Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 13/101/2011)

Claiming to be descended from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Findlay Brown has ambitions to become an author. However, she is reduced to taking a job as a cleaner at the hotel run somewhere on the South Coast by failed actress Julia Ormond, whose novelist husband Sebastian Koch is enduring a severe case of writer's block in the wake of a runaway bestseller. Guests book into the Cliff House because of the story. But Koch is anything but a celebrity to the shrewish Ormond and even daughters Felicity Jones and Katie Overd view him with indulgent indifference.

Findlay Brown is quickly star struck, however, and risks her burgeoning friendship with Jones to embark upon an affair with Koch in between secret mentoring sessions, in which he advises her on her writing. She dumps boyfriend Harry Treadaway and fibs about her comings and goings to doting grandparents Hazel Douglas and Peter Vaughan, who have long looked after her. But the truth emerges shortly after a trip to Oxford - where Jones is hoping to study medicine and the pair delight in debunking toffee-nosed applicant Thomas Brodie Sangster - and Findlay Brown is not only forced to accept the consequences of her behaviour, but also accept the truth about her ancestry.

Screenwriter Tamzin Rafn freely admits her debt to Wish You Were Here, but she might have strayed a little further from its core storyline in depicting Findlay Brown as a vulnerable young woman who uses sex as a means of both getting what she wants and shielding herself from the inadequacies holding her back. Moreover, Rafn also struggles to identify the main protagonist, as the focus shifts periodically from Findlay Brown to Jones and Koch as they confront the issues that make them so dependent upon her for support and solace.

Nevertheless, the dialogue is sharp and the performances solid. Koch combines charm and self-doubt to such a deft extent that his seduction of a 17 year-old doesn't seem irredeemably seedy, while the underused Ormond suggests a melancholic disappointment with the way life has turned out beneath her snappish exterior. Jones also manages to prevent the studious daughter-friend from seeming too blandly prim as she begins to spread her wings. But it's the vivacious and charismatic Findlay Brown who steals the picture, along with cinematographer Jan Jonaeus's sunny views of such Isle of Man locations as Douglas Head and Port St Mary.

The setting is also crucial to Christopher Menaul's First Night, which is based on an unfinished script by John Mortimer and centres on a country house production of Mozart's opera buffa Cosi Fan Tutte. With life soon beginning to imitate art, it becomes more difficult to resist comparisons with Stephen Poliakoff's Food of Love (1997), in which a group of old college friends reunite in an idyllic village to perform Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. And it doesn't help matters that both films star Richard E. Grant as the wealthy backer hoping to use the project to realise some unfulfilled dreams.

Under the scornful eye of housekeeper Tessa Peake-Jones, businessman Grant welcomes conductor Sarah Brightman, accompanist Andy Massey, designer Hugh Ross and his assistant Laura Power, along with a cast that comprises Italian diva Mía Maestro, cocky wannabe baritone Julian Ovenden, gay tenor Nigel Lindsay, sleep-around soprano Susannah Fielding and lovelorn Emma Williams, who is dating director Oliver Dimsdale, whose bold staging suggestions don't meet with universal approval.

Ovenden had lied during auditions that he is the protégé of Italian legend Stanley Townshend, unaware that Maestro had just ended an affair with him. So, picking up on her antipathy toward him, Grant and Lindsay challenge Ovenden to seduce Maestro before opening night. However, Dimsdale and Brightman learn of the bet and their disapproval jeopardises Grant's chances of romancing Brightman, for whom he has long harboured a secret passion.

But the love lives of the other performers are scarcely running smoothly. Lindsay makes a play for Dimsdale, who has long protested that work-related stress had prevented him from responding to Williams's amorous advances, while Fielding strings along handymen Jack Walker and Michael James, much to the annoyance of the former's mother, Peake-Jones, who doesn't want her inexperienced son to have his heart broken by a callous city slicker. However, it's only when Maestro discovers that Ovenden has been pitching woo to win a wager that fur really begins to fly and Ovenden needs to find Grant's misplaced mobile phone to prove that his intentions have been entirely honourable.

As one might expect, the music is as glorious as the interiors and grounds of Manderston House in the Scottish Borders town of Duns. But, despite the efforts of a willing cast, this elegant comedy never attains the levels of frothiness and fun for which Menaul so valiantly strives. The characterisation is thin, the contrivances are corny and the loose ends are tied too neatly in a trite denouement. Yet the round of passion, dalliance, jealousy and comic error fashioned by Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte has worn well enough over 220 years to make this an amiable, if undemanding watch.

The interplay between fact and fantasy was more deftly handled by Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Amélie, which is being reissued in cinemas to mark its 10th anniversary. A popular hit back in 2001, this engaging saga of a Parisian waitress who finds love while seeking to improve the lives of her friends and family has since been reassessed for its conservative political content. But the majority of British viewers will primarily wish to reacquaint themselves with Audrey Tautou and her globe-trotting garden gnomes for another helping of irresistible crème brûléed sweetness.

Narrated by Jacques Thébault, the action opens with a brief resumé of the heroine's past. Having lost her mother (Louella Cravotta) in a freak accident, the child (Flora Guiet) was raised by her aloof doctor father (Rufus), who mistook her excitement at being with him for a heart condition and kept her closeted away from the world she longed to explore. Thus, by the time she moved to the capital, Tautou is so in love with life that she can't help herself from playing practical jokes and involving herself in the everyday travails of her tenement neighbours and café workmates and customers.

Having made it her mission on that day that Princess Diana dies to return to its rightful owner (Maurice Bénichou) the box of juvenile trinkets she finds hidden behind a wall in her apartment, Tautou determines to play Pollyanna across Montmartre. At the Two Windmills café run by Claire Maurier, she consoles struggling author Artus de Penguern after he receives his 30th rejection letter, while also monitoring the ménage forming between waitress Clotilde Mollet, her jealous ex-boyfriend Dominique Pinon and hypochondriac tobacconist Isabelle Naty. Meanwhile, back home, she strives to convince widowed concierge Yolande Moreau that her philandering husband really adored her, tempt reclusive artist Serge Merlin to reconnect with humanity and teach grocer Urbain Cancellier a lesson for bullying his mild-mannered assistant, Jamel Debbouze.

It's a busy schedule. Yet Tautou still has time to send her father snapshots purportedly sent by his missing garden gnomes on a world tour and collect stones she thinks will be perfect for skimming. She also develops a crush on adult video clerk Mathieu Kassovitz, who appears to be a kindred spirit, as he is compiling an album from the discarded photographs he recovers from the coin-operated booth at the railway station.

Exquisitely designed by Aline Bonetto and photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, this is essentially a billet doux to the Poetic Realism that dominated French cinema in the 1930s. Echoes abound of Jacques Prévert's screenplays for both Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) and Marcel Carné's Drôle de drame (1937). But, while these were cherished for their celebration of the spirit of optimism and unity that existed under the Popular Front government of socialist Léon Blum, Amélie was castigated by left-leaning critics for acquiescing in the right-wing status quo established by President Jacques Chirac. Moreover, the film was criticised for relying on a combination of fantastical digression and visual trickery that made the picture seem stylistically and diegetically trite.

Jeunet perhaps overdoes the mannerist gimmickry in attempting to create an enchanted milieu. He also allows the story to drift in matchmaking Tautou and Kassovitz. But his conscious of manipulation of audience expectation recalls the eagerness of the auteurs of the nouvelle vague to highlight the filmicness of their pictures - most notably in François Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste and Louis Malle's Zazie dans le métro (both 1960) - and such calculation can surely be excused when the results are so charming. Audrey Tautou is similarly exhonerated of overdoing the quaintness in a performance that exudes mischief, as well as gamine adorability. With editor Hervé Schneid and composer Yann Tiersen also making invaluable contributions, this is a slick, innovative and beguiling piece of film-making, whose tendency to patronisation, sentimentality and whimsy is more than balanced by its moments of deliciously dark humour.

The wit is just as incisive and even more gleefully contrived in Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, which amusingly seeks to expose the perniciousness and ubiquity of advertising and product placement by selling promotional spots within the film itself. Back on Super Size Me (2004) form after somewhat losing his way with Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (2008), Spurlock again proves a much more genial on-screen presence than Michael Moore, although he is still prone to the intellectual superficiality and grandstanding lapses that have made Moore such a decreasingly effective critic of the contemporary American scene.

Intrigued by the extent to which commercials and sponsorship have impinged upon most aspects of modern living, Spurlock decided to buy in rather than sell out and make a film about the process of funding the very picture he was shooting. Consequently, he hit the phones in a bid to attract potential investors and gets the action off to a rousing start with a montage of pitches and rejections that finally results in Ban deodorant agreeing to come on board for $50,000. Other companies eventually follow suit and Spurlock is seen meeting with founders and executives as he contracts to drink nothing but Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice on screen, as well as exclusively fly with Jet Blue airlines, drive Mini Cooper cars, stay in Hyatt hotels, eat Amy's Kitchen pizza and conduct as many interviews as possible in Sheetz gas stations and convenience restaurants.

He also consents to shoot an ad for Mane`n'Tail shampoo, as he is so taken with a product that can be used on both humans and horses. In so doing, Spurlock fulfils his promise of total transparency. Moreover, he also succeeds in discussing such issues as brand perception, marketing strategies and consumer suggestibility with a satirical insight that would be all the more trenchant if he could resist mugging to the camera whenever he hits a target. Yet Spurlock manages to finance his `docbuster' entirely with other people's money without relinquishing artistic control.

Indeed, he finds time for a couple of digressions, as he buys ad space on the perimeter fence of a cash-strapped school in Broward County, Florida and visits São Paulo to discover how mayor Gilberto Kassab and co-ordinator Regina Monteiro removed all outdoor advertising in a campaign to end visual pollution. Moreover, he also gets to learn some tricks of the trade from PR gurus like Tony Seiniger, Britt Jonson, David Whales, Richard Kirshenbaum, Martin Lindstrom and Peter Bemis, as well as debating the phenomenon of product placement in mainstream movies with directors JJ Abrams, Brett Ratner, Peter Berg and Quentin Tarantino and the ethics of advertising with such academics and activists as Noam Chomsky, Susan Linn, Robert Weissman and Ralph Nader. He even commissions an official film song from the rock combo OK Go.

The majority of these encounters are knowingly droll, with Spurlock never missing the opportunity to winkingly emphasise ironies and reassure the audience that they are not being as manipulated as ordinary punters in being sold the benefits of the tie-in products because they are in on the postmodernist joke. But he struggles to answer such questions as whether having his film sponsored will raise its profile before opening weekend or how much the average consumer is actually influenced by advertising in an era when TiVo and the internet allow them to eliminate sponsors messages at the press of a button.

One thing Spurlock triumphantly succeeds in promoting throughout the film is himself. But the suit he wears on the Jimmy Kimmel Live chat show represents a splendid lampoon of corporatism and logo fixation, which also demonstrates a laudable strain of self-deprecation that goes a long way to restoring Spurlock's credibility after the Osama fiasco.

A much more serious documentary on the War on Terror concludes this week's slate. Cannily cross-cutting between the tour of duty that led to Marine sergeant Nathan Harris being seriously wounded in the hip and his agonising rehabilitation, Hell and Back Again is a judicious insight into the sacrifices and suffering involved in ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban. Embedded photojournalist Danfung Dennis's combat footage is as remarkable as anything in the recently acclaimed Restrepo or Armadillo, with his focus on the fear of the locals caught up in the fighting being particularly sharp. His chillingly ironic juxtaposition of scenes of domesticity in Helmand and North Carolina is equally acute. But it's the struggle endured by Harris and wife Ashley to return to a semblance of normality that proves most revealing, as strangers and comrades alike commend the 25 year-old for his courage without fully appreciating the consequent physical and psychological traumas.

In 2009, Nathan Harris was serving with Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment in southern Afghanistan. Danfung Dennis was seconded to the unit and captured intimate images of troops conducting routine patrols, interacting with the locals and going into combat against a largely unseen enemy. But, while these sequences are notable in themselves, they become utterly compelling when contrasted to the suffering that Harris himself has to endure during his convalescence.

A trip to Wal-Mart becomes a major expedition, as Harris frets about his failure to find a parking space. But his grumbling abates when an old lady comes to welcome him home with a hug and a request to be photographed with him. However, the front line is never far from the thoughts of a die-hard patriot whose ambition had always been to kill people for his country and the terrifying comparison of Harris patrolling civilian streets and playing a violent video game is followed by scenes of him justifying the US presence in Afghanistan to his sister-in-law and showing Ashley how to load and aim a pistol as they sit on their marital bed.

Equally disconcerting is the linking of Nathan and Ashely's trip to view a potential new home with shots of a Marine patrol kicking in the doors of Afghan dwellings and conducting gunpoint searches without a shred of the respect and tolerance that Harris sets so much store by in his speeches to camera. But breakdowns in communication are commonplace in Helmand, with the elders explaining during a night recce why they refuse to co-operate with foreign forces because they are more afraid of Taliban reprisal than they are of American reprimands.

However, before the audience can begin empathising too much with the besieged villagers, Dennis shows Harris (who is at risk of becoming addicted to the painkillers that make daily life bearable) preparing to return to his base for a memorial service for 13 fallen comrades. The distress displayed by padre Terry Roberts as he valiantly attempts to deliver his sermon and the dignity of the survivors filing past the helmets and portraits of the lost is deeply moving and it's impossible to forget that while they may be infidel devils to many of those they are seeking to protect in the name of democracy, they are also sons, brothers, husbands and buddies to others.

At this point, Dennis shifts the focus on to Ashley to reveal how the relief of Nathan's safe deliverance is tempered by the frustration of having to cope with his mood swings and the realisation that her own life has been changed just as dramatically as his by the machine-gun bullet fired during a helicopter raid on a remote enemy stronghold in a country far, far away. Thus, she has to deal with his bitterness when he learns from the doctor that his recovery from the replacement of part of his lower leg with titanium will be slower than he expected and their argument in the car on the way home from the hospital is upsetting to witness. Even more disturbing is his cruel joke as they snuggle up in bed that she had perished in a game of Russian roulette he had been imagining in the front room. Yet she speaks of him with nothing but enormous pride on collecting his medication from the pharmacy and Dennis leaves viewers with the sobering conclusion that, even though Harris may well walk again, he has been permanently changed physically and psychologically by his experience and that the task of finding a new niche in society is going to be every bit as daunting as that of bringing peace and justice to Afghanistan.