Films in brief: Barbaric Genius; Personal Best; Free Men; Tales of the Night The author, chess wizard, and former homeless wino John Healy is a fascinating if stubbornly enigmatic subject for a documentary. He simply won't give it to us straight about the notorious spat with Faber & Faber that led to his most famous book, The Grass Arena (1988), being withdrawn from circulation. Some say he threatened Faber's management, including then editor-in-chief Robert McCrum, with an axe: McCrum is amazingly tight-lipped on the incident, given that he's referred to it in print on several subsequent occasions. Paul Duane's film uses the possibly apocryphal story as a fulcrum to explore Healy's life and reputation, and does so very absorbingly, convincing us of an obscured talent whose lack of exposure remains something of a mystery. The only slight pity is that we don't get any clips from the BBC's 1992 Grass Arena adaptation, which had Mark Rylance on blistering form as Healy, and made more of the chess. Personal Best * * * 12A cert, 86 min London 2012 agnostics looking for reasons to tune in are urged towards this stirring home-grown doc, not to be confused with the 1982 Robert Towne film about lesbian pentathletes. Director Sam Blair follows several sprint hopefuls over their last few years of training and competing abroad: Jeanette Kwakye, currently ranked as Britain's fastest woman, was our first since 1984 to qualify for the ladies" 100m final in Beijing, and James Ellington has a shot in both the 100m and 200m. They've had their hardships - Kwakye has come back from a career-threatening knee injury. The portraits could have done with a little more intimacy and drama, but the richly ambient score and sound design, over brooding shots of London's tower blocks, knit it hypnotically together, and the photography's splendid. Free Men * * 12A cert, 99 min Tahar Rahim's search for a meaty post-A Prophet role continues in this socially nutritious, unimpeachably competent, but shapeless and sluggish wartime drama about the little-known collaboration between North African immigrants and the French Resistance. He's well-cast as Younes, a shifty black marketeer who helps shield the real-life club singer Salim Halali (Mahmoud Shalaby) from arrest - he was secretly Jewish and homosexual. Sadly, French-Moroccan director Ismaël Ferroukhi lacks the style to stop us wishing we were watching Casablanca instead, and these characters - more interesting at the start than the end - feel co-opted into telling a story that's good for us. Tales of the Night * * * U cert, 84 min Dir: Michel Ocelot A trilogy of fairytales from the French silhouette-animator Michel Ocelot, lacking the spooky magic of his best work. It's sweet but earthbound. Beware the dubbed version.