Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early longeurs in her depiction of a downtrodden functionary hero who is existentially trapped in a crazed colonial world.

Played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, Don Diego de Zama has been festering for years as a magistrate in a riverside hell-hole that must be one of the Spanish Empire’s most far-flung possessions (apparently Paraguay, though geographical location is as loosely defined here as is the 18th century historical setting). If his tricorn hat and crimson jacket must have initially suggested an element of louche elegance, the rot obviously takes its toll on those who remain too long in these parts. It’s manifested in a distracted lethargy, with energy expended between apparently meaningless bureaucratic tasks and desultory engagement within this enclosed would-be garrison of civilisation.

The chaos of 'Zama' seems to be everywhere, and outside time

Beyond it lies the world of the natives, who are presented more as clusters that respond with servile obedience to any random demand than as individuals, and the diversion of a liaison with a local woman has given Zama a mestizo child. But any attachment there is as empty as the lackadaisical (and bruisingly futile) flirtation he carries on with the wife of a senior official. “Europe is best remembered by those who were never there,” she advises, perceptively highlighting the vacuity of society’s rituals copied in a location in which they can only ever be irremediably alien.

Zama’s every petition for relocation – at some stage in the past he has even acquired a wife and children in Buenos Aires, but their existence is vrtually fabular – is met by absurdist rebuttals that evince the particularly Kafkaesque bureaucracy that rules this remote corner of empire. The casual dismissal with which his requests are treated is nothing, however, to the casual brutality that pervades the whole colonial enterprise, in which human ears, supposedly cut from the corpse of a local bandit, are treated as a gambling token.  An adaptation of the 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, the film’s sense of absurdist confinement in a meaningless world surely recalls the work of the Argentinian writer's contemporary Samuel Beckett, as well as his literary master, Dostovesky. The existential gesture of escape that Zama takes in the film’s final reel changes the visual tone of Martel’s world almost beyond recognition. From the dusty, claustrophobic brown hues that define the settlement, his bedraggled group of adventurers sets out on a sort of Heart of Darkness journey into a luscious wilderness, the deceptive beauties of which disguise dangers lurking both without and within.

Portuguese cinematographer Rui Pocas captures those closing landscapes as almost hallucinogenic in their wide vistas: they seem to shatter any colonial illusion that the European interloper can ever find a place here. Martel is a director for whom sound has always been as important as image – if not more so – and both dominate here over text. Her sound designer Guido Berenblum melds the insistent sounds of nature into an aural fabric of dislocation, made all the more abtruse and disorientating by snatches of human speech that seem to hang in the air, neither dialogue nor voice-over in any traditional form. It’s a crazed sensual tapestry that is completed by easy contemporary guitar duo melodies (from Los Indios Tabajaras) that only emphasise their beguiling anomaly. Martel may compel us to accompany her legion of the lost on their particular 18th century journey, but the chaos of Zama seems to be everywhere, and outside time. Oneirically intense, it’s auteur filmmaking at its most ambitious.

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the preview for Zama

Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s.

“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young women, a rare sighting in the male world of the skate park.

Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management.

Swiss director Marcel Gisler’s film tells a story that is hardly new – but neither, sadly, is it old, as in about a thing of the past. That professional football continues to be homophobic, a world in which it is virtually impossible for a star player to come out as gay while continuing to play at the top of the game, is no secret. Two decades on from the suicide of Justin Fashanu, the destructive consequences are all too well known; recent fictional reminders, such as John Donnelly’s The Pass (made into an accomplished film by Ben A Williams two years ago), suggest that little has changed.

Where that Russell Tovey-starrer concentrated its action into intense bursts, the more nuanced Mario takes time to develop (arguably, slightly too long) as it tells the story of Max Hubacher's title character, whose ascent towards a professional football career runs in parallel with his first love – and ne’er the twain can meet. The phlegmatic Mario is a rising star in the Under 21 team of YB Bern, with promotion in sight; he certainly lives for his football, even if he’s rather obviously playing out his father’s ambitions as much as his own.

The 'market value' of a player who’s been outed falls dramatically

When outsider Leon (Aaron Altaras) is brought into the team – Leon has only come from Germany, but in these Swiss ‘burbs the concept of “outsider” is exaggerated, while his good looks suggest a Mediterranean type – an element of rivalry kicks. Both play as forwards, a duplication that could complicate future prospects, but rather than stimulating rivalry Mario’s coach counsels him to “seek interaction”. The two duly end up sharing a flat, and few viewers will be surprised by how that interaction progresses.

Leon is certainly the more forward of the pair, while for the more gauche, even callow Mario it’s his first love. (There’s irony, or perhaps not, in the fact that Hubacher would be a shoo-in for anyone needing to cast a young Putin.) But such powerful feelings aren’t enough to make him disregard the certainty that the faintest rumour would wreck any future in the professional game. When the rumours do start circulating – no surprise there, given that this seems a rather vindictive, small-town world, with a locker-room atmosphere that’s heavier on vindictive jibes than eroticism – their moment of decision approaches remorselessly. Closing-reel developments catch the increasingly desperate and destructive deceptions required to maintain stadium image intact (fake WAGs by now long in mandatory tow). It’s not over-complicated in dramatic development, but the film plays out with telling power, backed by performances from its two leads that do convince about their attachment.What Gisler certainly captures is the hypocrisy behind the system itself. It takes Mario’s otherwise lugubrious coach to point out that club management not only has to be seen to be treating the issue with appropriate sensitivity, but that the “market value” of a player who’s been outed falls dramatically. In one of the extras here, “Breaking Taboos”, the director recalls how the president, now openly gay, of Hamburg St Pauli (the club features in the film, and like YB Bern clearly wasn't afraid of the association), used exactly that phrase to him.

Mario tells a sad story, one that leaves us to ponder just what makes football’s determination that such secrets be kept so categorical. It’s not management – which readily suggests help from therapists to players known to be gay – nor surely the majority of fans who have long moved on; "sponsors" get cited, while the press certainly sticks to old guns. Gisler concludes his commentary by hoping that the film will “keep discussion alive”, though he admits he remains in the pessimistic camp. Unlike his actor Altaras, whose optimism shines through: Mario needs to be shown in football youth training camps, he suggests. Sadly that’s not likely to be happening in this country, given that the film was given an 18 certificate for “strong sexual images, sex references”. Astounding: the BBFC really should get out more.  

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the preview for Mario

Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone.

For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.

Hazanavicius logs into the action in 1967, with the director (played by Louis Garrel) finishing La Chinoise with Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin). It was the year of their marriage, the two decades that separated the couple in age – she was still a student, but had already starred in his Weekend, too – proving no barrier to their love. Hazanavicius based his script on Wiazemsky’s roman à clef recollection of the period, Un an après, though he is on record that he emphasised the adaptation’s elements of comedy (something that Wiazemsky, then at the end of her life, was apparently very happy about).

La Chinoise did not go down well with audiences – we see walk-outs and napping at its premiere – while the screening at the Chinese embassy was even worse: expecting to be received with open arms by the Maoists with whom Godard was becoming increasingly involved, it was rejected as a “piece of shit”. But with the Evènements of May 1968 underway, politics was coming out onto the streets of Paris and into the lecture halls of the Sorbonne.These are big set pieces that are beautifully recreated here. Godard's presence at the street protests is ironically marked by the recurring joke of how he breaks his glasses over and over again in the demonstrations (a nice late line in Stacy Martin’s voice-over suggests that it was the rising optician costs that finally stopped him joining them). More significantly, he was rejected by the student protestors, not least for arguing, in relation to Palestine, that the “Jews are the new Nazis” (plus ça change...). Intent on changing his creative direction, Godard was flummoxed by people coming up to him to ask why he wasn’t making movies like Breathless anymore (even a policeman, after a fracas, confesses how much he loved Contempt).

Losing his sense of humour in parallel with the lightness of that earlier work, Godard becomes increasingly narcissistic and his contretemps with Anna increase. There's an excursion to the South, during the days when Godard and fellow protestors were instrumental in closing the 1968 Cannes film festival, followed by an extremely well-shot long car journey back to Paris (the social upheaval had produced general strikes and shortages of petrol). Alienating his companions in the crowded vehicle, he argues for the destruction of the oeuvre of his one-time heroes such as John Ford or Fritz Lang, the frame of his previous admirations reduced to the likes of comic Jerry Lee Lewis.

'Redoubtable' has delved deep into Godard’s box of cinematic tricks

Hazanavicius’s film was released in the US with the title Godard Mon Amour, and despite all the mockery of his protagonist, the effect isn’t snide: the stylistic tributes from the director (best known, of course, for that other cinematic homage, The Artist) illustrate that. Redoubtable has delved deep into Godard’s box of cinematic tricks, with numerous citations (the Jean d’Arc moment from Vivre sa vie, for one), games with titles, as well as drops in and out of black-and-white and reversals into negative. There are some smartly ironic script touches – one scene has the two main actors appearing naked as they talk about the purpose of nudity in cinema – while cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman achieves impressive visual pastiche, matching the colour palettes and shots of Raoul Coutard’s 1960s work for Godard to perfection.

There’s considerable sadness in the long final scene. With Anna happily absorbed in the shoot of a Marco Ferreri film, Godard arrives from the set of his latest radical anti-project full of petulant jealousy and self-centred paranoia: the ship that is their marriage – Redoubtable was actually the name of a French nuclear submarine, its appearance in the title an increasingly ironic commentary to the developing action – scuttles to the accompaniment of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. There's a final coda that glimpses Godard engaged in the strictly collective group-management cinema of his Dziga Vertov Group phase. Dead, dead, dead...

The playing of the lead couple is supremely accomplished, Garrel growing increasingly ruffled and sulky as Martin blooms. They both feature with Hazanavicius (along with the director’s wife Bérénice Bejo, who plays a smaller role here) in the only extra on this release, a 20-minute stage appearance and Q&A at the 2017 London Film Festival. It reveals little, though Garrel, talking about his own scepticism, mixes it up with “septic”. Godard had a self-regard that didn't really admit scepticism, but the poisonous overtones of that second word catch the direction we see him taking in Redoubtable all too aptly.

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the preview for Redoubtable