Parky at the Pictures (DVD 16/2/2012)

Determined to discover the identity of the mole within MI6, Control (John Hurt) sends field agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Budapest to try and coax a top-ranking general with access to Soviet secrets into defecting to the West. The mission goes badly awry and spells the end of Control's career. However, following his death, Under-Secretary Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney) summons retired time-server George Smiley (Gary Oldman) to reopen the investigation.

He enlists the assistance of earnest insider Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), blowsy researcher Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke) and quixotic assassin Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) to forge connections between Russian spy Polyakov (Konstantin Khabenskiy), his Kremlin handler Karla and the British operatives whom Control had dubbed tinker, tailor, soldier, poor man and beggar man: the cynically ambitious Percy Alleline (Toby Jones); the sardonically suave Bill Haydon (Colin Firth); the ruthlessly zealous Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds); ingratiating émigré Toby Esterhase (David Dencik) and the stoically introspective Smiley, whose sense of disillusion and betrayal extends to his private life, as he has been cuckolded by his wife, Ann (Katrina Vasilieva).

Although Smiley relies on Guillam to smuggle documents out of the Circus (as MI6 is nicknamed), he also does some legwork of his own and thinks back to the Christmas do in a soulless strip-lit room that so effectively deglamorises the clubbable world presented in the TV incarnation. Moreover, this gathering gives Smiley fresh insight into the personality of his fellow suspects and reveals the truth about his own domestic malaise. Bleakly designed by Maria Djurkovic and sombrely photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema, these cutaways lay bare the mood of morose melancholia that envelopes the cabal and the mixture of solitariness, suspicion and corrupted idealism that dictates their every move.

As one might expect of a cast of this calibre, the performances are impeccable. The Oscar-nominated Oldman dominates without quite exorcising the small-screen ghost of Alec Guinness, while the quipping Firth, weaselly Jones, eager Cumberbatch and acerbic Burke provide polished support. The writing of Straughan and O'Connor (who died of cancer at the age of 49 during filming) is also first rate, as is the insidious score of Alberto Iglesias, which considerably enhances the sense of unease and blends well with the eclectic choice of soundtrack tunes that includes George Formby's `Mr Wu's a Window Cleaner Now'.

But the most plaudits should go to Alfredson, who was making his English-language debut after so impressing with the juvenile vampire chiller, Let the Right One In (2008). As is so often the case, the outsider's eye catches minor details that offer telling insights into both an alien culture and its core characteristics. But Alfredson also exploits the glacial elegance of the visuals and clipped eloquence of the script to reclaim the spy movie from the chic inconsequentiality of the James Bond franchise and the flash-cut viscerality of the Jason Bourne pictures, which, between them have prioritised spectacle over subterfuge in delineating a milieu devoid of integrity, honour and humanity.

By contrast, another Scandinavian Nicolas Winding Refn working Stateside for the first time, opts for the high-octane approach in Drive, a bungled heist saga that apes the kind of 1980s actioners that deceptively genial crime boss Albert Brooks once used to produce. However, in casting Ryan Gosling as an edgy Hollywood stuntman-cum-getaway driver, one suspects that Refn was hoping to recreate something closer to such cerebral crash-bang exercises as John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), Peter Yates's Bullitt (1968), Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972) and Walter Hill's The Driver (1978). But screenwriter Hossein Amini's aversion to subtext and flawed decision to leave the anti-hero from James Sallis's novella as a one-dimensional enigma robs this slickly staged succession of wheel-screeching set-pieces with a psychological vacuum at its heart that the gallery of colourful secondary characters simply cannot fill.

Taciturn, toned and modishly dressed, Gosling divides his time between crashing cars on movie sets and hurtling them through the nocturnal streets of Los Angeles while being pursued by the cops. He also does a bit of tinkering at the garage owned by his manager, Bryan Cranston, who might have swung a deal for shady businessman Albert Brooks to sponsor Gosling's ambition to race stock cars. But Gosling takes his eye off the prize in falling for winsome neighbour Carey Mulligan, who is raising son Kaden Leos alone while husband Oscar Isaac is in jail.

On his release, Isaac vows to go straight. However, a prison debt means he has to pull off one last job and Gosling agrees to join him and accomplice Christina Hendricks in a multi-million-dollar blag. Naturally, things don't go according to plan and Isaac incurs the wrath of Brooks's associate Ron Perlman, who uses a pizza joint as a front for his more nefarious enterprises. Realising that Mulligan and Leos are in danger, Gosling stands up to be counted. But much blood will have to be spilt before the scores are even.

Considering how much emphasis Refn placed on rounded characterisation in his Pusher trilogy (1996-2005) and the hard-hitting biopic Bronson (2008), this is a disappointingly superficial study in lowlife morality. As Jean-Pierre Melville demonstrated with Le Samouraï (1967), it's possible to create a captivating protagonist without providing him with a backstory. But even the most maverick anti-hero requires a personality and Amini's failure to delve beneath Gosling's bashfully smiling surface reduces him to a cipher who is upstaged by just about all the supporting cast, with the exception of Mulligan, who is not only underused, but also allowed to get away with simpering sweetly instead of suggesting something of the femme fatality that makes her so irresistible to law-breakers.

Newton Thomas Sigel's moody cinematography, Mat Newman's razor-sharp editing and Cliff Martinez's rousing score give the action a degree of audiovisual class. But, even though it becomes increasingly violent towards the denouement, the picture lacks the blend of noirish intensity and generic energy that made the aforementioned motor movies so audaciously subversive and disconcertingly exhilarating.

Refn's fellow Dane Lars von Trier has spent his career eschewing the conventions of the classical Hollywood narrative and the auteur aesthetic. Yet, in Melancholia, he displays an innate understanding of the generic conventions against which he has so often railed, while also allowing himself a little introspection. Von Trier has long suffered from crippling bouts of depression and he seemed to hit rock bottom in his depiction of a hopeless humanity in Antichrist (2009). But, even though this latest melodrama teeters on the brink of Armageddon, it is much more accepting of our flaws and fragility and, as a consequence, it makes death and destruction seem less daunting, if still hardly desirable.

The action gets off to an unforgettable start, as Wagner's Tristan and Isolde plays on the soundtrack over a chillingly beautiful montage of surreally supernatural images connected to the impending collision of the planet Melancholia with Earth. At their centre is Charlotte Gainsbourg, who seems to be sinking into a golf course while carrying her son, and sister Kirsten Dunst, who endures a shower of dead birds, stalks through a dense forest in a wedding dress and floats in a murky pond before extending her arms to allow jagged shards of electricity to fizz between her fingertips as a portent to the cacophonous explosion that signals the end of the world After eight intoxicatingly excruciating minutes, these carefully controlled compositions give way to handheld viscerality as Von Trier cuts to Dunst and new husband Alexander Skarsgård sitting in a stretch limo struggling to navigate the narrow, winding road leading to the country hotel run by Gainsbourg and husband Kiefer Sutherland. Although this is supposed to be her happiest day, Dunst is sorely troubled by anxieties that Gainsbourg strives valiantly to keep in check, as divorced parents John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling exchange barbed insults and Dunst's advertising agency boss, Stellan Skarsgård, pesters her for the tagline of an important new campaign.

However, as wedding planner Udo Kier discovers to his increasingly frazzled cost, Dunst is a manic nightmare to organise and she even exhausts her groom's patience as she disappears into the woods to answer a call of nature, decides to have a bath just as the cake is going to be cut and then abandons the bridal suite to roll around in a bunker with Skarsgård cousin Brady Corbet. By the time Dunst returns, everybody has gone (including her spouse) and she and Gainsbourg clear their heads by galloping through the grounds in the early morning mist - although Dunst still manages to notice that something significant has happened in the sky.

The focus is supposed to fall more on Gainsbourg in the second half of the film, which takes place a few weeks later. She is terrified by the growing threat of Melancholia and is busy trying to ensure she and son Cameron Spurr can survive the implosion. Sutherland is a disaster denier and confidently predicts that the entire scare has been whipped out of all proportion by the media. As for Dunst, she spends much of her time bathing in the rays from the approaching sphere and becoming increasingly sanguine about the whole business. Even when Sutherland commits suicide on realising that his scepticism has been misplaced, Dunst continues to acquiesce in a consummation devoutly to be wish'd.

Given that the opening gives away the inevitable denouement, this is less a work of science fiction than a philosophical treatise on the insignificance of mankind and the futility of existence. It may not be as profound as Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, but, despite the odd purple passage or deliberately incensing outburst, it also avoids being trivial. Moreover, it very much chimes in with the director's previous pictures and their preoccupations, with Dunst and Gainsbourg being flipsides of the typical Von Trier anti-heroine, who manages to survive the slings and arrows hurled at her without quite knowing why she has been spared. Only these sibling perish along with everyone else in the depressive's ultimate revenge on his critics.

Manuel Alberto Claro's photography and Jette Lehmann's production design are faultless. But the performances are also remarkable. Hurt and Rampling are hilarious as the genial johnny and the embittered bitch, while Stellan Skarsgård archly lampoons the breed of advertising executive who not only thinks that everything's for sale, but that everything can be sold. Sutherland is slightly sold short with the role of a pompous prig, whose cocksure boasting during the wedding breakfast he has stage-managed at such effort and expense giving way to a rather clichéd cowardice. But Dunst and Gainsbourg are superb and although the former won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, it is the latter's sympathy for her near-catatonic sister in the midst of her own unbearable torment that gives the occasionally implausible and often self-consciously Chekhovian doomsday scenario its heart and soul.

Sadly, there is nothing as intriguing on offer in David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense, an under-scripted and underwhelming science-fiction romance that reunites the director with his Young Adam star, Ewan McGregor. Narrated by Katy Engels in a wistful manner that places more emphasis on cod poetics than an explanation of the global pandemic that is robbing people of their senses, the action lacks the urgency and trepidation expected of an apocalyptic scenario. More fatally, however, despite a surfeit of naked physicality, there is precious little chemistry between McGregor's commitment-phobic chef and Eva Green's epidemiologist, who is closely guarding her emotions after suffering a broken heart.

When not confiding her woes to older sister Connie Nielsen, Green is helping doctor Stephen Dillane cope with the outbreak of olfactory cases at their Glasgow hospital. But she allows herself to become distracted by McGregor, who just happens to work with best buddy Ewen Bremner in Denis Lawson's restaurant across the courtyard from her apartment. He can't sleep with anyone else in his bed and she seems happy for their fling to have a reckless impermanence.

However, when they also begin to lose their sense of smell after enduring an unbearable sadness, Green and McGregor become increasingly reliant upon each other, as they savour the senses left available to them before they also vanish. As news broadcasts report the ramifications of identical incidences on other continents, the pair freewheel around the city and listen to busker Anamaria Marinca before gorging on soap and other inedibles after losing the ability to taste.

Lawson's business briefly seems to be in jeopardy, but patrons eventually begin eating out again to enjoy the ambience of the surroundings and the presentation of the food rather than its flavour. But, as the action succumbs to silence following humanity's mass loss of hearing, McGregor launches into a room-smashing fury that drives Green away and the lovers are only reunited for a brief time before the planet is plunged into darkness.

Taking the premise of Fernando Meirelles's 2008 adaptation of José Saramago's novel Blindness to its logical conclusion, this might have been a fascinating treatise on our relationship with senses we too often take for granted. However, Dane Kim Fupz Aakeson's screenplay never delves beneath the surface of the science or the fiction. Consequently, while Mackenzie and cinematographer Gilles Nuttgens bring a disconcerting gloom to proceedings (which is evocatively reinforced by Max Richter's mournful score), the storyline strands McGregor and Green as polar opposite personalities whose passion never takes on the desperation that the end of sensual days would seem to demand.

Tilda Swinton, on the other hand, conveys an entirely authentic sense of intellectual confusion and emotional numbness as a mother seeking to understand the crime committed by her teenage son in Lynne Ramsay's audacious adaptation of Lionel Shriver's acclaimed novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Adroitly reworked the epistolary text, Ramsay and co-scenarist husband Rory Stewart Kinnear have cast it as a series of flashbacking recollections that course unremittingly through Swinton's mind as she tries to get on with a life that has been heading for the buffers ever since she and husband John C. Reilly quit the city and moved to the soulless suburbs to raise the baby from whom she has felt detached from the moment of his conception. Abetted by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, editor Joe Bini and sound designer Paul Davies, Ramsay has fashioned the audiovisual equivalent of mental and emotional anguish.

Yet the prenatal backstory could have been better limned and the film itself sometimes feels a touch too directed, with more than the occasional image seeming self-consciously composed and several close-ups labouring the portentous point as insistently as some of the vintage numbers on the soundtrack. Nevertheless, Swinton remains mesmerising, as she shifts almost imperceptibly between confusion, resentment and defiance and love, grief and shame.

Swinton is first seen as a face in the crowd at the La Tomatina tomato festival in the Valencian town of Buñol. But this is the last time we see the renowned travel writer entirely happy. She is swept off her feet by photographer Reilly and conceives a child at the height of their passion. However, she is uneasy throughout the pregnancy and fails to connect with a son who cries so constantly that she parks his pram next to roadworks to get some relief. The antipathy is mutual, though, with the boy making sure she always knows he prefers the company of his father as he grows from toddler Rocky Duer to six-eight year-old Jasper Newell and adolescent Ezra Miller. Indeed, it's not until she falls accidentally pregnant with daughter Ashley Gerasimovich that Swinton feels even the remotest maternal pang.

By this stage, however, it's much too late to repair her relationship with Newell, even though he briefly allows his mother to cosset him during an illness that sparks what proves to be his catastrophic fixation with Robin Hood. But Ramsay refuses to judge whether it's Swinton's lack of empathy, Reilly's easy complicity or Miller's inherent wickedness that provokes the high school tragedy that makes Swinton such a pariah that she is slapped on the street by complete strangers and has her shopping smashed in the trolley by unforgiving parents. Even her workmates at Siobhan Fallon's rundown travel agency view her with suspicion, with the exception of seedy Alex Manette, who views her as damaged goods and hits on her at the staff Christmas party in the hope she is suitably self-loathing to stoop to his level.

Yet Ramsay frequently frames Newell and Miller as though they were essaying Damien in The Omen and, while this allusion to a horror movie is pretty apt, it risks making the action seem unnecessarily melodramatic, especially after such pains have been taken to reduce the shock impact of the massacre that obliges Swinton to pay a weekly visit to the forbidding correctional facility on the edge of town. Indeed, such is Ramsay's arthouse sensibility that she places more emphasis on the sound of the scudding water sprinkler than sight of the bodies lying the lawn when Swinton learns the full extent of Miller's barbarity.

Coming nine years after her sophomore feature, Morvern Callar, this confirms Ramsay among this country's finest film-makers. It may not be as purely cinematic as her outstanding debut, Ratcatcher (1999), but her control of pacing is impeccable and she coaxes deeply impressive performances out of her young cast. She is less successful with Reilly, who is rather wasted in an part that may well have been deliberately underwritten to stress his marginal significance to both his wife and son. But Ramsay could not have asked more of Swinton, whose mastery of mood, gesture and expression almost redefines how first-person narratives can be tailored for the screen.

A very different take on family life is provided by Jake Scott in his sophomore outing, Welcome to the Rileys. Executive produced by the his father, Sir Ridley, and his Uncle Tony, this overdue follow-up to Plunkett and Macleane (1999) suggests that Scott has spent too long directing commercials and pop promos, as he seems to have lost any sense of how to pace a story. Consequently, while this looks good - thanks to Christopher Soos's sombre photography - and the performances are surprisingly strong considering the surfeit of clichés and clunky lines in Ken Hixon's hackneyed script, this never convinces for a second, as either a slice of life or a recessional parable.

Despite being married for some three decades, James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo have been drifting apart since the death of their daughter eight years ago. She has developed agoraphobia and refuses to leave their home in the Mid-Western city of Indianapolis, while he divides his time between playing poker with his chums and sleeping with black waitress Eisa Davis. However, when she is killed, something in Gandolfini snaps and, while on a plumbing supplies trip to New Orleans, he ventures into a strip club.

Much to his astonishment, dancer Kristen Stewart bears more than a passing resemblance to his much-missed daughter. So, he decides to protect her and moves into her seedy residence and sets about tidying the place and trying to persuade her to follow a more suitable line of work for a pretty 16 year-old. This odd platonic liaison scarcely runs smoothly. But when Gandolfini refuses Leo's demand that he returns home, she plucks up the courage to leave the house and drive south to retrieve him.

On arriving in the Big Easy, Leo realises immediately why Gandolfini had strayed and, rather than chastising him, tries to insinuate herself into their relationship as a surrogate mother. However, the frank and foul-mouthed Stewart is not prepared for cosy domesticity and the arrangement soon begins to implode.

This would be a pretty far-fetched scenario in a low-budget TV-movie or a dime novelette. But Scott takes such an earnest approach to his maudlin material that it often comes close to being risibly unwatchable. This is a shame, considering the talent on either side of the camera and the sincerity with which everyone approaches the story. But while it might just be plausible for a woman who has lost her child to conquer her demons in a bid to salvage her marriage, the interdependence that arises between Stewart and Gandolfini is wretchedly contrived and the entire picture collapses around its soap operatic triteness.

Nicole Kidman just about convinced as a grieving mother who enters into an unlikely friendship in John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole. But neither Leo nor Gandolfini seems as bereft, while the latter's moral indignation at the way in which Stewart is treated by her customers (and, to a large extent, by herself) lacks the trenchant fury of George C. Scott's bid to rescue Ilah Davis from some Californian pornographers in Paul Schrader's Hardcore (1979). Moreover, too little use is made of what should have been atmospheric locations suffused in sin and squalor. Thus, while this could not be any more well intentioned and isolated moments come close to genuine poignancy, it is too sluggish and strained to overcome its copious shortcomings.

Amiable, but rarely as amusing as it might have been Yoav Factor's Reuniting the Rubins is a tale of squabbling siblings that feels like an elongated sitcom pilot. The cast works hard, but the storyline sprawls and Factor tries to cram in so many pressing issues - ranging from religion, family and tradition to globalisation, developing world corruption and human rights activism - that he ends up saying little of consequence about any of them.

Retired lawyer Timothy Spall is about to take a well-deserved cruise when he is called to the hospital bed of ageing mother, Honor Blackman. She has purchased the house where Spall raised his four children and wants him to reunite them for what may be her last Pesach supper. However, communications tycoon James Callis, African charity worker Rhona Mitra, Buddhist monk Asier Newman and Jerusalem rabbi Hugh O'Conor can't stand the sight of each other and Spall has to travel to the Congo to coax Mitra into accepting the invitation, after her brothers succumb to a combination of pleading emails and personal pressure.

The African trek proves to be a wild goose chase, however, as Mitra is already back in London preparing to block Callis's bid to back some local rebels in the hope of securing the minerals he needs to launch a holographic computer system. So, while his assistant Blake Harrison makes contact with the well-armed militia, Callis and Mitra harangue each other and jeopardise a deal with some Chinese backers.

Meanwhile, the rigidly devout O'Conor has arrived with pregnant wife Loo Brealey and their two sons, who strike up an immediate friendship with Callis's neglected kid, Theo Stevenson (who has just reached the final of an inter-school cultural diversity competition). With Spall threatening to rejoin the cruise because he cannot abide refereeing his quarrelsome offspring, all agree to behave during the house-warming party that Blackman has arranged. But, as the bickering threatens to break out once more, Brealey goes into labour and all rush to the local hospital to agonise over a pre-eclampsia crisis similar to the one that killed their mother when O'Conor was born.

Tying up its loose ends with a convenience that typifies the contrived nature of the entire enterprise, this gentle comedy is just about kept afloat by a genial performance by Timothy Spall. But the supporting turns are either shrill or hammy, while the exploitative capitalism subplot simply fails to ignite. Even the key theme of parenting is overwhelmed by the need to keep the dysfunctional farce moving, with the consequence that Spall's role in his children's unhappiness (and Blackman's in his) is never properly addressed. Thus, this becomes increasingly sentimental and slight, without ever raising more than the odd indulgent smile.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Emily Lloyd became an overnight star thanks to her performance as a rebellious teenager in a sleepy seaside town in David Leland's Wish You Were Here (1987). Sadly, it proved to be the high point of a career that never quite took off and one hopes that Jessica Brown Findlay doesn't suffer the same fate after her admirable debut turn as an equally precocious temptress in Niall MacCormick's first feature, Albatross. This looks unlikely, however, as Brown Findlay is already well known as Lady Sybil Crawley in Downton Abbey and she does enough in this genial, if derivative comedy to suggest that greater things lie ahead.

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 proves equally important to screenwriter John Michael McDonagh's directorial bow, The Guard, as the rugged west coast of Ireland reinforces the chasm between Garda sergeant Brendan Gleeson and FBI agent Don Cheadle, who find themselves teamed after a body turns up in Galway shortly after a vast sum of drug money goes missing in the States. Putting an amusing transatlantic spin on the kind of mismatched partner policiers that Hollywood seemingly never tires of making (viz the 48HRS, Lethal Weapon and Rush Hour series), this has been hailed in some quarters as a comic triumph on a par with In Bruges (2008), a buddy romp directed by McDonagh's older brother Martin, which paired Gleeson with Colin Farrell. However, while this has some hilarious moments, the demarcation between funny man and stooge is too rigid, with the consequence that while Gleeson is able to revel in his character's knockabout buffoonery and unregenerate boorishness, Cheadle is often reduced to mugging reaction shots that damningly expose the sketchiness of the script.

From the outset, it's obvious that Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong, and David Wilmot are the smugglers planning a huge cocaine drop off Gleeson's patch. But McDonagh treats the deal as a macguffin that brings Cheadle to the windswept terrain where Gleeson is a law unto himself. He disapproves of the corruption of his superiors, but isn't above consorting with prostitutes or helping himself to the drugs he finds at crime scenes. Indeed, only dying mother Fionnula Flanagan (who is every bit as foul mouthed as he is) seems able to rein him in. Therefore, Cheadle has as much chance as recently arrived Dubliner Rory Keenan (complete with Romanian bride Kararina Cas) of coercing Gleeson into handling the case by the book.

With its guitar and trumpet score by Calexico and the byplay between Cheadle and Gleeson occasionally recalling that between Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (1974), this could almost be described as a `potato Western'. However, the comedy also has a screwball feel and McDonagh maintains a wisecracking pace while keeping the focus firmly on the odd couple, whose eventual nabbing of the crooks feels almost accidental.

Feeding off Cheadle's generous underplaying, Gleeson plays every pratfall and politically incorrect utterance to the hilt and his bravado is matched by Larry Scott's restless camerawork and Chris Gill's crisp cutting, which greatly enhances the timing of the sight gags. The humour is not always as scabrous as it could be, but McDonagh avoids gratuitous snipes and Keystonesque slapstick in telling his mock heroic tale with a confidence that bodes well for the future.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, however, will be pressed to top his directorial debut. Opening up the Bob Glaudini play in which he had starred off Broadway, Hoffman gives Jack Goes Boating the kind of low-key authenticity that made such early television transfers as Marty (1955) so engaging. He never quite disguises the stage origins, with the scene transitions being particularly stubborn and the dialogue sometimes seeming a touch declamatory. But the performances are impeccable and it's a relief to know that someone in America is prepared to make a movie about middle-aged people going about their daily lives.

Hoffman and best buddy John Ortiz are limousine drivers in New York. They don't say much and when they do speak it's in staccato bursts and usually concerns Hoffman's love of reggae and his ambition to work for the city's MTA transit authority. Ortiz is married to Daphne Rubin-Vega, who works in a Brooklyn funeral parlour with Amy Ryan, whom she thinks could be Hoffman's soulmate.

There's certainly a vague interest on both sides after the first meeting, but neither wants to rush into things. Ryan is a serial loser, whose propensity for misfortune recently caused her to be assaulted on the subway, while Hoffman is so unused to talking to strangers that he succumbs to coughing fits whenever he gets nervous. Besides, no one falls in love in the depth of an East Coast winter and Hoffman takes advantage of the hiatus to take a cookery class, so he can make Ryan a romantic dinner, and some swimming lessons with Ortiz, in case the worst happens during the boat trip he has promised they will take in Central Park.

Unfortunately, as Ryan and Hoffman grow closer, Ortiz and Rubin-Vega begin to drift apart, especially when an adulterous interlude they both hoped they had survived comes back to haunt them. Consequently, the long-awaited dinner party descends into a slanging match that ensures the evening will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Considering he must know the play inside out, Hoffman rather surprisingly allows the final act to overheat. Moreover, he lets the leads lapse into the kind of actorly attitudes that spellbind theatre audiences but are always magnified into grandiloquence by the camera. Nevertheless, this is consistently entertaining and touching, with Hoffman matching Ernest Borgnine's bluff geniality in Delbert Mann's adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's teleplay and Ryan capturing Betsy Blair's sense of spinsterly modesty and fragility.

The fireworks come from Ortiz and Rubin-Vega, however, who were also part of the LAByrinth troupe that mounted the original production. Whereas Hoffman and Ryan accept the cards dealt to them, this bickering couple can't resist wondering what might have happened had they not patched up their differences and gone their separate ways, with Ortiz especially resenting the emasculation that his surface swagger doesn't always succeed in hiding.

As for Hoffman's direction, he achieves a nice blend of reflection and anticipation in the slow-motion montages that have been evocatively photographed by W. Mott Hupfel III and illuminated by the mournful jazz passages in Evan Lurie's instrumental score. Moreover, he keeps the camerawork simple. But it would be nice to see him tackle something that challenges him to be more overtly cinematic.

Partially exploiting the travails that made him such an persistent tabloid target, Mel Gibson essays another man whose inability to communicate persuades him to seek unlikely assistance in Jodie Foster's The Beaver. Working from a script by Kyle Killen that was rejected by a number of high-profile directors, this bears a passing similarity to Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl (2007), in which Ryan Gosling takes emotional solace in an inflatable doll. However, a surfeit of sub-plots deflects attention from the central storyline, with the result that viewers are never sure who they are supposed to be rooting for or why.

Toy manufacturer Gibson has been depressed for so long that his business has slumped and long-suffering wife Foster can no longer tolerate the adverse effect his clumsy suicide attempts and prolonged silences are having on sons Anton Yelchin and Riley Thomas Stewart. Indeed, the former is so terrified that he will turn out like his father that he has amassed a post-it list of common traits and vowed to eradicate them from his personality. Ironically, Yelchin profits from the inability of his classmates to express themselves, as he charges them to write homework assignments. But he is particularly intrigued when cheerleader Jennifer Lawrence asks him to compose her valedictory speech and he begins hanging around her on the pretext of researching his subject.

Meanwhile, Foster has thrown Gibson out of the family home and, in returning from a liquor store, he finds a scruffy beaver puppet in a dumpster. He takes it back to his hotel room on a whim. But when he hears it shout at him as he prepares to jump from the balcony, Gibson becomes convinced that the beaver's Cockney brogue will enable him to salvage his hopeless situation. However, while Stewart is vaguely taken by the toy that never leaves his father's left hand, Foster and Yelchin are aghast that Gibson seems to have surrendered his personality to what he insists is a prescription puppet.

An already strange story takes an even more bizarre turn when Gibson becomes something of a celebrity when a new line of beaver toys takes off and Foster allows him to come home and even agrees to a ménage that must surely be in line for a Razzie nomination at the very least. However, the downward spiral was already irreversible long before this, as the tone lurches between awkward comedy, unsubtle satire and mawkish melodrama. Yet, to his credit, Gibson delivers a committed and often discomfiting (if not always convincing) performance, while Lawrence shows well as the popular girl trying to hide her grief for a deceased brother. The primary problems lie in the script, but Foster's direction lacks the authority or conviction to prevent it from becoming much more than a grotesque curio.

A furry creature is treated with considerably less respect in Tyrannosaur, as a drunken Peter Mullan staggers out of the pub and brutally sets about his dog in a bout of self-pitying fury that would condemn most characters for the remainder of the picture. But he retains a flicker of decency that enables him to acknowledge his flaws and seek redemption in Paddy Considine's expansion of his 2007 short, Dog Altogether. Following in the wake of Gary Oldman (Nil By Mouth; 1997), Tim Roth (The War Zone, 1999) and Samantha Morton (The Unloved, 2009), this is another uncompromising slice of social realism from a British actor making their directorial debut. Yet none of this quartet matches the cinematic, dramatic and comic skill demonstrated by Mullan in his own first feature, Orphans (1997).

Despite mocking the wife whose size inspires the film's title, widower Mullan has never really come to terms with her death. He now faces losing best pal Robin Butler to cancer and his bitterness not only causes him to kill his pet, but also to smash a post office window during a daytime tantrum. Seeking shelter in a charity shop, he makes the acquaintance of volunteer Olivia Colman. Initially, he derides her faith in God and her fellow human beings as a bourgeois luxury that those enduring real hardship cannot afford. But Colman suffers grievously at the hands of husband Eddie Marsan, a small man with a short fuse and a cowardly habit of begging forgiveness after each merciless outburst.

Much of the violence takes place off screen, although Considine refuses to flinch from its severity and its debilitating effect on Colman. However, he goes too far in having Marsan urinate on her for falling asleep on the sofa and the drama only edges back towards credibility when Colman decides to flee and starts to forge a bond with Mullan after he offers her sanctuary. Indeed, Considine even allows them a few moments of light relief, as Mullan's regular drinking companion, Ned Dennehy, takes a shine to Colman and they drown their sorrows at Butler's funeral. Colman also encourages Mullan to stand up to neighbour Paul Popplewell for bullying stepson Samuel Bottomley. But, even though there's a glint of optimism in the redemptive denouement, this is not the kind of picture in which a happy ending can be trusted.

Plumping for the kind of scuffed Loachian naturalism that mentor Shane Meadows prefers over relentless BritGrit miserabilism, Considine is too preoccupied with performance to make much of Simon Rogers's prosaic interiors or Erik Alexander Wilson's equally functional camerawork. However, he is fortunate in being able to call on such a dependable leading trio, with Marsan chillingly shifting from seething to snivelling, Mullan persuasively combining self-loathing with a longing to improve himself and Colman movingly realising that she has wasted her life on an undeserving man and that she stands more chance of a better future if she relies on herself than faith.

Australian novelist Julia Leigh's first foray into film, Sleeping Beauty, is a very different kind of grim fairytale. Inspired by a pair of novellas - Yasunari Kawabata's The House of Sleeping Beauties and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores - it bears the imprimatur of Jane Campion (who `presents' the picture) and shares her provocative attitude to the depiction of women on screen and the tyranny of the so-called `male gaze'. Yet the clearest filmic influences on this eerie treatise on sexual power games come from Luis Buñuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Stanley Kubrick and Michael Haneke, which not only muddies the philosophical waters around this determinedly postmodern parable, but also gives the action a perversely old-fashioned feel that is more redolent of pastiche than personal style.

Whether to fund her studies or satisfy a disconcerting psychological craving, the impassive Emily Browning undertakes a series of benumbing jobs in offices and cafés. She even consents to having balloon tubes fed down her throat as part of a medical experiment. But she finds her most exacting employment in the dubiously high-class establishment run by Rachael Blake in an imposing mansion. Initially, she serves drinks in lingerie and intimately indicative lipstick. But she is soon promoted to the Sleeping Beauty Chamber, where she is drugged to spend the night with clients who are permitted to indulge any non-penetrative fantasy. Browning is promised that she will not remember a thing the next day. But, after she is scorched with a cigarette during her second experience, she determines to discover what potential delights and indignities she is subjecting herself to and secretes a camera in the boudoir.

Like many writers before her, Leigh struggles to find a audiovisual equivalent to the authorial voice. Consequently, Browning remains an enigma, whose interiority is unfathomable and whose actions often seem capricious and contrivedly reckless (whether it's picking up strangers in bars or burning her wages). But it's the vacuum that exists when Browning is comatose that proves the most problematic, as it exposes the scantiness of the self-consciously elliptical storyline and Leigh's inexperience as a film-maker. Her dialogue is often stilted, most notably in Browning's encounters with dying friend Ewen Leslie and first client Peter Carroll's interminable summation of Ingeborg Bachmann's story `The Thirtieth Year'. But it's her failure to create anything of significance out of Browning's courageous bid to jettison her child star image, Geoffrey Simpson's resolute cinematography and Annie Beauchamp's stern production design that most betrays her literary origins and the cynicism of her attempt to implicate the viewer in the picture's calculated voyeurism.

The fable is altogether sharper and sweeter in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, a literary companion to his 1985 filmic fantasy, The Purple Rose of Cairo. The recipient of four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Direction and Original Screenplay, this is the latest supposed return to form for a prolific auteur who may have become increasingly inconsistent in recent years, but who has never ceased to amuse devotees with his wry observations on life, death and everything in between. There's no denying the fact that he has had the odd misfire since his private life started making more headlines than his pictures. But, even a mediocre Allen movie contains more memorable one-liners than a blockbusting romp concocted by the Farrelly brothers or Judd Apatow and this love letter to the City of Lights is also replete with nostalgic charm and melancholic wisdom.

Unlike fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her Tea Party-supporting parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), screenwriter Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is so completely seduced by the French capital that he suggests quitting Hollywood and relocating so he can finish his first novel. Teasing him for being a hopeless romantic, Inez hooks them up on a series of sightseeing trips with her old college tutor Paul (Michael Sheen) and his partner Carol (Nina Arianda) and Gil is appalled as Paul shows off his half-digested knowledge at Versailles, L'Orangerie and the Rodin Museum, where Gil is so embarrassed by Paul erroneously contradicting the tour guide (Carla Bruni) that he later returns to apologise.

Frustrated by Inez's inability to see through Paul's bluster and a bit tipsy after a wine tasting, Gil encourages her to go dancing and wanders off alone through the backstreets of Montmartre. Sitting under a streetlight as the clock strikes midnight, Gil is surprised to see a vintage yellow Peugeot pull up and its passengers beckon him into the back seat. Convinced they must be bright young things returning from a black tie dinner, he is amazed when they introduce themselves as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) and whisk him off to a party where Cole Porter (Yves Heck) plays the piano, Josephine Baker (Sonia Rolland) dances and Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) holds forth about books, war, manliness and being true to one's talent.

Having always been entranced by the Jazz Age, Gil immediately feels at home and, when Inez refuses to accompany him the following evening, he joins TS Eliot (David Lowe) in a car bound for the home of Alice B. Toklas (Thérèse Bourou-Rubinsztein) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). The latter agrees to read his novel and introduces him to Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) and his companion Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who has also been the mistress and muse of Modigliani and Braque. Smitten from the moment she praises his writing, Gil can't wait to get back to the 1920s. However, he is dismayed to learn that Adriana has run away with Hemingway and has to spend the evening with to Man Ray (Tom Cordier), Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van) and Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody), who keeps fixating on rhinoceroses.

Unaware that his prospective father-in-law has hired a detective (Gad Elmaleh) to see where he goes each night, Gil passes an amiable hour on the Left Bank and buys some gramophone records from a stall run by Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), who shares his love of the past. However, his dream is about to be shattered, as Adriana reveals she finds the present insufferably dull and pines for La Belle Époque. At midnight, a horse carriage transports them to Maxim's, where Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Vincent Menjou Cortes), Paul Gauguin (Olivier Rabourdin) and Edgar Degas (François Rostain) convince her to remain to pursue her ambition to become a fashion designer.

Heartbroken, but roused from his reverie, Gil returns to the hotel to accuse Inez of having an affair with Paul and announce his intention of remaining in France. As night falls, he ventures down to the Seine and bumps into Gabrielle for a stroll in the rain that suggests he has finally found a way of having the best of all worlds.

From its opening montage of Parisian landmarks in touristic sunshine, cinematic rain and electric darkness, this is an unalloyed pleasure. It helps enormously to be on Allen's wavelength, especially as it's not always easy to distinguish between the pseudo-intellectual pomposity of charlatans like Paul and the writer-director's own haute culture pretensions. But gags like Gil's determined attempt to coax a bemused Buñuel into seeing merit of the scenario he would eventually make as The Exterminating Angel are priceless. Moreover, it's impossible to resist basking in the affectionate glow cast by the members of the lost generation, who are played with effortless ease by a magnificent ensemble.

Wilson and Cotillard also excel, with the former amusingly parodying both West Coast vacuity and Allen's trademark nebbishness. Indeed, everything impresses here, whether it's Darius Khondji's lustrous photography or the period trappings unearthed by art directors Anne Seibel, Jean-Yves Rabier and Hélène Dubreuil. But it's Allen who is most deserving of praise, as he finally returns to the era that spawned the music that inspires him - as well as the scene of that joyous episode in Everyone Says I Love You (1996) - to lament that, for all the past's enticement, there is no escaping the present and that we should make the best of it or it will never become some future dreamer's idea of perfection.