Early in the first part of his sprawling metafictional docu-whatsit Arabian Nights, the director Miguel Gomes is reflected in a café window as he flees his crew for conceiving the absurdly overambitious project he’s set up. It was "the dumbest idea", he says in voiceover, to think “I could make a fine film of wonderful, seductive stories while following Portugal’s miserable situation for a year.” To reconcile militancy and escapism, he goes on: “That is betrayal. Disengagement. Dandyism.”

The Florence Foster Jenkins industry reaches newly giddy heights with Stephen Frears's film of the same name, which cleverly casts a great talent - who else but Meryl Streep? - as the cheerfully self-deluded American soprano. The subject already of separate Broadway and West End plays (both in 2005) and a French film (Marguerite) that has only just been released, Jenkins's extraordinary story here stands apart by virtue of that rare leading lady who can make a character's misguided belief in her gifts seem a form of bliss. 

Was it a blessing of sorts that Jenkins's head was somewhere in the clouds? Perhaps, or so the film suggests from its first glimpse of Streep dressed as an angel and kept airborne during a 1944 entertainment at New York's Verdi Club that happens to have been founded by this self-same philanthropist.

A culture doyenne with a particular avidity for potato salad - bathtubs of the stuff, in fact - Jenkins dreams of bringing her coloratura soprano to the tony confines of Carnegie Hall. That goal finds a ready enabler in her ever-droll common-law husband St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant, pictured with Streep above), who makes up in support and kindness toward his beloved "bunny" what he may fail to provide sexually. On that front, Bayfield has a mistress (Rebecca Ferguson), about whom Jenkins remains seemingly as oblivious as she is when it comes to recognising her limited talent.

Determined yet dithery, her sweetness amended by a gently perceptible sorrow at her syphilitic past (Jenkins contracted the disease at 18), our heroine completes a triptych of sorts for Frears of singular women from entirely divergent backgrounds that includes Helen Mirren's Oscar-winning turn in The Queen and Judi Dench's Oscar-nominated Philomena. 

If Streep gets a nomination for this, as surely she will, that will mark her 20th Oscar nod, and there's something lovely about seeing so consummate a talent play this blithely self-absorbed squawker - the enjoyment amplified for those who caught Streep's two most recent films, Into the Woods and Ricki and the Flash, in both of which she demonstrated her well-known singing skills. 

And while a more churlish view of the material might glory in Jenkins's comeuppance, Frears and screenwriter Nicholas Martin remind us that here was a performer who sold out faster than Sinatra and who could make fans out of even the frostiest observer. The Tony-winning Broadway actress Nina Arianda illustrates as much with her scene-stealing bit as a ditzy Brooklynite who shifts from jeers to cheers, while a quorum of drunken soldiers in attendance at Jenkins's eventual Carnegie Hall appearance might as well be us in their about-face from sceptical disinterest to fervent ovation. (Frears isn't above employing some familiar showbiz clichés.)

Amid inevitable and deserved praise for Streep, one must pay very real tribute to Grant, who seems to have found a humanity not evidenced from him in years. While an endearing Simon Helberg gets ready laughs as the pianist Cosme McMoon, who regards his newfound employer with a mixture of admiration and alarm, Grant tempers his sometimes curdled urbanity with a depth of feeling that meets Streep head on.

Can it be that, faced with a first-rate scene partner, Grant decided to up his game? "No one can say I didn't sing," Jenkins tells a teary Bayfield near the end. Nor can anyone say in Florence Foster Jenkins that Hugh Grant didn't act. 

• Who was the real St Clair Bayfield? Find out on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Florence Foster Jenkins

The sad, short life of country legend Hank Williams makes for a surpassingly dour biopic in I Saw the Light, which does at least prove that its protean star Tom Hiddleston can do a southern American twang and croon with the best of ‘em. If only the actor weren’t trapped in the feel-bad film of the season.

There are times when you sit in the cinema and wish that you didn’t speak English and could just enjoy what you’re seeing. Unfortunately Knight of Cups is one of those times. This is a stunningly beautiful film, the first of Terrence Malick’s films to be (mainly) set in Los Angeles, and it features amazing work by long-term collaborators cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and designer Jack Fisk. But its narrative voiceover and dialogue are excruciating, quasi-parodic and they drag down the stunning images irretrievably.

This is a world of gorgeous women, glossy minimalist architecture, movie-star palaces, infinity pools and empty beaches permanently basking in the light of golden hour. We follow Rick (Christian Bale), a disenchanted screenwriter, through a series of almost hallucinatory encounters with various amours – kooky Imogen Poots, a saintly Vegas stripper (Teresa Palmer) and a model (Freida Pinto). There are lengthy pool parties, orgies in glassy apartments and intimacies in darkened hotel rooms. At times it’s horribly reminiscent of those high-end perfume advertisements that big-name directors and superstars take on to fund their passion projects.

Some of the sex scenes (toe-sucking?) are cringe-worthy when you consider Malick’s age (he's 72), and you can’t help wondering what happened to the stronger roles for women that he was once so good at creating – from Sissy Spacek in Badlands through to Jessica Chastain in To the Wonder. Here the only actress allowed to keep her clothes on is Cate Blanchett (pictured below) as Rick’s ex-wife. She is a doctor ministering to the deformed and the diseased in downtown LA while her ex dives into another doomed relationship, the longest being with Natalie Portman’s cheating wife who finds herself pregnant by Rick. These actresses are playing ciphers, but it’s hard to blame a director’s misogyny when Rick too is a hollow man, a prodigal son without prodigious talent.

Characters are prone to utter lines such as "You don’t want love, you want a love experience” and “Dreams are nice, but you can’t live on them”, or “All those years, living the life of someone I didn’t know”. About 20 minutes in, the narrator muses, “How do I begin?” Sadly it’s a question that’s never answered. Malick scholars will be rummaging through their Tarot packs, re-reading the Pilgrim’s Progress (intoned here by John Gielgud) and scrutinising the director’s own biography to parse this tale of an alienated artist trying to find his muse and reconcile with his disapproving father (Brian Dennehy) and his angry brother (Wes Bentley), all of whom are haunted by the violent death of a younger brother.

Bale gives a one-note performance as Rick, the wandering Knight in his black shirt, the same little vein throbbing under his haunted eyes, whether he’s walking on the beach with yet another beautiful muse, driving in a vintage sports car through the city or discussing his work on a Hollywood backlot. As always with Malick, there is a whispery voiceover (Dennehy) and much philosophical musing, delivered not just by Blanchett but also by Armin Mueller Stahl as a priest. The film could have done without the weirdly clumsy earthquake sequence.

On the plus side Malick is the master of the floating camera, the unexpected angle and the eliding edit. It would be wonderful to go on a Knight of Cups location tour, especially if accompanied by its magpie soundtrack – Pärt, Debussy, Grieg and Vaughan Williams vie with contemporary tracks and ambient electronica from Biosphere. If there were a way to switch off the dialogue, leaving the images, music and layered soundscape, Knight of Cups would be wondrous. As it is, it’s a bit of an endurance test.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk

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Your Highness (2011). Gross-out comes to medieval England. Here's hoping it bought a return ticket

No Strings Attached (2011). Natalie Portman isn't the only girl to swoon over cute Ashton Kutcher

Thor (2011). 3D graphics and 2D gods: Marvel's version of Norse myth is best when earthbound

Jackie (2017). One brief shining moment that was known as Camelot: how the Kennedy legacy was born

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Knight of Cups