Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 31/12/2016)

Such was the standard during 2016 that a further 23 contenders that might have figured in previous years have to be content with jostling for position on the `near miss' list. Many are now available on disc and download, as are such epic reissues as Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927), which just pips another BFI title. Pioneers of African-American Cinema, as the home entertainment highlight. The mixed bag of English-language nearly notables features Shira Piven's Welcome to Me, Rachel Tunnard's Adult Life Skills, Joe A. Stephenson's Chicken, Stephen Fingleton's The Survivalist, Felix Thompson's King Jack, Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash and Ben Rivers's The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.

On the foreign slate are (in no particular geographical or qualitative order) Ken Ochiai's Uzumasa Limelight, Magnus von Horn's The Here After, Asaf Korman's Next to Her, Xavier Giannoli's Marguerite, Krzysztof Krauze and Joanna Kos-Krauze's Papusza, Tomasz Wasilewski's United States of Love, Jaco Van Dormael's The Brand New Testament, Lucile Hadžihalilovic's Evolution, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Journey to the Shore and Creepy, Catherine Corsini's Summertime, Thomas Vinterberg's The Commune, Hany Abu-Assad's The Idol, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Theo and Hugo, Piero Messina's The Wait, and Min Bham's The Black Hen.

15 THE GREASY STRANGLER.

Undoubtedly one of the year's most divisive releases, Jim Hosking's debut feature, The Greasy Strangler is a bold blend of the bestial and the banal that counts actor Elijah Wood and director Ben Wheatley among its executive producers and confirms the quirky promise that Hosking demonstrated between his first short, Little Clumps of Hair (2003), and his `G Is for Grandad' contribution to the horror anthology, The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). Comparisons are bound to be made to the early works of John Waters, but the influence of Harmony Korine, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the Farrelly Brothers and the heyday of Lloyd Kaufman's Troma company can also be detected in a `sexy comedy' that has something to offend everyone.

Big Ronnie (Michael St Michaels) has raised son Big Brayden (Sky Elobar) since he discovered he was being abused by stepfather Ricky Prickles (Sal Koussa). However, it's an abrasive relationship, with the silver-haired Ronnie forever berating Brayden for failing to put enough grease on his food. Yet Brayden adores his father and joins him in dressing in pink sweaters and shorts to conduct disco tours around the seedier parts of Los Angeles. While pointing out the doorway in which the Bee Gees wrote the lyrics to `Night Fever', however, Ronnie gets into an argument with an Indian (Sam Dissanayake), a Senegalese (Abdoulaye NGom) and a Scandinavian tourist (Holland MacFallister) over their entitlement to free drinks.

Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo) remains neutral in the dispute. But she takes a liking to the baldingly pudgy Brayden and Ronnie gets so angry about them going on a date that he slathers himself in grease and murders the troublesome tourists after a protracted discussion on the correct pronunciation of the word `potato' beside the snack machine at their hotel. Returning home after cleaning up in the car wash at garage run by blind African-American Big Paul (Gil Gex), Ronnie informs Brayden that he disapproves of his liaison with Janet and insults her the next day outside the mini-mart that once employed Kool from Kool and the Gang. However, he also imagines her naked and works off his frustrations by strangling a hot dog vendor (Mel Kohl) on the toilet of his mobile home and pan frying his eyeballs before heading to the car wash.

Meanwhile, Brayden is seductively chowing down on a saveloy while telling Janet about his encounters with Ricky Prickles. He consoles her when she frets about the murdered tourists and takes her home to show her the desk where he writes his unpublished fantasy novels. In return, she bares her breasts, only to tick him off when he attempts to nuzzle them.

The next day, Ronnie and Brayden meet up with their friend Oinker (Joe David Walters), who wears a fake pig's nose over the gaping chasm where his own proboscis used to be. He congratulates Ronnie on making Brayden's eyes sting by breaking wind and invites him along to a night at the Horror House movie theatre, where Ronnie clambers behind the counter to put extra grease on his popcorn before returning home to bang his cutlery in anticipation of the fry-up Brayden and Oinker concoct in the kitchen.

When Janet comes over for a baguette supper, Ronnie informs her that he makes his own extra virgin olive oil in his room. The morning after Janet takes Brayden's virginity, she watches Ronnie smear a grapefruit with fat and has to endure him cleaning his teeth while she uses the bathroom. But she rather likes the attention and gives Brayden the silent treatment when he asks if they are exclusive. Feeling his dander rising, Ronnie goes off to throttle Oinker (who is turned on by the asphyxiation) and, having used his finger to taste the goo in Oinker's nasal cavity, returns home via the car wash.

While out in their pink outfits the next day, Ronnie threatens to evict Brayden unless he allows him to take Janet out for the evening. They go to a disco and Ronnie regales Janet with his sordid recollections of a foursome in his office with Michael Jackson. She is suitably impressed, but resists his attempt to kiss her. But he accuses Brayden of soiling the bed and being a serial loser and Janet seems to lose her heart when she sees Ronnie dancing in a spotlight against a brick wall.

Knowing his father is a smoothie, Brayden is terrified of losing Janet. But she assures him that nothing happened on their date and he seems content. However, their conversation is interrupted by the news of Oinker's demise and Brayden becomes convinced that Ronnie is the Greasy Strangler when he spreads some of the gunk found at the crime scene on a slice of toast and Ronnie declares it to be delicious.

Ronnie invites Paul to supper and they mock Brayden when he asks if he can come disco dancing with them. He cheers himself up doing unspeakable things to Janet's derriere. But they fail to satiate her lust and, when she bumps into Ronnie by the gate, she falls for his patter and Brayden is left to sob on his bed while listening to the sounds coming from the next room, where the well-endowed Ronnie is giving Janet an oily massage.

Feeling betrayed, Brayden accuses Ronnie of being a `bullsh*t' artist and they having a blazingly repetitious row in the street. That night, Janet sits on Ronnie's knee as he compliments Brayden on the greasy texture of his farfalle and they further humiliate him by incessantly chanting that Janet is a `Hootie Tootie Disco Cutie' after he bursts into Ronnie's bedroom to complain about the noise. Yet, when she next stays over, Janet bumps into Brayden in the kitchen and she is touched when he cornily claims that he would write her name on the moon in his blood to impress her.

Eavesdropping on his son's clumsy attempt at a marriage proposal, Ronnie greases up to murder Paul and attempt to shoot baskets with his severed head. But he leaves a blob on the bedroom carpet and, having tasted it, Janet concurs with Brayden that Ronnie is the Greasy Strangler. They decide to call Detective Jody (who is clearly Ronnie with a moustache and long yellow fingernails) and he recommends dropping the investigation as the grease is merely circumstantial evidence.

Later that night, Janet agrees to marry Brayden. But Ronnie (who has been hiding under the bed) forbids the match and orders Brayden to leave his house. They yell `Hootie Tootie Disco Cutie' at him, but Ronnie is not to be denied and abducts Janet. However, Brayden is a changed man and he stomps into Ronnie's room, where he finds a vat of grease. Reckoning that he can also become a Greasy Strangler, he coats himself and hastens to the Horror House, where Ronnie is busy killing Janet. When her eyes pop out, he shares them with Brayden and they settle down to watch the show.

Still smothered in grease, father and son stroll along the beach, as Ronnie tells Brayden that he gave up the opportunity to open a New Orleans niterie with John Travolta in order to rescue him from Ricky Prickles. Brayden suggests slaughtering his tormentor and they finish him off after a brief chase through the woods. They are slightly daunted by the sight of their non-greasy selves being executed by a firing squad, but they head for the hills to live a feral existence. Arriving in cinemas the week after Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Swiss Army Man, this gleeful provocation is surely destined for cult enshrinement, as it seems to have been designed to appeal to sniggering naughty boys of all ages. Hosking and co-scenarist Toby Harvard put the excesses down to trying to make each other laugh while writing. But those who don't share their penchant for back-and-forth banalities, gross-out and schlock will find this impossible to sit through.

Resembling a cross between Klaus Kinski and Jimmy Savile and sporting a firehose prosthetic, 72 year-old Michael St Michaels throws himself into the role of the psychotic father, while Sky Elobar channels his inner Napoleon Dynamite as the fortysomething innocent torn between loyalty and lust. Some of their slanging matches are tiresome. But the sheer energy the pair put into the most pointless exchanges often wear down the audience into smiling. Led by the game Elizabeth De Razzo (who spends much of the picture in a state of undress), the supporting cast enters into the spirit, with the lengthy deliberation between the tourists on the merits of ridged paprika crisps being the oddball highlight.

In truth, Hosking lets things slip from the appearance of Detective Jody and time hangs heavy after Janet's killing. But Andrew Hung's eccentric score remains a consistent delight, while Marten Tedin's photography is as droll as Martin Astles's make-up effects. Moreover, given that Hosking shot this deviant little picture in 18 days, it makes much more of an impact than the majority of directorial debuts and, let's face it, trendies and trash aficionados are going to love it.

14 QUEEN OF EARTH.

Mumblecore alumnus Alex Ross Perry is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting film-makers in America. Now in his thirties, he follows up Impolex (2009), The Colour Wheel (2011) and Listen Up Philip (2014) with his finest achievement to date. Eloquently employing studied technique to reinforce the psychological undercurrents of its story, Queen of Earth could be described with equal validity as a seething melodrama, a low-key horror and a pitch black comedy. Filmic influences abound, with Perry being happy to acknowledge his debts to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Woody Allen's Interiors (1978). But traces of Douglas Sirk, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polanski, Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, Barbet Schroeder and Chantal Akerman can also be detected in a study of the darker aspects of friendship that unsettles so relentlessly that many will experience cold shivers long after Teddy Blanks's deceptively elegant calligraphic credits begin to roll.

Sobbing mascara-streaked tears, Elisabeth Moss veers between entreaties and accusations as boyfriend Kentucker Audley dispassionately breaks the news he has been cheating on her. She berates him for betraying her so soon after the death of her beloved artist father and orders him to move out of their home as quickly as possible because her love has turned to hatred.

The following Saturday, Moss arrives at the tranquil Hudson Valley holiday home of best friend Katherine Waterston. She goes to her room and finds a painting of a large skull, which seems to have been her sole collaboration with her father. The women sit by the lake and Moss admits that she is finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that her father suffered from depression. As she goes to bed, Moss thinks back to the previous year when she brought Audley to the lake house. But, as she reflects on how happy she was to have a man who adored her, she seemingly fails to notice how their open displays of affection antagonised Waterston, who resents Audley coming between her and Moss.

As Sunday dawns, Waterston goes for a run and is surprised that Moss managed to walk four miles to the store and back to buy crisps while she was out. She goes for a swim, as Moss sleeps on the sofa, and eavesdrops as she has a heated phone conversation (seemingly with Audley). When she returns, Moss complains about a pain in her face. The scene flashes back to the previous summer, as Waterston asks Moss why she is brandishing her happiness with Audley when she knows she is having a hard time. Waterston wonders how Moss would cope if the situation was reversed and she is put out when she comes back from lunch with Audley to discover Waterston smooching on the sofa with neighbour Patrick Fugit. Audley warmly shakes his hand, but Moss goes on the defensive and takes exception to Fugit questioning her working relationship with her father. Instead of confronting Fugit, however, Moss denounces Waterston as a spoilt brat and Fugit confides to Waterston as he leaves that he can see why she finds it do difficult to deal with her friend.

Returning to the present, the camera captures Moss and Bernstein in Bergmanian profile while they chat about bad relationships. Moss confesses to forgiving an unreliable beau because he sent her a handwritten letter, while Waterston recalls being surprised by the speed with which a relationship with a casual friend escalated and declined. She tries to console Moss by saying they are better off without such losers, but receives a quizzical glance because Moss clearly feels more validated by the love of a man than the affection of a friend. On Monday morning, Moss comes down to find Fugit in the kitchen. She claims not to remember him and refuses a cup of coffee while dismissing his condolences about her father. She has a heated phone conversation about Audley leaving her apartment and Waterston watches her with a steely impassivity that could easily be mistaken for hostility.

A flashback sees the pair chatting about Waterston having a dream about giving birth. She surprises Moss by revealing that she has no qualms about cutting the dead wood from her life and reassures her that she would never abandon her. Back in the present, Waterston brings a salad to Moss's room, but she leaves it uneaten on the night stand and spends a sleepless night staring at the ceiling and wondering why everyone and everything seems to be conspiring against her.

The following morning, Waterston returns from a jog to find Moss scarfing cookies and cola in the kitchen. Some time later, she poses for a portrait on the verandah, but they soon begin bickering when Waterston asks Moss about her relationship with her father. She further sours the mood by revealing that Fugit will be coming over later and Moss complains that she is going out of her way to spoil their holiday.

Moss goes for a walk by the lake, where groundskeeper Craig Butta asks what she is doing there. She explains she is friends with Waterston and he warns her to be careful around rich folk. On her return, Moss hears Waterston and Fugit giggling on her bed and is stung when he closes the door in her face. She lies down in her room and gazes into the distance with her eyes burning with hurt and indignation. It's dark when she wakes and she wanders outside to find Keith Poulson crashed out on the grass. She invites him inside for a drink and he wonders if they have met before. He seems as much stoned as disorientated and Moss smiles slyly that she could murder him and nobody would know. When Waterston rises on Wednesday morning, she is perplexed by the fact that Moss giggles when they pass in the kitchen. Her mood soon turns, however, when she finds Fugit making coffee and she smashes a cup when he teases her about hearing her talking to herself the previous evening. Moss snaps that he is in the way and he retaliates by branding her a spoilt child who would be nothing if she hadn't been so mollycoddled by her father. Waterston overhears the end of the exchange and looks on sadly because he friend and her lover so evidently detest each other.

Despite her face continuing to hurt, Moss resumes the sitting and urges Waterston to keep still. However, she can't resist goading Moss about how different she is without a man to lean on and Moss struggles to retain her composure as she protests about Waterston attacking her when she is feeling so alone. Waterston insists she will always care about her, but Moss brushes away her deadpan concern.

After lunch, Moss allows herself to be talked into a canoe trip with Waterston and Fugit. But she loses patience with their efforts to be solicitous and complains about her face hurting, as Fugit fights the urge to torment her. Waterston tries to keep the peace, but is clearly feeling the strain. As the evening wears on, she picks up the extension when Moss is on the phone. However, she hears no one else on the line and nettles Moss by asking who she was speaking to.

That night, Waterston hosts a party and Moss feels uncomfortable being surrounded by so many strangers. She is piqued when Poulson fails to recognise her and angry when Kate Lyn Sheil asks if she is the woman she saw on the TV news whose father had ripped off some people and squirrelled away their money. Struggling to breathe, Moss chokes on some crisps and sinks to the floor in her distress. As she looks up, the guests seem to close in around her in a threatening manner and she screams for them to back off. But, when she looks again, everybody is laughing at her eccentric behaviour from the other side of the room and she rushes away convinced that everyone in conspiring against her. Early Thursday morning, Moss comes down to the kitchen to find Sheil drinking coffee. She asks how Moss knows Waterston and implies that their fathers may well have had a business connection. But nothing more is said and this tantalising aspect of the story is left unexplored. Moss goes outside with her foldaway easel and finds an animal jawbone in the long grass. She brings it back to the house and stares at it while hunkered on the sofa. Over the next few hours, Moss throws a coffee cup into the lake and incurs Waterston's wrath by allowing something to catch light on the stove.

Fugit comes over for supper and goes on the offensive by declaring that Moss's facial condition is purely in her mind, as over a dozen doctors have given her a clean bill of health. He asks how the portrait is coming along and mocks Moss for exploiting her friend to get a little free publicity by painting her picture. Waterston tells him to behave, but Fugit continues to bait Moss as he eats messily with his fingers. Eventually, Moss launches into a stinging counterattack, in which she claims that he epitomises the greed, mendacity and indolence that drove her father to kill himself. She calls him vile and deems him unworthy to share Waterston's bed. Fugit remains calm during the chillingly controlled outburst, but Waterston is so spooked that she instinctively puts her hand on the bread knife as Moss jumps up from the table.

Some time later, Fugit comes to Moss's room to check up on her. She asks why he dislikes her and he repeats his charge that she's a brat who has lived her entire life in a protective bubble. He also accuses her of making an exhibition of herself when it burst and gloats that her father would have had nothing to do with her had she not been his daughter because she lacks talent and tenacity. Distraught at being so brutally denounced, Moss clings to Fugit as he tries to leave the room and Waterston is appalled by her attempt to try and undo his belt. Moss slumps to the floor and begs forgiveness for having made such a mess.

For the final time, the scene flashes back 12 months to show Moss and Audley taking their leave. Moss apologises to Waterston for being so preoccupied when she was going through a crisis and Waterston raises a forced smile in joking that the tables might turn one day. They hug and agree to meet up again next summer. As the action returns to the present, Waterston wanders round the empty house. She finds the finished portrait on the bed and, as she is about to let out a cry, Perry match cuts to Moss's lipsticked mouth, as she bursts out laughing without the slightest hint of amusement.

As the credits start to roll, the laughter mingles with a female lamentation being accompanied on the soundtrack by an atonally spectral piano and the sense of dread that has hung over the previous 90 minutes finally starts to abate. But this is not the kind of film to fade from the mind the moment the house lights come up. Such is the intensity of the performances and the relentless close-ups that this will continue to haunt viewers, even though it is often frustratingly opaque and a touch self-conscious in its homages to Perry's cinematic heroes.

All you need to know about the technique can be summed up in an adroit medium shot that exploits the architecture of the house to show Moss getting out of bed in the top right-hand corner of the screen and Sheil mooching around in the kitchen under the high ceiling below. The composition couldn't be more precise and, yet, it gives little away about Moss's emotional state or the subplot that moils away in the background involving her artist father and his nefarious dealings. Hitchcock couldn't have played this hand with any greater finesse and Perry should be commended for generating and sustaining suspense in a scenario in which the majority of the participants would scarcely have noticed any.

Much depends, of course, on the calibre of the acting and it's intriguing to compare the statuesque Waterston's phlegmatic display with the borderline mugging used by the diminutive Moss to convey the feelings her painfully fragile character seems incapable of controlling, whether they are positive, negative, psychosomatic or self-destructive. As the camera is so intrusively close, Moss can be forgiven for the odd facial expression being magnified, as this is a courageously raw performance that is made all the more compelling because it is never wholly apparent whether Waterston's reticence is menacing or compassionate.

Some might wish that Perry placed greater faith in his own style and referenced pictures like Bergman's Persona (1966) and Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) a little less flagrantly. But his evocation of the psychological chillers of the late 1960s and early 1970s will delight devotees of cult cinema, as will Sean Price Williams's 16mm photography, Anna Bak-Kvapil's production design, Robert Greene's deft editing and Keegan DeWitt's disquieting score. Perry's script might have been sharper and more generously expository, but this is a minor cavil with a film whose faults are an essential part of its fascination.

13 YOUTH.

The ghosts of Federico Fellini and Alain Resnais linger in the shadows of Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, an impossibly beautiful rumination on legacy, love and loss that is an early contender for the film of the year. Representing the Italian's second English-language outing after the misfiring Sean Penn vehicle, This Must Be the Place (2011), this is a worthy follow-up to The Great Beauty (2013) and proves that Sorrentino can make exceptional cinema without his Mastroianni-like muse, Toni Servillo.

Retired composer Michael Caine has been coming to the same Alpine spa hotel for years and is pleased to be sharing this vacation with Harvey Keitel, an American film director who is working on what he hopes will be a valedictory masterpieces. In addition to being best friends, the pair are also in-laws, as Caine's daughter is married to Keitel's son. However, Ed Stoppard breaks Rachel Weisz's heart when he bails out of a Polynesian holiday by announcing that he is having a fling with pop star Paloma Faith because she is much better in bed.

This bombshell comes shortly after Caine has his peace disturbed by Alex Macqueen, an unctuous envoy from Buckingham Palace who has been dispatched to promise the octogenarian a knighthood in return for special performance of his most famous work, `Simple Songs'. Unconcerned that the Queen wishes to surprise the Duke of Edinburgh on his birthday, Caine insists that he has personal reasons for not wishing to return to the podium. His stance is applauded by Hollywood actor Paul Dano, who deeply resents being primarily known for playing a robot in a wildly successful blockbuster. Yet, while he misses the point of Caine's objection, the older man is grateful for the support and inquires about the role Dano is researching for a forthcoming German picture.

When not watching the nightly cabaret acts, Keitel is locked in script conferences with aspiring writers Tom Lipinski, Chloe Pirrie, Alex Beckett, Nate Dern and Mark Gessner. However, inspiration eludes him and he seeks out Caine for trips to the local pharmacy or a spot of people watching. Among the other guests are Buddhist monk Dorji Wangchuk, who sits in quiet contemplation while hoping to levitate; corpulent ex-footballer Roly Serrano, who has a Karl Marx tattoo on his back and has to be helped out of the pool by wife Loredana Cannata; Miss Universe Madalina Diana Ghenea, who likes to bathe in the nude; and middle-aged couple Helmut Förnbacher and Heidi Maria Glössner, whose sullen silence at meal times prompts Caine and Keitel to bet on whether they will ever speak to each other.

Despite rejecting the royal command, Caine clearly still feels the musicality of existence and sits in a meadow conducting a chorus of bird song and cow bells. But Weisz has a more discordant experience in the form of a nightmare parody of Faith's video for `Can't Rely on You' and takes out her frustration on Caine in the steam room. Accusing her father of neglecting her to pursue his career, she further berates him for treating mother Sonia Gessner so abominably and reveals that they both knew about his gay fling. Yet, when Macqueen returns to make a second entreaty about `Simple Songs', Caine reduces Weisz to tears by declaring that the reason he cannot perform is that he wrote the piece for Gessner and that it only makes sense to him when she sings it.

Meanwhile, Keitel has an epiphany with his script and celebrates with his acolytes by popping a bottle of champagne on a mountainside. While waiting for his star's reaction, he strolls with Caine and reminisces about a girl they had once both loved. They confide concerns about their fading memories and malfunctioning prostates and regret having been such mediocre parents. Caine admits to feeling guilty about being touched by juvenile masseuse Luna Zimic Mijovic (who devotes her spare time to a Wii dancing game), but has more positive encounters with young people when he gives budding violinist Leo Artin a tip about the position of his bowing arm and sees teenager Emilia Jones approach Dano in a cuckoo clock shop to express her admiration for one of his lesser-known roles.

This morale boost prompts Dano to wander around the hotel dressed as Hitler. But, while he impresses Caine with his knowledge of the German philosopher poet Novalis, Dano gets his comeuppance when he tries to flirt with Ghenea and she proves to have brains as well as beauty. Elsewhere, Wangchuk levitates and Serrano shows he has lost little of his skill by playing keepy-uppy with a tennis ball. Moreover, Weisz allows herself to be seduced by bearded climber Robert Seethaler (who promises to cure her of her vertigo), while doctor Wolfgang Michael assures Caine that he is as fit as a fiddle. But he loses his bet with Keitel over Förnbacher and Glössner when they come across them fornicating in the forest shortly after she had slapped his face in the dining room.

Keitel's luck gives out shortly afterwards, however, as Hollywood legend Jane Fonda breezes into the hotel to inform him that his screenplay sucks and that she would rather do a foreign television series than renew their partnership. He is crushed because he knows his financial package depends upon Fonda's participation and, as he takes a walk to clear his head, he is tormented by the sight of the various female characters he has created across the genres reliving their roles in a field. Keitel tries to put a brave face on things by telling Caine he will have to come up with a new scenario. But, instead, he calmly walks on to his balcony and jumps to his death.

Caine is distraught by the loss of his friend, but travels to Venice to lay flowers on the grave of mentor Igor Stravinsky and visit Gessner, who is suffering from dementia in a nursing home. He tries to apologise, but the words fail him. However, he shows his love by conducting a final rendition of `Simple Songs' (actually composed by David Lang), with violinist Viktoria Mullova and lyric coloratura soprano, Sumi Jo. As he performs, Weisz allows herself to relax into Seethaler's embrace as he abseils down a mountain.

Exquisitely designed by Ludovica Ferrario and ravishingly photographed by Luca Bigazzi, this is a film to rekindle even the most jaded cineaste's passion for the moving image. Replacing his trademark cynicism with an unassuming compassion, Sorrentino reflects upon age, creativity and the different kinds of relationship we strike up during a lifetime with a wistful wit and wisdom that are all the more affecting for the effortless elegance and intelligence of the performances.

Proving there is life beyond Direct Line commercials, Keitel acquits himself admirably. But he remains something of a sidekick until his devastating showdown with Fonda, who summons up the spirits of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to create a monstrous diva, whose lack of gratitude towards the director who helped make her a star slyly counters the truism that nobody writes decent roles for actresses of a certain age. Weisz also provides deft support, as the dutiful daughter who allows the mask to slip when robbed of her precious sense of security and self-worth, while Dano and Macqueen have their moments as interlopers into Caine's hermitic idyll.

Now 82, Caine gives one of the best performances of his career, as the composer resigned to the fact that his time is drawing to an close and content to retain the benefits of celebrity while reneging on its attendant duties. Yet, while he can snap at Macqueen, Wangchuk and Stoppard, he can also indulge Dano and Artin and take simple pleasure in people watching, the sounds of Nature and the tricks of a fading memory. Amidst the furore over the lack of diversity among the acting Oscars, a case could be made that Caine has been excluded on the grounds of ageism, as his knowing display is far superior to those of the nominated quintet, as it provides the core around which Sorrentino decorously arranges his vignettes and digressions. Some may find the effect self-consciously operatic, but this is very much the work of a maestro who understands that structure and rhythm are as crucial to a screen story as theme and style.

12 THE MEASURE OF A MAN.

One hopes that Ken Loach admired Stéphane Brizé's The Measure of a Man, which continues the proud French tradition of cine-realism that dates back to the 1930s. Co-scripted by Olivier Gorce, this compelling insight into the compromises that people need to make in order to keep their heads above water during the ongoing recession owes much to both Loach and the Dardenne brothers. But Brizé also taps into the unaffected humanism of Jean Renoir in creating an everyman who is played with such naturalist conviction by Vincent Lindon that he thoroughly deserved to win both a César and the Best Actor prize at Cannes.

A year after he was laid off from the factory job he had hoped he would hold for life, 51 year-old Vincent Lindon complains to job centre counsellor Yves Ory about being sent on a time-wasting training course in crane driving that has done nothing to improve his employment prospects. He attends meetings of former workmates who are still convinced that they can fight the company if they stick together. But Lindon's heart is no longer in the struggle and he argues with his pals in a bar.

As 700 men lost their jobs when the plant closed, wife Karine de Mirbeck realises Lindon is doing everything he can to find work and makes no complaints about trying to stretch the monthly €500 dole cheque to feed them and their teenage son, Matthieu Schaller, who is in a special needs class at school. He amuses Lindon with a story about drops of water in an empty glass and they are proud of his progress. However, they also value their time alone together at a dance class run by Noël Mairot, who insists on cutting in to demonstrate the steps with De Mirbeck.

After several fruitless applications, Lindon gets a Skype interview and the unseen Christophe Rossignon adopts a high-handed tone as he questions him about his experience with machine tools and his readiness to take a pay cut from his last position. Despite answering dilgently, Lindon is left in little doubt that he will not be offered work after Rossignon takes him to task for the poor composition of his CV. A meeting with bank manager Catherine Saint-Bonnet barely goes better, as she tries to persuade him to sell his flat to pay for Schaller's fees at a progressive boarding school. When he insists that he has invested too much in the property to lose it now, she suggests he takes out a life insurance policy.

Lindon and De Mirbeck decide instead to part with their mobile home and drive to the coastal caravan park to show it to prospective buyers, Roland Thomin and Hakima Makoudi. Thomin is concerned it is 16 years old and tries to haggle Lindon down from his €7000 asking price because he feels it is old-fashioned and in need of renovation. But he refuses to budge below €6800 and feels stung that a stranger should criticise a place he associates with happy memories. Lindon also resents having his video criticised by the other delegates on Tevi Lawson's interview training course, as everyone around the table takes it in turns to denigrate his dress sense, body language, amiability and clarity.

Out of the blue, however, he lands a job as a security guard at an out-of-town hypermarket and rather enjoys dressing in a jacket and tie to patrol the shop floor. However, he feels like the poacher turned gamekeeper after catching Soufiane Guerrab pocketing a phone charger. He tries to bluff his way through his interrogation by Stéphanie Hurel and claims that he was ordered to steal the connection by a man who threatened to beat him up unless he co-operated. After a while, however, Guerrab comes clean and offers to pay for the charger and annoys Hurel by insisting on being treated like a valued customer.

After hours, Lindon joins the rest of the staff in wishing Gisèle Gerwig a happy retirement after 32 years with the company. He looks on wistfully, knowing that he won't be there that long or be held in such high esteem. New manager Saïd Aïssaoui, who only joined six months ago, commend Gerwig on putting in 10 years on the tills, as well as 22 years on the cold meat counter. But Lindon gets plenty of affection at home when Schaller joins in as he dances to `Stay' with De Mirbeck and they all hug each other. Lindon is shown around the CCTV operations room by Rami Kabteni, who points out what to look out for when people hold on to items before putting them in their basket or trolley. He also warns him to keep an eye out for open bags and surprises him by revealing that checkout staff are sometimes in cahoots with shoplifters. Left alone, Lindon flicks between images on the bank of screens, as he tries to get a feel for customer behaviour. That evening, he gives Schaller a bath before going to the school with De Mirbeck to discuss with principal Eric Krop the need to improve his grades in order to apply for a college engineering course. A few days later, Lindon is on duty when ageing bourgeois Christian Watrin is detained with two items of fresh meat in his pocket. He readily produces his papers and is mortified at having caused everyone so much trouble. Lindon assures him that he can go if he pays for the stolen produce, but Watrin laments that he has no money and doesn't have any family or friends who could lend him the necessary amount. Lindon is dismayed that such a patently decent fellow should be in such a predicament, but has no option but to call the police.

Shortly afterwards, Lindon's car breaks down and he has to ask Saint-Bonnet for a bank loan to buy a new one. She is pleased he is back on his feet and agrees to the payment. But Lindon is finding it increasingly difficult to compromise his principles at work and feels decidedly uncomfortable when long-serving checkout operator Françoise Anselmi is caught recycling coupons from her till. Manager Aïssaoui summons security guard Jean-Eddy Paul to back up Lindon's story and she pleads with them to make an exception because she has never done anything wrong before. Aïssaoui accuses her of stealing bonuses from her colleagues and regrets that he can no longer trust her.

A couple of days later, Aïssaoui assembles the staff with human resources manager Guillaume Draux to inform them that Anselmi has killed herself in the store because she is so ashamed at being fired after 20 years. Droulx reveals that her son was a drug addict and that she had fallen into debt because of his habit. He tells the employees not to blame themselves for what has happened, as Anselmi had problems they could not have solved. Indeed, he even implies that she has been selfish in staging her death at the supermarket when the reasons for her unhappiness lay elsewhere.

At the funeral, Lindon can barely bring himself to look at the coffin as it is carried into the church. But his patience snaps a few days later when Sakina Toilibou is charged with swiping her loyalty card through her till to claim unwanted customer points. As she pleads with Samuel Mutlen not to take the matter any further, Lindon walks out of the interrogation room and strides through the store to his locker. He puts his coat on and makes for the car park. Without a second glance, he gets behind the wheel and drives away into an uncertain future, as, even though his integrity is intact, he will be forced to wait for his benefits claim to be processed and will doubtless struggle to find future employment.

Harking back to the days before Loach became overly dogmatic and melodramatic, this is a compelling slice of life that has all the authenticity of a documentary. Photographed in long, unobtrusive takes by actuality specialist Eric Dumont, the action benefits from the use of actual locations and the blend of professional and untrained actors. But Brizé and Gorce take care to avoid driving home their political message and resist the temptation to heap the blame for the troubles of those on the lower rung on jobsworthy middle managers or the faceless fat cats who profit from their exploited labour. This refusal to suggest that everything would be so radically different in a socialist paradise roots the film in real life rather than ideological wishfulness. Moreover, it makes Lindon's battle with his principles all the more persuasive. He knows what he is risking by taking a stance, but he can no longer live with the version of himself that can acquiesce in the enforcement of petty rules that have already driven one desperate woman to her death.

Anselmi's drastic action feels somewhat excessive, while the inclusion of a developmentally challenged child seems a tad contrived. But Brizé otherwise maintains the air of observational detachment that makes the episodes feel eavesdropped rather than workshopped. He also leavens the story with flashes of dark humour and genuine warmth that show how out of touch the comfortable and the complacent are with grimmer reality. But what separates this from so many other social realist tracts is that Lindon says everything with his actions and expressions rather than with impassioned agit-prop speeches and the silent withdrawal of his collaboration says much more than any polemical showdown ever could.

11 ARABIAN NIGHTS, VOLS 1-3.

The portmanteau picture has been long been a convenient way to allow a multitude of directors to discuss a range of issues without going into exhaustive detail. However, the format has also been exploited by single film-makers since the Expressionist era, when Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921) and Paul Leni's Waxworks (1924) first linked the anthology with the horror genre. Although the multi-story picture is nowhere near as popular as it was in the 1960s, it continues to entice talents like Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, who recently followed in the footsteps of Pier Paolo Pasolini with Wondrous Boccaccio, which used a 14th-century plague in Florence as the starting point for a series of tales taken from The Decameron.

But the most ambitious portmanteau project has to be the trilogy fashioned by the Portuguese critic-turned-director Miguel Gomes. Revisiting themes explored in Our Beloved Month of August (2008) and Tabu (2012), this 361-minute analysis of recessional Portugal really needs to be seen in its entirety. However, the films (which come with an on-screen index) do stand alone and the expert juxtaposition of factual and fictional elements means that Arabian Nights Volume 1: The Restless One has plenty to say about the state of contemporary European society.

The prologue begins in the north of the country, where 600 workers stand to lose their job at the Viana do Castelo shipyard. Over a montage of images from the yards heyday, those who have been laid off share their memories and complain about the mismanagement that has sounded the death knell of a proud tradition. Intercut with these lamentations is a snippet about a local beekeeper, whose hives are under threat from a strain of Asian wasp. The message is clear (and is one that British steel workers will recognise) and is reinforced by the revelation that some fire brigades have stopped attending certain types of blaze, as they no longer have the equipment or the trained personnel to do so without excessive risk.

Back at Viana do Castelo, violence erupts as strike breakers are sent into the yard and director Miguel Gomes (who is covering the stand-off) begins to doubt his ability to do justice to what he is witnessing. He makes an excuse to leave his crew and tries to run away, protesting that he feels impotent and foolish and is suffering from a vertigo brought on by abstraction. However, they catch up with him and declare that he deserves execution for such scurrilous dereliction of duty. But Gomes pleads for leniency and promises to amuse everyone with an array of anecdotes. He decides to delegate the responsibility, however, and the scene shifts to the Island of Young Virgins in Baghdad, where Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) awaits to regale the audience with `The Men With Hard-Ons', which opens with delegates representing the Troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank arriving on camels to urge Portuguese dignitaries to make swingeing budget cuts in order to keep the economy afloat.

Interpreter Carloto Cotta bizarrely translates the discussions into Brazilian Portuguese and struggles to understand French-speaking African wizard Basirou Diallo, when he interrupts proceedings after lunch to announce that each man has been rendered impotent and that he can cure them with his patented aerosol spray. The politicians and financiers are thrilled with their new virility and the Troika delegates grant concessions that allows the Portuguese to accept their ruinous terms. However, they soon come to realise that a permanent erection has its disadvantages.

The mood is similarly playful, but markedly less focused in `The Story of the Cockerel and the Fire', which is based on the experiences of Fernanda Loureiro. The action takes place in the wine-growing community of Resende and begins with a judge putting a rooster on trial for crowing too early in the morning. The bird protests that it is merely warning the residents of the dangers to come and decides to stand in the forthcoming mayoral election. Meanwhile, a young girl becomes increasingly frustrated when her boyfriend becomes involved in a texting relationship with a female fire fighter. In order to keep her rival busy, she starts setting fires across the surrounding countryside.

A sombre tone also informs `The Swim of the Magnificents', which sees mayor Adriano Luz enlist the help of punk Crista Alfaiate to organise the annual New Year swim in the sea. However, the carcass of a dead whale washes up on the shore and Luz has to find a way to remove it so that the festivities can go ahead. As he ponders, a trade union official interviews two men and a couple about their struggle to survive at a time of high unemployment. But the immediate crisis is averted when the whale suddenly explodes and the locals brace the waters to uphold their tradition. Similar signs and symbols (which will be much more familiar to Lusophonic audiences) abound throughout this challenging, but always accessible feature. But even those who fail to spot the references to totems like the fabled Rooster of Barcelos will still leave the screening with plenty to think about. Gomes may be happy making allusions to pictures like Wim Wenders's Lisbon Story (1994) - in which Rüdiger Vogler plays another director having trouble with his film - but he never looks as comfortable taking a self-reflexive role as Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard have been before him. He and co-scenarists Mariana Ricardo and Telmo Churro also have problems incorporating all of the disparate strands, with the threads about some Austrian schoolchildren and a Chinese emperor feeling particularly extraneous. Gomes also skirts serious statements about authorship and the subversion of linear narrativity, while largely settling for being dryly amusing rather than bitingly satirical or overtly political. But, in basing his vignettes on real life, he does succeed in presenting an intriguing snapshot of a country at the crossroads.

He also displays the passion for cinema and an eye for a telling image that characterised his earlier work. There is something a little archly cineastic about hiring Apichatpong Weerasethakul's regular cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, as little of his personality appears to pervade the mostly restrained 16mm and 35mm widescreen visuals that owe much to the ingenuity of production designer Artur Pinheiro and the acuity of Gomes, Churro and fellow editor Pedro Filipe Marques. The performances are fine, if a touch anonymous alongside the more heartfelt contributions of the non-professional cast. But few who check out this brazenly ambitious epic will want to miss the ensuing instalments.

Gomes dispenses with the elaborate framing devices and plunges right into the heart of the action in Arabian Nights Volume 2: The Desolate One. Once again, Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) relates the bitingly ironic fables from the Island of Virgins. But Gomes avoids distractions and digressions in fashioning another triptych that will reward those prepared to look for the universal truth beneath the Lusospheric specifics.

The clumsily titled `Chronicle of the Escape of Simão “Without Bowels”' starts with a shot of a police drone hovering over the scrubland outside a small hillside town. Suddenly, Chico Chapas appears. He is a scrawny man of advanced years, who has earned his nickname because he can eat what he likes and never put on an ounce of weight. However, he has just killed his wife and daughter, along with two other women, and is on the run from the police.

As he lays low, Chapas allows his mind to wander and he fantasises about lavish banquets with partridges and prostitutes. But Scheherazade refuses to judge him, as in times of economic privation, `evil is only a severe tendency of selfishness'. None of his neighbours seem to blame Chapas for his crime and he becomes something of a folk hero over the ensuing six weeks for giving 160 armed policemen the run around. Children play nearby as he stops for a smoke, while the grown-ups would rather side with a killer than the hypocrites who rule over them. Hence, they say nothing when Chapas sleeps in their barns or steals clothing from their scarecrows.

Even Gomes also takes pity on the fugitive, by suggesting that it appears to be easier to survive on the lam than it is making ends meet on meagre wages or benefits. But Chapas is eventually apprehended and bundled into the back of a police car. As he is driven through the town, however, the residents applaud him for his act of defiance and for exposing the incompetence of the authorities (which is further mocked by the fact that the leader of a troop of scouts plummets to his death while guiding his charges through a team-building exercise).

The legal system comes in for more ribbing in `The Tears of the Judge', which centres on magistrate Luisa Cruz, who leaves to hear a case in an open-air courtroom after congratulating daughter Joana de Verona on losing her virginity to a man of her mother's choosing. On trial is a woman who has been accused of stealing her landlord's furniture. She explains that she sold the items to pay compensation to her daughter-in-law, who has to put up with her husband's voracious sexual appetite.

A witness informs Cruz that the landlord is something of a dolt and has a habit of phoning the emergency services at all hours of the day and night because he likes to hear the sirens as they pass. The man admits his guilt, but protests that he was only acting on the instructions of a genie. As if by magic, he is brought into court and pleads that he was solely following the orders of the wicked fellow who confined him to a lamp. But, just as Cruz thinks things cannot get any stranger, successive witnesses bring to her attention the theft of 13 cows and a racket to import Chinese mail-order brides. When Cruz complains that it is impossible to discern who is telling the truth, a man wielding a machete presents himself and insists that he is a lie detector.

Nonplussed by the escalating insanity of the testimony, Cruz despairs of ever finding a just resolution to a case in which everyone involved seems to have wronged or offended someone else. She opines that `tears are contagious' and laments that there simply aren't enough prisons to hold the culprits holding society to ransom. Having adjourned proceedings without reaching a verdict, Cruz goes home to her deflowered daughter. She is relieved to get away from the florid speeches and bizarre revelations. But, most of all, she is glad to escape the ordinary people who seem to be as responsible for their own misfortunes as the system the rail against. Yet, Gomes still notes that the Chinese consular official confides that his client had given Portugal a recommendation on TripAdvisor.

If this vignette becomes impossibly convoluted, `The Owners of Dixie' has a structural intricacy to match its narrative elaboration. Dixie is a stray cross between a Maltese terrier and a poodle, who is taken in by Margarida Carpinteiro when it starts mooching around a rundown tenement building. She quickly passes the dog on to the depressive Teresa Madruga, who shares her flat with her agoraphobic partner, João Pedro Bénard.

They have befriended reformed drug addicts Gonçalo Waddington and Joana de Verona, and persuade them to keep an eye on Dixie while they go away for a few days. However, the bodies of Madruga and Bénard are found 16 days later and it is confirmed that they were victims of a suicide pact. Waddington and Verona have enough problems without worrying about a dog. So they hand her over to the building supervisor, who gives Dixie to her daughter-in-law and she becomes an immediate favourite of her children, who give her the affection she has craved all along.

All of life seems to teem around this shabby neighbourhood. When they are not arguing about money, queuing at food banks or facing eviction, the residents are having noisy sex in full view of the local kids, who spy on they through a hole in the wall. They also peek at nude sunbathers between their games. But this is a community in which people muddle through. The lift has been broken for some time since its mechanism was damaged by urinating party revellers. Yet no one complains or makes inquiries about getting it repaired. They simply use the stairs and get on with their lives.

Fainy echoes of Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar (1966) can be detected in this closing segment, as Gomes muses on the enduring struggle of the lower classes and the way in which people treat animals that only require a little respect in return for undying loyalty. The appearance of a ghost dog seems to add a little post-colonial acidity to the mix, although each episode contains references to the casual racism of Portuguese society, as well as the other reasons for its malaise. Once again strikingly photographed by Thai maestro Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, this is by far the most freewheeling entry in the series. Yet, while a vein of wry humour marbles proceedings, Gomes does not shy away from either tragic incident or trenchant analysis. Nor does he flinch from apportioning blame in denouncing the austerity measures that have placed the heaviest burden on those least fitted to shouldering it. But he also finds reasons to be optimistic in the indomitable spirit of those in the margins or on and below the lower rung.

After 382 minutes, many will be expecting Gomes to make a grand pronouncement on the state of the world at the end of Arabian Nights Volume 3: The Enchanted One. But he proves as mischievously elusive as he has been in the previous two instalments of this beguiling trilogy and settles instead for showing that life goes on, whether one inhabits an exotic realm or a working-class Lisbon neighbourhood in the depths of the worst recession for 80 years. Moreover, Gomes suggests that the line between fact and fiction is very narrow and forever shifting, with the consequence that people with little left to lose are finding it increasingly difficult to discern between fantasy and reality.

Back in the Antiquity of Time, Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) continues to tell stories to her tyrannical husband, King Shahryar (Amar Bounacharda) in the hope of delaying her inevitable execution. She has spent 500 days devising new fables to distract and delight and her Grand Vizier father (Américo Silva) is concerned that she is running out of inspiration. As she constantly reminds him of his much-missed wife, he longs to free his daughter from her ordeal, but dares not confront Shahryar, whose growing restlessness convinces Scheherazade that her time is running out.

She takes an excursion to the old quarter of Baghdad and meets a variety of eccentrics and lowlifes. A diver named Lionel (Lionel Franc) worships her from a distance, while a break-dancing thief (Elvis Barrientos) tries to entice her before he takes up with Beatriz (also Alfaiate), a married noblewoman whose husband pays the ultimate price for interfering in her affairs. Scheherazade also encounters a genie of the wind (Hervés Diasnas) and a tousle-haired blonde Adonis called Paddleman (Carloto Cotta), who reveals that he has fathered over 200 children. He offers to impregnate Scheherazade, but she dismisses him as a fool and tosses away the rare fragrant flower he had given her.

Returning to the palace, Scheherazade embarks upon her next story, `The Inebriated Chorus of the Chaffinches'. This is essentially a documentary interlude that ventures into some of the capital's less salubrious neighbourhoods to meet the impoverished Lisboans who trap and train songbirds to exhibit in prestigious competitions. Known as `vinkensport', this pastime was imported from Belgium at the end of the Great War and actors Chico Chapas and Gonçalo Waddington mix with non-professionals to show how nets are used to catch finches who are kept in covered cages and whose song is passed down through the generations until it is heard no more.

Gomes briefly interrupts his investigation (which relies heavily on explanatory captions) with a potted history of postwar Portugal and a treatise on the state of public housing in Lisbon. He also includes a final fable, `Hot Forest', which centres on the relationship between a vinkenier and a Chinese student (Jing Jing Guo). She gets pregnant, but is abandoned after opting to have an abortion. Distracted from her studies, she becomes a live-in companion to an elderly lady. However, when she perishes in a fire, the girl decides the fates are against her and she returns to Beijing.

Leaving Scheherazade to her destiny on the 515th night, Gomes ends the picture by having Chapas free a wind genie who has become ensnared in a chaffinch net. But those who have been paying attention will know that Gomes has little faith in such easy escapes and leaves the audience to lament that the gap between the utopia we wish to inhabit and the grim reality we have created for ourselves (or, rather, allowed others to impose upon us) is getting wider with each passing day and no amount of exotic yarn-spinning is going to make a ha'porth of difference.

Although Gomes reveals debts here to Manoel de Oliveira and Chris Marker, the biggest influence on this concluding episode is undoubtedly Pier Paolo Pasolini, who produced his own version of The 1001 Nights in the `trilogy of life' that was composed of The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974). However, it is also worth noting that Catalan film-maker Marc Recha also based Little Indi (2009) on a 17 year-old youth from the rundown Barcelona suburb of Valbona who devotes himself to the cherished goldfinch he hopes will win enough prize money to help his impecunious family.

Despite the gloriously stylised Orientalism of the Baghdad segments - which boast splendid pastiche costumes by Silvia Grabowski and Lucha d'Orey and lavish Bruno Duarte and Artur Pinheiro interiors that Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom ensures clash anachronistically with modern settings visible on the horizon - this challenging climax to an epic achievement often comes closer in tone to the actuality aspects of the first film's real-world prelude. Gomes reminds us that stories emanate from people's fears and desires and help them survive the trials of daily life. But he also seems to suggest that we can only help ourselves (whether we are telling tales to avoid execution, training songbirds or reacting to personal tragedies), as we can expect little assistance from neighbours as enmired as we are and nothing at all from those above us in the social strata, as they are too busy looking up to notice what is going on below them.

As before, Gomes reins in his anger to appear optimistic in the face of quiet despair and there is something deliciously quirky about his decision to include on the soundtrack the cover version of Klaatu's `Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft' by the children of the Langley Music School Project. But, while some may be frustrated by the open-endedness of Gomes's approach at the end of such a mammoth undertaking, this peerless triptych acknowledges the failings of the past and rails against the austerity of the present in the hope that Portugal and its people can eventually look forward to a brighter future.

10 THARLO.

On 25 June, Tibetan director Pema Tseden was detained by the Chinese authorities at Xining Airport in Qinghai Province. By all accounts, he was held in police custody on a charge of `disrupting social order' after leaving a piece of luggage in the departure hall. Two days later, Tseden (who suffers from a number of chronic conditions) was taken to hospital and he has not been seen in public since. A photograph appeared to show bruising on his hand and wrist and friends are convinced that his `diappearance' is highly suspicious.

As the first Tibetan to graduate from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, Tseden (who is called Wanma Caidan in Chinese) has been kept under close surveillance, as he has not been afraid to address the concerns of his homeland since debuting with The Silent Holy Stones (2006), which explored the impact on the mind of an impressionable child monk of traditional Tibetan opera and a Chinese drama serial. Compared by Abbas Kiarostami with the work of Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson, this droll, but deceptively acute picture was followed by Soul Searching (2009), which was made under the auspices of Chinese Fifth Generation titan Tian Zhuangzhuang and was hailed as the first feature by a Tibetan director to be filmed in his own language on native soil with an entirely local crew.

Owing much to the spirit of Kiarostami, this road movie follows a film-maker holding impromptu auditions for an adaptation of the Tibetan opera, Prince Drimé Kundun, and reveals the extent to which the Autonomous Region has been exposed to outside influence. However, having captured city life, Tseden retreated to the countryside for Old Dog (2011), which charts the lengths an ageing shepherd is prepared to go to recover the beloved Tibetan mastiff that his wastrel son has tried to sell on the black market.

Languidly paced and drawing on the tradition of scroll painting, this lament for a culture under threat from Han Chinese largesse was followed by The Sacred Arrow (2014), an examination of the younger generation's fixation with new technology and the defiance of custom that takes its cue from the story of King Langdarma's assassination by the monk Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje. But, after this rather underperforming fable, Tseden has returned to form with Tharlo, which he was promoting when he was detained.

The action opens inside a regional police station, as Tharlo (Shide Nyima) demonstrates his phenomenal memory by reciting verbatim in Chinese a lengthy extract from Mao Zedong's `Serve the People' speech from 9 August 1944, which he learned as a nine year-old boy. Feeding the orphaned lamb he carries around in his satchel, Tharlo (who is nicknamed `Ponytail' because of his long hair) explains to Chief Dorje (Tashi) that he tends 375 sheep on the slopes outside the township (100 of which are his own) and has a special system for telling them apart.

Yet Tharlo can't remember his own age and struggles to understand why he needs an identity card when everyone knows who he is. He tells Dorje that he hopes to emulate Comrade Zhang Side (a soldier killed fighting the Japanese in 1944), as his death was supposedly heavier than Mount Tai because he had done his duty. But Dorje is more concerned that Tharlo obeys the law and dispatches him to the nearby town to get his photo taken for his ID.

Riding his moped to the Deryki Studio, Tharlo is asked to take a seat by the photographer (Dandrin Yantso) while she attends to a newly married couple posing awkwardly in front of a backdrop of Tiananmen Square. She sends them off to change into Western clothing before taking a snap in front of the Statue of Liberty and they ask Tharlo if they can borrow his lamb so they can relax in front of the camera.

Over her blaring radio, the photographer tells Tharlo that his hair needs washing and he wanders across the street to a hairdressing salon, where Yangtso (Yangshik Tso) gives him a dry wash. He enjoys the sensation of her fingers massaging his scalp and tells her all about his sheep before she rinses him off. As she blow dries him, Yangtso asks Tharlo about his name and informs him that he would be very handsome if he smartened himself up. He asks why she has such short hair and she flirtatiously responds that she keeps it that way in readiness for long-haired hunks like him.

Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Tharlo leaves hurriedly and pays over the odds. However, the photographer is still busy, so he sits outside on his moped to feed his lamb. Yangtso eats sweets while watching him from across the road, but is distracted by a customer as a cop sidles over to ask Tharlo why he is loitering. The photographer comes out to reassure the officer that Tharlo is not a thief and that he is waiting to have his ID photo taken. She ushers him inside and orders him to remove his hat, coat, satchel and amulet before urging him not to smile as she takes the picture.

Tharlo is surprised by the speed of the process, but has to wait outside while Deryaki makes a print. As he mooches on the pavement, Yangtso emerges from her shop with an ice cream. She repeats her contention that he is handsome and Tharlo smiles bashfully before she asks if he likes karaoke. Even though he needs to return to his flock, Tharlo accepts the invitation and leaves the lamb inside the salon to ride his moped through the nocturnal streets to the bar.

Once inside their private booth, Yangtso sings with more enthusiasm than talent. But Tharlo insists she has a lovely voice. A balloon pops on the wall behind him, but he is more taken aback when Yangtso lights a cigarette, as he is so unused to seeing women smoking. She offers him one of her brand, but he prefers his own roll-ups. As they drink, she encourages him to sing a folk song and he does so without the microphone. However, he gets a coughing fit after Yangtso sings another tune and they have to send out for a bottle of spirits to calm his throat.

The following morning, Tharlo wakes on Yangtso's sofa with a hangover. She joins him at the table and explains that he was so drunk that she had to carry him home while wheeling his moped. He asks about the lamb and she assures him that she fed it before they fell asleep. Standing behind him, Yangtso puts her arms around Tharlo's neck and suggests that they run away together and see such far away places as Lhasa, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and beyond. When he admits that he would like to see New York, Yangtso pleads with him to sell his sheep so they can be together. The lamb bleats loudly, as if in warning. But Tharlo is smitten and he hastens away after Yangtso kisses him.

Having bought some firecrackers and booze, Tharlo heads home. He gives Dorje his photo and, as he waits for a receipt, he mutters that he might have met a bad person in town. As he feeds the lamb, Tharlo tells his friend about the cop accusing him of being a thief and Dorje jokes that that is why he needs some ID. However, he seems puzzled when Tharlo asks if his card would be valid in Lhasa or Beijing.

Back in his humble shack, Tharlo sets off a couple of firecrackers when he hears wolves howling in the night. His dog barks, but he goes indoors to listen to old folk songs on the radio. The next day, he fetches water on his moped and lets the sheep out of their pen. He digs in his compound, while listening to a song about a mountain bird needing a companion and belts out the lyrics, as he sits on the pylon-dotted hillside with his flock Resorting to spirits to cure another coughing fit, Tharlo lets off more fireworks to scare away predators. But, the next morning, he finds several carcasses in the pen (including his favourite lamb's) and he is devastated to have slept through the attack. The owner of the sheep (Jinpa) is furious with him for falling down on the job and slaps him across the face three times before loading the bodies on to his truck. Contemptuously, he throws one down for Tharlo to eat and he butchers it with a heavy heart before consuming the meat off his knife.

As the dense darkness descends, Tharlo struggles to light a fire and reaches the conclusion that there may well be something better awaiting him than the life he had always known and loved. Consequently, he rides back into town and plonks 160,000 yuan on Yangtso's counter. She is amazed and quickly hides it away before persuading Tharlo to part with his ponytail, as it draws too much attention.

He is keen to return to the karaoke bar, but Yangtso insists on going to a nightclub, where they watch famous singer Dekyi Tsering perform. Tharlo is unimpressed with the rap style and ignores Yangtso when she chides him for smoking roll-ups in front of her trendy friends. He starts to cough and she fetches him some hooch. However, it merely makes him possessive and he almost gets into a fight with one of her crowd when he tells him to keep his hands off his girl. Embarrassed by his rustic manners, Yangtso agrees to go to the karaoke bar.

When he wakes the next morning, however, Tharlo is dismayed to discover that Yangtso has disappeared with his money. He hurries to the club, but no one remembers her. The photographer is also unable to shed any light on Yangtso and the crestfallen Tharlo pops in to tell Dorje that he is no longer fit to die like Zhang Side and will perish as light as a fascist feather. Not bothering to ask why Tharlo is in distress, Dorje asks him to recite to `Serve the People' speech to impress his junior officers. But Tharlo makes several mistakes and Dorje tells him he should never have had his ponytail cut off, as he is only half the man. Moreover, he no longer looks like his ID photograph and he orders him to go back to town to get another one taken.

Shooing Tharlo away before he can report the crime, Dorje promises to catch the wolf that ravaged the flock. But Tharlo is no longer interested. He potters off on his moped, only to run out of petrol. He cuts a tiny, forlorn figure in a sprawling long shot, as he starts to push the bike. As the film ends, the camera hovers behind Tharlo, as he smokes and smashes his last bottle in frustration. The scene abruptly cuts to black as he lights a firework and holds it at arm's length. There's a double crack, but its significance is left unknown.

Expanded from Tseden's own short story and confirming his reputation for wry wit and scathing critique, this should do much to bring his current plight to wider attention. Some of the symbolism may be a little blatant, as Tseden exposes the pernicious effects of free market capitalism that have been introduced into Tibet by the occupying Chinese. But the satire is often as charming as it is cutting, with the sequence with the newlyweds betraying their country roots in front of a fake Statue of Liberty being particularly amusing. The karaoke interlude is also engaging. But Tseden avoids pitying Tharlo when he realises his folly, although there is genuine pathos in his inability to recall Mao's speech after he is duped by a gold-digger whose flattery is evidently superficial to everyone but Tharlo from the outset.

A huge star in Tibet, comic-actor-cum-poet Shide Nyima excels in his first feature lead, for which he agreed to be shorn of the ponytail he had been growing for 17 years. Singer Yangshik Tso also impresses on her screen debut, particularly with her caterwauling in the karaoke booth, although they both come close to being upstaged by the ever-hungry lamb in Tharlo's bag. The bleating forms a crucial part of Dukar Tserang's sound mix, which combines tellingly with Wang Jue's score to contrast the town and country soundscapes. Lu Songye's meticulously composed monochrome imagery is equally accomplished, as it creates the bleak beauty of the wilderness and the faux glamour of the neon-lit modernity against which this unflinching noirish study of identity, authority, alienation and clashing cultures plays out.

9 SON OF SAUL.

The time is coming when the last survivor of the Shoah will pass. However, humanity will never forget the atrocity known hideously as the Final Solution and cinema has done its share in bringing personal testimonies to the attention of a global audience. Considering it lost so many citizens, the Hungarian film industry has been curiously quiet on the subject, But Barna Kabay's Job's Revolt (1983), Andor Szilágyi's Rosa's Songs (2003) and Lajos Koltai's harrowing adaptation of Nobel laureate Imre Kertész's semi-autobiographical novel, Fateless (2005), have now been joined by 38 year-old Laszló Nemes's exceptional debut, Son of Saul, which won four prizes at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film Towards the end of the Second World War, Sonderkommando Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) spends his days greeting the trains arriving at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. He maintains a steely silence, as others try to sound reassuring while guiding the newcomers towards the wooden outbuildings. Some will be chosen for special occupations befitting their skills and, as they undresss, they are urged to remember their peg number, as there will be hot soup once they have showered. But, once the door is locked with a resounding clang, it becomes clear, as the screams and banging abate, that no one will be leaving these gas chambers alive.

As he sifts through the corpses, Saul finds a young boy who is still breathing. He is swiftly smothered by one of the SS guards. But Miklós (Sándor Zsótér), a Jewish doctor who also collaborates with the Nazis in return for special privileges, wants to perform an autopsy. Touched by the youth's brave, but futile resistance, Saul swears that he is his son and begs to be allowed to give him a proper Jewish burial.

Saul asks around to see if there is a rabbi in the camp who can recite the mourner's Kaddish and learns from his friend Yankl (Attila Fritz) that a Greek rabbi nicknamed Renegade (Márton Ágh) has arrived at the camp. The other Sonderkommandos are preoccupied, however, with a plan being hatched by Abraham (Levente Molnár) to rebel against the SS and the commandant. But Oberkapo Biederman (Urs Rechn) suggests that it would be more useful to compile evidence of their crimes by photographing the daily activities so that there will be evidence of the genocide when the Allies defeat the Third Reich.

Biedermann tells Saul about a camera that has been smuggled into one of the barracks and orders him to take some incriminating pictures, He gives Saul a piece of jewellery to use as a bribe in case he is caught, but he is allowed across the compound on the pretext of repairing a broken door. Moreover, he acts as a lookout while one ot the inmates photographs corpses being incinerated in the crematorium.

The ashes are shovelled on to a truck and Saul hitches a ride with a party of Sonderkommando that has been detailed to scatter them by the riverbank. As the dust flies up into his face, Saul hears that the Renegade is nearby and he asks if he will conduct a funeral service. Keen to hide his identity, the Greek refuses and Saul threatens to report him to Oberkapo Mietek (Kamil Dobrowolski). In a blind panic, the Renegade plunges in the water in an attempt to drown himself and Saul has to haul him to the bank. They are taken to Oberscharführer Busch (Christian Harting), who sneers at the pair during their investigation before releasing Saul and sending the Renegade to his death. When Mietek confronts Saul about his folly, he buys his silence with the jewellery he had been given by Biederman.

At roll call, Abraham takes Saul to one side and orders him to go to the women's area and collect some gunpowder that has been smuggled into the camp. He pays a visit to Miklós and is humiliated by some German doctors who mock the way that Jews dance. Relieved to leave the office, Saul collects his parcel from Ella (Juli Jakab), whom he seems to know well. As he crosses the camp, he sees a batch of new arrivals being herded into the woods to be shot to relieve the pressure on the gas chambers and ovens. Saul asks around for a rabbi and is overjoyed when Braun (Todd Charmont) assures him that he can help. Saul disguises Braun as a Sonderkommando and sneaks him back into the camp. In all the fuss, however, he loses the gunpowder.

As he clears away after dinner in the officers' mess, Saul hears Oberscharführer Voss (Uwe Lauer) direct Biederman to draw up a list of names and convinces himself that his unit is about to be liquidated. The following morning, Miklós asks Saul to find a replacement for the the cadaver, which he has bundled into a sack. Trying not to draw attention to himself, Saul discovers that Biedermann has been killed and Abraham incites his fellow prisoners to rise up against their gaolers. One of the crematoria is destroyed and Saul spots a chance to flee with some of the other captives.

He leads Braun into the woods and asks him to perform the ceremony. As they dig a shallow grave, however, Braun proves to be a fraud, as he can't perform the ritual. Abraham and the other escapees implore Saul to leave the body behind. But he insists on carrying it across the river, only to lost his grip on the sack in the current. Braun rescues him and hauls him to the shore. They reach a hut in the depths of the forest and huddle inside. Abraham promises that they will make contact with the Polish Home Army partisans based nearby. But Saul is distracted by a young boy peeking into the shack and smiles in the belief that he is his real son. The lad runs away, however, and, as the camera follows him between the trees, he is passed by a detachment of SS troopers and gunshots ring out off screen.

It's fitting that this gruelling picture should be bookended by scenes in which the crucial action takes place away from the camera's gaze. Shooting on 35mm in long, perspectival takes whose shallow-focused Academy ratio chillingly heighten the sordid squalor of László Rajk's grimly authentic sets, Laszló Nemes and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély block out the familiar realities that have been sanitised, sensationalised and sentimentalised in so many Hollywood Holocaust recreations to focus solely on one man's bid to regain part of his lost soul by performing a small act devoid of moral ambiguity.

Key to the success of a technique that Nemes seemingly picked up from the Dardenne brothers rather than compatriot Béla Tarr (whom he assisted on The Man From London, 2007), is the sound design of Támas Zányl, which uses the babble of Hungarian, German and Yiddish dialogue and the noises attendant on mass murder to leave the viewer in no doubt what is happening beyond the frame, as Géza Röhrig tries to keep his head down and not draw attention to himself. Indeed, reinforcing this sense of self-containment in a godless hell is the fact that the edges of the images are often blurred, as Röhrig tries to avert his eyes from atrocities that are made all the more onerous by the nature of a job he knows is only delaying his own inevitable demise. In his first feature, Röhrig gives a remarkable performance that contrasts strongly with that of David Arquette in Tim Blake Nelson's similarly themed The Grey Zone (2001). He is ably supported by Levente Molnár and Juli Jakab, as well as by Christian Harting and Uwe Lauer, whose Nazis are largely free of the stereotypes that undermine so many films on this sobering subject. This is largely down to Nemes and co-scenarist Clara Royer, who clearly seem to have seen Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo (1960) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), as the judgement of tone is as commendable as the evocation of authenticity (an uprising did take place, for example, on 7 October 1944) and the masterly deployment of the countless extras, whose anonymous presence goes some way to conveying the scale of this indelible crime against humanity.

8 TRAIN TO BUSAN.

Survival is the name of the game in Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan, a riotous zombie horror that sees the South Korean animator behind The King of Pigs (2011). The Fake (2013) and Seoul Station (2016) venture into live action for the first time. Given the recent MERS epidemic, this was a timely release on the peninsula. But its allegorical assaults on human nature, the class divide, financial malpractice, corporate corruption and mob rule remain universally pertinent and will raise as many hackles as smiles among viewers prepared to look beneath the surface scares. Following a prologue in which a truck driver hits a deer in the road near a quarantine zone and is spooked by the undead creature's glazed eyes, the scene shifts to the Seoul office where divorced fund manager Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) argues with his ex-wife while trying to nail down a deal with his assistant. She is angry because he won't let their young daughter, Su-an (Kim Su-an) take the train to celebrate her birthday in Busan. But he insists he is too preoccupied to worry about minor domestic issues.

On arriving home, however, Seok-woo learns from his mother (Lee Joo-sil) that Su-an is feeling low after forgetting the words to her song at the school concert. He tries to cheer his daughter up with her birthday present, but he bought her a Wii for Children's Day and, in order to atone, he agrees to accompany her to Busan the next day. Left alone, he watches the camcorder footage of Su-an's performance and is stung by the reproachful look she shoots the lens.

Early the following mornng, Seok-woo and Su-an board the KTX high-speed train to Busan. As the captain (Jung Suk-yong) climbs into his cab, conductor Ki-chul (Jang Hyuk-jin) and his staff welcome the passengers to their seats. However, they are too preoccupied to see a homeless man (Choi Gwi-hwa) and a distressed young woman (Shim Eun-kyung) burst through the doors before they close. Thus, no one hears the hobo whispering about everyone being dead or sees the runaway writhing in the corridor clutching a leg wound before falling momentarily still and contorting back to zombified life.

Sniffing the air and snarling, she charges into the nearest compartment and buries her teeth into a defenceless stewardess. Once infected, she also turns and, within seconds, dozens of ravenous ghouls are rampaging through the carriages and only a few members of a high-school baseball team manage to escape, including Yong-guk (Choi Woo-sik) and cheerleader Jin-hee (Ahn So-hee), who has an unrequited crush on him. Also spared are ageing sisters In-gil (Ye Soo-jung) and Jong-gil (Park Myung-sin), self-important transport executive Yong-suk (Kim Eui-sung) and chip-shouldered working stiff Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) and his heavily pregnant wife, Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi), who is using the lavatory when the mayhem begins. Hearing the commotion, Su-an slips away from her distracted father and sees the wailing horde shuffling towards their carriage. She is swept to safety by Sang-hwa, who tries to hold the door closed against the revenants. However, Seok-woo realises that they don't have the intelligence to open the door and suggests that they will stop clamouring if they cover the glass with wet newspaper because zombies only respond to what their enfeebled eyes can see. Seong-kyeong blocks them off and silence reigns. But Yong-suk has been watching the TV news and tries to establish himself as the leader of the survivors with the aid of the conductor. He informs them that Daejeon has been placed under military quarantine and that they should be safe once the train stops. However, Seok-woo is in no mood to listen because he has just heard his mother being attacked by the zombies while saying her farewells down the phone.

Seok-woo dislikes Yong-suk as much as Sang-hwa bears a grudge against him. So, he calls his army buddy to see what is going on in the city and is advised to go to east rather than follow directions to the main square. When the train stops in the deserted station, the captain is uncertain what to do for the best. But Yong-suk leads everyone up the escalator, while the zombified passengers in the other compartments press hungrily and helplessly against the windows as they pass.

When they reach the concourse, Seok-woo guides Su-an to one side and she is puzzled why he is breaking away from the group. He tells her that they will be safer this way and she accuses him of putting himself before everyone else and bawls that her mother had been right to leave him. She pulls away from him and rejoins the throng desperately trying to get back on the train after encountering a battalion of voracious soldiers guarding the entrance. Seong-kyeong grabs Su-an's hand as they run and Seok-woo only just manages to get through the glass door being held shut by Sang-hwa and the last three baseballers.

Somehow, they succeed in bolting the doors and wedging bats through the handles. But, as they pelt towards the platform, the glass shatters and the zombie troops tumble through. Young-guk alone makes it back to the train, as his teammates are savaged. But, when he calls Jin-hee to assure her that he is safe, along with Seok-woo and Sang-haw, Yong-suk convinces the others that they have been bitten and are trying to trick them into letting them into the last safe compartment on the train.

As the captain calls control for advice and is urged to get to Busan before the plague hits the city, Sang-hwa gets a call from Seong-kyeong to say she is trapped in a bathroom with Su-an. Determined to rescue them, Seok-woo and Sang-hwa persuade Young-guk to bind their arms with gaffer tape and tool themselves up to battle through the carriages separating them from their loved ones. They bludgeon their way through the first compartment, but discover in the second that the zombies are disorientated by tunnel darkness and they are able to pick their way through the seats before sending them careering to the wrong end of the corridor by setting off Sang-hwa's mobile phone.

They free Seong-kyeong and Su-an and wait between compartments for a tunnel before proceeding further. However, the zombies block the aisle and they have to crawl along the overhead luggage racks to reach sanctuary. On knocking on the carriage door, however, Yong-suk browbeats Ki-chul into keeping it shut. As Sang-hwa holds back the zombies from a partially closed door, Seok-woo and Young-guk try to smash their way into the safe zone and Seok-woo finally comes to admire Sang-hwa when he uses his failing energy to protect them after he is bitten on the hand. He begs Seok-woo to look after Seong-kyeong and Seok-woo nods his assent before rejoining Young-guk.

As they break through, however, Sang-hwa is overpowered and In-gil sacrifices herself so that Seok-woo, Young-guk, Seong-kyeong and Su-an can enter. No sooner are they in the carriage, however, than Yong-suk whips his fellow survivors into a paranoid frenzy. Seok-woo punches him for wasting lives, but Yong-suk retaliates by suggesting that Seok-woo has been infected by his blood-spattered shirt and they demand that the newcomers are isolated. Jin-hee and the homeless man readily join them to get away from Yong-suk's baying acolytes. But Jong-gil is so furious with them for demeaning her sister's sacrifice that she gazes into her clouded eyes at the door and opens it so that the zombies can feast on the self-centred fools. But Yong-suk and Ki-chul manage to shelter in a toilet, while Seok-woo's party take stock in the vestibule.

While he stares out of the window, Seok-woo gets a call from his assistant. He reassures him that Busan is safe, but breaks down on revealing that one of the companies they represent was responsible for the chemical leak that has unleashed the chaos. Seok-woo tells him not to blame himself and crouches down beside Su-an to check she is bearing up. But any hopes that the worst might be over are quickly dashed when the captain announces over the tannoy that a train has derailed at East Daegu and that they are going to have to disembark and try to find another locomotive.

Stopping outside the station, the captain descends from his cab and creeps along the empty platforms. A couple of trains are packed with frustrated zombies, but he manages to find a working engine and slowly edges out into the open. Seok-woo, Su-an, Seong-kyeong and the homeless man climb down and make their way along the track. At that moment, a flaming train ploughs into the platform and a spinning carriage nearly crushes the fugitive quartet. Although Seok-woo is knocked cold.

Meanwhile, Young-guk and Jin-hee take a different route and jump aboard a stationary service to weigh up their options. However, they run into Yong-suk, who has already fed Ki-chul to the stragglers outside the bathroom to create a diversion and he has no compunction about using Jin-hee as a decoy to make good his escape across the track to the moving loco. Heartbroken at seeing the girl of his dreams suffering, Young-guk gives up the ghost and allows her to devour him.

Having witnessed the collision, the captain slows the train to look for survivors. He sees Yong-suk running towards him and courageously jumps down from the foot plate to assist him. However, Yong-suk has no intention of returning the favour and he races after the engine, just as Seok-woo regains consciousness. He slips through a gap beneath the derailed carriage and is about to reach for Su-an when the rolling stock shifts and he has to draw on all his strength to remove a piece of twisted metal to save Su-an and Seong-kyeong. Hearing the glass holding back the trapped zombies, the homeless man motions for them to go without him and he holds back the flesh-eating tide long enough for the trio to flee.

They chase after the engine and clamber aboard. The pursuing zombies grab hold of the railings and act in concert go form a giant undead brake. But Seok-woo tramples on their fingers and they are left in a heap on the track. Unfortunately, they are still not safe, as Yong-suk has been bitten and he emerges from the cab to plead with Seok-woo to get him home to his mother. They fight on the walkway and Seok-woo manages to throw him overboard. But he is wounded in the process and he tells a bereft Su-an to stay close to Seong-kyeong before making his way to the back of the engine. As his eyes mist over, he thinks back to holding his daughter in his arms for the first time and he smiles before his shadow is seen leaping into oblivion in a noble act of self-sacrifice.

At the end of the line, Seong-kyeong and Su-an stop the train and wander towards a tunnel through a scene of utter devastation. They are spotted by a couple of soldiers in a machine-gun nest, who can't make out whether they are human or not. Their commander orders them to shoot over his walkie-talkie, but the sniper pauses when he hears Su-an singing the song she had rehearsed for the concert and her voice rings out bravely as she finally reaches Busan.

As is clear from the synopsis, this is a breakneck ride and Yeon Sang-ho stages the action with an innovative panache that has recently eluded so many K- and J-horror directors, as well as their American counterparts. But, while the set-pieces are cannily handled (particularly when the massed ranks are swarming), it's the ingenuity of Yeon and Park Joo-suk's screenplay that ensures this remains tense and startling.

Credit should also go to cinematographer Lee Hyung-deok for making the most of the confined spaces, as well as editor Yang Jin-mo, make-up artists Kwak Tae-yong and Hwang Hyo-kyun, and the fine ensemble led by Gong Yoo (who regains his humanity in losing his life) and Kim Su-an, who switches from sulky contempt to childlike curiosity and hysterical misery with great conviction for one so young. Even Kim Eui-sang merits a mention for playing the caricatured fat cat villain with such hissable relish. One can only hope that the seemingly inevitable Hollywood remake combines suspense, pathos, gore and bleak comedy with the same finesse.

7 FRANCOFONIA.

Alexander Sokurov's Francofonia is a rivetingly provocative companion piece to his masterpiece, Russian Ark (2002), which not only offers pertinent insights into the relationship between art and power, but also provides a unique analysis of the current state of Europe and its ongoing struggles with migrants, terrorists and the Kremlin. At times resembling one of Peter Greenaway's early avant-garde outings, such as Vertical Features Remake (1978) and The Falls (1980), this audacious, but assured amalgam of archival footage, dramatic reconstruction and philosophical musing may prove a bit daunting. But, while the cascade of intriguing images and ideas requires concentration, it repays careful viewing and demands to be seen again.

While lamenting that Russia no longer has the wisdom of a Tolstoy or a Chekhov to guide it, film-maker Alexander Sokurov tries to make Skype contact with a Dutch sea captain named Dirk. He is carrying artworks in need of restoration, but has run into stormy waters and keeps breaking up as he confides his fears that his cargo might not survive the voyage. As he listens, Sokurov mumbles in voiceover that the tide of history can be equally treacherous and suggests that everyone has an ocean raging inside them.

Sokurov has always been fond of Paris. But even the happiest cities have their grim moments and the City of Light fell into Nazi hands on 14 June 1940. The vast majority of the population had already fled south, so that the streets were deserted when Adolf Hitler made the infamous tour of inspection that culminated in him posing before the Eiffel Tower. Tinkering with the sobering shots of Führer taking in the sights, Sokurov adds a comic voice asking directions to the Louvre. He claims this vast museum is worth more than the rest of France and struggles to imagine Paris without it. But he also has a high regard for the Hermitage in St Petersburg, which was not treated with quite so much reverence when the Wehrmacht besieged Leningrad between September 1941 and January 1944.

According to Sokurov, museums wish to be left in peace to guard their treasures. But he believes they are also showcases for the abuse of power, as so much of what they contain was acquired by conquest and plunder. Yet, he admires the Louvre's collection of paintings and wonders how different European culture might have been if portraiture had not become so popular. Over a montage of faces from the Renaissance onwards, Sokurov demands to know why art is so unwilling to teach us prescience.

Following the German invasion in the spring of 1940, Paris was declared an open city to protect its buildings and infrastructure. The High Command was astonished by the ease of victory and urged the occupying forces to be respectful of the French capital and its citizens. Among those setting the right example was Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath), who was detailed to compile an inventory of major artworks so that the Reich hierarchy could appropriate them. This duty brought Metternich into contact with Louvre director Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), who had opted to remain in the Nazi sector in order to protect France's enviable heritage from the likes of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler himself.

Both in their mid-forties, Metternich and Jaujard had been called up during the Great War. But, while Metternich had survived action, Jaujard had been invalided out of the French army with tuberculosis before being forced to endure the loss of his father on the Western Front. Despite being on opposite sides for the second time in two decades, the Prussian junker and the bourgeois republican shared a determination to prevent the priceless artefacts coveted by the philistinic inner circle from leaving France. Consequently, as he looks down from his office on to a German mounted band playing in the street below, Jaujard decides to take Metternich into his confidence and reveal that the museum has been emptied of all but its largest statues from Antiquity, with the most precious items being hidden in chateaux across the country.

Sokurov speculates on the mindset of the French who came to terms with surrender so easily and quickly settled into a peaceful co-existence with their conquerors. He also wonders why Germany was so content to occupy the northern half of the country and leave the remainder in the hands of the puppet regime led by the 84 year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy. As Sokurov points out, Napoleon III was on the throne when Pétain was born and he expresses disdain for the ease with which he betrayed the principles of the Revolution to spare his homeland from slaughter and decimation. Yet he also ponders whether it was a price worth paying, as although millions became refugees, life went on as much before after the army was disbanded and factories began producing helmets for German rather than French heads.

There were times in Paris when it was difficult to believe that war was raging elsewhere on the planet. But, as he contemplates the dousing of the spirit of French resistance, Sokurov is interrupted by a message from Captain Dirk, whose face keeps turning into a pixellated chessboard, as the signal shifts. Sokurov advises him to jettison the cargo to lighten his load and distracts himself with the thought that the sea had played its part in bringing items like a giant Assyrian statue from 700 BC to the Louvre. This intricately carved lamassu was commissioned to inspire fear of royal power and Sokurov claims that art and architecture have long been used to cower populations into obedience and it's tempting to speculate on the reasons for ISIL's destruction of sites in Iraq and Syria and the ransacking of Egyptian museums during the Arab Spring. But, in drawing our attention to the fact that some cultures set little store by the preservation of the past, Sokurov also notes that untold treasures were lost at sea (along with many lives) and that we will never know what remarkable relics rest on the bed of the Mediterranean.

In order to accommodate its new artefacts, the Louvre was expanded and the allegorical goddess Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes) is shown riding a buggy through a network of underground corridors spouting the revolutionary credo, `liberty, fraternity and equality'. According to Sokurov, the hand is smarter than the brain, as it creates more quickly and he uses a 9000 year-old sculpture found in Jordan in 1972 to support his contention. He wonders what architect Pierre Lescot would have made of this amazing find and shows us the Henri II staircase that Lescot designed in 1553, as well as his drawings for a new façade. Clearly an admirer, Sokurov urges modern architects to be as polymathic and sensitive to environment as this priest, mathematician and painter.

At this moment, however, Napoleon Bonaparte (Vincent Nemeth) hoves into sight and proudly announces that the Louvre would be nothing without him bringing capturing items like the statue of Seneca. He insists that Parisians should be grateful to him, as he waged war to help civilise the nation, while also having the good sense to employ experts to advise him on what to leave behind. Yet, while conflict enriched France in many ways, Jaujard and Metternich were keen to prevent it being impoverished by conquest. Having visited Paris before the war and having supervised the evacuation of Cologne Cathedral in the late 1930s, Metternich is deemed worthy of a visit to the Château de Sourches, where so many Louvre treasures were stored for safe keeping.

Over footage of the Louvre clearance, Jaujard feels a pang of guilt at collaborating with both Metternich and Pétain. But, as he shrugs in the direction of Leonardo Da Vinci's `St John the Baptist' (1513-16), he suspects that he is taking the most pragmatic approach to an insurmountable problem. The noise of the workmen disturbs Napoleon, who peers through a door as the 2nd century Winged Victory of Samothrace is wheeled away on a trolley. Sokurov tells him to stop fussing, as this was added to the collection long after his death.

Up on the roof, Sokurov provides a 360° panoramic view of Paris and explains that the Louvre site was first occupied as it offered sanctuary from marauding Vikings. A fortress castle was built in the 12th century and drawings are laid over an image of the one square kilometre area to show how it developed under successive monarchs. Much changed after the Revolution, however, and it was Napoleon who converted the buildings into a museum. He drags Marianne through the galleries and shows her an equestrian portrait, while boasting, `That's me!'

Jaujard presents paintings of the Louvre from 1666 and 1789 and reveals that Napoleon relied heavily on director-cum-artist Hubert Robert, who was responsible for the construction of the magnificent Grand Gallery. Similarly, Napoleon III entrusted the square hall and the Apollo Gallery to Louis Visconti and Sokurov explains over Robert paintings from 1880 that the Louvre helped set artistic tastes and trends during this period. Indeed, it became a temple of art that frequently became the subject of pictures like the 1885 view of the sphinx in the Egyptian Hall and the 1894 image of two women restoring a Botticelli fresco. Napoleon has no time for the fact that the Louvre contains many pictures of women painting and urges us to gaze instead upon Iacques-Louis David's 1807 record of his coronation as emperor. He is unnerved, however, by the sight of so many Prussians in the museum and Sokurov descends to the foyer, where Metternich is making a speech at the grand re-opening of the Louvre to the public. As he refers to the Hague convention on the conduct of war and occupation, Sokurov commends France on having such a reasonable neighbour, as the same courtesies were not extended to the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded in 1941.

He concludes that the Germans unleashed their full fury on the Bolsheviks because they hated their ideology and because they had the temerity to resist. Fortunately, the curators at the Hermitage had removed their most important objects, as the museum had its purpose transformed during a siege that saw thousands tossed into mass graves and corpses being cannibalised by the starving citizens. Watching footage of the rearguard, Sokurov wishes he could forget what he has witnessed. But, despite Europe having produced so many fine minds down the centuries, its nations have always succumbed to ambition and hatred and conquest and destruction. Consequently, while Marianne can proclaim her litany, Bonaparte can also point at `Mona Lisa' (which he stole in 1797) and declare `that's me!' and claim with some justification that France (and the Louvre) would be nothing without him.

However, it was not a warrior, but a refined aristocrat who protected the museum and Sokurov returns to his address and his intention to restore a semblance of normality to everyday Parisian life by bringing the Louvre back to life. Indeed, Metternich's Kunstschutz programme did much to preserve and repair artworks in France, Belgium, Italy, Greece and Serbia. He also issued a letter to all occupying troops exhorting them to treat the chateaux, townhouses, hotels and castles where they were billeted with the same respect he hoped they would extend to his home, the Palace of Gracht.

During his visit to Sourches, Metternich was filled with a sense of awe and familiarity, as he was shown around by a Louvre functionary who seems to miss the irony of the fact a wall had to be demolished in order to store some of the larger items. They pause to look at Théodore Gericault's `The Raft of the Medusa' (1818), as it leans against a corridor wall. Sokurov considers its allegorical meaning, while reflecting upon the loss of so many artefacts in waters that are now claiming the lives of countless migrants seeking a new life in Europe.

The bitter reality that inanimates are more welcome than human beings is not lost on Sokurov, as Captain Dirk reports on the state of the sea from his lurching ship. But Metternich had choppy waters of his own to navigate, as he had to keep devising bureaucratic snafus to frustrate Nazi grandees eager to redecorate their homes and offices. Moreover, he also colluded with Jaujard in securing the release of prisoners who had not fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. They are shown meeting in a playground full of children and drinking in a café, as Jaujard pleads for museum colleagues with Maquis connections.

As they leave, Sokurov asks if he can have a moment of their time. They nod and sit on wooden chairs in an anteroom. He praises Jaujard for continuing to curate exhibitions during the remainder of the war and even purchase some new acquisitions. Shortly after the Liberation in the summer of 1944, De Gaulle will reward him for his efforts at the Louvre and with the Resistance by making him Director of the Department of Arts and Literature. A further promotion will come in 1959, when he is appointed Head of the Ministry of Culture. However, his son with third wife Jeanne Boitel (an actress and Maquis heroine) will despise him and, despite receiving the Legion of Honour twice, he will be mysteriously removed from office in 1967. The disappointment will kill him, while his reputation will be posthumously damaged by the destruction of documents and photographs testifying to his achievements.

Jaujard looks up mournfully as Sokurov reveals that he could not find a single soul who had known him personally. But, as Jaujard asks about the fate of the Louvre, Sokurov turns to Metternich. He will be recalled to Berlin in 1942 to explain the delays in exporting masterworks, but he will survive the war and Jaujard will prove so helpful with his denazification that Metternich will also be awarded the Legion of Honour. In his later years, he will work in Rome and travel extensively before dying at the age of 85 in May 1978. As Metternich takes in the information, Jaujard tuts that Sokurov is raving and stalks away. The German lingers for a moment before following and the screen falls dark to the accompaniment of a discordant version of the Soviet national anthem.

We never learn what happens to Captain Dirk and his cargo (although the evidence suggests it sinks) or why the scenes involving Jaujard and Metternich have a visible audio track running down the left-hand side of the Academy frame. But Sokurov is entitled to his narrative and stylistic secrets at the end of a film so full of innovation, ingenuity and intrigue. Indeed, they enhance it and distinguish it from the many recent documentaries about great museums - although it must be said that it shares the odd reconstructive trait with Margy Kinmonth's Hermitage Revealed (2014).

Sokurov's themes are much more complex, however, as he laments humanity's inability to learn the lessons of history and the ease with which the masses can be seduced by charismatic leaders or doctrines that reinforce their own prejudices and fears. The contrast between Napoleon and ISIL by-passes the linking collapse of the Ottoman Empire, but the point is well made, as is comparison between Bonaparte and Metternich (which is made all the more ironic by the fact that the former saw his empire broken up by an Austrian chancellor of the latter name through the terms of the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, which stored up as many problems for future generations as the Treaty of Versailles a century later).

The linking through Gericault of the vessels carrying artworks and migrants is equally astute. But Sokurov also has a hidden agenda, as he slips in stinging criticism of Vladimir Putin's persistent interference in the affairs of neighbours anxious not to become part of a new Soviet Union. And, with Europe in the process of fragmenting, who would be able to stop him, as he seems more preoccupied with seizing territory and influence than museum exhibits?

Ably served by his small cast, as well as by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (who gives the Occupation scenes a silver nitrate sheen), editors Alexei Jankowski and Hansjörg Weissbrich, and composer Murat Kabardokov, Sokurov aims for intimacy rather than the majestic sweep of Russian Ark. But there's nothing narrow about his focus on Europe's feckless failure to heed the warnings contained in paintings produced over the last millennium or the cautious note he sounds about the danger of glossing over the suffering of previous generations, as otherwise, 200 years from now, Hitler may become as much a shriven hero as Napoleon is now.

6 THINGS TO COME.

August was dominated by Isabelle Huppert, who followed up her long overdue reunion with Gérard Depardieu in Guillaume Nicloux's Valley of Love with an even more notable performance in Mia Hansen-Løve's fifth feature, Things to Come. Marking a return to form after the disappointing Eden (2014), this family saga based on her own mother's experiences demonstrates once again the keen insight into love, loyalty and loss that informed All Is Forgiven (2007), The Father of My Children (2009) and Goodbye First Love (2011). But, for all the 35 year-old's confidence behind the camera, this is very much Huppert's picture, as she strides with purpose between the crises that redirect the destiny of a fiftysomething philosophy teacher who seemed to have it all worked out.

Several years ago, Isabelle Huppert and André Marcon had taken their children on the ferry from Saint-Malo to see the clifftop grave of François-René de Chateaubriand on the tidal island of Grand Bé. She had seemed distracted and slightly distanced from her husband during the visit. But they had muddled on to reach their silver wedding anniversary and still teach with distinction at different lycées in Paris. Indeed, Huppert is so dedicated to education that she marches through a student picket line and confronts the strikers intent on preventing her pupils from attending class.

This single-mindedness continues to inspire protégé Roman Kolinka, who is developing a reputation as a promising writer and, when they meet up after school, Huppert promises to recommend him to the company that publishes her own acclaimed philosophy textbook. When she visits editor Guy-Patrick Sainderichin, however, he suggests that Kolinka needs to tone down his radical idealism. He further upsets Huppert by introducing her to the new marketing team of Yves Heck and Rachel Arditi, who curtly inform her that her books are no longer selling and need to be redesigned. Huppert is unimpressed with the proposed covers and questions why a core collection of extracts and essays needs to be jazzed up.

On her way home, Huppert calls in on elderly mother Édith Scob and her black cat, Pandora. Scob keeps having panic attacks and calling her daughter in the middle of the night. But the onetime model seems sprightly when discussing the fact she has been cast as a corpse in an upcoming shoot and showing off the new clothes she has bought, even though she can hardly afford them.

Despite not being given to excessive outward displays of emotion, Huppert dotes on her mother and children Sarah Le Picard and Solal Forte, who have now left home. She is pleased to see them, therefore, when they come for supper. But she insists on making a fuss of Kolinka when he comes from getting into a fight on a demonstration to collect some books. Marcon can scarcely conceal his contempt when Kolinka openly criticises Huppert's new work on terrorism and, after he leaves, Marcon warns her that Kolinka is only friendly when it suits him. However, she jokes that he is jealous because she hadn't shown him the text and the fact that Marcon is unaware that his wife has published a new book betrays how estranged they have become.

A few days later, Le Picard meets Marcon after school and, during a walk in the park, she accuses her father of having an affair. She asks him to make a quick decision about his future and he looks sheepish. Across the city, Huppert has to abandon an outdoor seminar because Scob has texted to say she has turned on the gas in her apartment and the fireman at the scene lectures Huppert about the number of nuisance calls that Scob keeps making to the emergency services. She is stung by his suggestion that she is responsible for her mother and should put her in a home if she can no longer cope.

Arriving home exhausted, Huppert is confronted with Marcon's confession of adultery and his plan to move out. As Franz Schubert's `To Sing on the Water' swells on the soundtrack, she mutters that she thought he would love her forever, but snaps into pragmatic mode and remains phlegmatic when Scob suddenly decides to go into care. However, she is slightly surprised that Scob makes no mention of Pandora, who has to be prised from behind a radiator because she is so reluctant to leave. As she sits in the car with Forte outside the home, Huppert stifles a sob about the smell of death pervading the place before driving off.

Returning to the empty apartment, Huppert is furious to discover that Marcon has bought her flowers and she tries to stuff them into the pedal bin in the kitchen. When the bouquet proves too big, she stuffs it into a laundry bag and stomps down to the dumpster in the basement. But, having tossed the flowers away, she turns back to retrieve the bag, as it might come in useful. She regains her composure in time to meet Kolinka, who informs her that he is leaving Paris to live on a farm with some friends. He is surprised that she is so calm about her impending divorce and seems more concerned that she will no longer have access to the Breton holiday home she had spent so much time sprucing up because it belongs to Marcon.

A short time later, Huppert and Marcon go to Brittany and he is taken aback when she insists this will be her last visit and starts packing her belongings. She goes for a swim in the sea and ventures out on to the sands to try and get a phone signal. When she finally gets through to the care home, she discovers that Scob hasn't eaten for three days and takes a last wistful look at the scenery she had come to love as Marcon drives her to the station. Rushing to her mother's bedside, Huppert is relieved to find her alert and hungry. They eat chocolate while watching television and Huppert smiles when Scob says Nicolas Sarkozy is ugly and declares that Jacques Chirac used to make love with his boots on.

Eager to stay busy, Huppert invites some of her students to tea and is amused when they ask her to write for their new website. She sits on the sofa looking at the flowers they bought her and suddenly feels alone. On impulse, she goes to the pictures to see Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy (2010) and has to change seats when stranger Jean-Charles Clichet puts his hand on her knee. He moves to sit behind her and follows her through the quiet streets after the show. She tells him she is not in the mood and he leaves her alone. But, as she walks home, she gets a call to inform her that Scob has died after a fall and Huppert hails a taxi in a state of shock.

Huppert meets priest Olivier Goinard to give him some details of Scob's hard life to use in his oration. She recalls her lack of education and three marriages, but insists that her own father was the true love of her life. At the funeral, Goinard speaks touchingly about Scob giving Huppert the curiosity to become a philosopher and she reads a favourite passage from Blaise Pascal at the crematorium. But, despite her efforts to be brave, she is overcome with a sense of grief and loneliness while travelling on a bus across Paris and bursts into tears. Everything through the window seems to be a blur, but Huppert laughs bitterly aloud when she catches sight of Marcon and his mistress on the pavement.

Just as Huppert thinks things can get no worse, she learns that her textbooks are being discontinued and she fumes around the apartment when she discovers that Marcon has taken some of her books as well as his own. Needing a change of scenery, Huppert takes Pandora to stay with Kolinka. He picks her up at the station and they listen to Woody Guthrie's `My Daddy' while driving through the spectacular countryside. She frets when Pandora runs away and quickly comes to realise that she has little in common with Kolinka and his anarchist companions, as they are hatching ideas she first heard broached decades earlier. Thus, she goes to the kitchen to help girlfriend Élise Lhomeau with the washing-up rather than listen to a self-absorbed debate about authorship.

Having wandered out in the dark to find Pandora, Huppert is appalled when she wakes her the next morning with a dead mouse. However, she is so pleased to see the errant cat that she gives her a hug. After a walk in the hills, Huppert returns to breakfast and is hurt when Kolinka brands her a complacent bourgeois. She cries on the bed while stroking Pandora, but joins the party when they go swimming beside a waterfall. Still feeling fragile, she sits apart from the others and reads and makes up her mind to go home. She tells Kolinka there is a leak in her apartment building and he confides in Lhomeau that he has obviously said something wrong.

Back in Paris with Pandora, Huppert begins to rebuild her life. A year passes and she hurries to the hospital to meet her grandson. She is miffed to find that Marcon has beaten her to it, but fusses over the infant until the melancholic Le Picard demands him back. Shortly before Christmas, Huppert takes Pandora to live with Kolinka and Lhomeau. They show her their new donkeys and she is pleased to see that Kolinka has mellowed a little. She smokes a joint and comes downstairs when she struggles to sleep. Smiling at the sight of Pandora sitting contentedly by Kolinka's desk, she watches him work while listening to Donovan singing `Deep Peace'.

Arriving home, she is surprised to find Marcon sitting in the dark. She demands the return of her keys and tells him that he no longer has the right to drop in unannounced. He lingers in the hope of being invited to a festive supper, but Huppert ushers him out so she can cook. She teases Le Picard and Forte when they fail to notice Pandora's absence and they indulge her pleasure in the fact that Kolinka has sent a collection of philosophy primers for the baby. On cue, he starts to cry and Huppert urges her children to finish their meal, while she sings a lullaby to her grandson that segues into `Unchained Melody' by The Fleetwoods, as the camera pulls out into the cosily golden-lit hallway.

Despite again revealing the influence of Eric Rohmer and husband Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve very much emerges as her own film-maker with this beguiling saga, which earned her the Best Director prize at the Berlin Film Festival. In addition to creating a role worthy of the peerless talents of Isabelle Huppert, Hansen-Løve also shows that it's possible for a woman to find fulfilment outside a man's embrace. During the course of a traumatic year, Huppert loses her mother, her husband, her holiday retreat and her publishing deal. She also sees her children leave the nest and her favourite student reject her teachings. Yet she refuses to buckle and arrives at a form of contentment rooted in the knowledge that she is as fine as she ever was: it's the rest of the world that's gone to pot.

Seemingly in a perpetual state of motion as Denis Lenoir's camera struggles to keep pace, Huppert bristles through the action with a quiet tenacity that contrasts with the contentious ideas (in which she fnds both challenge and solace) of such diverse thinkers as Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Slavoj Zizek, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Raymond Aron, Emmanuel Levinas and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. But she never allows herself to wallow in nostalgia or self-pity and keeps her focus fixed firmly on the future that she still hopes to affect by teaching those who will shape it to think for themselves.

Such is the brilliance of Huppert's performance that only Marcon and the scene-stealing Scob make much of an impression. But this reflects Hansen-Løve's natural preoccupation with a character based on her own mother, who separated from her father when the director was in her twenties. To some extent, therefore, this is also Hansen-Løve's story and one wonders how much she believes Huppert's casual claims, `I'm lucky to be fulfilled intellectually...that's reason enough to be happy,' and `So long as we desire, we can do without happiness.'

5 PATERSON.

Considering it only ran for two years in the mid-1950s, The Honeymooners remains a touchstone for American situation comedy. British viewers will probably know it best from the cutaway references to bus driver Jackie Gleason and his long-suffering wife Audrey Meadows in Family Guy. But Jim Jarmusch invokes its spirit in Paterson, while also teaming it with a more enduring small-screen favourite, Cheers (1982-93), to provide a cosy dose of nostalgia that seems entirely out of keeping with the seething recidivism that swept Donald Trump to power in the recent presidential election.

Rising before six one Monday morning, Paterson (Adam Driver) kisses Iranian-American partner Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and eats a bowl of Cheerios under the watchful gaze of her bulldog Marvin before heading off to work. He carries a little grey lunchbox, as he walks to the bus garage, where he takes time to scribble a poem about a box of Ohio Blue Tip matches in his notebook before heading into the New Jersey city of Paterson. As he drives, he listens to the inconsequential conversations of his passengers and keeps mulling over the verse that he eventually writes down during a break he shares with a postcard of Dante Alighieri.

On arriving at his bungalow home, Paterson straightens the wonky mailbox pillar and compliments Laura on the curtains she has hand-painted with her trademark black-and-white design. She has ambitions to open a cupcake stall at the farmer's market and encourages Paterson to find a publisher for his poetry. But he would much rather take Marvin for a walk and slip into the bar run by Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley). He chats briefly with brothers Sam and Dave (Trevor and Troy Parham) and sips his beer as Doc moves a piece on a chessboard on the counter.

The next morning, he listens to the complaints of garage supervisor Donny (Rizwan Manji) before eavesdropping on two blue-collar pals boasting about recent encounters with women that draws the ire of a black female passenger as she disembarks. That night, Laura urges Paterson to photocopy his poems before anything happens to them and begs him to allow her to buy a guitar on Ebay so she can fulfil her new ambition to become a Country-and-Western star. Despite knowing they can't afford to waste $200, he gives his consent and is rewarded with a kiss before being dispatched to walk Marvin.

As he strolls through the neighbourhood, Paterson is advised by some lads in a car to make sure fhat Marvin doesn't get dognapped. Yet, as usual, he ties him to the post outside the bar, where Doc is debating whether to add a cutting about Iggy Pop to his wall of fame. They become involved, however, in a tiff between Marie (Chasten Harmon) and Everett (William Jackson Harper) that culminates in them getting the giggles when Doc commends Everett on the delivery of his tale of woe about being unloved and he takes offence at the suggestion that he should become an actor because he already is one.

After an unremarkable Wednesday on the road, composing poems about dimensions and legs with a mind of their own, Paterson comes home to upright the mailbox and discover he is having quinoa for dinner. Marvin seems unimpressed and pulls hard on his lead during their walk. But he pauses outside the laudromat to listen to Method Man (Cliff Smith) working on a rap while his washing spins. It's quiet at the bar and Paterson watches Doc chatting to a female customer, while two men play chess in a corner. He stares into his beer and seems content with his lot.

Thursday dawns and Paterson gazes at Laura as she dozes with her hair spread over the pillow. He passes through the rundown area adjoining the Market Street depot and overhears a couple of students discussing the exploits of a 19th-century Italian anarchist weaver. On his break, he writes a poem about waking up next to Laura and fearing she will one day see him for the ordinary Joe he is. As he knocks off, Donny regales him with his latest problems before Paterson stops to sit with a tweenage girl (Sophia Muller) who is waiting for her mother and twin sister. She shows him the secret notebook in which she writes her poems and reads him one about rain and the dirty mirrors made by puddles.

He is touched by her words and she seems pleased that a bus driver has heard of Emily Dickinson. Over a supper of cheddar and sprout pie, Laura tells Paterson that she read online that Petrarch kept his poems to his own Laura in a secret book. She badgers him to make copies of his writing at the weekend and he promises he will. Distracted by a picture of a waterfall on the wall, he recites part of the girl's poem and Laura says it sounds like one of his and teases him by muddling the name of his favourite poet, William Carlos Williams. He spots a large bag of flour in the kitchen and she says it is her turn to make cupcakes for the farmer's market. Looking over at Marvin asleep on his armchair, he gulps down water to take away the taste of the pie before gamely eating on.

At the bar, Paterson and Doc discuss Bud Abbott, who not only has a statue in Paterson, but also a park named in his honour. They start running through the `Who's on First' sketch when Doc's wife (Johnnie Mae) bursts in and demands that he replaces the money he took from her savings or there will be big trouble. He promises to pay her back after the weekend chess tournament, but she just snorts incredulously. As Paterson asks Doc if he is okay, Marie snaps at Everett and storms out of the bar, leaving Paterson to nurse his beer in gratitude that Laura understands him so well.

Waking alone on Friday morning, Paterson finds Laura icing cupcakes in the kitchen. Marvin barks when they kiss and whines in the hope of being fed a tidbit. Laura is excited about the market and the fact that her guitar is due to be delivered. But, while Paterson is less convinced that she is on the verge of a double career breakthrough, he mumbles encouragement before heading to the depot to begin on a new poem. He is interrupted by Donny, who is too stressed to even discuss his problems. But Paterson gets a problem of his own when the electrics fail and he has to wait for help on the pavement with his passengers. But he is not alone in feeling frustrated, as Marvin is so peeved by Laura strumming her harlequin guitar that he scuttles into the front garden to push against the mailbox post before returning indoors.

Stopping en route to give some money to a homeless person, Paterson arrives home to be serenaded with the part of `I've Been Working on the Railroad' that Laura has learned to play. He is impressed and she asks if they can have takeaway pizza for supper so she can conquer the whole song. She notices her husband looks tired and implores him to get a mobile phone for emergencies. But he insists the world worked fine before them and flatly refuses to be at everyone's beck and call all of the time.

In the bar that night, Doc teases Paterson about rescuing his passengers from a potential fireball. Marie comes in and complains that Everett refuses to accept that she is not in love with him. As they talk, he bursts in brandishing a gun and shouts that he will kill Marie or himself unless she relents. Seizing his moment, Paterson disarms him by knocking him to the floor. But Doc calmly fires the pop gun at Everett's and tells him to stop upsetting his customers. Marie thanks Paterson for being a hero, but Doc mocks him for not being able to spot a toy.

In view of a photograph of Paterson in his medal-strewn army uniform, Laura wakes him with a kiss on Saturday morning. She frets that he might have been in danger at the bar and asks him to read Williams's `This Is Just to Say' as she packs her cupcakes into boxes. Marvin sits grumbling on Paterson's chair at the table as he reads and proceeds to drag him along his chosen route past the waterfalls when they go for a walk. He also sulks when Paterson spends the afternoon writing in the basement and then gets left behind to guard the house when Laura insists on celebrating her cupcake success by going to a revival screening of Erle C. Kenton's Island of Lost Souls (1932).

When they get home, they find that Marvin has shredded Paterson's notebook. Laura apologises for her dog, who scurries away before he can be punished. But Paterson blames himself for leaving it on the sofa. The next morning, however, he whispers to Marvin that he doesn't like him as they sit facing each other in the living-room. Laura wants to put Marvin back in the garage, but Paterson lets him stay and goes for a walk rather than let Laura cheer him up by playing her song.

He bumps into Everett, who apologises for behaving so badly in the bar. They exchange banalities in the sun before walking on. Paterson sits on a bench by the waterfall bridge, where he is joined by a Japanese tourist (Masatoshi Nagase). He asks if Paterson knows about William Carlos Williams and they briefly discuss poetry. The stranger shows Paterson his notebooks and regrets that his own poems are in Japanese and would rather not translate them, as this would be akin to taking a shower in a raincoat. As he leaves, he gives Paterson a blank notebook and reassures him that the empty page presents the most possibilities. Feeling suitably buoyed, he finds a pen in his pocket and writes a poem.

As the film ends with Paterson getting up for work on Monday morning, he confirms Everett's throwaway line about the sun coming up each day regardless of the problems that ordinary people might be facing. It's a fitting way to close a picture that retains a quiet faith in the American way, even though all the recent evidence appears to give grave cause for concern. Some have criticised Jarmusch for filling the neighbourhood with so many flawed African-American and immigrant characters, who lack Paterson's Zen pragmatism. Others have complained that it celebrates an Eisenhowerian view of society, with the man of the house having a noble job that he enjoys while his homemaker wife bakes and works wonders with fabrics. But, while Laura seems proud that her little unit belongs in the 20th century, Jarmusch's lament for a lost age of innocence still has teeth (as Marvin proves).

The great neo-realist screenwriter, Cesare Zavattini, once said that the perfect film would depict ’90 minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens'. Jarmusch comes close to realising his ambition here by resisting the temptation to impose a conventional movie narrative upon the marvellously phlegmatic Adam Driver. His existence is scarcely without incident, however. Nor is it utopian and Driver channels these myriad mundane occurrences into lyrical musings (actually penned by 73 year-old Ron Padgett) that demonstrate the importance of the little things that stick in our minds for no good reason, like the pieces of trivia that Barry Shabaka Henley plucks from the air behind his bar. But what makes Driver so engaging is that he recognises that poetry doesn't have to rhyme. Thus, Marvin can chew his book to tatters because what matters is the serenity to accept the things that can't be changed and start again on a fresh page No matter what he does, Driver seems at ease in his own skin and this sense of being comfortable extends to his relationship with Golshifteh Farahani, which has settled into an affectionate cosiness that suits them much better than the kind of grand passion that William Jackson Harper seeks with Chasten Harmon. He may be the more grounded of the two, as he knows her grandiose dreams for them will never be realised. But he supports her right to excel at everything she does and appreciates her faith in his writing, even though he would just as happily keep it hidden as have it published. Hence, he keeps his poetry books on a small shelf in his basement den and lets Farahani do whatever she wants with the rest of their home, as that is her exhibition space.

Conveying Farahani's kooky personality, Mark Friedberg's production design is as splendid as Frederick Elmes's Patersonian views and Carter Logan's stealthily affecting score. But, right down to the defiantly clumsy Iggy Pop reference that promotes his documentary, Gimme Danger (see last week), this is very much a Jim Jarmusch film. Its sedate pace recalls the early works that established him as an indie hipster in the 1980s and it is perfectly complemented by the droll humour and resolute refusal to indulge in any greater contrivance than a bus breaking down. Yet what most viewers will take away from this shambling feature is the scene-stealing brilliance of Nellie, the English Bulldog who deservedly (but very sadly) became the first posthumous winner of the Palm Dog award at the Cannes Film Festival.

4 THE BLUE ROOM.

Ever since Jean Renoir made La Nuit du Carrefour (1932), the prolific Belgian novelist Georges Simenon has intrigued and challenged film-makers. Alongside the many Maigret adaptations for both cinema and television, directors as different as Julien Duvivier (Panique, 1946), Marcel Carné (La Marie du Port, 1950 & Three Rooms in Manhattan, 1965), Claude Autant-Lara (En Cas de Malheur, 1958), Bertrand Tavernier (The Watchmaker of St Paul, 1974), Claude Chabrol (The Hatter's Ghost, 1983 & Betty, 1992), Patrice Leconte (Monsieur Hire, 1989), Cédric Kahn (Red Lights, 2004) and Béla Tarr (The Man From London, 2007) have reworked what Simenon called his `hard novels', which focused on the foibles and failings of mostly weak men led astray by promises of preferment and passion.

In 2002, the Mexican director Walter Doehner starred Juan Manuel Bernal, Patricia Llaca and Elena Anaya in a little-seen take on the 1964 novella, The Blue Room. Now, Mathieu Amalric has relocated the story to the Vendée in West Central France for an elliptical, flashbacking revision and cast off-screen partner Stéphanie Cléau (who co-wrote the scenario) as the femme fatale who lures Amalric away from his wife and daughter and lands him in the office of an investigating magistrate. By shooting in the Academy ratio, Amalric intensifies the sense of entrapment. But he also narrows the narrative perspective so that information is withheld from the audience as well as the weak dupe who only comes to suspect the truth when his fate is sealed.

After 15 years away, farm machinery salesman Mathieu Amalric has moved back to Saint Justin with his wife, Léa Drucker, and their young daughter, Mona Jaffart. Business is booming and the family have a modern house on the outskirts of the small provincial town, where Amalric grew up. Soon after his return, he bumps into old classmate Stéphanie Cléau, who has married ailing pharmacist Olivier Mauvezin. She has broken down on a road through the woods and makes it clear that she has always had a crush on him. They kiss and she leads him into the undergrowth.

Soon, they are soon meeting for regular afternoon sex sessions in the blue room of a backstreet hotel in Triant. During their love-making, Cléau persistently asks Amalric if he can imagine a new life with her. On three occasions, she also bites his lip and draws blood, while asking innocently how he will explain the wound to his wife. One afternoon, however, as Amalric is stretching naked by the window, he is horrified to see Mauvezin marching towards the hotel. He dresses hurriedly and makes his getaway past a maid and a couple of workmen, while Cléau continues to recline on the bed, with an insect crawling across her sweat-streaked belly.

Amalric relates this information to investigating magistrate Laurent Poitrenaux, who is accompanied by cop Serge Bozon and psychologist Blutch (the professional name of artist Christian Hincker), but no mention is made of any crime. They read back the testimony before Amalric thinks back to making light of the wound after he arrived home. He tells Drucker he bumped into a lamppost and she seems to believe him. She is taken aback when he suggests they go to the cinema that night and wonders why he has taken so long to park when he misses the start of the movie because he has dashed back to the hotel to pay for the minibar. As they drive home, Drucker suggests Jaffart could do with a holiday and is surprised when he readily agrees. However, they barely exchange a word as they undress for bed and Amalric turns his back on his wife before she turns out the light.

Lawyer Paul Kramer tries to get Amalric to reassess the nature of his relationship with Cléau (as they only met eight times in 11 months), while Blutch explores whether losing his mother and sister at seven and being raised by an elderly father impacted upon his psyche. Intercut with these discussions are holiday scenes, as Amalric lies to Drucker when she asks what he is thinking about on the beach and then upsets her when he ducks her a little too aggressively while they swim in the sea. This incident reminds him of the red towel that Cléau used to hang from the balcony above the pharmacy when she was free to meet. But Amalric is more concerned that he has become known as a monster in the press (even though the viewer still has no idea why he has been charged).

On returning from Les Sables, Amalric ignores Cléau, who sends him three notes to reassure him that her husband suspects nothing and that they can keep seeing each other. Despite Poitrenaux's insistence, he denies messages were sent to his work or slipped under his windscreen wiper. But, while he was devoting himself to his customers, the locals appear to have been gossiping about his affair with Cléau, as when he walks past the pharmacy the day after Mauvezin dies, everyone turns to look at him as if he had no shame. Drucker is also so shocked by the news that she dropped a casserole dish. But Amalric is bemused by what seems to be an open secret, as he felt he had been so discreet in meeting Cléau.

As Poitrenaux asks what he knew about Mauzevin's death, Amalric remembers making love with Cléau beside an open window during a thunderstorm and wonders if this is when their trysts were discovered. But he denies having anything to do with Mauzevin and claims to have stayed away from Cléau, as she fought with mother-in-law Véronique Alain over his estate. Moreover, even though he is shown tearing up and burning pieces of paper, he also persists in rejecting the assertion that he had received further missives from his now-widowed mistress. But Poitrenaux is keen to contradict him and brings him face to fact with Cléau in his office. Amalric attempts to avoid eye contact, as Poitrenaux and Cléau discuss marks in her diary denoting the days she claims to have written to him. However, when she keeps stressing that they had been deeply in love and had made promises to each other, he loses his temper at what he perceives to be her calculated efforts to implicate him in her crime and has to be restrained when he grabs her by the throat.

Having slept in his office, Poitrenaux looks through some photographs showing Drucker's corpse on the kitchen floor. He greets secretary Christelle Pichon and summons Amalric for another interview, during which he concentrates on the fact that Drucker had sent him to the pharmacy to collect some medicine for Jaffart and he had coincidentally come home with six jars of homemade plum jam that Drucker had ordered. Not seeing Alain working alone in the backroom, Amalric had striven to keep things businesslike with Cléau so that he could leave as quickly as possible, as he has an important meeting.

He explains that he had picked up a spare part from the depot before dropping off the skin cream and jam and had driven to Poitiers to discuss selling his share of the company and moving away. He was stunned, therefore, to get home and find police waiting to arrest him for Drucker's murder. As Poitrenaux listens, Amalric cries because he thought something had happened to Jaffart and, thus, he was too dazed to say anything when he was taken to the morgue to identify his wife's body.

A few days later, Amalric and Cléau are brought into the blue courtroom for their trial. She half-smiles reassuringly at him, as a variety of witnesses give evidence that seems to confirm Amalric's suspicious behaviour around the time that Mauvezin and Drucker died. But it's only when Alain takes the stand that he pays close attention. She insists that the seal on the box of jams was unbroken when he collected it, but he recalls having noticed that it had already been resealed when he put in on the passenger seat of his car. When Alain testifies that she thought Cléau had married her son for his money, it dawns on Amalric that she could easily have tampered with the jam. Indeed, when she gives him a hard stare as she leaves the witness box, he has convinced himself that he has been framed as part of a grieving mother's revenge.

As Cléau is cross-examined, Amalric has become so accustomed to being boxed in that he seems unconcerned whether she killed Mauvezin or not. All he knows (or thinks he knows - he is never shown defending himself) is that he has been set up by either Alain or Cléau. Hence, he receives his sentence of life imprisonment without a word of protest and merely looks back in confusion at Cléau when she reassures him that no one had managed to separate them.

Of course, such is the brilliance of Simenon and the canniness of Amalric and Cléau as his adapters, that there is no guarantee that this is the right reading of events. The frail Mauvezin might have died of natural causes and Cléau had only poisoned Drucker out of jealousy when she realised that Amalric had no intention of leaving her. Then again, Alain may have decided to ruin Cléau to prevent her from enjoying the wealth amassed by her husband and son and allowed Amalric share her punishment for cuckolding Mauvezin. And we should not overlook the possibility that Amalric has become such a skilful liar that he can even his memory can dissemble. Wherever the truth lies, the scenario leaves so much room for doubt that post-screening debates are an inevitability.

More might have been made of the class difference between Amalric and Cléau and the unrequited juvenile crush that might have prompted her to wreck Amalric's happy family after she had been forced to settle for money rather than love. Drucker's dutiful, but joyless wife is also sketchily drawn and, as a result, the equally impassive and emotionally timid Amalric's adultery feels lazily impulsive rather than rooted in any palpable frustration with his marriage or sense of midlife ennui. However, the lack of psychological depth leaves the viewer to mull over real source of Amalric's remorse and the precise meaning of Cléau's seemingly casual post-coital question: `If I were suddenly free, could you free yourself too?'

Ably aided by his admirable co-stars, Amalric the (studiously classical) director makes astute use of the blues and reds in Christophe Offret's evocative production design and Christophe Beaucarne's meticulous Academy compositions. After lashings of romantic strings, Grégoire Hetzel's earnest piano score comes into its own during the climactic courtroom sequence, as the pieces start falling into place. But the standout creative contribution comes from editor François Gédigier, who archly conceals so much crucial information in the opening scenes that Amalric is able to generate the Chabrolian sense of unease that makes this comparatively short feature so elusive and disquieting.

3 HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE.

New Zealander Taika Waititi has demonstrated an understanding of the juvenile mindset since stationing tweenagers Rangi Ngamoki and Hutini Waikato in a pub car park in the Oscar-nominated short, Two Cars, One Night (2004). But, having further explored the 11 year-old psyche with James Rolleston in Boy (2010), Waititi has decided to tackle a troublesome teenager in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which has been adapted with infectious vigour from Barry Crump's bestseller, Wild Pork and Watercress. Leavened with knowing movie references, this is a fond parody of the Bush adventure and, if there was any justice, it will continue the rise of Julian Dennison, who debuted impressively in Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland's Shopping (2013) before teaming with Waititi on the drug-driving video, Blazed (2014).

Chapter One, `A Real Bad Egg', opens with teenage delinquent Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) being driven by cop Andy (Oscar Kightley) and social worker Paula (Rachel House) to the remote smallholding where he is going to be fostered by Bella Faulkner (Rima Te Wiata) and her husband, Hector (Sam Neill). With the aid of an amusing montage, Paula warns Bella that Ricky is a real handful. But she gives him a huge hug, tells him to call her auntie and bundles him into the house to meet Zag the dog and give him a feed. She also tucks him in with a hot water bottle.

Ricky, however, considers himself to be a skux gangsta and runs away, as soon as it goes dark. But he only manages to get about 200m from the house before falling asleep and Bella coaxes him home with the promise he can scarper again after breakfast. When Hec tells him to shove off, Ricky seeks out Bella, who is skinning rabbits. She tells him about the Bush and how she hopes her spirit will rest in the lake that touches the clouds. He confides that he writes haiku to cope with emotional stress and she shows him how to fire a rifle. But, when they come across a wild pig while walking in the woods, Ricky faints when Bella slaughters it with a knife.

On Ricky's birthday, he joins in with a special song Bella has composed on a mini keyboard. But Hec coughs irritably when the candles are blown out in his face and merely shrugs when they take Ricky to the barn to meet his new dog, Tupac. Snuggling in bed, he thanks Bella for the best day ever and she apologises for not finding him soon enough. Yet, when Ricky comes home after a morning romping with Tupac in the fields, he finds Hec by the clothesline, sobbing over Bella's lifeless body. Only a handful of neighbours come to the funeral conducted by the local pastor (Taika Waititi). He preaches about a door that leads into a room full of goodies. But, when he asks what might be behind a second door, he snaps at Ricky for suggesting vegetables instead of Jesus and testily prays for God to make it easier to get through doors hiding good stuff.

At the start of `Chapter Two: Another Door', Ricky brings Hec a plate of burnt toast for supper. The old man thrusts a letter into his hand and tells him to read it aloud and Ricky discovers that social services are coming to collect him because it is inappropriate for Hec to raise the boy without a woman in the house. Brusquely dismissing the suggestion to find a new wife, Hec claims not to care if Ricky goes back to the city and dies in a drive-by shooting after becoming a drug-dealing rapper. So, taking the casket containing Bella's ashes, Ricky burns himself in effigy in an outhouse and leaves a note bidding farewell to the cruel world before heading into the woods with Tupac.

Only a few strides into `Chapter Three: Goodbye Ricky Baker', Ricky polishes off the loaf he had stuffed into his bag and complains that he would go home immediately if he wasn't lost. Hallucinating that Tupac is an ice-cream sundae and Hec a giant burger, he is relieved to see the gnarled bushman. But, to disguise their feelings, they trade insults about Ricky's survival skills and Hec's inability to read. Ricky suggests they compose haiku to deal with their issues, but Hec isn't the poetic type and makes a lunge to catch his charge. However, he wedges his ankle between some tree roots and informs Ricky that they are going to have to camp in the wilds until the fracture has healed.

Appalled by the prospect of using leaves for toilet paper, Ricky hunkers down. But, as `Chapter Four: Broken Foot Camp' commences, Paula and Andy find the charred ruins of the hut and she summons reinforcements to help track the fugitives. However, Hec is going nowhere and passes the time making sketches of Bella, while Ricky dances to his Walkman and daubs warrior lines on his face before going hunting. Having being knocked over by the rifle recoil, Ricky manages to bring back a few sprigs of `salad' and is grateful that Hec has managed to catch an eel in the river. When he asks how he did it, Hec tells him about `the knack' and listens quietly as Ricky remembers his friend Amber, who died soon after reporting her foster father for making her feel uncomfortable.

While Hec recovers his way into `Chapter Five: Famous', Paula briefs the media and ensures that they all mention her mantra that `no child gets left behind'. Thus, when they come across a ranger hut in the depths of the forest, Ricky and Hec learn that they are all over the newspapers. Aghast to be accused of kidnap, Hec asserts that they shove off after supper. But they are cornered by hunters Hugh (Cohen Holloway), Ron (Stan Walker) and Joe (Mike Minogue), who jump to the conclusion that Hec is a pervert when Ricky makes an innocent protestation sound sinister in the extreme.

As they leap on Hec to teach him a lesson, Ricky fires into the air and they beat a hasty retreat. Camping for the night, Ricky apologises for his foolish yammering and Hec says he can understand his reluctance to return to juvenile hall, as he once spent time behind bars for accidentally killing someone in a drunken brawl. So, they agree to stick out and a montage shows them stealing provisions (including loo roll) from woodland huts and killing prey for bonfire feasts. Moreover, they stay one step ahead of the search party, as the action passes into `Chapter Six: Close to the Sky.'

Basking in the autumn sunshine, Hec looks across the lake and calls the view `magestical'. Ricky ticks him off for making up a word and asks if this is the place Bella wished to rest. But Hec says she didn't really know where she came from, as she was an orphan and that's why she wanted to look after him. Paula has a less charitable outlook on Ricky, however, and shocks the hosts on a breakfast news show by calling him a spanner in the works that she intends putting back in the box. But Ricky has more to worry about, as, soon after stumbling across a bird that might not be as extinct as the experts claim, they find a ranger suffering a diabetic fit in his hut and Ricky and Tupac have to head down the mountain in search of help.

Lumbering into `Chapter Seven: A Normal Life', Ricky spots teenager Kahu (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) riding her horse and is almost too tongue-tied to speak. She invites him to jump up and they trot across the sunlit fields. Once home, Kahu offers Ricky sausages and apologises for chattering. But he is so smitten that he can barely tell Kahu apart from the girl in the Flake advert on the television. He explains that he needs to get a doctor, but they are interrupted by Kahu's father. TK (Troy Kingi), who is so delighted to have a celebrity in the house that he takes endless selfies and urges Ricky not to surrender before dashing off.

Ricky also has to leave in a hurry the following morning after dozing off while Kuha plays her guitar. She gives him a lift on horseback and laughs at his ungainly dismount. But Ricky is forced to take cover because Paula and Andy are outside the hut discussing the Stingray system that a geeky technician named Gavin (Hamish Parkinson) has set up to intercept Ricky's phone signal.

Undaunted, he darts into `Chapter Eight: The Knack', as a news update shows TK's selfies going viral and Hugh, Ron and Joe fibbing about giving Hec a thrashing for harming Ricky. As the bulletin ends with details of a reward, Ricky finds himself on the opposite riverbank to Andy and Paula. She taunts him that he is Sarah Connor to her Terminator, but he refuses to betray Hec and is relieved to be reunited with the old man after making his escape. Remembering a book in the ranger station about trekking wildebeest, he declares that they are the Wilderpeople and they celebrate their new outlaw status by stealing backpacks and supplies from Hugh, Joe and Ron, who are camping in a clearing.

However, Hec is beginning to feel the pace and he proposes that they turn themselves in, as they have been on the run for four months. But Ricky protests that he is a menace to society and would be given an awful job like driving a steamroller. As they bicker, Zag and Tupac see a wild boar and give chase. Zag is badly mauled and Hec is also wounded as he tries to stab the beast. Jumping into the ditch, Ricky shoots it between they eyes. But Hec has to put Zag down and they bury him beside a waterfall. Ricky produces Bella's casket and Hec is grateful to him for bringing her somewhere special.

Winter falls and a process 360° shot shows Hec and Ricky trudging through the snow with Paula hard on their heels as they enter Chapter Nine: `Turn of the Tide'. At one point, they hide under the path with the cops passing over their heads and Ricky jokes that it's like something out of The Lord of the Rings. However, Hec has no idea what he is talking about and he is equally bemused when they run into a man camouflaged as a bush. He introduces himself as Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby) and explains that he has lived in a caravan for 15 years because he hates filling in forms and the New Zealand rugby team. He updates them on the news and upsets Hec by confirming that he is still regarded as a pervert. However, opinion is divided as to whether they are heroes or villains.

As they sink into their bunks, Ricky reads a haiku and Hec is pleased to hear his name. He says Bella would have loved the adventure and Ricky asks why they never had children. He finds it ironic that they couldn't have kids when his mum didn't want him. But Hec suggests she was young and scared and would be proud of him now, as he is `pretty likeable'.

Any hopes of lying low are dashed at the outset of `Chapter Ten: War', however, as Sam tinkers with Ricky's phone and activates the Stingray mechanism. Paula gloats that they are surrounded. But Sam lends them an all-terrain truck and Ricky takes the wheel to speed them away from the pursuing cop cars. However, while he doubles back to avoid a line of tanks, Ricky turns the truck over on crashing through a corrugated iron fence and Hec declares he's had enough. Hurt that he is quitting, Ricky informs Paula that Hec is a `molesterer' and becomes so overwrought that he accidentally shoots him in the buttock.

A courtroom montage follows showing the witnesses giving the testimony that convinces the magistrate to let Ricky and Tupac go and live with Kahu and TK. However, he still has unfinished business and, as Hec leaves prison for a halfway house at the start of the `Epilogue', Ricky arrives with a proposition. He is pleased to learn that Hec has taught himself to read and invites him to move to TK's farm and help with the chores. Grumpily grateful, Hec declines, as he has always been his own man. But, as Ricky turns to leave, Hec recites a haiku about being in the Bush with a fat boy being the best time of his life and the story ends with Hec insisting that Ricky calls him `uncle' as they return to their `magestical' place in search of the rare bird that they hope will being them fame and fortune.

First and foremost, this is great fun. Taika Waititi tells an old-fashioned boy's own story with verve and wit, while making exemplary use of Lachlan Milne's widescreen views of the breathtaking North Island scenery. Kristin Seth's costumes are also spot on, with Sam Neill's scruffy, but practical duds contrasting with Julian Dennison's brightly coloured hoodie, baseball jacket and cap. But, while they are pitched as an odd couple, Neill and Dennison both underplay to perfection in order to bring some warmth to the stereotypical old coot role and some fragility to the aspiring gangsta. What most unites them, however, is a fear of being abandoned that is deftly established through Rima Te Wiata's lovely performance as the nurturing wife and surrogate mother.

A couple of the supporting turns are less restrained, with Rachel House struggling to match Pam Ferris's officious compassion as Miss Trunchbull in Danny DeVito's 1996 adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda and Rhys Darby straining to inject a little Flight of the Conchords humour into Psycho Sam's eccentricity. But, as he proved with the mock documentary, What We Do in the Shadows (2014), Waititi is able to pull off tonal shifts without upsetting the diegetic balance and, even when this teeters closest to sentimentality, the emotions are slyly blunted by bluff Kiwi nonchalance.

What will stand out for many, however, is the adroit self-reflexivity of the gently parodying references to such new wave classics as Roger Donaldson's Sleeping Dogs (1977) and Smash Palace (1981), and Geoff Murphy's Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), as well as the Mad Max and Lord of the Rings franchises. But, while these gags confirm Waititi as an innovative and irreverent film-maker, it's his trust in Dennison and Neill that makes this the best picture by a New Zealander since Toa Fraser's Dean Spanley (2008).

2 LOVE & FRIENDSHIP.

To many Janeites, it won't matter a fig that American director Whit Stillman has such fine films as Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998) and Damsels in Distress (2011) to his credit. They will solely be concerned that he has had the temerity to turn Jane Austen's posthumously published epistolary novella, Lady Susan, into a chic satire of Georgian manners entitled Love & Friendship. It's possible some will take exception to the transatlantic undertone and the letter-reading scene lampooning the young Austen's chosen format. But, as was the case with Joss Wheedon's inspired interpretation of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (2012), the sacred text is in respectful and capable hands and only those unable to overcome their pride and prejudice will fail to enjoy this slick chronicle of the cunning schemes of an indigent femme fatale.

Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) has been staying at Langford since the death of her husband. However, Lady Lucy Manwaring (Jenn Murray) is so convinced that something is going on between her guest and her spouse (Lochlann O'Mearáin) that Susan is forced to make arrangements to visit brother-in-law Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards) at Churchill. His wife, Catherine (Emma Greenwell), has never met her relation before, but has heard sufficient gossip to be wary of her and has never forgiven her for voicing opposition to her marriage. Catherine's younger brother, Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), has similarly preconceived notions and he is mortified when the newly arrived Susan overhears him sharing them with his sister.

Quickly dispensing with unpaid travelling companion-cum-maid, Mrs Cross (Kelly Campbell), Susan sets out to make a good impression on Catherine by pampering her young son. She also exploits Reginald's embarrassment to monopolise him at every opportunity and he soon becomes her unyielding apologist whenever Catherine questions her behaviour or motives. Indeed, he even defends her peevishness when her daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), runs away from school and asks to be allowed to stay at Churchill despite spurning a proposal from the eligible and affluent Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett).

Catherine confides her frustration in a letter to her parents (James Fleet and Jemma Redgrave), which Sir Reginald insists on reading aloud, complete with punctuation, when Lady DeCourcy admits to having tired eyes. But she can only welcome Sir James when he pays a surprise visit, even though it is readily apparent that Frederica wants nothing to do with him. Susan is aware that Mrs Manwaring wants to make a match with her own daughter, Maria (Sophie Radermacher) and complains about Susan's machinations to her guardian, Mr Johnson (Stephen Fry), the ageing husband of Susan's closest confidante, Alicia (Chloë Sevigny), an American who has been warned she will be dispatched back to Connecticut if she continues her friendship with the disreputable widow.

While in London to make provision for Frederica's continued education, Susan visits Alicia and reveals that she is charmed by Reginald, but would still rather be intimate with Manwaring. Aware that the latter is married, however, she sticks to her plan to unite Frederica and Sir James and lures him to Churchill to plight his troth. As a country gentleman of limited schooling, he makes a poor impression from the moment he declares his bafflement at the naming of the estate when it possesses neither a church nor a hill. He also causes eyebrows to raise when he is nonplussed by the peas he is served at supper.

Thus, when the timorous Frederica informs Reginald that she has no desire to marry Sir James, he promises to raise the matter with her mother. The resulting conversation turns into a full-blown argument, however, and Reginald announces that he is going to stay with his parents. But Susan moves swiftly to repair the damage and (off screen) commits to wed Reginald and leaves for London to see Alicia.

In fact, Susan has gone to the capital to see Manwaring and she is most put out when Reginald shows up unannounced at her lodgings. She sends him on an errand to deliver a letter to Alicia. But his arrival coincides with that of a distraught Lady Lucy, who has come to seek the counsel of Mr Johnson. Such is her distress that she rips the missive out of Reginald's hands on recognising the handwriting and reveals that Susan is currently alone with her estranged husband. Reginald doubts the veracity of her accusation, but a servant is produced who testifies that Susan had duped him into being a messenger while she trysted with her lover. Dismayed by her perfidy, Reginald calls on Susan. However, such is her inability to admit to any wrongdoing that she condemns him for failing to carry out a simple mission and breaks their engagement because she feels she can no longer trust him. He returns to Churchill to find Frederica still being pestered by Sir James because Susan has impressed upon her the importance of obeying God's law about honouring a mother's wishes. She consults with the young curate (Conor MacNeill) and he assures her that it is his favourite Commandment and Sir James concurs that it is the most important of the twelve. When Charles corrects him, he is delighted that there are two dictates he no longer has to worry about and wonders which other could be dropped along with the Sabbath restrictions that keep him from hunting.

Drawn together by circumstances, Reginald and Frederica take to walking together while staying with his parents. They are overjoyed, therefore, to receive a letter from Susan announcing her marriage to Sir James. She admits he is silly, but concedes he has a certain charm, as well as ten thousand a year. Charles and Catherine (who is no better disposed towards Susan) are relieved by the news and begin making plans for a wedding. However, as Sir James reveals to Alicia over tea, he is about to become a father and she smiles as he explains that he received the tidings the morning after their wedding night. He also expresses his excitement that Manwaring has come to stay with them, as he is a keen huntsman and both he and Lady Susan enjoy his company.

As the film fades on Frederica singing at her reception, one is left with the impression that no one could have done a better job of tailoring this story for the screen. Stillman has always had a fine ear for dialogue and he captures the idiom and cadence of 1790s English with considerable aplomb. He also coaxes splendid performances out of Kate Beckinsale and an excellent ensemble, while making the most of the country house locations across Ireland. Production designer Anna Rackard, costumier Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh and cinematographer Richard Van Oosterhout prove key collaborators in this regard and Benjamin Esdraffo and Mark Suozzo are also to be commended for their feather-light score, which is as droll as the old silent movie inserts introducing the dramatis personnae.

However, Stillman might have found more diverse ways of staging the numerous conversations, as he relies over heavily on the kind of walk-and-talk tactic beloved of such TV shows as The West Wing. Obviously life moved at a different pace in the late 18th century and confidences were often shared outdoors. But, even though he enlivens certain episodes with on-screen script), so many scenes seem to start with the characters starting to stroll towards the camera that the effect becomes wearyingly repetitive.

Nevertheless, the acting is uniformly first rate. Reuniting with Stillman (and Sevigny) after The Last Days of Disco, Beckinsale is particularly impressive, as she delivers her lines at a confident clip that confirms the quick-thinking wit of the genteely fiendish Lady Susan. Her ability to remain civil while deceiving and double-crossing without a shred of conscience is matched by Tom Bennett's hilarious lack of intelligence and any form of social grace. His garrulous idiocy is a joy to behold, as is his complete ignorance of his own shortcomings, as he does his utmost to be affable and knowledgeable. If there is any justice, he will be nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar next spring.

Fresh from appearing in Burr Steers's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Morfydd Clark also shows well, as she reveals herself to be very much her mother's daughter in wrapping Xavier Samuel around her little finger. Emma Greenwell might have been a little acerbic in her dealings with Beckinsale, but only Chloë Sevigny struggles to get into the swing alongside the scandalously underused Stephen Fry, even though Stillman has found amusing ways to justify her presence. But she rises to the occasion when trying to calm the hysterical Jenn Murray and when making tea for Bennett's flushed father-to-be. Such is the magnitude of Stillman's mercifully irony-free achievement in adapting presold material for the first time that one wonders how long it will be before someone takes a tilt at Sanditon or The Watsons.

1 THE SON OF JOSEPH.

Forget Office Christmas Party, there's only one Yuletide film to watch this year and it's Eugène Green's amusing reworking of the Nativity story. Somewhat improbably produced by those doyens of austere realism, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Son of Joseph employs an audacious blend of Bresson and the Baroque to examine the crisis of masculinity in modern society and the extent to which art impinges upon everyday life. Shifting between dense religious symbolism, sly satire, literate quips, boudoir farce and poignant drama, this feels deeply rooted in the French theatrical tradition. But such is Green's visual mastery that this is also an eminently cinematic parable that offers a little optimistic cheer in these bleakest of times.

Opening with shots of vehicles and pedestrians in the streets around the magnificent church of Sainte-Eustache in Les Halles, the first chapter, `The Sacrifice of Abraham', harks back to the beginning of screen time to show students spilling out of their school doors like the workers who emerged over a century before from their factory gates in an early Lumière film. Leaving two pals to torment a caged rat with some sticks, 15 year-old Victor Ezenfis steals a screwdriver from a backstreet chandler and returns it after savouring the satisfaction of getting away with his crime. He bumps into classmate Félix Debraux, who offers him a partnership in his online sperm bank. But Ezenfis is shocked by the suggestion and stalks out of the Palais Royal garden in high dudgeon.

Brooding on his bed beneath a poster of Caravaggio's `The Sacrifice of Isaac', Ezenfis informs nurse mother Natacha Régnier that no one loves him and that he is incapable of love. She smiles sweetly and assures him he is wrong. But he is in no mood to be mollycoddled and demands to know the identity of his father. Looking hurt, Régnier insists that he has no father and her mood is scarcely improved when she goes for a post-prandial stroll and sees lovers chatting on the pavement outside a nearby café. Moreover, at the hospital the next day, she has to withhold from young Bérénice Piéjus-Morel the news that her father was killed in the car crash she survived.

While Régnier is at work, Ezenfis gets into her locked bureau and finds a letter addressed to publisher Mathieu Amalric. Over a shot of an empty street, we hear Régnier informing Amalric that he is the father of her two-day-old child. She hopes that he will acknowledge his son, so he has a name. But the envelope was returned unopened. Ezenfis confronts his mother with the contents when she gets home. She slaps his face and says she deserves better for having tried to protect him from the fact that his father had not just disowned him, but had also actively urged her to abort him.

Starting `The Golden Calf' by researching Amalric online, Ezenfis gatecrashes a literary soirée in honour of prize-winning author Quentin Papapietro and is mistaken for a wunderkind novelist by critic Maria de Medeiros, who introduces him to Sophie Delage, who is nettled by being dubbed the best authoress in Luxembourg when she considers herself second in the entire French language behind only Marguerite Duras. Across the room, Amalric's secretary, Julia de Gasquet, humours gossiping guests Christelle Prot and Adrien Michaux, who are trying to work out whether Papapietro is a catamite or De Medeiros's secret lover. De Gasquet settles their dispute and they bitch behind her back that she performs personal services for Amalric, who is forced to bluff when De Medeiros congratulates him on signing such a brilliant young talent as Ezenfis.

Having woken with a start in the night, Ezenfis goes to the hotel where Amalric has an office and is warned by desk clerk Eugène Green that no one gets far in life by being early for appointments. However, Ezenfis is a resourceful young man and he steals a key from a maid and gets a copy cut so that he can slip into the room whenever he wants. He sits at Amalric's desk before dozing off on his chaise-longue. Luckily, he as Amalric and De Gasquet enter and has time to hide under the chaise before they begin a vigorous bout of love-making that severely tests the springs. They are interrupted, however, by his wife, Anne-Guersande Ledoux, and Ezenfis notices De Gasquet's underwear on the floor as he spies through the chaise's braided fringe.

Ledoux asks where he has been and is unimpressed with Amalric's insistence he has been working. She tells him his son is stressed and he seems surprised to learn they have two sons and a daughter. He tells Ledoux he has no head for details and suggests she uses contraception, as the world is already overpopulated. She drops the black panties on his desk before leaving, but De Gasquet reminds Amalric that they won't be able to resume their game because he has a meeting with Papapietro.

Emerging from beneath the chaise, Ezenfis is appalled by the truths he has learned about his father and steals a knife on his way home. He asks Régnier for a sick note to cover his absence from school and she asks no questions about the important business that will detain him. Having studied the Caravaggio on his wall, Ezenfis marches into the hotel at the start of the third chapter, `The Sacrifice of Isaac'. But he is not Amalric's first visitor of the day, as estranged brother Fabrizio Rongione has come to request a loan to buy a farm near their home in Normandy. Embarrassed by the fact that Rongione dropped out of school and was disinherited by their father for smoking joints, Amalric turns him down and stares with disdain as Rongione hopes that he reaps the fruits of his virtue.

As Rongione orders breakfast in the bar, Ezenfis lures Amalric out of his office by having Green tell him that his wife and children are waiting for him. He hides under the chaise and leaps out at Amalric when he returns, cuffing him to the arm of his chair and gagging his mouth with a red scarf. But, even though he positions him like Isaac in the Caravaggio, Ezenfis can't bring himself to slit Amalric's throat and he runs away. Seeing him blunder through the bar, Rongione stops him and warns him that such panic will alert onlookers to his misdemeanour. They walk calmly out of the hotel and take a taxi to a posh café, where Rongione reveals that he has no family and wants to raise cows because they are such peaceable creatures. Ezenfis smiles and takes Rongione's number, in case he ever needs a helping hand.

Having read an online account of the attempt on Amalric's life, Ezenfis calls Rongione at the start of the fourth chapter, `The Carpenter'. They agree to meet by the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens on Saturday lunchtime and Rongione (who is drinking alone at a bar) stares long and hard into the camera lens. But any fears the audience might have about his motives for meeting Ezenfis are soon allayed, as they discuss the Abraham and Isaac story on a bench and Rongione confides that God is in everyone trying to prompt them to do the right thing. After looking at some statues, they have lunch and arrange to visit the Louvre.

They look intently at Philippe de Champaigne's `The Dead Christ' and Georges de la Tour's `Joseph the Carpenter' and swap bad jokes before sitting before the candlelit altar of the Church of Saint-Rock to hear Louise Moaty recite Honoré de Racan's `Épitaphe pour son fils' and Claire Lefilliâtre of Le Poème Harmonique sing Domenico Mazzocchi's `Lamentation de la mère d'Euryale'. Ezenfis is overwhelmed by the experience and bursts into spontaneous applause.

He invites Rongione to dinner and Régnier is charmed when he invites her to the cinema. They go to see Michelangelo Antonioni's The Red Desert (1964) and she confides over drinks that films from that period always give her hope. They agree that the world has become very cynical and arrange to meet again. While walking in the Luxembourg, Rongione asks Ezenfis why he wanted him to meet his mother and he smiles when the youth insists that an angel told him to matchmake them.

In the concluding chapter, `The Flight into Egypt', they spend a weekend in Normandy. However, Rongione is frustrated to find that Amalric has invaded the family home with his clique. So, while Amalric offers to introduce a tipsy De Medeiros to Marcel Proust, Rongione shows Régnier and Ezenfis around his old bedroom and playroom. But, as they leave, they bump into Amalric, who recognises his would-be assassin and calls the police. In an effort to escape, Rongione suggests dumping the car and fleeing on foot. As always, the model of trusting patience, Régnier asks no questions. But her feet start to hurt as they head for the coast and Ezenfis persuades farmer Jacques Bonaffée to lend them his donkey.

He readily assents, as his father has been in the Maquis. But the trio are cornered on the beach by armed gendarmes and Ezenfis is clapped in handcuffs. Amalric arrives in his car with De Medeiros. He identifies Ezenfis as his assailant. But, when he recognises Régnier and Rongione, and they tell the police they are the boy's parents, Amalric changes his mind and Ezenfis is released. He goes to collect Nenette the donkey and smiles with satisfaction as Régnier and Rongione walk arm in arm along the sand.

Long-resident in France, New Yorker Eugène Green has always used his films to inform and inspire. Ever since he demonstrated the appeal of poetry in Toutes les nuits (2001), he has been restoring faith in art and humanity by extolling the virtues of music in Le Pont des Arts (2004), cinema in The Portuguese Nun (2009) and architecture in La Sapienza (2014). Indeed, this celebration of painting, verse and madrigal is something of a companion piece to the latter, as mentee Fabrizio Rongione becomes the mentor as he guides the anguished Victor Ezenfis through the thorns of confusion to the path of youthful innocence.

Infused with the sublime music of Emiilio de' Cavalieri, Domenico Mazzocchi and Adam Michna z Otradovic, the action is playfully stagy, with the admirable actors declaiming their lines with knowing gravitas and walking with the same deadpan sense of purpose that Isabelle Huppert exhibited in Mia Hansen-Løve's Things to Come. But, while they all-but wink at the camera at times, Green explores his themes with a disarming earnestness that often recalls Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, while also echoing Woody Allen without any of the self-conscious pseudiness.

Composed on celluloid without being remotely postcardy, Raphaël O'Byrne's imagery is a delight. Moreover, considering how rarely Green moves the camera, it also seems deceptively nimble, as there is always so much intra-frame movement to offset the effect of the mischievously static acting. Such is the vogue for naturalism these days that some are going to find such methods archaic and artificial. But Green is a master of his cerebral craft and his impish wit is epitomised by a closing caption reassuring viewers that Gargantua the rat survived being prodded and has since retired to his mansion on the Riviera. Some may not find that quite so droll, however, after watching the Morgan Spurlock documentary discussed below.