Polisse (Maïwenn, 2011)

Polisse hoovered up the prizes at the French César Awards and won a Cannes Jury Prize to boot, but this is largely just testament to its political worthiness, being a depiction of daily life inside the harrowing world of a police child protection unit in Paris. So it tells it like it is, with little excess melodrama, but this also means little in the way of an actual predominant dramatic arc, jumping as it does from squabbling character to squabbling character - who are all fairly unlikable in a way familiar to viewers of the similarly 'gritty' Parisian police series Engrenages. Put simply, an actual documentary on the topic would have better served the purpose of educating, while in this form there is always a seed of doubt with regard to verisimilitude, while its fictional nature does not provide a compensatory emotional pull. It could have ended after half an hour or gone on for a whole series and the overall effect would have been the same.

5/10