Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 28/2/2019)

When wife Dafna (Sarah Adler) faints on answering the door, Tel Aviv architect Michael Feldman (Lior Askkenazi) knows immediately that the three uniformed figures administering a sedative have brought bad news about his son, Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray), who is serving with the Israeli Defence Force. Too stunned to speak, Michael tries to take in the information about the funeral arrangements and needing to avoid dehydration. He is too shocked to take offence at one of the visitors programming his phone to beep on the hour to remind him to drink a glass of water. When left alone, however, he kicks the dog trying to console him and goes for a breath of air when older brother Avigdor (Yehuda Almagor) comes to offer his condolences. 

Wandering past a dance class at the old people's home where his mother (Karin Ugowski) lives, Michael informs her that her grandson has died. However, while she insists she understands what he has told her, she mixes him up with Avigdor and he feels very alone. On arriving home, he shoots his brother a reproachful glance when he is met at the door by his sobbing Dafna's sobbing sister (Ilia Grosz), who throws her arms around his neck. He also sees a soldier (Itamar Rotschild) waiting to go over the funeral rituals and is so angry to hear Avigdor contacting the press to dictate the death notice that he locks himself in the bathroom and burns his hand with the scalding hot water from the tap. 

Frustrated at not being able to contact his daughter, Alma (Shira Haas), whose phone is switched off, Michael allows Max the dog to nuzzle his hand as he listens to his guest's well-rehearsed, but far from tactful spiel about the burial rubric. He asks to see the body and draws the conclusion that Jonathan has been blown to smithereens when the soldier attempts to stall and change the subject to any personal touches that the family might like to include. Clumsily, he suggests that an amusing story might help ease the tension and the dog runs away when Michael snaps in irritation. 

While confiding his fears to Avigdor, Michael hears the doorbell and comes into the hallway to see Dafna's sister rushing to the bedroom to wake her. The notification party has returned and the senior officer (Danny Isserles) informs Michael that there has been a bureaucratic error and that another Jonathan Feldman has been killed. Dafna is just happy their son is alive, but Michael is furious that he has been forced to endure five hours of torment and he slaps Avigdor's hands when he tries to calm him down. He also smashes a glass when the female trooper (Yael Eisenberg) urges him to drink something and Dafna pleads with her husband not to succumb to his demons in front of strangers. 

However, Michael is overcome with a mixture of rage and relief and, as some black birds swirls in the sky above the apartment, he blacks out momentarily. Leaping to his feet, he evades the steadying clutches and calls a friend who knows a military bigwig who can snap his fingers and have Jonathan sent home as soon as possible. 

A precisely timed cut takes us to the Seam Zone somewhere in the northern sector, where Jonathan is on duty with his pal (Itay Exlroad). They raise the creaking red-and-white barrier to allow a camel to pass through before the other soldier begins to demonstrate the foxtrot and breaks into a jerky duet with his machine-gun. After a top shot roves slowly over the off-duty detail on their bunks, the night relief trudges through a flooded part of the path to take up their places at a checkpoint that is made up of a floodlight tower, a gun emplacement, a bench and a pale green van with a woman's face painted on the side. 

As Renzo Cesana's `Walk the Lonesome Night' plays on the radio, a car approaches through the darkness. The driver (Mussa Zhalka) smiles nervously as he hands over the ID cards and a check is run on his wife (Ruti Tamir), as she no longer resembles her photo. But they are given the all clear and one of the troops fires a flare into the night sky to light their way. After a while, the camel plods back from whence it came and the guard changes after another uneventful shift. 

They return to their rickety barrack and use one of the tins they have been eating out of for supper to gauge whether the building has tilted. As he sketches a pin-up with crosses over her nipples under a caption reading `One Last Bedtime Story', Jonathan tells his comrades (Dekel Adin, Shaul Amir and Gefen Barkai) about his great-grandfather entrusting his daughter with an heirloom bible before he perished in Auschwitz. She survived and informs her son that he will inherit the bible when he joins the army. However, he traded it for a pornographic magazine and Jonathan jokes that Michael had passed this on to him when he was called up to keep the family tradition going in its new twisted form. 

The next day, a driver pulls up at the barrier (Rami Buzaglo) in a van full of toys. He snarls as they take a gun-toting robot and place it on the tarmac. It makes a lot of noise and looks impressive with its shades and body armour. But, when it tries to walk, it falls over and is left helpless on its back. While one of his mates plays a video war game that night, a trooper muses on the purpose of their posting and draws the conclusion it's a waste of time. His scepticism is echoed by another who tells a buddy listening to loud music on his headphones that they are under constant surveillance. He curses him for not being a hot woman like Pamela Anderson or Jessica Rabbit and is speculating on the size Roger Rabbit's appendage when a car screeches to a halt at the barrier. 

A man (Yaakov Zada Daniel) and his wife (Irit Kaplan) in evening dress are ordered out of the vehicle. She is told to deposit the contents of her handbag on the road and she exchanges a reassuring half-smile with her husband as they are left to stand in the rain while her ID picture is verified. Some time later, another car approaches, with a couple canoodling in the backseat (Eden Daniel and Eden Gmliel). As the driver (Firas Nassar) deliberately drops his ID so that the soldier has to kneel on the ground to retrieve it, Jonathan is struck by the profile of the girl in the passenger seat (Noam Lugasy). 

She smiles quietly and turns away because she realises she has trapped her dress in the door. However, when she opens it, a beer can rolls out and a panicked soldier misidentifies it as a grenade and Jonathan fires on the car, killing everyone inside. A sombre phone call is made to their base and a digger comes out to excavate a hole into which to deposit the vehicle, as if it has never existed. Jonathan sits in appalled silence a short distance away from his brothers in arms, as the rain washes away the digger's tyre tracks and everyone is required to carry on as though nothing untoward had happened. 

At first light, a senior officer (Aryeh Cherner) helicopters in to conduct the briefest of inquiries. His shiny black boots are coated in mud by the time he gets to the barrack, which is now lurching significantly. He declares that the case was closed before it was opened and that the quartet did the right thing because they couldn't afford to take chances in a war zone. As he concludes, his phone rings and it's the friend Michael had been trying to contact to arrange Jonathan's immediate return. The officer orders him to cadge a lift with the supply truck and he asks the driver why he's been sent home. 

In the passenger seat, Jonathan opens his notebook and an animated segment commences in which Michael drives his mother to a mental breakdown by selling her father's precious bible. Rising from her hospital bed, she morphs into the pneumatic Amazonian in Jonathan's sketch and we see the cross from her breast attach itself to Michael's face when he sucks her nipple. This mark remains for the rest of his life, as he does his military service, graduates, marries a philosophy student and becomes a successful architect. In his mind's eye, he's a well-hung Adonis. But, each night, his younger self comes to pull aside the tape from the corner of his eye so that he could shed a bitter tear of regret. 

A match cut takes us from the line drawing to Michael crying quietly to himself. He is sitting in Jonathan's room and leafing through his notebook. A page has been ripped out after a drawing of the smiling girl in the car and Michael is wondering about the tear when Dafna storms in and asks him to leave. She has been decorating a cake for what would have been Jonathan's 20th birthday and she has deliberately barked her knuckles on the grater. While she tends to the cuts, Michael wanders into the lounge and sees the torn drawing of a digger holding a car in its jaws. 

Dafna asks for a cigarette, while chiding Michael for smoking again. He wonders if they might do something to mark the occasion, but she says she wants nothing to do with him. She reveals that she wishes she had terminated her pregnancy and, yet, she always preferred Jonathan to Alma and not feels his absence with a ferocity she could never have anticipated. Michael tries to empathise, but she curses his weakness and insists that both children sensed he was flawed. 

Sparking a joint, they argue over who is the bulldozer and who is the car in the drawing (as they know nothing of its real meaning) and get the giggles over the pomposity of an invitation to attend the unveiling of a plaque in honour of their son's heroic death. Alma comes home and is surprised to see them together after what has clearly been an acrimonious parting. They cut into the cake and Max snaffles a piece from his master before Alma gets a text and beats a hasty retreat. She says her parents look good together and they sit at the kitchen table with shared pride at how their daughter has turned out. 

Suddenly, Michael opens up about his own wartime experience and how he had been returning from a mission when he waved a support vehicle through. It had struck a mine and he watched in horror as the passengers died in an agony that fate had allowed him to escape. When Dafna became pregnant, he had taken the birth of a son as a sign of God's forgiveness and he confides how content he had been when Jonathan had driven them to the bus stop for what would be his last tour of duty. He jumps up and shows her how the steps of the foxtrot always bring you back to where you started and she throws her arms around him and they circle slowly on the kitchen floor in what might be a new beginning or a sad ending. 

Cutting away to the point-of-view shot with which the film started, we find ourselves in the supply truck with Jonathan and his driver. There is nothing but wilderness either side of the narrow strip of tarmac and he passes the time inking in his bulldozer sketch. When he looks up, he sees a camel standing in the middle of the road and the vehicle swerves to avoid it and overturns in plunging down a shallow incline. It's such a futile way to die and the biting irony of the commendation, `in the line of duty', clangs with a hollowness that echoes the misgivings many Israelis have about the IDF's mission. 

It's easy to see why Maoz has come in for so much criticism at home (Culture Minister Miri Regev branded the film `anti-Israeli'), but he insists that he is trying to understand his compatriots rather than condemn them. Yet, while it was put forward as Israel's submission for last year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film, it failed to beat Lebanese auteur Ziad Douieri's The Insult into the final five - a picture that has, thus far, failed to secure UK distribution. Whether this says more about the vagaries of the Academy's selection process or the politics of its members is open to debate. Either way, this potent and deeply artistic picture confirms Maoz as one of the country's finest film-makers and one can only hope we don't have to wait eight years for his next outing. 

While the performances of Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler and Yonaton Shiray are outstanding and the camerawork and production design of Giora Bejach and Arad Sawat are exceptional, it's Maoz's overall concept that makes this so compelling. The tonal shifts between the three segments is audacious and inspired, with the gnawing horror of the opening scenes giving way to a playful surrealism on the front line that lulls the audience into a Catch-22-like sense of security before the shocking intrusion of everyday violence brings us joltingly back to harrowing reality. 

Yet Maoz isn't finished there, as he fearlessly slips in a passage of monochrome animation before springing the revelation that the Feldmans are grieving after all and leaving viewers to stew over how Jonathan met his demise while his parents get high and remember (for however long) that their pain unites rather than divides them. Even then, the denouement is as absurd as it is tragic and, therein, lies the truth that Maoz is striving to convey - as no death in a political context can ever be entirely futile, whether it takes place in a death camp or on winding road in the middle of a militarised nowhere.

Despite being so photogenic, the city of Strasbourg has only rarely been used effectively as a feature backdrop. Besides the likes of Valeria Sarmiento's L'Inconnu de Strasbourg (1998), Philippe Claudel's Tous les soleils (2011) and Catherine Corsini's An Impossible Love (2018), the standout picture is José Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia (2007), which not only captured the look of the Alsatian capital, but also its atmosphere. This may not be the best time to release a film set in the home of the European Parliament, but Camille Vidal-Naquet's debut, Sauvage, sets its focus elsewhere, as it invokes the spirit of Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985) in producing the most unflinching study of French rent boys since Robin Campillo's Eastern Boys (2013).

Following an assignation with a client posing as a doctor (Lionel Riou), Léo (Félix Maritaud) heads to a popular cruising spot on the outskirts of Strasbourg and is invited by Ahd (Eric Bernard) to join him in a threesome with a disabled man (Lucas Bléger). As Ahd is reluctant to kiss, the john offers him extra money to embrace Léo, who is taken aback when Ahd pushes him away after a couple of tentative pecks. Consequently, he tries to give Ahd the cold shoulder when they run into each other at the pick-up point. However, he is tickled into submission and spends the day getting high with Ahd's pals. He is put out when Ahd disappears with the only woman in the group, but winds up snuggling up to him when they share a bed for the night because, as Ahd insists, they are not animals. 

Back at the woods, Ahd asks Léo why he kisses the clients and warns him that enjoying the work will keep him on the streets. He reveals that he is straight, but would cheerfully shack up with a man who would take him away from his mundane life. At a club that night, one of Ahd's regulars (Joël Villy) invites him home and promises to buy him some clothes if they can spend the night together. Not wanting to be alone, Léo sidles across to an ageing librarian (Jean-Pierre Baste), who takes him back to his apartment to show him some of his rare books. After abandoning sex because it is too painful, the old man reminisces about watching his wife brushing her hair before bed and he is touched when Léo asks if it would be okay to stay so they could sleep in each other's arms. 

During a night shift at the rendezvous, Léo wanders over to a luxury motor and is chatting to the driver when Ahd ushers him away and informs him that The Pianist (Jean-François-Charles Martin) is into blood and violence. They spend the next day smoking near the airport runway with Ahd's pals and they watch the departing planes with envy. Subsisting on stolen fruit and scraps found in litter bins, the scrawny Léo has a coughing fit and one of the group offers him a cotton shirt to stay warm. As he sleeps rough, however, Léo has no way of keeping clean and a pierced couple (Nicolas Fernandez and Nicolas Chalumeau) consider asking him to leave because he smells. Ultimately, they use and abuse him with an outsize butt plug and send him packing without his fee. 

He seeks out Ahd to help him get his money and he is furious with him for approaching him when he's with his sugar daddy. However, he agrees to mug one of the punks and gets so angry with Léo for placing him in a compromising position that he beats him up on the street. Feeling rough, Léo consults a doctor (Marie Seux), who discovers that he has asthma and a tubercular-related problem. As she is examining him, Léo wraps his arms around her and she allows him to hug her because he is so clearly starved of affection. She questions him about his work and his friendship with Ahd and suggests that he should think about going cold turkey to cure his addiction to crack and crystal meth. When he seems puzzled why he would want to give up one of the few things that makes him happy, the doctor smiles sadly at him, as he seem so naive at 22 that she worries how he will find an alternative path. 

Missing Ahd, Léo is pleased to see the return of Mihal (Nicolas Dibla) after Ahd cut his skull open during a fight about discount prices. They go to a club together and pick up a bearded man (Thierry Desaules), who invites them back to his mother's apartment. Mihal gives Léo a drug to inject into the tip of his penis in order to render the john unconscious so they can burgle the place. He has no qualms about robbing the man, but only takes a stapler to repair the tear that Ahd made in his jacket during their tussle. Waking in the park the next morning, Léo reluctantly joins Mihal and his mates in a game of football, but he feels faint and is amused when Mihal insists on trying his asthma inhaler. 

Spurned by Ahd again, Léo hooks up with Claude (Philippe Ohrel) on the railway bridge. He is Quebecois and hints that he would be happy to take Léo with him when he returns. It's his first time with another man and is calmly sympathetic when Léo coughs up blood during sex. Claude offers to find him a doctor and invites him to stay while he recovers. But Léo calls him old and ugly and storms out in annoyance that his weakness has made him vulnerable and emphasised his loneliness. He goes to the sugar daddy's place and attacks him when he discovers that Ahd is going to live with him in Benidorm. Genuinely fond of Léo, Ahd urges him to find an older man because he's a romantic and needs to have love. 

Distraught, Léo wanders the streets and suffers from excruciating abdominal pains. In a daze, he gets into The Pianist's car and Claude finds him staggering along the railway bridge several hours later after he has been savagely mistreated. Holding him in a Pietà pose, Claude promises Léo that everything will be okay and he looks remarkably healthy when he is signed off by a rehab doctor (Philippe Koa). He asks about his plans to move to Montreal with Claude and admits that he is concerned that he will break his friend's heart. But Léo seems attached to Claude when he meets him outside the clinic and kisses him while waiting for their plane at the airport. When Claude goes off to buy something, however, Léo realises that he is making a mistake and he strips off the jumper and shirt he is wearing to feel the sun on his skin, as he rushes back to the woods, where the camera leaves him curled in a ball under his new jacket. 

With so many scenes being staged near places of departure, it's almost inevitable that Léo will choose to remain in the personal hell he is too afraid to leave. As next to nothing is revealed about his background and few palpable insights are offered into his psyche, we are left to speculate why Léo is on the streets and why he is so resistant to assistance. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that three scenes (one bogus) take place in a doctor's surgery, no mention is made of Léo's sexual health and there are no references to condoms throughout the entire picture. This blasé attitude to safety is all the more surprising considering Félix Maritaud's involvement in Robin Campillo's AIDS drama 128 Beats Per Minute. But romantic recklessness is key to a feral survival instinct rooted in a self-destructive unwillingness to protect himself and Vidal-Naquet makes no apologies for the film frequently sharing all the impersonality of a trick. 

As he is so often depicted in unrelenting close-up, the deceptively impassive Maritaud is very much the centre of the story, with the other rent boys and their clients largely being stereotypes (although it should be noted that several of the hustlers are immigrants, while their patrons are all white and middle-class). Jacques Girault also sticks close to Maritaud when he is stomping through the streets, with jittery handheld imagery often being shredded to add to the audiences sense of disorientation by editor Elif Uluengin. Yet Vidal-Naquet is careful to avoid overt voyeurism, as, while he lingers throughout the sordid encounter with the masochistic punks, he shows nothing of the sadistic tryst with The Pianist.

Strasbourg is consciously presented in an anywhere manner, although Charlotte Casamitjana's interiors for the various assignations are thoughtfully designed to show Léo, Ahd and Mihal as being outsiders in any setting apart from the gay clubs, where they can be themselves while gyrating in strobe-lit anonymity. On occasion, Romain Trouillet's score betrays more emotion than the actors, but Vidal-Naquet wisely leaves the most poignant moment silent, as Léo seeks a moment of maternal solace from the doctor who has seen enough disaffected youths to know that proffered help isn't always accepted.

Echoes of Michelangelo Antonioni and Michael Haneke reverberate around Andrea Pallaoro's Hannah. However, this sophomore follow-up to Medeas (2013) owes most to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), as it follows Charlotte Rampling's efforts to come to terms with life-changing disclosures. Inspired by a newspaper story, Pallaoro and Orlando Tirado's screenplay keeps close guards over its contextual secrets and will frustrate some with the gnomic nature of its ellipses. But the 71 year-old Rampling gives a fearless performance that is on a par with her remarkable work in François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000) and thoroughly merits her Volpi Cup win at the Venice Film Festival. 

At first glance, Hannah (Charlotte Rampling) and husband (André Willms) look like any other couple who have spent the best part of half a century together. But, as they eat supper in a silence that remains unbroken as he changes the popped light bulb over the table, it becomes clear that this will be the last one they will share together for some time because he has to report to prison the following morning. He bids a fond farewell to his beloved spaniel and entrusts his watch to his wife, as they travel across the city together in a taxi. But Hannah makes the return journey alone on the subway, where she keeps her head down rather than indulge in her usual people watching. 

Initially, the nature of her spouse's crime is withheld, but Hannah remains loyal and pays him mournful visits in between starting a new job as a cleaner to the affluent and much younger Hélène (Stephanie Van Vyve) and taking acting classes with an amateur dramatics troupe run by an enthusiastic teacher (Fatou Traoré). Indeed, these vocal and breathing exercises appear to be Hannah's only form of cathartic release, as she goes about her daily business with a quiet determination to go unnoticed by slinking into the background. She has to deal with the children upstairs when they let the bath overflow and cause an orange stain on her bedroom ceiling. But she refuses to answer the door when a woman demands a mother-to-mother conversation because her child has been so traumatised by her husband's crimes and she wants Hannah to feel some shame for what has happened.

Nothing is said about whether Hannah knew anything about her spouse's behaviour and she tries to be cheerful when she makes a prison visit. But he is in poor spirits and announces that he is going to be transferred because he has been targeted by the other inmates. On returning home, Hannah closes the blinds and lies in bed contemplating the enveloping isolation that feels like widowhood, but without any of the compensatory sympathy. She gives the dog a bath and they share the hairdrier after she showers, but she's unsettled by a silent phone call and takes her rubbish out to the apartment block bins under cover of darkness to avoid bumping into her neighbours. 

She continues to attend her acting classes, with one chap calling round to the apartment to run lines with her. The scene concerns a wife parting from her husband and she reins in her emotions, as the significance of the words dawns on her. While cleaning, she enlists the help of Hélène's young son, Nicholas (Simon Bisschop), to help her fold a sheet, but she clearly has little rapport with him. Moreover, the dog insists on keeping its vigil for its master by the front door and it hides from Hannah when she tries to give it a special meal. Nevertheless, they end up lying on the bed together, as they realise they only have each other. 

Despite her son, Michel (Julien Vargas), ignoring her phone messages, Hannah bakes a cake for her grandson's birthday and carries it across the city on the subway. She finds herself caught between an arguing couple and doesn't know where to look when the woman (Jessica Fanhan) bellows that she wouldn't have invested so much time in her lover if she had known he was going to make such unreasonable sexual demands upon her. Arriving at the party, Hannah is greeted with affection by Charlie (Gaspard Savini). But his father orders him indoors and Michel quietly informs his mother that she is not welcome in his home. She beats a dignified retreat, but this humiliation cuts her to the quick and she takes refuge in a public washroom to sob in uncontrollable pain.

She throws away the lilies she had bought to brighten up the apartment and suffers the indignity of having her swimming pool membership revoked. But she enjoys a brief moment of release when Nicholas asks her to stroke his hair and tell him a story. They are interrupted when workmen come to hang a painting. When a plumber comes to inspect the ceiling stain, however, Hannah finds some damning photographs hidden behind the wardrobe and hurries to the dumpsters to bury them in a bid to pretend she had never seen them. 

Indeed, when she next visits her husband, she puts on an act that Charlie's party had been a huge success. Yet, when he snaps that he will never forgive Michel for disowning him when he is innocent of all charges, Hannah reveals that she has found the envelope and he can barely look at her, as he turns away, uncertain whether she will ever return. When Hélène reads her son a newspaper article about a whale stranded on a beach near Ostend, Hannah takes a bus to see the creature for herself. She also goes to Charlie's school to watch him through the bars of the playground and gives the dog away to a young girl and her father. In a last effort to retain a grip on her old existence, she goes to her acting class. But she proves unable to deliver a monologue and she leaves feeling flustered and heads for the subway station, where she boards a train to an unknown destination. 

Given the formal rigour of Pallaoro's approach and Rampling's emotional restraint, the climactic cetaceous symbolism feels a little gauche and a touch too obviously borrowed from Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). But, even though this `existential giallo' keeps the audience at a distance and offers too few psychological insights into Rampling's ordeal, there's much to commend on the technical side. Production designer Marianna Sciveres makes bold use of colour to intrude upon Rampling's cocooned retreat from reality, while Canadian cinematographer Chayse Irvin relies on disconcerting angles in shooting with a mostly static 35mm camera through windows, doors and mirrors. Editor Paola Freddi also keeps things edgy by ending several scenes before they seem to have played out, while the absence of a score locks the viewer into Rampling's world. 

Giving little away with her heavy-lidded eyes, Rampling is mesmerising as a woman trying to make sense of her spouse's treachery and the backlash directed at her when she also feels like a victim of Willms's undefined violations. Yet she seeks no easy pity in her bid to carry on in the face of humiliation and shame. There's a slight overlap with her Oscar-nominated display in Andrew Haigh's 45 Years (2015), in which she has to deal with an unwanted confession from husband Tom Courtenay. But this is an even more impressive performance, as Rampling also has to come accept both her own guilt for failing to realise what Willms was up to and the consequences of her accidental complicity.

As is customary with genre cinema, new releases are often linked to benchmark hits to allow viewers to make unseen comparisons. So, just as Hereditary (2018) was heralded as the successor to Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), Lee Cronin's feature debut, The Hole in the Ground, is being spoken of in terms of Ari Aster's much-lauded chiller. As the young mother faced with unsettling manifestations threatening her child, Seàna Kerslake could easily form a WhatsApp group with Essie Davis and Toni Collette. But, while Cronin demonstrates a decent grasp of the horror basics, this unsettling Irish saga lacks malevolence and rather peters out after unleashing its secret. 

Returning from a visit to the Hall of Mirrors at a seaside funfair, Sarah O'Neill (Seána Kerslake) and her young son, Chris (James Quinn Markey), have to swerve to avoid a mumbling cowled figure standing in the middle of the road. They have just moved into a new house abutting a vast forest and, when Chris refuses to eat his supper, they play a face-pulling game to see whether he has to empty his plate. He loses and sulks when Sarah refuses to kill a large spider crawling across the kitchen floor. Moreover, he grumbles that his father would have squished it and disappears into the woods after stepping on the insect. In running after him, Sarah comes across an enormous sinkhole and she is standing transfixed at its rim when Chris comes up to apologise. 

During a dinner party with neighbours, Sarah learns that the woman she nearly ran over is Noreen Brady (Kati Outinen), who killed her son in a car accident shortly after being released from care after accusing him of being possessed. She encourages Chris to make new friends at school, but he seems the solitary type and Sarah gets into a panic when he goes missing from his bed in the middle of the night and she dashes into the woods to look for him. Finding no trace, she returns to call the police, only for her son to appear blinking in her torch beam and claim that he had not left the house. 

Feeling shaken, Sarah consults the doctor (Bennett Andrew), who prescribes a course of pills. When she wakes the next morning, she finds Chris has picked her some flowers from the garden. But he seems more intense than usual and she notices on picking him up from school that he has made friends with a boy he had previously badmouthed. They are stopped by Noreen wandering along the road in her nightgown and her husband, Des (James Cosmo), comes out to apologise to Sarah for the inconvenience. As she returns to the car, Sarah is shocked when Noreen shrieks out that Chris is an impostor and butts her forehead into the passenger window. 

The next time they're out in the car, Sarah stops outside the Brady farm and ventures through the gate. She sees Noreen kneeling on the ground. But, when she reaches her, she realises that her head has been buried in the soil and she is still feeling numb when she makes a statement to a police detective (John Quinn), while Chris arm wrestles with an unseen guard. When she returns to work at the bric-a-brac shop owned by Louise Caul (Simon Kirby), she asks her boss if she ever fails to recognise her own kids and Louise jokes that her pair go from angels to monsters in the blink of an eye. 

At the funeral, Des tells Sarah that Noreen had been convinced that their son, James, had been replaced by a lookalike. But he assures her that she had meant no harm to Chris when she had shouted at him and Sarah nods in a bemusement that continues to grip her when she finds her boy's favourite action figure on the edge of the sinkhole while she's out jogging. Over supper, she asks Chris if he has broken his promise to stay out of the woods and he is so affronted by her doubting his honesty that he pushes the table with such ferocity that it sends her careering back across the kitchen floor. 

Unnerved by the fact that a year-old scar on her forehead (caused by her husband) has started bleeding again, Sarah tries to relax in the bath. She hears scurrying from the kitchen and peers under the door to see Chris pluck and eat a spider. When she takes him to the doctor for a check-up, he assures her that kids eat worse things. But she is sufficiently suspicious to hide a video camera behind a brick in his bedroom wall and is so spooked by his performance at the school concert that she confides in Louise that Chris is not her son before bolting along a corridor. 

She consults the footage from the hidden camera and shows it to Des, in the hope that he will admit that his own son was switched. But he refuses to confirm or deny and smashes the camera in his distress. Back home, Sarah uses her sleeping pills to doctor Chris's favourite `dust cheese' on his spaghetti. But he senses she is on to him and makes an awkward attempt to cuddle her and tell Sarah that he loves her. When she accuses him of being a replica, he tosses her across the room and hauls her into the garden to bury her head down in the ground. However, the pills take effect in the nick of time and Sarah is able to escape. 

She drag's Chris's slumbering body into the basement and uses a mirror to check if he is her child. Not liking what she sees, she takes a torch and lowers herself into the sinkhole to rescue her baby. Crawling along a narrow passage, she finds an antechamber containing skeletal body parts and is relieved to discover Chris alive in the middle of the floor. She picks him up to make her escape, only to be confronted by alien forms that move at a conveniently slow pace to allow her to reach the tunnel. As she edges away, one of the creatures follows her and she is appalled to see it has assumed her own appearance. 

Miraculously, a cut to black enables Sarah and Chris to make the woods unscathed. Needing the car keys to make their getaway, she goes back into the house and hears the `Chris' trapped in the basement whimpering for him mammy. Not taking any chances, Sarah sets fire to the house and speeds away, looking back occasionally at her slumbering son, who smiles quietly to himself. Some time later, Sarah is back at college and living in student digs with Chris. However, she still can't be sure that the boy riding his bike in the courtyard is her own and she constantly takes photographs of him from a room lined with mirrors that she hopes will reveal any telltale details.

Those familiar with Through the Night (2010) and Ghost Train (2013) - which also found its way on to the horror portmanteau, Minutes Past Midnight (2016) - will know what to expect from Lee Cronin. He is clearly fond of the overhead travelling shot from the opening of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and has obviously watched Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960) a few times each. But horror directors have always been fond of quoting from the classics and Cronin deserves credit for the quality of his borrowings and the finesse with which he integrates them into his own MR Jamesian storyline.

Co-scripted by Stephen Shields, the narrative is riddled with blithe details that don't stand up to close scrutiny. Critics should never pull at loose plot threads, as that way madness lies. But, while it's fine to avoid explaining the origin of the evil at the bottom of the pit, surely someone in the village at least has to acknowledge its existence, along with the fact that it has been left to gape for decades after the Brady episode. Had Sarah's boss been anything more than a cipher, she might have been able to provide some information. But, even if she's in denial along with the rest of her neighbours, her reaction should have confirmed Sarah's suspicion that something sinister is afoot. 

Setting imponderables aside, Cronin has assembled a fine crew, with Tom Comerford's prowling camerawork exploiting every nook and cranny of Conor Dennison's wonderfully corny old dark house. Colin Campbell's precisely paced editing helps Cronin build suspense and all are to be commended for eschewing the kind of cheap jolts that keep multiplex teens amused. Jeroen Truijens and Quentin Collette's sound design is eerily complemented by Stephen McKeon stealthy score, while James Cosmo and Aki Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen provide deft support to the splendidly disquieting James Quinn Markey (who seems set to become the Irish Haley Joel Osment) and Seána Kerslake, who follows her effervescent turn in Darren Thornton's A Date For Mad Mary (2016) with a watchful performance that favours neuroses over histrionics in conveying a creeping sense of dread that her offspring might be something much worse than just his father's son.

A lot has happened to director Jeremy Wooding since he made his feature bow with Bollywood Queen (2002). In addition to helming the first series of Peep Show (2003), he has worked on such different shows as The Restaurant (2007), Dani's House (2008), The Legend of Dick and Dom (2008) and Bear Behaving Badly (2009-10). He has also kept his cinematic hand in with such features as the football comedy, The Magnificent Eleven (2013), and the horror Western, Blood Moon (2014). In teaming with music journalist Neil Spencer, he manages to blend chuckles and chills in Burning Men, a picaresque chiller set along the rarely filmed eastern half of England that overcomes some bumps in the road to keep you rooting for the anything but heroic protagonists. 

Rapidly approaching their thirties and getting nowhere with their band, The Burning Men, guitarist Ray (Edward Hayter) and bassist Don (Aki Omoshaybi) are arguing about writing their own songs rather than rehearsing cover versions when they get home to find bailiffs waiting for them. Moreover, Ray discovers girlfriend Kate (Stacie James) in bed with another bloke. Frustrated at wasting their time in Deptford, the friends head to the market to sell their vinyl collection to make the air fares to Memphis, Tennessee. However, Tony (Raffaello Degruttola) will only give them £150 for their rarest items, while Mad Dad (Andrew Tiernan) wants nothing to do with them. So, while Don is scoring drugs from fashion stall owner Eduarda (Simone Lahbib), Ray swipes a valuable acetate of the Death Metal track `Children of Hades' from Mad Dog's stall and urges Don to drive to the big record fair in Norwich so they can cash in and disappear before they're caught. 

Ducking down a side road to avoid the cops after popping Black Jack Davey pills, Ray and Don park beside a field with a scarecrow peering at them. Ray feels uneasy and warns that his old fears are returning. But they fool around when they play the purloined disc and, even though Ray is spooked by the sight of the scarecrow catching light, he makes light of Mad Dog's threats when he calls them while they're crossing the River Yare at Reedham Ferry. However, he is feeling paranoid again by the time they fetch up in Great Yarmouth, having taken an unexpected detour. 

Wandering into a pub, they notice Susie (Elinor Crawley) and Gemma (Katie Collins) listening to the band. Don buys them drinks, but Gemma turns him down and only agrees to go with the strangers after they get into a scuffle with the group's singer and emerge triumphant. She takes them to an empty caravan by the dunes and suggests a game of musical beds after they down some hooch and medicate. However, they are woken in the night by two men with distorted faces and they are only able to make a getaway when Gemma produces an unloaded gun from her bag and Don drives the interlopers away with a display of bravado.

The next morning, Gemma heads off to care for her young son (her Iraqi War veteran husband had thrown himself off a tower block) before the boys discover they're a week early for the record fair. Susie finds a shop that buys and sells and Lenny (Christopher Fulford) puts them in touch with Micky (Joseph Millson), a collector in Newcastle who will offer them £7000 for the disc. However, they get chased out of the store when Gemma mocks Death Metal's links with Neo-Nazism and, when Ray suddenly descends into the doldrums, Don explains to her that he spent time on a psychiatric ward at 16 when his father caught him communing with some spirits through a set of headphones plugged into a marijuana plant. 

Don thinks Susie should go back to Yarmouth, but she is determined to stay with them and suggests calling on her farmer friend, Robert (Guy Pratt), to buy some of the weed he grows with his Vietnamese companion (Tinnie Tong). He used to be in a band and instantly recognises the disc as being a recording by Stig Hansen, `the Aleister Crowley of rock`n'roll', who was into Satanism and White Supremacism before his gruesome demise. Robert reveals that by playing the track, Ray and Don have summoned all the spirits and weirdos in Norfolk and warns that they should smash the record and bury it in holy ground surrounded by water to stop it falling into the hands of those who would use it to destroy their enemies. 

Unnerved by this unwelcome information, the travelling companions decide to keep heading to the North East and fly to America as soon as they cut a deal with Micky. However, they detour to Hull to see Ray's ailing mother, Julie (Denise Welch). She lives on a rough estate and Steve (Riley Stewart) has to chase away the kids crowding around Don's battered car. Julie is pleased to see Ray and apologises for not speaking up when he was hospitalised, as her own mother had also been able to see spirits and she hopes that he finds some happiness in Memphis. 

Don wants to ditch Susie, but Ray insists she is now part of the band and they keep heading north with Don more anxious than ever about the figures he keeps seeking lurking on the landscape. He spots a cowled monk when they stop for a bathroom break at Rievaulx Abbey, but Susie echoes Julie in calling him special rather than disturbed. She walks out during supper in Newcastle, however, when Don demands that Ray cuts her loose because the band has to come first. But it's Susie who bursts into Micky's studio, as he and Belladonna (Sarah-Jane Potts) are telling Ray about the disc's baleful powers and his hopes to cause chaos across Europe by unleashing supernatural powers. 

Relieved to be rescued, he makes for Holy Island to dispose of the disc and avert disaster. However, the Volvo Amazon breaks down and they are forced to spend a night in the wilds. Don cracks open the bottle of peyote that Robert had given him and they all trip happily until Susie finds a Danish rune in the undergrowth and has to use the last three bullets to fire at some spectral Vikings marching towards them. Miraculously, the car starts in the morning and they join some pilgrims carrying wooden crucifixes across the causeway to Lindisfarne. A biker coshes Ray with a crowbar and steals his bag, but Susie had swapped the disc for Herb Alpert Plays The Beatles and they smash the accursed record and bury it under a stone to the nodding satisfaction of the monk who had been watching over them. 

Notwithstanding the complete lack of menace or suspense and the resoundingly anti-climactic denouement (complete with its awful `vinyl resting place' pun), this is a quirkily enjoyable road romp that seems to delight in its own convolution and inconsequentiality. The chances of a marijuana farmer in the middle of East Anglia having an in-depth knowledge of Scandi Satanic Rock are slim, but Wooding and Spencer blunder on with an insouciant confidence that is reflected in the blasé attitude of Ed Hayter and Aki Omoshaybi to being pursued by desperate Aryan occultists. 

Justin Adams's eerie score and the adeptly chosen indie songtrack do much to reinforce the offbeat feel, as does Jono Smith's adoption of the point-of-view close-up technique that Wooding employed on the first series of Peep Show. It takes a while for the viewer to settle into this disorientating approach, as we are so accustomed to the two-shot and over-the-shoulder perspectives that have become central to classical Hollywood syntax. But the combination of the unconventional framing and the deadpan delivery of the often mock-poetic dialogue gives the action a distinctive edge that draws attention to its artifice by challenging the convention of the fourth wall. 

Cinematographer Smith also makes splendid use of the contrasts between the flat expanses of East Anglia and the more rugged vistas of Northumbria, as Wooding seeks to put a post-millennial spin on Albion folklore and the mysteries of the landscape. One suspects this could easily become a cult favourite and many would cheerfully tune in for the continuing adventure of Hayter, Omoshaybi and Elinor Crowley, who makes a pluckily resourceful heroine without ever having to become a damsel in distress. All they'd need would be Stig Hansen's guitar and they'd be away.

The great English actor Edmund Kean had it right when he declared, `dying is easy, comedy is hard'. One always feels inclined to cut neophyte film-makers some slack when they decide to tackle a comedy for their first feature rather than something less risky like horror. But, while all credit should be given to debutant Jack Spring for getting Destination: Dewsbury made on a shoestring budget when he was just 19 years old, it has to be said that laughs are at a premium in a derivative and often contrived road movie that is populated almost exclusively by charmless knock-offs from vastly superior comedies. 

As the action opens, Gaz (Dan Shelton), Smithy (Tom Gilling) and Peter (Matt Sheahan) are trying to flag down a vehicle to help them because their friend Adam (David J. Keogh) has overdosed on pills. When the passenger of a van proceeds to punch Gaz in the face, Peter (our narrator) feels it necessary to whisk us back to the 1980s, when he (Douglas Badger), Smithy (Toby Harkin), Gaz (Josh Fedrick) and Adam (Richard Mason) were trying desperately to be cool at a North London comprehensive with their classmate, Frankie (Isaac Verrall), and avoid the ultra-nerdy Neville (Jordan Wright).

He jerks us back into the present equally abruptly to reveal that he is now teaching at his old school, where he is treated as something of a joke by staff and students alike. After a night sleeping in his classroom because Chelsea (Catherine Martindale), his wife of 10 years, has dumped him for not being manly enough, Peter is reunited with Frankie's father, Richard (Maurice Byrne), who informs him that his son is suffering from testicular cancer and wants to see the old gang before he dies. As he only has a week left, Richard urges Peter to get a wiggle on and he soon discovers that Gaz is too stupid to realise he's not the father of his black daughter, Smithy is stuck at home with his mum and failing miserably on the speed-dating scene and Adam has become an embezzling banker who is in so much lumber that he wants to kill himself. 

As they all thought the world of Frankie, the pals agree to drop everything and head to his adopted home of Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. However, Adam runs into a bit of trouble when Russian creditors Yslav (Filip Mayer) and his sidekick Dolohov (Denis Khoroshko) catch up with him and use his phone to track him when he makes an unlikely getaway. After catching a coach that deposits them in Chester and swallows Peter's phone in its blocked lavatory, the quarter are forced to spend the next at a B&B recommended by the driver (David McClelland) that turns out to be a haven for swingers run by Doris (Jane Hollington), who bought the premises with the compensation payment after the zip failed on her late husband's gimp mask.

Waking to find Gaz has acquired a car after posing for some photographs in his underwear, the friends head for the Pennines. However, Smithy's revelation that he lost his virginity to the music teacher necessitates a stopover at a pub, where they just happen to run into Neville (Kevin Dewsbury), who is on his way to a funeral. Giving him the slip, Adam slips into a coma after taking some pills he found on the floor of the car, which breaks down and leaves the foursome stranded in the lay-by where we first encountered them. The person who punches Smithy is Yslav, but they manage to give him the slip and steal his van, even though he has tied them up in a barn. 

However, they arrive too late to see Frankie (Michael Kinsey) and his widow, Melanie (Ellen Ryan) shows them a video he had been watching the night before he passed. At the end, he has recorded a message for them all. But Adam's cuts out before he can hear it and he is distraught. However, they all get to share their memories of their mate round a campfire before donning black suits for the funeral. Richard folds up his prepared speech to eulogise from the heart and reclaim his son from the disease that killed him. At the wake, Peter bumps into Neville and Smithy gets off with Sally (Sharon Heywood), while Adam accidentally kills Yslav during a punch-up in the graveyard and the others help bury the body to prevent him from going to jail.

As Peter explains in the closing voiceover, Frankie managed to bring the group together again. But he wonders whether they've actually learnt very much from their experience or whether they've evolved as people. In truth, few will care that much because, as was the case with Chris Green's Strangeways Here We Come (2017) and Sid Sadowskyj and Scott Elliott's Scott and Sid (2018), it's difficult to feel anything but disdain for this collection of sketchily limned caricatures. 

Peter and Gaz are essentially Will and Neil from The Inbetweeners (although Peter also has a bit of John Cleese and Rik Mayall about him), while Adam is a non-punk version of Vivian from The Young Ones and Smithy is the bland nondescript (with just a hint of Nick Frost) who so often makes up the sitcom numbers. Spring clearly regards Edgar Wright as his directorial touchstone and his technique draws heavily on close-ups, flashy camera flourishes and quirky cuts. Yet, while there's nothing particularly original about this approach, it's hard to deny that Spring handles it rather well. 

With only £150,000 at his disposal, he has produced a proficient piece of work that thoroughly justifies his decision to quit the film-making course at the University of York because its prioritised theory over practice. It's clear from his online interviews that Spring doesn't lack self-belief. But, despite churning out an impressive number of shorts in a short space of time, his inexperience inevitably shows here. He might have been more rigorous in blue-pencilling Aaron Nelson's writing, while he often struggles to prevent two of his leads from mugging. Moreover, far too many of the bit players (with the notable exception of the hilarious Jane Hollington) deliver their lines as though they were auditioning against their will for a village hall amdram. But kudos to him for getting out there and not only making movies, but also getting them seen. Let's hope this is the first of many.

In 1974, Leonid Brezhnev outlawed women's football in the Soviet Union, as it was supposedly bad for their health. Perestroika saw the ban overturned and the town of Chernihiv in Ukraine became one of the first to set up a women's team. Documentarist Alisa Kovalenko's cousin, Ira, was one of the era's star players and became one of the last Ukrainians to play for the USSR in 1991. Fate prevented her from fulfilling her sporting goals, however, and Kovalenko decided to pay tribute to her talent (she now lives in Poland) by showing how little things have changed for girls dreaming of making a career in elite sport. In February 2016, she went to watch a training session at Atex Kiev, the only professional team in the capital, and was advised by the coach that the subject of Home Games should be 20 year-old Alina Shilova.

Alina began playing football at the age of seven and her mother used to help disguise her as boy so she could play for the local team. When she was arrested as an accomplice to a robbery committed by her drunken husband, she spent several years in prison and Alina was raised by relatives. On her release, her mother had two more children before disappearing, leaving Alina to raise seven year-old Regina and her six year-old brother, Renat, in a tattily cramped apartment. 

Although her coach is convinced that she has the talent and work ethic to be one of Ukraine's best players, Alina confides to her longtime girlfriend, Nadya Karatchuk, that she isn't sure that she can devote herself to sport when her half-siblings are her responsibility. Nevertheless, she spends hours cutting out pictures to create a world chart in which she rubs shoulders with the superstars of the men's game. Her grandmother, Raisa, helps out when she can, but she is old and finds coping with the youngsters when Alina is playing away games something of a strain. But she feels sorry for her granddaughter because she knows how much football means to her and that she stands more chance of giving her siblings a better childhood than she had if she makes it to the top of the tree. 

When her junior team reaches the Kiev area cup final, Coach Alla reminds her charges that `cowards don't play football'. Alina stars in a thumping win and the organisers commend them on their attacking play. But, while the rest of the team is celebrating, Alina receives news that her mother is in intensive care and she gets back in time to console Raisa and her father, Roman, for their loss. She sheds a quiet tear by herself, but has to stay strong for Regina and Renat, who play ambulance emergency with their toys in re-enacting their mother's sudden collapse. 

Despite her problems at home, Alina continues to thrive on the pitch with Atex Kiev. We see her playing against FC Panthers Uman in the Ukrainian Premier League and she clearly feels the pace, as she is devoting so much time to Regina and Renat, while also coping with Roman coming and going as he pleases and Raisa struggling to hide her contempt. On Renat's birthday, Alina prepares a special tea and Nadya helps her give a puppet show version of Cinderella that brings squeals of delight from her siblings, who look adorable in their best clothes. 

Although we're not told how, things improve sufficiently on the home front for Alina to call Coach Alla and promise to commit 100% to the team over the next season. She travels by train with Regina and Renat to a summer camp at Ochakiv and endures some gruelling sessions on parched pitches, while also missing out on bonding sessions with her teammates in order to take care of the kids. She jokes that people comment on how her son and daughter resemble her, but Alla is reluctant to allow Alina back on the team until she has sorted out her domestic situation. 

Back in the apartment, Granny is waiting with news that Roman has forgotten to register the kids for school and Alina has to make all of the arrangements. They go on a shopping expedition to buy pens, exercise books and uniforms and Alina has to take on a paper round to make some extra money. Somehow, with Nadya by her side, she manages to keep afloat and it's apt that she's seen in a rowing boat after watching with pride as Regina and Renat line up with their new classmates for the first day of school. Sitting in the prow, Nadya breaks into Céline Dion's `My Heart Will Go On' from James Cameron's Titanic (1997) and Alina joins in with affectionate amusement. 

However, Nadya has problems of her own, as she feels abandoned by her parents and Alina wonders whether that's such a bad thing, as Roman is frequently drunk and fritters his money away when he should be contributing to the housekeeping. He blows a kiss to the camera before lingering less playfully in the doorway, leaving Alina to cook for her grandmother and siblings. But Raisa has had enough of his antics, as he is spending child welfare money on vodka and she persuades Alina to seek legal aid to become Regina and Renat's legal guardian. The lawyer thinks she has a decent case, but warns her that she will have to grow up to take on such duties. Having just sold her phone and football boots to buy food, she assures him that she is already making parental sacrifices. 

Having decorated the apartment, Alina has a kickabout on some wasteland, as she hasn't yet abandoned her sporting dream. During the Premier League game against FC Lviv'yanka Lviv, she curls a free kick into the top corner and is mobbed by her teammates. For the first time in a while, she has something to smile about and the closing credits reveal that she is now on the verge of the Ukrainian national team. Moreover, Roman has moved out of the apartment and Alina and Nadya are now an officially registered couple caring for Regina and Renat. As the film ends, she finishes a retelling of Cinderella that involves a golden football boot and her siblings roar with laughter when she says they are also living in a fairytale and start a pillow fight.

Enormously engaging and unshowily inspirational, this intimate profile should be shown to every professional footballer (male and female) so that they can appreciate just how lucky they are to be making funny money from kicking a ball. It's unlikely that Alina would want to be vaunted for merely doing the right thing by her sister and brother, but she clearly deserves much more than a medal for keeping the family (and her relationship) together in the toughest of circumstances. 

How right Coach Alla was when she pointed Kovalenko in Alina's direction. However, she is also fortunate in having met a director who is so evidently on her wavelength, as the naturalism of the behaviour before Serhiy Stetsenko's camera suggests that Kovalenko readily earned everyone's trust, with the possible exception of the shifty Roman. Editor Olga Zhurba flits nimbly between sporting and domestic situations, while also judging the tonal shift to a nicety, as Alina tries to juggle being a sister, mother, lover and footballer. As is often the case with compelling documentaries, it would be nice to know how the story develops. Perhaps Kovalenko is already working on a sequel: Bend It Like Shilova?

Where does the authorship of an actuality lie when a director compiles a profile from footage recorded by another film-maker? This is the case with Chef Flynn, a study of gastro wünderkind Flynn McGarry that has been made by Cameron Yates using home movies shot by the boy's mother, Meg, who is a respected documentarist in her own right. Almost a decade has passed since Yates came to prominent with The Canal Street Madam (2010) and this follow-up represents a markedly different kind of assignment. But, as it unspools, it becomes clear that Yates isn't sure which McGarry intrigues him the most and, consequently, he loses focus and fails to ask the sort of searching questions about the relationship between mother and son that have been exercising the viewer from the outset. 

The daughter of comedian Larry Daniels and his NBC producer wife, Peggy, Megan Daniels had been making films before she married stills photographer Will McGarry. They both appeared in early shorts like Umbrella (2007) and Kisshui (2008), with children Paris and Flynn also featuring in Meg's home movies. While Paris came to dislike having the camera turned on her, Flynn enjoyed being the centre of attention after his father left home to cope with his alcohol-fuelled demons. Bored with his mother's cooking and her tendency to order takeaways, Flynn began experimenting with recipes from Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook and Meg allowed him to set up a small kitchen in his bedroom that had every mod con a 10 year-old could want. 

Seeing how he was bullied at school, Meg began home-tutoring Flynn, while Paris remained in mainstream education. Nevertheless, friends from school would act as the serving staff at the small restaurant called Eureka that he opened in the family home in Los Angeles. When chefs from the prestigious Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan came west for a book signing, Flynn showed them phone images of his dishes and he was invited to spend time in the kitchen and learn from the experts. Inspired, he returned home to attempt more ambitious menus for Eureka and, when he was 13, his precocious talent was feted in an article in the New Yorker and he came a foodie celebrity. 

Aware that her encouragement had helped create a phenomenon, Meg felt compelled to keep filming his development, even though Flynn didn't always want a lens being trained on him when he was trying to create under pressure. However, he is happy to have his father home and they build a barbecue in the garden. He also takes a job in the kitchen of an LA restaurant named Alma. But the 15 year-old's reputation is made when he makes the cover of the New York Times Magazine and he is profiled in a special edition on up-and-coming chefs. Meg is appalled by the vitriolic nature of some of the comments on the newspaper's website, but Flynn rides them, although he is nettled by those who accuse him of coming from a privileged background and not having had to struggle to get on the ladder. 

There's a faint hint of envy mixed in with the pride, as Meg admits that she will never make the cover of the Times Magazine and, over a montage of press cuttings, she concedes that the fame is imposing a strain that she is uncomfortable with. Yet, when he's asked to run pop-ups at hot LA eateries, Flynn always agrees and revels in the hard work and the satisfaction of producing good food (Beet Wellington, anyone) as much as the fame. But the New York debut of Eureka proves onerous and Flynn struggles to get the kitchen running smoothly (some of the staff clearly resent being ordered around by a kid with acne) and he is stung by an online review the next day dubbing him the Doogie Howser of haut cuisine. However, Meg and the maitre d' reassure him that he will learn more from setbacks than successes and he takes some convincing because he has always been on an upward curve and given the benefit of the doubt for being so young. 

Flynn nails the second night, however, and Meg confides to Paris that she doesn't know how her brother copes in such stressful situations. As his mother and his manager, she is conflicted because she wants him to be happy, but she also wants him to succeed. While she is keen to resume her own career, she is aware that she has been subliminally shaping Flynn's story and clips from home movies dating back to him being a toddler show her directing him for the camera. Even as she drops him off at LAX to fly east to work in New York, she has the dashcam recording their reactions and she has to angle the lens through the windscreen before she can hug him goodbye. At one point when he is barbecuing under an umbrella in the dark, he asks why she is bothering to film something so insignificant and she replies how could she not?

As we see Flynn being interviewed by Larry King and asked about the `prodigy' tag, Meg avers that her boy has grown up and is ready for the next challenge. We see him moving into his apartment and dealing with well-wishers at the farmers' market and developing people skills. But Yates cuts away from a speech Flynn gives to a culinary conference, in which he reveals how mature he has become in questioning the traditional macho apprenticeship way of climbing the rungs and his grasp of how pop-ups and social media have changed the nature of the business deserves to be heard in greater detail. As the film ends. however, he is looking for premises and continuing to keep his profile high through media work and guest spots. Meg also appears to have resumed work and even seems to have moved into her own apartment now that the chicks have flown. But the family is seen together at Paris's graduation, so who knows what their future may hold.

Capably edited by Hannah Buck, this is a curate's egg of a movie, as it makes effective use of the archive material without coaxing either Meg or Flynn into exploring their attitude to their shared past or the extent to which one was ever exploiting the other. He works hard to refine his skills, but he does have opportunities that a kid from a less well-connected family could only dream of. Similarly, Meg devotes herself to protecting her child, but also lives vicariously through him and Yates misses the chance to ask how that feels for the daughter of a star comic and the mother of a stellar chef. 

Perhaps at their own behest, Will and Paris remain in the background without their views being canvassed. Indeed, no one but Meg and Flynn expresses an opinion, as school friends, customers, critics and staff members alike are reduced to bit players in the carefully staged drama. Yet, even though Yates gives the McGarrys a relatively easy ride, this never feels like an infomercial, as Meg (the compulsive documentarian) can't resist letting slip confessional titbits that suggest that, ultimately, this is more a study of her, her self-image and her parenting than it is of her obviously gifted child.