Recently, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder have found themselves in a career renaissance. Reeves has made a remarkable comeback as the dog-loving action-hero John Wick, while Ryder won audiences over as the grief-stricken mother, Joyce Byers, in Netflix’s 80s nostalgia-fest Stranger Things.

This is a romcom of two radically different halves, vaulting so dizzyingly from insultingly unbearable to daringly hilarious that walking in half-way through becomes a viable option.

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.

How does the ever cherub-cheeked Alex Lawther keep getting served in pubs? That question crossed my mind during the more leisurely portions of Old Boys, an overextended English schoolboy revamp of Cyrano de Bergerac that flags just when it most needs narrative adrenaline.

A British boys boarding school in the 1980s. Not the most obvious setting for a romantic comedy, especially one based on the most famous romcom of all, Cyrano de Bergerac.

The Royal Northern College of Music’s December opera production was the useful double bill of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi from Puccini’s Trittico.

There’s a lovely feel of folk freedom to Carlos Marques-Marcet’s second film, which sees the Spanish writer-director setting up creative shop resoundingly in London – or rather, on the waters of the city’s canals that provide the backdrop for Anchor & Hope. It’s there right from the film’s opening song “Dirty Old Town”, in the Ewan MacColl original, rather than the better-known, and far grittier Pogues version: these London waterscapes are lived-in and naturalistic but they’re also photogenic (and beautifully shot by Dagmar Weaver-Madsen).

The gist of the action is nicely caught in MacColl’s line “Dreamed a dream by the old canal”, except that the film’s lead couple, Eva (Oona Chaplin) and Kat (Natalia Tena), are actually living on that waterway. Home is a canal boat, which they steer up and down the banks of North and East London with unhurried freedom: it’s the perfect backdrop for the world they have created for themselves, one defined by their independence – both have on-off jobs, but employment seems hardly a priority – and passion (an early scene makes clear that their sexual spark is very much alight). We never learn how or when they got together, except that Kat is Spanish, although that's a detail you would hardly notice (except in pondering whether it represents the sort of pre-Brexit idyll that we may shortly come to miss rather desperately?).

But the almost unspoken security of their relationship will be tested, a process indirectly set off by the death of their cat, the kind of seemingly unlikely association that actually rings very true to life here. The feline funeral, complete with Buddhist rites administered by Eva’s mother Germaine (played by Geraldine Chaplin, her mother in real  life, who has a whale of a time with a role that is both memorably batty and attractively rich-hearted). The film’s opening chapter title may read “We can get another cat”, but Eva’s realisation that she wants her children (a subject so far apparently unmentioned between the two) to know her mother before it’s too late pushes a more immediate issue to the fore.

Kat is underwhelmed by the prospect of parenthood, even when the perfect candidate for surrogate father turns up in the shape of her visiting Barcelona friend Roger (David Verdaguer), a happy-go-lucky bohemian who takes to the idea, initially raised at a tequila-fuelled get-together, with enthusiasm, and then a more unexpected degree of emotional commitment. Marques-Marcet and Jules Nurrish’s script enjoys its comedy – often of quite a loopy kind, into which Verdaguer fits especially well – but hits home when charting the fluctuations of feeling that engross the uneasily expectant trio.

The canal world offers a quietly revelatory pleasure in itself

The immediate reference of Anchor & Hope’s title may be the waterside pub where Kat works part-time, but its associations run deeper, surely alluding to the kinds of secure foundations that allow planning for the future (or not...). Does parenthood bring responsibilities that preclude the kind of impromptu lifestyle that the two women have so obviously enjoyed to date, based on the (relative) impermanence of their canal lifestyle? The film’s closing scenes, as well as its Spanish title Tierra firme, suggest that such ideas are somewhere in Marques-Marcet’s mind.

But his film wears any such seriousness lightly, delighting instead in the emotional dynamics of day-to-day life. (Didn’t Michael Winterbottom, many moons ago, use to explore somewhat similar territory?). Even when the temperature of the film’s bondings chillis, its seasonal setting seems to remain summer. The film's ending is left as fluid as the waters that flow through it – there's a degree of meandering, too, on the length front – while the canal world offers a quietly revelatory pleasure in itself (the Film Offices of the NE and E boroughs must be happy). Marques-Marcet keeps his soundtrack largely diagetic, its sparsity broken only by some lovely Molly Drake folk tunes that add a delicate melancholy. Anchor & Hope has much that charms, and it's good to find a film that treats viewers as grown-ups.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Anchor & Hope

A proper production of Così fan tutte should make you feel as if the script for a barrel-scraping Carry On film has been hi-jacked by Shakespeare and Chekhov – working as a team. The story is so silly (even nasty), the music so sublime.

New Zealand comic Rose Matafeo is a fan of romcoms and has decided she is destined to appear in one at some point in her career. As she explains, it's not possible – as a mixed-race woman – to play the film's heroine, but she is surely a shoo-in for the role described in show's title, Sassy Best Friend; after all, she has the wild hair, the specs and the perky personality that such a character demands.

Breaking up is hard to do, sang Neil Sedaka, and Mercedes Grower plays out that sentiment in a quirky, original and often funny film, which neatly subverts Hollywood romcom tropes.

It's an episodic piece (with a stellar cast) that cuts between nine couples breaking up with resignation or despair, angrily or comically. There's some unbearably honest writing, but also some rather less accomplished scenes that have the feel of improvised material.

And some stories work better than others, but there are a couple that stand out. Julia Davis is wonderful as Livy, a self-obsessed, talent-free actress smarming her way into a role and into the director's bed (Peter Wight, both pictured below) while considering a fling with fellow actor Karl (Seb Cardinal); Elliot (Julian Barratt) is a touchingly innocent man-child swooning over straight actor Raymond (Oliver Maltman) whom he tries to win back by buying him an ice cream.While there's some nice comedy in those episodes, in others there's a dark undertow – such as middle-aged couple (Kerry Fox and Roland Gift), whose marriage won't survive their booze-sodden mutual loathing and resentment; or the break-up between Peter and Susan (Paul McGann and Kate Hardie), who have clearly been at this point in their relationship many times over the years, in that on-off-on-off-again revolving door that so many would recognise.

Grower herself appears as Layla in the most discomfiting story. Layla is heavily pregnant by Daniel (Noel Fielding), a nasty piece who works in a sex shop and denies he's the father, and spends every moment dribbling a football, which he gives more attention than he does to her. 

Despite being made on a tiny budget, 'Brakes' often looks like a love letter to London

In the second half of the film the couples' stories are rewound for a briefer series of scenes where we are told how they got together. We see the fun and laughter of those first encounters – a couple bonding over a mutual interest in books, or a comic misunderstanding at work, or how Daniel's boyish charm, and later drugs, won over Layla, or how Raymond met Elliot when he was on a lad's weekend in Barcelona and somehow ended up back at Elliot's flat

A few stories are difficult to engage with: the posh businesswoman regretting a one-night stand with a builder who turns out to have been stalking her, an artist getting involved with a man who suffers from perpetual ennui, a long-distance couple whose Skype relationship falters with their broadband connection.

Grower – writer, director, actor and producer – shoots London on a handheld camera through the seasons. Despite being made on a tiny budget, Brakes often looks like a love letter to London while offering bleak insights into dysfunctional relationships. It's an accomplished debut.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Brakes