Toby Jones plays the spaniel-eyed schoolmaster setting Harry Lawtey’s needy young pupil on course for haughty international stardom

The career of Richard Burton seemed mythic at the time, and more so in retrospect. In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie The Room Next Door, Julianne Moore’s character is even shown reading Erotic Vagrancy, Roger Lewis’s account of Burton’s then-adulterous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor in the early 60s, the title taken from Pope John XXIII’s extraordinary denunciation: “You will finish in an erotic vagrancy, without end or without a safe port.” In fact, the nearest thing Burton ever had to a safe port was his inspirational English teacher Philip Burton in Port Talbot, south Wales, whose own frustrated dreams of the theatre were poured into the bright young miner’s son Richard Jenkins, coaching him in acting and even making him his legal ward and getting him to change his surname to Burton to facilitate the teacher’s sponsorship of his Oxford scholarship.

It’s the subject of this heartfelt, vigorously acted, enjoyable, if slightly naive movie from screenwriters Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams, and director Marc Evans. Toby Jones stars as the spaniel-eyed Mr Burton and Harry Lawtey is Richard, a lanky, needy kid morphing into that insufferably haughty and sonorous prince of the English stage. It tells a uniquely painful and dysfunctional story, and does its best to show how Burton’s pride always coexisted with shame and self-hate, and culminated with him playing Hal in Henry IV Part 2 at Stratford with Mr Burton in the audience, the pair effectively enacting their own version of the Hal/Falstaff betrayal scene.

Documentary follows the baloeiros, who illegally build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles

An intriguing film set in Brazil, first shown last year at the CPH:DOX documentary festival in Copenhagen, in which expatriate Danish film-maker Sissel Morell Dargis takes a look at a unique grassroots cultural phenomenon: the baloeiros, the ballooners. These are groups of young men, as secretive and loyal to each other as Freemasons, who (illegally) build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles. Why? As kind of graffiti, or a community self-expression, or situationist artform, or just a subversive gesture of pure joie de vivre that does not need or admit of any explanation.

The baloeiros are harassed by the police, on the ostensible grounds that they are part of gang culture, and the authorities encourage local people to inform on those they suspect of building and transporting a balloon. But baloeiros are cheerfully committed to their own kind of public-access artistry. The balloons show colossal images of Sly Stallone and Luciano Pavarotti – aspirational role models and pop culture icons. As Dargis says: “A flying balloon belongs to everyone, even the police.”

Kilmer, who has died aged 65, made his name with Top Gun and The Doors – but his exceptional talents were often under-appreciated by the mainstream film industry

• Val Kilmer, star of Top Gun and The Doors, dies aged 65
• A life in pictures

Why do some movie careers take off … and others go a bit sideways? Val Kilmer was a smart actor, a looker, a terrific screen presence and in later years an under-appreciated comic performer. His finest hour as an actor came in Shane Black’s comedy action thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, when he was quite superb as the camp private investigator Gay Perry Shrike: a gloriously sleek, plump performance which was transparently – and outrageously – based on Tom Ford. If only Kilmer could have started his acting life with that bravura performance, and shown the world what he could do. Instead, and at a crucial stage in his career, he was trapped in the body and face of a staggeringly beautiful young man.

He could somehow never quite persuade Hollywood to accept him as a leading man and above-the-title player in the mould of his Top Gun contemporary Tom Cruise, who in 1986 played Pete “Maverick” Mitchell to Val Kilmer’s Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. As the 80s and 90s rolled by, Kilmer never ascended to the league of Cruise, Hanks, Clooney and Pitt. Medication for the illness he latterly suffered can’t have helped, and it is a great sadness that fate never allowed him to mature in the same way as, say, Kurt Russell.