DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.

Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a dramatisation of the real-life slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831, depicting Turner as a visionary preacher pre-ordained to lead his people from their bondage, though his bloody attempt to do so was doomed to failure.

Parker directed, stars and wrote the screenplay (the story is credited to Parker and Jean McGianni Celestin), and he has brought a charismatic energy to the project which often overrides the orthodox nature of the storytelling. As a boy, the young Turner is taught to read by plantation mistress Elizabeth Turner (Penelope Ann Miller), a kindly act somewhat undercut by Elizabeth's view of her slaves as a species positioned somewhere between infanthood and the animal kingdom. "These books are for white folks," she explains patiently. "They're full of things your kind wouldn't understand."

Nonetheless, the lad studies the Bible, finds he has a gift for sermonising, and begins preaching the Word to his fellow slaves. Times are hard in the South, and at the urging of the Reverend Zalthall (Mark Boone Junior), Nat's owner Sam Turner (Armie Hammer, pictured above with Parker) hires Nat out to local plantations, with the aim of placating rebellious urges among the slaves with soothing Scriptural messages.

Sam Turner seems relatively liberal, enjoying a friendly rapport with Nate (they were childhood friends) and rescuing him from the vengeful intentions of a spiteful fellow landowner. However, in Hammer's skilful portrayal, he's gradually revealed as a weak man with a drink problem who's never going to break ranks with his white compatriots and become a civil rights advocate for his negro chattels.

The narrative steadily gathers pace as it arcs towards its inevitable denouement. Nat's early optimism is soured by the appalling sights he sees on his travels (not least a scene where a slave has his teeth knocked out with a chisel before being force-fed). His preaching begins to sound more like a cleverly coded exhortation to fling off the chains of bondage and rise up, and his progress towards rebellion is guided by visionary images (corn spattered with blood, a dramatic total eclipse). A couple of incidents of rape, including an assault by slave-catchers on his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King, pictured above, depicted as little more than a signifier of idealised love and fidelity), prompt Nat to recall that the Lord could be vengeful as well as merciful. When he's brutally flogged by Sam, for baptising a white man, the rebellious die is cast.

Parker has been accused of excessive self-regard for the Christ-like overtones in his portrayal of Turner, while any positive contribution towards bridging the racial divide has been scuppered by his depiction of the white characters almost exclusively as depraved, misshapen sadists. The Birth of a Nation's apparently glittering commercial prospects in the States were dented by a media storm over the fact that both Parker and Celestin had faced rape allegations in 1999. Nevetheless, if we can judge the art and not the artist, this is vivid and unsettling film-making.

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@SweetingAdam

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Birth of a Nation

As an old Sixties lefty brought up on paranoia-infused thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American conspiracies. However, in contrast to his earlier labyrinthine epics Nixon and JFK, this account of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden keeps clutter to a minimum as Stone fashions a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.

It's no great surprise to find that Stone portrays Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of America's intelligence agencies, and if you happen to work for the CIA you'll hate this movie, but Stone makes Snowden's journey towards his fateful decision to spill the top-secret beans plausible and persuasive. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Snowden (many of whose family were federal lawyers or in the US military) starts out as a sincere young patriot, training for Special Forces but rejected as not physically strong enough to make the cut (pictured below). A computer genius who's keen to serve his country, he joins the CIA instead and whizzes through the admission tests with astounding ease.

However, as he's given various postings around the world, he becomes disillusioned at how the CIA and National Security Agency are abusing their seemingly unlimited powers. He's shocked at the way Timothy Olyphant's Geneva-based CIA operative cynically compromises a contact and blackmails him into becoming an informant, then later is horrified by the way a programme he helped create, EpicShelter, is being used for marking targets for extermination in drone attacks.

The sheer extent of what the Americans were, or are, up to remains flabbergasting, with the NSA supposedly capable of tracking every mobile phone on the planet, though it's supposedly all justifiable in the name of national self-defence. They're trying to "find the terrorist in the internet haystack", as Snowden's CIA trainer Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage) puts it.

"You didn't tell me we were running a dragnet on the whole world," Snowden protests to his boss Corbin O'Brian (Rhys Ifans), who likes to point out that "the front line is everywhere". For the the O'Brian role, Ifans (pictured below) has assumed a gravelly baritone loaded with menace, and seems to be channelling Jason Robards and Scott Glenn as he looms ominously from the screen in giant close-ups. 

Stone isn't known for his light romantic touch, but he handles Snowden's complicated relationship with girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) deftly, and the way that Agency suspicions about Snowden's attitude to his work start to cast paranoid shadows over the couple's private life effectively personalises the broader picture. Indeed, the degree of intrusion which intelligence operatives are subjected to by their employers is a fascinating aspect of the tale.

Scenes of Snowden hiding out in Hong Kong while Guardian journalists prepare to publish his reams of top-secret revelations tend towards melodrama (Tom Wilkinson seems to share only the most only tenuous of connections with defence correspondent Ewan MacAskill, while Joely Richardson makes an unfeasibly actressy hash of Janine Gibson, editor of Guardian USA). Melissa Leo's portrayal of Laura Poitras (who made the Snowden documentary Citizenfour to which Stone's movie is quite heavily indebted) is marred by the malevolent creepiness Leo brings to every role.

However, Gordon-Levitt is pitch perfect in the title role, gradually revealing the steely inner core behind his nerd-like exterior, and skilfully evoking Snowden's process of disillusionment as he sees more and more of the skull beneath the skin of his homeland. Overall, this is a much better film than Stone's recent history might have led you to anticipate.

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@SweetingAdam

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Snowden

Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter was released in 1968, the screenplay adapted by James Goldman from his long-running play. Loosely based on historical fact, the Lear-like plot charts an ageing King Henry II’s futile attempts to choose a successor after the premature death of his eldest son.

Latin America has learnt from harsh experience just what the legacy of dictatorship involves, when the structure itself may have been dismantled but the psychology that it engendered remains.

The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El Dorado to be stripped of its riches. In most jungle movies, including The Mission and The Emerald Forest, the indigenous population is romanced or demonised, or a mixture of both.

From the schoolroom straight to the throne: it was a rapid rise for 18-year-old Victoria, and managing as monarch wasn’t helped when everyone around you had their own agenda and was raring to act on your behalf. Moving nicely from TARDIS to palace – and mercifully from Alexandrina (even worse as the shorter 'Drina) to Victoria – Jenna Coleman in the title role combined wide-eyed innocence with an independence and hints at a steelier impetuosity that delivered well in this opening episode (of eight) of what has already been dubbed the new Downton.

Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as vigilante. For him radical intervention was the only way of responding to the social breakup of the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse brought his society to a profound low point, both psychologically and economically, while those nominally in power were conspicuous by their inaction, or worse. He's been doing it ever since.

Much like Margaret Thatcher’s tearful tumble from Downing Street, the haggard, hoarse Tony Blair who materialised after Chilcot must have given even his enemies pause. The glib, youthful Nineties spin-master now recalled Scrooge’s reproachful future ghost, a man mutely begging to be shriven. The last person he’d choose for such confession, though, would surely be George Galloway, whose presence as presenter may handicap this film’s reception. If any politician is even more toxic than Blair, it’s Gorgeous George.

So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change…

The Flames of Paris, in Alexei Ratmansky's 2008 reworking, is a ballet of contrasts. Between the first and second acts, so different in pace and quality, between the naturalistic intimacy of certain pas de deux and the stylised posturing of the crowd scenes, between the tedious masque in Act I and the fireworks show-off variations in Act II, between the liquid velvet blood-red curtains and the flat black-and-white line drawing sets.