Parky at the Pictures (DVD 20/6/2019)

Closer to home, we've had features located in the Midlands (Shane Meadows, 2002) and Dublin (Jason Figgis, 2009) and, now, we have Simon Rumley's Once Upon a Time in London, which seeks to present the capital's postwar underworld on a grand scale and a modest budget. That it doesn't entirely succeed is down more to a failure to emerge from the shadow of BritCrime than any lack of ability or ambition.

As a narrator informs us that London was becoming a dangerous place in 1936 under the White and Sabini families, a couple of chancers start to rise through the ranks. Jack `Spot' Comer (Terry Stone) makes a name for himself during the Battle of Cable Street, when the East End took exception to a march by Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, while Billy Hill (Leo Gregory) comes to the notice of Charles Sabini (Adam Saint) and Alf White (Jamie Foreman) and his son, Harry (Justin Salinger), after he knocked over the same jewellery shop twice in a week. Comer also makes himself useful to Darky Mulley (Geoff Bell), who runs a string of racecourse bookmakers. But he has to take the odd reprisal beating at a time when fists and razors were used rather than guns because the death penalty was seen as a suitable deterrent. 

While a prison sentence interrupts Hill's romance with Aggie Vaux (Holly Earl) and Comer endures a short stint in the army before being discharged for being mentally unfit' to fight, the London scene changes dramatically during the Second World War, as the Sabinis are detained as enemy aliens and Comer joins forces with Mulley to challenge Harry White for the title of King of the Underworld after the death of his father. Meanwhile, Hill befriends `Mad' Frankie Fraser (Roland Manookian) while serving time for black marketeering and, having heard about Comer's unprecedented haul of ration coupons, he writes him a fan letter offering his services when he's released. 

Needing a loyal lieutenant to help him clean up in Soho, Comer takes Hill under his wing and introduces him to Gypsy Riley (Kate Braithwaite), who becomes his mistress in the same way that Tiger Lilly (Shereen Ball) becomes Comer's moll. However, he threatens to ditch the newcomer after White smashes up one of the clubs on Hill's patch and he's only restored to favour when Fraser discovers Whilte's whereabouts by throwing darts into the skull of one of his oppos. Always ready for a punch-up, Comer wades into the White mob to the accompaniment of `I Love Those Cheeky Chaps From the East of London'. But the episode proves to Hill that Comer can't be trusted and he begins making plans to go solo.

Separated from Aggie, Hill slashes the face of the pimp who slaps Gypsy around and Comer is less than amused at having to pay him off to stop him going to the police (who have also started demanding bigger bungs to turn a blind eye to Comer's operations). Annoyed at being reprimanded in public, Hill exploits a gambling debt that a postman has run up at one of Comer's clubs to get inside information on a delivery route and blags £287,000 from the Eastcastle Street postal van heist. When Comer comes to collect his cut, Hill contemptuously throws banknotes at him and a montage follows showing Comer's empire crumble under attack from Hill and new racecourse maven, Albert Dimes (Doug Allen). Nettled after getting it in the ear from pregnant Irish wife Rita (Nadia Forde) about Dimes calling him at home, Comer sparks a vicious street brawl. Yet, when the case comes to court, the gangster's code means that neither man can recognise his assailant. 

Riding high, Hill hires journalist Duncan Webb (Simon Munnery) to ghost write his autobiography, Boss of Britain's Underworld, which he launches with a lavish party. Enraged at the revelations about himself, Comer convinces three young thugs to murder Hill. But their prattle is overheard by a pub landlady and they are tortured by Fraser into squealing on Comer, who is attacked outside his Paddington home. Despite Hill offering a truce if Comer plays the game, Rita refuses buckle and testifies against Fraser and Bobby Warren (JJ Hamblett), who receive seven-year sentences. As Comer opens a pub, Hill welcomes Reggie (Kerim Hassan) and Ronnie Kray (Ken Croft) into his ranks before the narrator winds things up by informing us that Hill quit while he was ahead and ran a nightclub in Tangier before passing peacefully in 1984, while Comer slipped into poverty before dying in poverty in 1996. 

Packing plenty of plot (and a few too many digressions) into its 111 minutes, this falls some way behind Peaky Blinders (2013-) in its evocation of a time and place. But Rumley is a canny director and there's an edge to the bad lad nostalgia that sets it apart from glossy reconstructions like Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007). He's splendidly served by production designer Anna Mould and costumier Michelle May, while Tom Parsons makes a tidy job of editing Milton Kam's astute camerawork, which slowly allows colour to seep into proceedings as the action moves away from the bleak days of the 1930s. Glamour is kept on a leash, however, as Rumley offers unflinching insights into the brutality of gangland life and the curious conventions that prevented rivalries from descending into bloodbaths. 

Leo Gregory and Terry Stone offer hints into the psychotic psyche, but the characterisation is more serviceable than inspired. Indeed, with the exception of Justin Salinger's amusing portrayal of serial loser Harry White, the secondary figures are little more than ciphers who know when to laugh at the boss's joke and throw a punch to defend his manor. The WAGs are also sketchily drawn, although Nadia Forde makes the most of her day in court and the hospital sequence in which she urges Comer and Hill to stop behaving like overgrown schoolboys. In many ways, her analysis is spot on, as the Stan and Ollie-like hospital visiting scene (with its gag about a bunch of grapes) seems to imply. But these were dangerous days, as Rumley conveys by having this gangland game of thrones tap into the spirit the Boulting brothers' adaptation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and St John Legh Clowes's take on James Hadley Chase's No Orchids For Miss Blandish (both 1948).

Just as film directors emerged from television, advertising and music videos, it was somewhat inevitable that the Internet would become the next source of screen talent. Brazilian Joe Penna made his name with the MysteryGuitarMan channel on YouTube and he makes his feature bow with Arctic, a variation on the castaway theme that contains echoes of his sci-fi short, Turning Point (2015), which featured Jade Harlow as a woman stranded in a contaminated zone and made innovative use of elisionary pan transitions instead of traditional cuts to link the scenes. 

Having been left stranded somewhere in the Arctic Circle following a plane crash some two months earlier, Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen) carves the letters `SOS' into the snow and ice in the hope of being spotted by an aerial search team. In the meantime, he undertakes a rigorous daily routine of checking his fishing lines and maintaining a beacon. He also keeps an eye on a polar bear that has stolen some of his supplies. 

When a helicopter scouring the forbidding terrain crashes, Overgård rescues the female co-pilot (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) and strives to keep her alive by stapling a sizeable gash in her side. He learns from a map found inside the wreckage that there is a building in relatively close proximity and he lashes the woman to the sled he retrieved from the chopper and sets out across the white expanse. He makes slow, but steady progress until he encounters a rock wall that proves impassable with his companion. 

Undaunted, Overgård decides to go around the obstacle and is forced to use one of his distress flares to frighten off the bear when it comes across the twosome in a mountain cave. Setting off again, he becomes convinced that the woman's worsening condition means she has no chance of surviving the trek. Shortly after abandoning her, however, he falls into a crevasse and traps his leg under a rock. Although he manages to free himself, Overgård further damages his leg and he is relieved to discover the woman is still when he struggles back to the sled. 

Summoning his last reserves of strength, Overgård continues his journey and sets off his last flare on spotting a helicopter. Much to his frustration, the crew fails to spot him and he sets light to his coat in a desperate bid to catch their attention. When the chopper flies away, he collapses on the snow next to his ailing patient and reaches out for her hand in acceptance of his fate. However, the helicopter had noticed them and touches down on the snow behind them, as the film ends. 

Strikingly photographed in Iceland by Tómas Örn Tómasson to emphasise the insignificance of the two dots on the landscape, this makes a much stronger visual than emotional impression. The same was also true of Felix Randau's Iceman and Harald Zwart's The 12th Man (both 2017) and Dane Mads Mikkelsen's manfully physical performance as a polar Robinson Crusoe recalls those of Jürgen Vogel in playing Kelab, the Neolithic Ötztal Alpine hunter, and Thomas Gullestad as Norwegian resistance hero Jan Baalsrud. Indeed, one is struck throughout this earnest, but rarely pulse-troubling adventure of the similarity of the action with such recent pictures as Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void (2003), Ridley Scott's The Martian, Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant (both 2015), and Wolfgang Fischer's Styx (2018).

This lack of narrative novelty is hardly surprising, however, as Penna and his editor and co-scenarist Ryan Morrison leave themselves little room for manoeuvre by imposing a sense of Bressonian austerity on the action that carries over into Joseph Trapanese's score and Mark Mangini's sound design. There are arresting set-pieces, such as the howling storm that drives Mikkelsen into the fuselage of the plane. But, even though they appear to eschew computer-generated effects, the showdown with the polar bear and the battle to free his trapped leg feel more formulaic and undermine Penna's rather blatant bid for cinematic credibility by proving he has more in his locker than website whimsicality. It will be interesting to see what he does with his recently announced sci-fi thriller, Stowaway.

You don't have to sport a dragon tattoo to wreak vengeance, but it helps. The female fury film has a chequered history, with its serious themes often being hijacked for exploitationary purposes, as can be seen from some of the titles in this list: François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood (1973-74), Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Abel Ferrara's Ms 45 (1981), Robert Greenwald's The Burning Bed (1984), Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003-04), David Slade's Hard Candy, Park Chan-wook's Lady Vengeance (both 2005), Neil Jordan's The Brave One (2007), Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled (both 2017) and Pierre Morel's Peppermint (2018). 

However, the debuting Sarah Daggar-Nickson puts a new #MeToo era spin on the avenging angel character in A Vigilante, which makes for compelling comparison with the Charles Bronson Death Wish movies (1974-94) and Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here (2017). It might stray a little towards generic territory in the final third, but this is an intelligently unsettling variation on a theme that would spark some lively discussions after being paired in a double bill with Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).

Living out of a suitcase in New York state, Sadie (Olivia Wilde) answers the coded calls of women enduring domestic abuse. On hearing the phrase, `the trucks won't stop coming', Sadie helps the likes of Andrea Shaund (Betty Aidem) by using coercion and violence to force husband Michael (CJ Wilson) to transfer three-quarters of his assets into his wife's bank account, sign over their home and quit his job as a financier. Moreover, as she escorts him off the premises, the reminds him that she will kill him if he ever bothers his wife again and that she will take pleasure in dispatching him. 

When not dispensing rough justice, however, Sadie suffers from panic attacks in her motel rooms and the scars on her back can be seen in the half light, as she seeks solace in a treasured drawing. She needs this to help her sleep, as well as the knife she keeps under her pillow. But Sadie can look after herself, having taught herself the Krav Maga self-defence technique from a manual, and she regularly checks into a gym for strenuous punch bag workouts. Moreover, she keeps the items she needs for her self-applied disguises hidden in a car in the woods. 

Having listened in flashback to a black woman (Estefania Tejeda) relate her story at a shelter help group run by Beverly (Tonye Patano), we see Sadie respond to a trucks call from Charlene Jackson (Cheryse Dyllan) and leaves her hog-tied husband kneeling on the floor, while she smashes anything that will break in the home that had become her prison. Refusing to take payment for her services. Sadie sees Charlene drive off towards a new life and heads back to the motel to remove her make-up and bop to some driving rock. Having played arcade games and watched some kids ice skating, she goes for a drink in a seedy bar, where two guys attempt to assault her in the car park. However, she leaves them in a heap and warns them never to try a similar stunt again.

Changing her car, Sadie picks up a message from a former client about two boys being abused by the addict mother (Paige Rhea). As she is sparked on the sofa, tweenager Zach (Kyle Catlett) lets Sadie into their apartment and she frees his younger brother, Leon, from the bathroom after knocking their mom out cold when she tries to resist. When she tells Zach that she is going to entrust them to social services, Sadie has to fight back a tear. But she promises him that things will improve and urges him to call if he ever needs her. The sight of a small boy in such distress gets under her guard, however, and she sobs in the car.

At a group meeting, Sadie reveals that her husband (Morgan Spector) used to terrorise her between survivalist camping trips with their son, Cody. One day, when he came home with a new trailer and told Sadie that they were going to live off  the grid, she had tried to flee. But he had caught up with them and killed their child in a rage. He promptly vanished and Sadie learned from a lawyer (Chuck Cooper) that he had saddled her with so much debt that their house was going to be repossessed. Moreover, as he has gone into hiding, she couldn't claim on his life insurance. 

One of the women at the shelter (Jude Marte) had reprimanded Sadie for cowering in corners and spending her days reading children's books. Thus, after she had returned to the house to collect some belongings (including the black-and-white picture Cody had been working on before he died), she decides to dedicate herself to those who can't fight back. However, she has not given up hope of finding her husband and has settled in the Adirondack region where they had once camped. Indeed, she has been marking off areas she has searched on a map and is dismayed one night when her husband takes her by surprise in her motel room and abducts her. 

When she comes round, she is gaffer-taped and gagged in a remote shack and her spouse gloats about the fact that he spotted her in the forest and had been able to get a jump on her. He rips up the drawing and tosses it into the stove before going off for food. However, Sadie has secreted a blade under the skin on her wrist and she uses her fingernail to gouge it out and free herself. When her husband returns, however, she hesitates with a hunting knife at his throat and he is able to overpower her. Ordering her to place her arm on a wooden slat, he stomps on her and shatters the bone. But he makes the mistake of turning his back on her and Sadie is able to escape. 

She trudges through the deep snow and finds an abandoned factory, where she makes a splint from a piece of metal and some tape. Her husband follows her and shows her that he is unarmed, as he stands on the side  of a covered-up swimming pool. Sadie emerges from her hiding place and sneers when he claims to still love her and wants her to come home. She accuses him of having a perverse need to control her and vows to avenge their son, as she slowly closes in on her husband, who seems powerless to defend himself when she stabs him, as he is stricken with remorse. 

Taking a snapshot of her son from the cabin, Sadie dumps her spouse's naked body in the middle of a country road in the dead of night. When the lawyer contacts her through Beverly (who has always known about her double life), he informs her that the cops want her to identify the corpse and provide proof of her movements for the last month. Moreover, he tells her that the life insurance can now be paid and Sadie holds back a quiet smile of satisfaction, as she now has the means to devote herself to her vocation on a full-time basis. 

Tautly written and directed by Sarah Daggar-Nickson and played with a wholly credible blend of steel and compassion by Olivia Wilde, this is a gruelling realist exposé of the agony that so many women endure at the hands of brutal and manipulative partners. In order to provide a little balance, Daggar-Nickson shows two small boys at the mercy of a junkie mother. But the focus falls predominantly on gaslight relationships, in which wives and mothers are too scared to break away from the tormentors making their lives a misery. 

By having Sadie suffer from both abuse and post-traumatic stress, Daggar-Nickson is able to chart her progress from victim to vigilante in a fragmentary manner that also reflects her damaged psyche. However, the final showdown feels markedly less rigorous than what has gone before, as not only does Sadie turn the tables on her persecutor with unpersuasive ease, but the presentation relies on exploitation thriller tropes rather than reclaiming them. Nevertheless, abetted by cinematographer Alan McIntyre Smith and editors Ben Bauduin and Matthew C. Hart, Daggar-Nickson avoids excess and laudably keeps nearly all of the violence off screen. The pain, however, is there for all to see.