The Bafta awards have been and gone, and with them the eyebrow-raising announcement that Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón's marvellous Hollywood space spectacle, was the best British film of the year, a classification made possible by its UK-produced effects work. Make of that what you will, but the list of great British (or even part-British) films ignored entirely by awards voters this year is rather a long one, with the under-seen Irish co-production Mister John (Artificial Eye, 15) somewhere near the top.
Husband-and-wife duo Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy made a startling 2009 debut with Helen, and that film's thematic preoccupation with identities lost and assumed is extended in this even more accomplished follow-up. The superb Aidan Gillen (recently seen leering to delicious effect on Game of Thrones) is on supremely taciturn form as a jaded London businessman who travels to Singapore to tidy up affairs following his brother's death – and finds it easier to slip into the dead man's shoes than he probably should do. Lawlor and Molloy tease the viewer with thriller possibilities, but it's a film where tension exists chiefly within the protagonist as we (and perhaps even he) tangle with the motives behind his self-disappearance. Beautifully composed and immaculately played, it's the film Only God Forgives might be if it went off and had a good think.
Close to the bottom of last year's Britfilm pile, however, was that breathtakingly bird-brained biopic Diana (Entertainment One, 12), which limps on to DVD shelves with a sheepish "not even the US market fell for this" simper. All the best jokes about Oliver Hirschbiegel's portrait of a princess's post-divorce romantic awakening have already been made; to crack more is to suggest the film has acquired the status of essential high camp, and it's far too dull for that. If you must, fast-forward to the scene where Naomi Watts's relentlessly doe-eyed Diana asks her cardiac-surgeon beau if hearts can actually be broken, chuckle mildly, and then stick on Madonna's W.E. for proper House of Windsor hilarity.
There's probably more authentic royal intrigue at play in Thor: The Dark World (Disney, 12), though that's faint praise indeed for this half-hearted superhero sequel, in which the bastardised Norse god (Chris Hemsworth) and his malevolent brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) are teamed up to battle indiscriminately sinister forces. Eschewing the rousing classicism and goofy fish-out-of-water farce of Kenneth Branagh's 2011 franchise starter, this feels altogether more directed by committee: one doubts accomplished TV man Alan Taylor had much say over the doomy tone, sludgy effects and jabs of Joss Whedon-esque snark. Hemsworth and Hiddleston's chemistry just about saves it; Natalie Portman looks to be considering participation via Skype in the next instalment.
Two arthouse releases arrive, coincidentally enough, a year after appearing in competition at Berlin. Polish clerical drama In the Name Of (Peccadillo, 15) centres on a handsome Catholic priest (a fine Andrzej Chyra) with a dark secret that is neither particularly dark nor particularly secret; the tasteful homoeroticism oozes from the opening frame. Director Malgorzata Szumowska dodges the story's potential for ripe melodrama. Another tale of Catholic inner conflict, decorative French period piece The Nun (Metrodome, 15) has no such qualms, least of all in Isabelle Huppert's bonkers turn as a sapphic abbess.
On the streaming front, a relatively forgotten Disney title makes its way to Netflix this week, and with Frozen having recently revived the flagging fortunes of the company's animation arm, it's worth looking back to a time when things looked considerably bleaker for them. The most expensive animated feature in history at the time of its release in 1985, The Black Cauldron was a mortifying flop: surprisingly enough, kids didn't flock to a Welsh mythology-inspired tale of youths and bards fighting horned kings for control of a magical cooking vessel. Watch it again, however, and there's grace in Disney's folly: the storytelling is sophisticatedly dense, the pioneering computer-aided visuals frequently remarkable and Elmer Bernstein's orchestral score a treat.
