Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 20/9/2018)

With her distinctive double-colour hair, Agnès Varda is instantly recognisable. By contrast, the enigmatic JR refuses to divulge his name or emerge from behind his hipster shades and pork pie hat. He is 55 years younger than the 88 year-old cat lover and they explain in an opening montage how they didn't come to meet on a country road, at a Parisian bus stop or in a bakery or a disco. Instead, JR came to Varda's home in Rue Daguerre after being enthralled by the strength of her image-making in films like Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962) and Murs Murs (1980), which celebrated public mural art in Los Angeles. Having been equally impressed with the collage of faces he affixed to the floor of the Pantheon and his portraits of Cuban women, Varda was happy to welcome her guest and pay a reciprocal visit to his studio to meet his co-workers Émile Abinal, Guillaume Cagniard and Étienne Rougery-Herbaut.

Describing himself as a `photograffeur', JR uses a specially converted van with a lens painted on the side to blow up snapshots in order to plaster them on walls and structures in order to comment on the sitter and their milieu. Varda is taken by the fact he reminds her of her old friend Jean-Luc Godard, who also likes to hide behind dark glasses and she vows to coax JR into posing without them, just as she had persuaded Godard (then the enfant terrible of the nouvelle vague) in the early 1960s. 

Agreeing to hit the road and see what happens, Varda and JR drive into the French countryside and make their first stop at the village of L'Escale. Inviting locals to sit in the booth in the back of the van with a baguette in front of their mouths, JR paste the pictures on to a long wall to create the impression that everyone is tucking into the same enormous sandwich. The onlookers are suitably amused by the conceit and Varda is delighted that JR is introducing her to new people to photograph so that their faces don't fall down the holes in her memory. 

Prompted by a collection of postcards that Varda had of some miners, the pair head north and reach the pit village of Bruay-la-Buissière in the Pas-de-Calais. JR photographs Varda against two vast slagheaps before they discover Jeannine Carpentier, who is the last resident of a row of cottages that have long been due for demolition. Having spent her entire life in the family home, however, Jeannine has no intention of leaving and she remembers how excited her siblings used to get when their father came home with the leftovers from his buttered baguette, which they used to call `alouette bread' because it had become gritty from being underground. 

As the team paste snaps of bygone miners on the terrace facade, strangers sidle up to Varda to confide their memories of working down the pit or of scrubbing their father's back when he got home from a bruising day in the bowels of the earth. Jeannine is deeply moved to see her own face looking back from the brickwork of her home and Varda muses on her valiant determination to stay put, as she sits on a bench near an imposing rustic church with her feet dangling because they don't reach the floor. 

Concurring that leaving things to chance is the best way to proceed, Varda and JR hit the road again. He recalls meeting farmer Clemens Van d'Ungern while hitchhiking and returns to Chérence in the Val-d'Oise to post a full-length portrait on the wooden doors of his barn. Clemens loves his machinery and his gadgets and admits that he is more of a passenger on his tractor than an old-fashioned farmhand. But he is also available for hire and works for several of his neighbours, even though most communal forms of farming have disappeared. Fortunately, he enjoys being alone, although he is glad to have a family to go home to and he jokes that JR's image of him shrugging with open palms will make him a celebrity in the district. 

Venturing south, the intrepid twosome fetch up in Bonnieux in the Vaucluse to meet Marie Dolivet and Jean-Paul Beaujon, the grandchildren of Émile and Émilie, who were so in love that he kidnapped her to overcome the disapproval of her family. The photograph of the couple is yellowed and torn, but JR finds a cameo frame for it and the siblings pose for selfies beneath the image pasted to the wall of Marie's home. The local gendarme joshes JR about needing a permit to put is scaffolding on the street and accompanies them to the café to meet Nathalie Schleehauf, a waitress who has agreed to pose with a parasol and a straw hat for a picture to be attached to the gable end of a row opposite her workplace. 

Vincent Gils brings his mother's wedding parasol and Nathalie feels self-conscious as she perches on a low wall with her bare feet dangling for JR to photograph. While the pictures are developing, he follows Vincent to the church for a lesson in bell ringing. Within hours of Nathalie's picture going up, it has become an Internet sensation and her children come to take selfies in front of it and to stand and tickle her giant paper feet. But, while Varda is delighted with the effects, she is disappointed by Nathalie's embarrassment at having become an accidental icon. 

Passing through fields of sunflowers, JR and Varda drive on to the Usine Arkéma at Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. The town cinema owner, Jimmy, had told them all about Varda and they were keen to collaborate. As the factory makes hydrochloric acid, there is lots of salt in the storage bay and Varda and JR strike a pose as if they are explorers in an Arctic wilderness. They meet Claude Fiaert, Patrick Bernard and Amaury Bossy, the youngest worker on site, who is part of the health and safety team and is pleased to have a meaningful job. He's good at table tennis and Varda watches on as he plays JR on a tiny table with upturned cans for a net. 

They have decided to use the long, low walls of a passageway for their pasting and the workforce is charmed by the idea that they will all appear in the same place at once, as shift patterns mean that they are rarely all on site at any one time. JR makes them extend their arms above their heads and lean to one side so that it looks as though one group is reaching out to the next. The staff members are pleased to see managers mingling with underlings and Varda is touched that Didier Campy Comte is going to remain on the wall even though this is his last day before retiring. But, before they leave, Varda and JR can't resist decorating the water tower standing over the site with dozens of photographic fish. 

We flash back to see Varda and JR snapping the fish in the market and a graphic eyeball match cut takes us to an ophthalmologist's surgery, where Varda is having injections for the condition that blurs her sight. She jokes about the needle being nothing compared to the razor blade that slashes the pupil in Luis Buñuel's Un Chien andalou (1928) and JR tries to cheer her up by positioning a human eye chart on the steps of the clinic. He is impressed that she can remain so cheerful in the face of physical discomfort and decline and she mischievously avers that it's important to retain one's sense of perspective.  

A drone shot swoops over the abandoned settlement of Pirou-Plage in Normandy, which has been reclaimed as a `ghost village' by local artists. Folks of all ages come from the neighbouring villages to picnic and participate in a DIY art event and Varda devotes herself to people watching, while JR and his crew snap, snip and stick. In a Tatiesque tribute to Jour de Fête (1949), a uniformed postman cycles in with a letter `N' to give to a woman in the window of a ramshackle house. Yet there's a slight sense of artifice that this unfinished estate has been commandeered for a demonstration in how strangers from diverse backgrounds can rub along if they have a common goal.

Varda has known village postman Jacky Patin for a long time and she shows him the painting he once did for her. She repays the favour by having a full-figure portrait appended to a wall in the village and he is amused that the shutters of the house open across his face because he thinks he has an ugly mug. He once cycled everywhere with a radio on the handlebars and the farmers used to give him melons and tomatoes. But he now uses a yellow van, although this enables him to run errands for his elderly customers. 

Descending on the picturesque town of Reillanne in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, the pair create an open-air portrait gallery and 75 year-old bric-a-brac artist Pony-Soleil-Air-Sauvage-Nature comes to watch. With his parchment skin, hair in gnarled dreadlocks and snaggle teeth forming a cheeky smile, he takes Varda to his dwelling in the woods, which is full of pieces he has fashioned from items others have discarded. He claims to have inherited his warmth from his father and his coolness from his mother and, while he has to make do on a basic pension because he cheerfully admits that he hasn't worked a day in his life, he is essentially content. 

As they are watched by one of Varda's cats in her back garden, she opines that every new person she meets feels like the last one. JR tells her to stop playing the doomed granny and she ticks him off for being a cocky free spirit. But they are soon on the road again and calling in on goat breeder Patricia Mercier at Goult in the Vaucluse. Having visited a factory farmer who burns off the horns of his herd when they are kids to stop them fighting (and make them more docile when it comes to milking), Varda and JR are pleased to see that Patricia's animals are as nature intended. She maintains around 60 goats with one assistant and they do all their milking by hand. Similarly, she only uses natural ingredients in her cheese and Varda likes her all the more because she also keeps around a dozen cats. 

Local man Abdeslam Ould-Ja is amused by the giant close-up of a glaring goat on the wall of an outbuilding and vows to join the fight to outlaw de-horning. He suggests that farmers put rubber balls on the tips of the horns to stop them fighting and wonders whether using different colours could help them identify their animals. But, when Varda goes to take JR's picture in front of the paste-up, she gets cross with him for refusing to remove his sunglasses and they stomp off across a field in opposite directions. 

Varda recalls the black-and-white photograph she had taken in 1954 of a white goat that had fallen off a cliff and landed on the stony beach below. She had posed a naked man and a child in the background and revisits Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, which JR also knows well from a motorcycling holiday. He had remembered a Second World War blockhouse that had tumbled off the cliff and landed on its side and he brings the team to work out how long the tides will give him  to cover it with an image of Guy Bourdin, a fashion photographer friend of Varda's who had posed naked for her in the ruins of an abandoned house. She suggests attaching this picture to an unfinished cinderblock house, as they are always looking for beautiful settings rather than evocative or authentic ones. 

JR teases her that it's a terrible idea, but feels so guilty at mocking her that he agrees to post Bourdin on the Nazi fortification. Varda takes him to her friend's old house and to the beach hut where she had positioned him for another picture. As the wind whips around them, JR strikes the same pose and Varda is clearly touched. While the crew begin the tricky task of pasting Bourdin's portrait with the tide getting nearer, Varda chats to the major of nearby Sainte-Marguerite, who reveals that the pillbox was deliberately pushed over the cliff in 1995. However, the fact that it landed on its side was a fortuitous accident and JR makes a wonderful job of arching Bourdin's image so that it looks as though he is slumbering in a giant military hammock. When they come to inspect their handiwork the next morning, however, they are saddened to see that it had been washed away by the tide. 

Hunkering down on the beach, JR declares that the elements make short work of the majority of his outdoor postings and Varda frets that Nature will sweep her away before she's had a chance to finish the film and take a photo of her co-director without his specs. While they're in Montjustin, they visit the graves of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his second wife, Martine Franck. Varda is struck by what a tiny cemetery it is and she discloses that she's not afraid of death because she doesn't expect there to be anything on the other side. 

Footling on, they take a break in a café and JR reveals that he has always had a soft spot for old ladies. He takes Varda to meet his 100 year-old grandmother, who has no problem with him always wearing his glasses and hat. However, she isn't in a particularly talkative mood and, so, the pair decamp to the docks at Port du Havre in the Seine-Maritime. Varda has never been to Le Havre before and sings a song she had learnt as a child. JR introduces her to Christophe, David and Denis, who had worked with him on a project to put a pair of eyes on the side of a ship and who support his contention that the docks are like a village. 

Varda goes to meet their wives, Nathalie Maurouard, Morgane Riou and Sophie Riou, who drives trucks on the waterfront. The three blondes are dressed in black and sit in a nearby field in much the same way that Godard posed his trio of students in his pre-Dziga Vertov Group outing, Un Film comme les autres (1968). The women are proud of the solidarity between the dockworkers and they readily agree to pose for pictures that will be plastered across a stack of shipping containers on the wharf. 

As JR and Varda take a crane to inspect the work, they recall the last time they were in a lift together. They had gone to the Louvre to parody the sequence in Godard's Bande à part (1964), in which Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur had charged through the galleries. Varda had plonked herself down in a wheelchair and allowed JR to push her through the Renaissance section, as she whispered the names of the artists they were skating past before they came to a halt in front of a couple of Giuseppe Archimboldo's. It's a gleeful digression, as is the dockside timelapse montage that concludes with Nathalie, Morgane and Sophie sitting (with varying degrees of confidence) in the open maw of the containers immediately beneath the faces of the container totems towering above the port. 

Varda hadn't been able to see clearly when the women had started flapping their arms like wings. So, JR takes extreme close-ups of her eyes and the soles of her feet so he can affix them to the side of tankers that will be pulled by trains across France. In this way, Varda can visit places she has never been and a railway worker in the marshalling yard thinks if's a sweet idea, even though he isn't entirely convinced that it's art. In order to show her gratitude, Varda bundles JR on to a train for Switzerland. En route, she plays him a clip from Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald, which she made with Godard and Karina in 1961 and used as the film-within-the-film in Cleo From 5 to 7. He is excited to be going to meet one of his heroes. But Varda warns him that Godard can be unpredictable and that she's not seen him for a few years, even though he was once very close to her and film-maker husband, Jacques Demy. 

On arriving in Rolle, they stop at a café for some herbal tea before their 9.30am rendezvous. But there's no sign of Godard, who has written a cryptic message on the window that reminds Varda of the note he had sent her when Demy died. Unsure whether he is being cruel or touchingly apologetic, Varda is clearly shaken by his choice of words and she just about holds back the tears before calling Godard a `dirty rat' for letting her down. She scrawls a note of her own on the glass cursing him for his inhospitableness. Yet, she also appends a little heart and leaves a packet of his favourite brioches on the door handle.

They sit by Lake Geneva and JR wonders whether Godard was pranking her by challenging the narrative structure of her film. Varda is unsure, but certainly didn't appreciate the reference to her lost spouse and she smiles when JR tries to cheer her up by removing his shades. Amusingly, Varda blurs the shot to approximate her vision and they turn to gaze at the water, with Varda perhaps reflecting that the subtitle of his 1961 vignette was Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires, which translates as `Beware of the Dark Glasses'. 

If the pain wasn't so palpable, one might almost suspect that Varda had set up the climactic Godard no show, as this quirky Situationist road movie is strewn with references to the man, his films and his unpredictable ways. There seems little doubt that Varda is partly drawn to JR because he reminds her of her fickle, but phenomenally talented friend. But the personal politics surrounding this unhappy ending shouldn't be allowed to cloud the fact that this is a celebration of the best aspects of human nature. That said, it shouldn't be forgotten that Varda and JR barely scratch the surface of the social issues their raise on their tour and nor should it be overlooked that the vast majority of the faces that beam for the camera before being plastered on buildings in what are relatively cosy burghs are white. 

This evidently says more about the kind of people who would come forward to participate in such a joyous experiment than any selection policies. Varda has never been anything less than conclusive in her work and JR's choice of subject matter suggests likewise. But the social make-up of the sitters feels scarcely representative of Emmanuel Macron's France (or Marine Le Pen's for that matter) and suggests that this affectionate and occasionally whimsical odyssey doesn't have quite the same critical edge as Raymond Depardon's not entirely dissimilar documentary, Journal de France (2012), 

It might strike some that the notion of forgotten people seems a tad démodé in the age of instant imagery. But just as items are slipping through the holes in Varda's memory, so countless inhabitants of La France périphérique are at risk of falling between the cracks in an increasingly divided country. As she demonstrated with The Gleaners and I, Varda is such a compassionate and inquisitive humanist that she would strive to ensure that no one gets left behind. But it's harder to fathom JR's political stance from this elusive appearance, as the nature of the project dictates that the onetime graffiti artist spends more time problem solving with his team than he does communing with the common folk. Yet, while Varda provides the film's driving heartbeat in returning to features for the first time since The Beaches of Agnès (2008), JR proves a consistently empathetic companion and a more than willing apprentice. Few would complain if they felt the need to reunite.

Until now, siblings Jacqui and David Morris have been best known for McCullin (2012), their BAFTA-nominated profile of war photographer Don McCullin. This situation seems set to change, however, with the arrival of Nureyev, which is being released to mark the 25th anniversary of the passing of one of the finest dancers in ballet history. What makes this documentary particularly enticing for aficionados, however, is the fact it contains around 16 minutes of dance footage, much of it previously been seen, which the film-makers had discovered after they were presented with 20 boxes of video tapes that the Nureyev Foundation had come across in an archive at the New York Public Library. 

An opening caption explains how ballet was saved from extinction in Russia after the 1917 Revolution by Communist zealots who were prepared to overlook its aristocratic associations in order to exploit its propagandist potential. Violinist Yehudi Menuhin opines that Russians are able overcome oppression and poverty and dance with freedom on the stage because they have added fire in their bellies. Rudolf Nureyev must have had more fire than most, as he was born near Lake Baikal in 1938 while his mother was travelling by train journey to join his soldier father in Manchuria. 

A stylised recreation shows a woman dancing in front of a ruined building in the snow to symbolise Nureyev's tough childhood. But, when chat show host Michael Parkinson attempts to coax him into opening up about his youth Nureyev contents himself with saying that no one had invested in his nascent talent and that he had been lucky to have survived being evacuated from Moscow. Over newsreel footage, historian Evan Mawdsley confirms that life for refugees in the South Urals Mountains would have been harsh and dance partner Gabriela Komleva recalls her mother telling her that people used to strip the bark off trees to eat. 

In his Memoirs (read by Sian Phillips), Nureyev recalls being called a beggar when he went to kindergarten in Bashkir, where being the son of a Tartar Muslim made him a target for bullies. As he tells Dick Cavett, however, he knew he wanted to dance from an early age, even though his father, Hamet, was dead against the idea. Consequently, he had been forced to sneak around in order to study with Anna Udeltsova, who had danced with the Ballet Russe and had reinforced the love of dance that had first been sparked when Nureyev's mother, Farida, had smuggled the entire family into the theatre on one ticket to see Song of the Cranes on 31 December 1945.

Friend Tamara Zakrzhevskaya recalls Nureyev getting lessons in the Young Pioneers around the time that Soviet premier Joseph Stalin died in 1953 and she suggests that local administrators pushed for him to go to Leningrad to pursue his ambitions in order to bring a little reflected glory to their region. However, Hamet was furious with his son for bringing unmanly shame on the house and dance critic Clement Crisp reckons that the sacrifices Nureyev made at this time shaped his dance character, as he had an energy and commitment that his first teacher, Alexander Pushkin, could mould. 

Rising rapidly through the ranks of the Kirov Ballet, Nureyev became a soloist and his balance and dynamism are evident in an unlabelled monochrome clip. Partner Alla Osipenko remembers these as dark times and describes how her dressmaker mother had taught her clients a secret knock that would give her time to hide her cloth if someone had informed on her. Impresario Victor Hochhauser recalls how quickly the newcomer became a star, but Nureyev still tells an anecdote about having his mattress taken away as punishment for going to the theatre without permission. Friends Leonid Romankov and Liuba Myasnikova aver that he enjoyed spending time with them because he came from poorly educated stock and was grateful to them for teaching him about poetry, painting and music. 

Zakrzhevskaya recalls Nureyev accompanying her to literature classes, while Myasnikova remembers his fondness for illicit rock`n'roll, even though he had not been able to dance to it in case he injured himself. This was a time of repression and subterfuge and Western influences often had to be smuggled in. But, while America had fridges and washing machines, the Soviets felt they had the best corps de ballet. Moreover, as Dr Jill Stuart points out, they were also ahead in the space race and Nureyev was seen as a symbol of new Russian masculinity alongside Yuri Gagarin. 

As First Secretary Nikita Khruschev was keen to show how progressive Soviet culture was, the Kirov was allowed to travel to France and Osipenko jokes about how the company took to Parisian nightlife and often snuck past the guards at their hotel to go clubbing. Nureyev's colleagues were aware that he preferred men and were concerned that his sexuality made it dangerous for him to kick against the constraints that were being placed upon him. But Nureyev was never one to conform and dancer Pierre Lacotte recalls him plotting his escape after befriending socialite Clara Saint, who had once been engaged to the son of Culture Minister André Malraux. 

As the tour continued, Nureyev's differences with artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev became more severe and it was suggested that he should be sent back to Moscow rather than be allowed to travel to London. Osipenko remembers being heartbroken and promising to use her influence to get Nureyev on the plane at Le Bourget Airport on 16 June 1961. When Saint arrived, she realised that Nureyev had made up his mind to defect and contacted a couple of French detectives who explained that they would be able to protect him if he was fully aware of what he planned to do. When he assured them he was ready to take the risk, they swept him away from the KGB because (as he said in his memoirs), he was a bird who could not be kept in a net. As he was left alone in a room with doors leading back to his old life and on to a new chance, Nureyev felt his dignity being returned to him and, consequently, he had no hesitation in choosing France and freedom. 

Within a week, he was dancing The Sleeping Beauty with the Grand Ballet de Marquis de Cuévas and he tells Parkinson how the French Communist Party had sent provocateurs to throw smoke bombs and broken glass on to the stage in a bid to disrupt his performance. Partner Ghislaine Thesmar recalls him being afraid, but also him being determined to dance well and take decisive steps away from his past. As Jill Stuart reminds us that Nureyev's defection came midway between Gagarin going into space and the Berlin Wall being erected, it shows how blatantly he was being used as a pawn in the Cold War. He was relieved, therefore, to holiday on the Rivera and enjoyed a photo session with Richard Avedon, who understood him instantly and later wrote that he could sense Nureyev revelling narcissistically in his beauty and enjoying being the centre of attention in an orgy of one. 

Biographer John Gruen recalls how Nureyev met Danish dancer Erik Bruhn and prima balleina Dame Antoinette Sibley agrees that he was both beautifull and gifted. It was love at first sight, as Pushkin had told Nureyev years before that he could learn from Bruhn and he had seen footage of him in action. While they started a new life, however, Zakrzhevskaya was thrown out of the university for failing to detect an enemy of the state, Myasnikova was denied promotion for a decade, and Osipenko was barred from leaving the USSR for the next 10 years. By contrast, Farida Nureyev refused to denounce her son in public and threw away her Party membership documents in disgust at him being driven out of his homeland. 

While Sibley, Leslie Caron and biographer Meredith Daneman enthuse about the poise and precision of Margot Fonteyn, a passing mention is made of her bizarre role in an attempted coup in Panama in 1959. We see a clip of Les Sylphides, in which a little girl watches Fonteyn dance from the wings, while Daneman explains that she had become a star touring the country during the Second World War and performing for the troops. But, according to Dame Ninette de Valois, the founder of the Royal Ballet, and Sir John Tooley, the former director of the Royal Opera House, the Panama incident led to Fonteyn being excluded from the charmed circle,

When she arranged a charity gala, however, Nureyev wrote to ask if they could dance together and, despite the 19-year age difference, she agreed and they did scenes from Giselle and Swan Lake. Lady Deborah McMillan, the widow of choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan, remembers how exquisite they were together on stage and we hear Fonteyn declaring that she thought their success came from mutual respect and a determination to overcome the challenges that their age disparity created. 

Biographer Nigel Gosling reflects on the tensions that Nureyev's new approach to the ballet created. But Fonteyn trusted him implicitly and they became ballet's equivalent to The Beatles. As `Please Please Me' plays on the soundtrack, the screen splits and we see Nureyev and Fonteyn on The Ed Sullivan Show and crowds gathering at stage doors to scream for their exotic hero. Sian Phillips recalls Nureyev making a grand entrance at a party by downing a bottle of cherry brandy and walking along a table and picking a hairpiece off the head of a female guest. Rather than be outraged, the victim was charmed and Phillips (who became a friend) avows that he had this effect on people. 

In their TV interview, Dick Cavett asks Nureyev about his famous temper and he smiles about giving warning lights if he's harassed over a futile question. He muses on his Tartar heritage and how this makes him different from the Russians (as we see footage of Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, 1938) and he is proud of his roots and the contribution that they make to his artistry. Ted Murphy, the master carpenter at the English National Opera, remembers Nureyev being dedicated to his art and how he used to get cross with himself if his performance wasn't up to scratch. Then again, he often took his anger out on others. 

Betty Oliphant, the co-founder of the National Ballet School of Canada, tells a witty story about one student being so thrilled that Nureyev had spoken to him that he had failed to realise that he had sworn at him. Heather Watts, principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, recalls him being a phenomenon and describes how he and Fonteyn were arrested for attending a pot party in San Francisco in 1967. We see footage of them being booked at the police station and Nureyev winking gently at a camera being thrust into his face. As they leave in a taxi, they look quite calm and Watts suggests that Nureyev had a sense of superiority that made him simultaneously difficult and irresistible. 

While Gruen, Sibley and dance partner Vivi Flindt ponder the nature of Nureyev's relationship with Bruhn, dancer David Chase uses the Balcony Scene from the film of the Royal Ballet's Romeo and Juliet to consider the depth of feeling that Nureyev had for Fonteyn and whether they were lovers as well as partners. But, if Nureyev had to keep his counsel over Fonteyn, he had to be even more circumspect about the USSR, as his mother and siblings still lived there and he knew that they would be made to suffer if he spoke out. 

Intriguingly, Mawdsley reveals that Swan Lake was often shown on Soviet television during Leonid Brezhnev's presidency during times of political or diplomatic upheaval, as it had a soothingly melodic effect and reminded viewers of the communal nature of the swans. However, ballet isn't always so placid and Lacotte and Thesmar recall the tempestuous arguments between Bruhn and Nureyev, as the younger man began to steal his lover's thunder. We see them both dancing with Maria Tallchief on American television and hear that when he was forced to make a choice between love and art, Nureyev always chose to dance, as that was what he lived to do. 

Around the time his romance broke down, Nureyev also parted company with Fonteyn, as she felt compelled to nurse husband Roberto `Tito' Arias after he survived an assassination attempt in 1964. She continued dancing for a while to pay his medical bills, but her need to be seen to be doing the right wifely thing in public eventually led to the end of her partnership with Nureyev. Moreover, in 1974, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the star of the Kirov Ballet, defected in Canada and stole a bit of Nureyev's thunder. But his arrival also made it more difficult for Nureyev to try and get his mother and sister out of the USSR after it signed up to a human rights charter. 

Cavett asks Nureyev if he feels any nostalgia for the Motherland, but he insists that he will only start to miss it after he stops dancing. Yet, as Janet Eilber, the artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, reveals, he was moving into new forms of dance in the mid-1970s and Randal Bourscheidt, the founder of the Estate Project for Artists With AIDS, remembers the thrill of seeing Nureyev attempting something so different. But Myasnikova notes how such work was frowned upon in Russia, with his former tutors disowning him for betraying the classical repertoire.

Julia Gruen, of the Keith Haring Foundation, remembers how AIDS began to impact upon the gay community in the 1980s and Chase curses Ronald Reagan for ignoring it and praises Princess Diana for having the courage to stand up and be counted. Eilber is saddened that a generation of dancers was wiped out through no fault of its own. But it was cancer that accounted for Bruhn and Nureyev went to his bedside and delivered the eulogy at his funeral. 

Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev had assumed power in Russia. Nureyev compared him to the Second Coming and had high hopes that things might change for the better. Myasnikova wrote to inform him that his mother was dying and he got to travel back to see her during a special three-day visit. He also took up a directorship at the Paris Opera and Lacotte and Crisp recall the energy of the performances he staged. But, while there, he discovered he was HIV+ and artist James Wyeth drew some remarkable portraits while Nureyev was staying with him. 

Ten days after the Berlin Wall came down, Nureyev danced in his homeland again on 20 November 1989. During this trip, he was also reunited with Udeltsova, who was now 100 years old, and Myasnikova was delighted to be present at the deeply touching scene. However, while in Russia, Nureyev learned that Fonteyn was in financial difficulty and he paid for her medical care until the end of her life in February 1991. Daneman recalls their final meeting when each was dismayed by the ill-health of the other and she reveals that Nureyev was crushed by her death and would phone people in the night to sob in his distress. We see the scene from Romeo and Juliet when Nureyev places Fonteyn's body on the bed and mourns her in a way that makes the quotation from Elizabeth II about grief being the price we pay for love all the more pertinent. 

In December 1991, Gorbachev falls in a coup and Mawdsley reveals that, for once, a TV transmission of Swan Lake failed to do its duty. Nureyev had his last birthday in Russia with Myasnikova, who also got to see him during his last weeks in hospital. But he went out with a triumphant production of La Bayadère at the Paris Opera and Crisp recalls the emotion at his curtain call, as everyone knew that he was saying goodbye. As we hear `All I Have to Do Is Dream' by the Everly Brothers, Flindt and Sibley recall the privilege of dancing with Nureyev and declare that he gave his life to ballet. 

It's always frustrating when film-makers presenting archive material opt against using annotative captions. Not everyone watching will be an expert on the material and it would not have hurt this compelling portrait (which has been variously subtitled online as `All the World His Stage' and `Orgy of One') if the Morrises had followed James Erskine's lead in labelling the routines contained in his memorable John Curry tribute, The Ice King. 

The dances are eventually identified during the closing credit crawl, which also contains a reminder that, while AIDS can be managed in the West, ignorance, fear and prejudice mean that it remains a death sentence in many parts of the world and that it needs to be conquered everywhere, as it has most certainly not gone away. While timely, this statement is somewhat ironic given that Nureyev kept his own illness secret until the day before he died at the age of 54. 

But this is much more a celebration of Nureyev's life than a lament on the nature of his passing. As is perhaps inevitable, in lauding the inspired dancer, the flawed man is given a rather easy ride, which was not always the case in such previous studies as Peter Batty's Fonteyn and Nureyev: The Perfect Partnership (1985), Patricia Foy's Rudolf Nureyev: A Documentary (1991), Teresa Griffith's Omnibus film, Dancing Through Darkness (1997), Tony Palmer's Margot (2005) and Richard Curson Smith's BBC teleplay, Nureyev: Dance to Freedom (2015). Moreover, there are gaps, with no mention being made of Nureyev's long relationship with American dancer Robert Tracy, with whom he shared an AIDS diagnosis and to whom he had confided his hopes of fathering a son with Nastassja Kinski, his co-star in James Toback's misfiring drama, Exposed (1983). 

Instead, much emphasis is placed on the choreography staged on an open stage in some woodland to illustrate key scenes from Nureyev's life, such as his friends dancing in front of a full bookcase to illustrate his `kitchen culture' education and the passing of flourescent lighting tubes to convey his struggle to defect at Le Bourget. No self-respecting docuementarist currently feels they can do without reconstructed passages and these Terpshichorean interpretations make perfect sense. But, considering the VHS treasure trove that has been unearthed, the majority of viewers would presumably rather watch Nureyev in his pomp.

Programmes like The Only Way Is Essex have given scripted reality a bad name. But Denver-based Chinese director Chloé Zhao demonstrated that there was another way to produce docu-fiction with Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), which chronicled the relationship between Lakota Sioux siblings John and Jashaun Winters on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. While making that film, Zhao met horse trainer Brady Jandreau and she turns to his tale in The Rider, a poignant study of life on the modern-day frontier that would make a perfect double-bill fit with Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete. 

Checking himself out of hospital after having a metal plate inserted into his skull after a rodeo fall, 20 year-old Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) returns home to examine the livid Frankensteinian scar on the right-hand side of his head. Popping pills for the pain, he wraps his hair in cling film to prevent the wound from getting wet in the shower before going out to the stable to see his beloved horse, Gus. 

Brady lives in the South Dakota Badlands with his loving, but wayward father, Wayne (Tim Jandreau), and his younger sister, Lilly (Lilly Jandreau), who suffers from Asperger Syndrome. Mother Mari died in 2013 and Brady goes to visit her grave in a simple cemetery on the sprawling plain and, because he is afflicted by palsy, he has to use his left hand to relax the grip of his right fingers around a model horse he finds in the unkempt grass. 

Despite the doctor advising him never to ride again, Brady tells boss Frank (Leroy Pourier) that he'll be back in the saddle as soon as he can. He also reassures Lilly that he'll make a full recovery and she sings a song to cheer him up. When buddies Cat Clifford, James Calhoon and Tanner Langdeau (all playing themselves) come calling, they tease him about the scar before taking him into the scrubland to drink beers beside a campfire. They pray for their friend Lane Scott, who is now a paraplegic after his own rodeo accident. Yet, as Cat sings to his guitar, Tanner urges Brady not to give up because a true cowboy ignores the pain. 

After a few weeks of sitting around the house watching television, Brady rouses himself to see Gus and drops into the hospital to visit Lane. He can only communicate using his left hand and he jokes that Brady needs to rub dirt in his wound to help it heal faster. They watch video clips of Lane riding bulls and he grins with fond recognition, even though his reckless courage eventually laid him low. This ingrained thrill prompts Brady to take Lilly to the rodeo and his old posse are surprised to see him. He helps out on the pen gate and hollers his support for the riders, but senses that his own day is done. 

In a nearby bar, Bill (Allen Reddy) offers Brady the chance to train one of his more stubborn horses, while Terry Dawn (Terri Dawn Pourier) invites him to smoke a joint after he flips out at the sight of Tanner and Cat playing with Lilly. They drive out into the wilderness and Lilly sings at the moon, while Terry Dawn suggests that discretion might be the better part of valour and that Brady needs to find something to occupy his time and his mind. When the landlord calls for the rent arrears, Brady applies for a job at the local supermarket and puts on a brave face when one of his rodeo rivals, Victor Chasing Hawk (Derrick Janis), comes to his checkout. 

While he continues to convince himself that he will return to training horses, Lilly refuses Wayne's attempts to make her wear a bra, as she is now 15. But she takes her scissors to the latest garment and Brady is amused that they share a stubborn streak. He asks Cat to create a tribute tattoo to Lane on his back and tells him that their friend still harbours hopes of returning to the ring. However, Brady's own aspirations take a hit when Wayne sells Gus to their neighbour, Todd (Todd O'Brian) and they argue over the fact that Wayne drinks and gambles away the pittance he brings into the house. Rising early, Brady wanders out to the field to say goodbye to Gus, who allows him to ride bareback as the sun comes up. 

Any doubts about Brady's ability to handle horses are quelled during a training session with Bill's spirited stallion. Initially, the animal bucks and backs away when Brady tries to approach him. But he is soon standing calmly and allowing Brady to ride him around the pen. So, when he pays a call on Victor and learns that a colt named Apollo needs a little TLC, Brady considers buying him. He is surprised when Wayne offers to stump up the cash and feels so confident while putting Apollo through his paces that he asks Frank (who has a hook for a right hand) if he can resume full-time training.

A montage follows, in which Brady gets to know Apollo and tames some of Frank's wilder broncs. He rides one into the scrub and gets it used to gunfire, but he also has hairy moments when the palsy in his hand prevents him from pulling on a control rope in the corral. While out with Apollo, however, he has a vomiting fit and keels over. He wakes to find himself in hospital, where the doctor warns him that he is heading for serious trouble if he insists on defying her advice. In an effort to conform, Brady gives his rodeo gear to James. But he feels so emasculated that he challenges him to a wrestling bout and Cat looks on anxiously as they fight and Brady ignores a submission call to prove that he's not completely washed up. 

As he works on his friend's new tattoo, Cat tells Brady that he needs to let go and find a new path. But the ink on Lane's back, `Say I Won't and I Will', pretty much sums up Brady's attitude. He joins him in a rehab session that allows Lane to straddle a wooden horse and Brady encourages him to whoop as he pulls on the reins. Seemingly aware that this could be his own fate unless he quits, Brady gives Lane a long, lingering hug before he departs and he has to pull over when his emotions get the better of him on the drive home. 

Embarrassed when a couple of young fans recognise him at the store and pose for photos, Brady returns home to find Apollo missing from his pen. He notices blood on the grass and realises that the animal must have injured itself in its struggle to escape. When he finds him on the plain with its hind leg tattered from chafing against a combination of rope and barbed wire, he knows that he has to put the creature out of his misery. But he can't bring himself to pull the trigger and Wayne has to do the deed, while Brady walks away and whistles for his mount. 

Feeling crushed, he tells Lilly that a horse that had been as badly injured as he had been would have been put down. So, he bundles his saddle into the back of his pick-up truck and, ignoring Wayne's pleading, Brady goes to the rodeo. Welcomed by his friends, he prepares his equipment to ride and tests the flexibility of his restricted hand. But, as he stands in the pen and looks down on the agitated animal in the stall, he catches sight of Wayne and Lilly peering through the perimeter fence and realises that he can't allow self-pity and pig-headedness to inflict any more misery on them. Thus, he clasps Cat by the hand and wishes him luck before sidling over to his family. 

As the film ends, Brady goes to visit Lane, who signs for him not to give up on his dreams. They watch old clips of Lane in his heyday before Brady takes his hands and encourages him to pull on the reins and ride Gus across the prairie, where they can all be free. A closing dedication `to all the riders who live their lives 8 seconds at a time' drives home the theme that this is a way of life rather than a lifestyle choice, as the cowboys continuing a tradition that remains at the core of America's image of itself have to be on horseback to feel alive. 

Less an attempt to reinvent the Western than to relevantise it, this is a mournful reflection on the decline of the Midwest that leaves viewers to draw their own political conclusions. Rusty engines are more common than thoroughbreds on the farms depicted here, while there seem to be as many queuing to risk their lives in the pens as there are fans cheering in the stands. But, while Zhao very much has her finger on the pulse, she follows Lucy Walker's profile of snowboarder Kevin Pearce, The Crash Reel (2013), in focusing more on the fragile nature of American masculinity than on the state of the nation. 

Drawing performances of admirable restraint from her non-professional cast, Zhao also examines the extent to which Brady's yearning to ride derives as much from his environment as from his need for adrenaline rushes. She dots proceedings with female characters, including Lilly and the much-lamented Mari. But there's no hint of Brady being interested in girls, as such is the depth of his devotion to his horses and his mates that there simply isn't any spare emotion left for romance. Ultimately, however, it's the love of his family that pulls him back from the brink, although there's little guarantee that they'll be following happy trials as they ride into the sunset.

Zhao treads the line between the dramatic and the everyday with impressive ease. But she is indebted to cinematographer Joshua James Richards, who had detoured to Yorkshire for Francis Lee's God's Own Country (2017) after shooting Songs My Brothers Taught Me. His mastery of the landscape is matched by his affinity with both the horses and the milieu Brady inhabits, which is brought to vivid life by Paul Knox and Ben Gieschen's exemplary sound design, which deftly combines the wind off the prairie, the buzz of the rodeo arena and the breathing and braying of the horses. 

Nathan Halpern's moody score and Alex O'Flinn's editing are also first rate. But the secret of the film's success likes in Zhao's intuitive casting, as, whether he's revealing his vulnerability or his tenacity, Brady Jandreau is a natural who more than holds his own alongside Robert Mitchum in Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952), Steve McQueen in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner (1972) or Robert Redford in Sydney Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979).

Since making a solid start to his career with Tattoo (2002) and The Family Jewels (2003), Stuttgart-born Robert Schwentke has been making modest waves in Hollywood with such workaday outings as Flightplan (2005), The Time Traveler's Wife (2009), RED (2010) and R.I,P,D. (2013), as well as the final two entries in the Divergent Series, Insurgent (2015) and Allegiant (2016). In returning to his native Germany for The Captain, however, Schwentke had made a bold political and stylistic statement that is bound to spark debate about the relationship between authority and latent evil. 

It's April 1945 and the end of the Second World War is still two weeks away when army deserter Willi Herold (Max Hubacher) flees from a jeep posse led by the sadistic Captain Junker (Alexander Fehling). Hiding under a protruding root in the woods, the 19 year-old corporal evades capture and spends the night in a deserted railway station with a skeletal straggler who had staggered along the tracks. He is pitchforked to death by farmers when the pair are caught stealing eggs from a barn and Herold stumbles on alone across the frozen fields. 

Eventually, he finds an abandoned car next to a small bonfire of official documents. On the backseat, Herold finds a basket of apples and a suitcase containing a pristine Luftwaffe captain's uniform. Changing into the warm, dry clothes, he looks at himself in the car mirror and likes what he sees. While juggling apples, he sings a song about Fortune smiling on him and practices giving out orders while sporting a monocle. But he falls silent when he sees the bedraggled Private Freytag (Milan Peschel) wandering towards him. He insists that he lost his unit during heavy fighting and helps Herold get the staff car out of a rut. Intrigued by the stranger's reaction to his uniform and his assumption that he has power, Herold allows Freytag to become his chauffeur and they drive to the nearest town to find an inn. 

The locals are initially indifferent to the captain, as they have long lost any respect or fear. But their demeanour changes when Herold reveals that he is on a special mission to discover what is happening behind the lines and has the authority to reimburse them for all items stolen by looters. Having savoured a roast dinner, Herold retires to his room. However, the innkeeper and his torch-brandishing friends drag a looter into the street beneath his window and demand justice. Steeling himself to sustain the deception, Herold puts a single bullet into the kneeling soldier's skull and returns to his room, where Freytag helps him off with his jacket and promises to wake him early so that they can make a swift getaway. 

Driving through the desolate countryside, the duo fetch up at a remote farm, where they hear the sound of music playing on the radio. Inside, they find a trio of deserters intimidating a farmer (Jörn Hentschel) and his wife (Rike Eckermann). But, even though Kipinski (Frederick Lau) suspects Herold is an impostor because his uniform trousers are such a poor fit, he decides to throw in his lot with the officer and asks to become attached to his unit. Recognising that there is safety in numbers, Herold amends their ID papers and allows another pair pulling an anti-aircraft gun to join their ranks. In order to keep up appearances, he orders them to fire at a plane passing overhead. But he taxes their loyalty when the staff car runs out of petrol and Herold insists on being pulled along by ropes. 

After a few miles, the exhausted Kipinski is about to challenge Herold's authority when a military police patrol rolls up and Captain Josef Sichner (Sascha Alexander Gersak) charges the unit with being deserters. Remaining in the car to gather his thoughts, Herold challenges Sichner's right to examine the papers of a brother officer and convinces him that he is on a mission approved by the Führer himself. Kipinski suppresses a smile at how bullishly Herold is maintaining his deception. But he faces a sterner test when Junker halts the convoy at a checkpoint and climbs into the back of the car and orders it to proceed to the nearby detainment camp. As they drive, Junker asks Herold where they have met before and he bluffs his way through a campaign conversation before Junker warns him that he never forgets a face. 

Junker insists on Herold joining him for a drink and introduces him to the commander of Camp II Aschendorfermoor, Schütte (Bernd Hölscher). He is keen to dispose of the looters and deserters wasting his precious resources and he complains to Herold that he is prevented from court-martialling them by Justice Department pen-pusher, Hansen (Waldemar Kobus). Thinking on his feet, Herold suggests that he might be able to do more than merely mention the problem to Hitler and Junker leaves confident that he has left the matter in good hands. On being shown into the barrack housing the `criminals',  however, Herold recognises men who are every bit as scared as he was when he was running through the woods. He inspects the front rows and allows Kipinksi to bludgeon one deserter and, when he finds a harmonica clasped in his hand, he orders the others to empty their pockets of any valuables. 

As a decent man caught up in a nightmare, Freytag asks Herold if they are doing the right thing. But he shrugs that they are already condemned to die and strides off to have lunch. He is interrupted, however, by Hansen, who asks him to delay further executions until he has spoken to his superiors and established Herold's credentials. Yet, when Hansen phones Dr Thiel, Herold swears that he only killed prisoners who resisted his inspection and Schütte is so impressed by his sang froid that he promises to contact the local Gauleiter to knock Thiel out of the loop and give Herold a free hand to dispense justice as he sees fit. 

Mocking him through his office window, Schütte watches Hansen receive phone confirmation that the Gestapo in Emden has handed jurisdiction to Herold. Turning away, Hansen sees the prisoners digging a mass grave near the perimeter fence and he closes his curtains as the first prisoners are summoned from the barrack. They are forced to sing a marching song, as they cross the compound and climb into the trench. As Herold and Schütte drive to the spot, the anti-aircraft gun is rolled into position and Herold covers his ears and lets out a scream as the deserters are mown down. Schütte orders some of his guards to finish off the wounded and Herold turns to see Freytag walk away in disgust after an officer with an arm in a sling vows to report such inhumanity to the highest authority. 

Angered by Freytag's attitude, Herold orders him to put one wounded prisoner out of his misery by climbing into the trench and walking across the corpses until he reaches him. As the floodlights beam down on the darkened camp, Freytag puts the fellow out of his misery and turns to salute. But, when quicklime is tossed into pit before it's covered over, however, one of the prisoners is still very much alive. Concerned that he will be implicated in the murder of 90 men, Hansen contacts Thiel and steers clear of the celebration dinner that Herold is hosting in the mess hall with Schütte and his wife, Gerda (Britta Hammelstein). 

While the soldiers eat, prisoners Roger (Samuel Finzi) and Schneider (Wolfram Koch) perform an anti-Semitic cabaret before Schütte and the camp brass band join them for a hearty rendition of `Band of Brothers'. This proves to be an ironic choice, as Kipinski picks a fight with one of the guards and the brawl spills outside into the courtyard. Amused by the mayhem, Herold calls Roger to the table and asks why he was arrested. Reluctant to condemn himself, Roger agrees to play a game of hypothetical accusations that starts with Herold admitting that he stole the captain's uniform. Aware that his fate depends on what he says, Roger plays along and confesses to stealing from a fallen comrade. But, while he goes into a panic when Schütte grabs him by the lapels, he joins Schneider in filling his pockets when Herold and Schütte wander off to see what's happening outside. 

They find Kipinski and Schütte's No.2, Brockhoff (Marko Drylich), beating prisoners with their bare fists. Schütte pleads with Herold to restore some order and he binds the hands of the four surviving inmates and orders them to turn and run. Herold guns down one, so that the other three have to pull his corpse behind them, and hands the pistol to Roger. He takes out another fugitive, but Schneider prefers to shoot himself than debase himself. When the revolver jams, Gerda steps forward with her own weapon and the besotted Schütte steadies her hand as she wounds the last man standing, who is gunned down by the rest of the party, as though he was a target in a game. Herold welcomes Roger to his task force and gives Kipinski a glare to remind him who's in charge and how precarious their position really is. 

The next morning, Herold has a tailor take up the hem of his trousers. So, when Schütte asks for a rallying speech before his bicycle patrol goes to round-up any more deserters, Herold addresses the men in his underwear and still manages to sound authoritative. Once again, Freytag struggles to hide his emotions and Herold (who has become fond of him, as his lucky charm) sends him to the mess to compose himself. A slow-motion shot of the Herold Task Force indulging in debauched revelry follows before Schütte returns to find corpses littering the compound. He is about to protest when the RAF bombs the camp and only Herold, Kipinski, Freytag and Roger survive. He promotes them all and invites the others unscathed by the assault to find themselves some uniforms and join the ranks.

In a curious digression, a caption informs us that a single brick post is all that is left of Camp II and Schwentke cuts away from the stark monochrome in which the picture has been filmed to a colour shot of the site today. Just as abruptly, he returns to 1945, as Herold stands in the front of the staff car as it bowls along with the legend `Herold's Express Court' daubed in white paint on the side. Arriving in a sleepy town, he executes the mayor and announces that he has come to restore order. In fact, he throws a riotous party and becomes so enamoured of Erika (Annina Polivka) and Irmgard (Eugenie Anselin) that he puts Kipinksi before a kangaroo court for flirting with them and bringing the Task Force into disrepute. He strips Kipinski naked and guns him down in the street, but not before he reminds Herold that he crept into his soul like the devil and will continue to haunt him. 

Throwing an orgy, Herold ogles Irmgard and Erika as they sing a song about special times being over too quickly. This proves to be the case when the military police raid his headquarters the following morning. Yet, even though he is charged with impersonating an officer, murdering a mayor waving a white flag and organising a massacre, Junker and his fellow prosecutor convince the presiding officer that Herold showed leadership and spirit in the face of defeatism and should be given the opportunity to rejoin the army and fight for the Fatherland. 

Despite giving an enthusiastic salute and vowing to deliver Berlin from the Red Army, Herold uses knotted sheets to escape from his cell window and he scarpers into the woods. Skeletons litter the floor, as he pauses to stare accusingly into the lens before closing captions inform us that the Royal Navy arrested Herold for stealing a loaf of bread on 23 May 1945 and was executed on 14 November 1946, along with six of his accomplices, for the slaughter of around 170 victims. 

Having shown admirable restraint in his depiction of the carnage, Schwentke rather spoils things during the closing credits by ramming home his message in having Herold's crew ride through a modern German town to interrogate some unsuspecting residents going about their daily business. Complicity is a common theme in recent German recreations of the Nazi period and the point is worth reiterating as right-leaning groups start spouting their pernicious views on the migrant crisis. But the decision to shoot in black and white has the effect of distancing the incidents and issues that Schwentke is so keen to highlight. One suspects he took this creative decision to associate Herold's crimes with those of Amon Göth (Ralph Fiennes) in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), but the gambit doesn't quite come off. 

The same problem besets the inclusion of the postscript captions, as they serve to emphasise the fact we learn nothing about Willi Herold before he deserted in the spring of 1945. Many German viewers will know that `the Executioner of Ermsland' was a chimney sweep from Saxony who had received an Iron Cross for his courage at Monte Cassino in early 1944. But it wouldn't have harmed the narrative to have added a few background details to the closing summary. Indeed, it would have made Herold's ability to sustain his impersonation at such a tender age all the more remarkable, as there was nothing in his past to suggest that he was capable of either such conniving con-artistry or such steely ruthlessness. 

Impressive though Max Hubacher is in the title role, he is matched by Milan Peschel and Frederick Lau as the flipsides of Herold's coin. Waldemar Kobus and Bernd Hölscher also show well as the rivals at Camp II, with the latter's creepy relationship with Britta Hammelstein (whom he seduced when she was 15) hinting at the under-explored subject of the role that women played in the atrocities perpetrated by the Third Reich. But the emphasis falls firmly on the banality of evil, the corrupting nature of power and the ease with which charlatans can acquire a fanatical (and often lethal) following. 

Marbed with moments of bleak and sometimes cruel surrealism that are counterpointed by Martin Tadsharow consistently unsettling score, the action is photographed in widescreen by Florian Ballhaus with an austere, angular elegance that contrasts with the grinding grimness of Harald Turzer's settings. Given the tone of Schwentke's Stateside features, such refinement comes as something of a surprise. But this would merit its place in an all-nighter programme alongside Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004), Max Färberböck's A Woman in Berlin (2008) and Cate Shortland's Lore (2012).

It's hard to imagine a bigger contrast than that between Camille Thoman's debut documentary and her first feature. In The Longest Game (2014), she profiled a trio of octogenarians who meet each day in Dorset, Vermont for a game of paddle tennis and a chance to reflect upon their eventful lives. But the mood is markedly different in Never Here, a brooding reflection on art and identity that reunites Thoman with Mireille Enos, who had headlined her 2006 short, Falling Objects, in which a gallery manager is tempted to stray from a steady, but unfulfilling relationship by the photographer whose unsettling exhibition she is curating. While there's a degree of overlap here, this thoughtful thriller manages to be both original and derivative, as Thoman borrows from various literary and cinematic influences in her bid to make the audience work towards drawing its own conclusions rather than passively spectate.  

Conceptual artist Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) is having some decorating done in her New York apartment when journalist Margaret Lockwood (Nina Arianda) comes to interview her about her latest project. Having found a mobile phone, Miranda decided to piece together information about its owner. Avoiding only his e-mails and his browsing history, she followed GPS leads to photograph the places he frequents and used contacts in his address book to elicit details about his life from family and friends. They had assured her that Arthur Anderton (David Greenspan) would be thrilled by the idea. But he isn't and Miranda is unnerved when he attends the opening and accuses her of doing `a bad thing'.

Miranda is having an affair with her dealer Paul Stark (Sam Shepard), who is careful to keep the liaison secret because his wife is sick. It's strange, therefore, that he would get out of bed to answer her landline. But, as he stands by the window, he sees a woman being attacked in the street below and, to protect his reputation, Miranda claims to have witnessed the assault when she calls the police. She sends him downstairs to re-enact what he saw and she does the same when NYPD detective Andy Williams (Vincent Piazza) comes to investigate. He had been at school with Miranda and she is surprised to see him and amused when he agrees to participate in an exhibit involving emptying the contents of his bag. 

When she's called to the police station for an identity parade, Miranda is surprised to learn that Margaret was the victim of the attack. She is also intrigued by No.5 in the line-up, as she thinks she recognises him and she follows him when he comes to the gallery, which has been vandalised. As Arthur had been threatening to sue. Paul is sure he smashed and defaced the exhibits. But Miranda insists on them being left as they are because they reflect Arthur's response and keep the artwork alive. However, in following No.5 to his home, she has already embarked upon a new project. 

Renaming him S (Goran Visnjic), Miranda inveigles her way into his building and starts keeping a diary of their encounters. She also follows him with a camera on a tripod when he goes buy a polka dot scarf and she speculates on the recipient of the gift. Paul has his misgivings about the enterprise, but she checks that there were no dangerous criminals in the line-up when she goes on a Halloween date with Andy. He informs her that the attacker has been arrested and she is relieved, as she can now pursue S without fear. But she is taken aback when Andy kisses her lingeringly on the cheek at the end of the night and alarmed when her dog barks at her from under the table when she gets home. 

He is still cowering when Miranda's assistant, Cleo Flitcraft (Angelica Page) brings her nephews for a visit and, when Miranda gets home to find the chaise longue has been moved, she confides in Paul that she thinks Arthur has been in her apartment. She is reluctant to call the cops, however, as she thinks it would be hypocritical to deny him access to her place after she trespassed on his life. Moreover, she says nothing to Andy, who has now become her lover and he knows nothing about her continued interest in S. She tracks him through the city and senses that he is aware of her presence, as she has often been right behind him recording his every movement on her phone. 

But Miranda is also feeling spooked by the changes in her own apartment and checks to see if the key she leaves under the doormat is still in place. She is surprised to get a late-night visit from Margaret, who is confused as to why Miranda had not been able to identify her assailant from the line-up. She also reveals that she remembers it was a man's voice that frightened the attacker off and Miranda confesses that Paul had witnessed the crime. Margaret is angry and leaves after informing Miranda that Arthur had tried to shoot himself. 

While rummaging in a drawer, Miranda finds the green polka dot scarf and she realises that S has been in her apartment. She goes to his building and finds the key under the mat and lets herself inside. Donning a pair of lilac rubber gloves, she does the washing-up and wanders around the apartment before taking pictures of herself posing on the bed. When Andy calls to see her, Miranda confesses that she is worried that she is disappearing, even though she has a neon sign reading `You Are Here' over her bed. She tells him about the car crash that killed her parents and how much she regrets asking them to bring her a white shirt. Andy tries to be sympathetic, but he frightens her when he tells her that a woman has disappeared from her favourite bar, The Nightingale, and that it's likely that the suspect was coerced into confessing. 

As bartender James (Desmin Borges) has also vanished without explanation, Miranda becomes scared because she followed S to the bar and watched him go inside. Moreover, as she knows the attacked looked up to see Paul in the window, she is scared for his safety. But he refuses to go to the police to spare his ailing wife any pain and Miranda has to respect his wishes. When he disappears, however, Miranda goes into a blind panic and makes a statement to the police. She admits being Paul's lover and tries to convince the unseen interrogator that S is behind the crimes. On hearing she's at the station, Andy comes to reassure her that there is no evidence that anything bad has happened to Paul. But he admonishes her for two-timing him and for potentially placing him in an awkward situation. He claims they barely know each other and that it would be best if they stopped seeing each other. 

Back in her apartment, Miranda feels frightened and take the gun that Andy had left under a glass case for the bag exhibit. She is alarmed to find two bullets in the chamber and is holding the gun when she answers the door to Margaret, who is hysterical at learning that her attacker is still on the loose. Miranda tells her about S and they go to his apartment with the intention of planting the gun on him. But, while Margaret keeps watch in the street below, she is set upon by S and runs away, leaving Miranda to face him by herself. He pulls a gun on her and reads her rights while searching for some handcuffs. Realising he must have been one of the cops Andy had told her were in the line-up, she tries to apologise. She is also relieved to receive two text messages from Paul saying sorry for having taken off without warning. 

However, rather than face what's coming to her, Miranda hits S over the head and flees into the night, as the camera prowls from a close-up of S's bloodied head as he plays with a red ball to a sequence of pictures on a wall of Arthur posing beside the `You Are Here' sign. Arriving at her apartment, she is puzzled by the fact her latchkey doesn't work and caretaker Mr Martinelli (Jarek Truszczynski) proffers her a new one. But she backs away and hails a cab in the alley outside and asks to be taken to the airport. As the credits roll, the long-held shot of a flashing red arrow suddenly gives way to an image of a film crew lighting a scene in a darkened studio. 

It's unclear whether this closing switch is a self-reflexive gambit designed to emphasise the fact that what has just transpired was filmed artifice. But it provides one more thing for the audience to think about at the end of a noirish story with so many loose threads that one could interweave them into a number of feasible scenarios. At first glance, this would appear to be a riff on Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995), as several key elements in the narrative are linked to artworks on Miranda's newly decorated wall, including an assault scene and a neatly folded white shirt. But there are so many magpie references here that it's hard to know where to start. Thoman has acknowledged the influence of Alfred Hitchcock and Paul Auster, who wrote about an exhibit that French artist Sophie Caille fashioned from names found in an address book. The Hitchcock connection is also readily evident from the clip from The Lady Vanishes (1938) and that fact that Margaret Lockwood is named after its star. 

It's tempting, therefore, to suggest that Thoman named the cop Andy Williams because the audience is often `Almost There' in sussing what she's up to before she moves the goalposts again. Despite the continuous sleight of hand, it's still possible to detect the debt Thoman owes to David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick in general and to Irvin Kershner's Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Curtis Hanson's The Bedroom Window (1987), Jane Campion's In the Cut (2003) and Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) in particular, as the latter all contain borrowed plot points. But, Miranda's situation might not be entirely original, Thoman's approach is satisfyingly oblique, as she uses stylistic flourishes to create both atmosphere and suspense, while also keeping the viewer guessing by showing and concealing the salient and the insignificant to equally artful effect. 

As the artist whose amorality and egotism conceivably conspire against her to bring about a guilt-induced breakdown, Mireille Enos brilliantly combines vanity and vulnerability in a manner that makes a deeply resistible character seem eminently sympathetic. In his final role, Sam Shepard also wears his flaws on his sleeve, as he tries to be a dutiful husband while succumbing to his passion. But, while Vincent Piazza exudes decency as the cop drawn into Miranda's web, Andy is somewhat one-dimensional and only marginally more fleshed out than the numerous other ciphers who populate Miranda's milieu (or is it simply her imagination?).  

Numbering actor Zachary Quinto among its executive producers, this represents an impressive start to Thoman's fictional career. Her script lacks psychological depth. But, as an accomplished editor, she assembles the visual fragments with a precision that carries over into Sebastian Winterø's skittish camerawork and Chris Trujillo's handsome production design. Micah Bloomberg's sound mix is also deftly complemented by James Lavino's score. Ultimately, Thoman over-reaches in striving to make her denouement as enigmatic as possible. Yet, even with its self-consciously low-key sign-off, this remains a troubling and laudably cerebral treatise on identity, privacy, surveillance, chance and the ethics of artistic appropriation.

It might have taken three years for John McPhail's first feature to secure a theatrical release, but Where Do We Go From Here? will be followed later in the autumn by Anna and the Apocalypse. Bearing a passing resemblance to Len Collin's Sanctuary (2016) and Paul Duddridge's Together (2018), while also containing faint echoes of Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill's enduring popular sitcom, Still Game (2002), this may not always be the most original outing. But it has enough warmth and wit to engage and amuse. 

The action opens with a bold and beautifully executed nine-minute montage that chronicles the cradle-to-grave relationship between James (Tyler Collins) and his doting Scottish grandad, Jim (Jim Sweeney). Over 25 years, Jim had been James's best friend and he had no hesitation in taking a job at the Easy Love Care Home after Jim fell ill and they had to cancel their plans to travel the world together. But, while he had enjoyed spending time with Jim's new pals, Malcolm (Richard Addison), Joan (Alison Peebles) and Nancy (Deirdre Murray), the gangling James is left bereft when he passes away and he has to start afresh without him. 

It's then that English nurse Jen (Lucy-Jane Quinlan) applies for a post at Easy Love and martinet manager Miss Thompson (Maryam Hamidi) takes her on because there are no other applicants. While Jen is enduring a nightmare interview, the ditzy Nancy is using a mirror to help the compulsively mendacious Joan beat the wheelchair-bound and mute Malcolm at Battleships. But, while James takes an instant shine to Jen, she thinks he's a bit weird, as not only does her dress like a pensioner, but he also enjoys spending his spare time with the kind of seniors that makes one wonder who such a gerontophobe came to work in a facility for the elderly in the first place.

Yet, despite Jen finding everything about old people eminently resistible, it's James who is placed on a final warning by Miss Thompson after Nancy hurts her wrist after slipping on a patch of urine deposited by the serially incontinent Jacob (Craig J. Seath). Reminded by his grandad's ghost to approach double shifts with a smile, James throws himself into his daily chores and is part-way through a reverie involving Jen when she catches him in a swooping clench with his mop. She corrects the impression that she despises the elderly, but admits that she does find his situation odd. 

They are interrupted by Malcolm brandishing a petition to force Thompson into reinstating the annual trip to Deep Sea World. However, Jen promises to see James at lunchtime and Joan is appalled when she notices that he has put gel in his hair. Unfortunately, the 99 year-old Mr Savage (Russel Davis) collapses in the dining-room and Jen is in no mood for small-talk after failing to resuscitate him. Moreover, Thompson chews out James during a staff meeting when he tries to raise the petition issue and he returns to his room in a state of atypical annoyance. Indeed, such is his frustration that he throws a pillow and accidentally breaks a photograph of the mother who had died giving birth to him. 

When he spot that the picture was taken at Fort Augustus and that this is where Savage is being returned for his funeral, James hits upon a plan to scatter his grandfather's ashes near when the photo was taken and persuades Malcolm, Joan and Nancy to join him on the excursion. Using his computer skills, Malcolm sends them invitations to the funeral on the banks of Loch Ness and Thompson reluctantly allows James to escort the trio and even insists that Jen goes along to provide expert medical care. She is suspicious when Malcolm produces an itinerary of the places they plan to visit during the trip, but James assures her that it will do them good to get out and about.

On leaving Deep Sea World, which is located beneath the spectacular Forth Rail Bridge, Malcolm finds a Say and Spell toy, but prefers to keep communicating with his blackboard and chalk. On checking into a hotel in Aberfeldy, Joan swears that she knows the woman having her 75th birthday party in the community centre (Cathy McPhail) and they all gatecrash the event. However, while James and Jen are discovering a mutual passion for travel, Thompson discovers that the funeral isn't for another fortnight and finds evidence in James and Malcolm's rooms that mean they're for the high jump. 

Jen only discovers she's been misled the next morning and leaves James in the hotel car park with his grandad's urn. But Joan convinces her that he had lied for the noblest reasons and that he has been nicer to her than anyone else in her entire life as a spinster cleaner. Consequently, Jen doubles back to collect James, only for them to run into Thompson, who has called the police. However, Joan has no intention of going quietly and she rolls down the ramp in Malcolm's wheelchair wearing nothing but her black beret in order to create a diversion to allow James to get to the loch. Moreover, when Thompson tries to push Nancy out of the way, she is arrested for assault and James is able to say goodbye and thanks to his grandad in peace.  

By the time Joan gets to tell the other residents the story of Thompson's disciplinary hearing, she had managed to prevent her from detonating a bomb belt. But, no one seems to mind, as they are all too keen to wish James well on his perambulations with Jen. She is waiting for him in the car outside and they kiss before wondering where they go from here. 

The romantic subplot might not ring true and James's personality change might seem a little abrupt, but there's little else to quibble about with this genial geriatric romp. Beanpole Tyler Collins makes a suitably daffy anti-hero, while Maryam Hamidi throws herself into the role of the hissable Cruella character. But the stars of the show are undoubtedly the mumming Richard Addison, the delightfully dotty Deirdre Murray and the marvellously Mittyesque Alison Peebles, who was deservedly nominated for a Scottish BAFTA for her spiritedly spiky turn, which brings to mind Sheila Hancock's equally relishable display in another story about a senior citizen refusing to go gentle, Simon Hunter's Edie (2017). 

McPhail never manages to top his charming opening gambit, but he directs and edits with a precision that is matched by Grant McPhee's visuals. Doubling up as composer, Collins perhaps errs on the twee side, as does McPhail's script. But this enjoyable excursion joins Andrew Haigh's 45 Years (2015), John Miller's Golden Years (2016) and James Marsh's King of Thieves in showing that Britain's silver thespians still have plenty to offer.

CinemaItaliaUK returns this weekend with its third film of the month. Simone Spada has served as an assistant director on dozens of features and TV episodes over the last two decades, including Ivan De Matteo's The Dinner (2014) and La vita possibile (2016), and Gabriele Mainetti's They Call Me Jeeg Robot (2015). Having teamed with Andrea Camuffo on Lovte (2003), a medium-length documentary about some Roma living near Rome's greyhound track, Spada made his directorial bow with Maìn - La casa della felicità (2012), a biography of St Maria Domenica Mazzarello (1837-81), the founder of the Salesian Sisters of St John Bosco. Being a satire on cinema, insularity and political instability, his sophomore outing, Hotel Gagarin, therefore represents something of a change of topic and pace.

Summoned by his corrupt MEP pal Pietro Turone (Simone Colombari), Franco Paradiso (Tommasso Ragno) agrees to go to Armenia to make a film so that they can skim off the grant money and make a profit. The script has been written by Nicola Speranza (Giuseppe Battiston), a film studies teacher who struggles to interest his students in pictures like Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's The Lark Farm (2007), which explored the Armenian Genocide. When Franco calls him and declares his eagerness to make Marta's Journey for Tindaro Film, Nicola agrees to drop everything to start work the next day.

Needing a leading lady, Franco offers the part to prostitute Patrizia Affogalosino (Silvia D'Amico), who has just plonked herself at the next table outside a mobile snack bar. He then talks Russian con artist Valeria Radu (Barbora Bobulova) into accompanying the unit to Armenia in order to act as interpreter before doing a bunk with €70,000 in her pocket. She recommends electrician Elio (Claudio Amendola) to do the lighting and videographer Sergio (Luca Argentero) jumps at the chance to skip the country for a while, as he is being pursued for unpaid debts. 

Nicola confide his misgivings about the star and crew to Valeria on the plane. But she assures him that they are all experts in their field and he happily goes along with the fact that they are met at the airport by Kira (Caterina Shulha), the pregnant punk driver of their battered minibus, and Aram (Hovhannes Azoyan)

a drunken guide, who sleeps during the entire journey through the snow-covered countryside to the forbidding Hotel Gagarin. However, having lit a candle in a hilltop monastery, Nicola is feeling better about things, while Patrizia is overjoyed to be staying in such luxury. Moreover, Elio is happy to be reunited with the dope he stashed in a box of lenses, while Sergio is bowled over by friendly waitress, Ana (Marjan Avetisyan). But Valeria simply wants to get her job done and head home to enjoy her loot. 

She rides along as Nicola goes scouting locations and he is blown away by the beauty of the ecclesiastical architecture. However, he is taken aback when Patrizia asks if he indulges in casting couch practices and he is even more surprised when he sees her acting during their first rehearsal. But he continues to look on the bright side, even though Elio has slagged off his colleagues to Valeria and expressed his suspicions that something is not quite right about the enterprise. 

While his colleagues are wondering how to film charging Ottoman horsemen on a plain dominated by a nuclear power station, Elio notices troops surrounding the hotel and tries to hide his weed. Patrizia gets back from a horse ride in time to see her friends being escorted at gunpoint and Valeria explains that they are being kept indoors for their own good because fighting has broken out in nearby Nagorno-Karabakh. Any hope that Valeria had of a speedy getaway are confounded during a phone call to Franco when he is arrested by the Italian police. Thus, the party is stuck in the middle of nowhere with no money and even less chance of making a movie.

While Sergio makes an ill-advised break for it and everyone else has a sleepless night, Patrizia is grateful to be somewhere luxurious and tucks into her breakfast without a clear understanding of her predicament. Elio and Valeria chat on the terrace and attempt a little character analysis and try to deflect the fact that the other has summed up their dead-end life rather neatly. Inside, Nicola meets the elderly Virgil Kevorkian (Philippe Leroy), who advises him not to waste a second of life because it goes past so quickly. 

They spend the morning playing chess, while Patrizia chats to Kira about motherhood (and her three abortions) in the hot tub and Eio and Sergio start painting white clouds on a vivid blue curtain in the ballroom. During the afternoon, 65 year-old Vartan Azurmanyan (Ara Sargsyan) wanders in from the nearby village because he has heard there is an Italian film crew in town and asks them to help him realise his lifelong dream of playing Yuri Gagarin. Rising to the challenge, they build a Vostock satellite and film the white-bearded Vartan waving to the crowd as he climbs inside. He is thrilled and Virgil thanks Nicola for making a stranger's dream come true. 

That night, they find an old record player and party the night away, with Elio and Valeria tumbling into bed together and Sergio and Ana making love with genuine affection. But, the next morning, Valeria tries to distance herself from Elio and soon finds herself on the defensive when Nicola reads the messages on her phone and realises that she was part of Franco's con. She admits that she was planning to abandon them and that the trip was part of a scam. But she was touched by Nicola's kindness towards Vartan and regrets having deceived them. He rejects her apology, however, and is in the middle of branding Elio, Sergio and Patrizia as ignorant losers when Kira beckons them outside. 

Word has spread about the Italians making dreams come true and the whole village has arrived at the hotel to make their pitch. Looking at everyone chattering excitedly with the soldiers, Nicola asks the others to help and they are soon putting gymnasts, ballerinas, wannabe heroes and Humphrey Bogart lookalikes in front of the camera. Elio and Valeria patch up their quarrel and Kira discovers a maternal instinct in chaperoning the kids. However, the real world intrudes when an Italian (Paolo De Vita) with a couple of restaurants in Yerevan passes through to inform them that the war has been over for weeks and promises to mention them to the embassy. 

Sergio decides not to return, however, as he doesn't want to leave Ana and Patrizia decides to ride on horseback to Nepal with Aram (who turns out to be a gifted pianist). When the diplomats come to fetch them, the others are equally conflicted, as they watch the villagers wend their way home with their dreams unfulfilled. Nicola discovers that Virgil was either a ghost or a figment of his imagination, while Valeria offers to pay Elio's debts so he can return to Rome. As they drive to the airport, Nicola thanks everyone for helping him achieve something worthwhile and, as the credits roll, we see cutaways to the realised dreams, as a man sits on the Brooklyn Bridge, a girl plays a rock concert at Wembley, an aspiring footballer dribbles round some giant Subbuteo players, a pair of gunslingers fight a duel and the grizzled Gagarin hurtles through space. 

At the outset, this recalls Ben Hopkins's Lost in Karastan (2014), a satire on independent film-making and the politics of Central Asia that was co-scripted by Pawel Pawlikowski and follows the misadventures of declining director Matthew Macfadyen after he is invited to a retrospective at the Palchik International Film Festival in the Autonomous Republic of Karastan. However, the tensions in the region are relegated to the background, as Spada produces a latterday slice of Capra-corn that culminates in one of the most charming montages of the year so far. 

With the ensemble buying into the feel-good fairytale, Spada is able to skip over the less feasible aspects of the scenario and its more sentimental outcomes. In particular, Barbora Bobulova is typically strong as the hard-faced realist, while Giuseppe Battiston engages as the cultural snob who learns a little humility and humanity. But the standout is Silvia D'Amico, whose performance as a working girl who has endured enough on the Via Pontina to appreciate some pampering contains echoes of Giulietta Massina in Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria (1957). 

Crisply photographed by Maurizio Calvesi to make the most of both the Armenian landscape and the Hotel Gagarin's distinctive interiors, the action ably paced by editor Clelio Benevento. Maurizio Filardo's jaunty score is also spot on, particularly during the minibus trip and the closing dream sequence. But this would be nowhere near as magical without the ingenuity of Luisa Iemma's production design, the deftness of Amideo Califano's visual effects and joyous simplicity of Spada's vision.

Having explored the world of conspiracy theories in Die Weltherrschaft, Fritz Ofner and his film-making partner Eva Hausberger turn to a subject more readily linked to their previous studies of conflict in Guatemala and Libya, Evolution of Violence (2011) and Libya Hurra (2012). Examining the hard facts relating to the Glock pistol, as well as its cult cachet, Weapon of Choice is showing in London under the Dochouse banner and is bound to prove a clarion call for those advocating greater gun control. 

In seeking to understand the appeal of the Glock, Ofner travels far and wide. His first interviewees are an Iraqi who refuses to show his face and Frank and Joshua Shamonsky, the father-son owners of a Pennsylvania gun shop, who not only show off their Glock stock (mercifully, with no smoking barrels), but who also reminisce fondly about a trip to the factory that produces them in the picturesque Austrian mountain town of Ferlach in Carinthia. As Ofner points out, however, this is a new facility, with the original base being in Deutsch-Wagram. When Gaston Glock set out to design a reliable gun for the Austrian military in the 1980s, he had no idea that a small family business would become a multinational concern. 

But, as Ofner notes, his empire would not become so gargantuan without sales to the United States. During a tour of the South Central district of Los Angeles that has been immortalised in movies and rap lyrics, Christian Pearce, the author of Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture From Samuel Colt to 50 Cent, reveals that hundreds of hip hop songs have referenced the weapon and we hear snippets from L'il Vicious, The Wu-Tang Clan, Cypress Hill and 2Pac. But, while he jokes that it's popular because it rhymes with lots of cool words, tour guide Hodari Sababu reminds him that the Glock has a reputation for not jamming and that this reliability makes it the weapon of choice for rappers and gang members alike. 

We meet African-American Derek Brown, who teaches boxing to the neighbourhood kids to keep them out of trouble. But he admits that he wanted to be a drug dealer in order to afford the cool stuff that the local gangstas flashed about. His Glock was fired around 30 times and he concedes that there is something addictive about the feeling of popping off a bullet. However, Glock didn't want the kind of endorsements they were receiving from rappers, even though they could only have been happy with the sales figures.

By contrast, the softly spoken Lisa Marie Judy (who wears a blue baseball hat with the legend `Gun Goddess' in pink letters) thinks that guns are essentially items of safety for women in the United States. Never without her Glock (even when cuddling with her husband), she claims that weapons level the playing field, as women can defend themselves against drug-crazed potential rapists and murderers. We see her giving a lesson, as she purrs with pride at persuading an 82 year-old widow to buy a Glock after her guard dog died. 

Over footage of police attending the fatal shooting of seven year-old Amari Brown while he played in a Chicago garden with his friends, we hear Tom Diaz (author of Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America) explaining how Glock made a determined pitch to US law enforcement agencies in the 1980s and enjoyed enormous success. But, as the crooks also began to get hold of the same weapons, Glock began offering higher calibres and semi-automatic items in order to create demand and keep the tills ringing. The result is what Diaz calls a `spiral of lethality' and yet neither Joshua Shamonsky nor Lisa Marie Judy would see things that way, as the former shows off the gun safes in his home and the latter explains why the screensaver on her phone is a gun resting on the Constitution because the Second Amendment is a built-in guarantee against tyranny. 

As he chats, Shamonsky sits in front of the Stars and Stripes and a table lamp with two upright guns for its stem and a shade bearing the phrase `Veritas Aequitas', from Tom Duffy's vigilante movie, The Boondock Saints (1999). He says he would rather carry a gun and not need it than go unarmed. Indeed, he won't go to places with stringent gun laws and reveals that he has 19 Glocks in his collection. Presumably one of the places he would be reluctant to visit would be Chicago. Brown laments that it has acquired the nickname `Chi-raq' and recalls how he used to be part of the problem before his drug-dealing gang buddy Walter was killed. Such was his anger and grief that he wanted to go out and shoot all of their enemies, but he felt a presence calming him down and promising him that violence was not the answer. 

This epiphany changed Brown's life. But, as he celebrates Independence Day, Ofner reveals that 4 July is the most dangerous day in Chicago and that 10 people were killed and 55 were injured in eight hours during his stay. Ofner attends a police briefing and the speaker makes no bones about the fact that he blames the Gun Lobby for the problems facing the city. He also films a pavement vigil for young Amari and captures his mother sobbing at the loss of a son who wanted to be somebody. As her neighbours sing a hymn about the power of Jesus breaking chains, hysterical sobs can be heard off camera, as the needless waste of a young life hits home. 

Cutting away from contrasting scenes of a gun fair and a protest rally, Ofner shows us a clip from an Austrian documentary about how Glock started out with a contract for the national army. He meets Amritz Enzinger, the former deputy mayor of Deutsch-Wagram, who says that nobody in the town speaks about the Glock factory because they are just pleased to have a job in uncertain times. As the workers handle separate components, no one has a guilty conscience. But it does bother her that the ancient Jewish cemetery that is enclosed by the factory has been allowed to go to seed, in spite of rumoured agreements to maintain it. 

Unable to meet anyone from the company, Ofner films the deadhead monkeys in Vienna Zoo because the reclusive Gaston Glock (who is now in his late 80s) is one of their sponsors. He has more luck with Paul Jannuzzo, the former CEO of Glock USA, who recalls how the mass shooting at Killeen, Texas at Luby's Cafeteria in 1991 did more for sales than any advertising because it demonstrated that the gun worked as a rapid fire weapon. Ofner reveals that Jannuzzo was accused of embezzling money from Glock and was arrested in the Netherlands after fleeing to Mexico. He insists, however, that he is the victim of a conspiracy because he uncovered a massive tax fraud and he is now suing the company after his conviction was overturned in 2013. 

Charles Ewert (aka Panama Charly) also crossed swords with Glock, who had hired him in the 1980s to use his experience of offshore banking to help expand the company. Speaking from his prison in Luxembourg, Ewert reveals how he had never been anything but loyal before Glock was attacked in an underground car park on 27 July 1999. According to Ewert's lawyer, Philippe Onimus, Ewert and Glock had arrived in the same car and the latter was inspecting Ewert's new Morgan motor car when he was beset by Jacques Pecheur (who was better known by his wrestling name, Spartacus), who set about him with a tiling hammer. Fearing for his own safety, Ewert ran up the stairs to call his secretary and urge her to phone the police. When the only other witness to the incident arrived, Glock and Pecheur were struggling over the hammer. 

Ewert says he is many things, but he is not a killer and suspects that he was found guilty of hiring Pecheur because he knew too much about the company's practices and guilty secrets. However, Glock continues to live in Velden am Wörthersee and Ofner shows a rainbow over the lake, as he explains how the tax issue disappeared after Glock moved its accounts from Vienna to Klagenfurt and the Governor of Carinthia, Jörg Haider, found that there was no case to answer. In nearby Treffen, he opened the Glock Horse Performance Centre, where he hosted such celebrities as Chuck Norris, Maria Carey and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Ofner lists some of the charities to which Glock donates before mentioning that he flew in Robbie Williams to sing `My Way' at his birthday party. 

In a rather abrupt transition, Ofner takes us to meet Jeans Cruz, the American soldier who captured Saddam Hussein in his underground lair. He stands in a park at night with New York twinkling in the distance, as he recalls the moment he made history. On Saddam's bed was a Glock and this is now on show in the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, where PR Manager John Orrell explains how it epitomises the tenets of the Bush Doctrine. Cruz isn't one for memorabilia and claims the photos and citations he has are a waste of trees. He claims `karma is a b*tch' and muses on the fact that Glock continues to manufacture weapons with the warning that what goes around comes around. 

While accompanying a US patrol in Kirkuk, Ofner reveals that Washington came to an agreement to allow Glock (which is based in a neutral country) to supply weapons to the new Iraqi security forces. Police colonel Mustafa Najat complains that he never received the guns he required and admits that ISIS now uses them and many were sold on the black market by corrupt policemen. The unseen fellow from the opening sequence jokes with Ofner that he could shift Glocks in huge numbers if he could use his influence with the company to get him the concession.

Returning to Austria, Ofner discloses that Glock began by producing 1000 guns a month. Now, it churns out 34,000 a week and this means that 1.5 million new guns go into circulation each year. Keeping track on them all isn't the company's problem, but it admits that our uncertain times are good for business. 

Pulling few punches without going on an all-out attack, Ofner and Hausberger present plenty of damning evidence in this compelling documentary. They struggle to drag Gaston Glock out of the shadows and rather botch the telling of the Panama Charly episode. But they are much more assured in tracing the impact that Glocks have had on urban America and in leaving the likes of Jason Shamonsky and Lisa Marie Judy to shoot themselves in the foot (as it were). 

With Ofner operating the camera and Hausberger on sound duties, they can occasionally be heard prompting their interviewees. But Ofner's narration has a laconic burr that recalls Werner Herzog and it's neatly offset by Siegfried Friedrich and Peter Kutin's ominous score. Gerhard Daurer and Karina Ressler's editing is slick enough, but they don't solve the structural problems inherent in the laudable, but flawed attempt to interweave the story's corporate, the biographical and the testimonial elements. Moreover, the subtitles are often illegible. Nevertheless, this has much to say about greed, globalisation, government collusion, corporate abnegation and the dire consequences of poverty, ignorance, injustice and prejudice.