Lesbian love in a closeted Orthodox Jewish North London community suggests a place of barriers and secrets. In adapting Naomi Alderman’s novel Disobedience for producer-star Rachel Weisz, the Chilean-Argentine director Sebastián Lelio might as well have landed on the moon.
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love in real life while making The Light Between Oceans, which lends an extra dimension to a morose period weepie that needs every bit of excitement it can get. Reminiscent of the laboured celluloid romances of a bygone era that could once have starred Robert Taylor, the film is as vacuous as it is pretty, and if director Derek Cianfrance cut some of his stars' lingering glances, it would have the added virtue of being short.
As it is, 132 minutes is a long time for a movie whose narrative more or less demands that the audience is several steps ahead of the game. Adapted from the 2012 book of the same name by the London-based Australian novelist M.L. Stedman, the film might benefit from a bit of self-awareness as to its hoarier aspects: one can imagine Todd Haynes having a high old time with it.
But in a break from the bristling intelligence of his career-making Blue Valentine, this latest effort finds Cianfrance going all po-faced on us. Only the belated entrance into the action of Rachel Weisz (pictured below), playing the real mother of the child whom Vikander's luckless spouse and parent has brought up as her own, brings the much-needed juice - not to mention respite from lines like "you still have a light inside of you". 
The narrative - ripe for parody - finds Fassbender playing a battle-scarred survivor of World War One who finds the calm he has been looking for in a job as a lighthouse keeper in a rural Australian outpost. Any thoughts of him idling the decades away humming "Waltzing Matilda" to the gulls are soon routed by the appearance of Isabel (Vikander), who knows a thing or two about war's ravages, having lost two brothers to combat.
Several lingering glances over a prolonged lunch lead to - well, you know - and before long Tom and isabel are man and wife, only for fate to deal her a cruel blow via not one but two miscarriages. And yet, just when Isabel seems destined to succumb to despair, a boat washes up on the shore, bringing with it a dead man and a very much alive, squawling infant girl. Suddenly there's God so quickly, as Blanche DuBois might have said, except for the emergence of Hannah (Weisz), the child's real mum, whose arrival on the scene recasts the movie as a study in morality: Tom and Isabel don't see eye to eye as what to do with Lucy once her actual mother forces a day of reckoning.
Weisz's energy seems to belong to a different film. Elsewhere, one thinks for instance of what the Mike Leigh who gave us Secrets and Lies might have done with the ensuing moral maze and the primal emotions that get unleashed. Instead, Fassbender retreats inward - the performance is recessive to a fault - while Vikander aims for the jugular, the two rarely suggesting on screen the passion that was reportedly aborning off it. We are treated to the requisite picturesque longshots and dewy close-ups, and yet the thing never connects. Instead of reaching for a tissue, I was checking my watch.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Light Between Oceans
The fountainhead of creativity is at the heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s English-language follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. The film is set in a Swiss hotel-cum-sanatorium whose summer residents include Michael Caine as a composer who remains resolutely retired even when the Queen sends a messenger to request he perform for her, and Harvey Keitel as a fading filmmaker who still believes he has skin in the game.
Also loitering on the premises are Rachel Weisz as the composer’s heartbroken daughter, whose marriage to the scriptwriter’s son has just ended, and Paul Dano as a hot young actor preparing to play Hitler. Sorrentino’s Felliniesque world, in which jaded men trade philosophical nostrums and obsess about sex and death, just about survives translation into English, partly because his painterly eye for exquisite formal imagery is if anything enhanced by his sojourn among grassy peaks and orthopaedic plunge pools.
If there's a hint of a void at the heart of the film it is Caine, who contributes a melancholy stillness without ever quite convincing as a great contemporary classical maestro. There is a glorious cameo from Jane Fonda as a harpy jetting in with bad news, while among other curiosities are a fiery cameo from Paloma Faith as herself and a homage to a grotesquely fat former football god, pretty clearly Diego Maradona. As he humps a tennis ball in a furious session of left-foot keepy-uppy, Sorrentino argues that genius lingers long after the host body gives up the ghost. For Caine the beautiful equivalent is conducting a pasture full of cowbells and windswept trees, for Keitel the vision of all his female film leads joining him on an afternoon stroll.
This is another sentimental ravishment from a director who knows how to retain distinctly Italian flavouring as he crosses borders. The extras include a making-of featurette and an interview with Sorrentino, who is careful to explain that, Dano aside, he nabbed all of the stars before he’d won the Oscar.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Youth
Toward the end of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, a tough-as-nails Hollywood diva played by Jane Fonda informs Harvey Keitel’s creatively spent director that television has supplanted cinema as the home of screen drama. True or not, this has been the industry consensus for about five years, but Sorrentino demonstrates there’s life in cinema yet by orchestrating a flow of effortless-seeming sequences that combine widescreen grandeur with whimsicality.
Yorgos Lanthimos is the director who reinvigorated Greek cinema with his dark, absurdist films Dogtooth and Alps. His English-language debut is even more off the charts, yet also the most familiar; after all, it is essentially a love story.
Amazing untold stories remain waiting for cinema. Alejandro Amenábar has found one in the female philosopher Hypatia's quest for knowledge during the religious turmoil that gripped 4th-century Alexandria as the Roman Empire fell into the Dark Ages. Somehow he has managed to parlay the freedom given by his 2004 Foreign Language Oscar for The Sea Inside into a cosmic, 50-million-Euro epic of ideas which leaves Hollywood's narrow narrative parameters far behind.