Lesbians have a love-hate relationship with cinema, a place in which, Andrea Weiss wrote in her 1992 work Vampires and Violets, only one image of the lesbian may surface at any one time. For at least the past half-decade (since the release of Todd Haynes’ adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol) that image may look something like this: a period drama with an oedipal understory, chronically white, a sombre mood, dialogue exactingly stark. A sensorium of touch and taste, the space between bodies, and the yearning therein. A fantasy for all audiences to enjoy..

In these films, the action is silently displayed on faces and behind eyes, before it’s finally loosed in the form of a long, drawn-out sex scene. In 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the camera hovers over the lovers’ faces so intimately that you can see the spit as they kiss, the pores on their cheeks, the ecstatic boredom in their eyes. The erotic and romantic ache of Carol is generated from across-the-room looks and sudden touches.

The same interminable foreplay (because this kind of film is usually hinged on at least one sex scene) has been applied to a surge of recent films that have reimagined female historical figures across the lesbian continuum. 2018’s Wild Nights With Emily dramatised the life and imagined romance between Emily Dickinson and childhood friend Susan Gilbert. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s affair was beautified by Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki in Vita & Virginia. We were also introduced to the life of Lizzie Borden and her affair with her live-in maid in Lizzie – as very enticingly played by Chloë Sevigny and Kirsten Stewart. In all of these films, lesbianism conveniently provides a doorway out of patriarchy and the limitations placed on women.

Now comes Ammonite, Francis Lee’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed debut God’s Own Country, which seems to tick off almost every box of today’s sapphic film checklist. Inspired by correspondence between the 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning and her female friends, Lee told Entertainment Weekly that he “was fascinated to set this film in a period that was totally patriarchal and where women were completely owned by their fathers or their husbands”. Its vision is a direct contrast to the pastoral brutality of his debut – a love story between two male farmers, with images of hands glistening with mucus, dripping spit, half-living calves shot dead in the head. Ammonite’s brief was for “a very soft and gentle approach”, Andy Cole, the film’s gaffer, recently revealed. “Working with two lovely female leads, Stéphane [Fontaine, the film’s cinematographer] wanted a textured feel to the lighting that would enhance the beauty on screen.”

Starring Kate Winslet as Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as her young and wealthy lover Charlotte Murchison, Ammonite, like the films that came before it, relies on a narrative of difference. In this case, Mary is old and Charlotte is young. Mary is poor and Charlotte is rich. Mary leads a life of work and Charlotte a life of leisure. In the tradition of the lesbian film, these differences are often reconciled with an oedipal undercurrent, or “mummy issues”, to put it crassly. Although not so explicit as the lesbian mother-daughter dynamic in recent films such as 2016’s The Handmaiden (in which the protagonist Sook-hee says she wishes she could give her lover Hideko her milk, as they suck one another’s nipples), nor Carol, in which the eponymous character’s lover is styled to look uncannily like her daughter.

Much of the detail in Ammonite is derived from this kind of maternal melodrama: romance kindled through caregiving. Geologist Roderick Murchison entrusts Mary to care for Charlotte, his “mildly melancholic” wife, thinking the sea air will do her good. Mary tends to Charlotte like a surrogate mother (“You care for me like your child,” Charlotte says while Mary tucks her into bed). There’s also a brief appearance from Elizabeth Philpot (played by Fiona Shaw), with whom it is implied that Mary has a romantic history. In Lee’s vision, Fiona Shaw’s character is a foil to the newly developing mother-daughter relationship. The real-life Philpot met Anning when she was still a child. With 20 years between them, she first encouraged Anning to study geology. That Lee ascribes a romantic backstory between the two seems to indicate that Lee is unable to see past the maternal dynamic that so many lesbian films have been buttressed on.

A lot like last year’s A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Ammonite also draws heavily from an arthouse cinema aesthetic – the pared-back acting style, creative camerawork and sound design, sobering minimalism. It’s part of a tradition that Patricia White charts back to the arthouse lesbianism of European cinema “which entered postwar American markets at least in part because of the sex”, she writes. Today, sex remains the focal point of the lesbian film, and they seldom make lesbian sex appear passive or easy. In Ammonite, the lead actors reportedly choreographed their sex scenes themselves. They are all gaping-mouthed and starving; a tender frenzy that is in stark contrast with what Brian Tallerico describes as the “drudgery” of the rest of the film.

In the end Ammonite is yet another thin phantasm of a fantasy – a lesbian separatist sensorium – filled with dated tropes, in which potentially complicated women are flattened into foils of one another and whereall hope of an emancipated feminist future is hinged on lesbianism. It is less an avant-garde piece of cinema than a restating of tired tropes and is further proof of Weiss’s theory: only one type of lesbian is permitted at a time.

The late journalist and media commentator Molly Ivins, an outspoken liberal from Texas, has an illustrious reputation among connoisseurs of political writing of the late 20th century, but is not so well known outside the US. This affectionate but thankfully not hagiographic documentary, directed by Janice Engel, offers a handy preçis of her biography, character and impact.

It’s told partly through fresh interviews with admirers (including the doyenne of progressive journalism, Rachel Maddow, as well as Dan Rather and Paul Krugman) and Ivins’ friends and family. But above all the film relies on a smoothly edited melange of archive footage that recorded Ivins’ killer comic timing in interviews on various public stages, as well as her incisive intelligence and irreverence, captured mostly on shoddy video with C-SPAN blazoned in the corners. But neither age nor compression artefacts can wither her immortal charisma.

Ivins was born into a high-Wasp clan but rebelled against her parents’ expectations that she do something genteel, instead becoming a civil rights supporter and then a reporter. While working at a Minnesota paper during the late 60s she was proud to have wound up the police so much with her reporting that they named their mascot pig after her. Then came a stint at the New York Times where she never quite suited the buttoned-down culture, given her tendency to walk around barefoot and bring her dog, whom she named Shit, to work with her.

The film implies she was sacked for describing a mass chicken slaughter in the midwest as a “gang pluck”, a phrase that didn’t make it into print but still raised the ire of the editor in chief. (She said later she only used it to make the copy editors laugh.) Eventually she returned to Texas and became a syndicated columnist and author of several books on politics that gave her a national reputation.

Given that it’s 13 years since Ivins died, it’s puzzling why this film is coming out now, but it’s never not a good time to celebrate a woman with an outsized, big-boned talent, a heroine for the left even if she didn’t always adhere to the party line. Heaven knows we need all the plain-speaking, fearless heroines we can get right now.

• Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins is in cinemas and on digital platforms from 23 October.

I was 17, and just beginning university, when Requiem for a Dream descended on cinemas like an opaque, bruise-blue mist. Notwithstanding the no-under-18s restrictions stamped upon it by stern censors in the UK and elsewhere, I like to think I was the optimal age for it. Darren Aronofsky’s addiction drama may be cross-generational in its focus, but with its unremittingly punishing storytelling and frenzied, all-systems-go cinematic energy, it represents a very young person’s idea of how a very adult film looks, sounds and spasms. I loved it, even as it followed me through a tertiary arts education to the point of overkill: its poster gracing umpteen friends’ dorm rooms, its Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet string theme – and its countless remixes – soundtracking all manner of student theatre pieces and presentations, its formal and literary flourishes seized upon by many a hip professor seeking a modish mutual reference point.

If this sounds like the prelude to a revisionist takedown, I thought it might be one too. It’s 20 years since Requiem for a Dream was released, and at least 15 since I last saw it: revisiting it this week, I was prepared for it to be as dated and artificially edgy as a turn-of-the-millennium tribal tattoo. In a sense it is. There’s no mistaking Aronofsky’s film as a highly styled product of its era, its hopped-up editing schemes and plethora of lens choices and gimmicks a glossy refinement of 90s indie aesthetics and Tarantino-patented extremity. It doesn’t miss a trick, and doesn’t want us to miss any of its tricks either. Some critics called it over-directed at the time, and more of their colleagues would probably join them today; a generation of more restrained kids as old as I was then, quieter rather than shock-inclined in their anxiety, might even agree.

And yet. Certainly, a large part of Requiem’s stylistic mania amounts to auteurist showing-off. It was Aronofsky’s second film, coming two years after his scrappier, more cryptic but equally out-to-dazzle Sundance sensation Pi, and with more money and bigger names at his disposal, he set out to prove himself as the pre-eminent artist-provocateur of his indie class. Still, in choosing to adapt Hubert Selby Jr’s cultish 1978 novel of New York junkie miserablism – and very faithfully, at that – the then 31-year-old film-maker found about the ideal canvas for his ugly showmanship.

The novel was grimly forensic in detailing the physical and mental destruction wrought by drug addiction on a quartet of characters: three of them connected in their youth and knowing submission to heroin, and the fourth an elderly Brooklyn widow, drawn obliviously into amphetamine psychosis by solitude, TV fixation and irresponsibly prescribed diet pills. It’s a slender story that makes its essential points early, often and obviously: we’re all vulnerable to some manner of addiction, and legal ones aren’t necessarily safer or less ruinous than their underworld counterparts.

Scripted in collaboration with the author, Aronofsky’s interpretation doesn’t complicate things any, but it does bring to the material an electrified sensory charge that hasn’t quite been replicated in any other addiction drama. In all its flash, slam-bang technique, it vividly evokes the sensation of what drugs actually do to your system, briefly for better and mostly for worse, from twitchy initial rush through to comedown and tortured aftermath.

Aronofsky’s film-making is neither subtle nor tasteful, two words you wouldn’t tend to apply to heroin addiction either. Its excesses feel grounded, however oppressively, in the hellish experience of all its characters – it’s surely the most stylishly made drug drama ever to escape any accusations of glamorising the scene. As two young, beautiful, kohl-eyed lovers bound by needles and deferred dreams, Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly initially seem veritable poster children for that quintessentially 90s concept of heroin chic. By the time the film reaches its notoriously grotesque, despairing climactic montage, crosscutting between the amputation of his gangrenous arm – a body-horror image more unforgettably gross than any cursed cigarette-pack photo – and her going ass-to-ass with another woman for a braying, paying audience, any concept of “chic” is firmly off the table.

Such is the paradox of Requiem for a Dream, which pushed the envelope in its explicit, from-the-inside view of addiction and its spiralling consequences, while maintaining a philosophical perspective as cautiously moralising as any Just Say No public service announcement. What real shock value it had was tied mostly to Ellen Burstyn’s indelible, progressively unhinged performance as frail, sweet-natured shut-in Sara Goldfarb, whose short-term chemical solution to her loneliness and body-image issues winds up frying her brain as drastically as any class-A drug. Burstyn’s fearless turn hooked this impressively abrasive film an Oscar nomination it would never have received in any other category – and with it, an older audience that probably wouldn’t have considered seeing a film about three young, damned smackheads. It probably surprised them as much as it did any student-age punters drawn in by the vogueish, subversion-promising marketing: “the cinematic heroin nightmare for the whole family” wasn’t anywhere to be seen on that ubiquitous poster, but it wouldn’t have been far off.

Two decades on, Requiem for a Dream doesn’t look especially cool – but then, it never really did. Rather, its numbing, slightly-sick-in-your-mouth power remains undiminished, as does the hard-driving impact of Aronofsky’s film-making: it set the pace for a filmography marked by earnest, grandiose outrageousness, from the ludicrous, ravishing romantic folly of The Fountain through to the magnificent, unapologetically narcissistic artist’s self-diagnosis of his recent Mother!. As someone born closer to the year 2000 than I was might say, Requiem for a Dream didn’t have to go so hard. But I’m kind of glad it did.