Not the Ricky Gervais Netflix show, but a 1998 Japanese film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, After Life is set in a kind of waystation where a small team work with the recently deceased to identify the one memory they want to retain in the afterlife. Each Monday, a new batch of deceased people arrive; each Saturday, they sit down with the team to watch the filmed re-creations of their memories, after which they are instantly translated to the next stage of existence, retaining only that single memory.

Set in a run-down institutional building with bare winter trees outside and filmed in murky sepia tones, the film follows one group of deceased people through their week in the facility and their interactions with the counsellors whose job it is to help them identify the one memory that will sum up their life. It's a slow, gentle, thoughtful film, poignant without being sentimental, and I liked it a lot.

Former YouTuber Bo Burnham's debut feature film Eighth Grade follows 14-year-old Kayla through her last week of middle school. Like Burnham, Kayla has a YouTube channel, where she posts peppy life-tips videos for fellow teens, but her following is minuscule and in real life she's awkward, shy and lonely; mortified to be voted "Most Quiet" by her classmates, stammering and feeling out of place when invited to a popular girl's birthday party. It's a touching and funny portrait of teenage life in the era of YouTube, Instagram and active shooter drills at school, and manages to be realistic without giving in to the temptation to be grim. Despite the modern technology, and the fact that Burnham wasn't even born when I was a 14-year-old girl, a lot of it felt very familiar. It's deeply ironic that a film about a 14-year-old has a 15 certificate, making it inaccessible to actual 14-year-olds, but it's definitely worth seeing if you remember being 14.

Carol Morley's latest film, Out of Blue, is a stylish metaphysical murder mystery. It follows detective Mike Hoolihan as she investigates the shooting of astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell, a shooting with many similarities to a series of unsolved killings from nearly 40 years ago. The investigation encompasses dark matter, black holes, Schrödinger's cat and parallel universes, as well as more mundane examinations of evidence and interviews with the dead woman's family and colleagues; Mike, normally unaffected by her cases, finds herself having dizzy spells and fainting as she investigates. There's more to this case than first meets the eyes, and Morley uses repeated phrases and images to lampshade the truism that crime drama is always at least as much about the detective as it is about the crime.

There's a very Twin Peaks feel to Out of Blue, at least if Twin Peaks was set in New Orleans and centred on women rather than men. I liked it a lot, though T was a bit more ambivalent.

This week, we decided to pass on The Aftermath, the big-budget period piece starring Keira Knightley and set in post-war Germany, on the grounds that it looked utterly predictable, and instead took a chance on Jellyfish, a no-budget British drama which is the debut feature film from young director James Gardner.

Set in Margate and shot in a naturalistic style light years away from the polished Hollywood films we've seen recently, Jellyfish is the story of fifteen-year-old Sarah, carer for her mentally ill mother and two younger siblings, desperately trying to keep the family together and find enough money for the electricity meter, berated by teachers and her sleazy boss at a seaside amusement arcade for not being dedicated enough as she tries to balance all the competing demands upon her. It's a bleak situation, and the film is not easy viewing and frequently heartbreaking in a Ken Loachish kind of way, but the misery of Sarah's life is offset by her discovery, prompted by her drama teacher, of a talent for outrageous, tells-it-like-it-is Frankie Boyle style stand-up comedy. Liv Hill (only 16 at the time, in her second professional acting role) delivers an absolutely stunning performance as Sarah and the film conveys the atmosphere of a shabby, down-at-heel out of season seaside resort perfectly. I think it's only getting a limited release, but (with the caveat that it should come with a content warning for non-graphic rape* so anyone who will find that triggery should stay away) if you get the chance I'd really recommend it.

*the woman in front of us walked out at that point

You can say one thing for Kenneth Branagh, and that's that he makes very beautiful films. I thought that about his otherwise rather pointless Murder on the Orient Express, which had lots of gorgeous snowy landscapes and long vistas and one stunning scene clearly inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, and his latest film, All Is True, is similarly chock-full of lovingly-filmed (or possibly lovingly-CGIed) landscapes, beautiful old buildings and lots and lots of foliage; it really is a delight to look at.

The gorgeous visuals go a long way to make up for what is otherwise really quite a slight film about an ageing Shakespeare returning to Stratford-upon-Avon after the Globe Theatre burnt down in 1613, becoming reacquainted with the family he had neglected for so long and finally mourning the death of his son Hamnet in 1596. There are some great performances - Judi Dench predictably wonderful as Anne Hathaway, Kathryn Wilder excellent as Shakespeare's bitter, resentful elder daughter Judith (a Judith Shakespeare who I thought owed at least as much to Virginia Woolf's Judith Shakespeare of the generation before as she did to Shakespeare's historical daughter), and Ian McKellan putting in a stunning cameo as the Earl of Southampton, tarnished golden curls framing an ageing face and giving a hint of the beauty of the young man who was immortalised in Shakespeare's sonnets - but Ben Elton's script seems to be trying so hard not to slip into being Upstart Crow by mistake that it's sometimes a bit po-faced, and the best moments are when Shakespeare is allowed to use his own words instead (the moment where Shakespeare recites Sonnet 29 to Southampton, who mirrors it back to him with subtly changed emphasis, was probably the high point of the film, as well as obviously being a shipper's delight).

It's not dreadful, and was an enjoyable enough way to pass a couple of hours on a February evening, but this was the seventh biopic we've seen so far in 2019: The Year of Biopics and was definitely the least good.

Next week, in a shocking twist of events, we get to see a film that isn't a biopic! (If Beale Street Could Talk.)

We're still managing a film a week as the Oscar hopefuls stack up. This time it was Adam MacKay's Vice, a darkly comic biopic of former US Vice President Dick Cheney. Vice mixes docudrama, vintage news clips, a voiceover narrative with a twist and occasional flights of fantasy (such as the moment when Cheney and his wife switch into mock-Shakespearean iambic pentameter) to build up a portrait of an ambitious man engaged in a ruthless pursuit of power, regardless of the devastating impact his actions have on the wider world (MacKay's film blames Cheney for, among others, the rise of Fox News and ISIS). It's (obviously) not a cheerful film, but it is a very good film and an interesting insight into recent US political history, which I know less about that I probably should (I had had no idea that Donald Rumsfeld had held office under Nixon and Ford before popping up as the stream-of-consciousness soundbite guy in the Bush 2 administration, just for starters). Christian Bale and Amy Adams are both terrific as Cheney and his wife Lynne, and Sam Rockwell does an excellent impression of George W Bush.

January is always a good time of year for films, as the award hopefuls get their main releases in the hopes that they'll still be at the forefront of the judges' minds in a few weeks' time. Come summer we're often hard put to see a film a month, let alone one a week.

I was a bit unsure about Stan & Ollie, not being a Laurel and Hardy fan, but that didn't really matter, as the film is about their relationship rather than their work. It's mainly set during their final tour of Britain in 1953 and is much more melancholy than I was expecting a film about a comedy double-act to be; it's a film about a long-term couple nearing the end of their lives together, and the fact that their relationship is platonic and professional rather than romantic doesn't change that. Steve Coogan and John C Reilly are fantastic in the title roles (I am always surprised by just how good an actor Coogan is, as having known him first and for several years only as Alan Partridge I never think of him as a 'proper' actor), and although most of the focus is on the two men and if it manages to be a Bechdel pass it's a very marginal one there are brilliant supporting turns from Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda as Lucille Hardy and Ida Laurel.

It was probably my least favourite of the three films we've seen this month so far, mainly because there weren't any lesbians the subject-matter was less intrinsically interesting to me, though I'd say it was probably a better film than Colette, if not as beautiful to look at. The Favourite is still hands-down the best, though.

Neither of us is very keen on musicals, so we had never watched Mamma Mia!. Still, when T mentioned tonight that he’d recorded it to watch because it kept coming up in quiz questions, it struck me that on a dank grey January day a film set on a sunny Greek island and full of ABBA songs might be just the ticket. And while it was deeply silly, it was actually quite good fun, and certainly delivered the goods in terms of sunshine and ABBA songs, as well as a surprisingly impressive performance from Meryl Streep, who didn’t appear to be letting the silliness of the film affect her commitment to her role. Also, I think I like musicals better when I already know the songs and don’t have to follow new-to-me music as well as a plot.

T has been away for a couple of weekends recently, leaving me at a loose end, and I've discovered that when I'm on my own on a Saturday going to a lunchtime showing at the Picturehouse is rather a pleasant way to pass the time, especially when preceded by cake at the Jericho Cafe and followed by a walk to Summertown along the canal.

By coincidence, both times I've done this the films have been about the lives of women born in the nineteenth century. A couple of weeks ago I went to see A Quiet Passion, which about Emily Dickinson. I'm not generally a big fan of biopics, and to be honest, this reminded me why; you can't really compress a real life, with all its messiness and lack of narrative coherence, into an hour and a half and make much of a film, so it felt oddly episodic and didn't really seem to know what it was trying to say. I also felt that it didn't really manage to convey the passing of time; the opening scenes feature a younger Emily, and then there's a sequence where the younger versions of the characters are gradually morphed into the older versions, but once that has happened the film spans a period of 25 to 30 years with no sense of any real change or aging. As I often do with films purporting to depict real people or events, I also spent a lot of time wondering whether the filmed sequences actually bore any resemblence to the real life of Emily Dickinson, or were simply Terence Davies' imaginings. (Mainly the latter, I think; he has been quoted as saying he was seeking 'narrative truth' rather than factual accuracy.) It felt rather lacklustre (despite fabulous costumes) and certainly didn't leave me feeling I know any more about Emily Dickinson than I did when I went in.

By contrast, yesterday I went to see Letters from Baghdad, which is about Gertrude Bell. This takes a very different approach; it mainly consists of Bell's own letters, read by Tilda Swinton, over a montage of photographs of and by Bell and old film clips. The only fictionalised element is the inclusion of various 'talking heads' of Bell's family, friends and colleagues, though even in these cases it's clear that least some of the comments are based on letters and diaries. It's clearly the result of painstaking and dedicated archive research; it's a beautiful and interesting film, but it's very definitely a documentary rather than a drama, and I think I much prefer that to films which attempt to dramatise actual events, which always ends up fictionalising them. I'd recommend it highly.

Our Kind Of Traitor is surprisingly upbeat for a John Le Carré adaptation. More interestingly, it's a film directed by a woman which has a couple of shots in the early scenes which basically invert the default male gaze - an initial close-up of a male dancer (Carlos Acosta, in fact) and then a scene with the central couple, played by Naomie Harris and Ewan McGregor, where she gets up, puts on a dressing gown and wanders into out-of-focus background while the camera lingers on his face and naked shoulders/chest.

Other than that, it's mostly solidly competent rather than great, but if you want an intelligent espionage thriller with a reasonable amount of tension, some lovely scenery and no fridging or putting the female characters in danger just because they're female and that will drive the male characters' character arcs, it's not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.