Parky at the Pictures (DVD 12/9/2013)

What makes The Eye of the Storm all the more ambitious, is the fact that a quarter of a century has elapsed since Schepisi last made a film in his homeland - the dingo baby saga, A Cry in the Dark (1988), which earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination for her performance as Lindy Chamberlain - and a decade has passed since he completed his last feature, It Runs in the Family (2003), which starred Kirk, Michael and Cameron Douglas. In truth, the 73 year-old seems a bit rusty, as he allows some scenes to drag and doesn't always prevent his stars from playing to the gallery. But Judy Morris's screenplay is laudably loyal to the book and its 1972 Sydney setting and the recent dearth of quality heritage pictures means this is certainly a welcome release.

As Centennial Park socialite Charlotte Rampling lies bedridden following a stroke, son Geoffrey Rush and daughter Judy Davis return from Europe to visit her. She is attended by nurses Alexandra Schepisi and Maria Theodorakis, while German housekeeper Helen Morse fusses over her with more affection than the waspish matriarch deserves and tries to keep up her spirits with bits of business from her old cabaret act. Rampling is pleased to see her offspring, but cannot resist mocking Rush's shortcomings as a stage actor and delights in mentioning his much-derided turn in King Lear. She is even more cutting towards Davis, however, who may be a princess, but is separated from her French aristocratic husband and has remained on the continent less because she hopes to patch things up than because she has reached the sobering conclusion that she has nowhere else to go.

A series of flashbacks explains the tensions between Rampling and Davis. Several years earlier, Davis had visited her mother on one of the tropical Queensland Islands with her new beau, Martin Lynes. However, Rampling had seduced him and Davis has never forgotten the pain of walking in on them in bed together. But, soon after they departed, Rampling was trapped on the island by a ferocious storm and had to seek sanctuary in an underground shelter in order to survive. Consequently, well aware that her children have come home less out of a sense of duty than expectation, Rampling summons lawyer John Gaden and takes sadistic pleasure in letting slip to his wife Robyn Nevin that they had once been lovers. Moreover, she asks Gaden to redraft her will so that he becomes the sole beneficiary.

Meanwhile, Rush has become enamoured of the lusty Alexandra Schepisi and, even though she has a long-term boyfriend in Dustin Clare, she embarks upon a sexual relationship with the much older man. Indeed, she even stops taking the pill and quickly becomes pregnant. However, Rush is so scandalised by her behaviour that he humiliates her in front of the staff and she flees in furious embarrassment. Feeling stifled by their cluttered surroundings and tired of having to be polite to such visitors as aspiring prime minister Colin Friels, Davis and Rush slip away to the countryside where they grew up. Davis confides in Rush about the Lynes incident and he proves so solicitously consoling that the siblings wind up in bed together.

Vowing not to repeat their rash act and never to speak of it again, Rush and Davis arrive back in Sydney just as Rampling takes a turn for the worse. She reconciles with her daughter before she dies, but Gaden ignores her final wishes and informs the pair that they have inherited a sizeable fortune. Distraught at losing the only friend she had, Morse commits suicide and Schepisi makes a dramatic return having suffered a miscarriage and Clare is happy to take her back. As for Rush and Davis, however, they seem to have learnt little from their ghastly experiences and now have the wealth to make even more lavish mistakes.

The recipient of 10 nominations from the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, this lively adaptation won for Melinda Doring's production design and Terry Ryan's costumes, while Rampling and Davis shared the Best Actress Award. They certainly shine and their scenes together have a seething bitterness born out of the former's envy of her daughter's youth and the latter's lingering senses of neglect and treachery. By contrast, Rush rather overdoes his character's hammy theatrics, while his voice-over narration often feels intrusive (as well as dramatically odd, as it makes the erroneous presumption that he is the central character). Nonetheless, his contrasting love scenes with Davis and Schepisi are fascinating. Indeed, the supporting turns are uniformly splendid, with Schepisi bursting with saucy vivacity, Gaden exuding guilty decency and Morse conveying a bonhomie that can't quite hide the melancholy that inspires her sad demise.

Morris ensures the cast has plenty of relishable lines and Schepisi handles the flashbacks as adeptly as he did in the London-set Graham Swift adaptation, Last Orders (2001). But he makes laboured use of overhead shots and often allows the momentum of several scenes to lapse by having Ian Baker's camera linger on details whose significance will mean more to White aficionados than casual viewers. Yet he catches the small gestures and expressions that are so key to the performances, while his insights into class, snobbery, age, egotism, loyalty and missed opportunity repay the decade that producer Antony Waddington spent mounting the production. 

Another traumatic incident is explained in flashback, as Mira Nair attempts to fathom her protagonist's misunderstood motives in her fussy adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's bestselling novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It hardly helps that William Wheeler's screenplay places the book's sprawling core content in the entirely inappropriate setting of an international hostage crisis in which time is of the essence. Nevertheless, as she proved in Mississippi Masala (1991) and The Namesake (2006), Nair has an inmate understanding of diasporic Asian communities in the United States and, while this earnest picture fails to grip as a thriller, it provides some telling insights into how many of America's Muslims must have felt in the days after 9/11.

Following the kidnapping of an American academic, journalist Liev Schreiber (who may also be a spy) arranges a meeting with professor Riz Ahmed, who may be involved with the radical group behind the abduction. Urged to proceed with caution by CIA agent Martin Donovan, Schreiber enters a student hotel in downtown Lahore and his trepidation is far from eased by the greeting of activist Adil Hussain. However, he is somewhat reassured by Ahmed's insistence that appearances can be deceptive, as he launches into his life story.

At 18, Ahmed relocated to the US with poet father Om Puri, mother Shabana Azmi and younger sister Meesha Shafi. Excelling at school, Ahmed gets a place at Princeton, where he so impresses high-flying financier Kiefer Sutherland during an interview that he is recruited for a Wall Street consultancy specialising in downsizing struggling businesses. Initially, Ahmed has misgivings about waltzing into companies and dictating redundancy and cutback terms. But Sutherland and African-American colleague Nelsan Ellis convince him that they are inflicting short-term pain to ensure survival and Ahmed heads to the Philippines with a greater sense of conviction and belonging.

His mood is also improved by a romance with boss Victor Slezak's photographer niece, Kate Hudson. At first, she finds it difficult to come to terms with the cancer death of her previous boyfriend. But Ahmed earns her trust and they become inseparable lovers. He also sparks Hudson's creativity. However, while he is on a trip to Turkey, he feels a pang of guilt at closing down Haluk Bilginer's family book business and the sense that he is a lackey for American imperialism is exacerbated when he experiences a moment of exhilaration on hearing about the attack on the World Trade Center.

Flying back to the States, Ahmed is stopped by airport security and forced to endure a humiliating strip search. But, while he accepts this as a necessary evil in the aftermath of an atrocity, his conscience dictates that he quits his job. Moreover, when he realises that Hudson has made him the subject of her latest exhibition, he feels patronised and betrayed and can barely bring himself to feel any guilt when she commits suicide.

No longer feeling comfortable in New York, Ahmed returns to Pakistan and starts lecturing in finance at the local university. However, he has been radicalised by his trials and, even though he was attending a Sufi dance demonstration at the time of the kidnapping, a furtive phone call leaves the audience to suspect that he may be involved in the plot. A second call in the middle of his interview with Schreiber calls his complicity into question. But, with time running out, Schreiber has to make a snap decision that will have wide-ranging ramifications.

Notwithstanding a solid performance by Christ Church alumnus Riz Ahmed, this is a ponderous picture that places too much emphasis on the human drama to leave much room for an analysis of the geopolitical complexities that prompted the attack on the Twin Towers and strained US-Pakistani relations to breaking point. Sutherland swaggers around like a character out of Mad Men, while Hudson fails to convince as either a sensitive artist or a crushed flower. Considering his character exists solely to facilitate Ahmed's reminiscences (as the undercover aspect makes little sense), Schreiber contributes some laudable gravitas. But too many secondary characters are mere ciphers, while the storytelling is often as sloppy as the shifts in tonal gear. Moreover, Nair regularly manipulates audience emotion, with Declan Quinn's photography contrasting the warm hues of Lahore with the soulless chill of Manhattan and Michael Andrews's score making sentimental use of Urdu lyrics and Qawwali refrains. Thus, while this undoubtedly means well, it frequently meanders while simplifying too many imponderables.

Ambiguity also proves crucial to Mike Figgis's Suspension of Disbelief, which seeks to recruit the viewer to its way of thinking with an opening red-lettered caption outlining Carl Jung's theory of the Participation Mystique. When a writer produces something intense and creative, the text explains, it's almost as though they have projected all kinds of unconscious material on to the fiction and, as a result, the reader understands it as if he or she was the actual writer. In such instances, according to Jung, fiction becomes fact and the most bizarre experiences can take place within the narrative because the reader is experiencing it directly. As such, there is no need to `suspend disbelief' because the reader is `in' the story. Yet, despite his shrewd attempt to flatter the audience into buying into his theses, Figgis doesn't quite succeed in persuading us to surrender all of our critical faculties.

Martin (Sebastian Koch) is a Munich-born novelist-cum-screenwriter, who supplements his income by teaching script craft at the London  Film School. Fifteen years ago, his wife, Claire (Emilia Fox), disappeared without a trace and, now, their daughter, Sarah (Rebecca Night), is playing a character based on her mother in a film Martin has written for up-and-coming director Greg (Eoin Macken). The first instance of Figgis trying to blur the lines between fact and fiction occurs as Sarah has a saucy telephone conversation in bed, which turns out to be a scene for the movie, which Greg isn't sure is going all that well and he warns Sarah that she can be replaced if she keeps having problems about handling a role with subtextual meaning so close to home.

Across London, Martin is teaching a class and seeking to convince his students that audiences become lost in films because their brains cease to discriminate between truth and fiction. The words pop on to the screen in blue and white letters to an accompanying blast of jazz, like something in a Jean-Luc Godard feature. Indeed, Figgis ensures that we see the posters of Godard and his wife-muse Anna Karina on the classroom wall before splitting the screen for the opening credits, which depict Sarah redoing the masturbation scene in noirish monochrome, while an evidently distracted Greg does the telephone voiceover in colour while pacing behind the scenes.

Sarah is about to celebrate her 25th birthday and Martin buys her a digital Leica to use at her party. Greg comes with her co-star Juliette (Melia Kreiling) and argues with Martin that a screenplay is meant to inspire a director rather than serve as a road map. As he chats with his agent, Nesta (Frances De La Tour), about late revisions for a Paramount project, he notices Sarah's friend, Dominic (Lachlan Nieboer), arriving with a striking stranger. She is Angélique (Lotte Verbeek) and, as Martin gazes at her, the noise of the party blanks out and his blurry vision is accompanied by the sound of his computer keyboard, as Figgis seeks to confuse us about whether what we are seeing is real, fiction or a figment of Martin's imagination. Martin goes to bed as if in a dream, with his glance catching the playbills lining the staircase walls of fliers for the plays he wrote for Claire.

As Martin falls on the bed, there is a cut to Angélique sitting coquettishly on a swivel chair in front of a red curtain before a further cut shows Sarah and Greg watching their movie from the front row of a theatre (preview or otherwise). The image goes hazy and the slurring sound effects give the impression that Martin and Angélique have made love, but everything is left deliberately vague so that, when Sarah gets a call from Dominic next morning saying that Angélique failed to come home, the close-up of Martin eavesdropping in the foreground is invested with a guilt that may or may not be justified (the Kuleshov Experiment, anyone?).

The scene shifts back to the film set, as Greg tries to coerce Sarah and Juliette into performing a lesbian kiss to conclude the final scene. He explains that this is `a film within a film within a film' moment. But, as the screen splits, the actresses question their motivation for such a clench and Greg proclaims that it will help the picture's overall challenge to the postmodernistic clichés of the Humphrey Bogart-style of film noir. Still unconvinced, the pair begin to rehearse and promise to do it during the take when Greg insists that women in the audience will feel empowered by what they see.

Back in Hampstead, some jaunty music introduces Inspector Bullock (Kenneth Cranham), who wants to ask Sarah and Martin about Angélique's movements after the party. He tries to lighten the mood with some ill-judged jokes about French girls and makes Martin feel even more uneasy by mentioning that people have a habit of disappearing from the house. Before Martin can take offence, however, Bullock gushes that he is a big fan of his books and, just as suddenly, returns to what Martin can remember of chatting to Angélique around 2am. Martin shruggingly recalls that they merely exchanged pleasantries before he went to bed around 3am, but his train of thought is interrupted by Bullock asking if he would take a look at a script he has written.

At this juncture, Figgis cuts back to Martin telling his class that beginnings are easy. It's knowing what to do next that makes the difference between good and mediocre films. He says that the writer owes it to the audience to deliver on the promise and confides that a good rule of thumb to remember is that `character is plot'. While he is speaking, a couple of fishermen spot a body in the canal and Martin and Sarah go with Dominic to identify the body. Bullock asks Martin if he has had a chance to look at his script yet, but he apologises saying he has been too busy. Emerging from the morgue in a state of shock, Dominic bumps into a woman who looks exactly like Angélique and Thérèse (also Verbeek) announces that she has come to see her sister.

A large blue caption proclaiming `twin' appears on the screen, along with a dictionary definition. As Thérèse faints from the stress of the situation, Sarah suggests that she stays with them. The legend `character is plot' flashes up and a shot of Martin writing is juxtaposed with one of either Angélique or Thérèse lying on a bed with pills spilt on the pillow. Once again, the viewer is left high and dry about whether they are watching fact or fiction and it hardly helps that Martin scribbles `possible ending of first act' on a piece of paper before screwing it into a ball and missing the bin when he tosses it across the room.

Over dinner, Thérèse announces that things are more complicated than she imagined and that she will have to remain in London for 10 days. They insist she stays with them before Martin goes to his study to peruse Bullock's script. However, he is distracted by an image (that may be a memory) of Angélique rising from his desk chair to pull down her dress as he reached up to touch her cheek. But the reverie doesn't last long and Martin delivers the harsh verdict to Bullock that his scenario is hopeless and is even more sternly dismissive when Bullock hopes that he is joking. Martin offers to make a statement and is busy admitting that Angélique came on to him at the party when the crestfallen Bullock begins to cry at having had his dreams dashed and he falls off the chair in the throes of a heart attack.

Left alone, Martin tries to write about the night Claire had told him in a busy restaurant that she wanted a divorce. She had taunted him about being spineless and having slept with all his friends. She had even threatened to keep his beloved Sarah away from him before throwing a glass of wine in his face. He had risen to strike her, but the flashback is interrupted by the phone ringing and he coaxes Sarah through some doubts about whether she has the talent to play such a demanding role. Too distracted to work, Martin goes to see if Thérèse is in her room and he cooks dinner for her. She says Sarah is a lovely girl and Martin explains how she had applied for the role of her mother under an assumed name in case anyone suspected nepotism. They smoke and drink wine together and are laughing across the table when Sarah comes home still feeling low and unhappy that Thérèse is wearing some of Claire's clothes.

The next day, Thérèse accompanies Martin as he scouts locations on the south coast  In the car, she reveals that her parents had been killed in a crash when they were eight and they had been raised apart in a small town where everyone knew everybody else. One day, Angélique had confided that she was being abused by her new father and he had killed himself at the height of a scandal. She had come to live with Thérèse's family and, for a while, everything seemed blissful. But Angélique accused her foster father of harassing her, which Thérèse knew to be untrue. Thus, when she was interviewed by the police, she had exposed Angélique as a liar and disowned her after she was sent to an institution for troubled children.

Martin listens in silence before a cut shows his movie alter ego being humiliated in the restaurant. Juliette looks on jealously, as Greg and Sarah have an intense, intimate discussion about the scene before she asks to have Sarah moved out of her eyeline, as she is putting her off her stride. Greg urges the actor playing Martin to convey the feeling that this is the worst thing that has ever happened to him, just as the real Martin heads for home and Thérèse says she suddenly feels as though she has been pitched into a movie. She discloses that Angélique would have loved the situation, as she delighted in pretending to be somebody else and was so good at passing herself off as her twin that few could tell for sure which was which. As they drive in the darkness, Thérèse turns to face Martin and asks what he had thought of Angélique. He says he had only said `hello' to her and Thérèse suggests she would have been attracted to him, as she had always gone for older men with power.

Figgis superimposes Martin's memory of Angélique over Thérèse's face and, apart from a string of pearls, there appears to be no difference between them. She undoes a button on her dress and asks Martin if he slept with her sister and he is so taken aback that he swerves off the road and lands the car in a ditch. They clamber out unhurt and hold hands as they walk back to the village to use the pub phone, as Martin cannot get a signal on his mobile. As the stand on a bridge over the river, Thérèse wonders about how long it had taken her twin to drown, as she had never been able to swim.

They share a single room in the pub and Martin calls Sarah to explain what has happened. She tells him that the police have taken her camera to check the photos for clues, but they get cut off and she chides Greg for looking through the things on Martin's desk (which include a notebook containing a marked-up map of the village in which he has just been stranded - as if he had planned the whole thing or Figgis is playing meta-games with us again). Greg and Sarah kiss and she fellates him uttering the phrase `daddy's little girl' at his insistence, as a montage of her pictures flits behind her on Martin's screensaver. A cut shows the movie Claire being throttled and this appears to be the dream that Martin is having when he wakens with a jolt to calm Thérèse, after she also seems to be assaulted by a nightmare. However, as she rolls on to her side, her eyes open to suggest she had been feigning.

Soon after he returns to London, Martin is visited by DCI Hackett (Julian Sands) and a WPC (Ginny Dee). He repeats Bullock's dubious jape about this being an unlucky house before pursuing an aggressive line of questioning that puts Martin on the defensive. However, he takes the opportunity to change his story, by insisting he went to bed around 2am and had barely spoken to Angélique, let alone seduced her. He also says that Bullock had collapsed because he had been upset about his script and Martin seems almost touched by the news that he has since died. Hackett shows him one of Sarah's snaps suggesting that Martin had flirted with Angélique, but concedes that it's no longer true that the camera never lies and he leaves after Martin agrees to a DNA test.

At the inquest, Thérèse sits between Martin and Sarah and the WPC keeps a close eye on Martin as the coroner (Rachel O'Meara) returns a verdict of accidental death, as Angélique was under the influence of drink and drugs and may well have tottered off the towpath and drowned because she simply couldn't swim. But, while the police seem content to accept this finding, Martin has his doubts and the word `suspicion' pops up in blue letters along with another dictionary definition. A brief montage shows him flying to France and speaking to a swimming instructor (Sarah Lewerth) in the public baths. Meanwhile, Sarah invites Thérèse to a friend's birthday party and is slightly unnerved when she submerges her head to rinse some stinging shampoo out of her eyes. But, even though their faces monetarily merge on the surface of the bath water, the incident passes as quickly as the image of the young Thérèse and Angélique appears on the screen as Martin learns that they were both fine swimmers and often changed places so it was never clear which one had won the trophy.

Sarah gets drunk at the party because Greg is back with Juliette and she feels used. She dances provocatively with Thérèse and they kiss in the taxi on the way home. Next morning, however, Sarah feels uneasy at waking up in the same bed and leaves for the set without discussing what had happened between them. Left to her own devices, Thérèse wanders up to Martin's study and, sitting in a white dressing-gown, begins to read a manuscript. She is interrupted by a call from her old swim coach telling her that a stranger had been snooping around and then by Dominic bringing dropping off Angélique's belongings. She takes the bag upstairs and, in slow-motion, inhales the aroma of the clothing, as Dominic tries to make small talk in the adjoining room. She asks him if he had read the notebook in her bag, but he admits his French is woeful.

A fleeting grainy image of Angélique walking unsteadily along the towpath seems to end with her stopping to speak to someone she knows, but it disappears as Thérèse strips and puts on her twin's dress. Martin walks in and Dominic hastily makes his excuses. Thérèse asks how his research mission had gone and he senses that she has been tipped off. He also suspects that something occurred with Sarah in his absence, as she is suddenly keen for their guest to leave immediately after the funeral (although quite why this should take place in London rather than in France seems to be a sloppy piece of contrivance).

Sarah urges Martin to come to the crematorium and he sleeps badly. A voice intones `this is clearly a dream' on the soundtrack, as Thérèse appears to tell him that Angélique had a horror of drowning and she accuses him of thinking she had killed her sister. He sees himself pushing one of the twins into a pool bedecked with red curtains and she swims over to kiss him underwater (but he is no longer certain whether he is fantasising or fearing Thérèse or Angélique). As he wakes with a start, he goes to the bathroom and stares at himself in the mirror (with the doors of the cabinet creating an intra-frame split-screen). What seems to be Angélique's ghostly face appears in the mirror behind him and he drops his water glass in terror - but it's not revealed if this is part of another dream or just his over-active imagination playing tricks on him.

Martin and Sarah keep a respectful distance at the funeral, as Thérèse leaves her pew during the sermon to touch the coffin, as though pushing it into the incinerator (as she may or may not have pushed Angélique into the canal - or as Angélique might have pushed Thérèse). She sips water at the reception afterwards, as Martin is pestered by Dominic's parents, who are avid readers. Thérèse asks Martin to drive her to the airport and, as he parks in the multi-storey, she accuses him of hypocrisy for suspecting her of murder. He asks how much of her childhood account was true and she concedes that a kindly farmer and his wife adopted them both and they joined forces to arrange his accidental death when he began abusing them. She snaps that he did the same with Claire, or at least thought about it, and tells him to stop being so judgemental.

But the revelations are still not over, as Martin says he discovered that the girls were separated and raised in separate homes, but kept changing places and led their new parents merry dances. Thérèse counters by saying she knew that Angélique had made a play for him and still feels it is possible that he killed her. Yet, as she protests that her heart is broken, a quiet smile plays on her lips as she gets out of the car and she says they are very alike, as they kiss goodbye. Martin smiles in acknowledgement of her supposition and watches her walk away. She pauses to look back, either because she has fallen for him or because she needs final reassurance that he has bought her story, and the scene fades, with no proof existing that foul play was involved in the death of whichever twin perished in the canal.

However, Figgis isn't quite ready to let go yet. He cuts back to a debate in Martin's scriptwriting class about whether it is fair to the audience to leave them hanging. A further cut takes us to the premiere of Greg's film, which ends with Claire killing Martin and Juliette and Sarah kissing with a pool of red blood oozing on to the monochrome cobbles (against a CGI backdrop of a nocturnal metropolis). Martin joins in the applause, as the closing credits ripple over Greg, Sarah and Juliette's bodies, as they take their bow. The real crawl begins with Thomas Hengelbrock's `Miserere' and viewers are left to make what they will of what they have just seen.

As likely to frustrate as it is to fascinate, this is a film that will inevitably divide opinion. Figgis has long been willing to experiment in his features and, while this is nowhere near as visually ambitious as Timecode (2000) or as dramatically powerful as Leaving Las Vegas (1995), it is exciting to see someone testing digital technology's potential for more than making pretty pictures. It is also good to see someone refusing to be bound by the conventions of the Hollywood narrative, even if the self-reflexive gambits he employs were passé when Godard was iconising Karina. But Figgis is simply not in the same league as a film-maker and, consequently, for all his laudable efforts to do something different, his Jungian ruse fails to persuade us to suspend our disbelief for more than a few seconds at a time. Thus, while it often teases, frequently amuses and occasionally intrigues, this mostly settles for proclaiming its own ingenuity in much the same manner as Nicolás Pereda's Greatest Hits (2012), which played in last weekend's London MexFest.

In fairness to the cast, they mostly acquit themselves admirably. Sebastian Koch delivers another solid display of steely impassivity, while Rebecca Night is suitably vulnerable as the naive daughter and Kenneth Cranham excels as the comic-relief detective. Dutch actress Lotte Verbeek is less assured in coping with the demands of her deadpan delivery, but her occasional hesitancy adds a certain brittleness to her work. As for Figgis (who probably served as his own cinematographer and editor, as well as composer), he clearly had a ball and, if he periodically pushes his luck, he can be forgiven for being a bit pretentious and smug, as too few other British directors, beside the shamefully marginalised Peter Greenaway, are attempting anything similar.

It seems at the moment as though young American independents are competing with each other to pay the most eloquent tribute possible to Madgalen College alumnus Terrence Malick. Benh Zeitlin set the ball rolling with Beasts of the Southern Wild and the trend has since been continued by Derek Cianfrance in The Place Beyond the Pines, David Lowery in Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Jeff Nichols's Mud. Indeed, Malick even referenced himself in To the Wonder. Set in the Arkansas Delta where Nichols was raised, Mud follows on from Shotgun Stories (2007) and Take Shelter (2011) in exploring how modern American males react under pressure imposed by others and themselves. However, echoes of Mark Twain reverberate around this Mississippi rite of passage that take it slightly out of reality and into a neverland where Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn find another island and another Muff Potter in need of their assistance.

Fourteen year-old Tye Sheridan lives with parents Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson on a riverboat in a hardscrabble delta community where folks scrape a living trap fishing or diving for oysters. Sheridan senses that things are not right between McKinnon and Paulson and wishes they were as nice to each other as he is to older neighbour, Bonnie Sturdivant. But, while he likes to think of her as his girlfriend, Sheridan's best buddy is Jacob Lofland, who shares a trailer with his eccentric uncle, Michael Shannon. He warns the boys about the detritus that comes floating down the river, but they are still keen to explore the world opening up around them and dare each other to venture to a nearby island to see a boat that is supposed to have been stranded up a tree during a recent flood.

While the rumours turn out to be true, the real discovery is that the craft is providing a refuge for Matthew McConaughey, who is wanted in town for killing the man who beat longtime girlfriend Reese Witherspoon and caused her to miscarry. As they help him repair the boat, he convinces the teenagers that he is a victim of circumstances and that they shouldn't believe what the police are saying about him on the mainland. The hopelessly romantic Sheridan is particularly taken by McConaughey's assertion that he acted out of love and he offers to take messages to the motel where Witherspoon is hiding out, while her deceased assailant's father, Joe Don Baker, scours the vicinity with a lynch mob.

McConaughey's friend, Sam Shepard, also wants to help, but is too afraid of sticking his neck out. But Sheridan and Lofland revel in the danger and seize the opportunity to have an adventure. However, it doesn't take long for cruel reality to intrude, as Sheridan learns that his parents are going to split up, sell the boat and move to the city. Moreover, even though he punches an older boy who impugned her honour. Sturdivant rejects his advances and, in a blind rage, he crosses to the island and picks a fight with McConaughey for feeding him false notions about love. Yet, when Sheridan tries to run away and is bitten by cottonmouth snakes as he crosses a creek, McConaughey risks his freedom to take him to hospital in a motorboat.

Unfortunately, Baker and his posse have been keeping tabs on the boys and know they have been acting as couriers between McConaughey and Witherspoon. Thus, when the former comes to the houseboat to tell Sheridan that he is going away, he is ambushed by Baker's men. In the ensuing gun battle, Shepard kills Baker's other son, Paul Sparks, only for McConaughey also to be hit and he is presumed dead when he falls into the river. As Sheridan resigns himself to life away from the Mississippi, however, Shepard strikes out into the Gulf of Mexico in the little vessel, with McConaughey as his sole passenger.

It is surely no coincidence that this simmering saga bears more than a passing resemblance to David Gordon Green's Undertow (2004), which was produced by Terrence Malick in much the same way that Mud has been produced bsy Malick's regular collaborator, Sarah Green. Nichols also used the same production designer, Richard A. Wright, to convey the sense of a small community shaped by its surroundings. He also makes exceptional use of Adam Stone's painterly compositions and Matthew Petrosky's sinuous Steadicam moves to give the impression of the action taking place from the viewpoint of its young heroes. A couple of conversations take place out of their hearing, but this concentrated perspective, together with David Wingo's lilting score, evokes the impression of wide-eyed wonderment narrowing as the grimmer realities of growing up become more apparent.

Ultimately, even though it is unlikely that anyone will live happily ever after, the plot is resolved a little too neatly. But this doesn't detract from the potency of the tale or the stength of the performances. Continuing the renaissance that begin in William Friedkin's Killer Joe, McConaughey dominates proceedings with a display of edgy charm that constantly suggests he is every bit as dangerous as Baker and Sparks. Sheridan (who featured in Malick's The Tree of Life) and Lofland also show well, although such is Nichols's insight into compromised masculinity that he gives Witherspoon, Paulson and  Sturdivant far less interesting things to do than Shannon, Shepard and McKinnon .But, with its inklings of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Robert Mulligan's adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) lingering in the background, this is primarily a film about maturation and, while it has not been made for children, there is no reason why this should not grip intelligent adolescents as much as any comic-book transfer or CGI animation.

The setting couldn't be more different for Adam Leon's debut feature, Gimme the Loot. But he and cinematographer Jonathan Miller capture the look and feel of the Bronx on a hot summer day so evocatively that this has a much greater authenticity and spontaneity than Schepisi's more mannered perfectionism. Rooted in a pair of documentaries, Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style and Tony Silver's Style Wars (both 1983), this borrows a simmering sense that anything might happen from Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). But it has none of the aggression that characterised the `hood movies that dominated the New Black Cinema of the early 1990s. Indeed, it feels closer in spirit to David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000) and even harks back further in time to Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley's coming-of-age gem Little Fugitive (1953), which followed young Richie Andrusco on an adventure to Coney Island after he convinces himself he has killed his older brother.

Teenagers Ty Hickson and Tashiana Washington start this freewheeling two-day saga with clear consciences, as they look out over a New York that may have no place for the likes of them, but they are hardly impressed by it, either. Nothing matters beside the occasional joint, trading platonically playful insults and expressing themselves on the nearest wall. However, when their latest graffiti masterpiece is vandalised by members of the Woodside King Crew from Queens, Hickson and Washington vow to exact their revenge. Aware that their rivals are big fans of the New York Mets baseball team, they decide to tag the giant plastic apple that appears whenever they score a home run. No one has achieved this feat for over 20 years. But, in order to get into Shea Stadium (Washington refuses to use its sponsored name, Citi Field, because of its banking connotations), they will have to raise $500 to bribe the security guard.

Without a bean to call their own, the pair know that bombing the apple won't be easy. But Hickson steals five bags of weed from his dealer friend Adam Metzger and heads into Manhattan to sell them to spoilt white girl, Zoe Lescaze. She flirts with Hickson and he is instantly smitten. However, he also notices that the apartment is filled with pocketable treasures and he particularly notes the key to a jewellery box that could fund their entire operation. But he is chased away when Metzger's boss Sam Soghor shows up and he has to flee without his payment for the dope and his sneakers.

Ironically, Washington has a client debt paid with a pair of sneakers. But, as she returns to the street, she finds that her bike has been stolen and has to chase after the thieves. She catches one and takes his mobile phone in retribution. However, she is tricked out of pawning this at the convenience store and, even though she manages to sell the shoes and some knocked off spray cans, she is robbed by the WKC thugs who have been following her around. And, to compound the felony, they even tag her t-shirt.

Meanwhile, the bare-footed Hickson has ventured back to Lescaze's place and is disappointed by her attitude when she introduces him to her friends as the drug boy. Any scruples he might have had about stealing from her vanish in a trice, but he only manages to get his hands on the key to the jewellery box before making himself scarce. Reuniting with Washington, he goes to find Meeko Gattuso, a heavily tattooed thief who readily agrees to break into the apartment. However, he talks a better game than he plays and the heist is bungled and they leave without pinching a single thing. Next morning, therefore, Hickson and Washington decide to pack the wad of notes for the security guard with pieces of cut newspaper. However, he fails to show up for their assignation and they are left crushed and without a plan for the day.

Superbly played by the eager, but naive Hickson and the world-weary, but genial Washington, this is an absolute delight. In classic Hitchcockian mode, the central plot to bomb the apple is little more than a macguffin designed to set the train of amusingly slackerish events in motion. But, even though the ensuing incidents are hardly earth-shattering, Leon and his wonderfully natural leads make us care what happens to them.

Inevitably, the screenplay doesn't entirely avoid clichés and the odd caricature and this is bound to lead to similar accusations to the ones that Benh Zeitlin.endured about Beasts of the Southern Wild being a patronising white outsider's view. But there is never anything generic or condescending about action nimbly shot in long takes that are all the more audacious and accomplished given that the budget only ran to $200,000. Moreover, this distinctiveness is reinforced by Nicholas Britell's deliciously eclectic soundtrack, which eschews the rap that is de rigueur for most African-American pictures (even though the title is taken from a Notorious B.I.G. tune) and slips effortlessly between gospel, jazz, 1960s R&B and bluegrass before culminating triumphantly with Marion Williams's version of Bob Dylan's `I Shall Be Released'.

Adapted from his own acclaimed stage play, Rikki Beadle-Blair's Bashment packs considerably more punch than his previous screen outings, Fit and Kick Off. However, this exposé of London's hip-hop and ragga scene is no less polemical and dialogue that might sound immediate and authentic too often rings hollow, as Beadle-Blair seeks to make complex political and cultural ideas accessible to a wide audience. Played with admirable brio by an inexperienced cast and capturing a palpable sense of place and mood, this is one of those films whose message is more important than its content and style.

Arriving in the capital from the West Country, Joel Dommett is determined to make it as an MC. But, while it's bad enough being a white outsider in outlaw country, Dommett is also gay. Furthermore, he makes the dreadful mistake of declaring his sexuality during the Urban Slam finals, just as boyfriend Marcus Kai is falling foul of Jason Steed and his Ilford Ilmanics, who have been disqualified for turning up late.

Many viewers will doubtlessly be repulsed by the brutality of the beating that leaves Kai with brain damage. But the sudden shift from throbbing beats and racial tension to domestic strife and climactic reformation is even harder to swallow. Dommett devotes himself to caring for Kai, while struggling to cope with the guilt of provoking the incident. But he is also tortured by the feeling of being robbed of his big chance to make something of himself. Consequently, he checks into a victim reconciliation programme for guidance and goes to see Steed in prison in the hope of achieving some sort of closure. But the Ilmanics are so aggressively unrepentant that he decides to take Kai with him for a last visit before they are released.

What is most impressive about this well-meaning film is its insistence on exploring the social circumstances behind the homophobic lyrics and lash-out prejudice. Yet, in seeking to present Steed and his crew as victims trapped in their own ghetto, Beadle-Blair resorts to stereotype and sentimentality and dissipates much of the story's power. That said, stand-up and MTV presenter Joel Dommett shows well in his first leading role and the film can only be commended for tackling such contentious issues.

Headlining his adaptation of his own bestseller, Tony Hawks takes a decent stab at playing himself in this ambiable, but only fitfully amusing piece of Oirish whimsy. Stepping into the breach when Brendan Fraser withdrew, Hawks doesn't always hit the fine line between sketch mugging and character acting. But the doggedly independent manner in which he mounted this production is highly laudable and sets an example many British film-makers would do well to follow.

Tired of trotting out the same old schtick on a daytime panel show and having bombed spectacularly at a royal gala, Hawks descends on friend Andy Taylor to drown his sorrows. Drinking into the night, he decides that the best way he can avoid the wrath of agent Josie Lawrence and kick-start his flagging career is to accept Taylor's bet to hitch-hike around the entire circumference of Ireland with a fridge within one calendar month. So, he selects a suitably portable appliance from a Dublin store the next day and (having unknowingly ruined roving reporter Valerie O'Connor's shopping mall link to Ed Byrne's radio show) takes a bus into depths of rural County Cavan.

However, hitching proves as difficult for Hawks as it did for the bloke he once saw doing the exact same thing while in Ireland for a music festival and he soon finds himself in the middle of nowhere with only cows and scoffing farmers for company. But, just as he is about to quit, travelling toiletries salesman Sean Hughes puts him live on Byrne's show and the whole country is suddenly talking about the English eejit and his eccentric enterprise. O'Connor is detailed to report on his progress and the newly nicknamed Saoirse (after the Gaelic word for freedom) becomes a celebrity after she goes surfing in the Atlantic.

But not everything goes so smoothly, as Hawks's blossoming relationship with O'Connor is blown off course by his adverse reaction to the news she has a seven year-old son and her discovery live on air of his one-night stand with Kiwi chambermaid, Susan Paterno. Thus, by the time he reaches Dublin (for a triumphal entry that singularly fails to materialise), Hawks is far from certain what sort of welcome to expect from O'Connor.

Steadily directed by Ed Bye, this follows the picaresque pattern of being more a loose assemblage of vignettes than a dense narrative. Consequently, it often feels rather like a stand-up act, with the gags coming thick and fast and some raising bigger smiles than others. However, the supporting cast is game and if the studio-confined Byrne struggles to register and Hawks is occasionally awkward in the non-comedic passages, O'Connor more than compensates with a display of radiant geniality.

An inability to comprehend changing circumstances also underpins the satire in Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, Tony Hawks's follow-up to Round Ireland With a Fridge (2010), which he headlines in addition to producing the screenplay and the score and co-directing with Mikolaj Jaroszewiecz. Once again based on a bestseller that was inspired by a reckless bet, the action frequently meanders as widely and languidly as its protagonist, who once again struggles to play himself with any degree of naturalness. But, as with his circumvention of the Emerald Isle, Hawks makes for genial company and the lesson in humility that he learns after several weeks of self-absorbed Western European smugness is poignantly revealed in a coda that does him enormous credit.

Having just watched England thrash Moldova in a 1998 game at Wembley, Tony Hawks makes a wager with friend Stephen Frost that he can beat each member of the team at tennis. Agreeing that the loser has to sing the Moldovan national anthem naked in the street, Hawks contacts his agent to try and secure an advance on a book deal and asks tennis partners Angus Deayton, Laura Solon and Morwenna Banks if they have any contacts that might help him.

Luckily, Banks knows a member of The Counterfeit Beatles, a Moldovan combo that just happens to be in Liverpool for a convention and one of its members arranges for Hawks to stay with doctors Viorel Cornescu and Silvia Luca at their home in the capital city, Chisinau. While his hosts can barely speak English, their teenage children Igor Babiac and Ana Chirita are reasonably fluent and they help Hawks rendezvous with translator Anatole Durbala and PR executive Ina Surdu, who has been hired to help him negotiate with the various club chairmen.

Things get off to a sticky start, however, when FC Zimbru refuse to allow Hawks inside the training ground it had taken hours in a taxi to find. Moreover, Durbala is singularly unimpressed by Hawks's supposedly friendly jibes about his homeland, which has found the transition to free market democracy incredibly difficult after decades of Ottoman, Romanian and Russian repression. He is also put out when Hawks uses a message translated by Chirita to approach the players directly after watching them play a league game in a stadium that is almost empty in spite of free admission. But, when Hawks tries to strike out on his own and take a bus to go sightseeing in Orhei Ul Vecchi, he nearly gets crushed by the packed-in passengers and finds himself deposited in the middle of nowhere when the driver insists he gets off at his requested stop.

His luck changes when Zimbru coach-cum-president Sandu Grecu accepts a meeting and agrees to let him play one of his stars. Hawks wins the game easily and gets phone numbers for a couple more players, who prove equally useless. Feeling optimistic when four more members of the Wembley team consent to matches in the next couple of weeks, Hawks ignores the protests of Durbala and Surdu and decides to venture into the near-lawless region of Transnistria to meet with bigwig Igor Caras.

Despite a nasty moment at the border, Hawks and Durbala are taken to Caras's compound, where Hawks responds to an attempt to coerce him into doing a shady business deal by recording an abusive camcorder message that Caras cannot understand. Fleeing back to Chisinau feeling foolish for not having heeded Durbala's warning, Hawks wins his next four games. But a second encounter with Caras (who has had the tape translated) at a football conference in the capital seems to have kyboshed the enterprise.

During a day out to the wilds of Orhei Ul Vecchi, Durbala reprimands Hawks about his dismissive attitude to Moldovan culture and society and he feels as chastened as he did when Cornescu took him around the badly equipped hospital where he works. Convinced he has let everyone down (especially Chirita, who has never wavered in supporting him), Hawks prepares to fly home. But Babiac discovers that Moldova has a forthcoming international with Northern Ireland and Hawks soon finds himself back on track after a trip to Belfast .However, one player continues to elude him and Hawks has to travel to Jerusalem to meet him. But things hardly go according to plan.

Very much story led, this is a pleasingly old-fashioned piece of family entertainment. The performances are a touch stiff (particularly those in London), while Hawks's leisurely scenario and Christopher White's circumspect editing enervate the dramatic momentum. Nevertheless, working in tandem with Mikolaj Jaroszewiecz (who doubles as cinematographer), Hawks raises the occasional smile and pauses periodically to assess the painfully slow progress that Moldova made to life after Communism. He also sportingly makes no effort to excuse his thoughtlessness in mocking everyday life and the fact that the profits from the film are destined for the centre Hawks founded in Chisinau for the free treatment of children with cerebral palsy testifies to what a noble fellow he is.

Finally, the fine art of spinning a yarn is further explored in Sarah Polley's teasingly self-reflexive documentary Stories We Tell, which confirms the impression made with two earlier studies of marriage under pressure, Away From Her (2006) and Take This Waltz (2011), that this acclaimed Canadian actress is also one the country's finest directors. Revelling in the spate of ironic coincidences attendant upon her tale, Polley uses her own family history to explore how narratives shift focus according to the perspective of the teller. This may not be the most original topic and Polley borrows heavily from Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite (1978) to help examine it. But her confidence in both her subject matter and her technique ensures that this remains compulsive viewing, even during the more intimate revelations that often leave the viewer feeling uncomfortably like an intruder.

The focus of the film is Polley's mother, Diane, who is first seen in monochrome in the mid-1960s delivering a rendition of "Ain't Misbehavin'" as part of a television audition. Super 8 home movies follow to explain how she was the life and soul of the party and husband Michael and children John, Suzy, Mark and Joanna all testify to her being a wonderful mother and an irrepressible spirit. However, we learn that she had earned a certain notoriety when she scandalised polite Toronto society by abandoning her affluent husband and losing custody of her first two children in order to romance Michael, an English actor with whom she had become besotted during a production of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. Michael and Diane had married soon afterwards and had even appeared in a couple of plays together, including Eduardo De Filippo's Filumena, which provided the basis of Vittorio De Sica's Marriage, Italian Style (1964), in which Sophia Loren cons Marcello Mastroianni to the altar by refusing to tell him which of her three sons is his.

Unfortunately, Diane had fallen for the characters that Michael played on stage and was more than a little disappointed when he quit acting to get a regular job so that they could afford a large house and a comfortable lifestyle. She, however, continued to run a casting agency and appeared in such TV series as Street Legal, and remained the extrovert party girl even after having two more children. In 1978, she was offered a part in the Montreal production of David Fennario's Toronto at the Centaur Theatre. Reading from the letter he had written Sarah when her life had changed forever in 2007, Michael admits that he rather relished the prospect of a few months of respite and readily gave his blessing for her to go. However, on paying her a weekend visit, he was pleased to find their old passion re-igniting and was delighted when Diane returned from the engagement to announce she was pregnant.

Following a change of heart en route to the abortion clinic, Diane gave birth to Sarah on 8 January 1979. As her siblings left home, she found herself the centre of attention. But, when Sarah was 11, Diane was diagnosed with cancer and died soon afterward. Bereft, Michael and Sarah became closer than ever, although a family joke began to circulate around this time that she bore no resemblance to her father whatsoever. What is not mentioned here, but is crucial to know, is that Diane had launched Sarah as a child star and she had earned the nickname `Canada's Sweetheart' through appearances in films like Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and the Disney Channel's Road to Avonlea. Moreover, even after she fell out with the latter in 1991 for wearing an anti-war badge at an awards ceremony, she continued to act and won acclaim for her work in such pictures as Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me (2003).

In 2007, however, while preparing to shoot Jaco Van Dormael's Mr. Nobody, in which a 118 year-old man tries to piece together his forgotten life under hypnosis, Polley decided to find out whether Michael was her biological father or whether, as family rumour suggested, it was really actor Geoffrey Bowes. John recalls overhearing an anxious phone call in which his mother had confided that she was pregnant in a way that made him suspect the hearer was the father of the child. But he had said nothing for 28 years and Diane's friends Ann Tait and Deirdre Bowen had similarly held their counsel. However, a few days after Sarah confronted Bowes and was assured that he was not her father, she received a message from film producer Harry Gulkin, who had scored a major hit with Czech exile Ján Kadár's Lies My Father Told Me in 1975. Happy to meet another of her mother's circle, Sarah was aghast to discover that the 79 year-old was her real father and he explained how they had been drawn to each other during the run of the play and how he had tried, on learning of the pregnancy, to persuade Diane to leave Michael and live with him in Montreal.

While still processing the news, Sarah was contacted by a journalist who wanted her permission to run the story and she recalls weeping on a park bench wearing Neanderthal make-up from Mr Nobody as she pleaded with the reporter to hold fire until she had had time to tell Michael. Naturally, he had been devastated by the disclosure and had tried to arrange his feelings in the long missive that forms the linking narration to the film (and which we see him recording under Sarah's impassive and exacting direction). He was even more distressed when the results of a DNA test confirmed Gulkin as the father, although Sarah was amused to notice that she shared a gummy smile with his other daughter, Cathy. The situation also impacted upon the lives of her other siblings, as all three sisters got divorced shortly after the truth emerged and it became headline news across Canada.

In an effort to come to terms with her mother's secret existence, Sarah decided to make this documentary and relations became strained for a time with Gulkin when he insisted that his was the only side of the story that mattered, as he alone had gone through the same emotions as Diane and had been forced to keep silent about his paternity after attending her funeral. Eventually, however, he was persuaded by Sarah's insistence on studying the way in which stories can become distorted and falsehoods can become accepted truths and agreed to be one of the many talking heads seen in the film. But it only gradually becomes clear that Sarah had also played sly visual games throughout the picture and that the photos and home movies had been leavened with grainily shot reconstructions in which Rebecca Jenkins had played Diane, Peter Evans had been Michael Polley and Alex Hatz had been Harry Gulkin.

With this realisation, comes relief that Sarah had not filmed herself breaking the news to Michael from several angles as he sat in anguish at the kitchen table and that the septuagenarian occupies the privileged position of being narrator, actor and interviewee and, thus, is allowed to blur the line between reality, memory and reconstruction in a unique manner. Michelle Citron had also staged vérité moments in Daughter Rite, which had also been accompanied by a poetic voiceover. But Polley potently shows herself talking through scenes with Rebecca Jenkins, as though she is discussing her own life with her mother, and promptly debunks this deeply moving incident by concluding with a shot of the sheepish Geoffrey Bowes admitting that he had slept with Diane after all.

Slickly edited by Michael Munn, ingeniously designed and photographed by Lea Carlson and Iris Ng, and cleverly costumed and coiffeured by Sarah Armstrong and Josie Stewart to complete the Super 8 illusion, this is probably no different from a thousand and one other domestic sagas in which families have managed to survive secrets and lies and renegotiated a new way of getting along. The fascinating aspect is that, while Diane is not there to defend her actions, nobody actually seems to blame her for her infidelity (as it is generally accepted that Michael wasn't the most demonstrative husband) and only John takes her to task for recklessly neglecting birth control arrangements while in the throes of passion. This could be taken as a comment on the status of women in the 1970s, but it also suggests that a family with a dramatic background is fully aware of the allure and power of the flawed heroine. Most of all, however, it confirms Polley's contention that the recollections of everyone in the film (including herself) are prone to reinterpretation by virtue of the circumstances in which they were recorded and their positioning in the final cut. Consequently, even the absolute truth (if it ever exists) can be brought into question by manipulation on the screen

Operating with great sensitivity, particularly towards Michael (whom she clearly still adores), Polley refuses to soft soap and, while she allows John the odd breach of the fourth wall, she keeps a firm grip on proceedings to prevent the account becoming too sensationalist or sentimental. But hard facts remain at a premium and it is evident by the close that a fair amount of damage has been done by Diane's elaborate charade, with even some of her offspring betraying their disappointment at her conduct. What's more, it isn't ultimately clear why Polley wanted to make the film (and subject her loved ones to such public introspection) or quite what she got out of it. This vagueness is reflected in the odd digression and self-indulgence, as well as the decision to keep Diane as an elusive enigma. Moreover, Polley stubbornly avoids expressing many opinions of her own, either on camera or in her voiceovered emails. But whether it proved cathartic or not, this is an ambitious, lucid and accomplished piece of film-making whose conclusions on the ownership of an episode and the authentic and unreliable memories it accrues will cause many to cast a backward glance at their own past.