By the Letter of the Law

However, no country has benefited more from this screen renaissance than Romania, whose new wave continues to go from strength to strength with Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective.

Having won the Caméra d'or at Cannes for 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), his hilariously revisionist take on the 1989 Romanian revolution, Porumboiu surpasses himself with this chilling insight into the extent to which things have really changed since the coming of democracy. Tackling such complex issues as language, the law and the long reach of history, this is also a stylistically ambitious picture that compellingly combines long stretches of mundane activity with taut sequences of intricate verbal dexterity.

Dragos Bucur is an undercover cop in the north-eastern city of Vaslui, who has been detailed by inspector Ion Stoica to shadow teenager Radu Costin, who is suspected of being a drug dealer. Following him from his apartment in a drab tenement, Bucur watches Costin sneak away with classmates Alexandru Sabadac and Anca Diaconu for a crafty smoke on some wasteland near a toddlers' playground. He also spends hours lurking outside Sabadac's family home, noting the comings and goings of his parents and the disappearance of an older brother, who is probably responsible for smuggling the dope into the country. Yet, even though he has collected a couple of joints, Bucur is far from convinced that Costin is a danger to society.

When he's not on stakeout duty or setting slowly turning bureaucratic wheels in motion back at headquarters, Bucur is bickering with new wife Irina Saulescu, either over her repeated playing of a corny pop song on her laptop or the imprecise use of grammar. Ironically, it's a linguistic matter that proves Bucur's downfall, as he is subjected to a grilling by martinet captain Vlad Ivanov, who makes him look up the words he uses so casually in his report to demonstrate the rigidity of the Romanian legal system.

Photographed in long realist takes by Marius Panduru, this is a darkly satirical, yet insidiously disconcerting study of routine and rubric. Moreover, it's an acute dissection of a society trapped between its totalitarian past and a pan-European future. Bucur is unwilling to prosecute Costin, as he will receive a life-ruining sentence for something that would merely be deemed a minor misdemeanour under incoming EU legislation. But, having spent days scrupulously avoiding his superiors, his humiliation by Ivanov suggests that not everyone is yet prepared to relinquish trusted methods.

Exposing the absurdity of much detective work and the growing inability to communicate in the new media age, this is a deceptively trenchant film that ends the drolly interminable scenes of surveillance and beadledom with a resounding thump, as the iron fist of authoritarianism crushes any notions of personal initiative.

If Police, Adjective is a remarkable exercise in minimalism, Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's Bella is slight to the point of futility. Indeed, it's difficult to understand why this dramatically negligible and tooth-rottingly saccharine weepie has secured a UK release four years after it was made.

Ever since his football career ended suddenly in tragic disgrace, Eduardo Verástegui has been struggling to get his life back on track. He works as a chef in brother Manny Perez's New York eaterie, but he takes little pride, let alone pleasure in the dishes he produces and is only roused from his lethargy when Perez fires waitress Tammy Blanchard for persistent lateness. Abandoning his kitchen in the middle of preparations for a make-or-break sitting, Verástegui rushes after Blanchard and they proceed to spend the kind of day that only existed in kitschy 1940s Christmas romcoms.

Blanchard confesses that she is pregnant by a man who no longer cares for her and she worries how she is going to cope without a job. However, Verástegui introduces her to a rival restaurateur, who proceeds to hire her on the spot. They then take a trip to the coast to meet Verástegui's parents, Angélica Aragón and Jaime Terelli, as well as his younger brother, Ramon Rodríguez, who has asked his mother to cook a traditional Mexican dinner in order to impress apple of his eye, Ali Landry. Naturally, the evening is a huge success, even though Perez is furious with his sibling for jeopardising his business and Verástegui finally has to confront the psychological ramifications of the car accident that left a child dead and his reputation in tatters.

Complete with a cosy coda that typifies this latterday fairy-tale's determined optimism, this undeniably amiable picture unaccountably won the audience award at the Toronto Film Festival. Yet, for all its good intentions, this is emotionally manipulative, vacuously elliptical and relentlessly sentimental. The performances are fine. But Andrew Cadelago's camerawork and Fernando Villena's editing contribute to a stylistic hotchpotch that only serves to emphasise the tele-novelettishness of Patrick Million's tacky and clumsily structured script, which drops in backstory revelations whenever it meanders into another dead-end. Moreover, it also raises issues like immigration, the recession, celebrity responsibility and the place of family in an increasingly fragmented society without ever developing them beyond a hook for the next vacuous conversation.

This may well find an appreciative audience on DVD and the small screen may also prove to be the best place for Chris Smith's Collapse, which affords a platform for the strongly held and trenchantly expressed opinions of Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD officer who has spent the past three decades disbelieving headline news stories. Both a compelling study of a man on a mission and a terrifying warning about the global ramifications of an oil crisis, this talking-head documentary audaciously allows hard-hitting fact and more specious supposition to compete for the viewer's credulity.

Having come to wider attention in the 1980s after accusing the CIA of involvement in the drug trade, Ruppert became a crusading journalist for his own newsletter, From the Wilderness. A scathing critic of the Bush administration, Ruppert predicted the credit crunch and he is now convinced that a greater catastrophe is inevitable unless humanity changes its mindset. Insisting that market capitalism's trust in infinite growth is a reckless folly based on a lie, he makes his case with a persuasive mix of cogency, passion and gallows humour and not even the odd lapse into hyperbole and contradiction can discredit his plausibly apocalyptic vision of a future without fossil fuel.

Resident in Culver City in California, the chain-smoking Ruppert devotes himself to his dogs and wondering where the next rent payment is going to come from. Yet he has not abandoned his bid to persuade the public to lobby their elected representatives and bring about reform before it is too late. However, in addition to promoting political iconoclasm and such eco theories as self-sufficiency in food, Ruppert is also a firm believer in 9/11 conspiracies and it's telling that Smith elects not to raise this issue on camera, as he allows cinematographers Ed Lachman and Max Malkin to perform elaborate manoeuvres on Andrew Reznik's stark set in order to evoke the style of Errol Morris's The Fog of War (2003). But, if he overdoes this interrogatory gambit, Smith makes able use of archive footage and creates the relaxed environment that allows Ruppert to hold court with an informed fury and candour that makes this tough, but necessary viewing.

Mark Cousins's The First Movie also deserves to be seen. But this engaging treatise on the healing power of cinema is perhaps better suited to the small screen, where it debuted last Christmas. Playfully titled to recall Dennis Hopper's 1971 cult epic, The Last Movie, this is an ambitious attempt to see the world through the eyes of the children of Goptapa, a village in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq that suffered grievously during the 1988 Anfal launched by Saddam Hussein. However, the recurring and often florid voice-over emphasises the televisual feel, while also occasionally deflecting attention from the picture's real stars.

Raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Cousins found film a source of escapism and strength and this conviction was reinforced during a visit to Sarajevo in the early 1990s to show movies to the besieged citizens in an underground venue. The concept of introducing young minds to film is laudable and the joy experienced by the children on viewing Astrid Henning-Jensen's Palle Alone in the World (1949), Mohammad-Ali Talebi's The Boot (1992) Francesco Stefani's The Singing Ringing Tree (1957) and Steven Spielberg's ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982) is inspirational. The same sense of innocent enjoyment is beautifully captured in a sequence depicting them playing with some balloons.

But the heart of the documentary lies in the short films made by the children themselves with the digital video cameras that Cousins provided. There are scenes of larking around and showing off, by boys and girls alike. But, as their confidence grew, the likes of Mushta, Falla and Mohammed began to produce more personal items, with Falla filming the menfolk ending their Ramadan fast and interviewing those who remembered the piteous gas attacks that killed so many members of their families. But it's Mohammed's simple study of a friend playing in an irrigation channel - which Cousins called The Boy and the Mud - that proves most poignant, as the voice-over describes the practical wish of being able to build a house out of the mud and the magical notion of investing in it all the boy's hopes and dreams.

This moment alone justifies the entire enterprise and Cousins is entirely right to draw comparisons between this reverie realism and the work of such acclaimed Kurdish film-makers as Yilmaz Güney and Bahman Ghobadi. But his own film rather drifts into self-indulgence after the last-night screening, in which he shows the locals the children's shorts, the footage he has compiled and Albert Lamorisse's enchanting 1956 Oscar winner, The Red Balloon. But if the CGI animation accompanying Cousins's final musings before heading home and the fond letter he sends to Mohammed from Edinburgh are conspicuously poetic and a touch self-congratulatory, this is excusable in a project whose heart is entirely in the right place and which poignantly links a 15 year-old Belfast lad's love of movies with the newly awakened imaginations of youngsters who have discovered a world beyond war.

It's hard to believe that a quarter of a century has passed since Michael J. Fox starred in Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future. But that's the thing with time. It goes so quickly - whereas film remains as a lasting memory of a specific moment. It's fitting, therefore, that the 25th anniversary of this landmark teenpic should be marked by a reissue that demonstrates just how far special effects have come in the intervening period and how drastically screenwriting standards have dropped.

The story couldn't be simpler. Marty McFly (Fox) is frustrated by life in the sleepy town of Hill Valley. Parents George (Crispin Glover) and Lorraine (Lea Thompson) are genially dysfunctional, but they allow themselves to be bullied by neighbour Biff Tannen (Thomas Wilson). Principal Strickland (James Tolkan) is equally tough on Marty and warns him that his future will be bleak unless he can pull himself out of his slacker nose dive. Yet eccentric scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) knows that Marty is a bright spark and shows him the time machine he has created out of a DeLorean car fuelled by plutonium stolen from some Libyan terrorists.

But, when the Libyans launch a surprise attack and Marty seeks to get away in the souped-up vehicle, he finds himself transported back to 1955, when his parents first met. The trouble is, history keeps threatening to rewrite itself and, unless Marty can ensure that George and Lorraine fall in love, his very existence will be in jeopardy.

Full of smart gags that have since been copied by countless TV shows, including the shamelessly magpiesque Family Guy, this remains hugely engaging and charmingly old-fashioned in a family entertainment kind of way. Michael J. Fox is superb and he's well supported by Glover and Thompson, whose crush on her own son is one of many edgy elements that made this superior to Francis Ford Coppola's similarly themed Peggy Sue Got Married, which emerged in 1986. Unusually, the two sequels were also lively and innovative and it's fascinating to see the light they shed on the 1980s - a decade that nobody in their right mind would want to be nostalgic about - by respectively revisiting 1955 and then hurtling further back to the frontier days of 1885.

Finally, the tone is much more sombre in Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells, as a 12 year-old novice monk has to leave the security of his Irish abbey to find the materials required to complete a magnificent illuminated manuscript. Combining monastic iconography, Celtic design and UPA-style animation, this largely hand-drawn odyssey is visually impressive throughout. However, the narrative is occasionally heavy going, with its complexities likely to confuse or scare the youngest viewers, while the unrelenting earnestness risks exasperating their older siblings.

As the Viking threat becomes an increasing reality, Abbot Cellach busies himself fortifying the monastery at Kells in County Meath. However, his nephew Brendan is bored by having to remain inside its walls and welcomes the distraction provided by the arrival of Brother Aidan and his cat Pangur Ban from the imperilled island of Iona. Aidan has nearly finished a fabulously decorated edition of the gospels. But he needs Brendan to disobey his uncle and fetch him some berries from the enchanted forest to make the finest green ink. While on his errand, Brendan meets Aisling, a kindly fairy who not only helps him find his quarry, but also overcome his fears while seeking a crystal (which is protected by the fearsome god Crom Cruach) that Aidan needs to conclude his work before the Norsemen attack.

With Brendan Gleeson, Mick Lally, Evan McGuire and Christen Mooney providing the voices, this is clearly a notable achievement. The visuals are audacious and accomplished and the use of Celtic mythology and Christian lore is laudable in an age of dumbed-down adventure. But this could still have done with being a touch more child friendly to draw inquiring minds into the action.