Parky at the Pictures (DVD 28/5/2015)

The coincidences are striking - especially as we now know that Mulligan also struggled to inhabit a role that slipped tantalisingly out of Christie's grasp. It's well worth having another look at Schlesinger's handsome picture, which not only boasts sumptuous Metrocolor cinematography by Nicolas Roeg, but also a laudably faithful scenario by Frederic Raphael, who had also earned an Oscar for Darling and arrived at this exquisite period piece fresh from landing another nomination for his script for Stanley Donen's shamefully underrated comedy of modern marital manners, Two for the Road (1967), which had starred Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, who had appeared in Fred Zinnemann's The Nun's Story (1959) alongside Peter Finch, who was cast as William Boldwood after the part was declined by Christie's Darling co-star, Dirk Bogarde.

Having saved hard while working as a shepherd near the Wessex village of Weatherbury, Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates) buys his own flock and makes an offer of marriage to Bathsheba Everdine (Julie Christie), who has arrived in the area with her aunt, Mrs Hurst (Alison Leggatt), to take over the running of her late uncles farm. She turns down Gabriel's proposal, as she is determined to stand on her own two feet. However, Bathsheba hires Gabriel as her shepherd when an inexperienced dog drives his sheep over a cliff and he fails to find alternative employment in Casterbridge.

Despite his gratitude, Gabriel refuses to be subservient and criticises Bathsheba when she teases farmer William Boldwood by sending him a Valentine message. She fires him, only for her sheep to be stricken with bloat and offers Gabriel his job back after he saves the majority of her flock. Boldwood misinterprets the playful nature of Bathsheba's entreaty to marry her and requests her hand. However, she has become infatuated with Francis Troy (Terence Stamp), a dashing sergeant in the Dragoon Guard who thrills Bathsheba with his displays of swordsmanship.

Much to Boldwood's chagrin, Bathsheba plights her troth to Troy. But she quickly discovers that he is a reckless gambler, who discarded maidservant Fanny Robin (Prunella Ransome) on their wedding day because she accidentally went to the wrong church. Shortly after their union, Bathsheba and Troy encounter the heavily pregnant Fanny on her way to the workhouse in Casterbridge. Stricken with remorse, Troy gives her money. But she dies in childbirth and her coffin is returned to Weatherbury. In her husband's absence, Bathsheba opens the casket to discover a stillborn child with its mother.

Troy is overcome by the sight of the pair and attempts to drown himself off the coast after informing Bathsheba that he had never once loved her. But he is rescued from the strong current and returns to the village on Christmas Eve, having heard that Bathsheba has agreed to marry Boldwood when she is officially declared a widow. Distraught at being humiliated in front of his party guests, Boldwood shoots Troy, but is spared hanging because of his mental state. Bathsheba has Troy buried with Fanny and prevents Gabriel from leaving for a fresh start in California by consenting to become his wife because she has finally realised how much she needs his quiet strength.

There's no question that the critics were out to take Christie down a peg or two following her meteoric rise to the top and the largely hostile reviews did much to damage Far From the Madding Crowd's box-office prospects. But Schlesinger (who had clashed with Finch and tormented Stamp during the shoot) confessed to being disappointed with the way the picture turned out and cast it from his mind as he turned his attention to the adaptation of James Leo Herlihy's novel, Midnight Cowboy, which would win him an Academy Award in 1970.

Yet there is much to admire here, from Nicholas Roeg's appreciation of the light and colours of the changing seasons to Richard Macdonald's thoughtful production design and Richard Rodney Bennett's rustic score. The acting is also admirable. Rather like Kate Winslet in Jude (1997), Christie is simply too contemporary to be a convincing period performer, but she catches the spirit of women's liberation that was beginning to stir in the mid-1960s and rekindles a tangible spark with old flame Terence Stamp. He struts to fine effect as the uniformed scoundrel, but is somewhat overshadowed by the more imposing Finch and the infinitely more sympathetic Bates. He exudes a peasant dignity that prevents Gabriel from becoming a melancholic milksop, while Finch subverts the brooding intensity of Victorian machismo to hint at Boldwood's psychological fragility.

Despite striving to reproduce the rural rhythms of the 1870s, Schlesinger's is a touch too languid in places and editor Malcolm Cooke might have picked up a little of the slack. Raphael's script also removes much of the socio-political subtext. But this remains one of the best Hardy translations to the big screen and Vinterberg proved unable to surpass it.

Set in a London bathhouse as the Sixties ceased to swing, Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End (1970) makes much greater arthouse demands on its audience. Nevertheless, this is a complex and compelling mix of rite of passage, social realism, psychological drama and sex farce and the BFI deserves enormous credit for not only sponsoring such a superb restoration, but also for freeing the film from the co-production tangles that have largely kept it from being seen since its box-office performance failed to reflect the almost universally enthusiastic reviews.

Fresh from leaving school, bashful 15 year-old John Moulder-Brown is hired as an attendant by Newford baths manager Karl Ludwig Lindt and entrusted to the care of Jane Asher, a redhead eight years his senior who is lusted after by stoker Dieter Eppler and swimming instructor Karl Michael Vogler and disapprovingly envied by cashier Erica Beer. Recognising his innocence, she plunges him into an encounter with lusty private bath client Diana Dors and he only just manages to escape with his honour intact as she enfolds him in her towel and gushes about George Best dribbling and shooting.

He is more wary with second customer Ursula Mellin and old school crush Anita Lochner and is beginning to feel he has a grasp on both his duties and his co-workers when Asher is spitefully rude to his proud parents, Uli Steigberg and Erika Wackernagel, when they pay him a surprise visit. He also struggles to understand her attitude to the married Vogler, a former teacher whose larking around blinds Moulder-Brown to the inappropriateness of his pawing of both Asher and his female students. But, most of all, he cannot fathom her love for fiancé Christopher Sandford, and follows them to the pictures (where, by curious coincidence, they also watch a monochrome porn flick).

Sitting in the row behind them, Moulder-Brown begins touching Asher and she slaps his face. Yet, when Sandford goes to fetch manager Eduard Linkers, who in turn calls the cops, Asher passionately kisses the teenager and he sits back in his seat with an expression of deep satisfaction. Allowed to leave without charge, he tracks the couple back to Asher's house and informs a passing policeman that Sandford is a pervert. But Asher is simply amused by his antics and flirts with him at the baths by covering him in a family planning poster depicting a pregnant man.

But such attention merely fuels Moulder-Brown's obsession and, having set off the bathhouse fire alarm to prevent Asher from trysting with Vogler in his cubicle, he spies on her as she accompanies Sandford to an exclusive Soho club. Scarfing hot dogs from Bert Kwouk's cart to keep himself occupied, he recognises Asher as the life-size nudel model outside a seedy strip club and takes refuge in the rooms of prostitute Louise Martini, who lounges on her bed with a broken leg and a growing fascination in the handsome and evidently inexperienced intruder. However, he bolts away to confront Asher with her cut-out lookalike on the tube and incur the displeasure of fellow passengers including a cameoing Skolimowski.

However, things come to a head when Moulder-Brown gatecrashes a race that Vogler has organised in a snowy park and uses a broken bottle to burst a car tyre to thwart his planned rendez-vous with Asher. She loses patience with the boy and they begin to fight. But she loses the diamond from her engagement ring and the pair wind up back at the baths with two sackfuls of snow in the hope that the stone will turn up when they melt it down in the pool.

The climactic tragedy risks introducing a melodramatic element into this dark comedy of sexual manners. But, while there's no question that the sequence is contrived, Skolimowski and cinematographer Charly Steinberger's use of underwater slow-motion gives Moulder-Brown's desperate naked embrace with Asher a macabre beauty that is wholly out of keeping with his stalking, her promiscuity and the red paint-spattered sleaziness of the surroundings.

Having entered the Polish film industry somewhat unconventionally by redrafting the screenplay for Andrzej Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers (1960), Skolimowski enrolled in the prestigious Lodz Film School and collaborated with Roman Polanski on the script for Knife in the Water (1962). His forged his own directorial reputation with Identification Marks: None (1964), Walkover (1965) and Barrier (1966) before relocating to Belgium to make Le Départ (1967) after the authorities refused to release Hands Up! (which was eventually shown in 1981).

Despite being mostly filmed in Munich's Bavaria Studios, Deep End was Skolimowski's second UK picture, after the misfiring Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation The Adventures of Gerard (1970). He would return here to shoot The Shout (1978), Moonlighting (1982) and Success Is the Best Revenge (1984) and the BFI could do worse than box them up as a `British tetralogy'.

The latter saw Skolimowski reunite with Jane Asher, but she never surpassed her performance as the temptress who is fully aware of her power over men and ceaselessly exploits it to amuse herself and irritate Beer (who has to endure periodic tauntings such as the conspicuously sensual consumption of a chocolate pudding in front of her ticket window). Moulder-Brown would also team with the director again on King, Queen, Knave (1972). But even though he continued to act, this proved the high-water mark for the former child star, whose irrational and incrementally anti-social behaviour is as much a puzzle to himself as it is increasingly perilous to others.

Some may be distracted by the dubbed dialogue and the absurdist approach to the angry young man scenario. But, with its soundtrack contributions by Cat Stevens and German prog rockers Can, this remains a supremely daring work that nails the lie of Sixties socio-sexual emancipation and captures Asher's flirtation and Moulder-Brown's fixation with a visually provocative vivacity that the majority of British social realists have since discarded in favour of a return to classical kitchen sink miserabilism.

Ira Sachs warms to the theme of same-sex marriages in Love Is Strange, which marks something of a departure from previous outings like Forty Shades of Blue (2005) and Keep the Lights On (2012) in that it doesn't draw directly on the director's own experiences, but on those of his acquaintances. The premise is so contrived that the ensuing dramedy could easily have lapsed into sitcomedic or soap operatic mode. But Sachs and co-scenarist Mauricio Zacharias elect, instead, to take Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) as their role models and the resulting picture, while a touch twee in places, benefits greatly from the decision.

After living together perfectly happily for 39 years, artist John Lithgow and music teacher Alfred Molina surprise themselves, as well as their family and friends, by announcing their intention to get married. As the picture opens, the pair get ready for the big day in their comfortable Greenwich Village apartment and bicker through the nerves as they struggle to hail a taxi. They exchange vows with affection but little fuss and return home to celebrate with downstairs NYPD neighbours Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez and Lithgow's workaholic nephew Darren Burrows, his novelist wife Marisa Tomei, and their teenage son, Charlie Tahan.

While they are on honeymoon, however, John Cullum, the archdeacon in charge of the Roman Catholic school where Molina teaches, learns about the nuptials. While he could turn a blind eye to Molina co-habiting with Lithgow, the public affirmation of their relationship puts him in an awkward position and he feels he has no option but to dismiss him. As Lithgow earns little from his painting, the couple realise that they can no longer afford the mortgage and decide to sell the apartment. However, as neither drives, an offered double room in Poughkeepsie is out of the question and they throw themselves on the mercy of their wedding guests until they can find something more affordable.

Molina finds sanctuary on the sofa with cops Jackson and Perez, while Lithgow ships out to Brooklyn to use the lower bunk in Tahan's bedroom. But Molina quickly discovers that his much younger hosts have little time for Chopin and an improving book and divide their off-duty time between partying, playing Dungeons & Dragons and watching Game of Thrones. When Molina meets up with Lithgow, therefore, he flops into him because he can no longer stand the pace and just wants their old quiet life back.

Lithgow is also struggling to settle in, as he keeps breaking Tomei's concentration when she tries to write and can't resist asking Tahan questions that no self-respecting kid would wish to answer. Moreover, it gradually becomes clear that Burrows isn't always working at the office when he calls to say he'll be late home and Tomei's worries are further compounded by the suspicion that the skateboarding Tahan is more than just close pals with Russian classmate Eric Tabach. Lithgow scarcely helps the situation when he asks Tabach to pose for a portrait on the roof and the newlyweds concur that they need to make alternative arrangements as swiftly as possible. However, an untimely fall exposes the extent of Lithgow's cardiovascular disease and a distraught Molina is forced to look for new accommodation alone.

Keenly observed and expertly played by Lithgow and Molina, this is one of the most intelligent tearjerkers to reach British cinemas in a long while. Obviously, disbelief has to be suspended on occasion. But, once the set-up has been established, Sachs concentrates on how the situation impacts upon the characters. The anguished phone calls and clinging reunions are beautifully handled, especially when Molina and Lithgow pretend to be Stonewall veterans in order to get free drinks at a bar. But Tomei and Tahan also have their moments, as Lithgow intrudes upon her carefully regimented routine and his grumpily adolescent need for privacy. However, such is the canniness of the storytelling that neither of the quandaries thrown up by Lithgow's sojourn are ever entirely resolved.

Sachs and Zacharias also have a fine ear for the argot and rhythms of everyday speech. However, Sachs isn't solely interested in exposing the homophobic bigotry that continues to linger in supposedly polite society. He is also eager to explore the durability of soulmate romance (hence the throwaway reference to The Philadelphia Story) and capture a part of Manhattan that is rapidly disappearing. He is ably abetted by Greek cinematographer Christos Voudouris, whose views across the rooftops, streets and parks are every bit as elegantly nostalgic as anything that Gordon Willis achieved for Woody Allen. But this isn't simply stylistic archness, as the imagery reinforces the leisurely tonal shift from cosy contentment to melancholic sanguinity.

Iranian-American twentysomething Desiree Akhavan also has trouble breaking some unwelcome news to loved ones in her debut as writer-director, Appropriate Behaviour. Many critics have rightly compared this to Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010) and it will surprise few to learn that Akhavan has been invited to join the cast of Dunahm's cult sitcom, Girls. Fizzing with deadpan wisecracks and studded with random flashbacks, this is a hugely confident picture that juggles clichés and taboos with reckless glee. But, for all its cynical exuberance, this is a touch too scattershot for its own good and, one suspects, Akhavan will do much better next time after learning her craft at spiritual sister's knee.

Having broken up acrimoniously with girlfriend Rebecca Henderson. Desiree Akhavan is forced to find new accomodation in Brooklyn and, because she has just quit her job as a journalist, she seeks the assistance of comfortably off parents Anh Duong and Hooman Majd. However, she has never summoned the courage to tell them or judgemental urologist brother Arian Moayed that she is bisexual. Akhavan's straight friend Halley Feiffer urges her to come out of the closet, but she is quite happy to play the field and even has a one-night stand with a man she meets on the OK Cupid site. Moreover, she tries to chat up Aimee Mullins, the gay rights lawyer who runs her lesbian discussion group, and even accepts an invitation for a threesome from strangers Chris Baker and Robyn Rikoon, whom she meets in a bar.

The ménage ends badly when Baker gets jealous and asks Akhavan to leave, but she has more luck when Feiffer's stoner friend Scott Adsit offers her a job teaching film-making to a kindergarten class of five year-old boys. She quite enjoys getting the kids to work on a shot-for-shot pastiche of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). However, she is dismayed to discover that the woman in charge of the girls, Rosalie Lowe, is now dating Henderson and she goes into a nostalgic funk after encountering them at a party. Feiffer tries to cheer Akhavan up by taking her shopping for lingerie, only for the assistant to criticise her for not wearing a bra. Moreover, she keeps thinking back over the year she spent with Henderson and wondering whether the good times actually outweighed the bad. She recalls, for instance, the time they attempted S&M role play, when Henderson pretended to be a tax inspector and merely offered to help Akhavan's naughty girl fill out her annual return.

At the end of term, the two classes show their films and the girls produce an exquisite piece of monochrome minimalism that standa in start contrast to short made by Akhavan and the boys. However, Adsit is delighted with The Tale of the Fart and tells Akhavan that she has talent, as well as attitude. As New Year comes around again, Akhavan attends a family Nowruz gathering and tells her mother and brother about her sexual orientation. But neither is surprised.

Inspired by Akhavan's split from her first serious girlfriend, this is very much a film sprinkled with autobiographical detail, in the same vein as The Slope, the lesbian web series she created with Ingrid Jungermann. But, for all the self-deprecation, one never gets the impression that this is wholly confessional. Moreover, while her screen presence is highly distinctive, there is too little of her personality in either her storytelling or direction, which are disappointingly conventional. The flashbacks may be achronological and unsignposted, but this hardly constitutes an assault on linearity, while too many secondary characters are mere ciphers who exist to make a socio-cultural point or facilitate a throwaway gag.

The scene in the bookstore reminds us that Woody Allen's original title for Annie Hall (1977) was Anhedonia and this might have been a suitable name for Akhavan's picture, as her world-weary reluctance to take pleasure in anything or trust anyone eventually becomes wearisome. Indeed, she can be an exasperating narcissist who is hard to warm to, especially as her contempt for her neighbours in either the swanky Park Slope or the more offbeat Bashwick neighbourhoods occasionally comes close to misanthropy rather than equal opportunities satire. What's more too few of the jibes are particularly eloquent or insightful and Akhavan will have to sharpen her pen and raise her aim before she tries again. Yet, despite her problem shifting through the emotional gears, this remains an entertaining, if one-dimensional view of a side of New York and its hipster and migrant communities that are rarely seen outside indie festival offerings.

There was much positivity around the release of debutant Paul Katis's Kajaki: The True Story, a reconstruction of a terrifying ordeal endured in Afghanistan on 6 September 2006 by members of the Third Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. Given the insight he provided into life in boot camp in Full Metal Jacket (1987), Stanley Kubrick might also have applauded the bantering sense of camaraderie achieved by Katis and screenwriter Tom Williams. But he would also have realised that this has much more in common with Tom Petch's The Patrol (2013) than Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2008). Nevertheless, this is a difficult film to criticise, as it is being self-distributed through Alchemy Releasing, with a sizeable portion of the profits being earmarked for various military-related charities.

When not patrolling the area of Helmand Province around the strategically vital Kajiki dam, the men of 3 Para try to occupy themselves with good-natured taunting, pornography and chess matches played with discarded water bottles. Morale is good under Corporal Mark Wright (David Elliot), but everything changes during a routine patrol on what would become known as `the day of days'.

While scouting the terrain adjoining the dam, sniper Stuart Hale (Benjamin O'Mahony) spots what he believes to be a Taliban roadblock. When he closes in to investigate, however, he steps on a landmine that blows off the lower part of his leg. Desperate to assist their fallen comrade, Wright and medic Paul `Tug' Hartley (Mark Stanley) rush to the spot. However, they have entered an unmarked minefield left behind by the Red Army in the 1980s and Corporal Stuart Pearson (Scott Kyle) also loses a limb when he seeks to help his pals. Realising that they are trapped, Wright contacts the base and requests a helicopter to winch the men to safety. However, the Chinook dispatched lacks the necessary equipment and the downdraft it generates in trying to land causes another explosion that injures Wright and two more of his unit.

Those familiar with the story from the headlines will remember how this tragic incident played out in the scorching sun after the arrival of better equipped American Black Hawk choppers. But Katis and Williams are reluctant to apportion blame in a film that nails its colours to the mast in seeking so scrupulously to avoid referencing the politics of the war. This is understandable, given the support that the project received from the armed forces and the survivors of the calamity. But this embedded approach undeniably enervates a drama already somewhat hidebound by its resolution to be as true to fact as possible.

As with Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land (2001), gallows humour seeps into the exchanges between the brothers in arms, even at the height of the emergency. But Williams barely does more than sketch in the backstory essentials for the key personnel and this deficient characterisation restricts audience identification with the victims and their hapless would-be rescuers. However, cinematographer Chris Goodger wisely eschews the shakicam run`n'gun technique that has become such a cliché in recent combat pictures (or, indeed, the vast majority of supposedly visceral action sequences) and uses the static, widescreen frame to connect the soldiers with their locale and, in the process, to ratchet up the suspense because the viewer never knows where the next detonation might occur.

Coming from a corporate film-making background, Katis demonstrates a decent eye for a telling image and a fine sense of rhythm and realism. He also insists on confronting the audience with graphic evidence of the damage that a landmine can do and Cliff Wallace merits mention for his gruesome make-up effects. But the great strength of this unflinching reconstruction is its emphasis on the ordinariness of both casualties and heroes alike. A couple of the regional accents waver in the heat of the moment, but this serves as a timely reminder of the sacrifice made by those who served in both Afghanistan and the trenches of the Great War, whose centennial spectre casts a grim shadow over this well-intentioned enterprise.