The worst offence Iron Lady is supposed to have committed is that it shows her as having severe dementia. But actually, she is mostly portrayed as being about as wrapped up in her past as the next old woman. There are some sadly impertinent conceits (the idea that Denis resented her standing for party leader; that she is at war with his shade; his parting shot about her self-sufficiency) which seem silly, but they are at least self-evidently dubious or unproven. (I haven’t read Carol Thatcher’s book, and stand ready to be corrected.)

The revelation is in the politics. Since this is a movie from Mrs T’s point of view (as its makers keep saying) it isn’t perhaps surprising that we hear her own arguments for her opinions and actions. They do of course, says this right-winger, stand up very well. What I hadn’t expected is that I could recommend the movie to a young person seeking to get a snapshot of those days, and to grasp why so many in the country supported her at the time. The young may even understand why some older people have come to see her as far more right than they thought her at the time.

Bingo.

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Davies’ big mistakes were to slow the Rattigan to a snail’s pace, to make it unnecessarily gloomy, and to deprive its central character – Hester, Lady Collyer – of the anger, intensity, classiness, intelligence, wit and talent which she has to display along with the despair which at first overwhelms her and which she eventually largely overcomes. It is unfair to pick on Rachel Weisz, who may be capable of acting, when asked to. And it certainly isn’t her fault that she was allowed to speak a mid-Atlantic, classiness demotic. Obviously, she also can’t help being too young for the part.

For some reason, Davies goes out of his way to create scenes in which Hester’s husband, the judge, becomes a mother-ridden wimp, perhaps the better to create in our minds the idea that he might be a closet homosexual, which is nowhere in the Rattigan, and weakens the play’s point. At every other moment Terence goes out of his way to create slushiness and anachronism. It is hardly likely, for instance that a judge would have a huge scene with his wife in front of the chauffeur, or that middle class people would harangue each other in the street or in an art gallery. Come to that, in the 50s, gas fires did not self-ignite, nor did penurious middle class people leave the equivalent of a quid or two lying in the street.

Davies robs several characters of their real interest. Rattigan’s landlady and the disgraced doctor are both sharply-written and crucial to Hester’s self-discovery.

And what was all that singing about?

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It was fascinating to see Max Mosley seem to tell Marr that he supported the idea of DSK as the victim. Well, we’ll see. But I did have a flicker of anxiety as to whose privacy had been invaded here and whose reputation traduced. Pace Leveson, is the unfolding of this saga showing the presss in a good light? For a start, are the methods of the US journalist and his sources kosher? Would Max Mosley really endose them, on reflection?

I have no idea, yet. But what is so absorbing is that we now have the media and cultural habits of the US and France on display in one case. Presumably the DSK story is a nearly perfect comparative study for Leveson.

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Contagion avoids all that, until the last frame. It’s set in large part in Minnesota and seems to enjoy the understated, big-boned people to be found there. They become hysterical, when they must, in rather a sound way. One expects John Sandford’s Luke Davenport and Virgil, his burly hippie sidekick, to stroll by at any moment.

Contagion doesn’t feature the masses and their sob stories nearly so much as it dwells on the travails of bureaucrats of every sort. I’d say, from some experience, that US officials and their offices, and US academics and their laboratories, really are as depicted here, and it’s mostly a reassuring picture.

There is one hilarious moment when someone saws open Gwynnie’s skull, and peering inside, is astonished at what he finds. Her performance is splendid, as they all are. Jennifer Ehle draws the shortest straw and has to act inside a hazmat suit. Jude Law is suitably unattractive as the only real villain: a blog-creep. There is one very memorable line, when a scientist declares that blogs are no more than graffiti with punctuation.

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The Israeli version is by comparison almost amateur and has some moments of real oddity, one of them important. And yet I preferred the earlier version.  It seems more authentic and engaging. It’s a small point, but the Ukrainian scenes are sharply real: that country looks and feels as it is depicted. All in all, I was more involved with the Israeli account.

I wouldn’t like to find myself believing that a Jewish outfit had more right to make a thriller out of this sort of material: art isn’t like that. That thought may lurk, though. I hope what I have spotted here is a difference which derives from the idea that such material deserves to be low-key in presentation. The 2011 account was one tad too vulgar.

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Melanie Laurent is the preternaturally nice Anna who decides the gloomy cartoonist Oliver is worth the time and trouble as he frets through his feelings about his late-gay father and his larky mother (a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as so many fag-hags seem to be). Laurent does her work with none of the kitteny princess-ship which makes one hover on the brink of loathing for the standard French actress.

Plummer is great, and so’s the Jack Russell. Mary Page Keller makes a superb wife and mother, circling the distrait, but not quite flushed away as she remembers that she made a deal with Hal/Plummer and is in any case obligated to some some sort of parenthood. She thinks he ought to be educated in sadness and in dissidence, and shows him the discreet way.

But the miracle is that so null a creature as Oliver comes to life in McGregor’s hands. As a character, I imagined him as a grown-up version Julianne Moore’s son in The Hours. He seemed within his rights not to trust himself to be any use at managing anything as tricky as real life. I believed him when he tried to keep things in sensibe, drawable, snippable compartments. And I liked him, and wished him well.

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Pedantry is worthwhile in this matter. After all, it is far easier to help people thrill to period detail in a cartoon than it is in a ”real” movie or even with CGI.

Moving on, I did generally believe and delight in the late 1950s feel of the piece. Often, its fleeting watercolours were lovely in their own right. I believed in Ackerley, and that was before I looked him up on Wikipedia and was reminded (Lord, I hope I did sort of know this in a lurking way) of his period as literary editor at the BBC’s culture magazine The Listener. Crucial to this sense of reality was the easy if slightly frightened condescension toward to the working class but also the assumption that the middle classes were capable of a fabulous and often eccentric sense of superiority. The former WW1 officer turned farmer, and the bullish, pubbish tyro dog breeder fill this brief famously.

Best of all, My Dog Tulip produces one of the best human bitches since Cruella Deville (shown to great advantage in that other fine doggy piece, Disney’s cartoon of 101 Dalmatians). Ackerley’s sister Nancy is impeccably drawn, in every sense. The late Lynn Redgrave gives her a voice which has that carrying capacity and and clarity which is this side of shrill and betrays none of the elocution class which dogged Mrs Thatcher’s.

The portrayal of Ackerley himself is improving as it mellows in my mind. At the time, I was a bit irritated that he didn’t shut his bloody dog up and I was too busy sympathising with his neighbours to quite empathise with the bond between literary gentleman and hound. The alsatian scatology didn’t bother me, though I have recently quite disliked a small puggy thing on account of the way its vulva was sort of prolapsed whilst it was in its first heat.

I was a little saddened by the lack of a narrative arc in the piece: either Ackerley, or the movie-makers, detected no process of socialisation in this mutt, and that – had it been true – would have been very sad. Maybe I am being unsubtle: I should perhaps have been thrilled by Tulip’s becoming a mother and mopped up all sorts of assumptions from it.

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Lincoln Lawyer is a proper legal procedural and courtroom drama. You may say its central character Mickey isn’t quite as beaten-up as we expected from the novel, nor his wife quite as hard-bitten. But those are small weaknesses in a movie which had to work like clockwork and did. This felt like a classic we’ll be curling up with on wet Saturdays for many years.

Essential Killing mostly carried me along. Who’s not going to like a rogue male figure on the run getting a drink of milk from the swollen breast of an alcohol-sodden Pole who’s fallen off her bike in the snow? I am becoming an easy mark for one-damned-thing-after-another enterprises which hover near magic realism. There’s certainly a fashion for this stuff: The Way Back had some of it and so did Defiance, the story of the Bielski partisans. Throw in Of Gods and Men and you have a strong set, though this last does not feature women heroes and is the odd man out in that respect.

No Greater Love ought to have rung all my bells. Of Gods and Men, Into Great Silence, In Memoria di Me had all done so. It is quite wrong to look at accounts of monastic life from the point of view of a spiritual tourist, but it’s also inevitable. I have hung around more monasteries than most people and I speak, if not with authority, at least as a connoisseur.  I like a certain style to other people’s piety in general and to their monasticism in particular. I won’t say that I prefer it to be male, though there is something about the element of a platoon or a ship’s company about monasteries which is pleasing (at least to this outsider). Anyway, NGL didn’t quite do it for me. I’m going to split my complaint into two. The movie aimed (I guess) to give us the interiority of the nuns, but one had too little sense of them as persons. And then the nunnery itself didn’t put its best foot forward: or maybe it really is a bit like an over-polished girl’s public school in which people pray up and pray the game for no particular reason.

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This epic (and it is a tad too long) has some of the mythic quality of a Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), the hunt for redemption of MR73 (2007), the pervasive criminality of Gomorrah (2008), the muscular doggedness of 22 Bullets (2010).

We meet Uxbal as he communes with three dead boys and faces his own terminal diagnosis. He’s tough: a few rungs up from the bottom in the street-trading world. But it’s a topsy-turvy toughness: he can’t stand a nurse drawing his blood so he draws it for her. In effect he’s a lone father, and it’s a bumpy ride. He can certainly multi-task though.

As in Gomorrah, cash is king in his world. It flows through his hands so quickly and in so many different directions. He shuffles the notes out to buy faulty gas fires, bent policemen, crock handbags, peace from and for his estranged wife; to pay Chinese middlemen, Senegalese traders. Most importantly he hands over money to a sort of Mother Africa figure.

As each episode unfolds, we hear and see echoes of previous events, but this is never clunky. Nothing is in this mighty piece. Well, nothing except one crucial piece of improbable melodrama involving those gas heaters. I fear, we could see it coming from the off.

But the characters all seem pitch-perfect, and what’s better the moral exchanges seem as real as the financial ones. The point being that any sense that these people are petty is stripped away. They are desperate for small things, and their backdrop is squalid. The movie doesn’t tell us  The misery isn’t sentimentalised, and we meet so much pettiness of spirit that we know that where we also see grandness of spirit, each is as real as it ought to be. Uxbal is not figured a triumphantly good man, but he’s built on a very big scale.

Uxbal is one of the noblest figures I’ve ever seen on screen: he is battling for everyone who swim into his world and it’s as though he is condemned to love far more people than most of us bother too.

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