Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 19/5/2011)

Arriving at grandfather Michel Galabru's Breton home for a welcome break from her detested boarding school, 14 year-old Clara Augarde discovers that parents Lio and Thierry Neuvic have finally separated after years of bickering. Following his father's lead, Neuvic is a committed atheist and Augarde has her own doubts ahead of her forthcoming confirmation, even though her devoutly Catholic mother has arranged for special instruction sessions with Italian priest Stefano Cassetti.

Resisting the urging of parents François Bernard and Françoise Navarro to leave her ailing father-in-law to his own family, Lio insists on trying to coerce him into keeping a hospital appointment. However, Galabru is more interested in his record collection and revisiting the temptations of his youth. Indeed, he even hints to his granddaughter that he would like a final glimpse of the place from whence he came and it's only after she arouses him during a bed bath that she realises he doesn't mean his home village.

Augarde, however, has started to have erotic longings of her own and she confusedly dotes on a holy picture of Christ and the cherubic face of choirboy Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil. However, the more aware and poised she becomes, the more Lio comes to resent the prospect of her happiness and the failure of her own relationship and the likelihood that she will never experience passion again. She confides her fears in Cassetti, who is enduring his own crisis of faith, as he finds Lio's vulnerability stimulating and begins taking long walks and joining in football matches with the local kids to keep his mind occupied.

Amidst such fervent feelings, it's hardly surprising that Augarde faints while attending her first requiem and allows Leboulanger-Gourvil to kiss her clumsily during a trek through the woods. However, he is anything but a typically lusty teen and, when she finally consents to come back to his bedroom, he shyly sings her a song with his guitar. But he is not to be the recipient of her first sexual favours and her determination to follow her own head and heart further manifests itself as she approaches bishop Philippe Duclos on the high altar and, later, as she reads an explicit poem at Galabru's funeral.

Taking its title from a Serge Gainsbourg song and scripted by Quillévéré and Marie Désert with a compassion, restraint and sapience that also extend to the perfectly judged performances, this is one of the most accomplished debuts of recent times. The shifts between Tom Harari's graceful tracking shots and more intrusive handheld close-ups are impeccable, as is the selection of soundtrack music (right down to the fascinating choral rendition of Radiohead's `Creep'). Quillévéré, who had previously made three acclaimed shorts, also leavens the candid drama with wisps of acerbic wit. But it's the direction of the exquisitely dauntless Augarde that most impresses, as Quillévéré not only succeeds in capturing both her curiosity and growing confidence, but also her increasing awareness of her physical beauty, sexual potency and intellectual independence.

Coming to terms with life and death is also the theme of Hattie Dalton's Third Star. Yet, while the onetime assistant editor also arrives at her first feature after completing a trio of shorts (including the 2004 BAFTA winner, The Banker), this is where all similarity with Quillévéré ends, as this bromantic road movie demonstrates a decided lack of control in the scripting, acting and directing departments. However, it also possesses a sincerity that gives the conclusion an unexpected piquancy that is elsewhere missing from the debuting Vaughan Sivell's determinedly laddish, but nonetheless relentlessly mawkish disease-of-the-week-style scenario.

Bidding farewell to parents Rupert Frazer and Helen Griffin and older sister Nia Roberts as he leaves what he knows will be his last birthday party because of his terminal cancer, wannabe writer Benedict Cumberbatch heads for the Pembrokeshire coast with thirtysomething buddies JJ Feild, Adam Robertson and Tom Burke. He wants one last look at Barafundle Bay before he dies and his pals have rigged up a rough-terrain wheelchair that can not only get him across the wild countryside, but also carry their camping equipment and supplies.

Bantering incessantly to avoid discussing darker matters, the quartet manage to get involved in a fight at an isolated pub during a local festival, while Feild has his stolen watch tossed into the sea by a sullen adolescent (Eros Vlahos) wearing angel wings. They also come across surly ferryman Karl Johnson, who misses the joke when the outsiders mock his anomalous fare rates, and eccentric beachcomber Hugh Bonneville, as he searches for a washed-up consignment of valuable Star Wars action figures. But they are soon alone and left with no option but to confront the reason for their journey.

However, as they get stoned beside the campfire, Cumberbatch surprises his companions by launching into Robertson for always complaining about his job in television and his relationship with the now-pregnant girlfriend he doesn't really like. The tirade is excused because Cumberbatch is in a difficult place. But he also ridicules Burke for needing to be wanted so much that he has devoted excessive time to caring for him and Feild for lacking the courage both to confront his illness and publish the novel that he knows isn't a patch on anything written by his recently deceased father.

Many would have turned back in the face of such criticism, especially after the outwardly cocky Feild is goaded into confessing that his business is failing and that he is having an affair with Roberts. But the threesome insist on getting Cumberbatch to his destination, even after they torch one of the tents during a firework display and send the wheelchair careering over a cliff during yet another bout of fisticuffs. Yet when he asks one last favour, nobody feels able to comply.

Riddled with contrivances involving avoidable mishaps, vital medication and thinly veiled secrets, this always feels more like a teleplay than a cinematic feature. Even the de jour Cumberbatch is guilty of trying too hard to wrest significance from what is mostly trite melodrama. Nonetheless, Carlos Catalán's handsome Super 16 vistas go some way to atoning for the ripe dialogue and over-effusive performances, while Dalton does enough on a budget of just £450,000 to suggest better things lie ahead.

An expedition of a more momentous kind is chronicled by Herbert Ponting in The Great White Silence (1924), a first-hand account of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated 1910-12 trek across Antarctica that has been remarkably restored from a Dutch print with the original tinting and toning by the BFI National Archive. A magnificent companion to South (1910), Frank Hurley's record of Sir Ernest Shackleton's equally unsuccessful 1914 bid to traverse the same region, this should preclude the necessity of re-enacting events in well-intentioned, but cumbrous docudramatic form for next year's centenary.

Leaving the New Zealand port of Lyttleton aboard the Terra Nova in the autumn of 1910, Scott's party was held up for 20 days by pack ice. However, Ponting makes no mention of the significance of this delay and prefers, instead, to show how he created a special camera platform to film the metal-tipped hull facilitating progress through the frozen ocean on the 400-mile voyage to the Great Ice Barrier. He also shows how the animals travelled and how the crew kept up morale while preparing for the rigours that lay ahead.

But Ponting comes into his own once Ross Island is reached and he is able to capture such key figures as Scott, Lawrence `Titus' Oates, Henry `Birdy' Bowers, Edgar `Taff' Evans and Edward Wilson going about their duties, tending to the ponies and dogs required to pull sledges, joining in a chaotic football match and practising the camping and cooking drills that would be vital during the push to the Pole. He also succeeds in conveying the forbidding majesty of landscape features around Cape Evans like Mount Erebus. But it's the footage of the indigenous seals, whales, gulls and penguins that would have most amazed contemporary audiences, as they would have been seeing moving images of such creatures for the first time.

Ponting admits to giving nature a helping hand in order to record the nesting habits of the skua gulls and Adélie penguins and show how mothers sought to protect their newborns from predators. But, considering the perishing conditions in which he handcranked his Prestwich and Newman Sinclair cameras, these Flahertyesque tactics can (for once) be forgiven. However, one wonders whether he might have made a more polished job of creating the map and stop-motion model effects used to show the route that Scott followed before discovering on 17 January 1912 that Amundsen had beaten him in his quest by five weeks. But the inclusion of captions containing such famous diary entries as `Great God! This is an awful place.' and Oates's valedictory `I am just going outside and may be some time.' heightens the sense of tragedy that eventually came around 29 March and seemed so much more calamitous as the group was only 11 miles from the next supply depot.

Ponting had originally sold his images to Gaumont, who released them as With Captain Scott RN to the South Pole in November 1911. The following year, the same company issued two more instalments in this series, as well as the Graphic newsreel segment Captain Scott and Dr Wilson with the Pony 'Nobby'. But Ponting bought the footage back for £5000 and shaped it into The Undying Story of Captain Scott (1913) prior to giving a royal command lecture at Buckingham Palace in May 1914. Moreover, he made many similar public appearances over the next decade - including screenings for troops on the Western Front during the Great War - before publishing The Great White South (1921) and supervising The Great White Silence, which he re-edited for two sound variations, 90° South (1933) and The Story of Captain Scott (1936).

Some have criticised Ponting for seeking to exploit the deeds of patriotic heroes to bolster his own reputation, while others have claimed that his cinematography is purely of historical value. But there is considerable artistry in both his compositional sense and his use of natural light and, if few would now echo George V's hope that every British boy could see a story that typified `the spirit of adventure on which the Empire was founded', most would consider this at least the equal of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), which is widely credited with establishing the cine-documentary.

A noble, but much less spectacular battle against adversity is charted in Neil Jones's Risen, which stars Stuart Brennan as Howard Winstone, the Welsh featherweight who overcame the loss of three fingertips on his right hand to become world champion in 1968. Clearly produced on limited resources, this is a solid tribute to a gallant fighter. But the boxing sequences lack conviction, while the insights into Winstone's troubled domestic life are short on drama. Winstone was working in a Merthyr Tydfil toy factory when his fingers were crushed in a machine. Nevertheless, with the encouragement of his parents (Boyd Clack and Helen Griffin) and the expertise of miner and former European bantamweight champion Eddie Thomas (John Noble), he changed his style to place greater reliance on his left jab and won the bantamweight gold at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff in 1958.

Turning professional the following year, Winstone won his first 24 fights and earned a shot at the British title held by Terry Spinks (Billy Rumbol) at the Empire Pool, Wembley in May 1961. Yet his victory brought him few riches and his dedication to his training after the death of his father began to impact upon his marriage to Benita (Gránnie Joughin). Moreover, he suffered his first defeat - to American Leroy Jeffrey in November 1962 - and some came to question Thomas's handling of a talent that the legendary Angelo Dundee claimed could earn him millions.

Resisting calls to match Winstone with the dangerous Cuban Sugar Ramos (Junior Witter), Thomas set up a European challenge against the Italian Alberto Serti (Tony Doherty) in Cardiff in July 1963. But a further two years were to pass before Winstone got a shot at world champion Vicente Saldivar (Erik Morales), although his three fights against the Mexican southpaw probably brought him more glory than his eventual victory over Japanese contender Mitsunori Seki (Leon Sua) in January 1968. He lost the WBC belt in his first defence and retired immediately afterwards. Awarded the MBE, Winstone remained an iconic figure in his hometown, where, five years after his death, he was voted its greatest ever citizen in 2005.

There's no doubt that Winstone's is a remarkable story. The tenacity and courage he displayed to overcome his accident and reach the top of his sport is almost unrivalled. But Jones and co-scenarist Neil Brennan struggle to convey the magnitude of his achievement at a time when boxers fought far more regularly but had to wait a lot longer for tilts at titles. They also gloss over the intensity of the pressure for Winstone to replace Thomas as his manager and the severity of his problems with Benita, who stabbed him in the arm at the height of his rivalry with Saldivar.

More damagingly, the bouts themselves lack authenticity, while too much information is conveyed in the lairy spiels of promoters Mickey Duff (Simon Phillips) and Mike Barrett (Shane Richie) and the urbane commentaries of Harry Carpenter (Simon Wakeford). However, Jones packs the picture with cameos by ex-pugs, including Enzo Maccarinelli, Richie Woodhall, John H Stracey, Glenn Catley, Alan Minter and Eddie Avoth. He also coaxes a decent turn out of Stuart Brennan and a fine performance from Gránnie Joughin, as the wife who bore Winstone four children but turned to drink and eventually adultery to cope with the long periods of loneliness caused by his punishing schedule of 67 fights in under nine years. The sporting theme continues in Fire in Babylon. Despite limiting reference to back-to-back World Cup wins to a single shot of Clive Lloyd lifting the trophy at Lord's, this is an engaging account of the golden age of West Indian cricket. Assembling many of the key players from the period 1975-91, director Stevan Riley recounts events with passion and insight. But he sometimes seems hampered by restricted access to archive footage, as the many montages of still photographs lack the pace that is vital to any study of Caribbean cricket at this time.

Riley opens up by placing the cricketing achievement in a post-colonial context and Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft, Deryck Murray and Desmond Haynes recall how they came to resent the patronising label of `Calypso cricket' that was applied to the West Indies's exhilarating, but inconsistent performances in the test arena. However, it was a 5-1 humiliation at the hands of the Australian pace duo of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson in 1975 that transformed their fortunes.

Inspired by the rise of Black Power and Rastafarianism and determined to prove themselves role models on a par with Muhammad Ali, Lloyd's team found their own fearsome quicks and, over the next few years, Roberts, Holding, Croft, Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall helped secure victories over India and the old imperial masters England, which was all the sweeter as South African-born captain Tony Greig had promised to make them grovel.

However, the West Indian Cricket Board failed to reward the squad for its success and most of its key personnel decamped to Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket in 1977. Further controversy came in 1982, when Croft was among those to receive a lifetime ban for joining Lawrence Rowe's rebel tour to South Africa, which was then excluded from tests because of apartheid. Yet Lloyd again rallied his troops for consecutive 5-0 `blackwashes' of England between 1984-86 and Viv Richards continued the run with Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh now supporting Marshall with the ball.

But signs of decline were evident in the 1983 World Cup final defeat and the failure even to make the semi-finals in 1987 and West Indian cricket has since struggled to re-establish its once undisputed pre-eminence. Riley overlooks the significance of the one day results and the reluctance of the Board to re-organise the game across the islands in order to build on the foundations laid by this exceptional side. But his take on the socio-political consequences of the team's triumphs is much stronger. Thus, this is a must-see for any cricket fan, with the musical contributions of Bunny Wailer and Lord Short Shirt and the soundtrack inclusion of Bob Marley, Gregory Issacs and Burning Spear being an added bonus.

If this is likely to send you out singing, Shelley Lee Davies and Or Shlomi's Planeat will have scurrying home to scour your cupboards and rethink your diet. Vegans will be able to sit back and gloat as audiences watch this uncompromising investigation into the environmental and medical implications of humanity's appetite for dairy products and meat. However, for all the sensible advice that this considered film gives, it avoids any mention of the cost of healthy eating and the refusal of food producers and retailers to make plant-based foods affordable for people on limited budgets.

Much of the focus falls on the researches of Dr T. Colin Campbell, who discovered while working in the Philippines that those on low protein diets ran less risk of contracting cancers. Collaborating with scientists in Beijing and Oxford, he launched the China Project, which mapped out dietary habits and diseases and showed how the consumption of certain foods could reduce the prevalence of cancer, heart disease and other afflictions that were rampant in urbanised societies. Dr Caldwell Esselstyn's research further showed how nutritional restraint could arrest and even reverse coronary artery disease in severely ill patients.

However, this isn't simply a lecture on eating to live. Davies (who also narrates) and Shlomi also consider the effects of dairy and meat farming on the environment, with geo-scientist Gidon Eshel and bioethicist Peter Singer discussing the waste involved in growing crops to fatten cattle, pigs and poultry and the contribution that meat and dairy make to the average Westerner's carbon footprint. Farmers Martin Ping, Michael Bergonzi and Carol Ann Sayle also explain how relatively easy it is to change agricultural practices and abandon the industrial techniques that have begun to spread into the increasing affluent nations of the Developing World.

This is a film with a serious message to convey. But it's not all pie charts, bar graphs and finger-wagging factuality. The directors also try to tempt viewers with dishes and desserts rustled up by the likes of chef Chad Sarno and baker Erin McKenna, which show how easy and appetising meals made with locally sourced, plant-based ingredients can be.