London Film Festival: our picks for Thursday October 15

Seen by many as our greatest living auteur, Terence Davies has had to fight for every foot of film he has made, from the early autobiographical trilogy to the more recent documentary Of Time and the City and the Terence Rattigan adaptation The Deep Blue Sea.

But none has been more a labour of love than Sunset Song: a 16-year odyssey of rights being acquired and expiring, producers coming and going, money mounting up then evaporating. Now finally, triumphantly, it is here: the long-awaited adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbons’s great 1932 Scottish novel.

The central character is Chris (Agyness Deyn), whose mother commits suicide when she is a child. Then her brother emigrates to Argentina, leaving Chris to run the isolated farm alone with her ailing, fierce-tempered father (Peter Mullan). Dark themes, lowering skies, strength found in adversity - these are classic Davies themes. And, thanks to producers Roy Boulter and Sol Papdoulos (with him since Time and the City), there isn’t going to be such a long wait for the next film (the man, after all, turns 70 next month): principal photography is already complete on another long-cherished project, A Quiet Passion, a biography of the American poet Emily Dickinson, with Cynthia Nixon in the lead.

Also endowed with the swoon factor, meanwhile, is another of today’s films: Paolo Sorrentino’s gorgeous Youth, about two elderly men, one (Michael Caine) a conductor, the other (Harvey Keitel) a film director, coming to terms with ageing and the tensions of friendship in a luxury Swiss spa. Definitely one for anyone who loved 2013’s The Great Beauty, where Sorrentino tackled a similar theme.

And to complete an emotional day at the movies, why not take in the revived 1971 film The Raging Moon, with Malcolm McDowell and Nanette Newman refusing to allow disability to get in the way of romance – a theme for the day, maybe?

Sunset Song: 20:45, Vue 7; 21:15, Vue 5; Sunday, 12:15, Vue 5

Youth: 18:00, Vue 7; 18:30, Vue 5; Sunday, 18:00, Picturehouse Central

The Raging Moon: 18:15, NFT2

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