Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 12/7/2012)

Pitched somewhere between a British screen comedy of the post-Ealing era and a Richard Curtis romcom, it can hardly be called ground-breaking. Indeed, with its regrettable reliance on gender stereotypes, it could easily be branded chauvinist. But this is hardly a picture that sets out to cause offence. For the most part, it is highly enjoyable and also laudably polished for what is essentially a community project. The humour may occasionally be no more sophisticated than that of an amdram pantomime, but it is none the worse for its celebration of country living and its optimistic embrace of happy ever afters.

When young Tom Yates returns from boarding school to the Oxfordshire manor house owned by his flint-hearted banker father Duncan Armitage, he is relieved to find himself entrusted for the summer to the care of dotty grandmother Lesley Staples and Polish au pair Alice Zawadzki. However, he is far more intrigued by gardener Mike Kemp's new assistant, Tom Mitchelson, who shares his interest in aeroplanes and is himself back in Kingston Bagpuize after three years in London dabbling in microbiology.

Naturally, Mitchelson falls headlong at first sight for the blonde, violin-playing Zawadzki and the feeling is entirely mutual. However, he is far too bashful to make a move and his tongue-tied gauchness makes him an easy target for Sharon Gavin, Anna Scott and Kate Terence, who work in the Kingston House tea rooms. Their own love lives are anything but beds of roses, however, with Terence becoming increasingly frustrated at being married to farmer Des Brittain and Gavin having just splashed out on a boob job to try and attract a likely lad. Even scullery lackey Philip Herbert has a tough time under the thumb of housekeeper Sue Parker-Nutley, while church warden Richard Ward, publican Neal Higham, father of four Ivan Kaye and newlywed Kev Lewis-Wood are all equally in thrall to respective spouses Ingrid Evans, Petina Hapgood, Tracy Bargate and Jo Lewis-Wood. Indeed, only ex-gamekeeper Tony Long seems to be master in his own household and that's largely because he has been ostracised since accidentally shooting Yates's grandfather several years earlier.

Mitchelson is not the only moping bachelor, however, as divorcé Steven Elder is also on the lookout for love. But, even though he is an army veteran, he can't quite get round to asking Gavin for a date. Consequently, whether they're either unable to talk to women or can no longer abide listening to them, several of the local menfolk sign up to participate in a pantomime horse race at the annual Kingston fete. The event itself is something of a farce (and merely slows the pace of the plot without adding too much side-splitting mirth) and the summer ends with Zawadzki heading home without Mitchelson managing more than the occasional mumbled greeting, let alone an eloquent declaration of passion.

She returns the following year, but Mitchelson is no more venturesome and takes refuge in the `Husband Obedience Trials' that are the centrepiece of the forthcoming fete. However, this unfortunate farrago (which is about as socially enlightened as a Donald McGill postcard from the 1950s) and an accompanying fly past by the Red Arrows serve only to delay the denouement, which sees Mitchelson asking Gavin out in revenge for Elder propositioning Zawadzki and it's only at the end of a disastrous double date that true love finally finds a way.

Although he is new to films, Guy Browning is renowned for the incisive wit of his bestselling books Never Hit a Jellyfish With a Spade and Never Push When It Says Pull and the BBC radio sitcom, Weak at the Top (2005-06), which recalled his previous existence in advertising. It's slightly surprising, therefore, to see him plump for such broad humour in his directorial debut. Even more dismaying is the antediluvian nature of some of the female caricatures (although several secondary males are also pretty grotesque). Yet this is a surprisingly easy movie to like, with Mitchelson possessing the looks and charm of a young Hugh Grant, Zawadzki radiating geniality and Gavin bristling with confidence in displaying the timing evidently honed in a comedy partnership with her older sister Lauretta.

Moreover, it's pleasing to see a film being made about an aspect of British society other than council estate struggle, gangland London and the culture of drugs and violence attendant on the rap scene. But what most impresses about Tortoise in Love is not the fact that it's the product of neighbours rallying round a dream (although this greatly enhances its appeal), but that it overcomes its restrictions and shortcomings to make evocative use of its splendid setting and to entertain an audience that is far too often forgotten by film-makers clutching lottery handouts and film council grants.

Although it flirts with BritCrime convention, Simon Aboud's first feature, Comes a Bright Day, also seeks to do something a little bit different. A commercials veteran, who just happens to be Paul McCartney's son-in-law, Aboud strives to put a romantic spin on a Dog Day Afternoon situation, as two of the hostages in a bungled jewellery heist grow closer. But, while he proves technically proficient, the debuting writer-director struggles with the scenario's shifts in tone and, consequently, this never quite works as either a hard-boiled thriller or an offbeat love story.

Twentysomething Craig Roberts is working as a bellboy at a plush London hotel until he can gather the wherewithal to open a restaurant with his chef pal Anthony Welsh. However, while taking boss Geoff Bell's broken watch to the Mayfair jeweller's run by genial Timothy Spall, he not only finds himself instantly smitten with elegant assistant Imogen Poots, but also in the middle of a robbery targeting a priceless butterfly brooch. Following a shootout that accounts for elderly customer Sibéal McGuinne, Kevin McKidd and Josef Altin (who are operating under the pseudonyms Cameron and Clegg) hole up in a backroom and inform the besieging police that they will not hesitate to kill their captives.

Despite being wounded, Altin manages to conduct the negotiations while keeping the short-fused McKidd relatively calm. But tension soon mounts as he begins to lust after Poots, who has started to suspect that Roberts might be part of the gang after catching him out in an innocent lie. As time passes inexorably slowly, Spall (who is widowed and specialises in selling antique pieces with amorous histories) encourages Roberts to ignore the gulf in class and persist with Poots, who is planning to travel around the world before making any plans to settle down. And he finally gets his chance after the crooks make a couple of fatal errors and Spall reveals himself to be much more than just a soft-centred matchmaker.

By confining the key action to a single setting, Aboud places considerable emphasis on the byplay between the characters. Yet, while John Lynch's photography is consistently stylish, such is the banality of much of the dialogue that the movie quickly loses what little dramatic momentum it has and becomes something of an ordeal. Roberts and Poots spark reasonably sweetly and Spall is persuasively avuncular. But the increasingly erratic McKidd is allowed to gnaw the scenery, while his hair-trigger mood swings are too often utilised to kickstart the plot whenever it stalls.

The determined bid to fuse Ealing whimsy with social realist grit in insisting that most people are essentially decent is encapsulated by a post-traumatic coda that ties up the loose ends a touch too neatly. Yet, for all the flaws in the screenplay and the odd tonal lurch, Aboud displays a visual confidence that suggests he may flourish as a director for hire. However, some of the blame for the writing deficiencies must be borne by the producers, who should have eradicated such glaring miscalculations as the smug joke at the expense of the Coalition leaders in the development stage.

A couple of 15 year-olds discover the vagaries of the adult world in Bouli Lanners's The Giants, a summer rite of passage that seems like a mischievous exercise designed to meld such contrasting authors as Mark Twain and Stephen King or SE Hinton and Enid Blyton. However, Lanners and co-scenarist Elise Ancion (who also designed the costumes) are less gifted storytellers and, while this Belgian saga has its amusing and insightful moments, it frequently feels fragmented and too often strains for effect.

Left at their late grandfather's tumbledown country pile by a mother who periodically checks up on them by mobile phone, Martin Nissen and his 13 year-old brother Zacharie Chasseriaud are more bothered about being bored than running out of provisions. However, things take a turn for the better when they crash grandpa's car into the scooter-riding Paul Bartel, who is none the worse for the accident and eager to enlist his new pals in a scheme to escape from his thuggish brother (Karim Leklou) by running away to Spain.

The trio initially content themselves with a boat ride down river, which is followed by an expedition to an empty holiday home that results in them getting drunk and experimenting with the peroxide they find in the bathroom. Suitably emboldened, they decide to score some dope off local dealer Didier Toupy, who cuts an eccentric figure alongside girlfriend Gwen Berrou. But he is a shrewd operator and persuades Nissen and Chasseriaud to lease him their granddad's house for three months and they compound the error by selling off all of the furniture.

Realising they now have nowhere to stay, the siblings take refuge in a riverbank shack and are forced to break into another residence when it collapses around them. Kindly Marthe Keller, who has a Down Syndrome daughter, takes pity on them and invites them out of a downpour for tea. But, when the boys return home to collect Toupy's unpaid rent, they discover he has hired Leklou as his bodyguard and the ensuing showdown culminates in them fleeing by boat and Nissen tossing his ringing phone into the water as a defiant symbol of his new-found maturity and independence.

Departing slightly from the wry realism that informed his first two directorial outings, Ultranova (2004) and Eldorado (2008), Lanners intriguingly seeks to recast the traditional adolescent adventure in a very modern idiom. Thus, while Nissen, Chasseriaud and Bartel get themselves into some pretty harmless scrapes, they also steal, curse and dabble with drink and drugs in a way that Tom, Huck and the Famous Five would never have dared. Moreover, they discover that they can take care of themselves when threatened physically and one is left to wonder at the close how these essentially nice kids will turn out after such transformatory experiences.

Despite Leklou being irksomely one-note in his bruising villainy, the young cast is splendid, with Chasseriaud particularly impressing as the naive tag along responding to each new development with a charming mix of incredulity and acceptance. Jean-Paul De Zaeytijd's lustrous views of the verdant environs (which are actually in Luxembourg) and the score by the indie combo The Bony King of Nowhere are also noteworthy. But, while Lanners generates plenty of picaresque nostalgia in ruminating on the folly of youth, the boisterous storyline rings hollow too often for it entirely to convince.

A similar problem threatens to enervate Rebecca Thomas's debut feature, Electrick Children. But such is the conviction of the writer-director and her admirable cast in this eccentric tale of an immaculate conception seemingly wrought by a tape recording of a cover of Blondie's `Hanging on the Telephone' that it not only survives a growing tally of contrivances and digressions, but also positively thrives on each new implausibility.

On her 15th birthday, curly-haired blonde Julia Garner is summoned to the office of father Billy Zane, who is the pastor of their Mormon community in Grafton, Utah. Also present is her older brother Liam Aiken, who will operate the cassette player as she responds to the questions during her family confirmation ceremony. Curious to hear the sound of her own voice, Garner gets up in the night and sneaks into the basement where the recorder is kept. However, in addition to listening to her own testimony, she also hears her first pop song and is tentatively starting to dance when Aiken bursts in to stop the noise from waking their parents.

Unfortunately, mother Cynthia Watros hears the commotion and sees the pair struggling on the floor. Thus, when Garner announces a few months later that she thinks she might be pregnant, Watros dismisses her theory that the male voice on the tape brought about a miracle and reports the siblings to Zane. He insists that Garner marries neighbour Trevor LaPaglia and banishes Aiken from the compound. However, Garner refuses to accept his judgement and speeds off to Las Vegas in the family truck, unaware that Aiken is hiding under a tarpaulin in the back.

Determined to find the mystery singer, Garner tries to get into a nightclub. But, just as the bouncer is turning her away, slackers Rory Culkin and John Patrick Amedori are ejected and Garner convinces herself that the latter must be the father of her child as there is a picture of a cassette tape on his t-shirt. Ignoring Aiken's plea to return home and clear his name, Garner hitches a ride with her new friends and soon finds herself back at their place along with party girls Cassidy Gard and Paola Baldion.

Despite being bemused by her Little House on the Prairie attire and naive attitude, Culkin takes a shine to Garner and agrees to marry her after she hears Amedori's band play and realises he couldn't possibly be her mystical paramour. Moreover, he also tries to teach Aiken to skateboard and puts his arm in a homemade splint after he crashes on his first run. But Culkin is powerless to prevent Aiken from being arrested after they break into his family's luxury home and father Guy Camilleri calls the cops. Nor can he stop Garner from fleeing the scene in his car and capriciously following a red Mustang like the one in Watros's favourite bedtime story.

Things become increasingly freaky after this encounter with ageing hippie Bill Sage, who turns out to be Garner's biological father. But Thomas keeps things on track and even pays homage (whether intentionally or not) to the closing sequence of The Graduate (1967) in having Culkin arrive in Grafton just as Garner is about to make her wedding vows. Indeed, by flecking recollections of her own Mormon youth with such dashes of magic realism and offbeat indie spirit, Thomas persuades the audience to overlook the clumsy use of taped voiceovers and the flimsiness of the closing scenes.

She is considerably abetted by Mattias Troelstrup's ethereally desaturated cinematography and Elizabeth Van Dam's precise production design, which neither kitschifies the homestead nor indulges in neon-bathed Vegas cliché. But Thomas's biggest debts are owed to the drolly straight-laced Aiken, the sweetly debauched Culkin and the adorably ditzy Garner, whose unwavering belief in her unlikely story and understated eagerness to fit in with her new crowd gives this rite of passage its sensibility and places her firmly in the front rank of emerging American actresses.

Although the protagonists are considerably older, Jonathan Canzual Burley's The Soul of Flies is also a coming-of-age odyssey that deflates its deep philosophical ponderings with plenty of absurdist humour and offbeat music. At times, it's almost as if Luis García Berlanga and Aki Kaurismäki had joined forces on Samuel Beckett's reworking of The Wizard of Oz. But, while this may sometimes feel excessively eccentric, it makes evocative use of the parched thoroughfares of Salamanca's La Armuña region and raises enough issues and smiles to delight devotees of so-called `slow cinema'.

Shot in sepia and using an album of old photographs to turn back time, a prologue narrated by the director recalls the racy life and peccadilloes of Castilian roué Feliz Cenzual, who was born during a carnival firework display and never knew the meaning of the word `fear'. He threw away the stamp collection he had been given at the age of 10, as he didn't think it was fair to keep such well-travelled items trapped. However, he kept one to remind him never to succumb to the same fate and, in crossing the globe 35 times, he made love and mistakes in equal measure.

Now, on his death bed, Cenzual writes to sons Javier Sáez (who lives in South America) and Andrea Calabrese (who hails from Italy) to invite them to his funeral. Neither was previously aware of the other's existence and they meet for the first time at a railway halt in the middle of nowhere that they only learn has long been abandoned from passing motorist, Luis Cenzual. He offers them a lift in his beaten up car and Sáez calls ahead to San Felix to let grandmother Francisca Lucas know they are going to be late.

En route, the vehicle is pelted with watermelons by Mirian Montero, the driver's artist daughter, who is trying to brighten up the dusty yellow landscape with dollops of splattered pink flesh (as though she is, somehow oblivious to the field of scarlet poppies bobbing gently in the breeze). However, the engine packs up soon afterwards and the pair are left munching on melon as they wait for a bus in the tiny village of Berzos.

Eventually realising they are waiting for nothing, Sáez and Calabrese strike out across the countryside, at one point resting on a red sofa that has been conveniently stationed at the side of the road, where they hungrily discuss their ideal meal. The narrator comments on their progress and wonders whether they are being guided through the fields their father knew as a boy by his spectral memory. Perhaps he also influences Calabrese's dream of a serenading a beautiful girl (Diana Pintado) as she gathers sunflowers and he wakes his half-sibling to ask about his wife back home. Sáez waxes lyrical about her taste and smell and the bachelor Calabrese becomes more determined than ever to find love for himself.

Further along the road, Calabrese plays with a stray dog and claims to be able to gauge its personality by gazing into its eyes. Sáez is sceptical, however, and they speculate about whether dogs have souls. But, while Calabrese is prepared to believe his new canine companion does, he concludes that the flies buzzing around them are too small to house one.

Their conversation is halted, however, by Norberto Gutierrez, who is about to jeopardise his own soul by hanging himself from a tree. The strangers approach him and he explains that he suffers from narcolepsy and is so prone to sleeping fits that he has long since stopped changing out of his pyjamas. After a brief discussion, Sáez and Calabrese agree to cut him down and, as they wander back towards his village, he reveals that he wanted to end it all because his wife had left him and his waking existence is made a misery by bully Eduardo Hernandez, who had stolen his moped.

The siblings track him down to Antonio en Alcalde's bar, where Hernandez proceeds to mock Gutierrez and taunt them. Resuming their journey, they stumble upon their tormentor relieving himself by the side of the road and steal back the bike, which a grateful Gutierrez insists they keep. However, it soon runs out of petrol and Sáez and Calabrese find themselves being haunted by their father's ghost, which urges them to work as a team even though they may not like each other.

Vanishing after revealing that flies have souls after all, Cenzual leaves his sons to settle their differences. Following a short, rather pathetic fight, they lie on the desiccated soil and Sáez confesses that his wife no longer understands him and wants a divorce, while Calabrese frets that he will never find the girl of his dreams. Deciding not to bother with the funeral, the pair wait outside the cemetery, where Calabrese tells a long anecdote about a neighbour who smelt so strongly of flowers that the dead rose to sample his odour and he was driven away by his frightened friends and left to die in a ditch.

Trudging on, they pass Pintado picking sunflowers in a field and Calabrese is smitten at first sight. However, they are waylaid by a band of thieving troubadours who only decided against robbing them when they learn they are going to their father's funeral. Indeed, they persuade the pair not to miss the ceremony, or they will regret it for the rest of their lives. This sentiment is reinforced by Calabrese's campfire dream, in which he gathers papers scattered by Pintado only to discover that they are blank and he realises that life is worth living because it creates the memories that serve as a solace in old age.

Next morning, Sáez and Calabrese arrive in San Felix to be greeted by priest Innocenco Di Lisi. He ushers them into the church, where they sit behind the coffin of the father they never knew. Having paid their respects, they set off to put into practice the lesson he had taught them on the road, with Calabrese going in search of Pintado and the happiness he has always craved.

Shot on a shoestring with a crew of seven and vibrantly played by a non-professional cast (only Sáez is a full-time actor), this is a highly engaging picaresque that effortlessly blends neo- and magic realism in exploring a range of existential quandaries. The largely percussive score and quirky songs by Tim Walters and Andrea Calabrese are equally effective. But it's Cenzual Burley's eye for a telling detail and assured sense of pace that makes this so consistently arresting and so delightfully idiosyncratic.

The great outdoors proves more forbidding than welcoming in TV veteran Daniel Nettheim's big-screen debut, The Hunter, a gripping adaptation of a 1999 novel by Julia Leigh, who recently made an impression with her own first feature, Sleeping Beauty. Majestically photographed by Robert Humphreys in awe-inspiring locations across Tasmania and boasting an atmospheric sound design by Matteo Zingales, Michael Lira and Andrew Lancaster, this measured parable works as both an eco-thriller and a human drama. However, the sketchiness of the characterisation prevents it from being entirely satisfying.

Summoned to Paris, American hunter Willem Dafoe meets with Jacek Koman, a shady representative of the Redleaf military biotech company, who instructs him to go to Australia and investigate rumoured sightings of a Tasmanian Tiger. A carnivorous marsupial with a striped coat and a vulpine head, this species dies out in captivity in 1936 and has been officially extinct since 1986. However, Koman's bosses want Dafoe to track and kill any surviving thylacines and bring back samples for Redleaf to clone so it can lay exclusive claim to the venom it supposedly excreted to paralyse its prey.

Refusing the assistance of the brooding Callan Mulvey, Dafoe insists on travelling alone and he arrives in a backwater town posing as an academic researching Tasmanian devils. Local guide Sam Neill has arranged accommodation with Frances O'Connor, who is struggling to recover from the disappearance eight months earlier of her environmentalist husband and cope with the task of raising chatty tweenager Morgana Davies and her taciturn younger brother Finn Woodlock on her own.

Having already been informed by Sullivan Stapleton in John Brumpton's bar that strangers are fair game for the loggers who stand to lose their livelihoods because of the green protest being staged by tree-huggers Jamie Timony and Dan Spielman, Dafoe is reluctant to get involved with O'Connor and her somewhat feral kids. However, the fact that she rarely gets out of bed and leaves Davies and Woodlock to fend for themselves pricks his conscience and he helps clean up the bathroom and fix the generator in between expeditions to the inhospitable wilderness.

Neill rather resents Dafoe muscling in on his patch, as he has been keeping an eye on O'Connor since her husband vanished. Moreover, he is suspicious about the true nature of Dafoe's mission. But he is powerless to object when Dafoe stops giving O'Connor the pills prescribed by her doctor and she begins to make a speedy recovery. Indeed, she even hosts a party for Timony and Spielman when they obtain an injunction to halt all tree felling and develops something of a crush on Dafoe when he stands up to Stapleton and his bully boys and agrees to take the family on a picnic.

However, Dafoe is ordered by Koman to concentrate on his task and he returns to the cave to which he was led by one of the eerily well-informed Woodlock's drawings to await the tiger he is convinced is eking out a lone existence. Challenged at gunpoint by Mulvey to reveal the whereabouts of the lair, Dafoe leads him into one of the steel traps he had planted in the undergrowth. But, what he doesn't know, as he hides his stalker's corpse and waits for his quarry is that Mulvey had paid a visit to O'Connor's cabin before heading into the wilds.

The conclusion to the hunt is somewhat inevitable, as Dafoe realises his duty to help the sole surviving Tasmanian Tiger. But, while this is touchingly done, the denouement of the human drama is more contrived and less credible. Much of the fault lies with screenwriter Alice Addison's decision to jettison the backstory that Leigh originally gave her anti-hero, as his gradual transformation from bullet-headed loner to compassionate everyman feels flimsy without reference to the unhappy childhood and demoralising army experiences that so dissuaded him from close contact.

Nonetheless, Dafoe excels as the mercenary learning to value life and he is ably supported by the ever-reliable Neill and O'Connor and the hugely impressive Davies and Woodlock. Moreover, Nettheim adroitly equates Dafoe's meticulous, but potentially deadly fieldcraft techniques with the simple chores that help preserve a household that was itself drifting towards extinction. The symbolism may not be subtle and neither are the recurring contrasts between destruction and conservation, tradition and progress, and isolation and community. But the action is often tense and the computer-generated creature fashioned by the Fuel VFX studio is sufficiently authentic to make the long-anticipated encounter genuinely moving rather than cornily mawkish.

In the not too distant past, Christopher Walken might well have been cast in the Dafoe role. Nowaways, however, he has to settle for character supports such as the grumpy father in Todd Solondz's Dark Horse, which arrives at the Ultimate Picture Palace this week. Teamed with Mia Farrow, Walken gives a typically good account of himself. But the veteran scene-stealer is roundly upstaged by Jordan Gelber, as the eponymous loser who lives at home and notionally works as an accountant for his father's estate agency when not riding around in his bright yellow Hummer or bidding on action figures on Ebay. However, the only thing that really motivates the pudgy thirtysomething is his all-encompassing detestation of humanity.

It comes as a shock, therefore, when he walks over to the heavily medicated Selma Blair's table at a Jewish wedding and proceeds to chat her up in such an aggressive manner that she feels almost obligated to give him her phone number. Similarly resident with her parents, emotionally scarred by a liaison with Aasif Mondvi (who hails from Dubai) and suffering from Hepatitis B, the morose Blair continues to be so bowled over by Gelber's straight-talking lack of charm that she even accepts his cumbersome marriage proposal. But the need for the two families to meet and for Gelber to be introduced to Mondvi coincides with his growing fixation with chubby secretary Donna Murphy, who comes to dominate fantasies that become increasingly indistinct from Gelber's already tainted reality.

Eventually, Gelber's bid to become a late-blooming dark horse makes him so unreliable that Walken fires him and he drives off in a rage. He envisages himself visiting a vast toy store to select a better model of fiancée, only he comes round to discover that he has been in a coma for four months after crashing his car. Worse still, although Blair is pregnant with his child, she has been receiving positive treatment from Gelber's detested doctor brother Justin Bartha and has become his girlfriend. Typically, Bartha can do nothing to save his sibling and his ghost haunts the family home with a simmering fury that would be intensified if Gelber knew that Murphy had been in love with him all along.

As admirers and detractors alike will know, Todd Solondz's films have always sought to provoke, whether he was discussing bullying and parental neglect in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), paedophilia in Happiness (1998), promiscuity in Storytelling (2001), sexual deviancy in Palindromes (2005) and a mixture of all of the aforementioned in Life During Wartime (2009). But, whereas he has frequently opted for ensemble scenarios, here he focuses on a single, deeply flawed character whose disconcerting physical and psychological issues are mirrored in the problems facing the women he lusts after.

Curiously, the consequence is a dilution of the dark humour that has become the Solondz trademark and which allows for the seeping in of a hint of compassion (albeit of a particularly bleak variety). Some critics have seen this as a betrayal, others a sign of middle-aged mellowing. However, the majority have decided that, while this may not be as incisive or subversive as earlier Solondz dissections of the American psyche, it maintains his reputation as the indie sector's most fearlessly abrasive satirist.

Brilliantly creating an individual of monumental insensitivity and boorishness, Justin Gerber is well supported by the underrated Blair (playing what may well be a variation on her doormat wannabe writer in Storytelling) and the affable Murphy, whose real or imagined presence enables Gerber to fathom the recesses of a personality so resistible that even parents Walken and Farrow find him hard to like. In many ways, he resembles the kind of man-child depicted by Seth Rogen in the mainstream comedies of Judd Apatow and his acolytes. But, as the ranting monologue about irredeemable humanity demonstrates, Solondz is always more merciless in his denunciation and that is why his fleeting sympathy for Gerber (such as when Blair is surprised by how unhorrible their first kiss is) is all the more unexpectedly potent.

As the whole of Oxfordshire must know after this week's torch relay, it's just over a fortnight to the start of London 2012. But, as no one had the sense to make a film about William Penny Brookes and the Much Wenlock Olympian contests that prompted the revival of the ancient Athenian games in 1896 (there was a screen treatment available, but nobody wanted to read it), cinemas are being forced to rely on reissues to cash-in on the Olympic spirit.

The winner of the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Score and Costume, Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981) was old-fashioned when producer David Puttnam first conceived. Ironically, some three decades later, the very fustiness that caused so many to dismiss it as patriotic, middlebrow tosh only makes it seem more authentic. Moreover, with British cinema seemingly reluctant to produce heritage pictures for fear of incurring the same critical disdain, its revival serves as a timely reminder that the past is a rich source of compelling stories that film-makers obsessed with fashionable topics with a veneer of socio-politcal relevance should ignore at their peril.

Flashing back from a 1978 memorial service and taking several liberties with fact, Colin Welland's tale opens in Cambridge in 1919, as Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) tries to ignore the frequent anti-Semitic taunts he receives while studying at Gonville and Caius by performing in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with his future fiancée Sybil Gordon (Alice Krige) and by maintaining a long unbeaten streak on the athletics track. Despite what the film may say, he did not become the first man to run around Trinity Great Court in the time it took for the college clock to strike 12 (this feat was actually achieved in 1927 by Lord David Burghley, who is the model for Nigel Havers's character, Lord Andrew Lindsay). But he did turn to professional coach Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm) when he was soundly beaten by Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), the son of Scottish missionary parents who had been born in China and risked the ire of his devout sister Jennie (Cheryl Campbell) by giving glory to God by using his talents as a rugby player and sprinter.

Abrahams's decision to hire a trainer infuriates the bigoted masters of Trinity and Caius (played respectively by John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson), as gentlemen amateurs were not supposed to stoop to such tradesman tactics. But Mussabini improves his technique and Abrahams is selected to represent Great Britain at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. Old friends Lord Lindsay, Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell) and Henry Stallard (Daniel Gerroll) also make the squad, as does Liddell. However, on discovering that the 100m heats fall on a Sunday, Liddell refuses to dishonour the Sabbath and is called to a crisis meeting with Lord Birkenhead (Nigel Davenport), Lord Cadogan (Patrick Magee), the Duke of Sutherland (Peter Egan) and the Prince of Wales (David Yelland).

Luckily, Lindsay volunteers his spot in the 400m, having already taken a silver in the 400m Hurdles. So, while Liddell prepares to step up a distance by preaching at the city kirk, Abrahams receives a stern dressing down from Mussabini after being trounced in the 200m by Americans Jackson Scholz (Brad Davis) and Charlie Paddock (Dennis Christopher) and learns from his mistakes to triumph in the dash. A few days later, Liddell also wins gold and the whole British team shares in his victory.

Strangely, the first notes of Vangelis Papathanassiou's synthesised score still has the power to make hairs stand on the back of the neck and even the ludicrous slow-motion sequence on the beach retains a nobility that proves unexpectedly inspiring, although it is never in the same class as Leni Riefenstahl's stylised images of bodies in motion in her epic documentary, Olympia (1938). The insights into class snobbery, racial prejudice and the declining influence of organised religion similarly remain telling. But what is most striking is the status of sportsmen in a country still reeling from the loss of a generation of youth in the trenches and one cannot help wondering how much the Olympic ideal has been tarnished in the intervening decades, as the big stories leading up to 2012 have not been about sacrifice and struggle, but have centred on drug cheats being legally sanctioned to compete and multi-millionaire superstars being denied their chance to fulfil a dream by the caprices of a selection procedure.

It's unlikely that any of the competitors in London will risk as much as the Americans who advocated the Civil Rights cause in Mexico City in 1968. Several black athletes and white oarsmen stood up to be counted during their medal ceremonies and amongst them was a single Australian, whose courage and conviction are proudly recalled by his nephew, Matt Norman, in the fascinating documentary, Salute (2008).

Even before they shared a moment of history on the podium following the 200m, Tommie Smith, Peter Norman and John Carlos had much in common. Smith had been brought up on a California farm and had only begun running seriously when his father allowed him to skip chores if he won. Carlos grew up on the tough streets of Harlem, while Norman was also raised in poverty and only abandoned the high jump after a chance substitution in a relay race led to him concentrating on sprinting.

As Australian coach Ray Weinberg recalls, Norman was seen as the main threat to Smith, Carlos and their white teammate Larry Questad in the 200m. But his American counterpart Payton Jordan expected Carlos to pip Smith for gold as they lined up for the final on 16 October 1968 (a fortnight to the day after 2000 protesters were killed in the infamous Tlatelolco massacre that nearly caused the Games to be cancelled). Ultimately, the form book went out of the window, with Smith emerging as the victor and Carlos trailing Norman into third place. Yet, while this had been the fastest race over this distance in history, it was what took place in the aftermath that entered sporting history.

Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, Harry Edwards, the founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, had urged African-Americans to boycott the 1968 Games in protest at continued racial discrimination within the United States. However, too many athletes wanted to compete to guarantee an effective walkout. Thus, badges proclaiming the OPHR were produced in the hope that winners would wear them on the medal rostrum. But, even though the politically aware Jim Hines had won 100m gold in the first all-black race in Olympic history, nobody had made such an overt statement. Until now.

While preparing for the ceremony in the athletes' lounge, Norman (who had been taught to believe in equality by his Salvation Army parents) had heard the Americans discussing how Smith would sport a black scarf to symbolise black pride, while Carlos would open his tracksuit to reveal a bead necklace commemorating victims of racial violence around the world. They were also planning to step on to the podium in black socks to denote the poverty of most African-Americans. However, Carlos had forgotten the black gloves he was supposed to wear for a head-bowed, clenched-fist salute during the playing of `The Star-Spangled Banner' and Norman suggested that Smith should wear his right-hand glove and give Carlos the left. Moreover, Norman also insisted on wearing an OPHR badge and shared the hostility of the crowd as the athletes left the stadium.

International Olympic Committee chief Avery Brundage (who had raised no objection to the Nazi salute when he led the US team at the 1936 Berlin Games) ordered Smith and Carlos to be suspended from the track squad and ejected from the Olympic village. Yet, even though Brundage succeeded in having them sent home, he couldn't prevent the all-white members of the rowing eight from following Norman's example of wearing an OPHR badge or the 400m trio of Lee Evans, Lawrence James and Ronald Freeman from wearing Black Panther berets during their medal ceremony.

Despite receiving hate mail and death threats (and Carlos having to endure the heartache of his wife committing suicide under the strain), Smith and Carlos managed to sustain NFL careers with the Cincinnati Bengals and the Philadelphia Eagles respectively. Moreover, each was accepted back into the athletic fold, with Carlos serving as a community liaison during the 1984 Los Angeles Games and Smith coaching the US team at the 1995 World Indoor Championships before being named the California Black Sportsman of the Millennium in 1999.

As for Norman, he was ostracised by Julius `Judy' Patching and the Australian sporting establishment and excluded from the 1972 Olympics, even though he had a great chance of medalling. He was even denied a role in the 2000 Sydney Games, although he was invited by AOC representative Steve Simmons to the US team hotel, where he was lionised by the likes of Edwin Moses and Michael Johnson. Furthermore, he retained close links with Carlos and Smith and the film includes footage of one of their reunions, as well as clips from individual interviews and public speaking engagements. The Americans even served as pallbearers when Norman died in 2006, having spent several years battling depression and alcoholism.

Television director Matt Norman pays his uncle handsome and well-merited tribute here. His views on racism in Australia, South Africa and the USA are trenchant and make for interesting comparison with those of Larry Questad, who came sixth in Mexico and whose occasionally injudicious remarks make him look like the villain of the piece (when, as female Olympic medallists Wyomia Tyus and Willye White testify, this is clearly the loathsome Avery Brundage). Rowers J. Cleve Livingston and Paul Hoffman, along with journalist Cordner Nelson, commentator Tony Charlton and coach George Williams join Smith and Carlos in noting the self-effacing Norman's humanitarian decency. Their affection is evident, particularly when Carlos recalls how he could always rely on Smith for support at the height of the furore, while Norman had to face the flak alone. But more might have been made of the scandalous price that Norman was forced to pay for his action, especially as the American side of the story has been told in such detail elsewhere by Geoff Small in Black Power Salute (2008).

Five years after these iconic events, Patricio Guzmán sought refuge in Cuba after being released from the notorious Santiago football stadium where he had been detained (and repeatedly intimidated with mock executions) for shooting the footage that would eventually form The Battle of Chile (1973), the definitive account of the overthrow and murder of Salvador Allende that still ranks among the masterpieces of political cinema. Four decades later, Guzmán offers a very different perspective on his homeland in Nostalgia for the Light, which was made at an altitude of 22,589 feet in the Atacama Desert and contrasts the dark deeds of the Pinochet era with the luminescence of the stars that draw astronomers from around the world to this arid and unknowable plateau.

According to astronomer Gaspar Galaz, there is no such thing as the present because light takes time to travel from a source to the viewer. Consequently, everything is seen in the past and Guzmán applies this logic to both the observatories and archaeological stations that dot the Atacama landscape and the survivors of the Pinochet tyranny, who still search in the sand for remnants of yesteryear and mementoes of disappeared loved ones. While scholars hunt for pre-Columbian artifacts, 70 year-old Violeta Berrios and Vicky Saavedra continue to look for the body parts of the lost, with the latter showing off the teeth, skull fragments and shoe-clad foot belonging to her murdered brother, which Guzmán films with typical sensitivity, as these are the relics of a political martyr and should be revered.

But while scouring the skies can provide clues about the nature of heavenly bodies, it is much more difficult to understand human behaviour. One only has to see the cemetery and the saltpetre settlement that was turned into the infamous Chacabuco concentration camp to realise the ever-present pain the locals must endure. There may be no humidity here, but there is no shortage of humility, as Guzmán examines the extent to which memory is both a consolation and a curse for those who continue to suffer from the knowledge of what friends and family went through and the guilt of themselves having survived.

In the sincere, but occasionally unfocused Santiago segment, Guzmán strains slightly to connect the cosmos, ancient Indian civilisation, dictatorial barbarity and the need to keep remembering. But there is something chilling about the images of the pages of scientific data with the grim records of torture and slaughter that outlasted Pinochet to condemn him.