Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.

Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and has a range of cameos from various figures in the film world who were clearly in on the joke, happily sending themselves up in sympathy with the tribulations of would-be producer Charlie and his scriptwriter Neville as they try to get their Aberdeen oil adventure drama Gulf and Western off the ground.

Alan Bennett cameos as a hilariously diffident doctor

The two are played by Charles Gormley, the Glasgow director who moved from early documentary work – he had a production company, Tree Films (“Branches Everywhere”), with Bill Forsyth in the 1970s – to make features like 1986’s Heavenly Pursuits, and actor and television writer Neville Smith. Hatton gives it all a nicely sardonic verité touch, complete with elements of voice-over narration and Shandy-esque intertitles, along the lines of “On the dangers of not looking before you leap” or “Wherein ways are explored to keep the wolf from the door”. One simply announces, “Scene missing”. By definition a micro-budget project, it was shot in grainy black and white on a combination of short ends and some East German ORWO stock that was pushing its expiry date.

Charlie has a script – though the pains of rewriting are central to the film – and some funding promised, if he can get a name director on board. So it’s off to Edinburgh, in search of Sam Fuller (the director had a long association with the Film Festival there), but Fuller is nowhere to be found. “Is he press?” one assistant in the festival offices queries. Charlie tries to interest Wim Wenders, too, who's there to present his The American Friend (Wenders is credited as “Another Director”). John Boorman becomes another later candidate.

The duo becomes an unlikely trio with the appearance, for no particular good reason but very charmingly, of actress Annie (Anne Zelda). Various picaresque dashes around the Edinburgh streets follow, one in a car commandeered from Stephen Frears (credited as “Biscuit Man"). Gallerist Richard Demarco appears somewhat grouchily as himself, Alan Bennett turns in a brilliant cameo as a hilariously diffident doctor who, on being told that writing is a lonely profession, suggests meals on wheels. Susannah York gamely plays along: hearing that the female role is underdeveloped, she coolly replies, “So you came to me?”

Long Shot is a perfect fit for the BFI’s Flipside strand, a rediscovery that is absolutely worth making – as well as a snapshot of the times, it’s also a true reflection of the enormous struggles, not to mention ingenuity, that go into getting a film idea anywhere near the screen. Gormley simply had cinema in his blood – Glasgow surely deserves a memorial to the director – and the film's final scene transports him in glorious technicolour to Hollywood, cruising the boulevards in a stretch convertible. It's a lovely ending, the stuff that dreams are made on.

This release's three extras are right on topic, too. Ross Wilson’s 1986 Hooray for Holyrood celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Edinburgh Film Festival: it’s presented by Robbie Coltrane, who doubled as a driver for the event in his stylish vintage auto (Sam Fuller did turn up, and was among his passengers). Sean Connery's Edinburgh, from 1982, is exactly what it says on the tin, lavish in its production values. Maurice Hatton’s earlier Scene Nun, Take One, a 1964 26-minuter, is a London street comedy starring Susannah York and the adventures that follow when she dresses up as a nun. There's an affectionate booklet tribute to Gormley, "Long Shot to Hollywood", by Bill Forsyth. An enchantingly off-beat package.

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Overleaf: watch the new trailer for Long Shot

A well-known internet sales site currently offers seven previous home cinema editions of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some are DVD or Blu-ray only, others are on both formats – increasing the amount of packages on offer. Only a brave company would enter such a crowded market with another version of the film to take the total to eight. Yet, here we are with a new dual format DVD/ Blu-ray edition.

After Eyes Without a Face, came this. Georges Franju is largely known for the grisly, surreal horror of his second feature, about a mad surgeon grafting stalked young women’s faces onto his disfigured wife. His all but forgotten follow-up, Spotlight On a Murderer (1961), is a breezy lark by comparison.

Hitting the essence of a Fellini masterpiece in a different medium is no easy task. Try and reproduce his elusive brand of poetic melancholy and you'll fail; best to transfer the characters to a different medium, as the musical Sweet Charity did in moving the action of Le notte di Cabiria from Rome and environs to New York.

The two words cut to the chase. The cast play, or actually are, maniacs. There are lots of them. Multiple Maniacs also nods to the title of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1964 proto-gore movie Two Thousand Maniacs! John Waters’ 1970 second full-length film also borrows from Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel and Tod Browning’s’ Freaks as well as demonstrating a fondness for John Cassavetes’ affected naturalism.

It’s strange to think that Sean Connery is still out there somewhere, aged 86. But this 17-year-old Gus Van Sant cousin to the director’s Good Will Hunting remains the great Scot’s penultimate film (Sam Mendes pulled back from the Skyfall cameo that should have been). His brawn, brusque charm and impatient street-wisdom are undiminished as the J.D.

Gurinder Chadha is still best-known for directing a low-budget comedy set in Hounslow about two girls who just want to play football. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) introduced Keira Knightley and in 2015 became a stage musical that lured Asian audiences to the West End. While she also explored British Asian culture in Bride and Prejudice (2004) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), in her new film she abandons light comedy to address the biggest and most decisive moment in Britain’s relationship with India.

Viceroy’s House is set in 1947 at the moment Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi to oversee the handover of India to its own people. Independence turned out to mean partitioning the country along religious lines, resulting in the migration of 14 million refugees across newly created borders. Among those migrants were Chadha’s paternal grandparents, who left their home in what became Pakistan. (The migration continued: in 1960 Chadha was born in Kenya and grew up in Southall, west London).

The film features the Mountbattens, played by Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson, and the politicians arguing over the rights and wrongs of Partition. But it also dramatises the lives of the indigenous staff working in the eponymous palace, among them a young Muslim translator (Huma Qureshi) and a Hindu security guard (Manish Dayal) who fall in love across the religious divide. Viceroy’s House is a darker film than anything Chadha and her co-scriptwriter Paul Mayeda Burges have made before – lest we forget, she once directed Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. It’s much more sumptuous to look at too. She tells theartsdesk what drew her to the material after avoiding it for many years.

JASPER REES: Why did you shun this story inspired by your family history for so long?

GURINDER CHADHA (pictured right on set with Om Puri): I just didn’t really have the courage. It’s a very sad part of my background. It was a very turbulent moment in our shared history, British and Indian, and there were a lot of people with very strong feelings about it and I just didn’t know if I could tell that story. It was only when I went to Pakistan for the first time to my ancestral town with Who Do You Think You Are? that I received such a warm welcome and really felt for the people who had moved into my grandfather’s house where my grandmother had left as a refugee in 1947. There were now five families who had moved in as refugees themselves. So I felt at that point that I really should do something on the Partition but from the people’s perspective.

A lot of people don’t know anything about this history - they don’t even know that Partition happened. I had to get a lot of information in in a way that would feel like proper storytelling. Then I got the idea to do it as an upstairs downstairs story – long before Downton Abbey happened. I wanted to tell the political story about Mountbatten negotiating with the leaders, but at the same time I wanted to see the effects of the decisions being taken upstairs on the ordinary people downstairs so I needed to build up the relationships with Mountbatten’s butler and valet and the translator and the chefs (see clip below).

The film is appearing at another moment of mass migration. Does that give the film extra impetus?

Absolutely. When we were shooting one of the refugee scenes I had 1,000 extras in a fort in Rajastan. That morning was the day the little Syrian boy’s body had been found washed up on a beach. We were at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. Every day we’d see that on the news and on our phones but then go out and shoot refugees in the film.

And how it might land on a cinema-going audience?

We live at a time where people are trying to divide us instead of looking at real issues of unemployment and economic stability for ordinary working people. I think that what the film really does is provide a timely reminder of what can happen when you start scapegoating different groups and how quickly that can escalate into terrible violence and death. It can just happen overnight. And that’s what happened in 1947.

You have a fictional relationship at the heart of the film between a Muslim woman and Hindu man, and there’s a lot of dialogue between the Mountbattens and their Indian staff. Did you feel that, in order to animate the canvas, characters had to speak to one another in a way they possibly mightn’t have in reality?

Absolutely, I was looking for interactions between the upstairs and downstairs. I was looking for what would have been real. Mountbatten banging on about his medals and the order in which he liked to get dressed – all that is very real and based on interviews with people who were there at the time. And yes we did fictionalise the downstairs characters but in many ways they represented people out there at the time – Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs – who all had to make decisions about their future. Doing it through a love story was a very accessible way to show that (see clip below).

This is not a film about giving the British a bloody nose. Was that very deliberate?

This is a film 70 years later looking at the lessons we can learn from events and how the geopolitics at the time unfolded and how can we be aware of those sacrifices that people made then and make sure that we don’t walk into the same trap today. I think Britain is ready to go back and look at some of our shared British Asian history of the Raj but not from the point of giving a bloody nose but saying, this was a policy at the time, these were our interests, and these were Pakistanis’ interests and these were India’s interests. Fourteen million became refugees overnight. What are we doing today when those things can happen again? We’d better watch ourselves

Was it very deliberate that you went in Hugh Bonneville for an extremely likeable Mountbatten?

Yes because Mountbatten actually was likeable and very charming but not particularly astute as a politician, unlike his wife. I felt that Hugh conveys that. He’s very charming and you want to have a drink with him but do you want him to be ruling over your country? I don’t think so.You’ve avoided any hint of an affair between Nehru and Edwina. Why? (Pictured above: Gillian Anderson and Tanveer Ghani)

I didn’t avoid it. I show them sitting quite intimately with looks towards each other. I show they’re very comfortable with each other’s company and that there is an intimacy there. What I didn’t choose to do was bang on about a relationship because I thought that took away from the story that was important to me, the political story but also the ordinary people. For me it was more important to tell the love story downstairs.

What did you carry away from David Lean’s A Passage to India and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and perhaps The Jewel in the Crown as well?

These are all films that were part of my education on the British Raj. Gandhi was a searingly important film for me. It was on an epic scale. It was a massive event for us as a community. The Jewel in the Crown of course did attempt to look at the role of the British in India in a different way. All these films have been part of my film education which is precisely why I wanted to set Viceroy’s House up as a sumptuous British Raj costume epic and then start subverting it by focusing on characters who might not have had the importance in other films. Having a foot in both communities I’m able to straddle both sides and hopefully tell you the story from a different perspective.What would you have done in 1947 if you’d been in charge?

Oh my lord. Well I certainly would not have agreed with Mountbatten bringing the date forward. If I had been in charge I would have had more people on the ground listening to what was going on and planned for transition better. But ultimately, I probably would have kept it as one country but made sure that the Muslim minority felt protected.

Did you grandparents end up living in the UK?

No. After my grandfather had spent 18 months looking for my grandmother and the children, he then took them all to Kenya. They had businesses there and they used to go back and forth from India to Kenya. Later my grandfather built another big building in India which is still there but somehow I just don’t feel connected to it. Sadly I never met either of these grandparents and these are stories I was told through their children. I knew my maternal grandmother. She came to live with us, and she had lots of horror stories to tell of that time. I’m told by a friend of mine who is a psychic that my grandfather walks with me. He saw a picture of him and said, "He’s always there standing with you." That's a bit of a freaky comment but at the same time I do take comfort from it.

• Viceroy's House opens on Friday 3 March

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Viceroy's House

Two Neapolitans are wrestling for Italian cinema’s crown. Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone’s rivalry was for a time so personal that, though they were neighbours, they didn’t speak for years.

Prepare to disagree. 2016 has been getting bad reviews all year long, but for film it was actually pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that there are big omissions from this list of our best films from the past 12 months. Our method of selection was arbitrary: each of the theartsdesk’s film reviewers was invited to volunteer one film each as their favourite of the year. No one was allowed to choose two.

So there is no place in our top seven for the film which was this year’s winner of the Oscar for best film (Spotlight), nor best adapted screenplay (The Big Short), nor the film with the best performance by an actress. No room for Room? What did we choose instead? Read on. And on page two we sharpen our blades and carve up the year’s true turkeys, some of them very expensive turkeys.

THEARTSDESK'S BEST FILMS OF 2016

ANOMALISA

"Chekhov meets Edward Hopper" is merely one way of describing Charlie Kaufman's extraordinary stop-motion film, an Oscar-nominated portrait of anomie as the prevailing psychological condition of our time, which also has the good sense to fold Cyndi Lauper into its soundscape. The up-tempo Lauper anthem is, of course, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", a carefree sentiment inimical to the careworn landscape in which the itinerant Michael (David Thewlis), an LA-based Brit in Cincinnati to speak at a conference, meets the sad-eyed Lisa (a peerless Jennifer Jason Leigh). Their connection is an attempt to enliven the anaesthetised sameness of a world in which, tellingly, all the other characters are voiced by one person (Tom Noonan). Thewlis hasn't had a role this rich since Mike Leigh's Naked, a movie coursing with the kind of electrical charge unavailable to the characters in Kaufman's scarily samey environs. That the film was obviously conceived and made before the rise and rise of Donald Trump makes its baleful tone even more remarkable: too much more of the president elect, and I suspect many will be feeling Michael's bone-deep desolation as their own. Matt Wolf

ARRIVAL 

Denis Villeneuve's film is sci-fi for those who don't like sci-fi, a time-jumping tale about aliens visiting Earth in pod-like structures, with weird heptapod creatures inside who speak only an abstract language that linguistics expert Louise Banks (Amy Adams, pictured above) and mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) have to interpret to find out if the aliens come to wage war (as the military running the operation, including Forest Whitaker's army colonel, fear). As the experts (not the military, you note) eventually find, the aliens have come to warn us that to save our planet we must co-operate internationally, and at its heart is a powerful message about communication, the importance of language and the need for humans to properly listen to one another. This being a Hollywood movie, there has to be a (sort of) romance, and there's a Gravity-style story involving a mother and a lost child, but both are done with subtlety, and it's a film that releases its secrets gradually, like the best detective stories. It pulls off that difficult trick – of being mainstream entertainment that makes the audience think. Veronica Lee

JULIETA

Everything about Julieta felt totally Almodóvarian despite its unusual source: a trio of short stories by the Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro. A family saga blending tragedy and levity, ravishing cinematography as a backdrop to exquisite performances from a company of passionate actresses led by Adriana Ugarte (pictured above with Daniel Grao) and Emma Suárez as younger and older incarnations of the title role. Many of the director’s abiding themes were here: terminal illness, sudden death, a mother’s love for a lost child, men hanging about the fringes. As ever there’s a lovely performance from Almodóvar’s tomahawk-faced stalwart Rossy de Palma.

Meanwhile Almodóvar’s career-long homage to Hitchcock continued in Alberto Iglesias’s Hermannesque score, the ravishing costume designs of Sonia Grande and above all in Julieta’s immutable blondeness. Almodóvar’s veneration for femininity of all ages is gracefully caught in a scene in which the young Julieta’s dyed blonde mop is dried by her daughter; when the towel is removed she has transformed into the older Julieta. The signature colour is red, which pulses on the screen everywhere like a hazard light. It’s the colour of everything in this heartbreaking but hopeful film: rage, blood, heat, passion, danger, love. Jasper Rees

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

From the quivering body fat of its provocative opening titles through to its beautifully framed, icily immaculate interiors, it’s clear that designer-turned-director Tom Ford’s second feature is going to be nothing if not impeccably stylish. But his tale-within-a-tale of young love, disillusion and bitter revenge packs a massive emotional punch, too – and Ford draws out some of the strongest performances Jake Gyllenhaal (pictured above) and Amy Adams have given in years. The harrowing atrocities of the film’s embedded novel – a young family's nightmarish encounter with a trio of Texan thugs – are what stick uncomfortably in the memory. But Ford’s real achievement is keeping us hanging on every frame until the quiet desperation of his horribly lonely ending. Assured, unsettling and magnificent. David Kettle

SON OF SAUL

If the news in 2016 drenched us in images of war, refugees and racism to the point where we could no longer follow the nuances of right and wrong and instead retreated into mourning celebrities, looking to history to provide moral certainty proved elusive. László Nemes’ drama, Son of Saul, took us back once again to the death camps of WWII and in place of the usual binary narrative of bad Nazis/good victims gave us a complex, wholly immersive tale of moral ambiguity and incomprehensible compromises. Géza Röhrig plays Saul (pictured above), a Hungarian drafted into the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners charged with ushering new arrivals into the gas chambers for a few months before being slaughtered themselves. In the babel of languages and conflicted allegiances between prisoners of different nationalities, Saul’s quest to honour one of the corpses with the religious rituals of death is impossible, absurd and heart-breaking. This is one of the very few films in 2016 that grows more equivocal with every viewing and repays in-depth consideration. That Son of Saul should be made in Hungary in 2015 as anti-Semitism and persecution of the Roma and Sinti people are once again at full throttle is wholly admirable. One can only hope that its Foreign-language Oscar led to wider viewing in its native country. Saskia Baron 

TALE OF TALES

Fairy tales were the primal source for the relentlessly original story and spectacle in this gory, gritty one-off. Giambattista Basile’s 17^th century tales, freely adapted by Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone with Goya and Game of Thrones in mind, lack the comforting predictability of our sanitised retellings of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. Instead, as Salma Hayek’s queen chomped on a sea-dragon’s heart, Bebe Cave’s princess caused collateral damage to a passing circus troupe during her savage escape from an ogre, and Toby Jones as her father the king preferred the company of a beloved giant flea, we were in a world of darkly redolent wonders.

Garrone sprinkled a fairy tale’s stardust on his last film, Reality, in the unlikely setting of Rome’s Big Brother house. Tale of Tales conversely gave visceral conviction to scenes of grand artifice. Filmed in the castles which stud Italy’s landscape, special effects recalled animated Ray Harryhausen creatures from analogue childhoods. Like much of the Italian renaissance confirmed this year by Youth and A Bigger Splash, Tale of Tales was also richly, earthily Neapolitan. Hollywood rules were ignored. Folk truths of human nature and artisan, crafted visual imagination combined, and felt uncompromised. It caused quiet entrancement at seeing things we hadn’t quite seen before. Nick Hasted

THE REVENANT

Notorious for being the movie in which Leo di Caprio got mauled by a bear, sheltered for the night inside the corpse of a horse and ate raw bison liver, The Revenant brought new meaning to the word “immersive”. It was a tale of fur trappers on the wild frontier in the early 1800s, and was as gruelling and physically punishing as film-making has ever been, but director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki wanted more. While the action sequences (not least the opening battle between trappers and indians) had you ducking for cover as bullets, arrows and axes sizzled past your ears, Lubezki’s astounding photography (much of the movie was shot in the Canadian Rockies) meant that the pictures really did tell the story. Awesome mountain ranges, frozen forests prowled by torch-carrying horsemen, fiery comets in the heavens and a weird derelict chapel in the middle of the wilderness made The Revenant feel like the real Apocalypse Now, its near-mystical power reinforced by a brilliantly-conceived sound picture which suggested a landscape filled with spirits and mysterious natural forces. When di Caprio, Lubezki and Iñárritu scarpered with the gongs on Oscar night, it seemed only reasonable. Adam Sweeting

THINGS TO COME

It’s been an année merveilleuse for Isabelle Huppert – the great French actor has given us two major screen roles, first Things to Come at the Berlinale, then Elle in Cannes, as well as the landmark theatre project Phaedra(s) which has toured internationally (“total stage-goddess territory for Huppert”, theartsdesk said). Plus, two more than respectable films, Valley of Love with Gerard Depardieu and a “breezy romcom” performance in Souvenir; she’ll be back in Michael Haneke’s new Happy End in 2017, too.

“What proper cinema for adults is all about” is a phrase that has been used of European provocateur Paul Verhoeven's Elle, which only reaches the UK in March, and that film’s explicit story and content is certainly “adult” in one way: Huppert is at the top of her game, in remorseless control of a story that initially looks like something very different. Reach your own verdict, but for me Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come – that title a brilliant, bleak translation of the French original, L’Avenir – trumped its racier stablemate. It’s Huppert (pictured above) at her most brilliant, playing maturity to the full, as she loses control of much in her life: her marriage falls apart, her mother dies, that future changes. It’s serene, rich in understanding, and transcendentally profonde. Tom Birchenough

WEINER

Anthony Weiner, a successful Democratic congressman, was forced to resign in 2011 after a sexting scandal in which he sent pictures of his bulging briefs to various women, often under the name of Carlos Danger. Dickileaks, Stroking Gun, Weiner Exposed: it was a gift from heaven for the New York Post's headline writers. But he decided to clean up his act and run for mayor of NYC in 2013. So far, so good: his super-stylish wife, Huma Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, was, mysteriously, behind him all the way. However in the middle of the campaign it turned out that Weiner was still sexting like crazy and one of his recipients, a woman known as Sydney Leathers, went public. “What is wrong with you?” an MSNBC host asked Weiner, and you do have to wonder. He soldiered on for a while, with Abedin looking grim – they have a child together, as well as a very odd-looking cat – but finally the game was up and he withdrew (sorry). What’s fascinating is how weirdly appealing the egotistical, self-sabotaging Weiner seems. Trouble is, we now know that it was the FBI’s last-minute investigation into emails on his laptop that may have lost Hillary Clinton the election. Politics – what a game. This riveting documentary showed that in all its glory. Markie Robson-Scott

Overleaf: the worst films of 2016

What to do if you’re a despotic leader with an underperforming film industry? Hiring better directors and actors wasn’t an option for Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s, so he took drastic action: luring South Korea’s biggest female star Choi Eun-hee to Hong Kong on false pretences and having her abducted. Her ex-husband, the South’s leading filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, did the honourable thing and went in search of her, only to suffer the same fate. What happened next is the subject of Rob Cannan and Ross Adam’s engrossing documentary.

Shin was a financially inept directorial maverick, whose production company had been shut down by the restrictive South Korean regime. He and Choi were one of the country’s most famous couples, though his infidelity had recently led to divorce. On arriving in North Korea, Choi was kept in a gilded cage while Shin languished in prison after repeated escape attempts. Shin managed to convince his captors that he was willing to work for the regime and the couple were reunited. They co-directed 17 films over a two-year period, with movie buff Kim Jong-il effectively acting as producer (pictured below right, with Choi and Chin).

It’s an insane, credulity-stretching story, clearly and unfussily told. Interviewees include a spry, elderly Choi, and it’s a neat touch to have some of the more outlandish anecdotes illustrated by clips taken from Chin’s films. Choi managed to obtain a micro-cassette recorder and tape many of the pair’s conversations with the dictator – the cassettes later confirming that they had not willingly defected, as some nay-sayers on both sides of the divide later claimed. Chin’s comment that he hated “everything apart from not having to worry about money” is bitterly apposite; despite his semi-incarceration he was given unprecedented artistic and financial freedom by Kim Jong-il, a tragi-comic figure all too aware of his charisma deficit. Chin and Choi managed to play the game for several years, the pair well aware that they could be discarded in an instant should the Dear Leader fall out of love with them.

How they plotted and pulled off their eventual escape is brilliantly reconstructed, but the triumph was short-lived. Shin’s Hollywood career was limited to producing a series of bad Disney comedies. He returned to Seoul under a cloud in 1994, making few films before his death in 2006. Cannan and Adam make excellent use of archive footage, and it’s to their credit that they’ve managed to persuade so many bit-part players in the story to talk frankly on camera. And how well constructed this film is, its 94 minutes flying by. Image and sound are impeccable, but there are no extras.

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Overleaf: watch the film's trailer