertly avoids any Ed Wood-style clunkiness. Moreover, he and Wright generate a palpable sense of despondency, as the walkways become strewn with debris and the doomed man retreats deeper inside his own psyche.

There are missteps, however. The inclusion of four random talking heads addressing such issues as love, loss, personal interaction and recorded history are a major miscalculation, especially as they have been integrated with such a lack of finesse. Similarly, the obfuscatory climactic explanation is conceitedly calculating. But Wright's performance is admirable, as is the Angels and Airwaves score that reinforces the chimerical nature of Bob Kellough's sound design and Eubank's own production design and cinematography. So, while this space opera may be more adept at provoking debate than providing insights into human nature, it merits mention alongside Gareth Edwards's Monsters (2010) for making so much out of so little and it will be fascinating to see what Eubank opts to explore next.

While Eubank attempts to do something new with the `lost in space' format, Richard Parry sticks far too closely to the `found footage' rubric in following his debut feature South West Nine (2001) with A Night in the Woods. As one would expect of a cameraman-cum-director with considerable frontline news and documentary experience, the visuals are strongly authentic and often disconcertingly atmospheric. But their look and feel is so heavily indebted to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's The Blair Witch Project (1999) that one is left wondering why Parry didn't attempt something more distinctive, especially as the storyline was inspired by his own experience of ghoulish hands grasping at his throat in the dead of night during a camping expedition to Dartmoor.

It's evident from the opening caption that things are not going to go well for Anna Skellern, American boyfriend Scoot McNairy and long-lost cousin Andrew Hawley when they embark upon their outdoor adventure. Skellern is miffed that McNairy insists on filming everything from the moment they leave London and only perks up during a stopover at Stonehenge and when she meets Hawley off the Sheffield train.

Envious and short-fused, McNairy seems to take an instant dislike to Hawley and is suspicious that Skellern has never mentioned her favourite cousin in the six months they have been dating. Thus, tensions are already running high before locals in a pub on the edge of Dartmoor warn them of the folly of straying into Wistman's Wood and regale them with tales of a hunter who roams the area seeking sinners to string up from the nearest tree. However, emboldened by beer, the trio stride off into the misty rain and tease each other about potential terrors lurking behind every boulder.

But McNairy quickly tires of the banter and views the cousins with a jaundiced scowl as they sing and strum a guitar together. So, when Hawley wanders off to explore a stream, McNairy follows and forces him to watch the footage he recorded some months earlier of Hawley breaking into his house. Shocked to have been caught in the act, Hawley bluffs his way out of the confrontation by threatening to tell Skellern about McNairy being thrown out of Berkeley on account of his notorious temper.

The truce proves short-lived, however, and no sooner have they pitched camp for the night than McNairy storms off into the darkness. Left alone, Skellern and Hawley immediately start making out, as he is not her cousin, but the first boyfriend her father had forbidden her to date when she was 15. However, Hawley gets over-excited and Skellern pushes him away in disgust. Frustrated at botching his seduction and angry at finding his guitar missing, Hawley goes in search of McNairy. Inside the tent, however, the target of Skellern's fury soon switches when she not only discovers that McNairy has left a hidden camera running in the corner, but that he also has dozens of creepily candid clips of her sleeping stored on his laptop.

Scared by a sudden burst of activity outside, Skellern grabs the camera and uses its bright light to investigate. On finding no one there, she ventures into the woods and that's where her troubles really begin.

Alternating between lamplit and night-vision imagery, the closing action comes with all the handheld jerkiness we now expect of this increasingly tiresome sub-genre. In fairness to Parry and cinematographer Simon Dennis, the visuals are often splendid, with the brightly illuminated shots of the lush greenery and embrowned bracken contrasting eerily with the haunting night-vision greyness being used for sightings of such sinister objects as nooses dangling from a branch and for the perspective of an unknown operator who might be McNairy, the fabled soul hunter or any other malevolent presence bestriding the moors. Udit Duseja's sound design is also commendable, while the cast deserves credit for improvising much of the drama, with McNairy being suitably pent-up and incrementally unhinged and the Australian Skellern producing a fine array of screams to match her English accent.

But the film plays so slavishly by the `found footage' rules that it is utterly devoid of suspense and surprise. It's a given that little if anything will be explained and that viewers will have to imagine the worst for themselves when McNairy staggers into view with blood on his neck or when Skellern finds a body strung up from a gnarled branch. But audiences know that the raw terror they experienced on first seeing Blair Witch can never be recaptured and, while fanboys might admire Parry's knowing efforts, few average movie-goers will notice even the slightest shift in their pulse rate.

Changing the mood completely, Lauren Greenfield's The Queen of Versailles is one of the year's most perturbing documentaries. Equally laced with Schadenfreude and compassion, this intimate profile of a trophy wife trying to keep her family together as it becomes enmired in the economic meltdown represents a marked departure from Thin, Greenfield's sensitive 2006 study of eating disorders. Yet, while it may be difficult to discern where its director's sympathy lies, the film still provides a fascinating insight into how the other 1% live and how their wealth detaches them from anything the rest of us might recognise as reality.

When Greenfield first met David and Jackie Siegel in 2007 they were on the crest of a wave. Entering his seventies and 31 years older than his former beauty queen wife, he was a billionaire whose reputation as the Timeshare King reportedly gave him the clout to carry George W. Bush to victory in Florida in 2000. Fiercely proud of both her breast enhancements and her wardrobe, she was the mother of seven children and the guardian of her teenage niece Jonquil, who had come to live with the Siegels because Jackie's sister was unable to care for her. Judging by the portraits depicting them as Antony and Cleopatra, they were very much in love and determined to indulge their children and each other in every little whim.

However, all was not well. The Siegels had decided that their 26,000 square-foot mansion was simply too small to house them and their 19 domestic staff. Consequently, they had commissioned a 96,000 square-foot chateau that combined the best architectural features of the Palace of Versailles and the Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, as well as incorporating 30 bathrooms, 10 kitchens, a roller rink, a bowling alley, a full-sized baseball pitch and $5 million of Chinese marble. Safe in the knowledge that they would soon be the owners of the biggest domicile in the country, they hosted a reception for the Miss America beauty pageant and greeted the great and the good with a justified sense of having made it big.

Within months, however, the credit crunch had turned into a full-blown financial crisis and the dreamers who had once been tempted to buy timeshare accommodation had started finding better uses for their savings. Almost overnight, work ceased on the dream home and Siegel and his son Richard found themselves fighting to retain control of their most prized asset, the Westgate Tower in Vegas.

Like any loyal wife, Jackie stood by her man. Indeed, she went out of her way to keep the kids quiet while David was trying to relax and did her best to cheer him up whenever his mood darkened. But, despite hailing from humble Binghamton, New York stock and having earned a university degree in engineering when she was younger, she simply could not grasp the concept of tightening her belt and budgeting for essentials. Even after the staff had been reduced to four and was forced to overcome her culinary limitations to feed her brood, she still went on a Christmas binge at Walmart that infuriated her spouse as much with the quality as the quantity of the gifts she purchased.

Confiding to Tom Hurwitz's camera that being married to Jackie was like having another child, David battles to save his business. When the bank changes the terms of his loan, he puts the palatial property on the market for $100 million finished or $75 million unfinished. Yet he was still left with no option but to make hundreds of employees redundant and part with his Vegas hotel headquarters. Meanwhile, back home, Jackie keeps coming across dog faeces and the corpses of pets that have simply died of neglect. She strives to keep David connected to his offspring, but his mind is elsewhere and Greenfield clearly feels sorry for a woman in real danger of losing much more than a fortune.

Before the film's premiere, David Siegel filed a libel suit to prevent the screening because a line in the press release implied that he had gone bankrupt. In fact, he had used the phrase `rags-to-riches-to-rags story' himself and the self-inflicted furore generated a little additional publicity for a tale that was already being splashed across newspaper and website pages nationwide. One presumes it must have been possible for the Siegels either to terminate the shooting arrangement or at least withdraw their co-operation. Thus, while one has a sneaking admiration for Jackie's courage in continuing to put on a brave face for her kids and the watching world, it's difficult to empathise with what can only be described as a plight in comparative terms.

Greenfield shrewdly allows her subjects plenty of rope with which to hang themselves and they do little to earn our pity. She also dwells on the fact that nanny Virginia Nebel has been away from her own family in the Philippines for 19 years in order to provide for them. But there are moments when the camera seems to survey the grotesque displays of opulence and highlight the lapses in taste with a sense of satisfied superiority that is frequently reinforced by Jeff Beal's mock-classical score. While such tactics may be the norm in reality television, they feel out of place in a documentary feature that otherwise has much in common with David and Albert Maysles's Grey Gardens (1975) in its keen appreciation of the extent to which wealth and class are often mutually exclusive in modern America. Indeed, had Greenfield placed less emphasis on the story's freak show elements and more on its social, political and economic context, as well as its utterly compelling Tennessee Williams-like human aspects, this might have been a vital record of recessional reality coming home to roost for the Haves who had invested everything in the American Dream.

On 2 April 2011, the post-punk dance combo LCD Soundsystem played its last gig at Madison Square Garden in New York. In an interview a few days earlier, chat show host Stephen Colbert had wondered why 41 year-old frontman James Murphy was canning the band when it was so clearly at the top of its game in helping to define 21st-century pop culture. Smiling archly, Murphy had claimed that the time felt right and that he wanted to preserve his status as an average Joe who could ride the subway without being recognised. But as Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace's documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits progresses, one gets the feeling that panic and fear were the primary motivating factors in a decision that had been regretted almost as soon as it had been made.

Taking their cues from Martin Scorsese's record of The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz (1978), Southern and Lovelace cut between highlights from the show and an interview designed to provide insights into Murphy's personality and his musical achievement. However, they depart from the template by following Murphy on his first day of retirement, as he wakes after an epic backstage party and potters around his apartment, walks his French bulldog, pops into the empty LCD office and holds a half-hearted post-mortem with manager Keith Wood. But it's only when he goes to a lock-up to survey the instruments and equipment that will either have to be stored or sold that Murphy lets slip any sense of emotion and the muffled sobs merely reinforce the suspicion that rather than being a hip rocker making the ultimate cool statement by calling it a day while still at the top, this is a man having a mid-life crisis.

During his one-to-one session with journalist Chuck Klosterman in an empty downtown restaurant, Murphy complains about touring turning his hair grey. His concern that this is an outward sign of the inevitable decline of his vital organs will strike a chord with many viewers of a certain age. But it also reveals a self-preoccupation that Southern and Lovelace indulge by keeping their focus firmly on Murphy at the expense of bandmates Nancy Whang, Pat Mahoney, Tyler Pope, David Scott Stone, Matt Thornley, Gavin Russom, Al Doyle, Phil Mossman, Petunia and Gunnar Bjerk, whose expert musicianship makes the 11 tracks culled from the 29-strong set sound so slick.

For those coming late to the MSG `funeral', tracks like `Losing My Edge', `Dance Yrself Clean', `All My Friends', `North American Scum', `Someone Great` and `Jump Into the Fire' will come as something of a revelation. Sounding almost like dance variations of Talking Heads, The Smiths and New Order, LCD Soundsystem apparently captured the mood of the nation in the aftermath of 9/11 and proved Murphy's contention that an ordinary bloke could become a rock star. But the validity of these claims don't seem to concern the co-directors, as they make little effort to assess or contextualise the onetime DJ, his band or their music. Instead, they are content to allow Murphy to exploit their project to facilitate his readjustment to normality and to justify his exit from the limelight in rambling answers to pompous questions whose hesitancy is intended to convey profundity, but actually betrays the trepidation of facing an uncertain future.

It's fitting that Southern and Lovelace opted to film LCD's goodbye dinner through the restaurant window, as, for all the access to Murphy on the day after the night before, this is very much a profile by outsiders looking in. Nobody as self-conscious or introspective as Murphy would be willing to open himself up such frank scrutiny at the very moment of his retreat into reclusivity. But while this exercise in mythologisation always feels overly stage-managed, it still makes a fine introduction to some fascinating and frequently funky music and to a frontman whose recent announcement that he is set to direct a short film with Ron Howard means that he will clearly not be in the shadows for too long.