Personal cinema has been one of the enduring legacies of the nouvelle vague. It has also been the cornerstone of much American independent cinema since the early 1980s. Yet, in drawing on his liaison with literary agent Bill Clegg for his new drama, Keep the Lights On, director Ira Sachs has curiously opted to eschew intimacy in taking a detached view of the incidents that make and mar the relationship over several years between a Danish documentarist and his crack-addled lover. Given that the story has already been chronicled by Clegg in his memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, it suggests that Sachs has exercised great restraint in not presenting his own version of events. However, in being quite so fair minded, he has succeeded only in creating a couple of characters who scarcely invite empathy.

Some time in 1998, while still suffering the anguish of a recent break-up, thirtysomething Thure Lindhardt finds himself in need of a distraction from the profile he is researching of pioneering gay photographer and film-maker Avery Willard. He calls a chatline and derives a certain pleasure from flirting and negotiating the terms and conditions of a possible meet. However, much to his own surprise, he arranges a date with Zachary Booth, a lawyer with a major New York publishing house, who tumbles into his bed, despite protests that he has a girlfriend.

Lindhardt confides details of his growing crush to sister Paprika Steen and producer friend Julianne Nicholson, who both urge him to be careful. However, within a few months, Booth has dumped his girlfriend and moved and the pair are swept along by passion and the sheer excitement of discovering someone new. But, almost immediately, Sachs pushes the action forward two years, and we not only learn that Booth is beginning to grow restless, but that he has also developed an addiction that causes him to disappear for days on end and refuse to discuss his recklessness upon his return. Lindhardt keeps the truth from Booth's boss (Jodie Markell) and arranges an intervention that results in him agreeing to go into rehab. But the romance is over and Lindhardt seeks solace in artist Miguel Del Toro.

When we catch up with them again, Booth seems to have regained control over his life and Lindhardt is still sufficiently smitten to suggest they try again. However, while he is premiering his film in Berlin in 2004, Booth goes on another bender and Lindhardt finds him three weeks later in a hotel with rent boy Shane Stackpole. He admits he needs help, yet still makes Lindhardt wait in the next room until he has finished copulating and, when forced to make a choice between commitment and uncertainty, he breaks Lindhardt's heart once more.

Complete with clips from Avery Willard's own films and cameos by intellectuals Marilyn Neimark, James Bidgood, John Michael Cox, Jr, Henry Arango and Ed Vassallo assessing his significance, this is an intriguing treatise on the distinction between an artist's creative life and their physical cravings and emotional needs. Shooting on 16mm stock, Greek cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis makes evocative use of bright lights to expose every aspect of the relationship, while Sachs adroitly positions his protagonists in front of open doors to convey their reluctance to commit and uncertainty of where they are actually heading, both as individuals and as a couple.

Equally effective are Amy Williams's production design and a score inspired by the compositions of Arthur Russell (whose career was so sensitively revisited by Matt Wolf in the 2008 documentary, Wild Combination). But the action seems to take place in a netherworld of self-preoccupation that cannot even be breached by calamities like 9/11. Moreover, it lacks the genuine sense of connection between the characters that made Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) so credible and compelling. Similarly, a hint of the wit that informed Bill Sherwood's evidently influential Parting Glances (1984) would not have gone amiss. But, while Sachs and co-scenarist Mauricio Zacharias concoct some stinging exchanges, Booth's bad boy remains something of a cipher, while Lindhardt struggles with the psychological shading that would make him seem less like just another vulnerable victim of a feckless lover. Moreover, the writers find too little for Nicholson and the ever-excellent Steen to do. So, in spite of making a welcome return to overtly Queer themes for the first time since The Delta (1997), Sachs strays from the edginess that made Forty Shades of Blue (2005) and Married Life (2007) so impressive.

The problems of this rather self-absorbed pair pale into insignificance compared to the hideous threats facing the gays in Uganda, as Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall reveal in the deeply disturbing documentary, Call Me Kuchu. Taking its title from the Swahili nickname given to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, this started out as a record of the ramifications of the 2008 legal victory won by transsexual activist Victor Mukasa, after he sued the country's Attorney General for allowing the police to raid his home. However, on meeting Uganda's first openly gay man, David Kato, the debuting directors realised that his struggle was the natural focus for their film. But his assassination on 26 January 2011 meant that it became a tribute to his ideals and his courage, as well as a clarion call for the outside world to demand an end to the homophobic violence and injustice that is being supported by right-wing Christian groups from the United States and elsewhere.

Wright and Zouhali-Worrall first catch up with Kato as he attends the ninth anniversary party of some close friends. Safe from the threats to which he is constantly subjected, he feels sufficiently relaxed to dance and chat with friends and supporters in the organisation to which he has devoted his life: Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). Having realised his own preferences during a visit to South Africa, Kato had resumed his career as a teacher on returning to Uganda in 1998. But the growing fury of religious leaders like Pastor Solomon Maale and MPs like David Bahati prompted him to join full-time LGBT activists like Longjones, Naome Ruzindana, Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, Dr Sylvia Tamale and Stosh, a lesbian who relates horrifying tales of `curative' rape, forced abortion and endangerment with the HIV virus.

Yet, while Kato can draw on the help of prominent churchmen like Bishop Christopher Senyono, he faces the implacable opposition of homophobes like Gilles Muhame, the managing editor of Kampala's Rolling Stone tabloid newspaper, who sent undercover reporters to LGBT haunts to snatch incriminating photographs that were published with the addresses of some 100 innocent people under the inflammatory headline `Hang Them!'  This outrage followed hard on the heels of the introduction in the Ugandan parliament in October 2009 of an Anti-Homosexuality Bill by David Bahati, which not only called for a mandatory death sentence for all HIV+ males, but also a prison sentence for anyone failing to report known sexual deviants to the police.

As accusations flew that Ugandan LGBTs had joined forces with Al-Qaeda and were responsible for terrorist outrages and evangelical firebrands like Lou Engle and Scott Lively flew to Africa to address vast rallies, Kato joined forces in November 2010 with Kasha Nabagesera and Julian Patience `Pepe' Onziema to take Rolling Stone to court to prevent it from publishing further names and images. Wright and Zouhali-Worrall were given a front row seat as lawyer John Francis Onyango argued the SMUG case against Muhame, Maale and their thuggish cohorts. But, within three weeks of securing a favourable verdict, Kato was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his home and mother Lydia Nalongo's touchingly misguided hope that he would marry Naome and settle down were dashed forever. Moreover, she had to endure the shameful trial of Pastor Thomas Musoke denouncing her son and the kuchu culture he represented as he conducted the funeral service.

Despite attempting to end on a positive note, as Longjones vows to take up the mantle and resist bigotry, the film-makers cannot ignore the fact that Kato's killer has never been caught (male prostitute Sidney Nsubuga Enoch is almost certainly a patsy, despite a 30-year prison sentence) and that even after President Yoweri Museveni established a commission to investigate the implications of the Bahati bill and it ran out of time after its first reading, it was resubmitted in February 2012. Thus, although Wright and Zouhali-Worrall present plenty of disconcerting evidence and rightly trace the pernicious prejudice back to British colonial times and onwards into the detestable tyranny of Idi Amin, they can do no more than alert the audience to the situation in the hope that outside pressure can be brought to bear before the fundamentalists get their way.

Having examined the continuing significance of rural tradition to an Oxfordshire village in Way of the Morris (2011), Rob Curry has teamed up with Anthony Fletcher to show how the works of William Shakespeare retain a contemporary relevance in Tempest. Made over four years in the Oval area of London, this documentary could not have had a more laudable aim, as it seeks to show how kids from the lower rungs of inner-city society can achieve great things if they are afforded a decent education and are exposed to the masterpieces that are perceived to be the preserve of the social and cultural elite.

But Curry and Fletcher are likely to find many engaged in the provision of state education taking exception to their naive contention that a community drama project is better placed to nurture potential than the comprehensive system, while others may detect a little patronising paternalism in the notion that it takes the Bard to bring out the better aspects of juveniles who might otherwise be watching reality TV or listening to rap music or binge-drinking, getting pregnant, taking drugs or rioting.

Notwithstanding these misgivings, Tempest succeeds on several levels. Curry and Fletcher allow viewers to get to know the dramatis personae without resorting to backstories of tabloid sensationalism or mawkishness. Moreover, they avoid reference to any relationships that might have developed between the cast members and appear to let them discover for themselves the subtexts of the play and the way in which the characters relate to their own everyday experience. Indeed, the workshopping sequences are the most compelling in the entire picture, as the teenagers come to understand how language that initially feels like a forbidding code comes to reveal basic human traits and emotions that speak directly to them.

Some of the stagings are a touch arch, as loaded speeches are read or recited in public spaces in order to equate Prospero's island with the concrete jungle that is the performer's reality. The shifts from monochrome to colour are equally contrived. But, when the co-directors adopt the role of observers, the action comes alive and the home truths acquire a much greater veracity and potency.

Zephryn Taitte (Prospero), Paris Campbell (Miranda), Jummi Bolaji (Alonso), Mitchell Bonsra (Sebastian), Charlotte Gallagher (Antonio), Nathan Wharton (Ferdinand), Afra Morris (Gonzalo), Kieran Edwards (Trinculo), Stef O'Driscoll (Stephano) and Tom Kautill (Boatswain) all warm to their tasks, as do Emily Sarah Wallis and Roy A Weise as Caliban and Liz Francis, Jennifer Twomey, Chloe Reader, Felina Tramonti, Charlotte Russell, Maeve Burke and Rosanna Mallinson as the different facets of Ariel's complex personality. They are rewarded with the hushed fascination of a first-night audience and the evident satisfaction of having mastered such a challenging play. But it would be intriguing to see how lasting the lessons learned and impressions made prove to be and one hopes that Curry and Fletcher can be persuaded to track their cast down some time in the future.

Art of a very different kind gave brothers Jeff and Mick Geggus a chance to express themselves, as Richard England reveals in East End Babylon, a profile of The Cockney Rejects that firmly roots them in their Canning Town community and the historical forces that shaped it. Clearly having picked up tips while executive producing Julien Temple's Dr Feelgood tribute, Oil City Confidential (2009), England combines lively recollections with archive footage and plenty of music. But he is also keen to examine the socio-economic factors that influenced the band and the part it played in the `Oi!' culture that became associated in the late 1970s with football hooliganism and the far-right politics of the National Front.

The docklands area of London bore the brunt of the Nazi bombing campaign during the Second World War, as the Luftwaffe sought to disrupt the trade that was sustaining Britain's resistance. Yet, while the docks played a vital part in the reconstruction of the capital and its emergence from Austerity, new modes of transportation saw them go into decline in the 1960s and many families endured deprivation, while nursing the suspicion that they had been forgotten by ungrateful governments who were not averse to traditional communities being broken up to facilitate the onset of a new cosmopolitanism.

Amidst this atmosphere of simmering resentment, many young men found release in rumbling with the supporters of rival football teams. Few mobs were as feared as West Ham United's notorious Inter City Firm, whose away day antics drew the attention of extremist politicians keen to find new recruits among the skinhead fraternity whose anger and sense of alienation made them eminently suitable for exploitation.

Although the Geggus siblings were die-hard Hammers, they preferred to channel their energies into boxing clubs and music. They didn't necessarily plan to form a band, however, and almost got a chance to record a demo by accident in 1978, when they convinced Sounds journalist Garry Bushell to book them studio time and 15 year-old singer Jeff and guitarist Mick hurriedly talked brother-in-law Chris Murrell into joining them on bass, while Paul Harvey played the drums. The session generated the song `Flares & Slippers', which so impressed Pete Stennett of Small Wonder Records that they were signed up to record `I Wanna Be a Star' and Murrell and Harvey were replaced in the rhythm section by bassist Vince Riordan and drummer Andy Scott.

Selling out the first pressing of the single, The Cockney Rejects made their stage debut at the Bridge House in Canning Town in June 1979 and a contract with EMI followed three months later. A furious burst of creativity saw them hit the lower reaches of the charts with such bruising post-punk offerings as `I'm Not a Fool', `Bad Man', `We Can Do Anything' and `We Are the Firm', while `The Greatest Cockney Rip Off' got them on Top of the Pops, where they flirted shamelessly with the dance troupe Legs & Co. During a later appearance to promote their punk version of the West Ham anthem `I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles', a drunken Jeff provocatively made it clear he was miming and now recalls that the Rejects got into a backstage scrape with The Lambrettas.

However, this was nothing compared to the events that occurred at the Cedar Club in Birmingham later in 1980 when the band's club allegiance caused them and their entourage (who were hardly blameless victims) to be attacked by what was reckoned to be around 300 tribal Brummies out for blood. Mick Geggus was charged with GBH and affray and, even though the albums Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 and Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 were selling well, the `battle of Birmingham' stopped the Rejects dead in their tracks. The media backlash against the `Oi!' counterculture that Bushell had done so much to promote proved equally deliterious and the albums The Power and the Glory (1981) and The Wild Ones (1982) made markedly less impact.

Yet, three decades later, The Cockney Rejects are cited as seminal influences by a surprisingly large number of cutting-edge musicians and the band itself continues to record the odd album. England is less interested in their legacy than in their origins and their place in the socio-cultural history of the East End. He is fortunate in having such vibrant subjects as Mick and Jeff (who also went under the name Jeff `Stinky' Turner), who refuse to mince their words and harbour no regrets, although they are well aware with hindsight that they might have done things differently. But where's the fun in that?