Colette

Keira Knightley was born to play the feminist icon Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and is in her willowy, defiant element in Still Alice director Wash Westmoreland's precise, elegant and decorously titillating account of a literary figure who became a sensation during the belle époque in France. All stiff collars, inky quills, chugging cars and heavy drapes, it was co-written with Richard Glatzer (Westmoreland's late husband) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, Disobedience), and concentrates on Colette's marriage to Henry Gauthier-Villars (a harrumphingly priapic Dominic West), who published her racy stories under his name for reasons of patriarchal orthodoxy. Even while playing the part of his young wife in the salons of Paris, she experimented publicly with sexual mores and had approved extramarital relationships with a Louisiana heiress (Poldark's Eleanor Tomlinson) and brazen cross-dresser "Missy" (Denise Gough), whose "gaydar" twitched a century before the term was coined. The predominantly British and Irish cast eschew 'Allo, 'Allo accents, and the Hungarian locations, exquisitely shot with sparing use of CGI, evoke provincial France without strain. When Knightley's journey of enlightenment puts her on the stage for theatre's first same-sex kiss, Colette's connection to the modern feminist struggle is clear.