It remains to be seen whether No Time To Die is any good, although I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be an enjoyable and satisfying close to Craig’s tenure as 007, but the theme song is terrific. It doesn’t try and break any new ground, but as Eilish sings conspiratorially about how “The blood you bleed is just the blood you own”, and that “You were my life, but life is far away from fair”, it summons up an appropriately noirish atmosphere, aided immeasurably by Hans Zimmer’s brooding, sweeping orchestral arrangement and Johnny Marr’s guitar playing. Even if the rest of the film is useless, at least we’ll be assured that the opening credits will be worth watching.

The song, which was co-written by Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell, thus joins the pantheon of the best of the Bond themes, which surprisingly few recent efforts have deserved to inhabit. The most recent attempts in the Craig era have encompassed one absolute classic, which might even be the single finest song ever written for a Bond movie (Adele’s “Skyfall”), Eilish’s latest, Sam Smith’s warbly and boring Writing On The Wall from Spectre, the late Chris Cornell’s tuneless “You Know My Name” from Casino Royale and the nadir of them all, Jack White and Alicia Keys’ “Another Way To Die”, which sounds as if it was written and recorded in a frantic hurry. Two hits, three misses: not the finest of averages, all things considered.

Yet those who would try and talk about how much better the music was in ‘the old days’ are likely to come a cropper, too. It may sound sacrilegious to admit this, but the Shirley Bassey theme songs today sound dated and brassy, with the beautiful John Barry music almost overwhelmed by Bassey’s megaton vocals. It is impossible to listen to “Goldfinger”, in particular, and not think of the camp qualities of Austin Powers. Many of the others hold up far better, such as Tom Jones’s bravura “Thunderball” and, of course, Louis Armstrong’s infinitely sad “We Have All The Time In The World”, which none other than Barry believed was his finest composition for a Bond theme. He was not wrong.

The scattergun approach really began when Roger Moore took over from Sean Connery as Bond, and the theme tunes alternated between classics (Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die”, barring the unfortunate reggae interlude, Carly Simon’s magnificent “Nobody Does It Better” and Duran Duran’s “A View To A Kill”) and the profoundly unmemorable; Lulu’s “Man With The Golden Gun” was as dismal as the film it accompanied and Sheena Easton’s “For Your Eyes Only” was truly forgettable.

Neither of the Timothy Dalton theme songs have made much of a cultural impact, rather like the films themselves, and the Brosnan era started magnificently with Tina Turner’s “Goldeneye”, before going into a steep decline – although some would argue that Garbage’s “The World Is Not Enough” is a fine, classic song in the Barry tradition. The absolute low point, both cinematically and musically, came in 2002 with Die Another Day and Madonna’s appalling theme song for it. Many had hoped for a moody, sweeping epic like “Frozen” from her Ray of Light album; what appeared instead was anything but that. Perhaps the first warning sign came in an interview when Madonna stated that she had intended to turn down the commission, but decided ‘you know what? James Bond needs to get…techno’. He didn’t, it transpired.

If it seems surprising that so many disappointing songs have graced the Bond franchise, it is even more of a shock to realise how many good ones have been rejected. Those who have seen their work consigned to B-sides, or never released at all, include Radiohead, the Pet Shop Boys, Blondie, Johnny Cash and Pulp; arguably a more impressive selection of artists than those who did end up having their themes included. It is possible to find some of them still, and Pulp’s excellent “Tomorrow Never Lies” (from the film’s original title, which was changed due to a typo on a promotional release) and Radiohead’s mournful “Spectre” stand comparison with anything in their oeuvre.

The James Bond themes, good, bad and ugly, retain a special place in musical and cinematic culture. It would be a heartless type who didn’t feel a sense of anticipation whenever a new one joins the canon, and the brief thrill of exhilaration when one hears it for the first time. If it’s up to scratch, as “No Time To Die” is, then it builds anticipation for the film, but if it’s a “Die Another Day” or “Another Way To Die” – and yes, the word “die” seems to be overused in Bond songs – then at least, once the shock and disappointment wears off, one can laugh at it. But ultimately, the real thrill of a good Bond song is that it transports you to a world of elegance and danger for a few moments, where martinis are shaken, not stirred and where secret agents have a licence to kill. And there are very few pieces of music that can do all that in three and a half minutes.

Of course, anybody reading this knows what happened last December, in the most decisive General Election for a generation, and probably beyond. It is easy to suggest that the Conservatives’ success lay with their straightforward message to “get Brexit done”, but polls equally suggest that one of the reasons for their success was that the nature of the Corbyn Labour party’s apparently ambivalent stand on hatred towards Jews and Judaism. Those who were only too eager to spit venom at those who were uncomfortable with trans rights, unchecked immigration or, indeed, those who voted to leave the European Union were, at best, silent on the issue of anti-Semitism within their party, or, in many cases, all too happy to denounce it as a “Zionist plot”. Because, of course, to be anti-Zionist is not to be anti-Semitic. Everyone knows that, surely.

I would hope that Lisa Nandy, Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Emily Thornberry could make time in their schedules from campaigning to be the next leader of the Labour party to go and see Tom Stoppard’s new play, the wise, weary and heartbreakingly sad Leopoldstadt. Stoppard, the greatest living playwright we have, is now 82, and has suggested that this may be his valedictory work, although he has also hinted that he would like to write a play about journalism. One hopes that he can manage to do so, but if he does not, this is a hell of a high note to go out on.

It begins in late nineteenth century Vienna, in the home of the prosperous factory owner Hermann. All seems to be well, although Hermann’s blithe assertions that his Judaism is no more relevant than a detail is not believed by all of those around him, especially the cynical Ludwig, who is only too keen to remind everyone that persecution and the Jewish people go hand in hand. Yet they live in a civilised city, amongst decent and educated people. It is impossible that the worst can happen.

Of course, everyone knows what comes next – the Anschluss, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. It is a tragedy that has been told many times, in different ways and through countless media. It is hard to make it seem relevant or shocking again; everyone knows the images of emaciated bodies being stacked on furnaces, or living corpses with blank, terrified expressions on them. Yet Stoppard’s great achievement here is not to emphasise the horror so much as the obscenity of its incursion into an ordinary family. An extended, hideously tense scene in the second half, set in late 1938, shows what happens when the Nazis begin to take an interest in this particular family, and a devastating coda from 1955 indicates the awful cost that has been levied.

In some ways, it is an atypical work from Stoppard. His usual trademarks – witty wordplay, intellectual allusion and a sense that the audience has to struggle to keep up – are largely absent. In the lighter first half, Adrian Scarborough dominates as Hermann, conveying quiet dignity as he struggles to come to terms with his beloved wife’s infidelity (a Stoppard trademark), and Stoppard’s son Ed is excellent as the professorial Ludwig. But the whole cast is very fine, especially Sebastian Armesto as Nathan, the one who got away, and Patrick Marber’s confident, fluent direction makes the two and a half hour running time flow past as if one is waiting for a train. Hopefully not one with a fatal final destination.

In the hugely moving final scene, Stoppard includes the grown-up character of Leo, an Anglicised Jew who is more comfortable with his ‘funny books’ that he writes and the trappings of England – cricket and the Royal Family – than he is confronting his own heritage. One can only feel that this is Stoppard’s own self-portrait, perhaps even his exculpation. During his long and peerlessly distinguished career, he has never before attempted to come to terms with his own birth identity as Tomas Straussler, who fled Czechoslovakia for England while still a child. Leopoldstadt, at last, represents his efforts to write something from the heart. His career-long tendency to prize wit and intelligence over raw emotion has now been answered. At last, like Wilde, he has realised the vital importance of being earnest.

Many will prefer his “earlier, funny” work. Certainly, it never reaches the astonishing dramatic peaks of his masterpieces Arcadia or The Invention of Love, and some may find the accessibility and straightforwardness disappointing, as Stoppard has jettisoned the fireworks of previous plays. Yet it is the drama that we need in our conflicted, uncertain time. It is distressing, thought-provoking and immensely sad. It isn’t the jolly night out in the West End that Stoppard’s loyal audience might want, but something altogether more challenging and richer. I suspect it will be remembered for many years to come.

In its new touring revival by Max Roberts and Theatre by the Lake, there has been no attempt to modernise it, no ham-fisted insertion of references to social media or iPhones or #MeToo. All of this is just as well, as attempting to update Russell’s play would be fraught with difficulty. Instead, the dynamic remains the same. Frank is a middle-aged alcoholic English lecturer, struggling to summon up the slightest enthusiasm for his subject and depressed by his failed career as a poet. He takes on Rita, a quick-witted but unpolished hairdresser, who wishes to study literature via the Open University. The dynamic between the two of them shifts over the course of the play, moving from tutor and student, through an odd-couple friendship, to something quite different by the close.

It is a hard play to do particularly well, although relatively easy to offer an undemanding and straightforward account of. Russell owes a significant debt to Shaw’s Pygmalion (or, if you will, My Fair Lady), but David Mamet’s later play Oleanna, a considerably harsher and nastier work about the power relationship between a male tutor and a female student, probably has more to say about what happens – or goes wrong – in the intimate setting of an educational institution. And, of course, Alan Bennett’s The History Boys offers a starry-eyed view of the wonders and privileges of teaching, which Russell’s Frank (he has no surname) does not. He is more interested in the bottles of whisky that adorn his (surprisingly palatial) office in Patrick Connellan’s excellent stage design, lurking behind the volumes of literature that he half-heartedly teaches his students.

In order for Educating Rita to work, and not simply exist as a quaint period piece, it has to have two superb performances at its centre, and thankfully Roberts’s staging has two great actors. Stephen Tompkinson has been giving excellent performances for many years now, and he inhabits the role of the boozy, arrogant lecturer with aplomb, helped by a perfect choice of costume design, courtesy of Sam Newland; the creased corduroy jacket, the shabby shirt, the askew tie, the seen-better-days chinos. In Frank’s great drunk scene in the second half – there are echoes of Jim Dixon’s “Merry England” farrago from Lucky Jim, which coincidentally Tompkinson once appeared in – he shows a great flair for physical comedy, but also conveys a sense of a life utterly wasted, as he alternates between patronising superiority and poignant regret.

He is matched by Jessica Johnson as Rita, who arguably has a much harder part, and not simply because of the endless costume changes that chart her growth and development as a character. As written, she is not just the Eliza Doolittle figure of the smart but uneducated ingénue, but something more complex – there is a wonderful moment, beautifully played by Johnson, when she talks of her sadness at being unable to join in a pub singalong with her family and friends because she no longer can find the simple satisfaction in run-of-the-mill pleasures that she used to. Amidst the jokes about Peer Gynt (something of a go-to for dramatic ridicule, as anyone who enjoyed the references to it in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter will know) and EM Forster, there is a real sadness in this particular account of a pedagogic relationship, platonic though it remains. There is just the right touch of affection and longing between the two of them, delicately handled by both actors, and the gradual evolution of their friendship is entirely convincing.

The play can be accused of being dated. There is absolutely no way that a man like Frank would ever be allowed to teach in any university these days, let alone invite his student to his house for dinner, and the current argot of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘cancellations’ would ensure that a contemporary Rita would not last beyond its first scene. A more serious issue is that Russell’s drama fits snugly into the confines of the well-made play, rather than allowing difficult or challenging subtext to emerge, and Roberts’ staging does nothing to challenge this. There are subtle political points to be made, revolving around the way in which university education can stifle as well as emancipate, but they are only made obliquely here, if at all.

Nonetheless, this is a splendidly entertaining evening out, and certainly the best recent production of the play (which was staged with Lenny Henry at Chichester in 2015 and at Liverpool the same year). The jokes alternate between the profound and the sitcom-level (Rita thinks that Yeats is the name of a wine lodge) but there is a sadness and melancholy to this particular educational study that edifies as much as it entertains.

Iannucci’s film, which has won awards and is doing very well at the box office, is the most traditional of the three, but is by no means staid or boring. After a couple of decades in which Dickens adaptations tended to be extremely well-crafted but faintly dull and prosaically literal accounts, usually made for the BBC and often featuring Edward Fox, writers and directors have belatedly (150 years after Dickens’ death) woken up to the realisation that his books can be adapted in a more exciting and adventurous fashion.

One way in which this manifested itself in David Copperfield is with its diverse casting, led, of course, by Patel. Its producer Kevin Loader suggested that “In all our conversations, we never spoke about another actor to play our lead than Dev. We often have lists for parts, but we never had a list for David Copperfield”, implying that, had Patel turned the role down, the film would not have been made, which would have been an enormous pity.

Iannucci himself noted that the reasons for the diversity of the casting were twofold. Firstly, as is now the custom, to broaden the range of actors used, but also to be true to the original novel. As he said in a recent interview, “It speaks of contemporary issues. I wanted to get that life and that humour and approach it as if there were no rules as to how you make a costume drama. I wanted it to feel that the audience feel that the people they’re watching are in their present day, this is their modern world.” When Patel asked Iannucci whether he was making a social or political point – making the Copperfields Indian or Pakistani immigrants, for instance – Iannucci answered that the casting would be entirely colour-blind, saying “Although it’s set in 1840, for the people in the film it’s the present day. And it’s an exciting present.”

Although a few people have predictably grumbled about the casting, Iannucci has made what is certainly his most ambitious and interesting film, moving away from the rat-a-tat-tat satirical profanity of In the Loop and the horror comedy of The Death of Stalin in favour of something more poetic. He is helped by his perfect cast, who serve up big laughs and pathos with consummate skill; Hugh Laurie, especially, brings an almost unnerving sincerity and poignancy to the character of Mr Dick, usually portrayed as simply a comic grotesque who has become obsessed with the execution of Charles I.

But then, it would be hard to fail with actors of the calibre of Tilda Swinton (as Betsey Trotwood), Ben Whishaw (Uriah Heep), Rosalind Eleazar (Agnes) and Iannucci regular Peter Capaldi, as an unusually manic and antic Mr Micawber. It’s just a pity that there was no room for his famous saying on the virtues of thrift and the dangers of extravagance, though one imagines that, in Capaldi and Iannucci’s world, it might have been delivered as “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, nought and six, result – you’re fucked.”

Iannucci’s film is a thoroughly enjoyable and often hilarious couple of hours in the cinema, with his exemplary actors bringing the story to life. It differs greatly to Knight’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which often seemed grim and downbeat for the sake of it. In his interpretation, an oddly-accented Guy Pearce made heavy weather of the part of Ebenezer Scrooge, and was saddled with an awkwardly integrated subplot concerning his sexual blackmail of Bob Cratchit’s wife. I suspect that literally nobody, other than Knight, has ever read the novel and thought “What this really could do with is a scene in which Scrooge forces Mrs Cratchit to strip before humiliating her”. However, it now exists, and must be considered alongside more conventional versions of the novel starring the likes of Alastair Sim, George C Scott and Patrick Stewart, as well as the surprisingly excellent and faithful Muppet’s Christmas Carol.

Yet what Dickensian adaptations could do with is more joie de vivre and colour. Long before Gravity and Roma won him Best Director Oscars, Alfonso Cuaron made a joyful, vibrant film of Great Expectations, relocating the narrative from mid-nineteenth century London to late twentieth century Florida, and transforming Pip from an orphan-turned-gentleman into an aspirant artist named Finn, bankrolled by a mysterious benefactor. The chemistry between Ethan Hawke and a pre-GOOP Gwyneth Paltrow is electric, a supporting cast including Robert de Niro, Anne Bancroft and a brilliant Chris Cooper as an updated Joe Gargery are all superb, and the lush cinematography by Cuaron’s regular director of photograph Emmanuel Lubezki is just as good as the films that he won Oscars for. It remains underrated, but is well worth seeing.

So this is what we need. The vibrancy and intelligence of David Copperfield, the colour and sexiness of Great Expectations, the social conscience of Oliver: Lagos to London – and, if you must, the swearing and irreverence of A Christmas Carol. The next adaptation that combines all of these facets should be all-conquering and truly unmissable. And, come to think of it, it’s been a long time since there was an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers…

The first series of the show focused largely on the sexually repressed Otis (Asa Butterfield), whose inhibitions are contrasted to great comic effect with the blasé openness of his sex therapist mother Jean (the sublime Gillian Anderson, who with this and her forthcoming performance as Margaret Thatcher in series four of The Crown is almost becoming Netflix’s go-to star). Ironically enough, he ends up offering sex therapy to his classmates, with the assistance of his bored, brilliant classmate Maeve (Emma Mackey), a social pariah who lives by herself in a trailer park, her mother having absconded. It concluded with Maeve realising that she was in love with Otis, but by this time he had begun a fumbling relationship of sorts with Ola (Patricia Allison), the daughter of his mother’s boyfriend.

Thus the second series begins with Otis unexpectedly enjoying a belated sexual awakening (cue an extremely amusing montage of him masturbating in the most unlikely of places, and climaxing, if that’s the right word, with an outrageous moment involving Anderson) while Maeve has quit school and is being pursued by her feckless mother trying to make amends (Anne-Marie Duff, in the definition of luxury casting). Otis’s best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) is being pursued, to his confused joy, by a taciturn but handsome French transfer student, Ola is dissatisfied by her boyfriend’s sexual technique, and the repressed, permanently fed-up headmaster Mr Groff (Alistair Petrie) has his own problems to deal with, mainly involving his ne’er-do-well son Adam, whose bullying of Eric in the first season was eventually revealed to be a blind masking his own sexual confusion, a subplot carried on here.

There is a lot more going on, to generally hilarious but also poignant effect. It’s a particular pleasure to see the excellent Jim Howick have more to do as the useless teacher Mr Hendricks, whose surreal attempts at talking dirty to his girlfriend (“I’m going to ruin your life…I’m going to get you fired”) produce startled yelps of hysterical mirth, but this is a programme that revolves around its young cast. The particular genius of Nunn and her co-writers is to switch between surreal humour and moments of deep seriousness with alacrity, sometimes even in the same scene. If there is nothing that quite compares in terms of emotional impact to the stand-out episode in the first series when Maeve goes to get an abortion, a sub-plot concerning the ever-effervescent Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) being the victim of sexual assault on a bus, and the subsequent fallout from that, is a timely and chilling reminder of the psychological damage that apparently small acts can cause.

The setting remains as surreal as ever. Perhaps because of the huge amounts of American money being pumped into the show, this is an odd cross between California and Britain, where the students have English accents but the school looks as if it could have been transplanted from the West Coast, and where Jean and Otis live in a grand house with panoramic views over lush greenery (filmed, as much of the series is, in the Wye Valley and Wales). Yet expecting social realism from this programme is a pointless endeavour. The world depicted here is one that is about as woke as it could possibly be, with the school’s sporting star being not only black but brought up by his (decidedly conservative) lesbian mothers, and where the diversity of the student body is simply presented as an unremarkable fact. As, of course, it would be within just about any comprehensive secondary school today. The music choices are spot on (it’s never not going to be good to hear Air’s timeless Sexy Boy or the Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes again) and the whole caboodle adds up to another splendidly bingeworthy Netflix show.

If one is going to carp, then there is a persistent sense that the American influences dominate, and that this would be more or less the same if it was transplanted to the United States, no doubt with Anderson still part of the cast. But this seems like nit-picking, and the touches of British humour that permeate the script, thanks to Nunn and her co-writers, bring the bizarre world agreeably to life. A greater problem for me is that Butterfield, in the lead role, remains something of a twitchy blank, outmatched by his charming and interesting co-stars, especially the brilliant Mackey and the ever-charming Gatwa. Yet this is ultimately an ensemble piece, and the return of one of Netflix’s most purely enjoyable shows is something to be welcomed with open arms – and, given the priapic nature of most of the characters, open legs as well.

Elton John is, in that dreadful, sycophantic cliché, a national treasure, although on the evidence of this scintillating book, less so for his musical career and more for having survived decades of debauchery with his wit, if not his hair, intact. There is a cherishable description of his being seen by a horrified domestic worker with his latest wig askance, and he helpfully makes the comparison between himself and comedian Frankie Howerd.

His early years in Pinner were grim, with a cold, distant father who was more interested in his record collection than his son, and with a blowsy, domineering mother whose major contribution to his life was to recognise his musical talent, ensuring that he was accepted for study at the Royal Academy of Music. After he had served as keyboard player to the then-fashionable singer Long John Baldry, he changed his name, began collaborating with Bernie Taupin and the rest is history.

Except, of course, it isn’t. Elton has made the excellent choice to work with Alexis Petridis as his ghostwriter, and anyone who has enjoyed Petridis’ writing in the Guardian in the last couple of decades will know of his finely honed way with a laugh-out-loud joke, and virtually every other page has some quotable bon mot. Whether he’s bemoaning his failed attempts at hippydom (“I looked like a finalist in a competition to find Britain’s least convincing flower child”), candidly discussing his drug use (“If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough”) or enlightening the reader with his tales of voyeurism and sex on snooker tables (“Don’t come on the baize!”), this has to be one of the liveliest and funniest rock memoirs ever written.

Those expecting much in the way of musical analysis will be disappointed; as far as Elton presents it here, he receives Taupin’s, often, to be fair, dreadful, lyrics, and then sits down at the piano and bashes out an appropriate tune. He began his career as a would-be Tin Pan Alley songwriter, and that dedication to graft is ever-present; whether he’s playing hundreds of gigs a year or knocking out songs one after the other, before, back in the day, plunging his face down into a mountain of cocaine or today having a wholesome game of tennis before playing with his two young sons with his husband, David Furnish.

The book is at its funniest and most enjoyable in the first two thirds, with walk-ons from virtually every great musical star of the 20^th century, and memorable appearances from a variety of industry grotesques. Manager John Reid does not come out of this well, any more than he emerged from the films Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman. When Elton embraces sobriety and married life, the narrative begins to sag, although there are still excellent stories of absurd diva behaviour and a riotous/disturbing account of his playing a concert almost immediately after major surgery, and realising that he has urinated uncontrollably while taking the audience’s applause. And his account of his love of his young sons feels sincere and moving, rather than gushily sentimental, although it is hard to take seriously his claims that they will have a “normal” childhood; still, one only hopes for their sake that it will be a happier one than his.

It might seem extraordinary that a plump, balding young man could go on to become one of the most successful musical stars that Britain ever produced, and certainly one of the likeable aspects of Elton’s story is that, decades after his first success, he still seems faintly incredulous that it managed to work out for him. He writes affectingly about the loneliness and boredom that he often felt, even at the peak of his fame, and yet again manages to give the impression that multi-millionairedom is as much of a curse as it is a blessing – although Petridis, who frequently rails in his reviews at how boring a lyrical theme a superstar moaning about success is, manages to make this wryly amusing rather than self-indulgent – even while coyly hinting that there are even more outrageous stories that have been omitted from the book on legal or spiritual advice. One honestly wonders what they are, and what they could have involved. Satanism?

Still, what we have is a riotously engaging romp through an era where bad taste and great music walked happily together, and where a sentence like “I sat in a dressing gown covered in puke, wanking” is not even the most eyebrow-raising revelation of the chapter. The Queen, who has quite enough on her plate at the moment, might not quite be prepared for what she is getting into with her Honourable Companion, but the rest of us will be extremely grateful for so candid and uproarious a dive into a life lived to the full.

The setting is Germany at the end of the Second World War, and the ten-year old protagonist Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a devoted would-be Nazi, so much so that his imaginary friend is none other than a cartoonish version of Hitler himself (Waititi), given to speaking in a kind of fascist version of Valley Girl slang. His resourceful mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) has managed to stay on the right side of the authorities, but Jojo learns, to his horror and disgust, that a real-life Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) is being hidden in their attic. Yet, as the Gestapo close in and the situation becomes ever more perilous for them all, Jojo begins to wonder, like Mitchell and Webb in their famous sketch, whether he has, in fact, been on the wrong side all along.

Jojo Rabbit has received some surprisingly negative reviews from critics in Britain, many of who seem to have been offended by Waititi’s full-on vision. It’s reminiscent, tonally and in its major plot device, of Fight Club as it moves between cartoonish comedy and disturbing violence, sometimes even in the same scene, and Waititi has directed his cast accordingly. In supporting roles, Rebel Wilson and Stephen Merchant, as Nazis, don’t so much chew the scenery as take doggy bags and make sure that they’re going to be snacking on it for days afterwards, although Sam Rockwell finds some nice grace notes in his performance as the jaded alcoholic one-eyed Captain Klezendorf, whose own devotion to the regime that he has spent his life serving is more questionable than it should be. McKenzie’s performance is very touching as the frightened yet resilient Elsa, at one point improvising her way out of a potentially fatal situation with flair, and Johansson is particularly good in a tricky role that allows her to be both warm and flamboyant, combining maternal affection with something looser and wilder.

Whether one likes Griffin Davis’s performance in the lead role is more of a matter of taste. In a sense, Waititi (adapting the screenplay from Christine Leunen’s book Caging Skies) has written an almost unplayable part, because a small child has to be both ragingly dislikeable and, as the sources of his neuroses become clear, increasingly sympathetic. Although Griffin Davis does a decent enough job, he too often is saddled with looks of petulance and irritation. And this is what will ultimately prove divisive about Waititi’s film. There is nothing wrong with laughing at the Nazis, as both Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch realised decades ago, and if this had been conceived simply as a wacky comedy, it could well have worked sublimely on that level.

Amid the jokes and absurdities, it is quite clear that Waititi is striving for Meaning and that he wanted this to be An Important Film. One particular joy of his earlier work, including by far the most enjoyable Marvel picture, Thor Ragnarok, and his vampire farce What We Do In The Shadows, was the sublime lightness of touch, but here the contrast between the absurdities of his intentionally OTT performance as Hitler and the hideous realities of what life was like under fascism often feels too great. We see resistance members hanged in the square, but the absurd characters that we are invited to laugh at seem incapable of doing their own shoelaces up, let alone operating in a regime of fear and suspicion. The film concludes with a quote from Rilke, who is referred to throughout; it suggests “let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just keep going/No feeling is final”, but many will feel that the sentiments have not been borne out in the previous hour and three quarters.

Still, there is still much to enjoy in Waititi’s film, which may very well put in a strong showing at the BAFTAs and Oscars next month. It has a warm heart, a righteous sense of anger that makes the laughs seem earned and, in McKenzie, an extremely promising performer who does wonders with a very difficult, if ultimately highly rewarding, role. And as a bonus, it has what will undoubtedly be the year’s best use of the words “f*** off, Hitler” at its climax.

It has the distinction of following Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, which took the series in new and unexpected directions. Whether you loved or hated it – and I, never much of an obsessive when it came to this series, had a miserable couple of hours mourning its smug excesses and woke preoccupations – it at least tried to do something different, a comparatively brave move at a time when mass-budget cinema has been as conservative and unadventurous as it has ever been. Such an accusation could not be levelled at Rise of Skywalker, which treads a well-trodden path from start to finish. Yet it’s generally entertaining and thrilling stuff, considerably more so than its predecessors, moving at a fabulously swift pace and building to a proper crescendo of sound and fury.

The storyline doesn’t bear an awful lot of examination. The dastardly Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid, whose fabulously rich, sonorous voice is used to splendid effect) has, it transpires from the opening crawl, been alive ever since his apparent demise in Return of the Jedi, and has been manipulating events. Leaving aside whether this is even a logical possibility, it necessitates much soul-searching on the part of Rey (Daisy Ridley), who is increasingly troubled by dark visions and her psychic bond with her fellow Jedi Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who is now Supreme Leader of the First Order. (I was saddened that there was no New Order amidst the various villains, offering Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner a chance to look menacing in stormtrooper attire. Alas.) As the usual final reckoning approaches, it falls to heroic fighter pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and former stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) to marshal the forces of what remains of the Resistance, against new adversaries including Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E Grant).

Even attempting to come up with a potted summary of the plot is a non-starter, as this barely scrapes the surface of the endless events. Not that it especially matters. The villains are dastardly and one-note, the heroes courageous and one-note, and the only really interesting character, the Byronic Kylo Ren, is played by the excellent Driver with all the conflicted dash and sweep that he deserves. Not that he gets much time for introspection; barely has a scene begun before it’s over, often exploding in a shower of special effects, and buffeted by John Williams’ symphonic score, which adroitly weaves in themes from earlier in the series.

There are space battles, lightsaber duels, exotic creatures and mostly successful moments of comic relief. There are reappearances from many of the best-known characters in the series, including the dead ones, and one particular unexpected turn proves to be the film’s emotional highpoint. Abrams has also managed to resurrect Carrie Fisher, who died before filming, with the adroit aid of a mixture of unused footage. The sneering baddies boast British accents (of course), the square-jawed heroes are properly diverse and some bizarre moments where characters do entirely absurd things to drive the plot along, but it all moves along quickly. There is also so much emphasis on the sins of the fathers (or grandfathers) that it comes, at times, to seem as if the screenwriters kept referring to Larkin’s This Be The Verse. But at least it moves like lightning. There is no Last Jedi-esque tedium here; this is two hours and twenty minutes long, but it never feels its length, rollicking and swashbuckling its way to the derivative but nonetheless effective climax.

It is easy to bemoan the way in which the Disneyfication of cinema has led to an absence of risk-taking and danger. Films of these enormous budgets are viewed less as artistic endeavours than as means of keeping balance sheets healthy. If a picture of this nature makes less than a billion dollars, it would be viewed with trepidation as a flop. But there seems little danger of Rise of Skywalker being anything other than an enormous hit. The cinéaste in me bemoans the waste of talent and a missed opportunity to do something fresh, which, for all its endless faults, The Last Jedi had a crack at. But the ten-year old boy in me enjoyed virtually all of it, and congratulates Abrams and his cast and crew on putting together the most intrepid of space adventures. If this is to be the final Star Wars film in the original, George Lucas-inspired canon, then at least it goes out with giddy aplomb, not so much with a whimper as with an enormous, cheery bang.

His newest effort is Motherless Brooklyn, a long-gestating adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel. Two decades in the making, it arrives in Britain trailing commercial disappointment in the US in its wake. It isn’t at all hard to see why. The cast, although starry, mainly consists of middle-aged male actors arguably somewhere past their commercial heyday, and there is a limited market for Fifties-set crime dramas with downbeat atmospheres. Nor is it a flawless piece of work, with several issues that a more experienced director might have addressed successfully. But it’s an intriguing and highly watchable film with an air of melancholy and sadness to it that lifts material that, at times, feels distinctly by-the-book.

Its lead character, at least, is an unusual and intriguing one. Lionel Essrog (played, inevitably, by Norton) is a low-level private investigator with Tourette’s Syndrome, prone to humiliating and violent verbal explosions at inopportune moments. A lonely orphan who lives with his cat, he is employed by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), a more experienced detective and a surrogate father of sorts to him. When Minna is killed, Essrog is reluctantly launched into a quest to discover why and how his mentor was murdered. It will involve a civil rights lawyer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a down-at-heel genius (Willem Dafoe) and, most potently, an all-powerful city planning supremo, Moses Randolph, who is a barely disguised version of Robert Moses, and is played, with unusual commitment and menace, by Alec Baldwin.

Baldwin’s casting should indicate that there are obvious parallels between the narrative and contemporary America. Norton, who also wrote the screenplay, does not lose any time at making his anger clear at the toxicity of a society in which the poor and undesirable are, quite literally, moved out of the way so that the rich can get richer. As a piece of barbed social commentary, this is effective stuff, although only the most patient of viewers will be delighted to learn that this goes on for nearly two and a half hours. As a mystery, it is less successful; the final revelations owe far too much to Chinatown for comfort, but also leave the audience with a sense of “And?”. There is a tender almost-romance between Norton and Mbatha-Raw, but this is not a film otherwise preoccupied with human relationships. Most of the characters are flawed, venal and selfish, only out for themselves and blind to the larger problems that their actions are creating. As someone once so famously said, “Remind you of anyone?”

Norton’s direction is, alas, workmanlike rather than inspired. Still there are some satisfying moments of cinematic bravura, not least an early scene when Essrog, smoking crack in order to help him relax, imagines himself drifting down into an endless, watery abyss. By far the most interesting and original contribution here comes from the composer Daniel Pemberton, whose score combines elements of contemporary jazz with the distorted, troubling sounds of Kid A/Amnesiac-era Radiohead. (Thom Yorke, who was originally asked to do the score, contributes a sad, plangent ballad, Daily Battles, which recurs throughout the film in various forms.) It enlivens any scene that it is used in, most specifically a moment when Essrog visits Penn Station to collect a crucial document from a locker; Pemberton’s music oozes and hums with disorientation and menace, and the narrative gains added momentum and interest as a result.

If the film doesn’t entirely succeed, at least its intentions and ideas are constantly engaging and provocative, which is more than can be said for the majority of its peers. Norton himself is excellent, playing a more vulnerable, pathetic character than he usually takes on. Aficionados of Fifties costume and production design will be hugely impressed by the way that a relatively low-budget film can make the era seem so vivid. It is a shame that Motherless Brooklyn is unlikely to be any more than a curiosity, but it’s very much worth seeing, nonetheless, and the air of gentle sadness stays with the viewer long after the plot’s machinations are forgotten.

While Bowie was still alive, but withdrawn entirely from public life, he was asked for an interview to support the touring exhibition David Bowie Is. He refused, but offered something that was in its own way more useful: a list of 100 books that he loved and that had inspired him, albeit without any further context or explanation. Some of the references were obvious; Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was the inspiration behind his 1974 album Diamond Dogs, which in turn arose from his pique at being refused permission by Orwell’s widow Sonia to adapt the novel into a musical, and A Clockwork Orange was one of the major cultural influences on his Ziggy Stardust character. Others were more obscure. Why, for instance, did Bowie cite Rupert Thomson’s 1996 fourth novel The Insult, Tom Stoppard’s 2002 Russian drama trilogy The Coast of Utopia and The Beano as being his favourite books? What did he mean?

It is easy to see why O’Connell, a music critic who interviewed Bowie in 2002, was drawn to this particular subject. Although he does not refer to it explicitly, he is following in the footsteps of Thomas Wright’s Oscar’s Books, in which the author attempted to piece together an alternative biography of Wilde’s life through his library, both catalogued and speculative. (Surprisingly, given the enormous similarities between the two men, there is no book by or about Wilde on this list, although it does feature Comte de Lautréamont’s 1868 Les Chants de Maldoror, one of many influences on his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray.) The subject offers O’Connell the chance to approach Bowie’s extraordinary intellectual breadth and interest from an unusual, even oblique perspective. Had this been done as well as it could have been, it would have been the literary equivalent of Chris O’Leary’s magisterial, definitive song-by-song Bowie blog, Pushing Ahead of the Dame.

It has not been, but this is for two distinct reasons, one of which is O’Connell’s fault and one of which is not. The failing on his part comes from an inability to probe as deeply into some (admittedly obscure and difficult) texts as the reader would like, and the necessity of relating the books to specific songs in Bowie’s oeuvre. When he succeeds – as in the comparison between James Baldwin’s 1963 essay collection The Fire Next Time and the title track of Bowie’s 1993 album Black Tie, White Noise – the results are thrilling and convincing, as O’Connell marshals close reading of a book with a new appraisal of Bowie’s lyrical richness. Several of these essays are good enough to justify the book’s purchase alone.

When he fails, the results are either perfunctory – a friend believes it was “highly likely” that Bowie continued to read Private Eye when he was exiled to New York – or frustratingly superficial. Nabokov’s Lolita, for instance, is rich in black humour, sexual transgression and graced with an unreliable narrator whose charm and erudition seduce the reader, until they realise that they are dealing with a psychopath. This gulf between image and often sordid reality was a key one throughout Bowie’s work – one thinks, for instance, of Life on Mars? – but O’Connell describes the major similarity between Bowie and Nabokov being that they both lived in Switzerland at one point, and his suggestion for further listening is Bowie’s 1967 song Little Bombardier, a sad tale of a lonely war veteran being chased out of town when he forms a friendship with two children.

It would, of course, be impossible to go into lengthy detail about every book covered, but Bowie’s Books often gives a potted summary of a plot or argument, makes a tendentious comparison to some aspect of Bowie’s life or work, and then moves swiftly onto its next subject. One imagines O’Connell cursing with frustration at having to make an argument for why Bowie enjoyed, say, Jessica Mitford’s 1963 exposé on the US funeral industry The American Way of Death, and simply giving up by writing “life excited David Bowie, so it follows that he would have loved Jessica Mitford’s blackly comic, fastidiously researched exposé of corrupt practices in the American funeral industry”, before suggesting that his readers listen to Bowie’s cover of Jacques Brel’s La Mort. It all but screams “Will this do?”

The other problem with the book is nothing to do with O’Connell’s efforts, but an inevitable flaw of attempting to treat song lyrics as literature, rather than an indivisible part of the creation. When one hears the words “It’s a god-awful small affair”, “I, I will be king, and you, you will be queen” or “I’ve heard a rumour from Ground Control”, there is a thrilling, Pavlovian rush of excitement as one thinks of the magnificence of the music that brought these stories and characters to life, in thrilling, widescreen glory. Without the music, and the indelible efforts of those who were responsible for creating some of the twentieth century’s most indelible songs, one is left with poetic musings of varying levels of profundity, often beautiful and brilliant themselves. But as a great man once said, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, and Bowie’s Books proves that no amount of analysis can really replace the sheer joy of listening to the music once again.

For what it’s worth, I hated The Last Jedi beyond comprehension for its arrogance and smugness, and it has joined a small circle of hell in which similar follies like I Heart Huckabees and Ocean’s Twelve reside. But Johnson has now returned to the smaller films that made his name, albeit with a starry cast, in his post-modern take on Agatha Christie murder mysteries, Knives Out.

Does it pass muster? Thankfully, it does, with some flair and aplomb. Although the heart initially sinks when Johnson appears in a filmed introduction, asking the audience not to give the whodunit aspect away, the picture engages pretty much from the off.

In one of those loathsome, privileged families that American cinema does so well, the multi-millionaire patriarch and successful crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead the morning after his 85^th birthday party. It  looks like suicide, but eccentric private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) suspects foul play, and says so at every opportunity, much to the discomfort of those around him.

But who is responsible? Is it Thrombey’s apparently devoted nurse Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas)? His grandson Hugh “Ransom” Drysdale (Chris Evans)? Or the sinister Walt (Michael Shannon), Thrombey’s son-in-law? One thing is for certain. In any film called “Knives Out”, and there is a vast display of elaborate-looking knives, they are going to be used at some point.

The biggest surprise here is how funny the whole affair is. Many of the wittiest lines are thrown away virtually as asides. When one minor character is shown a crucial but poor quality security videotape, he asks earnestly “Does this mean that I’ll be cursed and die in a week?” There are also some wonderful moments of high and low humour, from clever references to the great age of detective fiction to a running joke about falsehood-induced vomiting, which pays off in spectacular fashion at the end.

Humour does rather overwhelm suspense, and this is not a film that will have viewers on the edge of their seats, but the final revelations are clever, well-thought-out and do play fair with the audience. This is especially so after it seems, playing against expectations, that the whodunit aspect has been wrapped up far earlier than the average viewer might expect.

It’s also surprisingly political, and clever with it. Although Johnson wore his left-wing sympathies on his sleeve with The Last Jedi, Knives Out does a far more elegant and involving job of offering the Thrombey house, in all its Gothic, gloomy magnificence, as an analogy for Trump’s America. Particular credit must go to production designer David Crank for his superb work.

The characters in it are lecherous, greedy and instinctively hostile to immigrants – there is a good gag about how none of the family ever get Marta’s country of origin right – but are nonetheless willing to defend their kingdom at all costs. When your cast includes the likes of Don Johnson and Jamie Lee Curtis, both excellent at the kind of deadpan comedy this requires, it makes the jokes land all the harder, along with the points it’s making. No doubt this will be required watching in the Bernie Sanders household, and beyond.

It helps that Johnson has assembled a crack team of actors. Craig, visibly relieved to be freed of his Bond shackles, is a hoot as the drawling private detective, speaking his aphorisms in a deliberately absurd southern accent. His other iconic co-star Evans is also relishing the chance to play a jerk, complete with a variety of excellent knitwear, who could not be further removed from Captain America if he tried. The rest of the ensemble are all excellent, especially Plummer in a role equal parts twinkly and stern, and it’s a delight to see Frank Oz in human, rather than puppet, form as a put-upon lawyer. Finally, Johnson’s cousin Nathan contributes a suitably dramatic, witty score.

Film companies often take a risk releasing original, adult-oriented pictures around Christmas, a time when the market is usually saturated with mega-blockbusters, including this year’s great curiosity, Cats. Still, Knives Out is terrifically enjoyable, clever and enormous fun, a genuinely intriguing mystery with as many big laughs as fiendishly sophisticated revelations.

By now, anyone watching Peter Morgan’s series knows what to expect. After a surprisingly shaky first season, the second grew into its stride with a series of consistently well-conceived and gripping hour-long mini-films (The Nazi past of Edward, Duke of Windsor! JFK! & Jackie K! A teenage Prince Charles at Gordonstoun! Stephen Ward!) that had both significant emotional resonance and managed to make the historical period all but burst from the screen, aided by a vast budget that bought the very best out of above and below-the-line talent.

This time round, the programme has found itself caught between two distinct narratives. The first few episodes feel like a logical continuation of the first and second series. The theme of political skulduggery is returned to in the opener, Olding, which explores whether the new Prime Minister Harold Wilson (as played, with suitably bluff decency, by Jason Watkins) is a Russian spy, and introduces a splendidly serpentine Samuel West as Anthony Blunt, who definitely is. The second, Margaretology, allows Helena Bonham-Carter’s Princess Margaret to come to the fore, as she and her husband Lord Snowdon (Ben Daniels, replacing Matthew Goode) are roped in to try and (metaphorically) seduce LBJ into giving the UK much-needed financial aid. And the deeply affecting third episode, Aberfan, deals with the horrendous Aberfan disaster of 1966, and the Queen’s emotionally illiterate response, which gives Colman the opportunity to show her upper lip at full stiffness and which will probably win her another Golden Globe.

All of these are well mounted, as usual, but there is a strange sense of flatness to some of the writing, as if Morgan had had to rush through his storylines. The exchanges come heavily burdened with symbolism and exposition – Blunt is revealed in his treacherous true colours as he makes a speech about concealment in art – and not all of the switches in casting are wholly successful. Daniels, while excellent in Aberfan, otherwise lacks Goode’s charm, coming across as merely irritable (although anyone married to Margaret could hardly be blamed for that) and the reappearances of John Lithgow as Winston Churchill (one scene, on his deathbed) and Pip Torrens as the Royal Family’s eminence grise Tommy Lascelles, albeit in flashback, tacitly acknowledge the irreplaceability of those fine actors. And, at the risk of sacrilege, Colman cannot eclipse memories of Foy, although Tobias Menzies, as Prince Philip, is a significant upgrade over Matt Smith.

And then matters shift significantly later in the series, clearly anticipating 2020’s fourth instalment, with none other than Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher – perhaps the most brilliant casting decision so far. The appearance of Josh O’Connor as a young, angry Prince Charles gives the programme a new protagonist, and, crucially, a more youthful dynamic, as he rails against protocol and tries to carve out a niche for himself. Some might argue that, half a century on, nothing has changed. There are parallels to the present day, some entirely serendipitous; episode four’s Bubbikins, which shows the humiliation that the Royal Family endured when Prince Philip decided to expose them to the pitiless scrutiny of a BBC documentary crew, has gained in resonance with the similar debacle of last week’s Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, although it is a sign of the times that what passed for scandal in 1966 (the Royals drink gin and tonics while watching television) and what scandalises us today (Pizza Express in Woking, being medically unable to sweat, etc) are very different.

And that, perhaps, is why The Crown continues to beguile, even despite growing signs of a clunkiness in the writing that, at times, comes across as unfortunately reminiscent of late period Downton Abbey. More than once, Morgan uses the dramatic device of some foreshadowed disaster being avoided by quick thinking or a simple display of personal charm, which, for a programme which indicates a healthy display of scepticism about the monarchy, occasionally comes close to a rather simple conclusion: that if we trust in the essential goodness of those who rule us, all will be alright in the end.

Perhaps this is the ultimate argument against republicanism, as evidenced by the show. While we might become excited at the idea of saving the millions of pounds that the royal family costs us, and even more thrilled at the ability to hive off the more disreputable members of “the Firm” into far-flung ambassadorships, from which no return is possible, we also look to “the first family” to act as a symbolic representation of our hopes and ideals, even as we thrill to dramatized accounts of their failings and shortcomings. Thus, while The Crown remains essential viewing, it is tempting to suspect that Morgan, like so many other sceptics, has been at least half-seduced by the trappings and proximity of monarchy. It will be fascinating to see if this holds true in future series, but for the time being, this is Union Jack-waving, National Anthem-singing stuff, and none the worse for it.

At first glance, the film resembles a slightly updated version of the kind of Hitchcockian entertainments that were in such demand in the Fifties and Sixties. Roy Courtnay (McKellen) is a successful but ageing con-man, tiring, along with his partner in crime Vince (Jim Carter) of small scores that bring in the tens of thousands, rather than the millions. What he wants is a spectacular “last job”, presumably that he can retire on, and as the film begins, he has found his “mark” in the form of Betty McLeish, a former Oxford don who is in poor health thanks to a series of strokes. Courtnay rubs his hands together in figurative glee, and sets about insinuating himself into Betty’s life, much to the horror and disdain of her protective grandson Steven (Russell Tovey). To Betty, Russell seems a decent and caring sort, if not without his eccentricities. But is she the full shilling as well?

To discuss plot specifics would be to spoil the storyline’s myriad twists, some of which are guessable and some of which are not. It is easy to see how the film might have been made a generation ago, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in the roles so ably played by McKellen and Mirren, but it is also likely that the film would have been considerably lower on the swearing and violence that, at times, incongruously intrude upon the carefully written and acted game of wits that the lead actors are engaging in.

Make no mistake, The Good Liar is worth seeing for the two stars alone. As Courtnay, McKellen delivers the rumpled charisma and charm that he has specialised in throughout his latter-day career, cut through with something nastier and more feral when it has to be. (A scene on the London Underground, as he disposes of an intrusive mark, has a particular kick to it.) Mirren, meanwhile, has a trickier role to play, as this fine and intelligent actor has to convey an almost passive sense of gullibility for most of the first two acts, until her own motivations and intentions become clear.

Condon’s film is fine, literate entertainment, but some of the more outrageous revelations do beggar belief. Without wishing to give too much away, two extended flashbacks reveal that the film is working in an entirely different register to what one might initially imagine it is, and while the first is convincingly brutal and psychologically intriguing, the second is heavy-handed and raises questions that are never entirely answered by the final twists. The director is responsible for some excellent films (Kinsey, Gods and Monsters) and some dreadful ones (The Fifth Estate, Twilight: Breaking Dawn), which reveals an entertainingly haphazard attitude towards his career choices. This, thankfully, is closer to the former category, but there are irritations throughout, not least Tovey’s character, a two-dimensional bleater whose main plot function is to keep telling his grandmother that she is making a mistake, at least until the final revelations make his actions even more perplexing. But there are compensations, too, not least Carter in a scuzzy role, complete with excellent hair, that could not be further from his paternal butler in Downton Abbey.

Perhaps this will represent the beginning of a beautiful friendship between McKellen and Mirren and many subsequent collaborations. Certainly, both of them relish the well-written (by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher) script and the opportunity to move beyond showy cameos into two dynamic lead roles. It would be stretching the point to argue that The Good Liar is great cinema but it reflects the novel that it is based on; literate, enjoyable adult entertainment, with great actors giving it their all, and an unexpectedly thoughtful undercurrent that lingers longer than all the scenes of violence by, and towards, characters well into pensionable age.

The film is both enjoyable and frustrating. On its own terms, it works well as a nerve-jangling psychic thriller, with a good mixture of scares and tension. Ferguson is an unusual, chilling villain. But its larger problem is that it is simultaneously an adaptation of Stephen King’s 2013 novel, a sequel to the original 1977 book, and a follow-up to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film. This leads to a tonal uncertainty that is only partially ameliorated by its extended climax: a return to the Overlook Hotel.

King’s original novel, as published in 1977, is justifiably regarded as one of his greatest books, a terrifying and white-knuckle journey into a supernatural hell set in a malevolent and sentient hotel. It was inevitably ripe for adaptation, but nobody quite expected the attention of the already legendary auteur Kubrick. He had not directed a film since the brilliant Barry Lyndon (1975), which had underperformed at the box office compared to A Clockwork Orange (1971) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He wanted a hit. It was an unlikely match, but the deal was made.

The filming of The Shining is the stuff of legends. Kubrick spent over a year making it, and filmed takes over and over again, sometimes more than a hundred times. Jack Nicholson, who played the difficult role of Jack Torrance, took it in his stride, although he wryly commented “Stanley’s demanding. He’ll do a scene fifty times, and you have to be good to do that.”

Kubrick’s perfectionism only grew. At one point, Wendy Torrance, wife of Jack, played by Shelley Duvall, to her horror, finds that her husband’s much-worried-over novel simply consists of the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” written over and over again. Kubrick had a set assistant write the phrase thousands of times, even though it could only be seen briefly on screen. Zealous attention to detail or near-autistic obsessiveness? The jury is still out.

One man for whom it was the latter, or worse, was King. He was horrified by what he saw as the butchery of his novel, saying “a visceral sceptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others.” He concluded, damningly, “What’s basically wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shining is that it’s a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that’s why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.” King even wrote and produced his own made for TV adaptation of his book, which was not a success and failed to supplant Kubrick’s film in the popular imagination.

Today, The Shining is widely regarded as the greatest horror film ever made despite originally being critically panned with Kubrick nominated for a Golden Razzie for Worst Director. The reasons for its success are simple; unlike most ghost stories, which explain why the spirits exist and what they want, Kubrick leaves much of this to the audience’s imagination.

It is never entirely clear what is going on, why the apparitions are appearing or what Danny Torrance’s psychic gift – “the shining” – actually is. This sense of unease and uncertainty permeates the film’s every frame. It is aided immeasurably by its soundtrack, a mixture of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s original electronic music and modernist classical composers, including Penderecki, Ligeti and Bartók. It is impossible to watch the film and not feel unsettled, even as nothing more sinister happens than a small boy driving his tricycle through the corridors. What lies around the corner is at the heart of all primal fear – the sense of a malevolent, unstoppable unknown.

Doctor Sleep does not have the sheer giddy fear of its predecessor. Barring a truly horrific torture scene midway through, it is short on really nightmarish stuff. Even its predecessor’s famous “elevators of blood” scene is reprised almost for a throwaway joke. While well above the usual norm for contemporary horror it seems unlikely to displace The Shining from audience’s affections as a legendary example of what happens when one of cinema’s greatest directors turned his interest to the horror genre, to indelibly frightening effect.

The bus driver looked at me in incomprehension. “Where?”

“Hawarden. Where Gladstone’s Library is.”

His face brightened. “Oh, HAR-DEN! You should have said.”

Arriving at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden (pronounced, as I now know to my cost, “Har-den”) is a revelatory experience. It’s only a few miles from Chester, but it’s set in a bucolic village in North Wales, the kind of place where the general store will sell you a cornucopia of local produce and where the (excellent) pubs know all the locals’ names, preferred drinks and, by the sounds of it, intimate involvement in various scandals. Yet it is the far from scandalous library that dominates the village, both literally and metaphorically. If getting here is something of an odyssey, then one’s eventual arrival represents little less than a homecoming.

Gladstone’s Library is unique in two key respects. It’s the only residential library in Britain, and probably in the world, although this doesn’t mean, alas, that residents hunker down at night in a bivouac with the books; instead, they trot along to one of the 26 bedrooms, which are spartan in their comforts but perfectly pleasant, and sleep peaceably there at the end of a day’s intellectual toil. It is also the only equivalent that we have in this country of an American-style presidential library, although its foundation was considerably less formal and rather more eccentric. William Gladstone, a resident of Hawarden, wished to share his vast collection of books with the less fortunate and intellectually curious – as his daughter Mary put it, “he wished to bring together books who had no readers with readers who had no books” – and so, at the age of 85, he spent £40,000 of his own money on founding and building the library that bore his name, obligingly carrying 32,000 of his own volumes three-quarters of a mile between his home, Hawarden Castle, and the temporary structure that housed them.

He did not live to see the library’s construction, but it bears his imprimatur in every regard, from the copious statues and photographs of him that loom imposingly in virtually every direction to the high-minded intellectual attitudes that permeate the place. The central hub of the library lies in the vast two-tiered and wooden-beamed structure that houses the bulk of the collection, mainly consisting of ecclesiastical, political and historical books, including Gladstone’s own volumes. Biographers and other aficionados have had decades of pleasure rifling through Old Glad-Hand’s own annotations, which seldom spared writers who he considered to be intellectually vapid. One often comes across splenetic comments such as “completely untrue” and “nonsense!”, which makes what may have been a voyage through dry-as-dust tomes come alive with the immediacy of a good bitching session.

The library itself is used by a variety of visitors and residents, from local children revising for exams in peace to clerical visitors from far away making the pilgrimage to consult rare and learned scholarly texts. There is a pleasingly intense air of scholarship in the main theology section, with its denizens setting up shop behind their desks as if they have been there for decades, eyebrows twitching knowingly behind piles of ancient books. Yet the reach is a broader and more cosmopolitan one, as well. The library is home to various writers-in-residence throughout the year, who dart about the place looking thoughtful, and who give occasional talks and seminars as part of their month here; the positions are decided by application, and there is no shortage of hopeful literary types anxious to claim the privilege of a month’s stay here, complete with full board and a stipend.

Gladstone himself was a notably ascetic character, but that does not mean that his library is a drab place. There is a bustling canteen-bistro, Food for Thought, which does good-quality, if culinarily unadventurous, meals, specialising in dishes like bangers and mash and apple strudel. In the evenings, one can have a glass of decent Valpolicella for an entirely reasonable £4.50, or retire to the Gladstone Room, a well-presented common room with all the accoutrements that one needs for relaxation: a roaring fire, battered leather armchairs and an honesty bar, which sounds more enticing in theory than it is in practice, thanks to steep-ish prices and a curious lack of ice or lemon for the g & ts. On my visit, the residents were a notably abstemious bunch, too; when I glanced at the record before retiring to bed, the sum total of drink taken had been two glasses of wine. Unless, of course, the scholarly and worthy types I had seen in the library earlier were getting merry on sherry and forgetting to declare it.

Yet this is a place to come and indulge the life of the mind, rather than simple corporeal pleasures – which in any case can be amply catered for at the Glynne Arms a couple of minutes’ walk away. The library is having a £4.5 million extension built imminently, and a planned refurbishment will presumably bring its bedrooms up to a higher standard of comfort, as well as bringing in the usual accoutrements of a shop, a study centre and reception area. These are necessary improvements, and will see Gladstone’s Library well into the 21^st century. Yet there is an especial joy in coming here now, before something of the otherworldly and bookish atmosphere dissipates. As Gladstone himself said, “Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.” Such a maxim remains true of this marvellous institution, and hopefully will stay so for the indefinite future.

We do, however, live in an age when an attention-sated audience cannot get enough of a good thing, and so not only do we have the excellent prequel Better Call Saul, which focuses on how dodgy-but-decent Jimmy McGill can metamorphose into evil-but-entertaining lawyer Saul Goodman, but now Gilligan has returned with a straight sequel, a two-hour continuation of the saga which picks up literally at the moment that the last series ended. Walter White is still dead, succumbing to a bullet wound amidst the gleaming splendour of a drugs lab, but his protégé Jesse (Aaron Paul) has escaped from the gang of neo-Nazis who have held him hostage to manufacture drugs for them, or “cook”, and is on the run, pursued by police and criminals alike. Predictably, nothing goes according to plan.

There is a great deal of talk in our society of “fan service”, or of films and series being precision engineered to please a particular audience, artistic integrity be damned. El Camino represents this to the highest degree, both in terms of the excellence with which it is executed and also of the essential redundancy of its premise. While Paul, an increasingly convincing and affecting presence in the original series, makes for a protagonist that one instinctively takes the side of, the narrative swiftly turns into a mixture of flashbacks and set-piece cameos. This allows for the return of deceased characters (who it would be unfair to reveal, but one can guess the highlights without particular difficulty), and also gives fan favourites such as Badger, Skinny Pete and the late Robert Forster’s Ed Galbraith their particular moment in the spotlight. Some are missed, others outstay their welcome, but this particular victory lap is one that few would begrudge.

If Gilligan, who both wrote and directed El Camino, has a central point, it is that the past leaves scars on one that are, literally and metaphorically, too deep to expunge. The opening, featuring the return of curmudgeonly hitman Mike (Jonathan Banks) sets out the store with admirable economy. Jesse, in search of adventure, asks Mike where the older man would recommend that he head with his drug money, to which he receives the reply “If I were your age, starting fresh, Alaska. It’s the last frontier. Up there, you can be anything you want.” As Jesse excitedly replies that he’ll “make things right”, Mike looks at him with contempt, leavened by pity. “Sorry kid, that’s the one thing you can never do.”

One of the central joys of Breaking Bad was the way in which certain lines of dialogue, almost incomprehensible out of context, became loaded with inordinate significance. Thus if one encounters someone hissing “If you don’t know who I am, then maybe your best course would be… to tread lightly”, or announcing in declamatory fashion, “I am the one who knocks”, then the allusion becomes a symbol of a shared kinship and a mutual understanding. Yet the giddiness and amphetamine rush of the original series is replaced in El Camino with a sadder, statelier pace, and the eminently quotable dialogue takes a back seat. There is a surprising paucity of action until the final third, although Gilligan’s patented slow drip-drip of tension is present throughout, and Walter White’s Shakespearean grandeur has been replaced by Jesse’s scrappier, angrier presence. This befits the character and the story being told, but some admirers of the original might feel disappointed.

If they do, then they only have themselves to blame. Gilligan has assembled a typically excellent ensemble cast, with Jesse Plemons’ homely psychopath Todd a particular stand-out once more, and allowed them to take their characters in interesting, if inevitably predictable or pre-ordained, directions, and, as ever, the vast vistas of the cinematography, simultaneously dwarfing or enhancing the characters, have a 70mm scope that means that seeing this on the big screen would be a highly enjoyable experience.

Yet what viewers are likely to take from it is not the giddy adrenaline rush that they might be expecting, but a sad, elegiac coda, best epitomised by one character saying to Jesse “You’re really lucky, you know that? You didn’t have to wait your whole life to do something special.” If El Camino has a reason to exist, it is to explore the lie behind that idea, and to show that Mike’s gruff admonition has its own truth behind it. After all, as Thomas Wolfe’s novel noted, you can’t go home again. The best you can hope for, as Jesse Pinkman does, is to make your peace with that, and trust in the future anyway.

Pullman is currently Oxford’s most famous living author, the bearer of a torch that has passed from Carroll, Tolkien and CS Lewis to him. Like his forbears, he creates richly detailed and imaginary worlds that bear as strong a relation to their own experiences as it does to the imagination. He is a mild-mannered, donnish presence in person, reserving his vitriol for social media, where he rails against Brexit, Boris Johnson (who he recently suggested should be strung up from a lamppost à la Mussolini, leading to a rare onslaught of outrage against him) and all that he sees as false and corrupt in today’s society. Much of this anger has been channelled into his books, which set its central protagonist Lyra Belacqua and her allies against a totalitarian institution known as The Magisterium, a fictionalised version of the Catholic Church.

Aficionados of the series, which has sold in the tens of millions, probably think they know what is in the latest instalment. They may be wrong. Pullman took a significant break between the publication of The Amber Spyglass in 2000 and the return to Lyra’s world in La Belle Sauvage, a prequel to the series, in 2017, but The Secret Commonwealth is the first true sequel to the eschatological events depicted in the original trilogy. At first glance, Pullman might seem to face the same dilemma that JJ Abrams encountered when he came to reboot the Star Wars series; if one has arrived at a perfectly satisfying (if unavoidably bittersweet) conclusion, with evil vanquished or at least at bay and the heroes triumphant, what is the point in continuing the story? Thankfully, he has an answer that is both satisfying and, in our confused world, stirring in its eliciting of hope.

Lyra is 20 years old in The Secret Commonwealth, and far removed from the sprite-like heroine of the original trilogy. She is estranged from her daemon Pantalaimon, who still harbours resentment towards her for her actions in The Amber Spyglass, and is in thrall to the modish moral philosopher Simon Talbot, whose central argument is that objective reality does not exist. Experience has hardened her, removing the joie de vivre that was so integral to her character in the original trilogy. Many of the characters from the earlier books return, but they are older, shabbier and more frightened. And the Magisterium has recovered from the defeat of the Metatron to once again dominate society. Its major opposition is Oakley Street, an underfunded secret service of sorts so poor that its directors have to travel between clandestine meetings on third-class rail tickets.

It is not too seismic a spoiler to reveal that Lyra, Pantalaimon and Malcolm Polstead, the now grown-up protagonist of La Belle Sauvage, face a foe more implacable and dangerous than ever before. Of course the Magisterium is every bit as malevolent, but then so is Talbot’s bland emptiness, as his charm and witticisms fail to conceal an entirely hollow and mendacious fraud. Comparisons could be made with Pullman’s fellow Oxford author Richard Dawkins, but a more relevant – if perhaps unintended – one is surely our current Prime Minister, another master of concealing his vacuousness with fine words. Pullman cites John Milton – whose Paradise Lost gave His Dark Materials its title – as a great influence, and it is hard not to think of the oleaginous demon Belial in the second book of his epic poem when encountering Talbot:

A fairer person lost not Heav’n; he seem’d
For dignity compos’d and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas’d the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began.

The Secret Commonwealth is a tough book, lengthy (well over 700 pages) and with distinctly grown-up themes. Lyra is much harder to like than her earlier incarnation, and many will miss some of the first trilogy’s indelible characters – although, who knows, they may yet return in some sphere or other. Works of this nature manage to bend traditional rules of time and space, to thrilling effect. Yet it is still a true fantasia of imagination. Pullman has a unique knack for creating worlds that enthral and challenge as much as they can terrify, and this new and often challenging voyage into the great, unknowable world of “Brytain” is a compelling and fascinating read. It will undoubtedly sell in huge quantities, and it richly deserves to.

The answer is very much “yes”, albeit not, perhaps, in the way that you might imagine. For all of the scuttlebutt and rumours swirling around, this is still a piece of mainstream entertainment from a major Hollywood studio, directed by the man behind The Hangover and with two A-list lead actors in Joaquin Phoenix and Robert de Niro. Anyone going to it expecting a quasi-religious experience that redefines cinema will inevitably be disappointed. Those hoping for a smart, dark look at American urban life, leavened with a generous helping of social satire and with a knockout lead performance, will be altogether happier. Although I’m still not entirely sure about the inclusion of Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2 in a key scene, a moment at which the filmmakers overplay their hand and attempt to troll the audience. As if they needed to.

The film, for the uninitiated, deals with the “origin story” of Batman’s greatest nemesis, the Joker – although it must be noted that the scenes that try to tie the narrative into a wider comic-book storyline are some of the film’s weakest. (I worked out that this was the fourth time in recent cinema that I had seen Bruce Wayne’s parents be murdered; twice was probably more than enough.) As portrayed by Phoenix, Arthur Fleck is an aspiring stand-up comedian in the early Eighties who ekes out a pitiful living dressing up as a clown, enduring violent physical abuse in the course of his work and suffering from a variety of mental health issues. He lives with his mother in the kind of cursed and tiny apartment that unhappy people in the movies always have to inhabit, and his only real pleasure comes from watching oleaginous talk-show host Murray Franklin (De Niro), whose show he has fantasies of appearing on. His life meanders on in an unhappy way, until a co-worker’s misplaced kindness and a late-night subway encounter with a trio of drunken Wall Street bankers combine to memorably visceral effect. Cue the emergence of “Joker”.

A great deal of the advance word on the film suggested that it was a deliberate homage to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and the influence of both is clear, especially in the casting of De Niro in a pivotal role. Its director and co-writer Todd Philips, obviously trying to distinguish himself with a far more serious picture than his previous work, manages to keep the feel authentically grimy and gritty, especially in the first act. There are long stretches when one feels as if one is watching some lost classic from the era in which it is set, and the casting of the fine character actor Bill Camp in a small role as a moustachioed detective only contributes to the seamy atmosphere of it all. The political dimension is also clearly present. Fleck finds himself, by accident, at the epicentre of a movement that sets the angry poor in their rat-infested city against the uncaring rich, and riots ensue. It is hard not to think of the gilets jaunes, or, of course, a certain red-baseball capped provocateur-in-chief. This is America, and it is definitely not great.

The casting of Phoenix, one of the edgiest and most risk-taking actors working today, represents a considerable coup for the filmmakers. Phoenix is usually found in altogether more esoteric fare, and this is his most high-profile role since 2005’s Walk The Line, although this could hardly be more different. There, he played Johnny Cash with gusto and brooding, but ultimately stopped short of investigating Cash’s truly dark side. Here, he is like someone unleashed. If he doesn’t erase memories of Heath Ledger’s Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight, that is solely because they are such different interpretations. Ledger’s terrifying, inexplicable figure seems to have emerged fully formed from hell; Phoenix’s Fleck has been created by a mixture of everything from inadequate mental health funding to deep-rooted parental issues. Initially, one pities him, before the violence shifts from being borderline justifiable to unpleasant.

Phillips’ film is technically excellent, thanks to Lawrence Sher’s appropriately gritty cinematography and, especially, Hildur Guðnadóttir’s growling, cello-heavy score, which grows in intensity and foreboding as the action progresses. I’m not sure that it is anything like as dangerous or threatening as some of the early publicity has indicated, although no doubt there will be a few idiots causing trouble while wearing clown masks on opening weekend. Instead, it is a splendidly effective look inside the mind of an extremely troubled man, played to perfection by a fine actor. We can only imagine what Donald Trump will make of it all, but no doubt he will offer his thoughts on social media in due course. And thus the whirligig of life imitating art imitating life will, once again, turn full circle. Frankly, if you weren’t laughing, you’d cry.

In the fascinating and authoritative catalogue, none other than Alan Moore, himself a noted Blakean, writes “in the hallway of 13 Hercules Buildings, Blake beheld both austere deities and trampled devils. It is to the credit of his generous and blazing soul that Heaven was not spared his fierce, critical gaze, nor Hell his sympathy.” This is an excellent summary of Blake, someone whose art reflects an obsession with the duality of the soul and the body, often expressed in beautiful yet disturbing ways. Anyway who has ever seen his memorably monstrous picture “The Ghost Of A Flea” will know how bizarre and baroque his imagination could be; the abiding feeling that anyone who has wallowed in Blake for a while has, in a curious sense, strayed into a parallel world, not that unlike our own, but warped and horrific as well. No wonder Philip Pullman is an avowed admirer of his work.

All of which, unfortunately, makes the Tate’s rather timid approach to this exhibition something of a disappointment. There is something surreal about, on a wet and stormy Tuesday afternoon, looking at some of English art’s most astonishing works, and feeling comparatively unmoved. The problem comes in the curators’ attempt to be both comprehensive and conventional at the same time. It is arranged chronologically, which isn’t a bad idea per se but unfortunately means that there’s at least one not wildly interesting room to get through before you can get onto the really compelling ones. There are a couple of attempts to do something interesting – a recreation of a 19^th century gallery where Blake might have exhibited, a mock-up of an altar piece in St James’ Piccadilly Church – but there needed to be a lot more of that and a lot less of a sense of “this is how we do an exhibition in 2019”.

There are other issues as well. There is a depressingly box-ticking adherence to “woke issues” – if you’ve ever wondered about LGBTQ+ issues in Blake’s art, then you’ll be delighted – and it is an unfortunate feature of many of his most extraordinary works that they were conceived and executed on a relatively small scale, meaning that an awful lot are crammed into each of the galleries. By the time that you reach the final exhibit, the extraordinary “The Ancient Of Days”, it is hard not to nod at it with a sense of a job being done, rather than being able to revel in the wonder and beauty of Blake’s art. A more imaginative curator might have attempted to look at the work thematically – “Innocence and Experience”, perhaps. And if the Tate had had real cojones, the thing to have done would have been to have staged it as a pop-up exhibition outside the gallery, in whatever Soho space they could have rented. Or, staying truer to the spirit of Blake, they could have ventured further away, to whatever passes for artisan poverty in contemporary London, and seen if that had a greater effect.

It is easier to criticise the exhibition for what it isn’t than for what it is, and to its credit, it brings together an unparalleled selection of Blake’s work together. As long as you don’t mind being overwhelmed, there are treats and surprises here, including everything from hackwork engravings undertaken to make money to some of his lesser-known pictures; there is a particularly striking and chilling depiction of the blind Milton, eyes glassy and staring. And some of the connections between his writing and art are well made and interesting. It’s not a bad exhibition, just a rather disappointing one.

Blake, though, will endure. I hope that it inspires writers, artists and filmmakers in the way it should, and that this strange, troubled man’s afterlife continues to live on. But, please, can the next retrospective be something altogether more Blakean and less Tatean?

In the case of Ad Astra, directed by the auteur James Gray, there is no doubt that this beautiful, deeply serious and profoundly thoughtful film will attract an appreciative, mainly arthouse, audience. Despite the starry presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role, and the likes of Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and Liv Tyler in support, it is probably too esoteric and abstract for the mainstream, and, like many of Gray’s earlier films, seems destined to remain a cult curiosity. Yet it should be sought out on the biggest screen if you can, possibly with a glass of something strong to hand, and wallowed in. Cinematic voyages like this do not come along too often.

The storyline owes something to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as well, inevitably, to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), but Gray’s influences are rich and varied, including Malick’s Tree of Life (2011), Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and even Andrew Niccol’s horrendously underrated Gattaca (1997). Major Roy McBride (Pitt) is a talented and heroic astronaut who nevertheless has a deep feeling of existential ennui, communicated to the audience by moody voiceover that often resembles a more comprehensible version of Malick’s characters’ musings. He is the son of famed space pioneer Clifford McBride, who is believed dead after a mission to Neptune vanished years before. The purpose of his mission was to discover whether there was other intelligent life in the universe, and it was believed to have failed, but mysterious energy surges appear to be emanating from the mission, which are threatening life on earth as we know it. McBride is therefore tasked with a dangerous and personally taxing journey, to see if his late father has left something behind, or if the world is simply doomed.

Gray, whose last film The Lost City of Z starred a miscast Charlie Hunnam but was otherwise terrific, is a very underrated filmmaker. His earlier collaborations with Joaquin Phoenix, including We Own The Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008), indicated that he was a writer-director of unusual intelligence and compassion, and this, by far his grandest and largest-scale work, finally allows him to play at the level of his great influences. Although Ad Astra is nowhere near as cryptic or esoteric as The Tree of Life or 2001, it still moves slowly by conventional sci-fi standards, and relies on inference and suggestion rather than one-liners. It does feature some astonishing action set-pieces – a moon buggy chase, a zero-gravity fight that rivals Nolan’s Inception (2010) and virtually any of the scenes in space – but they are shown in almost abstract fashion. Even as the characters on screen are locked in life-and-death struggle, the audience is hard pressed to find more excitement than a solemn mood of contemplation.

This, of course, is Gray’s intention. He portrays his milieu extraordinarily effectively, setting his world around two or three decades in the future – where the Moon has been colonised and grinning tourists take selfies by plastic aliens, and where global brands like Virgin Atlantic and DHL have become, quite literally, universal – and neither glamorises it nor makes it seem scuzzy. He is helped by one of Pitt’s greatest performances. Between this and Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, this fine actor is having a splendid year, and here he delivers an iconic performance, often in extreme close-up, which makes one empathise with a character who, for most of the film, is a miserable and emotionally isolated loner.

Apart from Pitt, there is good work from Sutherland as an enigmatic high-up, Jones as his missing father and, in tiny cameos, Tyler as Pitt’s estranged wife and Ruth Negga as a helpful scientist. If one was to criticise the film, it would be for the want of human interest; with the exception of its lead, this is a picture that rhapsodises in the sense of the unknown, with vast vistas of inky black swimming into view, accompanied by Max Richter’s brilliant, mournful score. Yet, by the end, this criticism seems an unfair one. It would be unfair to hint at what happens, but, eventually, what initially seems to be a superbly accomplished but cold film reveals its emotional core, and, for many, it will resonate very movingly indeed. It is unlikely to be a box office smash, but Ad Astra is that rare thing in our not-so-Marvellous age – a serious, grown-up film with something to say, which does so with sombre integrity. And that, surely, is worth cheering it to the stars.