This is the kind of film you would very much like to like. It’s a low-budget British effort with a perfectly decent cast who are all easy on the eye. It makes the most of the windswept Isle of Man, where so many films just take advantage of tax breaks while pretending they’re in Barbados. You would like to like it. Unfortunately, as with so many low-budget British films, it just doesn’t come up to the mark.

Because Humphrey Jennings was a director of documentaries, he is never spoken of in the same breath as the greatest British directors of the past - Chaplin, Hitchcock, Powell, Lean and Reed. Another reason is that his career was short, compressed into the 16 years before his death at 43 in 1950 from a cliff fall in Poros, Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film about postwar healthcare in Europe. 

Treacle Jr is a cautionary tale of the fragility of UK film careers. Writer-director Jamie Thraves’s debut The Low Down (2000) is still regarded as a minor classic, but he took nine years to follow it up, then remortgaged his house to make this third film.

There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of the world famously conjured up over a long period of clandestine development in the now time-honoured fashion. Nothing and everything changes in the work of Mike Leigh (b 1943). However, consumers of his vast oeuvre stretching back to the 1960s will this year have had the chance to do something extremely rare: see a pair of works by Leigh in the theatre.

One should never pass up an opportunity to revisit an Ealing comedy. Invariably arch, ingenious and wonderfully played, these dozen or so films made between 1947 and 1957 offer a lovely snapshot of a Britain long gone, while the films themselves still feel remarkably fresh. The Lavender Hill Mob isn’t quite there with the very best of them, but a digital restoration on its 60th anniversary is still irresistible.

Bill Morrison’s film, mostly edited together from archive material, serves as an elegy to Britain's recent industrial past. The older footage has been handsomely restored, and often it’s only the clothes that give a sense of period. It focuses on the Durham coalfields, where the last mine closed in the early 1990s. There’s little left to show for it – the film is framed by aerial sequences where we search in vain for any trace of the industry. Collieries have been replaced by retail parks, artificial ski slopes and football stadia.

At the end of Joanna Hogg’s acutely observed drama of bourgeois manners, Patricia (Kate Fahy) and her grown-up children Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) and Edward (Tom Hiddleston) restore to the living-room wall of their Scilly Isles holiday house a painting they’d removed for being “rather horrible".

Several years ago the film career of Simon Pegg was launched by Shaun of the Dead, a comic tribute to the low-budget killer-zombie flick. Pegg has long since moved on to bigger, if not always better, things. Without him the film’s producers have returned to the same thematic patch, but with one crucial difference. This time the invading force is stalking not white middle-class slackers in their thirties but a tooled-up posse of teenage boys from the ‘hood. It feels like a much fairer fight.

Comedian Richard Ayoade’s kinetic, charismatic and accomplished directorial debut follows an introspective adolescent with his feet clamped firmly on dry land but with his head all at sea. In Submarine, our protagonist haplessly negotiates the quagmire of first love, whilst simultaneously dealing with his parents’ romantic disillusionment.

Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.