So, a rough tally. We’ve had a trial, a near suicide, a punch-up, death by drowning, a near bankruptcy, a tin rush, another punch-up, a baby, a probable rape, a riot, another baby, and another one on the way, possibly a product of that probable rape. And more. Poldark (★★★), in the delivery of incident upon full-blooded incident, could be accused of many things, but it will not die wondering.

The original 1961 poster for Paris Blues trumpeted it as “a love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you”. Would it were actually thus. Instead, it’s ponderous and features a cast so obviously “acting” that any verve implied by being filmed in Paris and set in the world of jazz is missing in action. Paris Blues is worth seeing, but don’t expect the pulse to quicken.

True to its title, Pool of London is one of the great London films. More than this, it included British cinema’s first – albeit chaste – interracial romance and convinces as film noir. Filmed in 1950 and released in February 1951, it was passed by the British Board of Film Censors for screening with no cuts. But it did get an “A” certificate, which meant children had to be accompanied by adults. This no children’s film, though.

The perception of Steven many-hats Berkoff as “one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain” makes sense when you see this. Here are two chamber pieces, both two-handers, written 20 years apart, which gain hugely from being run together. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine either of them having much of a life as a single entity, since even combined they make a short evening at the theatre.

The Emigrants and The New Land have to be seen. In each, the story is gripping, the acting marvellous and the depiction of the period setting evocative and flawless. Any of these aspects would be reason enough to see a film, but the clincher is director Jan Troell’s adeptness at showing how the smallest details impact on destiny. Taking a moment’s rest from a menial task on a farm can lead to consequences which colour a whole life. But this is not where it stops. Troell weaves such moments seamlessly into a grand, sweeping arc for which the only word is epic.

“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.

"I've always thought there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't participated in it, and so I write about people who've done that to a certain extent." Edward Albee has died at the age of 88, having participated in his life far more actively than George and Martha, the couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? whose idea of hell is each other.

If you’re expecting family drama, the opening of Captain Fantastic will surprise. We’re following a hunter, greased-up so he’s invisible in the woods, stalking a deer. There’s an edginess to the scene, the atmosphere primal as the animal is killed. Other disguised forms emerge from the trees, and a ritual of smeared blood ensues – nature, red in tooth and claw.

It feels a long way from civilisation; it transpires that we have been witnessing a rite of passage for eldest son Bodevan as he turns 18, orchestrated by his father Ben (Viggo Mortensen, bearded, back in The Road mode, on excellent form). This is not a family tied to convention: home is an Indian tipi deep in the forests of Washington State, where they live off the land. Director Matt Ross gradually reveals how Ben structures his children’s lives around physical testing (hard exercise, pictured below, risky rock-climbing) and mental discipline, which has seen them develop at an intellectually precocious rate: it’s a film where a little girl will exclaim “I’m a Maoist” out of the blue or riff on Pol Pot, and everyone’s jumping ahead with their Great Books (Karamazov to Middlemarch, via Lolita). They make up quite a nice little family music band, too.

That road trip allows Ross’s script to expand its range, particularly towards comedy

Mortensen moves vigorously between benign patriarch and commander, and any balancing feminine presence seems much missing. Ben has set up this survivalist, counterculture hub with his wife, Leslie, a decade or so earlier, leaving society behind to create the very distinct world in which they want their six children to grow up. They are named almost à la Tolkien: as well as Bodevan (played by British actor George MacKay, lean and nervy), there are twin sisters three years younger, Vespyr and Kielyr, who manage something of a motherly presence, 12-year-old Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton, stroppy), and the youngest, Zaja and Nai, who have only ever known this way-out world.

They live so far off the grid that it takes Ben a long ride in the family camping van – which has a relatively normal name for these parts, Steve – to reach the nearest phone, a journey he makes to keep up with news of Leslie, who is in hospital in the care of her parents, down in New Mexico. Her illness, of which we gradually learn more, is something their alternative lifestyle can’t deal with, but neither can its traditonal counterpart: she is dead, and her father (Frank Langella, dominating) warns that if Ben and family come anywhere near the funeral, he will have them arrested. There’s little shared ground between these worlds of individualistic self-expression and convention, but that’s not going to stop the family journeying south to pay its last respects.That road trip allows Ross’s script to expand its range, particularly towards comedy, as this busload of isolationists brushes up against small town America in a confrontation occasionally as abrupt as Ben’s description of Cola as “poison water”. Yet there’s a subtlety to the balance that Ross presents: the family’s right on the nose in some things, not least when they note that virtually everyone they encounter is obese, but there are other incidents that make us think twice. An elaborately staged supermarket grab, genially redefined by Ben as a “Free the Food” moment, has him feigning illness while the kids make off with the shopping. It makes us ponder. yes, it’s an appealing game, a thumbs-up to society (albeit one clearly rehearsed, which makes you wonder, not for the only time, just when, and how?), that serves as prelude to an impromptu “Noam Chomsky Day” celebration – Chomsky takes the place of Christmas for this lot – to cheer everyone up. It’s not only the knives being bandied around by six-year-olds that makes us wonder whether it’s a good thing…

Let out into the wider world the children are challenged in other ways. Bodevan, who has applied for college (with his mother’s encouragement, but keeping the news from his dad), is already thinking of the future, the present being a place in which he’s rather lost: attracted to a girl at one of their camping stops, the only way he knows how to conclude their meeting is to propose to her. It’s very funny, very natural and guileless (and MacKay plays very nicely, absolutely convincing beyond his usual horizons), but brings home how the enclosed environment in which they have grown up can’t last forever.

That sense of different worlds colliding reaches its peak at the funeral, at which Ben and family turn up dressed like they're having a wild party (main picture). Leslie had left her own instructions for her send-off, and they aren’t being followed in the ceremony organised by her parents, so their disruption is right on one level, but it leads to more grief. An element of resolution, even reconciliation follows, as the family comes to terms with its loss: as well as the Langella’s uncompromising grandfather, Ann Dowd plays a more nuanced grandmother, and a decision about the children’s future appears to be reached (Ann Dowd with Frank Langella, pictured above right).

At which point Ross changes the register of his film dramatically. If until then he’s been making an essentially indie, rather than Hollywood studio film – a dichotomy that, it could be argued, in some way parallels the distinction between the independence of the family's forest world and the conventional society which they are rejoining – from here on Ross starts playing by more predictable rules. There’s a particular moment at which Captain Fantastic turns away from more challenging territory, one where issues can be left unresolved, towards something increasingly sentimental.

That may not be a reading shared by the majority of viewers, and it doesn’t stop the film from still being entertaining, funny and moving, while the acting remains outstanding throughout, but it flows against the original grain. After that opening scene that went to one extreme, Captain Fantastic closes on Ben and his remaining offspring living what might almost be a parody (but, I fear, isn’t) of the American domestic hearth, right down to soft focus furnishings and granola. It’s just too cosy to be true, and it’s hard to credit how Ben has ended up there unless he’s been stiffed a quick off-screen lobotomy (he hasn’t). Closing credits recording archery and taxidermy contributions remind us of what’s gone missing.    

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Captain Fantastic

You can usually tell a show is in trouble when it executes one of its main characters. By the end, Cold Feet had run out of gas. Its instinct to laugh at life rubbed up against genuine grief, and there was nowhere for it to go but off air. But 13 years on here we are again. Historical precedent suggests it has no right to work. This Life didn’t profit when exhumed and nor in the end did Upstairs Downstairs. But if Cold Feet was your thing, it looks so far as if it still will be.

“One of us is crying/ One of us is lying/ In her lonely bed/ Staring at the ceiling/ Wishing she was somewhere else instead…” Poor Juliet Stevenson must have wondered how she’d ended up like the girl in the Abba song – waiting for a call from her agent to apologise for getting her into this mess. It’s not Juliet’s fault. It’s the silly script.