Politics certainly caught up with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. The Brazilian director and his cast appeared at their Cannes competition premiere last year with placards protesting that democracy in their native land was in peril: it was the day after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been suspended. Cut forward a few months, and the film’s autumn release coincided with the announcement that Rousseff would be thrown out of office and impeached.

Given that Aquarius tells the story of Clara, a spirited matriarch in the coastal city of Recife – Filho’s hometown is the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco – who refuses to be evicted from the apartment in which she has spent her life, the parallels with the presidency were striking. While it brought the film extra attention the situation didn’t play exclusively to its advantage. First it received an unjustified 18 certificate (later adjusted), then it was controversially overlooked for Brazil’s Best Foreign Film Oscar entry.

'Aquarius' certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom 

Filho is certainly a director alert to politics, at least with a small “p”. His debut feature Neighbouring Sounds from 2012 was an elliptical picture of his homeland through the microcosm of a small urban environment. It depicted contemporary Brazil as carrying considerable historical baggage, caught between tradition and modernity: one dividing line was drawn around real estate – low-rise, old style versus high-rise, new style.

That distinction is at the heart of Aquarius, but there’s nothing abstract in the way it’s portrayed. Its heroine, played with wonderful aplomb by Brazilian star Sonia Braga, has spent her life, at least as far back as the 1980 flashback with which the film begins, in a spacious apartment in a three-storey building – its name gives the film its title – overlooking the beach. Its interior is packed with the accumulations of a life richly lived – now 65, Clara was a music critic, whose broad tastes range from Brazil’s great native composer Heiror Villa-Lobos to Queen (her vinyl collection is enormous).

That opening episode shows the younger Clara (played by Barbara Colen) as a free spirit, driving her car on the beach, music playing loud; she is gamine, her hair cropped close, as opposed to the flowing tresses that are so much part of her later personality (the film is divided into three loose parts, this opener titled “Clara’s hair”). The main business of the episode, though, is a celebration party for her much-loved Aunt Lucia, another independent soul whose life spans back into earlier eras of Brazil’s history, who never married, and spent time in prison (a clear political allusion).

Aquarius certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom, and the camera relishes a chest of drawers, as Filho fills in its particular history with flashbacks to Lucia’s own youthful sexual passion. It highlights the sense that life is an accretion of such memories, such precious objects. Thus, the associations of Clara's building are incomparably richer than the skyscraper that would be put up in its place.

Clara's husband and three children are at the centre of that celebration, and through them we learn that she has successfully battled cancer (her mastectomy features later). By the next part, she is widowed, her children grown up and living their own lives, with attitudes that do not always accord with those of their mother. .

Filho weaves a rich tapestry with his feisty, forthright heroine in centre place, surrounded by a host of other characters. There’s her long-serving housekeeper Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto, prompting reflection on the divides, class-based and racial, that characterise Brazilian society); her wider family (pictured top), including a favourite nephew; the newspaper connections from her earlier career that will assist at a crucial moment; even the lifeguard on the beach who supervises her morning swim, with whom Clara has a long and affectionate friendship, and whose help will also prove useful (beach scene, pictured above). Above all there is the company of a wider group of women friends, with whom she congregates at a dance evening early on in the film; it’s a lovely, laughing, gossipy atmosphere which reveals, among other things, that this is a generation for whom sexuality remains very much a thing of the present.

At close on two and a half hours, 'Aquarius' is a languid film

Filho portrays it as an organic world whose natural habits and routines are threatened by the prospect of its physical locus, the Aquarius building, being destroyed. The director makes the lead player in the company trying to redevelop it the grandson of its original proprietor, adding another generational element to the story; we sense that if the older man somehow fitted into the accepted order, the younger one, slick with the new confidence of a US Business Studies degree, plays by new rules. The variety of methods to which he resorts is inventive, their impact most unsettling for the way that they reverberate uneasily in Clara’s dreams. The ending is left open, with Clara’s cancer – those two words are the title of the film's closing episode – assuming a somehow symbolic quality. If cancer destroys the body from within, Filho makes explicit parallels to the destruction of Clara’s building, but also refers to her wider society (in Brazilian terms, by the almost insuperable entity that is capitalism and politics combined).

At close on two and a half hours, Aquarius is a languid film, lovingly enjoying its length, and blessed with a simply glorious performance from Braga. Physically she stands out, high cheekbones, a balletically slim form, and the hair, either falling loose or tied tightly over her head. It’s combined with such keenness of intelligence, such a sense of strength intermingled with vulnerability, such depth of character. Estupenda!

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Aquarius

In space, no-one can hear you say “hang on, haven’t I seen this before?” The sprawling, labyrinthine space ship full of ducts and passageways for terrifying creatures to hide in, the laid-back crew who’ve become a little too blasé about life in space, the cute little outer-space organism that looks like an exotic novelty pet…

Percy Fawcett: does the name ring a bell? He ought by rights to sit in the pantheon of boys’ own explorers alongside Cook and Ross, Parry and Franklin, Livingstone and Mungo Park, Scott and Shackleton. Either side of the Great War, he returned again and again to the impenetrable South American interior, in pursuit of an ancient Amazonian civilisation which he called Z.

"Attention must be paid," we are famously told near the close of Death of a Salesman. And so it was this year on Oscar night when Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi won his second Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (A Separation was the first), this time for a movie that leans heavily on Arthur Miller's classic – though whether as crutch or inspiration will remain for individual viewers

What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking? It’s all those things, and more.

This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot.

As Elle’s director Paul Verhoeven put it, “we realised that no American actress would ever take on such an immoral movie.” However, Isabelle Huppert didn’t hesitate, and has delivered a performance of such force and boldness that even the disarming Oscar-winner Emma Stone might secretly admit that perhaps the wrong woman won on the night.

But it has to be admitted that Elle (adapted by screenwriter David Birke from Philippe Djian’s novel “Oh...”) could never be mistaken for a Hollywood production. A perplexing but electrifying mixture of sexual violence, black humour and social satire, it might be considered misogynist or voyeuristic or merely in dubious taste, were it not for Huppert’s commanding presence, allied with a batch of supporting performers who mesh smoothly together like a finely-tuned theatrical company.

From the opening, Elle defies you to pin it down to a single genre. Neither Verhoeven – a brazen button-pusher who made Basic Instinct and Showgirls, let's not forget – nor his star are in a mood to take prisoners. We hear, but don’t see, Huppert’s character Michèle Leblanc being attacked and raped by an intruder in her home in the Paris suburbs (Michèle gets a gun, pictured left). Then we see her tidying up the wreckage of her living-room, despite the blood running down her thigh, and getting on with her life as though nothing has happened – no cops and no trauma counselling. Though she does buy some CS spray and learns to fire a pistol. 

She refuses to play the victim. It seems her private persona is as controlled and inscrutable as the professional face she presents to her employees at the tacky but lucrative computer games company she runs with her close friend Anna (Anne Consigny). Though the team of 20-something designers and programmers who create lurid sex-and-monsters romps regard Anna and Michèle as a pair of old squares, Michèle is happy to spell out with extreme bluntness where their work is falling short and who’s running the company. She demands more on-screen death, sex and titillation.

While Michèle’s mystery attacker – we see him in increasingly startling flashbacks, dressed in a black outfit with a balaclava helmet – keeps up a campaign of creepy and obscene harassment, Verhoeven assembles a picture of the rest of her life, through which she moves with an aura of cool, ironic authority. She knows what she wants, takes it and leaves it. She has a casually friendly relationship with estranged husband Richard (Charles Berling), but like most of the men she knows he’s ineffectual and slightly ludicrous (“their flailing vulnerability is endearing,” as Huppert herself commented). She’s having an affair with Robert (Christian Berkel), but her emotional investment in it is zero. She impatiently does her best to put up with her son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet), a gormless under-achiever shackled to a hysterical tantrum-throwing girlfriend (Alice Isaaz). When the latter has her baby, Vincent ludicrously can’t bring himself to accept that the child is black, unlike its supposed parents.

The only man who truly piques Michèle’s sexual interest is Patrick (Laurent Lafitte, pictured right with Huppert), a handsome, successful banker, who has moved into the house opposite hers with his wife Rebecca (Virginie Efira). In several raucous dinner and party scenes, Verhoeven makes plenty of space for his excellent cast to cut loose with abandon, and when Michèle throws a Christmas party she seizes the opportunity to flirt outrageously with Patrick. Meanwhile, much macabre comedy is extracted from Michèle’s toxic relationship with her mother Irène (Judith Magre), a grotesque plastic surgery junkie with a weakness for gold-digging gigolos.

Storm clouds gather, however, when Michèle finds herself drawn into a potentially fatal cat-and-mouse game with her attacker. As events gather pace towards an explosive climax, her motivations become darker and knottier. Is she planning an elaborate revenge, or does she genuinely relish being beaten and violated? Perhaps the fact that her father was a notorious serial-killer from the 1970s has left her with catastrophic psychological damage… or perhaps there’s more of her father in her than she can bear to acknowledge. Verhoeven isn’t going to spell it out, and Michèle will only live in the present and refuses to dwell on the past. We have to form our own judgments. Isn’t that the way it should be?

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@SweetingAdam

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Elle

There have been three versions of King Kong and only one of them answers the question of how they get a massive ape back to New York. In 1976 they shipped him in an oil tanker, but the vessels in RKO’s 1933 original and Peter Jackson’s 2005 homage were nothing like big enough.

From the opening shot of a distant train making its slow journey toward the camera across flat plains ringed by Montana’s mountains, the audience knows they’re in for one of those subtle, low-key American art films. Kelly Reichardt, who doesn’t just direct her movies but edits and writes them too, is the queen of the slow-burn 21^st-century Western.

The Partition of India is vast and unexplored terrain in modern cinema. It triggered the migration of 14 million people: Muslims moved from an India reduced in size overnight to the new homeland of Pakistan, and non-Muslims made the opposite journey. It was what we’ve seen in Syria but multiplied by sheer volume of numbers, and squeezed into a much smaller timeframe. The border squiggled on the map was arbitrary and conjured up in haste. So a film about this seismic subcontinental shift is long overdue. It has fallen to Gurinder Chadha, a British filmmaker of Indian origin brought up in Kenya, to try to squeeze a huge canvas onto the screen.

Rather than fan out across India in the manner of David Lean’s A Passage to India or Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, Viceroy’s House confines itself of the official residence of the man who oversaw the transition to independence in 1947. Lord Louis Mountbatten – Dickie to his wife Edwina and other assorted intimates – assumes the genial form of Hugh Bonneville, who has had quite a lot of practice at being nice to the servants as they dress him up in silly outfits. His thankless task is to oversee discussions among the leading figures in India’s political landscape - Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi. Meanwhile his own cohort of governors report trouble in the regions, internecine massacres which the departing British no longer have the manpower to prevent.For budgetary reasons these larger events happen off camera or in newsreels, but the house itself is not cut off from the wider context. The liveried servants, the staff in the kitchen, the guards all have an urgent need to know what’s happening in the negotiations. Some yearn for an independent Muslim state, others are passionate for India to remain whole. Thus there’s a good deal of listening at keyholes and through cracks in doors.Chadha’s script, written with Paul Mayeda Berges, dramatises a nation’s agony in a story of thwarted love between two members of staff. Jeet Kumar, who is Hindu, falls for Aalia (Manish Dayal and Huma Qureshi, pictured above), the daughter of a former Muslim political prisoner (Om Puri). The problem is that Aalia is betrothed to one of her own, a soldier who hasn’t returned from the war. In the palace compound where they live tensions rise between communities, until the Muslim housing is torched.

The film is very handsome to look at, and Chadha’s funny bones lay on plenty of light entertainment. But the laughs – and the sumptuous production values - feel like a sleight of hand distracting from the greater tragedy of India’s unseen agonies, which are mainly reported in dialogue between the higher-ups. Britain also gets a bit of a free pass as the architect of Partition. It falls to Michael Gambon as General Hastings Lionel Ismay, 1st Baron Ismay, KG, GCB, CH, DSO, PC, DL - "Pug" to his chums - to embody the nastier side of British realpolitik, while the Mountbatten family unit – and by implication the British establishment as a whole – is portrayed in the most flattering light.

Because Mountbatten had only six weeks to deliver independence, there’s an artistic justification to the corresponding compression of a huge story into less than two hours. It does feel overcrowded and each narrative feels as if it would profit by expansion. In another world, and with a bigger budget, this would be a simmering 10-parter on Netflix, in which the nuances and niceties and, damn it, the political complexities might be given more air to breathe. As it is, Viceroy’s House takes its storytelling cue from Gillian Anderson’s decision to squeeze Edwina Mountbatten’s vowels into a tight space.

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@JasperRees

'I've never set foot in India in my life': watch a clip from Viceroy's House