Cinema has always provided a venue for dreams of the exotic, but few directors in these post-colonial times can revive such fantasies without guilt. This is the dilemma which James Gray, among the most intelligent of modern American filmmakers, must grapple with in The Lost City of Z, his epic account of the career of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Fawcett, regarded by some as Britain’s last great explorer.

Based on the 2009 book of the same name by New Yorker writer David Grann, the film chronicles Fawcett’s obsessive quest – which lasted well into the twentieth century – for the ruins of a fabled lost city in the jungles of ‘Amazonia’. Reports suggest the film became something of an obsession for Gray himself, who battled to get it made over a number of years: at one point it was meant to star Benedict Cumberbatch, whose angular patrician looks are a close match for the impact made by Fawcett in photographs.