Departure

Ultimately, Departure doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before, and what it does do isn't enough for us to overlook that.

This is water colour territory, the palette dominated by blues and greens - beautifully captured by up-and-coming DoP Brian Fawcett - Jools Scott's music subtly affecting and the mood as melancholy as rain running down a window pane.

While theatre director Andrew Steggall's debut feature is beautifully shot, and the landscapes of southern France accentuate the elegiac tone, the drama is overwrought at times.

A little languorous in places, it's nonetheless an interesting reflection on love, loss and being honest, above all with yourself. It also looks lovely thanks to DoP Brian Fawcett.

Delicately handled and beautifully filmed Departure also boasts two deeply felt performances with Juliet Stevenson making the most of an all-too-rare leading role.

Finbar Lynch is affectingly spiky as the all-but-absent husband whose presence feels more like a void, but Stevenson steals the show as the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

[A] sincere, if overly familiar tale of adolescent self-obsession and sexual confusion.

The dynamics are given plenty of time to play out in this delicate, somewhat laboured character drama, which could almost be seen as a hymn to the great British art of not really talking about stuff.

A sensitive, sensual and occasionally amusing portrait of teenaged obsession with a winning turn from Lawther.

Simply very moving.

Steggall must be commended for avoiding any sense of overt theatricalities, which is quite the achievement given the content of the narrative.