Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films.

Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it.

Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process.

In the current reappraisal of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, what to make of the depiction of women in their key films, that striking tribe of Isoldes with chestnut hair and passionate natures?

Announcing “A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production” or, alternatively “A Production of the Archers”, an arrow thuds into the centre of a roundel. Whether in black and white or colour, that famous rubric not only conflates the auras of Robin Hood and the Royal Air Force, but issues a warning you’re about to get a shot in the eye. 

Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the young lad glimpsed smoking a pipe in the boys’ toilets.

This modest British dramedy is billed as a “heart-warming story of friendship and survival set against the backdrop of the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak”. That’s perhaps not the first catastrophe we associate with that fateful year, but it was a grim event in its own way: a livestock epidemic that led to the culling of countless farm animals across Britain.

It’s the summer holidays, and though Georgie (Lola Campbell) is only 12, she’s managing to keep her council house looking just the way her mum liked it. There may be a few spiders hanging around but they have names and personalities and there’s food in the cupboard, even if it’s been paid for from the proceeds of selling the bikes Georgie has stolen.  

Medusa is having a moment. From Natalie Haynes’ feminist novel to the recent Brazilian horror movie, the beleaguered, beheaded, snake-haired monstress of Greek myth rises again, and again, as a symbol of female rage and resistance.

Fridtjof Ryder’s debut feature made a strong impression at last year’s London Film Festival, and its cinema release ought to give the Gloucester-born director’s career a hefty shove in the right direction. Although that doesn’t mean that Inland is an especially easy-viewing experience.