The statistics of Whitney Houston’s career are flabbergasting in this post-CD era. Her 1985 debut album sold 25 million copies. “I Will Always Love You” is the best-selling single by a female artist in music biz history. Its parent album, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, sold more than one million copies in a week. She had more consecutive Number One hits than The Beatles. She has sold 200 million records worldwide.

As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Michelangelo – Love and Death, directed and edited by David Bickerstaff, which is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s Michelangelo/Sebastiano exhibition (just!

The best bit is in the trailer. It's the scene where Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) are inside a stricken Hercules transport aircraft as it suddenly plunges vertically out of the sky, leaving its occupants in weightless limbo as they struggle frantically to find parachutes so they can bale out. But it's too late – the ground comes screaming up to meet them, and poor Tom can't get out.

From the breathless questions posed at the beginning onwards, My Cousin Rachel charges forward like one of leading man Sam Claflin's fast-galloping steeds. Presumably eager not to let this period potboiler become staid, director Roger Michell swoops in on the characters for close-ups and lets his surging camera duck and dive where it may.

“You’re like a drowning man trying to wave at an ocean liner,” says lawyer Philip (Michael Sheen) to his uncle Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere as you’ve never seen him before – a revelation). “But I’m a good swimmer,” replies Norman, feverishly making notes on a napkin. Swimming, for Norman, means trying to network his way around New York City’s biggest Jewish names and make a deal.

The Shepherd – original title El pastor – is a Spanish film which carried all before it at the Raindance Festival. It’s a very Raindance kind of movie. Shot on a low budget with a small cast, a single handheld camera shaking like a leaf, it sticks up for the little guy against a big bad corporate world.

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is a master of family drama, carrying on the traditions of his illustrious predecessors Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. But these are not films of raised voices or open conflict, rather highly nuanced studies of the emotional dynamics between parents and children – differences across the generations – or partners whose relationships have cooled. There’s always a gently melancholic tinge, and Kore-eda has a particular gift for working with his child actors, movingly presenting their point of view on the issues that divide the adults who surround them.

In addition, Kore-eda has assembled almost a company of actors with whom he has regularly worked from film to film, creating the effect almost of a family in itself. It makes for a rare intimacy. In After the Storm his mother and son protagonists are played by Kirin Kiki and Hiroshi Abe, who played similar roles in his 2008 masterpiece Still Walking. Abe plays Ryota, something of a prodigal who has come back into the life of his mother, Yoshiko, after the death of his father. Well-aware of her son’s shortcomings – which seem to repeat many of those she put up with from her late husband – she accepts him without judgment.

Abe’s hangdog face is an expressive joy in itself 

The same can’t be said for his estranged wife, Kyoko (Yoko Maki). Their meetings, arranged formally for the father to see his young son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa, another child role masterfully drawn out by the director), are coloured every time by his failure to produce the maintenance payments he is supposed to. However, the closeness between father and son is powerfully felt, and reciprocal, even if Ryota struggles to give him the kind of gifts being offered by Kyoko’s new partner (and, perhaps, husband-to-be).

The context of divorce is one Kore-eda explored in his 2011 I Wish, while the nature of family loyalties were at the centre of his more complicated Like Father, Like Son, from 2013. But there’s something of a new element in After the Storm, a degree of rather macabre comedy less familiar from his work. Some 15 years earlier Ryota had published an acclaimed first novel, but his literary career has clearly stalled. For some time he’s been working for a detective agency, ostensibly claiming it as research for a new book, but it’s clear that he’s staying there because it’s the only source of the cash he needs to keep a roof over his head.

As well as the more mundane tasks of detective work like lost pets, the agency seems to specialise in divorce work, following unfaithful partners for evidence that they are cheating on their marriages, and the like. However, Ryota has made a personal speciality of exploiting such cases for his own ends – he’s an adept at blackmail, or selling incriminating evidence to the guilty party, even shaking down a kid for money to hush up a liaison. Abetted by a fresh-faced colleague, he’s unscrupulous in almost every respect, yet the repercussions of his actions never seem to catch up on him (in a different movie genre, he’d be up making some nasty enemies). He’s doing this, we discover, to feed his longterm gambling habit.

He has even been sleuthing on Kyoko, as well as drawing facts about her new life out of Shingo. All of this is background context for a day in which the paths of the trio cross, first as father and son spend time together in the city, then when the three of them end up in Yoshiko’s humble flat. We’ve been aware of typhoon warnings throughout the film, and when one finally breaks, they are forced to spend the night there, giving rise to a series of conversations that reassess the past, the hopes with which each character had started, and where they have ended up. The storm may be raging outside, but its still centre for Kore-eda is playing out with a potent intimacy within these cramped apartment walls. (Pictured below: Hiroshi Abe, Taiyo Yoshizawa, Yoko Maki)

It gives rise to a moving denouement, one which even offers hints, however tentative, of hope for the future. Yoshiko may be aware of her encroaching end (“new friends at my age only mean more funerals”), yet hasn’t lost interest in life, even joining a classical music group to discuss Beethoven (she has a soft spot for the teacher, too). Abe’s hangdog face (pictured, top) is an expressive joy in itself, and we somehow can’t help feeling for this undoubted scamp who nevertheless doesn’t seem to mean any harm (“How did my life get so screwed up?” he asks himself). Yoshizawa as the sensitive Shingo beautifully captures the complicated nuances of the child’s love for his unreliable dad, which makes for a loyalty that endures regardless of what he gets up to.

Played in a plangent, minor key, After the Storm is rich in whimsy, with Hanaregumi’s score drawing plentifully on whistling, to give the sense of an everyday amble through life’s unpredictabilities. It’s set in a dormitory suburb of Tokyo, Kiyose, where Kore-eda spent part of his youth, a slightly down-on-its-luck neighbourhood that life seems to have in some sense passed by, just as it has the director’s protagonists. It’s a perfect location for a film that ruefully captures a sense of life's tribulations, as well as its occasional small joys.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the trailer for After the Storm

Oh dear, writing this review is a bit like being mean to a small cuddly animal. Dough has such very good intentions – characters separated by race, religion and age can find common ground in a bakery – it’s a shame that it doesn’t rise into a tasty loaf but instead remains just a bit wholemeal and stolid.   

The excellent Jonathan Pryce plays Nat Dayan, an orthodox Jewish widower whose sole reason to get up every morning at four is to work in his beloved shop. He inherited it from his father and still bakes traditional bagels, pastries and challah bread. But the neighbourhood’s changing, customers are dwindling and his assistant has quit to work in the rival supermarket next door. Nat’s son has gone up in the world and is a lawyer; he isn’t interested in taking over the business and wants his dad to retire. Joanne Silberman (Pauline Collins) plays a frisky widow who owns the freehold, and she’s keen to sell the building to an evil developer (Phil Davis, practically twirling a villain’s moustache). Nat is stubbornly holding on to tradition, but needs help.

Meanwhile in a parallel narrative (it’s literally cross-cut) we meet Ayyash (Jerome Holder, pictured below with Pauline Collins and Jonathan Pryce), a young refugee from Darfur. He’s trying to get a job with the local drug baron (played by Ian Hart, sporting a shaved head); he’ll take Ayyash on as a dealer if he’s got a cover job. Working at the bakery as Nat’s apprentice provides Ayyash with the perfect front. Soon he is selling bags of weed alongside the muffins to those customers in the know and business turns around for all concerned.Nat doesn’t know about the sideline sales, and becomes fond of the young man, impressed by his baking skills and touched by his piety – Ayyash doesn’t get high on his own supply and is a devout Muslim. In another cross-cut sequence we see both men performing their particular ritual prayers in separate areas of the bakery. It’s all very well-meaning, hands-across-the-divide stuff with plenty of gags about Jewish and Muslim preconceptions about each other, but it pulls its punches. It would have been braver to have had Ayyash come from the Middle East rather than Africa.

Dough aims for the comedy-caper genre, with gags around cultural and generational misunderstandings and shenanigans with the police and local criminals, but it relies on bland stereotypes and despite the best efforts of its actors, they cannot rise above a clichéd and implausible script by first time writers Jonathan Benson and Jez Freedman. After Ayyash accidentally adds a bag of weed to the challah dough, no-one notices the resulting loaves taste and smell different, but all just enjoy the giggles and crave more – no matter how orthodox they are. Soon he’s dumping bags of grass into brownies and other sweet treats and there are queues around the block and smiles all round. Sadly, a cursory browse of the many online recipes for cooking with marijuana would have disabused the writers of the efficacy of this method (there are some delightful how-to videos out there).

It’s not just problems with the script; there’s a flatness to the lighting of the interior scenes which make them look like cheap TV, and an absence of a sense of place with few exterior scenes. Dough is a Hungarian-British co-production and, judging by the credits, a lot of it was shot in a studio in Budapest with a few location scenes in the UK, and it shows. This is veteran TV drama and documentary director John Goldschmidt's first film in many years (his credits include helming Jack Rosenthal’s wonderful Spend Spend Spend in 1977) and it’s waited two years to get a cinema release in the UK after doing reasonable business in the USA. It would be lovely to acclaim it as a lost gem, but unfortunately that’s not the case.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk

@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the official trailer for Dough

After dipping a toe in the new-look DC Comics universe to brighten the otherwise leaden Batman v Superman, now Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman gets a chance to shine in her own Hollywood movie. Gadot makes a pretty fine job of it too, bringing a bit of soul and empathy to the proceedings, but sometimes it’s more despite than because of the production surrounding her.

A man is caught up in a storm at sea; giant waves like Hokusai crests throw him onto a deserted tropical island. Over the next 80 minutes, his struggle to survive occupies the screen. Curious crabs provide a little company, but not enough to stop him trying to make a raft only to have his attempts at escape thwarted. While he is eventually blessed with some human companionship, there is no dialogue throughout the film, just music and sound effects.The Red Turtle features many beautiful sequences set in bamboo forests and thrilling underwater scenes, but it's a slow watch and at a couple of points, quite upsetting for a tender-hearted child. It is tricky to see this becoming a family favourite. This is animation for the art house, not the theme park.

Over the three decades it has been making films, Studio Ghibli has created its own fantastic universe, populated by magical creatures and quirky humans. Although its films are usually set in Japan (Totoro, Spirited Away, Grave of the Fireflies), sometimes its heroes have strayed into unspecified mittel-European towns (Kiki's Home Delivery, Howl's Moving Castle) and purely fantastical landscapes (Tales from Earthsea).

But this is the first time the studio has co-produced a film with European backers and it has a very different feel. The Red Turtle is directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit, a Dutch animator who made the short Father and Daughter, which won an Oscar in 2001.

That short was the tale of a young woman growing away from her father, replete with dream sequences, and there are echoes of it here in The Red Turtle with its narrative of family bonds stretching out over time. Perhaps if viewers come to the film not craving the humour, pathos and quirky inventiveness of classic Studio Ghibli, they won't be disappointed. As it is, while admiring the atmospheric animation I was left a little underwhelmed by the ponderous narrative.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk

@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the official trailer for The Red Turtle