Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 1/9/2011)

However, this has not been a vintage year for French features and even those that have intrigued - such as Bertrand Blier's The Clink of Ice, Christian Carion's Farewell and Eric Lartigau's The Big Picture - have been somewhat flawed. Consequently, the pick of 2011 to date is Katell Quillevere's Love Like Poison, which finds a quirky companion piece this week in Mona Achache's The Hedgehog.

Adapted from Muriel Barbery's novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, this provides a delightfully skewed view of the world and the debuting Achache works hard to illustrate the distinctive perspective by having 11 year-old Garance Le Guillermic spy on her restricted milieu through the Hi-8 camera with which she obsessively observes her pill-popping, champagne-swilling mother Anne Brochet, distant politician father Wladimir Yordanoff and sniffy sister Sarah Lepicard. She also allows her an inner monologue to reveal her disappointment with a goldfish bowl life in a nondescript apartment building and her determination to commit suicide on her 12th birthday.

But Le Guillermic then makes the acquaintance of widowed gardienne Josiane Balasko and retired Japanese salaryman Togo Igawa and gains a whole new insight into being a grown-up. Balasko may be prickly on first meeting, but she has cats named after Russian writers and revolutionaries and a secret library of classic novels, which Igawa supplements with generous gifts. He also invites Balasko to watch Yasujiro Ozu's The Munekata Sisters (1950) and conspires with Le Guillermic to coax Balasko into recognising the inner beauty that will gradually prompt an elegant transformation that alerts the child to the tender pleasures of companionship before reality rudely intrudes.

Dispensing with the novel's philosophical musings and shifting from written to filmed diaries to convey Le Guillermic's confused impressions of adult behaviour, this is an engagingly melancholic fable that occasionally feels like a tweenage variation on Breakfast at Tiffany's. Le Guillermic is splendidly precocious and Igawa touchingly solicitous. But it's Balasko's transition from defensively frumpy stereotype to the embodiment of her true nature that gives this its edgy charm. Some of the intellectual allusions feel a touch affected and the social critique is very mild. But Achache has told her story in a laudably cinematic manner, with Patrick Blossier's camera inquisitively roving around Patrick Schmitt's dark interiors and Le Guillermic's drawings occasionally taking on a life of their own to the charming accompaniment of Gabriel Yared's score.

Achache has been criticised in some quarters for replacing Barbery's cultural sophistication with middlebrow accessibility. But her literary and cinematic allusions are no more laboured than those Athina Rachel Tsangari makes to natural history programmes in another rite of peculiar passage, Attenberg.

Amongst other things, Tsangari has associate produced Dogtooth (2009) since making her directorial debut with The Slow Business of Going (2000) and the influence of Yorgos Lanthimos's bleak satire extends well beyond his cameo in this long overdue sophomore feature. Rigorously minimalist, but also disarmingly droll and increasingly poignant, this boldly unconventional drama offers further proof of the flourishing of Greek cinema over the last decade.

Despite being almost inseparable, best friends Ariane Labed and Evangelia Randou couldn't be more different. Randou works in a small-town bar and readily exploits her sexual allure, while Labed lives with disillusioned architect father Vangelis Mouriskis and is so naive and indifferent to men that she has to ask Randou to teach her to kiss. However, when she's asked to chauffeur visiting engineer Yorgos Lanthimos between his hotel and the factory where she's employed, Labed finds herself becoming intrigued and tentatively enters into an exploratory flirtation with the accommodating stranger. But Labed has more to worry about than losing her virginity, as Mourikis has been diagnosed with cancer and she spends long hours sitting with him in waiting rooms and private wards.

There's little more to report as far as plot is concerned, but this makes for consistently riveting viewing from the opening sequence in which Randou attempts to teach Labed to French kiss against a peeling whitewash wall before the pair drop on all fours and begin spitting at each other like cats. Equally enigmatic are the twosome's quirky dance routines that are periodically inserted into the narrative to reinforce the connection between the twentysomethings and the animal behaviour depicted in the David Attenborough documentaries that Labed adores.

Much of the focus falls on Labed, who won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival. She certainly proves a compelling presence, whether she's playing table football in Randou's bar, showing her friend her remarkably protruding shoulder blades or becoming increasingly confident with Lanthimos after he initially rejects her charmingly gauche effort to seduce him. Yet she's most affecting when confiding in Mouriskis that she imagines him to be entirely asexual and when listening to his instructions for his body to be transported to Hamburg after his death, as cremation was then illegal in Greece.

However, Labed's performance always feels directed and Tsangari's impact seems equally strong on Thimios Bakatakis's measured photography, Leandros Ntounis's evocative sound and Dafni Kalogianni's stylised production design. But this suggestion of external control only enhances the sense of the characters being subjects in an anthropological study designed to show that this is a society uneasy with such basic and essential human activities as procreation and death.

Terrence Malick's fascination with the elemental is equally evident in Days of Heaven (1978), which is being reissued for cinema audiences to gain a full appreciation of the widescreen glory of Nestor Almendros's Oscar-winning cinematography. With Alberta in Canada standing in for West Texas in 1916, this feels like an epic elegiac cross between Steinbeck and the Bible. Yet it also has an intimacy to match its intensity and an integrity to reinforce its ingenuity in evoking the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper to recreate the visual simplicity of contemporary silent cinema.

Forced to flee his Chicago foundry after accidentally killing supervisor Stuart Margolin, Richard Gere rides the rails to the Pandhandle with 16 year-old sister Linda Manz and sweetheart Brooke Adams, who agrees to pose as his sibling to avoid awkward questions about why they are unmarried. They disembark in wheat country and accept an offer to help with the harvest from Robert Wilke, who is the veteran foreman of the farm owned by Sam Shepard.

The work is hard, but Manz (who narrates the story) is happy to find a friend in Jackie Shultis and enjoys playing with Gere and Adams in the river and woodlands that are a blessed release after the satanic slums of the Windy City. However, Wilke takes a dislike to Gere and tries to warn his boss when he develops a crush on Adams that Gere decides to exploit after overhearing the doctor informing Shepard that he only has a short time left to live.

Initially, Adams is reluctant to encourage Shepard's attention. But she trusts Gere when he assures her that the farmer is incurably ill and she will inherit his fortune if she accepts his marriage proposal. However, following an idyllic honeymoon, she grows increasingly fond of her husband and feels guilty at keeping nocturnal assignations with Gere, who contemplates shooting Shepard on a hunting trip before deciding to allay Wilke's suspicions by leaving the estate with flying circus artistes Richard Libertini, Sahbra Markus and Frenchie Lombard.

By the time he returns several months later, Adams is deeply in love with Shepard and Gere accepts her rejection with grudging good grace. However, the watching Shepard misjudges the nature of their tryst and his struggle to suppress his insane jealousy coincides with the arrival of a plague of locusts that decimates his crops. As he inspects the damage with a lantern, an argument breaks out with Gere and splashing kerosene sets the fields alight and a tractor trench has to be dug to confine the flames.

Next morning, Shepard goes looking for Gere with his rifle and is stabbed with a screwdriver in the ensuing scuffle. Wilke vows vengeance and a posse pursues the fugitives, leaving Gere with little option but to sacrifice himself so that Adams and Manz can escape. However, the teenager has become accustomed to life on the lam and the film ends with her doing a bunk from the dance academy in which Adams had enrolled her to take her chances with Shultis and her doughboy boyfriend.

From the opening montage of monochrome photographs accompanied by Ennio Morricone's exquisitely folksy score, this is a tantalising mix of nostalgia, realism, poetry and melodrama. Resplendent in Almendros's natural light visuals, Jack Frisk's sets and Patricia Norris's costumes are further enhanced by Malick's eye for detail, which extends to his reverence for the Great Plains in the period between the end of the Gilded Age and America's entry into the First World War.

In many ways, the storyline is no more sophisticated than a DW Griffith two-reeler. But the rhythmic fluidity of the imagery (to which Haskell Wexler contributed) far surpasses anything that Billy Bitzer could have achieved with a handcranked Pathé camera. But Malick further doffs his cap to the silent era with a spare use of dialogue to compensate for the decentred literary eccentricity of Manz's narration.

A similarly laudable dependence on the visual informs Howard J. and Jonathan Ford's The Dead, a zombie road movie with a spiritual core that the siblings have declared a hybrid of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996). Making imposing use of vast tracts of bush in Ghana and Burkino Faso, the Fords refuse to waste time explaining the reasons for the flesh-eating frenzy that has overtaken Africa and pitch the viewer right into the plane crash that prevents American engineer Rob Freeman from flying to safety.

Having floated to shore on a packing crate, Freeman breaks it open to get a gun to blast the zombies tottering towards him. Avoiding the countless somnolent figures plodding across the landscape, he heads inland and, having survived a cornfield confrontation, eventually finds a truck in a deserted village. The tension mounts as the camera nimbly orbits Freeman as he refuels, tinkers with the engine and puts on a new wheel. But he manages to escape in time and increases his stash of weaponry when he acquires a machine-gun from a crushed mercenary.

Meanwhile, army sergeant Prince David Oseia has returned to his home village to find his wife dead and his young son disappeared on a lorry making for a refugee camp in the north. Oseia happens upon Freeman as he is being surrounded by zombies and mows them down before pushing the truck over a pothole in the road. Freeman offers his rescuer a lift and they agree that he can keep the vehicle if he can help the American reach the nearest airfield.

Stopping to scavenge at a ransacked house, they dispatch the famished stragglers and drive through the night to reach the aerodrome. However, none of the planes are in flying condition and Freeman fails to make radio contact. Suppressing his frustration, he helps Oseia carry a barrel of petrol back to the truck and decides to accompany him to the camp.

Weakened by a fever, Freeman is grateful for the sanctuary offered by mercenary leader Ben Crowe, who tells Oseia that the civil war is over now that they have a more pressing common foe. Freeman hallucinates in his sleeps and is taken aback by Crowe's contention that the plague is nature's way of redressing its delicate balance and punishing humanity for its greed. However, he recovers enough for them to leave and they are lucky to find a water pump to cool the radiator before the relentless marauders can catch them. But they are soon forced to travel on foot after the truck crashes into a zombie in the road and Freeman is left to continue alone after Oseia sacrifices himself when they are surprised by an attack on their campfire.

Staggering across the desert in a thawb and kufeya taken from one of his victims, Freeman rescues a dying mother's baby daughter and entrusts her to the occupants of a passing truck before making a daring escape across rocky terrain and finally reaching the camp. Carving his way through the undead clamouring at the gates, Freeman is welcomed by leader Sergho Dak Jean Gustaphe and manages to make radio contact with his unit. However, he learns that his family have died and that there is no chance of reinforcements being sent because the base itself is about to be overrun. But a single symbol of hope remains, as Freeman finds Oseia's son and they stand together in a magic hour moment as the film ends.

The Fords endured a nightmarish shoot, with Freeman contracting malaria and several members of the cast and crew being mugged by local thugs. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful treatise on outside attitudes to Africa and the continent's distressing predilection for internecine conflict. Evoking memories of psychological Westerns and Val Lewton's Haitian zombie movies, the action is often intense. But there's a limit to the number of narrow escapes from incredibly slow-moving monsters before they come to seem repetitive. More might also have been made of the relationship between Freeman and Oseia, who must surely have had something vaguely interesting to talk about on their endless journey?

Unfortunately, the prattling never lets up in Gillian Wearing's Self Made, a documentary of little cinematic worth that provokes primarily because of its contentious methodology. Wearing may be a past winner of the Turner Prize and many will consider this to be a searching work of art. But others will deem it every bit as exploitative as reality television and will question exactly what Wearing was seeking to prove in selecting seven highly vulnerable individuals to undergo a crash course in Method acting before starring in a short film designed to show how the techniques they have learned have helped them cope with a pressing personal issue.

Hundreds of wannabes responded to a press advertisement that read `Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.' But, as Method teacher Sam Rumbelow explains on first meeting, Asheq Akhtar, Lesley Robinson, Dave Austin, James Baron, Lian Stewart, Simon Manley and Jerome Prince were chosen because they had potentially interesting stories to tell. In other words, like the contestants on Big Brother, they were the volunteers most likely to make the most compelling viewing, as they worked through the various psychological traumas and self-image insecurities that they felt they could be best addressed in the company of an amateur therapist in front of a movie camera.

Although they participate in the sense memory exercises conducted in a cavernous warehouse, black model Prince and factory worker Manley clearly don't turn out to be as exciting as Wearing had hoped, as their shorts (which one presumes were made) don't make the final cut. However, Manley proves a solid supporting player in a couple of the mini-dramas, as he surprises Robinson by throwing a dinner service against a wall and trades bantering insults with Austin in a scenario that is overshadowed by the outwardly chirpy chappie's revelation that he intends to commit suicide in 2016, as his experiences in an old people's home have given him an aversion to decay.

After years of guarding against potential emotional ties, Austin remains pretty much in control of feelings, as does the self-conscious Robinson - although she has a touching moment with Akhtar in playing a married couple at loggerheads of over having children. But Baron, Akhtar and Stewart are more prepared to confront the bullying, abuse and paternal neglect that have blighted their lives.

Baron choreographs an unsettling bullying sequence with a group of youths and beats seven shades out of a dummy in re-enacting a tube showdown with one of his persecutors, while Akhtar reacts tearfully to memories of childhood bath-times before giving vent to his views on white, middle-class families. But Stewart is more cautious in describing her interaction with the absentee father who repeatedly betrayed her trust and reveals more in post-workshop interviews than she does in a rather listless recreation of train journeys to and from yet another disappointing meeting with her dad.

Stewart's film is the most polished, as it uses a circling camera on an empty theatre stage to rework the opening scene from King Lear, as Cordelia refuses to flatter her father's ego in return for land. Goneril and Regan are somewhat unnecessarily replaced by brothers, while Lear is accorded a silent wife. Moreover, Stewart's Geordie delivery is a touch monotone. But the tear that trickles down her cheek seems to stem from a genuinely cathartic sensation that is borne out by her closing revelation that she has contacted her father and is giving their relationship another try.

It's less clear, however, what the other four get out of their filmlets. Having previously been coached by Rumbelow in giving a speech in the ranting Mussolini manner, Austin plays a man found hanging upside down from a tree in a grotesque imitation of the dead dictator. Quite how this brings out the intangible something that supposedly buzzes around his head like a wasp is far from apparent, although it is significant that a man who seems so rational about his own demise would wish to open his eyes and prove himself alive as the camera closes in on his battered face.

The angry Baron also seems to want to play the victim in his scenario, which sees him getting stabbed by the teenagers he challenges for making too much noise outside his night-time home. Yet, rather than addressing this, it's the sense of exhilaration he feels at wanting to punch one of the lads that he confides at the end of the shoot. Similarly, Akhtar struggles to identify exactly what benefit has accrued from essaying a man walking home from the shops who suddenly feels the urge to kick a pregnant white woman in the stomach.

By contrast, Robinson's loneliness and low sense of self-esteem are more obvious both in a dramatisation with Austin of a date that is spoilt by him giving her a gift and a monochrome wartime vignette, in which she spurns the attentions of a kindly neighbour, even though they are mutually attracted. But, while she joins the others in saying how much she has enjoyed the experience and has learned much about herself from it, a discomfiting sense lingers that she has been exhibited in a piece of artsploitation that timorously refuses to disclose its own precise purpose.

There's no doubting what producer Stephen Shiu had in mind when he scripted 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstacy with his namesake son and Mark Wu and his ambition to make pots of cash was fulfilled when Christopher Sun's Category III romp scored the biggest opening weekend grosses in Hong Kong screen history. Clearly the softcore stereoscopy piqued curiosity. But, even though this review is based on the flat version, the use of objects protruding, flying and exploding into the viewer's eyeline looks pretty perfunctory, while the sex scenes are filmed with far less imagination or eroticism than the various three-dimensional versions of the Kama Sutra that were briefly available in the early noughties.

The story is set during the Ming Dynasty and centres on scholar Wei Yangshang (Hiro Hayama), who debates with rival Shanguan Shun (Jason Iu) about the need to devote as much of one's limited time on earth to physical gratification. However, on marrying Tao priest's daughter Tie Yuxiang (Leni Lan), Wei becomes frustrated by her chaste ignorance of how to please a man, while she soon tires of his lack of endowment and endurance and longs for the affection he had made evident in the portrait he painted on their first meeting. Determined to improve his technique, Wei ventures to the Tower of Rarities, where the Prince of Ning (Tony Ho) keeps his collection of priceless calligraphy, paintings and antiques. Ning is ready to dismiss Wei when he identifies a forgery among his possessions and is rewarded with a visit to the Paviliion of Ultimate Bliss, where he is encouraged to sample the delights offered by the sadistic Dongmei (Yukiko Suo) and the insatiable Reizhu (Saori Hara).

Yet, while Wei relishes the opportunity to indulge in an endless orgy, his genital deficiency earns him the scorn of his paramours and he is humiliated by a comparison with the generously equipped Elder of Ultimate Bliss (Vonnie Lui), a male sage with the body of a beautiful woman. (S)he maintains her vitality by acquiring the Zen of yin yang and introduces Wei to quack surgeons Dique (Tenky Tin Kai Man) and Tiancan (Mark Wu), who transplant a donkey penis that he employs to seduce every woman he meets.

Meanwhile, Tie waits patiently for her errant husband to return. But her father and maid Xian Lan (Carina Chan) urge her to forget about him and secure a divorce. Her situation is monitored by footman Quan Laoshi (Kirt Kishita), who is keen to take advantage of her pent-up yearnings. However, as she succumbs to his rapacious advances, Wei realises the error of his licentious ways on finding himself charged with stealing one of Ning's priceless possessions to pay for his gratification. Moreover, he realises that the prince has been exploiting him to amuse himself and leave saintly abbot Budai (Wong Shu Tong) defenceless against the predatory lusts of Ruizhu.

Despite its increasing complexities and contrivances, the plot is merely a pretext for the copious copulation that dominates this loose adaptation of Li Yu's ancient fable, The Carnal Prayer Mat. Ultimately, all ends well for Wei and Tie, as they learn the companionship that sustains them into old age after he is castrated in the frantic and occasionally nonsensical finale that sees cruelty and carnage replace wit and sensuality. But subtlety is always at a premium, as commercials director Sun encourages his cast to camp it up in both the dramatic and concupiscent sequences, which have been designed to show off much more female than male flesh. The result is often tedious, with the endless gyrating being photographed and edited by Jimmy Wong and Wai Chiu Chung with more energy than finesse. Indeed, besides Tony Yu's production design, this is scarcely an improvement on Michael Mok's original Shui-produced Sex and Zen (1991), which starred Cat III icons Amy Yip and Carrie Ng. Moreover, it is anything but the first 3-D porn movie, as has been claimed, as several titles were released in the wake of Al Silliman, Jr's The Stewardesses (1969), with the most notorious being Stephen Gibson's Hard Candy (1976) and Hot Skin (1977), which were headlined by the legendary John Holmes.