The screen musical of the stage musical of the film of the book . . .

DANIELLE BROOKS has an Oscar nomination to show for her barnstorming performance in The Color Purple (12A, 141 mins, )))**), in which she plays Sofia, as bold and defiant as her victimised friend Celie (Fantasia Barrino) is timid.

Just like last week’s release, Mean Girls, The Color Purple is a screen musical based on a stage musical, which was based on a film which was based on a book. That propels it about as far as possible from the original source, Alice Walker’s acclaimed but turgid 1982 novel about the tribulations of a young African-American woman in early 20th-century Georgia and the redemptive power of female friendship.

The songs and lively dance routines aren’t always a natural fit with a narrative that, among other things, is about incest and domestic abuse. But perhaps that was ever thus. The much-loved Fiddler On The Roof, after all, is set against the backdrop of anti-Semitic pogroms. And there are certainly a few splendid scenes, although the greatest thing about this over-long musical might be the producers: Steven Spielberg (who directed the 1985 film), Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones. From masses of experience to hardly any, two low-budget films this week are by firsttime writer-directors, both of whom show oodles of promise.

Jamie Childs’s Jackdaw (16, 97 mins, )))**) is a gloomy thriller set in the industrial north-east of England where ex-soldier Jack Dawson (Oliver JacksonCohen) needs to find his abducted brother, while fighting off a local gangster. It’s relentlessly downbeat but stylishly done. And I wonder whether the tall, handsome Jackson-Cohen might be an outside bet for the new James Bond?

On various streaming platforms, , Oliver Pearn’s On The Line (12A, 74 mins, )))**) — not to be confused with a recent film of the same title starring Mel Gibson — is reminiscent of Steven Knight’s brilliant Locke (2013) in that the narrative cleverly builds on the back of one person’s conversations with disembodied others.

Victoria Lucie plays Agnes, a telephone exchange operator on Alderney in 1964, whose exchanges with various islanders (one of them voiced by Harriet Walter, no less) lead her to believe that a woman is in mortal danger. In many ways it could just as easily be a radio afternoon play, but it’s a pleasure to see that period switchboard in action. Pearn, like Childs, is one to watch.