If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten.

Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida television presenter who shot herself in 1974 while live on air on the station for which she worked. If that’s a real-life act that’s (inevitably) impossible to follow, Craig Shilowich’s script and Campos’ direction open her story out to us with a fully convincing wider perspective, a story that combines talent with aloneness, insight with mental illness, and personal drive with a brittle everyday manner (when a colleague tells her, “You’re not always the most approachable person”, it’s an understatement). 

Michael’s remedy is to apply an 'If it bleeds, it leads' news policy 

It’s also a time that doesn’t accept assertiveness from a woman easily: when the channel’s boss Michael (Tracy Letts, sympathetic even when he’s driven to exasperation) accuses her of being a feminist, he means “always talking louder than the other guy”. It doesn’t help that revenues are down, for which Michael’s remedy is to apply an “If it bleeds, it leads” news policy, a headlines-chasing search at odds with the “issue-oriented” journalism that Christine advocates for her “Suncoast Digest” strand (but doesn’t always manage to find, Sarasota being something of a backwater, so she’s left covering plenty of local curiosity stories).

But if such a précis sounds dour, Christine isn’t. There’s plenty of humour in Shilowich’s script, not least in its depiction of how a news studio actually works: how long-ago it all seems now, with TV still shooting material on film, the move to video only just underway here. (Christine’s television world clearly recalls Sidney Lumet’s 1976 Network too, not least because that film is about a presenter threatening suicide on air: Network clearly absorbed elements of Chubbuck’s story, even if writer Paddy Chayefsky said that he’d started developing its script before her death.)

There’s a finely crafted sense of the dynamics of this small working company. Michael C Hall is the station’s anchor George, the good-looker on whom Christine has a crush – as weathercaster Steve pays hopeful but unrequited attention to her – but though a late scene shows him to be considerate to Christine, George is more caught up with “the little blonde number in Sports”, especially when the chance of a promotion to a larger station comes along. There’s real sensitivity from Maria Dizzia, who's superb as Jean, Christine’s immediate assistant (and camerawoman), whose intentions are all good but can’t keep up with the increasingly hyper tendencies that her boss (and friend) is showing (pictured below: Rebecca Hall).

At home, that’s the problem also facing Christine's mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron, a wonderfully sympathetic performance that has her trying so hard to do the best, but just unable to find the right keys to press). There’s clearly been a breakdown in the past, and Peg can spot the symptoms again – better than the doctor to whom Christine goes about another ailment that proves the source of new anxiety. The doctor is ready to offer, so characteristically for the Seventies, pills for the stress that Christine complains about all the time, without recognising the deeper channels of her mania.

There’s so much more nuance than any retelling of the film's story can suggest. We see Christine not only when she’s struggling, but also when she's volunteering as a puppeteer at a local children's home, which reveals a different side to her. I have no idea if Shilowich drew that element from real life, or added it to his story, but it blurs our expectations beautifully – if we only saw Christine as a neurotic harridan, we would not be rooting for her, for things to turn out any other way than as they did.

Another element that strongly colours the film is its sense of period, specifically the months around President Nixon’s resignation in the aftermath of Watergate, an act that somehow forces America to confront a national neurosis that parallels that of Christine. Production design from Scott Kuzio catches a terrific sense of the moment, and it’s there to a tee in Emma Potter’s costumes, too, all the colours and the cuts. The outstanding technical achievements extend to sound design (Coll Anderson) that sways with Christine’s moods, alongside a score from Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans that employs some glorious tracks of the time. It’s a lovely balance: we relish Christine singing along to pop as she drives around determinedly in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle every bit as much as we feel with her when she’s entering darkness.

It’s a five-star performance from Rebecca Hall that reveals whole new facets to the actress, whose omission from the Best Actress Oscar shortlist looks little short of perverse. It’s more than enough – not that there isn't a great deal else around to merit it – to swing a fifth star for the film itself, not least for the hope that director Antonio Campos delivers on its promise. The two films he made before were at the arthouse end of the spectrum, and we can only cheer that a studio (Universal) gave him the chance to make a film that gives – in the best, if now rather old-fashioned sense? – adult viewers an adult story, one that challenges. Christine may make demands, but how much more richly it repays them.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Christine

After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.

As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot. 

I exempt from that charge a first-rate cast in which a lips-pursed, blazing-eyed Timothy Spall excels yet again, this time playing Irving. And the stakes posed by the narrative are high enough that one is riveted throughout to a story whose outcome is no surprise: Irving famously lost a libel case that he brought in 1996 against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her UK publishers, Penguin Books. Indeed, seeing this film amidst the present climate, I doubt I'm the only one wishing that Tom Wilkinson's indefatigably incisive Richard Rampton QC might be put to work combating several leading politicians in Ms Lipstadt's modern-day America. The film introduces its central sparring couple at a lecture Stateside, where Emory University professor Lipstadt is heckled from the floor while giving a talk for her latest book by the unrepentant gadfly that is Irving, Waving $1000 by way of provocation, Irving proceeeds to deploy both his age and experience – and the fact that he is English – to challenge Lipstadt (and anyone else) to prove that the Nazis did in fact gas Jews at Auschwitz. From there, Irving ramps up his needling to pursue Lipstadt for libel in court, where she is quite rightly astonished to discover that in Britain she will be presumed guilty unless proven otherwise; America's vaunted presumption of innocence is nowhere to be found.

Lipstadt's dismay leads her to that firebrand solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott, smiling only when totally necessary), whose CV includes handling "the Diana thing" – which David Hare's surprisingly laboured screenplay then goes to some lengths to explain. Julius, in turn, leads Lipstadt on to the barrister, Rampton, who insists on an exhaustive and first-hand tour of Auschwitz (pictured above) that makes for certainly the most visually heart-stopping section of the film. The soundtrack goes silent as Haris Zambarloukos's roaming camera lets the baleful imagery speak for itself. 

Elsewhere, Hare and director Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard) take a largely by-the-book approach, as if perhaps to resist the emotionally incendiary nature of what is on view. The script is full of "you must be" identifiers that seem like the lazy way out, and one feels slightly for Harriet Walter, who is forced to embody the entire community of Holocaust survivors that Lipstadt wants brought before the judge (Alex Jennings, suitably imposing), though her legal counsel argue otherwise. The Anglo-American differences are fairly ham-fistedly dealt with – Lipstadt jogs as incessantly as Rampton drinks fine red wine – and I stifled a laugh at the visual emphasis placed on a particular piece of London statuary which would have been far better left on the cutting room floor. 

Still, Hare has always provided catnip for actors (Weisz led a recent New York revival of his 1978 play Plenty), and they more than rise to the challenge here, Weisz giving it her Sally Field-style gusto-driven best, notwithstanding a Queens accent that might as well exist in inverted commas. The men are all terrific, ranging from British theatre regulars like Elliot Levey and Pip Carter in smallish roles to the trifecta of Scott, Spall, and Wilkinson: the last-named a Mozart-loving paragon of integrity who instructs Lipstadt on the appeal of black pudding (yuk!).  

Indeed, listening to Wilkinson hold forth on the depredations of prejudice and cowardice sends the mind on a mental march, the likes of which all too many men and women at the moment in Washington would do well to take on board. 

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• Overleaf: watch the trailer for Denial

"This had better not be shite, Danny," was the warning delivered to director Danny Boyle from his cast, amazingly reunited from the original Trainspotting 21 years later. They had reason to be fearful, knowing how things often go with sequels, but Boyle, teaming up again with original screenwriter John Hodge, has pulled a fabulously misshapen rabbit out of his hat, which triggers echoes of the 1996 film yet can stand unaided in its own right.

“A First Lady must always be ready to pack her suitcases,” remarks Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). Melania Trump, take note. Jackie, the first English-language film by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain (Neruda, No), is set in the week following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, as Jackie moves out of the White House and before the Johnsons move in.

The homecoming narrative is one of the most elemental ones we know, playing on the most primal human emotions. Stories of separation and reunion have been handed down from time immemorial, varying in their specifics but dominated by their intricate connection to feelings of origin and identity. Lion may be inextricably linked to the details of contemporary life in one sense, but its final scenes have a power that goes far beyond it. In director Garth Davis’s hands the story is told with a sensitivity that avoids the lure of sensationalism.

Adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, the film is based on a true story. Given that it’s one we may have heard about before watching – and the film’s existence presupposes a certain conclusion – the ending feels less important than the story that has come before (the final mystery actually lies in the title). Set between India and Australia, its action crosses continents – and, no less importantly, the very different ways of lives we see in each – and amply realises Lion’s cinematic potential.

Pawar conveys a wide-eyed, silent wonder as he discovers it all

Davis and his cinematographer Greig Frasier relish wide landscapes, presented through panoramic aerial shots, and Lion opens high above the dry plains of central India, the year 1986. It’s the subsistence world in which five-year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar, who has real screen panache) lives. His life revolves around his mother (Priyanka Bose), who works as a labourer, and his adored older brother Guddu, who does whatever odd jobs he can. Their very basic existence is grounded in family love, more often conveyed through gesture and image than words, in a film whose first half is spare on dialogue.

Saroo’s eagerness to prove that he too can make a contribution precipitates Lion’s first dislocation. Accompanying Guddu to a nearby town, his elder brother leaves him sleeping on a railway station bench. The next thing we know, Saroo is waking up on an empty train taking him off to an unknown destination, his cries of help to anyone he sees in the passing landscape ignored. If that’s a shock, arrival more than a thousand miles away at Kolkata’s teeming main terminus is an immersion in horror, not least because he speaks only Hindi in this frenzied Bengali conglomeration.

Saroo may slowly find his bearings in this unfamiliar world, but his survival is initially a matter of chance as he’s hassled by police and narrowly escapes the attentions of others whose designs on him are clearly sinister. Even when a chance act of kindness brings him to an orphanage, it’s a far from nurturing environment. We get a sense of the city’s variety, from the station underpasses (lit in anaemic yellows) in which Saroo sleeps on cardboard, through its shrines and streets, to the sheer scale of life around the wide Hooghly river.

When all attempts to resolve the mystery of where he has come from fail, Saroo is chosen for international adoption, and his next removal is to Tasmania, to his new parents Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham). After the aridity and tumult of India, this Australian landscape is an open one, dominated by water, every bit as unfamiliar to Saroo as the refrigerator and television in his new home. Pawar conveys a wide-eyed, silent wonder as he discovers it all, and he’s anchored by Sue's unquestioning presence. There’s nothing glamorous about Kidman (pictured above with Pawar) – even for late-80s Tasmania she seems almost determinedly plain – but she’s translucently sure of herself, emanating a stillness that captures the screen. It’s an assurance that will be tested with the arrival of the couple’s second adopted son, Mantosh, clearly damaged by his experience in a way that Saroo has avoided.

Cut forward to 2008. Saroo, now played by Dev Patel (pictured below) as a lightly bearded, gangly 25-year-old, has come to Melbourne to study. He's winningly confident in this new world of international contacts, which includes Lucy (Rooney Mara), an American student who becomes the film's understated romantic interest, as well as some Indians at the same college. It’s when he visits the latter for a meal that he’s thrown back into a past that he has seemed to blank out completely: it’s a distinctly Proustian moment, the re-association coming with jalebis, the brightly coloured Indian sweets that are lodged deep in his memories. In fact, food – and how you eat it – provides a nicely linked connection in Luke Davies’s screenplay. In childhood Saroo ate with his fingers, then a scene in Kolkata shows him discovering a spoon; part of his formal preparation for going abroad involves laboriously learning table manners, while with his new Indian friends, he’s once again inducted into eating with his fingers.

But it’s something else that he learns from them that propels Lion’s denouement. When Saroo opens up about his past, their mention of Google Earth sets him on a new journey, which will both disrupt his Australian life and (no particular spoiler alert) open a new Indian world. That it’s a piece of new technology that sets him out on his journey home may seem at first anomalous – myths normally being made of things other than GPS coordinates and screen images – but there’s no disputing the reality of Saroo’s story: we see its real-life conclusion in the film’s coda.

To say that Davis doesn’t complicate Lion is meant as a compliment, relying as he does instead on some excellent playing, from Patel and Kidman especially. Its vision of India may not surprise, and be somewhat served up for international tastes, but it doesn’t milk its story. Lion has a cinematic heft, not least in an emotive, often piano-driven score from Dustin O’Halloran and Hausckha that fills the screen, but finally allows the simplicity of its story to speak for itself.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Lion

There is an event at the heart of Manchester by the Sea that cannot be spoken about, either here or by any character who is a witness to it. But it explains why Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) has withdrawn into a state of catatonic frigidity. He is so cut off from the world around him he can barely persuade a muscle on his face to twitch. Only if he sinks enough beers is he roused to start thumping people in bars before returning to his dingy one-room apartment. We’re a long way from La La Land, this week’s other five-star movie out in time for the Oscars.

Lee is not entirely incapable of action. When he hears his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) is back in hospital with a chronic heart condition, he returns from his job as a janitor in Boston to the maritime community where he grew up. He arrives an hour too late. After tenderly kissing his brother’s corpse, he is soon angry at his memory when he learns that Joe has appointed Lee guardian to his 16-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges). He flatly refuses to accept the role even though there’s no one else: the boy’s mother is an estranged alcoholic, while other relatives are off somewhere unpronounceable in Minnesota.

It’s not clear why but flashbacks to a sunnier past reveal that Lee was once a family man himself. There’s a beautifully crafted scene in which, cheerfully sozzled, he returns home from work to his wife Randi (Michelle Williams, pictured below) and it is slowly revealed how many children he has fathered. One’s making stuff on the floor, another’s on the sofa watching TV and, look, here’s another new-born hiding in its cot. But for some reason Lee doesn’t live with them any more, and on his return to the community he is the focus of intense, hushed gossip.Manchester by the Sea, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, maps out its emotional terrain in a sparse opening sequence. On the rear platform of a family fishing boat carving through a coastal sound, Lee joshes with the young Patrick (Ben O'Brien) that he’d be a better bet in a survival crisis than his father. Cut to deep midwinter where Lee shovels snow, dumps trash and, as a plumbing handyman, deals with other people’s literal shit. This is a film about man who is so frozen solid he has no means of dealing with his own.

It becomes clear that Lee has barely seen Patrick in the intervening years, and their relationship is soon on a testy footing. Patrick is a confident boy juggling two girlfriends. “Am I supposed to tell you to use a condom?” Lee says when one of them stays over. Embedded in his community, Patrick is horrified by Lee’s edict that they will be moving to Boston. The fact that his father can’t be buried in the rock-solid ground till the spring buys some time. So Lee enters a holding pattern, ferrying his nephew around, hunting for work, and not confronting the profound trauma that is mirrored in the face of everyone he encounters.

If this all sounds like a long hard stretch in miseryland, that's not quite how it pans out. The mutual incomprehension of uncle and nephew is the source of much awkward comedy. Patrick is feistily incapable of grief apart from one bad encounter with the fridge-freezer. He disastrously enlists Lee to help in his efforts to get laid in the house of one of his girlfriends. And throughout, a jagged seam of tenderness between the two goes mostly unexpressed.The reckoning when it comes is not what would happen in other films. Lee has an encounter with Randi in which Michelle Williams, very impressively, does all of the emoting. "You can't just die," she pleads, and it's quite heartrending. If the film has a flaw it is that Lonergan (pictured above on set with Affleck) places just a little too much faith in the tactic of withholding. He puts most of the overt feeling into the soundtrack instead, which at heightened moments features Handel, Albinoni and Massenet. And he lets elemental symbolism do a lot of the heavy lifting: this is a story about ice and fire. And water: the family boat is not just a boat, it's a means of staying emotionally afloat.

For all Lonergan’s storytelling skills, Manchester by the Sea stands or falls on its central performance. Casey Affleck, outstandingly skilful at keeping his cards close to his chest, packs immense power into a study of incurable grief and guilt. Hedges is a screen natural too, and makes for a lively foil. Chandler and Williams offer strong back-up while Gretchen Moll is touching in a cameo as Patrick’s brittle mother. For the bromide of superficial redemption, best look elsewhere. This is a collectors’ item: a mature, slow-burning, unshowy film for adults.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer to Manchester by the Sea