Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 29/3/2012)

This week, however, a feature is being released that puts the rest into perspective. The quality of its content is almost irrelevant. What is important is that Jafar Panahi defied the sentence of an Iranian court to tell the world that, while his movements may be limited, he remains unbowed in his determination to express himself both politically and artistically. In so doing, he has demonstrated a level of courage that few directors have been forced to exhibit in the 117-year history of the projected moving image and his audacity merits the respect of audiences everywhere.

Panahi may be coerced into remaining within the confines of his Tehran apartment in This Is Not a Film. But, by even appearing before Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's camera, he was risking much more than he did in making such humanist gems of The Circle, White Balloon (both 2000), Crimson Gold (2003) and Offside (2006).

Arrested on 1 March 2010 for supposedly producing `propaganda against the Islamic Republic', Panahi was banned from filming under the terms of his appeal, while awaiting the verdict in a case that could see him jailed for six years and prohibited from writing or directing a motion picture for two decades. But born subversives will always find a way and this record of his activities on 15 March 2011 demonstrates a self-deprecating wit to match Panahi's fierce intelligence and undaunted courage.

With his wife and children away visiting grandparents, Panahi invites Mirtahmasb over to discuss some ideas before listening to his answer-phone messages, one of which features his son explaining that he set up the camera currently shooting, so his father could not have contravened any bail conditions. Somewhat amused by their subterfuge, but obviously aware of the potential peril in which they're placing themselves, the pair embark upon `an effort' that initially involves Panahi playing all the characters in a reading from a screenplay about a young woman who has been prevented from attending university by her father locking her in her room.

Striding between pieces of masking tape laid Dogville-like on the floor to delineate the scenario setting, Panahi circumvents the proscription on giving interviews by expressing himself through the dialogue. But, even though he is careful not to depict anyone other than himself so they cannot get into trouble for collaborating with him, this isn't quite a one-man show. Igi the iguana makes a guest appearance, as does the yapping dog of downstairs neighbour Shima. However, Panahi eventually shares the frame with the unnamed student who comes to collect his rubbish in the absence of the building manager and Panahi chats amiably with him about the day he was arrested as they take the elevator to the ground floor to the increasingly cacophonous sound of the Fireworks Wednesday celebrations marking the Iranian new year.

Even this seemingly throwaway sequence is loaded with significance, however, as Panahi had earlier watched a news bulletin in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for fireworks to be made illegal Indeed, he seems to take comfort from the skyline beyond his balcony that he is not alone in disagreeing with the president and his ideas.

Panahi's plight is clear from the phone conversation he has with his lawyer while waiting for Mirtahmasb to arrive. But his bullish good spirits are equally evident throughout this audacious video diary and the eschewal of self-pity or self-justification reveals just how aware this master film-maker is of the bigger picture.

Confinement of a very different kind comes under scrutiny in Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, a typically acute and challenging documentary by Werner Herzog, in which the ever-inquisitive German investigates the manner in which lawful executions are carried out in a Texan jail. Making no bones about his position on capital punishment, Herzog eschews facts and figures and avoids proselytising to concentrate on those left to face the consequences and deal with the heartache of the callous murder of 50 year-old nurse Sandra Stotler, her 17 year-old son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson by Michael Perry and Jason Burkett in order to steal a red Chevrolet Camaro from a gated Montgomery community within the town of Conroe in October 2001.

Meeting Perry for the first time just eight days before he was due to face a lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, Herzog explains that they don't have to like each other to conduct their interview and the 28 year-old grins back more like a goofy schoolboy than a cold-blooded killer. But, as Herzog reveals from crime scene footage, there was nothing accidental about the way in which Stotler was shot and her body deposited in the nearby Crater Lake. Yet, while Perry was condemned to death, Burkett received only a life sentence after his father Delbert delivered an emotional plea for clemency that he reprises for Peter Zeitlinger's camera.

Herzog concedes that Conroe is a tough place to grow up, especially on the wrong side of the tracks. But he refuses to make excuses for Perry and Burkett, just as he declines to pass judgement on them. Yet his the insistence of his off-screen questioning ensures that he denies perpetrators and victims alike a place to hide and some of the most powerful contributions come from Lisa Stotler-Balloun (the daughter, sister and aunt of the deceased, who feels a palpable sense of release after Perry dies), veteran Death Room captain Fred Allen (who suddenly saw the barbarity of capital vengeance after overseeing over 125 executions) and chaplain Richard Lopez, who has administered the last rites to countless inmates in various states of penitence and defiance.

Perry protested his innocence to the last. But, even though there is no doubt about guilt that Herzog establishes in much the same forensic manner that Truman Capote employed in delving into the case of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock for the 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, he remains fiercely opposed to the maxim of an eye for an eye. Once again demonstrating the affinity for environment that has long been the cornerstone of his factual and fictional cinema, Herzog exposes the chasm where the American soul once resided and yet still retains a weary compassion for both those seemingly incapable of avoiding wrong and those convinced they have right on their side.

Events have overtaken The Island President, Jon Shenk's profile of Maldive president Mohamed Nasheed, as he was forced to resign on 7 February 2012 (reportedly at gunpoint) following weeks of unrest on the streets of his idyllic Indian Ocean archipelago. But, even though the Liverpool-educated Nasheed has been ousted from power, this remains a compelling account of his efforts to raise global awareness of the threat posed by climate change to the 1200 islands comprising his nation.

Imprisoned for his opposition to longtime dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Nasheed lacks neither courage nor conviction. He also has a gift for publicity and stunts such as the underwater cabinet meeting succeed in amusing as well as alerting. Yet, despite Nasheed's impassioned ingenuity, Shenk (who intelligently exploits his unprecedented access) stresses the indifference of the emerging economic superpowers to the plight of the world's most vulnerable state and dismayingly concludes that few lessons will be learned from the Maldives becoming a paradise lost.

None of the islands making up the Maldives is more than eight foot above sea level. If carbon emissions continue at their current rate, therefore, they will disappear beneath the waves in under a decade. On taking office in 2008 (following the country's first genuinely democratic election), Mohamed Nasheed realised that expensive infrastructure projects like dykes and sea walls could only hold back the tide for so long and vowed to bring the plight of his people to the attention of the wider world in the hope of securing changes to eco policy that could retard the melting of the polar ice caps and stop water levels from rising.

Having been arrested 12 times and tortured twice during the tyrannical rule of his predecessor, Nasheed had the courage to match his energy and tenacity and he was soon bestriding the world stage to the manor born, as he addressed the United Nations, the British Parliament and any journalists who would listen to him about the deterioration of the situation since the 2004 tsunami. Prepared to be contentious to make headlines, he compared global warming to Nazism to provoke people into recognising its gravity. But he must have known when he arrived at the 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen that developing nations like India, China and Brazil, as well as industrial giants like the United States and Germany, were never going to consent to his stringent global emissions cap of 350 parts per million.

Given unprecedented access, Shenk succeeds in capturing the personality and passion of a remarkable man, who is prepared to work long hours and risk his own reputation to make his case. But Shenk is also aware of the uphill battle Nasheed faces just to make the Maldives carbon neutral, let alone transform international energy policy. Thus, when not hurtling hot on the heels of the perpetually mobile president, Shenk depicts him as a tiny figure in a vast whirl of competing agendas, whose positivity is might precipitate the odd pause for thought, but never a radical rethink.

The thin lines between fact, fiction and fabrication are trodden with teasing ease by Chilean Cristián Jiménez in Bonsai: A Story of Love, Books and Plants, a quirkily clever adaptation of poet Alejandro Zambra's bestselling novella about passion, literature and lies. But this is no precious dissertation on highbrow affectation. Indeed, in slipping between timeframes and exploring the limitations of truth and the link between creativity and deceit, Jiménez fashions a cinematic celebration of the written word that is witty, sensual and sweetly melancholic.

Revealing at the outset that would-be author Diego Noguera's soulmate dies, Jiménez switches between the college crush on feisty fellow student Nathalia Galgani that prompted the indolent Noguera to discover life after reading À la recherche du temps perdu and the tentative tenement relationship with translator neighbour Trinidad González that forces him to pen a self-reflexive tome to convince her that he is collaborating with acclaimed novelist Hugo Medina when, in fact, he had been sacked from transcribing a new handwritten manuscript because his typing fees are too excessive.

But is the text an approximation of what Noguera thinks Medina should be writing or is it simply a romanticised variation of his time with Galgani in the coastal city of Valdivia, when he was more of a reader (albeit lazy and mendacious one) than the writer he now pretends to be in Santiago? It could even be argued that the whole Galgani episode is an invention - after all they seem to spend most of their time making love or devouring the works of Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust and Raymond Carver - and that what we see are reveries rather than flashbacks to eight years earlier. And is the bonsai tree that Noguera purchases symbolic of his limited ambitions or his realisation that while his first romance never had time to grow, a second might?

The delicious uncertainty is what makes this such a captivating watch. The odd moment of deadpan comic inspiration helps, too, most notably when Noguera falls asleep while reading Proust on the beach and is left with a telltale sunburn mark on his chest that almost betrays his duplicity to Galgani on their first date. However, despite the excellent performances, as many are likely find the film's temporal and emotional shifts as frustrating as Noguera's inability to grow up and tell the truth.

But, as in his debut feature, Optical Illusions (2009), Jiménez proves a teasing storyteller and he is ably abetted by cinematographer Inti Briones, whose lustrous images are wittily and precisely assembled by editor Soledad Salfate. Even the use of both Bach's Cello Suites and the rhythmic rock of indie band Panico amusingly emphasises the contrasts between highbrow aspiration and middlebrow reality and the grand amour that Noguera so craves and the perfunctory physicality for which he has to settle.

Adhering to the old adage of writing about what you know best, Lena Dunham makes a distinct impression with Tiny Furniture, a low-budget satire on life in boho Tribeca and the difficulty of finding a niche when all around are either over-achieving or revelling in their mediocrity. Casting her own mother and sister as the major sources of angst for her flailing twentysomething film studies graduate, Dunham adds some semi-autobiographical bite to a script that clearly acknowledges its fealty to Seinfeld. However, there are also flashes of Woody Allen and Mumblecore in this amusing and laudably self-aware debut.

Distraught at having broken up with her long-term boyfriend, Dunham returns from college in Ohio to the loft above the studio where mother Laurie Simmons makes a living shooting photographs that juxtapose small furniture with full-size humans. Her current model is daughter Grace Dunham, who has just won the country's most prestigious high school poetry prize. However, neither is particularly pleased to see Lena and she is relieved when they leave New York on a college scouting trip.

Left to her own devices, Dunham bumps into old friend Jemima Kirke at a party, where she also meets Alex Karpovsky, who is in town to discuss a TV show after becoming a YouTube sensation as the wisecracking Nietzschean Cowboy. Karpovsky is a rabidly self-obsessed free-loader, but Dunham invites him to crash and he is soon raiding Simmons's well-stocked larder. Kirke is also prone to helping herself to Simmons's wine supply, but at least she helps Dunham find a job as a hostess at a nearby restaurant, where she develops a sardonic friendship with bookish chef, David Call.

Things take a turn for the worse after her family gets home, with Grace humiliating Lena during an impromptu party for her school friends, Call standing her up after they make tentative plans for a date and classmate Merritt Wever imparting a few home truths after she reneges on a flat-sharing arrangement. However, she also has a film of her washing in a campus fountain in her underwear accepted for a gallery show and comes to realise that while she may not be as gifted as Simmons, Grace or Karpovsky, she has the resilience to stay true to herself and her goal - whatever it may be.

Seemingly using the film to resolve some domestic issues as well as announce herself as an artist, Dunham takes great credit for producing such a refreshingly honest and insightful comedy. She is particularly well served by Simmons and Kirke. But, schlubbing around in unflattering clothes and responding to setbacks and positives with the same non-committal expression, she also delivers an appealingly anti-heroic performance of her own. However, it's the precision of her writing and the timing of the gags that makes this so engaging and noteworthy, while cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes's use of space and distance within the contrasting interiors gives the action a context and an immediacy that reinforces Dunham's relishably deadpan wit.

Despite its adherence to the Dardenne brand of pared-down realism, Alice Rohrwacher's feature debut, Corpo Celeste, has most in common with Katell Quillévéré's Love Like Poison, with its focus on a watchful adolescent girl's growing appreciation of adult foible, religious duplicity and her own physical and emotional maturation. However, in charting Yile Vianello's struggle to settle in her native Reggio di Calabria after several years in Switzerland, Rohrwacher also considers the social, economic and cultural insularity of southern Italy and the extent to which Catholicism has contributed to its retardation.

She also uses Hélène Louvart's mobile camera to capture the dispiriting landscape and Vianello's quizzical perspective, as she seeks to find contemporary relevance in priest Salvatore Cantalupo's teachings and tries to make sense of her relationship with that unknowable man hanging on a cross.

Just turned 13 and virtually a stranger to her sisters, Vianello is struggling to adapt to life in the boot of Italy after relocating with her ailing mother Anita Caprioli, who is usually so exhausted by her exertions at a giant bakery that she has little time for her introverted daughter or her insecurities. Accustomed to chic Swiss city comforts, Vianello finds the scrubby landscape as alien as the religious ceremonies she is compelled to attend while preparing for her forthcoming confirmation. Moreover, her feelings of outsiderness are exacerbated when she is humiliated in a catechism class run by the earnest (and desperately unfulfilled) Pasqualina Scuncia, who changes the lyrics to pop songs in a cringeworthy effort to dupe the kids into thinking God is trendy.

Vianello also finds herself bemused by the Fr Cantalupo's conduct of mass and her fascination with him alternately amuses and appals the rest of the congregation. However, the tetchy prelate is too preoccupied with backing the right-wing candidate in the upcoming mayoral election and his own promotion prospects (with their attendant hope that he might be transferred somewhere far away from this backward backwater) to minister to his flock. Yet, when he passes Vianello while en route to the ghost village of Roghudi to fetch the crucifix from the abandoned church to replace the neon effort in his own rather soulless modern edifice, he offers her a lift and they chat awkwardly as they travel along the Ionian coast.

Perplexed by getting her first period in transit, Vianello is glad to slip away by herself and meets ageing priest Renato Carpentieri, who translates passages from the gospels that Santa had suggested she took on trust and paints a picture of Christ as an angry man at odds with the shortcomings of his followers and the iniquities of his time. Thus, she has plenty to think about as she heads home with Cantalupo. But a bizarre traffic accident causes the crucifix to fly into the sea and makes up Vianello's mind what she must do when the confirmation service starts.

It's clear from the opening shot of the Marian procession over parched terrain and under a road bridge and from the images of despised immigrants scrabbling in rubbish tips for salvageable items that this is a dirt poor community. But, while one might expect faith to not just be a consolation, but also a necessity, the locals are too busy getting by to adhere to rigid Catholicism. Thus, Santa slaps Vianello in class and later orders some boys to dispose of some kittens in the cruellest manner possible. Even Cantalupo is not above pausing a ritual to answer his mobile phone or plead with the bishop to end his penance and deliver him from this unholy place.

But, while Rohrwacher draws on her documentary background to capture the look and feel of the locale and makes intuitive use of Louvart's handheld camera to convey Vianello's watchful perspective, she never quite manages to make the townsfolk (with the notable exception of Cantalupo) feel more than ciphers. Consequently, the scenes of quotidian life feel forced, even though they are supposed to be viewed through the eyes of a stranger (who is interestingly played by a girl who had never previously left the mountain village where she was raised in a home without electricity). Thus, while this is often socially and satirically shrewd, it occasionally comes close to being patronising and as parochial as the region it is scrutinising.

Norwegian Pål Sletaune made an impressive start to his directorial career with Junk Mail in 1997. However, neither You Really Got Me (2001) nor Next Door (2005) made much of an impact in this country and one suspects his fourth feature, Babycall, only received a theatrical release because it is headlined by Millennium trilogy star Noomi Rapace in a role that earned her the Best Actress prize at the Rome Film Festival. Bearing an uncanny likeness to Álex de la Iglesia's The Baby's Room - which formed part of the Spanish tele-series Films to Keep You Awake (2006) - it is scarcely original. However, it is competently unsettling and Rapace delivers another eye-catching performance as a paranoid single mother in danger of becoming detached from reality.

Having being forced to flee the abusive ex-husband who tried to harm their eight year-old son Vetle Qvenild Werring, Rapace moves into a new apartment in a distant town in the hope of starting afresh. However, she is so afraid for Werring that she never lets him out of her sight, even making him sleep in her bed. But, when social workers Stig Amdam and Maria Bock insist that the boy is allowed to go to school, Rapace agrees to let him have his own room, providing she can monitor him with the baby alarm she purchases from seemingly affable salesman Kristoffer Joner.

One night, Rapace thinks she hears cries of terror coming from the intercom and rushes into Werring's room to find him soundly asleep. When she asks Joner about the incident, he assures her that the device must have picked up interference from another monitor. Despite being dubious, Rapace has more to worry about, as Werring has befriended decidedly disconcerting classmate Torkil Johannes Swensen Høeg and has begun to experience what may be hallucinations (such as the appearance of blood on one of Werring's drawings and the sudden transformation of a lake into a car park), but could also just as easily be conclusive proof that something sinister is going on in the apartment.

Striving to produce a tense psychological study rather than an outright horror, Sletaune makes eerie use of Roger Rosenberg's oppressive sets and adeptly sustains the mood of unease through the combination of John Andreas Andersen's prowling camera, Tormod Ringnes and Christian Schaanning's fearsome sound design and Fernando Velazquez's skittish score. He is also superbly served by the teasingly unpredictable Joner and the magnetic Rapace, whose growing sense of derangement is sufficiently rooted in parental perturbation to remain plausible. But this is only ever superficially creepy and the flaws in the scenario become gapingly evident as Sletaune pulls the rug away in a denouement that is almost insultingly duplicitous and manipulative in its resolution and its refusal to explain a host of red herrings.

Frédéric Schoendoerffer's Switch could hardly be accused of being any more subtle. Indeed, it's hard to remember a thriller containing so many whopping contrivances. Yet, such is the propulsive nature of the storyline that it sweeps the viewer along, if only to see what far-fetched device will be used next to hurtle the action ever more recklessly towards implausibility. As the son of the Oscar-winning documentarist Pierre Schoendoerffer (who died a couple of weeks ago) and the director of the César nominated Scènes de crimes (1999) and the slick Vincent Cassel-Monica Bellucci vehicle Agents secrets (2004), Schoendoerffer clearly knows what he is doing. But this is only likely to attract fans of Pan Am's Karine Vanasse and ex-footballer Eric Cantona.

Vanasse is a fashion designer struggling to catch a break during the recession in Montreal. However, when her appointment with the buyer at a prestigious couturier is cancelled, her assistant, Maxim Roy, takes pity on Vanasse and offers to buy her lunch. As they chat, Roy suggests that Vanasse could use a vacation an recommends the Switch.com website to arrange an accommodation exchange with someone in Paris. Intrigued, Vanasse logs on, signs up and arranges a swap with Karina Testa, who has a duplex near the Eiffel Tower.

Arriving in the City of Light, Vanasse sees the sights by taxi and bicycle before making the acquaintance of Iranian architecture student Karim Saleh, who offers to be her guide if she needs some company. After an idyllic first day, Vanasse settles down to sleep. But, when she wakes next morning, she feels inexplicably rough. However, as she takes a shower to perk herself up, the front door is kicked down and Inspector Cantona and his crew burst in and arrest her for the murder of the decapitated man found in the upstairs room that had been locked the night before.

So begins a nightmare that sees Vanasse fail to convince either Cantona and sidekicks Mehdi Nebbou and Stéphane Demers that she has been framed by Testa or psychiatrist Laetitia Lacroix that she is sane. However, she proves highly resourceful when all her documents contradict her story and she persuades Cantona to take her for a dental check, as her records would be unique. But this is merely a ruse to grab a sharp implement and hold dentist Maurice Bitsch hostage until Cantona hands over his gun and phone, as well as the Testa file, and Vanasse disappears into the night in a car stolen from Japanese tourist Lika Minamoto.

Dressed in fresh clothes bought at a backstreet store run by genial African Jacob Desvarieux, Vanasse checks into a hotel and calls mother Sophie Faucher in Quebec to see whether Testa has gone through with the house swap. However, she has to listen helplessly as Faucher is murdered after entering the darkened building and Vanasse despairs on realising she now has no one to confirm her true identity.

Indeed, Testa has been actively worsening her situation. In addition to collecting the severed head of her lover and putting it in Vanasse's house before torching it, she has also slashed Roy's throat in her bathtub and boarded a flight back to France. Cantona has also been busy, after superiors Aurelien Recoing and Bruno Todeschini warn him that the headless victim's parents (Claude Lulé and Françoise Michaud)have government connections. But it's not until he stumbles on to the fact that both Michaud and Testa's sculptress mother Niseema Theillaud visited the same fertility clinic that he begins to realise Vanasse may have been telling the truth all along.

However, it takes a foot chase through the streets around Theillaud's house, a fatal reunion with Saleh and a frantic nocturnal dash to a disused iron foundry before the ordeal ends - although whether this noun applies solely to Vanasse or the audience very much depends on attitude.

Several Gallic thrillers make it across the Channel each year, but this is nowhere near as compelling as, say, Guillaume Canet's Tell No One (2006). Indeed, it feels more like a hybrid of the Liam Neeson pictures Taken (2008) and Unknown (2011) or Pawel Pawliakowski's recently released The Woman in the Fifth. The performances are solid enough, with Cantona puffing on cigarettes to emphasise his bafflement and frustration and Vanasse just about pulling off the transition from smilingly demure to determinedly psychotic. Vincent Gallot's Parisian vistas, Dominique Mazzoleni's nimble editing and Bruno Coulais's pounding score are also equally serviceable. But Schoendoerffer and Jean-Christophe Grangé's screenplay is so bereft of credibility that it might just be sufficiently absurd to become a cult classic.