Parky at the Pictures (DVD 17/1/2019)

Having lost his job as a tool fitter after 20 years, fiftysomething Londoner Micky Mason (Martin Herdman) finds work folding t-shirts at a printing company. When he learns that his dementia-suffering father, Sam (Ian Hogg), has to leave the Parkside residential home because of restructuring, Micky has no option but to give Sam the sofa bed and make do with the floor of his bijou studio flat. Luckily, on the same day Micky is laid off from the factory, Vic the caretaker (Ken Shorter) is able to offer him the use a bigger property, on the proviso he tells anyone he asks that he is former tenant Drew Thompson. 

Kindly neighbour Jean (Marlene Sidaway) is worried that Micky is going to have his hands full with Sam and a full-time job search, but he's confident something will turn up, as the job centre manager (Joanna Monro) is in his corner. He copes with Sam wetting the bed and even plucks up the courage to ask café waitress Lorraine (Tracey Wilkinson) to go on a date. But the problems start tumbling in after he is mistaken for Drew by a pair of thugs working for the local drug dealer. However, Paul (Mark Gillis), turns out to be an old classmate and they natter about the old days while sipping posh coffee and Micky seeks reassurances that he won't be pestered by any more heavies because Drew has absconded with some of Paul's merchandise.

Despite missing his signing-on time, Micky gets a tip about a business looking for drivers and he feels sufficiently optimistic to go for a run. However, he exhausts himself after a few minutes and spends the afternoon with Sam and his son, Jason (Josh Herdman), a recovering addict who insists that things will turn out for the best. Taking Lorraine to a hill above the city to see Big Ben and the London Eye lit up against the night sky, Micky feels ashamed when he can't afford another round at the pub. But Lorraine is happy to pay and teases him about being Jenson Button when he shows her the police notices for being caught speeding twice within an hour by the same camera. 

They are enjoying a little intimacy back at the flat when Sam comes barging in looking for a clean shirt to wear for work and mistakes Lorraine for Micky's ex-wife, Joanne. He is curt with her the next morning and Micky leaves him with Jean when he heads off to do a cash-in-hand job at the t-shirt factory. When he gets, home, however, he finds that Sam has slipped out alone (although he knows nothing about the fact he had found a gun in Drew's sock drawer and had been pointing it at Jean while having monochrome flashbacks to playing cowboys as a kid with the girl next door). He is grateful when a couple of teenage gang members bring him home. But Micky confronts the black lads he catches selling drugs to Jason and demands to know why he has lapsed after working so hard to get clean. 

Realising he can't rely on Jean to keep an eye on Sam, Micky asks the Parkside manager (Karen Archer) if he can spend time in the day rooms. But she regrets that it would be against the rules and has to hold him back when he threatens one of the directors in the car park for putting profits first. Lorraine also regrets not being able to help, as she is still getting over nursing her late mother. However, the gravity of the situation becomes clear when Sam walks in on them, brandishing the gun, and shoots Micky in the arm. Paul gets him an appointment with a Harley Street doctor so he can attend his job interview. But Mr Wilson (Robert Calvert) withdraws his offer when Micky confesses to the nine points on his licence and he has to stop himself from heaving a brick through the windscreen of a sneering yuppie's car when he bad-mouths him for parking in his space. 

Along that night, Micky looks at some old photos and fights back the tears, as he tries to find a solution to his problems. Against his better judgement, he pays a visit to Paul, who hooks him up with Marion (Sadie Shimmin) so they can pose as a couple of tourists and pick up a consignment of drugs from the French countryside. Taking the ferry across the Channel, Micky is a bundle of nerves and Marion has to give him a pep talk after they spend the night at a vineyard, while the car is being fitted up. She reminds him of the money he stands to earn and teases him about not sweating when the vehicle is checked by a sniffer dog. However, even she gets twitchy when a customs officer (Simon Hepworth) asks Micky to open the boot and he hesitates before declaring that the booze they have bought is for a surprise party Marion knows nothing about. 

They are allowed to pass and Micky throws up after they have gone a few miles from the docks. But it's all smiles as Marion drives them home and they chuckle when they tell Paul about their adventure. He hands over two chunky envelopes and Marion drives off with her girlfriend, leaving Micky to buy some groceries for Jason, flowers for Jean, a box of Rice Krispies for Sam, and a coffee maker for himself. He tries to convince himself that he's turned a corner and is consoled when Sam opines that what matters is where you're going rather than where you've come. But the reality of what he's descended to kicks in, as he gazes from his balcony at Canary Wharf, that capitalist den of thieves where conscience is an alien concept. 

When the original Angry Young Men wrote about the Condition of England for the page and stage in the late 1950s, they devoted as much time to locale and character as they did to dramatic incident. Television soap opera has done much to shift the balance, with the result that so many social realist and BritCrime pictures are stuffed with short scenes of often tangential significance that clutter the action while keeping it ticking along. 

To his credit, Mark Gillis makes a virtue of this development by focusing on `the constant drip' that pushes Micky closer to the edge and prompts him to park his disdain for Paul's operation and join the strength. The Gallic escapade feels rather like a discarded storyline from Eastenders. But there's no denying the fact it's suspenseful and introduces the last of the numerous female characters who try to help Micky out of his mire. Indeed, with the exception of the drug-dealing trio, the Mercedes duo and the care home director, everyone seems to like the onetime promising boxer and it's always circumstances beyond his (or their) control that conspire against him. 

Yet, while the shadow of the skyscrapers stretches a long way across the Thames, Gillis avoids overt politicising and, consequently, Micky is spared the kind of emotive diatribes that Dave Johns got to deliver in I, Daniel Blake (2016), with which this film otherwise has much in common. Despite being every bit as effective as Johns, Martin Herdman is unlikely to receive the same plaudits because his middle-aged white man (who drives a Nissan Micra rather than a white van) is more a plaything of fate than a victim of the Department of Work and Pensions. 

Clearly, Gillis might have been more trenchant in his discussion of the ongoing economic crisis and it's a touch surprising that nobody mentions Brexit, let alone conflicting ideologies. But, maybe that's the point: film-makers use working-class characters to espouse their own views, while real men and women on the street are too busy getting by to bother with such intellectual niceties. 

Simon Archer's camerawork keeps Micky rooted in his environment, while Lucy Cooper's production design feels suitably lived-in. Mallik Gris's score is also well judged and ably supplemented by Oliver Hoare's renditions of such standards as `Rigs of the Time', `No Power on Earth' and `We Poor Labouring Men'. Of course, the script could have been harder hitting and less dependent on stereotypes and clichés. But you won't see another film all year make wittier use of a Jamie Oliver cookbook.

Ventriloquist's dolls have been putting the wind up movie audiences ever since Otto took control of Erich von Stroheim in James Cruze's The Great Gabbo (1929). Michael Redgrave similarly fell foul of Hugo in Ealing's classic horror portmanteau, Dead of Night (1945), while Anthony Hopkins fought a losing battle with Fats in Richard Attenborough's Magic (1945). But there's something extra malevolent about the eponymous puppet in Matthew Holness's feature bow, Possum. 

Echoes of the films of Pete Walker and Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected reverberate through this dicomfiting chiller, which is markedly different in tone to Holness's cult TV series, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004). But it also takes more obvious inspiration from David Cronenberg's Spider (2002) and Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014).

As we hear Philip (Sean Harris) reciting an eerie children's poem on the soundtrack, we see him in a wood with a brown leather bag surrounded by the tentacle-like branches of a tree. He carries a similar bag on the train taking back to his childhood home in Norfolk, but he is spurned when he tries to take an interest in what schoolboy Michael (Charlie Eales) is drawing in his exercise book. 

Arriving at the bleak and long-empty property, Philip leaves his bag on the drab hall carpet while he goes upstairs. He sees a spray of yellow balloons on the landing, but misses the black smoke that appears to envelope them, as he wanders into a bedroom and thumbs through an old notebook full of drawings and poems about a creature named `Possum', which he unearths from beneath a floorboard. When he descends the stairs, the bag has been moved into an adjoining room and Philip wonders whether Maurice (Alun Armstrong) is around. But he is quite alone and ventures into the garden to dig up another brown leader holdall from underneath a metal bin.

Leaving the bag by the back door, Philip finds Maurice at the kitchen table and he mutters something about an old teaching friend writing to tell him about a performance that had landed him in trouble. Philip doesn't want to talk about the unfortunate experience and goes out alone, complaining about the state of the place. He lights a roll-up while sitting on a swing in the playground abutting a housing estate. But he is unsettled by a mother and child stopping in their tracks and heads into the woods to dispose of the contents of his bag. However, he is quickly confronted with its arachnoid limbs and he hurries back home. 

Philip asks Maurice if he can borrow his tools and the older man teases him about dismantling Possum when puppeteering was the only thing he was good at. He produces an old doll and reminds Philip that he had been taught the art by his dad. But Philip dismisses his contention that puppeteering must run in the family by hissing that Maurice is not his father. Up in his room, he hears about Michael's disappearance on the TV news and turns off the set, as the picture disintegrates into interference.

The next day, a couple of youths accuse Philip of being a pervert, as he passed them on some steps. He goes into the woods and is about to leave the bag in the tree with the tentacular branches when he hears a voice calling his name. Retrieving the bag, he crosses a flat expanse of land and sits on a bench to plot his next move. He reaches some marshland and tosses the bag into a rivulet from a narrow wooden bridge. As he tries to flee, however, he slips in the mud and feels compelling to wade into the shallow water to recover the bag. After a while, he up to see a doll's skull and some entangled limbs in the sodden earth. 

Waking from a nightmare-pocked sleep, Philip sees Possum's face on the pillow next to him and pushes the puppet on to the floor. He stuffs it in his bag and is about to leave when Maurice beckons him into the kitchen. Noticing the puppet sitting on his knee, Philip keeps his distance and flinches when Maurice offers him a treat from the sweet jar in the cupboard. Peering up from beneath the peak of his cap, Maurice asks Philip to recall the time some bullies had pushed his face into the wounds of a dead fox and he had been terrified when the creature had opened its eyes and slunk away. Cackling at the thought of the boy's discomfort, Maurice mentions that the old army barracks are about to be demolished and he taunts Philip when he pauses outside the door of a room that had always unnerved him. 

Creeping through the deserted barracks, Philip finds a cadet beret on a filthy mattress and inspects the badge before heading outside. He takes Possum out of the bag and we see him in full for the first time, as Philip raises him above his head and hurls him down to the ground. Having punched the clown-like head, he stamps on the doll before bundling it back into the weighted-down bag and tossing it into a water tank. 

Returning home, Philip sees Michael's face on the front page of the newspaper on the kitchen table. He is getting ready for bed when he hears Maurice reciting one of his Possum poems. Following the voice, Philip finds Maurice in a small sitting-room and snatches back his notebook. Maurice mocks him for being so defensive and asks if he has succeeded in getting rid of the puppet. Philip curses him for not having gone up in flames and retreats to the sound of a hacking cough and a scathing laugh. 

Strolling down to the railway station, Philip sits under the arch of a bridge and looks at the photograph of his parents that he keeps in his cigarette tin. He gets home to find Possum hanging on a hook in his bedroom and carries him into the garden, where Maurice is burning papers in an oil drum. Accepting one of the old man's smokes, Philip drops the puppet into the flames and uses a spade to push him deep into the furnace. Maurice reminds him of the time a boy went missing from his class when he was at school and feels sorry for him when he gags on a green sweet from the jar, as the memories of the tragic incident return. 

That night, Philip has another nightmare, as Possum keeps coming back from the dead and he wakes with a start to hear pounding on the front door. A spider scurries across the floorboards, as Philip tiptoes downstairs and hides behind a wall, as a torch beam shines in through the window. The next morning, he hears the television burst into life in his room and he watches a report about the police searching for a man fitting his description. Terrified of becoming caught up in the case, Philip goes scouring around the marshes and the barracks and has to dodge a patrol car. 

On arriving home, Maurice informs him that someone has been asking about him. He also tells Philip that he is going away for a few days and suggests that he lays low for a while. However, Philip goes to the nearby school and asks to see the headmaster. Feeling like a guilty pupil, as he had done when his classmate disappeared, Philip sits in the corridor outside the office. But his courage fails him and he runs away. As he sits staring at the snapshot of his parents, black liquid drizzles on to him and seeks sanctuary inside the barracks, However, Possum pursues him and Philip runs out of places to hide, as he passes a dead fox on a country path that revives to shoot him an accusatory glare. 

Appearing to wake from another nightmare, as one of the green sweets pops out of his mouth, Philip returns to his room to fight his demons. He sweats profusely and turns deathly pale, as he summons the courage to enter the room with the blackened door. Peering round the fire-damaged room, he sees a blanket on the floor and a jar that he holds up to the light. However, he is pinned to the ground by Maurice, who derides him for being a poor little orphan boy who lost his parents in a blaze. He blames him for failing to report the fact that Maurice had abused children throughout his teaching career and scoffs that he will now take the blame for Michael's disappearance. 

Too ashamed to resist, Philip allows Maurice to pull down his trousers and start thrashing him with his belt. But, on hearing muffled noises coming from inside a trunk, Philip suddenly snaps and not only defends himself, but also fights back. He breaks Maurice's neck and unlocks the case to let Michael scuttle free. As the film ends, Philip sits outside the back door of the house where he had known nothing but pain and waits for his immediate fate to be revealed. 

As is often the case with stories taking place inside a ravaged mind, it's not always easy to determine what is being imagined and what is happening for real. As with Mireille Enos in Camille Thoman's Never Here, Sean Harris appears to be trapped as much in his traumatic recollections as he is in his current predicament. Even though he snaps Alun Armstrong's neck during the climactic tussle, it's possible that he is merely being haunted by his erstwhile tormentor and that his efforts to destroy Possum represent his struggle to conquer the dark thoughts that have driven him to kidnap the boy whose doodling on the train brought back memories of his own youth. 

Wherever the truth lies, Matthew Holness keeps the audience guessing, while subjecting them to Harris's excruciating pain. At times resembling Derek Jacobi, as he strains to regain control of his mind, Harris gives a deeply troubling performance that is more than matched by Armstrong, who often appears to be chanelling his inner Wilfrid Brambell, as he leers and taunts his emotionally fraught victim. It's never established whether Armstrong is an uncle, a stepfather or merely a teacher, but the hold he exerts is vice-like and Holness makes inspired use of the score produced by the Radiophonic Workshop to keep the audience on edge. 

He also collaborates to excellent effect with cinematographer Kit Fraser, whose 35mm deep-focus imagery both conveys the bleakness of the East Anglian flatlands and brings out the dankness in every nook and cranny of Charlotte Pearson's forbidding, time-forgotten sets. Editor Tommy Boulding also deserves a mention for the dream sequences, even though he allows some of Harris's perambulations to drift. Creature designer Dominic Hailstone should also be lauded for giving Possum a head that recalls those skulls seen on plague monuments in gloomy country churches. But Holness must take the plaudits for taking a risk in dispensing with his trademark humour and for tackling such potent and pertinent themes in such an intriguingly innovative manner.

Born in the Punjab, but raised in Bradford, debuting director Mitu Misra draws in Lies We Tell on his own experiences of the tensions that arose  between the Yorkshire city's different ethnic communities in the wake of 9/11. Billed as a `northern noir', this glossy thriller has attracted a couple of Hollywood heavyweights and several familiar British character players. Yet it falls a long way below the standard set by Freesia (2017), fellow Bradfordian Conor Ibrahiem's less generic and more focused study of Islamophobia.

Gabriel Byrne is employed as a chauffeur by American billionaire Harvey Keitel, who lives in a mansion on the outskirts of Bradford. He regularly drives him to an address in the country, where Keitel meets mistress Sibylla Deen. But, when he dies suddenly, Keitel leaves instructions for Byrne to clear out the apartment and ensure that nothing remains linking him to Deen, who is the ex-wife of her gangster cousin, Jan Uddin. Unfortunately, Deen arrives for an assignation as Byrne is looking round and she feels hurt and humiliated at not being informed of her lover's demise. She is even more aghast when Byrne offers her a lift home and they are stopped by the police in the city's red light district and she is forced to flee before she is recognised by anyone leaving the nearby mosque. 

Deen has left her handbag in Byrne's car, however, and she uses a payphone to call her mobile. But, as he pulls up to return her property, Byrne sees Deen being beaten up by the heavily pregnant Emily Atack, who is currently dating Uddin and plans to marry him once she has converted to Islam. Her friend, Ambur Khan, takes a photo of Deen being consoled by Byrne after he comes to her rescue and jokes that Uddin won't be pleased to see the company she is keeping. Deen offers no explanation to Byrne, as she cleans herself up in the car. But she does ask him to find Keitel's phone, as it contains a compromising video of them together in Paris.

Returning to the farmhouse he shares with brother-in-law Mark Addy, Byrne ignores the divorce papers sent by wife Gina McKee and chugs a beer. In the days the follow, he clears out the apartment, while Deen works in the office of Leeds lawyer Nicholas Farrell and tries to help mother Sonia Kaur keep on top of the bills her work-shy father, Manzar Sehbai, can't afford to pay. She thanks Byrne for finding the phone, but needs further help when her younger brother, Aqib Khan, runs away from home and she tracks him down to the Score nightclub, where Uddin is regarded as a hero. When he recognises Byrne from the snapshot taken by Atack's pal, he follows him to the car park to taunt Deen. But she hits him in the face with a brick from handy skip and runs off into the night, much to Byrne's bemusement. 

A few days later, Deen comes to the farm to explain to Byrne how she was raised alongside Uddin before her parents flew them to Pakistan on her 16th birthday and forced her into an arranged marriage. Uddin agreed to put up a front until they could divorce. But he changed his mind and raped her and Deen alienated both families by lying to secure a divorce. In an effort to smooth things over, Deen agrees to apologise to Uddin's father and she has to endure the false bonhomie of a traditional celebration organised by matchmaker Harvey Virdi, while Byrne flies his dead daughter's kite with Addy to mark her birthday. 

While Deen studies for her law exams in her room, she hears a scream and rushes downstairs to find younger sister Danica Johnson being castigated by Virdi for wearing make-up. Deen protects her sibling and burns the curse she leaves tied to the living-room table. She also takes her to the farm in time to see Addy's dog give birth to puppies. But she is unable to prevent her parents from agreeing to let Johnson marry Uddin and Deen warns him that he is making a mistake if he thinks he can intimidate her. She also takes in her stride the news that Keitel's son, Reece Ritchie, has found the Paris video and that Byrne has quit his job rather than reveal her identity. 

However, Ritchie makes contact and suggests that he inherits her along with the rest of his father's property. But Uddin interrupts their conversation and forces Deen to promise not to interfere in his marriage to Johnson in return for the memory stick containing the video. She agrees, but promptly whisks her sister off on the train, only for Johnson to call a friend and betray the fact they are in Manchester. Disowned by her family, Deen seeks sanctuary at the farm and teases Byrne about having feelings for her. However, she also needs his advice about what to do next and he urges her to make peace with her father. 

Deen catches Sehbai drinking and gambling with his pals and says he would have made a better pimp than a father. But he refuses to cancel the wedding and Deen decides to leave for London. En route to the station, Byrne takes her to the venue and sneaks her in through the back door so that she can catch Johnson's eye as she gives her three-time assent to Uddin's proposal. While he whoops it up aside with his mates, Johnson turns him down at the third time of asking and Sehbai and Deen patch things up, while Virdi and Harish Patel glower at them with disdain. However, the furious Uddin refuses to let Deen get away with thwarting him and, having given Atack away to lascivious friend Amer Nazir, he has her murdered on the station platform as she says her goodbyes to Byrne. But Byrne also has vengeance in mind when Uddin confronts him at Deen's graveside.

Ending with the improbable sight of Byrne barking on all fours at the snarling dog chasing its own puppy across a wild moor, this is a plot-heavy saga that keeps using fragments of subplot to atone for the lack of character development. Yet nothing about Byrne's history with his wife, daughter and brother-in-law is disclosed in any detail, while Deen's relationships with her intellectually challenged brother, quasi-rebellious sister and ultra-conservative parents are important only in so far as they justify the lurchings of a storyline that is strewn with clichés and caricatures. Her romance with Keitel also strains credibility, especially as we learn so little about the home life he is jeopardising when he smugly informs Byrne, `the only men who get caught are those who don't love their wives enough'.

Looking less comfortable than he does playing Winston Wolf in the Direct Line adverts, Keitel feels utterly detached from his milieu, while Byrne appears out of his depth in a Bradford he seems not to have suspected existed before encountering Deen. It might have made sense had this been worked into the scenario to suggest how little the component communities mingle. But Mistra and screenwriters Ewen Glass and Andy McDermott seem more intent on questioning the customs of British Pakistanis and how they prevent them from integrating with their neighbours than they are on examining the dynamics of multiculturalism. 

Byrne and Deen (who hails from Sydney) do what they can with a script that does Addy, McKee and a pre-jungle Atack few favours and leaves Uddin, Virdi and Sehbai battling against soap operatic stereotype. Veteran composer Zbigniew Preisner also has an off day, with a score that underlines the action rather than complementing it. Ever-reliable cinematographer Santosh Sivan and production designer Jane Levick fare better, as does editor Chris Gill, who contributes some neat transitions to speed up the otherwise sluggish storytelling. Considering this is a first outing, Mistra has done remarkably well to assemble such a notable cast and crew. He also generates considerable testosterone-fuelled menace during the nightclub sequence in which Uddin helps Nazir find a suitable bride from among his female clientele. But the surfeit of tangled threads and loose ends prevents this urban thriller from being as gritty and gripping as it might have been.

It's been a while since Oxford featured in a movie in its own right rather than as an historical location and sophomore director Matt Gambell gives us a fine aerial view of the Dreaming Spires in his low-budget thriller, King of Crime. However, residents of Goring-on-Thames are also going to recognise the manor house in which much of the key action happens in this laudable bid to bring BritCrime into the cyber era by pitching an old-style villain against the terrorist extremists with designs on hijacking his online scamming empire. 

At the precise moment that Marcus King (Mark Wingett) discovers that vicious rivals have slaughtered some of his tech team, his wife Yvonne (Claire King) stabs Gemma Carter (Francesca Louise White), who has made the fatal mistake of revealing that Marcus is her father. She is determined to protect the interests of her twin sons, Andrew (Jonno Davies) and James (Zed Josef), and orders factotum Edward (Christopher Ellison) and new assistant Jessica Slade (Rachel Bright) to dump the body in the basement until she can decide where to bury it. Just to be on the safe side, Yvonne also sleeps with Robert the gardener (Jacob Crossley), who might have witnessed the dirty deed. 

Stealing Gemma's documents and taking a lock of hair that might come in useful at a later date, Jess wraps the corpse in a sheet and smooches with Andrew when he helps her carry it downstairs. That night in Oxford, however, she flirts in a bar with Anthony Tully (Hainsley Lloyd Bennett), a computer whizz kid who ditches friend Kylie White (Lisa Ronaghan) to go back to Jess's place. 

While walking home, however, they are mugged by two masked men, one of whom rapes Jess before running away. Tully thinks she should report the crime, but she explains that the assailant had slipped a note into her pocket warning her of worse to come unless she disables the security system she had been hired to crack in order to pay off her spiralling debts. Tully volunteers to use his skills to get Jess out of a jam, but is taken aback when she avers that she is much tougher than her mother, who killed herself because her father fell in love with somebody else. 

Marcus's sidekick, Jimmy Tate (Greg Tanner), discovers that the group putting the frighteners on his boss has links with ISIS and sets up a meeting in London with their chief fundraiser, Mr Mustaffa (Vas Blackwood). When Marcus tries to play hardball, Mustaffa shows him live pictures of a suicide bomber blowing himself up in a pub linked to Marcus's operation and gives him 48 hours to hand over his empire or face the consequences. Jess and Tully see news coverage of the blast and she turns on the waterworks to convince him to help her bypass the firewall and keep her safe. However, she leaves her flat and meets up with Andrew, who had staged the rape to dupe Tully into putting his expertise at the disposal of the King cause. 

Andrew isn't the only member of the family with a secret to hide, however, as his father is having an affair with George (Bryn Hodgen), a transvestite who lives in a cottage on the outskirts of town. While they are taking tea, however, a suicide bomber arrives at the manor and Tate is badly injured trying to incapacitate him. In visiting him in hospital, however, Marcus discovers that Tate is diabetic, like his sons, and he does some research online that leads him to draw a sobering conclusion. He gets Jess to take a hair sample from Tate and have it compared with those from James's comb. Nevertheless, he recognises that Andrew and James still have their uses and sends them to punish Dexter (Richard Summers-Calvert) for stealing family credit cards by turning his girlfriend Zoe (Makenna Guyler) into a human torch.

Determined to hang on to his ill-gotten gains, Marcus brings Tully to the mansion and offers him £1 million and Jess's release from dungeon captivity if he can devise a code that will protect his assets from Mustaffa's hackers. However, the Frenchman isn't in the mood to be generous with time and slices off Marcus's earlobe to prove that he means business. Meanwhile, Tate tells Yvonne that Marcus has realised he didn't father the twins and she cuts a deal with Mustaffa to betray her husband in return for a cut of his fortune. But Kylie photographs their meeting and calls Marcus to see if he would be willing to help take down a common enemy.

Furious at being caught out at every turn, Marcus takes out his frustration on George, who is beaten so badly that he has to be hospitalised. Jess goes to see him, as she is his daughter. However, she uses Gemma's DNA test results to convince Marcus that he is her father and he is glad to have a child of his own after learning that Tate sired Andrew and James. He tells Jess to meet him at the airport the next day, as he is leaving Blighty to start again, Marcus wants George to come with him and leaves a suitcase under his hospital bed before heading home to lock Yvonne and her sons in the blazing manor. 

Unwilling to let Andrew perish, Jess rushes back to rescue him. At that moment, Tully calls Marcus to inform him that he has completed his mission and insists that Jess is freed under the terms of their arrangement. But she had already flown to Spain (not Mexico, as Marcus let Yvonne believe) and he is delighted when George comes to join them. He is appalled to find Jess masquerading as Marcus's daughter in order to avenge her mother's suicide. But they don't have much time for talk, as Andrew and Yvonne show up pointing pistols, only for Marcus to kill his wife after she shoots him in the groin for cheating on her and Andrew to be wounded by a stray shot. 

That's when a couple of soldiers burst in and knock Marcus unconscious and Jess is also captured as she tries to flee. When she wakes, she finds himself on a USAF base in Norfolk and learns that Tully is a CIA agent in cahoots with Kylie, who has been playing her from the start. Marcus discovers the same thing when he is taken to an empty Stadium MK to meet Brad Walsh (Nicholas Brendon), who has been using his cyber set-up as bait to snare Mustaffa. He offers Marcus a new identity and he is soon sunning himself on a yacht in Gibraltar. But he is poisoned by a fake waiter and Tully takes Jess back to the mansion to inform her that Marcus bequeathed it to her in the mistaken belief she was his child. He urges her to make the most of her windfall and she is swayed when she sees Andrew appear at the door. 

Echoes of the indie features produced by the likes of Tristan Loraine and Oxford's own Vicky Jewson reverberate through this effectively made crime saga. Dunscombe's screenplay is full of deft twists and turns, but the characterisation is markedly less effective, while too much of the dialogue rings hollow. Making his second feature after completing What Goes Up (2014) while still a student in Lincoln, Gambell makes the most of his locations and keeps Tom Anderson's camera close to the protagonists. However, while TV veterans Mark Wingett and Claire King are quite at home in such murky situations, the less experienced Rachel Bright has the odd awkward moment, while some of the support playing is decidedly average. 

Saverio Rapezzi and Luigi Pulcini's score also lays it on thick during the action sequences, while some of the visual effects are highly unconvincing. But it takes dedication and courage to make movies at this end of the market and Gambell and Dunscombe should be applauded for their ambitions rather than upbraided for shortcomings that are far less egregious than those in the majority of thick-earned BritCrime flicks.

Having made a decent impression with his feature bow, Frank & Lola (2016), Matthew Ross succumbs to second filmitis with Siberia, an old-fashioned fish out of water thriller that might have been made in the 1970s with Elliott Gould in the lead because Robert Redford and Warren Beatty were gainfully employed elsewhere. Keanu Reeves turns up the impervious impassivity to 11. But, while Ross makes the most of the kind of backwater burg glimpsed in Vitaly Mansky's documentary, Putin's Witnesses, Scott B. Smith's scenario struggles to hold the attention after its opening twists and has long parted company with credibility before the climactic shootout. 

Arriving in St Petersburg to find his contact, Pyotr (Boris Gulyarin), has gone missing, American diamond trader Lucas Hill (Keanu Reeves) cuts a deal to sell a consignment of blue diamonds to Russian thug Boris Volkov (Pasha D. Lynchnikoff) before flying to the Eastern Siberian town  of Mirny to rendezvous with Pyotr in a small hotel. No sooner has he stepped into the lobby, however, than he receives a call from South African shark, Vincent (James Gracie), who is keen to gazump Volkov and acquire the rare gems for himself. 

Needing a drink, Lucas braves the cold to go to a nearby café, where Ivan (Dmitry Chepovetsky) asks a pair of lugs to keep an eye on his waitress sister, Katya (Ana Ularu), so that the Yank doesn't try to take advantage of her. They get a bit boisterous and leave Lucas in a heap after he tries to intervene and Katya gives him a couch for the night. However, as Ivan is convinced that she has already slept with the stranger, she makes a deal with Lucas to introduce him to Pyotr's miner brother, Andrei (Vlad Stokanic) if he agrees to bed her on their return. 

Andrei informs Lucas that Pyotr left almost as soon as he arrived because he is being trailed by a gangster who knows about the stones. However, Andrei reveals that the gems his brother has sourced are fakes of exceptional quality and that they stand to make a killing if the deal goes ahead. Realising he's been lured into a trap and is powerless to do anything until he finds Pyotr, Lucas Skypes wife Gabby (Molly Ringwald) and returns to the bar, where Ivan and his brother, Leo (Taran Vitt), warn him off Katya and invite him to join them on a bear hunt. He impresses them when he puts a suffering wolf out of his misery and he feels guilty about sleeping with Katya, as not only is he married, but she is also promised to Anton (Cory Chetyrbok), who seems a decent bloke. 

Returning to St Petersburg, Lucas finds the sample diamond hidden inside a blue candle in Pyotr's room. As he had given Katya an identical candle from his hotel room, he asks her to bring it to him and promises to send a private plane. He also arranges meetings with both Vincent and Volkov and loads the gun that Pyotr had hidden in his suitcase. The former tells him to leave Russia because major malfeasants are watching his every move and Katya is also disappointed that he is involved in something so shady. However, she is more concerned that he still has feelings for Gabby, despite their living separate lives, and she asks him to make love to her as though she were his wife. 

Annoyed at being left in the room while Lucas visits Volkov, Katya finds the address on a notepad and joins the party. She has to pay a high price for her line of cocaine, however, as Volkov insists on oral pleasuring to seal his pact of brotherhood with a nauseated Lucas, who realises he has no option but to comply with the demand. Managing to calm Katya when they leave at dawn, he is unable to protect her when FSB agent Polozin (Eugene Lipinski) offers to return her safely to Mirny in return for Lucas convincing Volkov that the worthless diamonds Pyotr passed on to the big league crook so that he can recoup his cash. 

Unaware that Lucas can speak Russian, Polozin and his deputy joke in the car that he will be a dead man once Volkov discovers the deception and Gabby and Katya will also the ultimate price for his folly. Persuading Volkov not to use a spectrometer to examine the stones because they are brothers, Lucas receives payment and emerges from the lair unscathed. However, he receives a message that Pyotr has returned to Mirny and he asks Vincent to make Volkov a $60 million bid for the blue diamonds so that he can fly east and find out what's going on. 

Asking Ivan for a favour, he finds Pyotr's frozen body in an outhouse beside a dacha in a snowy forest. His arm is blackened from puncture marks and Lucas asks Ivan to take his sister to safety and the Russian leaves him his rifle so he can defend himself. Holing up inside the cabin, having lied to Katya that he will make her French toast in the morning, he activates the GPS in his phone so that Volkov's snarling sidekick Pavel (Rafael Petardi) can find him. Lucas kills a few of his goons before Pavel shoots him in the back and he dies with an image of making love with Katya flashing through his mind before the camera lingers on his cold, lifeless eye. 

Grinding to a halt for prolonged periods while Keanu Reeves and Ana Ularu give each other smouldering looks before jumping each other's bones, this so desperately wants to be a complex, sophisticated exposé of Russian criminality, along the lines of Michael Apted's Gorky Park (1983). But it proves as bogus as one its Macguffin diamonds, as the screenplay is so sketchy and strewn with ciphers that it singularly fails to make us care a jot what happens to Reeves or his cardboard cut-out lover. 

It doesn't always pay to spoon-feed the viewer, but we learn precisely nothing about Reeves's background or business operation  and, as a consequence, it's a big ask to accept him as a stubbled, sharp-suited troubleshooter along the lines of such charismatic B movie rogues as The Lone Wolf, The Falcon or The Saint or such archetypal Keanu characters as John Wick. Similarly, we're supposed to deduce the depth of Reeves's adulterous guilt on the strength of two brief scenes with Molly Ringwald and a passionate fling that struggles to generate any sparks because Ularu is presented as an ice queen and Reeves is being Keanu.

Eric Koretz's photography is suitably imposing, while Jean-André Carrière's production design draws effective contrasts between the eastern backwater and the Window on the West. But Ross struggles to convey any authentic atmosphere, as he settles for clichés and stereotypes that will play into the preconceptions of his American audience. He also misjudges the tonal shifts and deserves nothing but censure for the grotesquely misogynist and utterly redundant fellatio sequence. But, while Ross emerges with little credit, Scott B. Smith seems to have fallen a long way off the pace since he wrote Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998).