Parky at the Pictures (DVD 23/6/2011)

Dispensing with the noirish cynicism that made the Coen picture so chillingly chic, Zhang combines classic Beijing Opera business with the e'gao style of brash parody that is currently all the rage in Mainland China. Consequently, he packs the dialogue with anachronistic slang and allows the cast to ham it up in a manner that occasionally threatens to reduce the deliciously dark storyline to pantomime. Nevertheless, this is a still a lively comedy of murderous errors that is made all the more atmospheric by the oppressive intimacy of Han Zhong's sets and Zhao Xiaoding's lustrous red vistas.

Somewhere in the wastes of Northern China, Ni Dahong runs an inn with younger wife Yan Ni, hunky chef Xiao Shenyang and the dim-witted waiting duo of Cheng Ye and Mao Mao. Customers are rare and Yan has started off-setting her boredom by flirting with Xiao. However, she finds a new distraction when Persian trader Julien Gaudfroy sells her a new-fangled, three-barrelled gun. But, in the course of demonstrating his other wares (including a cannon), he causes sufficient commotion for local policemen Zhao Benshan and Sun Honglei to investigate.

Keen to placate his unwelcome guests, Ni has his staff demonstrate their noodle making skills in a routine mixing martial arts balletics and slapstick that later finds echo in an equally arch rap-singing sequence. However, Sun takes the opportunity to inform Ni about Yan's liaison with Xiao and the cuckolded skinflint hires the corrupt cop to kill them and dispose of their corpses in the sand.

But Sun is more interested in quick cash than criminous deeds and, when he discovers the stash hidden in Ni's safe, he decides to bump him off with Yan's new gun and let her take the blame. His scheme quickly goes off the rails, however, after Xiao discovers the corpse and, thinking Yan is the culprit, tries to cover her tracks. But she is bemused when he lets her know what he thinks he knows and confusion reigns as the body count begins to mount.

More likely to appeal to domestic and diasporic audiences than arthouse admirers of Zhang's earlier oeuvre, this is never anything less than rousing fun. Moreover, it's a fascinating antedating of an American indie classic and suggests that commercial Chinese cinema has latched on to a tactic from which Bollywood has been profiting for quite some time. Zhang handles the plot twists with more conviction than the more conspicuous crowd-pleasing set-pieces. But a touch more psychological insight into the baser aspects of human nature might not have gone amiss.

Sadly, Zhang's Fifth Generation comrade Tian Zhuangzhuang is much more bereft of inspiration in The Warrior and the Wolf, an adaptation of a Yasushi Inoue novel in which a director better known for his trenchant dissections of social issues singularly fails to match the visual panache, period precision and dramatic intensity of Zhang's Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).

Setting the action in the Warring States period (between 475-221 BC), Tian struggles to make sense of a plotline riddled with cavernous gaps and often resorts to explanatory captions that only serve to emphasise the clumsiness of the storytelling. Moreover, he also proves unable to bring the best out of a multi-national cast, whose contrasting acting styles only reinforce the impression that this is a project that simply failed to come together at any stage of its production.

While on campaign against rebellious tribes in the Kunlun Mountains, General Tou Chung-hua stumbles across shepherd Joe Odagiri, who knows nothing of politics and is happy playing with the wolf cub he has recently befriended. However, Tou entrusts him with the care of a prince captured in battle and begins teaching him both martial philosophy and the brutal techniques of combat. Despite his natural gentility, Odagiri quickly becomes a pitiless warrior and when Tou is captured in battle, Odagiri takes command and arranges to exchange him for the prince.

Needing somewhere to spend the winter after suffering a shattering defeat, the army enters a deserted Harran village, where Odagiri finds widow Maggie Q hiding beneath some furs. He repeatedly rapes her in defiance of her curse that she will turn into a wolf for copulating outside her tribe, but they begin to have genuine feelings for each other after he prevents her from committing suicide. But the war continues to rage and a showdown becomes inevitable after Tou returns to the front some five years later with the Emperor's offer of peace.

Shooting in the remote Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Tian and cinematographer Yu Wang achieve some spectacular images. Emi Wada's costumes and Liu Weixin's production design are also commendable. But the fragmented narrative never gathers any momentum, especially as Tian needs to keep pausing to clarify points and describe events happening off screen.

Clearly, he was not helped by the authorities banning his original leading lady - Tang Wei, who had headlined Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. But, while Maggie Q (the Nikita star who was born in Hawaii to a Vietnamese mother and a Polish-Irish American father - the `Q' stands for Quigley) suggests pride and passion in a difficult role, the Japanese Odagiri and the Taiwanese Tou don't always seem so committed. However, it can't have been easy working in a foreign language or with such risibly mock heroic dialogue. But their cause is not helped by a bombastic score and some decidedly mediocre CGI work (most notably during the wolf attack and the supposedly imposing finale).

Tian has himself suggested that the trailer was a better piece of work than the finished picture. But he only has himself to blame, as his use of flashbacks and symbolism is cumbersome and he seems uncertain whether he is examining man's feral urges, the futility of warfare, the rising of the common people, the durability of women or the impermanence of power.

Coming forward a couple of centuries and adapted from two historical novels by Heinrich Mann, Henry of Navarre is a handsome, imposing, but ungainly biopic of the king who brought religious toleration to France with the 1598 Edict of Nantes. Determined to understand the man, as well as the times in which he lived, director Jo Baier is to be applauded for his ambition. But this feels more like a trimmed mini-series than a big screen epic.

Despite preferring to commune with his subjects in the tiny kingdom of Navarre than be a pampered prince, the young Henri's fate is sealed when Huguenot mother Jeanne d'Albret (Marta Calvó) is informed by Nostradamus (Fritz Marquadt) that he will one day rule France. Entrusted to Admiral Coligny (Karl Markovics), Henri (Julien Boisselier) grows up on the battlefields of the Wars of Religion. However, Catholic regent Catherine de Medici (Hannelore Hoger) is desperate for peace and arranges for Henri to marry her daughter, Marguerite de Valois (Armelle Deutsch). But their passionate love-hate relationship becomes irretrievable after the Duc de Guise (Wotan Wilke Möhring) murders Coligny and sparks the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.

Escaping from the court of King Charles IX (Ulrich Noethen) and his scheming siblings d'Anjou (Devid Striesow) and d'Alençon (Adam Markiewicz), Henri reunites with trusted retainers Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné (Joachim Król) and Guillaume du Bartas (Andreas Schmidt) and resumes the conflict. However, Bartas is killed and tensions begin to mount between Agrippa and Henri's new aide, Maximilien de Béthune (Roger Casamajor), even though neither trusts Henri's mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrées (Chloé Stefani). Yet the deaths of Charles, Catherine and d'Anjou (as King Henri III) bring Henri to the throne and he vows to bring peace and reform his broken country.

Gabrielle earns the respect of Agrippa and Béthune after she raises the funds to suppress an insurrection. But the pope refuses to allow Henri the divorce he needs to marry her and he is plunged into despair when she dies while heavily pregnant. Convinced by a doctor that she was not poisoned by an enemy, Henri agrees to a dynastic match with Marie de Medici (Gabriela Maria Schmeide) in order to sire an heir and consents to converting to Catholicism to unite his people. However, his marriage is deeply unhappy and the newly crowned, but unforgivingly envious Marie conspires with François Ravaillac (Frank Kessler) to assassinate her husband, as he drives through the crowded streets of Paris.

Exhaustively inclusive, but rarely examining events or their significance in much detail, this is a breakneck chronicle that places more emphasis on combat spectacle and bedchamber pyrotechnics than political intrigue. Only Boisselier and Hoger are allowed to essay anything approaching a developed character, as Baier sweeps between tableaux meticulously designed by Klaus-Peter Platten and Christian Strang, costumed by Gerhard Gollnhofer and Ute Hofinger and photographed by Gernot Roll. Consequently, this will neither fire the imagination of general viewers nor satisfy those with more than a passing knowledge of the period.

Marc Dugain puts a totalitarian slant on the use and abuse of power in An Ordinary Execution, which he has adapted from the first part of his own bestselling novel about recent Russian history. Loweringly photographed by Yves Angelo in sombre browns and blacks, this is a chilling supposition set in the last days of Joseph Stalin's tyrannical regime that has a terrible ring of authenticity. Yet, for all its austerity, credible conspiracy theories and sense of shrouding suspicion, this is just a touch self-satisfied in its academicism and its allusions to both Raputin and Vladimir Putin.

Doctor Marina Hands has incurred the wrath of her colleagues at a Moscow hospital for her ability to heal patients by unconventional means. Indeed, only the protection of director Tom Novembre has prevented lustful rival Alain Stern's report on her activities from being sent to the authorities. Even at home, she is under the constant watch of concierge Denis Podalydès, who informs her that her noisy attempts to get pregnant with civil servant husband Edouard Baer have been upsetting the neighbours. However, such everyday prejudice and snooping come to seem petty after Hands is summoned to the Kremlin to ease the suffering of the dictator (André Dussollier), who has recently purged his personal physician for participating in a Zionist plot.

Initially sure she was being taken to the Lubyanka - the headquarters of the NKVD controlled by the sinister Lavrenty Beria (Gilles Gaston-Dreyfus) - Hands is somewhat surprised to be ushered into Dussollier's inner sanctum, where he menacingly reassures her that she has nothing to fear providing she relieves his aches and pains and tells nobody about her mission. Indeed, to that end, he suggests that she divorces Baer, because she cannot possibly be loyal to him while married to another. Speaking in measured tones that fleetingly reveal the man of steel beneath the world-weary affability, Dussollier is pleased with the mystical magnetism of Hands's ministrations and he promises to call her again soon.

Deeply disturbed by both Dussollier's paranoia and the peril in which she now finds herself, Hands returns to her humble apartment and informs Baer that she has taken a lover and wants a divorce. He is crushed, but seems to sense that she is trying to protect him. However, both Baer and her mother (Anne Benoît) and uncle (Gilles Ségal) soon wind up in custody to ensure Hands's continued co-operation, as she treats Dussollier in both the Kremlin and his Georgian dacha. During their meetings, he reminisces about his handling of Hitler, Roosevelt and Truman and justifies the brutal methods he employed to drag his peasant nation into the modern era.

Hands largely remains silent for fear of provoking a rage that will condemn her family. Then, one night in March 1953, she notices a paper on Dussollier's desk denouncing her as a foreign agent. But, it turns out not to be her death warrant.

Making exceptional use of Yves Fournier's forbidding interiors, Dugain and Angelo create a claustrophobic, mausoleum-like atmosphere that increases the tension of Hands's excruciating consultations with the intimidating Dussollier. The performances couldn't be better, with Hands ever watchful for a shift in her patient's mood and Dussollier tempering his vulnerable avuncularity with controlled flashes of cynical cruelty. The sequence in which he torments Hands with details of Baer's torture is particularly disturbing. But the silences Hands endures as Dussollier sleeps on a sofa after each treatment are equally effective in conveying both her dread and the aura of uncertainty that pervades the entire picture.

The medical aspects are much more graphically depicted in Reinout Oerlemans's Love Life. Adapted from Raymond van der Klundert's autobiographical novel, A Woman Goes to the Doctor, this was a huge hit in its native Netherlands. However, there is too little in this tale of infidelity in a time of cancer to distinguish it from the quotidian love-rat melodrama or `disease of the week' movie.

Narrated by Barry Atsma in a tone that veers between swaggering self-congratulation and shrugging justification, the action opens with a whirlwind romance between the dashing thirtysomething Amsterdam advertising executive (who seems to have once played for Ajax) and feisty colleague Carice van Houten, which culminates in a picture-book wedding, the birth of a cute daughter and a move to a soullessly luxurious house in the suburbs. Atsma seems to have the world at his feet. But he is only really content when cheating on his wife and his addiction to adultery intensifies when Van Houten is diagnosed with breast cancer and Atsma exploits artist Anna Drijver to provide a release from the tiresome routine of accompanying Van Houten to hospital appointments and nursing her through the ghastly side effects of her treatment.

Eventually, Van Houten catches Atsma in the lies he has been perpetuating with the respectively reluctant and active assistance of workmates Jeroen Willems and Walid Benmbarek. But she accepts his assurance that he is devoted solely to her recovery and, when she goes into remission, he jets her off for a tropical holiday. No sooner have they arrived, however, than Atsma receives a call from Drijver and Van Houten demands a divorce. Even then, she is unable to break free and their reconciliation is reinforced by the return of her illness. But, even though Van Houten only has a few months to live, Atsma still proves incapable of remaining faithful.

Refusing to venture beneath the surface of Atsma and Van Houten's superficial world, this is a glossy and rather glib drama that devotes too little time to its female protagonists. Drijver is simply a source of irresistible temptation, while young Yfke Wegman is wheeled on periodically to say something adorably meaningful that causes mummy and daddy to look at each other with tearfully brave smiles. Even Van Houten is required to do little other than suffer nobly and occasionally chastise Atsma for the philandering she eventually comes to tolerate to the extent that she urges him to be happy with Drijver after her death.

Atsma's amoral louse is no more fully fleshed, however. Oerlemans and screenwriter Gert Embrechts stop short of condoning his actions and even lace the voice-over with ironic remarks that betray his self-centred shallowness. But Oerlemans certainly suggests that Atsma's extra-curricular activities are highly enjoyable in flashily directed scenes set in trendy nightclubs and well-appointed studio apartments. His use of music is no more subtle, with just about every track shamelessly manipulating the audience's emotions. Clearly the audiovisual style is supposed to reflect Atsma's personality, but even Van Houten's ordeal feels designed more to provoke a viewer reaction than provide a realistic insight into the ravages of a pitiless disease.

The performances are solid, with Atsma letting his looks and charm do much of the work, while Van Houten conveys the distress of hair loss, endless vomiting and the devastation of discovering she has not been cured with a stoic sadness that is tempered with occasional flashes of fury at the unfairness of her situation and the cruelty of her husband's behaviour. But while this may have broken Dutch box-office records, it will seem more like a psychologically vacuous soap opera to those unfamiliar with Van der Klundert (who uses the nom de plume, Kluun) and the critically mauled bestsellers that have made him a controversial celebrity.

Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl could have been made at any time over the last four decades. However, this is meant to be a compliment, as the Portuguese centenarian invokes the spirit of Luis Buñuel and Claude Chabrol in translating a short story by the 19th-century realist, Eça de Queirós, to credit crunch Lisbon. Lustrously lit by Sabine Lancelin, this is a mischievous miniature that confirms De Oliveira's cinematic mastery, 70 years after he made his directorial debut.

The action flashes back from Ricardo Trêpa relating his doleful saga to fellow train passenger Leonor Silveira, as they travel to the Algarve. He has been dispatched to recover his composure by uncle Diogo Dória after falling for entrancing blonde Catarina Wallenstein, after spotting her from the balcony of the accounting office above Dória's fabric shop. However, his passion turned out to be ruinous.

Having spent days gazing at Wallenstein flirting coquettishly behind her Chinese silk fan and a translucent window blind, Trêpa rushes gauchely into the store when she comes to look at some cashmere with her mother, Júlia Buisel. However, he is promptly sent back to his desk by the dourly disapproving Dória and has to be content with Wallenstein's intrigued glance, as he retreats up the creaking staircase. A few days later, Trêpa notices acquaintance Filipe Vargas doffing his hat to Buisel from the pavement and he tracks him down to a club devoted to the appreciation of De Queirós in order to request a formal introduction.

The following Saturday, the pair attends a soirée hosted by lawyer Miguel Seabra and, while the other guests listen to a harp recital and a poetic recitation (given by veteran actor Luis Miguel Cintra), Trêpa clumsily attempts to make small talk with Wallenstein and winds up being embarrassed by a missing chip during a card game. His indiscretion doesn't deter Wallenstein, however, and he asks Dória for permission to marry. But not only does the starchy merchant refuse his nephew, he also turfs him out of his job and lodgings and Trêpa is reduced to residing in a squalid bedsit and snatching glimpses of Wallenstein from the street, as he tries in vain to find employment.

Eventually, stranger Rogério Samora offers Trêpa an opportunity in the Cape Verde Islands and Wallenstein promises to wait for him. After several months of unbearable toil (the details of which are restricted to a single letter), Trêpa returns, having restored both his reputation and his finances. However, he feels duty bound to invest in Samora's new hardware business and is bankrupted when the rogue absconds with an ensign's wife. He reappears shortly afterwards to suggest another African jaunt, but Dória decides that Trêpa has suffered enough and not only takes him back into the firm, but also consents to his wedding. But Wallenstein then chooses to reveal her true colours.

Despite continuing his investigation into subjectivity and modes of representation and the relevance of his acerbic asides on the perils of materialism, De Oliveira doesn't always succeed in convincingly updating this charmingly old-fashioned fable to the present day. Some may also bridle at the oblique brevity of the minimalist melodrama and the clipped mannerism of the performances. But there's no denying the wit, acuity and precision of the direction and De Oliveira's insights into unchanging foibles of human nature. Moreover, the deftness with which he uses long takes and entrenched camera placements to suggest the antiquated formalism of his source attests to his innate understanding of the relationship between text and image.

Taking the action out into the real world, Asli Özge's Men on the Bridge is a perceptive study of a nation in transition that is rooted in the traditions of Free Cinema, a 1950s British movement that saw young film-makers like Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti introduce a new docudramatic realism to studies of everyday life.

Umut Ilker, Fikret Portakal and Murat Tokgöz spend much of their lives on the Bosphorous Bridge that unites Europe and Asia. Umut is a 28 year-old cabby who seems permanently stuck in the slow-moving traffic through which the 17 year-old Fikret weaves trying to sell flowers to disinterested motorists - that is when he's not being moved on by Murat, a 23 year-old cop who has recently transferred to Turkey's biggest city from a backwater in the east.

Their home lives are scarcely easier. Fikret lives in a crowded street in an impoverished neighbourhood with one bathroom for all the residents, while Murat shares digs with fellow cop Serkan Özcan, who constantly teases him about a Muslim faith that forbids him from drinking beer, but which allows him to flirt with girls in internet chatrooms. Umut is married and lives in a small, but comfortable flat. However, wife Cemile Ilker is dissatisfied with the fact that he lets pal Bülent Demirkiran pay him a meagre wage for driving their shared cab and keeps pressurising them into moving into a smaller flat so he can charge the new tenants a higher rent.

Cemile is a babysitter, but has ambitions to work in an office. However, she soon learns during an interview at a recruitment agency that she's seriously under-qualified and Fikret discovers much the same thing as he applies for vacancies in clothing and electrical stores. Deprived of citizenship as a Roma, let alone an education, Fikret only learned to read so he could bet on the horses and, following a disastrous stint in a kebab café, he quickly abandons all attempts at bettering himself and returns to his illegal pitch on the bridge.

Murat also dislikes his job and is torn between going to university and doing national service. But, as his desultory dates with online contacts Didem Delen and Nezihe Özcan prove, he lacks drive and only a terrorist attack by Kurdish separatists jolts him out of his lethargy. Indeed, Umut and Fikret also have nationalist inclinations, with the former marching in a demonstration in protest at PKK activity and EU demands for internal reform and the latter attending the Republic Day parade and expressing bellicose sentiments on seeing the army hardware trundle through the streets.

Despite their pipe dreams, the trio remain stuck in their respective ruts. Fikret and buddy Tayfun Kiskaç smoke a joint and console themselves with the fact that flower selling allows them to sleep late, while Murat puts off any life-changing decisions beyond promising his mother he'll visit when he can. But Umut is entrenched without solace, as even though a climactic argument concludes with mention of divorce, Cemile had already confided in gal pal Mine Yildrim that even though she doesn't love Umut she can't leave as she is so financially dependent upon him.

Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, while also exposing the fissures between Turkey's Western and Eastern mentalities, this is a superbly controlled and deeply compassionate picture. Working with a largely non-professional cast, the debuting Özge and cinematographer Emre Erkmen make evocative use of locations that reinforce the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. But the discussion of such contentious topics as tradition, globalisation, poverty, patriotism, religion and the status of women is never forced, as Özge suggests that Turkey is a country condemned to wait for a future that is as likely to break as make it.

The performances are excellent, with Murat exuding awkwardness whether on duty or on dates, and Fikret conveying much through impassivity, as he sleepwalks through his jobs, raps with his mates and gets ejected from a city centre store for looking like a potential troublemaker. But it's the Ilkers who fascinate most, as Umut hides the hurt of suspecting that Cemile married him solely to escape her parents and she barely suppresses the disappointment of being stuck with a man who cares but can never provide her with the little luxuries she feels she deserves.

Finally, Franck Richard puts a grizzly twist on recessional themes as he takes torture porn into more macabrely amusing territory in The Pack, which boasts a splendidly scene-stealing deadpan turn from Yolande Moreau, as the owner of a roadhouse off the beaten track in northern France. Shuffling and scowling, she barely manages to summon up some civility, let alone hospitality as she serves feisty motorist Émilie Dequenne and hitcher Benjamin Biolay and borders on the downright rude in dealing with retired lawman, Philippe Nahon. But it soon becomes clear that Moreau is pretty much detached from reality and rather than being the victim of a sinister disappearance, Biolay is her partner in gruesome crime.

Waking up in a cage after sneaking back at night to investigate a false washroom wall, Dequenne finds herself chained alongside Chinese cowboy Jan Fonteyn and being prepared for some sort of sacrifice. An attempt to reach her mobile phone succeeds in alerting Nahon that something sinister is happening in the roadhouse cellar, but Dequenne has to ensure a ghastly night at an abandoned pit head - that sees Fonteyn devoured by zombie miners who emerge from the ground that claimed them - before she can be returned to the comparative safety of captivity.

Naturally, Nahon's bid to rescue Dequenne ends in decapitated failure. But Biolay has taken a shine to her and he agrees to help her exterminate the undead. However, the pair prove to be powerless against the ravenous horde and not even the support of a trio of burly bikers can allay the inevitable.

Shrewdly laying the ground for a possible sequel, this is a consistently teasing piece of genre savvyism that avoids dwelling on plot detail to focus on ambience and imbalance, as the demented Moreau lures victims for her late lamented sons. Her curses and cackles are matched by Dequenne's spirited fury and Nahon's knowing eccentricity, while Laurent Barès earthy imagery is similarly complemented by the cramped decrepitude of Florence Vercheval's sets and the serviceable ghoulishness of Olivier Afonso and Frédéric Lainé's make-up effects. The face-off in the blazing hut is a touch anti-climactic, but Richard slips in a mischievous reverie before delivering a resoundingly bleak ending.