Parky at the Pictures (DVD 28/6/2012)

In Fred Cavayé's `La Prologue', Dujardin plays a typical middle-aged roué bowling through the streets of Paris in a flashy red sports car, while trying to sing along to loud music. However, the illusion is shattered when he stalls at some traffic lights and has to walk to collect Lellouche for an evening's carousing. Lellouche is in the doghouse with wife Geraldine Nakache for getting home late the night before and she accuses Dujardin of being an accomplice in his adultery.

As they stroll through the city between bars and nightclubs, Dujardin and Lellouche eye up everything in a skirt and debate why males feel the need to stray, even though they may be happily married. Trading glib bon mots and forever justifying their foibles, the pair hit the dance floor before checking into a cheap hotel with a couple of casual pick-ups. They continue their deeply philosophical discourse during coitus and seem offended when the girls leave without saying goodbye. However, being French males, they simply shrug and compliment each other's physiques while gazing into the bathroom mirror.

Michel Hazanavicius directs `La Bonne conscience', which sees Dujardin attending a conference in St Etienne for his bio-technology company. Throughout the sessions, he tries to make eye contact with Maeva Pasquali, but she has the hots for Lellouche's wheelchair-bound whizz kid. So, having failed to flirt with the young Spanish receptionist and decided against visiting an S&M escort in town, Dujardin skypes his wife and kids back home before heading to the bar for a reception.

Clearly his reputation goes before him and he is largely shunned before a craven bid to muscle his way into Lellouche's clique dismally misfires. He is similarly ostracised at an after hours party in Pasquali's room, where an attempt at telling a shaggy dog story is scuppered by the hostess asking everyone to leave. Undeterred, Dujardin sneaks back to knock on Pasquali's door, only to discover Lellouche lounging in her bed and cadging his last remaining cigarettes.

Although it is now 2.15am, Dujardin follows another frantic onanistic bout by gathering up the miniatures from his fridge and tries his luck with Isabelle Nanty, an unprepossessing colleague who listens patiently to his laments about his failing marriage before throwing him into the corridor when he asks if she has ever contemplated an affair. At breakfast next morning, he endures the humiliation of seeing Nanty show Lellouche and Pasquali the `I Luv You' note he had pushed under her door as a last resort. But, as he texts his wife that he has missed her, Dujardin feels a quiet sense of satisfaction and superiority at having stayed faithful.

Eric Lartigau takes over for `Lolita', in which Lellouche plays a successful dentist who leaves his plush surgery for a café rendezvous with patient Clara Ponsot, who is studying literature at the nearby university. He is disappointed when she shows up with some of her friends and has to give them all a lift to a student bar before he can finally whisk her away to a luxury hotel.

Lellouche has ordered an intimate dinner for two, but Ponsot wants to go clubbing and his protestations fall on deaf ears. While she dances the night away, Lellouche finds himself chatting to a quiffed loser (Dujardin in a homage to his own Brice de Nice character) who refuses to accept his age. However, Lellouche is ejected by the bouncers when he gets into a fight with the youth snogging Ponsot and he spends the entire night sat in his car waiting for her to come out. But she had already left and Dujardin is the last to stagger out into the dawn light.

Driving to a backstreet, Lellouche smashes the windscreen of his expensive car with a golf club and heads home. Wife Hélène Seuzaret is giving their two children breakfast as he peers around the door. She sees him and follows to the bathroom, where he explains that he has had an accident. However, the scene fades before it is revealed whether she believes him or not.

A slight shift towards the female perspective is provided in Emmanuelle Bercot's `La Question', as Alexandra Lamy (who has been her co-star's off-screen partner since they became overnight hits in the TV sketch show Un Gars, une fille) rolls her eyes at husband Dujardin while buddy Lellouche boasts about his affairs and oblivious wife Anne Suarez clears away the dinner things. However, as they walk back to the car, Lamy asks Dujardin if he has ever strayed and promises to remain calm if he has anything to confess.

Having checked on their sleeping son, Dujardin admits to a one-night stand that ran longer than he had anticipated and Lamy listens with admirable sang froid until she wonders how many of their mutual friends knew about his treachery. Suddenly inconsolable, she demands details and Dujardin has to reassure her that it was a momentary lapse to satisfy a shameful need and she seems to accept his reasoning.

But her forgiveness stems from the fact that she had also cheated on him and Dujardin rantingly demands an explanation before they kiss passionately and wind up in bed. Next morning, Lamy comes down to find Dujardin helping Cyrius Rosset with his reading and they exchange glances over the breakfast table. But there is more consternation than affection in their eyes.

Sandrine Kiberlain runs a course for sex addiction in Alex Courtès's `Les infidèles anonymes', which reintroduces Guillaume Canet and Manu Payet from earlier interludes dotted among the longer storylines, alongside Dujardin as a philandering financier and Lellouche a s the owner of a pizza joint for swingers. The dour Kiberlain lectures the attendees about conquering their lusts and poses a number of questions for them to ponder, as well as placing them in tempting situations that she wants them to resist.

Each man in circle is a slave to his libido, with Payet's search for a kinky mother figure, for example, resulting in him being caught by his own kids in a compromising S&M game in his garage. But, while Kiberlain thinks she is making progress by forcing the fellows to question why they hang out in brothels and seedy bars, she finds that none return for the second day.

Finally, the pals from the Prelude return for `Las Vegas', which is directed by Dujardin and Lellouche themselves and shows them springing the news on respective wives Mathilda May and Geraldine Nakache that they are heading to Nevada for a six-day spree. However, having driven down the neon-lit strip and cavorted with a couple of hookers, they become bored with the glitz and drive out into the desert, where Lellouche bemoans the fact that he thinks Nakache has had enough of his gallivanting.

Dujardin persuades him to return to Glitter Gulch and a deft montage by editor Anny Danche follows them on a black-tie jamboree around the casinos that ends with a plunge in the pool and the Brokeback encounter that was somewhat telegraphed in the opening moments of the picture. The segment (by far the gaudiest and least amusing of the lot) ends with a collage posters and magazine covers showing the pair taking Vegas by storm as Siegfried and Roy-like magicians.

It's an anti-climactic end to a typically patchy omnibus that has its amusing and poignant moments, but which mostly gets by on bullish playing, slick directing and an unabashed willingness to risk offending by simultaneously mocking and celebrating Gallic stereotypes. The Hazanavicius and Bercot episodes are by far the most consistent and considered, while the Lartigau and Courtès segments raise the odd eyebrow and smile. But this won't win Dujardin any new fans and may even alienate several of those seduced by his Oscar-winning twinkle.

Stillness has always been a key facet of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's cinema. Having studied photography since the age of 15, he applied the static camera technique developed while taking portraits to the films he started making while doing his national service in the Turkish army. However, such passivity is highly deceptive, as much is revealed in the long takes employed to study the crises of existence endured by the protagonists in such acclaimed features as Distant (2002), Climates (2006) and Three Monkeys (2008), which drew comparisons with such masters of measured dissection as Robert Bresson and Michael Haneke.

But Ceylan's unique ability to capture of environment and atmosphere is road tested in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, as he brings his distinctive brand of composed observation to picture that is in equal parts an odyssey, a police procedural, a whodunit and a satire on official corruption and ineptitude and the growing insecurity of the modern Turkish male.

In the sleepy southern backwater of Keskin, Firat Tanis confesses to killing buddy Erol Erasian with his slow-witted brother Burhan Yildiz. However, as he was drunk on the night in question, he can only remember that he buried the body beside a fountain and police chief Yilmaz Erdogan insists on bundling the suspects into driver Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan's car and heading off in a convoy containing another car and a jeep to locate the corpse. As everything has to be done by the book, the party is accompanied by Ankara prosecutor Taner Birsel and local doctor Muhammet Uzuner.

Following a break in the journey to dine with small-town mayor Ercan Kesal (whose pretty daughter, Cansu Demirci, has a profound effect upon them all), Birsel attempts to relieve the tedium by telling Uzuner the story of a woman who predicted her own death, However, he succeeds merely in unintentionally initiating another mystery, as the sceptical medic is curious to know if an autopsy was ever performed on her body. But, while suspicions rise that the woman in question may well have been Birsel's own wife, Kesal cracks under the pressure of tiredness and remorse and reveals that Erasian was killed in a fracas after he let slip that he was the father of his son Fatih Ereli with wife Nihan Okutucu. The body is recovered and taken back to town, where Ereh throws a stone at Kesal as he is led into the police station. But one final secret remains to be unearthed and re-concealed.

Ceylan confirms his reputation as a cinematic master with this audacious meld of disparate screen genres. What appears to be a simple crime story, as three vehicles snake across a bleak, storm-threatened nocturnal landscape in search of a buried murder victim, slowly evolves into a compelling road movie, a dense human drama and a deceptively trenchant socio-political critique. The cadaver proves hard to find, but attentive viewers will note the significance of Chekhovian snippets of information dropped into seemingly casual conversations about everything from yoghurt and lamb dishes to ethics, social hierarchies and the complexities of family life and will begin to piece together a profound, poignant and pessimistic snapshot of Turkish manhood and its ambivalent attitudes to the law, faith, bureaucracy, death and, most tellingly, women.

The actors appear to be upstaged by the majesty of Gökhan Tiryaki's cinematography, but the devastating denouement reveals the full extent of their subtle brilliance. Nonetheless, the star here is Ceylan, whose control of composition, character, mood and pace is impeccable. Yet, what is perhaps most striking about the scenario written by Ceylan, his wife Ebru and Kesal, is the dry wit that prevents the compassion for these hapless males from becoming mawkish.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Radu Mihaileanu's The Source, which examines the status of women in the modern Islamic world. However, as he has proved before with his studies of the Holocaust (Train of Life, 1998), ethnicity (Live and Become, 2005) and the Communist legacy (The Concert, 2009), the French-based Romanian has a habit of coating contentious topics with a sugary whimsicality that diminishes their credibility and efficacy. Thus, even though this latterday mix of Lysistrata and the Arabian Nights is spiritedly played by a solid ensemble, it can't quite escape the pervasive air of schematic schmaltz.

In a remote village somewhere in the Maghreb, a baby is born at the precise moment that a woman miscarries after falling while carrying water from a spring at the summit of a treacherous mountain path. Outsider Leila Bekhti interrupts the celebrations with a bitter song about the travails that women have to endure and mother-in-law Hiam Abbass is furious with her showing up her family in front of the neighbours. As a teacher at the local school with a reputation for progressive thinking, husband Saleh Bakri has more sympathy with her viewpoint and even supports Bekhti's call for the women to withhold sexual favours until the men either lend a hand transporting buckets or force the authorities into providing a supply of fresh running water.

Brother-in-law Saad Tsouli is less impressed, however, and forces himself upon wife Amina Boussaif, whose facial bruising shocks everyone when she comes to do her laundry. Elderly Biyouna urges her sisters to be strong and chides Sabrina Ouazani for joking that she struggles to keep her hands off hunky hubby Karim Leklou. But the village sheikh (Omar Azzouzi), the Imam (Mohamed Tsouli) and the school principal (Mohamed Choubi) are angry with Bekhti and even sister-in-law Zineb Ennajem comes to resent her when the parents of her prospective husband decide against a match because they don't wish to be associated with Bekhti and her fellow `witches'.

Younger sister Hafsia Herzi remains loyal, however, as Bekhti reads her the stories of Scheherazade and writes the love letters that she sends to Gary Mihaileanu, a strapping youth from a nearby village. But she doesn't know that Bekhti also pens the replies delivered by mailman Mohamad Yazidi. Nor is she aware that visiting entomologist Malek Akhmiss is Bekhti's old flame from the time when she lived in the south of the country. However, the truth leaks and Bakri takes the news very badly. But, even in the face of threatened repudiation because she is barren and a bad influence, Bekhti sticks to her principles.

Bearing a marked similarity to Lebanese auteur Nadine Labaki's forthcoming Where Do We Go Now?, this would be an engaging battle of the sexes were it not for Mihaileanu's cumbersome approach. He dots the action with musical numbers whose lyrics espouse the women's cause. But, while this tactic amuses when a group of tourists watching a traditional dance is oblivious to the real meaning of the song, it feels forced later in the piece when the words of a festival routine are reworked to express the women's ongoing frustration. Similarly, the depiction of the menfolk as chauvinists who hide behind Qua'ranic verses so they can sit around playing cards and sipping tea is as lazy as the stereotype of Biyouna's homecoming son (Reda Benaïm) and his radical fundamentalist mentor (Hamid Boutbaldine).

Speaking in the obscure Moroccan Darijia dialect, the cast works hard to smooth the often lumpen transitions between romance, comedy, melodrama and socio-political critique. Glynn Speeckaert's photography and Cristian Niculescu's production design are also commendable. But Mihaileanu and co-scenarist Alain-Michel Blanc too often settle for what the French call Orientalism rather than providing genuine insights into Islamic attitudes to arranged marriages, the rearing of children, the education of girls and the place of women within the average household. Even their satirical jibes at the corruption and indolence of Arab bureaucracy feels patronisingly secondhand. Indeed, at one point, they even seem to contradict the plot, as Herzi is supposed to be besotted with Mexican soap operas, yet when Bakri goes to see a local dignitary about fitting some modern plumbing, he jokes that if you give women water today they will want electricity tomorrow.

Ambiently scored by Armand Amar, this clearly means well. But, unlike Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar, it lacks authenticity and too often settles for superficial discussion instead of discernible understanding. By contrast, a song-and-dance routine is just about all that's missing from 28 year-old Yuya Ishii's Mitsuko Delivers, a relentlessly optimistic rallying cry to banish the recessional blues and seize the initiative in order to create a better tomorrow. Replicating the upbeat quirkiness of Sawako Decides (2010), this is a busy satire on the national tendency to insularity, the bashful hesitancy of the modern Japanese male and the surprisingly defeatist attitude to the economic downturn that tamed the Asian tiger. Some may find this a touch too propulsive. But Ishii directs with knowing brio and he is sparklingly abetted by Riisa Naka in the title role.

Having disappointed parents Shiro Namiki and Miyako Takeuchi by relocating to California, twentysomething Riisa Naka had a fling with a burly black man and now finds herself heavily pregnant. Deciding against returning to the family's Tokyo pachinko parlour, Naka allows a gentle wind to dictate her fate and she follows a floating cloud to the very backstreet where she grew up. Former landlady Miyoko Inagawa is still in residence, but she is now bedridden and much else has changed.

The once bustling alley is almost deserted and has lost its characteristic sense of `iki' or smart spontaneity. Convinced she can turn things round, Naka moves in with Inagawa and quickly discovers that childhood sweetheart Aoi Nakamura is still on the scene and is still working at uncle Ryo Ishibashi's restaurant. She also learns that Ishibashi has long nursed a crush on café owner Keiko Saito, who lives with her young son and struggles to attract custom.

In between power naps and phone calls home to reassure her parents that everything is hunky dory Stateside, Naka sets about making changes. She encourages new tenants to move into unoccupied properties along the street and agrees to marry Nakamura. But she has more difficulty in coaxing the painfully shy Ishibashi into declaring his feelings for Saito, who is about to sell up and move to Fukushima to look after her ailing mother.

Yet, while she is quite prepared to let fortune dictate her own destiny, Naka cannot resist meddling in the lives of other people. Thus, when the unexploded Second World War bomb beneath Inagawa's home finally goes off, Naka bundles everyone into a car and heads to Fukushima to ensure everybody has a happy ending.

Packed with flashbacks, digressions and flights of fancy, this can be seen as an updating of cosy shoming-geki sagas like Yasujiro Ozu's Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) or the 48-strong Tora-san series (1969-95) that starred Atsumi Kiyoshi as a travelling salesman solving the problems of others while searching for his own slice of happiness. But, while Ishii dwells on touching incidents like Inagawa being widowed during the war before she could consummate her marriage and the young Naka (Momoka Oono) being enchanted by the bustle of life around her, this is never simply a wallow in rose-tinted nostalgia. Indeed, this is very much a call to disregard the current acquiescence in conformity and Naka makes an ebullient cheerleader (even though some may be dissuaded by her hectoring tactics).

Amusingly designed by Tomoyuki Maruo and crisply photographed by Yukihiro Okimura, this Amélie wannabe has a belligerent charm. But it lacks socio-political edge and occasionally drifts like Naka's guiding cloud. Moreover, the ending increasingly comes to feel like a cartoon soap opera and, while there's no denying that Ishii is a distinctive new voice, he still needs to learn the fine art of modulation.

Having already reduced Jude the Obscure to Jude (1996) and relocated The Mayor of Casterbridge to the Old West for The Claim (2000), Michael Winterbottom attempts his most ambitious adaptation of Thomas Hardy in Trishna, which sees the events of Tess of the d'Urbervilles transferred from 1890s Wessex to modern India. The translation works in so far as the film shares the book's preoccupation with the corrupting nature of class. But, by merging Angel Clare and Alec d'Urberville into a single character, Winterbottom deprives the story of much dramatic tension and places too great a burden on Riz Ahmed to convey an abrupt personality change that owes more to a facile Bollywood movie than a complex work of Victorian literature.

Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed) is the English-educated playboy son of a blind property developer (Roshan Seth) who has grudgingly agreed to manage one of his father's hotels in Jaipur. However, he would much rather be gallivanting about Rajasthan with his dope-smoking pals and flirting with the local girls than working. So, having caught sight of 19 year-old Trishna (Freida Pinto) with her younger siblings at a remote rural temple, he makes a clumsy attempt to chat her up and offers her a job at the hotel when her father is badly injured in crashing his Jeep while making the deliveries that sustain his large family.

Trishna is reluctant to leave, but her parents desperately need the weekly 2500 rupees that Jay is prepared to pay and she travels to Jaipur by bus and is surprised when the boss comes to the depot to collect her in person. Sharing a room with two other girls, Trishna works well and charms Mr Singh when he hears her whistling to the birds in the hotel aviary. She also benefits from Jay's patronage, as he pays for her to go on a training course to improve her career prospects.

However, Jay has an ulterior motive and he seduces Trishna after rescuing her from a couple of wideboys after she gets lost in Jaipur on the way home from the wedding of a friend from her Bollywood dance class. They sleep together, but Trishna regrets her action and takes the first bus home. When her disapproving father learns she is pregnant, he coerces her into having an abortion and packs her off to look after an ailing aunt and work in her uncle's tea factory.

But Jay comes in search of her and sweeps her off to Mumbai, where he hopes to break into movies as a producer. Ensconcing Trishna in a luxury apartment overlooking the beach, he introduces her to director Anurag Kashyap and actress Kalki Koechlin (playing themselves) and gives her a taste of the high life that she finds as bewildering as it's intoxicating. However, when Jay is called to London to attend his ailing father, Trishna is left to her own devices and has to find new accommodation when the lease expires. Indeed, she is about to accept a loan from choreographer Avit (Aakash Dahiya) to get a Bollywood dance licence when an apologetic Jay returns and explains that they are going to live in another Singh hotel, as his father is no longer well enough to run the business.

However, Jay is a changed man and the news that Trishna aborted his child only exacerbates his unsuspected penchant for callous exploitation. He insists that Trishna lives in the staff quarters and has nothing to do with her outside their lunchtime trysts when she is expected to satisfy his lusts while serving his meal. Humiliated at being asked to perform increasingly demeaning acts from the Kama Sutra, Trishna strikes out in a manner that dooms herself, as well as her ornery lover.

Michael Winterbottom has to be commended for the audacity and diversity that characterises his canon. But nothing quite works in this forced adaptation whose flaws are compounded by some unconvincing improvisation and a rushed and largely unpersuasive conclusion that serves to emphasise the limitations of the photogenic, but unnuanced leads. Yet Winterbottom succeeds in capturing the spirit of the source in depicting a traditional society in the midst of a seismic upheaval and this reinvention is as respectful of Hardy's genius as more straightforward interpretations like Roman Polanski's Tess (1979).

Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind evocatively captures the contrasts between the poverty of Trishna's village and the opulence of the hotels converted from Raj-era palaces, as well as the bustle of the Mumbai streets and the regimented order of the Bollywood movie sets. But Mags Arnold's fussy editing imposes a staccato rhythm on proceedings that is not only at odds with the lilting waltziness of Shigeru Umebayashi's score and the aching melancholy of Amit Trivedi's soundtrack songs, but also with the hesitancy of the central romance. Moreover, the brevity of the shots draws attention to the convolution of the storyline and leaves too little room for the serious discussion of such potentially fascinating themes as the status of women on the subcontinent, the relationship between its urban and rural communities, the impact of globalisation on an already chasmically divided society and the falseness of the dream peddled by the cornball masala musicals that owe virtually nothing to the harsh realities of everyday existence.

A woman's place is also the theme of René Féret's Mozart's Sister, an audiovisual masterclass that proves a more than worthy companion piece to Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984), as it eschews feminist cant to present a melancholic treatise on transient celebrity and wasted talent. Laudably resisting the temptation to taint the 1760s with modern sensibilities, this superior speculation on the Mozart family nevertheless exposes the folly of wilfully upholding tradition.

Riding in a coach through the snowy French countryside, Leopold Mozart (Marc Barbé) laments in a letter that life on the road is arduous and its rewards unreliable. He relates how a German nobleman had preferred to hunt rather than listen to his 11 year-old son Wolfgang Amadeus (David Moreau) and 15 year-old daughter Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia - known by her nickname Nannerl (Marie Féret) - run through a repertoire designed to showcase the boy's prodigious talent as a violinist and unique ability to amuse through displays of blindfolded ingenuity. However, a broken axle interrupts his train of thought and, along with his children and wife Anna-Maria (Délphine Chuillot), he seeks lodging for the night in a remote convent.

Despite the reluctance of the abbess (Dominique Marcas), the family is granted sanctuary until the coach can be repaired and Nannerl quickly befriends Louise (Lisa Féret), Sophie (Adèle Leprêtre) and Victoire (Valentine Duval), the daughters of King Louis XV, who were taken away from their mother as infants and raised in isolation to ensure they did not cause scandal at court or distract their brother, the Dauphin (Clovis Fouin), from his duties. Louise is particularly excited at finding a confidant and she shows Nannerl the book of blasphemies that the nuns confiscated from Victoire and urges her to burn it at the earliest opportunity. She also asks her to take a love letter to Hugues Le Tourneur (Arthur Tos), the Dauphin's companion to whom she lost her heart during a brief visitation.

Nannerl agrees to play messenger during her audition at Versailles and bids Louise a fond farewell as the Mozarts set off for the royal court. While Leopold and Wolfgang are making arrangements with the master of music (Nicolas Giraud), Nannerl is swept away by Isabelle d'Aubusson (Salomée Stevenin), a courtier in Louise's confidence, who explains that the Dauphin was recently widowed by the childbirth death of his young wife and that Nannerl will have to disguise herself as a man in order to pass the billet doux to Hugues, as his master is forbidden from consorting with females during his period of mourning.

Nannerl consents to the deception, but is distinctly uneasy at being left alone with the Dauphin, who is obsessed with music and is suitably impressed by both her exquisite singing voice and her mastery of the violin. He asks Nannerl if she composes and, when she admits to having produced a few items, he commissions her to write something that he can be the first to play. Despite being aware that Leopold disapproves of her doing anything other than accompany her brother, Nannerl accepts and begins seizing rare moments of privacy at the home of Madame Van Eyck (Mona Heftre) to work on a piece fit for a king in waiting.

With her performance with Wolfgang approaching, Nannerl realises that she cannot keep up the deception for much longer and the Dauphin is delighted to discover her true identity and smiles at her during the concert. Such is her excitement at being valued in her own right that Nannerl asks her mother if she can remain in Paris and take pupils while attempting her own compositions. Despite refusing to let her into his classes with Wolfgang, Leopold allows her to stay when the family departs for London and shows his love for her by playing violin at her bedside as she is nursed through a bout of fever (although his concern for his son is far more extreme when he breaks out in angry red spots and Leopold fears not only losing his child, but also his livelihood).

However, Nannerl quickly discovers the extent to which Leopold had sheltered her from the realities of life, as she is summoned to the convent to which the 14 year-old Louise had retired on discovering that Hugues is actually her half-brother and warned that she should not fall in love with the Dauphin, as he has a terrible fear of succumbing to the same womanising decadence that he feels has compromised his father's reign by allowing power to fall into the hands of his chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, and his mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Yet Nannerl is charmed by his enthusiasm for her music and overwhelmed with happiness when he assembles the court orchestra and hands her the violin to lead it through the premiere of her composition. But a nasty surprise awaits her when the Dauphin summons her back to Versailles to play for his new bride, Marie-Josèphe de Saxe (Océane Jubert), and, following a last meeting with Louise, Nannerl is relieved to be welcomed back into the bosom of her family, even though she knows she will never again escape her brother's shadow, especially as Leopold is now keen for him to begin producing operas.

Employing his son Julien as his assistant and wife Fabienne as his editor, René Féret tinkers with history in having Nannerl forge friendships with Louise and the Dauphin. But such is the brilliance of the Versailles setting and Marie-Jeanne Séréro's pastiche score that the fictive elements feel as authentic as the insights into Nannerl's life as a child prodigy, whose opportunities are limited by both her gender and the growing fame of her precocious sibling.

The performances are also delightful, with the director's daughters Marie and Lisa capturing an aura of deferential solemnity that is nicely punctuated as they run around the convent cloister and as Marie improvises at the keyboard or engages in a joyous pillow fight with the equally impressive David Moreau. Recalling Roberto Rossellini's historical dramas in its bid to suggest the past caught on film rather than painstakingly reconstructed for it, the action benefits greatly from the muted photography of Benjamin Echazarreta and the striking, but subtle production design and costume of Veronica Fruhbrodt and Dominique Louis. But what most captures the imagination is the immediacy and intimacy that few period pictures ever come close to achieving and that makes this enchanting fiction feel entirely plausible.

As the daughter of a Jewish father whose parents died in the Warsaw Ghetto and a Catholic mother who fought in the capital's 1944 Uprising, Agnieszka Holland is well placed to assess the thorny issue of religion and resistance in Poland during the Second World War. Having previously examined the clashing ideologies battling for supremacy in Eastern Europe in Europa Europa (1990), she returns to the conflict to mark the 70th anniversary of a little-known episode involving an unlikely hero in the Oscar-nominated drama, In Darkness.

Drawing on Robert Marshall's study In the Sewers of Lvov, this earnest exposé of occupation opportunism challenges some of the rapidly calcifying conventions and caricatures of the Holocaust movie and owes more to gritty accounts like Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1954) and Kanal (1957) than such glossy Hollywood reconstructions as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002). Yet, for all its laudable efforts both to disprove the myth that ordinary Poles knew nothing about the Final Solution and suggest that human foible was not exclusively the preserve of the persecutors, this still trades in emotive tropes to make the audience feel rather than understand.

Although he works as a sewer inspector, Robert Wieckiewicz is also something of a chancer. Thus, when he and accomplice Krzysztof Skonieczny witness German troops chasing and executing a group of naked Jewish women in the woods outside the city of Lvov in 1941, he realises there will be empty properties to loot in the ghetto. Despite detesting the Nazis for invading his homeland, Wieckiewicz is also inveterately anti-Semitic and readily accepts a commission from onetime cellmate-turned-collaborationist Michal Zurawski to search the labyrinthine sewerage system for any Jews who had eluded the mass round-up.

However, on encountering a small band of fugitives living in stinking, rat-infested darkness, Wieckiewicz cuts a better deal and agrees to supply provisions in return for cash and valuables. Keeping the arrangement secret from wife Kinga Preis, Wieckiewicz informs Skonieczny that he will aid the Jews until the funds run out and then turn them over to the Gestapo in return for a handsome reward. But his conscience begins to get the better of him and his determination to protect his charges comes to be driven more by morality than hopes of remuneration.

His efforts aren't always appreciated, however, and Holland quickly makes it clear that not everybody in this subterranean refuge is as irreproachable as Anne Frank and her fellow attic dwellers or Itzhak Stern and his co-workers. Reformed crook Benno Fürmann may be prepared to sneak into the Janowska camp to rescue feisty Agnieszka Grochowska's sister, but affluent couple Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup are prone to moments of snootiness in seeking to limit children Milla Bankowicz and Oliwer Stanczak's contact with riff-raff, while Marcin Bosak betrays his wife and daughter in choosing to smuggle mistress Julia Kijowska into hiding and promptly disowns her when she realises she is pregnant and the group has an appalling decision to make about a baby whose cries could easily give them away.

Suspense naturally plays its part in proceedings, as Bankowicz and Stanczak get lost in the maze of tunnels and a sudden rainstorm causes water levels to rise dangerously. But the focus remains on Wieckiewicz, who continues to take reckless risks despite knowing that his actions could jeopardise the safety of his own family. Thus, as in Europa Europa, Holland manages to present both sides of a complex story without trivialising or compromising it. However, this is never as compelling or convincing as her adaptation of Solomon Perel's autobiographical account of his experiences while masquerading as first a young Communist and then a Hitler Youth to avoid detection as a Jew.

One of the problems is slightly born of necessity, as the imagery has to be murky to give an authentic impression of the conditions in which the outcasts are living. But cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska submerges so many scenes in dense shadow that it's often difficult to see what is going on and Daniel Pellerin's sound design only partially compensates. Nevertheless, it is still possible to discern the ingenuity of production designer Erwin Prib's sets, which look more like the real thing than studio constructs and convey a palpable sense of entrapment, menace and imminent peril.

Similarly, the characterisation defects derive from screenwriter David F. Shamoon's determined bid to have a flawed hero succour some unsympathetic victims. However, Wieckiewicz is admirable as the Catholic profiteer who questions accepted values, while Marcin Bosak is courageously odious and Benno Furmann displays defiance rather than bravura in opting for active resistance. Holland might have paid more attention to the arduous tedium endured by the confined, but the social, sexual and psychological tensions between them ably reinforce the sense of life carrying on as normally as the claustrophobic situation allows.

Only 300 of Lvov's 200,000 Jews survived the war. Among them were the cabal assisted by Leopold Socha, who now ranks as one of the 6000 or so Poles deemed a `Righteous Gentile' by the Israeli government. Holland dedicates the film to these unsung heroes, along with Marek Edelman, the Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and this gesture encapsulates the estimable, if not always wholly efficacious equanimity of the entire enterprise.

Although they are Belgian and are aged 60 and 58 respectively, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have found themselves hailed as members of le jeune cinéma français, which earned the nickname with the foreign press of the New New Wave. In addition to winning the Palme d'or twice at Cannes for Rosetta (1999) and L'Enfant (2005), they also brought a new austerity to the social realist style that had become a staple over the Channel in Britain. Films like La Promesse (1996) and Le Fils (2002) were rigorously naturalistic, but staunchly humanist dramas that exposed the hardships of life on the lower rungs in the declining industrial city of Liège. They rather missed their step with The Silence of Lorna (2008), in which they unusually contrived a tale of people trafficking rather than observing everyday existence, and they don't manage to get quite back on track on returning their familiar Seraing surroundings with The Kid With a Bike (2011).

Eleven year-old Thomas Doret is convinced that father Jérémier Renier would never abandon him and escapes from his foster home to return to the housing estate where he used to live. Distraught at finding no one home and his beloved bicycle gone, Doret tries to give social workers the slip by rushing into a nearby doctor's surgery and pleading with hairdresser Cécile de France to protect him. She reluctantly lets him go and he is taken to the empty apartment to see for himself that Renier has absconded and that submitting to council care is now Doret's best option.

De France is deeply moved by the boy's plight and, next day, she brings him his bike. She tells him she bought it from a man on a nearby estate, but Doret is convinced it must have been stolen because his dad knew how much it meant to him. He is touched by De France's concern, however, and asks if she will look after him at weekends and she agrees without fully realising what she has let herself in for.

Stung by the discovery of an advert for his bike in the local paper, Doret becomes keener than ever to track Renier down and De France decides to accompany him to the restaurant where Renier is attempting to make a fresh start. Unsurprisingly, he is anything but pleased to see his son and orders him to stay away, as he wants nothing more to do with him. De France tries to console Doret. But, having alienated her boyfriend, he shrugs off her sympathy and drifts into the orbit of Egon Di Mateo, a shifty gang leader, who recruits kids because they are easy to control. However, Doret's first attempt at a robbery is somewhat botched and Di Mateo is so sure than news vendor Fabrizio Rongione will recognise Doret and incriminate him that he orders him to keep the cash and make himself scarce.

Hoping the money will bring him closer to Renier, Doret offers him the ill-gotten gains and is surprised when they are rejected. Confused and hurt, he seeks out De France, who manages to convince Rongione to accept his cash back along with Doret's apology. But the kiosk owner's son is less forgiving and he vows to mete out his own brand of justice when he bumps into Doret on the street.

Originally conceived as a modern-day folk fable, with De France acting as a kind of fairy godmother, this is markedly closer in tone to the kind of neo-realism perfected by Vittorio De Sica in Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) than the harsher style developed by Ken Loach in Kes (1969) and subsequently made even more uncompromisingly gritty by Lynne Ramsay in Ratcatcher (1999) and Andrea Arnold in Fish Tank (2009). Making rare use of music (in the form of Beethoven's `Emperor Concerto'), the Dardennes even allow themselves a little self-reflexivity in contrasting Doret's prickly tweenager with the character played by Renier in La Promesse. Even Alain Marcoen's summery cinematography errs more towards lustre than edginess, while the presence of Cécile De France on her return to Europe after featuring in Clint Eastwood's Hereafter (2010) suggests commercial concession as much as acute casting.

This is not to say that the Namur-born De France is anything less than superb, with her scenes with the remarkable Thomas Doret. being genuinely touching, as she reaches out to offer the solace he so desperately needs and that she, in turn, yearns to give in order to shore up the holes in her own life. But the Dardennes seem to lose faith in the potency of this relationship and drift towards melodrama by letting Doret fall in with such an obviously predatory lowlife as Di Mateo and the bids to buy Renier's affection and Rongione's forgiveness feel conspicuously designed to tug on the heartstrings rather than provoke moral outrage. Edited, as usual, by Marie-Hélène Dozo with a keen sense of the rhythms of the daily grind, this is a solid outing by master film-makers. But it feels deficient in the compassion that has become a Dardenne trademark.