Like Ken Loach and the Dardennes brothers, Laurent Cantet is a filmmaker with a keen interest in social issues and themes, often using non-professional actors and a naturalistic approach, but perfectly willing to inject a little plot contrivance to spice things up.

The first Suspiria was a sensation, and spectacularly, monomaniacally new. Its young heroine Susie Bannon’s ride from an innately hostile airport through eldritch woods in which a panicked girl ran from her destination, the Markos Academy of Dance, as Goblin’s rock score gibbered and pounded at the senses, was hysterical, relentless film-making.

What a charmer! An irresistible combination of diffidence and confidence, Michael Caine is so much more than Alfie, and this surprising book, his second after a delightful autobiography, is multi-layered, filled with tips for acting, on stage and screen.

On 22^nd July 2011, on a tiny island off the Norwegian coast, 69 young people were killed, with another 109 injured in a terrorist attack. It was the darkest day in Norway since World War Two, and one that is still evident in its news, politics and society today. But somewhere down the line, the victims became background noise to the circus around the aftermath and perpetrator.

If a Queen biopic called for drama, scandal and outrage, then Bohemian Rhapsody spent its fill in production. Several Freddies had been and gone, rumours swirling about meddling band members, and then director Bryan Singer’s assault accusations caught up with him. In a way, it’s impressive the film came out so coherent.

Watching Matthew Holness’ debut feature Possum, you’d be forgiven in thinking he was a tortured soul. Lead character Phillip (played by Sean Harris, pictured below) is a lean marionette of a man, prone to horrific flights of fantasy involving a human-headed spider puppet.

Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.

The straw hat is surely the season’s requisite headgear for great actors embarking on their valedictory screen performances. It was there on the venerable Harry Dean Stanton’s head through much of Lucky, and the great John Hurt makes it his own in Eric Styles’ That Good Night, his last lead film role (his cameo in espionage thriller Damascus Cover hardly counts). As its title, drawn from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem about death, suggests, the whiff of mortality is strong, and so is the sense of a script creaking, dramatic impact sustained principally by the charisma of a master.

“The horizon recedes as we go through life… then a day comes when it stoops receding,” Hurt gives us in opening voice-over, all that old flushness of voice still there, its cadences glorious. He plays Ralph Maitland, a once-eminent British writer now living out his days in halcyon, albeit grumpy style in a perfect Portugese landscape. It seems a practically blessed existence, in the loving care of younger wife Anna (Sofia Helin, unrecognisable from The Bridge), until a hospital diagnosis brings “the ultimate deadline” into his world.

The immaculately urbane Dance spars with the cantankerous Hurt

Selfishness has clearly long been second nature for Ralph, so his determination to die according to his own wishes comes as little surprise. An impetuously urgent call to semi-estranged son Michael (Max Brown) brings up various ghosts, hardly in any healing manner, and results in an ugly family row when Maitland-fils – he’s a scriptwriter too, though of admitted schlock – arrives in the company of a girlfriend (Erin Richards), to whom Hurt’s character can’t resist being gratuitously rude. No calm passing for this “terrible old goat”, then.

And that’s despite Ralph’s having looked into options for euthanasia on the sly, which precipitates the appearance of an elegantly clad stranger – representing a shadowy organisation known only as “the Society”, he has no name, credited only as “the Visitor” – onto the scene. Played by Charles Dance in trademark white linen, the visitor’s responsibility seems to be to assess his client’s wishes. He only gets three briefish scenes, but they give That Good Night much of its brightness, as the immaculately urbane Dance spars with the cantankerous Hurt (pictured below).There’s at least one nice surprise in that interaction, which is more than can be said of most of the rest of the proceedings. Father-and-son interaction, along the lines of Michael’s accusation, “You were always generous with money, never with affection”, is distinctly formulaic, with Brown limited to playing foil to his father, the mere fact that they are still in contact at all something a surprise. Coupled with Styles’ casually loping directorial style, the female roles come across as little more than cyphers, Helin in particular displaying a blissed-out serenity that’s a million miles from the complexities of The Bridge. Barely a brow furrowed here, in fact.

The irony is that That Good Night treats its subject with, to adapt the Dylan Thomas poem again, far too much gentleness, its sense of whimsy far more pronounced than any hint of rage. Styles has adapted the 1996 NJ Crisp play that was a vehicle for Donald Sinden, adding a tangible luxury of cinematic location that certainly hasn’t toughened the piece up, while composer Guy Farley provides a score that is soupily insistent.

And yet… Hurt’s death at the beginning of this year can’t help giving bravura to his performance, playing as he was in the full knowledge of his own demise (Hurt’s own diagnosis came in 2015). That Good Night hardly delivers what its title appears to offer, but Hurt’s closing recitation of the lines of the Thomas poem is reason enough to see it through to its far-from-bitter end. 

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the preview for That Good Night