Parky at the Pictures (DVD 16/8/2018)

Touring campuses in California in 2002, Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) and her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), listen to an audiobook of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Both tear up at the end of the story. But, within seconds, they are bickering about the fact that Marion refuses to use her daughter's preferred name, Lady Bird, and is determined to stop her from applying for places on the east coast because her father, Larry (Tracy Letts), is facing redundancy and they will barely be able to pay her fees for a college closer to their home in Sacramento. Frustrated by her mother's reluctance to let her fly, Lady Bird opens the door of the speeding car and rolls out on to the deserted highway.

With her arm in a pink plaster cast, Lady Bird returns to the Eternal Flame Roman Catholic school, where she is best friends with the pudgy Julianne Steffans (Beanie Feldstein). Despite not being a believer, Lady Bird has to attend chapel services, along with her lessons. She is a solid rather than inspired student, who likes running for class offices, even though she knows she stands no chance of winning. When her campaign poster disturbs Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the elderly nun suggests that Lady Bird might find a more suitable outlet for her talents in the school musical, which is being staged with the boys from the neighbouring Xavier academy. So, she signs up for auditions with the loyal Julie before heading to the minimart, where she annoys her adoptive brother, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), and his girlfriend, Shelly Yuhan (Marielle Scott), by looking through the magazines. 

Despite the fact that money is tight - Marion works double shifts at the hospital - Lady Bird has set her heart on applying for a New York college and Larry agrees to look into financial aid packages to help her secure funding without Marion finding out. He drops her off at school, where she looks enviously at the affluent and popular Jenna Walton (Odeya Rush), before discussing masturbation with Julie while lying flat on her back and scarfing communion wafers in the chapel vestry. Defying convention again, Lady Bird puts on a special dress to sing `Everybody Says Don't' from Anyone Can Whistle during her audition for the production, while Julie performs `Make Me a Channel of Your Peace'. But, while she is supportive of her friend, Lady Bird is furious when she gets a better part in Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along opposite Danny O'Neill (Lucas Hedges), who won her heart with his rendition of `Giants in the Sky' from Into the Woods.

Almost swooning when she bumps into Danny while shopping with her mother, Lady Bird offers to lend him a set of heated rollers so he can curl his hair for the role. She watches him like a hawk during acting classes with Fr Leviatch (Stephen McKinley Henderson), the priest producing the show who is rumoured to have found religion after his teenage son committed suicide. Moreover, during the school hoedown, she asks Danny to dance and rejects a life home with Julie so she can stay behind with him for her first kiss. However, her bubble is burst the moment she gets through the front door, as Marion is in a foul mood because Lady Bird went out without tidying her bedroom and they can't afford to replace her school uniform now that Larry has lost his job.

Undaunted by this turn of events and the guffawing of the guidance counsellor (Carla Valentine) who advises her to lower her college entry expectations, Lady Bird throws herself into her romance with Danny. They declare their love for each other while gazing at the stars and she is touched by his insistence that he respects her too much to touch her breasts. She is also overjoyed when he invites her for Thanksgiving at his grandmother's house, as it is the dream home she passes on her way to school each day. But Marion is upset that she has opted to miss her last family celebration before college and buys her a new dress with a heavy heart. She is also a little nettled when Danny comes to pick up Lady Bird and points out that he actually had to cross the tracks to get to the house. 

Having made a good impression on grandma (Joan Patricia O'Neill) by folding the napkins, Lady Bird hooks up with Julie and her friend Greg (John Karna) to go drinking and smoking dope. They pile into the kitchen scoff leftovers and Marion comes down to check they are okay. As the visitors drive away, Shelly lets Lady Bird know that Marion was hurt by her absence because she loves her so much. She reminds her what a good woman she is, as she took her in after her own parents threw her out for sleeping with Miguel. But Lady Bird is too stoned to pay much attention. 

So keen to improve her grades that she throws away a mark book belonging to maths teacher, Mr Bruno (Jake McDorman), Lady Bird informs Julie that she has reached saturation point with learning and puts all her energy into he romance and the play. The family comes to opening night and Miguel and Shelly sit bemused while Marion and Larry beam with pride, as does Julie's mother (Kristen Cloke) and her trendy boyfriend, Uncle Matthew (Andy Buckley). But Lady Bird comes down to earth with a bump when she catches Danny kissing another boy during a celebratory supper at a fast-food restaurant and Julie listens to sad songs with her to ease her pain. 

With her cast removed, Lady Bird recovers her poise as Christmas comes around. Larry gives her a completed financial aid form as a present and she takes a job at a local coffee shop to boost her savings. While waiting tables, she flirts with Kyle Scheible (Timothée Chalamet), a Xavier poseur who cultivates an air of intellectual edginess and plays in a band called L'Enfance Nue. Deciding that he is Danny's replacement, Lady Bird attempts to cultivate a friendship with Jenna and abandons the theatre club, whose production of The Tempest will be directed by Miss Patty (Marietta DePrima) and Father Walther (Bob Stephenson), a sports coach who thinks that Shakespeare can be staged in the same way as an American football game. 

When Sister Sarah Joan criticises Jenna for the length of her skirt, Lady Bird helps deck out her car with a `Just Married to Jesus' slogan and earns an invitation to the parking lot where her clique hangs out. She tries to flirt with Kyle and can't fathom whether he is being serious when warning about the surveillance properties of mobile phones. As Lent arrives, Lady Bird is still snubbing Julie and gets into a row with Miguel and her parents when she gets an offer from a college with an agriculture faculty. She smooches with Kyle at a party at Jenna's house and gets suspended from school when she heckles an anti-abortion speaker. Naturally, Marion is furious with her and reveals that her father is suffering from depression and doesn't need any additional stress. Lady Bird demands to know how much it cost to raise her so that she can pay off her debt and stopping speaking to her mother. But she regrets embarrassing Larry by asking to be dropped off before school. 

She is equally ashamed when Jenna discovers she lied about living in Danny's grandmother's house and is disappointed with Kyle when he misleads her into thinking he is a virgin when they sleep together for the first time. He suggests the war in Iraq is more of a tragedy than her sensibility, but Lady Bird protests that people don't have to die for things to be sad. Marion picks her up and lets her cry on her shoulder before they go to cheer her up by looking around properties for sale in the post part of town. 

Shortly afterwards, Lady Bird is commended on an essay about Sacramento by Sister Sarah Joan, who confides that she found the car prank amusing. She also receives a letter from an eastern college informing her that she is on the waiting list for places. Larry is pleased for her and is just as encouraging when he bumps into Miguel applying for the same computer programming job. Marion helps her pick a prom dress and promises she loves her after wondering whether her choice isn't a bit too pink, Shelly and Miguel feel sorry for Lady Bird when Kyle honks when collecting her and, when he and Jenna decide to miss the dance to party with some friends, she asks to be dropped off at Julie's house and they go to the prom together and have a nice time, even though Lady Bird is saddened to hear that Julie is spending the summer with her father and that they won't see much of each other. 

She goes to see Danny in the play and is proud of him. However, while they are celebrating graduation day, he lets slip that she has applied out of state and Marion feels so betrayed that she sends her to Coventry. Thus, Larry along brings Lady Bird a muffin with a candle in it on her 18th birthday and she marks the occasion by buying a scratch card, some cigarettes and a copy of Playgirl. She also removes the pictures from her bedroom wall and paints over the messages she has written to herself during her childhood. Inheriting Miguel's position at the supermarket, Lady Bird even works two jobs for the summer and Larry re-mortgages to house so she can afford to study in New York. But Marion refuses to wave her off in the airport and is on the loop road to park when she is overcome with emotion and rushes back to the terminal, only to be greeted by a reassuring hug from her husband.

Settling into her new digs in the big city, Lady Bird finds an envelope full of letter drafts written on yellow A4 by her mother. Using her new mobile phone, she calls Larry to ask what they mean and he says she wanted to say she loved her, but was afraid Lady Bird would judge her writing style. At her first mixer, Lady Bird gets drunk and introduces herself to David (Ben Konigsberg) as Christine. They kiss and she throws up and is rushed to hospital, where the nurse quickly realises she is just drunk. On waking up in a side room, she sees a small Asian boy with an eye patch. She wanders towards the campus and stops into a church during a service. The sound of the choir prompts her to call home and leave a message for Marion. She recalls driving around Sacramento for the first time after passing her test and thanks her for everything she has done for her.

Directed with confidence and charm, this may not be the perfect picture some of the online forums would have you believe. But it's mightily impressive and reveals just how much Gerwig has absorbed from her viewing and acting. She probably won't be delighted to hear any comparisons to Woody Allen, as she has distanced herself from him after appearing in To Rome With Love (2012). But she may be happier to be linked with Eric Rohmer and Philippe Garrel, as well as John Hughes (Pretty in Pink, 1986), Diablo Cody (Juno, 2007), Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture, 2010) and Mia Hansen-Løve, with whom Gerwig will reunite later this year on Bergman Island after their first teaming on Eden (2014). 

The structuring of the action as a chain of short scenes demonstrates remarkable storytelling maturity, although Nick Houy must take some credit for the fluency of his editing. Sam Levy's photography, Chris Jones's production design, April Napier's costumes and Jon Brion's score are equally acute. But this has an auteur feel, right down to the montages of beloved Sacramento haunts and the fact that Saoirse Ronan incorporates Gerwig's speech patterns and mannerisms into her performance. 

Yet, excellent though she is in carrying the picture, Ronan is splendidly supported by a marvellous ensemble and matched every step of the way by Laurie Metcalf, who will be best known to UK audiences for her small-screen work in Roseanne and The Big Bang Theory. Desperate to prevent her daughter from getting ideas above her station that can only result in disappointment, Metcalf is forever fighting her own sense of frustration and failure as a wife and mother. Yet her brand of gruff love is as authentic and as  keenly observed as the red-tinted Ronan's inability to avoid making basic and  avoidable mistakes in her relationships with her family and classmates. 

Given its status as an antidote to Trumpist pomposity and the pre-Oscar backlash against Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards, Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water and Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By My Name, Lady Bird was unlucky not to slip through to take Best Picture. But it would have been a major surprise if Gerwig had beaten Del Toro to Best Director, even though she has clearly announced herself as a talent to watch in demonstrating the importance of being yourself and paying attention. Much will depend on that always difficult second feature.

Film-makers have been imperilling blind women since the silent era, although few movies have exploited this hoary gambit as effectively as Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967), Richard Fleischer's See No Evil (1971) and Michael Apted's Blink (1993). The difference with Anthony Byrne's In Darkness, however, is that Natalie Dormer has co-scripted the scenario that sets her alongside Audrey Hepburn, Mia Farrow and Madeleine Stowe in being stalked by a desperate killer. 

Blind since the age of five, Natalie Dormer uses a white stick to get around London. A pianist working on a horror score composed by Michael Bott, she makes her way home on the tube and buys a coffee for busking violinist Charlie de Bromhead, even though he fails again to play a piece of music she doesn't recognise. While picking up her mail, she meets upstairs neighbour Emily Ratajkowski, who has asked Dormer to play at a benefit concert for her father, Jan Bijvoet, a Serbian businessman who is in the news because of possible links to war criminals. As she needs the money to pay her own father's medical bills, Dormer claims to be unconcerned about the morality of the commission and heads up to her comfortable apartment. 

Despite being disturbed by footsteps overhead and the sound of Ratajkowski arguing with a man, Dormer works on the score and wonders why her friend is so secretive about the perfume she wears. Returning from the studio next day, Dormer slips on a scarf left on the stairs and cuts her hand. As she takes the lift, Ratajkowski slips in beside her and tells her to keep hold of the scarf for the moment and confides that her scent is called Liquid Gold. During the course of the evening, however, Dormer hears raised voices again and suspects that someone is lingering in the basement when she takes out a bin bag. But she is still taken by complete surprise when Ratajkowski cackled manically and plunges to her death on the bonnet of a parked car in the street below. 

When police inspector Neil Maskell comes to question her, Dormer claims to have heard nothing because she had her headphones in. He asks whether her other senses are more acute to compensate for her blindness, but she admits she doesn't know, as she has nothing else to compare them to. While they chat, Joely Richardson chides brother Ed Skrein for being seen in the lift by Ratajkowski's neighbour and orders him to finish her off and find the memory stick that Bijovet is desperate to recover before it falls into the hands of the Russians. When he breaks into Dormer's apartment, however, Skrein realises that she's blind and decides to spare her after they both listen intently for signs of activity on either side of the bathroom door. 

Meanwhile, Maskell learns from the autopsy that Ratajkowski was on medication for a bipolar condition, had recently had a nose job and was 12 weeks pregnant. But he keeps these facts hidden, as the press hound Bijvoet at the morgue and Dormer is so distressed by hearing the lurid TV news coverage that she almost walks into a passing car in crossing the road. Nevertheless, she attends the drinks gala for Bijvoet's refugee foundation and piques his interest by playing a song that he had sung to his daughter when she was a child. Troubled by her own flashbacks to her youth, Dormer keeps her nerve when Bijvoet asks to speak to her alone. She is going to give him a small glass vial that she had been keeping in her bathroom cabinet when Richardson comes in to snoop on them and Dormer has to crush the bottle with her shoe and cover its traces by dropping her champagne flute on to the stone floor. 

Unconvinced by Skrein's conviction that Dormer is blind, Richardson waves a hand in front of her face when they meet in the washroom. She watches her powder her nose and tells her she looks like a million dollars before laughing loudly when Dormer compliments her on her shoes. Keen to keep tabs on Dormer, Richardson orders Skrein to follow her home and he rescues her from a gang of rapacious youths (seen only as shadows, but speaking Multicultural Youth English). Dormer is grateful for his help and accepts his invitation to have a coffee to settle her nerves. But she is sufficiently suspicious by his line of questioning and his silence when she shows him Ratajkowski's scarf that she asks De Bromhead to play some Satie if he ever sees Skrein following her. 

Woken by a nightmare about a fire and the erratic behaviour of her deceased mother, Dormer showers as Bijvoet washes his daughter's body with a reverence that was noticeably absent earlier when he had defaced photographs of her and recalled her voice threatening to ruin him. Shortly after Dormer remembers Ratajkowski slipping something into her coat pocket and finding the USB, Maskell pays her a visit and asks if she knew that her neighbour was pregnant. He jokes that she was a woman of mystery, but lets slip that he doesn't think that a woman with so much to live for would leap to her death. 

However, Maskell knows only a fraction of what is going on, as Dormer is a Bosnian fugitive who has vowed to get even with Bijvoet for killing her sister and mother. She meets protector James Cosmo on a bench opposite the Houses of Parliament and slips him the memory stick in a coffee cup. He wants her to go into hiding, but she is determined to finish what she started. Being blind, however, she doesn't see Skrein spying on her. Nor does she see the sinister van kerb crawling towards her and she is powerless to prevent herself being abducted by thugs who string her up to the roof of the vehicle and start breaking her fingers before Skrein manages to rescue her by ramming the van and killing its occupants. 

Skrein bundles her through the busy streets and implores her to hand over the USB. But Dormer refuses to trust him and, when he kills another man who tries to intercept then, she calls for help and Skrein scarpers before the police arrive. Cosmo sits by her hospital bed and tells her that the files on the stick detail Bijvoet's connections and he is convinced that Ratajkowski was trying to ruin him because she had come to realise what a monster he was. But Maskell watches them talk, as he has reviewed CCTV footage of the street attack, and places the cup Cosmo had been using in an evidence bag. 

Realising that Maskell is getting closer to establishing her identity, Dormer discharges herself and returns home to find that a photograph of her family has been stolen. She sends De Bromhead to the café where Skrein is waiting with a message to meet her in Ratajkowski's apartment. She ties the scarf around his eyes and makes love to him before revealing that she used to play in Bijvoet's garden before Yugoslavia imploded and can never forgive him for what he did to her family. Skrein suggests that killing him will do little to alleviate her pain, but she insists on seeing Richardson alone and they rendezvous in front of Titian's `The Death of Actaeon' at the National Gallery. 

Richardson returns the Polaroid, but reminds Dormer that Bijvoet would recognise her parents if he ever saw it and would act accordingly. However, Dormer reveals that she knows that Richardson is working undercover and that one word to Bijvoet would lead to her exposure. So, Richardson agrees to escort Dormer to Ratajkowski's funeral and arrange for them to be alone together. Dormer seems not to suspect that Richardson would betray her and she accepts a lift back to the reception without trepidation. 

As they drive through the cemetery, Dormer lunges at Bijvoet's throat with a knife. But he stays her hand and reveals that he is her father because he raped her mother for being a Catholic (Joanna Makaruk) married to a Muslim (Alejandro de Mesa). He sneeringly boasts of raping her again before he killed her and Dormer is dumbstruck when he opens the car door and pushes her into the crowd of protesters clamouring for him to be tried as a war criminal. She goes to the police station to find Maskell, but wanders away on learning he's not there. Instead, she calls Cosmo from a phone box and discovers that he passed away the previous evening. 

Maskell finds Dormer at the coffee shop and posits his theories on the case. He also reveals that he has learned from Cosmo's fingerprints that he has been protecting Dormer and has allowed her to use the name of the daughter who died in a car crash when she was two years old. Although he hasn't figured everything out, he suspects that Dormer is about to do something foolish and tries to persuade her to let the law do its job. Meanwhile, Bijvoet has rumbled Richardson's true identity and, although Skrein promises to help her flee the country, she is murdered in the car taking her to the airport. 

As Skrein sprints across London to Dormer's building and Maskelll speeds there in his squad car, Bijvoet arrives to kill her. He is throttling her (in a shot reminiscent of the image on the screen in the recording session) when Skrein bursts in to push him out of the window and impale him on the railings below. Somewhat preposterously, Dormer seems to regain her sight and tries to staunch the bleeding of Skrein's abdominal wound. But he pleads with her to leave before the cops arrive and she leaves him with Ratajkowski's scarf befoe disappearing into the night, as she had done all those years before. As the father of an asthmatic daughter, Maskell shrugs and decides to let her go, as she is entitled to a third chance at happiness. 

Proving once again that there are few things more difficult in movie-making than giving a thriller a credible last reel, this intriguing collaboration between off-screen partners Anthony Byrne and Natalie Dormer loses its way badly after its big secret is revealed. While Dormer appears to be a vulnerable victim, the story proceeds with a pleasing predictability that is enhanced by the studied performances of the eminently plausible Dormer and the drolly despicable Joely Richardson. However, the more Byrne and Dormer begin to exploit the Bosnian Civil War as a convenient plot point without examining its horrors in any meaningful depth, the more cynical and convoluted the picture becomes. 

Byrne has worked predominantly on TV series like Silent Witness, Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders since starting out on the feature trail with Short Order (2005) and How About You... (2007). Consequently, he's a dab hand at building suspense, as he keeps Si Bell's camera moving in sinuous tracking shots that either suggest Dormer's sightless progress or that she is being followed. But he's less effective at staging action set-pieces and allows editors Tom Harrison-Read and Paul Knight to employ a choppy staccato that works against the dynamism and spectacle of the sequences, in spite of the eager efforts of Niall Byrne's score. Moreover, Byrne can't resist a visual flourish, as he and production designer Sonja Klaus reference such gialli as Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975), while sound designer Sebastian Morsch owes several debts to Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012). Nevertheless, before the script starts using rape and genocide as character motivation, this shows promise.

Imagine Pulp Fiction being re-enacted in the Sin City part of Wonderland and you get close to the postmodernist milieu that the debuting Brit Vaughn Stein has concocted for Terminal. Strewn with references to Lewis Carroll, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino, this self-reflexive muddle recalls those achingly hip fanboy flicks that emerged in the wake of Reservoir Dogs (1992). But this isn't a favourable comparison, as Stein is too wrapped up in his own perceived cleverness to realise that this smugly nodding neo-noir fails on almost every level. 

As hitmen Vince (Dexter Fletcher) and Alfred (Max Irons) decipher the codes in lonelyhearts ads in their seedy digs, a shadowy figure watches their every move on a network of CCTV screens that also covers the concourse on which a terminally ill academic Bill Braithwaite (Simon Pegg) is waiting to throw himself under a train. Informed by limping night supervisor Clinton (Mike Myers) that there won't be another service for hours, Bill makes for the End of the Line buffet. Having survived a half-hearted mugging attempt by Lenny (Matthew Lewis) and Raymond (Thomas Turgoose), Bill makes the acquaintance of Annie (Margot Robbie), the waitress we have already seen in a bobbed wig and thick red lipstick making a wager with the mysterious Mr Franklin over the future of his assassination bureau. 

With no one else to serve on the graveyard shift, Alice asks about Bill's ailment, but he insists his doctor (Paul Reynolds) is baffled. She is amused by his precise conversation and he tries to remember where he has seen her before, as she describes how she lost her mother and endured a difficult childhood. A flashback to three weeks earlier (signalled by one of the many neon signs dotting the mise-en-scène) shows Alice in her Uma Thurman guise tormenting Nigel Illing (Nick Moran), the sleazebag when has handcuffed to the brass bedposts prior to castrating him with a scalpel. 

Back in her waitress uniform, the eavesdropping Alice serves Vince and Alfred, as they ponder the contents of a suitcase recovered from the platform locker to which Franklin has directed them. A matchbook takes them to The Rabbit Hole, a pole-dancing club where Alice works under the name Bunny. In return for an envelope full of cash, she presents the bickering duo with a briefcase and flirts shamelessly with Alfred, who smooches with Alice over the buffet counter as Vince returns from a testy exchange with Clinton, who wants hush money for not reporting the fact that Vince has stolen a suitcase from a locker. 

While Vince follows Alice looking like a cross between Kim Novak and Sharon Stone along the pink neon corridors of a nearby hotel, Alfred is enticed into the diner by Alice wearing a beret like Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Clinton enters carrying a case, which he opens to remove a dictaphone that plays a recording of Vince's telephone conversation with Franklin, in which he instructs him to eliminate Alfred after they dispatch their next target. 

Back at the diner, Alice avers over a glass of Victory Gin that Bill lacks the courage to kill himself or he would have done something about it before now. She wonders if he is paying for past sins and a flashback takes him to a confessional, where he has a tetchy exchange with an unseen priest (Robert Goodman). Alice helpfully suggests that he could end it all by jamming his head down on his upturned fountain pen. When he prevaricates, she confiscates the pen because she thinks it's elegant and he will have further use for it once he's dead. 

While Alfred and Vince get on each other's nerves staving off boredom waiting to fulfill their contract, Alice takes Bill to the disused ventilation shaft and dares him to put himself out of his misery by leaping into the unknown. He flinches when she stands close to the edge of the gaping chasm and averts his eyes from her mocking gaze when she accuses him of being a coward. Snapping out of his self-pity, Bill begins to rant about her disrespecting his situation and claims to have seen dozens of attention-seeking brats like her during his teaching career. At that moment, he remembers where he has seen her before and a rapidly cut series of flashbacks show him abusing the young Alice when she was a pupil in his care and she wreaks her revenge by plunging his pen into his neck and pushing him backwards into the abyss - confident that she knows where he will land in the afterlife. 

She now turns her attention to Vince and Alfred and calls them to prepare for their hit. When Vince lines up a shot into the building opposite, however, he is puzzled to see Alice standing in the window and dismayed to find Alfred pointing a pistol at his head. They waste little time in offing Vince and arrange to meet on the concourse. Clinton comes to dispose of Vince's body and shuffles into view after Alice turns the tables on Alfred. She asks if she has passed the audition to become one of Franklin's trusted assassins and Clinton nods deferentially before returning to his cubby hole whistling `Danny Boy'.

It will surprise few to discover that Clinton and Franklin are one and the same or that the blue-eyed Alice has a green-eyed twin called Bonnie. Dressed in nurse's uniforms, they regale Clinton with the story of Chloe Merryweather (Katarina Cos), the woman he had seduced as a younger man (Les Loveday) and impregnated with daughters she kept hidden from the world, while working as a waitress. Chloe suspected that Clinton was a desperate character and discovered the extent of his cruelty when he had torched her flat after she had witnessed him killing a man. Devoted to the end, she had managed to get Alice and Bonnie out of the window, but they had spent years at the mercy of the perverts entrusted with their care. So, in order to get even with the cause of their woes, they perform an ice-pick lobotomy on Clinton before driving a nail into his skull and sashaying away in identical red coats. 

It's hard to know where to start with a movie with so many flaws. However, Vaughn Stein has to take the brunt of the brickbats for his Scooby-Dooish plot, glib dialogue and garish style. Given that he was working to a tight deadline on limited budgets, he could be forgiven more readily if he hadn't pilfered so cynically from the likes of Guy Ritchie, Gasper Noé, David Fincher, Martin McDonagh and Nicolas Winding Refn. But it's unlikely that he will escape from the critical opprobrium that this crass mishmash is bound to attract. Not that he would care, apparently, as he told one interviewer, `If I could make anything just 1% as good as Tarantino I'd be a happy man.'

A degree of credit has to be given to production designer Richard Bullock for  the atmospheric station set he constructed on a vast Hungarian sound stage, while Julian Day's costumes and Christopher Ross's cinematography are notably slick. Even though it's resistibly flashy, Johannes Bock and Alex Marquez's editing is also highly competent. But the performances reflect the swaggering hubris that riddles this derivative, pretentious and faintly ridiculous pastiche that needs seeing for its badness to be believed.

Ever since Val Lewton produced Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim (1943), Hollywood has been fascinated by cults. Yet, while the likes of Ralph L. Thomas's Ticket to Heaven (1981) and Ted Kotcheff's Split Image (1982) have adopted a weighty dramatic approach, recent items like Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) and Ti West's The Sacrament (2013) have played up the horror element. Having already broached the topic in Resolution (2012), writer-directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson revisit cultdom in The Endless, in which they also take the leading roles. 

When brothers Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson receive a digital video tape in the post from Camp Arcadia, Moorhead spends the money set aside for a new car battery on a camcorder capable of playing it. Having been raised in the compound after their mother was killed in a car crash, Moorhead begins pining for Camp Arcadia. However, Benson had rebelled against the compulsory castration policy and fled with his sibling before everyone committed suicide in a mass ritual known as `The Ascension'. 

After consulting their psychiatrist, Benson agrees to take Moorhead back to the California desert to see whether the settlement still exists and convince him that, even though they are trapped in a cycle of menial jobs, they are better off out of it. En route, they notice birds circling in the sky near the spot in the road where the family car crashed. But they press on and are greeting enthusiastically by genial leader Tate Ellington, who recognises them from a decade earlier. So do Shane Brady and Callie Hernandez (who had appeared on the tape that had so intrigued Moorhead). Over lunch, the brothers are also reacquainted with the ever-smiling David Lawson, Jr. and the beardedly grave Lew Temple, while also being introduced to Kira Powell, an artist who had wandered on to the estate from the nearby mental health facility. 

During a run around the grounds, Benson is puzzled why nobody seems have aged since and, that night, asks Ellington whether he has had any luck in cracking the physics formula on which he has long been working. He reassures Benson that everyone looks so young because they eat well, drink their home-brewed ale and lead happy lives. But, while he remains unconvinced (even after Brady impresses him with a magic trick involving a disappearing baseball), Moorhead is intrigued by how content everybody is and responds eagerly to the applause when he accepts Ellington's campfire challenge to pull on a rope that seems to stretch into the night sky. 

Benson burns his hand when the rope is yanked from his grasp and Powell tends to the wound (having completed a charcoal drawing two sinister eyes in the darkness). He agrees to let Moorhead stay another day, even though he is perplexed by a post-it reading `Please Keep Quiet' that he keeps finding on walls around the camp. Moreover, he's curious about the padlocked cabin that is closely guarded by Temple and is positively bemused by the back-ticking clock he finds mounted on a tent in the woods near a circle of Polaroid pictures in the dust. When he asks Ellington for an explanation, Benson notices two moons in the sky over the camp and has to cling on to his sceptism when Ellington promises that the answers he seeks are out there and that he will learn much if he dives below the buoy depicted in the Polaroid he had picked up.

While Hernandez shows Moorhead the ocular effect of the moons on the horizon (which resembles Powell's sketch), Benson finds Emily Montague sobbing in frustration on some steps. She came to Arcadia to find her missing spouse and keeps leaving post-its asking people to keep down the noise while she tries to sleep. But everyone is having too good a time to consider others and her cynicism clears Benson's head. Nevertheless, while out fishing with Moorhead the next day, he dives into the lake and emerges with a metal cashbox and the conviction that something had been trying to hold him under the water. They find another videocassette inside the box and Moorhead informs his brother of his intention to leave. 

Despite his growing disquiet, Benson is persuaded to attend a goodbye gathering by Ellington, who produces the video from the lake, which contains snippets of Benson and Moorhead denouncing their erstwhile benefactors as members of a `UFO death cult'. He asks Benson why he would have spread such pernicious rumours and Moorhead is furious when he discovers that his brother had devised the castration myth. But, while Ellington offers to forgive Benson, he refuses to stay in Arcadia with Moorhead and is livid when he reaches their car and discovers that the battery's gone flat. 

Grateful to stumble across a shack in the wilderness, Benson is confused when he sees James Jordan simultaneously alive and dangling from a noose in an outhouse. Mocking him for allowing himself to be lured back into the loop, Jordan explains that everyone in the vicinity is trapped in endless cycles of varying durations that are controlled by an unseen entity with an insatiable appetite for stories. As a result, he has to put up with his hanged self. He also demonstrates how totems driven into the ground mark out areas where it's possible to defy the laws of space and time and gives Benson a shock when he vanishes into thin air and reappears from inside the outhouse. 

Entrusting Benson with a compass and a map, Jordan sends him in search of Vinny Curran, who will provide him with a gun. He finds him chained to the wall of a hut because buddy Peter Cilella is trying to cure him of his substance addictions. Cilella is Montague's husband and he remembers Benson from when he was a boy. He has been digging outside and has unearthed an old hard drive that contains an audio clip of people in torment. They shudder and shrug that the incident could come from their past, present or future, as there is no longer any way of delineating between them. Curran urges Benson to find a way out of the labyrinth and show no fear if confronted by the entity because it will seize upon his weakness and drag him into its orbit. 

Back in Arcadia, Moorhead also contemplates the nature of the Lovecraftian beast with Ellington. He accepts that Moorhead has to go in search of his brother and he becomes invisible from the sadly waving Hernandez after he passes beyond the marker staffs. Wandering into the woods, Moorhead finds the tent with the backticking clock and broken record and pees through the flap to see Ric Sarabia (dressed in the explorer's garb of the early 1900s) endlessly repeating an evidently terrifying incident. However, he has time to hiss a warning to Moorhead to get away from the spot as quickly as possible. 

Meanwhile, Benson takes his leave of Cilella, who jokes that he misses the annoying notes that Montague used to leave around the house. He hopes that she has managed to move on and Benson hesitates about telling Cilella that she is hemmed inside Arcadia. But he trudges away and looks back only to see Cilella torch the wooden structure in an effort to break out of his cycle. No sooner has Cilella closed the door on the conflagration, however, than time shifts and Benson sees him arriving at Curran's door for the first time, many rewinds ago. As he walks on, he is taken aback by the sight of a camper van on a brow and a mountain lion prowling through the undergrowth. However, Benson shows no fear and, as the creature turns tail, Moorhead pops into view and joins his brother in seeking a way out. 

Finding no one home in the camper - but noting a pot of the red flowers that are valued so highly in Arcadia - the siblings press on, without seeing their shadows being cast on to a drying sheet by a projector that is hurled by an unseen force towards a network of shimmering domes that have appeared on the plain below. As a third moon appears in the sky, Moorhead confides that he slept with Hernandez and Benson is amused that he literally means spent the night chastely in the same bed. While they walk past ominous edifices that resemble shapes in Powell's drawings, Ellington presides over a mournful repast in Arcadia and Jordan blows out his brains with the gun that Benson leaves for him. 

Undeterred by such grim repeat performances, Moorhead announces that he wants to stay behind because the life Benson forces him to live is unbearable. Refusing to argue any longer, Benson escorts him back to Arcadia. However, the compound is deserted and they wander into the shed on the stoop after they see Temple removing the padlock. It's full of film cans and video tapes and they watch episodes from their visit on a TV screen that suddenly flickers into life. But a sense of foreboding overtakes Moorhead, who rushes out to warn his friends of an impending disaster. He is too late, however, and the Arcadians are frazzled by a force that seems bent on changing the story once again. 

Racing to the car, Benson urges Moorhead to push so that they can kickstart the engine. Even though the world behind them is imploding, they pause because Moorhead insists on driving, as he is tired of Benson making dreadful decisions on his behalf. Jumping into the vehicle, as Ellington and his circle look on apprehensively, the siblings speed along the dirt road and seem to make it through to the other side, despite colliding with a car coming in the opposite direction. They whoop with delight, as they leave the bubble behind. But Benson seems to know that something has gone wrong when he settles back in his seat on noticing that they are still moving, even though the fuel gauge is on empty. 

Opening with HP Lovecraft's quotation about the oldest and strongest kind of fear being the `fear of the unknown', this is an admirably intelligent and consciously convoluted treatise on the cyclical nature of both history and fiction and the uncertainties that each generates. Political and theological subtexts abound, as Benson (who scripted) and Moorhead (who handled the striking cinematography) wisely leave the audience to draw any conclusions about the finer points of this dystopian Arcadia. Yet, for all its ingenuity, this mumblecoric variation on the theme of characters searching for an author takes some unnecessary detours, the most obvious of which sees Curran, Cilella and Montague reprise the roles they played in Benson and Moorhead's Resolution (2012), in which Cilella's attempt to put Curran through cold turkey is manipulated by an imperceivable force. 

It also seems a shame that the action revolves around the brothers, as the real tragedy involves those lost souls imprisoned inside a neverending story. Melancholic rather than dictatorial, Ellington turns all notions of cult leadership on its head, while Hernandez is touchingly maternal in the way she resumes her protective attitude towards the still naive Moorhead. But, having taken the decision to play the leads themselves, Benson and Moorhead can be forgiven for keeping their characters centre stage, while they and production designer Ariel Vida, sound mixer Bryn Hubbard and effects guru Michael Matzur deserve enormous credit for producing such an atmospheric, teasingly self-reflexive and thought-provoking picture on such a modest budget.

Australian director Warwick Thornton has been busy since winning the Camera d'or at Cannes with his debut feature, Samson and Delilah (2009). In addition to serving as cinematographer on Beck Cole's Here I Am (2011) and Wayne Blair's The Sapphires (2012), he has also directed the documentaries Art + Soul (2010) and We Don't Need a Map (2017), curated a collection of Aboriginal ghost stories in the Jackanory-like curio, The Darkside (2013), and examined Aboriginal spirituality in Words With Gods (2014), a portmanteau that also included contributions from Hector Babenco, Mira Nair, Hideo Nakata, Amos Gitai, Álex de la Iglesia, Emir Kusturica, Bahman Ghobadi and Guillermo Arriaga. 

He returns to fiction with Sweet Country, a study of racial tensions in the Northern Territory of the 1920s that has been scripted by David Tranter and Steven McGregor. Flitting between flashes back and forward to present the unfolding saga from the perspectives of the principal characters, this is a period piece with a clear contemporary resonance. But its insights into human nature and racial injustice extend far beyond the Outback deserts captured so evocatively by Thornton's camera. 

A decade after spending three years on the Western Front, Harry March (Ewen Leslie) arrives in the bush to make a new life for himself. He asks religious neighbour Fred Smith (Sam Neill) if he can borrow Aboriginal stockman Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris) to do some odd jobs on his property. Sam brings his wife Lizzie (Natassia Gorey-Furber) and niece Lucy (Shanika Cole) with him. But the hard-drinking March takes a shine to the young girl and, when he fails to get her alone, rapes her aunt in his darkened shack after methodically closing the shutters to turn the screen black. He warns her that he will skin her if she says a word to her husband and she remains taciturn on the ride home. 

As Fred is about to go into town, Sam asks if he will return Lucy to her mother, as he didn't like the way that March was looking at her. Meanwhile, March makes the acquaintance of his other neighbour, Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright), who runs his smallholding with elderly Aboriginal, Archie (Gibson John), and the youthful Philomac (who is played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan). Mick tells March that he had to fire Sam after they had a scrap over his lack of deference and agrees to lend him Archie and Philomac to complete his chores.

No sooner have they returned to March's hut, however, than he accuses Philomac of trying to rob him and chains him to a rock in the paddock. The boy manages to escape in the night and is hiding in Fred's outdoor dunny when March rides in demanding the return of his prisoner. As Fred had given Sam and Lizzie permission to sleep in the house, they cower beside the bed, as March fixes his bayonet to his service rifle and orders them to surrender Philomac. Having no idea what he is talking about, but determined to defend himself, Sam loads Fred's shotgun and blasts March in the neck when he kicks down the door.

Archie is appalled that Sam has killed a whitefella and urges him to head into the bush to avoid capture because no one will ever believe his side of the story. As Sam and Lizzie scurry away, Philomac steals March's pocket watch and sneers at him for mistreating him. He returns home and informs Mick that he didn't see what happened at Fred's place, but does make sure that Mick knows that March had shackled him for no good reason. 

Fred returns to witness March's burial by fellow veteran and local copper, Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown). Despite never having met March, Fletcher gives him a hero's send-off and vows to capture his killer. However, Fred insists on riding with the posse, as he wants to ensure that Sam is taken alive and given the chance to defend himself in a court of law. He objects when Fletcher refuses to let Archie sleep near the fire and brings a smile to the face of Constable Minty (Tom Willoughby) when Fletcher asks if he or Mick can sing and Fred pipes up with `Jesus Loves Me'. 

Back on Mick's land, Philomac's uncle chides him for stealing March's watch. He accuses him of being no better than the whitefellas and warns him that being a `myall' will prevent him from understanding his own culture and being able to call on dreamtimes or chant to bring rain. The boy seems unconcerned, but he crops up in conversation around the campfire when Fletcher asks Mick if he is his son. When he nods, the sergeant recommends that he keeps him under control, as he will take him into care the first time he over-steps the mark. 

The next morning, as Lizzie throws up and Sam spots a ceremony party from a rocky vantage point, Fletcher fails to notice that Archie has dropped back from the party and rides right up to the Aborigines in their loincloths. Minty brandishes his pistol and is knocked off his horse with a missile after shooting one of the warriors and he is slaughtered as his colleagues beat a hasty retreat. Fletcher is furious with Archie for delivering them into an ambush and he takes out his frustration on Fred when he suggests that they go home because Sam knows the bush too well to allow himself to be captured. 

As Fred abandons the chase, Lizzie tells Sam that she thinks she's pregnant. He seems to put a spell on a scorpion so that it appears in Fletcher's boot and bites him in the toe. But he refuses to quit, even when they reach a vast salt flat and Mick and Archie turn back for home, after the latter suggests that Sam is now travelling alone. Fletcher rides on with no idea where he's going and is relieved when Sam comes out of the blazing sun to throw him water canteen. Turning away to rejoin Lizzie, she complains that he should be angy with March not her, as she didn't want to sleep with him. However, they make up after Sam rescues her from Aborigines attacking her at the side of a shallow pool and, that night, she snuggles up to him by the fire.

Fletcher also finds some water and daydreams about Nell (Anni Finsterer) the barmaid as he reclines. But there's no room for fond feelings back on the Kennedy plot, as Archie is jealous because Mick has given Philomac a pair of boots and told him to move his things into the old man's bunkhouse. He scolds him that he will always be a blackfella and that he will never be allowed to take over his father's land, just as he was deprived of his inheritance when he was captured and sold into what has amounted to a lifetime of slavery. 

Back in town, a travelling showman (Sotiris Tzelios) uses a handcranked projector to give a screening of Charles Tait's The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), which mythologises the exploits of the notorious 19th-century outlaw, Ned Kelly. But Fletcher stops the show, as he tears down the screen and curses the loss of a good man on a wild goose chase. He spends the night in Nell's bed and suggests that they buy some land and rear cattle with her adolescent daughter, Olive (Luka May Glynn-Cole). The next morning, however, he finds Sam and Lizzie sitting outside his office waiting to surrender. 

Judge Taylor (Matt Day) arrives to hear the case and immediately has Lizzie released. He also summons Archie as a witness Mick drives him into town. Fletcher gloats to Sam that they will hang him high from the gallows being built in the main street. But Taylor insists on due process and sets up his court outdoors because he refuses to hold a trial in the pub. He calls Doctor Shields (Kenneth Longbottom), who describes March's wounds, and Archie, who explains how he had gone to find Philomac after March had chained him to a rock. When Lizzie takes the stand, however, she is too ashamed and afraid to reply when asked about March's behaviour towards Lucy and Fred takes her back to her seat (they are using the movie show's deckchairs) without her saying a word to help her hapless husband. 

Sam is less reticent, however, and not only taunts Fletcher that he would never have caught him unless he had given himself in, but he also reveals that he only returned to town because Lizzie is expecting. When Taylor asks whether he could be the father, Sam reveals that he can't have children before describing how he shot March when he tried to blast his way into Fred's house. On finishing his testimony, he stares across at Fletcher, who is sitting stern-faced behind the bench. 

Taylor reconvenes the court the next morning, while Fred is reading from the Bible outside Sam's cell. The townsfolk are already rowdy from drinking in the pub and protect vociferously when Taylor announces that Sam had killed March in justified self-defence and is, therefore, free to go. When the mob close in, Fletcher raises his pistol and they back away, allowing him to remove the shackles and deliver Sam to Fred's safe keeping. Fletcher sees Fred, Sam, Lizzie and Lucy to the edge of town, while Mick bundles Philomac into his buggy. As they ride away, a shot rings out and Sam slumps back into Lizzie's lap. 

Fred curses the coward who pulled the trigger and despairs of a country that can allow this kind of barbarism to go unchecked. Cross-cuts show Fred striding away from the murder scene towards a rainbow in the leaden sky and him supervising the raising of a church. Back at the Kennedy place, Philomac drops March's gold watch into the creek. 

As the credits roll to Johnny Cash singing `(There'll Be) Peace in the Valley for Me', it's hard not to think back to New Wave classics like Fred Schepisis's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), as well as more recent tracts on bush injustice like Rolf De Heer's The Tracker (2007). Tranter and McGregor based their script on a similar trial in Central Australia in the 1920s, but Thornton also draws on the mythology of the Hollywood Western in exploring the way in which the indigenous populations have been portrayed through the genre's history. He also foregrounds the landscape around the MacDonnell Ranges, as he addresses both the connection between the First Australians and the soil and the outsider status of the white colonials who subjugated them and confiscated their ancestral homeland.

Despite the stellar presence of Sam Neill and Bryan Brown, Thornton keeps the narrative focus on the fugitives, who are played with dignified reserve by non-professionals Hamilton Morris and Natassia Gorey-Furber. Similarly delivering their lines in pidgin English and the Aboriginal Arrernte language, Gibson John and the Doolan twins also make a fine impression, although Philomac proves an elusive character, as Thornton denies us psychological access as the boy tries to work out where he stands in a situation he has caused by daring to run away and complicated by stealing from the corpse. 

Teaming with son Dylan River on the visuals, Thornton atmospherically contrasts the ochres, silvers and greens of the scrubland with the hues rippling the dawn and dusk skies. He and editor Nick Meyers also make astute use of dissolves and superimpositions to convey the vastness of the wilderness and the insignificance of the humans traversing it. But Meyers also paces proceedings with a precision that carries over into Tony Cronin's exceptional production design and Heather Wallace's soiled and sweat-stained costumes. Together, they have created a frontier dystopia that seems to belong to another age. Yet, around the time this story was unfolding, Don Bradman was making his Test debut in the baggy green.