Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 18/12/2014)

In fact, it was East Coast supremo Nicholas Schenck who blocked the deal for Kelly to appear in Joseph L. Mankiewicz

's Guys and Dolls (1955), in order to settle an old score with producer Samuel Goldwyn, and the exuberant hoofer's career never really recovered from the setback. However, it's debatable whether his presence could have done much to improve what was a tumescent adaptation of a vibrant stage classic.

Damon Runyon was the `laureate of the illiterate' and 16 of the stories contained in his 1931 collection Guys and Dolls were filmed. But it was `The Idyll of Sarah Brown' that inspired Frank Loesser's musical, with its book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. Subtitled `A Musical Fable of Broadway', the show ran for 1,200 performances from November 1950 and prompted a bidding war that saw MGM, Paramount and Columbia drive Goldwyn to $1 million, then the highest sum ever paid for a story property.

Having failed to land Gene Kelly, Goldwyn and Mankiewicz considered Tony Martin, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster for the role of inveterate gambler Sky Masterson and even saw insistent representatives from Bing Crosby and Clark Gable before Goldwyn came up with the preposterous idea of teaming Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

However, he finally settled on Brando (who was reluctant to risk himself in a singing part, as he felt his voice sounded like `the mating call of a yak'), while Mankiewicz was over-ruled in his preference for Broadway original Sam Levene in the casting of Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit, the cash-strapped organizer of the oldest established permanent, floating crap game in New York, who bets Sky that he can't seduce a Save-a-Soul missionary in order to fund his latest enterprise.

When Grace Kelly proved unavailable, Goldwyn sought Deborak Kerr for Sarah Brown before settling on Jean Simmons, while Vivian Blaine was allowed to reprise the role of Nathan's long-suffering chanteuse fiancée, Miss Adelaide, after Goldwyn fell out with Betty Grable (when she cancelled a meeting to nurse a sick dog) and Mankiewicz refused to work with Marilyn Monroe after his experiences on All About Eve (1950).

Eleven of the original 16 songs survived, with

Loesser's genius for underworld argot bringing a wiseacre realism to the lyrics. But he was less comfortable with romantic ballads and was rightly vexed when Brando's discomfort with one of his best, `I've Never Been in Love Before', led to its replacement with `A Woman in Love'.

Ultimately, Brando's vocals was cobbled together from the best takes. Yet, he still had the temerity to criticise Sinatra's delivery style, which only further strained their combustible relationship. Sinatra had never forgiven Brando for stealing Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) - and winning the Oscar for Best Actor in the process - and deeply resented his insistence on improvisation, which he felt undermined his own spontaneity. Eventually, he and `Mumbles' communicated solely through intermediaries after Brando deliberately muffed a number of takes during the cheesecake vs strudel sequence because he knew how much Sinatra loathed the former.

Yet, in spite of his musical prowess, it's Sinatra who gives the weakest performance. Realising he had been saddled with a supporting role, he puts little effort into his renditions of `Adelaide' and `Sue Me'. By contrast, Blaine tries too hard in her bid to break into movies, although `Adelaide's Lament' is delivered with the same panache that fellow stage alumnus Stubby Kaye brings to the rousing `Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat'.

The real problems, however, lay in Oliver Smith's over-stylised sets (which added artifice but little style or wit) and Mankiewicz's lack of trust in his material. Indeed, he so over-wrote his screenplay in an effort to invest it with dramatic legitimacy that Orson Welles told Abe Burrows that he had `put a tiny turd on every one of your lines'.

Yet business boomed, in spite of the indifferent notices, including Brando's own contention that the picture was `nothing to get on your tricycle about'. Even without Goldwyn's proposed strapline, `Brando Sings!', Guys and Dolls more than doubled its $5.5 million investment and in some countries it outperformed Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939). It has since remained a cult favourite. But, even with a newly restored print doing the rounds, it's still tempting to speculate about Gene Kelly's possible interpretation of `Luck Be a Lady' and the Simmons duet, `I'll Know'.

Brando had first burst on to the scene in 1947 when he introduced Broadway audiences to the power of Method Acting in Kazan's production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. That same year, Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl established his own place in the history books and the story of his remarkable achievement is retold by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg in Kon-Tiki. Released in both Norwegian and English-language versions, this handsome picture recreates the 101-day voyage across the Pacific Ocean made by Heyerdahl, his five crewmates and a parrot named Lorita. The aim in sailing 4300 nautical miles from Peru to Polynesia was to prove that South Americans had navigated the same route in pre-Columbian times on balsa wood rafts and Heyerdahl not only emulated their feat, but also won Norway's sole Academy Award for Kon-Tiki, his idealised 1950 documentary about the journey, and became a bestselling author for an account that has now been translated into 70 languages.

Intent on setting the record straight, Rønning and Sandberg laudably seek to extol the scholarship behind the enterprise, while also presenting the perils that the crew faced on a daily basis from the elements, currents and sharks. But, while the action sticks closely to the facts and could not be more authentically restaged, the adventure simply fails to capture the imagination. Much of this is down to Petter Skavlan's screenplay, which constantly whips up conflicts to be resolved. The first contretemps takes place at the New York Explorers Club, where Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Hagen) is denied backing for his expedition and it is only when he is recognised by Dane Peter Freuchen (Søren Pilmark) that he begins to get anywhere. He advises the outsider to employ the methods available to the indigenous mariners some 1500 years earlier and build his craft without a single nail or rivet.

Suitably inspired (and not at all daunted by the fact that Freuchen lost a leg to frostbite), Heyerdahl informs wife Eva (Agnes Kittelsen) that he is going to make history and starts assembling a crew to make the attempt. However, while communications expert Knut Haugland (Tobias Santelmann), Swedish steward Bengt Danielsson (Gustaf Skarsgård), navigator-cum-artist Erik Hesselberg (Odd Magnus Williamson) and radio operator Torstein Raaby (Jakob Oftebro) are presented as decent chaps, Skavlan decides to make German engineer and second-in-command Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) more adversorial. Moreover, he also suggests that he is something of a cowardly attention seeker, whose attempts to flaunt his value almost invariably endanger Kon-Tiki (which is named after the Inca sun god) and his comrades.

It doesn't help that Rønning and Sandberg depict minor incidents like Lorita pecking through a radio cable as such calamities that they have tipped the emotional scale long before anything truly momentous occurs. They also treat Heyerdahl like a flawed hero in the Lawrence of Arabia mould, when it might have made for more compelling viewing if they had made him more Herzogian. As a result, this feels more like a 1960s Hollywood co-production than a meticulously researched reconstruction.

The feud between Heyerdahl and Watzinger quickly becomes tiresome and prevents any worthwhile examination of the dynamic between the crewmates during crises and triumphs alike. But production designer Karl Júlíusson is to be commended for conveying the cramped conditions aboard Kon-Tiki, while Geir Hartly Andreassen's seascapes emphasise the fragility of the craft, the hostility of the ocean and the enormity of the achievement once Heyerdahl had arrested the potentially fatal drift off course and made the connection between the Humboldt and South Equatorial currents.

Producer Jeremy Thomas had been striving to make this picture since the mid-1990s and had even managed to secure Heyerdahl's permission before his death in 2002. Indeed, such was his faith in the project that Thomas shot English and Norwegian versions simultaneously. But the largely fictitious (and, frankly, defamatory) tensions between Heyerdahl and Watzinger seriously undermine its integrity and, instead of being an epic, this feels more like a feat of endurance.

Heyerdahl was excavating sites in British Columbia in the hope of proving his theory of transoceanic migration when the Second World War broke out and it was during this period that actor Karl Meier founded Der Kreis, a multi-lingual magazine that exploited the 1942 amendments to the penal code that legalised homosexuality in Switerland. Given the levels of intolerance then extant in neighbouring Germany, this was a remarkably liberal step and director Stefan Haupt might have explored its implications in greater detail in The Circle. However, in combining re-enactments with talking-head interviews, he concentrates instead on the romance between Ernst Ostertag and Robi Rapp, who met at one of the balls thrown by Meier's journal and made history half a century later by becoming the first Swiss couple to register as same-sex partners. Their story is undeniably touching, but its impact is frustratingly diluted by a hybrid approach that precludes dramatic momentum.

In 1956, Ernst Ostertag (Matthias Hungerbühler) is hired by principal Max Sieber (Peter Jecklin) to teach French literature at an all-girls school in Zurich. He is warned off introducing his students to experimental existentialist works, but Ernst is such a naturally cautious fellow that his family has no idea he is homosexual. Indeed, he rather surprises himself by becoming involved with Der Kreis, a self-help organisation that organises social events to enable gay men to meet and discuss the burning issues of the day. As membership cards only contained numbers, Ernst feels secure in the welcoming environment and begins helping with the eponymous magazine, which is mailed twice a month in plain envelopes and contains articles in French, German and English (which was used for the racier items, as the censors were seemingly not trilingual), as well as full-frontal nude drawings.

Although initially content to engage in the intellectual side of the club's activities, Ernst falls head over heels for 18 year-old hairdresser Röbi Rapp (Sven Schelker) when he sees him performing a drag number at a costume ball. He is taken by Röbi's acceptance of himself and delights in the company of his mother, Erika (Marianne Sägebrecht), a German widow who works as a cleaner and uses her experience as a theatrical wardrobe mistress to help her son create his fabulous costumes. As Ernst needs to be discreet until he has obtained his teaching certificate, so Röbi (who is two years under the age of consent) has to maintain a lowish profile to secure his naturalisation papers. But, as their relationship develops, a string of murders within the gay community sees the police put pressure on the Kreis hierarchy to release the names of its members, while the climate of fear in Zurich inspires the local papers to carry increasingly homophobic editorials.

Taking the story into the 1960s, this subplot sees Ernst become a more outspoken advocate for gay rights and it might have made an intriguing subject in its own right. But Haupt fails to develop it sufficiently and similarly underplays the sad fate awaiting Max, who turns out to be a Kreis member who convinces his wife that he is out bowling whenever he is attending functions. Indeed, this forever feels like a film of missed opportunities, with the chatty snippets with the elderly Ostertag and Rapp rarely adding much of consequence to the reconstructions they consistently interrupt. This is doubly a shame, as the pair have clearly been through a good deal together - and still bicker about the fact that Ostertag only came out to his family on his 70th birthday - and their union may well have been better served by a standard documentary treatment.

But Haupt also sells Hungerbühler and Schelker short, as the inclusion of so much footage of the lovers in the present day robs their sequences of palpable tension, as we know that things worked out well in the end. Nevertheless, the performances are nicely judged, with Schelker throwing himself into the musical routines that Rapp gamely recreates in bookending segments. Federico Bettini's score is a little twee in its efforts to combine emotional cues with period kitsch, but, thanks to Tobias Dengler's burnished imagery, production designer Karin Giezendanner and costumier Catherine Schneider are more successful in evoking time and place without straining too hard for effect.

Israeli documentarist Nadav Schirman similarly finds it difficult to strike a balance between his materials in The Green Prince. Adapted from Mosab Hassan Yousef's book, Son of Hamas, this is Schirman's third feature, following The Champagne Spy (2007), in which Oded Lotz reflects on his father Wolfgang's double life as a Mossad agent, and In the Dark Room (2012), which examines the relationship between Carlos the Jackal and his wife Magdalena and their daughter, Rosa. But, whereas he has previously been able to juxtapose archive clips and talking heads to potent effect, Schirman struggles here to incorporate reconstructed footage that has clearly been manufactured to atone for the fact that so few of the revelations made by Youssef and his Shin Bet handler, Gonen Ben-Yitzhak, can be illustrated with authentic material. Consequently, the fabricated drone shots (complete with faux crosshairs) quickly become tiresome and one is left wondering whether this compelling saga might not have been better of being left on the page.

Born in Ramallah in 1978, Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a leading figure in the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. As he states to camera, Hamas was tantamount to the family business and Mosab was first arrested at the age of 10 for throwing rocks at Israeli settlers. With his father frequently being jailed, Mosab was seen as his heir apparent and often took part in clandestine operations. However, he was arrested while gun running in 1996 and was offered the chance to spy for the Shin Bet security service in return for his freedom.

Mosab refused and was sent to prison. But, while he loathed the torture methods employed by the Israelis, he was even more shocked by the brutality of his fellow Hamas inmates, who regularly punished those suspected of being informers. Having always been uncomfortable with the way in which the organisation exploited the suffering of ordinary Palestinians to achieve its aims, Mosab finally lost faith in its tactics when he was raped and, shortly afterwards, he agreed to spy for Shin Bet.

His handler was Gonen Ben-Yitzhak, an experienced agent (seven years Mosab's senior) with a degree in psychology who had worked in Judea and Samaria before coming to the Occupied Territories. He received information about planned suicide bombings and other terrorist missions, while also seeking to protect Mosab from both his own superiors (who regularly subjected Mosab to polygraph tests) and the Hamas hierarchy by ensuring that he remains deep undercover. As a consequence, Mosab (who was codenamed `The Green Prince') remained operational and took advantage of his contacts to have his father arrested to prevent him from being assassinated.

As Mosab states at one point, turning traitor was deemed `more shameful than raping your mother'. Yet, such was his disillusion with Hamas and his idealistic belief that he could covertly temper its excesses that he was willing to betray the cause of Palestinian autonomy (in which he fundamentally never lost faith) and risk his own life over the course of a decade. But when Ben-Yitzak was accused of becoming too friendly with his contact and was discharged, Mosab refused all further co-operation and fled to the United States, where he has since converted to Christianity and fought a protracted battle for political asylum.

This could have been an invaluable companion piece to The Gatekeepers (2012), Dror Moreh's insider history of the Shin Bet. But Schirman's framing of Mosab and Ben-Yitzak in medium or close shot is deadeningly uncinematic, while his use of ancillary material is disappointingly unimaginative. It scarcely helps that Mosab is so hesitantly inarticulate in his second language and, thus, the decision to shoot in English in order to reach a wider audience has to be deemed a miscalculation.

The ominous score by Max Richter (the British composer who also worked on Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, 2008) also outstays its welcome. Much more problematic, however, is the lack of impartiality, as while Schirman avoids the nakedly propagandist, he condemns Hamas with far greater trenchancy than the equally brutal Israelis, while offering few insights into the wider historico-political context. As a consequence, this fails to do justice to either a tragic situation or the sacrifices made (rightly or wrongly) by both Mosab and Ben-Yitzak.

By contrast, Bryn Higgins adopts a self-consciously stylised approach to conveying the sensation of suffering an epileptic fit in his otherwise realist adaptation of Ray Robinson's novel, Electricity. The smears, streaks and striations of light and colour have been deftly achieved by cinematographer Si Bell using a pinhole camera. However, seemingly aware of the dramatic limitations of this big city reworking of Alice in Wonderland, Higgins ends up relying too heavily on the effect to jolt the moribund narrative back into life. Model Agyness Deyn may surprise some with the courage and conviction of her performance, but even her character is so thinly sketched by screenwriter Joe Fisher that she simply becomes one more cipher in a `grim darn sarf' saga whose artistic pretensions are swamped by its soap operatic contrivances.

Twentysomething Agyness Deyn suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy. She works in an amusement arcade in the rundown Yorkshire resort of Saltburn, where boss-cum-landlord Tom Georgeson keeps an eye on her after she has her latest fit while out on a date. In a voiceover, Deyn explains how she was thrown down the stairs as a two year-old by mother Sharon Percy because she wouldn't stop crying and how her juvenile misery was compounded when younger brother Christian Cooke was taken into care for trying to defend her from bullies. Thus, when she learns that Percy has died, Deyn slaps her face when she goes to view the body, as payback for all her troubles.

Venturing back to her childhood home, Deyn finds older sibling Paul Anderson, a poker hustler who ticks her off for not doing more to help Percy in her later years. However, a flashback to her fitting younger self (Millie Taylforth) nearly drowning in the bath as a cacklingly addled Percy looks on confirms Deyn's detestation and she eagerly accepts Anderson's suggestion that they sell the house. But she insists they split the £180,000 three ways and proposes to travel to London and find Cooke, who has drifted around since being released from prison and going in search of old flame Alice Lowe. Anderson tells her she is wasting her time and buys her a ticket to join him on a gambling trip to Las Vegas, but Deyn is determined to repay her brother for losing his liberty to protect her.

Arriving at King's Cross, Deyn checks into a swanky hotel and starts showing Cooke's photo to the strangers on the streets. She even engages private eye Peter-Hugo Daly and struggles on after suffering another fit. However, homeless beggar Saffron Coomber offers to help her and they visit a hostel in their search for clues. Deyn invites Coomber to spend the night in her room, but she steals her belongings and she has to ask local doctor David Smith for a repeat prescription of her medication. He expresses surprise that she has been taking her pills for so long and suggests she undergoes tests, but Deyn dismisses his concerns, as Daly has come up with Lowe's address.

Heading into suburbia, Deyn is intrigued to know if the boy who answers the door (Callum Coates) is her nephew. However, Lowe aggressively warns her to stay away from her family and Deyn is so distressed that she has a major incident on the Underground. She wakes in her room two days later and uses a number in her bag to contact the woman who helped her get back to the hotel. Lesbian secretary Lenora Crichlow offers Deyn her spare room and promises to provide unquestioning support in her quest. Grateful, Deyn decides to confront Lowe again and she admits that she dated Cooke and hurt him by cheating on him with Anderson (who is Coates's father). She tells Deyn that Cooke was living under an assumed name in Balham and suggests she makes inquiries at the Grace Inn.

Electrician Ben Batt claims to know Cooke and they get chatting. Deyn trusts him implicitly and winds up in his bed. But she suffers another fit and Crichlow is distressed that she can do so little to help her new friend. Deyn jokes that she isn't on the market, but Crichlow keeps a watchful eye on her as she has a bath and reassures her she is happy to be a friend. She is a little peeved when she learns that Deyn has slept with Batt, however, but is pleased that he has persuaded Cooke to meet her at the pub. Skulking in a back corridor, Cooke apologises for being so elusive and Deyn regrets not having come looking for him sooner. She tells him about his inheritance and he orders her to bring the money as soon as possible so he can get on with his life without anyone trying to interfere.

Batt promises to act as go-between and Deyn rewards him with a night of energetic passion. However, she has a post-coital fit and is rushed to hospital, where she undergoes a series of tests before neurologist Julian Firth informs her that she has to change her medication. Despite feeling like she has snow on the brain, Deyn snaps at the doctor for patronising her and discharges herself. She returns to GP Smith and is furious when he concurs that she will be better off with the new prescription, despite her insistence that she knows who she is on the current dosage. Deyn complains to Crichlow that the new tablets make her feel like a ghost and she is still feeling vulnerable when she meets up with Anderson, who has brought Cooke's share of the money. She rejects the snake bracelet he bought her in Vegas and sheepishly apologises for lying about Lowe and claims he merely wants her to love him as much as she does Cooke.

A couple of days later, Cooke shows up at Crichlow's house and trashes the place in a burst of fury that Deyn is powerless to assuage. He lifts his shirt to show her his snake tattoo and gyrates in front of her before storming off. Crichlow tells Deyn not to worry about the damage and gives her a consoling hug. That night, Deyn has a dream in which birds fly out of her mouth and, the next morning, she flushes her medication down the toilet and declares she is washing her brain out. That night, she goes clubbing with Crichlow and has a massive fit on the dance floor and her face is badly scarred when she comes round in hospital. She proves a difficult patient and growls that she is not a dog when asked why she doesn't wear an identity tag that could help people recognise her condition. However, she perks up when Anderson delivers Cooke's cut of the house sale and she is equally delighted to see that Georgeson has come to take her home.

Slipping away after spending her last night with Crichlow, Deyn finds Cooke at the pub and he apologises for his earlier vandalism. He says he doesn't deserve the money or a second chance at happiness and makes Deyn cry by telling her that he stayed away because he always hurts those he loves the most. They hug and she says he has to come and find her next time. As she drives home, Deyn hangs out of the car window and lets the breeze blow through her hair. Saltburn may not be paradise, but it is home and she smiles at a man walking his dog on the beach, as she watches the kids play and the wind turbines whirr on the hazy horizon. She is off her meds and, for now, feels at peace.

In his second feature collaboration with Fisher after the little-seen Unconditional (2012), TV veteran Higgins makes a brave stab at suggesting what it must be like to experience a full-blown epileptic fit. There is an avant-garde audacity to the flash-cut jags and blurs concocted with Bell and editor Ben Yeates. But the sheer number of attacks (while perhaps clinically valid and accurate) feels excessive, especially when taken in conjunction with the multifarious flashbacks and dream sequences. The fact that even the snake bracelet momentarily comes to life betrays that Higgins is taking refuge in his Stan Brakhage-inspired special effects in the hope of distracting the audience from the clunkiness of the storytelling and the fact that the majority of characters exist simply to ease the plot out of its latest dead end.

Sporting her cuts and bruises like a badge of actorly honour to distance herself from her modelling past, Deyn impresses as a rather resistible anti-heroine who is anything but a vulnerable victim. However, some of the support playing is decidedly sub-par, although the likes of the dependable Crichlow are hardly helped by the florid, often tin-eared dialogue. Indeed, Fisher's script is strewn with clichés and caricatures (for which Robinson must share some of the blame). But it's the lack of emotional depth and subtlety that makes this such a cold and unmoving exercise.

Anyone spotting We Still Kill the Old Way in the listings and hoping for a reissue of Elio Petri's bleak 1967 adaptation of a noirish Leonardo Sciascia novel will be disappointed to discover that this is the latest offering from the BritCrime coterie. Director Sacha Bennett may not be a critics' darling, but he has a decent track record, with Tu£sday (2008) and Outside Bet (2012) being more distinctive than the more formulaic Bonded By Blood (2010) and Get Lucky (2013). However, this tale of East End vengeance is far closer in tone and quality to the latter pair. Indeed, it bears a resemblance to Gabe Turner's The Guvnors, although the tropes and actors are recycled so often within this increasingly bankrupt sub-genre that it is getting difficult to tell one film from another.

Back in the day, brothers Steven Berkoff and Ian Ogilvy ruled their manor with a rod of iron. However, since the latter retired to the Costa del Crime, Berkoff has been living off the memories he is happy to share with any old mucker prepared to listen. These tales of old-school thuggery don't impress the new kids on the block, however. So, when the hot-tempered Berkoff tries to stop Danny-Boy Hatchard and his E2 homies from gang-raping Dani Dyer, they exact a fatal retribution that brings Ogilvy back to his old stomping ground.

Time has clearly done nothing to douse the sparks between Ogilvy and old flame Lysette Anthony, who called to break the news in Spain. But his charm fails to work on DI Alison Doody, a single mum who is used to taking a pragmatic approach to policing, as such is the code of omerta across the generations that it is next to impossible to secure damning evidence. She advises Ogilvy against taking the law into his own hands, but it is only a matter of minutes before he has reassembled the old gang and James Cosmo, Chris Ellison and Tony Denham are more than ready, willing and able to teach the impudent upstarts a few lessons about respect.

The besuited quartet may belong to a different era and may find it tricky keeping one step ahead of an enemy that prefers using social media to knuckle-dusters. But they learn quickly and realise that power tools are as useful as guns and swords when it comes to torturing the blunter instruments in the E1 box. Hatchard proves more elusive, however, and it takes a little more cunning to lure him out for a showdown.

It would be easy to describe the sadistic treatment that Ogilvy and his cohorts mete out to the likes of Elijah Baker, but there is something so distasteful about the way in which Bennett allows Ismael Issa's camera to linger over the brutality that the temptation will be resisted. Let us content ourselves, instead, by noting that Ian Ogilvy's display of lethal urbanity falls somewhere between Michael Caine's turn in Daniel Barber's Harry Brown (2009) and Danny Dyer's in Stephen Reynolds's Vendetta (2013). He is solidly supported by the ever-watchable Berkoff, as well as such usual pseudo-Expendable suspects as Cosmo, Ellison and Denham, although it might have been nice to see Nicky Henson given more to do.

What sets this apart from other gangland sagas, however, is that the female characters are more than decorative damsels in distress. Lysette Anthony may not be Helen Mirren in Robert Schwentke's Red (2010), but she is more than just a Mockney moll telling Ogilvy to leave it out because Hatchard ain't worth it. Similarly, Dani Dyer (who proves to be very much a chip off the old block) reveals a feisty side that contrasts with Alison Doody's world-wearier cop, who now has too much to lose away from the beat to take any unnecessary risks. By all accounts, Bennett and co-writers Dougie Brimson and Gary Lawrence already have a sequel in the pipeline. But keeping the focus on the tough women behind the hard men might just give BritCrime a new lease of life.

Finally this week, and, indeed, this year, comes Yuzo Asahara's A Tale of Samurai Cooking: A True Love Story, which is set in the Kaga Domain during the Edo period of Japanese history and purports to reveal the role played by members of the famous Funaki family of chefs in the struggle for power between the Maeda warlords and their more progressive rivals. Unlike the majority of foodie films, this avoids lingering overlong over the preparation of exotic dishes and concentrates more on the human drama occurring within the clan kitchen. Indeed, it's easy to see why this has been seen as a companion piece to Yoshimitsu Morita's Abacus and Sword (2010), which was also co-written by Michio Kashiwada (who teams here with Yukiko Yamamuro) and is both set in the same part of feudal Japan and also explores the role of a minor functionary (a book-keeper rather than a cook) within the ruling household.

Since being divorced by her husband for speaking her mind, Aya Ueto has worked as a maid at the Maeda castle. However, it comes to the attention of head chef Toshiyuki Nishida that she is a gifted cook with a talent for preparing and blending her ingredients. As son Kengo Kora is struggling to accept that, since the death of his older brother, he must continue the family's culinary tradition, Nishida and his wife Kimiko Yo arrange for Ueto and Kora to marry and orders her to teach her new spouse how to cook. Frustrated at not being able to pursue his dream of becoming a warrior, Kora is reluctant to swap the sword for a knife. But Ueto is a formidable opponent and not only does she start persuading him to face reality, but she also nurtures an interest in food and how to spice up the most mundane dishes.

Although Kora grows fond of his wife and slowly improves at the stove, he remains intrigued by the machinations at court. But Ueto has a nose for trouble as well as aromas and, with a little help from her mother-in-law, she not only manages to steer her spouse away from the radicals, but also helps him re-ingratiate himself with their lord, Takeshi Kaga. Indeed, not only did the Funaki line survive the so-called Kaga Disturbance, but they also continued to serve the Kaga clan until the end of feudalism in the 19th century.

Presenting fascinating insights into concepts of masculinity within the bushido tradition, while also exploring the role played by women in the advancement of their menfolk, this handsome costume drama clearly has an allegorical subtext pertaining to the changing role of the salaryman in recession-stricken Japan. As with Abacus and Sword, the comparisons are subtly made between the underclass having to settle for second best and the younger generation struggling to get a foothold on a becalmed socio-economic system. But this also has perceptive points to make about marriage, chauvinism and the efficacy of political revolt.

Best known for her role in the TV series Hanzawa Naoki. Ueto makes an engagingly feisty heroine whose exchanges with the immature, but well-meaning Kora retain their zest even after the pair become genuinely fond of each other. The support playing is solid, notably by scheming reformer Naoto Ogata and fencing master Tasuku Emoto and his wife, Riko Narumi. But this is never as satisfyingly involving in its discussion of power and fealty as Yoji Yamada's Love and Honour (2006), which centred on the samurai-turned-food taster. Nevertheless, Tetsuo Harada's production design is as splendid as Yukihiro Okimura's photography, which reinforces Asahara's astute bid to invest historical events with a little human intimacy.