Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 15/9/2011)

Despite the occasional Rogers and Hammerstein adaptation, the focus had shifted on to rock and pop musicals aimed at teenagers and starring the likes of Elvis Presley and the beach blanket duo of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Yet Broadway kept churning out shows that Hollywood producers couldn't resist - even if the resulting pictures were increasingly being dismissed as `box-office poison'.

For what is now regarded as a masterpiece, West Side Story took something of a buffeting when it premiered in 1957. The majority of the Broadway notices were positive. But the naysayers were vocal and acerbic, with one branding the show `a juke-box Manhattan opera', while others identified either a lack of humanity and humour or an excess of posturing and ferocity. Many found the pace and the storylines overly abrasive, while others still suggested that the treatment of race and gang rivalry was too superficial and sentimental to engender true tragedy.

A laudable opening run of 732 performances was followed by a near-shut out against The Music Man at the 1958 Tonys and a 249-show revival in 1960. Yet the reception accorded the Panavision 70 movie couldn't have been more antithetical. The reviews were almost unanimously ecstatic and the picture scooped 10 Academy Awards, including a special Oscar for Jerome Robbins for his contribution to screen dance.

But there were dissenting voices. Composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents all disliked the film, while Pauline Kael dismissed it as `a piece of cinematic technology' whose dancing tries `so hard to be great it isn't even good'.

Bernstein's score was also singled out for pastiching everyone from Friml, Herbert and Romberg to Kern, Porter, Rodgers and even Stravinsky. Moreover, the stereotypical characterisation and platitudinous dialogue were similarly castigated alongside the unpersuasive juxtaposition of street realism and studio artifice and the mediocre performances of Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood.

Yet West Side Story is unquestionably an artistic landmark - a concept musical, with a danced opening and a mimed finale, that aspired higher than much musical theatre before it. Conceived, choreographed and directed by Jerome Robbins, the show was originally entitled East Side Story and set Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet amongst New York's Catholics and Jews. However, over the six years that followed Robbins and Bernstein's initial discussions, the focus shifted onto the tensions between the Americans and Puerto Ricans across the city, in order to exploit the poetic argot and ethnic energy of 1950s urban life.

Yet while Sondheim's lyrics reflected the angst and inarticulateness of the disenfranchised, Robbins was intent on having the characters primarily express themselves through dance and `Prologue', `Dance at the Gym', `Cool', `Rumble' and `Somewhere' formed the core of the action. Introducing jive and rock steps to Broadway, Robbins also gave the routines an aspirational twist by using raised arms and legs to symbolise a determination to get out of the ghetto.

But what proved seismic on stage felt more contrived on screen. Having fought to retain artistic control, despite his cinematic inexperience, Robbins deeply resented having to rethink his acclaimed choreography to suit the expanses of West 68th Street and what associate producer Saul Chaplin had envisaged as `a little black-and-white picture' soon assumed blockbuster proportions.

Despite the effective opening swoop from the sky to ground level, Robbins made little use of camera movement or depth of field. Moreover, his insistence (after an unprecedented 10 weeks of rehearsals) on experimenting with alternative angles with a disregard for continuity convinced co-director Robert Wise (who had made his name as an editor) that the routines would not cut together. Thus, with costs rising and the schedule elapsing, Robbins was dismissed - much to the relief of many cast members, who found him an egotistical taskmaster - leaving Wise to overuse close-ups in his interpretation of the choreography. Indeed, his pursuit of `dramatised realism' transformed a dance show into a song film and, unsurprisingly, neither Wise nor Robbins mentioned the other in his Oscar acceptance speech.

However, Beymer and Wood were scarcely more compatible - although she failed to have him removed from a role that had been coveted by Marlon Brando. With their vocals provided respectively by Jimmy Bryant and Marni Nixon, they rarely suggest the reckless passion that could culminate in slaughter and are easily upstaged by Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris and Rita Moreno (who was dubbed by Betty Wand).

Yet, West Side Story added a bestselling soundtrack album and a $20 million gross to its Oscar haul by introducing `dance movement' to the screen and suggesting new topics for the genre to explore. Futhermore, it offered a starkly contrasting view of American youth to those presented in either the Mickey and Judy barnyards or new-fangle rock sagas. But its release coincided with the decline of the traditional musical format and the arrival in Hollywood of nouvelle vague techniques that quickly dated its melodramatic conventionalism and patronising social propaganda. Thus, yet another stage show that was considered ahead of its time was calcified by a movie version lacking in courage, creativity and class.

A measure of how far juvenile hang-ups have changed in the intervening half century is made plain in Tomboys, the charming study of hesitant emotions and confused identity with which Céline Sciamma follows up her impressive debut, Water Lilies (2007). Variously recalling such classic Gallic childhood tales as Jean Eustache's My Little Loves (1974), François Truffaut's Small Change (1976) and Alain Berliner's Ma Vie en rose (1997), this perfectly captures the way in which younger kids accept the world around them. However, it also raises sly questions about the extent to which personalities and preferences are established in the formative years and the role that peer and parental pressure plays in forming them.

Moving into a Marne valley estate outside Paris with pregnant mother Sophie Cattani, workaholic father Mathieu Demy and pesky sister Malonn Lévana, 10 year-old Zoé Héran is entirely comfortable with being a tomboy. Yet when she meets Jeanne Disson, she is so keen to befriend her that she fails to correct her mistaken assumption that Héran is a boy and she is forced to keep up the pretence in order to avoid embarrassment.

Thus, Héran finds herself playing football with the other lads with her shirt off and stuffing some plasticine down her trunks to go swimming. She is nearly rumbled when Disson comes to the house and asks for `Michael', but the whip-smart Lévana realises what is going on and exploits the deception to her own advantage.

Naturally, the truth emerges and Héran is not only faced with repairing the damage with Disson, but also with coming to terms with the fact that her new baby brother has usurped her status within the family. But Sciamma skirts melodramatics as deftly as she avoids sexualising the puppy love that develops between Héran and Disson. Consequently, the action retains its essential innocence, even though Sciamma is constantly exploring weightier themes below the surface.

Shooting with a Canon 7D photo/film hybrid, Crystel Fournier keeps the camera moving in mostly intimate close-ups to convey the eager naturalism of the performances. Héran is sweetly gauche, but the six year-old Lévana steals just about every scene with her impish wit and delight in sharing a naughty secret. Indeed, the assurance of the young stars ultimately atones for the fact that the narrative rather peters out into predictability, with the grown-up intrusion feeling all the more contrived because Cattani and her neighbours had previously been so peripheral.

A very different rite of passage is presented in Fernando Barreda Luna's Atrocious, which switches between ominous interiors and malign boscage to chronicle the encounter between a Spanish family holidaying in Garraf Woods outside Sitges and a girl named Melinda who mysteriously disappeared on 2 October 1940. Heavily reliant on Ferrán Castera Mosquera's handheld point-of-view and night vision photography, this is the latest picture to exploit the `found footage' gambit that has become more than a little clichéd in recent times.

Opening with caption averring that the mind is like a labyrinth in which it's easy to get lost, Luna crash cuts into camcorder footage of an unspeakable act that rewinds to a police warning notice. The scene then shifts to 30 March 2010, as siblings Cristian Valencia and Clara Moraleda discuss the Melinda myth while trying out the camera they have borrowed from friend Sammy Gad Gonzalez so they have one each on their vacation.

They use the cameras next day to film the passing landscape as they travel to the Catalan coast with parents Xavi Doz and Chus Pereiro, younger brother Sergi Martin and faithful dog Robin. They also accompany them as they push through a locked gate to explore the hedge maze that abuts the property where Pereiro grew up and which the family has avoided for the past decade. Even when Doz's old pal Jose Masegosa drops in for a kick about, the lens captures every detail.

Valencia and Moraleda inform Masegosa they are making a documentary about Melinda and he agrees to be interviewed. He tells them there are many versions of the legend, but warns against being enticed by the sound of her crying and turning one's back on her. Inevitably, however, they fail to heed his words after becoming distracted by the discovery of a television and some Bruce Lee videos. Consequently, they wander back into the maze without a care in the world and Valencia frolics around the well in which Melinda is supposed to have drowned.

However, he suspects they were not alone on their ramble and searches his footage for evidence of an obtruder. But the realisation that Robin has gone missing after spending the night barking at the gate deflects his purpose and they defy Pereiro to search for him. They find his body at the bottom of the well and agree not to tell Martin the distressing news. But he vanishes in the night and Valencia and Moraleda follow their distraught mother into the pitch blackness in the hope of finding him.

It's very much to the credit of Luna, Mosquera and sound recordist Óscar Grau that the lengthy ensuing passage of green-tinged PoV footage proves so suspenseful. Valencia and Moraleda become separated and the boy becomes increasingly afraid after someone or something makes a grab at him. Eventually, he finds his sister tied to the pillars of the folly at the centre of the maze and they stagger back to the house after she steps on a nail sticking up from a stray piece of wood.

The whimpering sounds of dread coupled with the disorienting visuals are unnervingly effective. But things spiral out of control once the kids return indoors. Moreover, the credibility of the `found footage' conceit is stretched to breaking point as Valencia keeps shooting even as he rushes to the kitchen to find a cloth for Moraleda to wipe away the blood and then hides her away in a cupboard after the power cuts and an alarm rings out above the suddenly cacophonous banging. However, it is the final revelation that will exasperate the majority of viewers, as Valencia emerges from his barricaded room before dawn to find his sister gone and a telltale tape about schizophrenia playing in the basement. The abrupt switch to news footage of the discovery of the carnage and an extract from Masegosa's hysterical phone call to the cops is equally irksome, although nothing tops the rewinding of the action prior to the creeping entrance of the killer and the close-up of their confused face.

For all its faults, Atrocious is a masterpiece compared to yet another found footage flick, Episode 50, which shows how badly a decent premise can be let down by budgetary constraint and inadequacy both before and behind the camera. Making only their second picture after the prodigal daughters drama Dirt Roads and Cornfields (2006), Joe and Tess Smalley pack in the stock shock clichés without pausing once to reflect on the idiocy of characters who place themselves in situations whose potential for danger would be evident to a four year-old, let alone experienced TV ghostbunkers.

However, West Virginia State Lunatic Asylum presents more of a challenge than Tyson Kaup and Marie Weiss's seemingly cosy home, which is more of a death trap thanks to poor maintenance than a nest of malevolent spirits. Consequently, a caption informs us, that Epidode 49 of Paranormal Investigators proved to be the last in the series, as the fiftieth case undertaken by Josh Folan, Chris Perry, Natalie Wetta and Robert Maisonett had such a tragic outcome that the recording had been withheld - until now!

Hired by dying bad man Jim Thalman to verify whether the asylum contains a gate to the underworld to which he fears his misdeeds have condemned him, the quartet is confronted in the car park by religious zealot Keithen Hergott, whose Academia Spirit Searchers Club seeks to challenge the scientific rationality of the PIs by proving the existence of evil. He is aided by techie Justin Brutico and Aussie psychic Eleanor Wilson, who doesn't like the aura of a place that had served as a Civil War hospital before becoming a mental institution and which had seen the unexplained deaths of five homeless men in the main wards and two teenagers in the TB wing since its decommissioning.

The spectral figure of a nurse (Anna Venizelos) lingering at a window should have informed the interlopers that all was not well, especially when someone (or something) carefully arranges some dead bees on a window sill and the whispering Venizelos urges Wetta to leave at all costs. But a combination of investigative pride and macho bravura convinces Folan and Hergott to continue their feud, which seems to have its roots in a childhood trauma that left the former deeply sceptical about religion and the afterlife.

Thus, Wilson allows herself to be blindfolded and led through the ill-lit corridors until she divines that Venizelos has opened a portal to an inhuman (Ossie Daniels) who is controlling all the other ghosts on the premises to achieve his wicked goal. Kieron Elliott, a Scot who has curiously been imported to host the landmark episode of the show, thinks they should heed the warnings, as Wilson is clearly terrified by what she has telepathically witnessed. But not even Wetta's abduction by a sinister shape that subjects her to electro-shock therapy in an operating theatre can deflect Folan and Hergott's twisted purpose.

Despite the indifferent acting and surfeit of garbled jargonese, the action to this point had been relatively coherent. But the Smalleys start to lose control when it is revealed that Daniels is a serial killer who has been using the guise of a frightened child (Arahmus Brown) to lure the unsuspecting intruders into doing his bidding and he makes Wilson his ninth victim before heading back to the penitentiary where he had previously been incarcerated (which is now a museum) to complete a mission that may or may not be thwarted by the now allied Folan and Hergott.

This is a film so strewn with flaws it's hard to know where to begin. The smug jokiness of the Kaup-Weiss interlude is bafflingly followed by talking-head interjections by scientists Alexandra Dickson, Sandra Maren Schneider and Cherish Duke and ghost-hunting twins Katherine and Karen Jacobs, whose breathless views on paranormalism are presumably supposed to give the subsequent farrago some sort of intellectual legitimacy. The gambit fails, however, and the protagonists proceed to do increasingly dumb things without once bothering to look at their carefully positioned CCTV feeds to see bone-crushed corpses rising from linen trolleys and apparitions appearing with more frequency than David Mitchell on comedy game shows.

There is something sinister about the fact that the maniac is black and an AIDS victim. But this double demonisation gets somewhat lost amidst the chaos and carnage of the climactic sequences, although the Smalleys still find time to pause just before Folan steps into the jaws of Hell to reveal the truth about his juvenile encounter with a fire-starting incubus.

Documentary crews and sham psychics also crop up in Ricky Grover's Big Fat Gypsy Gangster, a Mockney mockumentary that contains even more extraneous plot strands and minor characters than Episode 50 and demonstrates even less evidence of quality control in the scripting department. Essentially a parody of BritCrime atrocities like Robert Cavanah's Pimp and Nick Nevem's Terry and stuffed with cameos by low-wattage soap and comedy stars, this is often more risible than hilarious. But it also has a quirky conviction and an irresistible momentum that somehow keeps you watching.

Released from prison after a decade stretch was extended by six years for bad behaviour, Ricky Grover is determined to re-establish his reputation as London's hardest villain. However, Eddie Webber, the cop who busted him for robbing the same bank 11 times in one day, has been trespassing on his manor and trashing his reputation in a bestselling book. Moreover, aunt Laila Morse is about to lose her boozer to the bailiffs. So, with American documentarist Joshua Lou Friedman in tow, Grover heads home to `sort it aat'.

However, being a larger than life diamond geezah, Grover takes a quick detour to treat Friedman to jellied eels and a whistlestop tour of the capital atop Ewen McIntosh's stolen bus. It's all a lark, innit? Except it isn't, as Grover has picked a fight with mouthy accountant Omad Djalili and has serious mother issues that he has to resolve with prison shrink Peter Capaldi (who has more than a few problems of his own). Moreover, he needs to make some quick cash and when ex-trainer Andy Linden's night of bare-knuckle boxing fails to do the trick Grover calls in a favour from cousin Lorraine Stanley to arrange a lucrative dwarf wrestling bout.

Sounds riotous, doesn't it? Yet despite the paucity of wit and subtlety, Grover keeps up a cracking pace as he packs the action with eccentric monochrome digressions (in which he speaks directly to the camera while wearing a stocking mask and sunglasses) and shoehorns in guest bits by the likes of Derek Acorah and Rufus Hound as a pair of dodgy mediums and Tulisa Contostavlos and Rochelle Wiseman (of N-Dubz and The Saturdays respectively) as half of an all-girl group devoted to embellishing Grover's legend.

However, a semblance of a storyline has to kick in eventually and Grover discovers that personal guru Steven Berkoff has betrayed him to Webber and he exploits the spurned fury of the gay copper's discarded boyfriend (Leo Gregory) to exact his revenge. Okay, so it's not much of a storyline. But, without it, this would be a string of mirthless sketches riffing on notions of family, loyalty and the changing nature of the East End.

In fairness, everyone gives their all. Geoff Bell, Roland Manookian and Maxwell Laird prove sturdy as Grover's sidekicks, while Djalili milks his anal pen-pusher's slighted sense of honour for all its worth and Morse revels in swearing like a trooper and surrendering herself to the sexual advances of the ghosts haunting her bedroom. But, with political correctness being an early casualty, the humour rarely rises above the abrasive or the coarse - although it also frequently descends into the baffling, as in the case of Michael Smiley's monocular Irishman, Dave Legeno's short-fused Romany thug and diminutive Oxford resident Mark Sealey's turkey-loving wrestler.

Presumably, Grover's vanity project is aimed at much the same lad's mag-reading constituency as Lee Sales's Turnout. However, anyone who has seen Eran Creevy's Shifty (2008) or Sam Holland's Zebra Crossing (2011) will suffer from a severe case of déjà vu while watching this Hoxton-set saga about a decent, but dim drug dealer who gets in too deep and has only a matter of hours to `sort it aat'.

Polo-shirted George Russo has managed to reach the grand old age of 27 without ever having a proper job. He makes his money selling skunk with waster pals Francis Pope, Neil Maskell, Neil Large and Kyle Summercorn. However, when wide boy Sonny Muslim gets the wrong side of combustible supplier Ben Drew, Russo suddenly finds himself without merchandise just as he needs to pay for his upcoming holiday to Barbados with prim girlfriend Ophelia Lovibond.

On Pope's advice, Russo decides to borrow the cash that Lovibond has deposited in a shoebox under his bed and invest it in a consignment of cocaine from bigger league dealer Peter Fernandino. However, mates like Maskell, Fabrizio Santino and Dorian Simpson are slow in paying their debts and Russo has to keep coming up with so many feeble excuses to delay visiting the travel agency that Lovibond's City office workmate Zara Dawson attempts to set her up with respectable colleague Jamie Belman.

Why directors keep thinking that handheld footage of drunken or otherwise addled twentysomethings living it large makes for great cinema is befuddling. Sales certainly fails to make the parties, club nights and karaoke sessions seem like fun (or maybe that's the point?). But he also struggles to coax his supporting cast into essaying anything other than chav caricatures and Eastenders stereotypes.

Russo works hard as the lazy, lairy, but essentially genial no mark and is certainly more credible than Lovibond's simpering bourgeois. But their relationship is merely a macguffin, as the actual focus falls on the white urban lad culture that currently sustains a generation becoming increasingly detached from a society that views it with growing contempt. The debuting Sales depicts this with a soap-flecked social realism that is reinforced by his sure eye for a telling shot. But, while he ties up the many loose ends in a reasonably neat denouement, he needs to devote more time to plot and character development in the future.