The screen world has spent the last week digesting the verdict of the 846 film-makers, critics and distributors who have voted Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) the best picture in Sight and Sound's decennial poll. Some have taken the opportunity to gloat at the deposing of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) after a 40-year stay at the top, while others have noted the conservatism of a selection that includes three silents in the top 10. There are surprises among the 1045 films cited, but the absence of 21st-century titles from the top 20 is entirely expected, even though the current all-time box-office list is dominated by blockbusters released in the last decade.

There is little point discussing the disparity between critical discernment and popular taste, as the Sight and Sound balloting procedure itself means that personal favourites are as likely to be nominated as canonical classics. What does seem evident from the 2012 poll, however, is that emotional response to a film seems to count for more than an appreciation of its artistic or technical significance. Moreover, the influence of university film courses also appears to be felt more keenly than in previous years, as a lot of `case study' movies have made the cut.

A decade ago, this critic was invited to participate in the poll and the following choice was based on the contribution that each film made to the development of the motion picture as both an artform and a mainstream entertainment. DW Griffith's Intolerance (1916) was chosen as it demonstrated that audiences were becoming sufficiently cine-literate to follow non-linear storylines, while Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) was included for its refining of the montage editing technique that is still employed today.

Anticipating many of the tropes and tricks associated with the nouvelle vague, Sacha Guitry's little-seen The Story of a Cheat (1936) merited its place as an innovator alongside Citizen Kane, which similarly sought to utilise a dazzling array of audiovisual gambits to take the viewer into the heart of a narrative that audaciously combined the political, the satirical and the humanism that had been pioneered in cinema by Charlie Chaplin, John Ford and Jean Renoir, whose influence on Welles and his use of the mise-en-scène technique made him the godfather of what we now call arthouse.

The neo-realist style launched by Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) continues to thrive, as does the mix of the epic and the intimate that enabled Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) to introduce to a wider audience such Japanese masters as Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. By contrast with Kurosawa's masterly use of flashbacks and diegetic dissemblance, the comic action was deceptively simple in Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), which focused on character instead of plot and utilised depth of focus to dot gags around the frame.

Rather than plumping for Vertigo (which always seemed narratively contrived and calculating in its staging), Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) got the nod for its employment of a television crew (and, thus, for confirming the now unbreakable link between cinema and its small-screen rival), as well as for its injection of the indie spirit into American film-making and for the revitalisation of the horror genre that became the staple of the vital exploitation sector. Similarly, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was included as much for what it inspired as for its own achievements, as this was the progenitor of the science-fiction blockbuster that became the bedrock of the blockbuster boom of the mid-1970s.

Finally, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) was listed as it epitomised the dynamism of an alternative American cinema which proved that film-makers didn't have to be straight, white and male. Sure, it would have been nice to have found room for the likes of Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (1939), Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain (1952), Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964). And you can't imagine the guilt felt at not mentioning such heroes as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Luis Buñuel, Vincente Minnelli, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Woody Allen and the French cabal of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol.

But the new electorate has spoken and it has decided on a running order of Vertigo, Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, La Règle du Jeu, FW Murnau's Sunrise (1927), 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929), Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) and Fellini's 8½ (1963). It will be fascinating to see how long Vertigo retains its crown - Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) won the first poll in 1952 and now finds itself languishing at No.33. But the BFI must be hugging itself, as Hitchcock came out on top in the very month it started a three-part tribute to the Master of Suspense at the National Film Theatre.

As part of this retrospective, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926) is being released into theatres across the country. Notable as the feature that gave notice of Hitchcock's genius, this wonderfully evocative and melodramatic thriller was adapted from a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. But, for all its British bustle and the allusions to Jack the Ripper, Hitch's first commercial success had more in common with the Expressionism of the legendary UFA studio outside Berlin than the typical product of the Gainsborough facility located on the banks of the Regent Canal in Hoxton.

When news reaches June Tripp (billed here only by her first name) that the serial killed nicknamed `The Avenger' has slayed another blonde, she laughs at her fellow showgirls for covering their bleached tresses with dark wigs. Moreover, she dismisses the concerns of parents Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney, as well as policeman boyfriend Malcolm Keen, who has been reading the latest developments in the paper. Thus, she is not in the slightest bit suspicious when the dashing Ivor Novello arrives later that night to inquire about the room available for rent at the top of the family home. Indeed, unlike her mother, she is not overly concerned by his request that the pictures of blondes on his bedroom wall are removed or that he seems to spend the remainder of the evening pacing the floor.

As time passes, Tripp and Novello form an attachment that makes Keen jealous, particularly as he has not been able to devote much time to his sweetheart since being transferred to the Avenger case. In addition, Ault has become increasingly wary since waking to hear Novello leaving the house late at on the night of another blonde killing and since discovering that he has locked the cupboard in his room. As the murders are coming closer to their neighbourhood, Ault and Chesney order Tripp to stay away from Novello. But she defies them and breaks off her romance with Keen when he catches them together.

Stung by the betrayal, Keen obtains a warrant and finds a bag inside Novello's cupboard containing a gun, a map of the surrounding streets and a photograph of a pretty blonde. Despite Tripp's protest, Novello is arrested. But he manages to escape and explains to Tripp when she tracks him down that his sister had been the Avenger's first victim and that he had promised his dying mother that he would bring her killer to justice. However, in trying to warm the shivering Novello with a brandy in a nearby pub, Tripp succeeds only in attracting an angry mob and it takes the intervention of a plucky newsboy to prevent a tragic miscarriage of vigilante justice.

Having recently returned from making The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle (both 1926) in Munich, Hitch was keen to put into practice the Expressionist techniques he had picked up while watching FW Murnau directing The Last Laugh. The equation of the blacked-out windows of the van in the opening sequence with the vigilant eyes of the citizens and the voyeuristic gaze of the audience was typical of the Germanic influence, as was the dissolve through the ceiling to show Ivor Novello pacing above the inquisitorial Buntings. But, in fact, the brooding shadows and canted angles owed more to Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921) and Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) than Murnau's psychological realism.

Whatever its source, producer Michael Balcon was acutely disturbed by this foreign stylisation and the Freudian suggestions that The Lodger might be either homosexual or incestuously involved with his sister. So, he commissioned Soviet-influenced critic Ivor Montagu to take the curse off Hitchcock's amorality.

In addition to cutting down the number of captions from around 400 to 80 (and recasting them in a Gothic-Deco hybrid), Montagu also suggested some retakes, most notably for the climactic chase sequence. However, he agreed with the decision to ignore the book's guilty verdict (which was adopted by the 1932, 1944 and 1954 remakes; the latter being called Man in the Attic) and retain the air of ambiguous innocence that Hitchcock had concocted on being told that his preening matinee idol was not going to be allowed to play a killer.

Widely hailed as the finest British picture to date, this was Hitchcock's first study of a wronged man being judged by a hypocritical society. Moreover, it also contained his debut cameo appearance, as a reporter on the phone in the newsroom (a role he took solely because the hired actor failed to show up). But it was still very much the work of a hugely promising and highly ciné-literate beginner.

Somewhat conveniently, a couple of new British thrillers are released this week so we can gauge how far the genre has come in the intervening 86 years. On the evidence of I Against I and Truth or Dare, however, it would seem that little progress has been made. Indeed, the reliance on cliché, caricature and obfuscatory fast cutting has stalled the suspense-cum-chiller format, if not actually sent it into reverse. That said, this is not an entirely British problem, as the Norwegian romp Jackpot appears to confirm.

Directed by Mark Cripps, David Ellison and James Marquand, I Against I is a real thick-ear of a movie. Considering Marquand (whose father Richard directed Return of the Jedi, 1983) made such a solid debut with the Liverpool-set gangster drama Dead Man's Cards (2005), it's no surprise that the action sequences are capably handled. Moreover, Matthew Whyte's nocturnal cityscapes are evocative and Anton Short's editing is sharp. But the storyline is disappointingly formulaic, while the characterisation is as bereft of depth as the performances are inconsistent.

When club owner Kenny Doughty and Russian Ingvar Eggert catch sight of each other leaving the London office block where crime kingpin John Castle has been murdered, they suspect the other of being the culprit. However, when Doughty is captured by Castle's short-fused son Mark Womack, he is given until 6am the following morning to kill Eggert or face the direst consequences.

As he has been having an affair with Womack's wife, Sónia Balacó, Doughty is desperate to warn her of the trouble they may be in. But Womack is keeping a close eye on her, while Doughty has to stay one step ahead of Eggert, who has been given the same ultimatum or wife Jenna Goodwin and son Daniel Marquand will pay the price. So, after they confront each other in an all-night diner, Doughty attempts to strangle Eggert in a back alley and has to flee when some by-passers intervene.

Calling Womack for help, Doughty learns that Eggert is due to arrive at an outskirts hotel and stations himself in the corridor with a golf club. However, Eggert is ambushed by likely lads Paul McGrattan and Ian Keir Attard, who force him into bag-handling duties during a drug deal that Doughty interrupts with explosive ramifications. Doughty's effort to have hulking buddy Epeli Taione bump off Eggert outside a restaurant similarly misfires and, when Eggert breaks into Doughty's luxury apartment, he hears an answerphone message from Balacó and understands why she had hired him to kill Womack.

Suddenly aware that they are potentially on the same side, Eggert calls Doughty to arrange a meeting at his club. But the latter refuses to trust him and locks him in a back room with the intention of dousing him with petrol and striking a match. However, he soon needs Eggert to rescue him after he is abducted by truck-driving hitman Robert Shannon and the pair finally agree to join forces to outwit the scheming Womack, although their alliance remains decidedly shaky.

Despite dotting the first third with flashbacks showing how the antagonists came to be pitted against each other, Cripps, Ellison and Marquand eventually get up a head of steam. But neither Doughty not Eggert essays a particularly winning character and they wind up being pieces moved around a games board rather being allowed to develop as flawed individuals fighting for their loved ones. Their dour ruggedness is matched by the typically seething Womack, whose Scouse burr seems at odds with the fact that Castle is clearly a Cockney and the backdrop is the capital rather than Merseyside. However, accents are the least problematic aspect of a picture that is poundingly propulsive but far too predictable.

Robert Heath's Truth or Dare comes closer to being a torture porn horror than a thriller. But, apart from defying the `last girl' convention of the slasher sub-genre, this is a resolutely by the numbers outing that compounds the weak characterisation in Matthew McGuchan's screenplay with some undistinguished acting. The pair invest a good deal in a climactic twist, but the damage has already been done by the clefts in a threadbare storyline and few will relish spending time with such resistible brats or take much pleasure from their unimaginative persecution.

At a typical student party, wallflower Tom Kane is mocked by genteel Florence Hall's abrasive boyfriend Jack Gordon and their cocky pals Jennie Jacques and Liam Boyle. Encouraged by ligger Alexander Vlahos to tell Hall about his feelings, Kane is so fraught by being gently rejected that he lets his emotions during a game of spin the bottle and is assaulted by the furious Gordon. But who approaches him as he sits alone outside and what do they propose?

Without revealing the answer to either question, Heath proceeds to dispatch Hall and her clique to the countryside for a weekend party at Kane's family mansion. However, old retainer David Sterne directs them to a cabin in the woods where Kane's soldier brother David Oakes informs them that his sibling has been held up while returning from a humanitarian trip to Chile and apologises for not being able to let them know that the bash had been cancelled. He opens a bottle of champagne and suggests they make the best of a bad job and the guests reluctantly agree.

Once they start playing truth or dare, however, it becomes clear that Oakes is far from the genial host he initially appears. Indeed, he is determined to discover who sent the humiliating postcard that prompted Kane to hang himself in this very hut and shoots Boyle in the leg when he tries to resist. Coercing Vlahos into helping him tie Boyle, Hall, Gordon and Jacques to chairs in the middle of the room, Oakes starts drawing on his army training to terrorise them into confessing. He wheels in a trolley bearing glass jars containing water and battery acid and urges Hall to make a choice before forcing a pipe down her throat and turning on a tap.

But, while Hall is lucky in her choice, Gordon is less fortunate and drug-dealing late comer Jason Maza perishes soon afterwards when he raps on the cabin door. Yet the need to dispose of his body allows Hall to free her hands from the gaffer tape and she manages to climb out of a window before Oakes returns. As he pursues her to the darkened house, Jacques and Boyle try to persuade Vlahos to untie them, but his hesitancy gives the vengeful squaddie the opportunity to make his grand re-entrance with an unexpected companion.

Several critics have complained that Heath breaks the rules by allowing the most objectionable character to survive. But this is the only noteworthy aspect of an otherwise unremarkable and undemanding feature whose homophobic subtext is both unpersuasive and unpleasant. Oakes is solid enough as the aristocratic and increasingly unhinged villain, while Jacques has her moments as the spoilt daughter of a bankrupt who is prepared to do anything to ameliorate her deteriorating situation. But it's nigh on impossible to empathise with victims who have already revealed themselves to be so despicable and Heath's failure to generate any suspense or sense of dread means that this is more likely to appal than alarm.

Having waxed so lyrical last week about Morten Tyldum's take on Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbø's Headhunters, it's disappointing to report that Magnus Martens has made a much less successful job of Jackpot, which appears to have been teased out from an original outline written with the screen in mind. Packed with twists and darkly comic turns, this brisk caper has the potential to be highly entertaining. But Martens is too keen to demonstrate his audiovisual flair, while the borrowings from Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo (1996) and Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998) feel more like slavish homages than wry nods.

As cop Henrik Mestad surveys the carnage after a shootout at the Pink Heaven strip club-cum-porn shop in a town near the Swedish border, he is surprised to see Kyrre Hellum emerge from beneath the corpse of a voluptuous hostess. Clapping on the cuffs and whisking him down to the station, Mestad tries to intimidate his prisoner by boasting of his unconventional interrogation methods. But he is soon reduced to mumbling bafflement, as Hellum begins relating his increasingly incredible saga.

A hangdog nobody who rents a room from prying ex-cop Fridtjov Såheim, Hellum is the boss of a plant that offers repeat offenders a path to rehabilitation by recycling waste into artificial Christmas trees. Soon after bruiser Arthur Berning arrives at Evergreen, he suggests that Hellum join him and workmates Mads Ousdal and Andreas Cappelen in a football pool that promises a bumper payout for 12 accurate predictions. Somehow landing the jackpot after Hellum changes one of the scores when buying the ticket from girlfriend Lena Kristin Ellingsen, the foursome throw themselves a party to celebrate.

However, while Hellum is incurring the wrath of Pink Heaven owner Peter Andersson while buying more booze, his comrades begin bickering about their windfall and Cappelen literally loses his head. Bluffing on the doorstep to prevent Såheim from seeing what all the noise is about, Hellum suggests they wrap the body in a rug and make for the factory, where they dispose of Cappelen's torso in a shredding machine. Unfortunately, they lose his head while skidding to avoid a moose and are relieved that slow-witted cop Jan Grønli accepts that they are scrambling around in a ditch to answer a call of nature.

Mestad is more sceptical until assistant Marie Blokhus returns with the cranial evidence and he urges Hellum to resume his freakish fable. He describes how Berning was killed with a nail gun after falling out with Ousdal in the works canteen, but they had to hide his body in a tanning bed belonging to Hellum's mother (Anne Marie Ottersen) because the prowling Grønli prevented them from turning him into plastic Christmas trees and the cemetery soil was too frozen to bury him. Just as they were about to go into town to collect their winnings, however, they are cornered by Andersson who demands the money Ousdal owes him.

Following an uncomfortable snack with the irresistibly hospitable Ottersen, Hellum and Ousdal pick up their cash and Ellingsen notices a car pull out to follow them as they leave. They are distracted, however, by the fact that Grønli buys Ottersen's sunbed and Ousdal steals it back and drives off with it at full speed. When Blokus tracks the bed down, Mestad is curious to know where Berning's corpse has gone. But a trip to a nearby pigsty provides the answers, while a return to Pink Heaven and a peek at the CCTV recording suggests that not only has Hellum been telling the truth, but that a mysterious stranger has also made off with the bag full of cash.

Such is the gleeful complexity of this labyrinthine narrative that there are still plenty of surprises left to spring before the rather inevitable denouement. But, while Tyldum directs with great gusto, he always seems to be inviting the audience to admire his ingenuity and panache and this relentless bravura eventually becomes as much of a distraction as an irritation. This is a shame, as Lina Nordqvist's red-spattered production design, Trond Hoines's canny camerawork and Jon Endre Mørk's sharp editing are polished, while the performances are splendid, from Hellum's bemused everyman and Mestad's smug cop to supporting roles judged to a pantomimic tee. It's easy to see this becoming a cult favourite. But, with a touch more modesty, it could have been truly memorable and one suspects that Martin Scorsese won't make the same mistakes if and when he gets round to making Nesbø's Harry Hole outing, The Snowman.

It's not all gloom on the UK front, however, as Keith Wright has produced a low-budget gem with Harold's Going Stiff, a zomance that was filmed in natural light in and around Sheffield in just seven days. Refining the improvised, single-camera mockumentary style employed on his 2008 comedy Take Me to Your Leader, Wright deftly shifts tone between comedy, drama and horror. But the great strength of this irresistible charmer is the acting of a cast that belies its limited screen experience to deliver performances of winning naturalism and affecting warmth.

Since becoming the first to contract the men only neurological condition known as Onset Rigors Disease, widowed pensioner Stan Rowe has found life increasingly difficult. But, while he has experienced the creeping stiffness that makes it a struggle to comb his own hair or make a cup of tea, Rowe has not followed other sufferers in losing his memory, becoming facially pustulated and growing ravenously violent. However, he has watched enough television to know that he is a trophy target for the vigilante groups that roam the country clubbing zombified victims before they can feast upon their neighbours.

Andi Pandini is the leader of such a gang and he and cohort Lee Thompson delight in taunting rookie Richard Harrison, whose bashing technique leaves a lot to be desired. While they beat the unliving daylights out of a farmer with a tell-tale lumbering gait, neurologist Phil Gascoyne explains that he dislikes the use of the word `zombie', as he is convinced a cure can be found for patients more in need of pity than pulping. Indeed, he appears to be on the right track when a link is discovered between ORD and the Meat-a-rino fried sausage snack, which news reporter Roger Bingham learns is highly addictive when he interviews gannet Matthew Roberts and his anguished mother Constance Barnard, who hopes that hymn singing will save her son from developing symptoms.

Meanwhile, Rowe has been assigned chubbily cheerful nurse Sarah Spencer, who increases his mobility with massage therapies that attract the attention of Gascoyne, who invites the pair to his institute so he can monitor their progress. However, Rowe dislikes being under scrutiny and returns home, despite the threat posed by Pandini, who is shown ridiculing Harrison's inept efforts to finish off a casualty trapped in a cave. Indeed, Rowe is so enjoying his new-found freedom that he ventures out to a charity shop to buy Spencer a scarf, as he has come to value her friendship as much as her ministrations.

Spencer also enjoys Rowe's company, as her attempts to find Mr Right keep going horribly wrong, as online contacts either fail to keep dates or regard her as easy prey. However, she remains devoted to her work and volunteers at a hostel where dangerous cases like wild man Richard Atkinson are kept in isolation. But the real menaces are bigoted thugs like Pandini and Rowe finally meets his nemesis when he takes Spencer to the beauty spot where he proposed to his wife.

Although it will probably be viewed as a spoof horror, this is actually a touching study of loneliness and an incisive denunciation of modern society's shameful habit of judging by appearances and jumping to ignorant conclusions. Pandini and his cabal are depicted as boorish buffoons, but their rush to vicious violence has sinister echoes of the knee-jerk vigilantism that has become disturbingly familiar in recent news-making murder and paedophilia cases. Wright pokes gentler fun at the medical establishment's messianic confidence in the face of a pandemic it clearly can't comprehend. But what makes this so engaging is the subtle and positive discussion of the human aspect of age- and weight-related issues that are so frequently covered without compassion by a media so obsessed with youth, looks and style that it would never lionise the likes of Stan Rowe and Sarah Spencer, whose performances are beautifully understated and poignantly truthful.

The restraint of the performances is also key to the efficacy of Joshua Marston's The Forgiveness of Blood, an intense drama about an Albanian clan feud that is every bit as controlled and authentic as Maria Full of Grace (2004), the harrowing tale of a pregnant Colombian teenager coerced into working as a drug mule that earned an Oscar nomination for its star, Catalina Sandino Moreno. Once again immersing himself in a foreign culture, the American director demonstrates an admirable understanding of the 15th-century legal code of Kanun and its impact on a younger generation increasingly detached from the traditions their elders are prepared to die to uphold.

Seventeen year-old Tristan Halilaj is more interested in best mate Erjon Mani's motorbike and flirting with pretty classmate Zana Hasaj than in baker father Refet Abazi's ongoing row with Veton Osmani, whose family inherited fields once owned by Abazi's grandfather. Consequently, he thinks nothing of a bout of name calling in their rural village bar. But, next day, when Abazi is out on his rounds with daughter Sindi Lacej, Osmani refuses to allow them to take a short cut over their land and a seething Abazi fetches brother Luan Jaha for a showdown that results in Osmani's death, Jaha's arrest and Abazi's flight into hiding.

However, by evading justice, Abazi makes Halilaj and his younger brother Elsajed Tallalli  legitimate targets for Osmani's family under the rules of Kanun. Consequently, they are forced to remain indoors, with a teacher coming from the nearby school to give Tallalli lessons, while sister Esmer Alda is able to attend classes freely and Lacej is allowed to continue her father's bread round. This is not an easy task, however, as while Osmani's female cousin Servette Haxhija thinks the dispute is foolish, his male cousin Zefir Bushati blocks Halilaj's horse cart with his truck and threatens her if she dares to defy him. Moreover, regular customers start swapping suppliers to avoid becoming embroiled in the feud and Lacej looks into selling cigarettes as a sideline to keep the money coming in.

Frustrated at being confined, Halilaj turns the flat roof of an unfinished extension into a gym and begins training with makeshift equipment. However, when grandfather Cun Lajci declines elder Gjin Basha's offer to mediate in the dispute, Halilaj takes matters into his own hands and arranges a midnight rendezvous with Hasaj, who clearly feels uneasy at taking such risks to see him. Eventually, however, Abazi is captured and the rival clan grant a besa that allows Halilaj to leave the compound. But, instead of going to visit his father in prison, Halilaj calls on Hasaj and, realising he is in danger of losing her, he goes to Osmani's estate to offer himself in the hope of ending the altercation. Rather than seizing their chance, though, grieving father Selman Lokaj offers Halilaj a way out that will allow each family to retain its dignity.

Despite the specificity of the Kanun element, this is a soberingly universal story that exposes the macho posturing responsible for so much communal, ethnic, religious and national strife around the world. However, Marston adroitly tilts the tale so that the emphasis falls on Sindi Lacej and how she has to sacrifice her own college ambitions to join mother Ilire Vinca Celaj in unquestioningly supporting their menfolk and carrying out the tasks they can no longer perform. But, in collaborating on the screenplay with Albanian Andamion Murataj, Marston seems most intent on examining how the members of a generation tutored and tempted by the internet responds to the imposition of ingrained notions that seem so anachronistic and futile to the outsiders whose lifestyle their web browsing has taught them to admire.

Making their screen debuts, Halilaj and Lacej are superb as they respectively cope with incarceration and rise to the challenge of operating in a man's world. But Marston makes expert use of off-screen space to convey how they have been trapped in a feud they can do nothing to defuse. He is ably abetted by Leonardo Heiblum and Jacobo Lieberman's atmospheric score and by British cinematographer Rob Hardy's involving switches between long shots capturing the mood of the northern Albanian setting and more intimate handheld passages that reinforce the sense of confinement and building resentment. But what most impresses here is Marston's refusal to judge or patronise and this tense saga leaves one hoping we don't have to wait eight years for his next feature.

The contrast couldn't be greater between Marston's modest methodology and the flamboyance of Fernando Meirelles's globe-trotting approach in 360. Scripted by Peter Morgan and presumably inspired by Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 masterpiece, Der Reigen, this is a disappointingly negligible muddle of melodramatic vignettes that says little about either enduring facets of human nature or the state of a modern world that has been fragmented and dehumanised as a result of being shrunken by air travel and online communication. Clinical and contrived without ever being compelling or compassionate, this suffers fatally from the blight affecting the majority of portmanteau pictures that while the odd storyline is diverting the rest are patchy if not downright dull.

Fittingly, the action opens in Vienna, as Slovakian twentysomething Lucia Siposova and her protective sister Gabriela Marcinkova enter the studio of Johannes Krisch, a pony-tailed photographer who also doubles as a pimp via a website aimed at businessmen needing a little distraction while away from home. Having impressed Krisch with her looks and spirit, Siposova gets a client straight away. However, British motor trade executive Jude Law backs out of their assignation after bumping into German colleague Moritz Bleibtreu in the hotel bar where they were due to meet.

Unfortunately, Bleibtreu is sufficiently worldly wise to recognise that Siposova is a hooker and he hires her himself in order to coax her into revealing that Law had been her original john. Ashamed at being caught and blackmailed into a deal he had previously rejected, Law returns home to wife Rachel Weisz intent on seizing his second chance. However, he is blithely unaware that she has been having a passionate affair with Juliano Cazarre, a Brazilian photographer she had commissioned to shoot a spread for her chic magazine. Upset by Law's passionate phone messages, Weisz decides to break up with Cazarre and heads off to join him at their daughter's school production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Cazarre gets home to find that girlfriend Maria Flor had been stalking Weisz and discovered their liaison. But, while he frantically calls their friends to find her, she is already on a flight back to Rio de Janeiro, where she meets Anthony Hopkins, a father who has spent years searching for the daughter who disappeared when she stumbled across his infidelity to her mother. He is heading for an Arizona morgue to identify the body of a British woman who died in a fire and arranges to have dinner with Flor when their flight is held over in Denver by bad weather.

However, Flor gets tipsy on free wine and recklessly invites stranger Ben Foster to her hotel room, unaware that he is a sex offender who has been granted a furlough by his trusting case worker Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Designed to be tense, this creepily seedy instalment peters out when Foster conquers his demons and locks himself in the lavatory. Thus, Hopkins is able to wish Flor bon voyage the next morning and drop into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Phoenix after discovering the charred cadaver is not his daughter. His vow to cease his search and enjoy what is left of his life inspires fellow AA attendee Dinara Drukarova to return to Paris and dump her Russian mafioso husband Vladimir Vdovichenkov and make her feelings known to boss Jamel Debbouze, a widowed dentist who has reluctantly decided against propositioning her on the advice of his imam.

No sooner has Drukarova sprung the news than Vdovichenkov is summoned to Vienna by boss Mark Ivanir, who just happens to be canoodling with Siposova in a hotel room when the bookish Marcinkova befriends Vdovichenkov on a park bench. However, a text to Krisch changes everyone's lives forever.

Despite the fact the entire picture looks and feels like a swish commercial, Meirelles deserves credit for the low-key staging of tales predicated on forks in the road that are so strewn with cliché and cariacture that they could easily have become ridiculous rather than merely novelettish. He is well served by a stalwart cast and by Daniel Rezende's deft assembly of Adriano Goldman's lustrous images. But the notion of travel and telephones distancing and connecting lovers and strangers is hardly original and its discussion is superficial at best. More interesting are Morgan's knowing asides on the capricious nature of happiness, but the characters are too cipheritic to elicit audience sympathy and some of the big speeches (particularly Hopkins's AA monologue) are over-written. Thus, this is a film to admire rather than be absorbed by and not only does it pale besides Max Ophüls's masterly La Ronde (1950), but it's not significantly better than Roger Vadim's 1964 version, Circle of Life.

Finally, this week comes Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. As much an activist and a performance provocateur as a conceptual creator, Ai is a Warholian superstar, who has put his genius for social-networked self-promotion to heroic use in exposing police brutality, the darker side of the Beijing Olympic dream and a conspiracy over the number of schoolchildren killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. But, while she extols Ai's courage and ingenuity in baiting the Communist hierarchy, the debuting Klayman presents few insights into the value of his art and glosses over issues in his private life that seem at odds with the carefully concocted Confucian image of `Teacher Ai'. Thus, while this engaging portrait ends on the chastening note of Ai being humbled by the regime he had striven so hard to discomfit, this frequently compelling portrait is ultimately somewhat scattershot and lightweight.

The son of controversial poet Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei spent the first 16 years with his mother Gao Ying in the remote town of Shihezi after his father was sent to the labour camp in Xinjiang. In 1978, Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, where his classmates included such Fifth Generation pioneers as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. However, he was more committed to the Stars avant-garde art group before spending two years in New York in the early 1980s, where he became interested in creating conceptual pieces from ready-made objects.

He returned to China when his father fell ill and published Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995), and Gray Cover Book (1997) to publicise the growing significance of the experimental movement based in Beijing's East Village. In 1997, Ai co-founded the China Art Archives & Warehouse and began introducing local audiences to works by the younger generation and major international names. The following year, he moved into architecture when he designed his own studio house in Caochangdi, from which he curated several landmark exhibitions and where he started the online blog and the Twitter account that were to become increasingly key to both his creative and socio-political activities.

As stills from a famous series showing Ai extending a middle finger to a variety of famous buildings suggest, Ai is quite prepared to take risks in order to express his views. So, having contributed to the design of the Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics, Ai became increasingly critical of the policy of bulldozing entire neighbourhoods to make room for the Games facilities. He then became even more provocatively vocal in challenging the official casualty figures of the Sichuan earthquake and conducted exhaustive research in order to publish the government-suppressed names of the children who perished in the calamity.

Moreover, he further antagonised the Party by pressing charges against the Chengdu policeman he claims struck him so fiercely on the head in a hotel room in 2009 that he required emergency surgery. There is something Michael Mooerish about the way in which the portly Ai strides into a police station to have his statement taken in the presence of Klayman and his own videographer. But the subsequent pursuit through the adjoining streets by cops intent on demonstrating who had the upper hand in this situation should have set the alarm bells ringing.

The chance to travel to London to supervise the filling of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall with 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds gave Ai a brief respite. But he relaxed sufficiently to let slip that, even though he had been married to artist and selfless supporter Lu Qing for some 15 years, his affair with Wang Fen, an actress-turned-editor who had collaborated on Ai's underground documentaries, had resulted in the birth of his only son, Ai Lao. Yet rather than pressing Ai on his casual attitude towards both Lu and Wang, Klayman shifts the focus to present Ai as a victim, as a technicality prompts the demolition of his new Shanghai studio and Ai himself is subjected to an 81-day detention from which he emerges subdued and sad, but possibly not wholly vanquished.

Incorporating footage from Ai's own documentaries Hua Lian Ba'Er and Lao Ma Ti Hua, Klayman ably captures the diversity and dynamism of the artist's manifold projects. But no attempt is made to contextualise or evaluate his achievement. Instead a who's who of Chinese worthies is encouraged to eulogise about his courage as both a creator and an activist. Among those falling over themselves to extol his virtues are cinematographer Gu Changwei, rock star Zuoxiao Zuzhou,  performance artists He Yunchang and Hsieh `Sam' Tehching and photographer RongRong, assistants Lee Ambrozy, Liu Yanping and Inserk Yang, critics Karen Smith, Philip Tinari, Feng Boyi and Hung Huang, patrons like Ethan Cohen, tele-celebs like Hung Huang and such artists as Zhang Hongtu, Chen Danqing and Li Zhanyang

Much of what the above have to say is illuminating and/or amusing. But, bearing in mind the unprecedented access that Klayman had to Ai Weiwei over several months, this is a sloppily unstructured and hagiographically unquestioning fan letter. Moreover, just as Klayman demonstrates no overall vision, she fails to convince that Ai is any less dilettante in pursuits that often seem content to bait the establishment rather than make a coherent statement. Given that he has devoted his entire career to forging an enigmatic persona, Klayman can be forgiven for both being manipulated by her quarry and for failing to solve his carefully constructed riddles. But the absence of in-depth analysis of his museum shows or any intimation of what Ai and his work mean to ordinary Chinese leaves this looking rather naive and slight.