When Jason and Tracey were trying for a baby, the worst happened. Tracey was diagnosed with breast cancer, and although she eventually recovered, was unable to carry a child. For Jason, the answer was clear - as a trans man, he would become pregnant instead.

Benjamin is the debut feature of Simon Amstell, a young director who has thought cleverly about the torments (and hilarities) of artistic creation in an information-soaked world.

You might think an American high school comedy an unlikely place to locate a love letter to Oscar Wilde – even if there’s a flamboyantly gay story behind it. But Freak Show screenwriters Beth Rigazio and Patrick J Clifton, adapting James St James’ source story, have a way with wit that is clearly aiming to match the writer whom they keep quoting.

Ripeness is sometimes all. 80-year-old Martin Sherman's recent play, receiving its UK premiere at canny Park Theatre, says more about gay history in 100 selective minutes than The Inheritance managed in six and a half hours.

Joel Edgerton’s second turn as a director is the second film in a year to treat the subject of gay conversion therapy. The first was Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, whose victory at Sundance a year ago confirmed, symbolically not least, its origins within the world of American independent cinema.

Time and a transfer haven't been kind to this well-meaning but surface-thin revival of Coming Clean, the 1982 Kevin Elyot play that is surely more poignant than is ever apparent here.

Dallas writer-director Yen Tan has brought 1985 back to stylistic basics, and the resulting resolute lack of adornment enhances his film’s concentration on a story that achieves indisputably powerful, and notably reserved emotion. Independent cinema through and through, it’s economical in every sense and thrives on excellent all-round performances.

Tan’s drama of family relations, set at the moment when the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was gradually becoming clear to Middle America, takes us back three decades, and there’s a similar feel to the visual style that he and his cinematographer (and producer) HutcH have chosen. They filmed in black-and-white Super 16, which seems to amplify contrasts, heightening darkness and often draining light – there’s a certain graininess, too – that surely consciously plays with the idea of home movies.

Secrets (and half-lies) are never quite what they seem here 

Which is appropriate for this narrative, given that protagonist Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) is coming back to his Fort Worth, Texas home for Christmas after three years away in New York. He clearly took the first chance he had to get out of there and head for the big city, drawn by its freedoms of attitude and behaviour. The resulting separation has become much more than just geographic – even though it’s been a long absence, by any standards – and we sense that he’s moved on in every way from the suburban, Bible Belt world from which he started.

There’s certainly a tense distance with his father (Michael Chiklis), when he meets him at the airport, the older man’s down-to-earth quality a contrast to Adrian’s city style: he’s also clearly the stronger force for religion in the family, that security of belief an anchor in a life that, we learn later, included service in Vietnam. Mother Eileen (Virginia Madsen, giving a beautiful performance) compensates for any such paternal chill with an almost anxious affection, while younger brother Andrew (Aidan Langford), barely a teenager, clearly harbours resentment at how his elder sibling disappeared from his life. The only genuinely uncomplicated reunion awaiting Adrian is with the family’s big old German Shepherd. 

The reticence here isn’t only because Adrian hasn’t come out to his parents, which makes for uneasy questions about his New York roommates, as well as a re-encounter with a past girlfriend (Jamie Chung) that reaches through the pain and awkwardness to achieve some welcome catharsis. There’s an anxiety about his health, too, with his mother’s concerns about how he’s lost weight, and the stomach flu that is wearing him down: Tan’s story certainly takes its time with its reveals, and his very chaste film gives a glimpse of Adrian's other world only in a brief final moment.But though a thread of tragedy spins itself through 1985, there’s also a lot of warmth, as well as some lovely humour, to balance that, and a sense that returning home to a world that you have left behind inevitably brings its incongruities. One scene has a high-school contemporary of Adrian’s apologising for how he’d treated him in the past: it’s both agonisingly awkward and redeemingly well-intentioned. This is certainly no return visit of accusation or a demand for recompense; instead there’s a strong sense of paradoxical love, heightened by a sense that it’s in all probability the last time.

The humour works particularly well within the family framework. A shared love of Madonna has Adrian rebonding with his brother, whose cassette collection has been purged on the instructions of the local pastor, as does his sense that the boy is growing up no less of an outsider than he has become himself. There’s a marvellous scene of bonding with his mother, which has her revealing her own dark secret – for these parts, at least: that she hadn’t voted for Reagan in the ‘84 elections. But secrets (and half-lies) are never quite what they seem here, something Tan hauntingly foregrounds in late revelations. They are all the more powerful for being made practically sotto voce, creating a sense of almost unbearablly fragile tenderness.

Tan developed 1985 from the short film of the same name that he made two years ago, which comes as an extra on the forthcoming DVD/Blu-ray dual format release, together with an audio commentary from the director Yen Tan and his DP HutcH.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for 1985

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

Postcards from London is a surprise. You will certainly come away from Steve McLean’s highly stylised film with a new concept of what being an “art lover” can involve, while his subject matter is considerably more specialised, not least in the sexual sense, than its seemingly innocent title might suggest. Mischievously self-conscious in tone, its niche approach to certain established themes – principally gay culture and art history – leavens any pretension with generous humour.

Harris Dickinson plays Jim, an 18-year-old naif (pictured below) who leaves behind the restrictions of his Essex home life – defined equally by parental admonishments and unnaturally confining walls, it’s a literally enclosed world – for the bright lights of the city, Soho in particular. Where he quickly discovers, Whittington-like, that the streets are not paved with gold, though his striking good looks suggest career prospects lie in a familiar direction. But just as Postcards was shot in its entirety in studios rather than on the much-trodden grimy streets of the neighbourhood concerned – Annika Summerson’s cinematography fully relishes the lighting and colouring opportunities that such an approach allows – the experience that Jim comes to offer is rather more aesthetic than sexual.He becomes a member of high-class escort club The Raconteurs, which specialises in post-coital cultural conversation that involves a different kind of boning up to the usual one. The fact that he looks like a Caravaggio model makes history of art Jim’s natural field, and his beauty is soon conquering Soho, though somewhat parodically: the one encounter we witness involves some high-comedy, practically Carry On bathos, involving an elderly and portly CofE gent with a fixation on ancient history shooting rubber-tipped arrows at Jim, who’s modelling for St Sebastian (the real transgression is their smoking indoors). From that it’s a short skip to his becoming a muse for Max, a Soho artist of a definite vintage who’s a cross between Francis Bacon – for his sexuality; Bacon’s lover George Dyer is liberally referenced – and Lucian Freud, for the almost obsessive demands an artist can make on his sitters.  

But Jim’s artistic affinities run still deeper: he’s so sensitive to a good painting that he falls into a swoon when he sees one, becoming literally caught up, via dream sequences, in its creation. That makes for some lovely behind-the-canvas scenes where he's modelling for Caravaggio (main picture), an experience of some risk given the world that painter inhabited; played by Ben Cura, he’s a fiery character, succinctly summed up by Jim as “definitely a nutter”. That’s just the kind of down-to-earth touch that McLean’s script captures winningly: Jim’s specialisation in the Baroque is tartly deflated by his pronouncing it “bar-oak”.

Dickinson's bluff humour resonates with the visual stylistics that surround him

His condition is duly diagnosed as Stendhal syndrome: caused by high-concentration exposure to artistic beauties, that’s drawn from real life too (and rather in the news lately, Florence as its epicentre). A late plot strand sees Jim’s unexpected ability exploited in new ways, given that he can now effectively authenticate a work of art – faced with a fake, he’s left cold. Though that’s nicely mined for some satire at the pretensions of the art world, it’s an element left slightly high-and-dry at the end of a distinctly picaresque narrative line (“plot” would probably be an overstatement).

Nevertheless it articulates a distinction that's at the heart of Postcards from London: between loving art, in an almost old-fashioned sense – as The Raconteurs do, and as Jim does, corporeally, when he’s absorbed into it – and restricting it to the realm of commerce. In that sense, McLean – and his collaborators, Sally King (art direction) and Ollie Tiong (production design), every bit as much – is firmly in the former camp. It’s there in the film’s affectionate homage to the Colony Room world of Bacon and Freud (with a nod there, surely, to John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil), as well as a cinematic line that takes in Fassbinder (hints of Querelle) and a very generous dose of Derek Jarman – the only influence not, I think, mentioned here by name – from Sebastiane through to Caravaggio.

They have found a worthy inheritor in McLean, whose command of irony prevents Postcards from taking itself too seriously (arguably, unlike some of those progenitors). It’s certainly a departure for Harris Dickinson after the agonised Brooklyn teenager that he played in 2017’s Beach Rats, and his bluff humour here resonates very nicely with the over-the-top visual stylistics that surround him. Beguiling.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Postcards from London