Unsavoury stories from the set of his Palme d'or winner, Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013), look likely to dog Abdellatif Kechiche for the rest of his career. Indeed, the lingering reaction to that controversial lesbian romance has coloured the assessment of his sixth feature, Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno, as he has once again allowed his fiftysomething male gaze to dwell on the naked bodies of his young female leads. There's no escaping the unsettling impact of such voyeurism. But, in reworking François Bégaudeau's novel, La Blessure, la vraie, Kechiche and co-scenarist wife Ghalya Lacroix appear to have consciously invoked the spirit of Eric Rohmer to reflect upon juvenile attitudes and appetites in south-eastern France in the mid-1990s and contrast them with those of today. The result may not convince everyone of the nobility of Kechiche's intentions or the integrity his approach. But this sunkissed evocation of a not-too-distant era is anything but salacious nostalgia, as it dares to suggest that the complex interaction between the sexes can't simply be reduced to convenient PC platitudes.

Abandoning his medical studies in Paris, Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) returns to his coastal home in Sète to await a producer's verdict on his latest film script. While out cycling, he spots the delivery scooter belonging to his cousin, Tony (Salim Kechiouche), outside the house owned by the aunt of his childhood friend, Ophélie (Ophélie Bau). Peering through the window, Amin is dismayed to see the couple making passionate love, as he not only has a lingering crush on Ophélie, but she is also engaged to Clément, a soldier on active duty in the Gulf.

Deciding to break-up the tryst by knocking on the door, Amin is amused by the speed with which Tony scarpers and sips a beer while enjoying Ophélie's embarrassment at being caught with her lover. She admits that they have been seeing each other for four years, but still intends to marry when her fiancé gets home. As she tidies the bed and offers Amin some strawberries from the family farm, she reveals that her aunt is in hospital with cirrhosis and that she is looking after the house in her absence. Amin spots a Polaroid camera and reminds Ophélie of the photographs he took of her when they were younger and she teases him about the fact he doesn't have a girlfriend to pose for him. As they stroll beside the waterfront, he promises to invite her to Paris so he can show her a statue she resembles in the Place de la Nation.  

Some time later, Amin and Tony meet Nice holidaymakers Charlotte (Alexia Chardard) and Céline (Lou Luttiau) while they are sunbathing on the beach. Tony and Charlotte do most of the talking, as he boasts about the restaurants he manages in Sète and Hammamet in Tunisia. Charlotte reveals she's at business school, while Céline is training to be a dancer. Tony tells them about Amin writing movies and they are charmed by his story set in 2020 about a man falling in love with a female robot. While Charlotte and Tony smooch in the sea, Amin offers to show Céline around Paris and asks if he can take her picture to see if he can capture her dancing elegance. She smiles, but isn't quite such a pushover as her friend. 

The quartet go out for the evening and Tony introduces the girls to his Uncle Kamel (Kamel Saadi), who pays them extravagant compliments before they go to eat at the couscous restaurant run by Amin and Tony's mothers (Delinda Kechiche and Hatika Karaoui). While Tony gets a ticking off for failing to show up for his deliveries, Charlotte and Céline meet Tony's sister, Lamia (Lydia Bouchali-Zemmour), and another cousin, Joe (Hamid Rahmi), who invites them to sit with his friends, Melinda (Meleinda Elasfour) and Thomas (Thomas Fessard). However, they quickly cross the street to dance in a bar, where Amin feels put out that Joe makes a move on Céline, while Ophélie can't help but notice the attention that Tony is paying to Charlotte. 

Scolded by mother Delinda for watching Alexander Dovzhenko's Arsenal (1929) when he should be out in the sunshine, Amin listens to her criticising Tony's parents for setting him a bad moral example by their bickering. She admits her brother is a bad lad for playing away, but says Hatika is too shrewish and she hopes she has set Amin a better example. Joking that she no longer knows what women want, she dashes off to the restaurant, leaving Amin to develop some photographs of Ophélie. He meets up with her on the beach, where she grumbles about her friend quizzing her about Tony and Amin recalls how white he went when Clément threatened to emasculate anyone who laid a finger on his girl. 

Nearby, Charlotte complains to Céline about Tony cooling down towards her and she wonders whether she has made a fool of herself with him. As she walks back to the farm to do her chores with the goats and lambs, Ophélie tells Amin that Charlotte is nuisance and is pleased to report that Tony finds her frigid in bed. She has more time for Céline, who prefers having fun to stealing other people's boyfriends. But Amin keeps his opinion to himself, as he watches Ophélie bottle feed a lamb in a halo of dusk sunlight. 

That night, Charlotte and Céline come to the restaurant to find Tony. She is upset at being messed around and struggles to hold back the tears as Kamel greets her. However, he gets told off by Dalinda for making Céline sit on his knee and she whisks the girls into the pool room to find Amin. He tells Charlotte to forget Tony, as he isn't worth fretting over. But she is uncomfortable chatting with Ophélie and Melinda and is relieved to be swept away by Amin to meet his favourite aunt, Camélia (Hafsia Herzi), and her boyfriend Fernando (David Ribeiro). He asks Amin if he's met Jean-Paul Belmondo in Paris and Camélia mistakenly thinks that her nephew and Charlotte are an item. But she is trying to have a serious conversation with Tony, who has arrived with a new group of friends and who keeps flannelling her with gushing protestations that she knows are nonsense. 

Meanwhile, Céline flirts with Ophélie and dances with Kamel, who suggests that they go to a nearby disco. Dalinda tells him to act his age and leave the young girls alone, but he insists on piling into a car and the action cuts to the gang enjoying a morning-after swim in the sea. As they tuck into spaghetti on the beach, Camélia joins Dalinda and Hatika to gossip about Ophélie. When she joins them, they talk about Clément and Hatika admits that she was saddened to see him go off to war in the Gulf. They discuss weddings and fidelity and Ophélie is relieved when Amin rescues her from what she realises is a scarcely disguised browbeating. He had met a Russian girl named Anastasia at the disco and Ophélie tries to coax him into revealing details about what they got up to. 

As they walk along the beach, Amin reminds Ophélie that she owes him a favour for keeping quiet about her affair with Tony. He asks if she will pose nude for him, but she is reluctant and fobs him off with access to some lambing ewes because he needs some pictures to illustrate the screenplay he is writing. When he comes to the milking pen, Ophélie teases him because her younger sister (Charlotte Jude) has a crush on him and she is amused by how bashful he becomes whenever anybody mentions girls. She leaves him perched on a hay bale waiting for one of the sheep to go into labour and is so taken by his earnestness and gentle treatment of the animals that she promises to think about posing for him. 

Amin's patience is rewarded when a ewe gives birth to two lambs and nuzzles them as they struggle to their feet. He leaves this scene of tranquility for the disco, where Ophélie is strutting her stuff on the dance floor, while Tony is flirting with a couple of Spanish girls. There's no sign of Charlotte, but Céline is happy to bop around with Ophélie and Camélia, as they writhe around poles, thrust out their behinds and whirl their long hair in time to the music with an abandon that seems utterly oblivious to the desires they are arousing in the men enrapturedly watching them. As Sylvester's `You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)' blares out, the sense is unmistakable that everyone is putting on a show and sending out signals that can just as easily be ignored as misinterpreted. Although Céline tries to get him to dance with her, Amin is content to survey the scene with a passivity that stands in marked contrast to the intrusive detachment of the camera, as it upskirts Ophélie and Camélia (who isn't wearing underwear) and gets just a touch too up close and personal with the other women being ogled and fondled under the influence of half a dozen too many shots. 

The next day, Amin goes to Anastasia's hotel, but she is out and he resists the attempts of her model roommate (Karina Kolokolchykova) to kiss him. Wandering on the beach at sunset, he runs into Charlotte. She has moved out of Céline's grandmother's house and she invites him back to her apartment for supper. He accepts gladly and offers to help make the tomato sauce and, when she says it's best to let it simmer, he says he has all the time in the world. 

With Scott Mackenzie's `San Francisco' playing over the closing credits, Kechiche appears to draw a parallel between the Flower People of 1967 and the young hedonists of 1994. But he leaves it unclear whether he is suggesting that it was easier to have fun in those days or whether millennials are too hung up to let their hair down. Either way, he runs into the old movie brick wall that it's easy to show people having a good time in a bar or on a dance floor, but it's much more difficult to entice the audience into entering into the spirit. As a consequence, the lengthy club and disco sequences are by far the dullest in a film that otherwise captures the rhythms and banalities of daily life with considerable acuity. 

Although it consistently echoes Kechiche's 2007 gem, Couscous, the loudest reverberations come from such Eric Rohmer masterpieces as Claire's Knee (1970), Pauline At the Beach (1983), The Green Ray (1986) and A Summer's Tale (1996). The use of light by Kechiche and cinematographer Marco Graziaplena is certainly Rohmeresque, but so is the rambling dialogue, which reminds us of the nonsense we often talk when trying to make a good impression on someone. Amin's conversations with Ophélie are particularly well observed, although the conversational highlight is the gossipy exchange between Camélia, Hatika and Dalinda (who is played by Kechiche's sister), which becomes all the more amusing and revealing when Ophélie joins them and finds herself being discussed as if she wasn't there.

Naturally, much focus will fall on the need for César-nominated Ophélie Bau to be naked in the opening love-making sequence and for the girls in bathing suits and tight skirts and shorts to be objectified quite so pruriently on the beach and on the dance floor. But there are occasions when the camera is approximating the gaze of the male characters and Kechiche would not be accurately reflecting the way the genders operate under the influence if he merely restricted the dance moves to chaste shuffling around a handbag. It sometimes makes for discomfiting viewing. But, even though he might have opted for some more discreet camera positions, Kechiche is reflecting life as it was lived a quarter of a century ago before social media killed privacy and made everybody more hypocritically censorious. 

In praising Ophélie Bau to the skies, several critics have accused Shaïn Boumedine of making Amin seem voyeuristically creepy. This seems a little harsh on wallflowers and seems to denounce people watching as sinful. He is much less stalkerish than Xavier Lafitte's artist in José Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia (2007) and, besides which, he is supposed to be an aspiring film-maker and powers of observation are usually considered a professional prerequisite. For the rest, this is an ensemble miracle, with Alexia Chardard and Lou Luttiau being worthy of a picture of their own, as the tourists whose friendship dissolves in the sea air. However, much of the energy of the performances comes from the exhilarating editing of Nathanaëlle Gerbeaux and Maria Giménez Cavallo, whose contribution (along with that of Lacroix) suggests that the action has not solely been observed by or presented for the male gaze.

By a quirk of coincidence, Ryû Murakami published his novel, Piercing, in 1994. However, it's not clear exactly when the action in Nicolas Pesce's screen adaptation is supposed to be taking place, as Alan Lampert's production design has a 70s feel that isn't necessarily borne out by the narrative. By all accounts, Pesce filmed a dry run using miniature sets and puppets to ensure that every detail of the mise-en-scène was precisely in place. But, as was the case with his monochrome debut, The Eyes of My Mother (2016), Pesce seems happier creating unsettling visuals than he does creating characters or telling a story. 

Fighting the urge to attack his infant daughter with an ice pick, Reed (Christopher Abbott) tells wife Mona (Laia Costa) that he is going to a conference in order to check into a hotel room and butcher a prostitute. He calls home to let Mona know he has arrived safely before walking himself through the murder and dismemberment of  his victim (to the accompaniment of the gruesome sound effects in his head). He even renders himself unconscious to test the efficacy of his chloroform. However, from the moment she arrives as a  last-minute replacement Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) makes Reed feel uneasy. 

She locks herself in the shower after he winces when she starts pleasuring herself while discussing their options. But, when he opens the door to check she's okay, Reed finds Jackie repeatedly stabbing her right thigh and she bites him on the hand when he tries to stop her from screaming while he subdues her. Fielding a phone call asking him to keep down the noise, Reed lays Jackie on the bed and cleans her up before making a dash for the lift. However, she staggers into the corridor while he is talking to an elderly guest who has misplaced his wife and he decides to bundle Jackie into a cab and take her to the hospital. He waits on a bench outside and imagines calling Nora for advice on how to proceed before seeing Jackie back to her apartment. 

She invites him in and he asks how she explained her injury to the doctor. He laughs when she says she claimed to have fallen off her bike, but he shudders when she shows him the scars on her other thigh from previous bouts of self-harm. As they chat, she encourages him to get the pent-up feelings out of his system and the screen splits as he goes to his bag to get his bondage kit. However, the thought of being tied and abandoned on an empty stomach doesn't appeal and she asks if they can eat first.

Jackie feeds Reed soup made with curry powder. However, it's drugged and, before passing out on the floor, Reed hallucinates about a girl killing a pet rabbit (Olivia Bond), his mother (Maria Dizzia) having sordid S&M sex before being stabbed (by him) in the belly, a scurrying beetle-creature emerging from a pipe and a bathtub filling with a noxious brown fluid that threatens to flood the room. 

When Reed comes round and calls for Mona, Jackie hits him across the face with a can opener. But he recovers from the assault and crawls across the floor to get a rope from his bag. She allows him to tie her hands and stuff a handkerchief in her mouth. However, she resists when he announces that he is going to stab her with an ice pick and she knocks him unconscious. Finding a notebook in Reed's bag, Jackie lounges back on the sofa to read about his meticulous planning.

The next morning, Reed wakes to find himself bound and ball-gagged, wearing only his boxers. Jackie swans around the apartment in a white silk robe and pierces one of her own nipples while waiting for the espresso maker to finish. She pushes Reed down when he tries to sit up and rakes the tip of the ice pick over his skin. He flinches when she raises her hand and threatens to plunge the point into his flesh. But she pulls back the gag so he can speak and he repeats her earlier request to eat first before the screen plunges into darkness. 

Takashi Miike's Audition (1999) was also based on a Murakami novel, but there's a chasm of difference between the films. While Miike feels wholly in control of his material, Pesce seems uncertain how far to push the macabre comedy and, as a result, he delivers a muddled De Palma-cum-Cronenbergian rehash of Mary Harron's American Psycho (2000) and Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa (2015) that neither amuses or appals. 

This is all the more frustrating given the unsettling nature of his debut and the presence of offbeat indie talents like Antonio Campos, Sean Durkin and Josh Mond among the producers. But, despite the bold playing of Christopher Abbott and the ever-unpredictable Mia Wasikowska and the canny use of a couple of Gene Pitney songs and some musical cues ripped from such giallo composers as Piero Piccioni, Goblin's Claudio Simonetti and Bruno Nicolai, this larky provocation feels like a bloated short that is too pleased with its murkily cruel wit to notice or care about the lurches in logic and sketchy characterisation.

Reading some of the press coverage of the National Film Theatre's Barbara Stanwyck retrospective, you'd be forgiven for thinking that she had been rescued from cinematic obscurity after a cache of her previously unseen films had been discovered in the permafrost in Dawson City. For those of us who have always worshipped at the Stanwyck shrine, there's a smug sense of satisfaction that everyone else has finally cottoned on to the verve and versatility that made the four-time Oscar-nominated and three-time Emmy-winning Brooklynite such a distinctive talent. It's also good to see that the BFI has chosen The Lady Eve (1941) to promote the two-part season, as this screwball gem is easily the best picture that Preston Sturges ever made - and he had The Great McGinty, Christmas in July (both 1940), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero (both 1944) on his CV.

Having spent a year up the Amazon collecting snakes with his bodyguard, Ambrose `Muggsy' Murgatroyd (William Demarest), brewing heir Charles Poncefort Pike (Henry Fonda) boards a luxury liner heading back to the United States. His arrival is watched with interest by Colonel `Handsome Harry' Harrington (Charles Coburn) and his daughter, Jean (Barbara Stanwyck), who drops an apple on to Pike's pith helmet, as he climbs the ladder from his launch. 

During dinner, Jean uses her make-up mirror to snoop on the gold-diggers eyeing up Pike, as he tries to read at his table. She comments tuttingly on their gauche tactics before tripping Pike up as he retires and insisting that he accompanies her to her cabin to get a change of shoes after he snaps her heel. Once she has him alone, Jean discovers that `Hopsie' (so called because of Pike's Ale -`the Ale That Won for Yale') is bashful when it comes to girls and feigns modesty when he kneels to help her strap on some new shoes. 

Back at the table, the Harringtons lose heavily at bridge and Hopsie feels awful when the colonel insists on paying his debt. He escorts Jean to her quarters, only for her to steer him to his own room and then makes an inordinate fuss when she spots a snake named Emma slithering across the floor. Aghast at having distressed Jean, Hopsie follows her back to her cabin, where she proceeds to swoon and cradle his head and ruffle his hair while discussing her ideal man. 

Having spent the evening playing cards with Harry's associate, Gerald (Melville Cooper), Muggsy is sure that they are cardsharps. But Hopsie is too smitten to believe anything bad about Jean and asks Harry for permission to propose after they play poker after dinner. Jean shames Harry into tearing up a cheque for $32,000 after swindling Hopsie at double or quits and they take a turn about the deck before Hopsie proposes in the moonlight. However, while Jean is telling Harry that she intends going straight after she's married, Muggsy obtains a photograph from the purser identifying the Harringtons as sharps and Hopsie is so dismayed that he lets Jean think that he was on to her from the outset and was stringing her along to teach her a lesson. 

Determined to wreak revenge on Hopsie, Jean poses as Lady Eve Sidwich, the niece of Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith (Eric Blore), who is really their old scamming confederate, Curly. He has a house in Bridgeport, Connecticut near to the Pikes and is invited to bring his niece to a house party being thrown by Hopsie's parents, Horace (Eugene Pallette) and Janet (Janet Beecher). Speaking in an English accent, but looking exactly the same way as she had done on SS Southern Queen, `Eve' enchants Horace and so befuddles Hopsie that he trips over the sofa and pulls down a curtain while the guests are going into dinner. Muggsy swears that Eve is Jean, but Hopsie is convinced that the facial resemblance is merely a coincidence and he proceeds to fall in love all over again. 

Within a fortnight, Eve has secured a proposal and, after a glamorous white wedding, she chooses their honeymoon night on a speeding express to tell Hopsie about eloping with a stable boy at 16 and the subsequent romantic adventures that led to her family sending her to the United States. Flabbergasted, the prudish Hopsie abandons her and she calls Horace to inform him that she doesn't want a cent in a divorce settlement. All she requires is for Hopsie to tell her to her face that he doesn't love her anymore. When he refuses and embarks upon another sea voyage, Jean arranges to bump into him as herself and he is delighted to see her. As they canoodle, Hopsie confesses to being married and Jean replies in kind, as they slip into her cabin and close the door - only for it to open again for Muggsy to slip out and opine that Eve and Jean are `positively the same dame'. 

Scripted by Sturges from a Monckton Hoffe story entitled `Two Bad Hats', this is exactly what moving pictures were invented for. Photographed in shimmering monochrome by Victor Milner on sets designed by Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegt, and with Stanwyck looking resplendent in costumes created by Edith Head, the action manages to be both sweet and sensual, flippant and deceptively deep. If Ernst Lubitsch had his famous `touch', Sturges had a caress, as well as a knack of knowing how far to push a gag. Thus, he has a horse nuzzle Fonda's hair while Hopsie is proposing to Eve and keeps tossing in pratfalls that daringly go against the sophistication of the screwball wit. 

Reuniting after Leigh Jason's The Mad Miss Manton (1938), Fonda and Stanwyck proved such fine foils that they were teamed together again in Wesley Ruggles's You Belong to Me (1941). But they never sizzled as they did under Sturges, who defied the Breen Office to cut the lengthy passage in which Stanwyck tousles Fonda's hair and nibbles his ear. But the censor passed the sequence uncut and it retains a playful eroticism that puts more graphic love scenes to shame. 

As always in a Sturges film, the support playing is superb, with Charles Coburn, Eric Blore and Eugene Pallette joining such stock company regulars as William Demarest and Robert Greig (as the put-upon Pike butler). Sturges always ensured his character players had zinging lines, although the come hither expressions of the women hoping to catch Fonda's eye in the saloon are equally memorable. But this is all about the chemistry between the leads and the mastery of a writer-director who would so lose his confidence as postwar comic tastes changed that only Unfaithfully Yours (1948) came close to matching the brilliance of his unprecedented hot streak at the start of the decade.

Five decades have passed since Ken Loach set the standard for British rite-of-passage cinema with Kes (1969), an adaptation of Barry Hines's deeply moving novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, which saw the St Peter's College alumnus make a decisive move away from television and into cinema. Ever since, film-makers have been striving to create a girl's own version of Billy Casper's travails and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009) and Tom Beard's Two For Joy (2018) are now joined by James Gardner's Jellyfish, which sees the Hereford-born National Film and Television School graduate make his feature bow after being acclaimed for the shorts, Two Dancers (2012), The Car Washer, Barry Glitter (both 2015) and Ferris & the Fancy Pigeon (2016). 

Fifteen year-old Sarah Taylor (Liv Hill) has to take care of younger siblings, 
Marcus (Henry Lile) and Lucy (Jemima Newman), because their single mother, Karen (Sinéad Matthews), is a manic depressive who rarely leaves her bed. When not being sneered at by the mean girls in the performing arts class run by Adam Hale (Cyril Nri), Sarah works at the amusement arcade managed by the grumpy Vince (Angus Barnett), who doesn't seem to realise that she makes extra money (for snacks and the electricity meter) by offering hand relief to adult customers in the alley beside the bins. 

He fires her, however, when Sarah is late for an afternoon session during school time after she loses track of time watching Frankie Boyle after Hale sends her to the library to research comedians with attitude like Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor and George Carlin. She gives Vince a mouthful and is equally abusive towards the wife (Helen Kennedy) of property developer Martin (Tomos Eames), who has found Marcus and Lucy wandering around the town centre after Karen forgets to pick them up from school. Her classmates also feel the sharp edge of her tongue when Nicole (Lauran Taylor-Griffin) accuses her of smelling and Hale urges her to channel her frustration and fury into her act. But, when he calls on her during the next lesson, she has nothing to say and stands in surly silence before he sends her out of the room. 

Arriving home from a joke-writing session at the Lido, Sarah finds that Karen has fallen behind with the rent because she has been missing her signing-on appointments at the benefits office. Reducing her mother to tears for letting the family down, Sarah tries to impersonate Karen in order to claim backdated payments and gives the duty manager (Victoria Alcock) a mouthful when she threatens to refer the case to social services, as Sarah has no intention of going back into temporary care. So, after Karen has a meltdown after messing up the supper, Sarah goes to a nearby nightclub and flirts with Martin before threatening to tell his wife that he has a thing for underage girls unless he hands over the money in his billfold. 

Excited at having the funds to pay off some of the rent arrears, a buoyant Karen allows the kids to bunk off and visit Dreamland. However, when Hale calls Sarah and reminds her not to play truant, she hands over the cash to her mother and rushes off to show Hale the material she has been writing for the upcoming show at the Theatre Royal. He is angry with her for being late and she gives him both barrels when he tells her she's been dropped from the line-up. Things get worse when she arrives home to find that Karen has used the rent money to buy a white mini-van and she storms off after a blazing row about Sarah being a buzzkill who prevents Karen from being herself. 

The next morning, having had to hide from social services when they come to the house, Sarah quits school and pleads with Vince to get her job back. He reluctantly agrees to let her go full-time on a part-time rate, but is appalled when he catches her pleasuring a regular client in the alley. She offers the same service to dissuade him from calling the police, but he takes advantage of her in the locked office and the camera pulls back through the arcade to contemplate the traffic on the roundabout outside while Sarah is raped. 

Finding the house in darkness, Sarah sinks to her knees in the kitchen and is helped to bed by her brother and sister. She is awoken by Karen the next morning, who has sold the van for £100 and is feeling chipper about the future. However, she laughs when Sarah tells her about her newfound passion for comedy and storms out to cycle to the theatre (unhooking the child trailer she uses to ferry her siblings around as a statement of intent), where she strides on to the stage before Hale can stop her. 

Starting slowly, Sarah grows in confidence as her barbed remarks about Margate bring a few chuckles of recognition. But she is hit in the head by a pound coin and Hale charges on to the stage to identify the culprit. However, Sarah refuses to relinquish the microphone and she accuses Vince of rape before cycling to the station to take a train to London. She thinks better of such a rash decision, however, and puts her head on Hale's shoulder when he finds her slumped on a bench on the platform. 

Bookended by day-night montages showing Margate as a place that has seen better days, but keeps hoping for more, this is the latest social realist postcard - after Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort (2000), Penny Woolcock's Exodus (2007) and Simon Welsford's Jetsam (2008) - to suggest that you need a tougher shell than a whelk to survive on the Thanet coast. Yet, while Gardner and Lord saddle the luckless Taylors with enough woes to keep a soap opera household busy for a year, they offer few insights into the family's particular plight or the wider socio-political situation exacerbating it. 

It's not enough to evoke a sense of Loachian familiarity and expect the audience to remain empathetic as the characters find themselves in increasingly melodramatic predicaments. For too long, UK film-makers have been getting away with a form of miserabilism bingo that seeks to condemn bourgeois viewers for being complicit in the suffering of those on the margins of Broken Britain. Yet, for all their haranguing, such features rarely, if ever, connect with the working-class constituency purportedly being depicted. Gardner is not the first and won't be the last neophyte to make a heartfelt plea on behalf of the dispossessed. But there's something DeMillean about the way in which he lingers on Sarah's degradation before emulating Alfred Hitchcock's famous retreat shot from Frenzy (1972) in order to point a finger at those peering through the darkness. 

This isn't the only borrowing in the film, as Sarah's decision to get off the train in the final scene recalls another aspiring comedian's dose of cold feet at the end of John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963). Moreover, teacher Cyril Nri's encouragement of the excellent Liv Hill recalls Colin Welland's efforts to get the equally disaffected David Bradley to talk about his bird in Kes. Such homaging is all well and good. But, when he comes to make his sophomore picture, Gardner has to do more than simply tell a story. He also needs to have something to say that hasn't been said before. 

The signs are good that he will, as he clearly has his head and heart in the right place. Moreover, he has an eye for detail, as cinematographer Peter Riches's views of the rundown seafront are as evocative as those of John Fletcher in Lindsay Anderson's seminal documentary, O Dreamland (1953). He also coaxes a fine performance out of rising star Hill, who has already impressed in the BBC's Three Girls (2017), Lenny Abrahamson's The Little Stranger and Jessica Hynes's The Fight (2018). Her scenes with Sinéad Matthews feel somewhat clichéd in echoing those between Samantha Morton and Bella Ramsey in Two For Joy, while her cathartic confessional showcase is nowhere near as furious or funny as it should be. But, hopefully, Gardner will learn and place more emphasis on lived life and less on movie reflections of it next time out.   

Reaching cinemas so soon after Under the Wire, Christopher Martin's excellent documentary adaptation of photographer Paul Conroy's book about his partnership with Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, Matthew Heineman's A Private War, was always going to feel like a dramatised afterthought. Having presented a thoughtful insight into the ongoing Syrian crisis in City of Ghosts, Heineman was certainly the right man for the job and Wadham alumna Rosamund Pike is a fine choice to play the indomitable Colvin. But, while this well-meaning tribute is vastly superior to Eva Husson's Girls of the Sun (in which Emmanuelle Bercot played an à clef version of Colvin), it shows how difficult it is to make complex conflicts accessible to mainstream audiences without trivialising them or demonising fighters on either side of the struggle. 

Hoping to rekindle her marriage to academic David Irens (Greg Wise), American Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike) suggests having a child. Instead, she goes to Vanni in Sri Lanka in 2001 to interview Tamil Tiger leader SP Thamilselvan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) and loses her left eye in an ambush. Friends Rita Williams (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Amy Bentham (Amanda Drew) rally round and insist she would look good with an eye patch. Editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) agrees to keep her on the foreign desk, where she befriends newcomer, Kate Richardson (Faye Marsay). However, she breaks up with Irens because of his womanising and heads to the Iraqi border in 2003. 

Here, Colvin renews ties with translator Mourad (Fady Elsayed) and defies the US Army's insistence on embedding reporters to hook up with freelance photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Doran), who is happy to travel with her to Fallujah, in spite of the warnings of veteran shutterbug, Norm Coburn (Corey Johnson). She poses as a nurse to get past a checkpoint and faces hostility from some male villagers, as she waits for a digger to excavate a mass grave of Kuwaiti POWs executed by Saddam Hussein. As the skeletons begin to emerge from the dust, Colvin smokes angrily as Conroy takes pictures and she explains to Richardson back at the press billet that her job is to find stories that the public will identify with in order to ascertain the truth for a rough draft of history. 

Back home, however, Colvin has recurring nightmares about a dead Palestinian girl lying on her bed and has panic attacks that she seeks to assuage with cigarettes and alcohol (just as she has cathartic sex on mission with one of her fellow scribes). But, while she confides her fears over the phone to Williams, she hides them from Ryan, who keeps championing her stories so that they make the front page of the paper. Reluctantly, she accepts she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and checks into a clinic, where she pours out her worries and contradictions to the sympathetic Conroy, who has had his own brush with PTSD while in the army. 

Ryan also comes to see her and assures Colvin that her place on the foreign team is secure and, in 2009, she finds herself in Marjah in Afghanistan. She covers the aftermath of a roadside mine and commends the courage of civilians who manage to endure much more than she ever could in trying to get on with lives blighted by carnage on a daily basis. Once again, she gives her minder the slip to join Coburn and Conroy in covering a story the authorities are trying to cover up. But we see nothing of this mission, as we are whisked back to London for a party being thrown by Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci) to celebrate the end of Dry January. As she leaves, Williams implores Colvin to own up to the fact she's an alcoholic and wishes she would slow down and deal with her own health rather than keep dashing off to war zones to prick the conscience of her complacent readers. 

Having tumbled into bed with Shaw, who hopes to see her again because he enjoys sexual adventures, Colvin sees a news bulletin about the declining situation in Libya and she speeds off to Misrata in 2011 to cover the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi (Raad Rawi). She hooks up with French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik (Jérémie Laheurte) to meet with rebel leaders and Conroy has to chide her for a reckless dash through a fire fight. But the danger comes home to her when Coburn is killed and she sees his shredded body when it's brought back to the press centre. For a moment, the clamour in her brain falls silent, as she perches on the edge of a hotel parapet. However, the chance to conduct a combative interview with Gadaffi (who claims she is the woman he most likes spending time with) proves irresistible and she also takes the opportunity to survey his battered corpse after he is murdered by the people he had oppressed for so long. 

Returning to London. Colvin settles into a relationship with Shaw. But Ryan is concerned that she has stopped reporting and tells her that he could offer her a gardening brief, only that would mean she has lost her conviction. She has always told him that she goes to war zones so that he doesn't have to and he fears that the stories won't get covered if she walks away. Suitably nettled, Colvin goes to Homs in Syria in 2012 and she braves another dash through flak to meet FSA leader Abu Zaida (Wissam Tobaileh), who takes her to meet some of the women and children shelerting in crumbling buildings under siege from air strikes ordered by President Bashar al-Assad. One woman urges Colvin to make her story more than print on a page and she promises to do what she can after seeing a child die at a makeshift medical centre. 

As the bombardment intensifies and drones pick up on mobile phone signals, Colvin manages to get a Skype call to Ryan to offer a broadcast to counter Assad's claims that he is only targeting terrorists. He pleads with her to get out as soon as she can, but she feels she has a duty to the helpless civilians who have no voice unless she speaks for them. As she speaks to CNN on 22 February, Ryan, Shaw and Richardson listen with tears in their eyes and Conroy gulps down his emotions, as the news anchor hopes she stays safe. However, the building is targeted by rockets and Colvin and Ochlik are killed as they flee, leaving Conroy to grieve as a drone shot pulls away through the ruins of the city and we cut to a shot of the real Marie Colvin declaring that she has no time for fear while she's on the frontline and will only come to realise what she has been through when her time is over. 

Scripted by Arash Amel from Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article. `Marie Colvin's Private War', this is a noble attempt to convey Colvin's idealism, cynicism and fortitude, as well as the psychological effects of the horrors she witnessed during a remarkable career in which she was spurred on by the hope that enough people cared to respond to the stories she brought them. Yet, while Rosamund Pike delivers a performance of touching trenchancy and vulnerability, Heineman and Amel fail to find a way to turn her endeavours into a relatable narrative. 

Each new mission is treated with the utmost gravitas, as Colvin peers through the window of a vehicle speeding through a parched landscape filled with untold dangers. But no context is offered for any of the conflicts she is covering, and, consequently, Colvin comes across less as a compassionate communicator with a compunction to alert the world to the harsh truths it would rather not contemplate than as an adrenaline junkie who needs to place herself in peril in order to feel alive. Moreover, the script reduces a complex individual to a few graspable character traits, while Colvin's colleagues (some of whom are composites, while her lovers are fictional stand-ins for Patrick Bishop and Richard Flaye) are reduced to ciphers and those she reports upon are presented in a way to provoke pity rather than revulsion for the geopolitical forces that blithely disregarded their basic humanity.

Given that most people will know in advance that Colvin perished in Homs in 2012, it's difficult to generate any sense of dramatic tension. But the episode captions ticking down to doomsday hardly help matters, nor does H. Scott Salinas's bombastically manipulative score. Robert Richardson's grainy handheld imagery and Nick Fenton's jagged editing reinforce the chaotic jeopardy in which Colvin often found herself, although the montage in which a vigorous one-night stand is juxtaposed with combat footage is clumsy in the extreme and rather typifies Amel's scenario, which opts for a `greatest hits' approach and yet still manages to omit Colvin's crucial work in East Timor. Tunisia and Egypt.

For all his commitment to the cause, Heinemen - who is no stranger to risk having investigated the drug war on the US-Mexican border in the Oscar-nominated Cartel Land (2015) - struggles to convey what's at stake in each situation and how reporters process the atrocities they have witnessed. Moreover, he fails to emerge from the shadow of Conroy's own harrowing cine-memoir. Thus, while Pike thoroughly merited her Golden Globe nomination - and Annie Lennox most certainly did not for the sentimental ditty, `Requiem for a Private War', which plays over the closing credits - this is flawed tribute that confirms that this kind of subject matter is best left to actuality.

Seething in the background of the majority of documentaries about the global migrant crisis is the dangerous right-wing ideology that populist politicians have seized upon to boost them into power. There's no need to name names, but Jan Gelbert narrows the focus to Peter Švrcek, the leader of the Slovak Recruits, in his feature debut, When the War Comes. Showing under the aegis of Dochouse, this insight into the rise of Pan-Slavism suggests that this is the worst possible time for European unity to be in jeopardy, as the younger generation seeks scapegoating alternatives to the democratic institutions that they believe have betrayed them. 

First seen doing a viva voce examination on his last day at school, teenager Peter Švrcek is the founder of Slovenski Braci (Slovak Recruits), a paramilitary youth organisation that adheres to a nationalist agenda. Reliant on his mother to wash his camouflage uniform and his girlfriend to help cater a weekend camping expedition in the woods, Švrcek cuts a slightly preposterous figure, as he marches his platoon of spotty kids through his rural Slovakian village. But, as he puts his volunteers through basic training, the local police respond to complaints that they have been seen brandishing weapons in public and Švrcek deals with the officers confidently, even though he is peeved to have rank and insignia removed from his combats. 

Delighted to be featured on a national news bulletin that reveals that the authorities are powerless to clamp down on the Slovak Recruits because they don't contravene any laws, Švrcek boasts to his mother and girlfriend that people will be drawn to him and his message and that they will soon be too big to ignore. They rather indulge him, but there's nothing harmless about the comments made by Švrcek and his oppos as they monitor the progress of a column of migrants. One wishes they'd brought a machine gun, while another compares them to the Germans trudging back from Stalingrad. 

Švrcek grumbles that they will cause a war in Europe and he reaffirms his duty to protect Slovakia from incursion when addressing his `troops' on a night-time exercise. He also shows his disciplinarian side, as one of the recruits gets the giggles while doing a bayonet charge and he is forced to watch as the others are punished for his error. One of the group to receive a promotion during the gathering is Adam Šero, who is seen playing with his dog in the garden before he goes indoors to look up weapons on the Internet. 

When the Open Society Fund holds a meeting to expose the threat posed by the Slovak Recruits, Švrcek goes to argue his cause. Following a video entitled, This Is Not a Game, the organiser points out that Švrcek has liked such bodies as The Voice of Russia, Donbass Revolution and Stop Islamisation of Europe on his Facebook page. But he argues that he follows friends and foes alike and that such evidence proves nothing about his views or the aims of his organisation. One of his supporters questions the agenda of the meeting and accuses the Open Society Fund of having American backing. As the session ends, Švrcek smiles with satisfaction because he has emerged from a potentially tricky encounter unscathed. 

Despite claiming to be against war, Švrcek puts his units through regimes he was taught while training with the Cossacks in Russia. He does a TV interview during a weekend camp and insists that he has nothing against the migrants because they have had a tough time. But he will always put Slovak and EU citizens first and he jokes with one of his assistants that the female reporter tried to flatter him into declaring an interest in politics, when he has his archaeological studies to complete and hopes to start a family. He prides himself on sidestepping a deliberate attempt to make him look foolish and the Slovak Recruits from appearing fascistic. But, while he is clearly still naive, he also has a conviction and a charisma that ensures the loyalty of underlings like Šero.

Deciding to abolish elections to key posts within the hierarchy to ensure he retains power, Švrcek also institutes a new numbering system for volunteers so that they recognise they are part of a unit and not individuals. But the ranks begin to swell and he organises a march through the town centre prior to the annual dinner to report on the year's activities. He hopes that they will need a bigger venue still in 2017 and urges his followers to remain true to the cause before everyone gets drunk and Švrcek makes a fool of himself with his stylised moves on the dance floor. 

Asked to provide security for an outdoor event hosted by the Slovak Foundation, Švrcek seeks new recruits and begins going into schools to introduce children to the importance of being patriots. This leads to protests from opponents who fear indoctrination, but Šero's father thinks it's an excellent strategy and is proud of his son for taking on additional responsibilities within the local group (even though he is reprimanded by a superior for giving a poorly prepared speech and reminds him that presentation is everything). Indeed, Šero finds himself among the Senior Recruits at the next training camp and forms part of a detail chosen to administer punishments to those who bungled assignments. 

Having watched admiringly as Donald Trump is sworn into office and following a pow-wow with the Night Wolves bikers from Russia and Belarus, Švrcek decides to set up a political wing of the Slovak Recruits and call it Our Fatherland - Our Future. He has some photographs taken showing him in uniform and at work at his desk. One of the poses reminds him of a picture of Stalin and he jokes that he might not agree with his ideas, but he has to respect his pictures. In the course of the three-year shoot, he has come a long way from being the fresh-faced boy and there is a menacing momentum behind Švrcek, as he addresses a small rally in front of a war memorial before the screen cuts ominously to black. 

Disquieting in its depiction of the creeping influence of neo-Nazi thinking across Central and Eastern Europe, this is also an intriguing treatise on how a grassroots organisation can attract adherents and give them a purpose and a sense of self-esteem that they would never get from their ordinary lives. There are amusing moments, though, such as Švrcek's change of hairstyle (what is it about zealots and weird barnets?) and the fact that he remains under his girlfriend's thumb. 

But this is a serious topic and Gebert wisely opts for a watching brief that exposes Švrcek's frailties without giving him a soapbox. Moreover, by including clips from TV news bulletins, he is also able to denounce Prime Minister Robert Fico for refusing to take action against Slovenski Braci and other groups because they remain within the law. However, with the exception of Šero, the other members remain faceless numbers when it might have been illuminating to hear what is so wrong with their lives and why they were attracted to Švrcek and his ideology. It might also have been useful to witness any hostile reaction to the group to see how the corps conducts itself under pressure. But one suspects that Švrcek laid down strict rules about what Gebert could film, which suggests that he is already well on the way to emulating his idols.