The son of an Italian father and an African-American mother, Jonas Carpignano was born in New York and raised in Rome. Film-making runs in the family, as his grandfather and uncle are documentarist Vittorio Carpignano and Luciano Emmer, who produced some of the finest films ever made about Western art. But Carpignano has been concentrating on Italy's ongoing migrant crisis since making an impression with A Chjàna, a 2012 short that recreated the unrest that erupted in Rosarno following the shooting of two African workers who had been picking fruit for the local Calabrian mafia. 

During the making of his debut feature, Mediterranea (2015), Carpignano had his car stolen in the coastal town of Gioia Tauro and his attempts to recover it from the nearby Gypsy settlement prompted him to script a loose sequel, A Ciambra. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese and produced by Carpignano's father, Paolo (who grew up in this neck of the woods), this provides positive proof that the glorious tradition of neo-realism is alive and thriving, as Carpignano elicits performances of raw power and dogged energy from a non-professional cast led by Pio Amato, who now forms part of an unholy trinity of scene-stealing juveniles with Enzo Staiola  from Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Salvatore Cascio from Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988). 

Fourteen year-old Pio (Pio Amato) lives in a Roma ciambra camp outside Gioia Tauro. In the heyday of his grandfather Emiliano (U Ciccareddu), the currency was horses. But cars pay the bills for Pio's father, Rocco (Rocco Amato), and older brother, Cosimo (Damiano Amato). In addition to mother Iolanda (Iolanda Amato) and older siblings Riccardo, Simona, Antonella and Susanna, Pio also lives with nephews and nieces Nicolas Damiano, Patrizia, Cosimo, Gesuele Massimo, Cristina and Francesco Pio. He helps the latter melt down some copper wire, while trying to fire up an old motorino. But he can't afford the petrol to make it work.

Kids of all ages buzz around the outbuildings, cheeking their elders and smoking like chimneys and Pio revels in the bustle and bravura. At the disco, he runs into his Burkinabe buddy Ayiva (Koudous Seihon), who teases him about his crush on a teenage single mother and tries to force him into kissing another girl on the dance floor. But Pio is more interested in what Cosimo is up to, as he suspects he has a deal on the go. 

The next morning, the cops raid the camp and everyone scampers around to hide their illegal activities. Pio unhooks the wires siphoning off free electricity before jumping on the back of Cosimo's scooter. He shows him the car he has just stolen and asks Pio to ride lookout on the scooter while he drives it to the chop shop run by his pals. As the mechanics work, Cosimo gives Pio a crash course in how to hot wire a vehicle and disable any security devices. 

Back at home, Iolanda chides her daughters for drinking too much wine, while she chugs down a beer. They joke that they have started eating like Italians before the conversation turns to the African migrants staying near the town and the womenfolk admit to being intimidated by them. During supper, however, a couple of members of the local `Ndrangheta network, come to ask Cosimo if he has stolen a black Fiat Punto with a rabbit sticker and he assures them that he only picks up cars in Reggio.

Sceptical, the gangsters inform Cosimo that they have lined up a burglary for him in a big house at the Tonnara. Pio rides along in the flatbed van, but jumps out before they reach the address and doubles back to climb the fence. Scared off by a barking dog, he runs into a snooping neighbour, who apprehends him and calls the Carabinieri. Wriggling free, Pio makes his escape across the fields and reaches home at first light. He sees the cops descend and returns home in time to see Cosimo being bundled into one car and Rocco into another, when the cops rumble his electricity scam. 

Iolanda hollers about discrimination as her husband and son are driven away. But Pio knows he has to complete Cosimo's deal for a white Fiat and calls the man from Turin (Paolo Carpignano) who commissioned the theft. While he waits for the customer to call back, Pio overhears a `Ndrangheta minion ask Iolanda to return the car for a cut of the ransom money. However, Pio knows he can make more by selling it and asks Ayiva to help him when he can't spark the engine. They park it near the station and Pio conducts the negotiations with hard-faced aplomb for someone who can't read or write. 

Returning home, he slaps the money on the kitchen table when Iolanda browbeats him for taking such a risk. He stalks out and joins Keko at a card game, where he drinks and smokes alongside the grown-ups. During the night, however, the cops raid the house looking for some stolen copper and Pio has to move quickly to sneak the stash away. When he gets back, he sees the senior officer hand Iolanda a €9000 bill for the stolen electricity and she knows she doesn't have enough to pay. 

Pained to see his mother in such distress, Pio steals a suitcase from a train at the station and asks Ayiva if he knows someone who wants to buy a tablet. His friend Jennifer (Faith Uchenna Eburu) has a friend in Rosarno and they travel by scooter because Pio refuses to go by rail (as he is scared by anything that moves too quickly, like lifts). Too embarrassed to enter a squat, Pio waits for Ayiva by his bike and is disappointed only to get €70 for the trade. He's also stung when Ayiva insists on keeping some money for petrol and sulks on the pavement when his friend threatens to leave him to make his own way home. 

Unhappy that Pio is having to break the law to help her. Iolanda accepts the cash in glum silence. But Pio is delighted that he has cash for petrol and is able to get the motorino going. He also finds another bike in a shed and takes his cousins for rides around the compound, as his grandpa looks on. However, time is money and Pio needs to make more cash to help his mother. He finds a laptop in another suitcase and asks Ayiva to fence it for him. But he is having Skype problems with his sister and daughter and Pio realises how little he knows about his friend and his problems. 

Ayiva introduces Pio to Kingsley (Kingsley Asimung) at a tented camp on the edge of town. He also needs a television and Pio agrees to deliver the one Ayiva has in his lock-up. He doesn't want to discuss his private life and heads off to work, as Pio lugs the set across town on his head. Kingsley is delighted to see him and invites him to watch the game with his friends. Jennifer recognises him and explains that she is Nigerian, but everyone else is from Ghana. They chant Pio's name when their team scores and he has a whale of a time smoking and drinking with his new mates. When Ayiva arrives, he crouches down behind him so that Jennifer can push him over and he smiles at the boy he has become fond of since they first met when Ayiva was picking fruit. 

Next morning, Pio has a hangover and craves a cuddle from Iolanda, who joshes him about trying to be a man too soon. After a kickabout with his cousins, Pio helps grandpa in the garage. The old man confides that the Roma used to be free on the open road and laments being stuck in a permanent site. He also reminds Pio that the rest of the world is against them and he bears this in mind when a couple of `Ndrangheta heavies tick him off for nearly walking in front of their car. But what drives the message home is an encounter with a grey dappled horse on the road, as he walks home after helping Ayiva, and the vision of his youthful grandfather riding the animal around a blazing bonfire, as a symbol of the pride and freedom of their people. 

The next morning, Pio is woken with the news that grandpa has died and Rocco and Cosimo are allowed to attend the funeral. The `Ndrangheta boss, Raffaele (Pasquale Alampi), comes to the church to pay his respects and Pio resents the fact that they treat his family as inferiors. As the kids sing around a bonfire that night, Pio tells Cosimo that he has been the breadwinner while he's been inside and asks if they can start stealing together. However, his brother is disdainful and Pio vows to prove his worth by breaking into Raffaele's house. He throws a football over the fence in order to watch the code being tapped into the security gate and, when the capobastone takes his children out to dinner, Pio sneaks inside and fills a bag with valuables. 

Unfortunately, he is caught in the garden and driven home to face a humiliating audience with his entire family. Raffaele warns Pio that he will kill him if he ever steals from him again and orders Iolanda to pay compensation for the damage. Rocco is so furious that he throws Pio out of the house and he hammers on the gate in shame and frustration. He sees Emiliano and his horse at the end of the road and hears the clop of hooves, as they walk into the distance. However, a bike gang zooms in from the opposite direction and torches an outbuilding in reprisal. As the menfolk carry buckets to douse the flames, Pio cycles off to find Aviya and is grateful when he allows him to spend the night at the squat. 

Next morning, he receives a call from Cosimo and they meet on a rooftop at the abandoned housing estate abutting the ciambra. As his brother explains how Italians have more time for the Roma than the despised migrants, Pio accepts that he has to do something to earn back his family's trust. But he is horrified when Cosimo orders him to help burgle Aviya's lock-up and can't understand why everyone is so prejudiced against the Africans. Patrizia seeks him out to offer her support and she follows him to the railway station when he goes to steal some luggage. Spotting her on the train, while he is making his getaway, Pio jumps back into the carriage and leads her to the toilets to hide from the guard. He sweats profusely, as the train speeds along and Patrizia holds his hand when they disembark at the next station and make their way home without any loot. 

As dusk descends the next day, Pio sees the truck arrive to collect Cosimo and cycles off to distract Ayiva. He crashes his bike and calls Ayiva to tend to the cut he has sustained on his forehead. Huge tears trickle down Pio's cheeks, as the Burkinabe cleans the wound and asks what's bothering him. The boy clings to Ayiva, as he takes him home on the back of his motorbike and rests his head on his back, as he suspects these will be the final moments of their friendship.

But Cosimo is pleased with his efforts and, when Pio bridles on being teased about almost being a man, Cosimo pays for his younger brother to be fellated by a motherly backstreet prostitute. He returns to the ciambra next morning and Iolanda examines his forehead with unfussy affection. Walking on, Pio is faced with a choice of hanging out with the kids or joining Rocco and the grown-ups at the garage. In milky sunshine, he opts for the latter and a protective hand slaps him on the back, as he follows his father inside.

Reuniting Pio Amato and Koudous Seihon after their brief encounter in Mediterranea, Carpignano uses their colour blind bond to examine in intimate detail the hand-to-mouth existence of so many disenfranchised minorities on the margins of Italian society. Surrounded by relatives, Amato is on screen for much of the picture, with cinematographer Tim Curtin keeping tabs on his every move, as he ducks and dives in a bid to keep his family fed while his father and brother are behind bars. However, as the handheld close-ups of his wonderfully watchful face suggest, he is still very much an uneducated and impressionable kid and his dangerous errors of judgement betray his lack of understanding of his place in the macho underworld hierarchy. 

Chatting with engaging overlapping spontaneity, the remainder of the Amato clan are also natural performers, with Francesco Pio having a cocky insolence that is matched by Patrizia's sympathetic concern and Iolanda's world-weary maternalism. But Seihon also impresses, as the wheeler-dealing Africa whose own problems reinforce Carpignano's contention that so many find life a gruelling struggle. Yet, while he cannily notes that the migrant crisis has allowed the Roma to move off the bottom rung of the social ladder, Carpignano rather clumsily uses the visions of grandpa and his horse to emphasise the freedom that the travelling community has sacrificed in return for a smattering of security. 

Amato's loss of innocence with the voluptuous middle-aged hooker also feels unnecessarily heavy handed. Nevertheless, with Dan Romer's eclectic score providing a driving accompaniment to Affonso Gonçalves's muscularly skittish editing, this remains an unflinchingly authentic and unsanctimonious study of the everyday reality of grinding poverty.

Sylvia Syms has been on our screens for 63 years and she continues to deliver memorable performances. Now 84, she tends to take supporting roles like the Queen Mother in Stephen Frears's The Queen (2006). But, following in the footsteps of fellow octogenarian Sheila Hancock in Simon Hunter's Edie, Syms proves that she can still carry a picture, as she headlines Paul Duddridge's Together, which has been inspired by the case of Jessie and Ray Lorrison, who were infamously forced apart for the first time in their 65-year marriage in 2016 when South Tyneside Council refused to allow the 88 year-old Jessie to join her dementia-suffering husband (who was 95) at the Westoe Grange Care Home in South Shields after she was released from a stay in hospital. 

Dressed in their finery, Sylvia Syms and Peter Bowles introduce themselves and reflect on how their lives had changed since they celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary. Neighbour Amanda Barrie had made a fulsome speech and Syms and Bowles had replied with touching fondness for each other. However, Barrie had passed away shortly afterwards and Syms had hurt her ankle helping the widowed David Hargreaves into the minibus taking him back to his home because carer Emma Richardson had protested that she couldn't help because she hadn't reached that point in her training. 

Doctor Rufus Wright had recommended that Syms stays in hospital for a few days, as she has sustained a nasty break and he wants to talk to her about the antidepressant pills she has been refusing to take for the last 48 years. Annoyed that locksmith son Steve Steen has been called by the hospital, Bowles sullenly accepts a lift home and goes to cheer up Hargreaves, who is back home and feeling low. He claims that happiness is rationed like postwar eggs and that there's nothing left to look forward to when the shop runs out. Bowles suggests that time is a great healer, but Hargreaves is less than convinced. 

Four days later, Bowles returns from visiting Syms to see Hargreaves being wheeled to an ambulance by paramedics chattering blithely about him dying from a broken heart. As Bowles starts to look more dishevelled with each trip to the ward, home care services are asked to check up on him. Team leader Cathy Tyson is battling poor resources and low morale among committed, but dispirited case workers Tom Price, Natey Jones, Juliet Cowan and Katie Sheridan. But the latter seems breezy enough when she calls on Bowles and convinces him (rather archly) that Syms would be happier and would make a speedier recovery if she knew he was being well looked after. Persuaded that he would be helping his wife, Bowles agrees to check into Morvale, where he is shown round by chirpy manager, Carla Mendonça.

Despite insisting that he's only there for a short stay, Bowles has been in the home for almost a fortnight when Steen finally drops in to see him. He assures his father that being in prison is a cakewalk compared to a place like Morvale, as everyone is straining every sinew to appear to be nice. They chat about the past and how difficult they all found it when Steen's sister died when they were still kids. But Bowles had no idea how hard the loss had hit his son and he promises to make amends for years of estrangement.  

When Dr Wright sends Syms home, she is assigned Richardson as her carer and is far from impressed when she fails to remember their first meeting or that she had been caring for Hargreaves when he died. Bridling in her wheelchair, Syms struggles to discover any chore Richardson is capable of undertaking and she's relieved to get home. She calls Bowles on the mobile phone that Steen had given him and he gleefully packs his bag and heads home. Finding Syms asleep, he curls up beside her on the bed. However, they are woken in the night by Mendonça demanding that he returns to Morvale immediately and, when he politely shuts the door on her, she returns with Detective Inspector Dominic Carter, who arrests Bowles for breaching a care order. 

Back at the home, Carter asks Bowles how Syms injured her leg and produces a file containing details of a domestic abuse caution that Bowles had accepted after hitting Syms five decades earlier. He tries to explain the circumstances of the incident, but Carter instructs him to keep away from Syms until the investigation is over and recommends that he hires himself a lawyer. Clutching a cushion, a cowed Bowles lies on his bed in shock.

Twenty-five days have now passed since Syms broke her ankle and Bowles tries to enlist the help of MP Mariya Mizuno, who is trying to make a reputation as a defender of the elderly. She's too busy to see him, but thanks him for his service during the Second World War. Mendonça also assumes that Bowles is old enough to have fought and he snaps at her to show a little common sense instead of her rictus empathy. He also demands that he is allowed to return home, but Tyson and her team are loathe to accede to his request in light of his past violence and Steen's frequent brushes with the law. Sheridan wants to be more supportive, but she's applying for promotion and realises rocking the boat might jeopardise her chances. 

Meanwhile, estate agent Dan Tetsell comes to the house to carry out a council-requested evaluation of the property. Syms turns him away and he tuts that the muggins tax payer can't be expected to pick up the tab for Bowles's care when he is sitting on the funds to pay for it himself. With Bowles heading for a day in court to challenge the detention order, Syms confides in Richardson that he has never laid a finger on her because he took the blame for her self-harming when she began drinking after the loss of their daughter. However, none of this information is available to magistrate Nina Wadia and she is about to rule against Bowles on Sheridan's twisted interpretation of his plea for help when Richardson wheels Syms into the courtroom.

She waives the right to consult with counsel and explains that she and Bowles have been suspicious of medics knowing best since the GP failed to realise that their seven year-old daughter had meningitis back in 1969. Wadia listens, as Syms claims that Bowles had known at the time that something serious was wrong. But they had trusted the experts and swallowed their pain, as people did back then. Curiously, however, she says nothing about causing the black eye for which Bowles took the blame and the couple sit holding hands in the lobby, as lawyers and social workers negotiate earnestly as if they weren't there. 

The compromise is to allow Bowles to spend three days a week at the family home to demonstrate he's not a risk to Syms. But Wadia finds this preposterous and sneers at prosecutor Sebastian Blunt and the council officials he represents for sticking to formulae rather than using their common sense. Nevertheless, she orders the council to devise a test to show that Syms and Bowles are capable of living together unsupervised. 

After 46 days apart, Bowles can see light at the end of the tunnel. However, Russian carer Mihai Arsene warns him that the state never sets a test unless it intends catching you out and Bowles and Syms focus to the utmost when assessed by James Barnes. Everything seems to have gone well, until Barnes reminds Bowles to tie his shoelaces (an age-old trait) and he feels crushed. When the verdict goes against them, Syms calls Steen to help them break into the hall where they had their wedding reception and Bowles dances Syms around the floor in her wheelchair. They complete their video message and then swallow enough pills to ensure they cease to be a burden on those doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. 

As Mizuno appears on the news to exploit their situation to help her self-aggrandising crusade, Sheridan discovers she's been promoted and stamps `Closed' on the case file. We see Bowles and Syms lay flowers on their daughter's grave and hear the end of their video message before the film ends on a close-up of Steen shrugging with as much bemusement as bereavement, as he looks at a photo of his parents in the house he's about to inherit. 

The fact that the word `apart' keeps drifting away from the day tally captions rather sums up this well-meaning, but flawed feature. At the outset, it should be stated that Syms and Bowles are splendid and that Duddridge is right to raise such an important issue and highlight the under-funding and bureaucratic rigidity that allows such travesties to occur. But this muddled melodrama simply never convinces as a slice of life and there's something distasteful about the fact that Duddridge considers this to be `practically a horror film for people over a certain age'. 

His direction is steady enough, but the script lurches awkwardly between moments of monstrous injustice and ill-judged comedy. The cameos by Mendonça, Richardson and Tetsell are particularly problematic, as is the contrived manner in which the ambitious, but supposedly soft-centred Sheridan dupes Bowles into going into care and then misrepresents his words in court in order to prove to Tyson that she's tough and professional enough to be promoted. 

But the entire notion that experts and councils are not to be trusted has a discomfiting post-Brexit-cum-Grenfell feel and somewhat trivialises the source ordeal endured by the Lorrisons. However, with the population ageing, care strategies have to be addressed and if this mawkish picture has a positive impact, then all well and good. That said, those seeking a more nuanced and potent treatise on the topic should check out Bryan Forbes's The Whisperers (1967), which reveals how shockingly little things have changed where Britain's elderly are concerned in the intervening half century.

As is often the case in screen history, Georges Méliès was the first to take multiple roles in one film when he played seven musicians in The One-Man Band (1900). Buster Keaton surpassed his feat of trick photographic innovation when he essayed the orchestra and the audience, as well as numerous other roles in The Playhouse (1921). Yet, the record for the most characters played by one actor in a single picture had already been set by Rolf Leslie, who took on 27 different parts in Bert Haldane's biopic of Queen Victoria, Sixty Years a Queen (1913). 

Two years later, Joseph Henabery nabbed 16 roles, including Abraham Lincoln, in DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), while comedian Lupino Lane directed himself in 24 different parts in the 1929 short, Only Me. Subsequently, Fernandel (The Sheep Has Five Legs, 1954), Jerry Lewis (The Family Jewels, 1965), Eddie Murphy (Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, 2000), Denis Lavant (Holy Motors, 2012) and Noomi Rapace (What Happened to Monday, 2017) have all taken on the challenge of creating numerous characterisations, as have such Bollywood stars as Kamal Haasan (Dasavathaaram, 2008) and Priyanka Chopra (What's Your Raashee?, 2009). 

But, while Peter Sellers and the Pythons regularly mixed and matched, the most celebrated example of multi-thesping in British cinema saw Alec Guinness play eight members of the d'Ascoyne family in Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Now, however, Guinness has competition in the form of Timothy Spall, who tries his hand at 15 characters in Stephen Cookson's Stanley: A Man of Variety, an unsettling rumination on the dark heart of British comedy that lacks the thematic depth to match the boldness of its conceit and the brilliance of Spall's performance(s).

Six days before the closure of the Estuary Island psychiatric facility, Stanley (Timothy Spall) divides his time between cleaning the floors with a mop and bucket and inserting tokens into the television in his cell to watch snippets of an old black-and-white film before the power gives out. When he visits the bathroom, a monochrome James Finlayson emerges from one of the stalls and begins covering his face with foam and shaving him. In true slapstick style, he even covers Stanley's glasses.

Left to his own devices again, Stanley wipes away the words, `Rest in Peace, 15 Years', which have been written in suds on the floor. As he cleans the steps of the staircase, however, Max Wall appears before him and urges him to write a letter requesting compassionate leave in order to mark the 15th anniversary of his daughter's tragic demise. As Wall does some trademark bandy-legged dancing, Stanley taps away on a typewriter, even though Wall reminds him that his request is unlikely to be granted, as the judge said he should spend the rest of his natural life behind bars. 

Stanley rifles through some law books in the library in the hope of finding a clause to support his application. When Wall hands him a letter denying permission, Stanley tries to hang himself with a sheet slung over a pipe. But he winds up strapped to a bed in an empty room, where he is examined by Dr Boob, an Indian physician modelled on the character that Peter Sellers played by Peter Sellers alongside Sophia Loren in Anthony Asquith's The Millionairess (1960). Boob comments on the fact that Stanley is a racist for conjuring up a caricature based on such outdated notions of imperial supremacism. Yet, while Stanley denies being racist and declares that he simply wishes to visit his daughter's grave, Boob says he has no chance of being granted a pass. 

Having taken a bath, Stanley starts cleaning the windows and engages in a conversation with Tony Hancock, in his iconic Homburg hat and Astrakhan coat. He complains that he sought fame only to drink himself to death and warns Stanley about getting his name in the papers. Stanley insists that he wants to remain anonymous and Hancock snipes that he will do because he's a nobody. Hancock laments the state of the world economy, the threat of war and famine and the fact that he's got hard skin on his toe because somebody stole his pummice stone. Stanley protests his innocence, even though he's the only person in the asylum, and Hancock curses the fact that we are all alone and heading towards our inevitable demise. 

Sitting in the visiting room, Stanley chats with Noël Coward, who is sporting a smoking jacket. He has little sympathy with Stanley's plight and opines that he is not a skillful enough actor to press his case with any conviction. Stanley complains that his heart is going `boom diddy boom' and Coward scoffs at his dismal display of self-pitying hypochondria and concurs when Stanley confesses to being a sorry little man. Canned laughter rings out as Stanley claims to be having a heart attack and Coward commends him on his performance when he keels off his chair - not great acting, but good enough for this lowbrow bit of nonsense.

Stanley wakes on the bed again. But he doesn't linger and sets off with a torch into a dark corridor. He finds a candlelit room and is greeted by an Igor-like character, who considers Dr Boob to be his master. He informs Stanley that he is going to be allowed out and needs him to sign his name at the bottom of a long scroll. When Stanley inquires how he is going to be taken out, Igor pushes him backwards into a coffin-shaped box (even though Stanley is claustrophobic and needs the loo). As Igor cackles, the box whisks through a hole in the ceiling and Stanley finds himself suspended from a hot-air balloon decorated with a large pair of eyes.

Stand-up comedian Max Miller stands on the coffin and begins a patter routine full of double entendres about a man with a large nose. He asks Stanley to tell him a bit about his family and he describes how his father wore a suit (which had been donated by a morgue attendant) in all weathers and attracted some negative publicity when he was caught decapitating guinea pigs with a miniature guillotine. His mother had been a woman of a strong constitution, whom he sees in his mind's eye scoffing chocolates in bed. She fell ill because the eyepatched Mrs Moler accidentally put chilis in her rissoles. Stanley avers that they argued with him because they were unable to appreciate the subtext in the comedy shows they all enjoyed and Stanley had decided to destroy the radio by dropping it in the bath. Unfortunately, his brother was bathing at the time and he was frazzled to death.

When the balloon lands with a bump that causes the film to rewind on itself in a rapid montage, Miller saucily declares a need to toss himself off in order to avoid injury. On opening the coffin lid, Stanley creeps along a corridor and finds a door, whose key is hanging from a piece of string inside the letterbox. Venturing inside, he sees a long-abandoned room with dust sheets over the furniture. There's a theatrical poster on the wall and the cover of an old copy of Radio Times. Under a blanket on the table is a dust-covered collection of old cigarette cards. As Stanley turns round, George Formby rises from the sofa clutching his ukulele. He sings a song about a coffin being laid in the ground for all recorded time, as Stanley searches around for the location of his daughter's gravestone. 

Formby suggests a game of hide-and-seek and promptly vanishes. Stanley wanders outside and bumps into his parents, who urge him to admit his guilt. He wonders what they are talking about and finds himself propping up a bar with Frank Randle, who is wearing a greatcoat and baggy flat cap. Randle takes two slugs of booze and fishes round in a jar of pickled onions, while asking Stanley is he has ever done anything wrong. Bashfully, he admits to having stolen a penny chew and having once gone to school without a clean handkerchief. But he can't think of anything bad. When the gurning comic inquires whether he has ever hurt anyone, Stanley takes bemused offence and sidles away. Pausing for a moment, he stares at himself in the mirror and feels somebody put a blanket over his head and silence only conquers a throbbing cacophony when he shatters the glass with his fist. 

Climbing some stairs, Stanley sees a figure in a pool of light emanating from a doorway at the far end of the corridor. The shadowy form approaches and reveals itself to be Alastair Sim, replete with long white hair and a top hat. He explains that he is going to act as a Dickensian guide in the hope he can help Stanley face up to his guilt an avoid becoming an unrepentant souls trapped in Purgatory. Sim asks Stanley if he has anything on his conscience and he concedes that he has spent the last 15 years being tormented by guilt. He wishes that he had brought his daughter up differently, as she was teased at school because of his antics and her odd clothes. After a while, Stanley had withdrawn her for home schooling. But a man had intruded upon their bliss and Sim feigns surprise that she would have used a stranger to help her escape the nightmare of life with her father. 

As Stanley struggles to remember what he has done, Sim warns him that the noose is tightening around his neck and beckons him to follow so that he can witness his misdeed. Stanley re-enters the dustsheeted room and takes a tray of drugs off the top of a metal chamber pot (which has an eye on its base) and proceeds to set about an unseen figure on the sofa. Blood splatters on to the cigarette cards and other objects dotted around the room. 

Venturing into a courtroom, Stanley sees that Margaret Rutherford is the presiding judge. She reminds him several times that she suffers from amnesia, as she coaxes him into confessing his crime. Rutherford also criticises Stanley for forcing his obsession with old-fashioned and unfunny comics on to his daughter until she was driven as mad as he is. Feeling as though he has made a mistake in trying to hang himself, Stanley explains that he hated John Wilson, as he had hooked his daughter on the drugs that had killed her and admits that he bludgeoned him to death with the chamber pot. On hearing this declaration, Rutherford asks the jury for its verdict and, in a series of close-ups, Stanley's comedy heroes denounce him. She asks the 13th member of the jury to deliver the sentence and a monochrome Stanley calls for the death penalty. 

Shocked by the sight of himself among his accusers, Stanley mewls that he wishes to live. But Rutherford has moved on to the next case and he feels himself struggling with the makeshift noose around his neck. As his glasses fall on to the rug beneath his feet and he dangles like a grotesque puppet in a blurred view along the corridor, Stanley wakes with a start in his cell, whose walls are adorned with Radio Times covers. But Stanley appears to have survived his ordeal and he shuffles along the asylum corridor clutching a suitcase.

Back in his tidy flat, Stanley speaks on the phone to the doctor and assures him that he is feeling calmer than he has done in years. He promises to contact him if he sees the visions again and says `bye bye' like Harry Corbett at the end of The Sooty Show. Pouring the contents of a bottle of pills over his cigarette cards, Stanley sweeps them into the chamber pot, as the phone starts to ring. He places a bag of rubbish in the bin in the corridor, which has bicycles outside two of its other doors. He throws three objects down the corridor and a distorted song begins to play on the soundtrack. Stanley smiles and, when he looks up, the corridor is completely empty. But he starts talking to an unseen person and claims not to have the time to go with them or finish their game because he has to have his tea.

Returning indoors, Stanley sits at the table with the pills on the cards and the phone ringing. He picks up to an inquiry about a missing female named Alexandria, but he has no idea who they are talking about and apologises for being unable to help. The kettle boils on the stove, as Stanley sweeps the pills into the potty. He takes two cups out of the cupboard and calls Alexandria, hoping that she has taken good care of his magazines or she will face the consequences. 

Hearing voices at the door again, Stanley edges into the corridor and chats with another unseen figure about raising funds for his charity. He goes back inside and makes a phone call to arrange for the sale of his memorabilia, much of which is very rare and had been considered lost forever. Stanley walks across the now empty room to his suitcase before a sudden cut places him back at the sitting-room table with the sofa (which hadn't been there when he returned) in prominent view. He stares at the door, as though dreading someone coming in, and the camera retreats, leaving him sitting at the table playing the spoons. As the pull away reaches the corridor, a caption reveals that Stanley's psychiatric carer believes he poses no threat to the wider community. Just before the front door shuts, another caption reveals that Stanley has never had any children. 

This bravura enterprise rather limps over the line, as Cookson and Spall seek to make their point about mental health care in this country. Taking more cues from David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) than Kind Hearts and Coronets, the scenario affords Spall a unique opportunity to demonstrate his talent. Opting for impersonation rather than impressions and favouring mannerisms over catchphrases, he captures the despairing cynicism and sinister wretchedness of a well-considered range of comic greats. However, even the keenest student of old-time comedy will struggle to recognise Laurel and Hardy's Scottish sidekick James Finlayson and Lancashire likely lad Frank Randle (misspelt `Randall' in the credits) from Spall's interpretation. He's more successful with the likes of Maxes Miller and Wall, Coward, Hancock, Formby and Sim, however, while he raises disquieting questions about the tradition of male comics blacking and dragging up in his displays as Dr Boob and Margaret Rutherford. 

Yet, while there's no denying Spall's versatility or the excellence of 
Coleen Kelsall's costumes and Penny Smith's make-up, this always feels more like a novelty showcase than a serious study of the human condition or what British comedy has to say about the nation's socio-cultural preconceptions. Production designer Felix Coles makes adroit use of the rooms in Tower Bridge Magistrates Court, while Konstantinos Koutsoliotas takes pains to ensure that the special effects don't overwhelm Ismael Issa Lopez's visuals. But, for all the canny word play and hall of mirrors ingenuity, this exercise in what Spall calls `English noir' is stronger on atmosphere and comic critique than it is on storyline and psychiatric authenticity.

Finally, this week, The ICA in London hosts Claudia Priscilla and Kiko Goifman's provocative documentary, Tranny Fag. Blending performance, interview, speeches to camera and dramatic reconstructions (not all of which are factual), this is an uncompromising profile of Linn da Quebrada, a 27 year-old from the favelas of São Paulo, who refuses to conform to traditional gender identities and uses her music to deconstruct cis stereotypes and heteronormative notions of sexuality. 

Following an opening sequence, in which Linn da Quebrada goes searching with a torch beam bearing the Brazilian Portuguese title of the film, Bixa Travesty, she sits at a radio station microphone to warn men that their time of hegemony is over, as the tricks they have used to subjugate their feminine counterparts are about to be turned on them. She performs a song about body beauty with Jup do Bairro, who joins her in the studio to discuss definitions and confront the gossip that is swirling around about who Quebrada is and what her sexual preferences are. Back on stage, she sings about her desires and recommends to a man trying to flirt with her that he will have to get `faggier' if he's to pique her interest.

Quebrada pays a visit to his mother with friend and fellow performer Raquel Virgínia and tries to explain to her that she is not a woman, but transvestite and feminine. She laments having had so much anonymous sex and declares that his first duty is to love himself. Indeed, she even considers being comfortable in her own mind and skin as a political act. Despite occasionally using a male pronoun, Quebrada's mother is wholly supportive of her stance and she hugs her in the shower, as they wash  each other's bodies and their underwear. 

After another musical interlude, Quebrada and Raquel muse on surgical alternatives and concur that it's preferable to stay out of any doctor's surgery. Relaxing in a sauna and then a tub with Bairro, Quebrada wishes that people would realise she is not a man when they look at her and they conclude that they should be allowed to be non-male in their own way. Back at the radio mike, Bairro reveals that the taxi driver called him `sir' and they link this refusal to accept them as they are with more odious forms of homophobia. 

While having her eyebrows shaped, Quebrada talks about romance with the beautician and about how there should be no hard and fast rules for attraction. At the mike, she confides that she often felt she was alone in the dark and, as a result, she invented a space in which she could feel comfortable. She joins Bairro in a performance piece in the woods and describes herself backstage before a gig as a gender terrorist doll, who talks when you press her stomach. They are amazed and delighted to be doing what they are doing and play a drinking game while singing songs. 

In the radio booth, Quebrada explains how her personality and name evolved and claims that she is now a collection of the shards of a broken mirror that once reflected a man. She admits that her impoverished background has had a sizeable impact on shaping her, but tells photographer friend Nubia Abe that she can't always recognise herself in the pictures they flip through on her laptop. They laugh at a clip of her applying lipstick to her genitals and her attempt to penetrate a soap bubble. But we also see footage of Quebrada losing her hair while undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer and she confides to camera that she learnt more about her body when she lost control of it and doctors and loved ones got to have a say in the decisions pertaining to her well-being. 

They laugh at some of the more outrageous videos that they filmed in the hospital and Quebrada tells Abe that she has always been passionate about her body. She sits at the piano playing a simple melody that ends with her repeatedly pressing a broken note in the middle of the keyboard. A lengthy passage follows, as she sings while showering and the camera roves over her body, with its shoulder blade tattoo and belly piercing. When a couple of male musician pals call round to sing a song about Capricorns, Quebrada frets about being unable to find a silver glove that resembles the elongated fingernails of the Coffin Joe character played by Brazilian horror legend José Mojica Marins. Having had the word `She' inked on her eyebrow, Quebrada returns to the stage and the radio studio to warn complacent macho men about the imminent hour of their destruction and to pledge to keep shape shifting, as she remains a work in progress. 

It's safe to say that this unapologetically abrasive study won't be for everyone. Even those intrigued by Linn da Quebrada will find themselves craving more background information, as Priscilla and Goifman make no concessions for those not already au fait with this brash, edgy and somewhat narcissistic performer's oeuvre. In truth, we get to know very little about Quebrada, who prefers to make bold statements rather than reveal much about her past or her deeper emotions. Indeed, Priscilla and Goifman seem to cut away to a song or a carefully stage-managed encounter whenever talk turns to anything remotely personal. Consequently, we get to know more about Quebrada's opinions on the significance of the anus than we do about her identity or illness.

In fact, she says more in her lyrics than she does in her confidential asides and the clips of her stage act in front of small, but devoted audiences are by far the best thing about the film. Quebrada clearly wants viewers to rethink their attitudes towards gender. But, curiously, her strident defence mechanistic antics prove something of a distraction from her message and one is left wishing she had trusted us with a little more frank intimacy and a lot less manufactured image.