Parky at the Pictures (DVD 4/4/2013)

Sally Potter is a distinctive voice in British cinema. Making amateur films from the age of 14, she dropped out of school two years later to pursue her ambitions and initially found a niche within the London Film-Makers' Co-operative in the early 1970s. At the end of the decade, she garnered festival acclaim for Thriller, a deconstructivist variation on Puccini's La Bohème, and landed Julie Christie as the lead for her first feature, The Gold Diggers, in 1983. She achieved a measure of mainstream success with her Virginia Woolf adaptation, Orlando (1992), and has since explored the relationship between film and dance (The Tango Lesson, 1996), music (The Man Who Cried, 2000) and verse (Yes, 2004). Indeed, her commitment to innovation even saw the digitally shot Rage (2009) become the first film to premiere simultaneously in cinemas and on mobile phones.

Yet, when she comes to making her most personal picture to date, Potter has embraced cinematic narrative convention so whole-heartedly that it is difficult to distinguish Ginger & Rosa from such early 1980s rite-of-passage teleplays as Michael Apted's P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Philip Savile's Those Glory Glory Days, which respectively explored aspects of the young lives of writers Jack Rosenthal and Julie Welch in 1948 and during the 1960-61 football season when Tottenham Hotspur won the league and cup double. In each case, Apted and Savile used location and period detail to root their droll dramas in a specific time and place, as did Lone Scherfig in her adaptation of Lynn Barber's 1960s memoir, An Education (2009). But Potter struggles to evoke the London of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and, consequently, fails to provide a convincing social, political and cultural context for what is, essentially, a disappointingly formulaic domestic melodrama.

Inseparable friends Christina Hendricks and Jodhi May give birth to daughters on the day that America drops the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Around a decade later, May is abandoned by her husband and left to raise Alice Englert and her younger siblings in a maisonette estate, while, across the capital, Hendricks struggles to play happy families with Elle Fanning and her college tutor father, Alessandro Nivola. Considering how close they once were, May and Hendricks no longer seem to be in each other's pockets. But their girls have followed their lead in doing everything together and, as they hit 17, Englert starts whisking Fanning away from school to teach her how to smoke, wear grown-up clothes, ride in cars with boys at the beach and get home tipsy in the wee small hours of the morning.

The conservative Hendricks heartily disapproves of such behaviour. But Nivola is proud his daughter's rebellious streak and also clearly approves of the way in which Englert has matured, as he drives her home in his open-topped car through a brightly lit tunnel that gives way to the neon-flecked darkness of a lower-end inner-city suburb. Moreover, the fatherless Englert is touched by Nivola's solicitude and writes a letter empathising with both the pain he has endured since being jailed as a conscientious objector during the war and the desire to live a more bohemian lifestyle away from the stifling norms of everyday society.

Thus, when Nivola invites Fanning and Englert for a weekend sailing trip on his boat, he uses the opportunity to flirt with his daughter's impressionable friend and Fanning starts to feel a nagging resentment at the fact the two people she most admires are squeezing her out as they grow closer. This sense of impotence similarly overcomes her when Nivola picks a fight with Hendricks over her desire to have her cooking complimented and the sacrifice she made in becoming a home-maker instead of a painter acknowledged by a man who has done exactly what he likes since getting her pregnant as a teenager.

Exploiting the row to justify his decamping to a flat in a rundown neighbourhood, Nivola allows Fanning to move into the spare attic room and she celebrates her new independence by tucking her teddy bears into her bed and turning up the volume on the jazz record she seems to prefer to the rock and pop that would surely have been enticing kids of her age in the autumn that saw the release of The Beatles's first single. However, Fanning seems to take most of her cues from the people around her and, having heard about the growing threat of nuclear war on the radio while brushing her teeth, she follows the example of homosexual godfathers Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt and their feminist friend Annette Bening in joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and dragging Englert to meetings chaired by duffle-coat-wearing bearded activist Andrew Hawley (in the same manner that Englert had insisted that they pray in a church and wear rosaries around their necks as a kind of Christian lucky charm).

Despite claiming to despise Hendricks, Fanning had felt sorry for her when she heard her playing sad songs on her accordion in the middle of the night and had made her a consoling cup of tea. Yet she continues to idolise Nivola, even after the noise of him seducing Englert in another part of the boat cabin had reduced her to tears and the sight of them canoodling as he types one of his philosophical tracts at the kitchen table fills her with confused revulsion. However, when Englert breaks the news that she thinks she might be pregnant, Fanning finally loses control and gets herself arrested at a CND sit-in and refuses to co-operate with either the police or the psychiatrist who informs Spall, Platt and Bening when they come to bail her out that he thinks her need to protest is a sign of psychosis.

The inevitable showdown that takes place amidst the tumbling revelations in Hendricks's front parlour would not be out of place in a soap opera and it is this casual attitude to telling her tale that sets this apart from all previous Potter pictures. Maybe she was too close to the characters, incidents and ideas to tackle them with sufficient perspective. Or, perhaps the erstwhile avant-gardist found the task of making the action as accessible as possible trickier than she had anticipated. Whatever the reasons, this turns out to be an earnest, but wholly unconvincing saga that suffers from having too many non-Brits in key roles and from lacking either the budget or the desire to make the physical and psychological milieu seem more authentic.

Thirteen year-old Elle Fanning tries hard to convey the angst and guilelessness of a young woman four years her senior with a penchant for scribbling lines of intense, but inexpert poetry at times of crisis. Alice Englert (who is director Jane Campion's daughter) seems more attuned to the romantic notions of a character caught somewhere between beatnik and hippie. But she drifts out of the story in the second half and becomes as inadequately delineated as the ciphers played by Hendricks, Spall, Platt and Bening, whose slogan-spouting American radical seems to come from nowhere.

With Carlos Conti's production design and Lucy Donowho's costumes smacking of self-conscious accuracy, it's left to cinematographer Robbie Ryan and editor Anders Refn to inject a little nouvelle vague energy into visuals that wobble and jump-cut with laudable proficiency. But even these effects feel as calculated as the inclusion on the soundtrack of tunes by Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus that suggest a greater concentration on the fumbling hipness of the period than its perilous politics and the hypocritical chasm that exists between Nivola's pontificating intellectualism and his own personal morality.

A struggle to cope with imminent death dominates the first feature by former South Bank Show director, Gerry Fox. The fourth in Edward St Aubyn's pentalogy about the Melrose clan, Mother's Milk was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2006. Having drawn comparisons with John Updike, Iris Murdoch and Alan Hollinghurst, and having even been dubbed a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Bret Easton Ellis, the Keble-educated St Aubyn has now adapted the novel for the screen with Fox. Admirers of the source series will revel in the dark wit of the writing and the adept audiovisual means employed to convey the leading character's inner turmoil. But those coming to the material afresh will be struck by its superficial similarity to David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun (2009), which turned out to be the final film made by Jean Simmons, just as this proved the swan song of Margaret Tyzack.

Jack Davenport arrives in Provence for a holiday with wife Annabel Mullion, young son Thomas Underhill and their new baby in the house that Alzheimer-suffering mother Margaret Tyzack has donated to the New Age foundation run by charming Irish charlatan Adrian Dunbar. Having alienated nanny Annette Badland, Mullion is forced to pay more attention to her children and Davenport's growing frustration is exacerbated by a ghastly visit to bourgeois friends Robert Portal and Emma Amoss, who are entertaining workaholic David Armand and his pregnant Australian wife, Helen Dallimore. The latter monopolises the conversation, while Portal films everything on his camcorder and spoils tweenage son Antoine Bataillard with a poolful of inflatable animals. Yet he seizes the first chance he gets to pack off the children with nanny Lucy Power and Davenport recognises this façade of happy families from his own youth.

Although the scenario doesn't mention it, Davenport was abused by his doctor father from an early age and he deeply resents the fact that the alcoholic Tyzack did nothing to protect him. But what galls him most is that by giving away her wealth in order to salve her own conscience, she has now robbed him of the one consolation that made the years of humiliation bearable. Infuriated by his mother's inability to see through Dunbar's chicanery, Davenport embarks upon a drinking binge that is supplemented by pills obtained from local Bulgarian doctor Jacques Germain.

Davenport's sozzled perspective is capably conveyed by cinematographer Steve Haskett's use of jerky camera movements and focus shifts. But St Aubyn and Fox are less successful in getting inside Davenport's mind or providing sufficient backstory to prevent incidents like his fling with sister-in-law Flora Montgomery seem as contrived as waspish mother-in-law Diana Quick's tongue-in-cheek conversion to Dunbar's cockamamie philosophy and Tyzack's sudden decision to seek an assisted suicide in Switzerland.

Amidst all this, Underhill becomes Davenport's wholehearted ally against Dunbar and receives a gentle admonition from Mullion when he exacts some prankish revenge. But his father is too preoccupied with his own sense of injustice and self-loathing to recognise his devotion and only begins to pull himself together after an inebriated display of boorishness at the home of Quick's wealthy friends Jane How and Jean Vincent. Indeed, Davenport even has the last laugh on Dunbar when a pair of paintings that he hoped would enable him to purchase a couple of isolation tanks turn out to be fakes.

Despite some strong performances - most notably from Tyzack, who is heart-breakingly convincing as the proud, intelligent woman imprisoned by her gnawing guilt and inability to communicate - this always feels like the continuation of an existing story rather than a self-contained drama. The abrupt switch in focus around the 20-minute mark from Underhill trying to make sense of the grown-ups and conquer his jealousy of his new sibling to Davenport and his myriad of hang-ups also feels forced. But Fox always seems to be following the story rather than imposing his personality upon it. He allows Haskett's camera to circle characters for no good reason and makes an awkward job of depicting Davenport's visions of killing Tyzack and Dunbar over lunch and seducing a bikini-clad beauty at a beachside bar.

Moreover, Davenport's simmering resentments with his various adversaries seem to come more from his own peevish fecklessness than the addled milk he received from a mother whose past is left frustratingly sketchy, even though it is clearly crucial to the development of her son's persona and the problems that beset him. Much of the dialogue is sharp and acerbic and the cast revels in the situations and the surroundings. But one can't help feeling that this might have been better suited to a television serial along the lines of A Dance to the Music of Time (1997) so that the Patrick Melrose saga could be related in full.

Having established himself as Ireland's pre-eminent director with Adam & Paul (2004) and Garage (2007) - the latter of which stands as the country's finest feature in recent times - Lenny Abrahamson moves away from offbeat comedy in reworking Kevin Power's novel Bad Day in Blackrock as What Richard Did. Based on the killing of Brian Murphy outside Club Anabel in 2001, the book explored the impact of the Celtic Tiger on the Dublin class divide and Abrahamson and screenwriter Malcolm Campbell dot this measured melodrama with copious references to the Republic's economic predicament. But, for all the confidence of the subtext and the efficacy of the mix of scripted and improvised sequences, this always feels more like an arthouse elongation of a Hollyoaks episode than a revealing recessional allegory.

Eighteen year-old Jack Reynor has the world at his feet. The son of a successful Danish father (Lars Mikkelsen) and his glamorous Irish wife (Lorraine Pilkington), Reynor is a promising rugby player about to go to university and is fully intent on enjoying his last summer with his school pals. He plans a camping trip to the beach near his family's holiday home at Blackrock and piles into a car with teammates Gavin Drea and Fionn Walton and female friends Rachel Gleeson and Liana O'Cleirigh. However, while drinking in the local pub, he develops an instant crush on Róisín Murphy, the girlfriend of Sam Keeley, who is something of an outsider on the squad, as not only is he working-class, but he is also a Catholic.

While Keeley sings Gaelic folk songs in the bar, Reynor clumsily attempts to flirt with Murphy under the watchful gaze of Mella Carron, a younger girl on the periphery of the group who is smitten with Reynor even though his aspiring magician mate Patrick Gibson is desperate to ask her out. But his cause looks more hopeless than ever when Reynor rescues Carron from some lads forcing their attentions upon her and his heroics clearly impress the demure Murphy. Convinced he has a chance, therefore, Reynor persuades the reluctant Drea and Walton to go to Keeley's birthday bash at the rundown Gaelic Athletic Association clubhouse. However, he is frustrated in his efforts to give Murphy his phone number by Keeley throwing up and he sidles ruefully away.

Murphy is surprised that a posh boy would fancy her and she shows up at the beach house as much out of a sense of intrigue as infatuation. But they strike up an immediate rapport and make love in the open air. Yet Reynor's sweetness soon gives way to possessiveness, as Murphy tries to break the news to Keeley with as much tact as possible when they meet in a suburban park and Reynor is genuinely taken aback when Keeley snubs his suggestion that they can still be friends when they bump into each other in a shop. Consequently, when he sees Murphy chatting with Keeley at a house party after the bouncers have refused him re-admission, Reynor grows increasingly agitated and corrals Drea and Walton to give his rival a good kicking when he departs.

Next morning, however, Reynor is horrified to hear on the radio that Keeley has died from his injuries and he summons his cohorts to square their story. He also urges Murphy to stand by him and she is sufficiently intimidated to agree to lie to the police. But the guilt gnaws away at Reynor and he tearfully confesses his crime to Mikkelsen, who admires the way in which his son has handled the matter and suggests that he lies low at the beach house until the fuss dies down. Tormented in isolation by a combination of regret, fears for his future and the enormity of taking a life, the terrified Reynor screams in anguish. But he is soon recalled when the Gardaí announce that they are seeking to question some gatecrashers and attends the rugby club wake as just one of the boys. .

Relieved at having survived the ordeal without betraying himself, Reynor joins Carron, Gibson and their friends as they drink around a bonfire behind the cricket nets in the park. Much to Gibson's annoyance, Carron stays with Reynor when everybody else leaves and they have reckless sex without considering the consequences. At the funeral the following morning, Reynor is shaken by grieving mother Gabrielle Reidy's emotional appeal for information to help catch her son's killers and has to be steadied outside the church by Murphy. Despite being distressed by her part in the tragedy, she feels pity for Reynor and accompanies him to the beach house, where he vows to turn himself in after they spend a final night together. However, as he drives back to Dublin, he seems more composed and, safe in the knowledge that the ranks have closed around him, he appears to have a change of heart as the picture ends.

Cinematographer David Grennan bathes the early sequences in a golden haze redolent of the first carefree glow of teenage emancipation and gradually imparts a grey-blue chilliness as Reynor's situation deteriorates. But, notwithstanding the relaxed performances and the almost casual delivery of the dialogue, the film lacks stylistic distinctiveness and frequently suffers from laggardly pacing.

Having captured the plight of the outsider with such affectionate acuity in his previous films, Abrahamson seems less in tune with the affluent youths seizing every opportunity to indulge, enjoy and improve themselves. Indeed, an air of disapproval pervades proceedings, although the reproofs seem to be aimed as much at the country as a whole as the hapless Reynor himself. Even so, the nationality of his father seems a little cumbersomely coincidental when Ireland received a crucial €400 million bailout loan from the Danes in the spring of 2012.

Similarly, the attempts to cast a noirish pall over the action by making Reynor a kind of naive palooka undone by a temper tantrum and a twist of fate are let down by the fact that Murphy is too vaguely drawn to make much of a femme fatale and that, besides his own crushing remorse, Reynor never seems in real danger of being apprehended or let down by his circle. As a result (and despite Stephen Rennicks's ominous score), the central drama is short on tension, while the ease with which Reynor's crisis simply evaporates feels more expediently contrived than unsettlingly ambiguous.

Michael Winterbottom's refusal to be pigeon-holed has led to him slipping somewhat beneath the radar. Since starting out in television with Cracker and The Family, the Balliol-educated director has produced three innovative Thomas Hardy adaptations (Jude, 1996; The Claim, 2000; and Trishna, 2011), two splendidly unconventional biopics (24 Hour Pary People, 2002 and The Look of Love, 2012) and such hard-hitting political dramas as Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), In This World (2002) and A Mighty Heart (2007). He has also courted controversy with his use of unsimulated sex scenes in 9 Songs (2004), his unquestioning attitude in the Tipton Three docudrama The Road to Guantanamo (2006) and his graphic depiction of violence towards women in The Killer Inside Me (2010).

Yet Winterbottom's best film was Wonderland (1999), a family saga that updated the social realist style that had been the vernacular of the British film industry since the `kitchen sink' era at the start of the 1960s. Thus, hopes were high for Everyday, a study of a married couple and their four children over the five years that the husband was in prison for an unspecified crime.

Everything about the project seemed intriguing and admirable. By filming intermittently over the real time of the sentence, Winterbottom sought to show the kids growing and, by using different cinematographers for each phase, bring a fresh perspective to the continuing story. But, although the picture was commissioned by Film4 as a study of the prison system, Winterbottom seems to have been less interested in crime and punishment than in separation. Thus, while this would still have been a fascinating subject, he and co-scenarist Laurence Coriat have opted to place so much emphasis on the quotidian and the mundane that what might have been a compelling, condensed variation on Michael Apted's 7 Up format feels more like a loose collection of afterthoughts that were knocked out in the time permitted by the busy schedules of its principal cast and crew.

Shortly after Christmas, Shirley Henderson wakes her brood (aged between eight and three) and guides Stephanie, Robert, Shaun and Katrina Kirk towards the bus stop nearest their remote house in the Norfolk countryside. An interminable journey by train and tube follows before they are reunited with John Simm in the visiting room of his latest prison. The conversation is awkward, with Simm having to be jolly to the kids while wanting to be more intimately confessional with his wife. This sets the pattern for subsequent meetings and the anguish of parting and the missed opportunity to make something more meaningful of their brief time together is etched on Simm's face as he returns to his cell to lie on his bunk and gaze either at photographs or the ceiling.

Henderson does a good job in jollying the children along and convincing them that everything will be fine. She works in a DIY store and at the local pub, where she has a willing shoulder to cry on in Simm's pal, Darren Tighe. Indeed, she gets more support from him than she does from mother Valerie Lilley, who has seemingly always disapproved of Simm and takes her babysitting duties so laxly that she fails to notice that Robert and Shaun have gone off into the woods with their father's shotgun. A bullying incident at school also threatens to turn into something more than a passing detail, but Winterbottom scrupulously avoids allowing anything to descend into drama and the thread is snipped before it can develop.

Eventually, Simm is permitted a release day and the family head to the nearest town, where they have curry for lunch and Simm and Henderson leave the kids playing in the park to sneak away for a little alone time. However, Simm is caught smuggling drugs back into the prison and breaks down in trying to explain how he was bullied into co-operating with harder cases than himself. Yet, once again, Winterbottom and Coriat decide against following up on this episode or examining its ramifications. Instead, Henderson shrugs and carries on and drifts into an affair with Tighe, who becomes something of a surrogate father by default. But no attempt is made to scrutinise Henderson's psychological state or the kind of relationship that Tighe forms with her children.

Moreover, they appear remarkably unconflicted about keeping quiet about their mother's treachery when Simm is allowed a home visit and they play happy families with a mature understanding that feels so wildly implausible that it exposes the cynically contrived anti-dramaticism of the entire enterprise. Even when Simm is finally released and Henderson admits to her infidelity as they lie in bed together, Winterbottom confines the crisis to a few exasperated shouts before cutting to a static shot of the family strolling into the distance across a nearby beach so that they can get on with working things out in private.

This is not an easy film to critique, as many of the perceived flaws could well be triumphant vindications of Winterbottom's typically questing methodology. Simm's exchanges with the Kirks smack of actorly improvisation. But this could be because Winterbottom wanted the character to be seen to be playing the role of a father rather than actually living it. Similarly, the eschewal of tangible narrative reinforces the notion that the family is being punished every bit as much as Simm, as their lives have also been put on hold until he can return to share them.

However, the rejection of conventional storytelling often seems wilful, while Winterbottom's godlike deployment of simple mortals occasionally borders on the patronising. Photographed effectively, but disappointingly anonymously by James Clarke, Sean Bobbitt, Marcel Zyskind, Simon Tindall and Anne Marie Lean Vercoe, the action also frequently rings hollow. Nothing is shown of the intimidation that supposedly daunts Simm, while Henderson's apparently exhausting struggle to make ends meet is belied by the comfortable existence that the family seems to enjoy in its large and well-appointed house. This faux atmosphere of penury is hardly helped by Michael Nyman's distinctively refined score, which seems tonally at odds with the content and too often comes across as emotionally manipulative. Moreover, it lacks the genuine plangency of something like the Slade song `Everyday', which conveys much more convincingly the pain and regret of being apart.

There's one thing that the producers of drug movies keep forgetting: scenes of simulated hedonism are crashingly dull. Even the maestro of screen sin, Cecil B. DeMille failed to make viewers wish they were in the midst of one of his extravagant orgy sequences. So what chance does the average modern hack have of convincing anybody that scenes set in heaving nightclubs with sweaty bodies gyrating under flashing coloured lights and the influence of diverse chemicals are the epitome of chic excess?

In remaking Pusher, the first part of Dane Nicolas Winding Refn's trilogy about a dealer facing the harsh realities of his trade, Spaniard Luis Prieto falls into all the old traps in striving to make decadence seem cool. We have the booming beats, the crowded dance floors, the montages of revellers tossing back shots before surrendering themselves to the rhythm and then sidling off into a quiet corner to purchase the cheeky bindle of cocaine that will make the evening go with a bang following a quick trip to the toilets. It's all so sordid, so depressing and so predictable. But what's a director to do? Art is, after all, an imitation of life and this, sadly, is a lifestyle to which many aspire and the media does all it can (in the grand DeMillean manner) to demonise it while making it look as glamorous and enticing as possible.

The scene may have shifted from Copenhagen to London and Kim Bodnia and Mads Mikkelsen may have been replaced by Richard Coyle and Bronson Webb, but little else has been changed in translation. Coyle and Webb still cruise the niteries and strip clubs of the capital flogging their wares to party animals with more money than sense, like Paul Kaye, who is buying in bulk at the start of the week to ensure his Saturday birthday bash is a success. However, while Coyle plays hard ball over a £300 short fall in the transaction, he is ready to move into the big league and has arranged for courier Daisy Lewis to smuggle a large consignment from Amsterdam.

In order to fund the shipment, Coyle borrows £45,000 from Zlatko Buric (who seems to be playing Turkish here as opposed to the Croat he essayed in the 1996 original), who runs a ruthless operation from an office behind a bridal gown shop. Coyle is already in debt to this effusive charmer and knows he cannot afford any slip ups. Which makes it all the more puzzling that he should agree to score a key of coke for Neil Maskell, who approaches Webb in a club with a story that he knows Coyle from their prison days and needs to do a deal in a hurry.

Naturally, the handover goes badly with the cops ambushing Maskell's car and chasing Coyle into the lake at a local park, where he disposes of the evidence with the grim realisation that he has just landed himself in a deep hole. Having refused to buckle under interrogation by Badria Timimi and Richard Shanks, Coyle seeks out Webb and beats him to within an inch of his life as he ogles the afternoon shift at the nearby pole-dancing establishment.  He also pays a call on Buric and explains his predicament in the hope of leniency. Instead, he is given a ridiculously tight deadline to pay what he owes, plus interest, or face the knee-capping consequences.

Initially, Coyle seems reasonably relaxed about the situation. He has the Dutch blow to sell and always has the secret stash he keeps in a lock-up behind the market. But, with Lewis refusing to return his calls, he becomes increasingly tense and even dancer girlfriend Agyness Deyn struggles to distract him. He threatens middle-aged junkie Bill Thomas at his pet shop, demands the incapacitated Webb forks out what he owes and even tries to con mother Joanna Hole into lending him some cash. However, when Lewis finally surfaces and admits she was duped into bringing back a bag of dextrose, Coyle realises he is in serious trouble and things start rapidly to spiral out of control after Buric's enforcer Mem Ferda terrorises Thomas into committing suicide and Coyle buys a pair of handguns from wideboy Adam Foster to rob Kaye's safe and his party guests.

All looks bleak when Ferda hauls Coyle into Buric's office and he has his nipples singed with live wires for failing to honour his debt. However, he manages to grab a gun as he is about to have a finger removed with a pair of bolt cutters and seeks sanctuary in Deyn's apartment. Recovering some of his poise, he suggests they beat a hasty retreat to Spain. But fate has one last surprise for him, as he dashes round the city trying to sell the last of his merchandise.

Those familiar with Refn's reputation-making thriller will know exactly how things pan out and many will leave the cinema with a certain trepidation that Bronson Webb might be entrusted with the sequels that did so much to help Mads Mikkelsen make his name. The fact that Refn is credited as an executive producer confirms that this remake has his blessing. But he must also be aware that this is a pale imitation of his cult hit and that no amount of flashy cinematography and pumping electronica can disguise the fact.

In fairness to Richard Coyle, he delivers a decent performance as the façade of cocky control becomes as badly dented as the paintwork of the car that is vandalised by kids at the start of his nightmare week. But no other character is so well defined, despite Buric revelling in reprising the role of the avuncular thug and Deyn having the odd soulful moment as the dancer-cum-escort who injects heroin between her toes in times of stress. Similarly, while Matthew Read sensibly sticks closely to the screenplay that Refn wrote with Jens Dahl, he offers few fresh insights into the pusher's state of mind as his plight worsens.

Most frustratingly, however, Luis Prieto fails to bring an outsider's eye to London and while production designer Sarah Webster's array of trendy clubs, seedy Turkish baths, poky offices, bland apartments and abandoned warehouses are all apt, they could be anywhere and this lack of distinctive character seeps into Simon Dennis's photography, Kim Gaster's editing and the incessant retro score by Orbital. Essentially, Prieto has smoothed off the rough edges that made Refn's debut feature so daring and dangerous and has coated the remaining core with the gloss he has since brought to pictures like Drive (2011). Thus, while this is slick and efficient, it never pulsates with the intensity and suspense we already know the story possesses.

The emphasis shifts on to mother and son with I, Anna, as the debuting Barnaby Southcombe directs mother Charlotte Rampling in a flimsy film noir adapted from a New York novel by Elsa Lewin. Scripted in the most self-consciously elliptical manner in a bid to disguise the non-mystery's readily apparent deficiencies, the feature is further hampered by a jarring techno score by K.I.D., some extraneous songs by Richard Hawley and a final reel reveal that is designed to add psychological depth, but serves only to tip an already pretentious attempt to give a genre flick some arthouse significance into Sixth Sense territory.

First seen being fobbed off by a friend during a conversation in a pay phone, Charlotte Rampling works in the beds department of an Oxford Street store and shares her home with daughter Hayley Atwell and her young daughter. Recently divorced and struggling to cope with the rejection, Rampling attends speed dating events organised in posh hotel by Caroline Catz. Encouraged by Honor Blackman during a brief encounter at the make-up mirror in the ladies to put her best foot forward, Rampling accepts a drink from singleton Ralph Brown and surprises herself by going back to his apartment in the Barbican complex.

Next morning, she wakes to find a bloody body beside her and, in fleeing, leaves her umbrella in the lift. Shortly afterwards, neighbour Perry Benson notices water dripping through his ceiling and calls the police on discovering Brown lying on the living room floor. Insomniac DCI Gabriel Byrne picks up the call from headquarters and conducts preliminary inquiries, while being distracted by a testy phone conversation with his ex-wife. He is more alert on leaving the building, however, when he notices Rampling reclaiming her umbrella and notes down her registration number as she drives away.

Across the capital, Brown's son, Max Deacon, arrives home with a scratch on his face and mother Jodhi May suspects the worst when DI Eddie Marsan leaves his card under her door and asks him to call her when she has a minute. Along with underlings Bryan Dick and Nav Sidhu, Marsan quickly establishes that Deacon and his pal Jumayn Hunter owe money to drug dealer Joey Ansah and that they had planned to steal cash from Brown's safe. However, when Deacon walked in to find his father canoodling with Rampling, he told Hunter they would have to postpone the robbery and was badly beaten for his trouble.

But, such is the convolution of the scenario, that these bald facts are scrambled in the hope of generating a modicum of suspense in those who have not already realised the connection (concocted during the shoot after Rampling genuinely injured herself) between Brown being battered to death with a stone bust and Rampling having hurt her wrist so badly that she needs to have it encased in a plaster cast that causes an itch that doubles as her troubled conscience, as she seems to have suppressed all memory of her crime. Indeed, she cannot remember greeting Byrne when she retrieved her brolly and this convinces him, after they have flirted at another speed dating session, that she is either entirely innocent of Brown's murder or is hiding something.

Rampling has had cause once before to bury tragedy in her subconscious and Byrne prompts this to resurface when she catches him playing back her tell-tale answerphone messages. Indeed, ignoring Marsan's plea not to handle the case alone, Byrne comes perilously close to making matters much worse by taking Rampling back to Brown's flat to confront her demons. But, even though he succeeds in talking her down from an outside balcony ledge, there is no guarantee (in spite of the discovery that Brown had a history of violence) that a jury will accept her plea of self-defence or that she will find a happy ever after with her dishevelled detective.

Given the magnitude of some of the flaws in a film that is positively riddled with them, it has been more than a little annoying to see so many critics citing Rampling's failure to possess a mobile phone among the plot's primary implausibilities. It may come as a surprise to them to learn, but there are people out there who manage to function and even have reasonably fulfilling lives without owning a device that both places them permanently at the beck and call of anyone with itchy fingers and prevents them from having meaningful conversations with people actually in the same room as themselves. Surely the sloppy structuring, risible climactic twist and disappointing lack of chemistry between the leads are more valid reasons for frustration than a sixtysomething women opting not to own a mobile when she could easily afford one.

All carping aside, there are a few plus points here. Southcombe and cinematographer Ben Smithard make atmospheric use of their locale, with the Barbican being made to seem particularly soulless and sinister. The performance of Eddie Marsan is also typically strong, while Rampling manages to convey a hint of vulnerability beneath her customarily haughty exterior  But Gabriel Byrne seems stuck in Colombo mode and only suggests the lingering pain of his own divorce when alone in his hotel room. Thus, while it has a few pertinent things to say about isolation, regret and meeting somebody new in later life, this is a bit of a muddle that should stand its makers in better stead when they embark upon their next project.

Stuart Urban has had a chequered film career. In 1972, he became the youngest director to have a title accepted by the Cannes Film Festival when his featurette, The Virus of War, was selected for screening. Then, having read Modern History at Balliol, he won a BAFTA for his Falklands drama, An Ungentlemanly Act (1992). Subsequently, however, he found himself edged out of the acclaimed serial Our Friends in the North after falling out with writer Peter Flannery, while neither of his fictional features, Preaching to the Perverted (1997) and Revelation (2001), proved as interesting or accomplished as his documentaries, Counterblast - Against the War (1999), which he co-wrote with Harold Pinter, and Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead (2006), in which he chronicled the remarkable life of his father, who survived both the Soviet gulags and the Holocaust.

Sadly, his third fictional outing, May I Kill U?, is pretty much on a par with its predecessors, as it seeks to explore public attitudes to law and order following the 2011 riots by following the misadventures of a London bicycle cop who starts dispensing vigilante justice. Given the recent revelations about police collusion with the press and the conspiracy to cover-up the truth about Hillsborough, the force was probably due a satirical backlash. But, while it contains some intriguing ideas, this is one of those comedy horrors that is never sure whether to place the emphasis on gore or guffaws and, consequently, it falls flatly between the two.

The bulk of the action is staged as a flashback, as bobby Kevin Bishop recounts his crimes to Jack Doolan, a gun-wielding stranger whose motives become clearer as the story unfolds. During the disturbances that have turned usually quiet streets into no-go areas, Bishop and partner Hayley-Marie Axe find themselves on the wrong end of a haranguing during a community policing consultation. Indeed, as they cycle away from the meeting, Bishop is sent flying over his handlebars by Afro-Caribbean thug Tyson Oba putting a stick in the spokes of his front wheel and has to spend several days off work. However, he keeps suffering from disorientating headaches and, when he catches Oba making off with the proceeds of a looting raid, he grants the repeat offender his wish when he says he would rather die than go back to prison by braining him with a purloined flatscreen television.

Having recorded the incident with his helmet camera, Bishop downloads the footage on to Oba's Bookface page and is moved to tears when the anonymous maverick is congratulated by the mother of the teenage boy whom Oba received a reduced sentence for killing. Bishop's own hypochondriac mother, Frances Barber, is also impressed by the mystery man and curses her son for being such a milquetoast. But Bishop feels invigorated by the thrill of taking the law into his own hands and rescues battered wife Rachael Evelyn by garrotting abusive husband Ali Craig in a back alley dumpster.

Now rejoicing under the online tag `N4cethelaw', Bishop uses voice disguise and silhouetting software to produce online speeches in which he promises his followers that he will clean up the capital - providing his victims grant him permission to kill. The trouble is, Bishop isn't a always good judge of the situations in which he finds himself and he pushes potential teenage suicide Jessica Jackson-Smith into the Thames when she seems to be crying for help rather than definitively trying to end it all. However, she survives the plunge and later wanders past Bishop as he tries to apologise to Axe for the latest in a long line of insensitive remarks.

He also goes easy on shoplifting pensioner Rosemary Leach when she explains that she has a fatal medical condition and would willingly change her will to make Bishop her heir instead of her thieving nephew. But, while he is tempted by the prospect of inheriting her well-appointed house, Bishop decides he would rather keep her as a friend and is genuinely upset when he discovers that she has taken her own life. On leaving the premises, however, he catches the attention of Doolan, who just happens to be the exheridated nephew and he starts tracking Bishop while planning his next move.

Bishop, meanwhile, has rescued Russian prostitute Kasia Koleczek from a pair of brutal Bulgarian people traffickers in the shadow of the Millennium Dome and brought her home to meet Barber. Naturally, the feeling of loathe at first sight is mutual. But things quickly get much more difficult for Bishop, as just as he and Koleczek are having a set to with Barber, Axe makes a shocking discovery during a chance (and darkly fleeting) encounter with Jackson-Smith and Doolan bursts into Bishop's house to exact his revenge for what he is convinced is Leach's murder.

Filling the screen with tweets and other social media paraphernalia to give the action a modish feel, this strives valiantly to lampoon British bourgeois obsessions with crime, celebrity, serial killers and right-wing intolerance. Kevin Bishop works particularly hard to present a post-Thatcherite twist on Norman Bates, while the scenery-gnawing Frances Barber more than does her bit to emulate Mother.

Yet the farce is consistently strained, with too many of gags missing their target and the majority of the minor characters being mere ciphers. Considering the budgetary restrictions, Urban and cinematographer Fernando Ruiz make thoughtful use of different digital camera formats and come up with some unusual angles. But the screenplay is not only tonally wayward, but it also lacks a tangible viewpoint on the milieu it depicts and the lowlifes who populate it.

Finally, Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett gleefully dispense with reality and adopt their subject's indifference to veracity in making A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman, a comic reverie that employs 17 animation styles in tracing a life that began in Leamington Spa during a Luftwaffe air raid and ended 48 years later with a virulent strain of throat cancer. However, Chapman refused to be silenced and an audio recording of his bestselling and deliciously unreliable memoir is the highlight of this well-intentioned, if patchy tribute to a gay hedonist, inspired surrealist and unrepentant misfit.

The story opens on stage in the 1970s, as Graham Chapman forgets his lines during Monty Python's Oscar Wilde insult sketch and his life flashes before his eyes as he is sucked into a spaceship through a hole in the theatre roof. Having survived his blitz birth, he relates how his mother used to take him for walks in his pram while his policeman father pieced together the body parts of those killed in the previous night's bombing. Amidst the tall tales of youthful excess, Chapman recalls his time at Eton, where he cut a dash on and off the cricket pitch and even got to kick Harold Macmillan up the backside.

But the real turning point of his early years was a rain-sodden holiday in Scarborough. As his mother fretted about buying fish while sitting in the car on the waterfront, Chapman discovered Robert Graves's I, Claudius and realised the folly of his father's suspicion of reading. A sudden daydream pitches him into a homosexual adventure with Biggles and he lands on the couch of Sigmund Freud (voiced by Cameron Diaz), who reveals that his tangled subconscious thoughts and obsession with maps means that he is keen to find his own way in life.

A rapid run through a series of juvenile pranks and sexual fumblings culminates in Chapman declaring that it is pointless searching for the man in the misdemeanours of childhood and the scene cuts to a wildlife park, where monkeys bearing a curious resemblance to Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (but not Eric Idle, who chose not to participate in the project) debate the merits of calling their new TV series Owl Stretching Time or A Horse, a Bucket and a Spoon.

This is a mere digression, however, as the main narrative resumes with Chapman heading to Cambridge, where he endures a chemistry practical and a grilling about his prospects in physics before being accepted to read medicine at Emmanuel College. When not studying,  playing rugby or drinking beer, Chapman treated himself to a hectic sex life that involved several women and numerous intrusive fantasies about men. Such was his confusion that he felt like he was riding in a phallic rollercoaster car and he finally decided he was `a raging poof' after realising on a bus that he would rather sleep with the male passengers than the female ones.

Having determined his sexual orientation, Chapman began having doubts about his medical vocation. As a longtime fan of the satirical show Beyond the Fringe, he joined the famous Footlights Club after arriving at his audition dressed as a carrot and performing a sketch about a man with metal fingers being attracted by a magnet. He quickly became friends with John Cleese and credits the Queen Mother (who seemingly laced her tea with gin) for encouraging him to go on tour to New Zealand and the United States. On returning, he quit his course and started writing for The Frost Report with Cleese. Indeed, David Frost played a key role in both his creative and personal development, as it was during a screenwriting sojourn in Spain (during which Cleese romanced first wife and Fawlty Towers co-creator Connie Booth) that Chapman met the love of his life, David Sherlock.

Back in Blighty, all attempts to break the news of his new happiness fell flat, with Cleese, Marty Feldman and Keith Moon being either preoccupied, bemused or befuddled during a coming out party. However, there was no time to dwell on their disinterest, as Monty Python's Flying Circus had become a cult hit on the BBC and a live-action clip of the Spanish Inquisition sketch is interrupted by an extract from the Letter of St Paul to the New Zealanders, in which God urges people not to grovel or have more children than they can manage.

A stage rendition of `The Bruces Song' returns us to the narrative path, just as Chapman begins to succumb to the temptations of success. Among the many sexual conquests (which are relived to the accompaniment of `Sit on My Face'), Chapman has some eccentric encounters with female fans and becomes increasingly dependent upon drink, as he fronts Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) and, at the insistence of his confreres, confesses his peccadilloes to chat show hosts Michael Parkinson and Germaine Greer. An attempt at sobering up is illustrated by the Python sketch about Colin `Bomber' Harris wrestling himself, a vision of a pantomime appearance opposite a talking cat and a ditty on the perils of boozing delivered to the tune of the Souza match that became the Monty Python theme. Yet such is the blithe blurring of fact, fiction and fantasy that it is impossible to detect the extent to which Chapman acknowledged his addiction or wished to be cured of it.

Chapman's recovery seems complete as he plays Monopoly with his friends and records the linking sequences for the Life of Brian soundtrack album. But he returns to the party circuit while living in tax exile in Los Angeles and a furious session of name-dropping is followed by his decision to hire a door-opening agency because he has become too grand to deal with such menial tasks. At David Frost's 40th birthday party, Chapman is advised to seek help and he decides to host a farewell party. Despite having issued the invitations in a spacesuit (after a possible alien abduction), Chapman finds himself alone on the big night and seeks solace at the grave of Oscar Wilde, which conveniently brings him back to the Python stage sketch, where he disguises the fact he has dried up by blowing a raspberry that brings the house down.

A caption records Chapman's death on 4 October 1989 and the closing sequence shows Cleese giving his brilliantly disrespectful eulogy at a memorial service attended by the rest of the Pythons. It's a fittingly iconoclastic conclusion to a film that tries so hard to honour the anarchic spirit of Chapman's comedy by breaking the rules whenever possible. The trouble is, the graphic shifts quickly become something of a distraction, while the wildly differing interpretations of the brief mean that some passages are incredibly literal and others abstract to the point of wilful quirkiness. Furthermore, the digitisation of Terry Gilliam's celebrated photomontage style is a disastrous miscalculation, while the use of 3-D will doubtless add to the sense of visual overkill.

Compensation comes in the form of Chapman's splendid voice-over (from the 1980 tome he co-wrote with Sherlock, Douglas Addams, David Yallop and Alex Martin) and the contributions of fellow Pythons Cleese, Palin, Jones, Gilliam and Carol Cleveland (who play a range of characters in addition to themselves), as well as such guests as Stephen Fry, Tom Hollander and Troma producer, Lloyd Kaufman. But, while this defiantly represents something completely different and has its moments of hilarity and self-deprecating poignancy, there are few genuine insights into either Chapman's personality or his career, which Jones (who is Python Terry's son) and Timlett had already covered in pretty exhaustive detail in the epic six-hour documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth. Thus, while die-hard Pythonites will revel in the affectionate mayhem, this bold conceit grows increasingly vignettish, repetitive, inconsistent and superficial and has to be considered a missed opportunity.