Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 16/2/2012)

Arriving in France to try and patch things up with estranged wife Delphine Chuillot and see his six year-old daughter Julie Papillon, American academic Ethan Hawke finds himself on the run after Chuillot calls the cops for his breach of a restraining order. In a brief exchange with Papillon, he explains that he has been in hospital rather than prison, but no further explanation is offered for the situation that causes him to be robbed on a bus and stranded in a seedy hotel run by Samir Guesmi, who offers him a job as doorman at a dodgy backstreet lock-up.

Clearly a more resourceful person (or one with less to hide) would have gone to the US Embassy and reported the theft. But Hawke prefers to skulk around the city and accept an invitations to a literary soirées from bookseller Geoffrey Carey, who recognises him from the photo on the dust jacket of his sole novel. Evidently given the night off from staring at a CCTV screen and admitting leery-looking character to rendezvous with an unseen Mr Big, Hawke goes to the party, where he proves something of a letdown to Carey's highbrow sister Judith Burnett. However, widowed Franco-Romanian translator Kristin Scott Thomas is intrigued by him and gives him her card in the hope of an assignation at her apartment in the Fifth Arrondisement.

Hawke isn't short on offers, however, as Polish waitress Joanna Kulig also has the hots for him. However, as obnoxious neighbour Mamadou Minte points out, she is Guesmi's girl and he demands money to stop him blabbing what he thinks he knows. The blackmail threat backfires, however, as Minte is found murdered in the toilet he has previously fouled with such abandon and Hawke is briefly detained before Guesmi is charged with the crime. He is also summoned from Kulig's bed in the small hours when Papillon goes missing and he promises Chuillot he will find her.

However, in order to deliver his daughter from the dark woods full of creepy crawlies and other sinister creatures, Hawke has to strike a deal with Scott Thomas, who is remarkably reluctant to let her new lover go - even though she committed suicide some two decades earlier.

Long based in Oxford, Pawlikowski has been through the mill in recent times. In 2006, he opted to abandon his adaptation of Magnus Mills's novel The Restraint of Beasts (even though it was 60% completed) in order to nurse his dying wife. Subsequently, he struggled to raise funds for Sister of Mercy, about a Polish nun under suspicion of collaborating with the Communist regime, and a study of the Josef Stalin's early career that is currently being rewritten by Ben Hopkins under the title The Revolution According to Kamo. It would be a distinct pleasure, therefore, to declare The Woman in the Fifth a cogently scripted, stylishly staged and teasingly satisfying triumph. But, sadly, it is none of these things.

Despite featuring in almost every scene, Hawke remains entirely unknowable. Yet, such is surly mien that it's difficult to care whether he is a misunderstood victim clinging to the last vestiges of sanity or a paranoid danger to himself and others. The screenplay doesn't help matters, as it lurches between inconclusive encounters and contrived incidents with the clumsiness of a rough draft, while the dialogue is often as gauche as Julia Leighi's more purple patches in Sleeping Beauty (see this weeki's DVD column).

As always, Scott Thomas rises above her material to exude an irresistible femme fatality, while Kulig is sweetly trusting as the barmaid whose bedside photos may harbour secrets of their own. But their efforts, along with those of cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski, production designer Benoît Barouh and composer Max de Wardener, aren't enough to conceal the potholes or bind the loose ends of this muddled malice in Wonderland saga. Let's hope we don't have to wait long for Pawlikowski's take on the James Meek novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent so we can return to championing this brave and talented film-maker.

Reacting against cinéma vérité and the stark diktats of the Dogme95 manifesto, French auteur Bruno Dumont has consistently eschewed manipulative realism to focus in excruciating detail on the bodies and often aberrant behaviour of his characters in order to coerce audiences into feeling emotion rather than pondering the political and intellectual consequences of spectating. Rooted in the stark truthfulness of Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, uncompromising features like La Vie de Jésus (1997), L'Humanité (1999) and Flanders (2006) have divided critics as to whether they were fearlessly poetic or fatuously pretentious.

The debate is bound to continue with Hadewijch, which arrives in this country three years after its domestic release and seems likely to spark controversy with its intense discussion of the connection between spirituality, worldly disillusion and terrorism. Many will find the central conceit deeply flawed. But there is no denying the cinematic power of this audacious comparison of Christian and Islamic concepts of love.

Such is the fervour of her love of Christ that 20 year-old theology student Julie Sokolowski has entered a convent to test her vocation. However, so conspicuous are her acts of abstinence and self-abasement that prioress Michelle Ardenne complains to mother superior Brigitte Mayeux-Clerget and Sokolowski is sent back to her parents, low-ranking government minister Luc-François Bouyssonie and the haughtily disapproving Marie Castelain.

Initially distraught by her ejection, Sokolowski sobs at the shrine situated outside a chapel in the woods near the convent. But she soon resumes a mundane routine of watching television, walking her pet dog and wandering into churches to pray and listen to rehearsing musicians. However, she meets Arab youth Yassine Salime in a café and he invites her to a concert that evening on the banks of the Seine. Despite his clumsy attempt to put his arm around her, Sokolowski invites him to lunch on the Île Saint-Louis and is embarrassed by her father's awkward attempts to make conversation and her mother's utter disdain for her guest.

Back on the street, Salime is nettled by a bourgeois stranger's deprecating reaction to seeing him with a white girl and speeds off across Paris on his stolen scooter, with Sokolowski momentarily forgetting her piety to enjoy the illicit sense of liberation. However, when they stop for a drink, she tells Salime that there is no prospect of them becoming a couple as she has dedicated her chastity to Jesus. He shrugs off his evident disappointment and suggests Sokolowski meets his older brother (Karl Sarafidis), as he is equally committed to his faith and even gives classes in the high-rise project where they live.

While setting up this side of the story, Dumont pauses to introduce David Dewale, a labourer working on a site close to the convent, who was arrested for breaching the terms of his parole on the same day that Sokolowski was expelled. But, while he serves his time, Sokolowski becomes convinced by Sarafidis that God has chosen her to turn her devotion into action and she accompanies him to an unspecified war zone to see the mistreatment of Muslims at first hand and meet the jihadists leading the fightback.

On returning to Paris, Sokolowski conspires with Sarafidis to plant a bomb near the Arc de Triomphe before seeking sanctuary in the convent. Following an off-camera police interview, Sokolowski shelters from the rain with novice Sabrina Lechêne and Dewale, who is repairing the guttering of a garden outhouse. They exchange the merest glances, but Dewale seems to recognise a kindred spirit and, when Sokolowski hurries away to submerge herself in a nearby pond, he raises her from the water like a latterday John the Baptist.

Making compelling use of Yves Cape's close-ups almost to peer into Sokolowki's soul in the same manner that Carl Theodor Dreyer did with Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), Dumont earnestly examines the ease with which religious faith can become fanaticism. Few will be able to draw ready comparisons between her beliefs and those of the eponymous 13th-century Flemish mystic who advocated divine adoration over romantic love. But this is infinitely more accessible than Dumont's earlier outings and it's only the shocking Middle Eastern sequence and the suddenness of both Sokolowski's conversion and salvation that strain credibility.

Recalling Émilie Dequenne's determined opacity in the Dardenne drama Rosetta (1999), Sokolowski gives a touching neophyte display of vulnerable impassivity. But she struggles to convey the impressionable immaturity and hopeless sense of betrayal that would persuade someone so besotted with a God of contemplative love to despair at his distance from her and throw in her lot with a deity demanding affirmative action. Moreover, Dumont himself labours the point that, regardless of one's creed, total detachment from the corporeal world is fraught with danger. Thus, the connection between relentlessly pursued faith and violence is never satisfactorily made, with the consequence that the climactic narrative leaps seem all the more specious and self-consciously ambiguous.

Dutch-Indonesian documentarist Leonard Retel Helmrich has been following the Sjamsuddin family for a decade. He first encountered the devoutly Christian Rumidjah and her Muslim son Bachtiar in The Eye of the Day (2001), as they came to terms with new liberties following the resignation of the notorious President Suharto in May 1998. Six years later, he caught up with them again in Shape of the Moon, as Rumidjah left Bachtiar to raise his niece Theresia in Jakarta while she returned to her native village. Now, they are reunited for what Retel Helmrich has claimed will be the final time, in Position Among the Stars, which adds new wife Sriwyati to the combustible domestic mix and reveals the extent to which Western attitudes are impacting on the world's biggest Islamic community.

Concerned that Tari is about to flunk her final exams, Bakti travels to the country to coax Rumidjah away from the humble shack she shares with elderly friend Tumisah. Having been forced to ride part of the way on a moped cart after the train failed to stop at a remote halt, the pair arrive in the capital where Rumidjah soon realises that Bakti is struggling to make ends meet as a neighbourhood manager. Moreover, while he has a decent relationship with his yung son Bagus, he is hard pressed to keep Tari away from the local shopping mall and focused on her studies and Sri from complaining that he hasn't got her pregnant and does nothing to help with her fast food stall.

The situation deterioriates further when Bakti buys Sri a new gas ring and it promptly catches light and then uses the holy mosque water she hopes will increase their fertility on the fighting fish he breeds for gambling purposes. She gets her revenge by cooking the fish in an omelette and Bakti is so furious that he smashes up her kitchen utensils.

He's not entirely useless, though, as he helps buddy Dwi hide the luxury items in his backstreet home so he can plead poverty to the visiting benefit inspector and promises Tari he will do whatever it takes to secure the grant she needs to continue her education. But, by this stage, it has become increasingly clear that if Retel Helmrich isn't exactly experimenting with scripted reality he is certainly stage-managing events.

Tari's tantrum when Bakti hires a horse buggy for her graduation ceremony seems authentic enough, but her nocturnal motorcycle ride across the city to watch a wall of death show seems as choreographed as Bagus's sprint through the narrow streets with a stolen item of clothing, which not only contains several meticulously planned camera set-ups, but also bears more than a passing resemblance to a sequence in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Even the close-ups of the rats and cockroaches scurrying around the neighbourhood seem self-consciously arty, as does the chemical cloud that fills the street as it's sprayed against dengue fever.

Yet there are glimpses of everyday interaction and fascinating insights into the clash of tradition and progress in this teeming metropolis. A small boy wails his sense of betrayal after his mother promised that his circumcision wouldn't hurt, while Bakti denounces Rumidjah for taking Bagus to a Catholic church (which could jeopardise his prospects if the mosque elders ever found out) and lectures Tari for risking her reputation by holding hands with a boy in the marketplace.

For a teenager accustomed to Facebooking and singing pop songs with friends Linda and Anjelita, this abrupt reminder of old-fashioned morality and the weight of expectation upon her proves timely, as it coincides with Rumidjah's decision to pawn her house to the bank so that Tari can become the first in the family to go to university. Thus, as she rides a taxi that seems to be speeding her into the future, grandma heads home to present Tumisah with a gas ring she refuses to use (even though she is too old to keep collecting firewood) and they sing a childhood song in the cemetery, with Rumidjah confident that she will soon find her place beside God among the stars.

It seems slightly odd that the final part of the trilogy should receive a theatrical release when the earlier episodes were confined to the festival circuit. Yet, while this will undoubtedly prove more engaging to those already familiar with the Sjamsuddins, it can be viewed in isolation. However, even newcomers will be struck by the brazen playing to camera and the slickness of the Steadicam shots. The footage is most convincing when Retel Helmrich and co-photographer Ismail Fahmi Lubish employ long takes. But his surfeit of directorial flourishes undermines this vérité approach, while his failure to delve beneath the surface or place issues like religion, consumerism, urban sprawl or the status of women in a wider context mean that this often comes perilously close to docu-soap.

Leanne Pooley proves more respectful and revealing in The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, which makes expert use of live clips and archive footage to profile Jools and Lynda Topp, the identical lesbians who are as renowned for their political activisim as for the distinctive brand of character sketch and yodelling country music that has made them as popular on the comedy circuit as Flight of the Conchords stars and fellow New Zealanders, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie.

Born in Huntly in 1958, the sisters were raised on a Waikato dairy farm and began performing as children to entertain parents Jean and Peter, as well as their friends and animals. In the 1980s, following a short stint in the army, they started busking and developed a cult following as they toured the country and became involved with such causes as gay pride, Reclaim the Night, Maori land rights and nuclear disarmament. They also played a prominent role in the anti-apartheid protests against the 1981 tour by the South African rugby union team.

By the end of the decade, the Topps were playing to full houses across the world and their album were riding high in the charts. Moreover, they began adding sketches to their act and characters like beer-swilling farmers Ken Smythe and Ken Moller, country gals Belle and Bell Gingham, the doughty Camp Mother and Camp Leader, crown green bowling ladies Mavis and Lorna and social climbers Dilly and Prue Ramsbottom became more popular when the Topps were offered their own TV show.

All seemed to be going well, with Lynda and Jools respectively dating Donna Luxton and Mary Massara. But, in 2006, Jools was diagnosed with breast cancer and battled back from a mastectomy to campaign for cancer charities and include her experiences in the live show. These sequences are easily the most affecting, as Jools courageously allowed herself to be filmed at her lowest ebb. But this is very much a celebration with fellow comics Paul Horan and John Clarke, musicians Don McGlashan, Billy Bragg and Nancy Kiel, and activists like Charmaine Poutney, Mereana Pitman and Rosie Horton joining with former Prime Minister Helen Clark in praising the Topps for their contribution to so many aspects of Kiwi life.

However, while this may be the most commercially successful documentary in New Zealand screen history, it seems a curious choice for a UK theatrical release, even though the Topps will guest at live Q&A sessions following the screenings at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill and the Clapham Picturehouse on 18 and 20 February.