Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 23/11/2017)

As in the case of L'Iceberg (2005), Rumba (2008) and The Fairy (2011), the emphasis is firmly on the kind of gentle knockabout perfected by Jacques Tati that allows sight gags to emerge at their own pace from a storyline pitching an innocent into a mean-spirited world. Played with a combination of burlesque beauty and deadpan insouciance and, in its own subtle way, bitingly satirical, this is, quite simply, an unmissable delight.

Forty-eight years after Martha (Emmanuelle Riva) told her young niece Fiona (Emmy Boissard Paumelle) that she was leaving their small Canadian community to live in Paris, a letter arrives from Monsieur Martin (Philippe Martz) informing Fiona (Fiona Gordon) that he find a letter addressed to her in a rubbish bin. Now working as a librarian, Fiona has to endure a howling gale and a flurry of snow as the postwoman (Céline Laurentie) braves the elements to make her delivery. She lingers as Fiona reads that Aunt Martha needs her help, as she doesn't want to be put in a home when she is perfectly capable of looking after herself. That said, a cutaway reveals that the 88 year-old walked right past the postbox to deposit the letter in a waste bin and Fiona feels she has no option but to fly to Europe.

Carrying a large red rucksack topped with a Canadian flag in the Métro, Fiona bumps into Bob (Frédéric Meert) and discovers that he is a Mountie on an exchange programme, as she struggles up the stairs while he glides along on an escalator. They wave across the empty platforms before Fiona catches the train to visit her aunt. There is no reply at her apartment, however, and Fiona manages to fall off a bridge while a jogger (Guillaume Delvingt) takes her picture beside the Eiffel Tower. She is fished out of the Seine by the crew of a bateau mouche and sails down river oblivious to the fact that the jogger is running along the bank in an effort to return her phone.

Back at Martha's place, Fiona learns from Martin that her aunt has been behaving oddly of late and had twice kissed him on the staircase in order to hide from her carer, Madame Gentil (Françoise Lauwerie). But he has no idea of her whereabouts and regrets that most of Martha's friends have passed away. Meanwhile, on the banks of the river beside the Statue of Liberty, a homeless man named Dom (Dominique Abel) wakes from a nice snooze in her tent. He urinates off the embankment and is photographed by tourists on the boat carrying Fiona into the city. Smoking a discarded cigarette butt, he goes searching for food in the wheelie bin outside a floating restaurant and is about to enjoy a roasted pepper when it is whisked out of his hand by an angler casting his line. Snipping the line with scissors, Dom follows the floating pepper downstream and almost become entangled with the various people minding their own business in his path.

At journey's end, Dom spots Fiona's haversack and fishes it out of the water, just as she is reporting the loss of her passport and belongings to an official at the Canadian Embassy (Olivier Parenty). He offers her a meal voucher and she uses it at the same péniche where the newly spruced Dom is spending the money he found inside her handbag. The portier (Fabrice Milich) makes him wear a tie on top of the yellow sweater he found in Fiona's luggage, while the waiter seats him at a table next to the toilet door. It is also positioned beside the sound system speakers and the DJ (Jean Loison) has to scramble over Dom in order to run a wire to his deck.

As the music begins to play, the bass resonates so deeply that it makes Dom bounce in his chair and he turns the speaker away so that a mother (Annabelle Cocollos), father (Bruno Romy) and daughter (Mika Romy Cocollos) dining at the next table begin to bounce too. Keen to dance, Dom goes from table to table seeking a partner and wakes the dozing Fiona, who is swept on to the floor for an eccentric tango that ends with Dom asking Fiona if she is a professional dancer. She tries to make her excuses to leave, but Dom orders three bottles of champagne and offers to walk her home. But, as he pays the bill, Fiona recognises her handbag and falls into the Seine again in trying to wrest it from Dom's grasp. The champagne bottles bob in the water, as Fiona dries off aboard Le Maxim's and makes another call to Martha's apartment. But there is no answer and she is forced to spend the night at a launderette, while Dom tears the photo out of her passport and realises he is in lover. Fiona's fortunes change slightly next morning, however, as her rucksack is handed in at the Embassy. But she is not best pleased to see Dom and he has to hide behind a newspaper (and peer through a hole in the page burned with his cigarette) in order to eavesdrop on an African dishwasher (Balla Gagny Diop) at a café near Martha's apartment breaking the bad news that she has died and that her funeral will take place later that morning at Père Lachaise. He gives her directions, but Dom helps guide her to the cemetery, even though she has ordered him to stop following her.

He steals a yellow flower to take to the chapel, where they are greeted by the woman officiating at the service (Brigitte Lucas). She asks Fiona to say a few words. But, while she declines, Dom comes to the microphone and launches into a tirade in which he brands Martha a penny-pinching racist who hated the homeless. Having not understood a word, Fiona applauds gently when he finishes speaking, while the deceased's agent, Cyril (Salifou Bangoura), expresses his shock at discovering this side of his client's personality. As they attend a small reception, however, it becomes clear that they are at the wrong funeral and the flustered Fiona knocks over a candlestick as she beats a retreat.

Her departure, however, coincides with the arrival of her aunt and we flashback to Martha lifting hand weights in the window of her apartment. When Madame Gentil calls, however, she fears she is going to try to put her in a nursing home and does a bunk. She dodges policemen in the street and wanders towards the river, where she encounters Dom searching through Fiona's bag. Martha trades a pair of heart-shaped earrings for a jar that reminds her of home and she polishes off the contents before throwing up behind a tree. Forgetting where she lives, she sleeps under a bridge, where she is found by the stray dog that has been following Dom around. On waking, she sees an article in the newspaper announcing the funeral of her friend, Marthe (Sarah Bensoussan) and she sets off for the cemetery, as Dom recognises Martha from the photograph that Fiona shows him at the reception.

While Dom finds a screwdriver to remove the lid of the casket before it descends to the furnace, Fiona tries to hold open the lift doors. However, they both end up stuck, as he gets his tie caught in the lid and she gets her face squashed by the closing doors. As they try to extricate themselves, Martha runs into her old friend Norman (Pierre Richard) and they sit on a bench to do a joyously improbable soft-shoe routine to `Little Man You've Had a Busy Day' before his carer from the nursing home tracks him down. Inside the chapel, Fiona is worried that Dom has been accidentally incinerated when Cyril hands her the urn containing Marthe's ashes and he confesses that no one has any idea where Dom has gone.

In fact, he had been rescued by Gabriel the cremator (Grégory Legeai) and Fiona slaps him for making her so worried. Guided by a blind man (Marc Le Gall), Fiona finds a police station, where Bob the Mountie is based. They gain access to Martha's apartment, just as Martin is collecting some clean clothes to take to his neighbour, who is hiding out in the launderette. Seeing the cops arrive, she scarpers and finds herself down by the Statue of Liberty, as Dom polishes off the champagne bottles he had found floating in the river. They chat about Fiona, who is looking through a photo album and piecing together how Martha, Marthe and Norman once danced together under the name Le Trio. As they sleep, the screen splits to show Fiona and Dom dreaming of each other. However, Marthe is lying beside Dom and when he kisses her thinking she is her niece, she responds with enthusiasm and the tent lifts off the ground as they canoodle. Creeping outside for a post-coital cigarette, Martha finds Fiona's phone in a dustbin and calls her apartment. Fiona answers and is surprised to hear that her aunt has been drinking champagne and making love with a handsome man. But they are cut off when a police patrol passes and Martha tosses the phone away.

Wearing only a nightdress, Fiona takes a taxi to the Île aux Cygnes and pays with the coins inside Martha's piggy bank. She is dismayed to discover that Dom has slept with her aunt, but realises he is her best hope of finding Martha and allows him to tear a strip off the nightie so that his canine companion can get the scent. The dog takes them to a ladder propped up against a tree and this leads to the lower levels of the Eiffel Tower. As they take the lift to the observation deck, Dom and Fiona kiss. But she apologises for her impulsive action and goes off in search of her aunt. However, she soon requires Dom's assistance again, when the ladder she is climbing comes away from its mooring and he catches her and teeters along a girder so that she can ascend to the aerial deck, where Martha is sleeping soundly.

They embrace and laugh when Martha finds a twig caught in her clothing. She tells Fiona that Dom is a nice man, but calls him Norman when they sit on a ledge and watch the sunrise over the city. However, this turns out to be Martha's last hurrah and it rains so hard when Dom, Fiona and Martin gather by the Statue of Liberty to scatter her ashes that the biodegradable urn turns to mush in Dom's hands and he tosses it unceremoniously into the Seine. Fiona turns to say goodbye and Dom kisses her on both cheeks. But she decides to stay a little longer so that he can teach her French.

Few films generate laughter with such regularity, ingenuity and whimsicality as those of this inspired duo. The Australian Gordon exploits her gawky elasticity to beguiling effect, while Abel tempers his Hulotian naiveté with a touch of Chaplinesque rascality. But their comedy is always rooted in character and milieu, even when the pratfalls seem gleefully contrived. They are also generous in portioning out the gags, with the peerless Emmanuelle Riva (in her penultimate picture) and fellow veteran Pierre Richard (in a role originally intended for Pierre Étaix) revelling in their gleeful bit of sedentary business at Père Lachaise.

Such landmarks occur regularly, but there's nothing touristy about Claire Childeric and Jean-Christophe Leforestier's photography, as they follow the madcap antics with the discretion one associates with a Fred and Ginger dance number. Abel and Gordon once again prove themselves to be accomplished dancers, while their splendid choice of soundtrack music is encapsulated by the recurring use of Kate and Anna McGarrigle's version of `Swimming Song'. Let's hope we don't have to wait six more years for their next outing.

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, Marie Noëlle's Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge is a respectful, but conventional biopic that departs from the cosy romanticism of the many previous film and television tributes to show how the Polish-born physicist survived after the death of her beloved husband and workmate. Several fine actresses have played Marie Curie, including Greer Garson in Mervyn Le Roy's Madame Curie (1943), Jane Lapotaire in the BBC series Marie Curie (1977), Marie-Christine Barrault in the French mini-series Marie Curie, une femme honourable (1991), Isabelle Huppert in Claude Pinoteau's Les Palmes de M. Schutz (1997), Elisabeth Duda in Krzysztof Rogulski's Dans les pas de Marie Curie (2011) and Dominique Reymond in Alain Brunard's Marie Curie, une femme sur le front (2014). But this is the first account to focus exclusively on the period 1903-11, when Curie found her reputation as both a woman and a scientist coming under attack from fin-de-siècle hypocrites and chauvinists.

Shortly after the birth of her second child, Marie Curie (Karolina Gruszka) accompanies her husband, Pierre (Charles Berling), to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize. He speaks on their behalf in hoping that their work will bring about peace rather than the war that Alfred Nobel has seemingly made easier to wage through his invention of dynamite. During the course of his lecture, Pierre shouts down those countering his claim that radium might prove useful in the treatment of cancer. But, even though the couple are introduced to the Swedish king, it's clear that Marie is a lone woman in a male-dominated field and that her opinions and achievements are only valued if expressed by or credited to Pierre.

Hurrying back to Paris, the Curies are met at the station by their daughter, Irène (Sasha Crapanzano), Pierre's father, Eugène (André Wilms), and their laboratory assistant, André Debierne (Malik Zidi), who takes a flier from a young woman trying to drum up support for a demonstration about the separation of Church and State. The pair are so eager to return to their radium that they get up in the middle of the night to gaze upon it in stylised bluish light. Next morning, they tend to a patient, who is wearing an experimental collar to gauge the effect of radium on a cancerous growth on his neck. But Marie has no time for Gustave Téry (Samuel Finzi), the editor of L'Oeuvre, who wants to know how it feels to be famous.

Marie is worried about civil unrest in her native Poland and Pierre's health. But he seems in good spirits as he drinks wine with his father, Marie, André and Paul Langevin (Arieh Worthalter), a colleague whose petty-bourgeois wife, Jeanne (Marie Denarnaud), wishes he would make more money so that they can give their children the perfect upbringing. Pierre dotes on Irène and two year-old Eve (Emma Pokromska) and fusses over them before heading out on the rainy morning of 19 April 1906. But he fails to return, as he is hit by a carriage on Rue Delphine and Marie prostrates herself on top of his body, as he lies in the morgue. She also puts yellow flowers in his hands, while his father ties his boots, as he is laid out on the table at home before his funeral.

Marie collapses at the graveside during the modest funeral that leaves fellow physicist Emile Amagat (Daniel Olbrychski) wondering how she will cope without Pierre to open doors for her. She returns to the lab to burn his clothes in the stove and reminisce about how they used to work at equations on their blackboard. Her sister, Bronia (Izabela Kuna), urges her to return to Warsaw, as she will always be an outsider in Paris. But Marie can't leave the lab they shared and tells Eugène that she is determined to isolate radium in its pure metal form and build the institute that Pierre had hoped would cement their legacy.

She tries to relax with the children and they sit in a sun-dappled field. But she sobs on the stairs outside their bedroom, as she feels so alone without Pierre and worries for their future if she cannot further her research. However, Amagat and the Dean of the Sorbonne (Artur Dziurman) are dead set against Marie taking over Pierre's classes and, when Langevin tries to calm her down and introduce her to Ernest Solway (Jan Frytz), she is too furious to listen and storms out. In order to ensure that Irène and Eve have a better chance to compete equally, she enlists the help of Debierne and Langevin to tutor the children of her social circle and they start to learn while having fun.

Her next audience proves less easy to impress, however, as Marie lectures at the Sorbonne, with many of her male peers willing her to fail. Moreover, Jeanne is concerned that her husband is spending too much time with the Polish widow and notes Langevin's pride in Marie's performance with a peevish shrug. Yet Marie dismisses his congratulations and admonishes him for being late with his contribution to a paper they are writing. Indeed, all she does is work, when her thoughts are not alternating between lonely walks in a bleak expressionist wilderness and cosy sessions burning the midnight oil with Pierre at their partner desks. She curses the failure of her lab equipment and ignores Debierne's words of encouragement when she complains that she is becoming stupid without Pierre to guide her. However, she manages to inspire her students at the Sorbonne and Langevin is keen for her to attend a conference that Solway is organising to discuss the great scientific ideas of the day. She shows him some radium glowing as a pale blue substance in the bottom of a test tube and swerves away from his beard, as he close in for a kiss. Instead, she turns on the light and rushes off to the pharmacy to get some medicine for the ailing Eugène. But she gets home to fine Irène (Rose Montron) and Eve (Adele Schmitz) - who are now 15 and seven - waiting to tell her that grandpa had a fall.

As he dies shortly afterwards, we must be in 1910 and - following a brief scene in which Jeanne complains to Langevin that Marie is exploiting him and has no idea how to deal with real life - we are swept away to the Belgian coast for the famous Solway Conference. A line of figures dressed from head to toe in black is seen processing along the beach through the hazy sunlight. The effect is akin to a Jack Vettriano painting and the assembled scientists bandy around jargon that will be meaningless to the vast majority of the audience. She is introduced to Albert Einstein (Piotr Glowacki), who declares her the most intelligent woman he has ever met and Langevin is jealous when he makes her laugh while teasing Téry, who has come to the seaside in the hope of landing a scoop.

The camera flits and swoops around the conference table, as Solway echoes Marie's hopes that their discoveries can be put to peaceful purposes. But Amagat hisses to his cronies about her coldness and Langevin accuses him of being a misogynist snob, as he sits down beside Marie and Einstein puzzling over a problem. He is amused by how smitten the German is and pleased when Marie thanks him for making her laugh. She suggests they go for a swim and they strip down to their undies and plunge into a freezing cold North Sea that suddenly become magically blue and tranquil when filmed from beneath the surface. But Téry notices them returning up the beach in time for them to join their fellow delegates for a memorial photograph.

Back in Paris, bitter reality hits Langevin in the form of a slap from his wife when Jeanne bursts into his classroom wearing an enormous bonnet to reprimand him for turning down a well-paid job in industry. She bemoans the fact that she has to slave to feed six mouths while he thinks more about theories than he does his own children. He orders her to leave because she is of no use to him and Jeanne struts out in disgust. Marie sees her bustling down the corridor, but she chooses to follow Langevin to his rooms across the courtyard. She seems to have been previously oblivious to their existence and, as he opens the shutters to let the sunshine in, she accepts a glass of wine. This lowers her inhibitions and, no sooner have their fingers touched, than they are kissing so passionately that Marie feels obliged to let her hair down. She is surprised that she is still capable of such intimacy and returns home to celebrate with a slug of vodka and a pickled gherkin.

The next morning, Marie wakes between her daughters to the sound of tweeting birds. She bathes naked (instead of in her slip) and puts on a white dress to watch the girls playing in the sunny garden. But Bronia is worried that she is biting off more than she can chew by having an affair with a married man and warns her that there is nothing like the scorn of a wounded wife. Debierne is equally concerned, as Marie would rather moon over a bouquet of flowers from her lover than attend to the serious business of applying to the French Academy of Sciences. Although she scribbles distractedly between love-making sessions and feasts of wild plums and camembert, Langevin makes her giddy with love when he calls her `my beaming radium queen'. He also writes a touching tribute to Pierre and Marie is thrilled when the book is published.

But Jeanne is aware of Langevins affair with the `Polish whore' and pleads with him not to throw away everything they have worked for. She also confronts Marie with a knife on a quiet footpath and warns her that her errant husband always comes home after his latest dalliance. When Marie next sees Langevin, he has a cut on his face. But Jeanne is only getting started and she contacts Téry in the hope that he will publish a story that will expose Marie as a Jewish homewrecker. However, Téry becomes guarded after her anti-Semitic slur and he advises Jeanne to be careful with her accusations.

Amagat makes a clumsy attempt to offer Marie support at the Academy in retun for sexual favours, but she spurns him and he exacts his revenge by blocking her election by claiming that she has achieved nothing since Pierre died. Worse follows when Langevin discovers that Jeanne has stolen his letters from Marie and he admits during the ensuing argument that he has never had any intention of ending his marriage. Steaming with indignation, Marie gets home to find the Swedish ambassador waiting to inform her that she has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Bronia helpfully declares that this makes her the first dual recipient in history.

The following morning, however, the press gathered outside the Curie gate are solely interested in L'Oeuvre's front-page article on her adultery and she leaves the children with Bronia to board up her laboratory from the stone-throwing bigots who will inevitably follow. As they put up the shutters, Debierne informs Marie that he is going to stand as Langevin's second in a pistol duel with Téry and she rushes to the Sorbonne to plead with her lover to risk the embarrassment of a divorce rather than his life in the name of misguided honour. However, he refuses to drag the mother of his children through the courts and hisses that he knows he can never live up to Pierre's high standards as a scientist and a man.

Voices echo in her head as she rides in a car through crowds of angry people before Marie climbs over the fence to return to her daughters. Irène is baffled by the outpouring of bile, while Eve plays a defiant piece on the piano before joining the group hug. Bronia promises they will get through this unpleasant business and they drink through the night before Marie arrives in time to see Téry fire into the air because he cannot deprive France of one of its greatest minds. Marie and Langevin kiss urgently under a tree, only for her to hurry away when he resists her suggestion that they make their relationship public. She is equally irate when the Swedish ambassador forbids her from travelling to Stockholm because her prize has been withheld because of the scandal. Fighting to retain her composure, Marie protests that she is being discriminated against as a woman and sneers that the Academy would never be able to make any awards if candidates were judged on their marital fidelity.

Having thanked Debierne for standing by her, Marie goes to Sweden and tosses a bouquet of flowers out of her hotel window before collapsing on the bed. She accepts Téry's apology before collecting her award with Irène at her side. They walk along a corridor away from the camera until Irène turns to shoot an accusing glare. As their figures merge and become an abstract blur as the screen whites out, captions reveal that Irène won the Nobel Prize herself in 1935 and that Marie and Langevin's physicist grandchildren, Hélène and Michel, married in 1950. Marie died in 1934, but her remains were only placed alongside Pierre in the Pantheon in 1995, even though Langevin had been there since 1948.

The point is well made and Noëlle and co-scenarist Andrea Stoll rightly condemn the patriarchal prejudice that Marie Curie had to endure during a period of unprecedented scientific achievement. But closing credit inserts showing Marie and Langevin walking in period costume through modern-day Paris also reinforce the deleterious effect that Noëlle's stylistic stridency has on her story. The opening sequence sets the tone, with the glaringly sunlit imagery being manipulated to convey the wooziness Marie feels before going into labour. But the abrupt cuts used to get Marie and Pierre to Stockholm are as self-conscious as the flashbulb freeze frame that returns the action to Paris. Thenceforth, Noëlle employs a panoply of split screens, distortions, reflections, camera follows, wipes and soft-focus reveries that seem to have no purpose outside their deliberate self-reflexivity.

Notwithstanding such visual flamboyance, the drama itself is almost novelettishly conventional, as Noëlle disregards any conspicuous dating that might help us contextualise Curie's career and dots the drab romance with scientific buzz words that are never explained in any meaningful manner. Thus, we wind up watching shadows dancing rather than historical figures making epochal discoveries. Even the social critique is blunted, as the foes confronting Marie are little more than caricatures, while the comparisons between her attitudes and those of Jeanne Langevin often feel patronising and facile.

Karolina Gruszka is suitably committed as Marie, but she is often required to do little more than fix her face and walk quickly rather than express cogent opinions or explore her psychological state. Arieh Worthalter ably conveys the caddish side of Langevin, particularly in his dealings with Marie Denarnaud's one-dimensional Jeanne. But he lacks charm and any sense of identity as a great thinker in his own right, whereas Piotr Glowacki is allowed to play Einstein as an impish scientific superstar who alone matches Marie in his modernity.

Reprising the role of Pierre Curie that he had played opposite Isabelle Huppert in Les Palmes de M. Schutz, Charles Berling barely registers before his demise and Daniel Olbrychski's Amagat, Malik Zidi's Debierne and Samuel Finzi's Téry prove just as sketchy. But even more Third Republic worthies go unidentified during the Sorbonne, Solway and Academy sequences, as they spout the kind of pompous platitudes that characterised the biopics of leading scientists and inventors that were produced in Hollywood in the 1930s. Eduard Krajewski's production design and Christophe Pidre and Florence Scholtes's costumes are admirable, but Michal Englert's photography and Bruno Coulais's score do little to counter the impression that this is more a series of jittery vignettes than a considered study of Marie Curie's life and legacy.

Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson has earned quite a reputation with his short films. Between them, Þröng sýn (2005), Jeffrey & Beth (2000), Whale Valley (2013) and Ártún (2014) have won over 50 awards at festivals around the world. In making his feature bow with Heartstone, however, Guðmundsson appears to have forgotten any lessons learned about brevity being the soul of wit, as he allows his vaguely autobiographical coming out saga to sprawl, to the detriment of its delicately poised storyline.

Fourteen year-olds Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Christian (Blær Hinriksson) are best pals in a remote Icelandic coastal community. While lazing down by the jetty with Mangi (Theodór Pálsson) and Guðjón (Sveinn Sigurbjörnsson), they see a shoal of fish swimming beneath their feet and dash the brains of the unfortunate creatures against the mooring posts in a frenzy of mindless violence. Thor tramples on a bullroot simply because it's ugly and is peeved when his mother, Hulda (Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir), isn't more grateful when he brings home a box of battered fish. However, he is even more put out when older sisters Rakel (Jónína Þórdís Karlsdóttir) and Hafdis (Rán Ragnarsdóttir) taunt him about being Christian's boyfriend and try to steal his towel and lock him outside after he has been using hair from their brushes to give himself a merkin.

Embarrassed at seeing his father, Sigurður (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson), in a drunken stupor on the street, Christian takes Thor to the graveyard for abandoned vehicles, where they enjoy smashing windows and kicking panelwork. They also climb into the cab of a lorry and threaten to touch each other before they are forced to hide from Ginger (Daniel Hans Erlendsson) and his pals, who have come to shoot seabirds with a rifle. Walking back to town, they discuss the rumour that Ginger has slept with Beth (Diljá Valsdóttir) and they try to act cool when she comes to the local café with her friend, Hanna (Katla Njálsdóttir). However, the owner, Ásgeir (Gunnar Jónsson), likes to keep in with Ginger and his cronies and is about to tell them about Thor being caught without his towel when they draw attention to the pornography he is watching behind the counter.

Angry with Rakel for snooping while he masturbates in their shared bedroom, Thor tries to strike up a conversation with Hafdis. However, she is busy painting and he decides to call for Christian. They mooch around with Mangi and Guðjón, whose father has been in a fight with Sigurður. When Beth and Hanna tell them that the water is nice at the local heated pool, the four friends go for a swim. However, Christian has to protect Thor when the others try to pull down his trunks to expose the fact he has no pubic hair.

Over supper, Hafdis gets upset when Rakel mocks the sombre poem she has written and Hulda tries to keep order, even though she finds her daughter's artistic intensity a little odd. Thor avoids helping with the dishes to hang out with Christian and he gets embarrassed when they play a kissing game with Beth and Hanna on the football pitch. Christian starts to conduct a sham marriage ceremony and Beth admits that she might be open to dating Thor if he made some money. The girls invite the pair back to Beth's house for a secret sleepover and they wait nervously as Beth and Hanna put on some make-up. They play a truth or dare game and, having been made to French kiss, the girls insist that Thor and Christian do the same. The former is happy to give the latter a peck on the lips. But Christian is uncomfortable and sulks on the other side of the room.

Ashamed to have wet the bed in the night, Thor leaves early and stomps home in the rain. Hulda orders him to throw away the box of rotting fish and he hurls it into the river, along with his stained underpants. Christian is left to take the blame and he hisses his annoyance when he calls round that evening. As usual, Thor is being teased by Rakel and Hafdis and the latter persuades the boys to let her paint their faces and pose them topless for a drawing. Rakel looks on with scornful amusement, as Christian's hand begins to tremble because of its proximity to Thor's chest. As soon as Hafdis has finished sketching, they rush out into the rain and joke about how pretty they look. But Christian goes home to look at himself in the mirror and is turned on by what he sees.

The following morning, Rakel and Hafdis make known their displeasure that Hulda has been out on a date. Hafdis reads a scathing poem, while Rakel gets into a skirmish with her mother and pulls her hair because she is embarrassing them. However, Hulda feels she has a right to a life of her own, especially as their father left them for a lover half his age. Meanwhile, Christian's mother, Thordis (Nanna Kristín Magnúsdóttir), chides Sigurður for the homophobic baiting that has prompted Guðjón's father to move to the city. He tells her to mind her own business and takes a beer from the fridge. So, she asks Christian to take on the farm chores he had been hired to do because they need the money. Thor lends a hand, as they load hay bales and help Sven (Søren Malling) with his sheep. However, his flock has been attacked by a ravenous dog and he has to shoot the animals that have been bitten. He asks Thor about Hulda and hands him a necklace to give to her and the boy blushes with humiliation.

He gives the necklace to Beth and she invites him to go camping near the lake. They take two of Sven's horses (without permission) and Thor clings on to Beth as the ride across the rocky countryside. The boys steal fence posts to build a bonfire and Beth and Thor go for a walk, leaving Hanna and Christian to kiss in the tent. He is hesitant, however, and is relieved when the others return. But, when he hears Thor and Beth kissing, he coughs with disapproval and they giggle and settle down to sleep.

The next morning, Christian goes for a swim in the lake and plunges under the water, as he tries to work out what he feels for Thor and why he isn't attracted to Hanna. He fetches the girls, who are splashing him when Sven and Sigurður come looking for them. Sven reassures Thor that he is not bothered about them borrowing the horses, but Sigurður lays into Christian and he bawls at Hanna to stop touching him when he runs to the tent sobbing. On returning home, he is beaten and has to listen to Thordis being abused for defending him. But he is powerless to protect her and paces his bedroom in furious frustration.

By means of punishment, Sven makes Thor and Christian muck out the stables. Thor mentions that Beth has invited him to the town dance and Christian is dubious when he suggests that they get some alcohol. They tussle in the mud and Christian rolls on top of Thor and kisses him. He insists he was joking, but his friend isn't entirely convinced. The plan is for Thor to sneak in and let the other three in through the back door. But he is so horrified to see his mother dancing with Sven that he pretends he couldn't sneak them in. Instead, they return home, where Rakel and Hafdis are throwing a party for their friends. Ginger finds the painting that Hafdis has done of Thor and Christian wearing make-up and a fight breaks out before Rakel orders everyone to leave.

The following morning, Rakel and Hafdis take Hulda to task for bringing Sven home and inform her that she is regarded as a whore for having anything to do with the ageing Dane. She promises to make him leave before anyone can see him and Thor beats a retreat to the beach. Christian comes to find him and vows vengeance on Ginger for showing everyone the painting. Sigurður wants them to help his collect eggs from the nests perched on the cliff face and he reassures Thor that he will be safe. As he climbs back up, however, the rope slips and he slips down the rock and clings to Christian when he is hauled back over the top. But, while feeling relief at being in his friend's embrace, Thor is also discomfited by it and he tells Christian that they can only remain pals if he stops acting so weirdly.

Thor goes to see Beth and they experiment under the covers. He feels good about himself and flops on to the long grass on the way home. However, Christian has fled another parental squabble and Hafdis invites him in to wait for Thor. She shows him her sketchbook and intimates that she would have no problem with him if he turned out to be gay. Affronted and afraid, Christian rushes out and howls with pain in Sven's stables at the thought of becoming a pariah without Thor to support him. A shot rings out and Sven goes to investigate.

Snow has fallen overnight and Thor and his sisters are excited. However, news comes that Christian has tried to kill himself and Thor takes to his bed, as he blames himself for his friend's unhappiness. Eventually, Hulda forces him to go outside and he insults Beth when she asks him if Christian is gay. Consequently, she asks Hanna to return the necklace when Thor goes to the café and he uses it to slash Ginger across the face when he struts in and begins making homophobic remarks. They fight before Ásgeir separates them and Thor sprints across the fields to see Christian, who has just returned from hospital. However, Thordis refuses to let him in and he storms home to smash up the bathroom and weep bitter and confused tears.

Impressed by the way Thor had stood up to Ginger, Beth reassures him that they are still friends. She has heard that Christian is moving to Reykjavik because his parents are getting divorced and she agrees to distract Thordis so that Thor can climb through Christian's window. He sits on the bed and they clasp hands, as Thor asks if Christian is really leaving. But, while he nods, he refuses to explain what happened on the night of his `accident', and Thor only has time to kiss him on the forehead before Thordis comes knocking at the bedroom door. He goes to the jetty and sees a boy catch a bullrout while fishing. As it's such an ugly fish, the kid throws it back and Thor knows how it feels, as it sinks into the murky cold water.

Bringing the same feel for the Icelandic countryside that illuminated Grímur Hákonarson's Rams (2015), Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen makes a magnificent job of photographing the forbiddingly beautiful scenery that plays such a crucial role in this affecting rite of passage. However, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson fails to generate a sufficiently strong sense of place to background the fear and loathing that seeps into the story. Apart from a couple of establishing shots, we get little idea of how the community functions socially or economically. Moreover, apart from the odd snippet of gossip, we learn little about the make-up of a population that seems so insular that xenophobia and homophobia are about as commonplace as alcoholism and domestic violence.

Nevertheless, Guðmundsson clearly knows the milieu and the attitudes it fosters. Consequently, this retains its ring of authenticity, even as the rush of events compiled by editors Anne Østerud and Janus Billeskov Jansen and accompanied by Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen's swelling score threatens to tip proceedings into melodrama in the final reel. This is primarily due to the admirably restrained performances of Baldur Einarsson and Blær Hinriksson as Thor and Christian, whose physical contrasts reinforce their odd couple status among their peers. Yet, by having the focus increasingly fall on the former's crisis of manhood, Guðmundsson's sells the latter short and takes the edge off his drastic cry for help. More might have also been made of the part that the girls play in this circle, especially as both Jónína Þórdís Karlsdóttir and Rán Ragnarsdóttir and Diljá Valsdóttir and Katla Njálsdóttir demonstrate a maturity that is noticeably lacking among the boys. It also seems odd to watch a teenpic without any school scenes, as these might have helped fill in some of the environmental gaps in the plot. But, while his scene-setting, characterisation and pacing could do with refining, Guðmundsson judges the emotional tone so well that this always feels more convincing than Jakob M. Erwa's recent adaptation of Andreas Steinhofel's similarly themed YA novel, Centre of My World.

It's been a while since the last attempt to shake up cinema. If there's one thing a study of film history proves, however, it's that absolute novelty has been at a premium since the nouvelle vague prompted new waves across the world in the 1960s. Initiatives like Dogme95 have simply been variations on the self-reflexive theme and the `Hypereal' technique demonstrated in James Carver's debut feature, #Starvecrow, does little more than rejig for the smartphone generation the tenets of the contentious Vow of Chastity that was drawn up by Danes Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.

Billed as the first `selfie' movie, this twist on the `found footage' saga has been edited down from around 70 hours of imagery filmed by the protagonists and mixed with supposedly `hacked' surveillance tapes to fashion a guerilla drama that has been produced with `no crew, no script, no set design, no stylists, no make-up department and no red tape'. It's a bold conceit and Carver and his collaborators deserve credit for trying something new. But, despite its insights into obsession, narcissism, privacy, power and the dehumanising effect of technology, it falls a long way short of the experimental standards set by Sean Baker in Tangerine (2015), Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley's The Darkest Universe, and Alex Taylor's Spaceship (both 2016).

Following intimate footage of a birth, we cut to an extreme close-up of a mouth, as Ben (Ben Willens) boasts of how he has put this film together from hacked phone and CCTV footage. He films everything and we see him using his phone to record himself with his new girlfriend, Lucy (Kelly Hotten). A blur of incidents shows them playing with a turtle, rowing on a lake and fooling around with a street performer before we are introduced to their friends - Josh (Josh Taylor), April (April Robinson) and Buchi (Buchi Osuji) - during various days and nights out drinking. We also meet Ben's ex, Jess (Ashlie Walker), who has just come out of rehab and is trying to ease her way back into normal life. However, she is cross with Ben for not telling him about Lucy and snaps back when he teases her about having a glass of wine.

Ben is seeing a psychiatrist, who objects to him filming their sessions. However, he keeps his phone camera rolling as he explains how he likes to keep a record of things so that he can scroll back and check if his memory fails him. Over footage of Ben smooching with Jess in bed, he reveals that he always thought they would be together for ever and he was shattered when they broke up. As he speaks, we see footage of Jess and Ben in the bath together and him trying to cajole her to come to the country to spend a weekend. However, she insists she has plans with April and Josh and he becomes aggressive in demanding to know whether she is going with someone else and she clearly feels intimidated by his relentless possessiveness.

Ben tells the shrink about some of his dreams, one of which involves a stranger (Jeremy Swift) castrating him, while another sees him flee after somebody knocks on the door and abducts Jess. The music becomes disconcertingly jangly to convey the dislocated state of Ben's dreamscape and he admits to the psychiatrist that he is unhappy with Jess seeming to drift away from him and make her own decisions. He also reveals that he set up surveillance cameras at Josh and April's place in the country to spy on Jess while she was away from him.

At an unspecified time in the storyline, Jess goes to try on a wedding dress with April and Skye (Skye Lourie) and has a crafty cigarette to calm her nerves. However, the real reason for her disquiet is that she has discovered she is pregnant and she is aghast when Ben asks who the father is before demanding that she has an abortion. We cut from this to April and Josh being left alone in the house for the weekend - after being warned to behave themselves by their father, Alastair (David Bark-Jones) - and greeting the friends that arrive in a convoy of cars. Buchi tells a tired joke about the Invisible Man having sex with Wonder Woman, while Josh spooks out a small group while using a Ouija board. Another female guest screams when she ventures out into the woods with Buchi. But the poor quality of the light and the jerkiness of the footage prevents us from seeing what has scared her.

The following day, Josh finds a set of keys that unlocks a caravan in the garden and he uncovers his father's porn stash. He shows some DVDs to the assembled and they laugh and flinch in equal measure at the content and the thought that their own parents might still have sexual desires. Later, they play a truth or dare game. But they are interrupted by three masked figures emerging from the bushes and everyone dashes indoors. However, the intruders wielding axes and other sharp implements force their way into the house and there is blind panic, as a couple of the guests keep filming the invasion.

Trying to escape from Ben's car, Lucy also threatened when he follows her along the road leading to the party house. She looks inside and recoils in horror before running off across the lawn into the woods. Ben catches up with her and seems to be trying to console her before he insults her and bids her goodbye before the screen goes black. An odd array of images follows, with a hooded figure stabbing a snowman and producing red patches on its body, Jess seemingly being abducted and a cute cat devouring a mouse under a chest of drawers.

Back in the psychiatrist's office, Ben explains that he felt there was more going on beneath the surface of his happy-go-lucky friends. So, he decided to delve into the footage they were forever filming (and not being called freaks for doing so, as he is) and he began to find the secrets and lies that their superficial contentment was masking. One of the things he found is a clip showing Buchi having sex with Skye while she is unconscious after a heavy drink-and-drug session. Yet he flirts with her at a party as if nothing untoward had happened. But another video shows Skye sobbing because she is being abused and can't bring herself to tell anyone in case it aggravates her attacker. Buchi also finds himself involved in a card game with April where the loser has to pay a forfeit of having a cheese grater scraped across their nipples. Some time later, Skye gets her own back on Buchi by biting him during oral sex. Elsewhere, Josh rapes a blonde girl who won't remove her top for his camera, while April uses a birthday picnic to accuse him of molesting her during a family holiday in the Caribbean.

Abruptly, we cut back to Jess informing Ben that she is no longer afraid of him and that she is going to keep the baby. A frantic montage follows, in which we see an unkempt Ben struggling to cope alone. Moreover, as Jess has her child, Ben is suffocated while doing heroin and his murder is cross-cut with a flashback to when he first introduced Jess to Lucy and he calls her his sister. A final set of clips shows them as carefree children in the 1980s and leaves us with a sad reflection of how easily innocence can be corrupted.

More a collection of provocations than a cogent narrative, this is undeniably a bold enterprise by an innovative film-maker. Filmed over two years in a bewildering array of locations, the phone footage certainly gives the action a dizzying immediacy and verisimilitude that forces a discomfiting degree of complicity on to the viewer. But, despite the acuity of Steven Bollschweiller's editing and Noel Watson's sound design, the fragments don't always coalesce and, as a consequence, they invariably feel facsimilic rather than authentic. The party sequences are particularly frustrating, as they involve so many characters who pop up without being identified, while the blurry shakicam close-ups often makes it difficult to know exactly what is going on, let alone who is involved. However, there are several problematic passages, including a trio of casually racist messages that are jokily delivered by two of the girls dressed as Arabs, backwater Americans and Jews. As these are presented without context, it's impossible to know what they are supposed to signify and their inclusion reinforces the sense of confusion that comes from us never quite knowing what Ben has genuinely found during his trawling and what is happening in the dreams and imaginings that he mentions during the clumsily integrated session with the psychiatrist.

Ultimately, even in a picture containing semi-scripted scenes (by Carver and David Bark Jones), diegetic logic counts for less than artistic ambition. Thus, Carver and his recklessly courageous cast can only be commended for capturing with such relentless bleakness the chillingly soulless nature of a life-logging millennial existence that makes this fiftysomething feel relieved he is no longer young. But one suspects that the in-your-faceness of hyperealistic selfie cinema means that it is destined to be both a short-lived phenomenon and something of a creative dead-end.

Dashes of the nouvelle vague, Dogme95 and Mumblecore aesthetics have been liberally sprinkled throughout Mercedes Grower's first feature, Brakes. Made over four years on a meagre budget, this collection of improvised sketches appears to be heading into self-indulgence before a change of direction midway through forces the audience to reappraise what they have been watching and give some of the more tiresome characters a second chance. But, for all its debts to Bertholt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, this always feels like a group of pals having a lark and hoping it all turns out right in the end.

Following a snippet from a Skype conversation between Steve Oram and Kelly Campbell and opening credits cross-cutting old movie clips with shots of the characters we are about to meet, a caption proclaims `Part Two'. A cut takes us to the stage door at the National Theatre, where Julian Barratt has brought ice-cream cones as a surprise for actor Oliver Maltman. They seemingly had a fling in Barcelona and Barratt has come to London to continue the relationship. But the married Maltman is aghast and tries to escape along the narrow strip of beach abutting the South Bank, as Barratt pursues him with his melting cornet.

As Julia Davis leaves repeated messages for fellow actor Seb Cardinal, fashionista Siobhan Hewlett pays a call on builder John Milroy to let him down gently after a brief fling. She explains that she is off to Paris Fashion Week and is still feeling frail after the breakdown of a long-term relationship. But Milroy refuses to be brushed off and, after some abrasive abuse, he reminds Hewlett that they had been good in bed together and tries to kiss her.

Despite living with older partner, Peter Wight, Davis has got the hots for Cardinal, who has come to her apartment to discuss their collaboration in a forthcoming project. Eager to impress, Davis pours some wine and plays a song she has written for the film, which Cardinal applauds with a growing sense of unease. Across the capital, Paul McGann and Kate Hardie have an intense discussion about guilt and growing up and why their relationship keeps lurching between crises. McGann pleads with Hardie not to walk away, but she feels she has a duty to her children to have a good cry and pick up the pieces. Hurt by her refusal to give things one last try, McGann turns on his heel.

Sitting in facing armchairs on a rooftop, Morgan Thomas and Juliet Cowan discuss the state of their romance. He laments that while he once considered them the coolest people, he is now bored and she is appalled that he could say such a thing minutes after sleeping with her. As he sprawls on a mattress, she pulls a chair to the edge of the roof and makes as if to jump. But Thomas grabs her and they hug before standing on the ledge together.

Davis and Cardinal start to run through a scene and he is surprised that she elects to give her character a French accent. As they run lines, Wight comes home eating a banana and sinks into the sofa with a weary sigh. He is confused why Davis is rehearsing with Cardinal when she only has a minor role in the film and he struggles to retain his composure as Davis serves up some unappetising spaghetti. Feeling uncomfortable at being in the middle of a lovers' tiff, Cardinal makes his excuses. But Davis thinks he should see the kind of man he is going to be working with and urges him to stay. Wight asks Davis to sit down and calmly informs her that their relationship is over and, while she takes this bombshell on board, Cardinal seeks reassurance he still has the part before beating a hasty retreat.

Meanwhile, on another rooftop, Salena Godden gives Daniel Roch hell for messing up again. They have been invited to a fancy dress party and, while he has transformed himself as a zombie, she is decked out as the Bride of Frankenstein. She asks if he has been drinking and if this is his way of ending their relationship. Holding a watering can in the doorway of a bijou greenhouse, he shuffles awkwardly and tells her to go and enjoy the party.

In a snowy Soho, Noel Fielding (sporting a pair of shorts) kicks a football against a wall. He is greeted by the heavily pregnant Mercedes Grower and drug dealer Martin Hancock, who is wearing a West Ham scarf. They take shelter in the video shop where Fielding works before trudging off across Soho Square to a public convenience. Still kicking the ball as Hancock hands him a small packet, Fielding asks Grower where she has been for the last three days and she explains that she is feeling fragile because he is being so weird towards her. She asks him to stop kicking the ball and talk to her, but he locks himself in a cubicle until she is capable of showing him some respect. But Grower merely feels exasperated that the father of her child keeps turning away whenever she tries to kiss him and she trudges up the steps into the snow with a heavy sigh.

As the scene shifts to a plush apartment in Marylebone, Kerry Fox complains that husband Roland Gift is spending too much time with a female colleague. He accuses her of being tipsy on martini and suggests she has too much time on her hands now that the children have gone. She asks how he would feel if he came home to find she had taken a flight back to Australia and he replies that he would barely notice, as he never comes home to a cooked supper. Fox complains that he is no longer civil, let alone attentive towards her and Gift slams his laptop shut and goes to buy beer. She opens the computer and scrolls down the screen before snapping it closed, taking a tearful sip of her drink and getting some fresh air on the balcony.

By the time Gift returns, Fox has gone. Elsewhere, Fielding can't get through to Grower on the phone, while Barratt wanders around with his ice cream and Roch sings `Dream (When You're Feeling Blue)' while watering his plants. As they all come to terms with being alone, Oram and Campbell reach their own impasse, as he accuses her of seeing someone else and she feels frustrated that he doesn't want to come and see her in person. He asks her to take her clothes off, but she refuses and he wonders why they bother.

At this juncture, the `Part One' caption appears and we begin to see scenes from the initial stages of the relationships we have just watched implode. The first shows Barratt serenading a bemused Maltman after a night of capoeira in Barceloona. He strums a guitar and calls his unsuspecting lover pet names before Maltman dashes to the bathroom to throw up. Back in Blighty, Campbell accosts Oram in the poolside shower for swimming slowly in the fast lane, only to discover that they are attending the same conference and that he is the IT support guy who helped her solve a problem the week before. They laugh, as she apologises for being so grouchy in the mornings, and Oram watches appreciatively as she walks away.

Breezing in late for an audition to play Lady Macbeth, Davis catches Wight off guard when she removes her sunglasses to reveal bruises under her eyes. She dismisses them as `a boyfriend thing' and then suggests setting the play on a council estate before delivering the `unsex me now' speech in a Scottish accent. Trying to be polite, Wight asks how much Shakespeare Davis has done and she claims to have done all but two of the 38 plays. Suddenly, she bursts into the Kate and Anna McGarrigle song, `Heart Like a Wheel', and (because it's his favourite song) he joins in with the chorus before asking one of his assistants to being some champagne and oysters.

Old acquaintances Fox and Gift bump into each other by the EuroStar terminal at St Pancras and he asks her to give him a call when she gets back from Paris. Thomas and Cowan also meet by chance, when he gets bored at an art show and takes sanctuary in the cocoon she has set up for one-to-one encounters. Rather boorishly, he suggests that her concept is bunkum and she tries to laugh off his ignorance. But they are clearly attracted to each other in this confined space and, when he suggests they leave together, she impulsively agrees.

McGann and Hardie meet at adjoining seats at the British Library. She is readying James Joyce's Ulysses and admits that this could be the latest in a string of false starts. He jokes that he read it backwards to see if he would like it and gives away the ending before asking Hardie if she would like a coffee. Godden and Roch meet more unconventionally at an open mike poetry and song session in a pub and, during a brisk exchange, they agree to meet by the statue of Oscar Wilde for a date that's not a date.

Fielding and Grower have an equally eccentric encounter at the ice rink where they work. He has been tipped off by a mate about a pretty girl handing out the skates and tells her that he used to do the same job before he started driving the icing machine. Nettled by the fact that he doesn't like her name, Grower refuses to let him come behind the counter and he sidles off as if he doesn't care. More conventionally, Milroy and Hewlett get chatting at the Southampton Arms, where she is tipsily celebrating a promotion. She stands on the banquette to sing `Molly Malone' and he follows her outside when she goes for a smoke. He reveals that he is working in the building next to hers and has often wondered what it would be like to kiss her.

As Davis suggests that she and Wight get a room, Fielding returns to offer Grower a pair of skates that used to belong to his sister and she is touched. He asks if she would like to drive the ice machine while his boss is away and she readily agrees. The camera follows their progress before cutting to the credits, which include an insert of someone (possibly Grower) writing `The End' in foam on the back windscreen of a white Mini, which drives into the suburban distance as the image irises out.

While nowhere near as determinedly or dementedly zeitgeisty as #Starvecrow, this 2016 amalgam of vignettes has acquired an accidental relevance through the similarity of the Wight-Davis storyline to the scandals currently rocking the entertainment industry. But, while Grower and her ensemble make passing reference to a range of social and emotional issues, this improv exercise could just as easily have been undertaken by the Natural Nylon gang in the late 1990s.

A number of the threads feel limp, with the weakest links being the Hewlett-Milroy, Campbell-Oram, Cowan-Thomas and Godden-Roch episodes (although the latter does boast the best make-up). The presence of such familiar faces as Noel Fielding. Julian Barratt and Julia Davis gives their segments a certain cachet, but the most intriguing items are those played by dramatic actors like Kerry Fox, Paul McGann and Kate Hardie, who are more experienced at conveying unspoken backstory in their performance.

Technically, this survives the fact is credits three cinematographers seven editors because Grower is so clearly the project's driving and guiding force. For all her perseverance and ingenuity, however, her film is more of a calling card than a definitive statement. But her subversive approach to both structure and storytelling suggests that this won't be her sole directorial outing.

Completing this week's off-kilter triptych is James Kermack's debut feature, Hi-Lo Joe. This deserves praise for seeking to draw attention to the largely taboo issue of depression among young, seemingly gregarious men. But, while Kermack's heart is in the right place, he lacks the cinematic nous to rein in his first-time desire to show what he can do in order to involve the viewer in a drama that often appears to have been conceived as stage play.

Against her better judgement, Lizzie Philips goes to a party with pal Thaila Zucchi in a ramshackle squat pub. The music is loud and the guests are raucous and Philips wishes she had stayed at home when she realises that the host is ex-boyfriend Matthew Stathers. He is having a drinking contest with Ryan Oliva when he spots Philips and begs her to let him give her the five-minute party experience. Ignoring Zucchi's warning and taking a slug of Jägerbomb from the insistent David Muscat, Philips allows herself be whisked on to the dance floor and up the stairs for a whistlestop tour of the building. Once inside his bedroom, Stathers pleads with Philips to give it one last chance and she agrees that they can be friends without any of the romantic stuff.

Waking next morning to the impression that water is soaking his face and that the walls are crumbling, Stathers exchanges a series of texts with Philips reminiscing about their shared past. When he opens the wardrobe, Philips is waiting to dance for him and we see staged recreations of good and bad times before Stathers promises that things will be different this time round.

Despite Philips's stipulations, its Stathers who tries to keep her at an arm's length when they return to the pub from their first date. She cavorts on the top of the bar and makes crude remarks in the hope of seducing him. But, while she insists they are better together when they are mad and bad, Stathers keeps backing away. It proves a losing battle, however, and a montage follows showing the couple fooling around in bed and getting to know each other once more. All seems cosy and crazy and Philips is touched when she watches Stathers teaching younger sister Aavie Mae Kermack how to tell a knock-knock joke and letting her prance around in her ballet tutu.

Having once made a living as a children's entertainer at Mensa parties, Stathers is clearly good with kids. But Philips is taken aback when he mentions having a child with her and he swears that he is not getting ahead of himself. They tumble into bed and she asks him to tell her a post-coital story. He waffles on about a postman with a heavy sack until he falls in love with a princess in the castle and Philips ticks him off for the double entendres. However, she also forbids him from giving the story an ending, as she thinks it's unfair on the characters and he concludes that the tale is to be continued.

When Muscat asks Stathers to be best man at his wedding to Helen Kennedy because they met at his party, he gets into a state because he can't remember his speech. Philips promises a saucy reward if he can finish the address without a mistake and he focuses. However, Stathers keeps having nightmares and wakes from one to imagine that Philips has empty eye sockets and that skulls are growing out of the walls. Shortly afterwards, he asks her to move in with him and she agrees. As they unpack boxes, she finds a notebook that Stathers got from his father (James Kermack) when he was a boy (Noah James Kermack) being teased at school for having a lively imagination. Philips suggests they put a picture of his dad on the wall, but Stathers abruptly ends the conversation.

Shortly afterwards, Philips goes on a 10-day business trip to the United States and Stathers reassures her he can cope. But he drinks heavily and becomes morbid and sees an eyeless reflection of himself in the blade of the knife he uses to slash his arm. When Philips returns, she is dismayed to find him in such a state and plays back the drunk-dialled messages he had left her accusing her of having an affair with colleague Tom Bateman. Stathers tries to apologise and blames the drink. But Philips is worried something more sinister is going on in his head and she wishes that he would confront his demons.

She has more reasons for concern when they host a dinner party and Stathers is rude to Bateman, who is competing for Zucchi's attention with Statherss stand-up buddy, Gethin Anthony. Philips hisses at Stathers to behave himself, but he makes Zucchi uncomfortable by mocking the age of her recently deceased boyfriend and suggesting that she could cheer herself up with Anthony. However, his patter falls flat and Bateman patronises him to the extent that Stathers is seething to put him in his place.

He gets his chance when Bateman calls a playlist a mixtape and Stathers going into excruciating detail in pointing out the differences. Then, as the guests are leaving (and Anthony boorishly agrees to walk Zucchi home), Stathers pushes Bateman out of the door and warns him not to set light to himself in a tragic bin fire. Unsurprisingly, Philips is furious when Stathers claims that Bateman has spent the night `retinally raping' her. But she gets the giggles when he avers that Hitler and Goebbels prove that not all workmates are innocent acquaintances and he carries her off to bed for Incredible Hulk sex.

A few weeks later - when Stathers arrives home in full clown make-up after being stabbed in the testicles at a birthday party - Philips announces that she is pregnant. She would like to keep the child, but Stathers insists he has enough trouble looking after himself without being responsible for anyone else and she is disappointed by his reluctance to use parenthood as an opportunity to sort himself out. Off-screen voices chronicle the appointment to abort the baby, as we see Stathers trying to console Philips as she deals with the physical and the psychological consequences of the procedure. But, as the ensuing bedtime montage shows, the episode has had a ruinous impact on their relationship, as they now irritate rather than arouse each other.

In a manic mood, Stathers tries to make Philips laugh while she is sitting at the bar compiling her bucket list. Her 30th birthday is coming and she needs to know where her life is going. But Stathers can only make jokes about what he would include on his own list and Philips loses patience with him. On her birthday, she is fed up because Stathers is ignoring her calls. But, when she comes down to the bar, she finds he has decorated it and dressed as Lisa Minnelli, so that she can tick one of the items off her list.

Twigging that he has been rifling through her notebooks, Philips realises that he will have seen her entry about having a child. He apologises for making her have an abortion, but she castigates him for daring to presume that he forced her to do anything were her own body is concerned. She admits that she does want to be a mother, but also confesses that she doesn't see herself having a child with Stathers. When he tries to protest, she says they don't love each other in the same way and that she needs to be with someone who has goals and a sense of joy.

Moreover, she is scared because she has no real sense of who he is and is worried that the half she doesn't know is his real personality. Stathers burst into tears and reveals that he drinks to give himself a break from the dark thoughts that envelop him and keep him in bed on some days and make him contemplate jumping from a window the next. He doesn't want to be mad and doesn't want other people knowing how vulnerable he is and Philips promises that she will support him if he seeks the help he needs.

Over a sequence showing fruit on a counter being replaced by empty wine bottles and the calendar on the wall becoming covered with post-its, we hear Philips urging Stathers to make an appointment with a doctor. But he has lost all faith in medics because they failed to spot the brain tumour that killed his father and, thus, So, while sitting on the bed one day, Philips tells Stathers that he no longer makes her happy and that she needs him to end their story and seek help because he wants to recover.

Once she's gone, however, things take a downward spiral and Stathers loses his job and becomes something of a recluse until Anthony finally forces him to open the pub door. He has come dressed as John McClane and suggests they watch Die Hard together and this act of friendship seems to haul Stathers out of his slump. He starts seeing other women and has very different sexual experiences with Katie Sheridan, Liza Callincos, Joanne Pickard, Naomi Sheldo and Sarah Llewellyn Shore, who keeps screaming at him to stop touching her hair. But he knows he has to take the next step and calls the clinic and is encouraged by his doctor to write things down so that he is remembered for his thoughts not a suicide note. He starts using medication, meditation and exercise to take the place of drink, drugs and depression and tries to stick to a routine to give himself something to aim at.

One day, Stathers finishes the notebook that his father had given him and finds a message extolling him for having the courage to fight on and he draws strength from his undying faith. As a consequence, he is able to stand up to the mental blows he suffers and he finally confronts the memory of pushing open the bathroom door and seeing his father lying dead on the floor. Feeling at peace, Stathers pours his pills down the sink and we see the manuscript he had completed on the desk before he heads off to wish Philips well on her wedding day. As the picture closes, Stathers has learned the lesson that he needs to love himself before he can love others and they can love him.

Even though he is striving to convey the manic state that Stathers is experiencing, expectations plummet during the opening party sequence, as Kermack throws the directorial kitchen sink at a tiresome barrage of overacted cameos and frantic exposition. The gimmickily distorted close-ups quickly outstay their welcome, while the morning after mélange of text bubbles, stylised flashbacks and wardrobe reveries leaves one dreading what Kermack is going to dredge up next.

But, mercifully, he settles to his task after Philips moves into the pub and resists the temptation to illustrate every incident mentioned in the script. Philips and Stathers also grow into their roles, while they frequently deliver their lines as though trying to hit the back row of the stalls, they capably suggest a smitten couple whose bad times increasingly start to outnumber the good. However, the secondary characters are never more than ciphers and, even though scenes like the dinner party are spikily played, Kermack leaves Stathers and Philips to do more heavy lifting than they equipped to cope with.

Despite the fact it seems unlikely that Stathers would be left unmithered in such a sizeable squat, production designers Jess Elcock and Hugo Lopez-Castrillo do a grand job in making the premises seem alternately cosy and unkempt. Cinematographer Mark Nutkins and editors Carlo Taranto and Robert Avery also respond to the challenges that Kermack sets them, but it's often hard to escape the sense of audiovisual overload, as Stathers fights for his sanity. Some will cavil at the contrived convenience of the resolution, but Kermack has taken a number of creative and thematic risks in tackling an emotive topic and, even if a clutch of them fail to come off, he can't be accused of not trying.

The scene shifts to Hungary in the decade following the suppression of the 1956 Uprising in Árpád Sopsits's Strangled. Inspired by the infamous murder spree that took place in the industrial town of Martfu, this looks likely to do more for Sopsits's profile in this country than earlier outings like Video Blues (1992) and Abandoned (2001). The latter also used the failed bid to break free from the Soviet yoke. But, while it shares the same sombre tone as the story of a young boy who is consigned to an orphanage by a stranger who insists he knows what's best for him, this fact-based thriller is much bleaker and condemnatory. Moreover, with its unflinching depiction of the violence inflicted upon the female victims, it's also infinitely more disconcerting.

In 1957, the Hungarian town of Martfu is famous solely for the Bata shoe factory. One night, Ákos Réti (Gábor Jászberényi) meets Erzsébet Patai (Anna Mészöly) outside the gates after her shift. He asks to walk her home, but loses his temper when she announces that she no longer wants to move in with him and only started their affair because she felt sorry for him, As he has divorced his wife so that they can be together, Réti is distraught. But when he accompanies chief interrogator Bóta (Zsolt Anger) to the place where Patai's body was found, his account of her rape and murder is inconsistent with his earlier evidence. As she watches him re-enact the crime with the squirmingly uncomfortable Marika (Piroska Móga), Réti's sister, Rita (Szofia Szamosi), reassures their mother that he is innocent.

However, prosecutor Gábor Katona (Zsolt Trill) is under pressure to secure a conviction. So, when the judge proves too impatient to listen to conflicting evidence. he condemns Réti to hang for murder and necrophilia. He is viciously assaulted in the showers by the other prisoners for his sordid crime and, thus, he has mixed feelings when his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment on appeal.

He has reason to feel grateful seven years later, however, when Ibolya Sóskuti (Eszter Csépai), accepts a lift home on the back of a moped and is murdered by workmate Pal Bognár (Hadjuk Karoly) after a consensual fumble turns violent. He had been driven to kill again by a scene of brutality against a defenceless woman on television and, as before, he deposits the body in some water to cover his tracks. But the fact that Ibolya was four months pregnant convinces the forensic surgeon that she killed herself, even though Bóta questions why she would undress to do so.

Shortly afterwards, Bognár strikes again when he attacks Ágnes Köves (Dóra Sztarenki) on her way home from a dance. He hits her over the head with a hammer and lays her on the railway line after he rapes her. But Ágnes survives the blow and Bóta is eager to interview her. However, so is the new assistant prosecutor, Zoltán Szirmai (Péter Bárnai), who thinks that the investigation into the assaults has been sloppy. He has photographs taken of the motorbike tracks in the mud and sends officers with magnifying glasses to inspect the tyres of every bike at the shoe factory. But Bóta is at her bedside both when Rita (who is her supervisor) pays her a visit and when she wakes and is able to give a description of her attacker.

A key detail she remembers is a black beret and Bóta chases across country after a man on a motorbike sporting the same headgear. He turns out to be a poacher who had been fishing nearby and neither Bóta nor Szirmai get anything out of the eyewitnesses when another woman survives an attack near a hall of residence. These incidents encourage Rita, who visits Réti in prison, where he has a job sewing footballs. She urges him to lodge an appeal against his conviction and be a father to his young son. But he insists that he committed a crime and also has to live with his mother's death on his conscience.

Having examined a scratch on is neck, Bognár wakes his dozing son Máté to give him his supper before his mother comes home. He is surprised, therefore, when the police call him to the hospital because his wife, Nóra (Mónika Balsai), has been bludgeoned. She tells Bóta that she thought she recognised the way her attacker breathed, but she couldn't be sure. Bognár had failed to recognise Nóra because she had been wearing a wig in the hope of rekindling her dormant sex life. So, realising that he has had a narrow escape, he tosses the hammer into the lake and tries to keep his urges under control. However, the first time he sleeps with Nóra and they start kissing passionately, she pulls away because her head hurts.

Bognár pays Réti a visit and asks what drove him to kill. He mentions that his own wife was recently attacked and he suggests that he is keen to understand Réti so that he can track down the perpetrator. Bóta and Szirmai are under pressure from the local Party secretary and they snap at subordinates Marika and Juhász (András Réthelyi) to make themselves feel better. But, while diving in the lake, Szirmai comes to the conclusion that the crimes are linked and are probably the work of one man. He asks Bóta if there had been any similar instances and he recalls the Réti case.

Szirmai examines the trial records and quickly reaches the conclusion that the conviction was unsafe because so many potential defence witnesses had not been questioned. But Bóta defends the investigation and points out that Katona (who is Szirmai's mentor) had been in charge at the time. However, Katona denies Szirmai permission to consult the Réti file, as he refuses to accept either the notion of a serial killing in Communist Hungary or that he made any mistakes back in 1957.

Two years pass and Katona is still blocking Szirmai's requests see the Réti documents. Furthermore, he orders Juhász to keep him under surveillance in order to protect his own back. But Szirmai remains convinced his theory is correct and he is more certain than ever when a factory worker named Évi is strangled and raped in the cab of Bognár's lorry. Her body is found in the river and this discovery coincides with Réti's attempt to kill himself in his cell by piercing his wrists with a sewing needle. Katona had just turned down his request for a retrial and he begins to wonder whether he had put an innocent man behind bars. As she enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, his wife urges him not to lose his nerve, as they will be forced to raise their two daughters on a pittance if he is fired.

Bóta has a crush on Rita and wants to make it up for her for arresting Réti. He buys her a drink and she asks him to find the killer so that her brother can be freed before he lets his demons get the better of him. However, she is embarrassed when Bóta intimidates a waiter who was gossiping about them and Katona warns him that he needs to remember his station or he will land himself in trouble. He also reminds him that he has evidence linking him to the 1956 protesters and intimates that he would not hesitate to use it if Bóta fails to stop Szirmai from successfully linking the different Martfu murders.

Convinced that Katona is trying to pervert the course of justice, Szirmai goes over the events of the Réti case and proves that he couldn't have cycled home from the railway line to his lodgings in the time supposed. He takes his findings to the Party boss (Valentin Venczel), who meets him in the washroom and checks for hidden microphones before giving his unofficial permission to go behind Katona's back and reopen the Réti inquiry to see if a miscarriage has occurred. Naturally, Katona is furious and he tries to blame Bóta. But he already feels guilty about his conduct and refuses to carry the can because the Party had demanded a swift resolution so soon after the Uprising. Listening in on their bugged conversation in car parked outside Katona's office, Szirmai is appalled that two men he had trusted had behaved so unprofessionally. But, as he pulls the tape reels off the recorder in disgust, he is unaware that is snooping on him from around the corner.

With his back to the wall, Katona visits Réti and asks why he lied about killing Erzsébet Patai. He claims that he loved her and had become jealous of her friendship with one of the drivers. But, while he had planned to poison her with a peach plant, he had washed it clean before placing it on her window sill. On being arrested, he had become confused because he had intended to murder her and, by the time he realised she had been hacked with an axe, he had lost track of the truth. Seizing his opportunity, Katona accuses Réti of misleading the police and causing two more women to die. Thus, rather than support his application for a retrial, Katona declares that he will recommend that Réti remains in prison for his full term.

After Szirmai has Ibolya exhumed to prove that she didn't commit suicide, the Party secretary acknowledges the evidence, but refuses to accept that there is such a thing as a serial killer in Hungary. However, Bognár is on the prowl again and, after briefly following Rita after she had resisted a clumsy advance by Bóta, he offers a lift in his truck to family friend, Magda. She thinks he is joking when he pulls over on a remote road and starts pawing her. But he is deadly serious and, having strangled her, he excites himself by slicing into her breast with a knife. Moreover, having tossed her corpse off a bridge, he goes home to seduce Nóra in her wig. But his breathing suddenly reminds her of the assault and her eyes widen in horror at the realisation that she is living with a killer.

Szirmai has also made a breakthrough, as the pathologist finds fragments of glass from the broken window in Bognár's cab beneath Magda's fingernails and he is sure he will be able to track down the culprit. His confidence grows when he finds a fragment of glass on the bridge and in the cab of a truck at the factory. While Szirmai calls on Nóra and asks to see her husband's work clothes, Bóta interviews Bognár, who claims to have been home with his wife and makes such a fuss of needing to make a delivery that he is told to leave. Scarcely concealing a sardonic smile, Bognár walks away. But Bóta suddenly recalls that one of the witnesses had noticed the odd noise that his shoes made and he starts to chase after him just as Szirmai screeches to a halt in his car to make an arrest.

Bognár attempts to run away through the factory and reaches the lake after a pursuit over some scrubland. He plunges into the water and Szirmai follows because he is determined to exonerate Réti. Plucked from the depths, Bognár refuses to co-operate under interrogation and Bóta has to be restrained from using force. But Bognár gets cocky and enjoys being the centre of attention. He describes how he was nervous before his wedding that he wouldn't be able to perform for Nóra and had followed Réti and Erzsébet after he heard them squabbling outside the factory.

Hiding in the bushes, he had watched Réti attempt to force himself on Erzsébet and he had caught up with her and engaged her in conversation as they walked. As they shared their problems, she agreed to have sex with him. But Bognár had been unable to perform and he had killed her with a metal bar when she had tried to abandon him. The moment she died, he felt aroused and raped her. But she was already dead. Szirmai asks Bognár what went on in his head to make him want to kill, but he smirks and says he has to keep some secrets to himself.

A coda takes us to 1968, as Szirmai returns from a two-month holiday to find that Katona has been demoted and transferred and that Bóta has taken early retirement. Only Juhász remains and he is watching a TV news report of Hungarian troops returning home after putting an end to the Prague Spring. Unlike the Czechs, Réti is liberated and Rita hugs him outside the prison gates. As he takes a bus to the country to run through the forest and scream with fury while standing in a lake, Szirmai is deliberately knocked off his bike and killed in a quiet street, while Bognár goes to the gallows in bare feet because the boots chosen for him are too tight.

Accompanied by the sound of pounding drums, a closing caption reveals that, despite being found not guilty of killing Erzsébet, Réti was never rehabilitated and died a few years after his release. While hardly surprising, this information drives home the points that Sopsits has been making about the corruption, venality and incompetence of a regime that used paranoia, betrayal and intimidation to maintain its oppressive grip on power. However, the vein of grimly satirical humour that runs through the action is equally effective, especially as it probably contains barbs aimed at the current administration.

In some ways, the story recalls that of another picture set behind the Iron Curtain and inspired by actual events, Tomáš Weinreb and Petr Kazda I, Olga Hepnarová (2016), which centred on the last woman to be executed in Czechoslovakia. But there are also plenty of parallels with Abandoned, which is well worth tracking down, as Sopsits takes a dispassionately detached view of the sickening killings and the sort of society that could both engender such a psychopath and then actively seek to deny the serial nature of his crimes.

As well as his estimable contributions as writer and director, Sopsits also shares a design credit with Rita Dévényi. He is ably served by cinematographer Gábor Szabó, who particularly excels during the nocturnal sequences, and a splendid ensemble that is led with particular distinction by Károly Hajduk as the despicable Monster of Martfu and Zsófia Szamosi as the loyal sister refusing to let her desires deflect her purpose. But Peter Bárnai overplays his hand as the dashing zealot, while Zsolt Trill often comes close to caricature. However, the scene with the shrewish wife who has become accustomed to the trappings of power sits alongside Zsolt Anger's gauche attempts to persuade Szamosi of his essential decency in reminding us that all totalitarian tyranny needs is the acquiescence of the willing and the weak. Primatologist Jane Goodall is no stranger to the screen, having appeared in dozens of wildlife and eco-advocacy documentaries, as well as having been the subject of such profiles as Jeremy Bristow's Jane Goodall: Beauty and the Beasts, Lorenz Knauer's Jane's Journey (both 2010) and Mark Bristow's Jane Goodall: Return to Gombe (2004). But Brett Morgen's Jane seems set to become the definitive record of how a London secretary with no scientific training accepted a position to observe an ape colony in Tanzania and evolved into one of the world's leading authorities on simian behaviour. Narrated by the 83 year-old Goodall herself and drawing on the 140 hours of 16mm colour footage recorded in the 1960s by her late ex-husband and renowned wildlife photographer. Hugo van Lawick, this is engaging, revealing, moving and humbling in equal measure.

In 1957, without any prior experience in the field, Jane Goodall was chosen by the renowned archaeologist and palaeontologist Louis Leakey to undertake a study of chimpanzees in Gombe. Having always dreamed from a male perspective because girls simply didn't have adventures, the 26 year-old Goodall was delighted to quit her secretarial job and seize the opportunity to live in Africa with the insects, birds and animals that had always fascinated her. Previously unseen footage shows Goodall in her pristine safari suit with a fresh face and blonde ponytail, creeping through the bush and climbing trees to get a better look at the creatures she had been asked to study in their everyday environment.

Interviewed today, she reveals that there were no existing studies to consult and, consequently, she had to invent her own observation techniques as she went along. Aware of snakes, she convinced herself that she had a right to share the Gombe forests with them and that she would be unharmed if she avoided treading on them. During the early days of her sojourn, Goodall failed to find the chimps and sometimes would only see one in isolation. Thus, when she finally saw groups of apes whooping and feeding in a fig tree she was exhilarated.

Animation and rapid cutting are used to show notebook pages being filled and the pace of the editing increases as Goodall begins to find her way in the jungle. We see her washing her hair in a chuckling stream and learn that she was accompanied by her mother, who ran a clinic for the families of the local fishermen. Having lost her husband during the war when Jane was just five years old, Margaret Goodall had always encouraged her daughter's ambitions and readily volunteered to keep her company in the bush. But, while she was thoroughly enjoying her trip of a lifetime, Goodall was aware that time was running out and that she needed to seek the acceptance of the chimps in order to make a discovery that would justify the study being awarded another grant.

After five months, a male decided to trust her and led her to his territory, where she was able to watch the chimps at closer quarters. She learned about the importance of grooming and physical contact in their relationships and started naming them, as she got to know them. Her host was David Greybeard, who often spent time with the leader, Goliath, and Mr McGregor, a belligerent older male. She also got to know a female named Flo and her daughter Phoebe.

As she watched moments of affection and aggression, fear and jealousy, play and contentment, Goodall realised that the chimps were thinking creatures and thanked her lucky stars that she had not been to university and been led astray by theoretical preconceptions. Having also bankrolled Dian Fossey's study of gorillas, Leakey had wanted Goodall to observe chimps so that he might be able to gauge how Stone Age humans had lived and Goodall was able to inform him that David Graybeard used a twig to fish for termites in their hill. Thus, like our ancient ancestors, chimpanzees used tools to complete tasks. Moreover, they stripped the leaves off twigs to make them suitable for the task in hand and this evidence of implement modification convinced Leakey that the definition of animal and human needed to be rewritten.

Once the news of Goodall's pioneering work broke and the papers started reporting that a `comely' girl had made such a crucial discovery, attempts were made within the scientific community to discredit her methodology and her findings. As we learn that Leakey received a generous grant from the National Geographic Society to continue the research, a montage of headlines and anatomical drawings follows, along with explosions suggesting the seismic nature of the findings. Such pyrotechnics rather go against the calm rationality of Goodall's narration. But Morgen makes good use of the archive footage to show Goodall becoming acclimatised to her setting and getting to know the chimps on a more intimate basis.

In the summer of 1962, Dutch photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick was sent to document Goodall's progress. She admits that she wasn't overly impressed by an outsider muscling in on her project and didn't like him smoking. Yet she was acutely aware that he was interested in her and wasn't quite sure how to respond to his charm and compliments. But she was more concerned with the fact that David Greybeard had ventured into her tent and helped himself to some bananas. Emboldened by the prospect of some free fruit, the entire group began to follow suit and we see the chimps scurrying away with armfuls of bananas and coming right up to Goodall as she sat quietly. Eventually, one even took a small bunch from her hand and looked her up and down for a second before loping away. Unfortunately, the chimps also proved to be unconscionable thieves, who stole shirts and blankets, as well as cardboard boxes, which they used to chew. They also became aggressive over food and Goodall and Van Lawick had to take shelter in order to record the raids on the camp. In a bid to restore order, they decided to set up a feeding station which required the chimps to learn how to open a metal box buried in the ground in order to receive a reward. As the animals came closer, Goodall got to know them better an observed Flo attracting several mates (much to Phoebe's annoyance) and the footage of the mating ritual is teasingly cut with shots of Van Lawick and Goodall sitting together, with her pulling tongues at the camera and him picking things out of her hair.

We also see the telegrams in which Van Lawick proposed and Goodall accepted, as well as footage of an Alpine honeymoon and some overdue time back in Blighty. But the newlyweds were keen to get back to Gombe and see Flo rearing her son Flint, with a little help from Phoebe. Footage shows Flint clinging to Flo and clambering up her back. He also takes a tumble as he tries to walk and has fun playing on the sloping side of the tent. After a rope is strung between the trees for the chimps to play with, Goodall is allowed to tickle, tussle and groom those in David Greybeard's coterie. Five decades on, she still feels that being so accepted was a privilege and she concedes that getting to know the chimpanzees gave her a greater understanding of herself, as she became one with the spiritual nature of her surroundings.

Everything seemed to be going swimmingly when Goodall and Van Lawick set up a research station and invited students to assist with the project. But National Geographic withdrew Van Lawick's grant and he had to find other work filming on the Serengeti. Initially, Jane went with him and acquired a broader insight into chimp society from watching other animals. She also gave birth to a son of her own, Grub, and he became part of their safari party. As chimps had been known to eat human infants, Goodall stayed away from Gombe for a spell and when they did visit, Grub had to be kept in a play cage in order to protect him. But, while Goodall missed the chimps, her team continued to care for them and she was able to gain an appreciation of Flo's strong maternal instinct by experiencing it herself and even applying some of its to her own approach to parenting.

A television crew comes from America to make a documentary about Grub and Goodall explains how they had taught him to recognise danger signs. We see some hyenas attacking a zebra for a feed and the harsh reality of the wild hits home harder when a polio epidemic strikes Gombe and McGregor becomes so ill that he has to be put down. Morgen asks Goodall if she was interfering with Nature by vaccinating the chimps and she insists that it's a human duty to help a suffering animal. Indeed, she wouldn't want to keep living if she was similarly afflicted. She confirms that humans didn't bring the disease, as it had started to the south. But, as a result of the outbreak, all physical contact with the chimps was banned and, according to Goodall, Gombe was never quite the same.

Much to Goodall's chagrin, Grub develops a dislike for chimps and, with Van Lawick often being away on location, she begins to find it increasingly difficult to keep the station going and home school her son. Now a grandmother, Flo is also having domestic problems, as, while Flint has become an adolescent, he continues to cling to his mother and keeps trying to suckle, even though she pushes him away in an effort to coax him into becoming more independent. In a similar move, Grub is sent to school in London, although he would continue to spend summers in Tanzania. Tragically, the break-up of the family unit is reflected in the wild, as Flo perishes while attempting to cross a stream and Flint is so distraught by her loss that he stays close to her body in the water and makes repeated efforts with cries and touches to make her respond. After a period of mourning, Flint wanders away. But, rather than dealing with his Flo's death, he takes to a tree, where he stops eating and dies three weeks later because he simply couldn't bear the thought of living without his mother.

Shortly after the passing of Flo and Flint, their group began to divide and Goodall recalls her shock when the apes that had moved to the south were ostracised by those that had remained. Over shocking footage of an attack on their camp, Goodall reveals that the entire migrant group had been butchered in a ferocious civil war. It had dismayed her to discover that chimps had a brutal side, as she had come to see them as nicer versions of humans and her silence on the soundtrack speaks volumes, as we see photographs of the faces of the apes slaughtered in the power struggle. By this time, Goodall and Van Lawick had started to drift apart, as he was always away filming. They realised that they needed to pursue their own goals. But Jane has learned from the chimps that while we share many characteristics, we are different and our use of language has enabled us to learn about things that we can't see. Moreover, we can pass on stories about our past. This ability to communicate has developed an intellect that gives humans a duty to protect other species, as well as the planet as a whole. Since 1986, therefore, Goodall has toured the world calling for better stewardship of the Earth. As a consequence, she has not spent more than three weeks in any one place for the last 30 years.

A caption reveals that the Roots & Shoots programme was set up by the Jane Goodall Institute in 1991 to teach children around the world about conservation and, over the ensuing quarter of a century, millions have heard her message. Grub is now a boat builder in Dar-Es Salem and Goodall is proud of the way in which he took his own decisions about shaping his future. She is modest about her own achievement and puts much of it down to hard work and determination. But, as we see Goodall in her element with her Gombe chimps, she admits that a good deal of her success has also been down to luck and the stars.

Reflecting on her life and work with the analytical rationality that helped her push the boundaries of primatology, Goodall makes for excellent company, as she recalls her relationships with the people and chimpanzees she had loved the most. There's nothing sentimental about her memories of David Graybeard, Flo and Flint, but it's impossible not to be amused and moved by the stories of their mischief and melancholy. Guided by a typically apposite Philip Glass score, Morgen also resists the temptation to wallow, as he and editors Joe Beshenkovsky and Will Zndaric enhance Goodalls's beguiling anecdotes with Van Lawick's exceptional colour photography and up-to-date images by Ellen Kuras.

Coming after documentaries on boxing (On the Ropes, 2000), Hollywood producer Robert Evans (The Kid Stays n the Picture, 2002), the Chicago Eight (Chicago 10, 2007), The Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane, 2012) and Kurt Cobain (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, 2015), this represents quite a change of pace and topic for Morgen. By focusing on such a short period of time, he leaves a lot of questions unanswered. He might, for example, have made more extensive use of captions to date events. But he is surely aware that any assessment of Goodall's post-Gombe activities would be markedly more difficult to illustrate without this treasure trove of evocative images. It would also probably necessitate the inclusion of some talking-heads, whose observations would almost certainly not compensate for the loss of intimacy that Morgen achieves here. Maybe it would be instructive to hear some objective opinions on Goodall's work. But she is so plainspoken about her breakthroughs and mistakes alike that she is probably her own most perceptive critic.