When it was announced that Cate Blanchett was making her National Theatre debut with Martin's Crimp's new play, When We have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, its website exploded with people wishing to buy tickets. To those many thousands disappointed, I say: “Well done, you!”

Very much a woman of today, the Catholic Stuart heroine (Saoirse Ronan) of Mary Queen of Scots frequently hacks her way out of a thicket of power-hungry males, enjoys it when her English suitor Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) goes down on her, and is amused when her gay secretary and minstrel David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova) dresses as a woman while dancing with her gentlewomen in her private quarters.

Stan & Ollie unfolds mostly during Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s 1953 British concert tour, when the boys were on their last legs as a comedy act – Hardy was physically spent – but still showing flashes of their old genius. The lure of the tour, according to Jeff Pope’s screenplay, was to raise industry interest in a Robin Hood film to have starred the duo.

In a telling scene midway through Colette, our lead is told that rather than get used to marriage, it is “better to make marriage get used to you.” In this retelling of the remarkable Colette’s rise, it is evident she did much more than that; by the time she was done, all of Paris was moulded in her image, and in the hands of Ke

A cannily crafted biographical docudrama about the Lakota Sioux broncobuster and horse trainer Brady Jandreau – playing himself as Brady Blackburn – The Rider will resonate with anyone whose dreams have gone up in smoke. Jandreau was 20 when, on April 1, 2016, a horse stomped on his skull, fracturing it in three places, severely damaging two regions of his brain, and penetrating it with bone fragments caked in manure and sand. Defying doctors’ orders, he walked out of hospital shortly after having life-saving brain surgery. Six weeks after returning home he began training horses again. The video footage of Jandreau/Blackburn pulling staples out of his head is real.

The Chinese-American filmmaker Chloe Zhao got to know Jandreau when she was making her promising 2015 debut feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me about life on the impoverished Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Seeking a way to build a new movie around Jandreau, she was inspired by his recovery from his catastrophic accident, only five months after which filming began. Jandreau gives an affectingly low-key performance as the melancholy, laconic Brady Blackburn. 

At the heart of The Rider is the sombre recognition that, for many poor young men in the West, not least Native Americans, becoming a rodeo rider is the only way of escaping a hand-to-mouth existence. With a metal plate holding his head together, Brady dare not enter the arena on horseback again though, at one point, temptation proves too much.

Zhao’s direction is cool and objective, scarcely lyrical. Jandreau’s affectionate, learning-impaired teenage sister Lilly plays herself movingly; their father Tim portrays himself as a gambler, harsh and selfish. Jandreau’s childhood friend Lane Scott, a one-time bull-rider who was paralysed in a car accident, also appears. Brady twice visits Lane in his care facility and helps him with rehabilitation exercises, such as rocking on a saddle – haunting scenes that are testament to the human spirit but also indicate Jandreau’s comparative good fortune. Correlative to Brady’’s recuperation – and perhaps to Lane’s – is his tender breaking and training of a volatile wild horse that heartbreakingly comes to grief.

One extra only accompanies The Rider's DVD release – and it’s riveting. Jandreau participates, with British psychologist Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell, in a 45-mimute post-screening on-stage interview that reveals his charisma as a smart, optimistic young cowboy more truthful than Hollywood would ever allow. Happily, he wants to act again.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Rider