If only there were more: that's a first response to Nothing Like a Dame, Roger Michell's affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of four of Britain's finest actresses, all now in their 80s. As the camera circles around Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins in conversation, it's impossible not to be swept up in a collective portrait of these remarkable careers alongside their shared awareness of the advancing years. Small wonder the one classic role they pause to debate at length is Cleopatra. Age really cannot wither this quartet's infinite variety.
Due to be aired on the BBC following a limited cinema release, the film consists of chat caught, as it were, on the lam. Michell provides the occasional offscreen prod to get a topic going, and once in a while the film crew appears in a shot, more often than not to be shooed away by Smith. But with ladies like this, intrusions would be unnecessary as well as impolite. Who wouldn't want to hear as much as Smith has to say about pinching her comic technique from Kenneth Williams? Or from Dench, bronzed following a Cornish holiday, putting a patronising young paramedic in his place by announcing that she recently appeared on the West End in The Winter's Tale? (Pictured below: Judi Dench as Paulina, photograph by Johan Persson.)
The points of convergence between the women make for a veritable thespian cat's cradle. All except Atkins appeared in the Franco Zeffirelli film Tea with Mussolini, while I have seen Smith over the years onstage with each of the others in turn. Away from stage and screen, the ladies can all speak on what it was like having been married to an actor, Smith movingly insisting on remembering the good times she had with Robert Stephens and letting whatever else their marriage consisted of go unsaid. (She and Atkins remarried, Plowright and Dench have not.)
Filmed inside and on the Sussex grounds of the home that Plowright shared with her late husband, Laurence Olivier, this portrait of the artist as a reflective dame essentially takes the form of a round-table discussion spliced with pairings of Dench and Smith, say, on the sofa, chortling about memories and fretting about what happens with time to the memory.
The chosen clips – Dench as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Smith and Stephens in Private Lives, among others – won't generally surprise any British theatre buff who hasn't had the odd amble round YouTube, but one can surely infer from her remarks that this is yet another celluloid venture Smith most likely will not see. (She confirms once more that she has yet to watch Downton Abbey, pictured below.) Less expected, and utterly delightful, are remarks in passing about Atkins's unexpected acquaintanceship with the initials KY – cue much hilarity – and a sightless Plowright advocating yoga and mindfulness and the need always to exercise the brain.
Agelessly witty and effortlessly stylish as they are (all four have remarkable skin), the women make no attempt to conceal the toll exacted by time. Dench stops the heart, as she has made a career of doing, pausing before she talks of her beloved Michael Williams: a lifetime of feeling contained in a fleeting silence. Smith later admits to loneliness but not before informing us that Edith Evans had two sets of teeth: the gossipy and the self-aware ever-intertwined. We get talk about sharing hearing aids alongside lines from bygone plays remembered as if the years had somehow fallen away. And in one startling moment, all eyes turn in mock-fury on Dench for scooping up the best parts. (Theatre buffs will note the arrival of this film in the same week that Glenda Jackson and Diana Rigg, contemporaries all, got Tony nominations for their current Broadway parts: this generation of women, Vanessa Redgrave included, marches ever onward.)
Career highlights? Roles that got away? Changing tastes and preferences for work? Those are among the topics one could imagine explored in further depth had Michell's camera rolled ad infinitum. Let's just say that I laughed plentifully and was greatly touched and doubt I'm alone in wishing for a director's cut packed with outtakes. And when Nothing Like a Dame draws to a close with audio of Dench reciting "our revels now are ended", the only possible response is to insist that they are not.
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While Moll's 
If that sounds like the scenario for a South African Brokeback Mountain, the film’s third character, Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini, pictured below, in background, with Nakhane Touré), disrupts such a dynamic. He comes from a wealthy family in distant Johannesburg, a city boy brought here by his father for the toughening up that the ukwaluka promises. It's not only his trainers that set Kwanda's urban modernity apart from his fellow initiates: Xolani, who has one-on-one responsibility for the youth, easily guesses that he’s different from them in his sexual orientation, too. Kwanda stands at one remove, allowing him a degree of scepticism about the proceedings of the ukwaluka rite (in which respect he surely shares something with Trengove as outsider-director), as well as an insight into what’s going on between the two older men. The Wound draws us into this increasingly uneasy three-sided configuration, one which festers – unlike the physical wound of circumcision, which heals – with dramatic inexorability.
There may be big landscapes aplenty in the surroundings, but Paul Özgür’s widescreen cinematography is memorable for its intimacy. Visual elements of Xhosa tradition – the contrasted colours of the initiates’ loincloths, their white body paint (main picture) – aren’t exaggerated, but the film engrosses us in its (for the great majority of its viewers, anyway) unfamiliar world. You guess that making the film must have been a broadly collaborative process, and Trengove’s insight is so much more than merely anthropological (though The Wound certainly feels true on that level, too). Most of all, he has drawn performances from his main trio that may seem at first understated, but in which his characters come to inhabit their roles absolutely. Pared down almost to silence by the end, Nakhane Touré as Xolani proves emphatically that less can be more. You could say exactly the same about the film as a whole: The Wound impresses for its raw, incremental power.
As in his work on other period films like Carol, Haynes has put together an expert team of art directors and costumiers (including Britain's own wondrous Sandy Powell) and given them full rein to show their talents. The magnificent DP Ed Lachman does an expert job of capturing the grungy streets of Manhattan in the Seventies in Kodak colour. This homage to the mean streets of early Scorsese and the Harlem of the blaxploitation era is impressive. The lustrous black and white sequences set in the Twenties are perhaps a little weaker and a touch clichéd. There’s real artistry in Haynes' homage to DW Griffiths in the film-within-a-film, although Moore goes over the top as a melodrama star.