Back to Black review: Amy Winehouse biopic too melodramatic to hit the high notes

Indeed, the film’s cast applies delicacy and professionalism to a near-impossible task. Everyone brings their A-game; nobody is out to cause offence. The problems, however, are on the page, and Matt Greenhalgh’s silly, shallow screenplay is loaded with clumsy exposition and irksome rock-flick cliches.

Marisa Abela is our Amy, a charismatic jazz enthusiast who sets the world alight with her voice. The early years are covered in a flash. There is the obligatory family singalong where a young Winehouse delights her nearest and dearest over wine and birthday cake. Grandmother ­Cynthia (Lesley Manville) is proud as punch; dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) joins her for a duet.

Before we know it, Amy is signed to Island Records where she inevitably disappoints the various movers and shakers who’d like to control her. “I ain’t no Spice Girl,” she tells them, and that’s the end of that.

Alas, Amy is secretly struggling with an eating disorder, and her drinking is becoming a problem. It all comes to a head after she meets her future husband: a cocky troublemaker named Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack ­O’Connell). Chaos ensues.

Taylor-Johnson’s film works hard to depict the grisly truths of drug addiction and the horrid, inhumane behaviour of the paparazzi who stalked and harassed Winehouse.

It’s perhaps less successful at providing a meaningful portrait of her talent, and Back to Black offers no real sense of the singer’s accomplishments, and what they meant to her.

As such, it’s a little weightless, a tad rushed. Greenhalgh’s dialogue is too showy, too melodramatic, and there are times when Back to Black walks and talks like a shouty EastEnders special.

Full marks to its leading woman: Abela’s performance is more of an impersonation, but it’s a good one, and it deserves a stronger film. Will this one annoy viewers? Probably. Is it the disaster many expected? Not quite. It’s all just a bit pointless, really.

2.5 stars

The Teachers’ Lounge In cinemas; Cert 12A

An idealistic schoolteacher loses her way and, indeed, her students’ trust in this compelling, Oscar-nominated feature from German director Ilker Catak.

The staff at Carla Nowak’s new school have had enough: someone’s been stealing cash from the teachers’ lounge, and everyone blames the kids. Not Ms Nowak (Leonie Benesch), who decides the best way to catch the culprit is to secretly record them.

An ingeniously plotted thriller with a twist, Catak’s film rarely leaves the school building but it has more to say about the world we live in than most of the films I’ve seen this year. Essential viewing.

Four stars Chris Wasser

The Days of Trees Selected cinemas; Club cert Following Meetings with Ivor (2017) and The Meeting (2018), ­celebrated documentary film-maker Alan Gilsenan completes a trilogy with this searing inward journey to a trauma all too familiar in this country.

We meet Tomás Hardiman, the producer of those two films. Before the experiences were exhumed during psychotherapy sessions, Hardiman lived with no conscious memory of the clerical sexual abuse he suffered as a child. Shot in monochrome, this Ifta-nominated portrait charts his life before and after that breakthrough; his natural, undimmed charisma proving triumphant. Four stars Hilary White