Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 11/8/2011)

Having failed to solve his money woes by selling nonagenarian mother Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni's luxurious Roman home, sixtysomething Gianni Di Gregorio returns despondently to the comfortable apartment he shares with wife Elisabetta Piccolomini and student daughter Teresa Di Gregorio. However, the conjugal side of his marriage ceased long ago and Di Gregorio wonders whether lawyer friend Alfonso Santagata doesn't have a point about seeking a mistress - especially as one of the veterans who spends his days chatting outside the local bar is having a fling with the tobacconist.

Instead, he walks neighbour Aylin Prandi's giant dog while running errands for Piccolominni (who still works and thinks he has too much time on his hands) and plays relationship adviser to his daughter's slacker boyfriend, Michelangelo Ciminale, who is as blissfully unaware that he is about to get dumped and he is reluctant to get a job and stop depending upon his parents. But Di Gregorio is a mummy's boy himself and he shoots across the city when she calls to complain of ill health. However, she is happily playing cards in the garden with her cronies and only summoned her son to serve them lunch because Romanian carer Kristina Cepraga has the day off.

Appalled by her profligacy, Di Gregorio helps himself to the food and finishes the half-empty bottles of champagne that Bendoni thinks nothing of leaving around the kitchen. Thus, he is tipsy when Cepraga returns home and he feels so bad about awkwardly flirting with her (and resenting the fact that Bendoni buys her expensive gifts while he is hard up) that he stays the night in order to bring her an apologetic breakfast in bed. He is rewarded by Cepraga revealing that she dreamt of him in a grandfatherly way and he is suitably frustrated to allow himself to be talked into sharing lunch with Santagata and twins Laura and Silvia Squizzato, who put up with the boastful tall tales and make empty promises about Sardinian invitations before disappearing in a cab.

Another emergency dash to fix Bendoni's temperamental television leads to Di Gregorio giving elderly Lilia Silvi a lift and a Sunday date with her recently separated singer daughter, Gabriella Sborgi. But, having nearly injured himself trying to do some shape-up exercises and wasted his precious pension on a new suit, Di Gregorio finds Sborgi rehearsing with a handsome young pianist and he winds up gulping wine in the garden with her mother and getting more drunk in a downtown bar with Santagata, where he laments that he cannot even get a smile out of a barmaid in return for civility. Indeed, he begins to feel so crestfallen that he takes to wandering the streets comparing himself with more decrepit male geriatrics and accepting that he is all-but invisible to the beautiful women he wishes would just acknowledge his existence.

Ironically, when he does get a date with old flame Valeria Cavalli, he realises that she has probably only agreed to see him after so many years because she remembered what an excellent cook he was. She has an early start the next morning and, so, when she falls asleep on the couch after cursing yet another call from Bendoni (whom she half-jokingly blames for them not getting married) Di Gregorio creeps away resigned to his fate. However, the saggy sexagenarian has one more surprise in store, as he slips away from Bendoni's birthday supper to buy cigarettes and finds himself so under the influence of a spiked drink foisted on him at the playfully coquettish Prandi's party that he begins to hallucinate and is still drying off from climbing into a fountain when Ciminale sparks a hilarious concluding interior montage by wondering what on earth goes on inside Di Gregorio's head.

Full of wryly wistful insights into the gulfs between the genders and the generations, this is slickly scripted and deftly played. As in Mid-August Lunch, the impish Bendoni is hilariously manipulative and her sense of patrician entitlement and thoughtless selfishness make it a little easier to sympathise with her son. But it's the director's understanding of his own expressions and gestures that make Di Gregorio's melancholic predicament seem more touching than tasteless, as he appears to admire rather than letch and wonder chastely rather than covet lasciviously. He is much aided in this regard by Gogo Bianchi's discreet photography and a puckish score by Stefano Ratchev and Carratello Mattia that emphasises the fleeting, bittersweet joys of trying to grow old disgracefully.

By one of those curious quirks of programming, Pierre Salvadori covers similar ground in Beautiful Lies, which presents the ever luminous Nathalie Baye with the kind of role that most Hollywood actresses of a certain age would kill for. As a mother embroiled in her daughter's muddled revivifying scheme, Baye exudes vulnerability, sensuality and effortless elegance. Moreover, she demonstrates a sure comic touch that allows this droll ménage to overcome its core contrivances and intrinsic chauvinism.

Audrey Tautou has just opened a hairdressing salon with Stéphanie Lagarde in the sunny southern coastal town of Sète. Receptionist Judith Chemla is nervous of people, but business is brisk and handyman Sami Bouajila is a real find. However, soon after he sends Tautou an anonymous love letter, she discovers he is a highly qualified linguist and becomes intimidated by his intellect. As the awkward silences become more deafening, Tautou has to deal with mother Nathalie Baye's growing despondency at ever winning back the affection of her estranged artist husband, Daniel Duval. Consequently, Tautou decides to retype the billet doux and send it to Baye in the hope it will boost her self-confidence.

Unfortunately, Baye's initial euphoria turns to dejection when she fails to receive a second missive and she becomes more convinced that her admirer has lost his ardour on reading the laboured late-night efforts that Tautou composes under the influence of alcohol. However, matters take an unlikely turn when Tautou sends Bouajila to the post-box and, when he runs out of stamps, he decides to deliver the letter addressed to Baye in person and she follows him all the way to the salon in her night clothes and bare feet.

What ensues is a series of excruciating encounters, as the emotionally stunted Tautou fires the hapless Bouajila and rehires him to romance the libidinous Baye. However, she then realises she is also becoming attracted to him and is dismayed by witnessing her mother attempt to kiss him on the bonnet of her own car. Her feelings are further flustered by the chance discovery that Bouajila was the author of the original letter and she has a tearful exchange with him at the salon unaware that Baye and Chemla are listening on the other side of a curtain.

As one would expect, the loose ends are neatly tied in a cosy conclusion that even allows Baye (who has finally accepted that it's time to forget Duval) to rediscover her vocation as an artist's muse. But this easy resolution typifies the arch slickness of Salvadori and Benoît Graffin's screenplay, which devotes much more time to the intricacies of the storyline than the nuances of character. Thus, while the narrative pieces slot neatly into place, it remains difficult to warm to the curiously neck-tattooed Tautou, whose actions veer from the well-meaning and misguided to the reckless and spiteful without any real thought for their impact on anyone including herself.

Bouajila also makes an unconvincing transition from discreet devotee to Machiavellian lothario, as he loses patience with Tautou's inconstancy and exploits Baye's fragility to get back at her. Yet Baye retains her actorly poise, as she follows a gauchely girlish attempt to flirt with Bouajila with a considerably clumsier (but successful) bid to seduce him. Such antics are par for the bedroom farce course and Salvadori keeps them brisk and risqué. But, for all its wit and slickness, the film is detrimentally short of charm.

If several of the supporting characters seem somewhat stereotypical in Beautiful Lies, the majority of the protagonists in The Taqwacores feel like caricatures designed to highlight specific aspects of being Muslim in post-9/11 America. Adapted from the cult 2003 Michael Muhammad Knight novel that inspired an entire counterculture, this is a laudable, low-budget attempt to explore issues of identity, faith, sexuality and the need to kick out against social and spiritual conservatism. However, the project is hamstrung by some indifferent scripting and the decidedly mixed quality of the acting. Consequently, Eyad Zahra's debut fails to recreate the iconoclasm, intelligence and energy that Omar Majeed captured in the 2009 documentary Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam.

Dissatisfied with his college dorm in Buffalo, New York, Pakistani engineering student Bobby Naderi seeks accomodation with some fellow Muslims. However, the residents of the rundown building he chooses are unconventional to say the least. Pink-mohawked Dominic Rains is a wannabe guitarist, while Volkan Eryaman spends his days shirtlessly riding a skateboard and Ian Tran exists to pray and get stoned. The more devout Nav Mann tries to maintain a semblance of order, but his tirades invariably prove counter-productive and result in more beer being packed into the fridge and the music being turned up louder. Indeed, even the burqa-wearing Noureen DeWulf defies his demands for strict observation by covering her clothing with subversive patches and devoting her time to denouncing anti-feminist passages in the Qu'ran.

Naderi takes a while to settle into his new surroundings and is so shocked by Mann throwing Eryaman out of the house for having sex during a typically wild house party that he keeps quiet about his friendship with lapsed Catholic Anne Leighton. However, when he scares her off with his views on chastity, Naderi finds a welcome distraction in the furore that erupts when Rains invites a controversial fundamentalist band to the taqwacore Muslim punk concert he is organising. But, in addition to incurring the wrath of visiting San Franciscan gay pal Tony Yalda and his film-making associate, Rasika Mathur, Rains inflames passions closer to home that are to have inevitably tragic consequences.

This is a difficult film to assess for someone with so detached from its central themes and concerns. But, while this will clearly speak more immediately to its target audience, it is readily evident that it is a picture whose good intentions far outweigh its artistic attainments. Joshua Rosenfield's editing matches the bustle of JP Perry's occasionally monochrome camerawork and the abrasiveness of the punk anthems on the soundtrack. But the plotting is as haphazard as the characterisation, while only the sparky Rains manages to invest the often didactic dialogue with any credible conviction.

In tracing the origins and impact of Michael Muhammad Knight's book, Omar Majeed caught the sense of what it must feel like to be alienated from a dominant culture and subjected to racist scrutiny and accusation in the wake of an atrocity committed by co-religionists with whom one shares few beliefs. But Zahra shies away from such complexities in creating a milieu that feels as much a sham as the ease with which the spuriously naive Naderi readily accepts a contrarian lifestyle and a mindset after the most superficial of personal epiphanies.

What is most deleteriously lacking here is a tangible socio-political context and a similar deficiency detracts from the effectiveness of Steve James's documentary, The Interrupters. Inspired by a New York Times Magazine story by co-producer Alex Kotlowitz and edited down from over 300 hours of footage gathered over 14 months on the mean streets of Chicago, this profile of the CeaseFire organisation striving to reduce levels of gang violence pays handsome tribute to the courage and conviction of the reformed delinquents who risk their lives in an effort to change hearts and minds. But it always feels as though only part of the story is being told and that the material might have been more effectively presented in a TV series than a feature-length documentary.

CeaseFire was founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, who sees violence not as part of a moral crisis but as a disease that can be prevented and/or cured with the right treatment. Consequently, he views his interrupters as human antibiotics who work on the causes of a conflict and use their own experiences in such tough neighbourhoods as Englewood, Little Village and Riverdale to bring about its peaceful resolution. Indeed, virtually all the key players in this often poignant, powerful and provocative pictures once struggled with their own demons.

Tio Hardiman, the director of CeaseFire is a born-again street hustler, while ex-drug trafficker Cobe Williams and onetime car thief Eddie Bocanegra both served time for their part in murderous assaults. Most strikingly, Ameena Matthews was literally born into a life of crime, as she was the daughter of notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, who was eventually jailed for conspiring with Libya to commit acts of domestic terrorism. Having been abused from the age of nine and lived fast and loose for much of her youth, she is now a demurely covered Muslim wife and mother. But she has lost none of her feistiness and ventures into danger zones with a fearless zeal that enables her to win the trust of those she seeks to save, like Dee, whom she thanks for helping her defuse an incident involving some hot-tempered sisters coming to the aid of their stricken brother.

Matthews takes a special interest in Caprysha Anderson, a teenager who has become something of a surrogate mother to her younger siblings. However, she also has a talent for trouble that results in her regularly breaching the terms of her parole and spending lengthy periods in correctional facilities. Kenneth and Bud Oliver have also fallen by the wayside and Cobe Williams has been entrusted with bringing about a rapprochement with their mother Latoya. He handles this with the same mix of street wisdom and good humour that he later employs to prevent Flamo from seeking revenge on those responsible for the arrest of his mother and brother. A decidedly unstable individual whose drug frequently use clouds his judgement, Flamo eventually lands a job with the rail network and his salvation is mirrored by that of Lil Mikey, who volunteers to become an outreach worker after Cobe accompanies him on a reconciliation visit to the hairdressing salon he robbed years before.

Yet it's Ameena who keeps finding herself in the eye of the storm and husband Sheikh Rashid admits that he often worries about her readiness to intervene in the most potentially combustible situations. James shows her breaking up a fight between two gangs over a $5 bag of weed and then pleading with lads clearly unused to accepting advice from women not to avenge the friend who was shot while listening to the radio outside his own home. But she also has a way with victim families and does more for the mother and sister of Derrion Albert (footage of whose murder became an online phenomenon) than such politicians as Mayor Richard M. Daley, Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretaty Arne Duncan.

Indeed, Ameena helps Anjanette and Rhaea arrange a memorial and does much to bring kids from rival schools and neighbourhoods together in a seminar on the tensions and problems that both unite and divide them. But this gathering only emphasises the intractability of CeaseFire's dilemma, as many of its leading lights are similarly torn between doing right by the community and avoiding becoming too close to the law enforcement agencies for which many retain a healthy mistrust.

The frankness of such uncompromising figures as John `China Joe' Lofton and Norman L. Kerr contrasts with the less strident approach adopted by Eddie Bocanegra, the son of an alcoholic Mexican car worker who specialises in helping young children deal with the ramifications of violence. His sensitivity is readily apparent as he consoles a girl who starts crying during a discussion of life in her building and aids a class to produce paintings expressing their hopes and fears. But its in supporting Vanessa in the weeks following her 16 year-old brother's killing that he shows the most compassion and the sequence of the family having a barbecue beside the boy's grave is only rivalled in piquancy by the response to Ameena's address at the funeral of Duke Smith, during which she asks everyone aged 13-24 to stand up and starkly informs them that they will all be laid out in their own caskets unless they see the error of their ways.

Undertaker Spencer Leak, who once served as a chauffeur to Martin Luther King, laments the fact that an African-American may have reached the White House, but senseless deaths of black kids continues unabated. Indeed, soon afterwards, there are 20 shootings in a single night and Representative La Shawn F. Ford holds a town hall meeting with the locals after the authorities threaten to send in the National Guard. Consecutive speakers blame the violence on poor housing and schooling, unemployment, poverty, drugs and the gang mentality and one is left to wonder how CeaseFire can possibly succeed when James shows Tio Hardiman visiting interrupter Joel Sanchez after he was wounded in the line of duty.

But an epilogue suggests that grounds for optimism are not unfounded, as even Caprysha has managed to complete her education behind bars and Ameena sits with her during a concert (from which she had been excluded for misbehaviour) and hopes that she can stay on the straight and narrow because it's a hard road that lies ahead of her.

Juxtaposing vérité casework footage with interviews and insights into Ameena, Cobe and Eddie's home lives, James and editor Aaron Wickenden necessarily adopt a linear structure. However, the unpredictable nature of the storylines means that they resist the easy narratological organisation that enabled James to impart so much drama into the Oscar-nominated Hoop Dreams (1994). However, this was always intended to be a harder-hitting enterprise and he largely succeeds in the hugely ambitious task of conveying the harshness of the inner-city environment and the demands placed upon those seeking to make a difference.

Finally, this week, an object lesson in how badly the best of intentions can go awry is dismayingly presented in Project Nim, James Marsh's long-awaited documentary follow-up to the acclaimed Man on a Wire (2008). Adapted from Elizabeth Hess's book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, and supplementing archive footage and photographs with interviews and dramatic reconstructions, this unflinching exposé of the fallibility of scientific research is bound to provoke debate. But in chronicling the life of a chimpanzee who was consistently betrayed by those it trusted, Marsh is careful to avoid sensationalism or sentiment and, consequently, this succeeds where Nicolas Philibert's Nénette (2010) failed in creating a factual drama with the emotional intensity of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong (1933).

Nim was born at the Institute of Primate Studies in Oklahoma in November 1973 and within days he had been separated from his mother Carolyn in order to test Columbia University behavioural professor Herbert Terrace's theory that a chimp could be taught to communicate through sign language. Nim was entrusted to Terrace's former lover Stephanie LaFarge, who had recently married poet Wer LaFarge to whom the baby ape took an instant dislike. As Stephanie and daughter Jenny Lee recall, life in the large Manhattan brownstone was initially blissful, as Nim was dressed in human clothing and allowed to play while he learned. However, lacking a basic knowledge of animal psychology and increasingly struggling to cope with Nim's increased size, strength and independent streak, the LaFarges were forced to accept the assistance of undergraduate Laura Ann Petitto, who became Nim's primary carer when the project relocated to the 28-acre Delafield Estate in 1975.

Revelling in the freedom of his new surroundings, Nim became sufficiently boisterous and canny to require the attention of additional staff. But, while he was mostly affectionate towards Joyce Butler, Bill Tynan and Renee Falitz, he occasionally became aggressive and once bit Falitz so badly on the face that she required extensive treatment and had to be removed from the compound. Throughout this period, Terrace kept collecting data about Nim's ability to express himself through signing and continued to hope that he would eventually be able to form simple sentences. But Nim was smarter than he suspected and began developing skills to manipulate his carers and keep the work sessions short in order to maximise play and feeding time.

Eventually, Terrace pulled the plug on his nurture versus nature study and arranged for Nim to return to Dr William Lemmon's IPS facility, where he became the charge of Bob Ingersoll and Alyce Moore. A keen fan of The Grateful Dead, the former bonded instantly with the beast and even shared the occasional joint with him. However, a shortage of funding led to Lemmon selling his apes to the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates at New York University and it was only through a rights case brought by Ingersoll and lawyer Henry Hermann that Dr James Mahoney was able to spare the grim fate of his LEMSIP neighbours and eventually transfer him to the Black Beauty Ranch for retired animals run by Cleveland Amory and his assistant Marion Probst, where he died of a heart attack in March 2000.

This sorry tale makes for sobering viewing, especially as the designated villain of the piece refuses to exhibit the same remorse as his former employees. Clearly, there was academic merit in Herbert Terrace's experiment to disprove linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky's contention that humans alone were capable of understanding and using the grammatical principles key to sophisticated communication. But the decision to remove an infant ape from its mother, billet it with a foster mother and then treat it as a specimen rather than a creature capable of forming emotional attachments soon proved catastrophically misguided and Terrace's apparent indifference to both Nim's psychological well-being and his fate once the study was completed is one of the many contradictions that Marsh highlights with growing incredulity.

However, like Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man (2005), Marsh is also fascinated by the delusional anthropomorphising to which so many of the humans that came into contact with Nim succumbed. But he clearly finds it hard to follow Nim in forgiving those who abused him and this remarkable and impeccably constructed film stands as a damning indictment of scientific arrogance and folly. But don't be fooled into thinking this is just a treatise on the ethics of animal experimentation. This is also a shrewd dissection of the social and sexual attitudes that existed in the early 1970s and a castigation of the predatory chauvinism that enabled so many powerful men entice trusting female underlings into their beds.