“Past My Door” weaves together a series of leitmotifs. Beginning as a downbeat, mid-tempo shuffle, it then shifts into a staccato passage after which the tempo picks up before a more pacey section. Next, the character established at the song’s introduction returns. Over four-minutes 20 seconds, the different approaches are supported by oblique lyrics which include the memorable phrase “too late, cries the melting snowman". At its core, the melancholy “Past My Door” seems to be about missing chances and being left behind.

From the way that Czech director Ivan Passer remembers the genesis of this, his 1965 debut feature, in the 2006 interview that comes with this Second Run rerelease, Intimate Lighting happened practically by accident.

In William S, Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, a simopath was “a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army and discharge cures it.” Being in uniform, then, reversed evolution.

Watching this band in action is a treat. They gel absolutely and play off one another in a manner that’s easy and mellow, yet also sparks by occasionally teetering on the edge of their virtuosic abilities. The songs played throughout the evening at Brighton Festival are protest classics and other socially aware fare, but the group’s leader-arrangers, singer Carleen Anderson and keyboard player Nikki Yeoh, have turned them, via jazz, into almost completely new pieces of music.

There was a time when Hugh Grant was viewed as a thespian one-trick pony, a floppy-haired fop dithering in a state of perpetual romantic confusion. But things have changed. He was excellent in Florence Foster Jenkins, hilariously self-parodic in Paddington 2, and he’s brilliant in A Very English Scandal (BBC One) as smooth, treacherous Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. At moments, he even manages to look uncannily like him.

Ian McEwan has said that he decided to adapt his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach for the screen himself at least partly because he did not want anyone else to do so (with earlier works, including Atonement, he was glad not to have taken on the adaptation). The sensitivity of the original lies in its interiority, a quality that moves medium with far more difficulty than most. It’s a moot point whether the challenge could have finally been met by anyone, but somehow Dominic Cooke’s film, his screen debut, never quite attains the perfect, lonely poignancy of the book.

That said, Cooke has made a film of quiet quality, his most emphatic achievement to draw such high-calibre performances from his two principals, Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle). Elaborating their story feels somehow redundant: On Chesil Beach is surely one of those films which most viewers approach knowing at least the outline of the story. It seems equally extraneous to note that the ill-fated wedding night of these lovers is set in 1962, so ubiquitous have been the accompanying references to Philip Larkin (his Annus Mirabilis in particular, with its references to the following year, “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”).

The social details are so expertly captured that they seem practically carbon-dated 

It’s very much to Cooke’s credit, too, that he has brought no cheap embellishment to a stark story in the way that Hollywood might have done (the screen rights were first with Ang Lee, apparently). The back-and-forth between the couple’s in-the-moment honeymoon unease and their earlier acquaintance and courtship is subtle, as is the way in which character is defined by music – Edward’s jazz set against classical for Florence (the gradations of the latter, from the optimistic expanses of Mozart to the tempests of Beethoven, are nicely caught). (Pictured below: Billy Howle, Saoirse Ronan)

So too their respective family worlds. There’s the contrast between the freedom, the lack of order at the country cottage that is Edward’s home (it's located in some generic English screen-idyll village), and the sterner, harshly defined setting of Florence’s Oxford. It certainly pays, adaptation-wise, to add full visual context for the accident that defines Edward’s mother (Anne Marie-Duff, never overplaying but always poignant). The embellishments chez Ponting are more subtle, though that’s hardly the first word that comes to mind for Emily Watson’s image-breaking performance as Florence’s mother. (One does wonder how the Ponting household, where Iris Murdoch – once famously defined into her bonking and bonkers periods – seems to be on speed dial, has so disregarded sex, including education in aforesaid.)It leaves the trimly-moustached Samuel West, playing Geoffrey Ponting, whose very name seems to have a brisk home-counties efficiency to it, as the dark force of the piece. McEwan’s adaptation underplays his book’s more emphatic hint at abuse, leaving us with just a moment’s ambiguous eye contact between father and daughter across the deck of the family yacht. But the scene in which West, after soundly defeating Edward at tennis before then realising that Florence has been watching, positively explodes, signals with semaphoric clarity that something is very wrong in this family world.   

On Chesil Beach, book and film alike, leaves us to ponder the circumstances that brought these protagonists to such a seismic coincidence of anger and fear, one that will annihilate their youth and hope. For these are two lovers who cannot step out of themselves, out of their time, the social details of which are so expertly captured by Cooke and his design collaborators that they seem practically carbon-dated.

Was McEwan consciously aware, writing his story, of another literary honeymoon, another beach, another century, a different poet – “Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams…” – and the possibility of a different conclusion to marital desolation? The inability to act – to turn back, to reconcile – is as tragic as action blundered, but it’s not quite tragedy that defines McEwan’s conclusion, rather acute poignancy (another speciality of Larkin). Perhaps the sole false note of Cooke’s film comes in its final scene, one that channels emotion in the most familiar cinematic terms. Until then, On Chesil Beach has been a film of close sensitivity, in which Saoirse Ronan – musician that she is – plays never less than exquisitely.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for On Chesil Beach

The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.”  Oyewole is raging and it feels good.

French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth.

As Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry put it, “there’s a certain amount of fuck you-ness in everything Jeff does.” Perhaps it’s this which has allowed Jeff Beck to achieve the rare feat of surviving into his seventies as what you might describe as a guitar legend without portfolio.

Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world.