Parky at the Pictures (DVD 28/7/2011)

Gustavo Alonso and his daughter Florencia Colucci have agreed to tidy up an abandoned house on the edge of some woodland for family friend Abel Tripaldi. He plans to sell the property and has asked the pair to stay overnight so they can make an early start in the morning. Arming them with fluorescent lamps and a radio, Tripaldi disappears into the night and Alonso suggests they grab some sleep.

However, as he dozes, Colucci hears what sounds like footsteps and furniture moving upstairs and wakes her father to investigate. He is reluctant to go, as Tripaldi had ordered them to remain on the ground floor, and his misgiving proves entirely justified when, after an interminable wait, Colucci finds him bound, bleeding and dying.

What follows is a series of dextrous gambits designed to show how Colucci creeps around the old dark house and uses the flash of an old Polaroid camera to light her way and pick out the disconcerting décor. But, as the viewer becomes aware of the presence of both a potential psychopath and a spectral young girl, Hernández begins shifting the perspective of Pedro Luque's camera. Thus, instead of showing the back of Colucci's head, the image starts to approximate her viewpoint and then wheels round to capture the look of shock and terror on her face as her ordeal intensifies.

All this would be laudable were the denouement not such a disappointment. It's impossible to review a film of this calibre with adequate rigour while trying to protect readers from spoilers. So, all that can be said without giving too much away is that Colucci turns the `final girl' theory of horror criticism on its head and, in the process, leaves the viewer with a sense of having been misled rather than mesmerised.

The picture ends with a reassurance that the story was inspired by an actual case from the 1940s. But, while Hernández demonstrates considerable ingenuity in concocting his screenplay from the snapshots that were found at the scene, his conclusions are resoundingly anti-climactic and the lengthy closing coda only reinforces the sense of disgruntlement.

Considering he was working on a shoestring and managed to supervise the concomitant action while also eliciting such a compelling performance from Colucci, Hernández deserves much praise. He also merits commendation for trying to do something new with a shooting technique that had become more than a little clichéd following its overuse in `found footage' features like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and such participating lens outings as [REC], Paranormal Activity (both 2007) and Cloverfield (2008). But while Luque makes inventive use of the props, reflective surfaces, flashes of light and inky darkness in Federico Capra's production design and Hernández ably sustains the atmosphere and suspense through the sound of nursery rhymes and the fleeting appearance of sinister figures, they can't quite keep their secret hidden from aficionado eyes or spring it with sufficient surprise for the uninitiated.

Experimentation is also the order of the day in Ward No.6. Despite being head of Mosfilm, Russia's principal studio, Karen Shakhnazarov established a reputation for iconoclasm with Vanished Empire (2008) and she continues in the same vein in adapting Anton Chekhov's short story, as she disrupts the chronology, translates descriptive passages into interview responses and juxtaposes footage from silent home movies before jettisoning the idea of a cogent narrative altogether.

At the outset, a documentary crew interacts with the inmates of a backwater asylum. But the focus soon shifts to Dr Andrei Ragin (Vladimir Ilyin), the former head of the institution, whose failure to deal with the rampant corruption, abuse and degradation led to him being denounced as incompetent by his scheming colleague Khobotov (Evgeni Stychkin) and confined to solitary, away from the paranoid Gromov (Alexei Vertkov), who alone seems to be on his wavelength.

It's hard to watch this uncompromising picture without wondering how it might have turned out if Shakhnazarov had been able to settle the creative differences that caused the abandonment of the 1988 Italian co-production that would have starred Marcello Mastroianni as Ragin. However, Ilyin delivers a devastating performance, with his rhythmic shuffling with a woman who may also be a patient during the climactic New Year's Eve dance being as tantalising as the final, fixed image that should leave viewers feeling perplexed and discomfited.

Filming in the mental hospital that took over the ancient Nikolo-Poshehonsky monastery near Moscow, Shakhnazarov followed Milos Forman's lead in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) of only employing professional actors for the principal roles. Thus, she had to teach the residents swathes of complex Chekhov text in order to play their parts. The tactic paid off, however, as their delivery complements the other dislocatory tactics that make this a difficult, but hugely rewarding watch.

Sadly, the same can't be said of Dario Argento's Giallo, which sees the maestro playing self-referential games with the baroquely violent style that gave Italian crime cinema the cult cachet it has retained since the 1960s. Although he shares a writing credit, Argento was essentially a director for hire on a homage project that was scripted by Jim Agnew and Sean Keller and he has since distanced himself from it in the wake of some hostile reviews. But while it's far from his best work, this bleak hunt for a Turin serial killer sees Argento reunite with longtime effects expert Sergio Stivaletti, cinematographer Frederic Fasano and Opera production designer Davide Bassan and marks a return to his Card Player form, as he passes acerbic comment on the current vogue for torture porn.

Concerned that model sister Elsa Pataky has been abducted, flight attendant Emmanuelle Seigner teams up with New York-born detective Adrien Brody, whose tortuous past has made him a specialist in psychopathic behaviour. The discovery of dying Japanese tourist Valentina Izumi in a convent courtyard puts the pair on the track of taxi driver Byron Deidra, who acquired the nickname `Yellow' at the orphanage where he was deposited as an infant with Hepatitis C by his junkie mother. But while he succeeds in locating both Deidra's flat and his gasworks hideout, Brody is forced to endure Seigner's vitriolic wrath after he fails to find Pataky.

Despite the stunt casting of Brody in an anagrammatical and latex-doused dual role and the reliance on plot details that require whopping suspension of disbelief, this will fascinate die-hards able to recognise the pattern of wry reflexivity that Argento started in Sleepless (2001) and continued in Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005) and Mother of Tears (2007). Technically, this isn't a giallo in the classic sense. Moreover, it lacks the postmodern acuity of Tenebrae (1982). But, notwithstanding Brody's sullenly charmless display as the chain-smoking cop, the risibility of his backstory and the sloppiness of the hammered head sequence, this maintains a palpable mood of foreboding while railing against the gross-out tactics employed so mindlessly by so many fanboy directors.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani pay slavish, but stylish homage to the Italian chiller in Amer. Cinematographer Manuel Dacosse and production designer Alina Santos make disturbingly sumptuous use of colour, space and texture throughout this visually beguiling enterprise. But the pseudo-Freudian melodrama succeeds only in capturing the surface allure achieved by such giallo masters as Argento and Mario Bava, while mostly missing their fiendish complexity and psychosexual intrigue.

What little story there is follows a female protagonist through three phases of her life. As a young girl, Cassandra Forêt witnesses parents Bianca Maria D'Amato and Jean-Michel Vovk having sex as she struggles to come to terms with grandfather Bernard Marbaix's death and grandmother Delphine Brual's eccentric behaviour in the room adjoining her own. Wearing the shortest of summer dresses, the adolescent Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud has an epiphany of her own, as she encounters a group of leering bikers while out shopping with her mother, while the adult Marie Bos, returns to the overgrown Côte d'Azur scene of her childhood traumas and perishes at the end of one of the most sensually sickening blade incidents since Simone Mareuil's eyeball appeared to be sliced by Luis Buñuel's razor in Un Chien andalou (1928).

The first segment is capriciously mysterious, as the secret of the downstairs room is initially withheld and Forêt's bemusement at the bizarre avian ritual Brual attempts to speed the passage of Marbaix's soul is reflected in a series of quizzical expressions, unexplained noises and furtive creepings. But Cattet and Forzani deftly sustain a mood of menacing innocence that gives way to a more precocious naiveté as Guibeaud adopts a Béatrice Dallesque pout in kicking young Thomas Bonzani's football down a steep street and attempting to retain her poise under the gaze of bikers who wouldn't look out of place in a Kenneth Anger film.

But it's the denouement that sees the co-directors most betray their cinematic influences, as allusions to Buñuel, Hitchcock, Chabrol and Maya Deren reinforce the arch giallo atmosphere, as Bos first overheats in Harry Cleven's taxi and then succumbs to the villa's lingering malevolence, her own instability and the savagery of a prowling stranger.

With editor Bernard Beets excelling throughout, there's no questioning Cattet and Forzani's technical surety or their eye for a striking image. Moreover, the use of split-screens, close-ups, zooms, jump cuts and coloured filters recreates the giallo aura as expertly as the voyeuristic camera angles and Daniel Bruylandt's inclusion of motifs by Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani and Adriano Celentano in a sound mix whose Foley intensity raises the odd unintentional smile. But while this makes for ravishing and often disconcerting viewing, the emphasis on audiovisual sensation and surface emotion fails to disguise the lack of diegetic depth that could have made this enticing hybrid of rite of passage and pernicious fantasy all the more engrossing.

Mia Hansen-Løve and Isabelle Czajka have recently followed Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis in presenting acute insights into the pangs of female adolescence. But, while Father of My Children and Living on Love Alone were both sensitively staged and superbly played, they lacked the intimacy, intensity and audacity of Katell Quillévéré's exceptional debut, Love Like Poison. The winner of the prestigious Jean Vigo Prize for best first feature, this is both a poignant coming-of-age saga and a considered treatise on the role of such institutions as marriage and religion in a world that is not only increasingly secular, but also more impulsive and impenitent.

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.

Considering the Vietnamese-born Tran Anh Hung had forged a reputation for locating characters within their environments and perfectly capturing the pace and atmosphere of lives being lived, Norwegian Wood is something of a disappointment. Not only is it a mediocre adaptation of Haruki Murakami's acclaimed 1987 novel, but it is also such a contrivedly poetic and calculatingly tasteful picture that there is no room for the emotion that is so central to the 1960s-set story.

Rinko Kikuchi and Kengo Kôra have been friends from infancy and Kenichi Matsuyama has been allowed to share in their intimacy after palling up with Kôra at school. However, when Kôra commits suicide on his 17th birthday, Kikuchi and Matsuyama drift apart and he buries himself so deeply his books that he barely notices the student demonstrations raging around Tokyo in 1968.

The 19 year-old Matsuyama lives in a dormitory room with the molysmophobic Tokio Emoto and Tetsuji Tamayama, a cocky patrician who treats devoted girlfriend Eriko Hatsune like dirt. However, Matsuyama isn't entirely blameless, as he frequently accompanies Tamayama on girl-hunting sessions, even though he has developed a crush on fellow student, Kiko Mizuhara. But when he unexpectedly bumps into Kikuchi, he allows his long-suppressed feelings to come to the fore and they make love on her 20th birthday.

As they lie together afterwards, Matsuyama asks the virginal Kikuchi why she never slept with Kôra and she is so distressed by the question that she disappears and only contacts Matsuyama many months later to say she is staying in a country sanatorium and will be in touch when she feels stronger. Feeling dejected, Matsuyama indulges in another one-night stand, while also retaining his interest in Mizuhara. However, she insists she has a boyfriend and, tempted though she is, she refuses to betray him.

Time passes and Kikuchi invites Matsuyama to visit her and he agrees to being chaperoned by her roommate, Reika Kirishima. Nevertheless, they find time to be alone and Kikuchi suggests she would like a romance with Matsuyama, but is still too psychologically fragile to commit fully, especially as she no longer feels sufficiently aroused when they attempt intercourse.

Back in Tokyo, Matsuyama tries to chat to Mizuhara, but she blanks him, as she is too aware of his conflicted passions. He is further shamed when Tamayana boasts in front of Hatsune about the night they swapped girls in a cheap hotel and she urges him during the car-ride home not to emulate Tamayana's self-obsessed boorishness. But, shortly after he moves out of the dormitory and asks Kikuchi to move in with him, Matsuyama learns that she has hanged herself in a snowy wood and he escapes to the coast to grieve.

On his return, however, he finds Kirishima waiting for him. She had written him several letters outlining Kikuchi's declining mental state and this closeness prompts them to sleep together in order to give them the strength to begin the rest of their lives. Kirishima has decided to abandon her husband and child and teach music in another part of Japan. But Matsuyama phones Mizuhara to profess his love and her quiet smile suggests she is finally ready for a relationship.

Ending gloriously with The Beatles performing the title track, this is an impeccable piece of craftsmanship. Ping Bin Lee's high-definition photography is the standout, whether he's gloomily illuminating drab campus interiors, revelling in the lush greenery and snowy whites of the sanatorium sequences or using torrid seascapes to convey Matsuyama's despair after Kikuchi's death. Norifumi Ataka and Yen Khe Luguern's production design is equally exemplary, while Yen Khe Luguern's costumes restrainedly capture the 60s mood as neatly as the Can songs on the soundtrack.

But the score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is much less subtle, as it rams home each emotional shift. Indeed, Tran's direction similarly suffers from over-emphasis and an elliptical enigmaticism that will dismay those familiar with the book and simply confuse those who aren't. The fragmentary structuring is compounded by the funereal pacing and the over-reliance on voiceover (which is used to reveal the tragic fate of both Hatsune and Kikuchi). Moreover, none of the principals particularly seem to inhabit their roles, with the debuting Mizuhara missing the garrulous vibrancy that made the contrast between the Midori and the Naoko of the novel so stark.

Kikuchi (who earned an Oscar nomination for her work in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel) is more persuasive as the latter. But she also seems too mature and controlled for such a vulnerable waif, while Matsuyama's Toru Watanabe is never as confusedly caddish as the novel's anti-hero. But the acting frustrates far less than Tran's melodramatic handling, which eschews the eroticism of the source and over-laces nearly every exquisitely composed image with faux lyricism in striving to render the aching sadness and desperate longing that Murakami achieved so delicately.

Similar problems beset Marc Evans's Patagonia, a reciprocal road movie that has been sublimely photographed by Robbie Ryan to capture the lush valleys of Wales and the barren expanses of Argentina's southernmost point. However, neither odyssey succeeds in firing the imagination, while the romantic subplots fizzle rather than catch light.

In 1865, a party of 163 hardy souls left Wales in search of a place where they could prosper and pursue their religious beliefs without persecution. They landed in South America and established a community that still retains its links with the mother country. Indeed, eightysomething Marta Lubos has always wanted to visit the farm where her mother was born and, so, she dupes her family into thinking that neighbour Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is escorting her to the nearby town for cataract surgery and coaxes him into crossing the Atlantic to go in search of her roots.

Meanwhile, in Cardiff, actress Nia Roberts is growing increasingly frustrated with photographer Matthew Gravelle's refusal to discuss the effect that failing to conceive is having on their relationship. Consequently, she insists on accompanying him on a trip to Patagonia to make a record of historic chapels. However, she soon becomes bored and begins flirting with guide Matthew Rhys to pass the time. But, following an injudicious night of passion and a visit to Rhys's family ranch, she realises she has made a mistake and hopes to atone before Gravelle learns the truth.

Back in Wales, Biscayart has similarly taken a shine to Duffy, a student he first meets when she is somewhat the worse for wear in a downtown nightclub. But they reunite when she comes to stay on the northern farm her grandfather leases out as a campsite and she proves more than willing share a moment of intimacy, while Lubos seeks the solitude to come to terms with the fact that her ancestral village was engulfed in the 1960s by the creation of a reservoir to supply Merseyside with drinking water.

The contrasting light and colours are captivating throughout this pleasingly meandering, if ultimately nugatory picaresque. But Evans and screenwriter Laurence Coriat never seem entirely sure what they are trying to say about either the wandering Welsh spirit or the fading evidence of its impact upon its most exotic outpost. Consequently, Lubos and Biscayart follow several false leads before finally striking lucky, while Grevelle and Roberts become separated a tad too easily to enable her to make her move on Rhys. Yet it's only during the climactic burial sequence on the Welsh lake that the easy naturalism is finally subsumed by sentimental melodramatics.

Finally, Jerzy Skolimowski makes much more effective use of the landscape in Essential Killing. Ostensibly the story of an Afghan prisoner escaping brutal US custody to endure the vicissitudes of a Polish winter, this is a near-wordless parable that could represent any individual's struggle against an imposed ideology during 72 year-old director's lifetime. Consequently, poetic truth is prioritised over plausibility, as a lone fugitive's desperate bid to evade murderous man and survive pitiless nature evokes memories of Jews fleeing the Nazis, dissidents eluding Communists and insurgents avoiding foes in any number of recent conflicts in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East.

Unintentionally cornered in a cave by stoner contractors Zach Cohen and Iftach Ophir and their soldier escort Ramond Josey, Vincent Gallo kills them with a rocket launcher and is captured by an American patrol after being stunned by a helicopter missile. Gallo could be a member of the Taliban or just a frightened man in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he has been deafened by the noise of the explosion and is unable to hear interrogating officer David Price's questions. As a result, he is waterboarded and beaten before being dressed in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed and hooded and bundled into a plane and then a convoy taking him to a secret detention centre in the Polish countryside.

The vehicle carrying Gallo crashes after swerving to miss a pig in the road and he manages to slip into the darkness undetected. He quickly comes across a detached SUV and dispatches both occupants before driving into the night. Next morning, wearing a change of clothes and armed with stolen weapons, Gallo presses on and just manages to stay ahead of his pursuers, even after he steps in an animal trap and has to remove his boot to get free. However, having sent the chasing sniffer dogs in the wrong direction by tying his bloody sock to a stray mutt, he again evades capture and even purloins a white camouflage suit from a dead tracker.

As the patrol closes in on an innocent hunter, Gallo presses through the snowy fields, scrambling up slippery inclines and eating bugs and tree bark to keep him going. Eventually, he clambers on to a logging truck, only to become trapped under a fallen tree in the woods and slays lumberjack Dariusz Juzyszyn with his own chain-saw to escape. Badly wounded, but desperate to keep moving after nearly being entrapped by ravenous dogs, Gallo steals a fish from fisherman Geir Marring and breast milk at gunpoint from nursing mother Klaudia Kaca, who has skidded off her bicycle while carrying her baby.

Finally, on Christmas Eve, he staggers into a farmyard and is given sanctuary by mute Emmanuelle Seigner, who protects him from a patrol and tends to his injuries. Next morning, however, she packs him off on a white horse before her husband returns and the film ends with Gallo nowhere to be seen and the bloodied beast grazing on tufts of grass poking through the snow.

Throughout his ordeal, Gallo recalls the promises made to Muslim heroes and flashes back to indistinct incidents that may have provoked him into committing to jihad. But his motives are never made clear, as Skolimowski seeks to induce the audience into accepting him as quarry rather than a terrorist or even a human being. Yet Gallo is never defenceless and his readiness to kill suggests he is anything but prepared meekly to accept martyrdom for his cause.

Switching chillingly from fear to ferocity, Gallo delivers a compelling physical performance, which earned him the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. Adam Sikora's visceral (and often subjective) photography, Réka Lemhényi's acute editing and Fiadhnait McCann's evocative sound design are all equally accomplished. But, while Skolimowski makes magnificent use of his desert and rustic locations, his refusal to contextualise Gallo's initial situation leaves the action reliant on dramatic contrivance and allegorical abstraction. Nonetheless, this still merits mention alongside such harrowingly suspenseful studies of desperate flight as Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966), Joseph Losey's Figures in a Landscape (1970) and Rafi Pitts's The Hunter (2010).