From Captain America to a personal injury lawyer with a voracious coke habit. Chris Evans plots a strange course, and he will no doubt have been warned that a film like Puncture makes neither money nor sense. Both are undoubtedly true. That he did it anyway is the mark of a man who might yet confound the trajectory of his earlier Human Torch.

A 1999 study revealed that 800,000 so-called needlestick injuries occurred every year in the United States alone. Overwhelmingly affecting nurses and other front-line health workers, such injuries were not only life threatening, but shockingly preventable. The hospitals knew it, the insurance companies knew it, and Jeffrey Dancort could prove it. He had invented a safety needle that was impossible to reuse, accidently or otherwise. Even so, Dancort was not a greedy man: he demanded neither financial reward nor a long career protecting his patents. All he wanted was to see his needle in every hospital in America.

Every hospital in America said no.

The reasons why amount to money, as they often do. Just a handful of purchasing groups managed two-thirds of the industry’s supply contracts, representing agreements worth some 35 billion dollars. Dancort alleged they had colluded to prevent him from even getting as far as demonstrating his product, let alone lobbying doctors and nurses for its uptake. Puncture documents just one woman whose life could have been dramatically altered had those companies behaved otherwise, yet it could have picked from 799,999 more.

This is a movie to be angry about. I’m not sure it is necessarily a great movie, but it’s certainly a clearer, more furious one than The Lincoln Lawyer. Where that relied on style and charisma to make up for its many deficiencies, Puncture is purposefully ugly. Mike Weiss (Chris Evans) is a hungry young lawyer just barely getting by. His talents are beyond doubt, but these can be no day in court to prove his brilliance when sitting opposite are a dozen highly paid attorneys, flanked on either side by a dozen more. That’s just how justice works.

Even if it wasn’t, Weiss is rarely in a fit state to help it along. He lives in what amounts to a drug-den, aimlessly indulging his nightly habits of drugs and prostitutes. He misses important meetings, and those he does attend are necessarily bookended by visits to the bathroom. When he and his partner meet with the sole senator willing to lobby their case, she discovers him bleeding and incoherent. Weiss cares profoundly, and still he self-destructs.

The film’s failing is in being too enamoured by the cult of personality. That’s understandable given Evans’ muscular and, ironically, rather subtle portrayal: he doesn’t hooah his way through the scenery, because Weiss is enough of a force without magnifying him further. But the issues at stake – and our outrage towards them – should be central, and they are not. There are ways to make that other kind of movie – Michael Mann did as as much with ‘The Insider’ – and yet Steven Zaillian’s ‘A Civil Action’ offers the most relevant example of how an incendiary personality can be made to supplement the larger, more impactful legal dramas contained therein.

Puncture remains a good movie, if not quite the one the story deserves. Evans is a revelation, and Brett Cullen is fittingly odious for the defence. These things are worthy of your time, and they will leave you with a renewed sense of injustice. That’s good for the soul.

Our window into this doesn’t even have a name.

What he does have is Alzheimer’s, and all that it brings. The film’s opening sequence captures his son, Nader, sitting with wife Simin. She has come for a divorce. In Iran, both parties must agree before such a dissolution can be granted. The camera takes the perspective of an unseen judge, before whom the couple – not for the last time – are called to defend themselves. Simin pleads with the camera to be allowed to leave the country; ‘the situation’ isn’t good for their young daughter, she sobs. Nader looks resigned, saying only that he must stay behind to look after his ailing father.

Finding themselves at such an impasse, Simin goes to stay with family while her husband is left to care for their daughter, Tehmeh. Nader arranges for a carer to come in and help with his father while he is at work. The woman is from one of the poorer, more religious areas of the country, and seems unbearably anxious even before she has begun. On her first day, Razieh finds the elderly man soiled, staring vacantly at the floor. Offering a towel does no good, since it is apparent washing is now utterly beyond him. Overcome with guilt, she phones a religious scholar and wonders whether it is more of a sin to clean this man than to leave him as he is.

The politics and strange customs of religion are but one theme in a rich tapestry. This is not an especially polemic film, which is perhaps just as well. Asghar Farhadi has instead made a more universal picture, tempering its controversies with a story that centres on domestic estrangement. When Razieh reluctantly returns to the house the following day, she does so without the knowledge or consent of her husband, which becomes important consideration when a violent argument lands her in hospital. The authority this time is a local police chief, who presides with ever-decreasing patience over a case that sees Nader facing jail and Razieh struggling to keep her threadbare story from coming apart.

Amongst the recriminations and counterarguments, we return time and again to Termeh and her grandfather. Alzheimer’s is a uniquely dehumanising sentence which seems to render its victims as leaden-props to be moved into position. He is without words, yet his observance of the house speaks loudly in their absence. Save for his son, those around him often treat his care as little more than an afterthought, with directions to ‘keep watch’ often ignored to the point of cruel sport. Such flippancy leads to situations most helpless; the elderly man wedged behind a door someplace or, just once, tied to a bedpost while his carer runs errands. When he subsequently falls face first onto the floor, he must remain there until his son arrives home early from work.

Termeh, on the other hand, has words and uses them judiciously. She remains a quiet and well-mannered child, who grows suspicious of her father’s story. She, too, is an authority figure of sorts, yet A Separation is not her judgemental account, nor anyone elses. No one acts unreasonably, as if motivated by the whims of drama. We understand their choices and are able to sympathise with them in a way that defeats so many other films. It would have been easy in the circumstances – perhaps not unfairly – to paint Nader as the villain of the piece, just as Simin could well have been a beaten-down, eastern stereotype: the eternally sorrowful wife, refused her freedom by a callous husband and the justice system that enables him.

Neither is the case, and A Separation is especially involving for that. There are no easy solutions to be found, cultural or otherwise, yet this Iranian drama remains inescapably contemporary, whatever the larger theatre.