The X-Men films have frequently managed to bring a shot of ethical awareness and emotional engagement to the superhero party, but even so this swansong for Hugh Jackman’s Logan (aka Wolverine) is likely to take your breath away. With James Mangold at the helm as director and co-writer, this is a haunting elegy for times past, battles fought and comrades lost, as Logan finds himself grudgingly dragged out of a drink-sodden semi-retirement as a limo driver.

Translating terrorism is tricky. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student is an adaptation of a play by the German writer Marius von Mayenburg which was staged in London two years ago under its original title, Martyr. One exchange in this story (which is set in and around a school) references what might happen if Christian extremists pursued their beliefs with a fervour we associate more with militant Islam. The two concepts don’t quite combine in English as they did in Russian, which used the title (M)Uchennik, a play on the two words which caught the associations of both.

Serebrennikov is known in his homeland as much as a stage director as for his film work – The Student is his sixth feature, and premiered at Cannes last year – and he first staged the play at the theatre which he runs in Moscow (casting partly repeats). He has not only adapted the work for screen, but clearly shaped the German original into a Russian context, most notably that of the Orthodox religion. It gives a sharp accent to an issue – the relation between state and Church, of concurrent official ideologies – that has become particularly acute in Russia this century.

Exact references, to both Old and New Testament, appear as screen titles 

All of which makes the film’s teenage protagonist Venya (Pyotr Skvortsov, sulkily intense, main picture) something of a contradiction. His adolescent rebellion, against both his mother and the school authorities, can’t be dismissed in the usual way because his protests are on fundamentalist religious grounds, and he cites the Bible, chapter and verse, to prove his points (exact references, to both Old and New Testament, appear as screen titles).

His single mother (Julia Aug), perpetually exhausted and working in three jobs, clearly loves him, but doesn’t have a clue what to do with a son who’s become practically a stranger (a normal teenager, in her book, would be “collecting stamps and jerking off all the time”). More enterprising is the approach taken by the school’s progressive biology teacher Elena (Victoria Isakova, giving a highly intelligent performance; pictured, below, left, with Julia Aug, right), who sees Venya’s stubbornness as some sort of cry for help, and initially tries to approach him more sympathetically.

But the dynamic between the two moves towards conflict. When she teaches sex education – including information about homosexuality, another highly sensitive issue in Russia these days – he strips naked and rampages around the classroom, meeting her explanations about contraception with fire-and-brimstone injunctions to “be fruitful and replenish the earth”. Lessons about Darwinism are countered by his dressing in a guerrilla costume and preaching creationism.

Even the priest who is attached to the school is defeated by the phenomenon, his attempts to co-opt the teenager into the official structures of religion countered by accusations about the Church’s venality, its attachment to palaces and Mercedes rather than its duty to “bring fire to the earth”. The things notably lacking in Venya’s worldview, however, are charity and love, highlighted particularly in his interaction with Grisha (Alexander Gorchilin, pictured below with Skvortsov), the bullied outcast of the class who latches on to his charismatic contemporary for his own reasons.

Venya sees Grisha not as a friend but almost as a disciple (which was, in fact, an alternative title for the film). Grisha has one leg shorter than the other, so Venya doesn’t hesitate to call him a cripple (Christ, we are reminded, sought out the cripples and the outcasts). Trying to extend the shorter leg becomes something of a ritual test of faith, as Venya intones “Grow, leg” over his companion’s half-naked torso; for the other boy, hands and half-naked torsos hint at something else altogether. The disillusionment will be painful.

Scenes like that reveal that The Student has plenty of very dark comedy, although you’d need an audience on the right wavelength to extract it (and some may well be lost in translation). The antics of the school’s headmistress and some of her proteges are conveyed with a pronounced degree of satire. Serebrennikov’s first significant feature, Playing the Victim, from a decade ago, another adaptation from the stage, also had a central figure who didn’t fit into the world around him, and was also gloriously rich in black comedy – but the mood in his new work is somehow darker, more desperate.

It’s felt especially in a very uneasy score from composer Ilya Demutsky, which uses strained, sometimes atonal string writing to intersperse episodes and set the emotional tone (it’s much more nuanced than repeated closing use of Slovenian heavy-metallers Laibach’s anthem “God Is God”). There’s something somehow detached to Vladislav Opelyants’ cinematography, too, working largely with long shots and controlling colour and light impeccably. Filmed in Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic, there’s virtually nothing that identifies the location as specifically Russian – rather it’s a somehow generalised small-town atmosphere, visually interchangeable perhaps for Scandinavia or other coastal northern climes.

That quality – of being very Russian in spirit, while presenting an environment that in itself is not distinctly Russian at all – could not help but recall Andrei Zvyagintsev, especially his first film, The Return. And comparisons for The Student are also appropriate with Zvyagintsev’s latest, Leviathan. Both films are saying that something is somehow very much not right in the society in which they are set, but whereas Leviathan unfolded on an almost epic scale, Serebrennikov’s film speaks in a more minor key, its dramatic action more muted (and its script, arguably, on the wordy side). The Student doesn’t make wide assertions about morality, instead it probes – teases, even – around issues of values (religion being, after all, among the deepest of all). It’s an uneasy film, one that leaves a somehow bitter taste behind.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Student

If only the recent American election had been similarly rectified. That was surely the thought on many people’s lips as the 89th Academy Awards ended in confusion with the news that the evening’s expected winner, La La Land, had in fact lost to Moonlight – an upset immediately amplified by easily the biggest cock-up in Oscar history. 

French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan leaves the time and place of It’s Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) deliberately unclear: “Somewhere, a while ago already” is the only clue offered by its opening titles. An adaptation of the 1990 play by the French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce, its unspoken subject is AIDS (from which Lagarce himself died in 1995), with its story of a lead character, Louis, returning to his family after a long absence to reveal that he is dying. It’s not only the absence of mobile phones or email that reveals we’re in the past: clearly, it’s a time when medicine could offer nothing.

The setting is also unspecific, and some have assumed that the youthful Québécois director has moved location away from his native Canada, to Europe. I don’t think so: follow the opening sequence of exterior shots which preface the otherwise overwhelmingly claustrophobic action, and the details, the buildings and street-look alike, surely identify as North American (Lucky Strike is the cigarette brand we notice, too).

Dolan has a record of harping on mothers 

That issue is more than a detail, since one of the contexts into which It's Only the End of the World fits convincingly is that of American dramatists like Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams and their studies of family units imploding. The film’s opening musical track “Home Is Where It Hurts” by French chansonniere Camille is anthemic for what follows, as Louis’s arrival (after 12 years away) and the meal that follows throw up issues which this more than usually dysfunctional family has been repressing.

Yet it also points up a difference, that Louis (Gaspard Ulliel, main picture) remains essentially a cipher, a central character about whom we learn little. Going back to dramatic precedents, End of the World at times seems like a Long Day’s Journey into Night cut short when its hero makes his premature departure for the airport. Opening voiceover aside, Dolan is as sketchy about Louis – he’s a playwright who has achieved international renown – as Louis himself has been skimpy in his contacts with his family over the years, communication limited to a series of elliptical postcards. His years away have obviously seen him realise his identity in the city, including the homosexuality that also remains largely unbroached as an issue within the family, limited as it is by the attitudes of its times and environment.That means he hardly knows his younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux) at all, and is meeting sister-in-law Catherine (Marion Cotillard) for the first time, though she and her husband Antoine (Vincent Cassel) have named one of their children after him. These two female characters are the ones that come closest to him: Cotillard’s character is especially sensitive, as she instinctively understands the issue – even if her words “Combien de temps?” lose much of their acuity in translation – that does finally remain unspoken.

We may wonder about the dynamics of that marriage. Cassel’s Antoine is so angry, so hostile to the brother to whom he is the absolute opposite: a man who works with his hands, who practically scowls at everything Louis represents (Cassel would make an outstanding Stanley in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire on this evidence). The film’s structure gives Louis time alone with each of his family members aside from the general gathering, and the excursion with Antoine into the outside world is bracing, to say the least.

Nathalie Baye plays Martine, the matriarch. Though it’s the entire family that is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, we certainly sense where it came from. Dolan has a record of harping on mothers – his debut film was titled I Killed My Mother, his most recent one just Mommy – but actually that isn’t the dominating relationship here, rather it’s the whole entity that is under cruel scrutiny. (Nathalie Baye with Gaspard Ulliel, pictured above right.)

It’s Only the End of the World has expanded its perspective from Dolan’s previous work, and the director himself has spoken of it as “my first [film] as a man”: it is his sixth feature – he is now 27. It won him the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival last year, yet critical reaction has been distinctly mixed. It’s a film that intentionally makes watching it uncomfortable, as if we are ourselves caught in this claustrophobia, scrapping bitterly while leaving the important things unaddressed. Cinematographer André Turpin certainly keeps us close to the uneasy action, with fast-shifting close-ups on faces, and the speed of dialogue seems occasionally unstoppable, like something we just can’t escape from (on occasions, Louis literally escapes into flashbacks, as if to prove just that).

Yet how bracing it is, such snatches of virtuoso flair. If sheer quality of acting on its own is ever enough to demand a viewing, It’s Only the End of the World compels. Diamond-sharp playing from all, simultaneously sparkling and liable to fracture at any moment.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for It’s Only the End of the World

Patriots Day is a patriots’ film. It dramatises the grievous day on which American values were threatened on American soil like no other time since 9/11. Two bombs were detonated at the Boston marathon in April 2013: two bystanders were killed, 16 lost limbs while two policemen would go on to lose their lives. The two terrorists of Chechen origin who planted the bombs were hunted down by Boston police and the FBI until the streets were once more safe.

How to put a human face on a story with so many disparate elements? The opening sequences carefully introduce us to the various individuals whose lives, you sense with grim foreboding, will be irrevocably altered or even terminated by the day’s events: a lonely Chinese student, a sweet shy cop, a young married couple on whose lithe, soon-to-be-amputated limbs the camera lingers as they make love. (Pictured below: Rachel Brosnahan and Christopher O'Shea as Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes.)

The script also chooses to zoom in on the domestic lives of the Tsarnaev brothers, the perpetrators of the atrocity. The older brother Tamerlan has a wife and a small child, and is clearly of a more ideological bent. “[Martin Luther] King was a fornicator,” he sneers. “But I’m a fornicator,” reasons his doubting kid brother Dzhokhar, who has a penchant for videogames and fast cars. But the main focus, the glue holding the centre together, is fictional police sergeant Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg), a fast-talking maverick who is just back in uniform after a period of suspension. He wears a knee brace and suffers the ribbing of colleagues but is essentially the huggable spirit of dauntless, decent Boston made flesh. He’s stationed closest to the bombing and, as the injured writhe and groan on the sidewalk, is at the heart of the police effort to clear the route of runners and allow ambulances in. Later, when the bigwigs of the Bureau (headed by Kevin Bacon) want to know how to locate the perpetrators on many hours of CCTV footage, they rely heavily on his matchless local knowledge.

Despite a real-life coda, this is no documentary reconstruction but a macho hybrid fashioning entertainment from tragedy. The tropes are familiar from disaster movies. “What do you need?” Kevin Bacon is asked. “A command centre,” he says. “A really big one.” (Watch clip overleaf) Cut to a vast warehouse soon cluttered with operatives at monitors. Rugged wit has been parachuted in to help lighten the script. JK Simmons's no-nonsense police officer has a humorous hint of Clint about him. There are laughs in the younger Tsarnaev’s desire for a Bluetooth connection in a carjacked SUV. Even the climactic shoot-out has its frothier moments.

Director Peter Berg licks the story along at an efficient pace, imparts a powerful sense of a city under siege in the overhead camerawork, and wrings tears in a final reveal involving the actual participants. Dramatically, though, for all the immense effort of the manhunt, not quite enough is at stake in Patriots Day. There is some alpha dog dick-waving between the FBI and John Goodman's police commissioner (“this is my fucking city,” he hollers). And that's about it.

Deep down this is civic hagiography in which America is on the side of the angels. The script is disinclined to interrogate the motivations, however fanatical, of its home-grown jihadists. In just one brief powerful face-off, Tamerlan’s wife is interviewed by an inscrutable woman posing as a devout Muslim. The film’s most dismal biorhythmic low finds Wahlberg muttering a climactic homily about love conquering hate and good evil. It’s a pity that this worthy memorial, which arrives at a loaded moment in America’s relationship with Islam, is more interested in redemption than nuance. Why doesn't Berg do something really useful and make a film about the mass murders caused by the US's slack laws on gun ownership?

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@JasperRees

Overleaf: 'It's terrorism.' Watch a clip from Patriots Day