There’s a lovely moment halfway through Alan Rickman’s film where he, playing King Louis XIV of France, is mistaken for a humble gardener by Kate Winslet’s designer Sabine. She is on the lookout for new flowers and plants, he is trying to find sanctuary after the death of the Queen. They chat a little but mainly enjoy the peace, silence and beauty that gardens can bring, before she finally realises her mistake and stiffens up. It’s a nice scene; playful, funny and langorous, and if it sounds a little dull, well, maybe it is.

The problem with Rickman’s film is that garden design is just not a terribly interesting subject matter. Those TV programmes which makeover people’s yards while they are at work is more exciting than this, and they aren’t exactly pulsating. To try and make up for the general lack of interest Rickman squeezes in some romantic affairs and a tragedy but still cannot raise the pace anything above slothful. Even visually the film is a disappointment. After all, the creation of Versailles should be wondrous to look at, but here we get, as Stanley Tucci’s hilariously camp character says, an awful lot of mud.

Winslet plays Sabine, a gardener who hates the constrictions and order that all of her rivals are using to create the great gardens of France. Matthias Scoenaerts is the man entrusted by The Sun King to bring the Garden of Eden to Versailles, and he has just the rigour demanded. However the project is too vast for just his one set of eyes, so he hires a helper. Sabine gets the job when she outrageously moves one of his pots from the middle of a circle to the edge. Thus begins a battle of wills, he determined to use maths, precise angles and circles, she preferring clashes of colour and shape. She wins a little project of her own, an amphitheatre with fountains which will take valuable resources and lots of muscle to build. However when Sabine begins to win the affection of Andre his wife Madame Le Notre (Helen McCrory) notices, and a woman spurned is a nasty sight.

Apart from the mistaken identity scene there is one other nicely played moment, a Sideways style speech where Sabine is talking to the King about roses, but it clearly becomes a metaphor for something else, in this case a woman’s fading beauty. These scenes apart though it’s a largely lifeless affair, with lots of walking through the woods, pointing at trees and discussing nature. Tucci has a blast as a hilariously camp member of the court, and plenty of acting is worthy, but there’s a frustrating sense that whatever Rickman is trying to say it’s taking him an awfully long time to say it.

Visually it’s something of a disappointment too, Versailles is clearly Ham House on the Thames, and nothing in the film looks or feels remotely French, which is odd. Even a scene where Winslet stares pleadingly into a wood with bluebells covering the ground, which should be arrestingly vivid, is oddly flat to look at.

Overall verdict: Released in time for gardening week this resembles a pretty made for tv programme more than a fully formed film. Terribly worthy, but frustratingly lifeless, which is a shame.

Reviewer Mike Martin

Perhaps the most alarming image in this harrowing documentary on Kurt Cobain is in the opening pre-credit sequence. We see a woman who looks like his mum – it is – then a younger women who looks like his sister – it is. Then there’s a bald, podgy chap with a beard covering his jowls, talking wih some insight into Cobain’s life, but who is he? Then it hits you, it’s fellow band member Krist Novoselic, now middle aged and wearing a bad shirt. Is that what Cobain would look like now? Like many a rock star Cobain will forever be 27, slim and good looking.

Brett Morgen’s rockumentary works very hard to avoid the usual rock clichés, and in the main it works. What we get is an intimate look at Cobain’s early life, which is disturbing and certainly explains a lot about what was to come. He was basically abandoned by his mother and father, and went to live with aunts and grandparents, none of whom wanted the increasingly troubled boy. The most telling moment is when his stepmother is telling the camera what a bad, naughty boy he was, and his father sits there, silent and motionless.

Morgen uses Cobain’s readings from diaries, which he animates, telling of a friendless school period and a fumbled losing of his virginity. He also got into drugs pretty early in life as a means of escaping his pain. The director also animated Cobain’s drawings and cartoons, which at the age of two were astonishingy accomplished, he could draw a perfect Snoopy or Frankenstein and continued to draw and paint through his life.

There is also a lovely interview with a first serious girlfriend, someone I was unaware of and who had some insights into this shy, tortured boy. His letters to her, and his scribblings in a diary or hastily-written lyrics or poems, reveal an exceptionally clever mind but clearly tortured and on the brink of a mental breakdown. His words are sometimes too heartbreaking.

We then race through his Nirvana years, which geeky fans may find unsatisfying. There is a very brief mention of his musical influences, no explanation of how the band was formed, and straight into the maelstrom of becoming the biggest band in the world. What hardcore fans will enjoy though is the treatment of the music. Instead of getting the greatest hits we get live and demo versions of songs, which then morph into powerful studio versions – try and see it with a decent sound system if you can. For the inevitable Smells Like Teen Spirit we get the video but a choral, orchestrated version of the song. Arguably the best musical moment is when Cobain introduces Molly’s Kiss; “this song has two notes – yep, two notes” he growls before launching into the song’s fantastic riff – which does indeed feature all of two chords.

There are two elephants in the room here, namely Dave Grohl and Courtney Love. Despite getting second billing Grohl is seen only in MTV interviews, revealing nothing, and doesn’t do the sit-down interview that Novoselic seems happy to do. We now know Grohl as the head man of Foo Fighters, a force of nature who is always engaging and chatty except on the subject of Nirvana. Maybe he still feels it’s too raw?

Bassist Novoselic is good value too, rather sadly looking back at his friendship with Cobain. Love meanwhile is listed as a producer, which may explain why there is so much footage of her and him nursing their baby towards the end of the film. It’s tiresome and does nothing to persuade you that she is anything else but a car crash. An interview question about Cobain becomes all about her in the blink of an eye, tellingly, and she is clearly out of it in several sequences.

What Morgen’s film ultimately does is remind you just how amazing and authentic Nirvana actually were, and how short-lived. Their final record, an MTV unplugged, was admirable but not a fitting finale to one of the most original bands of their era. But maybe his mum was right – when she heard his first record she cried, not through happiness but because she knew he was not ready for what was to come. Smart woman.

Overall verdict: unusual, revealing documentary which fills in a lot of gaps for fans of Nirvana but leaves plenty of questions still unanswered. Worth seeing just to revel in that raw, emotional music one more time.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Ridley Scott spent years fiddling with his film after studio interference, CGI developments and DVD reissues, and finally in 2007 we got the definitive version which is re-released by the BFI to give film fans another chance to see it on a big screen.

It is certainly a big-screen film, a unique futuristic film noir that creates a complete world that satisfies on just about every level. Pretty much all the elements of 1940s film noir are there – the lonesome gumshoe (Harrison Ford), complete with battered raincoat, drink problem and zero sense of humour, stalking the dark streets in search of the bad guys, with the obligatory visit to a seedy strip club. Sean Young is the femme fatale, with red lipstick, enormous shoulder pads and an untrustworthy past. The dark, neon-lit urban landscape of Los Angeles has more than a few echoes of Edward Hopper, with Ford’s apartment clearly inspired by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. And there’s a mystery – how do we know who are the humans and who are the replicants?

What makes Scott’s film unique is the fact it’s not set in the past but in the future, a nightmarish world in which technology has raced ahead perhaps too far, and man’s greed has created a breed of replicants, human robots who have evolved so far they now want to break free from slavery and live like humans. There’s a problem – they have a built in life span of just four years, and four of them have escaped a colony and are on earth trying to track down their evil creator, Tyrell, to get themselves rewired so they can live longer.

This version thankfully omits the awful Ford voiceover that was in many an early cut – one of the many problems the film had in its gestation, the main one being Ford and Scott’s difficult relationship. This cut, without the voice-over, was thought to be lost, but in 1989 Michael Arick, a sound preservationist, stumbled upon a 70mm print of the film. Scott refused to call it a director’s cut until he had tweaked a number of issues with the film, small mistakes such as the serial number on the snakeskin being read out wrongly, and Joanna Cassidy’s double crashing through the glass when she is shot – it’s clearly not her, but a bit of digital whizardry has papered over the cracks.

Watching the film now it’s clear that this is Scott’s masterpiece. Ford looks suitably pained but is a perfect noir hero, slowly falling for Young even though he suspects she is a replicant – early on he asks Tyrell tragically “How can it not know what it is?”

There are some minor flaws, sure – personally I found Hannah’s punk gymnast a tad annoying, and the Vangelis soundtrack, which sounded like the future in 1982, now sounds hopelessly weedy and dated – synthesisers have moved on quicker than CGI. However these can all be forgiven, especially in the face of Rutger Hauer’s near-perfect scene-stealing show at the end.

His is a lurking presence thoughout the film, with his mad unblinking eyes and extraordinary facial expressions, flicking from child-like to psychotic in the blink of an eye, but it is the final showdown between him and Ford which completely steals the show. During this amazing fight sequence, lasting 15 minutes, Ford utters not one word, while Hauer rants, cries like a wolf and hams his way through an amazing scene whilst losing more and more clothes. It veers between extreme camp – at one point he pretends to cry like a baby – to Jack Nicholson-style bonkersness, smashing his face through a wall, all the while throwing Ford around like a rag doll. His final lines though completely catch the viewer off guard, and it’s amazing to discover that, with all the script problems and rewrites, he improvised them himself. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe – star ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion” is one of the great lines of sci-fi.

Interestingly the whole idea of testing whether a robot can match a human for emotional response was dreamed up by Alan Turing, the subject of recent movie The Imitation Game but never mentioned in it. Somehow I feel Turing would approve of this film.

Overall verdict: This version can rightly take its place in the list of all-time sci-fi classics. It stands alone as a futuristic noir, beautifully shot, brilliantly realised and still absolutely gripping. It may have taken decades to get right, but it was worth it. A must-see, especially on a big screen.

Reviewer: Mike Martin