Colman stars as a depressed and bullied fisherwoman in medieval England. Fortunately, Peter Dinklage’s basketmaker delivers the answer to her dreams – an Alexander Skarsgård made of wicker

The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.

The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki.

Belittled for his speech and looks, and so short of cash he had to sell his dog, Stallone managed to write and star in one of the greatest boxing movies ever. How does Anthony Ippolito feel about playing his hero?

Fifty years ago this December, cinema’s greatest underdog story hit the screen, a tale about a Philadelphia ham-and-egger who takes the world heavyweight boxing champ all the way to the final bell, losing the fight on a judge’s decision but winning the hearts of a nation. That film, of course, was Rocky. Its creation, famously, was no less remarkable an underdog story – one about an out-of-work character actor with the curious name of Sylvester Stallone who wrote his own boxing movie then managed to convince a studio not only to finance it, but also to cast him in the title role. He then went one further than the character he was playing by earning the top prize: a best picture Oscar.

If you thought, half a century on, Rocky’s punching power – its unerring ability to make heroes out of zeroes – has faded, think again. This, after all, is a movie franchise whose stirring qualities are enough to make thousands of people hurtle up all 72 of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps every year in homage to its plucky pugilist.

Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave put in the performances of their lives in this film originally banned for obscenity that highlights the violence of power

‘I could never be Satan’s boy. I haven’t the humility.” The speaker is Father Urbain Grandier, the 17th-century French priest accused of witchcraft, stylishly played by Oliver Reed, in Ken Russell’s scabrous 1971 classic; it is now restored and rereleased in its complete form after years of censorship. It comes from an era when movies, playing in high-street cinemas, still had the power to shock, to position that shock in the polite cultural mainstream and to compel serious discussion about whether that shock – or, conversely, a ban – was justified.

The Devils is based on a true story of politically directed mass hysteria, adapted by Russell from two literary works: Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s stage play The Devils. Of course it is obscene; obscenity is the glowing sulphurous paint which Russell is applying to the canvas. It is about obscenity – but the obscenity does not reside in the sexualised images of the crucified Christ or naked nuns disporting themselves; it is the violence of authority that is shown to be obscene. The idea of martyrs or heretics being burned at the stake has long been an accepted fact recounted in U-certificate history lessons, and a punishment which survived well into the European enlightenment. Russell shows you what it might actually look like and that is to involve a confrontational assault on good taste.