There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life.

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray far from the brutal and disturbing.

Lord Clark –  “of Civilisation”, as he was nicknamed, not necessarily affectionately – presented the 13 episodes of the eponymous series commissioned by David Attenborough for BBC Two in 1969; it was subtitled “A Personal View”, and encompassed only Western Europe (from which even Spain was excluded).

Henry VIII had a troubled marital history and Charles I lost his head, but both have also gone down in history as original, innovative and obsessive collectors of art, founders in different ways of what is now one of the world’s greatest accumulations in all media.

The myth of Modigliani, the archetypal tortured artist, was set in train while he was still alive and remains potent almost a century after his death. Every so often a few game academics try to put things straight, and now Tate Modern’s exhibition reappraises his considerable output not through the broken lens of his addiction, but in the sober daylight of his influences and milieu.

Some 50 portraits by Paul Cézanne – almost a third of all those the artist painted that have survived – are on view in this quietly sensational exhibition. Eye-opening and heart-breaking, it examines his art exclusively in the context of his portrayal of people for the first time.

James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions.

James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of art historical study that often surrounds such a major figure as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Hamilton is positively in love with his subject, and writes with verve and enthusiasm, yet grounds it on vast research with primary and secondary sources, all impeccably noted.

For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.

They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, when their circumstances could hardly have been more different: Zola was the son of an Italian engineer whose early death left his family impoverished, Cézanne the rebellious scion of an affluent banking family. The early scenes of their childhood friendship are some of the best in the film, nicely spontaneous and natural. They certainly glory in their exploration of the Provence landscapes to which Thompson returns repeatedly, not least when we witness Cézanne creating his Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings in situ.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage 

But this script dives around across the decades, often rather confusingly. It opens in 1888, with Cézanne, after a period of separation, visiting the now acclaimed and prosperous Zola at his home north of Paris. They certainly had grounds for difference: Zola had married Cézanne’s erstwhile model and mistress, Alexandrine (a nicely understated performance from Alice Pol). But their immediate bone of contention was Zola’s 1886 novel L’Oeuvre (often translated as His Masterpiece), with its main character, a promising but frustrated painter, in whom Cézanne saw a painfully recognisable portrayal of himself.  

The accusations fly freely. “You don’t read my books any more, you judge them,” Zola tells Cézanne, to which the artist snaps back, “You’ve befriended the bourgeoisie you hated.” Between this beginning and end, there are some persuasive (and certainly culturally name-dropping) scenes of artistic fraternité. Cézanne’s first visit to Zola in Paris involves a prolonged encounter that assembles most of the great Impressionists – Manet, Renoir and Camille Pissaro, just for starters – around the same bistro table.

We see the controversies around the Academy salons that sometimes ended in fights, though appreciating some century and a half later quite what such differences meant is sometimes challenging. More beguiling are visual recreations of some of the great works of Impressionism, notably Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, even if it can feel like an art-historical roll-call: you hear someone hailed as “Berthe”, you know it must be Morrisot. The travails of Cézanne’s creation, including his propensity to destroy his canvases, is there too, in as much as any film can convincingly convey the process of painting. There’s a painful moment when Cézanne, funded in his Paris atelier by Zola, learns that one of his works has actually sold – but only its central detail, an apple, cut out of the canvas on the whim of a client.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage. Guillaume Canet plays Zola rather drily, with Guillaume Gallienne, billed as a member of the Comédie-Française – as if the augustness of this project culturel was not otherwise guaranteed – as Cézanne. Full plaudits to the film’s make-up artists, who endow both with impressive varieties and combinations of facial hair. Jean-Marie Dreujou’s cinematography is much more satisfying than an overwrought score from Eric Neveux. Like that apple excised from its pictorial context, Cézanne et moi is more satisfying in its parts than in its entirety.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cézanne et moi

Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same city, has it nailed down. It was founded through the mad enthusiasm, intelligence, determination and just off-the-scale energy of Peter the Great in 1703, built on the bodies of around 30,000 labourers (not the 300,000 that later rumours have suggested) at the whim of an Emperor.