"Good for the history of music, but not for music," one of Prokofiev's professors at the St Petersburg Conservatoire used to say of artistically dubious works which created a splash, according to the composer's diaries. I'm not even sure that this show is good for the history of art, though it's certainly enriching for the burgeoning discipline of queer theory, and food for thought whether or not you agree with the choices and the stance of the curator, Clare Barlow.

Park Chan-wook is a Korean decadent and moralist who’d have plenty to say to Aubrey Beardsley.

No-one has ever matched costume drama to psychological depth quite like Luchino Visconti.

French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan leaves the time and place of It’s Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) deliberately unclear: “Somewhere, a while ago already” is the only clue offered by its opening titles. An adaptation of the 1990 play by the French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce, its unspoken subject is AIDS (from which Lagarce himself died in 1995), with its story of a lead character, Louis, returning to his family after a long absence to reveal that he is dying. It’s not only the absence of mobile phones or email that reveals we’re in the past: clearly, it’s a time when medicine could offer nothing.

The setting is also unspecific, and some have assumed that the youthful Québécois director has moved location away from his native Canada, to Europe. I don’t think so: follow the opening sequence of exterior shots which preface the otherwise overwhelmingly claustrophobic action, and the details, the buildings and street-look alike, surely identify as North American (Lucky Strike is the cigarette brand we notice, too).

Dolan has a record of harping on mothers 

That issue is more than a detail, since one of the contexts into which It's Only the End of the World fits convincingly is that of American dramatists like Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams and their studies of family units imploding. The film’s opening musical track “Home Is Where It Hurts” by French chansonniere Camille is anthemic for what follows, as Louis’s arrival (after 12 years away) and the meal that follows throw up issues which this more than usually dysfunctional family has been repressing.

Yet it also points up a difference, that Louis (Gaspard Ulliel, main picture) remains essentially a cipher, a central character about whom we learn little. Going back to dramatic precedents, End of the World at times seems like a Long Day’s Journey into Night cut short when its hero makes his premature departure for the airport. Opening voiceover aside, Dolan is as sketchy about Louis – he’s a playwright who has achieved international renown – as Louis himself has been skimpy in his contacts with his family over the years, communication limited to a series of elliptical postcards. His years away have obviously seen him realise his identity in the city, including the homosexuality that also remains largely unbroached as an issue within the family, limited as it is by the attitudes of its times and environment.That means he hardly knows his younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux) at all, and is meeting sister-in-law Catherine (Marion Cotillard) for the first time, though she and her husband Antoine (Vincent Cassel) have named one of their children after him. These two female characters are the ones that come closest to him: Cotillard’s character is especially sensitive, as she instinctively understands the issue – even if her words “Combien de temps?” lose much of their acuity in translation – that does finally remain unspoken.

We may wonder about the dynamics of that marriage. Cassel’s Antoine is so angry, so hostile to the brother to whom he is the absolute opposite: a man who works with his hands, who practically scowls at everything Louis represents (Cassel would make an outstanding Stanley in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire on this evidence). The film’s structure gives Louis time alone with each of his family members aside from the general gathering, and the excursion with Antoine into the outside world is bracing, to say the least.

Nathalie Baye plays Martine, the matriarch. Though it’s the entire family that is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, we certainly sense where it came from. Dolan has a record of harping on mothers – his debut film was titled I Killed My Mother, his most recent one just Mommy – but actually that isn’t the dominating relationship here, rather it’s the whole entity that is under cruel scrutiny. (Nathalie Baye with Gaspard Ulliel, pictured above right.)

It’s Only the End of the World has expanded its perspective from Dolan’s previous work, and the director himself has spoken of it as “my first [film] as a man”: it is his sixth feature – he is now 27. It won him the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival last year, yet critical reaction has been distinctly mixed. It’s a film that intentionally makes watching it uncomfortable, as if we are ourselves caught in this claustrophobia, scrapping bitterly while leaving the important things unaddressed. Cinematographer André Turpin certainly keeps us close to the uneasy action, with fast-shifting close-ups on faces, and the speed of dialogue seems occasionally unstoppable, like something we just can’t escape from (on occasions, Louis literally escapes into flashbacks, as if to prove just that).

Yet how bracing it is, such snatches of virtuoso flair. If sheer quality of acting on its own is ever enough to demand a viewing, It’s Only the End of the World compels. Diamond-sharp playing from all, simultaneously sparkling and liable to fracture at any moment.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for It’s Only the End of the World

As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks unforgettably in the primal language of cinema itself.

It’s an independent film in the essence of that term, something that makes its progression to the front ranks of this year’s Academy Awards all the more impressive. And how skilfully Moonlight confounds definition by the categories into which it might easily be slotted – as a gay film, or a black film, however much both elements are crucial to its identity.

What’s more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust

To achieve something so universal, Jenkins has set his drama in a very particular location, the Liberty City district of Miami. It was where the director himself grew up, as did Tarell Alvin McCraney, the writer from whose original drama treatment In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue the film is adapted. The two did not know each other then: what they did share in youth, however, was the experience of growing up with mothers who had drug addiction issues.

It’s there that we first encounter the film’s hero, 10-year-old Chiron (Alex Hibbert, slight, silent), who’s known as “Little”, the word that gives the first of Moonlight’s three sections its title. The second, which carries the boy’s given name, catches him at 16, now played by Ashton Sanders, gangly and avoiding eye contact. The third, with Chiron a young adult, is titled “Black”, after the moniker he’s now given himself (also an affectionately bestowed nickname he had acquired in the middle episode).It’s not only physical slightness that sets Chiron apart: he’s treated as an outsider by his more aggressive contemporaries for another reason, one which they sense but he himself has not yet registered. The film opens with the latest of what we guess is a series of rejections, but this one ends on a more positive note with Little befriended by Juan (Mahershala Ali). Of Cuban descent, Juan may be a community hard man and drug dealer, but he shows only kindness to this resolutely silent youngster, first feeding him and then taking him home to his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe).

Her home becomes a place of refuge for the troubled Chiron as the circumstances of his home life with mother Paula (Naomie Harris, falling gradually and hauntingly into full crack addiction), as well as that of this “adopted” family change. The other anchor point of Chiron’s world is his friendship with his contemporary Kevin, shown from innocent childhood games through to more loaded adolescent encounters, a bond that will also presage damage as the film progresses.

“At some point you've got to decide who you wanna be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you,” Juan tells the boy at one point, his phrase catching the essence of what Moonlight is about: the shaping, the realisation of the eventual adult character. Juan’s words come shortly after one of the film’s tenderest moments, as he teaches the child to swim, though what’s actually more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust. The tragic irony that Ali’s character, the one who shows such concern for Chiron, is also dealing the substances that are bringing his mother down, prompts one of the most poignant moments of the first episode.

The defining moment of the succeeding section also takes place at the sea, as Chiron and Kevin talk on the beach (pictured above, Jharrel Jerome, left, with Ashton Sanders): Chiron once more risks trust, relaxing the barriers of self-protection that he has constructed around himself (“I cry so much sometimes I might turn to drops”, he poignantly reveals). The cruelty is that hurt will again follow revelation, culminating in an act of self-assertion that will change the course of the young man’s life, sending him away from his home environment.

But distance is not the only change that comes with Moonlight’s final part. Trevante Rhodes (an erstwhile professional sportsman himself, physically powerful here, yet so damaged inside) plays the now adult Black, who’s bulked himself up protectively: he’s become a dealer, like his first mentor Juan, with a muscled body to match, teeth ribbed in gold. When Black makes an almost impromptu journey from his new home territory, Atlanta, back to Miami, his whole life comes up for reappraisal. (Pictured above: André Holland, left, with Trevante Rhodes.)

Jenkins’ choice of an elliptical narrative structure, one that registers change rather than spelling it out, is a stroke of genius. It also makes for the sheer freshness of impression that is so powerful in Moonlight, suitable not only for a story anchored in childhood, but also involving a hero who’s at times reticent almost to the point of speechlessness. It's as if the director defines his canvas through spots of colour that coalesce into an image, rather than through any direct stroke of the brush.

Moonlight’s visual sense is highly painterly, too, from the pastel tones of the Liberty City locations (James Laxton’s cinematography catches them with an easy beauty that surely belies their real character) through to the distinct colour orientations of the film’s three parts. There’s a sheer confidence in Nicholas Britell’s score too, melding what we might expect – rap, jukebox melodies – with the grand emotional assertions of Mozart. Comparisons already drawn with the likes of Terrence Malick are not incidental, such is Jenkins’s sheer flair: it's only his second feature, and to draw this quality of performance from his three male leads and supporting players alike is an almost impeccable achievement. Revelatory filmmaking.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Moonlight

Mixing up your yakuzas and your triads can be a bloody business, as Takashi Miike’s films show in the goriest detail. The title of the earliest work in his “Black Society” trilogy, Shinjuku Triad Society from 1995, says it all – a Chinese criminal gang at the heart of Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho nightlife district, the traditional turf of Japan’s own deeply entrenched native criminal element.

As the UK prepares for a particularly severe cold snap, the opening of David Hockney’s major retrospective at Tate Britain brings a welcome burst of Los Angeles light and colour and Yorkshire wit and warmth. The exhibition, which opens in the lead-up to Hockney’s 80th birthday, will be deservedly popular – for many people, Hockney’s work is simply bright and beautiful. But the show also seeks to reveal the serious and consistent nature of Hockney’s interrogation of the meaning of picture-making, and his preoccupation with the joyous and rather subversive business of “looking”.

The curators have brought together Hockney’s youthful paintings from the 1960s (the earliest work is, in fact, an earnest self-portrait drawing of 1954 of the 17-year-old artist), with the iconic and intimate works of the intervening decades, right up to his brash (and less successful) recent paintings of 2016 – with the inclusion of two new pictures of the blue and red terrace of the artist’s present-day Hollywood home (overlooking lush gardens reminiscent of a Rousseau jungle) made especially for the exhibition. (Pictured below: Garden, 2015 © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt)As we make the journey through Hockney’s oeuvre – one that the artist has also clearly enjoyed revisiting – we move from his formative pictures as a student at the Royal College of Art in London, through to the breakthrough Los Angeles paintings – typified by A Bigger Splash (Hockney first moved to the Hollywood Hills in 1979) – to the first big room of the show: a stunning display that reunites Hockney’s celebrated series of large double portraits.

Despite the variety of media and subject matter, consistent themes emerge. Thus we find Hockney continually playing with the notion of flat, two-dimensional picture-making (revealing the inherent artifice, while trying to make the experience more "true"); critiquing the art fashions of the time (particularly abstract and conceptual art); showily improvising in the style of the artists who capture his interest (such as Dubuffet, Picasso and Munch); raunchily exploring homo-erotic relationships and his own sexuality (at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK); and urging us to question, engage with and examine what we see. Sometimes his artistic response is annoyingly puerile, while at others Hockney can be genuinely profound in the way he expresses personal encounters with people and places.

Hockney sees himself as a humanist: his reaction to the dominance of abstract art was to paint "pictures with people in": and not just any people. His sitters are usually friends, family or lovers. He came out early – while at college – deciding to embrace his homosexuality in his art; these paintings reflect his life and boyish humour, from escapades with early boyfriends to graffiti in the gent’s toilets. By being so constantly self-referential, Hockney became drawn to ambiguity, both in terms of the way we see the world, and the way the world sees us. (Pictured above right: Ossie Wearing a Fairisle Sweater, 1970. Private collection, London © David Hockney)

The relationship between the artist and the viewer is also central to this preoccupation. As a result, his work sets out to challenge the one-point perspective enshrined by single-lens cameras and crystallised in the rigid perspective constructions of Renaissance painting. Most of Hockney’s work sets out to undermine this "paralysed Cyclops’s" view of the world, as he calls it – though it is perhaps as much a way of thinking as a way of seeing. For Hockney, however, the question seems to be why would anyone choose to present a world that is so full of variation and contradictions in such a prescriptive way, and not actively invite the viewer’s eyes to wander, to embrace peripheral and contradictory viewpoints, or to mischievously seize on a particular detail?

The expansive sun-flattened spaces of Los Angeles, with their geometric buildings, blue skies and swimming pools, may seem to have the stillness that one associates with a Renaissance landscape or abstract canvas – but the geometry is often disturbed by the human presence. One of the surprises of the exhibition is Hockney’s corresponding love of areas of surface detail (like the meticulously painted splash). In the double portraits – such as the 1968 portrait of Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy – the great open spaces of LA are exchanged for a defined domestic space, delineated by the device of a shuttered window and the static charge between the two sitters.

Hockney’s interest in the human is intimately entwined with a feeling for the character of a place. The exhibition includes the winding hilly landscapes of his home in the Hollywood Hills (their fauvist colours capturing the dizzying journey to his Santa Monica studio) and the glowing landscapes of the Grand Canyon, followed by a contrasting room of Hockney’s expansive Yorkshire landscapes – selected from the many canvases that Hockney produced for his 2012 blockbuster at the Royal Academy. In these gentler Yorkshire landscapes – which are a celebration of the English seasons, especially the spring when the hedgerows burst with hawthorn blossoms – Hockney continues to play with the language of painting, using exaggerated perspectives and heightened colour, set off by areas of flat decoration depicting cow parsley and grass verges. (Pictured above left: Going Up Garrowby Hill, 2000. Private collection, Topanga, California © David Hockney)

This epic journey through the seasons continues in a room of four nine-screen video installations – capturing multiple viewpoints as we travel with the artist through space. The final rooms are part analogue, part digital – moving from a fine series of 25 charcoal drawings chronicling the arrival of the Yorkshire Spring (contrasted rather pointlessly with the terrace-scenes made on Hockney’s return to LA), to the same preoccupations played out through Hockney’s exploration of the digital: numerous images made on the iPhone and iPad. The inclusion of a number of animated iPad drawings, which show step-by-step how the artist makes his marks, layers his colour, fixes the objects in his eye, allows the viewer to share in the show business of Hockney’s recent transformations of the perceived world. There is, fortunately, better business than "show business" to be had in this show.

• David Hockney at Tate Britain until 29 May
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Overleaf: browse a gallery of Hockney paintings from the exhibition