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Evocative music and a poignant subplot put a shine on Jon Sanders’s story of a marriage cracking up in the south of France

The latest, and most ambitious film from Jon Sanders (Back to the Garden, Painted Angels), A Change in the Weather takes a semi-improvised, organic approach to a story of a failing marriage and a creative partnership that fractures during a theatre workshop in the south of France. Anna Mottram is magnetic in the role of Lydia, the actor wife who gradually realises that her marriage to her playwright husband Dan (Bob Goody) is over. A tendency towards navel-gazing improvised dialogue is balanced by evocative use of music and a poignant supernatural subplot.

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A dramatic impresario enlists his wife and two other women to play avatars of the same person in Jon Sanders’ intriguing work of miniaturism

Director Jon Sanders and his loose ensemble of actors, led above all by his wife, Anna Mottram, who basically improvises all her own dialogue, have been tending their own little peculiar plot of cinematic garden for few films now, starting with Painted Angels and progressing up through Late September and Back to the Garden.

Most of the time, these ultra-low-budget, ultra-rarefied films are about people like, one presumes, Sanders and Mottram themselves: highly educated, haute bourgeois Brits and Europeans with cultural capital to spare, endlessly fascinated with examining themselves, their relationships, their art. Here, the result is more contortedly self-reflexive than usual as regular player Bob Goody plays a dramatic impresario who has enlisted his own wife (Mottram) and two other women (Meret Becker and Maxine...

Jon Sanders, director of Painted Angels, which takes a compassionate look at the lives of prostitutes on the American frontier, here observes a gathering of old middle-aged, middle-class friends on the Kent coast to celebrate the 65th birthday of the genial, acerbic Ken, whose 40-year marriage is about to collapse. The title, the long takes, the few camera movements suggest Ozu, but the quiet, understated British movies of Joanna Hogg (director of Archipelago) also come to mind. All the dialogue is improvised, which gives the film a raw, honest feeling of actors digging into their shared creations but inevitably engenders a static, theatrical air.

DramaPhilip French

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Kelly Reichardt's beautifully shot western is a powerful evocation of the hardships endured on the Oregon Trail

Roughly defined, the western is violent entertainment about the American frontier experience set west of the Mississippi, south of the 49th Parallel and north of the Rio Grande between 1840 and the beginning of the first world war. Some films happening outside this particular area and time scale or not involving gunfights and physical conflict might be called pre-westerns, post-westerns, modern-westerns or, more vaguely, "sort of westerns". The term "anti-western" was also used for a while to describe movies that seemed to reject or even despise the conventions of the genre, though for much of the western's history many film-makers have been doing precisely that in the name of historical and psychological realism.

Kelly Reichardt's impressive Meek's Cutoff is set in 1845 on the recently created Oregon Trail that took wagon trains through...