Gazing out of my window pondering how to start my review of Ana Mendieta, I noticed a creeper engulfing the house at the end of my garden. Having covered the wall, one window and a chimney, the tentacles are spreading along the gutter and over the roof. Meanwhile, my neighbour’s roses have encroached six feet into my territory and, next door the other way, a vine is assiduously working its way along the hedge and into the branches of a tree. Nature, it seems, is quietly overwhelming north London.

From no visible source, the instantly recognisable voice of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis croons the words of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. But the lyrics aren’t in their familiar setting. Alone, he’s stripped from the band, naked and vulnerable. He’s been dead for 33 years, but this was as close as he could possibly be. Moments earlier, a string section had begun a cascading pattern that was more Bernard Herrmann than Joy Division, giving a new slant to this most familiar of post-punk musical landmarks.

Various Artists: Classroom Projects

In the remarkably meagre annals of Formula One movies, there are only two scores to beat, to wit: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (from 1966), a fictional story which used oodles of real racing footage, and Asif Kapadia's spellbinding documentary Senna (2010). Ron Howard's Rush slots in somewhere between them, being derived from the true-life Seventies rivalry of Niki Lauda and James Hunt but consciously shot and written like a drama.

Roky Erickson & the Aliens: The Evil One

Roky Erickson: Don’t Slander Me, Gremlins Have Pictures

The Beach Boys: Made in California

Plays for Britain was a short-lived ITV equivalent to the BBC’s long-running Play for Today, and doesn’t suffer in comparison. Strong writers, directors and actors on their way up – Alan Clarke, Stephen Poliakoff, Howard Brenton, Ray Winstone, Pete Postlethwaite, Miriam Margoyles – all do good work in the sole 1976 series’ six one-hour plays, complete here.

Sly & the Family Stone: Higher!

It’s always irritating being told “you had to be there”. Even more irksome is when some author, film director or nostalgic creative decides to record – naturally, they “fictionalise” it – their contribution to some golden era or significant event for posterity. Whether they’re being truthful, bigging themselves up or playing fast and loose with history is beside the point. They’re saying they were there. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air is the French director and writer’s entry in the canon and, shockingly, it’s great.

It’s great because Assayas has thoughtfully crafted a rich, universally resonant tableau. The turbulent France of May ’68 (the French title is Après Mai – see overleaf for a taste of the real Mai ‘68) is the jumping off point for a narrative centring on the Assayas analogue Gilles (Clément Métayer) and his interaction with a cast of middle-class characters embracing and then retreating from the preoccupations of the time. Some are earnest politicos or revolutionaries. Others are selfish hedonists or would-be careerists inevitably heading towards lives of responsibility. Central to Gilles's world is the torch he holds for the ethereal Laure (Carole Combes) and his relationship with the more earth-bound Christine (Lola Créton). Much of Something in the Air’s impact stems from its eye for accurate period detail. The music chosen is wonderful. Assayas had said that as he was there, he took control of the film’s look and props. Even so, Gilles’s hair is more poufed-up than anyone’s would have been back then – beyond Brylcreem, or whatever the French version was, male hair product wasn’t quite so wide-ranging in the late Sixties.

The DVD extras add little to an appreciation of the film. A making-of film features on-set footage punctuated by Assayas offering truisms to camera. A separate filmed interview gives him the chance to do so again, but in English this time. The must-see is footage of the light show created for the film’s concert sequences.

Something in the Air says nothing original – people move on, the world changes, causes aren’t necessarily forever – but says it persuasively and with sensitivity. File alongside Barbet Schroeder’s poignant duo of contemporaneously made films More and La Vallée, and even Withnail and I.

Overleaf: Watch the police storm the Sorbonne in Paris in May 1968

Shot in Seventies throwback grainy-cam, Amanda Seyfried is superb as Linda Lovelace in the surprisingly entertaining biopic Lovelace. Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Bobby Cannavle, Hank Azaria, Chris Noth, Juno Temple and James Franco round out a dream cast.