Let’s explain the peculiar title first: Operation Anthropoid was the code name given by the Czech Resistance for the planned assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War Two. The events have been portrayed on film before, a notable early example being Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (screenplay and score provided by "Bert" Brecht and Hanns Eisler). Lang took many liberties with the facts, whereas Sean Ellis’s 2016 film attempts to be scrupulously accurate. Heidrich was a repugnant, cold-blooded brute, sent to govern an occupied Czechoslovakia in 1941, his predecessor having been perceived as too lenient. Described by Hitler as “the man with the iron heart”, he was also the principal planner of the Final Solution.

Anthropoid begins, literally, with a bump, as two agents parachuted in by the Czech government-in-exile based in London crash into a wintry forest outside Prague. They’re played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, and within minutes they’ve been found by a pair of informers, whose truck they steal and head to Prague. There they gingerly negotiate a locked down city before making contact with Toby Jones’ resistance leader and reveal their plans. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the pair have to stay inconspicuous while convincing others of the need to kill Heydrich, always aware that the consequences of doing so might be even more horrific. Which turns out to be the case: the assassination attempt, thrillingly staged, doesn’t quite go to plan, and the fugitives find themselves holed up in a cathedral crypt thanks to a sympathetic priest.

They’re soon aware that innocent civilians are already being shot in reprisals, and that an entire village has been razed based on misinformation. Naturally there’s a wretched Judas figure (a slippery Jiří Šimek) on hand to betray his associates. But faced with the chance to gain a hefty cash reward and save his family, his actions are wholly credible. The interrogation scenes are mercifully brief before the virtuosic final shoot out, in which the rebels ultimately drowned when the crypt is flooded with fire hoses. So far, so bad, and knowing that such events really happened is deeply affecting, as is the fact that a brave band of Czechs and Slovaks put their lives on the line for a country which no longer exists.

To say that this film is technically impressive isn’t to damn it with faint praise; Ellis’s sure-footed direction and spare screenplay take us through this series of unfortunate events at a breakneck pace. Convincing sets and location footage really do conjure up a grey, wartime Prague, and how refreshing to encounter such a spare, economical soundtrack. That the actors all speak accented English is a distraction at first, but the performances are strong enough to overcome any doubts. Especially good support comes from a luminous Anna Geislerová (pictured above right) as Murphy’s love interest. Ellis is notably absent from the disc's bonus features – there’s no director’s commentary, but a "Making Of" short suggests that cast and crew enjoyed working with him.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Anthropoid

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.

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

This new wartime drama launched on Remembrance Sunday is a curio. The setting of My Mother and Other Strangers is rural Northern Ireland in 1943, where it’s green and wet and a long way from the conflict. Into the midst of the fictional Moybeg on the shore of a lough a squadron of bombers from the USAF has been introduced. Their planes careen across the cloudy skies of a farming community where previously the loudest noises would have been the mooing of heifers in labour, while their pilots swarm into the pub and the fleapit. So they’re the strangers of the title.

We last encountered Stephen Poliakoff on TV in 2013's Dancing on the Edge, which provoked mixed reactions (not least on theartsdesk). That was the story of a black jazz band in 1930s London, who played gigs at swanky hotels. Close to the Enemy (★)  is set in London just after the end of World War Two, and happens to feature a jazz band with a black singer who perform in a once-swanky hotel somewhat gone to seed.

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

In Monster Field, 1938, fallen trees appear like the fossilised remains of giant creatures from prehistory. With great horse-like heads, and branches like a tangle of tentacles and legs, Paul Nash’s series of paintings and photographs serve as documents, bearing witness to the malevolent lifeforce that, unleashed by their undignified end, has taken hold of these apparently dead trees.

There will surely be no end to the debate as to how any work of art can approach treating the Holocaust, and its depiction in cinema, with the great immediacy of that form, has always been especially problematic. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s 1965 film The Shop on the High Street (Obchod na korze) certainly stands in the very first rank of such attempts, its depiction of how a civilian population becomes complicit in treatment of outsiders remaining as insightful and necessary today as ever.

The latest in a long tradition of Russian Second World War films, Sergei Mokritsky’s Battle for Sevastopol itself emerged out of conflict. Initiated as a "status" joint project between Russia and Ukraine well before relations between those two countries soured, production continued despite the rift that deepened between them. The film premiered in both on the same day in April 2015, earning considerable – and equal – box office success on both sides of a border riven by war.

The 30th anniversary of the death of Andrei Tarkovsky – the great Russian director died just before the end of 1986, on December 29, in Paris – will surely guarantee that his remarkable body of work receives new attention, and this month distributor Artificial Eye launches a programme, Sculpting Time, which will see new digitally restored versions of his seven films being re-released around the country.