Actress Claire Foy’s double bill, H Is For Hawk and The Magic Faraway Tree, delivers

H Is For Hawk (PG13)

115 minutes, opens on April 2
★★★☆☆

The story: English actress Claire Foy stars as Helen Macdonald in an adaptation of the Cambridge University academic’s 2014 best-selling memoir on her profound grief upon her beloved father’s sudden passing in 2007. To cope, she adopts a goshawk.

A goshawk is a monster-size bird of prey, not the most obvious therapy pet. Regardless, the raptor is Helen’s spiritual connection to her photojournalist dad, who introduced her to ornithology and a love of nature.

Irish great Brendan Gleeson appears as the departed in Helen’s heartbreakingly tender flashback memories of the pair’s outdoor adventures together, and the empathetic performances, especially Foy’s, bring H Is For Hawk to aching life.

The British bio-drama on Helen’s year rearing a goshawk she names Mabel is co-scripted by Macdonald and award-winning director Philippa Lowthorpe from Foy’s Netflix hit series The Crown (2016 to 2023).

Helen’s attachment to Mabel is so absolute, she spurns all human concerns, including her health, and retreats from society to the alarm of her best friend (Denise Gough) and mother (Lindsay Duncan).

She exhausts herself teaching Mabel to hunt and kill – in the hope that she will, in turn, learn from the solitary bird an animal’s detachment towards death.

Truly, the wildlife footage of Mabel soaring over the tweedy autumnal woodlands, then swooping down to rip rabbits apart, is breathtaking.

Foy trained in the ancient art of falconry for the role, and her interaction with the feral majestic creature is as authentic as her anguish is raw despite her stoic reserve. This journal of bereavement is a small but deeply personal movie.

Hot take: “A” is for the sterling acting in a bleak, unsentimental true story of one woman’s emotional journey through loss.

The Magic Faraway Tree (PG)

110 minutes, now in cinemas
★★★☆☆

The story: A contemporary family decamps from London to the countryside. In the great outdoors, they discover the arboreal wonder of the title and reconnect through their journeys into enchanted lands.

H Is For Hawk star Claire Foy has a second, far jollier movie in cinemas that is the British family fantasy The Magic Faraway Tree.

Paddington 2 (2017) and Wonka (2023) scribe Simon Farnaby has put pen to another English heritage kid-lit title and updated Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree fiction series of the 1940s for director Ben Gregor. Foy’s Polly is now a tech designer, and Tim (Andrew Garfield), a househusband.

They are the Thompsons, a rustic barn their new home after Polly quits her corporate job.

There is no electricity, no Wi-Fi. So the couple’s three bored offspring (Delilah Bennett-Cardy, Phoenix Laroche and Billie Gadsdon) explore the nearby wood, where the beloved storybook characters Moonface (Nonso Anozie), Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera), the fairy Silky (Nicola Coughlan) and clanking Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns) reside in the canopy of a massive oak.

The tree is a portal to candy-coloured playgrounds up in the clouds, accessible via a ladder, and here the siblings encounter yet more eccentrics, all of them very funny in their silly wordplay and pantomime slapstick.

Rebecca Ferguson enjoys herself as villainous headmistress Dame Slap.

And how not to laugh at the ridiculousness of the multi-headed oracle, the Know-Alls (Michael Palin, Lenny Henry and Simon Russell Beale)?

Kids, see what you are missing when you look only at your devices? Adventure is right in your backyard if you surrender to the magic of childhood imagination.

Hot take: May this sweet-natured whimsy introduce a new generation to Enid Blyton’s timeless tales.