After his Oscar-winning performance in “Oppenheimer”, Cillian Murphy could have been forgiven for settling into a career as a Hollywood leading man, said Wendy Ide in The Observer . Instead, he has opted to appear in a string of bold indie films, the latest of which is “Steve”, a “gripping and exhausting” drama set on a single day in 1996, and adapted by Max Porter from his own novella.

Murphy plays Steve, the dedicated but frazzled head teacher at “a last-chance” boarding school for “delinquent, damaged teenage boys” in rural England. Steve is battling personal demons, and at work setbacks pile up “on top of disasters”: for starters, a news crew has arrived to shoot a local-interest segment, which has made the boys even harder to control than usual.

To make matters worse, a pompous To

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