Perhaps belatedly prompted by the release of Barbra Streisand’s new album Walls, the worst-selling disc in her 55 years with Columbia Records, this documentary was an uncritical celebration of Babs’s brilliant career from her first stage appearances in the late Fifties to the joys of Hello, Dolly!, The Way We Were and Yentl.

The privileges of writing reviews are very few (it’s certainly no way to make a living these days) but one that remains is the possibility of seeing a film before reading about it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter knowing in advance how a story will play out. It’s probably a good idea to let audiences know that they won’t get child-rearing tips from Rosemary’s Baby.

(Warning: spoilers ahead) For a brief 15 minutes, this was the biggest story in America: three boys, identical in looks, discovering each other at the age of 19. Edward “Eddie” Galland, David Kellman and Robert “Bobby” Shafran were all adopted from the same agency, but had no idea they were triplets. They were on the front cover of every magazine, guests on every talk show, and even had a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan.

The toughest subject you can imagine: when, and how, would you choose death over life? This riveting film examined that excruciating dilemma within the legal frameworks on offer to some of the terminally ill in the United States.

Peter Jackson has form when it comes to re-examining cinema history. In 1995 he made Forgotten Silver, a documentary about Colin McKenzie, a New Zealand filmmaker who not only made the first sound recordings but also invented the tracking shot and the close-up, and pioneered colour film, back in the 1910s long before his counterparts in America and France. His impressive oeuvre was lost until Jackson found the abandoned cans of film in a garden shed.

Apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s insidiously seductive celebrations of Nazism and the propaganda excesses of Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940), the films that were made in Germany during the Hitler period have been air-brushed out of cinema history, almost in mirror image of the culture that was entartet, or

“Why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew? There was no reason at all in it in my way of thinking.” Britain’s very last Tommy was Harry Patch, born in 1898, conscripted in 1916 and still alive on his 111th birthday in 2009. He was one of the witnesses in The Last Tommies, BBC Four’s remarkable work of oral history.

The Yukon Assignment tracks a 500-mile canoe journey along a remote river in Canada taken by a British adventurer and his father.

It’s been a whirlwind year for Tracey Emin, CBE, RA. Her pink neon sign, “I want my time with you”, greets passengers at St Pancras station, she’s installed bronze birds all over Sydney city centre, she’s making a derelict print works in Margate into a living-space/studio that’s going to be like Rodin’s in Paris but “slightly bigger”, and she’s got married. To a large stone in her garden in the south of France. This was an empowering, really good, healthy thing, apparently.

It’s an undeniably quirky set-up: an elderly Spanish farmer who takes it upon himself to travel to America and walk – alone – the epic, 2,200-mile Trail of Tears, following the westward route taken by the Cherokee fleeing white settlers. Alone, that is, apart from his trusty sheepdog Zafrana and Andalusian donkey Gorrión.

It’s such a bizarre idea, in fact, that a travel agent whose help the old man attempts to enlist worries he’s being pranked. But what’s most successful, and memorable, about Chico Pereira’s poignant documentary – co-produced by the Scottish Documentary Institute, and winner of best doc at last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival – is its slow, thoughtful, minimalist storytelling, and the way the director paints in farmer Manolo’s background and allows his tale to unfold with almost effortless ease. So much so, in fact, that we quickly forget about the oddness of his endeavour, and focus instead on this quiet but remarkable man (who is actually Pereira’s uncle and godfather), his relationships with his family and animals, and his understated determination.

This is no glib parable of a country boy lost in the big city

We thereby get to see Manolo’s warm interactions with his daughter Paca, who’s naturally unconvinced by this apparently preposterous idea, and a difficult medical fitness examination that concludes – not surprisingly – that 73-year-old Manolo really should be taking things easier. More importantly, we get glimpses into Manolo’s own solitary life, the solo excusions he’s been making all his life into the arid Spanish countryside – captured beautifully in the muted browns and greens of Julian Schwanitz’s photography – and his cranky relationship with his animals. Long-suffering donkey Gorrión might remain rather on the sidelines for much of the film, but makes his own stubborn determination humorously felt when confronted with crossing a precarious gangplank to a boat.

Once Manolo’s trip is underway – though it’s not immediately clear exactly where he’s headed – Pereira gently contrasts the gleaming technology of modern urban life with the homespun authenticity of the farmer’s outlook. But this is no glib parable of a country boy lost in the big city: Manolo strikes up conversations with truckers, delivers poetry with gusto in a bar, guides his unconventional trio of travellers across buzzing road intersections, and even parks them in front of a multinational corporation he hopes – unsuccessfully, it turns out – will help finance his trip.

Pereira’s film is a deceptively slight, quietly spoken tale of an old man’s slightly barmy caprices. But underneath its tender storytelling it deals with determination and resilience, with the inevitability of ageing, and with the importance of a slow contemplation of our world. It’s unavoidably narrowly focused in scope, but Donkeyote is an understated revelation.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Donkeyote