It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.

He did it Once. He did it with Begin Again. Sing Street is Irish writer and director John Carney’s third hymn to music’s inspiring power for his characters to find themselves. Almost too cute for its own good, it’s targeted at the feel-good market with the precision of one of those cruise missiles that can navigate up a jihadi’s u-bend. If you don’t see it on a date, you might just as easily watch it with children, grandparents, or your long-lost step-sister from Patagonia.

Teenage girls in the West who routinely abuse their parents for imposing midnight curfews, cancelling suspicious sleepovers, and insisting bra straps be concealed should hope that they are not suddenly dragged along to see Mustang. 

Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.

After Dazed and Confused, college days. This successor to Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult favourite about high school hedonism in 1976 moves on to the start of a 1980 college term. Everybody Wants Some!! is named after a Van Halen song instead of the earlier film’s Led Zeppelin but, with the Reagan years yet to kick in, little culturally essential has changed. The pursuit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll remains these American kids’ inalienable right.

Brighton’s barely a city. It was awarded the title in 2004 without having to build a cathedral, or become bigger than a greatly swollen version of Brighthelmstone, the fishing village it once was, hemmed in from further growth by the South Downs and the sea. For all the relentless tide of London incomers and tourists, and the bustle of the bohemian North Laine, most of Brighton is quiet and peaceful, hardly urban compared to the capital.

John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.

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.