François Ozon’s Frantz is an exquisitely sad film, its crisp black and white cinematography shot through with mourning. The French director, in a work where the main language is German, engages with the aftermath of World War One, and the moment when the returning rhythms of life only emphasise what has been lost. The eponymous hero of his film is one of its casualties – we see Frantz only in flashbacks – and his death has left a gaping, if largely unarticulated wound. His erstwhile fiancée Anna (Paula Beer, a revelation) has become effectively his widow, living with Frantz’s parents. That element of company assuages both their grief and her own, but it’s a world in which the shutters have been drawn down, both literally and symbolically.

It’s an unusually subdued mood for Ozon, a prolific director accomplished across genres (Under the Sand, all the way back in 2000, was the last time he assayed such sombre territory). He works around the story of a 1932 film by Ernst Lubitsch, Broken Lullaby, itself adapted from a stage play by the French writer Maurice Rostand, although the transformations Ozon makes, especially in the second half, finally count for more than anything that he has borrowed. If terming the film “exquisite” implies a level of artifice, there is certainly an element of mannerism. Ozon’s subject is less grief itself than the secrets and lies that come to surround it: how we keep secrets to guard the feelings of others, and how such acts of apparent kindness easily shade into something profoundly damaging.

They are no longer defined through the memories of a dead man 

The film’s opening scenes elegaically capture life in the quiet provincial German town where Anna’s existence revolves around her daily visits to Frantz’s grave (which is itself a fiction: his body, of course, never came back from the front). Her discovery that someone else is leaving flowers there leads to acquaintance with Adrien (Pierre Niney), the Frenchman who has come, he says, to remember the German friend he had known in Paris before the war. After uncompromising rejection by Frantz’s stern doctor father – “Every Frenchman is my son’s murderer,” he insists initially – the young man is gradually welcomed in by the family. His memories, of visits to the Louvre with Frantz, and their companionship in music (both are violinists), come to make his presence restorative for all (pictured below).

Ozon draws beautifully restrained playing from Ernst Stoetzner as Frantz’s father, and Marie Gruber as his mother; they are figures from an older, stricter generation, which only makes the sense of their feelings beginning to thaw more touching. As her world changes, Anna, who at the film’s opening has rejected the attentions of a well-meaning suitor offering companionship rather than love, finds prospects opening before her in a way she would never have imagined possible. As she walks with Adrien in the countryside, they talk – both are lovers of poetry, Verlaine a shared favourite – and gradually establish a bond that is their own; they are no longer defined through the memories of a dead man.But such foundations for any possible future will not withstand life’s harsher truths. Revealing them would be impossible, since Ozon is himself a storyteller who here, especially, plays with our expectations. He confounds (for those who know themes from the rest of his work) some of those on one level, and allows the visual reality of his film to flesh out a story that is itself illusory. Anna’s complicity in maintaining that version of events precipitates her journey to France in the second half (at which point Ozon leaves Lubitsch behind).

There she begins to function as a fully independent character, dealing with a world far wider than the one from which she has come; she asserts her ability to engage with it on her own terms, however unexpected or cruel it proves. Rediscovering Adrien, we are left with a sense that war’s casualties include those who have survived the physical hell of the trenches no less than those whose lives ended there.

Paula Beer conveys the trajectory of Anna’s journey wonderfully, her character’s initial reticence gradually opening out to reveal reserves of inner strength. She conveys the unspoken gradations of feeling with a rare, subtle power, in a way comparable to Ozon’s use of colour. The black and white images of Frantz give the film its opening severity, but in fact Ozon and his cinematographer Pascal Marti vary that texture, allowing elements of distant, subdued colour to intrude and change the mood.

The effect is sometimes that we are witnessing life returning, however hesitatingly, to this dead landscape. Yet the colour is also there, paradoxically, in the film’s scenes of invention, when cinema is doing what is most natural to it, telling a story – but in this case, too, inventing a false narrative. The final scene has Anna in the Louvre, looking at Manet’s Le suicide. “It makes me want to live,” we hear her say. What a nuanced journey she has accomplished, how impressively shaded Beer’s performance. Ozon has achieved emotional depths that are rather new for him.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Frantz

For a demoralising period towards the start of Miss Sloane, it looks as if we’re in for a high-octane thriller about palm oil. That’s right, palm oil. Everything you never wanted to know about the ethics and economics of the palm oil market is splurged in frenetic, rat-a-tat, overlapping, school-of-Sorkin dialogue. After 10 minutes your ears need a rest on a park bench.

When Ridley Scott returned to his hideous intergalactic monster with Prometheus five years ago, he brought with him a new panoramic vision encompassing infinite space, several millennia of time and the entire history of human existence. With Alien: Covenant, he makes a more modest proposal.

To appreciate the full engaging silliness of Mindhorn, it helps to have been born no later than 1980. Those of the requisite vintage will have encountered the lame primetime pap it both salutes and satirises. Everyone else coming to this spoof will just have to take it on trust that things, admittedly not all of them British, were indeed this bad back in the day.

The eponymous detective of the adventure crime show wears a brown leather blouson, grey leather slip-ons and an eyepatch that allows him to see the truth. He’s a hot smoothie who hunts down bad guys alone, principally on the Isle of Man, with the help of a fast soft-top and some arthritic moves from the martial arts playbook. But that was the Eighties and now Richard Thorncroft, the actor who played him, is a balding tub of lard in a bedsit reduced to earning a crust endorsing surgical supports for the elderly. His agent has no work for him. He gets summoned to an audition to play a yardie as a result of a clerical error. Kenneth Branagh, one of several A listers recruited to play himself, is underwhelmed.

Then a murder is committed on Detective Mindhorn’s old stomping ground and there’s only one person the presumed culprit (Russell Tovey) will communicate with. Thorncroft imagines this is an opportunity that can put him back in the game. Cue a frantic caper which mimics precisely the kind of naff storylines Mindhorn got mixed up in all those decades ago.

The pleasure of this low-budget British comedy is very much centred on the charming, buffoonish performance of Julian Barratt, the funny one from The Mighty Boosh, as a washed-up old ham whose ego has somehow kept his estimation of himself intact. (See also Bill Nighy in Their Finest.) There is almost no delusion which doesn’t have Thorncroft in its grip. Chief among these is that his old lover and co-star Patricia Deville (Essie Davis) still has the hots for him. Humiliatingly she has married Thorncroft’s thinner Dutch stuntman Clive (played by Barrett’s co-scriptwriter Simon Farnaby, pictured above).

Loitering on the fringes are Andrea Riseborough as a policewoman, Nicholas Farrell as a villainous civic leader, Richard McCabe as a hollowed-out cokehead in a caravan, and Steve Coogan (looking freakishly thin and ripped) as Thorncroft’s creepy old supporting player. Mindhorn is directed by Sean Foley, tacking across from stage comedy and bringing in pals like Branagh to lighten up and have a good time.

There are fun setpieces including a crap parade with a real shoot-out, plus some lovely lines too. Harriet Walter, ditching Thorncroft as her client, has a killer putdown which she administers over the phone: “I’ve left your headshots in reception.” It won’t win many awards or break many box office records, but Mindhorn doesn’t outstay its welcome and approaches the important business of spoofery with a practically academic attention to ridiculous detail. A hoot.

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@JasperRees

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Mindhorn