Correct me if I’m wrong – but at the end of the first Downton Abbey film, did we not see Maggie Smith’s Violet Crawley inform her beloved grand-daughter, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), that her days were numbered? 

There was a tender moment between them, remember, when an emotional Violet reassured a weepy Mary that everything would be fine, that life would go on without her, that they’d still be rich, etc, etc.

And yet, as Downton Abbey: A New Era commences, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that Violet is alive and... eh, is actually sort of well.

I suppose big, soppy cinematic goodbyes no longer mean what they used to. Our theory, if you’re interested, is that Downton creator and writer Julian Fellowes had no idea the first film would make $200m at the box office.

The 2019 feature, we imagine, was conceived as a sort of final hurrah for everyone involved in the lavish, long-winded venture about snooty aristocrats and their obedient servants.

It wasn’t supposed to spawn a sequel. If it was, Fellowes would never have suggested that Violet – Downton’s wittiest component and its most valuable player – was about to kick the bucket.

You can’t have Downton without Maggie Smith. It just wouldn’t work – and Fellowes knows it. So, too, does this spiffy and surprisingly adequate follow-up, which temporarily parks Violet’s grim medical diagnosis on the sideline.

A New Era acknowledges that granny is sick, but it never establishes what exactly that sickness is. She continues to attend dinners, replete in extravagant jewels and gowns. And she still gets all the best lines.

Part of the beauty of this unashamedly risible sequel is its simplicity. It’s the late 1920s and we have not one, but two tasty story developments on the boil. The first involves an old flame of Violet’s from an earlier century. Yep, the dowager countess had a fella overseas.

He’s dead now, but it seems the old charmer left her a swanky villa in the south of France.

To make matters complicated, the French chap was married – and though his wife isn’t happy at all about it, her son has invited the entire Crawley clan to come and claim what’s rightfully theirs.

The second part of the plot involves a Hollywood film company that asks the Earl of Grantham (played by Hugh Bonneville) if they can film a silent picture in his gaff.

The earl is appalled. Movies are for commoners, obviously – but apparently, they need the money (A New Era's greatest punchline), and besides, most of them will be decamping to France for a while, checking out granny’s old love shack. So they may as well let the movie people have their fun.

Snobby and scandalous antics follow. Mary complains of a leak in the attic. The fictional film’s leading man ( Dominic West as the fabulously monikered Guy Dexter) sets his sights on Barrow the butler (Robert James-Collier).

The fictional film’s leading woman (Laura Haddock) makes a sex joke at the Crawley dinner table. Someone isn’t well. Someone is making googly eyes at someone else’s wife. Someone refers to former Irish republican Tom Branson (played by Allen Leech) as a leopard who successfully changed his spots – no, really.

We could go on, but why bother? Fellowes will have his characters explain the rest.

Never before has such a generously budgeted, big-screen feature gone so far out of its way to ensure its audience understands the mechanics of the plot. Elaborately staged sequences come and go in the blink of an eye.

Their only purpose, it would appear, is to allow for Downton’s committed cast to remind each other – and us – of what’s happening, what’s happened, or what’s about to happen.

A handsome, yappy diversion, A New Era clips along and never shuts up – but you know something? I didn’t want it to.

Despite its shortcomings – and there are lots of them –  Fellowes’ film, capably directed by Simon Curtis, is never boring. 

True, it borrows heavily from a certain Gene Kelly musical, but the movie-within-a-movie aspect gives way to a smattering of cheerful comic interludes.

It’s brilliantly performed and neatly structured. It’s funny, charming and hammy in all the right places. It works, basically. A lush and ludicrous melodrama with a heart, A New Era passes the time nicely, and is better than it has any right to be. 

They can have that one for the posters.

Also on release

The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
One star
Netflix; Cert 15

You would imagine, given its title, that director Emma Cooper’s film might find something fresh to say about the incomparable Marilyn Monroe. As it turns out, this dour and spectacularly dull display is more of a sleepy walk-through of Irish journalist Anthony Summers’s extensive research for his 1985 biography on the screen icon.

Summers conducted hundreds of interviews with peers, friends and associates for Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, including Billy Wilder and John Huston. Here he shares his tapes for the first time. Why, we’re not exactly sure, and this crass and largely pointless film struggles to justify its existence.

The opening half plays out like a gloomy career retrospective; the second, a drippy examination of the circumstances surrounding Monroe’s death on August 4, 1962. Yep, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe indulges itself in silly sensationalism – and do not get us started on the stagy interview reconstructions.

Cooper’s documentary leans in hard on stories that have been repeated to death, and it does so in an icky, sinister manner that leaves a foul aftertaste. Chris Wasser

The Velvet Queen
Four stars
IFI & selected cinemas; no Cert

In his 1978 Tibetan travelogue The Snow Leopard, explorer Peter Matthiessen described the “terrible beauty” of the world’s most elusive big cat as “the very stuff of human longing”. Just like that book, this award-winning Gallic documentary is about two men setting off to glimpse the creature in a manner akin to a grail-hunt.

Director Marie Amiguet shadows celebrated wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and writer Sylvain Tesson as they trudge up to freezing rocky perches to wait and watch for an animal evolved to almost melt into its surroundings. Other wildlife appears – bears, wolves, falcons, antelope, foxes. These and the jutting Himalayan landscape, one of the last untarnished wildernesses, are captured through stills and footage in a manner that floors you.

As with so many stories about animals, The Velvet Queen is really about us. Tesson’s voiceover ruminates on the cosmic levels of patience required to sit and wait for something to materialise in your viewfinder.

While Tesson’s script can get over-ripe, the drive of people like Munier is undeniably fascinating to consider. The results, meanwhile, reveal themselves, just as the pair are close to giving up. Hilary White

Casablanca Beats
Four stars
IFI & selected cinemas; Cert 12A

The liberating qualities of art and expression are a vehicle for this spirited docu-drama about aspiring young rappers in a particularly rundown district of the Moroccan city made famous by Bogart and Bergman.

We’re not sure why Anas (Anas Basbousi) has stopped performing hip-hop in order to teach at a local cultural centre but subtle clues come through. Living in his car and passionate about imparting the power of the genre to his pupils, Anas is a supportive but demanding mentor. For the wonderful students in his hip-hop class, rapping and rhyming is not only a portal to political discourse but also personal empowerment in a cloistered Muslim society that shuns such self-expression.

This is yet another example of vital and brave social-realist storytelling from the MENA region. Director Nabil Ayouch gets brilliant returns from his gorgeous troupe of untrained actors, many actual teenage pupils at the real-life centre he co-founded where filming takes place.

Even if the structure of the story is not particularly unique, the setting and cultural baggage that it brings to the template give this an uncommon edge. Hilary White

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