Richard Curtis may have retired from making films, but he wrote the script for Danny Boyle's new film Yesterday, and it is basically like the most Richard Curtisy Richard Curtis film ever. By which I mean that, like pretty much every other film Curtis ever made, it's the story of a vaguely useless and slightly scruffy but basically decent bloke who spends a lot of time not realising that his gorgeous female friend is madly in love with him and then more time failing to find the words to tell her that he's madly in love with her too, but somehow still manages to end up with her, probably with the help of his completely useless and very scruffy best friend, whose purpose in the film is about 50% comic relief and 50% actually making the hero look good by comparison.

Yesterday's vaguely useless and slightly scruffy but basic decent bloke is Himesh Patel's Jack Malik, an aspiring musician who is on the verge of chucking it all to return to teaching when, after a road accident which takes place during a 12-second electrical blackout affecting the entire planet, he wakes up to find that he is the only person who remembers the Beatles (and also Coke and cigarettes). Passing off the Fab Four's songs as his own, Jack's musical career rapidly takes off, from playing local pubs to an appearance on local TV, to being drafted in to support Ed Sheeran at short notice and signing a deal with a major label which makes him the biggest star in the world, even though this means no longer being managed by the gorgeous female friend who's madly in love with him (in this case, Lily James's Ellie).

It's not a deep or thoughtful film. It doesn't really examine the full ramifications of the sudden absence of the Beatles from the world (it appears that Oasis also no longer exist, but Coldplay do, and the rest of the course of musical history is basically unchanged) or the enthusiastic reception of 1960s songs in 2019 (in one scene, Jack supports Ed Sheeran in Moscow and (obviously) comes out with 'Back in the USSR', which goes down a storm despite its reference to a country which ceased to exist around the time Jack was born; something which is lampshaded by Sheeran, but which still doesn't make much sense). There is one surprisingly poignant scene which, for me at least, gave the whole thing a slightly bittersweet cast, but overall it's a basically a light, fluffy romcom with some fabulous songs, and Patel sings them well.

Booksmart is the directorial debut from actor Olivia Wilde. Written by an all-female team, it follows friends Molly and Amy on their last day of high school. Molly and Amy are classic overachievers, having chosen to spend their high school years working hard instead of partying with their classmate so they can get into good colleges. There's only one problem: the kids who partied got into good colleges too, and Molly and Amy decide that spending their final night of high school partying is the only way to avoid feeling like they've wasted the last four years.

This is a sparky, sassy comedy, mostly reliant on witty dialogue for its laughs (though there is some gross-out humour and a small amount of embarassment humour, though much less than you might expect). It's also really heartwarming and uplifting, particularly in the way that it rejects the high school comedy trope of conflict between the different tribes - jocks, nerds, skaters, stoners - in favour of a more subtle approach which sees the members of the graduating class realising that there is more binding them together than dividing them. Its cast of young characters is both racially diverse and inclusive in terms of sexuality (Amy's lesbianism is accepted by her classmates even when her nerdiness isn't, and there are other queer characters among the background cast). Visually and aurally, it has a vivid, immediate, in-your-face quality which mirrors the intensity of teenage experience. I liked it a lot, though it clearly wasn't to everyone's taste as two women seated along from us walked out about half an hour in.

Woman at War is an Icelandic comedy in the same dark vein as Rams and Under the Tree. It centres on Halla, a middle-aged choir director who leads a secret double life as "The Mountain Woman", an eco-terrorist focused on disrupting industrial production with the aim of discouraging foreign industrial investment. Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir plays a double lead as Halla, alternating cycling through Reykjavík, conducting choir rehearsals and discussing adopting a Ukrainian orphan with running across mountains, toppling electricity pylons and evading pursuit inside a glacier, and her twin sister Àsa, a hippieish yoga teacher. I have to say that, for me, one of the great delights of this film was seeing so much screen time given to a woman in her 40s who spends a lot of the time in a lopapeysa and hiking boots and who, when depicted changing after swimming, is pulling on sensible big pants, though the Icelandic scenery is also stunning and, appropriately given the eco-conscious message of the film, is allowed to play a starring role. Director Benedikt Erlingsson doesn't allow the humour of the film to get in the way of ramping up the tension as the forces of law and order close in on Halla, and presents an absorbing portrait of an Iceland that isn't quite the liberal paradise many of us like to think it is (apart from the government's pandering to foreign industrial investors and the liberal use of roadblocks and surveillance to track down the saboteur, the hapless black tourist who keeps being arrested on suspicion with very litte evidence makes a serious point underneath the comedy). The cinematography is fantastic, and while the device of having the soundtrack performed by on-screen musicians seemed rather odd at first (especially as their first appearance is on a remote moss-covered mountainside) but actually worked really well (and I liked the music a lot too).

Neil Jordan's new film, Greta, is a classic stalker thriller. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Frances, a Bostonian innocent in New York City whose well-meaning act of returning a bag found on the subway to its owner ("In New York, if you find a bag you call the bomb squad!" chides her more worldly-wise flatmate) lets her in for more than she bargains for as Isabelle Huppert's Greta proves not to be the delighful new friend she appears to be. Nothing in the plot is really going to come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the stalker genre, and the jumps are all well-signposted by music and atmosphere, but they're jumpy nonetheless, and while if I'm honest it tended a bit too much towards horror for me it was entertaining enough (and probably better than the alternative, Red Joan, which I suspect would be rather formulaic and which reviews suggest suffers from Not Enough Judi Dench).

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.

I took today and Friday off to decompress before our holiday next week (a good idea, I think; I wouldn't have fancied driving 200 miles in the state of exhaustion I've been in most Saturday mornings lately) and today we decided to spend the afternoon at the cinema, watching two films with lunch at the Jericho Cafe in between.

The Kindergarten Teacher stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lisa, the eponymous teacher; middle-aged, bored in her marriage, disappointed at her children's life choices, taking evening classes in poetry despite an obvious lack of talent. When she discovers that one of the children in her class appears to have a talent for poetry, her determination to foster that talent rapidly becomes an obsession. It's an interesting, rather disturbing film, and Gyllenhaal is terrific as the gradually unravelling Lisa.

Asghar Farhadi's Everybody Knows stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem as former lovers Laura and Paco, long since separated and married to other people, but thrown back together when Laura returns to their home town for her sister's wedding and her teenage daughter is kidnapped. The kidnap plot isn't really the point, here; this is a drama about the unspoken things in families that somehow, still, "everybody knows", and the way old resentments can simmer under the surface for decades and bubble up again in times of trouble. I'm glad we saw this one second, as it's much the better film; really good ensemble performances, interesting and rounded charaterisation, and beautifully shot in a rather bleak and wintery Spain.

Back to biopics again this week with On The Basis Of Sex, starring Felicity Jones (once best known as Emma Grundy from The Archers) as the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, following her from her first days at Harvard Law School as part of one of the earliest cohorts of women admitted to study, through her years post-graduation teaching law at Rutgers having been unable to find a job practicing law to the tax case which gave her her first victory in her war against sex discrimination.

The film does a good job of depicting the everyday sexism of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, with even progressive men unthinkingly discriminating against women, and I also really liked the way it showed Ginsburg's husband Martin's unwavering support and devotion rather than ever hinting at marital discord resulting from Ginsburg's dedication to the fight for equal rights. I was less happy at the choice to derive narrative tension from depicting Ginsburg as committed, passionate, knowledgable but struggling to present her case to the court and flustered by the judges' questions, right up until the final moment where she stands up, fired with righteousness, to make her big speech; I wished she'd been able to be capable all the way through. To be honest, the film only came alive at the very end, when Jones climbs the steps of the Supreme Court only to be replaced by the real Ginsburg at the top, accompanied by recordings of her speeches. That sent shivers down my spine, but the fictionalised version mostly left me cold.

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.