We have to blame Friedrich Schiller for the notion that Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots ever met, as he created a confrontation between the Tudor cousins for his 1800 play, Maria Stuart. It's no surprise, therefore, to see Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie squaring off in Josie Rourke's Mary Queen of Scots, which arrives in cinemas just a fortnight after Yorgos Lanthimos cast his unforgiving gaze over the reign of the last of the Stuarts, Queen Anne, in The Favourite. 

The daughter of James V and Mary of Guise, Mary became Queen of Scotland at six days old. However, she spent much of her childhood in France (hence, she most certainly didn't have a Scottish accent) and became Queen Consort to Francis II in 1559. But she was widowed at 18 after only a year on the throne and returned to her homeland in 1561, which was being governed by her half-brother, James, 1st Earl of Moray. Four years later, she married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley and gave birth to a son, James, in June 1566. After just over a year, however, she was forced to abdicate following her marriage to James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who had supposedly plotted to murder Darnley. Mary fled south, but would come to regret her decision to request asylum from her first cousin once removed, as Elizabeth I feared her enemies would try to exploit Mary's claim to the English crown. 

Mary has been portrayed several times on screen since Mrs Robert L. Thomas took the title role in Alfred Clark's The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), an 18-second trick film produced for Thomas Edison's Kinestoscope viewer that made cinema history by employing a substitution splice to allow the director to replace his star with a dummy for the beheading effect. Among the other notables to take the role are Katharine Hepburn in John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936), Zarah Leander in Carl Froelich's The Heart of a Queen (1940), Samantha Morton in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Camille Rutherford in Thomas Imbach's Mary Queen of Scots (2013), She was also played by Vivian Pickles in the BBC serial, Elizabeth R, and by Vanessa Redgrave in Charles Jarrott's Mary, Queen of Scots (both 1971). In each instance, her rival was played by Glenda Jackson.

Redgrave was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. But, despite the praise for Ronan's work in this latest retelling of a story that never quite happened as the historians insist, it is Robbie who has been drawing the plaudits, as she snared a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress for disguising her Australian twang in this handsome, if worthy adaptation of John Guy's book, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart. 

The action opens in 1587 with Mary (Saoirse Ronan) striding towards the block before flashing back to her arrival at Leith some 26 years earlier. She is welcomed at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh by Moray (James McArdle) and Bothwell (Martin Compston) and entertained with songs by David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova). However, she also sends a message to Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) asking that they can rule in harmony with Mary as her cousin's heir. But, while William Cecil (Guy Pearce) and Lord Thomas Randolph (Adrian Lester) suggest that the Protestant Moray will prevent the Catholic Mary from attempting to overthrow Henry VIII's reformation of the English church, they are aware that Elizabeth needs to marry and conceive an heir before Mary does likewise. Consequently, Cecil tries to tempt the queen with the dashing and malleable Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Joe Alwyn). 

In Edinburgh, Mary's decision to allow her subjects to worship according to their conscience is denigrated by Presbyterian firebrand John Knox (David Tennant). But Randolph is impressed when he comes to Mary's court as an envoy and warns Elizabeth that she is an intelligent woman who can not be browbeaten into submission. While Mary coyly describes the sensation of  sleeping with a man to her maidservants - Mary Seton (Izuka Hoyle), Mary Fleming (Maria Dragus), Mary Beaton (Eileen O'Higgins) and Mary Livingston (Liah O'Prey) - Bess of Hardwick (Gemma Chan) eavesdrops on the pillow talk of Elizabeth and Dudley, as he is persuaded to travel north to provide Mary with a suitor who will keep her in check. 

Eager to secure her claim to the English crown and insulted to be offered an earl in matrimony rather than a prince, Mary rejects Dudley and hopes a meeting with Elizabeth in York will allow them to reach an understanding. But Randolph meets her at the border with news that Elizabeth is busy with the Huguenots (when she actually has the pox) and Mary tells Moray and William Maitland. Lord of Lethington (Ian Hart) that she is in no mood to be toyed with. So, when the 4th Earl of Lennox (Brendan Coyle) returns north with his son, Henry, Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden), Mary decides to marry her cousin (as he has a claim of his own to the English throne) rather than accept Dudley without being acknowledged as Elizabeth's heir. 

While Elizabeth accepts the advice of her all-male council around a table in a cramped chamber, Mary makes her own choice on horseback in the freedom of the glens. But neither woman is really in control of her destiny, as Moray leaves court in fury at Mary has jeopardised peace with England by marrying Darnley (who is Elizabeth's subject not her own), while Cecil (who accepts Elizabeth's insistence that she must rule as a man and not allow love to weaken her position) takes it upon himself to cause civil war in Scotland to prevent an attempted usurpation in England. 

Stung by Darnley's infidelity with Rizzio, Mary leads her troops into action against Moray, whose men have been whipped into a frenzy by the misogynist preaching of Knox. The first engagement of the so-called Chaseabout Raid is shown to be an ambush in which Moray's advance is blocked on a narrow bridge by some Highland cattle and his life is spared by the onlooking Mary, who had earlier chatted with her marching troops to give them courage. She celebrates her triumph by goading Darnley into impregnating her and this news prompts Lennox to seek terms with Moray to control the throne through Darnley and Cecil to plan a second uprising among Protestant Scots. 

Mary's position is not helped by Knox spreading rumours that her child has been fathered out of wedlock by an Italian minstrel and Maitland and Lennox convince Darnley that he has been cuckolded (by a man he has also bedded). He signs the death warrant and joins Bothwell and the other lords in bursting into Mary's bedchamber and stabbing Rizzio to death, with Darnley being forced by Lennox to administer the final blow. He informs Mary that he was coerced into conspiring against her, but Maitland offers to show her his signature in return for a pardon. In this spirit of reconciliation, she welcomes Moray back to court and promises to name her son James in his honour (and that of their father). Moreover, she asks Elizabeth to be the prince's godmother and (being so broody that she has created a bump on her shadow after visiting a newborn foal in her stables) she consents. 

Following shots of both queens sitting with their legs splayed, as Elizabeth produces paper flowers and Mary a child, we see the latter banish Darnley from court under Bothwell's supervision and Elizabeth condemn her privy council for scheming against a woman who has shown such fortitude that they should be grateful to accept her as their monarch in the event of her dying without issue. But the Scots are losing faith in their ruler and, when Bothwell has Darnley murdered at Kirk O'Field and forces Mary to become his bride, Knox brands her a harlot in rabblerousing his congregation into demanding her death. 

Forced to abdicate by Maitland and Moray, Mary seeks Elizabeth's protection and they meet in a wooden hideout in the woods. They are hidden from each other by draped sheets, as Mary offers eternal sisterhood to Elizabeth, who now whitens her face with mercury to hide her pox scars. For a brief moment, they stand before each other as lonely women who have been exposed and exploited by the Machiavellian cruelty of the men who are supposed to be their obedient servants. But, despite needing sanctuary, Mary refuses to consider herself an inferior and, nettled by a remark about her father's treatment of her mother (Anne Boleyn), Elizabeth reminds her that her strengths have become her weaknesses. She guarantees to keep her safe, providing that Mary offers no encouragement to her foes, before a tearful Elizabeth (who has removed her wig to show how vulnerable she is, despite all her efforts to assume a manly nature) leaves Mary to her fate.

As Elizabeth ages in the course of a stately walk along a cloister corridor, she composes an imaginary message to Mary, by way of explanation for her imminent execution. She laments that she has been forced to shed her humanity in order to keep her throne and wishes she had signed the warrant decades earlier to have spared Mary so much torment. But she has seen letters in Mary's hand proving her complicity in the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and, therefore, she has no option but to condemn her. Accompanied by her ladies in waiting (who have not aged a day, either), Mary reveals a bright red dress beneath her cloak and an onlooker scowls at her martyr complex. But she whispers a prayer to James to complete her work by uniting the realms under the Stuarts. 

Despite drawing on a Whitbread Biography prize winner, this often feels less like an historical recreation than an episode of screenwriter Beau Willimon's American version of House of Cards dressed up in Game of Thrones tropes to entice a #MeToo audience into thinking of Mary and Elizabeth as being peace-loving sisters betrayed by bellicose institutional sexism. All of which would be fine if the film wasn't so earnestly dull. There is every bit as much intrigue and skullduggery as there was in, say, Patrice Chéreau's La Reine Margot (1994), which was set in the French court around the same period. But, in making her feature bow after a successful tenure at the Donmar Warehouse, Josie Rourke seems far too intent on stressing socio-political issues that will chime with modern audiences to place enough emphasis on the core drama. Thus, while she persuades us to view the 16th-century cousins in a new light, she fails to convince with either her wider thesis or its presentation. 

With fire in her eyes to match the colour of her tresses, Saoirse Ronan makes a thoroughly modern Mary, in much the same way that Keira Knightley's Colette was more millennial and fin de siècle. She also puts a good deal of effort into the anachronistic Scottish accent, as if she was trying to channel her inner Nicola Sturgeon. But she never feels particularly regal or dynastic, with the result her struggle winds up having more to do with gender than power. By contrast, Margot Robbie more effectively combines human flaw and divine right to create an Elizabeth who sees the bigger picture and is a skilled political operator regardless of her sex rather than an impulsive victim, who is too often led by her heart rather than her head. 

No one else in the cast gets much of a look in, however, as the courtiers in London and Edinburgh are merely ciphers whose purpose is to be bewhiskered, boorish and bigoted. Guy Pearce's Cecil (who sounds curiously like David Attenborough) and Ian Hart's Maitland are ruthless in their cunning and conniving, but Willimon places much of the blame for Mary's woes on David Tennant's Knox, who is depicted as a misogynist religious crank who wouldn't be out of place in any 21st-century fundamentalist organisation. 

The decision to play up David Rizzio's homosexuality also feels like a contrived attempt to reel in potential LGBTQ+ punters, while the colour blind casting reinforces the idea that inclusivity matters more to the film-makers than authenticity. Once again, this would be completely fine if the picture wasn't so ponderous or so obsessed with palaces rather than people. Apart from a few shots of marching troops and over-excited kirk-goers, the hoi-polloi are an irrelevance. Yet more fuss has been made of the fleeting sight of some menstrual blood than the absence of life outside the confines of the courts or the gauche simplification of the complex impact of the Reformation on either side of the border.

Opening with Mary sweeping across the Old Schools Quad at the Bodleian Library and making evocative use of the Divinity School for Elizabeth's privy council chamber, Rourke and production designer James Merifield capture the period feel with the scenes set in Blackness Castle, Oxroad Bay, Hardwick Hall, Haddon Hall Manor and Gloucester Cathedral. Cinematographer John Mathieson's atmospheric lighting is equally estimable. But Max Richter's score is often over-emphatic, while Chris Dickens's editing fails to generate sufficient tension by cutting across the geographical divide separating the conflicted queens. Evidently keen to show she can operate outside the proscenium, Rourke directs thoughtfully. But the leads are hamstrung by a combination of awkward tonal shifts and Willimon's florid dialogue. Consequently, while it strives hard to redraft the popular conception of its heroine, this is so preoccupied with contemporary topics that it takes its eyes off the past.

The make-up team also works overtime as CinemaItaliaUK kicks off the new year at the Genesis Cinema in London on Sunday 20 January with Giancarlo Fontana and Giuseppe G. Stasi's dark comedy, Put Grandma in the Freezer. Played with spirit by a willing ensemble, this is clearly aimed more at the domestic than the international market. For all the smiles it raises, however, this may not be the ideal film to watch if you've still not got your tax return sorted out before the deadline at the end of the month. 

Claudia (Miriam Leone) runs a small art restoration business in Rome with her friends, Rossana (Lucia Ocone) and Margie (Marina Rocco). However, she is forced to live off the pension paid to her German grandmother, Birgit (Barbara Bouchet), because a bureaucratic snafu has delayed the payment of a state grant. In a bid to draw attention to her plight, she threatens to spray tar over Caravaggio's `Boy With a Basket of Fruit'. But her protests is interrupted because Birgit is feeling unwell and she rushes to her bedside. Much to Claudia's dismay, Birgit dies during and power cut and she allows herself to be talked into storing the body in the chest freezer so that she can continue claiming the pension that is keeping her afloat. 

Meanwhile, Simone Recchia (Fabio De Luigi) throws himself into his work as an agent of the Guarda di Finanza and keeps coming up with ingenious disguises to catch tax cheats in the act. We see him posing as a priest at the wedding between a young man and a chair-bound geriatric and as a blind man at a disability convention. However, Rambaudo (Maurizio Lombardi) keeps hijacking his missions and stealing the headlines, while underlings Gennaro (Francesco Di Leva), Marta (Susy Laude) and Palumbo (Carlo Luca De Ruggieri) wish he would fall in love, as he was nowhere near as workaholically zealous when he was married to his dentist wife. 

As chance would have it, Simone meets Claudia when he is hidden in a suit of armour to catch a financial superintendent (Giovanni Esposito) asking her for a bribe to speed up her grant claim. In her desperation to get the corrupt official to sign off her docket, however, she knocks Simone down a flight of stairs and feels sufficiently guilty to visit him in hospital. Marta and Gennaro realise their boss is smitten when he uses his teeth to tear up the charge sheet and get him drunk in an effort to talk him into flirting with Claudia, while checking up on her grandmother's pension account. 

Unfortunately, he picks the very day that Claudia has chosen to defrost Birgit because the strain of her deception is weighing upon her. However, as she wants to keep him out of the house after he sees Birgit propped up at the table playing cards with Rossana and Margie, she accepts his invitation and is bored stiff when he spends the entire afternoon telling her about his job. More disasters befall them before they get home to discover that the power has gone off and Claudia has to pretend she wants to sleep with Simone in order to prevent him from unpacking her freezer to stop the food from spoiling. 

However, she isn't attracted to him and Rosanna and Margie urge her to behave badly on a date at a posh restaurant to put him off. She claims to be schizophrenic and embarrasses him with her coarse make-up and blowsy manners. But he can't forget about her and comes back to the house just as Claudia is disguised as Birgit to prevent her lover of 50 years, Augusto (Eros Pagni), from going to the cops to report her missing. She manages to get rid of Augusto (who has come to offer his heart having just been widowed), only for Simone to show up to ask Birgit about her finances. Claudia manages to keep her face hidden while they chat and is so touched by Simone's profession of love that she rushes out to the garage to remove her make-up and bundle him into bed. 

They spend a month on holiday together and Claudio gets pregnant. But she also forgets about her grandmother and Margie and Rosanna agree to help thaw her out because she has promised Simone that she will never make him choose between her and the law. As bad luck would have it, on the very day the decide to move Birgit to Margie's place in the back of their van, Rambaudo causes Simone to let a tax-dodging mafioso slip through his fingers and Gennaro and Palumbo detain the van at a roadblock. Much to Claudia's horror, the body in the wheelchair is missing and they realise it must have bounced out when they hit a speed bump. 

Simone reveals that he has known all along that Birgit had been frozen and he puts out a call to recover a missing statue from the museum, unaware that Birgit has already rolled down an incline and caused the pursuing Augusto to have a seizure when he discovers she is stone cold dead in a woodland clearing. Rosanna and Margie find the couple and are busy dragging Augusto to the van when Birgit disappears. In a panic, they track down Claudia, who is distraught because Simone has broken up with her, even though he has told his colleagues to keep an eye out for a stolen statue rather than a corpse. 

Claudia is convinced she is going to go to jail when Rambaudo arrives with the task force general (Paolo Bessegato) to unveil the figure in the wheelchair. But Simone has switched the body for a statue and Rambaudo is given a rollicking by his superior, who just happens to be his father. At that moment, Simone's team arrive with their suspect in cuffs and he turns out to be Rosanna's new boyfriend. Relieved to discover he is a crook rather than a cheating husband, she promises to wait for him, while Simone agrees to refreeze Birgit because they still need her pension because his salary will be insufficient to keep Claudia and the baby if her restoration business folds.

Scripted by the prolific Fabio Bonifacci, whose credits include Riccardo Milani's Welcome Mr President (2013) and Fabio Bonifacci and Francesco Miccichè's Them Who? (2015), Fontana and Stasi's sophomore follow-up to Amore oggi (2014) breezes along a genial conviction that persuades you not to look too closely at its copious contrivances. It's certainly delightfully played by actor-cum-impressionist Fabio De Luigi (whose grandfather was screenwriter Tonino Guerra) and Miriam Leone, a former Miss Italy who was recently seen in Marco Bellocchio's Sweet Dreams (2016). Moreover, Lucia Ocone and Marina Rocco provide amusing support as Leone's ditzy confederates, as does the exceedingly supporting Barbara Bouchet, who some will remember as Miss Moneypenny in the 1967 Bond spoof, Casino Royale.  

Essentially, the seventysomething is a glorified prop, in much the same way that Terry Kiser was in Ted Kotcheff's Weekend At Bernie's (1989). But Fontana and Stasi appear less interested in macabre comedy than in satirising Italy's civil service, constabulary and tax system and in slotting the pieces into place to ensure that De Luigi and Leone wind up together with the former's incorruptible reputation secretly besmirched. To this end, they are adeptly abetted by cinematographer Valerio Azali and production designer Paki Meduri, while Fontana's editing also merits mention. For all its proficiency, however, this is more an larky romp than a weighty socio-political critique.

Anthology pictures were all the rage in the 1960s, with the most vibrant being the nouvelle vague gem, Paris vu par... (1965), which captured the mood of the French capital on the eve of Les Événements. Given the uncertainty over what might happen in the UK following the latest Brexit developments, London Unplugged may come to be seen as a similar bellwether movie, as it suggests a city at odds with itself, as alienated residents wander around in their own little bubbles, oblivious to the problems and feelings of others. As is the case with all vignette collections, the quality is decidedly mixed. But, with the majority of the contributors being first-time directors and several of them being women, this is well worth a look.

Connecting the segments is a running link directed by Nicholas Cohen entitled `East/West', which sees Ghanaian-Bajan athlete Yourlance Bianca Richards run from the Olympic Park in Stratford to Kew Gardens to discover a quiet place she has not visited since she was a child. Intercut with monochrome archive footage, Richards's thoughts on being alone in the big city testify both to the impersonal nature of urban living and the sense of isolation facing many settling in a new country and seeking to find their niche. 

The notion of making a connection is explored by George Taylor in `Dog Days', a meet cute scenario that sees office worker Melanie Gray bump into ice delivery driver Ivanno Jeremiah on a canal towpath on a hot summer evening after she is stood up on a date. Despite feeling uneasy at being approached in an ill-lit place by a black stranger, Gray senses a spark and accepts Jeremiah's unexpected invitation to accompany him to a nearby swimming hole for a cooling late-night dip. They kiss in the water and enjoy the sensation of being free and unobserved before chatting about the night sky and society's readiness to cling to outdated concepts and reluctance to accept change. 

As Richards runs past the canal, she passes the front door behind which a tragedy has occurred in Taylor's second contribution, `Feline'. Flashing back from carer Juliet Stevenson's discovery of a body, we see her dropping in on Eve Pearce before she goes away on holiday. Surrounded by her cats, the old lady is sure she will be fine in Stevenson's absence. But her suspicions are aroused when she pops out of the room and returns to find her spooning food into cat bowls from a jar she hurriedly tosses into a convenient pedal bin. All seems well, as Pearce runs a bath after returning from the shops to buy some more meat. But something has spooked the cats, who mass around Pearce after she slips and falls. 

The macabre gives way to the stark in Nicholas Cohen and Ben Jacobson's `Unchosen', as Home Office pen-pusher Poppy Miller finds rulebook objections to each of inexperienced lawyer Max Pritchard's reasons why Iranian exile Dimitra Barla should be granted asylum in the UK. The story is somewhat unnecessarily padded by having Pritchard offer his services after encountering Barla at the bar where she works. However, the co-directors makes their political points with clipped efficiency, as Barla recalls the fate of a cousin whose black mourning dress was mistaken as a sign of support for an outlawed party. Moreover, it concludes jarringly with the revelation that she is a lesbian who fled after her activist lover disappeared after being tortured in prison. 

After Richards offers an insight into her difficult home life, the scene slips between live-action and deceptively simple line drawings in Mitchell Crawford's `Club Drunk', which sinuously chronicles the dance-floor encounter between a lad who chugs down four shots before leaving home for his night out and a girl who snorts a line of cocaine before touching up her make-up. Reinforcing the theme of isolation that recurs throughout the film, this ships in the night saga is counterpointed by a thudding beat that could be taken for the throbbing pulse of the city or the driving relentlessness of modern living. 

The difficulty of finding somewhere affordable to stay is considered by Qi Zhang, Natalia Casali and Kaki Wong in `Mudan Blossom', which centres on the Skype chats between Chinese student Qi Zhang and her American counterpart, Kotryna Snuikaite, who meet in the flower shop where the former works and the latter is taking photographs. Snuikaite hopes to find accommodation in Chelsea, but her budget directs her search towards Shoreditch to Beckton, where she strikes up an acquaintance with an ageing male dog owner with rooms to spare. By contrast, Qi contemplates heading home after meeting an array of eccentric landlords and potential roommates. 

Finding her rent is also a pressing issue for aspiring opera singer Miriam Gold in Rosanna Lowe's `Pictures', which is based on a short story by Katherine Mansfield. She dreams of performing Bizet's Carmen, but can't get her foot through the door at the English National Opera and is reduced to wearing a kinky outfit for sleazy Soho film-maker Ivan Marevich. Her hesitant contralto fails to impress Shaun Prendergast during an audition to secure a busking spot on the Underground, even though she imagines herself on stage when a couple of musicians join in with `Habanera'. Consequently, when middle-aged talent agent Polly Lister takes Gold under her wing and promises to help her make a breakthrough, she feels duty bound to respond to her amorous advances over a bowl of strawberries. 

A lack of attention prompts a small girl to embarks upon her own trip to the smoke in Andrew Cryan's `Little Sarah's Big Adventure'. With her mum (Jane Kinninmont) preoccupied with something on her laptop, Sarah (Nina Cryan) puts on her own shoes and coat and toddles down to the Tube station to ride to the South Bank. Having had a wander around Tate Modern, she gazes across the Thames at St Paul's and chases some giant bubbles before arriving home just in time for her mother to compliment her on being so quiet and read her a story that amusingly recounts her own expedition. 

The glitz of Oxford Street in the run-up to Christmas is replaced by the backstreet grime of Soho, as Ricky Nixon slips into Bruce Payne's sex shop in Layke Anderson's `Shopping'. Following a whispered phone call that seems to suggest problems with his partner, Nixon comes to the till with a hand whip. Having mistaken him for a regular customer, Payne apologises for the slowness of the credit card machine and asks Nixon if he's ever been to Brazil in trying to make conversation. He explains that he used to be a chef and once had a wonderful relationship with his wife. But he has come to realise that things don't always work out the way he planned them and he curses his misfortune at having a marvellous memory for the little things, as he places the purchase in a carrier bag and wishes Nixon a pleasant evening. Somehow feeling buoyed by a stranger's confidences, Nixon smiles and heads into the winter night with his faith in humanity slightly restored. 

As the recurrence of a knee injury causes Richards to take a break in St James's Park, Andres Heger-Bratterud whisks us off to Earl's Court for `The Door To', in which call centre drone Stephen Cavanagh tries to learn the secret handshake that glamorous pedestrian Tuva Heger-Bratterud gives bouncer Craig Valberg to gain admittance to a side alley club. Realising how sad his life has become, as he watches a dog dancing online, Cavanagh records the shake on his phone and pays homeless man Phelim Kelly to help him perfect the moves so that he can join his dream girl in the promised land. 

With Richards reaching journey's end and dedicating her run to the father she lost four years earlier, the final story also brings us to the same botanical wonderland. Adapted from a work by Virginia Woolf, `Kew Gardens' sees director Nicholas Cohen span the century to mingle characters from 1919 and the present day in the magnificent palm house. While Anjana Vasan tries to read the story on the Tube, Woolf (Christina Carty) people watches and the blazered chap (Simon Wilson) confessing to his wife (Natasha Wightman) that he has been thinking about an old flame become matched in Vasan's consciousness by an elderly couple looking at the plants. Similarly, two gents chatting about a newfangled invention become app designers, while equivalents can also be found for two gossiping friends (Imogen Stubbs and Victoria Woodward) and a pair of young lovers (Charlotte Mulliner and Jack Etchells). 

It's a fitting way to end an odyssey that continuously reveals how the past and present co-exist in London and how the problems of its citizens remain the same the more that they change. There are over eight million of them now and some 40% of them were born abroad. But, while most exist in an inglorious isolation, they are all Londoners and share in its history and destiny in the same way that the characters did in other multi-directored offerings like Paris, je t'aime (2006) and New York, I Love You (2008). 

In starting things off, George Taylor makes deft use of montage to sketch in a hint of backstory in `Dog Days', although he is less sure-footed in `Feline', which contains a glaring continuity error in having one of Pearce's pets lick the jar that Stevenson had clearly thrown into a bin. Indeed, the whole story errs on the specious side, as the closing sequence shows Stevenson stroking a fluffy kitty like a Bond villain whose master plan has just come together, as she informs the WPC making inquiries that she intends taking the cats home to live with her. 

Cohen makes effective use of voiceover during `East/West', but it feels more tacked on to `Unchosen', as Barla shares her hopes and fears with her missing partner over the slickly assembled mosaic of images juxtaposed with the more rigid footage of the Home Office interview. The editing is equally adroit in `Mudan Blossom', which wittily dissects the dilemma facing young women far from home in the unfriendly metropolis. But, while it's easy to identify with their plight, one does wonder why they don't try to find somewhere together after outstaying their welcome with friends from the old country.

Rosanna Lowe puts an interesting spin on the #MeToo scenario in `Pictures', which proves a splendid showcase for Miriam Gold, who not only gets to sing, but also display a sure comic touch, as she endures various indignities in trying to realise her ambitions. Young Nina Cryan comes close to stealing the entire picture as the bored moppet wandering off alone in `Little Sarah's Big Adventure', although one can almost hear the tutting disapproval of her mother, who is too busy staring at a computer screen to notice that her child is missing. 

The comfort of stranger is offered and accepted with gratitude in `Shopping', a charmingly disarming reminder that not everything about Soho is sleazy and degrading. Wearing a chunky knit mustard cardigan, Bruce Payne sex shop owner has all the appearance of being disreputable, as he snoops as Ricky Nixon over the top of his spectacles. But he turns out to be the male equivalent of a `tart with a heart', as he offers a consoling word that makes Nixon feel better about himself and his clearly troubled relationship. Eschewing the flash-cutting techniques employed by his fellow directors, Layle Anderson opts for gliding elisions that slow down the pace of life and allow for a little reflection and introspection. 

Stephen Cavanagh also seizes the initiative in `The Door To', a MacGuffinesque vignette that pays no attention to what lies beyond the red portal, as it focuses on Cavanagh's ostracisation at work, his reluctant alliance with a beggar and his determination to become one of the in-crowd. It's a rather slight sleight-of-hand saga, but it engages nonetheless, as does the climactic riff on Virginia Woolf's beautifully observed study of a snail and the Kew visitors too busy to notice it. The message is that we should all pay more attention to the world around us and the people with whom we share it. But, while this is a noble sentiment, many will continue to find the first step from anonymity to amicability a difficult one to take in our increasingly impersonal society.

In 1936, Fortune magazine sent writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Hale County, Alabama to meet the sharecroppers enduring the Great Depression. The pair spent eight weeks in the Dust Bowl in a bid to learn how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was impacting upon those living in the direst poverty. There were few non-white faces in the resulting book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was published to considerable acclaim in 1941. But RaMell Ross seeks to right that wrong with his debut documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening. 

Having arrived in the Deep South in 2009 to coach basketball and teach photography, Ross started making his own record of the African-American community he encountered. During the course of the five-year shoot, he received the creative advice of the acclaimed Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and he was rewarded for his efforts with the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. More an elegiac rumination than a socio-political study, this is a collage of images and impressions whose ideas and insights seep into the viewer's consciousness to leave an indelible imprint. 

Amidst footage taken during a church service and a drive down a small-town's main street, a caption appears reading, `What is the orbit of our dreaming?' Such cod poesy will recur, but the images Ross presents have a natural beauty, even when they have obviously been posed rather than captured on the hoof. We see a father and son braving a thunderstorm under an angry grey sky, a grandmother dandling a child whose young father looks entirely detached and the members of a basketball squad sweating their way through some training drills. 

Ross also introduces us to Quincy Bryant, who is having his nose pierced. He speaks about wanting to fulfil his ambitions in sport and music and aims to be a role model to his son. But, while he awaits the birth of twins with his partner, Latrenda `Boosie' Ash, Daniel Collins seems to have a genuine shot at realising his aspirations to become a professional basketball player. He is studying at Selma University and, following a shot of the stars taken through the ragged hoop on a Hale County court, we watch Daniel practicing in the campus gym. He doesn't have many possessions to fill his room and he is excited by the fact that he has his own television, as life back home is hardscrabble in the extreme, with his mother, Mary, working in the same catfish factory as Quincy. 

Back on the estate largely made up of prefab dwellings, a man plays the blues on an electric guitar in spotlight created by some car headlamps. His sense of rhythm is matched by the cheerleaders at the local school, as they stomp out their support for the team. But their energy is exceeded by that of Quincy's toddler daughter, Kyrie, who waddles up and down the corridor leading off from the sitting room, as she runs for the sheer hell of it, while the unconcerned adults watch the television. She is clearly performing for the camera, as she presses her face against the lens to block out the light. But she also appears to be seeking the attention she eventually gets from her father. As a caption confides after she stalks out of shot, however, `Boosie careth not about the film.'

Cutting away from the locker room at Selma, as Daniel and his teammates psych themselves up for a game, Kyrie enjoys covering herself with soap suds in the bath, while some neighbourhood kids squeal at being soaked with a hosepipe. Boosie helps her father and his friends carry some furniture into her new apartment before we follow a point-of-view shot from the front seat of a car, as it drives through town to an imposing plantation house. Monochrome footage from Edwin Middleton and T. Hayes Hunter's Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913) is intercut with the colour clips to suggest that Bahamian comic Bert Williams is peering at the big white house from the bushes. A huge star in vaudeville, Williams used to have to blacken his face with cork and whiten his lips to conform to the conventions of minstrelsy and Ross juxtaposes the extract from the oldest surviving depiction of African-Americans in screen history with a shot of the thick smoke billowing up from a tyre fire and the caption, `What happens when all the cotton is picked?'

Among the following snippets, a shadow bobs and weaves, some frying chicken sizzles in a pan and a couple of elderly matrons shuffle past some younger men hanging out and shooting the breeze. The women cast a glance at the cabal, but don't seem overly impressed. Similarly, Mary looks down on a small girl who doesn't want to give her name, as she is too busy looking into Ross's camera. Daniel also struggles to concentrate in a lesson on racial stereotyping, while Quincy can barely stay awake as Boosie gives birth to a boy and a girl, who cry in the background while their mother looks up to her partner for some reassurance and gets none. 

Karmyn and Korbyn sleep in their rockers in front of the television, as Boosie watches over them. But an abrupt cut to a caption from a shot of a black butterfly informs us that Korbyn was buried in the early afternoon after he succumbed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The camera keeps a discreet distance from the graveside, although Quincy does confide to Ross that his biggest fear is choking to death and he feels awful that his infant son suffered this awful fate. Elsewhere, Mary plaits the hair of her young daughter, Shadedra, who cries quietly to herself and looks back at the camera in her unspoken distress. 

By contrast, Daniel leaps for joy as a teammate scores a basket before we see him bathed in the blue light of a patrol car, as he sits in the front seat and seems surprised that white cops pick on black kids. A montage follows with the words `whose child is this?' being repeated in a distorted manner on the soundtrack, as we see boys playing softball, girls wearing golden crowns and homecoming frocks and a tiny child waddling on to a pitch in full American football gear, Tragedy might strick, poverty might bite, but life does and must go on. 

A Wacky Waving Inflatable Tube Guy bends in half under a night sky in the glare of a bright spotlight before a match cut reveals a woman silhouetted against a nocturnal street scene with her arms upraised in prayer, as she pleads with God to protect the local children from the senseless killings that keep befalling them. A neon banner across the beam of a crucifix reads `Only Jesus Saves', but Daniel isn't so sure, as he has just been told by his coach that he had to be more of a team player if he is going to make it as pro baller. He is still struggling with his emotions in a church service and the earlier caption `How to we not frame someone?', takes on a new meaning, as we see more footage of someone being pulled over by the police. In the beam of the headlights, the breath of a calf standing in the road can be seen hanging on the cold air, as another caption asks, `Where does time reside?'

The camera looks down on Kyrie, as she gets her hair caught in a plastic basketball hoop suctioned to the wall. Some time later, her parents order a drive-thru takeaway, with Boosie dandling Karmyn on her knee while looking at a picture of Korbyn on her phone. They go to a tenpin bowling alley, where Kyrie flops around on the floor, while her sister sucks chirpily on the straw in her soft drink cup. Meanwhile, Daniel slogs in the gym with his coach, but he battles on, even though the effort is killing him - because what other chance does he have? 

Numbering Danny Glover and Laura Poitras among its executive producers, this is very well connected for a first film. In some ways, it recalls Jack Pettibone Riccobono's The Seventh Fire (2015). But this is a distinctively impressionistic profile that resembles a series of animated photographs and, consequently, serves as both a continuation of Agee and Evans's 1941 tome and a reproachful correction of its blinkered approach to Hale County's parallel communities. This may explain the fact that only one white face appears during the 78-minute running time, as a young woman is annointed with oil on the forehead during the opening church service. 

Yet, while RaMell Ross's selectivity makes a sociological point, this is not an overtly political film. Instead, it leaves the audience to draw their own inferences, as the passing parade of everyday existence flits by with a refreshing lack of judgementalism or sentimentality. Indeed, the picture works best as a mosaic, even though the happenstances that befall Quincy, Daniel and their families provide a narrative focus. 

Serving as his own cameraman and editor, Ross evidently has the eye and soul of an artist. But he is also able to blend compassion with criticism, as he lays bare the plight facing those who were hardly helped by Barack Obama and don't matter a fig to Donald Trump. Depressingly, a similar film could be made in this country about people `making enough money just to go back to work' and it would be fascinating to see how it would be received. 

In November 1972, Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés devised the Acali Experiment to examine the connection between human sexuality and violence. He proposed to set himself and 10 strangers from demographically diverse backgrounds adrift on a raft for 101 days, as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean between the Canary Islands and the Gulf of Mexico. Forty-five years later, the scheme sounds like a pitch for a Reality TV show. But, as Swedish documentarist Marcus Lindeen reveals in The Raft, the voyage made a lasting impression on its participants, as the seven surviving members of the crew recall their adventure aboard a life-size plywood studio replica of the 40 x 24 foot metal craft. 

Reading from the Mexican's writings, Daniel Giménez Cacho reveals that Genovés hatched the idea for the experiment while being held hostage by the terrorists who had hijacked the flight on which he was returning from a conference on violence in Europe and forced it to land in Cuba. Having been a member of Thor Heyerdahl's Ra expeditions, Genovés realised that he could isolate a group of people and monitor their responses in a bid to bring about world peace by identifying the human traits that cause and escalate violence. 

In order to achieve a microcosm of global society, Genovés placed advertisements in newspapers on every continent and, from the responses, selected five women and five men from various racial, cultural and spiritual backgrounds. News of the journey emerged as President Nixon launched a new offensive against North Vietnam and the chosen crew members were convinced that they were going to participate in an important study to help the world return to something approaching sanity and peace. However, Genovés hadn't taken them fully into his confidence. 

Even Swedish skipper Maria Björnstam, who was the first woman in the world to hold a maritime command certificate, had no idea of his ulterior motives when the crew first met up in Las Palmas on 11 May 1973. However, it soon became apparent to French frogwoman Servane Zanotti and American mother of two Fé Seymour that Genovés wanted to make conditions as difficult as possible to heighten emotions and provoke conflict, as the motorless vessel drifted on currents that could be navigated but not mastered. 

As the three women step on to the wooden deck for the first time, they are joined by American housewife Mary Gidley, Israeli doctor Edna Reves, Parisian waitress Rachida Lièvre and Japanese photographer Eisuke Yamaki. Maria puts a harness on Eisuke to show how he would be safe from being swept overboard. But she was almost yanked off Acali as it was being towed into the ocean, as her husband checked her contract with Genovés and took exception to the fact that she had agreed to obey his orders and give herself up mind and body to his dictates. Reflecting on her decision four decades later, she has no regrets and neither does Mary, who was glad to be escaping from an abusive relationship.

Sailing with the blessing of the United Nations, Acali struggled in the first swells and several participants suffered from seasickness. However, this played into Genovés's hands, as he had consciously given the senior roles to the female crew members and he was intrigued to see how the men responded. In addition to Eisuke, they were Uruguayan anthropologist José Maria Montero Perez, Angolan Catholic priest Bernardo Bongo and Charles Antoni, a Greek who ran a restaurant in Cambridge. But they were also unaware that Genovés had deliberately given the women positions of authority to see if they would be better at maintaining order or whether the men would assume superiority and attempt to seize control.

As books were banned, the crew had to amuse themselves with songs and stories and all was well for around three weeks. However, boredom began to creep in and Genovés began to notice the increase in flirting between the women and the long-haired José Maria and between the men and Rachida, who was the youngest member of the group. But he had also invited Fr Bernardo to serve as a moral guardian and he waited to see how long it would take for desire and tedium to gnaw away at any sense of inhibition. Edna and Eisuke smile warmly at each other while recalling their moment of intimacy and she also confesses to sleeping with Charles. But the happily married Fé was not interested in the men and resented Genovés's efforts to push her towards Bernardo, which she considered to be a form of racist goading. 

The survivors remember the embarrassment of being on 24/7 public display and Edna shows how she used to sit facing the sea in the lavatory cage so that nobody could watch her doing her business or see her cry, if she felt like shedding the occasional tear. The women also recall the questionnaires that inquired into every aspect of the experience and Fé notes how Maria had rebelled against Genovés by refusing to offer what she considered to be private information. But he continued to watch their every move and was delighted when José Maria took an axe to a baby shark that had become caught in their nets and he had been intrigued by how readily the others touched and ate its flesh after witnessing the most primitive instincts at work. He also detected the first signs of what sailors call `ocean vertigo', as the monotony of the view began to take its psychological toll.

Only now, however, does Fé feel ready to tell Mary that she had felt the spirits of drowned slaves calling to her as they drifted across the ocean. They hug and Mary reciprocates by admitting that she was drawn towards Genovés, even though she was running away from a similar macho man - her fisherman husband, Cass - who had almost killed her after he had overheard her telling a girlfriend that she wanted a divorce. These revelations remind Servane about the time the rudder got damaged and Genovés blew a gasket after she slipped underwater to fix it after he had almost drowned in a foolhardy attempt to be the boss. 

Around halfway, Genovés became frustrated by the lack of data and called a meeting to share confidential information in order to provoke a reaction. But, while he tried to force Edna and José Maria into exploring her attraction and his antagonism, he failed to grasp the bonds that had formed between the crew members. Yet, when Fé raises the issue of the attempt to persuade her to sleep with Bernardo, Servane and Rachida find it hard to accept that he was being racist and it's only when Fé pushes her case that they concede the point. 

As Acali entered the Caribbean Sea, news reached the crew of the press scandal that had erupted around `the Sex Raft'. Disowned by his university colleagues, Genovés began to fear for his reputation and his future. So, when Storm Brenda approached and Maria urged him to take shelter in the nearest island, he stripped her of the captaincy and placed himself in command in order to start giving orders and pushing buttons to engineer the kind of confrontation he needed for his report.

In a bid to recreate the conditions, Lindeen turns a wind machine on his survivors and asks them to adopt stoical expressions. But he also takes Fé and Maria aside to discuss how women use tears to channel their anger and how men too often mistake this safety value technique as a sign of weakness. Moreover, he brings Fé together with Mary and Eisuke to reminisce about the sense of murderous mutiny that arose towards Genovés after the storm subsided and they were forced to watch Maria withdraw from the group in order to deal with the fury and humiliation she was experiencing. Eisuke explains how he had considered pushing him overboard while they were taking some pictures, while Fé had plotted in her mind to steal some of Edna's drugs to stop his heart before each crew member placed their hands upon a blade to stab him. 

During a dark night of the soul, Genovés realised that the only person who had displayed malignant qualities was himself and he wept for the first time since he was a boy. Furthermore, he panicked when the raft found itself on a collision course with a liner and he withdrew into silent, sickly isolation after Maria resumed command and used flares to alert the ship's captain to their presence. For the remainder of the voyage, Genovés was a passenger, as the scientific part of the expedition was ground to a halt and its subjects found ways to amuse themselves until they reached land at Cozumel on 20 August. However, he later wrote that he wished he could make the crossing alone in a glass-bottomed boat so that he could be entirely at one with Nature. 

On the last morning, Genovés brought everyone together in the bedroom area and thanked them for their efforts. He apologised to Maria for being brusque and revealed that three of the crew had declared the expedition a failure. It's not revealed who they were, as Edna, Servane, Rachida, Maria, Mary and Fé gather around the table on the wooden deck. They discuss the extent to which the trip changed them before Fé points out that Genovés had been so preoccupied with conflict that he had failed to realise that the Acali Experiment had proved that collaboration, respect and love are the only ways to proceed in human relationships. Maria strokes Fé's cheek affectionately, with a moist-eyed smile before they all saunter out of the studio to enjoy what remains of their lives. 

Of course, it's also the people who make this film so compelling. Production designer Simone Grau Roney deserves praise for the splendid set, while Daniel Giménez Cacho delivers Genovés's prose with an acuity that matches Lindeen's astute use of his 16mm footage. But the mood changes whenever the survivors take centre stage. Although what they say is interesting, Rachida, Eisuke and Servane seem somewhat marginalised, while Edna, Mary and Maria make worthwhile contributions in both isolation and in wider discussions. However, Fé stands out at all times, as she accentuates the positive while also speaking frankly about the mistakes made by Genovés (who died in 2013, as Lindeen started filming) as both a scientist and as a human being. 

Rather facile comparisons have been made between the Acali Experiment and shows like Big Brother and Love Island. In fact, the project comes closer to those recalled in documentaries like Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public (2009) and Kyle Patrick Alvarez's The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015). But there's no question that the tabloid coverage of the voyage has left a legacy that the intrepid volunteers go a long way to correcting in the timeliest of #MeToo manners, as time really is up for such toxic masculinity and shameless exploitation. But it should also be up for confrontation and conflict to be considered legitimate means of resolving the world's problems.