Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 20/10/2011)

Ramsay and co-scenarist husband Rory Stewart Kinnear have adroitly reworked the epistolary text by casting it as a series of flashbacking recollections that course unremittingly through Swinton's mind as she tries to get on with a life that has been heading for the buffers ever since she and husband John C. Reilly quit the city and moved to the soulless suburbs to raise the baby from whom she has felt detached from the moment of his conception. Abetted by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, editor Joe Bini and sound designer Paul Davies, Ramsay has fashioned the audiovisual equivalent of mental and emotional anguish.

Yet the prenatal backstory could have been better limned and the film itself sometimes feels a touch too directed, with more than the occasional image seeming self-consciously composed and several close-ups labouring the portentous point as insistently as some of the vintage numbers on the soundtrack. Nevertheless, Swinton remains mesmerising, as she shifts almost imperceptibly between confusion, resentment and defiance and love, grief and shame.

Swinton is first seen as a face in the crowd at the La Tomatina tomato festival in the Valencian town of Buñol. But this is the last time we see the renowned travel writer entirely happy. She is swept off her feet by photographer Reilly and conceives a child at the height of their passion. However, she is uneasy throughout the pregnancy and fails to connect with a son who cries so constantly that she parks his pram next to roadworks to get some relief. The antipathy is mutual, though, with the boy making sure she always knows he prefers the company of his father as he grows from toddler Rocky Duer to six-eight year-old Jasper Newell and adolescent Ezra Miller. Indeed, it's not until she falls accidentally pregnant with daughter Ashley Gerasimovich that Swinton feels even the remotest maternal pang.

By this stage, however, it's much too late to repair her relationship with Newell, even though he briefly allows his mother to cosset him during an illness that sparks what proves to be his catastrophic fixation with Robin Hood. But Ramsay refuses to judge whether it's Swinton's lack of empathy, Reilly's easy complicity or Miller's inherent wickedness that provokes the high school tragedy that makes Swinton such a pariah that she is slapped on the street by complete strangers and has her shopping smashed in the trolley by unforgiving parents. Even her workmates at Siobhan Fallon's rundown travel agency view her with suspicion, with the exception of seedy Alex Manette, who views her as damaged goods and hits on her at the staff Christmas party in the hope she is suitably self-loathing to stoop to his level.

Yet Ramsay frequently frames Newell and Miller as though they were essaying Damien in The Omen and, while this allusion to a horror movie is pretty apt, it risks making the action seem unnecessarily melodramatic, especially after such pains have been taken to reduce the shock impact of the massacre that obliges Swinton to pay a weekly visit to the forbidding correctional facility on the edge of town. Indeed, such is Ramsay's arthouse sensibility that she places more emphasis on the sound of the scudding water sprinkler than sight of the bodies lying the lawn when Swinton learns the full extent of Miller's barbarity.

Coming nine years after her sophomore feature, Morvern Callar, this confirms Ramsay among this country's finest film-makers. It may not be as purely cinematic as her outstanding debut, Ratcatcher (1999), but her control of pacing is impeccable and she coaxes deeply impressive performances out of her young cast. She is less successful with Reilly, who is rather wasted in an part that may well have been deliberately underwritten to stress his marginal significance to both his wife and son. But Ramsay could not have asked more of Swinton, whose mastery of mood, gesture and expression almost redefines how first-person narratives can be tailored for the screen.

Dysfunction of a more amiable kind informs Yoav Factor's Reuniting the Rubins is a tale of squabbling siblings that feels rather like an elongated sitcom pilot. The cast works hard, but the storyline sprawls and Factor tries to cram in so many pressing issues - ranging from religion, family and tradition to globalisation, developing world corruption and human rights activism - that he ends up saying little of consequence about any of them.

Retired lawyer Timothy Spall is about to take a well-deserved cruise when he is called to the hospital bed of ageing mother, Honor Blackman. She has purchased the house where Spall raised his four children and wants him to reunite them for what may be her last Pesach supper. However, communications tycoon James Callis, African charity worker Rhona Mitra, Buddhist monk Asier Newman and Jerusalem rabbi Hugh O'Conor can't stand the sight of each other and Spall has to travel to the Congo to coax Mitra into accepting the invitation, after her brothers succumb to a combination of pleading emails and personal pressure.

The African trek proves to be a wild goose chase, however, as Mitra is already back in London preparing to block Callis's bid to back some local rebels in the hope of securing the minerals he needs to launch a holographic computer system. So, while his assistant Blake Harrison makes contact with the well-armed militia, Callis and Mitra harangue each other and jeopardise a deal with some Chinese backers.

Meanwhile, the rigidly devout O'Conor has arrived with pregnant wife Loo Brealey and their two sons, who strike up an immediate friendship with Callis's neglected kid, Theo Stevenson (who has just reached the final of an inter-school cultural diversity competition). With Spall threatening to rejoin the cruise because he cannot abide refereeing his quarrelsome offspring, all agree to behave during the house-warming party that Blackman has arranged. But, as the bickering threatens to break out once more, Brealey goes into labour and all rush to the local hospital to agonise over a pre-eclampsia crisis similar to the one that killed their mother when O'Conor was born.

Tying up its loose ends with a convenience that typifies the contrived nature of the entire enterprise, this gentle comedy is just about kept afloat by a genial performance by Timothy Spall. But the supporting turns are either shrill or hammy, while the exploitative capitalism subplot simply fails to ignite. Even the key theme of parenting is overwhelmed by the need to keep the dysfunctional farce moving, with the consequence that Spall's role in his children's unhappiness (and Blackman's in his) is never properly addressed. Thus, this becomes increasingly sentimental and slight, without ever raising more than the odd indulgent smile.

At least it makes sense, which can't always be said of John Langridge's Four, which adds little to an already threadbare formula that was recently rehashed to tenser effect in the likes of J. Blakeson's The Disappearance of Alice Creed and Malcolm Venille's 44 Inch Chest (both 2009). Failing to make the most of a splendidly atmospheric paper mill near Taplow, Langridge keeps Adrian Brown's camera close to the cast, as they deliver Paul Chronnell dialogue comprising mostly of mumbled cliché, mockney slang and mindless cursing.

The action divides rather thuddingly into two acts. It opens with surly private detective Sean Pertwee delivering the bound and hooded Martin Compston to cuckolded husband Craig Conway in a disused warehouse. Convinced he's the brains behind the operation, the well-heeled businessman is indignant when his hireling informs him that he has also brought along his cheating wife, so he can terrorise her into penitent submission. But Conway regains his composure when Pertwee assures him he is in complete control of the situations and encourages him to enjoy himself as he exacts his revenge on the scared Scotsman who has been sleeping with his missus.

Despite wanting to play the hard man, Conway is unnerved by Compston's protestations of innocence and is ready to believe that Pertwee has snatched his drug-dealing brother in error. However, following Compston's insistence that he was reluctantly seduced on a park bench - as well as some convoluted exchanges about The Shining and Reservoir Dogs and a calculated bit of business involving a misfiring lighter - Conway loses his temper and thumps his rival before striding off to intimidate his spouse.

Ignoring Petwee's express instruction not to remove the bag covering the bound victim's face, Conway quickly discovers that Kierston Wareing is not his wife. He also learns she is more than a match for him, as her reassurances she will not to go the police if he unties her become abusive threats that she will accuse him of rape and battery the moment she is free. The tables turn conclusively after a contrived incident with a lit cigarette and Pertwee and Compston quit their cosy backroom chat to arrive on the scene in time for Wareing to reveal the real reason for her abduction and the price that all three men will have to pay for their chauvinism.

Instead of twisting and tantalising, the final third of this resolutely stagy picture lumbers to its more than predictable denouement. Pertwee's decision to untie Compston seems wholly unmotivated, while Conway succumbs too easily to the blowsy Wareing's wiles for a control freak. Her final act of vengeance also feels forced, but her entire part is unconvincingly written and performed. Her male co-stars do marginally better, but it's always obvious they are playing parts in a scenario disappointingly bereft of depth, wit and menace.

By contrast, a hint of Takeshi Kitano and John Woo at their best informs Na Hong-jin's brutal fugitive thriller, The Yellow Sea. Despite making less impact in South Korea than Na's 2008 debut, The Chaser (which went straight to disc in the UK, but has been slated for a Hollywood remake), this is a pulsating pelt through a little-seen part of the world that not only sheds light on the plight of the Joseonjok community living in the north-eastern prefecture of Yanbian, but also exposes the corruption, decadence and vice that are infecting every stratum of Korean society.

Taxi driver Ha Jung-woo has hit a new low. One of the 800,000 minority Korean-Chinese living in the crime-riddled city of Yanji, he hasn't heard from his wife in the six months since she left to find work in Seoul. Moreover, he also has massive mahjong debts and has just lost his job. Thus, he is left with little option to accept shady dog seller Kim Yun-seok's offer to take over a commission from mobster Jo Seong-ha and kill businessman Kwak Byung-kyu in the South Korean capital.

Enduring an exhausting journey by train, bus and fishing boat, Ha is distracted by the discovery that his wife has disappeared. Nevertheless, he stakes out the professor's apartment and tries to fathom how to hit him in a building with an awkward staircase and a highly sensitive lighting system. However, the problem is partially solved for him, as Jo is not alone in wanting Kwak dead and a bloodbath ensues that leaves Ha fleeing for his life and into a maelstrom of dead ends and detours that eventually lands him in a frantic lorry and car chase through the streets of Busan.

With the police and various Chinese and Korean gangsters on his tail, Ha manages to avoid any number of bullets and blades, as Na not only keeps Lee Sung-je's camera hurtling through the nightmarish underworld of Lee Hwo-kyoung's design, but he also has editor Kim Sun-min cut the slickly choreographed action to the relentless rhythms of Jang Young-gyu and Lee Byung-hoon's poundingly propulsive score. Occasionally, the virtuosity seems too calculated and risks duplicating the thuddingly dull run-and-gun antics of the standard Hollywood actioner. But Na succeeds in placing the audience in the middle of Ha's enveloping hell and ensures no one can second guess what's going to happen to him next.

As Kim Jee-woon's A Bittersweet Life (2005) and Leo Jeong-beom's The Man From Nowhere (2010) demonstrate, lone wolves in extremis are nothing new in recent Korean cinema and Na fails to recapture The Chaser's originality and verve. However, in trading goodie-baddie roles, Ha invests his role with a shambolic anti-heroism that contrasts amusingly with Kim's demented psychosis and slaughtering prowess. And if the strategy of following eruptions of kinetic mayhem with quirkier, quieter codas eventually becomes repetitive, the opening sequences are supremely atmospheric and Na makes his socio-political points with stern authority before launching into the frenzied finale, which itself ends in a moment of unexpected poignancy.