Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 5/7/2012)

Setting each story on a different day of the week, the anthology opens on a Monday with actor Benecio Del Toro's directorial bow, `El Yuma', which takes its title from the local slang for an American. In the city for a week-long film school seminar, Josh Hutcherson is shown the sites by cabby Vladimir Cruz, who takes him back to his humble home for a meal of fried bananas cooked by his testy mother.

Following a misunderstanding with a flirtatious sister, Hutcherson hits the capital's nightspots with Cruz and his girlfriend and, as he becomes more intoxicated, he grows increasingly desperate to hook up with a local beauty. Unfortunately, his choice turns out to be transvestite Andros Perugorría, who nearly gets him into trouble with security at his hotel.

Another visitor strays from the tourist path in Pablo Trapero's `Jam Session', which opens with a striking one-take tracking shot that follows Serbian director Emir Kusturica from the bowels of a seedy bar into the back of Alexander Abreu's taxi and out on to the ocean terrace of the Hotel Nacional. Reluctantly in Havana as the honoured guest of a film festival, Kusturica seems intent on getting plastered after a stressful phone call with his wife back home and throws up backstage before accepting his accolade.

Refusing to attend the official dinner, he sticks with Abreu when he goes to play trumpet at a jazz club and is so moved by the music that he promises to hire him to score his next picture. As he bids farewell to the driver and his young daughter at the airport, Kusturica forgets his award and Abreu suspects that he won't be hearing from him any time soon.

Promises of overseas celebrity also inform Julio Medem's `Cecilia's Temptation', as Spanish producer Daniel Brühl tries to persuade singer Melvis Estevez to sign a contract and return with him to Europe. Aware of his crush on her, she comes back to his hotel room and slips into the shower while he makes phone calls on the balcony. However, she has misgivings on hearing Brühl joke with a colleague that he hasn't slept with her yet and she returns to the cramped apartment she shares with Leonardo Benitez, a baseball player who once passed up the chance of a lucrative contract in Puerto Rico to stay with her.

He tells her to forget Spain and says he has lined them up a raft to sail to Miami. They make love vigorously before Benitez leaves for his game, but Estevez is still tempted by Brühl's offer and is all set to take a cab back to his room when Benitez attacks them in the street. Packing angrily as Benitez slugs rum in a chair, Estevez has every intention of leaving the next morning. But, instead, she follows her heart rather than her head and meekly lies beside Benitez on the bed.

If this episode feels like a telenovela, Elia Suleiman's `Diary of a Beginner' has all the hallmarks of a wry arthouse satire. Unable to find his room in a labyrinthine hotel, Suleiman has to ask directions from a black female cleaner. Waiting for a car to take him to the Palestinian embassy, he watches a photographer snapping a pretty girl on the back seat of a vehicle that refuses to start. His own journey proves frustrating, however, as the diplomat he is meeting has problems making an appointment for him over the phone. Retaining his deadpan expression, Suleiman visits a bar once frequented by Hemingway and ignores the enticements of a hooker at the bar to take a photo of a drunken tourist and his unenamoured escort posing in front of the writer's statue.

Heading to the waterfront, Suleiman watches three women of different ages looking out to sea. Two rendezvous with friends, but the oldest continues to gaze into the distance as some youths dance to a car radio nearby. Still getting nowhere at the embassy and bored by the TV coverage of one of Fidel Castro's famously rambling speeches, Suleiman himself scans the horizon and perhaps compares Cuba and Palestine as places waiting for something to happen after decades of empty reassurance by charismatic leaders like Castro and Yasser Arafat.

There is every possibility that black schoolgirl Cristela De La Caridad Herrera is among the kids seen partying on the beach and Gaspar Noé 's `Ritual' shows her becoming so lost in the music that she kisses a white girl and takes her home. However, she is found spooning with her lover the next morning by her disapproving parents and her father takes her to a `palero' priest for a santería exorcism.

While a drum maintains a steady beat in the half-light, the priest cuts Herrera's clothing with a sharp blade and performs a series of rites before stripping and dunking her in the swamp to cleanse her of any wicked thoughts. Wrapping her in a towel, he returns Herrera to her mother, who dresses her in a clean white garment to symbolise her purification.

Across the city, Saturday arrives and Mirta Ibarra and Jorge Perugorría are woken by an alarm clock at the start of Juan Carlos Tabío's `Dulce Amargo'. Ibarra has a catering order to complete and sends her husband (who used to be somebody in the army before he started drinking) to fetch the ingredients, while she chats to soap-obsessed daughter Beatriz Dorta. Ibarra is also the mother of Melvis Estevez, who comes to collect some things and wants to let both Ibarra and her stepfather know that she loves them. Connecting the family into another storyline, Andros Perugorría pops in from the bakery to drop off some flower and try on Ibarra's new black wig.

Despite the chaos, everything seems to be running to schedule. However, a sudden power cut ruins Ibarra's meringues and she sends her spouse to find some more eggs (which seem to be in short supply in spite of a radio announcement boasting about record production by Cuban hens). Eventually, everything is ready and Ibarra takes a shower before dashing off to her second job as a behavioural psychologist on a TV show. But, while she is out, Perugorría gets a call from Estevez as she readies to set sail on a raft with Leo Benitez. Having stood by the sea wall crying in the moonlight, Ibarra lies still when the alarm goes off on Sunday morning. However, we never discover if she has died of a broken heart or simply lost the will to carry on the struggle.

The conclusion of Laurent Cantet's `The Fountain' is equally ambiguous, as elderly Nathalia Amore thinks back with quiet satisfaction on a remarkable Sunday. It started with her having a vision in which the Virgin Mary orders her to create a shrine in the corner of her tenement room. Never doubting her word for a second, Othello Rensoli and his fellow neighbours start demolishing a wall, while one group makes for a nearby building site to steal bricks and cement while another heads for the docks to bribe a warehouse manager into letting them have some cheap paint.

While an old lady sews the yellow dress that Amore has ordered, she bosses everybody around and complains about the size of the pool she wants to surround her cherished statue. But her chivvying gets results and, as Rensoli finishes the brickwork, youths go scampering to the sea to bring back buckets of water to fill the fountain. They even toss in a few fish and Amore looks on admiringly as Ibarra's food arrives and everyone gathers to sing hymns. Pleased to have brought everybody together and temporarily relieved the strain of their arduous existence, Amore sits alone and dips a hand into the water. But has she merely fallen asleep as her fingers suddenly fall still?

As a cartoon recaps highlights from the seven segments in an insert alongside the closing credits, one is left to wonder quite what this portmanteau was supposed to achieve. For the most part, Havana is presented as a vibrant city that is full of beautiful buildings, friendly people and sublime music. But fleeting allusions are also made to the poverty, intolerance, superstition, restriction and incompetence that undermine the Marxist idyll, as well as to the decadence of the foreigners whose lifestyle is supposedly so envied by some that they would risk everything to sample it.

With its hackneyed plotline, glossy visuals and melodramatic tone, Julio Medem's contribution is easily the weakest. But Benicio Del Toro's opener is little more than a shaggy dog story, while both Juan Carlos Tabío and Laurent Cantet's bustling domestic sagas feel a touch contrived in their efforts to meld Castro and Capra. Similarly, Gaspar Noé seems more intent on experimenting with avant-garde sensuality than examining Cuban life, leaving only Pablo Trapero and Elia Suleiman to reflect on the country's place in the wider world and the attitude of its citizens to endless promises of better tomorrows.

The performances are solid enough, as is the camerawork of Daniel Aranyo (who shot four of the episodes), Diego Bussel (who teamed with Trapero and Cantet) and Gaspar Noé, who produced his own chiarascuro close-ups. And, as one might expect, the music is splendid. Yet this always feels more like a promotional exercise than anything more concerted or captious.

Just as many Cubans are currently risking the Florida Strait to find sanctuary from authoritarianism, so thousands of Spaniards made for France to escape the totalitarian tyranny of Generalissimo Francesco Franco. However, Philippe Le Guay opts to focus on the lighter side of this dark period in The Women on the 6th Floor, a genial comedy that did the rounds of the UK festival circuit last year under the title Service Entrance.

Making his third picture with Le Guay after L'Année Juliette (1995) and The Cost of Living (2003), Fabrice Luchini turns in a typically polished performance in this genial romantic comedy that is set in the drolly downbeat Paris of 1962, but is consistently coloured by the oppressive nature of the Franco regime in neighbouring Spain. Shying away from a profound discussion of either the legacy of the Civil War or France's post-colonial problems in order to focus on buttoned-up bourgeois attitudes and the liberating effects of multiculturalism, this may seem a little trite to those who prefer their socio-political satire to be more incisive. But the breezy presence of a splendid Hispanic supporting cast and plenty of trademark Luchini schtick makes this eminently watchable nonetheless.

Having inherited his stockbroking business and the luxurious apartment block in which he resides, Fabrice Luchini has rarely been troubled by the real world. However, when faithful retainer Michèle Gleizer pushes her luck once too often (in complaining about plans to redecorate the lodging until recently ruled over with a rod of iron by Luchini's tyrannical mother), Luchini and prim wife Sandrine Kiberlain quickly find they can't cope with the chores, even though young sons Camille Gigot and Jean-Charles Deval are away at boarding school.

After a couple of days of dirty dishes, they decide to hire Natalia Verbeke, who can cook eggs to perfection and, unbeknown to Luchini, lives with aunt Carmen Maura on the sixth floor of his building, along with several other Spanish domestics, including the pious Berta Ojea, Nuria Solé, Concha Galán and feisty Communist Lola Dueñas. Luchini soon comes to know everything about them, however, as his obsession with Verbeke sparks a desire to sample all things Spanish - from paella and flamenco to language and politics.

But he gets the chance to grow even closer to them when Kiberlain throws him out on becoming convinced that his prolonged absences can only mean he is having an affair with a socialite client. Naturally, in rubbing shoulders with the lower orders, and exotic foreigners to boot, Luchini takes a turn for the better. However, with Verbeke determined to return home and find her missing son, there is no guarantee of a happy ending.

Somewhat patronising the maids by having them slave away to the jaunty strains of Dalida's rendition of `Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', Le Guay and co-scenarist Jérôme Tonnerre come close to conspiring with cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu, production designer Pierre-François Limbosch and composer Jorge Arriagada in creating a neverland of cavernous luxury and garret penury that is populated by Franco-Spanish caricatures.

Kiberlain's stressed provincial is most frustratingly trivialised, as she is unflatteringly contrasted with the sensual, fiery or matronly exiles who cosset Luchini, while she strives to keep up with chic friends Marie-Armelle Deguy, Muriel Solvay and Audrey Fleurot. But realism is forever at a premium in a picture that is consistently easy to enjoy, yet keeps throwing up disquieting statements and stereotypes.

Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire provides the inspiration for Frances Lea's second feature, Strawberry Fields. However, notwithstanding Dave Miller's delightful sun-dappled views, a shortage of backstory and a surfeit of plot prevents this self-conscious sibling saga from being anything other than a micro-budget bucolic potboiler.

All seems idyllic for twentysomething Anna Madeley as she cycles through the Kent countryside on a warm summer's day. Pausing at a loading bay, she gets chatting to hunky strawberry picker Emun Elliot and not only lands herself a job, but also accommodation in a rickety caravan. Informing everybody she is an art student from Scarborough, Madeley flirts with Elliot and his pal Jonathan Bonnici and makes herself at home, even though her haughty mien grates with some of her new workmates.

Her cover is quickly blown, however, when sister Christina Bottomley arrives and reveals that Madeley is a postwoman who lives a few miles up the road and seems to have taken leave of her senses in finding a sanctuary away from her everyday existence. Elliot remains loyal to Madeley, but soon realises that the siblings are competing for his affections. Moreover, it also becomes clear that, for all her outward normality, Bottomley is possibly more eccentric than Madeley and that her machinations might just prove more dangerous than peculiar Such is the emphasis here on emotional trauma and philosophical musing that the protagonists might easily have been called Martha, Marcy, May or Marlene. But, while this lacks the intelligence and intensity of American Sean Durkin's simmering drama, Madeley and Bottomley make for spirited, if stereotypical adversaries as they struggle with the notion that in order to grow up they will also have to grow apart.

As she proved with her Simon Beaufoy-scripted debut feature, Everyone's Happy (2000), Lea has a good eye for outdoor detail and an insight into the messy manner in which intense relationships often come to an end. But the absence of an adequate explanation for the seething rivalry makes its sudden manifestations seem excessively melodramatic. Moreover, as the leads seem far too old for their roles, the dialogue often rings hollow, especially during the highly theatrical shouting matches. Thus, while this is undoubtedly a confident picture, it always overly schematic.

Just as Lea merits praise for attempting to do something different, so does Canadian John Geddes, who puts a period spin on the increasingly formulaic zombie scenario in Exit Humanity. Admittedly, this isn't the first movie to confront the historical walking dead, as Rene Perez followed the lead given by Seth Grahame-Smith's 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in setting The Dead and the Damned (2011) during the 1849 California gold rush. But, while the idea of ending the American Civil War with a showdown against a band of ravenous monsters is highly intriguing, Geddes struggles to capitalise upon it and not even a clutch of animated interludes can atone for the lack of gore and some much needed gallows humour.

Narrator Brian Cox sets the 1860s scene, as Confederate soldier Mark Gibson battles to finish off a Unionist foe who simply refuses to die. Within a few years, however, such undeads have decimated the local population, with Gibson having lost his wife and son to their insatiable appetites. He is determined, however, to scatter the ashes of the child he had been forced to slaughter at the waterfall they had dreamed of visiting together and he loads his musket in preparation for a treacherous trek across the ravaged Tennessee countryside.

Not long into his journey, Gibson allies with Adam Seybold in a bid to rescue the latter's sister, Jordan Hayes, from the clutches of General Bill Moseley, who has instructed sidekicks Ari Millen and Jason Brown to abduct healthy specimens so they can be used to test the serum developed by quack doctor Stephen McHattie. But, while they succeed in their mission, Gibson and Seybold they find themselves facing even greater peril when they seek refuge with purported witch Dee Wallace and discover that the brood seems to have originated when a grieving woman cast a spell in order to revive the sister who had been hanged for attempting an abortion after being ganged raped.

Despite riffing on the valid notion that the living are much more dangerous than the dead, Geddes allows himself to be distracted by philosophical musings and sentimental outbursts. Consequently, this is never as horrific or as provocative as it might have been. Moreover, its moral standpoint is as muddled as its failure to reference slavery is baffling. However, the performances are spirited, while cinematographer Brandon Uegama ably conveys the disconcerting uncertainties of the backwoods and Snezhan Bodurov's animations make a neat backstory device. But what is most impressive about this more than competent picture is that Geddes completed it for around $300, 000, which suggests he could be a genre talent to reckon with if he ever had a bigger budget at his disposal.

By contrast, the original BBC version of Quatermass and the Pit cost a mere £17,500. Written by Nigel Kneale and broadcast live in six parts between December 1958 and January 1959, it was the third and last adventure featuring Professor Bernard Quatermass and created such a buzz that the final episode was seen by a staggering 30% of the British viewing public. Yet, while this hugely influential series is still regarded as a landmark in small-screen science-fiction, Roy Ward Baker's 1967 feature adaptation has a lesser reputation. Nevertheless, this Kneale-scripted Hammer production has its adherents and it will be interesting to see what response it elicits when it returns to cinemas as part of Studio Canal's Made in Britain programme.

When workers unearth skeletal remains while extending the Hobbs End Underground station, palaeontologist James Donald is called in to investigate. Uncertain whether metal found at the site is part of an unexploded wartime bomb, he summons Colonel Julian Glover, who has just been teamed on a British moonshot project with Professor Andrew Keir. Tests prove inconclusive, but Keir suspects the remains to be extraterrestrial and enlists Donald's assistant, Barbara Shelley, to help him uncover any strange phenomenon in the district's past.

As Keir becomes convinced that the contents of the dig are connected to spectral occurrences dating back centuries, engineer Duncan Lamont is hired to try and crack the casing with a borazon drill. However, a hole opens of its own accord to reveal three insectoids with horned heads that convince Keir of a diabolic presence. But an autopsy reveals the beings to have come from Mars and their release seems to have unleashed a telekinetic force that causes Lamont to have a vision of legions of ferocious creatures pouring out of the spaceship.

Eager to tap into the force, Keir conducts an experiment on Shelley and learns that the Martians arrived on Earth when life became impossible on their planet and formed a colony that bred with a race of apemen that eventually evolved into human beings. Government minister Edwin Richfield scoffs at the theory and agrees with Glover that the contents of the missile are nothing more than Nazi propaganda that was intended to cause wartime panic.

But, when Richfield decides to show the Hobbs End findings to the press, an unstoppable power erupts that turns the majority of people into turbid maniacs. Donald is immune and snaps Keir out of his own reverie in time to devise a plan for defeating the gigantic alien spectre that is hovering over London.

Cleaving closely to the TV storyline, this chilling and often exciting feature took six years to reach the screen, as Hammer struggled to find American investment, in spite of having already successfully translated The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). As with A Night to Remember (1957), Roy Ward Baker proved a dab hand at marrying live action with complex (if not always convincing) special effects and he generates a palpable sense of chaos and dread in the climactic sequence as Donald climbs a giant crane in a last ditch bid to save the capital.

The performances are admirable, as are Bernard Robinson's art direction and Arthur Grant's cinematography. But, while Kneale's message about difference engendering violence had packed a punch when Quatermass and the Pit was first shown within a few months of the appalling Notting Hill riots, it seemed less potent during the Summer of Love. However, the concept that humanity can be so easily confounded because of its prejudice seems all too relevant in our benighted times.

Contrasting starkly with all this engulfing mayhem is the stillness that characterised the performance piece that brought crowds flocking to the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 14 March and 31 May 2010. However, Matthew Akers and co-director Jeff Dupre are not content with just recording the event in their exceptional documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present. They also place it in a career context and go some way to fulfilling their subject's lifelong ambition to have performance defined as something other than an `alternative' artform.

Born in Yugoslavia in 1946 to military parents whose commitment to Communism left them little time to show their children any affection, Abramovic concedes that she may well have become a performance artist to receive the attention she had so craved as a girl. She started out in the early 1970s producing audacious physical pieces that required her to cut and whip herself, run into walls and lie at the centre of a flaming star. But she shifted her attention from the angry analysis of bodily limitation to the relationship between men and women when she forged a partnership in 1976 with Uwe Laysiepen, a German artist who went under the name of Ulay.

For many years, they toured Europe in a small van putting on impromptu performances and Abramovic insists on the vehicles inclusion in the MoMA retrospective curated by Klaus Biesenbach. She also resurrects one of their most famous works, Imponderabilia (1977), which saw them standing naked in a doorway so that anyone passing through would have to brush against their flesh.

In order to ensure this and the live-action revivals are executed to her exacting standards, Abramovic puts the models through a rigorous training programme at her Hudson Valley home. She also has a reunion with Ulay, from whom she parted in 1988 after they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle and say their goodbyes. However, the centrepice of her new show, The Artist is Present, is clearly inspired by their epic item Nightsea Crossing, which saw them sitting completely still opposite each other throughout a series of 22 performances staged in different venues between 1981 and 1987.

Abramovic confides in assistant Davide Balliano and gallerist Sean Kelly that the meeting with Ulay has stirred up some long-dormant emotions. But she regains both her composure and her focus, although Kelly has to dissuade her from allowing magician David Blaine to steal her thunder by incorporating a mock assault into proceedings. Thriving on the pressure of mounting the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA history, she also begins preparing herself for the 736-hour and 30-minute challenge of sitting motionless on an armless wooden chair in the museum atrium and looking impassively into the face of the person occupying the seat opposite her.

Including encounters with Ulay, the actor James Franco, some self-serving attention seekers, some curious bypassers and many devoted admirers, this enterprise takes up the final third of the film. Akers perfectly captures the intimacy and intensity of the piece by alternating between close-ups of Abramovic and her companions and establishing shots of the hopefuls queuing to participate and the onlookers fixated on the dynamics of interactions that eventually have to be time-restricted as the exhibit becomes a cultural phenomenon.

Considering it's a secondhand experience, the process of watching Abramovic offer herself for strangers to project their thoughts and feelings upon is surprisingly and deeply moving. Several sitters are reduced to tears, while a few more a rewarded with the occasional flicker of a smile. But the inscrutable Abramovic imposes nothing but quietude in accepting every reaction with a generosity that is humbling in its ingenuity, simplicity and completeness. Moreover, she never betrays a hint of physical discomfort during any of the 100 sessions and even insists on the table initially placed between the chairs being removed to allow a greater sense of reciprocity.

Biesenbach (who was himself a former lover) has the privilege of sharing the last session before Abramovic rises to tumultuous applause. Yet, even though the show has been a triumph, one local newscast still questions whether naked torsos, projections of screaming faces or the endurance of pain qualify as legitimate art. One only has to watch this fine mix of archive footage, interview and MoMA magic and appreciate the inspiration, effort and sincerity that Abramovic puts into every creation to realise that it most certainly is.

Just as Steven Walker celebrated the indomitable enthusiasm of the members of a geriatric choir in Young@Heart (2007), so Hugh Hartford captures the competitive zest of eight veteran table tennis players in the amiable documentary Ping Pong. Adhering to the standard format of introducing the contenders in their domestic environments before following their fortunes in a major event, Hartford does a solid job in conveying the drive and determination that keeps these seven remarkable octagenarians and single centurion going. But the climactic scenes at the 2010 world championships in China feel rushed and there is too little sense of either the trajectory or the quality of the mens' and womens' competitions.

Hartford also allows some of his subjects to slip into sidelines, with Stockholm's Rune Forsberg (85), Sun Yong Qing (80) from Hulun Bir in Inner Mongolia and Inge-Brigitte Hermann (89) from Preetz in northern Germany receiving scant attention, even though the first is the new pin-up of the Over-85s circuit, the second is convinced that a training regime based on beer and cigarettes has improved his game and the last has courageously battled back from a stroke and continues to practice whenever she can at her nursing home. The focus also quickly passes from 100 year-old Dorothy DeLow from Perth in Australia after the media fuss surrounding her dies down and she is eliminated from the tournament.

Much better served are the British duo of Les D'Arcy (89) from Wakefield and Stockport's Terry Donlon (81) and the bitter Austro-German rivals Lisa Modlich (85), who now lives in Houston, Texas, and Stuttgart's and Ursula Bihl (89).

As Les's children Paul and Jane recall, he was a sickly child who began body-building after the Second World War. However, while he dabbled in athletics, cycling and the triathlon, he found his métier later in life and has emerged from numerous health scares to win 12 world titles. Despite making light of seriously diminished lung capacity after a lifetime working with asbestos, Terry has also struggled in recent times with prostate cancer. But he is bent on getting to Hohhot, even though his doctors fear he only has a short time to live.

By contrast, both Ursula and Lisa are hale and hearty. The former lives with her son Gerhard, who helps with her training regimes and never ceases to be amazed by her tenacity in striving to defend her world crown. But she faces stiff competition from the irrepressible Lisa, who helped smuggle Jews out of Vienna during the war and won the Croix de Guerre for her service in France with the Maquis. A brassy blonde with an opinion on everything, she now lives with her toyboy shooter husband Joachim (they have been together over 40 years) and consistently astonishes coach Blanca Alejo-Jackson with her energy and fierce will to win.

Having established the personalities with such deft strokes, Hartford rushes through the championship segment. Dorothy regrets not putting up a better fight as she loses by three games to love, while Sun succumbs in the second round after a confident 3-2 victory. Inge does well against Japan's Yoshiko Rikima, only to lose a tight match, while Rune, who has devoted a fair amount of time to trash-talking Les before their meeting, accepts his comprehensive defeat with good grace.

Clearly feeling the pace, Terry soldiers on against Australian Bill Bates and heroically plays to a conclusion, with Les cheering him on from the sidelines. But there is no such camaraderie between Ursula and Lisa when they meet in the semi-final, with Ursula opining that her opponent is `a silly cow' after she struts away from her victory with a resistible swagger that returns following her success in the final as she waits impatiently to be presented with her trophy.

Les has to settle for being the gallant runner-up in his draw, after his lucky bat mysteriously disappears just moments before the final. However, he quickly forgets about his disappointment to return to Blighty to rally round Terry, who defies the doctors during another hospital stint to enjoy the publicity surrounding Ping Pong's release. Ultimately, this happy ending goes some way to atoning for the hotch-potch of the Hohhot sequences. But, while the picture might have been significantly improved if Hartford had concentrated on his principal quartet, it still engages and entertains and should encourage seniors everywhere to give wiff-waff a try.

Finally, Anthony Baxter has a crowd-pleaser on his hands with You've Been Trumped. Chronicling the resistance mounted by the residents of the Menie estate in North-East Scotland to Donald Trump's bid to build a colossal golf resort on their doorstep, this has much in common with Risteard Ó Domhnaill's coverage of a County Mayo community's efforts to resist Shell's Corrib Natural Gas project in The Pipe. Indeed, both films invoke the spirit of Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983) and it's no surprise to see Baxter incorporating clips from this enduring classic in his own committed and skilfully structured documentary, in which the director finds himself playing an increasingly significant role after attempts were made to disrupt shooting.

Baxter makes it plain early on that he regards Donald Trump and his identically named heir as the villains of the piece. However, he soon adds head green-keeper Paul O'Connor, Alex Salmond's Scottish Nationalist government and the more officious members of the Grampian constabulary to the roster, as he surmises that Trump is using his largesse to influence the verdict of the planning application hearing into the suitability of the venue he has selected for a $1 billion complex.

By contrast, Baxter is eminently more sympathetic towards the residents who refuse to kowtow to the Manhattan tycoon and his machine. He stresses the indomitability of eightysomething widow Molly Forbes as she tends to her chickens and recalls her father winning prizes for ploughing land that is now central to Trump's plans. Her son Michael and his wife Sally are also presented in a positive light, as they ride accusations that their 22-acre property is an eyesore and that they have reneged on two deals to sell up and move out.

Neighbours Susan Monro (who wants to remain in the house where she raised her family), David Milne (who seeks to protect the Hermit Point lifeboat house and adjoining coastguard cottages) and Mickey Foote (the onetime producer of The Clash who is now an environmental activist) are equally determined to stay put in the face of growing intimidation. But they are far from alone in their campaign, with local councillor Martin Ford enduring Trump vitriol for challenging the potential recourse to compulsory purchase orders and RSPB rep Ian Francis, artist David McCue, journalist Paul Holleran, land lawyer Andy Wightman and academics Jim Hansom, Paul Cheshire and David Kennedy all denouncing the project and the methods being employed to secure its greenlighting.

Kennedy, the former Principal of Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University, even goes so far as to return his honorary doctorate when Trump is accorded the same honour and the Tripping Up Trump group make their presence felt at the ceremony. Baxter himself joins the fray when he attempts to pitch a couple of curveball questions at a press conference. But, beside his adherents at Holyrood, Trump also has vocal supporters like Alex Salmond (who hopes Trump will bring jobs to his constituency) and Charles Skene, OBE, the Moriarty Professor at the Aberdeen Business School who also cites the economic benefits of the scheme in a testy on-camera debate with Martin Glegg.

Ultimately, the exchange of insults and counter-claims becomes something of a sideshow, as deforestation begins alongside the destruction of dunes that have been hailed by experts as a unique wildlife habitat. Debris from the digging is deliberately deposited close to the houses of the leading antagonists and Baxter finds himself being bundled into the back of a police car for committing a breach of the peace after politely asking Paul O'Connor why the Forbes water supply has been cut off.

Shortly afterwards, the same force turns a blind eye as workmen trespass upon Forbes territory to erect a barrier. They prove equally reluctant to investigate Milne's complaint about the cutting of power and the removal of a fence and Andy Wightman suggests they are guilty of political policing in failing to prevent the misappropriation of land that is clearly marked on official documents. Yet, when Baxter elicits the views of American golfers on the Royal and Ancient course at St Andrews, few appear excited about Trump's grand design and the film ends somewhat unsatisfactorily with marchers expressing their continued support for the Menie residents and work proceeding apace on the pair of championship links, the clubhouse, the hotel and the abutting 950 houses.

Having missed the chance to become the hero by undergoing a Felix Happerlike conversion, Donald Trump is inevitably demonised in this zealous insight into a David and Goliath saga that demands partisanship. A touch short on humour, it makes its points with a self-righteousness that is just about excusable given the extent to which the odds seem stacked in the billionaire's favour. But Trump does himself few favours in opting for a show of might rather than a charm offensive and the name-calling and points scoring that has gone on since the picture was premiered does neither side much credit.