Parky at the Pictures (DVD 7/6/2012)

This is a visually slick, but structurally cumbersome, historically slipshod and dramatically inert bore. Co-scripted by Madonna: Truth or Dare director Alek Keshishian, it is more a treatise on the elusiveness of true love and the pitfalls of celebrity than a considered account of the 1930s romance that convinced Edward VIII to renounce his empire for a two-time American divorcée. Indeed, Madonna and Keshishian are so superficially engaged with the story of Wallis Simpson and her prince that they cross-cut it with a back-up plotline set in 1998, which centres on an unhappy Manhattan wife who becomes obsessed with the couple during her visits to the associated artifacts on display at Sotheby's prior to their auction.

Arianne Phillips's costumes are exceptional and production designer Martin Childs amusingly contrasts Deco chic, royal lustre and New York nouveau riche, while editor Danny B. Tull fashions Hagen Bogdanski's glossy images and newsreel facsimiles into the kind of restless montages that were all the rage in pop videos when Madonna was at her peak. There are also a couple of casting coups, with James Fox playing the dying George V and his son Laurence doing his level best to avoid comparisons with Colin Firth as the stuttering Bertie. Judy Parfitt and Natalie Dormer also pass muster as Queen Mary and the Duchess of York, while David Harbour does a nice line in decent covishness as the cuckolded Ernest Simpson.

However, James D'Arcy neither looks nor sounds like the dashing David (as the heir to the throne was known to his intimates), while Abbie Cornish is equally ineffective as Wally Winthrop, the latterday Wallis whose distress at being unable to conceive is compounded by the petulant (and sometimes violent) disinterest of philandering psychiatrist husband Richard Coyle. However, just as Wallis drifted into an affair with the playboy Prince of Wales, so Wally finds unexpected solace in the arms of Russian security guard Oscar Isaac, who spies on her via CCTV screens as her Sotheby daydreams allow Madonna to flashback to unconvincingly coincidental incidents in the life of Mrs Simpson.

Such period-hopping tactics are nothing new and it took a director and screenwriter of the calibre of Stephen Daldry and David Hare to prevent similar action from lapsing into trite melodramatics in their adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours (2002). Unfortunately, Madonna and Keshishian are not in the same league and the transitions are often as ungainly as the graceless dialogue and such excisable episodes as Wally's trip to Paris to inspect the Wallis letters owned by Mohammed Al Fayed (Haluk Bilginer) and the neverland meetings between the two women, in which they sympathise with each other's plight.

What is most disappointing about the picture, however, is that is wastes a performance of considerable poise and poignancy by Andrea Riseborough, who not only physically resembles Mrs Simpson, but also nearly pulls off the difficult task of reinventing the fortysomething gold-digger and possible Nazi sympathiser of legend by conveying something of the emotional turmoil that Madonna insists she must have experienced as what started out as a harmless affair with a future king saddled her with a puerile paramour and pitched her into a maelstromic constitutional crisis that condemned the pair to perpetual exile as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Yet, while she hints at the magnitude of Wallis's sacrifice, the director (who clearly identifies with a fellow countrywoman falling foul of the vicious British press) would seemingly rather show Riseborough gyrating to `Pretty Vacant' by The Sex Pistols at a benzedrine-fuelled soirée and Chubby Checker's `The Twist' at the dying duke's bedside than attempt any serious psychological analysis.

La Ciccone includes the controversial German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl among the thanked in the closing credits, but her debt in these instances should be to Sofia Coppola, whose 2006 costume fantasy, Marie Antoinette, was packed with similarly calculated anachronisms. Perhaps Madonna was striving for something to set the picture apart from Tom Hooper's more traditional depiction of the period in The King's Speech (2010). Or was she simply determined to show that her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom (2008), was a blip and that this sophomore effort is the `Masterpiece' to which she alludes in the Golden Globe-winning theme song?

There have been lots of lists and surveys over the last few weeks about the great and the good in this second Elizabethan age. But the period 1952-2012 has failed to produce a writer of the calibre of William Shakespeare. What the era has seen, however, is a growing ingenuity in the staging of his peerless plays and Ralph Fiennes demonstrates with Coriolanus how works written 400 years ago retain a compelling contemporary relevance.

Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh also turned to the Bard when making their directorial debut and there similarities between Henry V and Coriolanus, not least in their discussion of leadership, camaraderie and the clash between personal aspiration and public duty. But, whereas Olivier and Branagh opted to recreate the events surrounding the Battle of Agincourt in period dress, Fiennes has translated the tale of an ancient Roman general to modern times and, along with screenwriter John Logan, has recast the struggle between a heroic conqueror and a cowardly cabal of envious politicians as a story breaking on a 24-hour news channel. It takes a while to establish itself, but this bold and belligerent revision eventually becomes compellingly powerful and poignant.

Having imposed martial law in preventing a band of discontented citizens led by Cassius (Ashraf Barhom) and Tamora (Lubna Azabal) from occupying the main grain depository in `a place calling itself Rome', Caius Martius (Fiennes) sets off for the city of Corioles to confront the Voluscian army led by the ruthless Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler). After fierce street fighting, Martius wins the day and returns to the capital to a hero's welcome from General Cominius (John Kani) and his ally Menenius (Brian Cox).

Martius insists he is only a soldier. But his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), who has dedicated her life to his career, is fiercely proud of his achievements and dismisses the fears of daughter-in-law Virgilia (Jessica Chastain) that the newly dubbed Coriolanus's elevated status will be his undoing However, her misgivings prove well founded, as tribunes Brutus (Paul Jesson) and Sicinius (James Nesbit) turn the people against her husband and he is forced into exile, where he seeks sanctuary with Aufidius and enlists his help to secure bloody revenge.

As Coriolanus is so infrequently staged or studied, Fiennes and Logan are able to hack chunks out of Shakespeare's second-longest text without too many viewers being much the wiser. Consequently, they can get away with dispensing with entire scenes and soliloquies as easily as they can turn an earnest discussion of the worsening crisis into a TV debate between David Yelland, Nikki Amuka-Bird and anchorman Jon Snow. Similarly, they can borrow from recent news footage to reinvent pitched battles as inner-city fire fights between snipers and foot patrols.

The purists will bridle at such liberties. But, taking his cues from Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995) and Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Fiennes keeps the gimmicks to a minimum in combining action man intrepidity, political intrigue, domestic strife and psychological trauma into an abrasive and accessible drama. Moreover, he succeeds in drawing unforced comparisons between the classical disconnection between the self-serving ruling elite, the armed forces and the common populace and the fissures that have widened between the same groups since the declaration of the War on Terror.

Fiennes might have limited the number of jarring accents (although this was always going to be difficult in a co-production shot in Serbia and Montenegro) and resisted the temptation to have cinematographer Barry Ackroyd repeat the handheld hijinks he performed in Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning, but highly overrated combat saga, The Hurt Locker (2008). But Fiennes does succeed in making both the verse and the internecine power games intelligible to the uninitiated and in preventing the diametrically opposed acting styles of Redgrave and Cox and Butler and Nesbitt from clashing too distractingly.

He also delivers a fine performance himself, as the seething, shaven headed and tattooed warrior who resorts to the violence he best understands after losing control of his own destiny to those seeking to bask in or exploit his glory. Making effective use of tight close-ups, Fiennes credibly creates a macho man more used to doing than communicating and his inability to ensure that his courage, loyalty and commitment (rather than his contempt for the rabble) speak for themselves against the glib barbs being used against him by careerist politicians has a contemporary relevance that is never as insistent as Ilan Eshkeri's occasionally bombastic score.

The music was, of course, one of the keys to the success of George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). But, while William Goldman's Oscar-winning screenplay left audiences with less of a cliffhanger than a precipice plunger at the famous final freeze frame, Spanish director Mateo Gil and writer Miguel Barros present an alternative vision of what might have happened next in Blackthorn. Owing less to the Hollywood original than the Leone revisionism that found a Spanish flavour in the 1970s with the so-called `Paella Western', this is a decent idea that suffers from somewhat hesitant handling. Nevertheless, the performances are solid and the use of landscape manages to invoke both John Ford and Werner Herzog in its depiction of humanity struggling against and being shaped by it unyielding environment.

Two decades after he supposedly perished with the Sundance Kid in a 1908 showdown with the Bolivian army and tired of laying low under the pseudonym James Blackthorn, Butch Cassidy (Sam Shepard) learns of the death of old flame Etta Place and informs her son Ryan that he intends returning to the United States. Breaking the news to companion Yana (Magaly Solier), Cassidy heads to Potosi to sell his horses and withdraw his savings from the bank. However, while riding home, he is shot at by Spanish mining engineer Eduardo Apodaca (Eduardo Noriega) and his mount Cinco bolts away with his money.

Convincing Cassidy that he was not the intended victim of the ambush, Apodaca offers to split the $50,000 he stole from Bolivian tycoon Simón Patiño if he helps retrieve it from an abandoned mine. Managing to stay ahead of Patiño's thugs, they return to Cassidy's humble ranch, where he thinks back on the happy times he (played in his youth by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) had with Sundance (Padraic Delaney) and Etta (Dominique McElligott). He also insists that Yana accepts a pocket watch as a keepsake. But she doesn't get to treasure it for long, as she is killed next day by two female members of the pursuing posse and Cassidy and Apodace head for the coast across the Uyuni salt flats.

Having narrowly escaped capture, Cassidy arrives at Tupiza. However, the doctor (Luis Bredow) who treats his wounds betrays him to former Pinkerton Detective Mackinley (Stephen Rea), who had always maintained that the outlaw had survived being waylaid at San Vincente. However, even after he discovers that Cassidy helped steal money belonging to the poor mine workers, he is reluctant to see him captured by the Bolivians. But Cassidy prides himself on his honour and he rides into the Andes to teach Apodaca a lesson.

Magnificently photographed by Juan Ruiz Anchía, this is more elegiac than action-packed. Initially focusing on the guilt and regret that haunt Cassidy as he lays low in mountainous ignominy, Gil and Barros gradually turn their attention to the struggle the renegade faces in acclimatising to changed times and notions. The unexpected bond forged with Mackinley is achieved without excessive convolution and some may detect in it an allegorical aside on the current banking crisis and modern attitudes to fiscal responsibility.

Yet this is primarily a treatise on ageing and dealing with the inevitability of becoming a relic in one's own lifetime. Sam Shepard excels as Cassidy seeks to honour the memory of lost loved ones by atoning for his misplaced faith in Apodaca and restoring the code by which he had once lived. However, Gil overdoes the flashbacks and his own freeze-frame finale feels cornily inevitable rather than homagistically sincere.

While Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh have appeared in several movies under their Butch and Sundance names, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have been paired together less frequently. They did get to knock seven shades out of each other in photographic form in Jan Svankmajer's typically subversive Surviving Life, but they proved much less entertaining as they trade stiff pleasantries and guarded barbs in David Cronenberg's deeply disappointing chronicle of the development of psychoanalysis in the early 1900s, A Dangerous Mind.

Dark impulses have always fascinated Cronenberg and he clearly detected them in The Talking Cure, Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation of John Kerr's 1993 book A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, which centres on the affair between Jung (Michael Fassbender) and a disturbed Russian patient (Keira Knightley) that led to the Protestant Swiss doctor's growing detachment from his Austrian Jewish mentor (Viggo Mortensen). However, the battle between order and desire, science and nature and rationalism and spirituality has recently been engaged more challengingly by Simon Pummell in the docudrama Shock Head Soul, which takes place in the same era and focuses on the court case brought by German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (Hugo Kooschijn) to prove his sanity after publishing Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which he had written (with a little help from the Writing Down Machine that transcribed his messages from God) while being treated by Professor Paul Fleschig (Thom Hoffman).

In Cronenberg's 1904, the 29 year-old Jung is expecting his first child with wealthy, but studiedly demure wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) when Sabina Spielrein arrives at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich suffering from paranoid hysteria. Sitting behind her in his consulting room to avoid making eye contact, Jung employs the method of Freudian analysis devised by his hero and succeeds in identifying that Spielrein's problems are rooted in the shame she felt at having enjoyed the spankings given by her father when she was a toddler.

Recognising Spielrein's feisty intelligence, Jung asks her to assist him in his experiments and she deduces that the passion in his marriage has been stifled by bourgeois convention while monitoring Emma's responses to a word association test. Jung is shocked when the virginal Spielrein offers to relieve his tensions. But, following his first meeting with Freud in Vienna, he comes to query his insistence on repressing desire while treating maverick analyst Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), whose hedonistic advice sparks an affair based on intellectual respect and corporal punishment.

As Jung's family grows, however, he begins to have qualms about the liaison and Spielrein slashes his cheek with a knife after he breaks up with her. She also demands that he tells Freud the truth about their relationship and wounds him further by agreeing with the Austrian's contention that most psychological disturbance has a sexual connection. Abashed by his admission and frustrated that Freud refuses to take seriously his ideas on extrasensory perception and mysticism, Jung becomes further alienated from his mentor during a sea voyage to New York, when Freud is stung by the fact that Jung can afford the first-class state room in which he dreams that the older man is a block on his ambition.

Despite a brief reunion, Jung and Spielrein eventually go their separate ways. When they next meet, on the eve of the Great War, she is married and pregnant and forging her own reputation in a field that is still regarded with scepticism by medics, scientists and academics alike. They admit to regretting that things didn't work out differently, but express their gratitude for the impact they have had upon each other before Cronenberg cuts to captions revealing that Freud died in London in 1939 after fleeing the Nazis, while Spielrein was murdered by German troops two years later in the Soviet Union. By contrast, Jung outlived both Emma and his mistress Toni Wolff to die in 1961. But such bald facts are somewhat symptomatic of this film's bloodless approach to a fascinating subject.

Considering the savagery with which Cronenberg had mocked psychotherapy in his 1979 chiller, The Brood, one might have expected this to be a more searching investigation into the strained friendship and increasingly bitter philosophical rivalry between Freud and Jung. But, while it keeps threatening to plunge into the dark dualities that made Dead Ringers (1988) so compelling, the action remains stubbornly superficial, as Hampton replaces civilised conversations with saturnine missives that even someone of Cronenberg's filmic ingenuity struggles to make visually intriguing.

Making the most of locations in Vienna and beside Lake Constance, James McAteer's production design and Peter Suschitzky's cinematography are impeccable. However, Denise Cronenberg's costumes are merely as functional as Howard Shore's score, while the quality of the performances is decidedly variable. Apart from the odd flash of sardonic wit and nettled egotism, Viggo Mortensen seems intent on remaining infuriatingly impassive behind his beard and fug of cigar smoke, while Michael Fassbender seems intent on doing a passable impression of Daniel Day-Lewis's Cecil Vyse in the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of A Room With a View (1985). As for Keira Knightley, who would have been in her element in the Indo-American heritage pictures that were once the jewel of the British cinematic crown, she opens with an excruciatingly inept display of over-acted lunacy before regaining her composure to convey creditably the difficulties facing a woman striving to be taken seriously in a man's world.

With factual accuracy and actorly aptness often coming at a premium, lavish production values and narrative coherence are usually the very least one can expect from a period piece. Given the topic and the available talent, therefore, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that A Dangerous Method represents a missed opportunity for both Cronenberg and his cast, who seem too caught up in the gravitas of the scenario to invest it with much scholarly insight, ethical conflict, emotional authenticity or dramatic significance.

Fassbender is on more arresting form opposite an even faster rising star of British cinema, Carey Mulligan, in Steve McQueen's Shame, a follow-up by the 1999 Turner Prize winner to his remarkable feature debut Hunger (2008), which Fassbender also headlined as the Irish republican prisoner, Bobby Sands. Coolly composed and chillingly controlled, this could easily be mistaken for soap operatic exploitation masquerading as art. But McQueen, co-writer Abi Morgan, cinematgrapher Sean Bobbitt and editor Joe Walker are too astute to allow this dissection of recollection, isolation, obsession, compulsion, alienation and non-communication to slide into melodrama, even when its climactic dark night of the soul threatens to descend into graphic cliché.

Such is the extent of thirtysomething Michael Fassbender's sex addiction that he cannot even get ready for work without pleasuring himself or travel on the subway to his Manhattan office without fantasising about the previous night's conquest or flirt with strangers like Lucy Walters, who seems to respond to the handsome executive's advances before recovering her married poise and disappearing into the rush hour crowds. Boss James Badge Dale has a more relaxed attitude to his vows, however, and accompanies Fassbender to a club, where his efforts to seduce one of the trio of women they meet are thwarted by his underling's irrepressible charm.

Arriving home, Fassbender is appalled to discover younger sister Carey Mulligan taking a shower in the bathroom of his well-appointed, high-rise apartment. Clearly, they share a past trauma (possibly connected to their childhood or their overly curious youth - but nothing is ever revealed) and he only agrees to her sleeping on his couch with considerable reluctance. The next day, Fassbender's computer is taken away for repair as it has picked up so many viruses because he spends so much work time watching online pornography. Dale seems unconcerned, however, and joins Fassbender at the bar where Mulligan performs a sultry and teasingly dilatory rendition of `New York, New York'. Indeed, he is so smitten that he lures her into her brother's bed and Fassbender is so disgusted that he dashes out into the night and screams at his sister on his return.

Whether trying to teach Mulligan a lesson or sort his life out, Fassbender asks African-American colleague Nicole Beharie on a date. He struggles to make conversation, as he usually relies on one-liners that seal a deal and allow him (or his overnight guest) to make a discreet exit in the morning. Consequently, he goes home to masturbate with a mix of pent-up lust and self-loathing, only for Mulligan to walk in on him and he accuses her of spying on him. Suitably ashamed, he junks his collection of magazines and even his laptop and clumsily kisses Beharie at the office in inviting her to a luxury hotel room. However, he fails to perform and not even cocaine can spare his blushes. Yet, no sooner has she left, than Fassbender goes in search of a stranger to restore his flagging faith in his libido.

When Mulligan returns home that night, she tries to console her sibling and encourages him to talk about his problems. However, he spurns her offer and throws himself into a wild night of excess that sees him get beaten up by a jealous boyfriend, visit a gay bar and indulge in a ménage with two women who appear to be complete strangers. As he waits for his train home, he listens to the increasingly desperate messages that Mulligan has been leaving him during the evening. Suddenly panicked, as he knows she has a history of self-harm, he races into the apartment to find her lying on the bathroom floor with slashed wrists.

Mulligan survives and Fassbender visits her in hospital. He sons uncontrollably as he leaves and seems chastened by his experiences. But, typically, McQueen withholds the vital information, as Fassbender finds himself sitting on the subway opposite Walters, who fixes his gaze and smiles at him. Although she seems to be wearing an engagement ring, her wedding band is missing and the screen cuts to black as she stands up and Fassbender'z gaze follows her to the doors.

Uncompromising in its exposé of shallow gratification in an age of instant internet access and brazen hedonist amorality, this is a powerful indictment of modern urban society that is all the more trenchant for its rigorous detachment. Shooting in fluent long takes, McQueen composes each scene with a meticulous care that strips away superficial glamour, invades privacy and alludes to guilty secrets that no amount of sex, drugs or confession can expunge or exculpate.

Although they strip unabashedly, it's the psychological courage demonstrated by Fassbender and Mulligan that makes their performances so laudable. Fassbender excels, as the deadness in his eyes betrays his dependence on proving his masculinity even as he becomes increasingly disillusioned (and perhaps even disgusted) by his lifestyle and the genuine pleasures of which it deprives him. More obviously damaged, but terrifyingly convincing in her raw vulnerability, Mulligan also impresses, as do Dale, Beharie and Walters (whose wordless bookending turn is impeccable).

Yet what is most devastating about this consciously complex and perhaps a touch self-congratulatorily dangerous film is that nothing is resolved, no lessons seem to have been learned and there is a distinct possibility that mistakes will not only be repeated, but they will also be wilfully committed without regard for their consequences. These are crimes that cause pain and carry the risk of an awful punishment. But the promise of pleasure is just too strong for them to be resisted.

If Shame is entirely credible, even at its most calculating, the same cannot be said of Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth. Adapted from a 2007 Douglas Kennedy bestseller about a writer struggling to retain his grip on reality, this clearly has aspirations to evoke Roman Polanski. But, instead, it comes closer to resembling the plot of the movie that Joey Tribbiani hopes will make him a star in the Friends episode `The One With Joey's Big Break'. Wasting a cast led by Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas, this would be easily dismissable were it not for the fact it is the work of a director with strong Oxford links, who has been responsible for several impressive documentaries, as well as the much-admired features Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2004).

Arriving in France to try and patch things up with estranged wife Delphine Chuillot and see his six year-old daughter Julie Papillon, American academic Ethan Hawke finds himself on the run after Chuillot calls the cops for his breach of a restraining order. In a brief exchange with Papillon, he explains that he has been in hospital rather than prison, but no further explanation is offered for the situation that causes him to be robbed on a bus and stranded in a seedy hotel run by Samir Guesmi, who offers him a job as doorman at a dodgy backstreet lock-up.

Clearly a more resourceful person (or one with less to hide) would have gone to the US Embassy and reported the theft. But Hawke prefers to skulk around the city and accept an invitations to a literary soirées from bookseller Geoffrey Carey, who recognises him from the photo on the dust jacket of his sole novel. Evidently given the night off from staring at a CCTV screen and admitting leery-looking character to rendezvous with an unseen Mr Big, Hawke goes to the party, where he proves something of a letdown to Carey's highbrow sister Judith Burnett. However, widowed Franco-Romanian translator Kristin Scott Thomas is intrigued by him and gives him her card in the hope of an assignation at her apartment in the Fifth Arrondisement.

Hawke isn't short on offers, however, as Polish waitress Joanna Kulig also has the hots for him. However, as obnoxious neighbour Mamadou Minte points out, she is Guesmi's girl and he demands money to stop him blabbing what he thinks he knows. The blackmail threat backfires, however, as Minte is found murdered in the toilet he has previously fouled with such abandon and Hawke is briefly detained before Guesmi is charged with the crime. He is also summoned from Kulig's bed in the small hours when Papillon goes missing and he promises Chuillot he will find her.

However, in order to deliver his daughter from the dark woods full of creepy crawlies and other sinister creatures, Hawke has to strike a deal with Scott Thomas, who is remarkably reluctant to let her new lover go - even though she committed suicide some two decades earlier.

Long based in Oxford, Pawlikowski has been through the mill in recent times. In 2006, he opted to abandon his adaptation of Magnus Mills's novel The Restraint of Beasts (even though it was 60% completed) in order to nurse his dying wife. Subsequently, he struggled to raise funds for Sister of Mercy, about a Polish nun under suspicion of collaborating with the Communist regime, and a study of the Josef Stalin's early career that is currently being rewritten by Ben Hopkins under the title The Revolution According to Kamo. It would be a distinct pleasure, therefore, to declare The Woman in the Fifth a cogently scripted, stylishly staged and teasingly satisfying triumph. But, sadly, it is none of these things.

Despite featuring in almost every scene, Hawke remains entirely unknowable. Yet, such is surly mien that it's difficult to care whether he is a misunderstood victim clinging to the last vestiges of sanity or a paranoid danger to himself and others. The screenplay doesn't help matters, as it lurches between inconclusive encounters and contrived incidents with the clumsiness of a rough draft, while the dialogue is often excruciatingly gauche. As always, Scott Thomas rises above her material to exude an irresistible femme fatality, while Kulig is sweetly trusting as the barmaid whose bedside photos may harbour secrets of their own. But their efforts, along with those of cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski, production designer Benoît Barouh and composer Max de Wardener, aren't enough to conceal the potholes or bind the loose ends of this muddled malice in Wonderland saga.

By curious coincidence, there's a chance to sample some genuine Polanski this week, as Carnage comes to DVD.

There's no surprise that Polanski finds drama in confined spaces. During the Second World War, he hid under the stairs to escape a Nazi round-up in Krakow and, after his parents were dispatched to concentration camps, he sought refuge with kindly Catholic families when not roaming the city sewers in a desperate search for food (an experience he relived as a young actor in Andrzej Wajda's 1954 masterpiece, Kanal). The action in many of his finest films takes place on small sets - a boat in Knife in the Water (1962), a London flat in Repulsion (1965), a New York apartment in Rosemary's Baby (1968), a Parisian tenement in The Tenant (1976), a beach house in Death and the Maiden (1994) and an island hideaway in The Ghost (2010) - and in Carnage, Polanski ensures that the quartet caught up in a petty dispute remains cooped up in a claustrophobic Brooklyn condominium so that the serio-comic tensions can simmer nicely until they eventually reach boiling point.

He is assisted in his circumscription by the stage origins of a scenario he has tailored for the screen with Yasmina Reza, whose play, God of Carnage, was a hit in Paris before transferring to Broadway, where the squabbling foursome was played by James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Hardin, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis. As is often the case, however, none of this capable cabal was deemed sufficiently stellar to make the movie version and John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet were selected in their stead. Admittedly, it can do no harm to a picture's box-office prospects to have a couple of Oscar winners in the cast. But something doesn't quite gel here and, while the performances are equally capable and there are plenty of amusing moments, this never feels as daring and dangerously engrossing as it must have done in the theatre.

Following a short credit sequence, in which a confrontation between some tweenage boys in a waterside park culminates in Elvis Polanski beating Eliot Berger with a stick, the scene shifts to a cramped computer alcove in the upper-storey home of the victim's parents (Foster and Reilly), as they try to compose a mutually acceptable account of the incident with the mother and father of the attacker (Winslet and Waltz). Despite the civilised veneer of the conversation, Foster is furious that her son lost teeth in the assault and wants to ensure that her guests appreciate how decent she is being in letting the matter rest at a stern admonition and an apology.

However, her efforts to gain the moral high ground are constantly deflected by Reilly's jovial assertion that boys will be boys, Winslet's well-mannered disinterest in what she clearly considers a storm in a teacup and lawyer Waltz's frequent need to hold furtive phone conversations with a client whose wonder drug has attracted adverse publicity after some calamitous tests. Nettled by their casual attitude to the situation, Foster struggles to contain a resentment rooted in the fact that her visitors have high-powered jobs (Winslet is an investment broker), while Reilly sells bathroom appliances and she works in a bookshop when not researching a book on the conflict in Darfur.

Waltz seizes on this inferiority complex and exploits it in suggesting that Foster has lost perspective on what is essentially a spat between a couple of kids. Much to his wife's annoyance, Reilly concurs and invites the visitors to have some coffee and cobbler while they get to know each other better. This act of hospitality quickly has unfortunate consequences, however, as Winslet vomits violently over Foster's treasured art books and the bickering becomes increasingly personal after Reilly realises that not only is Waltz mocking his blue-collar trade, but he is also putting a positive spin on the pills that have had adverse side-effects on his own mother (Tanya Lopert), whose calls keep punctuating proceedings.

After a heated round of accusations and insults, a semblance of calm is restored and Reilly invites Waltz to sample a rare 18 year-old single malt. Winslet and Foster protest at such boorish behaviour and do their bit in rapidly emptying the bottle. However, the alcohol loosens tongues and the contretemps between the kids is again forgotten as a mix of marital discontent and class contempt bubbles to the surface.

Drolly finding ways to sideline the central issue and prevent the visitors from leaving, Reza and Polanski keep the exchanges brisk and barbed in a manner more befitting a farce than a satire. However, the compactness of the action dictates that everybody gets drunk rather too readily and the calculated nature of the dialogue eventually becomes as apparent as the fact that the audience is often being manipulated as easily as the characters.

Nevertheless, this remains highly entertaining and there is much to admire in the deft way in which Polanski moves Pawel Edelman's camera around Dean Tavoularis's pitch perfect interiors. Herve de Luze's editing is also admirable, as he uses close-ups and two-shots to isolate characters or form them into shifting alliances that expose the fissures between the antagonists and within their relationships.

The performances, however, are less impressive. Reilly resorts to his trademark schlubby bonhomie, while Foster over-relies on a peevish passive-aggressive expression that reinforces the suspicion she has been miscast. Waltz relishes his sneering asides, but his subdued despicability is still somewhat clichéd, while Winslet similarly drifts towards caricature in focusing on an accent that is actually unnecessary, as there is no reason why she or Waltz should be American. Indeed, it would bolster the antithetical subtext if they were foreigners.

Polanski's well-documented travails prevent him from shooting in the United States and some nifty digital tweaking is required to capture the New York daylight changing outside the windows of a room constructed in a Parisian studio. Yet, even this subtle craftsmanship forces one to conclude that, for all its corrosive wit and slick polish, this is essentially a variation of Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) being played out on the set of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).

Finally, after so much confinement, it's something of a relief to get out into the open with an old-fashioned family film like Red Dog. Despite having produced the world's first feature, Charles Tait's The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), Australia didn't really have a film industry at the time this canine charmer is set. Local directors like Raymond Longford, Charles Chauvel and Ken G. Hall managed a handful of pictures in the four decades before Ealing ventured into the Outback for the `bush Westerns', The Overlanders (1946) and Eureka Stockade (1949). But homemade movies were about as rare before 1971 as victories Down Under by the England cricket team.

Four decades later, Australian cinema has an international reputation for hard-hitting drama and self-deprecating comedy. It has mustered few family favourites, however. But now Red Dog is set to take its place alongside the George Miller productions Babe (1995) and Happy Feet (2006) as a timeless gem to delight young and old alike.

Pulling into the town of Dampier in the Pilbara region of Western Australia in the early 1980s, trucker Luke Ford thinks he has stumbled into a murder scene as he overhears the conversation in the back room of Noah Taylor's bar. However, the talk of killing relates not to a human, but an ageing kelpie who appear to be on his last legs after consuming some poison. But Red Dog is a tough customer and, as the vet treats him, Taylor takes Ford back a decade to when he and wife Loene Carmen first opened for business in the remote mining community and brought the hitch-hiking hound with them as a lucky mascot.

As befits a free spirit, Red Dog initially flitted between garrulous Italian Arthur Angel, macho softie John Batchelor and mournful loner Rohan Nichol and each man tells Ford about their special relationship with a mutt with butt issues. Angel used to tell him stories about his home village, while Batchelor forgave him for revealing the fact he spent his evenings knitting and Nichol owed him his life after distracting the shark that had bitten off the leg of local fisherman Bill Hunter (in what, sadly, would prove to be his last role).

One day, however, Red Dog decided the time had come to have a single master and he selected American bus driver Josh Lucas. However, as one of many itinerant outsiders in the settlement, Lucas recognised that everyone had a stake in his pet and never restricted Red Dog's movements. He was outlawed from the caravan park where Lucas's secretary girlfriend Rachael Taylor lived, though, after he fought with the feisty cat owned by hissable warden Paul Blackwell and his wife Jacquy Phillips. But a tragedy was about to strike that would send Red Dog on the travels that would make him a legend across the country and beyond.

Adapted by Daniel Taplitz from Louis de Bernières's fact-based novel, this is quite simply wonderful. All the canine movie talk recently has been about Uggie, the scene-stealing pooch from Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist. But the real scandal is why Koko (the two year-old taking the lead here, as it were) was overlooked for both the Palm Dog and the Golden Collar for a display that at least rivals that of everybody's favourite Jack Russell. Indeed, only Philadelphia in Dorota Kedzierzawska's Time to Die (2007) and Vuk in Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte (2010) have matched it in recent times.

The human contributions to this paean to independence, acceptance and loyalty are also first rate, with Batchelor and Nichol doing their bit to improve the image of the average ocker and Angel getting amusingly tongue-tied during one of many trips to the vet to see assistant Keisha Castle-Hughes. Director Kriv Stenders handles the comic and melodramatic sequences with equal finesse and, even though he allows Red Dog's cross-country trek to ramble, only the hardest hearted will be able to resist shedding the odd tear. But what is most notable is the recreation of the period in both visual terms (Geoffrey Hall's views of the russet-toned landscape and Ian Gracie's rusting industrial production design are spot on) and in capturing the coarse charisma of such new wave landmarks as Bruce Beresford's The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Tim Burstall's Alvin Purple (1973), which were released just around the time Dampier's most celebrated resident forged an unlikely link with his feline foe.