Parky at the Pictures (DVD 1/12/2016)

In a sinister present of plastic and glass, professor Adrian Hoven supervises a project to generate 10,000 human `identity units' with a cutting-edge super-computer. However, a disturbing discovery prompts him to commit suicide and he is replaced by his assistant, Klaus Löwitsch. But when nobody else seems concerned by the inexplicable disappearance of the company's head of security, Löwitsch begins to suspect a conspiracy to cover up a dangerous glitch in the system and he enters the Simulacron's virtual world to investigate. On returning to reality, however, he finds himself being accused of insanity by his colleagues and murder by the police and he goes on the run to expose the truth and clear his name.

Despite occasionally feeling protracted at 205 minutes, this is a fascinating work by a fearless film-maker. Borrowing heavily from Kubrick and Godard (right down to including a cameo by Alphaville star, Eddie Constantine), Fassbinder pays his traditional homage to Douglas Sirk by strewing the mise-en-scène with reflective surfaces that emphasise the illusory of Löwitsch's milieu and the divided nature of both the human characters and the indentity units, who have no idea they are cybernetic organisms. Yet, while Horst Giese, Walter Koch and Kurt Raab's s nightmarishly chic production design, Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz's restlessly roving camerawork and Gottfried Hüngsberg's ominous score are crucial to creating the disconcerting sense of place and atmosphere, it's the ensemble cast that imbues the operatic, futuristic action with the alienated authenticity that makes it so consternating.

Löwitsch excels as the cog out of kilter and he receives strong support from Kurt Raab's rapid capitalist, Gunther Lamprecht's jobsworthy computer technician, Ulli Lommel's investigating journalist, and Margit Carstensen and Barbara Valentin's contrasting secretaries. Ingrid Caven also makes an impression, with her Dietrichian delivery of `Lili Marleen' in one of the many digressions with which the 27 year-old Fassbinder interrupts the storyline to assess the philosophical and moral mood of a society so flagrantly ill at ease with itself.

Nearly four decades have passed since this was produced, yet it remains startlingly prescient and contemporary. Sadly, the same cannot be said for another big business saga, Jérôme Salle's Largo Winch (2008), which has been adapted from the first two volumes of a 16-part Belgian comic-book by novelist Jean Van Hamme and illustrator Philippe Francq. Intended to be a romp rather than a weighty treatise on corporate avarice, this is entertaining enough, but it lacks the spectacle and sophistication to engross.

Tycoon Miki Manojlovic told neither colleagues nor rivals about the son he adopted from a Croatian orphanage. So, when Manojlovic dies in mysterious circumstances, there is genuine astonishment in the boardroom when Tomer Sisley (who has just escaped a dank cell after being detained on trumped-up drugs charges) comes forward to collect his $20 billion inheritance. Acting director Kristin Scott Thomas remains confident that she can seize control. But she faces stiff competition from vice-president Benedict Wong, treacherous security chief Steven Waddington, ruthless Georgian arms dealer Karel Roden, and slinky operator Mélanie Thierry, who is quite prepared to do whatever it takes to secure her cut.

Switching between Sisley's unhappy childhood (when he is played by Benjamin Siksou) and set-pieces staged in Hong Kong, Malta and Brazil, this is an awkward mix of fiscal jargon and globe-trotting glamour redolent of a James Bond adventure. Sisley's stand-up background enables him to inject some offbeat humour into proceedings, while Gilbert Melki proves coolly resourceful as his scarred chauffeur and Scott Thomas provides some deliciously pantomimic villainy. But while it makes a change to see a thriller unreliant on special effects and stunts, this is a touch too tentative, with the notable exception of the slick island chase sequence.

Alexandre Desplat's score and Denis Rouden cinematography are undoubtedly plus points and the latter is also behind the camera for MR 73 (2008), which concludes the trilogy that cop-turned-actor Olivier Marchal started with Gangsters (2002) and 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004). But, for all the downbeat authenticity of the scenario and the sterling efforts of Daniel Auteuil, this is a disappointingly formulaic police procedural that too often opts for caricature and cliché instead of insight and originality.

Bereft after his wife and daughter are involved in a devastating accident, Auteuil's hard-bitten inspector so tests the patience of captain Catherine Marchal that he and partner Gérald Laroche are removed from the pursuit of a sodomising serial killer and replaced by smarmy rival Francis Renaud. However, Auteuil gets a shot at redemption when he befriends Olivia Bonamy, who is justifiably terrified because Phillipe Nahon - whom she watched murder her parents when she was a child - has duped the parole board into believing he is a reformed character.

Whether taking hostages or hijacking a bus, Auteuil ably conveys the ferocious fragility of a man at the end of his tether. Yet, for all the intensity of his performance and the gory viscerality of the denouement, this struggles to rise above the routine. Rouden bleaches the visuals to give Marseilles a forbidding feel, but Marchal's dialogue is riddled with risible utterances that ruinously undermine his efforts to plunge the viewer into a world of unremitting wickedness, cynicism and despair. Bruno Barreto similarly misfires with Last Stop 174 (2008), as he seeks to construct a fictional story around Sandro do Nascimento's infamous five-hour bus-jacking in downtown Rio de Janeiro in 2000. The action opens in 1983, as junkie Marisa (Chris Vianna) has her baby Alessandro stolen by ruthless gangster Meleca (Rafael Logan) to meet unpaid debts. A decade later, a tweenager named Sandro (Vitor Carvalho) sees his mother's corpse after she is murdered in a robbery at the bar she runs in the provincial backwater of São Goncalo and he runs away to fulfil their mutual dream to see Copacabana. But Rio proves to be tougher than he expected and, in order to survive, Sandro seeks refuge with some street kids, whose activities include dealing drugs for Alessandro (Marcello Melo, Jr.). Encouraged by underage hooker Soninha (Yasmine Luyindula) and social worker Walquiria (Anna Cotrim), the maturing Sandro (Michel Gomes) nurtures hopes of becoming a musician. But, having witnessed his friends being slaughtered by a police hit squad on the steps of the Candelária Church, he ends up in prison with Alessandro and they forge a criminous alliance after staging a daring escape.

Despite their bond, the pair fall out over Sandro's renewed passion for Soninha (Gabriela Luiz). But Sandro also withholds the fact that Marisa has reformed and married preacher Jaziel (Tay Lopez) and is now searching for her long-lost son. Even though he suspects that she is Alessandro's mother, Sandro exploits Marisa's mistaken identification and moves into her humble home. But when Soninha dumps him, Sandro becomes increasingly dependent on drugs and his uncomprehending fury at his unravelling circumstances prompts him to take hostages on a downtown bus.

As can be seen, this is a plot-heavy melodrama that is told with confidence and compassion. But Barreto has nothing particularly new to say about either shanty privation or youth crime and, consequently, this feels more like Hector Babenco's liberal landmark Pixote (1981) than anything more visceral and contemporary. Moreover, the pedestrian pacing is compounded by the clumsy resort to shots of the statue of Christ the Redeemer on the top of Corcovado Mountain and the occasional uncertainty of the largely non-professional cast.

Despite its certainty of tone, problems with plausibility also blight Pablo Trapero's crime and punishment chronicle, Lion's Den (2008).

Having woken in a daze in her apartment, twentysomething Martina Gusman returns from a day's work to find boyfriend Rodrigo Santoro fighting for his life beside the corpse of the male lover they shared. Jailed for murder, the pregnant Gusman is placed in a maximum security ward for nursing mothers and endures the usual round of bullying and lesbian predatoriness as she settles into her new routine. But an unexpected romance with neighbouring cellmate Laura Garcia helps Gusman become a player on the wing and cope with the betrayals of Santoro (who promises to change his plea to secure her release) and mother Elli Medeiros, who can't quite get over the shame of her daughter's situation.

Although he adopts his trademark detachment from his characters and scrupulously refuses to confirm Gusman's guilt or condemn her prison pragmatism, Trapero indulges in a few too many generic tropes for this downbeat melodrama to convince as a slice of social realism. However, Guillermo Nieto's claustrophobic imagery reinforces the sense to which women are still compartmentalised in Argentinian society, while Gusman (who is Trapero's off-screen wife) wisely eschews easy sympathy, even in the face of the cowardly Santoro's calculating treachery and Medeiros's petite bourgeois attempts to gain custody of her grandson. Consequently, it's Gusman's guarded response to past and present traumas that authenticates her resolve to do whatever it takes to get through one day at a time.

Jacques Audiard achieves a much more menacing brand of jailhouse realism in A Prophet (2009), as he eschews the stylistic flourishes that have embellished earlier works to make 19 year-old Tahar Rahim's six-year passage from small-timer to dangerous criminal all the more credible and compelling.

Enduring the usual ritual humiliations on his arrival, the illiterate Rahim soon realises that his ethnicity could prove a problem in his overcrowded and highly factional surroundings. Consequently, he decides to throw in his lot with kingpin Niels Arestrup, even agreeing to murder fellow Arab Hichem Yacoubi before he can testify against the Corsican's confreres. However, Yacoubi's ghost begins to haunt Rahim's cell, silently expressing the doubt and dismay that the rookie feels about his own loss of individuality and surrender to the system.

As time passes, Rahim schools himself and finds a niche in Arestrup's ruthless hierarchy. He surreptitiously learns the Corsican dialect so that he can eavesdrop on the thugs who consider him scum. Yet when he is granted leave for good behaviour, Arestrup entrusts him with some business in Paris, which Rahim carries out with nervous efficiency, while also setting up his own drug-smuggling operation with former inmates Adel Bencherif and Reda Kateb. Indeed, Rahim becomes so key to Arestrup that he becomes the increasingly vulnerable hoodlum's closet confidant after several of his cohorts are released on political grounds.

Following a second mission to the south of France - to sound out Arab mobster Slimane Dazi about challenging the hegemony of Arestrup's Italian masters - Rahim acquires a reputation for prophecy after a recurring vision of a deer prompts him to avert a traffic accident on a winding mountain road. He also persuades Dazi to take revenge on the bandits who have hijacked the dying Bencherif's Spanish racket. However, it's what he learns about Arestrup that shapes the course of Rahim's final months behind bars and brings about a sobering encounter in the exercise yard, as Rahim contrives an alliance of convenience with the Muslim brotherhood.

With Michel Barthelemy's oppressive design setting the forbidding tone and Stéphane Fontaine's handheld visuals and Juliette Welfling's punchy editing conveying the novice's nervy need for vigilance and quick wit, this uncompromising drama imparts a contemporary spin on the conventions of the prison picture to examine the mechanics of organised crime, the failings of the justice system and France's fermenting racial tensions.

Rahim's charmed invincibility in seemingly every situation eventually begins to feel contrived, but this is a minor flaw. But both he and Arestrup are superb, with the former's deceptive, coiled intelligence contrasting with the flabby complacency into which the older man has settled after years of complicity with the corrupt authorities.

Audiard can't quite resist the odd adornment, but the intertitles, irises and slow-motion sequences never cause him to neglect the complex network of shifting allegiances. Indeed, he retains in total control over his material throughout the 155-minute running time, expertly switching between the grinding rhythms of the prison regime and the terrifying unpredictability of Rahim's excursions. Consequently, this manages to combine Cagneyesque swagger with Bressonian rigour to make Rahim's rise through the ranks feel more like an indictment of a failing system than another study of a self-made anti-hero.

The workings of a very different kind of foundation come under scrutiny in Institute Benjamenta (1995), an adaptation of the 1909 autobiographical novel Jakob von Gunten that marked the feature debut of Stephen and Timothy Quay, who had previously tackled the work of Swiss author Robert Walser in the animated shorts Stille Nacht I (1988), The Comb (1990) and Tales From the Vienna Woods (1992). Ethereally designed and photographed by Jennifer Kernke and Nicholas D. Knowland, this is one of the last black-and-white features to be made in this country and its use of the East German Orwo stock is particularly apt, as the visuals irresistibly recall the Expressionist style perfected in such silent fantasies as Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod (1921).

Speech is of secondary consequence here, too, as the Brothers Quay rely on haunting visuals, cervine symbolism and stop-motion puppetry to convey the atmosphere inside the boarding school for servants run by Gottfried John and his sister, Alice Krige. New student Mark Rylance seems content to learn on arriving at the dilapidated former hunting lodge. But his suspicion that all is not well with either his classmates or their austere tutors prompts him to begin snooping and his determination to act is exacerbated by his growing affection for Krige and a conviction that she is being held against her will.

Subtitled `This Dream People Call Human Life' and hovering between a fairytale and a Gothic romance, this is a mesmerising study of personality, power, subservience, isolation and responsibility. The composition and choreographing of the action is exquisite, most notably during the sequences in which the trainees are reduced to automatons, as they glide and sway through an exercise in the handling of napkins, utensils and tableware. The recurrent references to deer, forks and circles occasionally become as oppressive as the allusions to Kafka, Cocteau, Lewis Carroll and Mervyn Peake. But this remains the most original and striking debut by any British film-making duo since Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance (1970).

The Quays avoid identifying a specific time and place, but the setting is readily evident in Martin Koolhoven's Winter in Wartime (2011), an adaptation of a popular novel by Jan Terlouw that represents a laudable, if rather predictable attempt to present the Second World War occupation of the Netherlands from a teenage viewpoint.

Despising mayor father Raymond Thiry for co-operating with the Nazis, 14 year-old Martijn Lakemeier longs to join uncle Yorick van Wageningen in the Resistance. Having nearly been caught scavenging souvenirs from a crashed plane, he is entrusted with delivering a secret message by Mees Peijnenburg, the older brother of best friend, Jesse van Driel. However, his blacksmith contact is killed by the Gestapo and Lakemeier suspects local busybody Ad van Kempen of being a quisling.

Opening the note, Lakemeier learns that wounded RAF pilot Jamie Campbell Bower is hiding in a bunker in the woods and he begins bringing him food. However, the need for medical attention forces Lakemeier to trust nurse sister Melody Klaver, who develops an instant crush on the airman. After a couple of false starts, Lakemeier is finally ready to transport Bower across the river for a rendezvous with another partisan unit. But the Germans discover the corpse of the soldier Bower killed on landing and Thiry is among the townsfolk arrested in reprisal. Determined to do his duty, but racked with guilt for having doubted his father's integrity, Lakemeier turns to Van Wageningen for assistance and a dash to the heavily guarded bridge ensues.

Impeccably designed by Floris Vos and with cinematographer Guido van Gennep capturing the metaphorical chill of the snowscapes, this is always more visually striking than dramatically convincing. The relationship between Bower and Klaver sits uncomfortably, while the horse-buggy chase through the forest to the accompaniment of Pino Donaggio's overly emotive score feels gratuitously exciting. Much more persuasive are the scenes in which mother Anneke Blok pleads with the sentries to see her husband and Lakemeier blames Van Wageningen for failing to avert his father's execution. Indeed, by confining events to Lakemeier's viewpoint, Koolhoven is able to convey the confusion and treachery of warfare while also investing stock characters and the more clichéd situations with new power and poignancy.

By contrast, Theo Angelopoulos was compelled to adopt a new approach to story-telling in The Beekeeper (1986). Having spent his entire career subversively commenting on the rule of Greece's military junta, Angelopoulos found himself confronted with democracy and the need to choose between the past and the present. Thus, just as ageing teacher Marcello Mastroianni sets off to rediscover himself in taking up the ancestral pursuit of apiculture, so Angelopoulos sought to discern a fresh subject in the returning exiles, who no longer recognise a land that has remained essentially the same, and the young, who stride optimistically towards the future without the fearful burden of memory.

Angelopoulos would remain fascinated by the clash of cultures and generations for the next two decades. But here Mastroianni, already troubled by his abandonment of wife Jenny Roussea and his incestuous feelings towards his recently married daughter, is crushed by a sense of alienation and despair, which is deepened by his doomed attempt to connect with rootless and promiscuous hitcher, Nadia Mourouzi, who scrounges shamelessly off him (even using his room to seduce a passing soldier) before offering herself to him in a rundown cinema. Exquisitely photographed by Giorgos Arvanitis, this is an intense Greek tragedy about the unbearable agony of change.