Geraldine Page is magnificent in director Peter Masterson’s 1985 guaranteed four-hankie weepie, based on the Fifties Horton Foote play produced on American TV and on Broadway (with Lillian Gish).

Three cheers for the redoubtable Page who, after an astonishing seven unsuccessful Academy Award nominations, finally won the 1986 Best Actress Oscar as Mrs Carrie Watts, the quirky, dogged old widow lady determined to pay a last nostalgic visit to Bountiful, the fictitious place in Texas where she was born and passed her childhood. She’s opposed in this quest by her grudging, hen-pecked son Ludie (John Heard) and his attractive but controlling wife Jessie (Carlin Glynn), with whom she’s forced to stay so frustratingly in their home in Forties Houston, Texas...

Producer-director Don Siegel’s 1971 cult Civil War Western chiller is a rich and strange, and often quite beautiful movie. It was Siegel’s favourite of his films. It reunites him with Clint Eastwood, who stars as John McBurney, an injured Yankee soldier who is rescued from the verge of death by a teenage girl from an isolated Southern seminary for young women.

She manages to get the soldier back to the seminary, where he starts to recover. He then charms his way into each of the lonely women’s hearts and provides the sexual spark for the women’s fantasies. But the atmosphere becomes filled with jealousy and deceit, and his lack of response and manipulation of the situation lead to a terrible revenge.

Spilling over with the repressed, explosively contained sexual savagery of Black...