Saint or slut, abstinence or promiscuity: which road will a novice take?

Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s film, which is set in the 1960s, actually feels as if it was made in the 1960’s. A novice nun (Agata Trzebuchowka), about to take her vows, is ordered by her Mother Superior to visit her aunt (Agata Kulesza), who turns out to be an alcoholic prostitute, who tells her she is a Jew and that her parents were killed during the war.

There are three questions: how did they die and where were they buried? Will the girl go back to the convent and lead a life of a saint or will she become like her aunt and end up as a slut?

Strikingly photographed in black and white, the idiosyncratic and impressive framing of individual shots gives this bleak and wintry story a stark and severe reality.

LEVIATHAN (Artificial Eye). Kolya, who lives in a remote Russian fishing village, is having (like the Biblical Job) a really bad time. Why, he wonders, does God let these monstrous things happen to him? It’s no good asking a priest because the Church is hand in glove with the corrupt major who wants the land on which Kolya’s house stands.

When a Moscow lawyer intervenes and threatens to expose the corruption, the mayor acts quickly. There is no justice for the innocent and they go under. This unflattering vision of modern Russia, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, is, amazingly, Russia’s official entry for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

X MEN – DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (20^th Century Fox). Are we destined to destroy ourselves? Can we change the future by going back to the past? Can Hugh Jackman stop an assassination which happened in 1973? Can he break into the Pentagon?

Anybody can break into the Pentagon, if they have the special effects. It’s all absurd comic book stuff without being comic. It’s time travel gone berserk. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender play Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen’s younger selves.

Peter Dinklage, cast as a mutant scientist, is upstaged by his wig. Perhaps mutants might like it – the wig or the movie? If you can follow what is going on you must be much younger than I am.

UNDER THE SKIN (StudioCanal). Jonathan Glazier superior Science Fiction thriller has class but it is strictly for Art House audiences and so elusive that mainstream audiences will be quickly alienated by an alien (Scarlett Johansson), who is like a child, innocent and confused by what she sees in a foreign land.

She drives around Scotland’s urban cities and countryside, picking up men and leading them to an inky black death. She kills. She has sex. She is raped.

It’s a weird and unsettling film, which will fascinate and irritate by turns even those who recognise its qualities

BALLET BOYS (Matchbox). Three young Norwegian teenagers have ambitions to become professional dancers. One of them gets accepted by the Royal Ballet School in London. The other two stay in Oslo.

The Asian boy wishes he were white and Norwegian. The documentary is always on the point of being interesting; but, too brief, too cursory, it never digs deep enough into the competiveness, the success and failure rate, the sheer physical and emotional pain.

And what about the financial cost of going to ballet school for the parents?It merely touches the surface; and it also fails to develop the theme it has begun of teenage male friendship.

MIRANDA HART: MY WHAT I CALL LIVE SHOW (2 Entertain). Miranda Hart, who has done extremely well for herself on television, has just completed 49 one-night stands, playing to packed and enthusiastic audiences.