Parky at the Pictures (DVD 16/6/2011)

In Berlin for a biotechnology conference with wife January Jones, Neeson has to return to the airport to retrieve a forgotten briefcase. However, his cab veers off a bridge and into the River Spree and he wakes from a four-day coma to find that Jones has no idea who he is, as she is married to renowned botanist Aidan Quinn. Puzzled by this turn of events and the fact that long-time colleague Sebastian Koch doesn't recognise him, either, Neeson becomes positively resentful of the fact that someone is trying to kill him and goes in search of his taxi driver in the hope of finding some answers.

Bosnian refugee Diane Kruger is eager to help and enlists the aid of former Stasi agent Bruno Ganz. He is a wily character, with an intimate knowledge of the city's seedier side. But, while he and American associate Frank Langella spot the bio conspiracy amidst the red herrings, it takes a seismic twist for the pieces to fall into place.

Riffing shamelessly on such Hitchcockian tropes as the wrong man, the icy blonde and the unexpected MacGuffin, this is sufficiently entertaining for the last act legerdemain to seem less egregious. Screenwriters Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell seem more interested in keeping the action moving rather than exploring the source's philosophical and psychological themes. But the car chases are briskly staged and cinematographer Flavio Labiano makes as effective use of the Berlin backstreets as he does its more iconic landmarks.

On the acting side, Neeson conveys his initial confusion credibly enough. But he seems too bullish and resourceful to be sufficiently vulnerable for the narrative convolutions to work. Moreover, while he sparks effectively enough with the occasionally tokenistic Kruger, they are upstaged with effortless ease by Ganz and Langella, as they relive their Cold War heyday with a delicious sense of sinister nostalgia.

If Unknown often seems like Roman Polanski's spin on North By Northwest, David Michod's lauded debut, Animal Kingdom, has a feel of a Michael Mann variation on a Johnny To gangland saga. Chronicling the downfall of a Melbourne mob family, this is a satisfyingly tough crime drama that is dominated by the Oscar-nominated performance of Jacki Weaver, who makes Ma Barker look like a doting old biddy.

Seventeen year-old James Frecheville's heroin-addicted mother had devoted herself to keeping him out of the clutches of her notorious family. But, when she overdoses, Frecheville is left with little option but to move in with grandmother Jacki Weaver and his uncles, Ben Mendelsohn, Sullivan Stapleton and Luke Ford. The former has just been released from prison and is set on moving into the more respectable world of stock market speculation with partner Joel Edgerton. But when he is gunned down, Mendelsohn goes off the rails and detective Guy Pearce realises that his best chance of taking him down lies with exploiting his guileless nephew.

By keeping Frecheville in custody longer than the other suspects following the killing of two cops, Pearce succeeds in convincing his relatives that the rookie has blabbed and Mendelsohn and Weaver begin probing to see where his loyalties lie. But Frecheville is only willing to trust new girlfriend Laura Wheelright and his caution serves to ratchet up the tension within his clan.

Capturing the violent unpredictability of the suburban underworld, Michod chillingly exposes the links between organised crime and corrupt law enforcement, while also fashioning a domestic tragedy of often Greek proportions. Antony Partos's score epitomises this tendency to melodrama. But the combination of Jo Ford's oppressive interiors and Adam Arkapaw's prowling camerawork gives the action an authenticity that is reinforced by Michod's refusal to adopt either the fragmented visual style that is now de rigueur in Hollywood thrillers or the `heroic bloodshed' pyrotechnics so common in Hong Kong genre flicks.

But much depends here on the performances, with the speed-fuelled, multi-tattooed Stapleton and the cocky, but ineffectual Ford providing solid support to the maniacal Mendelsohn, the watchful Frecheville and the calculating Pearce. But Weaver rightly took the plaudits for a shift from doting granny to ruthless matriarch that is all the more terrifying for its subtlety.

Weaver found herself up against Michelle Williams in the Best Supporting Actress category (they both lost to Melissa Leo in The Fighter). But Ryan Gosling can count himself unlucky to have missed out on a nomination for his contribution to Blue Valentine, which intriguingly seeks the reasons for a couple's disintegrating relationship in its cosy beginnings. Shooting the contrasting periods with Super 16mm and Red digital cameras, director Derek Cianfrance adds a visual frisson to the Cassavetesesque drama without ever allowing it to lapse into the actorly self-indulgence that characterises so many US indie attempts to emulate European art cinema.

Married for several years, Gosling and Williams have a young daughter (Faith Wladyka) and the kind of problems that are hardly unique to a working-class family during a recession. He is losing his hair and has become overly fond of a cold beer, while the demands of her nursing job often leave her tired and irritable. Moreover, his father (John Doman) is on oxygen and their pet dog has gone missing. But even the preparation of breakfast oatmeal can now tip the pair into a slanging match.

It was all very different when they first met. Gosling drove a truck for a Brooklyn removal firm and he first met Williams when transporting a widower to the Pennyslvania old people's home where her grandmother was slowly approaching death. Williams was a medical student and was dating wrestler Mike Vogel. But something about Gosling got under her skin and, even though she suspects he is totally wrong for her, she succumbed to his charm when he serenaded her with `You Always Hurt the One You Love' on his ukulele.

Back in the present, Williams bumps into Vogel at the grocery store and is affronted when he teases her about her fidelity. When she tells Gosling about the encounter, he becomes sullenly jealous and, thus, dooms their romantic getaway at a themed motel - although his decision to select the alienating sci-fi inflected `Future Room' over `Cupid's Cove' hardly helps matters.

Cianfrance and co-scenarists Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne overdo the non-linearity in striving to introduce some artistic complexity into what is actually a very straightforward story. Moreover, they fail to identify the fatal flaw that doomed the romance from its outset. But the past and present incidents have a ring of truth that is reinforced by impressive performances that deftly convey the genuine affection that keeps the couple together in spite of the immature Gosling's under-achieving complacency and the regretful Williams's scolding passivity.

Andrij Parekh's cinematography is sometimes a touch self-conscious, while the leads occasionally allow the naturalism to be tainted by wisps of actorly self-satisfaction. But this is a sincere insight into the mechanics of a relationship and the sombre fact that, for all the love and commitment involved, some are simply predestined to founder.

Coping with confusing emotion is also the theme of Nik Fackler's debut, Lovely, Still. Clearly inspired by Sarah Polley's Away From Her (2006), this starts out as an offbeat late-life romance. But it changes tack so melodramatically that its mawkish manipulation becomes almost impossible to watch. Indeed, so crass and clumsily executed is the twist that it's tempting to give it away in order to expose the shoddy duplicity behind it.

Martin Landau is such a loner that he buys himself a present each Christmas and takes inordinate care in wrapping it and placing it beneath his tree. He has his routines (which Fackler presents in off-putting close-up) and a job bagging groceries at the Omaha store run by brash go-getter Adam Scott. But Landau's ordered existence is disrupted by the discovery in his sitting room one evening of new neighbour Ellen Burstyn, who uses a dent in his car fender as an excuse to ask him on a date.

Exploiting the Yuletide setting to up the quaint quotient, Fackler allows the lovebirds to bill and coo for a couple of scenes before springing a surprise worthy of the corniest `disease of the week' teleplay. Suffice to say, the change in circumstances explains Landau's disconcerting dreams and forces Burstyn's disapproving daughter, Elizabeth Banks, to change her tune. But the final reveal will appal the majority of viewers, who will not only resent being conned by such amateurish contrivance, but also the fact that two such revered Oscar winners could find no better vehicle for their undoubted talents.

The premise is equally far-fetched in Donatella Maiorca's historical drama The Sea Purple. However, this study of class and sexuality is based on Giacomo Pilati's novelisation of actual events and there is much to ponder in its insights into the social and religious conventions dictating life in a 19th-century Italian island community.

Overjoyed at the prospect of childhood friend Isabella Ragonese returning home after years away in service, wild child Valeria Solarino is dismayed to discover that she has plans to marry onetime playmate Marco Foschi. Determined to thwart the match, Solarino seduces the unsuspecting Ragonese during a religious procession and she is so swept away by Sapphic passion that she surrenders herself to the affair. Unfortunately, Solarino's gruff father, Ennio Fantastichini, has had enough of her brazenness and arranges for her to wed Corrado Fortuna, the son of his assistant at the quarry that is owned by the baron who employed Ragonese and is the village's main source of employment.

Refusing to bow to such patriarchal tyranny, Solarino declares her love for Ragonese and is promptly locked away in the cellar. But her put-upon mother, Giselda Volodi, takes pity on her and uses her knowledge of the parish priest's peccadilloes to blackmail him into declaring that a mistake was made at Solarino's birth and that she is really a man. As he had always wanted a son, Fantastichini accepts the solution on the proviso that Solarino takes a job at the quarry. However, she not only agrees, but also begins to campaign for better treatment of the workforce.

With Gianna Nannini's swelling score complementing Roberta Allegrini's glorious seascapes and Sabrina Beretta and Lia Francesca Morandini's costumes reinforcing the sobriety of Beatrice Scarpato's production design, this is a meticulously made melodrama that is suffused with the sensuality that Maiorca lavishes on Solarino and Ragonese. But so much time is devoted to love making and story arc that there is precious little room for characterisation. Thus, while this has a solid sense of place and a decent grasp of the period's social and political realities, there's too little depth beneath the handsome surfaces.

The setting switches to Tunis in 1942 for another tale of forbidden love, as Karin Albou charts the relationship between 16 year-old Muslim Olympe Borval and her Jewish neighbour, Lizzie Brocheré in The Wedding Song. Exploiting Nazi ideology to explore the contemporary Arab-Israeli situation, this is a consciously provocative drama that challenges attitudes to the status of women, as well as ethnicity and faith. Moreover, it is also a celebration of the female body and a denunciation of those who believe its primary purpose is male pleasure.

Despite the disparity between the Jewish and Arab communities, the secular Brocheré and the devout Borval have been raised as friends. They regularly go to the hammam bath together and have no secrets from each other, even though Borval has always envied Brocheré her freedom to go to school. However, Borval is excited by her upcoming nuptials to cousin Najib Oudghiri and has nothing but sympathy with Brocheré, who resents mother Karin Albou for arranging a match with older doctor Simon Abkarian in order to pay a residency fee.

But, with the civilising French influence in the city waning during the German occupation, attitudes start to change and Oudghiri begins collaborating with the SS after swallowing the promise that the Arabs will be granted independence at the end of the war. Initially, Borval disapproves of his anti-Semitism. But, after she is humiliated in a Jewish store and his new source of income means that she can finally set a wedding day, she begins withdrawing from Brocheré and it's only when she realises the full horror of the invaders' plans that she decides to risk her own life to protect her friend.

Using Laurent Brunet's camera to reinforce the proximities that become lines of demarcation within Khaled Joulak's sets, Albou adroitly shifts from two-shots to close-ups to emphasise the growing rift between Borval and Brocheré. However, she also retains focus on their eyes to convey feelings that can no longer be spoken and this subtle use of physicality contrasts with the more abrasive exfoliation to which Brocheré is subjected in order to be acceptable to her bridegroom.

She is less successful in limning the secondary characters, however, with Oudghiri's ignorant quisling being cast in a villainous light, while Abkarian is judged less harshly for his cowardly acceptance of a post that keeps him out of a camp for his social inferiors. But, even the themes sometimes seem shoehorned into the drama, this is still a thoughtful, courageous and beautifully realised film. The inner sanctum of the Third Reich itself is exposed by Heinrich Breloer in Speer and Hitler: The Devil's Architect, a 2005 blend of talking head and dramatic reconstruction that seeks to establish how much Albert Speer actually knew about the atrocities that were committed by the government in which he had served as Minister of Armaments. Breloer has interviewed Speer and was planning to make a film based on his diaries when his subject died in 1981. A quarter of a century later, working in collaboration with writer Horst Koenigstein, Breloer finally completed the project, which was broadcast as a three-part mini-series. Presented here with an interview with Speer himself among the extras, this makes for a compelling companion piece to Gitta Sereny's controversial 1995 biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth.

Starring Sebastian Koch and Tobias Moretti, this award-winning teleplay is the product of exhaustive research, with the sets being meticulous recreations of the Führer's headquarters on the Obersalzberg, the courtroom at the Nuremberg Trials and the cell in Spandau in which Speer was detained for 20 years. Moreover, Breloer conducted nearly 125 hours of interviews with 23 key figures in Speer's story, including sons Albert and Arnold, daughter Hilde and his nephew Wolf. He also unearthed previously unseen archive material from private and public collections across the world.

Docudramatic hybrids of this kind can often seem awkward. But such is Breloer's mastery of the topic and the commitment of a fine cast that this always feels more like an historical analysis than infotainment. In the first episode, Germania: The Madness, Speer thinks back from his Nuremberg cell with lawyer Hans Flächsner (Joachim Bißmeier) to the early 1930s when he and Hitler planned a new world order that would enable him to fulfil his architectural ambitions. Oblivious to the human toll that this `Welthauptstadt' would cost, Speer allowed himself to be dazzled by Hitler's personality and the prospect of creating the Avenue of Splendours, the Arch of Triumph and the Großer Platz. Similarly, he entranced the likes of Leni Riefenstahl, who claims to have developed a crush on him as she filmed him working on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally and the 1936 Olympic Games in Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938).

However, as the war began to turn against Germany, Speer proved himself to be willing to betray his friend and started scheming how to position himself in the aftermath. Thus, he devised the strategy of admitting to everything while taking responsibility for nothing to which he would adhere throughout the war crimes hearings. Moreover, as Breloer reveals in Nuremberg: The Trial, he also distanced himself from `mob' members like Hermann Göring (Hannes Hellmann), Rudolf Hess (André Hennicke), Admiral Karl Doenitz (Peter Rühring) and General Erich Raeder (Michael Gwisdek) to present himself as an outsider and a victim along with the rest of the innocent German nation.

Senior American prosecutor Robert Jackson (Edmund Dehn) warmed to Speer's story. But the defence that he was simply following limited orders is contradicted by documentary evidence that he participated in the expulsion of the Jews from Berlin and had teamed with Heinrich Himmler (Florian Martens) to monitor the building of V2 rockets at the Dora forced labour camp. However, Speer's fellow Nazis were aware of his contribution and, Spandau: The Sentence shows how Prisoner No.5 was shunned by Hess, Doenitz, Raeder, Reichsbank President Walter Funk (Götz Burger), Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Konstantin von Neurath (Elert Bode) and Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach (Markus Boysen), as he continued the process of reinventing himself by ensuring that wife Gretel (Dagmar Manzel) limited the facts that his six children discovered as he published an imposing history of the Third Reich and his diaries.

The final instalment is the most disarming, as it discusses the role that Speer's former colleagues and their offspring played in the postwar success of West Germany. Moreover, even as it dispels Speer's claims, it also suggests the lingering loyalty that many of Hitler's subordinates took with them to the grave.

Cornelius Rost was a more obviously blameless German was casualty. Captured by the Red Army shortly after leaving his wife and child in the summer of 1944, he endured a three-year trek across Siberia after escaping from a labour camp on Cape Deznhev. His ordeal inspired a 1955 novel by Josef Martin Bauer and now former Hollywood stuntman Hardy Martins follows West German television director Fritz Umgelter (1959) in bringing his story to the screen in As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me.

Martins rather hurtles through the events between Bernhard Bettermann bidding farewell to spouse Iris Böhm and being sentenced to 25 years in a lead mine near the Bering Strait. He devotes more time to the four years spent living underground in the most appalling conditions with only the friendship of dying German medic Michael Mendel and the compassion of Soviet doctor Irina Narbekova for solace. But Martins is keen to head into the wilderness and he soon has Pavel Lebeshev's camera striking out across the snow-covered landscape to the stirring accompaniment of Eduard Artemiev's score.

Bettermann heads north to throw chasing camp commander Anatoli Kotenyov off his trail and he forges an alliance with prospectors Vladimir Korpus and Igor Filchenkov after he fishes the former out of a river. But the Russians fall out over their treasure and Bettermann presses on with the murderous Korpus, who eventually throws him down a ravine on becoming convinced that he also intends to steal his gold. Having narrowly escaped a pack of wolves, Bettermann is befriended by a nomadic tribe of Chukchi herders and shares some unexpected intimacy with the chief's granddaughter, Irina Pantaeva.

On learning that Kotenyov is still pursuing their guest, the Chukchi send Bettermann packing with a dog for company and he manages to hitch a ride on a logging train. Another betrayal almost leads to his capture, but he manages to make his way across Central Asia and is helped to acquire a passport by Aleksandr Yefremov, a Polish Jew whose family has suffered at the hands of both the Nazi and Communist regimes. But, as Bettermann approaches the Persian border, he spots Kotenyov waiting for him.

Martins cannot help closing his epic odyssey with a sentimental Christmas reunion. But, considering this is only his second outing behind the camera, he can be excused such melodramatic lapses. Less pardonable, however, is the avoidance of explaining why so many survivors of the Great Patriotic War were willing to help a German and the tendency to compress key incidents, such as the sojourn with the Chuckchi. Martins places too much emphasis on action and not enough on characterisation. But this is pitched as an adventure rather than a psychological study and, as such, it succeeds admirably.