Sixty-five years have passed since Joseph Stalin was found on the bedroom floor of his dacha in Kuntsevo. The demise of the Man of Steel has been the subject of two recent features, Marc Dugain's An Ordinary Execution (2010) and Armando Iannucci's The Death of Stalin (2017). But the most riveting reconstruction of the dictator's final hours remains Alexei German's Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), which is being given an unexpected cinematic outing to mark its 20th anniversary.

Seven years in the making and scripted by German and wife Svetlana Karmalita from a combination of dissident poet Joseph Brodsky's short story, `In a Room and a Half', and their own recollections as the respective children of a famous novelist and a feared theatre critic, this is a notoriously impenetrable picture that demands the audience's full attention, as well as a working knowledge of 20th-century Russian history. Yet, two decades after it was completed, this delirious and chillingly brutal satire feels more relevant than ever as a study of the paralysis and paranoia that accrue as a result of the misuse of untrammelled power. 

As the action opens on 28 February 1953, a monochrome Moscow is covered in snow and the lights illuminating the buildings on a quiet street glimmer in the darkness. Leaving through a large iron gate, a boiler repairman (Aleksandr Bashirov) creates sparks when he opens a fuse box. But he seems unconcerned, as he tosses his hat into the air and mumbles to himself as he crunches his way along the pavement. When he pauses to inspect a parked car, however, he is grab by the trenchcoated KGB men who emerge from the vehicle and he is carried into the grounds of an imposing edifice and deposited in a small hut. 

The Soviet Union is in the grips of the so-called `Doctors' Plot', as Joseph Stalin (Ali Misirov) seeks to purge the Jewish medics he is convinced are trying to poison the members of his inner circle. Everyone is afraid, but General Yuri Georgievich Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo) is too drunk to care. He trudges home to the crowded apartment he shares with his wife (Nina Ruslanova), mother (Paulina Myasnikova), sister (Genrietta Yanovskaya) and son (Mikhail Dementyev). 

With his shaven head and large moustache, Klensky cuts something of a dash and he is feared by the doctors at his clinic and fawned over by the nurse who attends to his voracious sexual needs. Brandishing a hunting horn and requiring an axe to break down the doors in one part of the hospital, Klensky conducts his rounds. He is taken aback to discover a lookalike (Ivan Matskevich) being prepared for an enema, as he suspects that his Red Army rank and status as one of the country's leading brain surgeons won't protect him from the secret police. Moreover, he is spooked when a foreign reporter (Jüri Järvet, Jr.) turns up on his doorstep with news of his exiled sister. Knowing that tenement snoop Sonia (Nijole Narmontaite) is eavesdropping, Klensky berates the stranger and accuses him of trying to besmirch his reputation. 

But, while the journalist is picked up by the KGB as he leaves the building, Klensky is afraid that he has been implicated in the Doctors' Plot and he plunges into the basement to pick his way through bric-a-brac that includes military uniforms and vehicles and clamber over the wall into the street. Peering through the darkness, he watches the arrival of the plainclothes cops and scurries away to seek sanctuary with teacher (Olga Samoshina). She tries to resist his advances and they wind up huddled in a creaking bed together, while the KGB invade his home and rifle through his belongings prior to forcibly evicting Klensky's family, who are relocated to an already overcrowded apartment filled with elderly Jews. 

Under the gaze of one of the Seven Sisters that Stalin commissioned to transform the Moscow skyline, a convoy of Black Marias sweeps along the empty boulevards, as citizens mill around in a state of organised confusion. Despite making his way into the countryside, Klensky is taunted by some boys at the railway station and they steal his boots before he is finally captured and bundled into the back of a van marked `Soviet Champagne'. In transit, Klensky is forced to perform fellatio on one of the guards before being raped. When the truck stops in the middle of a misty nowhere, he has his head held under the water of a frozen pond while he tries to drink and is mocked when he lowers his trousers to sit on the cooling snow to relieve the pain. 

Much to his astonishment, however, Klensky is singled out by another officer arriving in a stately car and is taken to a barrack to spruce himself up. Once again, he encounters his doppelgänger, as he is shown into a bathroom and told to hurry. Swept away in an official car, he arrives at Stalin's dacha to be met by police chief Lavrentiy Beria (Mulid Makoev). He is ushered into a bedroom, where the semi-conscious Stalin is lying in his own filth, as a distraught nurse struggles to keep him clean. Realising there is little he can do for the dying leader, Klensky massages his belly and Stalin breaks wind and foams at the mouth before expiring. Calling his bodyguard, Khrustalyov, to fetch his car, Beria beats a hasty retreat to Moscow, leaving a bemused Klensky to wander outside as a free man. 

As the film ends, the rehabilitated Klensky is working as a conductor on a train. Enjoying his modest power, he throws a passenger off the slowly moving locomotive and repairs to an open truck, where he balances a glass of wine on his bald head, while puffing on a cigarette and bellowing his relief and delight at having survived the Stalinist era. 

It will be six years in February since Alexei German passed away and his stock among cineastes has never been higher. He only completed five films after debuting with Grigori Aronov on The Seventh Companion (67), which examined the reasons for the Red Terror during the civil war of the early 1920s. Nominally working within the Socialist Realist tradition, he dared to question the wholehearted patriotism of his fellow countrymen during the Second World War, as he presented a quisling reinventing himself as a partisan hero in Trial on the Road (1971) and revealed how the exploits of a dead soldier were mythologised on celluloid in Twenty Days Without War (1977). But he created his masterpiece with My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982), a Chekhovian chamber drama set in the provinces on the eve of the 1930s purges that took 13 years to produce and another three to pass through the censor's office.

His final outing, Hard to Be a God, took even longer to make, as permission to start shooting was withdrawn after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. But, while German managed to begin work in 2000, he kept having to pause in order to raise funds and died before he could finish his devastating vision of a distant planet experiencing its own Middle Ages. Ultimately, his son (Alexei, Jr.) completed the project, which means that Khrustalyov, My Car! is German's last fully realised work.

After two decades of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, it's dark warnings remain as potent as ever. But there are no easy symbols in a German film. Viewers have to keep their eyes open and use their intelligence and imagination to piece together the clues bestrewn around the mise-en-scène. For the most part, the dialogue feels less like the interaction between quotidian beings than the exchange of coded messages between participants in a conspiratorial allegory. But, while it's not always possible to read between the tightly packed lines, the main narrative is relatively straightforward, as Yuri Tsurilo's Blimpish doctor falls from grace and clambers back from the gulag to carve a new niche in a society in which dread has been replaced by mere trepidation. 

Buffeted by events over which he has no control, Tsurilo excels as a character based loosely on Yakov Rapoport, one of the Kremlin physicians who had been arrested during the Doctors' Plot and was coerced into ministering to the dying Stalin. The supporting ensemble also impresses, as they seem to inhabit the cockeyed world created by German rather than act out roles. Similarly, production designers Mikhail Gerasimov, Georgiy Kropachyov and Vladimir Svetozarov recapture a sense of time and place with the collaboration of costumier Ekaterina Shapkayts and cinematographer Vladimir Ilin, whose lighting of the high-contrast monochrome imagery and fluent camerawork keeps the audience at the centre of situations that often seem about to lapse into absurdism, as though Federico Fellini, Spike Milligan and Emir Kusturica had joined forces on a script for Andrei Tarkovsky. 

Even those au fait with the intricacies of Cold War Soviet politics will miss some of the allusions on a first viewing, as there is so much to take in. Indeed, one hopes that Arrow have plans to release this on disc, as it is indisputably one of the finest films produced in Russia since the collapse of Communism and should be every bit as well known as Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-winning insight into the ending of an era, Burnt By the Sun (1994).    

Once upon a time, a popular nursery rhyme meant that every child in America knew about Lizzie Borden and the whacks she administered with her trusty axe. Fans of the original series of Bewitched (1964-72) still feel traumatised by the memory of Elizabeth Montgomery in the title role of Paul Wendkos's The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975), although Addams Family aficionados will have been less surprised to see Christina Ricci assume the mantle in Nick Gomez's Lizzie Borden Took an Ax and The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (both 2014). But, while the brutal 1892 murder of a Massachusetts couple has been the subject of numerous books, plays and TV shows - indeed, it has even inspired a ballet, an opera and a musical - it has always been presented with the sort of sensationalism that one associates with a waxwork chamber of horrors. It's all the more disappointing, therefore, that Craig William Macneill's Lizzie opts for a similar approach in the #MeToo era. 

Flashing back six months from the discovery of two bloodied bodies in Fall River on 4 August 1892, Irish maid Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart) arrives at the imposing white-boarded house in which Andrew Borden (Jamey Sheridan) lives with his second wife, Abby (Fiona Shaw), and his daughters, Emma (Kim Dickens) and Lizzie (Chloë Sevigny). As he considers gas or electrical lighting to be an extravagance, Andrew lights the house with candles and his views on female emancipation are no more enlightened. Consequently, Lizzie elects to defy his refusal to let her leave the house unaccompanied to go to the theatre and he is only partially sympathetic when she is confined to bed after suffering an epileptic fit. 

Dismayed by Abby giving Bridget the servant name of Maggie, Lizzie offers to teach her to read after she shows an interest in the book Lizzie is reading to the pigeons she keeps in a loft at the end of the garden. However, Andrew has also taken a shine to Bridget and comes to her room in the middle of the night, much to the distress of the silent Abby. But, for all his displays of high-minded  respectability, Andrew keeps receiving anonymous letters threatening to expose him and, following a nocturnal banging on the gate, he summons brother-in-law John Morse (Denis O'Hare) to ask him to protect the interests of his daughters in the case of his untimely demise.

Overhearing this discussion, Lizzie fears that she will be placed in an institution and that Emma will be disinherited in favour of Uncle John. She challenges Andrew about whether he has done something to deserve the hate mail he keeps receiving and he reacts to her impertinence by slaughtering her pigeons with a hatchet and having them served for supper that evening. Lizzie appeals to family lawyer Andrew Jennings (Jeff Perry) for help, but he refuses to go behind her father's back and Lizzie exacts her revenge on him assaulting Bridget by breaking the glass in her hand mirror and scattering it on the boards outside the maid's bedroom door. 

Aware that Lizzie is trying to help her. Bridget starts leaving notes around the house and their hands start to touch while the servant is helping her mistress dress. But Bridget also has the knack of being in the right place and rescues Lizzie from Uncle John's wrath after she spots him leaving a note on the doorstep and compares the handwriting with his signature on a document in her father's study. He accuses her of being a shrivelled spinster with an over-vaunted sense of self-worth and warns her to tread carefully. Abby says much the same thing when she tires of Andrew's unsubtle pursuit of Bridget. However, his annoyance at her words drives him into the garden, where he sees her consorting with Lizzie in the pigeon loft and comes to the maid's room that night to administer his punishment. 

When Andrew tells Lizzie to stay away from Bridget and announces that he will dismiss her in September, she comments on his own behaviour and feels no shame about her own conduct. Abby warns her that she has burnt her bridges with her father, so she finds the papers granting control of the estate to Uncle John and puts them into the stove. Shortly afterwards, the bodies of Andrew and Abby are found in the house and Lizzie is arrested, even though she had insisted that she had merely found her parents and sent Bridget to fetch the police. 

In court, Jennings questions Harvard chemist Professor Wood (Tom Thon) about the blood and body parts found on the axe that  Marshall Hilliard (Don Henderson Baker) and Deputy Fleet (Jody Matzer) claim is the murder weapon and he reveals that there were no human traces on the blade. Angry at the way the trial is proceeding, Uncle John visits Lizzie in prison and notes how convenient it was that Abby died before Andrew, so that Emma and Lizzie would remain his heirs. He vows to find the missing will and claim his rightful inheritance, but Lizzie is no longer afraid of him and reminds him that he is little more than a washed-up horse trader.

Back in court (where the judge has decided to hold proceedings in camera), prosecutor William Henry Moody (Jay Huguley) interrogates Bridget about her whereabouts on the morning in question and why she is so certain about Lizzie's movements between Abby's death around 9.30am and Andrew's at about 11am. She declares she saw everything because Lizzie was outside while she was cleaning the windows and would have noticed if she had entered the house. However, Bridget comes to Lizzie's cell and confesses that she no longer knows her, as she has no idea whether she committed the crimes or not. 

A flashback to 4 August shows Bridget watching Lizzie as she puts a pigeon in a basket and places this in the wood store inside the house. She then climbs a ladder and vomits as a naked Lizzie slays her stepmother with some ferocity in her room and then cleans the axe blade and waits in her own room for Andrew to come home. The plan is for Bridget to strip and kill her employer. But she loses her nerve and Lizzie has to do the deed and then clean up both Bridget and herself before sending the servant for the police. 

As we return to the cell, Bridget implores Lizzie to forget her and not try to find her after the trial. Riding away in the train, she dwells on the moments of tenderness she enjoyed with Lizzie, who waits for the verdict in her cell. A caption reveals that the all-male jury acquitted her because they did not believe that a woman of her social standing could commit such a heinous crime. No mention is made of the fact that the evidence was reported at the time as being contradictory and circumstantial. Despite being freed, Lizzie fell out with Emma soon afterwards and they remained estranged for the rest of their lives, while Bridget moved to Montana and lived on a farm to the age of 82. Lizzie remained largely alone until she died at 67 in 1927 and left much of her fortune to the Humane Society.

From the opening sequence onwards, it feels as though Macneill and screenwriter Bryce Kass have seen William Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth (2016) and decided to couch the legend of Lizzie Borden in the same cinematic terms. Thus, the pacing is funereally measured and the sound of footsteps on the wooden floors is brought to the fore in Ruy Garcia and Chris Foster's sound mix. The cast members deliver their lines with grim deliberation, while Jeff Russo's score clues the audience how to react to every scene it accompanies. Yet, for all these avoidable flaws, this remains a curiously compelling picture, as Macneill and Kass seek to justify Lizzie's actions by making her and Bridget victims of the Gilded Age patriarchy that sought to oppress and exploit them at every turn.

This would be a noble aim if the script didn't resort to clumsy inventions that distort history in an effort to elicit audience sympathy. The film-makers are wholly entitled to speculate upon the nature of the relationship between Lizzie and Bridget (even though there is no hard evidence of a lesbian affair during the two years - rather than six months - that the latter worked for the Bordens), but Andrew catching them in flagrante is as much a figment as his decapitating Lizze's beloved birds. Similarly, there is no proof that Lizzie was an epileptic or that John Morse used vile language to Lizzie in her cell. Moreover, despite following the Elizabeth Montgomery teleplay by having Lizzie naked when she wielded her axe, her state of undress is also speculative and ignores police interest in a dress that Lizzie claimed to have burned because it had been spattered with paint. 

In defence of Kass and Sevigny (who also co-produces), this is a shadow of the in-depth miniseries they had originally envisaged, which was cancelled after the Ricci pictures beat them to the punch. A combination of budgetary restraint and Macneill's insistence on adding his own imprint led to character-deepening scenes between Sevigny and both Kristen Stewart and Fiona Shaw being excised. This is a shame, as all three give intense performances, as do Jamey Sheridan and Denis O'Hare, who is particularly creepy as the grasping uncle striving to gyp his nieces out of their inheritance. But, for all the excellence of Elizabeth Jones's production design, Natalie O'Brien's costumes and Noah Greenberg's shallow focus framing, this is a deeply unsatisfactory reconstruction that seems to have disappointed its star as much as the critics.

We've covered a fair few mountain films in this column over the years, but nothing compares to Free Solo by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who exceed all of the expectations set by their 2015 epic, Meru. That films followed Chin, Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk in their bid to scale the 21,000 feet of the Shark's Fin on Mount Meru in the Himalayas. But, while they endured sub-zero temperatures and often perilous situations during their ascent, they wisely used every piece of safety equipment available to them. By contrast, Alex Honnold sets out to scale the 3000ft vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park known as El Capitan with nothing more than a bag of chalk

When we first meet Alex Honnold, he is climbing a sheer face whose height only becomes apparent when he makes it to the top and the camera peers over the edge to see what he has just negotiated. As the veteran of such iconic challenges as the Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park and the Half Dome in Yosemite, Honnold is a master of the unaided climbing style known as `free soloing'. He has made over 1000 free solo ascents and keeps contemplating becoming the first to conquer El Cap without equipment. But even he admits it's a scary prospect and vows not to attempt it until he has plotted the safest way up the Freerider route. 

Having watched him climb with boyhood hero Tommy Caldwell, Chin ventures into Honnold's camper van to learn about his veggie lifestyle and how he got into climbing as a lonely kid in Sacramento, California. He also introduces us to Honnold's new girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, who gave him her number at a book signing in Seattle and occasionally joins him for some rope climbs. However, he considered breaking up with her when she let a rope slip and he suffered compression fractures that might have jeopardised the career he had spoken so nonchalantly about while visiting his old school to promote his foundation, which is dedicated to alleviating global poverty through finding eco solutions. 

But Sanni survived and continued to support his ambitions, even though he admits that climbing would always come before commitment. Thus, when he heads to the limestone cliffs at Taghia in Morocco, his companion is Caldwell, as he wants to use the trip as a training exercise to prepare for a possible tilt at El Cap. Chin and fellow climber-cameraman Mikey Schaefer also see this venture as a valuable pre-Cap operation, as they need to work out how to film Honnold with the latest equipment without causing any distractions that might lead to disaster. They concede that they are apprehensive when filming free solo expeditions because such fabled climbers as John Backer, Sean Leary, Derek Hersey, Dan Osman and Dean Potter. 

Curious to understand how his brain copes with fear, Honnold has an MRI scan and is told that his amygdala needs greater than average amounts of stimulus in order to register concern. He laughs this off, but reveals that he doesn't allow himself to get hang-ups, as he prefers to expand his comfort zone by confronting difficult manoeuvres. But even he can make mistakes and, while on the Freeblast Slab part of El Cap with Sanni, he falls 30ft on a rope and suffers a severely sprained ankle. He refuses to remain inactive for long, however, and mother Dierdre Wolownick insists she would never prevent her son from doing what makes him happiest. She recalls how her husband had a passion for travelling and a careless way with words that might have given Honnold the inferiority complex that he has sought to vanquish by climbing. But he avers that he doesn't remember the casual insults and has nothing but admiration for a father who coped with a form of Asperger's and always encouraged his climbing. 

Sanni suggests she would feel differently about holding her tongue if they were married with a family. But she joins him at a gym wall just days after his accident, when he insists on climbing with his protective boot still on. She persuades him to spend some Halloween time with friends and their kids, but he doesn't like being told when to have fun and is more interested in familiarising himself with such El Cap features as Freeblast, Hollow Flake, Monster Offwidth, Enduro Corner, Teflon Corner and the Boulder Problem. The latter requires him to perform an intricate and risky karate kick movement and he attempts it with a rope under Caldwell's supervision and he feels good about it. But fellow free soloist Peter Croft expresses his concerns about taking on El Cap without a fallback and questions whether being filmed is adding unnecessary pressure to an already fraught assignment. 

Chin and crew member Cheyne Lempe are also nervous about doing something that could sap his concentration. As a consequence, they decide to change on camera placement as Honnold isn't happy with it. But, when Sanni confides her own disquiet about his attempt, he bluntly informs her that he feels no obligation to take her feelings into consideration because having no emotional ties is part of the psychological armour he dons to make himself feel invincible. She nods quietly at the end of a conversation on the evening before he climbs and accepts that her boyfriend is going to attempt a free solo climb of El Cap whether she likes it or not. 

As it's late in the season, Honnold decides to leave before dawn to ensure he gets the best light on the trickiest sections. But something spooks him on Freeblast and he bales out and blames the presence of the cameras. Sanni is relieved and, three months later, she coaxes Honnold into buying a house in Las Vegas. He doesn't particularly enjoy shopping for fridges, but concedes that she has brought him out of himself and that this is the best relationship he has had so far. She hopes he has got El Capitan out of his system, but he tells fellow climber Mark Synnott that he has to give it a better shot and he sets out again in the Spring of 2017.

Synnott takes it upon himself to tell Chin how much pressure the cameras are adding and he offers to withdraw so Honnold can climb on his own terms. But his warrior spirit prevails, even though he is disconcerted by news of the death of Swiss legend Ueli Steck. He bids farewell to Sanni, who has to pull over to shed a few tears after she drives away because the thought hits her that she might have seen her lover for the last time. Schaefer is also apprehensive, as he will be operating the long-lens camera from ground level and will have the best view in Yosemite during the climb. 

Honnold goes into the zone while driving to the site on 3 June and the only voices we hear for the duration of the attempt are those of the camera crew via walkie-talkies. This is a neat way of identifying where Honnold is on the rock face and how quickly and confidently he's progressing. But it also feels somewhat contrived and it would have been much better to have presented the whole bid in silence, with no voices or music to compete with the sound of Honnold breathing and grunting with the sheer exertion involved. Instead, the commentary as he attempts the karate kick and is left exposed on the outcrop at Traverse feels as intrusive as the Marco Beltrami score that recalls the cheesy tension music used when a competitor is going against the clock in a TV quiz show. However, the decision to edit the three hours and 56 minutes it took Honnold to reach the top down to about 20 minutes pays off handsomely, as even though it's obvious from the outset that he is going to make it, any longer in such a vertiginous setting would have been unbearable. 

Having shared the moment with Chin and the other crew members at the peak, Honnold calls Sanni and admits to being a bit emotional. He even manages to tell her that he loves and appreciates her as he starts his descent. They hug on being reunited in his camper and she can't resist reminding him that he doesn't have to do this again. Her face is a picture, therefore, when Chin and Vasarhelyi cut back to her after Honnold hopes that a kid out there will find a cooler feat to top him - unless he decides to take a crack at it first. 

In the good old days of the silent serial, a sign-off such as this would have been called a cliffhanger ending. Who knows where Honnold's ambitions will take him next, but there seems little doubt that he will eventually set his sights on something much more reckless than marriage. One fears he could follow the likes of daredevil wingsuiter Alexander Polli, whose exploits were featured posthumously in Richard Parry's Base. But, as Jennifer Peedom demonstrated in Mountain (both 2017), there's seemingly no known cure for adrenaline addiction and Sanni will have to face the fact that her chap's machismo is a key component of his make-up. Nonetheless, one can only wish them all the best for their future. 

As for Chin and Vasarhelyi, they may well have peaked as bergfilme-makers, as it's hard to see how they are ever going to top this engrossing profile. Clearly, Honnold trusts them implicitly and their insights into his relationship with Sanni are as thoughtful as their approach to filming the free solo sequences. Making use of remote-operated rigs, as well as drone cameras, the duo provide the viewer with the ultimate POV shots and anyone afraid of heights is going to find this a monumentally challenging watch. Imagine this on an IMAX screen. Yikes. 

Apart from the misjudged drone during the 3 June sequence, the score switches effectively between mellow moments and pulsating passages, while Bob Eisenhardt's cutting and Felipe Messeder's sound editing are spot on. But the technical heroes are the camera operators, who perched on ledges and dangled from ropes to capture the astonishing footage that one can only hope that Honnold gets to watch in his old age.

CinemaItaliaUK rounds off another year of handpicked gems with Katia Bernardi's charming slice of staged reality, Funne: Sea Dreaming Girls. Returning to the Daone Valley that provided the setting for her 2012 documentary, Men of Light. Whereas that film made innovative use of footage recorded by Dino Risi and Ermanno Olmi, Bernardi's sixth feature centres on the efforts of a group of eightysomethings from a small village in the northern Italian mountains to raise the funds needed for their first-ever trip to the seaside. Taking its title from the local dialect word for `women', this could be described as an exercise in neo-reality and only the hardest heart will be able to resist it. 

As narrator Oliviero Cappellini tells a story about eels swimming upstream towards Daone and forgetting their maritime origins, we are introduced to such stalwarts of the Rododendro Club as Jolanda Pellizzari, Armida Brisaghella and Erminia Losa. At the end of a Wednesday bingo session, the latter mentions how nice it would be to celebrate the club's 20th anniversary by taking a trip to the coast, as only a couple of her fellow members has ever seen the sea. They agree to bake some cakes to raise funds for the excursion and we see the three friends chattering away as they bake and selling their wares on the street after a procession led by parish priest, Father Artemio Uberti.

But, while they sell everything, they only make €270 profit and Erminia suggests that they follow the example of the local firemen and make a calendar. Zita, Irma and Berta have their doubts, with the latter refusing to pose in a swimsuit or be Miss January because she was born in May. However, when photographer Massimo Giovannini, he persuades them to do a `calendar of dreams' rather than pose in scenes from their everyday lives. Some remain hesitant, but the idea goes down well with the assembled and they are sent away to think of something they have always wanted to do. Needing inspiration, however, several of the group pop into the church to ask Our Lady of the Snows for some inspiration because dreams are not so easy to conjure up as it might appear. 

Following a series of meetings, the women gather for the photo shoot in Massimo's bijou studio, with all of them putting on make-up for the first time in their lives. One imagines she's hitchhiking to Lourdes, while Erminia pretends to be bored with her billionaire husband. Vitalina stands with a wooden spoon against a white screen that will become a fabulous garden of fresh produce, while Enrichetta is encouraged to wave like Queen Elizabeth II. However, Armida has to delay her moment in the spotlight, as she has tripped on a loose cobblestone and broken her nose. Massimo makes a fuss of her with a big bouquet of flowers and not only snaps her individually, but also has her pose with Jolanda and Erminia, as he calls them `the Ave Maria Trio'.

As Christmas approaches, the photoshopped pictures arrive and Erminia hands them out to her friends. Armida is shown sailing in a paper ship inside a watering can, as she has always wanted to go on the Love Boat, while Valentina appears as `the Wool Queen' with her knitting needles. Amalia looks down from the basket of a hot air balloon flying over the Statue of Liberty, while Chiara features in a collage enabling her to dance a waltz in Vienna. They all agree they look beautiful, although Armida complains that Massimo has made her look cross-eyed. But she is more than willing to stand in the back of Erminia's truck and bellow through a loudhailer to encourage the villagers to buy the calendar.

Driving through the snowy streets, however, the pair come across a fire brigade vehicle doing the same rounds and Andrea Gattico and Matej Mestrovic's score becomes an amusing pastiche of an Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western soundtrack, as the competitors rush from door to door to sell their wares and prove that Daone isn't big enough for the both of them. However, as we see footage of the women going about their daily business and attending a rain-sodden carnival parade, we discover they only sold 75 calendars and Armida claims that people were put off because they didn't want to waste their money on sending some old biddies to the seaside. Erminia declares that their neighbours were too dim to appreciate the fantasy and fun of the enterprise and vows never to have anything to do with calendars ever again. 

With some of the group suffering from ill health and others from a nasty bout of indifference, Erminia asks if they want to scrap the expedition. As her friends at the Rododendro Club are too busy playing bingo, they take a half-hearted vote to scrap the project. But Erminia is still determined to see the sea and Armida and Jolanda join her in meeting Alberto Gianera, a computer whizz who introduces them to Facebook and the concept of crowdfunding. They record a video for their new web page and within days they are being mentioned in newspaper columns and on radio shows, as the plan to visit a shrine to Our Lady of the Snows on the Croatian coast catches the public imagination. Erminia and Jolanda are even interviewed over the phone by Mara Miceli on Radio Vaticana Italia. 

A montage follows of the women being interviewed in the village and in TV studios, as their publicity bandwagon rolls on. They make the front page of La Stampa and double their required total in just under a fortnight. Armida has qualms about what she considers to be online begging, but Erminia reassures her that everything is above board and they book their passages for August. They doze most of the way to the Island of Ugljan, but the Ave Maria Trio and four friends get to paddle in the Adriatic Sea and accompany Our Lady of the Snows and her little flotilla on a trip around the Zadar archipelago. As the narrator concludes, some fish get to swim upstream and perhaps more would if we could only understand what they wanted to say. 

Concluding with a lovely shot of the seven pilgrims sitting on white chairs in the sea in their bathing costumes, this is an absolute delight that deserves to be seen by the widest possible audiences (come on Storyville and True Stories, what are you waiting for?). It takes a little while go get used to the scripted reality format, but Erminia, Armida and Jolanda are naturals in front of the camera and their growing confidence slowly brings the best out of their  70-94 year-old clubmates Irma Battocchi, Orsolina Bugna, Valeria Cadone, Berta, Chiara and Vitalina Ghezzi, Teresa Grandi, Amalia Grandine, Lucia Macchiacchi, Valentina Nicolini, Enrichetta Parisi and Zita Pellizzari. 

Photographed throughout the seasons by Simone Cargnoni, Nicola Cattani  and Sebastiano Luca Insinga, Daone resembles a fairytale setting, as it nestles into the mountainside. However, life can clearly be tough in the summer heat and the winter chill and Bernardi refuses to gloss over the fact that many of the women have had a tough time raising their families on meagre wages. But the emphasis is firmly on escapism and how wonderful it would be if Radio Vaticana could arrange for the women to meet Pope Francis. Maybe that could be Bernardi's next assignment?

Showing at Dochouse just a few weeks after Erika Cohn's The Judge profiled pioneering Palestinian law-giver Kholoud Al-Faqih, Jean Libon and Yves Hinant's So Help Me God provides a compelling insight into the daily duties of Belgian examining magistrate Anne Gruwez. Yet, while the subject matter has several points of overlap, the contrasting tones could not be more different, as the film-makers introduce an element of jocularity that sometimes seems to be at odds with the serious case Gruwez undertakes. However, the more eccentric moments reveal the kind of temperament required for a judge to apply both the law and common sense in reaching their verdicts. 

Having already collaborated with Libon and Hinant on their long-running Candid Camera show, Strip-Tease, Gruwez is a natural in front of the camera, whether she is interrogating suspects or pootling around Brussels in her blue Citroën 2CV to point out the scenes of gruesome crimes or attend the exhumation of a corpse. This grim duty relates to Gruwez's teaming with cops Serge Graide, Mark Slavic and David Derumier to re-open the 20 year-old cold case involving a pair of murdered prostitutes, Nicole Nart and Yolande Stahl. Following the few clues found at the crime scenes, the quartet keep drawing blanks or meandering into dead ends before they hear that one of the men under scrutiny has been traced through police records in Chicago.

Napoleon Bonaparte declared that examining magistrates were the most powerful people in the Empire and, in spite of her penchant for gallows humour, Gruwez takes her responsibilities extremely seriously, as she has only 24 hours after an arrest to determine whether a suspect is to be committed for trial. In the course of the documentary (which was filmed over three years), Gruwez interviews two men accused of beating women, a cashpoint mugger and a junkie who attacked a wheelchair-bound pensioner. She also chides a cocky fellow who refuses to give a DNA sample and warns the family of a man who assaulted a cop about the dangers of in-breeding. 

But, while she is genuinely intrigued by the things a dominatrix is asked to do and amused by the misogynist ravings of a car thief who vows to train in Syria to wreak his revenge upon her, Gruwez is also poignantly compassionate towards a young mother, as she explains in deadpan detail why she felt compelled to murder her son and carry him across the city in a suitcase for burial. The majority of those under caution are from ethnic backgrounds and several of them are Muslims. But, by adhering strictly to an unflinching fly-on-the-wall approach, Libon and Hinant deny themselves the opportunity to draw any socio-political conclusions from such observations. 

Nevertheless, they leave viewers in no doubt about the problems facing those on the margins and the extent to which women bear the brunt of the most vile and violent crimes. Some have been shocked by the graphic nature of some of the testimony and have complained about the voyeuristic intrusion of the cemetery sequence. But such expeditions are all in a day's work for the remarkable Gruwez, whose sole companion away from her often sordid investigations is her pet rat. 

The name of Lola Arias will be familiar to anyone who saw Ruben Östlund's Oscar-nominated art-world satire, The Square, as the Argentinian writer, performer and curator filed a lawsuit against the Swede for using her name without permission as the creator of the eponymous installation, In fact, Östlund had cast Arias in a scene that hit the cutting-room floor. So, there's considerable irony in the fact that Arias makes her directorial debut with Theatre of War, a study of re-enactment that requires British and Argentine combatants to revisit their experiences of the Falklands War or La Guerra de las Malvinas. 

By all accounts, this `staged documentary' forms part of a wider art project that also includes a book entitled Campo Minando/Minefield, a stage play called Minefield and a video installation labelled Veterans. It would be fascinating to make a direct comparison of the components, but we shall have to content ourselves with a brief analysis of the film showing under the auspices of Dochouse.

The opening segment introduces us to  Lou Armour, David Jackson, Sukrim Rai, Rubén Otero, Gabriel Sagastume and Marcelo Vallejo. Standing in front of a bare wall, they give their names, ranks and ages before revealing their role in the conflict and their current occupation. Arias quizzes them their heroics and any subsequently post-traumatic stress that they might have suffered. She returns repeatedly to Armour's account of an Argentinian soldier dying in his arms and leaves the audience to pick up the differences in each telling of the piteous anecdote.

However, Arias demands more of her participants than confessions. She also ushers them on to a stage with a white backdrop and encourages them to act our some of the incidents they experienced or witnessed. For scenes set in a barracks, on a construction site and in a swimming pool, they don costumes, sing about their recollections, speak to schoolchildren and psychologists, and deliver their lines in each other's languages, as the veterans expose the compromised patriotism that provoked the war the spring of 1982 that claimed some 900 lives. Yet the very self-conscious artificiality of the enterprise forces the participants and the onlookers to dwell on the folly and brutality of warfare and the jingoistic banalities that set nations against each other. 

In many ways, this recalls both Richard Jobson's The Somnambulists (2011), in which a number of British military personnel face the camera to recall their activities in Iraq, and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012), which saw those who had committed atrocities in Indonesia in the mid-1960s return to the scene to recreate their hideous crimes. But Arias seems less interested in the rights and wrongs of the battles that the men fought than in the enduring impact they have had upon them as human beings and what these resulting emotions say about colonialism, masculinity, spontaneity, contrivance, language, and mortality. 

Having gathered her recruits and given them time to get to know one another, share their experiences and come to terms with the demands of her creative process, Arias leaves them nowhere to hide, as she confronts the fiftysomethings with items connected to the conflict and with doubles who embody the naiveté that feels like an outdated memory 36 years on. Armour and Vallejo gradually emerge as the central characters, as their memories overlap and clash. But the key figure is cinematographer Manuel Abramovich, who initially maintains a discreet distance before becoming an active participant in the ever-more artificial exploration of genuine agony and the forging of the bonds of true brotherhood that should render all future conflict impossible.

Still only in his early 30s, Dieudo Hamadi has dedicated his documentary career to alerting the wider world to the crises that are slowly tearing apart his homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having contributed the `Ladies in Waiting' and `Zero Tolerance' segments to the anthology, Congo in Four Acts (2010), Hamadi has examined the country's electoral process in Atalaku (2013), its education system in National Diploma (2014) and the efforts being made to eradicate sexual abuse in Mama Colonel (2017). In his fourth feature, Kinshasa Makambo, he turns the focus on the activists campaigning for the removal of President Joseph Kabila after he refused to step down following his mandated two terms in office. 

Taking its title from the state capital and the local word for `headache', this uncompromising record was filmed between late 2015 and the start of 2017 and chronicles the disarray that starts to divide the opposition to a leader who had assumed the presidency following the assassination of his father, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, in 2001. Inspired by anti-government protests in Tunisia and Burkina Faso, crowds took to the streets of Kinshasa to protests against Kabila's disregard for democracy. However, an opening sequence filmed by Hamadi himself with terrifying viscerality, shows how brutally such displays of opposition are put down by the armed forces and suggests the size of the task facing protesters like Christian, Jean-Marie and Ben. 

The latter has just returned home after a chastening exile in the United States, while Jean-Marie has recently been released from prison after being found guilty of subversion. However, he has clearly learned little from his political education, as he begins firing off bizarre written threats to members of Kabila's inner circle that feel detached from the realities facing Ben and Christian, as they fall out over the role that aged former prime minister Etienne Tshisekedi might play in toppling the president after he returns from exile in Belgium. 

However, with Tshisekedi ailing, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress loses the battle for hearts and minds and Christian and Ben see a workable compromise disintegrate, with the latter clutching at the rhetoric of 1950s independence titan Patrice Lumumba and the former becoming increasingly radical in his impractical proposals. Moreover, as the police begin to crack down, more time is spent on fashioning homemade tear gas masks as it is on debating ideology and the chances of Kabila losing his grip on power look remarkably slim by the picture's close. 

The combination of Hamadi's restless camerawork and Hélène Ballis's precise editing down the 70+ hours of footage ensures that this packs a kino punch. But the hopelessness of the situation and the earnest incompetence of the rebels will leave many feeling dismayed, especially the 47 year-old Kabila remains in control and has announced within the last couple of days that he fully intends running for office again in 2023 in his bid to surpass predecessor Mobutu Sese Seko's 32 years of chaotic tyranny.