History will be made at the 90th Academy Awards on Sunday night, when Daniela Vega becomes the first transgender performer to grace the glittering ceremony. She will also be hoping that the film that has made her a star, Sebastián Lelio's A Fantastic Woman, will bring home Chile's first Oscar, although it faces stiff competition from Andrei Zvyagintsev's Loveless, Ziad Doueiri's The Insult, Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul and Ruben Östlund's The Square. But, even if it goes home empty handed, this potent follow-up to The Sacred Family (2006), Navidad (2009), The Year of the Tiger (2011) and Gloria (2013) confirms the Argentine-born Lelio among Chile's finest film-makers, alongside Pablo Larrain, who co-produces with German auteur Maren Ade.

Following spectacular views of the Iguazau Falls, we see 57 year-old Orlando Onetto (Francisco Reyes) having a massage in a Santiago sauna. He returns to work at the clothing company he owns and gets into a flap over a missing envelope. Unable to find it, he goes to a cabaret club, where Marina Vidal (Daniela Vega) is performing with her band. Despite being half his age, she flirts with him from the stage and joins him for a Chinese birthday meal at her favourite restaurant. Orlando gives her a note inviting her on a trip to Iguazau and she smiles when he admits to having lost the tickets. They return to his apartment, where they make love. But Orlando wakes in the night feeling unwell and falls down the stairs in the middle of suffering an aneurysm.

Marina rushes him to hospital, but he dies on the operating table. The doctor (Alejandro Goic) is puzzled by her appearance when he comes to break the news and Marina is stung when he asks if she is using a nickname. Wandering outside in a daze after falling to her knees in a bathroom cubicle, Marina calls Orlando's brother, Gabriel (Luis Gnecco), and, in a grief-stricken panic, runs away into the night. She is tracked by the police and returned to the hospital, where she is being quizzed about her identity when Gabriel arrives. He explains that the family would appreciate a little sensitivity, bearing in mind that Orlando fell ill in the bed of his transgender lover, and the cop allows Marina to leave.

Still in a daze, Marina reports for work at the amusement centre café where she's a waitress. Her boss, Alessandra (Antonia Zegers), checks she is okay and cuts her some slack when she gets a phone call from Orlando's ex-wife, Sonia (Aline Küppenheim). As they divorced because of Marina, Sonia is curt in demanding the return of Orlando's car and personal effects. She also insists that Marina moves out of the apartment at the earliest opportunity. But her morning goes from bad to worse when she receives a visit from Adriana Cortés (Amparo Noguera) of the Sexual Offences Investigation Unit. She inquires about the nature of their relationship and asks whether Orlando paid her for sex. Marina is nettled by her questions and refuses to answer whether they had slept together before Orlando's seizure. She also opts not to explain why his body was covered in cuts and bruises, but reassures Cortés that there was no physical violence involved in their tryst.

Driving around the city, Marina thinks she sees Orlando reflected in her sunglasses and sitting in the back seat of the car. She gets a visit from his son, Bruno (Nicolás Saavedra), who keeps calling her Marisa and seems both fascinated and appalled by her and the relationship she had with his father. He orders her to leave the apartment or face the consequences. But Sonia is more accommodating when Marina returns the car (while listening to Aretha Franklin's `(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman'). Nevertheless, she still calls Marina a `chimera' and uses her former name, Daniel, in insisting that she stays away from the wake and the funeral for the sake of her distraught seven year-old daughter. Marina is hurt to be frozen out in this manner and promises to be discreet. But Sonia makes it clear that she will humiliate Marina if she shows her face.

Cortés summons Marina to headquarters and subjects her to a medical examination by a doctor (Roberto Farías) who takes photographs of her naked. When Marina objects, Cortés reveals that traces of marijuana were found in Orlando's blood and she threatens to open a case against her unless she co-operates. Offended by being treated like a criminal and by Cortés pretending that she is doing things for her benefit, Marina complies. But she rejects Gabriel's offer of a portion of his brother's ashes in return for her guarantee to stay away from the requiem.

Needing some affection, Marina attends a lesson with her singing coach (Sergio Hernández) and he hugs her before accompanying her through Geminiano Giacomelli's aria, `Sposa son disprezzata'. Walking home, she is buffeted by a headwind and leans at an angle to force her way along the pavement (a conscious tribute to the cyclone sequence in Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928). Arriving home, she finds her bag packed on the landing and she goes inside to finish the job before calling her sister, Wanda (Trinidad González), and her stoner boyfriend, Gastón (Néstor Cantillana), to collect her.

Angry at the family taking her dog, Diabla, Marina jumps out of the car and stalks into the wake. Everyone turns to look at her and Sonia's daughter bursts into tears. As she walks away, Gabriel tries to apologise for her exclusion. But Bruno follows her with a couple of pals, who bundle her into the backseat of their car and cover her face with sticky tape to teach her a lesson. They dump her in a backstreet and speed off, leaving Marina to look at her distorted face in the window of a parked car. She slouches through a rough neighbourhood before seeking solace on the dance floor of a gay disco. Having hooked up, she has sex in a back bar and looks up to see Orlando staring at her from across the room. Throwing herself into the music, Marina imagines herself dancing with an ensemble in tinsel uniforms and tries to feel positive about life.

Having slept on Wanda's sofa, Marina goes for a manicure and looks at herself in a large mirror being carried across the road. She goes to work and notices one of the customers has a key similar to the one she found on the floor of Orlando's car. It belongs to a locker at the Finlandia sauna and she ventures inside. Her skin glistening in the heat, she approaches the locker with trepidation and is disappointed to find it's empty.

Rushing outside, she takes a cab to the cemetery and arrives just as Sonia, Bruno and Gabriel are driving away. They tell her that she has missed the funeral, but she is more interested in getting Diabla back and runs up the bonnet and on to the roof to stamp her protest at their cruelty. Inside the facility, she follows a man into the basement, where she meets Orlando who pins her against the wall for a farewell kiss under a red-tinted light. She asks to see the body before it's cremated and squeezes Orlando's hand before he is pushed into the furnace and the flames begin to burn.

As the picture ends, Marina is settled in a new flat with her dog. She dresses up to perform. However, she doesn't sing at the cabaret club, but at a small concert hall, with her vocal coach on piano and a string quartet backing her on George Frideric Handel's `Ombra mai fu'. It's an ethereally beautiful end to a drama that seems to be forever dragging its hem in the dirt of sordid reality. And, for once, there isn't a reflective surface in sight, as Marina is being seen for who she is and not as how others might see her.

Such touches typify the care that production designer Estefania Larrain and cinematographer Benjamín Echazarreta take in capturing the world envisaged by Lelio and co-scenarist Gonzalo Maza. As in a Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Pedro Almodóvar film, the setting is crucial to establishing and sustaining the tone. Moreover, Lelio is fortunate in having Matthew Herbert's hauntingly Herrmannesque score to counterpoint the slings and arrows that the exceptional Daniela Vega has to suffer, as her lover's family exact their revenge for the pain caused by what they considered to be his depraved defection.

The supporting performances are also notable, with Aline Küppenheim's jilted spouse and Amparo Noguera's cop treating Vega with a contempt that understandable where the former is concerned, but deeply disturbing in the case of a professional who should be expected to maintain a certain degree of detachment and who must surely have encountered a transsexual in the line of duty before. But, as Paulina García discovered in Gloria, people can rarely be relied upon to react as one might hope they would to events that shake them from their torpor.

Yet, while the focus keeps coming back to the prejudice that Vega has to endure, this is primarily a study in bereavement that deserves to be discussed alongside the likes of Anthony Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply (1990) and François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000). She may not be required to delve too deeply into her pain beyond thumping punchbags, suppressing her righteous outrage and shedding the odd tear. But this is a performance of devastating dignity.

Moreover, this quietly empathetic feature is even more effective in the subtle manner in which it makes its case for transgender rights without once resorting to overt politicking. One wonders whether Lelio will exercise similar restrain in his English-language debut, Disobedience, which he has co-scripted from a Naomi Alderman novel with the ever-excellent Rebecca Lenkiewicz and which centres on the lesbian romance between a married Orthodox Jew (Rachel Weisz) and her childhood friend (Rachel McAdams).

Despite the title, there's more than a hint of Scandinavian noir about Tarik Saleh's The Nile Hilton Incident. Purportedly inspired by the 2009 Dubai murder of Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim by a hitman who had been hired by a leading Egyptian Shura Council member, the action retains the brooding sense of menace that made Tommy (2010) so effective. But the Stockholm-born Saleh is far from the average film-maker, as he was primarily known as a graffiti artist before he teamed with Eric Gandini on the hard-hitting documentary, Gitmo: The New Rules of War (2005), and made a striking fictional bow with the dystopian animation Metropia (2009). Now, he has added some bleak humour and a sharp edge of political critique to his armoury.

On 15 January 2011, Cairo cop Fares Fares curses the awful reception on his television set before heading off to an Internet café, where rookie partner Mohamed Yousry shows him how to use social media. Cruising round the city centre, Fares collects protection money from a variety of shop and stall holders, who are all complaining that his uncle, Yasser Ali Maher (who just happens to be the chief of police) has stitched them up with a new deal with the Chinese. As Fares returns home to smoke a joint while watching President Hosni Mubarak celebrating National Police Day, Sudanese cleaner Mari Malek reports for duty at the Nile Hilton in Tahrir Square. While on her rounds, she sees MP and prominent property developer Ahmed Seleem leave a room after a blazing row with an unseen woman. On returning to her trolley after a cigarette break, however, Malek sees the sinister Slimane Dazi slip out of the same room and has to hide in a cupboard to prevent him from seeing her.

When Fares is called to the hotel the next day, he finds a couple of cops ordering coffee and mango on room service and doing little to examine the corpse. Yousry recognises her as singer Rebecca Simonsson, but Fares has never heard of her. When Maher calls in, he warns his nephew that this is a sensitive case and the hotel desk clerk offers him a bribe from the owner (who just happens to be Selim) to stop him from prying too deeply. However, while he might have stolen some money from the victim's purse (as well a stub from a photography shop), Fares is professional enough to drive into the poor quarter where Malek lives and order district mayor Ger Duany to make her report to the station.

He is called away to tend to his ailing father, Mohamed Sanaaeldin Shafie, who despises Maher and refuses to take money from Fares because he suspects it's tainted. Shrugging in pained frustration, Fares buys a CD to listen to Simonsson's music and collects the photographs, which reveal that she has been sleeping with Selim. Yet before he can show the pictures to anyone, Maher informs him that the case has been closed and that the coroner has decided that Simonsson slit her own throat.

Unhappy with Selim using his friendship with Mubarak to protect himself, Fares drives out to a luxury housing project on the edge of the city and shows Selim a picture of his erstwhile mistress, only for the bigwig to report him to Maher for harassment. He already has enough on his plate, as students are beginning to hand out protest leaflets in the aftermath of the uprising in Tunisia and he reminds Fares that his job depends upon him doing as he's told. Back home, Fares fires up another joint and gets drunk while gazing at a photograph of his late wife.

Meanwhile, Malek leaves her job after being accused of stealing from the rooms. She buys a newspaper after recognising a picture of Selim and gets one of the boys who understands Arabic to read her the article. However, before she can act of her own accord, Duany demands a piece of the action and she has no option but to agree. He demands hush money from Selim, who has also been sent a copy of the photos that Fares picked up at Tareq Abdaila's shop. Selim admits to being in love with Simonsson and claims that he is now being blackmailed by Tunisian club owner, Hichem Yacoubi, who has the negative. Selim wants Fares to lean on Yacoubi to retrieve the evidence, but his loyalty is already divided because Simonsson's best friend, Tunisian singer Hania Amar, has been to the precinct to ask him to help him find her.

Having been promoted to colonel because Maher is pleased with him for getting in with someone as influential as Selim, Fares goes to Club Solitaire to hear Amar sing. She tells some admiring customers that Fares is a toilet manufacturer and gets him drunk before taking him back to her apartment. They make passionate love, but Amar proves evasive the next morning when Fares asks if she knows Yacoubi, who is now the prime suspect for Simonsson's murder (even though Fares knows this is nonsense). She refuses to get involved because she doesn't want to have her wings clipped and she laughs when he asks if he can see her again.

When news comes that Duany and Malek have been murdered, Fares goes after Yacoubi and finds him at Amar's apartment, where he has been taking compromising photographs of her with an older man. He escapes down some back stairs, but Fares follows him to an opium den and has to bribe a fellow cop in order to make an arrest on his patch. Even though he knows that Yacoubi is not the killer, Fares has him banged in the cells for 15 days and he urges Yousry to make sure that colleague Nael Ali doesn't try to harm him on Maher's orders.

In fact, Malek has survived (as her friend was mistakenly killed by Dazi) and she is laying low in a hostel for refugees. But, while she survives, Yacoubi is murdered in his cell and Fares is furious with Yousry for allowing himself to be blindsided. Maher is unconcerned by this turn of events, as he has learned that he is being investigated by security chief Taher Badr and he advises Fares to wear his uniform when he is interrogated. Badr shows Fares photographs of him in bed with Amar, whose body has been found with a cut throat. Fares is saddened to hear of her death, but dismayed to have been duped by her and he assures Badr that he knows nothing disparaging about either Maher or Selim.

An attempt is made on Fares's life by a shooter on the back of a motorbike, but he succeeds only in killing Ahmed Abdelhamid Hefny, the hustler who's been trying to get Fares satellite television on the cheap. Meanwhile, as unrest on the streets begins to intensify, Malek is arrested as part of a police sweep. In an effort to avoid being deported, she tells Ali that she is the Hilton witness. But, when Ali goes to report his discovery to an unseen superior, Yousry spirits her out of the cells and calls Fares from his car to meet with them.

While Malek tells Fares what she saw in the hotel corridor, Ali tortures Yousry. But the tide is beginning to turn in Fares's favour, as, when he confronts Selim on a golf course with the news that he not only has Amar, but also the incriminating negatives and brings him to the station, a single telephone call to Selim's lawyer let him know that Mubarak has cut him adrift to face the consequences of his actions. Rather than gloat, however, the exhausted Fares takes Malek back to his flat for safekeeping and gulps down a mouthful of pills and falls asleep watching cartoons on the television.

It's now 25 January and Fares wakes to rioting on the streets. Ali is ordered to fire on the crowds from the precinct roof and Fares decides to get Malek out of the city for her own safety. When he stops at a petrol station for cigarettes, however, Dazi attempts to kill her and she shoots him with the gun Fares had given her for protection. He finds Dazi's state security ID card and realises that this situation is more complicated than he had imagined.

On returning to Cairo, he finds Maher handing Selim over to his lawyers in return for a case full of cash. As they drive, Maher explains that he took a cut of the blackmail money paid to Yacoubi. But, when state security heard that Selim was involved with Simonsson, they demanded a share of the shakedown and decided to bump off the singer before she became a problem. Thus, Selim had genuinely loved her and had been as shocked as anyone by her death. Fares is appalled that his uncle is so ruthless that he ordered Amar's execution. Crowds of demonstrators make it impossible to continue by car and Maher gets out with the bag. Fares pulls his gun to arrest him. But Maher shouts out that he is being persecuted by a cop and disappears into the throng, as Fares gets a severe kicking from the mob. He is only spared by one protester insisting that the rebels are not like their oppressors.

Cleverly exploiting the historical setting to tilt the balance of the police procedural, this is genre film-making at its most adept. Saleh lets the audience draw its own conclusions and then keeps forcing them to rethink the situation in the light of fresh events and shifting circumstances. At the centre of the maelstrom, Fares Fares (who is no stranger to Scandi Crime after his stint in the Danish Department Q series) poignantly blends venality and vulnerability, as he slums it in a crummy flat, schleps around in a battered car and keeps blundering into avenues of inquiry he doesn't really understand. But no one is blameless in this grasping milieu, where even Malek's scared witness cannot resist the temptation to make a few bucks by blackmailing the killer.

Ironically, Saleh was forced to relocate to Casablanca after the Egyptian authorities withdrew permission to film in Cairo. But he still presents the capital as a Lynchian dystopia, where the murky smog has cast a pall over conventional morality, Saleh implies that the Arab Spring will do little to clean things up. Hence the harsh shiver of Krister Linder's electronic score, which feels as downbeat as Roger Rosenberg's drastically contrasting interiors and Pierre Aim's prowling views of the seething city. The support playing reinforces the aura of complacent corruption, resigned cynicism and stirring anger and one is left wondering why so few thrillers have similarly woven their plots around seismic events.

Towards the end of last year, French radio journalist Sonia Kronlund released an affectionate profile of Salim Shaheen, a larger-than-life war veteran who draws on his combat exploits for the action films that have made him the toast of Afghanistan. By contrast with The Prince of Nothingwood, Andrea Luka Zimmerman's Erase and Forget presents a sceptical and sometimes critical assessment of the creeds and deeds of James `Bo' Gritz, who claims to be the most decorated Green Beret commander of the entire Vietnam War. He is widely believed to have been the inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Hannibal Brooks in The A-Team (1983-87) and Sylvester Stallone's indestructible warrior, John Rambo. But, by emulating the tactics that former Vision Machine colleague Joshua Oppenheimer employed in The Act of Killing (2012), Zimmerman challenges Gritz's version of events and, in the process, lays bare the right-leaning agenda that helped win Donald Trump the White House.

Opening with a scene in the desert, as Gritz re-enacts a moment of derring-do, this patchwork portrait follows him to a gun show (where he tells a couple of adoring teens about a life of army adventure that hadn't cost him a dime) and a flag dedication ceremony near his Nevada home. A caption notes that a man called Jaime, who had attended the latter had promptly gone home and killed himself. But no definitive reason is given for this act of desperation, although Zimmerman does record Gritz telling someone on the phone that one of his own weapons was involved and he jokes that he has to be more careful about who he lends them to. He later confides to camera that he would probably feel worse about the tragedy if he was a civilian. But, having killed around 400 people during his Special Services career, he has a different view on life and death than most people.

Having lost his father during the Second Word War, Gritz wanted to make him proud and was rarely out of uniform during his childhood. He joined the Rangers as a second lieutenant and did his first tour of Vietnam as a 25 year-old in 1964. Between boasts about his covert operations missions, he shows Zimmerman a photo of his unit and recalls how various buddies died. He also plays a lullaby on his stereo and wistfully thinks back to how he had sung this to his young sons before shipping out to South-East Asia. This rare show of vulnerability follows a shot of Gritz watching the lads he met in Oklahoma City vowing to serve the flag and he admits that it would break his heart to learn that there greenhorns had perished before they had got to experience life.

Describing the weapons he keeps beside his bed at night, Gritz concedes that he was lost after being discharged, as he had so dedicated himself to becoming a soldier that he had detached himself from the everyday. Weapons manufacturer Tim La France hails Gritz as a hero. But Ted Kotcheff, the director of First Blood (1982), recalls how reviled many returning troopers were and he and Stallone went out of their way to prevent Rambo from taking a single human life. In the sequel, however, he became a killing machine and he regrets that a character he had taken such pains to root in reality was turned into an icon of kneejerk patriotism.

A rather muddled passage follows, as Gritz discusses the Chinese prostitute who understood his angst on leaving Vietnam and why first wife Claudia Jean left him for a handyman. He starts to explain why terrorists have it easier than state soldiers because of the oaths they swear, but interrupts himself to whistle his dog to heel. In another segment, he attempts to describe the sensations that coursed through him during a mission. He also recalls how his unit used to stack corpses at the end of a raid on top of bombs so that their Vietnamese comrades would be obliterated when they came to bury their dead.

Clips from Apocalypse Now and The A-Team punctuate this section, as Gritz humblebrags about his endeavours to both the camera and the audiences flocking to his personal appearances. He also reveals the existence of a parallel government that does the dirty work in keeping the country safe. As a Special Forces commander in Panama, he waged `unconventional warfare' in a bid to unseat a regime that didn't suit Washington and Gritz (who went under a number of aliases and codenames) liked the fact that he called the shots without having to justify himself to his superiors, as long as he got the job done.

According to Tudor Gates, the British screenwriter of Barbarella, Gritz had the looks and presence to be a movie star and we see a clip of their unrealised docudrama project. La France reads from the First Blood script and Gritz says he can identify with Rambo's frustrations in the film, as he had often been appalled by the carnage he had witnessed. He admits that he sometimes reflects on the souls he has killed and he worries that many returning troops fail to come to terms with their actions. Interview snippets with veterans Richard Noe, Jack Mercer and a black man named Scottie suggests that they are trapped in their memories. But Gritz is a realist and always finds ways to serve. Hence, for a while, he ran a training camp for mujahideen fighters and we see home movie footage of him teaching unarmed combat techniques and how to make explosive devices.

Intercutting scenes from George P. Cosmatos's Rambo: First Blood II (1985) and Gritz re-enacting them with a Stallone lookalike, Zimmerman muses on how the character mutated in the sequel and became the poster boy of Reaganite foreign policy. The story was seemingly inspired by Gritz's 1986 mission to rescue US POWs still being held in Laos and Thailand and Zimmerman juxtaposes news reports and Gritz's own recollections to show how Clint Eastwood and William Shatner donated to an enterprise that was privately backed by President Ronald Reagan. But, despite his assertions to a congressional committee, Gritz didn't find any prisoners in captivity and he returned to deplore the fact that the CIA was actively engaged in drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle.

Gates (who drafted the script for Jungle Warlord) takes up the story of renegade Burmese general, Khun Sa, and we see some of the footage Gritz shot during his expedition, in which he claims that Richard Armitage, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, was involved in the region's drug trade. Gritz insists he was ordered to `erase and forget' everything he had seen or risk being jailed for 15 years. Such was his sense of betrayal, however, that he went on the offensive and not only set up SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events), but also ran for the presidency in 1988 and 1992. In his efforts to alert the nation to the betrayals of the state and the need for ordinary people to be vigilant against foreign foes and enemies within, he also wrote a book on spycraft and took a supporting role in Charles Nizet's 1990 film, Rescue Force.

While running for the Oval Office for the second time, Gritz was called in to help end ex-Green Beret Randy Weaver's 11-day stand-off at Ruby Ridge in Idaho. The episode was re-staged in Roger Young's teleplay, The Siege at Ruby Ridge (1996), in which Gritz (whose name is mispronounced to rhyme with `grits' when it sounds like `rights') is played by Bob Gunton. During the aftermath, Gritz spoke to a group of skinheads outside the police cordon and he is later challenged by a TV interviewer with giving them a Nazi salute. Despite his angry insistence that he had merely been waving, film footage shows him holding the gesture and he is forced to deny holding any white supremacist views and points to the fact that two of his children are half-Chinese in defending his honour.

In the wake of this incident, Gritz decided to withdraw from conventional society and set up a covenanted community in the Idaho wilderness. Louis Theroux interviewed him there for the `Survivalists' episode of the Weird Weekends series (1998-2000). Yet, Almost Heaven proved a disappointment, as people came expecting to be protected by a gung-ho hero and, as Joe McNeal remembers, Gritz attempted to shoot himself in the chest.

Visiting an exhibition of soldier mannequins commemorating those who had died as a result of post-traumatic stress, Gritz is deeply moved and tells the owner that he could live with these guys. Kotcheff tried to convey this sense of pain with his original ending to First Blood, in which Rambo asks his commander, Trautman (Richard Crenna), to put him out of his misery. However, test screening audiences loathed the scene and it was re-filmed to provide a more upbeat conclusion. Zimmerman shows it in full before closing on shots of Gritz wheeling one of the dummies to his pick-up truck and of him standing strong and alone in the wilderness.

Starting out as a doctoral project, this complex and occasionally chaotic actuality took a decade to complete. At times, the German-born, London-based Zimmerman and editor Taina Galis seem to have too much material (much of it gleaned from the Internet) to manage and slot some of it into tiny gaps in the chronicle. As a consequence, this can often feel confusing. But the structure reflects the scattershot nature of Gritz's thinking and the unreliability of his testimony. Clearly at home in front of the camera, he plays the `good ole boy' role to perfection, while retaining an air of intimidatory menace. By allowing him to strut his stuff on his own terms, Zimmerman lures him into revealing more than he intends and presents it in such a way as to alert the viewer to the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his recollections.

However, what is going on in the background is just as significant, as Zimmerman captures an inward-looking, frightened and resentful country that is scouring the horizon for a hero to ride into view and save the day. Despite pushing the same populist ticket, Gritz proved not to be that man. But it's easy to see why Donald Trump (whom Gritz apparently detests) appeals to those who attend the gun fairs and patriotic rallies at which Gritz is lionised. More dismayingly, it's clear why Trump's bluster and brand of designer truth goes down so well in these constituencies, as they have been swallowing fake news for decades.

At once glamorous and hazardous, the recklessly derring-do lifestyle of the war photographer has been the subject of several films in recent years, including such documentaries as David and Jacqui Morris's McCullin (2012), Sebastian Junger's Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (2013), Brian Oakes's Jim: The James Foley Story (2016) and Harold Monfils's A Good Day to Die - Hoka Hey (2017). This week, Greg Campbell swells the ranks with Hondros, a profile of his lifelong friend and collaborator, Chris Hondros, who perished alongside Hetherington in an attack on their vehicle while outside Misrata covering the Libyan civil war. Boasting Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis among its executive producers, this is an affectionate, but objective impression of a man who cared about what he did and the people he photographed.

Having met Chris Hondros at school, Greg Campbell is uniquely placed to assess his achievement. Shaky video footage shows Hondros in the middle of a street fight in Liberia in 2003 and Campbell cuts between some of the images he captured and an interview in which he says that a war photographer has to be on the frontline to be effective and truthful. Joking that he isn't an adrenaline junkie, he claims that photography has a vital role to play in helping people understand conflicts and the way human beings behave in extremis.

Pancho Bernasconi, the Vice-President of News at Getty Images, knew he could trust Hondros to get to the heart of a story like the attempt to overthrow Liberian president Charles Taylor. Fellow photographer Mike Kamber and local fixer Ahmed Jallanzo recall his intrepidity in covering the shelling of a school near their hotel on Monrovia, while Getty colleague Spencer Platt and New York Times photographer Todd Heisler remember him venturing on to a bridge during a titanic encounter to snap the jubilant reaction of a rebel who had just fired a rocket launcher at the enemy. This image became iconic after it was published on the front page of the Washington Post. But, as photographer Jeff Swensen explains, the majority of Hondros's pictures from this tour empathised with the suffering of those caught up in the carnage and Kamber is proud that their efforts alerted the world to the crisis and prompted the United Nations to send in a peacekeeping force.

The son of Greek and German parents who had been child refugees at the end of the Second World War, Hondros grew up in New York, where he and Campbell made home movies like Undercover. His mother, Inge, wonders whether the stories she told him of her traumatic childhood might have fuelled his desire to become a photojournalist and she admits that she had to convince his father that this was a noble path to follow. Among his first assignments was Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, which Hondros and Campbell covered for the school newspaper.

Starting out at the Troy Daily News, where Tyler Hicks served as his intern, Hondros quickly decided he needed to witnessed history in the making and a montage of images follows from Kosovo, Nigeria, Angola and Sierra Leone. The immediacy and compassion of these pictures led to Getty Images hiring Hondros for their new wire service. Co-founder Jonathan Klein and former editor Patrick Whalen reflect on how he sought to tell stories to that would enable readers to understand the human toll of the conflicts hitting the headlines.

Peers like Justin Merriman note how Hondros was always ahead of the curve and left New York after 9/11 to follow the terrorist trail in Pakistan when no one else was pursuing that line of inquiry. Rather than going for `spot news' exclusives, he sought answers and was, therefore, never just a passive recorder of what he saw. Indeed, he could sometimes take reckless risks and Timothy Fadek recalls how they drove without an escort through the Iraqi desert in 2003 to join the first wave of US troops entering Baghdad. However, they were attacked by Iraqi forces and somehow managed to escape on shot-out tyres.

Yet rather than seeking protection from the advancing units, Hondros was all in favour of hiding out in a hole in the sand and taking his chances the next morning. Fadek concedes that they often acted out of arrogance and a deluded sense of indestructibility, but Platt was more pragmatic in stopping Hondros from heading into the bazaar near where he was ambushed to see if anyone was trying to flog the camera equipment he had been forced to leave behind in beating a judicious retreat.

Everyone speaks highly of Hondros's gift for friendship and Campbell flies to Liberia to meet with Jallanzo, who had helped Hondros track down the child soldier he had immortalised in his image. Faced with an uncertain future, Joseph Duo was contemplating becoming a mercenary or a criminal when Hondros found him and funded his education. He is now the police director in Paynesville and he owes his new life to the man who felt obliged to repay him for the picture that had made his reputation.

This sense of conscience meant that Hondros kept returning to Iraq when most other reporters and photographers felt the story had ended. He joined an Apache Company recce to Tal Afar and Specialist Brad Hammond remembers how willing he was to put his own safety on the line in order to do his job. While on a foot patrol, Hammond had spotted a car coming towards them at increasing speed, in spite of warning shots. Ordered by their commander to immobilise the vehicle, the soldiers had riddled the front seats with bullets. But, when the car came to a halt, they discovered a number of terrified children in the back seat and realised that they had gunned down their parents.

Hondros took pictures of the kids and sent them back to New York immediately in case efforts were made to impound them. One shot of a small girl in a blood-spattered dress (five year-old Samar Hassan) sobbing with fear made front pages around the world and Hondros lost his embedded status. But priority lay in exposing the realities facing ordinary Iraqis and the coalition troops sent to liberate them, even if it meant ruffling feathers in Washington. Moreover, he arranged for the badly wounded Rakan Hassan to be flown to Boston for treatment and colleague Joe Raedle declares that this act of decency summed up Hondros to a tee.

Yet, while he was committed when in a combat zone, Hondros retained an ability to switch off completely when he came home and friends marvel at the fact he managed to stay so sane in spite of what he had witnessed. Raedle and National Public Radio reporter Leila Fadel hark back to the parties they used to have in their Baghdad hotel after returning from a field trip, while Swensen remembers how key music was to his well-being. We see an excerpt from the slide show that Hondros edited to Bach's `Chaconne' and his artistry is readily apparent. However, Hammond is convinced that he must have had nightmares about the Tal Afar episode and tears roll down his cheeks as he recalls the Paris Match interview he did with Hondros and Campbell, in which he learned that Rakan had been killed back in Iraq in 2008.

Six years later, Campbell flies to meet Rakan and Samar's uncle, Nathir Bashir Ali, who reveals that Isis fighters had warned him against letting the children go to America and had punished him by bombing his house. Rakan had died in the attack and Campbell asks Raedle whether journalists should become personally involved in the stories they are covering. He admits that it's sometimes difficult to keep emotions in check, but couldn't say whether Hondros blamed himself for Rakan's death. In an audio clip, he states that terrible things happen in wars all the time and reiterates that it's his duty to make sure those at a safe remove receive regular doses of reality.

Campbell also interviews Samar, who says that she has been scarred for life by what happened that night. When he mentions that Hammond wishes to apologise, she dismisses his sentiments and declares that she would drink his blood if she could, even though it wouldn't bring her parents back. Her dignified fury is chilling to behold and hits home harder than even Hondros's finest pictures. He is heard in interview debating whether a photographer can be as nuanced as a reporter and insists that he has always sought to show situations from as many angles as he could. But, as this segment suggests, the still camera can only do so much.

Inge was always concerned that life would pass her son by without him finding love and Swensen remembers a lot of phone calls centring on loneliness. Fiancée Christina Piaia describes how she had started dating Hondros and how she had always understood the importance of his work. But events kept moving quickly around them and, in the spring of 2011, Hondros left for Egypt to cover the uprising against Hosni Mubarak. However, as Klein and Kamber explain, the role of the Western media had changed in the age of online propaganda and, consequently, journalists and photographers were no longer the only ones who could disseminate a story. Indeed, they could sometimes be seen to be in the way and their protected status dwindled as a result.

As Hicks recalls, however, Egypt was a cakewalk compared to Libya, as the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi was as brutal as the attempts to suppress it. Both Hicks and Raedle were captured and Hondros insisted on replacing the latter when he was released. Swensen tried to talk him out of going when he was planning his wedding and suggested that all the good pictures of AK-47 rifles in the desert had already been taken. But Hondros got one of the weapon being fired into the air as a rocket was being launched and it made the front cover of the Washington Post.

When Hondros called him to come to Benghazi, Campbell had no hesitation in agreeing. We see them with the rebels and Hondros confides to the camera that many of those confronting Gaddafi's troops were kids playing at war. Alongside him on the mission was Tim Hetherington and they were concerned that a lot of rookie photographers had come to Libya in the hope of making their names. Fadek and Kamber shared their misgivings, but Nicole Tung avers that Hondros was always checking up on the newcomers to ensure they stayed safe

Having parted from Campbell, Hondros went to cover the humanitarian crisis that had been caused by the siege of Misrata. As well as Hetherington, Fadel and Tung, Spanish photojournalist Guillermo Cervera and American Michael Christopher Brown joined Hondros on a 17-hour boat trip to the port and they realised the moment they arrived that this was a place where danger lurked around every corner. On 20 April 2011, the press went to cover a pitched battle for a crumbling building in a decimated part of the town. Footage dauntingly familiar from Junger's documentary shows Hetherington and Hondros venturing into the building as a tyre was lit to smoke out the enemy.

Everyone had made it out and returned to base. But someone suggested returning that afternoon to see how things had panned out and they were hit by a mortar. As we see slow-motion footage of Hondros and Hetherington, news bulletins describe their fate before captions reveal that the latter died on his way to hospital from shrapnel wounds, while Hondros succumbed to his injuries a few hours later. Inge insists he felt compelled to take pictures that mattered and she is proud that he packed more into 41 years than most people manage to achieve in a lifetime. In a closing interview snippet, Hondros admits that he has seen the worst of humanity. But he has also seen it at its best, as people show courage, charity and compassion and this flipside of the combat photographer's job has made his career seem worthwhile.

In a closing code, Jallanzo reveals that Hondros inspired him to take up photography and that he now works for the European Pressphoto Agency. It's a fitting legacy and ends this sobering study on a note of optimism (even though Jallanzo is shown covering the Ebola crisis). Campbell succeeds admirably in capturing his friend's drive and determination, while also showing how admired he was by his peers. Yet, as in so many of these documentaries about war photographers, the subject remains elusive and we never quite get to understand their motivations or appreciate the extent of their accomplishments. Indeed, the most poignant part of the film centres on Specialist Hammond's tormented remorse and Samar Hassan's lingering hatred and it's noticeable that Campbell opted not to include the latter's opinion of Hondros and his photographs of her, if she even gave it.

The images taken by Hondros and his ilk unquestionably make people outside a particular war zone stop and reflect. But how often do they actually make a difference? Thus, instead of speaking primarily to colleagues, Campbell might have asked academics, activists and policy makers about their reaction to the pictures and how they have impacted on their ways of thinking. He might also have delved more deeply into the changing role of the foreign correspondent at a time when controlling the message threatens the very notion of impartial reporting. Nevertheless, this is a noble tribute to a man who did what he could.

Running just over an hour, Jen Randall's Psycho Vertical profiles climber Andy Kirkpatrick. It takes its title from the garlanded book he claims he wrote to explain to ex-wife Mandy and their children, Ella and Ewen, how and why he become the man he is. Given that Kirkpatrick is dyslexic, it represents quite a feat to be one of only three dual winners of the coveted Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. But, as this engaging crowd-funded featurette reveals, nothing is beyond this witty, fearless and disarmingly frank character.

The format couldn't be more straightforward, as Randall cross-cuts between Kirkpatrick chatting to a static camera and vertiginous footage of his 18-day ascent of El Capitan in California's Yosemite Valley. But, while the visual contrast couldn't be greater, the qualities that allowed Kirkpatrick to overcome the various problems (some of them self-inflicted) that have shaped his destiny are readily evident in the way he tackles the 3000ft sheer face of one of the world's most forbidding climbs.

Acutely aware of his limitations as a human being, Kirkpatrick is able to forget his doubts and demerits while climbing because mountains treat everyone the same. As a child, he had idolised his father, who took the family to live in the shadow of Bird Rock in Tywyn on the southern coast of Gwynedd. However, as a climber who was often away on expeditions, he recognised he wasn't first-rate father material and Kirkpatrick spent most of his youth in Hull. Initially, he loathed the rundown urban sprawl and felt he had been submerged in water from which he would never emerge. But, as he got to know the docks, he discovered the high places that could supply his need for excitement (`the bigger the drop, the bigger the thrill').

Struggling at school with dyslexia, Kirkpatrick discovered a talent for drawing that persuaded him to attend art college and apply for university. However, he was rejected and spent a period living in a squat, while figuring out what to do with himself. He had started dating Mandy, who was a French student at the university, but had seen a glimpse of the future during a sojourn in the Lake District, where the peaks and solitude fired his imagination and his ambition to become a climber.

Shifting the scene from Humberside to Yosemite, Randall shows Kirkpatrick preparing his kit in base camp before launching his assault on the granite face. He sorts through the carabiners, quickdraws and chockstones he has stuffed into holdalls, along with his ropes, supplies and the clip cot that will enable him to sleep while suspended in mid-air. It's a painstakingly methodical process, but it pays dividends when he is able to use a series of pulleys to haul his baggage up the face and tether it beneath him while he sleeps.

Back in Blighty, Kirkpatrick had moved to Sheffield and started working in climbing shops while Mandy taught in London. Forever picking up tips from customers, he persuaded someone he met at a barbecue to let him join an expedition to the Alps and he was instantly hooked. Moreover, he had discovered his métier and he knew it would become an all-consuming obsession that would place a strain on his relationship. Yet, while striving to avoid making the same mistakes as his father, Kirkpatrick realised that climbing brought out the best in him and that he needed new challenges in order to move forward as a person (`I don't allow my own crapness to get in the way,').

He admits that he is selfish in wanting to live on his own terms, but knows the only way to the top is to be ruthless in pursuit of one's dreams. That said, he is a doting dad in his own way and we see images of him climbing in Yosemite with a 13 year-old Ella. But, as Randall shows Kirkpatrick as a tiny speck against a vast expanse of rock, being buffeted around by winds and having to take risks in order to achieve his goals, she suggests that he wouldn't be half the climber he is unless he had chosen his unconventional path through life.

As we see snaps of some of his landmark climbs, Kirkpatrick ponders whether his restless streak is a product of his childhood sense of betrayal and whether his determination to succeed is rooted in his educational struggles and a need to prove his detractors (and himself) wrong. This single-mindedness cost him his marriage and he concedes that it was something of a relief when the end came, as he could stop worrying about disappointing people who relied on him. Freed from this burden, he threw himself into his climbing and also began writing and making speaker appearances to describe his experiences.

Declaring himself to be a dangerous person, Kirkpatrick shuffles uncomfortably in his seat as he reflects on his family failures. But, as he reaches journey's end and hauls his kit to the top of El Cap, he insists that he is in a good place and is at peace with his decisions. He beams at the camera, as the film ends and one is left with the impression that he is very much on top of the world.

Much as Kirkpatrick excels as a homespun raconteur, it's his ability as a climber that makes this such an engrossing watch. The camerawork achieved by Randall, Ben Pritchard and Alex Gorham is little short of remarkable, as they seem to hover alongside Kirkpatrick during his ascent with an infeasible clarity and steadiness that leaves one wondering about the secrets of their technique. Yet, for all its honesty, humour and hard-wrought common sense, this is very much a niche project.