Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 28/5/2015)

Over the last month, the UK schedule has been similarly beset with minor releases that have played on single screens in London in order to command the attention of the national press. It says much for the dedication of this column that it has frequently allocated more space to these also-rans than either the four Fleet Street broadsheets or the top three specialist film magazines. But the standard of some of the features that have cluttered up the roster this May has been so morale-sappingly low that even a critic who has based a 30-year career on the maxim that every title deserves to be taken seriously feels forced to declare that enough is enough.

Since it first appeared on the Oxford Times website in 2006, Parky at the Pictures has prided itself on providing the most comprehensive coverage of the week's new theatrical releases. Regular readers will know why the focus has had to fall on non-mainstream titles and this opportunity must be taken to thank the various distribution and PR companies who have ensured continued access to discs and viewing links over the past 13 years. These pages have always been a labour of love. But the rapid rise in the number of films to be watched and rated each week means that they have started to take up time that could be more profitably devoted to the latest DVD releases (which are often far more interesting) and, from a purely personal point of view, to paid commissions.

Consequently, while they will continue to cover all of the films submitted for appraisal, the articles under the `In Cinemas' banner will be significantly shorter from now on. Worthwhile features will still be discussed in detail, but the more negligible offerings will be assessed with a new brevity that will, hopefully, prove no less incisive. In many instances, this will still mean that the reviews posted here will be longer than those in the quality dailies. But the days of agonising over 800 words on a parochial melodrama or a polemical documentary are over. Or, at least, that's the plan...for now.

Born in Mauritania, but raised in Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako trained at the famous VGIK school in Moscow and has steadily been building a reputation as one of the finest film-makers in Africa since making his feature bow with La Vie sur Terre in 1998. Acclaimed at Cannes for drawing on personal experience to consider nomadic alienation and displacement in Waiting for Happiness (2002), Sissako exposed the pernicious influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on African society in Bamako (2006). However, he has turned to an even more contentious theme in Timbuktu, which arrives in UK cinemas garlanded with an Oscar nomination and Césars for Best Film, Direction and Original Screenplay. Given the current strategy being pursued by Islamic State in its campaigns in Syria and Iraq, this measured, fact-based blend of censure and satire is bound to provoke debate. But, as always with Sissako, the intelligence and insight of his approach means that there are no easy answers to what appear on the surface to be straightforward questions.

Harking back to 2012 and opening with shots of the foreign insurgents machine-gunning tribal masks and statuettes that stand for the sacred and cultural heritage sites that were destroyed by the invaders, Sissako shows Malian imam Adel Mahmoud Cherif trying to reason with Ansar Dine leader Salem Dendou and his hot-headed acolytes. But their demand for the instant imposition of Sharia Law is upheld, even though the citizens of the ancient capital and revered seat of learning are predominantly pious.

The jihadists come from many different cultures and find it almost impossible to communicate without a translator. But, what they lack in organisational prowess, they more than make up for in zeal and, while Oumar Haidara rides around the streets on a scooter denouncing smoking through a tannoy, others broadcast the suppression of football and song. Another warrior tries to record a recruitment video for the Internet, but keeps frustrating himself and infuriating his comrades by muffing his lines. When they are off duty, the French members of the unit chat animatedly about the respective merits of Zinedine Zidane and Lionel Messi. But the moment a ball bounces down some steps, the youth chasing it is arrested for illicit enjoyment.

All of this would be amusing if it wasn't for the fact that the occupiers are ignorant thugs who start inventing misdemeanours to justify the callous fury of their random chauvinism and intolerance. Reduced to taking pot shots at statues with exposed female body parts and chasing a defenceless gazelle in a jeep, they are clearly bullies hoping to provoke innocents into indiscretion in order to show off the power they claim from a deity whose law they cannot possibly be honouring. Indeed, such is their desperation to demonstrate their superiority and inflict unnecessary violence that they reprimand a female fishmonger for not handling her wares with gloves, while worshippers at the mosque are upbraided for wearing excessively long trousers. Indeed, one man strips to his shorts in annoyance at not being able to keep his new regulation turn-ups in place. But Mahmoud Cherif remonstrates with Dendou in vain, as he has no respect for religious authority and cares only for exercising his random control in banning `any old thing in a public place'.

As those residents of Timbuktu who are able to leave start to flee, Tuareg herdsman Ibrahim Ahmed tends to his small herd of eight cattle in the desert beyond. He lives in a traditional nomadic tent with his wife, Toulou Kiki, their 12 year-old daughter, Layla Walet Mohamed, and orphan boy Mehdi Ag Mohamed, who helps with the livestock. But the guitar-playing Ahmed becomes concerned when Libyan jihadist Abel Jafri takes an interest in Kiki and begins mooching around the tent with his driver, Cheik Ag. Emakni.

Keener on enforcing the law than abiding by it, Jafri likes to sneak away from his comrades for a crafty cigarette and clearly feels no shame in openly lusting after another man's wife. But Kiki refuses to cover her head when he snaps at her because she is inside her own home and accuses him of being the transgressor for looking where his eyes should not linger. As they drive away, Emakni praises Kiki for her virtue and the frustrated Jafri fires his machine-gun at some tufts of grass growing between two undulating dunes. The symbolism could not be more damning.

Back in the city, a group of boys taunt their tormentors by running into a donkey field to play a cunningly choreographed game of football without a ball. But Dendou grows tired of what he considers a softly softly approach and sends his minions to break up an informal musical evening and administer 80 lashes to singer Fatoumata Diawara (who courageously continues to sing the proscribed refrains as the punishment is carried out). The guests are also admonished for failing to observe the proper segregation of the sexes. But it is only the women who are subjected to the whip and any sense that the interlopers are intent on protecting the morals of the female population is shattered when one of the jihadists coerces a young girl into marrying him in spite of the protests of her mother and the imam.

Only the beribboned and colourfully dressed Kettly Noël offers any sort of resistance. But she is rumoured to be a witch or a madwoman (or possibly both) and no one is willing to follow her example of volubly defying the self-righteous guardians of morality, who bury a co-habiting couple up to their necks in the sand in order to stone them to death. As the rocks rain down, Sissako cuts to one of the jihadists on his knees in prayer, as though to emphasise the difference between faith and fanaticism. However, for all his piety, he is also a hypocrite, as he starts to dance as he rises and gyrates around Noël, who is alone with him and has her head uncovered.

Away from the barbarism, young Mohamed take their cows to the river to water them. Unfortunately, he allows his favourite animal (a pregnant heifer nicknamed GPS) to stray into fisherman Amadou Haidara's nets and it causes so much damage in trying to free itself that Haidara kills it with a spear. Mohamed returns to the camp and tells Ahmed what has transpired and he slips a pistol into his pocket before going to confront Haidara. As their argument intensifies, the pair begin to struggle by the water's edge and the gun goes off. Haidara is killed. But Sissako (who has filmed the entire fracas in long shot) uses a jump cut to keep his death off screen, as this is the kind of crime that should be considered unacceptable rather than any trumped-up act of immodesty.

Moreover, Sissako refuses to flinch from the punishment the community deems fitting for murder, as when Ahmed concedes that he is unable to pay blood money compensation to Haidara's family, he is sentenced to death by judge Weli Cleib. The distraught Kiki comes to witness her husband's demise and Ahmed sees her through the crowd. As they run towards each other for a last embrace, the Islamists mistake their distraught affection for a clumsy bid to escape and gun the couple down where they stand.

Conveying indignant despair without lapsing into melodramatic outrage, Sissako and co-scenarist Kessen Tall lament the suppression of cultural heritage and diversity with a melancholic nuance that is all the more potent for its humanist compassion. Sissako and cinematographer Sofiane El Fani make sublime use of the Mauritanian cities of Oualata and Nema and the surrounding wilderness to contrast the beauty of nature with the corrupted innocence of mankind. The jihadists are depicted with as much pity as spite, as the younger ones have been led astray by leaders who have allowed power to blight their piety. But it's difficult not to view the senseless destruction of artefacts, Diawara's whipping and the stoning without a growing sense of revulsion.

Although they cloak their acts of pillage, rape and murder with scriptural rectitude, the Ansar Dine rabble is nothing more than a barbarian horde and Sissako allows them to condemn themselves in the audience's eyes. But he also damns them through the behaviour of those they persecute, as they live the faith these casual monsters claim to defend. The performances are crucial to Sissako's conceit and the largely non-professional cast rises to the challenge with mesmeric power. Although the victims convey an innate dignity, the villains are perhaps more impressively played, as they seem so ordinary and yet are capable of such abhorrent deeds. Eschewing Hollywood stereotypes, Sissako succeeds in making fundamentalism seem more terrifying because it is rooted in banality. But what sets this compelling picture apart is the way in which it shifts mood so deftly and uses its visual poetry to expose the enormity of the threat posed by Islamic imperialism.

The status of women in West Africa is discussed with equal sincerity, but markedly less efficacy by Joanna Lipper in The Supreme Price, a profile of pro-democracy activist Hafsat Abiola that explores the role played by her family in striving to bring stability and justice to Nigeria after six decades of military rule and patriarchal intransigence. A Harvard lecturer specialising in the use of film for social change, Lipper has focused on childhood in her previous documentaries, Inside Out: Portraits of Children (1997), Growing Up Fast (1999) and Little Fugitive (2006). But, while she makes adroit use of archive footage to explore a traumatic period from the perspective of a young girl whose parents were in the eye of the storm, Lipper fails to provide sufficient background to guide those unfamiliar with Nigerian history between its declaration of independence from the British in 1960 and the arrest of its democratically elected president in 1993.

Hopes were high when Yoruba businessman Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola claimed victory for his Social Democratic Party in a disputed ballot that was eventually annulled by outgoing military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida. As confusion reigned, Abiola was charged with treason by General Sani Abacha, who kept his rival behind bars for the next five years, as he established his dictatorship. However, his cause was taken up by the second of his four wives, Kudirat, who had remained loyal in spite of the fact that he had fathered some 55 children with his various spouses and mistresses. As Lipper recalls, with the aid of playwright Wolé Soyinka and former US ambassadors Walter Carrington and John Campbell, Kudirat campaigned tirelessly for her husband's release before she was assassinated during a demonstration against his solitary confinement in 1996. But, two years later, Moshood perished in suspicious circumstances on the day he was supposed to be released and his mantle passed to Hafsat, who graduated from Harvard the day after her mother died and honoured her memory with a whistlestop publicity tour of the United States.

Hafsat now divides her time between raising a family in Brussels with her British diplomat husband and her duties in Nigeria, as both a member of the ruling cabinet in Ogun State and as the founder of the Kudirat Initiative For Democracy (KIND), an NGO devoted to teaching women how to be the leaders of the future. Yet, while she receives unswerving support from her younger sister, Khafila, Hafsat is opposed every step of the way by her brother, Olalekean, an ultra-orthodox Muslim who runs a mosque in the grounds of the family compound. His mindset is very different to that of the Islamist terrorist sect, Boko Haram. But he speaks for the male majority in refusing to contemplate women playing a major role in reforming a nation whose 173 million souls see precious little of the wealth accruing from its vast oil reserves.

A victim of her own ambition, Lipper struggles so badly to cover the past 55 years that she almost overlooks key episodes like the war in Biafra and the democratic elections held under the second republic in the early 1980s. She also fails to place Nigeria in its wider geopolitical context and, as a consequence, undersells exactly what is at stake in the current battle against Boko Haram. The tribute to her friend is fulsome and Hafsat comes across as intelligent, dynamic, driven and dedicated. But, while she is happy to speculate on her parents' relationship, she keeps much closer guard over her own backstory, with the result that the audience is deprived of genuine insights into her creeds and methodology.

Employing a similar mix of monochrome newsreel and talking heads, first-time documentarist James D. Cooper also manages to skirt a few pivotal issues in Lambert & Stamp, which chronicles the unlikely friendship between the toff and the likely lad who turned The Who into one of the biggest bands of the 1960s. Cannily edited by Christopher Tellefsen to allow Kit Lambert (who died in 1981) and Chris Stamp (who passed away in mid-production in 2012) to tell their own sides of a remarkable story, this contains little that Who aficionados won't already know. But, as sole survivors Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey rehearse for their upcoming appearance at Glastonbury, it still serves as a timely reminder that The Monkees weren't the first designer combo and that, without the genius of Henry Purcell, the rock opera might never have existed.

The son of renowned conductor Constant Lambert and a godson of composer William Walton and ballerina Margot Fonteyn, Kit Lambert was educated at Lancing and Trinity College, Oxford. By contrast, Chris Stamp and his older actor brother Terence were born to a Thames tugboat skipper. Yet their shared passion for the nouvelle vague meant that they became firm friends when they met as production assistants at Shepperton Studios in the early 1960s. Stamp was deeply impressed that Lambert had just returned from a stint as a cameraman on explorer John Hemming's perilous expedition down the Iriri River in Brazil. However, while Lambert had worked on such blockbusters as J,. Lee Thompson's The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Terence Young's From Russia with Love (1963), Stamp had also made his mark on Bryan Forbes's The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Ronald Neame's I Could Go On Singing (1963), which was the last film made by Judy Garland.

Inspired by Free Cinema and the French New Wave, Stamp and Lambert decided to make a film charting the rise of an unknown pop group. However, they were beginning to despair of finding a suitable subject when they stumbled across The High Numbers, a London outfit that comprised factory worker Roger Daltrey on vocals, art student Pete Townshend on guitar, tax office pen pusher John Entwistle on bass and radio repairman Keith Moon on drums. Changing the quartet's name to The Who and using an address in Eaton Place to open a Coutts bank account, Lambert astonished his new friends by showing just how far a little upper-class chutzpah could still go in the Swinging Sixties in the absence of business experience, as he booked the band into classier venues and filmed their gigs with a vérité verve that is readily evident in the surviving footage.

Stamp also played his part by sending back the wages he earned on movies like Anthony Mann's The Heroes of Telemark (1965) to keep the enterprise afloat. But it soon became apparent that Townshend's songwriting abilities were a cut above the average and that shepherding The Who to the top seemed more logical than trying to finish the rockumentary. Yet, as the interviews that Lambert gave to German and French television suggest, the pair had learned from the likes of Brian Epstein and Andrew `Loog' Oldham that there was room in the limelight for the managers of a hit act, as well as the musicians themselves. Thus, they formed Track Records in 1966 and signed the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Brown and Thunderclap Newman, who all benefited from Lambert's growing confidence as a record producer.

Indeed, in addition to refereeing stand-offs between the pugnacious Daltrey and the impish Moon, Lambert also played a vital role in Townshend's creative evolution, as he loaned him recordings made by his father and, in the process, helped teach him how to structure a song and realise that there was more to rock than three-minute chart smashes like `My Generation' (1965), `Substitute', `I'm a Boy' (both 1966) and `Pictures of Lily' (1967). Lambert and Stamp also appreciated the need to encourage the Mod culture that nailed its colours to the Who mast and exploit it to set the band apart from such rivals as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

But Lambert's greatest achievement was the concept album Tommy, which was released in 1969 on the back of My Generation (1965), A Quick One (1966) and The Who Sell Out (1967). Townshend acknowledges the debt he owed to Lambert in offering him a home and in persuading him to try something new. But he refuses to share any artistic credit and makes no bones of the fact that he refused to allow Lambert and Stamp to fulfil their dream by directing the film adaptation. Ken Russell would land this gig in 1975, by which time The Who had dispensed with Stamp and Lambert, whose dependency upon drink and drugs had become an increasing problem during the recording of Quadrophenia in 1973.

It betrays the extent to which Cooper has allowed himself to become distracted by The Who that he fails to do justice to Lambert and Stamp's careers after this parting of the ways. Even bearing in mind the readiness of Daltrey and Townshend to share their memories, he also does a disservice to Moon and Entwistle by edging them into the background. Cooper also appears reluctant to push the extent to which Lambert contributed in the studio. But nuggets like Townshend playing the pair an early acoustic version of `Glittering Girl' more than atone, although it would probably take a four-part mini-series to do full justice to both the Lambert and Stamp (who proves a born raconteur) and Who stories and to explore the extent to which the wounds left by their rupture every really healed.

The plot of Guy Myhill's debut feature feels as though it could have been lifted from a film made in the 1960s. Set in Norfolk and following the fortunes of a 16 year-old loner, The Goob contains traces of the cine-DNA found in the social realist studies of childhood produced by Ken Loach and Barney Platts-Mills in the 1960s and by Pawel Pawlikowski, Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard in the present day. Myhill even plunders his own Channel 4 documentary on stock car racing at the Swaffham Raceway to add a little local colour. But his screenplay is far too fragmented to coax the audience into rooting for the characters, especially when so many of them exist solely to keep the cliché-strewn moving forwards.

Arriving home after his last day at school, teenager Liam Walpole tears off his uniform and faces the rest of his life without a shred of optimism. He lives with mother Sienna Guillory, who runs a greasy spoon abutting a pumpkin farm, and his older brother, Joe Copsey, who shares his distaste for Guillory's new boyfriend, Sean Harris. Notorious for his womanising and his short fuse, Harris races stock cars and he is furious when Copsey winds up in hospital after being chased through the narrow lanes winding through the flatlands while joy riding in his prize-winning motor.

With Copsey incapacitated, Guillory is short-handed at the café and she invites nephew Oliver Kennedy to help Walpole and waitress Hannah Spearritt, who is feeling blue because she has just broken up with Walpole's pal, Paul Popplewell. Kennedy delights in winding up Harris with displays of playful campness. But he also reveals to his cousin that he is not averse to dressing in women's clothing. Walpole is intrigued and senses that Kennedy has a crush on him. But Harris becomes so frustrated with him cavorting around the place that he humiliates Kennedy in public and he beats a hasty retreat.

Walpole grows increasingly resentful of Guillory for allowing this thuggish outsider to impose his rules on their previously happy household. But Harris is bent on making life as uncomfortable for Walpole as possible and persuades Guillory that she needs a nightwatchman on the pumpkin patch. Harris creates a low-lying camouflaged hide and orders Walpole to stay at his post or feel his wrath. But his initial disinclination quickly abates when Guillory hires some fruit pickers from the continent and Walpole finds himself enchanted by Marama Corlett, a French student who invites him to an illicit nocturnal party.

However, Walpole spends so much time with her that he starts neglecting his chores and matters come to a head at the end-of-season party when Harris makes a clumsy pass at Corlett and she refuses to spare his blushes in rejecting him. She asks Walpole to leave with her, but he insists he will only go if Guillory comes with them. When she opts to stay with Harris, Walpole departs with Corlett, as he realises that he can't afford to waste his time trying to protect her if she is going to let her heart rule her head.

Lustrously photographed by Simon Tindall, this may not be the most ground-braking rite of passage, but it certainly makes evocative use of its hot summer locale and the vast Norfolk skies. Myhill may plump for a few too many magic hour shots, while his depth of characterisation leaves a great deal to be desired. But, while he allows Harris (with whom he worked on the short Two Half Times to Hell in 1997) to gnaw the scenery as the testoserone-fuelled bully, he coaxes a splendidly natural performance out of 20 year-old non-actor Liam Walpole, whose skinny frame and vacant expression sometimes bring to mind John Gordon Sinclair in Bill Forsyth's Gregory's G|irl (1981).

Oliver Kennedy also makes an impression as the flamboyant cousin. But Myhill never solves the problem of why Guillory would be so attracted to an abusive thug like Harris that she would jeopardise her relationship with her disapproving sons. He similarly struggles with the subplot involving Popplewell and Spearitt (who will be familiar to many from her time with S Club 7), as it is allowed to drift into the margins, along with the seemingly forgotten Copsey. But Myhill has a good eye for detail and, with a little assistance with his storytelling, he should come up with something more original and rounded next time out.