Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 25/8/2011)

Despite the mischievous pomposity underlying these protestations of artistic rigour, Dogme drew as much critical scorn as respect and it made little box-office impact in the face of Hollywood's new-fangled computer-generated imagery. However, it reinforced the vogue for realism that had sustained the 1980s American indie scene and its influence is still evident in pictures like Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer's debut, R: Hit First, Hit Hardest, which was filmed for just €750,000 in the notorious Statsfængsel prison in the East Jutland city of Horsens.

Sentenced for a knife crime, first-timer Johan Philip Asbæk endures the humiliations of a strip search and the loss of his possessions before being billeted in a tough wing of a provincial maximum security prison run by ruthless lifer Roland Møller. Cocky, but not altogether smart, Asbæk quickly learns the sober reality of life behind bars when Møller orders him to smash an Albanian inmate's teeth in or face the punishment himself. But, rather than humbling the newcomer, this savage initiation makes him more determined to find a niche that will enable him to beat the system.

Thus, when he encounters twentysomething Muslim prisoner Dulfi al-Jaburi while on kitchen detail, Asbæk agrees to start running drugs between their wings and the pair soon establish a profitable business that raises their status and sees the misophobic Asbæk transferred to a cleaner, safer cell. However, their success earns the envy of their cellmates, while the seething racial tension between the Arabs and the Danes endangers them both. So, when a deal goes wrong, Asbæk is prepared to do whatever it takes to salvage it.

With Magnus Nordenhof Jønck's restless camera forever closing down space and depriving the characters of privacy and Morten Green's metallic sound mix emphasising the harshness of the surroundings, this is a disconcertingly intrusive and abrasively visceral insight into penitentiary routine. Despite casting reformed lags and former guards, Noer and Lindholm don't quite succeed in their bid to avoid the clichés and caricatures of the prison movie. But the inevitable comparisons are more likely to be made with Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956) and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (2009) than the average American slammer melodrama.

As the slender, handsome blonde coveted by hulking, skinheaded thugs, Asbæk ably conveys a sense of watchful foreboding that is shrewdly heightened by the decision to confine the viewer to his perspective. Consequently, the mood seems all the more volatile and Asbæk and al-Jaburi's fate feels all the more shocking. But what most impresses is the notion that life is as grim within these walls for Kim Winther and his fellow guards as it is for the lags.

Just as R seeks to expose the cracks in Danish society, Josh Sternfeld's As Blood Runs Deep attempts to assess the impact of the recession on the American heartland. But while the scenes of social discontent are capably staged, the pivotal police procedural plot suffers from indifferent characterisation and contrived lurches between clues and disclosures.

Jobs have been scarce in the New York town of Caswell since the sole factory closed down and young men like Jonathan Tucker and Kellan Lutz have turned to crime to survive. However, in breaking into Laura Benanti's plush property in nearby Hilliard, they accidentally kill her son and cop Nick Stahl spots evidence in the abutting woodland that links the culprits to the home town he left under something of a cloud several years before.

Teamed with new partner Rachel Nichols, Stahl renews acquaintance with old pal Michael Sirow, whose wife Kathy Searle is leading a bid to convince the Meskada County Commission to invest in new industry. Unfortunately, as Benanti is a key member of commissioner Jonathan Whitcup's panel, the fate of their presentation depends on Stahl catching the killers and none of the inhabitants want to betray their own to a disowned outsider.

Barman James McCaffrey is particularly resentful when Stahl uses the annual fete to start snooping around. However, instead of suspecting Lutz (who is dating McCaffrey's niece, Grace Gummer), Stahl begins tailing Tucker's brother-in-law, Norman Reedus, who knows about the bungled robbery and is determined wife Rebecca Henderson and ailing son Charlie Tahan aren't going to suffer for Tucker's incompetence and cowardice.

The workaholic Stahl identifies with Reedus, however, as his own marriage to Kerry Bishé is under strain and son Max Antisell is virtually a stranger. But, the more he tries to be fair to the Caswell residents, the more they see him as a Hilliard lackey and his hands are tied more tightly when Benanti hires a hot-shot lawyer and begins demanding results.

Fortunately, the arrest of fence Johnny Hopkins puts Stahl and Nichols on the right track and they bully Gummer into betraying her boyfriend to save her own skin. But before Stahl can arrest Tucker and Lutz, McCaffrey and his neighbours implement their own brand of justice and Stahl is left to deal with the consequences after taking out his frustration on McCaffrey's bar with a baseball bat.

Lifeless playing and a suffocating air of earnestness prevent this state of the union saga from gaining any momentum. Sternfeld's concerns about societal division are worth exploring, but his tone is better suited to a TV-movie than a theatrical feature. The cast couldn't be more committed to the cause, but the rivalry between the burgs is too obscure and the backstories of the principals too thinly delineated to command audience empathy. Moreover, too many scenes veer into emotional overdrive, while others become mired in low-key naturalism that is too self-conscious to convince.

Daniel D. Sariano's rustic vistas add a touch of authenticity. But nothing rings true about Mark Elliott's feature bow, Powder, which has been adapted by Kevin Sampson from his own novel about a Merseyside musician struggling to deal with the traumas that have prevented his band from hitting the big time. Bearing in mind Sampson's success as a writer and Elliott's reputation as an editor, this is a sloppily structured and ponderously self-absorbed melodrama that is stuffed with preening performances and saddled with dialogue that makes Hollyoaks sound like Ibsen.

Liam Boyle is the lead singer of The Grams, an indie combo who have been somewhat overshadowed by the meteoric rise of Al Weaver, a onetime acolyte who was content to open for Boyle before he stole one of his unfinished songs and scored a massive hit. Now, as seedy online journalist Stephen Walters and American promoter Tim Dantay dance to Weaver's tune, Boyle wrestles with the memory of watching stepfather Tony Pitts burn the guitar bought by his dead dad and the pain of being unable to complete the song that can make sense of his feelings.

Gal pal Vinette Robinson, manager Alfie Allen and bandmates Oliver Lee, Joe Edwards and Greg Mighall are prepared to give Boyle all the space he needs. But he puts pressure on himself by agreeing to cut a record for fledgling label boss Jefferson Hall and his adoring partner Jo Woodcock and finds himself having to work with inexperienced engineer Christian Foster after Weaver lures ace producer Neil Bell away on his American tour.

The sessions stall and Boyle announces that he has to fly to Ibiza to commune with the only person who really understands him. However, onetime neighbour Ralf Little has changed considerably since he used to encourage the young Boyle to learn his chords and now lives as a dreadlocked dropout in a hilltop tent. Nevertheless, he brews him a potion to soothe his tormented mind and Boyle announces that he will be ready to perform at the V Festival once he has confronted Pitts and made peace with his estranged mother, Sharon Byatt.

While Boyle is moping between London, Liverpool and the Balearics, Weaver storms back across the Atlantic after a Stateside humiliation to attempt to relaunch his faltering career with a dance remix of his greatest hit. Meanwhile, Allen has developed a crush on Woodcock, who only has eyes for Hall and drowns herself on overhearing that he thinks of her solely as a baby sister.

Allen decides to quit the music business and Boyle makes a half-hearted effort to coax him back before he has an on-camera showdown with the winegum-chomping Walters that sets the record straight about both his reasons for forming the band and Weaver's overnight success. With his demons exorcised, Boyle is now free to devote himself to his swan song and his long-postponed romance with Robinson.

As Kevin Sampson himself admitted in a recent article in The Guardian, film-makers have a lousy track record when it comes to movies about rock bands and, sadly, this dismal muddle must now take its place alongside Brian Gibson's Broken Glass (1980) and Still Crazy (1998) in the BritPop Hall of Shame. The soundtrack composed by Starsailor's James Walsh is disappointingly moderate considering The Grams's Facebook page lists Big Star, Joy Division, The Verve, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and Radiohead as the group's influences. But what makes this so resistible is the surfeit of dead-end sub-plots and unsympathetic secondary characters. The performances are also pretty shambolic, with Liam Boyle aiming for moody and meaningful and hitting mopey and mundane, while Al Weaver, Tim Dantay and Stephen Walters resort to shameless mugging that is often as embarrassing as the Ibiza sequence in which waitress Camilla Roholm is gratuitously required to remove her top while guiding Boyle to Little's woodland hideaway.

Back in an era when Mersey beats were worth listening to, Bettina Röhl and Mei Shigenobu were enduring much more difficult childhoods than Boyle's sensitive soul. But, as Shane O'Sullivan reveals in Children of the Revolution, neither woman has been entirely able to escape the fact that she is the daughter of a notorious radical whose activities in the 1960s and 70s provoked worldwide outrage and made the names of Ulrike Meinhof and Fusako Shigenobu forever synonymous with terror.

Piecing together Mei and Bettina's stories from interviews and a range of archive material, O'Sullivan and editor Ben Yeates compellingly make sense of the complex of networks that sought to challenge the status quo in Europe and the Middle East. However, the emphasis tends to fall more on the mothers than the daughters, with the consequence that this is more a study of the German Red Army Faction and the Japanese Red Army than the journalist and the news anchor whose respective memories of Ulrike and Fusako as mothers seem to matter less than their recollections of growing up in the eye of a storm.

Despite contributions from Baader-Meinhof comrade Astrid Proll, personal friend Erike Runge and kindergarten nurse Jutta Lack-Strecker, much of the Ulrike segment depends on Bettina's input and O'Sullivan's astute use of a TV interview with her father, Klaus Rainer Röhl. Noting the impact on Ulrike of a wartime childhood and the early loss of her parents, the film follows her progress through university and her involvement in the student Anti-Atomic Death' campaign. But it was her membership of the outlawed German Communist Party that attracted the attention of agents in the GDR, who encouraged Röhl to hire her for his left-leaning magazine, Konkret.

Meinhof proved a combative journalist and she married her editor in 1961, producing twins Regine and Bettina on 21 September 1962. However, shortly afterwards, she underwent brain surgery for a benign tumour and Runge is not alone in believing that the damage done during this operation transformed Meinhof's personality and prompted her to separate from Röhl in 1967 and join with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in a guerilla campaign that would involve bank robberies and bombings, as well as calls for gender and class revolt, before her arrest in Langenhagen on 14 June 1972.

During this period, Meinhof saw little of her children, although she did attempt to abduct them and settle them to a camp for Palestinian refugees in Italy before they were rescued in Sicily by Stefan Aust. Now a mother herself, Bettina still struggles to understand her attitude and the two-year silence that presaged her suicide at Stammheim Prison on 9 May 1976. Yet, she has successfully reclaimed her mother's stolen brain from the state and celebrated her parents' Konkret achievement in the acclaimed book Making Communism Fun.

Thirty-five years on, despite lingering mixed emotions, Röhl now remembers Meinhof as a loving woman who just wasn't cut out for motherhood. Mei Shigenobu is perhaps more affectionate in her recollection of Fusako, who was recovering in prison from colon and intestinal cancer when the documentary was made. But she is not alone in considering her activities, as O'Sullivan also includes the thoughts of fellow travellers Takaya Shiomi and Masao Adachi, as well as Palestinians Bassam Abu Sharif and Leila Khaled and her defence attorney, Kyoko Ohtani.

Born to a temple school teacher who became a major in the Imperial Japanese Army, Fusako only became interested in politics when she joined a protest against tuition fees at Meiji Univeristy. However, she quickly switched her focus from domestic affairs to the situation in the Middle East and her disillusion with the leadership of the Red Army Faction led her to commit to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine before founding the Japanese Red Army in 1971.

Based in Lebanon, she wrote numerous articles and books and became one of the world's most hunted women after a series of plane hijackings, the 1972 machine-gun and grenade attack at Israel's Lod Airport that left 26 dead and 78 injured and the 1974 occupation of the French embassy in The Hague (both of which were so memorably recreated by Oliver Assayas in Carlos). Yet she also became a mother and concealed the identity of Mei's father to protect her factional kidnapping plots.

Although she spent much of her youth in Lebanese camps and often went months without seeing her mother, Mei recalls her peripatetic existence with some fondness, as she was always well cared for and she only grew apart from her mother after she began concentrating on her education. Having graduated from the American University in Beirut, Mei first set foot on Japanese soil in April 2001. Now she is a popular newsreader, she regrets the violent tactics that the Red Army employed. Yet she continues to champion Palestinian statehood and strives to put an Arab perspective on breaking stories for her viewers. She also makes annual returns to the Middle East and has paid weekly calls on her mother in prison since she was arrested outside Osaka in November 2000.

Some bonds are, seemingly, stronger than others and it might have been interesting to have Mei and Bettina meet to compare their experiences. But this still provides powerful insights into tainted idealism, the use of force and the possibility of terrorist domesticity.