This long, fascinating documentary was apparently intended as the centrepiece of last autumn’s BFI celebration of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But Made in England was delayed while Martin Scorsese (executive producer, presenter, and narrator) and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell’s widow, who also gets a credit as an executive producer) put the finishing touches on Killers of the Flower Moon. 

Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s Hunger. It’s gripping from the first frame to the last; the tension rarely lets up as we watch the main character lying and cheating his way through life as he struggles with addiction and is fleeced by card and loan sharks. In a heart-wrenching scene, his brother Paul (expertly played by Cam Riley) begs him to seek help.

In a Dagenham hospital, Silver Haze’s compassionate nurse Franky, played by Vicky Knight, meets Florence (Esmé Creed-Miles), who’s been admitted as a patient for having attempted suicide. After Franky dumps her boyfriend, the two women begin a tempestuous affair – or is that a tautology?                   

Beautiful Thing’s opening scene plays out like a sweary take on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl, Meera Syal’s potty-mouthed PE teacher lambasting her Year 11 pupils with language that would now have her hauled up in front of a professional conduct panel.

A splendid cast struggle to make something coherent out of Wicked Little Letters, the latest film from Thea Sharrock who not that long ago was one of the hottest theatre directors in town.

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.

In Présages, Joanna Hogg talks about ghosts. This short film from 2023, commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, is included as one of the special features in the new BFI Blu-ray release of Hogg's intensely atmospheric The Eternal Daughter, with its virtuoso performance from Tilda Swinton in a dual role. Other special features include a Q&A with Hogg, Swinton and Francine Stock.

Margaret Thatcher’s witless assertion that “there is no such thing as society” dates back to 1987; Ken Loach’s The Old Oak offers a belated but powerful rebuttal.

You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.

“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.”