Despite making three series of The Trip (2010-16), Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have always denied that they are a double act and they prove the point by turning up in separate features this week. Neither picture is particularly successful at exploring its underlying themes in any depth and, despite both films containing synchronised swimming sequences, genuine laughs are at a premium in each instance. However, Brydon's Swimming With Men is much more grounded in recognisable reality than Coogan's Ideal Home, which strains so hard to seem insouciant about the casting of two straight stars as a gay couple raising a 10 year-old boy that it comes as something of a surprise to discover that the story has been based on the director's own experiences. 

Arriving so soon after Gilles Lelouche's Sink or Swim played at Cannes, Oliver Parker's Swimming With Men will doubtlessly be the subject of several jokes about waiting for a film about blokes synchronised swimming and two coming along at once. Sharing producer Stewart Le Maréchal with Dylan Williams's documentary, Men Who Swim (2010), this cosy exercise in male bonding can hardly be said to be original. But, after a pair of St Trinian's reboots (2007 & 2009), a third career Oscar Wilde adaptation (Dorian Gray, 2009), a Johnny English sequel (2011) and that execrable Dad's Army remake (2016), this flabby wallow in middle-age angst marks Parker's return to novelty for the first time since I Really Hate My Job (2007).

Accountant Rob Brydon is bored with his job in the City and frustrated that wife Jane Horrocks has gone off sex since becoming involved with local politics. Convinced she is having an affair with council colleague Nathaniel Parker, Brydon arrives late at the party she has thrown to celebrate her election and receives a lecture about failing to support his wife in her bid to do some good for the community. Teenage son Spike White is concerned that his parents are drifting apart and calls Brydon away from swimming at the municipal pool to disrupt a cosy meeting that Horrocks is having with Parker in their home. 

The best that Brydon can do to impose himself, however, is to confiscate the wine from the kitchen and check into a cheap hotel. He gets fighting drunk on gin the following night and is greeted on the step by a confused Horrocks, who shuts the door when Brydon can't bring himself to say that he still loves her. Returning to his hotel room beside the bottle bank, Brydon resumes his mundane existence. But, at the baths, he spots a male synchronised swimming team and he offers them a little locker-room advice on how to improve their latest routine. He suggests that they need to apply some mathematical logic to the choreography and is invited to join the ranks alongside estate agent Rupert Graves, retired widower Jim Carter, builder Daniel Mays, gay dentist Adeel Akhtar, the taciturn Chris Jepson, the enigmatic Ronan Daly and the rascally Thomas Turgoose, who is much the youngest member of the troupe.

A montage involving desk calendar pages shows Brydon counting the hours until his first session with his new pals and he finds himself enjoying the banter, as he masters the basic floating and water-treading techniques and familiarises himself with the rules of Swim Club. After a couple of sessions, Brydon learns that they have been asked by pool attendant Charlotte Riley to perform at a children's party. Despite the lack of enthusiasm among the dads expecting a female team, Graves is pleased with their performance, even though it ends with one of the kids spotting some faecal matter floating on the surface. 

Moreover, they are commended by Riley's friend, Christian Rubeck, who just happens to be a member of the Swedish men's synchronised swimming team. He claims that they should become the British entrants at the forthcoming world championships in Milan and the gang discuss their prospects poolside over the leftover jellies and fairy cakes. Graves is keen, but Mays appears to put the mockers on the situation when he reveals how freezing during the FA Youth Cup Final has left him with a lifelong fear of competition. A conference telephone call during working hours forces him to confront his demons, however, and Brydon is grateful for the distraction, as boss Robert Daws shows him newspaper reports about Horrocks crusading against library cuts and tries to involve him in a client's shady tax shelter scheme. 

Graves asks Riley to coach them and she puts them through gruelling sessions in the gym and on a climbing wall. She also gives them a demonstration with her own troupe and they have misgivings that they will ever be able to compete, especially when they make a mess of a wilting flower routine devised by Akhtar. Brydon also has his doubts when he gets cramp in the pool. But Riley confides that Swim Club means a lot to chaps like Carter, who has hidden from the others the fact that his wife died a year ago. 

Brydon has hardly given Horrocks a thought since he started swimming and he barely registers a flicker when White informs him that he thinks she wants a divorce. In fact, Horrocks is throwing herself into a protest against service cuts and she is taken aback to discover that her husband is missing meetings to attend practice sessions. She tries to snap Brydon back into facing reality and he moves out of the hotel to cut down his expenses. However, Graves sees him wheeling his suitcase around and invites him to stay on his houseboat, where he reveals that he was taken to the cleaners by his ballerina wife and now has limited access to his daughters. He also explains how Mays feels responsible for Turgoose after catching him stealing from his site. But Brydon ducks the opportunity to discuss his own plight and focuses on the fact they only have two days before they fly to Italy.

A potential crisis arises when Turgoose shows up for training with an electronic ankle tag and they have to hide him from the police when he breaks a curfew. But they survive a major bust-up and Brydon has time to quit his job before meeting up at the airport in their team suits. Horrocks is astonished when White shows her a news clip about the championships, as she had thought that Brydon was fooling around when he presented her with tickets to Milan. 

However, there's no sign of her in the crowd when they arrive at the arena and Brydon has to choke down his disappointment. Riley gives them a last pep talk and wishes them luck before Mays has a panic attack and is only convinced to participate by Brydon reminding him that they are part of a team that has helped him come to terms with his mid-life crisis and fears of ageing and failure. Buoyed by the sentiment that they are doing this for themselves and each other, they take to pool and Riley whoops frantically poolside, as the crowd applauds a routine that concludes with a triumphant back flip after a shaky start. 

The Brits come second to the Swedes and Carter grumbles that they have been robbed. But they all end up in the pool in their suits to celebrate after Graves plucks up the courage to kiss Riley. As Carter joins Brydon at the edge of the pool, he urges him to win Horrocks back and the troupe join him in performing a dance in the middle of a protest rally on the concourse in front of the fountain beneath the council chamber balcony. Turgoose has to scarper before the cops catch up with him, but Brydon gets to reassure White that he's not gay and sock Parker on the jaw before making up with Horrocks to the delight of swimmers and demonstrators alike. 

Clinging to the coat-tails of Paul Cattaneo's The Full Monty (1997), this is a pale imitation that rarely manages to convince, let alone charm. Screenwriter Aschlin Ditta must have spent hours taking notes from Simon Beaufoy's infinitely superior script, as he strives forlornly to turn the problems of a bunch of unremarkable blokes into a declaration on the state of the nation. But there is a whopping disconnect between reality and a story world that blithely ticks off hot-button topics like the crisis of post-millennial masculinity, tax evasion, sexual identity and local government cuts without discussing any of them in meaningful depth. 

It hardly helps that Ditta avoids providing any backstory for the majority of the swim team or that he sentimentalises those he elevates from cipher status with a passing revelation. But the biggest problem he fails to solve is the utter resistibility of Brydon's self-absorbed bean counter, who is motivated by his own priorities even while delivering the `in this together' speech that keeps Mays onside. Jealous of his wife's success, he risks ruining her reputation by leaving home and demonstrates scant interest in being a father to his son. Even the climactic grand gesture is all about him, as he draws attention to himself and away from the protest that Horrocks has organised to avert library closures. In truth, rather than melting her heart, this very public display of egotism should have earned Brydon a withering look of disdain and an envelope full of divorce papers. 

This isn't, of course, how screen comedy works and Graves and Riley also become an item, even though there isn't an iota of chemistry between them. Similarly, Turgoose is allowed to get away scot free in a crass two-finger gesture to the establishment that sums up the picture's lazy attitude to both plotting and plausibility. Yet, the ensemble performances are willing enough, with Mays and Carter standing out, if only because their cut-outs are marginally less cardboard than their confreres. David Raedecker's photography is little more than functional, although Parker struggles to convey the effort and elegance involved in the routines. He relies somewhat inevitably on top shots and underwater close-ups without ever succeeding in placing the viewer at the heart of the action. Thus, while this passes the time easily enough, it falls a fair way short of Men Who Swim (which was shown under the BBCs Storyville banner as Sync or Swim), whose Stockholm Arts Swim Gents cameos here as the Swedish squad.

Revisiting territory he had previously explored in David Wain's Role Models (2008), Paul Rudd steps into Brydon's shoes to provide Steve Coogan with a sounding board in Ideal Home. However, their contrasting styles prove difficult to mesh in a cornball confection that showcases the duo's determination to demonstrate how right-on they are by essaying gay men with a penchant for coupling on a bear rug rather than any sense of comic or romantic chemistry. 

When wastrel father Jake McDorman is busted by the cops for beating up a hooker in Albuquerque, 10 year-old Jack Gore avoids being placed in social care by schlepping across New Mexico to Santa Fe, where grandfather Steve Coogan hosts a basic cable cookery show that's directed by his longtime partner, Paul Rudd. The couple bicker constantly, but also throw the trendiest dinner parties and it's into one of these gatherings that Gore wanders carrying a plastic bag containing a bible, a notebook and a wrap of cocaine. 

Unsure what to do with a surly tweenager who won't reveal his name, Coogan takes him on a shopping trip to Walmart and even endures an expedition to Taco Bell after McDorman refuses to let Gore see him in jail. But, even though he bonds more naturally with the kid after learning that he witnessed his addict mother fall to her death from an upper-storey window, Rudd is hurt that Coogan has withheld this part of his past and is far from convinced that parenting is compatible with their lifestyle. Yet, when Child Protection agent Alison Pill comes to the ranch, it's Rudd who assumes the mantle of responsibility when she has concerns about Gore having access to their porn stash. He also takes Gore's schooling seriously, as well as teacher Lora Martinez-Cunningham's suggestion that he needs to find some friends of his own age. 

Coogan solves this problem by inviting some local families to the filming of an Indian party episode of his show and they soon find themselves attending barbecues and play dates at houses across the neighbourhood. Indeed, Coogan becomes so used to having Gore around that he explores the possibility of securing custody when McDorman declares that he has found God and plans taking his son to live with a religious community in Arizona. Having realised how much he cares about the boy after having a panic attack after preventing him from being hit by a speeding motorcyclist, Rudd shares Coogan's concerns. But he is more of a realist, even though he also gets a fit of the giggles during a dressing down from Martinez-Cunningham after Gore uses inappropriate language during a show-and-tell presentation about living with two gay men. 

Thus, when McDorman shows up on Christmas Eve to take Gore away, Rudd decides that he can't go on living with Coogan (having caught him crying on the shoulder of houseboy Evan Bittencourt) and accepts a job to work for rival cook Rachael Ray in New York. Having striven to remain calm while Rudd packs his belongings, Coogan drapes himself over the bonnet of the car taking him to the airport and Rudd realises he has no option but to return home when he sees Coogan's silly grin on the jacket of his new book. While they are having a make-up supper, McDorman crashes his car while under the influence and a judge grants Coogan and Rudd custody. Driving back to the ranch, Gore surprises them both by requesting a gourmet dinner to celebrate his return. 

Accompanied by 10cc's `The Things We Do For Love' a montage of happy LGBTQ+ family photographs presages the closing credits and reaffirms the entirely laudable message of Andrew Fleming's syrupy sitcom. Yet, in making the point that even neurotic gay men are quite capable of raising a child, Fleming seems set on dealing in stereotypes that were dubious when William Friedkin made The Boys in the Band (1970) and positively antediluvian when Mike Nichols remade Édouard Molinaro's La Cage aux Folles (1976) as The Birdcage (1996).

Three decades have passed since Fleming debuted with Bad Dreams (1988). But, despite the early promise shown in Threesome (1994) and The Craft (1996), he has mostly worked in television and feature outings like Dick (1999), The In-Laws (2003) and Barefoot (2014) have received mixed reviews. As was the case with his previous collaboration with Coogan on Hamlet 2 (2010). But, here, Fleming allows Coogan to play a camp Alan Partridge, as he minces and preens his way through a string of handcrafted quips that serve only to emphasise the artificiality of the situation.

The sketchy characterisation further exposes the fact that Coogan and Rudd are always acting and rarely come across as plausible people, let alone a credible couple. Given little more to work with than the odd shrug and grimace, Jack Gore is similarly ill-served as the petulant tyke, who has seen more grim reality in his short life than the prissily pampered Coogan and the soft-centredly pragmatic Rudd could possibly envisage. Consequently, there's little sense of tension as Gore acclimatises to his new surroundings and absolutely no feeling of jeopardy when he is predictably whisked away. Fleming's intentions are admirable. But his film is passé, patronising and unfunny.

Film-makers have been imperilling blind women since the silent era, although few movies have exploited this hoary gambit as effectively as Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967), Richard Fleischer's See No Evil (1971) and Michael Apted's Blink (1993). The difference with Anthony Byrne's In Darkness, however, is that Natalie Dormer has co-scripted the scenario that sets her alongside Audrey Hepburn, Mia Farrow and Madeleine Stowe in being stalked by a desperate killer. 

Blind since the age of five, Natalie Dormer uses a white stick to get around London. A pianist working on a horror score composed by Michael Bott, she makes her way home on the tube and buys a coffee for busking violinist Charlie de Bromhead, even though he fails again to play a piece of music she doesn't recognise. While picking up her mail, she meets upstairs neighbour Emily Ratajkowski, who has asked Dormer to play at a benefit concert for her father, Jan Bijvoet, a Serbian businessman who is in the news because of possible links to war criminals. As she needs the money to pay her own father's medical bills, Dormer claims to be unconcerned about the morality of the commission and heads up to her comfortable apartment. 

Despite being disturbed by footsteps overhead and the sound of Ratajkowski arguing with a man, Dormer works on the score and wonders why her friend is so secretive about the perfume she wears. Returning from the studio next day, Dormer slips on a scarf left on the stairs and cuts her hand. As she takes the lift, Ratajkowski slips in beside her and tells her to keep hold of the scarf for the moment and confides that her scent is called Liquid Gold. During the course of the evening, however, Dormer hears raised voices again and suspects that someone is lingering in the basement when she takes out a bin bag. But she is still taken by complete surprise when Ratajkowski cackled manically and plunges to her death on the bonnet of a parked car in the street below. 

When police inspector Neil Maskell comes to question her, Dormer claims to have heard nothing because she had her headphones in. He asks whether her other senses are more acute to compensate for her blindness, but she admits she doesn't know, as she has nothing else to compare them to. While they chat, Joely Richardson chides brother Ed Skrein for being seen in the lift by Ratajkowski's neighbour and orders him to finish her off and find the memory stick that Bijovet is desperate to recover before it falls into the hands of the Russians. When he breaks into Dormer's apartment, however, Skrein realises that she's blind and decides to spare her after they both listen intently for signs of activity on either side of the bathroom door. 

Meanwhile, Maskell learns from the autopsy that Ratajkowski was on medication for a bipolar condition, had recently had a nose job and was 12 weeks pregnant. But he keeps these facts hidden, as the press hound Bijvoet at the morgue and Dormer is so distressed by hearing the lurid TV news coverage that she almost walks into a passing car in crossing the road. Nevertheless, she attends the drinks gala for Bijvoet's refugee foundation and piques his interest by playing a song that he had sung to his daughter when she was a child. Troubled by her own flashbacks to her youth, Dormer keeps her nerve when Bijvoet asks to speak to her alone. She is going to give him a small glass vial that she had been keeping in her bathroom cabinet when Richardson comes in to snoop on them and Dormer has to crush the bottle with her shoe and cover its traces by dropping her champagne flute on to the stone floor. 

Unconvinced by Skrein's conviction that Dormer is blind, Richardson waves a hand in front of her face when they meet in the washroom. She watches her powder her nose and tells her she looks like a million dollars before laughing loudly when Dormer compliments her on her shoes. Keen to keep tabs on Dormer, Richardson orders Skrein to follow her home and he rescues her from a gang of rapacious youths (seen only as shadows, but speaking Multicultural Youth English). Dormer is grateful for his help and accepts his invitation to have a coffee to settle her nerves. But she is sufficiently suspicious by his line of questioning and his silence when she shows him Ratajkowski's scarf that she asks De Bromhead to play some Satie if he ever sees Skrein following her. 

Woken by a nightmare about a fire and the erratic behaviour of her deceased mother, Dormer showers as Bijvoet washes his daughter's body with a reverence that was noticeably absent earlier when he had defaced photographs of her and recalled her voice threatening to ruin him. Shortly after Dormer remembers Ratajkowski slipping something into her coat pocket and finding the USB, Maskell pays her a visit and asks if she knew that her neighbour was pregnant. He jokes that she was a woman of mystery, but lets slip that he doesn't think that a woman with so much to live for would leap to her death. 

However, Maskell knows only a fraction of what is going on, as Dormer is a Bosnian fugitive who has vowed to get even with Bijvoet for killing her sister and mother. She meets protector James Cosmo on a bench opposite the Houses of Parliament and slips him the memory stick in a coffee cup. He wants her to go into hiding, but she is determined to finish what she started. Being blind, however, she doesn't see Skrein spying on her. Nor does she see the sinister van kerb crawling towards her and she is powerless to prevent herself being abducted by thugs who string her up to the roof of the vehicle and start breaking her fingers before Skrein manages to rescue her by ramming the van and killing its occupants. 

Skrein bundles her through the busy streets and implores her to hand over the USB. But Dormer refuses to trust him and, when he kills another man who tries to intercept then, she calls for help and Skrein scarpers before the police arrive. Cosmo sits by her hospital bed and tells her that the files on the stick detail Bijvoet's connections and he is convinced that Ratajkowski was trying to ruin him because she had come to realise what a monster he was. But Maskell watches them talk, as he has reviewed CCTV footage of the street attack, and places the cup Cosmo had been using in an evidence bag. 

Realising that Maskell is getting closer to establishing her identity, Dormer discharges herself and returns home to find that a photograph of her family has been stolen. She sends De Bromhead to the café where Skrein is waiting with a message to meet her in Ratajkowski's apartment. She ties the scarf around his eyes and makes love to him before revealing that she used to play in Bijvoet's garden before Yugoslavia imploded and can never forgive him for what he did to her family. Skrein suggests that killing him will do little to alleviate her pain, but she insists on seeing Richardson alone and they rendezvous in front of Titian's `The Death of Actaeon' at the National Gallery. 

Richardson returns the Polaroid, but reminds Dormer that Bijvoet would recognise her parents if he ever saw it and would act accordingly. However, Dormer reveals that she knows that Richardson is working undercover and that one word to Bijvoet would lead to her exposure. So, Richardson agrees to escort Dormer to Ratajkowski's funeral and arrange for them to be alone together. Dormer seems not to suspect that Richardson would betray her and she accepts a lift back to the reception without trepidation. 

As they drive through the cemetery, Dormer lunges at Bijvoet's throat with a knife. But he stays her hand and reveals that he is her father because he raped her mother for being a Catholic (Joanna Makaruk) married to a Muslim (Alejandro de Mesa). He sneeringly boasts of raping her again before he killed her and Dormer is dumbstruck when he opens the car door and pushes her into the crowd of protesters clamouring for him to be tried as a war criminal. She goes to the police station to find Maskell, but wanders away on learning he's not there. Instead, she calls Cosmo from a phone box and discovers that he passed away the previous evening. 

Maskell finds Dormer at the coffee shop and posits his theories on the case. He also reveals that he has learned from Cosmo's fingerprints that he has been protecting Dormer and has allowed her to use the name of the daughter who died in a car crash when she was two years old. Although he hasn't figured everything out, he suspects that Dormer is about to do something foolish and tries to persuade her to let the law do its job. Meanwhile, Bijvoet has rumbled Richardson's true identity and, although Skrein promises to help her flee the country, she is murdered in the car taking her to the airport. 

As Skrein sprints across London to Dormer's building and Maskelll speeds there in his squad car, Bijvoet arrives to kill her. He is throttling her (in a shot reminiscent of the image on the screen in the recording session) when Skrein bursts in to push him out of the window and impale him on the railings below. Somewhat preposterously, Dormer seems to regain her sight and tries to staunch the bleeding of Skrein's abdominal wound. But he pleads with her to leave before the cops arrive and she leaves him with Ratajkowski's scarf befoe disappearing into the night, as she had done all those years before. As the father of an asthmatic daughter, Maskell shrugs and decides to let her go, as she is entitled to a third chance at happiness. 

Proving once again that there are few things more difficult in movie-making than giving a thriller a credible last reel, this intriguing collaboration between off-screen partners Anthony Byrne and Natalie Dormer loses its way badly after its big secret is revealed. While Dormer appears to be a vulnerable victim, the story proceeds with a pleasing predictability that is enhanced by the studied performances of the eminently plausible Dormer and the drolly despicable Joely Richardson. However, the more Byrne and Dormer begin to exploit the Bosnian Civil War as a convenient plot point without examining its horrors in any meaningful depth, the more cynical and convoluted the picture becomes. 

Byrne has worked predominantly on TV series like Silent Witness, Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders since starting out on the feature trail with Short Order (2005) and How About You... (2007). Consequently, he's a dab hand at building suspense, as he keeps Si Bell's camera moving in sinuous tracking shots that either suggest Dormer's sightless progress or that she is being followed. But he's less effective at staging action set-pieces and allows editors Tom Harrison-Read and Paul Knight to employ a choppy staccato that works against the dynamism and spectacle of the sequences, in spite of the eager efforts of Niall Byrne's score. Moreover, Byrne can't resist a visual flourish, as he and production designer Sonja Klaus reference such gialli as Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975), while sound designer Sebastian Morsch owes several debts to Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012). Nevertheless, before the script starts using rape and genocide as character motivation, this shows promise.

Ever since Val Lewton produced Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim (1943), Hollywood has been fascinated by cults. Yet, while the likes of Ralph L. Thomas's Ticket to Heaven (1981) and Ted Kotcheff's Split Image (1982) have adopted a weighty dramatic approach, recent items like Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) and Ti West's The Sacrament (2013) have played up the horror element. Having already broached the topic in Resolution (2012), writer-directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson revisit cultdom in The Endless, in which they also take the leading roles. 

When brothers Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson receive a digital video tape in the post from Camp Arcadia, Moorhead spends the money set aside for a new car battery on a camcorder capable of playing it. Having been raised in the compound after their mother was killed in a car crash, Moorhead begins pining for Camp Arcadia. However, Benson had rebelled against the compulsory castration policy and fled with his sibling before everyone committed suicide in a mass ritual known as `The Ascension'. 

After consulting their psychiatrist, Benson agrees to take Moorhead back to the California desert to see whether the settlement still exists and convince him that, even though they are trapped in a cycle of menial jobs, they are better off out of it. En route, they notice birds circling in the sky near the spot in the road where the family car crashed. But they press on and are greeting enthusiastically by genial leader Tate Ellington, who recognises them from a decade earlier. So do Shane Brady and Callie Hernandez (who had appeared on the tape that had so intrigued Moorhead). Over lunch, the brothers are also reacquainted with the ever-smiling David Lawson, Jr. and the beardedly grave Lew Temple, while also being introduced to Kira Powell, an artist who had wandered on to the estate from the nearby mental health facility. 

During a run around the grounds, Benson is puzzled why nobody seems have aged since and, that night, asks Ellington whether he has had any luck in cracking the physics formula on which he has long been working. He reassures Benson that everyone looks so young because they eat well, drink their home-brewed ale and lead happy lives. But, while he remains unconvinced (even after Brady impresses him with a magic trick involving a disappearing baseball), Moorhead is intrigued by how content everybody is and responds eagerly to the applause when he accepts Ellington's campfire challenge to pull on a rope that seems to stretch into the night sky. 

Benson burns his hand when the rope is yanked from his grasp and Powell tends to the wound (having completed a charcoal drawing two sinister eyes in the darkness). He agrees to let Moorhead stay another day, even though he is perplexed by a post-it reading `Please Keep Quiet' that he keeps finding on walls around the camp. Moreover, he's curious about the padlocked cabin that is closely guarded by Temple and is positively bemused by the back-ticking clock he finds mounted on a tent in the woods near a circle of Polaroid pictures in the dust. When he asks Ellington for an explanation, Benson notices two moons in the sky over the camp and has to cling on to his sceptism when Ellington promises that the answers he seeks are out there and that he will learn much if he dives below the buoy depicted in the Polaroid he had picked up.

While Hernandez shows Moorhead the ocular effect of the moons on the horizon (which resembles Powell's sketch), Benson finds Emily Montague sobbing in frustration on some steps. She came to Arcadia to find her missing spouse and keeps leaving post-its asking people to keep down the noise while she tries to sleep. But everyone is having too good a time to consider others and her cynicism clears Benson's head. Nevertheless, while out fishing with Moorhead the next day, he dives into the lake and emerges with a metal cashbox and the conviction that something had been trying to hold him under the water. They find another videocassette inside the box and Moorhead informs his brother of his intention to leave. 

Despite his growing disquiet, Benson is persuaded to attend a goodbye gathering by Ellington, who produces the video from the lake, which contains snippets of Benson and Moorhead denouncing their erstwhile benefactors as members of a `UFO death cult'. He asks Benson why he would have spread such pernicious rumours and Moorhead is furious when he discovers that his brother had devised the castration myth. But, while Ellington offers to forgive Benson, he refuses to stay in Arcadia with Moorhead and is livid when he reaches their car and discovers that the battery's gone flat. 

Grateful to stumble across a shack in the wilderness, Benson is confused when he sees James Jordan simultaneously alive and dangling from a noose in an outhouse. Mocking him for allowing himself to be lured back into the loop, Jordan explains that everyone in the vicinity is trapped in endless cycles of varying durations that are controlled by an unseen entity with an insatiable appetite for stories. As a result, he has to put up with his hanged self. He also demonstrates how totems driven into the ground mark out areas where it's possible to defy the laws of space and time and gives Benson a shock when he vanishes into thin air and reappears from inside the outhouse. 

Entrusting Benson with a compass and a map, Jordan sends him in search of Vinny Curran, who will provide him with a gun. He finds him chained to the wall of a hut because buddy Peter Cilella is trying to cure him of his substance addictions. Cilella is Montague's husband and he remembers Benson from when he was a boy. He has been digging outside and has unearthed an old hard drive that contains an audio clip of people in torment. They shudder and shrug that the incident could come from their past, present or future, as there is no longer any way of delineating between them. Curran urges Benson to find a way out of the labyrinth and show no fear if confronted by the entity because it will seize upon his weakness and drag him into its orbit. 

Back in Arcadia, Moorhead also contemplates the nature of the Lovecraftian beast with Ellington. He accepts that Moorhead has to go in search of his brother and he becomes invisible from the sadly waving Hernandez after he passes beyond the marker staffs. Wandering into the woods, Moorhead finds the tent with the backticking clock and broken record and pees through the flap to see Ric Sarabia (dressed in the explorer's garb of the early 1900s) endlessly repeating an evidently terrifying incident. However, he has time to hiss a warning to Moorhead to get away from the spot as quickly as possible. 

Meanwhile, Benson takes his leave of Cilella, who jokes that he misses the annoying notes that Montague used to leave around the house. He hopes that she has managed to move on and Benson hesitates about telling Cilella that she is hemmed inside Arcadia. But he trudges away and looks back only to see Cilella torch the wooden structure in an effort to break out of his cycle. No sooner has Cilella closed the door on the conflagration, however, than time shifts and Benson sees him arriving at Curran's door for the first time, many rewinds ago. As he walks on, he is taken aback by the sight of a camper van on a brow and a mountain lion prowling through the undergrowth. However, Benson shows no fear and, as the creature turns tail, Moorhead pops into view and joins his brother in seeking a way out. 

Finding no one home in the camper - but noting a pot of the red flowers that are valued so highly in Arcadia - the siblings press on, without seeing their shadows being cast on to a drying sheet by a projector that is hurled by an unseen force towards a network of shimmering domes that have appeared on the plain below. As a third moon appears in the sky, Moorhead confides that he slept with Hernandez and Benson is amused that he literally means spent the night chastely in the same bed. While they walk past ominous edifices that resemble shapes in Powell's drawings, Ellington presides over a mournful repast in Arcadia and Jordan blows out his brains with the gun that Benson leaves for him. 

Undeterred by such grim repeat performances, Moorhead announces that he wants to stay behind because the life Benson forces him to live is unbearable. Refusing to argue any longer, Benson escorts him back to Arcadia. However, the compound is deserted and they wander into the shed on the stoop after they see Temple removing the padlock. It's full of film cans and video tapes and they watch episodes from their visit on a TV screen that suddenly flickers into life. But a sense of foreboding overtakes Moorhead, who rushes out to warn his friends of an impending disaster. He is too late, however, and the Arcadians are frazzled by a force that seems bent on changing the story once again. 

Racing to the car, Benson urges Moorhead to push so that they can kickstart the engine. Even though the world behind them is imploding, they pause because Moorhead insists on driving, as he is tired of Benson making dreadful decisions on his behalf. Jumping into the vehicle, as Ellington and his circle look on apprehensively, the siblings speed along the dirt road and seem to make it through to the other side, despite colliding with a car coming in the opposite direction. They whoop with delight, as they leave the bubble behind. But Benson seems to know that something has gone wrong when he settles back in his seat on noticing that they are still moving, even though the fuel gauge is on empty. 

Opening with HP Lovecraft's quotation about the oldest and strongest kind of fear being the `fear of the unknown', this is an admirably intelligent and consciously convoluted treatise on the cyclical nature of both history and fiction and the uncertainties that each generates. Political and theological subtexts abound, as Benson (who scripted) and Moorhead (who handled the striking cinematography) wisely leave the audience to draw any conclusions about the finer points of this dystopian Arcadia. Yet, for all its ingenuity, this mumblecoric variation on the theme of characters searching for an author takes some unnecessary detours, the most obvious of which sees Curran, Cilella and Montague reprise the roles they played in Benson and Moorhead's Resolution (2012), in which Cilella's attempt to put Curran through cold turkey is manipulated by an imperceivable force. 

It also seems a shame that the action revolves around the brothers, as the real tragedy involves those lost souls imprisoned inside a neverending story. Melancholic rather than dictatorial, Ellington turns all notions of cult leadership on its head, while Hernandez is touchingly maternal in the way she resumes her protective attitude towards the still naive Moorhead. But, having taken the decision to play the leads themselves, Benson and Moorhead can be forgiven for keeping their characters centre stage, while they and production designer Ariel Vida, sound mixer Bryn Hubbard and effects guru Michael Matzur deserve enormous credit for producing such an atmospheric, teasingly self-reflexive and thought-provoking picture on such a modest budget.

Imagine Pulp Fiction being re-enacted in the Sin City part of Wonderland and you get close to the postmodernist milieu that the debuting Brit Vaughn Stein has concocted for Terminal. Strewn with references to Lewis Carroll, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino, this self-reflexive muddle recalls those achingly hip fanboy flicks that emerged in the wake of Reservoir Dogs (1992). But this isn't a favourable comparison, as Stein is too wrapped up in his own perceived cleverness to realise that this smugly nodding neo-noir fails on almost every level. 

As hitmen Vince (Dexter Fletcher) and Alfred (Max Irons) decipher the codes in lonelyhearts ads in their seedy digs, a shadowy figure watches their every move on a network of CCTV screens that also covers the concourse on which a terminally ill academic Bill Braithwaite (Simon Pegg) is waiting to throw himself under a train. Informed by limping night supervisor Clinton (Mike Myers) that there won't be another service for hours, Bill makes for the End of the Line buffet. Having survived a half-hearted mugging attempt by Lenny (Matthew Lewis) and Raymond (Thomas Turgoose), Bill makes the acquaintance of Annie (Margot Robbie), the waitress we have already seen in a bobbed wig and thick red lipstick making a wager with the mysterious Mr Franklin over the future of his assassination bureau. 

With no one else to serve on the graveyard shift, Alice asks about Bill's ailment, but he insists his doctor (Paul Reynolds) is baffled. She is amused by his precise conversation and he tries to remember where he has seen her before, as she describes how she lost her mother and endured a difficult childhood. A flashback to three weeks earlier (signalled by one of the many neon signs dotting the mise-en-scène) shows Alice in her Uma Thurman guise tormenting Nigel Illing (Nick Moran), the sleazebag when has handcuffed to the brass bedposts prior to castrating him with a scalpel. 

Back in her waitress uniform, the eavesdropping Alice serves Vince and Alfred, as they ponder the contents of a suitcase recovered from the platform locker to which Franklin has directed them. A matchbook takes them to The Rabbit Hole, a pole-dancing club where Alice works under the name Bunny. In return for an envelope full of cash, she presents the bickering duo with a briefcase and flirts shamelessly with Alfred, who smooches with Alice over the buffet counter as Vince returns from a testy exchange with Clinton, who wants hush money for not reporting the fact that Vince has stolen a suitcase from a locker. 

While Vince follows Alice looking like a cross between Kim Novak and Sharon Stone along the pink neon corridors of a nearby hotel, Alfred is enticed into the diner by Alice wearing a beret like Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Clinton enters carrying a case, which he opens to remove a dictaphone that plays a recording of Vince's telephone conversation with Franklin, in which he instructs him to eliminate Alfred after they dispatch their next target. 

Back at the diner, Alice avers over a glass of Victory Gin that Bill lacks the courage to kill himself or he would have done something about it before now. She wonders if he is paying for past sins and a flashback takes him to a confessional, where he has a tetchy exchange with an unseen priest (Robert Goodman). Alice helpfully suggests that he could end it all by jamming his head down on his upturned fountain pen. When he prevaricates, she confiscates the pen because she thinks it's elegant and he will have further use for it once he's dead. 

While Alfred and Vince get on each other's nerves staving off boredom waiting to fulfill their contract, Alice takes Bill to the disused ventilation shaft and dares him to put himself out of his misery by leaping into the unknown. He flinches when she stands close to the edge of the gaping chasm and averts his eyes from her mocking gaze when she accuses him of being a coward. Snapping out of his self-pity, Bill begins to rant about her disrespecting his situation and claims to have seen dozens of attention-seeking brats like her during his teaching career. At that moment, he remembers where he has seen her before and a rapidly cut series of flashbacks show him abusing the young Alice when she was a pupil in his care and she wreaks her revenge by plunging his pen into his neck and pushing him backwards into the abyss - confident that she knows where he will land in the afterlife. 

She now turns her attention to Vince and Alfred and calls them to prepare for their hit. When Vince lines up a shot into the building opposite, however, he is puzzled to see Alice standing in the window and dismayed to find Alfred pointing a pistol at his head. They waste little time in offing Vince and arrange to meet on the concourse. Clinton comes to dispose of Vince's body and shuffles into view after Alice turns the tables on Alfred. She asks if she has passed the audition to become one of Franklin's trusted assassins and Clinton nods deferentially before returning to his cubby hole whistling `Danny Boy'.

It will surprise few to discover that Clinton and Franklin are one and the same or that the blue-eyed Alice has a green-eyed twin called Bonnie. Dressed in nurse's uniforms, they regale Clinton with the story of Chloe Merryweather (Katarina Cos), the woman he had seduced as a younger man (Les Loveday) and impregnated with daughters she kept hidden from the world, while working as a waitress. Chloe suspected that Clinton was a desperate character and discovered the extent of his cruelty when he had torched her flat after she had witnessed him killing a man. Devoted to the end, she had managed to get Alice and Bonnie out of the window, but they had spent years at the mercy of the perverts entrusted with their care. So, in order to get even with the cause of their woes, they perform an ice-pick lobotomy on Clinton before driving a nail into his skull and sashaying away in identical red coats. 

It's hard to know where to start with a movie with so many flaws. However, Vaughn Stein has to take the brunt of the brickbats for his Scooby-Dooish plot, glib dialogue and garish style. Given that he was working to a tight deadline on limited budgets, he could be forgiven more readily if he hadn't pilfered so cynically from the likes of Guy Ritchie, Gasper Noé, David Fincher, Martin McDonagh and Nicolas Winding Refn. But it's unlikely that he will escape from the critical opprobrium that this crass mishmash is bound to attract. Not that he would care, apparently, as he told one interviewer, `If I could make anything just 1% as good as Tarantino I'd be a happy man.'

A degree of credit has to be given to production designer Richard Bullock for  the atmospheric station set he constructed on a vast Hungarian sound stage, while Julian Day's costumes and Christopher Ross's cinematography are notably slick. Even though it's resistibly flashy, Johannes Bock and Alex Marquez's editing is also highly competent. But the performances reflect the swaggering hubris that riddles this derivative, pretentious and faintly ridiculous pastiche that needs seeing for its badness to be believed.

Icelandic director Árni Ólafúr Ásgeirsson is better known for live-action features like Thicker Than Water (2006) and Undercurrent (2010). However, he tries his hand at animation with Flying the Nest, which has also been released under the title, PLOEY - You Never Fly Alone. 

When a stand of plovers flies back to its northern island home for the summer, Shadow (Richard Cotton) hatches a plot to keep the migrants off his patch. Yet, while the gormless Skua (Kasper Michaels) attempts to act as a decoy, Dad (Thomas Arnold) and Mom (Þórunn Erna Clausen) lead their charges to safety and even have time for a dance before spring cleaning their nest. 

In the blink of an eye, their son Ploey (Jamie Oram) emerges from his shell and starts foraging for himself. During one expedition, he meets Ploeveria (Harriet Perring) and their beaks meet when they slurp down the same worm. They also touch wings while playing in the grass and set off for flying school as the best of friends. But Sloey (Cameron Farrelly) also has his eyes on Ploveria and wastes no time in mocking Ploey when he proves to be scared of flying.

While on nightwatch, Dad is warned by Skua that Shadow is planning an attack and reminds him that he will have to winter in Paradise Valley if he fails to fly south. But Shadow evades the net held by Dad's cohorts and he defeats Dad when he rescues Ploey from a swooping attack. Distraught at costing his father his life, Ploey refuses to leave the nest and is only persuaded to practice flying when Ploeveria reminds him that the time is fast approaching to fly south. While perched on a ledge, however, Ploey loses his nerve and is caught by a prowling grey cat. 

Fortunately, he survives the snatch and wakes at the bottom of a cage inside the cat owner's house. Looking through the window, he sees Ploeveria and his mother flying away and manages to escape from the cage and the bedroom, despite the cat hot being on his tail feathers. Hitting the streets, he meets five chattering bunting birds who use postcards to give him directions to Paradise Valley and Ploey sets out for his destination on foot. He soon wanders into a snowdrift, however, and only keeps out of the clutches of the swooping Shadow with the help of Giron (Iain Stuart Robertson), a ptarmigan who hopes to catch Shadow in a snare he once found on the mountain. 

Giron asks Ploey to act as bait in the trap, but he dozes off while waiting and Ploey wanders away to rescue an Italian rodent, Mousey (Graham Dickson), who has been stranded in the river on a loose piece of ice. Ploey tosses him a twig to make it to dry land, only to drift downstream towards a waterfall and he is only saved from a bath by the diving Giron. Drying his feathers, he tells Ploey that he hates Shadow because he killed his chicks in the nest and he promises him that loved ones who have passed over are looking down on those left behind from the beauty of the Northern Lights. 

No sooner has Giron sung Ploey a song about never flying alone than the one-eyed ptarmigan is pounced upon by a fox (Stefán Karl Stefánsson) and Ploey is left with nothing but his guardian's treasured seashell. He blows into it and Mousey and his acrobatic family appear from nowhere to torment the fox in his lair and allow Ploey to revive Giron and escape. It only proves a temporary reprieve, however, as Ploey gets lost looking for berries while Giron sleeps and winds up bunking down in a nest in a mountain eyrie. 

He is woken by Shadow conversing with what appears to be the ghost of the wife who had died of hunger because he had failed to bring home sufficient food. But Ploey has no time to feel pity for the predator, as Shadow plucks him off the ground to polish him off as a snack. Just as he opens his beak, however, Giron crashes into the nook and Ploey uses one of the cartridge cases the ptarmigan carries to knock Shadow off his stride. 

As they land at the foot of the rocks, Giron wishes Ploey the best of luck before losing consciousness. Thinking he's dead (when he's only resting), Ploey trudges on alone and gets lost in a landscape of forbidding rock formations after the clouds cover the stars by which he is navigating. When he passes out from the cold after having had a nightmare about Ploeveria falling for Sloey), he is picked up by Deer (Colin Mace), who carries him on his antlers to Paradise Valley, where he is greeted by Skua, Mousey, Sheep (Doña Croll), Swan (Debbie Chazen) and Mink (Anna Lawrence). They think he's dead and are bearing him away for burial when Ploey comes round and enjoys the welcome party his new friends throw in his honour. 

As the weeks pass, the sun gets warmer and Skua tells Ploey about the spring and, after Sheep tells him about love giving creatures the power to fly, he vows to return to the nesting grounds to prevent Shadow from stalking his kinfolk. Having survived a test flight by a waterfall, Ploey heads home and arrives in time to see that Giron is still alive and has set his snare for Shadow outside the grey cat's house. Spotting Ploeveria at the head of the returning plovers, Ploey barges into Shadow when he seizes Sloey and entices him into the cat's room after the snare fails to snap. Somehow, Shadow escapes the feline's claws and comes hurtling after Ploey. 

They chase around the town centre before Giron tips Ploey the wink to lead Shadow into the bell in the church tower, which knocks him straight into an open plot in the graveyard. Ploeveria joins Ploey to peer down at Shadow covered in soil. But he still has the strength to reach out a wing and only perishes when Giron plummets down and knocks a wheelbarrow into the grave. Safe to enjoy their summer in peace, Ploey reunites with his mother and gives Giron a goodbye hug before showing Ploeveria how well he has learned to fly. 

Failing to make the imagination soar with either its themes or imagery, this well-meaning, but drab digital animation will only appeal to the least discriminating tinies and they won't care what size screen they see it on. Frequently recalling episodes from the five-strong Ice Age franchise (2002-16), Friðrik Erlingsson's screenplay clings to such storytelling staples as the loss of a parent, the presence of an implacable foe and the protagonist's need to prove something to themselves during a do-or-die quest. But, while the life lessons on offer during Ploey's odyssey are worth learning, Ásgeirsson and Erlingsson struggle to generate much jeopardy, in spite of the fact that Ploey is so small and vulnerable and that the island landscape is every bit as dangerous as Shadow. 

This is partly explained by the bland visuals and the feeble characterisation, which is not helped by the mediocrity of vocal work that is further undermined by the risible variety of accents among the mammals living on an island. One can understand how an Italian mouse and a French swan might have made their way to this remote spot. But a Caribbean sheep? At least we were spared a spirit-boosting reggae number, as the other songs are mawkishly forgettable. So many Euro animations lack personality and this one is no different. Nevertheless, any film that teaches children about overcoming their fears, accepting those different to themselves and fulfilling their potential can't be all bad.

Ever since Del Lord let the Three Stooges loose in Termites of 1938 (1938), these eponymous eusocial insects have been getting a bad cinematic rap. They have been given a particularly hard time in animations like Don Patterson's Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Termites From Mars (1952), Wolfgang Urchs's Stowaways on the Ark (1988) and Ed Darnell and Tim Johnson's CGI adventure, Antz (1998). But they have also been exploited as a metaphorical menace in arthouse pictures like Kleber Mendonça Filho's Aquarius (2016). So, entomologists everywhere will be delighted that Austrian Lisa Truttmann has joined Philippe Calderon (The Beseiged Fortress, 2006) and Jan Hošek (The World According to Termites, 2017) in siding with the little blighters in Tarpaulins, a cine-essay that is showing in London under the Dochouse banner. 

However, termites are only part of what fascinates Truttmann and she opens with a sequence showing the gumbies erecting a blue tarpaulin circus tent and muses in off-screen voiceover about how circus families tend to stay together. An amusing digression follows, in which Truttmann's alter ego (voiced by Tamara Rosenblum) helps her choose the colours she wants for her very own tarpaulin. She rejects certain combinations because of their patriotic or corporate connotations and eventually decides on yellow and green. When the scene shifts to the Lincoln Heights district of Los Angeles, as pest control operative John Ruddock explains how tarps are used to envelope a building being treated, Truttmann lets her yellow-green sheetiing cover the windows of the downstairs rooms. 

Truttmann introduces roof man Alejo Obeso, a Mexican migrant who has been in the United States for 18 years. As his crew cover a house like a Christo artwork, Obeso reveals how carefully buildings have to be covered to prevent the termites from escaping the gas being pumped in to exterminate them. He describes an edifice in Hollywood that posed problems because of its eccentric shape and points out that the majority of his co-workers are relations. However, Truttmann loses interest in the shrouding and cuts to black to suggest the interior of the house about to be fumigated. She spares a thought for the insects beavering around in her walls before handing the microphone to entomologist Michael Rust.

Over shots of new builds with timber frames, Rust explains how the wood termite is a relatively unevolved creature that lives in small colonies and feeds on its  home until it disintegrates. He doubts whether they will ever overrun the city, but suspects that they will refuse to budge as long as people keep erecting them glorified dining facilities. As we see insects scurrying from decimated chunks of wood, pest controller Robert Schwartz concurs with Rust and Ruddock that termites can't discriminate between buildings and trees and keep munching away regardless. 

Truttmann is touched by the fact that termites are simply doing their jobs and not seeking to inconvenience anyone. She discovers that they are photophobic and only leave their colonies to mate and establish new homes. Indeed, she becomes so obsessed that friends phone her whenever a new tent pops up and she hurries across town to record it before it's struck. She wonders how many other people have given the structures any serious thought, as they can't possibly miss them because there are so many and they spring up everywhere. 

Having consulted atmospheric chemist Mads Sulbaek Andersen about the negative impact of the gas on the environment, Truttmann joins Obeso's crew to record some tarps being removed. She compares them to bouncy castles and amusingly cross-cuts between them, as she and her alter ego debate whether the wrapped buildings have any artistic value or could ever be considered beautiful. However, Schwartz points out that they are supremely practical and are vital to the city's real estate industry, as so many houses in Los Angeles have wooden components that inspections and fumigations have become pretty much mandatory for anyone selling a property. His uncle founded his company in the 1940s and it has done a roaring trade ever since.

An extract from the works of urban historian Norman Klein (voiced by Ben Neufeld) draws comparisons between pest blights, poor planning and the diseases the gnaw away at the human body and South African naturalist Eugène Marais reached a similar conclusion in a passage from a study of termites read by Sonja Bertucci. Truttmann regrets that a once-natural process has become a battle for survival and evokes memories of historical exterminations in lamenting that cosy houses become graveyards that make the familiar seem eerily alien. 

Unfurling maps of the city and blueprints of local houses, Truttmann despairs of ever getting to know Los Angeles. But she comes to appreciate the size of the problem, as so many houses have timber frames rather than steel and she learns that these are better suited to the geological conditions in Southern California and, thus, make socio-structural sense. Andersen also informs her that fumigation leaves a smaller carbon footprint than demolishing a building and starting again from scratch. Ruddock has no problem with removing termites, as houses represent the single biggest investment in most people's lives and they have a right to protect their property and a duty to preserve it for the future. 

A montage follows showing Nora Sweeney and Behrouz Rae clapping their hands and clicking their fingers to cue cuts that show wooden frames become finished buildings and multi-coloured tents in the blink of an eye. Following a shot of a white model elephant being held by a hand smoothing down a tarpaulin, we see close-ups of industrious insects chomping their way through a cross-section of a piece of wood. On the soundtrack, we hear a passage from film critic Manny Farber's 1962 Film Culture essay, `White Elephant Art vs Termite Art', in which he lauds the B-hivers and indie auteurs who burrow into their subject matter rather than producing bloated studio blockbusters. And long may these particular termites flourish.

It comes as no surprise to discover Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003) and James Benning (13 Lakes, 2004) listed among Truttmann's mentors in the closing credits, as this thoughtful and amusing meditation owes much to their distinctive styles. However, as Andy Rector reads out the location of each tented edifice as it appears on screen, this also contains echoes of such early Peter Greenaway list films as H Is for House (1973) and The Falls (1980).

The visuals are admirable and are splendidly complemented by Aidan Reynolds's sound mix, with the enhanced termite noises managing to seem both consoling and squirm-inducing. But what is most striking, given the film's barely concealed political subtext, is the fact that so many of the tarpaulins resemble the flags of the very Latin American countries whose peoples Donald Trump is hell bent on blocking and eradicating.

Having started out as an editor on the Maysles classic, Grey Gardens (1975), documentarist Susan Froemke has examined an impressive range of topics. However, she has kept coming back to music, whether it's being produced by Herbert von Karajan and Jessye Norman or The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. In the course of making classical pieces like Horowitz Plays Mozart (1987), In Rehearsal: A New Butterfly for the Met (2006) and Wagner's Dream (2012), Froemke has forged a link with the Metropolitan Opera and she chronicles its mid-60s move from Broadway to the Lincoln Center in The Opera House. 

The first soprano to perform on the new stage was Leontyne Price and she describes the Lincoln Center facility as `the temple of opera'. However, Albert Hubay, who was the Met box-office manager between 1961-87, retains a soft spot for the original building, where he worked as an usher after being bowled over by the use of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in the closing scenes of Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932). Built in 1883 on the lot occupied by a long-demolished domicile on Broadway and 39th Street, the Met belonged to the blue bloods in the boxes nicknamed `the Diamond Horseshoe' and was as much a place to be seen as to listen. Archivist Peter Clark recalls how singers like Ezio Pinza and Risë Stevens became major stars, who appeared on magazine covers and in movies. 

Postwar, however, the board of directors decided the Met needed a new direction and Rudolf Bing was installed as general manager in 1950. Born in Vienna, but a British citizen, he held the post for the next 22 years and Price and bass-baritone Justino Díaz recall how he set out to modernise the staging of performancs to give them a fresh dramatic intensity. Clips from Huw Wheldon's Monitor profile of Bing show him working behind the scenes of `the great yellow brewery', while mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias recalls the thrill of standing on a stage on which icons like Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar and Maria Callas had performed. 

Richard Holmes, who is now the administrator of supernumeraries, remembers auditioning for the children's chorus in 1964 and standing in the wings to watch Joan Sutherland sing. Price was studying at Juilliard when she was mesmerised by Ljuba Welitsch and she got her big chance when her voice coach recommended her to composer Samuel Barber to perform Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But, for all its charm, the Old Met was anything but practical. Herman Krawitz, who was assistant manager under Bing, recalls how tiny the backstage area was and how scenery often had to be stored in 7th Avenue. Clark reveals that plans had been afoot to move to a new location since 1908 and Peter J. Johnson explains how an opera house was envisaged as the centrepiece of the Rockefeller Center right up until the Wall Street Crash in 1929. 

By the mid-1950s, however, Bing had decided that a move had to be made and he enlisted the help of Robert Moses, the public official whose unelected presence on a number of key committees enabled him to approve a policy of slum clearance that freed up the land on which a new Met could be constructed. Real estate investor Peter Malkin, urban studies professor Hilary Ballon and historian Samuel Zipp question his approach to inner-city renewal. But he was inspired to redevelop the area around the Coliseum on Columbus Circle and persuaded the New York Philharmonic to leave Carnegie Hall and join the Met and the New York Ballet in a purpose-built arts centre on Lincoln Square. 

Biographer Victoria Newhouse recalls how Wallace K. Harrison's work on the Rockefeller Center and the United Nations building convinced Moses to ask him to supervise the team of architects designing the different venues within the complex. Harrison was given the Met assignment and critic Paul Goldberger describes him as a master of the practical and the political, while Zipp dubs him the perfect team leader. But, while his early drawings were imposingly monumental, they were also expensive and funds had to be raised and donations sought. Meanwhile, Irish and Puerto Rican people like Michael Meehan and Joe Sanchez, who had been born and raised in the area targeted for clearance, lost their tenement homes. They share their memories of happy times in a diverting digression that is made all the more poignant by Meehan recalling that the news of their eviction was announced by the press on Christmas Eve in 1957. 

Chirpiily narrated newsreel footage of the demolition follows, while we hear Leonard Bernstein conducting Aaron Copeland's `Fanfare for the Common Man' (oh, the irony) during the ground-breaking ceremony in May 1959. Intriguingly, Peter Johnson avers that President Dwight D. Eisenhower's presence at the event demonstrated how Lincoln Center was being used to win hearts and minds in the Cold War by showing that Americans cared as much about the performing arts as they did cars, refrigerators and movies. But Moses faced criticism at the time for bulldozing families and Charles G. Moerdler, who was New York Building Commissioner between 1965-73, agrees that Moses (who was educated at Wadham College) was not one for letting anyone or anything stand in his way.

However, John D. Rockefeller III was concerned about the spiralling costs of the project and beseeched Harrison to scale down his grandiose plans for the Met. Architect Kyna Leski recalls how Harrison came to rely on her father, Tad Leski, as they went through 44 designs. We see a clip of Alistair Cooke showing off a model of the eventual structure on the BBC's Omnibus programme in March 1961, in which Harrison admitted that there had been a good deal of in-fighting and compromising involved in reaching an agreed plan. A montage of construction photos follows, as Leontyne Price recalls her excitement at being told by Bing and Barber that she was going to open the New Met in the latter's Antony and Cleopatra. 

Price was guest of honour at the topping-out ceremony in January 1964, but she was not alone in being saddened at the news that the Old Met was going to be knocked down. Once again, the BBC (in the form of Humphrey Burton) was on the spot to cover the gala farewell on 16 April 1966. Richard Holmes managed to hide away backstage in order to see the show, while Hubay admits that he returned to the balcony where he had once torn tickets to witness the closing chorus of `Auld Lang Syne'. Footage shows the start of the demolition process and Hubay confides that handing over the keys was one of the saddest moments in his life. 

Bing was unrepentant, however, as he announced an ambitious programme of nine new productions for Lincoln Center, including two world premieres. We learn how the famous starburst chandeliers came about because Leski splashed paint on a drawing minutes before a key meeting with Rockefeller and Bing, while Krawitz explains the mechanism for moving the five stages and Hubay recalls herding a party of young people into the auditorium to test the acoustics. But the technical side of the house was still far from ready and director-designer Franco Zeffirelli found himself fighting a losing battle with a faulty turntable on the stage. Moreover, as Krawitz and Holmes (who was in the children's chorus) remember, Barber's score and the libretto were also unfinished with a matter of days before the grand opening. 

Fascinating footage from Robert Drew's The New Met: Countdown to Curtain (1966) shows Zeffirelli problem solving and demanding changes to the score to fit the timings involved in moving personnel on and off the stage. Pryce and Díaz (as the leads) collaborated closely with Barber in reworking the music and kept having to learn new parts as fresh staging issues arose. Conductor Thomas Schippers and his orchestra also had to learn to be flexible, while the stage crew was forever having to adapt to Zeffirelli's latest demands. Rosalind Elias recalls the lengths of piping that had to be accommodated in the scenery (which didn't impress Hubay), while Price remembers being imprisoned inside a pyramid during the dress rehearsal when it failed to slide off stage as planned. For once, even the unflappable Bing was beginning to wonder whether he had bitten off more than he could chew. 

On 16 September 1966, as Bing welcomed Lady Bird Johnson, Zeffirelli was tinkering was Price's costume, while the orchestra was threatening to strike during the first-night interval. But the curtain went up on time, with a live camel being part of the scene and the applause was thunderous at the end of the show. Díaz and Price (who was overwhelmed that the First Lady invited her parents into her box) remain grateful to have been part of such an historic occasion (although nothing is said about the lukewarm reviews of Barber's opera), while Holmes recalls the relief that the tradition of the Old Met had been successfully carried over. Hubay admits that he still dreams of the original theatre, but Price is confident that her temple will still be standing in another 50 years. 

Making solid use of some vintage footage (a good deal of which has been sourced from the BBC archives), this is an engrossing account of the Met's crosstown move and the personalities involved in making it a reality. Froemke and her editor and co-director Peter R. Livingston succeed in capturing the spirit of both venues, although they are heavily indebted to such smitten eyewitnesses as Hubay, Holmes and Krawitz, as well as singers Díaz, Elias and Price, whose closing remarks about the angelic quality of her voice are worth the admission fee on their own. 

With its section on Robert Moses, this makes a fine companion piece to Matt Tyrnauer's Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, which revisits his confrontation with Jane Jacobs, a journalist-cum-anthropologist who felt compelled to become an activist in the late 1950s in order to oppose his redevelopment plans. Indeed, all we need is someone to produce documentaries about Rudolf Bing and Wallace Harrison and we'll have a treasurable boxed set - at least for opera-loving town planners and architects.

Two years after the momentous 23 June referendum, Britain is no nearer knowing how it will leave the European Union. As in-fighting within the Conservative Party (which, frankly, brought us to this juncture in the first place) complicates progress made no easier by the EU's determination to dissuade other member states from following the same course of action, David Nicholas Wilkinson wades into the debate with Postcards From the 48%. Refusing to apologise for its stance, this is less a Remoaner charter than an last ditch attempt to explain why going it alone would represent one of the gravest mistakes in British history. Moreover, it's a also an expression of regret on behalf of 16 million silenced voices to the nations they are about to leave behind.

Joining tens of thousands of others on a London march organised by Peter French, Wilkinson canvasses opinions from a range of anti-Brexiteers, as they listen to speeches by Peter Tatchell, Alastair Campbell and Patrick Stewart. There's no doubting the passion of the speakers, but there's little substance to their emotive utterances and this lack of in-depth facts and analysis has dogged the entire process. As actress Miriam Margolyes states (in the house physically closest to Europe in mainland Britain), a seismic decision was taken on the basis of misinformation and academic Adrian Low uses a pie chart to break down the result into the 17.4 million who voted to leave, the 16.1 million who wanted to stay, the 12.9 million who opted not to cast a ballot and the 19 million who were ineligible for reasons of age or non-registration. 

Low notes the age discrepancy between the Leave and Remain camps, while Nina De Ayala Parker from Our Future Our Choice reveals that 80% of women aged 18-24 voted to stay and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg regrets the fact that the victors have chosen to exclude the vanquished from what should be a democratic progress towards separation. Rachel Johnson (Boris's younger sister) recalls the anguish she felt on returning from France after the result was declared and this sense of schism within families and between long-standing friends is echoed by the ordinary people Wilkinson interviews - one of whom admits breaking the law in order to let his 17 year-old grandson use his ballot paper to have a say that had been denied him when youths of the same age had been allowed to vote in the referendum on Scottish independence. 

According to Matt Kelly, the former Daily Mail reporter who moved to Norwich to found The New European, the Leave vote reflected a frustration at the failure of the domestic political system rather than the EU per se and he regrets that an epochal decision was made were, essentially, the wrong reasons. In Folkestone, Baroness Wheatcroft laments the fact that the campaign was conducted in such a vitriolic manner, with the usual rules of political engagement being cast aside in favour of ranting and abuse. 

In Wales, 47.5% voted to remain, while 52.5% voted to leave and Wilkinson travels to Criccieth and Ebbw Vale to meet small business adviser Gethin Jones and steelworker Pasty Taylor to learn how many commercial and infrastructure projects were partially funded by the EU. Both men are in no doubt that Westminster would not have provided such support, with Taylor going so far as to declare Wales the forgotten part  of the United Kingdom. By contrast, Scots voted 62% to 38% in favour of remaining and Wilkinson meets journalist Lesley Riddoch in Fife so she can explain how EU cash has transformed large areas of the Highlands and Islands, as well as the post-industrial conurbations. She also mentions that Scotland has been pro-European for a lot longer than England and she feels that the wrench will be more keenly felt north of the border as a result. 

But the place where the new era will pose the most problems is Northern Ireland, which voted 55.8% against 44.2% in favour of Remain. Wilkinson visits Omagh to recall the impact of the Troubles on the province and how the EU played a key role in the Good Friday Agreement that ended them. Bob Geldof admits he never thought the conflict would end and now can't believe that its spectre might loom again because of the imposition of a hard border. He also goes to the PC-listed Derry/Londonderry to meet SDLP MP and former Deputy First Minister Mark Durkan, who recalls how the peace process was rooted in a unique vision of Ireland that few anticipated would be compromised by a British withdrawal from the EU. Fearing a return to the `borderism' of the past, Durkan concedes that many resent the fact that the island faces an uncertain future because of decisions taken outside of its perameters. 

Leaving the picturesque village of Pettigo - the site of the last battle between the IRA and the British Army, which straddles the Fermanagh-Donegal border - Wilkinson returns to England, which voted to quit the EU by 53.4% to 46.6%. Arriving in Leave bastion Stoke-on-Trent, he states that the sheer size of the English population meant that it had the casting vote in the referendum, regardless of how the other countries swung. As his father worked in the pottery industry, Wilkinson knows the city well and accepts that change seems an attractive alternative to those who feel they have nothing left to lose. He also accepts that those who voted to leave resent the patronising preaching of elitist Remainers they feel have no understanding of their plight. However, he points out that many of the deprived areas that agreed with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove will lose the EU funding that has been helping to regenerate communities neglected by the British government. 

Using another chart, Wilkinson also demonstrates how the £130 that each person donates to Britain's net contribution to the EU represents only 1.1% of government spending. He notes in passing how Brexiteers misrepresented this figure before meeting philosopher AC Grayling, who highlights the places in Hansard that confirm that the government was never duty-bound to implement the result of the referendum, as its purpose was intended to gauge the mood of the nation not change its direction. While he contends that the vote gave no legitimacy to mandatory withdrawal, Clegg, Campbell and Durkan echo the sentiments of the House of Commons website that Britain had never surrendered sovereignty to the EU and that arguments to the contrary during the campaign were at best fallacious and at worst mendacious. 

In a bid to prevent Theresa May from triggering Article 50 without a parliamentary vote, campaigners including Gibraltarian Paul Cartwright and anti-DUP Unionist Raymond McCord sought an injunction in the High Court. But, as MPs were prevented by the whips from voting with their consciences, the legislation passed through the Commons and a letter was sent to the European Council on 29 March 2017 announcing Britain's desire to leave the EU. Within weeks, Brexit Secretary David Davis was forced to admit that the government had conducted no impact assessments of how withdrawal would affect several crucial sectors of society. Grayling finds it astonishing that people voted to leave without having any idea what the consequences might be and Durkan stresses that the Irish government did its research so that it could be prepared for any eventuality.  

Heading to Sheffield (which voted 51% to 49% to leave), Wilkinson meets steel magnate Sir Andrew Cook, who deplores the impact that the decision has had on economic conditions and fears the imposition of ruinous trade tariffs once Britain leaves the Single Market. In Poole (58.2% leave to 41.8% remain), Lush Cosmetics founder Mark Constantine is equally downbeat about future prospects and reveals that he has opened factories in Germany and France to circumvent potential tariffs. Gethin Jones explains how the loss of free trade risks decimating the sheep trade in Gwynedd (58.1% remain to 41.9% leave), while Lib Dem MEP Catherine Bearder meets Wilkinson in the busy port of Dover (62.2% leave to 37.8% remain) to declare how leaving the EU deprives us of a voice in the shaping of policies that will still govern our trading strategies. 

Bearder also dispels the myth that EU-imposed fishing quotas have restricted British trawlermen, as 60% are directly dictated by the UK ministry. Baroness Kennedy takes up this point by highlighting the importance of reciprocity in making good laws work effectively and she worries that isolation will hinder the process of justice. Alastair Campbell chimes in that the Brexiteers have dismissed protests without regard for long-term impact and predicts that a falling pound will precipitate a diplomatic decline that can only make Britain weaker. Grayling concurs that going solo at a time when other nations have formed their own trading groups in imitation of the EU seems ill-considered to put it mildly. 

Keen to bring the two sides of the debate together, Vanity Fair editor Henry Porter organised a forum and novelist Ian McEwan, broadcaster Joan Bakewell and journalist Will Hutton were among those to answer the call. They regret the fact that the Brexiteers refuse to engage with them and resort to denigration in brushing their arguments aside. But Nick Clegg urges young people to take a stance, as they will be the ones who will have to live with the consequences of a decision they played so little part in shaping. 

One of the issues they will need to tackle is immigration and Grayling states categorically that migrant workers are net contributors to the UK economy and that it will struggle to work smoothly without them. Moreover, Jon Danzig from Reasons2Remain notes that all aspects of immigration law were debated by parliament rather than imposed by Brussels and he draws attention to the fact that we retained a good deal of autonomy by opting out of the Euro and Schengen zones. By leaving the EU, however, we lose the right to negotiate and will have to accept or refuse whatever terms are presented to us with no comeback.

An estimated 3.7 million EU nationals currently reside in the UK, while I.2 million Brits live on the continent. Wilkinson goes to see the Polish War Memorial in London with Piotr Szkopiak, whose father was the foreign minister in the last government in exile. He outlines the role that Polish airmen played in the Battle of Britain, while the late Liselotte Marshall recalls finding sanctuary in the UK in 1938 after she was driven out of Nazi Germany for being Jewish. Since the referendum, those entitled to German and other passports have been applying for them so that they can remain within the European Union. Bakewell and Geldof fear that English nationalism has set in motion a process of unravelling that will see both Britain and the EU break up and individual nation states return to bellicosity in order to protect their interests.

As the most cosmopolitan city in this country, London voted in favour of remaining by 59.9% to 40.1%. Dr Bettina Schoenberger regrets that she was denied a vote in the referendum, in spite of working within the NHS for 22 years. Fellow medic Rachel Clarke mourns the fact that so many old people voted for Brexit without seemingly being aware that the foreign nationals on whom they will rely for health and social care will be forced to leave the UK and Matt Kelly echoes her annoyance that blatant lies like the weekly £350 million of additional funding for the NHS were allowed to stand uncorrected. He is even more aggrieved that they were brushed under the carpet during the June 2017 General Election, which Prime Minister May called in order to secure a larger majority for a Hard Brexit. 

Wilkinson records the count that saw his MP, Labour Remainer Ruth Cadbury, increase her majority by almost 12,000. She puts this down to an anti-Brexit bounce, as May lost seats and had to form an alliance of convenience with the pro-Brexit Arlene Foster of the Democratic Unionist Party. Durkan suspects this will make it easier to bring about Irish unification, while Riddoch hopes that Scotland will be able to cut its own deal with the EU and that England pulls its head out of the sand because its decline will have an incalculably negative effect upon its neighbours. 

As Campbell launches a red bus declaring that leaving the EU will cost Britons a whopping £2000 million a week, Wilkinson follows the campaign to Manchester (60.4% remain to 39.6% leave) to see Campbell play `Ode to Joy' on the bagpipes and academic Bonnie Greer join Grayling, Vince Cable and Simon Allison from Tories Against Brexit on a platform calling for Britain to retain its ties to Europe. Their well-meaning sentiments lack the cogency and potency of Matt Kelly's denunciation of the Orwellian insistence on making 23 June the last word on a process that is constantly evolving. He believes that democracy would be best served by a second vote once the realities of Brexit have become clear. Cable and Durkan support this viewpoint and Clegg reminds the audience that David Davis and John Redwood initially advocated a two-step process that would give the electorate (or, at least, the referendum constituency) a chance to change its mind - as it would do if it had received a damning survey after agreeing to buy a house. 

As OFOC's Femi Oluwole (one of the few black voices heard in the film) declares, British political life has been brought to a standstill by Brexit and that government needs to refocus on the issues that mould daily life. But, even as the clock ticks down, we are no nearer knowing the precise nature of our fate. After 18 months of filming, Wilkinson finally finds the Union Jack flying beside the EU flag on a public building. But Hammersmith Town Hall is very much in a minority and this reluctance to nail colours to the mast is hampering the debate. Wondering whether the vote might have turned out differently if the European hymn had been scored by Elgar rather than Beethoven, Wilkinson reveals that age shifts within the British population are predicted to bring about a Remain majority by the summer of 2020. Convinced that a future generation will apply to rejoin, he hopes that the member states will remember the 48% and reward their trust and loyalty accordingly. 

It would be fascinating to see an equivalent Leave documentary, as this controlled cry of anguish and anger is going to serve as a red rag to the British Bulldog. It may be full of sobering statistics and eminently sensible opinions, but this is as much propaganda as any broadcast produced by the opposition during the campaign. Moreover, it sometimes smacks of the chatterati air of nannyish superiority that continues to alienate so many Brexiteers. On occasion, it also echoes what came to be called the Project Fear approach. But Wilkinson is fully entitled to opt against balanced argument in order to present the Remain message as cogently and concisely as possible. 

His decision to venture out from the Westminster Bubble is a good one and some of the more interesting insights come from the Celtic Fringe. He is also wise in avoiding frontline politicians, although there might have been room for a discussion of the impact of the Corbyn Factor on the ongoing process, as the Labour leader is playing as critical a role in its conduct as Theresa May. Alongside the regional diversity, a little more input might have been gleaned from ethnic communities and the lower classes. It might also have been instructive to hear at least one official voice from within the EU grieving for our imminent departure. However, Wilkinson has done well to cover a range of topics and respond to the ever-shifting situation without becoming overly dogmatic and without demonising the opposition. But the overriding emotion his film generates is sadness, as we stand to lose so much and are still very much in the calm before the inevitable storm.