Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 25/10/2012)

Fittingly, given the part played by SMERSH in the 007 legend, the pick of the non-Bonds comes from Russia. Andrei Zvyagintsev was hailed as the heir to Andrei Tarkovsky when he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his 2003 debut, The Return. However, the mixed reception accorded his follow up, The Banishment (2007), led some to question his credentials. But, despite winning the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes, Elena has prompted less debate about Zvyagintsev's qualities as a film-maker than about his patriotism, as he has been accused of painting a less than flattering picture of his compatriots in exposing the moral turpitude that led to Vladimir Putin regaining the presidency following a disputed election in December 2011.

Ageing Andrei Smirnov has been dependent upon fiftysomething Nadezhda Markina since she nursed him through appendicitis a decade ago. However, after two years of marriage, the pair no longer have much to say to one another and have almost reverted to a master-servant arrangement. Their shared meals are invariably taken in silence, while they watch television in different rooms and sleep in separate beds. Yet Markina enjoys living in a luxurious apartment near the Kremlin in the centre of Moscow and has no intention of returning to the rundown, post-industrial Biryulyovo neighbourhood, where her son Alexei Rozin and his wife Evgenia Konushkina are raising teenager Igor Ogurtsov and his infant brother.

Markina regularly takes public transport across the city to visit her family and promises the unemployed and invariably drunken Rozin that she will ask Smirnov about funding Ogurtsov's university place so that he can avoid military service. But rather than asking him directly, she leaves her husband a note and he promises to give her a decision when he is good and ready. However, circumstances change when Smirnov has a heart attack while swimming at his gym and he suddenly finds himself wholly reliant upon Markina once more. Yet, instead of acceding to her request for money, he asks her to send for his estranged daughter, Elena Lyadova, who has no time for her father and even less for Markina and her kin.

Determined never to have children because she hails from a bad seed, Lyadova still lives off her father and willingly makes her peace at his bedside to ensure he continues to keep her in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed. But, when Smirnov announces that he is going to change his will and leave his daughter everything apart from an annuity for his wife, Markina sets aside her deeply held religious faith and spikes his daily cocktail of pills with Viagara and he suffers a second, fatal seizure. Destroying the handwritten note that Smirnov had prepared for his lawyer, she also breaks into his safe and steals the cash that Rozkin needs to help the thoroughly undeserving Ogurtsov.

Moreover, Markina makes a suitable show of sorrow at being widowed and graciously accepts the legal verdict that she should share Smirnov's fortune with Lyadova, as he has died intestate. Yet, no sooner has she given her grandson the sum that should change his future, he gets badly beaten up while persecuting a group of homeless people with his worthless mates and Markina decides that it would be better for everyone if Rozin brought his brood to live in her newly inherited apartment.

For all the specificity of its discussion of the shiftless grasping that has come to characterise the modern Russian mindset, this treatise on gender, generational and class difference could be set almost anywhere. Indeed, it's possible to compare Markina's actions with those of a film noir anti-heroine like Joan Crawford in Michael Curtiz's 1945 adaptation of James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce, which sees a mother doing whatever it takes to protect a thankless child. Yet, despite admitting that his film is designed to urge Russians to abandon their feudal heritage and slavish mentality, Zvyagintsev insists that he has not caricatured the lower classes, but has lampooned the new bourgeoisie to which he belongs.

Whatever its political intent, this remains a compelling drama that makes controlled use of long takes and oppressive silences to draw the viewer into the dark heart of the story. Notwithstanding a compassion that comes from an innate understanding of human nature, Zvyagintsev and co-scenarist Oleg Negin make little effort to court sympathy for their characters, with Markina and Smirnov exploiting each other with the same callous cynicism displayed by their respective offspring. Yet, while Smirnov is cold and ruthless, it is easier to commend his views on hard graft and civic and moral responsibility than it is Rozin's indolent expectancy and Ogurtsov's mindless thuggery. But it is the paradoxical pragmatism of the outstanding Markina and the Lyadova that proves most fascinating, as each compromises beliefs as her respective maternal and self-preservation instincts kick in.

Chillingly photographed in steely shades by Vasiliy Gritskov and designed with a keen appreciation of what makes a home by Valeriy Zhukov, the picture acquires added intensity from the use of Philip Glass's Third Symphony on the soundtrack. But it is Zvyagintsev's rigour as both an artist and a citizen that makes this so enthralling and potent.

Dysfunction was also the theme of Ursula Meier's first feature, Home (2009), which saw Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet refuse to leave their family property even though it becomes almost uninhabitable after a long-abandoned stretch of motorway is unexpectedly completed. She broaches the subject again, albeit in a much more salubrious setting, in Sister, which brings a touch of Dardenne-style social realism to the Swiss Alps. Yet, while this is a laudably earnest attempt to contrast the lifestyles of the haves and have nots, it is also more than a little melodramatic and over-emphatic in its symbolism. Consequently, despite an exceptional performance from young Kacey Mottet Klein (for whom Meier specifically devised the project), this doesn't escape the class sentimentality that has become an increasing factor of Ken Loach's recent pictures.

Twelve year-old Kacey Mottet Klein doesn't have time for school. It's the height of the skiing season and he spends his days on the slopes stealing whatever he can grab to sell to tourists unwilling to pay the prices charged in the Alpine resort's stores and lacking in the scruples to ask how a scrawny kid came to be in possession of such expensive skis, poles, goggles and gloves. Ironically, neighbour Dilon Adémi is more aghast when his buddy presents him with a brand new pair of skis, but his qualms are eased when Mottet Klein simply scuffs the runners so his dad won't question their origin.

Mottet Klein doesn't have a father and relishes informing anyone who asks that he has lived with twentysomething sister Léa Seydoux since their parents were killed in a car crash. However, she is anything but protective towards him and snatches the jacket and cash he offers her before heading off for another night on the tiles with boy racer Simon Guélat, leaving her brother to feed himself in their unkempt flat in a charmless tenement block in the valley. But Mottet Klein never feel sorry for himself and self-possessedly proposes a partnership when Scottish kitchen worker Martin Compston catches him hiding contraband in a cupboard to the rear of the summit chalet where he works. Moreover, he blithely passes himself off as the son of a hotel owner in order to strike up a conversation with Gillian Anderson, a well-heeled American mother who is lunching with her two children at the restaurant.

But things are about to change dramatically, as the season comes to a close. Having narrowly escaped the clutches of angry skier Magne-Håvard Brekke after failing to steal his goggles from a café table, Mottet Klein and 10 year-old accomplice Gabin Lefebvre are caught trading by Compston's boss, Jean-François Stévenin, who orders them to keep off the mountain. Meanwhile, Seydoux has taken up with the BMW-driving Yann Trégouët and Mottet Klein feels deserted when she disappears for Christmas and only comes back to demand more funds.

Thus, when Seydoux tells Trégouët that Mottet Klein is only staying with her for a couple of days, the boy loses his cool and blurts out that she is actually his mother rather than his sister. Furious that his outburst has scared Trégouët away, Seydoux tells Mottet Klein that she bitterly regrets keeping him and he craves even more the affection that Anderson lavishes so unquestioningly upon her own children. Yet, when Seydoux lands a job as a cleaner at the hotel, Mottet Klein steals a watch from Anderson's room and she not only shames him into returning it, but also into revealing his true relationship with Seydoux.

Ashamed at disappointing someone who had been so kind to him, Mottet Klein flees into the wilderness. But a suggestion that his situation might be about to improve comes in the final shot, as he sees Seydoux coming to look for him as he makes his way back down to normality.

Much depends here on how one responds to the supposedly shocking revelation about Mottet Klein's parentage. Meier stages it adroitly enough by having the boy calculate its impact before shouting it out during an otherwise happy car trip with Seydoux and the genial Trégouët. But, even though the pair patch up after the boy drags his dishevelled mother inside after finding her insensible following a drinking binge and they share an awkward cuddle, the news scarcely changes the way in which they interact and, therefore, the manner in which it is broken feels almost soap operatic and wholly out of keeping with the restraint of the remaining action that is subtly counterpointed throughout by John Parish's sombre guitar score.

Aside from this misstep and the occasional difficulty in binding the Compston and Anderson sub-plots into the main storyline, Meier works well with cinematographer Agnès Godard and production designer Ivan Niclass to emphasise the unglamorous aspects of the pylons supporting the cable-car, the lift station machine room and the storage and dumpster areas vital to the working of the chic restaurant. She also handles Mottet Klein superbly, so that he seems chirpily resourceful when foraging in luggage and selling his ill-gotten wares and pitiably vulnerable as he savours pilfered sandwiches and tries so desperately to elicit fond feelings from Seydoux and Anderson. Indeed, nothing sums up this duality better than the sequence in which he drags a loaded sledge through the pristine snow of the mountain paradise to which he aspires and then through the sludge and mud of the estate where, for the moment, he belongs.

Another time of austerity provides the setting for Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), an Ealing adaptation of an Arthur La Bern novel that enhanced the studio's reputation for social realism that it had first earned during the Second World War. While it might be too much to suggest that this is a missing link in the chain between the short studies of working-class life produced in the 1930s by the British Documentary Movement and the kitchen sink sagas that changed the cinematic tone in the early 1960s, this gritty depiction of Bethnal Green in the second spring after the defeat of Nazi Germany deserves to be mentioned alongside the problem pictures of Basil Dearden in charting the evolution of a screen naturalism that reflected how life was actually lived by the vast majority of the audience.

In the early hours of Sunday 23 March 1947, Edward Chapman sees a sports car pull up in Coronet Grove and his second daughter Susan Shaw dash in from the rain. Nearby, wide boys Jimmy Hanley, Alfie Bass and John Carol are taking refreshments at a snack kiosk before heading off to do a job. However, it barely makes the headlines the next morning, as crook John McCallum has escaped from prison and reporter Michael Howard is convinced that he will return to his old manor.

Having once been engaged to McCallum, ex-barmaid Googie Withers is busy reminiscing about the ring he once gave her as husband Chapman, step-daughters Shaw and Patricia Plunkett and son David Lines come bustling in for their breakfast. Keen to be by herself, Withers slips away to find some blackout material from the air-raid shelter in the garden and finds McCallum hiding in the corner. She has to wait what seems an eternity for the rest of the family to go off for the day, but eventually brings McCallum inside and feeds him while his clothes dry before the fire. He asks for money and Withers is hurt when she gives him the ring to pawn and he fails to recognise it.

Meanwhile, Shaw has gone to meet her date from the previous evening, even though she is well aware that Sydney Tafler is a notorious married womaniser. Plunkett is similarly intrigued by his brother, John Slater, who operates a few shady sidelines from the amusement arcade he manages. But Plunkett eventually decides she is better off with tepidly loyal beau Nigel Stock and they wander through the streets as plain clothes coppers Jack Warner and Frederick Piper make inquiries about McCallum's flight and the neighbourhood robbery.

Withers frets throughout Sunday lunch, as the sisters chatter and Lines toots on the mouth organ he was given as a bribe to keep quiet about spotting Shaw and Tafler smooching in a record booth. Sensing their stepmother's tension, Shaw and Plunkett pick a fight with her outside the bedroom in which McCallum is secreted. But they back down to get ready for a night out and Withers is relieved when Chapman goes off to play darts and she puts Lines to bed.

However, the boy answers the door when Howard comes snooping and a desperate McCallum barges past him and dashes into the night. Warner and Piper give chase and manage to apprehend him and the murderous Hanley after a frantic pursuit through a railway goods yard. Amidst all the excitement, however, the unhappy Withers turns on the gas in the kitchen and is lucky to be found by her husband, who implores her to get well soon when he visits her in hospital, although it isn't entirely clear whether he is keener to get his wife or his housekeeper back home as soon as possible.

Produced by Michael Balcon, this is one of the best dramas produced by Ealing during the studio's comic heyday. Owing something to Sidney Gilliat's Gainsborough picture, Waterloo Road (1944), the screenplay by Hamer, Angus MacPhail and Henry Cornelius is perfectly complemented by Georges Auric's understated score and Douglas Slocombe's crisp monochrome coverage of the sets designed by Duncan Sutherland. But it's the way in which Hamer keeps the lid on a simmering plotline that could so easily have boiled over into melodrama that most impresses. Directing only his second feature after contributing `The Haunted Mirror' to the horror portmanteau Dead of Night (1945) before debuting with the period murder saga Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946), Hamer demonstrates both a sure grasp of everyday interaction and the sense of rhythm learned in the Ealing cutting room that would be so crucial to the success of his masterpiece, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

He also reveals himself to be a dab hand at coaxing actors, although John McCallum proved somewhat stiff, despite being married to his co-star off screen. Withers, on the other hand, excels as she struggles to cope with the feelings of entrapment that are exacerbated by the struggle to make do at a time of rationing in the near-slum dwelling she shares with a man she married more out of convenience than affection. Shaw, Plunkett, Tafler and Slater also show well, as does the ever-dependable Jack Warner. But the censor was less than impressed with the sordid nature of much of the noirish action and this whiff of official disapproval led to the film being one of the year's biggest box-office hits. However, don't worry if you can't catch this on a big screen, as it is being release on DVD on 12 November.

Ever since it was first released in the summer of 1975, Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been an even firmer audience favourite. But, were it not for Tim Deegan, Denise Borden, Louis Farese, Bill O'Brien and Dori Hartley, this musical gem would probably have been forgotten as soon as it saw the light of day. Faced with a critical and commercial catastrophe in the United States, Twentieth Century-Fox was planning to consign Richard O'Brien's B-movie homage to video when Deegan persuaded Borden to screen the film as a midnite matinee at the Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village.

But what turned a curio into a cult was Farese's ad-libbed interaction with the dialogue and O'Brien and Hartley's decision to attend screenings in character costume. Rocky, thus, became a refuge for outsiders and exhibitionists, who identified with the movie's motto `Don't Dream It, Be It', and it has been a countercultural phenomenon ever since.

The Rocky Horror Show opened in the 60-seater Theatre Upstairs at London's Royal Court in June 1973. It was the brainchild of struggling actor Richard O'Brien, who played Riff Raff, as well as writing the scenario and score. But much credit should also go to Richard Hartley - who helped O'Brien produce a song demo and persuaded the Court to mount the production - and director Jim Sharman and designer Brian Thomson, who were to be largely responsible for the look of both the stage and screen incarnations.

Producer Michael White and pop maverick Jonathan King also merit mention for respectively providing half of the £2,000 budget and for releasing a cast album that prompted US record mogul Lou Adler to open the show at the Roxy in Los Angeles. This, in turn, led to a movie deal with Fox, and a disastrous 45-show engagement at the Belasco Theatre in New York.

But there's little love lost between the various protagonists, as each is keen to secure his own slice of the kudos for Rocky's success. Yet, to most fans, the picture's appeal lies in O'Brien's score and Tim Curry's bravura performance as Frank N Furter, a transvestite from the planet Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, whose encounter with Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and his fiancée. Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) culminates in his own destruction and that of his creation, Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood), by his hunchbacked henchman, Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien), and his incestuous sister, Magenta (Patricia Quinn).

Rejecting a substantial budget and the prospect of Mick Jagger playing Frank, Sharman remained largely loyal to the original cast and shot the film for $1 million over eight weeks at the old Hammer studios at Bray and the nearby Gothic pile, Oakley Court. However, Fox nearly cancelled the project at the eleventh hour and few were surprised when it opened to disastrous Stateside reviews.

But the British press was less squeamish about Rocky's blend of audiovisual pastiche and good honest smut and it was soon hailed as a progenitor of punk. But it was the late-night screenings at arthouses, grindhouses and campuses across America that rescued it from obscurity - although the Waverly sequence in Fame (1980) did no harm, either.

The press release called Rocky `an outrageous assemblage of the most stereo-typed science fiction movies, Marvel comics, Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello outings and rock 'n' roll of every vintage' and Jim Sharman was very conscious of these origins: `Being surrounded by film mythology, the theatre version was very filmatic, as the film is very theatrical, although I've tried to avoid making a sort of filmed stage play.' 

But Rocky is now less of a movie than a karaoke experience. Screenings are tantamount to quasi-religious rituals, in which audience participation is regimented by orthodox quips and actions - although local variations do apply and new crazes are communicated by The Transylvanian newsletter.

Such mania has seen Rocky gross over $135 million. But even its cast members (many of whom prefer the vitality and viscerality of the stage original) are somewhat at a loss to explain its enduring appeal.

A key factor, however, is the subtext, which revolves around notions of stardom and MGM's attitude to its troubled creation, Judy Garland. Indeed, Sharman had even planned to shoot the action up to Frank's entrance in Wizard of Oz monochrome. But he had to content himself with the Kansas tactic of placing the alien retinue among the residents of Denton, as the ploy proved too expensive. However, the conceit can now be viewed among the extras on the 25th Anniversary DVD.

There have been several incarnations of Stanley Kubrick's take on The Shining since it first appeared in 1980. Indeed, British and American audiences saw markedly different versions of Stephen King's bestselling novel about a blocked writer slowly losing his mind while working as a caretaker at a remote hotel. However, a restored edition containing all 24 minutes of the footage that has been excised at various times is due for theatrical release in a couple of weeks and there is nothing better to whet the appetite of fans than Rodney Ascher's riveting documentary, Room 237: Being an Inquiry into The Shining in 9 Parts, which considers the different interpretations that have been placed on the film over the past three decades.

Journalist Bill Blakemore recalls seeing The Shining in a plush venue on Leicester Square and being immediately intrigued by the notion that Kubrick had used King's tale to decry the genocide of the Native American population. He was first taken by the wording of the poster, which alluded to `the wave of terror that swept across America'. But he was finally convinced by the placement in the dry goods store of a jar of Calumet baking soda, as this not only bore an image of a `Red Indian' on the label, but also took its name from the French word for a `peace pipe'.

Playwright Juli Kearns also noticed the diverse references to Native American culture, but drew completely different conclusions from them. However, at this stage of the documentary, she is merely content to say that she disagreed with the critics who had branded the picture a disappointment, as she had realised from the outset that it was a treasure trove of provocative ideas on a par with Kubrick's science-fiction masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Conspiracy hunter Jay Weidner claims to have had his first religious experience while watching 2001, which had persuaded him that cinema was far from the inferior artform he had always supposed. Indeed, he now recognised that it was a medium capable of conveying complex theses and images of extraordinary power and beauty and he knew from that instant that he had to dedicate his life to studying and making films.

Academic Geoffrey Cocks admits that he didn't get The Shining on first viewing, but was sufficiently intrigued to pay a second visit. This time, he noticed that Jack (Jack Nicholson) used an Adler Eagle typewriter and the coincidence of this German make and the copious references to (19)42 meant, to his mind, that Kubrick's subtext was the Shoah. He was further convinced when he discovered that Kubrick has corresponded with Raul Hilberg about his 1961 book The Destruction of the European Jews and had always been frustrated by his inability to realise his long-planned film about the Holocaust (The Aryan Papers), as the subject was too daunting.

By contrast, musician John Fell Ryan is certain that Kubrick had other things on his mind when he made The Shining. Thus, he harks back to the time when he worked in a film archive and learned that much of the action seen in wartime newsreels was shot in safe zones and then cut into authentic battlefield footage. As a master of filling the screen with visual allusions and in-jokes, Kubrick would have been fully aware that he could slip confessional details into the mise-en-scène that would enable him to salve his conscience and alert sharp-eyed viewers to his involvement in one of the most infamous pieces of screen chicanery in history.

Having introduced his experts, Ascher allows them to expand upon their themes in a segment headed `Boiling Down'. Unfortunately, as he opts not to label the unseen speakers, it's not always clear who is making which point. But it seems to be Blakemore who claims that Kubrick was so bored after finishing his adaptation of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon (1975) that he decided to challenge the conventions of mainstream film-making by following the lead set by contemporary advertisers (and chronicled in Wilson Bryan Key's book Subliminal Seduction) by strewing the imagery with sexual references that imply the Overlook Inn is populated by spirits who attract humans in order to feed off them. This rather far-fetched theory is supported by a slow-motion clip from the office encounter between Jack and manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) that makes smuttily phallic use of a paper tray strut close to the latter's groin and raises the worrying concern that the entire documentary may be heading deep into sniggering fanboy country.

Cocks and Kearns do little to counter this impression with discussions of dissolves being used to alter the size of figures and buildings and the impossibility of an interior office in production designer Ken Adam's ground plan having an outside window. But, even though the examination of the layout descends into the realms of minutiae while pointing out the significance of the food store, the Gold Room and the grand staircase, the pair salvage the segment by suggesting that Kubrick deliberately used infeasible geography to parody horror clichés, just as he disappeared a chair behind Jack during a lobby conversation with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duval) and then removed a door sticker of Dopey the Dwarf from the bedroom door of their son Danny (Jake Lloyd) after he passes from a child's to a grown-up's understanding of the hotel's sinister secrets.

Blakemore takes up the commentary again to reveal that Kubrick spent hours on the phone to the manager of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado that had inspired King to write his novel and that he even dispatched a team to spend three months taking photographs and notes and researching the history of the state so he could distil it to make to a universal statement about humanity. There is no question that the past plays a crucial role in the picture and Danny wisely realises that retracing steps can help us avoid repeating mistakes and embark upon a new course. Yet, while the references to TS Eliot and the `nightmare of history' are cogent, it seems to be pushing things too far to aver that because Kubrick had an IQ of 200, he was a superbrain who was striving to re-educate the entire species through dream imagery and logic.

Ascher dubs the next section `Navigating the Labyrinth' and opens it with Kairns linking the fact that Kubrick released Killer's Kiss (1953) through Minotaur Productions with a skiing poster, a picture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco and a bull head-dress to deduce that Jack is a latterday minotaur trapped at the centre of his own labyrinth. This is followed by a lengthy retracing of the routes taken by Danny on his Big Wheel, which culminates in a supposition that by trundling past the family living quarters and the place where Jack betrays Wendy with a stranger he is exploring his parents' head space.

Weidner has his own notions about Room 237, however, which date back to July 1969 when  Kubrick was supposedly hired to fake footage from the surface of the Moon following the landing of Apollo 11. He states that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the front projection process should have noticed the blurs and blotches caused by blemishes in the screen, but the guilt of perpetrating a ruse that he was not even allowed to divulge to his wife Christianne prompted Kubrick to use Jack's indiscretion with the naked woman he discovers in the bathtub (Lia Beldam) to own up to his deception. 

One of the many myths surrounding The Shining is that the owners of the Timberlake Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon (which doubled as the Overlook) asked Kubrick to switch from King's Room 217 to Room 237 to stop guests from refusing to sleep in a `haunted' suite. But the Timberlake doesn't have a Room 217 and Ryan contends that Kubrick alighted on the chosen number because he shot the lunar scenes on Soundstage 237 and because the distance between the Earth and the Moon is 237,000 miles. Just in case anybody missed the reference, he dressed Danny in an Apollo 11 sweater as he plays with his trucks on the corridor carpet. But not all of his imputations were as playful, as Kubrick changed the colour of the Torrance Volkswagen from red to yellow and then included a shot of a roadside smash involving a red VW (representing King's creation) and a giant truck (denoting his own more potent vehicle).

Under the heading `Elevator to the Graveyard', Cocks espouses his theories about The Shining and the Shoah. He intriguingly connects Jack Nicholson's ad lib from The Three Little Pigs with clips from Disney's Oscar-winning 1933 version, in which the Wolf adopts a Jewish disguise to get inside one of the houses. This, he intimates is both a denunciation of Walt Disney's shameful anti-Semitism and an astute nod to the way in which the phrase `a wolf at the door' lost its Depression association with poverty once various Nazi units adopted lupine insignia during the war.

According to Cocks, Kubrick studied Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment before making the film and incorporated lots of Freudian insights into fairytales like Hansel and Gretel. However, he also borrowed from indigenous fable by revealing that the Overlook was built in 1907 on an Indian burial ground and that, because all nations are founded on blood, the torrent of gore that engulfs the upper corridor comes directly from the wounded heart of conquered peoples, whose suffering is emblematised by the elevator doors that remain closed because subsequent generations have chosen to repress the truth.

Cocks concludes by highlighting the recurring uses of the number 42 throughout the film: on a car number plate; in the fact that there are 42 vehicles parked in front of the hotel in an aerial shot; in the showing of Richard Mulligan's Summer of '42 on the television; and in the fact that 2x3x7 equals 42. He also refers to the fact that Thomas Mann dwelt on the same numeral in The Magic Mountain, which also centred on an isolated individual witnessing events that relate to the decline of Western civilisation, and it is easy to accept, as we see the opening helicopter swoop over the lake to the accompaniment of Hector Berlioz's Dies Irae, that the film has been consciously constructed to force audiences into confronting the sins of the past and accepting their share in the burden of history.

But, having delivered such a coup de grâce, Ascher pads out proceedings with musings on the significance of Stuart Ullman and Bill Watson (JFK and his CIA handler), the reassurance intended by Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers) when he tells Danny not to be afraid of the awful things he will see because they are merely pictures in a book, and the assertion by online theorist Mstrmnd (who refused to participate in the documentary) that curious things happen if a print of The Shining playing forwards is superimposed on one playing in reverse. More enticing are cogitations on the hexagonal pattern of the landing carpet (and its similarity to Launch Pad 37A at Cape Kennedy) and the fact that the line along which the ball rolls disappears after a cutaway, thus trapping him inside the world of the Grady twins (Lisa and Louise Burns).

The journey ends disappointingly with some smugly valedictory reminiscences by the five speakers and a throwaway admission that postmodernist criticism allows almost any meaning to be ascribed to a piece of art regardless of the creator's intentions. But this should not be allowed to detract from an otherwise engrossing exercise in film dissection that may have its specious moments, but provides plenty of food for thought for avid Kubrickians and conspiracy theorists alike.

What makes this all the more impressive, however, is Ascher's droll use (in imitation of Mark Rappaport's equally acute reverie Rock Hudson's Home Movies, 1992) of extracts from Kubrick's back catalogue, as well as the following features: Edward B. Curtis's In the Land of War Canoes (1914); FW Murnau's Faust (1925); Robert N. Brady's Sitting Bull at the Spirit Lake Massacre (1927); John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939); Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan's The Thief of Baghdad (1940); Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945); Roger Corman's The Terror (1953); George Sherman's The Battle of Apache Pass (1953); Nathan Juran's The Brain from Planet Arous (1957); George Cukor's My Fair Lady (1964); Richard Fleischer's Doctor Dolittle (1967); Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969); Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar (1973); John Hough's The Legend of Hell House (1973); Luigi Matzella's The Heart in Heat (1975); Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976); Peter Hyams's Capricorn One (1977); J. Lee Thompson's The White Buffalo (1977); George Kaczender's Agency (1980); Michael Crichton's Looker (1981); John Landis's An American Werewolf in London (1981); Hans W. Geissendorfer's The Magic Mountain (1982); George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982); Uli Lommel's Brainwaves (1983); Joseph Ruben's Dreamscape (1984);  Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986); Mick Garris's The Shining (1987); Ted Lowry's The Eagle Has Landed (1989); Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993); Mike Nichols's Wolf (1994) and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006). homeless people and is himself badly injured and Elena suggests the family moves into Vladimir flat with her.