Even for a medium as inherently manipulative as cinema, the recent young adult takeover of terminal romance (AKA sick-lit) pushes that boundary more than most. While it has given audiences some solid features like The Fault In Our Stars – the film that kickstarted the trend in earnest – that is still in spite of storytelling that is almost begging the audience to start tearing up. The latest in this trend, Five Feet Apart, isn’t annoying because it is manipulative. It’s annoying because it feels stuck between trying to wring honest engagement out of the proceedings, and just dovetailing the typical clichés of the genre.

For what works about this production, one needn’t look further than the main couple. While Cole Sprouse as the reclusive bad boy love interest is a little too on-the-nose as far as teenaged pandering is concerned, Haley Lu Richardson more than picks up the slack with a performance that demands empathy and entirely warrants it. Bonus points for having a main character with OCD and not completely adhering to wizened stereotyping about the condition, something followed with the story’s approach to the focal-point condition: Cystic fibrosis.

While most films in this genre are fixated with tying themselves to literary classics to give themselves a sense of importance, this film is more interested in the hard facts about the condition itself. And as a result, when it’s not highlighting the endearing cuteness of the main couple, it’s giving facts about CF, living with it and the paradoxical situation it puts people in. The one group of people that best understand what they’re going through (other people with CF) are the ones that they absolutely need to keep their distance from.

It emphasises the need for tactile contact, even in the face of worsening health, and by film’s end, it turns that need into something universal that goes beyond the diagnosis. This ends up declaring what defines sick-lit as a sub-genre: highlighting the romantic trials of the sick to give sentimental advice to the healthy. Manipulative as hell, but for the most part, it works.

However, for every moment that feels sincere, there’s another that adheres to the sick-lit doctrine. The near-endless montages set to sterilised dream-pop, the fear of character death as an impetus to feel something, not to mention the schmaltzpocalypse that is the entire third act, where any intention of emotional integrity goes right out the window; it’s still trying to push through a fog of familiarity to make any of it stick.

What results from all this is a film that highlights some of the best and some of the worst that the sub-genre has to offer. Its heart is in the right place, but its brain runs from it by the time we reach the third act. It’s still worth checking out, even if only to see Haley Lu Richardson stake her claim as an actress to keep an eye on, but it’d be easier to recommend if there was more consistency here.

Can a film work when all of its characters are wholly unlikeable? It’s a dilemma that co-writer/director, David Barker, bravely toys with in his feature debut, Pimped. With a very small cast of characters made up of the unpleasant, the misogynistic, the snobbish, the cruel, and the unhinged, Barker truly backs himself up against the wall. Thankfully, he carries a few vital cinematic weapons: his themes are creepily prescient; his dialogue (co-penned with Lou Mentor) has a pruriently compelling quality; the locations are alluringly shot by talented DOP, Josh Flavell; the music is dynamic and original; and the cast is across-the-board excellent. The a-hole quotient undeniably strains the friendship, but Pimped remains a stylishly subversive treat…a bon-bon spiked with ground glass.

Lewis (a mind bogglingly smarmy Benedict Samuel) and Kenneth (Robin Goldsworthy nails the creepy-rich-best-friend trope with smashing bravado) are housemates with a taste for the debauched and amoral. When they target the loopy Sarah (a fragile but steely Ella Scott Lynch) – who is trailed by her alter ego, Rachel (also played by Lynch, but in an ugly black wig), with whom she actively and verbally debates the rights and wrongs of life – for an unpleasant sexual tryst, they get much, much more than they bargained for, and the bodily fluids really start to flow.

Mirroring low budget minor classics like Bound and Diabolique, the winningly titled Pimped has a real strut about it. Barker obviously knows that he can write and shoot, and he easily rises above his minimal budget. It’s a modest film with limited locations and a very small cast, but there’s an undeniable air of rumpled class about the film. The talented and charismatic Benedict Samuel (The Walking Dead, Gotham, Secret City) and Ella Scott Lynch (Love Child, The Code) are obviously major names-on-the-rise, and they add immeasurably to the sense of punchiness. It’s dark and nasty, but Pimped will continue to bang around inside your head long after the last evil deed has been done.

The late Hal Ashby was one of the great powerhouse directors of the 1970s, though he’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Altman. He was a looser, more eccentric figure than those cinematic titans, but his output during that famously freewheeling decade is nothing short of stunning, with his seven key career works – The Landlord, Harold And Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound For Glory, Coming Home and Being There – among the best films of the era. Wildly anti-authoritarian, raggedly eloquent, utterly self-possessed, truly independent, and with a deep, deep fondness for medicinal herbs, Hal Ashby was an equally fascinating figure off-screen, and this beautifully realised documentary portrait from director, Amy Scott, is a true revelation. It’s heartbreaking, insightful, moving, authentic, hilariously funny, and wonderfully entertaining…just like Hal Ashby’s movies themselves.

Featuring interviews with Ashby’s colleagues and collaborators (Robert Towne, Robert C. Jones, Cat Stevens), cast members (the likes of Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Jeff Bridges, Rosanna Arquette, Beau Bridges, Lou Gossett Jr., and Lee Grant – all in candid form – make this a very starry affair), and modern day acolytes (a literal who’s who of hip American cinema: David O. Russell, Judd Apatow, Lisa Cholodenko, Allison Anders, Adam Mackay, Alexander Payne), Hal captures all aspects of Ashby as a filmmaker and figureheads. There are great on-set anecdotes and teriffic stories aplenty, while the presence of Ashby himself is skilfully recreated via archival audio interviews and personal letters passionately read by actor, Ben Foster. Things get far more personal via emotional interviews with Ashby’s estranged daughter (like many men of his generation, he was no candidate for father-of-the-year), his ex-partners, and director and close friend, Norman Jewison, who gave Ashby his start in the industry as an editor.

While Ashby’s negligible 1980s output (Second-Hand Hearts, The Slugger’s Wife, Lookin’ To Get Out and The Rolling Stones lukewarm concert film, Let’s Spend The Night Together) is disappointingly glossed over completely in the space of literally one minute, the ignominies that he endured on his last feature film, 8 Million Ways To Die (on which he experienced constant and undue interference, amongst other indignities), are detailed in all their abject miserableness. With Ashby’s death from cancer soon after, it’s a sad end to what begins as a story filled with hope and raging brio, but as most of Ashby’s films themselves so lucidly demonstrate, happy endings are rare. Bittersweetness is often the best that you can get, and the insightful and affectionate Hal has it in spades.

Deep in mid-life crisis, vaguely unlikeable accountant Eric (Rob Brydon) walks out on his wife Heather (Jane Horrocks) when she is elected to the local council, primarily because he thinks she’s having an affair. At his local pool, he finds solace with a group of other mostly middle-aged men who have formed a synchronised swimming team. Eric uses his aquatic and maths skills to help the amateurs perform various moves and with the subsequent help of pool attendant Susan (Charlotte Riley), who happens to be a synchronised swimmer, the eight men decide to enter the championships in Milan.

The underwater scenes, and the depiction of the movements of the men in the swimming pool, are the film’s strong points, one sequence showing Eric sitting alone on the depths of the pool’s bottom suggests that deeper existential themes could be at play. However, any genuine reflection on middle-aged-men is rapidly dismissed from the narrative through an almost instant depiction of male bonding thanks to a brief comic reference to ‘Fight Club’ (one of their rules is “no one talks about Swim Club”). The film sketches the men through meagre backstories, but these are brief and offer little insight into ‘masculinity in crisis’. Meanwhile, the two women lack any depth in this already shallow male world.

The film becomes most awkward when our protagonists face their opponents, the Swedish team, resulting in largely unfunny jokes and a predictable subplot (little Britain never seemed so little, and it’s hard not to want to make a Brexit analogy). All of which seems like a missed opportunity, especially when considering the film has roots in the true story the Swedish men’s synchronised swimming team documented in Dylan Williams’ (credited as executive producer here) Men Who Swim (2010).

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this film is knowing that the strong ensemble cast (which alongside Brydon, Horrocks, and Riley, features talented actors Rupert Graves, Adeel Akhtar and Jim Carter) can deliver so much more than this.