It was both astonishing and depressingly unsurprising that Suffragette, Sarah Gavron’s feature about the insurgent foot soldiers of the campaign for women’s suffrage, was the first fictionalised film specifically about the movement. There are more films about the miners’ strike – which clearly tells us something.

In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.

Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the white American privilege and you'd be getting close, although In Between most reminded me of another director who made their debut film focusing on a feisty female central character, Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It, back in 1984. 

She has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times

Although In Between is an ensemble piece, Laila, played by the stunningly beautiful and super-smart Mouna Hawa is the strongest figure. She’s a lawyer with a mane of curls who sees nothing wrong in showing her cleavage at work. Laila is a secular Muslim who knows exactly what she can expect from her Jewish colleagues in the legal business. And in her downtime she also takes no prisoners; she’s got an appetite for drugs, dancing and female solidarity but is still looking for a man to be her soul mate. Her friend Salma (Sana Jammalieh) finds life a little tougher; she’s a DJ who works shifts in a restaurant as a sous chef where the Israeli boss doesn’t want the kitchen crew speaking Arabic. Meanwhile back home her Christian parents endlessly line up potential husbands because Salma hasn’t dared tell them she’s gay.

As there’s a lot of wild partying in their apartment, it’s not the obvious place for new flatmate Nour (Shaden Kanboura) to find a quiet room to finish her computer studies degree. Nour is a hijab-wearing Muslim with a disapproving fiancé who sees Tel Aviv as a city of sin. He wants Noura to marry him and return to their ultra-conservative hometown of Umm al-Fahm on the West Bank. Their relationship provides the film's most shocking scenes. There’s plenty of vivid drama along the way, all beautifully shot by Itay Gross and made wholly credible by semi-improvised dialogue scenes as not all the actors were professionals.

In Israel the film has been a huge and controversial hit. Maysaloun Hamoud has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times (pictured above: Mahmud Shalaby skinning up with Mouna Hawa). The film was banned in Umm al-Fahm while others criticised the director for receiving some funding from the Israeli government. Hamoud has received death threats because she is challenging fundamentalist religions, casual racism from Israelis towards Arabs and the endemic cultural repression that traps women (and to a certain extent men) in restrictive roles. In Between would make a fascinating double-bill with Menashe – both sympathetic portraits of normally inaccessible communities, ultra-orthodox Jews in Menashe; bohemian, radicalised Palestinians in In Between.

Intended as the first in a trilogy, I can’t wait to see more of the central characters. The DVD release comes with a scrappy short feature compiled from on-set footage and interviews with Hamoud and her Israeli producer, Shlomi Elkabetz. It looks as if they all had fun making the film – there’s a lot of hugging and high spirits – which makes In Between’s cool coherence even more impressive. 

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@saskiabaron 

Overleaf: watch the trailer for In Between

It’s hard to be sure if Rakal, Bella and Alice from Dream Wife are a rock’n’roll band or a girl gang with guitars. Either way, their debut album has got some cracking Riot Grrrl-flavoured tunes and a stridently feminist, in-your-face attitude. There is nothing demure about this trio and they really don’t care what your thoughts on that might be.

One of the much-hyped jewels in the crown of the family-friendly BBC holiday season is this new three-episode adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much loved novel by Heidi Thomas, the writer of Call the Midwife.

This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.

Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that implausible decade of wooden rackets, big hair and (ahem) unequal pay. The story is basically true: female champ Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) led a protest walk-out from a tournament circuit which offered much greater rewards to male players, set up a breakaway women’s tour, only to face a phallocratic broadside from left field when fiftysomething former pro Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) started challenging the top women to a gender-themed play-off.

Riggs had a clown's genius for garish marketing and happily cast himself as male chauvinist pig in order to boost ticket sales. His showdown with King in a Texan jumbo-dome became a famous event which, in retrospect, looks like a sideshow with a slight absence of oomph. So to beef up the script Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire) tells the parallel story of King’s discovery of her lesbianism and clandestine affair with Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), who travels as the tour hairdresser.

Thus King is fighting a public battle but, because she’s married, she’s also involved in a private one. She's not the only one with marital troubles. Riggs is a compulsive hustler who sacrifices his own family life, and a comfortable marriage to his heiress wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue, who gets a tender speech in which she gives him the boot). In this telling what matters to Riggs is the buzz of chasing preposterous bets on court, taking on all-comers while tethered to dogs or goats or wearing flippers.

It’s a role which Carell inhabits with relentless gusto (although his racket play is atrocious). As King, the ever-adorable Emma Stone wears the wire-rimmed glasses and apes the loping walk, and convinces as a steely feminist with a vulnerable core. Her swing’s not bad either (though the big match is CGI’d to the hilt). Riseborough is lovely as a free spirit whose gaydar, in an intimately soft-focus salon scene, tells her Billie Jean is there for the taking.

The facts of the Billie Jean story have been fairly outrageously origamied out of shape, events dragged around, people placed where they weren’t. King’s Australian rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee) comes off very badly as a hatchet-faced queer-basher. This being a feelgood fist-pumping version of a complicated narrative, the ugly aftermath of King's love affair doesn’t make it into the what-happened-next blurbs. Instead Marilyn hastens to Billie Jean’s changing room before the big game to fix her hair, the way these things happen only in the movies.If you accept that you’re being sold a simplified snapshot, Battle of the Sexes is a lot of fun. It has two directors – Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who made Little Miss Sunshine) – perhaps to prove that, somewhere on this project, the sexes really can collaborate as equals. Of course it's a necessarily rigged story from which no man emerges with much credit. It's hard to give two hoots for Riggs's private anguish. Billie Jean's walk-on husband Larry King (Austin Stowell) is a lantern-jawed dope. Tennis impresario Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) may as well horns and a curly tail. Even foppish tennis couturier Ted Tinling (Alan Cumming, not quite the full ticket as an English toff) spouts feeble bullet-pointed bromides - “some day we will be free to be who we are” etc.

There’s an awful image of fellow pro Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales, terrific) talking to camera with a tall patronising commentator clamping his hand round the back of her neck as if she’s his chattel. And spot the briefest cameo for that famous Athena poster of the tennis girl hitching up her skirt to reveal nothing underneath. The bare-faced cheek of male chauvinism needed a damn good slap. This fantasy history administers it lightly, with wit and grace.

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@JasperRees

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Battle of the Sexes