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Sylvie’s Love ( Netflix)

One of the few disappointments of Pixar’s otherwise fabulous new animated film, Soul, comes early on when our pianist hero – buzzing and pretty much floating on air after a barnstorming audition at a New York jazz club – falls down an open manhole and apparently dies. Suddenly all that glorious jazz and the super-coolness of brilliant musicians doing what they do best is gone.

Well, Sylvie’s Love is the film that fills that yawning, syncopated void. Along with Soul and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it’s the third film celebrating black jazz music to be released in the past few weeks, and very touching and enjoyable it is too. It’s a bit like La La Land, only without the songs, the dancing and the strange ending.

As the title suggests, it’s a love story that sees talented saxophonist Robert Halloway – played by former NFL star turned pretty decent actor Nnamdi Asomugha – fall very sweetly in love with Sylvie, the pretty daughter of a Harlem record-store owner. She’s played by Creed regular Tessa Thompson, revelling in the fashions of the film’s late 1950s, early 1960s setting.

Told largely in flashback, we’re given an early warning that the story may not end happily, but what on earth goes wrong for such an apparently wellmatched couple?

Suffice to say it’s complicated, in a film that is always stylish, occasionally a touch contrived and features eyecatching supporting turns from Eva Longoria, Wendi McLendon-Covey (right) and Bridgerton heart-throb du jour Regé-Jean Page.