Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 16/7/2015)

Despite his insistence that he had acted alone, Hitler was certain that Elser was part of a British or Communist conspiracy and he ordered the Gestapo to extract a confession that could be exploited in the press. But, despite being subjected to unspeakable torture and some experimental truth drugs, Elser stuck to his story and spent many months demonstrating how he had carried out such an audacious assassination attempt. Ultimately, he went untried for the bombing and spent the remainder of the war in a special prisoner unit at Sachsenhausen. Indeed, he was only executed in Dachau in the last days before the camp was liberated.

This led some to speculate that Elser had been an SS officer who had participated in a stage-managed atrocity designed to show how Providence protected the Führer and his cohorts. Yet, even when documents discrediting this theory were discovered in 1969, Elser was not hailed as a resistance hero until the 1990s, by which time his deeds had been commemorated on screen by Klaus Maria Brandauer in Seven Minutes (1989).

Now, Oliver Hirschbiegel has opted to return to the period he recreated so potently in Downfall (2004) to bounce back from his misfiring English-language trio of The Invasion (2007), Five Minutes of Heaven (2009) and Diana (2013). He has chosen wisely in recruiting the father-and-daughter team of Fred and Léonie-Claire Breinersdorfer to write the script, as the former was responsible for Marc Rothermund's admirable dissertation on the White Rose group, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005). But, despite its impeccable production values, 13 Minutes struggles to capture the full horror of Elser's ordeal under interrogation and fails to provide cogent justification for an act of reckless courage and ingenuity that might have changed the course of history.

Over the opening credits, Georg Elser (Christian Friedel) is shown packing dynamite into a space excavated in a pillar behind the speaker's rostrum at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. His knuckles and knees are scuffed from his exertions and he holds a torch in his teeth as he primes the device that he hopes will kill Adolf Hitler (Udo Schenk) and end the Second World War almost as soon as it has begun. However, as he makes for Constance on the Swiss border on 8 November, he is apprehended by suspicious guards and has enough incriminating evidence in his pockets to lead the Gestapo to make him the prime suspect for the explosion that just missed wiping out the Nazi hierarchy by a matter of minutes.

While his family and friends are rounded up in the Swabian town of Königsbronn, Elser is returned to Munich, where he is confronted by Kripo criminal police commander Arthur Nebe (Burghart Klaussner) and local Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller (Johann von Bülow). When he repeatedly refuses to give his name and birth details, however, his mind drifts back to happier Weimar times when he was repairing clocks in Constance, playing the accordion and flirting with pretty girls beside the lake. However, his idyll was short lived, as his drunken father Ludwig (Martin Maria Abram) is forced to sell part of their smallholding and Elser is welcomed back to Baden-Württemburg with some gratitude by his devoutly Protestant mother, Maria (Cornelia Köndgen). Reluctantly helping with the chores, Elser plays music in the tavern run by Eberle (Felix Eitner), which occasionally sees showdowns between the local Brown Shirts and the blackshirted KPD, led by his friend Josef Schurr (David Zimmerschied).

Back in the present, things are about to turn vicious again. The recording secretary (Lissy Pernthaler) leaves the room and Elser is tied face down to a spring mattress and thrashed with a rod. The camera tracks slowly along the corridor outside, but, even as the screams intensify, the secretary continues to read her book impassively. As Elser vomits in a bowl below him, the impatient Müller nods to an underling, who heats a bradawl in a naked flame and then rams it under Elser's finger nail. Outside, the camera glides away from the scene, as if to suggest the complicity of those who allowed the Nazis to take control of their country and simply walked past the crimes being committed in their name.

Bloodied, but unbowed, Elser is deposited in a tiny cell and Nebe confides in Müller that he thinks he was a lone bomber. However, Müller insists on bringing Elser's former fiancée, Elsa Härlen (Katharina Schüttler), to the interrogation room in the hope of frightening him into confessing to spare his loved ones. Elser harks back to the night in January 1933 when the National Socialists are voted into power. He was downcast by the turn of events, but his mind was distracted from politics when Elsa came into the bar with her abusive alcoholic husband, Erich (Rüdiger Klink).

Elser had watched as Härlen pawed his wife on the dance floor and he had cut the song short to spare her further humiliation. Moreover, when she had wandered outside to chat about the tango with a couple of female friends, Elser had followed her and taken her breath away with a series of dashing swoops. They had kissed in the shadows and she had joked that she knew about his reputation for loving and leaving women. But he had known at first sight that this was the real thing.

Müller is delighted that Elser wants to talk. But he persists with his story and annoys Müller by joking that Winston Churchill had called him on the pay phone in Königsbronn to confirm the details of the plot. Under pressure from an SS Obergruppenführer (Simon Licht) to get results, Nebe brings food to the cell and explains to Elser that Elsa will be safe as long as he co-operates. Keen to protect his beloved, therefore, Elser asks for a pencil and paper and starts producing drawings that are verified by explosives experts.

Relieved to be doing something to protect Else, Elser recalls how quickly his charming neighbourhood became a hot bed of National Socialism. He remembers Eberle arresting Schurr in his farmyard and seeing him emaciated some time later as part of a forced labour detail at the nearby quarry. Tousle-haired blonde boys join the Hitler Youth and start taunting the Jews who live in the area. Indeed, one of his oldest friends, Lore (Gerti Drassl), is forced to sit in the square holding a sign condemning her for sleeping with Jewish men. The family is mocked as it attends church on the Harvest Festival in 1934 and Elser watches with dismay as the townsfolk gather for a screening of Shepherds' Run, a propaganda film in which they have participated. But Elser is even more shocked when he sees a newsreel extolling the speed of German rearmament and hears on Radio Moscow how the Condor Legion has unleashed its terrifying might on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

As the situation deteriorates at home, Elser takes a job at the steelworks and a room at the Härlen's farm. With Erich often insensible, the lovers are able to spend more time together and Elsa informs Elser that she is pregnant with his child. When they are caught kissing, he promises to rescue her from Erich and take her to Switzerland to start a new life. But his growing sense of despair as the continent drifts inexorably towards war prompts Elser to start formulating a plan to kill Hitler when he comes to Munich to make his annual speech at the Bürgerbräukeller. Consulting photographs of the venue and timing past orations, he determines to plant a bomb and bring the Third Reich to a premature end.

Under Nebe's watchful eye, Elser explains how he acquired the parts for the device and how he built it and smuggled it into the restaurant over a number of weeks. The specialists concur that the bomb seems feasible. But the SS refuse to accept anything but the naming of names and Müller once again resorts to violence to try and coerce Elser into confessing. After a while, the secretary takes pity on him and slips him a snapshot of Elsa from his file and promises to convey his condolences to the families of the victims.

The news that an eighth person has died provokes a flashback to the birth of Elser's son and his renewed promise to Elsa that he will stand by her after the divorce. But he also starts testing the mechanism on trees in the family orchard and announces his decision to relocate to Munich to have undisturbed nocturnal access to the Bürgerbräukeller. Having taken another tongue lashing from the SS Obergruppenführer, Müller orders Elser to be strapped to a table and injected with the truth serum, Pervitin. A hallucinatory montage follows, in which Elser is troubled by his conscience and he recollects being stopped in the street by Elsa as he set off to Munich to be reprimanded for ruining her life. He takes the photo that he now keeps in his jacket pocket and he wanders into the distance for his brush with destiny.

Having regained his sense, Elser tells Nebe that he has realised that his cause must have been wrong because God did not allow him to prevail. He asks if he can atone by spending his last days serving society and Nebe almost feels sorry for him, as he has seemingly come to admire his fortitude and tenacity in refusing to be broken and in seeking to sacrifice himself to protect those who could suffer as a result of his failure.

A caption takes us to Plötzensee Prison in Berlin five years into the future, as Müller supervises the execution of Nebe for his part in the 20 July 1944 bomb plot organised by Claus von Stauffenberg. As Hitler had demanded that the conspirators died like cattle, Nebe is garrotted using a piano wire suspended from a meat hook and the camera remains stationary, ash his legs convulse below his naked body. A few weeks later, as the Allies close in on victory, Müller sends orders to Dachau to have Elser murdered quickly and quietly so that the records could show that he perished as a result of enemy action. He sits in his cell strumming a zither and singing a sad song to his guard before he is taken away. No explanation is given as to why the regime waited so long to exact its punishment and the picture closes rather clumsily with a caption informing us that although Elsa married twice more before dying in 1994, she always considered Elser to be her true love.

Impeccably designed by Benedikt Herforth and Thomas Stammer, this has fleeting moments when the depiction of rural Nazism compares favourably with that in Edgar Reitz's Heimat (1984). But, while Judith Kaufmann's photography often has a nostalgic glow that reflects the experience of ordinary people living everyday lives without romanticising or fetishising the period, the storyline meanders without generating much drama or suspense around any aspect of George Elser's existence. Although they are alluded to, Elser's motives are never made clear enough. Similarly, his political opinions lack trenchancy and, as a result, Christian Friedel always looks as though he would rather bed another beauty than topple a dictator.

Much of the problem lies with the Breinersdorfers being so reluctant to trust the audience with thorny questions of conscience that they make the Elser/Elsa affair the narrative fulcrum instead of his political evolution or the bomb plot itself. Evidently, Hirschbiegel wanted to avoid what might be called `Day of the Jackal' suspense. But the persistent shifting between time frames that are not always clearly delineated denies both plot strands the much-needed momentum that would have made them compelling rather than merely intriguing. Moreover, too key incidentals like the state of the Elser finances and the ease with which he found jobs in Party-restricted industries are unconvincingly handled.

Furthermore, Hirschbiegel is guilty of over-directing in places, most notably with the sun dappling of Lake Constance, the strained shot of the furnace flames reflecting in the lenses of Elser's goggles and in the grossly misjudged 8mm Privitin sequence. But he also settles for two many stereotypical good Germans and Nazi lackeys and, thus, comes perilously close on occasion to trivialising matters of grave importance. The performances are suitably earnest, but Burghart Klaussner forces the audience to challenge their preconceptions far more than Christian Friedel, whose integrity is never in doubt, but whose lack of fire as either a lover or a revolutionary proves unfortunately enervating. Georg Elser deserves to be as well known as Claus von Stauffenberg. But he would have been better served with an archival documentary than this well-intentioned, but historically schematic and psychologically superficial melodrama.

The German connection is much more benign in Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders, a quirkily disarming rite of passage that represents a solid follow-up to the Italian's impressive 2011 debut, Corpo Celeste. Echoes of rustic classics like Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Michelangelo Frammartino's La Quattro Volte (2011) reverberate faintly throughout a tale that touches on lots of pressing issues about modern country living without delving into any of them in much depth. Thus, with all the conscious gaps in the character backstories and the impressionistic approach to the flimsiest of plotlines, this feels like a watercolour sketch that is designed to evoke rather than depict a lifestyle that is under threat from all manner of commercial, chemical, communal and cultural pressures.

Twelve year-old Maria Alexandra Lungu lives on a Tuscan farm with her German father, Sam Louwyck; French mother, Alba Rohrwacher, and her younger sisters, Agnese Graziani, Eva Lea Pace Morrow and Maris Stella Morrow. Completing the household is Sabine Timoteo, a German woman who doesn't appear to be related, but helps out as best she can with the various chores that always seem to need doing around the ramshackle farmhouse. Having moved from the city to get back to the land, Louwyck keeps a few sheep. But his primary source of income is honey and Lungu enjoys the fact that she is her father's favourite and gets to spend lots of alone time with him in the apiary.

Hunters blaze away from time to time in the surrounding woodland, but the family is pretty much left to its own devices. One day, however, when the girls are out swimming, they see glamorous TV hostess Monica Bellucci recording a promo for a new series called Countryside Wonders, which seeks to promote agriculture and the quality of farm produce. Lungu is bewitched and is disappointed when Louwcyk shows no interest in the show. Instead, he is more concerned with making money, as the EU has insisted that he makes improvements to the hive compound. As a consequence, he agrees to foster German juvenile delinquent Luis Huilca Logrono, who will not only provide an extra pair of hands, but also a useful monthly stipend.

Sensing that her father now has the son he has always craved, Lungu feels put out and squabbles more vehemently than ever with Graziani, who is something of a mummy's girl. She also feels helpless when some of the bees are poisoned by the pesticides being used by neighbour Carlo Tarmati, who comes from peasant stock and laughs off Louwyck's complaints by declaring that he is merely playing at being a farmer.

Tarmati has entered Countryside Wonders and, when the family goes to the nearby market town to sell its honey, Lungu signs them up for the show. Louwyck is furious, but Rohrwacher insists that Lungu was only trying to help. He relents and leaves Lungu in charge of collecting the day's honey harvest. However, one of the sisters cuts her hand on a piece of machinery and has to be taken to hospital for stitches. By the time they return, however, the honey has spilt over the floor and Lungu only just manages to clean up before Bellucci's underlings come to give the premises a sanitary inspection. However, Louwyck is furious with Lungu for costing him so much money and his refusal to speak to her prompts Rohrwacher to move into the spare room and threaten to leave him.

Even the social worker monitoring the deeply traumatised Logrono ticks off Louwyck about his temper. Yet, despite her efforts to patch things up, Lungu is still in the doghouse when the family crosses to a nearby island for the recording of the show. Bellucci gushes about the joys of the country and so flusters Louwyck (who is humiliated to be decked out in a cod-Etruscan costume) that when she asks him to explain his passion for honey-making, he becomes tongue-tied and burbles his response. Tarmati is more effusive and his prosciutto wins the competition and he gushes on camera that he would like to turn his farm into a resort to attract pretty girls. The mood is further dampened by the fact that Timoteo tries to kiss Logrono and he runs away and gets left behind on the island.

Faced with unpaid bills, Louwyck is forced to sell his flock. But he tries to repair his relationship with Lungu by bringing home a camel, as she always wanted one as a small girl. He also spends a night camping with her. But, as Lungu returns to the farmhouse the next morning to find everyone sleeping on a mattress in the garden, it is far from clear that the dream of escaping to the country will remain viable for much longer.

Casting a neo-realist lens over the summery pastoral scene, French cinematographer Hélène Louvart reinforces Rohrwacher's contention that there is nothing remotely romantic about the agrarian struggle. In this regard, she invites comparisons with such dramas as Christian Carion's The Girl From Paris (2001) and Giorgio Diritti's The Wind Blows Round (2005), as well as Jonathan Nossier's recently released documentary, Natural Resistance. But Rohrwacher draws much of her inspiration from her own experience of being part of a German-Italian beekeeping family and one is left to speculate on how much the sibling rivalry between Lungu and Graziani owes to her own childhood squabbles with her sister, Alba.

As so much of the action is seen through Lungu's eyes, it's tempting to suggest that the story's lurches and lapses derive from her innocent inability to fathom the workings of the adult world. It would also explain the presence of the stylised musical interlude involving Lungu and Graziani and Lungu's party trick, which sees a bee crawl out of her mouth and along her face without stinging her. But Rohrwacher seems to delight in patchwork narratives and her reluctance to explain pivotal points like Timoteo's connection to the family (she might have once lived in a commune with one or both of the grown-ups) is a small price to pay for the intimate naturalism that bolsters this highly personal picture's offbeat charm.

Considering how underwritten many of the characters are, the performances are admirably engaging. Moreover, few will complain that the insights into domestic dynamics are sharper than the self-consciously gauche lampoon of reality television (regardless of Bellucci's splendidly over-the-top cameo) and the insubstantial asides on the fragile rural economy. But, for all her Felliniesque flourishes, Rohrwacher is always more interested in adolescence than apiculture and the way she presents Lungu's burgeoning fascination with boys, popular culture and the big wide world is both sensitive and astute.

Self-realisation is also the theme of Nandita Das's Between the Lines, a record of the 2012 stage play she co-wrote with Divya Jagdale and in which she co-starred with her husband, Subodh Maskara, who was making his theatrical debut. In many ways echoing another spousal collaboration, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014), this is a chamber drama that explores the impact of a court case on the marriage of a couple of Mumbai lawyers who had slipped into a comfortable routine before they found themselves on opposite sides when an abused wife is charged with the attempted murder of her husband.

With Das and Maskara taking dual roles, the play clearly required impeccable timing and lighting design to transport the audience between the courtroom and the spartanly chic apartment. But CinePlay director Ritesh Menon has opted to eliminate much of the stagecraft and employs costume changes, props and scene transitions to make the action feel more cinematic. As a consequence, the picture feels more artificial than it would have done as a straight filming because the switches seem so much more self-conscious, as though they have been deliberated upon to solve a problem and not because they flow organically from the story. Nevertheless, this still makes some cogent points about the status of women in modern-day India and confirms to British audiences that Das remains as compelling a presence as she was in Fire (1996) and Earth (1998), which formed two-thirds of Deepa Mehta's Elements trilogy.

The action opens on a breakfast scene with Maya and Shekhar taking it in turns to talk directly to camera about how they met at university and how well they work as a team. Shekhar claims that Maya holds the fort while he fights battles and she smiles at his flattery. But she is a bright woman and challenges him to a game of 20 Questions that remains unfinished as he leaves for the office.

Although she specialises in drawing up contracts, Maya informs us that she started doing legal aid work when their nine year-old son, Arjun, was sent to boarding school and the person she has asked Shekhar to identify is the first client she has been asked to represent. During the course of the day, however, he discovers she has been appointed defence counsel for a case he is prosecuting as a political favour. Shekhar urges Maya to resign, as it would be embarrassing calling her by her name in court rather than by the more formal title of My Learned Friend. But she refuses, as she has made a commitment and wants to help Kavita prove that she did not shoot her husband Mukesh with malice aforethought, even though he had subjected her to so many beatings that her self-esteem had been completely eroded.

A cut to the courtroom is followed by Maya questioning Mukesh about the frequency with which he raises his hand to his wife. He boasts that he is a considerate husband and has done it less than once a year in the decade since they were married. But Maya tells Shekhar how angry she was with Mukesh for accusing her of being too middle class to understand the problems of ordinary people and for quoting a United Nations survey stating that 53% of women think a husband has a right to correct and discipline his wife. Back on the stand, Kavita reveals that she was coerced into an arranged match and tells Shekhar that Mukesh once beat her so badly that she suffered a lengthy nose bleed. He notes that she has hurt her hand and she explains that Mukesh had pushed her into a door on the morning of the shooting and that she blames herself for not having made any ice to ease the swelling.

Alone at home (there is no sign of the oft-mentioned maid), Maya denounces Shekhar for bullying Kavita in the witness box and he retaliates by accusing her of over-playing the pity card, as the jury is not going to buy the idea that she reached for a gun because her self-esteem was so fragile. Shekhar asks Maya whether she would ever reach for a gun if he was beating her and blithely remarks that a woman of Kavita's limited intelligence and emotional fragility would have shot herself rather than her husband.

Suddenly, Maya realises that this carelessly callous comment is key to case and the scene shifts to show Kavita testifying that she saw the gun out of its usual drawer and was going to turn it on herself when Mukesh came in and there was a struggle that culminated in a single bullet being fired. She had wiped his blood with her sari and was appalled that such an accident could have happened - until the thought dawned on her that, if he died, Mukesh could never beat her again.

That night, Shekhar comes home furious that Maya is using something he had said in the privacy of their own home as the basis of Kavita's defence. He chastises her for melodramatising the case and turning the media against him. Moreover, he insists that he has been going easy on her in court because she was his wife returning to criminal law for the first time in many years. But, from now on, he will show her no mercy and Maya is dismayed that he has made things personal by arraigning her for ignoring the ethics of their relationship in order to seize the initiative in the trial. Indeed, she is so upset that she wakes from a nightmare, in which Shekhar had been bullying Kavita into admitting that she had wanted to murder Mukesh. Shekhar tries to console Maya, but she turns away and tries to hide how vulnerable she feels.

A monochrome montage ensues showing Maya and Shekhar arguing. An interval follows (which seems a touch bizarre in a film only running 79 minutes) and, on the resumption of the story, Shekhar and Maya are seen having supper. He has bought her favourite cake as a peace offering, but she ticks him off for always taking the biggest slice. She also declares that he is so traditional in his attitude towards women that he thinks she is lucky to have a husband, a son and a career. He protests, but Maya is only starting to warm to her theme. She asks who gave him the right to make all the big decisions that should be taken jointly and browbeats him for rushing her when she is trying to weigh up the pros and cons. Hoping to soothe her, Shekhar compares Maya to the grandmother who raised him and is taken aback when she says she doesn't want to be a meek woman who serves her man with love in her eyes. She may be a good cook, but that doesn't mean she likes cooking.

However, when Shekhar asks what Maya what she wants to do with her life, she has to admit that she doesn't know. Consequently, she confides to the camera that she has made a list of things that frustrate her about their relationship. She reads them out, but pauses when she reaches what is clearly a more intimate point. Later that evening, she tells him about the list as they play chess together. He loses his patience when she gets up to scribble a note at the desk and he tuts that he is getting tired of her always having to juggle while she walks on a tightrope. In confessional mode to the audience, Maya admits that she has become lax with her chores and reluctantly admits that she sometimes found caring for Arjun to be a bit mundane, even when he asked her adorably innocent questions.

Deciding to go to bed early, Maya breaks a vase. As she clears up, she tells Shekhar that she feels it was fate that Kavita came into her life, as she has been like a mirror enabling to see her own situation more clearly. She loves Shekhar, but has ambitions beyond being a homemaker and he taunts her for being a Flag Flying Feminist who has allowed her new assertiveness to crush the femininity and strength all women receive from the Goddess Durga. He offers to give her a back rub to help her relax, but succeeds only in winding her up by suggesting that she should have more empathy with Mukesh, as he is a magazine editor who has been lumped with a wife who is his inferior in every regard. When Maya snaps back that they are hardly the worlds most compatible couple at the moment, Shekhar tweaks her shoulder and she accuses him of deliberately hurting her. He protests that he merely gave her a finishing pat and refuses to apologise and they go into court the next day still harbouring their grudges.

During their closing speeches, Shekhar and Maya take digs at each other in respectively appealing to the jury to ignore emotional manipulation and chauvinist indifference. Maya wins and, once he returns to the apartment, Shekhar concedes to camera that he is livid at having lost. He tries to be gracious when Maya returns home carrying a huge bouquet of flowers and smiles at the number of texts she has received from people congratulating her and offering her cases. She calls Arjun, but stops short of telling him that she beat his father. When Shekhar complains that they should talk about something else, Maya asks if he would have been pleased if she had defeated another man. But she answers her own question in her final soliloquy, in which she berates him for being such a bad loser.

As Maya goes out to party with her friends, Kavita comes to extend her gratitude and leave a small gift for Arjun. Shekhar tries to be hospitable, but cant help but notice that she bites her lip when she starts discussing the shooting and he is left wondering whether she is quite the innocent victim she appears. When Maya comes home, Shekhar makes a fuss of her and insists he is pleased to see the return of the feistiness that had first attracted him at college. He also makes a point of phoning Arjun and telling him that his mother had trounced him in court. But, as they hug, Shekhar also hopes that things can get back to normal after this temporary breakdown in communications. Thus, when he jokes that all is well that ends well, Maya looks into the camera over his shoulder and sighs that everything is fine - for now.

Despite Ritesh Menon frittering the ingenuity of Nandita Das's stage direction, this is an absorbing exercise that has much to say about patriarchal societies everywhere. Speaking in English for Maya and Shekhar and Hindi for Kavita and Mukesh, Das and Subodh Maskara allow plenty of their off-screen chemistry to inflect their characters. Whether playing the college gold medallist rediscovering her sense of purpose or the bartered bridge who has lost her will to live, Das is compelling and it says much for the debuting Maskara that he never feels like the junior acting partner.

Sojan Narayanan Nair's camera is intelligently used to draw the audience into the action and to provide Maya and Shekhar with confidantes. But, even though it is used sparingly, Claudio Clavija and Hitesh Sonik's music feels intrusive, as do the superfluous switches to monochrome for the brief montage interludes. Bearing in mind its stage origins, it is hardly surprising that Das and Jagdale's text is a little florid in places. But, while a couple of Das's monologues might have been trimmed or more imaginatively filmed, the dialogue has a ring of authenticity because Das and Maskara always feel like a couple.

Given how rarely plays appear on television these days, it might not be the worst idea for a production company to produce a series of well-known works and tailor them for the cinematic or home entertainment release. Obviously, some would be more stage bound than others. But, since the early talkie boom. cinema has shamefully neglected playwrights from antiquity onwards and this would be a cheap and effective way of lifting works from the page and breathing some new life into them for the benefit of future generations.

It's 35 years since Wim Wenders began making documentaries in earnest. In that time, he has produced such exemplary profiles as Lightning Over Water (1980) about Nicholas Ray, Tokyo Ga (1985) about Yasujiro Ozu, Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1987) about fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, Buena Vista Social Club (1999) about a band of veteran Cuban musicians, and Pina (2011) about choreographer Pina Bausch. Now, he has teamed with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado to make The Salt of the Earth, a tribute to Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado that provides a magnificent showcase for the striking monochrome images that have been captured in trouble spots around the globe and have often come in for as much criticism as praise for aestheticising misery. Maybe because his co-director is the son of his subject, Wenders avoids asking too many awkward questions and, as a result, this often feels like a fawning paean rather than a critical assessment.

Sebastião Salgado was born in 1944 in Aimorés in the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais. Following an itinerant childhood, he studied economics at the University of São Paulo before going into exile in 1969 to escape life under a military dictatorship. While working for the International Coffee Organisation, he frequently visited Africa to compile reports for the World Bank. It was during an expedition to Niger that Sebastião started taking photographs. Encouraged by his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado (who has bought him his first camera), he started taking news photographs in 1973. He worked for a few years for the Sygma and Gamma photo agencies, but spent 15 years with Magnum before quitting in 1994 to concentrate on documentary projects for his own Amazonas Images company.

While Lélia tried to place his pictures with editors and raised their sons, Juliano Ribeiro and Rodrigo (who has Down Syndrome), Sebastião travelled to danger zones in a bid to capture the dignity of humankind in extremis. Having launched his solo career with the photo-essay, The Other Americas, he joined forces with Médecins Sans Frontières to explore the nature of deprivation and extreme poverty in The Sahel, the End of the Road. However, he made his reputation with Workers, a record of working conditions in the Serra Pelada mine in the 1980s that included several images that have rightly been described as Brueghelian for their density and unflinching frankness.

Sebastião reveals to Wenders that many of those enduring the mud and heat were not exploited peasants, but graduates and urban professionals who had been drawn to the gold mines like so many prospectors before them in the hope of striking it rich. He compares the scenes of toil with such the construction of such biblical edifices as the Tower of Babel and the Pyramids or the excavation of King Solomon's Mines. But it is also easy to see why critics like Susan Sontag and Ingrid Sischy could accuse Sebastião of composing his shots with Western sensibilities in mind and he does let slip in some of his conversations with Wenders that he sometimes felt he was witnessing spectacle and theatre rather than calamity and atrocity.

Such was the ambition of later empathetic projects like Exodus and Migrations that Sebastião was often away for months on end, as he liked to live in the communities he was profiling before he started shooting. Showing how the refugee's tent had become the commonest form of dwelling, these investigations into the way famine, war and economic exploitation impacted upon places like Ethiopia, Kuwait and Rwanda began to take their psychological toll on Sebastião and he and Lélia embarked upon a project to reforest with two million trees the parched cattle ranch he has inherited in the Mata Atlantica. Such was the success of the Instituto Terra enterprise that its lessons have been applied worldwide and this reconnection with the land prompted Sebastião to visit places as different as Siberia and Papua New Guinea for his latest epic, Genesis.

Having seen little of his father while growing up, Juliano Ribeiro jumps at the opportunity to work alongside him on this tome and his colour images of Sebastião at work perfectly complement the black-and-white interview passages, for which Wenders used a semi-transparent mirror to reflect the pictures in discussion so that they share the frame with Sebastião's face. While such ingenuity is acute, Wenders might have asked about funding sources and the reasons why he left Magnum in the mid-1990s, He might also have afforded Lélia more time, as she is clearly more than the little woman indoors, while much more should have been made about the ethics of photo-reportage and photographic art, as so many memorable images appear to have been carved into the celluloid and it is impossible to divorce the often shocking scenes from their compositional precision.

There has been a glut of photodocs of late, with the better examples including Richard Preiss's Bill Cunningham in New York (2010), David and Jacqui Morris's McCullin (2012), Sebastian Junger's Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, John Maloof and Charlie Siskel's Finding Vivian Maier (both 2013) and Michael Whyte and Luke Dodd's Looking for Light: Jane Bown (2014). In each case, the eponymous shutterbug has been lionised and Wenders leaves one in little doubt that he has been in awe of Sebastião Salgado ever since he had been moved by the Serra Pelada pictures. But he seems curiously incurious about Sebastião's influences, his sources of inspiration and his working methods. Evidently, the subject set some untraversable perameters. But surely Wenders could have used his voiceover to express the odd trenchant opinion instead of spouting fulsome praise that sounds like it has been lifted in its full purple verbatim from a book jacket or publisher's catalogue.

Considering he is the co-director, Juliano Ribeiro slips into the shadows a touch too conveniently in the latter stages, while Lélia is woefully neglected. Sebastião makes a frustratingly guarded interviewee until he presents his pessimistic verdict on the future of the vicious human animal and warms to the theme of eco-preservation. With a little more blunt forthrightness about the horrors he had witnessed and a markedly less cine-manicuring, this might have been more than a handsomely sincere puff piece.

Having directed the excellent Dr Feelgood rockumentary, Oil City Confidential (2009), Julien Temple was the natural choice for The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, which set out to chronicle the final months of the maverick guitarist after he was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in January 2013. Opting not to have chemotherapy, Wilko Johnson vowed to make the most of the time remaining to him and insisted that there would be nothing morbid or mawkish about his last screen testament. But not even he could have foreseen the twist ending that would make this slick swan song so moving.

On learning that he had 10 months to live, Johnson was surprised by the mood of serenity that came over him. Despite still mourning the loss of his wife of 40 years, he felt unusually alive and aware of the beauty of the world around him. Editor Caroline Richards cross-cuts between Steve Organ's digital close-ups of flowers, cobwebs and insects to reinforce this sense of unexpected vigour that prompts Johnson to travel to Japan to visit some peaceful temples in Kyoto. However, he can't resist playing a gig and feels no pangs of fear or regret as he thrashes through Chuck Berry's `Bye-Bye Johnny' in front of an adoring crowd.

Back on Canvey Island on the Essex estuary, Johnson takes stock while playing chess on the sea wall with a becowled alter ego. Temple reveals his inspiration for the shot to have been Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and proceeds to stuff the action with snippets from such choicely apposite pictures as FW Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, David Lean's Great Expectations (both 1946), Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Orphée (1950), Luis Buñuel's Simon of the Desert (1965), Sergei Paradjanov's The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). He also includes several clips from Philip Saville's BBC classic, Hamlet at Elsinore (1964), with Christopher Plummer being supported in the title role by Alec Clunes as Polonius and a young Michael Caine as Horatio.

The latter is obviously included because of its recurring references to existence and its ending. But it also links in to the fact that Johnson studied literature at university and taught for a while before becoming a titan of the pub rock scene. Quotes about from Shakespeare, Milton and Blake, as Johnson faces his imminent expiration with courage, erudition and wit. He laments the fact that he will never see Saturn or Orion again from the telescope on the roof of his home. But, as a figure strides around the Canvey Island seafront in 18th-century nautical apparel, Johnson continues to move the pieces around the chess board and strut the stage in a series of farewell shows with bassist Norman Watt-Roy and drummer Dylan Howe.

Still feeling strangely euphoric, Johnson also does the rounds of the TV studios to reassure his fans that he has never felt better and is quite enjoying his last hurrah. He is disappointed at having to bow out of Game of Thrones, in which he had been playing the silent executioner, Ilyn Payne. But he contacts longtime admirer Roger Daltrey and suggests that the time might finally have come to record that album they had always been putting off. The session only lasts eight days and the duo play a concert to celebrate the fact that Going Back Home is the biggest hit either of them has enjoyed for three decades.

The title is suitable for the section of the film in which Johnson revisits some old haunts and amusement arcades for what could well be the last time. Newsreel footage recalls the flooding that left the islanders stranded in 1953 and he speaks with some pride about the fact that his gasman father stayed behind to maintain supplies. The ordeal ruined his health, however, and Johnson admits that he felt no sadness when he died as he hated him. He touches on the fact that he had discovered quite late in life that he had been illegitimate and gazes across the sun-dappled water at the shipping coming in to the oil terminal that he considers as beautiful as the scenery. In noting a tower that had been painted by John Constable, Johnson recalls that he had ambitions to become an artist. But he is content with the way things have turned out and would change next to nothing.

As a means of marking the passage of time, Temple resorts to the old movie cliché of showing pages flutter off a desk calendar. But he pauses as the 10 months that Johnson was given to live elapse without his condition noticeably deteriorating. Having not bothered to get a second opinion at the start of the year, as he didn't think he had the time to waste, Johnson consults his pal Charlie Chan, a doctor-cum-photographer who arranges for him to see a specialist. He decides that the 3kg watermelon-sized tumour can be removed after all and Temple recreates the key moments of the 11-hour operation on 30 April 2014 that left Johnson with an impressive scar and feeling worse than he had done in years.

Sitting in a Canvey Island garden on his 66th birthday, Johnson looks frail, but defiant. He has become accustomed to living in the moment, as he had realised that he couldn't change the past and didn't have a future worth worrying about. But now he has to readjust once more and there is something almost miraculously heroic about the moment he strums his guitar for the first time after the surgery. However, the fact the Johnson is back out on tour confirms that his recovery has been as full as it is remarkable.

Julien Temple can never be accused of audiovisual underkill. He packs each frame and rarely waits too long between edits. Here, he employs distorted close-ups and psychedelic lighting to leave his indelible mark on proceedings. But, actually, such is Wilko Johnson's almost transcendental stoicism and garrulous good humour that the pyrotechnics often seem surplus to requirements. Perhaps reining in the whimsical gimmickry might have allowed Temple to provide a bit more background for the uninitiated, although it's doubtful whether this affectionate eulogy will attract many non-Feelgood fans. But, while some of his own ploys misfire, Temple's choice of film extracts is exemplary, as they provide a spiritual context to Johnson's musings, even though he is an avowed atheist who believes nothing but oblivion awaits him when he shuffles off his mortal coil. Hopefully, that is not something that will have to concern him for a few more years yet. Maybe Temple can pop along the Thames in the not too distant to see how Johnson is getting along, as it's clearly not time yet to call `Wilko and out'.