review

Kevin Sim's film Crime of the Wolf (C4) began with an image of icy beauty - a veil of snow slipstreaming over a tarmac road like liquid gas. If you liked this footage, you were in luck, because it reappeared several times in the very long film that followed, as if to top up the audience's sense of the howling implacability of existence. What followed was fascinating, but it couldn't be described as a film that was hesitant about the solemnity of its purpose. This is partly as it should have been - the tone was as Russian as its subject matter, susceptible to superstition and melancholy, to the Dostoevskian themes of morality and survival.

Sergei Maduev is one of Russia's most celebrated criminals, a man charged with five murders and numerous violent robberies. When he is arrested after an 18-month rampage (his longest period out of jail since the age of five), the senior prosecutor hires a recently bereaved woman to assist him in preparing the case: "She gave herself entirely to her work," he said, explaining why he had recruited her. She did indeed - soon Natasha Vorontsova, a gawky, wounded woman, falls under Maduev's spell - he convinces her to smuggle a gun into his prison cell, with which he then makes a bungled escape attempt. Maduev betrays her to the KGB, delivering her up to the authorities by kissing her during a meeting he knows is being filmed (an image of cold betrayal that also recurred again and again in Sim's film). Almost everyone involved proved capable of meeting the story's need for literary introspection: Meduev himself talks in grim aphorisms - "We call people brave if they can smother their fear" - while his prosecutor supplied a reflective voice-over, musing over the paradoxes of his charismatic prisoner's position. "Meduev is distinguished from us by two things," he said, "his absolute liberty and his absolute power." Discuss, writing on both sides of the paper.

Things weren't exactly calmed down by the fact that Sim is a director in whom the appetite for striking symbolism often wins out over the need for forensic exactitude. In his recent film about the fate of ethnic Germans in Poland after the war, he made arrangements for plangent images if none were naturally available. Here, his undoubtedly fine eye provided you with many memorable scenes - a large party of relatives advancing along the bank of the Neva to keep vigil outside the prison, Meduev himself beating out a desperate rhythm on the cell wall with his knuckles - but left you uncertain about the evidential status of what you were seeing. In contrast to the general observational style, for example, Meduev's first escape was filmed as a turbulent point-of-view shot, the breath of the escaping man loud in your ears as the camera twisted and turned down gloomy corridors. It seemed, for a while at least, that the director had fallen for his hypnotic charms as well, a suspicion confirmed by Crime of the Wolf's evasive reticence about the exact nature of Meduev's crimes.

Many other scenes, particularly those in which Meduev's lawyer discussed the case with a Chechen power-broker who was also won over by him, had been awkwardly reconstructed, as if to fill gaps in the record. These irregularities detracted from the purity of the film, just as the earnest landscape shots dissipated the essential claustrophobia of the tale, but, even then, it was a film to remember.

It is very unlikely that Stacey Tasker, deputy governor of Maidstone Prison, would fall under the spell of any of her prisoners, though she isn't above dropping the odd celebrity name. "I had the Cambridge Rapist, I had Jeremy Bamber, I had Dennis Nielsen," she said, recalling her time in training. "...Of course, I got close to them all." The last episode of Law Women (BBC1) was also a timely profile of the prison service, in which a practical humanity is being pressed on one side by budget cuts and on the other by the vindictive passions of the tabloid press. Ms Tasker looked admirably capable of withstanding the pressure.