Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 5/1/2012)

Since the middle of the last decade, however, a growing number of directors have opted to abandon the inner cities and council estates and venture into the leafy suburbs and rural villages that had once been the preserve of cosy sitcoms. The cognoscenti have installed Joanna Hogg as the chief chronicler of the prejudices, hypocrisies and insecurities simmering beneath these superficially idyllic surfaces, yet both Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010) suffer from an arthouse archness that afflicted David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun (2009), Gareth Jones's Desire (2010) and Gerald Fox's adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk (2011). Consequently, it seems that the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie that so fascinated such masters of its dissection as Luis Buñuel, Claude Sautet and Claude Chabrol continues to elude the new generation of British social critics.

Despite demonstrating a sure grasp of technique, DR Hood falls into many of the same traps as her peers in realising her feature debut, Wreckers. Thus, while Annemarie Lean-Vercoe's images of verdant fields, wind-rustled trees and shabbily snug cottages convey a laudably deceptive mood of bucolic bliss, the soap operatic storyline, cumbersome symbolism and frequently stiff dialogue serve to calcify a stifling sense of contrivance that is all the more disappointing given Dictynna Hood's country background.

Teachers Claire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch have moved to his childhood Fenland village in the hope that a change of scenery will facilitate their efforts to conceive. However, on returning from one visit to doctor Nicola Green, Cumberbatch admits that he has failed in this regard before with an old flame and the news devastates Foy just as soldier brother-in-law Shaun Evans arrives out of the blue after a tour of duty in Afghanistan. As his bouts of sleepwalking suggest, Evans has been traumatised by his experience. But, after hearing the siblings's former teacher (June Watson) speaking of them in less than flattering terms, Foy becomes more concerned by the allusions to dark secrets in her husband's past, particularly relating to the accident that led to his mother being hospitalised.

As Cumberbatch and Evans trade barbs and the occasional blow, Foy finds herself being drawn to fellow church chorister Peter McDonald, even though he is married to her friend, Sinead Matthews. Yet, despite becoming increasingly detached from Cumberbatch, few will be wholly convinced by Foy's reaction to McDonald's awkward advances and Evans's unfraternal flirtation.

The cast cannot be faulted for the earnestness of the performances, but nothing quite rings true in a picture that seems uncertain from the outset where it is heading. Having failed to establish her characters, Hood struggles to make the audience care about their fate, especially as Foy often settles for wounded petulance rather than genuine heartache. However, she is left exposed by a scenario that sidelines Cumberbatch and Evans for extended periods and the scenes of Foy teaching music at a local school are as unconvincing as her moments of intimacy with her spouse and Evans's battles with post-combat stress.

Unfortunately, Andrew Lovett's rustically clichéd score emphasises the artificiality of a plotline that becomes increasingly bereft of nuance as Hood dithers over whether to risk a dramatic grand gesture or play safe in slice-of-life territory. There's no question she has confidence and talent, but this rather mundane saga peters out feebly and one wonders why the producers didn't impose themselves more forcibly during the writing phase.

Few directors have ever matched the self-belief of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose death 30 years ago is marked by the reissue of his 1978 satirical drama, Despair. In a remarkably prolific career, the 37 year-old produced 44 features, shorts and television films, the majority of which reveal the stylistic audacity and thematic consistency that made Fassbinder such a key figure in New German Cinema. However, his first English-language outing is more of a curio than a classic, with Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1934 story lacking the acuity of visuals that, for once, owe more to Federico Fellini than Fassbinder's great exemplar, Douglas Sirk.

Hermann Hermann (Dirk Bogarde) is a Russian émigré who runs a small, lilac-hued chocolate factory in Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic. His mind is rarely on his business, however, as he has become fixated with the notion of doppelgängers and is utterly certain that a homeless fellow named Felix (Klaus Löwitsch) is his own lookalike, even though they do not bear the slightest resemblance to one another. Hermann is also sure that his portly wife Lydia (Andréa Ferréol) is a buffoon. But, while she believes the Wall Street Crash to be a physical rather than a financial occurrence, she is shrewd enough to cheat on him with her artist cousin Ardalion (Volker Spangler), who suffers from delusions of his own, as he has none of the talent he is so convinced he possesses.

Such is Hermann's confidence in his similarity to Felix that he takes out a new life insurance policy and persuades the hobo to impersonate him in what he insists is a harmless ruse. However, Hermann has a more sinister purpose in mind and goes on the run after executing a far from perfect murder.

Fassbinder invariably packed his mise-en-scène with reflective surfaces and frames and screens that challenged the viewer to notice the contrasts between art and life. But he excelled himself here in his use of doubles, deceptions and mirror images, at one point having Bogarde sit on a chair outside of the bedroom so he could watch himself making love to Ferréol before exploiting a trip to the movies to incorporate a self-reflexive joke about split screens enabling an actor to play twins on either side of the law in a silent melodrama.

He was well served in his mischief by a fine cast, with Ferréol playing the dumpy airhead with charming insouciance and Bogarde delivering a knowingly hammy display as the mentally deteriorating chocolatier that almost feels like a parody of James Mason's portrayal of Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 take on Nabokov's Lolita. Yet, even though Stoppard had explored the concepts of duality and misconception in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound, the screenplay is less effortlessly adroit than cinematographer Michael Ballhaus's compositions, which are made all the more hypnotic by the shifts between orchestral and synthesised passages in Peer Raben's idiosyncratic score.

The 1930s also provide the setting for Zelig (1983), which is one of two Woody Allen gems being given an extended run as part of BFI Southbank's survey of the New York auteur's best comedies. All the more impressive for the inspired and imperceptible manner in which fictional characters were inserted into archival footage a good decade before computer-generated imagery became an industry norm, this monochrome mockumentary is rarely listed among Allen's finest achievements. But it has a verbal wit to match its visual ingenuity, while it also provides a fascinating insight into the way in which celebrity culture changed during the course of the 20th century and the extent to which this transformation was due to the advent of motion pictures.

Jewish book-keeper Leonard Zelig (Allen) comes to the attention of Manhattan psychologist Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) when it emerges he has the uncanny ability to blend into any situation in which he finds himself. As the press seizes upon newsreel footage of Zelig changing his physical appearance in the presence of different racial groups or body types, he becomes known as the `Human Chameleon' and is mythologised in popular songs and dance crazes. Yet Dr Fletcher wants to understand why an ordinary man so drastically feels the need to be liked that he can also develop the social, sporting and intellectual skills to convince a novelist like F. Scott Fitzgerald, a baseball icon like Babe Ruth and a millionaire newspaper baron like William Randolph Hearst that he is the genuine article.

Moreover, she falls in love with the real Zelig and fears for his sanity when he is cynically exploited as a freak by his half-sister Ruth (Mary Louise Wilson) and her showman paramour Martin Geist (Sol Lomita). Thus, when, at the height of his new-found fame, Zelig gives the shameless pair the slip, Fletcher takes him to her clinic to subject him to the pioneering psychodynamic treatment she hopes will get to the bottom of his condition and enable him to embark upon a relatively normal life.

But, having recalled a tortured childhood as the son of a Yiddish actor who was beaten by his neighbours, Zelig disappears again after being exposed as a sham motivational speaker for a `Be Yourself' campaign and is forced to flee America amidst a welter of accusations of everything from plagiarism and bigamy to larceny and unnecessary dentistry. Nevertheless, Dr Fletcher (who is now her patient's wife) refuses to give up on him and they are reunited at a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.

This is much more than a comic chronicle of the loneliness of the serial conformist. In addition to commenting on the pros and cons of celebrity, Allen also assesses why organisations as divergent as the Ku Klux Klan, the Catholic Church and the Communist Party would seek to associate themselves with a name on everyone's lips without paying any heed to the ramifications that this could have for their own reputations, let alone on the individual involved. Moreover, he also denounces the fickleness of a novelty-hungry public, the opportunism and chicanery of the medical profession and the cant underlying the Melting Pot vision of American egalitarianism.

But, while this is a deceptively serious satire, it is also a technically brilliant one. All the film stock used was painstakingly aged and distressed to achieve the `found footage' look and while Gordon Willis's imitation of 1930s photographic styles (achieved using antique equipment) is impeccable, the precision of Susan Morse's editing and the effects supervised by R/Greenberg Associates is quite exceptional. Allen amusingly corrals expert commentators like Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow and Dr Bruno Bettenheim to enhance the story's credibility, while the supporting performances are so authentic it would difficult to know that Allen and Farrow were the only professionals in the recreation cast.

That said, the standard of the acting is of a much higher order in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), which supposedly took its inspiration from Leo Tolstoy's assertion in Anna Karenina that `all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. However, the focus on three siblings recalls Interiors, while the linking of autobiography, show business and family celebration also echoes Ingmar Bergman's late masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander (1983).

Indeed, the film referencing continues when Allen (whose neuroses and hypochondria had briefly driven him towards Catholicism) finds salvation in the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup (1933). Yet, for all its screen antecedents, the use of voice-overs and the 16 chapter headings give the action a distinctly bookish feel.

The acting, however, occasionally tends towards theatricality, with Michael Caine being particularly guilty of deliberated delivery in his Oscar-winning turn. In mitigation, however, he found Allen's working methods less than conducive and was reined in when he attempted to be more overtly comic. Max von Sydow and Barbara Hershey were likewise told to stick to the grand design when they suggested an alternate reading of the showdown between their disenchanted lovers.

Along with Allen, Mia Farrow seems most comfortable with the tone, although she was less than amused to discover just how much of their own lives Allen had slipped into the screenplay. The brain tumour related to the director's own scare during Manhattan (1979), while he conceded that the three male characters reflected facets of his own personality. But Maureen O'Sullivan (Farrow's real-life mother) refused to play opposite her daughter unless some of the more blatant references to Mia and her sisters, Tia and Stephanie, were removed.

Several scenes involving Caine and Hershey's affair were also cut. But, ultimately, Allen had to add the climactic dinner after friends at preview screenings objected to the ambiguous Interiors-like ending. The resulting picture was his most mature work to date and his witty, literate screenplay deserved its Oscar as much as Dianne Wiest's superbly realised Best Supporting performance.

The National Film Theatre is also marking the bicentenary of Charles Dickens with a season of acclaimed big- and small-screen adaptations and there could be no better way to start the year than with a wonderfully atmospheric adaptation of the enduringly popular novelist's most beloved tale, A Christmas Carol, which is available exclusively online at the Dickens Fellowship website (http://www.dickensfellowship.org/watch-charles-dickenss-christmas-carol-demand). The story of the miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge and his reformation through nocturnal encounters with spirits revealing his past, present and future was probably first filmed in 1901 and has since become a fixture of the festive season, thanks to performances down the years by Seymour Hicks (1935), Reginald Owen (1938), Alastair Sim (1951), Albert Finney (1970), Michael Caine (1992) and Jim Carrey (2009). Now, Vincent Fegan joins the ranks of grasping merchants in the first version of the 1843 novella to be made in Ireland.

Writer-director Jason Figgis opens the action with Dickens himself (Laurence Foster) excitedly seeking out a footman named George (Jason Shalloe) so he can read him his latest work. Ordinarily, voice-over narration is dismissed as a lazy device, but here it allows Figgis to use the author's peerless prose and reinforce the mood of the Victorian ghost story that was once a staple of Yuletide television schedules. Moreover, it avoids the need to include clumsy expository dialogue to keep the audience abreast of the quickly changing cast of characters.

Scrooge (Fegan) is first seen in his counting house, dismissing a seasonal invitation from his nephew Fred (Adam Goodwin) and a request for alms by a pair of philanthropical gentlemen (Steve Gunn and Oliver McQuillan) before he begrudgingly allows clerk Bob Cratchit (Neill Fleming) to spend Christmas Day with his family. Given the current economic situation, it's tempting to equate such curmudgeonliness with the self-serving attitudes of the fat cats whom most hold responsible for the crisis. However, in our cynical times, one suspects that it would take more than a spectral trinity to persuade today's globalising capitalists to mend their ways. On returning home for a meagre repast, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his late partner Jacob Marley (Bryan Murray), who warns him both of the folly of his continued avarice and the imminent arrival of apparitions charged with showing him scenes designed to prick his conscience.

Despite feeling a pang of pity for Marley's tormented plight, Scrooge scoffs at the caution. However, he is soon awoken by the Ghost of Christmas Past (Bernadette Manton), who reminds him of bittersweet incidents with his sister Fan (played as a child by Christen Mooney and a young woman by Shannon Murphy), his first employer Fezziwig (Brian Fortune) and his lost sweetheart Belle (Lara Belmont). But, before he can ruminate upon their significance, Scrooge is swept away by the Ghost of Christmas Present (Brendan Grace) to witness the Cratchits make the most of their simple fare and Bob and crippled son Tiny Tim (Mark Jackson) admonish Mrs Cratchit (Jane Elizabeth Walsh) for toasting Scrooge with marked reluctance.

An encounter with Ignorance and Want in the form of two raggedy children further disconcerts Scrooge. But worse is to follow in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, as he watches as a laundress (Jennifer Graham) sells a much-loathed man's curtains and bed linen to secondhand merchant Old Joe (Brendan O'Carroll), a mother (Emily Forster) and her daughters (Giselle Keenan and Ciara Maher) celebrate the delay of a potentially ruinous debt and Bob grieves for his departed son. Yet it is the sight of his own tombstone that finally prompts Scrooge to inquire if the visions are irreversible and whether has has an opportunity to make amends for his previous shortcomings.

Fegan's transformation may not be a joyous as Alastair Sim's in Brian Desmond Hurst's still seminal interpretation, but there is a satisfying sincerity about the manner in which Scrooge donates to charity, accepts the hospitality of Fred and his wife Lydia (Leonie Quinn) and gives Cratchit a raise after fooling him into thinking he was furious for his Boxing Day tardiness. Indeed, Figgis succeeds in achieving a sense of well-being without suffusing it with the sentimentality that so often blights this happiest of endings. But he makes few missteps in this thoughtful adaptation.

The on-screen depiction of Hamlet and his ghostly father early in the narrative seems a touch unnecessary, while Neill Fleming's impassioned lament for Tiny Tim feels a little theatrical. But Figgis (who acts as his own cinematographer and editor) makes the most of his evocative locations and the effects work for the phantoms is subtly effective rather than flashily spectacular. However, he deserves most credit for remaining faithful to the tone of the text, as film fans and Dickens aficionados alike will soon appreciate on visiting http://www.dickensfellowship.org/watch-charles-dickenss-christmas-carol-demand.

The special effects clearly cost a whole lot more, but they are scarcely used to better effect in Wilson Yip's supernatural romp, Magic to Win. Produced by Raymond Wong (who made his name with the Happy Ghost franchise in the 1980s), this is as confusing as it's madcap. But, while it passes the time amiably enough, it's not a film to linger long in the memory.

Karena Ng is part of the women's volleyball team at Hong Kong's Pegasus University and the pressure of an upcoming game causes her to fall asleep in one of Professor Raymond Wong's science lectures. He possesses magical powers, but contents himself with using them to perform household chores. However, when Ng crashes her bike into him after yet another humiliating defeat to nearby Dong Shan University, a thunderbolting transference of energy sees Wong rendered impotent, while Ng suddenly has the ability to perform little tricks.

Teammates Anjaylia Chan, Leanne Ho, Kelena Poon, Katie Kwok and Renee Li barely bat an eye on discovering Ng's new talent and convince her to join them in The Victory Club, which offers clients the chance to succeed at sporting events with a bit of enchanted assistance. However, while Ng is merrily profiting from helping wayward ten pin bowlers, inept swimmers and overweight decathletes, she makes the acquaintance of amnesiac environmentalist Wu Chun, who is invisible to everyone by Ng.

She is sceptical of his claims that he is involved in a major power struggle, but a spot of mind-reading takes Chun back to his hidden greenhouse and the clues eventually allow him to recall that Jing Wu has abducted novelist (and secret wood magician) Louis Koo because he was trying to warn the world that the evil fire wizard was close to gathering the five elements of gold, wood, fire, water and earth that would permit him to change the past. A battle of wits with stage magician Tonny Jan temporarily slows down Wu's nefarious scheme, but it takes a monumental showdown in Wu's fairground lair (and an overdue volleyball victory) for the dark arts to be vanquished.

The above precis makes this sound eminently logical and rather good fun. But it's actually something of a muddle that isn't sure whether it's supposed to be appealing to the erstwhile fans of fantasy farces or their Harry Potter-loving offspring. Consequently, the plotline and the humour often seem to be operating on different planes, while the cast frequently appear to be as bamboozled as the audience by proceedings that are almost rendered unintelligible by the lack of backstory. Karena Ng makes a peppy heroine and Raymond Wong camps it up nicely as the academic with a furtive crush on coach Yan Ni, but the CGI is pretty woeful and Wilson directs with little controlled bravura on show in earlier hits like Bio Zombie (1998), Bullets Over Summer (2000) and Ip Man (2008).