The Summer's Over - Now for Some Serious Cinema

Dealing with notions of class and loyalty, but essentially a simmering study in self-destructive loneliness, Chilean Sebastián Silva's The Maid is dominated by an exceptional performance by Catalina Saavedra. Yet, with the ensemble being as superb as Sergio Armstrong's fluent handheld camerawork - which stealthily confines the characters in their Santiago townhouse - Silva keeps a lid on the melodramatics, even as Saavedra's passive aggressive territoriality becomes increasingly sinister.

An unprepossessing provincial, Saavedra has served bourgeois couple Alejandro Goic and Claudia Celedón for 23 years. Indeed, she has done more to bring up their children, Andrea García-Huidobro and Agustín Silva, than either parent, with Celedón devoting herself to keeping up appearances and the workaholic Goic spending his spare time making model ships. But Saavedra has recently started to feel the strain and begun bickering with the increasingly haughty García-Huidobro. So, when she is hospitalised following a blackout, Celedón decides to hire her some help - which is the last welcome home present that Saavedra wanted.

Despite being forced to convalesce in her cramped bedroom, Saavedra quickly sets about undermining Mercedes Villanueva, especially after the wilful García-Huidobro makes such a show of befriending her. She vigorously scrubs the shower after the young Peruvian has used it and locks her out of the house when she goes to collect a grocery delivery. Celedón tries to explain that Villanueva isn't a threat to Saavedra's position, but she continues her campaign until her rival flees in tears. Replacement Anita Reeves is a harder nut to crack, however. Furthermore, she has no respect for her employers and Saavedra's frustration spills over into violence that prompts Reeves's dismissal.

Convinced she has triumphed, Saavedra resumes her duties. But Celedón - urged on by patrician mother Delfina Guzmán, who abhors temperamental domestics - resolves to impose her will and hires the exuberant Mariana Loyola. Although she's also a country girl, Saavedra greets Loyola frostily. But, as the interloper recognises how much the family means to Saavedra and defers to her with a cheery grace, the tetchy fortysomething not only begins to accept her, but also seeks her out in the evenings and even agrees to spend Christmas with her relations.

The trip is not without its unexpected developments, however, with Loyola's uncle making a move on the inexperienced Saavedra, who acquiesces out of politeness. But the bombshell comes when the pair return to the capital and Saavedra is suddenly faced with regaining the autonomy that no longer seems quite so important.

Despite frequently feeling like a Buñuelian spin on Jean Genet's The Maids (1947) and Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), Sebastián Silva's second feature follows Enrique Rivero's Parque Vía (2008) and Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow (2009) in exposing the class gulf that divides so many Latin American societies. Indeed, it draws on his own memories and was filmed in his childhood home. Thus, while it teasingly threatens to descend into horror cliché, this is a work of darkly comic humanism that is more interested in Saavedra's vulnerability than her inexpert attempts at defending her domain. Consequently, Celedón and her family are depicted as being carelessly patronising rather than snobbishly cruel in failing to comprehend Saavedra's plight, while her seething determination to resist change is rooted less in peasant conservatism than in a proud sense of irreplaceability that she has concocted to assuage her guilt at neglecting her own mother back home.

Tense and touching, acute and authentic, this is impeccable, compassionate and compelling. And it's mood of uncertainty is replicated in Abbas Kiarostami's equally excellent Certified Copy.

Making his first feature outside Iran, Kiarostami has produced a simmering pastiche of bickering couple pictures from Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1954) to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). Using mirrors and shifts of perspective to ensure that nothing is as it seems, this meticulously photographed, philosophically provocative and mischievously romcomic piece sends English academic William Shimell and French antique dealer Juliette Binoche on a Sunday odyssey to the Tuscan hilltown of Lucignano, where they debate originality, authenticity and value while keeping the audience (and themselves) guessing about the precise nature of their relationship. The dialogue is a touch ripe in places, but the leads respond splendidly to Kiarostami's playful mockery of the clichés sustaining both arthouse and mainstream film.

Shimell is in Italy to promote his contentious new book about copies being as artistically valid as the original works and he is warming to his theme when Binoche arrives late and takes a seat on the front row. She is distracted, however, by the restless antics of hungry son, Adrian Moore, and leaves hurriedly after hastily scribbling a note and acquiring six copies of the text. Later that day, Shimell ventures into her cellar shop and comments awkwardly on the reproduction statues she has for sale. He seems anxious to catch a train, but Binoche persuades him to take a drive into the surrounding countryside.

En route, she tells him about her sister's marriage and he listens with civility rather than interest. They arrive in Lucignano and Binoche tells Shimell that couples come here to marry because there is a golden tree in the church that is supposed to bring good luck. Once again, he responds politely and follows Binoche into the small museum, where a tour party is standing in front of a painting that was long believed to date from Roman times, but is, in fact, an 18th-century reproduction.

This time, Shimell allows his disdain to show and the hurt Binoche's mood is scarcely improved by a phone call from Moore asking if he can go skating rather than study. They stop at a café and, while Shimell is taking a call of his own outside, Binoche allows owner Gianna Giachetti to believe that they're husband and wife and invents a backstory to explain Shimell's demeanour. Yet, as they wander to the church, the conversation seems to suggest that Shimell and Binoche do have a history and this sense that a once great passion has cooled into fractious intolerance is reinforced by Shimell's refusal to pose with newlyweds beside the golden tree, a curious encounter with strangers Jean-Claude Carrière and Agathe Natanson in the town square and Shimell's peevish behaviour in a deserted restaurant.

The charade seems to be over, as they sit on some steps and listen to the bells tolling. But Binoche claims to recognise the pensione and they take the room she insists they stayed in once before. The view from the window looks familiar and Shimell's mood improves. Binoche goes to the bathroom to freshen up and smiles at her reflection, because while the situation may not be perfect, it's better than nothing.

Kiarostami has resolutely refused to clarify the precise nature of the couple's relationship. But the mystery merely adds to the allure of this cineaste's delight. Working for the first time from a detailed screenplay, Kiarostami peppers the conversation with ideas that veer from the challenging to the mischievous, while Luca Bigazzi's restless camera captures both the tension between the protagonists and the ethereal atmosphere of the sublime location. Making his screen debut, Shimell deftly recalls George Sanders's solicitous indifference in Voyage to Italy, while Binoche (who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes) adds a playful sensuality to Ingrid Bergman's melancholic determination.

Binoche has twice worked with Michael Haneke, on Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005). But it's the Austrian's breakthrough thriller, Funny Games, that comes most readily to mind while watching Cherry Tree Lane, despite the fact that director Paul Andrew Williams insists he has seen neither the 1997 nor the 2007 version of Haneke's bleak hostage scenario.

With a title that slyly refers to Mary Poppins (1965) and a mood that recalls A Clockwork Orange (1971), this is a very British affair that exposes the chasm that has opened up between the insular white middle-classes and the rest of society. The action occasionally comes close to reinforcing racial stereotypes, with one rapacious incident being particularly disconcerting. But this isn't supposed to be an easy watch and Williams's use of tight close-ups compels the audience to confront the chilling reality of the situation and the extent to which we have become desensitised to brutality through constant exposure in the media.

Bickering suburban bourgeois Rachael Blake and Tom Butcher are disturbed during dinner by the doorbell. However, a second ring sees Jumayn Hunter, Ashley Chin and Sonny Muslim burst in and leave Butcher beaten and bound on the floor, while Blake sits bleeding on the sofa. The interlopers demand to know the whereabouts of the couple's teenage son, Tom Kane, and settle in to wait on learning that he won't be home until 9pm.

Hunter is the ringleader, as he wants revenge on Kane for grassing up his cousin. But he is far from the brains of the operation and Chin watches his intemperate and inexpert efforts at intimidation with weary dismay. Having dispatched Muslim to a local shop to max out Butcher's plastic, Hunter begins eyeing up Blake, while Chin goes through the family DVD collection with incomprehension at the number of foreign films. He also has trouble using the remote for the television before he calls his mum to ask her to record a programme that's about to start.

But the tone darkens as Hunter bundles Blake into the next room and Chin apologises to Butcher for his boorishness. He gently taunts Butcher for knowing so little about his son and how stupid he has been for sending Hunter's cousin to jail. But the atmosphere changes again with the arrival of Jennie Jacques and Corinne Douglas, who have not only brought the hatchet that Hunter has requested, but also Jacques's younger brother, Kieran Dooner, who is dispatched to the kitchen to be spared the carnage that's about to ensue.

Williams resolutely refuses to take sides here. Blake and Butcher make a far from sympathetic pair. But, while it's impossible not to empathise with their plight, the thugs are anything but demonised, with Chin's reading difficulties and Hunter's twisted code of loyalty suggesting that these are youths who have been betrayed by the system rather than natural born tearaways. Yet in eschewing easy identification with the characters, Williams relies too heavily on caricatured shorthand and reneges on passing any meaningful social comment. Consequently, the action veers between the gratuitous and the contrived, particularly after Kane finally gets back from football practice and Butcher makes a bid for freedom.

Carlos Catalan's insistent camerawork reinforces the sense of menace and trepidation and the performances are persuasively naturalistic. But Williams dissipates both tension and revulsion by keeping the more unsettling occurrences off screen, while his readiness to settle for the generic renders this as disappointing as The Cottage (2008) as a follow-up to his exceptional debut, London to Brighton (2006).

Simeon Halligan's Splintered is a considerably less intriguing chiller. Nevertheless, he and cinematographer Michael Costelloe make solid use of an imposing edifice in Delamere Forest, while production designer Paul Kondras devises some suitably musty interiors for the abandoned orphanage that harbours a ghoulish secret.

Haunted by childhood memories of intruders in her bedroom, Holly Weston is fascinated by nocturnal creatures and ventures into North Wales in search of a fabled monster with her friends. They're a pretty fotofit bunch: Jonathan Readwin is a camcorder nerd, whose blonde sister Sadie Pickering is dating cocky Sacha Dhawan, while hunky Sol Heras hopes that a few nights camping under the stars will advance his cause with the singularly disinterested Weston. He spots a chance to make a move after Dhawan mocks Weston for still being a virgin during a campfire feud, but she resists his clumsy attempt at seduction and insists they investigate when she hears a noise in the undergrowth. They soon find themselves crawling through a hole in the wall of a derelict pile on the edge of the woods, but they're far from alone.

One of the more irksome aspects of the first third of this film is Halligan's reliance on false shocks and he follows Weston's car nightmare with another bogus scare after Heras is attacked in the darkness and she is knocked cold while trying to flee. However, he partially atones with a suspenseful sequence in which Weston attempts to escape from the tiny room in which she's been barricaded by the sinister Stephen Walters. But, for all her ingenuity, Weston is quickly recaptured and only breaks free again after the beast goes on the rampage and starts picking off her surviving pals.

When it comes, the explanation is told in a cumbersome flashback by Fr Colin Tierney, who has come to vanquish the siblings who slaughtered his mentor years before. This resort to a paedophile priest, having already rooted Weston's troubles in an abusive father, feels a little desperate. But the contravention of the Final Girl rubric is enterprising and the denouement brutally slick, even if Tom Grimshaw and Celia Haining's frantically fragmented editing makes it nigh on impossible to see what is actually going on (as is the case in so many modern horrors) .

Finally, there's a merciful return to quality with the reissue of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963). Unfortunately, the chances of seeing the 205-minute version that won the Palme d'or at Cannes before 20th Century-Fox butchered the picture for its American release now seem remote, but the digital restoration supervised by Martin Scorsese (and based on the 1990 cut mentored by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno) makes a pretty fine consolation prize. Indeed, with Mario Garbuglia's 1860s production design and Piero Tosi's costumes being captured in a glorious widescreen sweep by Rotunno's Technicolor camera, this adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's posthumous novel remains one of the most magisterial period dramas ever made.

With Garibaldi's red shirts on the march, Sicilian prince Burt Lancaster knows that Italian unification cannot be far away. He has cheerfully acquiesced in Bourbon rule from Naples and led his family in acts of Catholic piety in their private chapel, but, when nephew Alain Delon comes to ask his permission to join the rebels, Lancaster is too much of a pragmatist to stand in his way, especially as a hero in the family might just protect its lands from the sweeping reforms that will inevitably follow the demise of the old guard. Indeed, such is Lancaster's willingness to bend with the wind that, when Delon returns in triumph, he encourages him to distance himself from the aristocratic Lucilla Morlacchi in order to court Claudia Cardinale, the daughter of Paolo Stoppa, the boorish mayor of Donnafugata whose mercantile wealth will help Delon establish himself in the new society.

Reflecting the contradictions inherent in both Italian politics and the director's own life - as Luchino Visconti di Madrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was also a committed Marxist - this is a compellingly complex analysis the Risorgimento that also exposes the fissures in a nation still coming to terms with its recent Fascist past. The social commentary is particularly devastating during Lancaster's encounters with Stoppa and Cardinale, first at a dinner in their honour (when Cardinale's earthy laugh appals the blue-blooded guests) and then at the climactic ball, which accounts for the last third of the action. But the quieter moments Lancaster shares with wife Rina Morelli and confessor Romolo Valli are equally revealing of his attitudes to status, fidelity and faith.

Delon and Cardinale make a splendid match. But the real frisson is between Cardinale and Lancaster, especially when they dance to Nino Rota's intoxicating score. However, he refuses to contemplate the possibility of an affair for the same reason that he declines a seat in the Turin parliament, as while he is prepared to build bridges between the old and new orders, he wants no part in an alien future.

Combining the neo-realism of La Terra trema (1948) with the opulence of Senso (1954), Viscontii makes evocative use of the rough Sicilian landscape and the sumptuous palace interiors. But he also captures the aching melancholy in Lancaster's soul, as he looks back on mistakes and misdeeds with a weary resignation that reflects both Lampedusa's lament for his class and Visconti's fear that the revolution will be stopped by the insufferable, self-serving bourgeoisie.