Eureka’s restored print of Charles Vidor’s 1944 musical Cover Girl looks and sounds astonishingly vivid, especially when watched on Blu-ray. Would that everything were so simple: despite a starry creative team, the film makes for frustrating viewing. Doubly so when you consider that this was one of Jerome Kern’s final scores, with lyrics provided by Ira Gershwin which are the film’s one constant pleasure: couplets like “Because of Axis trickery/My coffee now is chicory” are peerless, especially when delivered in brash style by a young Phil Silvers.

Gene Kelly plays Danny McGuire, injured in combat and reduced to running a Brooklyn nightclub, whose star dancer Rusty Parker (Rita Hayworth) becomes an overnight sensation after appearing on a magazine cover. Despite McGuire’s love, she takes up a wealthy producer’s offer to swap Brooklyn for Broadway, agreeing to marry him along the way. The eventual happy ending won’t surprise anyone, but there’s an awful lot of chaff to get through en route, notably an interminable series of flashbacks where Hayworth plays her own grandmother. Including an absolutely terrible faux-cockney number, the dubbed Hayworth’s stilted performance making Dick Van Dyke’s unfairly-maligned turn in Mary Poppins seem like Stanislavsky method acting.

Still, the high spots are terrific. “Make Way for Tomorrow” begins with Kelly, Hayworth and Silvers in a quayside oyster bar, swiftly skipping outside for a superb extended dance sequence on a huge soundstage, encountering drunks, milkmen and a baton-twirling policeman. Kelly had been given free reign as choreographer, the scene's glories hinting at Singin’ in the Rain’s title number. And the passage where he tap dances with his own translucent reflection is eye-popping. Eve Arden’s sardonic PA gets many of the best lines, and the extravagant title song showcases Hayworth’s background as a dancer, her Rusty stepping out of a cloud before shimmying seductively down an improbably long ramp.

Production design is exquisite, from the fashion magazine’s gleaming art-deco office to the nightclub’s cramped kitchen and dressing-rooms. Vidor’s vibrant deployment of primary-coloured costumes anticipates both Jacques Demy and La La Land. Hayworth, Kelly and Silvers are always watchable. But slack pacing and a curiously unmemorable score mean that Cover Girl hasn’t aged well. Disc presentation, however, is excellent: there’s a brief appreciation from Baz Luhrmann and Farran Smith Nehme’s booklet essay is a pleasure to read.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cover Girl

After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.

Not that Gibson, as director, is doing anything very different to what he's always done. Hacksaw Ridge is a story of religious faith under pressure, and of imperturbable heroism in the face of extreme violence. Gibson's telling of the real-life story of Desmond Doss, who refused to handle firearms but served heroically as a combat medic in the US army in the Pacific in World War Two, harks back to themes in a number of Gibson's previous films, not least The Passion of the Christ and We Were Soldiers (which he starred in but didn't direct).   

The combat scenes of the battle for Okinawa in 1945 are rendered in horrific, hyper-real intensity, and you get a good idea of what you're in for from the opening sequence, which is a slowed-down montage of soldiers being shot, burned and blown up. However, you get an hour's respite from the really gruesome stuff, as Gibson prepares the ground by introducing us to Doss's almost Waltons-style home life back in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Andrew Garfield is impeccably cast as Doss, bringing a glow of simple sincerity to the role of a devout Seventh-Day Adventist whose upbringing has seared the message Thou Shalt Not Kill into his soul like a branding iron smacking into a sirloin steak. In earlier days, the part might have been a shoo-in for James Stewart or Gary Cooper, and Gibson's harking back to a simpler time of robust moral certainties is surely not accidental.

Doss's father, Tom (a haggard-looking Hugo Weaving), has been left twisted and broken by his experiences on the Western Front in the Great War. He mopes miserably over the graves of the friends who were killed alongside him, and lapses into drunken rages. His son is haunted by flashbacks to the occasion when he had to threaten his dad with his own gun after he'd been pointing it at his mother (Rachel Griffiths). Nor was the message of the occasion when he nearly killed his younger brother by playfully hitting him with a brick lost on him.

Even though it means leaving his best girl Dorothy back home (she's played with radiant, albeit one-dimensional, pulchritude by Teresa Palmer, pictured above), Desmond feels patriotically compelled to join up. But the Army can't get its head round the idea of a mustard-keen soldier who refuses to pick up a rifle (they call him a conscientious objector, but he calls himself a conscientious cooperator). Desmond is scorned, ridiculed and beaten up by his comrades, so much so that even his CO Captain Glover and gruff Sergeant Howell (Vince Vaughn, above left) start to take pity on him.

It's through the horrors of real-world warfare that the troops come to appreciate Doss's remarkable strengths. The battle scenes are set on the titular ridge, a slab of rock rising vertically which the soldiers have to scale with cargo nets, as blood from the previous waves of massacred Americans drips down on them. In a wasteland of rocks and smouldering shell-holes, the Japanese are pitiless opponents, bayoneting wounded Americans and pulling such stunts as pretending to surrender and then throwing hidden grenades at their captors. The Americans have to blow up their bunkers and tunnels with explosives and burn the defenders out with flame-throwers (below, Sam Worthington as Captain Glover).

Amidst all this, Doss stoically goes about his work of treating casualties and helping them off the ridge. The real-life Doss was credited with saving 75 wounded men, and apparently he really did walk through the middle of artillery barrages and storms of machine-gun bullets to do it. There's a moment when Doss himself is finally rescued and lowered down on a sling, and hangs in space as though en route to a celestial Paradise.

Gibson's film is clean, sober and shot through with a respectful piety, but somehow this scarcely believable story manages to feel a little flat and somewhat predictable. Maybe it's because Doss, despite his heroics, arrives as a fully-formed character who doesn't change or develop over the 140-minute running time. He doesn't experience an instant of doubt ("God, what do you want of me?" he asks in the midst of the mayhem, and is promptly answered by a wounded man yelling for help), which makes him quite difficult to identify with for us more feeble and timorous mortals.

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• Overleaf: watch the trailer for Hacksaw Ridge

In 1942, Roy Acuff set up Acuff-Rose Music in partnership with Nashville-based songwriter and talent scout Fred Rose. The new publishing company was dedicated to treating songwriters decently. They would not be cheated out of their copyrights. There would be clear and honest accounting. The contracts offered would have better percentages than rival publishers. There would be no shady deals. Acuff-Rose cocked a snook at the country music establishment and, in time, had writers as important as The Everly Brothers, Lefty Frizzell, Don Gibson and Roy Orbison on its books.

The most surprising thing about ITV's latest period drama is that they've scheduled it for Monday nights. Since you could soundbite it as a mash-up of Mr Selfridge and Downton Abbey, you'd have thought The Halcyon was a shoo-in for that peachy Sunday-night slot.

Anyone expecting a knockout punch from Matthew Bourne’s latest creation is in for a let-down. His hotly anticipated take on Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film, unlike his Swan Lake, is not going to send anyone out into the night weeping into their hankie. Nor is it likely to turn unbelievers into ballet fans, and yet it is probably his best piece of work to date.

Howard Brenton (Christie in Love) and Ruth Rendell (Thirteen Steps Down) are just two of the many writers inspired by the sordid goings-on in 1940s Notting Hill. John Reginald Christie was a postman, a policeman and a psychopath who, as a back-street abortionist, enjoyed killing for company. A fantasist with an iron grip, he ensured that his lodger, Tim Evans, was the first to be hanged for his crimes.

While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad). Stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard will guarantee some ticket-shifting action, but the apparent intention of director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight to recreate Hollywood's vintage wartime melodramas never quite comes off.

Still, it's quite fun to see them trying. The opening scene is a shot of sun-scorched desert sands carrying the caption "French Morocco, 1942", and into the top of the frame descends a pair of boots belonging to Canadian agent Max Vatan (Pitt), as he arrives by parachute. He's heading to – where else? – Casablanca to meet French Resistance veteran Marianne Beauséjour (that would be Ms Cotillard). She has inveigled her way into the local beau monde, where she rubs shoulders in the treacherous Vichy air with both French and Germans. Brad, posing as a phosphate engineer, purports to have come from Paris to reunite with his fictional wife.

Of course, they're really on an assassination mission, though there's some time to soak up the sultry North African night and hang out at the updated version of Rick's cafe. Marianne isn't too happy about Max's Parisian accent though, which is fair enough because Brad's mumbling French is little better than his music-hall Italian in Inglourious Basterds (and how Allied could do with some of the latter's deranged inventiveness and ferocious black humour!).Nonetheless the Casablanca job is doubly successful, since the couple not only zap their target but also fall in love (they seal the deal in the back seat of a car, as it rocks in a tempestuous sandstorm). Suddenly it's a year later, and Max and Marianne are happily married and living in Hampstead, NW3. Mysteriously detached from the war, they're enjoying a riotous life, with their gaggle of bohemian, cocaine-snorting (really, in 1943?) friends. Their cup of happiness runneth over when Marianne gives birth to their daughter while being frantically wheeled around on a hospital bed in the middle of a spectacular CGI air raid.

But just when it was all going so well, a bitter chill blows through in the shape of a baleful senior SOE officer (Simon McBurney). He describes himself as a "rat-catcher", and he has reason to believe that there's a Nazi informer operating in the immediate vicinity (I'm doing my no-spoilers best here, though I can reveal that Anton Lesser's shifty Hampstead jeweller needs to be carefully watched). Max refuses to believe it, but the mole must be caught and Max goes into spy-hunting overdrive, even hijacking an RAF plane and taking a wildly improbable awayday to occupied France to quiz a possible witness who's languishing in a French prison. There's also a macabre walk-on by a barely recognisable Matthew Goode, gothically disfigured in aerial combat. 

If only Marianne had played "La Marseillaise" to Max, everything could have been so very different. As it is, Cotillard's ability to suggest latent melancholy and a secret inner life allows her to march imperiously off with most of the acting plaudits, while Brad was probably better suited to that tank-commander's job in Fury. The Royal Navy next time, perhaps?

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BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS

Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck

Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history

Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble

Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball

The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis

The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring

The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story

PLUS ONE TURKEY

World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script

@SweetingAdam

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Allied

It's remarkable that the story of Seretse Khama, the king of Bechuanaland, isn't more popularly known, though Amma Asante's film may change all that. The movie opens in a smoggy, gloomy London in 1947, where Seretse (David Oyelowo) is completing his studies in law prior to returning to rule his homeland. Momentous change is in the air in the post-war world, as Europe struggles to rebuild and Indian independence signals sundown on the British Empire. 

Two things to note in Thursday’s Hallé performance at the Bridgewater Hall: the debut in the Manchester main series of their highly talented new assistant conductor, Jonathon Heyward, and another stride along the road towards the Hallé/Elder complete edition of the Vaughan Williams symphonies. Oh, and there was a very fine piece of virtuoso violin playing from James Ehnes, whose performance of Bruch's Second Violin Concerto would probably have been the headliner in any other circumstances … and the revelation of an unusual piece by Janáček.

The Russian director Alexander Sokurov has never been afraid of tackling weighty, often philosophical issues head on, and his latest film Francofonia is as pioneering – and, some might say, unnecessarily uncompromising – as ever. It’s nothing less than a meditation on civilisation, its potential for preservation or destruction, and history, seen through the prism of Paris's Louvre. Stretching, and evading, the conventions of both documentary and fiction, it’s perhaps best considered as an art project in itself.

Sokurov’s cinematic fascination with the museum as a concept stretches back to his remarkable 2002 Russian Ark, a single-take engagement, at just over an hour and a half, with 300 years of Russian history that was filmed in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Technically ground-breaking, it brought to the fore the interrelationship between the museum as a repository of history, and as a space in itself, in which history unfolds. (Interestingly, it seems to have spawned a new sub-species of cinema – from Johannes Holzhausen’s The Great Museum to Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery – investigating the museum as an entity in itself, with all its various accretions of cultural and human history.)

It feels too much like a metaphor imposed from outside

The Louvre duly followed the Hermitage in opening its doors, developing the programme “Louvre Invites Filmmakers” which sought “unusual, non-institutional views of the building, the collections, and the institution itself”, which made Sokurov’s appearance there completely natural. Francofonia is certainly “non-institutional”, mixing as it does an eclectic variety of elements. Its most direct level involves dramatic reconstruction of the life of the Louvre during wartime German occupation of Paris, and a story concentrating on the relationship between its then director, Jacques Jaujard (played here by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and the German officer Count Wolff Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath) who was the Nazi cultural overseer for France.

Beginning as formal, distant players on opposing sides, these two highly cultured contemporaries somehow become united by a shared determination to secure the Louvre’s collection. Shortly before the outbreak of war, everything except some sculpture had been evacuated into storage in chateaux cellars around France, and ultimately it was in no small part Metternich’s achievement that so little was removed as trophy plunder to Germany.Those two historical figures, living in their clearly defined moment, are joined by another couple, less directly but somehow more organically connected to locus. Stalking the museum’s halls Sokurov gives us the memorable pairing of the Emperor Napoleon (Vincent Nemeth) – responsible, of course, for much of the enlargement of the Louvre’s collection, as well as its establishment as a public gallery – intoning periodically “C’est moi”; and the tricolour personification of France herself, Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes), visually appropriated from Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, with her chant of Liberté, égalité, fraternité. In one scene, the two of them ponder the Mona Lisa: not the least advantage of having unfettered, after-hours access to a great space like this is the chance to see it without any other visitors. (Pictured below left: Johanna Korthals Altes, Vincent Nemeth.)

As the film’s narrator, Sokurov is himself – literally – caught up in both strands: he is equally observer, the eye of the camera if you like, and participant, engaged in dialogue with the characters, as well as with the space itself, the works in its collection, and its history. He creates the story that tells us how it all started, how the building grew and its galleries developed, all illustrated through depictions of that process in works of art from the collection itself.

He also weaves in a third truly varied element, best described as philosophical meditation, which is by some distance the hardest thing to describe about Francofonia. It ranges from invocations to the icons of Sokurov’s own cultural world such as Tolstoy and Chekhov, to a digression on the very different wartime fate of the director’s home city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad. The wartime devastation wrought by the Nazis on their Eastern front is set against the apparent tranquillity – although it is very much a selective tranquillity, from which many of the actualities of the time (most acutely, the fate of France’s Jewish population) have been banished – with which Paris engaged with her occupiers.

And behind that is Sokurov’s most abstract concern of all, his meditation on the fragility of civilisation – our culture, in the broadest sense – in history. To convey this he introduces himself in his everyday life: we see the director in his study, engaged in a film project, as well as in skype conversations with a friend, the captain of an ocean-going container ship that is transporting, among other things, items from a museum collection, through a perilously stormy sea.

Literally, as we see huge waves break over the bow of the vessel, this cultural freight is at risk (it’s symbolically linked to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, too). It’s a rich mix, but this last element is somehow the least persuasive: or rather, it demands a total commitment, on Sokurov’s terms alone, which viewers may not be ready to make. It feels too much like a metaphor imposed from outside on the structure of an already heterogenous film, making it solipsistic almost to the point of pretension.

The variety of technical forms that Sokurov and his cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel employ is every bit as diverse, but the result there is endlessly fascinating: the textures and hues, patinaed or distressed with age, sound strips and other elements left visible – it all comprises a work of art in itself. It’s a visually sombre film, combining pellucid black and white archive footage of Paris of the period with human encounters filmed in faded, treated colours. Murat Kabadokov’s score is, if anything, even more impressive: it rumbles richly throughout the film before dominating its final minutes – there are no end-credits where we would expect them – with a demonic riff on the Soviet (now Russian, too) national anthem. Mannerism seems the right term: if on the visual and audio side, Francofonia’s experiments in that direction never tire, the same cannot always be said of the content. A curio, albeit a fascinating one.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Francofonia