For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.

They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, when their circumstances could hardly have been more different: Zola was the son of an Italian engineer whose early death left his family impoverished, Cézanne the rebellious scion of an affluent banking family. The early scenes of their childhood friendship are some of the best in the film, nicely spontaneous and natural. They certainly glory in their exploration of the Provence landscapes to which Thompson returns repeatedly, not least when we witness Cézanne creating his Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings in situ.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage 

But this script dives around across the decades, often rather confusingly. It opens in 1888, with Cézanne, after a period of separation, visiting the now acclaimed and prosperous Zola at his home north of Paris. They certainly had grounds for difference: Zola had married Cézanne’s erstwhile model and mistress, Alexandrine (a nicely understated performance from Alice Pol). But their immediate bone of contention was Zola’s 1886 novel L’Oeuvre (often translated as His Masterpiece), with its main character, a promising but frustrated painter, in whom Cézanne saw a painfully recognisable portrayal of himself.  

The accusations fly freely. “You don’t read my books any more, you judge them,” Zola tells Cézanne, to which the artist snaps back, “You’ve befriended the bourgeoisie you hated.” Between this beginning and end, there are some persuasive (and certainly culturally name-dropping) scenes of artistic fraternité. Cézanne’s first visit to Zola in Paris involves a prolonged encounter that assembles most of the great Impressionists – Manet, Renoir and Camille Pissaro, just for starters – around the same bistro table.

We see the controversies around the Academy salons that sometimes ended in fights, though appreciating some century and a half later quite what such differences meant is sometimes challenging. More beguiling are visual recreations of some of the great works of Impressionism, notably Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, even if it can feel like an art-historical roll-call: you hear someone hailed as “Berthe”, you know it must be Morrisot. The travails of Cézanne’s creation, including his propensity to destroy his canvases, is there too, in as much as any film can convincingly convey the process of painting. There’s a painful moment when Cézanne, funded in his Paris atelier by Zola, learns that one of his works has actually sold – but only its central detail, an apple, cut out of the canvas on the whim of a client.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage. Guillaume Canet plays Zola rather drily, with Guillaume Gallienne, billed as a member of the Comédie-Française – as if the augustness of this project culturel was not otherwise guaranteed – as Cézanne. Full plaudits to the film’s make-up artists, who endow both with impressive varieties and combinations of facial hair. Jean-Marie Dreujou’s cinematography is much more satisfying than an overwrought score from Eric Neveux. Like that apple excised from its pictorial context, Cézanne et moi is more satisfying in its parts than in its entirety.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cézanne et moi

When you are adapting a novel like A Tale of Two Cities, it's a privilege to sit with a great piece of writing for a considerable amount of time. You also feel secure (and a bit cheeky) in the knowledge that another writer has already done most of the work.

When are the big international opera houses going to wake up to the great British talent that is Elizabeth Llewellyn? With her opulent soprano – shaded middle register, full bloom at the top, cutting chest voice – she was born to sing Verdi and Puccini, and her stage presence is undeniable from the moment she steps out.

There are certain roles where you’re lucky to catch one perfect incarnation in a lifetime. I thought I'd never see a soprano as Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace equal to Yelena Prokina, Valery Gergiev’s choice for Graham Vick’s 1991 production.

François Ozon’s Frantz is an exquisitely sad film, its crisp black and white cinematography shot through with mourning. The French director, in a work where the main language is German, engages with the aftermath of World War One, and the moment when the returning rhythms of life only emphasise what has been lost. The eponymous hero of his film is one of its casualties – we see Frantz only in flashbacks – and his death has left a gaping, if largely unarticulated wound. His erstwhile fiancée Anna (Paula Beer, a revelation) has become effectively his widow, living with Frantz’s parents. That element of company assuages both their grief and her own, but it’s a world in which the shutters have been drawn down, both literally and symbolically.

It’s an unusually subdued mood for Ozon, a prolific director accomplished across genres (Under the Sand, all the way back in 2000, was the last time he assayed such sombre territory). He works around the story of a 1932 film by Ernst Lubitsch, Broken Lullaby, itself adapted from a stage play by the French writer Maurice Rostand, although the transformations Ozon makes, especially in the second half, finally count for more than anything that he has borrowed. If terming the film “exquisite” implies a level of artifice, there is certainly an element of mannerism. Ozon’s subject is less grief itself than the secrets and lies that come to surround it: how we keep secrets to guard the feelings of others, and how such acts of apparent kindness easily shade into something profoundly damaging.

They are no longer defined through the memories of a dead man 

The film’s opening scenes elegaically capture life in the quiet provincial German town where Anna’s existence revolves around her daily visits to Frantz’s grave (which is itself a fiction: his body, of course, never came back from the front). Her discovery that someone else is leaving flowers there leads to acquaintance with Adrien (Pierre Niney), the Frenchman who has come, he says, to remember the German friend he had known in Paris before the war. After uncompromising rejection by Frantz’s stern doctor father – “Every Frenchman is my son’s murderer,” he insists initially – the young man is gradually welcomed in by the family. His memories, of visits to the Louvre with Frantz, and their companionship in music (both are violinists), come to make his presence restorative for all (pictured below).

Ozon draws beautifully restrained playing from Ernst Stoetzner as Frantz’s father, and Marie Gruber as his mother; they are figures from an older, stricter generation, which only makes the sense of their feelings beginning to thaw more touching. As her world changes, Anna, who at the film’s opening has rejected the attentions of a well-meaning suitor offering companionship rather than love, finds prospects opening before her in a way she would never have imagined possible. As she walks with Adrien in the countryside, they talk – both are lovers of poetry, Verlaine a shared favourite – and gradually establish a bond that is their own; they are no longer defined through the memories of a dead man.But such foundations for any possible future will not withstand life’s harsher truths. Revealing them would be impossible, since Ozon is himself a storyteller who here, especially, plays with our expectations. He confounds (for those who know themes from the rest of his work) some of those on one level, and allows the visual reality of his film to flesh out a story that is itself illusory. Anna’s complicity in maintaining that version of events precipitates her journey to France in the second half (at which point Ozon leaves Lubitsch behind).

There she begins to function as a fully independent character, dealing with a world far wider than the one from which she has come; she asserts her ability to engage with it on her own terms, however unexpected or cruel it proves. Rediscovering Adrien, we are left with a sense that war’s casualties include those who have survived the physical hell of the trenches no less than those whose lives ended there.

Paula Beer conveys the trajectory of Anna’s journey wonderfully, her character’s initial reticence gradually opening out to reveal reserves of inner strength. She conveys the unspoken gradations of feeling with a rare, subtle power, in a way comparable to Ozon’s use of colour. The black and white images of Frantz give the film its opening severity, but in fact Ozon and his cinematographer Pascal Marti vary that texture, allowing elements of distant, subdued colour to intrude and change the mood.

The effect is sometimes that we are witnessing life returning, however hesitatingly, to this dead landscape. Yet the colour is also there, paradoxically, in the film’s scenes of invention, when cinema is doing what is most natural to it, telling a story – but in this case, too, inventing a false narrative. The final scene has Anna in the Louvre, looking at Manet’s Le suicide. “It makes me want to live,” we hear her say. What a nuanced journey she has accomplished, how impressively shaded Beer’s performance. Ozon has achieved emotional depths that are rather new for him.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Frantz

It's funny how Parisians grumble about any major new venue which lies outside their chic central stamping ground. First they moan about having to trundle out to the Philharmonie concert hall in the Cité de la Musique, and now they look as if they'll need some persuading to support major music-making in Les Hauts-de-Seine, an administrative département which generously supports its culture.

We’re three films into Rowan Atkinson’s tenure as Inspector Maigret and so far he’s barely twitched a facial muscle. Gone are the eye bulges and nostril flares, the rubbery pouts. There’s sometimes a hint of a frown, the odd twinge in a wrinkle around the eyes, but Atkinson’s performance continues mainly to be about keeping his cards superglued to his chest. Gnomic is about the size of it.

The seizième arrondissement, the Paris equivalent of Kensington and Chelsea, or Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Haussmann’s Paris par excellence. Here, in a gated complex where American heiress Florence Gould hosted lavish wartime salons, indulging in conduct which, come the liberation, she was required to explain, lives Charlotte Rampling. The marble foyer is vast, the lift small and cranky, like something out of a movie.

What’s in a yellow dress? Hope over experience? Reckless confidence? This is a legitimate question when the second big cross-Atlantic people-pleaser hoves into view featuring a girl in a frock of striking daffodil hue. It doesn’t take a degree in semiotics to translate this. Forget the bad stuff, people. C’mon, get happy.

What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking? It’s all those things, and more.