Parky at the Pictures (DVD 23/1/2014)

Having slightly missed his step with his English-language debut, This Must Be the Place (2011), Paolo Sorrentino returns to terra firma with The Great Beauty, a companion piece to his masterly denunciation of former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008), which invokes Federico Fellini's La Dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963) to suggest that little has changed for the denizens of Rome's social and intellectual élite over the last half century. Exquisitely photographed by Luca Bigazzi to show the capital in all its glory and venality, this is a long, intricate and occasionally self-satisfied treatise. But it cuttingly captures both the spirit of its time and the sense of moral abnegation that was epitomised by the notorious Bunga Bunga parties that made the Italian establishment a global laughing stock.

The action opens with a quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1930s novel, Journey to the End of the Night: `Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.' But the scene soon shifts to the midday gun sounding on the Janiculum Hill, as a gaggle of Japanese tourists scurries around clicking their cameras and snapping up mementoes. Suddenly, one of the group collapses and dies from a heart attack and the myth of the Eternal City is called into question just as Toni Servillo hosts his 65th birthday party in a magnificent apartment overlooking the Colosseum on one side and a convent on the other. He has been in Rome for three decades, but has drifted since the publication of his acclaimed novel, The Human Apparatus, and has channelled his creative energies into journalism. Currently covering the arts and society happenings for a glossy magazine, Servillo flits between parties with a sense of entitlement and belonging that is tainted by a creeping boredom and the knowledge that he has wasted his talents and needs to act quickly if he is to do anything worthwhile before it is too late.

Among the guests toasting Servillo health are his dwarf editor Giovanna Vignola, failed playwright Carlo Verdone, toy salesman Carlo Buccirosso, left-leaning radical writer Galatea Ranzi, malcontented couple Iaia Forte and Pamela Villoresi, and impoverished aristocrats Franco Graziosi and Sonia Gessner, who have been hired to give the evening a touch of class. They exchange acerbic asides and calculated witticisms as they watch younger freeloaders gyrating on the dance floor. A giant neon Martini sign leaves one wondering whether this really is the right place and the right time and Servillo himself is jolted out of his complacency by a couple of chance encounters.

The first brings Vernon Dobtcheff to his doorstep, who reveals that his wife has just died. As Servillo sympathises, the stranger explains that he discovered in her diaries after 35 years of marriage that she never stopped adoring Servillo, who had been her first love. Deeply touched by this reminiscence of his innocent past, Servillo succumbs to the charms of fortysomething stripper Sabrina Ferilli, who still works for the drug-addicted, club-owning father who was once part of Servillo's coterie. He is still quite capable of luring beauties like Isabella Ferrari into his bed, but he starts taking Ferilli to functions and delight in subjecting his friends to her forthright opinions and contentment in her own skin. Yet he remains plagued by nagging thoughts that he needs to escape in order to rediscover his artistic soul.

However, the need to pay the bills forces him to assess the likes of performance artist Anita Kravos, whose latest piece consists of her running around naked (apart from a makeshift hijab and the Soviet hammer and cycle shaved into her red-dyed pubic hair) and banging her head as hard as she can against an ancient aqueduct. He exposes her as a charlatan within the first few seconds of their interview and her bitter tears contrast with the blankness on the face of the society beauty who seems more interested in her Facebook images than living a life and the sobbing of the 12 year-old action painter, whose exploitative parents look on as she daubs inexpertly for the watching media.

Such experiences should at least raise an eyebrow, but they seem no more tediously bizarre to Servillo than the magician who makes giraffes disappear, the underground sepulchre transformed into a botox clinic, the mammoth sea monster that has made the headlines or the photographer who has spent his entire career taking self-portraits. Not even the sight of a priest and his nun companion ordering expensive champagne in an exclusive restaurant seems extraordinary when cardinal Roberto Herlitzka (who is widely tipped by many to be a future pope) would rather share his tips on how to cook duck than explore the crises facing the Vatican. But religion does play a part in Servillo's salvation, as he hosts a dinner party for 104 year-old nun, Giusi Merli, whose wise asides on the world's woes convinces Servillo that he is finally ready to abandon his superficial milieu and start his second book.

Co-scripting with Umberto Contarello, Sorrentino laces the dialogue with waspish quips that complement his stylistic nods not just towards Fellini, but also to Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961) and Ettore Scola's The Terrace (1980). In some ways, this leaves him paraphrasing classic works, with Fanny Ardant's cameo as herself recalling Anna Magnani's appearance in Fellini's Roma (1972). But the fact that such clear parallels exist between the early 1960s and the present validates the approach and the comparison. However, there is nothing of Marcello Mastroianni's world-weary charm in Toni Servillo's performance, which is suffused with a melancholy that betrays both his fear of ageing, his regret at not fulfilling his potential and his acceptance that Italy probably won't have changed much in another 50 years.

This sense of paralysis is exacerbated by the shallowness of the amusements society seizes upon to escape the mundanity of existence. Sorrentino clearly has little time for avant-garde frivolity or celebrity novelty. But he is equally frustrated by the posturing of the haute bourgeoisie that has ensnared Servillo and he allows him fleeting flashbacks to teenage idealism to sustain him as he moves through circles Dante would have trouble describing. Moreover, Sorrentino uses the views of antiquarian landmarks, Renaissance basilicas and Risorgimento monuments to ask whether Italy has really sunk so low after centuries of accomplishment and one is left wondering what future generations will remember of this sorry, deluded era of spiritual, moral, cultural and financial bankruptcy.

Having already profiled Hildegard of Bingen and Rosa Luxembourg, Margarethe von Trotta turns her attention to a third notable German woman in Hannah Arendt, an ardent and considered recollection of the furore that arose when the exiled Jewish philosopher covered the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker in the early 1960s. Thought is notoriously difficult to depict on screen and, even when the resulting ideas prove to be as combustible as Arendt's, the cogitative process is necessarily reduced to passages of space gazing, floor pacing, paper shuffling, cigarette smoking and typewriter tapping. Thus, while this admirably conveys the intellectual and emotional impact that the Eichmann affair had on survivors of the Holocaust around the world, it struggles to capture the personal anguish that Arendt endured as she was disowned by lifelong friends enraged by her concept of `the banality of evil'.

As Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) teases novelist friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) about her complex love life, news reaches New York that Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann has been captured by Mossad agents during a nocturnal raid in Argentina. Arendt and poet husband Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) host a drinks party to celebrate the fact that she has persuaded New Yorker editor William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson) to let her cover the trial and New School colleagues Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen) and Thomas Miller (Harvey Friedman) are proud that the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism will be a witness to the prosecution of a key figure in the Final Solution. Blücher cannot resist taunting Jonas about his wartime service in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and McCarthy has to ask Arendt's secretary Lotte Köhler (Julia Jensch) to translate their argument. But he also fears that the proceedings in Jerusalem will bring back unhappy memories of Arendt's undergraduate affair with pro-Nazi tutor Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) and the trauma of being detained in Camp Gurs in France prior to her flight to the United States in 1941.

Having travelled across Israel by bus, Arendt is welcomed by Zionist friend Karl Blumenfeld (Michael Degen). But, from the opening speech by prosecutor Gideon Hausner, Arendt has misgivings that the trial has been stage-managed by David Ben Gurion's government in a bid to win over younger Jews who resent the failure of the older generations to defend themselves against the Third Reich and suspect that many debased themselves in order to survive the Shoah. Indeed, as she sits in the pressroom and watches Eichmann struggling with a cold in his glass cage and protesting that he is being grilled like a steak, she decides that he was not a monster but a mere functionary and that the evidence being presented is designed less to secure a conviction than to demonstrate what went on in the death camps and how the survivors merit respect rather than calumny.

Using monochrome footage of the actual trial, Von Trotta cuts between distressed witnesses giving their testimony to close-ups of Eichmann's impassive face and colour shots of Arendt listening intently and forming her opinions. She calls Blücher to lament that a single man is being blamed for the crimes of a regime and reaches the conclusion that Eichmann was not particularly anti-Semitic, but was such a dedicated logistician that he managed to replace curiosity and conscience with duty and job satisfaction and that, rather than being a wicked genius, he was a mediocrity who denied himself the luxury of thought in order to carry out his orders. Unpersuaded by Eichmann's contention that any resistance on his part would have done nothing to prevent the Holocaust, Blumenfeld warns Arendt that her perspective will make a lot of people angry. But she is unmoved and heads home with boxes of transcriptions to begin the arduous process of making sense of what she had seen and heard in the courtroom.

As she toils, Arendt recalls Heidegger telling her younger self (Friederike Becht) that thinking was a lonely and unrewarding business and she feels pressure from Shawn and associates Francis Wells (Megan Gay) and Jonathan Schell (Tom Leick) to deliver her articles as quickly as possible in order to cash-in on public interest in the trial. However, Arendt also has classes to teach and, during a discussion on the nature of radical evil, she tells her students how she managed to escape Europe with forged papers. But her focus is deflected when Blücher suffers a brain aneurysm and she devotes herself to his care. During his convalescence, Eichmann is sentenced to hang and Arendt and Blücher argue with Jonas over the condemned man's claim to have been following the law as it existed within the Reich and whether this excuses him from his greater moral abnegation. Jonas insists that Eichmann remained at his post even after Heinrich Himmler had abandoned the policy and, after he leaves, Blücher jokes that Jonas is still angry with Arendt for becoming Heidegger's lover when he also had a crush on her.

Eventually, Arendt delivers her articles to Shawn. But he is greatly disquieted by her contention that Eichmann merely epitomised `the banality of evil' and that the leaders of European Jewry co-operated with their persecutors in the hope of reducing the calamity. However, Arendt refuses to change a word and develops the pieces into a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she insists that the behaviour of the elders was the darkest element of a pitch black chronicle. Unsurprisingly, the New Yorker switchboard is jammed by complaints and Jonas and Miller join the chorus of disapproval. As her daughter Charlotte Beradt (Victoria Trauttmansdorff) denounces her arrogance, Arendt retreats to the country, where McCarthy comes to report on the raging media storm and Arendt thinks back to 1933, when she had begged Heidegger to explain why he had joined the National Socialist Party in the hope that his legacy would not be tainted. 

McCarthy complains that the majority of those attacking Arendt have jumped on a bandwagon without bothering to read her articles and she mounts a waspishly eloquent defence of her friend at a meeting of literary luminaries in New York. But Arendt discovers the full extent of the pain she has caused when she learns that Blumenfeld is dying while being threatened by a Mossad agent (Germain Wagner) and he turns his back on her when she visits him on his deathbed. Jonas's wife Lore (Sascha Ley) wishes things could be sorted out, but the hate mail continues to arrive, with Lotte reading one letter accusing Arendt of having cold eyes in wishing that she will be haunted forever by the ghosts of six million martyrs.

She insists on justifying herself to each correspondent and castigates Miller for starting a witch-hunt when he urges her to resign for bringing ingnominy upon their proud institution. But Arendt refuses to be bowed and uses a lecture to explain that the system was tried rather than Eichmann. She concedes that evil perpetrated without convictions is hideous, but stands by her assertion that Eichmann had been obeying orders rather than pursuing a personal vendetta. Miller stands to castigate her for blaming the Jews for their own destruction, but she insists that even victims lose their moral compass in extremis and posits that the leadership might have found an alternative path between resistance and collaboration. As Miller falls silent, Arendt states that she wanted to understand Eichmann rather than judge him and, in studying him and his utterances, she became convinced that his most grievous crime had been to surrender the ability to reach rational decisions, as this refusal to think had made industrial slaughter a possibility.

Arendt urges future generations to avoid repeating this mistake and Miller storms out as she is warmly applauded by her students. She sees Jonas sitting along and is taken aback when he snaps that her hubris and ignorance know no bounds. He asks why she cannot see that Eichmann was responsible for the train that took her to Gurs and that she was spared by a chance denied countless others. She tries to calm him down, but he says he wants nothing more to do with Heidegger's favourite student. Arendt is also ostracised in the canteen and she tells Blücher in their apartment overlooking the Hudson that she cannot apologise for telling the truth.

A closing caption reveals that Arendt continued to muse upon the nature of evil for the rest of her life. But Von Trotta and co-scenarist Pam Katz refrain from exploring how much damage Arendt's stance did to her career. Indeed, apart from a brief mention of the presidential race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the action is given little contemporary context. Even the situation in Israel and the tensions within Judaism are dealt with superficially, with the result that the full import of Arendt's opinions cannot be satisfactorily assessed, as she is presented as a woman who set greater store by friends than groups and who was deserted by all except some loyal females and a husband who often seemed to be supporting her to goad a detested rival.  

Nevertheless, Von Trotta is to be commended for broaching such a difficult subject and having the conviction to concentrate more on Arendt's writings than her private life. There is something Capraesque about her fall from grace. But, given the kneejerk nature of the ourcry against her, none can deny the power of her closing remarks in the lecture theatre about the only thing separating ordinary folks from the likes of Eichmann is their ability to think for themselves. This conclusion has a powerful resonance in our own era of angry mobs and vitriolic campaigns on social networking sites. But, even at a remove of half a century, Von Trotta appears cautious in her comments on the wartime Jewish hierarchy and its furious response to Arendt's theories. She also sidesteps several crucial times in Arendt's life, most notably between 1933-40 and the immediate postwar period when she returned to Germany to work with the Zionist welfare organisation. Youth Aliyah. Consequently, with its awkwardly incorporated flashbacks, this is nowhere near as trenchant as it might have been. It is also, on occasions, a little stiff, as films often are when they have to slip between several languages.

Yet, this is still a compelling portrait, with Barbara Sukowa (who took the leads in both Rosa Luxembourg, 1986 and Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, 2009) capturing the loneliness of academic endeavour and the steely certitude with which Arendt presented her views. She is ably supported by a fine ensemble, with McTeer bringing some much-needed vivacity as Mary McCarthy, while Caroline Champetier's photography and Bettina Böhler's editing are as acute as Volker Schäfer's production design and Frauke Firl's costumes. But the deepest impression is left by the clips of the unrepentant Eichmann, as he argues his case with the jobsworthy fussiness that made Arendt's appraisal of him so chillingly apt.

Jem Cohen urges audiences to see beyond surface artifice in Museum Hours, a slow-burning study of lonely hearts finding a connection following a chance meeting brought about by the most inauspicious circumstances. However, while this is very much a film about seeing the bigger picture, it also seeks to persuade viewers to notice the small details in both works of art and everyday occurrences, as they provide the secret to understanding both the intentions of the creator and the bigger truths about life, love and death.

Arriving in Vienna to see an estranged cousin who has lapsed into a coma, Canadian Mary Margaret O'Hara wonders whether she has done the right thing in acting on impulse. She speaks no German and has little money and doesn't even know where the hospital is. In some confusion, she wanders into the Kunsthistorisches Museum and is meandering around the galleries when sixtysomething attendant Bobby Sommer senses her distress. He gives her directions and wishes her well for her stay. But, with long hours on her hands outside visiting times, O'Hara soon returns to get out of the winter snow and finds Sommer just as welcoming as he was before.

Having been a woodwork teacher and a rock band manager in a former life, Sommer works at the museum for the company as much as the cash. With his brother now living in Düsseldorf (a city he despises), Sommer spends his evenings playing online poker or sitting alone in bars. Yet, while he seeks a little quiet after his noisy past, he still dotes on school parties and (in voiceover) muses on how different young people are in galleries and concert venues.

Delighted at having made a new friend, Sommer shows O'Hara some of the museum's more famous paintings and arranges for her to have a monthly pass that will gain her free admission whenever she requires. Although he enjoys pointing out masterpieces and priceless artefacts for her to enjoy, Sommer is aware of his limitations and suggests that O'Hara tags along with one of art historian Ela Piplits's tours. But she is intimidated by the grandiloquent discussion of `The Conversion of St Paul' and `Country Wedding' in the room devoted to the 16th-century Dutch master, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and opts to pass her visits with Sommer.

He offers to translate for her with the doctors and they go for a beer. As the weather improves, he also shows her some of the city's landmarks and slowly starts to rediscover a place he has long called home, but all too rarely embraced. As they chat, they begin to learn about each other's histories and hopes for the future. Being gay, Sommer is not interested in romantic love. But he feels a growing bond with O'Hara and they amuse themselves by imagining patrons strolling naked around the museum after O'Hara remarks upon the blissful lack of shame in Lucas Cranach's `Adam and Eve'. But, during one of their walks, O'Hara gets a call from the hospital and she not only fears losing a relative, but also that her platonic friendship is about to come to an end.

In collaboration with cinematographer Peter Roehsler and editor Marc Vives, Cohen has succeeded in creating a combination of essay, travelogue and intimate human drama that thrills the senses, the intellect and the heart in equal measure. The almost corny tactic of shooting exteriors in 16mm and interiors in high-definition digital works triumphantly. The performances of the non-professional Sommer and country singer O'Hara are also touching and authentic, while their story (such as it is) avoids contrivance in slipping between minor moments that often fail to hold Cohen's attention as something in the background catches his eye. Indeed, the visuals are the key to this beguiling film, whether contrasts are being made with a self-portrait by the aged and impoverished Rembrandt and a once-loved toy discarded in a junk shop. The people rooting for bargains in the flea market are also brilliantly juxtaposed with the peasants in one of Bruegel's famously democratic canvases, although Cohen adds to the impact by shooting through a glass window to the accompaniment of a guided tour tape.

This clash of the banal and the beautiful is further illustrated by the view of St Stephen's Cathedral that is partially blocked by a vulgar Coca-Cola sign. But the most affecting moment comes as Sommer describes an image of Christ in the museum to O'Hara's comatose cousin and the evocative efficacy of his simple language is deftly counterpointed by the camera drifting away to gaze through the window as a train travelling silently alongside a frozen river. Rarely has cinema captured the link between life and art, the ethereal and the earthbound with such delicacy or honesty. There are lapses, most notably the nude reverie, while the members of Piplits's tour party are quite awful actors. But these are minor flaws in an appreciation of the world around us and the masterworks it has inspired and, if this occasionally feels like a reworking of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) for senior citizens, it should remind film-makers everywhere that cinema is not the exclusive preserve of the young and photogenic.

A well-heeled South Korean family disintegrates in a darkly comedic manner in Im Sang-soo's The Taste of Money, an unofficial sequel to his glitzily shoddy 2010 remake of Kim Ki-young's 1960 masterpiece, The Housemaid. Taking rather predictable pot shots at the elite controlling the country's industrial and financial wealth, this is played to the hilt by a willing cast. It also looks magnificent. But, despite Im's insistence that he owed much in the plotting to Shakespeare, Balzac and Hitchcock, there is no getting away from the fact that this is a soapy potboiler dressed up to resemble sophisticated satire.

Middle-aged heiress Yoon Yeo-jeong ruthlessly rules the empire amassed by her now ailing father, Kwon Byung-gil, who is periodically wheeled around their Seoul mansion by hulking carer Hwang Jung-min. Yoon is married to company president Baek Yoon-sik, a shameless social climber who avoids his wife as much as possible and seeks solace in the bed of Filipina maid Maui Taylor, whose room is under covert CCTV surveillance by the seething Yoon, who envies the fact that Taylor is adored by her children back home while her two, divorced daughter Kim Hyo-jin and wastrel son On Joo-wan, pay her just enough respect to earn their monthly allowances.

In order to avenge herself on Kim, Yoon begins sleeping with private secretary Kim Kang-woo, who has risen from humble origins and is currently helping On broker a potentially lucrative deal with shady American businessman Darcy Paquet. However, when Baek announces that he wishes to leave Yoon and settle in the Philippines with Taylor, she has the maid drowned to show him who is in control. But Yoon is already starting to lose her grip, as On is arrested for setting up a slush fund for Paquet, while Kim Hyo-jin falls in love with Kim Kang-woo. Moreover, the heartbroken Baek kills himself and, having done his duty to the family, Kim Kang-woo announces that he is going to take Taylor's casket to her children. Unbeknown to Yoon, however, he has stuffed it full of cash and is joined on the plane by Kim Hyo-jin, who has decided to seize what may well be her last chance at happiness.

Without doubt, the stars of this tawdry, cliché-strewn romp are production designers Kim Young-hee and Kim June, whose vast and magnificently decorated sets are shown off in a series of increasingly flamboyant camera movements by cinematographer Kim Sung-kyu. Yoon also merits mention for a display of ostentatious bitchiness that would not have been out of place in Dallas or Dynasty in their heydays. But the fact that Paquet's fat cat is called Robert Altman and that Im quotes from both Kim Ki-young's and his own versions of The Housemaid betrays the smugness of a lacklustre enterprise that cries out for the unflinching anti-bourgeois malevolence of a Luis Buñuel or a Claude Chabrol.

Sex, power, greed and murder will always make for enticing viewing. But Im lurches straight into the lambasting without giving the audience time to get to know the characters. Thus, it's difficult to care what happens to anyone within the clan or amongst its staff. There is plenty of flesh on display, but far too little wit. Consequently, this simply feels like a cynically lurid exercise in bashing the rich that provokes the odd laugh, but induces a good deal more frustration that such an inspired craftsman cannot find a more incisive and insightful way of exposing the corruption and complacency of the patricians he so clearly despises.

Reflecting current events in cinematic terms is a risky business. In the early days, when films ran for just a few seconds, it was relatively easy to slip the odd reconstructed incident into actuality footage and pass it off as a genuine, as was the case with many claimed records of  combat from the 1900 American campaign in the Philippines to the Great War. More recently, Yousry Nasrallah debuted After the Battle at Cannes just four months after the revolution that ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. However, by the time Ibrahim El Batout completed Winter of Discontent, several documentaries about the Arab Spring had been released and events had moved on and damped the euphoria that liberty had initially brought. Indeed, as the current crisis between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood shows, the situation changes so rapidly that even 24-hour rolling outlets struggle to keep up with developments. Thus, while this intense flashbacking drama presents an intriguing insight into happenings before and after 25 January 2011, it feels like old news and the decision to rush it into the schedule at this juncture smacks slightly of opportunism.

As crowds gather in Tahrir Square, computer programmer Amr Wakid watches a video clip of a veteran of the Bosnian Civil War describing how he endured 15 days of torture. Concerned that events are about to reach a flashpoint, Wakid tells upstairs neighbour Ali Mohy El Din to buy lots of tinned provisions and cigarettes for himself and his diabetic mother. He returns to watch the local news channel, where ex-girlfriend Farah Youssef and co-anchor Tamer Diaey are being urged by channel boss Tarek Mandour to report the difficult events of Police Day from a pro-government perspective. Consequently, she calls a cop killed in the square a martyr and fawningly interviews uniformed guests who vow to round up the troublemakers seeking to destabilise the nation.

Meanwhile, across Cairo, a meeting of high-level officials discusses how to control the masses after Friday prayers on 28 January and secret police chief Salah al-Hanafy suggests a communications black out to prevent the rabble from organising effectively. A flashback returns to 18 January, as Wakid is being held in a CCTV-monitored cell and is ordered not to cross a white powder line on the floor. Al-Hanafy in interrogating a cleric by forcing him to drink water and tea until he wets himself and, at the height of his humiliation, Al-Hanaf orders him to stop mentioning the invasion of Gaza in his sermons.

Youssef returns home to find her parents watching coverage of the uprising on the BBC. They ask why her station is not telling the truth and Al-Hanaf's wife (Fatma) asks the same question over breakfast. By 28 January, Youssef is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the way Mandour is doctoring material for broadcast. She storms out of the studio after complaining that a phone call from Tahrir Square declaring that the protesters are unpatriotic has been faked because there is no background noise of the chaos. As she drives away, her car is flagged down by activists who beg her to take an injured man to the Egyptian Cultural Centre. But, as she waits outside, she is recognised and abused for being a Mubarak lackey. The president address the country on television that night and Youssef goes to the roof of her building to film the scene below so that a real picture of what is occurring on the capital's streets can reach fellow citizens and onlookers across the world.

The scene shifts to Al-Hanaf's office, as he promises to release Wakid if he stops supporting the Gaza campaign. He explains that Israel is not Egypt's enemy and that it betrays his ignorance that he should fall for Islamist propaganda. Slyly, he also suggests that Youssef earned her promotion by kowtowing to the authorities (and insinuates she even slept with him). Wakid returns home to learn that his mother has died while he has been away and he is consoled by El Din and older female neighbour Amani Khalil. Left alone, he weeps in his darkened room and, when Youssef comes to offer her condolences, he spurns her efforts to touch him.

Hurt by her reception at the cultural centre, Youssef records a message apologising for her cowardice and calls on all Egyptians to rise up and fight for freedom. She asks Wakid to use his satellite phone to upload the clip to the Internet and he agrees, as, even though his phone is monitored by the police, he is confident that the masses will have triumphed by the time they connect him with such an inflammatory diatribe. However, shortly after he receives a visit from Khalil's son (Tarek Abdel Hamid) to thank him for his kindness towards his mother, Wakid is arrested with such brutal force that an appalled Youssef is films the damage caused to the apartment with her camcorder. Wakid is taken to an abandoned school and the camera alights on his fellow prisoners as they are questioned: a man who was detained while collecting a pizza, a grandfather who had decided to join in because it was the will of the entire nation, and a smart alec punk whose backchat provokes a slap across the face.

While out with her children, Fatma has her car stopped by demonstrators. They let her pass without any harassment, but Al-Hanaf is sufficiently concerned to send his family to a safe villa with their maid until the tumult dies down. On 1 February, Mubarak took to the airwaves late in the evening to announce that he would not stand in the next general election. As he speaks, Wakid is dropped blindfolded in the middle of nowhere. He is amused, on arriving home, to see Hamid trying to repair the damage in his flat with a blow torch. But Youssef has nothing to smile about, as she and cameraman Sherif Farahat have their car stopped and searched. Wakid himself becomes embroiled in a vigilante beating in his neighbourhood and he is not proud at having allowed himself to lose control.

Fast-forwarding to 11 February, Mubarak announces his resignation and Wakid and Youssef are reunited among the rejoicing crowds on Tahrir Square. Al-Hanaf, however, has fled Cairo to join his family on the coast and one is left to suspect that the new regime will be requiring his specialist services in the none-too-distant future. As the picture closes (on a scene made all the more distressingly bittersweet by hindsight), captions reveal that 2286 people were to lose their lives over the next 12 months, while 371 lost their eyes and a further 8469 were wounded. Of the women detained by the army, 27 were tested for their virginity and 12,000 Egyptians were imprisoned after military trials.

Given the ongoing slaughter, these statistics seem less shocking than they should be. But, while it is tempting to be wise after the event in assessing El Batout's fourth feature, it has to be taken in its correct context. Moreover, it has to be seen as a film more for domestic than international consumption, as, even though scenes are meticulously dated throughout, the significance of their backdrop will not always be apparent to outsiders. Similarly, non-Egyptians will not know that Wakid's character is named after Nagi Ismail, a young film-maker who was arrested shortly after the Tahrir protest, or that the testimony he watches on YouTube in the opening scene comes from the director's own brother. Indeed, El Batout and editor Hisham Saqr don't always make it clear that the incidents depicted from Wakid's detention occurred in 2009. Nevertheless, the sense still emerges of a people slowly finding the courage and the wherewithal to overthrow oppression and El Batout and fellow scenarists Ahmed Amer, Yasser Naeim and Habi Seoud ably (if a touch melodramatically) succeed in showing how the military and media conspired with the state to enforce the authoritarian status quo. 

Often operating within Mostafa Imam's cramped sets, cinematographer Victor Credi equates austerity with subjection. But, while it generates a disconcerting mood of uncertainty, the focus on Wakid's incarceration and isolation prevents El Batout from revealing the scale and vibrancy of the Tahrir protests. Thus, what comes across is the aspirational spirit rather than the explicit fact of insurrection. This may be down to budgetary restraint, but surely more archival or guerilla footage of the throng could have been inserted to reinforce the revolutionary mood. Similarly, El Batout might have emphasised more forcibly the potential for the people's protest to be hijacked by forces seeking to impose a different kind of repression in order to impose its agenda. But the restraint of his brooding drama is admirable and one hopes he will return to the characters to chronicle their subsequent fates. But this remains a story whose ultimate ending is still far from certain.

Staying in the Middle East, we move into the documentary segment of this week's column with Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's The Lebanese Rocket Society, which makes fascinating use of its archival footage in recalling the amazing efforts of Armenian scientists at the Haigazian University in Beirut to keep Lebanon on the heels of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s space race. The brains behind the initiative was Manoug Manougian, who found a willing collaborator in army ballistics expert Youssef Wehbé. However, while Manougian bore an endearing similarity to a character in a Jules Verne or HG Wells science-fiction novel, Wehbé recognised from the outset that the only way to convince his superiors to back a rocket programme was to downplay the prestige it might bring the country and emphasise its potential to improve the firepower of the armed forces.

When they first saw a photograph depicting a missile test, Hadjithomas and Joreige were sceptical that Lebanon had once been a force in rocketry. However, on discovering that Manougian was now based at the University of South Florida, they paid him a visit and were afforded access to his unique collection of documents, photographs and home movies. He explains how the Rocket Society began and recalls how an early launch from one member's family farm nearly went horribly wrong. He also relates amusing anecdotes about the near disasters that occurred during experiments to find a suitable propellant fuel and clearly remembers such colleagues as Simon Aprahamian, Garabed Basmadjian, Hampartsum Karaguezian, Hrair Kelechian, Michael Ladah, John Tilkian, Hrair Aintablian, Hriar Sahagian, Jirair Zenian and Jean Jack Guvlekjian with great pride and affection.

College president John Markarian and photographers Harry Koundakjian and Assaad Jradi recall the first launch at Kchag in the Ain Saade region in April 1961 and the second at Sannine a month later. Beating Israel to the punch by three months, these feats prompted President Fuad Chehab to meet the HCRS crew in August and led the army to volunteer Wehbé and Joseph Steir as liaison officers. They remember being stunned by the Cedar II rocket reaching 2500 metres in September 1961 and how the launches of the larger Cedar III and Cedar IV craft in 1962 and 1963 made such an impact that the achievement was marked by a special set of stamps.

Yet, even though four more rockets were tested to 1966, the programme was halted. Academics Paul Haidostian and Zafer Azar join Hadjithomas and Joreige in speculating whether French pressure, the decline of Pan-Arabism following the Six Day War or the growing tensions within Lebanon itself proved the decisive blow. But it remains unclear why the Rocket Society was stood down and the co-directors rather pad out the final segment by turning their attention to the production of a replica of Cedar IV and its journey from the cliffs of Dbayeh to a courtyard in Haigazian College. An animated reverie by Ghassan Halawani illustrating how Lebanon might have looked in 2025 had the space programme flourished also feels somewhat superfluous. Nevertheless, with Manougian and Wehbé making splendidly contrasting interview subjects, this is still an intriguing account of a forgotten moment in the history of an otherwise deeply troubled region.

Reissued to mark the 60th anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's heroics in June 1953, Captain John Noel's The Epic of Everest (1924) chronicles the doomed third expedition up the world's highest mountain, which infamously claimed the lives of George Mallory and Merton College alumnus, Andrew Irvine. However, this newly restored print is also notable for containing some of the first footage ever taken of everyday life in Tibet and for the technical innovations that were used in its making.

Opening with a caption proclaiming that it is the birthright of humanity to conquer its surroundings, this reverential record notes in hushed awe that Mount Everest remains unconquered and that its allure will continue to attract men of mettle until its summit is reached. Having surveyed the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas and the plains that lead to a land of eternal snow, Captain Noel presents a blue-tinted shot of dawn breaking over the peaks of Nepal and Tibet. An iris singles out Everest, which rises as a 10,000ft precipice of rock from the ice-pinnacled Rongbuk Glacier and culminates a further 29,000 feet above sea level. The Tibetans call the mountain `Chomolungma' - the Goddess Mother of the World - and a caption boasts that this film will visit places previously unseen on camera and, as two tiny silhouettes edge forward in the cloudy distance, Noel reinforces the majesty of the landscape with a pinkish view of the glacier and its steeply sloping edifices of ice.

Lots of preparation is required for such an audacious expedition and an army of 500 men and animals sets out over the 15,000ft Jelep pass that takes travellers from India to Tibet. As cowbells ring on the soundtrack, the caravan is shown winding along narrow pathways in the snow. Eventually, it reaches Phari-Dzong, the highest town in the world beneath Chomolungma's 10,000ft cliffs of rock and ice, and Noel films the simple dwellings and uses captions to explain how the people live with their cattle and dogs, never wash and have their corpses hacked to pieces on a stone slab after they die.

A few curious souls smile for the camera and a caption informs us that the better class of Tibetan women wear coral ornamented fillets to bind their madonna-parted hair with braids falling over her shoulders. We are shown a silver and turquoise amulet box containing charms and a potion to ward off misfortune whose ingredients include powdered lizards, dried blood and the toenail clippings of a venerable lama. A Tibetan elder carries his badge of rank in a pendant earring of turquoise and gold, while another woman shows off a turquoise-studded aureole laced into her hair. She is very bashful for someone of her advanced years and there is something endearing about the way she covers her face and turns coquettishly away from the camera. Some mothers give their babies a sun-baking bath of butter to prepare their skin for the bitter winter winds and one is left to fear for a jolly beggar, who owns nothing but a drum and the rags upon his back.

Dressed in suits and pith helmets, Mallory and Irvine inspect the yaks that will carry the expedition 200 miles over the Tibetan plains. Dr Howard Somervell sketches one of the locals and his neighbours gather round to watch. Meanwhile, experienced Alpine climber John de Vere Hazard devotes himself to map-making duties, while Noel Odell checks the saddle of his tiny mountain pony. Their only companions now are the nomadic Dok-Pa shepherds and Noel films the womenfolk churning butter and spinning wool in tents that are closely guarded by black Tibetan mastiffs.

A caption reveals that the breathtaking beauty of the scenery helped pass the time during the long and arduous trek and the party is grateful for the hospitality it receives at each stopping point. Nonetheless, in true old colonial fashion, a quizzical eye is raised at some of the musical instruments and the damping rods used in a communal dance. The climbers are more respectful about the hamlet of Kampa-Dzong, which has stood on rock 15,000ft above sea level since before Tibetan written history began, and the Shekar-Dzong monastery, which is carved into the sheer rock face on several levels and is so spectacular that it is known as `The Shining Crystal'.

The route march takes several weeks and Noel records that a donkey born in camp had to be carried over a fast-flowing river after walking 22 miles on its first day and 16 the next. The party becomes aware that they are getting closer to Everest when they pass through sacred valleys pocked with the cliff cells that were once occupied by hermitic lamas. The lama of Rongbuk warns that the gods will deny them success, as he performs a ceremony in their honour, but they take no heed as they press on to a camp at 16,500ft for the yaks, who can go no higher.

In addition to Mallory, Irvine, Odell, Somervell and Hazard, Edward Norton, Bentley Beetham and Geoffrey Bruce are chosen for the big push and they pose awkwardly together outside a tent. Aiding them are 60 Sherpas, who will carry their packs and build glacier camps along the route. Transportation officer EO Shebbeare sorts out 1001 boxes and organises the stores to be sent up to the glacier depots. The first comes at 17,500ft, but there will be 15 miles of glacier to be negotiated before the party even reaches the foot of Everest's northern precipices, where temperatures plummet by 50° once the tropical sun sets.

Just before the expedition sets forth, a caption laments that just two weeks after this moment of optimism and pride, Irvine and Mallory would be dead. But spirits are high at the outset, with one female Sherpa showing at Frozen Lake Camp how she can carry packs as heavy as the best man. But the mood changes again, as a striking sequence shows the light changing on the snow as the clouds scud overhead and a caption suggests that the mountain was frowning down upon them as though it had been `angered that we should violate these pure sanctuaries of ice and snow that never before had suffered the foot of man'. Yet, as Captain Noel films wisps of cloud floating past the summit, Everest looks more beautiful than forbidding.

Shortly afterwards, however, bad weather sets in and two men succumb to frostbite. But they cannot turn back and trudge on with the rest, as the snaking line of fatigued bodies heads towards a blue-tinted Fairyland of Ice, where, according to Tibetan legend, imps, gnomes, goblins and hairy men hold high revels in the frozen night. Noel's framing of the mountainscape is often inspired, as he uses snow and ice to frame the daunting rocks in the distance. Moreover, as he frequently takes top shots of the party walking towards the camera, he clearly puts himself at considerable risk to attain such memorable images.

The seven-strong party strike out for Snowfield Camp below Everest's precipice, at 21,000ft above the sea. The men and tents look minuscule against the windswept North-East Ridge, which has been chosen as the optimum route to the summit. But, reliant on their climbing skills and some sturdy rope, they cut 2000 ice steps, place 400ft of hand ropes and even fix a rope ladder to scale the `Ice Chimney' that will allow their porters to make the next leg of the journey. A masked oval shows three men tackling a ledge and two more going up a steeper incline. A long shot shows six figures climbing in pairs through the snow. But, while the images are dramatic, it's impossible to know who is who and why the numbers on the climb keep fluctuating.

At Ice Cliff Camp, three members of the party sit on the rocks and gaze out from a height of 23,000ft at the humbling terrain. But it is decided that Noel's camera is too heavy to go any further and he can only watch from a distance as groups return from building new camps at 25 and 27,000ft. He is forced down to Snowfield amidst deteriorating weather conditions and it is from here that Noel uses a pioneering telescopic lens to film from one and a half miles away as Norton, Somervell and Mallory risk their lives to rescue the four men stranded on the topmost ledge of an almost vertical incline some 2000ft above.

On reaching Snowfield, the survivors told of hearing the phantom guard dogs of Chomolungma. But Noel is determined to remain with the spearhead party to capture the great moment for posterity and he heads to Eagle's Nest Point, where he has a clear view of Everest from ice cliff to the summit. A caption explains how the clear air made it possible to photograph silhouettes against the snow some three miles away and Noel makes use of a telescope mask to focus the gaze on the correct part of the screen. He demonstrates how the North-East Ridge looks to the naked eye and then shows how the lens can pick out Norton and Somervell at a height of 25,000ft from a distance of one and three-quarter miles away.

At 28,000ft, the climbers began to find the air too thin and they return to base camp with Norton snowblind and Somervell in a state of near physical collapse. They are laid in tents to recover, while Mallory and Irvine volunteer to take a tilt at the top using breathing apparatus. The camera catches a glimpse of them at 26,000ft from the Eagle's Nest and a caption claims that this is the longest distance that a motion picture camera has ever taken and image, as the pair were two miles away and 4000ft above the filming point. Odell claimed to have seen Mallory and Irvine a mere 600ft from the summit - closer to God than man had ever been before - but they suddenly vanished and the whistling wind effect on the soundtrack falls silent as a cut shows Everest (at some remove) in a telescope mask.

As the Sherpas sent out a search party, a caption speculates that the pair fell down a 10,000ft precipice, while another suggests they might have attained their goal and had simply been too tired to descend and had frozen to death in the open air. Shots of the mountain covered by cloud reinforce the notion of their fate being shrouded in mystery, as, after two days without word, Odell ventures up to 27,000ft to lay out six blankets in the form of a cross on the snow. A signal reading `Abandon hope and come down' was then sent and the tragic end to a glorious expedition hits home hard. Another caption states that they must leave the mountain and its secret, as nothing more can be done. As the letters dissolve, the implication is that we try to defy Mother Nature, but it she is too powerful and we are simply too small to challenge her might.

The party is seen returning across the snow and there is something chastening about the sight of such small specks of humanity against such a colossal backdrop. A caption ponders whether one could wish for a better grave than pure white snow and, as a pall of cloud draws across the land, another claims there can be no more fitting memorial than a simple cairn of stones. As photos appear of Irvine and Mallory, a caption reads: `With what uncanny and awful power did this mountain fight, and how cruel and heartless a human sacrifice did she claim!'

While the expedition saw Everest as merely a rock, the Tibetans continue to regard it as a goddess and, as rousing Simon Fisher Turner music plays on the soundtrack, another caption queries whether something ethereal had opposed human strength and Western science, just as the Rongbuk lama had predicted: `The Gods of the Lamas shall deny you White Men the object of your search.' As a last caption asks whether there is a guardian spirit beyond our comprehension that watches over the living mountain, a browny red tint is used to invest a long shot of sunset over Everest with additional mystery and the scene fades to black as clouds darken the view and the word `Chomolungma' lingers over the ill-starred enterprise.

Vital both as a record of an heroic bid to do what no man had done before and as a work of ethnography, this restoration has been undertaken in collaboration with Sandra Noel, whose father first became obsessed with Everest when he visited the region in disguise while on leave from his Indian regiment in 1913. Six years later, he proposed that the mountain should be climbed during a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society and this August body combined with the Alpine Club of Great Britain to form the Mount Everest Committee in 1920.

The first reconnaissance trip took place the following year, with Noel shooting the earliest footage of both Everest and Tibet while accompanying the 1922 expedition. But the Maharaja of Sikkim and the 13th Dalai Lama took exception to the depiction of Tibetan life in The Epic of Everest, with the former being particularly offended by the locals being shown eating insects and the latter considering the monastic scenes an affront to Buddhism.

Captain Noel's courage during the 1924 trek can never be doubted and his artistry is often as apparent as his ingenuity. But this never feels quite as engaging as either South (1919), Frank Hurley's  account of Ernest Shackleton 1914-16 bid to cross Antarctica, or The Great White Silence (1924), Herbert G. Ponting's  record of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition. This may be because so little effort is made to introduce the members of the summit party as individuals. Consequently, 90 years on, they merely remain names rather than stand out as identifiable heroes and it takes background reading to appreciate the enormity of their loss. Nevertheless, this stands as a worthy tribute to those who risked all for the glory of their country and their comrades.

It's somewhat surprising to report that Zachary Heinzerling's debut study of Brooklyn-based Japanese artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara has been nominated for an Academy Award. By all accounts, Cutie and the Boxer was filmed over five years. But there is no sense of time scale in an occasionally amusing, often dispiriting, but mostly frustratingly fawning profile that opts against examining the couple's very real relationship issues (both past and present) in any worthwhile depth and avoids any no outside critical assessment that might make more sense of their distinctive, but not immediately captivating work. Thus, while it cannot be faulted for its intimacy and affection, this falls into the traps that have turned too many recent art actualities into little more than puff pieces.

Ushio Shinohara was born in Tokyo in 1932 and became a prominent figure on the 1960s avant-garde scene when he founded a group called the Neo Dadaism Organisers. He came to New York in 1969 on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and befriended Andy Warhol before meeting 19 year-old Noriko in 1973. In spite of the 21-year age gap, they fell in love and eventually married in 1979. Seven years later, they moved into an apartment in the Dumbo Loft, where they still live with their adult son, Alex, who is also an artist.

No matter what they are doing, the pair bicker constantly, with Ushio always seeking slyly to assert his artistic superiority. But Noriko (who is still very elegant with her long grey hair) generally ignores him and they rub along well enough over supper, as they discuss the poison date scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and debate whether Steven Spielberg has lost it. Although she is forever adding to a series of line drawings reflecting their lives, Noriko often sets aside the Cutie and Bullie project to help her husband complete pieces for his latest exhibition. While he makes sculptures (the Wham! Pow! Vroom! show being curated by Ethan Cohen, for example, includes a giant cardboard motorbike), Ushio's speciality are action pictures created by hitting the canvas with boxing gloves tipped with paint-soaked sponges. Noriko takes photographs as the 80 year-old hurls himself forward with jabs, hooks and uppercuts. But, for all their power and energy, these pictures tend not to sell well and the Shinoharas are invariably strapped for cash to pay their rent and utility bills.

It is often said that Ushio is the least commercially successful major artist in New York and Alexandra Munroe, a senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum, struggles to find anything she likes when she visits the loft, despite Noriko and Cohen keeping up a relentless sales pitch and reassuring her that Ushio is avowedly off the bottle. Coming across a little like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1976), Munroe watches Ushio in action and suggests the title `Poppy Field' for the resulting picture before posing for a photo and fleeing in a flurry of budgetary protestations.

Undaunted, the couple return to work and Noriko confides that she used to find Ushio's initial success a bind, as he invariably drank away the profits and rarely took responsibility for his actions. She became pregnant after just six months and they lived on money from her wealthy parents until they decided to stop abetting an alcoholic (who appears something of a firebrand in some old home movies). Noriko admits that she lost interest in painting during this period and still blames Ushio for the fact that Alex is now an indolent drunk, who shuffles around the apartment when not producing abrasive pictures that seem to reveal a mixed (if not a messed)-up mind.

Against Noriko's better judgement, Ushio returns to Japan with a suitcase full of items he hopes will raise enough cash to meet some debts. Relishing the solace (as her husband is non-stop hard work), Noriko dedicates herself to the Cutie illustrations and shows them to friend Reiko Tomeii, who insists she should exhibit them. She warms to the idea when Ushio returns having made just $3600 from his trip. But he is dismissive and does little to support her when artist-cum-gallery director Shuhei Yamatani comes to assess Ushio's latest offerings and suggests mounting a joint show at the hpgrp gallery. There is scarcely disguised glee in Noriko's voice, therefore, when she teases Ushio for being jealous - but she quickly admits that she could never be as cocky with her husband as Cutie is with Bullie.

Having decided Munroe is never coming back, Ushio throws himself into a new collection. But he isn't satisfied and shoots the camera a petulant glance when Noriko ventures that the picture they are surveying is not among his best. Heinzerling suddenly intercuts footage of a drunkenly deranged Ushio ranting about art being messy before sobbing uncontrollably and having to be held down by his friends. Yet, having suggested that such demons still linger, Heinzerling cuts to slow-motion footage of the octogenarian swimming underwater at the local baths, as Ushio avers that art sometimes drags you along and you have to sacrifice yourself to create as the muse dictates.

Getting nowhere with his original concepts, Ushio changes tack and seems much happier with his new stuff. Noriko jokes that they are like two plants in the same pot fighting over vital nutrients and she deigns to criticise his cooking when he makes them some overly dry celery hamburgers. However, they agree long enough to call the show `Roar', as Ushio is a dinosaur and the sound approximates to Cutie's cries of frustration. But Noriko insists on changing the title to `Love Is Roarrr', as this is what experience has taught her. He is amused by the brochure calling them a great artistic couple (as he clearly doesn't rate his wife), while Noriko claims she is finished with being an unpaid chef and studio assistant. Yet, when he asks if Cutie hates Bullie, she tuts that she loves him very much, indeed.

Over footage of them dancing in their loft, Noriko wonders if their passion would have fizzled out without her durability. She concedes there has been plenty of pain and suffering along the way, but readily admits she would do it all again. However, she has enjoyed being the centre of attention and vows to take herself more seriously in the future. As Heinzerling takes his leave, the couple box outdoors with paint gloves, but the parodic slo-mo action reveals Ushio barely laying a glove on the ducking and jabbing Noriko..

Having been together so long and endured so much, it seems clear that Ushio and Noriko Shinohara are natural performers, who would keep up the same insouciant, almost subliminal banter whether a camera was being pointed at them or not. However, Heinzerling should be commended for creating an atmosphere that invites revelations and confidences, as well as droll quips and moments of unfeigned affection. We learn little about the quality of the couple's art, but we become familiar with the charmingly chaotic environment that engenders it and we also get to know Ushio and Noriko reasonably well as both individuals and as a partnership. But the animation of some of the Cutie panels feels coy and it might have been more instructive to hear about their liaison from some of their peers or the odd critic. Yet, even though this often seems like an authorised portrait, it is never dull and is strikingly accompanied by Yasuaki Shimizu's quirky sax score.

Assembled from countless television and radio programmes dating back to the early 1960s, John Akomfrah's The Stuart Hall Project is a masterly work of archival archaeology and editorial ingenuity. In collaboration with Nse Asuquo, Akomfrah has pieced together the life story of the Jamaican-born social thinker in a way that allows the subject to act as his own narrator. But, while the imagery is always compelling and the espoused theories are always potent and provocative (especially when counterpointed by the music of Miles Davis), it is not always clear whether this is a biographical documentary, a rite of intellectual passage or a chronicle of the times that both reflected and shaped ideas that did much to change the analysis of class, race, gender and the media in this country and beyond.

Born in 1932 into a middle-class family in Kingston, Stuart Hall was always aware that he was `three shades darker' than his parents and his sister and found the complexity of his origins a source of solace and isolation. Bound by familial and societal restrictions on where he could go and the kind of people with whom he could associate, Hall became interested in separation and assimilation and further refined his thinking when he was given the opportunity to experience the flipside of colonialism when he won a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1951. Arriving soon after the first wave of Windrush migrants from the Caribbean, Hall was able to witness the reaction of the motherland to subjects it had long exploited from a distance turning up on its doorstep and the prejudice he witnessed and personally endured helped define his attitudes to integration, equality and multiculturalism.

While at Oxford, Hall became increasingly involved in British politics and, in 1957, began editing the Universities & Left Review with Raphael Samuel, Gabriel Pearson and Charles Taylor. This cabal also launched the Partisan Coffee House in Soho to provide a meeting place for the New Left that had started to emerge after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising had prompted many to defect from the British Communist Party. In 1960, the publication merged with The Reasoner to form New Left Review and Hall recalls in voiceover how events like the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Revolution, the growing brutality of apartheid in South Africa, the first race riots in London and the struggle for independence in countries like Kenya and Indonesia enabled him to channel the influence of intellectuals like EP Thompson and Raymond Williams into his own sociological philosophy.

Around this period, Hall also became an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and invitations to speak at weekend rallies introduced him to a Britain he scarcely knew existed. This appreciation of how dramatically the country was changing as it came to terms with its new international status and its need to accommodate the demands of increasingly  vocal pressure groups led to Hall becoming a familiar face on television, at a time when the majority of presenters and guests on news, current affairs and arts programmes were white. He was subjected to a degree of abuse when he married white historian Catherine Barrett in 1964, but the same year saw him co-write  the landmark text, The Popular Arts, with Paddy Whannel and join Williams and Richard Hoggart at Birmingham University, where he played a crucial role in the evolution of cultural studies as an academic discipline.

Akomfrah illustrates these developments with clips recalling the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. Much is made of the pivotal year of 1968 in both the course of the Cold War and Hall's career. But such is the tendency to soundbitise Hall's insights into the great matters of the day that they lose much of their trenchancy and are often left without context or critical evaluation to float somewhere between the increasingly radical stylings of Miles Davis (who had touched Hall's soul at an early age) and the hard-hitting, if familiar found footage.

In 1979, Hall quit Birmingham to become Professor of Sociology at the Open University. The extracts from the programmes he produced for this august institution are compelling. Particularly memorable is a return to Jamaica, during which Hall met with Prime Minister Malcolm Manley and revisited old family haunts, including the house in which his mother had grown up and which had been left to decay by its current owner, the singer Eartha Kitt. Yet, while Hall bestrode one of the most prominent soapboxes in Britain as the Thatcher government pursued policies that transformed and divided the nation, his contribution to the raging debate is curiously muted by Akomfrah's limited selection of pertinent material. He also overlooks Hall's subsequent achievements, which seems a touch aribtrary, given that he remained in post at the OU until 1997.

But, while it is often relishable, this is a rather random overview of the life, times and opinions of a man who should be much better known today for his contribution to so many aspects of British life. In trying to cover so much ground, Akomfrah necessarily trivialises complex issues and ideas, which he scarcely makes more accessible with his somewhat obtuse chapter headings. Nevertheless, he ably conveys Hall's personality and approach to his métier and adroitly reminds viewers how relevant his views remain on such topics as identity, belonging, social justice, the welfare state and the manipulatory power of the media. Moreover, he succeeds in using Hall's journey to show how dismayingly little some facets of everyday Britian have changed in the six decades since he first arrived here.

Finally, Beeban Kidron's InRealLife delivers less than it promises. However, in seeking to expose the dangers to which modern kids are subjected each time they log on to the Internet, Kidron sets herself too many ambitious challenges to do them all justice. Thus, instead of making a feature, she might have made better use of her often shockingly compelling material in a small-screen series that would have allowed her to discuss such pressing topics as online porn, cyber bullying, the commercial exploitation of data and state surveillance in more worthwhile detail

Over shots of cables running beneath an East London street, Kidron declares in voiceover that she got so sick of seeing youths fixating on their electronic devices that she started asking them questions about the morality of modern communication and was scarcely surprised when her enquiries were met with shrugs of indifference and ignorance. She suspects our children have been out-sourced to the net and is determined to find out where they have gone and whho now owns them.

The first part of her quest turns out to be the least interesting, as Kidron meets David Hall from the Telecity Group to learn about how data travels along fibre optic cables to vast storage facilities across the world. As it is revealed that 90% of the world's data has been created in the last two years (one of many alarmist, but unattributed factoids that pop up throughout the film), Kidron expresses concern that her information is not in a cloud, as she had been led to believe. Consequently, she follows the cable under the Atlantic (with the underwater shots being accompanied by suitably ominous sound effects) to Manhattan, where Andrew Blum, the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet, takes her to 60 Hudson Street to explain that between 400 and 500 networks are interconnected in a dozen or so buildings located in key international cities. But, while vast amounts of data travel through these hubs, it is stored in facilities in places like Alameda County, Anaheim, Miami and Prineville and, as Kidron shows a series of soulless structures, she opines that too little effort is made to understand where our data goes and who has access to it.

However, she seems to lose interest in this wild goose chase once she establishes that every online transaction ever made is kept by conglomerates who intend profiting from their safe (or otherwise) storage. Instead, she focuses on a series of case studies involving British teenagers that are interspersed with comments by a range of professors, psychologists, programmers and entrepreneurs, who have either published a significant tome, hold a university post or are so infamous that their inclusion is bound to guarantee the film some free publicity.

The first subjects are Ryan and Ben, a pair of 15 year-olds who are shown browsing porn sites and demonstrating their working knowledge of the associated jargon. They deny being addicted to porn, but Ryan delights in describing his masturbatory routine before conceding that his notions of the ideal girl have been shaped by what his sees in videos. The pair laugh as they admit to competing with their pals to goad girls into misbehaving in chatrooms and it is noticeable that they have markedly little success when they go to the Thames Embankment and try to chat up women on the Underground. Eventually, Ryan confesses that online porn has debased his image of romantic love, as he usually considers girls he meets to be slags or broken-hearted waifs who are too complicated to understand.

At various points during this segment, Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Alone Together, despairs that adults allow kids online to leave a history that is being archived without their knowledge; while Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab explains that the Internet was devised as part of a military project and that nobody expected it to become so influential and become the basis of modern society; and Norman Doidge, the author of The Brain That Changes Itself laments that learning about sex from online smut gives kids the wrong messages about physical and emotional relationships and will, ultimately, drive a wedge between the genders.

As a montage of pop promos and YouTube clips plays on screen, a caption states that 40% of teenagers spend more time online with their friends than they do in real life. However, Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shadows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, insists that adults are becoming every bit as addicted and anti-social as their juniors and that society seems unaware of the effect that new modes of communication are having. But, as Maggie Jackson (the author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) suggests, adults have a better appreciation of how the net is controlled by capitalist forces than juveniles and this is where the hidden danger lies.

Page is a 15 year-old black girl who is forever updating her online status and resents having to hand over her phone at school so she can concentrate on her lessons. She reveals that she became so depressed when she lost her phone that she and a friend started prostituting themselves to raise funds for the latest BlackBerry When her mother found out what she was doing, she bought the phone, only for Page to have it stolen by a boy on a train. Determined to get it back, she followed him and his four mates into a park and even went back to a house and performed various sexual acts in order to get her BlackBerry back. Kidron is rightly aghast that she would put her phone before her safety and is saddened when Page admits that she views online friends as potential sources of amusement rather than real people.

Turkle echoes Kidron concern by saying that privacy is vital in helping individuals understand themselves by reflecting on their experiences. But kids today dread being alone and resist introspection and use online contacts the plug these inconvenient gaps in their lives. Doidge explains how neurotransmitters like dopomine send signals to the brain that can lead to addiction and Luis von Ahn, a software pioneer at Carnegie Mellon University reveals that the majority of websites are designed to lure punters back and conduct micro-experiments in huge numbers to discover how to ensnare users.

Back in 1962, Sam Moskowitz, the author of The Lost Machine, warned in an interview that offices were increasingly being taken over by labour-saving devices and that there could come a point when humanity abnegated the running of daily life to machines with the capacity to malfunction. Chillingly, Danah Boyd, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft and the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, admits that the laudable founding principle of the Internet - to bring people together - was soon snatched away by unscrupulous profiteers who recognised that fortunes could be made from selling users anything and everything they might and might not want.

Amidst a blizzard of pop-ups, a caption claims that people check their phones 150-200 times a day. But, as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales reveals, it's what they look at that matters, as all information online has a value and websites try to ensure that visitors read items with the highest monetisation levels. They are not altruistic providers of knowledge to students in bedsits or villagers in the Developing World. Instead, they actively promote trendy stuff that will appeal to 18-34 year olds in the hope of separating them from some of their disposable income.

Nineteen year-old Tobin claims he would happily read a book if the Internet suddenly disappeared. But he would be at a considerable loss if he had to stop gaming. He spends five hours a day on his Xbox and another couple scouting YouTube. Yet, even though he lost his place at Oxford because he failed to strike the right work-play balance, he denies he is addicted to computer games. When informed that the dictionary includes the phrase `adverse dependency consequences' in its definition of `addiction', he smiles quietly. But he accuses Kidron of being prejudiced against games and insists they don't ruin lives, like drugs. He concedes that he feels good when he wins and would rather play than do something more useful but less enjoyable.

Jackson highlights this craving for dopomine rushes and says that humans have always yearned for novelty and ease. But the younger generations have become hooked on these traits and Patrick Bellanca, a designer on NFL Madden for EA Sports explains how new audiovisual gambits are incorporated into each edition to make the game more authentic from a player and spectator perspective and he sees nothing wrong in toddlers becoming techno savvy, as this is the world they are going to inherit. Doidge despairs that psychologists are employed by Silicon Valley bluechips to make games and sites as irresistible as possible by detaching the users from the stresses and strains of reality and, as Van Ahn explains, one of the consequences of this has been the alarming shortening of attention spans to the extent that the Internet giants try to limit all exposition to a single sentence, as anything longer simply won't get read.

Kidron slips in part of an Eddie Izzard stand-up routine about nobody reading the terms and conditions they sign up to when getting a new phone or contract. She then cuts to Daniel Solove, a professor at Washington University Law School and the author of Nothing to Hide, who avers that nothing online is free, as every transaction is recorded and sold to advertisers who build up personality profiles. A caption proclaims that Facebook likes can be used with 88% accuracy to predict sexuality, while the use of narcotics can be detected from the same information with 75% accuracy.

Another caption announces that 2.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook on a daily basis. This seems a startling revelation, especially when Turkle states that everything we watch, listen to, browse or buy is shared across the net and Solove confirms that data is power and has the potential to shape how individuals use the Internet and the lifestyle choices they make. Stanford professor Clifford Nass (who is the author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop) claims the big corporations tell users what to like and constantly make suggestions about other things they might want to acquire. But, unlike our friends and families, these behemoths do not have our best interests at heart and there is something sinister about the fact that they have the capability to change our opinion of ourselves.

Having established that 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Kidron introduces Toby Turner, a 28 year-old who has become a media sensation using the pseudonym Tobuscus. She follows him to a flash gathering in Hyde Park that is attended by teenagers whose web pages have been awarded his seal of approval and, thus, earned thousands of additional subscribers. Tobuscus is mobbed by screaming fans, as though he was a rock star and he presses the flesh for a while before speeding away before the cops move in to disperse the crowd.

His celebrity is puzzling, but Kidron does nowhere near enough to explain it or justify why is might be worrying. Similarly, having listed the respective values of Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Samsung, she allows Julian Assange to pronounce the Internet the greatest spying machine ever developed. He is particularly suspicious of Google, which has conspired with the principal servers to include a code into every web page to enable it to record IP addresses and trace all business on the worldwide web. This not only means that Google knows users better than their own mothers, but also that national intelligence agencies can make requests for trail data and, therefore, keep an eye on anyone on their radar.

As an unidentified voice questions how Google earns its money, novelist, blogger and activist Cory Doctorow launches into a diatribe against Facebook, which he brands a giant behaviourist casino that teaches users how to devalue their privacy. He lambastes the way the site controls and exploits the information entrusted to it and describes the Zuckerburg doctrine as sociopathic, in growling that anyone who thinks it is appropriate to speak to everyone in the same tone of voice or use the same words for different audiences lacks the most basic social skills shouldn't be allowed to dress themselves, let alone be loosed on the world.

Following a montage of popular political protests around the globe, a caption states that in the year to June 2013, Microsoft, Skype, Google, YouTube, AOL, Apple and Facebook had received data requests on more than 64,000 accounts by the US Security Services. Clay Sharky, a professor at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody says that Facebook could drain the site of political opinion in a trice if it decided open debate was bad for business. Yet, Boyd insists that while the net does attract the darkest elements of capitalism bent on exploiting kids trying to find a niche for themselves, it also does lots of positive things.

A case in point involves 15 year-old Tom, who came out on Twitter and has sent over 7000 texts during the first three months of his long-distance romance with Dan. They chat on Google Talk and the Google Plus video link and tweet constantly. But Tom's parents have no idea he is gay or that he is planning to go and meet Dan some time in the near future. Sharky says that a British study demonstrated that today's boys have nowhere near as much freedom of movement as their grandfathers and that many seize upon social media as impassive interaction is better than none at all. But, as Kidron leaves Tom to sort out the crisis that has arisen because his parents have discovered his sexuality, Joi Ito, a director of the MIT Media Lab says that over-protecting kids online is riskier than giving them free rein, as they need to develop their own cyber immune system in the same way that they learn from their mistakes in the physical world. 

As if to counter this, Kidron flashes up a caption stating that 80% of young people think they are more likely to get away with bullying online than in real life. She then meets the parents of another Tom, a 14 year-old from the Midlands, who hanged himself after being persecuted on the net. The camera retraces his father's steps as he found the body behind the garden shed and then closes in on a large photograph of the lad between his parents on the sofa as they bemoan the fact that youngsters are no longer safe in their own homes.

Despite the rather tele-doc manner of its presentation, this is a harrowing story. However, Kidron is soon back on the trail of the other Tom, as he travels in a grey furry hat with ears across country to the accompaniment of Dusty Springfield's “Wishin' and Hopin'” to meet Dan. She rather strings out the journey, but the suspense mounts as Tom sits outside a barista bar in the rain waiting for his beloved. The intensity of their first hug is charming and confirms Nass's contention that, while e-mail is wonderful, face-to-face contact is even more sublime. His insistence that we need to find a way to let technology complement rather than dictate our lives is echoed by Jackson, who admits that grown-ups are as guilty as children of being a fragmented presence when fixating on their phones.

As Tom and Dan lie on a bed pressing their phones together to exchange data, footage shows a cable being laid under the melting Arctic and we learn that this could be worth billions of dollars if it speeds up stock market transactions. But Carr sounds the final note of caution, as he reaffirms the benefits of the communication revolution while warning against humans losing the capacity for free thought and individuality as the machines and the monopolies behind them strive to impose their will and manipulate our behaviour.

Given the content, it is not perhaps surprising that Facebook, Google, BlackBerry, Twitter, Yahoo and Apple refused to be interviewed for this highly personal cine-essay that is often provocatively emotive when it should be more clinically analytical. While playing on common fears, Kidron raises valid concerns and deserves considerable praise for the tactful way in which she coaxes Ryan, Ben, Page, Tobin and Tom into opening up for the camera. But too many `facts' are stated without corroboration and the film often seems less like an investigation than an assimilation of evidence supporting an entrenched opening position. As a result, the contributions of the experts are frequently reduced to soundbites that raise further questions rather than providing any cogent answers. This absence of credible conclusions and the somewhat scattershot nature of the presentation leaves an impression of righteous, if unfocused indignation and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that this ambitious, but superficial survey is more of a missed opportunity than a cohesive or persuasive treatise.