From its opening shot – of a flock of sheep backlit by the sun’s rays – The Settlers is visually stunning. But the beauty ends there; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that everything else about this episode in Chile’s history is cruel and ugly.

The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?

Mystery surrounds the provenance of Matthew Vaughn’s new spy fantasy, Argylle. Allegedly, it’s based on the debut novel of the same name by Elly Conway, with Bryce Dallas Howard playing a novelist called Elly Conway in the film. But evidence of the existence of a real-life Conway is hard to find, though there was a rumour that it was a pseudonym used by Taylor Swift (who denies it).

The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying John of Gaunt’s famous monologue lauding his ailing England in Richard II.

How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.

Andrew Haigh’s films come at you like stealth bombers, presenting everyday scenes in a spare narrative style, and then using them to blitz you with unexpected emotions. His latest is no exception. 

The End We Start From couldn’t be more timely, opening in cinemas after weeks of heavy rain and flooding dominated UK news. But the film’s release has also coincided with the ITV police drama After the Flood and it’s too tempting to compare the two. Both feature pregnant women dealing with the traumas of delivery for the first time; the waters break both in macro and microcosm.  

Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is not a roguish friend but a spiky pupil at the boys’ school in New England where he teaches classics.

“It’s an injustice of nature that I haven’t become an athlete and it’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings,” says German director Werner Herzog, aged 81, sounding characteristically intense.

Who else, muses Wim Wenders, one of the many talking heads in Thomas von Steinaeker’s exhilarating documentary, has succeeded in “inventing” their own accent in a way that the whole world imitates and enjoys? Herzog is a “truly mythological creature” and has, he says, shaped the American perception of Germans like no one else. Though no one else is quite like Herzog.

When it was published in 1976, “The Hite Report” caused such a sensation that it was translated into 19 languages and flew off the shelves in 36 countries to become the 30th best selling book of all time. Yet it’s author, Shere Hite was treated as Public Enemy Number One.