There are two clichés about the English that continue to endure despite copious attempts to prove them unfounded. One is that they are stubbornly unromantic, preferring always to muddle through life with caution and pragmatism rather than submit to overwhelming emotion. The other is that they can’t make good cinema.

To which there is one answer, a trump card so devastating that it ends all argument instantly: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. The 1946 film, which is often quoted in cineastes’ all-time top 10 lists, is still, relatively speaking, under-acknowledged by the wider public. Powell does not enjoy anything like the acclaim afforded to Alfred Hitchcock, whose talent was no greater. The screenplays of Pressburger (Hungarian by birth, trained in Germany, but as English as drizzle in sensibility) are rarely quoted in discussions of great writing.