John Wilson has built a reputation as a conductor which marks him out as a musicians’ musician. He doesn’t present himself with any pomposity, even wearing a neat black tie and lounge jacket on this occasion, while the male musicians around him were in white tie and tails. He doesn’t play to the gallery either: there’s a smile and a bow, but no flamboyance in his on-stage demeanour.

There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life.

Colours had meanings for Emil Nolde. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.” As the son of a German-Frisian father and a Schleswig-Dane mother, Nolde was raised in a pious household on the windswept flat land on the border on Germany and Denmark that his family farmed.

It’s fascinating to compare this Norwegian film, which despite being Oscar-nominated (it made the Best Foreign Film shortlist of nine, but not the final five) has slipped out without a cinema release in the UK, with Darkest Hour. Set over a crucial few days in April 1940, it’s a parallel story of powerful personalities and their personal and political dilemmas in the face of Germany’s invasion of Europe. But the parallels don’t extend to directorial style; where Joe Wright opted for overly artful set pieces and CGI flourishes in Darkest Hour, for The King’s Choice Erik Poppe adheres to the Dogme school of handheld camera and minimal artifice, save for a few visual effects.

The film opens with a classic montage of newsreel archive giving the backstory. Danish prince Carl accepted the Norwegian throne in 1905 when Norway declared independence from Sweden. We see the celebrations as Carl is crowned King Haakon VII. Grainy black and white footage of the glamorous royals, graciously playing their roles as figureheads over the decades, is abruptly superseded by the Germans torpedoing ships in Norwegian waters in April 1940. Norway’s neutrality means nothing to the Nazis; Germany wants its coast for strategic purposes and the country’s interior for its iron mines. Invasion is inevitable and the king is faced with a choice – surrender or fight the Nazi war-machine with wholly inadequate Norwegian forces.Poppe dramatises the next three days in painstaking detail. We cut between the royal family fleeing the city (pictured above: Haakon and the crown prince strafed by Nazi bombers), the baby-faced soldiers who are trying to defend them in the countryside, and the Nazi envoy to Norway, Kurt Braüer (Karl Markovics), who is trying to mediate with Berlin. The infamous Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who became a puppet leader under the Nazis, is heard spouting insidious commands on the radio, but never seen.

There are some great performances in the film – particularly by Danish veteran Jesper Christensen as King Haakon – and some powerful dramatic scenes that really capture the fear and tension of that time. Filmed in snowy landscapes or on deserted city streets, the muted colours and interiors are quite beautiful. Adhering to Dogme rules, there is a very minimal but effective music score and sound effects. It’s a refreshingly restrained war movie which focuses on the royal family, moral dilemmas and local characters.

But it’s a long watch and not without its clichés – as young women in beautiful cardigan-and-blouse combinations look anxiously at the uniformed men around them barking orders, it’s almost impossible not to have the Downfall bunker parodies come to mind. And while the story of Haakon’s brave stand against inevitable invasion is a cornerstone of modern Norway’s sense of itself as a nation, it’s possibly not of huge interest outside the country. This DVD release comes with unimpressive extras – film of the premiere in Oslo with reactions from pensioners, and a fragment detailing the effects used to create the navy explosions.  

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Overleaf: watch the Edinburgh Film Festival trailer for The King's Choice

Say what you like about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s partnership with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – and plenty has already been written – but sometimes the facts speak for themselves. At the end of this midweek matinee concert, an audience that had presumably been lured by the promise of Haydn and Max Bruch exploded in laughter and cheers at the end of a piece by György Ligeti.

If you're not going to mention the imaginative genius of Stravinsky, Auden and Kallman within the covers of your programme, and the only article, by the director, is titled "Acting Naturally", then the production had better deliver.

Only connect.

Wonder Woman was the film that defied all the predictions: a big-budget superhero movie directed by a woman which managed to please not only the feminists and their daughters but also the boys who love DC and Marvel. In its slipstream comes Professor Marston and the Wonderwomen, written and directed by Angela Robinson, best known for her work in TV on The L Word. It's surrounded by some controversy as it claims to be a based on a true story but there's not a lot of corroborative testimony from the central characters to justify its narrative.

It’s the tale of Harvard psychology professor William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), who together with his brilliant, spiky wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) designed a prototype lie-detector machine in the 1930s. We meet him lecturing and flirting with his all-girl class on his theory that male-female relations are based on dominance and submission. His argument is that women should play more of a dominant role upon occasion in order for the mental health of both sexes to thrive (Hall and Evans pictured below).Watching his bravura performance at the lectern throughout is his wife, but Marston's eye is particularly drawn to Olive (Bella Heathcote), a student whose doll-like prettiness (and an aunt and mother who are pioneer feminists) intrigues him. His desire for Olive is briefly thwarted when she demonstrates that she’s more interested in snogging his wife than him, but they soon settle into a scandalous sexy threesome and Marston is forced to leave the university.

Churning out pop psychology articles doesn’t really pay their household bills or promulgate his theory, so Marston turns to comic book creations and launches Wonder Woman on the world with the help of DC Comics. The kinky costume and barely concealed bondage and spanking themes that run regularly through Marston's comic strips see him hauled up in front of a decency committee while his home life (he had children with both women) causes local scandal.

Angela Robinson has bathed the entire film with a nostalgic glow

Writer-director Angela Robinson cuts back and forth between scenes of Marston being interrogated by a decency committee and the three-way romance. It's a rather clunky narrative device. She has bathed the entire film with a nostalgic glow reminiscent not of the actual 1940s but of a 1990s Armani advertising version of the era. The much-hyped sex scenes are so wholesome as to be almost farcical.

Cutting through this schmaltz is a laser-like performance from Rebecca Hall, whose intelligence and line delivery is entertaining if anachronistic. Did women in that era, no matter how smart, really say things like, "When are you going to stop justifiying the whims of your cock with science?" Or describe someone as a "Grade A bitch"? Hall makes the other two players in her ménage à trois look like Ken and Barbie dolls; her performance just about saves the film, but it's a bit of a wasted opportunity to tell what was a remarkable story. The end credits contain a moving sequence of photographs of the two real-life women, who carried on living together for decades after Marston's death.

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Overleaf: watch the official trailer for Professor Marston and The Wonderwomen