Parky at the Pictures (DVD 26/1/2017)

Having transformed the way films were edited with Strike! (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), Sergei Eisenstein sought permission to travel through Europe to give a series of lectures and learn about the new sound technology that he was concerned would compromise his chosen method of colliding images to create metaphorical meaning. Following stays in Berlin, Paris and London (during which time he spent a day in Oxford), he accepted Jesse L. Lasky's invitation to make a film for Paramount. Among the projects under consideration were a biopic of treacherous arms dealer, Sir Basil Zaharoff, and adaptations of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, Jack London's Sutter's Gold and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. However, anti-Communist union agitation prompted the studio to cancel the contract and, rather than return to Moscow a failure, Eisenstein acted upon Charlie Chaplin's suggestion to contact left-leaning author, Upton Sinclair. He agreed to finance a non-political project with his wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair, and Eisenstein set off for Mexico with assistant Grigori Alexandrov and cameraman Eduard Tissé. As the picture begins in 1931, Eisenstein (Elmer Back) arrives at a luxurious hotel in Guanajuato having already shot some 250 miles of footage for Que Viva Mexico!, with Alexandrov (Rasmus Slätis) and Tissé (Jakob Öhrman). Yet he was no nearer to finding a shape or theme for the film and the combined pressure of creative block, dwindling finances and surveillance by NKVD agents causes him to wonder if he is wasting his time on another doomed project. His spirits are lifted, however, when he meets guide Palomino Cañedo (Luis Alberti), a scholar of comparative religions who introduces him to artists Diego Rivera (José Montini) and Freda Kahlo (Cristina Velasco Lozano) and promises to take him to some local cemeteries and the famous Museo de las Momias, which houses an arresting collection of mummified remains.

Although feted by everyone he meets, the 33 year-old Latvian is very much an innocent abroad and he talks to his penis in the shower about the frustrations he is feeling as both a man and a film-maker. He loosens up considerably under the influence of mescal, but Palomino's wife, Concepción (Maya Zapata), is concerned about the amount of time her husband is spending with the illustrious visitor and her fears prove well founded when a naked siesta culminates in Eisenstein losing his virginity. However, while he is invigorated by accepting his sexual self, Eisenstein is brought back to earth with a bump when Mary Craig Sinclair (Lisa Owen) and her brother Hunter S. Kimbrough (Stelio Savante) descend upon the hotel and demand to know what progress is being made with their money.

Eisenstein would return to Moscow to endure a lengthy battle over his next project, Bezhin Meadow, with Joseph Stalin's film tsar, Boris Shumyatsky. But an air of optimism pervades the 10 days that shook his world, as Finnish actor Elmer Back imagines Eisenstein as an eccentric genius with the emotional maturity of an adolescent. He bounds around Ana Solares's baroque sets with an energy that contrasts with the laconic charm of Luis Alberti, who changes his charge's perspective on life with a jug of olive oil and a Soviet flag on a stick.

The raucous sex scene, complete with its sly aside on syphilis, seems designed to send a barbed message to the Kremlin about homosexuality. But, while he is much more political than Ken Russell ever was, Greenaway is a mischievous subversive and he delights in including some of Eisenstein's erotic drawings and in quoting from his writings to reaffirm how reluctantly he towed the Party line when it came to cinema. Indeed, it is fair to say that Greenaway is one of the few heirs to have pondered the potential of the medium with such consistent commitment. Here, he switches between colour and monochrome, intercuts extracts from Eisenstein's masterpieces and exploits the triptych technique that Abel Gance had devised for Napoleon (1927). But the standout sequence sees Reinier van Brummelen's camera glide through the columned dining-room in which Lisa Owen is laying down the law. However, editor Elmer Leupen has deftly merged shots taken from different angles to challenge accepted notions of narrative and audiovisual continuity.

Similar bravura moments abound amidst the barrage of verbiage that sometimes leave this feeling like a pretentious pantomime. But, such is Greenaway's respect for Eisenstein, that this avoids slipping into the crass Russellian vulgarity of The Music Lovers (1970) or Valentino (1977) to demystify myths, pay its respects to the dead (most notably in the touching scene after the mudslide) and expose the very human failings of even the most sublime artists.

Eisenstein would have been working on Ivan the Terrible during the sequences set in 1941 in Shamim Sarif's adaptation of her own bestselling novel, Despite the Falling Snow. But, while he would have recognised the climate of suspicion and fear that permeates the Soviet sequences in this flashbacking melodrama, he would not be particularly impressed by the standard of Sarif's direction, which remains as pedestrian as it was in teaming Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth in two more reworkings of her own books: The World Unseen (2007), which is set in apartheid South Africa, and the semi-autobiographical, I Can't Think Straight (2008).

In 1961, Kremlin bureaucrat Alexander (Sam Reid) is chosen to accompany his boss, Dimitri (Thure Lindhardt) on a peace mission in New York. During a reception, American agent Maya (Amy Nuttall), spills a drink over minder Oleg (Ben Batt) and grasps the opportunity to tell Sasha that he should make his excuses during the banquet and slip down to the kitchens where a car will be waiting to help him defect. Despite the close attentions of Oleg, Sasha makes it into the backseat of the speeding vehicle. But Maya informs him that no promises can be made about getting his wife Katya (Rebecca Ferguson) out of Moscow and he sobs as he realises he has been betrayed.

A caption (one of far too many) informs us that the action has advanced three decades and we learn that the sixtysomething Sasha (Charles Dance) is too busy being a bigwig in the New York food business to care about television news bulletins about the fall of Communism. He receives a visit from his artist niece, Lauren (also Ferguson, but with a trendy bob and a love of hats), who informs him that she has been awarded an exhibition in Moscow. Having raised her since her parents died when she was a girl, Uncle Sasha forbids her to go. But Lauren insists that she will use the opportunity to try and find out what happened to her aunt.

Back in the USSR in 1959, Sasha goes to a party with his buddy Mikhail (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), where he meets Katya. She works as a school administrator, as she refuses to indoctrinate the children because her parents were liquidated by Stalin's secret police in the 1940s. However, while she smuggles secrets to the Americans for Misha, she poses as a good Party member and this prompts Sasha to fall in love at first sight. Ironically, Dimitri's worsening myopia means that Sasha is increasingly asked to handle important documents and this makes him a perfect target for Misha and his CIA handlers.

Katya has misgivings about getting such a decent young man into trouble, but fears of exposure force her into romancing him. She tries to back out of their wedding, but Misha makes her an offer she cannot refuse and she spends the next few months taking covert snapshots of the papers her husband brings home. Such is the confidential nature of the material, however, that the KGB twigs that it is being passed to the Americans and Misha urges Katya to persuade Sasha to defect when he goes to New York. She confesses to being a spy, but assures Sasha that she has always loved him and convinces him that she can go to a safe house when he leaves.

Lauren begins piecing this story together with the aid of political journalist Marina (Antje Traue), who promises to help her track down Misha (Anthony Head). They find him in a tiny apartment and he gulps down vodka in complaining that he risked his neck for a decade to receive no thanks, while Sasha got to live in luxury and liberty. He pulls a gun on them and they beat a hasty retreat to kiss back in Lauren's hotel room. However, as a shot of her visiting a snow-covered cemetery suggests, Marina has an agenda of her own. Consequently, she sends a fax to Uncle Sasha that lures him into taking the next flight to Moscow. When they meet, she reveals that she is Dimitri's daughter and Uncle Sasha is crushed to discover that he was executed for failing to prevent his defection. Lauren resents being used, but patches things up with Marina by the time that she escorts Uncle Sasha to the gallery.

As he stands before the large portrait of Katya, he realises that Misha has entered with a suitcase. He recognises it as the one that Katya was carrying on the night they parted and Misha explains that he had become a double agent after being arrested by the KGB and had arranged Sasha's escape in order to protect himself by sacrificing Katya. Choking with regret, he confesses to shooting Katya in the back as she had tried to run away and the distraught Uncle Sasha tries to strike him. Realising nothing can bring back his beloved, however, he goes outside with Lauren and reads Katya's farewell letter, as the snow falls gently on the paper.

It's hard to know where to begin with this woeful muddle, but the bulk of the blame should be borne by Sarif, as her screenplay is every bit as listless as her direction. Distilling a 368-page novel into a 93-minute movie is a tricky assignment, but Sarif keeps tripping over her flashbacks and, in the process, prevents either story strand from gaining any momentum. She hardly helps matters with the paper-thin characterisation or by saddling her willing cast with such cliché-strewn dialogue. But it's the inept staging that reduces so many scenes to risibility. Why do so many secret conversations take place in public places - one stretch of riverbank, for example, is the setting for numerous exchanges in the Cold War and post-glasnost eras - and why do none of the characters see fit to whisper when imparting information they cannot possibly wish to have overheard?

Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson does well enough in her dual role, although her accent waivers a good deal while playing Lauren. But Reid never convinces for a second, while Jackson-Cohen, Lindhardt and Traue are frustratingly stiff. Forced to play a walking caricature, the dishevelled Head gnaws on the scenery, while Dance appears to be doing an impersonation of a particularly inscrutable Duke of Edinburgh. Mina Buric's production design and David Johnson's photography are serviceable, but Rachel Portman's score is an embarrassment of mawkish manipulations that sadly sums up the entire enterprise.

Mounted by the York Theatre Royal, Ross MacGibbon's big-screen version of the Olivier-winning stage adaptation of E. Nesbit's The Railway Children originally played at the National Railway Museum in 2008 and it subsequently called at Waterloo Station before arriving at its current destination, the King's Cross Theatre in London. No cinematic record could ever hope to replicate the thrill of sitting in an auditorium as a full-sized steam engine puffs into view. But this capably captures the energy and excitement of a live production that will have special appeal for local audiences, as its star hails from Oxford.

The daughter of two GPs, 22 year-old Rozzi Nicholson-Lailey started acting with the National Youth Theatre while at Oxford High School and read Classics at Cambridge before enrolling at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Anybody who has seen Lionel Jeffries's beloved 1970 film will associate the role of Roberta Waterbury with Jenny Agutter. But Nicholson-Lailey makes a splendidly spirited Bobbie, as she looks back with her younger siblings on the Edwardian summer that made them the Railway Children.

In Mike Kenny's, the audience is asked to accept that Bobbie, Peter (Izaak Cainer) and Phyllis (Beth Lilly) are in their twenties looking back on their time in the Yorkshire village of Oakworth after their father (Rob Angell), who works for the Foreign Office, is accused of spying. Despite a snide remark by the cook (Jacqueline Naylor), the children had no idea why he vanished soon after giving Peter a magnificent toy steam train for his birthday. But they agreed not to ask their mother (Andrina Carroll) any distressing questions and dutifully followed her to Three Chimneys, a cold, dark house on the moors that abutted the main railway line to London.

Living off the money that mother made by writing stories, the family got by with the help of Mrs Viney (Naylor), who popped in from the village to help with the chores. The children also befriend stationmaster Albert Perks (Martin Barrass), who forgives Peter when he catches him stealing coal from the station yard. He even offers to fix his broken engine and the local doctor (Angell) also agrees to charge a special rate when Mrs Waterbury catches influenza. She ticks off the children for letting the neighbours know they are poor, but Bobbie realises she is under enormous strain and tells Peter and Phyllis not to take her harsh words to heart.

Each day, the children run down to the fence alongside the track and ask the express to take their love to their father. An old gentleman (Michael Lambourne) travelling in the rear coach waves back at them and they are surprised to discover he is a director of the railway when they are rewarded for stopping a train from ploughing into some landslide debris by waving the girls red flannel petticoats to warn the driver. Their benefactor also intervenes when a Russian dissident author named Shepansky (James Weaver) collapses on the station platform and he manages to track down his wife and child in exile in the capital. Moreover, the children return the favour when a boy from the local school breaks his leg in the tunnel during a cross-country paper chase and he turns out to be the old gentleman's nephew, Jim (Alex Wingfield).

When not having lessons with their mother, the children spend a good deal of time at the station and, when Perks repairs Peter's engine, they decide to ask the residents of Oakworth to contribute presents for a special birthday surprise. Mother of several, Nell Perks (Elianne Bryne), is touched by the gesture and is dismayed when her husband bawls the children out for belittling him in front of his neighbours. But Bobbie makes him realise that the gifts are tokens of esteem and he is so sheepishly grateful that he gives her a pile of newspapers and magazines from the waiting-room.

Unfortunately, Bobbie sees a story about her father being convicted of treason and she asks her mother to explain. She insists that he has been framed and hopes that justice will prevail. But Bobbie would rather place her faith in the old gentleman than a judge and she slips him a letter the next time she sees him at the station. A few days later, she asks to be excused her lessons because she is feeling unwell and wanders down to the station. Along with her siblings, she had been surprised to see that everyone aboard the express had waved that morning and Perks seems particularly pleased to see her as the next train pulls into Oakworth. As the smoke clears, Bobbie recognises her father walking towards her and the family is finally reunited.

Deftly letting characters carry the narrative with recollections and direct speeches to the audience, Kenny tells his tale with supreme theatrical skill. Abetted by designer Joanna Scotcher and lighting specialist Richard G. Jones, director Damian Cruden makes clever use of a line running through the middle of the stage to bring figures into the action on sliding ramps that are pushed into place by stagehands sporting porter caps. This layout also allows the superb locomotive to make its grand entrances (with the first just before the interval being particularly thrilling). Moreover, it gives keeps the cast moving around the Signal Box Theatre and MacGibbon captures this kinetic energy with camera placements that never intrude upon the theatrical experience.

In truth, the acting is sometimes a little shouty, as one might expect in such an unconventional space. But the byplay between Nicholson-Lailey, Cainer and Lilly breezily recalls that between Agutter, Gary Warren and Sally Thomsett in the Jeffries film and it only occasionally dawns that they are far too old for their roles. Comparisons with Dinah Sheridan, Bernard Cribbins and William Mervyn are less favourable, although Carroll, Barrass and Lambourne do eventually impose their own personalities upon their roles, while Weaver has an amusing cameo as a boring dignitary giving a speech at the award ceremony. Kenny also slips in some wittily acute asides about class, gender, race and regionalism. But, as Lilly reminds the audience, this is very much family entertainment and, while cinema audiences will be deprived of the stage production's evocative sights, sounds and smells, they should still enjoy a rousing new rendition of a cherished classic.

Hollywood is forever on the lookout for acclaimed foreign directors keen to make their English-language debut and Norwegian Joachim Trier (who trained at the National Film and Television School) is the latest to give in to the temptation. Having made such a positive impression with Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011), it's perhaps not surprising that he has made such a decent fist of the transition with Louder Than Bombs. Yet, while it has drawn comparison with Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980) and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), this study in domestic ennui has much in common with compatriot Erik Poppe's A Thousand Times Good Night (2013), which also featured a female French photojournalist struggling to combine a cosy home life with her adrenaline-fuelled occupation.

Things are changing for academic Jesse Eisenberg. In addition to being made professor while still working on his thesis, he has also just become a father with wife Megan Ketch. As he fetches her something to eat, however, he bumps into old flame Rachel Brosnahan in the hospital corridor and does nothing to correct her mistaken impression that Ketch is dying. Elsewhere in Nyack, New York, Eisenberg's younger brother, Devin Druid, is still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his mother two years earlier. Isabelle Huppert was a lauded photojournalist, whose images of war zones had done much to change the public perception of forgotten conflicts. However, she had been killed in a car crash shortly after announcing her retirement and Druid has since become an obsessive player of computer games and has fought shy of father Gabriel Byrne's attempts to reconnect with him.

Druid also has a crush on classmate Ruby Jerins. But he is far too shy to let her know and confides his feelings to a journal, which he eventually plans to give to her, along with his heart. Huppert's journalist friend David Strathairn is also working on a piece with great personal significance, as he intends commemorating his erstwhile mistress in a New York Times article that will reveal that Huppert committed suicide. An actor who became a teacher to look after the family while his spouse was on assignment, Byrne has always known she took her own life. But he has hidden the fact from Druid, as he suspects it would only drive another wedge between them.

Eisenberg shows up to go through his mother's effects in order to see if any of the material from her last trip to Syria is worth including in a memorial exhibition. He offers little information about Ketch and the baby, but strongly advises Druid against showing Jerins his journal. Moreover, he learns about Huppert's infidelity and breaks the news to his father. Byrne is devastated, but rouses himself from his torpor to assume a character in Druid's favourite online game in a bid to strike up a rapport. However, he also starts a liaison with his son's teacher, Amy Ryan, and fails to notice that the crumbling Eisenberg is drinking to excess and behaving erratically.

An uneasy air descends as the feature on Huppert is published. Eisenberg makes a date with Brosnahan, but it doesn't go to plan. Druid has more luck when he sees Jerins at a party and plucks up the courage to speak to her. Despite being tipsy, he walks her home through the empty streets. Byrne thinks it's time that Eisenberg returned to Ketch and his child, so he and Druid bundle him into the car and the picture ends on a note of quiet optimism.

Exploring the extent to which a dangerous career can impact upon a person and their dependants, Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt leave plenty of room for ambiguity in between the half-certainties with which Byrne, Eisenberg and Druid console themselves. But this is anything but an artily detached study of macho dysfunction. Huppert may only be seen in fleeting flashbacks, but her presence is recurringly felt as her husband and sons try to make sense of her motives for periodically abandoning them to put herself at risk and for leaving them to fend for themselves. Typically, she makes the most of her scenes and is much more controlled than Juliette Binoche in Poppe's hugely contrived melodrama.

This is not without its convoluted moments and Trier sometimes tries too hard to follow in the long tradition of literary and cinematic outsiders trying to dissect American mores. He and editor Olivier Bugge Coutté jumble events in an attempt to tone down the soapier aspects of the saga, but Eisenberg's self-loathing scholar rather gets lost in the shuffle. Byrne and Strathairn also become marginalised as the focus starts to fall on Druid and his efforts to heal the wounds caused by his mother by experiencing first love.

Closer in tone to Reprise than Oslo, August 31st, this feels a tad conventional and becalmed for a director of Trier's ambition. However, he handles the dialogue well and maintains a cinematic feel in the face of the bookish structuring and a frustrating resort to voiceovers. He is well served by cinematographer Jakob Ihre and whoever took Huppert's war zone snaps, while Ola Flottum's score hovers between being mesmerising and soporific. But, while it avoids being openly mawkish, this reflection on the nuance of memory and contrasting shades of grief never quite compels as it might.

Despair drips from every scene as brothers Josh and Benny Safdie direct Heaven Knows What. Films about drug addicts are often gruelling to watch. The actors usually seize the opportunity to convey the effects of their cravings and highs, while the director cannot resist employing a panoply of perspectival gambits to suggest the emotional state of the junkie veering between sensations at either end of the physical and psychological scales. There is also a tendency to poeticise the relationships that develop between the dope-, coke- or smackheads, although such depictions invariably patronise both the characters and the audience.

Taking their cues from Jerry Schatzberg's seminal study of heroin addiction, The Panic in Needle Park (1971), the Safdies present the grim realities of the attendant lifestyle with an unflinching naturalism that owes much to the fact that Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein based their screenplay on Mad Love in New York City, an unpublished novel by 19 year-old Arielle Holmes, whom the siblings met while researching another project. Trapped in a violent relationship with her user boyfriend, Holmes had a spark that prompted the Safdies to encourage her to record her experiences on paper. Moreover, they convinced her to take the leading role in their movie, even though she had no previous acting experience. The risks were considerable. But they pay off to engrossing and consistently discomfiting effect in this gut-wrenching saga.

Teenage addict Arielle Holmes lives rough on the streets of New York with her boyfriend, Caleb Landry Jones. Handsome, but self-obsessed and largely indifferent to Holmes's feelings for him, Jones likes to hang out in the public library and update his social media pages. Following one of their periodic arguments, Holmes comes to find him and offers to prove her love for him by killing herself. Sneering in front of his mates, Jones urges her to do it and barely registers a flicker when she slices into her wrists with a razor blade. Indeed, he stays put, as Holmes is rushed to the emergency room.

After a lengthy stay in a psychiatric ward, Holmes is released and she returns to her regular haunts around Sherman Square and Riverside Park. There is no sign of Jones. But, even though she has nowhere else to go, Holmes refuses the attentions of Ronald Bronstein, an old friend who has genuine feelings for her. Instead, she hooks up with Buddy Duress, a dealer who lives with Diana Singh, an older woman who allows addicts to shelter at her place for a few coins a night.

Holmes and Duress spend their days begging on the streets, although they also go shoplifting and occasionally steal mail from the trolleys of unsuspecting postmen in the hope of finding cash or gift cards in some of the envelopes. They talk incessantly, but say nothing. All that matters is the next fix and finding somewhere safe to crash. Jones hears that Holmes is back on his patch and he picks a fight with her. Duress stands up for her and a scuffle breaks out that ends with Jones stabbing Duress in the hand.

As she nurses Duress, Holmes informs him that she still loves Jones and he tells her he will only bring her heartache. He goes on a bender and loses consciousness. However, as she sits with him, Holmes receives a phone message that Jones has overdosed and she goes to a nearby restaurant to see him. She helps revive him and he seems suitably grateful.

They become an item again and Jones agrees to leave the city and relocate to Miami. However, as Holmes sleeps on the bus to Florida, Jones disembarks and makes his way to an abandoned house. He tries to sleep, but leaves candles burning and is killed in the conflagration. Holmes wakes to find she has been abandoned. She gets off the bus and manages to make her way back to Manhattan, where she sees Duress holding court in a fast food joint.

Some critics have asked why the Safdies didn't make a documentary rather than pitching Holmes into a mix of professional and first-time actors. There is no doubt that Caleb Landry Jones stands out from the supporting cast, with a turn that plays knowingly to the camera while capturing the casual cruelty and ruthless selfishness of the narcissistic junkie. But Arielle Holmes also excels in revisiting situations that must have been excruciatingly familiar to her. Her eyes are hugely expressive and she effortlessly nails the earnest verbosity with which so many addicts attempt to converse as though they are entirely compos mentis.

Some may find this latterday take on the kind of vérité-speak that John Cassavetes perfected in the late 1950s a bit mannered, especially as the lines are often meshed with soundtrack snatches from Tangerine Dream and Isao Tomita's electronica reworking of Debussy. But such is the rawness of Holmes's emotional honesty that her performance is never anything less than vital and compelling.

Departing significantly from their cosier feature bow, Daddy Longlegs (2009) - in which Ronald Bronstein played a father trying to work out the best level on which to communicate with his children - Josh and Benny Safdie achieve a guerilla grittiness that is all the more remarkable for their eschewal of the jerkycam technique that has become a lazy visual shorthand for snatched from life realism. Instead, they tether Sean Price Williams's camera to tripods and dollies and keep it close to the characters at all times. For the most part, this results in a blurring at the edges of the frame (as in Son of Saul), which suggests the narrowness of their worldview. But, the occasional wide shot reveals just how small and insignificant the addicts are in the grander urban scheme.