Operation Mincemeat                                                          Cert: 12A, 2hrs 8mins

Rating:

The Lost City                                                                               Cert: 12A, 1hr 52mins

Rating:

The Northman                                                                            Cert: 15, 2hrs 16mins

Rating:

Benedetta                                                                                      Cert: 18, 2hrs 11mins

Rating:

When it comes to the pivotal events that heralded the beginning of the end of the Second World War in Europe, D-Day quite naturally takes historical centre stage.

But it’s often forgotten that the battle for Europe began almost a year earlier, when Allied forces landed on the beaches of Sicily in the summer of 1943.

It was a bold and hugely dangerous strategy, not least because invading Sicily – seen as the soft underbelly of Europe – was exactly what Hitler expected the Allies to do.

So, somehow, German high command had to be persuaded that the Allies’ objectives lay elsewhere… which is where Operation Mincemeat, the name of a top-secret intelligence plan and the new film it has now inspired, comes in.

I’ll leave military historians to argue how important Mincemeat – so-called because of its use of a slowly decaying dead body – actually was, but the star-studded film, which at times seems to have employed just about every character actor on British Equity’s books, is seriously classy.

Which is what you’d expect given that it’s directed by John Madden, who made Shakespeare In Love, and has a cast led by Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly Macdonald.

Firth plays Ewen Montagu, informal leader of a small and hastily recruited intelligence cabal who set out to persuade Hitler that the Allied invasion would actually begin in Greece.

They hope to do so with the help of the aforementioned dead body and a briefcase full of carefully faked documents.

The film oozes wartime atmosphere, Madden skilfully makes time both for intrigue and romance, and there are even moments of comedy as we watch Johnny Flynn playing Commander Ian Fleming, hatching the idea for the future James Bond as he works.

With Jason Isaacs, as Admiral Godfrey, stealing every scene he graces, only a slight dip in energy and an unforeseen shortage of plot in the last lap modestly mar the cinematic occasion.

But still, highly recommended.

The Lost City feels like a remake of Romancing The Stone or, perhaps more accurately, its sequel The Jewel Of The Nile, only this time it’s Sandra Bullock playing the romantic lady novelist who is kidnapped alongside Channing Tatum as the vain male model who graces her Mills & Boon-style book covers and reluctantly comes to her aid.

This is a formulaic, crowd-pleasing popcorn movie, which is sometimes exactly what many of us yearn for.

But along the gently underwhelming way this time around, we discover that Bullock and Tatum have limited screen chemistry, that giving Brad Pitt a distracting cameo seriously unbalances the film, and that any search for long-lost ancient treasure has become seriously old-hat since Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas’s day.

Thank goodness it still has a few funny lines.

The Northman is the latest film from Robert Eggers, maker of both The Witch and The Lighthouse, and has been proclaimed a masterpiece in some quarters.

But once again, I can’t quite see what all the excitement is about, as the American director combines a sub-Shakespearean tale of murder and revenge with Viking mythology, shamanistic ritual and a huge amount of bloody Dark Ages violence.

Quite how it escaped with only a 15 certificate is beyond me.

Yes, it looks magnificent and Eggers certainly goes all out, but it’s difficult to see much more than muscle and machismo in Alexander Skarsgard’s central performance as Amleth and, at times, the director’s decision to deliver the whole thing in a rich variety of cod-Scandi English is almost comically distracting.

Paul Verhoeven will probably always be best known as the director of Basic Instinct and, to a lesser extent, of the much derided Showgirls too.

So when you hear that his latest film is a medieval religious drama involving lesbian nuns, the first-thought is ‘uh-oh’.

And rightly so, it turns out, with Benedetta duly delivering a more than generous helping of titillating, 1970s-style lesbian nun sex but leavened with sufficiently heavy-going scenes of religious fervour, miraculous resurrection and Charlotte Rampling as a disapproving Mother Superior for the whole thing to be successfully passed off as serious drama.

Quite a trick.