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The result of four years' research and filmed with laudable detachment in sombre monochrome, this emotionally wrenching epic recalls the 1937-38 occupation of the former Chinese capital that saw some 300,000 inhabitants perish at the hands of their Japanese foe. Often recalling Roberto Rossellini's neo-realist studies of war-torn Europe and the less overtly Socialist Realist combat dramas produced behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s, this is a defiantly non-melodramatic reconstruction. Indeed, it says much for the commendable balance of Lu's version that his principal character is Japanese sergeant Hideo Nakaizumi, who recognises the depravity of the duties he is forced to perform, but is too inured to military discipline to protest.

In the front rank of the invasion force that captures China's wartime capital in just four days, Nakaizumi witnesses the extermination of resistance fighters led by Liu Ye. However, he retains a modicum of compassion and extends some bashful charity to Yuko Miyamoto, one of the comfort women who have been imported to fulfil the soldiers' sexual needs. But not even Nakaizumi can resist the dictates of sadistic platoon commander Ryu Kohata, when the safety zone is infiltrated in March 1938.

Events within the embassy enclave are presented with an identical emphasis on doing whatever it takes to survive. The central figure here is Fan Wei - who is the longtime assistant of John Rabe (John Paisley) - whose priority is protecting his pampered wife, Qin Lan, their young daughter and his spirited sister-in-law. At one point, Fan commits an act of heinous treachery in order to secure diplomatic immunity for his family. But he suffers a double loss before redeeming himself with a final act of nobility when the foreigners are forced to leave the zone. A parallel subplot involving teacher Gao Yuanyuan and reformed prostitute Jiang Yiyan proves equally affecting, particularly during the sequences in which the women are marched into a cavernous church in order to volunteer for brothel service and Gao risks her life to save her friends during a round-up of unmarried men.

Whether depicting guerilla rearguards, mass executions and triumphalist victory marches or moments of quiet dignity, selfless courage and poignant intimacy, Lu retains total control over the aesthetic and emotional tone of this remarkable picture. Cao Yu's handheld widescreen imagery and Yi Hao's harrowingly authentic sets palpably convey the sense of physical and spiritual decimation that is ably reinforced by the estimable ensemble. But what leaves the most indelible impression is Lu's melancholic appreciation of the dismay that was ultimately felt on both sides at the bestial depths to which humanity could descend.

The epic and the intimate are combined to more modest effect in 24 City, Jia Zhangke's adroit blend of fact and artifice that reminisces about half of century of production at Factory 420 on the outskirts of the south-western town of Chengdu.

From 1958 onwards, the plant developed into a mini-metropolis, with its own housing, cinema, sports facilities and schools, as workers from across China were force-migrated to Sichuan province. Yet, they had curiously little contact with the locals, even after it switched in the mid-1980s from making aviation engines to consumer goods. Alumni like Hou Lijun recall with little nostalgia the decline that culminated in the site being demolished to make way for luxury apartments, business offices and a theme park, although repairman He Xikun still pines for the self-sufficient camaraderie of the Great Leap Forward.

But Jia isn't content with an authentic chronicle and, about 30 minutes in, he allows four fictional characters to tell their stories, with Lu Liping complaining about the lengthy boat journey to reach the plant, Shanghai exile Joan Chen swooning over her first romance, personal shopper Zhao Tao harking back to her schooldays and TV presenter Chen Jianbin contrasting the old and the new. While it worked in Still Life, Jia's insistence that history is an amalgam of truth and imagination feels less persuasive in this awkward exercise in self-reflexivity. Yet he still passes trenchant comment on the difficulty of sustaining economic expansion and warns that China itself may eventually find labour being supplanted by leisure if the free market experiment isn't brought under control.

A small rural community is struck by tragedy in Bong Joon-ho's Mother, which is much closer in tone to his 2003 serial killer drama, Memories of Murder, than the more extravagant creature feature, The Host (2006). However, with Lee Byeong-woo's score evoking Bernard Herrmann and the plot twists drawing comparisons with Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), this is clearly a homage to Alfred Hitchcock that also exposes the darker side of South Korean society.

Weon Bin is an educationally challenged 27 year-old, who still lives with his widowed mother Kim Hye-ja. Known around the town for dealing in medicinal herbs and performing illegal acupuncture procedures, Kim is fiercely protective of her impressionable son and deeply resents his friendship with local tearaway Jin Gu, who constantly teases Weon about not having lost his virginity. Indeed, Jin is such a bad influence that when Weon is knocked over by a speeding Mercedes, he insists that they track it to the local golf club and exact revenge. Weon is more interested in collecting golf balls, but he finds himself in the middle of a fracas that quickly comes back to haunt him.

Later that night, having drunk too much after Jin stands him up at a bar, Weon tries to chat up a schoolgirl, who resists his approaches with a volley of stones. Next morning, however, she is found dead on the roof of a nearby building with a golf ball inscribed with Weon's name beside her. Naturally, the police arrest him and coerce him into signing a confession. But Kim is convinced of her son's innocence and begins delving into the victim's life and has to confront her own past in the process. Meanwhile, Weon is beginning to find prison something of a strain and his anguish unleashes some long-suppressed memories.

Although few viewers will recognise Weon as a onetime teen idol and Kim as the loving matriarch from the popular TV series The Rustic Diary, most will appreciate the skill of the performances in this increasingly compelling study of secrets and lies. Despite opening in an almost comic vein, as Bong emphasises Weon's harmless doltishness, this gradually settles into becoming an intense mystery, whose unexpected developments fail to deflect Kim's determination to clear Weon's name.

Atmospherically photographed by Hong Gyeong-pyo, this has been compared to an Almodóvar melodrama in its highly strung final sequences. But it's the Hitchcockian themes of the wrong man, mother love and evil in the everyday that make this so tense and audacious, although even the Master of Suspense wouldn't have attempted anything as shocking as this film's lacerating denouement.

Yorgos Lanthimos's compellingly provocative Dogtooth also caused quite a stir on its theatrical release. Utterly refusing to explain the rationale behind its bizarre, enclosed milieu and employing a dark Buñuelian logic that is both gleefully grotesque and surreally satirical, this is one of the most savage assaults on bourgeois insularity, patriarchal authoritarianism and youthful ignorance in years. Moreover, it also ranks among the most hilarious horror films ever made.

Although father Christos Stergioglou drives off to work each morning, he leaves wife Michelle Valley and their teenage children, Hristos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni, behind the high fence that cocoons their well-appointed home from the surrounding countryside. Despite having been subjected to misleading tape-recorded vocabulary lessons to curtail their curiosity about the wider world, the siblings are as fiercely intelligent as they are accepting and it's dismayingly amusing to see them acquiesce in such parental dictates as aeroplanes being mere toys (that occasionally crash-land in the garden) and cats having an insatiable hunger for juvenile flesh. But there's something infinitely more malign about Stergioglou paying factory security guard Anna Kalaitzidou to satisfy Passalis's growing sexual urges and it's her introduction of the notion of consumerism that eventually sews the seeds of discontent within the dystopic Eden that Stergioglou and Valley have taken such pains to create.

Many of the fabrications are splendidly perverse, whether it's Stergioglou filling the swimming pool with fish and then killing them with a harpoon to protect his adoring daughters or his insistence that Frank Sinatra's rendition of `Fly Me to the Moon' is a recording of their grandfather. The home movies the kids are allowed to watch as a treat and the dance display they stage in gratitude are equally freakish. However, the whispered bedroom conversations between the parents (while hardcore pornography plays in the background) become increasingly fraught and an air of inevitability descends after Papoulia stabs her brother and blackmails Kalaitzidou into loaning her the videos she finds in her bag. Yet nothing quite prepares the viewer for the ferocity of Stergioglou's retribution or the tragedy of Papoulia's bungled escape bid.

Chillingly designed by Stavros Hrysogiannis and photographed from an admirable array of alienating angles by Thimios Bakatatakis, this Cannes prize winner is a terrifyingly credible study of parental megalomania and tyrannical social conditioning. The performances are impeccable, with the contrast between the ever-watchful adults and the somnambulistically infantilised offspring being teasingly maintained by the calculatingly claustrophobic and rigidly controlled direction. Despite reinforcing the mood of dastardly dysfunction with veiled, but still sinister allusions to abuse and incest, Lanthimos refuses to pass judgement. Yet he consistently coerces the audience into confronting the discomfiting issues he raises.

Another complex sibling relationship dominates Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro, which boasts the director's first original screenplay since The Conversation (1974). However, this is never as intricate or effective as that exceptional treatise on an audience's complicity in the action it views and seems to owe less to American cinema than the theatrical tradition established by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Nevertheless, for all the sentimental pomposity of its melodramatic denouement, this is a meticulously made film by a once-undisputed titan who has been struggling to recapture his best form for nearly three decades.

Forced to dock in Buenos Aires when his cruise ship develops engine trouble, 17 year-old waiter Alden Ehrenreich goes in search of older brother Vincent Gallo, who fled home when he was a boy to pursue his writing career. He finds him shacked up in the bohemian La Boca district with dancer Maribel Verdu and nursing a broken leg. However, Gallo is far from pleased to see his sibling and suspects he has been sent to spy on him by their conductor father, Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Eventually, Gallo is persuaded to be more hospitable by the genial Verdu, although he still refuses to discuss family matters, particularly how his mother was killed in a car accident and Ehrenreich's came to be in a nine-year coma. Instead, Gallo allows Ehrenreich to meet the theatre crowd for whom he designs the lighting and, during a highly camp production of Faust, he introduces him to influential critic Carmen Maura, who announces the inauguration of a new writer's prize at a forthcoming festival in Patagonia.

Having stumbled upon Gallo's discarded writings and cracked their mirror-writing code, Ehrenreich begins to transcribe the material and is assisted by Verdu, who even brings scraps of paper to his hospital room after Ehrenreich also breaks his leg in attempting to save bartender Rodrigo de la Serna's puppy from being run over by a bus. However, Gallo discovers the treachery and Ehrenreich is forced to move in with producer Mike Amigorena, while he completes his manuscript and has it included on Maura's shortlist.

Verdu accompanies Ehrenreich on the journey south, in the course of which he is seduced by actress Leticia Brédice and her niece, Sofía Castiglione. But the triumph of winning the award is short-lived, as Gallo arrives with some news that will change their relationship forever.

The folly of youth has been a recurring theme in the films of French director André Téchiné and he dwells once more on the muddled motives behind a momentous action in The Girl on the Train. Adapted by Jean-Marie Besset from his own stage play, this unsettling story was inspired by the notorious 2004 case of Marie L, who claimed to have been attacked on the RER between Louvres and Sarcelles stations by a gang of anti-Semitic black and Arab youths, who cut her hair and drew swastikas on her torso while her fellow passengers sat idly by.

Dividing the action into segments entitled 'Circumstances' and 'Consequences', Téchiné concentrates on unemployed, rollerblading twentysomething Emilie Dequenne, who lives in the Parisian suburbs with child-minder mother Catherine Deneuve. Having failed to land a secretarial post with the law firm run by her father's Jewish army buddy, Michel Blanc, Dequenne hooks up with aspiring wrestler Nicolas Duvauchelle, who finds them a job as live-in caretakers of a warehouse that acts as a front for a drug smuggling operation. However, Duvauchelle is arrested after he is knifed by a desperate customer and Deneuve consults Blanc about defending him. But it's Dequenne's account of her assault that most intrigues Blanc, especially when it causes such a media storm that the president himself rallies to her cause.

Having delineated Dequenne's backstory with such meticulous realism, Téchiné proceeds to marginalise it in order to explore the relationships between the other principals and show how domestic travails are not exclusively the preserve of the lower classes. Despite working with feisty ex-daughter-in-law Rona Elkabetz, Blanc is estranged from son Mathieu Demy, who prefers flitting around the world on politically contentious assignments to getting to know his 13 year-old son, Jeremy Quagedebeur. Moreover, like Deneuve, Blanc is widowed and lonely, and he is hurt when she stands him up at a concert at St Eustache.

Yet while Téchiné succeeds in linking the families' fates, he struggles to deliver a convincing denouement, as Dequenne and Deneuve are invited to Blanc's country retreat and Quagedebeur shames Dequenne into admitting her fabrication during a thunderstorm tête-à-tête in his annexe bedroom. As ever, Téchiné tackles a thorny issue with a commendable mix of unflinching commitment and canny equilibrium. But while Julien Hirsch ably captures the characters' contrasting milieux, the action often seems to drift, especially when focusing on Demy and Elkabetz. Moreover, the ebullient Dequenne never seems so detached from reality or sufficiently crushed by her various vicissitudes to explain such a flagrant and ultimately high-profile lie. Thus, while this is always acute in its insights into modern French politics and culture, it's less persuasive as a human drama.

The enduring influence of the nouvelle vague can be felt in Benoît Jacquot's Villa Amalia, which makes more thrilling use of elliptical editing than any picture in recent memory. With Luc Barnier's fragmented juxtapositions creating an exhilarating sense of narrative momentum, while also helping to convey the enigmatic heroine's confused state, this adaptation of a novel by Pascal Quignard is Jacquot's fifth collaboration with Isabelle Huppert and it's easily their best.

The action opens on a rainy windscreen, as Huppert follows lover Thomas Beauvois to a rendez-vous with his mistress in the Parisian suburb of Choissy-le-Roi. However, just as she is about to return to her car, Huppert bumps into Jean-Hugues Anglade, a long-lost friend from her Breton childhood, who recognises her distress and offers her a drink to calm her down. They reminisce uneasily about his recently deceased mother before Huppert returns home for a showdown with Beauvois that causes her to realise that she has had enough of her supposedly idyllic existence as a pianist-cum-composer with an international reputation and a luxurious apartment.

Ordering Beauvois to leave, Huppert cancels her engagements, puts her property on the market and begins the complex process of dispensing with everything she owns and vanishing into anonymity. Anglade offers her a cosy room adjoining his country home, but she only wants his support in facilitating her disappearance by allowing her to bank her savings in his account and open a shared PO box for urgent mail. With all her transactions completed, Huppert takes a train and embarks upon a journey south that sees her change clothes and hairstyle, as she slowly leaves her old self behind.

Eventually landing in Naples, Huppert spots a villa on the brow of an incline while swimming in the bay and persuades elderly owner Clara Bindi to let her move in. Retaining the simple décor, she is soon joined by Maya Sansa, a free-spirited younger woman who had rescued Huppert from the Mediterranean after she got a cramp, and Anglade is surprised to discover that they have become an item when he pays a visit.

However, Huppert's retreat from reality is temporarily thwarted by the death of her mother, Michelle Marquais. She returns to the northern French coast for the funeral, only to encounter Peter Arens, the father who encouraged her to play the piano before abandoning her when she was still a small girl. But the reunion only confirms Huppert's conviction that she has made the right decision.

Capturing the changing colours as Huppert crosses the continent, Caroline Champetier's crisp photography consistently locates the fugitive in the diverse environments that bring her closer to her true self. Jump-cutting their way through the frustrating bureaucratic processes of starting again, Jacquot and Barnier impart an irresistible energy that is provocatively contrasted with the close-ups of Huppert's impassive face, as she passes through majestic landscapes in Germany, Switzerland and Italy to the accompaniment of Bruno Coulais's emotive score.

Nothing is explained, whether it's Huppert's sudden rejection of success, the one-night stand with a stranger in transit or her lesbian dalliance. Yet, even though she treats Marquais, Anglade and Sanya with blithe indifference, she manages to remain eminently empathetic during her uphill struggle to the peace that the villa provides (which has been shrewdly compared to Ingrid Bergman's road to redemption in Roberto Rossellini's 1950 drama, Stromboli).

The attempts of some critics to compare Uros Stojanovic's Tears for Sale, with the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet are slightly more strained, however. The most expensive picture produced in Serbia to date, this is undoubtedly a beguiling fantasy. But the humour is even darker than in Delicatessen (1991) and the sense of enchantment is much lustier than in Amélie (2001). Moreover, this adult fairy-tale is so steeped in Slavic folklore and the country's troubled recent history that it's much more difficult for non-Serbs to appreciate its full satirical, symbolic and political meaning. Perhaps contrasts with the dazzling pictures of Emir Kusturica might be more apt.

Some time after the Great War, sisters Katarina Radivojevic and Sonja Kolacaric make a living as professional mourners in a remote mountain village. Pokrp only has one surviving male. But, when the siblings accidentally allow their feelings to get the better of them, they succeed in killing gnarled veteran Paolo Magelli and are given three days to find a replacement male or their deceased grandmother (Olivera Katarina) will suffer the consequences of a witch's curse. The blonde, bashful Kolacaric and the brash brunette Radivojevic soon encounter Charleston-dancing smoothie Stefan Kapicic and his human cannonball buddy Nenad Jezdic and they agree to return to Pokrp. However, the newcomers soon stir passions and Radivojevic soon finds herself having to fight to keep Kapicic for herself.

Packed with extravagant special effects and impeccably staged set-pieces, this is an entertaining, if sometimes exhausting epic. However, magic realist moments like the visitation of the spectral husbands after the womenfolk down glasses of spider vodka lack the natural exuberance of the sequences in which a bare-footed Radivojevic smashes glasses as she stomps on a table top in order to catch Kapicic's eye and then as the couple dances in a minefield, which had been planted at the outbreak of war to protect the women and ended up only imprisoning them. Boldly scored by Shigeru Umebayashi to match the panache of Dusan Ivanovic's cinematography, Veljko Despotovic's sets and Ksenija Terzovic's costumes, this is boisterously played by a fine ensemble - although the chemistry between Radivojevic and Kapicic makes them stand out as the feisty virgin with a voracious appetite for life and the preening dandy. The debuting Stojanovic's direction is also splendid, as it shifts adeptly between broad humour, wild fancy and, ultimately, poignant melodrama.

The supernatural is also central to Javier Fuentes-Léon's debut feature, Undertow. Set in a remote Peruvian fishing village and exploring the homophobia that persists in communities deeply in thrall to machismo and Catholicism, this is a sincere and carefully made picture. But it too often opts for magic realism when a neo-realist approach might have been more appropriate.

A pillar of Fr Julio Humberto Cavero's church and about to have a baby with wife Tatiana Astengo, fisherman Cristian Mercado is much admired by family and neighbours alike. When his cousin dies, he helps José Chacaltana and Emilram Cossio carry the bier for the outdoor funeral and then escorts the body for burial at sea, in order to free its spirit. However, Mercado is also conducting a clandestine affair with Manolo Cardona, a bourgeois painter he knows from childhood holidays. They meet at secret rendezvous away from prying eyes and indulge in energetic sex. But Cardona wants Mercado to acknowledge their love and stalks off in frustration after the latest of their recurrent contretemps.

A couple of days later, Mercado is aghast to discover Cardona waiting in his kitchen and is even more amazed when Astengo walks past without noticing him. But, instead of being distraught that his friend has drowned in the treacherous tidal currents, Mercado is excited by the prospect of having a spectral romance that no one can criticise or disrupt. A montage follows, in which the couple enjoy their new-found freedom. But Mercado hasn't told Cardona that he has found his corpse on the ocean bed and lashed it to a rock to ensure that his spirit remains restless.

The idyll is doomed, however, as teenage maid Cindy Diáz exacts her revenge for Mercado rejecting her advances during a beach party by spreading gossip about the nude sketches and paintings she has found in Cardona's shack, while looking for somewhere to canoodle with her boyfriend. Mercado denies the accusations, but Chacaltana and Cossio refuse to celebrate the birth of his son and Astengo decides to leave him when he confesses everything after Cardona's remains are recovered. Finally, stung into facing up to his responsibilities, Mercado persuades Cardona's city-dwelling mother to let him carry out the local ritual and the film ends with Mercado sailing back alone to face an uncertain future.

Handsomely photographed in the village of Cabo Blanco by Mauricio Vidal, this owes less to life than the tele-novellas that Astengo insists that Mercado watches instead of the football. Indeed, Fuentes-Léon strews the action with equally hoary clichés, whether depicting the labours and leisure of the rugged trawlermen, the contented domesticity of the womenfolk or the conservative attitude of the entire community to homosexuality. The earnestness of the performances makes this easy enough to watch. But it's far too intent on avoiding offence to do more than reinforce stereotypes in meekly pleading for tolerance.

Israeli film-maker, Haim Tabakman, examines the impact of a gay relationship on a fiercely conservative community with considerably more gravity in Eyes Wide Open, which sees family man Zohar Strauss reopen his late father's kosher butcher's shop, only to raise the hackles of the worthies at his yeshiva by employing the much younger Ran Danker, who has arrived in Jerusalem with a bad reputation and a broken heart from a gay romance.

Withholding the truth about Danker's past from Tinkerbell, the dutiful wife of his four children, Strauss resists the urgings of rabbi Tzahi Grad and the local `purity police' to cast out the stranger. Indeed, he not only invites him into his home for the Friday meal, but also allows him to sleep in the shop's cluttered storeroom. However, following an excursion to an immersion pool on the outskirts of the city, Strauss succumbs to his growing passion for his assistant and they embark upon a torrid affair that threatens both Strauss's standing within his tight-knit community and his safety, after hot-headed zealots brick his store and plaster the neighbourhood walls with pashkavil posters outing him as a sinner.

Tautly scripted by Merav Doster and played with commendable sobriety by a fine cast, this is bound to provoke controversy. Yet rather than setting out to shock, Tabakman clearly seeks to show how a devout man can remain true to his strict orthodox faith and remain a decent citizen while also being homosexual. The fact that Strauss and Danker seem more physically than emotionally attracted saps some of the story's moral intensity, which could have been rectified by extending the scholarly debates about temptation and redemption.

More might also have been made of the parallel scandal involving a female shopkeeper following her heart despite being promised in marriage to another by her highly traditional father. But Tabakman makes evocative use of eloquent silences and enclosed spaces, particularly during Strauss's clumsy attempts to reassure Tinkerbell (and himself) that their union remains solid. Moreover, he tempers the more melodramatic aspects with a sociological authenticity that confirms the centrality of belief and belonging to Jewish culture.

Elia Suleiman is often compared to Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton for the deadpan manner in which he dissects daily life in the Occupied Territories. But his chief inspirations are Robert Bresson and Hou Hsiao-hsien and their precision and economy are evident in every frame of The Time That Remains.

Completing the trilogy started with Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) and Divine Intervention (2002), this deeply personal history of Nazareth from 1948 to the present day confirms Suleiman among the most acute and trenchant observers of the Palestinian situation. Retaining the technique of wryly observing minor incidents and revealing character traits from a detached distance, Suleiman also stars as a returning exile, who thinks back on his family's experiences during a taxi ride from the airport.

Sixty years earlier, Fuad (Saleh Bakri) had refused to follow his parents and sister to Jordan, electing instead to take up arms against the Israelis seizing territory for their newly established state. However, as he dodges patrols to link up with his comrades, civic dignitaries assemble to sign over birthrights and the formality of the ceremony contrasts starkly with the confusion erupting fitfully on the streets. Pausing to witness casual acts of looting and oppression, Bakri is eventually arrested and savagely beaten before being tossed over a wall to certain death.

However, he survives to marry his sweetheart (Samar Tanus) and father Elia (Zuhair Abu Hanna), a spirited son who is frequently chastised at school for denouncing American imperialism and refusing to sing patriotic Hebrew songs with sufficient enthusiasm on National Day. When not watching screenings of Zionist allegories like Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), Elia listens without conviction to the latest piece of gossip from his short-sighted Aunt Olga (Isabelle Ramadan) and takes note of his father's frequent nocturnal fishing trips and his guarded conversations with a cantankerous neighbour (Tarek Qubti), who is rarely averse to shouting anti-Israeli slogans and attempting self-immolation when in his cups.

Consequently, after Fuad is jailed for supposedly smuggling arms from the Lebanon, the now-teenage Elia (Ayman Espanioli) begins to sympathise with the cause of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Shortly afterwards, he is forced to flee after he is denounced for tearing an Israeli flag.

On his Christmas return as a middle-aged man, Elia (Suleiman) finds it almost impossible to communicate with his widowed mother (Shafika Bajjali), who can't forgive him for either his reckless act of political opposition or for being forced to abandon his father so soon after he had undergone open-heart surgery. Attempts at reviving fond memories through old songs misfire and Elia spends more time reacquainting himself with his hometown and some long-lost friends. Yet, even though much of what he witnesses can only appal him, he remains impassive as he watches a mischievous resident being followed by an Israeli tank as he disposes of his rubbish and a jeep patrol closing down a disco for infringing the curfew.

Making droll use of running gags to emphasise how little Arab-Israeli tensions have changed over six decades, Suleiman combines irony, surrealism and political critique with a deceptive skill that is reinforced by the poignant subtlety of his Keatonesque performance. He also excellently served by production designer Sharif Waked and cinematographer Marc-André Batigne, whose views of the Nazareth skyline are frequently framed by walls and arches to emphasise the extent to which Palestinians are enclosed within a pitiless society.

Finally, the pathos of another declining macho culture is captured in all its taciturn insignificance in Babak Jalali's offbeat debut, Frontier Blues. However, in dwelling on the soul-crushing repetitiveness of life on the Turkmen-Iranian border, Jalali generates his own ennui, as he fails to provide much insight into the principals or their morose steppe existence.

The focus is divided between slow-witted donkey owner Abolfazl Karimi, his outfitter uncle Behzad Shahrivari, restless chicken farmer Mahmoud Kalteh and testy minstrel Khajeh Araz Dordi. Still embittered by the abduction of his wife by a local shepherd, the latter has allowed himself to be roped into accompanying a patronising Tehran photographer, as he drives around in search of authentic images of everyday life. In fact, all his pictures are posed and riddled with clichés and Jalali amusingly shows him missing socio-culturally significant activities as he meticulously arranges Dordi and his teenage acolytes in the frame.

However, Jalali is equally prone to repetition, as he exposes the frustrations endured by the residents of Golestan Province. Between cigarettes in the doorway, Shahrivari endlessly folds the quaintly unfashionable stock that is never quite what his customers require. Kalteh is similarly stuck in a routine, as when he is not feeding the poultry in a vast shed, he is either teaching himself English so he can get a job in Baku or gazing at Karima Adebibe, the only marriageable women for miles around, as she potters around her father's remote house. Even Karimi is set in his ways, as he chomps on dried apricots, makes prank phone calls and plays Françoise Hardy's `Tous les garçons et les filles' on his cassette player.

Yet, while Dordi's encounters with the photographer and garrulous driver George Hashemzadeh raise a few smiles and Kalteh's dream of wedded bliss is achingly melancholic, too little happens at too slow a pace to engross. Essentially shooting still lifes and portraits against dramatic landscapes or humble dwellings, Shahriar Assadi achieves some striking images. But, for all their gentle humour and evident fondness, Jalali's reminiscences lack an anthropological rigour to match their audiovisual austerity.