The bleak opening of Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves is set in a nursing home where a man is dying of AIDS, tended by nurses who themselves know next to nothing of the disease. The phrase one nurse utters as a warning gives this Swedish drama its title: any human contact, even if it’s intended as the smallest act of kindness, risks passing on the infection. Simon Kaijser’s three-part drama will show us the varieties of response across society to these extreme new circumstances.

“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos. The electric, emotionally raw story of 15-year-old schoolgirl Adèle’s sexual awakening unfolds in a series of languid close-ups and unbroken takes, and her face is centre-stage throughout, captivating both in its moments of beauty and ugliness, continually on the brink of change.

Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose treatment of his cast and crew has sparked the kind of controversy that unfortunately threatens to eclipse all that is good about the film, exhibits an almost clinical fascination with Exarchopoulos, who for her part gives a performance so vivid and vulnerable that at times you feel winded watching her.

Despite the inevitable attention that has been drawn by the film’s expansive sapphic love scenes, it’s generally closer to a character study than a love story; from the very first shots of Adèle leaving her parents’ house in the suburbs, boarding a bus and commuting to her school in central Lille, an almost anthropological intimacy is established in our view of her. We see her learning, walking, sleeping, eating, dancing, teaching, talking, often in snatches rather than complete A-to-B scenes, and when we do see her having sex it’s in the same matter-of-fact detail as everything else.

The graphic novel from which Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix’s script is titled Blue Angel, in reference to Léa Seydoux’s worldly art student Emma, who becomes Adèle’s first real love and first real loss. Prior to their meeting she has an ill-fated fling with a male fellow student, and predictable though this is as a plot element, the crushing sense of erotic disillusionment that Exarchopoulos conveys in the aftermath is painfully immediate.

It’s more telling, in fact, than most of the lovemaking she shares with Emma, which unfolds in self-consciously lengthy single takes that feel anatomical rather than illustrative; they tell us little about the couple, their relationship or the momentous passion between them. This we discover in other, less showy moments: they share the kind of conversations about art, literature and career ambitions that are too often overlooked by screenwriters, and when the emotional storm clouds start to gather, it’s clear exactly how much both have to lose.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour made Cannes history this year, becoming the first film to be awarded a shared Palme d’Or for its director and two leading actresses. While the trifecta has plainly not been a harmonious one, what they have produced is a rare thing: a passionate, wrenching and genuinely complete portrait of a human being in flux. 

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Blue Is The Warmest Colour

What happens when a citizenry marginalised by society and weakened by an illness that could well be fatal are also called upon to rise up to demand the treatment, not to mention the civility and compassion, that are their due? The answer is on often grievous yet ultimately heartening view in How To Survive A Plague, David France's immensely stirring chronicle of the activism - spawned in New York and then spun out elsewhere - that accompanied the first decade or more of the AIDS crisis. 

Following theartsdesk's Monday opinion piece on reasons for moving towards a boycott on Valery Gergiev's concerts, and in the general climate created by other reports and protests, the conductor has issued the following statement, to which David Nice responds with an open letter.

Valery Gergiev's statement

Last Thursday I was giving a talk before a concert in Birmingham, decently but not inspiringly conducted by the much-liked Vasily Sinaisky. Had I been in London I could have taken my pick between two greater interpreters, Valery Gergiev launching his Berlioz series with the London Symphony Orchestra and veteran Yury Temirkanov returning to one of his standard programmes with the Philharmonia.

With a hero who’s an aspiring actor and an ensemble of theatrical types trapped outside time as supporting cast, the staginess of Ferzan Ozpetek’s A Magnificent Haunting comes as little surprise. It makes for sometimes nicely camp overplaying, though the comedy that made the Turkish-born director’s latest film a hit in his adopted Italy doesn’t travel easily beyond borders. Some elements, including gay traces, transvestite cameos and females at nervous breakdown levels, hint at eccentric sensibilities akin to those of Pedro Almodóvar.

Ground-breaking though it is as one of the first gay films to come out of Poland, Tomasz Wasilewski’s Floating Skyscrapers brings home how happy endings on such subjects are hardly to be hoped for in the conservative, Catholic country. Wasilewski’s second feature has real visual style though, with laconic imagery and accomplished performances. It has garnered plentiful festival acclaim already, and opens in the UK in December.

Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India.

Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

When piano-playing Vegas sensation and all round American entertainer Liberace (Michael Douglas) finds that his new live-in lover, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), is bisexual, he responds by saying, “Good for you – I wish I could be that flexible.” For these sort of snappy camp comebacks alone, of which the first half of the film contains plenty, Behind the Candelabra is enjoyable enough. What really makes the film, however, is the performances of its two leads.