Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 5/12/2013)

The mainstream critics will divide their time between Spike Lee's remake of South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook's disturbing kidnap thriller Oldboy, which stars Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen; Daniel Radcliffe playing Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in the debuting John Krokidas's Kill Your Darlings, which respectively co-stars Dane DeHaan, Jack Huston and Ben Foster as Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs; and Alexander Payne's quirky road movie Nebraska, in which alcoholic Bruce Dern shows sons Will Forte and Bob Odenkirk a side they never suspected existed as they Odenkirk trek through Wyoming and South Dakota to claim the $1 million prize Dern is certain he has won in a sweepstake. A few will make room for MJ Delaney's Powder Room, which pits Sheridan Smith, Jaime Winstone, Kate Nash, and Oona Castilla Chaplin (who is silent clown Charlie's granddaughter) in an adaptation of Rachel Hirons's stage play, When Women Wee.

Absolutely no one will review the Turk Selçuk Aydemir's wedding comedy Dügün Dernek or Prabhu Deva's Bollywood actioner R...Rajkumar, as they are rarely shown to the press and certainly not sent to those confined to barracks with, what will be in March, a 13-year back problem. Indeed, given this limited access, it's not a bad achievement to offer reviews of nine of the pictures hitting UK screens this week. Not all of them will reach Oxford, but, with London only an hour away, everything is in reach for the determined cineaste and there's no harm in whetting the appetite for the inevitable home entertainment release some time next year.

Casablanca stands in for the unnamed city in Atiq Rahimi's second feature, The Patience Stone, which he has adapted from his own 2008 Prix Goncourt-winning novel with the veteran French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. Based in Paris since his family fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion, Rahimi made his directorial debut with Earth and Ashes in 2004, which centred on an old man summoning the courage to tell his miner son that their village has been destroyed and that only his small grandson has survived. In many ways, this harrowing drama provides the other side of the coin, as it focuses on a woman who decides to pour out the frustrations and resentments that have been building up inside her during 10 years of marriage to a comatose husband who has always been more concerned about fighting causes than protecting his family.

Considering the battle being fought in the streets outside, it's ironic that wounded warrior Hamid Djavdan should have been shot in the neck by a comrade in arms who had insulted his mother rather than by a mortal foe. Wife Golshifteh Farahani is particularly vexed by the origins of the quarrel, as Djavdan has rarely show such loyalty to her over the past decade. Yet, she continues to sit by his bedside and change the drip that has been keeping him alive since he lost consciousness 16 days earlier. Mullah Mohamed Al Maghraoui had confidently predicted that her spouse would recover. But he has proved as unreliable as Djavdan's brothers and Jihadist comrades, who fled when the fighting got too close and left Farahani to care for the invalid and their two small daughters, Hiba Lharrak and Aya Abida.

Aunt Hassina Burgan empathises with Farahani's situation and suggests that she treats Djavdan's incapacity as a variation on the `syngue sabour', a magic stone in Persian mythology that shielded the owner from the misfortunes of life. Suitably emboldened, Farahani starts to tell her husband the secrets she has never been able to tell him before. She harks back to her childhood and confides the hopes that she had when her father arranged their marriage, in spite of the age difference. But she soon starts listing the flaws and failings that made him such a difficult and abusive man to live with, when he was actually home and not off with his pals defending their rights as macho Muslim males. Moreover, she also vents her spleen over her dissatisfaction with their culture, faith and social hierarchy. But, not content with uttering blasphemies, Farahani has one last confession to make about her relationship with dashing, but stuttering soldier Massi Mrowat. Ever since she was criticised for not wearing a headscarf at the New York premiere of Ridley Scott's thriller Body of Lies (2008), Golshifteh Farahani has been a persona non grata in her native Iran. Indeed, she has been resident in Paris since momentarily bearing her breast in a César promo after she had been nominated for her role in Hiner Saleem's comedy Si tu meurs, je te tue/If You Die, I'll Kill You. But she is unlikely to repair any bridges with her electrifying performance in this unflinching diatribe against prejudice, hypocrisy, brutality and oppression endured by so many Muslim women.

Lushly and lithely photographed by Thierry Arbogast against Erwin Prib's atmospheric sets, this avoids feeling overtly theatrical thanks to Hervé de Luze's deft editing. But such is the combustible content of the monologues fashioned by Rahimi and Carrière that the gaze remains firmly on Farahani, as she gets a lifetime's grievances off her chest and unexpectedly discovers the sensation of making love with a man who wants to please rather than possess her. More might have been made of Burgan's flintily sagacious prostitute aunt, while some may bridle at the climactic contrivance. But this is a bold and perceptive picture that deserves the widest possible audience.

A second director adapting one of their own print stories is Virginia Gilbert, who makes a middling debut behind the camera with A Long Way From Home. Despite the wonderful setting of the ancient towns of Nimes and Arles in southern France, this study of exile, desire and coupledom suffers from a technical sloppiness that one might not have expected from the daughter of the maker of such solid pictures as The Frog Prince (1986), Tom & Viv (1994) and Wilde (1997). However, in hiring cinematographer Ed Rutherford, Gilbert is clearly seeking to emulate Joanna Hogg rather than her father Brian. But, while this tale of age-gap infatuation lacks the dramatic finesse and thematic depth of Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013), it is deftly played by a quartet fully attuned to their characters' longings, fears and regrets.

Now in their seventies, James Fox and Brenda Fricker have been married for five decades. Even though they are very different personalities, they know each other inside out and don't need to speak in the mornings as he tootles in with the croissants and they read the paper and do the crossword on the balcony of their apartment complex. Yet Fox has become bored since they retired to in Nimes and watches elderly Betty Krestinsky chat to her dog as she sweeps her patio with the same faint disinterest with which he regards Fricker as she takes yet another French lesson with Isalinde Giovangigli.

They eat most nights in a quiet restaurant owned by Didier Bourguignon and Fox rolls his eyes as Fricker orders the same steak dish and cracks the same joke with the overly tactile host. Thus, he seizes upon the opportunity of befriending touring couple Paul Nicholls and Natalie Dormer when they are seated at the next table. The holiday-makers are considerably younger, but Dormer is grateful to Fox for his excursion suggestions and the warmth of his welcome.

Although Fox seems the more mentally robust, his occasionally forgetful Irish wife still has plenty of vigour, whether she is arranging for their grandchildren to visit or complaining about local doctor Julien Masdoua chiding her about her diet. She also seems to be the only one with any emotional tenacity and, when they see a cat get run over by a car outside the restaurant, Fricker is the one to put it out of its misery by wringing its neck. Moreover, she also has a keen understanding of her husband and says nothing when she sees the way Fox looks at Dormer and offers to show Nicholls around friend Jacques Hansen's vineyard.

As Nicholls takes a tour of the outbuildings, Fox and Dormer link arms for a sun-dappled stroll. They discuss their families and Fox realises how different their lives are and how she still has the whole of her life in front of her. But his discreet infatuation still grips him and Fricker senses he is lying when he follows the pair to Arles and becomes frustrated when he cannot track them down. They meet up again, however, for a farewell dinner at the best restaurant in town and Dormer confides in Fox that Nicholls has proposed and that she is uncertain whether this is the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with. As Nicholls and the tipsy Fricker go in search of a postbox, Dormer kisses Fox on the mouth and gushes that he would have been a wonderful father to daughters.

The realisation of her true feelings confines the crestfallen Fox to his bed for a few days. Aware he has been hurt, Fricker brings him breakfast and reassures him that he has merely been overdoing things and just needs to rest. She knows he would never have left her and has simply had his head turned by the attentiveness of someone of Dormer's youth and beauty. But she also knows that their future together isn't going to be easy, as his boredom, her mental lapses and their gnawing sense of far-from-home isolation are only going to get worse as time goes by.

Always feeling more like a sketch than a feature, this is still a touching exploration of ageing and attraction. In having Dormer doubt whether Nicholls is Mr Right, Gilbert invites us to speculate about the evolution of Fox and Fricker's partnership and how passion cools to yield the more enduring facets of affection and companionship. But, while the narrative is mercifilly free of melodramatic contrivance, it is also short on incident and the characters rarely do anything unexpected. In this regard, Gilbert's measured pacing is entirely apt. Moreover, she has been in this territory before, as her BAFTA-nominated short, Hesitation (2007), centred on a man whose French vacation is ruined by the taunting of a local boy. But Gilbert and editor Thomas Goldser frequently cut unconvincingly between scenes, while some of the continuity work is a bit slipshod.

Nevertheless, as was the case with Roger Michell's recent outing, Le Week-end, the performances more than compensate for any lapses in the storyline and the style, with Fricker easily stealing the show with a display of watchful spousal cognisance that complement's Dormer's radiant vivacity and romantic caution, the workaholic Nicholls's gauche devotion and Fox's melancholic realisation that age and mundanity have caught up with him and that this brief dalliance was probably his last hurrah. Thus, this EM Forstser-lite vignette remains genial and graceful, without ever entirely engaging.

Wrongly claimed by director Tomasz Wasilewski to be Poland's first gay feature - that was mentor Malgorzata Szumowska's In the Name Of..., which premiered just a few weeks earlier - Floating Skyscrapers essentially tells the same story as A Long Way From Home. The major difference, of course, is that the protagonist tempted into straying is a bisexual twentysomething experiencing his first same-sex crush. Moreover, the woman fearing losing her man to someone with whom she can't compete goes about keeping him in a much less artful manner. But, like Gilbert, Wasilewski makes effective use of his locales, as he did in his striking and disappointingly little-seen debut, In the Bedroom (2012).

Mateusz Banasiuk has devoted 15 years to becoming a swimming champion. Coach Mariusz Drezek drives him hard and mother Katarzyna Herman has made endless sacrifices to boost his chances. However, blonde girlfriend Marta Nieradkiewicz couldn't care less about his training or his hopes of making the big time. She resents having to live with Herman and having to share Banasiuk's precious spare time. Thus, she spends hours bickering with the manipulative Herman and regards it as something of a coup when she browbeats Banasiuk into accompanying her to the opening of an art exhibition.

Bored by the show, Banasiuk wanders away and gets talking to fey college student Bartosz Gelner. However, Nieradkiewicz spots them chatting from across the room and is deeply suspicious of their body language, as they converse with surprising ease and intensity. Gelner is not out to parents Iza Kuna and Miroslaw Zbrojewicz, but Nieradkiewicz senses that he is interested in more than a plantonic friendship with her man. She is furious, therefore, when Banasiuk starts cancelling plans with her to meet up with Gelner. What she doesn't know, however, is that Banasiuk has long been fantasising about the other men in the locker room and, after a session at the gym, he has sex in a toilet cubicle with stranger, Michal Grzybowski.

Summoning his courage, Gelner tells his parents that he has met somebody. But, while she is pleased he is being true to himself, Kuna urges him to keep his gay activities secret and only be seen with girls in public, as so many people are homophobic for religious or prejudicial reasons. Gelner calls Banasiuk to suggest they meet up and they smoke a joint together. They also hitch a ride on a goods train and Banasiuk is so smitten that he goes home to masturbate. However, he is also aware that he needs to create a smoke screen and invites Gelner to supper in the hope that Herman and Nieradkiewicz will accept him as a mate. But the latter sulks openly throughout the meal and her passive aggression drives Banasiuk into Gelner's bed.

Conscious of the fact that he is likely to be exposed as gay at the pool, Banasiuk sabotages his chances of making the swim team and Herman is livid that he has thrown away so much time and effort and accuses him of ingratitude. She still doesn't know about Banasiuk and Gelner, however, and raises no objection when they go on a trip to the lake with Nieradkiewicz. While Banasiuk is swimming, she confronts Gelner about the nature of their friendship and where he hopes it will go. Following a party, she also confronts Banasiuk and asks if he has slept with Gelner. He insists they are just pals, but is distraught when Nieradkiewicz breaks the news she is pregnant and he has to call Gelner to break up.

Shortly afterwards, Gelner is approached by Grzybowski in the changing room at the gym. Thinking he wants a quick tryst, he follows him, only to be ambushed and badly beaten by a gang of waiting thugs. As the film ends, Banasiuk seems oblivious to his fate, as she takes a bath with the victorious and, for now, contented Nieradkiewicz.

As with Szumowska's tale of a priest struggling to suppress his homosexuality, this earnest and admirably played drama will appear somewhat formulaic to those outside the areas of Eastern Europe where gay culture has yet to be accepted, let alone become established as one of the perks of democracy. But, while Szumowska invested her story with plenty of political subtext, Wasilewski is content to focus on the human factor and, as a consequence, this lacks sufficient context to make the risks taken by Banasiuk and Gelner seem as reckless and potentially dangerous as they really are.

The climactic ambush is also more than a little melodramatic, as is Nieradkiewicz's ploy to ensnare Banasiuk by playing on his sense of social decency. However, it's clear that there is nothing happy about the ever after facing the pair, as, to continue the recurring aquatic imagery, Banasiuk is scarcely going to settle for a confining bath after the freedom of the pool, especially as he now knows there are many more fish in the sea. The claustrophobic nature of the shot is fully in keeping with the visual ingenuity of Wasilewski and cinematographer Kuba Kijowski, as they generate tension, frisson, expectation and frustration through shots of cubicle doors, the depths of a swimming pool, a multi-storey car park at night and dark alleyways.

That said, Wasilewski is also skilled at staging key action off screen and leaving it to the sound design to fire the audience's imagination. He is prepared to be graphic, however, and the sex scenes here are much more convincing than those in Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour. But the characters are much less sympathetic. Indeed, in trying to tilt the balance too much in favour of Banasiuk and Gelner, Wasilewski risks turning Nieradkiewicz into a shrewish schemer who is as self-centredly clingy as Herman's controlling mother. In fact, she continues to love Banasiuk and sees resorting to biology as fair game in confounding her rival. It may seem a low, soap operatic gambit, but Nieradkiewicz's performance is more subtle, as her fear of losing the man she loves and the loneliness she will inevitably face without him registers far more poignantly than any disgust she might feel at the nature of his treachery.

The violence is much more sustained in Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado's Big Bad Wolves, a grimly comic revenge thriller that considerably enhances the reputation the co-directors forged with Israel's first horror movie, Rabies (2010). Once again, they refuse to play by the genre rules, as they present bruiser cop Lior Ashkenazi opening his inquiry into the disappearance of a young girl in a red dress playing hide and seek in the woods by hiring a couple of thugs to beat seven shades out of milquetoast teacher Rotem Keinan, who has been identified by one of the missing girl's playmates. Ashkenazi is convinced that Keinan is responsible for a string of attacks. But phonecam footage of his unconventional questioning finds its way online and he is put on gardening leave by commissioner Dvir Benedek and boss Menashe Noy just as the girl's headless corpse is found with her underwear around her ankles.

Unaware that Ashkenazi has no intention of staying home and is pumping sidekicks Guy Adler and Gur Bentwich for information, grieving father Tzahi Grad is furious that the investigation has stalled and has estate agent Nati Kluger show him a property in an Arab area with a soundproofed basement. Moreover, shortly after Ashkenazi Tasers the hapless and also suspended Keinan's little dog, Grad abducts both men and tortures the teacher so hideously that even the maverick cop objects. He is bound and gagged for his trouble and Grad continues selecting implements from a tool table (that includes hammers, pliers and blowtorches) in a merciless bid to force Keinan to reveal the whereabouts of the missing head. As a weekend father himself, Ashkenazi feels some pity when he learns that Keinan is prevented from seeing his daughter by his ex-wife. Indeed, he is beginning to suspect he might be innocent after all when things take an even darker turn when grandfather Doval'e Glickman arrives bearing chicken soup from his wife, Rivka Michaeli (who thinks her little boy is unwell), and lends a hand with the persecution, having eventually established which of the two hostage he's supposed to be maiming.

A phone call between Grad and a worried Michaeli is one of many darkly amusing moments, as Grad seeks to exact eye-for-eye vengeance. At one point, Keinan buckles (as part of a ruse by the increasingly uncomfortable Ashkenazi to free him) and gives a location that results in Grad and the cop having an encounter with horse rider Kais Nashif that even tosses the Palestinian question into the mix (and makes the expertise in sadistic interrogation methods learned while serving with the Israeli Defence Force seem all the more chilling). But such is the relentless nastiness of both the case under scrutiny and the vigilante methods used to prove a guilt that may be entirely baseless that this makes for increasingly disconcerting viewing, right down to the bleak twist that sees Ashkenazi return home having saved Keinan, only to discover that his own daughter has gone missing. .

The performances are wholly committed and as knowing as Haim Frank Ilfman's booming Herrmannesque score and Giora Bejach's gruesomely handsome visuals. But while some of the gallows wit treads a fine line (a homophobic exchange about rape is decidedly dubious) and the depiction of the brutality is sometimes over-prurient, Keshales and Papushado succeed in sustaining the moral ambiguity and, by so doing, implicate the audience in every sickening blow, which was not always the case in the recent Hollywood drama, Prisoners, in which fathers Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard united to coerce a confession out of the mentally challenged Paul Dano when their daughters vanish. Curiously, this was directed by Quebecois Denis Villeneuve, who must have been aware of a couple of variations on the same theme that were released in his native Canada in 2010: Robert Lieberman's The Tortured and Daniel Grou's Seven Days.

The blend of the excessive and the explicit would not be out of place in Mikkel Nørgaard's Klown, a 2010 spin-off of a long-running Danish TV series that combines elements of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Two and a Half Men. The feature version has more than a feel of Todd Phillips's The Hangover (2009) to it, although much of the humour edges a good deal closer to Farrelly gross-out territory. Having discovered at a family wedding that girlfriend Mia Lyhne is pregnant, middle-aged dolt Frank Hvam suddenly has to confront the reality of becoming a father. However, after an unfortunate masturbatory incident involving mother-in-law Elsebeth Steentoft (who spends the rest of the picture wearing an eyepatch), he has to convince Lyhne not to dump him and taking the honeymooning couple's podgy adolescent son Marcuz Jess Petersen on the canoeing trip with buddy Casper Christensen that was scheduled to take in a high-class brothel and a music festival obviously seems the best way of proving that he is parent material.

During the course of heading an idyllic creek (miraculously without losing any paddles), Hvam and Christensen manage to infuriate the teacher (Claus Damgaard) supervising a school field trip by flirting with the teenage girls in his care, repay the woman (Marie Mondrup) who extended her hospitality after they capsized by involving her in a humiliating threesome and then embarrass Petersen by mocking the size of his penis while bombed out of their brains at the festival. Christensen's patented method of man flirting to defuse awkward situations also lands them deeper in the mire and, naturally, Lyhne and Christiansen's long-suffering wife Iben Hjejle find out what has been going on when Petersen (who is Lyhne's nephew) nearly drowns and he is plucked from the water by a still furious Mondrup. But Hvam is nothing if not dogged and he persuades Damgaard and his students to help him and Christiansen drink 288 bottles of beer so that Petersen has enough bottle tops to claim a toy car in an Underberg brewery promotion.

Often excruciating, while occasionally raising the odd guilty smile, this coarse romp is played with laudable deadpan by small-screen regulars obviously at home in their roles. Surrounded by such guest stars as singer Medina, directors Jørgen Leth and Mads Brügger, radio and TV personalities Tina Bilsbo and Mikael Bertelsen and politician Niels Helveg Petersen, Hvam and Christiansen throw themselves into the slobcom and find a willing ally in young Marcuz Jess Petersen. But the `Tour de Pussy' element is highly resistible, while the gags on underage sex are dubious in the extreme. With Todd Phillips and Danny McBride reportedly backing an American remake of both the TV show and the movie, it will be interesting to see how they deal with the countless sex-related gags involving underage kids, Christiansen's campsite run in with a tweenage bully and his furious father and the cosy arrangement he makes with Damgaard to keep the bus on the road during the feel-good finale.

A knowing air also dominates Jamie Shovlin's Rough Cut, an art installation masquerading as a feature that has been sponsored by the Cornerhouse cinema-cum-gallery in Manchester. Claiming itself to be a `metamentary', it plays with the conventions of the 1980s slasher movie and the `making of' documentary to show how much thought, time and effort goes into producing even the lowest grade moving picture. But in revealing the tricks of the trade, Shovlin stretches his single-gag conceit to breaking point and, by continuously blurring the line between fact and fiction, he risks patronising an audience who is never quite sure whether it is listening to genuine anecdotes or yet more manufactured guff designed to mislead as much as amuse.

At the heart of the project lies a trailer for Hiker Meat, a non-existent horror by the fictitious Italian director Jesus Rinzoli, which was cooked up by Shovlin and writer Mike Harte and scored by Euan Rodger for an equally chimerical German noise band, whose career and fan ephemera had formed part of an earlier enterprise, Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-81 (2003-06). Operating as a kind of filmic Frankenstein, Shovlin compiled a trailer for the feature (whose title is an anagram of its author's name) from snippets of 80s horrors in order to examine the archetypes and mythologies of the sub-genre and the concerns and fascinations of the era that spawned it. However, when he was offered the opportunity by Bren O'Callaghan to remake the fabricated picture, he decided to take his affectionate homage and academic deconstruction to its logical extreme and headed for the Lake District with his cast and crew for an intense seven-day recreation of the scenes he had selected for the trailer.

Following the original trailer for Hiker Meat and a split-screen title sequence, the exercise opens with Rodger and Harte reminiscing about its genesis when they were students with Shovlin at Loughborough University. As it proceeds, the actuality cuts away to the first of several numbered shots from the Lakes sojourn, whose action and source are explained in accompanying captions (a full list of these will be provided at the end of the review in the order they appear). It's revealed that the unit has to complete 120 such shots in a week, but everyone is up for the challenge, including a shivering Di Lucille Campbell, the costume, hair and make-up supremo, who is one of several behind-the-scenes toilers whose contribution the invariably off-camera Shovlin foregrounds in the film.

In an effort to demystify the various elements of a shoot, Shovlin shows how footage is filmed to create a mask that will facilitate the illusion that a sinister figure has disappeared into the nocturnal mist. He then uses a highlighting tint to show how the composite appears in the finished scene, which is shown with the score and the Foley sound effects, whose creation is also exposed to full glare. At this point, Shovlin introduces Agnes Aspen, who is playing Eva in Hiker Meat and who claims that she shares several traits with her character. But he also decides this is the right place to let Harte outline his scenario (which he does with self-deprecating efficiency).

The action opens with Eva waking at 8am on 1 August. She leaves home and hitches a ride with Chuck (Bob Young), who informs her that the local town was a mining settlement that was turned into a commune through the generosity of a benefactor named Octavian (Bren O'Callaghan). As she arrives, the harvest festival is about to begin. But Eva soon learns that the idyll is a myth and that Octavian is really running a slave labour camp on behalf of a giant worm that lactates a narcotic capable of preserving life. The kids rise up against their overlord and, as Octavian is killed, the mine and the communal house explode. But the scream that rings out as the picture ends suggests that the worm has somehow survived the blast.

As effects artist Kev Thornton jokes that the worm looks like a large condom, Harte explains that there was a plan to sell the props so that others could make their own home-movie versions of Hiker Meat. But this could be as apocryphal as the claim that Shovlin watched over 1000 European and American slashers to find the clips to illustrate the scenario's 60-odd key actions. He reckons the task was made easier by the fact that horror tropes are so generic and that it was also relatively easy to lip-sync dialogue lifted from real movies that was counterpointed by musical cues that Rodger fashioned in imitation of Goblin, the fabled Italian prog rock combo that frequently collaborated with giallo maestro, Dario Argento.

Once again keen to reveal the truth about screen trickery, Shovlin shows a hose pipe being used to create the rain that spoils a picnic being enjoyed by Amanda Hennessey and Finlan Horsey. He also cuts to the Foley studio to show how ambient sound is mixed with the effects track before returning to examine how the spinning close-up of the mother playing with her son was achieved.

Having shown stills photographer John Grey at work, Shovlin focuses on the woodland chase that is part of Eva's dream sequence and uses a split screen to contrast the action and the sight of the pursuing cameraman slipping on the wet undergrowth during the nocturnal shoot. He then crosses to the dubbing studio, where Grace Duval Johnston frets that she sounds less terrified than orgasmic as she records Eva's heaving breathing as she escapes the unseen presence stalking her. Foley artist Paul Hanks is also seen at work, as Rodger explains how the score was composed to heighten the suspense and Shovlin remarks how the various post-production processes allowed him to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas at will.

Back in the Lakes, an American number plate is hastily cobbled together and fitted to a hired car. However, an abundance of traffic is making it difficult to snatch the required shot and, as Chris Paul Daniels confides that perfecting lighting and camera movement on location is often exceedingly tricky, Shovlin admits that the problems they encountered left him wondering whether to cheat if he couldn't get exact matches to the source clips. Despite travelling in convoy to protect the vintage vehicles, producer Marisa Draper reveals that a Chevy truck has had its front wing damaged in slipping off its flatbed transporter. Consequently, with both cast and crew members becoming increasingly cold and tired, morale dips and Shovlin knows he needs to re-energise everyone to stay on track.

Almost as if to raise the spirits of the audience, Shovlin decides at this juncture to reveal how the footage filmed thus far cuts together. The sequence starts with copious close-ups of flowers and trees, as Eva smells a bloom before looking at a butterfly in the grass. However, she finds insect milling over something cadaverous and she is next seen picking her way through the dark woods in a flimsy nightgown. Cross-cut with this are the images of the mother and son having their picnic disrupted by a shower and, as the woman spins her child around by his outstretched arms, Eva becomes aware of a sinister figure in the fog. He vanishes as the moon is eclipsed and Eva begins to run between the trees in mounting terror. She sees an isolated cabin and, as she fumbles with the key, a hand enters the frame. An abrupt cut has Eva waking in her motel bed and, as she sets off to hitch a ride, the opening credits to Hiker Meat roll over a montage of her accepting lifts in a variety of vehicles (which is contrasted in a split screen with the footage from the original cod trailer).

Rodger complains that he frequently had to compose music without knowing where the dialogue would occur in the scene and there is a sense of things becoming a little haphazard as Shovlin shoots a softball game, a lunchtime conversation and a campfire sing-song for the commune segment of the story. Yet, Harte reveals that quite a lot of thought went into certain aspects of the screenplay. The character names all had a connection to 1 August and he used Wikipedia to ensure the heroes and villains had Jewish and Nazi links, as there had been a vogue for SS horror flicks in the 1970s. He uses snapshots and a blackboard to demonstrate how everything fitted together and (rather like with this review) one can't help thinking that he went to an awful lot of trouble to make something that doesn't really matter as tautly coherent as it could be.

Harte confesses that this is a project about fakery and fitting facts to suit the conceit and Shovlin reinforces this by cross-cutting between the dubbing studio and some of the minor characters, including Anne (Helen Batchelor) and Clark (Adam Spencer), being slaughtered. He also includes phonecam views of the set-ups and a close-up of the dummy head used in the stabbing sequence. As Rodger rather preciously suggests that he felt himself and Lustfaust merging as he worked on the score, Shovlin switches between location and studio footage to show how sound and vision were recorded many miles and days apart and yet were combined to form a credible whole. This collaborative aspect clearly excites Shovlin (at least we have to presume it is his disembodied voice, as it is never formally identified) and, as he shows the Foley being recorded of Eva and Mike (Ashley Houston) escaping from the commune, he avers that the completed picture belongs to everyone who participated in it, as it stands as a testament to their willingness to go beyond limitation and expectation and transform a decade-old skit into something meaningful and worthwhile.

Sound recordist Arturo Aranguren jokes that nothing is as it seems on this movie, as Thornton and Karla von Denkoff put the finishing touches to the model house (based on the one at the Bates Motel) they are going to blow up with the help of a specialist pyrotechnics crew led by Steve Cawood. He and stills photographer Simon Webb are fully aware that the budget only permits one crack at this effect and the screen splits as it misfires. Luckily, it is possible to have another go and Shovlin intercuts footage of Mike and Eva fleeing with slow-motion of splintering planks flying through the air and flames rising into the sky. As Rodger continues to bemoan the trials he has endured in composing for fluid situations, Shovlin shows the wail of the worm being recorded and its body being carried from a shed somewhere in the Lakes. The screen splits into nine boxes to show people filming or following the snaking gaggle and there is plenty of banter as they prepare the creature for its close-up. Everyone falls around laughing as the clapperboy snaps the board's wooden arm next to the beast's jaws and the camera zooms in and out to create a mock horrific effect. But whether the audience will have as much fun as the cast and crew evidently did is very much open to conjecture.

Indeed, the longer Rough Cut runs, the more one begins to wonder who it was made for and whether it is more of a vanity project than a valid work of provocative art. There is no questioning the ingenuity of the makers and the initial concept is fascinating. But Shovlin rather takes for granted that everyone will be as riveted by the `making of' aspects as he is. Moreover, by concentrating on his own labours at the expense of a close analysis of the films he is supposed to be dissecting, he risks alienating the fanboys who might have been his natural constituency. He also allows the preening Rodger far too much air time and it's a shame more space wasn't devoted to Harte's astute methodology. But, while this is often self-consciously arty, it is also ambitious, assured and amusing.

For the record, the films quoted are: Shot 47 - handheld point-of-view wide shot of Eva trying to open the cabin door as the camera rushes in to her (Evil Dead, Sam Raimi, 1981); Shot 8 - static medium close-up of Eva's face and torso as she smells a flower (Opera, Dario Argento, 1987); Shot 26 - static medium close-up of Eva looking towards the right of the camera (Sergio Martino, Torso, 1972); Shot 36 - static wide shot of a man in the distance standing still and looking towards the camera. As the fog rolls past, he disappears (Torso, 1973); Shot 31 - slow-motion medium close-up from a boy's perspective of his mother swirling him around (Nick Garris, Psycho IV: The Beginning, 1990); Shot 45 - static wide shot of Eva running away from the camera towards the cabin (Evil Dead, 1981); Shot 52 - static close-up of Eva as she wakes up and looks to the right of the screen and turns left to look at her alarm clock (Chuck Russell, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, 1987); Shot 92 - static medium shot of Eva speaking through the driver window to Chuck, who can be seen through the rear window of his truck (Gary Sherman, Dead and Buried, 1981); Shot 100 - softball game (Sean S. Cunningham, Friday the 13th, 1980); Shot 101 - five commune members discuss the evening's activities around a picnic table (David Nelson, Death Screams, 1982); Shot 114 - static extreme close of Anne's face screaming as she is stabbed (Lucio Fulci, The New York Ripper, 1982); Shot 109 - static close-up of Clark with his back to the camera looking at a photo on the wall. As he illuminates the image with a torch, he is smashed over the head by an unseen assailant (Aldo Lado, Who Saw Her Die?, 1972); Shot 110 - handheld medium shot of Clark facing the camera, as the attacker puts a leather-gloved hand over his mouth from behind and he falls to the floor (Joseph Zito, The Prowler, 1981); Shot 112 - static extreme close-up of the underside of Clark's jaw as a knife exits through it (The Prowler, 1981); Shot 74 - static medium shot of Eva and Mike running through the mine tunnel towards the camera (James L. Conway, The Boogens, 1981); Shot 73 - slow-motion static wide shot of the model house blowing up (Roger Christian, The Sender, 1982); and Shot 118 - static medium close-up of a swinging light casting a shadow of the worm on the floor (Douglas McKeown, The Deadly Spawn, 1983).

We move to the neighbouring city of Salford for Benjamin and Gabe Turner's The Class of ’92, a profile of the six young players who came through the ranks at Old Trafford to earn the nickname `Fergie's Fledglings' and prove Match of the Day pundit Alan Hansen wrong by showing that it was possible to win things with kids. Having started so promisingly, however, the documentary almost inevitably follows the example of Bob Potter's excruciating corporate video, Manchester United: Beyond the Promised Land (2000), by reliving the key moments that helped secure the unique treble of Premiership, FA Cup and Champions League in 1999.

The film title is actually a misnomer, as Ryan Giggs was already in the United youth set-up when Gary Neville, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt broke in, while Phil Neville didn't appear until 1993 (when the nucleus of the same team was thrashed by Leeds United - but this is conveniently overlooked). However, the first five all played in the two-leg final against Crystal Palace that launched their careers and it is interesting to see the camaraderie that still exists with members of the squad who failed to make the grade at Old Trafford, including Robbie Savage, George Switzer, Andy Noone and Raphael Burke.

As they look back on their early days after amassing over 3000 games and 26 honours between them, the sextet have mixed feelings about the hazing that saw Scholes dumped on a bus inside a kit bag, Gary Neville being forced to chat up a girl in a nightclub and Beckham having to perform lewd acts in public to a calendar featuring first-teamer Clayton Blackmore. They were largely responsible for ending the bullying and the initiation ordeals, but all accept that they helped form their characters and gave them the steel needed to survive and thrive at the very top in English professional football.

All are equally effusive about the contribution that youth coach Eric Harrison made to their development as players and men. Indeed, they are much more affectionate in their appraisal of this genial and modest man than they are about Alex Ferguson, who is accorded respect, but is barely mentioned as either a tactical genius or a wielder of a hairdryer. Some may question the reluctance to discuss changing-room politics, but their refusal to do so suggests they all possess more class than the manager who recently went public about episodes that occurred behind closed doors in order to sell more copies of his shoddy and error-strewn autobiography.

Each member of the 92 brigade recalls his working-class origins and his love of Man Utd before he signed junior forms. Beckham proves to be the biggest fan and his reminiscence about being able to help the kit man after a match confirms how little superstardom has changed him. Indeed, all six come across as level-headed, supportive, refreshingly magnanimous and loyal mates (and you have no idea how much it pains a die-hard Koppite to type that). They fully accept that Hansen had a point in questioning whether they had the talent to replace Paul Ince, Andrei Kanchelskis and Mark Hughes after they were badly beaten 3-1 by Aston Villa at the start of the 1995-96 season. But the comments spurred them on and they put in plenty of hard hours on the training ground in order to improve their skills and ensure they won the league.

Eric Cantona was a key figure in that triumph. But he is alone of their contemporaries in discussing the impact that the Fledglings had on the club and it might have been useful to have included contributions from the likes of Roy Keane, Dwight Yorke, Andy Cole, Steve Bruce, Gary Pallister or Denis Irwin, who were perhaps more important in stabilising the team at the time and might have been able to reveal how the new boys fitted into things and whether they were something of a clique or mucked in with the rest. Instead, the Turners recruit film-maker Danny Boyle, Stone Roses bassist Gary `Mani' Mountfield and, somewhat bizarrely, Tony Blair, to extol the virtues of United as an institution and the 92 cadre in particular. A bit of journalistic input might not have gone amiss here, either, to put the achievements into a wider context, as little or nothing is said (beside a couple of brief interjections by Zinedine Zidane) about the quality of the domestic or European opposition the squad faced at this time.

More might also have been made of the lessons learned in adversity. Beckham speaks eloquently about the backlash he faced following his sending off against Argentina during the 1998 World Cup in France, while Phil Neville reveals that he took to praying before every game in the hope he wouldn't repeat the error like the penalty he gave away against Romania during Euro 2000, which led to him being castigated on away grounds for months afterwards. But United didn't carry all before them every season and it would have been instructive to learn how they bounced back as individuals and as a group from their periodic disappointments.

Where the film excels, however, is in capturing the six's markedly different personalities . The famously taciturn Scholes manages a couple of amusing stories, but is happy to leave the limelight to the others, as Giggs recalls the night Ferguson burst into the house he shared with Lee Sharpe to prevent them from going clubbing and Butt remembering a prank involving a hot kettle and a naked Peter Schmeichel's genitalia. The Neville generously concede that they had to work twice as hard as the others to make the most of their limited abilities, while Beckham (whom they all admire for his mental toughness) is happy to play second fiddle to Giggs, who was the inspiration for them all after he broke into the first team at 17 and, of course, is still a key player at the age of 40.

Too much time is given over to reliving the 1999 campaign, with the FA Cup ties against Liverpool and Arsenal and the final league game against Tottenham being discussed before the Champions League final against Bayern Munich in Barcelona's Nou Camp stadium. Given the significance of the input of goalscorers Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjær to the injury time victory, one might have thought this merited more mention. But the other five (including the suspended Scholes and unused substitute Phil Neville) are quick to praise the efforts of the often unsung Nicky Butt, who was the man of the match that night, yet never quite nailed down his place thereafter before being shipped out to Newcastle in 2004.

By then, Beckham had already gone to Real Madrid and Phil Neville would leave for Everton the following year. But the Turners are seemingly uninterested in what transpired after the final whistle went on 26 May 1999 - a date they almost consider as important as 6 February 1958, when the Fledglings' predecessors, the Busby Babes, perished in the Munich air disaster. Again, a little more insight would have appreciated in summing up achievements that are unlikely to be repeated. But there is still plenty here to engage Mancs and ABUs alike, although only the former are likely to derive much pleasure from it.

Just as Bruce Brown confirmed himself as the King of Ultimate Summer with a string of surfing movies, so Stacey Peralta became the doyen of the skateboard documentary with Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) and Bones Brigade (2011). However, as Tristan Patterson revealed in Dragonslayer, there was a darker side to the supposedly idyllic skater lifestyle and Marten Periel echoes this theme with This Ain't California, which harks back to the 1980s to show how riding was not simply an expression of personality in the German Democratic Republic, but also an act of subversion.

Teenager Denis Panicek first became aware of skateboards when he saw one on a programme beamed in from neighbouring Czechoslovakia. His pals Dirk and Nico were equally blown away by the sight of kids their own age having such fun and commanding such respect from doing tricks and adopting their own distinctive dress sense. Fashioning their own boards from some rollerskates and an old plywood chair, the trio began perfecting their skills and soon became so adept that Denis's dad began filming them on his 8mm camera.

The triumvirate was broken up when Nico was forced to move to Berlin with his pop singer mother. But Denis quit school and followed hot on his heels and they quickly infiltrated the local boarding scene, where Denis acquired the nickname `Panik'. Initially, the East German authorities were unsure what to do with a craze that smacked of Western decadence and rebellion. But they also soon recognised that the riders were do dedicated to improving their technique that they were too busy to cause any trouble.

Moreover, the exercise involved helped keep the kids fit and when competitions like Euroskate started to be held behind the Iron Curtain, the Party decided it would help boost patriotism among the younger generation if riders from the GDR began winning cups and medals and brought home a little prestige. Denis and Nico were among the first wave of skateboarders to be allowed to travel. But events in places like Prague opened their eyes to the restrictions and deprivations that existed beyond Checkpoint Charlie.

With Kai Hildebrand playing Panik in the reconstructed sequences and leading modern boarders like Valeri Rosomako, Kai Hillebrand, Lennie Burmeister and Juppie Diens strutting their stuff to increase the authenticity, this is a fascinating insight into youth culture behind the Berlin Wall in the decade before it was demolished. Throughout, Persiel avoids overt ostalgia and makes evocative use of both archive material, dramatisation and interviews with buddies and adversaries alike. The fact that Denis was killed in Afghanistan in 2011 while serving with the German army makes the picture all the more poignant, as the world seems to have learned little in the quarter century since it had supposedly changed for the better forever.

Finally, we come to a rather otiose offering in the form of Matthew Miele's Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's. Narrated by William Fichtner and taking its title from a 1990 New Yorker cartoon by Victoria Roberts, this chapter-doc could have been a compelling history of the luxury department store founded on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in 1899 by Herman Bergdorf . It might also have been a droll insider view from the perspective of fashion director Linda Fargo, personal shopper Betty Halbreich and window designer David Hoey. But, instead, it's a fawning paean to designers like Oscar de la Renta, Michael Kors, Karl Lagerfeld, Isaac Mizrahi, Jason Wu, Manolo Blahnik, Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs, Giorgio Armani, Bobbi Brown, Christian Louboutin, Naeem Khan, Patricia Field, Catherine Malandrino, Diane von Fürstenberg, Georgina Chapman and Dolce & Gabbana, who seem to be appearing more to ensure they get plenty of fat contracts in the future than from any more altruistic motives.

Similarly, famous customers like Susan Lucci, Candice Bergen, Nicole Richie, Jean Doumanian and the Olsen twins seem to be gushing in the hope of receiving a generous discount next time they're browsing without a camera fixed on them. Indeed, only Joan Rivers seems capable of making balanced (and typically waspish) comments and her line about dedicated followers of fashion being idiots is priceless. If only more contributors had been so bold. Instead, minor league liggers like Patrick `The Dandy' McDonald and Iris Apfel join Vanity Fair writer Amy Fine-Collins, Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran, Style.com's Candy Pratts Price and Harold Koda, the urbane curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art flutter and flatter without capturing either the essence of the shop or its ethos.

One is left longing for more information about the conversion of the old Vanderbilt mansion, the 1901 renaming as Bergdorf Goodman after 25 year-old apprentice Edwin Goodman purchased a sizeable stake, and the way in which he ran the business from the luxury apartment above the store. Apart from a few hard-to-read captions, little is made of the transition under his son, Andrew, who is heard in a number of audio clips and who sold the company to Broadway-Hale Stores for $12.5 million in 1972. But even less is said about the impact of the Bernie Madoff scandal on profits or later parent group, Neiman Marcus, being acquired in a leveraged buyout by the private equity firms, Texas Pacific Group and Warburg Pincus. It's almost as though it's considered vulgar to discuss money where this temple to aspirational avarice is concerned.

There are anecdotes about celebrity shoppers like Elizabeth Taylor and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who bought 200 pairs of mink earmuffs and over 70 fur coats respectively - the latter at a cost of $400,000 after hours one Christmas Eve. Elsewhere, everyone pays handsome tribute to Euro labels like Dior, Pucci and Fendi that gave the place a touch of postwar class. Similarly, the plaudits are showered on Dawn Mello, who did much as chief buyer to make the store the place to be seen for front-rank designers of clothing, shoes, jewellery and cosmetics.

But her successor's visit to upcoming couturier Ally Hilfiger (daughter of Tommy) is as tedious as Guggenheim queen bee Alexandra Munroe's audience with Ushio and Noriko Shinohara in Zachary Heinzerling's Cutie and the Boxer. Doing much to make amends are the all-too-short segment on the marvellously forthright Betty Halbreich (who, one hopes, like David Hoey, is one of the employees reportedly earning big bucks) and the recurring updates on Hoey's enchanting 2011 windows on a `carnival of the animals' theme. Also very special is the closing monochrome clip from a 1965 Barbra Streisand TV special, in which she flits around Bergdorf's singing a medley that includes `Second Hand Rose', `I've Got Plenty of Nothing', `Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out' and `Brother, Can You Spare a Dime'. But, for much of the time, the faux testimonials reduce this choppy, sloppy muddle to the level of a crass infomercial on behalf of naked consumerism.