Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 19/3/2015)

So, we shouldn't be surprised that both Mommy and A Second Chance are heavily dependent upon clichés, contrivances and caricatures. But, while Dolan typically makes a virtue of his Sirkian affectation, Bier leavens her Loachian social realism with Ozu-like digressions that are designed to prompt the audience into examining their own consciences and shedding their preconceptions and prejudices, as the hackneyed action takes ever-more improbable twists. It's one thing to bombard viewers with plotlines that would seem far-fetched in a second-rate soap opera, but to browbeat them at the same time seems a bit excessive.

In a dystopic Canada some time in the near future, a law known as S-14 is passed to allow parents to discard their emotionally unstable offspring. Three years after being widowed, fortysomething Anne Dorval takes advantage of the legislation to have 15 year-old Antoine-Olivier Pilon (who suffers from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) placed in a juvenile detention centre. However, he is expelled after causing a fire in the cafeteria and Dorval makes no secret of her resentment after she has a traffic accident while driving to collect him.

Once home, the pair bicker incessantly, with a ferocity that might be described as Oedipal were the blonde-dyed, cross-dressing Pilon not so obviously out of the closet. Although she dresses provocatively, Dorval is not afraid of hard work and cleans houses and translates children's books to make ends meet. Moreover, Pilon is capable of genuine affection and buys his mother a necklace and enjoys listening with her to the musical playlist compiled by his late father that includes tracks by Celine Dion, Laura Del Rey and Sarah MacLachlan.

Their antics are highly resistible, but they intrigue neighbour Suzanne Clément, a teacher with a trauma-induced stutter who is on sabbatical while battling depression. She is keen to find a distraction from her own domestic travails and offers to help Pilon with his schooling. Dorval readily agrees, as she knows that her son will be incarcerated in a much tougher institution if he fails to settle down and find a focus. But, while he enjoys taunting Dorval about how much he adores Clément after the dissolve into a giggling fit after opening a wine box, Pilon is soon picking fights with her, too. Indeed, one becomes so intense that Clément pins him to the floor after he breaks her necklace and Pilon wets himself from a mixture of fear and confusion.

Dorval finds herself being drawn to Clément and the trio have their happy moments dining, dancing and cycling together. But, when Dorval is served with a $250,000 lawsuit by the parents of the boy who received second-degree burns after Pilon set him alight, she turns her attention to lonely lawyer Patrick Huard, in the hope he can provide a little legal and financial assistance. They arrange to go on a date, but Pilon is immediately jealous of a rival for his mother's affection and, out of a twisted loyalty to his father, he accompanies them to a karaoke bar, where his rendition of Andrea Bocelli's `Vivo per lei' enrages some homophobic patrons and the evening ends in disaster.

Following a further contretemps with Dorval, Pilon attempts to kill himself with a Stanley knife in a supermarket. He dreams that he is grown up with children of his own. But, in bitter reality, he is being driven to another detention centre, as Dorval can no longer cope with his tantrums and tirades. However, she is dismayed when Clément informs her that she is moving to Toronto and the action ends as Pilon makes a bid to escape, despite having nowhere else to go.

There has always been something of Rainer Werner Fassbinder about Xavier Dolan. He is never afraid to push buttons or go to limits. Nor is he averse to playing with his medium and, as a consequence, he shoots this in a 1:1 aspect ratio whose confining boxiness is emphasised by black lines down the side of the frames. However, when Pilon starts to feel good about life as he is skateboarding along the street, Dolan has cinematographer André Turpin extend the frame to widescreen as Pilon pushes out his arms and feels the space around him. This contracts the moment things take a down turn. But Dolan makes the mistake of repeating the shot later in the picture and succeeds only in cheapening the effect.

He also has a bad habit of dawdling. The sequences of Pilon pirouetting in a car park in a shopping trolley is made tolerable poetic by the use of the Counting Crows track `Colourblind'. However, the scenes of Pilon acting out to the Oasis hit `Wonderwall' and having a hissy fit to `Blue (Da Ba Dee)' by Eiffel 65 are little more than glorified music videos and smack of self-indulgence. Indeed, the action could be comfortably cut by 40 minutes without reducing its impact, as the downtime does nothing to make the shouting matches (which often recall the snarling wit of those between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Mike Nichols's 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) between the leading trio seem any more shocking or intense.

Yet, Dolan continues to write coruscating dialogue and bring the best out of his actors, with the scene-stealing Pilon more than holding his own against the experienced Dorval and Clément. But, while this act of psuedo-atonment for the brattishness of I Killed My Mother (which shared the Special Jury Prize at Cannes with Jean-Luc Godard 's infinitely superior Goodbye to Language) remains laudably personal and demonstrates a growing maturity in Dolan's film-making style, he rarely has anything of momentous significance to say about his characters or their milieux. And, until he does, he will remain an arthouse darling, but will never be the artist he clearly has the potential to become.

Dolan's wicked sense of humour earns him a degree of critical leeway that Susanne Bier can never hope to attain. There's nothing wrong with a film taking itself and/or its subject matter seriously and no one could doubt Bier's sincerity or talent. But she and Anders Thomas Jensen keep insisting on asking audiences to accept po-faced potboilers as works of searingly insightful social critique. The conceit in A Second Chance, for example, is so preposterous that it feels like something plucked from a vanity published penny dreadful and one can only hope that Bier has got such novelettish nonsense out of her system before she embarks upon the biopic of Mary, Queen of Scots that she is currently developing for Saoirse Ronan.

Several years ago, provincial cop Nikolaj Coster-Waldau fathered his first child with wife Maria Bonnevie. They are overjoyed, but find coping with its incessant nocturnal crying fits stressful in the extreme. Alcoholic partner Ulrich Thomsen realises that Coster-Waldau is having a tough time and shares his dismay when they raid the apartment of junkie Nikolaj Lie Kaas and his girlfriend Lykke May Andersen and find their infant son bawling in a cupboard and covered in excrement.

Coster-Waldau tries to pressurise the authorities into taking the baby into care and putting the violently unpredictable Lie Kass behind bars. However, when Andersen tests negative for drugs, social services declare her fit to mother her child and Coster-Waldau bends Thomsen's ear about the fact that some people don't deserve to be parents. He could probably add Bonnevie's snootily wealthy mother Ewa Fröling to the list, as she has scarcely seen her grandson since he was born. But Coster-Waldau reserves his disdain for the lower orders.

A few days later, however, Coster-Waldau and Bonnevie wake in the night to discover their son has died in his sleep. Giving his distraught wife a sedative, Coster-Waldau takes the corpse and breaks into Lie Kaas's flat, while he and Andersen are asleep. He swaps the babies and coats his own child in filth so that its parents will be fooled into believing he must be theirs when they find it in the morning.

Lie Kaas blames Andersen for the death and stages an elaborate kidnap scenario in a desperate bid to avoid prison. Yet, despite many experts informing her that death transforms physical features, Andersen remains adamant that her baby has been abducted, but she is taken into psychiatric care and Coster-Waldau is able to coerce the crushed Lie Kaas into confessing that he buried the missing body in some nearby woodland.

An autopsy is ordered, but Coster-Waldau urges Bonnevie to remain strong and everything will be fine. But she is harbouring a terrible secret and commits suicide shortly before the coroner reveals that the deceased infant had succumbed to shaken baby syndrome. On seeing Coster-Waldau's anguish, Thomsen realises what has happened and persuades his friend to return the child to its mother. He warns him that he will lose his job, but promises to help him plead mitigating circumstances.

As the story ends in the present day, Coster-Waldau is working in a hardware store and occasionally sees Andersen and her son doing their shopping. But this concluding bid for normalcy only serves to emphasise the shameless melodramaticism of the preceding action. From the opening shots of Coster-Waldau lighting a lamp at the side of a grave and Bonnevie crouching in distress beside a toilet bowl, the leads commit admirably to their one-dimensional roles, while cinematographer Michael Snyman makes eerie use of chilly blues to achieve a visual sobriety to match the seething emotional tone that is reinforced with a deadening lack of finesse by Johan Söderqvist's endlessly ominous score.

But, while the Japanese maestro Yasujiro Ozu used pillow shots to root the action in the real world beyond the frame and give the audience time to contemplate the previous scene and speculate upon what might be about to occur, Bier archly employs them as postured pauses before the unleashing of the next crassly manipulative plot twist designed to convince us that decent people don't always make better parents than those with violent streaks, addictive personalities and long prison records. She is a much better director than this and it's a shame to see her producing such patronisingly shallow and resolutely mediocre pulp.

We remain in Denmark for the filmed record of Sarah Frankcom's staging of Hamlet at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, which earned a certain notoriety by virtue of the fact that the title role was taken by a woman. Maxine Peake is not the first actress to tackle the indecisive avenger. She isn't even the first to play the part in Manchester, as both Sarah Siddons (1777) and Charlotte Cushman (1847) comfortably precede her. Nor is Peake the first to bring her interpretation to the screen, as Sarah Bernhardt appeared in a crude sound-on-disc record of the climactic duel in 1900, while Asta Nielsen essayed a princess disguised as a male in Svend Gade and Heinz Schall's 1920 silent feature, which based its premise on Dr Edward P. Vining's study, The Mystery of Hamlet, which posited that the female heir had her sex concealed in order to secure the dynasty.

There are no such concerted revisionism in this gender- and colour-blind production, which populates its Elsinore with a shrewish Polonia (Gillian Bevan), a Goth Rosencrantz (Jodie McNee, opposite an Asian Guildenstern in Peter Singh), a swaggering Player Queen (Claire Benedict, who also helps turn Marcellus into Marcella) and a Scouse gravedigger (Michelle Butterly). Somewhat disappointingly, Gertrude (Barbara Marten) remains merely the mother of the anti-hero and the consort to his uncle and sworn enemy, Claudius (John Shrapnel, who also doubles as the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father), while Ophelia (Katie West) also remains an innocent maiden, albeit one with a black brother in Laertes (Ashley Zhangazha)

William Shakespeare's text has been trimmed to remove all trace of Fortinbras and, consequently, this becomes a study of domestic dysfunction rather than court intrigue at a time of national peril. Hamlet's mental instability is also played down, although Ophelia is still allowed to lose her reason (as well as much of her clothing) before drowning in a stream near the castle. Instead, the 40 year-old Peake presents the Dane as a student idealist, who returns from Wittenberg to tut like a petulant teenager at the corruption and venality that Gertrude has been powerless to prevent Claudius and Polonia from introducing during the extended absence that witnessed his father's demise.

Dressed in an austere blue suit and sporting a blonde crop, Peake resembles David Bowie in his Thin White Duke period and the androgyny of that character carries over into her interpretation. He is quick-witted, but emotionally stunted and it isn't easy to discern whether he is as gay as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern gossipily reckon or as Oedipal and cruel as his behaviour towards Gertrude and Ophelia might suggest. But the overriding characteristic of Peake's Hamlet is a pouting peevishness that stops well short of anger and, thus, prevents him from fulfilling the Ghost's exhortation to avenge him. This Hamlet can wield a sword with the best of them, but he lacks the crucial sense of self-doubt that ultimately seals his fate. Peake is too determined to prove that she can play the role (which she undeniably can) to accept its fatal flaws. Moreover, she has a tendency to mistake intensity for depth and she rushes too many of the famous speeches.

She is also hampered by the calibre of some of the support playing. Gillian Bevan captures the comic fussiness of Polonius, but misses his deceptive malevolence in her bantering exchanges with Peake, while John Shrapnel and Barbara Marten seem overly aware of not upstaging their co-star and, as a result, produce rather bland readings of Gertrude and Claudius. Claire Benedict revels in the Player Queen's grandiloquence, while Michelle Butterly almost pulls off the rather dubious conceit of Yorick's being a rolled-up sweater. Indeed, Amanda Stoodley's production design is one of the biggest casualties of committing a theatre in the round performance to digital video, as the live spectacle of her clever use of lighting in the Ghost scenes is ruinously diminished by the flatness of the imagery.

As was pointed out by several critics during the play's run between 11 September and 25 October last year, Frankom devotes too much time to finding cosmetic ways to make her Hamlet different when she should have been seeking novelty within the verse itself. However, the attention the production has received almost certainly means that we should be bracing ourselves for a transsexual Cleopatra, a pacifist Henrietta V, a white lesbian Othello and a son-betrayed Queen Lear. But one can but hope that if any of them are recorded for posterity, they are filmed with considerably more imagination and intimacy than director Margaret Williams managed with eight cameras over the last three nights of the Manchester run.

Another milquetoast with mental health issues finds himself being told what to do in The Voices, the rather unexpected English-language debut of graphic novelist-turned-director Marjane Satrapi, who began confidently in partnership with Vincent Paronnaud on the animated Persepolis (2007) and the live-action follow-up Chicken With Plums (2011). Set in Iran as the Islamic Revolution drives out the Shah and changes the life of a spirited nine year-old girl, the former not only considers the strictures placed upon women by the new regime, but also the prejudices of the West, as Marjane is smuggled to Vienna to complete her education and has a hard time acclimatising. Narrated by the Angel of Death (Edouard Baer), the latter explains why violinist Mathieu Amalric takes to his bed after old flame Golshifteh Farahani appears not to recognise him on the street. Having been presented with a special violin to channel his passions, however, Amalric not only fulfils his musical destiny, but also marries Maria de Medeiros and has two beautiful children (Enna Balland and Mathis Bour, who grow into Chiara Mastroianni and Christian Friedel). But something is missing and it's only as life ebbs away that he embarks upon a strange journey that provides him with the answers he has long sought.

Although Chicken With Plums failed to secure a release in this country, Satrapi slipped off the mainstream radar altogether with The Gang of the Jotas (2012), a low-budget, self-scripted romp that not only allowed her to direct alone for the first time, but also saw her play a Mafia moll on the run who seeks assistance from badminton players Patrice Roche and Mattias Ripa after picking up the wrong luggage at an Iberian airport. It's all the more surprising, therefore, to find her resurfacing with a Hollywood studio movie scripted by Paranormal Activity 2's Michael R. Perry that has been filmed entirely on location and in studio space in Berlin. Yet, while it may appears from a distance as though Satrapi is merely a director for hire, this echoes the themes of dislocation and acclimatisation that informed her collaborations with Paronnaud and it will be fascinating to see what she turns her hand to next.

Ryan Reynolds lives in the Midwest industrial town of Milton, with his cat, Mr Whiskers, and his dog, Bosco. He works in the packing department of a bathroom supplies company and wears his pink overall with a pride that carries over into his activities as a member of the factory's barbecue committee. As a bashful fellow, he knows he is better suited to girl-next-door Anna Kendrick. But Reynolds has a crush on Gemma Arterton, the flirtatious English girl from accounts, who accepts his invitation for a date, only to change her mind at the last moment.

Persistent in a chivalrous rather than an overtly creepy way, Reynolds comes to see why Arterton stood him up and winds up helping her start her car. But the evening ends badly, as a freak accident with a deer leads to Reynolds pursuing Artterton through the woods carrying the knife he used to put the distressed animal out of its misery. As she had removed her clothing because she was soaked, Arterton is forced to flee in her underwear and she perishes accidentally as Reynolds tries to reassure her that he means no harm.

Uncertain what to do, he consults Mr Whiskers and Bosco, who offer very different solutions. The morally upright mastiff suggests that Reynolds explains what happened to Sheriff Stanley Townsend. But the foul-mouthed ginger tom urges him to cut the corpse into pieces and store the head in the refrigerator. Moreover, he encourages Reynolds to kill again to see if it feels differently murdering someone on purpose.

Clearly, the pets cannot talk and it's obvious from his visit to psychiatrist Jacki Weaver that Reynolds is a schizophrenic, who can become dangerously disturbed if he decides not to take his medication. But it only becomes clear through a flashback to his childhood (when he is played by Gulliver McGrath) that his problems stem from the fact that German mother Valerie Koch is afflicted by the same condition and that her unhappiness at leaving Berlin to follow soldier lover Paul Brightwell to the United States tipped her over the edge.

What is not certain, however, is whether Reynolds is experiencing the storyline as a demented fantasy or whether he is living it for real. This is a crucial distinction for Kendrick and co-worker Ella Smith, as they end up sliced and diced before an increasingly unhinged Reynolds abducts Weaver and goes up in a blaze of glory during a police siege before performing a song-and-dance routine in heaven with his parents, his victims and Jesus (Michael Pink). But it's pretty immaterial to the audience, which gets swept along in spite of itself on the cockeyed logic of Reynolds's actions and the sheer bravura of Perry's scenario and Satrapi's teasing direction.

Some of the tonal shifts are a little abrupt, but Reynolds taps into his inner Anthony Perkins to make his serial killer seem like a gentle soul with the odd loose wire. His Scottish and folksy accents for Mr Whiskers and Bosco (not to mention the voices he does for the deer and the stuffed toy, Bunny Monkey) are amusingly eccentric and self-reflexively riff on the characters he has produced for such crowdpleasers as Turbo and The Croods (both). But he also gels well with Artterton and Kendrick before he starts storing their entrails in Tupperware containers. But, while Satrapi ensures Reynolds retains viewer sympathy by presenting events from his perspective, the switch from goofy to gruesome still jars.

Production designer Udo Kramer, cinematographer Maxine Alexander and editor Patrice Roche prove willing accomplices, as a darker pall slowly begins to descend over Milton's cosy façade. But Olivier Bernet's score strikes too many discordant notes, despite providing the charming accompaniment to an impromptu forklift ballet. The CGI used to animate the mouths of the animals and occasionally fill the frame with butterflies are persuasive enough. But Satrapi never quite convinces us entirely to suspend disbelief and, so, while this undeniably entertains, it is never quite as madcap and macabre as it needs to be.

Completing this weeks warped minds triptych is Paul Solet's Dark Summer, a follow-up to the lauded, but little-seen Grace (2009), in which mother-to-be Jordan Ladd refuses to accept that her baby has died in the womb following the car crash that killed her husband and delivers a still-born daughter who appears to come to life in the grief-stricken Ladd's fevered imagination. This sophomore treatise on Internet identity explores several related themes, while also containing claustrophobic echoes of DJ Caruso's Disturbia (2007) and Gerard Johnstone's Housebound (2014).

Indeed, the former even gets a namecheck, as 17 year-old Keir Gilchrist exploits the fact that his mother is away on business to receive an illicit visit from best buddies Stella Maeve and Maestro Harrell. Gilchrist has been placed under house arrest for cyberstalking classmate Grace Phipps and parole officer Peter Stormare explains the terms of his sentence as he checks on the electronic tag attached to Gilchrist's ankle. However, while he accepts that his physical movements are limited, Gilchrist is soon back on line after Maeve and Harrell smuggle in a tablet and he hooks on to a neighbour's wi-fi using an untraceable router. Moreover, he also breaks the restrictions about drink and drugs and is feeling pretty pleased with himself when he starts checking up on Phipps.

Much to his surprise, however, she Skypes him and taunts him before committing suicide in front of his very eyes. Yet, no sooner has Phipps blown her brains out, than Gilchrist notices that his computer screen has started to glow an eerie shade of green and he fears that his victim's threat to feel the pain she has endured is not an empty one. As he sits alone, Gilchrist becomes aware of sinister shadows and strange noises, and, as various electrical items start to malfunction, he even convinces himself that Phipps's ghost is haunting him.

Aware that he can't inform his mother or Stormare, Gilchrist calls on Maeve and Harrell to help him. As she has long nursed an unrequited crush, Maeve is more than keen to spend time in Gilchrist's presence and a touching connection forms between them as they face the danger together. Yet, as the things going bump start to sound louder and the hallucinations and spectral encounters become ever-more terrifyingly real, Gilchrist never seems to be in any particular peril until he deduces how he can break the curse by breaching the terms of his confinement in the final scene.

Thus, while Solet and screenwriter Mike Le generate a serviceable amount of suspense, they shy away from genuine scares. Cinematographer Zoran Popovic lights production designer Ariana Nakata's enclosed spaces effectively enough, while editors Josh Ethier and Benjamin Cassou tease incessantly in conjunction with sound designer Herwig Maurer. Moreover, Austin Wintory's inventively distorts his pleasingly unsettling piano and string score, while there is a subtle chemistry between Gilchrist and Maeve. But the plot lacks any psychological complexity, the characterisation is paper thin, the chills underwhelmingly low key and the denouement a resounding anti-climax. Genre buffs might be better predisposed when the picture becomes available for home viewing.

Past deeds also impinge upon Rob Brown's feature debut, Sixteen, which was produced on a shoestrong with crowdfunding support and has finally secured a limited theatrical release after being lauded at the 2013 London Film Festival. Closer in spirit to Alan Clarke than the more obviously politicised works of Ken Loach, this is a raw insight into life on a London housing estate that dares to suggest that Britain's urban youth doesn't know how lucky it is in comparison with their peers in some of the world's genuine trouble spots.

Coming up to his 16th birthday, Roger Jean Nsengiyumva knows he has a lot to be grateful for. He was rescued from being a child solider in the Democratic Republic of Congo by aid worker Rachael Stirling, who adopted him and now works all hours as a nurse in Bexley to give him opportunities he could never have envisaged. He has ambitions to become a barber and Stirling encourages him to follow his dream. However, his war zone experiences mean that violence is never far below the surface and Nsengiyumva is on a final warning at school after getting involved in fights.

Nsengiyumva hardly helps himself by hanging out with the thuggish Dean Williams, who is rarely out of trouble. One day, they see classmate Fady Elsayed stabbing local landlord Dave Hill to death in reprisal for him evicting drug dealer Sam Spruell. He tries to convince Nsengiyumva that he had to kill Hill because he had been molesting Elsayeds sister. But, while he is far from convinced, Nsengiyumva has learned enough from his experience in the Congolese civil war and his brief time in England that discretion is often the better part of valour and, consequently, he says nothing about what he has witnessed to either his mother, headmaster Christopher Simpson or Detective Inspector Alexis Zegerman.

Instead, he invites classmate Rosie Day for dinner and Stirling tactfully makes herself scarce to give them some privacy. Nsengiyumva offers to cut Day's hair and she realises there is more to him that the tough guy image he likes to project. However, she is discomfited when he is resists letting her see the scars carved into his chest during his pitiless Congolese childhood and is upset when they go to bed together and he treats her like an object rather than a lover. Nevertheless, she agrees to stay the night. But Nsengiyumva has such a vivid nightmare that he thrashes out and punches Day and she leaves in some distress.

The following day, Stirling receives a phone call that leaves her crestfallen. However, she can't find Nsengiyumva, who is busy following Williams after he spots him leaving Spruell's place. He notes where Williams conceals a gun, but says nothing about it when he sees him at school. Similarly, he keeps his emotions in check when he sees Day flirting with Elsayed and joking that she would love to see him stab someone else. Their conversation is overheard, however, and Simpson calls the police. But, once again, Nsengiyumva refuses to co-operate, even though Zegerman promises that she will protect him if he has anything he wishes to share wit her.

Nsengiyumva attends an open day to learn about applying for hairdressing courses. However, the instructor patronises him and he returns home to the news that his birth mother has died in Africa. Overcome with grief and memories of everything he had endured in uniform, Nsengiyumva reacts furiously after an attempted arson attack and threatens Elsayed and Spruell with the gun Williams had hidden. However, he allows the cops to take charge of the situation and tells Stirling that his days of being a soldier are over for good. Later that afternoon, Nsengiyumva sees Day in the supermarket and sidles over to patch things up.

Having gained something of a reputation with a series of admired shorts, Rob Brown makes a trenchant debut as both writer and director with this sincere and considered drama. As is often the case, even with social realist pictures, the plot depends far too heavily on principals making decisions that are foolish at best and positively reckless at worst. Nsengiyumva is forever being warned not to let his aggressive nature get the better of him or to get involved in other people's business. But he blunders on regardless, with Brown too frequently attributing his behaviour to the psychological scars he bears from his past life.

Nevertheless, Nsengiyumva delivers an imposing performance, which is all the more impressive as he his taciturnity means that he has to rely for the most part on gesture, expression and body language. Stirling and Day provide solid support, although much of the villainy is of the spirit-sapping thick ear variety familiar from so many third-rate BritCrime offerings. Much more impressive is Justin Shaw Brown's no-nonsense photography and John Bowen's sound design, which reinforce Brown's sure sense of place and the mood of melancholy that pervades much of the action. It would have been very easy to sensationalise or sentimentalise the storyline, but, even though some of the symbolism is a little heavy handed, Brown flecks it with authentic and unexpected touches, like Nsengiyumva's desire to cut hair and the moving sequence in which Stirling has to sever his last link with home.