Better to have an ungainly surplus of ideas than none at all; that seems to be Richard Ayoade’s philosophy behind The Double, a wild, uneven, but never dull sci-fi black comedy that purports to tackle Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, but is at least as interested in pilfering visual ideas from films gone by while marrying them to Ayoade’s winningly dry comic sensibility.
Virginia Gilbert’s A Long Way from Home, an adaptation of her own short story, explores issues of complacency and desire in old age. Having met at 23, couple Joseph and Brenda (James Fox and Brenda Fricker) have been married for 50 years, living out their retirement in France’s Nimes region. As former British citizens, the locale choice was meant to make things like a never-ending holiday, but the unchanging routine of their life – including eating at the same restaurant every night and repetitive mornings based around crosswords, letter-posting and the lingering listening choice of BBC Radio 4 from back home – now feels mundane and oppressive to Joseph.