Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 9/11/2017)

Some time in the future, as the waves crash beyond her wall, 85 year-old Marjorie (Lois Smith) shuffles back inside her beach house and sits to chat with her husband, Walter (Jon Hamm). He is half her age and speaks with a measured cadence that betrays the fact he is a Prime, a hologram programmed to process and recycle information in order to keep Marjorie company and mentally active in a bid to combat her dementia. He reminds her that she needs to eat before telling her the story of a trip to the cinema to see PJ Hogan's My Best Friend's Wedding (1997). She wants to change the film to Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) and wishes the venue had been an old-fashioned movie theatre. But Walter is puzzled by her readiness to reinvent the past to make it seem more romantic and she is cross with herself for forgetting that Walter was recalling the night he proposed.

As she eats peanut butter with a spoon, Marjorie laments that her condition often robs her of cherished memories. But Walter insists she has her good days before recalling the day they went to the dog pound and came home with a black poodle named Toni. She had adored running on the beach and had been a good pet before they had their daughter, Tess (Geena Davis). However, she had also wanted a dog and they had returned to the pound, where Tess had picked out another black poodle and Toni 2 had fitted into the family so well that her life merged with that of her predecessor. Marjorie is happy to reminisce and compliments Walter on looking so much like her late spouse and he acknowledges the compliment, as she brushes through his projected image to sit beside him on the sofa. She asks if they can just be silent and he smiles at her request, as he exists solely to do whatever she wants and has all the time in the world in which to do it.

Jogging on the beach, Tess tells husband Jon (Tim Robbins) that she doesn't like the Prime, as she feels as though she is pacifying her mother like a child that has been plonked down in front of a television. But Jon has faith in the technology and realises that Marjorie takes solace from being able to converse with her lost loved one at the age she remembers him most fondly. The pair hold hands as they turn towards home, with the sun beaming down and the ocean rolling hypnotically behind them. But Tess is bothered that her husband is helping refine a computer programme designed to deceive her vulnerable mother into believing that her past is still active. Moreover, she is peeved that her mother is nicer to Walter than she is to her and worries that she will become confused by having to deal with two versions of the same person. However, when Marjorie comes down to join them, she scolds Tess for thinking that she is so far gone that she doesn't know the difference between Walter and the Prime. Tess and Jon moved into the beach house a decade ago, as Marjorie was devastated by Walter's death. But they feel the need to take a break and have asked care giver Julie (Stephanie Andujar) to live with them. Jon introduces her to Prime and she is amused by the fact he can speak Spanish (among 31 other languages) and is entirely committed to improving the quality of Marjorie's life. To that end, he asks Jon about his career as a financial adviser and is phlegmatic when Jon suggests that this would bore Marjorie, as would too many recollections about their later life together, as there is a reason she chose his fortysomething persona to be her companion.

Caught in the rain during one of their walks, Tess and Jon drop into the club where Marjorie used to spend her afternoons. Tess fails to recognise Mrs Salveson (Leslie Lyles), an old friend who has become wheelchair-bound since suffering a stroke. She admits her faux pas to Jon, as he tinkles on the piano and justifies her slip by quoting William James's theory that memories become increasingly unreliable because we always recall the last time we thought about something rather than original incident or idea. Thus, the clarity eventually begins to diminish, as though each recollection is part of a montage of photocopies. As competitive academics, Jon seeks to top Tess's interjection with an anecdote about James giving Gertrude Stein an A grade for declaring her unwillingness to take an exam. But Tess changes the subject by suggesting that they sack Julie for taking Marjorie outside in the rain, even though she had been enjoying a quiet cigarette when Tess had called to check up on her.

However, Marjorie has a restless night and wakes next morning to Jon informing her that she had flirted with a doctor after having fallen. She is reminded of the French-Canadian tennis player she had dated before Walter and laments that her husband had not been a looker. However, she shocks Jon and Julie by declaring him a great lover and she looks forward to her next encounter with Prime after pottering around the house. She wishes she could still play the violin and he consoles her that the music will still be in her head, even though her fingers are no longer nimble enough to make the notes. He apologises for not being as dashing as her tennis pro, but she commends him for being a decent husband and asks him to ensure that her condition gets no worse even though he is powerless to make her better. However, as he is programmed to tell the truth, Prime confesses that he can only do what is in his power.

Tess and Jon interrupt and ask Marjorie if she would like to go for a drive. She hunkers up in her chair and recalls going on a business trip with Walter and sitting in a snowy park watching saffron-coloured flags fluttering on the breeze. The tranquility of the moment has never left her and she remembers being reluctant to leave and live the rest of her life. Jon is more touched by the story than Tess, who is furious with Julie for giving Marjorie a Bible, as she has been a lifelong atheist and is now being indoctrinated when her intellectual defences are down. But Marjorie insists she is not feeble prey and is embarrassed when Tess has to take her upstairs after she wets herself.

Later that night, Jon tells Prime about the New York trip and breaks the news that it took place soon after Walter and Marjorie's son, Damien, had committed suicide. He explains that Walter had never known how to show love to a reclusive child who was often bullied at school and he urges him to say nothing about him to Tess, who had never forgiven him for killing Toni. Marjorie had also clammed up about her boy and Jon gets so frustrated with Prime asking questions so dispassionately in order to burnish his knowledge that he tosses his drink in his face. Even though the liquid passes through the hologram, Prime seems stung by the gesture and his jaw tightens, as Tess comes to fetch Jon for bed.

The next day, Julie confides in Prime that this job is less stressful than her last one, as she fell in love with the patient's son and had to watch him physically assault the doctors treating his father. Prime urges her not to get upset, but she insists her tears are from allergies and tells Prime in Spanish that she knows that he is as confused as she is about what to do for the best with Marjorie. As she sit in the pool, Marjorie has a flashback to the night that Walter had proposed. They had been in bed and My Best Friend's Wedding was on the television. She (Azumi Tsutsui) had been dubious about accepting, as he was so much older than she was and she had bitten the ring he had offered her to test its quality before slipping it on to her finger.

We see Jon, Tess, Julie and Marjorie go down to the tideline and celebrate a birthday with a party. Suddenly, however, Tess sees Jon drive Julie away and she returns into the house. She sits with Marjorie and it's only partway through the conversation that it becomes clear that she is now a Prime and that Tess has chosen to remember her late mother towards the end of her life. Marjorie Prime asks for information about herself and their relationship as mother and daughter and Tess feels uncomfortable having to revisit their past. She explains that Marjorie had also had a Prime before her death and Tess admits that she had been hurt that she had chosen a Walter from a time before her birth, as it made her feel as though she had intruded upon their idyllic happiness.

Tess confesses that she has been prevented from talking to her own daughter by her therapist and it annoys her that a stranger should have any input into their relationship. It also irks her that Jon thinks she should see a shrink, as she doesn't like the idea that the man she loves considers her broken. Yet, here she is talking to a facsimile of her mother and needing emotional comfort she gets from their interaction. She appears to fall asleep and seemingly dreams of Walter Prime watching footage of saffron flags with Julie, who clings on to him in her own sadness. Tess wakes up and sits up to see she is quite alone. She goes upstairs and climbs into bed beside Jon.

They now have a Shiba Inu dog and it fusses around Jon while Tess sorts through the letters and photos that Marjorie left behind. She admonishes Jon for letting Marjorie remember Jean-Paul as a tennis player when he had owned a dry wall business and she finds a billet doux he wrote her distasteful. He reminds her that they had met after Walter had died and hopes that Tess would find a new love if anything ever happened to him. She shows him a snapshot of Damien and Toni and she admits to hating the fact that Marjorie had always loved him more and that her six year-old self had felt betrayed by her brother for driving a wedge that she would never be able to remove.

Unable to sleep, Tess comes to see Marjorie, who asks if she would like to hear some music. Tess curses the fact that they had never had the same tastes, but is moved when she hears The Band's version of Bob Dylan's `I Shall Be Released'. This proves to be the last time we shall meet her, as a series of shots establish that Jon is now alone with the dog and drinking quite heavily. He invests in a Prime and sighs because Tess Prime keeps making assumptions and he suggests that it would be better if she let him provide some background because she seems unwilling to accept the notion that Tess died even though she now exists in Prime form.

Opening a notebook, he reads a list of characteristics that he associates with Tess. They range from her being confrontational despite seeming quiet to her desire to be a better mother than Marjorie had been. However, he finds it difficult relating to something he knows is an electronic figment of his imagination and is pained when he has to recall how Tess had hanged herself from a 500 year-old tree during a long-planned camping trip to Madagascar. Tess Prime calmly asks Jon to trust her so that she can help him and asks about their early days as a couple and he flashes back to what appears to be an encounter in the garden at Versailles. But, as he kisses Tess, we see the backdrop is a large diorama-style painting in a gallery full of milling tourists. When he snaps out of the reverie, however, he finds himself alone.

Time passes and his 10 year-old adopted granddaughter Marjorie (Hana Colley) comes to visit. She asks to meet Tess Prime and tells her about how she is learning to identify plants and trees. Jon is proud of having another bright spark in the family and Tess smiles quietly. But time races on and, two decades later, Marjorie (Hong-An Tran) brings Jon (Bill Walters) a glass of water to take his pill. He is bearded with long white hair and the scene cuts away to show a dog running on the beach. It is being watched by Walter, who is chatting with the Primes of Marjorie and Tess. They miss Jon and wonder why he never drops round any longer. As they reminisce, Marjorie recalls Tess picking Toni 2 at the dog pound. But Walter corrects her and she is puzzled by his mention of Damien. Tess is also perplexed, but they accept what Walter is telling them as a happy memory and, as the snow begins to fall outside, Marjorie feels lucky that the family got to share so much love.

During this closing exchange - complete with a telling snippet from My Best Friend's Wedding and footage of the saffron banners in Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park artwork, `The Gates' - it's hard not to hear those haunting lines from James Joyce's The Dead: `His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.' But, rather than providing a neat ending, this scene prompts numerous questions. Why is there no Jon Prime? Did his relationship with granddaughter Marjorie deteriorate so badly that she would be happy to forget him or did the technology simply become obsolete? How did the Primes activate themselves without any human intervention and why has it taken the usually empathetic Walter so long to tell Marjorie and Tess about Damien and Toni? Has he developed a sensitivity to go with his intelligence, as he did appear to register an emotion when Jon threw scotch at him?

Yet, while such loose ends may tantalise, it's the philosophical content of Harrison's play that proves more intriguing than its sci-fi speculations. While the reminiscing between Marjorie and Walter is touching, the byplay between Tess and Jon is even more engaging and affords Geena Davis and Tim Robbins their best roles in years, as they play dialled down versions of Martha and George in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The way in which Jon interacts with Walter Prime is also fascinating, as he provides him with information that he can only know secondhand and it's interesting to note how much of what Jon tells Walter is withheld from the Marjorie and Tess Primes. Recreating her stage role, Lois Smith is exceptional as an artist who was never quite cut out for motherhood, while Jon Hamm invests his artificial intelligence with a sensibility that is all the more stirring for the fact that Walter is the only character who is deprived of some moments of humanity. Almereyda directs his actors with great finesse and avoids the temptation to open out the action too widely. He also lets Sean Price Williams's camera float around the Long Island location and Javiera Varas's deceptively modest interiors, while also ensuring that editor Kathryn J. Schubert keeps the transitions simple so as not to disturb the measured rhythms of the scenes. At times, Mica Levi's score gets lost amidst the Mozart, Beethoven and Poulenc. But it deftly reinforces the ethereality of a poignant, playful and poetic chamber drama that leaves a deep and affectingly consolatory impression.

For the last two decades, Franco-Senegalese film-maker Alain Gomis has been steadily building his reputation on the festival circuit with features like L'Afrance (2001), Andalucia (2008) and Tey (2013). But, while they have only received limited theatrical releases in the UK, these intriguing pictures have thoughtfully combined realist narratives with abstract interludes that enliven the respective experiences of a Senegalese academic working on a Parisian building site while striving to avoid deportation, a slacker of Algerian descent mooching around Paris and a dying man making his farewells to his family and friends in Dakar. However, Gomis finally seems set to reach a wider audience with Félicité, which takes him to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a tale of maternal love, institutionalised corruption, gangland violence, soft-centred chauvinism and glorious music. While the patrons drink and chatter at the tops of their voices, the Kasai Allstars start playing on the small stage in a Kinshasa nightclub. Having surveyed the scene, as the drunken Papi Mpaka staggers into the bar and starts boasting to the menfolk and flirting with the women, singer Véro Tshanda Beya takes to the stage and soon has people dancing with a full-throated performance.

While Mpaka sleeps it off on the pavement, Beya returns to the shack she shares with her 14 year-old son Gaetan Claudia. She calls neighbour kid Nathan Mulumba to find someone to fix her fridge and she is less than impressed when Mpaka wanders in and declares that the fan has gone jusr weeks after she had shelled out for a new motor. Beya gives Mpaka money to find her a cheap, reliable fridge. But she is called to the hospital because Claudia has injured his leg in what appears to be a motorcycle accident.

A cutaway takes us to a warehouse, where the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste starts to play Arvo Pärt's `Fratres'. Another abrupt transition reveals stars twinkling in the sky through the tops of some trees before we rejoin Beya, as she hastens along corridors looking for Claudia's ward. She finds him on blood-soaked sheets and has to be calmed by nurse Claudine Lumbu and doctor Médecin Chef Veyi, who informs her that his left leg is badly broken and will require an operation. However, the treatment will cost one million Congolese francs and Veyi insists that Beya makes a down payment before he can attend to her son.

Seeing how stressed Beya is, the elderly Sephora Françoise offers to go to the pharmacy to collect a prescription and Beya dozes off in the chair beside Claudia's bed. She dreams she is walking through long grass in the darkened countryside, but wakes with a jolt to discover that Françoise has absconded with her money. Lumbu takes pity on Beya and promises to move Claudia to another room, while she goes to the club to belt out another Congotronic song with the band. While she performs, Mpaka borrows a cap and takes a collection to help Beya pay her medical bills. But he gets distracted by an amorous customer and winds up having a knee trembler, while Beya asks her fellow musicians for a whip round and not everyone is willing to give.

Following another disconcerting dream, Beya wakes to find Mpaka working on her fridge. He proposes marriage and recites a snippet of poetry, while she dresses in the next room and chides him for being a dreamer. While riding on the back of a motorbike through the outskirts of the city, Beya sees mourners at a funeral and some youths pushing a broken down minibus. She goes to see her aunt, Mua Mbuyi, who wonders how she managed to turn out so ugly. Tutting at how her niece has wasted her life after coming back from the dead after falling gravely ill as a toddler, Mbuyi pleads poverty and Beya leaves in disgust.

She is also turned away by nightclub owner Léon Makola and returns with cop Firo Mafuka to force her boss into paying what he owes her. Beya gets into another row when she demands that a neighbour pays back a loan and Mafuka is insulted by the meagre tip she gives him for his assistance. However, she is still 120,000 francs short and cashier Kakiese Matuala recommends that she has Claudia moved to a general ward to save money. But Beya insists she will make up the shortfall and she swallows her pride to pay a call on her ex-husband, Modero Totokani. He is scornful of her efforts to be a strong, independent woman and accuses her of raising a thug. She pleads with him to think of the boy, but Totokani wants nothing to do with either of them and throws her out.

In desperation, Beya visits local gang boss Bavon Diana Landa and barges past maid Aziza Kengumbe at the gate. Landa is furious with Kengumbe for letting a stranger into his home and summons his henchman to remove her. But Beya puts up a fight and Landa feels sufficiently sorry for her to give her a donation on the proviso that she never returns. Counting the money outside, she rushes to the hospital, only for the doctor to break the news that Claudia's leg began bleeding and that they had to amputate.

Another cutaway to the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste follows for `My Heart Is in the Highlands', as Beya wakes to face another day and finds Mpaka working on her fridge again. He offers to help bring Claudia home and carries him to a taxi, where he boasts that he will do remarkable things for his new family if Beya gives him the chance. She almost allows herself to smile at his antics and she is grateful when he ushers away the neighbours who have come to gawk, as well as wish Claudia well. Yet, she gets jealous that night in the small club where she is working when she takes to the stage and sees him chatting up a woman at the bar. Unable to sing, she walks out and Mpaka feels a pang when he wakes up beside the stranger next morning. Beya has also had another night of disturbed visions of herself wandering in the pitch black bush and she decides to remove the woven extensions from her hair, while Mpaka tries to cheer up Claudia by plonking him down in front of the television. But he remains sullen and even girlfriend Gloire Mengi gets tired of sitting with him.

Venturing to the market to find a new transformer for the fridge, Mpaka seems some youths being savagely beaten after a chase through the stalls and wonders if this is what happened to Claudia. That night, he gets roaring drunk at the bar and Beya sits in embarrassed silence as Mpaka squares off against a burly patron before offering to buy everyone a round and then collapsing on to the floor. As she sleeps that night, Beya sees herself walking into a lake until the water is up to her chin and her reverie is ended by a performance of an Arvo Pärt choral work, which continues to play as Beya walks home through the bustling streets and sits down to think on the banks of the lake. Having made up her mind, she goes to Mpaka's bedsit, undresses and, with a tear in her eye, lies down beside him. He wakes and rolls on top of her. But, while their lips almost touch, he realises that she needs solace and sleep and covers Beya with a scarf so that she can doze off in safety.

As she dreams, Beya sees an okapi on the bank as she emerges from the water and it follows her to the club, where she stands in silence on the stage. The animal comes up to her and, as she stares ahead with a quizzical smile playing on her lips, she sees Mpaka lurching into the bar and seems to accept that, for all his flaws, his heart is in the right place. He proves this by fetching beer (with the whole street standing still on the blast of a whistle to let him pass) and getting Claudia drunk. As they sing bawdy songs and laugh at nothing, Mpaka promises to be there for the boy and picks him off the floor and props him on the sofa when Beya comes home to find them in no fit state. She looks impassively at the pair and goes to sit outside. Mpaka plonks himself beside her and she puts her head on his shoulder, as he starts to sing a song about her beauty. She pleads with him to stop because he has such an awful voice, but he persists and she laughs at having found herself with this impossible bear.

Mpaka fixes the fridge and stands for applause as it gurgles back into life. But it soon starts making a racket and Beya and Claudia try not to laugh, as he urges them to turn on the television to drown out the noise. That night, Beya sings well at the club and seems unconcerned when a drunken Mpaka leaves with a younger woman. She comes to his room the next morning and tells his bed companion to leave before revealing that she has seen Mpaka in the forest in her dreams and that she is prepared to put up with his failings because he is a decent enough man. He agrees that they have something special, but begs her not to pester him every day, as he will sometimes let her down. She smiles and seems to accept him as he comes and the film ends with Claudia hobbling back into the city on his crutches and the choir finishing their rendition of `Seven Magnificent Antiphons: O Emmanuel'.

Alternating between moody musical numbers, boisterous encounters between Beya and Mpaka, and prolonged periods of silence, this demands more audience patience Gomis's previous outings. Scripting with Delphine Zingg and Olivier Loustau, he eschews backstory entirely in painting a bleak picture of daily life for a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is reinforced by Céline Bozon's restless camerawork and Benoit De Clerck's busy sound mix, which is frequently complemented by the exquisite musical passages.

Yet, while Beya proves eminently empathetic as the camera fixes in shallow-focus close-up on her wonderful face, some will miss the impetus provided by the cash-raising search, as Gomis focuses on the slow-burning relationship with Mpaka and the dimly lit forest reveries that can seem excessively gnomic. That said, Gomis and Bozon are prepared to depart from everyday reality, most notably during the homecoming sequence, in which they blur and superimpose the faces of the visitors crowding in on Beya after they had all let her down when she needed them most. That she can find a way to smile after such an ordeal says much for her mesmerising performance (which even includes her quoting a passage from the German poet Novalis's `Hymn to the Night') and the deft outsider evocation of both the Kinshasa shanty and the city's distinctive character.

You have to be advancing in years to remember the time when Liverpool seemed to win everything. Two documentaries chart this period of Anfield dominance over the next few weeks, with Stewart Sugg's Kenny following Mike Todd's Shankly: Nature's Fire in profiling a pair of Scots who became adopted Scousers thanks to their success on the pitch and their ability to tap into the spirit of a city that insists on dancing to its own tune. What unites the films is a sense of wounded pride that the club reinvented by Bill Shankly and taken to a new level by Kenny Dalglish has spent much of the last quarter of a century living on its former glories. But they also reveal the affection and gratitude that the red half of Merseyside retains for sporting titans who were also working-class heroes.

Its somewhat fitting that Todds study should begin with Mary Hopkin's `Those Were the Days' playing over shots of Liverpool fans and members of Bill Shankly's family boarding a coach to make a pilgrimage to Glenbuck, the lost Ayrshire mining village in which Shanks grew up and learnt the harsh lessons that would stand him in good stead in later life. His niece, Barbara, explains that he was the youngest boy in a family of 10, while football historian Billy Kay gives us a brief social history of Scottish mining and the influence that the egalitarian ethos of poet Robert Burns would have had on the community. Granddaughter Emma Parry admits this is the first time she has been to Glenbuck and Barbara looks at the land where the Auchenstilloch Cottages would have stood when the 15 year-old Shankly went down the mine and turned out for the Glenbuck Cherrypickers and Cronberry Eglinton.

In all, 50 professional players came from the Glenbuck area and biographer Stephen Kelly, journalist Hugh McIlvaney and author Irvine Welsh highlight the fact that football gave lads from impoverished backgrounds a chance to express themselves and make something of their lives. Moreover, the values honed underground gave the likes of Shankly, Jock Stein and Matt Busby (who were born within 30 miles of each other) the sense of teamwork that would make them great managers. It was no accident, therefore, that Shankly's brothers - Alec (Ayr United and Clyde), Jimmy (Sheffield United and Southend United), John (Portsmouth and Luton Town) and Bob (Alloa Athletic and Falkirk) - all played professional football, with Bob even winning the Scottish championship with Dundee and reaching the semi-finals of the European Cup in 1963, where they lost to the eventual winners, AC Milan.

These details are missing from the film, but they reinforce the sense of drive and ambition that the Shankly siblings nurtured in each other. They were also helped by the domestic style of close passing that allowed so many Scots to flourish in the English game. Following a season with Carlisle United, Shankly found himself at Preston North End for the princely sum of £500, where he developed a reputation as a tough-tackling right-half. Ex-Liverpool player and Preston fan Mark Lawrenson drops into Deepdale to reflect on Shankly's time with the Lilywhites, which saw him reach consecutive FA Cup Finals against Sunderland (1937) and Huddersfield Town (1938). In archive footage, Sir Tom Finney recalls what an effective player Shankly was and the fervour that the world's oldest knockout competition could then generate is evident from the clips of the open-top parade the Preston team enjoyed in 1938.

The Second World War interrupted Shankly's playing career, although he represented Scotland in a clutch of internationals while serving with the RAF. Four years after the war ended, Shanks decided to hang up his boots and take charge of Carlisle. Further managerial stints followed at Grimsby Town and Workington before Huddersfield boss Andy Beattie brought him to Leeds Road as his assistant. Among those on the playing staff was a young Denis Law, who remembers the new coach as being an effusive character who taught him everything he knew about football.

But broken promises over transfer funds saw Shankly accept an offer to join Liverpool in December 1959. The shots used to set the scene include one of the famous Overhead Railway, which was known as `the Docker's Umbrella' and which had closed three years before Shanks came to Merseyside. We also hear from comedian Ken Dodd declaring that Liverpool was anything but the dingy slum of prejudicial repute. Musician Peter Hooton takes us into The Sandon, the public house where Liverpool FC had been founded in 1892, and he, Steven Gerrard. Jamie Carragher and stadium announced George Sephton explain how much football means to the city and its sense of identity.

The club had been languishing in the old Second Division for some time and Sephton suggests that the board were happy to be a big fish in a small pond. But, even though he lost his first game 0-4 to Cardiff City, Shankly had bigger ambitions and he formed the famous Boot Room team with Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett to ensure the players were fit and focused for every game. As fan John Morland recalls, Shankly transformed the training facilities at Melwood, while goalscoring legend Roger Hunt and right back Chris Lawler reflect on the fitness regimes that Shankly imposed to replicate the physical stresses and strains of a game.

Phil Aspinall (who put the lyrics of `A Liverbird Upon My Chest' to the theme of the 1968 John Wayne film, The Green Berets) remembers the effect of seeing the red shirts for the first time after his father had bought him a blue-and-white bobble hat while taking him to Goodison Park for a Liverpool Senior Cup tie against Everton. This amusing aside on the friendly tribalism that exists within the city goes some way to conveying the sense of reawakening pride that permeated the port in the early 1960s, as football and Merseybeat transformed its image. Broadcaster John Keith reflects this upsurge in When Shankly's Dream Came True, which sees him joined on the Epstein Theatre stage by Lawler, Ian Callaghan and Ian St John to mark the 50th anniversary of Liverpool's first FA Cup win in 1965.

St John had been bought from Motherwell shortly after Ron Yeats arrived from Dundee United and they formed a Scottish spine of the team with goalkeeper Tommy Lawrence. Shankly had persuaded board member Eric Sawyer that St John was key to the club's future success and Sephton recalls how the Kop based the chant for their new hero on `Let's Go', a minor hit by The Routers, which was one of the many songs that Liverpudlians had heard before anyone else in the country because the merchant seamen always returned home with suitcases full of American records.

Having won the Second Division in 1962 and the First Division championship two years later, Shankly adopted the now famous all-red kit and set his sights on the FA Cup, which Liverpool had never won. The final against Leeds United got off to a terrible start when Johnny Giles broke Gerry Byrne's collar bone. But, as this was a time before substitutes could be used, Byrne had to soldier on and the fact that Hunt and St John scored either side of a Billy Bremner goal in extra time made the victory all the more remarkable. Finally free of the Everton taunt that the Liver Bird would fly away from the Pier Head before Liverpool won the Cup, the fans took Shankly to their hearts.

As future skipper Phil Thompson avers, it could all have been so much better had the Reds not been cheated in the second leg of the European Cup semi-final in the San Siro by Spanish referee José María Ortiz de Mendíbil after a memorable 3-1 home win that began with Byrne and Gordon Milne parading the Cup in front of the Kop to whip up the atmosphere. Such a gambit typified Shankly's belief that the players and the fans were one unit and Paul Higgins confirms the strength of the bond, which owed much to Shankly's `man of the people' persona. Keith recalls that he had to pave over the front garden of his house in Bellefield Avenue because so many fans trampled over the lawn when coming to pay their respects. Granddaughter Karen Gill revisits the house and, as we see newsreel shots of the throng that greeted the team on 2 May 1965, it's clear how much the Cup win meant to the whole city.

Undaunted, Liverpool won the league again in 1966 (although there's no mention of the humbling 3-7 European Cup defeat to Johann Cryuff's Ajax) and the his ethos became more deeply ingrained at the club. As Hooton reveals at Glenbuck, the Spirit of Shankly group was formed to ensure that Liverpool FC retains its links with its core support in an era of corporate hospitality and inflated ticket prices that prevent the average fan from going to the games. Members Kieth Culvin and Roy Bentham opine that Shanks would be appalled by the way big money has taken the game away from the community and we flashback to the accompaniment of The Merseybeats singing `Our Day Will Come' to Lawler and Hunt remembering what an exciting place Liverpool was in the 1960s. The Kop are seen singing `She Loves You' in a famous clip from the BBC's Panorama programme, while Thompson and Howard Gayle (who became Liverpool's first black player) recall the adoption of the Gerry and the Pacemakers rendition of `You'll Never Walk Alone' as their anthem.

During a TV interview, Shankly commends the crowd for its natural enthusiasm and he was able to channel this fiercely partisan support into his players. But, as the decade came to an end, one or two stalwarts began to show signs of feeling the pace and Hunt jokily recalls earning himself a reprieve by urging Shanks to stand up to the directors who had questioned his form. Despite the pain of having to dispose of players who had served him so well, Shankly recognised the need to ring the changes and among the new crop were John Toshack, Ray Clemence, Steve Heighway and Kevin Keegan, who had been plucked from relative obscurity at Scunthorpe United and made an immediate impact after Shankly ordered him to run around and `drop hand grenades' all over the pitch. Forging a celebrated partnership with Toshack, Keegan quickly became a Kop idol and he recalls with considerable modesty how surprised he was by his meteoric rise, which was all down to Shankly recognising a kindred spirit.

Keegan was also impressed by how Shankly treated everyone employed by the club as a key component of the machine and this made players and tea ladies alike up their game. He drew on these sentiments outside St George's Hall after the 1971 FA Cup final defeat to Arsenal when he told the massed ranks that he had drummed it into the squad that they were privileged to play for such amazing fans. Thompson recalls how he saw the club as ambassadors for the community who had a duty to boost morale in tough times. Thus, he was delighted to be able to win the league and the UEFA Cup in 1973 before returning to Wembley to beat Newcastle United by 3-0 the following May. Yet, Shankly stunned the football world when he announced his retirement on 12 July 1974. Karen Gill alludes to the fact that he had been under pressure from his wife Nessie to call time on his career, but she also does stress how much Shankly came to regret his decision, as Bob Paisely took Liverpool to new heights, including the European Cup in 1977. Todd shows the classic clips from Tony Wilson's Granada Reports interviews with dumbfounded fans, while Keith, Keegan and Thompson conclude that the club handled the departure badly, as the board insisted on a clean break to prevent Shankly from being seen as a backseat driver. He tried to offer his services to other clubs, but got no takers and Hunt knows that he was hurt that his knowledge and experience were being spurned.

Interview extracts convey the pride that Shankly felt at having made the people happy and it's entirely fitting that this is carved into the plinth of his statue outside Anfield. Yet, while Paisley enjoyed even more success, he was a much more retiring character and was never adored by the fans in the same way as Shankly had been and still is. Emlyn Hughes recalls walking up to collect the European Cup in 1977 and thinking that Shankly had won this trophy by making Liverpool a powerhouse. But Shanks retained his distinctive brand of swaggering humility to the end and even stood on the Kop to watch a game against Coventry City in November 1975.

Lawler and Lawrenson remember the shock they felt at hearing of Shankly's death on 29 September 1981. Liverpool's next home game was against John Toshack's Swansea City and he wore a red shirt during the pre-match silence. The whole of Merseyside united to mourn the passing of an adopted son and Keegan recalls Nessie taking him to one side to return an award that Shankly had presented to his former No.7, only for Keegan to insist that the Boss deserved it more. Such small gestures testify to the greatness of the man and it's a shame that - prior the closing valedictions - the film somewhat clumsily cuts from footage of the funeral to the coach party singing `Shankly' to the tune of `Amazing Grace' being played by a lone piper. It's meant well, but it smacks of a schmaltz that has been laudably absent from this unashamedly nostalgic memoir.

Die-hard Koppites will be familiar with the Shankly story and some might lament the absence of some statistics to back up the accolades. But this is a fitting tribute to one of the great men of football, who fulfilled his promise to turn an unfashionable club into `a bastion of invincibility'. He once memorably declared: `Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that.' This documentary may be a little bitty in its layout and short of shots of Shankly on the touchline exhorting his players on to bigger and better things (surely there was room, for example, for the hand gesturing from the bench at Wembley in what proved to be his last game in charge?). But Todd astutely reads between the lines of this much-quoted pronouncement and, in the process, succeeds in capturing the city, the club and the icon. Although they have the moving image in common, commercial cinema and video art are poles apart. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to present a special Oscar to Alejandro González Iñárritu for his virtual reality installation, Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible). Of course, it could be that AMPAS is simply seeking to cock a snook at President Trump by awarding such a prestigious and rarely bestowed honour to a piece that focuses on migrants crossing the South-West American desert in the first light of dawn. But the announcement raises the profile of video art just as Gerry Fox profiles one of its undisputed masters in Bill Viola: The Road to St Paul's.

A little context is needed before we begin. Born in Queens, New York in 1951, Bill Viola took his first steps as a video artist in the 1970s, in conjunction with composer David Tudor and Italian video pioneer Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi, whose Art/tapes/22 (it) studio introduced him to the work of such innovators as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. However, his most enduring collaboration has been with wife Kira Perov, whom he met while exhibiting some of his earliest works in Melbourne in 1977.

Fascinated by video's ability to help viewers become more self-aware through sense perception, Viola has often blended human experience with spiritual inspiration in the 150+ works that have been shown in cinemas, galleries and museums worldwide. Among his best-known items are Déserts (1994), Catherine's Room (2001), Going Forth By Day (2002) and Ocean Without a Shore (2007). However, Fox concentrates on the 12-year project to produce two permanent video installations, Mary and Martyrs, for the High Altar of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Opening with extracts from The Crossing (1996) and The Raft (2004), the documentary uses captions to set the scene for Bill Viola's meeting with John Moses, the Dean of St Paul's, who had seen The Passions show at the National Gallery in 2003 and had decided that Violas moving tableau had the power to engage the viewer in a way that is beyond a static canvas. Clips from `Emergence' from The Passions (2002) and The Quintet of the Astonished (2000) follow, as the pair discuss the need for the installations to replace lost side chapels dedicated to Mary and modern martyrs and for them to reinforce the Christian message of life, death and eternal life. Six years later, Viola is wading through a field in Ojai, California, as he scouts locations with Kira Perov, director of photography Harry Dawson and actress Alessia Patregnani, who is playing Mary. He explains that the project has proved more difficult than he had anticipated, as the more he read, the more ideas he had and he felt the need to collaborate more openly than had sometimes been the case on earlier works. Taking his inspiration from religious art, he talks Patregnani and Deborah Puette through a reconstruction of the Visitation between Mary and Elizabeth, her cousin and the future mother of John the Baptist.

Curator and art historian John Hannardt comments on the potency of the ideas that Viola draws from paintings like Jacopo da Pontormo's `Visitation' (c.1528), which he had drawn on for a slow-motion piece entitled The Greeting (1995). We see him shooting the scene for St Paul's and uses a loudhailer to guide Patregnani and Puette through their movements and gestures and he rushes down the hillside to hug them for getting the shot so perfectly. He explains over images from Heaven and Earth and Nantes Triptych (both 1992) that life and death contain their own distinctive beauty, with the end portion of the latter work showing the last breath taken by Viola's mother, which he considers her last gift to him.

Having produced The Messenger (1996) for Durham Cathedral, Viola is well aware of the demands being made upon him at St Paul's. During a second site visit in 2006, he acquainted himself with the space in which the right-hand panel would sit and he reveals that he is toying with notions of mud-caked bodies being made clean with water to convey the ideas of death and transcendence. As he works, he explains how vital Perov is to his formulating concepts and turning them into reality and he describes how he contrasted the texture of images produced by different makes of camera in Ocean Without a Shore (2007) to reflect on the idea of how a body changes at the moment of death, when something appears to leave the physical form, even though you can't see what it is.

At the Venice Biennale in 2007, he presented this piece on the altar of the San Gallo chapel and this helped him fathom his approach to the walls in St Paul's. We fast forward to 2011, as Viola and designers David Nelson and Andrea Weidmann gauge how mock-ups of the installation will work with their surroundings. As Mary is about the female connection to the Earth, Viola wants the screens to stand on a plinth touching the ground, while Martyrs will only be attached to the wall to give a sense of it flying upwards towards Heaven.

Cutting from a meeting with executive Mouzhan Majidi to discuss materials for the screens and their surrounds, Fox takes us to the Salton Sea in California in 2011, as Viola is working on a Crucifixion scene with Mary, St John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene based on Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16). This fails to make the final cut, but Viola confides during the shoot that he has found this commission extremely difficult, as it requires a degree of narrative linearity that is entirely alien to him. But he adores the setting, which has also featured in The Passing (1991), as well as the Mojave Desert, which he used in Passing Into the Light (2005).

During a night shoot for the Pieta sequence, Viola notes how many themes recur in his work, with `Ascending Angel' from Five Angels for the Millennium (2001) conveying the power of the Resurrection. But, even while certain sequences slotted into place easily, others proved problematic and Viola admits that the thought that his work would be on permanent display was nagging away at him and clouding his judgement. He decided to take time off the St Paul's project and let the dust settle while he worked on items like The Dreamers (2013), which riffs on his fascination with the non-waking form and harks back to an earlier piece, The Sleepers (1992), which also focused on faces in repose underwater.

By 2013, Viola is ready to start shooting Martyrs in Los Angeles. Perov muses on the fact that those dying for their beliefs have come to terms with death and the four segments of this video will involve actors John Hay, Sarah Steben, Darrow Igus and Norman Stone respectively being subjected to the elements of water, air, fire and earth. As he watches soil covering Stone's cowering torso, Viola decides to follow his old art teacher's advice of circumventing problems by running the film backwards and he is so thrilled by the effect that he abandons the idea of Man being buried alive to him emerging from the dust of Creation.

Still pursuing other projects, Viola describes the rationale behind Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity (2013), which uses large slabs of granite to depict an elderly couple examining their bodies with torches for the imperfections that will kill them. The viewer becomes involved in a mutual mirror gazing exercise and Viola admits that he has been obsessed with death since he almost drowned when he was six years old. This experience clearly informed The Passing (1991), which examines the notion that we are just matter waiting to be recycled by the Cosmos and this chimes in with the Earth segment of Martyrs, which he runs for the first time alongside the other elements and he is too overcome to speak on camera.

Always in demand, Viola heads to Paris in 2014 to supervise an exhibition of his work and he reveals that he always learns something new about creations like The Veiling (1995), Nine Attempts to Achieve Immortality (1996) and Going Forth By Day on seeing them again. But he has little time to linger, as it's off to London to see the installations in situ and be warmly congratulated by the Chancellor of St Paul's, Mark Oakley. Dean Moses jokes after the premiere that he has been retired for eight years and has hopes that Mary will soon be in place on the opposite wall. Tate director Nicholas Serota enthuses about Martyrs and claims it enhances the cathedral and invites the viewer to recall all the other great works of art dealing with the same themes.

The following year, Viola is back in London to help curate another show, which includes older pieces like Moving Stillness (Mt Rainier) (1979). At this point, Fox opts to leap back to Viola's formative years at Syracuse University, where he made the likes of Information (1973) and The Space Between the Teeth (1976), and helped Nam June Paik install his seminal piece, TV Garden (1974). Rather in keeping with the restless nature of the documentary, we leap into the present again to join Viola in his Long Beach study, where he claims he feels the energy for new works like a woman must do when she starts to form a new life inside her. We see a clip from Ascension (2000), which again relates back to his childhood trauma and he admits that water has played a significant role in his output.

At his nearby studio, Perov and their son Blake join him to work out how to finish Mary, after it was decided that the 90-minute running time needed to come down to around 15. He decides to condense scenes into a three-screen polyptych in the manner of Catherine's Room, which had been based on Andrea di Bartolo's Predella, `St Catherine of Siena and Four Mantellate' (1428). After consulting with their editor, Viola and Perov go to St Paul's to see the finished article and Perov explains how the first segment shows an Eternal Mother suckling her child in slow-motion against a timelapsed cityscape. Former National Portrait Gallery Director Sandy Nairne is blown away and Viola is awed by the fact that this work that forced him to delve so deeply inside of himself is finished and will long outlive him in order to prompt people to reflect upon the Blessed Virgin Mary's journey, but also their own.

Never one to stand still, Viola is soon working on Inverted Birth (2014), which has since been dedicated to the memory of Norman Stone, who died in 2016. But this touching tribute feels an odd place for the profile of Bill Viola to end. However, several decisions with regard to the structuring of this otherwise fascinating film feel a little puzzling. Fox and editor John Street clearly wish to convey the extent to which Viola is forever quoting himself or revisiting key moments in his life. But the jumbled feel doesn't quite equate to the creative turmoil that Viola and Perov endured while making the St Paul's pieces.

Nevertheless, Fox makes the most of his unique access to one of the most inspired visionaries in the history of moving pictures and presents him as an unassuming and genial man, who just happens to be a driven genius. Moreover, he shows how indebted Viola is to the pragmatic skills of the ever-supportive Perov. But, despite being executive produced by Melvyn Bragg, this makes few concessions for those not already au fait with Viola and his milieu. So, perhaps, someone needs to make a start on a primer for the next generation of budding video art aficionados.

While TV audiences continue to marvel at Blue Planet II, a pair of starker, darker wildlife documentaries arrives in cinemas in the wake of Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani's The Ivory Game (2016). Next week, audiences will be forced into the moral maze that is Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau's Trophy. That is, if they are in any fit state after ex-conflict photographer Kate Brooks has put them through the emotional wringer in The Last Animals, which is showing in London under the Dochouse banner.

Having purchased illegal ivory and rhino horn products in Mong La on the Chinese border with Myanmar, Nie Khe in Vietnam and Vientiane in Laos, Kate Brooks introduces herself as a war correspondent who almost lost her faith in humanity after witnessing the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Syria. While in Africa, her spirits were briefly boosted by the sight of a column of elephants crossing a river. But the conflicts across the continent are threatening some of the noblest species on the planet with extinction and Brooks sets out to show how close we are to an environmental calamity, while also seeking to expose how the poachers are in cahoots with warlords, drug smugglers and people traffickers.

Yusuf Gulisho takes care of the baby rhinos at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya and he introduces Brooks to a four year-old orphan named Hope. The animals whimpers as it nuzzles up to the camera and enjoys getting caked in mud. But Brooks isn't seeking to anthropomorphise the creature, as she is pointing out how imperilled it is from poachers who will stop at nothing to procure a commodity whose current value exceeds that of gold. Across the other side of the world, Nola lives peacefully at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which has an excellent record for rescuing struggling species and returning them to the wild. But there are only five Nortthern White Rhinos left and Jane Kennedy reveals that the Sumatran (100), Javan (60), Great-Horned (2100), Black (500) and Southern White (20,000) breeds are also in danger of disappearing over the next 20 years.

The last Northern White in the Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo was seen in 2007 and Colonel Jacques Lusengo now heads an army unit to protect the dwindling elephant stocks. Brooks goes on patrol with them and sees some villagers being arrested for killing an elephant. She joins park ranger Taligo Tengu who says they are at war with Sudanese People's Liberation Army and the Lord's Resistance Army and we see a suspect being gently interrogated back at base. Gretchen Peters of the Satao Project reveals that these are invariably poor people, who are either coerced or bribed into poaching by guerilla leaders, who are themselves in league with traffickers and exporters like Baktash Akasha and Feisal Mohammed Ali. Major Jean-Claude Mambo Marindo shows her evidence that a Ugandan military helicopter was possibly involved with a mass attack on elephants in the park, but there was no way of making a conclusive accusation, as the bigwigs have contacts in the East African establishment.

At the University of Washington in Seattle, Dr Sam Wasser has become an expert in using DNA to trace the source of ivory and rhino horn seizures and he tells Brooks that Vietnam has become a major hub in the illegal trade. She journeys to Hanoi and easily manages to find dealers in jewellery, health products and souvenirs and she wonders why the authorities turn a blind eye to them when they are supposedly backing the `I'm a Little Rhino' campaign to teach the younger generation about the myths surrounding rhino horn. Brooks also goes to Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic to see Nabiré, another of the Northern Whites in captivity. Keeper Jan Zdarek explains that she is under the weather, while Lenka Vagnerova reports on how her father, Josef Vagner, had brought six Northern Whites to Europe because he felt Africa could not be trusted to protect them. But, as archivist Zdenak Cermak intimates, the programme of replenishing stocks failed because the animals struggled to breed in an unfamiliar environment.

In 2009, an attempt was made to take two Czech females to Kenya to breed and Batian Craig from the Ol Pejeta Convervancy introduces us to Najin and Fatu and explains how they have been dehorned to make them less of a target and how a security cordon has been set up around them in the hope of cross-breeding them with Southern White males. However, in trying to dehorn and tag a male, Craig and his team sent it into shock and it dies on camera, with mournful strings playing on the soundtrack. As Craig insists, there will always be risks, but the species would be doomed without some form of positive human intervention.

Brooks heads to Geneva to examine the work being done by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. She recalls the 1979 global moratorium on ivory trading, but notes that CITES allowed Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana to make a one-off sale to Japan in 1989, while another followed to allow South Africa to sell to China and Japan. However, the sums involved prompted a poaching epidemic and Dr Paula Kahumbu of Wild Direct deplores the decision to circumvent the ban and the death of one of the Garamba rangers shows the price that ordinary Africans are paying for the greed of the traders. Combat trainer Patrick Duboscq laments the meagre resources at the disposal of those seeking to protect the elephants and worries that increasing casualty numbers will see a decline in recruitment.

Wasser goes to examine some confiscated contraband in Singpore and is appalled by how many baby elephants are being slaughtered for tiny tusks. He flies to Geneva to address CITES and identifies areas in Gabon and Tanzania where the bulk of the poaching is taking place and suggests that clampdowns here and in the Kenyan port of Mombasa would do much to disrupt the illegal trade. However, Brooks sees the reality of the situation while filming Faisal Mohammed Ali's trial, as even though Peters and Kahumbu are convinced that he is behind animal, human and drug rackets, his lawyers are confident of convincing the jury that he has no case to answer.

Following the death of Nabiré, attention switches to Nola, who is also showing signs of fading. Brooks muses that a species that has roamed the planet for millions of years is down to its final four representatives, while the Garamba elephant population has decreased from 22,000 to 1200 in her lifetime. The security unit has its successes, however, as Duboscq co-ordinates an operation to capture SPLA troops who have taken hostages in a village within the park. Three men are captured and Lusengo ensures that a deceased poacher is buried with a semblance of human dignity. Shortly afterwards, however, he was killed in an ambush and Brooks stresses the ruthlessness of the conflict they are waging.

Prince William refers to this incident during a speech about the ivory smuggling in China and he tells Brooks that enough is known about the trade to stop it. But legal markets exist in China and the United States and senior WWF official Crawford Allan deplores Washington's reluctance to impose a ban. Senator Senator Raymond J. Lesniak echoes his frustration and suggests that states might have to go it alone to shame legislators into passing a federal law, as they even seem resistant to evidence linking poaching to terrorism.

Following the death of Nola, the Northern Whites at Ol Pejeta become more important than ever and Thomas Hildebrandt and Robert Hermes arrives to examine Najin and Fatu to find out what they are failing to conceive. They discover that their fertility levels are low and, with the last male Sudan having poor sperm quality, the species is doomed. As Hermes concludes, all we can do now is watch them die out. But regeneration efforts are being made at the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine, using Nabiré's stem cells, while Wasser attends the burning of Kenya's stockpile of confiscated horns and tusks and hopes that this symbolic highlighting of the pointless death of 10,000 elephants will do something to change attitudes.

Brooks signs off by hoping that her film will play some part in preventing selfish humanity from becoming the last animal on earth. But, the staggering statistic that over 100,000 elephants and 5000 rhinos perished while she was working on the documentary reveals the magnitude of the crisis and the extent to which time is running out much more quickly than we could ever have anticipated. She also uses captions to note that 44 US states are considering bans and to commend President Obama for signing an executive order outlawing the bulk of commercial trading of African elephant ivory in advance of a CITES vote in October 2016 to close all domestic markets. Yet, one in five of all species still faces extinction and Brooks is right to urge all viewers to lobby their governments to help combat poaching and climate change. Indeed, there is no doubting her sincerity and commitment in producing a clarion cry that avoids sentiment and hectoring in expressing heartfelt sadness at the folly of human behaviour. She also does well to step back after establishing her credentials in order to keep the focus on the crisis on the ground. At times, Paloma Estevez's score strains too hard for elegiac effect. But the speakers avoid emotive rhetoric, while editors Brian Antone and Brian Lazarte exercise laudable restraint in depicting the majesty and vulnerability of the animals, as well as the courage of those who strive to protect them. Inevitably, the tone becomes advocatory in places, but this is a worthy cause and Brooks succeeds in enlightening as well as exhorting.