Director Vincent Garenq is no stranger to stories ripped from newspaper headlines. In Guilty (2011), he drew on the autobiography of Alain Marecaux to expose the flagrant lies and legal failings that resulted in 17 people from the northern French town of Outreau being wrongly imprisoned for sexual assaults against minors. But, while Garenq sticks to much the same formula in Kalinka (aka Au Nom de ma Fille), this attempt to chronicle the travails of André Bamberski - who spent 30 years trying to prove that his ex-wife's doctor lover murdered their 14 year-old daughter - struggles to convey the courage and tenacity of a grieving father who eventually resorted to desperate measures in his pursuit of justice.

The action opens in October 2009, as André Bamberski (Daniel Auteuil) is arrested in a hotel room in Bavaria in possession of €19,000 in cash. But the story quickly switches back to Casablanca in 1974, where Bamberski is working as an accountant and raising children Kalinka (Lilas-Rose Gilberti) and Pierre (Timéo Bolland) with his wife, Danièle Gonnin (Marie-Josée Croze). She meets German consular doctor Dieter Krombach (Sebastian Koch) outside the school gates and starts an affair shortly after Krombach helps Kalinka when she is hurt in a traffic accident on a remote Moroccan road. Bamberski discovers his wife's infidelity when he finds a stash of cassette messages, but accepts her assurances that the dalliance is over and that they can start again back in Europe.

Shortly after the family settles into its new home in France, Bamberski follows Dany to a rendezvous with Krombach and serves her with divorce papers. Dany and Krombach marry in 1977 and Kalinka (Emma Besson) and Pierre (Antoine Milhaud) go to live with them in West Germany. Bamberski also moves on and begins a relationship with Cécile (Christelle Cornil). But, while they are on holiday in July 1982, Bamberski is informed by phone that his daughter has died suddenly and he travels to Lindau to see the body.

Krombach explains that he had given Kalinka a sleeping pill after she had complained of a headache. But, when he came to wake her the next morning, she failed to respond. An autopsy is ordered before the corpse is released for repatriation, but the report takes months to translate and send to Bamberski, who is appalled to learn of a number of puncture marks on Kalinka's arms, as well as evidence of abrasive sexual activity. He consults a doctor who advises him to burn the document and put the past behind him. But Bamberski is convinced that Krombach has something to hide and travels to Germany to confront him.

Krombach reveals that he had been giving Kalinka injections of Kobalt-Ferrlecit to boost her sun tan. He also confesses to having tried reviving her with a number of drugs before calling the emergency services. But he denies any wrongdoing and Dany insists that he was a loving stepfather who has been crushed by his failure to save Kalinka's life.

Wholly unconvinced and suspecting foul play, Bamberski demands that the case is re-opened. But, after a year of wrangling, his appeal is rejected by a Munich court and he is forced to leave Germany after distributing slanderous flyers accusing Krombach of rape and murder. Undeterred, Bamberski reads up on long-distance law suits and persuades lawyer François Gibault (Serge Feuillard) to represent him. He presses for a tribunal to reassess the shortcomings of the original autopsy and, as a result, Kalinka's body is exhumed in Toulouse in 1985. He is horrified to learn that her sex organs had been removed and disposed of and accuses Krombach of using his influence to pervert the course of justice.

Two years later, a court re-examines the evidence and concludes that Kalinka choked on her own vomit while in a coma induced by the shock of the Kobalt-Ferrlecit. But, even though Dany leaves Krombach and returns to France in 1990, she refuses to testify against him. Bamberski secures an order to have her questioned before a judge and she accuses her ex-husband of seeking revenge on the man who stole his wife.

As no German court was willing to resume the case, Bamberski asks Gibault to prosecute Krombach in absentia in a French court. In 1995, he is found guilty of causing unintentional death through intentional bodily harm and sentenced to 15 years. But, while Gibault congratulates Bamberski for refusing to give up, his father (Fred Personne) takes him to one side at a family gathering and pleads with him to let Kalinka rest in peace.

Much to Bamberski's fury, however, the French authorities refuse to send the warrant to Interpol and he organises a stunt for the press to accuse the nation of protecting a killer. He is invited to meet a senior minister, but he confirms that there is no point pursuing Krombach any further, as Germany would never extradict him.

In 1997, however, Krombach is charged with drugging and raping a 16 year-old patient named Eva (Emma Drogunova) in his office. Unable to resist, Bamberski goes to the trial in Kempten. Bemused that Dany has again refused to hear a word against Krombach, Bamberski sits in such a prominent place in the courtroom that Krombach sees him and accuses him of cajoling Eva into pressing charges. He also declares that Bamberski is armed with a gun to kill him.

After the fuss dies down, Bamberski listens to Eva's testimony, but has to rush to the bathroom in distress when she describes how Krombach gave her an injection prior to the assault. He is aghast, however, when Krombach is merely given a two-year suspended sentence and has his medical licence revoked. More determined than ever to make him pay the full price for his crimes, Bamberski discovers than Krombach regularly crosses Lake Constance and delivers details of his French warrant at all the border checkpoints. But, when he returns home, he finds that Cécile has left him, as she can no longer live with his obsession.

A few months later, Bamberski is informed that Krombach has been arrested at a train station in Austria. But Berlin puts pressure on Vienna and he is released, leaving Bambserki so convinced of governmental collusion that he makes an application to the European Court of Human Rights when it annuls the verdict because Krombach had been unable to defend himself. Realising that he stands no chance of winning, Gibault withdraws from the case and Bamberski retires in order to dedicate himself to bringing Krombach to justice.

When he tries to track him down in Bavaria in 2006, Bamberski is surprised to learn that Krombach is in prison. But he returns to wait outside the jail when he is released two years later and follows him to his door to warn him that he has no intention of quitting. However, with his legal options now exhausted, Bamberski decides to hire a local thug named Boris (Nicolas Planchais) to abduct the 74 year-old Krombach from his home in Scheidegg, beat him up and dump him beside the canal in Mulhouse.

But Bamberski is detained and only freed on bail through the efforts of Gibault, who brings the press to ensure maximum coverage of his release. He receives a 12-month suspended sentence, but fresh evidence emerges that Krombach had drugged Dany during his affair with a neighbour and she breaks down on learning that he had also used injections to assault two sisters.

Despite the efforts of Germany to have Krombach returned, he is tried in France and, in 2012, he is sentenced to 15 years for involuntary manslaughter with rape. As the film ends, Bamberski bumps into Dany at the cemetery, but they pass in silence, as he goes to Kalinka's grave to inform her that he had kept his promise.

Taking their cues from Bamberski's own written account, Garenq and co-scenarist Julien Rappeneau do a decent job of conveying the complexities of the case. But its stuttering progress prevents the narrative from gaining any momentum. Moreover, each fresh complication has to be fastidiously explained and those not paying close attention can easily become confused by the welter of dates and details.

As one would expect, Daniel Auteuil is compelling as the dogged, but never entirely empathetic Bamberski. Yet the script fails to delve beneath his steely resolution. Similarly, while he has some nuanced moments, too few demands are made of Sebastien Koch and too little attempt is made to analyse Marie-Josée Croze's motives for obstructing Auteuil by remaining so unquestioningly loyal to her second spouse. The supporting cast is solid, as are François Abelanet's production design and Renaud Chassaing's camerawork. But Nicolas Errera's score is often so emotive that this begins to feel more like a TV-movie than a docudramatic feature intent on exposing the legal and political reluctance to prosecute a cruel crime and why Bamberski (who is of Polish descent) found it so difficult to receive a sympathetic hearing from the courts in both France and Germany.

The week's other French film is an animation set in New York that has been saddled with an American voice track that will surely do little to sell many extra tickets. Despite the half-term release date, few kids will be clamouring to see Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's Phantom Boy (even though it would appeal to a fair few intelligent 8-11 year olds). So, surely it would have made more sense to cater to the arthouse crowd hoping to hear Audrey Tautou and Edouard Baer in this much-anticipated follow-up to the Oscar-nominated charmer, A Cat in Paris (2010).

Each night, tweenager Leo (Marcus D'Angelo) reads bedtime stories about his favourite detective hero (and his nemesis The Exterminator) to his adoring younger sister, Lily (Rachel Salvatierra). However, she is sad because Leo is about to go back into hospital for his next course of chemotherapy and their parents (Eileen Stevens and Brian T. Delaney) hug them before lights out and promise them that everything will be okay.

A month of hair-shedding treatment later, Leo doesn't share their optimism. But, no sooner has his mother gone home for the night, than Leo's spirit leaves his body and follows her (through doors, walls and thin air) to the car park to drive home in the passenger seat. It upsets him to see her cry and he wishes he could make contact with Lily. However, as he flies back across the Big Apple to his hospital room, Leo knows that he has helped several of his fellow patients rediscover their will to live (even if they have forgotten their spectral encounters).

Across the city, Detective Alex Tanner (Jared Padalecki) is getting it in the neck from Captain Simon (Bill Lobley) for causing a building to blow up after trapping a couple of gun-toting crooks at the local 7/11. Journalist Mary (Melissa Disney) is quietly impressed by Tanner smearing a tomato on his chest to make the robbers think he had been hit by a stray bullet. But he hadn't realised that the pot shot had pierced a gas pipe and the rest was kaboom!

Feeling sorry for himself after being transferred to the waterfront, Tanner eats pizza in his car unaware that a criminal mastermind known as The Man With the Broken Face (Vincent D'Onofrio) is about to unleash mayhem. Watched by his henchmen, The Little Guy (Fred Armisen) and The Big Guy (Joey Camen), The Face steers a giant crane over the skyline to tap on the window of the mayor (Phil McGlaston) with a mobile phone at the end of the boom hook. Opening the window, the mayor takes a call in which The Face demands $1 billion or he will let loose a computer virus that will paralyse New York.

Plunging the city into darkness to validate his threat, The Face cackles menacingly. However, he is interrupted by his tiny, but ferocious Yorkie dog, Rufus, who needs to find a lamp post. Unfortunately, in giving The Big Guy the slip to shelter from the rain under Tanner's car, Rufus attracts the cop's attention. Following a stand-off, Tanner knocks The Little Guy into the dock and his buddy out cold. But he is left for dead following a confrontation with The Face and a falling packing crate.

Confined to a wheelchair with a badly broken leg, Tanner winds up in the same hospital as Leo, who is excited at getting to know a real-life cop. However, Tanner is in a foul mood because Simon refuses to act on his tip-off about The Face's headquarters. But he is intrigued when Leo shows him how to float outside his body and takes him on a brief tour of the ward. Thus, when Mary comes to visit and offers to check out a lead in a building downtown, Tanner is relieved that Leo is able to follow her and relay what he sees through his own slumbering body in Tanner's room.

When she calls Tanner from an elevator, Mary is slightly spooked that he seems to know exactly where she is. But she drops her phone in trying to escape from The Face and his goons when they ambush her in a car park. However, the excitement takes its toll on Leo, who notices his hands starting to glow with a bluish light that means he has to return to his body as quickly as possible. He is back before Mary reports to Tanner, however, and looks on as Tanner contacts a shady safecracker named The Mole (Dana Snyder), who owes him a favour.

Mary is unimpressed by the smell in The Mole's car, as they stakeout the docks after getting a tip from the owner of a strip club (where Tanner ordered the 11 year-old Leo to avert his gaze while making his way through the bar). But Leo is feeling unwell and can't keep tabs on Mary, who is abducted by The Face after The Mole goes for a recce and can't resist the temptation to steal a little desk safe. This comes back to haunt him when he tries to sneak up on The Face, as it knocks him senseless when it slips out of his hands and he is deeply ashamed when he calls Tanner to let him know that Mary is in danger.

Despite struggling with the effects of his treatment, Leo insists on covering the waterfront to find The Face's lair. As they have Mary's phone, however, the gang knows precisely what he is doing and The Face taunts Mary that she won't be able to benefit from the biggest scoop of her career. Being cool under pressure, however, Mary puts The Face off his guard by refusing to listen to his sob story about how he lost his looks and tricks him into revealing that his master plan depends on his computer. She also gets a clue to the password. But Tanner is powerless to help her as not only can Leo not find her, but they are also under attack from The Big Guy and The Little Guy, who have found Tanner's whereabouts from Mary's phone.

The snarling Rufus helps them get past hospital security, but Tanner traps him in the drawer of his bedside cabinet, while he deals with The Little Guy. Leo only just manages to get back to his body in time because The Big Guy had kidnapped him, but he insists on following the fleeing Rufus back to the docks to find where Mary is being held captive. He tells Tanner the name of the boat where The Face is hiding, but Captain Simon refuses to send back-up and promises to fire Tanner if he bothers him again.

Fortunately, Mary manages to steal back her phone while The Face is preparing to put his plan into action. So, when she escapes on to the deck, Tanner and Leo are able to guide her to safety. But, even though The Face has detonated bombs to sink The Vizir, Mary is determined to try and crack the password and returns to the cabin with flames streaking the Manhattan sky. Concerned that Mary is putting herself in unnecessary danger, Tanner urges her to flee. But she succeed in working out how the password could be right in front of her eyes and stops the computer programme with seconds to spare, as The Face escapes across the harbour in a motorboat.

He is furious that the city has not been plunged into chaos and returns to the ship to punish her. However, he falls foul of one of Rufus's temper tantrums and they are too busy fighting to prevent Mary from diving into the water and swimming to a waiting police launch. Leo realises his powers are fading and flies back to the hospital without seeing Rufus reach the shore after a final explosion sinks The Vizir. However, his energy runs out before he can return to his body and Tanner has to summon help when the boy's body slumps forward in his chair.

As Leo's life hangs by a thread, Lily comes to sit by his bed. She has been learning to read and is able to work her way through the first page of her brother's favourite book. Earlier, Lily had plucked Leo out of the story scenario to ask him to explain the action. But, this time, she urges him to get better and sends his ace detective through a rooftop door that leads to Leo opening his eyes and smiling at the sight of his family and his new friends, Tanner and Mary (who are now an item).

Introducing a supernatural superheroic element to appeal to the kidpic crowd, this is essentially an animated reworking of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), which saw wheelchair-bound photojournalist James Stewart take a watching brief while intrepid girlfriend Grace Kelly secures the evidence to convict wife-murdering neighbour, Raymond Burr. In truth, the storyline and characterisation don't stand close scrutiny, with The Face being a disappointingly tame villain. The vocal work isn't particularly distinguished, either. But this is an enjoyable adventure that has the feel of an old-fashioned radio or movie serial.

With their fine art meets comic-book influence (The Face has a Cubist visage), the hand-drawn graphics are considerably more sophisticated. Yet Felicioli and Gagnol can't resist the temptation of having Leo perch on the Statue of Liberty's torch and allow more than a hint of sentiment to creep into the denouement. But the symbolism of a young boy fighting crime as he battles a life-threatening illness is potent and should prompt some interesting conversations with younger viewers on the way home.

The documentary has appeared in many forms since the 1890s, in keeping with John Grieson's definition that it should always attempt the `creative treatment of actuality'. In recent times, the emphasis has been on cinéma vérité, Direct Cinema and the chat-and-clip format that combines interviews with archive footage. But, while Reality manipulation has come to rival `fly on the wall' detachment, few documentarists have become so central to the story they are telling than Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami in Sonita, as she intervenes so directly in the fate of an Afghan refugee in Iran that she not only changes the direction of her film, but also the life of its subject.

Since arriving in Tehran from Herat with her sister and niece, 18 year-old Sonita Alizadeh has lived in an undocumented limbo. She works as a cleaner and seeks escape from her cramped single room by pursuing her dream of becoming a rapper. She dubs herself `Sonita Jackson' and claims that Michael Jackson and Rihanna are her parents. But, while the Tehran Society for the Protection of Work and Street Children tries to help as best it can, women are not allowed to sing solo under Iranian law and Sonita is becoming increasingly frustrated when she meets director Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, who made her reputation with Going Up the Stairs (2011), which showed how an illiterate 50 year-old woman emerged from the shadow of her domineering husband to exhibit her paintings in Paris.

Sonita and Ghaemmaghami recognise each other's potential immediately, as Sonita is a natural performer and Ghaemmaghami seemingly can't prevent herself from interacting with her from behind the camera. Thus, she coaxes Sonita into talking about her life under the Taliban and the perils she faced in escaping to Iran. She laments that she has no right to exist anywhere and wishes she could focus on her music and explore the issues close to her heart. But, for all her pluck, Sonita remains a young girl and the sequence in which she asks Ghaemmaghami to stop filming so she can remove her scarf and go to sleep is particularly poignant.

However, the profile changes tack when Sonita's mother turns up out of the blue. She has been a stranger for eight years and, while Sonita is happy to see her, she is dismayed to learn that she is only visiting to arrange her marriage to an older man back home in order to raise the money for her brother's dowry. Sonita knows she can never raise the $9000 her mother needs. But, reasoning that she is about to be sold anyway, she asks Ghaemmaghami if she would be willing to stump up $2000 to buy her six additional months of freedom.

Although the sound recordist voices the opinion that Ghaemmaghami is being played, no attempt is made to analyse the director's thought processes as she decides to go against documentary convention and intervene directly in the life of her friend. Sonita's mother (who was bartered at 13) seems happy with the deal and returns to Herat. But Sonita realises that she has to act quickly if she is to avoid having to follow her. Consequently, with Ghaemmaghami's help, she records a rap video, `Brides for Sale', which receives a good deal of attention after it's uploaded to YouTube.

In addition to garnering positive feedback from women around the world, the song also comes to the attention of the Strongheart Group that liaises with Ghaemmaghami to help Sonita take advantage of the offer of a full scholarship to Wasatch Academy, an independent boarding school in Mount Pleasant, Utah. These developments are rather rushed through and Ghaemmaghami avoids dwelling on any detail on the reaction of Sonita's family to the fact that she has essentially been removed from their influence. Nothing concrete is mentioned about the fate of Sonita's sister and niece, either.

Some will merely shrug and applaud the fact that a talented, free-spirited young woman has been able to escape the shackles of Islamic custom and make a new life for herself in the West. Others, however, will be perplexed by Ghaemmaghami's decision to take direct action. She is not the first to overstep the notional mark in making an actuality and it's hard to deny Sonita's relief at being spared what she is convinced would be a life of drudgery and abuse. But comparisons have to be made with Dane Berit Madsen's Sepideh: Reaching for the Stars (2013).

Raised with her brother by a widowed mother in Sa'adat Shahr, a town in the south-western Iranian province of Fars, 16 year-old Sepideh Hooshyar shows no interest in boys or learning how to cook or sew. Moreover, she is scarcely bothered that the fields have become parched because her relatives have reneged on a six-year promise to repair the well. Sepideh is solely concerned that her dream of becoming an astronaut is in jeopardy because her application for a university scholarship has been rejected. So, when the leader of the local astronomy club fails to help her (as he fears she is showing signs of becoming a touch too emancipated) and her letters to Albert Einstein get her nowhere, Sepideh decides to contact her hero, the first Iranian in space, Anousheh Ansari.

Clearly, there are differences between Sonita and Sepideh's predicaments. But Madsen and Ghaemmaghami's contrasting approaches to them could not be more marked. The latter's sincerity and integrity cannot be called into question. Yet Ghaemmaghami's refusal to provide any artistic or moral justification for what some might consider unprofessional meddling is much more problematic. Perhaps she will address these topics in a sequel that will reveal how her duty of care towards Sonita has changed since the six-month grace period ended.

Patrick Shen never seems quite sure how best to approach his potentially riveting topic in In Pursuit of Silence. Taking its title from the 2011 book by George Prochnik, this is as much a warning about the dangers of exposure to the cacophonous clamour of city life as a celebration of quietude. But, while he raises some important points, Shen affords his assembled scientists, activists and writers far too much time to air what often feel like New Age mottos. Consequently, while this often visually resembles the eco travelogues of Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke, it never achieves the contemplative tranquility of Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence (2006).

Key to the initial discussion is John Cage's fabled composition, 4'33", which caused controversy when it was debuted in 1952. Shen finds some splendid footage of Cage sitting motionless at a piano performing the piece in a busy city street. But, as he stated, it would be virtually impossible for any ensemble to find four minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence and he would not welcome such a situation, as it would preclude sounds unique to the specific occasion and deny the performers and the audience the opportunity to experience them together.

Cage's intention was to coax his hearers into listening, both to ourselves and the world around us. But Shen is aware that sound pollution is having a hugely detrimental effect upon daily life and humanity in general. Everything from planes, trains and automobiles to televisions, phones and computers adds to the din that the World Health Organisation has declared a danger to well-being, as it disrupts sleep, raises stress levels and prevents us from hearing the warning sounds to which our ancestors were much more attuned.

Bioacoustician Kurt Fristrup also notes that we are starting to miss the initial signs that we are losing our hearing. But you don't have to live in the world's loudest city to be inconvenienced and disadvantaged. Excessive noise dogs us throughout our lives, with one study from the 1970s showing that children schooled close to railway lines had lower reading ages than their peers educated elsewhere. Moreover, the hubbub in hospitals can impact upon concentration and cause a range of medical errors.

Yet, many of the world's great religions set great store by silence, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. Shen visits the Trappist community at New Melleray Abbey in Iowa to contrast the hush of the cloisters with the sublime plain chant in the chapel. He also drops into a Zen temple in Tokyo and learns about the dependence of both the body and the spirit on peaceful introspection. Bearing this in mind, Shen films a traditional tea ceremony at the Uresenke Tea House in Kyoto and explains how forest retreats have become a popular way to recover from the racket of urban living.

But even somewhere as remote and untamed as the Denali National Park in Alaska isn't entirely immune from the distant rumble of traffic. Indeed, even the intense silence inside the anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis proves deafening. No wonder 22 year-old Yale student Greg Hindy decided to take a vow of silence while walking from New Hampshire to California. He continued to communicate with handwritten notes during his year-long trek, but derived a greater understanding of the efficacy of words and the need to listen.

Unfortunately, Shen doesn't heed Hindy's advice, as he opens the floor to his talking heads. And boy, can they talk, even when they don't have anything particularly new or profound to say. Having researched the subject for their books, George Prochnik, Helen Lees (Silence in Schools), Pico Iyer (The Art of Stillness), Susan Cain (Quiet), Maggie Ross (Silence: A User's Guide) and Julian Treasure (Sound Business) know their stuff. But they present their ideas like college lecturers rather than viewer-friendly experts and their joyless gravity often makes their sound bites feel hectoring.

That said, some of the reflections recall the aphorisms that used to adorn Athena posters and Alex Lu's score reinforces this rather twee aura that is at odds with Shen and Brendon Vedder's thoughtful visuals and the sound scheme created and mixed by Steve Bissinger and Josh Ellis. Plenty of thought has gone into this rumination and it certainly makes you stop and think. But nowhere near as much as it could and should do.

With his sing-song Northern Irish brogue and deeply personal insights into a range of eclectic topics, Mark Cousins has become one of the most distinctive voices on the contemporary documentary scene. However, he adopts a disappointingly conventional approach to the compilation format in Atomic - Living in Dread and Promise, which was commissioned to mark the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was originally shown last summer in the Storyville slot on BBC4. It seems a little odd to give it a limited theatrical release a year later, therefore, especially when worthier features like Life May Be, which the prolific cousins co-directed with Iranian Mania Akbari, and 6 Desires: DH Lawrnece and Sardinia (both 2014) were confined to festivals.

Accompanied by an anodyne score by the Scottish combo Mogwai (rather than the usual quirky voiceover), this assemblage of clips gleaned from the BFI National Archive owes more to Penny Woolcock's From the Sea to the Land Beyond (2013) and Kim Longinotto's Love Is All (2014) than Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty's hilariously acerbic and darkly disconcerting Atomic Café (1982). One TV critic compared it to a gallery installation. But, for all its hip avant-garde agit-propism, this well-meaning, but often emotive montage lacks the cogency and pugnacity to achieve the desired levels of provocation.

The preamble has a Montage 101 feel, as title cards from old public information titles proclaiming `This Film Is Restricted' and `Don't Be Afraid' are followed by a shot of an earnest Robert Urquhart introducing Nicholas Alwyn's 1964 short. Advice to Householders. Under the chapter heading, `The World Was All Before Them', Cousins gathers extracts from mostly monochrome nature documentaries showing the wonder and complex simplicity of the various plant and animal life forms that share the planet with humans, whose racial diversity is stressed in a series of close-ups designed to demonstrate how alike and mutually fragile we are.

Cousins also intercuts a selection of portraits and signatures to namecheck some such pioneers in the fields of radioactivity and nuclear physics as JJ Thomson, Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Peter Higgs. He then launches into the longest segment of the film, `Into This Wild Abyss', which opens in 1945 and presages footage of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with somewhat naively idealised images of cherry blossom and ordinary Japanese people indulging in a number of stereotypically peaceful pursuits.

After a brief explanation of how an atomic bomb works, Cousins cross-cuts between shots of airborne American bombers (Enola Gay was a B-29 Superfortress) and Japanese adults and children working and playing innocently in the moment before `Little Boy' impacted upon Hiroshima on 6 August. The mushroom clouds are as chilling as ever, as are the shots of the windforce toppling buildings and trees. But the deepest impression is left by the tragically intimate images of a sobbing toddler clinging to the corpse of a dead parent and a terrified child looking into the camera and shaking as it sits on its haunches amidst the rubble.

Fading to black, the scene shifts to London during the Aldermaston marches of 1958 that united people across the class divide in calling for nuclear disarmament. Michael Aspel reads the news in a scene from Peter Watkins's controversial Oscar winner, The War Game (1965), that reinforces the futility of the civil defence precautions that civilians were advised to take to protect themselves from a nuclear detonation. Shots of folks scurrying to bomb shelters or holing themselves up in their homes convey the sense of terror that existed at the height of the Cold War, while also exposing the mendacity of government propaganda designed to reassure the public that nuclear blasts would be only marginally more destructive than the Blitz.

Recreations of cyclists ducking and covering in the undergrowth and soldiers enduring panic attacks are intercut with scenes of demonstrations, as ordinary citizens around the world sought a say in their future. But, as Karl Dallas's `Doomsday Blues' plays on the soundtrack, the sense of timescale is rather hazy, as 1960s protests are shown alongside footage from the 1980s of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. More confusingly, Cousins hops between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the suppressed uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) and images of the space race that saw the Soviets adapt their missile technology to send dogs, monkeys and Valentina Tereshkova into orbit.

Against this backdrop, however, Leonid Brezhnev ramped up tensions with his hardline approach and Vanessa Redgrave is pictured among those doubting whether nuclear weapons were helping maintain a fragile peace. But, despite a penchant for flash-cutting flags into the mix, the restless Cousins seems keen to crack on and leaps forward to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars project and his Reykjavík Summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1986. Yet, he elects to detour to show Polaris submarines in Scottish waters and the erection of a peace camp at Faslane before recalling the nuclear plant disasters at Three Mile Island (28 March 1979), Chernobyl (26 April 1986) and Fukushima (11 March 2011).

Flitting between long shots of desolate landscapes, clips of men in hazmat suits testing sites with Geiger counters and interviews with Soviet villagers wondering whether to move away or keep fishing in the stream as their grandparents had done, Cousins inserts previously seen close-ups of vulnerable people to make the connection between the holocaust and the inferno that humanity risks in pursuing its nuclear options. He also returns to Scotland to remind viewers of the faith placed in the fast breeder reactor at Dounreay before it was decommissioned following a safety report in 1998. But the point is well made, thanks to the juxtaposition of Caithness locals dismissing the threat of a meltdown and an executive from Tokyo Electric Power apologising to the people of Fukushima for the devastation caused by his company.

But Cousins doesn't wish to demonise science entirely and uses the concluding `That Must Be Our Cure' section to show how associated isotope technologies have been better employed in the development of X-ray and MRI machines than in warheads. Unfortunately, despite touching base at the Hoover Dam and the Cern Supercollider, his coverage is so superficial that it feels like a dumbed-down mash-up of an Open University broadcast and Tomorrow's World.

A couple of case studies involving children and their emotional parents are added for good measure. But this all feels rather haphazard and tokenist, as do the closing captions that rather randomly inform us that over 2000 warheads have been detonated since 1945 and that there are currently 15,700 dotted around the globe (which will cost $1 trillion to maintain over the next decade). Moreover, only South Africa has voluntarily abandoned its nuclear weapons programme, while only the United States compensates its nuclear test victims (paying out $1.3 billion to date). These may be stark statistics, but they sit awkwardly at the end of a film that has otherwise avoided hard facts in favour of insinuated impressions.

Timo Langer's editing is typically accomplished and the score is fitfully atmospheric. But this is more of a rattlebag of sights and sounds than a coherent thesis

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