Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 22/1/2015)

Having arrived in the United States as an impoverished migrant, Oscar Isaac has worked his way up from being a humble lorry driver to owning the domestic fuel company that once belonged to his father-in-law. His wife, Jessica Chastain, is forever urging him to use her family connections when dealing with his unscrupulous rivals. But Isaac insists on running Standard Heating according to the strict moral code taught to him by his Hispanic parents and refuses to contemplate the use of bribery or intimidation in his business dealings.

As the action opens, Isaac is concluding a deal with Hasidic landlord Jerry Adler to purchase a bay on the Brooklyn waterfront so that he can cut costs by handling his own imports. He agrees to pay 40% upfront and the rest within 30 days of the deed being transferred, in the knowledge that banker John Procaccino has already confirmed a loan on favourable terms. However, a number of Isaac's tankers have been hijacked over the past few weeks and he suspects that one of his competitors is behind the attacks. But, even after driver Elyes Gabel is badly beaten in a raid and Isaac is forced to chase away an intruder from the grounds of his family home, he ignores Chastain's suggestion to let her connections fight fire with fire.

Notwithstanding his reputation for integrity, Isaac receives a visit from assistant district attorney David Oyelowo, who warns him that his company is about to be investigated for corruption and fraud, as part of a wider inquiry into the conduct of the oil trade. Isaac is furious when Oyelowo arrives to search his home in the middle of his daughter's birthday party and barely conceals his dismay when Oyelowo implies that he would be willing to turn a blind eye if Isaac supported his political aspirations. But even his own lawyer, Albert Brooks, seems to think it would make sense to allow his drivers to carry weapons and Isaac slowly comes to realise that he is in serious danger of losing everything for which he has toiled simply in order to uphold his seemingly worthless principles.

Shortly after Gabel returns to work, his truck is subjected to another attack. However, he has decided to arm himself and a ferocious gun battle breaks out on the 59th Street Bridge before Gabel flees the scene as the cops arrive. Procaccino is so disturbed by these developments that he withdraws the loan offer and Isaac pleads with Gabel to give himself up for the greater good of the company. As he has always regarded Isaac as a role model, Gabel agrees to do the right thing. But his nerve fails him and he goes on the run, leaving Isaac to take the law into his own hands when another hijack is attempted and he chases the rogue driver on to a train in order to beat him into revealing that he is working for rival supplier, Glenn Fleshler.

Isaac threatens to expose Fleshler unless he pays compensation for the damage caused. But this extortion still leaves him short of the money he owes Adler and Isaac reluctantly sounds out competitor Alessandro Nivola about contracting a short-term loan. Nivola offers the cash Isaac needs at a prohibitive rate of interest and Chastain is compelled to confess that she has been skimming money off the profits and has enough squirrelled away to pay Adler.

Although relieved not to be in the scheming Nivola's debt, Isaac is livid with his wife for cheating him and accepts her donation with a mixture of regret and contempt. But, as he surveys his new premises with unconcealed pride, Isaac is surprised to see Gabel walking towards him. Exhausted and afraid, he can no longer stand being a fugitive. But he has kept hold of his gun and, when he shoots himself, Isaac rushes across to plug a hole in an oil tank with his handkerchief rather than tend to the dying man who had once idolised him.

Many have expressed surprise that this meticulously made film only managed to land a single Golden Globe nomination (for Jessica Chastain) before being ignored altogether by the Academy. But, while this is clearly the work of a superior craftsman, it is riddled with minor flaws that enervate it at every turn. From the calculatingly insouciant shots of the World Trade Centre to the melodramatic denouement, Chandor almost seems intent on sabotaging his own picture, in much the same way that Isaac's enemies are bent on destroying an edifice built on good intentions and unrealistic practices. As an outsider, Isaac buys into the American Dream, but he has no idea how it operates in the cold light of a New York day and the slick spiel he gives to his sales force lacks sincerity.

Thus, while one can lament his fall from grace, he is never a truly tragic figure like Michael Corleone, whose twisted sense of loyalty transformed him into an unscrupulous tyrant. As in Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, Isaac ably conveys the conflicts moiling beneath the surface of a seemingly placid, but actually rather resistible character. But none of the other characters are sufficiently fleshed out to set his virtues and vices against. Playing somewhat against type, Chastain exudes the sense of brash entitlement one has come to expect from Mob brats. However, she is wastefully underused and, as a consequence, her big scene feels overly theatrical rather than chillingly authentic.

The admirable Nivola, Brooks and Oyelowo might all have been given more to do, but Chandor opts to place undue emphasis on Gabel, whose travails too often smack of contrivance in a subplot that feels like a half-hearted homage to Raoul Walsh's George Raft-Humphrey Bogart trucking noir, They Drive By Night (1940). But, elsewhere, Chandor brandishes his influences too flagrantly and one ends up longing for some of the restrained grit that Lumet brought to Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981). Bradford Young's retro widescreen photography and Alex Ebert's score are as apposite as John P. Goldsmith's production design and Kasia Walicka-Maimone's costumes and reinforce the overall aura of confidence. But, for all its lowering intensity, subtle evocation of a city in crisis and astute (if hardly revelatory) insights into the capitalist psyche, this never quite rings true.

If A Most Violent Year feels like the pilot for a new series on Sky Atlantic, Marshall Curry's Point and Shoot has all the hallmarks of a YouTube video made by a narcissist with a screw loose. This is a disturbing documentary on many levels, but what dismays most is that it has been compiled by a director who has demonstrated an affinity with obsessive personalities in the Oscar-nominated duo of Street Fight (2005) and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011), as well as in Tom Berninger's Mistaken for Strangers (2013), which Curry executive produced to allow the psychologically brittle director to explore his rivalry with his brother Matt, who is the frontman for the indie rock band, The National. Fittingly, they provide the soundtrack for this profile of Matthew VanDyke. But, for reasons never made clear, Curry seems unwilling to challenge his self-glorifying account of events that can only appal right-minded audiences.

Raised by his mother Sharon in a comfortable home in Baltimore, VanDyke spent much of his youth watching Alby Mangels safari shows, reading adventure books and playing video games. Despite suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder that rendered him germophobic and terrified of hurting people, he followed a degree in Political Science with a masters in Security Studies, with an emphasis on the Middle East. But, while he seemed settled in a relationship with Lauren Fischer, VanDyke craved excitement and, in 2007, he embarked upon a motorcycle ride across North Africa, which he recorded with the intention of posting the footage online.

Some of the early shots taken in Gibraltar are amateurish in the extreme. But VanDyke quickly picked up a serviceable camera technique that would not be out of place in a standard adventure travel movie and Curry includes some amusing footage of him setting up images in the back of beyond that present him as some sort of macho daredevil. However, hurtling his Kawazaki through Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan and Syria failed to satiate VanDyke's wanderlust and, in 2010, he spent six months venturing from Iraq to Afghanistan via Iran.

At one point, he convinced the cash-strapped Baltimore Examiner to hire him as a war correspondent and he quickly discovered that the American troops with whom he was embedded were just as eager to have something dramatic to put on their Facebook pages as he was. But Curry opts not to reveal that the paper folded soon after VanDyke filed his sole report. Moreover, he fails to press VanDyke in the interview clips that pepper this slickly edited odyssey about why he felt the need to adopt the name Max Hunter and pass himself off as a fearless man of danger.

Even more egregiously, Curry decides not to delve too deeply when VanDyke explains why he elected to go to Libya in the spring of 2011, harbouring visions of becoming the new Lawrence of Arabia. Instead, he lets VanDyke reminisce about encountering charismatic free spirit Nuri Funas during his 35,000-mile road trip and reveal how his friend's online pleas for the outside world to support the revolution against Muammar Gaddafi both pricked his conscience and fired his desire to prove himself as a man. Clearly Curry is under no obligation to point out the problems that VanDyke might cause his putative brothers-in-arms by being unable to speak their language and having no military experience to contribute to their cause. But it feels like a dereliction of the documentarist's duty to leave commenting on this recklessly self-aggrandising behaviour to a girlfriend whose understandably wounded interjections are nowhere near as eloquent as the silence of VanDyke's conspicuously absent mother.

Welcomed by as a hero by Funas and his friends, VanDyke made himself useful filming their activities. But, in addition to capturing some truly visceral combat imagery, VanDyke also began recording posturingly triumphalist gun- and camera-brandishing selfies that flagrantly expose the egotistical, thrill-seeking naiveté underlying his new-found activism. However, on 13 March, he was injured during an ambush at Brega and found himself in the notorious Maktab al-Nasser prison in Tripoli, where he was held in solitary confinement in a tiny cell, with only a small skylight in the ceiling.

Curry enlists the help of animator Joe Posner to provide a lowering, first-person perspective of this 81-day ordeal. But VanDyke's recollections shed little light on either his treatment or his psychological state. He is no more forthcoming in describing how he escaped and came to join the National Liberation Army, in spite of pleas from non-governmental organisations like Human Rights Watch - as well as his mother and girlfriend - to return to the United States. However, the sight of VanDyke being filmed firing at a sniper confirms the extent to which he had committed himself to both a cause he barely understood and a romanticised version of himself that bordered on the sociopathic. But, while this woefully self unaware adrenaline junkie might have fooled himself into thinking that he had helped secure victory, Curry surely has a responsibility to point out that the capture and slaughter of Colonel Gadaffi did not bring victory and peace to a country that has since become a virtual no go zone.

However, Curry hides throughout behind the conceit that this is VanDyke's story and that he has refrained from any sort of editorialising out of respect for his subject. Yet, even though VanDyke takes a producer's credit, Curry is keen to stress that he had no creative control over the use of his own material in the finished film - which leaves one to wonder whether Curry really believes that intelligent viewers will buy into the stratagem that he is an honest broker who has merely pieced fragments together into a cohesive, but entirely detached mosaic. This might wash in the case of VanDyke's Syrian Civil War apologia, Not Anymore: A Story of Revolution (2013), but surely one has the right to expect more from a professional film-maker with something of a reputation for balancing empathy with objectivity?

The failure to tell the truth about the ongoing situation in Libya is regrettable, as is the missed opportunity to explore the effect that the presence of a lens has on the actions of combatants. But the decision to celebrate entirely unwarranted American exceptionalism is utterly despicable and one can but hope that UK audiences prove more discriminating than their US counterparts, who have showered this decidedly dubious enterprise with accolades and festival awards. To mix quotations from Monty Python's Life of Brian and Dad's Army, Matthew VanDyke is not a hero, he's a very stupid boy who viewed the Arab Spring as a suitable arena for exorcising his insecurities through `a crash course in manhood'. It say much for the state of actuality in the social media age that such vainglorious folly should have been treated with anything more than pity or contempt.

For all his psychological issues, VanDyke essentially behaves like an overgrown kid and British newcomer Charlie Lyne recalls the recent history of American teens on screen in Beyond Clueless, a compilation essay that is notable not only for the fact that it was funded by Kickstarter, but also because its director is a 23 year-old who was born in the year that this whistlestop survey opens. While still a teenager, Lyne made a name for himself with the Ultra Culture blog. His writing exudes a confidence in both his own opinions and his understanding of what his audience wants to read and, in this regard, there is something Truffautian about his irreverent attitude. This same fearlessness informs this meticulously researched and superbly edited clipumentary. But the insights into the adolescent psyche and its depiction in Hollywood movies lack originality and depth, while no attempt whatsoever is made either to put the pictures in a wider social or cinematic context or to consider how they were made and why the majority have stylistic, political and cultural traits in common.

Producer Catherine Bray (herself a respected critic) will lead a Q&A after the screening at the Phoenix on 27 January and it will be interesting to see how the film goes down with a student audience of much the same age as its maker. The problem facing a 53 year-old critic approaching this material is that it simply wasn't made for them and, as a consequence, they are likely to sound like a grumpy old man in assessing it. As someone who was in their thirties (and over) when the pictures under review were first released, it's difficult to have a personal relationship with them, especially as all most have going for them is a snarky postmodernist take on the anxieties, aspirations and attitudes that were already clichéd when John Hughes satirised them with infinitely more wit, finesse and empathy in the 1980s.

So, what follows has to bear the rider that while this critic saw most of the movies under discussion, he did so out of professional duty rather than personal enthusiasm and many seem no more acute or exciting in retrospect than they did at the time. This is not to say, however, that teendom and its cinematic representation are not worthy topics. Indeed, Mark Cousins and Matt Wolf have already covered similar ground in The Story of Children and Film and Teenage, respectively. But, while Lyne references many more movies, his scope is much narrower, as he focuses exclusively on American titles made between 1991-2006. Moreover, in comparison with Cousins, he lets slip little passion for his chosen subject. There is no joy, wonderment or guilty nostalgic pleasure in the commentary, delivered with such detached irony by cult actress Fairuza Balk that the more pertinent pronouncements get lost amidst the perfunctory synopses that accompany the pictures studied in greater detail. Thus, this often sounds more like a college assignment or an online think piece than a documentary script, which is a shame, as Lyne clearly knows his stuff and repeatedly proves himself to be an editor with an enviable eye and a judicious sense of tone and pace.

Dividing the treatise into five chapters, Lyne dissects the truisms of growing up and the rules of high school with a glib gravitas that is entirely appropriate for a genre that often runs more deceptively deeply than critics give it credit. In order to fathom the mysteries of `Fitting In', he invokes Andrew Fleming's The Craft (1996) to consider the nature of cliques and David Nutter's Disturbing Behaviour (1998) to lay bare the secrets of canteen pecking orders. In between, he stuffs a selection of corridor walks to introduce the bitches, jocks, nerds, skaters and boys and girls next door who will become increasingly familiar as the discourse develops. Lyne next latches on to Mark Waters's Mean Girls (2004) and Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions (1999) to show how newcomers can gain acceptance by preying on those more vulnerable than themselves. However, as the kids discover in Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), the outsider remains a potent threat to the cabal and has to be made over to fit the cookie-cutter template, as in Melanie Mayron's Slap Her, She's French! (2002) and Robert Iscove's She's All That (1999).

A montage of party snippets follows to the accompaniment of `House Party', a song by twee pop combo Summer Camp that includes the line, `you take yourself too seriously', which leaves more than an ironic undertone, as Lyne moves into a section entitled `Acting Out'. One of the problems of this documentary is its failure to define the parameters of the teenpic and to contextualise it. This omission proves handy, however, when Lyne wishes to slip into the mix features that don't necessarily conform to generic type. A case in point is Blair Hayes's Bubble Boy (2001), which is used to initiate a rumination on the role of burgeoning desire in teenage rebellion. Following a swimming pool montage designed to remind us of the physique-o-centric nature of adolescent pangs, Lyne enlists the help of Disturbing Behaviour, Rodman Flender's Idle Hands (1999) and Luke Greenfield's The Girl Next Door (2004) to reveal the dangers of letting lust run amuck. He also namechecks John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps (2000) to warn against the terrors of bodily transformation before using Tamra Davis's Crossroads (2002) to unleash a making out montage that culminates in Josh Hartnett flying over a sea of boobs in Michael Lehmann's 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002).

But, despite the teen movie's celebration of sexuality, Lyne knows it also has a socio-cultural responsibility to tame urges and even repress them when they seem transgressive or confusing. Following brief extracts from Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995) and Katt Shea's The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), `Losing Yourself' examines to the point of overkill the homoeroticism festering in Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers (2001), Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction (2002), Jeff Schaffler's EuroTrip (2004) and James Wong's Final Destination (2000). A montage follows showing what can happen when kids go to extremes and weirdness gives way to violence. Lyne wittily gives this package a false ending before fading to black and emerging in the chapter entitled `Toeing the Line', which begins its exploration of conformity with lengthy excerpts from Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty (1998) and Harry Elfont and Jennifer Kaplan's Josie and the Pussycats (2001).

This diatribe on the need to belong (or adulthood's insistence on stamping out individuality) lurches rather unpersuasively into an appreciation of prom night etiquette and the fear of rejection. But Lyne opts not to linger and ventures into `Moving On' to show how teenagers are required to reinvent themselves just as they have established an identity that allows them to survive (and sometimes thrive) in a classroom environment. The grim realities of being a college freshman are laid bare in Elfont and Kaplan's Can't Hardly Wait (1998), while a third visit to Disturbing Behaviour and extended sojourns in Gary Winick's 13 Going on 30 (2004) and Robert Iscove's Boys and Girls (2000) caution against falling into the abyss of perpetual teenagehood. John Schultz also sounds a warning bell against believing in happy ever afters in Drive Me Crazy (1999) before Lyne whacks in a masturbation montage that builds to a crescendo with the suitably corny `Learn to Love Yourself' throbbing away on the soundtrack.

He isn't quite done yet, however, as an epilogue offers a cursory glance at graduation day and its significance for the youth suddenly at the end of one rite of passage and the start of another. Rather archly, Lyne selects clips from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002) to make his point about role playing before a crawl details the 270 or so movies that he has filleted in the course of his dissertation. A full list can be found under the Connections banner on the film's IMDB page, but it's frustrating that Lyne leaves it until now to credit the various directors whose work he proclaims to admire. Similarly, by using character names throughout the narration, countless familiar faces go unacknowledged. It might have been instructive to consider how the Hollywood machine exploits such fresh-faced hopefuls, as very few go on to bigger or better things. The same is true of the majority of the film-makers cited here and it's disappointing that Lyne chooses not to explore the concept of auteurism within a teen genre that seems to preclude stylistic innovation.

Watching the various montages, it becomes evident just how many of these movies utilise identikit lighting and production designs, as well as textbook camera movements whose purpose is to keep the gaze fixed firmly on toned bodies and photogenic faces. But, as the relentless bombardment of untagged images continues, it becomes difficult to tell the caricatures apart. Moreover, it slowly begins to dawn that these visions of everyday adolescence have been concocted by directors who had left school years beforehand and run the risk of imposing their own preoccupations on the now generation. It seems clear, therefore, than depictions of a teenpic present date faster than sci-fi conceptions of the future and that the manners and mores Lyne seeks to enshrine have been old news for over a decade.

The curious decision to end the trawl in 2006 is compounded by the disappointing lack of diversity. Hollywood is certainly not alone in producing teenpics. Indeed, those made in Holland, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are often more honest and audacious in their discussion of quotidian problems and pressures. But, while one can forgive Lyne for limiting his scope to America, he has to be censured for prioritising pictures centred on white, middle-class kids in small towns or suburbia. He has no excuse, as there are dozens of films about black, Hispanic and other ethnic minority and lower-class teens. His refusal to engage with the agonies of coming out earns another demerit, as does his neglect of the fact that so many high school movies over the last 20 years have been inspired by works of literature, among them Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995), which has presumably been relegated to a blink-and-miss-it spot because the budget only allowed its inclusion under the terms of fair usage.

Bearing in mind such restrictions, Lyne has done a remarkable job in packing so many clips into such a comparatively short running time. He excels at spotting and matching recurring motifs and the montages are masterfully assembled in imitation of the kiss sequence in Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Christian Marclay's 24-hour, real-time video installation, The Clock (2010). Some may accuse Lyne of being capricious in selecting relatively obscure films for his case studies, but this eclecticism is one of the strong points of a slick, if somewhat self-indulgent exercise in commercialised structuralism, this is most definitely not without interest or merit.

Finally, this week, comes a documentary from a real master of the form. Indeed, only Frederick Wiseman and Raymond Depardon can compete with Nicolas Philibert when it comes to Direct Cinema. But, while either could have produced a study of Radio France to match La Maison de la Radio, neither could have invested it with such wistful wit and delicate discretion. Filmed over several months in 2011, the action has been shaped to suggest a day in the life of stations like France Inter, France Info and France Bleu, which share the thousand or so offices nestling in Henry Bernard's vast circular edifice on the banks of the Seine in the 16th arrondissement of western Paris. But rather than dwelling the bustle behind the scenes, Philibert concentrates on the cool professionalism that informs each and every broadcast.

Following an evocative montage of voices in studios across the complex building to an info-cacophony, Philibert leaves Patrick Cohen presenting the breakfast show to descend on the newsroom, where presenter Marie Christine Le Dû is giving rookie newsreader Faouzi Tritah some unvarnished tips on how to approve the composition and delivery of his new flash items. Clearly not wishing to intrude upon what is tantamount to a dressing down, Philibert slips into the drama studio, where producer Marguerite Gateau is taking someone through a story to explain how she wants it read. But Philibert doesn't linger long and flits from Tata Milouda conducting an interview about slam poetry to soprano Ruth Rosique preparing to record a jaunty ditty with her accompanist.

Back in the newsroom, Emmanuel Leclère tries to book an interview with the president, while managing editor Marie-Claude Rabot-Panson calls a reporter to arrange a live link-up. Assistant Florence Paracuellos scours the Internet for filler items and comes up with something about dying anchovies in Los Angeles. Outside, people scurry along corridors, while the garage and post room are hives of activity. An outside broadcast unit sets off on a motorbike to follow the Tour de France into Châteauroux, while blind journalist Laetitia Bernard types in Braille and Japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi is interviewed about the effects of the 11 March tsunami.

Down in the music studio, Rosique is backed by strings and an accordion, while Gateau listens intently as the cast completes a final read through before she starts recording her drama. Elsewhere, the audience enters in the spirit of a quiz show whose time clock ticks down to the sound of a xylophone. As a rapper launches into a number in English, Philobert cuts drolly to classical music specialist Frédéric Lodéon, who peers out from behind a stack of CDs on his desk to reveal how to spot when a programme has been pre-recorded. Luckily for journalist Philippe Vandel, he isn't going out live, as he muffs his lines in delivering a report on Belgium. But it's the sound of drilling coming through the supposedly soundproofed walls that frustrates Gateau, as she has to stop recording until peace is restored.

By contrast, things are becoming heated in an editorial meeting in the newsroom and Philobert cuts away to the soothing sound of a marimba band in full flow. Jesus Cabrera also provides a welcome distraction with his drinks trolley, while Rabot-Panson tries to lighten the mood by joking about the discovery of four bodies in Lille. As Gateau works on some sound effects for her production, a storm chaser named Michel discusses the French weather and sportingly agrees to do a plug for the interviewer's show. It's not an ideal day to be on the trail of the Tour, but spirits are high among the spectators, who come over and chat with the reporter and offer him a bottle of wine before he speeds off after the peloton.

Philobert cuts from a point-of-view shot through winding streets to a conductor leading his choristers through a song being recorded with a piano accompaniment. Writer-cum-actor Jean-Bernard Pouy is asked to extemporise a pensée to close an under-running programme and he waxes lyrical about potatoes while peeling some. Elsewhere, writer Annie Ernaux explores the place of anger in solitude, while sound recordist Marc Namblard ventures into some woods to set up a miscrophone under camouflage to record some ambient sounds.

Views of the Eiffel Tower bring Katell Djian and Laurent Chevallier's cameras back inside the Maison de la Radio to shuttle from Rabot-Panson following up a story about a cyclist racing a horse to Antonio Placer recording `Republicalma' with pianist Jean-Marie Machado. The close-ups used to capture this intense rendition are repeated to capture the changing expressions as Bénédicte Heim is interviewed by Alain Veinstein about her dual life as a writer and teacher. The contrast between his composure and her unease is fascinating and Philobert adroitly follows it with a clip of Umberto Eco ruminating on perspectives in novels before plastic surgeon Laurent Lantieri discusses how patients react when they first see their new faces.

Continuing the round of the magazine and chat shows, Philobert listens in as singer Arno Hintjens avows that he wouldn't want to be famous, as he like being able to remain the underdog and he shares the pleasure that actor Michel Piccoli still takes in travelling by bus. Comic actor Jos Houben clearly wishes that his fans could distinguish between his characters and his private self, as he reveals how people used to seeing him being knocked around on screen expect to be able to push him around in real life. This lament on the breaking down of barriers is juxtaposed with a clip of screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière contemplating how differently everyday noises would have sounded throughout history. But Philobert returns to Houben in time to hear him explain the need for rules in comedy and have to be reminded by his hosts that the sight gag he wishes to perform wont work very well on the radio.

Checking in on Gateau and Rabot-Panson once more, Philobert eavesdrops on conductor Matthias Brauer giving the Radio France choir a stern lecture on the need for precision in Germanic pronunciation. He also dallies to listen to Maïa Vidal singing `The Alphabet of My Phobias' in English to an accordion before cutting away to the world of critters and creepy-crawlies, as Namblard continues to record the sounds of Nature. As if to prove that preparation is everything, Philobert next cuts from current affairs presenter Alain Bedouet sorting papers in his office to him conducting a lively discussion on the role of Facebook in the Tunisian Spring. However, unpredictability is part of the magic and the shot of Caroline Ostermann grimacing after reading the shipping forecast splendidly conveys the tension that even the most experienced broadcaster feels when going out live.

A montage conveys the range of programmes on offer during the evening, with a football commentary providing the audio backdrop to shots of people typing, reading and recording. As a song about Virgil and Ulysses dies away, medical academic Jean-Claude Ameisen readies himself to speak. Nearby, Evelyne Adam hosts a popular request show on France Bleu and researcher Elisabeth Rodier fielding calls that may well come from the occupants of the cars visible from her window. But not everything is designed to provide the soundtrack to quotidian tasks, as Pierre Bastien demonstrates by using rubber bands, Meccano and a trumpet in a glass of water to make music on a France Culture show. Realising nothing can top this astonishing sequence, Philobert takes a final tour of the darkened offices and studios. Lights still burn through the night, however, as someone has to write Patrick Cohen's script for the next day's breakfast show.

Although this superb documentary depends heavily on Philobert's eye for detail and editorial acuity, its bid to convey the immediacy and intimacy of radio is entirely reliant on Olivier Do Huu's inspired sound mix. Whether capturing the mellifluous sonorousness of the spoken word or the rich variety of song, Do Huu judges each to perfection and sends the viewer back to the private spaces where they do their own radio listening with a fresh appreciation of the artistry and craftsmanship involved in communicating solely with words, music and sounds.

The majority of the faces on view (none of which are identified on screen) will be unfamiliar to British audiences, but the very denial of easy celebrity recognition forces non-Francophiles to concentrate on what is being said and how it is being presented. Gateau and Rabot-Panson are probably the star turns, but Lodéon strikes a chord (even though Philobert bends the observational rules by resorting to an interview situation) and Bastien's Heath Robinson turn is a joy to behold (although its probably not quite as compelling on a purely audio level). The real star, however, is Bernard's modernist masterpiece, which made headlines last autumn when it had to be evacuated during a fire scare. One wonders how a similar snapshot of the BBC might turn out, bearing in mind that the division of stations between London and Salford would preclude a commensurate sense of homogeneity. But, while Britain can currently boast a number of admirable documentary makers, there is no one who can hold a candle to Nicolas Philibert.