Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 19/9/2013)

As the camera peers hazily through long grass on a sunny day, a detached female voice wonders whether it would be possible to start again. An immediate sense of doom pervade proceedings, therefore, as Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris spot each other across the dance floor of a downtown Liverpool nightclub. He works in a scrap yard and has just moved into a new flat, while she works in a cheap greetings card shop and they meet as he is celebrating his 28th birthday. Morris's first words reveal he is already on a high and they snort cocaine before going home to indulge in energetic sex, during which she throttles him as he approaches climax. She apologises the next morning for the bite marks on his body, but they make love again in the shower and Morris is so infatuated with Campbell-Hughes and her fearless attitude that he tells sister Lisa Mallett and his workmates all about her. 

Complete with a Bill Shankly bon mot stencilled on the wall, Morris lives in a squat in an old school in Anfield. He is a bit of a scally and borrows a van from brother-in-law Johann Myers to drive into North Wales with pals Stephen Walters and Mark Ruane to score some drugs to sell in the city centre night spots. As they head into the countryside, Campbell-Hughes accompanies dominatrix friend Claire Keelan to the Wirral, where she subjects a banker to a beating in his basement and Campbell-Hughes is surprised by how much this disturbs her, given her own predilection for kinky sex.

Utterly smitten, Morris makes Campbell-Hughes a mix tap from his vinyl collection and gives it to her when they meet up by Alfred Gilbert's Eros fountain in Sefton Park. They walk around the lake and he points things out to her with the light hand on her shoulder contrasting starkly with the aggression of their first nocturnal encounter. As they watch some fishermen on the bank, Campbell-Hughes recalls how she used to fish with her father. They rarely caught anything, but brought packed lunches and made a day of it. Yet she blenches as she explains that he has since died and there is a suspicion that the relationship may not always have been so wholesome.

As they stroll in the sunshine, Piers McGrail's camera alights on the flora and fauna and the flies swirling in the dappled light. But the mood changes when they go to the Walker Art Gallery in the heart of the city and see another Eros and another Gilbert sculpture, `Mors Janua Vitae', a death monument of Dr Edward Percy Plantagenet Macloghlin that was commissioned by his widow, Liza, when the Wigan GP passed away at the age of 47. They were atheists who want to symbolise their love for each other and this intimate piece is contrasted with Giovanni Segantini's painting, 'The Punishment of Lust', which shows two mothers suffering in Purgatory for neglecting their children.

Campbell-Hughes states with deadpan bitterness that her own mother should wind up in a picture like this. But Morris asks no questions and follows dutifully when Campbell-Hughes announces she is bored and kisses him on the steps outside. She asks why he has waited so long to make a move and he admits that he wanted to kiss her when they were on the bus, but didn't want to presume. She seems satisfied by his explanation and suggests they go for a drink because she's cold.

They catch the bus to a pub and later in the evening go to the roof of a multi-storey car park to dance to Viking Moses song `Dancing by the Water Day'. Once again, the tenderness contrasts markedly with what happens when they return to his lodgings, as Campbell-Hughes ties Morris's hands behind his back and carves their initials into his back with a piece of broken glass, even though he has begged her to stop. As she walks alone by the docks, Morris tends to the tomatoes he is growing in the school playground. But, when Ruane notices blood on Morris's shirt during a game of five-a-side, he tells him to dump Campbell-Hughes, as he considers her way of showing affection to be sick.

Morris is laid off from the waterfront yard and, with the letters `K+V' clearly visible in his flesh, he falls to the floor sobbing after masturbating in the shower with a belt tied around his neck. Meanwhile, Campbell-Hughes goes to visit mother Gabrielle Reidy and is furious that she has invited ex-boyfriend Mark Womack to call round. They had once lived together but it seems plain that the romance had turned violent when Campbell-Hughes orders him to keep his distance and threatens to call the police.

Over the next few days, Campbell-Hughes goes shopping for clothes and returns to the gallery to look at the Gilbert memorial. Yet neither seems happy apart, with Morris disapproving when Walters forces his girlfriend to give him oral sex in the toilets at a party to celebrate one of their gang becoming a dad and Campbell-Hughes eating alone when Keelan stands her up. She drifts into a pub, only to bump into Womack, who is there his thuggish buddies Michael Ryan and Shaun Mason. He threatens them with a baseball bat when they menace Campbell-Hughes, but she is very much afraid as he closes in on her.

Back in the city, Morris almost gets into a fight with some drunken lads as he walks down a back alley. He thinks of his conversation with Campbell-Hughes at the Nelson Monument in Exchange Flags about getting away from Liverpool and working in a nature reserve. But such optimistic hopes quickly disappear when he finds Campbell-Hughes alone with a gash in her head and he rushes her to casualty.

They go back to his squat and, following a rather sweet `start again' exchange, they tumble into bed. As Campbell-Hughes begins tightening a silk belt around his neck, Morris relives the exhilaration and freedom he felt beside the Welsh lake. But his reverie distracts him and he is unable to give Campbell-Hughes the agreed safety tap and she accidentally strangles him. The next morning, as Campbell-Hughes goes to dial 999, she finds a message from Morris saying he can't stop thinking about her. She starts to cry and finally plays the tape he had given her and the scene fades as `Dancing by the Water Day' plays on the soundtrack.

Reckless hedonism and naked lust have become increasingly familiar facets of British film-making since Michael Winterbottom pointed the way with 9 Songs (2004) and Steve McQueen followed with Shame (2011). However, while this is nowhere near as graphic as the former or a cynical as the latter, it lacks the context to make the sadomasochistic desperation feel entirely authentic. Campbell-Hughes and Morris deliver courageous performances, but too many of the secondary characters resemble Scouse stereotypes and the setting often seems to be exploited more for its trendy transgresiveness than the social, political and cultural forces that shaped the lovers. In this regard, it bears a passing similarity to Pat Holden's adaptation of Kevin Sampson's Awaydays (2009). But Evans, McGrail and editor Tom Kearns make vastly superior use of their locales, while the songs selected by musical supervisor Paul Lambden counterpoint the action with unforced acuity.

Having established himself in the UK with the supermarket comedy Cashback (2006) and the psychological chiller, The Broken (2008), Sean Ellis takes a significant chance with Metro Manila, which is not only set in the Philippine capital, but is also enacted in the Tagalog language. Inspired by an argument Ellis witnessed between two security guards, the story co-scripted with Hollywood veteran Frank E. Flowers opens as a social-realist drama before gradually turning into a heist thriller that relies more on suspense than combustible action. In truth, Ellis allows the plot to drift and subjects the protagonist and his trusting family to ordeals whose authenticity doesn't make them any less clichéd. But his sense of place and visual style is strong, while the performances are so persuasive that it only a hardened heart could not be moved by the denouement.

Life is tough for Jake Macapagal and Althea Vega in the Banaue region of the northern Philippines. Unable to afford seed after the rice crop fails and they are paid a pittance for their harvest, they decide to try their luck in Manila and hitch a ride with their nine year-old daughter Erin Panlilio and her baby sister. Placing their trust in God, they arrive in the Quezon district with no contacts and the last remnants of their savings. However, they are quickly cheated out of these by a seemingly friendly man at the job centre and they are turfed out of the room they thought they had legitimately rented. Despairing at being paid for a day's labour in stale food, Macapagal takes his family to the Tondo slum after they decide it is too dangerous to remain in the city centre after seeing a woman snatched off the streets by some thugs in a passing car.

A new mother shows the foursome to an empty squat and suggests that Vega uses her looks to get a job at the bar run by Miles Canapi. Although dismayed by the prospect of luring clients into buying over-priced drinks, Vega realises she has no other way of making money and is pleased when the doctor conducting her medical check cures Panlilio's toothache. But she also discovers she is pregnant and hides the fact from Canapi, who hires her out of a mix of pity and the prospect that she will allow her to offer Panlilio to her less scrupulous customers.
Accepting that Vega is doing her bit for the family, Macapagal renews his efforts to find a worthwhile job and applies to become a driver for a security company, even though he doesn't have a licence. However, he strikes lucky, as interviewer John Arcilla recognises his military tattoo and promises to put in a good word with demanding boss, Moises Mag Isa. Arcilla even lends Macapagal a clean shirt and furnishes him with a dirty joke to sway Isa's decision and he seems delighted when the country boy is chosen as his new partner.

Kitted out in his uniform and pale blue Kevlar helmet, Macapagal joins Arcilla on their first run. As they drive through the busy streets, Arcilla explains that keys for the lockboxes they transport to clients are kept in the Processing Centre above Isa's office and that any attempt to force them open will result in the contents being doused in ink. He also reveals how his previous partner was gunned down during a robbery and how awful it was playing postman in returning his possessions to his wife. But he lightens up over lunch and buys Macapagal a chicken sandwich and confides in him that he has a mistress and needs Macapagal to clock out his card so he can sneak away to see her.

Feeling duty bound to repay the many favours he has already received, Macapagal punches Arcilla's card and is rewarded by being dragged along to a boys' night out with the other drivers at a nearby bar. The action switches between Macapagal getting increasingly drunk and Vega fighting back the tears, as she dresses to please the patrons and has to sit with the other girls before she is chosen by a lecherous westerner, who paws her in demanding a kiss. As if suddenly aware that he is being just as debauched while his wife humbles herself to help the family, Macapagal rushes to the bathroom after finishing his karaoke number and he makes his excuses so he can meet Vega with a tender embrace as she leaves work.

Macapagal is hungover as Arcilla teaches him to drive the next morning But he is sufficiently alert to notice that their truck is being tailed by a black car and Arcilla orders him to circle the block to give the pursuers the slip. That night, Arcilla invites Macapagal to dinner with his wife, Ana Abad-Santos, who makes a fuss of him and leaves the pair chatting on the balcony overlooking Metro Manila. Macapagal explains how he became a farmer after the silk factory in which he worked was driven out of business by ruthless rivals. He recalls how the owner's son, JM Rodriguez, vowed to save the company and held up the passengers on an aeroplane. Recognising his new friend's decency, Arcilla tells him it is too dangerous to remain in Tondo, as gangsters will discover his occupation and kidnap his family to force him to co-operate in a heist. He offers him the use of the flat where he meets his mistress and Macapagal is so overwhelmed by his generosity that there is as much relief as passion in the way he makes love to Vega in the shower after she gets home from her shift.

As they listen to opera in the cab the next morning, Macapagal wishes he could do something to thank Arcilla for his generosity. They arrive to collect a box from an American who fancies himself as a rapper and Arcilla can scarcely conceal his contempt as he watches the man fill the box with drugs and bark orders to his bodyguard and the women spaced out on his furniture. Back in the truck, he speculates how easy it would be to kill the client and his entourage and steal the money and the drugs. He seethes that scum deserves to pay for corrupting Filipino society and Macapagal tries to convince him that they would be no better than the criminals if they turned vigilante.

Back at the flat, Panlilio rescues a kitten from some cruel boys and asks Vega if they can keep it. But her father has no such protector as Arcilla orders him to pull over so he can relieve himself. However, Macapagal spots the black car from the day before and, realising Arcilla has gone without his walkie-talkie, rushes with his rifle to defend his friend. Much to his astonishment, Arcilla calms the situation when the gangsters pull their guns on Macapagal and he explains that they are going to commit a robbery that will be the making of them both. Standing beside the truck in broad daylight, Arcilla reveals that he kept the second box he was carrying on the day his ex-partner was murdered and has hidden it in Macapagal's flat. He now plans to let the hoods steal today's cargo so they have an excuse to gain admittance to the Processing Centre for a debriefing. 

Macapagal listens in amazement, as Arcilla tells him that he picked him out as a likely stooge and has been helping him to ensure his co-operation. But he says he would have no compunction in harming his family if Macapagal gets cold feet and blows such a big chance to set them up for life. Stunned and confused, Macapagal climbs back into the cab and, as Vega and the girls browse in a huge department store where they can't afford to buy anything,  Arcilla explains how Macapagal will have 15 minutes to take an imprint of the box key from the cabinet in an upstairs office. He tries to take in the information while concentrating on the road and wondering how he has landed himself in such a predicament. But, when they arrive at the hold-up point, Arcilla approaches the wrong person and is shot and killed, leaving Macapagal to break the news to Isa and Abad-Santos, who hurls abuse at him when he resists her attempt to seduce him into revealing the whereabouts of the box.

As his pay has been suspended until the insurance claim is sorted, Macapagal has to borrow some money from Isa. He hurries home and searches the flat for the box. The landlord calls for the rent just as he breaks a floorboard and he is ordered to leave by the weekend. Suddenly tempted by the riches that have landed in his lap, Macapagal goes out and steals a locket from a market stall. Meanwhile, Vega quits her job after Canapi asks if she would be willing to prostitute Panlilio and she returns home to say they made a mistake in coming to Manila and should go back to the provinces after returning the box.

The next day, Macapagal is teamed with one of his drinking buddies, who jokes that Arcilla has taught him well when he asks to clock him out. Jamming the door to the Processing Centre so it can't close when Isa leaves, Macapagal sneaks into the key room and, ignoring the CCTV camera bleeping in the corner, grabs a key. However, Isa is watching him and, when Macapagal tries to make a run for it, he is shot in the corridor and his hand opens to reveal the key in his grasp as he dies. Isa orders his men to call on the owner of the box, but the American rapper reassures them he has not been robbed.

Macapagal's new partner plays postman and Vega doesn't recognise the locket in the clear plastic bag. However, when she peels back the picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she sees an imprint in a small cake of soap and takes it to a stall to have a key cut. Her husband had left a letter with the box and, in it, he recalls how Rodriguez had ordered the stewardesses to collect cash from his fellow passengers and then plunged to his death using a parachute made of silk from his father's factory. He tells Vega how he has not been such an idealistic dreamer, but has done what he had to do to give his family a chance in life. As the film ends, Vega, her daughters and the kitten take the bus back to the countryside and the reddening sky seems to promise a better tomorrow.

A rich vein of social realism runs through recent Philippine cinema from Lino Brocka, Ismael Bernal and Mike De Leon in the 1970s and 80s to Brillante Mendoza, Lav Diaz and Raymond Red today. Indeed, in 2009, the latter based Manila Skies on the same Reginald Chua incident that inspired the silk factory subplot here. Such is the strength of the indigenous tradition that Sean Ellis's well-meaning film comes across as slightly patronising, in a way that Welsh contemporary Gareth Evans's Thai actioner, The Raid (2011), managed to avoid. Yet, while it frequently resorts to stereotype, sentimentality and melodrama, this remains a compelling study of the corrupting power of the modern metropolis.

Given that the cast had to translate an English script into the local dialect, the performances are splendid, with Macapagal's consistently bemused impassivity contrasting with Arcilla's sudden switch from geniality to menace. Ellis's cinematography is also noteworthy, as editor Richard Metter is able to cut between long shots of the alienating urban sprawl and intimate close-ups of decent people confronted with the need to make difficult decisions with ever-more serious consequences. Such a scenario could easily have descended into soap opera and it's very much to Ellis's credit that so much is underplayed (such as Canapi's grotesque suggestion about selling Panlilio to the highest bidder) or left unsaid (such as how Vega managed to get her daughter's tooth fixed). Nevertheless, he doesn't always find novel ways to depict the rural rubes being preyed upon by exploitative city types and the flashbacks to the stand-off that claimed Arcilla's partner and Rodriguez's ill-conceived mid-air robbery are less nimbly incorporated than some of the parallel cutting between the events robbing Macapagal and Vega of their innocence.

Ellis also manages to utilise his own unfamiliarity with the locale to inform the outsiders' perspective. But this always feels like a generic story that could have happened in any big city anywhere in the world and, while this is a work of evident sincerity and sensitivity, it is also fully aware of the fact and this self-consciousness, together with a certain stylistic grandiloquence, means it is never quite as convincing or affecting as it might have been.

The spotlight falls on one of the most famous babies born at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Hawking, a profile of the respected theoretical physicist and cosmologist that has been written by Stephen Hawking himself, with the assistance of director Stephen Finnigan and executive producer Ben Bowie. Narrated in the familiar synthesised voice, this is an insight into the world of a great mind trapped inside a flawed body and Hawking is not above using the odd cliché to make his feelings as clear to mere mortals as his game-changing theories. But this is also a wittily self-deprecating documentary that takes as much pride in the feat of surviving a cruelly incapacitating illness as any scientific achievement. Moreover, while the focus remains firmly on Hawking himself, he also pays fulsome tribute to those who have helped him through an often difficult life - although children Robert and Lucy and second wife Elaine Mason are notable by their absence.

First seen arriving at a lecture in San José, California and being feted by the specially invited guests before being wheeled on to the stage by long-term carer Niki Pidgeon, Stephen Hawking invites viewers in voiceover to share his perspective on the world. He starts by taking them back to 1942, when he was born to Highgate academics Frank and Isobel Hawking, whose progressive parenting methods are commented upon by St Albans school friend John McClenahan, while sister Mary and cousin Sarah Hardenberg recalls what a spirited boy he was, who hated to lose (switching from draughts to chess when Mary beat him) and who spent an increasing amount of time gazing at the heavens.

McClenahan recalls how Hawking earned the nickname `Einstein' after building a couple of functioning computers. But Hawking concedes that he didn't always apply himself and rarely excelled at school and only averaged an hour's work a day while reading Natural Sciences at University College, Oxford, as it was not considered the done thing to study hard. Besides, he much preferred coxing on the river, dazzling friends like Gordon Berry with his waspish wit and partying into the small hours than sitting in libraries or laboratories. Yet, despite doing the bare minimum. Hawking graduated with a first-class degree and was accepted to pursue a PhD at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.

As Paul Shellard lauds him as he arrives at the launch of a new super-computer, Hawking worries whether he has become more of a celebrity than a scientist. However, he is aware that he is lucky to have enjoyed any sort of career, as he was given just two or three years to live after he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease shortly after arriving in Cambridge. He had become aware of a creeping clumsiness at Oxford and had hidden from his family the fact he had fallen down a flight of stairs. But, as biographer Kitty Ferguson explains, a deterioration over Christmas had led his father to seek medical help and Mary and Sarah remember how devastated the family were by the news (although curiously no mention is made here of younger sister Philippa or adopted brother Edward) and Mary suggests that Hawking himself never fully came to terms emotionally with the magnitude of the diagnosis.

Back in the present, graduate assistant Jonathan Wood reveals that Hawking is approaching another potential crisis with similar stoicism, as the disease has started to limit the movement of the facial muscles that Hawking uses to control his communication software. So, he travels to Silicon Valley to meet Pete Denman at Intel, who has devised a new sensor that can not only be operated by the surviving muscles in Hawking's cheek, but can also convert his twitches to speech far more rapidly. This determination to keep in touch matches the sudden zeal the 21 year-old Hawking showed to completing his doctorate, when he suddenly discovered he enjoyed the hard work involved in trying to disprove the Steady State Theory that the universe had always existed and not only establish the concept of a big bang, but also demonstrate its nature and the part played in it by black holes. Yet, with a death sentence hanging over him, Hawking often found motivation a problem and used to listen to Wagner as he convinced himself he cut a tragic figure.

Salvation came, however, in the form of fellow student Jane Wilde, who urged Hawking to press on with his studies and married him in July 1965, as he continued to defy the odds and regain some of his former strength. The need to get a job to support his wife focused his mind, as he sought to build on Roger Penrose's concept of gravitational singularity at the heart of black holes. Penrose recalls how many difficult questions Hawking kept asking before he reached the conclusion that the universe was a singularity that had spontaneously created itself after the Big Bang. Hawking explains that he had never believed there was any religion in physics and that this conclusion explained how the universe could have come into existence without the need for a creator. The scientific community was not entirely convinced when he submitted his thesis in 1966, but it was impressed and Hawking was awarded a fellowship at Caius and bought a little house on Little St Mary's Lane, where he and Jane began raising their family.

Hawking soon discovered that he enjoyed teaching and Alexander Kaus admits what a privilege it is to work with him. But, back in 1970, Hawking was starting to experience greater difficulty in performing mundane tasks and, as he became increasingly reliant on Jane and she began to feel the pressure of nursing him and tending to two small children, they hit upon the idea of offering free bed and board to students who were prepared to become unofficial carers. Bernard Carr was a PhD student at the time and he helped interpret for Hawking as his speech became increasingly indistinct. He also assisted with dressing and meals and was, thus, witness to further breakthroughs as Hawking posited that black holes could merge and flew in the face of known physics by claiming that particles sucked into black holes could also escape.

Jane found these brainstorming sessions to booming Wagner hard to take. But she was very proud of him when, in Oxford on 14 February 1974, he announced at a conference that black holes were capable of disappearing and this notion of Hawking Radiation so outraged the presiding academic that he volubly took issue at the end of the lecture. However, it was soon accepted that Hawking had succeeded in unifying relativity, quantum physics and thermodynamics and his paper on exploding black holes led to him receiving medals, awards and accolades across the world. Shortly after being inducted by the Royal Society, Hawking was offered a visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology, where Kip Thorne recalls the esteem in which he was held and he culture shock he experienced as he became famous and became more mobile after the presentation of an electric wheelchair.

Wealthy and admired, Hawking seemed to have it all. Even after he lost the use of his hands, he turned it to his advantage by withdrawing into himself to conduct mental visualisations that enabled him to think in a way beyond any contemporary. As he jokes, while others are lost in conversation, he is deep in thought about the workings of the universe. But the severity of the downturn brought the Hawkings back to Cambridge, where Don Page was among his new assistants. He remembers that Hawking refused constant care and once so overloaded his wheelchair with charged batteries that he rolled into a hedge when it proved too heavy to climb an incline. Secretary Judy Fella recalls the pride he took in his independence, but, after one serious choking fit, he was compelled to accept expert nursing and Jane laments that she felt as though she was being sucked into her own black hole while her husband was revelling in his new status as a wunderkind.

However, Stephen Hawking was about to become a household name, as he told agent Al Zuckerman that he wanted to write about the cosmos that would be an airport page turner. They approached Peter Guzzardi at Bantam Books with the idea for A Brief History of Time and he admits that he was disappointed with the first draft and commissioned a rigorous edit. While this was in progress, however, Hawking caught a chill in Switzerland and developed pneumonia. He was placed in a drug-induced coma and the doctors recommended to Jane that she turned off the life-support machine. But she refused and, even though he had been robbed of his voice by a tracheotomy, Hawking began to make a slow recovery.

New helper Brian Whitt says Hawking was aware he was now on borrowed time and agreed to round-the-clock care to ensure he could finish his book. He was also greatly aided by the Equaliser computer system devised by Walt Wolotsz that enabled him to click on letters, words and phrases with his right hand rather than painstakingly raise his right eyebrow to guide an amanuensis to the individual letters he required to spell out words. Whitt was, thus, able to act as a go-between during the tortuous editorial process that culminated in the publication of a bestseller that was translated into 40 languages and earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for its longevity on the charts, as it cleared 10 million copies worldwide. Such was Hawking's cachet that he appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and he concedes that he enjoyed his fame and the idea he was making physics accessible to ordinary people.

However, the raised profile and the expanded care regimen filled the house with strangers and the lack of privacy prompted Jane to seek a separation in 1990. The couple divorced five years later and she admits that it took a while to rediscover her own sense of identity, as Hawking married favourite nurse Elaine Mason. They parted after 11 years amidst rumours that Hawking had been physically abused, which he refutes here in castigating the press for circulating them. 

While his private life might not always have been happy, Hawking remained respected within the scientific community, with astronaut Buzz Aldrin being among the many to seek him out at Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Secretary Judith Croadsell testifies to the volume of fan mail he receives and Hawking reflects that his public engagements to limit the amount of time he has for thinking. But he continues to push boundaries, most notably when he took a zero gravity flight and felt a brief release from the entrapment imposed by his condition. He subsequently accompanied Richard Branson aboard Virgin Galactic and he avers that humanity will have to colonise other planets one day in order to survive and predicts that space travel will become an everyday necessity.

Having guested on The Simpsons, Hawking also did a phone bit with Jim Carrey on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, which led to a lasting friendship with the comedian, who posed for a photo of his foot being run over by Hawking's chair. In 2004, Benedict Cumberbatch played Hawking in a BBC film about the onset of his illness and the actor remains in awe of his intrepidity, which was plain for all to see during the Enlightenment segment of the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in 2012, when Hawking's speech about overcoming limitation proved deeply moving. A cut from the fireworks around the Olympic Stadium to a Bonfire Night party in Cambridge shows Hawking again being the centre of attention. He admits to liking the fuss and intends making the most of it, as he doesn't believe in an afterlife. Now 71, he has spent half a century expecting each day to be his last and he has no intention of retiring. Jane, who now sees him roughly every fortnight, remains proud of the tenacity that others teasingly describe as the stubbornness that has allowed him to become a visionary genius - and one who hopes he still has much to achieve.

Apart from a couple of point-of-view shots, the insight into Stephen Hawking's daily routine is almost exclusively verbal in this nevertheless fascinating profile. Occasionally, a faint smiling twinkle can be detected in close-ups of his eyes as Hawking meets and greets admirers, who almost invariably pose for photos with him as though he was some sort of landmark rather than a living being. But we have to rely primarily on the synthesised narration, which actually reveals little about the man or the phenomenon, in spite of the deceptively chatty style. The talking heads avoid delving too deeply into delicate topics, either, with the result that the entire enterprise has a carefully stage-managed feel.

Naturally, Hawking emerges from the picture as a great intellect and a courageous individual. But, despite Jane's eloquent frankness, several questions remain unanswered about his home life (which would be fine if they hadn't been broached within the film), while those hoping for a weightier analysis of Hawking's thought would be advised to seek out Errol Morris's actuality, A Brief History of Time (1991), which, like Hawking's cameo on The Big Bang Theory, isn't mentioned here at all. Regardless of the omissions and shortcomings, this is often humbling in the extreme and it is impossible not to admire the sheer audacity of Hawking's defiant resolve as much as the originality and significance of his ideas.

The second of the week's documentary quartet, Beeban Kidron's InRealLife, also delivers less than it promises. However, in seeking to expose the dangers to which modern kids are subjected each time they log on to the Internet, Kidron sets herself too many ambitious challenges to do them all justice. Thus, instead of making a feature, she might have made better use of her often shockingly compelling material in a small-screen series that would have allowed her to discuss such pressing topics as online porn, cyber bullying, the commercial exploitation of data and state surveillance in more worthwhile detail

Over shots of cables running beneath an East London street, Kidron declares in voiceover that she got so sick of seeing youths fixating on their electronic devices that she started asking them questions about the morality of modern communication and was scarcely surprised when her enquiries were met with shrugs of indifference and ignorance. She suspects our children have been out-sourced to the net and is determined to find out where they have gone and whho now owns them.

The first part of her quest turns out to be the least interesting, as Kidron meets David Hall from the Telecity Group to learn about how data travels along fibre optic cables to vast storage facilities across the world. As it is revealed that 90% of the world's data has been created in the last two years (one of many alarmist, but unattributed factoids that pop up throughout the film), Kidron expresses concern that her information is not in a cloud, as she had been led to believe. Consequently, she follows the cable under the Atlantic (with the underwater shots being accompanied by suitably ominous sound effects) to Manhattan, where Andrew Blum, the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet, takes her to 60 Hudson Street to explain that between 400 and 500 networks are interconnected in a dozen or so buildings located in key international cities. But, while vast amounts of data travel through these hubs, it is stored in facilities in places like Alameda County, Anaheim, Miami and Prineville and, as Kidron shows a series of soulless structures, she opines that too little effort is made to understand where our data goes and who has access to it.

However, she seems to lose interest in this wild goose chase once she establishes that every online transaction ever made is kept by conglomerates who intend profiting from their safe (or otherwise) storage. Instead, she focuses on a series of case studies involving British teenagers that are interspersed with comments by a range of professors, psychologists, programmers and entrepreneurs, who have either published a significant tome, hold a university post or are so infamous that their inclusion is bound to guarantee the film some free publicity.

The first subjects are Ryan and Ben, a pair of 15 year-olds who are shown browsing porn sites and demonstrating their working knowledge of the associated jargon. They deny being addicted to porn, but Ryan delights in describing his masturbatory routine before conceding that his notions of the ideal girl have been shaped by what his sees in videos. The pair laugh as they admit to competing with their pals to goad girls into misbehaving in chatrooms and it is noticeable that they have markedly little success when they go to the Thames Embankment and try to chat up women on the Underground. Eventually, Ryan confesses that online porn has debased his image of romantic love, as he usually considers girls he meets to be slags or broken-hearted waifs who are too complicated to understand.

At various points during this segment, Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Alone Together, despairs that adults allow kids online to leave a history that is being archived without their knowledge; while Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab explains that the Internet was devised as part of a military project and that nobody expected it to become so influential and become the basis of modern society; and Norman Doidge, the author of The Brain That Changes Itself laments that learning about sex from online smut gives kids the wrong messages about physical and emotional relationships and will, ultimately, drive a wedge between the genders.

As a montage of pop promos and YouTube clips plays on screen, a caption states that 40% of teenagers spend more time online with their friends than they do in real life. However, Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shadows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, insists that adults are becoming every bit as addicted and anti-social as their juniors and that society seems unaware of the effect that new modes of communication are having. But, as Maggie Jackson (the author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) suggests, adults have a better appreciation of how the net is controlled by capitalist forces than juveniles and this is where the hidden danger lies.

Page is a 15 year-old black girl who is forever updating her online status and resents having to hand over her phone at school so she can concentrate on her lessons. She reveals that she became so depressed when she lost her phone that she and a friend started prostituting themselves to raise funds for the latest BlackBerry When her mother found out what she was doing, she bought the phone, only for Page to have it stolen by a boy on a train. Determined to get it back, she followed him and his four mates into a park and even went back to a house and performed various sexual acts in order to get her BlackBerry back. Kidron is rightly aghast that she would put her phone before her safety and is saddened when Page admits that she views online friends as potential sources of amusement rather than real people.

Turkle echoes Kidron concern by saying that privacy is vital in helping individuals understand themselves by reflecting on their experiences. But kids today dread being alone and resist introspection and use online contacts the plug these inconvenient gaps in their lives. Doidge explains how neurotransmitters like dopomine send signals to the brain that can lead to addiction and Luis von Ahn, a software pioneer at Carnegie Mellon University reveals that the majority of websites are designed to lure punters back and conduct micro-experiments in huge numbers to discover how to ensnare users.

Back in 1962, Sam Moskowitz, the author of The Lost Machine, warned in an interview that offices were increasingly being taken over by labour-saving devices and that there could come a point when humanity abnegated the running of daily life to machines with the capacity to malfunction. Chillingly, Danah Boyd, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft and the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, admits that the laudable founding principle of the Internet - to bring people together - was soon snatched away by unscrupulous profiteers who recognised that fortunes could be made from selling users anything and everything they might and might not want.

Amidst a blizzard of pop-ups, a caption claims that people check their phones 150-200 times a day. But, as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales reveals, it's what they look at that matters, as all information online has a value and websites try to ensure that visitors read items with the highest monetisation levels. They are not altruistic providers of knowledge to students in bedsits or villagers in the Developing World. Instead, they actively promote trendy stuff that will appeal to 18-34 year olds in the hope of separating them from some of their disposable income.

Nineteen year-old Tobin claims he would happily read a book if the Internet suddenly disappeared. But he would be at a considerable loss if he had to stop gaming. He spends five hours a day on his Xbox and another couple scouting YouTube. Yet, even though he lost his place at Oxford because he failed to strike the right work-play balance, he denies he is addicted to computer games. When informed that the dictionary includes the phrase `adverse dependency consequences' in its definition of `addiction', he smiles quietly. But he accuses Kidron of being prejudiced against games and insists they don't ruin lives, like drugs. He concedes that he feels good when he wins and would rather play than do something more useful but less enjoyable.

Jackson highlights this craving for dopomine rushes and says that humans have always yearned for novelty and ease. But the younger generations have become hooked on these traits and Patrick Bellanca, a designer on NFL Madden for EA Sports explains how new audiovisual gambits are incorporated into each edition to make the game more authentic from a player and spectator perspective and he sees nothing wrong in toddlers becoming techno savvy, as this is the world they are going to inherit. Doidge despairs that psychologists are employed by Silicon Valley bluechips to make games and sites as irresistible as possible by detaching the users from the stresses and strains of reality and, as Van Ahn explains, one of the consequences of this has been the alarming shortening of attention spans to the extent that the Internet giants try to limit all exposition to a single sentence, as anything longer simply won't get read.

Kidron slips in part of an Eddie Izzard stand-up routine about nobody reading the terms and conditions they sign up to when getting a new phone or contract. She then cuts to Daniel Solove, a professor at Washington University Law School and the author of Nothing to Hide, who avers that nothing online is free, as every transaction is recorded and sold to advertisers who build up personality profiles. A caption proclaims that Facebook likes can be used with 88% accuracy to predict sexuality, while the use of narcotics can be detected from the same information with 75% accuracy.

Another caption announces that 2.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook on a daily basis. This seems a startling revelation, especially when Turkle states that everything we watch, listen to, browse or buy is shared across the net and Solove confirms that data is power and has the potential to shape how individuals use the Internet and the lifestyle choices they make. Stanford professor Clifford Nass (who is the author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop) claims the big corporations tell users what to like and constantly make suggestions about other things they might want to acquire. But, unlike our friends and families, these behemoths do not have our best interests at heart and there is something sinister about the fact that they have the capability to change our opinion of ourselves.

Having established that 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Kidron introduces Toby Turner, a 28 year-old who has become a media sensation using the pseudonym Tobuscus. She follows him to a flash gathering in Hyde Park that is attended by teenagers whose web pages have been awarded his seal of approval and, thus, earned thousands of additional subscribers. Tobuscus is mobbed by screaming fans, as though he was a rock star and he presses the flesh for a while before speeding away before the cops move in to disperse the crowd.

His celebrity is puzzling, but Kidron does nowhere near enough to explain it or justify why is might be worrying. Similarly, having listed the respective values of Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Samsung, she allows Julian Assange to pronounce the Internet the greatest spying machine ever developed. He is particularly suspicious of Google, which has conspired with the principal servers to include a code into every web page to enable it to record IP addresses and trace all business on the worldwide web. This not only means that Google knows users better than their own mothers, but also that national intelligence agencies can make requests for trail data and, therefore, keep an eye on anyone on their radar.

As an unidentified voice questions how Google earns its money, novelist, blogger and activist Cory Doctorow launches into a diatribe against Facebook, which he brands a giant behaviourist casino that teaches users how to devalue their privacy. He lambastes the way the site controls and exploits the information entrusted to it and describes the Zuckerburg doctrine as sociopathic, in growling that anyone who thinks it is appropriate to speak to everyone in the same tone of voice or use the same words for different audiences lacks the most basic social skills shouldn't be allowed to dress themselves, let alone be loosed on the world.

Following a montage of popular political protests around the globe, a caption states that in the year to June 2013, Microsoft, Skype, Google, YouTube, AOL, Apple and Facebook had received data requests on more than 64,000 accounts by the US Security Services. Clay Sharky, a professor at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody says that Facebook could drain the site of political opinion in a trice if it decided open debate was bad for business. Yet, Boyd insists that while the net does attract the darkest elements of capitalism bent on exploiting kids trying to find a niche for themselves, it also does lots of positive things.

A case in point involves 15 year-old Tom, who came out on Twitter and has sent over 7000 texts during the first three months of his long-distance romance with Dan. They chat on Google Talk and the Google Plus video link and tweet constantly. But Tom's parents have no idea he is gay or that he is planning to go and meet Dan some time in the near future. Sharky says that a British study demonstrated that today's boys have nowhere near as much freedom of movement as their grandfathers and that many seize upon social media as impassive interaction is better than none at all. But, as Kidron leaves Tom to sort out the crisis that has arisen because his parents have discovered his sexuality, Joi Ito, a director of the MIT Media Lab says that over-protecting kids online is riskier than giving them free rein, as they need to develop their own cyber immune system in the same way that they learn from their mistakes in the physical world. 

As if to counter this, Kidron flashes up a caption stating that 80% of young people think they are more likely to get away with bullying online than in real life. She then meets the parents of another Tom, a 14 year-old from the Midlands, who hanged himself after being persecuted on the net. The camera retraces his father's steps as he found the body behind the garden shed and then closes in on a large photograph of the lad between his parents on the sofa as they bemoan the fact that youngsters are no longer safe in their own homes.

Despite the rather tele-doc manner of its presentation, this is a harrowing story. However, Kidron is soon back on the trail of the other Tom, as he travels in a grey furry hat with ears across country to the accompaniment of Dusty Springfield's “Wishin' and Hopin'” to meet Dan. She rather strings out the journey, but the suspense mounts as Tom sits outside a barista bar in the rain waiting for his beloved. The intensity of their first hug is charming and confirms Nass's contention that, while e-mail is wonderful, face-to-face contact is even more sublime. His insistence that we need to find a way to let technology complement rather than dictate our lives is echoed by Jackson, who admits that grown-ups are as guilty as children of being a fragmented presence when fixating on their phones.

As Tom and Dan lie on a bed pressing their phones together to exchange data, footage shows a cable being laid under the melting Arctic and we learn that this could be worth billions of dollars if it speeds up stock market transactions. But Carr sounds the final note of caution, as he reaffirms the benefits of the communication revolution while warning against humans losing the capacity for free thought and individuality as the machines and the monopolies behind them strive to impose their will and manipulate our behaviour.

Given the content, it is not perhaps surprising that Facebook, Google, BlackBerry, Twitter, Yahoo and Apple refused to be interviewed for this highly personal cine-essay that is often provocatively emotive when it should be more clinically analytical. While playing on common fears, Kidron raises valid concerns and deserves considerable praise for the tactful way in which she coaxes Ryan, Ben, Page, Tobin and Tom into opening up for the camera. But too many `facts' are stated without corroboration and the film often seems less like an investigation than an assimilation of evidence supporting an entrenched opening position. As a result, the contributions of the experts are frequently reduced to soundbites that raise further questions rather than providing any cogent answers. This absence of credible conclusions and the somewhat scattershot nature of the presentation leaves an impression of righteous, if unfocused indignation and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that this ambitious, but superficial survey is more of a missed opportunity than a cohesive or persuasive treatise. 

Arriving a year too late to make much of an impact at the box office, Daniel Gordon's 9.79* still makes for compelling viewing, as it harks back to 24 September 1988 to examine the furore surrounding the Men's 100m final at the Seoul Olympics. A quarter of a century after the event, the rivalry between Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis is no less intense or bitter. But what is most intriguing about this account is the fact that six of the eight competitors have subsequently been tainted by drugs controversy and that Johnson might well have been the victim of sabotage, even though he was patently guilty of illegal doping.

Given that he keeps his mementoes and boxes of unopened fan mail in his basement, one would be forgiven for thinking that Ben Johnson's athletic career means little to him. Yet, as he remembers the epidemic that claimed so many babies in Jamaica in 1961, Johnson is still convinced that he was spared by God to do something special and he took the first steps towards achieving it after he followed his mother to Canada when he was 14 and thrashed a class bully in a foot race. 

Arriving in Canada from St Kitts, Desai Williams also found sprinting an effective way to deflect racism and improve one's status. He was coached at the Scarborough Optimists Track Club by Charlie Francis, who had competed in the Munich Olympics in 1972 and had been so dismayed when Canada became the first host nation to fail to win a single gold medal at Montreal four years later that he vowed to find hungry athletes who were prepared to do whatever it took to succeed. Toronto Star journalist Mary Ormsby and former Canadian 100m record holder Angella Issajenko recall Francis searching for diamonds in the rough and Williams was convinced Johnson was a no-hoper when he used to trounce him at club and national events. But Johnson listened to Francis and he soon began to leave Williams in his wake and turned his attention to the leading American sprinter, Carl Lewis.

While coaching at the University of Houston, Tom Tellez had realised that Lewis was a phenomenal talent and had convinced him to combine the long jump and the 100m and use his sustained acceleration to destroy opponents as they were starting to slow down in the closing stages. He also persuaded Joe Douglas of the Santa Monica Track Club to nurture Lewis and he won him over by promising to make him so rich and famous he would never need to work again for the rest of his life. Always supremely confident in his own ability, Lewis took acting lessons to project himself better in interviews and even embarked upon a recording career (with Douglas comparing him to Michael Jackson, while Johnson scowls that he couldn't sing a note).

Having swept the board at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, Lewis never considered Johnson a serious rival, as he lacked the speed endurance to go with his exceptional start. However, Francis had reached the conclusion that East German athletes were getting away with doping and that the only way to compete on equal terms was to use drugs, too. Johnson and Issajenko agreed that it seemed fair, as everyone knew the sport was rife with illegal substances.

At this point, Gordon now returns to the other six men in the final and Brazilian Robson Da Silva, Brit Linford Christie, Jamaican Ray Stewart and Americans Dennis Mitchell and Calvin Smith all insist that they remained clean, with the latter being particularly proud of the fact that he broke the world record without resorting to cheating. Tellez and Douglas also swear that Lewis stayed within the rules, but Williams says many athletes succumbed to temptation because their sacrifices were being nullified by the dopers and the only way to reap any reward was to play them at their own game.

Although they were slow off the mark, the authorities were aware of malpractice and US sprint coach Russ Rogers recalls how the net began to close around the big names, as well as the smaller fry caught by the most basic testing. Smith's coach, Wayne Williams, testifies that his athlete was clean throughout their association, but he couldn't be sure about Lewis and Smith himself has his suspicions to this day. Back in 1983, however, Dr Robert Voy (Director of Sports Medicine at USOC, 1983-89) was finding out how many elite athletes were using drugs and Dr Don Catlin (Director of UCLA Olympic Lab, 1983-84) reveals how shocked everyone was at the brazenness of the usage of both drugs and masking agents in the run-up to the LA Olympics.

Determined to avoid any Americans being exposed during a celebration of national pride, the USOC testing blitz essentially taught athletes how to plan their programmes so that all traces of illegal substance would be long gone before they became liable to competition testing. However, Catlin reveals that lots of track and field tests taken in the last week of the 84 Games were lost and he is convinced that they were suppressed to prevent a scandal. Doping historian John Hoberman is equally certain that star names were using growth hormone at this time supplied by Los Angeles physician Robert Kerr. He even suggests that the wearing of dental braces was a sure sign of usage, as the jaw tended to grow, and it is strongly implied that Carl Lewis was among those in this situation. .

Ben Johnson had trailed in third in the LA 100m and Francis brought Jamie Astaphan into the camp to supervise the steroid regimen that would enable Johnson to increase his muscle power, as well as his strength and speed. As there was still no out of competition testing it was possible to pump the body during training and go undetected. The new improved Johnson announced himself at meet promoted at the Weltklasse in Zurich by Andreas Bruegger, who recalls that no one could touch Lewis at this juncture and that he was making a small fortune in appearance money alone. But this pulling power made Lewis something of an outsider within the sprinting fraternity and there was a certain amount of quiet satisfaction when Johnson started defeating Lewis on a regular basis.

Following his 9.84 second triumph at the 1987 World Championships in Rome, Johnson became an overnight celebrity in Canada and he recalls how Lewis had played the good sport for the cameras while accusing him of false starting. However, while eyebrows were raised by Johnson's dramatic improvement, athletes were wary of speaking out for fear of being excluded from lucrative meetings. Smith hinted that things were not right in one interview, but it was Lewis who made open accusations (without naming names), even though it was widely suspected that he was only attending events at which testing was unlikely.

Seeing Johnson's success and the riches he was enjoying after he signed a contract with Diadora, Williams returned to the Francis stable. However, he was aware of the tension between Francis and Astaphan over where the credit lay for Johnson's transformation and he sensed that a tug-of-war was going on between them with big bucks at stake. It seemed strange, therefore, that Johnson should put his trust so completely in Astaphan when he sustained a hamstring injury four months before Seoul and disappeared to St Kitts for six weeks of intensive treatment and relaxation. Johnson admits he took pills and received injections during this time, but it seems he might not have been alone, as Gordon reveals how Lewis tested positive for three banned stimulants after running a wind-assisted 9.78. However, aware that the mandatory three-month ban would put Lewis out of the Olympics, Douglas convinced the authorities that the result was an inadvertent positive and no action was taken. This information only came to light in 2003 and the substances would not trigger a positive today, but the implication is clear and there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy about Lewis's crowing that his victory over Johnson in Zurich just weeks before the Games caused him to take what turned out to be a ruinous risk.

The East Germans had been taking a steroid named Estragole and this is what Francis thought he was giving to his athletes. However, no one mentioned it on the day of the final, as the six runners in the outer lanes conceded that they were essentially bit players in the Lewis-Johnson show. Lewis had placed his 1984 100m gold in his father's coffin and was determined to get a replacement. But Johnson got such an electrifying start that his opponents almost became spectators of his record-breaking dash. He hit the tape at 9.79 and it is interesting that Lewis alone remembers nothing of the race that the others describe simply as awesome. Christie reckons Lewis spent so long looking for Johnson that he ran out of his lane several times, but the attention was only on Johnson and, once again, Lewis made a big display of sportsmanship as he congratulated his conqueror.

However, Johnson is convinced that Lewis and Douglas had arranged for Santa Monica colleague André Jackson to gain admittance to the testing area so he could spike Johnson's celebratory beer. Yet, he said nothing at the time and went off to party with Francis and his staff. But the festivities didn't last long, as Dick Pound (a Canadian lawyer and future president of the World Anti-Doping Agency) was informed that Stanozolol had been found in Johnson's sample. When he told Francis, he had scoffed that he would never use something that would make his athletes less loose and team aide Diane Clement remembers Francis stating immidiately that someone had tampered with Johnson's post-race drinks.

As the news broke, Johnson raced to the airport to spare his mother the indignity and he arrived home as a fallen idol. The IOC stripped him of his medal and awarded it to Lewis, with Smith being promoted to third behind Christie. But, while even Lewis expressed some pity in interviews, Smith refused to feel sorry for Johnson, as he was advised to deny everything and insist he had been duped into taking illegal substances. Issajenko was furious with Johnson for blaming the man to whom he owed everything and went before the Dubin Inquiry ordered by the Canadian government and admitted her own culpability and eventually shamed Johnson into doing the same. Commission counsel Robert Armstrong and others explain that Stanozolol was intended for use with horses not humans and the phrase `if you don't take it, you won't make it' kept recurring in the evidence.

Yet, even though Canada came down hard on its transgressors, no other country followed suit for fear that its top track stars would be exposed as cheats and disbarred from future events. But, while Johnson confessed to taking drugs, rumours continued to circulate about what occurred in the testing room. Lewis admitted in his autobiography that Jackson was present and, when he was asked in 2004 if he had doctored Johnson's fluids, he merely replied, `maybe I did, maybe I didn't'.

Several years later, Catlin decided to use improved methods to test some of the 1983 samples and discovered traces in countless samples that could not have been detected at the time. He states that the race is now between good and bad science, but Gordon concludes by confronting Johnson's rivals with their own misdemeanours. Christie insists his two-year ban was a travesty and points to the work he has done to improve his sport ever since. But Mitchell admits he made some bad decisions, while Stewart is indicted for selling drugs to elite athletes and Williams is reminded of his two-year ban for steroid use. Lewis continues to insist he was as clean as Smith and Da Silva (who have never been tainted with any drug scandal), but what this documentary most conclusively proves is that he was consistently smarter than Johnson, as he was banned for life after failing a second test in 1993.

When a tale is this sensational, the method of its telling is of somewhat secondary consequence. However, while Gordon and editor Nicholas Packer rely heavily on talking heads and rapid cutting between snippets of archive footage to sustain the momentum, this ranks alongside any recent sports documentaries and is all the more noteworthy for the aspersions it makes about some of Johnson's holier than thou rivals and their entourages. If Gordon doesn't exactly rewrite history, he casts enough doubt on the validity of the race and its revised result to suggest that the whole truth about this shameful incident may never be known. It might have been useful to have challenged a few of the administrators who made the key decisions about the US testing programme and accepted Lewis's unintentional positve plea. But Douglas has persuaded those who really matter to make their pitch and viewers are largely left to draw their own conclusions about who is being straight and who still has something to hide.

Lastly, this week, comes Christian Lamb's Def Leppard Viva! Hysteria, a record of the Sheffield rock combo's residency at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas that rattles through some familiar songs with taut efficiency, if not much panache. Things start promisingly with a montage of clips chronicling the bang's evolution from a bunch of school mates in 1977 to the 1983 line-up of singer Joe Elliott, guitarists Phil Collen and Steve Clark, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen that made the grade with the Pyromania album. By now firm favourites on MTV, the Leppards rallied round after Allen lost his left arm following a car crash in 1984 and, with a specially modified drum kit, he provided the backbeats for the 1987 Hysteria album, which supplies the majority of the tracks on view here.

The resumé makes no mention of Allen's accident and only passing reference to Clark's death from a combination of drink and drugs in 1992. But the remaining members are proud of the legacy he left behind and have continued to thrive since he was succeeded by Vivian Campbell, who debuted on `Now I'm Here' at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium. Subsequent highlights have included a homecoming gig at the Don Valley Stadium in front of 40,000 fans, which confirmed the group's popularity in Britain, as well as the States. But, as interview snippets from various children's TV shows suggest, the boys have never let fame and fortune go to their heads and have always made sure that the music came first and that they never forgot how lucky they have been.

It is clear from this all-too-brief intro that there is a fascinating documentary to be made about Def Leppard. But this is primarily a concert movie and the band runs through a playlist that delights the largely middle-aged white audience in a venue seemingly more suited to cabaret than heavy rock. Elliott makes confident use of the catwalk stage and Collen, Campbell and Savage  never miss the opportunity to sashay alongside him. But this is not a particularly demonstrative quintet and even the bank of screens behind Allen is used sparingly to present stylised lyric displays, shots of ordinary people playing the odd hit and a fulsome tribute to the fondly remembered Clark. Thus, the focus falls mainly on the music and `Women', `Rocket', `Animal', `Love Bites', `Pour Some Sugar on Me', `Armageddon It', `Gods of War', `Don't Shoot Shotgun', `Run Riot', `Hysteria', `Excitable' and `Love and Affection' are belted out with considerable polish before `Rock of Ages' and `Photograph' complete the encore.

The musicianship is excellent, with the shirtless Collen showing off his rippling muscles, as well as his slick licks. Occasionally, Elliott's voice sounds a bit thin when he attempts some of the higher notes, but he makes an unfussy frontman, who keeps the chat and the posturing to a minimum. The location and the make-up of the crowd are hardly conducive to a raucous atmosphere and the film singularly fails to convey the fact that the band played a different set each night around the core tracks from Hysteria. Fans will be appreciative nonetheless, but  time has not been kind to some of the anthemic, if hardly enlightened lyrics and, while it's good to see Def Leppard are still going strong after 35 years, the suspicion lingers that hair metal's days may be numbered.