"In a land of myth and a time of magic, the destiny of a great kingdom rests on the shoulders of a young man..."

Time and time again, we've heard those same words introduce each and every episode of Merlin, depicting the eponymous hero’s struggle with destiny and fate in the realms of Camelot. No one can deny that BBC1’s fantasy drama has proved a staggering rendition of the Arthurian legends of old ever since its début in 2008, but equally it would be impossible to deny the weight of expectations fans placed on the fifth and final season of the show this year. Could Julian Jones and his assembled production team ever truly satisfy the needs of this cult hit’s most avid followers?

Certainly, the signs weren't clear-cut in the opening stages of the run. For all its Game Of Thrones-riffing action and introductions of key elements of Arthurian lore (Mordred’s return a point of major interest), the opening two-parter Arthur’s Bane at times felt like a worrying rehash of stories gone by, recycling Kate McGrath’s portrayal of Morgana as a tired pantomime villain with little in the way of empathetic material. Before we knew it, Colin Morgan’s titular protagonist was portrayed in an unrealistic manner, goading Arthur to enforce the murder of a man only the warlock could know posed a greater threat in the long run. Thankfully, these suspicions and their implications on the character of Merlin became more compelling and believable as the season progressed, yet confined here they seemed vastly unfaithful to the legacy of the King’s greatest ally.

From here on out we moved into a number of standalone instalments that were met with mixed results and critical reception. The Death Song Of Uther Pendragon was little more than an unashamed rip-off of the horror movie genre, utilising predictable jump frights and spiritual hauntings to almost comic effect, so unbefitting were they of the show’s prior greatness. Another Sorrow was a slightly better yarn focusing on divisions of the realms surrounding Camelot, yet suffered from feeling like something of a non-event. Thank goodness, then, that The Disir came along to shake things up, placing a greater emphasis on the overall season’s narrative arc by placing Alexander Vlahos at the heart of the week’s mystery. Indeed, when Vlahos did step into the limelight for a fully-fledged performance as the man allegedly destined to kill Arthur, we as viewers could feel the colossal step up in episode quality as a result.

Angel Coulby had her time to shine as a budding British actress here, too: as fans had hoped, with The Dark Tower Coulby’s performing talents were showcased in great measure, with Gwen put to devastating psychological torture thanks to the schemes and manipulations of Morgana. Here, McGrath did come into her own, providing an emotive performance that was worlds apart from her character’s previous actions, and from here on out McGrath set a brilliant precedent which she did not fail to meet and match in the weeks that followed. The fall of Elyan in this sixth episode came as an unexpected surprise, and once again heightened the sense that no regular character was truly safe as the horns of war rang and the battle of Camlann beckoned.

After that successfully creepy romp, though, the season moved into what was by far its greatest failure. We've seen possessed opera singers, gaseous trolls and poorly implemented special effects aplenty in the five years that Merlin has graced our screens, yet few elements of the show have seemed quite as misjudged as the ill-fated 'Puppet Queen' trilogy. A Lesson In Vengeance, The Hollow Queen and With All My Heart were decent standalone instalments, yet only really served to have us question just why if the show’s producers knew this season would be their last, they did not trim the episode count down to a more feasible ten whereby they would not have to stretch out the narrative arc so much. By the time Colin Morgan had inhabited the guise of a female version of Merlin, it’s fair to say that the comedy of this tired trio of episodes had long worn off, regardless of the gravity and foreboding of ‘her’ departing words to the King.

The solution to this mid-season crisis? The tenth episode of the run, which carried a number of surprises and memorable moments. The Kindness Of Strangers presented an ambiguous Druid ally (portrayed wonderfully by Sorcha Cusack) who held a few choice words of wisdom for Merlin regarding his destiny, and while there was little of real substance to drive the season’s arc forward, it was a strong emotive tale. If fans needed an instance in which they could definitively assure the sceptics that this compelling series was worth a watch, then this adventure was definitely it- and the good times didn't end there...

Whenever a show wraps up, there are naturally going to be strengths and weaknesses involved within its final trilogy of episodes. Thankfully, for the most part The Drawing Of The Dark and The Diamond Of The Day didn't fail to impress, providing amongst Merlin’s most captivating performances yet. Colin Morgan and Bradley James mastered their roles as two of England’s most famous characters of lore, conflicted by the turn of Mordred (brought across brilliantly by Vlahos), then forced to separate in the midst of war, only to find themselves inevitably joined together again as the king faced his impending demise. The final moments we witnessed between these two iconic legendary incarnations were both touching and fan-pleasing, harking back to their first meeting and reversing the roles with the much-needed revelation of the magical secret that’s spurred the show on these past five years.

It’s probably fair to say that it was with the season finale The Diamond Of The Day Part 2 where things faltered just a little. It was still a relatively strong episode, packing many of the shocking twists that have made the programme such a joy to watch, yet its conclusion felt somewhat rushed. Character arcs weren’t always given a proper resolution (how will Gwen continue the line of succession, for instance?), and the supposedly innovative throw-forward to modern day England for a glimpse of Merlin’s eternal wait for the resurrection of Arthur’s legacy didn't quite hit the mark in the way it was intended. Even for a series that’s thrived on throwing in surprising twists on the lore of old, for me as a viewer this felt like a step too far, one attempt too many to play on our expectations. Then again, you’d have to wonder how the writers could ever have done things differently in terms of the climax without seeming over-indulgent or nostalgic.

Where does that leave the fifth and final season of Merlin, then? In short, while there are a good few missteps along the way, and it’s hard not to wonder why the episode count was trimmed down, it’s still a relatively consistent run. I wouldn't quite place it up with the best of 2012’s offerings- Sherlock Series Two and Doctor Who Series Seven Part One the greatest of Britain’s roster- yet there was still plenty enough reason to follow the show for its final twelve weeks. In a time of masses watching reality rubbish and a land of soap domination, it has been refreshing to see an indie drama rise up the ranks with such vigour and confidence over the course of half a decade, and with the broadcast of Merlin: The Diamond Of The Day Part 2, it's clear that BBC1's greatest fantasy saga has earned its place among the best of Britain's televisual history books.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK release of the film.

Released in 2001, Yann Martel’s modern fable Life of Pi was a literary hit, winning the Man Booker Prize and the hearts of readers worldwide. It was, however, deemed by many impossible to translate to the screen. How could the sense of spirituality and adventure be brought to cinema? How could a story set almost entirely on a small lifeboat be made watchable? How would they get the tiger to do all that without eating the crew?

Step in Ang Lee, a talented director whose filmography, encompassing Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Hulk, can only be described as ‘eclectic’.

Sticking close to the novel, Lee frames the story through a visit to a middle aged Indian man named Pi (established Bollywood lead Irrfan Khan) by a writer (Rafe Spall, who’s now broken free of being merely "Timothy’s son" and has a pretty good career going for himself). The writer has been told that Pi has a story which will make him believe in God. "I cannot tell you what to believe," says Pi, "I can only tell you my story."

And so Pi embarks on telling his eponymous life, and it truly is a fantastical life. Raised in a zoo in Pondicherry, Pi was a spiritually greedy child, wanting to follow all the religions and coming into conflict with his scientifically minded father when he tried to see emotion in the eyes of tiger Richard Parker (named through a "clerical error"). Pi’s family are forced to move the zoo to Canada when faced with financial difficulties, but their ship is hit by a storm and Pi finds himself stranded in a lifeboat with an angry hyena, an unhappy orang-utan, an injured zebra, and his old acquaintance Richard Parker. It’s no big spoiler to say that three out of four of these animals don’t last long and the heart of the story is Pi’s relationship with Richard Parker as the two drift the Pacific together.

What keeps the film going during this long period of Pi’s isolation is the two main performances and the beautiful look of the film. Though newcomer Suraj Sharma, as the younger Pi, hasn’t yet mastered quieter, more reflective emotion, in the more active sequences he energetically captures the anger, the confusion, and finally, the determination that Pi goes through on his journey. As Richard Parker, and as a whole host of other creatures, the CGI in the film is remarkable. The film has a magical realist feel; nothing ever looks out of place, and Claudio Miranda’s cinematography brings the vast ocean to life with a series of gorgeous tableaux. Shots such as a bird’s eye view of the lifeboat as a whale passes below it were obviously devised with 3D in mind, not to mention the tiger jumping at the screen and the enormous horde of flying fish. For fans of 3D, it’s an experience to be immersed in, though for sceptics, it’s still an amazing looking film in two dimensions. I have to go off track slightly and mention the title sequence, a journey through the Indian zoo, bringing in flamingos, a hippo, one of those monkeys with the funny noses, and much more. The sequence is beautifully shot, with vibrant, lush colouring, and sums up the relaxed, spiritual ethos of the film.

This is a mindset that continues through Pi’s time on the boat, as, like at several points in his childhood, he takes the opportunity to connect with God. As an atheist, I would have personally liked a little less rumination on the nature of God and a little less of Pi’s stern belief that, whenever something remotely fortuitous happens, he is being saved by a divine being, but it is worth noting that the film does counter this with the scepticism of the writer and of Pi’s father. Also worth noting is the way the film deals with Pi’s relationship with nature – despite what you may foresee from Pi’s childhood experience with Richard Parker, the human-tiger relationship is never overly sentimentalised; Richard Parker is clearly a dangerous creature, there’s always a conflict going on, and Pi’s side of the relationship is most definitely concerned with not getting eaten. The tiger is vicious and entirely believable as a tiger, but through the careful storytelling and the way it highlights the beauty within that vicious nature, we end up caring for it anyway.

In the end, that’s what Life of Pi is about – storytelling. Pi’s story is a fable told through his recounting to the writer and, though I don’t want to give anything away, the final part of this framing dialogue rounds off the story in a way which made me reassess the rest of the film and, in fact, reduced some of my issues with the overly spiritual tone of the piece. It’s an intriguing ending which will make you question the nature of storytelling.

Life of Pi, to sum up, can be very spiritual at times, which may not be to some tastes, and, perhaps contrary to that, it ‘s not exactly cheery in its depiction of nature, but it makes that roughness of the world into a visually stunning film with a sad, iconic and elegantly told story at heart. It’s a treat for the senses and one to get you thinking.

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This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK preview of the episode.

Whitby Davison Productions were once one of the standard bearers of period television drama in Britain, producing several series of Bramwell for ITV via Carlton. This success was followed by the less well-remembered and less admired Servantsfor the BBC. After almost a decade the partnership of Harriet Davison and Tim Whitby return to their old stamping ground of historical drama with a medical subject. With them is Lucy Gannon, still a respected television writer and once the toast of ITV for her 1990s hit series Soldier Soldier, Peak Practice and the aforementioned Bramwell, but whose first play, Keeping Tom Nice, concerned the suicide of a father of a disabled son. The Best of Men returns Lucy Gannon to the subject of disability with the tale of Ludwig Guttmann, a refugee Jewish German neuroscientist from Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), who after five years relative inactivity in Oxford was returned to active hospital life in 1944 as founding director of the National Spinal Injuries Unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, leading (among much else) to the foundation of what would become the Paralympics.

The BBC had chosen to shape much of the July television schedule around the build-up to the 2012 Olympics, where they were the only traditional broadcaster to have the rights to show the games in the United Kingdom. Bert and Dickie (reviewed on this site by Matt Hills) was an example of this. With The Best of Men, the BBC now join the build-up to the Paralympics, where they only have sound broadcasting rights. By contributing this play, the BBC are arguably demonstrating that they remain at the centre of national cultural life and have responsibilities even towards events where they are not the sole intermediary between the games and the remote public.

National cultural life is indeed important to this play - and I use the term play rather than film because while cinematic in picture grain and use of music the staging and careful use of locations points to its heritage in television drama - because it depicts the struggle of its protagonist Ludwig Guttmann to make both the authorities and wider society accept that his patients are not “moribund incurables”, as dialogue has it, but potentially active and useful men, who can be put to work. Sport is both an end in itself and a means to an end. In the words of the historical Ludwig Guttmann himself, as quoted on the website of the British Paralympic Association: "The aims of sport for the disabled, as well as the non-disabled, are to develop mental activity, self-confidence, self-discipline, a competitive spirit and comradeship." More prosaically, as The Best of Men's Guttmann says, it is the right of his patients to have the same problems as everyone else, to pay rent and taxes, and have more besides, and not to be treated as “smiling, dependent children.”

The build-up to the London Paralympics has seen a determined attempt to make Ludwig Guttmann a more widely-recognised historical figure. A statue of Guttmann was unveiled at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in June. One of the Olympic mascots, Mandeville, is named after Stoke Mandeville to recognise its role as the birthplace of the Paralympics. A range of publications have run stories about Guttmann, inspired by this play and by the imminent Paralympics. The challenge The Best of Men faces is to have the self-confidence and self-discipline to assert its own identity and not simply be a smiling trailer.

In the halcyon days of studio drama, this topic might have inspired a six-part serial, but nowardays budgets are tight and the filmic model is preferred. The result is a vastly simplified narrative which condenses the events of four years into ninety minutes and adopts a lot of familiar dramatic devices while still allowing room for some subtlety. In this, there are echoes of the personality of the historical Guttmann himself - this play's Guttmann refers in detail to his past in Germany and the unfolding only once, when he needs to assert his authority over the truculent physical training instructor Quartermaster Hill ('Q', of course). Even at home he insists to his wife (an unrecognisable Tracey-Ann Oberman, whose blousy screen persona from EastEnders and Doctor Who days is absent here) that even endearments must be in English. Guttman's difficulties in adapting to wartime Britain are more often shown in his discreet discarding of Sister Edwards's sugary tea (despite the ration?) or the stiffness with which he sits outside the pub, clutching a pint of bitter alongside Q. The Britain of the mid-1940s is depicted as unaware of the mass murder of the Jewish population or at least of the implications of official anti-Semitism for the futures of Germany and the “bloody Kraut” Guttmann. The contrast with the knowledge of the viewers of 2012, for whom the Holocaust is part of education and perhaps the defining fact of the Second World War, is an irony pressed gently.

Eddie Marsan's portrayal of Guttmann is as measured and determined as the man himself might have been, emphasising a persistence which knows when to be quiet and when to be loud, and which never loses a sense of what it means to be a refugee. The patients and staff at the spinal unit become Guttman's new extended family, addressing him as 'Poppa', and there are a few glimpses of how his domestic life suffers but remains sustaining.

The two other principal male characters are patients. The inclusion of Rob Brydon is a recognisable personality name might be interpreted as casting as marketing, but this is a channelling rather than a repeat of one of Brydon's comic turns. Brydon's Wyn Bowen is himself a performer - “the mighty sausage dog of the valleys” - now emasculated and consoling himself with cynical jibes and doses of sedative. His rediscovery of a sex life during his weekend at home in Port Talbot is treated lightly - the details of negotiation between husband and wife are never discussed - but its importance is in communicating that one can be a whole person with paraplegia.

The other male lead is George Mackay as William Heath. Twenty-year-old William, paralysed on his second day with his regiment, is the audience's entry point to life in the spinal unit. His dream of dancing on a hilltop with his girlfriend Ruth, intercut with his arrival at Stoke Mandeville in a sand-filled 'coffin' and with Guttmann's walk into his ward for the first time, support the opening credits. The transformation of his expectations are also those of wider society; his father, grateful for his place as a groundsman at a leading public school which has seen his son educated for free alongside the sons of the nobility, learns slowly and with resistance that he has no need to mourn his son, or treat him as a perpetual child. To recall the title of Lucy Gannon's first play, William is determined that he will not be kept nice.

Lucy Gannon's script chooses to portray Ludwig Guttmann as a plucky individualist, battling alone to overturn decisions made by a backward-looking collective. His antagonists are a general who takes the line of least resistance to overwhelming forces and a surgeon who prefers to immobilise spinal patients and let them die out of sight. The latter character, Dr Cowan, is too broad a caricature of a pompous reactionary and is associated with some clumsy signposting, as when one of his students points out an obvious gag about surgical shock. Though this portrayal undermines the barely-disguised anti-Semitism which Cowan expresses, it also weakens its portrayal and is one of the less-successful aspects of the production.

Producer Hannah Davison wrote in Broadcast that Lucy Gannon is averse to research. It's unsurprising that what emerges is impressionistic, but Gannon was employed for her authorial voice, not as a historian. The closing compilation of newsreel footage about the evolution of the Stoke Mandeville Games into the Paralympics shows that there were women participants from an early stage, but as the title indicates this play considers men, male coping methods, male attitudes to adulthood and sex. While histories of the National Spinal Injuries Unit (never named as such here) and the Paralympics emphasise the role of Joan Scruton, Guttmann's assistant and secretary, she is not included in this fictionalisation of events. Women are paralleled with being able-bodied; in his imagination, William caresses Ruth's legs. Sometimes the drama concerns the education of men away from objectification and towards a more subtle and sophisticated awareness of desire, feeling and identity, which Guttmann explicitly associates with women. This isn't the entirety of Gannon's viewpoint: Sister Edwards and her unqualified assistant Nurse Carr begin as a pessimistic Greek chorus waiting for Guttmann to give in and accept that his methods are hopeless and will only cause distress to patients and staff alike, but become disciples, proclaiming Guttmann's good news of rehabilitation through physical fitness, as well as becoming better people. With not much to work with, Niamh Cusack convincingly displays the trauma Sister Edwards experiences as she learns to communicate with her disabled charges, rather than just sedate them.

The Best of Men uses familiar methods to tell a story which it expects to be unfamiliar to its audience. If it's a wine (not, perhaps, Wyn's wife's rhubarb) it leaves hints of Potter and Rudkin on the palate. Primarily, though, it is a Gannon-authored piece, with heroes from unextraordinary backgrounds, looking forward to their prefabs, realising that conforming to the expectations of the inter-war settlement is a wrong turn, learning that they can be men and Britons still even when the outward signs of masculinity and national strength have been taken from them. Ludwig Guttmann becomes not just the advocate of a revolution in the treatment of spinal injury patients, but the prophet of a steadily more inclusive Britain and, through the Stoke Mandeville Games and the Paralympics, the world. History in broad strokes it may be, but it is certainly effective as a contribution to a national refoundation myth, and making the forthcoming Paralympics central to that myth, rather than marginalised. That the final compilation of news footage and photographs depicting the development of the Paralympics detracts slightly from the whole illustrates that The Best of Men has enough upper body strength to live on its own terms.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK preview of the episode. 

Perfectly timed to surf, or even scull, a wave of Olympic hype comes this feelgood drama celebrating real-life British achievements in the “austerity games” of 1948, all rationing and budgetary belt-tightening. From Chris Cleave’s compelling novel Gold to Walford’s leg of the torch relay, the Olympics has already found a contemporary home in popular fiction and soapland. It’s only fair that period drama should get a look-in.

Bert & Dickie is a curious mix of politicians sitting in stately rooms and sportsmen slugging it out on the river. The script can’t resist taking a few wry pot shots at commercialisation and sponsorship ("I can see it catching on") as well as gently mocking Olympic 'events' like poetry and etching. Some of my favourite sequences feature a TV salesroom transformed into the site of impromptu, amateur commentary delivered to a crowd of television-less punters; a far cry from the global media event confronting us today.

Director David Blair has previously worked with Christopher Eccleston on Accused, and David Tennant on Takin’ Over the Asylum. Here he bags another Doctor as his leading man, with Matt Smith putting in a spirited, subtle performance as sculler Bert Bushnell (displaying just as much interest in his headwear as he often does in Doctor Who). Bert and Dickie are thrown together as part of “Team GB ’48”, their partnership aimed at maximizing medal-winning possibilities. Whereas Bert doesn’t hail from a world of upper class privilege, Dickie seems born to Henley life, with his father – played capably by Geoffrey Palmer – being a well-established figure in the milieu of rowing clubs, blazers, and sporting the right tie. Writer William Ivory focuses on clunky class conflict, with dialogue that sometimes doesn't make it to the winner’s podium. You just know that “chip”, “shoulder”, and “silver spoon” are guaranteed to turn up before too long.

Sam Hoare puts in a strong showing as Dickie Burnell, and there’s a pleasing symmetry in the way that both Bert and Dickie confide in each other’s Dad. Dramas about the Olympics seem fated to follow a certain structure: shadowing athletes through the build-up, the heats, and on into the final-as-finale. Olympic competition provides a dramatic shape that’s too strong to resist, perhaps, but Bert & Dickie makes no real effort to innovate on this front. It has a lot of fun pointing up parallels and differences in relation to London 2012, though. Bert and Dickie appear to be pretty much in charge of their own strategy, seemingly inventing what they’re doing as they go along, whereas the infinitely more professionalized approach of today suggests that a fuller support team would be on hand. And their kit is home-made, as (historical factoid alert!) government funding doesn’t stretch to supplying shorts to male athletes, just official Olympic Y-fronts. Imagine a London 2012 where underpants were the only official garment… no corporate-badged sportswear and logo-smeared t-shirts. The curious thing about this drama is that it makes 1948 seem more appealing, and somehow more honourable, than various branding debacles dominating recent headlines.

Tugging at the heartstrings, Bert & Dickie joyfully implies that even at times of great hardship and struggle, the country can join together via rituals of sporting prowess, class differences magically forgotten. It’s a rather hazy, nostalgia-fuelled approach to dramatizing the Olympics, but then this is a primetime BBC1 vision through-and-through, not a BBC2 satire of jubilympic incompetence, or a BBC4-style subversion of Olympic ideals. Instead, Bert & Dickie is a sharply tailored crowd-pleaser. Despite ringing out a rather jingoistic tone, there are some touching moments when Bert befriends an American rower who would’ve been his rival. Despite that, other nationalities don’t get much screen time or dramatic development – even the feared sculling Danes aren’t brought alive as characters – and things remain resolutely anglo-american.

Alexandra Moen appears in a supporting role as Dickie’s wife, but on the whole this is a story of fathers and sons, (male) politicians and athletes. Female roles are underdeveloped and dramatically marginal, restricted to supportive girlfriends who make tripe and onion sandwiches – “the stuff of champions!” – and mothers whose nerves can’t take the stress of competition. Despite the real-life austerity games featuring Dutch “flying housewife” Fanny Blankers-Koen, you’re given little sense of female Olympic achievements here. Bert & Dickie is an apt title, emphasising how much this is purely a story of men and boys.

Blair’s taut direction gives things a constant emotional pull. The decision to focus on Smith and Hoare in tight close-up as they scull for glory is a particularly inspired moment; exertion’s etched on their faces as they move out of focus and into the blur of Olympic legend. Elsewhere Blair makes effective use of underwater camera (strangely reminiscent of The Curse of Fenric, but perhaps that’s just me), and puts production value firmly on screen via picture-postcard locations. This is typically celebratory stuff with just a slight undercurrent of 2012 critique, nonetheless stressing cross-class togetherness in tough times. “We’re all in it together” could almost be the tagline, with Bushnell and Burnell as poster boys for national unity... both then and now. I imagine Bert & Dickie will have been enjoyed by Dave and Georgie, despite the way it slyly sides with old-fashioned amateurism over today’s corporate spectacle.

Sometimes difficult viewing, Clone poses a disturbing question: what becomes of the family and self-identity when human cloning is an everyday, ordinary possibility? Given a 15 certificate in the UK and an 18 certificate in Ireland, this is very much a thoughtful, grown-up treatment of an otherwise generic SF idea. The world depicted in Clone is one where “copies” are discriminated against and treated as unnatural, and where “artificial incest” occurs if a woman gives birth to a perfect genetic copy of her own mother. One of the intriguing things about Benedek Fliegauf's script is that it reveals its altered, science-fictional world mainly by implication, in brief details and glimpses of the social order. We see paperwork from the Department of Genetic Replication, but its existence otherwise remains murky and unexplored. “Copies” are spoken about by children and by a mothers' group, but we gain no wider sense of what it might mean to be a copy. There is also little or no iconography of science fiction on show here: this film could just as well be a piece of social realism which happens to be set in a world radically unlike our own.

We follow the two lead characters, Tommy and Rebecca, from their childhood meeting through to their adult reunion. When Tommy (Matt Smith) is tragically killed, Rebecca (Eva Green) decides that she wants to bring him back, carrying and giving birth to his genetic replica. Curiously, while young 'Tommy 2' has time to grow up into Matt Smith all over again, the character of Rebecca barely seems to age across the same chunk of story. Perhaps copies age at a different rate to “originals”, but if so, this tangled timeline isn't quite made clear.

Fliegauf is the director as well as writer, and his visual style is rather languid, if not sometimes glacial. Clone couldn't really be described as a thriller; it runs at one pace – slowly – making repeated use of shots that are held for an extended length of time, as well as panoramic long shots where characters are dwarfed by the landscape around them. The latter makes for a self-consciously "beautiful" movie, and one where we're insistently reminded of the laws and the presence of nature. However, the former directorial choice is slightly more puzzling, since it means that Clone typically lacks any sense of urgency. For example, when Rebecca witnesses Tommy 1's death, we are shown Eva Green's reaction in a couple of drawn-out, unflinching shots that stress her real-time acting. But there's no gear change, no increased pace in editing and camerawork to indicate the tumult of events. And given that other sequences around this are also gently paced, there isn't enough sense of contrast and heightened drama at such a key moment. Instead, the film seems of a piece; consistently ponderous and detached in tone rather than visceral and vital.

Fliegauf also enjoys repeated, mirrored motifs: young Rebecca submerges her head under the bathwater, and later we see adult Rebecca emerge from seemingly the same bathwater. Young Tommy pulls his feet under the bedcovers; adult Tommy is then revealed to be in bed. Along with these playful transitions, a couple of key images linger in the memory, perfectly capturing the theme of a refusal to let go. Young Rebecca keeps a half-eaten, browning, shrivelled pear from her first meeting with Tommy, while Tommy preserves the pet snail in a matchbox that he'd intended to give to his sweetheart all those years ago.

Matt Smith, in particular, turns in an outstanding performance, and it's hard not to share Tommy 2's dismay and disorientation at the story's eventual conclusion. Smith also engages in a wonderful bit of actorly business involving a salt shaker at one point, and there are many moments of childlike wonder and eccentricity that resonate with his reading of the eleventh Doctor. Of course, this is a role which isn't limited by the rules and regulations of Doctor Who, so as well as seeing Smith run naked into the sea, he also features in a sex scene with Eva Green – playing his social but not genetic mother – that asks the viewer to consider whether they understand this act as incest. Conceptually challenging, Clone is not always easily enjoyable, but it is genuinely thought-provoking in a way that perhaps too few contemporary films are.

Excellent actresses such as Lesley Manville and Hannah Murray are given relatively little to do, as it is the Rebecca-Tommy relationship which lies at the heart of Clone. And despite the fact that this title is being heavily sold via Matt Smith's involvement – it is his face which dominates the DVD/Blu-ray cover – he is not on-screen for long periods of the movie. In his absence, child actors cast by Fliegauf are consistently strong, especially Tristan Christopher as the young Tommy. Along with emphasizing Matt Smith's presence in its marketing, this film has also been retitled for sell-through release – shifting from Womb to Clone – presumably after it was felt that a conventional SF title would sell better to the intended audience. But given the importance of Rebecca's decision to give birth to her beloved, I think it is a very real shame that Arrow Films have fought shy of retaining the original title. Changing it somehow implies that there is something culturally unacceptable about naming the film after a basic, biological part of human reproduction without which none of us would be here at all. Instead, Clone is a far safer option, and it is ironic that a film bravely tackling awkward material has been lumbered with a bland title sharing none of its bravery, as if Fliegauf's movie has been replicated as a copy of itself.