It can't be easy maintaining dignity when everyone in your vicinity is losing theirs. But that's the position in which the inimitable Judi Dench finds herself in Six Minutes to Midnight, a bewildering movie in which star and co-author, Eddie Izzard, spends a lot of time running hither and yon even as the film itself refuses to budge.

Stop the presses! For the first time in nearly four months, The Arts Desk can point to the first of several live theatre events amongst the highlights of the coming week: the tour across the nation's car parks to multiple drive-in audiences of Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain, a previous West End mainstay that has adapted with these strange times.

The decades-long stage relationship between Judi Dench and Trevor Nunn translates to surprisingly little with Red Joan. This is veteran theatre director Nunn's first film since Twelfth Night in 1996.

If only there were more: that's a first response to Nothing Like a Dame, Roger Michell's affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of four of Britain's finest actresses, all now in their 80s. As the camera circles around Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins in conversation, it's impossible not to be swept up in a collective portrait of these remarkable careers alongside their shared awareness of the advancing years. Small wonder the one classic role they pause to debate at length is Cleopatra. Age really cannot wither this quartet's infinite variety.  

Due to be aired on the BBC following a limited cinema release, the film consists of chat caught, as it were, on the lam. Michell provides the occasional offscreen prod to get a topic going, and once in a while the film crew appears in a shot, more often than not to be shooed away by Smith. But with ladies like this, intrusions would be unnecessary as well as impolite. Who wouldn't want to hear as much as Smith has to say about pinching her comic technique from Kenneth Williams? Or from Dench, bronzed following a Cornish holiday, putting a patronising young paramedic in his place by announcing that she recently appeared on the West End in The Winter's Tale? (Pictured below: Judi Dench as Paulina, photograph by Johan Persson.)

The points of convergence between the women make for a veritable thespian cat's cradle. All except Atkins appeared in the Franco Zeffirelli film Tea with Mussolini, while I have seen Smith over the years onstage with each of the others in turn. Away from stage and screen, the ladies can all speak on what it was like having been married to an actor, Smith movingly insisting on remembering the good times she had with Robert Stephens and letting whatever else their marriage consisted of go unsaid. (She and Atkins remarried, Plowright and Dench have not.)

Filmed inside and on the Sussex grounds of the home that Plowright shared with her late husband, Laurence Olivier, this portrait of the artist as a reflective dame essentially takes the form of a round-table discussion spliced with pairings of Dench and Smith, say, on the sofa, chortling about memories and fretting about what happens with time to the memory.

The chosen clips – Dench as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Smith and Stephens in Private Lives, among others – won't generally surprise any British theatre buff who hasn't had the odd amble round YouTube, but one can surely infer from her remarks that this is yet another celluloid venture Smith most likely will not see. (She confirms once more that she has yet to watch Downton Abbey, pictured below.) Less expected, and utterly delightful, are remarks in passing about Atkins's unexpected acquaintanceship with the initials KY – cue much hilarity – and a sightless Plowright advocating yoga and mindfulness and the need always to exercise the brain.

Agelessly witty and effortlessly stylish as they are (all four have remarkable skin), the women make no attempt to conceal the toll exacted by time. Dench stops the heart, as she has made a career of doing, pausing before she talks of her beloved Michael Williams: a lifetime of feeling contained in a fleeting silence. Smith later admits to loneliness but not before informing us that Edith Evans had two sets of teeth: the gossipy and the self-aware ever-intertwined. We get talk about sharing hearing aids alongside lines from bygone plays remembered as if the years had somehow fallen away. And in one startling moment, all eyes turn in mock-fury on Dench for scooping up the best parts. (Theatre buffs will note the arrival of this film in the same week that Glenda Jackson and Diana Rigg, contemporaries all, got Tony nominations for their current Broadway parts: this generation of women, Vanessa Redgrave included, marches ever onward.)

Career highlights? Roles that got away? Changing tastes and preferences for work? Those are among the topics one could imagine explored in further depth had Michell's camera rolled ad infinitum. Let's just say that I laughed plentifully and was greatly touched and doubt I'm alone in wishing for a director's cut packed with outtakes. And when Nothing Like a Dame draws to a close with audio of Dench reciting "our revels now are ended", the only possible response is to insist that they are not.

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• Overleaf: watch the trailer for Nothing Like a Dame 
• Exclusive premiere screenings tonight: https://www.nothinglikeadame.film/

“I am going to find out how much my trees live, breath, and even communicate. I am Judi Dench, and I have been an actor for 60 years – but I have had another passion ever since I was a little girl: I have adored trees. My six acres are a secret woodland, and my trees are part of my extended life.”

The charm quickly palls in Victoria and Abdul, a watery sequel of sorts to Mrs Brown that salvages what lustre it can from its octogenarian star, the indefatigable Judi Dench. Illuminating a little-known friendship between Queen Victoria in her waning years and the Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), whom she invited into her inner sanctum, the busy Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Lee Hall could use considerably more of the incisiveness and wit that made Frears's similarly royalty-minded The Queen soar. 

Instead, we get a characteristically deft character portrait from Dench, marked out by an utter lack of vanity, that is compromised by the faintly risible approach of a screenplay that treads with a heavy step indeed.

Is it because the movie has an understandable eye on the overseas market that the Brits on view all wander about saying "top hole" and "bloody hell" at every opportunity, even as Karim is given a sidekick (Adeel Akhtar) whose attempted levity mostly makes one cringe? (At least Akhtar's ever-sceptical Mohammed knows a good mango when he sees one.) Few would dispute the plea for tolerance and acceptance implicit in every frame – a monarch befriending a Muslim: imagine! – but greater rigour all round might have added a spine which Dench alone supplies.Britain's most beloved senior actress became a movie star, of course, on the back of Mrs Brown, which launched an Oscar-friendly film career. This Victoria redux finds the queen older and starchier and in need of the easy warmth and amity proffered by Abdul, a 24-year-old (and married) clerk who in 1887 gets dispatched from Agra to Britain to present Victoria with a newly-minuted mohur, or ceremonial gold coin. 

The two lock eyes at a formal banquet and something is kickstarted deep within the heavily cloaked royal, who is given lines like "we're all prisoners, Mr Karim", lest we fail to appreciate that presiding over an empire isn't necessarily great fun. So while her family and retinue bitch and moan about how this isn't the done thing (Olivia Williams's Baroness Churchill dismisses Abdul as "the brown John Brown"), Victoria makes of Abdul her munshi, or secretary-cum-teacher. Before you know it, the two are walking arm-in-arm and old Vic is proving a dab hand at Urdu, leaving her son and heir, Bertie (Eddie Izzard, pictured above), to furrow his brow with such intensity that you wonder whether Izzard's face might seize up altogether. 

One senses beneath it all the rebuke to Brexit-era Britain that courses through the depiction here of high society at its most straitened and blinkered, Victoria an expansive-looking visionary engulfed at home by bigots. As anticipated, Dench does brilliantly by her big set piece late-on, in which she defends her sanity while cataloguing the various other qualities and infirmities that she may or may not possess. (Were this a play, the moment would generate spontaneous applause.)Elsewhere, the movie seems determined to be a sort of de facto "This is Your Life" for its star, who gets to revisit not just the queens she has assayed over time, Elizabeth 1 and Cleopatra included, but is given a jolly Room with a View-style jaunt to Florence. While there, she and Abdul encounter Simon Callow, no less, having a high old time as Puccini, and Dame J does her best to trill a phrase or two from Gilbert & Sullivan. 

In casting terms, no one besides Dench gets much of a look-in, the sweet-faced Fazal, a Bollywood star at home, functioning mainly as an enabler for his senior colleague and not much else. The English supporting cast includes such notables as Michael Gambon, whom it is always nice to see onscreen given that he no longer works on stage, playing a tetchy Prime Minister, not to mention the late and much-missed Tim Pigott-Smith as Henry Ponsonby, the queen's private secretary (the two men pictured above). But the movie such as it is belongs to Dench, who at this point in her storied career deserves better, and when Frears's camera homes in on the queen breathing her last, one is reminded anew of the gifts of an actress whose talent, happily, remains timeless. 

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Victoria and Abdul