The Salt Path review - the transformative power of nature

★★★ THE SALT PATH Marianne Elliott brings Raynor Winn's memoir to the big screen

Marianne Elliott brings Raynor Winn's memoir to the big screen

“I can’t move my arms or legs, but apart from that I’m good to go.” Moth (Jason Isaacs) has to be pulled out of the tent in his sleeping bag by his wife Ray (Gillian Anderson). And this is only the second day of their 630-mile walk, split into two summers, along the south-west coastal path from Minehead to South Haven Point.

Lyonesse, Harold Pinter Theatre review - a step backwards for #MeToo

★★ LYONESSE, HAROLD PINTER THEATRE A step backwards for #MeToo

Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James star in misfiring drama involving divas, film execs and dead parrots

Penelope Skinner’s new play is one of the most eccentric things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s undoubtedly entertaining, with an engagingly bonkers attempt by Kristin Scott Thomas to navigate an almost impossible role, perched between victim, diva and madwoman, equally reminsicent of Norma Desmond and one of the posh recluses from Grey Gardens.

DVD/Blu-ray: Enys Men

Mark Jenkin's Bait follow-up is an avant-garde Cornish myth of unquiet land and loss

In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.

Enys Men review - mystifying Seventies Cornish folk horror

★★★ ENYS MEN Mystifying Seventies Cornish folk horror 

Mark Jenkin's follow-up to Bait is rooted in pagan history but fails to engage

Unlike the black and white Bait, Mark Jenkin’s highly acclaimed previous film, Enys Men (stone island in Cornish) is full of colour. Strange, saturated colour that doesn’t look quite real: a deep blue sea, a bright red raincoat, yellow gorse against brown bracken. And the flowers around which this abstract plot revolves don’t look real either. Such elongated stems and waxy white petals look like they come from outer space, not a windy Cornish coastline.

Doc Martin Christmas Special, ITV review - Santa comes to Portwenn as the final curtain falls

★★★★ DOC MARTIN CHRISTMAS SPECIAL, ITV Santa comes to Portwenn as the final curtain falls

It's a wrap for the 18-year-old TV institution

In 10 series stretching over the last 18 years, ITV's Doc Martin unobtrusively became an enduringly popular household name, but it finally reached the end of the road with this Christmas one-off. Unless, of course, there’s a prequel, a sequel, an origin story or a transformed internationalised version from Netflix.

Gustav Metzger: Earth Minus Environment, Kestle Barton review - an illuminating glimpse of a visionary activist-artist

★★★★ GUSTAV METZGER: EARTH MINUS ENVIRONMENT, KESTLE BARTON Ecological dirty-realism plus mass-media overload in an idyllic Cornish setting

Ecological dirty-realism plus mass-media overload in an idyllic Cornish setting

In later life Gustav Metzger appeared a marginal, eccentric figure. The diminutive, white-bearded artist, was often to be seen round London’s galleries in the early to mid-2010s, dropping off piles of hand-produced fliers urging his fellow artists to “remember nature”.

Prom 13, The Wreckers, Glyndebourne review - an overloaded ship steered with pride

★★★ PROM 13, THE WRECKERS, GLYNDEBOURNE An overloaded ship steered with pride

Ethel Smyth's grand melodrama stays seaworthy - in parts

Uncut, lovingly restored, and with two intervals in the antique manner, Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers invites its audience to embark on an epic voyage as well as a momentous one. This summer’s Glyndebourne Festival visit to the Proms brought us the rediscovered opera about a pious, paranoid community of Cornish ship-scavengers that the trail-blazing Smyth – who judged it her signature work – laboured over for several years before its premiere in Leipzig in 1906.