Cinema's current fascination with the terrorists and gangsters of the 1970s shows no sign of abating. Following on from Manuel Huerga's Salvador (Puig Antich) (2006), Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army (2007), Uli Edel's The Baader Meinfof Complex and Jean-François Richet's Mesrine duology (both 2008), Olivier Assayas's Carlos provides an even more exhaustive insight into the life and crimes of a freedom fighter than Steven Soderbergh's Che (2008).

Showing as a 330-minute triptych (although it will also be released in cinemas in a two and a half hour version), Carlos is a monumental account of the life and crimes of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known in the media as Carlos the Jackal. The nickname is never used here and Assayas and co-scenarist Dan Franck carefully note in an opening caption that, despite exhaustive research, this is a fictionalised biopic. Currently serving a life sentence in France, Carlos is said to disapprove of the enterprise. But this informed, controlled and brilliantly executed epic plausibly imagines the human drama behind the facts previously revealed in Barbet Schroeder's exceptional documentary, Terror's Advocate (2007).

The action opens in 1973, as the 23 year-old Sánchez (Édgar Ramírez) offers his services to Wadie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), the Beirut-based leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Having proved his credentials with a couple of missions in London and Paris - including a failed assassination attempt on the vice-president of the British Zionist Federation, Joseph Sieff - the newly named Carlos becomes involved in the Japanese Red Army's 1974 raid on the French embassy in The Hague and two rocket-launcher bids to down an El-Al plane at Orly Airport. However, when Lebanese contact Michel Moukharbal betrays him to the police, Carlos is forced to kill him along with three cops when they trap him in an apartment on the Rue Toullier.

Chastised by Haddad for courting publicity, Carlos determines to prove his worth to the PFLP and, in December 1975, he launches an attack on the OPEC conference in Vienna with Anis 'Khalid' Naccache (Rodney El Haddad) and the German activists Hans-Joachim 'Angie' Klein (Christoph Bach) and the headstrong Gabriele 'Nada' Kröcher-Tiedemann (Julia Hummer). Despite the efforts of Venezuelan oil minister Valentín Hernández (Alejandro Arroyo), Carlos announces that he will execute his Saudi and Iranian counterparts, Ahmed Zaki Yamani and Jamshid Amuzgar, after he has secured a safe flight to Baghdad. However, the negotiators only provide him with a plane capable of reaching Algiers and, having been refused sanctuary by Libya, Carlos is forced to allow the hostages to go free in return for the immunity of his gang.

Haddad is furious that Carlos failed to execute Yamani (Badih Abou Chakra), while Nada and Angie are not entirely convinced that he didn't sell them out for private profit. So, having been expelled from the PFLP, Carlos decides to set up his own organisation in conjunction with Johannes Weinrich (Alexander Scheer), a German terrorist whose Stasi connections enable them to establish operational bases in Budapest and East Berlin. Protected by the Syrian secret service, they bomb a French train and an Arab newspaper office in Paris while plotting to assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Saddat on the orders of the Kremlin. However, new wife Magdalena Kopp (Nora von Waldstatten) and Swiss terrorist Bruno Breguet are arrested while trying to plant explosives in Paris in 1982 and Carlos becomes less useful to potential employers.

Indeed, when the Iron Curtain collapses, he suddenly finds himself without a state and highly vulnerable to both CIA and Mossad agents. Reunited with Kopp, he relocates to Syria. However, the marriage disintegrates because of his serial infidelities and, when he becomes an embarrassment to the Syrian regime, he goes into hiding in Khartoum, where he is eventually captured by the French while recuperating from testicular surgery.

Despite the wealth of specialist detail, this is a consistently accessible and compelling chronicle that not only demonstrates Assayas's mastery of his sources, but also his versatility as a film-maker. He's admirably served by cinematographers Yorick Le Saux and Denis Lenoir and editors Luc Barnier and Marion Monnier, whose muscular cutting is matched by the non-nonsense performances of an exceptional ensemble that slips between French, English, Spanish, Japanese, German, Arabic, Russian and Hungarian dialogue with impressive ease.

Piling on the pounds over a 20-year period, Édgar Ramírez ably conveys Carlos's energy and egotism and he is particularly well supported by Alexander Scheer (who is busily pragmatic as the shady Weinrich) and Von Waldstatten, who brings a gutsy vulnerability to the role of a spouse whose commitment to her husband's cause is ultimately betrayed by his ambition and vanity. But this is very much Assayas's triumph, as he succeeds in making both international intrigue and realpolitik accessible to audiences unversed in their complexities and in creating a protagonist who fascinates and appals while also remaining something of an enigma.

Working on a much smaller scale, Iranian director Rafi Pitts also considers the fallout from the struggle for liberty in The Hunter.

Problems with his original lead meant that Pitts was forced to direct himself in his fifth feature, which was produced in June 2009 at the height the controversial Iranian election campaign. Thus, it's easy to read significance into the recurring use of the colour green and the broadcast of threatening statements on the car radio and even more tempting to surmise that the death that prompts Pitts to seek drastic vengeance was inspired by the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan. Yet, for all its political undertones, this is most noteworthy for its audacious attempt to combine the urban neo-realism of something like Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) with a more stylised outdoor thriller like Joseph Losey's Figures in a Landscape (1970).

Released after serving time for an unspecified crime, Pitts can only find work as a night guard at a Tehran car factory. Consequently, he doesn't see enough of wife Mitra Hajjar, six year-old daughter Saba Yaghoobi and their playful kitten. However, his weekend habit of hunting in the woods further limits family time and he returns from one trip perplexed to find nobody home. Eventually, he reports the disappearance to the police and learns that Hajjar has been killed during a stand-off between armed officers and a group of protesters. What's more, there is no sign of Yaghoobi and Pitts is left to search for her alone, as commander Ali Nicksaulat appears wholly indifferent to her fate.

After days of pounding the streets and visiting orphanages, Pitts is called back to the morgue for an identification. Calmly, he drives to see his parents and entrusts them with care of the kitten. Then, he fetches he rifle, takes up a position on a bank overlooking the motorway and waits for a police car to pass. Having gunned down its two occupants, Pitts speeds out of the city, changing his car after he fears he is being tailed by a helicopter. However, he is soon involved in a chase along a misty country road and he crashes his vehicle before fleeing into the woods.

Quickly apprehended, he is escorted by cops Gholamreza Rajabzadeh and Ebrahim Safarpour, who promptly get lost and begin bickering among themselves. Briefly left alone, Safarpour confides that Rajabzadeh is a corrupt and brutal man and he has to stop him from shooting Pitts to save the executioner the bother. Caught in a downpour, they seek shelter in an abandoned house and Rajabzadeh handcuffs Pitts to a hook in the wall and orders Safarpour to fetch reinforcements. Next morning, however, Safarpour returns to offer Pitts the chance to escape - providing he eliminates his detested colleague.

With editor Hassan Hassandoost achieving an ominous rhythm by cutting between Mohammad Davudi's measured images, this is a film of small, but shocking moments that offers a sombre insight into life in Ahmadinejad's Iran. The sense of soullessness is evocatively conveyed by the bleak factory, the congested roads and the deserted tunnels, while the mistrust between Pitts and anyone in a position of authority is palpable. The switch from dour realism to studied suspense may not convince everyone. But the storytelling is confident, the pacing is controlled and the quiet fury at the way in which Iran is being ruled is uncompromising and courageous.

In 1994, French journalist Freidoune Sahebjam published an eye-witness account of the stoning of Soraya Manutchehri in the remote Iranian village of Kupayeh. Her crime was adultery. But, according to her aunt, she was framed by her prison guard husband, as he wanted to marry the 14 year-old daughter of a Death Row doctor who was willing to consent to the match in return for clemency. As the husband knew that the local mullah was a charlatan who had served time under the Shah, he secured the holy man's co-operation and duped the mayor into reaching a guilty verdict that carried a capital punishment under Sharia Law.

The book provoked global outrage. But it did little to prevent similar executions from being carried out across the Muslim world and, sadly, Cyrus Nowrasteh's film version of The Stoning of Soraya M., will have even less impact. This has much to do with hardened attitudes amongst Islamic fundamentalists. But it also owes much to the fact that this is a remorselessly manipulative and mediocrely melodramatic movie that deals exclusively in clichés and caricatures and uses close-ups, slow-motion and a mawkish score to control the audience's response to nigh on every incident.

Soraya is played as the perfect wife and mother by Mozhan Marnò, whose dutiful devotion is starkly contrasted by the lustful machination of Navid Negahban, who not only turns her two sons against her, but also allies with mullah Ali Pourtash to coerce illiterate widower Parviz Sayyad into confessing to adultery in order to prevent his vulnerable son from being sent to an asylum. Mayor David Diaan lacks the backbone to resist the gossip of the womenfolk and the growing indignation of their husbands and disregards aunt Shohreh Aghdashloo's plea for justice by presiding over a kangaroo court and the public stoning of an innocent woman that is, at one point, grotesquely interrupted by the arrival of a travelling circus troupe.

The power and poignancy of the story - which is bookended by scenes of Aghdashloo confiding in Jim Caviezel's Sahebjam, who has been stranded in the village after his car breaks down - might still have come through had Nowrasteh not staged each scene so calculatingly. Marnò's last walk in the sunlit fields with her daughters links her with the angels, while Negahban's scheming with Pourtash and Diaan feels like something of an Arabian Nights fantasy produced in Hollywood Technicolor, with bearded and turban-wearing villains hypocritically fingering their prayer beads while chauvinistically plotting the demise of the innocent who has dared to thwart their nefarious plans.

Even the stoning sequence, which should have been excruciating to view, is blighted by stylistic excess, as Nowrasteh employs slo-mo, canted angles, blurred focus, point-of-view shots and lyrical flashbacks to depict savagery that would have been infinitely more shocking had it been shown in its simple brutality. But worse is to come, as Nowrasteh reduces Caviezel's departure to something out of a B thriller, as his bags are searched by the menacing Pourtash, only for Aghdashloo to return the cassette of their conversation as his car stalls before her house and he only just manages to get the engine started again and zoom along the dusty road to safety before a pursuing Revolutionary Guardsman can aim his gun.

The plight of women within tyrannical patriarchies is scandalous and worthy of cinematic discussion. But the persecuted deserve a much better memorial than this well-intentioned, but clumsily articulated and often hysterical clarion call. If only Nowrasteh had exhibited a fraction of the empathetic restraint that artist Clio Barnard brings to The Arbor.

The Royal Court Theatre is the spiritual home of British social realism and just as George Devine unleashed various angry young men there in the late 1950s, so Max Stafford-Clark sought to reinvigorate the kitchen sink formula two decades later by offering a female perspective. Yet while his principal playwright, Andrea Dunbar, was able to provide an authentic view of life on a council estate in the mid-1970s, her insights came at a great cost to herself and her family, as Barnard reveals in this inspired mix of fact and fiction that manages to be both critically informative and formally inventive.

Combining scenes from Dunbar's plays and Robin Soans's docudrama A State Affair (2000), as well as TV footage and lip-synched interviews with her family and colleagues, this is a tough watch that makes few artistic or sociological compromises. Residents of Brafferton Arbor on Bradford's notorious Buttershaw Estate provide a living backdrop to shouting matches re-enacted in an open-air parlour that make clear just how much Dunbar drew on everyday experience for The Arbor (1977), Rita, Sue and Bob, Too (1982) and Shirley (1986). However, her progress from 15 year-old sensation to 29 year-old alcoholic with children by three different fathers proved every bit as dramatic as her plays. Moreover, her death from a cerebral haemorrhage in the pub where she spent much of her time pitched offspring Lorraine, Lisa and Andrew into a spiral of uncertainty from which they are only just beginning to emerge.

The success of this exercise in verbatim theatre depends as much on performance as staging and Barnard is superbly served by Manjinder Virk and Christine Bottomley, who embody the pain and confusion that courses through Lorraine and Lisa's recorded recollections. Virk is particularly impressive, as she conveys both the anguish of being mixed-race in an intolerant environment and the remorse she feels for the heroin addiction that led to the death of her infant son and a jail sentence for manslaughter. However, the entire ensemble excels, whether it's Jimi Mistry as Dunbar's Pakistani boyfriend Yousaf, George Costigan as lover Billy the Wig or Natalie Gavin as Dunbar's alter ego.

But Barnard also deserves enormous credit for conceiving this complex profile and maintaining control over its diverse modes of representation. This could easily have descended into a smug stunt. But Barnard's empathy with both Andrea and Lorraine's travails and her refusal to settle for the clichés and caricatures that have calcified the screen depiction of the British working class ensures that this is one of the most audacious and accomplished feature debuts of recent years.

Rooted in fact and by turns touching, bleak and droll, Adam Elliot's feature debut, Mary and Max., may lack the precision of his Oscar-winning short, Harvie Krumpet, but this decidedly grown-up exercise in clayography is destined for cult status. Chronicling the pen-palship between an eight year-old Melbourne misfit and a fortysomething Manhattan outcast, the story has its rocky moments, particularly in the final third. But Barry Humphries's acerbic narration and acute voice-work by Bethany Whitmore and Philip Seymour-Hoffman perfectly complement the wealth of grimly witty details in both the deliciously offbeat text and the meticulously created brown-grey visuals.

Life is tough for Mary Daisy Dinkle in the nondescript 1976 suburb of Mount Waverley. Podgy, short-sighted and with an unsightly birthmark on her forehead, she is neglected by her dullard dad Noel and chain-smoking, sherry-swigging mum, Vera, and has no friends beside a pet rooster named Ethel. So, she decides to acquire a pen pal and, having randomly selected Max Jerry Horowitz from the phone book, sends him a missive unaware that he is an obese, middle-aged loner with Asperger Syndrome.

Charmed by Mary's handwritten inquisitiveness, Max types a response containing details about himself and his pets and questions about her likes and dislikes. Soon, they are corresponding on a regular basis and sending each other sweet samples and discussing their favourite TV show, The Noblets. He also describes his latest failure to find a job, while she tells him about her misfortunes at school. However, as Mary gets older (and Toni Collette assumes the voice-over), she falls for her sexually ambivalent neighbour Damian (Eric Bana) and writes a bestseller about her relationship with Max that causes a rift between them and plunges Mary into an alcoholic depression that finally prompts her to head for New York to meet Max in person.

The letters are packed with intimate revelations, touching insecurities and naive aspirations. But they are also witty, astute and entertaining and any misgivings the viewer might have about a 48 year-old befriending someone four decades younger quickly disappear amidst the deadpan non sequiturs and hilarious counterpointing visuals. The quality of the claymation is exceptional and the torrent of throwaway sight gags incessant. But it's the scripting that sets this fine film apart, as it tackles such un-animation themes as loneliness, body image, substance abuse, suicide and mental health.

Perfectly complementing Whitmore's sparky garrulousness and Seymour-Hoffman's drawling self-deprecation, Humphries's world-wearily empathetic narration holds things together during the darker last act, when plot takes over from character and Elliot struggles to sustain the odd couple quirkiness now that both Mary and Max are both socially deficient adults. Nevertheless, this remains charmingly eccentric, unsentimentally compassionate and ever so slightly seedily sweet.

If Mary and Max. feels like something from a bygone age of innocence, the two Frank Capra features reissued this week reveal just how distant the 1930s now seem. By preserving plotlines and performances on celluloid, cinema creates the illusion of timelessness. But the social attitudes on view in Forbidden (1932) and It Happened One Night (1934) belong to another world. Yet, such is the acuity of Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin's respective screenplays and the altruistic populism of Capra's direction that each film still provides keen insights into human nature and both remain hugely entertaining.

An unofficial adaptation of Fanny Hurst's best-selling novel Back Street, Forbidden opens with small-town librarian Barbara Stanwyck scandalising her petty-minded neighbours by quitting her job and sinking her savings into a two-week cruise to Cuba. Hoping to meet the man of her dreams, she spends the first part of the voyage alone. But when politician Adolphe Menjou drunkenly crashes out in the wrong stateroom, they quickly become inseparable.

Still calling each other 66 and 99 after their cabin numbers, they continue the affair back in the city, even though she is being pursued by wisecracking newspaperman Ralph Bellamy and he is married to the sickly Dorothy Patterson. But when Menjou confesses during a Halloween supper that he has been lying about being a bachelor, Stanwyck breaks off the liaison and decides against telling him that she is expecting his child.

Viewing Menjou's rise from district attorney to governor from a discreet distance, Stanwyck raises her daughter alone and bridles at Bellamy's obsessive bid to expose the skeleton that he hopes will wreck Menjou's political career. But, even after circumstances conspire to coerce Stanwyck into giving up her daughter for Patterson to adopt, she continues to protect Menjou's reputation and even marries Bellamy in the hope of preventing him from exposing the truth as Menjou announces his presidential candidacy.

In his notoriously unreliable memoir, The Name Above the Title, Capra rather dismissed Forbidden as a three-hankie weepie. Yet, it's a notable example of the kind of risqué, socially committed melodrama at which the Hollywood studios excelled before they were constrained by the 1934 imposition of the Production Code. Indeed, had it been directed by Frank Borzage, John M. Stahl or Douglas Sirk, it would probably be hailed as a masterly prototype of the woman's picture.

Broaching such contentious topics as the status of women, extra-marital sex, single motherhood, political chicanery and the power of the press, it provides a fascinating snapshot of its times. Moreover, it slyly uses Stanwyck's agony aunt column to examine issues that couldn't be accommodated in the main story. But there's no denying that the action becomes increasingly melodramatic and many modern viewers will baulk at the lachrymose denouement. Nevertheless, Stanwyck delivers an outstanding performance (in spite of the fact that she had spent six months in a bitter contract dispute with Columbia chief Harry Cohn) and, if Capra is guilty of ignoring the harsh realities of the Depression, he still captures the anguish of a love sullied by the hypocritical morality of social convention.

Capra returned to the theme of reckless amour two years later. However, he couched It Happened One Night in purely comic terms and scored the biggest hit of his career to date.

Having fallen out with father Walter Connolly, heiress Claudette Colbert dives off the family yacht and sets out from Miami to marry New York playboy Jameson Thomas. However, she is spotted on Ward Bond's bus by struggling reporter Clark Gable, who informs loyal editor Charles C. Wilson that he's about to land the scoop of a lifetime. Despite being aware that Thomas is a worthless gold-digger, Gable promises to help Colbert cross the country if he can have the exclusive rights to her story.

She reluctantly agrees after he protects her from wolfish salesman Roscoe Karns. But an evening of camaraderie and song improves her mood and she even begins to warm to her escort when a downpour causes them to stop at a wayside motel and Gable rigs up a blanket partition to give her some privacy. However, she quickly becomes disenchanted when they lose their connection and have to hitch a lift with hayseed Alan Hale. But, just as she is about to fall in love with him and ditch Thomas for good, she becomes convinced that Gable has betrayed her for a quick buck and is less than amused when he turns up at Connolly's mansion on her wedding day.

Had anyone tried to produce a movie about the making of It Happened One Night, no one would have believed it. Things started off reasonably enough, with Robert Riskin turning Samuel Hopkins Adams's magazine story, `Night Bus', into a screenplay. But the fanciful began to set in when MGM's Louis B. Mayer offered Columbia chief, Harry Cohn, Clark Gable in compensation for Robert Montgomery's refusal to play the gruffly genial journalist. However, this was no mere act of inter-mogul philanthropy, as Mayer had grown tired of Gable's pay demands and insistence on selecting his own roles. So, he agreed to loan out his fastest-rising star because he considered him `a bad boy and I'd like to spank him'.

Less than amused by his demotion to Poverty Row, Gable reported for his first meeting with the Sicilian-born Capra fighting drunk and racially abusive. However, he eventually accepted his punishment and came to recognise the quality of the script during pre-production. Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Constance Bennett and Margaret Sullivan, however, failed to share his enthusiasm and they all nixed the project before Claudette Colbert signed up because she had four weeks to spare before her Christmas vacation in Sun Valley. That said, she had little faith in Capra, who had directed her debut, For the Love of Mike (1927), and its failure had temporarily harmed her prospects.

But even though the lure of $50,000 (double her usual salary) assuaged her doubts, Colbert arrived on set intent on playing the prima donna. She refused point blank to disrobe for the famous `Walls of Jericho' sequence (which caused vest sales to plummet on account of Gable's bare torso) and only agreed to reveal her thigh for the hitch-hiking gag when Capra threatened to use a stand-in with better legs. Consequently, she told friends, `I've just finished the worst picture in the world.'

Yet, in spite of the friction, the film became the first to land the Big Five awards at the Academy Awards. But, more importantly, this fresh, fast and funny farce ushered in the screwball comedy, which remains its lasting legacy - although it also supposedly inspired Warners animator Friz Freleng to create Bugs Bunny (Gable), Yosemite Sam (Connolly) and Pepe LePew (Thomas).